“That’s right, buddy, the skinny pedal,” Stan was saying. “You can do it. Go any slower and I’d be able to give you the finger. Oh, sorry, glasses please.”
Andrew waited until he returned to the centre lane to reach over and nudge Stan’s sunglasses back up his nose. Half an hour later, Stan announced another plan. “You’re smooth between lanes. You keep your eyes open and moving, and I’m willing to bet you don’t keep those fingers near the horn just to impress me. Drivers ed taught you well. When we get back home, phone around to find a decent package for renting a standard.”
“We Porsche shopping while in T.O.?”
“They taught you to drive,” Stan clarified. “I’ll teach you to drive fast.”
On rented cars they progressed from frustration in empty parking lots to endless trips though town — “Stop and go traffic’ll give you the chops like nothing else. One more round” — to larger and larger highways. “Throw it fat on the curve. Fat on the curve,” Stan ordered, but joyously, urging Andrew to engine-brake by dropping into fourth. “Who’s dancing with a big one now?!” Stan yelled. Andrew hadn’t seen him grin like this in years. “All right, we’re out. Don’t burn your power.”
Here, beside Andrew’s legs on the drum kit of clutch and gas, Stan was almost all voice. Once again Stan was a disempowered body and a managerial, almost imperious voice. You’ll find a . . . You’ll want to . . . Bend down to look . . . Hundreds of times Andrew had wanted him to shut up. A few times he said so. Then, there in the fast night, he wished he could close his eyes to get just voice, swing hand over hand on that baritone rope. And this time the voice was different, crackling with fun even when it was full of care, maybe even peppered with a little daring.
“Think of chess,” Stan half-counselled and half-commanded. “Don’t just look at what’s moving, but also what could move. And from where. Rank and file. What’s beside you? Either side? What’s in front and behind? Take the Accord and do a full right sweep.”
The surprises were as numerous as the lane changes. That Stan knew all this, had once done it. Ghost muscles, the atrophied sacks at the tops of his arms, hid days of fast youth. Imagine those bent, cabled hands dissolving into pliant fingers, an easy palm, into the flick and snap of third to fourth gear, the right hook into fifth.
“No. No. Stay here. There’s space, regardless of how fast they’re going. You can fit. Gain on the Prelude. More. More. C’mon, you’re not even in his lane. Good. Steady. He’s a fixed distance in front of you. Feel that. Know it. Don’t lose or gain any speed, just slide left. The Neon’s not going to hit you. Slide. Slide.”
And the waste. The rented car. The scorching fuel. Insurance. A possible fine. “You handle the speed. I’ll handle the speeding,” Stan said more than once.
Andrew had got the balance down from paid lessons, got the clutch-and-gas Tai Chi, and took every prompting to use it. Stan didn’t need to close his eyes to remember the yin and yang of the pedals. Every kick and release rippled through the seat backs, each chuck and pull echoed through the floor. The kid was all right, all pink meat and reflexes, earning his confidence in five-kilometres-an-hour increments.
“Always know what’s happening to the space you’re leaving,” said Stan.
“Yeah. Got it.”
“Why?”
“So you know what’s happening and what could happen.”
“Be more specific. Your life depends on it.”
“To know where the cars are.”
“You’re repeating yourself. Always know if you can move back. A leap’s fundamentally different when you can’t leap back.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Is it? Anything over one-twenty, you’re dead in seconds. I’m a train wreck. You, we need to keep whole.”
That night, wired and splinted into bed, Stan could still feel the speed, the old narrow tunnel rush of it. Staring absently at the ceiling, he remained in the pouring lanes, was still in the fast tile game of moving cars. You handle the speed. I’ll handle the speeding.
Mercifully, Stan’s intended police charade had gone untested. For the bond with the boy, for this one rush he could arrange, Stan had thought himself ready to pretend to a police officer that the visible mutiny of his body had suddenly become worse, that the hostages of his bent shoulders or tented hands or half-paralyzed limbs were now in even greater danger. If a cop car had pulled them over, Stan told himself he would have gone horse-eyed and gestured with one of his paws at his silver tracheotomy tube. He’d swap badges across the boy’s chest, mouthing can’t breathe, work spittle all the way to the ER. He’d been slipping though the medical cracks for years, repeating syringomyelia so narcoleptic interns and pudgy GPs could make it to the nearest reference guide. Spine mechanics, trachea mechanics. Wow, same thing happened years ago. Some kind of blockage. I’m fine now.
