Confidence Read online

  Now he was standing at a streetcar stop with Robert Henninger, who of course wouldn’t recognize him. He had recognized Henninger and Baratelli both, because he had had Henninger as a T.A. up at York, and he had taken that Winthrup course that Baratelli had come and spoken at. Of course neither of them had recognized him, even though he had asked quite a few questions of each. He wished that he had the confidence to just go up to someone like Lionel Baratelli and tell him he admired him, that he thought his first novel had been brilliant.

  In fact, Gavin Snider (that was, remember, this guy’s name) had just been about to get up and walk over to Sharon and Jennifer, and reintroduce himself, because he had met Sharon through the Northwoods, but then he had seen the intense conversation with Lionel Baratelli and Robert Henninger and knew he could never compete with that. He had lost his nerve.

  Earlier than that, he had also tried talking to Chrissie the bartender, who had been sweet with him, but then he had seen the way that mammoth goof of a barback, the one with the stupid shaggy rock boy haircut, put his hand on her waist, and he knew she was with him or some other guy like him and he didn’t have a chance.

  What he needed was some kind of confidence. He had confidence in his writing, and that was it. That’s where he’d show them. He’d show them confidence. He’d come back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and write down everything he saw.

  It was freezing cold. He and Robert Henninger stood there in silence waiting for the streetcar.

  RACCOONS

  Mother’s day hung over the house like an appointment for surgery. It was not marked in the calendar of bright Rothkos that hung next to the fridge, but Ivor had seen the smaller daybook that sat on her desk, the square of May 13 marked almost imperceptibly with a tiny x in the corner. The day he saw it he felt sick, as if the house was bathed in a childhood smell like granny’s lamb or his dad’s sports liniment, a warning of punishment.

  He would be away on May 13, in Vancouver at a conference on education policy, most of which he would skip to walk on warm streets—dappled with European light and swelling with sunny bosom and calf—and have three beers before dinner, if he ate dinner at all, and watch BBC World in his toddler-free room, and she knew this, his wife did. The trip had already had, at its centre, a dark pit of guilt and now was overlaid by an almost certain failure and subsequent reproach.

  He could, he thought, as he stepped into the earth scent of the garage, arrange a brunch on the Saturday before he left, impossible though because he had left all his marking for that day, and had committees all day the Friday. There was the option of a gift and a bunch of flowers—inadequate because too easy; the obligation was to spend time, lots of it, not just money, commit oneself, would a little commitment be impossible for a man like himself to imagine?

  There was a man-sized space inside the garage in which to stand and blink in the gloom and then make out the tower of snow tires and early childhood toys—the yawning Diaper Genie, the training toilet, the never-used rocking horse—and think there, in private, about how the perception of sexual relations had now been forever altered by mommy blogs, and particularly by Kara’s own blog, 40YearOldMom, how one could not even think of Mother’s Day now without a tone of indignation, of amused slight, imprinting itself on one’s language; one could not even approach it without a filter of derision between oneself and the imagining of one’s pathetic inadequate actions.

  There was a deeper smell to the earth in there, and it was not good, a fecal smell, and this was why he had come in here, to face his suspicion.

  At night, Ivor dreamed of his house falling apart. He would be looking up at the newly plastered ceiling and see a dark spot, then reach up to touch it and his hand would sink into damp plaster, and then he would notice how far the stain had spread, the rivulets of brown water running down the walls, the exposed beams, the pewter sky visible. Or it would be the foundation, holes in the floor, a whole wall missing. And he would turn and there would be his father, sitting in the kitchen, unable to help him because of course he had been dead for seven years.

  And then he would wake up and hear the scrabbling, as if someone was playing with blocks on a wood floor, just underfoot or in the wall, and he would get up dizzy and realize he was not in his bed but in the daybed downstairs where he was usually exiled at about three in the morning when the Bean slapfooted down the corridor into the Big Bed, warm and whiny, and literally pushed him out. Then the noises would stop. And he would stand at the sliding door to the garden and see shapes in the dark, the striped tails, and be too cowed to open the door and shoo them.

