Yasmeen

by Carolyn Marie Souaid

  I cried after you called. I could not help it ’cause hearing your voice on the phone tells me you’re really far away. I’m gonna try to go down and see you before August. You’re worth going down for, you’re worth everything to me.

  I called an old friend in Montreal today, a guy who came up to the fishing camp when I was working there about three or four years ago. He said he would like to see me if I go down. That guy I gave a whalebone carving to and he never paid me. It was the best carving I ever made, it was real nice and big like the face of an Inuk. It was an iceberg with a bird on top. He only sent me one bottle of whisky. He was going to send me 10 but he never did. I think if I see him I’ll ask for more than just one bottle, even if it was two years ago or three. Don’t worry I’m not drinking a lot a lot, just sometimes a tiny bit when things are really boring and I can’t stop thinking that you are so far away.

  I’m very pooped now so I think I’ll just go to sleep. Remember I love you very much and I’ll see you maybe around the third week of July.

  Your Aippaq

  •

  Yasmeen opened the first newspaper she had held in months and read most of the articles with serious attention. It felt strange to be reading an entire paper filled with stories about people and places that were alien to her. She read a couple of long editorials about a failed coup by cocaine growers in Bolivia and Pierre Trudeau stepping down as prime minister. She read the Hollywood gossip pages and a light summer piece with suggestions for bored, housebound children.

  The café waiter was hoovering the rug underneath the table where her feet were, sucking crumbs through a long thin hose, a not-so-subtle hint he wanted to close up. She lifted her feet and continued leafing through the newspaper, scanning the book pages, the horoscopes, the concert and movie listings.

  She swirled the cold dregs of her coffee, considering whether to drink or leave it. Her thoughts drifted to Jacqueline. The last time they had talked, at Sam’s potluck, she was still undecided over how much longer she would stay with Tommy. Another year, two tops, she had said. Yasmeen didn’t see the point of dragging it out but wished her well anyway. “You know,” said Jacqueline, shrugging her shoulders. “He’s a great lay. And for now it’s enough.”

  The waiter glared at Yasmeen, checking his wristwatch. He unknotted his apron and hung it on a hook behind the cash. She decided to drink the rest of her coffee. She took her time the way she had learned to take her time in Saqijuvik. She folded the newspaper, section by section. She dug through her purse for a dollar and wedged it between the cup and saucer. As she got up to leave, the waiter beat her to the door with his jangling ring of keys. He unlocked it and locked it again, snappishly, behind her. He flipped the card in the window from Open to Closed.

  Outside, a wall of humidity slammed into her, a huge shock to her system after the refrigerated coffee shop. It felt strange seeing the darkness of the nighttime sky again. It felt strange being back in a world obstructed by billboards and office towers, a world dominated by the ugly and the manmade, jittery fluorescence, air conditioners, the blasting exhaust pipes of buses and honking cars.

  It was late to be out. All the restaurant patrons had left. The awning was rolled up and the moulded patio chairs and tables were chained together for the night. She tossed her newspaper into a wire garbage bin overflowing with cardboard takeout trays and Styrofoam cups. Heading toward the Peel Métro station, she passed a sullen, middle-aged musician dressed in black from head to toe. He was strumming under a dim streetlight, trying to impersonate Leonard Cohen. She tossed a quarter at the satin lining of the guitar case, dyed the same purple as the innards of an animal she had once eaten with Joanasi.

  Her reaction to being back in the city surprised her. She was melancholic but she didn’t miss the bitter cold days, the metric dumps of snow, walking around with a persistent chill in the bones. She was glad not to have to deal with her faulty shower nozzle, sporadic water delivery, meagre pickings at the grocery store. Her stove with only two working burners. She didn’t miss having only one television channel.

  The one thing she couldn’t do without was Joanasi. Had they never met she would have eased back into her life—with some difficulty, but it wouldn’t have been so lonely. She would have floated along until summer’s end, hanging with friends, shopping, going to the movies. She would have racked up debt on her credit card. She would have partied right up until the last day and repacked and said her goodbyes, signing on to Year Two with the confidence and clarity Elliot had had on the rickety plane when he pushed the stick of chewing gum into her hands. Wiser by a year. Ready to greet the new teachers with a smile and a whack of practical advice.

