Holding Still for as Long as Possible (7 page)

I went to a psychic last night because my best friend Tina and I were drunk, arms linked and weaving down Queen Street. That afternoon, Tina, who is also my co-worker, stole my travel mug and returned it full of rum with a Post-it note on top reading,
This is to celebrate surviving the longest staff meeting in the history of the world. Love yr fav. drunken slut
. Tina liked to believe we were Patsy and Edina from
Ab Fab
.

At four we went from the office to Java House, a cheap coffee, beer, and spring-rolls joint. The place was crammed with back-to-school drinkers and the waiters seemed inconvenienced and our voices crept louder and louder up the walls with the cockroaches, curling around the amateurish Goth art. By the time most people were finishing dinner out on the patios along Queen Street, we were shit-faced.

The psychic had a storefront that promised answers, and I had just finished telling Tina how much I needed one. “How could a relationship that started out feeling like a religious conversion have turned into this?”

Tina didn't have the answer, other than to lead me through the garish door and into the incense-fumigated bachelor apartment where we paid the palm reader for some enlightenment.

So far, 2005 was not shaping up to be my year. I couldn't stand the
Sex and the City
conversations Tina and I kept having. I'd become the girl who needed to process her love life constantly, even with a psychic stranger. I didn't feel like myself. I'd always been able to keep it together. I was
Most Likely to Be Prime Minister
in my yearbook and until now had felt above this pandering to the heart. Oh love, the great leveller. Shouldn't I have been calculating my carbon credits, organizing a benefit show, doing something worthwhile instead of this tedious inward search?

Tina wasn't a great help. Her longest relationship was an affair she'd had with her married lesbian doctor. Two years of clandestine hotel encounters, cell phones used only with each other, and neurotically safe sex. Tina thought I needed to cut Josh loose. “He was your first big-deal relationship. You're almost twenty-five now. Let him go and make some mistakes.”

The psychic, a middle-aged lady with a thick French accent, took my hand and said, “I see an ending. You have been lucky, yes, so far in life. But you will be challenged.”

I rolled my eyes. She sat back against her chair, satisfied with her vague and predictable assessment.

I reacted badly. “Why doesn't anyone have
good
news, eh?”

The rest of the night was sort of a blur.

I was piecing together some visuals, snippets of conversations, when Josh returned. My eyes brought him into focus, standing in the doorway pulling off his shirt. You could barely see the scars on his chest any more. He turned to set the alarm on the bedside table and I noticed his tattoo was starting to fade a little.

“Can you shut the blinds tightly, please?” Josh asked. “It was a really rough night.”

I remained in a ball at the end of the bed for a few more seconds before I limped reluctantly to the window wearing one high-heeled sandal. “I'm just remembering taking a piss in full view of the Drake patio,” I said.

Josh didn't seem surprised. I made a mental note not to drink for the rest of the week. I sealed away the offensive brightness with a few tugs of the thick, black drapes.

“Thanks, baby,” Josh said, curling up under the blue sheet.

Pulling the remaining shoe off with one hand, I leaned onto the bed to touch Josh's forehead with the other. I pressed my palm against it, as though I were a mother checking for fever. He once told me this was the most comforting touch, someone's palm against your brow. But now he rolled away, covering his head with my pillow, irritated.

In the living room I made a couple of calls. I cancelled my brunch date with my mother, and my afternoon manicure. I fell back asleep until 1 p.m., and then set about watching an afternoon movie on the
CBC
.
Waydowntown
, one of my favourite Canadian films, where the characters lock themselves in an office building for a month on a dare.

When I pictured the movie version of my life, Tracy Wright played me, and Don McKellar, Tracy's real-life actor/director boyfriend, played Josh. Our banter would be witty. We wouldn't look pathetic when we spent days smoking joints and crafting from garbage. Somehow, at the end of our movie, you wouldn't feel ripped off even though nothing actually happens.

It would be like one of those Canadian art movies where the characters wear unconventional green jackets and don't have parents. They exist as though poured from the rusty taps of the local indie rock bar.

I had another daydream where I was Parker Posey and Josh was Jake Gyllenhaal, but we mostly just sat around looking pretty in that one. I saw them sometimes on their bicycles on Queen Street — I mean Tracy and Don, of course — and I always smiled, as if I knew them. And then when I got up close I remembered,
Oh, they are just Toronto-famous. They are not my friends.
I'd like to be famous in the same way most people would, but I think I'd get bored quickly. I'd rather hold the camera.

Not like Roxy's new roommate Hilary, who was so clearly a performer. When she walked into a room she didn't say much, but what she did say would be hilarious or just weird and memorable. Same with Roxy or Tina: they were always
on
. Josh and I
observed
. We might have been very different in most obvious ways, but there was a quiet relationship to the outside world that we shared.

It was hard to pinpoint exactly when I started to
expect
things. Recently I had heard myself say, in an offhand way, “I don't get out of bed for less than twenty-five dollars an hour.”

Tina had nodded her head. “Oh yeah, fuck yeah, what's the point?”

When I said stuff like that, I sounded like the kind of artist my father could respect. My father was not one to understand the point of film if it wasn't comingling with commerce. He had tried to stop supporting me when I decided on art school.
I could cut off your money, you know. Your Mom and I have discussed it
,
he had said on many occasions. I would say,
You do what you have to do, Dad
,
knowing
my mother would never allow it.

