Various Positions (33 page)

“You coming?”

He looks at his friends and I do too. Their eyes are on me, not antagonistic, but I see that they could slip that way, animals deciding who they can trust. Kareem reaches his hand out. It’s awkward for him, I can tell by the wooden way he holds his head, tilting it back as though it’s pulled by string. I have nothing to do so I may as well do anything. I move toward him, slide my palm into his.

We move down the hall. It’s this easy, I think, this easy to do things you don’t want to. I look at the carpet and watch my feet. Each step is a tiny betrayal. There’s almost something delicious in this, ridiculous even, a big
fuck you
to myself. Kareem is staring ahead of him. We’re moving up the stairs. His haircut tapers into two shaved points. I wonder what he’s thinking. I look down at the darker hand pulling mine. The tendons in his wrist are sharp as wires. I think what I’m feeling is envy. Imagine wanting something so badly from another person that it turns into an action, that you pull them up the stairs.

Kareem lets go of my hand and moves ahead of me, opens the door beside the bathroom. I follow him inside. There’s a small bed under the window, lower and maybe narrower than an ordinary bed. It’s a kid’s room. The comforter on it is a faded green that reminds me of camping, a green of water canteens and army vests, and more than that too, earth fresh enough to smell. It’s a boy color, but something makes me think the room belongs to a little girl. A giant flower is painted on the closet door, and even though there’s a rug with the image of a steam engine alongside the bed, I see fluffy animals on the bookshelf, a shingled dollhouse on the floor. Kareem closes the door. He walks across the room and hesitates over the bed. He looks big next to it, funny big, and I wonder whether we’ll have sex on it, whether both of our bodies will even fit. He sits down on the rug.

“Are you gonna sit?”

I sit beside him. My foot covers the chimney of the train. I take a giant gulp of beer and then another one immediately after. I stay absolutely still to judge if I’m drunk. I think I might detect a new feeling in my head, something close to tiredness. The closet opposite is half open and I see small girl shoes on the floor, sandals with pink straps and the shine of patent leather. I feel the heat of Kareem before I see it, his face approaching mine. There’s a funny look in his eye, or maybe what’s funny is that there’s no look, like a runner blind to everything but the finish line. His mouth is on mine and it feels soft in a gross way. I think of furless animals, puppies in pink sludge. I keep my arms at my sides until he’s lifting my dress. I raise my arms, let him pull it over my head. Everything goes blue and sparkly until the neck uncatches from my nose. He looks at my boobs. I want to reach for my dress and cover them, but I know it’s supposed to go this way, that I have to let him look. He lies down on top of me and brings his lips to one of my nipples. The shock of it sends a bolt through my body, but then I realize that it doesn’t feel bad. His hands course down the sides of me to the top of my tights, but then he stops, looks at the door like he’s heard something. He gets up and pushes the dollhouse in front of the door, adjusts it again with his foot.

“Privacy,” he says.

He comes back and lies down on top of me. We start kissing again, but the weight of him makes it impossible for me to kiss back. Instead I feel like I’m controlling traffic with my lips, trying to keep an open channel to my lungs so that I don’t gag or choke. He gets his pants off in one swift motion and then takes off my tights and thong. He grabs his shirt from the cuff of the neck and yanks it forward. I wonder why he does it. His shirt could just as easily stay on and it’s all skin now, gummy, inescapable. He lowers his chest on top of mine and his body blocks the overhead light. I prefer the shadows anyway.

I think about a million things while we have sex. I think about the pain first, but it lessens every time he rocks into me. In my head, I see a pebble dropped into a pond, the ripples slowly dissipating until everything calms down again, goes still and smooth and numb. Then I think about Chantal. I picture the starved knobbiness of her body and wonder if you can get so skinny that sex becomes dangerous. Kareem’s hips knock against me, and if my bones were deprived of normal nutrients, I bet they could crack in half. Then I think about Roderick, how he probably has sex just like this with other people. I try to find more things to think about, but Kareem gets louder as he moves around on top of me. It sounds like he’s breathing through his mouth and his nose at the same time, and this makes it impossible for me to do anything but let his sweaty exhales slap my cheeks. If I could lift my arm I would smother his face with my hand, smush all his features together. He’s moving faster and I just want it to stop. I start saying things under my breath that I know he won’t be able to hear and I realize that I could laugh or stick my tongue out and he wouldn’t have any idea.

