The Graveyard
Fiction by Evie Christie
The Graveyard on Balsam and Blvd. was not so different from the other pubs of its era. It was, however, significantly different in that it survived, fully intact. The developers who neutered the strip in the 1980s failed to persuade the owner, one of those stories in which lore outweighs fact; but nevertheless, the cramped, low-ceilinged dive sprawled smokily on both Balsam and Blvd. trapping the bursaries of grad students and hopeful writers like the fly tape in plain view in its original stainless galley kitchen. Frederick — not Fred or Freddy he told Virginia, the barkeep, often enough she should have known by now — had just left the generic undergrad bedroom of another dreary middle-class girl who would go on to be a childless elementary school teacher on Zoloft if he hazarded a guess. Freddy! Virginia called out.
Freddy would have been a cool salute had he been, like the others, a sleepy rich kid who grew up seeing his parents between their time in Hong Kong and London, shuffled off to schools and camps with their slight, blond siblings, sisters with ski-jump noses and the right amount of freckling. As the son of Carol and Freddy Edwards, however, it was nothing more than a slur in his ear, which was bright red at hearing the busty Virginia’s voice and more so at seeing the others hear her voice. His grad school loans were running dry and Virginia was in the habit of forgiving every third drink so he didn’t stand up from his vinyl stool and say, Look, it’s Frederick, you know it is Frederick, even someone like you remembers things like this, things they are told over and over. Virginia, do you see that? How I call you by your name? The one you prefer? I didn’t call you Virge or Ginny, did I?
He suspected that Virginia knew, felt maybe he was closer to the likes of her than he was to the peers around him, and was torturing him with complete refusal to express that while using that signifier or signifiers, his father’s chosen name.
He slumped and hoped to fade into the hazy background of everyone’s thoughts and accepted his usual with a nod as the girl he truly loved walked toward the bar’s door, hopping over the arm of a drunken street performer and loosening her scarf as she entered. You look like an idiot with that fur jacket.
That suits me fine, I am an idiot.
Yeah?
Mhmm.
What is it now?
Gabe or Gabrielle Green was a well-read, lazy, and slovenly dressed undergrad with no real aspirations Frederick could detect. Even in longer moonlit drunken adventures through the parkettes of Toronto’s downtown and university district could he tease out any signs of that scathing, scalding, rage-filled hunger for fame or publication he felt himself and felt in the blisteringly direct and dismissive conversations he had suffered through in the English faculty lounge. And yet she was accepting of it when it came like a doe-eyed undergrad stud, landing at her feet. He didn’t blame them for wanting her but he blamed her for accepting it when she didn’t want it, didn’t need it, hadn’t worked for it as he had. What is it now? She reached a raccoon fur arm out and took a lit cigarette from the hand of a man ordering a drink. He smiled, she smoked for a moment silently then handed it back to him as his drink arrived.
What it is is that I’m pregnant. Horribly so. You know, I thought I was suffering from anemia or was eating too much wheat.
You don’t eat wheat or anything else Frederick almost said.
You really are an idiot aren’t you, he laughed, unsmilingly, looking at Virginia, willing her to bring him a drink with his mind.
Don’t you want to know who?
Ha, Frederick shouted in a cheerful manner. I’m good.
Suit yourself. Gabe took one of his cigarettes and he slapped her hand.
You’re a Puritan suddenly?
I just don’t agree with letting one’s bad habits destroy others is all.
I don’t think “one” can help that even if they tried since “one” never knows which habits will be most destructive to those around them.
In the summer Frederick became sweaty and red while those around him tended to get a hint of tan and wear linen, and when they did sweat it was forgiven because they looked as though they didn’t deserve it and it didn’t come naturally to them. He spent more time in air-conditioned bookshops and it was in Bog Standards heavenly, environmentally, and questionably chill back room he came across the issue of a magazine he was waiting for in his own mail slot. He stood greedily in front of the air condition vent holding his dress shirt up with one hand so that his waist was the recipient of all of the cold in the back quarter of the shop. His Professor, Dr. Bennett, said men did that, they zeroed in on solutions and even in this one small decision Frederick was doing what he was biologically created to do. He was less sweaty. He didn’t look up at an older woman in a denim vest who attempted to reprimand him with her eyebrows but instead woozily leaned his entire body on the vent and wondered if he should have the miffed baby-boomer call 911 on his behalf.
Moments later he was composed, physically, able to mask his sudden and severe illness at the shock of seeing it, Gabe’s name on the cover, the lower left corner amongst the highlighted contributors.
Moments later he was composed, physically, able to mask his sudden and severe illness at the shock of seeing it, Gabe’s name on the cover, the lower left corner amongst the highlighted contributors.
Are you alright? The lady in the denim vest looked warm and concerned. Go away, Frederick was able to say. His mouth was so dry the words were like an ICU patient or a hostage calling police from a Burlington cellar; he thought about the Tin Man saying oil can, he was unfortunately not without a heart or feeling and was reeling and angry and sad. He sat outside on a stone bench on St. George and waited for her to saunter out of the office of the professor she was most in love with. She burst through the double doors blowing a bubble with chewing gum and spritzing her face with a natural mist from a light pink bottle. Cunt! A student who no doubt was quite familiar with her ducked as the mist rained softly behind her.
