Guy

by Jowita Bydlowska

  “You are insane.”

  “No. I’m not. We own it. Flaunt it. They have those ribbons that they wear, right? I think they’re different colours for different body parts. So we’ll come up with a colour scheme for her. We make a logo or something. Her logo is whatever, brown, the ribbon is brown; it’s perfect. Talk to Pig – Jennifer about it.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Before you do, can you imagine the press? She can do inspirational interviews right away. Maybe a blog where she talks about the treatment.”

  “You want to exploit $isi’s tumour.”

  “Of course. Or no, not exploit it. Give her the voice. You know, inspire people. Other women. Use her celebrity to bring the world’s attention to it – how bad can that be? How bad is it anyway?”

  “Not sure. She has to have surgery. Then chemo. Maybe. It’s mostly preventive from what she tells me, but she’s going to be pretty out of service for most of it.”

  “That’s fine. She doesn’t even have to pretend to play the guitar anymore, she can just do a little dance or something when they perform. Or talk about the cancer in the intervals. Go sit down somewhere on the stage so that she’s visible, so that they can see her and think about it and, you know, feel feelings. They’ll buy albums out of guilt if nothing else.”

  “Christ,” Mark says, but his tone of voice has changed. I’m very sensitive to small things like that, tone of voice, eyes. People can tell you their life story by the way they speak, the way they look at you. How they sit, too. Nervous laughter, rapid blinking, fiddling with jewellery.

  This is extremely useful when picking up women. Knees away when you sit side by side: she’s mad at you. Vulgar jokes: she’s desperate, wants you to relax around her.

  Anyway, right now, with Mark, his voice, what I notice is that some spark comes back to it. He would hate to admit it, but Mark and I are similar; he is just pretending not to be for his own sake, for his peace of mind. How hard it must be living with all these restraints, pretending to be nice.

  After our phone call, I pour myself some sparkling water and drop a perfect, clean mint leaf into the glass. I sit in front of a window, letting my eyes lose focus, blurring out the apartments across the street, smudging the crawly little lives inside them.

  I picture $isi’s future: her big-eyed face, her little cherry mouth that speaks in a wispy voice into a microphone to a sea of her look-alikes, black-and-white-haired girls, choking up at every honest word she says about her struggle, her need to go on, her spirit of survival. It’s lovely. She’s wearing white. White nail polish. Later we – she talks about the special kind of… energy at her shows. The energy. The support of her fans. What keeps her going. The purity. The love.

  I call her number but it goes straight to voice mail. I tell her I know. I’m here to help. I mean it.

  I order a bouquet of flowers. White roses and, I tell the girl on the phone, whatever other white flowers go with roses so it’s not just roses; it has to be unique; it’s for a unique person. The girl on the phone giggles because she’s an idiot.

  13

  AS MUCH AS I DON’T WANT TO ADMIT IT, WHAT’S GOING ON with $isi has got to me. What does it say about my judgment, signing up artists who are such liabilities? Addictions, unstable behaviour in general, hysterics? Cancer. I’d blame my inability to foresee, but foresight is nonsense. How could I have known? I couldn’t have.

  I wake up with those sorts of anxious thoughts. The cleaning lady has done a nice job while I was away in Montreal, but I notice a tiny stain on the flat-screen TV and jump out of bed, irritated, trying to wipe off the stain with a sleeve of my silk pajama top. I succeed; the stain disappears.

  I unpack my suitcase; sort out the shirts to take to the dry cleaner.

  I get dressed. A crisp white Etro shirt, black raw-Japanesedenim jeans Gloria bought me on sale at Saks last Boxing Day. I don’t get things on sale, but Gloria kept insisting, and I remember feeling too tired to argue with her so I let her pick my clothes. The pleasure it gave her to dress me up like I was a baby made up for the spa gift certificate I gave her for Christmas. She had deemed the certificate “so impersonal it is almost insulting.”

