Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  I pulled on my clothing quickly, as if someone were about to enter the room, and, taking my slippers in my hand, I opened his door and hurried to the washroom. I soaped my leg and rubbed it with the wet corner of a towel and, without brushing my teeth or washing my face, I tiptoed to the room I’d been given.

  “It was a very long time ago,” I say firmly. “It has nothing to do with today. And nothing really happened, did it?”

  The ferry docks. He starts the engine and drives onto the road.

  “There isn’t much to see farther on. The ferry ride is the main event around here. We can turn back,” I say.

  He ignores me and drives on. “I suppose you can say, it’s true, nothing really happened. Nothing and a lot, at the same time,” he says. “You’ve always kept me close, close enough for your needs, but just out of reach for mine.”

  Whatever has happened to the jovial man who was just in our kitchen entertaining Alex and me, I wanted to know. Why is he now talking to me about the past — not the past, but this particular past? Is this why he has come to visit, to remind me of that time, to tell me how I had been with him? A fire rages in my mind, my face burning. I want to tell him that we both have things for which we must apologize. I want to tell him that he always came when I called. That he could have declined. Was I to blame for the choices he himself made, and continued again and again to make? He comes to a fork in the road and looks down the roads on either side. I say those are residential areas, we should go back and wait for the next ferry. He says, “No. We’re taking a little drive. Relax.”

  I find myself looking around, wondering why no cars are coming toward us and why there were no others on the ferry with us.

  “And do you remember the second time?” he asks.

  I shake my head to say I don’t know what he’s talking about. I am ready to return home. I say to him, “Why don’t we turn back? Alex will be waiting for us for dinner.”

  He says, “No, let’s carry on. It’s early still. Surely she’s not expecting us back this soon.”

  “I think we should turn around and go back to the house, Prakash,” I say firmly, but he ignores this plea. I cannot tell if my car door is locked, and if I myself have control of the lock.

  “Both those times, I remember well. I no longer dwell on them. But for a long while, even after Aruna and I were married, I would think about one or the other and I would crumble. They had quite an impact on me.”

  Two times. Could he possibly be counting his attempt to kiss me in San Francisco? Other than that, a far cry from any real intimacy, I can’t think of a second. What more does he need to get off his chest? I suppose I will hear about this supposed second time whether I want to or not. Before he arrived today, I had imagined telling him why I had cut him out of the picture when I came down here, and I wanted to explain how much I had appreciated all his attentions, and how little he’d asked for in return. I don’t have the courage to tell him at this time that it was his very persistence that made me cut him out of my life, and I see now that he is in fact angry that he got little from me in the way of the physical relationship he clearly wanted. I look away from him, through my window. I turn back as if to watch the horses that are in a field, two of them with blankets over them, and I note that the door is locked. I hadn’t myself locked it and realize it must be an automatic system that locks when the car is in motion. I focus on the knobby limbs of apple trees in an orchard. A stand of maple trees knee-deep in a pond of water. Banks of sumac bare of leaves, their burgundy seed tufts like fat solstice candles that have curved in the warmth of the sun.

  He carries on. “I came to tell you I was going to India to get married to a woman I didn’t know. You asked me if I loved her. I told you I didn’t know her well enough to know that, but if I married her, I would, in time, learn to love her, but that my heart was at the moment with someone else, and I wanted to know if that someone else” — here he points to me — “would consider having me. That night we walked down Yonge Street, from Bloor all the way to the lake. You wouldn’t give me an answer, but we held hands. You kept close to me, but you were quiet. I felt that you were considering, and I didn’t want to push you, so I let you think. When we got back to your apartment, you went to your bed, and I went onto the fold-out bed in the living room. I was restless. I couldn’t sleep. You heard me moving about and you came to me. You sat on the fold-out bed and you stroked my hair. I didn’t touch you. But you took my hand and led me to your room. Do you remember?”

  The car veers once more and I am startled. I instinctively reach for the steering wheel, and he looks ahead for a second and then back at me.

  It’s not how I remember it. I thought it was on a phone call that he told me about the upcoming marriage. I don’t remember walking with him on Yonge Street. I don’t remember him in my bed. But as he tells me, there is a vague sense of his account having happened, except that I am still unable to say I remember it. It is a sense, not a memory. And I don’t know that I had this sense before he put the idea of it in my head.

  “Do you remember how we made love?” His voice, almost a whisper, seems to crack a bit. “I’d never felt anything like that in my life. Before or since.”

  He brings his open palm over my knee, but he does not immediately bring it down to touch me. It hovers there, and then his fingers curl as if readying to play a piano, and then he slowly drops his hand and lets the tips of his fingers alight on my knees. Nothing more than the fingertips. They remain there for about five seconds, the rest of his hand hovering, and then he slowly withdraws it, places it back on the steering wheel. It is hot inside the car. The scent of his cologne is more powerful than it was when we left the house. And there is the smell behind it of his body.

