Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(52)

So he’d been in no mood to discuss the topic that was produced by Irena over the noodle-and-tuna leftovers, mercilessly, right off the bat.

“You’re three months behind on the rent money,” she said. Before he even had a chance to drink his instant coffee.

“Christ,” he said. “Look at that, my hands are shaking. I really tied one on last night!” Why couldn’t she be more understanding and nurturing, for f*ck’s sake? Even a perceptive comment would have been assuaging. “You look like hell,” for instance.

“Don’t change the subject,” said Irena. “As you’re aware, the rest of us have been forced to pay your share of the rent for you; otherwise we’ll all get evicted. But this has to stop. Either you find some way of paying or you’ll have to leave. We’ll need to rent out your room to someone who actually does pay.”

Jack slumped down at the table. “I know, I know,” he said. “Geez. I’m sorry. I’ll make it good, I just need a little more time.”

“Time for what?” said Jaffrey with a disbelieving smirk. “Absolute time, or relative time? Internal or measurable? Euclidean or Kantean?” It was way too early in the day for him to be starting up with the hair-splitting Philosophy 101 wordplay. He was such an * that way.

“Anyone have an aspirin?” said Jack. It was a weak move, but the only one he could lay his hands on. He did in truth have a fearsome headache. Irena stood up to get him a painkiller. She couldn’t resist the urge to play nursie.

“How much more time?” said Rod. He had out his little greenish-brown notebook, the one in which he made his mathematical calculations: he was the bookkeeper for their joint enterprise.

“You’ve been needing more time for weeks,” said Irena. “Months, actually.” She set down two aspirins and a glass of water. “There’s Alka-Seltzer too,” she added.

“My novel,” said Jack, not that he hadn’t waved this excuse around before. “I need the time, I really … I’m almost finished.” This was untrue. In fact, he was stuck on the third chapter. He’d outlined the characters: four people – four attractive, hormone-sodden students – living in a three-storey pointy brick Victorian row house near the university, uttering cryptic sentences about their psyches and fornicating a lot, but he couldn’t move beyond that because he didn’t know what else they could possibly do. “I’ll get a job,” he said feebly.

“Such as what?” said obsidian-hearted Irena. “There’s ginger-ale, if you want some.”

“Maybe you could sell encyclopedias,” said Rod, and the three of them laughed. Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate; in addition to which the idea of him, Jack Dace, actually selling anything to anyone struck them as funny. Their view of him was that he was a f*ck-up and a jinx from whom stray dogs fled because they could smell failure on him like catshit. Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, but it was working against him now.

“Why don’t you sell shares in your novel?” said Rod. He was in Economics; he played the stock market with his spare change and wasn’t too bad at it, which was how he paid his own f*cking rent. It made him smug and insufferable on the subject of money, characteristics he has retained ever since.

“Okay, I’m game,” Jack said. It was make-believe at that point. The three of them were humouring him – giving him a break, pretending to acknowledge his claim to talent, opening up a pathway to fiscal rectitude for him, if only a theoretical one. That was their story later: that they’d colluded in order to give him a boost up, lead him to believe that they believed in him, toss him some validation. Then he might actually get off his ass and do something, not that they expected this to actually happen. It wasn’t their fault that it had worked, and so spectacularly.

Rod was the one who drew up the contract. Rent for three months plus one – the three Jack hadn’t paid in the past, and the one that was about to happen. In return, the shares of the proceeds from his yet-to-be-completed novel were divided into four, with a quarter going to each of them, including Jack. It would be negatively motivating if there was no upside built in for Jack himself. With nothing to gain he might not feel energized about finishing the thing, said Rod, who was a believer in Economic Man. He sniggered at this last point, since he didn’t think Jack would finish it anyway.

Would Jack have signed such a contract if he hadn’t been so hung over? Probably. He didn’t want to be evicted. He didn’t want to land on the street, or, worse, back in his parents’ rec room in Don Mills, besieged by hand-wringing and pot roasts from his mother and tut-tutting lectures from his dad. So he’d agreed to every term, and signed, and breathed a sigh of relief, and, at Irena’s urging, had eaten a couple of forkfuls of noodle casserole because it was best to get something into his stomach, and had gone upstairs to take a nap.



But then he had to write the f*cker.

No hope with the four student characters living in the Victorian row house. It was clear they’d refuse to get their paralyzed buttocks off the third-hand kitchen chairs onto which their anuses were at present stuck like the suckers of a collective octopus, even if he lit their feet on fire. He’d have to try something else, something very different; and fast, because writing the novel – any novel – had become a matter of pride. He couldn’t allow Jaffrey and Rod to continue jeering at him; he could no longer endure the pitying, dismissive look in Irena’s lovely blue eyes.