Just Pretending

by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  One afternoon, when Joe is gone and Giselle is nowhere in sight, Julia locks the front door and goes into the studio. She hasn’t been here since coming home from the hospital. She closes the door with a quiet click. There’s a hush over the space. It’s as chaotic as always. Julia walks to the red sofa and lies across it, pretending to pose for an imaginary artist. The heat wave is long over; her rash has disappeared. She leans back into the cushions and puts her knee up, a hand on one hip. Slowly, she unbuttons her top, sitting up to take it off. She lets her pants and panties slide to the floor. She lies back on the couch and poses again, pulling the sheet partially up one leg, leaving her breasts exposed, feeling the air on her skin. She doesn’t hear Giselle enter the studio.

  “Hmmm,” Giselle says quietly, startling Julia.

  Julia reaches for the sheet to cover herself.

  “No, don’t,” says Giselle, and something in her voice makes Julia obey. Her fingers drop the sheet, and it remains draped over just her one leg, the rest of her body exposed. “Pull your foot in a bit,” Giselle says. “And rest your hand on your thigh. No, higher.” Slowly, Giselle examines Julia, from head to toe. “That’s better.”

  Giselle continues to watch her, not moving, and slowly Julia stops blushing and relaxes, settles into the burning excitement of being observed with such interest. They stay that way for several minutes, and then Giselle leaves the studio without saying a word, closing the door quietly behind her.

  Julia goes to the store and buys candles, boxes and boxes of long tapers in every colour. She uses a steak knife to whittle the ends narrow enough to fit into the beer bottle tops. While Joe is out, she goes into the studio and puts one in every empty bottle – on the worktables, the bookshelf, here and there on the floor, and in the dozens of bottles cramming the coffee table. By the time she’s finished, she figures there must be more than fifty candles standing erect in almost every corner of the studio. She waits until it gets dark and then lights them all. They blaze, throwing their white-orange glow around the room. The multi-coloured burning tapers remind Julia of something happy. They seem celebratory, she thinks. She undresses and watches in the mirror as the candlelight bounces and shimmers off her skin, giving her face a fulgent glow. She practices lounging on the red sofa and, just as she planned, this is where she is when Joe finally enters the studio. He says nothing at first, and then, “What’s going on?” But Julia can see by the way he swings the door shut without taking his eyes off her that he knows exactly what’s going on.

  “You look –” He breaks off and breathes, “Whooo,” as if at a loss for words. “Astonishing,” he finally says, still not moving.

  Julia blushes under the intensity of his gaze, anticipation causing her insides to ache, her apprehension about crossing the invisible line between them replaced by a mixture of desire and dread.

  He moves slowly across the room to the couch. When he kisses her for the first time, she closes her eyes tightly. That word, again, pops into her head: ravage. Ravage me, she thinks. Instead, she whispers, “Take me,” in his ear and arches toward him, welcoming his touch. Julia leans forward to help him peel his t-shirt over his head, running her hands over his back and across his chest before pulling him close to feel his skin next to hers. She lies back on the couch and puts her hands over his, guiding them, urgently, all over her body. She relishes the feel of his strong hands under hers, against her skin. It puts her in mind of the way he stroked the tomato that day in the market.

  Joe kisses her shoulder and runs his lips softly over her skin, across the curve of her breast, down to her stomach. A shiver skims over her torso like a breeze, and her nipples stiffen. She guides his hands to her breasts. Joe shifts his legs back as he moves his mouth down her body in a series of small kisses. His foot knocks over one of the beer bottles with its candle burning brightly. The tapers are long – longer than the bottles that act as their base, and this makes the empty bottles top heavy. The one bottle tipping sets in motion several toppling bottles with a chorus of clinking glass. “Shit,” Joe exclaims as he pushes away from the couch and scrambles to right them. There are at least a half dozen bottles down, their candles still burning. He stands clumsily and reaches to grab the ones that have tipped onto the floor. His knee jars the coffee table, and he knocks nearly every bottle over. They clatter into one another and onto the floor, like dominoes, each one setting in motion the fall of several more. Many of the candles fall out of the bottles and roll across the floor, still lit. “Help me,” Joe says, a cross tone creeping into his voice. “This place is a fucking tinderbox.”

