by Sarah Sheard
The situation persists into the next day like a weird drugstore perfume.
*
I tracked down Akira’s Japanese grocery store in Chinatown and went in. Foodstuffs coiled as neatly as hair or bound around like firewood or shaped into little bricks and folded in half like wallets. Bundles of leaves that turned like the pages of a book and swelled ten times their size, in hot water. Speckled clothesline in tight bladders of water, human ears threaded on strings, fish ground into pink mud, roe like vitamin capsules. Seaweed spirals to be ground into powder and sprinkled over rice. One-sided fish shining through their packages like Polaroid photographs.
The tin of wasabi. Two inches high, decorated with a vivid lithograph of mountains, a rainbow, a swollen river and fluorescent green radishes thrown onto the bank. The calligraphy soared out of a brilliant sky, obliterating nothing behind it.
Objects of worship.
Vive la difference, the shelves whispered. And after a while, Live the difference and finally, Leave the difference, leave the difference.
After I graduated, I asked for a job there and got it.
The man put his purchase on the counter. Smiled at me. He was very handsome. Tall for a Japanese.
‘Matsutake mushrooms very expensive,’ he noted, as I dropped them on the scale.
‘A little, but they’re so good,’ I said, smiling back. ‘That’ll be twelve dollars.’
He gasped and clapped his hand across his heart. Reached for his wallet.
‘Are you going to cook these yourself?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘Of course. I am bachelor.’ Slight accent. He looked to be in his mid-twenties. Playful eyes. ‘You must know all about Japanese food, yes? You have worked here long?’
I gave him his change. Wrapped up his mushrooms. His fingernails looked like Akira’s.
‘Two years.’
He put his wallet away but hesitated. ‘My name is Masaaki – Mas, for short. May I ask your name?’
‘Emma.’
‘Bye bye, Missis Emma.’
‘Bye Mister Masaaki.’
His eyes twinkled.
Next week he was back.
‘Konichi-wah, Missis Emma. Good afternoon.’
I nodded. His hand rested on his purchases. I reached for them and his hand touched mine. When I gave him back his change our hands touched again.
‘Working hard, Missis Emma?’
He was watching my face as I wrapped his packages. ‘You are doing very good job. Onions are quite safe now, I think.’
I looked down and blushed. I had wrapped each one separately in newspaper.
He picked up his bags and left. For the rest of the day, I squirmed a little each time I remembered him. He must have thought I was a complete –
I locked the till, turned off the lights, set the alarm and slammed the door behind me. Went over to my bicycle and began undoing the combination lock.
‘Missis Emma.’
I jumped. He stepped out of the shadows.
‘Please. Sorry to surprise you. I would like to invite you somewhere. For a beer perhaps, or coffee?’
‘Well, I ...’
‘Please? He put his hand on my bicycle seat. It’s very hot day. You need a beer after hard work all day long.’
He was a foreign student at the University of Toronto, it turned out, doing graduate studies in computer science. He was twenty-six, lived in a rooming house in the Annex, on a scholarship and had another year to go before he returned to take up his career with a Tokyo corporation. His English was excellent except for his articles. Better than Akira’s. He was almost six feet, slight shoulders, long limbs, short hair.
We began to go out. He picked me up in his car, always coming in first to say hello to my parents who were duly impressed with his tie and jacket. He always brought me home at a decent hour and we did old-fashioned things like picnics, trips to the zoo, the museum, the art gallery. Dinners in restaurants. He never took me back to his apartment or suggested anything improper. A perfect gentleman.
But I told Marjorie the truth. That almost from the very first, his hand lingered on my back, my ass, in public places, that the moment his station wagon turned the corner he was leaning over to kiss me, his tongue in my mouth, one hand fumbling to open my blouse. That we never socialized with one another’s friends. That the zoo was really the country where, in the shadow of the car, we spread out a rug and rolled over and over, fumbling, anxious, scared. He confessed that he was a virgin. He wanted to go inside. I was terrified of a single drop landing on me. Was positive I’d get pregnant if he touched me there for even an instant. Each time he began to get my skirt up, I bucked against his thigh, squeezed my legs together, wriggled below him until he groaned and slipped off.
