Circus

by Claire Battershill

  So how does a person come to be buying ground coffee for a woman who no longer loves him late on a Tuesday night? He and Lisa are not married. They have no children. He could leave whenever he wants. Sometimes, as he’s drying dishes that haven’t been properly washed, or scrubbing the bathroom floor, he imagines skipping town and then tries to imagine her crying, or calling her friend Sophia from the studio, cradling the cell phone between her shoulder and her cheek and hugging her own body. But try as he might to conjure a vision of her curled up in the fetal position on their carpet, listening to Joni Mitchell, it’s never truly her. It’s always someone else in Lisa’s clothing. It seems more realistic to picture her rolling over in bed and going back to sleep, the way she does every morning after he places her coffee on her nightstand. When he imagines that scene, it is Lisa’s shape that curves back into the duvet; it’s Lisa’s arm that falls elegantly across his side of the bed. He’s fantasized about telling her he’s leaving just as she emerges from the bath, dripping wet and clean, while he stands there in one of his new suits, holding his single, carefully packed briefcase. But even in this scenario, she reacts to his news by flipping her dark hair over and wrapping it up in a towel, before wandering out to the living room to slouch on the couch in front of the TV.

  Sometimes Jay stands in his living room when Lisa isn’t home and pretends he’s being interviewed about his Great Escape. “Yes,” he says to the broom handle, “it was a tough call. She’s a beautiful lady … My getaway was such a powerful experience. In fact, you might just say everything in my life was leading up to that horse with an empty saddle pulling up in front of our condo building. The steed just said to me, ‘Jay, welcome to travel by horse. It is wonderful and free and solitary. You will love it, and I’ve saved my saddle just for you.’ … No, no, I don’t talk to horses. It was a figure of speech. People say that, don’t they, that things ‘called out to them’?” Jay always ends these imaginary interviews by laughing self-deprecatingly and staring at the carpet, suddenly self-conscious, even though there is no Lisa there to judge him.

  Of course these are only musings, because he can’t imagine learning a whole new way of living that doesn’t include her. While it’s easy to see Lisa on her own, eating Bran Flakes! at their kitchen counter as though nothing has changed, he can’t see himself going on in the same way. He has never lived with anyone else, nor has he ever lived alone, so it seems simply impossible. And anyway, he doesn’t actually want to go. So he always clears his throat at the end of his reveries and carries on with the housework. But sometimes the empty apartment makes him brave enough to think about starting over.

  Jay wanders up the Toiletries! Housewares! Cleaning Products! aisle of MegaFresh, coffee in hand, and stops in front of the shampoo and conditioner section. He flips open a manly-looking blue bottle of 2-in-1 and smells it. The scent is noxious and wrong, like aftershave laced with gasoline. Too manly, maybe. He pops the lid on another and inhales slowly. This one has notes of citrus, a “pleasantly acidic nose,” as Lisa would say. She took a wine tasting course with her friend Blake last summer, and now insists on using the lingo, describing a Shiraz the way Jay himself might describe a pirate – “big,” “aggressive,” “blowsy.” Jay doesn’t know the difference between “earthy” and “fleshy” wines, but if Lisa had asked him to come along, he would have happily swirled and smelled and drank the stuff before bickering gently with her about the “mouth-feel” of the grape. “Zingy” and “refreshing” is how the bottle describes the conditioner in his hand. Now those are good adjectives, Jay thinks. It’s hard to turn off his professional eye. He has been in the business of branding long enough now that nearly everything he sees becomes a commodity in need of a sales pitch. MegaFresh’s own particular strategy is to make everything seem thrilling! And Jay feels it. He does! It makes him want to buy more out of sheer professional admiration. He tucks the bottle under his arm and leaves the aisle, deliberately avoiding the leave-in conditioners.

  About eight months ago, just after Lisa started to dance less and organize more, working full-time to manage the studio, Jay started to apply excessive amounts of her leave-in conditioner to his hair. It began with an accident. He knocked the bottle off the shower caddy and the lid fell off. He was about to put it back, but instead he found himself following the directions on the bottle slavishly, except he just used more. He started at the roots, as the bottle recommended, and he sprayed and sprayed until his hair was wet through. Then he used it on the hair on the other parts of his body. He rubbed it in circular motions onto his chest, lingering at the nipples. The stuff smelled vaguely like marijuana with a soft, enduring hint of coconut, and there was something in the fine print about herbs and botanicals. It also smelled like her in a way she wouldn’t notice, but that caught him every so often when he tucked her hair away to kiss her cheek.