  Julia jumps from the couch, grabbing the sheet and holding it in front of her with one hand as she begins to pick up beer bottles and blow out candles. She first feels the heat at her ankles but doesn’t look, thinking it must be her imagination. Then Joe begins hitting her shins with his open palms and she realizes the sheet is on fire. Instinctively, she shakes the sheet out in front of her, thinking to put the fire out but instead fanning the flames even more. She drops the sheet to the floor and falls to her knees, slapping the flaming fabric. For the first time, real panic starts to rise in her gut. She smacks the sheet with her hands, feels the flames burning her palms, starts looking around the room for a source of water. Joe is behind her, stamping out a number of spots where the flame has caught his papers. Finally, to Julia’s relief, she’s able to extinguish the sheet in a flurry of ashes and smoke.

  Meanwhile, Joe has filled a plastic container with water from the sink. She watches as he sloshes the water over the largest flames. One of the candles has ignited a small pile of sketch paper, and another threatens a stack of wooden screen-printing frames. Julia kneels over a few candles in the centre of the floor and holds her hair back as she leans over to blow each one out and then turn the bottles upright. Joe drops the container and goes around the room to methodically blow out all the remaining candles. When he’s finished, the room is dark. Their heavy breaths fill the space as the light from the moon and the streetlamps slowly filters in through the windows, bringing with it a dispirited flavour, the sensual mood created by the candlelight so easily obliterated. Julia finds her top, slips it on and sits on the edge of the red couch. She holds her smarting, ash-blackened hands in front of her. Joe, shirtless and sweating in the dim light from the windows, shakes his head and laughs. Julia has no idea what the laugh means, but somehow it makes her feel stupid.

  Joe comes over to the couch and bends to pick up her pants, handing them to her. She slips them on as modestly as possible, humiliation staining her face. He sits on the couch beside her, not touching her.

  “I’ve never been good at this,” he finally says. “With women. At relationships.” He speaks so quietly she isn’t sure, at first, if she heard him correctly. After a long pause, he adds, “I’ll tell you one thing that I know is true, though,” and he gives her a sideways glance before saying, into the air, “Nothing’s ever finished.”

  He puts his hand on her knee, and reflexively she moves away. She doesn’t want to be touched any more. She doesn’t like the way he’s speaking in absolutes. It’s not like him.

  Joe stands and goes to the door. With his hand on the knob, he turns and looks at her. She won’t meet his gaze. Finally, he says, “Dominic wants to come back. I heard from him a few days ago but didn’t know how to tell you.”

  Moments later, she hears the engine of the Lincoln roar to life. She runs through the house and out the front door in time to see the Lincoln driving away. She bolts across the front lawn and down the street in her bare feet, chasing after the Lincoln’s taillights. Julia waves her arm in the air as she runs, her hand outstretched. “Wait,” she yells, but he doesn’t stop. She thinks of yelling, “Take me with you,” but then she sees that’s really not what she wants. “Take me away from here” is more like it. As her feet slap the weed-filled cracks of the sidewalk, Julia lowers her arm and slows her pace. She keeps running, feeling strangely untethered. Without knowing it, she longs for the self
she was just a few weeks ago, an elephant, big as a house, a means to an end that at least she understood. Sitting in the Lincoln playing childhood games. Back then, when anything was possible, when Joe was still a game and riddles could still be solved.

  happy numbers

  The first time I see him is when Trudy points him out. “That guy’s watching you,” she says, arms crossed as she leans against the counter and points with her chin. “He looks like he’s in lu-uv,” she sneers. And sure enough, when I look up from sorting plastic hangers into bins, I see a homeless guy in a dirty, oversized coat lightly fingering the ladies belts and gazing in our direction.

  “Isn’t that your last boyfriend?” I dismiss Trudy’s observation and return to my hangers.

