How Happy to Be (19 page)

“Back to the girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” he looks guilty. Good. It was never her fault, this inevitable dissolution, but it still pleases me to imagine her protesting our meeting. Maybe I was the source of a fight between them. All of this means I matter still.

“You had to sneak out?”

“Not exactly sneak, but she’s not too comfortable with it.”

“With what?”

He squirms and sighs, always in action. “How you could be friends with an ex.”

“Are we friends?” I ask this seriously.

“I hope so. I mean …” he fades.

I sit down on the bench, suddenly tired. The snow is melting. Wedges of snow, the detritus of city blowers, form an ankle-high wall around the park perimeter, a grey, mottled wall stained with exhaust and urine, human and animal. John sits next to me, both of us consciously not touching and it feels strange that I don’t lean just an inch and put my head on his shoulder, his thin hand around my waist; how much time in my life I’ve spent in that position and then you have to unlearn it, another useless song lyric clogging up the brain.

The park seems to be shape-shifting, inviting spring. A blade of grass is pushing up through the melted snow right before our eyes.

I take a breath and blurt a question that’s rattled around my head for so long I don’t even hear it any more: “What went wrong with us?” Suddenly, it’s important to me to understand this. An entire unexplored universe could reside in the answer.

John kicks the cement with a salt-stained boot and moans a little. Then he says, like he’s reciting an instructional manual in fast motion, “We were unhappy. I was depressed and you were always pushing …” He slows down, reconsiders, and adds, “Then I fucked up. I fucked it up. But we were both miserable.”

I hate this answer. It’s true, and useless. I see myself standing by the clock on the stove waiting up all night, imagining him with her, or some her I didn’t know existed yet. It still knocks the wind out of me. I regret starting this conversation, my pathetic hope for some kind of resolution. I am immature, the kid who refuses to heal because she likes the bandages too much.

“But we weren’t miserable in the beginning, were we?” I ask. I need him to remember too.

“No,” he says, pulls the toque off and runs his fingers through his hair. It’s longer, a little lighter, as if he’s been somewhere warm. His glasses are dirty.

“And now you’re the one with the big career,” I say. “I saw your pictures at that show –”

“Oh yeah. You probably thought it was bullshit?” It’s a question, not a statement.

I answer slowly. “I guess I prefer your paintings, but this seems like it has an audience.”

He laughs. “Very diplomatic.”

His laugh is so lurching and familiar that I have to ask it, I have to get right up into that gaping bleeding wound, slip around inside its tissue, and ask, “Do you ever think about me?”

John moans again. “I can’t win, answering that question.” I jab him in the ribs. My hand on his body.

“Of course I do,” he sighs. “Max, we grew up together. When we split, I lost a big part of myself.” I’m surprised to hear him talk like that; I wonder about this Elizabeth, about what reserves of emotion she’s opened up in him, if she has a normal family to visit on holidays.

Then I think suddenly, aggressively, Why does she get him? I look at his eyes, the dark lids, the handsome pull of his mouth. What he is not any more: young, open, mine. We said everything to each other once. He knows more about me than anyone I have ever spoken to and in that way he’s like an extension of me that I lost the password for, a database functioning somewhere else out there, all knowing and totally separate.

I have so much to tell him, but this comes out: “I heard a thing on the radio the other day that we’re supposed to be a full ten years behind our parents.” I picture John’s parents in their suburban split-level. Their polite Christmas gifts: picture frames and candles. John’s adolescent surliness in their presence, his stingy way of refusing their advances and invitations. All through our twelve years, I still had to call them Mr. and Mrs.

I go on: “When our parents were our age, they had kids and houses and jobs for life. We still live like we’re in our
twenties. Isn’t that weird?” John pulls the toque down over his eyes, then back up.

“Maybe that’s why I’ve been eating so much candy lately,” he says.

Babies named, children raised. I remember when he moved out and I was beat up with missing him, and I couldn’t get used to that feeling of ghost limbs, that he couldn’t possibly still exist because he couldn’t exist without me. I told Sunera:
It’s like he’s dead
. She looked shocked:
But, Max
, she said,
your mom is dead. How can you say that?

