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  THE SECRETS MEN KEEP

  THE SECRETS MEN KEEP

  Stories

  MARK SAMPSON

  Copyright © 2015 by Mark Sampson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

  in any manner whatsoever without the prior ­written permission of the publisher,

  except in the case of brief quotations ­embodied in reviews.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and

  incidents are either the product of the author’s ­imagination or are used

  ­fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead

  is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sampson, Mark, 1975–, author

  The secrets men keep / Mark Sampson.

  Short stories.

  ISBN 978–1–926942–79–7 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8637.A53853S43 2015 C813’.6 C2014–908031–X

  Printed and bound in Canada on 100% recycled paper.

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Now Or Never Publishing

  #313, 1255 Seymour Street

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V6B 0H1

  nonpublishing.com

  Fighting Words.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing program.

  For Rebecca, for everything

  CONTENTS

  GOING SOFT THROUGH LUXURY

  THE ROCK GARDEN

  THE MAN ROOM

  THE SECRETS MEN KEEP

  ADVOCATE IN ABSENTIA

  INVASION COMPLEX

  CYCLE

  MALWARE

  THE FANTASY

  ITAEWON

  IN THE MIDDLE

  SNOOP

  MY SEASON OF EASY VICTORIES

  GOING SOFT THROUGH LUXURY

  And then the phone rings while you’re enjoying a few preprandial olives. Or is it capers? Yes, capers, those little green buds that you fish from the brine-filled jar in the fridge, which squeak when you chew them. You are enjoying a few preprandial capers in the late afternoon when the phone rings. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with capers or olives. This is who you are. Your wife watches you from her place at the kitchen’s nook, where she’s chopping celery for the salad. You are stirring the ragout. She watches you move from the stove out to the living room to answer the phone. Your wife knows you better than almost anyone. Knows that you love being in your mid-thirties, that you take disproportionate enjoyment in it. The cardigan, CBC opera, the whiskey with an ‘e’ before bed. She knows you don’t believe the grey hairs in your beard or the paunch you’re getting. Fuck them both, you’ve told her. I can see middle age the way Sarah Palin can see Russia. She laughed when you said that. This is who you are.

  You reach for the phone and realize that, no, it is definitely an olive. You’re actually thinking There’s nothing wrong with a few preprandial olives when you shuffle over to the cordless phone. The olive’s pit is still in your mouth when you pick up and say hello. You’ll remember that later. You’ll remember plucking it from your mouth, that little spent bullet, and rolling it between your thumb and finger as the person on the other end delivers the news. You’ll remember how the pit was an off-pink, the colour of pigeons’ feet.

  You set the phone back in its charger. It lets out a tiny chirp when you do.

  You go back into the kitchen. Your wife looks up, sees the news written all over your face. Sets her knife down.

  “Liam?” she asks, and you nod, solemn.

  She gets up, the slinky curve of her hip maneuvering around the nook, and comes over to where you’re standing. Pulls you in, puts her arms under yours and up around your back.

  “Poor little Liam,” she says.

  “Poor little Liam,” you say back.

  ~

  Except none of this will happen unless you go to university. You can’t deny it. Yes, it all starts with you in first year, sitting on your dorm room bed watching a girl with short red hair and a rainbow belt flip through your CD collection stacked on the window sill. Fact: You are in love with this girl. Deeply, hopelessly, completely in love with her. This is before you knew what a rainbow belt meant. The girl is seventeen (was skipped ahead in school) and wants to major in Classics. You listen to the judgmental slap of each CD case. You want to race to your own defence, say: Look, I was raised by farmers in a shapeless jerkwater! How was I supposed to know that Janet Jackson wouldn’t amount to much or that Michael Bolton was just lame?

  I need to bring you some real music, Rainbow Belt says. And does. In hindsight, you would’ve suspected Van Morrison or Bach. But instead, she brings Scarlatti. Who the hell listens to Scarlatti? Answer: The two of you, there on the floor of your first-year dorm room, your backs propped against the bed, your blue-jeaned thighs touching, the loose end of her rainbow belt, with its cold metal tip, splayed across the back of your hand. You listen to the piano music flood your room and think: Who knew fingers could do that?

