Weekend (6 page)

       
AJAX

“Is this love?” Ajax asked. “I dated this woman who went on about frogs in cook pots, right, how they won't jump out as long as the water heats slowly, how they won't protect themselves from a slow boiling? I dated her for maybe three fucking weeks, and then I made some crack that I'd been trying to drink more since I divorced. I'm basically abstemious, not because I've chosen to be, except behind the wheel, but because I don't particularly like it. I was striving to be a little easier with it generally, to learn to enjoy a glass over dinner. This girlfriend was an alcoholic, years sober but still going to AA every day, pretty much, and she said she wanted to break up with me because of what I'd said. She said she couldn't respect someone drinking to impress someone else. She said I was probably an alcoholic, just not drinking yet. She said she knew all sorts of people who'd become problem drinkers at my age. I was upset. She basically gave me an ultimatum: quit drinking or we were over. A little red wine is good for my heart, I said, and she said no, uh-uh, not on her watch. I said, but I'd be quitting because she had a problem with it, not because I did, and it seemed to me that if, after decades of abstinence, she still had this large a conceptual problem with alcohol, it was still fucking controlling her as much as when she drank, still wrecking her relationships. I quit for her, but every date from there on she grew increasingly hostile, and she'd show up with lists of all the things I'd done wrong since our last date. It was easy to see where her kind of
punitive anger was going, long-term, like turning up a burner, right, under that frog in a pot? I was almost a freaking frog who didn't know when to jump.”

“That's not love,” said Joe, swatting a mosquito. Her stitches were throbbing. She wished it would cool down. Maybe a fire in the heat was a bad idea? She'd push back her chair, if she could. “That's control, maybe. But that's not love.”

Logan built s'mores and handed them out—graham crackers, chocolate, marshmallows. They laughed as they tried to eat without dropping them. Toby came back to life, sitting on his haunches, waiting, diving on spills.

“We lasted about four months. She thought my friends were bad influences,” Ajax continued. “She hated my best friend. She thought my friend was getting in between us. She told me I shouldn't be allowed to choose my own friends since, obviously, I did a poor job of it. I had, for instance, another friend who was suicidal and needed to talk to me once while my girlfriend was over. She couldn't tolerate me being on the phone or on the computer, even if I was too sick to sleep. She would wake up mad that I wasn't in bed. And she called that love.”

“Do you know what we talk about when we talk about love?” said Elliot, tossing her hair. “We talk about the things we can tolerate, maybe, the vast list of things we give up for companionship.”

“You see it that way?” asked Joe, readjusting herself. She licked her sticky fingers. “These s'mores are good. A vast list?”

“We talk about lust,” said Logan.

“We talk about lust
and
sacrifice,” said Joe. “We talk about family bonds. About nurturing those who are dear to us.” She took the baby back.

Elliot said, “We ought to talk about never making too many sacrifices.”

“We talk about the things that we build,” said Joe. “I can feel that sugar rushing through me.”

Ajax raised a beer. She too felt the sweet claw into her brain. “The architects won't disagree.”

“It's still too hot out here and I'm fading,” said Joe. “Communities, I meant.”

“Or how about this one? I dated this woman who asked me to buy a dog cage for her to sleep in. I was, like, whoa, outa there,” said Logan.

Ajax thought about that. Kink was kink; was that kink? She said, “When I first came out, I put women on pedestals. I thought, as a dyke, I wouldn't experience any crappola. Boy, was I wrong.”

“She got slugged by her wife,” said Logan.

“Shit,” said Joe.

Ajax felt a burr of wariness that Logan was discussing it. “That's not true, exactly. She didn't hit me. She paralyzed my arm. She grabbed me and bruised me dozens of times. She used a lot of intimidation tactics to get me to behave the way she wanted. A lot of gaslighting etcetera, etcetera.”

“Maybe I don't know what love is,” said Logan. “But I've got enough experience now to know all the things it isn't.”

