“I’m sorry Mike offended you,” she said. “I really am. I’ll say something to him.”
“No, don’t bother,” I said. “He’d probably love nothing more than that.”
“You really think he’s so spiteful?”
I didn’t answer that right away. I didn’t want to say what kind of guy Mike was. The evidence to me was clear. He was a prick, and he liked to cut down bigger men than him so that he could feel good about himself. He was used to being the centre of attention. He had probably hogged Julianne to himself over the past year. He resented my arrival on the scene.
Julianne moved into the makeshift living room and slumped onto the mattress. She started playing with her hair. She pulled a lock of it in front of her face and inspected it.
“I have some split ends,” she said.
“I’ll tell you what I think of Mike,” I offered. “I think he thinks I’m a square, and he just wants to bust my balls a bit. But I don’t get his sense of humour like the rest of you. My Manspray days are an embarrassment. I wish he’d just shut up about the whole thing.”
Julianne sighed deeply.
“I told you I’d talk to him.”
“Julianne, that won’t help,” I snapped. “Let’s just leave it alone. Fuck it. I’m not interested in Mike. I’m interested in you.”
The conciliatory last line took some time to have any effect. She could see how angry I was. I had to get away from her for a few moments. I went into the kitchen. I poked around looking for something to drink. To my irritation, there wasn’t much of anything good to drink. I found some chamomile tea.
The argument had not come to an end. But our desire to argue had. We did not make love that night. We fucked.
At four in the morning, I woke to the sound of breaking glass outside. Julianne was still sleeping deeply. I moved out of the bed gingerly so that I would not disturb her. I went to the window.
Outside, I saw three young men. They were yelling at one another. I could not hear their actual words. There was more breaking glass. It was a beer bottle thrown against the cement. One of the young men jumped onto the back of the other. They careened to the left, then to the right. Then the bigger man stumbled over the curb and his cargo slid off him and onto the floor.
The men were about nineteen or twenty. Probably students.
If they had turned and looked, they might have glimpsed my white, naked body between the curtains. I realized this and closed the curtains. The men were on their way again, off to go make mischief elsewhere.
How many times had I gotten drunk and done stupid shit like them? More times than I cared to recall. Just then, I heard one last booming shout at the night. Then the young men were too far away to be heard anymore. How many of my neighbours had they woken up?
You did that kind of thing when you couldn’t get laid. It was a cliché of the party scene. Any one of those guys would have traded places with me. I looked at Julianne’s form under the blankets.
But anything beautiful was also delicate. It took so much patience and skill to make things work, and still, things never worked the way you wanted them to. That’s when you wanted to trade places with the men outside and smash things up.
25
I woke again to the sounds of panic. Julianne had slept through the alarm, or maybe she had not set it. Either way, she was due in class in fifteen minutes and she wasn’t going to make it on time. There was no question of skipping. For back-to back-classes, she and her classmates were giving oral presentations. It would be supremely embarrassing to miss her classmates’ presentations while expecting them to listen to hers the following class. She was hopping around the room clumsily, cursing. After she had left, it was like a storm had come and gone.
I had never been in her bedroom alone. I rolled over and looked at the picture of her on the dresser. It was taken when she was a girl. She was holding a soccer ball under her arm, smiling nervously but proudly at the camera. I picked up the picture. You could see a faint trace of the woman she was going to become, especially in the eyes. I put the picture down again.
I opened the top drawer of the dresser. She always retrieved what little jewelry she wore from here. I remembered how my mother had also kept her jewelry in the dresser. I pulled myself up on the edge of the bed so I could see better. Alongside the jewelry box, there were a few bills of American currency — no more than fifty dollars. There was also a big key with a stylized “H” on it. A spare car key. The rest of the drawer was taken up with a laptop computer. That seemed a bit odd. It was a clunky, ungainly model — probably ten years old. I doubted it was much good for anything anymore. I wondered why she had kept it, and somewhere so private too. Then I slammed the drawer shut. It was wrong to snoop like this.
I got dressed. As I was pulling on my T-shirt, I shivered. The very floorboards had become colder. I went to the window. The sky was grey and heavy. The wind had forcibly mugged the trees for the last of their leaves, and now there wasn’t a scrap of colour left. I ran down the stairs — each one groaning under my weight — and I pushed open the front door. The air was glacial. I wouldn’t be able to paint today. Ten feet of soffits on the east side of the house and the last of the three dormer windows had been all that waited me. Including primer and two coats, allowing time to dry, eight hours of work. But today, it would be impossible.
“Can you close the door?” I heard a voice call out.
One of the roommates.
“I’m leaving anyway,” I said.
“All right, then. Bye Luke.”
It was Vicki. I pulled on my shoes and coat, stepped out and slammed the door, closing up the cozy house against the cold.
I walked the fifty metres or so to my own house. A Co-op taxi slowly moved down the slight incline towards me. It was just rolling — you could hardly hear its motor. It was rolling in the fashion of a vehicle in unfamiliar territory. The driver was leaning over and almost pressing his face against the opposite window in an effort to read the numbers on the houses. I couldn’t see who was in the back seat.