“Get off,” I whisper. “Get off, you jerk.”

Finally Kareem arches his back and his eyes cross toward the bridge of his nose. There’s a pause, and then he stands up and pulls on his pants. I want to get out of the room as fast as possible. I pull on my clothes too, and tell him I need to find my friends. I step into the hallway and rush down the stairs. I feel weird between my legs and wonder if other people will notice, whether I’m hobbling like someone who’s been hurt but doesn’t want anyone to know. There are still tons of people on the main floor. Veronica and Anushka are nowhere. I bring my hand to my forehead to see if I’m sweating, but my fingers tweak dry. The indoor air is stagnant, slowed by the hordes of people and smoke wafting in every time the door opens. If someone talked to me, maybe even just glanced in my direction, I think it would knock something over inside me. I find my parka where I left it in the corner and, when I think no one’s watching, I go out the front door.

I run straight down the walkway and up the sidewalk in the direction from which we came. My feet pound the cement, and the temperature’s dropped more now, or maybe it’s just that the wind has picked up, swings knives to the tips of my ears. I have to keep running so that if anyone sees me they won’t have a chance to laugh at me, make me feel like a freak. I run all the way to Parliament Street, and when I stop, I’m so out of breath that it feels like my heart could burst through all its valves and ventricles and sputter onto the pavement. I bend over and suck new air in as slowly as possible, dip my head into my chest to encourage the oxygen to flow. When I feel as normal as I’m going to feel, I drag my feet forward.

I don’t know much about this part of the city, except that it’s not the kind of area where I should be walking alone at night. I don’t see anyone on the sidewalk, but I hear sounds of downtown mischief, screeching car brakes and a siren coiling like a nearing storm. Some of the buildings I pass look like they’ve been deserted for centuries and shadowy alleys split one from the next. I hear something across the street. A man in sloppy sweatpants stands on the step of a convenience store and hollers something at the street. His jacket is open and I think I see the gleam of his exposed belly, and it might be the ugliest thing in the world. I worry he’s talking to me and I walk faster. The label of my dress scratches my back inside my coat but I can’t fix it, don’t want to feel the skin of my spine and remember that the night has its tongue on me. This is exactly the kind of neighborhood where cars slow down and beg women to climb inside, take them to fields near the highway. I lift my purse and cross it over the opposite shoulder, as if the white vinyl strap will cover more of my body.

I think I’m heading south, although that doesn’t really help me since I have no idea where I plan to go. My fists are in my pockets, fingerless. This is the craziest I’ve ever felt, and as soon as I’ve acknowledged this, I dare myself to prove it. I stop stiff as a mannequin and stare at the sky. A swath of murky velvet. There’s a stoop to my left, some kind of oily coffee shop, and I decide that I’m just going to sit there until I figure out what to do next. I move toward it, check whether the stoop is slushy, but it’s just salt crystals and boot grime so I pull on the back edge of my parka and drop down. I can’t stay outside for much longer. I wonder what time it is. Probably after midnight. On any normal day, I’d be fast asleep so that my muscles would be rested for rehearsal. I have nothing to do tomorrow, nothing to do the next day either. Stopping ballet will make new time, hours of it, and maybe that’s what makes its loss unbearable, the mess of pointless minutes.

I pull a red fist free of my pocket and move my fingertips under my parka and dress, slowly up my tights. I guess I’m not expecting to find any difference and maybe that’s the real ache, the inconsequence of the whole thing, borrowing a body the way you’d borrow a book. Can this be all that ordinary people want out of their muscles and bones? I get up off the stoop and start walking again, but every step is a battle against what’s dawning on me, the nothingness of normal life. It’s such a waste when I know another way of moving, a real way. I wrap my arms around my middle and remember Roderick’s hands there. His touch wasn’t disgusting, because it was more than just one body perving over another one. We were creating a perfection that mattered to us both. I swallow and feel the hugeness of this vibrate in my chest and collarbones. It’s like the feeling before you burst into tears, a lump at the back of my throat and then the truth burning up my face. What have I done? Roderick must be collapsing now, suffocating with rage. I bet he’s so angry that he wants to hurt me, would take my neck and snap it the wrong way. I push my fingernails into my thighs and let the sting of it sharpen the guilt. I’ve ruined everything. Roderick was my biggest supporter and I’ve done something so horrible that it’s made him resign. The tears start running now. One drips off my nostril, another off the edge of my jaw.

