by Liam Card
“Do it again!” she said, gasping for air. “One more time, please!”
“Good evening, I’m Sterling MacKinnon … and I just murdered yet another stylist for improperly combing my gorgeous, gorgeous hair.” Diana laughed so hard, her nostrils flared and pulsated. The two of us rehashed the worst tragedies of the last decade: natural disasters, conflicts, and elections, and debated which network had covered it best.
Who with the most integrity.
Who with the best spin.
Who with the worst.
Who with the greatest agenda.
This day would go on to be the greatest of my all-too short life.
Some guy at the party yelled last call, and Russell took Diana’s friend back to our dorm room. Diana suggested that we go back to hers. She said she made the best French press coffee.
No coffee was had.
Lying there afterward, she asked if that had been my first time, and I confirmed her shrewd hypothesis.
“Honestly, don’t worry about it,” she said.
“Should I be worried?”
“No, I mean, don’t worry about it … if you were worrying about it. What I’m saying is there’s nothing to worry about,” she said.
“That’s good to hear.”
From there, she informed me that I was, in fact, pretty damn interesting and that I should carry myself as if I believed it wholeheartedly.
“Trust me on this; your love for books is your fishing rod and bait.”
“Why are you teaching me to fish?”
“Keep asking girls what they’ve read lately and see what happens,” she said. “So far you are one for one. Terrific stats if you ask me.”
“I guess you can’t argue with math.”
“You have a real quality about you,” she said and combed my hair with her fingers. “Girls will be bamboozled for one night with a fun, fast-talking guy like Russell, but they’ll want a lifetime with a guy like you, Luke. That’s a fact. That’s your take-away from this evening.”
I asked her if that was a backhanded compliment.
She smiled, called me cute, and relaxed into the lighting of a joint. She took an effortless pull of smoke, held it for one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, and then majestically released it into the air, as though having purified any toxins or impurities with her superhuman composition. She rolled to her side and offered the joint up to me.
“I don’t. But thanks.”
“See, you keep proving my point,” she said and took another pull. “Listen to me, Luke, stay the hell out of bars. Never go into a bar again if you’re looking to find someone. That’s out of bounds for you now. Promise?”
“Promise.”
She held out her pinky, and we sealed the deal as pinky fingers do. I didn’t ever want that pinky lock to break. Soldered together for life at the pinky would have been fine with me.
• • •
In the morning, after pulling on my wrinkled clothes and stepping into my untied shoes, I stood in her doorway looking for the right words.
“You want to ask me out again, or to hang out another time, right?” she said, like an oracle or something.
“Yes.”
“Luke, you don’t want me. You’re just about to have the time of your life out there. Enjoy it. But you don’t want me.”
“I think I really do.”
“Trust me. You don’t.”
And I believed her, because I believed everything that came out of her perfect mouth, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. If Diana-of-no-last-name had other plans for me … so be it.
Off I went without putting up a fight.
• • •
After Diana-of-no-last-name, there was something to live for again. No longer was I obsessed with my rear-view mirror, my fixation with Death. Diana had reintroduced me to Life. From that pivotal moment forward, I did my best to take her advice and foster situations where I could meet girls with interests like hers. Like my own. Truth be told, I became relatively good at it: meeting girls at book clubs, book launches, author readings, and anything book-related.
Good, relative to my pals and their success rate at bars.
Their success was little to none, and any perceived successes were deemed remorseful shortly thereafter. Routinely, their nights ended with late-night pizza or jumbo hot dogs with a heaping side order of greasy excuses. Mine ended with the library shutting down for the night and a desire to keep chatting.
Chatting leads to things. Diana taught me that.
My relationship with Life was booming. The looks from the friends in my circle, and the way they treated me, informed the idea of myself, that imaginary self-portrait we paint, to shape-shift. I felt the growing pains of confidence as it multiplied inside me and within the borders of that stretched canvas. Finally, the image I had of myself was something to be proud of. Something you’d want on the mantle at home for your mom to smile at as she walked past it.
Like I said, I was having the time of my life with Life.
Then I graduated.
At commencement, I stood in my cap and gown, listening to the speaker wax philosophic about widespread religious tolerance and what that world might look like in fifty years. I wondered what Diana-of-no-last name might look like that very minute. What she might be up to and who with. I spoke a silent prayer, a silent thank-you to her, as if she were God and able to hear it. She was the one responsible for my rebirth, after all.
• • •
A few short years and a gemology degree later, I moved back home just in time to remember how much I hated it and set up a jewellery boutique in one of my father’s commercial buildings. Like a model entrepreneur, I took out some debt, set up the shop with product and began selling high-end watches and diamonds to young men and elderly women looking to spread some inheritance money around before they kicked off. Despite my sincere guidance, this is what always happened: the old women would cheap out and the young men would spend beyond their means. Acts of chest-pounding, all with the help of some prehistoric, compressed carbon that when faceted and polished not only reflected light but also your rung on the social ladder.
