She and Marco hardly touch breakfast but she makes us cappuccino first thing, the whistling, hacking steam. The cappuccino maker is new. All the cats. Last year she coaxed a feral kitten by lying on her stomach in the backyard for a full week, extending a stick with a gob of wet food on the end. She stops halfway down the stairs to the trains. Stands still.
I need a can of house paint, she says, I’ll pour it. A few subway transfers lift in a subterranean wind and eddy around her knees. She trots down the stairs again and I hurry to catch up.
This Contact thingy, I say. Do they talk, at Contact?
Roar of train, she closes her eyes against it.
There’s little talk, she says.
So you just approach someone?
You sidle up.
And touch them?
You’ll see. It’s very sweet.
A church basement, no music. Everyone wearing sweats. A woman rolls toward me. Her bare foot squeaks on the gym floor. I’m lying on my stomach. Old wood, shiny brown varnish. High ceilings.
My first time, I whisper.
Mine too.
Our calves touch, we start like that. Her ankle looks stern, circumspect. Her ankle looks like the right-sized wrench grasping a bolt. This is a stranger’s ankle. An ankle that has come from somewhere: an old-fashioned bathtub with a flare of rust near the drain, plume of leftover, slow-breaking bubbles, red sock, a streetcar, she’s stepping off and pigeons fly up, just bones. I’m loving that I’ll never see her again. So few people do I never see again. Our thighs, the backs of our hands, touching. One shoulder, the other. I’ll see Jeremy later, tomorrow. He has an answering machine, the old kind, with a tape.
I say, If you’re there. It’s me. Jem, if you’re there? But he doesn’t pick up. I listen to the oceanic silence in the pay phone receiver, a phone on Bloor, it’s sunny, someone opens a glass door and the world in the glass folds into spears of light and flings itself wide open again, cars emerge, skyscrapers, a woman it takes a beat to recognize, slightly elongated, the camel-hair coat, myself. I believe Jeremy’s listening to my voice in the empty room. I imagine him sitting in a chair, the fabric worn shiny and torn at the armrest, burlap and coarse cotton batting with flecks of sawdust poking through. Some chair he dragged in from outside, a shawl thrown over the back. His hands in his hair. Listening, yawning, the kettle plugged in.
Jeremy? Pick up. I know you’re there.
I roll on top of her, her bum. Imagine, in a city this big, the swimming pools from the air, trees, warehouses. My hipbone in the cleft of her bum, and rolling away, our feet locked. Just
toes. You don’t not touch, you touch. Lily has assured me there’s nothing sexual about Contact.
It’s not that way, she says. It just isn’t. There was a notice to that effect a couple of weeks ago. I can’t remember how it was worded.
I’d love to know, I say.
It was the gist, says Lily.
Worded. Nothing exists until it’s worded. How deliberate it all is: this ankle, my marriage, the baby, Jeremy’s bike locked to a post somewhere. The money he’s made, suitcases, Europe he’s saying. Australia. He’s not really saying. The way he will thread through a crowd the last time I see him, turn a corner. My voice in an empty room. I believe it is empty after all. Listen, if you’re there.
Our spines, this stranger’s and mine, touching like the inner workings, the cogs of something precious: a Swiss watch, a bank safe. My head drops into the curve of her neck. She squishes herself under me. Lifts. The end of her ponytail against my cheek. Her body as spare and emphatic as a jungle gym. Then I dance with a man who has sweat dripping from his face. It drips from his hair, his eyebrow, the tip of his nose. He wears drawstring pants and rising from the waistband is a swirl of black hair up his belly. He thrusts me skyward with one hand. My thigh pressing his damp neck.
Jeremy has broken up with Stella. Stella calls me in St. John’s and we talk for hours. We have talked this way since grade ten. I’ve got the yellow tablecloth under my elbows. A white bowl with a mottled banana and a paperclip, the pip of
an orange. The baby is asleep, my husband has gone upstairs to write. He’s writing a sociology of hell. He just showed me a picture of a monster eating people and shitting them out whole. A screaming, kicking person in each of the monster’s hands, another coming out the monster’s anus. Horned angels piggybacking naked sinners, dropping them through the clouds into the tortured throngs below. The caption says, An example of Renaissance overcrowding. He hands me a joint. It takes only one stretchy moment to feel stoned. I must make sense. I sit up straight, a nimble recruit in the war for adroit thought.
