Polar Vortex

by Shani Mootoo

  And so there we were, accompanying each other into the night.

  Then, in the middle of the night — he’d long become quiet and had curled up on the sofa — he bolted up, straightened himself, and looked directly at me sitting awake in the chair opposite, watching him. He said, “She needs to be taught a lesson. She can’t do this to people. Why can’t she at least say where she’s spending her nights so we don’t worry about her? Why is it that she gets to have so much fun, and people like you and I, who really love and care, sit and wait and get hurt? Why can’t we have fun, too? Why don’t we go out and enjoy ourselves?”

  I heard myself respond, “Let’s. Let’s go out. Let’s go to a restaurant. Or go and have a drink. But I don’t think anything’s open at this time of night.”

  He stood up, saying it was exactly what we should do. He dangled his keys. I started pulling on shoes and my jacket, and he stopped me and said, “I have an idea. Just a minute.” Without looking for it, he walked directly to the phone, and I noted his familiarity with where it was. He dialled, and there seemed to be no answer. He said, “Have you ever been to Bracebridge?” I had no idea where that was. He had an ex-girlfriend whose family owned a cottage up there, he said. He used to go there with them. The cottage wasn’t winterized, so no one would be there. We should go.

  It was a crazy idea. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know where this place was. It was not his place. He was crazed by rejection. He didn’t really know if I was currently a threat to his relationship with Fiona.

  “Surely,” I said, “you have to ask if you can use the cottage. Wouldn’t she or they mind? You have to get the key from her.” I imagined this would be a plan then for another day, by which time he would have calmed down, and I wouldn’t be involved in his drama.

  He said she wouldn’t care. He knew where the key was hidden.

  What if something happened to us, and we got killed on the road, or he killed me, or we were caught and arrested and thrown in jail for breaking and entering? I remember I thought about Prakash. What would he have thought, I had wondered, but in the moment I didn’t care. There was a kind of freedom necessary in that moment in going far away with someone who wanted nothing from me. But then I thought about my parents. They knew Fiona was my roommate, not my lover, and that in itself was another enormous pain. I didn’t care if I died or ended up imprisoned. I felt I was going mad.

  * * *

  I turn and look behind me, stare into the trees and up and down the beach, but I don’t see Prakash. I move to a higher part of the rock so that I can see farther. He still isn’t in view. On the other side, the two people are still visible. I hope they don’t leave.

  * * *

  An hour north of the city, it had begun to snow hard and fast, and I learned first-hand that night what a blizzard was and what a whiteout was. Stan drove slowly. The road signs we passed were whited out in blown snow. I couldn’t tell at any point where we were. We hardly spoke. My heart was breaking, and in the dark, in the constant torrent of snow rushing at us in the headlights, in the wordlessness between him and me, I wanted to let myself go mad and bawl, but when I realized Stan was stifling his own crying, I stiffened. I listened to his occasional sobs, and when suddenly he slammed his open palm violently against the steering wheel, my breath caught. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave a squeeze of understanding. He took his hand off the wheel, grabbed my hand, and flung it off, shouting at me, “Don’t touch me.” It didn’t frighten me. I understood.

  * * *

  The man and woman on the beach are up and running again, chasing each other in circles. One of them catches up to the other, hits that one with what looks like a fluorescent green foam noodle, and then the one who’s been hit turns and grabs the noodle and chases the other. Their screams and laughter are brought to me on breezes pushed along the shoreline. Prakash is nowhere to be seen. I lower myself and sit, and the cold of the rock quickly penetrates my jeans. I stare in the direction of the bend. The light is changing fast. A hint of pink creeps into the sky at the horizon, already reflected on the crests of the billowing water. I keep my eyes open for Prakash and recall that long unpaved road off the main road to Stan’s friend’s cottage. It had not been plowed. On the drive in, the wheels of the car caught again and again in the high snow and spun, the car lowering into it fast, and several times Stan had to try to reverse, and in frustration he’d accelerate hard and send us further into the ground. He got out of the car and pushed while I sat in the driver’s seat and he shouted frantically, “Go. Go. Go, damn it.” I prayed that on acceleration I wouldn’t send the car flying, spinning, skidding into the gulley or into trees. I had never been in those conditions, that kind of snow. Eventually the car would go no further. We had to get out and walk. I had never before experienced anything like this; my ankle-high winter boots could not keep the snow out, and my feet became wet and numbed fast, and the wool scarf I had wrapped to cover my face grew horribly wet and icy around my nose and mouth. Wet wooly hairs entered my mouth and I felt as if I’d choke. I was sure I’d stumble and freeze where I fell and wouldn’t be found until the spring, when the snow thawed. As my heart sank further at the thought of my parents’ disappointment in me, the cottage came into sight. Stan left me at the back door, while he went to fetch a spare key that was kept in a shed on the property. In the dark, I hugged and rocked myself, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I fully expected some dangerous animal or person to appear out of nowhere. I stomped my feet and wiggled my toes to keep the blood flowing. Stan returned, not soon enough, with a key, let me inside, and left again to look for wood to make a fire. The house was freezing, but thankfully dry. I sat on one of the several couches and blew into my hands to warm them every few seconds while I removed my boots and the wet socks. My feet were a frightful pink. I wanted to cry. Stan returned, cradling a few logs in his arms. He muttered that was all the dry wood in the shed. He lit a fire, and he too removed his shoes and socks and placed them, with mine, before the fire. He rummaged through a large wicker basket and drew out oversized knitted socks, and we pulled them on. It took almost an hour for the area in front of the fire to warm up, and about that length of time for my feet to begin to thaw. I can still recall the sense that they were on fire and, at the same time, were being pricked by thousands of needles. I hobbled through the five small bedrooms, trying to figure out where I might spend the night, and was disheartened to find that the heat of the fire had not reached them in the least. Stan grumbled that he hadn’t properly thought through driving up to the cottage; in the past, when he’d come with his girlfriend in the winter, they’d bring heaters and duvets and big sweaters. I slumped on a bed, cold and shivering and near tears. He came into the room with several blankets, which he piled on the bed for me, and he went to another room. After a while I heard him piling more logs on the fire. Where he found them, I have no idea.

