Any Day Now (20 page)

I'll come out for Labour Day to see the show, I said before he left. We can write letters. I love writing letters. Let's see, he said.

Curtis and Mary Anne were singing now. “Don't cry for me, Argentina.” Coffee isn't like a drug. It
is
a drug. “I kept my promise, don't keep your distance.” Mary Anne had a good voice with lots of vibrato and confidence. He could sing, too, his voice higher and more tender than I would have thought.

“You're great,” Curtis said.

“Yeah?” said Mary Anne and looked back at Joe. But Joe was asleep, his head leaning against the window.

“Hey, Joe-Joe, easy not to talk when you're asleep,” said Mary Anne.

“You know the songs from Sondheim's
Company
? They're fucking beautiful,” said Curtis.

When I woke up we were coming into Escondido and the temperature in the car was way up. They were back to
Evita
, Mary Anne singing, more wistfully, “I'd be surprisingly good for you.”

I sat up straighter and realized four things: they were holding hands across the gear shift, Joe was awake, staring straight ahead at Mary Anne's headrest, it was close to 2:00 a.m., and my headache was gone.

“Hey, dreamers,” Curtis talked to me through the rear-view mirror. “How about Tour B? We stop here in Escondido, find a Starbucks, do a drive by the San Diego Wild Animal Park, though we're still at least an hour out of San Diego, so I don't know why they don't just call it the Escondido Wild Animal Park, do you know why, Mary Anne?” He was speedy with chicory.

“Tour B also includes time out at a cheap motel,” he added. “I need to crash for a few hours if I'm going to get us back to Casa Hilarity in time before our Sondra discovers something large missing.”

“I can drive,” I said. “I can take over.”

“I don't think that would be right,” said Curtis, not looking at me through the mirror any more. “It
is
Sondra's car.”

“I'm really tired, too,” said Mary Anne. And I realized they'd worked this out already. We were going to check into a motel so they could have a go at each other. That's what I'd felt on waking up. That crackle in the air, that gotta-have-it frequency. I nudged Joe and he turned to me, looking so unlike himself. So…vacant.

Escondido was a sleepy old suburban place. But we finally turned up some Starbucks at an all-night convenience store. It was empty, with pinball machines and loud music and an elaborate coffee counter lined with huge coffee flasks. Mary Anne and Curtis conferred over what they would get and settled on sharing extra-large cups of Ethiopian and French Roast. I'd only known Curtis for a short time, but I'd never seen him look so happy. Joe stood at the magazine counter, but didn't pick up anything.

“How's the French Roast?” I asked Curtis who'd already taken a long swig and topped his off again.

“Good. Do you have a few bucks on you? I left all my money back in the room. I'll pay you when we get back, don't worry.” I gave him my last five, and opened the tap on the Kenya. I had just enough change for a medium.

Curtis and Mary Anne left me at the cash and went back outside. I saw them drift around the side of the store. Joe was still at the magazine rack, looking but not touching. With the all-night fluorescents and more caffeine, I felt like I was on Pluto, loneliest little planet in the universe.

Joe looked at me and pointed to a magazine.
Hustler
. We both smiled at that, then went out to the car, which Curtis had neglected to lock. We sat there for a long time, maybe an hour, until the other two came back. They weren't singing or holding hands. They were just back to being themselves.

“Tour C,” Mary Anne announced to the back seat.

“They probably have alarms at the animal place anyway. In case someone wants to do the nasty with the beasties. You know, hump the hippo?” said Curtis. Nobody laughed.

For the next three hours, all the way back to Casa Hilarity, nobody spoke. Joe went back to sleep. I could hear his head now and then bumping the window. Mary Anne looked straight ahead. Curtis floored it.

I had a weird little dream about Candace where she was a checker at a grocery and wouldn't let me pass for reasons known only to herself. She waved one of those rubber divider sticks you use to keep your groceries separate from the guy's in front of you and shrieked verbs at me. Awake, I took out my notebook and looked over my earlier verb list.

Pranam
. Such a beautiful word, really, though I remembered that each time I was resistant. It was more than just not wanting to get down on a dusty old floor; it was the idea of subjugating myself, being that worshipful. It seemed, standing, such a long way down. But once I was there, it was peace unknown, my arms stretching over my head in full-body surrender, every part of me touching the ground. Once, when Guruji came to do a special intensive with the most devoted among us, we'd
pranamed
on the grass. Devotees. I hadn't thought that word in such a long time.

