Poison Shy Read online

  I wasn’t so lucky. My approach to meeting women was essentially a non-approach. I liked to sit back, make eye contact, smile, and wait for them to come to me. It didn’t work every time — in fact it rarely worked. Most nights I was left to wander home alone after Chad had helped his soon-to-be conquest into a cab. I didn’t mind, really; there was always Internet porn, one hundred percent STD-free.

  Chad’s favourite bars were what I call plush holes — dimly lit date joints with high tables and cushioned stools that served ice wine and raspberry-flavoured beer. I couldn’t stand them. He said he went for the bimbos. I went because I didn’t have any other friends.

  One night, I told Chad I was in the mood for something different. We went to this new place called The Bloody Paw I’d read about in The Frayne Exchange. According to the article, the bar’s owner was an environmentalist named Viktor Lozowsky. He’d spent the last few years in the Northwest Territories, canvassing for a save-the-bears project he’d spearheaded, and had recently returned to the place where he’d grown up. He’d decorated the walls of his establishment with graphic hunting photos — animal carcasses, live bears caught in various traps, beavers being skinned alive. He said he wanted to expose his customers to the horrors of animal cruelty, and shock them into taking political action.

  The strategy struck me as more perverse than inspiring, but the thought of spending another night watching Chad caress the bronzed thighs and glittered shoulders of the barely legal daughters of Frayne was enough to make me insist on The Bloody Paw.

  We showed up during peak hours of campus pub life. A gathering of smokers puffed and mumbled on the sidewalk outside the bar. A scruffy guy with a harelip opened his mouth to show his pierced tongue to a gaggle of tipsy blondes.

  “Guaranteed to moisten you up and put you in a trance,” he said to them.

  Chad and I snaked our way through the crowd to the entrance. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim orange lighting, I saw the place was packed with all manner of college dweebs in pre-ripped jeans, second-hand T-shirts, and oversized sunglasses. They slouched over the checkerboard tables, watered-down pints and mixed drinks in hand, and discussed the teenification of punk rock and Hemingway’s sexual orientation with straight faces and unbrushed teeth. The music of Neutral Milk Hotel crashed through the speakers and sank down into the funk of patchouli oil, stale beer, and armpit reek.

  The photos decorating the walls were explicit. In one, a massive grizzly roared at the camera as he tried to pull his blood-caked paw from a trap’s teeth. In another, the same bear lay dead on its side, its eyes black and dead as a stuffed toy’s. Inches from its head was an upturned chunk of skull. Bits of brain hung over the rim like stew. The third photo in the sequence showed an older man with his arm around a younger man’s shoulder. The younger man held a shotgun. The bear lay in the background like a lump of dirt.

  Chad made a barfing sound with his throat. “Come on, let’s grab a table.”

  We’d had two or three beers before I caught a glimpse of a freckled face at an L-shaped table in the corner. Melanie Blaxley sat with ten or fifteen others, all of them clapping and cheering on a broad-shouldered guy with thick-rimmed glasses and a shaved head. He stood on his chair and took a bow. His mouth was moving like he was giving a speech, but the music was too loud to hear anything. Also at the table was Melanie’s roommate Darcy. Seeing his matted hair and yellow, watery eyes again gave me the creeps.

  “What’s going on over there, you think?” I asked Chad.

  “Not sure,” he said. “But I think that guy might be the owner. That wacko you were telling me about.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m guessing. I overheard someone at the table behind us say he’s Viktor something-or-other.”

  “Viktor Lozowsky, yeah.”

  “What a nutjob.”

  I watched him for a while as he gabbed and gestured like some enthused orator. His friends seemed to eat up everything he said, Melanie included. Darcy was the only one who looked like he didn’t give a damn.

  I couldn’t stop staring at Melanie. Her hair was pulled tight behind a thin black headband. Her top was low-cut and hung open between her breasts. I wanted to shrink myself down, climb onto the bendy straw in her drink, and dive head-first into her cleavage.