  I say — my voice, too, cracking — that this conversation is making me uncomfortable, and that he should turn the car around, that it is time to return home, but he drives on slowly up the coastal road. He says, “We slept hugging the whole night, but in the morning you were, as usual, distant. I wanted to take you out for breakfast, but you sent me on my way, saying you had an appointment, you had to go. Did you really have an appointment? Don’t tell me, I think I know the answer. Do you remember where you took me the following night when I came over unannounced?”

  I don’t.

  “You don’t remember anything.” On the word anything he hits the steering wheel with his fist. My heart seems to have stopped beating.

  “You took me to a lesbian bar. We stood drinking at a table, and I was terribly uncomfortable, but I didn’t say I was. You acted as if going there with me was the most ordinary thing, and I went along with it. Then a woman came and asked you to dance, and you went with her. You weren’t close on the dance floor. She tried to be close to you, but you held back a little. She kept talking to you, you to her. I watched you. You never took your eyes off her. I watched the woman as she watched you, too, and as she was drawn into mimicking your moves. You were kind of cool, and it was as if I hadn’t seen you before. You were so attractive. But I knew right then that I would marry Aruna. I decided I would try to be the best I could be for her.”

  He had accompanied me more than once to a lesbian bar. The occasion he speaks of left no impression on me.

  We pass a sign marking the turnoff toward the lake for a provincial park. He stops on the highway and, as no cars are ahead or behind, he reverses. At the turnoff for the park, he turns down onto the unpaved road. I tell him the park might be closed, we should go back, go to Madame Bovary’s and have hot chocolate or ice cream and talk some more. He shakes his head, says, “No, let’s see where this takes us.” The car bounces along and we remain quiet. I think of Alex, what she’d say if anything were to happen to us.

  The park has not closed. We come to a parking lot and he pulls into a space between a van and a motorcycle. When he stops the car, he presses the button for the lock on the doors and mine pops up. I follow relucta
ntly when he gets out, putting on my jacket and zipping it. I am tired and it has become cold. Exhausted and dizzy, and yet I am wide awake, buzzing with apprehension. Vultures circle overhead and squirrels run up the trunks of the pines, along the branches. Through the trees the black water of the lake glistens. We walk along a short dirt path wide enough to see that the sky is fast losing its blue tinge and taking on a cool yellowish white. From the dogwood at the edge of the path, small birds rise and take off as we approach. If I were to take off, to turn around and run, would I make a fool of myself? I would have to ask for help from some stranger, to help get me home. The police might be called. Would I then get him in trouble unnecessarily? Would I end up having to explain to Alex why I felt I needed to run? What would it say about me? And where would I run to, anyway? He has the car. The keys.

  I walk beside him, and the path opens onto a narrow strip of pebbled beach and the lake. Rippling waves roll in and split apart weakly onto the beach. On either side of the strip are massive slabs of grey-and-brown-pocked limestone arranged in steplike formations that invite climbing, and so we climb and hop over slim crevices, from one slab to the next, until we are a couple of metres above the beach. A flock of late-migrating Canada geese flies overhead in perfect V formation, honking and squawking one after the other. I stare out at the water that is not quite as black as it was on the ferry ride, but a deep, dark green. Farther out, it moves swiftly, flows like a river. Wisps of grey cirrus clouds move fast across the sky. In the distance there’s a man and a woman and it looks as if there’s a baby’s carriage, or some kind of wheeled vehicle parked on the beach near them. They go to the water, bend and remain bending, and then move purposefully back toward the trees. The man is wearing red pants. They appear again, return to the water’s edge, then back into the trees. Perhaps they’re collecting fossils. Then they stand on the beach together. Suddenly the man runs and the woman runs behind him; they’re chasing each other, it seems, running in ragged circles on the beach. I can hear them laughing.

  Prakash stands next to me on the rock. He is not taking in the view. Neither am I simply taking in the view.

  “I want to ask you something,” he says. “It’s been on my mind all these years. I want you to answer me truthfully.”

  I shrug.

  “After we returned from Salt Island, I didn’t see you for a while. Then one day I came to your apartment. There’d been a blizzard the day before. I came to check on you. But you weren’t in the apartment during the blizzard. I waited in the foyer for you to return from wherever you’d gone. Then a car rolled in to the parking lot. At first I couldn’t see the occupants, but then I realized you were in that car. And the driver was that man, Stan, whom Fiona had been seeing. It seemed to me that he was hugging you. I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head, and dashed across the road to the foyer of the apartment building opposite and watched. He didn’t get out of the car, but when you did, you had an overnight bag with you.”

  He stops there, and I try to firm myself on the rock, but I feel myself sway in the slight wind.

  Then he says, “What was that about? Why were you with him? That seemed strange. Had you spent the night with him?”

  What right has he to ask these questions? The air has seeped out of my lungs, and I don’t have the strength to challenge him.

