The Push & the Pull

by Darryl Whetter

  The manageable sight and heft of Glen in hand or mouth complete the drop intuitively commenced when they had walked across the gas station parking lot. He likes meeting this plummeting decision, is relieved to lash himself to its falling weight. You will give me highway miles. I will take you inside. Of course I know how to do this.

  Accelerated by wine, relief, surrender and a transgressive arousal he’ll later wonder if the fully gay ever lose, he drifts from the strokes, gulps and licks into a quasi-telepathic link with Betty. Inclining his weight back past the fulcrum of his knees and lowering a jaw to the mattress to enable and entice Glen, he moves also into some future when he can describe it all to Betty. He’ll tell her how easy it was to turn his body into a version of hers, to angle his own hips as he had angled hers, to receive the exploratory thumb he used to give. He will only ever find words for this moment in her presence, could relate to her alone the undilutability of this fit.

  I thought of you the entire time, the adulterers half-lie, trying to forget about the orgasm they can’t forget about. Near the finish, this telepathic link with Betty is scrambled briefly by difference. When Andrew straddles and posts he meets longer, stronger arms. Where you have clutched at those two faceted pools at the base of my spine, this one can reach up and down my entire buttocks, marks ripples on the surface of my back’s disturbed water. A pelt of chest hair is in Andrew’s fingers and Betty’s. What power to deliver this inside, to crest and deepen his every whinny. Already this experience is a memory, something to share with someone not here, someone who should be here. With its unstoppable pushes and multiple pulls, memory is an orgy.

  107

  Betty stayed over again on the night of Andrew’s hallway confession. After a few restorative days of constant hugging and classes cut for hours in bed, for movies, for reading novels, for yes sex, again sex, thank you sex, how dare you sex, we’ve just had a shower sex — for confidence and disclosure, Betty pulled off for a day. Class again. The library. Errands.

  That night he found a moss green envelope waiting for him on the dining-room table. Taped inside a card of calligraphic Japanese flowers was an image of a small cockroach rolling a Timbit. No, wait, smaller than a Timbit, and with tiny bits of green leaf sticking out everywhere. Maybe she wanted him to be as strong as an ant, capable of carrying numerous times his own weight. Switching from the image to her looping inscription he read:

  The male dung beetle spends countless hours tirelessly building a ball of dung before parading it past potential mates (think of the new trucks cruising Princess St.). Females require the insulated, nutritious dung for a nest. They, too, need to see that a man has his shit together before mating.

  You were afraid I’d condemn you for letting your father die. That’s just not possible. (In fact, it’s a little crazy, but one step at a time here.) There’s simply nothing for me to judge there. Do remember, though, that I contest your note. With us, the way your father died is not worse than lying to me. Please look beyond your grief to see that.

  Healing is the admission price we pay for love. I’m your celebration. I’m your preventative exercise. I’m not your treatment.

  Let’s heal.

  — Your Bet

  108

  He wakes in a bed to layers of panic and a new pain. Where am — What’s he — The bike.

  The rest of the bed is empty, the room still. His bike leans against a wall of the motel room, extra fruit hanging in a grocery bag off one handlebar. He is stupefied at the vulnerability of this coma. It’s 4:14 in the afternoon, and he’d been dead enough not to hear an exit or the entrance of his bike. Exhaling with relief, he rolls onto his back. And pain. How am I going to put this on the saddle?

  Another hot shower and a snack don’t even take him to six p.m. Before every small chore he peeks out the curtains, perpetually debating the tactical necessity of waiting for the cover of darkness. He didn’t gain more than seventy kilometres in Glen’s truck, a distance he’ll make himself by morning. He had thought a milking fuck delivered on cabled calves and glistening flanks would score him hundreds of kilometres.

