“Physically?”
“Yeah, uh-huh,” said Logan, uncapping another beer.
“That should fucking just never happen,” said Ajax. “I know that it does in our community, and lord knows, I had my own trouble like that with an ex; we’ve all had our experiences with controlling, angry partners, but—”
“That is over the top. That’s not love,” said Elliot.
It was humid, the night pressing in on them, pressing, it seemed, their sweat to their skin. Logan saw a shooting star and pointed too late to share it.
“What’s love, though? They would have said they were in love,” said Logan. “Even Miranda, when she was being battered, she would have said she was in love. And Daisy probably would have said she was in love. You know you have it when you have it, but other people can’t assess your heart to say you’re right or wrong. Is love a feeling or is love an action?”
“We have it,” said Joe. “It’s a feeling and an action.”
“It’s a feeling,” said Logan.
Ajax said, “It’s an action.”
“I guess we have it,” said Joe. “I mean, I’m happy when Ell’s around. I light up. I mean, I have my moments, and this week there have been lots, but …”
“She’s maybe been a little cranky,” said Elliot, patting Joe’s knee.
“You try pushing a watermelon out your hoo-haw,” said Joe.
Logan made a face.
The fire spit sparks.
Elliot took the baby from Joe and wrapped a blanket tightly around her, covered her head, swung her up to her shoulder to pat her back. “If you’re talking about love, you could talk about this. Four days ago, I didn’t even know Scout. Now I can’t imagine life without her.”
Aww, thought Joe.
“Daisy was completely obsessed with my cousin, is what I am getting at. She wanted to know everything she was doing, everyone she was seeing, you know. And maybe that was a kind of love.” Logan took a slug, drew Ajax closer.
Joe said, “That’s not love!”
Ajax said, “Having a planned baby is love, for sure.”
“It matters to me that Joe would put herself through that,” said Elliot. “Labour was hard. But, I mean, look what you get.”
Ajax grinned at Logan and stroked their leg.
“Maybe love is just the ability to get along together, day to day,” said Logan. “To stand each other’s foibles. Maybe that’s all it comes down to. Maybe it’s understanding that if you break up, you have to take yourself along and that’s who you’ll be dealing with—again.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Elliot.
“Maybe it’s loving unconditionally,” said Ajax. “I loved my ex unconditionally, but she didn’t love me the same way. Really, I doubt she knows a thing about love.”
“But fighting can be good,” said Elliot. “Things build up between us, for instance, and then we fight, a good walloping yell, and then things feel better afterward. That’s love too. There’s no reason that can’t be love.”
“If it’s not rage. Melt-downs and suicidal ideation. If it’s not violent,” said Ajax. “If it tips into violence, that’s not love, I’m sorry. If you’re manipulating the other person, no. That’s just not love.”
Logan said, “I give you that. Fights are important. Fights are sometimes just as important as getting along. But not always. My mother married her first husband in Morocco, and they had two little boys. That man beat my mother, he beat her to a pulp. She was a PhD, you know, and he was a medical doctor, but he still got home and beat her every night, and this one time, she just ran. She ran as far as she could to get away from him, which in this case was to southern Spain, and she abandoned my brothers.”
“Not you?”
“I wasn’t born yet,” said Logan. “And my brothers aren’t in my life.”
On Elliot’s shoulder, Scout burped and fell sound asleep.
