Weekend (12 page)

       
JOE

The baby slept and slept—far longer than ever before. Joe wasn't used to not changing diapers, not breast feeding; she guessed she should feel cheerier about a break, but she didn't. Her throat was thick and she felt lost. She worried Scout was sick.
Do something
, she told herself. She sorted laundry and, wary of bending over her stitches, started a load. There was still no sign of Ell and Scotia, but the two boats were definitely gone; looking out the window again and again didn't change that. Bad but also weird that Elliot hadn't checked in. The idea of Elliot with Scotia, with fresh, unblemished, uncomplicated Scotia, only made her feel worse.

Joe made tea and settled back on the couch, thinking, cynically,
Lactation tea.

The phone rang and she grabbed it. Linda, an old friend from Nanaimo in BC, wanted to catch up on baby news before she announced to Joe, sotto voce, that her first partner, Dree, had died in a car accident.

“Whoa,” said Joe. She braced herself on the couch.

“I'm sorry to tell you.”

At first, Joe's voice wouldn't come, she produced sound but not words. Then, “Do you know what happened?”

“Driving drunk. Driving stoned, maybe. The tox results will be a while. Wrapped herself around a tree. I don't know; gossip says maybe she wanted to, maybe it was on purpose.”

Slowly, Joe waited for the news to penetrate. She said, “She
was always threatening to kill herself. This is—I can't—Poor Dree. This is really horrible.”

“I remember she was suicidal,” said Linda.

Elliot had never threatened suicide. Joe'd forgotten what a shitty piece of manipulation suicide threats could be when someone was just using them to get what they wanted. Joe thought back to the drama, the meltdowns, the scenes, the hysteria. “Why was I with Dree, for god's sakes, Linda? Why did I think that kind of behaviour was okay? Love at first sight, I remember. And I'd had skin cancer on my back a few months before we met, went through all that treatment baloney, and she told me that she'd had uterine cancer, far worse than what I'd gone through, and it'd spread inside her abdomen. She looked at me and I looked at her—and that was it for the next five years. It's a wonder I ever got my mechanic's ticket, I was so distracted.”

“And the lying,” said Linda. “Remember?”

Joe made a strangled noise, said, “Know how you knew Dree was lying? Her lips were moving.”

Linda giggled.

Joe looked around the cottage, but it was suddenly a Dali painting, dripping, the clock hands running in goo down the wall, the table legs liquefying. Her life now and her insane life with Dree bled together. “She used to steal things,” she said. “I tried everything to get her to stop. I told her how embarrassing it would be if she got caught and I had to tell our friends. I begged her. I tried giving her money, buying her stuff to stop
her. And she was addicted to codeine. Lord, tell me please, why was I with that lunatic?”

“She was funny,” said Linda. “Really fucking funny.”

“She
is
funny! She's so funny!” Joe realized her tense was wrong, sighed. “I loved how funny she was. And warm when she wanted to turn her charm your way. But oh god, the lying, Linda! I remember right off she said she'd reimburse my plane ticket when I flew to Saskatoon to see her, and we went out shopping and she wanted a bunch of clothes and she said she'd pay me back if I used credit, and then, of course, none of that happened. Her cancer diagnosis was like dice in my brain, rattling. If there was a ninety-percent chance she'd be dead in five years, could I commit to loving her
no matter what
, could I take a chance on a woman who was probably going to die, soon and badly?”

“Yes,” said Linda softly. “I remember that.”

