The Push & the Pull (16 page)

“It's not home to me if there isn't sawdust across a floor and paint cans stacked in a corner,” she said. “When other people were addicted to cocaine or divorce in the eighties, my mom was addicted to flipping houses. Eight in twelve years. I didn't have a bedroom; I had luggage. For her, why date when you can hire and fire contractors?”

“Remind me to buy a tool belt.”

“Mmm, and film for my camera,” she said, whacking his ass.

After pizza and wine, she reached across the table to rub paint off his wrist. “And what are you going to do with this place?”

“
Do
? For now I'm just going to exploit your taste for as long as I can.”

“I'm serious. Beyond this year. Are you thinking of —”

“Hey, wait,” he said, leaping up and slipping to a nearby bookcase. “I've been meaning to lend you this.” He handed her his parents' copy of
St. Urbain's Horseman.
“One of my all-time faves.”

“Great. This from a course?”

“Are you kidding? Study English in Canada and you get two choices: Blighty's poesy or novels of the oppressed, by the oppressed, for whoever's oppressed enough to have to read them. Besides, this is funny.”

She was thumbing through the novel's opening pages, no doubt reading Stan's spidery inscription. “This was —”

“A courtship bauble, then a spoil of war.”

“I thought
I
saw too much,” she said, comparing parental divorces again.

Two nights later he wrapped his arms around her tired shoulders as she studied. “I just cleaned the tub. I've got candles.”

He returned upstairs knowing he was starting more than the bath. The first time she had seen him in his cycling gear — taut black flanks shining, snug jersey blazing — she had asked when she would get to shave his legs. Now, immersed limbs laced wetly together, small candles burning, he finally raised a calf.

“Want to make Saturday's ride a little faster?”

“Saturday's? More like tonight's,” she said, reaching for her razor. She gelled his calf.

As he is about to ride into Quebec, his third province, he passes borders of vision and perspective, in addition to those of government and law. After a week of riding, his eyes no longer lead his body. Or his mind. Although normal humans share several key characteristics with birds rather than quadrupedal mammals, the cyclist loses one of those and hangs between sky and ground. Like birds, humans are more active during the day than at night. Our young both depend on extended care. And our eyesight is our dominant sense. Watching Andrew dress for a ride, Betty once pointed out a fourth comparison between birds and humans. Well, at least cyclists.

“The males have bright plumage,” she'd said, toying with the zipper on his magenta jersey.

But the bicycle is a mammal's skeleton. His eyes and nose are now closer to the ground. Finally, his eyes cease to be the advance scouts of body and mind. Instead, they are now just pushed on ahead of him like dirt in front of a stable broom. Visually, he's losing detail. Leaves shimmer en masse. The highway's painted yellow line is an endlessly spinning disc. So when a fully loaded red Mustang approaches head-on and too slow for its crew of young men, Andrew genuinely cannot remember whether he saw its tail lights whip past him a few minutes ago or not. Four thick heads turn his way as the car passes. None of them conceals his idiot grin. They drop over the hill behind him, and his mirror becomes a photograph he wishes would not develop.

He should roll through the ditch and stand by the treeline, should grab a handful of rocks.

He doesn't.

His knife hangs in the right-hand pocket of his jersey.

The Mustang's nose and grill come back smirking. The front tires advance like shark fins. The front passenger, all hockey jaw and beer T-shirt, works steadily at a cigarette as the metres between grill and bike close. Andrew will always remember this determination to get
the cigarette down to size but understands it too late. As the car passes again, the two in the back are already laughing, heads moronically craned, and Andrew reluctantly follows their gaze to the front passenger leaning back out the window, then flicking a cocked finger.

The burning cigarette hits Andrew's chest, an unfathomably hot bullet that bounces rather than penetrates and hits him again on his left knee before dropping out of sight but not smell. Ill-timed and misplaced, his left hand swats at the pain, causing the bike to wobble sloppily and nearly take him down. The two burns continue to deepen long after the laughing thugs squeal away.