  Reading naked in bed, he staves off the growing hunger as long as he can, defending himself with underripened bananas, decent oranges and a final whiff of grapeshot. The sun looks tireless as he mines his own lammy cliché and watches television news in a rented, ugly room. A split face wouldn’t be national news, so he flicks channels looking for the newscast with the cheapest decor and the most flashy anchor-woman. Listening, he understands maybe a third of the French, but the pictures and icons help. A labour strike. Something about doctors. Pollution and water. Nothing about a cyclist on the run.

  Face it, you got away. Relax. Be human again.

  Miscalculate or drop your guard and you’ll never leave the country, will work shit jobs forever, would drag a partner down.

  Eventually, he burns the day’s novel pages, that useless mass, in the bathtub and upends the food bag hoping for something other than fruit. A new jar of Nutella rolls onto the bed, Cheers written across its label with his pink highlighter. He eats the Nutella with a finger.

  109

  Initially, Andrew and Betty’s shared status as only children and only children of divorce gave them similar landscapes of emotion and experience, rolling hills of uncertainty, plateaus of loneliness that rose into bluffs of independence and watercourses of boldness. Eventually, though, they found difference as well. Her parents’ divorce had been a ceasefire in a hostile war of hurled insults and slammed doors, while his had been one person walking briskly out the door. Fundamentally, everyone in her house had said too much, too loudly and too often. Whereas his parents hadn’t said enough. Not, at least, until the divorce started.

  Andy would always remember that Stan had sat for his custody speech, sat at the kitchen table and invited him to do the same. He was straighter there with all of those right angles, all that firm support. Pat had been gone for a week.

  “In ways, I shouldn’t tell you any of this. You won’t end the day without agreeing with me on that. Right now, this moment, your life, it’s splitting apart. A huge chasm is opening between who you thought you were and who you need to be. I know that. Worry about the circumstances of change, not change itself.

  “So, here it is: I’m in the shit. We all know that. Your mother, we’re splitting up. And yeah, you’re the rope in this tug-of-war. You didn’t get to choose whether you wanted to choose. I agree; that sucks.

  “Please know, forever, that I will always love you, whatever you choose to do. Yes, I’ll be sad if I only see you on weekends. But that’s not the only sadness here, is it? Promise number two: however much I need you, however much you help me, you’re not expected, by me or by anyone, to stick around. You’re my son, not my nurse. I’ll still love you if you go, and I’ll get by. But here’s the thing it might be easier for you not to hear. A boy might go because I’m in the shit, cut and run for higher ground. A young man might stay for the very same reason. Andrew, no one is accidentally strong. I’ve got a fight I don’t want, and I’ve got to fight it all the way without getting bitter. And, son, that’s life.”

  110

  When he had biked around Kingston, Andrew had been happiest to create circular routes that didn’t see him doubling back much. Returning to Kingston from Halifax by bike was conceived of as a route with no doubling back, at least not geographically. Ever forward. When Betty returned to Andrew’s house that winter, his lie and fear now acknowledged, she too preferred not to double back. After the initial bliss of reunion, after the grinning pleasure of meals and sleeps together, she had to admit, to herself and to him, that she hadn’t, in fact, returned. They’d started again and were a slightly different them. Phase Two. They remembered their past, but, however recent it was, they wouldn’t get back to it. Could not, should not, would not and, she began to wonder, maybe even didn’t want to. They’d changed their emotional arrangements; why not their living arrangements?

  Walking home fr
om campus one day in February, she was trapped on the sidewalk behind two so-called fellow students, walking prisoners to their idiocy.

  “There’s no way you were as wasted as Tony.”

  “Dude, absolutely.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “Six shooters, three —”

  Betty hated them even more when she stepped out from behind their leather jackets and baseball caps to cross the street and their loud, thick voices carried effortlessly to the other side, amplified, no doubt, by necklaces of coral or hemp. Raising her collarbones, lowering her shoulder blades, she tried to fly away from these fellow Canadians. At “Chelios is back in tonight,” she thought again of how she had never been in Paris’s Georges Pompidou Centre. The dumb, efficient pace of these dudes tirelessly matched hers, exiling her to Morocco’s Tagghdite Plateau at “fucking killer tits, man” and too temporarily sending her off to an austere Warsaw.

