“And how’s that working out?” asked Linda.
Joe laughed. Scout started to cry, and Joe’s breasts let down in response. “Up, you know, and then it plummets, pretty fucking far some weeks. Like, really, this week. I guess I thought she’d change, you know, with the baby, but she’s been drifting lately, and we’re, I don’t know, estranged?”
“Fuck,” said Linda.
“Although thinking about Dree certainly makes me glad for what I have now.” Joe had once become Dree’s frog in the boiling pot of water. Now was she Elliot’s?
Joe sent out texts to Elliot, knowing most of them would bounce back due to bad connectivity, but hoping something might get through.
Once Scout was suckling, Joe telling her to open wide, guppy-latch, pulling her firmly to the boob, all she could think about was Dree and what a strange, deranged woman she’d been, and how Joe had loved her to pieces even so, and how she was shattered, and shattered that she was shattered. The kinds of things Dree had done were straight out of the personality disorder checklists: shallow emotions, situational morality, entitlement, lack of sense of self, but back in those days she hadn’t understood that. She’d stood up for herself that once, about the mail, and then never again because never again had Dree made such a transparent blunder. She embarrassed Joe in Nanaimo, stealing, creating divisions between Joe and people she’d never even met, between Joe and her friends. She screwed up special occasions, started scenes in restaurants and parks.
Those were bad old days.
Joe had still been shaky from Dree when she got together with sane, ordinary Elliot. All Elliot—smart, accomplished Elliot—had ever wanted to do was be able to sleep with other women, and she didn’t want to lie about it or go behind Joe’s back. She hadn’t manipulated Joe. She hadn’t lied, she hadn’t stolen. If she was sometimes self-absorbed, if she wasn’t as romantic as Joe might want, if she wasn’t attentive, Joe would take that any day over what had happened with crazy Dree.
Dree, who’d finally hit a tree.
AJAX
“Part of what I love about you, Ajax, is that you were raised in the Bahamas.”
Woof! said Toby, shaking himself. Logan rose to let him out.
“Only until I was twelve.” At the table, pushing around a maple syrup bottle.
“Still. It’s more European than Canada is, surely.” Their thumbs in their short pockets.
Ajax stuck her finger in a pool of syrup, licked it absent-mindedly. “That wasn’t my experience, really, Logan.” She’d grown up poor and scrabbling. Her parents had worked for a dive resort and had emigrated because life in the Bahamas was dead-end. Nowhere to go but sideways and eventually into old age. Ajax’s grandmother had sponsored their move to Canada. They’d landed in a Toronto blizzard, and that had been difficult, the few months shivering through winter while her parents bickered (her mother was glad to be back, but Ajax and her father couldn’t handle the cold in the land or the people)—but carrying on to Vancouver hadn’t made it much better. Warmer, with beaches both familiar and strange—same water, more or less, but cold and mountain-backed, and the weather was no great shakes. Her parents had edged her away from painting, wanted her to become a professional—a doctor, a dentist—but she’d stubbornly attended Emily Carr and earned a certificate that lead to … well, they’d been right: it hadn’t led to much. A hand-to-mouth life as a portrait painter. She and Logan, no matter the laboured parallels Logan wanted to draw, were not from the same side of the tracks. Logan’s mother had taught at universities—in South Africa, in Paris, in Montreal, in Toronto. Logan’s dad had been a CEO for a gold-extraction company. Logan didn’t have a clue about class stratification. Saying, You won’t have to worry about anything if you’re with me, which they had said a hundred times, was baloney, a sentiment rather than a fact. She’d learned her lesson about getting too dependent with her ex.
“But it’s a Commonwealth country.”
“So is Canada, Logan.” Ajax was annoyed; was Logan looking for her to be something she wasn’t? Educated? White, maybe? The curtains lifted in the same breeze that had been captivating the night before. There was something so achingly summery about them—about everything here—that Ajax could almost close her eyes and imagine herself back in the Bahamas. And right now it irritated her.
