Best Canadian Stories 2020

by Paige Cooper

  From inside the car, Mary pushed the button that unlocked the door to the gas tank. She watched him in the mirror where there was a note of warning that said objects in mirror were closer than they appeared. He knew what to do. He came over and pushed aside the door, reached his hand in, and twisted the lid. Mary knew it opened to a little hole. He turned, pressed a few buttons on the machine, brought over the pump, and pushed the nozzle in. Mary could hear the oil, how it rushed in, eager and desperate. It took a while to fill that voluminous tank. He came over to the driver’s side and she opened the window just a slit. She ironed out the wrinkles on a bill with the warmth of her palms. She pressed on the side with that old man’s face, and pressed again on the reverse on the image of a white building. All the money was green. It was easy to give away the wrong denomination. She checked all four corners for the number fifty, to be sure. The bill came out of the window like a tongue and he grabbed an edge. Mary drove away before he could give her back her change.

  *

  The town did not encourage much walking around. There were no sidewalks, only grassy ditches along the road. Most people drove pickup trucks, and at interstate speed. Every bank had a drive-through window. The tax deadline was approaching and Mary relied on being noticed. It would take some time before anyone did. She had to set up her office in a public place early this year, get a head start, especially in a town like this. Besides, she could use the money. She worked out a deal with the manager of the community centre to let her set up her office there, in front of the library. She brought in a foldable desk and put out her sandwich-board sign. She looked around and thought it was the perfect place. There was a lot of foot traffic. There was a pool and a gym, too.

  She saw the gas station man. His whole body was covered up. The only flesh she could see was his hands and his head. She wondered who was at the gas station now that he was here. He was checking out a book from the library. She saw it from the back but couldn’t tell what book it was. He noticed her sitting at her desk and came over and said, “Hey, can I ask you some questions?” He had on large black-framed glasses. They looked too big for him. His eyes were grey or blue. It was hard to tell. There was glass in the way. And while she was trying to determine their colour, he was seeing all of her. Most people stared at a detail of her face or at the wall behind her. To be in someone’s gaze was something more.

  Even before she answered his question, she did not like how he used that first word. Hey. As though she were some hole in the wall you could just stick your questions into.

  “You have to make an appointment!” she yelled. There was fury in her voice. She pulled down her skirt, which had been creeping up, showing too many details of her legs. The ankles and their bony joints, the muscled curve of her back legs, the rough patches of her knees, and the area above that did not tan. He laughed.

  “Okay then. Can I do that?”

  When she turned to look at her schedule, he had taken the seat in front of her. He continued with his questions. “There’s no one here.” He looked around. It was true, but she was a professional. He couldn’t just walk up to her and take up her time as though it were free.

  “I am a professional, sir,” she said. “Professionals take appointments.”

  He seemed amused. “I never met anyone like you.”

  She did not know whether that statement was a compliment. She decided it was an observation. An observation of a fact. Well, working at the gas station, how could you? she thought.

  “Oh. I get it. Dressed in black. Death and taxes,” he said.

  She ignored his comment. She handed him her business card and said, “How is nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  “But I’m here now.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “What’s the problem then?”

  “No problem. As I said, you don’t have an appointment.”

  He kept pushing.

  “We’re done here,” Mary said, making a small circle in front of her with a finger, a boundary that needed to be drawn.

  He put his hands up, as if preparing for an arrest, and said, “Ma’am. I like you. Sharp. Real tough. I’ll see you tomorrow.” And he walked out.

  Mary drove home that night, glad she didn’t have to go by the gas station. On purpose, she drove over three bumps in the road. She made sure she went slowly, so she could feel the rise and rise, rise and fall, of the car. The bounce was more pronounced at a slower speed. Her eyes looking up at the ceiling, her jaw loose and open. At high speeds you couldn’t feel anything at all.