“After she moved in with me, she took over the chore of picking up my mail from the post box I had because I moved so often back in those insecure rental years, when I was always having to leave because the landlord was renovating or selling the place, or my girlfriend had left me. One day, Linda, I saw the bag Dree always took into her office, hanging on the doorknob, open, stuffed with mail. I looked; letters to me, bills mostly. I spilled them out in a way that could suggest the dog had just bumped into it—you know, a reminder to give them to me. When she got home, she just put them back in the bag, so I knew she was withholding my mail. I sat her down after
dinner and called her on it. Usually I just had a wobbly case against her lies—some vaguely formed suspicion—but this time I had proof. I confronted her, and she fought me on it for four unremitting hours. She had crazy tactics! She tried chastising me:
How dare you think so little of me!
She tried loving me up:
Oh, sweetie, I would never do anything like that. Why on earth would I? Does that make sense to you? Does that make even a smidgeon of sense?
And of course it didn't, at all, and ordinarily I would have folded. I did fold in similar arguments because she had such good points—the bad stuff never made sense, so it couldn't be real, right? I was a battered old fiddle, and she was a bow. She was good at manipulating me. After that tactic didn't work—and I remember, she gave that one a good hour—she switched to anger: I set her up! How fucking dare I, a fucking student, accuse her, a pharmacy tech, of lying? I ought to be ashamed of myself because, who was I, who was I? I was an asshole, that's who I was. She wished she'd never met me. But I still stuck to my guns. What I remember now is my firmness:
No, you lied. You took my mail. No, you lied. You took my mail.
And her relentlessness. The conversation for her wasn't about stealing, it was about winning. Finally, I got up and went to bed and told her she was not welcome to join me and that I'd give her one last chance in the morning, and if she didn't come clean then, she should pack her bags and move. In the morning when I got up, she was gone. Not her stuff, just her. And there was a note that said, ‘Joe, I did steal your mail. And also, I never had cancer. I hope you can forgive me.'”

Linda said, “You never told me this before.”

“I'm not sure I've told anyone,” said Joe. “It was just so bizarre, and it seems even crazier looking back. I was young and vulnerable. I'd had female lovers, but I'd never been in love before Dree.” Joe considered. “Because we'd both been ill, I thought I'd met a kindred spirit. I thought,
Wow, two women, recovering from sickness together. We can do this.
And then, that morning she announced that the projections I'd built our future on—all the joy and tenderness and good wishes and hope and palliative care at the end, you know—all that was bullshit. She'd stolen my mail and she lied to me about having cancer. She'd had endometriosis, not cancer. I didn't know what to do, Linda. I felt so shattered. I felt dirty and used.”

“Yes,” said Linda. “Of course you did.” Linda talked for a minute about Dree's current partner, Eileen, how crushed she was, her erratic behaviour as she tried to adjust to Dree's loss.

Joe said, “Dree came back to clear out her stuff, and I wasn't mad anymore, just hurt and broken, and I saw her and hugged her. Because I had thrown my lot in with her, and under all the bullshit, what she'd told me was good news, right? Dree wasn't dying! She wasn't dying!”

“I know,” said Linda. “The best news you could have gotten—that your partner was going to live. But also, for you, the worst.”

“We were in Vancouver then. Dree wanted to move back to Nanaimo, and we'd lost our housing because our landlord had sold out from under us, and I just said,
Fine, let's go back,
whatever. Whatever you want. It will help you stay off codeine, right, and stop stealing.
”

“And you moved here.”

“What a con woman. What a bullshit artist. I can't even count the number of other women she got involved with while we were together.”

“I'm sorry,” said Linda. “I wonder if it's been that bad for Eileen all these years and no one had any idea. They were together a long time. Sorry Dree was such a complete waste of space. Sorry she's dead.”

Elliot had rigged a simple rope pull to the cradle so that every time Scout fussed, Joe could rock her without getting up, but Joe didn't dare send her back off to sleep because she'd been under so long after her cry. “Do you know she was the number one reason I agreed to a poly relationship this time?” Joe felt a cinch in her heart about Elliot and Scotia. “So all the shenanigans would be above board. I'd know. Every goddamned time my spouse fucked someone else, I'd know all about it. Because of Dree, really.”

“And how's that working out?” asked Linda.

