Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  Because of this action, as well as the more ambitious one we started planning for next, my studies began to suffer. I felt distracted in tutorials and barely scored 70 percent on my Russian quiz on irregular past tenses. I couldn’t blame this entirely on my desire to save the world. Filling Sonia’s shoes with Russian words, drinking tea with her ( Japanese style if we went to her room, Russian style in mine), rearranging my room so that my futon was next to the grate, reading to her through it—for me, these were the real actions. After she dozed off, it would take me an hour or more to calm myself because, near her, even if there was a floor between us, I felt jittery with happiness. I couldn’t forget the kiss any more than I could forget its literary antecedent.

  Still, I wouldn’t name the feeling, couldn’t admit to love, not even to lyubov.

  For the subject of my final term paper in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in Translation I chose Anna Karenina. I wanted to write something about Levin’s second proposal to Kitty, whom he asks to marry early in the book, only to be refused because Kitty expects an offer from the dashing Count Vronsky. It takes Levin another three hundred and sixty pages to get over his wounded pride and ask for her hand again, which he finally does while Kitty is sitting at a card table doodling with a piece of chalk. Fear of a second rejection renders him mute. Levin takes the chalk and writes the letters w-y-t-m-i-c-n-b-d-y-m-n-o-t? He means, When you told me it could not be—did that mean never or then? He hands her the chalk and she writes: T-I-c-n-a-d. Then I could not answer differently. They continue like this, writing on the felt top of the table, declaring their love in code.

  I was intrigued by the scene. In one way their reserve seemed anti-romantic, a contrast to Anna and Vronsky, who have no difficulty communicating their passion. Yet as the novel progresses, Anna and Vronsky’s ideal romance flags while Kitty and Levin’s marriage, portrayed with all its flaws, grows more delightful. I hadn’t begun to formulate my thesis. All I knew was that it had to do with language and that I wanted to write a paper that would please Professor Kopanyev and make up for my stuporous performance of late.

  In the chapter where Kitty first meets Anna, I read this sentence: It was obvious that Anna admired her beauty and youth, and before Kitty knew where she was she felt herself not only under Anna’s sway but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with married women older than themselves.

  Do they?

  I got up for a drink of water and, realizing then how stiff I was from lying on my futon all morning, decided to go out for a walk. I left the house and for several blocks walked with my head down, agitated but pretending not to be, trying to think about my paper without thinking about the implications of that line, so by the time I reached Kropotkin Street and looked up, what I saw stopped me in mid-stride: the avenue ahead in full frothy bloom, as though a pink mist was streaming down it on both sides. I crossed quickly over. A cumulus of blossoms. Overnight these few blocks of Third Avenue had been transformed. Nature had performed this action which, indisputably, trumped ours. All at once I felt like sobbing, the way I had at the end of If You Love This Planet when Dr. Caldicott declares how deeply in love she is with the world and how seeing it in spring especially makes you realize you have to change the priorities of your life. Maybe it was the tears in my eyes, but everything seemed magnified, more intensely coloured, pinker. I desperately loved the world! That was what I was feeling, I decided. The pure embrace of life.

  I broke off a cluster of blossoms that, back home, I placed in a glass of water on my card table. Over the next few hours I kept glancing up at it, reassuring myself I hadn’t dreamed what I’d seen and felt.

  Mid-afternoon Sonia called up and asked what I was doing. “Reading,” I said.

  Ya chitayu.

  I got an idea. I plucked all the petals off the branch, waited a minute, then called her name. When she appeared under the grate, I released them, pink, liberated moths, watching as they fluttered down on her smiling, upturned face.

  One hundred and forty-nine pages later, Kitty, having been made physically ill when Vronsky abruptly transfers his attentions to Anna, is taken by her mother to a German spa. There she meets a Russian girl of her own age, Varenka, and Kitty, as often happens, felt an inexplicable attraction to this Mademoiselle Varenka.