  I think of calling Gloria but I don’t want to confide in her. Confiding in her would confuse her – we’re already a little too close, and I know she’d be eager to try to comfort me, which would mean I would owe her. I would probably have to book a weekend in the country to pay for showing my vulnerability. And then, who knows? Maybe she’ll bring up combining our lives, as she has done recently, alarmingly. Instead, I call Jason. He says it’s terrible. What happened with $isi.

  “It is,” I say. “I wonder if our thing released something in her, turned on some kind of a switch in her brain that caused the tumour.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “An earthquake in the amygdala.”

  “So poetic!”

  “Thank you.” I read the phrase online in an article about brain tumours. It would make a song title, why not?

  ***

  I eat very little. Smoothies and delivery from the deli in Whole Foods. I drink water from my new Aquasafe reverse-osmosis filter system I had installed a few days ago. The filter is supposed to remove major water contaminants such as lead or pesticides. I pour a glass of water from the bathroom and I drink to see if I can detect the difference between the old water and the new water. Both old water and new water taste like water. I weigh the glass in my hand and consider throwing it against the wall. I’m not sure why. To experience throwing a glass against the wall? I think about the shards exploding, finding pieces of them weeks afterwards, stepping on them unaware, glass fibres burying into the soles of my feet, the pain.

  I set the glass back down on the counter.

  I send Dog away to a kennel, pay somebody else to walk and feed him.

  I don’t work out. I can’t concentrate on my workouts, and there’s no point in doing them if they’re not done as they should be.

  Jason calls, but I stop answering my phone.

  I don’t answer my phone and don’t turn on my computer.

  I ignore a personal visit from the reps for the video production company behind the new Charlie video. I send them away as soon as they show up on the intercom screen, their eager little eyes staring right into the camera as if they could see right into me looking back at them.

  My only contact with the world is via my mail and the mysterious roses that are delivered every second day. I guess someone got the address wrong, but I can’t be bothered to check. Just imagining myself on hold with some bitchy customer service rep makes me exhausted.

  This has happened before, this sudden, unprovoked agoraphobia. This time it’s all her fault. It’s all my fault. I wish for the tumour to turn out deadly. Swiftly deadly. To erase her. And with her, erase all the guilt. Because this thing, it’s guilt – it’s guilt that I’m dealing with, isn’t it? So unexpected and violent, slick like an organ falling out of my abdominal cavity, landing on my neon-white floor.

  The tumour is not deadly. Too bad.

  It’s a terrible thing to wish on a young girl, death. There’s something wrong with me. Or maybe I’m just better at admitting to what I really feel about life; how human I really am. We’re here only for a short time, so why lie? But of course, we need to lie. We lie to survive. We lie even to ourselves.

  I am devastated about $isi’s tumour.

  I walk around. There’s lots of room to walk around. My suite is on the top floor, with wraparound windows. I can see into other buildings. People are so indiscreet – flaunting their blurred asses and blurred faces, their silly blurry lives, to the world. I’m reminded of naked mole rats I once saw at a zoo. The rats’ cross-sectioned tunnels were visible to the public. The animals, pink and blind, would try to lurch forward, frantically crushing each other inside the plastic sausage – the blades of yellow teeth, gunky paws swiping – unaware of their shame.


  A feeling of loneliness comes over me sometimes when I get stuck on a particular window, watching the human mole rats go about their lives – eating dinners, hugging in kitchens, fucking in bedrooms. Bodies pressed against the glass in the more exhibitionistic dwellings; sometimes, in the next room, their ratlings’ faces, too, pressed against the glass. I could never be them, hugging in a kitchen, pressing a wife against a glass window, inserting a child into a crib.

  The feeling of loneliness vanishes.

  To rest from pacing, I lie down on the cool floor and look at the ceiling (steel beams, pipes). The ceilings are high, which gives me the feeling of being free, yet being locked in, stuck in a contained galaxy, a large aquarium. I keep my aquarium as plain as possible. The noise and chaos outside is enough, and even though I can’t hear it, I imagine it filtering through every little crack and open window.