I'd tried to explain it to Coleman once, those years when I was in a spell of meditating and chanting and of service, which was a nice way of saying menial labour. But really, I told him, “Chopping onions for vats of stew at the ashram was like a meditation.”

“Sounds like brainwashing, Jen,” he'd said. “But then you are so highly suggestible,” and he'd grabbed me and pulled me into him, because those were the days when he wanted me at least some of the time.

I couldn't explain that it was nothing like brainwashing. “Detach,” Guruji said. The first time I heard him say that — it was on a video shown at our meditation centre, since Guruji lived in India and could be with us in the flesh only rarely — I knew this was it. All my pain had to do with being stuck with the hopeful, hurtful glue of expectations. People, places and things, that was my undoing. All I had to do was unstick and I would be free and happy.

Guruji came to our little centre after I'd been doing my practices for nearly two years. I was free. I was happy. Or at least freer and happier. I was celibate for the first time since sixteen, still not having figured out how to do love and stay detached. I'd seen pictures of our guru, but I'd been unprepared for what a tiny, merry creature he was. He laughed all the time, his belly quivering under his robes, his head nodding slightly, rapidly, blissfully, side to side.

“Guruji,” one of us would ask during
satsang
, our evening chats, “how does one have physical needs and still follow a spiritual path?”

Ahh, he'd murmur. And his head would bob more joyfully. “The body is spirit. The spirit is body. There is no separation.” Ahh, we'd murmur.

I sat at his feet for the whole of his two-week visit. Sometimes when he'd swat me with his peacock feather, I thought I could see a special gleam in his eyes. I was burning up all my dead, old karma. My illusions were toast. On his last night, Guruji asked to see some of us separately, a few of us women who'd helped set up the centre each night for
satsang
. We waited outside the small room we'd furnished with a purple loveseat, candles and pictures of Shiva. When it was my turn, he didn't speak, just bobbed his head and gleamed at me. But when I closed the door, he lifted up my sari, fondled all my parts, and pushed me down, face down, onto the Oriental carpet we'd bought at Pier One and which I'd vacuumed each night of his visit. His belly was soft against me. Ahh, he said when he came.

The sky had been lightening at its furthest fringes for a while, but as we came into Temecula, then just as quickly left Temecula, the sky burst open above and around us. We were in a huge glorious bowl turning blue and crimson and fuchsia, lighter and lighter every second. I watched it as I've never watched anything. I could hear Joe breathing and Mary Anne; Curtis, too, though his breath seemed to be held. We all saw it. Still, we didn't speak, not even when we pulled into Casa Polarity's circular drive and inched our way back to our departure point, the parking space right under Sondra's window.

I half-expected to see her face in the window, her expression not at all inscrutable, but the curtain was drawn and no one was about. We separated right away, as if we couldn't bear to be together a second longer. Though they were sharing a room, Joe and Curtis walked a few feet apart, Joe leading the way. Mary Anne speed-walked toward the room she was sharing with Gabriella and Allison. (Gabriellison. It
was
one of the night's best lines.)

I stood on the walk, indecisive, as they scattered. Candace would probably wake up and want to know where I'd been and why, but then it hit me that she wouldn't be able to say any of that, not a word. I laughed out loud at the thought of a silenced Candace and the sound was so strange and so wonderful after all that chatter and all that silence. I found a little hillock of grass, dewy but not cold, and sat.

It was only 6:00, but the community was stirring. Some women hurried by, linens stacked in their arms. Were they cowed by their men, their domestic duties? All that roughage? Or were they almost free in their little veggie world of laundry and married sex? At least some things were clear. Because only a fool would think any of this was simple. I thought of Curtis and Mary Anne and Joe, that weird triangulation. I thought of Coleman, his decaf, his dick. I thought of Candace and all her hurt, Sondra and the novel she would someday have to finish. I even thought of Griffin and Nippy, those waterlogged boys. I watched the silent women and when the sun was directly in my eyes, I took out my notebook and began to write. I had no idea what it would be.

