by Ailsa Kay
The most obvious thing about her face, from this angle at least, is her chin and the set of her mouth. She has a strong chin, a single shallow dimple at its centre, and she bites her lower lip hard, as if biting down a pain. And it is maybe this combination, of the strong chin and the serious frown when she looks at the clock, together with the bitten lip that makes Tibor want to talk to her even though, for all he knows, she speaks no English.
He does another lap and then emerges beside her. “Cramp?”
She half laughs, more like a sniff, embarrassed. “I always get them.” American, he guesses. Probably also here for the conference. Academics occupy the entire hotel—geographers, historians, political scientists, legal theorists all here in Montreal, Quebec, to discuss the meaning and future of post-Soviet Central Europe.
“You have to walk it off.”
Holding her foot more tightly, she nods. “I’m sure it’ll go away in a minute.”
And Tibor, in a moment of what he would later consider remarkable insight, realizes that she is likely reluctant to struggle clumsily to an undignified stand and hobble away.
“Let me get your towel.”
“Oh. Thanks.” And she points to where it lies folded on one of the plastic lounge chairs.
He drapes the towel over her shoulders. “Can I give you a hand up or would you like to sit for a bit?”
“I’ll just sit it out, I think.”
“All right then. Well. I’m done for the day.” Tibor grabs his own towel and flip-flops back to the change room.
Warming in the sauna, he congratulates himself for being both perceptive and generous. He could have swum for another half-hour at least but instead had done the gracious thing, leaving the woman to deal with her affliction without spectators. He hopes she’d recognized how perceptive he’d been. He hopes he’ll see her again before the conference ends.
They nod when they see each other in the pool again the next morning. And then that afternoon she attends his paper on the twenty-first-century reverberations of early twentieth-century Hungarian nationalism, and she stays to ask him a question after the talk. Her stiffly collared shirt makes him long for the red one-piece, but he is undistracted by the freckled cleavage the shirt coyly hides as he explains the Hungarian emotional attachment to territories long-since lost.
There’s not much mystery to Tibor Roland. He knows this. He would like to be more intriguing. He’d like to have more layers, but he doesn’t. Mostly, he’s made his peace with this because, he figures, it’s what made him a historian. History gives him mysteries to solve, stories to tell. He’d chosen to specialize in Hungarian history both because this was his mother’s birthplace and because she refused to talk about it. So maybe his mother has layers that he doesn’t. In any case, Rafaela, clearly, is interested. On the last evening of the conference, over glasses of cheap Australian Shiraz, as limp, savoury pastries circulate in a newly carpeted room without chairs, they talk. The plastic square that dangles from her neck identifies her as an “independent scholar.” That is, unemployed. She’d completed a Ph.D. in regional studies, specializing in Russia, at Harvard six years ago, but she is based in Toronto now. She moved there with her husband when he got a job at Queen’s Park. No, not a politician but a policy analyst.
There are not too many women named Rafaela, certainly not more than one married to a provincial policy analyst. It is a coincidence, but there it is. Daniel had never introduced Tibor Roland to his wife.
“Daniel loves it,” she continues. “I can’t imagine anything more boring. Provincial politics—it’s all health care and education, wait times and dropout rates. Makes me want to stick a fork in my eye.” Rafaela grins. “Which I’ve never done, by the way. I’m really a paragon of self-restraint.” She lifts her wineglass to her lips and sips, somehow without shifting her laughing gaze from his.
Is she flirting with him? Has she mentioned her husband to make the boundaries clear? He expects her to say next: “I think you know my husband. Didn’t you go to school together?” But she doesn’t. And her tone is a ball tossed ever so gently. It says, How flimsy—no, how arbitrary and scalable—a boundary is a husband.
“Self-restraint’s all right if it saves your eye, I suppose, but I’d hate to think you’d adopted it as a defining virtue.”
“Really? I thought you Canadians were all about self-restraint. I’ve been trying to master it ever since I moved here, but I don’t think I’ve got it yet. I can tell by the way people stiffen.” She bares her teeth in aghast-Torontonian rictus. “Sort of the way you looked when you first saw me in the pool that day.”
Tibor feels himself blush. “I like to have the pool to myself.” He shrugs.
