Every Little Piece of Me

by Amy Jones

“Emiko,” Mags called across the room. Without turning her head, Emiko held up a finger signalling for Mags to wait, then wandered out of the room. I’m here for you, Emiko had said when they first hired her, but so far it seemed like she was only here for herself. Or whoever was on the other end of that phone. At one point, Mags had hoped she and Emiko could be friends, share a beer at the end of the night, talk about something other than music, other than the band, other than the boys. But friends had each other’s backs. They didn’t leave each other to flail in the wind, to become nothing but a body, cross-armed in a lacy bra under harsh studio lights, the bright outlines where skin meets air in sharp relief against a night-black curtain.

  Emiko didn’t even drink beer, Mags discovered one night, a sweaty bottle of Clancy’s clenched in each hand as she waited for her to get off the phone. “I only drink clear liquids,” Emiko said, gazing impassively at Mags’s meagre offering, and so Mags drank them both, sitting backstage waiting for the boys to finish playing pinball with the crew so they could go home. More and more, it seemed, all she wanted to do at the end of the night was go home.

  “Okay, great, let’s get started,” the photographer said, waving his hand through the air to round up his assistants.

  Mags glanced around desperately, but no one was paying attention to her.

  “You see,” Sam was saying, pointing to the television, where the image of a giant candy-coloured house appeared onscreen, “the family’s last name is Hart, and the B&B is called Hart’s Desire.”

  “That can’t be their real name,” Paul said, scratching his head, his unwashed hair forming a stiff cowlick where his hand passed through. Of course, no one would brush it down, just like no one would trim Zac’s nose hair or put concealer on the dark circles under Sam’s eyes. They would say it was cool, it was rock and roll. Never wash your hair again, they’d say. Stop showering and let everything grow out and fester and smell. It doesn’t matter. You’re a man. You’re supposed to be a little dirty, a little rough around the edges. You’re supposed to be human.

  Mags tapped the photographer on the shoulder. He turned around, but he stared right through her. “If you don’t like the sweater, I have another shirt in my bag,” she said.

  “Shhh,” the photographer said. “Don’t move.”

  “Okay,” Mags said. “Sorry.” She tried to smile at the photographer, but he waved his hand at her dismissively.

  “No smiling,” he said. “Think sexy thoughts. We need you to smoulder.” He rubbed her shoulder. “Don’t worry, sweetie. My assistants will tell you what to do.”

  Mags shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know what to do,” she said. “This isn’t my first photo shoot.” And don’t touch me, she thought but didn’t say out loud. How was it that it had been so easy for her to handle the skeeves at the bar when she was playing with the Brigatines, but now, when it came to one pretentious photographer, she had forgotten how to stand up for herself?

  The photographer sighed. “Just do what they tell you.”

  He was gone before Mags could protest further. It wouldn’t matter anyway, she knew. So she did what they said, moved the way they told her to, let her body be arranged into the shapes they wanted. And then the boys moved in beside Mags and snap, snap, snap, it was done. She hadn’t even had time to check her hair, talk to Sam, or peek down to see if her nipples were showing. When it was over, someone handed back her sweater and she slipped it on, wrapping her arms around herself, pulling herself in. Sam gave her a wink as he shook the photographer’s hand, and Mags resisted the urge to jab her finger right through his eye.

  Later that night, they played a gig opening up for an American band that Mags had never heard of. Right before they went onstage, she and Sam had a massive fight in the green room, so loud that the venue manager had to come in and tell them to keep it down, the bar patrons could hear them over the music.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t stand up for me!” she yelled as she angrily rummaged through her makeup bag. “That photographer could have had me naked and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “I thought you were fine with it!” Sam said, waving his arms in the air, his right hand gripping the neck of a beer bottle. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I tried!”

  “You didn’t say anything to me.”

  “I didn’t think I had to!” She pulled out a powder brush and some powder and began violently applying it to her cheeks in the mirror, the bristles bending awkwardly under the force.