  The similarities disturbed me: as young girls do, as often happens. Did it? I knew it happened now, because of Carla, but I had assumed that lesbianism was a modern phenomenon, that it had to do with feminism, with taking a stand against men, not with love. But now I read in a book more than a hundred years old that Kitty was aware, when their eyes met, that Mademoiselle Varenka liked her too.

  Five chapters are dedicated to Kitty’s obsession with Varenka, chapters that had apparently not seemed very important the first time I read the novel since I barely remembered them. Varenka, Kitty decides from a distance, while pretty, is not likely to be attractive to men. The two women see each other daily in passing but, not having been formally introduced, are obliged to communicate with their eyes. Kitty’s eyes say, Are you the delightful being I imagine you to be? and Varenka’s answer, I like you too, and you are very very sweet.

  Kitty begs her mother for an introduction until the Princess Shcherbatsky, weary of these entreaties, approaches the Russian girl at last. “My daughter has lost her heart to you.”

  Varenka: “It is more than reciprocal, Princess.”

  And so they finally meet. Kitty blushed with happiness, long and silently pressing her new friend’s hand, which did not return her pressure but lay passively in hers. The hand did not respond to her pressure but Mademoiselle Varenka’s face glowed with a soft, pleased, though rather sad smile. . . .

  Exactly the way Sonia’s looked when I showered her with petals! I remembered, too, how she had held my hand during that first NAG! meeting, and my confusion about what to do. I, too, had gone limp. Like Kitty, I blushed now.

  Kitty becomes more and more fascinated by her friend, enraptured by her. Soon she learns that Varenka has also been wounded in love. “Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after knowing you,” Kitty tells Varenka.

  “How good you are, how good!” exclaimed Kitty and, stopping her, she kissed her.

  She kissed her.

  I touched my face, feeling that tingle again. No, I couldn’t write about it. As I reshelved Anna Karenina in the milk crate, the word palpitations came to mind, though it felt more like my heart was hurling itself against the bars of its cage. Eventually these protestations subsided. I had other, more pressing things to distract me: our date with the end of the world, my long mental slog toward another essay topic.

  At our next house meeting we decided to have a party. After the requisite bickering, we reached consensus on a date—the following Friday—who, and how many people we would invite, and what each of us would do to get ready. Then, on Friday, I came home to an unusual domestic scene, Sonia on her knees angrily scrubbing the kitchen floor while Pete sat cross-legged on the table, well out of her way, shelling peanuts into his lap.

  “Let me,” I begged her. “I’ll do it.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  The point was that we, the women, were yet again cleaning while they, the men, were not. Sonia glared at Pete. I hurried out with the teeming compost, knocking another rotting stave off the fence in my eagerness to stay in the we that included her. When I came back with the empty bowl, Pete waved me over and dumped his shells in it.

  Since hinting wasn’t working, Sonia sat up on her haunches and asked him outright: “Pete! Why aren’t you helping us?”

  “I got the snacks.” He waved the bag of peanuts.

  “When we said we’d get the house ready, we meant put the food out and decorate. We didn’t mean do everybody’s chores.”

  “So put the food out and decorate.”

  Her little nostrils quivered. The effect was charming. “You go around saying you’re a feminist! If you really were, you’d help!�
��

  “Wrong. I really am a feminist, therefore I refuse to treat you differently than I’d treat a man.” He cheerfully cracked another shell with his perfect teeth. “Ask Dieter. He’d be happy to patronize you.”

  This was why anarchism would never work, I thought. No one would ever want to wash the kitchen floor. When I made the mistake of voicing this, Pete replied, “Wrong, Zed. This is actually an example of how perfectly anarchism works. Someone always wants the kitchen floor to be clean. In this case, Sonia wants it to be clean, so she’s washing it. She’s washing it of her own free will. If I relinquished my principles and went ahead and washed it, even though I’m perfectly satisfied with the condition of the floor, I wouldn’t be an anarchist. Because an anarchist will not be limited in the exercise of his will by fear of punishment or by obedience to any person or metaphysical entity. He—or she—is guided in his—or her—own actions by his—or her—own personal understanding and ethical conceptions.”