It was close to forty degrees Celsius and the sisters had taken off every possible item that might be considered extra: cotton vests, scarves, sunglasses on a neck cord. Carmel had even slipped out of her bra, ducking down in the back seat behind Lasha's handsome head, unhooking, yanking and tucking the damn, damp thing into the hemp bag (very ethnic, very cheap) she'd bought at an outdoor market the day before. Lasha, on the other hand, was their hired driver and drivers here dressed like middle managers back home: black polyester suit, white shirt, dark, discreet tie. The thought of all that fabric — the weight! the warmth! — made Carmel long to slip off her underwear.

“Take off your jacket, Lasha,” Andrée told him when he'd pulled up at a quarter to eight, temperature already in the low thirties, humidity at ninety percent. Lasha had only shaken his head. He wasn't used to women telling him what to do — at least not women who weren't his mother. It was, in fact, Lasha's mother, Nona, who'd suggested this little road trip to Kakheti, the wine region of the proud but impoverished former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

“Six degrees of separation, forget it,” Andrée had told Carmel on her first night here. “Everyone knows everyone in this country.” Andrée, a visitor for mere weeks, was already plugged into its abbreviated, but exclusive, social circuit: filmmakers, artists, writers, a couple of scientists, a couple of princesses. Dissidents and personalities, Andrée's usual crowd.

Gordon Jamison, part of her usual crowd back in London, had misted up when he heard where Andrée's latest project would take her. “Tbilisi?
Georgia?
Darling, you have no idea.” Back in Brezhnev's day, Gordon had tried to make a film about the Georgian State Opera. The film, like many well-intentioned, cross-cultural projects of the time, had fizzled under the weight of its goodwill and lack of hard cash. But Gordon had never forgotten the Opera's rousing production — not even the Bolshoi could compete — of
Prince Igor
and the silvery voice of its youngest soprano, Nona Garashvili.

They might even have had a thing, Andrée speculated to Carmel that first night at Nona's. One of those hopeless behind-the-Iron-Curtain romances. Nona's now-dead husband had been a high ranker in the Party. “He could have had them banished to a labour camp in Kamchatka or Vladivostok or any other scenic spot in the great Siberian white-out,” Andrée said.

Whatever Gordon and Nona had shared, there had never been any question of Andrée, on location in Tbilisi for a long-planned oeuvre on women artists in the FSU, staying in a hotel. Or for that matter, Carmel, her sister, visiting for a week from Toronto.

“Nona makes marvellous jam out of whatever's around and talks about the purges and what's wrong with capitalism, and it's very textured, very Georgian,” Andrée had told Carmel via long-distance phone. Normally the two stayed in touch through e-mail, but electricity in Georgia was a sometime thing, Andrée said.

Is it like Russia? Carmel had asked. She'd been to Moscow in the late seventies with a group of high-school high achievers, had some matryoshka dolls as souvenirs and the memory of being kissed in Red Square by their young Russian tour guide. In secret, of course. He'd whisked her over to see something “speeshall” and hastily kissed her on the cheek. Only Carmel had turned and their lips had touched. Her body hummed for the rest of the trip.

“The world you saw in Grade 11, gone,” said Andrée, who'd been all over the world, shooting documentaries and kicking up dust. “It's 1998, way past glasnost, dear. Besides, Georgians make Russians look like large, pale, sentimental, Slavic boors. It's a tough place, but beautiful.”

Lasha was being passed on the right and the left simultaneously. How? What? Carmel had been panting from the heat in the back seat, only coming up for air to admire the green fields and passing vineyards of Kakheti. But now a Lada — “Lotta trouble, lotta noise,” Andrée's line — was speeding to the left of them, while another raced them on the right. They were flying in formation down the two-lane road, a triumvirate of Ladas. Before Carmel could yell, the one on the right accelerated its overworked insides just enough to pull in front of them. Then the other sped ahead and managed to cut them
both
off. Lasha braked, rough and fast, as the toy cars raced each other into the horizon.

“Many accidents,” Lasha shouted. “Many dead people.”

“No kidding,” said Andrée.