This was what his parenting had become: reckless, pointless speeding protected by lies and schemes, weakness a badge. Sorry, Andrew, sorry — playing my hand.
40
The wetness in the highway air has changed once more. Again his cheeks wear a moist blush, but something in the wet air is different. His curious chin prowls about ceaselessly, a dog dissatisfied with every corner. Finally his flared nostrils understand. He can feel water but no longer smells it. The salt is ending.
Ferris-wheeling over the next New Brunswick hill, he sees a flash of river snaking through the trees. Mentally he leaps ahead into the shaving clean of cold moving water. This keen leap should be regarded as the fruit of a fourteen-minute climb, should be tied to his three-digit pulse, and yet he is already a series of wet crescents. His chinstrap floats among the reeds of his whiskers. His crotch is a swamp. If saturation won’t change, though, temperature certainly will.
Down the hill, up an oiled gravel side road past a faded Dead End sign, he lugs the hot machine until the river curls and gurgles in front of him. He digs beneath his jaw for the helmet’s warm buckle, removes and cups the bright yellow beetle in one hand. Exposed, his sweat-drenched hair begins to cool in the breeze.
As soon as he dismounts he begins scraping his pale, wrinkled feet from the tight, hot shoes. The wet jersey comes over his head like a sail in scorched wind. Glancing briefly around the gravelled shoreline of weeds and squat shrubs, he finally tosses the balled jersey ahead of him into the river.
The water’s cold bite is just a nibble compared to the icy mud’s ceaseless, severing gnaw. Strips of mud seal around each toe, buzzing constantly with a frigid electricity. Beneath his heels, the mud sucks playfully at first, then jealously, entrappingly, as he tries to stumble forward into the water’s filleting cold. Wading in past good sense, he is disappointed to see streaks of dirt still visible on his shins beneath the thin brown gauze of diffusing river mud. How can the cold hurt his skin so much without cleaning it? A thin, frigid line inside his skull may be a logical argument for a higher water temperature at the river’s surface but may also be the thin edge of a hypothermic wedge as this long body of sun-cooked sweat, this strip of plunging mercury springs forward into brain-dissolving cold. He turns onto his back to hold his skull together with a series of lung-emptying whoops. Inside his recently molten shorts, his testicles mutiny and burrow into his pelvis. Sliding the shorts off, he either kills two dirty birds with one foul stone by using the balled Lycra as a washcloth or he simply smears bacteria all over himself. Each armpit gets chiselled with soap. As the cold deepens, chest, thighs and feet are lathered and rinsed with increasing haste. Contrary to both experience and expectation, his crotch remains warmest and invites a scratchy, prolonged soaping.
Returning to the gravelly shore he watches purple spill over his skin, cheap Chianti barfed from every vein, before he’s even out of the water. Fingers jerking on a pannier zipper, he rips his way through to the car-care chamois which 250 Touring Tips assured him would make the perfect camp towel. He shoves the faux-sheepskin chamois, a silly beige rectangle no larger than a placemat, around his
body in absurd shapes — a scrotum-to-stomach codpiece, a nipple-to-nipple flag — to arrest the growing chill. Still, cold spills in. Fleece, rain pants and toque stall but don’t reverse the purple tide. He needs a burn. Back left pannier for the sealed bag of dryer lint, lid-pocket for the waterproof matches. He has four sources of paper.
When he had read touring sites refer to dryer lint as “puffy gasoline,” he was skeptically stupid enough to take matches along on his next trip to his apartment laundry room. To his very abrupt surprise, the pink cloud of lint in his hand had exploded its already puffed nature, maximizing the three-dimensional sprawl of its shaggy molecules in a nearly instantaneous leap from end ignited to end burning. Although he had hoped to drop it to the ground and extinguish it with his shoe, the lint was even lighter when it was ablaze, and it floated, a tiny Hindenburg above dirty, cracked linoleum.
