by Karen Smythe
***
“Of course I’ve thought, Why not? Why shouldn’t we?” Josh said. “You know how much you mean to me.”
Josh had called early, before I left for class, to talk about my latest letter — the Letter, the one I mailed after my visit to his loft, the honest one I couldn’t not send any longer. His reaction was straightforward. The conversation could have gone much, much worse: he could have been patronizing, or kind — and that would have killed me. What he said was this: “The easiest thing in the world would be to get inside you, and make you pregnant.” (Pregnant?) “But I’d be a schmuck if I did that to you. I don’t want to be a schmuck, for once.” Then he told me he’d messed up his friendship with Rachel that way. (Rachel? Really?) “I don’t want to do that to us, Mazz.” He said a lot of other things that I don’t remember because my ears were ringing with the realization that this was the end — not of our friendship, not yet anyway, but of my suspension of disbelief that it was possible for us to be together.
My roommate, Tanis, had encouraged me to write that letter to Josh, after I got back from New York and told her about the afternoon we spent in his loft. She knew more about my feelings for Josh than my other friends did, so when I told her about his early-morning call she was amazed that I wasn’t rolling on the floor, smashing my head against walls, howling into pillows. Strangely, though, all that day and during most of that semester, I was fine. I felt relieved.
In the immediate aftermath, it was as if I were watching another Maslen tame her raging, rampant longing. I admired her for handling it so well, and I convinced myself that I was finally ready to judge potential romances on their own merit, instead of measuring them against the potential partnership I imagined having with Josh. I went out with lots of people — classmates, friends of friends, professors — until I met Ted. Between these brief pairings, I pondered why I’d felt good, even high, after Josh rejected my reach for romance, and I decided it was because I was free. My passion had been deflected, but I was also relieved of the anxiety, its constant, crushing companion. It had been my best, false self that Josh grew to love. The fear of not being good enough for him went away, for good. I wouldn’t be caught wanting him again.
And for a time, when my impossible longing seemed to cease, I landed in the pure, clear waters of friendship with Josh. His honest refusal of me had left smooth edges on both sides, somehow, like a clean break in a bone; the state of our relationship was suddenly uncomplicated and thus, I thought, entirely reparable.
***
We did make each other happy, Josh and I, when we spent time together. There were all those afternoons we’d leave school in his car. Josh would pull out of the parking lot with a screech of tires, trying to impress me with his stick-shift swagger, no doubt; we’d take the Allen expressway down to Forest Hill to hang out in the apartment-like set-up he had in the basement of his house, to listen to records; or we’d go to the Art Gallery of Ontario, usually on Wednesdays, when admission was free. Once, we splurged and bought tickets to a special exhibit of abstract expressionism, but neither of us got it. I couldn’t stop laughing when Josh started to parody a tour guide narrating what a Franz Kline painting seemed to be saying: “The black swaths here, you see, clearly indicate that the artist is conflicted about his childhood. He is imitating a four-year-old’s kindergarten artwork in this marvelous piece, which is about the crisis of identity in the twentieth century…” The docents asked us to keep our voices down, but as always when strangers spoke to Josh, they looked more pleased than angry.
We saw a lot of sculpture at the AGO, too, all the famous pieces — monoliths by Henry Moore, bronzes by Rodin, Giacometti’s elongated figures, Picasso’s heads, mixed-media pieces by Schwitters. The Netherlandish portraits drew Josh the most, which surprised me: awkward, angular faces with highly detailed, extremely pale profiles against pitch-black backgrounds were beautiful, he thought. With their high foreheads — bared and exaggerated by tightly pulled-back hair on women, but covered with thick, dark bangs, on men — and their large, fleshy noses, the subjects were anything but attractive to my eye. After considering a Hans Memling for some time, Josh turned to me and said, “You feel like you know these people, don’t you?” And suddenly, I thought I knew what he meant. Despite the heavy gilt frames around their portraits, the sitters were not fancy folk. The skin on their faces was marred by moles, blemishes, thin red spidery broken blood vessels; their eyes were often vivid blue and gleamed as if wet, and capable of seeing you. They were faces of people who knew hardship, for whom staying alive was serious business. The models were proud to be sitting for the artist, to be portrayed as themselves. Not vain, but proud.