She turned back, hit the inside of her elbow with a fist clenching the pink bottle, and her other hand flung up displaying only its middle finger.
Frederick stroked the lion’s face which seemed to be propping up the bench where he sat to keep himself calm, his heart beating too much he thought... can a heart beat too much though? he wondered. That kind of information was reserved for those who took rewarding and gainful academic careers. If you wanted to know the ABBA’s, anything about a sonnet really, but didn’t want to know anything that could help you survive, English literature was your rightful path.
Yes? Gabe lowered her sunglasses in Frederick’s direction.
When were you going to tell me? he meant to ask but instead yelled, spitting accidentally and feeling like a madman or the Incredible Hulk, transitioning.
Tell you WHAT? She spit at the ground after she said it.
Never mind, Frederick mumbled.
Gabe took off her glasses and looked down. Frederick’s hands were shaking and the journal in his hand fluttered as he shook.
I’m sorry. Hey? I’m SORRY. Gabe smiled softly.
Fuck you. Yeah yeah.
They walked towards a diner that doesn’t exist anymore where a husband and wife cursed in Greek at each other every time they visited.
Professor Bennett noted that affirmative action was responsible for most of the decline in art and literature we see today. And it was no different in literary journals than it was with Penguin or Faber. Gabe’s head seemed to hover above and away from her body as she talked. Frederick rubbed his eyes as though he had been in a smoky room.
Virginia looked as though she might belt out a nickname and Frederick cut her off by catching her eye and nodding. She carried four drinks with her fingers half-deep in each, dropped a scotch in front of him with such an experienced hand, not a drop splashed over the sides. She had a skill, she wasn’t born carrying drinks in glasses in an unsanitary manner. She worked at it, she cared about the craftsmanship in her role as barkeep, maiden of the graveyard. Nothing had fallen in her broad lap and had it fallen likely would have hit her boorishly unstylish naked cleavage first. As much as he didn’t care to admit it, Virginia and he were very much alike when it came to that — work ethic. Although his slender frame had been referred to as fragile by not one but two girls he’d dated since arriving at university and his pale skin and orange hair gave the impression he was the type to spontaneously combust in flames under the July sun, he was in fact, at his father’s insistence, a labourer throughout his youth and high school years. Something he had resented, but now in his less successful state wore as a badge of working-class heroism some of the younger political science, English, and especially philosophy students held a reverence for. He’d been to see Žižek speak but he didn’t care much about the chains of capitalism if he was honest. And he almost never was. Dr. Bennett had knocked some sense into him and it was becoming more and more difficult to unsee what the data had to say on the “worker” today. While Gabe rolled a joint in her lap he thought how innocent she looked in profile: studious, concentrated, biting one side of her bottom lip.
She had no idea what was happening. She would, sadly, be caught breathless and maybe stumble back upon hearing the news. If only I had the patience, Frederick thought aloud.
Huh?
Nothing.
To wait until the magazine came out . . . but no, he didn’t have that type of patience or if he had he’d burned through it waiting six years to see his name in print, in real print. While Gabe was attending guerrilla economy group meetings and supporting the unionizing efforts at the university bookstore while avoiding work and the economy in general, Frederick was assisting Dr. Bennett with his research. He wrote speeches and rewrote passages of manuscripts for Bennett, the professors ideas started to form in his brain and grow like fetuses scraped or left to thrive in Gabe’s womb. Frederick at first questioning the professor’s right leaning rhetoric, then not. He did see the potential for col- leagues and acquaintances to view these ideas as dangerous, slippery-slope-isms, but there was the maths and sciences behind them. The amount a woman worked and how much time she gave to her children, you could work out those numbers and Bennett did that. You could not fault him for the numbers and yet women were still complaining about equal wages while working unequal hours — at some point you have to choose, right? Choice was a misnomer; biology chooses, Bennett said.
Choose what? Gabe pulled a cigarette from his mouth and pressed it to her lips. Choose what, idiot, she blew the words in rings of nicotine and probably two hundred carcinogens across his forehead.
He wanted to stab her in the stomach. She must be the stupidest person in the world! He wanted to chop her head off and leave it on the desk of George Saunders. Is this what they wanted? Is this who should be writing our stories or raising our babies? Or fucking our professors? But he did not have it in him to cut off the head of a girl he loved, much less to sit in jail with a bunch of idiots for the rest of his life — although he probably wouldn’t be a dangerous offender and he wouldn’t write a pedestrian manifesto so it would likely be only twelve years.
Choose WHAT! she hollered over the Elvis song someone had put on the jukebox. I love you, you know.
Yeah yeah yeah …
Will you name the baby after him? Don’t know.
I wish I could chop your head off right here.
I know. She laughed it off as though he didn’t really wish he could do it, as though he wasn’t slipping away into a fantasy about 1950 middle America, the New Yorker, Gabe and her head wrapped in raccoon fur rolling from a Nagamaki’s slick blade into the sea, forever. »