by Carol Mason
Roger is studying me. ‘Can I ask you what you’re thinking?’ he asks.
I open my mouth to say something, but the words won’t come. I’m like a dyslexic trying to read for an audience.
‘Help me out, Angela. I’m trying here.’ When I don’t reply, he says, ‘Shit. This has taken a bad turn, hasn’t it/ I’ve got a feeling I’m going the same way the dwarf guy went.’
I give him a look that says, sorry, I think you might be right.
He studies me with that affectionate kindness again. ‘All I was doing—or trying to do—badly, obviously—was to find out about you. I’m interested in you and I like you. I want to know all the little things that make you the person who a very good man fell in love with.’
A pain builds in the bridge of my nose, along with the distant urge to vomit. ‘How do you know he was a very good man?’ My voice breaks toward the end.
‘Well, I’ve a feeling there’s a reason why he’s being so very hard to forget.’
He scours my face. His tone is different now, serious. I have to lower my eyes as they flood with tears. ‘You know, Angela, a friend of a friend of mine was married to a man who died in the World Trade Centre. All these years later she still hasn’t moved on. She still keeps his toothbrush in the bathroom. She still leaves the alarm clock set for five-thirty every morning. She still says she regularly walks into the house convinced she’s going to find him there, that he somehow got buried deep in a long tunnel where he was disconnected from the world, but he dug through, he fought his way back to her—’
The scraping noise of my chair along the floor feels like fingernails on a blackboard. I am moving without realising why I am doing it—without thinking at all. When I get my foot caught in the strap of my handbag, and trip, and practically lurch into the bowl of spaghetti on the next table, and other heads turn and look at me, it’s his gaze I want to strip myself of. I feel it clinging to my back like a fever, as I hurtle towards the door.
He doesn’t follow.
Not that a girl could exactly blame him for that.
When I get outside, it feels remarkably like I’ve had my head held under water but somehow I’ve managed to fight my way up for air, and the air feels fantastic, and I will never let myself come so close to drowning again.
Eight Months Later
‘Do you think it’s weird that a hunky Australian sheep shearer from Perth invites you over to his house to watch Brokeback Mountain, which he tells you he’s seen seven times, then he wants to have anal sex with you?’
I light up when I hear my friend Sherrie’s voice on the phone. I take one more look at myself in the bathroom mirror—my pale face, and longish, lank, blonde hair with about two inches of dark roots showing, making it look permanently in need of a wash.
‘Weird?’ I switch the bathroom light off. ‘Well, if he’s from Perth, yes. I mean, if you’d said Canberra or Sydney that’d be different.’
There’s a silence where I feel she’s smiling. My four-feet eleven, carrot-haired Jewish friend is a cotton trader. She spends eighty-percent of the year travelling to the middle of nowhere in China, Egypt, India, or West Africa, to buy or sell the bales of cotton that become yarn, that become fabrics, that become our clothes—racking up peculiar sexual conquests in the process.
‘What time is it there, anyway?’ I ask her, wishing she were here, then we might go out. I’m not starved of friends, but Sherrie’s my first pick every time.
‘The exact opposite of whatever time it is there I guess. We’re upside down, remember. In case you hadn’t noticed I’m currently standing on your head. Urgh, but then you’d see right up my skirt... Not a pretty sight, especially after—’
‘Stop! Too much information!’
‘Or I could be standing on the soles of your feet. Damned if I know.’
Sherrie will always say that between constantly living in different time zones, and being a slave to her cell phone around the clock, the world has no boundaries any more. Even light and dark don’t mean anything to her, which I find hard to fathom. But some days it sounds like quite a nice problem.
‘What are you up to girl anyway?’ she asks me.
I take the phone over to the chair, half abandoning my idea to go out for a walk now. ‘Oh, just another rocking Saturday night, you know... I’m sitting in my small Ikea loveseat, with my feet up on my small Ikea coffee table, in my small Ikea life that I’m supposed to assemble myself only it doesn’t come with any instructions.’
