*
Leah lay in the dark in her room; eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Wasn’t much to look at up there, and she’d already counted the ceiling tiles. And here she was, still awake. She let out a lungful of breath. This middle of the night wakefulness was what she got, she supposed, for sleeping all day and doing nothing to earn a night of rest. Lying on the couch reading home decorating magazines wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that could wear a girl out. It was plenty depressing, sure, and that brought with it its own kind of exhaustion, but it wasn’t the kind that tended to lead to the satisfied, deep sleep she was craving. She wasn’t going to find that kind tonight. She rolled over and looked at the clock. Coming up on two in the morning. God. Way too early to actually get up. Too late to get dressed again and pretend she’d just been napping. Way too late to call anyone, even Charlotte. Well, she thought, I can always get up and do the dishes.
“Yes,” she said aloud. “I’ll get up.”
She sat up, gingerly put her feet on the cold wooden floor. The birds shifted in their cages. Neil sat up, too, and said “Biiirrrrit?”
“I’m getting up, Neil. Can’t sleep. Downstairs?”
Neil stretched and leapt nimbly off the bed. On the floor, he stretched again, one leg and then the other, and looked at her intently while he did so.
“Don’t get any big ideas, though,” she cautioned him. “It’s the middle of the night, which is no known feline feeding time. So that’s not what this is about, as long as were both crystal clear, okay?”
Neil butted his head against her calf.
“I’m not kidding,” she told him. She pulled her bathrobe from the chair beside her bed, and drew it on, knotting it at the waist. “Shall we?” she asked. Neil trotted out ahead of her and four-legged it down the stairs. Watching his furry butt descend, she was filled with nameless, wordless, inexplicable affection. How could such an annoying creature fill her with so much love, she wondered. It was such pure emotion, what she felt for him. And he was just a cat. His fur smelled like corn, his nails were sharp, he had a pesky way of standing on her lungs when she was trying to sleep, and he could not be convinced to stay off the goddamn kitchen counters. More than once she’d found his teeth marks in the butter. She wasn’t even sure she really liked cats all that much, but Neil? Neil she loved. And these days, she was gladder than ever to have him around. This self-imposed exile needed company of some kind, and Neil’s was perfect. She could talk or not talk and it was all the same to him. She never had to explain herself or apologise for her mood. As long as she kept the crunchies and fresh water coming, Neil was satisfied. And he made a comforting lump in the bed at night.
She moved through the house in the dark, the rooms barely illuminated by light from the street. Everything was different at night. The possessions she knew and loved so well were shadowy, their use inscrutable, their shapes even a bit sinister. She felt a tingle of fear as she passed by the basement door, enough to make her hurry her pace to the kitchen, where she fumbled to turn the light on quickly, to banish that prickle, keep it in its place in the dark. That was the deal. No scariness allowed once the lights were on. She wasn’t sure who exactly she had this deal with, but she’d relied on it since childhood. The fluorescent lights of the kitchen were soothing to her now, and she brought her breathing back to normal. She surveyed the situation.
Pots and pans from the day’s cooking were stacked haphazardly beside the sink, along with the side-plates and chevre-encrusted knives that were the detritus of Leah’s usual spartan cheese-and-cracker meals these days.
She plugged the sink and ran hot water into it. A squirt of dish-washing liquid resulted in almost instant bubbles, and she began loading in the dirty glasses, plates and cutlery.
Leah loved to wash dishes. It satisfied the part of her that longed to take people and things that were fucked up, and make them whole and right. Doing the dishes was a particularly instantaneous way to gratify that desire. She loved to let her hands swim through hot soapy water. She loved the way the glass went all squeaky when it was clean, the way plates once dull could be made to gleam. She loved to return cutlery to its formerly sparkling self. She didn’t like drying quite as much, but on a night like this, even the lesser of the two tasks could scratch her itch. She gloried in the clean stack of cups and dishes, the points of the knives seeming to glow in the bright kitchen. When she was done washing, she let out the water and decided to scrub the sink. The cleanser smelled bleachy and good as she sprinkled it onto the stainless steel. She scrubbed at the metal and felt a kind of pride in how clean she was making it. Even though it hadn’t looked dirty, as she swirled clean water into the sink, washing the cleanser down the drain, the basin was noticeably brighter. Leah saw what she’d done and decided it was good. She leaned back against the stove and felt calm.
She wished she had a cigarette. Smoking used to punctuate her days, signalling an end to every task, the beginning of another. But she’d had to give up when Nathan got sick. It seemed too willfully stupid to keep smoking when he had cancer, even though the kind he had had nothing to do with smoking. Nothing to do with anything, as far as they’d been able to work out. It was just cruel and unusual punishment for — for what? For nothing. What had Nathan ever done to anybody? Sure, he was a pain in the ass older brother, but what older brother wasn’t? And she was sure he’d crossed a few people in his time, but come on. In terms of big sins? There just weren’t any; that she knew of. She’d seen him fight with Rebecca, but what could you expect? They were both totally stubborn. Of course they fought. Didn’t mean they didn’t love each other, weren’t perfect for each other. The whole thing just beggared belief, but if she started down that road, Leah thought, she’d never get off it. She’d never, ever again get to sleep. Better simply to lose herself in whatever she could. In this case, on this night, that’d be scotch and housework. She moved to the hoosier, took down the bottle of scotch and a clean glass. Poured the drink, not worrying this time about adding ice. She took the first warming sip, then pulled a tea towel from the drawer, put the drink aside, and began to wipe the dishes dry, one at a time.
