Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

  T’es encore là? She spoke to the cross, not to me. To me she said, Il te faut un casque, and knocked on her fragile head.

  Marie had taken her helmet but left her bicycle, and each morning I carried it downstairs and clattered it over the fissured streets towards the day spa on a route that still took me past Leonard Cohen’s house. If my mother called I’d make a point of telling her this, that every morning I rode past Leonard Cohen’s house, evidence that I was still studying.

  I spent the first weeks of winter alone, wandering the apartment’s half-empty rooms. Its windows are the old sash kind that mean trouble in the winter, but in the kitchen there are panels of colored glass that shoot red and amber oblongs across the floor when the sun finds the sweetest angle, so it feels kind of warm even when it isn’t. One morning I stood there, moving my hand through red light to gold, thinking: This is the kind of window where if you just stand for long enough, somebody will come and put their hand on your shoulder. Whoever it is you’ve been waiting for. Then my phone rang, and my heart kicked, but it was only an automated female voice congratulating me on a free trip to the Bahamas. I listened to the spiel of promises, thinking how someone had gone into a studio and recorded these words, understanding how they’d be used. And someone had written the script, and someone had mixed the levels, and someone else … on and on. It made me bone-sad, this voice. I hung up on it and called Jody to ask how he was spending the off-season. There was no off-season, he said. But after five months of guiding tourists through the backwaters of Plaquemines Parish to shoot at floodlit gar, of tossing marshmallows at tame alligators to distract whiny tourist children, he’d about had it with Louisiana anyway.

  I tried to sell him winter. It took less than fifteen minutes to sell him winter. He’d never lived a real one, a northern one. Never owned a pair of ice skates or salted a driveway.

  Cheap post-rock concerts, I coaxed. Nuit Blanche. Poutine (this felt like groveling). The pastéis de nata at the Jean-Talon market …

  Okay okay okay.

  I should have been the one hawking Bahamas cruises.

  Jody mooched a series of Amtraks up at the end of December, with $600 U.S. and no true winter coat. I snuck a look at his arms when he put them around me at Central, deep in the belly of the overheated station. A little bothered inside the elbows. Aside from the gator, I mean. Not clean, exactly, but clean enough. (Newly clean. Was there ever a phrase cobbled from more idiot-hope?)

  Memory had slightened him. It wasn’t till I saw the two of us reflected in a drugstore window that I realized how much taller he was than me. I decided to take this as further evidence of an overall straightening out.

  He said that this winter’s work would be liquidating his dead father’s blues collection, he and his sister sharing the take.

  We’re selling them off piece by piece. Slower that way but you get more in the long run, according to Cass. Said she’ll wire my share every couple of weeks. Less administration.

  Administration, I said.

  Her very precious time. One of us is our dad’s child.

  Wouldn’t you two be, you know, sentimental? I asked. Though I knew he would not be. I’d first met him in a roachy hostel kitchen in Tamaulipas, OxyContined to his eyeteeth, making everybody sandwiches whether they wanted them or not. (You, he’d said, shaking a salsa picante bottle at me. You’re avocado and hot sauce.) Afterwards he’d told me about the meds racket he and a friend were trying to get off the ground. Those were the words he used: get off the ground. Ailing elderly Americans with prescriptions to fill. And he objected to the term racket, insisting it would be a civic service. Basically an NGO. He’d be addressing a gross deficit in the health-care system, assisting those who’d slipped down into its many yawning chasms. All you needed were a minibus and the right attitude, a wholesome-looking girl. (That was me: wholesome-looking. An invitation of sorts.) He existed in a constant state of somnambulism, a soothing lassitude, but now and again you’d catch the sharp glint of scheme in his pyrite-flecked eyes.

  Look, he was saying now. Dad was Mr. Corporate Law. Guy wore a suit to the beach. Wouldn’t have known Blind Lemon from Blind Melon, he just knew what things were worth.

  The records had been crated up in storage for eight years, and as Jody put it, someone might as well be spinning some joy from them.

