by Mark Sampson
~
A filmmaker. That had been his little ambition, she suddenly remembered. He wanted to be a filmmaker. That was what he had shared with the group during orientation.
She lay in bed staring at her stucco ceiling, pleading for sleep, stroking Miles as he lay curled up next to her. Lynn tried to fight off the sensation she was feeling. Paul’s presence touched her between the eyes, and somewhere else as well. It was so stupid, the trap she was falling into. Getting advances from this guy at the same time as she was having a personal crisis. Feeling susceptible to things she may not want.
And yet, a filmmaker. She wondered about the status of that ambition, two years on. Had Paul abandoned it for the safety and regular work of the call centre? Or was he still hoping to do something with that dream?
She climbed out of bed. Picked up the phone, hesitated, then dialed the number she had had the foresight to swipe out of the personnel database after he had given her the samosa.
“Uhh . . . hello?” he moaned, half asleep.
“Do you still want to be a filmmaker?” she asked.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Lynn. Do you still want to be a filmmaker?”
He wasn’t caught off guard by this at all. “Absolutely. In fact, I’ve applied to the film program at NSCAD for next fall. I’ll find out in a few weeks if I can get in.”
She paused. “Is your offer to take me to dinner still—”
“Yes.”
Lynn smiled in spite of herself. “Alright. You’re getting your chance with me, Paul. Don’t fucking blow it, because you won’t get another.” She hung up and went back to bed.
~
A couple days later, she called the house. When her father answered, she didn’t bother hanging up.
“Hi, is Mom there?”
“Lynn? Hi. No, she’s not. I’m not sure where she went.”
This staggered Lynn a little. It was unusual for Michael not to know exactly where Carolyn was at all times.
“Well I just wanted to wish her luck with her doctor’s appointment tomorrow. And to remind her to call me and let me know how it went.”
“Oh, I’m sure she will. How are things with you, anyway? It feels like forever since we’ve talked.”
“Things are fine, Dad. Anyway, I have to run. Tell Mom—”
“Lynn?”
“Yes?” Jesus, here we go. Another long harangue about the dead-end existence of call centre employment, the black hole I’ve been sucked into.
“She didn’t say anything to you about her appointment, did she? She’s been coughing like crazy the last little while, and I get the feeling she’s worried. But she hasn’t said anything to me. Did she talk to you at all?”
He’s changed, Lynn. You should see him now. Really, he’s a different man. You should talk to him. He wants to be something more to you than what he is. He just doesn’t know how to go about it. And you should be something more to him, too. You should at least try to be something for somebody other than yourself . . .
“Not a word, Dad. Look, I have to go. Please tell her I called.” She hung up before he could say anything else.
~
They sat in a booth near the kitchen, the air thick with the fragrance of curry and garlic. A globular red lamp, adorned with yellow tassels, illuminated their table. The restaurant walls were covered in large intricate rugs and the floor beneath them was blood red. It was Saturday night.
“Are you ready to order?” asked the middle-aged Pakistani waitress.
Lynn gave the menu a final inspection. “Yes, I’ll have the eggplant baingan-bharta.”
“And for you, young man?”
“I guess I’ll have the karhah gost.”
“The karhai gost,” she and Lynn corrected him together. “Would you like chicken or mutton?”
Paul foisted a thin smile at Lynn. “Better give me the mutton.” The waitress nodded and took their menus, leaving them alone in the candlelight.
Lynn watched Paul sip his wine. He was wearing a white silk shirt with a black tie. His hair was spiky but not ridiculously so. He appeared to be checking out her dress—a denim frock she had taken a long time picking out for their date. “So you seem to know your way around Pakistani food pretty well,” he said.
“A little,” she replied. “My father spent some time in that part of the world, about three years ago. He came home a real convert, made the whole family go out to all these restaurants around town—Pakistani, East Indian, Afghan. I don’t think he expected me to like it as much as I did.”
Paul sort of laughed. “Oh yeah? And why’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “My father and I don’t agree on much. He’s a very . . .” She mulled over her words. Cruel? Self absorbed? Dominating? “. . . a very stubborn man.”
“Ah, so that’s where you get it from,” he smirked.
When their meals came, they ate in silence for a while. Lynn hoisted some of the puréed eggplant into her mouth, rolled it around on her tongue. She watched Paul take cautious, skeptical bites of his own meal before deciding that he liked it.
“Here, try some of this,” she said, and scraped a forkful of eggplant onto his plate. He took a taste, chewed slowly.
“Interesting flavour. What is that?”
“Probably the coriander and cumin.”
“Coriander and what?”
“Cumin?”
“Cumin,” he said, adding a randy little serif to his pronunciation. He looked at her. “Tell me, Lynn, do you enjoy cumin? Or should I ask you that later, when we’re doin’ It?”
She tried not to laugh, but failed. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
“I know,” he replied. “But you’re still going to sleep with me, right?” He seemed to be genuinely awaiting an answer.
“Let’s change the subject,” she said. “So. What do you think your odds are of getting into NSCAD?”
