This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  ***

  James continued to study field stones at the farm, right till the end. Was he seeking something unique in them, looking for subtle variations of colour or striation, to help him decide what to place where? I assume he liked the weight of the rounded rocks, how they felt in his hands. Using a plastic-handled chisel, he scraped off clots of dry, brown earth that clung to some of the stones, which he kept shoved through a belt loop on his dirt-encrusted jeans.

  The National Geographic issues keep coming. I haven’t cancelled the subscription, because I like to see James’s name printed on the label. When I open the mailbox and see the golden spine, I can believe for one or two seconds that nothing has changed: the Geographic arriving on schedule means that life is continuing as it should. It is crazy, but right now the delivery of a magazine to my mailbox each month is something I am counting on. I’ve let them pile up on the coffee table. I should move a few of them downstairs, but they are heavy, as heavy as my compilation from Josh’s portfolio was.

  ***

  Josh was wearing new blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt, leather sneakers with their too-long laces undone, the first day I spoke to him. He held one slim notebook in his left hand, a Bic pen sticking out of the spiral binding. It was late afternoon on a sunny spring day, and I wondered what Josh — who rarely attended classes — was doing there. As he approached me in the hallway, I kept my eyes on the bulletin board I’d been reading when he came in.

  He said hello in a deep, almost sleepy voice. I turned and narrowed my eyes, then reflected a slow smile back at him. “Mazel tov,” I said. Josh seemed amused. “For what, showing up?” I found myself pretending annoyance: “No, for making the front cover of the paper today.” On my way to school I’d seen a picture of Josh, sitting back to back with a sleazy-looking girl in a low-cut disco dress, in the newsstand. The headline above it said, “Winners of Annual Contest Given a Trip to Florida.” “But not together,” Josh pointed out. I told him I’d not seen the original prize-winning snapshot of him, published months before as part of the paper’s daily feature of especially good-looking people. “Oh, I looked good in that one,” he said, “kind of tough, like a young Brando.” But his friends were making fun of the front-page colour photo — the makeup caked on his face, the new, shorter haircut shellacked in place for the shoot.

  I agreed, it wasn’t the best picture. He complimented my sandals and said I had pretty feet. I looked down at them and he asked if I was a ballerina — I was standing in with my feet turned out in position four, more or less. “No,” I said, “I’m uncoordinated. I stand this way for balance,” and he laughed at that. He might have thought I was Jewish, because most students at the school were and because I could pass. I knew his mother was, so he was. And he’d been dating the Princess for three years, I knew that, too.

  A year and a half later, I was at Josh’s house helping him pack. After spending an extra semester at our school, Josh still hadn’t graduated; but a college in New York State, his father’s alma mater, had a Legacy admissions program, so that’s where he was going in January. For the few weeks he spent in college, Josh lived with the aunt and uncle who were raising his half-sister. He didn’t have his own phone line, so we didn’t talk very often, but he wrote to me at least once a week. If the envelope was manila, I knew he had included an assignment. He sent me most of his calculus problems and I couriered solutions back to him, sometimes consulting with my math teachers, Anne and Gloria — not that I needed their help, but I liked to flash my friendship with him wherever I could, now that he’d moved away.

  “Calculus, really?” I asked in the note I sent back to him with the first set of answers. “Why, Josh?” Business school was his backup plan, he said, in case modelling and acting didn’t work out. He’d need the calculus credit to get in, and with my help, he’d be sure to pass the course. “I know I can count on you, Mazzie.”

  ***

  A few times during the fall after Josh first approached me, he had coffee with Jennifer and me in the cafeteria. Since Jennifer’s house was near Josh’s, he sometimes drove her to school and picked me up at the York Mills subway on the way. On Saturdays, we’d review everything Josh had said to us the previous week, letting our imaginations skew the meaning of his conversation to our liking. We were silly, but we were having fun. Jennifer’s mother laughed at us, told us we couldn’t both have him. To me, she said, “And you’re not even Jewish.”

