Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  * * *

  Turning out of the driveway, I announce that Prakash will arrive any time. I laugh and say I can’t imagine him and Alex spending half an hour alone together.

  Skye doesn’t respond. She isn’t even smiling. It feels awkward, and I’m compelled to carry on. I feel she wants to say something, but she must know there’s a point where her interventions might feel like meddling. It’s a fine line.

  “He’s like a brother,” I say. I’m sure that sounded as if I were apologizing, or making some sort of excuse. But why should I have to defend myself to her? We’ve known her for less than five years. I’ve known Prakash for decades longer. Who is she to reproach me? I tell myself to breathe, relax.

  Just before the turnoff into the town of Macaulay, we approach the little white clapboard house of new residents, Syrian refugees recently sponsored by a local group. I seize the chance to change the subject, remove my foot from the accelerator to slow, and point out the house to her. She says, “Yes, I know. Everyone in town seems to know.” Three kids, perhaps between the ages of six and nine, dressed in winter jackets and toques, are riding bicycles, given to them by a business in the town, around a blue van parked on the grass in the front yard. I tell her that every time I pass this house I look for them and want to pull into their driveway and tell them I’m pleased they’ve come to live here. But after that, then what? I don’t want to initiate a friendship. We might well find we don’t share the same values and don’t actually like each other.

  She says just about everyone she knows has done just that with them, dropped in on them, taken them food and clothing and house items. Apparently they have more winter clothing than they may ever use. They themselves made a donation to the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, a handover that was photographed and written up in the local papers.

  “What a gift,” I say, “and what a burden. Imagine having — on top of being in dire need — to constantly smile and be grateful to everyone you meet. There’ll be many of us they likely won’t care for, or approve of, if they got to know us. Never­theless, they’ll have to show gratitude. Seems to me there’s something demeaning about that.”

  Skye says, “Yup, very likely. They’re dependent on us right now, and we get to feel noble and good and righteous. They won’t always be in need, but they’ll forever be beholden. At least the first generation of them. But that’s a better problem to have than the one that got them here, I suppose.”

  I recall Prakash’s experience and, without mentioning his name, I paraphrase and contemporize what he’d long ago told me: “They’re not blind or deaf. They’ll eventually feel the envy from people right here in the town who see themselves as also in dire need but who were never given a free house or car. They’ll see that Canadians aren’t necessarily all as warm and cuddly as we’re currently making ourselves out to be. And still, they’ll forever have to be expressing how grateful they are to us.”

  * * *

  Despite the good weather, there’s hardly any traffic this Saturday. I’m pleased; I’ll make it back in no time. Around and behind the houses that line the road walls of lilac, sumac bushes and maple trees are all bare of leaves, and fields and roads that are usually hidden are visible through the naked skeletal branches. The land stretches into the distance and undulates. I say that at this time of year it always seems as if there’s more countryside than town around here. At the beginning of the season, as it is now, the landscape appears disorientingly unfamiliar, and there is a bleak beauty about it — it looks spent and forlorn and vulnerable. Skye answers that snow actually warms up the look of the bare land. She looks forward, she says, to a proper snowfall soon so she can go snowshoeing. Winter without snowshoeing isn’t winter.

  We pull up outside her white-and-green two-storey house, but she doesn’t immediately unfasten her seat belt. She sits staring at the road ahead. There are no cars parked on it. Everyone keeps waiting for snow, and here in town the residents have already begun parking their cars in their driveways to make it easier for the snowplows. I’m about to point this out, when, to my chagrin, she brings up Prakash again.

  “Is he still with his wife?” she asks.

  “Of course he is,” I say. Taken aback, I can’t hide my defensiveness. I don’t actually know, but I’m not about to admit this — nor that in the last day or two I’ve found myself perversely hoping that he isn’t. There is no glee in the thought of his marriage having failed, but rather an illogical churlishness: I might not have wanted him, but I hadn’t ever wanted anyone else to have him either.