  Even when you did, even if you ran at them with your arms outstretched, screaming your best Monster—making the Bean laugh with the fantastic abandon only available to three-year-olds—they would sit for a second, stare at you, bemused, and then, as if rolling their eyes, slowly turn and lumber away, just before you picked up the brick to chuck at them. (Ivor had actually hit one with a brick once, when the Bean wasn’t around, from a distance of about three yards, but only half-heartedly, horrified at himself. The animal had flinched a little, then turned and snarled. The next morning there were piles of dung on both front and back doorsteps.)

  And the day before, in broad daylight, an enormous one had lumbered across the upstairs deck right past him, so fat it could hardly haul itself up onto the railing and then the abutting garage roof, utterly unafraid of Ivor’s barking and hissing. As he watched it waddle away, then force itself behind the garage (possibly into it?) Ivor realized the swollen girth was unnatural. It was gravid.

  So there he was, cellphone and fireplace poker in hand, in the clutter and dark and the spiky smell of foreign feces, looking for slimy babies to kill. They were definitely in there. He stood still.

  There was no rustling. There was nothing.

  His cellphone was also silent. If it rang in there it might echo and Kara, upstairs with her window open, might hear it. It had already rung twice that morning and she had asked and he had said it was telemarketers, but a third time would not be believable. Now was the time to fiddle with it to figure out the silent vibrate mode thing. He held it up, a little grey flashlight. He checked Kara’s updates—she was blogging, up in her room. She had just posted on Facebook, “Weird mood.” Five of her friends had asked her what was wrong and she hadn’t answered. Then she tweeted, Remember when you could do whatever you wanted on Saturdays? #endlesswork. And: Dr. Virpi Lummaa at Univ of Sheffield: research proves sons reduce a mother’s life span by an average of 34 weeks. Says nothing about husbands. #sciencefail

  He had to find the vibrate mode, but it was too dark to see the keys, and he hadn’t time to find the thing’s settings. He just wrapped his fist around it to muffle its inevitable detonation.

  There was also a box in there, somewhere behind the Diaper Genie, possibly protected by a sleeping raccoon, that he needed to get to, today, and he needed to find it, identify it among the other boxes, open it and get its contents out and through the house, not just past the raccoon but past Kara, and then into some unrecoverable inferno. He did not know how he was going to do this.

  He kicked at some boxes, banged at the metal shelving to scare the animal out.

  He listened for breathing.

  He began to push at objects, moving them behind him as he worked his way towards the stack of boxes that had been untouched since their move. Behind a CD tower there was another space to stand. The fecal smell was stronger there. There was a dark space between the boxes and the wall that was undoubtedly both a bed and a latrine for unimaginable wriggling vermin. He didn’t know which task was more urgent: the uncovering of the monster’s lair or the toxic box.

  He had not brought a flashlight. He used the phone’s screen to look between the stacks.

  There was possibly a hole in one wall, covered by boxes, through which they came and went, and with luck they would be out now—where? taking classes? shopping?—although they were supposed to sleep during the day.

&
nbsp; He began to pull down boxes. There were CDs, never to be used again, course notes, never to be used again, Christmas ornaments.

  Kara’s voice from the house. “Ivor? Ivor?”

  She knew, she could tell, the second he wanted to be away from her, that he did. She had a sense.

  He began ripping open the boxes more quickly. A heavy one, full of kitchen tiles, disintegrated. The tiles clattered.

  A backpack containing moldy camping gear. A box of cassette tapes. Closer.

  “Ivor.”

  “Garage,” he shouted. “Just checking.”

  “What?”

  Bag of car wax buffers, plus congealed wax. Plywood, assorted shapes.

  He put his phone down on a board and the second he did it rang like a siren.

  He grabbed it, stifled it, tried to suffocate it.

