The Push & the Pull (15 page)

Before this trip, before every single thing he carried had to have a present or impending use, he would have burned the rest of the map now to mark this wild new leg.

In December, Betty stuck an enigmatic Post-it Note a metre and a half up a door frame in the front hall and changed his Kingston house again.
PRISM NAVEL
. The note made him even more impatient for her to come home.
Home
. The word bent up now, not down, the
M
a trampoline, not squelching mud. The dirgeful
O
had become buoyant, flung.

Crossing to the thin blue shingle of a note, he easily dodged two pillars of guilt, one new, the other eternal. The gone-Stan was as certain as the here-Betty. He flexed the bottom of the note with a fingertip, bent its inked letters.

“Hey,” a returning Betty called out through the closed front door. Stepping into the entranceway she said, “Don't move it an inch,” while dropping her bags.

“Not moving. Just bending.”

“Hands off.”

“Hands off what?”

“You'll just have to wait and see.”

“Wait how long?”

“Until you see.”

Nearly ten days passed with the
PRISM NAVEL
note unexplained. Eventually, tape was necessary to keep it in place. Finally, on an afternoon home, Andrew sat reading a Canadian novel boring enough to be required university reading (the
divine
what? what's so
divine
about whining?) as a beam of December sunlight strained through one of the bevelled edges of the front door's leaded window. The thin winter sun refracted through the bevelled glass to land in a knot of colour on the door frame three metres distant, precisely on Betty's
PRISM NAVEL
.

The house had never seen so many cards and notes. A robin's egg blue envelope propped between triangles of brie in the fridge, or a small envelope the colour of oatmeal tucked into his Shakespeare.

Translucent scarlet on his bike handlebars. Where did a woman who routinely read past midnight find the time to buy cards of all sizes, textures and styles? Could he just write a Post-it back? No, apparently he couldn't. Not with a frosted tobacco envelope riding his pillow.

Andrew,

I don't know if you've been thinking of the L-word. People usually want to use the word before they need to. Frankly, I'm proud to never have wasted it on a prom guy or someone nursing his first sideburns. Here, though, I do wonder.

I might be in love with you. Mom always said love should mean need to live with. Not want,
need.

I am ridiculously happy living with you.

I might be. I could be. I want to be

Your Bet

As winter froze and bleached autumn, Andrew had trouble matching his opening move of September. He had made his initial, extravagant invitation to Betty. The orange room, half a house. She cooed for an hour, but then what? He didn't have another trump card until the opening of the
Strapped
art exhibit.

At an art gallery, she was definitely
Betty
. In second-year she had wavered. Maybe
Elizabeth
was better for the sweet white wine and track lighting of galleries. At nine and ten she had hated the stuffiness of the full, birth-certificate
Elizabeth
but soon grew to delight in its adaptability and its long list of usable parts. When boys her age were discovering the technological and marketing wonder of a toy/ cartoon character that was both one aggregate machine and several constituent machines, one giant robot or airship and several smaller, more specialized vehicles, she was scouting ground with Liz, Liza and Lizzie, was flying around in the slightly differentiated small planes of Beth and Betty. Most comfortable with Bet, she occasionally admitted that she never stopped loving how affectionately that word came out of her mother's mouth. Post-divorce, there'd been mother-daughter spooning and sleep wherever and whenever they found it.
Bet
was a friend. Funnelling down from Ottawa to Kingston to study contemporary
art, she did audition
Liz
, thinking it more appropriate for the organ meat suspended in fishbowls, the shredded phone books stuffed into kilometres of coiled transparent hose. In the maelstrom of young dating, who could forget a name that rhymed with jizz? But, no.
Betty
was Ping-Pong and flipped hair and a palpable step for the tongue. Betty was ready.

Exhibition openings were mandatory for the serious Visual Culture majors, but only the casually and confidently intelligent students relaxed enough to recognize that openings were for the artist, not the art. The conscripted audience, Betty and her classmates partially set down the conceptual toolboxes they built up during the day. Their usual attention to material, scale, cohesion and context was, and was not, suspended as they reached for little black dresses and lip gloss. By her last year, Betty knew she wanted a freelance curator for conversation, not a staffer, and who would be getting stoned in the receiving bay and who had wandering hands.