*
Henry leaned over the bar and shouted, “Two tequila and orange juice” to the bartender, but he might as well have been whispering. She looked at him and shrugged, her beautiful naked shoulders rising and falling like a wave he could drown in. He wanted to put his lips right against her ear, talk right into her, and given the chance, he wouldn’t waste his breath ordering drinks, oh no. But there was no way he’d be making time with this girl. She was way too beautiful, and besides, she was already irritated with him. He gave up on the mixed drinks, held up two fingers and yelled, “Two Keith’s.” She understood that one alright, turned away from him in a flounce of hair and breast and perfume — he swore he could smell it rising above the sweaty, smoky crowd — and bent to the beer fridge. He admired her perfect ass in its perfect low-rise jeans, each cheek lovingly outlined by the clinging denim. He felt the blood pounding in his head and in his pants and forced himself to imagine the machinations that would be involved in getting a girl like that to go home with him. Hell, in getting a girl like that to talk to him beyond telling him how much he owed for the two beers. That straightened him out pretty fast. It was an impossible situation, and he was already in one of those. No need to further complicate his deal. By the time she whirled around again, two cold and sweating bottles in her hand, he was over her. Or, more properly, he was over the moment of weakness that had let him think he would ever be in a position, ever be a lucky enough bastard that he would get the chance to get over someone like her. Hell, he couldn’t even get over Tina, and it had already been almost a month since she’d kicked his sorry ass to the curb.
God, Tina. He grabbed the beers from the beautiful barkeep and took a long swallow out of one of them. She snickered in disgust. “Eight bucks,” she yelled over the throbbing dance music. “It’s eight bucks.” He remembered himself, and grabbed for his wallet
, his upper lip wet with perspiration and beer. He pulled out a five and a handful of loonies and pushed them toward her. Then he grabbed the beers again, treated himself to another long swallow, and pushed off to find Johnny Parker.
The night Tina kicked him out it snowed like a bastard. And she had really kicked him out. None of this nice breaking up you hear so much about, where you talk for hours and hours trying to settle your differences, and when it becomes clear that you just don’t want the same thing, you both cry, and you hold each other, and then you climb into bed for some intense farewell sex, and in the morning you start looking for an apartment. And you live together civilly, even having more sex on occasion, if that’s what seems appropriate, until you find a new place to live, and you remain friends and have joint custody of the cat. None of that for his Tina. Oh no. She sent him out in a hail of broken crockery, in a shower of shouted insults, in a barrage of sneered accusations. There was no soft sentiment in that breakup that was certain. He went down under her violence and he was still waiting to surface.
And sure, he wasn’t blameless. Sure, he’d egged her on, he hadn’t listened to her half the time she’d bitched at him for whatever it was he was doing wrong. But he never thought it would come to this. Come to him rootless, owning not much more than the pile of clothes currently mouldering on James and Emily’s bathroom floor and the guitar that never dealt a harsh or unkind word his way. Come to him not even having a permanent place to live, for chrissakes, but shacked up instead in James and Emily’s place while James was away on tour, dealing with signs of happy coupledom wherever he looked — the matching night stands in the bedroom, framed photos of the two of them throughout the house, their left behind toothbrushes leaning together in the glass on the bathroom shelf. There he was every day, taking in their mail, seeing none of his own. He was sure Tina was dumping his in a snowbank or burning it on the barbecue — she probably wouldn’t even bring it in the house and burn it properly, in the fireplace — she hated him that much.
He couldn’t figure it out. She was the one who had cheated on him. After all that time, and all her fear, and all her misguided accusations, in the end, it was she who could not be true. Henry had had plenty of opportunity, and had been plenty tempted. And to him it would have been just sex. But the thought of it made Tina insane, and he loved her, or thought he should, and so he never strayed. And finally, one night when he was in Moncton pinch-hitting for Johnny Parker in some Tragically Hip tribute band, Tina stepped out on him. When he got home, she was sitting there, thin-lipped, white-cheeked and she told him. Told him she’d slept with her art teacher, a great poncey old man she seemed to think was brilliance incarnate. And when Henry just nodded and sank down heavily into a kitchen chair and shook his head once or twice silently, she lost it. She started yelling and screaming and throwing things. She pulled him to his feet and hammered on his chest and raved at him, as if he were the one who had sold their relationship out. He took it, he took it all, and he never said a word. What was there to say? His silence only enraged her and she stood there in the kitchen, eyes awash in hatred and something else, something Henry couldn’t place — disgust, maybe or despair — and she said in a voice so quiet that he almost didn’t hear it: “I think you’d better go. I think you’d better get your fucking stuff and get out of my sight.” Henry started toward the bedroom without a word, but Tina got in front of him and he reared back, as if she were on fire. “On second thought,” she said evenly, “just get the fuck out now. You can come and get your stuff tomorrow when I’m at work, but if you don’t leave right now, I think we’ll both be sorry.”
