The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  On her weekends alone she could not dwell on the fact that in Kingston, Gordon was sleeping with another woman while across the same city, Stan now slept alone. She was alone in bed two nights a week, while Stan was alone seven, alone with that mutinous body. She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t tell anyone, that instead of running off with another man, she had simply run off. Stan, my real selfishness here is leaving now so I can remember you at your best, so I can remember you, not your disease. If it’s any consolation, I don’t want children with Gordon.

  While she was drinking gin and guilt in Ottawa, Stan wanted to jam his mitten fists into his mouth and scream while biting his knuckles. But his had been a long study of the possible and the impossible. He wore a straitjacket of impossibility, an armour of impossibility.

  During her time as The Other Woman, the Ottawa touch, Pat tried to live off more than guilt, longing and fear. Night-class pottery. A little toe-wetting French. In her month of Tai Chi classes she had learned that the bones of her body had already set by the age of twenty-four. Twenty-four. Waving Hands Like Clouds, she looked back to herself at the altar at just twenty-three. All those troubled bones.

  Twenty-three. She could easily have been swept out to sea by the cultural pressures to marry, pressures that would eventually see couples in their mid-thirties undoing all of the matrimonial work of their twenties. During her engagement, sensibly neither too short nor too long, her mother concentrated on Stan’s Montreal suits and the report of his keen intelligence rather than on the crimped hand, the slight bow to his shoulders. Her house was small, her dresses too frequently mended. Her carpenter father simply asked, “Any debts?”

  Only Lois, friend and, because of her question, maid of honour, dared to ask, “This disease, how bad does it get?”

  “It’s like a staircase going down. How far, we don’t know. This could be as bad as it gets.”

  “But children. Is it —”

  “No. A one-shot thing.”

  “So you’re sure?”

  “What is sure? I know he expands me, he makes life different, better. And I know I want smart kids.”

  Although she was able to use the word bravery with Lois, she couldn’t quite share her image of Stan as a knight. Precisely because his armour was dented and bent, she saw past cliché to see genuine bravery riding for her through the banal mists of engagement. She knew without being told that she could marry a boy or a man, a fun boy or a slightly ruined man, this was another of life’s deals. As courtship neared engagement, he gave her a copy of Mordecai Richler’s sensational new St. Urbain’s Horseman. The cover image was indeed a mounted knight (again, he silently fingered her thoughts, put noun or image to her instinct, shook coals when she smelled smoke). Inside, he had taped a one-word cover note over his brief inscription, requesting After. Only read the full inscription after you have read the book. Yes, dear.

  What enormous private wheels turn in love. Those last few months she had known her feelings were deepening, had used the word love to herself and then to him, but had been unable to specify or itemize this growing respect until she spent hours behind Richler’s corny image of a knight, until, three-quarters of the way through the novel, she read the line “I can be your wife or nurse, not both” and realized plenty. She thought of that line all through the next day’s teaching then raced home to uncover Stan’s inscription.

  I agree, wife or nurse. I may need both, but I’ll only want one.

  Test everything, especially my courage.

  Reading this novel he adored, talking with him a thousand times, she grew to see that the sparkling intelligence driving every one Stan’s articulate sentences, that mogul skier’s descending bounce off felicitous adjectives and judicious verbs, was itself driven by will and bravery as much as talent. Target first your own assumptions, your own vanities. Once, after she thanked him for finishing a thought she wasn’t quite getting out, for switching tracks in a political disagreement they’d been having, he winked and said, “Hold nothing.” How often she would later wish that he could conclude his adult life, not just begin it, with that motto. Hold nothing. Tene nil.