In the wintertime, we threw our skates into the back seat but we never drove anywhere near a rink. Instead he took me to an underground garage – he was always discovering new hideaways – where we could lie together in the back of the wagon and neck until the windows steamed up. As his excitement mounted he would make a whimpering sound and then I knew I had to reach down for him, unwind the layers of clothing from around his nodding little stick of heat, barely longer and wider than my finger and work the skin up and down until his groans changed, steepened in pitch and his legs began to tremble uncontrollably, it was partly the cramped space, our nervousness, the naughtiness of it. But he never came. He made me use my mouth, pressing my head down until I gagged, the tears streaming but he still couldn’t come and I couldn’t come either although he loved to slide his slender fingers up my skirt until he found me and he had obviously been reading technique books – I could sense him turning the pages but I just couldn’t let go. At first, I fantasized he was Akira, squinted my eyes and lost myself inside his hair. But how could this twitching man above me, with his pants open, have been Akira?
Making love to Akira wasn’t what I wanted at all. My body proved that. And it was certainly not Masaaki I wanted either.
I wondered why he kept calling me up. Each time his car drove off, I figured that was the last I’d see of him. But the following week the phone would ring again. It got weirder. Between dates, Mas began to call and just breathe on the phone as soon as he heard my voice. He would breathe and then begin to whimper and I suddenly realized what he was doing. He whispered, Emma, Emma. And I would listen. Then interrupt in my daytime voice. Mas. Stop this. My folks are home. You’re crazy. And he’d pant faster, faster.
We parked on a hill overlooking the city. I told him. Mas. This is not good. For either of us. You have to study. I can’t do this any longer. I just can’t. Find someone else. Maybe someone older.
He slid closer to me. Turned the headlights off. Please Emma. just this once. Let me go inside. I promise I’ll be careful. Just this once. Please please. His mouth was all over me. He reached down and undid his fly, pressed himself against me, whispering, You like it, you like it, I know you do, just let me come inside, give you pleasure – He was trembling, his movements more desperate, he pushed me back by the wrists, forced his knees between mine. I wrestled him, the door handle digging into my back, he was stronger than I thought. I brought one leg up but he kneed it down again and holding both my arms with one hand now, began tugging at my skirt with the other. Mas! I hissed. Quit this! You’re being ridiculous. But his eyes glittered. My struggles were actually exciting him. I grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked his face off mine and he slapped me across the cheek and began to grind his hips against me.
You like it? It feels good? Can you feel me, Emma how much I want you? Touch me. Touch me – and he twisted his penis out of his pants forced my hand down on it.
I slid my hip below him and jerked up.
He gasped and sagged off me, opened the car door and curled into a ball in the darkness beyond. Silence. Just the sound of his gagging. And the traffic wafting up from the city below.
Marjorie introduced me to him.
He was unlike Masaaki in every way although he too, was
involved with computers. He was my age, he enjoyed socializing with my friends and he never, never pressured me into sex. He drove a motorcycle which was sexy but hardly a shagginwagon. With Boris I actually did go to the museum, the art gallery. He was mechanically adept and could cook. He loved puttering around the house with my father but was just much at home in the kitchen talking food with my mother. My parents adored him in spite of the motorcycle.
*
‘Boris,’ I asked, as we picnicked on the hillside over-looking the Gardiner Expressway – our special spot, a stone’s throw away from BurgerQueen, a dramatic spiral up from the Don Valley which made motorcycling down at sunset particularly terrific, in fact the same hill Masaaki had crumpled onto – ‘what are your aspirations?’
Well, you know, a career in electronic engineering. Plus, I want stuff.’
‘Stuff? What kind of stuff?’
‘Well, stuff-stuff. You know. A house. A backyard. A skylight. Kids.’
