The Mystics of Mile End (20 page)

I pulled my backpack onto my lap and took out my dad's manuscript. I never looked at it at home, knowing that if Jenny saw
it, she'd dish out a look so compassionate, so concerned, it would only make me feel worse. Here, I was free from the burden of other people's sympathy. I flipped to the first chapter and read:

ANI, the first vessel on the Tree of Life, is considered feminine. This is because, within the kabbalistic framework, the masculine bestows and the feminine receives. Given her position at the bottom of the Tree, Ani receives divine light from the vessels above her, but cannot emit her own. For this reason, she is associated with the moon, the orb that reflects the light of others.

I frowned. “The feminine receives”? The less-than-enlightened perspective on gender relations annoyed me, but I kept going.

The most evocative image associated with Ani is that of “the beautiful maiden without eyes.” Medieval sages believed that the eyes emitted rays of light, which landed upon objects, producing vision. To be without eyes, then, was to be without the ability to emit one's own light. This applied wonderfully to Ani, always the receptacle for divine light but never the progenitor.

“Evocative”? “Wonderfully”? Since when had my dad been able to appreciate the beauty of a religious idea? This from the man who had told me a bat mitzvah was just a worn-out tradition, who had called Mr. Katz “delusional” when a mystical tree rose up on his front lawn?
Now
my father decided to get it? Half-angry, half-suspicious, I flipped to the next page. There, crouching at the foot of a margin, was a hand-scribbled note:

Ani as shortcut to Ayin? (Cf. “crown.”) Dangerous if I jump from first to last? Skipping steps: check Lurianic, Hasidic sources for precedent.

My gaze zeroed in on one word at the note's center, that fulcrum from which all other words slid off into invisibility:
I
. The most abhorred word in academia. The forbidden personal pronoun. What if this hadn't just been academic for him; what if it had been personal, and he was actually engaged in the famously dangerous business of
climbing
the Tree of Life? And not only that, but looking for shortcuts to boot!

I jammed the manuscript into my backpack, said good-bye to Hannah, and left the café. But instead of going straight home, I stopped in at the public library. At the back of the special collections area, I walked through the stacks, letting my index finger trail along the spines, which was this thing I did sometimes. The air was thick and musty, and on the shelves were rows and rows of crumbling books. I didn't pick them up, I didn't open them, but I let their scents wash over me. Then I left the library and went home.

W
hile I was out, Jenny had found a new job. And a new friend. The new friend had found her the new job.

“Her name's Kyle,” Jenny said as I hung up my jacket.

“Kyle?”

“Yeah. She lives right across from The Word, and she's in her last year of undergrad, she's studying design? And she said that a bunch of her friends are in this art collective, they meet on weekends and stuff, and they're looking for a model. You know, like to sit for them?”

“I know what a model is.”

“Yeah. So, what do you think? They're students, so they don't have a lot of cash, but Kyle said she could pay me like—”

“Wait, she's going to be there?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I thought she was studying design.”

“Well, yeah, but she likes to paint on the side.”

My phone beeped. I took it out of my pocket and found a text from Lev.
I know we weren't that close, but I still miss him, you know?

“So what do you think?” Jenny said.

I switched off my phone. “About what?”

“The job.”

“Well, it beats bagging groceries.”

“That's what Kyle said!”

“What?”

“That it beats bagging groceries! That's what she does—that's where I met her—at the grocery store.” Jenny looked triumphant, delighted, as she added, “And maybe with the extra money we can fix the place up a bit.”

I flopped onto the couch. It was true that our small but beautiful apartment was still barely furnished, even though we'd moved in together two years ago. Because she'd just graduated from her arts certificate program and I was still a student, we didn't own much of anything; what we had was a kitchen table, a lamp, a bed, a clock radio, mismatched dishes, two chairs, books, an easel, and about seven thousand tubes of paint. The entire floor of the apartment was made up of black and white square tiles. As a result, I sometimes felt like we were living inside a chess game, one in which very few pieces remained.

