Stone Mattress

Irena was not alone on the second floor. Jaffrey lived there too, a cause of jealous brooding for Jack: how easy for Jaffrey to slither along the hall in his malodorous wool sock feet, drooling and slavering with unwholesome lust, to Irena’s door, unseen, unheard, when Jack himself was dead to the world in his attic cubbyhole. But Jaffrey’s room was over the tacked-on, tar-papered, insufficiently insulated and subcutaneously grime-ridden kitchen that jutted out from the back of the house, so there was no ceiling above Jaffrey’s head that could be stomped on.

Rod was similarly out of stomping range, and he, too, was suspected by Jack of having designs on Irena. His room was on the ground floor, in what would originally have been the dining room. They’d nailed shut the double doors with frosted glass panels that led to what was once the parlour and was now a kind of opium den, though they didn’t have any opium, only some fusty maroon cushions, a carpet in dog-vomit brown with potato chips and nut fragments ground into it, and a broken-down easy chair that stank of sickly sweet Old Sailor Port, the winos’ tipple of choice, drunk ironically by visiting philosophy students because it cost nearly nothing.

That parlour was where they lounged around and had parties, not that it was large enough for that, so the parties spilled out into the narrow hall and up the stairs and back into the kitchen, the party-goers self-segregating into pot-smokers and drinkers – the pot-smokers not being hippies as such because those hadn’t happened yet, but a whiff of things to come, a mangy, self-conscious, quasi-beatnik group who hung out with jazz players and took up with their marginally transgressive ways; and at such times he – Jack Dace, the now be-plaqued one, revered author of an International Horror Classic – at such times he was glad his room was at the very top of the house, apart from the milling throng and the stench of alcohol and cigarette smoke and weed, and sometimes of upchuck because people didn’t know when to stop.

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake.

But a successful luring of such a girl never actually took place, and if it had, it might have ruined his chances with Irena, who was giving tiny signs of maybe coming across. Irena did not drink or smoke weed herself, though she went around wiping up after those who did, and took mental notes of who was doing what to whom, and remembered everything in the morning. She never said that in so many words, she was discreet, but you could tell by what she avoided saying.

After The Dead Hand Loves You was published to such acclaim – no, not acclaim, because that kind of book didn’t gather anything you could call acclaim, not then; only much later, once pulp and genre had established a toehold and then a beachhead on the shores of writerly legitimacy – after the book had been made into a film, then – that kind of luring became much easier for him. Once he had a reputation, at least as a commercial writer, a commercial writer with large paperback sales and book covers with raised gold lettering. He couldn’t get away with the Art gambit any more; but, in compensation, quite a few girls liked the macabre, or said they did. They liked it even then, before the Goth wave hit. Maybe it reminded them of their inner lives. Though maybe they were just hoping he’d help get them into the movies.

Oh Jack, Jack, he tells himself, eyeing his baggy eyes in the mirror, fingering the thin patch at the back of his head, sucking in his belly, though he can’t hold it in for long. You’re such a wreck. You’re such a dupe. You’re so alone. Oh Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, with your once-dependable candlestick and your knack for impromptu bullshit. You used to be so full of beans. You used to be so trusting. You used to be so young.



The contract thing had started off in an aggravating way. It was a day in late March, the lawns heaped with grey and porous melting snow, the air chilly and damp, the tempers peevish. It was lunchtime. Jack’s three roomies were sitting at the Formica kitchen table – red, with pearly swirls and chrome legs – chewing their way through the leftovers Irena typically dished up for lunch because she didn’t like to waste food. He himself had slept in, and no wonder: there had been a party the night before, an unusually foul and tedious party at which, thanks to Jaffrey – who liked to hold forth at length on the subject of foreign, impenetrable authors – Nietzsche and Camus had been under discussion, which was worse luck for him, Jack Dace, since what he knew about either of them could fit in a salt shaker. Though he could do a fair-enough riff on Kafka, who’d written the side-splitter in which the guy turns into a beetle, which was what he himself felt like on most mornings anyway. Some sadist had brought a flask of lab alcohol to the night-before party and mixed it with grape juice and vodka, and, crazed by the droning of competitive literary display, he, Jack Dace, had drunk too much of it and puked up his kneecaps. That, in addition to whatever he’d been smoking, which was most likely cut with crotch-itch powder.