Mouth twitches. “Ah, Tibor. It’s hard to share, isn’t it?”
Rafaela’s breasts are perfectly pendant, barely supported, and they stretch the cotton dress she wears. Tibor thinks he would like to hold them, one in each hand, as he penetrates her from behind.
“I wanted to ask you yesterday,” she says, “about why Hungary seems to have become more nationalist, with more fascist leanings, than, say, Poland or the Czech Republic.”
They regain the ground of ordinary academic conversation, now pleasurably heightened by their confidence in their own attractiveness, the increasing likelihood of sex, their distance from her husband, Daniel, who has apparently never told his wife about his old friend, Tibor Roland. Tibor decides he’s hurt by this omission. Around them, the poorly ventilated room fills with the brittle polite laughter of academic networking. They go to the bar for more wine. Later, they sit together at dinner and when she turns to talk with the man to her right, Tibor feels abandoned and ridiculous. When she turns back, he is confident and witty again.
She has chocolate cake for dessert. He has pecan pie. They both have coffee. The less lucky drift away from the tables and back to their solitary rooms, leaving white napkins and crumbs of pastry.
“I’d like to see you again,” he says.
Tibor bites the inside of his upper lip but keeps his eyes on her face. He’s chosen the phrase carefully, not to offend, leaving it open for her to decide. Her reaction seems inordinately delayed, and for a moment he wonders if he’s misjudged, if she takes her marriage seriously and their conversation had been empty flirtation, not invitation. She is parsing the question, considering. God. She is going to tell him to fuck off. And then she’s going to go home and tell her husband that his old buddy, Tibor Roland, hit on her. But then, reprieve. Vibrant pink begonias blooming from her cleavage, all the way to her forehead.
“In my room?” she says finally. Daniel’s wife says, all red.
. . .
“I’m making eggs. You want eggs?”
“What kind of eggs?”
“Scrambled?”
“Scrambled is good.”
Daniel had his own place, a room in a shared house just off College Street. Tibor often slept on the couch on Thursday night after pub, unable or unwilling to return to his cheaper but much less exciting room north of Dupont. No one lived north of Dupont, but Tibor had found a basement in a house owned by lesbian filmmakers who grew vegetables in their front yard and charged him almost nothing in rent in return for his walking their dog and shovelling their walk in the winter.
This morning he remembers was fourteen years ago.
Tibor wandered into the kitchen in his bare feet, rubbing his eyes. “Tea?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Daniel whipped eggs as Tibor filled the kettle, his face stretched in its rounded chrome surface flecked with brown and orange spatters where grease had dried. There were four years of spattered grease on this kettle, and Tibor remembered when it was new and he’d only just met Daniel and he’d come to Daniel’s apartment to cram for the Russian midterm and Daniel had made tea, boiling the water in his brand-new, just-moved-out-of-home kettle. This kettle had seen four years of their friendship. Four years of Thursday nights and Friday mornings just like this one. Four years of sh
aring the pains and victories of academic life.
This kettle had witnessed the first nomination to dean’s list (both of them), the first C- (Daniel’s for a paper he’d written too quickly and, in retrospect he had to admit, too polemically), the first piece published in the student newspaper (also Daniel’s, an editorial, also polemical), the first suggestion from a professor to apply to graduate school (Tibor’s, from a history professor). Other momentous events: Tibor’s passion for the Japanese Visa student in his cultural geography class. It had lasted for the entire year, unrequited. Daniel’s joining the campus communist party and growing his hair long. Then meeting Juliette and cutting it all off and considering a career in law. Tibor’s confession that he had also been in love with Juliette. Both of them deciding together that being a socialist was more ethical than being a lawyer and then realizing that was the dumbest conclusion they had ever reached when Tibor, stoked on Solzhenitsyn and his first-ever reading of Foucault, reminded Daniel that any system has its disciplinary apparatus whether panopticon prison or gulag. Fight the power; want nothing.
Tibor loved the layers of grease on chrome. It was history in the making, tangible and unclean. Hardened volcanic streams of orange and brown also covered the gas stove—on its once-pristine white enamel surface, years of sausages and bacon and fried egg and canned beans. There was a satisfying feeling, in the house, of unperturbed masculinity, of the accumulated effort of boys becoming men.