‘Oh my god, really?’
‘There’s stuff and there’s stuff, Emma. I don’t want to hurt your feelings but a lot of the stuff around your house doesn’t qualify. Hey, sun’s going down, let’s catch it!’
One afternoon, shortly after that, I felt I loved him and we went to bed together.
He went off to university but before he left, he insisted I needed a change. He couldn’t bear the thought of me sticking out yet another year in my Japanese grocery store at six dollars an hour so he put out the word and a computer warehouse offered me something in inventory that paid considerably more.
It marked the beginning of the end of the person I’d been before meeting Boris. He worked like herbal medicine on my system – delicately at first but over time, a very potent drug. His value system gradually replaced my own, cell by cell, until the day came when it drew air on its own. Boris insisted that I had been formless in a way, all along, that I’d been a potato-person, full of potential that he’d shaped, whittled, seasoned and brought to maturity. He’d poked in cloves for eyes, pimento for a mouth. He’d peeled off lack of confidence, my yearnings to be someone I wasn’t, my negative fascination with normalcy, my nostalgia for the years between fourteen and seventeen. The Akira years, as he called them, accounted for my ineffectual, noncompetitive, goal-less, vague, lumpy sensibility. ‘Slough them off. They don’t work for you any more,’ Boris entreated me. A Kabuki doll was a lovely object to look at but I didn’t want to be one. I accepted this. I let myself be whittled and reformatted. I was eager to make myself over. I wanted to get on with life. I wanted to get over Akira.
A photograph from that time shows me wearing Boris’ leather jacket astride his state-of-the-art Honda 650. I am squinting at Boris, looking a bit like my mom in that autumn light, Boris is standing beside me, smiling with a piston wrench in hand. Already there is something about his eyes. As though his self-absorption had sprouted leaves, blotting out the spontaneous lights inside that had first attracted me to him.
*
Boris found a half-floor on Adelaide street, in what was listed as a ’mixed-use’ area. You can’t live at home forever, he said. Wait’ll you see this space. We can fix it up exactly the way we want it. I stared through the slatted floorboards of the freight elevator lurching its way up to our loft.
He heaved the doors of our cage apart – they opened up like monster jaws instead of the other way on – Watch your step, Emma. Don’t look down.
We went up onto the roof first. Our building was tucked behind a windshield factory, across the street from a car-wash. Lone men flitted in and out of the shadows below us. Not a tree in sight.
Boris took my hand and led me into the loft. It was the size of a dance studio. He talked fast, blocking out space with both arms. We’ll put in a kitchen here, a shower here, partition this area off into working and living space. You can cook over here, we’ll hang pots from that pipe over your head, you can watch the carwash, see the sun set from your stove, I’ll be over here at my desk – he paced off the area – we’ll put a loft bed in here, bolt it into this – he slapped the beam of wood sandwiched between layers of brick on the wall – a reading light, a roof garden, another work-cubicle at the other end, next to the shower-stall for you, if you’d like. And here – He waltzed into the middle of the room – is where we’ll eat. And all the rest, his arms swirled, is unassigned space.
Unassigned space. My stove. Work cubicles. I felt uneasy.
I caught onto the knack of punching the stop-start buttons to jerk the cage in increments until it was flush with the loft level, sliding the cans out onto the landing then going back down for another load. I cleaned up and painted while Boris worked tirelessly from the blueprint in his head, sawing wood, drilling holes, stripping wire. The loft provided full expression for his perfectionism. He installed a shower stall, a sink, shelves above the stove, a platform bed with storage boxes suspended from strapping. For our wardrobe, he said. He was a bird in love, flitting about with string and twigs in his mouth, showing me what a good provider he was.
I suggested a low table on the floor, a tatami platform maybe, for serving tea on. Folding chairs without legs, for sitting around the table. A scroll alcove to break up the unassigned wall-space. A little juniper bush in a pot maybe. Everything as spare and light as possible. I’m not a Buddhist monk, Boris snorted. My legs can’t take sitting on the floor. His heart was set on modular metal bookshelves, industrial light fixtures bolted overhead on rheostats, some oak furniture of his family’s.
