Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  For five years now Alicia has held her Yule party on Bruce’s birthday, co-opting all our colleagues and stuffing them so full of booze and canapés that they’re too hungover and bloated for the next week to think about having cocktails or even macaroni and cheese with Bruce and me. And Bruce has never said a thing to her about it, because he’s too sweet and self-effacing. He says he doesn’t care, but it chafes me, even though I’ve never said anything either. Of course she knows it’s his birthday, everyone knows, and every year at the party he gets back-patted and toasted and maybe even handed a trinket or two from his closer friends in the department, but the party is really and ultimately about Alicia and her gorgeous condo, her sound system and whatever DJ she’s hired for the night, her snack trays with local organic gluten-free ingredients, as Alicia tells us repeatedly, Alicia and her superhuman ability to be smart and toned and a great teacher and a volunteer at the Immigrant Workers’ Centre and still somehow have time and resources to throw The Party of the Millennium (So Far!).

  I slam the door too hard after I help Bruce out and he jumps a little. “Relax, kid, you’re makin me nervous,” he says. I take his hand and we walk up the outdoor staircase together, which is treacherous with snow. When we get to the door Bruce hums the Death Star theme. He is rallying, for my sake. As happens about every three days, my chest is crushed by a suffocating love for him, a love like a giant fist that squeezes my lungs into pancakes. I fight it, because if I don’t I will cry, or hit someone.

  There is a shriek from the hallway, and Alicia rushes at us, a gale of scarves and tinkling silver bracelets and a sweet jasmine smell. I shriek back and we hug. “Bernadette, you are the mostest,” she says. “You look fantabulous.”

  “I am ravishing, aren’t I?” I say.

  Then she turns to Bruce and hugs him tightly, not put off by his frailty, for which I’m grateful, though I worry she might snap a rib. “You look great,” she says.

  “Alicia, you mendacious bitch,” I say, “he looks like shit and you know it.”

  “Hi Alicia,” Bruce says, smiling at the floor. “It’s nice to see you.”

  “It’s nice to be seen. How about you kids put your coats in the bedroom, and then head over to the kitchen and let me fix you a drinkie-poo? We’re about to start the gift swap.”

  The gift swap has complicated rules in which presents are taken from a pile, but if you don’t like the present you’ve got, you can forcibly “trade” with someone else, even if they don’t want to give up their own gift. “So,” says a thin blond man in a sweater-vest, “it’s a ‘trade’ the way Canada ‘traded’ with the Indigenous peoples.” There is some laughter. Alicia points to the man, smiling, then taps the side of her nose. I wonder if she’s sleeping with him. Someone like her could have her pick, and not just among the teachers. Though maybe that’s unfair—she can’t be as sure-footed and brassy as she seems. Can she? For all that’s said about contemporary women’s sexual freedom and broad-ranging, uncrimped lust, surely some of those old demons must still stalk the female libido. Fear. Shame. Pride.

  My contribution to the gift swap is a sandwich, which I made myself. I took no small amount of pains with this sandwich. It’s goat cheese and grilled tofu—vegetarian-friendly—with roasted red peppers and homemade arugula pesto, on fresh pumpernickel from the Première Moisson. It’s stuck with a frilled toothpick and wrapped in Saran Wrap. It might seem silly but it’s bound to bring more joy than whatever Dollarama paperweights or coffee mugs are hidden in the pile. But when its recipient—a young woman who teaches, I think, videography, opens it, she looks puzzled. I explain what it is, and when I get to goat cheese she yelps “Hello, vegan!” and lunges for a stapler shaped like a hippopotamus. This stapler turns out to be the most coveted prize in the heap, and at one point a man named Martin, one of Bruce’s more admired colleagues in the history department, refuses to yield it to a usurper. The two arm wrestle for it, Martin emerges the victor, hands in the air like Muhammad Ali, and when the game is over I’ve ended up with my own sandwich. I laugh in what I hope is a good-natured manner and put it in my purse.

  Bruce sits the game out. He looks pale but he’s laughing along with everyone else. “You and your goat cheese,” he whispers, catching my wrist.

  “Worse than Hitler,” I whisper back, and he giggles.

  “Let’s get DOWN!” someone shouts, and whatever comes after is drowned in a surge of bass beats and swelling synth.

