Practical Jean

by Trevor Cole

  While Adele was gone, Jean lounged on the couch and drank most of the wine in her glass. She wasn’t sure it was the best thing to be doing, because she was very obviously drunk. But she didn’t see what actual harm it could do, and anyway, she felt safe in the big wide apartment with the whole dark world outside.

  She called out, “Why have I never been here before?”

  “I didn’t think you were interested,” came Adele’s reply from another room.

  Jean swivelled her head against the couch cushions and looked around her. There were plants in pots, she noticed, flanking the wide view of the city, and she lurched to her feet to examine them. It took her no time at all to realize they were Virginia chain ferns. The spores on the underside of each delicate leaflet were gathered in what looked for all the world like a series of tiny chain links. This was the very plant that had first got Jean interested in greenery; she’d seen one in a professor’s solarium and couldn’t get over how something as ordinary as a leaf, the leaf of a plain old fern, could reveal itself to be so fascinating. And when she was young and investigating the possibilities of her life, this discovery seemed to tell her something about the world. There were flowers that got all the attention, and leaves that did all the work, and lots of those leaves were dull and boring. But if that’s all you thought about leaves, you missed something. Because if you looked closely, if you didn’t get fooled into thinking one leaf was like any other, you found out that some of them were truly bizarre.

  Jean was holding one of the leaflets in her hand when Adele came up behind her and stood very close.

  “Adele, these are my favourite ferns in the whole world. I can’t believe you have them. They’re Virginia –”

  “Virginia chain ferns,” said Adele. “You told me about them.”

  “I did? When was that?”

  “When we were in college. We used to talk a lot back then, late into the night, remember?”

  “I remember we got drunk.” Jean giggled.

  “Do you remember I used to give you back rubs?” Standing behind her, Adele laid her hands lightly on Jean’s shoulders and began to rub and squeeze.

  “Mmm,” said Jean, closing her eyes. “That feels nice.”

  Jean tipped her head forward a little, let Adele’s fingers slide over the straps of her dress and scale the tense incline from her shoulders to her neck. She hadn’t realized how stressful the last weeks had been, and how all of the tension had migrated to those particular muscles, and now here was Adele doing just the right thing to make it all go away. She was like a kind of angel, and such a good friend. Her hands were so strong, and yet so soft, and they seemed to know just where to go and what to do. When Jean was thinking the word “wine,” or maybe she said it out loud, Adele’s hands brought more wine. When she felt very sleepy, they led her to a soft place to lie down. To Jean, with her eyes closed, anything Adele’s hands did seemed to be right. So when they slipped down over her arms, and her hips, and then her breasts, that felt nice too, and right in a way, if a little unexpected. Jean was feeling quite hazy, and just then what was right and what was unexpected were blending and floating together in a very interesting way, becoming part of the same misty cloud of experience. And when Jean felt the tickle of hair on her face as Adele bent over her, and the warmth of her breath, and the pressure on her mouth from Adele’s lips and her tongue, that was also unexpected. That was quite unexpected, actually. Jean thought the word, “Oh,” or maybe she said it out loud. And then she opened her eyes and saw that Adele had no clothes on, and they were in her bed, and she said it again.

  “Oh.”

  Adele lay down on the bed with a lazy smile and drew a finger across Jean’s cheek to brush away a hair.

  “Adele,” said Jean. Her head was clearing rather quickly. “What’s happening?”

  “We’re just enjoying ourselves.”

  Adele seemed to enjoy sliding the straps of her rayon dress off her shoulders, Jean noticed, and reaching around and pulling down her zipper. Being naked and having other people be naked seemed to be something she enjoyed very much.

  “I’m just a bit confused,” said Jean.

  Adele kissed her shoulder. “Why are you confused?”

  “Well,” Jean put her hands over her eyes and tried to focus, “I know we’re very good friends. Because we’ve known each other for so long. But now I think you’re taking off my dress.”

  “I am.”

  “Right. So …” She watched as Adele pulled down the top of her dress to reveal first her left breast, and then her right one. “It’s just unexpected, that’s all.”