Joe laughed. Scout started to cry, and Joe's breasts let down in response. “Up, you know, and then it plummets, pretty fucking far some weeks. Like, really, this week. I guess I thought she'd change, you know, with the baby, but she's been drifting lately, and we're, I don't know, estranged?”

“Fuck,” said Linda.

“Although thinking about Dree certainly makes me glad
for what I have now.” Joe had once become Dree's frog in the boiling pot of water. Now was she Elliot's?

Joe sent out texts to Elliot, knowing most of them would bounce back due to bad connectivity, but hoping something might get through.

Once Scout was suckling, Joe telling her to
open wide, guppy-latch
, pulling her firmly to the boob, all she could think about was Dree and what a strange, deranged woman she'd been, and how Joe had loved her to pieces even so, and how she was shattered, and shattered that she was shattered. The kinds of things Dree had done were straight out of the personality disorder checklists: shallow emotions, situational morality, entitlement, lack of sense of self, but back in those days she hadn't understood that. She'd stood up for herself that once, about the mail, and then never again because never again had Dree made such a transparent blunder. She embarrassed Joe in Nanaimo, stealing, creating divisions between Joe and people she'd never even met, between Joe and her friends. She screwed up special occasions, started scenes in restaurants and parks.

Those were bad old days.

Joe had still been shaky from Dree when she got together with sane, ordinary Elliot. All Elliot—smart, accomplished Elliot—had ever wanted to do was be able to sleep with other women, and she didn't want to lie about it or go behind Joe's back. She hadn't manipulated Joe. She hadn't lied, she hadn't stolen. If she was sometimes self-absorbed, if she wasn't as
romantic as Joe might want, if she wasn't attentive, Joe would take that any day over what had happened with crazy Dree.

Dree, who'd finally hit a tree.

       
AJAX

“Part of what I love about you, Ajax, is that you were raised in the Bahamas.”

Woof!
said Toby, shaking himself. Logan rose to let him out.

“Only until I was twelve.” At the table, pushing around a maple syrup bottle.

“Still. It's more European than Canada is, surely.” Their thumbs in their short pockets.

Ajax stuck her finger in a pool of syrup, licked it absent-mindedly. “That wasn't my experience, really, Logan.” She'd grown up poor and scrabbling. Her parents had worked for a dive resort and had emigrated because life in the Bahamas was dead-end. Nowhere to go but sideways and eventually into old age. Ajax's grandmother had sponsored their move to Canada. They'd landed in a Toronto blizzard, and that had been difficult, the few months shivering through winter while her parents bickered (her mother was glad to be back, but Ajax and her father couldn't handle the cold in the land or the people)—but carrying on to Vancouver hadn't made it much better. Warmer, with beaches both familiar and strange—same water, more or less, but cold and mountain-backed, and the weather was no great shakes. Her parents had edged her away from painting, wanted her to become a professional—a doctor, a dentist—but she'd stubbornly attended Emily Carr and earned a certificate that lead to … well, they'd been right: it hadn't led to much. A hand-to-mouth life as a portrait painter. She and Logan, no matter the laboured
parallels Logan wanted to draw, were not from the same side of the tracks. Logan's mother had taught at universities—in South Africa, in Paris, in Montreal, in Toronto. Logan's dad had been a CEO for a gold-extraction company. Logan didn't have a clue about class stratification. Saying,
You won't have to worry about anything if you're with me
, which they had said a hundred times, was baloney, a sentiment rather than a fact. She'd learned her lesson about getting too dependent with her ex.

“But it's a Commonwealth country.”

“So is Canada, Logan.” Ajax was annoyed; was Logan looking for her to be something she wasn't? Educated? White, maybe? The curtains lifted in the same breeze that had been captivating the night before. There was something so achingly summery about them—about everything here—that Ajax could almost close her eyes and imagine herself back in the Bahamas. And right now it irritated her.

“But it's more aware of being a Commonwealth country.”

“Have you ever even been there, Logan?” Ajax had grown up on a peripheral island and attended a one-room schoolhouse. She moved her fork through the syrup. “The standard of living is not high.”

