Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  “It would never have occurred to me you’d mind,” I said. “You know, I’d never tell you that one of your friends couldn’t stay with us, especially if it’s just for one night.” She didn’t answer, so I continued. “If you’re really asking me to cancel with him, you’re asking me to make a fool of myself.”

  I stormed past her, out of the main part of the house and to my studio. At once I remembered the installation — three altarpieces made for a gallery exhibition that had taken place years before I knew Alex — based on that old recurring dream, the one I awoke to just a short while ago. Pieces of it — three dark brown beer bottles — are stored on a shelf, there for all to see. I’d removed the original labels from the bottles and made my own for each. Alex had once, a good while ago, held up one of the bottles and examined the label, but didn’t pay it more than cursory attention. I had observed this but offered no explanation. The label on the bottle she held is a composite photograph of a bride and groom standing around a Hindu-like altar, a square box filled with dirt low on the ground. At the centre of the altar a fire burns brightly. The bride wears a red wedding sari. Behind them is a wall of red paper decorated with gold paisley. The marrying couple is arranged so they seem to be praying together, their eyes fixed on the fire in the altar. Prakash is the man in the photo. I dressed up and posed for the photo of the woman, but my face is hidden behind a veil.

  Had Alex forgotten she’d seen this, I wondered. Had she not made the connections? What on earth was I thinking? Then, and now? My heart beat fast as I gathered the bottles and stuffed them quickly into a box, taped it, and shoved it under a table.

  I decided then to try to immerse myself in work. But the tension between us had exhausted me. I kept trying to recall how many times she’d come into the studio lately and if I’d noticed her paying those bottles attention. I could not bring myself to focus, to uncap a jar, to lift a brush. Instead, worn out, I turned my easel so the canvas on it faced the couch into which I slumped. I stared at my half-finished painting of two willow trees bent to meet each other and contemplated it. Where their limbs arced, they were gnarled and required a palette of many shades of brown, from ochres and green browns to deep umbers. And where the two met in the centre, there was a profusion of lemon-like greens. The task was to keep the trees separate and yet in the middle create some new life out of the two. But I was too jangled to concentrate. All I did was mull over the unpleasantness between Alex and me. After some time, I heard her approach. I don’t know why I didn’t want her to see me half-sitting, half-lying on the couch, but I hastened toward a shelf — well away from the table under which I’d pushed the box — on which are stored paint jars and buckets of knives and brushes. She came through the doors, ignoring, I noted, the work on the easel, and without missing a beat she said, “Is he still interested in you?”

  A tickle in my cheeks threatened me. It was as if I’d been waiting for her to come in after me. I was dizzy with relief that I’d had the mind to hide the installation bottles. I turned and faced her directly, but then burst out laughing. This seemed to anger her, and she snapped, “Are you interested in him?”

  I tried hard to control the chuckling coming involuntarily out of my mouth, the self-consciousness in it, but it was difficult, and I had to angle away from her. I turned my back and fiddled with jars of paint. I reminded her that he and I had a very long friendship, which would not have been possible in the face of such a complication, and I asked if she could honestly imagine, knowing me as well as she did, that I might be interested in anyone but her. In typical fashion, she persisted.

  “Priya, I want to talk to you,” she snapped. She didn’t, for what felt like an eternity, say any more. I could feel her eyes on my back as I culled jars of similar colours in pyramid-shaped piles. All the while I held my breath. Then she said, “Look at me, Priya.”

  I faced her, my shoulders slumped and my mouth twisted in a show of fatigue.

  “We’re becoming strangers, Priya. We’re growing apart. What’s happened to us? We’re not communicating anymore. It’s as if I don’t know you. As if you hide things from me, don’t always tell me what’s going on.”