  87

  First to surrender to the cold night rain are his hands. Although the hands are not as distant from the core of his body as are his feet, the hands are completely exposed to the dual wind of the storm and his ride. Unlike on a mountain bike, where sometimes even your toes are needed to help you corner, on a touring bike the feet are basically stumps wedged into shoes. However cold, the feet are at least by now used to their reduction into mere blocks. But the proud hands prefer the individuated labour of thumb or forefinger changing gears or their synchronized curl around the handlebars. The cold, wet night undoes the evolution of his hands and chops off his opposable thumbs. For hours he has not gripped the handlebars, but simply rested clenched fists upon them. Gears no longer shift by finger or thumb. Pressing corners are found on fists squared by cold. His naked knuckles alternate between shades of white and purple. Even his wrists have gone numb.

  Victorious in its coup, the rain has relaxed into steady totalitarianism. Sheets of cold rain oppress the dark kilometres. His frigid crotch no longer burns with itch, but he can feel it marinating anew in the constant wet of his soggy, ill-fitting hiking shorts. Any warmth his body finds will cause this freshly watered rash to grow. Water soaks him from tip to toe, and yet he hasn’t swallowed half a litre in hours. Whatever heat he has comes from the endless pedalling, but what is he burning? The knees, knees, knees slosh a thinning blood through aching muscles and sprawling hunger. He regularly opens his mouth to the rain. Held up to the sky, his mouth is an aching funnel. Lowered back down, jaw dropped, it is a tiny net swept through cloud after cloud of rain. He trolls so long that his jaw aches, and still he rarely collects enough to swallow. After thirteen foodless hours, even his hunger has grown weak.

  Thirst, hunger and fatigue, those mewling triplets of inescapable need, force him off the road in search of water. Cracking open his fists to slow and turn onto a side road, he is tackled by a numb dizziness and finds a cold, naked shoulder hammered into the pavement. Neither hand nor foot breaks his fall. One entire side of his body — a spurred ankle, a stalled knee, a blind hip — falls heavily to the wet asphalt. He tries to crawl under the shelf of pain, mines the bright minerals of it glowing on knee and elbow. Perhaps he will stay here, spoon his machine into sleep.

  Headlights pour into this bowl. He crawls out from the frame and limps into deeper shadow.

  All water falls, and in this endless run of valleys besieged by rain, his is an unnecessary thirst. Water, water everywhere. Despite the steady trickle in either ditch of this hilly side road, he steps over one brimming ditch to momentarily forage in the woods, briefly deluding himself that minimally higher ground could yield cleaner water, or that this forest of slick branches is actually penetrable. He manages four zombie steps up a treed incline before stumbling. A conscious turn of the heel converts his near fall into his descent back to the flowing ditchwater. What sweet trickling music. At first, he doesn’t plan on dipping his face into the ditch, but his brief search for a small dam in the flood soon has him kneeling in front of a tiny mud bowl. The first handful does little more than splash his beard and disturb the bowl. Small stones poke out from the mud beneath his knees as he lets the bowl clear. Finally, he simply lowers his mouth into the water. Rain splatters his back and slides down his sopping shorts while he camels away at the passing stream. A faint taste of salted mushrooms passes his wet lips as the sucked millilitres swell to litres. Christ, he’d love some cheese, a fat bomb of melted cheddar soaking into some greased vegetable. A zucchini heart attack. An eggplant aneurysm. Sitting back, he turns and looks down at the still bike and beyond to the dull stripe of the highway. He could piss here, now, shrouded in rain. He gets up.

  After another hour on the road, gravity waits for his eyelids to flutter with sleep before snatching the front fork with a quick hand. He wakes just in time to see he is about to
fall. Free of the panniers, he’s able to counter with a hip toss, and rights the bike before his knee goes down.

  His heart pumps waves. The cold is the panic, the panic the cold. Now that he’s awake, his teeth begin chattering beneath his chin strap. His stomach, that abandoned old man, steadily moans.

  88

  Pat and Gordon leapt for each other at the last moment when North Americans admitted that work was arousing, that time spent together workday after workday exchanged more than memos. When cars were the size of islands and neckties were as wide as tree trunks, a man — even a politician — could still leave one woman for another and be just an individual monster, not the willing extender of monstrous and historic systems of oppression that victimized and blinded the feeble, impressionable Pat with power and cock. They found pleasure in his underwear, not hegemony. Here was the last possible moment in North America when they could be a simple philanderer and home wrecker, cut by friends but not newspapers, from dinner party lists but not the national party.