I drew level with the pathway home.
Then I had a premonition of who it was.
I had seen this coming — not this exactly, but a scene of some description, which undoubtedly would not be pleasant. The cab stopped and the driver got out. He opened the rear passenger door. I studied him briefly. He had a soft, kind face — features that spoke of almost eternal patience. He appeared North African. He had a slack body — not thin, not fat, just a body adapted to a car and long spells of waiting and little in the way of activity. I immediately sympathized with him.
“Wait here until we’re done,” the passenger said. “Get the suitcase.”
He followed her orders. He walked around to the back of the car, pulled open the trunk, hauled out the suitcase that I had owned since moving to Vancouver, and dumped it on the sidewalk.
She stood ten feet from me. The door she’d emerged from was close at hand, still open, as if she didn’t intend this to take long. That gave me some initial encouragement.
“You sad fuck,” she said.
As conversation starters go, this one didn’t give me much to work with.
“Stephie. How—”
“Having fun?” she interrupted.
She stepped closer. She kicked the suitcase a fewer inches across the sidewalk.
“That’s your shit,” she said.
“Come inside,” I suggested, hoping we could conduct this battle out of the view of onlookers.
“I don’t think so. Do you know why I think you’re pathetic? Because no matter what’s going on here — and believe me, I know there’s something going on — you are still going to have to live with the fact that you’re barely human, don’t even know how to be human, can’t even pretend to be human.”
She was inspecting my face as if for evidence of damage. These were clearly premeditated words. She delivered them calmly and cruelly. But she couldn’t help it, she was angry now.
“W
hat do you have to say?”
“Come inside,” I repeated.
“No. I don’t want to see where you’ve been carrying out your affair.”
“Stephie, I’ve handled this very—”
“I don’t want you to speak. You should shut up. I don’t want to hear you or see you. Save your lies for your new girl.”
The cab driver had wearied of us and resigned himself to a long wait. He slumped back into the driver’s seat and closed the door. Stephie paid him no attention.
“I’ve given up on you. You might have wondered why I stopped calling you. It’s because I don’t care, Luke. You had a girl prepared to love you and put up with your bullshit, but you’ve lost that girl. I went around our apartment and I packed up everything of yours — everything that would remind me of you. Every photo, every birthday card. Your books, your CDs. It’s all in here. There is no trace left of you. You will vanish from my life. As for all the furniture and things we bought together, you’ve lost all that now. Consider that the price you pay. Don’t try and come and get it. All our friends know what’s happened, and I wouldn’t risk your life trying to come anywhere near me.”
“Your friends know what happened?” I said. “What exactly has happened, then? What have you told them?”
“They know you’re a lying shit and you were cheating on me.”
“You say that with such certainty.”
“Are you telling me you weren’t?”
“I never— I didn’t mean to. I had an opportunity to, and I said I couldn’t because I was with you. But then…”
My voice faded out. It was hopeless. Why on earth was I even trying?
“You know how I found out?” she asked. “Your sister told me… It isn’t what she told me, but what she didn’t tell me. I had a long talk with her two days ago. I said, ‘What the hell is Luke doing in that house?’ She said, ‘You know, painting, sorting stuff out.’ I said, ‘No, what is he really doing? Is he sleeping with someone?’ And she wouldn’t answer that question. I asked it a different way. I said, ‘Can you tell me for sure he’s not sleeping with someone?’ She wouldn’t answer that, either.
“What really gets me is that you thought you’d get away with it. It’s insulting that you think I’m not smart enough to figure it out. Is that what you think? Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Stephie, no, I—”
“Because you’ve acted like I’m stupid. What do you think happens when you go days and days without calling? And even if you do call, you sound like your mind is on another planet. Do you think I can’t piece it together? The fact that you hide yourself away here in this empty house where your family can’t see you — you think I can’t understand your intentions?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Fuck you and your ‘sorry.’ Fuck you.”
There was little else to do but stand and take the abuse. I wondered if the cab driver had stopped the meter. When I realized I was having this thought, I wanted to laugh. What the hell was wrong with me? She was right. I was a sad fuck. I was every name she called me. I couldn’t even take this breakup seriously. I looked at the North African. His eyes were closing. He wanted to catch up on some shut-eye. I couldn’t believe it. This was absurd. She was making it absurd. There she went, kicking the suitcase again. Oh, how I hated myself for having let this charade of a relationship go on as long as it had. She’d kicked the damn suitcase hard enough to spring it open. There was my winter coat lying on top.
“You have nothing to say for yourself, do you?”
“You don’t want to hear anything I have to say,” I replied, but even this was disingenuous. The truth was, no, I didn’t have anything to say.
“I’ve wasted all this time and money getting here. You can’t say a fucking word. Pathetic. At least I’ve got your shit out of my home. Take your shit. Have it. Have your pathetic life. You are cold and dead. When girls figure that out, they’ll leave you. You’ll never hang on to one. They’ll all figure it out eventually.”