  Well, who doesn’t hide things? I wanted to ask. I didn’t, of course. But strangers? What did she mean by that? Well, she’s a fine one to bark. She’s the one who’s always preoccupied by her work. The book. My work. The book. My work. Long before all this commotion about Prakash. She’s the one who goes by herself on weekends — weekends when she and I could be together — to our friends’ cottage on the Shield to work on the bloody book. When she comes back, there’s always a distance between us. Her head still in the work, I guess, and me peeved she prefers to go up to such a beautiful part of the province without me. I distract her when I’m there, she says. Well, it’s true: there are walks to be had among the white pines, kayaking along the shore among the trumpeter and mute swans, et cetera, and I am not a loner — cultural difference, I suppose — so I prefer to share these things with someone, and yes, I guess I can be a nuisance when she’s trying to think and write. And that’s the point. We’re not on the same page about the kinds of things we want to do, about doing “extracurricular” things together. Maybe more like roommates than strangers. I suppose that’s just splitting hairs.

  But strangers? Perhaps she was suggesting she saw some sort of bigger problem between us. I glared at her, a look of incredulity on my face, then half turned and picked up a crusty old palette. With a palette knife I began to frantically scrape it clean, flecks of plasticized paint curling, flying, sticking with static to my clothing. I wanted to yell that there wasn’t any problem and to stop creating one. And that once he’d come and gone, she’d see we were good. Yes, she’d see that. We’re fine. We’re good.

  Unable to find my voice, I dropped the two items on the table in immense irritation. As if that were an admission from me, she, relentless, carried on. “So is there something you’re not saying? If you haven’t been in touch with him in all this time, why do you want to start back up a friendship with him? Out of the blue. Tell me what you’re not telling me, Priya.”

  It was as if she wanted me to say that I had indeed had an intimate relationship with him, or that I had been interested in him, or that he was coming down here so he and I could begin something illicit. As if she wanted me to destroy all that she and I had, right there and then. I went to the easel and dragged it back to the painting station, then walked past her to the doorway, where I turned and answered, “Out of the blue, yes. It’s called social media, Alex. It makes people go in search of their past lives. Of their past selves. Prakash and I never stopped being friends. Our lives got busy and we faded away from one another. Leaving the city to move here, we — you and I — gave up a great deal, including certain connections, and his was one of the friendships I ended up neglecting. I’d always expected he and I would somehow, sometime, somewhere reconnect. I mean, it’s a small world. And indeed, we’ve reconnected, for better or for worse, and there’s nothing to be done about it. It doesn’t have to be like this between us, you know. You’re the one creating all this distance. You used to admire, you’d say, my attention to friends and to family relationships. What’s happened? Why have you become so cold, so distant? Strangers? Yes, perhaps, but why? Is there something you’re not saying?”

  I wanted to add that if she was so peeved she should just leave for the weekend, go up to the cottage on the lake and work there. Stay out of our way. But I would have hated it if she were actually to have left me here with him. Anyway, the cottage had been closed for the winter ever since Thanksgiving weekend.

  I left her in my studio and waited for her to follow me back into the house, and I waited for the comeback, but there was none. Nevertheless, I held my breath.

  · · ·

  * * *

  Days later, she and I, in the TV room. The TV was on but the volume was off. The TV’s light and colour emissions were disconcertingly errati
c. I held my laptop on my lap and was reading an article, and she, sitting next to me, seemed engrossed in something on her electronic reader. Suddenly, apropos of nothing (well, that’s not exactly true, is it? It’s more like apropos of an elephant named Prakash in the room), she broke the silence to ask what work he did. I didn’t know about the present, I muttered as I tried to keep focused on the laptop screen, but last I knew he was designing software for one of the big banks. “Great,” she answered. “Scintillating weekend that’ll be.”

  I inhaled loudly, exhaled loudly, and shook my head in irritation, but I didn’t say anything. I could almost hear her staring at the silent TV screen. I closed my laptop and, aiming the remote at the television, began to scroll through the channels. I stopped on a travelogue about Prague and increased the volume.

  But Alex doesn’t give up easily. She said, “Can we talk for a moment?”

