“Andrew, what is going on?” Pat asked.
“We started seeing each other in September. I told her Dad died last August, not this one. We’d just met.” When Pat said nothing verbally but spoke volumes with a piercing look, he added, “I didn’t want her pity.”
“So you say.”
67
In Rivière-du-Loup, he wakes in a series of hot bags. The tent burns with an afternoon sun seemingly hot enough to ignite the grey nylon walls. The sleeping bag, half-opened and half-drenched with sweat, lies crumpled beneath him. More forceful than the sun are his gouging hands and their tireless, unconscious scrape at his measly crotch. In the bright light he can clearly make out sideburns of red spots at the apex of each thigh and sprinkled across his scrotum. The Gold Bond hasn’t been medicine enough.
His crotch shrinks from the cycling shorts like a pound dog from a raised hand. From the bottom of a pannier he unearths his single pair of hiking shorts. He slides into the civilian clothes then checks the cycling computer’s clock. Early afternoon. A pint and a meal? Undoubtedly. A potentially interminable wait for medical attention? Maybe he could just buy some calamine lotion and ride off. Perhaps the blind wash of kilometres will keep his scratching fingers out of his crotch. But he has seen that red-eyed stare below, knows the Martians have taken Central America and covet the north.
He’d have bathed even without the intended medical examination of his grand canyon, bathed for city life and the crisp delight of a cold scrub. Port after stormy seas.
Walking from the overgrown orchard where he camped, toward the rushing river, he sees again why rivers have always made such obvious borders. Despite the machine-cut wood chips that blanket the larger trails behind him and the monospecial humanness of the old orchard, the park behind him is positively sylvan compared with the parking lot that towers above him on the opposite side of the river. Curves and chlorophyll behind, concrete ahead. And up. The riverbank he picks his way down descends from a metre of dirt and brush into a metre of jagged rock, whereas the other side rises in a towering, coppery cliff. A parking lot tops the cliff, allowing grandmère and grandpère to enjoy their ice cream from the comfort of their idling Crown Vic while Andrew picks his way half-naked into the rushing, frigid water. Sitting against a slab of rock while the water cobbles his feet in cold, he watches a carload of teens drop a bag of fast-food litter out their car window before squealing off and wonders how much anyone bothers to see him below.
What, really, is so wrong with a little nudity? Sitting on one of the larger of the riverside boulders, he slips out of his hiking shorts. The gaping shorts rise and fall so quickly and promiscuously compared to the cycling shorts he has rolled on and off every day. Smashed rocks along the shoreline prolong his chilly, wading dangle to comic lengths as he sends one scouting foot after another between the sharp shards. Even in the shallows the current is strong, so his glances at the towering parking lot are largely abandoned for a tight view of the next step and the next. Pain and navigational challenges leave him, perhaps thankfully, to hear the floating, indistinct murmur of voices without seeing any pointing fingers or faces split by leers or fury. Though what, really, would they see? Where is the crime in a distant delta of fur, a genital daub? Finally, he reaches a pool, adds his bent knees to the sharp points of the rocks. Cold slices a strip off his back and temporarily smothers his speckled itch. Rolling over onto his stomach, he reaches down for a hold against the current, hangs a nightshirt of icy water from collarbone to hip, hears the first cheer from above.
Returned to his change-room rock, slopping wet feet into the wide legs of the hiking shorts, he can feel the rash’s burning itch through a skin of frigid water, and the hospital question shifts from if to when. Back at the campsite, hunger, dread at the anticipated emergency-room wait and a reluctance to sweat another drop from his stippled crotch finally ignite a dormant underbrush of laziness. Rather than break down his tent and re-sling every pannier, he simply drags the entire kit into denser brush. While he can lock his bike downtown, he can’t lock the gear to it, and he could be hours at a hospital. Sometimes you just have to trust.
