Open (16 page)

Go have your smoke, you say. Nothing’s happening yet.

But it starts to happen while he’s in the parking lot. He tells you later about his moment: how he will never be the same. He’s standing on a slab of concrete near a loading entrance at the back of the hospital. The door is tied open with a piece of rubber tubing. The smell of cold food, sausage, powdered egg, the churning of dishwashers, spilled cutlery. It’s a foggy night and he can smell the harbour and something bitter, pigeon shit. He’s bewildered, hardly able to remember how he got where he is.

When he goes back to your hospital room his son’s head is visible, becomes visible with each contraction and disappears again. It’s the most awesome, unlovely, soul-quaking thing he has ever seen. He cups one of your heels in his hand, your mother holds your other heel. The baby is mauve coloured, smeared darkly with guck, and crying.

Your hair will be by Suzanne.

They’re single or have just eloped, the stylists, young or staving off age with fashion, trend. The best one-room apartments in the city.

Do you have children, Suzanne?

Nope. No. Thank. You.

And you don’t ever?

You got that right. Kids are so
expensive
. Why would you?

Suzanne knows what she doesn’t want. Sometimes desire is forged by the process of elimination. Your husband wanted golfing and hockey, a new tent, to celebrate his Native heritage (hitherto unmentioned during seven years of marriage), to become a theologian, to hunt seals. (There’s a white mask the Inuit hunter holds to his face while approaching the seal basking at the edge of an ice floe. Everything is white, the hunter’s white furs, the ice, the air. When he lifts the white mask he’s obliterated. Your husband, the empty landscape, your husband, the empty landscape.) You prefer oblique dreams but you are too tired to manufacture the oblique. He wanted to be a vegetarian. (There are foods you can’t face anymore. Basil you can’t eat because of him. Even the smell of it.) To add on an apartment. (He got to keep the house through a conspiracy inspired by his mother.)

Then he realized what he didn’t want. To be married anymore. To you. And now he’s with Rayleen, an airhead.

The idea is to look good, you tell the stylist. That’s the idea.

Things the stylists insist upon: a fireplace, a cappuccino maker. Toronto once a year, loyalty, techno music. A stuffed toy.

What’s going on out there?

Suzanne: Still snowing.

The streets have become impossibly narrow. Snowbanks muscling the cars like ululating throats. The stylists win dance contests. Drink B52s, martinis.

You are here to learn how to become vulnerable again. How to give yourself over. They like a nice glass, fruit. They like their drinks to be blue, orange slices; they tip flamboyantly. There’s a big, decaying city in their past. Havana, maybe.Venice. They have no past.

The stylist absolutely insists upon silence at certain hours. Watching the February snow make the sky listless, the slob ice on the harbour lifting in swells so gentle it seems the couch moves beneath them. Hand-knit socks. Original art. Brand names: Le Chateau, Swatch, Paderno. To watch the dusk settle. Soap operas. The primacy of their cats.

Suzanne has one item in her fridge: dehydrated miniature crabs. She can see the whole city from her window in the Battery.

Your mother has been begging you for years to get your hair streaked. You have breakfast together and she puts down her fork.

Enough, your mother says. She leans over the table and touches your cheek with the back of her hand. You have been going with the salt over the eggs. You stop. And you go and go and go with the salt. Then you toss it across the kitchen.

You have made everything soft for him, like whipped cream.

There he is in the La-Z-Boy, hungover, misty-eyed.

I made a mistake, he says, I fucked someone.

Enough, you say.

Your mother cannot understand, nor will she accept, that you don’t want streaks. You had no money in law school. Sometimes you were hungry. You left home, and your mother had to shovel. Sleeping pills. It got dark so early. There aren’t even streetlights out that way. Her asthma. She’d have to walk through waist-deep snow and stop to use her inhaler. Icicles glinting. Leaks in the roof. You hear her smoke over the phone. A pause while she smokes. You hear the whir of the microwave, the bell. You hear the ice in her glass of scotch. You hear the icicles dripping outside. You hear her crying. What will make you stop crying, Mom?

She says, Have you thought about streaks?

Your husband wants to be an actor. He wants to give up his career as a bank manager. He wants a break from the kids. He wants the kids in his arms. He wants to go bankrupt, be a filmmaker. He has begun to identify with the clients whose assets he’s been forced to seize. They aren’t such bad guys.