  I emphatically aimed the remote, made a show of pressing the Mute button, and dropped it on the couch between us with just enough intention to suggest irritation, but not enough to be hostile.

  “Seriously,” she said. “Is he single?”

  “Why are you so threatened by him?” I didn’t mean to raise my voice.

  “Threatened? Should I be? And don’t raise your voice at me.”

  Raising it a bit more, I said, “I didn’t raise my voice.” I lowered it, but the words that followed sounded harsh. “This island is in all the Ontario destination magazines. He found out I live down here. Two birds, one stone. I’m sure it’s as simple as that. Look, it’s not strange or weird or odd. At least, not to me, and I should know.”

  She ignored my tone and reworded the unanswered part of her question: “Is he married?”

  “Last I knew, he was,” I allowed. I couldn’t imagine Prakash leaving his wife. Perhaps I should have simply said yes. That might have tamed the topic. But I actually and really didn’t know for sure, and it was one of those times when I was — as I can be — perversely drawn to the taunting inherent in vagueness.

  “Does he have children?” she asked.

  “Yes. Three.” It was a trap, a ridiculously small trap I’d nevertheless fallen into.

  “As you said, the island is a holiday destination. Everyone knows that,” she responded. “So why isn’t he coming with his family?”

  I glared at her. “How on earth am I supposed to know?”

  * * *

  Has she detected something in my responses, in my behaviour, I wondered, that might have caused her to question me in such a manner? It is unusual for her. She’s never even expressed jealousy when I’ve been just a little flirty with a woman. She might have curled her mouth, but not shown actual worry. Why on earth would she be worried about a man? Is there something about me that I myself can’t see that makes her think I’m not as committed to my sexuality as I profess to be? It unsettles me. It makes me angry. Sometimes I feel as if she doesn’t know me. Doesn’t understand me. Doesn’t trust me. And in other moments I feel as if she wants to push me away. It really had not occurred to me that asking him down here would drive such a wedge between us. Or is there a wedge I haven’t noticed?

  We’ve been living together almost half a dozen years, but there are times I look at Alex’s face in repose and realize I have no idea what goes on in her head unless she actually tells me. And if I were to ask her what is on her mind, how do I know if what she’d tell me is the truth? I can’t know. And vice versa. We just have to trust. Or believe. There’s a difference between these two, isn’t there? I wonder what she really sees of me that she doesn’t say out loud.

  Do I speak in my dreams?

  Last night, did my body shudder in sleep? When I go out of the room this morning, what exactly awaits me, pray?

  · · ·

  * * *

  I wonder what Prakash will see of me when he gets here? People used to think, when we were youngsters, that we were sister and brother — no doubt because of our race. We certainly didn’t look alike. I wonder what relationship people would imagine there was between us if they saw us walking side by side on the street. How I wish things were simpler between him and me; I do miss the times we had that were good, and there were many of those. He was always doing things to prove to me he wasn’t as conventional as I used to tell him — in a teasing way — he was. I remember we once took an extra-large pizza, always vegetarian for him, of course, to the beach in the east end of the city. We sat on the sand on a straw mat and ate two slices each. After, while we watched a group of people play volleyball, he broke the remainder of the pizza into bite-sized pieces, which he dropped in a plastic bag he’d pulled from his pocket. I showed some feigned disgust that he was destroying more than two-thirds of a good pizza, and with his bare hands, too, but he ignored me. When he was finished, he wiped his hands in a white handkerchief from his back pocket and suggested we take a walk at the water’s edge. Every few steps, he took a handful of pieces of pizza from the bag and dropped them on the sand behind us, and in no time a fluctuating line of screaming gulls were dive-bombing around us and nipping at our heels. The gulls realized the food was in the bag and some actually began to attack it in his hand held high above his head. It was quite hair-raising, and eventually we had to run to try and get away from them, but we were near tears with laughter, too, even as I knew better than to feed birds such food. If Alex knew we’d done such a thing, she would likely not see the silliness or the fun in it. She’d probably wonder how I could have condoned feeding pizza to gulls. I wonder if he does such silly things still.

