Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  “I’ll never forget the tinkling, one minute, like a crystal chandelier in an earthquake, and that insistent thumping,” I say, then laugh. “And you told me then that Lake Ontario was the smallest of the Great Lakes, and the thirteenth largest in the world.”

  She nods. “It sounded alive. As if it were breathing. The music from the blowholes — it was like a strange tune played on an oboe,” she says, and although she remains glum, I feel grateful.

  “And do you remember, you quoted Hardy?” I ask.

  She takes a puff and nods. After her long exhalation she says, “‘The sun was white, as though chidden of God.’”

  I was not surprised that she knew Hardy’s poem, but I was impressed that out of her brain she was able to pick an appropriate literary phrase to describe the scene in front of us. Impressed, but not surprised. On the way home, in another more sheltered section of the lake, where swans are known to gather for the winter, I brought the car to a crawl so we could see how they were faring. On the glass surface we counted thirteen swans, frozen stiff, some as if in full swim, some off-kilter, some sprawled on the surface, their wings unnaturally bent, stuck in parts to the ice while tips of feathers flapped in the wind. That was this same year, just eleven months ago. The feeders in our yard had remained empty until the middle of what was supposedly spring but still felt like winter. The moment I was able to, I went out and filled them up. But for weeks on end, no birds came. The seeds in the feeders stayed untouched and mosses flared up the sides of the clear plastic tubes. The songbird population — particularly the little chickadees, juncos, and finches — had suffered because ice had encased their food supplies, and we humans hadn’t been able to provide for them. I would not have experienced any of this had we not moved from the city. It has felt like some kind of privilege, albeit, at that time, a sad one.

  I lift the coffee mug to my mouth and its lip is unpleasantly cold. “Gads,” I say. “The coffee is like ice.”

  Alex stands, and as she walks toward the sliding door, she says, as if resigned, “I’ll make a pot.”

  “I’ll make it,” I say, bypassing her, ignoring her tone. “I’m making myself some toast. Want some?”

  She doesn’t. She’ll have a banana later, she says.

  * * *

  In the kitchen she has stopped at the counter. I grind the beans, and we both stand there and wait for the water to boil. I wet a cloth and wipe the counter. She has leaned against it, her back to me, and she scrolls the screen of her phone.

  While pouring our coffees, I see her in my peripheral vision, feel her eyes on me. The air in the room is prickly again. She wants to say something. I can feel it. But perhaps she is, rather, waiting for me to ask her what is wrong. That’s what it is: she wants me to bring it up.

  A bubble of irritation swells. My jaw tightens. It is inconsiderate and foolish of her, I think, to be so withdrawn mere hours before a house guest is to arrive. Doesn’t she see — or does she — that this is a kind of sabotage?

  It is as if an earth-moving tractor, ready to tear up the field of sunflowers I continue to wait for, is idling in the kitchen. I will not be drawn in, I tell myself. And yet I feel as if I am rolling up my sleeves, readying myself.

  I pour milk into the coffees and can’t help but make a grand gesture of putting the carton back in the fridge. The fridge door closes, and the muffled snap it makes is all that is needed to flip the switch of emotions competing inside me again. I really do want to be calm. I know today is a difficult day for her, that she has not wanted Prakash to come here, so it’s natural she’s agitated. It wouldn’t hurt me to show some consideration. Perhaps, after all, I should say something about him. Something conspiratorial with her. But I don’t know what exactly. Should I mention that he is fond of statistics and carries in his brain an armoury of facts and figures about the most obscure things, and that she must watch for this quirk of his? Isn’t this love of trivia something they share? Or that I’ve never known him to hold a grudge, or to say an unkind thing about anyone. Perhaps I could tell her a thing or two of what he’s told me of his family’s escape from Uganda. How young he was, and how much responsibility he’d taken on when they arrived here in Canada. He’d had to quickly improve his high school English — Swahili and Gujarati being his main languages — and interpret for his parents at their medical appointments, and when they went to a store to buy, say, a television or a fridge. Or should I tell her something with less potential to endear him, something that shows her I can be critical of him and I am not in the least attached to him? Such as, he enjoys being coy, thinks it’s playful and amusing to goad women with statements about their inferiority to men. I can imagine her rolling her eyes at this, and that alone might be enough to temper this impasse. I can tell her I’m willing to bet that when he gets here he’ll try to make them quick pals by getting her to join him in teasing me. Or shall I tell her that I never really meant to lead him on, that he’s the kindest, gentlest man I’ve ever known? Or that I fear he’s coming here to make sure I’m being treated well? Or to disrupt the peace and quiet of life here with her?

