CHAPTER 6

It was in such a setting that G could wrap around him the mantle of inchoate or rather uninformed class-consciousness, but he never would have used such a term. It was enough for him that he was a burning novelist from the Valley, a genuine, while these twits, half of them English boobs in tweeds and imperial accents, were College Types, parents probably all drove Jaguars, young men who had never got up at five in the morning in a tent up north and washed their faces in cold water from a creek. So all he wanted to do was wrap his nail-bitten fingers around a glass of rye and creme soda and slouch in a corner, maybe on a Queen Anne table, and not so much watch as be watched. Oh how mysterious, some young Green Room actress in first year, might say. Or what a pretentious looking young jerk, let's pass on, Rodney, was more like it.

But M always got him away from his best intentions. M had a way of talking at parties the way an educated whale might surface and spout. He might bellow Richard the Third's soliloquy, replacing horses with lawnmowers and French history with speculations about the sex life of Professor Joe Bobby Cottonbug, the rhetoric and composition teacher at the university on the hill. M was a delight, you had to give him that, the most animated short-term imagination in the crowd. And he never seemed to get drunk, at least not in the usual way. Like Dan Daniels, who would stand for an hour leaning on the kitchen wall, then sit for an hour with his back to the wall and his legs in wrinkled black gabardine sticking straight out in front of him, then for an hour lie flat on the kitchen floor with just his head almost upright against the wall. Then an hour later he would be lying flat on his back on the kitchen floor, his drink disappearing in a puddle under him. Eventually, after walking on his body for an hour, some of the stronger women in the crowd would pull Daniels's body to the basement door, always leading off the kitchen in Vancouver houses, open the door, and slide Daniels's body down the stairs, where it was usually found by strangers the next afternoon, ritualistically decorated from head to toe with bottlecaps.

But M had an odd metabolism. He said it was because he had been born in the North West Territories, on the roof of the world, as he liked to put it. He had ice in his veins. A beer upended into his mouth was doomed to meet the Terror of the Snows. At three in the morning M could be heard arguing the vacuity of the British Command at the Battle of the Somme, or speculating on the fate of European literature had Kafka decided on a chocolate eclair instead of a beetle for Gregor. G would never admit it until 30-odd (very odd) years later, but he was envious of M's quick three a.m. wit, and would hasten to overlook his shortcomings as a supporting male in most recent productions of the Players' Club.

So he was honoured to be employed as worthy opponent in M's verbal tennis game. When D heaved Carey into the middle of things, he was glad that M was not yet ready to wind down, who wouldn't be?

"Plant psychology has no place for impatiens," M smirked.

A beamed her appreciation.

"A sage in Abbotsford is soon acclimated," replied G, his heart sinking.

A looked at him with sympathy.

"Look on the face of international vegetarianism and weep," thundered M.

G turned his back, his shoulders stooped, and began to shuffle away. But D had him by the shoulder, or rather by the shoulder of his old air force trench coat, an item of raiment that G wore to all house parties, rain or shine or bleak of creepy night.

"Mein Herr," D said; then continued, true as ever to his own perception of what was relevant, "we have here some potential doubters, more than a half-dozen mass-debaters, too many term-paper lotharios, one crypto-masochist, three women with clean underwear whose fathers rode penny-farthing bicycles, and a sophomore with a fish in his jacket pocket. It is early in the party, people are paying attention or capable of doing so. Dwight D. Eisenhower has been asleep for six hours. Listen to me, G, listen, M, it is time that we stepped up to the mark of social responsibility and revealed to these churls and damosels the apparitions we observed just last night. Was it just last night?"

M took this as a cue.

"Was it," he roared, "thou, Morandia, who discovered deep in the dark night of the hole that the heart of the Anglo Saxon meat-bearing anthropoid was identical in chromosomic composition to the side of the Oreo cookie which, when the sides are snapped apart, does not bear the round dab of white goop?"

Against all odds there was a crowd or rather a shuffling circle of young inebriates forming about this tableaux. One of the bunch spoke.

"This lightsome mid-Pacific cajolery is probably an accomplishment that a West Point Grey mother might be amused by during the evening tooth-brushing observations," said Liam Chutney, reputed future owner of a crumbling but still aspiring castle in the west of Free Ireland, "but my erstwhile handyman D has promised me that I will hear this night a tale that will fill the heart of even a landlady with dread."

