What We Both Know, page 19
Slowly the Arthurs begin to gather in a half-circle, observing the room together. Baby joins, and I worry he will be ridiculed, but he is welcomed. Something about those men, together, feels natural. They are boisterous, patting each other on the back, nodding and grinning. I am able to relax for the first time since entering. It isn’t just him. They are all hunched, grey.
The passage of time is punctuated with small plastic cups of wine.
My body feels electric when I watch Catherine move through the room, searching for me, I suppose. I catch her eye, grin at her, and slip out of the main hall and into the bathroom. There is a tall skinny mirror mounted to a part of the wall set back farther than the rest. This gives me a feeling of being boxed in. The blouse I have buttoned over Pauline’s bra is cut low, exposing pink lace. Under my skirt I can feel the soft silk of the panties. I make no expression at the mirror. Back myself into a stall and lock it with both locks. Somebody else enters the bathroom and sets down a number of small objects on the counter, hovers by the mirror. I can see the scaly pointed toes of snakeskin boots.
When I pull up my skirt, pull down my pantyhose, there are pink welts on my thighs and on my kneecaps. I make an X with my nail in one of the larger oblong-shaped spots on my left thigh, feel the familiar sick pain of the allergy to insect venom. In a panic, I strip the pantyhose down off my legs, stay seated on the toilet and lift my feet to slip the underwear over the white patent boots I’ve gotten from another box of Pauline’s.
I return to the audience as they are inviting the Arthurs up onto the stage.
The men on stage are proud, stiff in formal dress, moving in awkward formation with a long-absent fifth. I walk in such a way so that I can apply some friction to some of the itching areas on my inner thighs. When I clench my left knee as my right leg takes a step I can affect one of the lower bites. I feel myself crawling though I must be imagining it. I think of Gregor Samsa, resist a smirk across my face.
In the schedule I was given at the door there is a biography of Baby, a list of publications, and a brief blurb on his forthcoming work: Baby Davidson’s forthcoming memoir chronicles a man entering complete and total isolation. The story is one of resignation, of suicide of personhood, and experimentation with greed, absence, and observation. An experience of death in life. These are Mark Richman’s words. The Death of My Name is Baby Davidson’s self-proclaimed “final work.”
I am caught up in the pamphlet when it is announced that Baby has won the “Most Influential Ontario Writer” award. The man doing the talking, one of the Arthurs I recognize from younger photographs but whose name I do not know, announces that they would like to formally invite Baby back in. I wonder if this is a challenge.
The group of them up there, all old and dressed in wool, and bespectacled and leaning on one another, remind me so much of Baby I feel a hopelessness of identity. In any case, this announcement is my cue. I enter the stage. Eyes are visible but not enough to identify.
I pause for a moment and take in the room. Be funny, I remember.
“When I was growing up,” I say. “I asked my dad, ‘What’s the difference between the kind of doctor you are and the kind who helps sick people?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t have any patience.’ ”
There are a few laughs.
Catherine is smiling. Baby is clapping his hands, looks elated. When he asked me to present him the honour I felt in a small way that he was bringing me into his world, and that this might mean I am becoming more of what he is. But I am only ever what he tells me. My story is only the most recent he’s written. He told me first to be a daughter, then to be—in a way—a partner, then to be a nurse, now to be…
There is applause. Soon it will quiet. I will exit the stage, exit the building. I will wait behind the steering wheel the amount of time it takes for my drunkenness to fade, for my vision to stabilize. Then I will drive home, wherever that is now, go upstairs and slip into bed. I will wake tomorrow and begin my work on being something good. Something of my own. Maybe if I am so good I will not even be me anymore. I will be so good that I drive others crazy, and I will have my perfect routines, and I will find something bigger than anything here on the ground, and I will dry up all of my juicy perversions and be empty, without any eggs left for any of the men in Orillia, and I will lie in my sheets and let the bugs feast on their good, God-sent meal. And when they have eaten me up I will be with Pauline, both of us inside of the bugs, together.
Baby replaces me on stage. He thanks the crowd, the Arthurs, Mark Richman. There is a new work coming, he says, called The Death of My Name.
“It is a memoir,” says Baby. “Written by my daughter, Hillary.”
Catherine elbows me, as if something light has just happened, a joke. People in the audience, those who recognize me, turn and look. If it was a mistake, a lapse, if it will be taken back in the morning, still in this moment we finally live in truth.
How strange it is that such a thing can happen so quickly, so quietly, and by accident. That a lightness can overtake me almost without warning, can threaten to lift me out of the room entirely.
And though he has just ended himself up there, I find I cannot imagine that Baby won’t live forever, somehow.
He has just ended his career, will sink back into the anonymous body of Marcus Greene, and it occurs to me that I do not know who that is, or who he will be, and I wonder if he has enough time left for me to find out.
In a way, in a sort of ugly way, the family is all together. I am drunk. I am with my father, his colleagues, Catherine. Everyone fits together in a way in which I feel I am able to step away, let things be. Tomorrow I will begin work on something of my own.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my family: Mom, Dad, and Aunt Beth, and to my good friends: Elliot Burns, Ali Pinkney, André Babyn, Jake Morrow, Joshua Chris Bouchard, Sophie McCreesh, Khashayar Mohammadi, Mary Germaine, Cody Caetano, Zak Jones, Joseph MacNeil, Jack Christie, and Quinn Mason.
Thank you to Professor Robert McGill and the University of Toronto Graduate English Department, to my outstanding agent Stephanie Sinclair at CookeMcDermid, to Harriet Alida Lye for the invaluable editorial guidance, and to brilliant editor Kelly Joseph and everyone at M&S.
Thank you always to the Canada Council for the Arts for the ongoing support.
© Evan Smith
FAWN PARKER is the author of the novels Set-Point and Dumb-Show and the forthcoming poetry collection Jolie Laide. She is co-founder of BAD NUDES MAGAZINE and BAD BOOKS PRESS, and president at The Parker Agency. Her story, “Feed Machine,” was longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Parker lives between Toronto, Ontario, and Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Fawn Parker, What We Both Know
