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The Chewing Gum God

Michael Summerleigh

    “....Really...sometimes she’s like Jimi’s Dolly.”
    It had been so long since they’d spent any real time together it took almost half an instant to process...to make the previously-instantaneous leap to Hendrix...Dolly Dagger...
    “Her love makes you stagger.”
    It was a statement of nebulous even dubious fact, waiting for the current definition of heavy from her twin brother. She was surprised to find herself suddenly...annoyed...rather than mock-maternally amused as usual. She was, after all, almost ten minutes older...
    “Jamie,” she said slowly, “you...are being...a fucking asshole...”
    Each word was measured and careful...she had always tried to be honest with him...but never cruel...
    “She puts up with so much shit from you.”
    It was his turn for surprise, that she would take side against him...not offer immediate consolation she was, after all, his big sister...
    “You’re not serious?” he asked incredulously. “Ran you’re kidding, right?”
    She shook her head, said only:
    “No.”
    He wagged his head twice. Beneath the still handsome face worn by years—and too much of everything come with them—to a less than pristine nobility, she could sense confusion in the spun-gold-gone-to-grey brows knit together... and then an almost frantic dismay.
    “Ranna...?”
    She turned away from him. Refused to let him see that for what she just now had inflicted upon him, she had in one sense damaged herself as deeply...and consciously became aware of something she had known in her heart for a long time.
    “Jamie how many times has she waited up all night for you? Have you ever stopped to count them? Have you ever stopped to think how she would feel, knowing you were out fucking someone else?”
    He was stunned into silence; she could see him turning it over in his mind as if there were a real possibility it never had occurred to him before. It made her sad that he could be that way...to have spent sixty-plus years on the earth bound to him by their birth without ever having taken notice...
    “She’s half your age and there’s nothing wrong with that but she trusted you Jamie...to be whoever it was she was looking for...and almost from Day One you treated her so badly... carelessly...just like everyone else before her, except out of all of them she’s the one who really doesn’t deserve it at all.”
    As she had done so many times before when he was hurt she wanted to put her arms around him and tell him, Things are okay little brother, okay, we’ve still got each other...but today she couldn’t do it...today something had changed...
    They sat drinking whiskey before dinner, watching the sunset splash crimson and gold down across the lake, listening to steaks sizzling on the barbecue and Canada geese coming home in great honking arrows overhead. All around and below them down to the shoreline the pines were deepening into dark green, the ash and the maple and the birches beginning to leaf, growing joyous with the fresh flood of life coming up from the ground.
    He shifted in his deck chair, leaned over and refilled his glass from the bottle of Mortlach on the railing of the porch. The dog snuffled in his sleep, wriggled higher up on his instep to discourage any further movement. Jamie drank two fingers-worth in one swallow, took another sip and stared out at the shadows where the sun could no longer go... brooding now...trying to find something to say in response to what she knew he felt was a betrayal.
    The day before he’d phoned her from Halifax, told her he was coming for a visit; that he’d be flying into Toronto that night and would see her in the morning in time for brunch. Just after eleven she heard the engine of his rental revving out of the village and started walking out towards the road to meet him, the big Pyrie dog padding along beside her, checking the wind for intruders. Minutes later she waved him down as he raced by her in a red metal-flake Ferrari, did a perfect hand-brake 180 less than a hundred yards down the road and rumbled back to where she stood at the unpaved drive to the lakeside cottage. The Great Pyrenees stood to her hips, growling ominously. Her brother rolled his window down.
    “You told me you’d gotten a dog, not a small horse,” he said. “Who’s this?”
    “I call him Jon Snowball, the bastard son of another big white dog. Put your hand out the window.”
    “I still need it.”
    “You use your right hand. Shut up and let him smell you.”
    She turned to the dog. “Snow this is my baby brother Jamie Roderick Craigen. Don’t bite him unless I say so.”
    The small horse masquerading as a dog sniffed outstretched fingers suspiciously, settled back against her leg. She nodded back over her shoulder.
    “It’s about an eighth of a mile in, but go slow or you’ll take the bottom out of your fancy car. I’ll walk back with Snow...”