  Dieter walked in then and Sonia got up off the floor and threw the sopping rag at him. It slapped his chest with a horse-dungy plop that made me laugh out loud. Sonia shrieked that she was on strike and ran out.

  “Asshole,” Dieter told Pete.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  Dieter dropped his books on the table and, tugging his pant legs at the thigh, got down on all fours. I knew then that he still liked Sonia, though he hardly bothered her any more. His glasses hung off his face as he worked, clinging to his temples by the arms. Pete kept on cracking peanuts.

  I went after Sonia and, finding her lying on the meadow of her bedspread, sat down to watch the fortunate air filling her up, the unfortunate air leaving. I felt so awkward around her now, a different kind of awkwardness than when I had first moved in. Then I had felt invisible, but now I felt far too obvious, like the sleeve I wore my heart on was fluorescent or Hawaiian.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said after a minute.

  “You should have waited for me to get home. I would have helped.”

  “It’s not just that. Jane? After exams? After my practicum?”

  “Yes?”

  She was staring up at nothing. “Do you want to move out? We can get an apartment.”

  “Together?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  It was hours before it really sunk in and the euphoria hit. What she said and her proviso: “If we’re still alive, I mean.”

  We had said eight o’clock but no one came until almost ten, after which the house was full of noise. Some of Dieter’s amigos turned up, including Hector, back from Victoria in the hope that his refugee application would finally be processed. For this Latin American contingent we played music happy with maracas, buoyant with unintelligible choruses, until midnight, when Pete brought down his milk crate of tapes and put on Purple Haze. People from SPND and EAR were there, too, and every-one from NAG! Belinda and Carla had set up in the kitchen, Belinda straddling a backward chair while Carla wove tiny braids into her hair. Several times during the evening Pete came in and asked, “Are you done yet?” to which Belinda replied, “God,” without looking up.

  I tagged along while Sonia hugged everyone and made sure they had drinks. Everything she did—replenishing the chip bowl, stashing a six-pack in the fridge—she did with grace. I was fascinated, enraptured. Then Ruth came over. “Can I talk to you, Jane?”

  “I’m helping Sonia,” I said and blushed. The adoration in my voice. So obvious! I followed Ruth out in case she’d noticed.

  No one was in the living room despite all the effort Sonia and I had put into festooning it with cranes. Ruth closed the French doors after us then slumped on the chesterfield and, face in her hands, began to cry. I was supposed to hug her, I knew, but I didn’t. I waited until she had blotted her tears on her paisley scarf. Taking a few pulls from the bottle jammed between her thighs, she said, “I’d do anything, Jane.”

  “For whom?”

  She burped into her fist. “To get into NAG! I know you’re in now. Sonia told me. How did you do it?”

  I felt sorry for her and told the truth: “I live here.”

  “I knew it! I tried so hard. You have no idea how hard I tried to get in. I even sucked up to Dieter.” Ruth started to sob in earnest now and, embarrassed, I looked out the ponchoed window. Someone was coming up the walk in moon boots. More than out of season, the glowing white boots were out of climate, but I was accustomed to strange garb by then, to T-shirts that screamed slogans, to tie-dye in the full spectrum of purple, to work socks worn with long Indian cotton skirts, to Birkenstocks, buffalo sandals, huaraches, clogs. He set down the duffle bag he was carrying and removed something from it—a book.

  “I’m so depressed,” Ruth said.

  How strange that our roles should be reversed, that Ruth with her barely blue eyes and blond hair and her pretty peach-fuzzed face should be miserable while I was so exultant. Strange, too, that I had the power to save the night for her. All I had to do was tell her why I was so happy. Ruth was drinking with intent now. I said, “Sonia and I are moving out.”

  She looked at me. “When?”

  “After finals.”

  “Thank you,” she gasped.

  “Together,” I added, in case she hadn’t understood that I loved Sonia. There. I’d finally admitted it.

  “So two rooms will be free?” she said, incredulous.

