by Shani Mootoo
“So who is this lucky person?” he asked.
“Let’s just hope she is lucky,” I joked.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Look, Prakash, let’s not do this,” I said.
“Do what? You’re being cagey. I went by your apartment. I knew you’d moved out. I could have helped you move. So does that mean you’re serious about this one?”
“I am serious. Yes,” I said. There was quiet, and then very jovially he said he needed, then, to meet this person, that, in effect, she was like his family, too. I said, “In time, not now. I need time to nurture this on my own, Prakash. I just want to keep this one to myself for now.” I knew I was hurting him.
“Priya,” he said, and I heard the tremble in his voice that made me want to put the phone down. But, as usual, I listened. “I haven’t stopped caring about you. Do you know how often I think of you? I’ve tried not to bother you, but I’ve felt lately that you are the only person with whom I can relate and confide. You will understand. I need to see you.”
“You know, Prakash, if I were to have given myself over to you, you’d have run. You don’t want me. You only want me because you can’t have me. You just don’t want to be rejected. You should figure that out and get on with your life. Aruna won’t like you speaking like this with me,” I blurted out.
He carried on as if I’d said nothing. “Aruna and I have an unspoken agreement. What she doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her. Let’s go for a drive, we can go to Niagara Falls for the day. Just for a few hours. I need to speak with you. I need to see you. Don’t do this to me, please.”
I didn’t discuss Aruna and his “unspoken agreement,” didn’t ask what he wanted to chat about, and I didn’t want to hear, or think about, what I was doing to him. I simply said I didn’t want any complications.
He said, “You’re happy now. What about later? When she dumps you, or you get bored? It’ll happen, you know. And then you will want me around. There’ll come a day when I might not be there for you, Priya.” There was an edge to his voice I had not heard before. Then he said, softly, “No, no, that’s not true. I’ll always be there for you.”
I felt so irrationally pulled toward him that I knew I had to end the conversation. When he called from then on, I simply didn’t answer my phone. That had been the last time I spoke with him. When Alex and I moved out here, I knew I couldn’t simply not answer my phone when I saw his name on its screen, so I gave it up and relied only on our land line, which wasn’t convenient — but it was necessary.
He and I were together — ah, there I go, so carelessly using this colloquialism that, unless I immediately clarify its usage, will suggest I have not exactly been forthright. Together is not the right word, for as I say, we weren’t a couple — it would never have matched up to what Alex and I have. What I meant was he and I knew each other for decades longer than Alex and I, and we were close for much of that time. He does not, however, know me now. I am a book Alex has read numerous times, and I’d like, this time, to give her the ending she hopes for. Oh, but who knows, really, what she hopes for? I do feel at a loss.
It must be remembered, my intentions from the start — the start being when he accepted my invitation here — have been clean and noble. Who knows, I may end this weekend with the strength to tell Alex everything, and to face whatever comes of that.
Or the wisdom to simply put it quietly behind me.
* * *
Alex’s back is to me as she fiddles with something on the corner of the counter where she keeps bills, notebooks, and scraps of papers with reminder notes scribbled on them. I decide to ask if she’d managed to get any work done earlier, but I am unable to lighten my voice completely. At least it is not as dark as when I mentioned the stink. She doesn’t turn to face me, but she manages to answer as if we are suddenly in a different time, a time when things between us are lighter. She says she got up at five and had been working in her office until just before I came out to the sunroom.
“Writing?” I ask.
“Revising a chapter,” she says.
So I am wrong. She wasn’t sitting in the sunroom all that time squirming about her and me.
Her work is not something I can focus on at this time, but still I ask which one.
She looks directly at me, but says nothing. I shake my head by way of saying I don’t understand why she isn’t answering. She says, “You don’t usually ask about my work. Why do you want to know now?”
“What do you mean? I just asked.”
There is a long pause, and I wonder if she’ll veer away to another subject. To Prakash, or to something about her and me, something that indicates there’s trouble that needs to be addressed.
“The one,” she relents, “on forgeries that, had they been successful, could have changed the history of the world.”
I soften. I stop and look at her back. I decide I will follow my desire of a moment ago: I will go to her, hug her from behind. I will gently kiss the back of her neck. I will tell her I love her.
But the moment passes in a flash when she continues, “I’ve had an email exchange with a forger in England. A man who’s been in prison for his work, and who is called upon by the police to help with authentications.” I must concentrate, I must engage with her on the subject. I ask if she thinks meeting with him in person would be of any use. She says she is not interested in meeting him, there isn’t any need to, and adds, “I feel so impatient. I just want to finish this chapter. The whole damn book. I’ve been working on it for such a long time.”
She is either compartmentalizing again or she is truly focused on the book. Her answer provides me with an opportunity. “If you need to work,” I say, “I don’t expect you to come and hang out today. I’ll just be showing Prakash around the countryside.” She says nothing, and it is becoming awkward again. Making sure I sound as if this is all about practicalities, I add, “Yeah, that’s probably not a bad idea at all. That way he and I can catch up and not bore you to death with talk of people from the old days, and you’ll get a good two, three hours to yourself, perhaps a little more, before we return. And then we can have supper together.”
