by Alex Pugsley
“Within her bed she is crafty sick? Fie!”
“I’m what?” Gail glanced at me with great suspicion, as she often did, then glumly swung her face to one side. Dank from lying under so many bedcovers and because she hadn’t showered for days, Gail was calmly pungent, the smell of her sleepy body recalling to me prior days and nights when we shared a bed, during the musky beginnings of her period, in the mammal warmth of bedsheets.
She made a sudden move to rise and then, standing upright, she leaned to grab at a cotton scrim that hung above the window. She slid the scrim along a wooden dowel, straining on tip-toe so she could distribute the fabric fully over the window glass. Gail wore an over-laundered grey T-shirt and green underwear with a white elastic waistband. As she jiggled the scrim over a splinter, sunlight streaked along her face, animating her chestnut brown eyes, and for a few moments she rested her face in sun-warmth. I’d forgotten how her profile fairly demanded to be reckoned with—the clear line of the jaw, her nose, perfectly classical except for a faint Sephardic snubbiness that matched the curve of her eyebrow, and I remembered further, from four summers past, the radiant Gail of the Naval Reserves, when in her off-hours she went about bralessly, brazenly with closely shorn hair, a thin ridge of starter-pimples on her suntanned forehead. At seventeen, Gail seemed unstoppable, a newly adult woman at ease with her form and possibilities and when she chose at the end of that summer to relieve me of my virginity in the basement sauna of her parents’ house I felt mystified to be transported into the frailties and mysteries of the grownup world and it occurs to me, as I remember all this, that Gail’s name isn’t really Gail at all but Malka, which means Queen in Hebrew, she breathed this in my ear, as a reward, as a sort of emotional keepsake, the first time we had sex.
“So what are you doing here?” she asked. “How did you find me?”
“Want to tell me what’s going on? Nobody’s seen you.”
“Ah,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. When the Cossacks come, I’ll just crawl under a porch and die.” She considered my outfit. “You seem very pleased with yourself. Poncing around in your little camelhair coat. Why are you in a suit? You look like a Mormon.” Gail reached for a can of Diet Coke on the floor. She opened it, took a gulp, and slumped back against the headboard. The beverage was an ongoing and habitual aspect of her daily life even though a year before it had torn a small ulcer in her stomach. “Oh, Jesus,” said Gail. “Of course. What poor woman are you stalking now?”
“Are you really not getting out of bed?”
She took the Diet Coke away from her mouth with a little upward flourish. “I told you, no.”
“Ah, I see. How can you get out of bed if you’ve not solved the mysteries of Rapa Nui? Fie, I say!”
“No, I don’t think you get to say that.” Gail was staring at me. “What is happening in that pea-brain of yours, McKee? You’re such a frigging idiot, I can’t believe I was ever attracted to you. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not going to work. And you still look like a Mormon.” There suddenly erupted from Gail a very resonant burp, a burp she made no effort at all to suppress. “My God, I haven’t had sex in so long. Do you know any half-decent men? I mean men who aren’t complete tools who would want to slam me up against a wall? Wait.” Gail slowly squinted at me. “Is it Buf-Puf? Is that who you’re stalking?”
This was a somewhat pejorative reference to Elizabeth Puffett, a female acquaintance three years our junior who bore a striking resemblance to the model featured on an Icelandic sweater pattern in the display window of The Yarn Shop on Quinpool Road. As a general rule, Gail considered my interest in other women to be unadventurous, frivolous, Presbyterian—in a phrase Titsy Goysy—but I detected a note of real dismissal in her voice.
“I could never imagine you going out with anyone,” said Gail. “But there’s no way a girl like Buf-Puf’s going to like you. You’re all over the place. You’ve got all these cockamamie plans. You’re the lunatic of a thousand ideas. And Buffy Puffett is a very conservative Convent girl who just happens to be a knock out. You think she’s going to want to go roof-climbing?” Gail swigged from the Diet Coke. “I don’t know what you think about things but it’s just wrong.”
