Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  Why can’t she be like that now, for Christ’s sake?

  · · ·

  * * *

  Tall dark evergreens loom in my mind. Driving toward them on a lonely highway. A drive Prakash and I took to Tobermory. We were young then. It would have been before he got married. I don’t know why that time and this particular image comes to mind — it hadn’t, as far as I can remember, been eventful. It had been a pleasant day. At that time, he was truly my family of choice.

  The day in the city had begun so hot you felt you couldn’t breathe. A drive, then, north, to a resort town, a landscape new to us both, was an escape. A little adventure. But the sun, I recall, beat down on the shimmering highway ahead all the way north. I had brought apples and sliced them with a pocket knife and handed them to him while he drove. I don’t think we stayed long in Tobermory, I don’t remember getting out of the car. We must have, but all I remember is the dripping dark and heavy green, despite the heat and the sharp, cutting light. Perhaps that trip comes to mind to say that all is okay, that he and I had indeed had good, ordinary, uneventful times together. Perhaps this is precisely why, as I lie here, as I await his arrival, this memory presents itself: because nothing had happened. We used to do together the kinds of things friends, or siblings or cousins, do.

  · · ·

  The day I met Alex, strange tingles ran up and down my body, little seizures of certainty flashed in my brain, a never-before-experienced confidence that this is it. It was shocking. We’d both attended the after-party of the opening of a much anticipated group-art exhibition at a warehouse space. I’d gone with a couple friends who knew everyone, it seemed, including this woman who, when they introduced us to one another, never took her eyes off me while we raised our voices to try to chat above the music. We discovered we had several friends in common, including Trinidadians involved in the arts and in activism. Prompted by the relentless thump thump thump of the electronic dance music, we commented on how seductive and yet boring it was. She contrasted it with Caribbean music styles, and I was surprised to learn she knew the difference between calypso, chutney, and soca. I was enthralled and made abundantly curious, particularly because knowing these things appeared to be of no consequence to her. She seemed interested and knowledgeable about many things unrelated to her personal life. We suddenly noticed that we were shouting even louder and having to repeat ourselves above truly deafening music and that the space had become crammed to capacity with people. There was a press toward the edges of the room as throngs of people pranced frenziedly in the centre. I suggested we leave and find something to eat. Restaurants in the vicinity were closing by this time, but we knew we’d find ones in Chinatown still open. I walked several blocks in the warm night beside this stranger with whom I felt a beguiling familiarity, and the air bristled with expectancy. We were soon sitting in the blaring cold light of a noodle house, Lotus Land, at Dundas and Spadina, drinking green tea and picking at spicy cold noodles, spare ribs, Chinese broccoli, and taro cakes. There, against the trills and meandering notes of a guzheng zither, she sang verses, to my amusement and pleasure, of old calypsos. I learned that she was six years older than I — not much, in truth, but those few extra years she had over me gave her, to my mind, an edge of reliability and trustworthiness, a concrete sense of self, that I felt I lacked. It was — she was — immensely attractive. I did not want the evening to end, and I could tell neither did she. Hours passed without either of us having consumed any alcohol, and yet I felt drunkenly brave and uncensored, as if there was nothing in this world I couldn’t accomplish. It seemed as if every sentence either of us spoke begged a segue into a new topic, and time passed unkindly swiftly. We left the restaurant at 3:00 a.m. because it was closing. Outside, a cool, refreshing wind gusted down Dundas Street as garbage and recycling trucks cleared the sidewalks, and produce trucks beeped backwards or lurched out of alleyways. There was a feeling of business as usual on the street, an intensity that suited our sense that we’d only just begun to chat. After we’d exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, I watched her get into a cab that would take her to her home, and I took the half-hour route to my apartment on foot. The following day — well, that day, actually — I stopped myself several times from calling her. I later learned that she had done the same thing. Two days later we went to a repertory cinema to see Fitzcarraldo, which we had both seen ages before but thought would be interesting to see again together. There was already in such an act a kind of intimacy. Afterwards, she came to my apartment. And it was there, sitting on the couch in my living room, with Elliot on one side of me and she on the other, flipping through the photo album, that a window opened wide in my mind, through which I saw the future, a beautiful view of rows and rows of sun-facing sunflowers that reached all the way to the horizon, and in the bluest cloudless sky a pair of Cooper’s hawks elegantly glided, dipping and rising, like kites on strings. And then, in a flash, the window closed. It banged shut tight. Somehow, I knew she was the person with whom I would work to accomplish the bliss I’d so clearly glimpsed when the window had been open.

  And on a different day — not today, I suppose — Alex would say it was the same for her. It was instantly a no-brainer, is actually how she put it.