  “Were she and you friends? Did the three of you hang out together?” Skye is usually obliging and indulgent, so why such prickly insistence? She is no longer being helpful. What does she want to know? It’s as if she wants to catch me out. As irritating as this is, I keep an appearance of calm. Ever since Alex and I arrived here and met Skye and Liz — amongst the first people we connected with — we have considered them our closest friends.

  I answer as calmly as I can. “She and I weren’t friends. He’d told her I was lesbian. She couldn’t understand this, nor why he’d befriended someone like me. I suspect she never knew Prakash and I met occasionally for tea.” There is relief in this admission. He’d sit at the dining table across from me nursing a cup of tea between his hands, refilling it from the teapot on the table, as he confided his disappointment in a marriage that had turned out to be as traditional as he had feared — but there’s no need to run my mouth.

  Skye looks at me and begins speaking swiftly. “He was a big part of your life. Whether he was explicit or not, I would guess you’re the one he wanted to live his life with. Perhaps still does. Thwarted desire doesn’t easily dissipate. Culturally, you have more in common with him.”

  I spin my head around and look directly at her. “Than with whom? He’s straight. He and I grew up in different countries, oceans apart. We might look like we do, but we don’t share the same culture. His first language isn’t English. That’s my only language. I am an artist. We might have gone to the same university, but he was in business and I went to art school.” The incredulity in my voice is unhidden.

  I want to ask her if she thinks skin colour is enough to make him and me the same, but I still don’t know with whom she is suggesting I have less in common than with him. His wife? Alex? Her? Her and Alex and the rest of our friends, all of whom are white in this rural area? I don’t know if she means to be talking about race but is mistakenly using the word culture. I suddenly feel a rift between her and me that I’ve never felt before. But I don’t want to be defensive, or to insult her, or have her think I’m getting very close to saying she’s making a racist connection. She isn’t racist. I know this. But something is being revealed here, and it scares me. It saddens me. She’s our good friend. I don’t want to fall out with her.

  “He has more in common with his wife than he has with me,” I say flatly.

  “That would be true, too. But you don’t actually know if they’re still together, do you?” she says under her breath.

  I need to be careful. “Alex might be from here,” I say slowly, trying to glean what her concern is really all about, and to find some kernel with which to quell this line of thinking. “She might be white. But she and I have way more in common than he and I.” I’m fumbling, but I carry on, an inexplicable panic suddenly gripping the muscles of my stomach. “In fact, culturally, she and I share a great deal of the same interests. Did you know that long before we met we’d both been involved as activists in the same kinds of social causes and had gone out on the streets in public demonstrations — that we may even have stood feet away from one another in marches against one kind of oppression or another? Do you know that long before we met we’d gone to several of the same plays — imagine that, the same plays in the same theatres. We’d listened to the same music, frequented the same galleries, on this and other continents? We both come from and know Western traditions, Western styles
. Prakash knows the basics — Leonardo, Michelangelo — but he doesn’t share my interests.” Billowing anger is stunting my ability to quickly make a more intelligent analysis. She wants to say something but I don’t let her; I carry on, more pertinently: “He may not even know the arts of his own culture, because he simply isn’t interested in art or literature. Look, there are ways in which Alex and I have many more interests and experiences in common than even you — you from here — and she. And because I grew up in a Westernized family from day one, I have more in common with you than with him. Look, I don’t know what you’re getting at.” I know I am prevaricating, not wanting to offend, discerning something but unsure of what it is exactly, unable to formulate what’s troubling me about her interventions. The muscles of my stomach have clenched so tightly I feel dizzy. I must try to approach more straightforwardly the impression baffling me. “Do you think I’m interested in him? Are you trying to set me up with him?” I say, the words tumbling from my mouth, uncensored now. Out of the silence that follows I find clarity. “Look, I feel as if you’re trying to get me to admit to something. I don’t understand your agenda here, Skye. Are you intentionally creating something between him and me, pushing me toward him? What are you doing? There’s nothing there, Skye. Nothing.”

  Her face has turned red.