As we wandered through the gallery, women would follow Josh with their eyes, and I knew they must be wondering what he was doing with me. I too expected that Josh would end up with a beauty like Catherine Oxenberg, a blond of semi-royal stock I’d seen in Vogue: her princess lifestyle and her oval face, with its pale, perfect skin and clear green eyes, made her a perfect mate for Josh. I distinctly remember thinking when I put down the magazine and glanced in the mirror that I was a defective specimen indeed.
***
My insecurities were reinforced almost daily by Gina’s barbs. “God, Maslen, would you just give up already?” I’d be drying my hair in the bathroom we shared, or putting on my eyeliner, and she’d start banging on the locked door. “You’re so ugly, it won’t make any difference! I’ve got to get ready now, to go out with Ben. Unlike you, I have a boyfriend.” Even Josh showing up at the house to see me didn’t stop her. “You think Josh would ever want you? Beauty and the Beast — that’s you.” I think she was shocked (I know I was) when I said, “Oh, you finally learned how to read?” The confidence I’d been practising was beginning to come more easily, it seemed. “Wait until you discover the Nancy Drew series, you’ll love it.”
***
I found an old philosophy anthology of mine when James and I were unpacking boxes in our new living room. Before I placed it with others on the built-in shelving unit, I flipped through the underlined, asterisked, arrowed, and otherwise marked-up pages, and I paused at this passage in a piece by Simone Weil:
Preference for a human being can be of two kinds. Either we are seeking some particular good in him, or we need him. In a general way, all possible attachments come under one of these heads. We are drawn toward a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide.
My attraction to James was of the first kind, the “seeking something good” kind, I thought that day, and I still think it was. James had never been one for analyses of the heart or philosophical discussions, so I didn’t ask him how he would categorize his attraction to me. But I was fairly certain that need was not an issue for either of us.
I had discussed this passage with Josh during his bookish phase, well before I sent the Letter. He was bettering himself, reading his way through the great thinkers, he said, as part of his training to be an actor. We’d call each other and read out an excerpt from a book we both had picked up, and talk about what it meant. We’d had lengthy, open discussions about Camus and Sartre before, but with Weil, I held back. I couldn’t tell Josh I could not do without him.
So I lied. I told Josh I thought we were friends because we’d found something good in each other, some unusual quality that we hadn’t found in other people. He agreed, but then he said this: “Sometimes we seek the not-good in others, too. Maybe you like the not-good in me, Mazz.” At the time I thought he meant his fear of commitment to one person — after all, he’d broken off with his girlfriend of three years to free himself, he said, from a predictable future, a life with no leaps. We didn’t talk much longer that night, and we didn’t talk about Weil again.
***
I went back to the AGO earlier this spring. James was never interested in art; I went alone once in a while, after work, but I hadn’t been there in a few years. When I fo
und the Canadian room, I looked for a long time at Tom Thomson’s work, with its trowelled, clay-like paint in pigments that crashed into each other. I could feel vivid orange dapple through me, I could hear scumbled textures singing. The dark bark of his trees seemed to hum with deep, dry notes pulled from the thick daubs of paint that rose from the flat surface in peaks. I stared, up close, at individual stabs of oil paint, at the slathered colours pushing up and across at angles that seemed to make streaks move across the canvas as I stood there. I could see the past there, I could almost see the act of painting happening. Those lines of paint smears seemed, to me, a means of measuring time, and looking at them was like seeing it cycle, over and over again. If I stood there long enough, I wondered, might I go back there, too, to the past? I felt slightly dizzy then, as if my blood sugar were getting low or I’d stood up too fast after lying prone for too long. And I sensed, for a second or two, that Josh was there with me.
