For a while neither of them spoke. Yasmeen drank Joanasi’s coffee, occasionally sneaking a glance at him. She didn’t remember him looking so gaunt.
“I’m thirty-seven, but I’m ancient,” Paulussie had confessed the night they arrived at the campsite before it started to rain, before he called her a fucking bitch over the telephone, before the frightful winter caused a power surge in his brain and made him set fire to the church and run.
Yasmeen couldn’t wait for Joanasi to finish his vodka so they could leave the hectic airport and start over in their quiet, secluded hotel room. She was homesick for her tiny house by the sea, where the air was so palpable the night he first touched her, the night of the school opening and the battering squall, the night that had sealed everything between them.
•
She located her car in the parking lot and popped open the trunk. He shut it without putting his bag inside, indicating the back seat was good enough.
Mischievously, he pinned her against the hood of the car, gripping her wrists the way he used to. The feel of her body against the vehicle stirred a familiar response in her. It awoke her passion and erased the irritation she had felt about his drinking in the coffee shop. “I missed this,” he blurted, pushing his nose into her hair.
“Me, too,” she said.
The earlier reaction was just her ugliness rearing up, the attitude of people like Morgan and her mother and her Uncle Ramzi, whose poison sometimes seeped into her when she wasn’t being vigilant. She decided that Joanasi’s little cocktail wasn’t really a relapse. He wasn’t falling down drunk all over her. It was just something to steady his nerves and give him confidence. Something to help him make the adjustment. After everything they had been through together, she could excuse that small thing.
She felt his erection through her dress and closed her eyes and imagined him as a bear circling in, licking her with his dry, whiskery tongue. Her toes curled in their sandals as she received his full weight against her.
It wasn’t exactly the reunion she had planned, but whatever. The kinks seemed to be working themselves out. The thought of the bunched up underwear in her purse made her additionally horny, the idea that she had walked past hordes of people in the airport, straight-faced, totally exposed; the idea that she had left the balm of her vagina on every chair she had sat on. She slid his hand between her thighs.
“What are we waiting for? Let’s get going,” he said impatiently. He flopped into the passenger seat.
She wondered what he was thinking as they drove toward the downtown core. She hoped he was working out a good fantasy between them. “What happened to the rose?” she asked, realizing she hadn’t seen it since the donut shop.
He looked at her and shrugged.
“Oh well,” she said, trying to hide her hurt. “Some other handsome fellow will get it. No big deal.”
Secretly she was disappointed it hadn’t had the impact she had hoped for. If it had been the other way around, if he had brought her a flower, she would have understood the symbolism and treated it accordingly. She would have hung it upside down in a safe place to preserve it. She would have pressed the petals between the pages of her journal, a keepsake for their children and their children’s children.
Yasmeen followed the steady river of traffic, narrating the city landmarks as they presented themselves, but Joanasi had no interest in anything but her. He hoisted her dress up and wrested her legs apart, making it difficult for her to concentrate on the road. She batted away his hand. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she promised. “Let’s wait it out.” When he agreed, she got pouty and dangled a hand provocatively between her legs. He pushed it away and rested his finger on her tiny orb.
“I said I missed this.”
“Me too, Joanasi, but I need to focus.” She didn’t know why she was sending him mixed messages, saying no but meaning yes. His hand didn’t budge, as though it could read her perfectly. Somehow the car floated along, almost by itself. Her eyelids dipped for just a second. She raised her arm up over her head, arching backwards, willing herself to spill into his hands. She wished he would stop but she didn’t have the strength to ask him to.
A horn blared and a shriek of light bounced off the side mirror, treacherously close.
“Holy Fuck, Joanasi! Cut it out!”
The other driver slammed on his brakes and she swerved, barely missing him. He gave her his middle finger in retaliation and she could only imagine what his railing mouth was accusing her of through the sealed window. She pulled down her dress, horrified by the close call, and swatted Joanasi’s hand away. She gripped the wheel with both hands, disoriented, counting to ten to regain her composure.
She thought she heard him mumble something, so she asked, “What?” and he answered “What?” back.
“Never mind,” she said. He slid out a cigarette, lit it and snapped the lighter shut. Smoke shot through his nostrils.
She opened the window and slid out the ashtray drawer, not wanting his ashes all over her mother’s car. He flicked them anyway, without taking care. Some of it sprinkled across the steering wheel.
She exited off the expressway and made a right off Guy onto Dorchester, east past Crescent Street and de la Montagne and Peel, until they neared their destination. She idled the car on the busy boulevard, beneath the floodlit statues of Mary Queen of the World Cathedral.
He squashed out his cigarette. “Is this the hotel?”
“No. I wanted to show you one of my favourite buildings first. It’s a replica of St. Peter’s in Rome.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“If you look up you can see the thirteen patron saints of Montreal, including John the Baptist.” She shifted into park and cut the motor, leaving the keys dangling from the ignition.
