They’d eaten at a Japanese restaurant where the prawns had been succulent, the sushi fresh as the sea, the hot burst of the wasabi as exhilarating as ever. Now she was sipping a chilled Sauvignon Blanc.
Nick sat down a few feet away, took up a drawing pad and some pastels. “Just relax,” he said.
His jeans hugged his slender legs and hips, his T-shirt clung to his lean chest, revealed his muscular upper arms. His hair, blond with a trace of grey, flopped over his forehead and he pushed it back with long fingers. There was something of the street about him, as though he’d been undernourished as a child, had needed to be a scrapper, a smartass, in order to survive.
She was feeling a constant hum of desire for Nick, which she knew somehow could be sated in a way that had been eluding her for a long time.
Strangely, her disturbing sexual surges had diminished after the shock of seeing Richard and the one she thought of as the girl. She mostly regretted sending that brutal email, but she had moments when she was glad about it. And she didn’t intend to regret any involvement with Nick. Two can play at that game, she thought, and then, Have I really sunk to that level?
“Have you always lived in Vancouver?” Carol asked. She would play it cool for as long as possible.
“Yeah, born and bred.”
“Me, too. Where’d you grow up?”
“Kerrisdale.”
“Ah.” Not a poor neighbourhood; maybe not a scrapper, then.
“You?”
“Point Grey.”
“‘Ah’ yourself.”
He reminded her of her first husband, Johnny, who had in fact come from a poor family. They both had thin, high-cheekboned faces and wiry bodies.
“You look great,” he said. “Good. No necklace. The better to show off the long line of your neck. Take off your shoes and tuck your legs under. That’s good. Lean against the arm of the couch. Get comfortable. You’ll need to hold the pose for ten or fifteen minutes. Okay?”
“I have posed before, you know. Not since I was a student at Emily Carr, but I still know how to do it.”
“Of course. Lovely, stay like that.” He worked steadily, his expression serious. His very concentration was sexy.
Johnny had been a carpenter, not an artist like her father. She’d married him largely because of the dissimilarity, she’d realized later. To friends she’d said things like, “He’s not pompous like my father,” and “He’s sweet, a regular guy, not elitist like my father.”
She and Johnny were compatible in some ways — certainly sexually. And he had an eye for beauty, understood her passion for art, but had no words to express his appreciation. Like a cat who lays a gift mouse at his mistress’s feet, he would bring her a pair of chairs with elegant bentwood backs, or a set of beautifully fluted wineglasses, and say no more than, “I found them at a flea market. Thought you’d like them.”
He had had a scar on his face that toughened his almost-feminine features, but he’d got it from playing hockey at eight years old, not from street fighting. He had a way of looking at you, assessing you with a sly grin, which he directed at other women, too, but she was pretty sure he’d never been unfaithful. It was just that he was sexy and knew it and seemed to need others to know he knew it. Maybe he would have strayed eventually. The honeymoon period was a long one, most of the four years they were together, and even now she still sometimes felt desire when she thought of him. Sweet as he was, she’d realized in the end that his lack of education and conversation bothered her too much. She hated that her father had been substantially right when he’d told her Johnny was not suitable for her.
She was the one, in the end, who was unfaithful. She’d met an older man at a university party — a pedantic old fart, he’d turned out to be — but with their affair, the damage was done. They’d discussed books and movies, had gone to plays, and she’d felt as though she were drinking spring water after a long drought. She’d known then she needed an intellectual equal in order to be happily married.
She’d told the old guy, Sidney was his name, about her dissatisfaction with Johnny, her dear Johnny — a worse betrayal than the sexual infidelity. Sidney, in response, had quoted part of an Auden poem too gleefully, a line about a “dense companion.” Later, she’d looked up the poem and written down three of its other lines: “The bond between us / Is chimerical surely: / Yet I cannot break it.”
But she had broken it.
“Dense companion.” Unkind, but true, by certain measures. Johnny was rough, not well educated, but he wasn’t stupid. And it suddenly struck her that Nick was a blend of Johnny’s physicality and her father’s artistic talent, with no denseness on one hand and no grandiosity on the other.
“You seem to have gone quite far away,” Nick said, holding up his pastel drawing for her to see.
“Oh, yes, just daydreaming.”
Nick’s drawing had caught her pensive look and the composition was beautiful, the negative spaces as shapely and interesting as the configuration of her body. “It’s lovely,” she said.
“It’s yours.”
They sat together on the couch and drank more wine.
“I’m sorry about you and Richard,” Nick said. “Do you want to talk about it some more?”
“No, thanks.” Carol had told Nick over dinner that they had parted. “He was difficult to be with,” she had said. “He was so gloomy. He’s probably depressed but he won’t take it seriously because he can still dress himself and drag himself to work. And he’s still teaching. He seems determined to change his life in some way that doesn’t seem to include me.”
Now she said, “No, I think I said enough about it already.”
Nick took her hand in his. “I am so sorry.”
“That was at first,” Carol said, Nick’s sympathy breaking down her resolve to say no more. “Now I think the bastard is having an affair.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“You’re hurt.”