He leaned back, sighed heavily. “I have no friggin clue. I think I put in a really good application. I mean, I have six or seven films I already want to make. But now people are saying that that might actually work against me. That the school wants students looking to learn, not just do.” He gulped wine and poured some more. “I dunno. I wish those jerks would just realize what a genius I am and get it over with.”
“It’s an unfair world,” she said, draining her own glass. The waitress came by and they ordered another bottle.
“So let me ask you something,” he said when it came. “And I say this with the utmost respect, as someone who’s looking forward to doing It with you and all. Why are you wasting your time in that call centre? I’m assuming you don’t want to work there forever.”
“Hey, I like the call centre. It’s easy, nobody hassles me, there’s plenty of hours, especially in the summer, and it pays enough for me to live on my own.”
“Yeah, but what do you want to do?”
She shrugged that off. “I’m more concerned with what I don’t want to do, okay. I don’t ever want to live under my father’s roof again. That’s number one. And I don’t ever want to marry a man like him. That, Paul, is critical.”
“Huh,” he said. And then asked, “I wonder how that makes your mom feel.”
The statement jarred her. She stammered under the wine. “My mom? My mom is living with the choices she made, okay. And so am I. She . . .” She could be dying, Lynn wanted to say. She’s really sick and could be dying. The wine felt thick in her blood. “I don’t know what to say. Let’s just . . . let’s just eat our meals . . .”
“Okay,” he replied, and took another bite of the mutton. He nodded at her plate. “How’s it cumin?”
“You’re not funny.”
“Yes I am.”
She polished off another glass and filled it again. Okay Paul, she thought. I guess I have t
o start admitting you are. So let’s see what you’ve got.
~
They fumbled into the lobby of her building. She had her key halfway into the security door when Paul reached his face around her shoulder from behind. She turned and he kissed her. His mouth, strong yet soft, gripped hers and parted her lips. She could taste coriander between them. She threw the door open and pulled him inside. They stumbled down the stairs and through the hall to her apartment. Came crashing in and turned on the lights long enough to toss Miles—meowing his meows of curiosity—into the bathroom and close the door. Then they were on her narrow bed, rolling, fumbling. She did not stop him when he pulled down the zipper of her frock and slid the garment gingerly off her. She played with the spiky hair on top of his head, rubbed his shoulders and kissed his neck. When his tongue, wet and nimble, slipped under the edge of her bra to the soft flesh below, she moved her hand up to the front of his pants and began working on the zipper.
She pulled him on top of her, wanting to feel his gravity press her into the mattress as deeply as she would go. She tasted his nipple, his mouth, his hair. She arched her back up and his mouth widened over her. The unmistakable claw of arousal gripped her between the legs. She pulled Paul down and brought him to her with her hand.
“Lynn,” he whispered. “Lynn, just, just take it slow for a sec . . . just for a sec . . .”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . .” He pushed his forehead into hers. “It’s just . . . actually it’s . . . its my first time . . . first time, you know, doing It.”
She smiled up at him. Kissed his mouth. “Of course it is,” she said before steering him into her.
~
And she found herself jubilant, almost airy, in the morning after Paul had left. There was the wine hangover beating at her temples and a rickety stiffness in her back from sharing her bed with Paul. Yet she felt as if she were walking on the air. She went over and scooped up Miles, whom they had released from the bathroom after they had finished making love. Lynn went over and pulled open her window, not caring about the smells emanating from the alley, and let the Saturday morning flood in.
She thought about Paul and everything he had been in bed. He was both the best and worst lover she had ever had. At the end of it, he had simply curled in against her, happy and full of himself.
There was a message on her machine. She had missed it when they had first come in; had missed it up until now. Lynn’s stomach fell out. She pressed the button, already knowing who it was from. Her mother’s frantic voice filled the apartment. “Lynn, it’s Mom. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday after my appointment, but . . . your father and I, we . . .” And she began to weep. “Ah Lynny, can you please just call the house . . . call us as soon as you get this . . . please . . .”
Lynn snatched the phone from its cradle. Pressed it to her heart, squeezed her eyes shut. She thought of all those cigarettes, those thousands of cigarettes her mother had smoked in weepy helplessness after all those fights with Michael. And Lynn decided that if he answered, she was ready to scream: YOU did this . . . YOU did this to her …
As she dialed the number and waited for someone to answer, all of her thoughts gave in to that rage, to a moment no longer ineffable.
INVASION COMPLEX
So I went to see my buddy, Aeiou. I had needed to earn extra money that fall—Christmas was looming and with it a chance to escape to the beaches of Indonesia, a venture requiring me to raise about one-point-two million in less than four months. It had been a harsh summer for me, ruined by long overtime hours: I was beginning to resemble some latter-day Al Pacino, say from Insomnia or People I Know, and was desperate to find the cash for a beach holiday. Not an impossible task in this city, if you were friendly with a character like Aeiou. He was, simply, one of those lifer expats, terminally stranded in Seoul and infinitely well connected. He once bragged to me that he had no less than 125 individual numbers logged into his Samsung handphone—most of them, I suspected, belonging to Korean girls he had picked up in the foreign quarter who wanted to marry him after one night of Western-style debauchery. He often rode me about my own lack of contacts. “How many numbers do you have in your handphone?” he once chided. “I don’t own a handphone,” I replied, at which point he poured a beer over my head. Like me, Aeiou was Canadian—though he originated from some vague border city in southern Ontario, a place rife in mobster types with nicknames like Jimmy the Shovel. And like me, Aeiou was a teacher. He specialized in Business English, the art of suppressing cultural peccadilloes.
