She must not have heard him earlier. He hadn’t noticed that the door was closed; Priya usually forgets and leaves it wide open. She’s become accustomed to living alone.
James kicks off his shoes, which are still damp from the earlier downpour, and he shrugs his almost-dry jacket onto the bannister. As usual, Priya’s panties and bras and other lacy underthings are draped over the railing to dry after washing, like decorations around the edges of a pubescent boy’s wet dream.
(Sidney, by comparison, washes each of her “intimates” one at a time on the delicate cycle of their state-of-the-art washing machine, then she gingerly plucks out each slight item between her index finger and thumb, carrying it to the ensuite to blow it dry with her hair dryer. Then she tucks it into its own Ziploc bag, which she files in her dresser, sorted by style and colour.)
James moves through Priya’s tight hallway, careful to tuck in his shoulders to miss the mirror surrounded by seashells and the little framed pictures of white-leather-jumpsuit Elvis, Henry Winkler as the Fonz, femme fatale Bette Davis, and Marilyn Monroe’s famous subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch.
As he passes Priya’s open bedroom door, he notices the print of Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère. He had given it to her as a housewarming gift. The pendant around the subject’s neck reminds James of the kind of thing that Priya would wear herself, and the woman’s dark, slightly disappointed-looking eyes could belong to Priya too.
James supposes that she falls asleep looking at the Manet. This makes him smile a little.
Priya’s small living room is crammed with knick-knacks: candles, books, vintage cameras, tiny medicine bottles made of green, blue, and brown glass, kerosene lamps, chrome hood ornaments from antique cars, and other colourful, curious objects that caught Priya’s eye at garage sales and second-hand stores.
Priya’s place has a turntable, an amplifier, and stereo speakers, with hundreds of real vinyl records in “borrowed” green and blue plastic milk crates. Some of the records once belonged to Sidney, back when she still allowed her friends to call her “Sid,” back before she became the “protégée” of Roland Baron.
The music inside Sidney’s McMansion comes from a remote-controlled, subscription-service satellite music system; James has never figured out how to convince the system to play the music he actually wants to hear, rather than the “ambient modern trance” that Sidney has selected as the default channel (again on the recommendation of Roland Baron’s three-hundred-dollar-an-hour decorator).
James does know how to play records, though, so he gets up to put one on the turntable. He selects The Supremes’ Greatest Hits, which he and Priya listened to a lot when they were working together on this room.
“Hey!” James calls out. “Are you okay in there?”
Priya, unlike Sidney, is usually in and out of the washroom in under five minutes. Sidney takes over two hours each morning to make herself “perfect.”
James corrects himself: Sidney took over two hours each morning. Sidney only exists in the past tense now.
“I’m here,” Priya says.
She had walked in so softly on her bare feet that James didn’t hear her enter the room.
James turns away from the turntable to face her.
The whites of her eyes are bloodshot, her eyelids swollen. Strands of her long black hair cling to her wet face.
“Wow,” James says, “what —”
She lunges at him, wraps her arms tightly around his torso, buries her face in the valley between his shoulder and chest, sniffling and sighing.
“You’re warming me,” she says. “Don’t let go.”
Priya is wearing her purple terry-cloth bathrobe, which James has seen hanging on the knob of her bathroom door, but never on her body. He doesn’t let go.
“This morning,” she says, “I felt like there was nothing I couldn’t do. I felt like I could change the world today. I felt like I could make it all better.” Five staccato inhalations and then, “Things can change so quickly. What a day.”
“It was a bad day,” James says.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
James shrugs. “You first.”
She sighs. “Okay. So, there’s this kid at school, Eric, whom I’ve been counselling for so long … shit! I shouldn’t have said his name! Confidentiality! Gawd, what’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Priya,” James, says, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “Tell me about the kid. I forget his name already.”
“He’s creative. He’s sensitive. And he’s very, very angry.”
She drifts into herself for a moment. James strokes her hair and waits.
“Anyway,” she says, “he’s been having trouble with his dad at home, arguing, physical confrontations. His father kicked him out, and he’s been couch surfing for the past few weeks. So, I invited them both to my office to talk it over, with me as the mediator.”
She shivers. James pulls her in a bit closer.
“As soon as they both got into my office, before I even got a chance to say a word, they were screaming at each other. And then they started fighting. And I mean full-out, trying-to-kill-each-other fighting. Punching, kicking, biting … it didn’t end until the son threw a big ceramic planter at his father’s head. He ducked, and the planter smashed through the window on my office door. Then they both took off.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Not physically.”
“Did you say there was biting?”
“The kid bit his dad’s hand. The Father of the Year bled all over my Official Conflict Resolution Manual.”
“He bled all over your Official Conflict Resolution Manual?”
“I guess I should order a new one, eh?” She laughs a little. “The dried blood might send the wrong message in other mediations.” She pulls herself closer. “You are so warm.”
All James can think to say is, “You can’t fix everything.”
“But I want to fix everything.”