“Anyway,” Jenny said. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said, and met her eyes, just for a second, but this was a mistake. They bludgeoned me with a look of such infinite kindness that I flinched and turned away.

“Samara,” she said. “Do you want to talk?”

“I have to pee.”

“What?”

“Just a sec,” I said, and locked myself in the bathroom.

Once I was in there, I figured I might as well go. No luck. But I sat anyway, savoring my moment of freedom from Jenny's pity—a pity that was all the more painful because it was so well-meaning. When I couldn't put it off any longer, I flushed, turned on the water, and pretended to wash my hands. The face in the mirror had bleary eyes and chapped lips. “You look like shit,” I whispered to my reflection, and started putting on eyeliner.

When I came out ten minutes later, Jenny was folding tiny paper cranes.

“Hey,” she said, “do you feel like spaghetti for dinner or— Are you wearing makeup?”

“Yeah. Have you seen my black halter top?”

“On the lamp,” she said, pointing with the crane's crisp beak. “Where are you going?”

“There's a dance thing tonight.”

“Where?”

“Downtown.”

“I didn't realize you were the clubbing type.”

“I'm not. But, well, Hannah invited me, so.”

She nodded at this lie, then dragged her fingernail across the crane's back to form the tail. I pulled off my ratty T-shirt and put on the halter. I could tell she was trying not to press me for details, not to push too hard. To give me some space.

“What time will you be home?”

“I don't know,” I said, dropping a kiss on her lips before grabbing my jacket and jamming my feet in my boots. “I'll call you,” I said, even though we both knew I wouldn't.

I
rushed out into a tangled nightwood of rank bars and dirty dance clubs, not stopping at any one place but flitting from room
to room, bottle to bottle. I folded my frame into foreign bodies, and this was where I felt relief, free from
how are you
and
I love you.

I was never the type of girl who goes to clubs, the type of girl who parties. I was not that sort of character, that was not my story—and wasn't that reason enough to go? I wanted to empty my mind, to free myself from the familiar. To be anyone but this unbearable person I could feel myself becoming: a heart full of anger, a head full of abstractions. So I worked my way into the center of the dance floor, letting the music crash on my ears, the bodies beat on my body. I swayed under the strobe lights and thought: This is me, on the dance floor, emptying myself. This is me stepping into an alternate storyline.

W
hen I got home, Jenny was asleep. I wanted to shower but knew the noise would wake her, so I stripped down to my underwear and slipped into bed beside her curled form. The clock radio read 3:48
A.M
. She was drenched in moonlight.

Jenny, my sepia girl. As a child she'd gone unnoticed by both parents: Judy, a bossy and busy lawyer, and Ira, a kind but weak and no less busy dean. Their unseeing eyes had rubbed the color right off her, so that by the time she was old enough to go to school, there was nothing left for her teachers and classmates to see. Her name sat quietly in the middle of roll call, plain and forgettable. She had a tendency to blend into backgrounds, with pale hair and skin the color of dishwasher detergent. In class photographs, her face invariably showed up as a smudge.

Maybe that was why, when I saw her sitting across from me on my bedroom floor at age thirteen, her translucent face focused on the watercolor she was painting, I lifted my paintbrush and, on impulse, spread a faint blue streak across her cheekbone. Her eyes widened with surprise—and then she laughed. She raised her own paintbrush and staged her counterattack, the bristles reach
ing for my nose and forehead and eyelids, but I was too fast for her. I grabbed her skinny wrists and wrestled her to the ground. She lay under me, squirming and giggling. I stared at her mouth and suddenly it was not colorless, in fact it was bursting with color, I had never seen anything so red. I leaned down and kissed her. For a second her eyes were wide and still. Then her face twisted as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, pushed me away and ran out of the room—a room she wouldn't enter again for almost ten years.

For a long time afterward, Jenny steered clear of all painting. But then one day, at the age of sixteen, she told her mother she wanted to redecorate her room and her mother bought taupe paint and Jenny revolted. She began to fill canvases with bouquets of wild color, to fill white with explosions of light and profusions of impossible brightness. She showed up at the dinner table with hands splattered in oils and acrylics, flicking their exotic names off her tongue one by one: amaranth, cadmium, chartreuse, burnt sienna, vermilion, xanadu, cerulean, heliotrope, atomic tangerine. She might as well have said
Fuck you
.

