Girls Fall Down (16 page)

The next song he recognized – it wasn't a slow song exactly, but
less fast – a song about
UFO
s and longing, about lights on the asphalt and aliens and escape, and Susie-Paul reached for his hand and led him onto the floor, and he wrapped his arms around her as she rested her head on his chest, swaying not quite in time with the music. And he knew this was something in her that was sad and nearly self-destructive; it wasn't what he wanted.

Take me away
Take me away

The first set was over, and they walked outside again, to the sheltered yard of St. Peter's Church where the sound of the traffic on Bloor Street was faint, like falling water.

‘I have to tell you something,' said Susie.

‘I figured you did.'

‘I've decided to go away. I'm going to Vancouver for a while.'

He turned from her, leaning into a corner of the limestone wall. ‘How long?'

‘I don't know.'

He ran his finger across the rough edges of the stone. It was almost glowing, in a diffused beam of light from somewhere. ‘Will you come back?'

‘I don't know.'

He walked a few nervous steps in the frosted grass. ‘You don't believe me,' he said, ‘but I will always know who you are.'

She shook her head. ‘You think that, Alex. But you don't understand.'

And when they went back inside, the bass player was leaning down, relentless, and the music crashing against the walls, fast and angry, the singer stretching out her arms and dancing, that ragged extraordinary voice.

Follow the light to where the little ones lie
Watch their faces disappear in the sky

The singer grabbed her mike from the stand and sang a long wordless cry and crossed the line of tape, dancing out into the audience and vanishing among their bodies.

Build ourselves a town
And then we'll watch it all come down

Susie-Paul spun into his arms like a collision, and pulled his head down and kissed him hard in the middle of the dance floor. And it wasn't what he wanted but it was the best he was going to get. He squeezed her against him and kept kissing her, the other people on the dance floor tripping over them, knocking them sideways, the night going on everywhere.

And suddenly nothing was urgent or desperate as he had thought it would be; as if the frantic pulse that had been beating at the back of his skull for the last year had abruptly calmed. He knew so completely that this was all he could ever hope for.

For a while they were kissing at the bus stop, muffled in their winter clothes, sucking warmth from each other, and when he drew away from her to breathe, the moisture on his lips began to freeze and sting.

He locked Queen Jane in the kitchen upstairs and unzipped Susie's dress. The skin of her shoulders was smooth and slightly freckled and tasted like sweat and yeast. He went down on his knees and ran his tongue up her thigh. Their bodies slick and wet in the hot basement, the taste of her on his lips, her mouth sliding over him, and the borders of everything turned fluid, time and space and movement. Far away from himself and falling, broken open inside her.

And then sometime during the night he started up from the bed in quick panic, his heart pounding and sweat pouring down his back. Hypo. Grabbed at the can of Coke on his desk and drank it fast, spilling part of it on the floor, and waited for the shaking to stop, and nearly wept because his blood could never leave him alone, because he could never, not for one minute, be free of this.

Susie-Paul tossed and muttered, and he went back to her, his fingers reaching between her legs, and woke her slowly, and they slid into each other again, the heat of her skin.

She left in the morning while he was still sleeping.

He wasn't sure what he had expected after that. But not complete silence. She had stayed in town for three more days, he learned later, but he never heard from her. When he called her house – he hadn't ever done this before – there was no one there at first. In the end he reached Chris, and by then she was already gone.

He knew exactly when she had left because he found out from Chris, the two of them managing to establish a very brief and unsatisfactory friendship based entirely on having been dumped by the same woman. Chris believed that Alex and Susie had been lovers for several months at least, and Alex never bothered to tell him otherwise.

He did think that she would phone him sometime, or write to him or at least send a postcard. Not so much because they'd slept together. He could accept that this was an anomaly and meant very little; but they had been friends. And he wanted to know, he was worried about her, she had seemed so damaged, and talked strangely; maybe she really was sick somehow – and then he thought of
AIDS
, and was ashamed of the thought, but it was true that he had been wholly careless. And he was by no means sure who else she had slept with.

