What They Wanted (20 page)

I shook my head, wanting to do away with the subject. “It was stupid, I shouldn’t have said it.”

“You got it from somewhere—where the fuck did you hear that?”

“Ohh, relax, Ben, cripes, it’s not contagious, nothing’s out to get your penis.”

He sat back with a look of surprise. My arms prickled with fright. I had invoked his penis. My head started shaking and I forced it to shake sideways so’s to make it look like an extension of speech as I quickly exclaimed, “Nothing, nothing, just the way he looks at you is all, like he’s jealous.”

“Jealous! Jeezes.”

“No, I didn’t mean that he was—only that—” I trawled for words, my neck growing hot. “It’s just that he doesn’t look at women,” I blurted.

A look of relief swept Ben’s face. “Jeezes, that’s cuz he’s a ditz, I told you he was a ditz, a social ditz. Jeezes”—he took a swig of beer—“you had me going. How do you know he don’t look at women? He looks at women.”

“Well—he doesn’t look at me, and I’m a woman.” I wrapped my arms behind the back of my chair. Inadvertently Ben looked at the smallish but nicely rounded front of my T-shirt, its two puckered points.

“Can see, perhaps, why you think that,” he said, and laughed a little too hard.

“Oh, you’re not sure? You like to check the merchandise?”

The words had come out fast. They hung like bits of my clothing around him, leaving me bared.

Ben was gripped in silence. I flushed. I started pulling on my jacket, an excuse to twist my face from view. I fisted through a twisted sleeve, hooking the cuff on my watch strap as I did, tearing at the stitching. “See that,” I muttered, examining the cuff, “should always check your merchandise—just never know what you’re getting, eh.” I smiled flippantly.

Ben raised his eyes to mine, holding them, but then they fell. “That’s why I like’em twice but nice, from the second-hand stores,” he said lowly. “Wear’em when I want, chuck’em when I don’t.” He touched the back of my hand, and then stroked it with an unbearable gentleness. “You wouldn’t do that to something nice, would you—something new and nice?”

Trapp appeared by the table, a jarring release from the awkwardness of the moment. The relief in Ben’s voice as he greeted him was painful to bear. “Grab one for me,” he called as Trapp trekked to the bar. “What about you—hey, where you going—?”

“Ohh, another jaunt through the cleaners,” I said with a feigned tiredness. “Gotta keep things at least
looking
fresh and nice. You know.” Flicking my hair over the collar of my jacket, I swaggered on my two-inch heels towards the exit. Trapp looked up as I sauntered past.

“
Waarm
evening,” he drawled in the broad, flat brogue of the old-timers around the bay, flattening out “warm” to rhyme with “arm.”

“Yeah, sure,
waarm
day,” I said irritably, and caught what might’ve been another real smile abort itself on Trapp’s mouth.

For days I burrowed into my room, hurrying through campus so’s not to encounter Ben, eating in the smaller, more obscure cafeterias. I became a slob, and wondered how Mother would react to the humps of clothing mounding my floors, bed, chairs. Myrah, my skinny, outport roomie, who’d become my first bosom pal and who was going through a real breakup, became equally a slob, and rather quickly our tiny room descended into beer haven squalor, with rows of empties lining our windowsills and coffee table like abandoned, beheaded soldiers. Shredded beer labels fell like confetti onto our laps, our beds, into our boots, our morning cereal. I took up smoking, fighting my way through nausea till I could finally hold a cigarette with grace, and bags of pot started taking up residence in a concealed portion of the junk drawer.

“Holy christ, Sylvie,” said Myrah after she found me painfully twisted around a wooden chair one morning, staring at a cold cup of tea, “is it still that bad?”

“Worse,” I whimpered.

“Ahh, come on, let’s get out, go for a beer—what time’s it— almost noon, come on, they’re not worth all this.” And for the tenth or twelfth time that week I trailed a step behind Myrah as we traversed the university grounds, listening to her tirade about men’s stupidity. I hung on to her every word, hoping to find a salve for my hurting, fool heart. If I’d just kept my mouth shut I’d at least still be hanging with him and sharing laughs. Most times I was content with simply his company, anyway— ohh, I cringed a thousand times rethinking that wretched moment of Ben’s rejection, his discomfort, his gentleness.

It was during one of Myrah’s rants, marching beside her through a crowded corridor, that I literally crashed into Ben. Too late I saw him and Trapp pushing against the flow of bodies and coming towards us. Deliberately Ben sidestepped in front of me, offering an unconvincing apology as I collided against him, my books bruising my ribs.

Muttering something unintelligible, I flushed hard and bent down as much to hide my face as to gather the papers that had slipped from my binder and scattered at my feet. He bent beside me, his leather jacket buckling upward, exposing an airline ticket in his inside pocket. “Where you going?”I asked, so’s to divert his attention.

Instantly he was on his feet, zipping his jacket. “Going home for the weekend,” he said with a wry look at Trapp. He clapped Trapp’s shoulder, nodding. “Yuh—weekend off.”

Trapp was rapidly chewing the corners of his mouth, his eyes squirrelling from me to Myrah as though we were about to discover his secret stash of acorns.

“Soo,” said Ben, bringing his attention back to me, “how you been doing—haven’t see you around.”

I stood beside him, fitting my papers back inside the binder. “Fine. Just fine. And you?”I looked him boldly in the eyes. He was smiling. I smelt his whisky coffee breath. Myrah clicked her tongue.