  From the house: “Who is calling you?”

  He picked it up; he had to or it would never stop.

  “You fucker,” said the voice. “You fucking fucker.”

  “Jasmine,” he said as evenly and quietly as he could. “Jasmine, I don’t know what you want.”

  “I am going to firebomb your fucking house is what I want. I know people. You know that? I fucking know people you do not want—”

  “Jasmine, please, please, I honestly don’t know what it is I did. I really truly don’t. And I told you, you can’t call here, I live here with my wife and my—”

  “Oh I can’t? I can’t? I can’t call there?” There was a pause and a sucking sound, for she would have a joint going now, of course at eleven in the morning. “You think I won’t find your other number? Your land line? You watch me fucking call it, you watch me call your fucking wife.”

  “Okay. Okay. Listen. What do you need from me?”

  From the house: “Ivor?,” then “Daddy!”

  “Oh you have no idea. You have no fucking clue. You are a liar. You are a fucking liar.”

  “Is it about the tapes? If it’s about the tapes I am looking for them right now, right this second.”

  “Oh now you’re smart, now you remember. Because I am going to burn down your fucking house, now you remember.”

  “You know these tapes are useless, right, to anyone without the exact same camera which is now completely obsolete? To play them you need a VHS tape player and then you need a special adapter to put the little tape in and then put it in the machine, and nobody has that machine or that adapter, anywhere, ever. So this is a complete waste of everyone’s time.”

  “How do I know you haven’t copied them?”

  “It’s impossible to copy them. I would have to take them to a place, one of those places where you pay—and, Christ, this is ridiculous, I haven’t looked at these tapes for two years, why would I do that?”

  “Why do you have them then?”

  Ivor covered the phone and yelled, “One minute!” He kicked at a metal trunk to make it sound as if he was working in there. “Listen,” he said to Jasmine, “I am finding them, now. And when I find them I am going to destroy them. I have no need for them at all, I promise you.”

  “Oh no. Oh no you won’t destroy them.”

  “I won’t?”

  “I don’t trust you for one second, you skunk.”

  “Jesus.” Ivor sat on a canister that looked like a case of grenades but that probably held Duplo Lego. “Jesus, Jas. What do you want?”

  “You are going to bring them to me. Today.” There was a noise of daytime TV, a giggly commercial.

  “Today is not possible. It’s Saturday. I am with my family.”

  “Today, like now. You are not going to have any time to copy them and put them on the internet or use them in any disgusting way.”

  “Jasmine, Jesus, I have absolutely no interest in doing that.”

  “You bring them to me in one hour or there are going to be fucking consequences.”

  The TV and her voice were gone. He put the phone in his pocket.

  He opened boxes quickly then, boxes of school binders and medical records, boxes of tax. He moved an umbrella stand and a plastic wading pool. There were no more boxes. It had possibly been thrown out in the move. That would be bad.

  It occurred to him that if he could not find the box, it might be time to think about calling the police. But this would entail a frank discussion with Kara that would be unimaginable at any time, let alone in the full flooding anticipation of Mother’s Day.

  He moved a bag of charcoal briquettes. They had not had a charcoal barbecue for three years. He put the bag of charcoal beside the bags of topsoil and grass seed. It was at least more coherent there, a bag among bags.

  He kicked the topsoil bag and it broke and its black powder ejaculated. He said “cockpoop shit.” When he bent to sweep the earth with his bare hand he saw it, the blue hat box with the white strap, under the weight bench. He had to lay himself flat on the dusty floor to reach under.

  He sat on the weight bench to open it. There was the clunky black camera, the battery the size of a juice box. It would probably be dead. And under it the blocky little Hi-8 cassettes, all labelled innocuous things like “Davenports’ cottage” or “Hockey Brampton.” Under each title he had marked in pencil his tiny x’s. Sometimes an almost invisible J.