Now I no longer had to take anything from my parents and it felt good. And I'd stopped feeling guilty about the things stacked against Josh when he was growing up. We were both adults now, supporting ourselves, and as far as I was concerned, we were on even ground.

Whenever I said that to Josh, he'd point to the kitchen floor with his foot, like,
Uh,
this house
?
Uneven ground.
But he made more than me now and was like a fucking rock of stability. “Stop pulling that victim shit, Josh,” I told him the last time it came up. “It's not attractive any more.”

He told me I'd become colder. “You used to be the warmest feeling in any room,” he'd said.

I looked at the date on an incoming text message from Tina that read,
You Alive?
I realized it was our four-year anniversary today, and both Josh and I had forgotten.

A week later, at Starbucks on Spadina, a jump below Queen, I saw my random crush. She was this little tomboy thing, blonde, messy-haired, always dropping something, always in a hurry. We'd progressed to nodding and smiling at each other, since we clearly had the same work schedule. She always ordered a tall green tea, and I was always two double soy lattes for Tina and me.

For some reason, seeing the random crush made me smile to myself as I walked across the street to work.

Tina noticed. “What's with the grin, goofy?” She rooted through her oversized purse for a pack of cigarettes while we stood on the polished wood floors of 401 Richmond, a beautiful building filled with galleries and offices for arts organizations, film festivals and magazines.

Tina and I worked on the fourth floor. We were waiting for Josh to bring the video projector down in the elevator. The lobby smelled like lemon, not in a Lemon Pledge way, but like the citronella lotion I used to wear at summer camp to ward off mosquitoes. The smell filled me with calm every morning when I came into work.

I was co-coordinating a project. Somehow my life had become a series of related
projects.
Tina and I were deciding who got grant money for a Super-8 film project, and we were watching the submissions at my house to narrow down the shortlist. The more I got involved in organizing festivals or teaching how-to-edit-film workshops, the less art I was actually making. But my inspiration had been dry anyway.

I rushed to the front door to prop it open as Josh marched through the lobby from the elevators, face eclipsed by the giant projector. He had come right from work, still in uniform, to help us out and drive us home. It could still make me feel something, that shade of blue.

I jumped ahead of him down the front steps of the building to our car, which was parked illegally outside the pizza joint. I popped the trunk and held it open so he could wedge the projector in between a bulk case of mineral water and the spare tire. Everyone stared at Josh when he was in his uniform. He'd learned not to care, but it weirded me out still.

We watched Tina bike through traffic ahead of us on Richmond Street, pounding her fist on the hood of a Beck taxi before darting through the intersection. Josh shook his head at her, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, kept time with the Modest Mouse song. We sang the chorus while stopped at Bathurst behind a streetcar. For some reason being stopped behind a streetcar always seemed like some sort of divine injustice. Patience. I needed so much more of it.

Josh put his hand on my leg. I turned and for a moment saw him the way a stranger might. I tried to picture us together in five years. Who would we be?

After lighting a cigarette and narrowly avoiding collision with another Beck taxi, Josh told me he had got an additional job, that he'd been selected to be part of a national team of emergency personnel specially trained for disasters. You know those
TV
commercials that ask, “Do you have a 72-hour plan for your family should a disaster strike?” Well, Josh would be sent to the nerve centre of whatever disaster actually ensued.

A few months ago he'd worked like crazy on the application. “Can you believe it?” he said now. “The competition was really stiff.”

“Congratulations, baby!” I said.

“We start training next week. I'll be gone for the weekend.”

I pictured myself stretched out on the sofa, doing my nails and drinking cocktails, the whole house to myself.

I couldn't do his job; I wouldn't be able to handle all those final moments, the blood and panic. Josh is the perfect personality for it. He doesn't freak out. When he's at work, even if he is secretly bored or thinking about dinner or wishing his partner would fall into the centre of the earth, he appears to be concerned only about you and your welfare. I think he has something I'll never have, an inner calm, or some sort of perspective on life you have to be born with.

Josh looked at me clutching my BlackBerry. “We're so different,” he said. “Sometimes it still confounds me that we fell in love.”

“I know!” I said too loudly, like a hiccup.

“Although, when we first met, it seemed almost metaphysical, like we weren't in control of it.”

“Otherworldly, for sure.”

Pausing on a red, Josh took a final drag and dropped the butt into an old coffee cup between the seats, pulling his shirt untucked and unbuttoning the collar. “Did you know we missed our anniversary last week?”

“I remembered that day, but you were asleep and I didn't want to wake you.”

Josh looked at me, and for a second I felt crushed under the weight of those lips, that familiar generous grin.

When we got home, he helped me set up the projector in the living room and he puttered around a bit before leaving for Roxy's.

Roxy and Josh had recently become close again. They had one of those long-term friendships where sometimes they didn't see each other for six months, but they were still family.

I suspected Josh had a crush on Billy. I could always tell. This made me feel simultaneously protective and jealous — affection laced with fear.

Mostly, after the door clicked shut, I was thankful for one hour of solitude before Tina arrived. I had time to correct the chips in my polish and watch some terribly entertaining tabloid
TV
show. If I wasn't working, I appreciated being able to shut myself off. I'd do anything to distract myself from contemplating these shifts between Josh and me, the uncertainty. Perhaps becoming this resistant to change was part of getting older. A depressing thought.

To be with someone in a healthy way, you had to be able to be alone in a healthy way. I believed this firmly. Right now the possibility of being alone made me hear horror-movie screaming. I hated that the universe seemed to be steering the wheel and I had no ability to get myself back on course.