  She tries to laugh but instead lets out a snort through her nose that sends her searching for a tissue. I try not to laugh at her because I know from experience she’ll take it personally and not talk to me all day.

  Later, the homeless guy comes through the checkout line with his fist full of pastel mints from the measly candy counter in the basement – excuse me, lower level. We’re not supposed to say basement in case anyone catches on to its morose undertone. Personally, I don’t think basement is so bad. I mean, it’s not like we’re calling it the morgue or something. Although you could almost get away with that on a technical level, considering how many old ladies work here.

  He grabs my hand as I give him his change – seizes it awkwardly between his thumb, nestled in my palm, and his fingers that press insistently on my knuckles. When I glance up at him, he’s grinning from ear to ear in a way that suggests he knows me, which is definitely not the case. Despite this gesture, I’m not alarmed. Behind the tangled beard and hair, I see a boyish face. And his teeth are surprisingly white, for a homeless guy, suggesting to me some mystery behind the façade. I decide that he isn’t nearly as old as he looks at first glance. Likely no older than me, mid-thirties at best. I’m finding that maybe as many as nine times out of ten, things are not as they might first appear. It’s disconcerting, but also a little reassuring, to think that you really can rely on not being able to rely on pretty much anything.

  He lets go of my hand and snatches the bag from the counter. Once he’s gone, I find a note tucked in my palm. In hasty handwriting: Didn’t we go to scool together. I wonder if he spelled “school” wrong on purpose.

  The next day, I see him lurking in the sunglasses and women’s accessories. Shortly afterwards, I notice Jan, the pregnant undercover security guard, “shopping” in the same area. Well, you can’t blame her – he’s an obvious mark. But something tells me he’s not as desperate as people think.

  Trudy and I go for lunch in the food court, where we see him looking forlorn by himself at a table for four.

  “We should sit with him,” I say to Trudy, only half joking. But then security shows up and talks to him, and I see him leave.

  “Once we had a homeless guy at the Circle who was on house arrest,” Trudy says, mouth full of egg salad. “He gave the mall as his home address,” she snorts.

  I’ve heard this one before. Trudy talks like she knows everything there is to know about retail because she’s worked in every mall in the city. And she says it as if it’s something every sane person should envy her for. Trudy’s one of about twenty “assistant managers” in our department store, which means she gets ten cents more an hour than me and the satisfaction of wearing her title on her name tag. I’m relegated to “associate,” which incidentally contains the word ass and might be marginally symbolic of the position. Then again, so does Trudy’s.

  Everyone knows you can’t get much lower than “associate” unless you’re a “stocker” – then you’re just nobody. As “assistant manager,” Trudy is entitled to see my personnel file, which contains my resumé – on which I have lied extensively. This is why I can’t tell Trudy about my own considerable and varied experiences in retail. According to my resumé, I’ve spent the past seven years working in Korea as a karaoke singer. I counter scepticism at job interviews by pointing out, with no minor amount of incredulity in my voice (as if to say, I know, crazy, isn’t it?), how much Korean men love redheads. Even overweight ones with nerdy glasses.

  “But you don’t have red hair,” they invariably say, eyeing my dark head suspiciously.

  To which I ruefully reply, “Oh, but I did,” as I cast my eyes downward in apparent nostalgia. I had to tell the Korea lie because I couldn’t reasonably be expected to record all the jobs I’ve held over those years, pretty much none of which would give me a decent reference, or even remember me in some cases.

  So when Trudy acts like she knows everything there is to know about working retail, there’s really not much I can contribute without totally blowing my cover. And I haven’t always worked retail. I spent my first years after dropping out of university as a bean counter in a large plant that sold pre-fab houses. My “condition,” as my mother likes to call it, eventually took care of that job, just like it took care of university, and condemned me to this life of servitude in a series of McJobs.

  I go several days without seeing him anywhere in the store or mall. Then one afternoon as I leave through the back doors of the mall, which lead to the bus terminal, I know I’m being followed, and I know it’s him. I stop in my tracks and wait.