Long, messily quiet seconds go by again and then, turning to face me, she asks, “Would you rather I didn’t come?”
Is now a good time to embrace her? But I can’t move. I feel stuck in this spot. “Of course not. To tell the absolute truth, I’d rather you came, really. I mean, that would be great, but in all honesty, I suppose I don’t know how scintillating” — I bat my eyes playfully to emphasize the word, knowing she’d remember having used it days ago — “it would be for you. He tends to talk incessantly about himself. As I think about it, I recall that when he and I are together, we don’t really engage much around things that are happening in the larger world. I mean, if you don’t mind that sort of thing, hearing every detail about each of his children, about his home life, about his parents, you should come, definitely. Anyway, it’s only for a weekend that he’ll be here, I suppose, and I am looking forward to hearing what he’s been up to. I wonder if his children are still at home. The youngest, she must still be with him and his wife.” Too much? Am I protesting too much?
“You’re right. It might be better if I stay and work.”
“Sure, whatever. Do what you need to do,” I toss off nonchalantly.
“You were going to make dinner. Are you still thinking of making pasta and a sauce? Vegetarian, you said?” she asks, and I am grateful for the normalcy that this talk of dinner promises. I’m about to say I’ll be back in time to do it, but she carries on, “Just go with him, don’t worry about dinner. I’ll make it.”
“To tell the truth, I think you’re oil and water,” I say unnecessarily. I wish I could just tell her that I do actually care about this man, that I feel with him a kinship, the kind of love one feels for a good brother. And that I love her more than anything.
I imagine Alex watching Prakash, listening to him speak, wondering why I’d chosen someone like him as a friend, and Prakash doing the same with her, it dawning on him, for the hundredth time, or for the first, why I might not have wanted a life with him.
When I stand up, she is facing me. She catches my eyes and says, “You keep hinting at that, but I’ve more or less liked all your friends so far.”
“Look, if he and I were to meet for the first time, today, we wouldn’t be friends. It’s the circumstances in which we met that made us friends. We were both like fish at the university, both out of our element. We were oddities, misfits, and the instant our eyes met we recognized this in each other. We might have run from our reflections — others might have. But we didn’t. We gravitated, like magnets, toward one another. It was years later, once I’d found my feet in this country, once I began to think of this place as home, that my eyes opened to how different he and I actually are, how conventional he is. Left up to me, we wouldn’t have stayed friends. But he’s a better person than I: it was he who made the effort again and again. It’s his best trait and his worst: he’s incredibly loyal.”
“Incredibly loyal? The same Prakash you said, just last night, was here today, gone tomorrow? Which is it? Why all the inconsistencies? Time is short, Priya.”
I mustn’t turn her off him entirely. What does she mean by “time is short”? Thank God Skye is coming over. I answer lightly, “You know what I think will happen this weekend? I think he’ll see me for who I am. He’ll see what has become of me. You and me together, the kind of people we are. And he’ll realize that he and I — that we and him — have little in common. He’ll appreciate that what brought us together in the first place was circumstantial and therefore flimsy, and what kept us in touch was his own kindness, his own insistent blindness. He’ll see that you and I are solid, more than he could have imagined I’d ever be. This is good, this visit here.” I repeat the thing about her and me, that he’ll see us together, and see that we’re one, that there’s no room for him in our lives.
She gives her head a little jerk to say I should follow her out to the sunroom, the cigarette already hanging in the corner of her mouth. Her words are slightly garbled: “You say he’s conventional. Conventional is about following norms, doing what the majority does, conducting yourself for the approval of your peers, of society in general. Conventional people like it when everything runs in the ways they believe are ‘normal.’” She makes quotation marks with her fingers.
“He isn’t homophobic. That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it? He isn’t.”
She stares at me in expectation of more.
“He’s known about me from day one. Well, for the longest time, anyway. He’s even known a couple of my previous girlfriends. He became friends with them.” Am I boasting? I want to add, Sort of, but I don’t.
She doesn’t miss a beat: “Yes, but you told me you weren’t serious about any of those women. If he’d been interested in you, as you said he was, he’d have known this, instinctively.”
I wish I had not said he was once interested in me. I wish her memory was less sharp.
“He went out, on a few occasions, with me and whoever I was seeing at the time. He actually asked to go to a club with us.” Why did I use the word actually? As if to suggest how amazing he was for making such an amazing request! Alex sees through walls. This is exhausting. Nevertheless, I carry on. “We went dancing together. I mean, we danced, he didn’t. He just watched. But he was totally at ease, totally congenial.” The instant I say this last part, I can just hear a possible retort: of course, what straight man, given the opportunity, wouldn’t jump at the chance to go with two lesbians to a lesbian club? What straight man wouldn’t “watch”? So I take front before front takes me, and say, “Yeah, yeah. I know what you could say to that. But he’s never been disrespectful of or to me, or questioned me, or shown a bad face in any way, to me or to any woman I was with.”
