The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  In the echoing clatter of the cavernous exam hall, she showed her ID and held out for inspection her flat of gum, can of Coke, and pencils. She was led to her place, a small desk attached to a green metal chair. The scooped-out seat was cold against her fleece pants. She shivered, the nerves flickering up from her stomach and travelling along her arms, little zaps as she drummed her fingers against the desk. Two minutes until she could open the white sheet on the desk in front of her. She wrote her name and her student number on the exam booklet. Her course and section. She could feel herself beginning to detach as the lines of the desk wobbled. She held on to the edges as if she were on a boat, rocking in an eddy, the river rushing by. Afraid.

  A bell chimed. She opened the page and blanked at the first question. And the second. And the third. She didn’t know what they meant. She looked at the title at the top of the page, checking to see it was the right exam. She looked around to see if anyone else was puzzled. All the bent heads, the pencils flicking. Some chemistry students pulled out little coloured balls and squares on wires. They clicked them together, linking them in the contorted shapes of babies’ rattles. They looked down at their papers, scribbled, clicked and reshaped the toys, their pencils between their teeth. When she saw a proctor frowning at her, she put her head down on the desk and closed her eyes. All around her the balls snapped and clicked.

  When the proctor shook her to say she could leave if she was done, she realized she’d fallen asleep. The panic rose like a great wave and she could barely breathe. No, she said, she’d keep going. She stuffed gum into her mouth and went back to the first question. She selected an answer. Then the next one. A, B, C, D, she shaded in the little squares. Sometimes E. When the exam ended, she set down her pencil, feeling as if something was gnawing a semicircular opening under the curve of her ribs. Her mouth was raw from the gum. She wondered if there was anything else left in the world but the crying girl rushing past the squat, grey-haired man showing a smiling young woman a configuration on the model. The haggard, the hollow-eyed, the red-rimmed messes. The happy chatterers. She felt as if she’d landed in the aftermath of a battle, the victors cheerful, the wounded and dying dragging themselves away from the scene of their defeat.

  Outside she waited in the cold air, trying to figure out what had happened. Goosebumps rose on her arms, but she didn’t think to put on her coat until she was shaking, her jaw clenched. She hugged her pack close, tucking her hands under her arms, and ran. Her cellphone pulsed against her ribs. Greg probably, finding out how she did. She ignored it and ducked into an alley, a shortcut to residence.

  “Whoa!”

  She looked up just in time to literally bump into David. His hands were held out to catch her. He was wearing a black wool coat down to his calves, a long scarf, and gloves. His hair stood up in little licks, gold-tipped black as if he’d been dipped in gilt. A surge of adrenaline made her giddy.

  “I just bombed my last exam,” she said.

  He grinned, not believing. He opened his coat and wrapped it around them both. His heat startled her. He smelled wonderful. She didn’t. Nose against a down vest, she mumbled. “You’re dressed for the Arctic here.”

  He spoke to the top of her head. “I have a ticket to an outdoor concert at the Nitobe Gardens.”

  She welcomed the pressure of his hands against her body and his face against her hair. She drew back, reluctantly, still standing in the circle of his arms, under the wings of his coat.

  “I’ve got some time,” he said. “Do you want lunch?”

  She shook her head. “I’m beat. I’m going to jump in the shower and then crash for a few hours.”

  He walked with her down the stairs toward the House of Learning. Ice crystals formed at the edge of the waterfall, streaks where the spray fell and froze before it was washed away. She stopped as she always did, to listen to the water’s conversation, the way it whispered songs to the world even as it froze. Hush, it said. Hush. She gasped when David’s gloved hands found their way under her clothes, the leather warm on her rib cage, his thumbs seeking out her nipples.