  She didn’t want to be mad at Sam—he’d seemed so fragile since they moved to Toronto that sometimes she was afraid she might break him. It had taken months for his body to heal after his fall in Halifax, and Mags was convinced he still hadn’t, not fully—that he had only learned to live with the pain. So she kept all her frustration inside, or tried to channel it into her music. And it had worked, for a while. But this was something she couldn’t channel away. “You’re supposed to have my back, Sam. You’re supposed to watch out for me.”

  “And you’re supposed to be an independent woman who can take care of herself.”

  “Oh, that’s such a cop-out. Saying you don’t want to help me because you think it’s important for me to help myself.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Mags exchanged the powder brush for some mascara and went in on her eye. “Of course it is. But it’s just as important for me to know you’re on my side.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to know that, Mags?” He took a drink of his beer and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “How am I supposed to know when I’m supposed to rescue you and when I’m supposed to let you take care of yourself? When one guy touches your ass I’m supposed to stand back and let you handle it, but when another guy makes you take your shirt off I’m supposed to act like a man and punch him out? Should I write all this down? Is there some kind of cheat sheet for this, Mags? Or am I supposed to read your fucking mind?”

  “That’s not fair,” Mags said, throwing the mascara wand onto the table in front of her. She caught Sam’s eye in the mirror. “You knew I had that under control, you knew it, but you stepped in anyway.” It had been the promoter for one of their early shows in Toronto, before they had moved here. Just came up behind her out of nowhere in the dressing room and squeezed. Mags had been in the process of telling him what she was going to do with his hand if he touched her again when Sam came charging at him, shoving him up against the wall, holding his arm up against the guy’s throat until his eyes started to roll back in his head. The promoter had refused to book them ever since. “Besides,” Mags continued, “things are different now.”

  “Please,” Sam said, sitting down on one of the couches and spreading his arms wide. “Enlighten me.”

  She leaned back against the counter, staring him down. “No one listens to me, Sam. It’s like I’m fucking invisible.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Don’t let Paul and Zac hear you say that,” he said. “They might remind you of all the times we’ve been referred to as the backup musicians for Mags Kovach.”

  “At least people call them musicians!”

  “Let’s not get started on that again.” Sam drew in a deep breath, and Mags could see him preparing to capitulate. Don’t you dare, she thought. Don’t you dare patronize me. “Listen. I know this is hard. But you need to take care of yourself. I’m not always going to be here to save you.”

  Fury lashed like a laser beam behind her eyes. “Oh, really? Because as far as I can tell, you are never here anymore. Where are you, Sam? The world could be caving in around you and you wouldn’t even notice.”

  “Guys!” Paul stood in the doorway, guitar in one hand and a beer in the other. Even from across the room, she could smell the reek of weed. “Quiet the fuck down.” He turned to Sam. “Wanna…?” He made a puffing gesture with his hand.

  “Sure,” Sam said. Then, seeing the expression on her face, he shook his head. “Actually, nah, go ahead. I’m fine.”

>   “What about me?” she asked, glaring at Paul. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “You’ve got to get your shit together, Mags. We’re on in ten minutes, and you’ve only got makeup on half your face.”

  “Maybe I did that on purpose!” Mags yelled as he walked away. She turned back to Sam. “You guys should try having to spend an hour getting ready to go onstage instead of just pulling on a T-shirt that doesn’t smell and going out back to get baked.”

  “I didn’t even go!” His face flashed with a brief moment of pain—whether it was mental or physical, Mags couldn’t tell. Likely both. It was as though the closer the band got to their dream, the more life it took from him. Mags sometimes wondered if he had made some kind of crossroads deal with the devil, and success was quietly eating away at his soul. Here they were, on the cusp of greatness, and everything felt so, so wrong.

  “Jesus Christ, Sam, just go, I know you want to.” She stared at him. When he didn’t move, she threw her makeup bag at him, scattering tubes of lipstick and bottles of foundation across the floor. “Go!”