  Lisa never remarked on his new hair, always slick with product. She just let Jay touch the back of his hand to her face as though he was testing for a fever and say something about how her skin was as perfect as a ripe peach. “You’re sweet,” she’d say, her eyes fixed on the TV as he ran his hand over her shoulder and down her arm, where he let it rest, hardly touching her. Jay was going through more than one bottle a month, stealthily replacing it in Lisa’s absence, hoping she wouldn’t notice the extra expenditure. It was pricey stuff. Looked fancy, too, in its silver bottle with silky in cursive lettering. He thought about switching to a drugstore brand for himself, and leaving Lisa to her outrageously expensive but sparingly applied conditioner, but he figured it would be better to kick the habit altogether than to risk trying something new.

  Jay runs an open hand over his hair. He’s finding it easy to get distracted by all the things he could bring home. He wanders over to the baking aisle to see if they’ve restocked the Tahitian vanilla beans Lisa likes to put in her shortbread. She never eats the cookies herself, so he’s her taste tester. “Trying to quit!” she’d say brightly if Jay ever suggests that she have one, though it wasn’t a habit she’d ever had in the first place, as far as he knew. When he asked her why she spent all that time baking cookies no dancer would even think of eating, she’d just wipe her hands on a dishtowel and say, “It’s the quickest way to make something out of nothing. I put all the right measurements of the right ingredients in and it just works every time. And plus, you love them, right?” She knew he did. That’s why she used to leave two cookies on a plate for him by the espresso machine for when he got home from work. She hasn’t procrasti-baked in a long time, not since she started teaching ballet to four-year-olds on weekend afternoons and hanging out with the other instructors afterwards, staying out late for dinner and drinks. She has also stopped sorting their mail, including the flyers and coupons, by colour – a useless organizational tactic that began five years ago as a joke about Jay’s overly fastidious filing systems. Now the mail just sits on the counter in a large unsorted pile, and the apartment smells like conditioner instead of vanilla.

  “I’m really busy with work right now,” she texted him last week when he had asked if she’d be home for dinner. And a minute later: “You of all people should understand that.”

  “I’m just asking,” Jay texted back, “if you want me to get some food ready.”

  “Nothing for me. Don’t wait up.”

  “OK,” Jay texted, and paused for a moment before adding a kiss.

  Lately, Jay finds it easier to talk to her while she sleeps. Sometimes she murmurs gorgeous nonsense in response. Other times she even mumbles affection. “You’re too sweet,” she said the other night when he was encouraging her, praising each of her eyelashes and tracing his finger around the curl of her ear.

  Jay hopes that she might not be able to resist the lure of the new beans. But the supermarket is still out of stock.

  When Jay begins to tire of browsing shelf after shelf of smartly packaged food and daydreaming about his own daydreams, he makes his way to the only open checkout counter. In front of him i
s a man who, although he appears to be in his thirties, is wearing a tweed cap and a sweater vest under a blazer with a pocket square. On someone else the ensemble might have seemed dapper – trendy, even – but the man’s clothes are loose and ill-fitting and highlight his scrawny frame. He has inky, bluish-black marks on his temples and his eyes dart furtively beneath bushy eyebrows. He reminds Jay of one of the guys from Lisa’s dance program at NYU: slightly affected and a little dirty, as if one day he decided what he would look like every day for the rest of his life, cobwebs and hair growth notwithstanding. Jay runs his hand down the front of his suit jacket and removes a reusable shopping bag from his briefcase as he gets in line behind the somewhat unsettling man.

  “I already had chicken today, but I didn’t have any bread,” the man says, staring past Jay, probably at the display of plastic lemons filled with lemon juice, or at the pyramid of actual lemons beside it. “You’re not buying any chicken. Not overly fond of the bird?”

  “Oh, I like chickens okay,” Jay says, in case the stranger is talking to him.