“You do, honey. You do. This is love,” said Ajax, squeezing her tight. “Love is treating your partner and your friends and family with respect and admiration. Respect, yes. And love is kindness. It's honouring your partner even when times are challenging.”

“Well,
maybe
that's love,” said Logan. “Or a facet of love.”

“Don't make me fight you,” said Ajax. She put up her dukes. “'Cause I will. I will box you into the ground to prove kindness is love.” She laughed.

Elliot said, “Or maybe love is self-love just as much as any of those other things.”

Joe looked at her. Was she as self-centred as she sounded? “Sorry to s'more and run,” she said, creaking up, shooting Ell a glance.

“I have to get these guys home,” said Elliot. “Forecast says storm.”

Logan looked up. “It's clouding over.”

Ajax and Logan watched Elliot help Joe climb the hill, Joe slow and measured and in obvious pain.

“I
will
wrestle you,” said Ajax quietly as soon as they were out of sight, slipping onto her knees in front of Logan, pulling down their zipper. “What are you wearing?”

“It's good,” said Logan. Logan changed five or six times a day, different dicks for different purposes. They spent more time in the washroom than Ajax did. A packing cock. Cock for anal. Big Albert for when Ajax craved a stuffing. Cock for sleeping. Cock for showering. Dude of a Thousand Cocks. Ajax pulled
this one into her mouth, began to move on it, thinking how it was better than it had been eons ago with guys, thinking she wasn't so worried about her teeth. Logan said, a hand on the back of her head, “
This, this
is love.”

Logan did up their shorts. They damped the flames, pushing dirt atop them.

As the fire sputtered, Ajax sat back on her heels and said, “Let's go swimming!”

“Now?” Logan said, gathering their supplies.

“Sure, now. Why not? Water'll feel perfect at this time of night. What about Toby?”

“He won't wander far. There's not far to wander, come to that.” Logan kept damping down the coals. “I don't swim at night. Clouds are rolling in. See that, to the west?”

“Except for the great white lake sharks, it's completely safe.” Ajax slapped Logan's leg. “Come on, you'll love it.”

“Can I just hold your towel for you?”

“Chicken.” Ajax reached for Logan's hand, tugging them up.

“Cock, not chicken,” said Logan. “I ain't scared a
nothin
'
.
”

They picked their way down to the dock, where Ajax stripped. She took Logan's clothes off too until Logan was down to their skivvies and loafers. Logan pulled the binder off, stripped gaunch, held tight to their harness. Ajax wavered on tippy-toes on the edge of the dock.

Logan wrapped their arms around Ajax, bending to kiss
the back of her neck. Small tender kisses. Squid ink sky, long creaking dock. “You taste like sweat.”

“You know what Sartre said to de Beauvoir?” Ajax said. She leaned back into Logan. “He said, ‘I love you with the window open.' I want to love you like that, Logan.” Ajax turned. “Without expectations and jealousy. Loving the full person you are.” She petalled kisses on Logan's face, forehead, eyelids, cheeks. “Swim with me. Will you swim with me?”

Toes over the edge, they held hands, swung arms. Big leap of faith going where they couldn't see anything—the water was emptiness, blacker than sky, a void. They could hear it, though, against the pylons. Slapping.

“I see the Big Dipper,” Logan said, pointing. But rain clouds were pushing in fast, cowling the sides of the lake.

Faintly, faintly, the barely rippling sky-ladle off to the right. Ursa Major. Dubhe, Merak, Phecda, Megrez, Alioth, Mizar, and Alcor, each fifty-eight to 124 light years away, unimaginable.

Ajax said, “That light has travelled 50,000 years to get to our retinas. My dad used to teach me about the stars.”

“You go first,” Logan said.

“Both first. Together.”

Bats dive-bombed them, flicking black spectral arrows. Across the lake, the trees hulked dark against a lighter sky.

“Sharks, you said?”