She wouldn't do that, though. She was not the sort of person who would do that. He tried to keep this in the back of his mind where he kept all his other irrational fears about her – cancer, suicide. He didn't know why she didn't write. At the end of that strange awful year a man in Montreal picked up a rifle and went out hunting feminists, and fourteen women were dead, and he knew she had said she was going to Vancouver and anyway all the dead women were named, but he thought of that too, blood on her white lace dress. It couldn't be true, of course. But he wished she would write and tell him so.

Dissonance
came out less and less often through the winter, and finally stopped altogether. For a while he managed to increase his hours at SuperPhoto so that he could pay his rent, and borrowed money from his parents to cover his insulin, but he knew he would have to find a better job somehow.

Finally, in the spring, he heard at several removes – from Adrian, who had heard it from Evelyn's cousin – that she was indeed in Vancouver, working as a canvasser for Greenpeace, and seemed to
be more or less okay. He forced himself to go to the clinic and get tested, and he was clean, and he tried to believe that he had never expected anything else.

A few weeks later he was at the hospital to see his endocrinolo-gist, and there was a notice on a bulletin board inviting people with photographic expertise to apply for a job, and he tied back his hair and went for an interview.

There no was precise point at which he understood that he would not hear from her again.

In the indigo evening, a woman knelt on her front steps with a rag and a tin of cleanser, her hands red and raw, scrubbing the stairs again and again. Every time that she started to think she was finished she would see a spot she couldn't remember cleaning, and again her mind would fill with the possibility of contagion, of the people collapsing on the subway, and what they carried with them when they left and walked into the city. She would think of vials of Asian flu inadvertently opened, of sarin and tabun deliberately released, of some tiny particle borne towards her, tracked into the house, onto the floor where her children walked, some flake of poison, of illness, of malign intent. She poured more cleanser onto the rag, dipped it in a bucket of water, and scraped it again across the stone, weeping, exhausted, shaking with cold.

She was an intelligent woman, she knew that this behaviour was somewhere within the range of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She knew that there was no possible contaminant that would cling to her front steps or kill them all with a single molecule. She knew, as well, that the burning pain in her shoulder was the result of tension and cold, not a heart attack, not the effect of a neurotoxin. But this knowledge was useless. Her knuckles frozen white, the skin of her fingertips chafed away till they almost bled.

Inside the house, the sound system was playing, the music meant to convince her that this was less than torture, a bearable household chore. Leonard Cohen's vampire voice singing ‘Ain't No Cure for Love,' over and over. She dipped the rag in the bucket again, shook the tin of cleanser over the steps, wondered what breathing it in was doing to her lungs, as the night gathered around her.

‘You don't mind me coming along with you?'

It was Friday afternoon, and Alex was kneeling by a butcher's stall in St. Lawrence Market, under the high ceiling of the old hall, when Susie arrived. He had been photographing a man packing up trays of meat as the market closed for the day, working on the contrast
between the slick deep redness of the steaks and the thin and papery skin on the man's gnarled hands.

‘It's okay, it's good you called,' said Alex, putting the camera back into his bag. ‘Besides, I bet this is something you don't even know about.'

‘What, raw meat?' asked Susie, looking towards the butcher's stand. ‘I know more about raw meat than you do.'

‘No, this was just me killing time. We'll be going north from here.'

‘And this doesn't bother you at all?' asked Susie, with a gesture towards the heaps of ground pork, the glistening coils of sausage.

‘Bodies in space, Suzanne,' said Alex, standing up. ‘It's all bodies in space.'

They walked out of the hall and crossed the street. She was wearing a rather elegant black and white batik dress and a red quilted jacket, not quite warm enough for the weather. ‘I have to go to a party for some American hotshot later,' she said, shrugging, aware that he'd noticed. ‘House of a major donor to the university, up in Rosedale. Filipina maids handing around wine and smoked salmon. And academic backbiting.'

‘The maids hand around the backbiting?'

‘They might as well. The upper classes can't do a thing for themselves.'

‘Sounds fantastic. Don't let me keep you from it.'