  From my skin, all through my body and up my face, radiates a terrible heat, my brain engulfed in a raging fire. I am not thinking coherently. I try to speak with more reason. “I don’t think,” I manage wearily, “that once he and Alex meet, we’ll see much of him after.” But in the next moment, with some urgency I blurt, “And just to be clear: I have everything I need or want in Alex, in my home here, in my life here. And same with her. There isn’t anything she wants or needs.”

  “Alex isn’t happy. I care about her. About you both.”

  She’s really persistent, and out of line telling me about Alex. It’s none of her business. Her edginess says she knows it, too. I want to tell her to fuck off. Can a friendship like ours handle that?

  I am baffled that she carries on: “Look, there’s more going on here. You and Alex need to come clean with each other. This may end up not really being about Prakash at all.”

  I really have to bite my tongue. What the hell does she know about our private lives? Clearly nothing. Such nonsense. Is she trying to play therapist? This is the point at which friends need to know their place and back off. I tap the digital clock on the dashboard’s radio. I put my hand on the key in the ignition. “Nothing — no one — will come between Alex and me. Alex knows I love her. And vice versa. I will not jeopardize what I have with her. Neither of us is up for grabs,” I tell her, and, looking at the road straight ahead, I add with finality, “He’s probably already at the house.”

  She undoes her seat belt and opens the door. She does not say goodbye, except by knocking the roof, two taps with her knuckles, as she pushes in the door.

  * * *

  Twenty kilometres over the speed limit, I pass the house of the refugees again. The children are gone. The van is gone. Fuck Skye. Fuck her. Just fuck her. What is she trying to do? I’m not going to let her spoil this day.

  Perhaps he’s just arriving. Or maybe he arrived a minute after we left the house. Fucking Skye. What did Alex tell her? I feel exposed. A bit of a fool. But I mustn’t be too annoyed with Alex. If she needed someone to confide in, Skye is perhaps the best person.

  If Prakash is at the house, I wonder what they’re talking about. I can just hear him boasting to Alex, Did you know this or that about Priya, Priya used to do this, Priya and I once did that. I can’t bear that they’d discuss me in my absence. I can’t get back fast enough.

  I round the bend, and from a few houses away, I see a car parked in our driveway, a silverish, two-door convertible BMW.

  3

  The Visitor

  · · ·

  * * *

  I hoped Priya would return from taking Skye home before her friend arrived. I didn’t want to have to spend time alone with him. I stood in our bedroom, at the foot of the bed, looking around the room. Had she, while she was in here, heard my conversation with Skye?

  Clothing, hers and mine, was jumbled on an armchair in the bay window. Her pyjamas lay across the bed, and on her bedside table were her e-book and a pile of regular books, the same ones that have been there, unread, for the last year or so. On my side of the bed, I sat on the rumpled sheets and contemplated how the day would unfold. I picked up Priya’s pillow and set it on my lap. From it rose a scent I’d fallen in love with years ago. I brought the pillow to my face and breathed in the familiar alluring aroma. I hugged the pillow tight.

  Things that had once intrigued me about my lover of the last six years now confounded me. I used to be able to take it in stride that I couldn’t guess Priya’s next move. It frustrated me now.

  I saw early what she was like; there shouldn’t have been any surprises. Take, for instance, the time just after we met and began seeing each other. Before she moved in with me, we shuffled from her apartment to my house, spending hardly a night apart. But after any period of wonderful intensity, she would always pull far away. If we were at my house, she’d suddenly get up and run, as if she’d just remembered a pot on the fire at her apartment. When eventually we spoke on the phone, she’d say she just needed a little space, that she felt claustrophobic and thought we shouldn’t see one another for a few days. It used to distress me; I believed we were on the verge of breaking up. Then, later that same day, she’d call, sheepish. She missed me; she couldn’t bear to be away a second longer, so let’s forget that nonsense about space and meet up right away. And a night of fierce lovemaking would ensue, fuelled for me by the torture of uncertainty and then relief. Such a push and pull, but I went along, knowing, or rather hoping, that on her own she’d eventually come around. I used to wish I could pin her down, hold and calm her. I thought at the time that that was my job. My task. Waiting, the act itself, was my way of saying to her, I’m here. You’re safe with me. I won’t run. It is why I said yes when she proposed marriage. I thought that would reassure her that I was here to stay. To this day she insists — in jest, I think — that she did not actually propose, but rather simply suggested we get married. She sees some meaningful distinction in this. I don’t. To me it was her way of proposing. Her usual obtuse way. I expected that with time she’d have become more open with me. I look back and see that not much changed — even when she professed love, I intuited a certain distance.