The anger shooting down each calf banishes his inflamed heart and swollen lungs from both reason and wisdom. Taking an avenging leap in pace, he tries to match the conqueror's steel directly when he should have just slipped between the trees. He could have simply braked and let them fly ahead. He could have avoided them, and definitely cannot catch them, but he tries to bike away from these irrefutable facts, tries to hitch his pace to his two drilling burns. Chasing them will exhaust him, take him into metabolic red zones he should not enter. If Mark were here, he'd tell Andrew that once he bets everything on his pace he is in his enemy's control. But, of course, Mark isn't here.

As he snorts and rides through the valley, he grows to appreciate that at least there are two burns. He can transpose the dual pain of chest and knee to the regular pain of one leg and then the other hurting in a climb. Or front tire and back tire. Upper body and lower. Two aching lungs. The fools, he's used to pain.

Betty found it appropriate that the artwork that most enraptured Andrew was a piece of sculpture. Of course someone devoted to “the animal machine” of the bicycle would fall for three-dimensional, thingy sculpture. In January, when she learned that Ottawa's National Gallery was launching a retrospective of the “viciously realistic” sculptor Ron Mueck's work, she had thought
term paper
and
road trip
simultaneously. Only as she raced home to invite Andrew did she think of Mueck's signature sculpture,
Dead Dad
, with its “hyperreal” frailty and its well-known shrinkage of Mueck's father's body down to just one metre in length. But Andrew was all enthusiasm. He wanted them to avoid their mothers and get a hotel. He proposed eating Indian and renting skates.

Later that night she tried again to slow their plans as she remembered the crumpled fusion of Mueck's realism, with its individually applied hairs, its layered tones of indictingly fleshy paint, and the shrunken, metre-long
Dead Dad
laid out on a floor. Drive, hotel and skating date all hung in the balance as she tried to warn Andrew. But he wouldn't be dissuaded, shared an interest both personal and vicarious.

“He did high, high-end mannequins in London,” she warned, “he did film work. Super, super accurate, and there's always this manipulation of scale.
Dead Dad
is tiny and, well, it's
his
dad. Not
a
dad.”

“A lot of people have dead dads,” he said. “This is one of the things you realize. Thanks for checking, though.”

“You sure?”

“What is sure?” he asked honestly.

Andrew was keen and helpful to get to Ottawa. He compellingly proposed cutting his Friday afternoon class so they could be at the gallery on a weekday for extra elbow room. His art chat in the car was better than what she got from most of her classmates. She went through Mueck's sculptural oeuvre, informing him about the use of scale then quizzing him.

“
Dead Dad, Old Woman in Bed
; they're tiny, smaller than life. What about a young girl, big or small?” she asked.

“Seven young, or twelve young?”

“Elevenish. Growing, so extra skinny. Long legs but no real tits to speak of, more like boobettes.”

“Oh big, for sure. Do the opposite. Or size to potential, something like that. Definitely big.”

“Yep, all seven feet of her.”

“No doubt. Seven feet of the creeps.”

“Okay,” Betty pressed on, “what's she wearing?”

“Oh, you're merciless.” He thought for a kilometre or two. They raced past frozen farms and clacking trees. “I don't know, a sleeveless sundress?”

“Worse. A bathing suit.”

“This guy hits below the belt.”

Each of them could spoon up this chat for hours. Lust might start with the body or how it's presented, but it blooms fully in the private language of love. Foretalk, give me this foretalk.

“Wait, she's not wearing a bikini, is she?” he asked. “I don't think I could take a bikini.”

“No, no. A one-piece. You don't want to see a larger-than-life girl's belly button?”

“I'd rather see a woman's life-sized one,” he said, smiling and reaching for Betty's shirt.

“Wait, one more. A pregnant woman.

Big or small?” “Big. No question. We're talking
force
.”

All of this talk about the sculptor's work, all of this preparation, and yet forewarning Andrew did not adequately prepare him for the sight of Mueck's
Dead Dad
lying face up on a little morgue-like slab. When they changed rooms in the gallery and finally saw Mueck's dead father, Andrew's had been dead for five months, though he continued to let Betty believe it had been seventeen.

