Authors: Joanna Gosse
Liar (19 page)
Dust to Dust
He could have me still,
if only he could hear
my whispers in the dark,
threading the wind
with searching sighs
and silky webs,
blindly reaching for communion,
touching only empty space
where once a warm, pulsing body
drummed with love;
Now the silence drums
with unanswered questions,
unfinished hours,
and the waste of wishes
crumbling to ashes,
marital dust to dust.
~ ~
China sat on the floor surrounded by boxes and felt a sense of deja vu, several deja vu’s, but the most recent one was when she’d landed on Grimshaw Island. How happily she’d unpacked her boxes, arranged a home for Sam out of nothing but love and determination.
June 2/98
I feel like hard-hearted Hannah. I feel like wearing a badge warning men to stay away forever.
Ceramic
There was a time
when I was just a mass
of soft, smooth clay
waiting to be formed
by the fingers of a man
ceramic in his hands;
The men who molded
were left with crumbs
when they found
my hidden faults,
They were unwise
and I was a vessel
unwilling
to hold their lies.
China had found a one-bedroom apartment four blocks from Jane and Tina but her old studio space wouldn’t have room for her for another couple of months. So, besides the boxes, she had four semi-finished Sam’s staring at her out of semi-formed eyes. When Tina visited she liked to pretend they were people. They were about her height and she had great fun dressing them up with different hats, coats and accessories. When Tina went home, China covered them with sheets, unable to bear their wooden reproach.
June 13/98
Had a major wobble today. Was ready to run back to Sam. My head said no but my heart was yearning badly. I called Sarah she told me what I was feeling was familiarity for the old life, a way of life for two years. It won’t change overnight. All I have to do is build a new life and familiarity will become old and stale and distant. Talking to Sarah was so soothing. The gift of a true friend. The knowledge of her growth and mine. We are always there, constant, an infinite song of love, ebbing, flowing, understanding.
China awoke at five in the morning sweating and screaming, LIAR! She wasn’t feeling nostalgic familiarity today. Hate was more like it. Okay, she could deal with hate. It was very energizing. She’d get a lot of sculpting done today.
The phone rang as China was about to step into the shower. She thought it might be Jane so she ran to answer and quickly picked it up before the answering machine kicked in.
“How do we proceed?” asked Sam.
“What do you mean?” said China with sweet revenge. She relished the opportunity to use Sam’s favourite, inane answer to all of her questions.
“I want to know in what order you wish to proceed. We need a plan. Do you want support?”
“Yes, I want support. In case you’ve forgotten, I gave up my life to follow you, so I’ll need a few months help until I’m on my feet again. I found a temporary job as a receptionist but it finishes in a couple of weeks.”
“You lied in your journal,” said Sam.
“Yes, Sam, you mentioned that before. I had to lie to myself in order to live with you. You don’t understand anything, do you? You cannot bring up my journal as a person, as someone with whom I’m cheating on you with. You cannot be jealous of my mind. How I act in real life, how I treat others, is the important stuff. What I write in my journal is a lot of garbage. It’s a compost heap. It gets rid of the rest of the world and clears my mind. It brings me peace and clarity. You should try it Sam. Keep a journal like Nathan suggested. Write down your thoughts, if you have any. At the worst you could keep track of your lies!”
China slammed the phone down and allowed the shower to sooth her. The man was certifiable! She was quite sure that the journals loomed very large in Sam’s weird mind. He probably thought of them as great, dark, shadows he couldn’t fight, or talk to, or manipulate with his courtroom parry and thrust. All he could do was read them, a guilty voyeur, peeking into her underwear. Poor bugger. There he was without China to manipulate. Without her journals to read. He was alone with himself, flailing frantically, his self an uncomfortable companion.
China went further back into the journals before Sam and read why she fell for him. She had simply forgotten what happened to her when she fell in love. She had lived without a man for six years, other than the occasional fling, and two years had passed without even that. She had been ripe, over-ripe for the picking. Sam appeared and she put her good sense in the freezer of forgetting.
Oct. 1, 1995
How long is it since a man has touched my body with desire? Much, much too long. I try not to think about it. I get very busy. But sometimes, reading a love scene in a book or watching TV, I see a man and a woman in an intimate embrace and my longing is as big as the ocean and I fill up with sorrow for myself and the man I should be loving.
Where is this mythical man, the one I will finally settle with? The ones I settled with before were terribly flawed. Or perhaps I was terribly flawed to have chosen them. No, not true. I am almost perfect. Gold perfection glinting in the sunlight, warm and generous and no one sees me. I'm lost in the wilderness, and so rare as to be practically non-existent. Maybe he doesn't exist either. Maybe we only live in another world that has nothing to do with this one.
Am I to spend the rest of my life alone, listening longingly to my friends complain about their husbands? It's too long since I've had a man to complain about. Instead I dredge up ancient memories of Bill or Joe or Frank and offer them up for some nostalgic scrutiny. My friends look at me sympathetically. Has she no more recent offering to lay on the sacrificial altar of womanly forbearance? Do they hear the longing in my voice and think tenderly of their imperfect husbands, suddenly grateful for the devil they know?