  At first she was elated to open the door to Andrew and an uncorked red. Two glasses sat patiently on a clean counter. Garlic roasted in the oven. “Making hummus,” he called.

  She’d just set her bag down and his (Scotchy?) tongue was in her mouth.

  “I got my Monsters essay back.”

  “Well?” she obliged, aware of how close the front door remained to her back, of how she was standing in a corner with her coat still on.

  “A-pahluss.”

  “Hey, wow. Great. Great.” One kiss. To his neck. “You pour while I run up to the washroom.”

  One floor up, she now had the bathroom door, not the front door, behind her back as a surrogate spine. She just needed a breath or two alone. The comfortingly firm door was not, however, thick enough to keep out the eventual sound of clinking glasses and footfalls on the steps. She ran the taps, flushed an empty toilet, watched clear water spiral away.

  “There’s more.” His voice drew near the door.

  “I’m sure there is. Give me a second here.” One minute, two, what difference did they make?

  Maybe her mom had a point. Maybe there is a right and wrong room for everything. Betty never lost thought, word or sight of hallway as she stepped out to a glass of wine and Andrew arranging a floppy white term paper in his hands.

  “You ready? Andrew, this is quite simply one of the strongest undergraduate essays I have had the pleasure to read. The numerous strengths herein (an unwavering attention, a focused imagination, a sustained eloquence) will obviously live beyond the scope of this paper, and so, too, could its principal assertions. Your central idea of self-monstering — of monstering both chosen and demanded — could and should form the basis of an MA thesis. You will be extremely competitive for scholarships. Consider working at UNS with Nigel Ryan.”

  “Wow. Andrew, that’s —”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  He was clutching the paper so tightly he appeared to have one hand and a white flipper.

  “I mean, you barely think something — you hope, but you don’t want to hope because that might ruin it — but sometimes you do get what you want. Hey, can I buy you dinner? Jezboto or Split Yellow?”

  “So, you want to do this?”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t know. In ways, yeah. I’m just excited about the recognition.”

  When these waves of wine, hope and endurance finally broke on their walk home, they each found how cutting one could now be, how discrete knives had been custom forged for single hands and hearts. The first of many battles in their war of Europe versus grad school began.

  “Go off in search of praise,” she said. “Go chase your check marks.”

  “You’re right. Running away is much more admirable.”

  111

  His play with Glen wasn’t the smartest indoor sport for someone interminably on a bike. The small, hard saddle now feels like a meat-hook.

  How did Betty wake up and go to class after this? How did she walk around?

  But he’s fed, bathed, hydrated and rested, more than willing to take the saddle sores. The clean edge of speed. Beneath the cramped, stolen track pants, he’s got freshly shaved legs sharp in the night. His crotch’s red tide seems to have turned.

  Back on the road his body continues to remember the softness of last night’s mattress, and he’s grateful to no longer be slinging around an empty stomach. Free of hunger, he can see again. The valleys have flattened. Retracing European settlement, fighting the westerly wind, he can see the Maritime valleys behind him as a natural defence, row after row of sharpened stakes driven into the ground. Here, finally, is flatter farmland, the agricultural sweet spot of Quebec. The highest of these now manageable hills affords him a horizon of electric light. Lingering, unnatural light stains the far distance. Cities have returned.

  Even this rural highway has signs announcing that he is en route to Quebec City, directing him to le capital national, the province’s capital and proud home of a provincial legislature named Assemblée nationale du Quebec. The National Assembly in Quebec and Queen’s Park in Ontario — Europe’s grip cast off in one place then clung to down the road. Here in the lonely dark of a provincial highway, no longer within the parade of licence plates he left back on the Trans-Can, he recognizes that Quebec’s licence plate slogan, Je me souviens, is the only Canadian poetry going. Here is a society distinct from the sales pitches of wild rose country and ocean playgrounds.

