Cities of Refuge (29 page)

“Nothing to apologize for,” said Harold. It wasn’t true, he thought. “At least not to me.”

The woman said, “I instruct him in a way that he understands.”

“You instruct him on the snout,” he said mildly.

“It’s for his own good,” said the man. He seemed sympathetic to all sides.

The couple moved on without further acknowledging him. Josef looked back once, presumably in regret, until the woman whistled and he straightened up, face forward, and kept to her heel as they disappeared around a bend. Harold had borrowed the disapproval from Kim, and had voiced it on her behalf. On a downtown street he’d once seen her reprimand a smartly dressed young man wearing the rectangular glasses of a Belgian film critic. He’d pinched the ear of his husky and set off an argument about dog training. Kim told him people ought to have to pass tests before owning a dog. The man doubted she could teach a dog to sit. He said he knew the type and he was serious, how would she do it? “You want the answer?” she asked. “You get down on your back and play with the animal until you’re both exhausted.” The man laughed. “What kind of answer is that?” “The answer is screw the question.” In Kim’s life, the answer had often been screw the question.

The ridge now cast a shadow over the gorge. It was time to go home.

The ascent left him breathless and a little high. Back in the car, it was as if he was back in time, stuporous in the worst days of the estrangements. When he’d returned to Marian and Kim after four months of silence in ’95, he walked around afraid to show himself, feeling their judgment and his own.

He must have seemed, must still seem, to be harbouring something. They were right about that, his family. But his secret was love. He was paralyzed with love, speechless with love. He cowered under the magnitude of his love. His love was the one sure thing in his life, though it was beyond him, beyond his expression, and anyway, he had grown superstitious, knowing there was still a chance it might be returned to him if only he didn’t say something to extinguish the possibility.

He wanted to remind Kim that people are more than the sum of their experiences. He reminded himself that, given the attack, it was natural that she’d have these bouts of distrust. He didn’t know how to help her, other than to be patient, and let her call him a liar if that’s what she needed.

The light through the windshield was streaming with inclemencies, he couldn’t stay with his thoughts a breath further, but then did so.

I’m alone, he thought.

Then said, “We’re alone.”

H
e’d stood her up without so much as a note and she’d gone to the research library and lost herself in study. At home now she found her old running bra and sweatshirt and sweatpants and expensive ridiculous cross-trainers and they still fit her, and as had been her habit, she made a point of avoiding mirrors on her way out of the house, into stride.

This was part of her resolve, a half-hour of open fleeing. She liked to imagine she was sweating away some poison and today the poison she settled on was her mother’s pain. This morning
Marian hadn’t come out of her room when Kim made breakfast, on the cusp of another bad day, and had finished her lunch and was sleeping again when Kim returned. A few blocks on she concentrated on letting go of other disturbances. A bird dead under a window, dismal events picked up in passing. Like this she would detox her system and then swear off the daily news for a week or two, running, melting away the verb-mangling sportscasts, rooftop weathermen, vapid celebrity junkies, maybe even the murders and wars. For a week she’d carried around the high school yearbook shots of the lead local terror suspects who wanted to blow up buildings and behead parliamentarians. They were late teens, mostly, and not prepossessing in appearance. She’d been troubled by one in particular who was just plain downright ugly, and she wondered if his ugliness had worked upon him, and of course it had. All young men were stupid and impressionable, their imaginations full of cartoons and dirty pictures, and nothing was real to them like it was to everyone else, except the physical facts, like if they were thought attractive or ugly by whatever the dominant standard. That much they could figure out.

Not all young men, maybe, but most of the ones in the news.

As her body began to feel tested she lapsed into a thought of something blue and stolen and she lengthened her stride and upon the new rhythm escaped it.

Nothing sweated out, of course.

Harold was avoiding her. That her inability to reach him might open an old wound in her hadn’t occurred to him. He was re-enacting his absence.

