Believing Cedric (12 page)

What did she, Denise, believe in? What poignant speech could she deliver to the furtively open ears of the world, crouching in corners to overhear?

As the exams were passed out, she placed her purse on the floor and, in doing so, looked around at everyone else's handbag, noticing that they really were, as Joan had pointed out, all the same size and style, even the colours varying within only a few shades of one another. She noted other similarities of the throng, wondering if there actually was an irrevocable change that was pervading the globe. What if, within a few years, no one would see an exam room like this one, ever again, where virtually every individual dressed and spoke and cut their hair in the same way? What if they were all going to look back at themselves, rows of their smiling faces staring out at their future children through yearbook mediums, and laugh.

It was a long week for Denise, and what little time there was between studying and writing her exams, she filled with pensive silences. Once, she had sat in her room with the lights off, curtains drawn, breathing evenly and soundlessly for so many hours that she lost track. And by the time she found herself standing there at the dance, her back against the wall of the gymnasium, she felt like she'd had some kind of epiphany. It was slight; no tectonic displacement in the foundation of her ideals—she wasn't about to become a flower child and abandon her secure life, no—but she was going to take charge of her direction more consciously, become less passive. She was going to let herself go every now and then, follow her instincts into a direction she wouldn't normally step. And she was going to start tonight, with Cedric Johnson, because if there was anyone that made her feel a little dangerous, a little impulsive, it was him.

The last time she and Cedric were at a party together, he had waited for his girlfriend to disappear into another room and had approached Denise, who was standing alone in a corner. Without saying a word, he held out a pack of cigarettes to offer her one, watched her long fingers slide it out, unfolded a book of matches, struck the phosphorous so the flame illuminated his face, unhurriedly leaned in to light it in her lips, and lingered there, intimately close, his breath on her neck, studying her mouth as she blew a stream of smoke into the room. There was something so carnal, so implicit in the act, Denise had to smile. Cedric didn't, the air sticking between them like sweaty skin.

She finally spotted him at the dance, walking through the dark along an imposing gymnasium wall, dwarfed by its height, and passing under the tactless decorations and hand-drawn posters, where the words
END-OF-SCHOOL BASH
had been coloured in with permanent markers, the letters unaligned and uneven. He stopped and leaned casually against the white-painted brick, his back to her, exactly as she'd envisioned he would.

She eased herself away from the clammy wall and started toward him, feeling tense, thrilled, uncomfortably warm. But when she tapped him on the shoulder, to her surprise, he didn't turn around like he should have. Instead, his body stiffened, and he looked up at the poster on the wall, the ceiling, the disco ball, the dance floor, as if he were taking in the scene for the very first time and was unaware that anyone had even touched him. So she tapped him on the shoulder again and was almost startled by how quickly he spun around to face her, his expression light and playful.

“Of course,” he said above the music, clapping his hands once and holding them together as if he were praying, “Lest we forget: Denise.”

She pulled her head back. “And what's that supposed to mean?”

Cedric let out an ambiguous chuckle. “It means . . . I guess it just means I'm glad to see you. Glad it's not all—I don't know—trauma of some kind or another.”

“What?” This wasn't how she'd imagined it. He'd always been so down to earth, so predictable. And if he hadn't been looking her over in the same way he normally did, letting his eyes slide shamelessly down the curves of her body, she could have mistaken him for someone else entirely, someone who only looked like Cedric Johnson, a double.

“Look,” he said, “I know I'm not making sense. It's just . . . I mean, something's happening to me that I . . . can't even . . . 
pretend
to understand.” He ran a hand through his hair and gripped the top of his head, squeezing it tight.

Then, seeming to let go of whatever it was that was bothering him, his arm dropped to his side, relaxed. “But I
do
know a place out there in the hallway that—uh . . .” he nodded toward the steel doors of the gymnasium, “that you could show me.” He held a hand out between them, waiting for her to take it.

She didn't move, stunned. How did he know that she'd poked her head into one of the recesses along the corridor, a classroom entrance, and had imagined leading him there, had intended on doing exactly that? Did that mean he had done the same?