  I open the fridge again, but my mind is not on what I am doing. I stand there, staring in.

  “You seem rattled,” she says. I remain as I am, and she says, “Are you?”

  And then, that switch again. A heat begins to rise in me. I can feel it travelling upward from the heels of my feet, fast, and this time it is uncontrollable. It makes me want to stomp, to slam my fists at the walls. Why should I be the one to have to break the stalemate?

  “You’re the one who seems rattled.” I’m not sure it’s what I should say, but I can’t stop myself. “It’s a beautiful day. Are you just going to remain serious and glum? You’re not helping things, you know.”

  I want to throw the mug that is on the counter, the one I love, at the wall so hard it smashes. It is one thing to want to, and quite another to actually engage in so violent an act. It would, I’m certain, be the kind of statement from which there would be no retracting.

  Just breathe. Do not do it. I rest the mug on the counter and move away from it.

  I have to wonder if something else is the matter. The matter with her, that is. She’s been trying these last few weeks to control me, and I won’t let her. This is the problem with living with someone. Suddenly, just so, just because you live together, you lose your independence. You’re expected to halve yourself, merge with the other person. But I don’t try to stop her from doing what she wants. I don’t even ask her for details of her day. It’s not that I don’t care, but rather that small harmless mysteries stoke the fire of my interests and attractions. The feeling of jealousy, as long as its causes are not wounding, affect a delightful flame in me. This provocation and playfulness of feigned jealousies was a shared trait, a sensibility, that attracted us to each other. She’d not truly been a jealous person before. Why now? Am I misreading something here? I’m not doing anything wrong by having Prakash visit. I need to see him to clear up some misunderstandings between him and me. Why doesn’t she just trust me? There is nothing sinister about this. It should be a noble thing. Just let me have some freedom here.

  How I wish I were on my own.

  Okay. That’s not true. I wouldn’t want her to go away, or us to be apart. I just want her to be more understanding. If she were to leave, if we were to be separated, I think I would go mad. I do love her. I love her. I don’t want her to hurt. We shouldn’t be hurting each other like this. Not today.

  She doesn’t move; her hand is fixed on the handle of her coffee cup where it sits on the counter. She says nothing. She is not a weak person. Far from it. I feel she wants a fight. But she won’t initiate it. She wants me to start it.

  I am tempted to tell her everything about Prakash and me. I want to hurt her, to let her see how she is making me want to hurt her.

  But this is not me. I am not a cruel person. I love her, can’t she see tha
t?

  Why doesn’t she just come out with whatever it is she wants to say? It’s in the air, so why don’t we just get on with it? It’s what we do, she and I. We get on with it.

  I can’t bear this. I walk around the counter swiftly, taking a wide berth as I march past her on my way out of there, toward the bedroom shower.

  * * *

  The hard spray of hot water hits my head and the back of my neck. Memories of Prakash wash across my mind. Fiona, him, and I in the apartment she and I shared. How young we were then. How he loved being the man in our lives. When we walked on the road together, he’d place himself between us, linking his arms through ours. When she and I were on our own, we’d marvel one day at his naïveté and presumptuousness, while on another we’d talk of him as one of the sweetest people we’d ever known.