I couldn’t tell her that I was secretly glad for a new loss. I didn’t want to seem callous, to say what I was thinking, which was that this loss was almost worse. It was worse because there remained some semblance of hope, the body hadn’t been found, the missing posters still flapped from the poles.

“I’m kind of glad you called back, actually, even if it took a while,” he says. “I wanted to tell you something.”

I know what it is. You just know some things, because he has the steely demeanour he gets before a cruel statement, as if it will hurt him more than it could possibly hurt you, and he has to shut down to protect himself, and that shutting down will protect you too; he will shoulder the burden. He never knew this habit just made me more frightened.

“You’re getting married, or you’re having a baby,” I say, partially to release him from having to say it, partially to prove that he’s still mine, and I know everything about him. My breath makes a light smoke. Maybe spring is coming; think about that. Think about that. In a tighter voice: “Or both.”

He relaxes, always grateful that I would be hurt before he had to do the dirty work. He picked the right person, forever hurt.

“We’re getting married,” he says. “I didn’t know if I would ever want to get married. You and I talked about it so much …”

Did his sentences always trail off like that? Was he always this incapable of completing a thought? I put my finger to my forehead to pinpoint the banging – right above my left eyebrow – then I laugh.

“It’s important to Elizabeth. She’s more traditional than you are,” he says fast, defensive, and then annoyed that I’m making him feel defensive. “You know, I never really bought the whole marriage thing from you. It just didn’t seem like you would ever really follow through. You’re too …” He’s flapping his hands in the air, frustrated, looking for a word.

I set my face.

“Too?”

He shrugs, drops his hands. It’s not his place to make pronouncements about me any more.

“I think I’m going to go now,” I tell him, and I stand up, feeling an enormous tug of fatigue dragging me down to the ground. I brace myself with one hand on the back of the bench: So that’s how it might be then, nine months of bad footing.

“You never told me why you called,” says John, standing up.

It would never occur to him that my news could be as profound as his own.

“I’ll tell you some other time,” I say, stomping the slush from my boots. This statement is habit, but out there in the park it implies some kind of future, and there isn’t one.

We stand there, and I’m wondering if I’ll get a goodbye hug, and it occurs to me that we might never meet again. He does it first, just bends a little, and I know where to go. I put my face in his neck to smell him. Through the frozen wool of his scarf, I do.

E
VEN WITHOUT A WATCH, I KNOW IT’S TOO EARLY FOR
anyone else to be at work. The parking lot is nearly empty when the cab drops me off, the sky just beginning to brighten and frighten off night. I buzz through security, past an empty reception desk. Even Ad Sales isn’t in his cubicle.

7:30 a.m., says the clock on the wall. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours.

I kick through the Diet Coke cans and lower my chair as far as it goes. Thirty-six hours without Diet Coke, without smoking. Not even a drink. Thirty-six hours in the same
corner of my bed, staring at the same patch of ceiling, not weeping and moaning, but waiting.

Since John left, I have never spent that long in my apartment at one time.

When my back got numb, I showered and called Mohsen to drive me up here. A new patch of ceiling.

I smooth out the prescription pad paper with the number of the abortion clinic, place it next to the phone. On the other end of that number are fetal vacuum cleaners and armed protesters lying behind bushes waiting to shoot doctors.

Way off in the distance, far from my cubicle, is a window and through the window is a dripping orange sunrise like the start of a children’s book.

Who is the father? Will the baby arrive with tassels on his feet, a tiny beeper on his waist? Will he be soft and sleepy-eyed, a little bundle of empathy, a baby who knows how to get out of time and space? “Have you thought about your options?” asked the doctor. My options right now don’t seem so different from the same ones that got me here.

And then this: A small version of Theo for the rest of my life might be something I could live with. It’s the big version I can’t picture: a father with a child on his shoulders. A homework helper. The three of us digging sand. Surely there is more to it than these movie fragments, but what do I know about fathers? My father, it is clear to me now, went mad during my childhood. He had always stayed just enough in the world for her, but once she was gone, it was like watching someone walking away in slow motion, down
a staircase, descending into something liquid. He put aside that depression during her life, and welcomed it after.