  Josh had broken up with the Princess in August, just before he started to call me at home. He and I had talked a lot more than he and Jennifer had; I soon grew tired of the game I was playing with Jennifer, pretending that I wouldn’t mind if Josh paid more attention to her, too. So I betrayed her. How this unfolded isn’t important, now, but it worked: she and Josh had a falling out, and I was the one who ended up with him in my life.

  ***

  When Josh came to my house, I took him upstairs to show him my room, which I’d redecorated myself. The wallpaper was a Laura Ashley pattern, with tiny deep-blue flowers on a linen-white background. I told Josh about the man I’d impressed at the paint store when I taught him how to create a tincture using the colour closest to what I wanted, and adding drops of black — to get the exact shade of teal for my nightstand. “Tincture,” Josh said. “Like pinching?” He reached toward my breasts, but I pulled away and laughed, then swatted him as he splayed the legs of the blue-and-white china doll that sat at the end of my bed. “I know,” he said when he turned around to face me. “Immature. That’s me.”

  That was Josh. When I was home in bed with the flu, he called to see why I wasn’t at school. “Would you feel better if I came over and massaged your boobs? Or maybe I could put it in your ear?” My voice was raspy, so when I quipped back — something like “Put it where your mouth is, why don’t you?” — he didn’t hear me correctly, and he thought I was annoyed at him. So he apologized. “You’re the only person who’ll tell me if I’ve gone too far,” he said.

  ***

  My nipples were finally starting to swell. They were so sore that when Gina made fun of them, her finger jab sent a searing ache deep into my nascent right breast. When I complained to my mother, she said, “I think it’s time to get you a bra, Maslen.” But my development was barely noticeable, and she forgot. Two weeks later, when I asked her to take me to Eaton’s, I had to remind her why I wanted to go.

  In the store, I hoped no one else heard my mother ask the cashier where we’d find training bras. This sounded embarrassing and surreal, and I pictured breasts as training wheels on a kid’s bicycle. We left with a padded lacy double-A teen model, a bra in name only that drew more attention than ever to the flatness of my chest.

  By the time I was sixteen, I stopped wearing the regular bras I’d finally grown into. “After all that fuss?” my mother said when she noticed I wasn’t putting them into the laundry basket. “They’re uncomfortable and unnecessary,” I said. “At least in my case.” She tilted her head. “Oh yes, I forgot,” she said. “You’re the feminist in the family.”

  ***

  Josh said it was suffocating, being part of a Jewish family, that the requirement to embrace everyone in the tribe went beyond unconditional; it was inescapable. He was glad he was only half, he said. He wanted a different kind of life — one that would not include a three-car-garage home in the right neighbourhood and a manicured housewife in the suburbs with darling, overachieving children and Friday night family dinners. My family’s Sunday gatherings were no different, and I thought I knew what Josh meant about not wanting an ordinary life.

  Now I have to wonder if what he was looking for — what we both were looking for, then — was not a different way of belonging, after all. It was more like relief, what we wanted; relief, however brief, from longing of any kind.

  ***

  At the farm, on days that were especially bad for James, I left my door open when I went to bed in my room, so he might feel less alone across the hall, in his. James wheezed in the night
like a balloon losing air through a tiny hole, but amplified. I’d turn out my light and listen for the click of the fan we’d bought to help muffle the sound of James’s strained breathing; I would hear the blades starting up, their whir climbing steadily with increasing speed until a blanket of nothingness hung in the air between us.

  ***

  Dr. A. told me at a follow-up exam after my surgery that the kind of breast cancer I had is often seen in older women who haven’t had children. She also said that a history of cysts correlated with higher risk, which made sense to me. Then she asked why James hadn’t come with me to the appointment, since he had been so supportive of me all the way through. In a breach of her usual communication protocol, which was very stiff and formal, she moved the conversation into the personal realm; she spoke quickly, like a teenaged girl, and told me that — though she’d been happy, as a busy single person — she was now dating a man she’d met online, and she was considering moving to Australia to marry him. What was married life like, she asked, and did I think she should do it, did I think her life would be better if she were married? “You have a wonderful husband,” she said, not giving me a chance to reply. Immediately she added, “Not all of my patients are so fortunate.”