  Sam slammed his beer bottle down on the table and left the room without a word. Mags bent over and picked up her favourite lipstick, which had shattered on the floor, and started to cry. She wiped at her face, and when she brought her hand away it was smeared with black. Great. Now she would have to start all over. Because as much as she wished it were possible, she couldn’t just go out there and sing. She couldn’t just be Mags Kovach, person with a job. She had to play a part. And her reward was the singing, it was true. But for the first time, she wondered if that was going to be enough.

  * * *

  —

  Fights in relationships never really end, they get dog-eared, a folded-down corner of a page to remind you of where you left off for when you’re ready to return to it, notes in the margins to remind you of what you were angry about in the first place. Mags and Sam dog-eared their fight and went out on stage and played as though God himself were in the audience, God or Rick Rubin, whoever. Then, as was their post-show tradition, they fucked in the backstage bathroom, Mags’s ass resting on the sink, her dress hiked up around her waist, her heels pressed against the doorframe.

  “I’m…still…mad at you…” she said as Sam thrusted up against her, his face red, his blue eyes like slits in the flickering bathroom light. “This…doesn’t change…anything. Oh god,” she moaned as he bit down on her neck. “Do that again.”

  Sam brought his mouth to her ear. “You don’t get to be mad at me,” he breathed. “And I’m not doing that again until you apologize.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Not fair at all.” He snaked his tongue over her neck, and she dug her fingers into his shoulder, arching her back. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “No.”

  “Say it.”

  “No.”

  “Say it.”

  “No!”

  Sam grabbed Mags’s hips and pulled her forcefully toward him, holding her suspended over the sink, his fingers digging into her flesh as he shuddered against her. Mags wrapped her legs around his waist, but she couldn’t hold on, her body slipping from his grasp as his fingers loosened. Her ass hit the edge of the sink, which separated from the wall with a loud crack, Mags screaming as the two of them tumbled to the ground in an avalanche of plaster and drywall, landing hard on top of the sink, their limbs in a tangle, water spurting freely from a pipe jutting out of the wall, spraying across the tiny bathroom.

  Mags scrambled over the slippery floor and pushed herself up against the wall while Sam grabbed on to the toilet, hauling himself to his knees, his now flaccid penis still hanging free, his bare white ass in the air. Water ran down his face in rivulets as the pipe gushed above his head. Mags looked down and saw her dress was ripped all down the front, her breasts already starting to prune from the moisture.

  Their eyes met, and they burst into laughter.

  “Holy shit,” Sam said, shaking his head like a dog as the gush slowed to a trickle. “We are supremely screwed.”

  “Yup,” said Mags. “We’re dead.” She reached out and took his arm, which had been slashed by a jagged edge of porcelain, blood welling from the centre of an aggressively blooming bruise. “And you’re bleeding.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Just a flesh wound.”

  His mantra, now. She traced her finger gently over his arm, along the widening gash. He cringed but didn’t stop her. Both of them were starting to shiver, but they didn’t move. “I don’t know how to do this, Sam,” she said eventually, keeping her eyes down, watching the blood mingle with the water and run off onto the floor.

  “Do what?” he asked, wiping his other hand across his face, in a futile attempt to dry it.

  “Be tough. Be vulnerable. Be a singer. Be your girlfriend. Be a fucking grown-up. Be everything everyone wants me to be.”

  Sam pulled her in with his uninjured arm. She could feel his heart racing under the thin, wet material of his shirt. “You don’t have to be anything but yourself,” Sam said, pressing his lips to her dripping hair. “You don’t have to be anyone but Mags. Okay? Whatever happens, remember that. You are Mags.”

  Wordlessly, she nodded. She knew it wasn’t as easy as that, of course, the same way she knew their fight wasn’t over, it was dog-eared at a later chapter. But in that moment, sitting on the floor in the flooded bathroom with her dress half off and her underwear still around one ankle while the venue staff and the rest of their band banged on the door outside, it was enough. For now, it would have to be enough.