Terrorists. Political kidnappings, murder. Last week she passed by the TV Donald was watching. The old man superimposed on
his younger self was James Cross, the one from the
FLQ
crisis who didn’t get killed. He said, “I think of it as a storm. You might say my life since then has been a calm after the storm. The storm didn’t take my life. But it has made it less my own.” There was Trudeau, Laporte. Months ago, inside one of their debates, Harold had told her Canadians once knew who they were and who they weren’t, and that was the beauty of them. “But there isn’t a ‘we’ anymore, Kim. There’s only who we used to be.”

The running felt bad until it felt good. Even the old wrestling with her quitting mechanism made her feel like a kid again, absorbing self-discipline in furtherance of some abstract quality of character. Years ago her gymnastics coach had told her that training would make her a fighter. The short, unsmiling woman made mantras of goal-result thought and broke things down into lists of three. Balance, line, explosion. Practice, technique, focus. “Training makes the fighter.” “Fight means focus.” Anything that mattered, meant for memory, fell to clipped phrases, in the limited English of a transplanted Romanian instead of the Scots-Irish old blood she was. But maybe she’d been right, Coach McKinnon. Kim had fought gymnastically. She’d been trained into focus as if being prepared all along for that moment years away of thrust and escape.

She walked for a minute before the turn home, another minute after, then began again. A little flush, like the kind she felt before vomiting, but she pushed through it and tried to hold her pace. She was strong for her size but her lungs had never been very good. As always she blamed her former smoking father – the flush had always led to blame – and then she pushed through that too. Her scar was itching. She was sweating real sweat now. It had been too long.

She pictured Pinochet and Thatcher in an old news photo. He’d ordered men to be mutilated, dropped from helicopters, throatslit. He’d ordered women burned alive.

It wasn’t just poetry, the news that stayed news.

With the house in sight she let off and trotted to a walk. Short of a brain disease she would never again be newsless, wordless, but soon she’d be naked in a glass stall, staring at a bar of green soap with its carved name washed away and keeping her thoughts there with her, in the steamy present, where the flesh lived.

I
t happened one afternoon that he came later than usual, near the time she was going home, and so he waited and accompanied her onto the streetcar and down to the subway platforms and the silver train and then onto a southbound bus. When he’d first met Luis and Teresa he’d hoped that their common pasts and language would inspire in him things to say, but he was not a talker, not to anyone, and now on this route home with her when he felt most in need of words between them he felt only his deficiency. When he looked around at the city he saw cars and people, buildings and trees, not anything more particular, and many of the things, he didn’t know the names of because they existed only in English. There were blocks of store windows to the south full of metal things he wanted, knives, watches, lighters, studded belts and boots, and he used to imagine that if he had one or two of these things they would remove the mocking absence of the names of other things, but because he had no money he stopped walking by those windows and thought less and less often about them until now he didn’t feel their pull at
all, and didn’t believe now that the metals had any power to help him anyway.

He walked her past towers, to her tower building. He looked at her in wonder, the black hair, her head level as she walked. She at least was all in the particular – the skin, the flat bones of her face, her hands turned in slightly – of a kind anyone who really looked at her could know.

In the lobby she stopped at her mailbox and collected a package from her sister, and she guessed it would contain crayon drawings from their nieces and one or two books. In the elevator she told him about her brother’s daughters and then he asked about the books. She laughed a little, and opened the package and showed him. There were two romantic novels, each with a picture of a man and a woman on the cover. One of the nieces had drawn a picture of the very tower they were now inside, with a stick-figure Teresa waving from a window.

— Maria is more a mother to them than our brother’s wife, she said.

She mentioned her sister more and more, it seemed, and he hoped it was to remind him that she only played Luis’s wife, but he wondered why she would. There was no shame in her secret, he wanted to tell her, but the truth was that there was shame in it, and they both knew it. Luis knew it but didn’t care because it wasn’t his shame.

Inside the door she called out for Luis and then pretended to discover that he wasn’t home. She said the job he had now often kept him out past midnight.