  The camera opened like a book, the viewing screen folding outwards. He picked a tape—“City parade 2002”—that had two pencil x’s. It slid into its cage, and amazingly the red power light came on. He pressed play.

  There was the green room, her basement room, and there she was, pale and smiling and delicious, bare-legged, on her stained bed, running her hands through her hair, smoking a joint. He knew every second of this tape, knew exactly when the voice off-camera, his voice, embarrassingly squeaky, would say, “Take your top off,” and her smile then, the sunniest, most open smile, a smile of love and abandon, as she crossed her arms to pull the fabric upwards. He had watched this tape at first to see her body emerge, over and again, in its pallor and its vulnerability, to see the coin-sized yellow bruise on her ribcage, the quiver of her belly, and the sheer joy she had at exposing herself for him.

  And then after a while he had only watched the beginning, to see that smile, a smile indicating a pleasure he had never caused anyone else to experience.

  “Daddy,” said a voice close to him, “what you doing?”

  “I’m cleaning, sweetie. I’m cleaning up. Tell your mother I’m cleaning up.” He had snapped the screen shut and dropped the camera back into the box in one motion.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Old toys I’m throwing out.”

  “I want them. Let me see.”

  “No, you don’t. They’re not yours.”

  “All the toys are mine.”

  The Bean had a point here.

  “I’m going to clean this up and then I’m going to go in the car to give them away to the Salvation Army.”

  “To the poor people?”

  “Yes. So go inside and—”

  “No. I want my toys.”

  “They’re baby things. You’re not a baby, are you? Now go inside and tell mummy that’s what I’m doing.”

  “It’s a camewa,” said the Bean, pointing at the hatbox. “Let me see it.”

  “No.” Ivor pushed it away with his foot. “Now go tell mummy—”

  “It’s a camewa!” the boy squealed. “Let me make a movie!”

  “No, it doesn’t work. Listen, I’m looking for raccoons. Do you think there are raccoons in here?”

  The boy stepped back, into the sunlight. “No. No.”

  “They are a little scary. I think I’d better look for them on my own.”

  “I want to see them.” But he was backing away.

  “No, you don’t. Go inside and tell mummy I haven’t found them yet.”

  “When you find them, will you kill them?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “Do we eat them?”

  “No.”

  “And if you kill them
they will be in the sky.”

  “No, they won’t. I won’t kill them.”

  “Will they come inside?”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “What will they do?”

  “They will. Ah. I’m not sure yet.”

  “Daddy, what will you do? What will you do?”

  “Ivor.” And there was the tall shadow of Kara. “I’ve been calling you for ages.”

  He stepped into the light to block her way. “I haven’t found them yet,” he said, “but I know they’re in here.”

  “He’s not going to kill them,” said the Bean.

  “So I’m off now,” said Kara.

  “What I’m going to have to do,” said Ivor, “is clean this thing out a bit. There are a bunch of things I’m going to take to the Salvation Army. All these old baby things. I can go right now.”

  “Daddy,” said the Bean, “what is called crack cocaine?”

  Ivor and Kara were quite still for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “What is what?”

  “Crack cocaine.”

  He kneeled and looked in the boy’s eyes. “Where did you hear that word?”

  “The report man said the mayor was smoking crack cocaine.”

  “Yes that is right. He said that.”

  “What is crack cocaine?”

  The sun was in Ivor’s eyes and his knees burned. Kara was moving into the shed. “Where are they?” she said.

  “Crack cocaine is poison,” said Ivor. “Right mummy? It’s a poison and it’s very bad for you.”

  “And you smoke it?”

  “No, you don’t. If you touch it, you have to go to hospital. And the police will come and take you to jail. That’s why everybody is very very mad at the mayor.”

  “Why did he smoke it?”

  “Well, we don’t know if—”

  “The report man said the mayor smoked crack cocaine. And but, but, but, but, but, but, but.”

  “Okay,” said Ivor.

  “But the mayor said he didn’t smoked it. Doesn’t smoked it. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and.”