  The condo, which was once a hat factory, is open-concept; the only true door is the bathroom’s. On the way there I pass through the bedroom, and without really meaning to, I stop to examine the wall, which is hung with framed things. There are Alicia’s degrees, and photos of her hiking in Thailand and receiving an award for outstanding achievement in teaching. There are a few arty black-and-white shots of buildings, and an old-fashioned drawing of a bird.

  In the centre of the collection, in a plain black frame, is a portrait of three. I don’t know why I’ve never noticed it before; it doesn’t look new. Two are middle-aged women, both heavy-set. One wears a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt and has very short hair, with bangs spiking up from her forehead. Her arm is around the other woman, whose neck is draped with a colourful scarf. She has a taffy-coloured bob, and wears a touch of peach lipstick and dangly silver earrings. Her head is angled slightly towards the leather-clad woman, her mouth open as though laughing. The first woman is more stoic, but the corners of her mouth lift like she’s just made a joke that satisfies her. Behind and to the left of them is a battered Suzuki motorcycle.

  In between the two women is an unattractive girl of about twelve or thirteen. Her hair is long and greasy and parted in the middle. It swags over her eyes, which gaze out of the picture from behind large frameless glasses. She wears an ugly, pilled turquoise zip-up jogging sweater. Her cheeks and forehead are livid with acne, her expression one of misery unadulterated. Other than the hair and the acne, she is the spit image of the leather-clad woman.

  Behind me come footsteps and I trot into the bathroom, careful not to slam the door. The knob jiggles.

  “Just a minute!” I sing out.

  “Get a move on, Bernie, I have to piss like a wildebeest,” says the girl from the picture.

  Pink grapefruit martini in hand, I swerve through the crowd like an icebreaker navigating glacial seas. An elbow pops out and jostles me, and half the drink spills onto my wrist. I find Bruce and Alicia being talked at by a young man with thick black hair that’s short in front and longer on the crown of his head, where it sticks up in a brave thatch. The effect is that of the top of a pineapple. As he talks he bobs his head continuously. I hand the drink to Bruce and lick my damp forearm.

  “Labyrinth is basically about development of female sexuality,” he is saying, “the journey from child to woman, with an emphasis on the normative motherhood role.” He gives me a short nod and goes on. “See, at first Sarah rejects the nurturing role she’s been given over her brother. She’s still a child, essentially genderless, and she just wants to play. But by the end of the movie she’s come to accept and even love caring for the baby. It’s reinforced continually. Hoggle, for instance, represents the male phallus, which at first is revolting to the girl-child—she finds him ugly, crude, and useless. But by the end of the movie she’s made him her closest friend.”

  “So Labyrinth teaches girls to love cock,” Alicia says. She looks at me and goggles her eyes. I picture that teenage girl, vulnerable as an eyelid. I widen my eyes back and mouth “shameless” at her. She smiles and pinches my side, under my bra.

  “I’m making a film about it,” the man says. “A documentary. I haven’t started working on it yet, but the ideas are all up there.” He bobs his head a few more times, to show us where the ideas are.

  “I’m sorry,” says Alicia. “Bernie, this is Oliver—he’s a new hire in the department. Very up-and-coming. Oliver, this is Bernie. Th
e rock of the chemistry department.”

  “Sounds like crystal meth,” I say.

  “Now there’s an idea,” says Bruce. “Turn the chemistry department into a meth lab. No more funding problems.”

  “New microscopes for everyone.”

  “Solid gold Bunsen burners.”

  “Swarovski crystal test tubes.”

  “That’s the ticket,” says Bruce.

  “Speaking of,” Alicia says. She takes a long rectangular tin out of her pocket; it bears the image of a lion-haired woman in a position of repose on a divan. Alicia opens the tin and takes out a copper-coloured pipe. Under the pipe is a baggie containing a spiky white substance.

  “Where did you get that,” says the blond sweater-vest, whose name is Jeff. The videographer is behind him, looking raptly over his shoulder.

  “I know a guy,” says Alicia.

  “I bet she does.” Bruce looks at me and I realize I’ve spoken out loud, though quietly.