James glances around the room, at the dump she’s transformed into a home, at the bits of trash she’s transformed into treasures.
“I know you do,” he says, kissing her forehead. “That’s why I love you so much.”
“Really? You love me so much?”
He nods.
She stands on her tiptoes, bringing her face closer to his. “Thanks. I need someone to love me today.”
She kisses him on the mouth; her body is still shivering, but her lips are warm.
James sucks her upper lip between his, Priya flicks her tongue under his front teeth. Soon their tongues are spiralling together like currents in a whirlpool.
James’s hands slip up under her purple bathrobe, up and then down her goosebump-speckled back, gripping the round of her behind.
They fall onto the couch. Priya unties her robe, and James pushes it open, like parting velvet curtains.
Every fantasy he has ever had in the shower about Priya floods through his mind and body. He frantically kisses her neck, her collarbone, sucks her nipples into his mouth, licks into her navel.
Priya arches her back, pulls James’s hair, breathes as if she is running for her life.
Then she pushes his face away from her skin.
“Wait!” she cries. “No! We can’t.”
“We can,” James says.
“But … Sid! I mean Sidney. No. We can’t.”
James props himself on one knee against the sofa cushion and pushes his fingers into his front pocket, past his aching erection, digging out the note. He unfolds it to show Priya.
Don’t forget to go to Priya’s place tonight !
DON’T FORGET!
“She’s been sending me to your place so she can fuck Roland Baron.”
“What? Her … um … mentor?”
“I caught her with him tonight.”
“That guy?”
“In our bedroom. On our bed.”
“Oh, James.”
“So we can do whatever we want to, Priya. Sidney can go to hell.”
James pushes Priya’s legs open and descends between them.
Her back arches against the sofa cushions. Little waves ripple through her stomach muscles.
Then Priya pulls herself away from James, crawls out from under him up onto the arm of the sofa. She pulls the bathrobe around her body, steps backward onto the floor, ties the purple terry-cloth belt tight around her waist.
“No, James,” she says. “Not like this.”
“But Priya —”
“Not like this.”
James rises from the couch, reaches for her.
Priya steps back from his outstretched fingers. “I can’t be your revenge fuck, James.”
“What?” James yelps. “Revenge f—? What?”
Priya is crying again. “I can’t be your revenge fuck. I won’t. Not after everything else. It has to be more than that.”
“Priya, it, it is more than that!”
She pulls the bathrobe tightly around her torso, tugs it down to cover anything that might still be exposed.
“James, you have to go. It’s been a bad day for both of us, and you have to go now. Okay?”
“Priya —”
“James, you have to go.”
“Priya.”
“James, you have to go now.”
He wants to kiss her as he passes her, only on her forehead, or maybe on her cheek. But he doesn’t. Any kind of kiss means something completely different now.
As he recedes clumsily through the narrow hallway, James’s hip sends a flock of Priya’s lingerie fluttering over the railing. His shoulder bumps femme fatale Bette Davis, knocking her frame crooked against the wall.
As he passes Priya’s bedroom, he sees Un bar aux Folies Bergère, with that pensive, distant expression on the woman’s face. He glances back to see Priya standing in her small, kitsch-jewelled living room; she has the same expression on her face now, too. And James finally understands what it means.
On the cramped landing, he pulls on his hiking boots, tugs his leather jacket around his shoulders. As he descends the narrow staircase, he turns sideways to avoid bumping the salvaged Manet, van Gogh, and Goya reproductions.
He reaches for the doorknob, but then he hesitates, turns around, looks up.
Priya is standing at the top of the stairs.
“I meant to give you something,” she says, “before we got carried away.”
She tosses something small from the top of the stairs. James catches it with both hands.
It’s a ring. A simple silver ring. James holds it up to the single dim light bulb that hangs above his head. The ring is engraved inside. It says Forever More.
“I found it on the sidewalk downtown. I thought that you might like it.”
“I do.”
It nestles comfortably into the groove left behind by his discarded wedding ring, covering that bloodless wound. The ring is maybe a bit loose, but his fingers are cold; it will fit perfectly when things warm up again.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
James stands at the bottom of the stairs, and Priya stands at the top.
Finally, she sighs. “An Affair to Remember.”
“I’m not sure that this qualifies as an ‘affair,’ Priya.”
“The movie,” she says. “Remember?”
Of course he remembers. They saw it together at the repertory theatre after putting on the last coats of Sangria Red and Ocean Blue.
They loved that old cinema — the flickering pink neon tubes outside, the burnished brass concession stand, the pastel-coloured paint peeling from the art deco friezes inside the cool, musty womb of that decaying theatre.
Priya had smuggled a mickey of Crown Royal into the mostly empty movie house, and she’d emptied it into the bucket of watery soda-fountain cola they bought at the concession stand. She and James sucked on their wax-paper-cup highball through two red-and-white-striped plastic straws, like kids on a date in a bygone era.