  · · ·

  * * *

  It has not, of course, been quite so smooth a ride for Alex and me as the term no-brainer might suggest. I remember the first fracture, two months after we met, the way one remembers a first kiss. She’d wanted me to move in with her as much as I had. We behaved well through the strain of packing and transporting my belongings, Elliot prancing excitedly one minute, then cowering and trembling the next. Our laughter and incessant, impulsive intimacies belied the nervousness beneath the making of such a commitment. But finding a home for the contents of my many years’ worth of possessions was less easy. It was a small house, one half of a duplex, and making space was a challenge. Alex wasn’t actually prepared for her home to be encroached on roughly by half. One day, in frustration, she kicked one of my unpacked boxes that, with several others, towered up one of the walls of the living room, and shouted, “Goddammit, Priya, you have too much stuff! It’s too much. It’s just much too much. Get rid of things, or . . .” She stumbled in her speech, and repeated or again, then stopped.

  I quietly said, “Or what?” anticipating a hurtful choice. “Or leave?” I added. As I thought, So this is what her anger, her temper, looks like, I also felt terrified I’d be in an instant thrown with my dog onto the street.

  In the first few years, we took turns being the one on the verge of storming out, leaving forever. In between, little drafts would come through the seam of the window and remind us of the refreshingly cool air and the magical sunflowers and birds on its other side. I’m not saying we don’t squabble still — naturally we do, like any two bonded birds in a cage.

  And up until three weeks ago, until the resurfacing of Prakash, that is, a squabble was just that: a little disagreement that would settle down in no time, and might even leave us laughing at ourselves. The window-vision, I felt, and still do now, to some extent — or at least, I did until — well, until you know when — wasn’t a lie.

  · · ·

  * * *

  What is it that makes family out of two people who have not known each other from birth? Having children together is the most convenient answer. Alex and I don’t have children. Elliot was the closest thing, I suppose. He was my child, so to speak, and her adopted child. He was the centre of our lives, and when we had to have him put down just before we moved here, she grieved as much as I. His loss bonded us even more. She and I are family. I’m certain of that. We bought this house together, and most of what is in it. There’s land enough for her to garden. And I have my studio. We have everything we need to be settled and happy. We take holidays together, have friends we made together, dreams for the future. We know each other’s intolerances and needs, and for the most part we cater to one another. I am more carefree t
han she, but I think it is a quality she likes in me, as I appreciate and need the opposite that is in her. We have memories of shared moments — but, it’s true, our memories do not always match. Nor our interpretations of things said, things meant, things unsaid and unmeant. But that’s a relationship, isn’t it? That’s what it is to live in a family. Constant negotiation. Perhaps it’s true that all good things are bound to come to an end. Entropy. The law of physics. All things fall apart. But things also go in cycles, of course. Gravity. Decline. Disintegration. And then renewal. The process toward disintegration beginning always in renewal, and renewal preceding and following disintegration.

  I take solace in the fact that she and I are no longer youngsters in search of ourselves. We’re old enough not to truly disrupt our lives together — and I wish Alex would recognize this. I may be bringing a bit of chaos into our home, but it will be short-lived. Alex is, as I am, comfortable in this home we’ve made. Neither of us will completely tear this down over a disagreement about the one-night visit of an old friend. We just have to get through the next few hours and all will be well again.

  We’ll figure this out.

  · · ·

  * * *

  When the larger world around you does not support your kind of love, it can be hard to nurture and sustain a relationship. It’s hard to stay in when things get rough and tough; you don’t see your problems as common ones that any relationship might come up against. You can’t talk to your mother and get advice or comfort or stories from her. You see your failure as a result of who or what you are, of you as a person — you begin to chew on leathery words like normal, and when that happens, when you question your own worth, it’s impossible to embrace someone else who reflects to you what you are. Well, at least that’s how it was for me in my younger days. It’s different now, but I do wonder how different it really is. Anyway, it’s not something you can talk to other people “like yourself” about because even if they have privately experienced the same set of feelings, they want the actions you take, the things you say, to reflect a kind of politics that says that, no matter what, we’re out and we’re proud and we’re happy, very happy, to be the way we are, and you’d better get used to us.

  · · ·

  * * *

  Alex and I have always been pleased that neither of us had to be chased by the other, that we knew there was potential here without any of the craziness or need for hurt or pain associated with falling in love. We both knew from the start we’d found partnership and companionship, and we felt the potential for love between us. As if in a fortuitous arranged marriage. Without having been subjected to a single whirlpool in the sea of limerence. Or, as we say back home, we had not gone tootoolbay. We did not, when we were not together, walk about in a lovesick daze, bumping into things, seeing each other in everything around us, unable to eat, living only for our next encounter, pursuing that encounter ad nauseum. We did not suffer insatiable hunger. Hover about the phone hoping and waiting. Say no to invitations from friends because we worried we might give up opportunities with one another. And I believe for this we were both thankful and, in short order, we decided to give it a go.

  · · ·

  * * *

  Alex is fierce and won’t be taken advantage of, and yet, when she decides to trust you, hers is the trust of a child or a hand-fed bird; she can be as gutted as either if she is deceived or her trust betrayed. To be trusted by someone so strong and yet so vulnerable is irresistible. But it makes you susceptible, too. You can so easily be found wanting.

