The Push & the Pull (24 page)

He rose to greet her. Thankfully he didn't try to offset baldness and turning fifty with safari clothes. Jeans and a blazer. Small, low eyeglasses. Divorce had kept him thin.

“Well, whatever's wrong, you're still walking,” he said, hugging her shoulders roughly.

From Sunday night email to borrowed morning shower and into her walk downtown, she had had no idea how much she would tell her father or what, if anything, she would ask him. She knew this want by picture, not thought, and this was it. A clean, well-lit restaurant with plenty of space around a table half in the sun. Maybe she just needed a really good lunch.

He had already studied the menu. She knew she was being treated tenderly when he didn't ask, “You're
still
a vegetarian
?”
and stated, rather than wondered, “We'll get wine. Have you ever had a white Bordeaux?”

Chat, chat, until one coffee, another, all right — let's share a piece of cake. As the table cleared, she shifted from conversation to a smallish monologue, describing Andrew despite herself. By the time he replied they were almost huddling.

“The greater the love, the more you feel death for the deceased. Those first days are all shock or terror or loss for a life you haven't yet really realized is gone. You dwell on the how. You tabulate future losses as if they'll hurt more — friends unseen, holidays unenjoyed, even food they won't get to eat. All of this you still count for the dead. Eventually, though, you realize none of this matters. You matter. This is the hard part. You're the one who needs attention. You're the one losing. Go through a big death and you'll learn to anticipate this second, larger death, the you death. Loss from you, for you, not the dead. That knowing wait is horrid, one of the things you'd rather not learn.

“It's great to have a survivor in your lifeboat but maybe not in your bed. For all his loyalty to his dad, your man knows he's the one left standing. He knows that or he's gotta learn it. Decide whether you're willing to teach him.”

The bright sun slid past.

Fittingly, Andrew is still tipsy when a doctor in Rivière-du-Loup tells him the red crotch rash that has been burning for days is a topical yeast infection.

“A yeast infection?” Andrew's quietly incredulous tone carries the shame of an STD diagnosis plus the fear that he has biked himself into hermaphroditism.

“
Oui
. It is not only a gurl ting.”

Pervert of the microscopic world, yeast love the wet, dark and warm. While their cousins are content to produce bread or the sweet clouds in the unfiltered beer in Andrew's stomach, another strain of yeast has been baked into a scarlet rash below.

“Your shorts,” the doctor continues, “all these days. The sweat.”

Touring has given Andrew a monastically low standing heart rate and rock-crushing thighs but also a cramped high back, a rash-sprayed crotch.

“What do I do?” Andrew hikes up his underwear-less hiking shorts.

“Wash your shorts regularly and dry them in the strong sun. You will need this cream.”

Rolling away from the clinic, a tube of ointment riding in his jersey like a single bullet, Andrew the Monistat man releases the bike to the fading pulse of Maudite still inside him and surfs the city's long, tiered hill. Without the cumbrous panniers and the weight of the tent and sleeping bag, the bike feels whimsically loose. He is suddenly more nimble, and faster, though the city has temptations to slow him down. He sets out for the park and his neglected gear, but it is so easy to surrender to gravity, to take only the turns which ease allows him. He reaches another sunlit bar patio without having to climb a single hill. Entering the bar, he heads straight to the bathroom for a second, radically premature dose of the slick cream and only then to a crowded, sunny balcony. The river's enormous flood plain and the angle of its valley and a joyously hopped beer all combine to show
him that the spring sun is beginning to win its arm-wrestle for the sky, is growing into summer. His delight in the first strong and lasting sun does not, however, survive his discomfort below. Within minutes he relocates to a table in the shade.

A yeast infection. So this is a private medical affliction, a failure of the body which is at least hidden. Kingston had been small enough that he and Stan were hardware store celebrities, known at their grocery store, spotted around town. The ruined man and the flesh of his flesh.

Back on the bike, tipsy — okay drunkish — he cuts and drops toward the park with sweet-potato french fries in his gut. Rolling over the bridge of the gorge, he has warmth in his belly and cold, moist air brushing his limbs and face.