Choosing to busy myself with other activity, I stooped over the kitchen table and laid out the unsweetened cranberry juice, Kit Kat, and Twizzlers. But Gail was alert only to an embossed envelope that fell to the floor from the inside pocket of my suitjacket.
“What’s that? What did you just throw down so officiously?”
“I didn’t throw it down. It fell.”
“What is it?”
“Wedding invitation.”
“Oh? Is someone getting married today?”
I said she knew exactly who was getting married today and that at one time we had discussed going together.
“So who are you taking instead—one of your sisters?” Gail seemed to be inspecting the cuticle of her thumb. “You know how I feel about your sisters. Your sisters are a tribe. They want to impose their own rituals on everyone. Especially other women.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“I just don’t know about women who keep dying their hair blonde, that’s all.” There followed a medium-pitched commotion from within the bedcovers—sounding like a sluggish blend of slide trumpet and soprano bugle—after which Gail shrugged and said, “Whoops. That one kind of rose up the crack of my bum. Excuse me.” A soft, legume-y smell, implying in its organic history the green mulch of wet cow yards, dissipated in the air of the room. “McKee,” said Gail. “I asked you a question—what was it?”
“Give me a moment. I’m just trying to—Give me a moment, please.”
“It’s just nature,” said Gail. “What was I saying?”
“You were talking about farts as I recall.”
“You know, if you could just stop being an insane, maniacal freak for one second then maybe I could remember what I was saying because—Aubrey, are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“I swear you have the shortest attention span of anyone I know.” A dangle of hair spilled over her eye. With a savage flick, Gail cleared it from her face. “Where was I? What was I talking about?”
“Hey—here’s an idea—why don’t we open a window?”
“Piss on you, McBean.”
“I think we tried that.” I walked over and raised the inside window—its sash cord tightening with an abrupt jigger—and studied the old-fashioned storm window beyond it. At the bottom of its frame was a hinged wooden slat that covered three circular air-holes. It was frosted shut. Outside, snowflakes spun out of the darkening sky.
“What are you doing?” asked Gail. “How did you get like this? Really? I want to know.” Putting down the Diet Coke, she assumed a rather carefree, supine position on top of the bedcovers. “You’re so scattered, I swear to God. You never know what you’re doing. You’re fumfering.”
“Look, lady, I’m trying to do something here.” I bumped the window slat with the heel of my hand. I bumped it again. After a third bump, the slat trembled and came free.
“You’re such a fumferer.” Gail wriggled on top of her bed, twisting her hips this way and that, bending one of her knees, and in the next moment held in a raised fist the green underwear. “You’re a complete and utter tool. In fact, you probably suck.” She pitched the underwear at my head and, as I turned from the opened window, it caught me spang on the temple, the underwear slipping a little before its elastic waistband caught on the top of my ear. Gazing into my eyes, Gail’s scream was full of delight. “Smell my panties.”
“Excuse me?”
“Smell my panties! There’s a pop-up book in there. Ha! That was like one of your jokes. I’ve become infected with your brain.”
I walked, as decorously as I could with underwear drooping over my eyes, to the kitchen table. “Hmm.” I sat
down. “So what were we talking about?”
There was a small eruption in Gail’s nose as she laughed again—it was a brazen laugh, really, it took her into almost any mood—and it was not so much a reaction to my deadpan delivery as pleasure in her own achievement. She jumped off the bed and walked over to sternly review me, little smirks dimpling on either side of her mouth. Then she plucked the underwear off my head and peered into my hair. “You’ve had those cowlicks your whole life, haven’t you?” Her jaw was set forward in a contemplative, cowlick-assessing under-bite. “You look like Fran Lebowitz. You look like a Mormon version of Fran Lebowitz. But exactly. It’s freakish.”
Gail in her grey T-shirt was standing very close to me and I was briefly mesmerized by the pattern of swirling black hair on her forearm, and becoming aware of her further intentions for me, when from the hallway came a few noises off—a tenant stumbling or a packet of flyers dropping to the floor—and Gail looked up, instantly on guard, reacting, as she sometimes did, as if each new mortal was a direct personal challenge.