“Yes, I’m bloody well hurt.”
He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, then very softly on the mouth. He sat back and looked at her solemnly. “Was it all right to do that?”
In answer she kissed him back, a long, tonguing kiss.
“The artist and his model. God, what a cliché,” she said. “Was there ever a male artist who didn’t fuck his model?”
“I’m flattered by the Picasso reference, but posing for me once for fifteen minutes doesn’t exactly make you my model.”
Carol laughed. “No, you’re right, but I’ve been teaching a feminist section in my art history classes, emphasizing how the ‘male gaze’ is detrimental to women in general and to women artists in particular. It’s a view I hold strongly.”
“Well, then, I’ll never paint or draw you again, and I’ll avert my eyes when we fuck.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you? That kiss might be a one-off, for all you know.”
“And is it?”
“I don’t know, either.”
Nick poured more wine and said, “Tell me more about your art classes.”
Carol regarded him for a moment, unsure if he really wanted to hear her feminist views. He had an ironic edge that she feared could sharpen into mockery or dismissal. For all she knew, he could be indifferent or even hostile to women artists and their plight.
Sensing her hesitation, he said, “No, really, go on, I’m interested.”
Carol told him some of the main points in her classes on female artists, and how angry she still became over the attitudes of some of the young men.
“Quite shocking in the twenty-first century,” Nick said. “When I was young, not surprisingly, I liked, and still like, the macho guys: Pollock and de Kooning and Jasper Johns. But when I studied the Impressionists, I was smitten with the mother and child paintings of Berthe Morisot. They’re sensuous and she has a delicate way with light and colour and —”
“Stop,” Carol said. “You had me at Berthe Morisot.”
They talked for a while lo
nger, until Nick said, “Let’s stop now. I want to work on your mouth.”
“Another drawing?”
“No, not a drawing.”
Febraury 2012
Carol,
When you took up with Nick, I became very jealous. Then I read a trick for letting go of a lover — or in my case, my jealousy. One strategy I liked was to picture Nick in undignified positions, such as on the toilet, straining red-faced, pants around his ankles.
One of my favourite images was of him naked, hopping in circles on one leg, over and over, round and round, his cock — very small, of course — bobbing up and down.
It helped.
After a while, I stopped. A sad acceptance took over.
And now you’ve gone and married him.
Richard
TWENTY-SEVEN
JACINTHA REMEMBERED THE exact moment when her perception of Richard began to change. She was in his office and had picked up the clay dog made by his daughter, when something strange and complicated happened. The hand holding the dog became warm at the same time as she felt a small stab of pain in her chest, and a throbbing in her head, and she looked at Richard and saw something equally complex in his eyes. He sat with his mouth slightly open and stared at her. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, and when he looked at her again, the tenderness she saw overwhelmed her. The very air of the room vibrated.
I think he loves me, she’d thought. And then, Good — it will make things easier for me. But she didn’t feel as triumphant as she’d thought she would. Instead, she found herself pushing down doubts about her plan.
She had only ever loved one person. She was fond of her adoptive parents, but she couldn’t say more than that. The one person, of course, was her birth mother. But that had been primal. Yes, primal. And now there was him.
She could hardly sleep that night, but in the morning wondered if she’d been wrong about what she had seen. Maybe Richard had simply been thinking of his daughter, whom he was missing, remembering her as a six-year-old. Still, what she had experienced had been intense, had not seemed to be triggered by a memory, but by the electricity of the moment that was generated between the two of them.
She was confused and hated the feeling. She had learned to survive by being sure of herself. It was never a matter of right or wrong, but what she chose to do. She had told herself the practical way to look at it was that he had shown her a moment of weakness; that if he had loved her in that moment, it needn’t be important. It would just make him more malleable, more susceptible to what she had in mind for him. But the thought passed. She knew it wasn’t what she wanted now.
At the Thanksgiving party, she had caught him looking at her with tenderness, too. And then, oh then, the kiss in the garden. His body felt so familiar pressed against her; so comforting. She couldn’t remember ever feeling quite that way before. Of course, she reasoned, people feel most at home, most comforted by members of their family. The genetic bond. Even their smell is comforting.
She knew for sure now that he was her father. She had been almost certain when she’d learned his exact age. She had told him she was reading about the sixties and asked him if he’d ever been a hippie.
He’d laughed and said, “No, I was only ten years old in 1967, the so-called ‘Summer of Love.’ And I never wanted to have long hair or wear beads.”
The DNA test result, which she received a few days before the party, had confirmed his paternity.
As she had been walking to his apartment that night, she suddenly knew she couldn’t go through with it. She had meant to take him just to the edge and then take a photo of them half-undressed and tell him who she really was. He would be shocked and humiliated. She had planned to send the photos and the damning information to his wife and to the head of his department, to hurt him in retribution for how he had hurt her and her mother. She had been left fatherless and unprotected. But her plan had depended on her hating him, and she didn’t hate him then. She wanted to forgive him, and more than that: she wanted him. And he doesn’t need to ever know who I really am. The thought shocked her, but she wasn’t about to let it go.