Welcome to Oakville.
Home to old wealth, new wealth, and damn near there. Home to private schools with higher yearly tuition than most universities and littered with giant luxury SUVs hauling around petulant children who kick and throw tantrums because they understand the law too well for their own development. High-end shops lining quaint downtown streets and multi-million-dollar homes lining the thickest cut of rough alongside private golf courses that used to be farmers’ fields.
Barely real. A mirage.
And it was somewhere in that mirage that I stumbled upon Alice Beck.
Of all my gross indiscretions, this one tops the list: I disobeyed Diana-of-no-last-name’s specific orders and met a girl in a bar. She was shorter than me by a foot or so, and the perfume wafting from her hair was intoxicating. Plumeria, as I recall. Upon first glace, I knew that she wasn’t for me. This was a girl who liked guys like Russell. I could just tell. People like her were extras in my world — there to populate venues and to add a certain production value to life. People whom I would notice but were somehow instructed not to take any notice of me. And that was fine. This woman at the bar, she was two things: unequivocally an extra, and an obstacle in my path to getting a drink. My arm waved in the air above her scented hair, doing my best to flag down the bartender, but the motion looked more like I was poorly hailing a cab. Snapping fingers turned into something like open-palm window washing, then back to snapping, then devolving into outright pointing.
The bartender looked at me and shook his head, complete with the eyebrow flinch as if to suggest I was mentally ill or something.
“Sorry, are you trying to order a drink, or are you telling the bartender to steal second base?
” she said and flashed a teasing smile. “That, or you’re conducting an opera.”
“It’s a tragedy,” I said. “The hero dies at the end due to thirst.” She smiled again. The whole thing was strange. The extra had not only acknowledged my presence but had now engaged in conversation. Something was wrong. Like I said, typically, I’m invisible to anyone who would be attracted to Russell. It just worked that way. I was confortable in that universe.
She smiled and cupped her hands around her mouth like a coach yelling words of encouragement at a labouring marathoner. “Hey, make it two, please! I need one more!” The bartender didn’t even look up; he just nodded. “There,” she said. “You’re getting a whisky sour.”
“Thank you. Listen, the whole round is on me.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You seem to have his ear. Why not add a few shots to the mix as well? My treat,” I said, and her eyes locked onto mine with something of a death grip.
“Aren’t you a fun one,” she said and poked me centre mass, right between the ribs charged with the task of protecting my heart. With that initial touch and those five deadly words, she poisoned the well. A dangerous thought was introduced to my brain that I could be the fun one at the bar, just like Russell was, and I ran with it. I abandoned the teachings of Diana, and became someone else for the rest of that night. I took that self-portrait of myself and whitewashed it right then and there. Drinks and shots became a cycle worth repeating, fuelling my growing confidence with each round. She dragged me across the dance floor by the hand and after pinballing off a few dozen people, she introduced me to her friends.
“Isn’t he fun and cute!” she shouted over the music. They all smiled and raised their glasses to toast her, like she had accomplished something of great meaning and importance. More poison for the well: I was now being described as both cute and fun — the verbs played hard and loud into my new persona. What would Russell do next? I dragged her by the hand back to the dance floor and we cut loose to a Bon Jovi track, screaming the chorus, the only part anyone ever knows.
We danced.
We laughed.
We kissed.
“I don’t even know your name,” she said. “I don’t kiss random boys on dance floors.”
“Luke.”
“Alice.”
“Stevenson.”
“Beck.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, and we kissed again.
I had become him. I was Russell, and imagined him leaning up against the oak and brass of the bar, tipping his hat to me with pride and admiration.
• • •
This was New Luke. New Luke went out three to four nights a week with Alice Beck. New Luke partied hard, overspent, and stayed out late. New Luke ate at fancy restaurants with well-educated, well-groomed couples that Alice introduced him to. But most importantly, New Luke loved when Alice Beck would say that he was the most fun guy she had ever dated. Wild. Crazy. More verbs to describe this iteration of me that Old Luke would cross his arms and shake his head at in disbelief. It didn’t matter much what Old Luke thought. Because New Luke was, in a word, popular.
This popularity, it infected my body and released a never-ending supply of endorphins to surf through my vasculature. This high, it was the best I had felt in my entire life, and it had to continue, or I thought I might shrivel up and become the worst thing of all: insignificant. Like any quality junkie, New Luke determined that the best course of action was to ensure the stability of the rush by becoming permanently attached to my dealer — Alice Beck. Forever with her — that was New Luke’s dream. An infinite supply of late-night partying and rubbing elbows with the popular crowd.
This is what New Luke did in order to foster that dream: he married her.