The stylist takes a pair of scissors from the jar of blue liquid. Snaps them twice, flicking drops.

Suzanne’s hair is short, stucco-like in texture, blond with ironic roots. Black-framed glasses. The bones of her hips pressing the red plastic jeans. Her shirt is clingy, reveals her belly button, a piercing. There are two kinds of hair, you’ve been told. The long and wispy: fuck-me hair. The short and androgynous: fuck-you hair.

You don’t have the money now nor you will ever have the money to get your hair done every four months, which is how often you must in order to keep the roots from showing. You
do not like roots. You hate them. You will not incur the extra expense just now when your bastard prick of a husband, who has run up every jointly owned credit card, who has spent the nest egg saved to help your mother retire early and not have to wade through snowbanks with her inhaler. The bastard prick has a spending disorder, in fact, hitherto unmentioned, and has left you with half his debt, which is the law, and is seeing an airhead, and you can’t trust him to come up his half of the. You won’t incur the extra expense for anything because you had to buy a new house and a second-hand car, the engine of which is tied together with dental floss.

Suzanne says, You’re thinking colour.

Yes I am.

You need colour.

Yes I do.

I’m thinking streaks.

So am I.

When you are in your ninth month with Adrian, a youth hurls his chair across the courtroom at you. You see one metal leg blur past your temple. You’ve prosecuted this kid several times. Perhaps five. His sister also. Almost all the girls who appear in youth court are named Amanda. They are named after Rachel’s daughter on the discontinued soap opera
Another World
. Most of the boys are named Cory. The boy leaps onto a table and is striding across the backs of the fixed seating. The judge has a button on his desk for moments like these. He presses the button, his black robes puff with air, and the safety door clicks
quietly closed behind him. You can see him in the small square window of the door peering out to watch the action.

You think: Judge Burke has saved himself. You are taken up with a giddiness. Judge Burke strikes you as humorously prissy. You are trembling with a fit of suppressed giggles. But as the boy gets closer, your initial feeling about Judge Burke changes. You realize his decision to save himself and leave you, along with the handful of spectators, three security guards, three more youth also scheduled to appear before him this morning — Judge Burke’s decision is a sound one. Certain men, given the appropriate circumstances, will behave with decisive and thorough self-centredness that smacks of sound judgement. Burke is elderly, completely unable to defend himself against a physical attack. Batty, even. His pronouncements are usually unsound. You often have to say, Judge Burke, I can see you’re angry because your face is getting red, and I can tell by the tone of your voice that you are upset because you are speaking very loudly, but I feel I have to continue. You say things like this for the benefit of the court stenographer so the records will reflect Judge Burke’s demeanour, should he come to the batty conclusion that he should charge you with contempt. Right now Judge Burke is nowhere to be seen. Right now a young man named Cory is going to kill you just before you give birth to your son, Adrian. As far as you know there have never been any Adrians on
Another World
. The youth is leaping, you have a contraction that doubles you, the security guards have him, water pours down your legs.

The male stylists are openly gay, mavericks, blithe, built. But
it’s the women who interest you. The women are beautiful, or look beautiful, stubbornly independent, current, childless. They enter and win lip-sync and wet T-shirt contests. At home in airports. Their families make allowances. They don’t shovel. At Christmas they are the most extravagant, most deflated by the aftermath of unwrapped presents. They are the babies in the family. They’re allowed to pick at the turkey. Suzanne brings you to the porcelain sink with the scoop for the neck. You lean back, close your eyes. You are determined to enjoy this.

She says, You don’t have to hold your neck like that.

You have been holding your neck. You let your neck go loose. You are submitting. You let go. The salon falls away. Your scalp is a grass fire. You would kiss something if you could, or drift to sleep. The long, greying hair is such a weight. The hose makes you tingle all over. A hot, delicate raking. She’s raking you to the surface of yourself. She drops the hose. Squirts a thread of viscous cherry over your scalp and begins with her fingers. She lets her nails graze. No one has touched you like this since your husband left. You almost kiss the snow white inside of Suzanne’s wrist.

