Sweet Affliction (20 page)

This guy wants it fast. This guy wants it slow. This guy wants lavender-scented oil and this guy wants none. And this guy cries wee wee wee…

Lynnie hums nursery rhymes to herself while she works. It's become a tic that she's barely aware of, the way her feet seem to chant
come on, come on, come on
as she walks to and from the metro on nights when she's too tired or achy to bike. Her favourites are the ones about clever animals that outsmart a common enemy by working together; she's less keen on the princesses and ladies-in-waiting. Too much emphasis on clothes. In Montreal summer it makes her itchy just to think about bustles and corsets and hose and all those layers of silk and cotton jacquard. She thinks about pigs in jaunty hats, clever ants and idle grasshoppers, swashbuckling cats and silly geese. She would like to make a stencil for the tadpole's crib, but she doesn't think she'll have time.

“Guh,” says this guy. Then, “thanks.”

“No worries,” says Lynnie as she runs a towel under lukewarm water. “See you next week.”

“Check it out, the cat can talk,” says Alice.

“No it can't,” says Lynnie.

“Yes it can. Listen. Max, what's your weapon of choice?”

Arrow.

“Max, what's your favourite chocolate bar?”

Aero.

“Max, put your ducks in…”

A row.

“Okay, okay, I get it. Hilarious.”

As Lynnie goes out the back door she sees Mario, Renaud's mastiff, leaping against his window. His bark is faint, muffled by the retrofitted double-paned glass. He leaps and leaps, his claws scrabbling against the glass, leaving long whitish smears.

Lynnie and Raelle ride home after the John Waters movie, in preparation for which they stashed a couple cans (ginger ale for Lynnie, PBR for Raelle) in their purses and gave each other razor-thin eyeliner moustaches. A few blocks from their apartment, a man steps out into the street and flags them down, waving his hands over his head like he's on a deserted island and they're an airplane.

“A favour,” he says when they slow down. “It's a holiday.”

The man is Hasidic. He wears a white shirt and a prayer shawl and those short black pants and stockings that remind Lynnie of Tintin. Instead of a black hat he has only a small matte skullcap. His sidelocks are almost totally straight and limp from the heat. Lynnie and Raelle look at each other.

“Come, come,” says the man.

They dismount and roll their bikes to the fence outside the apartment. The yard is overgrown and weedy, with plastic toys scattered around. The man waits in the doorway. As they lock up, Raelle grabs Lynnie's arm and whispers into her face.
Moustaches
. They lick fingers and apply them to each other's upper lips. Raelle has a tenderness that Lynnie had not been aware of before.

“Am I good?” says Raelle. She has a faint brown smear, like she's been drinking hot chocolate.

“Yeah, you're good.”

Lynnie and Alice's old landlord was Hasidic, and it took him three years to figure out who was Lynnie and who was Alice because he never looked either of them in the face. But this man is garrulous and friendly. He ushers Lynnie and Raelle inside, where his wife is smiling and nodding under a massive tinkling chandelier. “Thank you, thank you,” they say.

“Would you like a drink?” the woman asks. She goes down the hall and into the kitchen, while the man smiles and nods at them. She returns with two plastic cups and a carton of Tropicana. In the kitchen doorway a couple of small girls appear in matching striped dresses, holding hands. They stare in eerie twinnish silence.

“Thank you,” says Lynnie, taking the juice. It's cold and viscous, like shower gel.

The four of them stand in the hall smiling at each other, while the girls watch the strangers with big eyes. Finally the woman claps her hands and beckons for Lynnie and Raelle to follow her. Lynnie expects to be led to the kitchen, where one or another of them will turn the oven off or the air conditioner on. Instead the woman mounts the staircase, leaning heavily on the banister. Lynnie and Raelle follow, the man bringing up the rear. At the top of the stairs they are motioned into a bedroom.

In the bed is an old man, old-old, ancient, with papery wasps'-nest skin and eyelids that hang like dough over his red-rimmed eyes. He's wearing an oxygen mask connected to a hissing metal tank. The thinnest possible thread, no wider than a spider's filament, seems to connect him to the world. A small television sits mute in the corner of the room.

