The Better Mother (5 page)

Danny leans over and pats Edwin’s knee. “I know, Eddie, I know.”

“Of course you do, my closeted friend. Maybe you should tell my parents and I should tell yours.” Edwin throws back his head and laughs some more, until tears form in his eyes. “We’re a little overwrought, Danny. We need a drink.”

Danny stands up and starts to walk to the kitchen. “I have some beer and a bottle of wine. Let me get it.”

“No, no, stupid. We need a drink somewhere else. Somewhere with eye candy. Somewhere I don’t have to look at your sad face all night.” Edwin jumps up off the couch. “Let’s pretend we’re in high school again, when we were ignorant and cute and thin, although I was never the thin one. Come on.” He grabs Danny’s sleeve and propels him toward the bedroom. “Put something nice on and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

This is a feeling Danny knows well: that combination of weed and gin, when the music in the club bores into his eyes and ears and belly button until his heart is beating harder than he ever thought it could. It rises and falls and rises and falls and he is breathless, leaning against a concrete pillar that is sticky against his palms with old beer and the fluids of others. He
wants to scream above the driving music, slam his body into the crowd, fight or fuck or both, it doesn’t matter. Edwin bounces across the dance floor, damp hair flopping against his forehead. Danny laughs and then emits a loud, deep belly cry that peaks above the driving bass line for one short, crystalline second. He is lost in the crowd, the men whose skin rubs against his, whose sweat dries in layers, one for every hour spent in this dark, airless club.

Edwin breezes past him and shouts something in his ear, but all Danny can hear is
hot, green pants
and
don’t look now
. He watches him dance to the middle of the room where he shimmies to the irregularity inside his head, which is like no rhythm Danny has ever heard. Edwin looks over his shoulder and winks in Danny’s direction, and it feels like an arrow burrowing into his gut.

There has always been something about Edwin that isn’t quite right. He explodes with enthusiasm, squeezes kittens until they squirm and cry and wriggle out of his grasp. He smiles openly at strangers until they look at the ground. Instead of walking, he bounds down the street, his unbuttoned jacket flapping in the air behind him. When they were teenagers, he always offered to buy the beer, even though the clerks ejected him, their faces grim when he stuck his tongue out at them through the glass doors. These are the reasons Danny loves him, but these are also the reasons Danny wants to shake him until his head rolls loosely on his neck and he is mercifully silent.

No matter. There is music to dance to and men all around him with square hands and sharply lined jaws. He runs his finger along a tall man’s stubble, his skin tingling as he feels one hair after another. Yes, this is why he’s here. For this very thing.

Later, Danny walks down Richards Street, his hands and hips and spine still loose and warm from an hour in another man’s apartment. He passes club after club, smiling to himself, sure that no one can see his face on this dark night. He can smell the spilled beer on the sidewalk, hear the sound of high heels on concrete. At the corner, he stops for the traffic light and turns his head to look into the lit window of a club on his right. Through the glass, he sees three men—all tall, all handsome—gathered around one woman in a purple dress. She holds a martini glass and balances expertly in her gold pumps. One of the men whispers in her ear, and she flips back her black hair and turns her face upward. Danny starts. It’s Cindy—languorous, lean, smiling. The very same Cindy he saw three days ago shuffling through their parents’ house. Her lipstick is glossy. Her hold on these men is iron-tight; they look at nothing but her.

Danny knows the pre-sex dance as well as anyone, and he can see that Cindy is poised for a long night. The fabric of her dress shivers as she moves, slides like water over her hips, her small breasts. She shines for the night, and the night loves her back.

He knows that Cindy will sleep with one of these men in a matter of hours, a man whom she will probably never see again, even if he phones, even if he asks to meet her parents and offers to take her far from the house on Dundas. He knows that tonight will be filled with deep core urges, and that tomorrow she will smile over her secret while twisting a piece of hair around her finger. But she will still have to sneak into her bedroom, shoes in hand, all the while listening for the sounds of their parents’ breathing—Doug’s snore and Betty’s
soft inhale and exhale, still alert because she has waited for her daughter’s return, but is pretending otherwise. How long can Cindy keep this up, swimming in a different life after dark, in these downtown clubs where she can be the most beautiful woman in a room? In the morning, she is just Cindy, the daughter who says little to her parents before taking the bus to the bank. When she returns in the early evening, she changes into her sweatpants and dutifully sweeps the puddles of water off the walk and into the storm drain.