So he’d been in no mood to discuss the topic that was produced by Irena over the noodle-and-tuna leftovers, mercilessly, right off the bat.

“You’re three months behind on the rent money,” she said. Before he even had a chance to drink his instant coffee.

“Christ,” he said. “Look at that, my hands are shaking. I really tied one on last night!” Why couldn’t she be more understanding and nurturing, for fuck’s sake? Even a perceptive comment would have been assuaging. “You look like hell,” for instance.

“Don’t change the subject,” said Irena. “As you’re aware, the rest of us have been forced to pay your share of the rent for you; otherwise we’ll all get evicted. But this has to stop. Either you find some way of paying or you’ll have to leave. We’ll need to rent out your room to someone who actually does pay.”

Jack slumped down at the table. “I know, I know,” he said. “Geez. I’m sorry. I’ll make it good, I just need a little more time.”

“Time for what?” said Jaffrey with a disbelieving smirk. “Absolute time, or relative time? Internal or measurable? Euclidean or Kantean?” It was way too early in the day for him to be starting up with the hair-splitting Philosophy 101 wordplay. He was such an asshole that way.

“Anyone have an aspirin?” said Jack. It was a weak move, but the only one he could lay his hands on. He did in truth have a fearsome headache. Irena stood up to get him a painkiller. She couldn’t resist the urge to play nursie.

“How much more time?” said Rod. He had out his little greenish-brown notebook, the one in which he made his mathematical calculations: he was the bookkeeper for their joint enterprise.

“You’ve been needing more time for weeks,” said Irena. “Months, actually.” She set down two aspirins and a glass of water. “There’s Alka-Seltzer too,” she added.

“My novel,” said Jack, not that he hadn’t waved this excuse around before. “I need the time, I really … I’m almost finished.” This was untrue. In fact, he was stuck on the third chapter. He’d outlined the characters: four people – four attractive, hormone-sodden students – living in a three-storey pointy brick Victorian row house near the university, uttering cryptic sentences about their psyches and fornicating a lot, but he couldn’t move beyond that because he didn’t know what else they could possibly do. “I’ll get a job,” he said feebly.

“Such as what?” said obsidian-hearted Irena. “There’s ginger-ale, if you want some.”

“Maybe you could sell encyclopedias,” said Rod, and the three of them laughed. Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate; in addition to which the idea of him, Jack Dace, actually selling anything to anyone struck them as funny. Their view of him was that he was a fuck-up and a jinx from whom stray dogs fled because they could smell failure on him like catshit. Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, but it was working against him now.

“Why don’t you sell shares in your novel?” said Rod. He was in Economics; he played the stock market with his spare change and wasn’t too bad at it, which was how he paid his own fucking rent. It made him smug and insufferable on the subject of money, characteristics he has retained ever since.

“Okay, I’m game,” Jack said. It was make-believe at that point. The three of them were humouring him – giving him a break, pretending to acknowledge his claim to talent, opening up a pathway to fiscal rectitude for him, if only a theoretical one. That was their story later: that they’d colluded in order to give him a boost up, lead him to believe that they believed in him, toss him some validation. Then he might actually get off his ass and do something, not that they expected this to actually happen. It wasn’t their fault that it had worked, and so spectacularly.

Rod was the one who drew up the contract. Rent for three months plus one – the three Jack hadn’t paid in the past, and the one that was about to happen. In return, the shares of the proceeds from his yet-to-be-completed novel were divided into four, with a quarter going to each of them, including Jack. It would be negatively motivating if there was no upside built in for Jack himself. With nothing to gain he might not feel energized about finishing the thing, said Rod, who was a believer in Economic Man. He sniggered at this last point, since he didn’t think Jack would finish it anyway.

Would Jack have signed such a contract if he hadn’t been so hung over? Probably. He didn’t want to be evicted. He didn’t want to land on the street, or, worse, back in his parents’ rec room in Don Mills, besieged by hand-wringing and pot roasts from his mother and tut-tutting lectures from his dad. So he’d agreed to every term, and signed, and breathed a sigh of relief, and, at Irena’s urging, had eaten a couple of forkfuls of noodle casserole because it was best to get something into his stomach, and had gone upstairs to take a nap.



Margaret Atwood's books