  Rainbow Belt looks at you. Yes?

  Fuck yeah, you reply.

  Okay. So. Do you make a move? Of course you do. You’re eighteen and living on your own for the first time. Sex is just one grimy dorm room bed away. But with a tenderness you’ll appreciate later, Rainbow Belt kiboshes your advance. I’m seeing someone, she says, almost sadly. I think you’ve met her, that time we were all at the SUB together for poster day.

  Oh. Right.

  So now you occupy two types of friendship, circles that overlap in a Venn Diagram. In the first, you become Rainbow Belt’s good buddy, as dependable as a sidekick. You’re there during the biggest belly laugh of her life (a flight of fancy, now forgotten, told in the Day Student Lounge, something about the Muppets doing Aeschylus), and, more importantly, you’re there to lend a shoulder when her father abandons the family for another woman. You intercept her at a crucial moment in that despair, invite her up to your dorm room to let her rage about her dad, for hours. You listen intently; you console her. You make her laugh; you make her weep; you make her laugh while weeping, and she tells you she treasures you for it. And yet. In that second circle of the Venn Diagram, you spend years watching over the flame-like flicker of her movements—the way she talks with her hands, the way she bounces between groups, the way she flirts with both genders—and still fantasize about having her, having her completely. You accept the fact that this will never happen. The first truly adult decision of your life.

  ~

  Except. Except let’s fast forward, say, five years. You’ve graduated, acquired an entry-level job in your field and moved to the other side of the harbour, where rents are cheaper. You have a one-bedroom apartment, a George Foreman grill, a bus pass. Your commute is a ferry ride across the harbour to your city’s small but bustling downtown. During the last two years of school you gained about thirty pounds and so you decide to join a gym. You go Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and once on the weekends. You want large lean muscles, the cut look, like the pro wrestlers you watched on TV as a kid. You’re surprised at how swiftly you get into shape. Soon, other changes come. You are maturing. Dramas on TV don’t engage you as much anymore. Neither do Hollywood movies or episodes of Friends. You’re rereading Douglas Coupland and discovering Philip Roth. You notice how radio commercials have started to annoy you—like a dog whistle you’re only now beginning to hear—and so you switch stations, permanently, to the CBC.


  Then one summer evening, the phone rings. It’s Rainbow Belt! She’s back in the city after two years abroad. Had switched her major from Classics to Law during third year and got to do a really cool exchange program in Ireland. She’s back now, articling at a firm downtown. She’s bought herself a tiny condo in one of those ugly glass buildings that have metastasized along the waterfront. She relays this fact to you, sheepishly. You wanna come over?

  So you come over.

  The first words out of her mouth when she gets a good gawk at you are, “Wow, you look fantastic.” And you do. Good pecs and a flat stomach and all that. She herself has put on weight, but it suits her, makes her vivacious. She’s grown her hair long and dyed it black. She’s also acquired an Irish harp tattoo on her shoulder—you can you see it peeping out from under the strap of her skimpy green tank top. Rainbow Belt welcomes you in, apologizes for the size and mess of her condo, and offers you a drink. In three minutes flat, she’s introduced you to whiskey with an ‘e’, has educated you on the difference between it and whisky without an ‘e’.

  You sit together on her white Danish couch and set your drinks on her coffee table, which is really just a trunk with enormous hinges. She apologizes, again, for the condo. It’ll seem even smaller, she sighs, once Gord moves in. If he can ever sell his pub in Dublin and immigrate here.

  Your eyebrows fly up like loose balloons. Your face goes slack and a thousand questions pour into your eyes. She understands your confusion instantly, and wants to set you straight. You will never quite remember whether she spoke these words aloud or simply implied them through a kind of whiskey-induced osmosis: Look, don’t call what I was a phase, because it wasn’t. And don’t call it experimenting, because I wasn’t. That was who I was then, and this is who I am now.

