The handsome man, p.12
The Handsome Man, page 12
One night Petra, a woman I work with more than anyone else, often every night, she comes in to work crying and she tells me that her boyfriend cheated on her and she’s shaking and she apologizes for crying and I tell her it’s okay, she doesn’t have to be here if she doesn’t want to be, I’m fine working alone and her friend comes, a woman I only ever see with Petra when they’re drinking and her friend is sad too and they sit at a table weeping, both of them, both of them drunk both of them crying and I don’t envy Petra now and the night gets so busy I’m overwhelmed and everything happens at once like a snap of the fingers of a rude customer trying to get my attention leaning over the bar and yelling, I go home with more money than I’ve ever made in a night and I look in the mirror and the person looking back at me is thinner than I remembered, another person entirely, eyes sunken still bright. I haven’t written anything in months.
* * *
It’s winter and it’s morning and I’m microdosing, careful not to take more than I can handle, to not be overwhelmed, and I meet with Sally and Ed to eat breakfast together in a restaurant close to the Rainbow Bar because it’s always there somewhere in the background and we sit together my body light, sometimes too light like I could fly away but no it’s not enough for that, it’s enough to float, a ship in the Pacific dipping up and down, a plane in turbulence. We haven’t known each other long at this point, Sally and Ed and I, I met them through some friends a few months back, in the dog days of summer where every day was the same and beautiful, hot and lazy days of drinking and they were lovely together, they welcomed me in, whoever they met, and made me feel part of their world and I ask them, “How did you two meet anyway?”
“It was a while back,” Sally tells me, “two years ago, I think?”
“Three,” Ed says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it was the same year we drove down to Detroit and the election was happening.”
“Oh yeah, remember that bar we went to and we watched the Obama and Romney debate?”
Ed laughs, “Yeah, that was crazy.”
“So it was three years ago. I was living in a commune. I didn’t realize it was a commune at first, I thought it was just some buds living in a house together but it was like up at dawn, gardening, house meetings, communal meals, lots of planning. I was a kid, I thought that was just how adults lived. Not that they were kids, I was the youngest one there, I think. But we built this stage in this old big black barn out back and we’d invite bands to come play once a month. Oh man, we’d have these huge parties with all the locals. It turned out to be a good way to get in good with the community. Lots of old folx. Weird old-timers. We’d all get dressed up in dresses or in drag, it was a blast. But because the house was in the middle of nowhere I’d have to drive into town and pick up the bands in this big Cadillac. I’d drive them through the country, real slow along the dirt roads because they were hell on the engine undertray. I remember the car was all wood panelled and painted blue, oh man I loved that car.
“So one time I picked up this band and they had this manic, laughing energy and they all came giggling into the car laughing and a mess. Shit, if it wasn’t intoxicating. I loved these guys right away. But you know, it was also really overwhelming too. Like so much that I thought I’d have a panic attack. Then I noticed the boy in the back seat not laughing. He was more thoughtful. He was looking out the window looking sad, watching birds circling above us in the sky. Something inside me said I’d fall in love with that boy right then.”
Later, when Sally is in the bathroom, just Ed and me now, Ed says, like it’s a secret, “You know, it’s funny. Sally loves telling that story. To be honest I don’t remember a lot of that stuff. Like, for me it wasn’t fireworks right away. I don’t even remember that car ride. I do remember meeting her that night though. She was so insistent that we dance together, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Not that I wanted to say no, she was cute. I remember she was dressed in a blue suit with a beard of blue glitter. I remember she held my hand and led me through that party and it was sweet. I remember being charmed. But I thought it would only be that night. It was a while after that, after she called me a bunch and we started writing letters and then she moved to Toronto and we dated for about a month or two and blah blah blah, before I think I started feeling what she felt. It was something. But I was really aloof for a long time.” And then he says something like it’s funny, these stories you share are always different depending on who tells them and when they’re told, right?
By then we’re finished eating and the light coming through the window is becoming too much for me and I say, “I might have to go home,” even though we made plans to spend the day together but I leave because it’s right for me right now and I go home and I lie alone on my couch watching the sky through the window, the simple clouds rolling and folding into themselves, opening and closing like a curtain, something wonderful for only myself now.
Later I’m feeling more grounded and I go back out to find Sally and Ed again but they’re gone, not answering their phones, not at home, the night coming on and the cool night air and a co-worker calls wanting me to fill in at work because he’s in a fight with his partner and doesn’t want to leave, I say okay, I’ll be there soon, I’m wearing a golden yellow sweater, frayed and too hot for working but I have to because it’s all I have and I only mention the sweater because at work, sweating, the lilt of coming down floating through my body, the wonderful feeling of the afternoon lingering, this woman comes up to me and she motions with her finger for me to come closer because everything is loud, her mouth grazing my ear she says, “I like your jumper,” but with an Australian accent, the sound of it confused like, “Ah liek yah jumpah,” and I laugh and I say, “Excuse me?” and she looks at me the same way I’d been looking at those clouds earlier that day, the music in the background singing tonight tonight tonight.