  Feigning indifference, I look off in the distance and wonder about the clouds forming above the gas station to my left. Rain always makes me sad. It’s part of my “condition,” which I like to call dysthymia to confuse people. It’s a medical word for sadness, far as I can tell, and while I’ve never had an official diagnosis, it’s the closest I’ve been able to come to a self-diagnosis. It’s like I was born depressed.

  He comes up behind me and slides the book seamlessly between my arm, stiff at my side, and my body. It happens in a fluid motion executed so cleverly that his step does not falter. I watch him amble away, his overcoat flapping at the backs of his knees. Heart of Darkness. The title makes me shiver and, combined with the rain clouds, threatens to fill me with some irrational remorse. This book was my nemesis in school. It’s like a punch in the gut, seeing it again.

  I hurry home as if my constant and quick movements can stop the pall that looms. I can’t even bring myself to look at the book on my way home as I chant Hurry hurry to myself under my breath, trying to make it before the black hole opens.

  I drop the book like a cinder block inside the door of my lonely apartment. I can’t look at it now. I try to resist, but soon I find myself crawling between the covers of my bed for relief. I bury my head into the pillow and drop into sleep. I have to spend the next three days in bed, calling in with a migraine – a handy excuse, easier for sure than calling in with depression. Each day, I try to will myself out of bed. Each day, I fail. I sense the book lurking in the hallway near the front door like a sneaky visitor hoping to be invited in fully.

  Finally, near the end of the third day, I’m able to shuffle to the door and retrieve the book. Cross-legged on the bed, I examine the copy of Heart of Darkness, well worn, the cover crisp and flaking where it’s been bent, the yellow pages curled at the corners. With interest, I notice a bookmark on page thirteen. A very good sign, I think. Thirteen is a happy number. Thirteen is innocuous and delicious.

  Starting on page thirteen, he’s underlined words, here and there in the text, in order to make a sentence. He’s used an unimaginative blue pen; demerit points for that. I go back to the kitchen and grab a piece of paper. I flip the pages and write out the message – it’s not all darkness behind a veil of tear. He missed the s on tears – a legitimate tears with an s does not occur for another forty-nine pages. I say legitimate because what he’s given me is actually tear, as in rip. Maybe he thought forty-nine pages was too far for me to have to look. But he doesn’t know me. I wouldn’t have given up. And forty-nine is such an exquisite number; it would have been exceptional to have to turn those forty-nine unmarked pages looking for the completion of the message. It�
�s like an omen or something that all these happy numbers are coming up. Forty-nine is absolutely as simple and innocent as it gets, astonishing by its combination of sevens, i.e., seven squared, when seven is the quintessential perfect number. Anything as nice as forty-nine has to be lucid, first-rate stuff. I can’t believe he missed it.

  I’ve always liked certain numbers because they have personalities. At first it was like this: a number like five could make me sad, just like that, while another number, say seven, could make me feel, well, not happy exactly, but optimistic anyway. And I didn’t have any kind of reason for this association.

  One shrink, when I was a kid, told me he found this hard to believe – that numbers could have such an effect on me. I told him that I found it hard to believe that he could be a certified shrink and not know that people felt this way. He ended up telling my parents I was “sensitive” because I had been “overprotected.” My dad blamed my mom, and my mom blamed my dad before they collectively decided that the shrink was on drugs.

  Then my dad brought home a book that belonged to one of the guys he worked with at his creepy agriculture lab. He was excited to show me the page that talked about happy and unhappy numbers, right there in a textbook. I couldn’t stop freaking out. “Man, I knew it!” I screamed, jumping up and down hysterically on the couch, hopping from cushion to cushion. My dad held the book open and ran around the room turning on all the lights so we could see it better. I just kept jumping and screaming like I’d cut my arm off or something. Scared the hell out of my mom, who came running in from the kitchen to see what all the yelling was about. All I could think of was that numbers do go with feelings. Wow, that was a great moment. My dad always worked hard to understand me.