The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
Chapter 4
Regardless of life’s complications, of stubbornness gained and flexibility lost, I knew from the start that I’d love Maddy forever.
I understood this the day she moved into Adam’s house. I’d just finished an eleven-hour shift, a shift so hot and exhausting that by well before morning break it had wrung the Vince-induced hangover from me like foul water from an old, wet sock. And now, aching, streaked with sweat and crushed rock, and with the steel caps of my work boots broiling my toes, I limped into the house and poked my head through the kitchen doorway — just to catch a glimpse of the owner of the new, lilting voice coming from within before I took my shower and collapsed into bed.
Of course, the siren’s song was hers. She sat across the kitchen table from Katie; a glass of white wine sat in front of each of them and a single enormous suitcase rested by Maddy’s side. I’d never seen a woman like her before — a woman who could look so incredible with no apparent effort. She glanced at me, with her auburn hair, straight and clean, falling over the shoulders of her plain white T-shirt and touching the waistband of her faded Levi’s. Her flawless skin, with no hint of makeup, and her face, with its perfect symmetry, mesmerized me instantly. Beauty without fanfare: was she even aware of it?
Looking back, I realize I was seeing everything through a burst floodgate of hormones; I think Katie had picked up on this, or, more likely, anticipated it. She laughed loud and said, “You’re pathetic, Jimmy boy. No, check that — you’re just a man and all men are pathetic.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Look at you. Flexing in the doorway for the new broad.” She turned and looked to Maddy. “No offence, Maddy. Just making a point.”
“None taken,” Maddy replied, smiling, making herself even more beautiful.
I took stock, and yes indeed, there I stood, in my strap T-shirt, both hands up, not so nonchalantly gripping each side of the door frame as I peered into the kitchen. Perhaps I should have called out “Stella!” But really, it wasn’t my fault. The fabricated stance, honed and evolved over the millennia, genetically encoded, stated that I could, in fact, offer protection from the saber-tooth and the mammoth. And in my defense, my body was new, improved, and although still not in the babe-magnet category, held fifty percent more attracting power than I was used to wielding. If I’d struck a pose like that six months earlier, I’d have been laughed out of the room.
But I’d been unmasked now, so I dropped my arms.
“Well, don’t just stand there looking bug-eyed,” Katie said. “Come on in. There’s beer in the fridge.”
Our kitchen at that house was vast, the floor a sea of two-by-six planks painted navy grey, uncluttered except for a yellow and black scarred Formica table surrounded by a ring of rickety, non-matching wooden chairs. A fridge and stove set, circa 1963, completed the decor, but we didn’t use either very much. Mostly, we used the fridge for a cooler, the coffee-maker for nourishment, and the table as a meeting place.
I opened the fridge door. A six-pack of Amstel Light sat chilling along with the wine. I’d noticed, too, that the women had been eating what looked like endive salads, courtesy of La Petit Gourmet, a pretentious take-out place around the corner. A normal Saturday night meant pizza, wings, or Chinese food, with a minimum of twenty-four beers sitting in the fridge. Things just didn’t add up. But confused, and more than a little nervous in Maddy’s presence, I held my tongue.
“So anyhow,” Katie said, “Madeleine Moffatt — or Maddy, as she likes to be called — meet Jim Kearns and vice versa.”
I nodded from the fridge. “Hi, Maddy,” escaped my dry lips like a croak.
She smiled and said hello back.
Then Katie said, “Y’know what? Despite Jimmy here being a total goof, I think you guys are going to really get along.” I don’t know if you could call it shameless, but obviously she was instigating something.
I walked to the counter drawer, looking straight ahead, and started sifting through it for a bottle opener. I could feel the back of my neck flushing. I liked Katie a lot, and she liked me, too, but I’d always felt we’d existed under the unspoken decree that we shouldn’t act on our feelings — that two people of our nature coming together would be like mixing matter and antimatter, a fart and a flame, that the union would be glorious but brief, ending in some kind of explosion and ruining everything. Plus, she intimidated me. She’d broken up with her last boyfriend (a greasy womanizer, it turns out) via the telephone. With the entire household sitting around the living room listening, she delivered this parting shot: “Here’s your problem, jerkoff. You think your penis is big when, in fact, just its aroma is.” She paused for a beat, listening, barked out a laugh, then continued. “You make me want to puke. Don’t ever come near me again.” And he hadn’t, leaving half his wardrobe and an entire record collection in her possession. She’d kept the records and donated the clothing to the Salvation Army, apologizing to a puzzled-looking clerk for her momentary lack of taste as she placed the stuffed-to-bursting duffel bag (also the ex’s) on the counter.