  For art, I have a couple of framed posters – Keep Calm and Carry On covering a safe – and a couple of black-andwhite photographs of buildings. I have one large black-and-white photograph of Gloria’s back and ass, given to me by Gloria last year on my thirty-first birthday. I don’t know what to think of it. I don’t look at it much. The most impressive feature in the main space is a mass of wires, glass and metal with seven different kinds of light bulbs that hangs between the kitchen and the pullout. It was made by a designer friend of Gloria’s. You can operate the bulbs to dim or, alternatively, shine brightly with a remote control. I enjoy playing with it, changing the moods of my space with the movement of my fingers.

  I never cook for anyone here; no one stays here except for me, not even Gloria.

  14

  OUTSIDE, TORONTO TURNS FROM SEPTEMBER TO EARLY October and everything is bathed in yellowish-green-soon-to-be-red-and-brown-and-then-dead hues.

  I think about $isi obsessively. Today, I’ve been thinking how I met her. She sent a demo of herself singing an Amy Winehouse song. She was raw and young and strange, but there was something to her that made me look twice, made me listen to the demo and then made me replay it twice more.

  She was a serious girl in that video, with a pale face and a big nose and lips that were too big even for the nose. She wasn’t plain. She wasn’t like the girls I sleep with. She was jolie laide – an ugly beauty: a face of too many wrong angles and a smile that could fix everything in a flash.

  She excited me like no one else excited me before – it wasn’t sexual, at least not all of it. It was as if her little video and her presence in it gave me some kind of elusive peace of mind that I’m so keen on. I phoned Jason and told him about it.

  “You sound like you’re in love,” he said.

  “I might be. I’m smitten.”

  “I’ve never heard you say that before.”

  “I feel inspired.”

  “I bet.”

  “Not like that.”

  He was wrong. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t need his feedback. I just wanted to tell someone about her. She was what I’d been looking for, for years, a cookie-cutter sensitive girl who was distinctive enough to possibly make it big.

  I called her and flew her in. She showed up with her mother, who was all bleached hair and bad skin, who smoked and said almost nothing the entire time. When she did speak, she spoke softly. She twitched, couldn’t wait to leave. She might’ve been on something. I never asked. She seemed ready to sell her daughter to whoever would buy her. So I bought her.

  After her mother left, $isi moved into a place I’d rented for her. In the recording studio, she squealed and jumped and threw her arms around necks by way of greetings. She wrote notes for everyone, thanking them for working with her. She would come by with Tupperware full of cookies and cupcakes that she never touched because she was worried about getting fat.

  I hired a stylist to come up with a look for her. I hired someone else to bleach her teeth. I hired a music coach to get her in shape and started making phone calls to all my contacts to get her promoted. Then we gave her a name. She was no longer Sylvia. And once people received her studio-slick demo, they called us right back.

  ***

  She cried in the cab after not winning anything at her first awards show. I made some jokes, but I’m not very good with jokes. Knock knock.

  I tried calling Mark and getting him to come down, but he was away in Europe that week, annoyingly unreachable. By this time, $isi and I were in a booth at a club, with a curtain separating us from the crowd dancing on the floor. I didn’t really know what else to offer her. I put my hand on her tiny shaking knee and she looked up at me with teary, mascara-gooped-up eyes and opened her lips a little, enough to see her tongue.

  There was a bottle of sparkling wine chilling in a silver bucket. I ordered sparkling despite the fact that there was nothing to celebrate. Or there was, as I kept insisting. It was an honour to just be nominated. So we celebrated.

  ***

  I spend one more night of moping around in my condo. I listen to music of my late teenage years, when I went through a brief period of dark clothing and makeup, and locking myself in my room even though my parents were nice and I had no reason to lock myself in my room. But I liked to imagine that I had bad parents; a father who shouted outside my door, an absent mother who stumbled around the house all day in an open robe with a cigarette. The music was dark: morbid, heavy beats of electro and synth. It begged my life to be tragic. I’m tragic now; I’m seventeen again, and I am depressed for no good reason. I lie on the floor in the darkness until I fall asleep. No dreams.

  ***

  I wake up refreshed, as if after a detox.

  I want to go outside.

  I’m hungry.

  I want to see people.

  I want to fuck.

  There’s only a chunk of stale bread left in the breadbox. I make French toast.

  I shower. In the shower, I shout my own name over and over to test the timbre and strength of my voice – it comes out in a croak at first, but then it booms through the apartment, bouncing off the concrete walls, echoing back to me, filling my ears with its strength.

  I call Dog’s kennel and ask them when I can pick him up. I want some company and Dog’s company is the best way to ease into it, a training ground for the company of others.

  I collect all of the roses that have been accumulating in the little vestibule by the elevator. It’s the same kind of arrangement every time – six deep, bloody red roses with shaved-off thorns, each bunch wrapped with a thick red velvet ribbon. There’s a sticker attached to the ribbon with the name of the delivery company and a number.

  I call the number to try to find out where the roses are coming from. The robotic-voiced woman won’t even tell me if they’re an international delivery or not.

  Maybe $isi is behind the flowers. I wonder if it’s some perverse way of showing that she pines for me, or if it’s the result of her being high on medication. If it’s a reply to the white roses I sent to her when she was in the hospital for the first time, overnight.

  Wherever they’re coming from, I throw them all out because they’re shedding black flakes all over the floor.

  I call Gloria and make a plan to fuck her later. I’ll have to go through the usual sequence of dinner, drinks and light-yet-serious relationship talk where she will ask me where we stand, have I found somebody else, and where I will say she has nothing to worry about, I’m all hers, and I love what she’s done with her hair and I would love to taste her, it’s been so long.

  15

  MY IDEA FOR MAKING THE TUMOUR $ISI’S THING TURNS OUT to be brilliant. Post-tumour, there are TV appearances: morning shows, afternoon shows, even a few evening show appearances. There are a couple of magazine articles. We get interview requests – too many, so we have to start turning them down. $isi has been asked to give advice on everything from how to be at parties to healthy eating to fashion in the bedroom. For the latest release, we rejig the lyrics so that the song has the word grey in it. The ribbon colour for brain tumour is grey. With a nod toward Amy
Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” the writer comes up with a title: “Black to Grey.”

  Although $isi is on the way to recovery, it’s important to continue with our Thing, to keep giving it a positive spin. Everyone works hard to keep the tumour issue in the public eye.

  I have many ideas.

  I call Piglet. “What about the destigmatizing angle. Let’s destigmatize it. We can talk about the stigma. How $isi is trying to do that – how she’s not shying away from talking about dark subjects. Like tumours.”

  “Very good.”

  “You like it?”

  “We just need to come up with a new word. She says she hates saying that word.”

  “Tumour?”

  “It’s an ugly word,” she says.

  “We should have a coffee someday,” I say.

  “I’m allergic to caffeine.”

  “Tea then.”

  “I’ll call $isi right now,” Jennifer says. “I have to go.” She hangs up.

  I throw the phone at the couch to satisfy my desire to throw it. I will have to ask Mark if we can get another publicist; one I can actually see in person because this is ridiculous.

  ***

  I belong to one of those private clubs with leather chairs in the library, a farm-chic dining room and wide counters for doing lines in the bathrooms. In exchange for high membership fees, I have the privilege of spending thirty dollars on martinis that always get served with microscopic trays of salty almonds and sweaty olives.

  Gloria loves these places, so I mostly use it to wine and dine her when she’s in town. Her favourite is Bibliothèque, the one I belong to. It’s filled with ad guys; PR types looking for junket-loving journalists; junket-loving journalists pairing up with PR types, film guys and young MBAs; old guys with money trying to look like young MBAs; and the old guys’ Botoxed au pairs.