  She was glad of the chaos of her room because it hid how little was there besides a calendar, stats graphs, and a couple of mountain posters. Trevor’s wall hanging was the only beautiful thing really. She tried not to notice how carefully David draped his coat and folded his vest over the one chair. Slipping into the bathroom, she threw her dirty clothes into the cupboard under the sink and stepped into the shower, opening her mouth to flood the tender interior and wash away the mustiness of the last two weeks. The shower door slid open and he was with her, his hands sliding over her slippery skin. More water, more cavities, more unspoken conversations. She managed to forget about her exam. Fifty percent of her final mark, a big zero.

  “The music is about to begin,” David said later. She got out of bed and opened her window. It looked out onto the high wall surrounding the gardens. A faint sound of flutes floated along the cold afternoon air. She felt lightheaded. He came and stood beside her, listened, and named the music. She looked at their bodies, side by side in the pale winter light. His skin had an amber cast to it, the pale yellow of old ivory. Hers was browner. But the colour was close, a colour that lacked entirely the pinkness of her mother’s skin. She used to wonder what colour her father was. Her skin darker than Jason’s, but paler than Trevor’s. Somewhere in between the two men who came on weekends to take the boys to hockey tournaments. The white car salesman and the Gitxsan fisherman. She used to examine every man who knocked on the door, asking for Isabel. Every man who hovered at the edge of their world, trucks sending out clouds of exhaust on the street in front of their house, men asking where her mother was. The ones her mother never let set foot inside.

  She ran her hand across David’s chest and decided her father had not been Asian. David came from culture, from class. From people who went to symphonies and had memberships in art galleries. From people with expensive prints on their walls. Her grandmother had that kind of class. Her mother didn’t and here she was, a northern bush chick with worry dolls tucked under her pillow. He closed the window. “It’s too late now. I’m going to hear about it though — that ticket was very hard to get and my friends will be pissed.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  He laughed. “You’re in business school — don’t they teach you about networking?”

  He picked up his clothes, checked for God knows what. Lice? He buttoned up his faded pink shirt, made sure his pants hung below the waistband of his boxers. Janna felt suspended — he was suddenly an irritant, but she didn’t want to be alone. She did not want to think about the exam, about how soon it would be Christmas. He held up his vest, restless and uncertain. He pulled it on, zipped it up. “Why don’t we get some food?”

  “Sure.” She picked up some of her own scattered clothes, guessing which were the least dirty. Black stretch pants that were almost baggy, she’d lost so much weight in the last couple of weeks in spite of Greg’s attention. Little folds of material across her pelvic bones, the stomach concave between them. A midriff top and then a big sweater. And the leather jacket, the one she had spotted that day Amy bought the clothes. The one she’d saved for.

  In the graduate student lounge, over congealed sushi, he told her he’d taken down the exhibit at the art gallery that morning. “That beautiful print you liked. The flute player. Soon it will be locked up in a drawer in Coleman’s file cabinet.”

  “Sounds like residence,” she said. “Don’t you hate the end of term feeling? All that intensity and then, whoosh, like a bubble popping.”

  “There are remedies for such feelings.” He pulled out his wallet, poked a finger into a slit, and fished out a small fold of cellophane enclosing five tiny yellow pills. He laid one on a fingertip and held it toward her.

  She shook her head.

  “Sure?” He dropped it into his own mouth, and offered her another.

  Her tongue slid slowly out. He waited, eyebrows raised. She nodded and he
dropped the pill onto its tip. She pulled her tongue in and swallowed. They went outside into the late afternoon dusk. He asked her if she had a car. “Not here,” she said. She was already inventing another life for herself, imagining spending Christmas in his apartment.

  As the bus accelerated to cross the bridge, she began to hum a Christmas carol — God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay — and giggle. They sat at the back of the bus. As it filled, she was pressed up against the outside wall and David sat half-sideways, his back to the man wedged in beside him. Two big women filled the seat in front of them, their backs as solid as a wall between her and the other passengers. David wrapped his arm and his coat around her, his hand on her breast, one finger circling the nipple. The bright lights wobbled as the bus lurched from stop to stop. Under the cover of his coat, David slid his cold hand down under her sweater. She shifted slightly to give him easier access, hooking one foot over his boots. She stared at the boots, the way they were so firmly planted, feeling at the same time his fingers searching. Long fibres of sensation descended from her crotch, descended into the boots, roots descending into the grey mat on the floor of the bus, into the dirt in her mother’s garden. It wasn’t until he pulled her up at their stop that she realized how stoned she was. The stairs to his apartment slid into each other, the rail twisted and bulged under her hand.

