Sweet Affliction (13 page)

“Not really,” Selena said.

“It was kind of a combination of kale, mustard and something almost soapy tasting, like cilantro maybe?”

Selena shook her head. “I don't know,” she said.

“Well, anyway,” I said.

“Yeah.”

She smiled at me then, in this way that reminded me of my old girlfriend Jinghua. It wasn't just because she had that same accent where the consonants curve around the vowels like cupped hands. It was this quality of smile that I had always interpreted as being secretly for me—there was an outward part of it, which was to show the world that everything was going great, but it had an inner chamber too, a chamber of irony and some pleasure withheld, reserved for me only. Now I saw myself on the other side of that smile, and I wondered what had really been going on in Jinghua's head.

Some time later I ended up on a sofa with Selena, the guy in the shirt, and a couple other people. Someone had put on The Velvet Underground. Marty had gone on a dep run with the girl he was after, so things seemed to be progressing well in that department. Selena mentioned I had been an English teacher, and the guy in the shirt took that with a kind of grave interest.

“Did you like teaching English?”

“I guess I did,” I said. “It's satisfying to watch people actually get better at something they'll use in life.”

“What's your favourite verb tense?” he said, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. The shirt was frayed at the collar and cuffs, and had a cigarette burn between the third and fourth button.

“The present perfect,” I said after a moment.

“Why?”

“It's the most difficult to explain,” I said. “I don't know if it's particular to English but a lot of ESL learners have trouble with it. But once you get it, it changes how you think about time. And,” I said, “it has the best name.”

“Present perfect,” said the girl whose apartment I think we were in.

I sneaked another look at the shirt. It fit him differently than it had me—it was longer, but tighter in the chest and shoulders. He was bulkier, like a guy who works out, or used to.

I had left for Taipei five years ago, after six months of unemployment and binge drinking. My room was a futon and some cassette tapes. I had a TOEFL certificate and a prescription for Adderall, and I didn't much care where I ended up. I remember falling asleep in the Dior shirt the night before I left, next to a girl I'd met at the bar. In the morning she sat on the futon, naked under the shirt, drinking coffee while I frantically packed. “Do you want any of this stuff?” I asked her. “Clothes? Coffee mug? Music? I have a tape dub of
Live at the Gymnasium
.” But she didn't have a cassette player. I sent her a postcard when I first got to Taiwan and we messaged a few times, and then I met Jinghua and end of story.

“What do you mean, it changes how you think about time?” the guy said.

“Well,” I said, “because it doesn't describe an event that occurs at a specific point in time, like, say ‘I ate a sandwich.' It's about whether or not something is part of your total life experience. ‘I have eaten a sandwich.' There's no specific time at which you ate a sandwich, but sandwich-eating is something you can say you've done.”

“Total life experience. That's good. I like that,” the guy said.

“Lovely,” said the girl whose apartment it was.

People said I was different when I came back from Taiwan, and it's true, I was. But not in the way they thought. “Andrew's been pussy-whipped,” the guys said. The girls said “domesticated.” It's true I didn't party the way I used to, but it wasn't that, exactly. I was like a person who finds out that his incurable, fatal disease was actually just allergies. People saw the look in my eyes, the newfound knowledge of impending life, and they mistook it for calm, or resignation. I didn't care.

We were out of beer. Marty had been gone for what seemed like hours, and I assumed he had abandoned the party for greener pastures. This wasn't atypical of Marty. Once, back in university, he didn't show up for a dinner. We got worried, and more worried, and when we were on the verge of calling hospitals he showed up wasted, close to midnight, with an enormous hickey on his neck.

I offered to go to the dep, and the guy in the shirt said he'd come with. Someone had lined up all the Blundstones in the vestibule in ascending order of size and it took us a while to pick ours out.

“Is that shirt designer?” I said.

The guy frowned. “Yeah, I think it's Ralph Lauren or something.” He said
Lauren
like he was saying a girl's name.

“Did you know Ralph Lauren's real name is Ralph Lifshitz?”

He considered, shrugging on his coat. “I think I did know that,” he said. When he opened the front door a wall of cold air met us. After the close hot party it felt great. The stairs were dusted with a fine fresh layer of new snow—it must have fallen since Marty and I arrived.

“What's funny about that,” I said, descending the stairs, “is how people change their name from Lipshitz to Lifshitz.”

“Because it's really the lip part that gets you,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said, a little surprised. “We can't have people going around calling us lip-shits. I know, let's change it to
lif
.”

“I had a teacher in junior high named Mrs. Holding Dicks,” he said.

“No.”

“Truth.”

“How do you spell that?”

“H-O-L-D-E-N hyphen D-I-X.”

“Get out.”

“I heard lately that she shortened it. To just Dix.”

“That's pretty good,” I said.

“I don't think I know your name,” he said.

“Andrew.”

“Neil.”

We walked the rest of the way to the depanneur in silence. Having told each other our names we were suddenly shy, like a couple after their first kiss. We paid for a case of beer and turned back. The snow was too powdery to crunch or even squeak—it absorbed our footsteps like heavy felt.

“Where did you get that shirt?” I said, like a guy who is just interested in men's fashion.

“Oh,” he said. He made a thinking face, as though trying to look like he couldn't quite recall where the shirt had come from. “It was my ex's,” he said. “She never wore it, so she gave it to me. She got it off some guy she had a thing with. She stole it from his room. She was kind of a klepto. I'm pretty sure she ripped off fifty bucks from me once.” He sounded more sad than angry about it.

“What was her name?”

“Kara.”

“Tara?”

“Kara.”

We passed a lamppost, then another.

“That was me,” I said.

“What?”

“That was me.”

“What was you?”

“The guy. The thing. The guy she took the shirt from. That was my shirt.”