  She didn’t make anything to eat. She wasn’t hungry. She took a shower, washed her hair, and polished her only pair of shoes. She read a book that had belonged to her as a little girl. It was about a monster. It wasn’t scary at all. She had played both parts. The beauty and the beast. Mary loved being the beast. She could roar and pound at her chest and no one ever said that was not how a little girl should be. She could be ugly and uglier and even more ugly. She threw the book across the room. It left a dark mark on the wall, like a bruise. To be a monster, a beast of some kind. Watching everything shudder, down to the most useless blade of grass.

  *

  The next morning, Mary smoothed out her black hair, put on makeup, dabbed some lipstick onto two fingers and patted them on her cheeks. She spread this same colour on her lips. She wore black. One of her black pencil skirts and the long-sleeved blouse.

  It was 8:15 when she arrived. The sky was a long unbearable lump of grey and there was rain all over everything. When she walked up to the community centre, the sliding doors parted. It made her feel like some god parting the ocean. Sometimes, when she thought no one was looking, she spread her arms dramatically out to the sides.

  Instead of going to her desk, she went to the bathroom. It was clean and bright with lots of room. You could smell the bleach. She sat down on the counter next to the sink and pulled her skirt up to her thighs, spread her legs apart, and arched her back. She closed her eyes. She brought a finger to her mouth and her teeth clutched it there, muffling a moan of pleasure. The fluorescent lights were unflattering.

  She went to take her seat and opened her laptop, looking at her list of appointments. The gas station man had an ordinary name. If you looked him up in a phone book, his name would take up several pages. Everyone knew at least one person who had that name.

  A brown suit came into view, something definitely from a second-hand store. The lapels were wide. It belonged in a different time and to a different person. It was sad.

  “I have an appointment,” he said.

  “Take a seat.” Mary rested her elbows on the desk and interlaced her fingers. He asked his questions and was gone.

  That afternoon, she stepped out into the rain and tried to look for something familiar, to steady herself. Everything was wet and muggy. She stepped back underneath the awning and noticed a little mound of dirt. Ants. At the centre of that mound was an entrance and an exit, efficient. Everything in one place. She hated that it was closed off to her peering. That world of work, their little secrets of living together and lifting things greater than themselves. She imagined the networks below her feet. How they went on forever. She lifted a foot and wiped away the mound. As if nothing had ever been there. They would build it back eventually. That was the magic they had, together.

  *

  Mary got to his apartment and pressed the button in the elevator to go up to the fifth floor. It was not the speed she liked. It crept up too slowly, moved in jitters and jitters and then jolts. She could have walked up the stairs. It would have been faster. She would have liked to feel her legs pound each step.

  When the elevator arrived, there was a ding, like a microwave. Her black shoes clicked on the floor and when they stopped, the door to his apartment opened. He served dinner. He explained everything to her. How it would all unfold. He said it was going to be sweet and tender and loving. The
n, at every opportunity, he’d tell her he didn’t love her. It’ll be a lie, he said. “I don’t like feelings.” She was going to go home, but he sat there on the bed looking lonely and sad. It was the thing she loved most in the world. The one no one saw, the one no one wanted. So she stayed.

  It turned out the gas station man was an artist. He pained only with black. He had very large canvases leaned against the wall. They all looked the same to Mary. There didn’t seem to be any difference, until she got closer to each one. The thing about these paintings was their strokes. Each one was particular, original. She angled one until the light hit it and saw where the strokes had been slapped on, where they changed, where they thickened, where they swirled.

  *

  It was just as he said it would be. It was tender and sweet and loving. When he was around, all Mary could ever see was the black at the centre of his eye. The world and its little towns fell away. What time it was, what day or hour, where the sun was in the sky, Mary never noticed. All she saw was him. “I want to stay in,” he said. He kept himself inside her, attached, his body forming an appendage that grew out of her centre. After a while, he said, “I don’t love you.” Mary did not say anything back. She was listening to his breathing, feeling. She saw now that his eyes were grey. And she was not there anymore. She said nothing about love, asked nothing about it, or how he felt. “You’re lying,” she said. “Like you said you would.” He said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” What was the difference between someone who lied about love and someone who didn’t love you? Nothing.