  But Joanasi made her return to Montreal unbearable, having had such an intense relationship and abruptly cutting it off for the summer. Feeling him as a shadow presence and a palpable absence, she hated being back in her mother’s home in the suburbs, where the wind whistling through the trees was a constant reminder that she was here while her lover was fifteen hundred kilometres away. She stayed clear of Morgan, which by now had become a cakewalk given Morgan’s polite but nuanced excuses—“I so wish we could get together but, um, you know …”—meaning that the outside world, the world they’d once trashed and ridiculed together, had become more important to her than Yasmeen. Trish and her graduate courses and whatever radical experimentation she was into these days.

  Yasmeen did whatever she could to keep busy. She decided she preferred the boisterous metropolis to the quiet suburb. She sat through movie matinees and fell into lock step with the anonymous masses traipsing through the labyrinth of the city’s underground shopping concourse. She bought herself little things to give her a lift, the latest of the New York Times bestsellers, a new bottle of Yves Saint Laurent perfume, the Kitty Wells record she and Joanasi always listened to, the one with their special song, “The Winner of Your Heart.” She went to noisy restaurants, where she ordered triple espressos with steamed milk, or frosted glasses of white wine, depending on the hour. She spent hours at the same table writing love letters to Joanasi, tapping her cigarette ashes into a tinfoil ashtray. She told him she missed the arches of his feet, the feel of his hands; she missed his tensed jaw when he mounted her to make love. Nights she slept with his shirt against her cheek, infused with layers of his outdoor sweat. She remembered a sky dotted with geese, the hardy wind with the sea on its breath.

  She eavesdropped on people’s private conversations, lively, coffee-drinking students arguing about art and philosophy as though they were the only intelligence on the planet. Their earnest sounds drifted toward her, offering a kind of unintended camaraderie. It brought solace. It passed the time. She sat in sunny cafés and on park benches, watching the bustling day unfold, businessmen scurrying with newspapers under their arms, beggars scrounging for spare change, parking inspectors writing tickets, city workers jackhammering around a steamy dump of asphalt. Every block seemed to have a pinging arcade, greasy hamburger joint or Triple X peep show on it. The air grizzled with patates frites and Coke. As the days passed, Yasmeen grew to appreciate the madness of the city again, its flashy, abrasive, king-size distractions.

  A week after she got home a brown envelope arrived in the mail. It was from Sam. There was no note, only a yellow Post-it stuck to a snapshot of Yasmeen’s protracted goodbye to Joanasi on the dingy airstrip, the one Sam had taken through the window before the plane took off. “You’re welcome,” it said. It resembled all of Sam’s photos, out of focus, usually with the people’s feet cut off. She couldn’t understand why Sam had bothered to send it except that maybe she felt any souvenir, even a bad one, was better than none at all. Yasmeen stared longingly at it, even though she and Joanasi were off-centre and their faces were so blurry they were hardly recognizable.

  •

  Yasmeen went with her original plan not to mention Joanasi’s visit at all, not to her mother or her siblings or even Morgan, though Morgan wou
ldn’t have cared less. The last thing Yasmeen needed was people’s criticism to deal with. She wanted to love Joanasi as freely as she had in Saqijuvik, and negative talk would have only spoiled it. At this point anyway, why did they need to know? Once she returned there in the fall she would write them a letter telling them her decision about staying for good, how she adored the North, how she had finally found her true calling. Joanasi could remain completely out of the picture. There was only the loose end of Morgan to consider, whether or not she would mind her own business and keep quiet about him. It seemed plausible given her history with Yasmeen’s mother, their absolute dislike for one another. Of course there was still the slim chance she might blow the whistle, saying she was doing it for Yasmeen’s own good. But Yasmeen weighed it in her mind and bet on their long-time friendship and solidarity.