  “That chick’s hot,” Chad said, nodding in Melanie’s direction.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You should go talk to her, man. I know you like to play Mr. Cool, but listen: if you don’t go talk to her, I will.” He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.

  “Come on, Chad. She’s with a big group of friends. Any one of those guys could be her boyfriend.”

  “No way of knowing unless you talk to her,” he said, which was bullshit. There were plenty of other ways to find that out. Patient observation, for one. But I knew Chad was going to keep on my case until I did something.

  “All right. Fine.” I gulped down the rest of my beer. “I’m going to embarrass myself, and it’ll be your fault.”

  He rubbed his hands together.

  I’ll admit that part of me did want to talk to Melanie. I just wasn’t prepared. It occurred to me that what I passed off as a tactic for meeting women was really just shyness and self-doubt. I racked my brain for an excuse to talk to her. Perhaps she’d remember me from the fumigation. I could ask her quickly about the results, then hurry back to my table and tell Chad that I’d been right about her having a boyfriend.

  Nobody noticed me coming as I made my way slowly to her table. When I was almost there, Melanie stood up. Darcy stood up as well and went to her side. I stopped and waited. They made their way together to the bathrooms. Melanie whispered something in Darcy’s ear that made him laugh, and then Darcy put his hand inside the back pocket of Melanie’s jeans. His knuckles clenched and squeezed her ass. He kept his hand inside her pocket until they reached the door to the ladies’ room and Melanie went inside.

  Well, there’s my answer, I thought.

  I turned around and there was Chad, chatting up a chubby, olive-skinned girl in a red poncho. Her large rear end was in my seat. It hadn’t been more than thirty seconds since I’d stood up.

  “Oh, Brandon, this is Farah,” Chad said. “She’s from Lebanon.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows, as though this were impressive information.

  “Nice to meet you.” I turned to Chad. “I think I’m going to take off. Enjoy yourself.” I tossed him a twenty-dollar bill.

  He said, “Brandon, man, wait,” but I just walked out.

  The image of Darcy’s hand in Melanie’s back pocket burned inside my eyelids. As I made my way home, I imagined them fucking in their stuffy, bug-ridden apartment. Why Darcy? Maybe Melanie was one of those girls with inexplicably low self-esteem. Maybe she was in a phase of claiming that looks weren’t important to her, and purposely sought out an unattractive mate in order to prove her point. Maybe Darcy had saved her from a near-death experience. Maybe he was rich, or grotesquely well endowed. I tortured myself with increasingly ludicrous scenarios. Darcy was a vampire, a werewolf. Satan himself.

  It was after midnight when I got back to my place. I stripped down to my boxers, made myself a sandwich, and sat in front of the television. I put on the sports channel, turned the volume down low, and converted my pull-out couch to bed mode. I tried reading a book, some Dean Koontz bestseller, but I couldn’t get Melanie out of my head. I went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Stared mindlessly at a jar of pickles and a carton of milk. My copy of The Frayne Exchange was open on the kitchen table. I sat down and flipped to the back pages, to the section advertising escorts and prostitutes.

  I came across a redhead named Suzie. The photo showed her bent over a chair with her face blurred out, two black stars over her nipples. I told myself that when the clock on the microwave changed, I would have to make a decision: call or d
on’t.

  12:37 became 12:38. I picked up my phone and dialled the number. It rang three or four times then a woman said, “Hello?” The voice was hoarse, like Kirstie Alley’s.

  I was silent. My mind was blank.

  “Hello?” the woman asked again, a little louder.

  “Yes, hi. Sorry. Is this, umm . . . Suzie?”

  “It sure is. And who is this?”

  “This is, uh, Darcy.”

  “Nice to hear from you, Darcy. You don’t have to be shy. It’s all right. I’m friendly, see? You’ve woken me up and I don’t mind. Are you looking for a date, honey?”

  I admitted that I was and gave her my address. She said she’d be over in half an hour, she just needed to shower. I tried not to think about what that could mean.

  After precisely half an hour — I’d been watching the clock — Suzie still hadn’t shown up. I opened a beer and drank it down in three or four big gulps. I felt the stirrings of panic in the back of my skull. It occurred to me that I should call her back and cancel.