  I should —

  There I go again: should should should. But I really should shower up quickly and get back outside. I could be washing dishes in the sink, straightening books on shelves. There are papers to gather and put away someplace they won’t be seen. It wouldn’t hurt to plump the cushions in the living room. None of this has been done yet. Alex began yesterday what she would have considered her share, but I stopped her, saying he’s a guy, he won’t notice a thing, and in any case, I’ll do whatever needs to be done. Relax, I told her, and I was grateful she backed off.

  His long slim fingers come to mind. His nails were — probably still are — smooth, shiny, a pale pink shade, like the inside of a seashell. I remember walking a couple times with him in the Don Valley. Arm in arm, because there I was unlikely to run into anyone I knew. No ex-lovers, no potential ones. We could walk for hours and not come upon anyone: bicyclists or the lone walker, runners, yes, but we never met anyone we knew. What an amazing thing it had been then to link arms in public with another human being, to be able to declare to the trees and the grasses, to the sky, to the river, the closeness we shared — to not have to worry, like I would have had we been two women — about the lash of strangers’ eyes or tongues and acts of scorn. Even as I cherished walking with him like that, I was made sad, too, by it.

  He’ll arrive around lunchtime. We’ll have bagels and hummus here, and then we’ll go out for a cup of tea or to the pub for a drink. The three of us, perhaps, but more likely — I hope — just him and me. People who know me will probably assume he’s my brother, or some other relative. But I am recalling, too, that he loves — or loved — to engage in conversation with strangers, and he would always implicate me, when I was at his side, as his girlfriend. Come to think of it, I’d rather not run into anyone I know with him. This is a small town. Everyone knows everyone — even if you don’t know people by name, you know them to say hello to, and you recognize couples, and families, and friends of friends. People here are less tolerant of infidelity than they are of same-sex relationships. I’d hate it if, when talking to someone — a waiter, perhaps — who is a stranger to him but not to me, he were to refer to me as his “lovely woman” as, to my horror, he once did at a pub in Toronto. When I chastised him out of earshot of the waiter, he apologized, insisting that he was simply meeting the man on his terms and having a little fun. He might not repeat that mistake now, but who knows? The only café on the island that remains open after Thanksgiving is Madame Bovary’s. It’s smack in the middle of town. Perhaps we can start there, go for a drive, and then finish with a drink at the pub.

  Surely he has, as I have, changed.

  Will what I do, what I say today, be interpreted by him as signs of my present-day feelings about him? How careful do I need to be? I don’t want to mislead him. But I also don’t want to be too calculatingly, obviously resistant to him.

  Tonight we’ll eat supper here, at home. I’ll have to orchestrate the flow so as not to make too lengthy of an evening with him and Alex at the same table. And there’s breakfast tomorrow. We have apples, there’s a carton of half-and-half, a loaf of bread in the freezer. I’ll make a custardy apple bread pudding. There’s no history there, and it’ll satisfy his sweet tooth. I must remember to take out the bread. After showering I’ll quickly prepare tomorrow’s breakfast and put it in the fridge overnight. I can bake it in the morning before anyone else awakens. And hopefully he’ll leave before lunch.

  But maybe that’s too much of a fuss. Alex likes granola. That’s what I’ll make. That won’t be too hard to pull together. I’ll do that while we await his arrival. She likes it with roasted almonds and chocolate chips. I don’t think I ever had granola with Prakash. It won’t have any association with him, and Alex will be pleased. She’ll feel I made it for her. And regardless of how I arrived at this decision, it ends up being true, doesn’t it?

  * * *

  I crank up the hot water and lift my arms. The hot spray hits my sides. I turn and it cascades down the middle of my back. A delicious heat spreads over me every time I shift position. The steam fills the stall, and I’m hidden from the world. Alone, like an incubating egg. This is my home. And yet, sometimes I long for home. The old, the first, original home.

