Read a sneak peak of Ben Ladouceur’s short story below and pick up your copy of our Summer issue, 56.4, for the rest!
“A Boy of Good Breeding” questions who gets to tell whose story. It features an aspiring playwright, Hank, and his newly-out boyfriend, Jerry. Jerry lives with broken family ties and ulcerative colitis; Hank has incorporated both of these attributes into the life of his latest on-stage protagonist, with no sign-off from Jerry. Here is the final scene, written in the future tense (the rest of the story is in the present tense). I’m providing this section in particular because the rest of the story features a lot of echoes, developing and revisiting tread marks made of memory and language. This section has way less connectivity, taking place as it does in a different world, the future. So it’s the only part that’s any good while all alone. I hope you check out the whole story though.
Years ago now, a short film I wrote called “Other Men” (dir. Stephanie Coffey) premiered at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Inside Out Film Festival. The characters in this short story came from that screenplay. “Other Men” was meant to be a web-series pilot, but as it goes with many projects in film, adequate funding didn’t materialize, and we all got busy with other, more monetizable projects. This publication wraps up the story of Hank and Jerry to great satisfaction. For that reason, I’m insanely grateful that PRISM international is giving “A Boy of Good Breeding” a home, and I’m proud to give these made-up humans the send-off they deserve.
An Excerpt from A Boy of Good Breeding
Here’s what will happen tomorrow. To get rid of their hangovers, they will walk to St. Lawrence Market, as they often do if it isn’t raining. They will meander through the aisles of paperbacks, antiques, doilies in plastic sheets, and ceramic mugs with charming imperfections and asymmetries. Hank will keep his sunglasses on, even in the market hall, in order to give the impression of suffering, of dehydration, of a Friday night spent with the cool kids.
They will come upon a typewriter. Hank will feign interest, and type a few keys on the page that has been placed there. Amongst the curse words and the rows of same letters over and over – aaaaaaa, zzzzzzz – Hank will type promotional information about his play, which runs for another two weeks. He will type the time, the place, the price. He will long for a typewriter like this, all loud and clunky. He will express interest in becoming a typewriter person, keeping the neighbours awake all night by making art. But he will not buy the typewriter.
Jerry will go to the bathroom to defecate, as he does every hour or so after a night of drinking. He will return to the typewriter, and see that Hank is now further down the aisle, poking through books. Jerry will purchase the typewriter and bring it to Hank as a gift. Hank will do a double-take.
“Where will we keep it?” Hank will ask, for the bachelor apartment they share is tiny.
“Don’t sweat it,” Jerry will reply, a thing he never says without meaning it.
Hank will then kiss him on the side of the lip, even though public displays of affection make Hank’s palms sweaty for a reason he has never disclosed to Jerry.
As they walk out of the market, Hank will deduce why Jerry told him not to worry about space. The reason is that there will soon be plenty of space in the apartment, for Jerry is not long for this apartment, this city, this life. Jerry will have brought Hank to such an understanding without having to find the words. The words were elusive, they weren’t words yet, and they never would be, they were phonemes, methane, theories. Words are not Jerry’s thing. It always takes too much out of him, forming them.
The conversation will be unexpectedly quiet. Hank will cry behind his sunglasses and maintain his composure. He will not plead or scream, but, feeling newly free of the emotional obligations of a lover, he will tell Jerry many, many hurtful things. He will, in his anger, reach for all the most devastating criticisms of Jerry’s life and personality, uttering carnages that Jerry will remember verbatim for decades. As he does this, he will demand cigarette after cigarette from Jerry, lighting each with the tip of the last.
With the typewriter, he will write another play about Jerry, who will not attend the production. Jerry will be living and working in Fort McMurray by the time it is staged. He will come upon a trailer for the play while browsing Hank’s Facebook page, a habit of his, Fort Mac being a lonely and heterosexual space. He won’t be out of the closet there; nobody will suspect it, and it’ll never come up.
He’ll watch that trailer many times, on many nights. It will be, at once, sad and pleasant, moving through those months again, but this time from a distance, as part of the audience.
Ben Ladouceur is a writer living in Ottawa. His first collection of poems, Otter (Coach House Books), was awarded the 2016 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut poetry collection in Canada. He has recently published stories in Maisonneuve, The Rusty Toque and Prairie Fire. In 2018, he received the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers. His second collection of poems, Mad Long Emotion, is forthcoming in 2019, also with Coach House Books.