“But you learned manners.”

“We learned colonial manners, that's true. But I barely wore shoes the first decade of my life.”

“We moved a lot,” said Logan.

Were they trying to equate their immigration experiences? Had Logan also moved into a too-small house in a rural suburb
of Vancouver which had been already overcrowded with people? Ajax thought not.

“I never felt at home. I never made friends. I always knew I'd just be uprooted again.” Logan poured themself a vodka tonic.

Ajax stood to take dishes to the kitchen. “Moving is hard on kids.”

“My little barefoot goddess,” said Logan, bussing her as she gathered plates.

“Don't,” said Ajax, lifting their plate. “Now you're just ticking me off.” She bumped into a life preserver on her way to the kitchen—was suddenly annoyed by the kitsch on the walls. Hung paddles, old rusty lanterns. Things that said,
I am rich. I hired a designer. My house could appear in
Cottages North
.
I will never need an actual lantern.

“Hey! Hey! I didn't mean to offend you. I'm just trying to say I like you.”

“Right,” said Ajax, tightly. “There is some awful something happening right now, right here, that I am just going to cross out because I don't want to get into it with you. Not this weekend. Can we defer?”

Logan said, “I just like you. I like everything about you.”

We'll see how long that lasts,
thought Ajax. Logan was pushing close to buttons: poverty, race, emigration, resettlement, hunger
.
Her past life wasn't something Logan would ever understand. She filled the sink with hot, soapy water, plunged in her hands. Quintessentially, she and Logan had almost nothing in common. Which had essentially no bearing on love.

“You'd be wrong to expect differences aren't an issue for me, Logan,” said Ajax in bed where they'd found each other again after breakfast. So much divergence between them. Ajax had lost her parents; Logan's were still alive. She had kids, Logan didn't. “I just want to be sure there's enough to go on with if our attraction wanes.”

“You already said that,” said Logan. “You've said that ten times. Do you think I'm not listening? It's not like I can do anything about any of this. You come from where you come from. I come from where I come from. You think it's relevant. I don't.”

“Don't be snappy. These are my preferences and expectations, extensions of what I value in
my
life. I just—I need to discuss it more. I need to talk about what it means, what it signifies, how it changes my life to be with a rich white person, to be taken as half of a heterosexual couple.” Ajax heaved a sigh. “I shouldn't care what other people think, I know. At my age, people don't even notice me anyhow. But it's embarrassing for me to feel straight.” Logan shot her a look. “It's like stuffing myself back into that closet I escaped from.”

“Oh, come on,” said Logan. “Really.”

“I know, I know. I'm not exactly proud of this. Defensive, yes, but proud, no.”

The screen door slammed—the dog, letting himself back in. They heard his nails click across the wood, him slurping water.

“Me with a transman. I just never thought.”

“I say it again: Don't label me. I'm just me.”

“You're not a woman,” said Ajax. She thought of women as water, and Logan was definitely not water. Not wet. Not flowing.

“Obviously.”

“I signed up for loving you,” said Ajax. “So this is just part of the equation when I think we might get more serious. You're white and you're trans.”

“But this
is
who I am,” said Logan, irritated. “White, Germanic heritage. And not born a girl even though I have girl bits.”

“Please don't get mad.” A pause. “You're mad.”

“I'm not mad.” Logan rolled away, stiffened.

“You are mad, I can tell.” Ajax thought, said, “But lesbian sex is different.”

“How is it different?”

“It's not … It's not focused as much on ends.” She thought back to lovers who took four or six or eight hours to make love, lovers who came a dozen times, lovers who never came (nor seemed to care). She thought about sex with Logan: dirty, hot, enflamed. But not so much an exploration—nothing much to explore with Logan's body nearly always going to be out-of-bounds. Or was she missing something? A language the two of them could speak that was contained in this kind of sex? A cursory guide to BDSM would suggest she certainly was missing things—if that's where this went. And for certain she'd never been this physically opened or wet with anyone before. Logan didn't explore Ajax's nuances, either; Ajax wasn't sure Logan was capable of nuance. “A lot of the time,” she offered, “making
love can be as sultry as laundry on a tropical clothesline on a breezy day.”