‘Well it’s better than being given a large throbbing enema by a hunky outback guy who’s secretly wishing you were Jake Gyllenhaal.’
‘Want to bet?’
My friend laughs as though I’m hilarious. ‘Well, it was just a quick hello. My cell’s about to die on me, so I’m probably gonna jump him one last time before I gotta leave here, if he’s up for it. Think I’ll put the movie on again! I’ll be home tomorrow. Man do I need a vacation!’
‘You’re on one!’
‘This is work, honey. They don’t pay me the big bucks to do nothing you know. Actually they kinda do! Anyway, give me a few days to get my schlep together, then I shall take you out and we’ll work on getting you laid.’
‘You could pack your Aussie in your suitcase for me.’ Not that I’d probably remember what to do any more. A fortune-teller once told me that I’d never go a long time without sex. She also said that when I married it would be for life. It seems she wasn’t quite as psychic as she thought.
‘No, you can’t have him! He’s all mine! And he’s all man. Or maybe he isn’t. Damned if I care! Delusion is a great side effect of the drugs!’ She blows a string of deliberately British air-kissing ‘mwa!’s’
When I put the phone down I instantly miss her. My friend Sherrie—who I met quite randomly crossing a road when a driver almost ran her over—is a lover of life. If she has a serious side, she rarely lets it out. If she ever feels down, she compensates for it by acting up. She has unapologetically never wanted kids. She doesn’t care if she’s got nobody to grow old with. If she makes an idiot of herself she’s the first one to laugh. And if she laughs hard and loud, she’s the last one to think she’s making an idiot of herself. I love Sherrie. Nobody could do anything but love Sherrie, unless they had a thing against small, loud, life-loving Jewish people. After Jonathan died, Sherrie, and Jonathan’s best friend Richard who he opened the law firm with—and my mother who came over from England for two months—were nothing but rocks to me. Many of our friends had become scarce after the funeral. People generally don’t know how to behave around sudden loss. With cancer they’ve got time to prepare themselves to have you fall apart on them. Sherrie would phone me daily from whichever plantation she was wheeling and dealing on, and listen patiently while I did a very good job of talking about everything except how I was doing or how I was feeling, and she’d always manage to uplift me with some story about a disastrous date she’d had with a megalomaniac, polygamist, spear-chucking pygmy who keeps a wild boar. After one phone call with Sherrie I can smile for days.
After we hang up, I decide I do want to go out after all. I scrape my hair back into a ponytail and pinch my cheeks. I’m always pale lately, which makes my dark brown eyes look almost too intense for my face. And with being thinner now, my nose looks bigger. It’s the one thing I would change about myself if I dared have cosmetic surgery. It’s bad enough that it’s aquiline like my mother’s, but, unlike hers, it’s got a slight cleft at the end, like a nose cut in two. Jonathan used to say it was cute. But then again, he had quite a hooter on him too. In terms of noses we were really quite matched.
As I step outside of my apartment door I’m still grinning from Sherrie’s call, and the man coming out of the suite opposite smiles back at me, then looks to see who’s with me. Nobody but the people I carry with me in my thoughts.
Down at English Bay the sand is custard yellow and the water silvery with the sun on it. Vancouver is one of those charming, laid-back cities where you can
live and work, yet manage to feel like you’re on holiday. I sit on a bench beside a giant palm tree and colourful blossoms, and contemplate the pro bono speech I’m supposed to be writing for the Director of Raise the Roof, a non-profit agency that shelters the homeless: my first real assignment at the peculiar little advertising agency where I recently started working.
The world and his wife are out this evening. I’m just taking in the sailboats that glide past the oil tankers on the horizon when I see them, just a few feet away from me: the black couple I saw earlier today in a café down at Coal Harbour. They have to be tourists. He’s a big man, well put together in indigo jeans, and a funky waistcoat. She’s like a middle-aged Beyoncé, in a clingy, colourful dress. They stop almost right in front of me. She knots her hands around his neck, and reaches up on her high lime green sling-backs to pop kisses on his mouth. She has a full mouth, and, as she kisses him, before her lips move away, his lips claim her lower one in a big suck, which makes her smile into his kiss. His hands go from cupping her hipbones to travelling slowly up and down her sides, like he’s reading brail, feeling out a language. Then, of all the things, he starts to sing Percy Sledge’s Warm and Tender Love. It’s a good voice. It’s a good song. He does it unselfconsciously without any display, and, oh, she’s in seventh heaven. She curls her arms around his neck, and his hands go to her bum, and he knows all the words, and he sings them, and he doesn’t care who’s watching.