• • •
Aside from entering that bar in the first place, the biggest mistake I ever made was marrying an entertainment coordinator named Alice. After we settled into marriage, there was nothing entertaining about it, and it was largely my fault. The undeniable fact was this: I had sold Alice a phony bill of goods. The persona of New Luke became as equally impossible to uphold as the expense of the breakneck speed of our lifestyle. After six months with a band on my finger, it was all I could do to show up, smile, hug, shake hands, and order those rounds of drinks and trays of shots, as advertised during the courtship. The jewellery store had picked up significantly and was taking the lion’s share of time and energy to make ends meet. Old Luke was dying to lie on a couch on a Friday night and watch a movie or read a book. But the opportunity to do that was a ghost. That inability to decompress, that full social dance card, that ongoing maintenance of my phony persona, grew into a poisonous resentment of New Luke.
Old Luke murdered him.
All that was left after that was little old me. The real me.
And that version of me Alice hated.
Shortly after Alice met the real me, her demeanour, even when intimate, was litigious, and she wore and wore on my confidence to the point where the bone becomes visible and you understand how injured you truly are. Like a dog habitually licking a wound, I licked at my relationship sores for years.
I could taste the infection.
I understood that the prognosis required amputation, but I stayed put in that marriage for five years.
Half a decade.
My father once told me that when your attitude changes, everything changes. But the way I saw it, that particular glass of decade was half-empty. Late one night, over a few too many pints, I said to him, “Alice Beck lied to me, Dad.”
“How’s that?” he said.
“She not from Milton at all. She’s from Hell.” He laughed, and that was fine, but it was me who had been the liar. Me, the Oscar-worthy performer who would see no applause, no golden statue, or full spread in the entertainment section. And it was the guilt over what I had done, the deception, that kept me heavily belted and tightly fastened in my marital seat to take the emotional beating she gave me. It was something deserved after the routine I had given her. For the betrayal of my true self.
Alice forged ahead with her own life. She became obsessed with her level of fitness and started working out at the gym several times a week. She hired a hulking personal trainer who beat her up in the early mornings, and she joined a running club that pounded the pavement on nights when we didn’t have social engagements. Invariably, she would spill into the house at around ten-thirty at night, unlace, and head directly upstairs for a long shower. To be honest, it was nice to see her sink her teeth into something that was pure. Something that was good for the body, mind, and spirit. Something unlike the rest of her world.
Tammy Yau, one of her running mates, came into the store looking for a tennis bracelet one afternoon, and I made a comment about how late their evening runs went. I said something about how they should be sponsored by 3M, simply for a discount on the reflective tape.
“Luke, what are you talking about?” she said. “Our runs finish at eight.” And with a big smile she slapped me on the shoulder like I had made a juvenile error in telling time.
“You must get together for a drink afterward.”
“God, no. We all head home.”
While I marinated in this fascinating bit of information, Tammy took her sweet time modelling every tennis bracelet I had in the store. One made her wrist look tiny. Another made it appear swollen. One reminded her of her Aunt June. Another had a terrible vibe to it — riddled with bad energy.
“You should get rid of this piece,” she said. “All blood diamonds on this one,” and offered it back to me as if it were a dead cat she was holding by the tail. I assured her that my diamonds were all conflict-free, but she just shook her head with a furrowed brow. “Impossible,” she said. “Those diamonds are dripping.”
Eventually she found the one that best spoke to her, and I rang it up, laid it in a velvet box, and
tied a bow around it. She left and the bell jingled on the door.
If the running group wrapped things up at eight o’clock, it seemed that jogging might not be all that Alice was sinking her teeth into. Who was this person? Who was shaking my hand at all of these social events and dinner parties with a little extra might in their grip, given the circumstances? Given their silent one-upmanship of me. The only soul I trusted enough with this information was my childhood best friend, Geoff Black. He said, “What do you care, Luke? You can’t stand her. This should be good news, no?” And that response startled me both in its candour and lack of empathy. Was she entitled to this imagined act of infidelity? Perhaps this was the second phase of my punishment for pulling the wool over her eyes with the persona of New Luke. If anything, I simply wanted to put a face to my theory. To sleuth out the truth and feel the comfort of a win in my column. Something to justify moving on. But without proof, my hypothesis was nothing more than a best guess. Try as I might to catch her in the act, she smelled my suspicions. Probing questions were diverted like a jetliner approaching a thunderhead. Alice was far too clever to be caught, certainly not by the likes of me.
Over the years, an embittered Alice managed to turn my confidence, that imaginary self-portrait, into the worst sight of all. A wash of red with deep cuts. Sections of shredded canvas hanging by threads on the crooked, splintered frame.
Nothing recognizable.
No head.
No neck.
No shoulders.
Just something to be collected and discarded, like all those bodies on the news.