  The doorbell rang and, tingling all over from my confession, I went to answer it. The book was under his arm now, the duffle on the porch, a dark grey parka with a fake fur–trimmed hood draped over it. I only noticed because it was the same coat that got so many boys through Alberta winters, that boys all over Canada wore, presumably, but that I’d never seen in Vancouver because parkas were unnecessary. His hair, brown and wavy, flopped in his eyes.

  “Does Dieter Koenig live here?” he asked in a voice thick with hope.

  I nodded and stepped aside; he whisked the duffle in with him. There was something so comical about how he did it, bowing and bobbing and brushing away the hair, that the people who were hanging around in the vestibule smiled. Or maybe it was the boots. “Go ahead,” I said. “I think he’s on the deck.” Just then Ruth came out of the living room, blotted and beaming, and I hurried after the newcomer before she had the chance to thank me physically.

  “Through that door.” I pointed.

  Sonia, tidying the counters, collecting empties, smiled at me. How good you are, how good! I thought, as Dieter’s friend in the boots came clomping back inside, the book clutched to his chest like a flat black breastplate. “I don’t see him,” he told me.

  We went out together where about a dozen people braved the chill. Dieter was in the corner with Hector, the two of them talking with their hands. When Dieter spoke English, even when Hector did, their arms hung limply at their sides. English seemed to bring on a semi-paralysis, while Spanish animated everyone who spoke it. I wondered what Russian did. Made you drink vodka probably. “Dieter!” I called over the voices, the boom-box maracas, and pointed to Moon Boots, who raised a tentative hand and smiled. Dieter waved back blankly. A joint that was circulating reached us just then and Moon Boots took it with wide eyes, looking from the person who’d passed it, to me, as though he’d won a prize.

  I went back inside where Sonia was telling a man in a Question Authority T-shirt about the renaming of the streets. “Far out,” he kept saying. “Far out.” Ruth was bubbling away to Pete, who unwound the scarf from her neck and draped it over her head like a dust cloth over a lamp. She carried on giggling and saying flirty things, even after Pete walked off. Then Moon Boots came in for a second time and, noticing Ronald Reagan hanging on the nail, stopped to put the mask on. The notebook slid out from under his arm and he stooped to retrieve it, almost tripping someone else coming in from the deck. He tugged the mask off, bobbed an apology, was just attempting an exit, seemingly before something else could go wrong, when Sonia nabbed him. “You don’t have a drink.”

  His eyes d
arted. “Milk?”

  Sonia poured him a glass out of her carton, handing it to him with a suppressed smile. We watched him glug it, saw the pump in his throat and the residue above his lip, the only moustache he looked capable of growing. His jawline was spackled with zits.

  Sonia: “I like your boots.”

  He looked down at them. We all cracked up.

  A siren woke me. I thought it was a scream until the fire truck rumbled past. It would be hours before anyone else got up, I assumed. But Sonia was at the kitchen table when I went down, in her pyjamas, cradling her headache in her hands. First I surveyed the devastation, then I put the kettle on. “Go back to bed,” I told her. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Why should you?”

  Because I wanted to. Because I loved her. Because I wanted to make her happy.

  “It was fun last night,” she said. “I feel so guilty whenever I have fun. That’s when it’s going to happen. When we least expect it. Reagan’s just waiting for me to look the other way so he can press the button.”

  “Did you sleep?” I asked.

  “No. Tell me the truth, Jane. Is my insomnia honourable or am I just torturing myself?”

  This was a reference to Dr. Korolyov in “A Case History.” “So you’re not sleeping,” he tells Liza, the young, conscience-stricken textile factory heiress. “It’s lovely outside, spring has come. The nightingales are singing and here you are sitting in the dark, brooding.” Outside, the watchman bangs two o’clock, and Korolyov sees Liza tremble and notices that her eyes were sad and clever, and clearly she longed to tell him something.

  Korolyov: “Your insomnia is something honourable: whatever you may think, it’s a good sign.”

  “I want to be a Liza,” Sonia said. “I want it so badly.”

  “You already are one.”