He could see she wasn’t fucking around, so he groped for his coat as quietly and subtly as he could, as if any sudden move could make her explode again. He carried it in one hand; it hung down like the carcass of an animal he’d found in the woods. He looked longingly at his guitar as he passed it in the hallway, but he didn’t dare grab for it. He could feel Tina’s eyes on him from the kitchen, and for the first time in the five years he’d known her, he felt afraid. Real fear. And real pity, and a blend of other emotions with a rank bouquet, a blend he decided then and there to try as hard as he could to forget.
He took his leather jacket and let himself out into the night, then slid into its sleeves and zipped it up. He stood on South Street and wondered what the fuck to do. He went to the pay phone across the street and rang up Johnny Parker.
He moved now through the crowd at the Booze Barn, a crowd that seemed to undulate with one mind, or, more properly, he thought, with one crotch. He held the beers aloft and looked for Johnny Parker in the fray. Finally he saw him, his friend’s six-foot-four frame towering above a group of — what else? — pretty girls. Johnny’s blond curls were like a beacon in that room, and girls were floating his way, dashing themselves on his rocks. He leaned down conspiratorially and flirted with three girls who were probably in first year pharmacy, or maybe kinesiology. There was a sameness about girls like that, and on nights such as these, Henry thought, it’s a sameness that comforts to no end. He came up on the group and handed Johnny Parker the Keith’s he hadn’t started to drink. They clinked bottles and Johnny Parker smiled a half smile at Henry, who raised his eyebrows back. The girls tossed their hair and Henry could feel them evaluating him. He did a mental inventory; did he feel air on his cock, meaning his zipper was down? Could he feel anything hanging out of his nose? When was the last time he’d actually seen his hair? And could they tell he really, really didn’t care which one of them he went home with, as long as he went home with one of them? Did it matter if they could tell? Probably not. In fact, it would probably help. Oh, sure, they’d make it difficult for him, there’d be a hint of humiliation in it, but he realised he actually didn’t give a fuck, as long as he could find himself, within a few hours, being led up the stairs to some two-bedroom flat, having to be quiet so as not to wake the roommate, snickering quietly and pushing his hands up some accommodating girl’s sweater, as long as he could peel her clothes off and shed his own like a skin he’d grown out of, as long as he could climb atop some living, breathing, laughing, fucking girl and just move. That’s all. Just move on her, move in her, move her, move the bed. As long as he could fuck and fuck until she cried out and then he did, until he could collapse, sweaty, spent, satisfied and fall into sleep and forget for a few miserable hours just who he was and how things had gone so very very wrong for him. Was it too much to ask one of these pretty young girls to take him home and let him disappear from himself for awhile?
Sometimes, Henry worried himself. Tonight, however, he was determined to ignore the nagging feeling that he was becoming deeply weird. He smiled at the brown-haired girl Johnny didn’t have an arm around and said, “Wanna dance?”
*
Charlotte leaned back, her elbows propping her up against the bar.
“Can I buy you a drink?” asked the guy in the chequered shirt who’d been staring at her ever since her neat dismount from the mechanical bull. She’d landed on her feet in a cloud of straw on the floor, wiped her palms on her jeans, let out a lungful of breath and sauntered coolly across the room. The guy, however, had not been quite as cool. Now he was standing in front of her, nervous and red-faced. Charlotte looked him up and down. He wasn’t exactly setting her on fire, but she was willing to try anything once. “Sure. Jack Daniels, neat,” she said, twisting over her shoulder to deliver her order to the barkeep.
“Jack Daniels, neat,” the nervous guy repeated. He swallowed hard. “Make that two.”
Charlotte barely tipped her cowboy hat in his direction, smiled at him with her mouth.
“Come here often?” the guy asked. At least he was consistent in his approach, Charlotte thought.
“No,” she told him. “Never, in fact.”
The bartender set two glasses up on the bar, poured the shots, said to the nervous guy, “Six bucks.”
The guy pulled out his money, slid it across the bar. He handed a glass to Charlotte, kept the ot
her one for himself.
“L’chaim,” Charlotte said, raising her glass a moment.
“Gezundheit.”
She laughed once, while confusion rippled across his face. She knocked the JD back and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Nervous Guy took a big gulp of his drink, coughed and sputtered.
“Need a pat?” Charlotte asked, lifting her arm.
He flinched away then remembered himself, coughed and sputtered anew, and finally said, “No, no, I’m good. I’m good.”
“Good,” Charlotte said. She twisted over her shoulder again, held up her empty glass, caught the barkeep’s eye, and said, “’Nother one, please.” She looked at Nervous Guy. “You?”
He gestured to his drink, barely depleted. “No, uh, no thanks. I’m uh — “
“Good?” Charlotte said.
“Yeah,” Nervous Guy said, nervously. “I’m good.”
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