  I had deliberately kept the appointment details from James. I felt lucky, but James was still not seeing it that way. The loss of my breasts was devastating for him in some way I still don’t understand. Here is how it seems to me now: there was a connection between my successful surgery and James’s anxiety attacks that I’d dismissed as coincidence.

  ***

  Playing the deformity game with Ted: I would love you if all of your limbs were amputated! I would still love you if you were brain-dead! I will always love you, no matter what!

  Did Ted say that? Yes, yes he did. And it was thrilling; I felt as though I was breathing pure oxygen, and floating above myself, above us both, every time we played that game.

  But James said that, too, the day I got the diagnosis over the phone and went home to tell him. And he said, as well, that I could count on him to help me through it.

  ***

  People can count on me, they say. Ted, Josh, Gina, Nancy. What about James? Did he say ever that to me? No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember him saying that.

  I thought James felt the way I did, or believed what I did: that we didn’t need what we didn’t have. Maybe that’s where I messed up. Maybe I didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, that James was counting on me — counting and measuring, taking account of what there was between us and coming up short.

  ten

  James started complaining, after my diagnosis, of a burning sensation in his chest when he jogged. I thought it could be an allergy to something, but James said no, it was more serious than that. “It could be lung cancer,” he said, which sounded ridiculous to me, because he’d never smoked. But he countered with the fact that his dad had chain-smoked in the house and in the car throughout James’s childhood. “And on the road trips we took every summer, he wouldn’t let me open the window because of the air conditioning.” We’d recently celebrated James’s birthday. “Come on, hon,” I said. “You don’t really think second-hand smoke is affecting you now, decades later, do you?” James turned his face away from me and sighed. “It’s possible, that’s all I’m saying. It’s possible.”

  And so it started, what would become James’s personality paradigm shift: from highly sexual to self-obsessional, from pleasure-seeking to body-fearing — to fearing what our bodies were capable of doing to us.

  ***

  When Gina visited me at home a second time after my surgery, she brought bags of chips and chocolate bars and a DVD. We ate our way through The Way We Were. As soon as the theme music started, I was sixteen again. The plot, with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford as the unlikely Jewish/Gentile couple, was the story of Josh and me — the ugly duckling and the stunning boy who’d surprised himself and everyone around us with his interest in me. The feelings that flared up as I watched the movie that day with Gina were fierce, still, all these years later.

  Josh and me, our relationship: it was, for a long time, a consistent, persistent connection, and it shaped me. It taught me to know the taste of wanting, the disorientation of relentless unrequited love. I’d left those memories of Josh untouched for so long that I knew, as the film ended, I’d have to be cautious drawing them up again, the way a deep-sea diver has to rise slowly to the surface of the water to avoid the bends.

  Gina had probably forgotten about Josh, I thought, but I wanted to say his name out loud, so I brought it up casually after the movie was over. “What a sad story! Kind of like me and Josh. Katie still wants Hubbell, but she doesn’t have the right style. Do you remember him, Gina?” She wasn’t listening. “Gina,” I said again. “What? Oh yeah, Josh was that model guy, right?” She stood up and stretched her shoulders back. “I hate these sagging bags of fat,” she said, cupping her breasts. “They give me backaches. I’d rather have a flat chest like yours, believe me. But without the bottles,” she added, fake-shivering at the memory of seeing them. “By the way,” she said, collecting her purse and keys, “your shower curtain and your Kleenex box are perfectly coordinated. It’s ridiculous, how well they match.”

  After Gina left and before James got home, I opened up James’s laptop and started to google. There should have been pictures of Josh all over the Internet. A model, an aspiring actor — surely he would have a public profile? I searched online for archived issues of Vogue, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar — all of which Josh had appeared in. I knew collectors sold back issues, so I tried eBay: nothing. Craigslist: nothing.