I also wish I had never used the word conventional. I had simply hoped my argument would bring her to her own conclusion that she would rather not spend the day with him and me. I am tempted to ask if it can’t be suggested that her own questioning resembles conventionality. But I don’t. No need to score points.
I don’t want to carry this on, so I say, “Okay, I don’t think he’s homophobic, but I also don’t think he spends a lot of time judging people. Forget conventional. He’s the epitome of a computer nerd. Not your type.” I point toward the kitchen and say, “Were you tidying the counter or looking for something? It would be nice if you could clean up your mess of papers. Just tidy it up a little?”
She ignores me and says, “So, what I’m getting out of all of this is that you don’t want me to tag along.”
It has to be better to just own up to it. “Yes,” I say. “He’ll bore you to tears. And I will worry about you being bored to tears.”
“Fine. I hear you. Go. I’ll entertain myself here. I hadn’t really wanted to come, anyway. I have things to do. Where will you go? Almost everything has closed for the season. The Cider Company, that’s closed. The cheese factory, that’s closed, too.”
“We’ll probably go to Madame Bovary’s, drink something hot, and talk.”
“You could always do that here. I won’t mind, I’ll just go upstairs and work. But suit yourself. I understand you want to show him around. Makes sense.”
“Right. Exactly.”
She exhales loudly. I take that to mean we’re finished with this conversation.
Just as I turn to go back to the kitchen to start making the granola, she asks if I’ve told him that she and I are married. I spin back around and shout, “Alex, come on!” She raises her eyebrows, and I lower my voice again. “I’ve barely had a conversation with him. I called you my partner. He knows I’m lesbian. He knows I live here with you. It never occurred to me to say that. What do you want? Don’t you think that might have sounded a little defensive when there’s nothing for me to be defensive about with him?”
“Just asking,” she says, waving her cigarette at me by way of saying, Carry on, go do what you will.
Will I tell him we’re married, I wonder. It’s a big deal among our gay and lesbian friends. But I’m often uneasy revealing it to someone who’s straight. I do, but not easily. And him? Will I tell him?
It had been my idea. After I moved into Alex’s home, I wanted to make every effort to make this relationship work, come what may. In the six years since same-sex marriage had been legalized, I had not been with anyone I’d felt so sure about. One day, I said to her, the words falling out of my mouth almost by themselves, “If we’re serious about this thing between us, why don’t we get married?” She said, “Yeah. After all, we can. Let’s.” And so we did. There was a small ceremony in the backyard of friends of hers and a party with finger foods afterwards. When she and I returned to our house that night, a married couple now, we felt deliciously ordinary, and more in love than before. I experienced a sense of responsibility I’d never known. The love we made that night was slow and thoughtful, as if the act were new to us. The strange thing is that it was only after I told my parents that I’d married a woman — not an easy confession to make — that they finally accepted me as lesbian and said they hoped to one day meet my “friend.” But I’m not sure I want to tell Prakash that she and I are married. I don’t know why not, but, at the moment, I have the sense that this visit is not the time to tell him.
* * *
It is with the smell of a dead and rotting-animal thing as a backdrop that I am preparing the granola when Skye arrives. I must watch the syrup on
the stove, so Alex, dressed for the day, lets her in. From where I am I cannot see them. I hear Skye say to Alex, “You’re looking rather lovely. Nice necklace. Armour?” So she knows of Alex’s theory that jewellery is armour. Some minutes pass. I hear their voices, muffled from this distance. Shoes and jacket are no doubt being removed and put away. Then Skye does what all our friends do — makes her way directly to the kitchen, bypassing the living and dining rooms.
In the kitchen she comes around the counter and meets me at the stove and we embrace, squeezing the life out of each other, playfully hard and rough, the cool of her cheek refreshing against mine. It is always so good to see her. Her corn-yellow hair, thick and curly, has recently been cut. She keeps it short, and must cut it every few weeks. I tussle it, tell her it looks good. With her sharp, angular features, her lean athletic body — although her main physical activity is no more than these long walks — she must surely have once passed easily for a very handsome boy. How I wish I had her genes. Tall, lean, muscular, and no amount of sugary desserts or quantity of food seems to alter this. She is, indeed, a rather handsome woman. She inspects my pot of bubbling syrup, waves the steam up toward her beautiful aquiline nose, and inhales the cinnamon-and-maple aroma. Then she lifts her head, that nose of hers leading her in the direction of the corner of the room. Her brow furrows but she doesn’t say anything. I say it: “We think it’s a dead mouse or, judging from the smell this morning, it might well be a person down in the basement, an intruder who came in through the basement window, slipped on a wet mossy spot or tripped on a pipe, fell, hit his head, and died down there a while ago. Smells like that, eh?”
