“Wondered?”
“You know,” she said. “Your mom told me to keep an eye out for signs.”
Julie and I were unlikely friends. We became so only when I was designated to keep track of her homework and upcoming assignments because she was going to be out of school for two weeks for minor surgery. Our class was small, but we had barely known each other. There was a certain rowdiness about her I found off-putting. Always, when she laughed, I thought there was mockery in it; I thought she was noticing that my ponytail wasn’t as smooth as hers, that my breath wasn’t quite right, or that the pleats in the back of my kilt needed ironing. Our teacher had chosen me to take her work to her because we lived near each other. What made our friendship possible was that Julie’s candour, so unexpected, immediately capsized all my opinions about her. The first time we sat down in her kitchen to make a schedule for when I would come by, she told me all about her surgery. She had a problem called retention with afterflow. It was a bladder problem, more common among older women. She would think she had emptied her bladder, then she would have to go a little more, sometimes even urinating a bit without feeling it.
“It’s just that it doesn’t all come out when you want it to,” she had said. “And there it is a bit later, when you have no control.”
Talking about bladder control: undoubtedly the beginning of something.
Her mother thought the problem was caused by the fact that Julie, as a child, had refused to urinate more than twice a day and had even gone away for the weekend to a friend’s cottage and drank little and allowed herself to go only when everyone was outside, after she had already been there for almost twenty-four hours. She was mortified by the prospect of people hearing the revealing tinkle through the thin wooden walls. Of course, Julie’s mother had no medical knowledge whatsoever, other than being married to a cardiologist and being impressed by all doctors. She was a shopgirl at Holt Renfrew and had long, thick red nails. She insisted that all their cars have vanity plates and believed that there was not a man alive who could fail to become besotted with Julie. When she talked about the reason for Julie’s retention with after-flow, her voice became loud and nasal and she used words that were not words, like lossage and drainery.
My friendship with Julie lasted for as long as it did, not because we had such a special connection, but because I was fascinated by her, and I never stopped being honoured that she had told me the reason for her surgery so openly, given that she had the kind of mother who invented words to replace the words that corresponded to the real functions of the human body. Julie would always surprise me in this way. She would behave in a way that her behaviour a moment later would call into question—ashamed at the prospect of people hearing her urinate during a cottage weekend, but capable of telling me she had a bladder control problem. It is difficult not to fall for unpredictability.
And several weeks later, at my house, Julie bonded with my mother over their fondness for discussing sex. I came from looser people than Julie did, but I had turned out much tighter. In my house, the toilet was likely to be full of unflushed urine at any given time. Julie had had sex, which her mother did not know, and she and my mother were united through their sex-loving complacency. Halfway through grade ten, Julie broke up with her first boyfriend, and for six months in the wake of the breakup, he argued for her love through daily letters. “He’s obsessed,” Julie told my mother matter-of-factly and my mother nodded eagerly, beaming. The three of us pored over his letters at my dining room table after school. “You move through my head like some useless tune I have unconsciously taken to,” he wrote. “I whistle your cherry kiss, your sweet honey voice all day. I hum your spirit!” Each paragraph ended with an exclamation mark. He never signed his name to the letters, and in one of them explained that he couldn’t bring himself to sign his name to Julie. He was afraid that the name would throw her off, that she wouldn’t be able to connect it to the person he was in her head. “It is my label, but it is not my essence as you know it,” he wrote. He spoke frequently of his essence. Instead of signing, he trailed off each letter with a squiggly line.
My mother was immensely comforted by my affiliation with Julie. She had been disturbed by my lack of sexual activity, and she wanted to be reassured that I masturbated. She seemed to harbour suspicions that I was not sufficiently sexual, and that I failed to experience the degree of horniness that normal teenaged girls did. When facing her inquiries, I often pretended that I did masturbate regularly, although I did not, simply to ease her mind. Later, during my phase of furious sex with Stephen, my mother came to visit and made it known to me before she left that she was delighted to see three empty condom boxes in the garbage.