  As soon as I picked up the phone, however, someone buzzed my apartment.

  “Yeah?” I said into the intercom, trying to sound both casual and confident.

  “Is this Darcy’s place?”

  I pinched my eyes shut. It was difficult to remain standing, to support my own body weight. “Uh, yes it is. Is this Suzie?”

  “It sure is, honey. You wanna buzz me in?”

  I thought about throwing on some pants and a T-shirt as I waited for her to come up the stairs, but decided it didn’t matter. I’d just hired a prostitute for the first time in my life. Did I really need to be concerned about making a decent impression?

  She reached the top of the stairs and knocked. I could smell her perfume through the door. I swept all my doubts into some far-off, cobwebbed corner of my conscience and turned the handle, half-expecting to be confronted by my father’s ghost, or Medusa, or Jesus Christ Himself. Instead I saw a woman with curly red hair and large freckled breasts that were straining to burst out of her little black dress. She smiled at me with a mouth covered in red lipstick. A layer of wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes.

  “Hey there.” She stepped inside, heels clicking on the hardwood floor. Her mauve-painted toenails were cracked and unusually long. She looked me up and down. “You look like you’re ready to get down to business.”

  She looked to be in her early fifties. Older than I expected, but I was so full of alcohol, so pathetically horny, that I found myself obscenely attracted to the idea of fucking her.

  She asked for the money up front. Eighty bucks, a bit lower than I had thought. She slipped out of her dress and exposed her enormous, water-balloon breasts. Her thighs were full of bruises and cellulite, her kneecaps covered in scabs. She performed oral sex on me while I sat on my mattress and stared blankly at an infomercial for a vacuum cleaner with state-of-the-art sucking technology. I tried to conjure up a mental image of Melanie’s face, but it kept morphing into Patricia’s — the only other face I’d ever seen between my legs. I stared up at the ceiling and concentrated on finishing the job as quickly as possible.

  When we were done, she asked to use my bathroom. I could hear her vomiting into the toilet. She came out reeking of perfume and handed me her business card, a shot of her much younger self straddling a stripper pole. I watched out my window as she got into a cab and drove off to wherever.

  I felt dirty. I felt alone. I opened a bottle of whisky and drank myself to sleep.

  2

  I never paid much attention to clients’ households. Whatever mess they left lying around — dirty laundry, credit card statements, pornography — my job was to come in, wipe out whatever vermin was making their lives miserable, and leave. There was no judgment involved, no snooping around. No scoffing at old family portraits or clever rearrangement of fridge magnets. The private lives of Frayne were about as interesting to me as the breeding habits of the common crayfish.

  One time, when I was working with a guy named Ansel, we were called in to take care of a cockroach problem at the apartment of one of our frequent clients, Gottfried Burl. Mr. Burl was the owner of a breakfast diner called Egg on Yo’ Face. It had been featured on one of those restaurant makeover reality shows, and became an overnight success as a result. Kill ’Em All had a deal going with Mr. Burl: we sent him free rat traps in exchange for half-price takeout for all KEA employees.

  None of us had ever been to Mr. Burl’s home before. Ansel and I figured it was no big deal. We met him outside his building. He gave us the keys, said he was heading to Vancouver for a weekend “rendezvous.” We let ourselves into his apartment, and honest to God, the guy had swastikas all over the place. I mean everywhere. On the walls, on the lampshades, on the floor tiles. He even had a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in his living room. It was like walking into a miniature Nazi museum.

  I remember the expression on poor Ansel’s face — sheer bewilderment. He was Jewish. I can only imagine how he must have felt, standing in that place in his mustard-brown uniform, a dented can of bug spray hanging at his waist like a gun. I remember thinking: if I were him, I’d trash the place. But Ansel was one of the most mild-mannered guys I’ve ever known. I told him he didn’t have to stay, and after his shock wore off, he took me up on it and left. I finished the job myself, suppressing the urge to poison the food in Mr. Burl’s fridge.

