I’m aware of Dolores through my body. My body reacts to her heat. I would like to put my nose in her hair, under her armpit, under her sweaty breast, but right now I’ll have to do with what comes my way via the air. I can make out a cheap, fruity shampoo. A deodorant that’s strong, so strong it must be a men’s deodorant, the way it dominates all the other smells – sharp, with a violent tang of minty freshness. Underneath all this, I imagine Dolores smells sour and a little sweet, a little like a baby.
“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” I point to the beach, the way the water looks dark against the white from the now-blaring sun, like an overexposed photograph.
She nods.
I talk about coming here a few years ago and falling in love with the way the sky and water looked, the morning contrasts and the evening’s intense palate – both times of day so saturated with their own substance they seem heavy, velvet with colour.
I talk about how sometimes there is fog so strong it seems to linger on during the day. Even after the sun comes out, there are layers of haziness, like smoke.
I’m talking like I’m romantic. I’m better at talking like this than I am at making girls giggle.
Dolores finally gets the courage to ask me more about my work. I’m happy to oblige and tell her whatever I can about my temperamental muse, $isi. That’s who interests Dolores most. She wants to know what $isi is like, and I’m not sure what to tell her.
Not in real life, $isi is a bubbly, feisty-yet-approachable pop star with hits like “Friday Night” and “Brokenhearted.” Her favourite colour is red; she loves going to the movies; she’s too busy with her music to get a pet, but she would love to get a rabbit one day. She bought her mother a house outside Vancouver, where she’s originally from. She eats healthy, is not a night owl.
In real life, $isi is not a night owl because she’s usually passed out from drinking before midnight. She’s a smoker and a fucker of male groupies. She is trying to live up to her idol, Amy Winehouse. She hasn’t been to the movies in years. She’d probably prefer a rat to a rabbit, and she often talks about how she hates her mother. Privately, she says things like, “I want to pay someone to tell me how much I suck. Everyone says I’m so good. I’m surrounded by liars. I want to pay someone, like a dominatrix, to tell me I’m a worm.”
Dolores wants to know what $isi’s favourite food is.
I oblige: dark chocolate, ceviche (I explain ceviche), fruit (fermented fruit mostly, though I don’t add this detail).
“Where did $isi go to school?”
“Where did you go to school?” I ask Dolores.
“A Catholic school. St. Mary’s. My parents are Catholic, sort of. Well, my mother is, so I guess it was her idea. Now I’m at Brescia.”
I don’t know what Brescia is and Dolores explains that it’s an all-girls college in London, Ontario. She is studying psychology there because she’s interested in psychopaths, especially Paul Bernardo, who is Canadian, which is why it’s awesome that she goes to school in Canada. What made him that way?
She goes on, “It’s really frustrating because I can only take first-year courses, so that’s, like, only general psychology. It’s like they don’t trust people to make their own choices and force them to take all this unnecessary crap because of some bullshit about students coming out well rounded, and it –”
To keep myself awake, I perform a couple of amusing chronological mind twisters: I was Dolores’ age when Dolores was ten years old. That guy, Paul Bernardo, was my age when he killed a girl half his age. I was that girl’s age at the time she was murdered. I’m not sure what all this adds up to.
I have to call $isi. My phone keeps pinging as her texts come through. I have to answer emails about the latest video. I have to make some arrangements to go see her in Montreal, where she’s supposed to be doing a yoga retreat, but where she’ll probably end up snorting lines with a DJ. All of this before I’m going to let myself have my afternoon nap, and before that, actually, have lunch, which today will include ginger potatoes with firm tofu in soy-garlic sauce with olive oil and an egg-yolk-mustard dressing on a dandelion salad.
***
We walk to my beach house now. Dolores admires it without speaking.
“I’m so glad we ran into each other,” I say.
“Yeah. Me too. My book was really starting to depress me.” The skin on her cheeks is peeling a little. Tiny flecks of white I would love to pick ever-so-gently with my tongue and swallow.