I can’t take my eyes off them, the way they look against this background cinema of mountains and glittery ocean. I realize, and then flood with shame, that I must be wearing a queer smitten smile.
How easy it takes me back to Jonathan and me in Barbados. It was the last night of our holiday. Just two days before the knock on my door with the news that changed my life. A steel band was doing a very good version of Bob Marley’s Is It Love? An older American couple had just asked us if we were newlyweds. Granted they’d had a few drinks, and the man kept asking the palm tree behind me if it planned on having children. ‘No,’ Jonathan said, pulling me into a hug. ‘Five years married, us.’
When we got up to dance, I was hit with the last night blues. We must come back here, I thought. But Jonathan hated going back to places; like Cat Stevens, he’d say, we only get to dance on this earth for a very short time. The girl at the next table watched us. I felt her gaze, a quiet heat on top of the heat of a Barbadian evening. I remember realising I was happy. The feeling just visited me, like you might suddenly be aware you feel tipsy or over-full. More than that, I was content, which felt bigger and better than happiness.
‘Why do you have goose-bumps?’ Jonathan asked, pulling me closer to him, his big hand accidentally finding the burn I’d got from a day spent binging on my last dose of sun while he’d been out water skiing. Jonathan always had to be doing things or he’d get twitchy. It was quite funny. Sometimes it drove me mad.
‘Ow!’ I said, not realising I’d burnt my shoulders so badly. I didn’t know why I felt a chill. It wasn’t an outward cold but seemed to originate from some inexplicable place within me. I just remember not wanting the night to end. I wanted to keep him there, on that dance floor. I didn’t want him to take one step to separate us.
‘Take your top off,’ he said. ‘The straps are irritating your burn.’ His eyes had a look I’d seen in them many times. Jonathan’s turned-on look.
‘Yeah right. Me, the girl who won’t go in the ocean because of the jellyfish, and won’t have sex on a dark beach because I’m too scared of the crabs in the sand. Yep, that’s exactly something I’m going to do.’
Jonathan always had a knack for making me feel boring. Although next to him, I was. Jonathan was one of those rare people who dared to do, or say, what others would have liked to. The sort of guy you want at your party, and you really want in your corner if there’s a fight. Sometimes you’d wonder if he was a bit off his head. Other times, you’d dazzle in the knowledge that the most fun, sexy man in the whole world was with you, loved you, wanted to spend his life with you. And you’d want to possess every inch of him, and rip his clothes off at peculiar times, in peculiar places, and straddle him and nail him to the bed and make him promise he’d never leave you. Because sometimes life felt too good to be true.
He cupped the back of my head and gave me a devouring kiss. Jonathan was like that: an exhibitionist in his love for me. Then he walked off the dance floor and swiped a fuchsia cloth off a table. Then, wafting the fabric in the air, he sent it around me like an enchanted cape. And, so nobody could see, he proceeded to remove my sun-top and bra—copping a feel in the process of course—then finished by tying it at my nape like a sarong, and clamping a kiss on my burn.
Someone in the audience clapped. A bloke said ‘Wey-hey!’ I hid my face in his neck. His skin smelt warm and so alive, with that hint of showered-off sunscreen. ‘Let’s go up to our room,’ I said. I was as horny as a harlot in June.
The bed had been wonky from the start. We put the mattress through the frame. Jonathan thought it a brilliant testament to his prowess. ‘Next time I’m going to put you through the wall,’ he said.
But there wasn’t a next time.