I rode the subway for forty minutes to get to the foreign quarter that Saturday afternoon and the pub where I knew I’d find him. A ceaselessly strange experience, to climb the stairs out of a hole in the ground and feel like you’ve been transported across continents and returned to a street in your home nation. The pub he frequented was even worse. Not a stitch of Asia anywhere in its atmosphere, save for the miniskirted waitresses floating through the crowd with beers on round trays. I entered the pub to the sounds of American rock and American conversations; the GIs were still hours away from their curfew. I found Aeiou in a smoky back corner playing pool by himself. He had a battered ball cap crushed onto his cranium to hide fresh bed-head.
“You little fucking monkey,” he said as way of greeting, trying to restrain his joy at seeing me. He had this way of acting hurt that I let weeks and weeks go by without calling him, even though I represented but 1/125TH of his social circle.
“Oh give it a rest, Aeiou,” I said grinning, trading hands with him.
“I never see you unless you need something,” he pouted. “So what gives?”
I explained my situation.
“Oh fuck you, man! Like I’m going to find you extra work? I scored you part-time lecturing at a university, and you turned it down. I swore I’d never help you again after that.”
“Aeiou, look at me. I need a holiday. I need the money to go on holiday. Can you not set me up?”
He sighed, then handed me his pool cue. “Alright. You finish this game. I’ll make a phone call.” And dug his handphone out of the leg pocket of his cargo pants.
By the time I slammed the eight ball home, he had returned to the table with business done. “Her name is Ji-young. She wants to meet for two hours on Sundays. Her dad owns some ritzy hotel in Kangnam Station, so she can afford to pay. It’s fifty thou an hour, so don’t fuck it up. Here’s her number.”
I did some quick math in my head. “I knew you’d pull through.”
“Another thing: I know this girl. She’s cool, but she’ll tell the most godawful lies about me.”
I laughed. “Thanks, Aeiou. I won’t believe a word.” To show my gratitude, I bought him a pitcher of beer before packing up to leave.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“What, you think you’re the only wheeling and dealing I have to do today? I’ll be in touch.”
“You are such an asshole.”
“Really, I mean it,” I said, steering towards the door. “We’ll hook up next week.”
“Yeah yeah,” he sniped, racking up the balls again, then called out across the bar just before I disappeared. “And get yourself a handphone!”
~
I wasn’t always a beach holiday sort of fellow. I came here looking to embrace that holy grail: the Cultural Experience. I wanted to find rich histories among the skyscrapers and subway stops, the blood and bones of a 5,000–year narrative still in progress. So I did it all. The pagodas. The temples. The fortresses. The giant Buddha statues. After eighteen months, I learned something about this pituitary gland dangling off China. This is a country of fighters, ever vigilant of those who encroach on their destiny. So many have come in those fifty centuries—Japan, Mongolia, China, America—to take something away. It goes on and on, like a parade of people who believe invasion is in your best interest. Thi
s is what I’ve learned from those cultural landmarks: that nothing here is really built; it is simply re-built to substitute that which existed before it. Each monument comes with its own apology: “The original temple, burned to the ground by Japanese marauders in . . .” “. . . the fortress was reconstructed when the Chinese vacated the land after . . .” And so I began hunting for anything not re-built. A piece of cultural detritus that had stood its ground, untouched by the race to replace all those things that foreigners found necessary to destroy.
~
I sat across the table from Ji-young trying to insinuate a theory of mine into our conversation. We were in a café with the words JAZZ, COFFEE & DRINK written on the window. When Aeiou had said “Don’t fuck it up”, he meant only one thing: Don’t attempt to turn your private English lesson into a date. And in the beginning, I was of course all business: we were there to discuss verb tenses and current affairs, not our turn-ons. But a few sessions in and it was hopeless. My afternoon charge was a brutal little cutie-pie, stylish, 48 kilos, long black hair and skin like an unmarked beach. I was soon overrun with the urge to make her blush.
My theory: I find prepositions incredibly sexual. I mean, how could one not? You can’t tell me you teach someone prepositions and not feel the tug of arousal in your imagination. What would sex be without them? In. Out. On top of. Underneath. Between. Behind. See! This was a theory that I hoped Ji-young would grasp as we worked on her prepositions, but it wasn’t going well. I suspected her English and general life experiences were a bit underdeveloped to appreciate my insights. In a lot of ways, she was 27 going on 15: still lived at home, still had unrealistic expectations about love and careers, still spoke with a kind of vague idealism. Yet, one mention of Aeiou changed her demeanour completely: She got this smoky, mischievous gleam to her eyes at the sound of his name that made her look worldly in a tartish sort of way. I was awash in curiosity. When I asked for an explanation, she just shook her head and returned to her demure self. “A foul man,” she said with a restrained smirk, mixing her f sounds with her v sounds. “A foul man.”