He asked why she was stalling. She said, “I’m not stalling.” But something in her was resisting him. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe a combination things, the slight dip in her libido in the aftershock of their near collision, excitement, anxiety, fear that one or the other wouldn’t measure up, that their long-awaited reunion would be less than adequate.
“You’re tired,” she said. “We both are. Maybe you should get some sleep. I can always come back in the morning when we’re both fresh.”
“The hotel first, I need to see you.” He burped the kind of burp that slithers out before a person realizes it. He told her he wanted to fuck her like there was no tomorrow. She knew he was just repeating what he’d heard in some movie; it wasn’t in his nature to talk that way. Usually he just did it to her, without labelling it this or that. He did it in a way that left a lingering reminder that he had just lit a fire there.
Yasmeen couldn’t help feeling that her perfect night was slipping away from her. She couldn’t stop thinking about how he had arrived drunk off the plane, and how a good percentage of the alcohol was probably still in his blood. She knew that no matter what they did together while he was still under the influence, it would feel like so much less. “It’s going to be alright,” she said, touching his cheek. She didn’t really know what she meant by it.
Joanasi read it as a softening, an invitation back into her good graces, not that he had ever fallen out, and what else was there to do now that she was wet with anticipation? He fumbled around until he unsnapped her seatbelt. Her yes was spontaneous and decisive. They would lock up the car and make a beeline for the hotel where he would push her onto the floor and hold her in a head lock and she would wait with her eyes closed, half expecting something terrifying to happen, the other half knowing that when he thrust into her, a feeling would wash over her like warm water, an intense happiness that came from being his.
She felt his quickened pulse as he rotated his right hip and lifted his leg around to mount her. He cursed and smashed the steering wheel for getting in his way, bumping it repeatedly as his mouth filled up with her hai
r.
She shoved him off. “Not here! What’s wrong with you?”
Just then a slow-moving squad car materialized in the side mirror. Yasmeen turned the ignition key once. She pressed the button in the door handle until the power windows sealed shut. Sweat was rolling down her face and Joanasi was staring vacantly ahead, shoulders rising and falling with each intake of breath. She straightened her hair, trying to appear normal as she waited for the cruiser to accelerate past. She wasn’t afraid of this Joanasi and they weren’t in unfamiliar terrain. Countless times she’d been the object of his scorn. She’d tolerated his dark moods and cool silences. She knew from experience that with him there was a tipping point and that they often came dangerously close. It was part of the thrill. It was also the cause of their troubles.
Joanasi was knuckle-white. He took a deep breath and bellowed into her ear. “WHAT did you say?”
Yasmeen recoiled. What had she said? She couldn’t remember, why couldn’t she?
“Don’t you listen when I say something?” He rambled like someone desperate, someone who knew deep down that things were spiralling out of control and he was helpless to do anything about it.
Yasmeen was beginning to see it, too. Since he had arrived, whatever they said to each other seemed to be the wrong thing. The person sitting beside her felt like a total stranger to her. And yet, she knew every intimate part of him. She knew his eyes as he undressed her, his erection that she kissed with intense pleasure. She knew his knees scarred from childhood games, his large, square hands that in the bedroom were unpredictably tender, loving, rough. It upset her to think of stopping everything once and for all. Forever. How would she go on without him? Would she go around the rest of her life looking for Joanasi in somebody else? She didn’t have a vocabulary for what would come afterwards if they ended it.
He showed no sign of remorse, eyes darting from her to the window and back to her again. Outside, the light had dimmed. He swallowed hard and leaned forward, chin in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. He sat rubbing his temples with his fingers. She thought she saw tears welling up in his eyes, but she was wrong.
Everything happened fast, too fast, his fist out of nowhere slamming into the glove compartment. The veins of his forehead were popping out. “Fuck you, lady! FUCK YOU!” She was sure he would slap her, but he didn’t. He jerked the keys out of the ignition and stuffed them into his pocket.
Whatever apology, whatever gentle words had been forming in her mind dissolved on her tongue. Instantly. This isn’t happening, she repeated to herself. They were barely a block from the hotel, steps away from making everything right again. Everything was set and waiting for them, the cooled champagne, the strawberries, the silk sheets. She waited for him to calm down.
Her instinct was right. He spoke remotely, haltingly. “Why are you doing this to me, Aippaq?”
Me doing to this you, she wanted to say. She bit her tongue. She thought of the day at the Co-op when he dragged her by her elbow and said he would follow her everywhere for the rest of time the way Sedna’s evil husband did; that he would never trust her enough to leave her alone, not ever. And what had she done about it? Nothing. She accepted his apology and they fucked and life went on as though nothing had happened. She could have been leashed to him like a dog and still she would have taken it. Not just tolerated it, she would have accepted it. She would have continued making excuses for his behaviour, the way a battered woman stays with her man because a small, faulty part of her still loves him. Because somewhere inside she is deeply damaged.
She was desperate to reach him. She needed to prove to herself that she was normal and that this was just a terrible misunderstanding between two people who loved each other. She had to before it was too late. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Aippaq, suviit?” She combed her fingers through his hair, noticing how she towered over him the way she towered over her students.