  Not only did she book a room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Yasmeen checked in early and ordered up a bottle of Dom Perignon and an overflowing basket of fruit. She was sure he would get a kick out of sleeping in the same hotel where John and Yoko had held their celebrated bed-in. She rearranged the furniture to make the room more inviting, sprayed the sheets with an essential oil, and laid the fluffy hotel towels on the bed. She pushed aside the heavy drapes to let a bright square of sunlight into the room. It bounced and shimmered off the wine goblets she had set down on the bedside table.

  His plane was due at 6:30 in the evening but she arrived at the airport two hours early to avoid rush hour, her stomach in knots. She ducked into the restroom to freshen up.

  Someone had scratched All who wander are not lost on the stall door. Regardless of its author, she connected with the message. She slid off her underwear and stuffed it into her purse. She couldn’t wait to stroll with him through the airport, gliding with a confidence that would indicate to every onlooker that the manly man on her arm was the one who had had the brawn to win her over. She flushed the toilet and went to the basin to wash her hands and kohl a dark line around her eyes. She teased and fluffed her hair and adjusted the straps on her new sundress. She smoothed the dress with the hand wearing the polar bear ring. Standing in three-quarter profile, she ran her hands slowly down her breasts and torso, wondering whether he would find her attractive in clothes that publicly revealed more of her skin. Probably, she decided. Most men enjoyed showing off the fact that they had conquered a certain type of woman. They liked to broadcast their success to the world, parade the trophy they had nabbed and gotten into bed, the woman with the beautiful face or the seductive body or the whatever magnetic thing she possessed that lured them to her. She was sure this ritual would appeal to her new-and-improved Joanasi.

  She glanced at her watch. Only fifteen minutes had passed. She sat and watched waves of people wheel their towers of luggage past her. Her attention settled on an Indian family with four toddlers, their toys and belongings monopolizing an entire bench plus a good part of the floor. The mother wore a periwinkle sari and a wrist full of silver bracelets that jangled whenever she tried to rein in their noise at the behest of the father, who sat with an open newspaper, surveying them with his stark eye whites. He signalled and she popped open a Tupperware container, lacing the air with a strong bite of curry. Her brood congregated around her as she spooned the yellow mash into each of their mouths.

  When Yasmeen tired of watching them she wandered over to the flower shop and inquired about the black roses on display. The clerk pursed her lips and cocked her head sideways with a look of sympathy and said she’d come to the right place. The black ones were popular here at the airport where people were always breaking up with their lovers. Yasmeen ignored her and went to the glass refrigerator and chose a red one still folded up tight, petals brushed with tiny beads of water. She said no to the cellophane wrap, the usual tangle of greenery and baby’s breath. All she wanted was the single long stem. “Oh, and just so you know, I’m not breaking up,” she hissed.

  She wondered why time played those terrible tricks, why it always inched forward when you wanted it to speed up. She wondered whether the reverse were true, whether you could slow time down when you were running out of it, say if you had a galloping terminal cancer. Could you sit at the oncologist’s office, for example, where the appointments were always two hours late, and postpone your demise? Her eyes kept roving to the overhead panel board where the arrival and departure times were constantly being updated.

  She visited the airport shops, tried on deerskin gloves and fur hats, sprayed different perfumes on her wrists. She read the dust jackets of paperbacks and leafed through the movie star magazines until the clerk declared in a very rude French that they were for paying customers only. She bought a soft drink to make a sarcastic point, and went back to watch the comings and goings of businessmen and backpackers and regular suitcase-toting tourists. She sat on a bench with her flower, sipping her drink. A gaggle of stewardesses with upswept hair and silk scarves rushed past, pulling bags behind them. Then came a man in dark glasses tapping his way with a white cane. Yasmeen closed her eyes and listened to the ambient sounds of the airport, wondering how she would feel if she were blind and whether Joanasi would still love her if she were. She sprang out of her chair when the garbled intercom announced that the Nordair flight from Great Whale River was in. Her heart pounded, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here.