But as I said, we liked each other, did things for each other, and as I look back on that day now, in search of the highs and lows and rights and wrongs, I do find that pretty amazing. You would never see a cougar or rhino pitching a friend’s virtues during mating season; it would be all snarls and head-butts. Of course it’s normally that way with humans, too, during the mating years, at bars, parties, wherever, but those moments exist that separate us from the lower animals. And here was one now, as Katie, obviously calling the shots, tried to present me as civilized, intelligent, even nice.
I turned with my open beer and sat at the table, close enough to catch Maddy’s scent for the first time. Her scent. How’s that for romantic bullshit? But it’s true, too. She smelled clean and pretty (words I normally wouldn’t assign to a smell), and beneath that, I guess, pheromones floated, plying a subtle magic that men and women can never consciously wield.
I spent my first minutes at the table — if it’s possible to remember being in a daze — just looking at my right hand wrapped around my beer, watching the ingrained grime in the crook of my thumb turn slick from the bottle’s sweat as I listened to them talk and laugh; and then Katie struck again, guiding the conversation to common ground.
“So, anyway, Maddy,” she said. “You mentioned earlier that you’d studied P.G. Wodehouse in one of your courses last year. Jim’s a huge P.G. fan.”
“Really,” Maddy said, turning to me. “That seems like a rarity these days.”
I believe I responded in the affirmative, with something like: “Oh yeah, uh-huh.”
Luckily, Maddy, trooper that she is, kept going. “I ran across him at the end of Grade 9. I don’t think I stepped outside a single day that summer — except to go to the library and back.”
That was it. Together, they’d tossed me some sort of mental lifesaver as I’d floundered in my choppy sea of nerves and exhilaration. I took a huge swallow of beer. “It was Grade 11 for me,” I said, my brain and tongue finally starting to mesh like gear and cog. “I read every book in the Jeeves/Bertie series, including the short stories, during Christmas break.”
“Well take my advice and never sign up for a course called Twentieth-Century English Masters,” Maddy said, shaking her head. “Having to listen to theories about the Drones Club representing the downfall of the British Empire came close to ruining it all for me.”
Not an auspicious start, I know, but short of pulling someone from a flaming car wreck, what is? And relationships do have to start somewhere.
We talked through dusk and into the night, the words coming easier and easier for me; throughout the rest of the house, people came and went, introducing themselves to Maddy as they passed through the kitchen. On occasion the stereo would rumble to life from the living room, spewing out Lou Reed or the Stones, and still we sat, perched on our small, hard chairs. By ten, a small party had broken out, and the smell of weed drifted into the kitchen. By eleven, the party and the smell of weed had drifted off, to the Vince or another house, as did Katie, winking at me as she backed out the kitchen door, and still Maddy and I talked.
By one o’clock, as I pulled off my boots and peeled away my work clothes in preparation for my shower, my thoughts were a total jumble. Maddy was by no means mine; serious courting and planning lay ahead. But at that particular time, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, really. All at once was I, several stories high. There weren’t no mountain high enough, there weren’t no ocean deep enough … all of that crap crowded my head, if not the songs themselves, their imagery and feeling, from the most perceptive right down to the corniest.
Maybe, when it’s all said and done, that’s partially what rankles now. Those initial months of true love, when you stagger around in a delicious fog, perhaps comparable only to that instant you first hold your newborn to your heart and know you’d die for him — when do you acknowledge that you’ll never reach those heights again?
And once you have acknowledged that, what’s left to do but mark time?
* * *
I like to mark time, or a small part of it anyway, by hitting the heavy bag. I hung one in the garage the year Rachel turned seven, the year … well, never mind that for now. I put it up five years ago, screwing a heavy-duty eye hook into a crossbeam, clearing all unnecessary items to the side, and setting a boom box at low volume on some raucous radio station twenty-four hours a day to keep the raccoons away. Once they set up shop in a place, they wreak havoc and the stench is unbearable, but the radio’s presence makes them think the garage is constantly occupied.
Punching the bag has been my tai chi, my yoga. When I let my hands go, I feel all tension and negative thoughts go with them. I transfer everything into that swinging, sixty-pound sack; it must be pure evil by now, a black hole of bad karma, with its true weight approaching immeasurable, because, let’s face it, mad, bad, and sad weigh a fuck of a lot more than glad. These are things you notice in your step, in every movement, in fact, when you have to carry them around year after year.