The woman smiles. “My daddy,” she says. “A good man. A rebbe.”

They nod.

“A serious man.”

They nod. Behind them the husband is fiddling with something in a drawer.

“Now, he don't go out so much. He gets lonely.”

They nod.

“A man, he needs certain things. Even an old man.”

They nod.

“So?” she says, raising her eyebrows at them, expectant.

The husband has taken a black oblong object from the drawer and placed it on top of the bed, between the twin hills of the old man's feet.

Lynnie feels suddenly dizzy. She puts a hand on top of her belly, wishing she could somehow reach through the layers of skin and meat and grasp the fetus, which she imagines as cold and hard, like a china figurine. Nowhere, nowhere is she safe. With her other hand she grasps Raelle's.

“Listen,” she says. “I don't think we can give you what you want.”

Raelle squeezes her hand, hard. Harder than reassurance. She looks down. The object is a remote control. The woman is still smiling. Raelle aims it at the television, and a talk show clicks on.

“The thing about a talking dog is not what it's saying but the fact that it's talking at all,” says a woman in a periwinkle pantsuit.

“Thank you,” whispers the old man.

As they're leaving, Raelle turns to the woman. “
Zie gezunt
,” she says. The woman responds “
Gey gezunterheyt
.” She smiles and flaps a hand as they pass through the threshold.

“You speak Yiddish?” Lynnie asks as they unlock their bikes.

“A few phrases. Nothing real conversational.”

“How did that happen?”

“Dad worked at a retirement home for Jewish seniors. He picked it up, I guess. Until I was twenty I thought
keyn-eyn-hora
was an old Trinidad expression.”

A Hasidic man and his daughter, about twelve, are taking a night stroll around the block. The man waves at the two of them in a shy and friendly way. They wave back.

“Okay,” Raelle says, “I gotta know. Who knocked you up?”

Lynnie smiles. “A turkey baster,” she says.

“Oh c'mon,” says Raelle.

“Look,” says Lynnie. “Do you have, like, a really old comfortable T-shirt? And you'll probably never wear it out of the house, but you'll never get rid of it, because it fits you really well, and feels pretty nice, and… gets you pregnant? Okay, that metaphor fell apart.”

“Fine,” says Raelle, not crossly, “I get it.”

Lynnie crosses her fingers behind her back and hopes Alex doesn't mind being called a T-shirt.

When Lynnie gets home Mario is still at the window, barking and leaping. She looks closer. There are streaks of blood on the glass, red drying to russet. She runs inside, holding her belly as she takes the stairs two at a time.

She and Alice watch from the balcony as Renaud, stretchered, is loaded into an ambulance. The neighbour, an older woman with hair dyed the colour of a Florida sunset, comes out on the adjacent balcony. She turns to look at the two women, pregnant Lynnie and sweat-stained Alice, with their arms around each other, brown bottles and potted herbs littering their small balcony. The ambulance lights reflect in her huge glasses and she stares at Lynnie and Alice with blinking red panels. She mutters something under her breath, then goes inside, slamming the door behind her.

“They're ginger ale bottles,” Lynnie calls as an afterthought.

The first-floor apartment is thick with blue smoke and relatives. Lynnie realizes she had imagined Renaud a lone wolf, estranged from his family, an old coot with a grudge against the world. But his former home is packed with sisters, brothers, cousins, friends, nieces and nephews. There is even a daughter, who Lynnie never knew existed, with a handsome, possibly Haitian husband and a toddler chewing on a rubber toy. The daughter takes the sodden shape from the boy's mouth and considers it, and Lynnie realizes it's one of Mario's. She takes a scoop of
pâté chinois
from a pie plate and approaches the daughter, makes a weak French joke that the daughter smiles at. Her son clutches his mother's leg. He has Renaud's same eyebrows, cocky. Though maybe this is only wishful thinking on Lynnie's part.

“It's nuts to butts in here,” says the daughter, Christine.

“Renaud had a lot of people in his life,” says Lynnie, hoping she sounds neither trite nor incredulous.

“When are you due?” Christine asks.

“End of the summer.”

“Are you scared?”

“Shitless,” says Lynnie.