“Many, many sharks, all nocturnal,” said Ajax, lifting her arms to shape her dive. “Hammerheads. Basking sharks. Even whale sharks. Okay. One … two … three!” And she went over.
The lake was warm, even bordering on hot. As her head broke the water, Ajax thought,
Love badly, then love well.

Logan cannonballed, shrieking.

Ajax laughed. She could barely see them in the dark. But she could hear them.

They came up sputtering, said, “This is truly weird and bizarre.”

“It's my favourite thing, Logan. I don't feel there's been summer till I've swum naked at night.”

They floated on their backs holding hands like otters; even this late, the lake was too warm for their nipples to erect. Ajax narrowed into an inverted bowl of stars and the inside-out sound of her wonky heartbeat drumming. That beat of life that had gone off its own rails, and above her the flash and pizazz that was their galaxy. The world narrowed just to her heartbeat and stars, Logan's hand an umbilicus leading her back home. Reality spun her on her axis three times three times three.

“We're in the suburbs,” said Logan, “of the Milky Way. In case you didn't realize.”

Ajax lifted her head. “What's it like downtown?”

       
JOE

Some vaguely recalled dream about parenthood being a terrible mistake. Joe struggled awake, found, to her great relief, Scout curled up beside her, absolutely fine. Heart pounding, she wondered what had woken her. At first, she thought maybe the noise was a raccoon knocking over trash cans. It was murky here in the guest bedroom, just a night light in one wall to help guests find their way to the bathroom, otherwise a stumble through tar blackness. The island wasn't like the city. Up north, with no ambient light, darkness was absolute. Joe worried the baby had slept too long, but she realized that when Scout cried, she thought that went on too long too.

She was lonely and nervous. She needed Elliot. Elliot was getting normal nights' sleep, because one of them might as well.

She felt the outline of Scout, patted her.

The idea that she could form a family with someone … She was raised in the heart of the city with no siblings and parents who fought before separating. What hubris to think she could do something different, break the chain, offer her child a different outcome. It wasn't possible. One parented as they had been parented. The best she could offer Scout, she supposed, was parents who were at least present, flawed and full of idiosyncratic foibles. She couldn't even promise that they wouldn't fight, since they were already hissing at each other. Was that something she wanted to tell her daughter about love?

Joe was being held captive by maternity in a way that Elliot
just was not. Elliot had been pregnant, and had miscarried—would it be the same if that fetus had grown to term, and Elliot was the one chained by maternity? Joe suspected if Ell had been the bio-mom, Joe would still have been the one strapped to the domestic—being further toward femme in the gender spectrum, having a less lucrative job. Perhaps even by inclination.

Did she hear Elliot retching in the bathroom? Apparently Ell had picked up that bug going around.

Maybe she'd overlooked the fact that, before Joe had wanted a baby, Elliot had cautioned,
Why rock the boat?
But, eventually, Elliot had clutched the IVF life preserver every bit as hard as Joe did. She carried, Joe carried, they both miscarried, bang, bang, all in six months. So much loss. Boats taking on water, boats foundering. Bloated women sinking below the waves, babies gone to fish. They'd had one embryo left, suspended in liquid nitrogen, and Joe, without even telling Elliot, had made steps to have it implanted, a final try.

Joe breathed slowly, deeply, trying to calm herself. What
had
she been dreaming? Intellectually, she knew Elliot was just as committed to Scout as she was, and not being at Joe's side every minute didn't imply that she wasn't. Might, in fact, be more of a comment on Joe than on Scout. But in her heart, Joe fretted. Her marriage, and now Scout too, were the most important things she'd ever had.

Once, long before the IVF upheaval, just after they'd gotten together, Ell'd sat Joe down.

“You know I use het porn,” Elliot said. “I still find guys sexy.”

“Okay,” said Joe slowly. Het porn—blech. “Right. So what's the pragmatic fall-out to that?”

Elliot claimed there wasn't one. Then she blanched and said, “I might be bi.”

Joe laughed. Elliot had slept with whole baseball teams. And was truly butch.

