Blasted (40 page)

The sky began to lighten; the whole night had gone. The thought of not having to continue – no more pain or fear or disgust with myself – unfurled in my heart like a dark flower. My friends, my grandfather, they'd understand, they'd be better without me. The buildings at Yonge and Bloor towered over me grey like cliffs, wind pouring between them. My braids whipped at my face, my neck, into my eyes. I bent into the teeth of the warm fall wind. A few cars sped by, hissing on wet pavement, the faces in them indistinguishable. The road curved, I was crossing a bridge, trees green below me. My feet slowed, stopped. Looking down, I saw the streetlamps of a quiet road winding through the woods beneath me. What about here? The viaduct was just a little further, but it had those barriers like Christian crosses and the rigging of silver ships, keeping people from the edge, from jumping. This bridge was high enough, and its concrete balustrade only chest-high.

The air rising from the trees smelled sweet. A wet, fresh wind smacked my cheek. Streaks of bruised watermelon barred the palest blue sky, and the wind came from over the lake carrying a flock of soaring gulls, crying for the sea. I shivered, supporting myself on my palms against the rough, wet balustrade. The occasional car vibrated behind me on the bridge. My head felt heavy, and despite the chill in my bones I sank until my chin rested on my forearms. The gulls cried. My eyes drooped closed.

A rush of wings behind me, a distant shriek. “Escaped intact, I see!”

My head whipped up. At first I thought it was an angel: blurred by movement and pre-dawn light, I saw a pair of outstretched white wings hovering over the street. The image abruptly resolved into a bicycle hurtling along the bridge, propelled by a figure in a long white raincoat; a man, I thought. He wore canary-yellow bicycle shorts and hip-high black leather boots, an old leather pilot's cap on his head, and on his face, swimming goggles.

He swooped toward me and pulled up with a squeal of wet brakes, whipping the bicycle sideways to stop. He stood astride his bicycle on one skinny hairy leg, dirty white raincoat flapping. With his swimming goggles he resembled a demented bird.

“Heigh-ho! Headed home?”

“Yes… no… what the hell do you care?” I raised my head and squinted at him, trying to look menacing. Would he try to stop me? I peered over the bridge rail, wondering if I could jump off now. My heart raced, my fingers curled on the concrete. When I looked back at the birdman, he pulled his hand out of a capacious pocket and threw something in my direction. I started backward with a cry, but came up cold against the balustrade. My head snapped back and with that movement the braids came undone, my hair unraveling in the dawn breeze. A shower of small, glittering things fluttered and danced around me, swirling and dipping like tiny birds, settling and sticking on my wet skin, my upturned face.

It was glitter, I realized, that's all; small pieces of cheap, shiny, coloured glitter. I shook my head, but when I looked, Birdman was gone, and my arms, face, and loosened hair were aglow with tiny pieces of light.

CHAPTER 28

“I'm not in the least suicidal,” Blue told me over a cup of tea, once I got home. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” I said. My stomach clenched and heat rose up my neck and across my face. I rubbed my face with my hand; bits of glitter sparkled there. Where had they come from? Something – a bird-like man on a bicycle, a green chasm – a memory, already shredding and drifting away. “
I'm
not suicidal,” I said.

“That's true.”

“How do you know?” I thought he was right, but – what had happened to me on the bridge?

“Well…” he shifted in his chair. “I don't. Not for certain. But I've known a few suicidal types in my life, some of them successful – if you call that success. And I have my own demons.”

I reached out and touched his inner arm, veined and brown in the lamplight, his skin smooth and warm. “Your scars?”

“Oh, those.” He laughed, turning his arm, and the pale round circles gleamed like little silvery moons. I remembered asking him, drunkenly, what they were shortly after we'd first met, knowing damn well what they were because Juanita had them too: cigarette burns, self-inflicted, up and down his inner arms. “Those weren't suicide wounds. Self-hatred, crazy mind, but not fatal.”

“Did you try? To kill yourself?” He looked at me. “You don't have to answer that,” I said.

“Passively. Throwing myself down flights of stairs, driving hammered, getting into dangerous situations. Fights… you know. Pills. Booze. Hard stuff.”

“But now…”

“Not now. Not for a long time.” He stirred in his chair, crossing his long legs. “In my life there's been a lot of hatred to deal with. Hatred for myself, and hatred from outside. I had to look for knowledge. And being a faggot – I knew there was something, well,
wrong,
pretty early on.” A quick smile, then he looked out the window, thinking. “And there is such a thing as racial memory,” he went on in a quieter voice. “I carry within me… sometimes I think the wounds I inflicted on myself were ways to try and manifest…” He trailed off, nodded his head. “I have teachers, I have my guides.”

“Yes.”

The next night I couldn't sleep at all. I'd modeled for four hours that evening, and after dinner with Blue and Gil and some mindless TV alone, I went to bed and twitched, muscles uncoiling from the hours of standing still. I stared at the ceiling; the skylight above me remained clear, no invaders. Pigeons were only doves, that's all, just stupid city birds. But those things I'd been seeing, could they be simply birds? I forced my eyes closed. The painting Brendan was working on kept appearing to me as flares of colour, dismembered chunks, an elbow here, a foot there. The painting itself was gorgeous, and only that day I'd been thinking how much I loved it. I tried to see the figure in its entirety, as it was meant to be, but I'd get halfway up the left leg and then the thing would fragment, joints opening up like a dead bird's. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't give her a head. The face, the hair and skull, were nowhere in my mind to be found.