Christine takes her hand. “You're a strong girl,” she says. “Renaud loved you very much.”

Lynnie doubts Renaud has ever said such a thing to his daughter, but she smiles and squeezes back.

Alice and Raelle are talking to two of the brothers, wisecracking pot-bellied guys with easy laughs. Their names are Vincent and 'Tit Gars, and they tease Raelle about her dreadlocks, calling her Sister Marley. Normally Raelle would blacken an eye for such a thing, but she laughs and pokes Vincent in the belly and calls him the Pillsbury Doughboy.

One of the sisters puts on a Gare Garçon record and starts singing along.

Alex comes in from the balcony, his eyes red, his hair skunky. “You wouldn't believe the stories these guys have,” he says to Lynnie. “That Pierre, he flew a CF-18 during the Gulf war.”

“So what, that makes him cool?” says Alice. “Do you know how many civilians died in that war?”

“Over a hundred thousand,” says Alex. “I should know, I helped organize the weekly demos against it.”

“I went to those demos!” says Raelle.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Alex says. Alice shakes her head.

The next song is up-tempo, with a pseudo-samba beat. Christine's husband comes over and takes Lynnie's hand and leads her into the middle of the floor. From the corner of her eye Lynnie sees Raelle dancing with Vincent, and Alex talking excitedly with 'Tit Gars and Pierre, making buzzing, explosive sounds with his lips. The husband twirls her, spins her out and then snaps her back. The tadpole is a gyroscope in her, keeping her upright.

The voices of the five young boys, old and gone now, blend and rise. “Cha cha cha,” says Renaud.

“
T'es une belle danseuse
,” the husband tells her.

“No I'm not,” she says.

Cha cha cha
.

Publication Notes

Earlier versions of some of the stories in this collection firstappeared elsewhere.

“Moving Day” first appeared in the limited edition booklet
Moving Day & Other Stories
(Paper Pusher, 2011).

“The Yoga Teachers” was broadcast on CBC Radio One in January 2010, and was published at maisonneuve.ca and in the anthology
Minority Reports: New English Writing from Quebec
(Vehicule Press, 2011).

“Last Man Standing” first appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of
Maisonneuve
, and was reprinted in the limited edition booklet
Moving Day & Other Stories
(Paper Pusher, 2011). A French translation (Le dernier homme, trans. Melanie Vincelette) appeared in
Zinc
No. 25. A recording of the story, read by John Dunn Hill, appears at annaleventhal.com.

“Sweet Affliction” was published in
Geist
#77, and was reprinted in the limited edition booklet
Moving Day & Other Stories
(Paper Pusher, 2011).

“The Polar Bear at the Museum” was first published in
Geist
#67 in 2007 and subsequently republished in
The Journey Prize Stories 20
(McClelland & Stewart) in 2008.

A 500-word excerpt of an early draft of “Glory Days” appeared anonymously on the CBC Writing Awards website as part of the CBC Writing Challenge in fall of 2011.

Thanks

I extend my gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quèbec for providing me with funding to write this book.

Parts of this book were written at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Alberta, and the Roberts Street Social Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I thank them for giving me a place to rest my laptop, along with community and solitude in fair measures.

Thanks to Greg Hollingshead, Lee Henderson, and Oana Avasilichioaei, who gave this manuscript valuable guidance at an early, tender stage.

Thanks to my agent, Natalie St. Pierre at the HSW Literary Agency, for her unflagging faith in this book. And to Nic Boshart, Robbie MacGregor, Megan Fildes, and the Invisible team—the coolest dudes in the game. And to my editor, Michelle MacAleese, for her patience and sharp eye.

Michelle Sterling, Sean Michaels, Jeff Miller, and Melissa Bull: you are my eyes and ears. Thanks doesn't seem like enough, but here it is anyway.

To my parents, Paula Mitchell and Arnold Leventhal, for their next-level support and encouragement. And to Sarah Pupo, Taliesin McEnaney, Catherine McInnis, Alphie Primeau, Robyn Maynard, Carly Glanzberg, John Hodgins, Chloe Vice, Andrew Hood, Suzie Smith, and Caitlin Hutchison.

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