“I spotted you from outside,” she says later, when things get quiet, when we’re shutting down the bar, “I was having a cigarette and I noticed that jumper of yours. Thought it looked real pretty on ya.”
“Thanks,” I say, “I found it in the trash.”
“Well, it suits you.”
“Well, it’s old and it’s falling apart.”
“Hey, you want to meet up with me tomorrow?”
“I can’t tomorrow, I have to work. What about next week?”
“I won’t be here next week, I gotta go down to New York then I’m back to Australia.”
“Okay, if a drink in the afternoon is okay with you then yeah, totally.”
“I’m Australian,” she says and I say I can tell and she says no, I mean I’ll get a drink whenever, my name is Coral.
* * *
The next day in the afternoon we meet at Ronnie’s, another bar a different one and the room is empty except for us, the light streams into the dark room bouncing and slow like a million sea horses floating beneath the slow tide of the ocean, calm, it moves slowly across the floor, warped from the window and warming Coral’s feet as we drink three beers each and a shot over a few hours, the room smells sweet, she says, “You clean up nice in the day, don’t ya?”
I laugh and say, “I think I clean up pretty good in the night too, don’t you?”
“Where you from anyway? You can’t be from around here.”
“Why not?”
“You’re dirty, you’re like an Australian but a little shy, a little sad.”
“Australians aren’t sad?”
“Never met one, nah. You must not have met a lot of Australians.”
“You’re the first.”
“Get out, that’s not true.”
“I mean, I’ve met some but never spoke more than a hundred words with one, no.”
“Well, we must be up to about a hundred words now, that’s a new record isn’t it?” but she says “isn’t it” like “innit.”
She tells me she’s only visiting a few days, she finished up a job and went travelling with the money she saved, she’d been to LA and to Texas and to New Orleans and to New York, now she’s here in Toronto but is going back to New York in a few days, staying there the rest of the month then heading back to Byron Bay where she lives, where her whole life is, her mom and her dog and beaches stretching out for the rest of your life.
“It feels like I left yesterday,” she says, “been gone a month now, got a few weeks left still. It’ll pass like an hour, I bet.”
And we talk in that bar until I have to leave, I have to go to work, I say let’s go to the island tomorrow, you can’t come all this way and not go there. She says yes and I go to work that night and it’s like I’m standing still now and everything moves around me, moves around her mouth saying yes. The next day Coral tells me she slept last night in a hostel, says, “You could have asked me to stay with you, ya know,” and I say, “You can stay with me tonight if you want.” Later she stays with me but we don’t sleep together, I hold her in bed and she pulls me close like maybe she’s been hurt too and quiet and we sleep, a little drunk, a little snow drunk, because that day we go to the island and we stand at the dock where there’s a sign pointing to Halifax and a sign pointing to Vancouver which is a stone’s throw from Australia, she says, and we share a flask of whisky and everything is quiet, barren of tourist summer stuff and I show her a hidden spot where people have fires sometimes, I know this hidden place because I’d been there with a woman I’d been in love with once, a woman who left me, who I left, and Coral is the first woman since her but I don’t ever tell her that because there are some parts of you that are large and are round and are frightening and you don’t roll all of that out to anyone for a long time, sometimes never.
We don’t leave my apartment all the next day and barely the day after that, only leaving because I go to work and I come home and she’s there sleeping in my bed, I slunk in next to her, moving graceful through the morning air like a sea horse in the calm waters deep below the waves, warming her winter feet with my warm body. We make love like all the candles of the world being blown out and we order in food and we watch movies, we drink a bottle of wine and then another bottle of wine and I’ve never felt so full of love. Or I have felt that love before but it’s gone now, that old love, and it’s recontextualized and many-layered through the experience of loss. This is happening now, this new big love, the only one now. It’s the only thing.
* * *
A few days later Coral leaves, she has to go to New York to visit with some friends, it was a promise she’d made and she says, “Us Aussies, we don’t break promises,” joking I think, but a quiet between us then. When I drop her off at the bus station I don’t look back because I might ask her to stay and what if she says no and everything we’ve done, all that love, is ruined. I stay quiet.
She messages me a few hours later and says:
I’m in the USA now, no turning back
and I write back:
do you want to turn back?
and then:
I wanted to ask you to don’t go, to stay here with me
and she writes back:
lol you shit
and then:
you should have asked me to stay, I would have stayed with you. I wanted to.
