Decadence at the Gym

As long as I’ve known, there have always been chandeliers. In Bobi’s dining room on Rockland, in my childhood house on Wilder Avenue before it became Antonine Maillet, and now in this ramshackle Willowdale house, in my own dining room, this chandelier that cost seven hundred dollars when I didn’t think anything of the cost, the standing chandelier on the buffet—there’s a tall buffet and a long one with three drawers and two cupboards at either end. It’s a set, two buffets and a table with eight chairs, deep dark brown carved oak with my grandmother’s blue oriental carpet beneath. A rich royal blue tapestry table cloth is displayed on the table when we’re not eating in this room, which is almost all the time except for Friday nights and birthdays and our anniversary. I tell my girls their father and I are going to grow old in this house that’s falling apart before its time.

We’re at the Mansfield Gym in North York. John’s biker friend Bob and his lesbian girlfriend join us. Bob wants Sophie to compete, but she doesn’t want to, she’s not sure, she doesn’t think her family will approve. “What do you want?” I say, but she doesn’t know, she sees a seesaw with Bob on one side and her parents on the other. Sometimes they balance and sometimes Bob’s up on the top, all alone, such a skinny little thing and then she feels sorry. Other times, he’s sneering at the bottom, holding her parents high in the air, and they’re screaming away in Greek, but no one comes to rescue them. “They’re not young anymore,” she says. “You have to figure out what you want. Abie says I’m wasting myself. He says I’m hanging around with gym monkeys.”

John pulls me aside when I walk into the gym. His brush cut has that slept-in look like wind-blown grass. “Will you quit talking to her,” he says. “You’re uprooting all the seeds Bob’s planting. Sophie’s his business, not yours.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Women got to stick together and what’s all this shit about seeds like she’s a kid he’s moulding, his little woman.”
“We’re not all as big as you are, Bev.”
“Damn straight,” I say.

Not much cash these days. We cart around our old Visa card. Sixty dollars at a pop at Kitchen Table and they won’t check it out. I don’t like answering the phone on account of collectors calling. Mr. Johnson from the mortgage company phones to ask where an alleged cheque is. He says he’ll have to turn the matter over to his lawyers. “What kind of man is your husband anyway?” he says. “That can’t even take care of his family. And you should be aware of your financial situation, don’t you think?” I tell him about Caroline. I try to explain how she grabs my heart and time, no use saying I’m losing my heart and I horde my time and that real life is shit. NSF cheques. Payments made and stopped. Fucking rich parents in their Highland Beach penthouse condo dealing with their residual socialist guilt as they watch their middle daughter and her family squirm under the financial knife. Then there’s a coach who’s got a habit, juicing up, shots in the ass. I guess I’m his sugar mama but I just want him to love me. So I phone my father collect and ask for cash. “What wrong with that swine you’re married to? There’s got to be some changes here.” I keep the phone an inch away from my ear so I can hear when he stops talking.

John’s driving, lurching and breaking , wrecking the transmission, swerving on turns. Bob’s in the back seat—“We’ll tie her down, then we’ll blindfold her, you don’t like blindfolds, do you hon? Yeah, I know. Been there and back. I’m a master sweetheart. Anything you can think of. Done it all. See, I’m in retirement now. At your service sweetheart.”

I follow John up the stairs of his mother’s pre-war house. Lately I’m not wearing panties; I’m in my decadent faze. I don’t tell Bob who’s behind me shouting obscenities. But the truth is I miss the closeness of my underwear. Bob says his glutes won a contest. “See?” he says, pulling down his sweatpants, bending over, and wiggling his ass. He’d been fading away for a year in a mental joint somewhere out west, maybe Vancouver, and John asked me for two-hundred and fifty dollars to bring his friend home—Bob was going to pull the plug, he said. So I gave it to him. Bob tells me he was a hit man with no feeling until he met his Sophie. He’d pop a guy off, watch him bleeding in the street and he’d walk off. But he also has this beautiful daughter who can walk in any tough part of town and he’s still tight with his ex, a Japanese artist. He can talk at length about Dali and Warhol. Even Rilke. “I’m teaching our John about the art of decadence,” he says and winks at me.