“Go on. Take it,” he urged. “Lead the way.” He winked at her.

Glancing down at his palm, she saw a dot of light streak across it and realized that everything, however outlandish it was turning out to be, had become titillating, enticing. The walls of the gymnasium seemed to pull in toward them like a levee on the verge of bursting, a levee that inevitably would. It was decadent.

She took his hand and they walked into the harsh light of the hall, past a fountain where a girl was drinking, straightening to wipe water from her chin, where they slipped into the doorway that both of them had apparently noticed. In the hidden alcove, Denise leaned back, her hands behind her, on the doorknob, while Cedric brought his face up close to hers. He moved in closer until his mouth was at her ear and whispered, “You'll never guess what door in this hallway just happened to be left unlocked.”

Not believing him, she gave the metal knob a twist, and both of them fell into the room, stumbling awkwardly into the cool and chalky air. They shut the door behind them, laughing, and instantly, in the sudden dark, everything had become even more alluring; they were alone, unseen, and anonymous, the band's guitars shut out and muffled, strumming the standard folk songs to a crowd that had no idea where the two of them were.

“How did you know?” she asked while her eyes adjusted to the glow seeping under the door.

He stepped closer, put a hand on her hip, his other on the side of her neck, his fingers moving along the downy edge of her hairline. Then he dipped his head under her chin and carefully touched the skin of her throat with his open mouth, hovering there, not kissing her.

His words registered as vibrations in her trachea more than sound. “I knew . . . because of this strange thing I told you about . . . that's happening to me. It's part of it. Like I know that, after this,” he let the wet of his bottom lip catch on her skin and dragged it along the warmth of her neck for a moment, “after this—this first time—cheating on my wife will just get easier.”

It took a second for this to fully register, and she struggled to pull away from him, trying to read the expression on his face but seeing only blurry features there. “What do you . . . you're not married to her, are you? No.”

“Not yet. No. But I will be in a few years.”

She pushed him farther away. “Why would you say something like that, right now?”

“You're right,” he whispered, stepping forward and trying to touch her again. “It has nothing to do with right now.” At first, she pushed his hands away, but he persisted, getting closer, until his face was right in front of hers. “Absolutely nothing.”

Then he kissed her, softly, firmly, with a kind of learned concentration. He was calm, assured, and moving down her neck again, the moisture of his mouth tracing a cool line along her skin like a vapour trail in the night sky above the college. He unzipped the back of her dress with a sleight of hand she hardly noticed and eased her onto the carpet.

Denise's thoughts were moving farther away, her arms on the floor above her head, arching her back, feeling the wineglass smoothness of one of his fingernails as he ran it across her lips, his other hand busy taking off his own clothes. And just before her mind was emptied of the last of its conscious streams, before she plunged into the warm water of focus, it occurred to her that Cedric had said things that were much more than peculiar, and that he might be doing this purposely, in an attempt to make himself more mysterious.

She didn't really believe him. In fact, the only thing she believed was that there was a new world wobbling on a new axis, and that she was on her way to becoming a woman that might be able to thread her way through it with a kind of quiet daring. She believed that, from now on, she would be able to lead the things that she wanted into unseen corners and taste them. She wasn't a conventional girl anymore. Now she was something else, something more. And that was all she believed. Not in Cedric, not in his strange words and countenance. Not really.

She tilted her head back, his hands slipping over her bare thighs like water, and smiled into the dark. Feeling like every colour in a nighttime rainbow.

