Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Naomi just nods now as Iquito tells her again about his stolen sister. She has never seen him angry about anything else and she doesn’t know what to think.

  4. Fish

  Goldfish, sunfish, swordfish, jellyfish, angelfish, devilfish, fish story, fishwife.

  His tongue in her mouth flickers like a fish: tickling. The taste of her later on his lips is like fish: salty. His hands upon her face smell like fish: familiar. The major (indeed, the only) export of the island is fish: indispensable.

  But even in the utopian ocean the fish must eat each other to survive.

  5. Time

  Time passes. All time passes in its own good time.

  Iquito does not think in hours.

  At first, Naomi is always asking, “What time is it? What time is it now?”

  Iquito gives her answers like, “It is time to eat. It is time to sleep. It is time to make love. The sun is shining. It is raining. It is dark. I am hungry. It is time to make love.” Naomi would rather have a nice simple number to go by but Iquito cannot figure out how or when the number six might mean supper and what difference does it make if the sun comes up at seven, eight, or nine: it comes up anyway.

  Eventually he teaches Naomi how to tell time by the sun and the stars, by the tides of the sea and of her own body. She stops asking stupid questions. She will also learn to navigate eventually.

  No matter how you figure it, time is always passing and proving that everything changes, everything must move forward and forward and on. It is only when you think of it that time stands still.

  C. VERBS

  1. To Love

  Iquito loves everything (except monkeys). He is always saying, “I love you. I love the sun. I love your left nipple. I love red bicycles. I love your yellow hair. I love all the stars and the full moon too. I love your teeth and your great big mouth. I love bananas. I love the way your belly button sticks out. I love raw meat.”

  Teasing him gently, Naomi says, “I love the way you love me and I love pizza too.”

  Iquito, who has never seen, let alone eaten, a pizza in his life, says, “Ah yes, that too.”

  2.To Laugh

  They laugh at each other with their eyes squeezed shut, their mouths wide open and round. Their laughter is delicious, like that of mischievous children stuffed to bursting with secrets and plans.

  3.To Rain

  Iquito wants to sleep on the beach. He does not trust the hotel. To him, all enclosures are an aberration. Naomi can suddenly see what he means.

  They lie down in the sand with their legs entwined. Naomi nestles her head into the curving bowl below Iquito’s left shoulder. She presses her ear to his moist brown skin. She can hear the blood inside of him (or is it her own blood?) like the ocean inside a seashell. The sound of the surf seems to come not from the sea but from the stars speckled above them. While they sleep, the clouds come in like ghost ships. The rain drops down on their skin like cool silver coins.

  4. To Sleep

  The little green island feels like a boat, sealed up and salty, on the verge of becoming gladly and forever lost at sea. There is no telling what has become of the rest of the world.

  In the dream, he asks, “What do you want?”

  She says, “I want you to grovel.” And in the dream he does it. With great delight. Prostrating himself before her on the sand, winding around her ankles, and whimpering like a slippery well-fed cat. She loves him so much in her sleep that she wakes up in the morning exhausted and covered with fine white sand and Iquito’s elfin face sleeps on softly beside her.

  D. CONJUNCTIONS

  1. And

  And the rain still falls silently into the sea.

  2. Because

  Because there is nothing to be said, there is nothing to be remembered or regretted.

  In the dream there is no word for love.

  In the silence, Iquito and Naomi are jumping out of their angels and swimming sleekly away.

  3.But

  But there is always the rest of the world out there, waiting to be acknowledged and appeased.

  E. INTERJECTIONS

  1.Oh

  Oh never mind about that.

  2. O

  O to lie down in your arms and laugh.

  Nothing Happens(1990)

  Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect on me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I have been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

  —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  To the anxious (ardent, eager, anguished, or tormented) lover embedded (immersed, marooned, sunk, or stuck) in unrequited (uncertain, unreliable, undeclared, or unrealistic) love, the simple but eloquent phrase “I love you” becomes charged with a divine potential power. In such circumstances one is inclined to believe that if only one can say those three words often enough, then something will happen.

  I love you.

  I love you.

  I love you.

  (Do something.)

  The phrase, in repetition, assumes an incantatory quality, becomes like the mystical chant of a sorcerer which, if administered with the appropriate number of abracadabras while sprinkling the beloved’s beautiful head with just the right kind of magic dust, will make something happen.

  It is perhaps a self-delusory trick of all human natures to believe that if only one can make oneself clear (perfectly, fervently, exquisitely, heart-wrenchingly clear), then something will happen, then what one wants to happen will happen.

  When does one acquire the maturity to stop trying to make things happen? How does one arrive at the wisdom of knowing how and when to just let it go?

  Didn’t our mothers always tell us that where there’s a will, there’s a way? Didn’t we always believe them?

  When are we going to realize that whenever we say, It didn’t work out, what we really mean is, It didn’t work out the way I wanted it to?