  He turned the key in the locks, one, two, three, and led her into the dark living room; all the Christmas lights from the stores across the way lit up the walls with red and golden light. Huge shadows advanced and receded across the ceiling as traffic moved along the street below. The light seemed to respond to the sounds, swelling and exploding in big sunbursts, then subsiding into washes of colour.

  “What did I eat back there?”

  “Two C-B.” He giggled. “It’s like Ecstasy only sexier.”

  He was right about that. She took off her jacket, and as its weight left her shoulders her whole body responded to the lightness. She kicked off her shoes and twirled a slow motion spiral around the room’s hardwood floor. She remembered the bed and the scarves and the postcards. She wanted to see the light playing across the objects on the walls. His hand covered hers before she could open the door and a large uneasy moment filled the room. He didn’t want her in there.

  She swayed, suspended, as he brought out candles, which he lit and set out on the ledge that ran along two walls. He pulled the futon off the couch onto the floor and tossed some cushions around. He flipped through a huge basket of CDs. She stared at the light pinpointed in the shining doorknob of the bedroom. Then the music began — a single flute — and she was transfixed. The notes entered her body: bubbles of sensation in her crotch rose in a line through her midriff and forked to her nipples. Wanting to remove the layers between the music and her skin, she peeled off her clothes, undulating to the notes as if they were fingers. She barely noticed when the light and music turned into David’s hands; time stretched into one long nerve bundle of sensation.

  She vaguely remembered looking out a window sometime in the night, her thighs warm against the radiator, snowflakes falling into the space between the buildings, blurring the lights into shimmering waves. David stood behind her, slowly moving inside her, his hands on her breasts, between her legs. She had opened the window and let the outside air swirl across her, feeling the snowflakes like other hands on her body. It seemed as if they moved there for hours; when she finally came, Janna felt her whole body break into flakes of light, flakes of light with huge empty spaces between each glittering prism.

  She awoke to the sound of David’s voice, far away, talking. On the telephone, she hoped, covering her head with a quilt he’d thrown over them sometime in the early morning. She hunkered down, wishing he’d come back to cuddle her warm. She was light-headed and shivery, her throat raw. Outside, car tires swished through puddles. The snow had turned to rain.

  She pulled the quilt off her head and heard David laugh. A satisfied ugly little laugh that made her realize she didn’t know him at all. Not in any way that really mattered. His words carried clearly through a pause in the traffic. The one I told you about, he said, and something about one last young fuck before the return of the bitch. It shouldn’t be a problem, he said after a minute. A knot formed in Janna’s stomach and she felt as grey and washed out as the light falling across the dishevelled bed on the living room floor.

  The kitchen door opened and he came out with a steaming cup and set it on the floor beside her. He was polished and gleaming, dressed as if for the symphony or a waitering job, a white open-collared shirt, black pants, black carved beads around his neck, an earring shining discreetly above his collar. His hair was gelled back into golden Christmas pine cone tips. Behind him, she could see dishes washed and set out to drain. A bag of garbage tied and set by the door, his suitcase beside it. He wasn’t coming back to bed. He had one more thing to tidy up. Her. Her anger surprised her. Gave her energy.

  “I’ll go out and pick us up something for breakfast,” he said. “Any requests?”

  “Whatever,” she said, shoving aside the covers.

  “Friends are coming to pick me up in a while…” the words trailed off into an awkward pause as she stood naked in front of him. “We’d give you a ride home, but we’re going up to Whistler.” He stared at the bruises the radiator had left on her thighs. She forced herself to stretch, unconcerned. She scratched her head.