Late one Friday afternoon she phoned home from the gallery where she volunteered to cancel the pre-opening dinner they had planned. “I've been suckered into set up,” she consoled Andrew.

“What, they need more genuine human urine? Used tampons not fresh enough?”

“Not quite. We fan and refan the pamphlets. We expand and contract the distance between cheese and fruit trays.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Nah . . . Oh, wear something nice.”

“Mesh? Latex?”

“See you at eight.”

He was already smiling as he hung up the phone and reached for the Scotch. He'd drink to Stan then wear one of the suits he had inherited along with the house. Walking upstairs to the hall closet, he had made his decision before he'd reached the top stair. The two-button charcoal. High lapel notch. Slash pockets. Unpleated pants.

When he strolled into the gallery, indigo tie resplendent, he stopped her in her tracks.

“Wow,” she said, “come back here.”

Nutella, chocolaty, gooey Nutella, has become his sex. Bicycle, bi-sexual, then unisexual. At least with Nutella he's monogamous.

How can a — no, not a food — how can this spreadable candy so ensnare him when a month ago the cloying smell of it turned his stomach? From his education, from that slow maturation into his mid-twenties, he's no stranger to first reading of emotions or actions and then finding them more easily or frequently within himself. But to date, he thought this immersion belonged solely to good novels, great films and indicting porn, not cycling blogs. More than one tour blog consists of nothing more than daily distance juxtaposed with a volume of Nutella:
127km: 150ml approx (on crackers, spoon)
. Nauseating, industrial Nutella has become sweet, fuelling Nutella. Chocolate's cocainic climb broadened by earthy hazelnuts (with their illusion of sustenance and nutrition). The European hazelnut fuels this European sport and spares him from the even more vomitous North American peanut-butter cup. Maybe that's the allure: (slightly) better chocolate, less North American wax. Without the francophone diet, this addiction would have been harder to manage. In Quebec, Nutella, cheese, beer and wine can be found in corner stores.

There's a red, measly rash growing in his crotch. That couldn't be from too much Nutella, could it?

Stopping here on the roadside to dig out his dwindling jar (front right pannier), he's able to deal his fix without even stepping off the frame. Licking the brown goo from his knife blade, he glimpses Vienna in the chocolate haze, has one toe in Paris.

He now knows the taste of Nutella better than the taste of Betty. Nine months ago, he felt like he lived between her thighs. Undeniably, her crotch was the focus of his life in the house. Oh sure, her feet were attractive, her shoulders, her neck. No harp ever played sweeter music than her hips. His life divided into before and after his relationship with the soft warmth of her breasts. They were young in the age of
truly ubiquitous porn. No part of either body went unexplored. And yet nothing enraptured him like that private mouth at the base of her body. Her scent of soft cheese. Her taste of buttered blood. The texture of her clit, that key left above the door, is now becoming vague to him. He is starting to forget her body.

Riding pain day after day, rolling over land he flew over nine months ago, pushing his now and pulling his past, he is surprised but not ashamed at the tears that suddenly begin falling out of his eyes. Inexplicably, he pictures that other, yellow rider he let go. This, this is what he wanted, his own quiet road. He doesn't stop pedalling to cry. The sobs are steady, not jagged; no muscle gets wasted pumping out the tears. They just leak from him silently then get yanked by the wind across his sun- and wind-burnt face before they're buried in his thickening auburn beard. He can feel their wetness on his cheeks, a wetness that continues for kilometre after kilometre. Lower down, beneath the grip of his hands and past his bobbing knees, he can also feel the faint weight of Betty's postcards. Hard shame and bright knowledge spill out with the tears. There's an extra little flutter in his lungs but no waver in the legs, no sag in the pace. The bald digits of his speedometer blur beneath his tears. This is what he's been biking for.

Kids, dogs, teams (corporate or athletic) and those living under the yoke of disease all appreciate routine. So one Friday evening during Andrew's final year of high school when Stan called him up to his room, he was surprised to see a rarely used closet door hanging open. Andrew was even more surprised by an unopened bottle of Scotch sitting on Stan's dresser. He glanced from the bottle to his father standing crookedly in the centre of the house's dull master bedroom.