Neil looked at me. He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind. “You want it back?” he finally said.

“No, man. It's yours.”

We were back at the apartment. Neil more or less jogged up the stairs, the bottles clanking against each other in the box. As I was taking off my boots in the hallway I could hear Marty's complaining voice from the kitchen.

“What the hell? I said I'd be ten minutes!”

“Sorry,” I said, taking off my coat and draping it overtop an open door. “We didn't think you were coming back.”

Marty was offended at that. “You could have texted,” he said.

“‘Yo dawg you in the bone zone or what?'”

He tilted his head, considering this. “Unlikely,” he said. “She was all ‘I have to get the last metro.'”

“Bummer.”

“Women, amiright?”

We clinked bottles.

“So what about Selena?” he said. “You all up on that?”

“I comported myself like a perfect gentleman.”

“What, too good for her or something?”

“I'm not exactly on the market,” I said. “But I appreciate the gesture.”

He squinted at me. “You need to move on,” he said. “You know what my dad says.”

I did.

“‘The only way to get over someone is to get under someone.'”

“I know,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Whatever.” He shuffled off into the living room. I put my fingers over my eyes and pressed. When I took them away again Neil was standing in front of me. He seemed to be at the centre of a deep red aura. After a few moments it cleared.

“You smoke?” he said.

“Quit,” I said.

“Good on ya.” He stepped out onto the balcony. I followed. “I could use some fresh air,” I said. Neil nodded.

“How long were you with Kara?”

“A year,” he said. “A year and change.”

I nodded, trying not to seem surprised, though I was.

“Are you… Do you still see her around?”

For an answer he lifted his half-full bottle of beer to his mouth and drank it off in one continuous gulp. Then he set it down on the balcony railing, carefully and with some finality. He smiled a closed-mouth smile and went inside.

His cigarette was still burning so I picked it up and took a drag. I remembered something from an Ian Fleming novel.
The drink Bond enjoyed the most was the drink he had in his head, before the first drink of the day.
I guess Fleming knew something about something.

The door opened again and Neil came back out, wearing a puffy nylon jacket. His face was composed but he seemed inflamed, excited somehow, like something under his skin was jumping around in there.

“Sorry about that,” he said. He cleared his throat. “The thing about it is, Kara died. I mean she's dead. So no, I don't really see her around. Though actually that's not true. I actually see her around all the time. You know? Like I'll see some girl on the street or something, and for a second I'll think, hey, there's Kara, or I'll be on the bus and suddenly I'll, you know, smell her smell, and suddenly it's like she's right there, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But it's not her.”

“No,” I said.

“Fuck,” he said. “I'm sorry. I'm being so selfish right now. I'm sorry you had to find out like this.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I didn't know her well.”

“She was alright,” he said tightly, and I realized he was trying not to cry. I patted his shoulder a couple times and went back inside.

In the bathroom I looked up Kara's Facebook page. It took a little while because I couldn't remember her last name. When I found it, I saw it had become a memorial site, like those heaped flowers you see sometimes alongside a highway.

MISSING U

<3U 4EVR

<3<3<3

Hey Kara thought of you today miss you big time girl

LOVE U

<3

They were old messages; the most recent one was dated last spring, about the time Jinghua and I broke up for the last time.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Just a minute,” I said.

Once Jinghua and I took the bullet train out to a small fishing village whose name I forget. We had an idea about picnicking in nature, but we couldn't seem to find it. We walked through three or four villages, each time expecting the buildings to thin out and nature to encroach, until we found the bank of a small creek or a wooded hill to spread our blanket on, but each village just blended into the next. It was spring, a day that would have been considered glorious by Quebec standards, but cold for Taiwan. Jinghua shivered in her light jacket. After an hour of walking we decided to head back to the station, buy lunch there and save our picnic for another day. We took a bridge over a river, which was full and fast that time of year. “Let's drop our plates into the river and see whose gets to the other side of the bridge first,” I suggested. I marked my plate with an
X
and hers with an
O
, and we counted to three and dropped them, then ran to other side of the bridge and waited for the plates to appear. We were both laughing like kids. “Go plate go,” Jinghua shouted. The wind whipped her hair around and I thought I would never feel as much love for her as I did at that moment.

And it was true, I never did. Even though we stayed together for almost three years, including one excruciating year of long distance and that disastrous spring she spent in Montreal, the spring we broke up, and even though I loved her more completely and fully than any other person I have known, and that includes my family, that time on the bridge was the peak of it, my maximum output of love. Of course I didn't know it at the time. Would it have been better if I did?

The snow had started again sometime during the night. The footprints, mine and Neil's, were almost totally obscured now, and I lost track of them a block from the party. My old MP3 player had a radio receiver and so I put that on. The CBC's overnight programming, those voices that are just barely foreign: Dutch, South African, the crumbling Empire. A report on go-kart racing, some oldies music. Fats Domino singing “
Blueberry Hill”
. And suddenly I found that what I had thought to be a thickness was actually a thinness, the icing on a layer cake of sadness I had forgotten was there. Those warm blueberries, that lonely hill. I telescoped out, feeling amazed and very old, remembering all the sadness I'd felt more or less since adulthood, and sometimes before. There was a lot, a whole flea market of sadnesses. And yet the biggest sadness there, the piece that throbbed and glowed like a shard of uranium, that piece wasn't mine.

The Polar Bear at the Museum

In gym class we have to measure ourselves with callipers to find out how much of our body is made up of pure fat, as if we are bags of microwave popcorn. You are supposed to pinch a wodge of skin between the callipers' ends, measuring your belly, thighs, upper arms, all the mayonnaise-coloured hairless bits. The thickness of the roll of flesh you conjure up tells you how much of you consists of dimpled subcutaneous lard and how likely you are to die young.