  · · ·

  * * *

  The day Alex and I sat in front of the muted television, I decided after some prickly silence between us to retreat to my studio and build stretchers. I could barely concentrate on what I was doing, my mind fixed on what I might have, could have, or should have said to her, analyzing every nuance in the words she spoke to me. Distracted to the point of making mistakes in my measurement with the stretchers, I decided to return to the main part of the house and speak with her again. She had not moved from the sofa — which I understood to mean she was not finished with the conversation and was waiting right there for me. I sat next to her and put my hand on her knee. I grabbed the kneecap firmly. “Alex, you can’t possibly imagine there’d be anything to worry about. I mean, look at me. Am I the type? Seriously. We’re not strangers, Alex. Even if someone were interested in me, I’d have to be available, and I’m not.”

  She stared at my hand on her knee. For some painful moments she said — and did — nothing. Then she put one forefinger on my hand and tapped it once. She got up and said she needed to get some coffee. That was that. At least my assurances changed the mood.

  · · ·

  * * *

  “I guess that’s the thing about getting older, isn’t it?” Alex said. We’d been chatting, just days ago, pleasantly at last, as if all was well between us, and then she came at it from what she might have thought of as slightly higher ground: “We start searching for anyone and everyone we used to know in our younger days. That’s what social media has done to us. It makes us imagine we can create this expansive story, this full picture, of our lives, stitch every single recorded moment of our pasts and presents together seamlessly. Everyone’s an artist these days, creating self-portraits, portraits via social media of their world.”

  Now what, I thought. But I didn’t bite, and so she just came right out with it.

  “We’re different, Priya. You and I. In regards to our pasts, we only know what we tell each another. You have more in common with this man than you have with me. Isn’t that so? You have history with him. You and I, we don’t share a past. I’m impressed that he, a straight married man, the father of three children, would come all the way down here to seek you out after so many years, and he intends to spend a night. What doesn’t make sense is that he’d come on his own, without his family. This is unusual for an Indian man, isn’t it? What does hi
s wife think of all of this, I wonder. And I have to ask — I’m just saying — why you’ve encouraged, or allowed, this. I think it’s a bit much, don’t you?”

  This did not deserve my defensiveness, but I couldn’t stop myself. “For God’s sake, Alex. What? Yes, I had a life before you. So had you before me. A good part of it in different countries. There’s a lot we can’t know about each other. Am I supposed to just chop off my past? Is this a prison I’m in? Are we so tied to each other that we can’t have any thoughts or feelings or ideas or friendships that aren’t shared? Why won’t you accept that an enduring and platonic relationship between a straight man, a straight Indian man, and a lesbian, as unconventional as it might be, might simply be refreshing? And how do you expect me to know what his wife thinks? I can’t imagine he’d come down here if it weren’t fine with her. Enough now. Seriously. Leave it alone.”

  But she wouldn’t. “One of the differences between us, Priya, is that your boundaries are far more fluid than mine.” I let her continue as she launched into her elaborate explanation. “You come from a place where family and friends are in each other’s lives every day. You miss your family in Trinidad, your friends in Toronto, your food from back home, the constant closeness, the ceaseless chatter between people. I left my family because I wanted independence. I don’t need to hold on to the past. I left Toronto for peace and quiet and to be left alone to think. Where you come from, no one’s an acquaintance — everyone’s a friend. And you’re bringing this into our home. You should have asked me. You should have asked. You’re in a relationship. You’re not the only one living in this house. You can’t simply do whatever you want.”

  What I heard loud and clear was the insinuation that I had to ask permission to invite someone to my own home. “So, this is a prison,” I said. Then I added, “We live as equals in this house, and I don’t need permission from anyone to have my friends here. We might be different, but room has to be made to allow for both our differences.”