How odd, the mind.
four
Lately I’ve been dreaming about making things out of clay. Last night I dreamed I was making a pinch pot, but as I worked at it I was daydreaming within the dream, and before I noticed how much time had passed the clay had sucked the moisture out of my fingers. The surface of my skin had tightened, and fissures crept across my hands. I can’t stand the sensation of desiccation; I used to dip my hand frequently into the water-filled margarine containers during my pottery classes, but in my reverie, there was no dish, no relief. I reached for a dirty, soaked sponge and squeezed drops into my mouth. It wasn’t enough, so I poured the thick, fetid slip at the bottom of an abandoned bowl down my throat. I coughed myself awake and opened my eyes and called out “James!” as if he would hear me and rush in with a glass of cool, clear water.
***
I stayed over at James’s condo one night, for a change, and when I woke up with cramps, I asked to use his hot water bottle. He told me he didn’t have one; then he disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard the tap running for a few minutes. When he came back to the bedroom, James was carrying a wrung-out, steaming hand towel, which he held out toward me like an offering. I lifted my T-shirt, and he gently laid the towel across my belly. When it cooled, he repeated the process, and after the third round I fell back asleep.
In the morning, when I told him he was the sweetest man I’d ever met, James said it was nothing, just a trick he’d learned from his mother when he was little and had growing pains in his legs. “My shin bones would ache and ache, and I’d be moaning in the night,” he said. “The warm towels she wrapped around my calves kept me quiet enough that my father didn’t wake up. I think that was the main reason she came up with the idea, to keep my dad from hearing me cry.” After James told me his father was the kind of man who would say to a kid, “I’ll give you something to cry about!” he started to imitate Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners: he made a fist and punched the air, saying, “To the moon, Alice, to the moon!” When we stopped laughing, James sighed and said, “Some men shouldn’t have children.”
***
In the spring after I met Ted, he became a Big Brother. He joined the program to beef up the “service to society” section on his application to medical school. Ted knew exactly how to play it, how to get people to think he was not only wonderful but sincere. And maybe he was, in the case of Charlie, the seven-year-old he was matched with. Charlie loved Ted — and so, as it turned out, did Charlie’s mother. Ted could charm the pants off anyone, as he put it. He told me not to worry about Charlie’s mom, because he wasn’t interested in older women. I don’t know about the mother, but Charlie had his heart smashed when Ted accepted an offer of late admission the following September and moved to Toronto to attend medical school.
I found a lump in my breast that summer, while Ted was still in London. We were both terrified. This was a few years before AIDS was everywhere, and cancer, the Big C, was still the worst thing that could happen to you. Ted came to Toronto to be with me for the biopsy, then called me twice a day to ask if the pathology had come back yet. When I got the news from my doctor’s office that I was clear, I called Ted right away. He wanted a copy of the report. “I’m going to frame it like a diploma, Mazz. I’m going to hang it on the wall.”
***
James’s body is gone. So is our marriage, the entity that the two of us created, and shared. I didn’t merge with James, not the way I did with Ted. We didn’t lose ourselves, James and me; we didn’t pour ourselves into a single vessel. This perhaps is what gives me an edge, now. I am still me, not half of a whole. Two out of three leaves me.
Relationships. We talk about them as if they’re separate entities: there is you, me, and “our relationship.” When James died, I lost my husband and our relationship. The corporation of “us” dissolved.
“Corporation” is from the Latin corpus (body). A corporation has the legal status of a person, yet the adjective “corporate” implies “impersonal.” The adjective “corporeal” makes me think of swollen private parts, of sexual pleasuring.
I imagine James’s voice doing an impersonation of W.C. Fields: “Corporeal. Ah yes, a veritable cornucopia of carnality.” But this sounds sad to me, instead of funny; my James did impressions all the time, but he wouldn’t have put those words together.