Stan declared, “You're going to learn to drink whisky and wear a suit. Don't laugh at my suits until you've got one on, and no ice. Those are the rules. Water we'll live with, but please, no ice.”

The bottle was multiply surprising. Liquor store, beer store, Andrew had long been Stan's bag man even when he was still driving. Here was a full bottle out of the blue.

“Stanley, are you having an affair?”

“Dial-a-bottle.”

“You ordering anything else on the phone?”

“Kiss but never tell. All right, listen. Proposition time. Friday nights aren't exactly pleasant for either of us when you stay in, and when you are out, you're not coming home with the grace of a ballerina. That sprint for the toothpaste isn't fooling anyone. Give me one night of the weekend and you can stop haunting parking lots, waiting for some stranger to float your bottle on the other night. Stick around and learn a few things.

“Time to meet a proper suit. Me, I'm for the monkey-wear these days.” Last week Stan had paid fifteen dollars to have a full-length zipper added to the front of a twenty-dollar golf shirt. Using a door frame, he could lever a buttoned shirt on or off his shoulders, but his fingers couldn't manage the buttons. Pullovers used to work, but now his head was becoming an unpoliced outpost unreachable by his weakening arms. “Time to tie a tie on you for a change, and with something
a little more elegant than the schoolboy's knot. Now, grab two glasses and pour a little cold water into a measuring cup for yourself.”

Andrew fit a tumbler into Stan's wide paw, setting it there and holding it until he could feel Stan ferry the weight. When they toasted — to a good fit — Stan simply nodded his head, too slow to raise his glass. The whisky tasted like steel wool dipped in gasoline.

Stan's parents had both died unexpectedly at the end of his teaching education. The impecunious austerity of his university days was abruptly replaced with both principal and income. The inheritance would go to a nest, the income to its occupant(s). Daily trains sped east and west from Kingston. The same travel time and fare would land Stan in the Toronto or Montreal of the late 1960s. For suits, he had headed east.

Now his nearly grown son stood down the hall, not really looking at his once-prized, custom-made suits.

“All brown? What are you talking about? Actually separate the hangers and look at them. No, we can't start with that. Because it's double-breasted. You might never go back. Try again, please. Yes, the charcoal. Well, then, go get one of yours, preferably not a band T-shirt. That's right, then the trousers. Okay, turn toward me. Smashing. Broad in the shoulders, but you'll grow into it. A suit's never the garment to hide in. Let its shoulders settle on yours. Feel the unseen seam at your back and realize that it follows your spine. Let the jacket hem advertise your hips.

“You'll see notched lapels far more often than the curved or shawl collar. How deep will the notch be, and how high or low will it ride? Also consider the width of the lapel. Just be thankful I wasn't casting my net in 1974. Art, life, a suit — look for pattern and variation. C'mon, find me two related angles. Well, yes, inside and outside lapel edges, sure. Dig deeper. Yes, notch and pocket. Slash pockets, jaunty notch. This is order. Deserves a drink, absolutely. The taste is an invasion, so don't bother trying to hide. Get washed in it. Chew it.”

Next weekend, another suit, another drink. This time, Andrew held his glass accessibly low. “C'mon, if you can get it to your mouth you can get it to my glass.” He surreptitiously tilted one hip to lower his glass still farther so Stan could join him in a toast.

“To proclaiming the man,” Stan said, briefly but audibly touching his glass to Andrew's.

Then, with Betty, the same house, once a dungeon of care, became a bright nook, a pad, a glowing balance of prospect and refuge. Clothed prospect and naked refuge. They were pleasantly surprised to find themselves preferring house paint on a Friday night to yet another student pub with bad music and diseases of gossip. Each was quietly relieved to be within grabbing distance of the other, with their music on the stereo and better pizza in the oven. Here, finally, was a dinner companion delighted by his marinated tofu, equally committed to roasting nuts and insatiable with salad. Household objects he had stopped seeing a decade ago suddenly leapt into view again. One day a floor lamp wore a new shade. Cups and saucers that hadn't seen the light of day in fifteen years were dropped off at the Sally Ann en route to the hardware store. Weekend archaeologists, they pried down through worn carpet, past a brittle subfloor, to three-inch Douglas fir floorboards.