Now China would have a lot to talk about. Sam’s transgressions would be an endless source of speculation. They could talk about the beginning, the middle and the end, ad nauseam onto infinity. No, not really. She knew from experience that you couldn’t keep talking forever about the same man unless you stayed married to him forever. She had forgotten that once you divorced a husband, you could only talk about him briefly, as though he were not quite dead. And sometimes, if children were involved, or the same circle of friends, the vile, creature you once loved, then hated, would, with time and necessity, become the dearly divorced.
~ ~
China answered the phone for the hundredth time. She wondered how long, she would have to continue this boring job of receptionist for a bunch of weird computer programmers? The office manager had asked her to stay on a bit longer and China was grateful for the pittance. She waited impatiently for a commission to come her way and save her life, waited for word from a gallery on Queen St. to take a chance on her.
She scribbled at night, talking to herself about what she wanted to be, what she sometimes was, what she could never keep, what she still might occasionally be. Her first role on stage was as a candle dressed in papier mache. She still had the picture. She glowed softly, a slight smile on her face, full of innocence and joy. She had been extinguished many times since then. Sometimes she ached dreadfully for unfulfilled promises. Was that what arthritis was all about?
When she got home she collected her mail, and found a letter from Sam. She sat on the couch and stared at the letter suspiciously. She made herself a cup of tea, took a deep breath, opened the envelope, and read the carefully typed, very eloquent letter.
Grief flooded her muscles, dragging her bones into her feet. Impossible to cry a body full of tears. Missing him with her body, not her mind. Yearning without mercy for the weight of his body on hers, the way his hand felt when closed around hers, warm and dry and solid, like the wood she loved to carve.
She grabbed the phone and called Sarah.
Please, please, let her be home.
“Hello,” answered Sarah.
“Thank God you’re home,” said China with relief.
“What’s the matter?”
“I got a letter from Sam. The most eloquent letter. The letter I wish he’d written a long time ago. Not his usual rambling disconnected thoughts. Just beautiful, coherent, gentle words.”
“I wonder who wrote it for him,” said Sarah seriously.
Sarah’s very sensible reply immediately knocked some sense into China and she burst into shocked laughter.
“Sarah!” said China.
“Well, what’s he saying?”
“He wishes with all his heart he could undo the past. He realizes reading all my journals was wrong and he couldn’t face the conflict of admitting what he’d done. That he read about my pattern of ending relationships and what he felt was my unwillingness to accept responsibility for my actions....”
“Stop right there. First of all, a journal is definitely a very personal point of view. Why on earth would you write someone else’s? Too bad Sam preferred your journals to the real you. What a nut case! How come he didn’t address all of his lies that you so laboriously catalogued?”
“I don’t know. He must have read my past with great interest and simply skimmed my present. He must have gotten fed up with reading about himself and became obsessed with my past.”
“What else does he say so eloquently?”
“He says that I want to feel that he’s the only one responsible but that’s not the way things work in the real world. In the real world we own 50% responsibility. He says he doesn’t blame me for anything and he doesn’t understand why I should try to put all the blame on him.”
“Let me get this straight. He doesn’t blame you for anything and doesn’t want you to blame him for anything. On the other hand he wants you to take 50% responsibility for his lies?”
“No, no, no. I think he’s trying to say that he wants me to take responsibility for the lies in my journal.”
“China, have you ever written anything angry about me in your journal? Wrote less then complimentary things about me?” asked Sarah.
“Sometimes. But only when you deserved it,” confessed China.
“Do you treat me with love and respect to my face?”
“Always.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way you treat me.”
“Exactly. A journal is a conduit to solutions and better feelings. Some people punch pillows or run marathons. It’s a private place for reflection and analysis. Two things that Sam knows nothing about. Your journals were innocent creations until Sam read them and turned them into something evil. Your words are not evil. His intent was. Maybe he was trying to steal your thoughts because he has none of his own. Stop beating yourself up over a man who has the heart of a thief.”
“Hey, you’re quoting my poem.”
“What poem?”
“The poem for the Thunder Ceremony.”
“No. I never saw it. Read it to me.”
“I don’t think I finished it but I remember part of it says
there is no belief in the heart of a thief,
but I was saying that about those nasty people who ruined Sam’s Thunder Ceremony.”
“But China, he’s a product of that village and their problems. He’s no different from the others, except for a thin veneer of education and some city sophistication thrown in for camouflage. There’s no way you could ever have fit into Sam’s life. I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.”
“I did try, didn’t I?”
“With every ounce of your very formidable soul. Too bad Sam didn’t try as hard as you did.” Sarah paused for a moment and then asked, “Are you feeling better now?”
“I’m fine Sarah,” said China in a subdued voice. “I love you.”
“Love you back.”