  “I don’t feel I can ask them to drive back the other way when the traffic’s like it is.”

  The room was freezing but she refused to shiver. She picked up the cup. “I’ll just grab a quick bath.”

  He nodded as she sipped the tea. It felt good sliding down her throat. She walked to the bathroom, knowing he was watching her.

  “Janna?” She liked the uncertainty that had entered his voice, such a change from the boy brute telephone persona. He was trying to figure out if she was going to berate him, or cling and whimper. She liked him anxious. But he wasn’t anxious enough. She wanted to see his composure vanish. She turned, rubbed one breast.

  “If the phone rings, let the machine pick it up,” he said.

  She just turned and went into the bathroom. In his medicine chest she found some cold pills and took two. While her bath ran, she found a thermostat and turned the heat up. She gathered her clothes. Outside, the rain was a grey wall of water.

  She sank into the hot water and let its warmth seep into her. Dangling her arm out of the water, she inspected her clothes: panties, socks, tights, and T-shirt. She grimaced and dropped each one into the water. She didn’t care what kind of hurry he was in. She was not going to put those clothes back on. She soaped them up, rinsed them, squeezed as much water out as she could and draped them on the clanking radiators.

  After her bath, she went into the bedroom looking for something clean to wear. Compared to the chaos of her previous visit, it was spotless. The bed was neatly made, the tables and dressers polished, the surfaces cleared of everything but a couple of photographs of Asian temples and a big carving of a bulbous woman in spotted stone. She pulled open a drawer and looked into a tangle of bra straps, thongs, silvery belts, and scarves. Messy, but very nice lingerie. Silk. She balked at putting on another woman’s underwear, but in the next drawer found a black chenille sweater that looked warm. In another she found a nice little kilt, Christ she’d look like a schoolgirl, and big red wool socks. She ran and slid across the long living room floor right up to the closed door of the other room. She opened it to see a computer, bookshelves, desk, and swivel chair.

  David had told her he was house-sitting for a prof on a year’s sabbatical in Thailand. Well, the sabbatical part may have been true, but the implied distance in their relationship was not. A series of photographs hung around the room. David’s spine. They’d been taken in the bed he hadn’t let her into last night. In each picture, the photographer reached out a hand, extended a thumb and placed it on one of his vertebrae as if laying down a fingerprint. In the f
irst picture, the thumb was on the top vertebra. In the next, the top vertebra was tattooed and the thumb pressed on the second. In each picture, the thumbs descended the vertebrae, one by one, until the entire column was tattooed. The tattoos he’d said were part of a first-year art project. In the final photograph, a handprint appeared on each buttock. He must have drawn the line there because his butt was untouched. Or maybe that was next. Looking closer, Janna saw that in the first photograph, the photographer’s wrist was tattooed with one petal-like flame. In each subsequent photograph, an additional flame was added until flames encircled the wrist.

  She found the woman in another photograph. Probably in her mid-thirties, she had short spiky hair and a long face, her mouth an almost invisible line. Standing very pale against bright green shrubbery, she wore a shirt with a high standing collar. Janna recognized her by the hand held up to what looked like another tattoo around her neck. Flames encircled her wrist. The knot tightened inside Janna’s empty stomach.

  The phone rang. After two rings, the answering machine clicked on and a woman’s voice called over the message. “David, David, pick up the damn phone will you?”

  She heard the downstairs door open, and without thinking, picked up the phone, as ordered. “David, David,” the voice continued, angry now. She put down the receiver as the key turned in the lock. She smiled at the fear on his face when he saw she was wearing his girlfriend’s clothes. He looked like he might be sick when she explained how her clothes fell into the bathtub and she had to find something to wear. She praised the very interesting underwear this woman had.

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t take any,” she said and flipped up the kilt to show him.

  “Very funny,” he groaned. “She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my prof. And she’s coming back to reclaim her apartment later today. Hence the cleanup and my imminent departure.”