How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?

by Doretta Lau

  I let Oliver sit on my floor and talk until dawn. Had it been later in the year, birds would have begun their morning song before the first light. He mostly spoke about Natalie—he was delivering a eulogy, gaining closure—but he also talked about his childhood on a farm in Manitoba and the years he spent homeless after dropping out of high school.

  When Oliver ceased to speak, I told him about a show I went to earlier that week and how I was thinking about taking guitar lessons. He offered to teach me, and I accepted.

  “You’re the only person I’ve talked to for more than thirty minutes in weeks,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Then we started laughing about an odd experience he’d had on a photo shoot that day. There was a harmony to our voices, which was soon accompanied by the sound of Jordan banging on the wall, imploring us to quiet down. For the first time in months my small suite in the Shaughnessy felt like home.

  III

  December and January seemed a blur of frost and discontent. Rather than make the trip to Kelowna to visit my mother—who was living alone for the first time in her adult life—I stayed in Vancouver to earn double pay during the statutory holidays. Saving money had become a habit, despite the fact I no longer wished to travel. I had not yet developed a taste for expensive things, so my bank account continued to grow at a steady pace. On Boxing Day, the temperature dropped to four below, and I stayed at work after my shift ended at a temporary retail job to enjoy the free heat and to avoid telephone calls at my apartment.

  To my surprise, Yoichi was angry when I told him I would not join him in London. I had assumed he didn’t really miss me all that much—I was mistaken. He told me that he would come back to Vancouver in June with the intention of staying for three months before returning to school and he asked me what I thought about that. I said I wasn’t sure, and that I needed time to consider this new development.

  “Is this because of that guy?” he asked. His tone of voice was

  aggressive.

  “What guy?” I asked, mystified.

  “Kara said you went to her housewarming party with some guy named Oliver Andrews.”

  I sighed. “We didn’t go together. I saw him there.”

  “She said you left with him. Who is he?”

  “My upstairs neighbour. You know, the tall Korean dude. He drove me home.”

  “I don’t remember him.”

  “This isn’t about him. I made the decision to stay in Vancouver for myself.”

  “Why don’t you want to come to London?”

  “What would I do there?”

  “The same things you do now, only with me.”

  Yoichi continued to talk, but I didn’t feel like listening. Our conversation was about to go in circles.

  I hung up the phone.

  I didn’t go to sleep immediately. I lit a cigarette and flipped through Exclaim! until I reached filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s audacious column, “Blab,” which I anticipated every month like a small child on Christmas morning. For this particular instalment, he related his

  adventures with his boyfriend, known as “The Muslim,” at a fairground and at his parents’ house during Thanksgiving. As I read about their month of cotton candy, ecstasy, family and fortune cookies, I knew that I yearned for Yoichi, but I was too stubborn to call him back and admit that maybe I was wrong to stay in Vancouver.

  The guitar lessons with Oliver went better than expected; I was rhythmically challenged and tone-deaf, though knowing this never stopped me from hogging the microphone at karaoke. Somehow, likely because he was a patient and forgiving teacher, I was able to master basic chords. “I can start my own punk band now!” I said the first time I made it through a simple song without faltering. At that moment, I pondered what it might be like to kiss Oliver, but before I could act on the impulse, the phone rang—it was Yoichi. I felt guilty even though nothing had happened.

  One day after a lesson, we were sitting in my apartment listening

  to the Frog Eyes album The Bloody Hand, which we were obsessed with at the time. We scanned the listings in The Georgia Straight to figure out what we wanted to do that afternoon, vetoing anything that would cost more than fifteen dollars each. After combing through the paper, Oliver wanted to go to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, and I agreed to accompany him.

  The exhibition contained both art and obsolete technologies: an iron lung, a set of Eadweard Muybridge photographs, a Lee Bul sculpture. As I gazed upon the objects I realized that nearly every person I met was just as anxious about the future as I was. Technology did little to mitigate our fears and our desires, especially after the violence of 9/11.

  Once we grew tired of looking at art, we emerged from the gallery onto the street. It was already dark out, but there was enough light for me to see that upon the steps just outside the building, Natalie was sitting with a guy (I recognized him from a local band, but I couldn’t recall which one). She had not noticed either of us, but Oliver gazed over and she looked up and there was no avoiding an encounter. Oliver nodded in her direction, seemingly cool, but as she stood up and walked towards us, he grabbed my hand.

  “I don’t think this is the tactic you want to take. Abort mission!” I whispered, but he ignored me and in seconds she was before us. I freed my hand from his as she leaned over to hug him.

  “Julia, this is Natalie,” he said, stepping back from her.

  “Hello,” I said. I tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace.

  “You look so familiar,” she said to me. “Where do I know you from?”

  How many times had we seen each other in the Shaughnessy? Fifteen, twenty times? “I get that a lot,” I said, attempting to smile again but failing. “Did you just see the cyborg exhibition?”

  “No, Alec and I are just waiting for friends.”

  “New boyfriend?” Oliver asked.

  “Yes.”