  Josh, my Josh, had disappeared.

  Months later, a magazine cover I recognized from my lost Josh collection finally did appear on the computer screen. I paid an outrageous sum for shipping the twenty-three-year-old issue of GQ from California to Toronto. When it arrived, I turned the pages one by one, until I saw Josh’s young face. I knew that picture so well. In it Josh is wearing Italian designer clothes, posing with a blond model who might have been his Norwegian girlfriend; in another photo, he is shot in profile, a melancholy expression on his face, sitting on a patio alone. I’d kissed those moist lips. I’d made that mouth smile so many times. Looking at Josh as he was then made the years spin backwards. Actual pain, not remembered longing, plunged me into a state of mind I could not have explained to James, had he still been there to witness it.

  ***

  Falling in love is like being hit by lightning, and there is nothing you can do about it. It’s an event, one that turns you into someone new. You fall, you break apart, and you’re reconstituted. When it happens to both of you at the same time, parts of each of you slide into the other and overlap, like circles in a Venn diagram. And if or when it ends, it becomes a remnant, this wrapped-up love, an entity with rings around it for each year of its active life, the final circle a thick contour containing all of who you were when you were together. The rings are a map of where you started from, and where you ended up.

  We become chopped up into different versions of ourselves over the course of a lifetime, loving people in whatever way that we do.

  At twenty-five, Josh was looking ahead to forty. “Being a model is nothing,” he said then. “Nothing.” I don’t recall how Josh and I managed to let our friendship lapse. When we last spoke, he was still unsure of what and where he should be in this world. I feel sorry for that young man now, and for the young girl I’d been, too, when she fell for him and got stuck there, waiting and wanting, unsure of her worth. We’d smelled sadness in each other, I think, and not known what to do about it.

  Thinking about Josh now, thinking back to when he and I stood in his New York loft holding hands, I feel angry at time, and I feel angry at myself — because fear and self-judgment prevented me from cementing the moment by embracing him, from showing him beyond words and smiles alone how much I valued him. I would like to have moments like that one back, to do over again. />
  What does Josh look like now — still slim, smooth-skinned? Is he still careful about what he eats?

  ***

  Josh came over to make omelettes for our lunch on a day when neither of us had classes. I cracked the eggs and was relieved there were no red specks in the yolks. When Josh took the butter out of the refrigerator, there were broccoli bits in it from dinner the night before, which embarrassed me, but he just scraped it clean and scooped a tablespoon full into the frying pan, where it bubbled and frothed.

  Josh was wearing dress pants I’d never seen on him before. He told me his grandmother wouldn’t let him leave the house in jeans, because he was going to “a young lady’s house.” He seemed a little bit nervous, less relaxed than usual.

  I smiled at him, thinking how old-fashioned his grandmother sounded and how sweet it was that he’d obeyed her rules of social engagement, but Josh’s story made me nervous. Then he said, “There’s five bucks in my pocket. It’s yours if you can get your hand in and out without touching me,” and we were back to normal. I wasn’t brave enough to take him up on it, though, so I said, “In that case, you can keep your money.” He laughed and looked at me. “I like that side of you, Mazzie,” he said, and blew me a kiss.

  Oh, how he teased me. In the school parking lot the day before, he’d said, “Hey, our cars match our eyes. What would our baby car look like, if my green Datsun and your brown Honda fucked?” “Josh,” I said, “you know what makes you different from other guys? They think about cars and sex, but you think about cars having sex.”

  ***

  One of Josh’s shoots in Paris Vogue was for a wedding-themed issue. He choreographed some of the shots himself and showed me the one he was most proud of: clad in a tux, with nerdy, round black glasses perched low on his nose, holding a bouquet of flowers behind him, he kneeled before a woman in a white organza gown, her hand held out to him for a kiss. Her expression was hard to read; the word “condescending” came to mind (which wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounds, since the model was even more beautiful than Josh), but he said the look she was giving him reminded him of me, of the look on my face when he’d make a joke about sex and I’d tell him to knock it off.