by Karen Smythe
***
Josh spent part of a winter semester going to college in the States before he decided to model full time, but school didn’t pan out, so he left for Italy in the fall. Then, after more than a year of taking assignments all over Europe, he’d grown tired of modelling; so he moved to New York to take acting lessons and audition for films. He phoned me often, usually when he was either really happy or somewhat bored.
During one of our calls, he said he was stalled in class and running out of cash. “Can’t you model part time again?” I asked, but he said he couldn’t do it anymore, he hated the superficiality of that life. “Put the Gucci on, pose, pose again, take it off. Put Armani on, pout, turn, take it off. I’ll have nothing to show for myself when I’m forty.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going with that. “You think you’ll stop getting work, because your looks will be gone?” “No, it’s not that. It’s…it’s like, what am I going to tell my kids about what I’ve done with my life? Hold up eight-by-ten glossies and magazine covers and say, ‘Just look at that hair’?”
***
Josh and I went to a lot of movies before he left Toronto the first time. Being There, Airplane!, The Big Red One. He always bought my ticket, and I was disappointed in myself because of it, both for letting him follow the sexist convention and for liking it. I usually took the subway to meet Josh at the theatre and went home the same way. But one night after the movie —we’d seen Young Frankenstein, I think — Josh drove me home. Gina and Ben were sitting in the den, watching Saturday Night Live on TV. Ben was usually outgoing, but after Josh and I sat down, he became subdued. Gina was her usual silly self, playing with her hair and giggling at everything Josh said. Josh was funny, very funny, but I never giggled the way girls at school did, swarming him with smiles and touches on the arm at every word. It bothered me that Josh seemed to be enjoying Gina’s company, and I was quiet, too. When my father came in to say good night — an insomniac, he delayed going up as long as he could — Josh stood up and shook Dad’s hand. I thought that was so sweet that I couldn’t help but smile.
When I walked Josh to the door, he said goodbye and we kissed for the first time. Behind me I heard Ben say to Gina, “It’ll never last.” I didn’t know if Ben meant Josh was too good-looking for me or if he thought I was too smart for Josh, but I wasn’t upset either way, because to Ben, Josh and I were a pair. An “it.” We had been named into existence. It was an unexpected compliment from Ben, and it changed how I saw myself.
I never thought I was pretty — my nose is a little too wide, my forehead too high — but my mother used to say I was interesting-looking. I have sculpted cheekbones, big brown eyes that are almost black, and a heart-shaped face. I’d noticed that my eyes looked larger with mascara smudged under them in the morning; kohl eyeliner was not in style at the time, but when I found kajal pencils in an old-style pharmacy run by an Indian family near the Bloor subway, I started to rim both lash lines in black.
My hair, which Jennifer envied, was dead-straight and the colour of dark chocolate, and I wore it side-parted, bobbed, a little longer at the front and shorter at the nape. This was in the late seventies, when girls wore their hair long and loose. Josh liked my cut, the angle of it, he said, when I told him I was bored with my look. “Why not cut bangs across your forehead and dye your hair jet black, then, and wear white kabuki face powder? Oh, and pluck out your eyebrows and draw thick black lines in their place, while you’re at it.” I’d hit a nerve. Did I sound vain, to him? Did I remind him of the other girls, the giggling gaggle?
With Ted I felt beautiful, because he told me I was, over and over, right to the end. James rarely spoke of beauty or commented on anyone’s features, but when we started out, before I knew how deeply he cared for me, I still looked at myself through Ted’s eyes; I waited for James to tell me that he, too, thought I was lovely, but he showed me, instead. And eventually, though it took years, I was able to look in the mirror without focusing on flaws or wondering what others noticed about my appearance. Now I simply see my face, and I have James to thank for that.