Thankfully the only shirts he has are two cycling jerseys. Without a jersey’s tall pockets he would no doubt have succumbed to the speed of rash logic and taken nothing but cash off to town. As is, he adds the amputated novel to the centre pocket (hospital wait) and his wallet to the left. The knife already sits in the third pocket. He grabs the postcards at the last moment because he has a thirst for more than water. In his beer, he’ll think of the postcards, will want the familiarity of her flowing handwriting with its peaks and curls, its loops and crossovers. Rationally, he thinks of patriotism as manufactured consent or brand loyalty or mass delusion, yet the sight of the word CANADA written out repeatedly in Betty’s hand swells his heart a little, even if they are addressed to a Halifax apartment he has already vacated. In her hand, from foreign shores he hasn’t seen, CANADA becomes a pet name. Normally it’s hard to love the worst per capita water and energy use in the world, or a nation of civil servants. Stan once told Andrew that there are more education administrators in Ontario than there are in all of Western Europe. In a newspaper, CANADA refers to the idiots keen to torch and pollute the Canadian environment to fuel the American economy and the unimaginative meekness of a country that exports twenty per cent of the world’s lumber but no furniture. Nonetheless, across the twenty-seven postcards, the common denominator CANADA evokes how much Betty and Andrew knew of each other before they even met, the similar props and scenes and activities and overheard comments of each other’s childhoods. At their first kiss they could almost see back to the insides of the family cars of their childhood, could guess what kind of sandwiches their grandmothers had made. Biking off in search of a restaurant with a patio and strong, unfiltered Québécois beer on tap, jersey pockets stuffed with half a Canadian novel and Betty’s postcards, he has never felt more Canadian. He doesn’t yet know that the Québécois beer he seeks is now owned by a Japanese brewery.
Why did he ever ignore the touring recommendation to sling a pair of weatherproof flip-flops on the back of the rack? His uniform shoes mercilessly pinch these furlough feet.
A rash isn’t going to get him anywhere at emerg, especially a crotch rash. Oh, put it where you shouldn’t, did you? Just make yourself a part of the furniture and we’ll have someone who’s currently thinking of applying to med school glance at you dismissively within the decade. Might as well eat first.
Never in the history of this body has he sat down to table and menu with such ferocious ability. Each bite of salad is a cambered bite of green air. Then the buttered, earthy breast milk of soupe aux champignons. He’s quickly off the menu, thinking that crème brûlée has melted gooey stuff, so “une baguette avec le fromage brûlée” should get him some melted cheese. “Mais avec les oignons et champignons dans la moitié.” Another Maudite, oui. This high-alcohol beer, essentially a pint of wine, doesn’t help him keep his hands above the table and not scratching at his rash. Back and forth his knees swing, fanning his crotch. “Oh, et un potat — pomme de terre, s’il vous plaît.” Pie and a cappuccino for desert. Three Maudites? His high-rev metabolism takes the beer like water.
The fact that Canada has two official languages but most Canadians only speak one and a half affords both tolerance and strangeness. Where else can you feel like an immigrant in your own country? English and French Canada, these two solitudes, endure the same offshore queen on their stamps and money. A Canadian summer drive with a flat tire twists simple data into phenomenological poetry. The others, not the back ones, they will have need of the same impression please. Stop to walk your dog while driving through Quebec and you become a crazy uncle. The best fashion in which to make the acquaintance of a dog is with the bum of your hand. Like this.
“Oui, une autre bière.” Back into the half-novel. Both hands above the table. Above. The. Table.
68
Divorce, career and character had kept Betty’s jo
urnalist father, Jim, away from most of the dentist appointments and dance recitals. To her partial surprise, this removal, this track record for stocking RESPs but not kitchen cupboards, made her email him, not her mother, when she was leaving the lying Andrew. After running from Andrew and his mother at the restaurant, she’d spent the night at a friend’s.
Lies were like tar, sticky and toxic. If she had tried to fight Andrew’s lies, she would have just become ensnared herself. No, she ran. From the restaurant. From Andrew. Even, finally, from the relationship she’d been running from when she had first run into Andrew. Emotionally, she knew the exhilaration of wind at her back. When she emailed her dad, that bird of a feather, she didn’t need to explain a thing.
Will you take me to lunch? Tomorrow? Tues. at the latest?
