Линн Коуди - Best Canadian Stories 2020

“And how do you maintain your beauty?” asked the Catalan, who carried his own salt cellar and sprinkled each slice of steak before he ate it. The affectation made Renga quietly angry, distracting him from the taste of his own fish every time he saw the man drop a pinch from the engraved wooden box. He was about forty, but unhealthy, with skin the colour of an old rope in a gymnasium. The heartbreaking falseness of his wig made it clear that even great wealth couldn’t cover everything.

“I maintain it the same way I developed it. I had to start the accident. My parents’ shabby cells couldn’t do the job. For my nose to make sense, for my cheekbones to counterbalance my jaw, I had to impose reductions elsewhere.”

Enzo took a photo wrapped in paper out of his wallet. He removed the picture from its folded sheath and pushed it over to the Catalan, who owned three garment factories.

The Catalan, who had lied and told them his name was Umbrosi, stared at the photo. The subject, a teenage boy, wasn’t fat, but he was anonymous, a background actor who would never be called forward to deliver a line. Enzo described the process of unearthing himself from that accidental body.

Renga picked up the paper the photo had been folded in; it was a prescription, a few years old, for glasses. The doctor’s name was Nordic-sounding.

“Is this your father’s handwriting?” Renga asked. Enzo picked up the photo and the prescription and returned them to their folded clasp.

“No, he charged too much. I only go to doctors I can fuck for the bill.” Saying this in front of a client ran counter to Enzo’s first tenet of the job: Never act like a whore. Whether he’d said it impulsively or with calculation, it worked. The Catalan laughed.

“Let’s go to the house,” the Catalan said. It was eight miles from the restaurant, and they made the trip by cab. The Catalan never used his own car on nights when he was seeing a boy, Enzo said. His driver was an old friend, a scholarshipped classmate from secondary school who’d ruined his former career with drugs, and now clung to Catholicism and the job he’d been given. Umbrosi didn’t like to make him uncomfortable by having him chauffeur Roman street meat.

Their cab took Grande Raccorde, a dull but effective route, circling towards the part of town where they needed to be before penetrating back through the concentric slices of the city. The house had all of its lights on: Umbrosi’s theft deterrent and a way of keeping his dogs comfortable.

They fell on Renga and Enzo when Umbrosi opened the door. Enormous, friendly, poorly-trained Irish wolfhounds, alien-bodied and unreal beasts that Renga had recognized from the inclusion of the breed in Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going . They moved like new fawns in the constricted hallway entrance, their legs sturdy but their bodies large enough to destabilize the tiny space they crowded into.

“They only live six, seven years. So I let them have their fun,” Umbrosi said. The larger of the two hounds had its paws on Enzo’s shoulders and bore him back into the door, which closed beneath the boy’s feathery weight. Umbrosi finally called the dogs when Enzo’s knees started to wobble. They corralled themselves, backing single-file toward a pile of small Persian rugs in front of an empty fireplace.

Their heads bobbed as the immense curving backs receded, wheeling and trotting out of sight. Renga’s former terror of dogs had been alleviated by the endless sequence of lap-bound near-invertebrates he’d encountered in clients’ homes, small creatures with misaligned jaws and flat muzzles that had no function or ability to threaten. Quite a few had bitten him, their soft teeth denting his skin and leaving sulky trails of mucous. Soon he was able to see kindness, deference, or indifference in the eyes of larger domestics. The scavenging wild dogs of Rome were quite easy to avoid, and were constantly being impounded or secretly executed by angry homeowners wielding guns left over from the war. The wolfhounds in this house had fewer aggressive instincts than their owner, who was watching his night’s hire with a particularly charged lust that Renga didn’t think he himself could ever feel or inspire.

Enzo straightened and brushed dog-hair epaulets off his blazer, which he then took off and hung from a hook by the door. His lucent thinness was exposed by his pearl-white shirt. The pants were narrow and tapered to pencil-width at the ankles, and a red leather belt was shelved on his hipbones.

Renga eyebrowed his friend. Enzo had told him that the Catalan’s sessions always started with the dogs, but thankfully they weren’t involved in any of the later portions of his evening’s entertainment.

“Do you want to stay down in this room, Renga?” The name came out as Wray-Gah when Umbrosi said it, as though he were addressing some foe of Godzilla’s. “I can set you up in the screening room, if you’d like.”

“No, I’ll stay here. The dogs are fine with me?”

“They’re fine with everyone. I’ve never seen them hungry, perhaps that would change things.” Umbrosi was looking up the stairs, barely glancing at Renga as he spoke, touching himself through his right pocket. He’d prepared things for Enzo before meeting the boys for dinner, alluding to the “scene being set” at least four times at the table. He wasn’t like most clients, who kept their stuff in the basement.

“Most of these fetish dungeons they take me to, they’re totally historically incoherent,” Enzo had once said after an appointment on Via Frattina. “It’s medieval as well as fascistic. Thomas More used to have people who read the Bible in English instead of Latin tortured, you know that? Maybe executed, I can’t remember, but surely tortured first. This fat client today, takes tongs just to find his cock, he collects old implements. Devices. A flat piece of iron he paid thousands of lire for, with a handle at the back—he says he has its lineage, stolen from some museum when the Allies came. It’s an abacinator. They’d heat it up white, hold it in front of your eyes, melt them right out. You cry them out, the sockets are left empty, the optic nerve seals up and shrivels. Terrible. I always worried he’d use it on me, get too worked up, but he’s just a sweet dentist. And I never let him tie me up.”

Enzo had been silent since they’d come into the house, sinking into passivity, acting his way into the Catalan’s fantasy. Renga watched them walk up the stairs to a second floor that had been imposed on the original structure, rooms slotted between the roof and the stone first floor, supported by grim, immense beams, which had likely been salvaged from some ancient barn. The wood throughout the house was the same greyed-brown as the hounds, a colour that Renga identified with Flemish paintings. Peasants copulating in the dirt by collapsing buildings.

Umbrosi needled Enzo in the back with a finger as they mounted the top stair. The boy stopped and let Umbrosi walk around him to open the bedroom door, which was just visible to Renga. The Catalan liked going through his sexual paces in his proper bedroom, the place where he slept and wanked and sometimes brought models and actresses for a night of puzzled slumber while he leaked a more salacious story by phone to a collection of trusted gossip columnists.

Renga took a post on the couch behind the curled enormity of the canines, with a copy of the only novel in English he could find on Umbrosi’s shelves, Double Indemnity . The cushion next to him was stacked with copies of L’Unita , the communist paper. Umbrosi probably read it for research on the unions that he fought against to keep the shirts he made, but never wore, as cheap as possible.

Renga fell asleep a little after the dogs did, waking only when the negotiations upstairs passed from lash to bullwhip, and the yelps turned into three real screams, sounds that Renga had never heard from his friend, which rose and pitched into an androgynous then animal screech. One of the dogs moved its legs, dream running somewhere, following or fleeing a phantasmagoric parallel of the screams upstairs.