  I could see that Oliver found this news devastating—his hands betrayed his feelings—so I said, “I’m getting a bit cold. We should be on our way. It was lovely to meet you.”

  We said our goodbyes and departed.

  “Will I ever get over her?” Oliver asked as we walked home.

  “In another few months you’ll wonder why you were so upset.”

  “It’d be nice to be a cyborg right about now.”

  “I think I’d rather have feelings,” I said.

  The weather improved after March, but my guitar skills did not. Oliver decided to sublet his apartment and go to Toronto for a few weeks.

  “Don’t run away,” I said.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said. “I just can’t be here right now.”

  He sent me postcards with short messages about how Natalie was fading from his dreams but that he still could not think about her without experiencing a slight ache in his chest. I wrote back with reports on new tenants and small changes in the building. (“The landlord finally repaired the broken railing on the staircase!”) The weeks became months, and I knew there was a chance he wouldn’t return. I resumed knitting, determined to perfect a scarf for Yoichi despite the fact that his sojourn in Vancouver was to be over the summer. I made plans with friends I hadn’t seen in over half a year. I got a proper haircut. The sadness I was feeling seemed to dissipate.

  Soon it was June. One afternoon there was a firm knock at the door. I did not need to check to see who was there—it could only be one person. There, at the entrance of my apartment, stood Yoichi. He looked no different than the day we’d parted at the airport and he smelled the same too. Had nothing changed?

  “Julia, I’m home,” he said.

  I thought about the days ahead of us; his return to London seemed far off and inconsequential. As he entered, the hardwood floor creaked as if to herald his arrival.

  Writing in Light

  I

  Curtis ca
lled me at 9:30, waking me. I pretended I had been awake for hours, but he knew better, despite having met me only twice. A few days earlier he had promised he would take me through Jeff Wall’s latest New York exhibition before it closed, but we hadn’t confirmed our appointment.

  “Good morning. I meant to wake you,” Curtis said. “I’m at the gallery. They want to shut off the power, so you should arrive on the early side of 10:30. Say 10:15?”

  “10:15,” I repeated. “See you then.”

  I removed a book about Robert Smithson from a pile of clothes sitting on a chair so I could find the black dress I wanted to wear. For the last few months, I’d been thinking about Smithson’s art, dinosaurs, fossils and skeletons. Somehow I believed that these elements would work in my thesis screenplay, though I wasn’t sure what story I was trying to tell.

  I dressed quickly. But I was careful to look, as my mother might put it, presentable, in case I needed to deal with a gallery assistant. Girls who sat at the front desk of art galleries scared me, more so than record store clerks once did. Many things frightened me during this time—germs, vampires, suspension bridges—but I feared people the most.

  I discovered it was warmer on the street than in my apartment. My room faced a courtyard that didn’t get much sunlight. An ex-boyfriend believed that an episode of Law & Order had been shot below my window last year. It seemed like there was always a television show or a movie being filmed in our neighbourhood and that I was moving between reality and fantasy whenever I left home.

  Although the walk to the 116th Street subway station was a short one, I began to wonder if I would make it to the gallery, located midtown, by 10:15. For a moment I considered taking a taxi, a luxury I could rarely indulge in, but the urge to be economical overrode the need to be on time. I walked to the subway stop and waited on the platform.

  The train seemed to take forever to come, a trick of perception. I leaned forward to see if I could spot the lights. It was dark in the tunnel. I began thinking of Jeff Wall’s Double Self-Portrait (1979).

  II

  In Double Self-Portrait, the artist looks at us from the corner of his eye. There are two Jeffs in the photograph: one wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and one in indigo rinse jeans and a grey sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed back. The Jeff in jeans is wearing a watch. The other Jeff, the one in the white shirt, has his arms crossed, so it’s impossible to know if there is a timepiece on either wrist. Behind the two Jeffs is a couch with a pink blanket on it. Jeff with the watch—the one who possesses the technology to measure the passing of time—is touching a papasan chair that’s missing its cushion. The chair is white and looks to me like bleached bones in the desert. The man and his doppelgänger are positioned within a room, perhaps located in a building in Vancouver, but that is of little importance. What matters is the look on Jeff’s face, the way he is peering out at us peering in at him.

  III

  On the train, there was a sleeping couple sprawled on the seats across from me. During my first semester of grad school I took a photography class with Thomas Roma, who often quoted Robert Frost in his classroom critiques. When I looked at Roma’s photographs, even the ones of gospel singers and lovers asleep on the subway, I thought of Frost’s poetry.

  One afternoon, two days after I cried during his critique of my photographs, Roma told me that he thought writing and photography were the most similar of all the arts. He was certain that taking photographs would help me with my writing; he had once compiled a collection of photographs thinking only of Norman Mailer while he worked.

  That night, while reading a textbook for a film theory class, I discovered that photography is derived from a Greek word that translates to writing in light. This gave me comfort. I concluded that every art form was a way of telling a story—a record of a particular moment in time—even in cases where there was no discernable narrative. Through word and image, I would find a direction for my work: I could write in light.