I’m sitting on the floor pretending to pat John’s old bug-eyed dog, while Bob is shaking up a vial of GH or diabonal. A set of handcuffs dangle from John’s second drawer handle. There’s a scene in “Something Wild” and the wild thing is this chick bent on teaching a little man about life and salacious love. I told John about the flick, and the day before he went to visit his nurse girlfriend, I went downtown to Yonge Street and bought a pair of handcuffs all laid out in a black velvet box. “You having a party?” the tattooed salesman asked, winking at me. “Something like that,” I said, “I’ll take two.” I also checked out several whips but they didn’t look authentic. So I went to The Rider’s Crop on Avenue Road. “My daughter takes lessons at Sunnybrooke Park and I’m told she requires a switch for her competition,” I said. “Do you know what size or type?” the middle-aged saleswoman asked. “No, I don’t really. She’s not a beginner, actually, you know. What do you think?” The saleslady adjusted her forest green cardigan. “There are two I might suggest,” she said. So I bought both, kept them in the Rider’s Crop bag and stashed the handcuffs inside as well. And now John was using the cuff to secure his roids. I look at his flushed cheeks—fucking wasp choirboy. Bob sure has his work cut out for him.

“John?” I say.
“Don’t even think of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
When he talks like that. I smile. Can’t help it.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Bob says to John and to me, “Holy shit, aren’t you something else!”
“I’m jealous,” I say, “I want to be as big as you are.”
“You’ll never be as big as I am, in mind or body,” John says.
“Asshole,” I say.

I’m taking Nilevar. Five feet one inch and one hundred and thirty pounds of muscle embedded in a modest amount of fat. Substantial tits. I’ve been juicing for two weeks. John gives me more shit which I put in my black gym bag. “Be smart,” he says. When I get home, I put my leather bag on one of the kitchen chairs, the navy blue ladder-back chair nearest the counter, and start making supper. Abie comes in and puts the gym bag on the floor. The pill bottle falls out.

“And what is that?” Abie says.
“Aminos,” I say.
“Who are you kidding?” he says, his chest puffing up and his arms flaring.
“Aminos.”
“How about I call the police?” he says.
“Anabolics, OK?”
“What kind?” he says and I say “Nilevar.” He wants to know who gave them to me, was it John or Bob, he says, it was John wasn’t it? He says he’ll call the police and have both of them put away. He’ll call someone he knows and have John’s house raided. “How will your little friend like that?” he says.
“You think I’d put my friends in that position?” I say. My throat aches. I hate myself when I cry.
“Then who gave them to you?”
“A jock at Gold’s. The guy in the grey flannels. Anyone can get pills at Gold’s.”

He’s going to get the pills tested. I still have a half a bottle stashed away. I empty the pills into the whole wheat flour in the dark brown Tupperware container in the lazy Susan beside the stove and I’m thinking—what’s happening to you, what the hell is happening to you—while I’m sifting through the flour and Abie’s talking of police and broken kneecaps and dead bodies dropped off somewhere. And I’m just a forlorn child standing in rubble, German bombers flying overhead—an old flick in black and white.

Elaine the sad bakery chick phones. Bill the baker is fucking someone else, she says. She’s hiding from Children’s Aid and living with four guys who screw her regularly. Except for Bill, she never feels anything, but Bill, she’d wanted him for so long, she just came all over the place but now he has another girl and she really needs to see me before she does something really crazy. “Alright,” I say, “I’ll try to get out, but my husband is really angry and he’s watching me all the time.” I put on a red plaid lumber jacket. In the ornate hallway mirror, I look too big. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself.

“Fucking damn shit,” I scream, slamming my fists on the steering wheel. I use the pay phone at the Grantbook and Finch strip plaza. Bob is out. His father has a French-Canadian accent. John’s line is busy. I drive along Cummer to Bayview in search of payphones. Abie’s too broke to delegate. I check to see whether a silver Mercedes is following me. Sometimes I call John a schmuck or an asshole, “you’re only after my money,” I say, and then he talks away until I feel ashamed and laugh from the craziness of it all, because I’m fucking thirty-nine and wild in love with this vigilant twenty-three year old. Elaine’s street is dark and it takes me a long time to locate her house number.