Once again he turns into the trail's descent, bumps toward his nylon base. He will sleep easily in the tired, old orchard, will nap his beer then wake for dinner, perhaps a fire. Burn these fallen limbs. Smudge the sky with appley smoke.

Fleeing Andrew, his precious house and their rotten relationship, Betty began to wonder if only the young, possibly only the young and those educated in the arts, could think that love is the permission to say absolutely anything. Blocking his emails, deleting his phone messages without listening to them, Betty began to see that no relationship could survive total honesty.
I know you're afraid to love me.
Or
You're different when you have an audience.
Or how about
I still think of X when I come
. Andrew and Betty learned the hard way that love does not invite you to say anything you feel. But that same school of hard knocks also showed them that love enables you to say more than you thought you had to say. Your ability to talk, not just your desire to, is increased by love.

All this time they'd been disagreeing about next year, he'd offered her every excuse for keeping his house, every counterfeit emotion possible save the truth:
I still miss him. I can't let go yet.
Instead she got:

The Argument of Possession

Betty told him, “You've got a home you don't want to leave, that's fine.

I don't, though, I don't.” “You did once. You could again.”

“Not without leaving first.”

Asshole. Asshole. Asshole. His lies had mutated her, forced her into nasty corners she should never have been in. Nastiness like:

The Argument of Change

“You nursed your dad to death and you still think the humanities are taught in school?”

In the city, biking into his park campsite, he sees that young jerks are not restricted to country living or eight-cylinder cars. As he approaches his tent, he spots two male teenagers sacking his campsite. One half-crouches over an emptied pannier, flicking through his clothes and small bags of food. A pot lid lies decapitatedly at the end of this sprawl. Past it, a second youth stands with his back to Andrew, pissing on the tent wall in sharp smirks of urine.

The crouched sacker is the first to spot Andrew. His quick rise into a stand wordlessly alerts the pisser. A hood of anger tries to rise from Andrew's shoulders, but the fear between nipples and hips is arresting. As the squatter stands and the pisser ceases, Andrew must look between them, one foot resting his weight, fingers still half-gripping the brakes. He can feel a palpable triangle of earth beneath the ball of his resting foot and the shoe's sharp cleat. The pisser tucks, zips and turns. Andrew doesn't have time to think properly. Instead he feels the edges of his thighs. He watches the two of them while they are watching only one of him. More recognizable than thought are the twins of fear and rage. Then everything is wiped away when these two glance back past his shoulder at a rustle in the leaves.

In his mirror, Andrew sees a third punk stepping out from behind some shrubs with a bastard's grin and a pannier held open at arm's length. The boy is proudly exclaiming some French version of
steamer
when he spots Andrew and his briefly idle friends. Time becomes entirely space. The two at the tent leap to close the fifteen metres which separate them from Andrew's front tire. In the vulnerable arc, Andrew turns to cut back left. He must temporarily turn his back to their charge and lose them from his line of sight and then the too-slowly sweeping disc mirror. In front now, the shitter crouches slightly but doesn't yet drop the pannier. His spine-sinking, knee-flexing crouch could be designed to meet or avoid Andrew's charge.
The chase behind grows. In front, the fouled pannier finally gets chucked aside.

Now their numbers are felt, not counted. These three are a net of young muscle tightening around him. Legs, legs, legs.

Because one eye keeps checking the (filling) mirror and the (too-distant) trailhead, he can't really tell how thoroughly or not the shitter in front has raised his arms. Only when Andrew brakes suddenly in the second before meeting the shitter do the young arms rise fully, and they are not shield enough for the quick lance coming. Braking both tires then briefly turning the handlebars away from the youth, Andrew opens a column of space his freed right leg can fill. Unforgettable will be the small, preparatory heel twist of his right foot, the minuscule dab of lateral force necessary to free his kick.