  IV

  Another Jeff Wall work: A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947 (1990).

  Red, orange, white, yellow and green helium balloons are touching the living room ceiling, which has a rough texture to it. This is October 1947, the year and month of my father’s birth, in muted colour, lit by two lamps.

  We are viewing a kid’s birthday party. Children are sitting or standing upright, hands clasped in front or behind them. One child is leaning on the arm of a chair. Although all the children are posed differently, their expressions are the same, in clichéd rapt attention.

  The ventriloquist is a woman with brown hair and a dark coloured dress. Her dummy is male, with brown curls and a shirt with a white ruffled collar. The collar makes me think of fools and Shakespeare or fools in Shakespeare.

  In the presence of the ventriloquist, the children forget the snacks and candies: each kid is waiting to hear the words from the dummy’s mouth. When the fool speaks, I imagine one of the boys wonders why it sounds so much like the woman with brown hair, the only adult in the room.

  V

  Back in 2002, Ben was renting a room in Jonathan’s house on East Cordova Street in the Downtown Eastside. This was before Jonathan and Helen had their baby and there was still a spare bedroom. There were drawings affixed to every surface of the kitchen; both Ben and Jonathan liked sketching pop stars and actors of the moment, and they displayed their work on the refrigerator, on the doors of cupboards and in piles on the table. During this period Nelly, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck figured prominently in their work. Both had a knack of rendering Band-Aids and large diamond rings with a few pencil lines.

  Ben and I met at a show. Not an art show. Perhaps it would be clearer if I said Ben and I met at a concert. But the word concert was too formal for the occasion. Throw in the word concert and most people start thinking about Bach or Mozart or even Satie. Then rather than Chucks and jeans and hoodies we’re clad in suits and dresses with low necklines, which wasn’t the case at all. Perhaps I should have said that Ben and I met while our friends were playing music at the Sugar Refinery, a restaurant/bar/venue where we used to spend a lot of our time. Once, the post-rock band the Beans played a forty-eight-hour show there. I went in the afternoon on the first day and again for the final few hours.

  Ben took photographs and I wrote. We were not collaborators, but I think if we were to pool our work, we would have a comprehensive archive of an obscure part of Vancouver’s modern history. The Sugar Refinery closed on New Year’s Eve 2003, and it seemed as though an era ended with its final show. But even then, I knew six years was nothing when compared to the Mesozoic Era. This was life: over time, we would lose the places and people we loved most.

  One afternoon, just before the chill of winter made an outdoor stroll unbearable, Ben and I decided to walk from Vancouver’s downtown core to where he lived; further down his street lay the Strathcona neighbourhood. My senses of direction and geography were poor, but I believed that Strathcona, which included Chinatown, was considered a part of downtown Vancouver as well. The distance between point a (“downtown core”) and point b (“Jonathan’s house”) could be measured in minutes: 30 on foot, 7.5 on the buses headed for Powell Street or Nanaimo Station. Our walk lasted longer because we detoured through a park and by a series of fashion warehouses.

  Although I’d grown up in the Lower Mainland, I had not spent much time in Strathcona. Other neighbourhoods in Vancouver had become gentrified during the 1990s, but Strathcona remained stubborn to major changes. The first wave of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese boat people still remained within historic Chinatown, while artists and young families lived on the frontier of industrial zones. Nearby in the Downtown Eastside, there was a series of Single Room Occupancy hotels that were meant to serve as low-income housing but were often in disrepair, creating an environment of seedy despair. Then there were the people that urban planning forgot: homeless men and women drifting from doo
rways to underground parking lot staircases in search of warmth.

  As we walked up to the house, we passed a man standing next to a car. The man’s clothes looked like they had been carefully chosen; he stood out in the modest neighbourhood. Ben said hello to the man.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, he works in the house next door.”

  “What’s next door?”

  “A photographer’s studio. Do you know Jeff Wall’s work?”

  VI

  The train passed 86th Street. I thought about The Destroyed Room (1978). The title identifies what the image depicts: a room that has been destroyed. Order has been transformed into disorder.

  Judging from the materials strewn about, the room is likely a woman’s bedroom. The walls are red. There is a twin mattress with a slash in it. There may have once been a door, but it is gone, leaving the door frame empty. The drawers on a bureau are opened. White fabric peeks out. A hole in the wall reveals soft pink insulation material. The shoes strewn about have heels that tower at a height that, if I were to wear them, would cause me to fall or twist my ankle. Did the woman who lived in this room run in similar shoes to escape from the violence pictured? (Does it matter that, upon closer inspection, the room reveals itself to be a set? That everything I see has been staged?)

  It’s not the dresses or hats or sunglasses that command my attention. Nor is it the pieces of wood from mismatched furniture scattered about. It is the jewellery that stops me: a strand of translucent orange beads, several plastic orange bracelets, rings made of bone. If I get close enough, I can see earrings. For me, there is something very intimate about jewellery. I marvel at how we let necklaces and bracelets encircle the most vulnerable parts of our bodies and how sometimes we rely on rings to show our love and commitment.