  When are we going to accept the fact that for at least sixty-five (seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety-five?) percent of the time our hands are tied? Tied perhaps with golden bracelets fine as angel hair, with white satin ribbons slippery as skin. Tied perhaps by a benevolent assemblage of family, friends, and distant relatives, by a bank of memories accumulating compound interest daily, a shared history rich and complex as a Latin American tapestry, unusual icons woven in vivid colours on a black background against a white wall.

  Tied pleasantly enough perhaps, but tied nonetheless.

  It is important to come to the conclusion that while strong people have strength, less strong people — I am reluctant to use the word weak here because of its negative connotations which bring to mind newborn mewling children or purblind suckling kittens, infirm old people, or the kind of tea you want when you’re sick—less strong people have power. Strength is like a box, a straight-edged sharp-cornered protective packaging around the one who possesses it. Strong people are like monoliths on legs and other people automatically assume they are invincible, never needing anyone or anything. Power, on the other hand, is like a web, elastic, a little sticky perhaps, expanding in all directions, taking everyone in and keeping them there. Strength gives a person the means to survive. Power gives a person the means to make things happen.

  My lover always tells me that I am a strong person and that is one of the things he loves about me most. He says, You are a survivor. Which is supposed to be a compliment but sometimes sends me into a ridiculous rage, for which I am later embarrassed and apologetic. Sometimes these arguments send us out to a bar late at night when nobody knows us, a diversion which is meant to be relaxing and distracting, but in the morning I have a round bruise the size of a silver dollar on my right wrist-bone from banging my fist on the table while trying to make myself clear.

  His wife, he says, is not strong. No
t as strong. He says he loves her but he admits (to me anyway) that he knew marrying her was a mistake in the first place. Not a fatal mistake, he says, but a mistake nonetheless. Once, in anger, he said, I made a mistake. Why can’t you just accept that? I made a mistake. All right?

  When is he going to realize that the danger of mistakes lies not in making them (for everyone alive must do that) but in feeling bound forever after to perpetuate them?

  When is he going to realize that the only right reason for being (or staying) with someone is because you want to?

  There are, in my opinion and experience, a great many possible wrong reasons — some of them noble, honourable, or decent perhaps, but wrong nonetheless.

  These wrong reasons may include (this is akin to those ingredient listings on food packages which say may include as if they can’t remember now, can’t really say for sure what the hell they put in the stuff) staying because your family will disown you, because her family (who loves you like blood) will disown you, because you have a nice house with a big mortgage and a good garden, because maybe in fifteen years you will both have turned back into who you were when you first met and then you will be happy again, because the other person is a good person and does not deserve to be hurt, because you have always thought of yourself as a good person and do not want to hurt anyone ever.

  When is he going to see it my way?

  One of the things my lover and I have in common is our proclivity for complicating every single thing beyond recognition (beyond resolution, beyond hope, beyond belief).

  Sometimes I say, Some things are simple.

  I do not mean simple/easy, I mean simple/straightforward. Who is it that he cannot live the rest of his life without? I do not ask this question out loud because even when I’m angry I am afraid of the answer.

  Sometimes he says, I’m a monster. He says this with his eyes closed, with his head in his hands. I am quick to assure him that he is not a monster, that I don’t think he is a monster, that I would not love him if he was a monster. But there is little real consolation to be found for either of us in this because within it there is also always a lingering doubt: maybe he is a monster and maybe I am just plain stupid. His wife is a good person and we do not try to pretend otherwise—our powers of self-delusion are not that well developed. We cannot find any reason to dislike her at all. So maybe we are both monsters, maybe we are not decent people after all, maybe we are detestable, evil, and damned.

  Sometimes we joke that if something doesn’t happen soon, we will end up in adjoining rooms at the psychiatric hospital (or, I say, at the detox centre). Do we really mean that we will end up in adjoining catacombs in hell with the flames licking at our treacherous unfaithful feet?

  Usually he calls in the morning around eleven o’clock, every morning except Saturday and Sunday. We seldom get to see each other on weekends. Sometimes on Saturday I am possessed by a compensatory frenetic energy so that I spend the whole day rushing around doing errands and chores I’ve been putting off for six months, vacuuming, washing floors, polishing silver, and rearranging the kitchen cupboards. Sometimes by Sunday I am so worn down and depressed that I stay in bed till noon and then spend the rest of the day pacing around the clean rooms of my house in my sweat pants, drinking coffee, smoking too much, and mumbling to myself, rehearsing aloud the It’s-all-over-this-is-killing-me-I-can’t-take-it-anymore-I-deserve-better-than-this-I-never-want-to-see-you-again speech which I will never give.