  In her hurry to go meet him, she pricked her thumb on the rose. “God dammit,” she yelped, squeezing the skin together, forcing a bright bloom of blood to the surface. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, dreaming of how Joanasi would look after a month of hunting and fishing, bronzed by the sun and wind.

  Racing to the gate, she cursed the slowpokes who had difficulty walking at a normal pace. Her mind flooded with questions. Would he be smiling from ear to ear or shy, as he was at the airstrip the day Elliot introduced them? Would he be cautiously confident, knowing she was a sure thing without taking her for granted, the way he played it the night of the school opening when they ended up making out on her couch for the first time?

  People streamed into the baggage area. She scanned their faces but couldn’t see Joanasi among them. Patience, she told herself. She knew he wouldn’t have missed the flight. Not after all his letters to her. He would have arrived at the airstrip early even, overwrought, eager to see her. She studied the crowd, eyes catching on a shirt or jacket that looked like one of Joanasi’s—that could have been his, something his style and colour. Then, no, it wouldn’t be him after all, and then wait, maybe, and then no and then, stop—was that him? One of those times it was really him. Her whole body tensed up. The balls of her feet pressed excitedly into her sandals.

  He was wearing tan slacks and an open-collared shirt, looking a little smaller than she remembered. She waved at him from a distance. He smiled a half-smile and followed all the others to the revolving luggage carousel. Shy was what he mostly seemed. He watched the bags go around in circles until he saw his and reached for it and stumbled in his attempt to wrestle it off. The white woman standing beside him offered her assistance and he nodded her a thank you without looking happy about it. He shuffled toward Yasmeen, popping a mint nervously into his mouth. Up close she saw he was badly in need of a haircut.

  His eyes had the same glazed look they had when he was on a weeklong bender. “Aippangai … qanuipiit?” He flashed her a warm, lazy grin.

  “I’m … good … and you?”

  “Qanuingngi.”

  They swam in the awkwardness of the moment until Yasmeen handed him the rose and kissed him on the mouth. They hugged clumsily.

  “You look like a different person in your high heels and fancy hairdo,” he slurred. “I almost didn’t recognize you.” He gripped the rose cautiously, between the thorns, unsure what to do with it. She took it back to hold.

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  He pinched open his thumb and forefinger to indicate “this much only,” a negligible amount, hardly anything. She detected a
slight movement in the eyelid that twitched when he was nervous or excited or lying about something. She locked arms with him and headed to the nearest coffee shop, where they joined a long line of customers waiting to be served. She handed the rose back to him.

  “Crowded,” she said. “What a drag.”

  He nodded dutifully.

  She wondered what the veiled Arab woman ahead of them had on under all her robes. She had heard that many wore sexy lingerie as a way to prove that they, not their husbands, controlled their bodies. It was in an article she had read.

  By the time it was finally their turn, the nasal cashier was in a foul mood, twice having had to change the Arab woman’s order due to a mix-up in communication. Yasmeen carried their tray to a quiet corner table and went to the dispenser for napkins and a handful of sugars. Joanasi dragged the chair out to sit down, scraping its metal legs across the floor. He was starving, he said, and folded the entire donut into his mouth.

  “You didn’t eat anything on the plane?”

  He shrugged.

  She poured a packet of sugar into his coffee and stirred it around.

  “No,” he said, pushing the cup back at her. “You have it.” Waves of coffee spilled over the lip and splattered across the table.

  She jumped back to avoid getting it on her dress, then quickly sopped up the mess with a handful of napkins. “It’s good with a donut,” she insisted, trying to encourage him.

  He narrowed his eyes. “No, I said. I have what I need right here.” He bent down to unzip his duffel bag and rooted through his clothes until he found a bottle of Smirnoff. “We’re back together again. This calls for a celebration.” He cracked it open and poured some into the same thermos cap they had used for tea the day he rubbed her belly with the fertility paste. He transferred it slowly, careful not to spill a drop. He screwed on the top and tucked the bottle back between his socks and underwear, without offering any. Not that she would have accepted it.