  Happiness is not a crime. Please, Andrew. Eventually, if you

  let yourself, you’ll understand.

  For more than a year after she left, Pat kept a journal. Divorce was a new country with new ways. She didn’t question that suddenly she was writing in bed, not reading, hushing Gordon when he was there and better enduring his absence when he wasn’t. Yes, she needed some talk with Gordon, and she got a passable version of it. But the old chats with Stan, even with Andy, these chats did not and would not stop. So she kept them going, privately but not futilely. Paradoxically, in leaving Stan she wanted to talk to him even more, to talk about what hadn’t worked, who she was becoming, even what she missed. But that would’ve been unfair, reopening old wounds she had hoped to cauterize with the bluntness of her departure. If she could no longer talk with Stan, she’d talk at him.

  A few years later, her journal put aside but not thrown away, she’d advise any friend who was divorcing to do the same. “Write it down first. That way you get it out and then you can decide whether to share it.” A decade after that, she’d recommend a similar kind of journal to those early widows who began to appear in her circle. By then, she had resumed her own journal, writing to an even more absent Stan and an errant Andrew.

  89

  Only between four and five a.m., deep into a stupor of frigid fatigue, does he realize that the postcards and the partial novel he had parked behind him on the empty pannier rack have been in the pouring rain for hours. His first reaction to this recollection is not to worry about the fate of the book or cards, but to wonder if they could somehow warm his naked chest. If he had thread, could he sew together a paper shirt? Of course he has no thread. He doesn’t even have dental floss any more, not to mention a toothbrush. A wet paper shirt wouldn’t be very warm, but it might blunt the wind a little.

  He doesn’t turn around to look back at the stack of soggy postcards. Instead he simply reaches back with one finger to blindly touch a wet corner.

  Notice how the word travel is very close to the French travail, to work? Lug the pack to Hostel 1. Wait until it opens. Find out it’s booked. Slink on to No. 2. Find out 2 is full then watch later arrivals get rooms. Be insulted to your face. Starve. Bathe rarely. Race for trains. Wait for trains. Always carry too much of the wrong currency. Master the Italian phrases Bathroom? How much? Hello? Please, Thank you and Excuse me just as you move into Germany.

  — Working Girl

  90

  Riding with Mark he was always behind. The younger brother. A shadow stretched out. At the start of a summer ride with Mark, Andrew was grateful for the company, grinned at the protracted stereo of shaking zippers and clicking gears. By the time his swollen lungs had melted from his spine, though, the very air was merciless, indicting. Fifteen rides together, twenty, and he could feel a harder body emerge within him, could feel his heart annex more hot space. The last three rides, he had shot through the stump field perfectly. Now he too accelerated toward a dirt jump built up alongside a tree, loaded his shocks on the fly to clear a log on the other side before splashing through a stream and rambling up its bank.

  Mark waited until Andrew finished the fast climb before announcing, “Never going to get your girlfriend to ride that section” and then sprinted on ahead.

  Long past Fort Henry, a string of metal power line towers cut the forest as far as the eye could see. The wide strip of cleared land beneath the towers was divided into short and tall grass, with uncut green cover beneath their tires and two-metre-high brown stalks swaying in the breeze to one side. This rider’s expressway served multiple pockets of single track, each carved by the unseen riders of yesterday.

  Trails are communal veins pumping through the muscle of a landscape. No trail is ever built in a day, so when Andrew saw a passing, skinny stretch of broken grass he thought it could be a possible trail start, the recent exploratory work of just one or two riders. Andrew called, “Head on left,” then turned into the half-track of broken grass. He slowed down to start a recon in the man-high grass. What was Mark doing riding so quickly behind him? A nudging front tire was inferred, if not actually felt.

  While the numerous blades of bent and dog-eared long grass in front of Andrew clearly recorded some passage, the ground itself had barely been touched. Andrew was not following a burgeoning trail but an abandoned one-off. “I don’t think this is anything,” he said. Tall grass swayed above them.