  Mary packed her bags and left all her furniture. She knew if he called her, she would go back right away. But she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to go and stay gone. She was free. Free, she drove to the gas station and pumped gas into the car herself. He watched her from his tiny glass box. When she was done, she threw the pump down on the gravel and didn’t pay. She twisted the lid to the gas tank, and when it was tight to her satisfaction, she drove away. She took the one road out of that town, picked up speed, flying over the potholes, not feeling any bumps. She knew she would reach the city. Its bright lights sprinkled across the sky like broken glass. She would become one of those bits, in a few hours’ time.

  And as for him. He’d still be there, in that town. Nothing would change there, but she imagined a few years from now the gas station would be shut down. Its bright tennis-ball green faded. No one would be able to see it from the interstate. The glass box broken on one side. Weeds growing through the concrete cracks. No one would be paying him to be there anymore, but there he would be, not even knowing why. Probably the hair on his head would fall out and would not come back. His face round and heavy and drooping. Two front teeth missing. The glasses he wore still there on his face, but behind one lens the eyelid remained closed. It didn’t matter what happened there anymore. She knew what she never was, a void that was not immense.

  Common Whipping

  Naben Ruthnum

  “You’ve been here how long?”

  “Two years ago. Christmas, ’71. Quit my course in Scotland, came over. My family still doesn’t know.”

  “You never talk to them?”

  “My old flatmate, Brian, he forwards me mum’s mail. He even sends replies back for me. I put five or six letters in a big package, ship that to him, he takes them to the postbox once a week.” Brian had been Renga’s first real lover, a resident in the psychology program who now lived with a fake girlfriend (herself a lesbian, a psychiatric nurse who was especially skilled in electroshock therapy treatments, as Renga himself had witnessed on a ward visit he’d made with an identification badge nicked from the Sikh resident who shared their Citroën).

  “Two years.”

  “Yes. And I still haven’t played on a single track. I’ve written a lot, though.”

  “Your Italian?”

  “Mostly decent, but I run into trouble when I’m describing something a little abstract,” Renga tried to say in Italian. He could tell from the mingled confusion, pity and disdain on Massimo Troisi’s face that he was butchering both language and accent. Renga crossed his legs to hide the dark stain he’d just seen near the left knee of his pants, and the movement smoothed his transition back into English. “It’s not good enough, is what I’m saying. Apparently not good enough.”

  “Why didn’t you go to India? Plenty going on there. You would have had more luck.” Massimo leaned back to allow the waiter to set down a platter of transparently thin cured meats. Renga took and gnawed, swishing liquor between his teeth to dislodge studs of pig gristle.

  “No Morricone out there. And I don’t speak Hindi.”

  “So you’re as useless there as you are here. And for money?”

  Renga grinned and looked away. The waiter mistook his sidewards glance for another drink order, which was not a problem. Another glass of Fernet Branca arrived, bobbing with miniature semi-spheres of ice that would melt in seconds.

  “I didn’t think I was your only one. Just glad you’re doing well,” said Massimo. This time he was the one to cross his legs, perhaps to cover a stirring under the expensive cream trousers. No one would have been able to see it. Like most of the cafés and bars Renga’s clients favoured, Rubinetto was dark, underground. The stone walls were old, and the cement holding them together was no longer distinguishable from rock, the whole room tinted by decades of liquor stains and smoke.

  Massimo poked Renga’s knee with the tip of his shoe, something he’d been doing since they’d sat down. The origin of the stain. Massimo’s constant touching was proprietary, his attempt at a physical claim on something he’d never encountered before. Renga was a rarity in the city, a place where most sexual options were anything but. Slender, more-or-less Indian, accommodating, with a pleasing accent. Passage-to-India rough trade.