When high school ended, she chose Concordia over McGill, fine arts over liberal. She left the wealth of Westmount and deliberately moved into the dirtiest, shittiest apartment to be found in the student ghetto. She had money but wanted to live as if she had none. She had parents but wanted to live as if she had none. She painted in her dank apartment and waited for something she could neither name nor remember. She told herself she was learning the opposite of gray, but for all her efforts over the coming months she remained invisible.

Until the day I showed up at her student art show, not knowing it was hers, and she let me walk her home afterward to her tiny one-and-a-half. I touched her face and, one by one, her features sprang away from the cracked wall behind her. I held her by the hip and the
gray drained away. I pushed her against the wall and she laughed a vermilion laugh, feral and throaty, her mouth stained red. I kissed her there and the color spread—she was amaranth, cadmium, cerulean, heliotrope, atomic tangerine—and I pulled her into bed and inside the walls were raining, paint was pouring down, and outside the sky was darkening to a deep pitch black. In the morning, when I held the mirror up to her face, she wept the impossible tears of one who has never known what it is to see her own body.

I never would have thought that one day those colors would sting my eyes, forcing me to look away.

B
y the second week of the semester, the voices of my professors and classmates were needles entering through my ears and piercing my brain. When I looked down at my Norton anthology, the words on the page quietly picked up and rearranged themselves.
How long are you going to sit here listening to this crap?
the letters read.
Don't you have more important things to do?
I skipped one class, then two, then three. It didn't faze me. The letters were right; Barthes and his cronies would get along just fine without me.

As to the “more important” things—well. My dad's manuscript lay crumpled at the bottom of my backpack, but I couldn't bring myself to look at it.

So instead I spent every other night at the clubs, drinking and dancing until dawn. I slept in until two in the afternoon, and when I woke up, Jenny followed me around with big, worried eyes. “Don't you have school today?” she asked. “Do you want to talk?” she asked. I pretended not to hear the panic in her voice.

Then Saturday rolled around and Jenny started her job as a nude model. By the time I woke up, she was gone. She left me a note on one of the paper cranes:
Went to sit for Kyle & co. It's 486 Milton, in case you get lonely. Might not be back for dinner. Leftovers in fridge.

This note filled me with an immense sense of relief—and excite
ment. She would be out all day, I had the place to myself, I could do anything I wanted! This excitement lasted approximately three seconds, which is how long it took me to realize that there was nothing at all I wanted to do. I picked up a novel but couldn't focus. Poetry wasn't any better. I tried to fold a paper crane but couldn't remember what to do after the first few steps.

I got dressed and went to a downtown café. When I ordered a bowl of soup, the cashier asked for my name and I told her it was Miranda, which was this thing I did sometimes. I liked to have strangers call me by other names, names that were not my own. It made me feel like I was getting away with something, hoodwinking the universe in some small cosmic way. Five minutes later, the cashier called out “Miranda!” and a bubble of happiness floated up inside me.

When I was done eating, I walked outside and tried to think of something else to do. What would Miranda be doing right now? She would be shopping for new shoes. They would come in unusual colors like turquoise and purple. They would be stylish but not painful. If she didn't feel like shoe shopping, then she would almost certainly be acting in an independent film. Miranda was quirky and eccentric like that.

Because I didn't know how to act and couldn't bring myself to wear turquoise, I did neither of these things. What I ended up doing was thinking, but this was a mistake. I thought about Jenny, naked, surrounded by a ring of beautiful girls with boyish haircuts and oversize glasses and androgynous names. Kyle, I was sure, would have red hair and freckles, but not in an
Anne of Green Gables
kind of way. In a sexy,
look how cute I am as I eat an apple/hold a paintbrush/hand you your clothes
kind of way. Would she trail her fingertips along Jenny's neck, the back of her knee, the curve of her spine to guide her out of one pose and into another? I felt sure that she would.