“Me?” He drew a look of concern. “Geesh, I’ve been studying, actually.” He lifted a finger to his throat, feeling for a pulse. “Must be something going around.” He gave an affectionate smile, and I thought for a moment he was gonna chuck me beneath the chin in some fatherlike gesture for having said something cute. I made to dart around him and he caught my arm, pulling me sideways against a row of lockers. “Where you running off to? Why did you run off the other night?”

“I, uh, I have a class, I have to go—”

“Settle down, you’re like a dog with burr—what’s the matter with you anyhow, cripes, you’re like a dog with burr.”

“You just said that.”

“So I did, you got me circling like a dog.” He fell silent, then gave a self-conscious laugh. “What’re you doing Monday night—I’ll take you to dinner, would you like to go to dinner?”

“Where?” I asked.

“Where—I don’t know where, we’ll find a where. Whatsa matter now,” he asked as I hesitated, “you gotta think about it?”

“Yeah, I gotta think about it. I have a class on Monday night.”

“After class then. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria. Around nine—half-past nine?”

Myrah clicked her tongue, more sharply this time.

Ben shot her a crude look.

“Half-past nine,” I said.

He gave a quick nod, a tentative smile, and then, with a curious look at the stone-faced Myrah, followed after Trapp who had since lost himself amidst the river of bodies flowing through the corridor.

Monday evening I was sitting in the cafeteria, waiting. I was wearing a crinkly-textured T-shirt I’d bought for the occasion and a new pair of skin-tight jeans. My hair was loosely curled and heavily hair-sprayed so’s to hold the curls in place. I was wearing an underwire bra that penned me in like a whalebone corset yet pushed my breasts upward in an alluring manner. I was wearing blush and gloss and eye shadow. And huge hoop earrings that stroked coolly across my cheek each time I bent my head to look at my watch.

An hour passed. No Ben. The cafeteria started emptying. Janitors scraped aside chairs and tables, sweeping the floors, slopping them with heavy, wet mops. The last few bodies left. I’d never heard the cafeteria so quiet. Gathering my books, heart weighted more with disappointment than anger, I left.

Next evening I was back again, wearing the same earrings and jeans and crinkly-textured T-shirt, thinking I might’ve gotten the time wrong. On the third day I forced my step away from the cafeteria, away from the campus bar or any of those places where I might run into Ben. Keeping my thoughts from obsessively returning to him, however, was like trying to forget the rock in one’s shoe.

It was Mother who told me. Ben had dropped out of university with Trapp and gone to Alberta to work in the oilfields. Poor Suze was crazed with worry, Mother said, and couldn’t figure it because he’d only a semester left before graduating with his engineering degree, and his marks—while low—were passable, and he had money in the bank. And Trapp, too, had just a semester left towards an engineering degree. Why in the name of gawd would either of them quit now, the distraught Suze beseeched me each time I came home after that.

“Because that’s what lots of students do,” I lied to her that first time she came to Mother’s house to see me. “They suddenly get tired and take time out, works for a bit, then goes back to school and finishes. Not a thing to worry about.”

It was not an answer that comforted Suze. She wheezed for breath, her padded cheeks exuding a rashlike redness as she flapped her arms and wrung her hands and paced the small confines of the kitchen, worrying for her boy.

“He’s not a boy, Suze,” Mother said consolingly, but still she carried on with her flapping and wringing and pacing. I kept my comments to myself, relieved the poor woman knew nothing of her “boy’s” wasted eyes and whisky breath.

For the longest time university life without Ben felt about as exciting as a Sunday sermon. But time smoothes the sharpest of stones, and thankfully, after a few months of ardent study and good grades, I was once more traipsing lightheartedly through campus, this time with Myrah and a keen group of philosophy students I’d taken to studying with.

IT WAS DARK
when the plane rattled down the runway outside Grande Prairie, the sky racked with thunder and lightning. I found my car in the parking lot and drove us through the night, straining to see through the sheets of rain and shushing Chris, who kept swearing at the rutted road and exclaiming over the lightning forking across the uninterrupted sky.

SIX

I
DROVE
for fifteen, twenty minutes through the worsening storm, then pulled onto a side road, lurching through potholes, the high beams funnelling a faint yellow through the woods pressing in on each side. “

Where the hell you taking us? Where’s the city?” “

Something I been meaning to tell you,” I replied, slowing to a crawl through a washed-out section of road. “Well, easier to simply show you now.” I cut sharply to the side and braked, the headlights striking a row of darkened tents huddling near a river, some lit from the inside with candles and flashlights, others with the whiter, brighter light of lanterns.

“Welcome home. Ninth one down is ours.”

“What—?”

“It’s a boom town, brother. No room at the inn. Don’t worry,” I said to his shocked look, “it’s a nice, big tent—can sleep eight men, long as they stretches out nice and straight.”

“You’re living in a tent—smothering jeezes, wait till Mother hears this.”

“Mother won’t,” I said hotly, reaching around to the back seat. “You don’t tattle from school. Now, help me get my bag. Chris!” He was staring aghast at the huddle of tents, the river sloughing blackly beside them. “Look, there’s no place to rent, is all. People sleeping in cars, everywhere. We’re lucky. And beside, it’s just for the summer; why waste money on high rent? Cripes, a thousand bucks for a porch is what they’re charging.”

“What about winter—you never slept outside all winter.”

“’Course not, stayed with a girl from work. She got married and I got the boot. Will you stop looking like that? You got it good—there’s four to six people sleeping in most of them tents. And really, it’s kinda cool,” I added lightly. “All kinds of people, mostly French, and they’re all great. If it wouldn’t pissing right now, they’d be sitting around campfires, playing guitars and stuff.”

“My sister’s a freaking hippie.”