Danny looks up at the changing traffic light. As he walks away, he remembers that she is almost thirty, that one day she will be past the age that most men find attractive, and then what? She could be a caricature, a middle-aged, grinning version of herself in thick makeup who sips vodka tonics at a table for one in the back. Or she might fade away in her Chinatown slippers, white strands of hair growing at her temples as she rubs their father’s back every night in the fall and winter.
Run away, Cindy
, he thinks as the cars rush past him.
Run now
.

Danny turns south on Seymour, feeling that the night is not quite finished. He looks ahead to the flickering green neon sign. Underneath, in crooked lettering, the club announces that it has
THE BEST GIRLS IN TOWN!!!
The fluorescent bulbs have a pulse of their own. Danny feels their buzz inside his body, that dark cavern in his torso where the blood echoes the sputtering rhythm of the flashing lights. Turning up his collar, Danny digs his hands in his pockets and steps from the sidewalk and through the front door, not daring to look up the street.

Inside, he is not the only person sitting at a table by himself. To the right, a tall man with bifocals and sparse,
straw-coloured hair sits with rigid posture, his hands wrapped around a full glass of white wine. His expression never changes, his colour remaining an unhealthy yellow, even when the dancer onstage walks slowly toward him and bends over, holding her breasts together two feet from his eyes. He nods slightly, and she walks away, winking at him over her shoulder.

The waitress, wearing a red and black lace bra top and a faux-leather miniskirt, brings Danny a beer. Her frosted hair is carefully brushed away from her face. When she places the bottle on the table in front of him, she smiles. “Back again?”

Danny nods, holds on to the beer with one hand, waiting for that chill to travel up his arm and into his spine.

The waitress pats him on the shoulder. “At least you’re well-behaved, even if you’re a little quiet.” She laughs and turns away, sauntering toward a table of college boys, who wave at her with two-dollar bills.

Danny is here for one complicated reason: this club—with its glossy stage and sticky tables—feels like home. Not, of course, the type of home where just-baked cookies cool on the windowsill, but a home where a fierce mother pulls you in for a hug that envelops you but also makes you gasp for air. A home where comfort and a crackle of excitement commingle. At his usual table, he waits for the stockinged leg to part the curtains with a kick, for the swish of satin as a dancer makes her way to centre stage, head up, back straight. He comes here because, every once in a while, a girl will make his heart swell. Sometimes it’s the ribbon in her hair, or the coral lipstick she wears. Sometimes it’s nothing at all that he understands, but even then he sits at this table, hope and dried liquor gluing him to his chair. There are nights when he
sits here for hours and hours, and nothing catches his eye. He leaves dejected with a droop in his shoulders and the film of too many beers on his gums. When he returns home, his apartment feels colder.

Tonight, he doesn’t like his chances.

The two spotlights spin, meeting in the middle of the stage and parting again. The curtain ripples slightly, like skin covering the breathing chest of a sleeping lover. The club is briefly silent. Everyone, even the fraternity brothers across the room, seems to be waiting on tenterhooks for the next performer, for the girl who will emerge with feathers and long gloves, for the girl who will crack jokes and sing a little as she peels off her gown and stockings, for the girl whom they imagine loving for her breasts and legs, but also for her smart mouth and knife-sharp energy. The spotlights come together once more, illuminating a narrow crack in the curtains. There are possibilities waiting to burst through, to overwhelm him with wit and shine and shimmy. He holds his breath.

The music starts, an up-tempo dance track sung by an aging rocker who has turned to disco in desperation. The tall lone man is bobbing his head to the unrelenting beat. The curtains part and standing on the stage is a small, compact woman with high breasts and bleached hair. She struts her way to the pole in front of a row of tables and quickly, with a beauty-pageant smile, she tears off her short plaid skirt, revealing a pair of sheer black panties. She twirls her fingers in her pigtails and launches herself into a spin around the pole, her legs held stiffly in a wide split.