  “Did you finish?” Sam asked, cupping one of her puckered breasts in his hand.

  “No,” she said, and he peeled back the wet edge of her dress and slid his fingers between her legs, his other arm clasped around her neck, his legs pinning her legs to the ground. She pressed back against him, feeling the puddle ripple underneath her, cool water and warm skin, his lips hovering beside her ear as she rose on the tide of his breathing, in and out, in and out, breath, breath, breath.

  * * *

  The next few months, Mags thought about that moment every day. About how in that tiny pocket of time, it seemed like everything was going to be okay.

  It didn’t matter that by the next morning it was clear that Sam’s arm was broken, or that they ended up at Toronto Western Hospital, where the X-rays showed a broken rib that had never healed from his fall. Or that after a whole three-ring circus of tests the cancer showed up. It didn’t matter that they had to schedule the rest of their recording sessions around chemotherapy, or that Sam had to stay seated for every performance because he was too weak to stand, or that she knew Paul and Zac had conversations, behind closed doors, about whether they should find a new bassist. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that her heart broke a little every time she stepped onstage, knowing that Sam had vomited everything up moments before the show, that he had spent the previous three days in bed, unable to move, but that he still insisted on playing, on recording, on travelling, on pulling his weight. That night, none of it mattered except the two of them.

  “You will pry this bass from my cold dead hands,” Sam had said one day when she tried to help him load the van on the way to the studio. “And I am not dead yet.”

  “Maybe that should be our album title,” Mags said. Preserving the jokes, because that was what they did with each other. That was their normal. That was how she could still do normal.

  He put on his best radio-announcer voice: “This week’s number-one album is Not Dead Yet by Align Above.” He grinned at her. “I like it.” He closed the back doors of the van, and then sat on the bumper, catching his breath. “Hey, remember that time we hit the deer? On our drive to Toronto?”

  Mags sat next to him. She wished she had a cigarette, but she had stopped smoking in front of Sam. “That was in Thunder Bay,” she said gently. The chemo had made his mind fuzzy, and he was incredibly self-conscious about it. “Like four years ago. We didn’t hit anything while we were d
riving here.”

  Sam furrowed his brow, running his hand over the peach fuzz of his head. “I swear to you there was a deer on our drive to Toronto,” he said. “On the 401 somewhere.”

  “That stupid show.” Mags leaned forward, her hands on her knees. Her hair fell over her face, but she didn’t push it back. She knew Sam liked to do it. “That Hart show. You made a joke about a deer in the house.”

  “Right.” Sam reached out and took a lock of her hair between his fingers, tucking it behind her ears. “We should get married,” he said.

  Mags smiled. “I know,” she said.

  He knew, Mags thought. When he fell down the stairs, he must have known. That there was something very wrong. That the moment he walked into a hospital, it would become real. And that’s why he resisted. And even though there was a part of her that wished she had pushed him to go to the hospital that day in Halifax, knowing that they would have caught it seven months earlier, and he would have had seven more months of treatment, she wasn’t sure she would have traded this time together. Because even though deep down they had both known something was wrong, for those seven months Sam’s illness was just a feeling, a grey cloud of doubt growing between them, something that hadn’t yet been broken by a final pronouncement, a diagnosis. And a cloud can lift, give you some relief. Reality never does.

  Shout Out – Canada’s Music Scene

  Coming into Alignment Continued from page 4

  just doesn’t feel like a relevant question,” Van Ness responds. “We do the music we do, and we don’t like to compare ourselves to others. I mean, of course I have influences, everything from Fugazi to Yo La Tengo to early Neil Young. Mark Knopfler is obviously a huge idol of mine. And I really love the new Schoolboy Q. It’s so raw and authentic. I really enjoy music from every genre, as long as it’s honest.”

  I turn my attention to Kovach, who has been fairly silent during the interview, leaning back in her chair, surveying us with those sultry eyes. “So what’s it like being in a band full of guys?” I ask.