Now at the riverside, Andrew retrieves his already diminished sack of lint with shivering fingers. He is by now a graduated sapper and knowingly laments the charge’s meagre supply. Cold continues to race out of the river and fling itself at him. Arctic cleavers take one kneecap, then the other, as he piles twigs, sticks and snapped lengths of dead branches. The match’s tiny flame wobbles then stands before briefly igniting the lint’s inadequate store. Again the cyclist’s razor pares mass from priority. He wants fire. Toilet paper, novel, Betty’s postcards, or map? Choose now.
No single garment is less welcoming to life without toilet paper than cycling shorts. Given the snugness of the cycling shorts, their value and a crotch itch that he fears is becoming constant, he reaches instead for the map and slices off its unnecessary provinces. Newfoundland, off in its columnar time zone, is the first to go, then Thunder Bay and a panel of Ontario from the other edge. The useless southern row, New Brunswick’s porch door on the States, also meets the press gang. In less than a week and with the help of his knife, Quebec will finally separate.
Warming, finally, he begins to refold the heartland remnant of the map then recognizes that he has already biked off its neat squares. The red highway line stretched between distant Maritime towns has no relation to two and a half days of sweat. The map’s lime-green hash marks are too quaint for these acres of trees. Older than the nascent Trans Canada Trail, the map doesn’t show him the one thing he can’t find himself. This gap between paper map and daily muscle is a small epiphany, the mere actualization of theory learned with a burning thigh. More important is his acceptance of a deeper, simpler navigation. He doesn’t need a map at all. Just take the highway west. Chase the setting sun.
Before this trip, before every single thing he carried had to have a present or impending use, he would have burned the rest of the map now to mark this wild new leg.
41
In December, Betty stuck an enigmatic Post-it Note a metre and a half up a door frame in the front hall and changed his Kingston house again. PRISM NAVEL. The note made him even more impatient for her to come home. Home. The word bent up now, not down, the M a trampoline, not squelching mud. The dirgeful O had become buoyant, flung.
Crossing to the thin blue shingle of a note, he easily dodged two pillars of guilt, one new, the other eternal. The gone-Stan was as certain as the here-Betty. He flexed the bottom of the note with a fingertip, bent its inked letters.
“Hey,” a returning Betty called out through the closed front door. Stepping into the entranceway she said, “Don’t move it an inch,” while dropping her bags.
“Not moving. Just bending.”
“Hands off.”
“Hands off what?”
“You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Wait how long?”
“Until you see.”
Nearly ten days passed with the PRISM NAVEL note unexplained. Eventually, tape was necessary to keep it in place. Finally, on an afternoon home, Andrew sat reading a Canadian novel boring enough to be required university reading (the divine what? what’s so divine about whining?) as a beam of December sunlight strained through one of the bevelled edges of the front door’s leaded window. The thin winter sun refracted through the bevelled glass to land in a knot of colour on the door frame three metres distant, precisely on Betty’s PRISM NAVEL.
The house had never seen so many cards and notes. A robin’s egg blue envelope propped between triangles of brie in the fridge, or a small envelope the colour of oatmeal tucked into his Shakespeare.
Translucent scarlet on his bike handlebars. Where did a woman who routinely read past midnight find the time to buy cards of all sizes, textures and styles? Could he just write a Post-it back? No, apparently he couldn’t. Not with a frosted tobacco envelope riding his pillow.
Andrew,
I don’t know if you’ve been thinking of the L-word. People usually want to use the word before they need to. Frankly, I’m proud to never have wasted it on a prom guy or someone nursing his first sideburns. Here, though, I do wonder.
I might be in love with you. Mom always said love should mean need to live with. Not want, need.
I am ridiculously happy living with you.
I might be. I could be. I want to be
Your Bet
As winter froze and bleached autumn, Andrew had trouble matching his opening move of September. He had made his initial, extravagant invitation to Betty. The orange room, half a house. She cooed for an hour, but then what? He didn’t have another trump card until the opening of the Strapped art exhibit.