AJAX
“Is this love?” Ajax asked. “I dated this woman who went on about frogs in cook pots, right, how they won’t jump out as long as the water heats slowly, how they won’t protect themselves from a slow boiling? I dated her for maybe three fucking weeks, and then I made some crack that I’d been trying to drink more since I divorced. I’m basically abstemious, not because I’ve chosen to be, except behind the wheel, but because I don’t particularly like it. I was striving to be a little easier with it generally, to learn to enjoy a glass over dinner. This girlfriend was an alcoholic, years sober but still going to AA every day, pretty much, and she said she wanted to break up with me because of what I’d said. She said she couldn’t respect someone drinking to impress someone else. She said I was probably an alcoholic, just not drinking yet. She said she knew all sorts of people who’d become problem drinkers at my age. I was upset. She basically gave me an ultimatum: quit drinking or we were over. A little red wine is good for my heart, I said, and she said no, uh-uh, not on her watch. I said, but I’d be quitting because she had a problem with it, not because I did, and it seemed to me that if, after decades of abstinence, she still had this large a conceptual problem with alcohol, it was still fucking controlling her as much as when she drank, still wrecking her relationships. I quit for her, but every date from there on she grew increasingly hostile, and she’d show up with lists of all the things I’d done wrong since our last date. It was easy to see where her kind of punitive anger was going, long-term, like turning up a burner, right, under that frog in a pot? I was almost a freaking frog who didn’t know when to jump.”
“That’s not love,” said Joe, swatting a mosquito. Her stitches were throbbing. She wished it would cool down. Maybe a fire in the heat was a bad idea? She’d push back her chair, if she could. “That’s control, maybe. But that’s not love.”
Logan built s’mores and handed them out—graham crackers, chocolate, marshmallows. They laughed as they tried to eat without dropping them. Toby came back to life, sitting on his haunches, waiting, diving on spills.
“We lasted about four months. She thought my friends were bad influences,” Ajax continued. “She hated my best friend. She thought my friend was getting in between us. She told me I shouldn’t be allowed to choose my own friends since, obviously, I did a poor job of it. I had, for instance, another friend who was suicidal and needed to talk to me once while my girlfriend was over. She couldn’t tolerate me being on the phone or on the computer, even if I was too sick to sleep. She would wake up mad that I wasn’t in bed. And she called that love.”
“Do you know what we talk about when we talk about love?” said Elliot, tossing her hair. “We talk about the things we can tolerate, maybe, the vast list of things we give up for companionship.”
“You see it that way?” asked Joe, readjusting herself. She licked her sticky fingers. “These s’mores are good. A vast list?”
“We talk about lust,” said Logan.
“We talk about lust and sacrifice,” said Joe. “We talk about family bonds. About nurturing those who are dear to us.” She took the baby back.
Elliot said, “We ought to talk about never making too many sacrifices.”
“We talk about the things that we build,” said Joe. “I can feel that sugar rushing through me.”
Ajax raised a beer. She too felt the sweet claw into her brain. “The architects won’t disagree.”
“It’s still too hot out here and I’m fading,” said Joe. “Communities, I meant.”
“Or how about this one? I dated this woman who asked me to buy a dog cage for her to sleep in. I was, like, whoa, outa there,” said Logan.
Ajax thought about that. Kink was kink; was that kink? She said, “When I first came out, I put women on pedestals. I thought, as a dyke, I wouldn’t experience any crappola. Boy, was I wrong.”
“She got slugged by her wife,” said Logan.
“Shit,” said Joe.
Ajax felt a burr of wariness that Logan was discussing it. “That’s not true, exactly. She didn’t hit me. She paralyzed my arm. She gr
abbed me and bruised me dozens of times. She used a lot of intimidation tactics to get me to behave the way she wanted. A lot of gaslighting etcetera, etcetera.”
“Maybe I don’t know what love is,” said Logan. “But I’ve got enough experience now to know all the things it isn’t.”
“You do, honey. You do. This is love,” said Ajax, squeezing her tight. “Love is treating your partner and your friends and family with respect and admiration. Respect, yes. And love is kindness. It’s honouring your partner even when times are challenging.”
“Well, maybe that’s love,” said Logan. “Or a facet of love.”
“Don’t make me fight you,” said Ajax. She put up her dukes. “’Cause I will. I will box you into the ground to prove kindness is love.” She laughed.
Elliot said, “Or maybe love is self-love just as much as any of those other things.”
Joe looked at her. Was she as self-centred as she sounded? “Sorry to s’more and run,” she said, creaking up, shooting Ell a glance.
“I have to get these guys home,” said Elliot. “Forecast says storm.”
Logan looked up. “It’s clouding over.”
Ajax and Logan watched Elliot help Joe climb the hill, Joe slow and measured and in obvious pain.