“I hate depressing stories,” I say, even though I don’t have the time to read much. At least not books.
“Isn’t it the worst? Nobody can really be together like normal people. There’s this vampire guy in the story, Albert – I should be reading something smart, like Dostoyevsky or something.”
“Dostoyevsky is depressing. But you should give it a try.”
“You think?”
“Yes. It’s good to challenge yourself. Want to have dinner tonight? I’d like you to have dinner with me,” I say.
She says nothing.
“You’re quiet. Is that a no?”
“No. I mean, yes,” she says, her voice shaking a little. She’s trying to suspend any belief she’s ever had about the things that don’t happen to girls like her, things like meeting vampires or princes and living happily ever after. Magic.
“Great. See you tonight, Princess,” I say. The nickname just pops into my head like that, perhaps because I am a nice, magical vampire prince.
7
FOR DINNER, I MAKE A CHILLED CAULIFLOWER VELOUTÉ AND kataifi pastry–crusted blue prawns with Romanesco broccoli and cilantro cream. This is the amuse-bouche, which I follow with some langoustines (wrapped in crispy potato and serrano ham) as an appetizer – I’m keeping to a relatively loose nautical theme.
The main is yellowfin tuna steak drizzled with some olive oil, paired with panisse and marinated anchovies.
For dessert, a Korean-grocery staple: black sesame ice cream accented with a dollop of green tea ice cream to offset the tacky sweetness with a nice bitter tang.
I serve some Pinot Grigio with the food, sparkling water on the side.
***
Dolores shows up right at six, and she’s extremely pink. Her face is pink, her arms are pink, her dress is pink and her white shoes have pink shoelaces in them.
“You look nice. I love those shoelaces,” I say, using the easiest trick in the book, my book, which is to compliment a girl on a detail in addition to the more expected, general flattery. In my experience, a woman remembers very well when you note the details: the unique piece of jewellery lost amid a stylish dress, the discreet scarf in the expanse of the more obvious coat, the way she does her hair (instead of just telling her she’s got nice hair, say that you love it in a ponytail).
Dolores stares at her shoes and smiles.
The dining room is lit by candles. This, I hope, creates an ambience that evokes those fantasies of vampire boyfriends.
“Please sit down.” I pull out the chair for her.
“This is amazing,” she says, I’m not sure about what.
I serve our meal.
Dolores gets pinker with every course. “This is so amazing. So amazing.”
There’s quiet classical music coming from the speakers strategically placed on the walls – a slow, melancholic piano rainfall by Erik Satie, whom I talk about when Dolores asks. I tell her the story about Satie’s twelve identical suits, found in the closet of a small room he lived in on the outskirts of Paris. I tell her about Satie carrying a small piano on his back as he travelled to the city to play in cafes, straining under the weight of his instrument and the weight of his largely undiscovered talent as he walked home in the night after his performances, quietly inserting himself back into his stark attic.
I move on to other subjects: the food we were just eating, how I got into the music business. How I was with $isi when she was nominated for her first Album of the Year award. How I had to console her afterwards bec
ause she lost to a gay cowboy – I give Dolores a PG-rated bullshit fable starring $isi and I going out for sorbet and seeing a flick with a funny actor in it to distract ourselves.
I ask Dolores about her family. She’s not very forthcoming, says something about her father living in Mexico with a new wife, much younger than him. Her mother is dating a manager at the bank where she works. That’s about it. “Nothing too exciting, everyone’s cool, the end,” Dolores says. She asks me about my family: are my parents still together?
“Yes,” I say. (They share a nice plot at the cemetery, finally sleeping next to each other after years of separate bedrooms.)
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
I talk about my sister moving to Australia a few years ago.
“Why did she move there?”
“She met a guy.”
“What is her husband like?”
