Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(26)

Their mother wasn’t drunk all the time. Her binges took place only on weekends: she had an underpaid secretarial job that she needed to make ends meet, the military widow’s pension being so minuscule. And she did love the twins in her own way.

“At least she wasn’t too violent,” Jorrie would say. “Though she got carried away.”

“Everyone spanked their kids then. Everyone got carried away.” Indeed it was a point of honour to compare your slice of corporal punishment with those of other children, and to exaggerate. Slippers, belts, rulers, hairbrushes, ping-pong paddles: those were the parental weapons of choice. It made the young twins sad that they didn’t have a father to administer such beatings, only ineffectual Mother Maeve, whom they could reduce to tears by pretending to be mortally injured, whom they could tease with relative impunity, from whom they could run away. There were two of them and only one of her, so they ganged up.

“I suppose we were heartless,” Jorrie would say.

“We were disobedient. We talked back. We were out of control. But adorable, you have to grant that.”

“We were brats. Heartless little brats. We showed no mercy,” Jorrie sometimes adds. Is it regret, or bragging?

On the cusp of adolescence, Jorrie had a painful experience with one of the oafs – a sneak attack from which Tin failed to defend her, being asleep at the time. That has weighed on him. It must have messed up her life in regards to men, though most likely her life would have been messed up anyway. She deals with this incident now by making fun of it – “I was ravished by a troll!” – but she hasn’t always managed that. She was downright sullen on the subject of rape in the early ’70s when so many women were going on the rampage, but she seems to have got over that by now.

Molesting isn’t everything, in Tin’s view. He himself never got molested by the oafs, but his relationships with men were just as scrambled, and if anything more so. Jorrie said he had a problem with love: he conceptualizes it too much. He said Jorrie didn’t conceptualize it enough. That was back when love was still a topic of conversation for them.

“We should put all of our lovers in a blender,” Jorrie said once. “Mix them up, average them out.” Tin said she had a brutalist way of putting things.

The truth is, thinks Tin, that the twins never loved anyone except each other. Or they didn’t love anyone unconditionally. Their other loves had many conditions.



“Look who just croaked,” says Jorrie now. “Big Dick Metaphor!”

“That nickname could apply to a lot of men,” says Tin. “Though I assume you mean someone in particular. I can see your ears twitching, so he must be important to you.”

“Three guesses,” says Jorrie. “Hint: He was at the Riverboat a lot, that summer when I was doing their bookkeeping, volunteer, part-time.”

“Because you wanted to hang out with the bohemians,” said Tin. “I do have a vague recollection. So who? Blind Sonny Terry?”

“Don’t be silly,” says Jorrie. “He was decrepit even then.”

“I give up. I never went there much, it was too fetid for me. Those folksingers made a fetish of not bathing.”

“That’s untrue,” says Jorrie. “Not all of them. I know it for a fact. No fair giving up!”

“Who ever said I was fair? Not you.”

“You should be able to read my mind.”

“Oh, a challenge. All right: Gavin Putnam. That self-styled poet you were so nuts about.”

“You knew all along!”

Tin sighs. “He was so derivative, him and his poetry both. Sentimental trash. Quite gruesomely putrid.”

“The early ones were very good,” says Jorrie defensively. “The sonnets, except they weren’t sonnets. The Dark Lady ones.”

Tin has slipped up, he’s been maladroit. How could he have forgotten that some of Gavin Putnam’s early poems had been about Jorrie? Or so she’d claimed. She’d been thrilled by that. “I’m a Muse,” she’d announced when the Dark Lady suite first appeared in print, or in what passed for print among the poets: a stapled-together mimeo magazine they put out themselves and sold to one another for a dollar. The Dirt, they’d called it, in a bid for grittiness.



Tin found it touching that Jorrie was so excited by these poems. He hadn’t seen much of her that season. She had, to put it mildly, a hyperactive social life, due no doubt to the alacrity with which she flung herself into bed, whereas he’d been living in a two-roomer over a barbershop on Dundas and having a quiet sexual identity crisis while toiling away at his doctoral thesis.

This was a solid enough but not honestly very inspired re-examination of the cleaner and more presentable epigrams of Martial, though what really drew him to Martial was his no-nonsense attitude towards sex, so much less complicated than that of Tin’s own era. For Martial, there was no romantic *-footing, no idealization of Woman as having a higher spiritual calling: Martial would have laughed his head off at that! And no taboos: everyone did everything with everyone: slaves, boys, girls, whores, gay, straight, pornography, scatology, wives, young, middle-aged, old, front, back, mouth, hand, cock, beautiful, ugly, and downright repulsive. Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. Chastity was not the primary virtue, for men or for women either, but certain forms of friendship and generosity and tenderness did get top marks. His contemporaries labelled Martial as unusually sunny and good-natured, nor did his scathing, acerbic wit do anything to diminish that perception. His criticisms were not directed at individuals, he claimed, but at types; though Tin had his doubts about that.