We’d been working for close to six weeks on the loft when we had our first serious fight.
I had expressed nervousness about enclosing the plumbing above the kitchen sink. In case we had to get at it later. I thought accoustic ceiling tiles were unnecessary and uninteresting
How can you live looking up at pipes and naked rafters? Like we were goats in a barn, he snapped. You disturb me saying things like that, Emma. Just because you lived like a hillbilly in the past doesn’t mean you –
I didn’t grow up in a barn, Boris. What are you saying? And don’t roll your eyes at me like that. You look demented.
Silence.
You want to squat on the floor, Emma. You want to live by candlelight and shuffle around in zoris. We can’t ask our friends to do that. This is North America, Emma. You are North American. It’s time you grew up and accepted that.
Exactly what are you saying, Boris?
But he picked up his caulking gun and disappeared inside the shower stall. Slammed the door closed.
I flung it open.
Boris?
He swivelled around, the gun trained on my belly. We’re talking about standards, Emma. You aren’t holding up your end. I have worked like a dog to kick this loft into shape and I’m not sure you even want to live here. You prefer some raw-edged oriental fantasy that has nothing to do with who you are or what I’m comfortable with. Maybe you should –
Your gun’s dripping, Boris.
No, what I actually said was somewhat worse. I picked the fight. Boris was squatting, an easy target of ridicule, in the shower-stall, caulking, caulking. I knew I’d been a useless nerd during much of the love-nest reno. I was resisting something, fighting down an image of myself as I actually was, a typical North-American woman about to take the predictable first steps towards a commitment that led to: The. Whole. Package. I never realized how much I loved my irregular nature. My eccentricities, such as they were. The only things separating me from all the women I’d gone to school with. Boris threatened to wipe me out.
My attraction to him was self-mutiny, in a way.
You can’t do this to me, I said. I can’t let you sacrifice me on the table of love. This loft is a decoy. You intend to live another kind of life. The middle-class blueprint. No more surprises for the next fifty years. I marry you. You get promoted. I get pregnant. I learn how to make soufflés in that oven over there. We turn in early, night after night. My parents ADORE you. The kids are the spittin’ image. The bike’s traded in
on a hatchback. (The word hatchback fuelled me onward.) My wisdom shrivels, is replaced with homilies, recipes, baby talk, little prickles of pride in your achievements while I –
Boris swivelled around to face me, his eyes radiating pained astonishment. How could I tell him that I hadn’t rehearsed a word of this outburst, that the sight of his stooped back had triggered my new-found vision of us as – I went on. You are not artistic, Boris. You are not creative. My parents love you more than me. (I stopped. Where had that one come from?) You are just a dry-leaves mind, a presumptuous machine-head, a –
A what, Emma?
– technocrat with a heart like an iron, steaming out my wrinkles, one by one. You want smooth bed-sheets, not a comPANion!
Emma. You fill me with despair. And horrible doubt. I’ve been watching you. My work is suffering. You take everything. Nothing comes back. You’re a waste of skin. Go home. Grow up. Get out of here.
Boris never sweats. Boris never shouts. Boris never swallows, I sang through the clenched jaws of the elevator and out into the street.
Boris didn’t call me at work the next day. I didn’t call him.
Two days later a telegram arrived.
The vessel of our love has cracked – Boris.
I relented.
You’ve done a lot of work, Boris, I said, walking around the loft. I peered into the shower-stall, climbed up the ladder and inspected the new bed. A nest of magazines around his pillow. A heap of reading too, I said, climbing down.
He pulled two sofa cushions onto the floor, took my hand and pulled me down beside me. He held my face in his hands and kissed me, tears in his eyes. I missed you, Emma, he whispered. I’m trying to understand. But you know what I think?