The head and the heart know in different ways. His head knew all about Mueck's hyperrealism. Theoretically, he knew that the
Dead Dad
of art would be removed from life in various ways: dead, laid out on a pedestal close to the floor and reduced in scale to just three feet in length. Yet for the second time in his life, his heart saw the blatant
uselessness of a corpse, that unfiring engine with its few residual stains of vitality. Simultaneously, he stood in a gallery above someone else's dead father and yet he was also, once again, standing over Stan's body in the entranceway of their house. At least with Mr. Mueck there wasn't any blood, not outside the body anyway.

The sculpture said
death
with its pale, immobile limbs, its un-openable eyes and its nudity, yet it still had echoes of life. Colour, that deep grammar of art, juxtaposed pale stillness with the vigour of dark hairs on the calves and shanks and the scouring pad of pubic hair. Black, indomitable black, held out beneath a revolution of grey in the eyebrows and the hair on his head. The miniaturized nipples lay like discarded pennies.

However unique Stan's body had been with its bends and twists, it never stopped saying that it was a version of a man's body. A fallen man. A man so rudely stamped. But a man nonetheless. Standing above either man, Andrew saw the familiar, ruddy trinity of scrotum, testicles and penis.

Unlike Stan's, Mr. Mueck's corpse was surrounded by a crowd. More so than the sculpture of a pregnant woman, or a mom with a child, or a baby's head, Mueck's career-making
Dead Dad
constantly had a crowd around it. Shrewdly placed close to the floor, the prone corpse said
morgue
and
grave
in equal measure.

Surrounded, Betty and Andrew had so much to see and to hear. Andrew saw two dead dads, and also saw Betty's fear for his fear, as well as her helplessness and maybe just a little of the double vision of love. She could see the sculpture but also Andrew's difficulty with it. And yet that view was false. Just as a fresh wave of guilt caught him, they each overheard details that threatened to capsize Andrew entirely. Mueck had become an internationally famous artist with this sculpture of his father, who had been a toy-maker. He went on from this piece to others in the same hyperrealistic mode with individual human hairs. Betty and Andrew knew all of that and barely batted an eye when a bystander said, “It's his dad.”

Only when another viewer added, “Not just that, he put his own hair on his dad's body,” did Andrew finally say, “I need a break.”

Betty let Andrew wander off in search of a courtyard. If she'd been ten years older she might not have felt guilty while she continued to
wander around the sculptures alone. She wouldn't have felt so tethered to him in his grief. Care, yes. Coddling, no. But she was young and in love. Curtailing her last circuit of the mind-blowing, ego-dissolving sculptures, she sought out Andrew. She found him on a stone bench near an interior pond, took his head into her arms, her chest, wore a few of the tears he half-tried to hide.

“Do you need to leave, or can you make do waiting here with a book and a cup of tea?”

He did wait a while off in the gallery sidelines, but quickly enough he sought her out again, even told her he needed to see the flattened little dead father one last time.

When they finally left the gallery, they tried to resume their twenty-four-hour itinerary. There was hotel sex with its white anonymity and soulless décor. There was a long vegetarian feed at an Indian restaurant, each of them surprised that other people could leave the Mueck show and go off to eat flesh. Dinner and drinks were sweetened by the filial hooky of each of them being in Ottawa but not seeing, or even calling, their mothers. And yet throughout it all he felt the pull of a guilt he thought he had buried. Each of her consoling touches was chilled by the lie he had told her five months ago on that sunny Kingston ferry. There in Ottawa, she'd squeeze his hand thinking that he was nursing the scar of Stan's loss, not its still-open wound.

Only when they descended down onto the frozen Rideau Canal to rent skates and slide out into the cold darkness did he feel any relief from the strain of guilt. His legs still worked. His lungs stretched reliably in the clean air. He was grateful for the seemingly endless ice of the winter canal, grateful to skate forever forward, not in dumb circles, skate past her patience for cold fingers and clamping aches. Moving across the hard, even ice he tried to push ahead of the pull of guilt. When she became too cold to enjoy herself, he parked her in a warm-up hut and assured her he wouldn't be too much longer. No matter how much farther he skated, however, distance, pain and movement withheld their usual annulment. Each cutting blade and all of the cold, twinkling night said the same thing over and over again.
Tell her the truth and she'll leave you. Don't and you're not really together
.