At the compound, my dad would vanish for days at a time. He and Elaine were sometimes a couple, sometimes undeclared, but it didn’t matter; I spent the nights without my father on a foam mattress on the floor of Elaine’s room, unable to sleep. I needed the sound of my dad’s breathing through the wall of the two attached bedrooms that were ours in the motel strip.

He would return days later, fish roped over one arm, hosing down his boots, hanging the catch over the back porch of the dining hall. He walked right by me, eyes on some invisible point off in the distance. First the walk to the shower and then to Elaine’s bed, where he would lie alone and recover from his solitude while she worked in the garden.

One time he returned with a glass orb, an old fishing buoy covered in seaweed. He loved that orb, shined it with vinegar and made a nest of wood chips for it to live in. Parents would get stoned and pass it around, nodding at their reflections, babbling on about Meister Eckhart and the skeletons of America, believing that shit as if the Eighties weren’t jogging by in bright white Keds across the harbour.

Our schoolbooks were stapled-together sheaves of paper mimeographed in the city, long pages of purple ink. The typewriter at the compound had a temperamental E that rose high above the other letters. When we used the textbooks left behind by the Department of Education on their
yearly visits, other people’s mothers would sit with black felt pens, inking out the sexist parts.

Some kids couldn’t wade through the muck. A little boy named Erik fell weeping when he read of the Viking pillages, white, male, and Scandinavian as he was. A little girl with a shaved head did a presentation to the learning circle, declaring that Capt. George Vancouver had set foot on our island, but because there were no natives to butcher here, he moved on to Vancouver Island, and that’s why we weren’t living in the capital of British Columbia. The mothers murmured their approval, reminding us that one version of history held as much veracity as the next, that every moment should harbour a creative act, even spelling was an art form.

When we were driven to school gymnasiums in North Vancouver to take our tests at the end of each school year, these children – the converts, the believers, the ones who, in regular classrooms, would be brown-nosers and apple-bringers – did badly. I did well. I got older and I learned how to hold the books up to the light and see past the black lines. There was a vast library at the compound where I read about victory, and it was just victory. Clean. Declared.

By grade ten, I asked my father if I could go to the mainland for the rest of high school, taking the school ferry and the city bus back and forth. He put down his nails and boards (what was he building anyway? The whole compound was in disrepair, gopher-hole-sized spaces in the floorboards and nails protruding; a little girl sliced open her bare foot on a rusty bolt and had to be rushed to the mainland for a tetanus shot). This was in the time when his pupils were so dilated
that it was like looking at a plastic baby doll with black circles of ink for eye sockets. He rubbed his forehead so hard I thought he’d pull skin off.

“Okay,” he said finally. “If that’s what you want.”

I did. I wanted alligator shirts and acid-wash Levi’s and one pink plastic earring in the shape of a cube and fingerless gloves and school dances and strawberry-flavoured coolers and joints fat as thumbs.

I learned quickly that if I got off the bus a little early on the way to school, I could go to the Park Royal Mall. The theatre there had matinees and restricted movies and a serene old woman at the counter who never checked ID; she could barely see through her one watery blue eye. I cut class for movies, and for worse, but mostly for movies. Sometimes I stayed out so late that I missed the last boat back and Elaine would come across in her outboard motor to find me waiting on the dock, bra in my pocket from a drunken fumble.

After one of those evenings, I lay on the mattress on her floor, trying not to close my eyes to keep the room from spinning. Elaine came in from the bathroom smelling like grapefruit soap and crouched down, handing me a rainbow-striped Guatemalan woven wallet with a $20 bill in it: “Mad money.” She explained that a woman should always have a little money to protect her, money to wake the water taxi owner and get home, money to let her get angry, instead of sucking it up. The idea chilled me, as if without this twenty-dollar bill, I might be forced to do something against my will: “No, it’s okay. I’m not mad. I’ll stay.” Money to keep the bad at bay.