***
I missed Josh when he wasn’t around, but I didn’t disintegrate. We hadn’t become a couple, for one thing, though our friendship made me feel protected; just thinking about him soothed. But Ted — well, that was different. We’d become completely entwined. I’d let that happen, I’d allowed it and wanted it so much that after he disappeared from my life, I felt I didn’t exist anymore. We’d been so close, for so long, that without him — solo — who was I? Who was left of me, after Ted left me? I wasn’t sure I could stand up on my own anymore, and for a time, bedridden, I didn’t try. The ligaments in my legs might as well have been severed.
When I was no longer floored by abandonment, I considered moving as far away as possible. Perhaps I wouldn’t miss Ted as much, I thought, if I went somewhere we’d never been together. In Toronto, every step I took was in our city, the subway ride downtown was the route to his place, the ringing phone was sure to be Ted calling.
So when I saw an ad for a job similar to mine at an ESL school in Vancouver, I applied. This was in the day when employers were still allowed to ask women about their plans for having babies. During the telephone interview, when I answered that I didn’t think I wanted any children, the mother of two I was speaking with said, “That’s selfish, don’t you think?” When I told Gina, who had Anna by then, she said she was glad I didn’t get the job, and she was glad that I didn’t have kids yet, too. “When Anna is driving me insane, who else could I get to take her off my hands for a few hours?”
James didn’t want children. “I’ve been teaching for over twenty years, so believe me — I’ve had enough of kids.” He said this soon after we met. I believed him, and I was grateful, too. I told James that same night that I’d never wanted children, and I let him think that until the end. But it wasn’t entirely true.
When I was with Ted, I did want to have a baby — two, really, to make up our eventual family. With James, though, our twosome was enough; we met, we were together, and that was enough. I wasn’t waiting to go somewhere else with James; we were there, where we wanted to be, already. Here, I mean. At least that’s what I thought I felt back then, about the children issue. About not wanting to have any children with James.
Our friends were childless and, other than Tony, they had settled, too. Nancy, at my office, had been married to Oscar for almost as long as James had been teaching. They’d tried to have kids for years, but Nancy said Oscar’s sperm count was too low, and he refused to adopt because the child would be a constant reminder that he wasn’t man enough to sire his own. Most of the others we knew were teachers who either chose not to have children (James’s crowd) or were too unstable to think about it (mine). At the language school where I worked, high teacher turnover was the norm; the industry attracted risk takers, I noticed, the kind of people who were desperate to find a way out of their lives. “They want to be uprooted,” I told James once, when we were getting to know each other. “I’ve watched teacher after teacher take off to unfamiliar places where they can reinvent themselves.”
James asked me during that conversation if I’d liked my job for the same reason. “All that travel you did, before you took your new position — was it a chance for you to lose yourself? To get away from your life?” I was instantly stymied. Not only was I surprised at James’s ease in getting right to the point, but I was shaken by it. James, a near stranger, was asking me to confront the possibility that had I been using the busyness of work to evade some deep truth about myself.
Gina dropped over for coffee a few days later, and I told her about my dates with James. “I bet this guy will be good for you,” she said. “ And I think he’s romantic. I mean, bringing you flowers each time he comes over to your apartment?” There was a rose in a bud vase, on the window ledge, and a mixed bouquet on the coffee table. “He seems to see inside my head sometimes. I didn’t expect that from him.” “Well,” she said,
“maybe you’ve met your match. But promise me this: you’ll get rid of those flowers once they die, okay?”
***
We stopped giving Mom flowers on her birthday and Mother’s Day, because she’d only add them to her collection of desiccated blooms. She’d treat entire bouquets with a sealant spray and dry them in silica beads sold in craft stores, back when people didn’t worry about carcinogens floating around in the air they breathed. There’d been vases of preserved red roses, yellow lilies, and gentian irises covering every visible surface in the house. Even the walls were peppered with small ceramic versions of potted blooms, pieces that sat on a smattering of shelves she’d hammered in place herself.