The scent of Priya sitting next to him in those crushed-down velvet seats was more intoxicating than the whiskey. Rather than wearing boutique perfume that costs as much per ounce as precious metals, Priya dabs vanilla extract on the back of her neck and behind each ear. When she leaned against him to sip that rye and Coke, her left breast would brush James’s right forearm; James knew that she was wearing that sexy transparent black bra beneath her blouse (he had watched her pluck it from the railing). It took all of his fortitude to prevent himself from kissing her vanilla-scented neck and earlobes.
James looks up at her now, standing there in her purple bathrobe at the top of the narrow staircase.
“I remember,” he says.
Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. They were both engaged to marry other people, but they fell in love with each other anyway. They would meet again in six months at the top of the Empire State Building if their love was meant to be.
“We’ll meet at the top of the CN Tower in six months,” Priya says. “If we both still feel the same way, we can take it from there. Okay?”
A jolt flashes through James’s body. Six months? He doesn’t have six months. He is not going to play the I think I might be dying card now, though; how desperate and pathetic would that look? So he simply says, “I don’t think I can go six months without seeing you, Priya.”
She sucks in her lower lip, the way she does when she’s trying not to cry. Even from this distance, from the bottom of the staircase, even in this dim lighting, with her face lowered into a shadow, James can see it.
“Six weeks, then,” Priya says. Then, with a flourish of her purple bathrobe, she turns and disappears.
James turns and pushes open the front door, and it sings out that lonesome high note, as always.
From behind the mould-scented curtains, the voice of Priya’s landlord crackles like a dusty record. “Priya’s repairman! You leavin’ now, son?”
“Yes, sir,” James says.
“Everything fixed now?” the old man wonders.
“No. Not everything.”
James hovers at the foot of the stairs and contemplates ascending.
The Toes of One Foot
Dapper Dan’s voice scratches the air like 80-grit sandpaper. “You know, Clementine, you can count the number of perfect days in a year on the toes of one foot.”
As she wheels the old warrior out from under the awning and into the sunlight, Clementine wonders why he said “the toes of one foot” instead of “the fingers of one hand.” At least he is using her actual name today; sometimes she is “Mary,” since apparently Clementine reminds Dan of some woman from his war years, where his memory has been spending a lot of time lately.
“Some days are so cold it’s cruel,” Dan continues, pausing to inhale the fragrant summer air. “And then some days are so hot it sucks the life right out of you. Some days you get soaked with rain, and some days you get pelted with snow and ice.”
His tone of voice adds a certain authority to everything he says. It reminds Clementine of a recording of some important speech, delivered through a crackling old radio with the tone knob cranked over to the bass side.
“Some days the wind gets up and tries to knock you down, and some days the air is just too still, like it’s waiting to pounce. Some days are so humid the air feels thick and congealed, like a bowl of reheated soup. Some days are so dry your skin cracks and blisters, like an old workboot.”
Dan’s seasoned, saddle-leather voice makes it seem to Clementine as if he is imparting some ancient wisdom to her, some metaphorically encoded philosophy of life, even when all he is doing is making small talk about th
e weather.
“But days like this one,” he continues slowly, sustaining the note of each vowel, stretching each syllable as if he’s playing a jazz solo on a tarnished saxophone, “days like this one are a true rarity.”
Dapper Dan and Clementine drift for a moment in the sweet, beautiful silence, until it is shattered by Sheila, the supervising nurse, who clangs the time-change bell as if she’s rattling a battlefield sabre. Sheila runs the veterans’ wing of the Faireville Nursing Home as if it’s a strict military unit, which the facility’s former-soldier patients neither want nor need.
Dan chooses to ignore the jangling bell. He says, “We should savour this day, Clementine, to show our appreciation. We should linger in this day, to show our gratitude.”
“And to whom should we show our gratitude, Dan?” Clementine says, knowing that Dan has proclaimed himself to be an atheist; she has observed that most old warriors either believe in God completely, or not in much of anything at all.
“We should be thankful to nature, I suppose,” Dan says. “Or to the universe, perhaps. Or to chance, maybe. To fate. To luck. To chaos. To whatever force it is that makes anything happen in this world.” He turns to glance up at Clementine, who is leaning on the grips of his wheelchair; he knows that his favourite nurse comes from a strictly religious family, so he offers, “Or to God, I suppose, if that’s what you choose to call it.”
Clementine closes her eyes and draws a long, slow breath in through her nostrils. The sound of her own breathing reminds her that she is alive. She would love to linger all afternoon on the sun porch with Dan, but now Nurse Sheila is screaming at her through the sliding doors of the veteran’s wing.
“Gawd-damn mit, Clem! Gawwwwwd-DAMN IT! How many times do I have to call you inside, Clem? Do the rules not apply to you?”
Clementine hates it that Sheila always calls her “Clem.” She isn’t fond of the name Clementine to begin with, but Clem sounds like the name sewn onto the patch on a pair of used worker’s overalls in the discount bin at the Sally Ann store. That’s probably the way that Sheila sees her, though: as just another labourer.
Rockets Versus Gravity Page 11