  Adele began to explain to Jean, and as she explained, she rhythmically kissed Jean’s breasts, first the left and then the right, so that Jean found it very hard to concentrate on exactly what Adele was saying. But it seemed that Adele had felt this way for a very long time, since she and Jean had roomed together in college. And it had always been Adele’s hope that one day she would be able to make love to Jean. In fact, she explained that one night she had gotten Jean very drunk and she had tried her best to seduce her. But before it could happen, Jean had sat up and announced that she had to go home. And because at the time Jean was living with Adele in the residence, “home” meant Kotemee. Jean had just packed a bag that night and left. She was gone for three days, and during that time Adele realized that she was in love with Jean, and she could never have her. That was quite clear. So she decided to do what her parents had always wanted her to do, which was to study economics at Cornell.

  “You left art college because of me?” said Jean.

  “I just thought it was easier that way. I never brought it up because I was happy just to be your friend, and I didn’t want to risk losing you again.”

  Jean thought that might have been the sweetest thing she had ever heard. It was certainly nicer than anything Milt had ever said. So as she lay on Adele’s bed, with the top of her green rayon dress bunched around her rib cage, exposing her breasts to this woman she had known, but not really known, for so long, Jean collected her courage like someone gathering tomatoes after a frost. Carefully, uncertainly, hoping to make the best of what was there.

  “Adele,” she said, “is this very important to you?”

  Adele was blowing a tickling stream of air down her neck from her ear to the ridge of her collarbone. She stopped and said, “Yes.”

  “If this happens, will it make you very happy?”

  “It will make me wonderfully happy.”

  “Then … we should probably get this dress all the way off.”

  There was no bluff or bluster to Adele Farbridge now, no city airs, and Jean wondered if that rarefied manner of hers, which so grated on Natalie and others, had for all these years been a kind of shield. Well, at least now she saw her the way she really was: worn by years, more brunette than Jean had realized, and needing love like any poor soul.

  When Adele lay back on the sheets, Jean was able to see for the first time the long white scar and puckered skin where her friend’s left breast had been. In the bell of light from the bedside table, it had its own kind of beauty, and Adele seemed not to mind when she drew her finger along that sinister line, and over the small drumlins of flesh, from the place her nipple had been to the hollow beneath her arm. Lying against Adele’s small, marked frame, feeling the velveteen brush of her tight skin, Jean was aware of her own body’s fluid expanse, its carnal heft, like the weight of her responsibility. And so, still just a bit lightheaded, she embarked on her quest to make Adele happy, to receive the pleasure Adele seemed determined to provide, and to give the same in return.

  The receiving, it turned out, was … oh … remarkably easy. It was tender and deep, felt both sisterly and sinful, and Jean was quick to compliment Adele again and again and again. The giving, she quickly found, was the more stressful part of the exchange. Not that she didn’t know what she was doing. She’d spent so many years willing Milt’s appendages into various movements and places she had a ready
catalogue of what worked and didn’t. But Jean knew what was coming, there was no doubt about that now. Adele had sacrificed the happiness of being with her (in that way) for the sake of their friendship, and Jean could not let her down. And if she’d needed one last sign of the rightness of her course, it came in the form of Adele’s scar. The moment she saw that she knew she could never abandon her friend to the lottery of malignancy. So as Jean made her way down the slippery paths, she felt the force of her obligations. The pleasure she gave couldn’t be just any pleasure. It had to be the greatest gratification Adele had ever known. A part of Jean was glad to be able to give Adele that gift, but as she worked away, measuring the increments of her success in moans, she felt sympathy for men she had known who had crumbled under similar pressure.

  But after a while, and another glass of wine, Jean felt that she had done her very best. Adele lay dreamy and languorous on the pillow beside her, and the air they breathed seemed to glow.

  “Are you happy?” Jean asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Adele groaned.

  “Good. Do you know what I’d like to do now?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to give you a back rub.”

  “Really? On top of everything else? You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to,” said Jean. “You just get comfortable on your stomach and I’ll do the rest.”