“No, Joe, don't mock me. I think I have to go back to men. I've thought a lot about this. Being a lesbian just isn't working out for me. Whatever I thought it would give me, it's not giving me. It didn't fix anything.”

Fix anything?
Was being queer supposed to
fix
something? “Can you maybe talk about this, please?”

But Elliot withdrew. Joe thought to give Ell some room before revisiting it, before she collapsed in sorrow, but two days later, when she again inquired, Elliot claimed never to have said it.

Joe said, “You know perfectly well what you said, and if you're thinking that way, it's my business because it threatens us as a couple. I've been mulling, and now I need to talk about it, to find out what its edges are, to find out what you meant and why you told me and why now and what you plan to do about it. Do you want to peg men, is that it?”

Elliot again said that she hadn't said it. Joe was just—Joe did this. Made up stories.

“I didn't make it up,” Joe told her firmly.

“You know you do this,” said Elliot.

“I'm calling you on something distressing you said. Don't make me lose respect for you, Elliot.”

Elliot raised her hands palms forward. “I just never said it, Joe.”

Eventually, over time, when nothing came of it, Joe had more or less forgotten it. More or less. It only flickered through her brain during insecure moments.
Really
insecure moments.

If Scout stayed asleep, if she could transfer her to the cradle, maybe Joe could sneak upstairs and surprise Ell, curl up, bask a little in the breeze from the fan, admire Elliot's honed muscles. Her earthy smell. She hadn't done stairs yet, except for outside. She gingerly transferred Scout to the cradle and crept up the stairs. When she reached the door, she saw Elliot, back arched, mastectomy scars white, bringing herself to orgasm in front of the TV to the sight of herself being pegged by Logan. In the video, she still had breasts. Ell stifled a cry as she saw Joe, and stuttered into an orgasm at the same time. Joe's own clit twitched helplessly.

“You have
sex tapes?
”

Did Ell still need to see old footage? Maybe the breasts were incidental. These were the sorts of questions they never asked each other. In some sense, Ell's life was her life, and Joe's life was hers. She missed the intimacy of their brand-new time, the spontaneous dancing in the kitchen, the wrestling, board game nights. Now they sealed themselves up behind individual
screens—not even TV, which at least they'd watched together.
What are you watching? I'm on FB. What are you watching? Harold and Maude.

Elliot just looked at her, exasperated. She'd wrecked the orgasm, Joe guessed.

Joe sat down on the bed. She half thought,
I should just have joined her. I should have seen what footage of the two sexiest women in my life together would do to me.
“Are you okay? I heard you in the bathroom.”

“What? Go 'way, no. You're embarrassing me.”

Joe walked herself down the stairs while Elliot ran after her, hopping to get into her pajama bottoms. “I'm really sorry, Joe. It's not what you think.”

Joe turned from the banister. “What do I think?”

“You think I don't want you. I know you think that. I wish—”

What do you wish?
thought Joe. There were more broken sentences than finished ones these days. “I just had your baby, and it's still not me you're fantasizing about. What the fuck am I to you, Ell? Just some brood mare?” White hot anger flicking in her veins. “Fuck you. Fuck you and fuck Logan and fuck motherhood. This sitting around leaking from my breasts with stitches in my cunt while you have sex with someone else? Hoop that. Uh-uh. I am not a moron. And while we're at it, someone ought to go over there and tell that poor woman Logan's planning to marry that she had better fucking say no because Logan is never going to be any good.”

“You
like
Logan. Come on, Joe, you know you do.” Elliot had her pants up and strode after Joe.

“So what? That's like liking crystal meth. Sooner or later your teeth are gonna rot.”

“You're not fair to them, Joe.”

Joe coughed. “Fair? Like Logan needs me in any capacity to be fair?”

“They don't have many friends. Logan needs us to be there for them. We have to do more than just share property.”

“They really don't, Elliot.”

“They do—and you know what? I don't even understand why you're huffy about this.”

“You know what, Ell? Fuck off into the sea.”