“You are safe. You are with me,” said Lasha, and he flashed Carmel a smile via the rear-view mirror. He was twenty-two, twenty years her junior, a fine specimen of Georgian manhood, with dark hair cropped short, but still wavy, at the neck, grey eyes and a slightly flat, aristocratic nose. Lasha had something of his mother in the way he nodded appreciatively when you spoke to him, something of her way, too, when he turned his head to check — not quite often enough for Carmel — for cars behind them. As if he deemed everything to be ever so slightly beneath him.

“So you didn't answer my question from last night. Do you or do you not have a girlfriend?” Andrée banged Lasha on the arm again. As an out-there lesbian, she could ask men the most personal questions.

Lasha beeped something Carmel couldn't see, and accelerated again to death-wish speed. “Girl who is friend?” he asked. “No, I think no.”

“You
think?”
Andrée teased. Lasha shrugged.

“I take it that means you're a free man,” Andrée turned around to wink at Carmel and made sure Lasha saw this. Andrée had a pretty good idea of her sister's life. Married an unlucky thirteen years, no sex for the last one, no kids. It hadn't taken much to convince Carmel to leave Hugh at home in Don Mills, Ontario, with his cell and remote. Remote in his cell.

“More or less,” said Lasha, and looked into Carmel's eyes through the rear-view mirror.

“Well, what is it, darling boy? More or less?” pressed Andrée.

“In Georgia” — Lasha pronounced it as three syllables: George-ee-ah — “a man is never completely free. There is always Mother.” He smiled at his passengers, a charmer.

“Your mother is wonderful. She's incredible really, she's…” Carmel tried to talk over the noise of the car. Lasha's Lada sounded as if it was on its last pistons, though he had told them, opening the doors for them this morning, that the car was new. “There's no such thing as a
new
Lada,” Andrée had joked, but Lasha hadn't laughed. And Carmel had winced (nothing new) at the way her sister could be both so perceptive and so insensitive.

Nona
was
a marvel. In her mid-forties, she was everything any woman could hope to be: beautiful, slender, smart, gracious and wise. No wonder Gordon had been willing to brave Siberia, if not the real frozen thing, then the threat of it. Having now spent time with the goddess Garashvili, Carmel was convinced they
had
shared a behind-the-curtain grand amour.

Of course, nobody talked about the Iron Curtain anymore. But when she was young, Carmel had imagined a storeys-high edifice sculpted with steely, dignified folds behind which sometimes wondrous, sometimes unspeakable things were enacted, things no audience could see. Then when she was seventeen, the curtain had parted, at least as far as it was allowed to part. She'd seen the Bolshoi, the Winter Garden in St. Petersburg, tasted the spurt of butter buried deep inside chicken Kiev. Now she found herself missing the romance of that old world, though it had existed only for people like her. The Commonwealth of Independent States (but who actually called it that?) was now nine time zones of crumbling cities and abandoned farms. She tried to tell her Grade 9 history students what it had been like, but they were far more interested in the Russian mafia.

“What my sister is trying to say is that we're all in love with your mother,” Andrée said.

“And you have not even heard her sing,” said Lasha.

“I didn't think she sang any more,” said Andrée. Nona had already declined to be part of Andrée's film, telling her she needed to talk to younger women. “Someone not so tired as me.”

“She sings,” Lasha said, “when she wants and for who she wants.”

“That's not what she told me,” said Andrée.

Deep-summer green was rushing past and Carmel had to keep remembering where she was. Giant, swooping eucalyptus trees made her think of Southern California. Stretches of farmland actually reminded her of southern Ontario, though she'd never say this to Andrée. She was having the same problem in Tbilisi, a tarnished jewel of a city. It was Europe, Florence perhaps, with that certain angle of old wall and bridge, red tile and peeling mustard-yellow paint. No, Jerusalem with its pink, afternoon light. No, Moscow with its (English) Georgian touches. Tbilisi was all and none of these.

On the ride in from Tbilisi's tiny airport that first night, Carmel had tried to nail this familiarity down. She was exhausted from her barely economy Aeroflot flight and a fold-down dinner tray that kept falling off its hinge and whacking her in the knees. And then there were the men in the aisle, singing and drinking and giving her the eye. She'd felt inhibited and joyless next to them, the only passenger who stayed seated.

“The terrain looks a lot like Italy,” she'd said to Andrée in the taxi. Already she was getting a taste of Lada-land and hired drivers, clutching her thighs around crazy curves at crazy speeds because there were no seatbelts. “Or maybe more like Spain.”