“I will wrestle you,” said Ajax quietly as soon as they were out of sight, slipping onto her knees in front of Logan, pulling down their zipper. “What are you wearing?”
“It’s good,” said Logan. Logan changed five or six times a day, different dicks for different purposes. They spent more time in the washroom than Ajax did. A packing cock. Cock for anal. Big Albert for when Ajax craved a stuffing. Cock for sleeping. Cock for showering. Dude of a Thousand Cocks. Ajax pulled this one into her mouth, began to move on it, thinking how it was better than it had been eons ago with guys, thinking she wasn’t so worried about her teeth. Logan said, a hand on the back of her head, “This, this is love.”
Logan did up their shorts. They damped the flames, pushing dirt atop them.
As the fire sputtered, Ajax sat back on her heels and said, “Let’s go swimming!”
“Now?” Logan said, gathering their supplies.
“Sure, now. Why not? Water’ll feel perfect at this time of night. What about Toby?”
“He won’t wander far. There’s not far to wander, come to that.” Logan kept damping down the coals. “I don’t swim at night. Clouds are rolling in. See that, to the west?”
“Except for the great white lake sharks, it’s completely safe.” Ajax slapped Logan’s leg. “Come on, you’ll love it.”
“Can I just hold your towel for you?”
“Chicken.” Ajax reached for Logan’s hand, tugging them up.
“Cock, not chicken,” said Logan. “I ain’t scared a nothin’.”
They picked their way down to the dock, where Ajax stripped. She took Logan’s clothes off too until Logan was down to their skivvies and loafers. Logan pulled the binder off, stripped gaunch, held tight to their harness. Ajax wavered on tippy-toes on the edge of the dock.
Logan wrapped their arms around Ajax, bending to kiss the back of her neck. Small tender kisses. Squid ink sky, long creaking dock. “You taste like sweat.”
“You know what Sartre said to de Beauvoir?” Ajax said. She leaned back into Logan. “He said, ‘I love you with the window open.’ I want to love you like that, Logan.” Ajax turned. “Without expectations and jealousy. Loving the full person you are.” She petalled kisses on Logan’s face, forehead, eyelids, cheeks. “Swim with me. Will you swim with me?”
Toes over the edge, they held hands, swung arms. Big leap of faith going where they couldn’t see anything—the water was emptiness, blacker than sky, a void. They could hear it, though, against the pylons. Slapping.
“I see the Big Dipper,” Logan said, pointing. But rain clouds were pushing in fast, cowling the sides of the lake.
Faintly, faintly, the barely rippling sky-ladle off to the right. Ursa Major. Dubhe, Merak, Phecda, Megrez, Alioth, Mizar, and Alcor, each fifty-eight to 124 light years away, unimaginable.
Ajax said, “That light has travelled 50,000 years to get to our retinas. My dad used to teach me about the stars.”
“You go first,” Logan said.
“Both first. Together.”
Bats dive-bombed them, flicking black spectral arrows. Across the lake, the trees hulked dark against a lighter sky.
“Sharks, you said?”
“Many, many sharks, all nocturnal,” said Ajax, lifting her arms to shape her dive. “Hammerheads. Basking sharks. Even whale sharks. Okay. One … two … three!” And she went over. The lake was warm, even bordering on hot. As her head broke the water, Ajax thought, Love badly, then love well.
Logan cannonballed, shrieking.
Ajax laughed. She could barely see them in the dark. But she could hear them.
They came up sputtering, said, “This is truly weird and bizarre.”
“It’s my favourite thing, Logan. I don’t feel there’s been summer till I’ve swum naked at night.”
They floated on their backs holding hands like otters; even this late, the lake was too warm for their nipples to erect. Ajax narrowed into an inverted bowl of stars and the inside-out sound of her wonky heartbeat drumming. That beat of life that had gone off its own rails, and above her the flash and pizazz that was their galaxy. The world narrowed just to her heartbeat and stars, Logan’s hand an umbilicus leading her back home. Reality spun her on her axis three times three times three.