I went to the door, still crooked in its doorjamb, pulled it open, and stepped back as a cat nosed her way inside. This was a full-sized mackerel tabby by the name of Tinker, belonging to the apartment’s regular occupant, and Tinker tended to treat all other creatures with maximum indifference. She moved swiftly to the kitchen area where two bowls were set on the floor, one holding stale water, the other crusty with uneaten cat food. I was filling the first bowl with fresh water when I noticed Gail behind me picking up the wedding invitation. She pulled the card from the envelope and read its text aloud. “Mr. and Mrs. Gregor Burr request the honour of your—oh my fucking puke.” Gail’s eyebrows crinkled with complication. “And you want to go to this?” She continued to gaze at the invitation. “Jesus. The Burrs. They’re a real masterpiece of a family. I’m sure everyone’s really pumped for this wedding. Or really jazzed. Or really amped. Which is it?”
“I think it’s stoked. I think everyone’s really stoked.”
“Please—” Gail dropped the invitation on the table and returned to her bed. “Someone just put a bullet in my brain. My God, I have to leave Halifax. I have to leave this fucking place. I can’t bear the thought of watching Boyden Burr grow old.” Boyden Burr, the day’s groom, was a rather inescapable Haligonian, an athlete, a rich kid, a singer who founded the stunningly popular Thunderhouse Blues Band, and someone I’ve known since I was four years old. His father, a well-known lawyer and Member of Parliament for Halifax West, was often in the news and a favourite subject of the scandal magazines. My policy regarding the Burrs, for a variety of reasons, was strictly non-interventionist.
“And you?” said Gail. “What’s going to happen to you? You couldn’t leave this place. You’ll be here your whole life. Chasing your grand conjunctions. I’m just not sure it’s going to work.”
“What’s not going to work?”
“Because of Halifax disease. It’s all about what you do. What street you live on. What vacations you take. And it never changes. It’s like who you are in grade twelve is who you are forever.”
“But I’m such a frigging idiot—”
“No, you’re not. Don’t be a moron. Just stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Oh dear God.” Gail bounced a fist into the bridge of her nose. “You’re losing it. You’ve lost it. You’ve already lost it. What’s going to happen to you? Really. It’s just—I don’t know.” She looked at me, pensive. “I’m worried about you.”
“About me?”
“You are naive, Aubrey McKee. Fuck, you’re naive. I always forget. You still think you can be friends with everybody. And that’s nice. But people are horrible. People are corrupt and selfish twat-heads. And it’s naive to think they aren’t. How have you not learned this? Maybe it’s because you’re the middle-child peace-maker, I don’t know. You want everyone to get along so you act like a clown and get trapped in your schtick—”
“Fart—”
“Like, why are you this parody of yourself? Why don’t you ever take yourself seriously?” Gail sprang off the bed. “Can you be serious about your emotions for once instead of having a ten-mile-away ironic distance? Why do you avoid everything? Doesn’t that seem like a fact worth investigating?” Holding unwavering eye contact, or rather forcing unwavering eye contact, Gail began to back away toward the bathroom door. “Maybe it’s worth asking why that happens. Maybe it’s time for you as a twenty-two-year-old man to grow up a little and take some responsibility for once in your life.” With these formidable words, Gail turned from me and vanished into the bathroom, the door closing with a pronounced click as its latch settled into the strike plate.