  I had had to return home, to Trinidad that is, on graduating from university, but I wasn’t there a month before I decided to leave again. I sent in an application to the Canadian High Commission in Port of Spain, for emigration to Canada. Within two years I was approved and, losing no time, l returned and set myself up in a small apartment in downtown Toronto. But it isn’t easy to replace one home with another simply by wishing it to be so. And city living presented bigger — sometimes more overwhelming — challenges than I’d had at the university. Prakash was also living in Toronto by then, and in no time we reconnected and he became my ever-ready guide. We spent a great deal of time together at first. We’d shop for groceries, cook together, go to movies, for walks on the waterfront. There was that time we went to Point Pelee, he and I, for an afternoon outing. He picked me up at my apartment in an old car he’d recently bought and was proud to own outright. How great it was to be seated with him in his own car. I could imagine myself being courted, on a path that could lead to acceptance from so many quarters of life. There was no one around to watch me try this out, to see me fumble or to witness whatever pleasures might surprise me. At the seaside, we shared an ice cream, with big frozen chunks of meaty black cherries in it, walking on the beach, seagulls dive-bombing everywhere, squawking as if they were being murdered, the metallic smell of the sand, and the weird, silly intimacy of one ice-cream cone between him and me. It seemed playfully provocative then, and all the laughter we shared that day. As we neared the city on our return, the fantasy dissipated. I wouldn’t let him come up with me when we arrived at my apartment. He was visibly crushed, and I detected a hint of anger. Had I led him on? A little, I suppose.

  There were times, before Alex and I began living together, when I would have that dream, and in the dream I would be wracked with desire for him, my body opening like a pulsing tulip, but always, just as I felt him hard against me, just as he was about to penetrate me, something or someone would interrupt us, and I would awaken. I would awaken to thoughts of telephoning him, of insisting he come over at once, my intention being to have sex with him that very day. I was convinced, in those first few waking moments, that that was what I must do. But once I arose, the moment my body left the bed and I was exposed to the reality of the day, the desire turned to torment and confusion and depression that I could have had such a dream. And I was further appalled that even in my waking state — though it would have been for no more than, say, fifteen or twenty minutes at most — I’d been convinced I should have sex with him. I’d shake the dream off, like a dog just out of water, and put him out of my mind.

  But, goodness, the memories come like rain. Walking into a lesbian bar on Church Street with him, feeling his mix of excitement and fear, my simultaneous discomfort with his presence at my side, embarrassment even, and gratitude that when I left the bar there was someone to walk home with. Late-night walking, together, whil
e he gaily nattered on about something or other, every so often throwing his arm around me when he laughed at something he said, leaving his arm there until the awkwardness of my not drawing closer made him drop it.

  But it wasn’t all gratitude: walking back to my apartment knowing I had not had the courage to go to the bar on my own, to flirt there with some vivacious woman, buy her a drink, dance holding her lightly at first, as we sculpted the imminent possibility of a night spent together. Time had passed since I’d emigrated, and yet I had long remained terrified there’d be a Trinidadian lurking somewhere who’d see me and report back home to the entire country. The idea that another Trinidadian in that situation would likely have had the same concerns about me, and that our secret identities might have been safe with each other, could not be fully trusted. And so Prakash was my willing foil.

  * * *

  I close my eyes and rub my face with a gritty cleanser Alex says makes a remarkable difference on my skin, smoothing, brightening it. It’s been more than six years. I’ll have aged visibly, I’m sure. Will he see that I have? I’ll put rose cream on my face, tidy my eyebrows. I’m trying to remember the last time I saw him, but it is him dressed in a cream sherwani, the collar and cuffs embroidered in heavy gold thread and pearl-like beads, that comes to mind. The dhoti he wore. And the ceremonial canopy, the Mandap from which the beaded curtains hung. Those pearls and all that red and gold. And his joota chupai, like fancy boats in Asian waters, pointed and curled at the toes. With my eyes closed, and the wet and the heat gushing on my breasts and on my stomach, I see him standing on the petals of red flowers. I remember it all, as clearly as if I’d been there.