Boysie then took a dirty piece of paper out of his pocket, and he unfolded it, deliberately slowly, and then handed it to Henry. Henry looked at it seriously, creases of concentration marking his face, and he nodded something like agreement, and then he handed the piece of paper, after folding it back in its old creases, to Boysie. Boysie took a deep breath through his nostrils and his mouth at the same time, giving the impression that he had passed some very important educational test. The paper contained a drawing of a plunger which Dr. Glimmermann had made for Boysie’s benefit, after the event, and which he had included in his pay envelope. “A plunger! Godblindyou, Dr. Glimmers! Old Man Jonesy didn’t remember to show me the blasted plunger, at all!”
“And you couldn’t even admit you never see one o’ them things before! You couldn’t admit to Glimmermann the real reason and motivation concerning your ignorance of this instrument. And you couldn’t Boysie, merely because you never had the experience back home of doing your number-one and your number-two in no blasted indoor-water-closet, hah-hah-hehhhhhh!”
“Gorblummuh, I didn’ know it was as serious as that!” But he tried to think about it, in this serious manner, for a second or two, and he said, “A simple thing like a plunger made that man know my whole arse-hole background! But look at that …”
“And that boss-man, a big Doctor of Religious and Theological Studies, goddamn, he bent down and used the blasted plunger with his own hands! And you, Boysie, the office-boy, because that is what you are, a goddamn office-boy, you didn’t know the top of the plunger from the goddamn bottom o’ the plunger! That is life, boy.”
“And look,” Boysie said, weakly. He took two other pieces of paper from his other pocket, and he unfolded them, and showed them, one after the other, to Henry. Henry looked at each one, shook his head in approval, and returned them to Boysie. One was drawn with blue colouring pencil, the other with red. They were two drawings of a plunger. Boysie had drawn them, following the model he received from Dr. Glimmermann that sad afternoon in his pay envelope. His pay envelope contained ten dollars less: the cost of repairing the damaged mahogany table, and probably also what Dr. Glimmermann considered compensation for the rise in his blood pressure. “A fucking plunger cost me a job. The first ipso facto job, as that bitch Dr. Glimmermann himself used to say, that I ever had on my own.”
“A plunger for a job, a plunger for a goddamn job! This is Canada, baby.”
But deep down, Boysie was not too disturbed that he had lost the job cleaning the offices at the Baptist church house. The only disappointment was that he had promised Henry he could use the basement to hold his wedding reception. Cleaning the fifteen offices was a harder job than he had expected; and the iron-ruled precedent laid down by Old Man Jonesy was the precedent of slavery.
Boysie would be so tired at the end of each day, even before he started to clean the offices, that many times he lay beside Brigitte, panting like the sides of a thirsty dog in the sun, useless, fagged out, limber as a piece of melting rubber.
When he did move out, and back in with Dots, he was glad of his decision. It had not been an actual separation between Boysie and Dots: merely that husband worked one place, and wife worked another place. His wife used her free time from him to visit Bernice and talk; and once or twice during this hiatus, she romped and rollicked in bed, naked with Bernice. They did not make love. They merely kissed, because Bernice insisted that “God would be vexed with the two o’ we for doing that.”
Boysie now began to see his wife as more beautiful than he had ever noticed before: if indeed he had ever paid her any attention. He noticed that Dots was a better cook than Brigitte. He realized that his own West Indian meals were more interesting, more appetizing than the German meals Brigitte had been cooking for him. He found out with a great amount of amazement and some guilt, and also with sexual gratification, that his wife was more sweetly maneuverably agile and pleasing in bed than Brigitte. He noticed that his wife wore cleaner panties than Brigitte, that she was cleaner than Brigitte in those personal areas of the underarms and underthighs. He noticed that his wife took better care of money (hers, and his little amount from the cleaning job) than he had come to give Brigitte credit for. He noticed that his wife dressed better, in more style and taste, than Brigitte. Boysie opened his eyes and noticed and saw his wife for the first time.
To assure her of this new attention, he made love to her, twice the first night. And when morning came, he was still locked amidst her thighs. Dots was smiling in her sleep; and Boysie (“Is this bitch really sleeping, or she playing tricks on an