  “However, I don’t make a habit of eating chicken wings,” the man says, staring up at the ceiling now and blinking hard at the ruthless lights. “There are bones from all different birds and that’s not healthy. Different parts of different chickens. That is not good for your heart. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  As Jay offers a weak nod, a twitch crumples the man’s face every few seconds, like a newspaper that’s been thrown into a campfire.

  “The best thing you can do for your heart is to stay outdoors,” the man continues. “I ride my bicycle every day. Will you look at that?” He pulls a quarter from his breast pocket and examines it. “It’s a silver quarter. Real silver. You know, the Canadian mint produced genuine silver quarters until 1967, and then they switched to aluminum. I’ll just keep this right here next to my heart. It’s very important to take care of your ticker. I personally have a strong heart –”

  “That’ll be three eighty-nine, sir,” the punk cashier says once she rings his bread through.

  “Oh, I see. I see now. Well, that’s very expensive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I need some bread, don’t I?”

  “I’ve rung it through now.”

  “I have a strong heart, you know, and I’ve already eaten some chicken today. Actually, I also tried to eat a fruit from the Chinese market. As a matter of fact, it was very expensive, too. It was brown and it was like a flower, but when I bit into it, well, that was a painful experience. Yes, the husk was hard, but a beautiful juice emerged from the centre, a milky white juice from the middle of the flower, and that tasted delicious. It tasted wonderful. I had hoped you could eat the whole thing, though, because those are expensive fruits. You can only get them at the Chinese market in the summer.”

  Jay considers saying the word lychee to give the man’s poetic description a name. For some reason, he doesn’t. He understands the feeling, though. Once in a while you put something in your mouth that tastes exquisite. Not just the usual kind of nice, or tasty, like when your sister makes Thanksgiving dinner for the family and everyone says, “Well, isn’t this delicious!” And it is. But it doesn’t take you to that next level, that place beyond delectable that makes your whole mouth and heart and stomach turn luscious, turn meltingly into gold. Jay is quite sure this is the feeling the man is talking about, only Jay wouldn’t get it from lychees. He thinks fleetingly of his new shampoo, of massaging it in a circular motion through his hair, of the water running down his neck. To each his own. But instead of agreeing, instead of saying, “Yes, you’ve totally got it! Tell everyone about exceptional fruit!”, he watches as the man declines a plastic bag, picks up the bread, and tips his cap. “Keep the change,” Jay says as he pays for his own groceries in a rush and follows him outside, where he watches from a safe distance as the man hops onto his bicycle – the plastic bag of bread dangling from the handlebars – and teeters away.

  Jay pauses for a minute by the bike racks. Wedged between an orange hipster bike with a wicker basket and a fancy new road bike with impossibly thin tires is a teal beater. It’s rusted in the body and has a kickstand that sticks out from its socket like a badly broken bone. There’s a U-shaped lock fixed to a clip on the back wheel, but it’s not attached to the rack. It’s no shopping cart in an empty supermarket, but it’s the next best thing. He looks around to see if anyone’s watching: an elderly woman wearing at least four layers of clothing sleeps beside the drug store across the street. There’s no one else around. Instead of walking in the direction of his condo, he puts his grocery bag into the basket at the front of the bike, balances his briefcase precariously on top, and grips the handbrakes to make sure they work. So far, so good. He backs the bike out, steps up on the pedals, and begins to ride away. The bike is too small and his knees nearly hit the handlebars with each turn of the pedals, but he rides faster anyway. Though he pounds away on the high-tech recumbent exercise bikes at the gym, he hasn’t ridden an actual bike since he was a child. It’s been at least three decades since he’s pushed himself forward with his own strength, but it’s true what they say about never forgetting. Barrelling through the city streets without a helmet, one hand on the handlebar, he picks up so much speed that his eyes water and his breath quickens. By the time he’s travelled five blocks he finds his rhythm and air is gathering in his sleeves. The world seems quieter than usual, but his own body sounds louder: there’s wind billowing inside his ears like he’s listening to the sea.

  He cycles down to the lakeshore and, having cleared the clutter of city light, he turns towards the water and rides head-on into the wind. There’s the stupid moon again, now that it’s come out from hiding behind a condo building. It’s so big that the sky is bright to bursting. Who does the moon think he is?