“You want sex to be like laundry? More tumbling?”

Ajax laughed.

“You think you know so much.” Logan sounded put out.

“I do know so much, and you're mad, and maybe I'm wrong to bring this up again. Maybe it sounds like I'm saying
You're not enough.
You've fought to be who you are with freedom and dignity and now I come along and imply I need you to be someone you're not and never could be. I'm just thinking out loud. Ruminating. Do you get that? I'm not building a skyscraper here—like, this is the floor, this is the ceiling. Tell me you get that. I'm not saying this is how I have to have things, that I have nothing to learn from you and how you fuck.”

Stiff nod.

“Maybe I should only talk about my qualms with friends. But grant me this: We both arrive here with that dreaded ‘baggage.' Like, me being sick changes your entire life, Logan. I need accommodations, and you have to make them if you want to go forward with me. Well, it's the same for me. You need accommodations for this thing about you, and I have to make them if we're going to go forward. Do you see?”

“I don't see why it doesn't just matter that I love you.”

It went through her in shivers, Logan's love. “Your being a boy presses me closer to being a girl, and I don't want to be a girl. It's not who I am.”

“Why does it?”

“People read by one's company, too. As you read more masculine, I read femmier.”

“Good.”

“Good if I wanted to look or be femmier. We're the same, really. You're just farther along the gender curve than I am.”

“No curves for me, if you don't mind.”

“Ha!” said Ajax.

“Well, I feel so cherished.” Logan sat up, their voice hollowed. “Basically, you've said I'm bad in bed and I'm not unique and being with me is a kind of agony for you.”

“God, no!” said Ajax, pulling them back, meeting their eyes. Such deep, cold eyes when they were mad or hurt. “God no. For fuck's sake, not in a hundred years. My thing is negative and your thing is neutral. I get the difference. But your thing is so hetero, Logan. And what if you start taking T?”

“Isn't it queer if I'm queer? By definition? Plus I'm not taking T,” said Logan. “I'm not planning to take T.”

“What if you get your boobs taken off?”

“What if I do? I probably will when Mom dies.”

“Boobs are a major turn-on for me,” Ajax said. “If I'm going into this, with all that I am, I need to know what I'm capable of accepting and embracing, what my limits are. I need to know whether I can handle it if your breasts are gone, you're on T, and you're getting a moustache and goatee. If I don't ‘pass' anymore as gay because you've become … an actual guy.”

Logan's chums?
thought Ajax.
They were already straight men, almost exclusively
.

“You know what it means. It means I'd be allowed to use washrooms everywhere I go.”

“I know that,” said Ajax. “I wasn't talking about bathrooms.”

“Well you would be if you'd been the kid going home with wet pants because you were taunted when you tried to use the girls' room and you'd already been banned from the boys' room.”

“Oh, honey. Honey, I'm sorry. That's horrible. Scarring.”

“I'm
glad
you don't have a clue.”

“I get harassed often enough as it is and I look like this.” She motioned toward her large breasts.

“You don't get harassed. You don't know harassed.”

“Well, when my hair's short, I've had women lurch across restaurants to keep me out of the ladies'. I've had women come into washrooms while I'm cleaning my hands and go back out to look at the door to see if they're in the right place. I've had women say,
Sir, did you know this is the women's washroom?
”

“My sweet girly girl,” said Logan.

“Not to het women, I'm not. I'm transgressive, even if you don't notice it. Just because I'm a bottom doesn't mean I'm not butch.”

Now Logan laughed out loud. “My wanna-be butch baby.”

“I applied, but I failed the entrance exam.”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ajax.

“Now,” said Logan.