*        *        *

    He’d brought three bottles of champagne and orange juice and a swanky bag full of expensive finger foods from an airport clip-joint. They drank two of the bottles and got a little bit stupid together it had been over a year since she’d seen him...and if she had not happened to glance into her own mirror earlier that morning she would have been more than a little unsettled to see that he had grown older, no longer her stunningly beautiful seemingly ageless twin brother.
    After the champagne had worn off a bit he asked for a tour, never having visited her new digs before, and she took him along the pathways and overlooks that had seduced her from the moment she had laid eyes on the property...then drawn him into the separate outbuilding a stone’s throw from the cottage that could have been another house but was instead one large studio space, with north-facing skylights and windows and a wood stove she swore kept itself banked for whenever she felt the urge to bang hell out of a piece of stone or slap paint on a canvas.
    She had always been able to impress him by the mere fact that while they shared so many of the same sensibilities...likes and dislikes...only she had been the one to translate talent into vision and creativity. She could tell by the way he ran his hands over the sculptures, reached to within a hair’s-breadth of her paintings, that he was both proud and a little bit envious.
    “I’ve got a show in town in August,” she told him. “Anything and everything I care to have shipped down. You and Tess should come...”
    He was cuddling up to a half-size nude in pink marble that was at the far end of the room so she didn’t quite catch his response, but his tone spoke volumes and presaged a topic of conversation to come. They went back to the house for the last bottle of champagne and headed down to the lakeside...uncorked the bubbly and plonked into a pair of Adirondack chairs at the water’s edge.
    “Snow helped me drag them out here yesterday morning. I think he knew you were coming.”
    “This is a way’s out from civilisation, big sister,” he said without too much concern.
    “I haven’t seen any neighbours. Don’t you get a bit strung out with the quiet?”
    She smiled quietly and sipped her champagne. Overhead the sky was impossibly blue streaked with thin tatters of clouds that seemed frozen between winter and the threat of warmth. They watched the first loons come paddling across the still surface of the water, making ripples that lapped soundlessly at their feet...listened to the first whippoorwills mindlessly cooing through the still air.
    “I’ve got my small horse,” she said contentedly, “and I’m only five miles from the village where I know everyone and they know me. There’s some truly good people in around here Jamie...another painter on the other side of the lake. I’ve got people dropping by all the time, and since we’ve been lucky to have been born with silver horseshoes up our arses I have all the comfort and luxury of living in town without all the fuss and the stink and the noise.”
    Again she caught that faint whiff of envy coming off him. He didn’t begrudge her anything, she knew that for a fact...but he was jealous of her being at peace with the world. He got up suddenly, startled Snow into a warning growl at her feet, but showed him his hands and turned away to the lake, knelt and starting skipping slivers of shale across the water.
    “What’s goin’ on, little brother?” she asked. “You didn’t come out here to throw stones in my lake...”
    And he had made a face at her...rueful...suggested they finish the champagne and then go back up to the house...put potatoes in the oven to bake...dragged themselves out onto the porch with the single malt in tow and thrown a pair of monster steaks on the barbecue. Ranna had waited...wounded him...waited some more...went inside and put an old McKendree Spring album into the CD player...came back outside and waited some more. Jamie wouldn’t look at her now...
    “I just don’t know what t’do,” he said plaintively. “You know Tess...she’s sweet and smart and lovely and we fuck like bunnies...”
    “But.”
    “But it’s too much, Ran! I feel this weight of her love on me, and I don’t mean to hurt her but it’s too goddamn much....her expectations...me trying to live up to whatever the hell it is I’m supposed t’be for her. With us it was always so easy...”
    She could have wept for him...understanding...knowing exactly what he meant...how he must feel. Inside on the stereo Fran McKendree tried to break her heart by singing to her brother...
     “If I gave you everything you wanted...would I be the one who’d have t’cry...
    ...And then it was her turn to look away because she didn’t want him to see her crying for him...didn’t want to chance falling back into something that had not been wrong but had not been right either and giving him some reason to believe she was still the one who would make his life right for him.
    “Ranna, I need to ask you something, okay?”
    And she knew what was coming...had been waiting for it all day for almost fifty years...
    “D’you remember in ‘70 when we did that music festival?”
    “We went to a lot of them that summer, Jamie.”
    “You know which one I mean...the last one...”
    “I know. The Isle of Wight.”
    “It was never the same after that,” he said.
    “You mean we never shared the same bed again.”
     “Yeah.”
    For a moment she remembered what it had been like when they were sixteen...running away all over Europe...cash-proud...clinging to each other totally fucked up and happy... and one weekend in amongst another six hundred thousand people crammed onto a tiny island off the south coast of England...like yesterday she could taste the freedom of being out in the world totally free with her beautiful baby brother and the way he tasted when he kissed her or they leaned against each other swaying in slow stupid dances together in the sun and the rain it had all seemed exactly the way it should be....
    “How’s Mom?” she asked. Somehow it seemed like a relevant question.
    “Remembering less and less. It took her a while to figure out who I was the last time I saw her. She doesn’t remember Dad anymore...but the time before that out of the blue she said you had told her...”
    Ranna whispered back.
    “She asked and there wasn’t any point in lying to her because she knew. Jamie, I’m pretty sure she knew right from the start. Never mind beds that didn’t get slept in, all you had t’do was look at us in our rags and tatters... finishing each other’s sentences...trading secrets without even talking...fucking off all over the place for weeks at a time. There was no way she didn’t know...”
    He nodded, and she forced herself to meet his gaze because after a lifetime it was time for a Truth between them, far too important to allow herself the cowardice of looking away when she told him.
    “I don’t know how it happened Jamie. We were so stoned and stunned with the music and I hadn’t planned anything at all but I sort of woke up behind the stage and walked right into him...touched his face...he never said a word I just put my fingers in the waistband of his trousers because I was all tottery after bumping into him and he looked down at me for a second before he put an arm around my shoulders and leaned on me a little bit, like he was really tired...”
    Now she had to look away...could see the worst damage was already done...that the rest would be just as hurtful but nothing she wanted to see.
    “They had played for almost two hours and I remember watching his hands and his fingers how they were so ferocious...tearing the music out of his guitar strings...but you could see...you just knew...when he was done...when the music was over...then they would be so light and gentle with each touch that I wanted to scream for more than just being teased.
    “The skin on his belly was so smooth and silky...his skin was sweet like chocolate cream...with veins running down into his crotch. I never saw them in the dark but I could feel them under my tongue...
    “He was the best night of my life Jamie...I’m sorry...better than we could ever have been because we were just following up on the outside what we’d been on the inside, before we were born...but he had no idea who I was. I was a total stranger to him...and he knew for a fact he’d never lay eyes on me again...but nobody since has ever been that brand new sweet and generous as he was to me that night. He was so tired but it was never about him...and in the morning when he kissed me goodbye he thanked me. He smiled that shy little smile and he thanked me...”
    She heard his breath catch in his throat, could feel him straining not to cry out loud.
    “Little brother, we’re so fucking old now; please, let’s stop playing at this. I know it’s not a game to you, I know you’re not heartless, but we’re all bearing the weight of something on our souls. You’re not the only one. At least admit it to her face... apologise if you’re really sorry...don’t pretend if you’re not...”
    She got up...staggered a bit with all the alcohol...turned the steaks over on the barbecue and then knelt down in front of him forcing him to look at her she held his face in her hands.
    “I know we’re both missing pieces...somehow we both lost the one where we find real true love forever and a day...but after that night I realised even one day with someone could be enough, and that searching for something that might not even exist might ruin my life. Maybe we could have been what we were forever, but the reality is that the world was running out of time for the life we were living...our little bubble of peace love and happiness...and one of us...maybe both...would have started to wonder what it was like outside the bubble.
     “I’m so sorry it wasn’t that way for you. I never meant to cut you loose like that I thought you could work it out same as me...”