  Je me souviens. The viens looks like conjugated iterations of venir, to come. Here in the dark of night, I remember is also I come back.

  Quebec City. Some version of six hours by car to Kingston. With distance at least he remains bi- not uni-lingual, remembering or calculating distances by car, then translating them for the bike. Six hours by car will put him back in Kingston in a few days. Leg it home.

  Or leg it back to his house. All those months fighting with Betty, telling himself and her that in part he was doing his MA to maintain ownership of the Kingston house — had he really wanted the family brick and mortar, or just Betty? Had he, as she once claimed, wanted her on his terms (in the house), not hers (bumming around Europe)? Their honesty was cutting one moment then inviting the next. When he had told her about his first significant girlfriend, that late high school pairing off, she’d interrupted his description of an anniversary dinner to ask about Stan.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Your dad checked himself into a clinic so you could get laid?”

  “No, that’s just when the —”

  “Appointment was, when you were seventeen and having your first anniversary with your first serious girlfriend. Pimp Daddee. Pimp Daddee.”

  “How did I not see this?”

  “Sex. Parents. We build walls,” she commented quickly.

  Three weeks later, tired of arguing over plane tickets and Plato, she found new game to hunt. Questioning some phone calls and emails he’d been trading with a female classmate with long hair and a longer list of past boyfriends, she was suddenly yelling, “He’s dead. He doesn’t need any more vicarious ass.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “What it does,” Betty snapped. “Maybe career options aren’t the only options you’re looking to expand next year with this MA.”

  “Couldn’t that be said of your Grand Tour, as well?”

  “Could and should.”

  “Super.”

  In the court of love, anything you say can and will be used against you.

  House aside, timing aside, ambitions temporarily ignored, in ways their fight was head versus heart, history and personality be damned. His grad student plan was orchestrated and accredited, with clear expectations and semi-predictable outcomes. Here is a reading list. These are the deadlines. Find what you can. Make what you must. But then one of them would realize that this was also true of her proposed Grand Tour. For four years she’d been looking at art in textbooks or on slides or websites. In London, major galleries had free admission. What does that culture feel like? You’ve either stood in front of a Rothko or you haven’t.

  Wh
en they traded confessions, not insults, they agreed each of them was chasing a fantasy of the heart and calculations of the head. At a calmer moment, he tried to sell her on his joining The Centaur Project at a university in Halifax.

  “It’s not just an MA. It’s an interdisciplinary bike project. A physicist. A social geographer. A human kineticist.”

  “So what are you and the gym teacher actually going to do?”

  “I take courses in Travel Lit, another Monsters in Lit and The Body in Theory so I can write about the bicycle as social projection. Not just history but social context. Why leisure here but daily life in China?”

  “What about The Body in Practice?”

  “Theory first. Horses were expensive. Walking was slow. Rail was the big break, but it didn’t last. Why did we misstep in the evolution of train, bicycle, car? Why did we forsake affordable travel that makes us fit for debt, pollution and getting fat?”

  “Bikes don’t have a back seat.”

  The arguments weren’t frequent so much as constant — making dinner, walking for groceries, late into the night, with or without wine. Making lunch, it would be a rational argument, a chess game of voice and mind over common, gridded ground.

  “I’m not pushing you out of the nest, your dad is. It’s his will for fuck’s sake,” she tried to say.

  Cleaning that same kitchen four days later, they’d fight to wound, tugging their rope between tuition and plane tickets. In the night’s grey air, each was sniper and surgeon both, piercing the organs they’d soon patch together again. Arguments of timing, desire, honesty, possession, change, everything that mattered and several subjects that didn’t. Other nights, in bed, there was utter sweetness, brief confessions while spooning, hope and doubt acknowledged equally.