~
This apartment was rented to a person named Paxton, a friend of Gail, a woman with a low-slung posterior, a crew cut, and a PhD from Cornell. She moved from New York to Nova Scotia to become the ombudsperson for Dalhousie University. She was butchy, low-voiced, mordant, and queer. I didn’t like her at first. I didn’t like her later either. It would be some years before I was comfortable with the concatenation known as Paxton. She was born Shelley-Anne Cluett in upstate New York and for reasons mysterious decided at twenty-six to change her name. Her new designation was chosen when in a thrift shop she found the name embroidered into a sewn-in panel on a Maritime Flooring and Tile work-shirt. Paxton was no-nonsense, watchful, and self-contained. She was The Moosewood Cookbook and Joan Jett, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and La Cave Restaurant. I met her two summers earlier when she was marshalling Gail out of a club called Rumours along with a transgendered, mixed race friend named Shasta-Ly. That evening Paxton was wearing corduroy overalls, cut off and hand-hemmed at the knee, a Bundeswehr singlet, distressed Blundstone boots, a tightly-wrapped kerchief around her left wrist, and seventeen keys clipped into the hammer loop of the overalls. She had deep-set eyes, furry armpits, and a compelling aura of fecundity—but I thought, and still think, seventeen keys was a bit fucking much. She spoke obsessively and snappily about ex-girlfriends, women who seemed to do nothing but infuriate Paxton, though they all seemed to still figure very much in her life. Indeed, she was spending the Christmas holiday with an ex-girlfriend because the ex had yet to inform her parents she’d broken up so she and Paxton were in Orlando pretending to be a couple until January. Gail had spoken vaguely of difficult circumstances—abuse, addiction—in Paxton’s childhood as Shelley-Anne that were supposed to explain away the levels of distrust Paxton propelled toward me and my sort but I did not really accept this explanation, perhaps because I sensed Paxton’s influence would loom large in Gail’s semi-distant future.
Left alone in the main room, I went by the bookshelf and glanced over a few books by authors I didn’t know—Szymborska, Irigaray, Dworkin—then considered the materials on the drafting table. There was a neat array of purple paper clips, seven sharpened pencils in a Dundee Marmalade jar, and an opened Kodak envelope out of which spilled several white-bordered colour photographs. In these images, Paxton’s hair was long and lustrous and she was pictured with a very fit-looking Korean man. He seemed like the sort of chap in third-year med school who runs triathlons and volunteers at the Kids Help Line. He and Paxton were bent over with exhaustion and laughter, both wearing medals around their necks, joyously hugging each other, smiling at the camera. After a moment I recognized him as John Yu, a kid from Sunday school, and, recalling his details, I realized he and Paxton must have competed and won something at the Head of the Charles Rowing Regatta. They both looked very happy and I was jealous of their success and jealous that Paxton, a new arrival, a Come From Away, was constructing an actualized adult life in Halifax. Most of the time I was haunted by what I hadn’t achieved, frustrated by my inability to realize my best projects, and threatened by a looming sense of disorder. I made messes, sometimes glorious messes, but messes all the same and I knew in Halifax I was mostly understood as a drug dealer, punk rocker, and wayward odd
ity.
There is a line from Northrop Frye, a writer whom in the last few years I’d mentioned so often that Gail had taken to calling him Northrop Dum-Dum, where he suggests we’re all in the situation of a dog in a library, surrounded by a world of meaning we don’t even know is there, and I was beginning to feel like such a spaniel, someone who doesn’t quite get it, and I thought for a few moments of the many things I’d done, or half-done, and poorly, and standing by myself in a sublet apartment on South Street, wearing a second-hand suit, and watching as a cat appeared from under the bed to smell along the base of my dyed loafers, I saw myself as sort of strange and sad and isolated in the bizarre personas I’d created for myself.
~
The bathroom door swung open and out stomped Gail, tutta nuda. She charged across the room, her bare feet slapping on the hardwood floor. There was an ungainly quality to her progress—Gail tended to walk, even in a sundress, like a saddle-sore bronc-rider—and as she arrived at the window her nose bumped through the cotton scrim and into the glass. Annoyed, she pushed the scrim to one side and simply stood there, without clothes, daring the world to judge her, daring the world to deconstruct its own assumptions of nakedness.
Faint dimples were apparent on her lower back, on either side of her tailbone, and, just perceptible, near the top of her ass, around a plum-coloured mole, was an eddy of fine white body hair. Spinning from the window, she squatted beside the boombox and glared at the cassette tape inside. “I think I’m going out.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Just out.”
“Why?”
“Because we suck.” With a quick scowl in the direction of the wedding invitation, Gail turned to me. “I find it, frankly, sort of fucking ludicrous that you’re going to that wedding.”