  The fire went out in the middle of the night, and I clasped my hands between my knees, rubbing my feet hard on the bottom sheet, hoping that friction would warm them, and tucked my head under the covers. At one point I heard him shifting about and I called out softly to ask if the fire had gone out. He answered that it had, and to start it again he’d have to dress to go out to the shed and dig around for more dry wood, and he didn’t want to do that. He said the best thing for us to do was to make a bed on the floor in front of the embers and lie together, with as many blankets on top of us as possible. I said I couldn’t do that. He said, “Suit yourself,” and I remained in the frigid room, listening as he dragged a mattress out and fixed a bed for himself. After about half an hour or more, I got under the covers with him. It was warm under there. We kept our distance, our backs to one another. I slid further down, pulling the blankets over my head. It eventually got too hot, and I had to come back up. In no time, I was cold again. He spoke. “Are you awake? Are you cold?” His voice had softened.

  “It’s cold,” I mumbled, my teeth chattering.


  “When the fire is going, this place is like a furnace. But yeah, it’s cold. I love this cottage.” He was whispering as if there were others in the cottage whom he didn’t want to awaken.

  I didn’t respond. He didn’t seem to be the same angry, hurt person I’d travelled there with.

  He continued, “Susie and I were together since we were in high school. When I got my licence, we would come up here almost every weekend.”

  “On your own?” I asked.

  “Yeah, her parents were liberal hippie types. They treated me like I was their son. Well, son-in-law, I guess. But we were kids, really.”

  I asked what happened to her, to them. They outgrew each other. They were still friends, but he was no longer as close to the family as he had once been. He asked if I’d ever been to a cottage in Ontario before. He told me that when it snowed like this, outside looked in daytime like a black-and-white photograph.

  We were talking. The hostility between us had evaporated. We talked for a long while. I told him about my family back home. I realized he must have grown up in Canada because he had a Canadian accent. But I thought his family was from one of the Caribbean islands. I learned that they were from Nova Scotia. That they’d been there since the eighteenth century, freemen who’d come up from the American colonies. Neither of us mentioned Fiona. The room was getting colder. My feet were painfully cold. I told him I wished I had heavier socks. He turned and lay on his back. I too lay on my back. He placed his foot over mine. He rubbed it back and forth. After some moments he stopped, but left his foot touching mine. We lay like that in silence. I whispered thanks, and he moved a little nearer, one of my hands next to one of his. He locked fingers and said, “Why were we fighting? We’re both hurting. Let’s not hurt one another.” I began to sob, and he turned and held me. I wept, and he kept saying, Shhh, shhh, and then he lay on top of me to try to hold me still. I held on to him. I’d never lain with a man like that and it felt good. I felt safe with him. It wasn’t until the light broke outside and showed us that it had stopped snowing, and our eyes were heavy and sore with crying and with tiredness, that we both fell asleep, almost together. We awoke clinging to one another. I didn’t want to part from him. Was it because he, unlike Prakash, didn’t seem to want anything from me? Or was it because lying with Fiona’s lover was a way of lying with her? It was as if, having both been spurned by her, we had become a kind of unit. Eventually he dressed and left the cottage. I curled into the warmth he’d left and fell asleep again, awakening only when he returned carrying a box of wood that he said he’d found in a neighbour’s covered pile. I sat on the mattress on the floor, the blankets wrapped around me, and watched as he poked and prodded at a slow-forming fire. In time, the room became warm enough to remove the blankets from around me. He filled a bucket with snow and put it on the fire and found teabags and cups in the kitchen. We washed our faces and had tea. He took me down to the dock, and it was as if we were walking on a cloud of soft whiteness. We walked through the woods in the deep snow, holding hands in the black-and-white landscape. The only sound was the powdery slip and slide of snow beneath our feet. Could I ever admit to anyone this strange adventure, I wondered. At one point Stan held me back and said, “Stop. Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” I whispered, looking questioningly at him.