  On weekday mornings I go about my business nonchalantly, pretending that I am not waiting for the phone to ring. But I am waiting, always waiting, waiting just the same, and usually hating myself for it. This is like having an itchy spot on your back in the middle of the night and you try to ignore it, you try not to scratch it because somehow scratching seems like giving in to things beyond your control. But after a while you can’t help it and before you know it, you’ve got your arm twisted around at an impossible angle beneath you and you are scratching so hard that your fingernails leave long red welts on your skin. It is an involuntary response as is my anticipation. So for a while I’m not waiting and then all of a sudden I am. The difference is that waiting does not bring with it the relief that scratching does. It is only an admission, not a release.

  When he is late calling, I start to worry. I imagine that something has happened, something big, The Big Thing.

  I imagine that the shit has hit the fan.

  I have the feeling then that we are poised upon the proverbial fence (a whitewashed fence with uncomfortably pointy pickets which we are gingerly straddling). This is the fence between nothing happening and all of our (my) dreams coming true.

  When he finally does call, I am both relieved and disappointed to discover that he was late for some silly reason—friends dropped by for coffee, the toilet backed up, he had to take the dog to the vet—for some silly reason that has nothing do with me, her, or us.

  When he finally does call, I cannot picture his face.

  Sometimes he calls from a phone booth on a busy downtown street and I can hear the heavy morning traffic, the passersby laughing, a baby crying, a dog barking, sirens, brakes squealing, once the sound of breaking glass.

  But usually there is only silence in the background and I imagine him calling me out of some vacant lunar landscape dotted with boulders and craters, foggy and unfathomable. I cannot bring his face into focus but his voice comes to me out of this opaque moonscape like a lantern or a buoy on a dark lake in the cool north.

  When he finally does call, the first thing he says is, Are you all right?

  He is always calling, calling, always asking, asking, Are you all right? Are you all right?

  And I am always saying, I’m better, yes, I’m much better now.

  But I’m not and sometimes when I hang up the phone, I find myself crying, crying for no reason, crying for all the reason in the world (too damn much reason in the world). I am always saying, I’m fine, just fine, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. But what if I’m not? And still I cannot picture his face.

  The only time I can see him clearly is when we are making love and his face above me is illuminated and when I come he whispers my name and I close my eyes but he is still there and afterwards he rests his head on my shoulder and I can feel his breath on my neck and I can still see his face.

  But then he has to go home again and before he gets to the end of my driveway, once again I cannot picture his face, can think only of how his back looks out there in the real world, walking away.

  Sometimes when we are together we talk about ordinary things and I love to hear about the movie he saw last night, the dull dinner party he went to, the dream he had about pumpkins. I love to tell him about the great book I read, the fabulous dinner I cooked for myself, the erotic dream I had about him, making love on a mountain with the gods all around.

  Other times we talk about “the situation.” This is what we have taken to calling it—”the situation”—as if what is happening, or not happening, between us has assumed a life of its own, has become greater than the sum of its parts and is now a free-floating entity in its own right. This way, when we get angry (mostly I’m the one who gets angry), we can say we are angry at “the situation” instead of at each other. What this really means is that I rant and rave and he understands and nothing happens.

  Once he said there is a part of himself that he always holds back, even in this situation, even though he loves me more than anything, anyone, ever. Maybe that is why he can always afford to understand me, even when I’m crazy. On a rainy evening alone again (drinking draft beer in a downtown bar, sitting in a booth by the window watching the headlights of the cars coming down the wet street like stars, the seat across from me empty and enlarging moment by moment with the absence of anyone to make myself clear to, drinking and dreaming that he is out there in the storm searching, the rain on his face and my name on the frantic tip of his tongue), I realize that this is the part of him I will always love the best: th
is part of him that I can never have. This is the part of him that his wife can never have either.

  Sometimes I say reckless things when I’m angry, things like:

  I think I’ll go to Vancouver for a while.

  I think I’ll go out with Leonard who has been calling twice a week for a month.

  I think I’ll move away forever.

  But I say these things and then I regret them. I don’t say them because I mean them. They are just recklessness trying to get a reaction, trying to make something happen, searching for that key which will throw our lives back into motion. Sometimes I crave action the way other people crave a drink or a good thick steak, medium rare.

  Sometimes I wish I had a gun. I have always been afraid of guns but sometimes now I wish I had one. I would carry it outside carefully on a warm and fragrant August night. I would stand in my white nightgown in the middle of my front yard between the two giant fir trees which would be black in the dark, their tops gone out of sight. I would stand in front of my little white house with the gun in my hands over my head and I would shoot blanks at the sky. The red shutters would be the colour of blood. The moon would be full or absent altogether.

  My neighbours, who are respectable peace-loving people, would call the police in a panic, of course.

  By the time they arrived, I would be sitting on the front step in my nightgown, resting my back against the black iron railing, resting my head on my knees. The gun then could be anywhere: invisible, lost, a figment of all imagination.

  By the time they arrived, I would be innocent.

  A Change is as Good as a Rest (1990)

  What it all comes down to is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.

  —Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces