She arrived home to the phone ringing.
“I’m throwing a party,” said Elliot. “You’re coming, right?”
“What’s the occasion?”
“The end of the semester,” he said. “You’ve heard of Christmas in July? Well, this is summer in December, a luau. B.Y.O.M.”
“Huh?”
“Bring your own margarita. Get it?”
Yasmeen hung up and dialled Sam. “So, are you going?”
“Everyone’s going,” she said. “Even Jacqueline and Tommy.”
Yasmeen mentioned it to Joanasi.
“Why do you wanna go over there?” he said. His back was to her and his head bent like he was working at something that required all of his concentration.
From where she stood, Yasmeen couldn’t tell what he was up to. She waited for his answer. She waited some more. “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Plus, I want to show you off,” she said.
•
They could have been in Jamaica. Or the Bahamas. Yasmeen hardly recognized Elliot’s place when she walked through the door. It was a tropical paradise, a makeover created with just a few items ordered through the mail: a life-size mural of a sandy beach at sunset, plastic palm trees, melon-coloured paper lanterns hung from the ceiling. He had fashioned a straw Tiki bar and stocked it with hibiscus-pink tumblers and wine goblets, and full bottles of tequila and rum. Swizzle sticks and miniature parasols poked out from exotic drinks served in coconut shells. Joanasi’s eyes lit up.
Elliot bellowed from the kitchen for everyone to grab a drink. No wasn’t an option. It’s a party. At a party, you party.
Jacqueline was sitting barefoot on Tommy’s lap in a grass skirt and halter top and was chewing on a red straw, admiring her toes, curling and uncurling them as though they were the most interesting thing in the world. She sounded slightly drunk, repeating “Tommy just loves kissing my toes,” to whoever would listen. Across the room Iris was sipping from a tall glass of ginger ale, her effort at a costume limited to a floppy white flower in her hair and a dangly pair of snail earrings. Sam and Paulussie were partying on the dance floor, hands across each other’s shoulders, kicking their feet from side to side to “Good Vibrations.”
Yasmeen ducked into the kitchen to say hello while Joanasi stood on the sidelines and lit a cigarette. Elliot was in a loud Hawaiian shirt, his back to her as he slid a tray of ice cubes into the freezer.
“Welcome,” he said, pecking her on each cheek. “Let’s dance.”
“In a minute,” she told him. “You didn’t tell me we were supposed to dress up.”
“Don’t get your knickers in a knot.” He wiped his hands on a dishcloth and followed her like a puppy into the living room.
Yasmeen grabbed two coconut drinks and curled up beside Joanasi on the couch.
“C’mon!” shouted Elliot. He grabbed her hand, almost spilling her drink on Joanasi. “No one sits on their tush to the Beach Boys! Not in this house!” He took the drink from her and gave it to Joanasi to hold. She waved in protest but he dragged her up and hooked his arm around her waist and swung her in circles, saying, “Excuse us” to the tables and chairs they kept bumping into. She laughed so much she couldn’t catch her breath. He told her to calm down or she’d have a heart attack.
“You sure are a lunatic sometimes,” she yelled across the music. He reached out and pulled a strand of hair out of her eyes.
Something went click inside her. She pushed his hand away, glancing over at Joanasi. Smoke was shooting out through his nostrils. She blew him a kiss and mouthed the words I love you. He smiled without smiling too much, crushed out his cigarette and lit another.
Yasmeen called for him to join them, but he scrunched up his nose and shook his head. “You dance,” he said. “You dance with Elliot.”
The opening chords of “God Only Knows” came on. She wrenched her hands free of Elliot’s and went to plant a wet, deliberate kiss on Joanasi’s mouth. “I love this song, Joanasi,” she said.
Joanasi shook his head and said, “No, not now.” He moved in closer. “Later I’ll fuck you really hard,” he said. His hot breath in her ear gave her goose bumps.
“What’s up with you and Joanasi?” said Elliot, when she returned to the dance floor. “Don’t tell me you’re an item.”
“You could say that.” She could see that he was surprised.
They slow-danced at an awkward distance from one another until the song was over and a fast one came on. Elliot pulled her into a corner and sat her down. “I only want a minute of your time,” he said. She bobbed up immediately.
“Joanasi’s waiting,” she said.
“Just one,” he said, holding up his forefinger. “Do me a favour.” She sat back down and looked across the room at Joanasi, trying to send him a message with her eyes.
“Make it fast,” she said. She crossed her arms.
“Okay, so there was this white guy named James Houston. You heard of him?”
Yasmeen stretched and faked a yawn.
“James Houston, Canadian artist. From Toronto.” He said Toronto like an American, pronouncing every T. “In 1948, Houston ends up in Inukjuak with the idea he’s going to paint. He spends, I don’t know, maybe ten years there. During that time he sees these guys making beautiful carvings out of soapstone and he decides he wants to help them out, he wants to do something good for them, you see what I’m getting at here?”
“Not really.”
“So he takes some of their small carvings down to Montreal and the people there go bananas and the next thing you know, there’s a government grant to send him back up there to get more. By now, city folks are lining up around the block to get this stuff. It’s getting shipped out to Europe, South America, the Middle East, everywhere. See what I mean?”
Yasmeen shrugged. “What’s your point?”
“My point is they were happy as pigs in shit making their little carvings before Houston came along. I’m saying maybe they didn’t need his help. I mean, look where it’s got them. When they’re sober, they produce these sublime sculptures. But these days, because of Houston, they know that if they need pocket money for booze, they can always just whip up one of those beauties and there’s always going to be a white guy ready to pay big bucks for it.”
“What the fuck does this have to do with me and Joanasi?”
“What I’m saying is, we’re teachers, we’re here to teach a few kids math, a little English, that’s it.”
“Maybe that’s it for you, but not for me,” she said.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he said. “A record album can be skipping at the same spot every single day for an entire month and you ask a guy here, is it gonna skip tomorrow? Nine times out of ten the guy will say ‘Aatsuuk,’ maybe, who knows, while the white guy says, ‘Of course.’ It’s how we think. And it’s how they think … My advice? Enjoy the experience, take it all in, take great pleasure in going for a walk and breathing in the fresh air,” he said. “But crossing over to the other side, that’s a whole other ballgame.”
Yasmeen rose to her feet. “As usual,” she said. “You’re full of shit.”
•
Night was waning. Yasmeen yawned into her hand. The Tiki bar looked like the aftermath of a Grey Cup celebration with its moraine of empties and crumb-filled chip bowls. Wall decorations dangled from their filaments. A blue curtain of smoke hung in the air.
Iris had gone home early. Sam’s head was lolling drunkenly on Paulussie’s shoulder, the two of them snoring on the couch. Yasmeen and Jacqueline were sitting on the floor, backs propped against the wall. The beach music had mellowed into Cat Stevens.
“Tell me about you and Tommy,” Yasmeen said, jiggling the ice at the bottom of her glass.
“Qu’est-ce que tu veux savoir, ma belle?”
“Well … do you plan on marrying him eventual
ly?”
Jacqueline picked at the ragged label of her beer bottle. “Honnêtement, je croix qu’non. Tommy is a beautiful lover, yes, of course. But I’m not here forever.”
“You mean he’s not the one?” She stared at Jacqueline’s ankle tattoo, the antique key that Yasmeen had called the key to her heart. She knew now that it probably had nothing to do with Tommy.
“The world is a big place. J’ai pas l’intention de rester plantée ici toute ma vie. Forever is a long time.”
Yasmeen hid her surprise. “What’ll you do? Will you go back to Shawinigan?”
“Hell, no. I want to move around. There’s still Thailand I want to see, and India, of course. Puis c’est mon grand rêve de faire l’amour avec un Arabe un de ces jours. Tu sais, un bel homme aux yeux noirs!”
Yasmeen couldn’t believe her ears. She couldn’t believe how badly she had misread that relationship. Here she thought Jacqueline was a permanent fixture in Tommy’s life and all along she’d been fantasizing about the next lover, someone on the other side of the ocean, an Arab with intense black eyes.
“I don’t get it. Why have you stayed for so long, then? Four years, that’s a big chunk of time.”
“Peut-être,” she said. “But where else in Quebec does a nurse get to be her own boss? I mean, really run the show?”
Yasmeen nodded. She had so many questions, like how was she going to break it to him and didn’t she feel the least bit guilty that she was going to hurt him in the end.
But Jacqueline had a bigger picture in mind. She told Yasmeen about one of her cases a while back, a man who arrived at the clinic with blood all over his clothes and hands. The tire of his pickup had exploded in his face. She told the story breathlessly, about how she knew when she saw all that blood she wouldn’t be able to bandage him up and send him home, so she called a doctor in Kuujjuaraapik and told him she had an emergency and what should she do. “Oh my god, you must have been shitting bricks,” said Yasmeen. And Jacqueline shrugged, saying how the doctor told her to stay on the phone, he would guide her step by step so she could properly sew him up and not have to medevac him out, and she took care of the whole thing without a single slipup. And now that she knew she could do something like that, she was ready for the next challenge in her life.
“I don’t know how you do it, Jackie.”
Their men were hovering over them, a potent whiff of alcohol coming off one or both of them. Yasmeen couldn’t look Tommy in the eye without thinking about the swarthy Arab who would one day replace him in Jacqueline’s bed.
“Get your sandals,” Tommy said in a gravelly voice. “Let’s go.” Jacqueline stood and kissed him on the mouth.
Joanasi was wobbling a little but sober. He stretched his hand out to Yasmeen and pulled her up off the floor. “Home,” he said.
THIRTEEN
The teachers were headed south again, Christmas less than a week away. A few villagers made it out to the airstrip to see them off but most were busy preparing for their own festivities, or sleeping. Besides Joanasi, a small delegation came out to say goodbye to Yasmeen: Annie and two students, Elisapie and Salatee. The girls waved shyly from the sidelines as a sharp gust of wind from the propellers swept their hair in all directions. They looked like changelings, midway between childhood and womanhood.
“Why aren’t you girls wearing hats?” shouted Yasmeen.
They shrugged and came to stand beside her.
“I think that you are the smartest teacher that I ever knew,” said Salatee, kicking up snow with the toe of her boot.
“I’m really, really gonna miss you,” said Elisapie.
Yasmeen hugged them both at once. “I’m only going for two weeks,” she said. “You can’t get rid of me that easily!” She glanced over the tops of their heads at Joanasi who was waiting patiently to have her to himself. Annie hugged her and told her to hurry back. Yasmeen pointed to her alirtiks and gave Annie the thumbs up, meaning she couldn’t have made them without her. A hand poked around Yasmeen’s waist and she turned just in time to meet Joanasi’s lips. The girls skedaddled.
He and Yasmeen waited in silence as the plane loaded up, Joanasi’s mouth clamped tighter than a bear trap. Yasmeen could tell by the little throbs at his temples that he was grinding his molars again. When it looked like they were about to begin boarding passengers, he dug into his pocket. “I have something for you,” he said. He rolled it between his fingers so she could see that it was an ivory ring. He held it for a moment in his palm.
“My god, Joanasi, it’s beautiful,” she said. He removed her mitt and slid it along the marriage finger of her hand.
She dropped her knapsack in the snow and threw her arms around his neck. “I wish I didn’t have to go, I wish I were already back.” She felt a lump in her throat, but she didn’t cry.
“So don’t,” he said, his eyelid twitching. “Don’t go. Stay here with me instead.” He ran his thumb along her upper lip.
“You know I can’t. My family’s expecting me.”
He nodded and walked her slowly to the plane. She hugged him and started up the steps, turning to look at him one last time before leaving him behind.
She settled into the last available seat, beside Elliot, and shoved her knapsack under the seat in front of her. The co-pilot banged the door shut, locked it and went to belt himself into the cockpit. The pilot turned and flashed a Pepsodent smile at everybody. And now, it’s ho-ho-homeward bound, he called out.
He drove a short distance along the airstrip before turning the plane around. A chorus of phlegmy coughs erupted in the back seats. Yasmeen craned her neck to get a last look at Joanasi waving. A blast of wind blew off his hat but he just stood there, refusing to go after it.
They thundered down the runway, gathering momentum as the plane rose weightlessly into the air. The last thing she saw was Joanasi’s black cap tumbling over the white snow, lifting a little, touching down again as it drifted further and further out of range.
Yasmeen stared through the window until the village disappeared behind them. It wasn’t long before the flat, snow-covered land grew harsh again and all that was left was a veined hemisphere of ice and rock. She once told Joanasi that she could hardly conceive of so few inhabitants on such a vast terrain. It made her appreciate the concept of the Inukshuk even more, how a small pile of rocks made the inhuman landscape human.
She ran her thumbnail along the band of the ivory ring, wondering whether Joanasi was still lingering at the airstrip. It felt strange to be in the sky so far away from him. She knew that after she switched to the bigger plane in Kuujjuaraapik and then touched down in Montreal, it would feel like they were in two different galaxies. Over there, in what the Northerners called the South, the sad light of neon and office towers would reign over the sky. It would make her wish she could turn back the clock to the first night of Joanasi’s hands in her hair.
Now all she had was his ring, its crown delicately raised into the head of a polar bear. She admired how it looked on her hand.
Elliot was chewing gum and leafing through an airline magazine. He cleared his throat, refusing to look up. “So, are we talking?”
“I guess.”
“Good.” He slipped the magazine back into the seat pocket and turned to face her. “What I’ve been trying to tell you is that people aren’t always what they seem on the surface.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Okay, then, how about this? Don’t trust your heart.”
She rolled her eyes. “What do you know about that?”
“I just know,” he sighed. “I had a wife.”
“So you had a wife, big deal. So does half the planet.”
He swallowed. “So, she took off with my best friend and then she took me to the cleaners.”
“How does that have anything to do with me?”
“I’m just s
aying, trust me. You aren’t the first to fall for someone up north.”
“So?”
“So, I’ve been here longer than you. Eventually, these things … they go sour.”
“Are you speaking from experience? Because if you’re not, you have nothing to teach me.”
“You’re not going to change him.”
“I would never do that. I respect him too much.”
Elliot picked up the magazine again and opened it to a random page. He brought it close to his face, pretending to read it.
“What is it you want from me?”
He turned and looked straight in her eyes. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“Who asked you to protect me?”
“It’s not about protection,” he said. “You’re a big girl, I know.”
“Then what?”
She was drained. The day had exhausted her, the worry over how she and Joanasi would part, their goodbyes, the anxiety over seeing her family again, the uncertainty of how much of her new life she would reveal to them. Would she tell them of Tommy’s break-in? Would she mention Joanasi? She didn’t have the patience for Elliot’s guessing games. She told him to cough it up, stop beating around the bush, just come clean and say what you want to say.
He slapped the magazine shut. “Okay, here’s the thing. I lost everything, so I came up here. It’s not that easy to start again from nothing, you know.” The lines around his eyes softened.
A part of her felt sorry for him.
“You know, my dream was to go to law school,” he said. “I could have done it, but I worked to put my wife through school and then, well ….”
“My mother hoped I would go to law school.”
The plane hit an air pocket. Elliot’s magazine flew off his lap but Yasmeen snatched it before it hit the floor. “Don’t worry, things will work out,” she said. She passed back the magazine and gave his arm a comforting squeeze.
•
A flashing cabin light instructed passengers to fasten their seatbelts. Yasmeen raised the blind and gazed out at the wavy point of light in the distance, watching it slowly become a twinkling network of bridges and roads, high-rises, cathedrals, shopping plazas, railway yards, houses. The sound of the engine shifted as the effervescent city filled more and more of her window. She stared as though she’d never seen it before, its blood flow, its swelter of rush and noise, its dirty snow and agitated traffic, its jewelled red taillights that snaked through the busy nerve centre. Sitting where she was, at the wing of the plane, she watched the opening of the landing flaps, stippled with grease and rivets. She closed her eyes and let the jostling aircraft carry her as though she were aloft in the belly of a large bird.
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