  Right.

  Her nascent heterosexuality, if it’s even nascent, has suddenly made you uncomfortable. You’ve become acutely aware of her proximity to you on the couch. You try talking to her about other stuff—your job (she has no interest), her family (don’t even go there)—but all she wants to talk about is Gord, Gord, Gord. It’s so hard, she says, doing the long distance thing, as if it were a Celtic dance with elaborate hops and complicated spins. She’s scared Gord won’t be able to sell his business and move here. She’s scared she’s made a terrible mistake, coming home and buying this condo while still so young and poor. She’s scared, period. She’s getting all weepy and maudlin—it’s the whiskey with an ‘e’, probably. And look at you, Mr. Confidence, moving in to comfort her, putting a hand on her side. You’re convinced you wouldn’t have the confidence to do this if you were still flabby and watched Friends. But you do have the confidence, the strength to be strong. And she reciprocates, puts hands on your sides, up your back really, to where those new racks of muscle are. She readjusts her legs on the couch to draw you in.

  Okay. So. In this circle of the Venn Diagram, you learn that, up close, her dye job looks awful but is full of fantastic smells. You learn her chest is soft and yours is hard. In this variant on the situation, she takes her time pulling away from you and then wipes your saliva off her lips with the back of her hand. The moment ends with her wide-eyed, a little shocked, and saying, ‘That can’t ever happen again.’ But you’re not sure she means it. A new circle has been added to the Venn Diagram. You’re unclear where it overlaps, or what it all means.

  ~

  So back to those olives. You’ve taken up the habit of a few olives (or capers) before dinner. Nothing wrong with that. This is who you are. Such indulgences make you feel like you’ve arrived, like you’ve settled into a final, stable version of yourself. Indeed, you love what your life has become. Your wife is excellent at being your wife. Your job satisfies you and the fridge is always full of food. You love your routines—classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening, three newspapers at Sunday breakfast.

  But then you get the call that delivers the news. You can now say for certain that, yes, you had an olive in your mouth when you shuffled over to answer the phone. ‘Shuffle’ is a more accurate verb than ‘waddle.’ You are heavier, yes, but you still go to the gym three days a week. It’s hard, mind you—you’re not so much building muscle anymore as sculpting fat—but your wife is encouraging, doesn’t begrudge the hours you spend hoisting weights and grappling with the elliptical machine. She herself does hot yoga. Who the hell does hot yoga? Lots of women in the neighbourhood, your wife informs you. And even a few men. Even a few men go to hot yoga, she informs you. You do not go to hot yoga.

  So you answer the phone with your olive pit and your cardigan on and your extra pounds of weight. The person on the other end who delivers the news is a friend of Rainbow Belt. You’ll remember how at first you thought she was a telemarketer—they call so often now—and the rudeness you had at the ready. You’ll feel bad about that. You’ll feel bad about the olive in your mouth. And you’ll feel bad when the friend of Rainbow Belt says, “Somebody’s with her now but she just wanted me to call a bunch of people and . . .”

  So I’m ‘a bunch of people’ now?

  Two minutes later, in your wife’s arms, you cannot explain how much that stranger’s words have hurt you. In the circle of the Venn Diagram you now occupy, those feelings must stay unsaid. All you can say is ‘Poor little Liam’ and all your wife can say is ‘Poor little Liam.’ And you’ll reach for something then, in that moment, a strength you’ve taken for granted, a hardness you assumed was always there. You’ll need to be strong for your friend. You’ll reach for this, this comforting capacity within a younger you that Rainbow Belt treasured, and realize it’s not there. There is a weakness in its place, a softness that has crept up on you. You realize you’re a man who enjoys a few preprandial olives and has so few reasons anymore to be strong, to pull off the feat of strength Rainbow Belt will need from you now.

  ~

  But hold on a sec. You can’t go blaming an olive for your shortcomings. Think about it. Think about what else might have led to this failure.