“But it’s more aware of being a Commonwealth country.”
“Have you ever even been there, Logan?” Ajax had grown up on a peripheral island and attended a one-room schoolhouse. She moved her fork through the syrup. “The standard of living is not high.”
“But you learned manners.”
“We learned colonial manners, that’s true. But I barely wore shoes the first decade of my life.”
“We moved a lot,” said Logan.
Were they trying to equate their immigration experiences? Had Logan also moved into a too-small house in a rural suburb of Vancouver which had been already overcrowded with people? Ajax thought not.
“I never felt at home. I never made friends. I always knew I’d just be uprooted again.” Logan poured themself a vodka tonic.
Ajax stood to take dishes to the kitchen. “Moving is hard on kids.”
“My little barefoot goddess,” said Logan, bussing her as she gathered plates.
“Don’t,” said Ajax, lifting their plate. “Now you’re just ticking me off.” She bumped into a life preserver on her way to the kitchen—was suddenly annoyed by the kitsch on the walls. Hung paddles, old rusty lanterns. Things that said, I am rich. I hired a designer. My house could appear in Cottages North. I will never need an actual lantern.
“Hey! Hey! I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m just trying to say I like you.”
“Right,” said Ajax, tightly. “There is some awful something happening right now, right here, that I am just going to cross out because I don’t want to get into it with you. Not this weekend. Can we defer?”
Logan said, “I just like you. I like everything about you.”
We’ll see how long that lasts, thought Ajax. Logan was pushing close to buttons: poverty, race, emigration, resettlement, hunger. Her past life wasn’t something Logan would ever understand. She filled the sink with hot, soapy water, plunged in her hands. Quintessentially, she and Logan had almost nothing in common. Which had essentially no bearing on love.
“You’d be wrong to expect differences aren’t an issue for me, Logan,” said Ajax in bed where they’d found each other again after breakfast. So much divergence between them. Ajax had lost her parents; Logan’s were still alive. She had kids, Logan didn’t. “I just want to be sure there’s enough to go on with if our attraction wanes.”
“You already said that,” said Logan. “You’ve said that ten times. Do you think I’m not listening? It’s not like I can do anything about any of this. You come from where you come from. I come from where I come from. You think it’s relevant. I don’t.”
“Don’t be snappy. These are my preferences and expectations, extensions of what I value in my life. I just—I need to discuss it more. I need to talk about what it means, what it signifies, how it changes my life to be with a rich white person, to be taken as half of a heterosexual couple.” Ajax heaved a sigh. “I shouldn’t care what other people think, I know. At my age, people don’t even notice me anyhow. But it’s embarrassing for me to feel straight.” Logan shot her a look. “It’s like stuffing myself back into that closet I escaped from.”
“Oh, come on,” said Logan. “Really.”
“I know, I know. I’m not exactly proud of this. Defensive, yes, but proud, no.”
The screen door slammed—the dog, letting himself back in. They heard his nails click across the wood, him slurping water.
“Me with a transman. I just never thought.”
“I say it again: Don’t label me. I’m just me.”
“You’re not a woman,” said Ajax. She thought of women as water, and Logan was definitely not water. Not wet. Not flowing.
“Obviously.”
“I signed up for loving you,” said Ajax. “So this is just part of the equation when I think we might get more serious. You’re white and you’re trans.”
“But this is who I am,” said Logan, irritated. “White, Germanic heritage. And not born a girl even though I have girl bits.”
“Please don’t get mad.” A pause. “You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad.” Logan rolled away, stiffened.
“You are mad, I can tell.” Ajax thought, said, “But lesbian sex is different.”
“How is it different?”