  Jay can feel his suit pants rubbing against the seat of the bike, and his tie needs further loosening, but he pedals on, the bike now bouncing along the wooden boardwalk beside the open water. At the end of the path, he rides into the empty concrete stretch of parking lot beside the entrance to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, with its grand archway topped by the winged stone angel who guards the nation’s miniature ponies and corn on the cob. Our Lady of the Midway. Jay breathes in diaphragm-deep before he leans back in a way he hasn’t done since he was ten and pulls a wheelie. As he tugs on the handlebars he can feel the weight of the bike lift off the ground, and he rises – not quite up, and not quite away, just a little higher than in everyday life. The trick doesn’t last long. As the front wheel drops jerkily back onto the ground, a siren cuts through the quiet spectacle of his only show-off move. He starts to hear the world again as the front wheel strikes the pavement a second time. For a moment he is simply astonished that he hasn’t fallen. As he turns the pedals in a slower, smoother motion, keeping himself steady, his throat tightens at the thought that he’s stolen this bike – even if only for a short ride. What would Lisa say if she saw him now, moon-crazed and loose-tied, riding a stolen bike as proudly as a kid with training wheels? He loops the bike in a wide circle around the lot and turns in the direction of home.

  Jay rides, slower now, through the side streets full of shambling Victorian houses, their gardens trellised with still-green cherry tomatoes. As he pauses at a stop sign, despite there being no cars around, he’s reminded of the elderly man who used to ride his bike along the same route past their condo every day whistling show tunes. He has never seen anyone be as consistently cheerful as the musical cyclist in his reflective clothing and trouser clips. Jay and Lisa used to call each other to the window whenever The Whistler passed by, waving at him from the seventh floor, even though he never noticed them, but it’s been months since they’ve had reason to do so. Even though Jay has kept watch, the poor guy hasn’t been around lately. Lisa thinks that The Whistler is old enough to have died, but Jay hopes that he has just moved to a seniors’ community where bicycle riding is encouraged.

  The uncompromisingly
chipper glow of the MegaFresh sign welcomes him back to his neighbourhood. Stepping off the bike, Jay pretends not to notice that the punk cashier is standing outside smoking and no doubt watching him as he rests the bike back up against the stand. He almost expects her to unleash her inner black belt and charge towards him howling Tarzan-style while she delivers a flying kick right to his chest. “Honestly,” she’d say, keeping him pinned to the ground with her foot on his sternum until the cops arrived and gave him the right to remain silent, “why would someone like you need to take what isn’t yours?” But the girl tosses her cigarette on the ground and turns to go back into the store. Instead of relief, Jay feels as if she does have her foot firmly planted in the centre of his chest. She tossed his grand performance away so easily: the butt-end of a slow day.

  When he arrives home, the condo is dark and smells of laundry detergent. It’s Clean Breeze, a scent designed to give clothes the impression of lightness and fresh air. Still, Jay can’t help himself from breathing in deeply. He sets his briefcase down by the door and navigates by the moon’s soft light to the kitchen to ready the coffee for the morning. He opens up the espresso and fills the chamber of the coffee grinder so that all he has to do when he wakes up is hit “start.” There is nothing on the counter except an unsorted pile of mail.

  Maybe he’s been unfair to the moon, which is still enormous outside the living room window. Actually, now that he really looks, it seems to have backed off a little. Jay can’t say why, but he just needs the moon to be the right size. What if the lunatic became so narcissistic it stopped knowing when to pull the waves in? Maybe it’s already forgotten its role in the ordinary pull and push of days. That might explain why Jay has fallen out of his usual rhythms lately: he can’t predict when he’ll want to rush home and when he’ll feel so far away from her he can hardly remember why he’s there at all. Or maybe there are no cycles left to follow, no steady movement of days into nights into days. With a conciliatory nod at the moon, Jay closes the curtains and gets ready for bed. He doesn’t turn on the bedroom light for fear of waking Lisa, so he puts his T-shirt on backwards and feels the tag scratching his neck as he lies down next to her and rests his cheek against her shoulder. She shrugs him off and murmurs, but doesn’t wake. He turns his back to her, draws his knees in close to his chest, and closes his eyes.