  When Alicia flames the rock there’s a smell of burning plastic. I take only a quick hit, to unbend the edges. Bruce does too. In this way we are beholden to Alicia, and she to us.

  “Put some hurt on it,” says Oliver as Bruce passes him the pipe. “Oh yeah, put some hurt on it.”

  Alicia goes to the stereo system and chooses a record. John Prine and Nanci Griffith. As a kid in Abitibi I thought John Prine was a friend of my dad’s, that country music was about us.

  “Alicia.”

  “Hnh.”

  “Alicia.”

  “What.”

  “You always forget.”

  “What.”

  “Every year. You always forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Today,” I say, “is Bruce’s birthday.”

  “Ah,” she says. “Shit. Bruce?”

  Bruce shrugs in a no-denying-it-now kind of way.

  “You know that,” I say. “You’ve known that every year. But you don’t care. Because your party is the mo-host important.” As I say this I realize I am making a speech, so I try to do it up a little by standing on the futon and raising my arms in the air. And a one and a two and a—

  I tell her her parties are insufferable displays of ego. I tell her she only acts sensitive and socially-aware because it looks good on her c.v., and that if she really cared about her friends she’d give a rat’s ass about a man who almost died—I say it, died—and at least get him a goddamn fucking birthday cake.

  I say that a shitty childhood is no excuse for such two-facedness, and what does she think, she’s the only one who ever had gay moms? Suck it up.

  I tell her, more or less, that she doesn’t deserve Bruce’s friendship, nor to a lesser extent, mine.

  “But here we are,” I say. “Here we goddamn fucking are.”

  My point made, I sit back down with a flounce. Bruce, in his infinite modesty, refuses to look at either of us.

  There is a pause. Then Alicia convulses as though she’s been stabbed. “Oh. My. God. Bernie. You’re right. It’s Bruce’s birthday.” Hands on his skinny shoulders, she leans in close. “Bruce,” she says, “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “Thank you, Alicia.”

  “Although. Please. Inquiring minds want to know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Where is your other testicle?”

  Someone, the videographer, issues a single barking laugh. I don’t know where to put my eyes.

  “I mean,” Alicia continues, “they did take it off, right? Did you keep it?”

  Bruce looks at his hands, his index fingers forming a steeple. Then he says “well, I had originally planned to donate it to science.”

  “Really? I mean, you didn’t want to keep it? As a souvenir?”

  “And deprive modern science of one of the great marvels of our time?”

  “The Ball of Bruce,” Alicia says reverently.

  “Schoolchildren would come from miles around,” he says. “But actually, I keep it in a jar of formaldehyde. On the mantel above the fireplace.”

  “Mais non,” says Alicia.

  “Saving for a special occasion,” I say, somehow.

  “On an unrelated note,” Bruce says, “Alicia, when’s your birthday?” Alicia laughs, throwing her head back in delight.

  Some of the tension in my throat unknots, leaving only a dry ache from the smoke. I put my arm around Bruce. “I believe,” I say, “the time has come for a song.” He glances at me, then away again. I would do anything for him, anything. I turn to the room and raise my arm like I’m holding a baton. “And a one and a two and a—”

  Mon cher ami

  C’est à ton tour

  De te laisser parler d’amour

  The Québecois national anthem is sung in unison, and then in a round, with me conducting like Mickey Mouse in an old cartoon. A few people sing the birthday song in English, and underneath John Prine is still strumming his sad cowboy song. People sway and swing their glasses, bottles in the air, stomping on the ground, whistling and hollering at my husband. I lean in close to Bruce and sing in his ear. His face is flushed and he’s staring at the floor. My dearest, my heart.

  My dear friend

  It’s now your turn

  To let yourself speak of love

  Such a wonderfully simple wish.

  I lift my head. I must have fallen asleep; there is a small damp spot on the upholstery where my mouth has rested. Alicia is seemingly comatose on Jeff’s lap; he is mumbling the top of her head with half-conscious kisses. Bruce is gone. I run my hands through my hair a few times and hoist myself off the sofa. My eyes feel like feet and my feet feel like basketballs. I can’t find Bruce anywhere in the apartment. I go into the kitchen and rinse two cigarette butts out of a glass jar, fill it with water and drink it in one go. A breeze nudges my bare ankles, and I see the door to the balcony is open a crack. Bruce is standing in the light snow, bundled in a fleece blanket, looking out across the alleyway. I slip my feet into a pair of rubber boots by the door and join him. It’s cold enough. The windows of the apartments across the way are all dark.