He says, If you watered the plants now and then you might have some appreciation for them. The phone rings. Stella, calling from Toronto.
She says, I wake up, my heart is racing.
Listen. If you want him back bad enough.
I do.
If you want him back, you go get him.
And I like, what, hit him over the head with a club?
Just coat the guy with snot and tears.
Snot, she says.
You weep and beg and cover him with snot, drip all over him. I believe any woman can get any man, I say.
The statement leaves me giddy, exhausts me. I wonder, during the ensuing silence, if I believe it. I find that I do, though I also know it to be, in some minor way, incorrect.
I’ve tried that, Stella says. There’s another silence.
I’ve tried snot, she says.
More snot, I say. Just go with more snot.
After Contact, Lily and I sit at an old picnic table outside the church, facing a chainlink fence, a parking lot. Ukrainian hymns come through the brick. Lily lights a cigarette.
I like to sit here after, she says, and just —
She takes a deep draw on her cigarette. We’re in the shade and the smoke looks blue and hangs. There’s no hurry. Lily has always been beautiful. Right now she’s very beautiful. My husband stirring something with his hand in a stainless steel bowl the night before I got on the plane. That hour after the dishes, the baby asleep.
The kitchen echoing itself, concentric rings of kitchen pulsing from the kitchen. This would be the moment my husband and I have worked toward all day, every day, for fourteen years, more or less. The dryer going. The kettle. The rest of the house detaching like the burnt-out parts of a rocket.
It was potatoes, he was pouring a dressing. Tapping the paprika jar with his finger, clouds of it sifting. The potatoes falling through his fingers against the bowl. He held his hand, shiny with oil, under the tap. Flicked his hand a couple of times, dried it with the tea towel. I knew he would say about the floor. About the floor would be the next thing. He covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. He opened the paper. Look at that, he said. The phone rang and neither of us moved. Can you believe it, he said and turned the page.
I see
The New Yorker
lying in the breadbasket. A story it’s taking me two days to read. A boy and his father, ducks. So rich that Louisiana came over me in the supermarket, and I’ve never even been there. Later, while putting clothes in the dryer, I
imagined the smell of swamps. Last night I’d crept down the stairs into the cold kitchen, my T-shirt and underwear, looking for
The New Yorker
to finish the story. Wanting the climax, resolution. Gunshots. The boy and his dad, unyielding loss. Wanting to read myself to sleep. But when I got to the kitchen I couldn’t remember why I was there. Now, in the breadbasket.
This floor, my husband says. He turns the page.
In the shady alley outside Contact, lightly perspiring, all of that comes to me: the kitchen, the way the lamp over the fridge caught my husband’s freckles. And from nowhere, walking home with him from a bar the first night we slept together. He lit a candle and that was the only light. I was wearing a cotton dress that got twisted so that I couldn’t move under the heavy bedclothes, woollen tights. We had come in from the rain and the candlelight in his black hair, his lower lip gleaming, his earlobe was dark and, when I touched it, hot. How he convinced me.
The scene doesn’t unfold, but manifests of a piece, truer than the chainlink fence, Lily’s pink jacket, the Ukrainian hymns through the brick. Truer. I am of an age. Things are passing through me. Ungraspable. And gone. Not memory, it barely has content. Some story in
The New Yorker
, the yellow tablecloth. Is/was. But my skin gets goose bumps that I recognize as or confuse for love, amorphous, rough-hewn. My husband in the replenishing kitchen. From a time long past: two days ago.
Lily is talking about her brushstrokes, some flying up to the surface and just as quickly receding. I see the paintings. The
one with the darkness closing in is about giving birth. Paprika. Turning off the tap, flicking his hand. The tea towel.
You’re going to hate me, I say. She drops the cigarette and steps on it. Okay, I know this is crass, but the painting over the sofa is vaginal to me. Like when I gave birth, that painting is.
I don’t hate you, she says. She pats my back. All the paintings are like
coming
.