  Time came and went, and if anything changed it was my heart. It toughened. An enormous amount of energy is required for a heart to toughen, and in the end it’s draining.

  * * *

  I quickly pulled the bed together and went into the main part of the house, fluffing the pillows in the living room, tidying a bit. In the kitchen I washed the cups we’d used when Skye was here and began to gather the ingredients for the pasta and sauce I said I’d make for dinner. As I did so, I contemplated how Priya was capable of being as kind and magnanimous as possible, and then, without cause it sometimes seemed, cool and hurtful. She wasn’t mean, but her self-protectiveness made her almost cruel.

  That said, the attention she is capable of paying seems like a contradiction. I will never forget my first birthday with her: I awoke to a streamer strung across the door to the kitchen of my old house in Toronto, and little silly presents hidden in places she knew I’d look throughout the day. Then, at dinner at that restaurant she’d made reservations at, she presented me with a particular out-of-print book I’d wanted and couldn’t find locally but which she’d managed to track down through a British second-hand bookseller. I’d had no idea she was doing any of this. And it’s been the same, more or less, every year, no matter what is happening between us at the time. I can contort myself wondering if such magnanimous gestures were really about her love for me, her desire to make the day a truly special one for me, or if they were a project tha
t allowed her to see for herself what a good partner she could be. But what’s the point of trying to figure any of this out now?

  I hadn’t realized it before, but difference as an attraction only lasts while it’s new. A life with someone is different than a courtship.

  * * *

  After Priya announced this man would spend a night in our house, I naturally asked about him, about the nature of their friendship. Not because I was jealous — I was not. At least, not at first. I simply wanted to know who this visitor was, this person she said she was once close with. It was a way of finding out more about the person I was living with. But her defensiveness and skittishness made me wary. I began to wonder what she was hiding. Unable to extract answers from her, I took the opportunity several days ago, the instant she left the house for a haircut in town, to take a peek in her studio for a photo album she’d long ago shown me. The studio was pristine, everything in its place. I usually enjoyed going in, but only did so when she was there. I did not want to turn on the long fluorescent tube lights in case she returned to get something she might have forgotten, and moved through her space keeping my ears peeled to the driveway. Large canvasses dwarfed the room. There was enough light from the large windows on one side so I could clearly see images of shimmering lake water, reflections in them of holiday cottages, white pines and birds, canoeists and water skiers — all northern landscapes and activities but painted in her vibrant, carnival-like tropical palette. She is a good painter. A room comes alive, dances with her palette. I can admire that honestly, despite how we’ve drifted apart.

  There were a few labelled boxes on shelves — Ends, Reviews, Sequins/Ribbon/Fabric Paint — and an unlabelled one under the table in the studio. It had been pushed so far to the back that I was naturally drawn to it. But I’d have had to untape it, an act that might eventually have been discovered. I began my search, then, in the office area, a room at the back of the studio. My hands shook as I rifled among books on a shelf. I was disappointed not to find the album I had come for. I quickly scanned through her filing cabinet and a cupboard in which she kept printer paper and office supplies. Then I noticed a large suitcase-like cardboard box atop that cupboard. I pulled up a chair and took down the dusty box, behind which was a row of shoeboxes. I brought those down, too. None were taped, and in them were albums and what must have been hundreds of loose photos of people and places I did not recognize. If you’re going to snoop, I thought, you better be prepared to come across something you’d rather not have found. Something which you will not be able to pretend to not have found. My heart thundered. My limbs were ticklish with guilt. I calculated that she was likely at that time just having her hair washed before the cut.