by Shani Mootoo
· · ·
* * *
If I took from him, it is because he gave willingly. It takes two to carry on the way we did. I needed, he gave. He needed, and — well, I tried my best.
When I was okay, when I didn’t have to reach out for him, I didn’t. Doesn’t that say something positive, too, or must it only say the negative?
What place does he expect to have in my life now that I no longer need him?
He will have spent a day here, and a night, and tomorrow morning will soon come. And before he leaves, I will have cleared the air with him.
· · ·
I really should get up this minute, roll up my sleeves, go out, and prepare a proper breakfast — eggs and toast, or pancakes. A little lemon and a dusting of sugar on them. There’s time to construct a leisurely morning with Alex. I can make time for such a gesture. A gesture of appreciation for her. Might as well begin the future now. I will set the table nicely, but not too elaborately to bring it notice. We’ll sit at it and eat breakfast and chat. I’ve been meaning to ask her about her work.
Christ, I must truly be off my mark today — Alex seldom eats breakfast, but more than this, she hates eggs. It is Prakash who loves his breakfast of eggs. Eggs and potatoes. Which I dare not make tomorrow morning, for he’ll surely see it as a sign of something or other. I will make Alex and me toast, I’ll butter it lavishly. That, she’ll like.
I’ll just wash my face, brush my teeth, go out as I am. I’ll remain in my pyjamas. It mustn’t seem that I’m trying hard to — well, I was about to say, to appear guilty of nothing. I am guilty of nothing. Or, if not, surely it is possible to be at the same time blameless?
* * *
It’s much too cold to go traipsing about the house in thin cotton. I’ll get sick if I go out like this. But no, going out dressed as I am is an announcement. Today is not a normal day. Whatever out of the usual comes later, it will seem to have been foreshadowed from the very beginning of the day by my late waking, and then this manner of presenting myself.
That’s right, let the day begin, then.
2
Cold
· · ·
* * *
The house is quiet. Alex is probably already upstairs in her office, ensconced in her writing. The most successful art forgeries of all time. How she comes up with these topics for her books amazes me. There isn’t a subject she isn’t interested in. But I can’t tell if she’s up there unless I call out to her or go up, and I won’t do that just yet. When she’s working, a bomb could go off next door and she wouldn’t notice.
Forgeries. A paradox, isn’t it — successful art forgeries — the artistry of the forger being an incidental sidebar. The real story is the length of time and the many hands through which it passed before fraud was discovered — how and by whom, all those fooled people.
How unpleasant the still air is, achingly cold when it settles on my upper arm and around my elbows, or at the back of my neck.
Alex and I need softness between us. No tension. Just a little softness. Tenderness begets tenderness.
As if the presence of a human moving about the house triggers it, the furnace kicks in, and a grumble, and then a prolonged hum, barrel through the house.
I hardly reach the kitchen and there is that smell again. For several days, ever since the pest-control man set poison throughout our country house for mice that come inside to shelter from the cold, we’ve been plagued by the odour of decomposition in the kitchen. We smelled it first in one corner, where a wall of cupboards abuts a wall of drawers. But the odour migrates — one day it seems to come up from under the Afghan rug in front of the wine fridge, and the next, to jump nearer to the sink at the end of the counter, then later, halfway across the room to where the microwave is housed. The smell this morning is worse, as if we’d dumped shrimp shells behind the fridge. A few days ago Alex went into the basement to see if there were any dead mice rotting down there, or some other animal that could be the source of this smell. She saw nothing. There wasn’t even the faintest whiff of decay there. Now it fills the kitchen again.
Coffee has already been made. The milk carton, half full, sits on the counter. I won’t make anything of this today. I round the central counter and glance past the TV room, to the sunroom. She is there, on the couch. I can see her through the haze of pale blue cigarette smoke that swirls lazily up to the room’s high ceiling, sitting in her corner reading, the wide hood of her long black coat pulled up around her head. The second to last finger of the hand that holds her cigarette alights with a dramatic staccato tap on the screen of her electronic reader. She reads fast. I have accused her of skimming, but she swears she reads every word on a page. I count seven seconds, and as usual, sure enough, there’s her finger, a little hammer, coming down again, a perfect rhythm. And again: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. And exactly on seven: tap. Which comes first: does she actually finish reading the page in — no more, no less — seven seconds, or is it the rhythm that dictates the drop of her finger, whether or not she has read every word?