  I want to see where we are. I want to know where I am. I want to be my own witness.

  The man and woman are still in view. They’re sitting now, lying down more likely, only their heads visible behind a log. There is a wind here, a cold wind. I pull up the zipper of my jacket. I will stand tall and wait where I am. I’ll look at everything. I’ll be able to name everything I see. Every detail. There are rust-coloured lines in these rocks. Pockmarks, some of them full of water. There is moss, lime-green moss on the rocks near the edge of the water. The pebbles on the shore can fit like misshapen oranges in one’s hand. But I need a defining landmark. There, on the far shore, on the other side of this body of water, directly across from where I stand, among the pines I see an H-type hydro pole.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say so softly he asks me to repeat myself. I tell him I’d gone to the gym with Stan that morning and what he saw was Stan giving me a lift back home. Fiona had dumped him, I say, and add that I don’t know why Stan came to me, but he did. The words, once I begin, come fast. Stan knew Fiona and I were no longer together, I say. We went to the gym and for coffee a few times. But we didn’t remain friends.

  “Why was he hugging you? Or you him?” he asks flatly, like an interrogator.

  “I don’t remember that. You must have been mistaken. Why is this important, anyway? If he was dropping me off, it might just have been a friendly goodbye hug or something. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it didn’t make as much of an impression on me as it did on you.”

  He does not respond. We stand there in silence. He turns and begins to walk away, calling to me that he needs to clear his head. I try to breathe deeply, but my lungs seem to have shrunk. I think to walk toward the couple, but to get to them from the rock I must be prepared either to get my feet wet or go back onto the path on which we came, back toward the parking lot, and find another opening through the trees on the other side of the rock on which I am standing.

  The beach curves in and out and, as Prakash walks on it, hopping up on slabs of sandstone and down again onto the beach, he disappears and reappears. I remain standing so I can see all around me. So much has happened that I am confused.

  A broken heart can make a person go mad. Do uncharacteristic things.

  I had gone mad. And, back then, I did uncharacteristic things. Yes, one could say I had gone mad. How angry has he been? How mad is he now?

  * * *

  There he is, stooping, looking, no doubt, at the shale and rock. In these parts you find fossils in almost every bit of rock. He is more like a Jain than he is Hindu. He would not hurt an ant in his path. He has never before shown anger. I think he has a right to be angry with me, but this thought confuses me. I was confused then, and I am now, too. I hadn’t made him stay at my side — he stayed because he wanted to, isn’t that right?

  * * *

  He’d phoned one night late. Stan, that is. I was awakened from sleep by a telephone call from a man asking for Fiona. She was no longer sleeping in the apartment, although most of her belongings were still there. I told the man she wasn’t there and I had no idea when I’d see her. It was best, therefore, not to bother to leave a message for her with me. The following day another call came, the same voice asking for her. And then later that evening, again. I heard distress in his voice. It could only have been Stan, and I was shaken — for if this was indeed Stan trying to find her, she was, then, clearly not with him. She was, I immediately understood, with someone else. So yes, Stan had been dumped, too.

  The man shouted on the phone, “She’s there, isn’t she? Why won’t you let me speak to her?” I told him wearily that I didn’t care if he spoke to her or not, but that she wasn’t there, and I hung up the phone.

  When she finally turned up, I told her, as if indeed I didn’t care, a man had been calling for her. She said, yes, she’d been expecting him to call — he was a musician who needed a pianist to accompany him for his recital, and he’d been trying to get her to work with him. Bullshit, I thought, but I didn’t challenge her. She’d take care of it, she said.

  The calling stopped. Then, some days later, there was a knock on the door. I opened it and a handsome black man, dressed in a smart dark blue suit and a beautiful white shirt opened at the neck, was at the door. I thought he was a Jehovah’s Witness, but he was alone. Perhaps he was selling something, I thought, and I was ready to shut the door. But when his disappointment upon seeing me registered, I realized this was Stan. He tersely asked if Fiona was there. I told him she wasn’t but that he could come in and wait for her. I knew she wouldn’t come home that day, but I wanted to see who this man wa
s. He refused my invitation. I said to him, “If she cheated on me, didn’t you think she might one day cheat on you, too?” He came in.

  He slumped in the corner of our armchair — a chair I knew he must have sat in before — his body twisted to hug the arm, his head on his forearm. He hit the arm of the chair again and again, unabashedly. He must have muttered, out of clenched teeth, “Fuck,” a dozen times. I felt embarrassed for him. And pity. But it was as if I were invisible to him. Of no consequence. Had I been a beautiful woman, a straight woman, he would not, I was willing to bet, have so shamelessly emoted. Time passed and he began to groan that he loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone. I was tempted to mutter loud enough that she’d told me she loved me more than she’d ever loved anyone, but it seemed petty, childish. He wailed and I watched. We “waited” for what seemed like hours like that, hardly a word spoken between us.