This was what happened, sometimes, when I tried to remember my father's face. I'd try but wouldn't be able to see it any longer, just images from the few photographs I possessed. Or I'd dream up a gesture of his, a look, only to find it vaguely, horribly wrong.

I didn't sleep that night, or the next, or the next. Days I spent alone in the apartment, suspended between sleep and waking, stirring only if I had a session with Brendan. I'd watch the sun shift over the wall, reflected light clear and yellow as pale wine in the mornings, bright in the heat of the day, then thinning out about an hour before sunset until I thought the sun had sunk without me noticing it. Then, in the final moments of day, surprising me every time, the light thickened, ripening into the intense, drunken colours of dying, staining the white walls like kisses, like bruised roses, like blood.

It was Sunday. I had to dress myself and leave the apartment: a modeling session with Brendan. He was almost finished a painting, the last of the series for his show, and the show was soon.

He met me at the entrance of the building which housed his studio to let me through the Sunday-locked doors. “Sorry I'm late,” I gasped, out of breath.

“Fine, fine,” he said, striding to the stairwell. He never took the elevator, goddamn it, and I trotted after him as he whistled tunelessly through his teeth. He was wearing old jeans and a black shirt covered in paint where he impatiently wiped his brushes while working. We went up the stairs not speaking. His arse was right in front of my eyes. I'd never stared at Brendan's arse before. Each time we rounded a corner of the art-deco marble staircase, I'd drop my eyes; then all the way up the next flight (six to his studio) my eyes would creep back, staring like a lech at my friend's butt. Step, step, step. He was one of those men with broad shoulders and no hips; he wore his jeans loosely with a big leather belt, and I'd never, never looked at him with any of this nonsense before.

We got to the door of the studio, him still whistling happily, me with my face burning. When I stripped, my underwear was damp. Thank the sweet lord Jesus I wasn't a guy; what did male models do in this sort of situation? All through the session I battled twinges in my crotch, knees trembling. Everything he did seemed a provocation – the way he stroked the canvas with his brushes sent tremors through my belly – when he met my eyes and smiled, it was all I could do not to fling myself at him. I couldn't stop sweating. “It's hot in here,” I said during a break.

“I don't think so.”

The painting was gorgeous. The figure was about to step out of the two-metre-tall rectangle, teeth just showing; the points of bone at knee, ankle, knuckles, jaw pushing at the skin, a little frightening. The dark tangle of hair, regular glints over the shoulders to create braids where I wore none. The nipples, red points in round deceptive softness, hooded eyes, a gleam beneath the lids. So Celtic warrior women might have looked to the first bewildered Romans, before they grew unafraid to kill women on the battlefield. So Indian women might have looked to the settlers – fearful temptation.

Brendan turned away from the work and paced to the opposite end of the room, twenty feet away, then faced the canvas. He stared, impassive, not moving; I hardly dared to breathe. I glanced toward the canvas. It was
her
standing there, was it? – my eyes flinched back to Brendan like I'd been slapped. I couldn't look at her.

I'd never noticed before how Brendan's shoulders pushed at the cloth of his shirt; how sexual was his coiled power of concentration. It was something about the strength in him, as if embraced by those arms, my head nestled in the hollow of his neck, I could be blissful, somehow, safe. I wanted him, wanted to find the scent of him, the feel of his skin, the map of his body, where he needed to be kissed.

But again coldness entered me; I'd lost something in that park, on that bridge. I'd been living in fear ever since, a powerful aphrodisiac, some spell of the old wild magic dooming me to lust after the first one I set my eyes upon – no. It wasn't that; warm yourself, don't think of that, it's
him
. What could I do to make him see me? He wasn't going to be bowled over by me dropping my robe and gliding seductively toward him; he'd just spent weeks inspecting my naked body with his brush. His belt had a big brass buckle, he was coming toward me, smiling.

“I think… I think…” He was looking at the goddamned painting again. He took a deep breath, and started waving his arms in the air. “It's done! It's done.”

“Hooray,” I limped out.

“Just some more work on the background. I'll keep it flat green, like the walls, no point in artifice.” It really was a horrible green on the walls of the studio, hospital green. I staggered a little, I wouldn't look at the woman in the painting. “So, um, I guess…”

“Yes, yes, get dressed, you've finished, my perfect Ruby.”

I forced myself to walk away, slowly, toward my little changing area, and went behind the screen. Shivering I pulled on my clothes, one limb at a time. My brain kept sparking, short-circuiting with the urgency of my body. I emerged into the open. “Brendan?”

He was still staring at his work, head to one side. “H'm?”

“I love you.”

“What?” His kind eyes slipped, startled, from the painting to me, bewilderment and affection showing in them. Great, Ruby. Just great.
I love you.
That's a real turn-on for a fella. But although my face was burning and I knew my desire read plainly, I forced my head to stay up, I met his eyes.

“I love you too,” he said.

CHAPTER 29

My first love Patrick gripped my heart not by being coolly handsome, although he was. It was seeing him across the schoolyard skid on some ice, catch his balance, then look around to see if anyone'd witnessed his slip. That went on; I'd see vulnerability in some man, a silly twitch or neurosis, or something beautiful, an unconscious grace in the hands or sudden spat of generosity, the way the hair curled around his ears, and I'd fall in love with that.