I’ve never met him. I make up someone loosely based on the character from Crocodile Dundee, a rugged, snake-skin-wearing, lovable goof.
“How many kids do they have?”
“One. Sorry, two.” I’ve never met them, either.
“Don’t you miss them?” Dolores almost shouts.
“Very much so.”
“What are their names?”
“Alice. And –”
I get up and grab the bottle of wine, muttering something about it being almost finished. It isn’t, but I can’t remember the boy’s name. My sister and I talk once a year, on my birthday.
I say, “Albert.”
“Oh, I love that name,” Dolores says softly.
“Because of the book you were reading. That was the name of the prince, right?”
“It’s stupid.”
“No, not stupid at all. You should never apologize for what you like. So, why do you like this Albert so much?”
“It’s about conflict for me, I think? I mean, he wants to be with his soulmate, but he can’t because he’ll kill her if he tries to. So. He’s very tortured? I mean it’s kind of cheesy, but he’s just –”
I sit down and fill her glass. I’m still trying to remember what my sister’s boy is really called.
I ask Dolores more questions about Dolores. The intense attention is part of the seduction. And not only that: you have to make whatever she says seem interesting to her too: “What other exciting things are you up to this summer?”
“Not that exciting. Making up a calculus course because I have to have two maths before getting into statistics, and I only have one math and I’m not very good at it, so it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be difficult to study in the summer, but what can you do. I will probably also –”
After a while we move to the living room, where Dolores giggles over the nudes in the Helmut Newton coffee-table book. She opens the Eric Kroll book Fetish Girls and slams it shut, giggles some more.
She drinks her wine. She drinks gin and tonic. I open more wine. I drink more wine.
She looks through my CD collection, asks me why I hold onto CDs even though there’s iTunes, doesn’t wait for an answer, puts on my $isi Speaks album and gets up to sway side to side while mouthing the words.
I concentrate on her pink shoelaces, swirling before my eyes. I usually don’t drink this much.
Now she’s sitting on the floor, right at my knees, leaning gently against my leg. I consider putting my hand on her head – think about how much I’d enjoy the soft feeling of her wispy hair – but I don’t do that.
And again, she talks about the vampire prince from her book, Albert, and why she and her friends like him so much, how the boys their age could never measure up to someone so sophisticated and gentlemanly. All of a sudden, I recall my nephew’s name: Anthony.
Dolores talks and talks. I remain passive, letting her direct the evening. I’m straining to stay awake and be Albert-like as I lounge on the couch with what I hope is an Albert-like look of fascination, longing and internal conflict.
Eventually, the evening ends. There’s a kiss; a plan to meet the next day.
I sleep a drunken, dreamless sleep.
8
DOLORES IS WAITING BY THE SMOOTHIE SHACK. SHE’S WEARING a dress similar to the one she wore to dinner last night except this one is blue. I compliment her on the dress immediately, make sure to mention the cool pattern on it.
She blushes and says, “They’re snowflakes, I think? Thank you so much.”
The dress probably belongs to one of her friends – it’s digging into the skin above her breasts. It’s too tight in the back as well, making angry red rows when she moves, possibly feeling my eyes there. It’s not her discomfort that excites me (though perhaps there’s a little bit of that too) but how impossible it is for Dolores to get it right.
She bends down to pet Dog.
I watch her back for a moment, fascinated by the straps but also feeling a little impatient. I’m not at my calmest this morning thanks to idiot $isi and her middle-of-the-night tears. And my workouts continue to go badly, so I’m not in my usual easy-flow state of mind. I try to remember the cognitive exercises I taught myself – not to listen to negative thoughts, to think of neutral topics (nature, fashion, travel) or imagine a garden from my childhood – but instead I get caught in every dark place in my mind. In that state, neutral topics become troublesome: travel turns to thinking about the Sudan; nature reminds me of a rabid dog in my childhood; fashion conjures images of $isi’s nipple slips and bad haircuts.