And then I have an idea. Maybe it’s just that I’ve exhausted myself from crying, but I think, suddenly, that it may not be too late. I may still be able to fix things. I remember the twenty dollars in my purse, step onto the curb, and look for a taxi. I figure I’ll have better luck on Carlton and I jog in the direction I hope is south. As I near the intersection, I see a cab heading toward me, about a block away. I step out onto the curb and wave my hand. The taxi pulls a giant U-turn and stops beside me.

I listen to my voice as I tell the driver the address. I wonder how it must sound to him, a stranger, whether it sounds like an address I’ve given a hundred times before. I watch the driver in the rearview mirror as he nods. We pull back into traffic and drive south. I slip my hand into my purse so that I can pinch the twenty between two fingers. I smooth the other hand over my hair and pull on my dress so an inch of electric blue borders my parka.

Eighty-three Richmond Street looks silver in the moonlight. I give the driver my twenty and he gives me back some coins. It’s only when I’m out of the car that I realize I didn’t check the meter. Two glass doors with S-shaped handles lead into the building. The vestibule is shallow, just a few steps from the front door to the lobby, but as wide as the building. Mailboxes line the wall to the left, silver as the building’s exterior, and beside them is the apartment buzzer, a keyboard with a flat microphone mounted into the wall above. I walk over to it and skim my finger over the keys. They’re formatted three in a row, like a normal telephone. It’s probably a four-digit buzz code—I know they usually are—and if I ever paid attention in math I’d know the number of potential combinations, probably even the most likely ones to pick.

There’s a click behind, the sound of an opening door. A woman steps out from the lobby. She’s wearing high heels, toes that direct her like arrows. Her steps echo to the ceiling and her pale hair is piled high on her head.

“Are you looking for someone?”

“Yeah.”

She points to the two arrows above the number key. “You can scroll to the right name. Then just enter the buzz code.”

“Thanks.”

She waits for me to do something. I move my fingertips down the seam of my dress. It’s a senseless, childish fidget and I do it intentionally, play the part of a lost kid. If I ring Roderick from here, he won’t let me in.

“Who are you looking for?” she asks gently.

I say his name just loud enough to be heard.

“Oh,
Roderick
?” She adjusts her shawl over her shoulder. “I know Roderick. The choreographer?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s just down the hall from me.” She takes a step toward the lobby door, but pauses. “He’s expecting you?”

“Yeah.”

I watch her calculate the risk of letting me into the building. At first her focus is internal, but then she scrutinizes my hair, my face, the blue fabric orbiting below my parka. She walks to the lobby door and fans her handbag over the sensor. There’s a sound of a distant click and she pushes the door open.

“He’s 507.”

I walk past her, thank her with my eyes. I take the elevator to the fifth floor. The hallway is quiet and I calm myself by absorbing the details of the decor, the shiny oak panels along the wall with sheets of mirror between the wood, like sandwiches of glass. There’s adrenaline in my bloodstream. I feel the mechanics of it, the thud of every pump. I stop outside his door. My fingers are more than skin and bones. They feel huge and weightless simultaneously, like the long balloons that clowns twist into animals for kids. I knock.

I listen for sounds on the other side. I watch the peephole beneath the number, look for a shadow or the contour of an eye. Then the thought of actually seeing these things scares me and I look down at my feet. The door clicks. I raise my head just as it’s pulled open. Roderick is standing in front of me.

I fumble backward a step or two and it looks like he does too. His head retreats as though he needs a wider angle to credit what he sees.

“Hi.”

My voice sounds quiet and he doesn’t say anything. I see nothing on his face. He’s wearing jeans and a short-sleeved rugby shirt. I have never seen him in jeans before, and I see all his arm hair now, a tangle of darkness.