When I come out of my daydream, the black couple have gone. I see them walking off, hand in hand in the distance. I suddenly hope with a passion that neither of them ever finds themselves sitting alone on a bench on a Saturday night gazing at a couple in love, and remembering their last dance, their last kiss with their lover who would leave them. I send silent mental good wishes to them. Go safely and happily into the night. Love each other and be with each other for life.
I walk home, feeling a bit like an extra in a one-person play. The speech I have to write floats through my head again, but the words feel like they’re in a straightjacket; I can’t seem to animate them, to set them free. I take a shortcut past a new ritzy townhouse development. The Vancouver skyline has shot up dramatically in the few years we’ve lived here, making it resemble a mini New York. Yet it’s not a big, pulsing city. Beautiful yes. But, as I once read in a guidebook, ‘it’s beauty in search of a city’. Vancouver and I have a fair bit in common: we both could use a life.
Back in the apartment, I open a cheap bottle of red wine and eat Melba toasts straight from the packet, as I stare at my view of the busy interiors of neighbouring buildings. A new day swirls overhead in just a few hours, and I should be happy about that. But today has been one of those Jonathan-filled days, where I see him and feel him everywhere. When I clue in again, I realise I’ve sunk the entire bottle and I’m sat there in a tipsy fug of happy-sadness, with an acid stomach, wishing I’d eaten a proper dinner. I dial Sherrie’s cell. No matter what time of the day or night I call her, she always answers.
‘Sherrie, do you think that the dead can intervene in the lives of the living, to, you know, to bring us happiness? To look out for us?’
For some crazy reason I’ve been thinking about Jonathan’s promise, and whether or not he could possibly swing it from up there. Whether he’d even remember. Do you still have a memory when you die? Sometimes I wonder if he watches me, thinking, come on, get it together, and if he’s up there hatching a plan to sort me out.
There’s a pause. ‘Angela, my friend, do you know what colour North American Black Bears are?’
‘Erm… well…’ Is this a trick question? ‘Black, aren’t they?’
~ * * * ~
‘What’s your point?’ Sherrie always has one.
‘My point is—duh!—no need to ask a question when the answer’s as obvious as the fact that your ass is farther down your body than your ribcage.’
I try not to smile. ‘I was being serious.’
‘Oh! Well, if we’re being SERIOUS and you want my HONEST OPINION.’ She pauses. ‘Then no. God no! Dead people intervening in the lives of the living! Where did you get this stuff from? It’s a load of serious crapology! When you’re dead, you’re dead. It sounds simplistic, but that, my friend, is because it is.’
‘So
you’re pretty certain about that?’ I tease. ‘I mean, feel free to be blunt. I can take it on the chin.’
‘Why are you asking me these retarded questions anyway?’
I hesitate, not sure whether to tell her, in case, like a wish, the telling will stop it from coming true. ‘Okay, well… I know it sounds a teeny bit mad—and I’m probably only telling you this because I’m a bit pissed—but Jonathan once promised me that if he died he would send me someone to love from up above, and I was thinking of calling him on his promise.’
Another pause... ‘In Xambidny in the far reaches of Africa, the Pogs believe that if they eat the tail off a hippo they’ll grow a massive penis overnight.’
I grin my face off. ‘But hang on, I didn’t think hippos had tails. Only funny little stumps for tails.’
‘And now you know why.’
I chuckle. She chuckles. ‘And, again, your point would be…?’ I ask her.
‘That I suppose there’s no harm in believing something if it makes you feel good. Even if it is a serious load of crapology.’
I shake my head. ‘Goodnight Sherrie. Whenever I need a bit of perspective on things, I always know where to turn.’
In bed, I try, but fail, to fall asleep, a restless ache running down my legs, the speech going through my head again, sounding even more hopeless than before. I’m trying to care about the people of Vancouver who don’t have a bed for the night, but I can’t quite feel it right at this minute, at least, not enough to make it sound like it’s coming from the heart. I sigh and snow-angel my arms and legs out, my feet and hands reaching to the far side of the mattress. Sometimes I’ll do this, and I’m convinced I’m going to touch him.