  She slid out of bed and padded naked to the living room where her overnight bag lay. On her feet, moving amid the apartment’s hard edges and monochrome palette, Jean felt a little fatter, less in proportion, than she had in bed, more awkwardly aware of her townish self. But as she took up the hard, leather handle of her overnight bag she saw again the Virginia chain ferns. She knew now that Adele had bought them as a way of keeping her close, and she felt surer than ever that she was doing the right thing. To Jean, the affection she felt for Adele in that moment, a deeper bond than she had ever thought possible, would be rendered sham and disgraceful, a contemptible hoax, if she walked away now. If she condemned her elegant friend to the crass blatancies of a painful, unlovely end.

  In the bedroom, she caressed Adele’s legs, eliciting a quiet purr, then climbed onto her back, straddling her like a palomino, and opened her bag beside her. She rooted around for her nail file and laid it on the bed beside her. She plucked out the vinyl gloves, thin as plastic wrap, and pulled them on.

  “What are those for?” said Adele, watching with one eye.

  “Oh, I’m going to use something on your back and it’s gooey,” said Jean. “But anyway you shouldn’t be peeking. Turn your head.” She made a twirling motion with her gloved finger and waited until Adele obeyed. Then she pulled out the first Fentanyl patch.

  “What are you doing back there?” said Adele.

  “You’re supposed to be relaxing. Clear your mind.”

  Jean used the nail file to poke a hole right through the seal of the patch and the membrane underneath. She squeezed out the drug into a glassy blob in her hand and held it out over Adele’s shoulder blades.

  “This might be cold,” said Jean. “Or hot. I’m not sure.”

  “You haven’t used it before?”

  “Just shush.” She smeared it on quickly as Adele shivered, then she poked through the second and third patches, squeezed out the contents, and spread the gel with both hands over the whole of Adele’s back.

  “That stuff smells weird,” said Adele. “But it feels warm already.”

  “You’re enjoying it?”

  “Mmmm. Why don’t you lie on top of me? Squish around.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Is that menthol or something? It’s really going to my head.” She paused as if to catch her breath. “Come on, lie down.”

  “Just relax.” Jean tried to make the strokes of her back rub more forceful.

  “Please?” Adele reached back and grabbed Jean’s wrist, trying to pull her down onto her glistening skin.

  “Stop it, silly!” Jean resisted for a moment and then didn’t so much pull her forearm out of Adele’s grip as find it released, and Adele’s arm settled down at her side. In the bedside lamp’s soft light Jean could see that the skin of her back no longer shone; the gel was soaking in quickly. She drew her gloved hands once more down Adele’s back and rested them lightly on her shoulder blades, feeling the ebb of their rise and fall. Then she leaned down close to Adele’s cheek, kissed her, and whispered into her ear, “Are you still happy?”

  In reply, Adele gave a distant, ethereal whimper.

  “I’m so glad.”

  Then Jean opened and smeared on the gel from the fourth patch, just to make sure.

  Chapter 12

  It was early Saturday morning, and so the bus that took Jean back to Kotemee was only a third full, a ragged crop of heads, mostly middle-aged tourists, day-trippers, a few mothers with toddlers half-crazed for a splash in a lake. Her overnight bag on the seat beside her, Jean sat looking out an east-facing window, letting the city outskirts, the scrublands, the farmers’ fields earmarked for development all blur past her eyes, and the memories of her times with Adele run together like watercolours. She had tidied the apartment, washed and put away the wine glasses, pulled a duvet over Adele’s clay-cool back. More than once, when they’d lived together during that year of art college, she’d done precisely the same thing after a late, wine-soaked night.

  Milt, annoyingly, wasn’t answering when she called at eight-thirty, so, slipping her phone back into her purse, she abandoned the idea of having him pick her up at the station. Then she had to give herself a little mental kick because, of course, the car wasn’t available at all. It was sitting in a garage waiting for parts.