The schoolgirl act. Of course
.

Even from where he’s sitting, in the middle of the back row, he can see that she has used heavy pancake makeup to hide the pockmarks on her cheeks. Under the spotlights, her skin wrinkles every time she smiles or puckers, and Danny notices the age in her eyes, in the way she holds her mouth as she unbuttons her blouse. As he does during each visit here, he searches her knee socks, the elastics in her hair, even the tattoo above her left breast for some trace of glamour. Perhaps a sequin or some glitter. A bit of metallic thread sewn into the straps of her bra. Nothing.

The dancer pulls at the shiny green tie around her neck, easing it through its loop. She brandishes it in the air like a whip, then saunters over to one of the college boys. With a lopsided smile, she wraps the tie around his neck, knotting it into a neat bow the colour of unblemished grass.

Danny coughs, cold beer dribbling out the corners of his mouth. He stands up, drops a five-dollar bill on the table for his two bottles of beer, walks through the maze of tables and stumbles outside. On the way back to his apartment, he doesn’t see anything around him, not the homeless couple arguing over a half-smoked cigarette, not even the ambulance parked haphazardly on the sidewalk across the street, its lights flashing and reflecting on the dark shop windows. He is aware of the pounding in his head, the sensation that things long forgotten are smashing their way through the layers in his brain.

He runs up the stairs in his building while reaching into his pocket. His hands shake and he drops his keys before throwing open the front door and rushing into his bedroom. Memories churn.

“Frank?” he asks, and then shivers at the sound of his voice uttering a name he hasn’t spoken in three years. Frank the handsome. Frank the strong. Frank the one he loved, who left him.

No, not Frank. Danny turns around and stares at his black-sheeted bed.
Underneath
, he thinks.
Look underneath
.

He lies down on the floor and peers into the darkness. The one flashlight he owns is at his studio and so he relies on his hands. His fingers touch the springs of the bed frame, the cool wall behind the headboard. But then they brush against something pebbly and large, something with loose fibres that tickle his palm.

Still lying on his stomach, he pulls out an old, sand-coloured suitcase, the one he brought with him when he ran away. His mother’s Chinese and English names are written across the woven top in her light, spidery hand. When he undoes the latches and pushes open the lid, mothball-scented dust puffs into the air. He looks at the stained brown lining, the big rectangular space inside. Nothing.

He reaches into a pocket on the inside of the lid until his fingers touch paper. He is holding two department store catalogues, their pages stuck together with time and damp. He gingerly tries to peel one from the other and they fall to the floor. Muttering under his breath, he pulls them toward himself and feels something slippery between their covers, something altogether different from the slight tackiness of the catalogue pages, something that whispers on his fingertips like breath. He picks up a flat green square and it unfurls until he is holding one end of an emerald silk sash that blows the smell of cigarette smoke and female musk into the air.

The fabric shimmers along its wrinkles, ripples like the surface of water. He runs his thumb down its length and feels no loose threads, no seams, only the smoothness of silk, warmed by his own hand.

He spent so long forgetting his incompatible past that the rush of memory threatens to knock him over. All those childhood nights he spent dreaming in his twin bed below the damp ceiling had been carefully locked away. Up until now, he thought he had organized this perfectly, that his adult life was free of weights and burdens, that he was the Danny Lim of his own making, not the one shaped by his parents or the hours spent breathing in the air of the curio shop. He was the man who cruised without guilt and touched the hip bones of his partners with unshaking fingers. He stares at the sash in his hand and knows that he has failed, that his visit to the family house three days ago was a precursor to this moment. He never completely erased anything, only temporarily pushed his memories aside. All this time, they were waiting. He closes his eyes and groans. It has been a long, long night.

But he looks one more time at the sash lying across his lap and, slowly, his parents’ house recedes and he remembers a specific alley during a warm afternoon twenty-four years ago. A beautiful woman stood in a puddle of sunshine and he knew he wanted her to cuddle him as she sang him her favourite song, about a lover who died, her hands resting on that tender spot between his shoulder blades. Right there, beside the garbage cans. Right then. Danny smiles.