  A week later, Ansel quit. I didn’t blame him. He and his girlfriend moved into her parents’ place in some suburb of Toronto. A few days after that, rumour got around that Mr. Burl had been shot and killed in a church basement poker game out west. His restaurant was turned over to his sister, and our rat-traps-for-takeout deal came to an end. I never told my boss what I saw in Mr. Burl’s apartment, and I don’t think Ansel did either. It was sort of an unwritten rule in the pest control business that we turn a blind eye to our clients’ lives, no matter how troubling or strange — or alluring.

  That rule was on my mind the next morning as I lay in bed, thinking about the fumigation at Melanie’s apartment. I’d snooped around a bit. I hadn’t been able to resist.

  “Just gonna use the bathroom,” Bill had said, as soon as we stepped inside. “That pastrami sandwich isn’t agreeing with me.” He hustled down the hallway, keys jingling.

  “Take your time.”

  The place was small. Cozy. There was something distinctly masculine about it: posters on the wall for Pulp Fiction and The Shining, empty beer cans on the duct-taped coffee table. A TV plunked on a sagging milk crate. An Xbox and a small pile of video games on the floor. Curtains fashioned out of faded bedsheets. An old sweatshirt slung over a lampshade. A mountain of unwashed dishes in the sink.

  I could hear Bill grunting away in the bathroom, the spillage of his guts. I knew I had more time to look around, so I made my way to the bedrooms down the hall.

  The first door I came to had a No Exit sign nailed to it. Written below the sign in black marker was the phrase The truth is rarely pure and never simple — Oscar Wilde’s words, though I didn’t know that at the time. I did know, right away, that this was Darcy’s room. It smelled of wet dog and masturbation. The mess was similar to the one in the living room: two empty beer cans on the nightstand, dirty socks and underwear on the floor. Something resembling a cross had been crudely spray-painted on the wall above the crusty futon bed.

  Across the hall was a plain white door. It was closed. I put my hand on the knob. My palms were moist. I bit my lip and entered.

  Melanie’s room smelled of sharp cloves and candle wax. The walls were painted a deep blue and had been decorated with an intricate collage of Polaroid photographs. One of the pictures showed Melanie in a thin white tube top and red short shorts. She held a cigarette in one hand and a half-drunk bottle of vodka in the other. She was walking along the seat of a park bench as though it were a tightrope. Her eyes were pinched shut and her
mouth was wide open: an ecstatic scream, frozen in silence. The full moon shone directly over her head like a halo turned on its side. It was one photo among hundreds overlapping on the wall. I plucked it off and stuffed it in the back pocket of my uniform.

  There was a heap of laundry on the floor, and another on the unmade bed. Some of the clothes looked like they could have been Darcy’s, but it was hard to tell. On a small desk in the corner was a laptop, and above that, a vintage Playboy calendar. October’s playmate was a petite brunette in cut-off jean shorts, stretched out topless on a bale of hay.

  I looked at what Melanie had written on some of the dates.

  October second: Jill’s 21st b-day

  October fifteenth: American Lit essay due

  October thirty-first: Halloween, bitches!

  The toilet flushed. I scrambled back into the hallway. Bill emerged from the bathroom. I caught a throat-clenching whiff of shit mixed with air freshener.

  “Jesus,” Bill said, fanning the air with his hand. “You think the bugs are already dead?” He laughed in a fit of wheezes. His self-deprecating jolliness made the stench more bearable, and I laughed along with him.

  We put on our masks and sprayed the living room and kitchen before moving on to the bedrooms. Bill went straight for Melanie’s room, so I got stuck with Darcy’s. Wrestling his multi-stained futon into the plastic case was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. The side of my hand touched a stain that still felt wet.

  I blocked it out and thought about Melanie. I wondered how old she was and where she’d grown up. Was she an only child like me? Were her parents alive? Did she have any bad habits or outrageous childhood dreams? I thought about taking her out to dinner, bombarding her with questions. Spotting constellations in her freckles. Would it be considered inappropriate to ask her out on a date?