So it’s coming on Christmas and I’m going to New York because she asks me to come, to spend it with her and her friends there and I say yes and so here I am, coming to the USA now, no turning back.
* * *
The man sitting next to me on the bus doesn’t speak much English and he’s young and I have to guide him as we go through border security, right up to the kiosk, and I offer to help translate for him and the border guard says step back, sir, he’s fine wait your turn and we both get through and he smiles at me says, “Merci.” I say you’re welcome. I fall asleep and when I wake up all the lights are coming on in the bus and it’s all so sudden and everyone is rushing out now, not yet morning, the flood of cold from the open bus door and the flooding darkness too and I walk out into New York shaking now, I shake all the way to the subway where I go to Central Ave station and on the way I stop shaking because the subway is warm and now I’m struggling to stay awake, the calm steady sound of movement and then I’m there and the sun is peaking out, I go to a diner called Tina’s Restaurant because it’s the only place open and it’s all cops and it’s all junkies and it’s all hipsters still awake and all of them on cocaine and it’s all me and it’s all of us here together, a full cup of coffee the classic kind from the thin tall white cup thick and lipstick-stained.
When I meet with Coral, when the sun comes up and we’re sitting at a café near where I’m staying and it’s called the Swallow Cafe and I remember when I was a kid I had a friend, a girl named Tina, and she was from New York and she would visit every summer. She stayed in a house on the water and it was her parents’ summer house, I visited her often in the summers and I remember every summer there would be a bird always sitting in the same place, on a phone line overlooking the water, on the path I took to visit Tina and it was nice to have something consistent, something always there and it was there every summer until Tina stopped coming to visit and I’d walk past that empty wire sometimes with the ghost of the bird and I wonder what happened to her, it was so long ago I don’t remember what she looked like, I don’t remember what we did those summers it’s all lost now and I tell Coral all of this and I say, “Anyway I think that bird was a swallow.”
Coral says, “Do you think we should look her up? Let’s all hang out, you, me, and what was her name?”
I say, “I don’t remember now, who cares?” and we laugh not because it’s funny but because it’s just us now, we drink a coffee and we go to where I’m staying, a hotel room I’ve booked nearby, and we sleep, I sleep through the rest of the morning and I dream a dream of a fire in a secret place and I’m there and Coral is too and I wake to Coral there with me what better.
* * *
We’re walking through the white winter afternoon of warehouses and men throwing boxes from the backs of trucks, sneakers hanging from phone wires that criss-cross the street like spiderwebs and it’s Christmas Eve, everything is quiet here and Coral has some friends who live in a loft nearby, they’re having people in, people who have nowhere else to go, she says, so we go there and we bring beer and we bring presents for our hosts, a book we find in the street called Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, a bouquet of lavender we find at the only open bodega, a big bottle of wine. A man lets us in, Coral introduces me to him, he lives here his name is Dan, he’s also an Australian and he’s kind. He introduces me to everyone else. For the rest of the day and night I’ll only see Dan laughing with his friend whose name I can’t remember, his friend who wears all black and has an accent I can’t place, the two of them together sitting in front of a mirror face up like a table dusted white always talking so chatty, moving fast. We eat and we talk and as the sun is setting we all go onto the roof because the sky has turned an otherworldly orange and pink and purple and we take photos of each other and at one point Coral and I are looking down into the street and there’s a young couple there in front of a stoop and they’re talking and they’re nervous and she says, “Do you think he’ll kiss her?” and I say, “I don’t know, I hope so.”
“Do you think they were on a first date just now?”
“On Christmas Eve?”
“Yeah, that’s fucking romance right there,” and she holds my hand now as we watch them, the sky and everything it enfolds another world entirely.
We stay at her friend’s apartment that night, we don’t sleep, it’s a blur of faces and drinking and everybody has an energy like a sustained forever midnight until the room starts to fill with light and I don’t remember much of what was talked about, the country, the world. I remember someone, several people, being vulnerable with me. I remember being vulnerable too. I remember sitting with Coral on a couch, the two of us talking with people like we’re one person, like everyone engaging us together as one and in the morning we all exchange presents, all of us still alive and it’s Christmas and I don’t know these people, just me and her I suppose.
We nap in the day and in the early evening we do the same thing, the same thing from the night before, all of our bodies more emotional, more flung through the world. What even happened then but a lot of words? A lot of moments lost and those faces I can’t remember and at the time they were the most important, more important than anything before but now I’m leaving with Coral before the sun comes, in the cold morning we shake through Bushwick our bodies so sensitive now, every light and every sound an assault but we’re happy and we go to my hotel room nearby and we rest, we sleep into the afternoon, both of us not dreaming now.