So three times a week I slip out the back door with my hands taped, from my knuckles up to just past my wrists, and with a pair of sparring gloves slipped over the wraps. I probably should wear twelve-ounce gloves to prevent knuckle separation, but then I’d lose what little feeling of speed I enjoy. Besides, my hands are already screwed from decades of gripping shovels and clutching paving stones, the tendons and ligaments stretched to their limits under the constant parade of loaded wheelbarrows.
My choice of exercise must seem pathetic, I know. A forty-five-year-old laborer does not tattoo a sagging, duct-taped heavy bag with the rattattattatt of a ring craftsman. As I lumber around the garage, the sound of my slow-motion combinations squeeze, muffled and wet, from under the half-closed roll-down door: poop, poop, pause for a beat, poop,poop, poop. Then sucking sounds, the desperate sounds of the catching of lost breath, follow, as if the creature within is pre-emphysematous (and all bets are off on that).
From the street, passersby peering down our lane would hear these strange noises and see the doughy legs and shuffling feet of a heavy-set white man, the garage-band equivalent of an aging Chuck Wepner, as he performed his slow, awkward dance around the bottom of a swaying cylinder in preparation for some non-existent fight.
This is what my neighbor, Simon Weir, sees too, when he peeks out his kitchen window with his nose crinkled and his forehead V’d as he drinks in my vulgar display. I’ve caught him looking this way, rearing back from his partially open curtains too late as I ducked under the garage door and into the driveway in search of fresh air on those muggy, dusky summer nights.
When you throw in the fact that the music tapes I find my rhythm to out there, the Pearl Jam/Roxy Music/Pixies mixes (not to mention a round or two of the newer breed: Moby and Fat Boy Slim), stick a thumb in the eye of his Glen Gould sensibilities, of course there’s going to be friction. But what can you do? Our troubles lie far deeper than our musical tastes.
This became obvious the week he moved in, no, the day he moved in … hold on, the hour he moved in three years ago this summer. Although our houses are detached, our garages aren’t; they’re semis, and we access them through a shared driveway that flares out into our separate backyard properties. The garages themselves straddle the property line, but, as with our tastes, property lines aren’t really our problem either.
The problem is our mere co-existence, with him viewing me as an ignorant middle-aged shovel-monkey with a penchant for crude insults, and me viewing him as a pompous, middle-aged community college English teacher with bloated feelings of self-worth.
It started the moment the Allied moving van rolled to a stop in front of his new home and the movers dropped ramp to start their antlike procession. This was when he pulled into the driveway, parked, and, separating from his wife and daughter, instantly marched back to his half of the garage carrying a Black and Decker cordless drill and a bag of screws and hooks.
Within the hour he’d set up his anal lawn-care storage system, with his lawnmower, shovels, rakes, brooms, weed whacker, hand spades, and whisks, largest at the entrance to smallest at the rear, all hung on the common wall of our garage.
Of course, I had no idea what he was doing at the time. I’d merely been exercising my neighborly rights, watching from our porch with coffee in hand on a hot summer morning, as the new guy busied himself with his move — first lugging a screw gun to the back, then (two coffees later on my behalf) the gardening gear that lay waiting for him at the rear of the van.
From the beginning he radiated a feeling of pseudo-intellectual superiority that was palpable. Tall and pale, he sported a graying Vandyke beard. Thinning brown locks hung over his collar (just a smidgeon, mind you, but it spoke of an intellectually rebellious youth) and dark pouches, the color of his hair, drooped under his eyes. Your basic endomorph, if that means pear-shaped, he seemed to fill his billowing short-sleeved Arrow shirt, even the nooks and crannies. But his physical presence — his eccentric choice of moving shirt and strange, bulbous softness — hadn’t swayed my opinion of him. Many people struggle with their weight. The North American economy exacerbates this problem, genetics and metabolisms perpetuate it. No. What swayed me was his pretentiousness, the way he walked down the moving van’s ramp, unable to control either his gait or the ramp’s bounce under the lightest of loads, like Neil Armstrong trying to corral the grip of a strange new world, and the looks of contempt he gave the movers as they flowed easily down the ramp while bearing the weight of refrigerators, sofas, credenzas.
Of course, that was mere observation, but he fully exposed himself, and his intellectual snobbery, just hours later.
The conflict unfolded like a bad sitcom as Rachel and I hit the heavy bag together in the garage later that day. For whatever reason, she liked to go out there every once in a while and flail away while Eric wanted no part of it. I never knew whether to be concerned about or proud of this reverse stereotyping, but ultimately I just accepted it because Rachel seemed to have so much fun. And that afternoon started out no different.
“Do I, or don’t I,” she said to me partway through the workout, “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee?” And then, hopping about in her girlish manner, she unloaded a doubled-up left jab, a straight right, and a fluid left hook — surprisingly fast considering the full-sized gloves weighing down her slender arms.