  No brakes squeezed behind him. No indecision slowed their rolling pace. Why bent grass but not cut mud? Mud will hold tire tracks until the next big rain. “Seriously. Nothing. Wait, wait, stop.”

  The line of grass broken at mid-height ended abruptly in a flattened circle. Andrew and Mark stopped and dismounted, bewildered at a one-metre circle of flattened grass.

  “Deer bed,” Andrew finally concluded, extrapolating a deer’s body from a large teardrop of toppled grass. The eerily stamped patch had them standing still in awe. Mark was the first to release his bike from his hand to let it drop into the tall grass beside him. Two-metre tall grasses swayed above their heads or drooped alongside them, sweeping and clattering in a thick August breeze. With no traffic audible in the distance, with a deer’s absent body stamped here in front of them, Andrew recited, “But charm and face were in vain / Because the mountain grass / Cannot but keep the form / where the mountain hare has lain.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s Yeats,” Andrew replied.

  “That’s what you do, memorize other people’s words?”

  Andrew would always wonder if Mark’s stepping toward him at this moment, if the challenge in his jaw and step would’ve made “Fuck you” a better response than the “What words don’t belong to someone else?” he chose, and what difference, if any, that would have made.

  “That’s the trouble with words,” Mark said, standing directly in front of Andrew’s chest. “They’re unclear.” He punctuated this last word by gently setting the knuckles of one fist against Andrew’s damp, hard stomach then dragging them un-left and clear-right across his buzzing hips.

  When Andrew set, but did not punch, his own fist against the hot wall of Mark’s stomach, he felt none of the relief he had hoped for. Mark immediately set his second fist against Andrew’s other hip. Each fist felt and looked ready to turn screws into Andrew’s hips. To set his own remaining fist to Mark’s free hip would exhaust this brief arms race. Then what? Each of them stared from tinted plastic glasses, flexed their jaws against the chinstraps of their helmets.

  Rather than square off all of their arms, uncertain but not uninterested, Andrew used his free hand to smack his padded glove against the side of Mark’s hip. And ass. Because his hand sought Mark’s hip, he habitually expected it to meet some give and curve, the harps of his heterosexual past. Instead, Mark’s hip practically slapped him back. His sedimentary layers of muscle grinned at their Newtonian return of force, their palpable rewriting of ass. First to leave the swaying grass was the sl
ap’s echo, then the sting in Andrew’s hand, then his control.

  Mark smiled as he reared back to knock the brow of his helmet into Andrew’s.

  91

  If he finds what he’s looking for within this string of rural houses, he might get in as many as twenty more kilometres before he pukes.

  Elaine could tell him that the houses strung loosely along this rural Quebec highway rarely go on the real-estate market. When they are sold, legally and nominally sold, they are sold to children or nieces or nephews. When you see your great-aunt several times a month, you live in the country of house transfers, not house-selling. You live in deep country, family country. And you may not lock your car.

  Food does get left in cars. Food of a kind.

  If you were starving in the woods, friends, acquaintances and strangers love to ask a vegetarian, wouldn’t you eat meat? If I were starving in the woods, Andrew invariably replies, I’d eat you. Rarely does he add, We’re not starving in the woods, though. We’re in kitchens, supermarkets and restaurants; we’re in lineups, and never far from the bank.

  The growing depths of hunger and fatigue have him so delirious he feels as if he steps away from the bike into an afterlife. One minute he is leaning against a tree, clipped into the bike’s strong metal frame. Two steps away from the bike he is a ghost, shimmering with each squirt from his empty stomach.

  And squirt his stomach does. The gurgling pancreas and dripping duodenum squelch on his approach to the first parked car. The parched liver thumps its tub in disappointment when the car is locked. By the third house he does find an unlocked car, a Chevette, but no food save for one hard little brick of gum in a waxy wrapper. A barking dog redirects him from the fifth house. There is food of a sort at the seventh.