She made a move to kiss him but his body tensed up and he backed away. It was only the second time in their relationship he had treated her as though she were invisible. His arm reached around to the back seat, to the floor of the car where he had dropped his bag. She heard a zzzzip and some rummaging around as he searched for the vodka. In her silkiest voice she said, “Think about it, you don’t want to do this,” but he did it anyway, without regard for her, he pushed the bottle into his mouth and pulled on it like a baby on its mother’s tit, drawing every drop, working to exhaustion to drain it. She hated to see him under its spell again. She hated how little respect he had for himself and for her. She thought of how hard she had worked all her life to stay grounded, to stay level-headed, even when the temptation to let go was great.
He checked how much of the alcohol was left and capped the bottle and tossed it on the floor by his feet. A river of drool slid down his chin. He wiped it away with his sleeve, staring at her through the great hollows of his eyes. “I should of never—”
“Maybe you’ll be happier without me.” She realized only after she said it that it had the ring of goodbye. It felt as though everything they had shared together all these months could fit into a small valise.
He lit a cigarette and aimed the smoke into her face. “I was thinking,” he said.
“About?”
“Would you care if I died?”
“What kind of question is that?” she said. “Of course I would.” She thought of their cloistered night in the igloo when they made love like the very first humans on earth, the time he forced himself into her so hard she thought he had torn something inside her. She recalled the bliss she had felt afterwards in the rise and fall of their breathing.
He shrugged and looked away.
Her frustration mounted. “Did you hear anything I said? Or am I just a pair of moving lips to you with the volume on mute?”
He was dead still.
“Listen, if you want me, if you really want me, you can’t be drinking or smoking dope or yanking me around wherever you go.” She gently touched his arm.
He snapped it away as though it had been shocked with electricity. An ember of his cigarette landed on her wrist.
She flicked it off. “Because, Joanasi, you’re killing us. You’re really killing us.”
He bared his teeth and punched his chest with his fist, as though nothing she was saying made any impact. “Answer me. Did you meet someone else?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Not again.”
“I think I smell that fucking asshole on you. I’m warning you, if I find out ….” He ground his cigarette into the dash and jerked down the zipper of his pants.
The panic rose in her. She fumbled for the automatic window button, keeping him in her line of vision. It seemed safe to assume that if she pressed it and the window slid down while people were walking by, he would immediately have to stop his nonsense. Then she remembered. He had snatched the key and the motor was turned off. His eyes swivelled and he lunged at her and all that flashed through her mind was why hadn’t she flagged down the cop while she had had the chance? He forced her legs apart and rammed his fish-stink tongue into the back of her throat.
Butted up against the door handle, she sputtered and gagged but she found the strength to shove him off. “Pull yourself together!”
“It’s that fucking teacher, isn’t it? I knew it. I leave you two alone for a couple of weeks and ….”
“You’re being ludicrous, the booze has got you totally paranoid, now give me back my key before I …!”
“Before you what?” She felt the weight of him on top of her again. He pulled her dress up over her waist and groped her as though his hand were a fork. “I’ll hurt you if you’re not careful.” When she tried to slap him away he slapped her even harder, across the face, and said “You do what I tell you or else.”
She clubbed him with her fists and screamed until she was hoarse. “I said gi
ve me the goddam car key!” Her body went limp and he bashed her against the seat as though he were totally disgusted with her. She rubbed her cheek where his hand had struck.
Just then, a young father strolled past on the sidewalk with his child, a curly-blond girl dipping her wand into a pink flask of soap solution. She blew out a big, shiny, quivering bubble and watched it float sideways into the air and flatten out, briefly, before bursting into nothing. She wept and her father scooped her up to comfort her as they continued on their way. The sky was edging on dusk.
It was just that, Yasmeen would recall afterwards: a fleeting moment of inattention. Still trembling from their altercation, she was unaware of Joanasi’s explosive rage collecting into a single point of energy. The outcome filled her ears, his piercing cry, his foot pressed against the windshield like a boot on ice, the fissure, a forked vein along the surface, widening until a deafening CRAAAACK shattered the silence.
And then, for what seemed an eternity, no sound at all. Slumped in the passenger seat, Joanasi gawked in disbelief at the damage he had caused, the way a dazed killer stares at his victim, thinking he had nothing to do with it. The torn strap of her sundress was in his hand.
“Give me my FUCKING key and get out of this car, right now!” she shouted. “NOW!”
He looked at her through stuperous eyes, refusing to budge.
“It’s over. We’re done! And this time it’s for good!”
He shrugged.
“I said OUT!”
He stared through her, speaking robotically. “Go ahead, call the police. I don’t care.”
Her eyes darted into the street, empty of people and cars, no one around to save her if she tried to make a run for it and he retaliated. If he dredged up the last of his strength and decided to end her. He could have. He could have done it handily. She closed her eyes and waited for it.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she opened them again. The hotel was still waiting on the next block. Her windshield still had a giant gash in it.
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