At an art gallery, she was definitely Betty. In second-year she had wavered. Maybe Elizabeth was better for the sweet white wine and track lighting of galleries. At nine and ten she had hated the stuffiness of the full, birth-certificate Elizabeth but soon grew to delight in its adaptability and its long list of usable parts. When boys her age were discovering the technological and marketing wonder of a toy/ cartoon character that was both one aggregate machine and several constituent machines, one giant robot or airship and several smaller, more specialized vehicles, she was scouting ground with Liz, Liza and Lizzie, was flying around in the slightly differentiated small planes of Beth and Betty. Most comfortable with Bet, she occasionally admitted that she never stopped loving how affectionately that word came out of her mother’s mouth. Post-divorce, there’d been mother-daughter spooning and sleep wherever and whenever they found it. Bet was a friend. Funnelling down from Ottawa to Kingston to study contemporary art, she did audition Liz, thinking it more appropriate for the organ meat suspended in fishbowls, the shredded phone books stuffed into kilometres of coiled transparent hose. In the maelstrom of young dating, who could forget a name that rhymed with jizz? But, no. Betty was Ping-Pong and flipped hair and a palpable step for the tongue. Betty was ready.
Exhibition openings were mandatory for the serious Visual Culture majors, but only the casually and confidently intelligent students relaxed enough to recognize that openings were for the artist, not the art. The conscripted audience, Betty and her classmates partially set down the conceptual toolboxes they built up during the day. Their usual attention to material, scale, cohesion and context was, and was not, suspended as they reached for little black dresses and lip gloss. By her last year, Betty knew she wanted a freelance curator for conversation, not a staffer, and who would be getting stoned in the receiving bay and who had wandering hands.
Late one Friday afternoon she phoned home from the gallery where she volunteered to cancel the pre-opening dinner they had planned. “I’ve been suckered into set up,” she consoled Andrew.
“What, they need more genuine human urine? Used tampons not fresh enough?”
“Not quite. We fan and refan the pamphlets. We expand and contract the distance between cheese and fruit trays.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Nah . . . Oh, wear something nice.”
“Mesh? Latex?”
“See you at eight.”
He was already smiling as he hung up the phone and reached for the Scotch. He’d drink to Stan then wear one of the suits he had inheri
ted along with the house. Walking upstairs to the hall closet, he had made his decision before he’d reached the top stair. The two-button charcoal. High lapel notch. Slash pockets. Unpleated pants.
When he strolled into the gallery, indigo tie resplendent, he stopped her in her tracks.
“Wow,” she said, “come back here.”
42
Nutella, chocolaty, gooey Nutella, has become his sex. Bicycle, bi-sexual, then unisexual. At least with Nutella he’s monogamous.
How can a — no, not a food — how can this spreadable candy so ensnare him when a month ago the cloying smell of it turned his stomach? From his education, from that slow maturation into his mid-twenties, he’s no stranger to first reading of emotions or actions and then finding them more easily or frequently within himself. But to date, he thought this immersion belonged solely to good novels, great films and indicting porn, not cycling blogs. More than one tour blog consists of nothing more than daily distance juxtaposed with a volume of Nutella: 127km: 150ml approx (on crackers, spoon). Nauseating, industrial Nutella has become sweet, fuelling Nutella. Chocolate’s cocainic climb broadened by earthy hazelnuts (with their illusion of sustenance and nutrition). The European hazelnut fuels this European sport and spares him from the even more vomitous North American peanut-butter cup. Maybe that’s the allure: (slightly) better chocolate, less North American wax. Without the francophone diet, this addiction would have been harder to manage. In Quebec, Nutella, cheese, beer and wine can be found in corner stores.
There’s a red, measly rash growing in his crotch. That couldn’t be from too much Nutella, could it?
Stopping here on the roadside to dig out his dwindling jar (front right pannier), he’s able to deal his fix without even stepping off the frame. Licking the brown goo from his knife blade, he glimpses Vienna in the chocolate haze, has one toe in Paris.
He now knows the taste of Nutella better than the taste of Betty. Nine months ago, he felt like he lived between her thighs. Undeniably, her crotch was the focus of his life in the house. Oh sure, her feet were attractive, her shoulders, her neck. No harp ever played sweeter music than her hips. His life divided into before and after his relationship with the soft warmth of her breasts. They were young in the age of truly ubiquitous porn. No part of either body went unexplored. And yet nothing enraptured him like that private mouth at the base of her body. Her scent of soft cheese. Her taste of buttered blood. The texture of her clit, that key left above the door, is now becoming vague to him. He is starting to forget her body.
The Push & the Pull Page 11