We crossed the country towing a bantam trailer

Crammed with boxes we couldn't trust the movers with

Sleeping at motels in nameless towns, our only food

Cellophaned or deep-fried in truck-stop diners

We watched the landscape change by degrees of longitude

Adjusting the hands of our watches while our daughter's

Fingers pointed out the red of granaries, the stretch of aspens,

And finally the blushing granite the highway cleaved between

It was on a long stretch in Ontario that I nodded off

Both of them asleep in the dim of the sedan, mouths open

And breathing against the windows while the patient

Hum of the engine lulled my head into a slow dip

Jerking awake with a panic so raw I had to stop, pulled

Into a picnic area with signs a national-park green

And surprised that neither of them woke when I turned off

The car, I stepped out into a night that smelled of waves and

Walked to the edge of the trees where an expanse of black

Water opened up so wide it swallowed silence

Grumbling swells rolling up slopes of rock, hesitating,

Then slipping back into the surf to boil in the dark

While in my mind the car-crash
what if
churned

Over and over on itself like a precarious shoreline

Melissa went down into the Don Valley Brick Works with the stack of pages and a lighter, setting them on a rock amid a tangle of small trees and long grass. She lit the wad of papers and straightened up, already satisfied, watching the line of char creep and boil, the corners curling like gangrenous tongues, velvety and cresting to lick the roof of a mouth that wasn't there, and so continued to furl and lift, until they were floating, the ashes rising, whirling into the air, only to settle farther off, into the bushes and grass, the fireflies of their sparks still glowing. Melissa stepped back, suddenly panicked, realizing the potential disaster. She ran over to one of the larger embers and stamped it into the reeds, looking over her shoulder as another feathery-grey parachute landed onto a shrub. She darted over there next, shoes crunching through thorny branches, then began moving out in a wide circle, patting and stomping, already humiliated, thinking in headlines, mortified that the cinders would spread, that the singeings of her scribbled lines might catch fire, the embers of her words growing into a swath of something wide and consuming and precarious, until she was laughing, madly laughing at the idea of it, knowing that this, her ridiculous scene, was sure to become a poem she would need to write someday. Words smouldering to take on a life of their own.

“Kóstas! Yórgos! Grigora, uh!” said Helena, coming into the kitchen and picking up Kóstas's sweater off the floor, neatly draping it over the chair beside him. Kóstas took little notice. “You know, I tell you both there's people coming into the house this morning and what do you do? What do you do?” She was speaking to her sons in Greek, which, normally, was more readily understood than her clumsy English, but today she had the distinct feeling that whatever came out of her mouth, neither of them were in the mood for listening. “You take an hour to eat your breakfast. One hour. Now I have to clear up in here. Right now. So get out. And hurry up.” She tapped her closest boy, Yórgos—who, at seventeen, really should've known better—lightly on the back of the head.

Yórgos also took little notice. He was bent over the table, absorbed in the narrative on the back of a Sugar Puffs cereal box while abstractedly scooping spoonfuls of the product into his mouth. “It was Kóstas,” he said, answering his mother in English, still fixated on the box. “He was the malaka that wanted toast and a million jams.”

“Oh,” Kóstas retorted. He was the younger, at fifteen, but more than capable of holding his own. “Eh, malaka, who's the one who spilt the juice, huh?”

“Hey, hey, hey! Skasei, uh!” Helena held her hands out. “I don't care! I don't care. Just get out of the kitchen. Or better yet, get out of the house. Go play outside or something.”

“It's too cold out.” Kóstas put his arm out on the table and rested his head against it as if needing a respite from the mere thought of going outside. And Helena knew he had a point; there'd been a trace of snow on the ground almost every morning over the past week, with the nights dipping well below zero.

She started clearing off the table. “Well, go watch some cartoons then. Or . . . I don't know! Just do
something
outside of this kitchen!”

“Ma,” Kóstas began quietly, as if confiding something grave and unfortunate. “We're too old for cartoons.”

Helena flashed him a look that had both boys reluctantly getting to their feet and disappearing into the living room. She heard the crinkle of a magazine and one of them settling onto the chesterfield while the other turned on the television and stood in front of it, flipping through the channels, the dial clicking until it finally stopped at a station that was playing Saturday morning cartoons anyway. She heard another magazine now, rustling above the squeak of the springs in the armchair. Helena considered the volume, especially for cartoons that neither of them were watching, as being a bit loud but didn't say anything.