“First of all,” I said, “where did you hear that ‘sting like a bee’ stuff?”
She looked at me, with her head tilted, for about a second. “I dunno. I just heard it, I guess.”
“Okay then. And secondly, you certainly do both of those things. But if I can make a suggestion.” I planted my feet slightly more than shoulders-width apart, the toes of the right in line with the heel of the left. “Shuffling around when you jab is fine, but when you throw the right-left, plant your feet like this — like you couldn’t be knocked over if somebody pushed you. The power comes up through your back leg.”
I threw the second half of the combination, the straight right and left hook, enjoying the abruptness of my fists stopping at the bag, the feeling of density waiting at the end of each punch, the way the bag hiccupped on contact.
Rachel already knew the mechanics of her punches, but overcoming enthusiasm isn’t child’s play. So she tried it again, this time planting, and for a nine-year-old girl (or boy, for that matter) she threw a tremendous combination, smooth and quick, with no hint of looping or awkwardness. Then she looked up at me, all flushed, with strands of hair sticking to her forehead, pretty the way Maddy must have been pretty decades ago, and awaited my approval.
Tears welled in my eyes, stopping just before they spilled out. Of course, this had happened to me before — but not often. Now it’s a common occurrence — a furtive look at a family member, obvious prose, even mediocre movies hold the power to squeeze a few out of me and make me feel as though I’ve become totally unbalanced, but back then it always took something meaningful, something as potent as Eric’s pain or Rachel’s expectations.
“That was perfect, Rach,” I said, my voice sort of shaky; but it didn’t matter. The music blared and we panted from the heat and exertion. I wanted to say more, to tell her just how great I thought she was, but an obtrusive “Halloo” shattered the moment.
I looked toward the garage door and saw only the bottom half of a man — grey flannels and a pair of beige Hush Puppies splayed out in a Chaplinesque stance. Before I could respond, another “Halloo” followed — too quickly, I thought. A loud, tinny palming of the sheet-metal door capped the intrusion.
I looked at Rachel, shrugged, and pushed down the big “stop” button on the boom box with the thumb of my sparring glove. Then I stepped to the door, rolled it up, and stood face to face with Weir for the first time.
No great revelations struck me, just your basic observations — that he looked even pastier up close than he did from a distance and that he had a bent for short-sleeved Arrow shirts (having changed into a different one after the move) — but I knew for certain then that I stood before a man I could never like.
He eyed Rachel and me for a second, his face seemingly impartial, then said, “I hate to interrupt, but your … activities here are disturbing some of the things I’ve stored in my garage.”
My previous neighbor had mentioned that, too — until I’d dutifully and fully insulated all four walls and scabbed a two-by-four onto the crossbeam holding the bag. He’d never brought the subject up again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I could have sworn I’d corrected that problem.”
“Perhaps you had — with the person who lived here last. But right now you’re endangering my gardening gear.”
I stepped out of the garage and peeked around to his side. Right in front of me, his Toro Lawn Champ, or whatever, hung half a foot from the floor. Nothing else on the wall, the brooms and such, seemed to hold any real value or breakable properties.
“I don’t want to seem stupid, but why have you hung your lawnmower?” I asked.
“The sweat from the concrete floor,” he responded, looking at me as if I were much more than stupid. “Hanging it keeps moisture from condensing under the casing and getting into the blades’ housing unit.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said, although his explanation seemed to stretch sensibility. You want to keep your ass off of damp concrete floors — and that’s to keep moisture from getting into your casing and housing unit. Lawnmowers were made to chop up tons of moist vegetation, and I’d seen hundreds sitting on garage floors in my lifetime.
“It makes total sense,” he replied.
I didn’t want trouble, really (although later allegations would imply differently), but the garage was the only place for my heavy bag, and I wanted to address and solve the issues as soon as possible, so I pressed on.
“My garage door was open when you moved in this morning,” I said. “Didn’t you see the bag hanging there at that time?”
“Of course I saw it,” he said, establishing at that moment what would become his unfailing, long-suffering tone. “But why would I have given it any consideration at all? I’ve never had anything to do with one before in my life.”
“Just the fact that it’s heavy, as its name implies, and it’s punched, as everyone knows, would raise the possibility of some shaking. You might have knocked on my door and inquired.”
“I didn’t think of it,” he said. “And I’ll tell you why. I’d just moved into my new house and I’d assumed I could load my new garage any way I saw fit.”