  “You enjoy this? Not with me, I mean. The job in general,” Massimo asked.

  “I like the hours and some of the sex,” said Renga. “Even some of the bad fucks you learn from. And anyone I go with is someone I know, or knows someone I know. Like you.’”

  “Right,” Massimo said. He didn’t ask Renga which category of fuck he fell into.

  “You like Cipriani? Stelvio?”

  “Of course I do.” Anonimo Veneziano was currently the third-most rotated LP in Renga’s collection.

  “He just cancelled on a project. That’s what the director says, but I think it was probably that he hoped Stelvio would do it and never got an agreement. They’ve got to get some kind of music on there. You got anything you can show the director? Mirazappa, a new guy.”

  “I have a record.” He did. A pressing of one hundred vinyl discs, each with a cover that he’d screenprinted himself in a cheap shop in Mauritius, a red circle on a dark blue background.

  “Is it classical sounding?”

  “There’s a variety of different sounds.”

  “Hm. You might want to make something new, bring it in on tape. Mirazappa was very specific, says he wants something classical, chamber-sounding. Says Bach a lot, but I think Bach is the only composer he knows.”

  “I can do that.” Renga would need to pay for six hours of studio time and a cellist, an engineer as well. And write something new, but that was never the problem.

  “Why d’you like Morricone so much? I know why I like him, but you?”

  “I hate voices, what they do in popular music. It’s why I couldn’t stand to go to India. You write for the movies there, you’re a slave to the playback singer, the stupid melody they want. Morricone, he makes voices behave. Forces them to be music. There’s a line, structure, something written on piano, a theme the flute will pick up when the voice can’t reach. Either that or he just makes them yelp in the recording booth, at the right pitch, the right time. That I like. It’s how voices should be used.”

  “Right. For me it’s the whistling. You know he laughs in all the wrong places if he’s around when
they edit? Really threw Sergio off the one time I was there, for Buono Bruto. Ennio’s in his own world, takes a few things from the script, from discussions, then goes and does his themes.” Massimo gazed off as he said this, watching condensation form in one particular depression in the ceiling, which the waiter had already walked over to poke dry with a mop once that evening. Renga too was feigning an experienced carelessness, which worked well when he was selling his cock and mouth, and seemed to be effective currency in the movie world as well. Being present as Ennio saw his score matched to film for the first time was swoon-material, as the linen-draped manipulator across from him knew. The story was almost definitely a lie, or something Massimo had stolen at a party.

  “I’ve heard that, yes. So when can I meet Mirazappa?”

  “You meet him after you give me the music. I’ll pay for half the recording and the musicians. We’ll call it a little gamble. Fifteen percent if Mirazappa likes it, and you give me a few free nights if he doesn’t. He won’t want to see you if he doesn’t like the music. And he really prefers working with Italians. Didn’t want to cast any Americans or Brits, but he did because he had to. You he doesn’t have to use. So we have to make him want you. Got an Italian name for the credits?”

  “Reinaldo Pazone.”

  “You serious?”

  “No,” said Renga, too happy to defend his carefully-arrived-at pseudonym. He gave Massimo his real address, something he rarely did with a client, and left the bar after promising to meet back there the next day—unless Massimo wanted him for another hour that night?

  “I’m fifty-two,” Massimo said. “I’d just fall asleep.”

  Massimo watched the departing boy, who’d reached for his wallet when the bill came with something approaching genuine grace. He walked that way as well, with the elegance of the unwatched. Renga didn’t act like a whore. At least not like one who charged his extremely reasonable rates.

  The need to shower overtook Renga as soon as he turned away from Massimo and headed up the stone steps into the afternoon. Under his light, stained shirt and cotton pants, Renga’s flesh felt tacky, and the heat would soon turn this into viscous stickiness. It was an unpleasant, tactile part of a job he mostly enjoyed.