"He saw the archangel Pineal arising from a burning ski lift," shouted Tommy P, who was nearly horizontal on the couch, Miss Anthrax lying upon him and licking the panes of his smoked glasses. It was an amazing party in that while there was a constant noise of broken dishes and falling bodies and shouted profundities, most one-liners were clear enough to be recorded by all the aspiring playwrights in the crowd.

D took the floor.

"We may," he said, "be living the last night of our young and often askew lives."

A huge cheer went up from the crowd, and at least four glasses were hurled into the big rock fireplace. G hoped that Fee's parents were gone to the Bay of Biscayne. But D in his elegant Oxonian way simply raised his voice.

"Only twenty-four hours ago, we three observed a huge flash of light behind the North Shore Mountains," he said, drawing out the hiss at the end of the last word.

The audience went into a supercilious silence. Sssssss. They waited for a sound. D went on:

"We waited for a commensurate sound," he said, "but found nothing but silence." He turned to M with a look comingled of sadness and love. It was the look D turned on all of his acquaintance, but there were some in the crowd who didn't yet know this. They were impressed.

M opened his mouth to proceed, but G beat him to it.

"The flash of light, "he said, "was only as frightening as the sensation of one's pulse disappearing for five minutes. The more frightening event, the more puzzling, the one that might get us out of the endless deferral of this story, the one that might begin the machinations of a novel, were this fiction rather than unproductive early life, was the ludic writing on the wall of the Sick's Brewery."

"That is called advertising," said a wag in the crowd.

"No, listen to them," put in A.

She stepped in front of G, treading on one of his feet in the maneouver. Her hair was perfect, Avonic. He reached for her tail but she stepped further, into the middle of the throng. Tommy P rolled onto the floor, where Miss Anthrax seized his legs.

"Listen to them," said A, and began an explanation of that necessity. "When William Butler Yeats attested that beings beyond our normal ken had brought the sources of his poems to him, no one credited the miracle, but later he nodded his white head over the medal from the Nobel Prize committee. That night the dark air of Stockholm was permeated with the sweet promise of a Nordic Winter. Diplomats in Broughams, their serge collars turned up wore white silk scarves around their pink necks. Offshore the harbour seals contemplated a new patch of oil slithering in darksome evening shades across the moonlight above them. The world knew parity and justice, for on a mountain slope in Patagonia at just that moment lovers disrobed and celebrated the first strong rays of spring. Demosthenes had a word for this kind of Masoretic balance. In a speech to the collected citizens of Athens in the last year of his sclerotic decline he spoke of the rashness of youth who never give heed to the night. Look, he urged, with the eyes the gods have given you on the nether side of your heads. Had there been a sudden flash of light from behind the peaks of Olympus, Demosthenes would have known it was time to hark, time to seek portents, time to become a reader of what the gods may have writ. Had words of curious intent appeared across the facade of the Architecture on the Hill he would have read them; he may not have guessed their message but he would have known something of their import. He was not a wastrel with a glass of his mother's hidden sherry in his hand."

And as she said this Fee McMannic took a quick glug and hurled what looked like a cut glass goblet into the fireplace.

"Exactly - "

But M spake only that one word, though for a few moments he made gestures with his hands. He busied himself for the next few moments, with his front teeth and the naked shoulder and neck of an actress.

"We pretend so often," said A, "to direct our thoughts and even our lives and sometimes the way we walk into the Koffee Kabin, by the words we read in the books that come to hand when one is an Arts student, Albert Camus - "

Three people blushed, something not often seen among the swacked.

" - Malcolm Lowry, Emmanuel Kant, Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire - "

She turned to peer at her date.

" - or at least the young Cold War veteran, G. Mickey Spillane," she added.

He gave her a mock smackeroo with his loose fist, on the shoulder. God, thought G, what a knockout. God, he thought, I have to have a piss, but she wouldn't take my departure at this point with aplomb.

"We pretend to direct our lives by the words we read in these people's books, words that are most of their time squashed against each other in closed volumes. But how many of us attend to the words scribed for us on the walls before our eyes. We are estranged from that with which we are most familiar, as Demosthenes said on the steps of the Capital."