Tibor’s mouth tasted ugly and he smelled of cigarettes and sweaty sleep and beery farts under flat polyester quilts but this, too, was a Friday morning joy, the stink and muzz of hangover. They ate on the futon couch that Tibor had slept on, holding plates mounded with eggs and toast close to their chins. Famished. They fed their bellies. They slaked their thirst with huge gulps of sweet hot tea from mugs purloined from family cabinets, evidence of the roommates’ pre-independence histories. Daniel’s firmly declaimed OPSEU: Your union while Tibor sipped from someone’s chipped homemade pottery.
“Aaah.” Daniel leaned back, hoisted his feet onto the milk crate that served as a coffee table as he lit a cigarette. “Good breakfast.”
Tibor leaned back beside him. “Great breakfast.”
In the kitchen, two of Daniel’s roommates talked in morning monosyllables. Tibor heard cornflakes hitting a bowl. How is it you always recognize it’s cornflakes? The sound of it, dry and husky. The cornflake sound.
“I got into Harvard.”
Daniel said it between drags, still holding his inhale so the sentence came out tight. Foreshortened. He exhaled, and the smoke plumed about his head.
Tibor’s chest tightened. He didn’t even know Daniel had applied to Harvard. Harvard. Who the fuck applied to Harvard?
“I didn’t want to say it out loud. I mean, it’s Harvard, you know.”
Tibor slapped Daniel on the shoulder—somewhat clumsily because they sat too closely together on the couch to manage a sincere, manly clap on the back but well intentioned. “Well, way to go, man. Harvard.”
Daniel’s face, as Tibor sneaked a sideways glance at it, seemed to shine. He was trying to hold back the shine, but he couldn’t. That face shone with the most arrogant son-of-a-bitch shine on the planet. It shone with worldliness, with the love of the world itself. The world loved Daniel and he knew it. He’d always known it and now he had proof. Sun-shining-out-of-his-ass proof. Fucker.
“Well, I should get going.” Tibor bent to find his socks somewhere under the coffee table. “Gotta get to the library. I’m so behind in Soviet politics.”
He fumbled his socks on. They smelled of his feet.
“Really good news about Harvard,” he said, standing. “Really. Amazing news.” And he patted his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, his pants pockets for his wallet. “Sorry to run like this. We’ll celebrate next Thursday?”
“Sorry, Rolly. Can’t next Thursday. I’m cramming.” Daniel always called him by his last name, Roland, Rolly for short. It used to make Tibor feel like he was part of a club. Now he hated the familiarity, the presumption. How had he never noticed the advantage it gave Daniel—the right of the namer to name.
“Right. Of course. Harvard man must cram.” Tibor heard his voice and didn’t like the sound of it. Better to just leave. Envy was a fist-sized bolus of undigested egg, lodged just above his sternum.
“See you later then,” he said, smiling widely at Daniel, who still sat on the sleep-rumpled futon, basking in his own glory.
In the grey linoleum hallway just the other side of the door, Tibor shoved his feet into cold shoes, grabbed the satchel he’d dropped there on the floor the night before, and fled.
The once-stylish Palmerston Boulevard, where Daniel lived, was just regaining its elegance in the early 1990s, but the eras were still rubbing shoulders: working-class immigrants who’d bought in the early 1970s and made vegetable gardens of their backyards, single men in tiny rooms with hotplates and bar fridges, students in similar tiny rooms, or shared apartments with hardwood floors newly exposed. Rents weren’t cheap in this neighbourhood. In summer evenings, up and down College, gorgeous young women with nonchalant hair laughed and swallowed red wine in great gulps and ate mussels with bread or sharply seasoned pizza, and young unshaven men with more wit than Tibor made them laugh and shared their wine and debated O.J.’s guilt, or Clinton’s charisma, or art funding in Canada.
When he first visited Daniel on Palmerston (when Daniel first made him tea with the brand-new kettle), Tibor felt he’d finally entered the heaving, bubbling pool where life itself was formed. This, right here, was the organic mess from which ideas, history itself, would emerge. You could feel the surge of it. You could walk along College and feel the sidewalk cracking, the old storefronts heaving, the streets blowing with futurity. And if you were here, you were part of it. Simple as that. Living cheek by jowl with the great and the potentially great, you could be poor, be artists, be scientists and writers and intellectuals, and you could whip this world. This was what it meant to be off College. It was not Tibor’s world. Tibor lived in a basement north of Dupont, a land barren of pretty girls and Italian coffees, and as he walked north, he knew that mattered.