*        *        *

    They ate supper slowly, quietly in candlelight. Chopin just barely heard on the stereo. The dog seemed to understand that something long unspoken had finally come into the light and found a small if grudging measure of acceptance; stretched out in front of the fireplace he twitched and snuffled in counterpoint to a piano prelude. Jamie kept his eyes down; she could see him trying to process through all the years...put all of his feelings into the context of what he too had known all along. She wanted so much to touch him, hold onto him the way she used to, because even with the one transcendent night that had sustained her understanding of self and the world around her, and all the lovers and friends who had followed...there always came a night spent sleepless with longing for the innocence and the senseless joy of what they had shared.

    “However it ends, Jamie, try to be kind. That’s what I learned from him. All it’s really about is the kindness...”
    Later that night she heard him on the telephone in her guestroom...talking to Tess... crying...trying to explain...asking her if it was all right to come home. In the morning she made coffee and fresh-baked bread...saying nothing...both of them starting all over again in a different way.
    He said, “I’m gonna go, Ranna.”
    She nodded, picked up his overnighter and walked him out to the car...walked alongside with Snow until they reached the road.
    “Drive careful, Jamie. Travel safely. Hug your lovely girl for me.”
    “It drove me crazy that he chewed gum all the time.”
    She leaned down through the window to kiss him softly on the lips.
    “Not with me,” she said, and smiled. “Promise me you’ll be okay from now on.”
    He said he’d try. Snow chased a rabbit back toward the house. She waved once, watched the Ferrari kicking dust clouds off the pavement, stood listening until she heard the car downshift through the village.

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