I wonder how long she’s been there. Under the “smoking jacket,” she wears her pyjamas, a red plaid long-sleeved flannel shirt and matching pants, which she puts on when she gets out of bed. Perhaps she hasn’t been to her study to work at all this morning. That’s not a good sign. We may have ended last night with a semblance of kindness between us, but that was last night, and today is not just any ordinary day. The sliding door that separates the insulated part of the house from that room is shut, so she can’t hear me. She looks like a monk. A hermit. She doesn’t care that wearing the hood indoors makes her seem a little odd. Her rationale when I once teased her about it was that she tucks her hair into the hood — summer or winter — to keep cigarette smoke from getting into it, into her thick, wiry mass of unruly hair that otherwise rises like a halo around her head, hugs her face, and cascades about her shoulders.
She is so absorbed in her reading that she doesn’t see my movements in the kitchen. This is probably not her first cigarette of the day. I so need to keep peace with her, but there is that little flicker of irritation, anger even, inside me, and I want to march out there and ask how many she’s already smoked for the morning.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Tap.
I remain as much out of sight as possible and pour myself a cup of the tepid coffee, but it is impossible to hide entirely. How can she be so absorbed that she isn’t aware of any movement inside her own home? Does she feel so safe in this house that she isn’t bothered by movement in her peripheral vision?
If I take the time to make a fresh cup, she’ll soon enough see me and come inside, and I’d rather go out there, greet her in the sunroom. It will be easier to begin the day, to confront it, looking out at the land and the trees, at the lake ahead, than inside, facing each other. It’s good she isn’t yet aware that I’m up and about.
But the sunroom is the coldest room in the house in wintertime. Perhaps I should go back to the bedroom and change my clothing. Except I want to greet her out there, and she might come inside before I finish changing. I won’t waste time; I’ll carry on as I am.
* * *
Even as I approach the sliding door, she still isn’t aware of my movements, and I grin now, as I know she’ll look up as soon as I begin to slide the door open.
And, indeed, I finally have her attention. She is solemn. Last night’s conversation no doubt still weighs on her, too. She closes the reader and sets it on the couch beside her. Her phone is partially tucked between her legs. I wave a hand at the thick blue air and laugh.
“You slept long,” she says, pulling the hood off her head.
“I must have needed it,” I answer, my voice bold and cheerful.
Because she has been smoking, the door that leads to the patio is ajar. The room faces the lake and a cool wind off it comes in. Shivering in pyjamas too thin for even such a mild morning, I set my cup
down on a window ledge and cross my arms in front of me. I rub my shoulders briskly. Even so, I pull the door open wider. I lift the pair of binoculars hanging on a hook next to the door and look out at the lake.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” I exclaim.
“It’s not all that cold. It’s nine degrees outside. Why are you standing in the doorway like that? You’re in your pyjamas. Are you okay?”
I shrug.
She shifts and extracts from under her the fleece jacket she wears while gardening in the fall. I shake it, and twigs and leaves and a cloud of dust — or it may be dirt — fall out.
“Whoa! That’s going to have to be vacuumed up,” I say, catching and attempting to alter my irritated tone mid-sentence. I arrange the jacket around my shoulders and pick up the binoculars again, aiming them at the trees on the far side of the neighbour’s land. She asks again why I am in my pyjamas. They’ve caused more of an impression than I’d intended. I finally answer, “Well, you’re in yours, aren’t you?”