“I feel personally rewarded,” she said. “Personally rewarded.”
Julie was living with her husband, Angus, in Riverdale, but that day in the café all she wanted to talk about was her therapist, whom she had seen just that morning. At the beginning of the therapy, he had been a disappointment, short and unattractive with copper-coloured hair and a bald patch he attempted to conceal with highlights, but (no doubt through some devious psychological strategy, she said) he had gotten to her. She was having nightly dreams about him.
“I had a sexual nightmare,” she said. “I went for my appointment and he wanted to take me somewhere else. I was afraid and didn’t want to go, but felt I couldn’t say no. So he drove me to a building, where he had this stark, empty apartment. We went in and he spread a blanket out on the floor, as if we were going to have a picnic, and he was staring at me in a gross way, kind of flirty and scolding. Then he started stroking my breast through my sweater in a slow, horrible way. He was sitting cross-legged and his penis was bulging out of his pants. I was afraid of him and wanted to get out, but I didn’t want to be rude. I thought that it was best to go along with it and get it over with. I kept noticing this bare patch of skin above his black socks, and it made me hate him.”
After that dream, at a mainly silent session during which he watched Julie while she sighed theatrically and contemplated the diplomas on his wall, she had suggested leaving. He shook his head apologetically and smiled as if at a small child pleading for candy. It was unthinkable, he explained, she wasn’t nearly ready to be on her own. “You’re being resistant,” he said with a tender dip of his head. “But that’s part of the process.”
I told her that twice I had seen a female therapist who called me doll and assigned as homework a book entitled Goodbye Mother, Hello Woman.
“I know,” said Julie. “They’re all bullshit. I can see that, but I can’t see that, if you know what I mean.”
I did know what she meant, exactly.
Julie spoke to me as if we had never stopped speaking. She had never been one for slow introductions, for easing through beginnings that could be bypassed. Her voice was full of impetuous goodwill, a desire to abandon false reserve, and she made me feel I didn’t have to work with her. Her voice had a regal breathiness that made you want to lean in and listen, and we talked with that rare mix of comfort and newness that occurs with girls quite young. Our conversation seemed expansive and mysterious, something not bound by consequence or expectation. While I was with her, I forgot all about Stephen. I forgot that I would have to go home to him. At one point, she took a long breath, looked at me and said, “I realize I’ve missed you.” It was the only time I had been out of Stephen’s and my apartment in three days, and I was hungry for the first time in a week. I thought, Finally, here is what I need: a warping and rechannelling of routine, unplanned alterations.
“I think I’m secretly in love with Dr. Stillman,” Julie said. “But I’m not sure.”
Looking back, I can see how what seemed so lovely was, in fact, the start of the problem. I wanted something of her life. It all seemed simple enough: Julie felt a kind of repelled love for her therapist, a pornographic undercurrent in every moment she spent with him. She hated her husband.
I suppose my need was such that I could not separate, the
n, what she told me from what I believed she had told me.
THE FIRST TIME I met Angus, Julie wasn’t there. She had invited me to her house for breakfast, and when I arrived, there was only him, sitting in the back of the small, pretty house in Riverdale, in a greenhouse he’d built on the back of their kitchen. He was surrounded by glossy emerald plants and ink-stained paper. I remembered, even years later, exactly how he smelled, like tree roots and ravine air.
When I arrived, no one answered the door. After knocking and ringing the doorbell for five minutes, I finally went around to the backyard. I had it in my head that Julie might be gardening, that it was the kind of thing she might do, even though it was December and there was no garden to tend. I was calling Julie’s name as I walked around to the back and saw the greenhouse. I knocked on its glass door and turned the knob, which was unlocked. When I went in, at the far end I saw a man sitting at a desk, facing the rear windows.