“We’re in the suburbs,” said Logan, “of the Milky Way. In case you didn’t realize.”
Ajax lifted her head. “What’s it like downtown?”
JOE
Some vaguely recalled dream about parenthood being a terrible mistake. Joe struggled awake, found, to her great relief, Scout curled up beside her, absolutely fine. Heart pounding, she wondered what had woken her. At first, she thought maybe the noise was a raccoon knocking over trash cans. It was murky here in the guest bedroom, just a night light in one wall to help guests find their way to the bathroom, otherwise a stumble through tar blackness. The island wasn’t like the city. Up north, with no ambient light, darkness was absolute. Joe worried the baby had slept too long, but she realized that when Scout cried, she thought that went on too long too.
She was lonely and nervous. She needed Elliot. Elliot was getting normal nights’ sleep, because one of them might as well.
She felt the outline of Scout, patted her.
The idea that she could form a family with someone … She was raised in the heart of the city with no siblings and parents who fought before separating. What hubris to think she could do something different, break the chain, offer her child a different outcome. It wasn’t possible. One parented as they had been parented. The best she could offer Scout, she supposed, was parents who were at least present, flawed and full of idiosyncratic foibles. She couldn’t even promise that they wouldn’t fight, since they were already hissing at each other. Was that something she wanted to tell her daughter about love?
Joe was being held captive by maternity in a way that Elliot just was not. Elliot had been pregnant, and had miscarried—would it be the same if that fetus had grown to term, and Elliot was the one chained by maternity? Joe suspected if Ell had been the bio-mom, Joe would still have been the one strapped to the domestic—being further toward femme in the gender spectrum, having a less lucrative job. Perhaps even by inclination.
Did she hear Elliot retching in the bathroom? Apparently Ell had picked up that bug going around.
Maybe she’d overlooked the fact that, before Joe had wanted a baby, Elliot had cautioned, Why rock the boat? But, eventually, Elliot had clutched the IVF life preserver every bit as hard as Joe did. She carried, Joe carried, they both miscarried, bang, bang, all in six months. So much loss. Boats taking on water, boats foundering. Bloated women sinking below the waves, babies gone to fish. They’d had one embryo left, suspended in liquid nitrogen, and Joe, withou
t even telling Elliot, had made steps to have it implanted, a final try.
Joe breathed slowly, deeply, trying to calm herself. What had she been dreaming? Intellectually, she knew Elliot was just as committed to Scout as she was, and not being at Joe’s side every minute didn’t imply that she wasn’t. Might, in fact, be more of a comment on Joe than on Scout. But in her heart, Joe fretted. Her marriage, and now Scout too, were the most important things she’d ever had.
Once, long before the IVF upheaval, just after they’d gotten together, Ell’d sat Joe down.
“You know I use het porn,” Elliot said. “I still find guys sexy.”
“Okay,” said Joe slowly. Het porn—blech. “Right. So what’s the pragmatic fall-out to that?”
Elliot claimed there wasn’t one. Then she blanched and said, “I might be bi.”
Joe laughed. Elliot had slept with whole baseball teams. And was truly butch.
“No, Joe, don’t mock me. I think I have to go back to men. I’ve thought a lot about this. Being a lesbian just isn’t working out for me. Whatever I thought it would give me, it’s not giving me. It didn’t fix anything.”
Fix anything? Was being queer supposed to fix something? “Can you maybe talk about this, please?”
But Elliot withdrew. Joe thought to give Ell some room before revisiting it, before she collapsed in sorrow, but two days later, when she again inquired, Elliot claimed never to have said it.
Joe said, “You know perfectly well what you said, and if you’re thinking that way, it’s my business because it threatens us as a couple. I’ve been mulling, and now I need to talk about it, to find out what its edges are, to find out what you meant and why you told me and why now and what you plan to do about it. Do you want to peg men, is that it?”
Elliot again said that she hadn’t said it. Joe was just—Joe did this. Made up stories.
“I didn’t make it up,” Joe told her firmly.
“You know you do this,” said Elliot.
Weekend Page 5