“It’s not … It’s not focused as much on ends.” She thought back to lovers who took four or six or eight hours to make love, lovers who came a dozen times, lovers who never came (nor seemed to care). She thought about sex with Logan: dirty, hot, enflamed. But not so much an exploration—nothing much to explore with Logan’s body nearly always going to be out-of-bounds. Or was she missing something? A language the two of them could speak that was contained in this kind of sex? A cursory guide to BDSM would suggest she certainly was missing things—if that’s where this went. And for certain she’d never been this physically opened or wet with anyone before. Logan didn’t explore Ajax’s nuances, either; Ajax wasn’t sure Logan was capable of nuance. “A lot of the time,” she offered, “making love can be as sultry as laundry on a tropical clothesline on a breezy day.”
“You want sex to be like laundry? More tumbling?”
Ajax laughed.
“You think you know so much.” Logan sounded put out.
“I do know so much, and you’re mad, and maybe I’m wrong to bring this up again. Maybe it sounds like I’m saying You’re not enough. You’ve fought to be who you are with freedom and dignity and now I come along and imply I need you to be someone you’re not and never could be. I’m just thinking out loud. Ruminating. Do you get that? I’m not building a skyscraper here—like, this is the floor, this is the ceiling. Tell me you get that. I’m not saying this is how I have to have things, that I have nothing to learn from you and how you fuck.”
Stiff nod.
“Maybe I should only talk about my qualms with friends. But grant me this: We both arrive here with that dreaded ‘baggage.’ Like, me being sick changes your entire life, Logan. I need accommodations, and you have to make them if you want to go forward with me. Well, it’s the same for me. You need accommodations for this thing about you, and I have to make them if we’re going to go forward. Do you see?”
“I don’t see why it doesn’t just matter that I love you.”
It went through her in shivers, Logan’s love. “Your being a boy presses me closer to being a girl, and I don’t want to be a girl. It’s not who I am.”
“Why does it?”
“People read by one’s company, too. As you read more masculine, I read femmier.”
“Good.”
“Good if I wanted to look or be femmier. We’re the same, really. You’re just farther along the gender curve than I am.”
“No curves for me, if you don’t mind.”
“Ha!” said Ajax.
“Well, I feel so cherished.” Logan sat up, their voice hollowed. “Basically, you’ve said I’m bad in bed and I’m not unique and being with me is a kind of agony for you.”
“God, no!” said Ajax, pulling them back, meeting their eyes. Such deep, cold eyes when they were mad or hurt. “God no. For fuck’s sake, not in a hundred years. My thing is negative and your thing is neutral. I get the difference. But your thing is so hetero, Logan. And what if you start taking T?”
“Isn’t it queer if I’m queer? By definition? Plus I’m not taking T,” said Logan. “I’m not planning to take T.”
“What if you get your boobs taken off?”
“What if I do? I probably will when Mom dies.”
“Boobs are a major turn-on for me,” Ajax said. “If I’m going into this, with all that I am, I need to know what I’m capable of accepting and embracing, what my limits are. I need to know whether I can handle it if your breasts are gone, you’re on T, and you’re getting a moustache and goatee. If I don’t ‘pass’ anymore as gay because you’ve become … an actual guy.”
Logan’s chums? thought Ajax. They were already straight men, almost exclusively.
“You know what it means. It means I’d be allowed to use washrooms everywhere I go.”
“I know that,” said Ajax. “I wasn’t talking about bathrooms.”
“Well you would be if you’d been the kid going home with wet pants because you were taunted when you tried to use the girls’ room and you’d already been banned from the boys’ room.”
“Oh, honey. Honey, I’m sorry. That’s horrible. Scarring.”
“I’m glad you don’t have a clue.”
“I get harassed often enough as it is and I look like this.” She motioned toward her large breasts.
“You don’t get harassed. You don’t know harassed.”
“Well, when my hair’s short, I’ve had women lurch across restaurants to keep me out of the ladies’. I’ve had women come into washrooms while I’m cleaning my hands and go back out to look at the door to see if they’re in the right place. I’ve had women say, Sir, did you know this is the women’s washroom?”
“My sweet girly girl,” said Logan.
“Not to het women, I’m not. I’m transgressive, even if you don’t notice it. Just because I’m a bottom doesn’t mean I’m not butch.”
Now Logan laughed out loud. “My wanna-be butch baby.”