  Hardly a cloud. And not too hot. Today would be a good day to be in the studio; the sidewalks would be filled with strollers from the city looking for ways to commemorate their trek into the hinterlands, something to show off to their friends, an artifact from that quaint little town. They’d rattle the bell of Jean’s Expressions, look around with their noses up, and conduct their interrogations. How long have you lived here? How do you pronounce it? Do you ever wish you were closer to the city? Is there any place to get a decent sandwich? Why just leaves? Don’t you have anything with animals?

  Jean decided she could do without that today. She was, admittedly, a little hungover. And she was wistful about Adele. About leaving her there in the city, that place of noise and smoke and garbage and gangs. Living her whole life in the quiet of Kotemee, the city had always seemed to Jean to be a place where death – startling, violent, inexplicable death – happened every day, just one of the common transactions of a tumultuous urban existence. She wondered whether, in that savage swirl of mayhem, anyone would really notice that Adele Farbridge had ceased to be. There was a part of Jean that couldn’t bear that thought. Another part was fine with it, admittedly, because the longer Adele went undiscovered the better it would be for Jean, and for the rest of her friends. But overall, she was wistful. Adele had shown her what true sacrifice for a friend looked like, and Jean knew that she had so much work to do to match her example. For Natalie and Louise and Cheryl … especially Cheryl. She had an awful lot to make up for there.

  At a quarter to ten, with the sun in her eyes, Jean was carrying her overnight bag up the hill of Conmore Avenue from the bus station, crunching along the gritty shoulder in her gold sandals, wondering what she’d been thinking not to pack a proper pair of shoes. Three cars drove past her the wrong way carrying people she knew. They all waved a friendly hello and looked perplexed as to why she was walking. My husband … she wanted to tell them … crashed our car.

  As she was coming to the brow of the hill she heard the sound of a vehicle slowing behind her and turned to see – what else? – Fran Knubel’s Cadillac SUV. It had obviously just been washed, was still dripping sequins from the wheel wells, and it came to a stop right beside her. Fran, in the driver’s seat, remotely lowered the passenger-side window.

  “Need a lift, the
re?” said Fran from the cool, dark hollows of her monstrosity. “I wasn’t going this way, but when I was coming out of the car wash I saw you getting off the bus and I figured you’d be getting tired.”

  Getting tired. In other words, thought Jean, Fran had waited until she’d covered four blocks in her sandals before offering her a ride, and also – and worse – Fran was of the opinion that four blocks was just about all the walking Jean could handle. Getting tired. As if Fran Knubel herself was an Olympian with an opal brooch. Jean regretted ever having apologized for what she’d said in the bookstore.

  “No thanks!” She showed her a big wide smile. “I’m doing great!”

  “Suit yourself,” said Fran. A hidden motor whined as the passenger window climbed and then she started off up the road, the fat tires kicking up fans of roadside grit.

  Within ten minutes Jean was home and launching her sandals across the foyer. She ripped the bolero jacket off her sweaty back and sent it halfway to the dining room, and for a moment she just stood in the front hall letting her chest heave and her temperature cool. Then she called out for Milt, and got no response. She limped a bit to the foot of the stairs.

  “Milt!”

  In the kitchen, she found unwashed dishes from what looked like the night before, including a pot with the remnants of chili caked into a hard tomato glaze. Upstairs, the bedroom looked tidy, except for a pair of Milt’s beige socks on the floor. The flowered curtains were drawn and the bed made.

  Jean let her green rayon dress fall around her feet, stripped off her underwear and unhooked her bra, and then stepped into the tub for the hottest, longest shower she could remember having in years. She leaned against the tiles with her eyes closed and let the spray do its worst, until she was pummelled numb on one side and turned around to let it have at the other.

  Milt was still not home and Jean’s skin was still sore as she propped a foot on the edge of the tub and dried off. Buffing her back and her legs with a fluffy cream towel, she decided to take advantage of the uncommon luxury of an empty house to call Cheryl. She dressed, and from her everyday purse she pulled out the sheet Welland had given her, with Cheryl’s address in Bier Ridge and her phone number.