Regan Wolfrom - Catholic Guilt and the Joy of Hating Men

IT STARTEDin her chest, right near her heart. The flames spread quickly. Within seconds her entire body from her hair to her toes was burning up in front of me.

I hadn’t known what was happening at the time. There’d been no lighter fluid or gasoline, no exploding boilers or burning SUVs… Kara had just been lying there in my arms. The shaking had stopped and her eyes had turned glassy, and I’d just realized that I’d lost her.

And then she caught on fire.

I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that Granny’s Cave is a shithole by design; god-awful music, dark wood panels on the wall that make you feel like your trapped inside a giant tree… I think they do it all on purpose, some way of getting you to drink a little more of their eight dollar draughts.

If it hadn’t been for Callum and his baseless optimism I would’ve been halfway home to East Van and the comfort of my neatly-categorized porn folders. But I decided to stay, even though there weren’t that many women around. The place was mostly packed full of guys with edgy piercings and poorly-placed tattoos, wearing those skinny guy t-shirts I’ve never had a legitimate reason to wear.

“Nice talent, eh, Lanny?” Callum said as we circled, checking out every woman in the room.

What I’d seen so far was nothing I wanted. All I saw were girls so nasty they looked like they lived and worked in the sewer. You can’t just take those kinds of women home and shove them in the shower, hoping that once they towel off they’ll be good as new; they’ll always have a little bit of grime left on them.

“Most of these girls are too young for us,” I said, not bothering to mention that they were probably too drug-addled and disease-ridden for us as well.

Callum grinned, immune to my doubts and to basic common sense. “Confidence is everything.”

He nodded towards a couple of girls talking together by the vintage cig machine; even the girls took notice, throwing smiles our way that didn’t seem altogether mocking.

“They’re into us already,” he said.

He marched right over to them as I followed behind, more anxious about being left behind than I was about making an ass of myself.

Callum claimed his target, the ultrathin blonde with hoop earrings and a stud in her nose.

That left me with the spindly brunette. She looked nothing like my ex-wife and I considered that a plus. She had all the markings of a girl who’s been called plain a lot: a purple streak in her hair, an ironic wool beret tilted to one side, the standard thick black glasses with the thinnest lenses known to science… and she looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week.

“I’m Lanny,” I said.

She gave me a cute little smirk.

I wanted to spontaneously combust.

“You girls going to school?” Callum asked, making it more obvious that we are old and they are not.

“UBC,” the blonde replied in a way that wasn’t at all convincing. “You old guys remember going to school?”

Callum didn’t skip a beat. “I’m a student, too… going for my doctorate. Architecture.” He’d learned long ago never to tell women what he really did for a living; the only girls who are into funeral directors come with some pretty heavy baggage.

“So a doctorate,” she said, giving a little roll of her eyes. “Student debt is so very sexy. Tell me all about your part-time job at Burger King.”

Callum laughed and kept going, and the blonde kept digging into him; she hadn’t pulled out the bear spray so I guess you’d call it flirting.

I felt someone grab my hand. “You’re married,” the spindly brunette said, holding up my wedding band as evidence.

“No,” I said, “I’m just depressed. I’m one of those idiots who really thought she’d stay married to me.”

“Stick of butter’ll get that ring right off.”

“Oh, really?” I said in a way she must have liked.

She held up her over-sized purple-red handbag. “I don’t have any butter in my purse, but I do have bolt cutters if you can trust my precision.”

“What kind of person keeps bolt cutters in her purse?”

“This kind of person,” she said, giving me the kind of smile you see on TV right before people hook up. “My name’s Kara.”

“Like Kara Thrace,” I replied with immediate regret.

“Who?”

“Uh… from Battlestar Galactica .”

She gave me a laugh. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I still think you’re cute.”

I bought Kara a shot of tequila and did my best to clean off a couch to sit on. As she sat down beside me she brushed up against my side in a way that couldn’t be mistaken for an accident.

It was all pretty textbook so far; I felt like I was on my way to waking up in a bathtub full of ice.

“You’re not a student,” I said. “I can tell.”

“Dropped out a long time ago.”

“Do you work around here?”

“I guess I’d say I’m a writer. So far it hasn’t paid much.”

“That sucks,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything better. I wasn’t about to ask her what kind of depressing jobs she’d taken to make ends meet, not that I could picture her wearing a hairnet or answering phones. Well, maybe answering phone calls from pervy old men…

“I think you can tell that Ashley and I aren’t like the other girls. I’m not sure you should be talking to me.”

“I’m a thirty-five-year-old divorced man with nothing to say. You probably shouldn’t be talking to me.”

“You’re only thirty five?”

“That hurts a little,” I said. “You’re wondering how I could have gotten so damned fat in just three and a half decades?”

“Don’t put yourself down. It’s not attractive.”

“What is attractive?”

“Smiling and nodding. I’ll tell you random things about my life and my cat and my favourite metal bands, nothing the least bit interesting. And you’ll pretend to like it.” She leaned in and whispered into my ear. “Then you’ll take me back to your place, we’ll have awkward but reasonably enjoyable sex and after that I’ll overstay my welcome by a couple of months.”

“Sounds good,” I said. It did sound good.

And she was pretty spot on about the sex.

Kara and Ashley stayed over for a few days. Ashley left on Sunday night after getting to know Callum well enough to make an informed decision; Kara never really left.

She did leave once, though, to bring over her cat.

After a little prodding, she borrowed my laptop to show me some of her writing. It was like nothing I’d seen before, words both beautiful and sad… it wasn’t pretentious or anything, but it was definitely deeper than I was used to, a story about the past that read as though she’d been there.

All I could say to her was that she had talent; she nodded and smiled, and I could see that my opinion didn’t really matter.

But I was still glad she’d shared it with me.

She gave me a hug and took her purse into the bathroom.

I decided to keep reading, looking for some kind of clue why she seemed as drawn to me as I was to her.

She didn’t come out for over twenty minutes, and when she did she was different, restless but relaxed, and her pupils had shrunk down until they looked like little emeralds shining back at me. She sat down on the couch and smiled at me, like she was having the best day of her life.

I think that was the first time Kara shot heroin at my place. I wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t want to send her away. She was already the best thing that had ever happened to me.