  “You doing okay?” I ask.

  “Fine,” he says, and continues to stare out at the alley.

  “I know,” I say after a moment, “but it’s not her fault. She’s just kind of socially retarded is all.”

  He looks at me, and I realize he isn’t upset at Alicia. He’s angry. At me, for what I did for him. To him. Furious. He could kill me with his pale skinny hands.

  “Bruce,” I say.

  “You had no right,” he says. “I hate that kind of thing. You know I do.”

  “I thought,” I said, “I mean after everything that’s happened—”

  He laughs, bitterly. In that laugh I hear the old smoke, the old fire.

  “Sometimes, Bernie,” he says, “I wish it was you instead of me.”

  “You have no idea,” I say. We both wait for me to say something else. The snow keeps up like it has somewhere to be.

  I know what I’ll do when I get home. I’ll go into the baby’s room. I’ll stand over the crib where he’s sleeping and lift him into my arms. He’ll stretch a bit and moan, but he won’t wake up. I’ll sit in the rocking chair by the window and look out at the tree. It will be still and dark and tree-like. I would do anything for him, anything, but never the right thing, and the weight of the baby’s head against my arm will be almost heavy as that knowledge, but not heavy enough.

  The Yoga Teachers

  Risa’s mother tries for what seems like hours to get Risa’s thick bumpy hair into a French braid. The hair is remarkably resistant, though Risa’s mother uses a snagging angry-toothed comb, thirty-seven bobby pins, and half a jar of Dippity-do. “Ow,” Risa says every time her mother pokes a bobby pin into the damp sticky mass. Her hair stands in gelled ridges over h
er head, like an aerial photo of the badlands. Finally, when Risa and her mother are both near tears, Risa’s father knocks on the door, and Risa must get into the car with him and be driven through the long snowy corridor to her dance class.

  Every week it’s like this, the vinyl floor that lifts at the corners like old slices of cheese and Risa’s teacher who is too beautiful, with breasts like long, smooth loaves inside her unitard, and her heavy circling arms. First position, second position, fourth position. Bras bas, which Risa knows is French for “arms lowered” but still thinks of as bra-BAH, a rallying cry shouted by staunch men on horseback as they ride into battle. First position hums like a calm day in an open field. Second position is a loud embarrassed relative. Third position is a mythological creature, half soldier and half clamshell. Fourth position is grey and ticking like the inside of a watch. Fifth position might be a little bit magic because of the way your thighs squeeze together.

  Risa was not meant for ballet, this she knows. She knows it’s because of the shape of her head and her thick, bumpy hair. Other girls—like tiny, flexible Shauna—have neat gravity-defying buns that rest comfortably on the back curve of their skulls. Their buns stay done up without hair nets or Dippity-do, they don’t have greasy braids crunchy with bobby pins. Their heads are streamlined and aerodynamic. They look like small fighter planes, doing grand jetés across the floor. In comparison, Risa feels like a wooden cart or a wheelbarrow; creaky, unstable, about to crush someone’s toe. Her teacher rolls her eyes when she thinks Risa isn’t looking, then puts her in the back row.

  This week, though, Risa’s fat, beautiful, cruel teacher is not there. Instead there are a man and a woman who are here to teach them yoga. The man is blond and tanned and muscular, but he is not a babe the way her friends talk about babes like David Hasselhoff. His hair is dry and tufted, and he wears a purple sleeveless shirt out of which his arms dangle like braided rope. The woman is small and intense, with an oily nose and torn blue sweatpants. They are American, so they can’t pronounce the last names of the kids in her class: Jurczak, Konwalchuk, Jzojzofsky. The yoga teachers want Risa to concentrate on her breath. Her breath is a retractable column like a telescope, and she has to push and pull it around her chest like a toy on a stick. She never knew this before, but she can see that it’s true, because sometimes it sticks in her neck, where part of the column must have rusted. The woman demonstrates the proper way to inhale and exhale, and her breath echoes through her as though her chest were an underground parking lot.