“Is Julie here?” I asked. I didn’t usually walk right into people’s houses unannounced, but I didn’t feel in the least embarrassed that I had done so.
The man turned around. His black hair was beautifully unkempt, the kind of profusion that’s ruined by grooming. All around him were plants, in handmade pots along shelves by the windows, on the floor in large, bright ceramic pots. The desk was covered in loose papers, and there was a portable heater churning loudly next to it. The man’s eyes were green. They were half-open, but gave the impression of uncommon alertness.
“You’re Julie’s friend.”
I nodded. “She invited me for breakfast.”
“Julie’s not here,” he said. “She went to a medical doctor. Her therapist. But he is, in fact, a medical doctor.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“It was an emergency,” he added. “I’m obviously Julie’s husband.”
Then he disappeared into the kitchen and returned dragging a chair. “Would you like to sit?” he asked.
“I can go,” I said. “I don’t want to interrupt.”
He set the chair down definitively.
He was wearing a T-shirt that said, “I’M SURROUNDED BY ASSHOLES,” and I noticed when he came close that all his fingernails were bitten. He was tall and had a flabby thinness, with a little belly that went around his waistline like a snake. Julie had told me about this T-shirt—one of her greatest struggles was his insistence on wearing it on teaching days. He was a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, and he neglected his teaching responsibilities but worked hard on his own research. This is what he talked about as we sat in the greenhouse. I imagined him lecturing a hall of first-year students, the kind of teenagers who ingratiate themselves with a well-timed compliment, then devastate you with a smirk of pure contempt.
“Drunks are surprisingly responsible,” he said. “At least when it comes to sex. That’s what we found, and of course it runs contrary to a popular belief.”
He was writing an article on the psychological underpinnings of drunk and sober decision-making. I asked him about his research and he talked about it with jumpy gestures that periodically blew the papers off his desk. When this happened, he snatched them back up from the ground immediately and stashed them protectively under his arm.
“I promise I won’t steal them,” I said.
“There’s so much people don’t understand. There’s so much we don’t understand, even though we study this,” he said. “People who are drunk—when informed about the dangers of unprotected sex—are actually less likely to have unprotected sex. Isn’t that a surprise? It’s very exciting.”
He explained his research very clearly, and while he spoke, he looked at my stomach. There was a sweet asexuality about him. He was an odd mixture of jittery discomfort and academic composure. His entire body stayed perfectly still while his hands flapped nervously. I could see that he was probably often on the receiving end of that dirty adolescent laughter, the kind of laughter that wants you to know you’re being laughed at. He had been married before, Julie had told me. When he was twenty-five, he had married a redhead who was fifty but looked thirty. She was perpetually melancholy, a closet poet. He came home one day to find that she had sloppily burned all her poems, which he hadn’t even known existed, in the middle of the kitchen floor, and all her clothes were gone. Everywhere were little burned bits of paper with allusions to other poems, such as “The Grecian urn has cracked,” and “We will not go then you and I until our blood has lit the morning sky.”
Julie had said, “Being a poet says a lot about a person.”
She had also said, in a satisfied sort of way, “When you marry a divorced man, you’re getting another woman’s baggage.”
Angus stretched his spine over the back of his chair, and his T-shirt receded, exposing the lower part of his stomach. I noticed he had a scar the shape of a crescent moon over his navel.
“Julie showed me an old picture of you from a yearbook,” he said. “I almost wouldn’t have recognized you.” He leaned forward. “Is there anything you need?”
I asked for a glass of water, although I didn’t particularly want it, because I had the sense that he wanted to do something for me. The cordless phone on his desk rang, and he answered, listened for several moments, then cupped his hand over the receiver and told me that he’d be several minutes and that there was a Brita filter in the refrigerator.
I was sweating under my heavy sweater and winter coat, and the kitchen was cool like a rush of outdoor spring air. I do not know what I thought of Angus then. Certainly I was not aware of any romantic envy of Julie, any immediate fascination with his sexual self, or even the kind of person he was. What I felt most was the nosiness that had at one time been my most infamous character trait, that itchy longing to know other people’s business that had led my sister to have a lock put on her door when she was fourteen.