‘I wish you could. But I have some time before it starts.'

Outside St. James' Cathedral, a Mennonite family was handing out pamphlets in the dusk – a man in a broad hat, three small girls in calico dresses and aprons, and a pregnant, tired woman wearing a bonnet. Alex took a pamphlet from one of the girls, and after a short negotiation with the father was permitted to take a picture of them, posed stiffly in a group, their papers clutched to their chests.

Alex studied the pamphlet as he picked up his camera bag. WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? it read on the front.

‘See, this is a question I ask,' he said. They walked by the cathedral garden, brown now and shrivelled, the dried seedheads covered with the powdery snow that had fallen during the night. ‘What
would
Jesus do? Would he be a fireman? A circus acrobat? I mean, you hang out in churches, you tell me.'

‘Something weird, I think,' said Susie. ‘This is what I'm starting to pick up, that he was a very odd guy. He'd be sitting on the church steps telling a story about mustard. He was always on about the mustard.'

‘You're making that up.'

‘No, really. I definitely have heard about mustard.'

‘I'm going to check with Evelyn before I accept that.'

‘Feel free.' Susie looked up and around at the office towers. ‘Damn, we're in the business district again.'

‘We should turn this way,' said Alex, pointing to a pillared corridor between two glass walls.

‘I got a letter from my ex-husband today.'

‘Oh?'

‘He says I was a bad wife. I mean, I
know
I was a bad wife, it's his fault he married me in the first place. I just don't see the point of bringing it up now.'

‘Well. Sorry.' He had no idea what his response to this was supposed to be. He and Amy exchanged polite and impersonal Christmas cards every year, and he could hardly imagine her mentioning their relationship, much less critiquing it.

‘Forget it,' said Susie. ‘It's a crappy day all over.'

They went on through the back streets, under grey walls, and then across Yonge and into a gravelled lot, entering an empty glass walkway and crossing out the other side, onto the little stub of Temperance Street. ‘There,' said Alex, pointing across the road. ‘That's the Cloud Gardens.'

Behind a five-storey building, the cold waves of a waterfall poured down the wall, reflecting coloured lights from a theatre marquee across the street. The brilliant water dove into a stone channel, framed as it fell by stepped and ragged limestone terraces and a network of metal bridges. To the side of the cascading waves, a long red oxide steel grid held squares of etched glass and beaten copper and pale concrete, rippled aluminum, green and gold metals. In the square below, curving stone walkways ran between bare oak and ash, banks of snow-covered shrubs.

‘Who even knows this is here?' said Alex, waving his arm as they walked onto the largest path. ‘No one even knows it's here at all.' Though this was clearly not quite true, as the bridges and terraces were dotted with clusters of teenagers, sheltered in pockets of darkness. The sharp smell of pot smoke was drifting down over the water.

‘I'm thinking that's why they call it the Cloud Gardens,' said Susie, nodding her head towards them.

‘Kind of takes you back, doesn't it?' said Alex, and then put down his camera bag and began moving through the paths, turning in a circle with his camera and causing some consternation among the pot-smoking teens. He had been taking pictures for a few minutes, and had climbed up onto one of the terraces, focusing down on the lights that flickered on the swift run of the water, when he saw that Susie was sitting on a rock, staring down and picking at her fingernails. ‘Hey,' he called to her. ‘You could come up here.' She shrugged and walked slowly towards him.

‘There's something else I wanted to show you,' he said. He led her up another terrace and over one of the metal bridges to a glass door. ‘It's closed right now, but look.'

Inside the glass, barely visible, was a dense foam of broad, deep-green leaves, tree trunks hanging with vines, cut through by more bridges. ‘It's the top of a rainforest,' said Alex. ‘They built a rainforest under glass here, over a parking garage. Just because. Just so it would be there. And no one even knows.' She had folded her arms and pursed her lips. ‘This is a human thing, Susie, and I love it. You can tell me it's pointless if you want. You can tell me it's built on exploitation and I partly believe that. But you can't tell me it isn't beautiful.'