Dolores must be picking up on my mood because she’s quiet, contained – much more contained than she was last night when she went as far as to show me her favourite illustrators on DeviantArt (vampires, girls with skull masks on their tattooed faces, ghostly figures with dresses turning into leaves blown away by the wind) and hipster videos on YouTube (big girls in little-girl dresses talking to clouds, stop-frame animation about a girl’s hang-ups regarding her giant nose, men using their toddlers as weights).
“I’ve had a bad morning, I apologize, I’m feeling unwell,” I tell Dolores, with knowledge that this kind of sharing, admitting to my weakness, is also a great opportunity for her to feel useful and therefore in power, which may, hopefully, even out our balance, at least momentarily, and allow me to gain a bit more of her trust, make the further, necessary moves.
“Oh, don’t apologize. It’s totally okay,” Dolores says. “Anything I can do?”
I pull her close and hold her against my body. I don’t say anything.
She stiffens in my arms, looks up. Her round eyes get even rounder.
Last night’s kiss was a kiss of clinking teeth and too much fumbling on her part when it was time to go: many extra gestures (smoothing her hair, shaking hand, touching my arm and flinching as if it burned) and some more babbling.
Now, I lift her chin up. She opens her mouth. This time it’s much better, technically, despite the fact that her mouth is trembling slightly and her tongue goes in circles then stops abruptly. But she could bite my tongue and it would be fine – she’s wonderful in her idiocy. Her hands rest stiffly on my waist. As the kiss goes on, the hands move equally stiffly until they finally meet in the middle. I run my fingers over the ridges in her skin where the straps of her dress are digging in.
When I finally pull away, she lets out a loud sigh. She’s falling in love with me. This thought, as soon as it forms itself, does something to the anxiety I’ve been feeling all morning. It melts it, pushes its bile back down. I feel better. In my gratitude, I pull her toward me again and kiss her again, this time harder, with my tongue pushing hers, biting ever so slightly on her lower lip, like Albert the vampire would do. This kiss is short. She is left breathing a little too fast when I break it.
We walk back, mostly in silence. I invite her over for lunch later, and of course she accepts.
We kiss again. Same confused tongue.
“See you soon, Princess,” I say.
“Okay. Bye.” She turns around.
I know she knows I’m watching her now b
ecause I notice her struggling to swing her hips (sexily?) and straighten out her feet. Her back is so stiff I just know that she’s killing herself not to turn around and check if I’m looking.
***
Fifteen minutes before lunch, I make buttermilk pancakes with asparagus in a classic white sauce. I serve it hot. Dolores is not late. I don’t have the focus to pay close attention to her outfit because the sauce has just been prepared and the stalks of asparagus are seconds away from losing their firmness and heat. I serve the pancakes with the vegetable and sauce right away. The pancakes are perfectly fluffy.
During lunch, Dolores asks me to make her a gin and tonic. She drinks it fast and I wonder if she may be an alcoholic. Why not? She’s old enough. $isi became a drunk when she was about her age or younger. Dolores’ potential alcoholism seems to be confirmed when she asks for another gin and tonic before lunch is over.
“It’s delicious,” she says. “The sauce.”
“It’s a very simple recipe. I’m happy to teach you,” I say. I realize that I haven’t come up with any way to amuse her until enough time passes to make a move. Perhaps a cooking lesson will do. I say, “We could make the sauce now. We’ll recreate.”
She blushes. “Oh, I don’t know.”
Her speech is not slurred. I can’t be sure the alcohol got to her considering her weight. She stares at her plate.
“What is it, Princess?”
“I want to have sex with you,” she says quietly.
“Come again?”
“I don’t want to cook. I want to have sex with you,” she says, sounding a little angry. But it’s not anger. It looks more like determination. She’s still not looking at me. A vein pulses in her temple. I haven’t noticed that vein before. It will get more prominent with age unless her face balloons from obesity.
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