I looked at the kitchen ceiling and imagined I could hear, beyond the distant stir of old copper pipes, the paint chipping slowly, peeling away in smooth curls. The glasses were in the first cupboard I opened, but I kept going. I inched each cupboard door open, afraid that their creaky hinges would give me away. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, just the usual. Something distasteful, something foreign and subversive. Things I would never buy. Teriyaki sauce. Gnocchi. Strawberry Pop-Tarts. Crystal Light drink mix. But Julie’s cupboards were stacked just like mine. Rice Krispies. Peanut butter. Spaghetti noodles. It was all the same. I couldn’t quite see to the top shelf, but I thought I glimpsed something familiar. I leaned around the corner and saw Angus, sitting motionless with his back to me, at his desk. Quickly, I pulled myself up onto the counter, determined to find out what was up there. I stooped on the counter so my head wouldn’t hit the ceiling, and looked into the top shelf. In the corner was an egg cup in the shape of Humpty Dumpty, a birthday present I had given Julie when she turned fifteen, in the days when she was caught up in memorizing nursery rhymes. I put it down and started digging to the back of the highest shelf. It was mostly cobwebs and kitchen things no one ever used, like beer mugs and rusty whisks.
I was trying to figure out what Angus’s favourite foods might be when he walked in. He stood for a minute quietly. My arm was extended into the back corner of the cupboard farthest from the door.
“What are you doing?” he asked. He sounded calm and curious, as if he had just caught me in the middle of a benign activity, like reading a geography book.
He came over to the counter and stood beneath me, looking up. He lifted his arms like a child, and I lowered myself into them. He set me on the ground delicately and looked at me. That was all it took. In his eyes, I saw the possibility that he had never harmed anyone.
Then he turned to the refrigerator and took out a pitcher of water.
I stood behind him and tried not to imagine myself touching the worn back of his T-shirt.
WHEN I WAS A teenager, I would lie in bed at night wondering what it was like to be on the receiving end of obsession. It seemed
to me the most honourable gift you could bestow upon someone. I knew I would behave quite differently than Julie if someone were possessed by me, consumed to the point of superlatives and imperatives, the hyperbolic language of hope and defeat. Every afternoon when Julie arrived home from school for those six months after the breakup with that first boyfriend, she would find love letters in the mailbox. At first she found them flattering, but a change came after some months, and Julie no longer found the letters amusing. The boy told her that she never left his mind for a moment, and that he would always love her. “What a burden,” Julie shouted, slamming the letter into the garbage. “I absolutely can’t stand this following me around forever.” And she meant it. Even in the first comic blush of the boy’s obsession, Julie never felt these epistolary outbursts were anything she needed. She didn’t feel adoration gave her anything extra; it didn’t nourish her in some way she was not already nourished. And for this I sometimes hated her. I was desperate to be the victim of terrorizing, vicious affection, such persistent and dishevelled lust. At best, I thought, I would find a typical love.
It is the typical that often breaks you. After hours of fighting one night, I initiated sex with Stephen at two o’clock in the morning because I thought it would warm me to him again. Afterwards, I couldn’t sleep. My whole body felt genital, rocking with a hot, queasy pulse. Stephen was already snoring beside me, and I got out of bed, making sure to slam the door when I left. I ran a shallow oatmeal bath to soak in. The water was cool and I was shivering, so I wrapped a towel around my shoulders and sat looking at my lumpy reflection in the faucets. It was one of those moments when the unpleasant becomes ritualized, the typical threatening. I felt the shift. It was the end of something, a movement away from that frenzied middle space we had been occupying.
Stephen finally came and stood in the doorway of the bathroom. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
“No,” I said, thinking, You’ve done enough.
The Virgin Spy Page 9