"Wait a minute," said G.

"On the steps of the capital," said A, "on whose facade might have been found the words that proclaimed democracy for the citizens of Athens. But just who were these citizens? Of all of you here, perhaps the only two that might have been permitted that rank would have been Liam and D."

"Wait a minute," said G.

"Wait a minute," said M.

"Liam and D, and I am not so certain about D," said A. "As for the women, as for the slaves, they would have been dumped from the couch," she said.

Now A was standing on a copy of Smoking Carrion, which was lying closed on a square table made of thick glass and wrought iron.

Fee spoke for the first time, from the side of his mouth, with his lips almost clenched, with, miraculously perhaps, another goblet of sherry or was it tawny port in his left hand. He used his right hand for a significant gesture.

"My oldest friend, the boy who fed me the perfect passes so that I could sink the opposition's hearts with spectacular jump shots at the dying of the clock, this fellow M told me that someone is flashing the unknown aretes behind Lynn Canyon and scrawling graffiti on brewery walls," said Fee. "I suspect a Zionist plot."

Most of them drank as if there was no tomorrow. Fee drank as if there was no tonight. Everyone understood that. He had a lot of good friends, and G, for instance, had leaned toward him early. As G went everywhere in his Bulgarian-length air force rain coat, Fee was never seen without his Bennie, an expensive but very bedraggled doghound's tooth overcoat. It was said that he often, for penance and the endurance of his heart, did forty lengths of the Aquatic Centre pool in his overcoat. He was an actor in the Players' Club, where he once acted Polonius in the self-same garment. He was M's equal as an actor, carrying his personality onto the stage with him, making Shakespeare into Durrenmatt, making Durrenmatt into John Foster Dulles, burning the hearts of black-stockinged nymphets in the Green Room, winning the heart of A when he compared her with the doe-eyed mistress of a Karamazov. "A Zionist plot," he snarled, and everyone knew that he was playing a terrific part. It was said that he had made love to every young woman, gentile or other, who had seen destiny in her nakedness inside his hounddog's tooth coat. There was not a young man or younger woman who did not admire his forlorn Rimbaudian doom. They all expected him to die in a useless accident, a large piece of furniture falling from the roof of a passing truck, a stack of Coke bottles collapsing on him where he toiled weekends.

G, thinking back on this tangle of besotted thespians and quite ordinary flesh from the vantage of his late years, wanted to go back and throw his arms around three people in succession: Fee, A, and the young G.

"The flash in the sky!" shouted M at last. "The runic inscriptions on the yellow wall!" He had found the word at last. "These are only the beginning!"

M spoke in exclamation marks for the rest of his presentation. He joined A on the glass table, but he was standing on an open-faced copy of Guns & Ammo.

"This morning!" he said, his voice quieter but urgent, as ears, pretty and malformed, were aimed his way. "I woke up! Well, it was this afternoon! Eventually I worked up the courage! I looked into the mirror! I looked into the parts of the mirror that are not covered with toothpaste and some stranger's lipstick message!"

"More words," said A.

"What did they say?" asked Tommy P, who was now standing close to the table. Miss Anthrax was rubbing the side of her head against the inside of one of his black-garbed legs.

"That's not the point!" said M.

"Oh, is there supposed to be a point?" asked the almost comatose but still standing Daniels. "Is that allowed?"

In the den, all this time, a brainless young girl who looked exactly like Susan Strasberg was gazing intently out the window. She was looking for a sign. She had a bamboo leaf in her hair.

"I say, old sport," said Liam Chutney. "If yon Demosthenes promises a point, the least we auditors can do is extend him our faith. I, for one, expect a point, though previous experience urges that I do not rely on its profundity. M has been, in my experience, an agreeable colonial, a bumptious but relatively honest and often fervent subscriber to the armory of received wisdom, that wisdom coming for the most part from the civilizing islands that gave me my birth."

No one upbraided Chutney for the mixed metaphor, because they were always indulgent of his rhetoric and accent. There was a widespread sentiment that he was over here on the Pacific Coast of this colony because of a Fenian tragedy in his family.

"I have not finished with my exclamation points!" said M. "As I was saying before I was so egregiously interrupted! I looked without optimism into the bathroom mirror! And what did I see there! Look! Look at what has happened to my hair!"