Although he has never once forgotten the cleat waiting at the bottom of this whipping leg, Andrew is somewhat surprised to see its ferocious bite into the kid's splaying cheek. More than force — no doubt pain, perhaps horror — drops the shitter to the ground and frees Andrew's path.

Of course, twenty cents didn't really end Pat's first marriage.

Shoe leather should be a labour index on any job. Her classroom and the Gamlin campaign had Pat running around for twelve to fourteen hours a day. When she walked into the campaign office at six-thirty that night, marooned in the mutinous, knee-high boots, a disastrous cycling lesson with Andy behind her, the heel was knocking. The refrain
My mom pushed me in the ditch
still hadn't left her inner ear. By nine p.m., the heel clapped. When the last of the others filed out at ten-thirty, she wasn't going to let the now flapping heel rob her old term-paper stamina. Gordon wouldn't see that.

He stood by a window reading a letter. Cars, the cars of their co-workers, could be heard starting and leaving from the parking lot beyond him. Extra light spilled briefly across the broad province of his shoulders. In the nearly empty office, the ka-clump of her heel and her compensatory shuffle became ridiculously loud.

“Why don't you just take them off?” he asked, turning.

A committed problem-solver, Gordon Gamlin will —
“Obviously I've thought of that. The zipper's broken.”

“Will you think I'm campaigning if I offer to take a look at it?”

“I'll know you are and have a camera ready.”

He emptied his hands while walking toward her.

She was ruined when he gave the desktop a demonstrative little double tap with all four of his fingers. “Hop up.” Her boots nearly reached her knees. Her skirt didn't.

“The tab's not entirely broken,” he said while remaining bent over, sounding every inch the able diagnostician. “Hang on.” He stood back to fish change from his pocket. “Don't ask how I used a pair of dimes in school. May I?”

He raised an eyebrow, she a leg.

In his hands, it was and was not her calf that filled the boot. His strong, collaring grip around her calf both added and released pressure.
Immediately she felt the difference of his hand, of his body on hers, but there was also the distinct sensation that his hand gave more space to her body, expanding the very muscles it pressed. Gordon's encircling grip finally confirmed what they had each known since the moment they met: together, they had a
them
body. One plus one equalled a sweaty three. Exhaling through her nostrils she could send part of her breath down into the grip of his hand. Her breath glowed inside his hand like the bones in an X-ray. His pinching dimes pulled the boot collar tight before opening the longest zipper of her life. At thirty-three, this zipper was the back of every dress she had worn for the past ten years of her marriage. The pants of her past, present and future were tugged open in his hands. The boot leather unclenched, but they did not. Because of the boot, she couldn't feel his wedding ring at all.

From sit-bone to heel, yes, she turned her knees out to curl her legs without actually spreading them. Her jaw rose to bare a little neck. Freed, the boot poured down her calf into his hands. Still cupping her heel in one hand, he looked at her just long enough before setting the other hand above and inside her knee to claim the leg entire. What agreeable gravity.

Her only moment of anything less than joyous acquiescence, the moment when she pressed and angled not to complete a shape but to change it, came during his early chest-leaning push to get her on her back for the full prone offer. No, no, you're going to look me in the face. Let me get that belt and fly, do more than just undress you, but you keep your face close to mine. This doesn't happen without you knowing who I am.

Physically, the two other tent sackers could probably catch him as he bikes off from the body he just dropped with a kick. However quickly he bikes, plunging his legs so frantically that he rises in the frame and all but leaps off it, he is still biking uphill on a soft trail. For the first few metres, the runners should have more acceleration. But, wordlessly, they stop their pursuit at their fallen comrade. Physically, they could have him. Global war, contact sports, gang violence — intimidation is always the meta-weapon.

He climbs chipped wood and adrenalin up the park trail. Swelling lungs, bursting heart, a still-empty mirror. Trail and panic flatten as he makes the bridge.

Speed is downhill, and he chases it. Shooting out of the park, he follows the steep hill down toward the river. He slaloms between moving cars, cuts into oncoming traffic when necessary and blows through an intersection. After just three blocks he has biked past the area of the city he knows.