Her mom would have speed-dialled before she’d read the entire email. Yes, Elaine would have offered unconditional support and immediate vengeance and broiling indictments, would have accurately mapped the distance between boy and man, but the shape of it would have been all wrong. Short questions. Personal tirades. A hypothetical yet demanding tactical debate. With her dad she’d be free to speak in paragraphs or monosyllables as it came, or didn’t.
Tomorrow, yes. Do I pick you up or meet you? (The Piggy, ya?)
Stepping into the restaurant, Betty saw her dad as an island once again. Afloat there on the raft of his table, he was, as always, so variously removed from the dad she had once clung to. Age, time and Elaine’s running caricature all kept Jim and Betty in a very loose solar system. They hung in some balance, but not a tight one. He was just shy of forty when they stopped living together, and was now partially clothed in nostalgia and mystery. In her memory, his shoulders were broad, muscled and tanned from their early life at the waterfront house, Black Rock. Today, the man at the restaurant table had smaller, more sloping shoulders.
He rose to greet her. Thankfully he didn’t try to offset baldness and turning fifty with safari clothes. Jeans and a blazer. Small, low eyeglasses. Divorce had kept him thin.
“Well, whatever’s wrong, you’re still walking,” he said, hugging her shoulders roughly.
From Sunday night email to borrowed morning shower and into her walk downtown, she had had no idea how much she would tell her father or what, if anything, she would ask him. She knew this want by picture, not thought, and this was it. A clean, well-lit restaurant with plenty of space around a table half in the sun. Maybe she just needed a really good lunch.
He had already studied the menu. She knew she was being treated tenderly when he didn’t ask, “You’re still a vegetarian?” and stated, rather than wondered, “We’ll get wine. Have you ever had a white Bordeaux?”
Chat, chat, until one coffee, another, all right — let’s share a piece of cake. As the table cleared, she shifted from conversation to a smallish monologue, describing Andrew despite herself. By the time he replied they were almost huddling.
“The greater the love, the more you feel death for the deceased. Those first days are all shock or terror or loss for a life you haven’t yet really realized is gone. You dwell on the how. You tabulate future losses as if they’ll hurt more — friends unseen, holidays unenjoyed, even food they won’t get to eat. All of this you still count for the dead. Eventually, though, you realize none of this matters. You matter. This is the hard part. You’re the one who needs attention. You’re the one losing. Go through a big death and you’ll learn to anticipate this second, larger death, the you death. Loss from you, for you, not the dead. That knowing wait is horrid, one of the things you’d rather not learn.
“It’s great to have a survivor in your lifeboat but maybe not in your bed. For all his loyalty to his dad, your man knows he’s the one left standing. He knows that or he’s gotta learn it. Decide whether you’re willing to teach him.”
The bright sun slid past.
69
Fittingly, Andrew is still tipsy when a doctor in Rivière-du-Loup tells him the red crotch rash that has been burning for days is a topical yeast infection.
“A yeast infection?” Andrew’s quietly incredulous tone carries the shame of an STD diagnosis plus the fear that he has biked himself into hermaphroditism.
“Oui. It is not only a gurl ting.”
Pervert of the microscopic world, yeast love the wet, dark and warm. While their cousins are content to produce bread or the sweet clouds in the unfiltered beer in Andrew’s stomach, another strain of yeast has been baked into a scarlet rash below.
“Your shorts,” the doctor continues, “all these days. The sweat.”
Touring has given Andrew a monastically low standing heart rate and rock-crushing thighs but also a cramped high back, a rash-sprayed crotch.
“What do I do?” Andrew hikes up his underwear-less hiking shorts.
“Wash your shorts regularly and dry them in the strong sun. You will need this cream.”
Rolling away from the clinic, a tube of ointment riding in his jersey like a single bullet, Andrew the Monistat man releases the bike to the fading pulse of Maudite still inside him and surfs the city’s long, tiered hill. Without the cumbrous panniers and the weight of the tent and sleeping bag, the bike feels whimsically loose. He is suddenly more nimble, and faster, though the city has temptations to slow him down. He sets out for the park and his neglected gear, but it is so easy to surrender to gravity, to take only the turns which ease allows him. He reaches another sunlit bar patio without having to climb a single hill. Entering the bar, he heads straight to the bathroom for a second, radically premature dose of the slick cream and only then to a crowded, sunny balcony. The river’s enormous flood plain and the angle of its valley and a joyously hopped beer all combine to show him that the spring sun is beginning to win its arm-wrestle for the sky, is growing into summer. His delight in the first strong and lasting sun does not, however, survive his discomfort below. Within minutes he relocates to a table in the shade.