Rodrigo sat at the table off the kitchen. He looked out at the view of the other towers, with the city between them running north as far as he could see.

What he most wanted was to see what Teresa saw when she looked at him, to think about himself however she did. What he wanted to talk about, and there was shame in this too, was himself. He had been falling away from his own thoughts for days. The only time he felt he belonged to his life, all of it, was when he was with her, and he didn’t even know her very well. But when he was with her he thought he knew a few things, that she should stop living with Luis, that he should leave Rosemary’s basement and get free of her charity and find work somewhere lucky, with the right man to teach him a trade and a way of being in this country so that he had money and friends and could build a life, even if it had to be in the shadows. He didn’t mind the shadows, and thinking about them filled him with the only anticipation he felt, other than when he was with a woman.

She took two cans of beer from the fridge and sat opposite him.

— When will you get your own apartment, Rodrigo?

— I need a good job. Rosemary’s looking.

— I think maybe she wants you to stay with her. Teresa smiled. I think maybe she’s in love with you, her hot young Latin man.

He looked to his beer. He didn’t think it was love but there was something. More and more Rosemary came to talk to him, and more often now about her life than his. What bothered him was that she knew he couldn’t always follow her, the words she used, how fast she talked, and yet she spoke on without bothering to ask
claro
, as she once used to do. He was serving some function in her life, the listener who only half understood and wouldn’t question her or enter his own thoughts into matters. She was full of stories, usually the events of her days, but sometimes she seemed to pause before one and then not tell it. Maybe
she’d fallen in love with someone. The closer she got to this story, the more silences in her speech. He had no sense of what it might be but it was only when the silences began that he felt close to her.

When he finished his beer Teresa went to the fridge and got him another, and this time she came around to his side of the table to put it before him. She was there, close at his side, and when he didn’t turn to her, she put a hand beneath his chin and pulled him to her belly and the smell of her skin in her shirt. He opened his mouth against her. She stood him up and kissed him and it all happened like they had been blind until now. The need for talk was gone. She had brought him forth by touch.

He wanted to have her where they were, high up over the city, looking down on it, but she took his hand and led him to her bedroom. Then she placed him at arm’s length and just looked him in the eye and so they stood for several seconds, saying nothing. She was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt with clouds or flowers, Rodrigo couldn’t tell, stitched in white into the front, swirling around each breast. A thin braided silver chain lay against her neck.

She held her hands out again and he took them and she pulled him onto the bed on top of her. He knew he was too hungry for her but couldn’t slow himself. She let him continue kissing, biting her mouth, as she rolled him to the side and unbuttoned her shirt. When he tried to help he got in the way so he went to work on his own clothes. His shirt was off now and he reached behind her and unhooked her bra and at first she didn’t let it fall. He got to his feet and removed his shoes and pants and stood in his underwear, hard before her. Then she let the bra fall and he saw that her breasts weren’t full, as if
she’d had a child somewhere in her past, he didn’t know, and she seemed shy about them, and he found himself kissing her nipples as they both got her out of her jeans and panties. He wanted inside her and she said it was safe and then he was there and she was someone different again and she told him to come inside her but he pulled out and came on her belly. With her hand she wiped the come on her breasts and in her pubic hair. He got up and cleaned himself and put on his pants and she asked him to come back to bed. Then he sat with her and they talked about food.

That evening they walked in the city for hours. Later, alone in his bed, the day returned to him half-crazy. He replayed the sex and the streets, what they’d said, what they’d seen, and the moments fell out of sequence. A young boy asleep on a hammock in a yard. Hard-rolling kids in a skateboard park. Her face beneath him. Store clerks and the way she stood next to him at the table and pulled him in. The blue in the necks of the black birds that resettled on the lawn after they’d passed by. How she held him with the printed flats of her fingertips and brushed him with her nails. All of it summoned out of the basement ceiling and looming all night in the unlit room.