China hung up and made her dinner and watched TV for a while and then made the mistake of reading Sam’s letter again. All very well to be brave when speaking to Sarah who demanded brave. The logic of their conversation did not enter into China’s bruised heart.
As she read Sam’s words, regret for what she thought he was, for what she still wished he could be, twisted her senses. No logic to her foolish yearning. When they were first in love he saw his image glowing in her eyes and it shamed him when he couldn’t live up to it. He tried briefly and failed. He felt China was unreasonable to expect that any man could live up to her expectations.
He was doing everything he could to manipulate her. She had reason to fear him, or rather his hold over her. Just his voice on the phone upset her. She felt like she was fighting for her life, fighting with herself, because she wanted out, but her need to love and be loved was still warring with her need to be free of Sam’s evil manipulation.
In her best moments she truly hoped that good men existed. Had to cling to that belief because the alternative was unthinkable. How could she walk down the street thinking that all men were horrible, another species and sub-human? All the books pointed to the fact that she just chose the wrong men as she sometimes chose the wrong pair of shoes or a dress that looked gorgeous that first time she wore it. When next she went to put it on, it was the wrong colour and a hideous print to boot. What had she been thinking?
China missed the woodshed. She missed the beach, the trees, the sea, the morning smell of Grimshaw Island. She missed Sam. All she had left of him were pictures and graven images of Sam 1234, still faceless. In her small apartment on George St. they surrounded her bed, accusing her of not enough hope, not enough caring or bleeding. The scent of the wood drove her crazy. She knew she should finish the faces and sell them but they were all she had left of Sam.
She dragged Sam #1 up onto the bed, put his head on the pillow and straddled him. She drew smudged outlines of Sam’s heavy features with charcoal and started carving the shape of his eagle eyes and heavy eyebrows. His mouth formed under the knife and tears dropped and rolled out of his wooden eyes. China kissed the cedar mouth and rubbed her clitoris against the morning wood.
She jumped and rolled off the totem, a splinter in her thigh.
“You son of a bitch! You really are dangerous aren’t you? That’s it! You’re out of here. The whole lot of you get finished today or I’ll burn you all and flush your asses down the toilet!”
China worked with a vengeance. She used Edgar Jim’s face for a more humourous looking Sam. She used the memory of Sam’s Uncle Wolf for Sam #3, carving a nice pot belly and heavy jowls, capturing perfectly Wolf’s drunken, bewildered expression. A fierce warrior the Mounties were afraid to arrest. When he was on a bender it took three of them to manoeuver Wolf into a police cruiser and into jail to sleep it off. The next morning his long-suffering wife, Josephine, would pick him up in Eddie’s taxi and holler him into good behaviour for another month or so. In the old days, before liquor, Uncle Wolf would have been the respected Chief. Today he was just another, old, handsome drunk, lost forever, inside the massive body and fearsome features of a baffled warrior deprived of war. Chief of nothing but an upcoming hole in the ground.
~ ~
The phone rang dragging China out of an exhausted sleep.
“Hello,” mumbled China.
“Did you get my letter?” asked Sam.
“What letter?” yawned China.
“I sent you a letter.”
“What was it about?” said China viciously feigning ignorance.
“Stop playing games.”
“Stop phoning me in the middle of the night! Yes, I got your letter. It was a lovely letter Sam but it came much too late.”
The silence stretched into a very long minute. China looked at her watch. It was 3 am.
Bastard!
“So you haven’t changed your mind?” asked Sam inanely.
“Have you changed your mind about sending me some money?”
“I don’t have a job right now. I’ve been ill. I’ll send you some when I can.”
“Goodbye Sam.”
Aug. 10/98
I’m in a rage because the sound of his goddamned voice can still make me tremble! I loved him so much and he didn't cherish me. He treated me like shit. He wallowed in my love, thought himself the luckiest of creatures and the only way he could return it was to make love to me constantly. Then, he even trampled on that by not being there.
Every time we fought I’d tell him very clearly what he was doing to me, to us, and he'd wait a day or two, or a week, until I'd let him back into me so he could prove how much he loved me, heal his transgressions with his penis because it's the only thing that works on him and even latterly that was failing. Probably bruised by my repeated rejections. He'd creep like a dog into my bed, tongue hanging out, Mea Culpa Baby. Let me lick your body, touch you with my healing snake, make you feel whole again, repair your love for me so that I can trample it again next week or maybe even tomorrow. DICKHEAD!
My heart still bleeds but my mind is a cold warrior carrying me as I limp, sometimes screaming at me for being a wimp, sometimes soothing me with gentle words, you're okay China, you'll be just fine, you'll learn to love again. Perhaps, but I’ll never love like this again and maybe that's a very good thing.
Even now, this moment, I'd give him my body, lie down beside him just to connect with the past. But he wouldn't be able to touch my mind and so my body would reject the ecstasy he once healed me with. He would be just another child to comfort with a hug and a kiss. No ecstasy, just sympathy. I would soak the mattress with my tears, drown him with regret and I would swim away.
~ ~