She pulls out her phone and looks at it, and says, “Yes, but that’s not strange for me.” Her face seems drawn, pale. There was a time when she derided anyone who was tied to their “devices,” as she called them. Lately, she’s constantly checking email, Facebook, Twitter, and looking at the various news sites on her phone. I am old-fashioned. It irritates me. But I mustn’t take notice of it this morning.
I didn’t really expect her to be in a grand mood but I hadn’t thought she’d be quite so sombre either. I am already on the defensive, despite my good intentions. Tenderness, I must remember, begets tenderness.
People are ambling on the beach that runs along the edge of our property, lazily tossing Frisbees for their dogs. They wear windbreakers and running shoes, strange for wintertime.
The phone on her lap buzzes. She looks down at it, concentrates. “Do you need to get it?” I ask. She doesn’t recognize the number, probably phone soliciting, she says. My parents are aged now, and I always imagine that one day soon she’ll likely be the one to receive a message from back home telling her to break it to me gently that I need to go back immediately. And it is in the middle of the night when it seems like the appropriate time for death to come, or early in the morning — like now, particularly on a weekend morning — before the time friends or telephone solicitors actually dare call, that the ringing of the land line or the buzzing of the cellphone can make my heart stop.
Prakash doesn’t have her cellphone number so it couldn’t have been him — whose number she would not have recognized — calling from the road to ask or say this or that. I am relieved on two counts.
I am clearly jumpy — at least on the inside. I must steady myself.
Her own unease is not hidden. I decide, however, not to ask what is bothering her. I know, after all, and it’s too late to have that kind of conversation. I don’t want Prakash to arrive and find us cool with one another, and her to be unfriendly toward him. It will cause me to be so, too, or at least to pick sides, and I don’t want to be put in such a situation.
Her phone buzzes again. She looks down, depresses the power button, and shuts it off. I want to say thank you, but if I do I’m sure to say it with sarcasm in my tone, and that isn’t advisable, is it?
At the beginning of this year there had been massive craggy hills of ice created by waves of lake water freezing upon previously frozen waves of lake water that were snow-covered in time along the shore. Those hills were so high you couldn’t see behind them. It was thrilling and frightening at once, just metres from our back door. They called to you, made you want to climb them to see what was on the other side, but I imagine that would have been foolish. Nevertheless, some days through the binoculars I saw tracks on them that might have been some foolish person’s footsteps, or perhaps a deer’s or a coyote’s. Alex and I are not the type to attempt any such thing.
Today the sky is so clear, the air so crisp, that there is a slight quiver of light on the horizon, a shimmer on the water nearer, gulls skimming, soaring, diving, and dogs and people passing by on the shore.
I want to ask her where she thinks I might take Prakash, but I don’t want the question of her accompanying us, or not, to come up, and the mere mention of his name presents the opportunity for more questions to be asked about him, about him and me.
I say, “Christ. I wonder what this winter will be like for us. Do you remember the last one, those big craggy mountains of ice just out there?”
“Um-hm. That was just this January past,” she says. She’s making an effort, and it’s as good a topic as any with which to try to communicate lightly.
“We’re just weeks away from another January,” I continue, “and just look at it; there’s hardly any sign of winter — save for how cold it is.”
“It’s not yet cold, Priya. It’s nine out.”
“I guess. It’s cold to me. Remember? You can take the girl out of the tropics but not the tropics out of the girl? That’s what you say about me.” She twists her mouth.
I ignore this. The tropics. There will be two people from the tropics in this house in a few hours. Two brown people in this town where, when I see one on the street, it’s cause for excitement. Prakash used to love to tell people when he first met them that the equator runs through Uganda, and that he used to be able to stand on the ground with the equator running between his legs. If things were different between her and me this morning, I’d tell her this and we’d chuckle.
“Eleven months ago — ten, even nine months ago,” I say, “the words polar vortex were on everyone’s lips. Doesn’t that freak you out?”