When we were teenagers, we begged Mom to toss the dried-out displays, which made the living room look like some ancient, abandoned funeral parlour. “But why should their beauty be so brief?” she’d reply, as if her question explained the meaning of life itself. When she died, Gina and I carried armloads of the best-kept bunches, thickened with dust, to the cemetery, and we set them in heavy brass containers on her grave. We knew the flowers would disintegrate in time, exposed to the weather, but we were glad to get them out of the house, and they did make the plot look less desolate. “I guess the groundskeeper will be putting sod down, soon,” Gina said. “It will look better then.” “And maybe later we can plant something that stays green year-round,” I said. “Like a patch of periwinkle. That’s a perennial, right?” But neither of us visited her plot in the winter, and by spring we both had forgotten about my idea.
I’m no gardener, but I have been able to keep a collection of easy-to-grow plants alive: two large-leafed avocados (grown from the pit), a pot of wandering Jew (do people still call them that?), and trails of pothos which, supported by thumbtacks, soon vined their way across the archway between our living and dining rooms.
Pothos is Greek for “longing.” When new leaves unfurl, droplets of water splash onto the floor, like rain.
***
Three weeks after my mother died, I left for my first year at university. I didn’t talk about her very much to the new people I was meeting. I’m not sure whether it was because I watched her deteriorate or because I knew that there wasn’t a true filial relationship between us, but letting my mother go had left me with a formal, quartz-like contentment. But I dreamed of her often in the months that followed. My dreams usually had something to do with death (hers) and guilt (mine).
I didn’t go back home very often, and when I did, I had difficulty remembering what her presence in the house had felt like. We’d erased it: the day after Mom died, Gina, Dad, and I began the process of removing the dust-caked tchotchkes, the reams of ribbons and pillows and other paraphernalia of the decorating hobby that consumed her for most of her life. It was satisfying, accomplishing this, and we didn’t feel sad as we worked. With window after window cleared, we were amazed by the light that began to pour into the room.
Then we tackled her closets. The piles of rumpled garments, the tangles of wire hangers, and the heap of shoes that blanketed the floor of her walk-in were astounding. Mom didn’t buy expensive clothes or items in fashion; she bought second-hand, mostly, but she tried to update old pieces — sewing colourful ribbon onto a plain ski jacket, for example, when colour-block styles were in, or adding rhinestones to clutches with glue during the glitter craze.
My dreams about Mom became more frequent; it was as if my mind were worrying a stone, a stubborn one that held secrets about my mother and me. On a whim I bought a bonsai to tend. It was tiny, like Mom’s pottery miniatures, and I thought it might give me some insight into my mother’s lifelong need for constrained, managed beauty — the dried flowers, the fully made-up face at the breakfast table, the girdles beneath those nineteen-seventies coordinated pant suits she donned each day to do her errands at the mall. But my experiment failed. I didn’t glean any new understanding of her by clipping back the small, feather-like branches of my wee evergreen. I knew that she’d been afraid to let go of things, that she’d used her collections to build a barricade of sorts, one that wrapped around her like a shawl to keep her from feeling too much, to keep other people, especially her children, at a remove. But I still don’t know why.
After I stopped trimming my tree, it didn’t get much larger. I figured it had given up on growing long before I brought it home with me.
***
Josh said during one of our calls that he wanted to give up modelling. He couldn’t stand the people he had to deal with in the world of high fashion. “You mean you’re ill-suited?” I said, but he wasn’t in a mood for laughs. I didn’t see his point, at the time. Modelling was glamorous, wasn’t it? And easy money — that’s what he’d told me before he left Toronto for Italy. He’d abandoned his attempt at college after a single, strained semester the previous winter, just as he had given up after a year and a half of taking grade thirteen courses at our school.