A yeast infection. So this is a private medical affliction, a failure of the body which is at least hidden. Kingston had been small enough that he and Stan were hardware store celebrities, known at their grocery store, spotted around town. The ruined man and the flesh of his flesh.
Back on the bike, tipsy — okay drunkish — he cuts and drops toward the park with sweet-potato french fries in his gut. Rolling over the bridge of the gorge, he has warmth in his belly and cold, moist air brushing his limbs and face.
Once again he turns into the trail’s descent, bumps toward his nylon base. He will sleep easily in the tired, old orchard, will nap his beer then wake for dinner, perhaps a fire. Burn these fallen limbs. Smudge the sky with appley smoke.
70
Fleeing Andrew, his precious house and their rotten relationship, Betty began to wonder if only the young, possibly only the young and those educated in the arts, could think that love is the permission to say absolutely anything. Blocking his emails, deleting his phone messages without listening to them, Betty began to see that no relationship could survive total honesty. I know you’re afraid to love me. Or You’re different when you have an audience. Or how about I still think of X when I come. Andrew and Betty learned the hard way that love does not invite you to say anything you feel. But that same school of hard knocks also showed them that love enables you to say more than you thought you had to say. Your ability to talk, not just your desire to, is increased by love.
All this time they’d been disagreeing about next year, he’d offered her every excuse for keeping his house, every counterfeit emotion possible save the truth: I still miss him. I can’t let go yet. Instead she got:
The Argument of Possession
Betty told him, “You’ve got a home you don’t want to leave, that’s fine.
I don’t, though, I don’t.” “You did once. You could again.”
“Not without leaving first.”
Asshole. Asshole. Asshole. His lies had mutated her, forced her into nasty corners she should never have been in. Nastiness like:
/>
The Argument of Change
“You nursed your dad to death and you still think the humanities are taught in school?”
71
In the city, biking into his park campsite, he sees that young jerks are not restricted to country living or eight-cylinder cars. As he approaches his tent, he spots two male teenagers sacking his campsite. One half-crouches over an emptied pannier, flicking through his clothes and small bags of food. A pot lid lies decapitatedly at the end of this sprawl. Past it, a second youth stands with his back to Andrew, pissing on the tent wall in sharp smirks of urine.
The crouched sacker is the first to spot Andrew. His quick rise into a stand wordlessly alerts the pisser. A hood of anger tries to rise from Andrew’s shoulders, but the fear between nipples and hips is arresting. As the squatter stands and the pisser ceases, Andrew must look between them, one foot resting his weight, fingers still half-gripping the brakes. He can feel a palpable triangle of earth beneath the ball of his resting foot and the shoe’s sharp cleat. The pisser tucks, zips and turns. Andrew doesn’t have time to think properly. Instead he feels the edges of his thighs. He watches the two of them while they are watching only one of him. More recognizable than thought are the twins of fear and rage. Then everything is wiped away when these two glance back past his shoulder at a rustle in the leaves.
In his mirror, Andrew sees a third punk stepping out from behind some shrubs with a bastard’s grin and a pannier held open at arm’s length. The boy is proudly exclaiming some French version of steamer when he spots Andrew and his briefly idle friends. Time becomes entirely space. The two at the tent leap to close the fifteen metres which separate them from Andrew’s front tire. In the vulnerable arc, Andrew turns to cut back left. He must temporarily turn his back to their charge and lose them from his line of sight and then the too-slowly sweeping disc mirror. In front now, the shitter crouches slightly but doesn’t yet drop the pannier. His spine-sinking, knee-flexing crouch could be designed to meet or avoid Andrew’s charge. The chase behind grows. In front, the fouled pannier finally gets chucked aside.
The Push & the Pull Page 18