Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good Read Online Free PDF Page B

“a winded bad boy who rustles up the requisite pastiche of all his worn-out old performances, glowering and simpering like an impotent satyr.” Here was the new kid, he of the meteoric career, “only slightly more irksome, in his droll delivery, than your neighbour’s coked-up cockapoo.”
    On cue the umgirl gave a great hoot-snort of laughter. Fair enough, who could resist a big-wang joke? It had taken Matt himself two viewings to stop finding it funny.
    “There isn’t one authentic”—or had he gone with
genuine?—
“instant in this whole cynical cash grab. The scenario’s so fixed, so phony you can hear the shriek of cellophane as each scene is dutifully unwrapped.”
    Another howl from the fizzy child. Matt suddenly wanted to touch her. He wanted it bad, the way you want to jump off a balcony when you get too close to the edge. What with the new dispensation at home, Matt’s pretty much perfectly starved of contact. Right now he’d take anything, a swat, a knee-bump, a jab in the ribs.
    “This film can’t be funny because it can’t be serious. It doesn’t
care
about anything so it can’t
betray
anything.”
    The teenybopper was really going at it now, booting Pepsi out her nose. Matt took another peep out his porthole. Spindly ice crystals, like flattened jacks, had formed on the glass. Or was it plastic? Plexi? And down below, badlands, dry as bone but puckered, pruned like waterlogged skin. This must be the edge of the old ocean, not far from McKay country, the Alberta wheat field from which the old man arose.
    Mariko had once—no, more than once—described Matt to himself as “an artist without an art.” Then she’d fancied that up with a bit of French, he was an “artist
manqué.”
Artist aborted? Something like that. He was a textbook neurotic, a creative guy with nothing creative to do. Thwarted. Bent. “A lot of the screwiest people in the world have been failed artists,” she’d kindly observed. “Hitler, Stalin.” Ah yes, fascists, film critics. Why didn’t he just tell her to fuck off? He’s certainly never had any luck explaining it to her, how she’s right, how she’s wrong.
    “Eeeeeeee!”
The umgirl was nearing, surely, the zenith of her delight.
    “Careful, though”—Matt’s review built here towards its own climax—“there’s a surprise awaiting you at journey’s end. Our diffident doofus is transformed from a sweet, ineffectual schlemiel into an assertive prick who swaps his whole private life for an instant of public approval, a standing O from a stadiumfull of strangers.” And that was
before
he read the crowd book.
    In a sense the movie had worked, at least in Matt’s case. Its subject was anger, and it had sure as hell pissed him off. Mariko had come up with this bit of pith when the piece first ran, and had been mightily pleased with herself. She viewed anger as the key to all Matt’s problems, recently remarking that for such a doll
(doll?)
he was the angriest guy she’d ever known. It was anger, she suggested, that held him back—anger at his dad, at his sister, at himself, whatever. This ticked Matt off too, of course. How could she claim he was angry? Docile, more like. Had he ever, even once, let loose over Sophie?
    Well, yeah, once, but Mariko wasn’t around so you couldn’t count it. Searching for the car keys one day he found, in her jacket pocket, a pair of unfamiliar panties, a pink thong (not Mariko’s thing) with a flaky stain (did he
have
to go looking for this?) at the steep
V
of the crotch. He confiscated the pair, thinking to use them on his wife someday. But use them for what? She wasn’t hiding anything anymore, so what was the point of the revelation? He put the panties back. Then he went outside, grabbed a scrap of two-by-four from under the back porch and beat the bejeezuz out of a stand of cedar saplings. By the time he was done his hands were satisfyingly blistered, and Toto was looking on terrified from an upstairs window.