She turned and walked to the car. The cabbie twitched into life. He hadn’t been sleeping, but it was very considerate of him to have kept up the pretense.
One last volley: “You’re really going to leave it at this? You’re really going to leave me to remember you like this — as a sad, lying, pathetic, cold, dead loser?”
I said nothing.
When she got into the car and slammed the door shut, she must have lost her nerve. She broke down in tears, hid her face behind her sleeves, and the North African, in whose hands she was in now, slowly pulled the cab away from the curb to take her away.
26
My account of events has probably done an injustice to the memory of Stephie. People disappear out of your life — and in this case, it really was a total disappearance — and after that, they cannot defend themselves. They don’t get a chance to give their own version of events.
I’m pretty sure how Stephie would sum up our relationship. Whatever else you can say about her, she wasn’t opaque. Her intentions were pretty clear. When Stephie first met my family, Laura figured out immediately what was up. “She wants to marry you,” she said. We were sitting at the Phase One food court in West Edmonton Mall. Stephie was in the washroom. All around us, we heard the clattering of registers, yelps of children, and shouts of reprimand from parents. There couldn’t have been a worse place to contemplate, for the first time, a lifetime commitment whose apparent ultimate goal was reproduction. Stephie and I had only been dating a couple of months.
In response to Laura, I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I was flattered by her observation.
“Maybe she does,” I said.
“Take it seriously,” Laura retorted. “She’s a sweet girl.”
Yes, she was. Too sweet, it so happened, for me.
Stephie’s version of events would likely go like this. That I gave her a false impression of myself. That I appeared ready for the comforts of life, for the slow onset of flabby middle age. And it’s true that the comforts of life were appealing. I remember an evening at her parents’ house, sitting in the basement, which had been converted into a luxurious entertainment centre, presided over by a huge television screen. There were flames licking the fireplace grate. Stephie’s mother was fussing over me, bringing me pastries, even though I’d already gorged myself on a huge dinner. Stephie was nuzzling against my side, fingering a new sweater she’d picked out for me. The movement of her hands reminded me of the pawing of a cat. I was heavy-lidded and slightly slow-witted from the quantity of wine I’d drunk at dinner. I was drinking her father’s scotch.
I had an epiphany. This is what most people lived for. The shelter from the winter cold. The full stomach. The easy entertainment. The proximity of loved ones. There was an awful lot to recommend it. Who was I to reject it?
I suppose I did give Stephie a false impression of myself. That I accepted to live with increasing comfort for so long, and uncomplainingly, was itself a tacit vote for living that way forever.
I lay on my makeshift bed, and for a long time, I stayed perfectly still. The house had become very cold, and I knew that I was becoming very cold, too. I felt absolutely numb. I knew that I’d behaved deplorably. But it was a separate voice that was telling me this. The real me had ignored this voice all along.
The phone rang.
“Are you happy now?” said Laura, without preamble. “The poor girl is distraught.”
“Stephie?”
“Yes. Who else?”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“On her way to the airport.”
“She’s not there with you?”
“No. She left five minutes ago.”
“I didn’t think she’d come all the way to Edmonton, Laura.”
“Sounds like you didn’t think of her at all.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you got mixed up in it.”
“Oh, I didn’t get mixed up in it. I didn’t get involved. She came here on her way to see you, said
she had to deal with the relationship one way or another. Then she came back here afterwards and told me that it’s been dealt with. I sincerely hope for your sake that this is what you wanted, because if it isn’t, you’re really going to regret losing a girl as good as her.”
Her lecture ended with a rising tone of irritation. To my surprise, she hung up. I phoned back immediately, but she didn’t answer. I thought, that’s a little immature. Then I felt guilty.
I curled up on the bed again and fell deeper into stillness.
Over an hour passed without incident, as if I’d fallen asleep and woken up a minute later. The phone was ringing. It was Laura again.
“You have to prepare to get out of the house,” she said. “Finish what you can. I’ve got a professional organizer coming in.”
“A what?”
“A professional organizer,” she replied. “She comes in and sorts everything out — what’s to be kept and what’s to be thrown out.
She’s coming next week.”
“A professional organizer?” I repeated.
“Yes, Luke. Just like I said.”
“What am I, totally useless?”
She hung up again.
What I did next, I did out of spite. I went to my mother’s room. I am not sure how I was so certain that I would find something. It was the same feeling that had kept me out of the room all these weeks, ever since finding the photo of Jacob.
The air in the room was as frigid as bones. I went through the drawers of the desk. Accounts, business flyers, tax forms, receipts. I went through the closet. Skirts, a nightgown, blouses, boxes. There were boxes in stacks on the floor. I pulled them out. There were more tax forms. A business certificate. An old passport. I looked at it. The expiry date was 1987. The picture of my mother was in black and white. Her eyes were open unusually wide, as if the picture had startled her.
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