Fraud Read Free Page B

mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.
    As a natural finale, the clouds begin to dissipate and a shaft of extraordinary late afternoon sunlight pours through and gilds a stretch of piney mountainside. Dusk is turning the rest of the sky into an indigo expanse pierced with hundreds of stars. The air is as clear and cold as vodka. Unexpectedly and with the speed and force of a freight train, I find myself quietly, desperately sad. I think, If I can only hear some traffic or if only the mist would part to reveal a parking lot—oh God, a beautiful, beautiful parking lot—down at the base of the mountain, I will get through this.
    A hot shower and two drinks brightens my mood considerably. I am warm and feeling kinder, grooving, even, on my experience. I have invited Larry and a friend of his to supper at the inn. The Daughter from Breakfast comes up to our table. She asks about the day’s climb. She is appropriately confident, clearly used to the attention of men. Larry and his friend are no exceptions; they smile and lean forward, laugh too loudly at what she says. She talks to Larry about his daily climb. “And how do you finance this
interesting
life with these daily climbs of yours?” she asks, her voice curling in on itself with playfulness. She is leaning on one arm on the back of my chair, her hips canted forward; her shirt rides up, showing a chevron of sleek tummy, a demure ring at the navel.
    “I work,” says Larry, suddenly cool. After a day spent talking about women—their absence on the mountain, their possible arrival on the mountain, the hypothetical projected excellence said arrival might embody—it is bracing and heartening to see that Larry knows when he’s being high-hatted, no matter how unintentionally. Looking across the table at him, I see nothing but a surpassingly decent guy. Through the familiar blush of drink, I feel the familiar guilt of journalistic cannibalism, ashamed of my jaundiced scrutiny. He didn’t begin his climbs five years previously in the hopes that a magazine writer might one day visit. By contrast, the mini test of my manhood notwithstanding, he was nothing but kind all day long. Everything about me, my inappropriate footwear, my effete lexicon, my unfamiliarity with such natural phenomena as trees, rock, and ice, have all been met with great equanimity and good grace. Larry and his pals are friendly. It becomes quite clear to me that the only one casting strange glances of disapproval my way is me.
    At the summit I had pulled out the disposable camera I bought in the Boston airport. I made Larry take my picture a number of times. When the film comes back, I will look at the photos of myself, scanning them for evidence. Looking for the face of an adult. The face of a man who climbs mountains. The face of a Dave.

ARISE, YE WRETCHED
OF THE EARTH
    Friday nights of childhood and early adolescence in Toronto were spent at the weekly gathering of the socialist youth movement of which my brother, sister, and I were members. Meetings were spent having earnest discussions of Marx and the great Labor Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl and A. D. Gordon; “bull sessions” about who in the group had hurt whose feelings; and air guitar contests to “Come Sail Away” by Styx. Occasionally the more dogmatic among us might even rise from one of the oily seat-sprung sofas and, with right index finger shaking and pointing heavenward, intone like Mayakovsky, “On Yom Kippur, we must go to a restaurant, sit in the front window, and eat pork!” A public
treyf
chow-down that would send an appropriate fuck you to the soporific comfort of our middle-class friends and families.
    We never actually went through with anything remotely like this, of course, but in such teapot tempests are burgeoning political consciousnesses