Almost at his door, she turned and ran, stumbling and almost falling. She couldn’t seduce him, not now.
She arrived back at her house and awakened Skitch. She made love to him with a frenzy that was both ecstatic and unreal. She was there but not there, oddly detached.
The next morning, she left before Skitch woke up, not wanting to face his giddy gratitude. She walked to Jericho Beach, and as the sun came up and dazzled the water, she sat on a log to think. She took off her shoes and dug her toes into the sand. She liked the way the cold air made her shiver. Everything around her, all the sights and sounds and smells, made her feel more alive than ever. She had had a dream in which she and Richard sat quietly together, happy and peaceful.
A new plan was necessary. Maybe their love wouldn’t be a sin. They were strangers except in their blood. There would be no need to reveal their history. Some people might disapprove of the age difference between them, but that would be easy to ignore.
She didn’t even know why sin had come to mind, since she didn’t believe in it. Crimes, yes, but not sin, and what she wanted, as far as she knew, wasn’t a crime, either.
February 2012
Richard,
I know I recently told you, and also all those years ago, that I found it hard to excuse what Jacintha did, however hard her life had been. But the insight you’ve just given me has changed my mind. (Again, I presume she told you all that.) How desperate and confused she was. How wrong-headed. But, to her, not wrong-hearted. All I can say now is how greatly I pity her. I don’t know what else to say.
Carol
Dear Carol,
Pity is right, and enough. Thank you.
Richard
TWENTY-EIGHT
CAROL WAS AT Nick’s again.
“Enough of the husbandly sex,” he said. “Let’s get creative.”
Afterward, as they sat eating pizza, Nick asked her if she’d like to go out with him to take some photographs in the neighbourhood, something he said he’d been doing regularly. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon.
They went to the alley behind Hastings, just off Main Street, with its poles that looked like scaffolding constructed to hang giants, and its Dumpsters and hookers and addicts.
Nick walked over to a young woman leaning against a brick wall and said, “Jackie, can I take your picture?”
“Hey, Nick, sure, how do you want me?” With a wicked smile, she lifted her skirt, showing sheer black panties.
“No, sweetheart, nothing special. Just be yourself.”
She kept smiling, striking silly poses. Nick laughed and kept clicking.
“Thanks, Jackie,” he said and gave her a couple of dollars.
“Can I take a picture of you?” he asked Carol.
“Here?”
“Yeah, that’s good, stop there.”
When he finished, Carol turned and saw a man shooting up a few feet behind her.
“What the hell, Nick. Why’d you snap me in front of him?”
“It’s good — come and look.” He showed her the digital shot, and she had to admit the composition was good: the juxtaposition of her, tidy and middle class, against the scruffy addict gave it a certain shock value, even social commentary.
He talked to a few more people and took a few more shots before Carol said she had to go. A lot of his subjects knew him.
“Come back soon,” he said, as they walked back to her car.
“I will,” she said.
On her next visit, Nick offered her cocaine. She’d used it only twice, many years earlier, and was reluctant to do it again.
“Come on,” Nick said. “Have you ever had sex on it?”
“Once, and we went on so long I began to be frightened that we’d never stop. It seemed unreal — mechanical, even.”
“But it felt great, too, didn’t it?”
“In a way.”
When they’d done a couple of lines, Nick said they were going out.
“I thought you wanted to have sex?”
“Later.”
They walked toward Main Street in the rain. “The rain feels good on my skin,” Carol said. “The air smells good, the cars sound interesting, don’t they? Swish, swish, I feel like I could do anything, we could travel, get a boat, go to the Gulf Islands, do you like the islands?”
“You are so stoned.”
“Yeah, talking a lot, is it laced with speed? I hope not, that’s not good for you, but I feel great, except my butt is cold.” She was wearing a skirt, but no tights.
“Let me fix that.” Nick held her close and rubbed her cheeks. “Better?”
“Yes, but they’ll get cold again.”
“Not for long.”
They were suddenly at the Main and Hastings alley.
“We shouldn’t go in there,” Carol said.
“It’s fine.”
It seemed so menacing, unlike the last time. She looked up at the ghastly grid of poles and wires and remembered how she’d told her students that the terrible could become sublime with a shift of perception, an inward gaze, but found she couldn’t make the shift.
“Terrible,” she said, but Nick was walking ahead and didn’t respond. She licked at the drops of rain that were soaking her hair and face.
She looked down. Oily puddles. Grey bricks. Smells of fish and rotting vegetables and shit. She almost stepped in a pile of steaming shit.
“Nick, wait, damn it.”
He stopped. She saw his teeth. Smiling? Grimacing?
She froze when she heard her name called loudly from somewhere behind her. A wail. “Carol! Carol!”
Nick took a step toward her, said sharply, “Don’t look back.”
“Don’t look back? Why did you say that?” Lot’s wife. Wives lost. Husbands lost.
“Someone’s calling me,” she said.
“No, the guy calls for Karen all the time. His girlfriend who disappeared. He doesn’t like to be stared at, gets aggressive, so don’t turn around.”
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