“Um-hm. Cold is what it was this time last year,” she says. “The body is always in the moment. It doesn’t care if it was warmer or colder any other time. It’s concerned — a matter of survival, naturally — only with how it is in the present.” She’s finally more engaged. How grateful I am. “But the polar vortex phenomenon didn’t really begin until January. And yes, it is odd, January of this very year,” she says, blowing smoke up into the high ceiling. Getting things right always animates her. Even so, she still sounds worn down. Burrowing into one neutral issue helps to skirt others, I guess.
The binoculars still at my eyes, moving them about our yard, I notice that the birdfeeders at the edge of the patio are empty. Empty birdfeeders are a sign of neglect. I must refill them before Prakash arrives. Last year, there was that day I noticed the feeders were low in seed, but the temperature outside was already in the minus double digits, and I was loath to have to dress up to go out there in the even colder wind. I reasoned that since the feeders weren’t actually empty I would wait until the following day to replenish them. But the next day, even though the temperature remained far below zero, freezing rain began to fall. It was so strange. Frozen dagger-like pellets came stabbing down on the land for days on end, and we watched amazed and frightened, as sheets of ice formed a sleek, thick, impenetrable sheath around us, and just when we thought enough was enough, more ice rained down, a carapace resolutely preserving what had already been laid down. Then the temperatures dove further and remained like that, fixed for weeks. The ice that covered everything wouldn’t melt. I wasn’t able to reach the feeders for the rest of the winter.
By the time the ice had stopped falling, I remember, Alex and I had had enough of being cooped up in the house. Once the roads were salted, we dressed warmly, packed an extra blanket in the car, and a knapsack with a thermos of hot chocolate, a container of crackers and cheese, apples, some local biltong, and the fully charged cellphone — a survival kit, in other words — and we drove to a park in which the sole road, plowed and salted, runs parallel, metres away from the edge of the lake.
I pulled the car to the side and turned off the engine, and we sat there, terrified and full of chutzpah at the same time. I can still see it all clearly in my mind. The wave-rocks glistening like sharpened steel. Stabs of light glancing off them, an indication that
the boulders were not stable.
I ask brightly, “When did we go for that drive through the park to the lake? I think we were mad to have done that.”
The cigarette has dropped from between Alex’s fingers, scattering ashes on her clothing and the couch before it hit the rug. Although she mutters, “Damn,” she gets up and dusts off around her as if nothing much has happened. I stare at the lit cigarette on the rug that was made somewhere in Africa of recycled plastics. A thin curl of dark smoke floats upward. She picks up the cigarette and flicks its head toward the ashtray on the side table next to the couch. I stare at the spot on the rug, expecting to see a pursed black lip of burnt plastic. I can’t see it from where I am, but I think better of stooping to inspect it at this stage of interactions between us. The glass on the table next to the couch is already covered in ash, as if she had been flicking the cigarette on the table rather than in the ashtray. She doesn’t use the opportunity to clean off the tabletop. After years of being together, I still can’t tell if this, and many of her other idiosyncrasies, like that habit of leaving the milk out or the cutlery drawer and cupboard doors open, are the marks of a forgetful genius or of a person who can’t be bothered. I am determined not to say a word.
“Oh, I don’t know. It was sometime after the ice had stopped coming down. Nothing happened. We were safe enough,” Alex suddenly responds, and for a moment I’ve forgotten I’d asked when it was we’d gone for the drive.
Were we really safe enough, though? I still wonder about that sometimes. Sitting in the car, the only people on that road, facing an expanse of frozen water as far as one could see. Metres from us, massive iceberg-like formations, frozen waves piled one atop the other. Knife-edged cliffs jutted out of the ice boulders into the sky and then dropped off into gemlike blue-and-green canyons. I had brought my window down a fraction, and we listened. A heaving, thumping rebellion came from beneath the surface. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine water undulating, restless, captive, wanting an escape from all that ice. It felt as if the force of the moving water beneath might actually, any second, wrench the boulders above from whatever anchored them and send them skidding toward the road, shoving us into trees or, more mercifully, simply crushing us flat. What seemed like a choreographed row of geysers, seven powerful spouts, one after the other in quick succession, rose every few minutes into the air.