Now, along with tone, he dripped attitude — and we’d reached that moment of no return; although no finger pointing, chest puffing, or yelling had yet occurred, we’d carried the confrontation to the next level in all the subtle ways.
With that thought, a trio of observations entered my mind. The first was this: in the space of one minute I’d gone from sharing a special time with my daughter to an episode of senseless friction with a stranger. The second was this: of course the moron in front of me had given the heavy bag full consideration, immediately thinking, Son-of-a-fucking bitch, we’ve just moved next to a Neanderthal. He just plain didn’t like me — and the heavy bag was a part of that dislike. And the third observation, the only one to give me any real pleasure, was this: the new jerk wasn’t being the least bit accommodating, so I wasn’t going to be, either.
I walked back to my garage and the heavy bag and took a swing at it — half-heartedly but with all the acting skill I could muster. I paused and cocked an ear towards his side of the wall. Nothing. I shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem bad enough to be concerned about. I couldn’t hear any movement at all.”
“That is not how you were hitting it earlier,” he said. “I stood outside your door and listened for some time.”
I’ll bet he had. “Maybe the music’s vibrations made it worse.”
“Yes, the music,” he said, grimacing.
He’d rapped on the garage door as “Baby’s On Fire” poured out of the stereo, with its bass line pounding and Brian Eno sneering, “Baby’s on fire/and all the laughing boys are bitching/waiting for photos/of the part that’s so bewitching.” And now, as he looked at me, a boorish thug in my smelly exercise rags, and Rachel, the disheveled match girl forced into brutish sport by her evil father, he allowed his anger or condescension (or some other emotion that pushed him into the territory of poor judgment) to take over. Or maybe, as a community college English teacher spending half his life in the world of fiction, he’d existed under the delusion that he kept rank with Callahan and Mailer and Hemingway and could, as they had on occasion, let his fists fly, punctuating his definitive statements with four-knuckled exclamation marks.
“Come here and keep your eye on the lawnmower,” he said, brushing past me. We switched spots and he stood in front of the bag, eyeing a soft spot in the canvas that hovered to his right at shoulder height.
Even then, I might have said, “Look. Why don’t you just move everything to the other side of the garage? Right now. It’ll only take about half an hour, and I’ll help.” I’d thought about saying that — I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The hate was already there.
Weir wound up, throwing his fist as if he were throwing a pitch, and I started wincing before he made contact. To the uninitiated, the spot he aimed for would seem insubstantial, almost cloudlike, but even the most worn areas of a heavy bag do what they’re made to do, and that’s stop a fist suddenly, absorb energy, and return it; hence the wraps and gloves. So when Weir’s bare knuckles hit their target, his unsupported and unsuspecting wrist turned sharply, bending his hand in on itself. An unfamiliar sound issued from around the bag, not a poop or a whump, but a POP, and Weir bent over, his upper teeth instantly digging into his lower lip. He clutched his hand to his stomach.
That, I suppose, allowed me my next opportunity to be the bigger man, to rush over and show concern despite his obvious hostilities. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, “Oooh, I didn’t see any movement on this side of the garage — not even a jiggly-poo. Maybe you should give it a shot, Rachel.”
“Bastard,” Weir hissed, glaring at me, and, still bent over and still clutching, he exited stage right in a reasonable Groucho Marx imitation. For the next month, I’m sure, he ached to flip me the bird. Unfortunately, his bird lay trapped, all bundled up in a knuckles-to-elbow cast. He never asked me to sign it.
I don’t know. Maybe Weir’s a nice guy. All it takes is a bad start to make you turn a blind eye to a person’s good points. Feuds, even wars, spring from minor disagreements, burying the initial petty causes beneath a sea of hurt.
That’s what has happened with us. I’ve lost sight of any other possibilities. When I walk up the drive, peek through the front window of his Volvo station wagon, and see a copy of, say, Raymond Carver’s Cathedral or Saul Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak (always left face up, of course, on the front passenger seat), I shudder and don’t think, My, what intellect. Unfair thoughts flit past, and I can imagine Weir (not in my mind’s eye, of course), hunched over in his den, performing a one-fisted Ginger Baker drum solo on his semi-tumescent pud as he contemplates Betty Sue’s perky split infinitive (or, possibly, that strapping exchange student’s blatant dangling participle) while grading midterms.
But the bigger picture is this: what does Rachel learn, as an impressionable child, when forced to soak up interaction between the unyielding and the obstinate, the pompous and the bitter? The superficial answer would be this: learn to throw a good punch — crisp and efficient. It’s how the world works.
But that would be wrong. I’ve proven the good-punch theory to be faulty and filled with repercussions — and now I’m paying for it.