You are alone. It’s your husband’s night with the kids. Since your husband left, you have been falling asleep early in the evening. You haven’t bought a TV. You got to keep the CD player but you only have a handful of CDs. You have listened to Cat Stevens’s
Greatest Hits
so often you can. At first you kept the radio on all the time. A cheap radio in every room. Then you got tired of the radio. You listen hard but there’s nothing to hear. A row of icicles falls from the eaves startling you so badly
you almost. You don’t turn on the lights. You see your neighbour across the street pull into his driveway, his headlights lighting up falling snow. He can’t see you in your window because the lights are off. He has asked you over for a glass of wine. Once you awoke to the sound of him shovelling your driveway. He gets out of the car and the light over his porch comes on. He looks up into the sky. He’s standing in his driveway with his hands in his pockets, his head tilted back. He stays that way. Your fridge cuts in. Nothing moves on the street for a long time, no cars, just the snow. Your neighbour goes inside and you are alone. You are very much alone.

Suzanne fits a rubber skullcap over your head. The skullcap is full of holes and she tugs strands of hair through each hole with a metal hook. It hurts so much you think you might cry. Then you do cry. Suzanne doesn’t make a big deal of it. She’s seen all this before. She keeps pulling your hair.

That’s the price, she says. She paints your hair with a foaming chemical. It’s an awful stink, poisonous and angry. It makes you feel exuberant.

Everyone has left the Aquarena because of the storm and your mother hasn’t come. Your coach switches off all the lights. They make a thwack noise when they go off, and the filaments burn pink then blue. The pool is empty and has gone still. The pool is a chameleon and it has changed its skin so it resembles nothing more than a swimming pool. It has become invisible. Your thirteenth birthday is coming and very soon
you will lose interest in diving. One day you can think of nothing else, you are haunted. The next day diving hardly exists. You can’t remember anything about it. You let your mother sleep in.

The storm has closed roads. Where is your mother? Your coach drives you home. The Trans Am flies through whiteouts. You lose the road. The flame on the hood swallowed by the mouth. You have been saying. Talking. Telling him. Your eyes two soft plums, and a soft plum in your throat. Your heart is aching, but your heart is your eyes and you have two and they are bruised and weeping. Your coach pulls over. You pull over into Lovers Lane together. The trees slap the windows, paw the roof. He cups his hand under your chin and he kisses you. He gently sucks a bright plum from your throat. He kisses and kisses. You have never. Nothing will ever be as wonderful as this. You give yourself over/over/over.

You want Suzanne to give you some advice before you leave, and she does. She tells you that from now on you must use a round brush. She holds a mirror behind so you can see how sharp the cut is. You can see your neck. You don’t recognize yourself from this angle. She’s sprayed you and blown the whole thing dry so your hair feels as hard as a helmet. The blond is called ash and it glints like a tough metal.

Grace

O
n the shiny collar of her black tuxedo jacket, at a potluck after the wedding, Eleanor notices a ladybug. Orange shell, two black spots. Under the jacket she wears a crimson dress. The skirt a pattern of folded, satin diamonds, each diamond held with a red bead, so that if she were to attain grace, or spill her beer, or be overwhelmed with some fleeting infatuation — she shouldn’t drink in the afternoon; she can see herself in Glenn Marshall’s sunglasses, her black patent leather purse like a match head folded in the flame of her skirt — if she were visited by a moment of grace, the beads of the dress might drop to the grass and the diamonds unfold into butterflies. She grips the wet beer bottle. Too cold to be outside. The tulle under her skirt scratchy against her bare legs. She’ll shave them before the reception. Where is Philip? At the heart of everything, she thinks, is the question of behaving with grace. He is falling in love with someone else. They have an understanding,
is the phrase people say. Couples who agree to open marriages, an understanding.

A big wind lifts the umbrella out of the hole in the centre of the plastic table and it pirouettes for a few seconds across the lawn on its white metal spike. Glenn Marshall makes a swipe for it, arm raised, fist empty. What she has decided: She will sleep with Glenn Marshall. An understanding is something for which you must acquire a taste, like all the other great things in life: coffee, wine, oysters, bungee jumping. A crowd of guests move out of the path of the careening umbrella. It knocks against the picket fence. A paper napkin flutters off the table and dips, like a dove shot out of the sky, a gash of lipstick on its breast. The crystal bowl of strawberries catches the sun, a tiny prism shoots across its sharp rim. The rowing shells on Quidi Vidi Lake glide fast. A team of women with yellow caps hold the oars above the water. They lean forward, they lean back. A riot of sparkles bursts around the prow. The last rower raises her hand to her cheek and is obliterated in the glare.