I visited Josh in New York once. I’d decided to go there in the early spring with Linda, Lise, and Phil, visual-arts majors who’d invited me to join them on an art crawl before they launched into their year-end studio projects. Josh said he was excited that I was coming to see him, but I was nervous. He was a model in New York City, for god’s sake; who was I? By then I’d decided I wasn’t going to be a doctor, but I had no career plan. I wasn’t anything yet.
My friends and I shared a double room in a one-star hotel in Times Square that had cockroaches the size of small mice and scratchy towels with huge, ragged holes in them. I arranged to meet Josh at the café where my friends and I planned to have lunch after spending our first morning at the Met. We were on the patio when Linda saw Josh striding toward us, and she froze. Lise and Phil turned their heads to see what she was looking at, and they, too, were riveted. “Holy shit, Mazz — he’s stunning!” Lise whispered in my ear. “He looks like a young Paul Newman!” The zipper of his grey leather jacket, which was open, glinted in the sun as Josh approached our table. The viridian cashmere sweater he wore over a white shirt matched his eyes, I noted, when he leaned down to hug me. “You still smell like Mazz,” he said before he let me go. After introductions and handshakes, I arranged to meet my friends back at “the hotel,” which I didn’t name, out of shame.
Josh put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me toward the street. He wanted to know what I thought of the Met, which paintings in which rooms I’d seen that morning. “It’s so massive, isn’t it, Mazz? We could get lost in there! We’ll go together next time you visit, okay?” He squeezed me against his hip. Men and women on the sidewalk glanced at Josh and held their gaze on his face, their lips slightly parted, slowing their steps and swivelling on the balls of their feet as we passed.
We walked and walked and I didn’t know where we were, but Josh had taken a specific route and we arrived at one of his favourite Japanese tea houses. We kept talking over shared pots of a tea that had popped rice grains in it. It was called genmaicha, and it was delicious — like a nourishing broth, I thought. The place also sold packages of tea, and before we left, Josh bought one for me to take home. It was very expensive and I protested, but Josh insisted. “This stuff will get you through your all-nighters,” he said. “It’s called ‘Fuck You Jew’ tea. No, really!” He took the small, sealed pouch out of the bag and showed me the label. “See? Fukujyu Sencha. Jew haters, the Japanese, but they do make great sushi. Do you like sushi? I’ll take you out for dinner when you come back to see me.” He was a bit manic, excited to be showing me around his city. “I’ll have my own place then, and you can stay with me. Maybe I’ll be on Broadway by then. Or on off-off-Broadway, at least.”
It was late in the day when we arrived at the loft he shared with another model in the Village. Renting a small space in New York City in the eighties was four times what it cost in Toronto, and since Josh had cut back on modelling to make time for acting classes, he couldn’t afford to live alone. There was a folding screen that divided the space in two, but couldn’t have provided any
privacy for either of them. “Make yourself at home — but only on this side of the room,” he lisped, mocking his roommate, I supposed. “It’s psychological, for him,” Josh explained. “He says it suggests there are two rooms in here. Lucky for me, he travels a lot. But he’s doing a shoot in town right now. He’ll be here soon.”
Josh picked up a matchbook and lit a stick of incense and a few votive candles he’d placed on the windowsill and on the tiny kitchen counter. I was standing by the door, watching him move around the room, when he walked over to me and took both of my hands in his. “Here is an exercise we do in class, Mazz. We’re supposed to get in touch with our feelings, keeping our minds on the moment. And then we tell everyone what we’re feeling. So now, Mazz? I’m feeling really happy that you’re here with me.” We were both smiling, squeezing each other’s fingers, and then we embraced. “To be here, right now, with you. Really, really happy.” I said, “Me too, Josh,” worried that my eyeliner would rub off and stain his cashmere.
He walked me to the bus stop and gave me a token. We kissed and Josh said, “Love you,” so I said, “Me too,” and let go of his hand. As I climbed the stairs, Josh called out, “Thanks for coming to see me Mazzie!” He stood there looking up at me with his hands in his pockets, until the bus pulled away.