  I admit I was skeptical. But every fortnight we’ve been charging glasses to Elzadie Robinson and T. Bone Walker; rare red wax and Parchman Farm; Ed Bell and his 1930 pressing of “Carry It Right Back Home.”

  Someone had taught Jody the nines thing, since the last time we’d slept together. I’d read about it before, tantric: shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow deep, so she—so I—could go along with him. He never lost count, must have gotten in a fair amount of practice. I didn’t really mind thinking of that. Whoever she might’ve been, she was far away, too far to be jealous of, practically imaginary. It was my name he’d shout, unfailingly, in the instant before coming. Typically American of him, I said. More than any other national. Americans all call your name out—it’s like they’re trying to stop you walking into traffic.

  Jody was nonplussed by this. Maybe hurt. Hard to tell.

  It’s just common courtesy, he said.

  Often his orgasm would carry within it the dark kernel of a migraine. Jody would pop two acetaminophen straight after to be safe, and a couple of something else for good measure. Partaking? he’d ask, and I would, and we’d drift off together, a tangled raft of random beach junk. He’d rouse when the girls downstairs were at it again. Waking me with a little shove, Hey, what’s that? What’s she saying?

  A game he called Fucking or Fighting? I’d listen a minute and then translate as best as I could: One of them wants to get a dog, I think, or: The Husky One thinks the Unhusky One has slept with somebody else.

  The Husky One and the Unhusky One. We’d hear them all the time, but their names remained a mystery. Possibly they knew mine, with Jody so courteously hollering it.

  That last one, he’d ask. What’s that mean?

  Mille-feuille? It’s a kind of pastry, but the way she’s saying it probably just means pussy. But a bit sweeter than pussy. I mean, nicer than. Ah. You know what I mean.

  He did not laugh. He took it all very seriously. Repeating in that methadone drawl of his, milfoy, milfoil, millfoey. French by tenement osmosis.

  Five days out of seven I was still getting up early to go and fold towels into pleasing shapes and wonder about the kind of women—mostly women—who would unfurl and ruin them without a blink. Men came too, but not many or often, and I didn’t fall to measuring my life against theirs in the way I did with women. Especially the women my age, the ones I encountered mostly in the things they left behind: La Prairie hand creams, lipsticks in obnoxious forty-dollar shades, designer underwear, magazines commodifying mindfulness and self-love.

  There was a lost-and-found, of course, but usually I either pocketed things or simply unfound them into the trash with disgust.

  As winter deepened it seemed crueler and crueler to sacrifice the meager quota of daily sunlight in the service of these women.

  On those night-dark mornings, the radio of our next-door neighbor was a kind of static rope I’d use to drag myself from bed, from Jody, to the kitchen. From there I hoped inertia might do the rest. The radio was loud and clear; I suppose it traveled through the plumbing, sink to sink, like the tin-can telephones we used to make when we were kids. I toasted bagels to a patter of rapid-fire Quebecois; a man’s voice and then a woman’s. Topical talkback. Something about the Charter of Values, military suicides. The weather report: neige neige neige, le vortex polaire. I was okay in high school. I got prizes in French. Now, when I tried to speak it, the words would fall out of my mouth like clumps of half-chewed bread. There was better luck listening: the words, more and more of them, floating back up towards their meanings like free divers’ balloons and then hanging there, swollen and luminous. Turnstile. Shoot
ing. Embezzlement.

  I’d roll these words dumbly around my mouth, waiting for the coffee to brew, staring out into the dark street to see how much snow had fallen overnight. Marie’s bike was useless now, chained to a railing, squirrel amusement.

  Afternoons I’d come home to find Jody compulsively refreshing a web page, following the frenzied final moments of bidding as though it were an NBA playoff game he’d placed big money on. I’d empty my coat pockets of tips and tiny soaps and miniature bottles of rich body lotion, then walk around turning all the thermostats down by five degrees.

  If you’re cold, I’d say, why don’t you put on a fucking sweater?

  If you hate your job, he’d say, why don’t you fucking quit?

  I glanced over his shoulder. On screen, Ramblingmike73 was winning Memphis Minnie at $392, and there were still ten minutes of scrummage left.