Jeremy has moved out, rented a small room of his own before he takes off for Europe. I have the perverse desire to tell him what to do. Jeremy has become impregnable, ephemeral. I can’t get a reading. Before now, I thought myself an excellent judge of character, gifted in this regard. Now, however, I don’t believe people have characters. I believe it’s something we impose on their actions in retrospect, a mirage. He is this way, that way. (My husband evaporates. I’m in Toronto! This is what I am in a parallel world, a woman in a camel-hair coat, fresh from a dance class. Someone has hung a perfectly good leather jacket on a fence post. I might take it, nobody knows me.)
I want to tell Jeremy this: We come apart.
But that’s no newsflash. Everybody knows we come apart. That’s why we cling so desperately. I slapped
The New Yorker
down and got the bucket and the mop. Yes, I’m doing the goddamn floor, okay. There, the floor. Are you happy?
The wide street at the end of the alley is blaring with sunlight. A car goes past with a radio and is gone.
We’ll walk, Lily says. She draws her knees up, rests her chin. She’s petite. Watching her dance at Contact, like putting your thumb against the bristles of a brush, flicking paint. The way
she tosses her head, her arching back. Her fingers. In a minute we’ll walk, she says.
You’re so shy, I say, this Contact thing is so.
It’s about right for me, she says. It’s just about my speed.
We walk along Queen and a man on crutches offers Lily daffodils. His eyes watery, knuckles on the handles, leaning forward.
I bought these for you, he says.
Let me give you some money. She has taken out a coin purse and ten dollars.
I wouldn’t take a penny, he says. I couldn’t take it from you. I could not. I absolutely. Those flowers are a gift. He puts the money in his pocket.
He says, What’s your name?
Lily.
Lily. This money is going to Sick Kids’. That’s where your money’s going. I want you to know. We walk away and Lily turns and waves to him. She waves goodbye with the daffodils, and puts her face in them.
We got some flowers anyway, she says. Her nose reddens and a gleaming line of tears. But she forces her eyes wide so they don’t fall and she bursts into laughter.
It’s just that it could be my father. Or any one of us.
Lily. You shouldn’t be allowed out.
Lily’s husband, Marco, is a physics professor. I have always hugged Marco without a second thought. There’s no question. There has never been a warmer guy. Sitting at his computer,
halo of grey hair. Clicking. He tells me about gravity.
We don’t know if it’s instantaneous, or does it propagate through space like electricity. If God puts this here. He swivels in his chair and places his cup.
I say, God, but there is no God.
As you know, there is no God. We are talking about a cup. How long does it take? He slides the cup to the edge of the table and almost lets it fall. Lily gives him a piece of bread covered with butter. Puts it down on the side table. Marco stands, stretches.
Baby, he says. He takes her face in his hands.
This girl, he says, can you believe this girl?
I thought there was a given amount of matter, I say. I thought if something disappeared from this side of the world it would show up on the other side, drawn by gravity. I imagine Jeremy in Trafalgar Square, putting his suitcase down, the fountains, children with bright, unbuttoned coats, the double-decker buses. He’s just standing.
Marco has already sat back down. The bread and butter will go untouched for a long time. He is almost lost to the computer. But he swivels. My ignorance bewilders him. A given amount of matter? His eyebrows, his eyes.
No, he says, this goes on all the time. Matter gets changed into energy. You didn’t know?
How easy it is for me to forget the cold facts. Energy, grammar. I like it loosey-goosey. I like the fact of Marco. The fact of Lily. But mostly there are no facts worth counting on. I don’t like to think someone can hug you goodbye, that he can
disappear in a crowd. I don’t like that people go away, or worse, I might forget them. Cling, goddamn it.
Jeremy, I’m at a pay phone on Bloor, listen, if you’re there could you just —
Hellllooooo.
Jeremy. You’re there.
Jeremy! He sits. I stand. We stand and I hug him. My cheek on his chest. Some snazzy shirt. If I’m going to do this hugging thing. I don’t let go. That’s the way they do it in Toronto. He’s been up here long enough, he’ll be used to it. I hug and hug. I feel all his bones, his shoulder blade. He does not pat my back in the way that means a fine, over-now-though hug. Rather, he accepts the hug expertly. Perhaps he has always been able to hug. Maybe all of my friends. The Contact dancer laying her hands on my hips and drawing me up from the floor, lifting me onto her shoulder.
I say, I thought we were getting Vietnamese.
We’re not staying here?
No, I want to eat Vietnamese.