“Why do you always have to compare?” asked Andrée. “Why can't something just be itself? Sorry,” she'd added, getting a look at her sister's face. “It's just that you always do that. It takes away from your pleasure. I'm sure it must.” And Andrée had leaned over and pecked Carmel on the cheek.

“After the film's wrapped, I'm coming back,” she went on. “I really want to spend some time here, time not behind a camera or thinking always ‘How am I going to use this?' Nona says I have to come back when it's cooler. There's a new puppet theatre production opening in October, one of Rezo Gabriadze's plays,
Stalingrad
. He's a genius, like a national hero. Exiled himself in Switzerland when things turned really rotten here after Gamsakhurdia fucked things up and there was the civil war with Abkhazia and South Ossetia and then Shevardnadze himself said, ‘Come home. I'll build you a new theatre.' And then there's the elections which could also be highly interesting. Here and in Russia, too, which, of course, still looms large for all the old republics.”

Two weeks and the country was hers. Carmel mostly loved this about Andrée, the way she swallowed things whole, the way she ran her sentences together in one awed take. Even as a kid she talked like this. “Add some punctuation, why don't you?” their mother would suggest.

Andrée was grilling Lasha again: “So what was it like back when you were a kid, Lasha? What was it like in the days of communist rule?”

“In some ways, better than now,” said Lasha, miraculously slowing the car. What for, though? Carmel had begun to scan the side windows.

“But you have so much more freedom now!” exclaimed Andrée. She often positioned herself this way in interviews: enthusiastic but naive, someone to be clued in. It made people want to set her straight, and in the process, they spilled their stories. Carmel had seen it so, so many times.

“Because too much freedom is as good as none,” Lasha said. Andrée turned to look at Carmel, eyes saying, See, he's a thinker, too.

“Explain that more, could you, Lasha, love? It's a paradox, isn't it?” she said.

“In old regime, people were more creative,” Lasha said.

“They had to be, didn't they?” said Andrée.

“Now there is only money, people killing for money. I detest it.” Lasha floored the accelerator again.

“But isn't it getting better under Shevardnadze?” Andrée asked. “In the West people seem to think so.”

“Shevardnadze is only big, big disappointment to Georgian people,” said Lasha. And then — announcing, “We need more petrol” — he braked so fast Carmel's knees rammed into the back of his seat. They indented the plastic before being sharply returned to her. Lasha must have felt them, a sudden bas-relief in the small of his back. Carmel rubbed her kneecaps hard as Lasha sprang from the car.

“He's smart and sexy, but he drives like a jerk,” Andrée said.

“I may never need to see a chiropractor again.”

“I think he likes you,” Andrée said.

“I think he likes you.”

“Waste of time,” said Andrée, grinning. She looked dewy in the heat, not slick and sweaty. Tan, blonder than usual, she looked marvellous for forty-seven. “I've actually been thinking of his mother.”

“Oh, Andrée,” said Carmel.

“Look at her!” cried Andrée. “Nona's the most splendid creature I've met in years.”

“I'd say she's heterosexual.”

“You are talking about sex?” Lasha was at the window. “I like to talk more about sex than politics.”

Andrée handed him some money from her backpack. They were paying Lasha $40 U.S. for the day of driving, plus gas and food. “Do you have any idea how much that means here?” Andrée had whispered earlier. “People earn, if they're lucky, 15 lari, which is like $15 Canadian or something, a month. And we're not talking street cleaners. Scientists, teachers, doctors, all manner of professionals. I don't know how people get by.”

Nona seemed to be doing fine. Her house was elegantly, heavily, decorated with large wooden furniture, dark tapestries and enough old crystal to throw a wedding for a hundred. She didn't seem to have a job per se. She went out early in the morning to buy fruit and bread, the newspapers, met friends for lunch, had “rendez-vous.” (Nona occasionally slipped into French as she searched for an English word.) She was always free in the afternoon for tea and conversation. The table was ever set with lovely cups on lovely saucers. The wine —
good
wine, deep, dry reds and light, floral whites — flowed at night. “I know,” said Andrée. “I keep trying to figure it out. Poverty never looked so good.”