  I got us, Jody said.

  But I was uncertain whether I wanted to be got. In the bathroom I arranged the gleanings from my shift into the medicine cabinet, where a few of Jody’s toiletries were neatly lined up along the top shelf. Mostly this was comforting. A cottonwool-swaddled thought: How sinister a spoon looks, lying all alone on a windowsill.

  Early one morning, as though a dream had leaked down into Rue Cartier: an old man, dressed in peacock green, gliding across the pond-chain of streetlights. Past the soft mounds of cars, long before any traffic came to churn up the night’s pure drift.

  Jody saw this, not me. I just heard about it. He’d caught sight of it from our terrarium window when he got out of bed for a glass of water. That same afternoon he went out and found a flea market on St. Laurent and came back with a pair of cross-country skis.

  You can ski?

  We’ll find out.

  Jody had never skied in his life, but neither of us doubted he’d have a knack for it. He picked up a lot of things with a striking nonchalance, drawing on a latent grace he never promised to any particular pursuit with any seriousness. Or maybe it’s agility I’m talking about, not grace. He still ate like a drug fiend. Indiscriminate combinations of overprocessed, microwaveable god-knows-what. A tendency to knife-lick. Didn’t your mother ever … But I could watch him move across a dark room forever.

  I championed the skis. I mapped out the trails around the mountain. It wasn’t as generous as wanting him to be happy; I wanted him to not be sorry that he had come. He felt asleep here, he’d said. Dimmed and dense-souled, like on dirty horse tranqs, more ketted than benzoed.

  You know you burn up just as much energy treading water as you do swimming towards something?

  This was information, not a question. I’ve since looked it up and I know for a fact it isn’t a fact, generally speaking. But it was true enough for Jody.

  He said he felt dried out, alligatored by the heating system, left an apple out on the sill to show just how he meant. We watched it shrivel and leather to become a grotesque little face. Accusing.

  Late into January, throwing up became my new morning ritual. In the kitchen, quietly so as not to wake Jody. The steel belly of the sink was like an amphitheater, and from within it I listened to the ghost broadcasts from next door.

  … a confirmé plus que mille planètes extrasolaires …

  Providence. Marie had promised. This wasn’t it. Or it depended on your definition of providence. The blessed piece of scallop shell had long disappeared by then; I turned out all of my pockets but it never tumbled out.

  I don’t know how she knew. I didn’t even know know; I was still hoping I was suffering from some kind of virus. But she knew. She saw me out her kitchen window one morning before work, on the balcony, inviting icy air onto my damp face, and she came out still wearing floral dish-washing gloves carrying a thermos, workman’s style. Once her husband’s, I figured. It was roughed up with the scratches and dents of a day laborer, or a fisherman.

  English is better for you? Maybe you cannot keep anything in your stomach, but this you will manage. I know; often I can manage nothing else myself.

  I wasn’t showing, it was much too soon. Even if I had been, there was so much winter goosedown to disguise it. She’d heard me, then, through our little two-way sink system? Or she could tell just by looking. Maybe you gained that power of insight after seven or eight decades in the world. Maybe life knows life, I thought, feverishly sentimental.

  You like it, you just say and I will bring more, she said, placing the thermos in my hands. AYLIFFE in faded black marker down the side.

  You knock here, like so, Madame Ayliffe said, rapping at her own kitchen window, startling a small tuxedo cat off the inside sill.

  At the metro station I unscrewed the lid and sniffed. It was a kind of hot ginger broth, something lemony and spicy and just a little bit sweet. I drank a dozen tiny sips, standing right there on the platform, and my stomach quietened. I finished it off in a corner of the tiny fluoro-lit staff room on my break, and felt replenished and clear-sighted, as though an ounce of grit had been sluiced from behind my eyes.

  That same afternoon I was fired for turning in a wonky swan. Really it wasn’t so much the wonky swan as my “shitty attitude” about the wonky swan, about the towels in general. My general carelessness. The wonky swan was just one example. I had little grounds to argue. I finished out the afternoon, resisting the temptation of petty vengeances; mixing up the hand soaps and hair products, folding towels to resemble labia.