Tibor had applied to Toronto, McGill, and Queen’s. He’d yet to receive an answer from any of them. He was reasonably certain that Toronto would accept him into its master’s program, but he was hoping for a federal scholarship, enough money that he could move to a new place, maybe a smaller place, more compact, where he could thrive and grow into the proportion he felt was rightly his. But an American school? He should have expected it from Daniel. And to keep it a secret too.
Tibor propelled himself northward, legs and arms pumping past the apartment balconies where he’d rather be, furious with his own passivity, furious with the fucking Tibor Rolandness of him that he hadn’t had the temerity to imagine Harvard for himself.
. . .
Three weeks pass before Rafaela calls. June. For the first week, he checked his answering machine regularly and his heart jumped when the phone rang. But then nothing, and he figured that she’d gotten home and given her head a shake, realized that she was married and what had she been thinking. She seemed a practical kind of woman, one not likely to succumb to fantasy.
So when she calls and says, “Hello, this is Rafaela,” she is answered, at first, by the blank silence of surprise.
“Rafaela,” he says finally. “How are you?”
“I’m good, thanks, and you?”
“Well, I can’t complain.” Did he really say that? He cringes, knocks a fist to his forehead.
“Great, great. I’m just calling to…” And here she, too, stumbles, uncertain of the tone and language required to set up a meeting where obviously the purpose is sex but where, just as obviously, the purpose couldn’t be overtly stated. “Are you free this Thursday afternoon?”
Tibor does a quick mental run through his schedule. Empty, basically. Why pretend? “Thursday? Thursday’s fine. Where would you, ah…”
/>
“How about…There’s a Second Cup on King, near Jarvis. Say twelve-thirty?”
“King and Jarvis,” he repeats, writing it down on the back of an envelope as though he might forget it otherwise. “I’ll see you there.”
King Street is nowhere close to his home, or his work, thank goodness. Also far from the University of Toronto student ghetto. Not much chance he’d bump into anyone he knew, students or faculty. King and Jarvis, where the business and bank towers peter out, and where, just a thin block away, furniture stores and condos are shouldering aside homeless shelters, pawnshops, and prostitutes. The Second Cup—bland and in between, the perfect setting for an illicit rendezvous. An affair.
Sometime not far into his cappuccino, he stutters to a stop. How absurd to be sitting—no, to be sunk—in a brown leather armchair with his knees uncomfortably high under posters of lavishly frothed milk, trading observations about Toronto in the summer—too humid, bad air quality, but there’s nothing like the pleasure of a beer on a street-side patio—and doesn’t it all look so utilitarian after Montreal’s pretty streets. It is so absurd that it almost entirely obliterates any sexual desire. The steam of latte, the brainless chatter of glossy-haired girls, the fucking endless grind and whirr of machines: it’s enough to flatten the most illicit of passions. And Rafaela. She is, after all, a quite ordinary woman with crow’s feet at her eyes and chapped lips. He watches her suck her frappuccino through a straw, eyes focused on the street outside, and he tries to hold on to the freckles and the wet red suit and the pink begonias, but they are fading fast.
He’s about to make up an excuse about a forgotten appointment or a diseased testicle when she fastens her blue eyes on him and says, “If you think you feel stupid, imagine what it’s like for me.”
There are things that he could say, but thankfully he does not say them. Without another word, they stand and leave their quasi-coffees on the table. They walk out and across the street into St. James Park under a blue sky pulled impossibly tight. They stroll out and ahead of their self-awareness. They stroll—slowly, closely. The heat feels good with that city humidity pushing down, flowers pushing up, and the dark still-cool lake at their backs. Junkies drowse, indolent under trees, and dogwalkers stoop to pick up after their pets while under the cover of the Victorian gazebo a tourist levels his camera. By the time they reach the end of the short park, Tibor is beginning, but just beginning, to remember the colour of Rafaela’s nipples.