“I applied, but I failed the entrance exam.”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ajax.
“Now,” said Logan.
JOE
When Elliot wandered in again, it was after dinner time, and Joe immediately noticed she was famished.
“Hey,” said Elliot too casually, hanging her keys.
“Wife-mo,” said Joe. “Where were you?”
“Didn’t you get my note?”
Her note?
“In the kitchen.”
“Ell, I’ve barely been near the kitchen today.”
“You didn’t eat? Make tea?”
“I didn’t eat, no. I’ve been waiting for you. Where were you?” That skinny thread of complaint in her voice. Scout at her nipple, hoovering.
Elliot dropped a kiss onto her part so lightly that she might as well not have bothered. Joe smelled sweat, and something else. Musk? “I went by my parents’. I called.”
She hadn’t called. “My old girlfriend died.”
“Dree? You mean Dree? Dree died?”
Joe nodded. She was trying to make it real: Dree was dead.
Elliot said, “Oh, no! What happened?” Ell threw herself on the couch behind Joe, massaged Joe’s shoulders while Joe, perennially sore from the new ways she was called to hold her body, moaned.
“Dree in a tree. She wrapped her car around a tree.”
“Oh, god, that really sucks. Are you—okay?”
“Anyway, Dree sucked.” Joe couldn’t control herself. Her voice sounded thick; she was crying, sort of. The kind of crying when a person you once loved and escaped from dies. When you are heartbroken because redemption is finite. Now Dree would never apologize and Joe never would, either, for whatever her part was.
“Didn’t you think that she was basically a good egg?”
“I believed … in her redeemable heart. Yes, she was a good egg. What is that? Hard-boiled, poached? She was scrambled. She was a challenge to live with. I don’t know if you remember, but she was with someone, a woman who used to be our couples’ counsellor, and I always felt so sorry for her. Eileen must have been incredibly—docile? forgiving? stupid? stoned?—because they were still together when Dree died. Losing a partner to death must be agonizing. Lord knows I have had my own worries I might lose you.” Scout came off the nipple and Joe twisted to see Elliot.
Elliot squeezed her shoulder.
“Remember to love the one you’re wit
h, right?”
Ell made a noncommittal noise, said, “I wish I could touch you.”
“I wish we could touch each other too, but it’s five more weeks.”
“I’m sorry you tore.”
Joe nodded.
Elliot took Scout from her and burped her. “How’s she been?”
You mean, the whole goddamned day when you weren’t here? “I took her out in the sun for a little bit. She had a screaming fit at some point. She gets herself so worked up that she just becomes rage, and it makes me wonder what it was like in utero. Did she feel no anger for nine months? What do babies in utero do when they’re mad? Because, holy heck, our girl can yowl.”
“You ready for chow?”
“We could go visit Logan and Ajax.” Joe laughed. Elliot frowned. “Okay, I’m kidding, but don’t you want to be a fly on a wall? I would give a lot to hear what Logan is going to say and if Ajax will say yes. She came over here and let me cry on her shoulder a bit today.”
“Ajax did?” A larger than expected burp came tunnelling out of Scout.
“While you were with Scotia.”
“I wasn’t with Scotia.”
“I thought you were going to be, though.”
Elliot passed the baby back. “I want to spend more time with Scout, but you’ve got her at your breast and all I have is, I don’t know, the top half of your breast and these flashes that I know I shouldn’t think are sexual. Your areolas are huge and dark brown and your nipples are swollen and you look sexy, and all I have are my inappropriate feelings about your tits, plus the back of Scout’s head, and then, you know, Scout’s screams. She doesn’t have much awake time when she’s not hollering.”
Joe said, “She’s a newborn.”
“Aren’t you glad that you still turn me on?”
“I don’t want to turn you on, Ell. I just do not want to turn you on right now.”
“Well, I don’t get that.” Ell’s voice had gone remote, distanced, preoccupied; she fiddled with her iPhone, checking messages, maybe, moving to the window where reception was better.
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