  Jody congratulated me when I told him, as though my leaving had been a matter of integrity, my personal choice. He insisted on cooking a celebratory dinner. Something had flicked on in him, and though I knew I wouldn’t keep the meal down, I couldn’t refuse. All he really knew how to cook was fish, he said, promising that when spring came and we could crack the windows and doors, he’d blow the roof off with scampi, jambalaya, gumbo, things that wanted all-day bubbling to stickiness on the stove, reeking up the kitchen. But for now he was keeping it fresh and simple: kingfish puffing steam from a little tinfoil papoose; kipflers and some kind of greens on the side.

  I chewed slow and careful. During a long silence, I nodded at the skis. Nobody’s going to want those when spring comes, I warned him once I’d managed to swallow. You’re not going to be able to resell them. You should at least try them out.

  I’m going to.

  You’ll need to get all the other truck, I told him.

  Yup.

  Poles and boots. Proper gloves. All that lark.

  Truck, he echoed. Lark. Do you speak that way in real life?

  This isn’t real life? I asked. Then I realized that if one of us didn’t think so, it probably wasn’t.

  Maybe I’ll take them back with me.

  What can you do with skis in Louisiana? I tried to sound indifferent, but a slatey, astringent saliva had flooded my mouth. The something-or-other glands, I’d learned in those first weeks of class.

  I forced a forkful of the kingfish and another of potato, but the acid in my mouth slurred the flavors of everything, and the textures became repulsive. I gagged, tried to swallow, gagged again, spat into a slice of bread and wadded it up like a napkin. Jody was staring at me.

  So many bones, I explained. Like a little pincushion. One stabbed the inside of my cheek, I said, scraping my chair back from the old drafting board we used as a table.

  Bones? he asked, prying apart the flakes of his own fish with a knife and fork. Sorry, I thought I got them all. His voice trailed me down the hallway.

  In the bathroom I ran water and threw up properly. I rummaged through a drawer, hunting out a mini hotel sewing kit. The jab to the inside of my cheek felt like the first prick of a dental injection. Crazy. Did I think he’d ask to see evidence?

  Fucking or Fighting? he asked when I came back to the kitchen.

  What? I tongued the tender inside of my cheek.

  He pointed his fork at the floorboards, cocked his head. His hair hung with the sad luster of velour. The yelps of the girls downstairs floated up.

  Fucking, I an
swered, but didn’t bother translating the specifics.

  What was real life, then? It was out there, Jody’s version of it. Baling wire and a worthy ache in the arms. Kicking animal feed off the bed of a Hilux, or the swamp seeping into your socks, if you were stupid enough to wear socks. His soles like burred wood, sassafras bark.

  Why couldn’t I tell him? Because I was a coward; if I told him, he’d decide on something. A direction, he’d pick a direction. But I didn’t know which direction that would be, and I didn’t trust myself not to follow it.

  I slept late, woke to strong light, felt stronger myself. I filled the Ayliffe thermos with tea and took it on a walk up Mont Royal. Cross-country skiers slid past, as if on greased rails. When I reached the cross I sat for a while, looking back towards the Plateau for our apartment, but the view didn’t work that way. I took a few mouthfuls of the tea, still hot and oversweet. I had come here to think, but fell into a false, wordless calm, opening the thermos now and then to let the steam breathe up into my face. But I forgot it on the bus coming home. My general carelessness, my carelessness in general. Pas bien fait, pas bien fait. The swan, the thermos, this other thing.

  Winter lingered impossibly, and still we managed to squander it. I had thick Russian classics and some design software to master. I thought if I could just get into the kind of work that let me live out of a laptop … I got twenty-eight pages into War and Peace, and the software never made it as far as an upload. Jody’s skis stayed vertical. There was talk of what to do once the roads thawed, working holidays we could take. In whose car? A bus, then, a train. Apples in the Okanagan? Apples was fall. Oranges, then. Or what comes first—asparagus? Jody looked disgusted. Down south it was strawberries.