  I knew, then, that if I wanted this relationship with Alex to last, we were going to need a clean slate on which to map our journey forward.

  It was I who suggested, therefore, we leave the city, where our individual past foibles and achievements had been recorded and were played back in just about every one of our present-day social interactions — in other words, where much baggage, good and bad, had come to identify us and was aired interminably. How could she, too, not also have wanted to leave the place in which we had both spent most of our years, and go somewhere neutral where we could remake ourselves and also create a new life together, where we could develop a circle of friends and acquaintances that were not mine or hers, but ours? It seemed only logical, and I’m sure, if prodded to rummage beneath the surface, she’d say she felt the same way.

  But the fact is, we did not delve into each other’s reasons then. For my part, it had felt mature not to do that; it was a nod of respect for what I thought of as a Westernized notion of individual “boundaries.”

  * * *

  I wish I could go outside, or Alex come and lie here with me, and we could look at this entire situation and marvel at how it came to be, rather than fight about it.

  * * *

  Among the areas Alex and I searched for a place to make a home outside of the city was this area that stuck out into Lake Ontario, joined to the mainland by an isthmus through which a channel had been cut to make boat travel easier. In effect, an island had been created. On the island, we discovered this hamlet of just a couple hundred residents nestled in a bucolic landscape of farmland. When we found this old house we live in, we felt as if the universe were anointing us with a future together. And so we let go of the house in the city, bought this one, and embarked on the clean slate on which our intention was to truly discover ourselves and each other and to fall in love — the latter, we felt, best experienced slowly.

  The week we moved, I deleted my Facebook account and ditched my cellphone, explaining to Alex that a land line was all I wanted or needed. Alex was more admiring than curious. I also gave up my email account and created a new one on a new server, selecting which contacts to transfer from the old address to the new one. If I had not been in touch with someone in the last five years, I deleted them. If I’d been in touch only a handful of times with someone who could be categorized as a social contact, I deleted them, too. And then there were those with whom I’d been in touch more often, but with whom I really had nothing in common, and was fine letting go of them in this new life I was creating. As a consequence, I lost touch, naturally, with many people. It was as if I were a landscape architect embarked on a new opportunity, clearing, pruning and weeding, preparing to move the earth, to build retaining walls, put in streams, a maze here, an herb garden there, a field of bluebells, poppies, and gayfeather to attract butterflies. A row of sunflowers stretching all the way back. An orchard. The development of a sightline from foreground to something worth seeing in the distance, a new landscape in which the right ecosystem, although cultivated, would eventually naturalize. The view through the window.

  It was during that time that the opportunity presented itself — even though it was not the first time I’d imagined or wished it — to disappear from Prakash’s sight. In this new life with Alex, it was clear: he, more than anyone, had no place. And yet, when it came time to highlight his name and address and press the Delete key, it was not easy. It was as if I were applying a Rototiller to my history. To my heart.

  * * *

  Alex, however, remained on Facebook and was on it and other social media sites, including Twitter, more than once a day. I often sat at her side while she scrolled down the screen, showing me who had posted what recently, what was trending, what had gone viral, and opening links to one thing or another that was in that very moment making news and about which, out here in the country, we wouldn’t have otherwise known. Like this, we remained knowledgeable about what people in the city — our city friends — were doing and thinking about, mobilizing around, and wearing, and I found myself wanting her to connect at times that were inconvenient for her. And then, when sitting beside me she did go online, I myself began to want her computer set on my lap rather than hers, so I could decide what links to click on, and when and how fast to scroll up or down on a page.

  That was five years ago, and so began the longest period, by far, during which Prakash and I had no contact. Even on a fake island
such as this one, one can imagine oneself to be cut off from old concerns and problems of the mainland, and so, eventually, I decided it was safe to assume that ties with Prakash had been effectively severed, that he had surely gotten the message that I did not want to be in touch. The time had come when I could safely emerge again, I thought, and so I opened a Twitter account in order to send my own two cents out into the ether.

  * * *

  I’d been on Twitter three months, mostly reading other people’s tweets, seldom tweeting and not even retweeting much, when that message in my email inbox informed me of a private tweet from Prakash Acharya. It is not overstatement to say that, even before I saw the actual message he’d sent, the appearance of his name in my inbox was enough to cause me to feel as if the sky had crashed down on my head. He’d found me. Barely three months on the site, and he’d found me. It was only then I realized that not a day had passed since I opened the account that I had not, somewhere in the back of my brain, expected a message from him. Therefore, there was even, I might say, a kind of relief.

  Hi. Write me. was all the message said.

  It was not likely he’d have come across my presence on Twitter by chance. We had no friends in common; the people or organizations I followed and those few following me would have been of no interest to him. He’d have had to enter my name in the search window. I wondered how often he’d done this over the last five years, and what he felt when a profile for me finally came up. I was immediately unsettled.