How I miss him. His kindness. His companionship. His body: James’s warm body, his skin and his musculature, his touch.
I didn’t know what I wanted sexually until I met James and we spent most of our time together in bed. Sex with Ted was always the same: he focused on himself, never thinking that I might want or need some finessing. Until James, I had no idea what I’d been missing. Or that I could be so loud — that was a new side of myself that surfaced. (Josh asked me, out of the blue, when we were sitting next to each other in a study room at school, “Do you make a lot of noise when you do it, Mazzie?” I usually rolled my eyes at his sexual non sequiturs, but I went along with him and said, “There’s only one way to find out…”)
I would never have asked Ted to do what James did with me, to me. Ted was too conservative for anything beyond the ordinary. I’d tried to interest him in phone sex once, when we were apart and I was missing him — missing the way we used to live together, staying for days at a time at one of our apartments, in London, until a roommate complained; but he hung up on me. Casanova and all that, sure, but Ted was not attentive, not in that way.
He definitely improved in bed, though, toward what became the end of our relationship. Funny, I’d almost forgotten about that. One night, he bent and pushed back on my left knee for a better angle, and when he entered me, I said, “Oooh, seems like you’ve been practising.” I hadn’t meant “with someone else,” but Ted paused for a split second after my comment; I might have seen a glimmer of guilt on his face, but if so, it was too fleeting to catch.
***
The first time James saw me, I probably had muddy streaks of clay on my forehead from tucking strands of hair behind my ears, to keep it out of my eyes. But he didn’t seem to notice. Later, his not noticing visual clues about a person became one of those annoying qualities that one gets used to in a partner, just as James must have gotten used to my paying attention to what other people look like, how they present themselves to the world.
My smock was smeared that night with reddish-brown slashes of drying clay that I’d wiped from my hands. I’d centred the body properly, but when the surface began spinning, the clay started to slide, and it went over the edge before I could stop it. The results of my attempts to throw a bowl on the wheel that night looked like the slop bucket from a gallbladder operation.
So I started hand-building pots. And I discovered that I liked the feel of the dense, wet clay between my thumb and forefinger. It seemed sexual, this way of working with the material; slip-slathered, the folds of clay that I pressed back into the centre of the pot, to solidify the curves for its wall, were like flattened wings or labia. And I was proud of the way I could smooth the entire surface of a small bo
wl with a single drop of water, if I worked quickly enough. My fingertips were permanently stained terra-cotta in those days, and my palms looked like drought-baked earth at the height of summer.
Sometimes when I worked with clay and got its texture as smooth as cream cheese, I had the urge to bite it, to taste the dirt in it. Gina craved dirt when she was carrying Anna; she wanted to scoop handfuls of mud into her mouth, for months, the whole summer of her pregnancy. I hadn’t understood that urge then and wondered if the compulsion I resisted was similar to hers, to what she’d been unable to satisfy.
Finding One’s Way with Clay, the textbook for my course was called. The cover had been glued on upside down, and a well-preserved moth fell out of the middle the first time I turned the book right side up. It reminded me of the flower I’d come across not long before in a Webster dictionary that had belonged to my mother. My sister and I suspected that Mom read the dictionary, a fixture in our kitchen, all day while we were at school. She drove us crazy using words we didn’t understand — “inchoate,” “conflagration,” “dirigible” — showing off her vocabulary, refusing to be easy with us.
***
That dead moth in my book was luminescent green with transparent wings. When it dropped onto my lap, I put it in my left palm and looked at it under the light. I wondered what the chances were for this little guy to have ended up here, pressed between pages filled with words and pictures of earthenware. He must have been going about his business, flying above the printing press to reach a window on the other side, perhaps, when pages 58 and 59 rolled off, slamming him down to pages 60 and 61, lying in wait below. Each sheet of paper weighed nothing, but the next and the next and the next would have kept coming, one after the other, as unstoppable as the days passing.