  “Exactly,” he said, a smile broad on his face. “Not even the hum of a car in the distance,” he added. He was a good-looking man.

  Later that day, he dropped me off at my apartment. In the car we’d hugged. A long tender hug. It was easy being held by him. I’d felt something for him.

  It was Fiona. That’s what I felt for him. Fiona. And yes, it was Stan I’d wanted — not Prakash.

  In the car, sitting there, he said he didn’t want to see Fiona again. He said he’d like to see more of me. Was I interested in getting together with him again?

  If we were to spend one more day together, we would, I knew, pass that day in bed. And this time we’d do so without a stitch of clothing on. That was, of course, what he was suggesting. Sitting next to him, I could feel it. I wanted to reach over and put my hand on his face, but if I did, he would have felt my desire. I kept still and allowed myself to feel my body opening up for him. I debated asking him to come up to my apartment. I saw myself tearing my jeans off and pulling him into me, him fucking me and me fucking him at once. I felt dizzy. But I knew it was not love I was feeling. It was a hurting and an aching. I thought of Prakash, of half-sitting, half-lying next to him in his childhood bed in New Brunswick, and although that had occurred only weeks before, I felt as if I’d grown up, as if I understood myself better. My mind returned to the past night spent in the cottage, and I saw that what I really wanted was Stan’s full weight pressing down on me, our individual and separate grief meeting in sympathetic resonance at the seam between us.

  How long could any kind of closeness between this gentle man and me, then, have lasted? Weeks? A day? Until he and I had had sex, and both of us relieved by orgasms of hurt, would one immediately want the other to disappear without a word? Until Fiona’s rejection no longer had such a hold on him that he would ask a lesbian out? Until a woman walked by and looked me directly in my eyes? And because I had had the mind to understand the genesis of his question — was I interested in getting together with him again? — I knew I wouldn’t see him again.

  That was three and a half decades ago, but I can still recall that day outside of my apartment, in his car. The snow had been cleared from the parking lot and pushed to the side. What I remember is the mountains of whiteness, a wall that had been erected daily. And I remember standing inside the lobby of my apartment, the door open so that I could wave, and watching as his car slowly pulled out over the crunching snow, the tail light blinking as he waited to turn out of the driveway. As I watched, a sadness washed over me, followed in an instant by a lightness that travelled over my body. Fiona’s hold on me, I felt, had loosened.

  I certainly had not seen Prakash, and don’t remember seeing anyone else that day, actually.

  * * *

  There is suddenly a rustling behind me, and the scent of his cologne on the wind, and then there is Prakash climbing onto the rock on which I sit. I stand quickly. He must have returned along the road, or on a path through the trees. His face is red, his nose running, no doubt from the wind, which is strong here by the water, and the chill that it brings. He swipes a gloved hand at it repeatedly. He looks younger, more like the man I used to know years ago. But he’s not smiling, he won’t look at me. He walks to the edge of the rock and lowers himself. He sits with his legs hanging down, facing the water that laps at the base of the rock. He sits and I remain standing. After ten minutes, or perhaps it is half an hour, or maybe it is five minutes, I lower myself and sit a little way behind him. For several minutes we sit like this, him in front, I well back. Eventually he turns his head toward me, but he still won’t look at me, and he pats the rock at his side. To not move forward to sit next to him seems like an accusation. Unsure of myself, I nevertheless slide my bum down toward the waiting spot, and I, too, hang my feet over the rock.

  Behind our quiet, carried on the wind, is the occasional sound of the two people up the beach talking. Their words are not distinguishable, but the man’s voice is deep and pleasant. Hers is not heard as much, except when she laughs loudly.

  “Prakash,” I say, and stop. I must choose my words carefully. I must choose the order in which I tell him what I think needs to be said, what, perhaps, he needs to hear. He does not encourage me with even a grunt. I am on my own.

  But where do I begin? It is a long friendship, more than half of our lives so far, but there can only be a few words with which to explain myself. I want to say, I am lesbian, Prakash, and hope that that explains everything. But I know it doesn’t. He will then say, But then why . . . ?

  I could tell him we’d both have been miserable. And again he’d say, But then
why . . . ?

  I could tell him I did love him, and I did think and wonder and imagine, and I tried. And what would he do if I said this to him? If he were then to push me off this rock, he’d almost have a right.

  “Prakash,” I say again. And I stumble through as I tell him: “I’ve never had a better friend than you. I already knew when I met you that I would not be with a man.” I correct myself and say, “I would not be happy with a man. And that a man therefore wouldn’t be happy with me.” And I continue, “But in those days, a life with another woman was not easy. We could not be out and open with each other in the world. And by the time it became easier in public, it was ingrained in me — and I see it still in my generation of queer people — that we needed to be careful and to be fearful. These were not conditions conducive to healthy, happy relationships, even between women who loved one another deeply.

  “In all my years in this country, you were my stability and my constant. You were always there for me. I never had to beg you to be there. You showed up in an instant. You paid for my meals when I had no money. You paid my rent. I never asked you, but you listened and you saw and you didn’t hesitate to help, and you didn’t then ask for repayment. You seemed to give freely and willingly.