  There’s a different version of you. A version that existed once, perhaps doesn’t anymore. A mid-twenties version of you who quits that entry-level job (who the hell quits a job?) to go backpacking around Europe. Belgian beers and Prague spires and all that. You do work a little bit—bus tables in Paris, teach ESL in Poland—but mostly you just travel. Gain a knowledge and awareness of the world you didn’t have before.

  You come home after a couple of years. Admittedly, you’re scared. Who wouldn’t be? You’re not sure what’s next. But to your surprise, you get a job right away. A different, better job than the one you had before. You can’t believe your luck. You’re convinced it’s not luck. You congratulate yourself on being talented enough to get a different, better job.

  You reconnect with friends, including Rainbow Belt. Gord has, finally, moved to Canada and she’s going to marry him. When you meet the guy, you wonder why. He’s nothing like you’d imagined, nothing like what you’d expect an Irishman to be. He’s not funny; he’s not a good storyteller; plus, he’s really short. And apple-cheeked, like a leprechaun. In fact, you will henceforth refer to him in your mind (but never aloud to her, except for that one time) as That Apple-Cheeked Little Leprechaun, or TACLL for short.

  You also notice that, after TACLL’s had a few shots of whiskey with an ‘e’, he’s sort of mean to her.

  Overall, you’re unimpressed with TACLL. But Rainbow Belt loves him and is going to marry him. Besides, she’s pregnant. She’s going to marry TACLL because she’s pregnant. If it’s a girl, they’ll name her Cara. If it’s a boy, they’ll name him Liam.

  You go to their wedding. Keep your mouth shut except for You look so lovely, thanks for having me and all that. And she does look lovely. Gone is the dye job, her hair returned to its natural auburn flare; she’s lost weight and her wedding dress is like sculpted frosting around her boobs. (TACLL, for his part, is wearing a white tuxedo. Who wears a wh
ite tuxedo on their wedding day?) You know you should be staring at Rainbow Belt as this marriage goes down, thinking your mawkish little thoughts about her, feeling that small, inappropriate ache at the sight of her being happy with somebody else. But you don’t. You don’t think that stuff at all. There’s a problem.

  The problem is the wedding photographer. You can’t stop staring at her. She’s this sporty little thing with curly brown locks and brainy eyewear—the sexy librarian look, only with a camera. You can’t stop watching her, watching her in action. The way she dips and crouches to get a good angle, the polite but firm flap of her hand to get people to Move In so she can take her shots. She’s so professional. So jaunty. You can’t help yourself. You find yourself chatting her up all night. She’s busy as hell—it is a wedding after all—but she seems receptive to your advances. You don’t know it at the time, but the wedding photographer is your future wife. After several shots of whiskey with an ‘e’, you find the courage to ask her out. She says yes despite that stupid grin on your face.

  You take your future wife for Ethiopian down on Quinpool (I love Ethiopian! she exclaims) and everything goes swimmingly. There have been other women in your life but nothing like this. Your future wife is completely outside the Venn Diagram, overlapping with nothing, her own isolated circle, a singular version of herself. You dig that. You dig that a lot. After dinner, you agree to go out again. And after that, again. It all advances quickly. It’s all great.

  ~

  Of course we’ll go. Why wouldn’t we go?

  It’s a question your wife posits as you release each other and return respectively to the ragout and celery. It’s a question that looms over your head even after you’ve retracted your hesitations with a flippant No, of course. Of course we’ll go.

  Why wouldn’t we go? It’s a question that lingers over the next three days, persisting in the air like a bad smell. It’s a question that hangs in your face as you stand in front of the full-length mirror in your bedroom, getting dressed for Liam’s funeral. The mirror. You don’t recognize the man in it. For the first time, you realize he looks old. Lines in his cheeks turning to jowls, shading under his eyes the colour of gun barrels, and those blasted streaks of grey in his beard. In this dress shirt, you can see how he’s become a medley of hard and soft, of muscle and fat. Good arms and shoulders but an unmistakable paunch. He looks like a man who enjoys a few preprandial olives in the late afternoon and a whiskey with an ‘e’ before bed.