The damages, p.26
The Damages, page 26
Sue is wearing a flouncy yellow blouse tucked into high-rise button-fly jean shorts. Her mask is jet black with tiny yellow flowers. In my blue surgical masks, I’m starting to feel like an outsider to an important fashion movement.
“Rosalind Fisher! My God!” she calls. That accent. She flips her hair, which she still wears long, but now with an artful Susan Sontag stripe. My students would never call her rude names. She looks like someone they might still try to copy—grey and all.
I smile in the Elaine Ng way: hard from the eyes. So strange to think that at any time in the last twenty years, I could have just done this—contacted Sue. But then again, this isn’t any year. People don’t have a lot to do right now. Plus, I am a person enmeshed in gossip and scandal—I am a good story, as far as someone like Sue is concerned. There is nothing more electric than the edge of danger.
Sue motions to the four-top beside my table. “Let’s move? I’d love the extra space.” She is still not afraid to ask for what she wants. It’s not entirely clear why this bothers me.
Once we’re both sitting down, Sue tilts her head and regards me. “How are you, Ros?”
“Getting by, thanks. All things considered.” It’s my standard response these last few months. It feels unseemly to be more cheerful than that in a pandemic. It’s also unseemly to be bleaker, even if your child’s father has just been accused of sexual assault. If you and your loved ones are still alive right now, you’re getting by.
Sue nods with feeling. I notice her forehead doesn’t change. Botox. We try to freeze what we can’t keep. I feel duped. Her grey hair tricks you into thinking she is all about aging naturally, and that way you’re left with the impression that her face just naturally defies age.
Sue leans back in her chair. She is ready now for me to begin. My meeting, my agenda. I have never craved anyone’s attention as much as I once craved hers, but now I’m uncertain how to proceed with it. I break eye contact, take a sip of juice.
I begin by congratulating her on her show and her artistic success, but she deflects the compliment. “You probably know this already from Lukas. Artists never feel ‘successful.’ ” I doubt that she doesn’t feel successful, but I am more taken aback by the casual mention of Lukas. I’d expected to take longer to get there. I am also interested to hear her say Lukas. I wondered if she might say Dutch.
Sue drops her mask to drink from her smoothie. Seeing her whole face, I feel a jolt of recognition. That defined chin, those perfect teeth. The lip ring is gone, but her glow is still there. Had I been in love with Sue? Maybe, in a way. But who wouldn’t be?
“Back at Regis, when you were taking those pictures, did you already know you were an artist?” I ask, feeling like some glib journalist.
She lowers her chin, lifts her eyes, and shakes her head. What is this coquettish headshake? I’ve seen my students do it. It must be in fashion. “I just took photos.”
“It was a trip down memory lane.” I realize that I have inadvertently quoted her tweet to Megan.
“When I look at those photos, I don’t feel nostalgic in any true sense. Because the thing was, I was already preoccupied then with the nostalgia that I imagined myself feeling later. I was painfully aware”—she touches her necklace here, a pink crystal pendant—“of how young and free I was and how that wouldn’t last. Which made me less free, of course.” The speech sounds canned, even the little pause.
“Was that Megan?” I want to knock her out of her little trance. “On the bench with her hands over her face?”
Sue frowns. “I offered to take it down. Megan was unsettled when she saw it at the AGO. But in the end, we both decided it had impact. This vulnerable girl alone in this hypersexed sea of bravado. Plus, no one would recognize her.”
Except that I just said I did. “Do you remember when you took it? Like, what you thought you were capturing?”
“I don’t think I could have known at the time.”
“But you did take all those photos, right?”
Sue’s look is cold. “Did I take all my photos?”
“I just remember that Lukas had your camera a lot? Like when we went out to the bars.”
Sue lets out a coarser laugh than normal. “Ros, I would know the difference.”
“Yeah,” I say. But I’m not convinced, and I wish I were.
An uncomfortable few seconds pass between us before Sue says, “So do you feel at home?” She flutters her hands around, indicating the café. “Patricio and I went to SoCal for research. He wanted that whole breezy, open feeling. I was pushing for more of a cramped Parisian vibe, but thank God we did his thing or we’d be out of business.” It is telling to me that Sue is not only shifting the topic but also fishing for a compliment.
“It feels West Coast, yeah.” I could tell her that I also lived in Paris, but I don’t get the sense it would interest or impress her.
“We didn’t do all that California stuff with the menu, though.”
“What stuff?”
“All the goddamn choice,” she says, piling her hair to one side. “It’s all pick a grain, pick a green, pick a protein, pick a Jesus Christ. When I pay sixteen dollars for a salad, I want someone to do the work for me. I want my salads curated. Do Americans all think they know how to make the best salads? I’d be a terrible American.” She says this smugly, like the truth is that she is too good to be American. Whereas I, on the other hand, must get along fine. “And the portion sizes,” she says. “My God.”
Shaming Americans on portion sizes is a national Canadian pastime. It’s very unoriginal. Sue, at least the Sue in my mind, could do better than that.
“Have you and Patricio been together a long time?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Six years.” She flips her hair back again. “No kids.” I think she might say, I’d be a terrible mother, in the same tone, but instead, she says, “But that’s not what you want to talk about.”
I fumble for a response to this. “Well, no, I’m curious how you’ve been—”
“I haven’t changed, Ros. Ask me anything.”
“It must have been strange to you,” I say. “To see that Lukas and I were together?”
It turns out that I can’t help myself. I have spent too long wondering what Sue thought of Lukas and me as a couple. I’ve imagined her coming across that information and being—and being, what, exactly? Awed? Jealous? A question enters my mind: How much of being with Lukas was motivated by some fantasy of Sue’s reaction to it?
“These things are a mystery. I was married to a real-estate developer for three years,” Sue says, avoiding my question, making it about herself again. “Filthy rich but boring. Anyway, I got a couple condos out of it.” I wonder if she dumped him because his carbon footprint wasn’t compatible with her image as an environmental photographer. She smiles brightly, looks down at her smoothie and stirs with too much concentration. “How’s Lukas? I guess not great.”
“He’s managing.”
“Good. I hadn’t heard from him in a while.”
“I didn’t realize you were in touch.”
She makes a dismissive hand gesture. “Just on WhatsApp every now and again. He sends me pictures of Benji.”
I have a lot of questions about this. For starters, since when? Just since we broke up, or was it more of a longstanding correspondence that he never mentioned? I take a moment to drop my mask, break off a little of the scone. The bread is far too sweet for the jalapenos.
“His career has been so exciting to watch,” Sue says. “But the higher you fly—” She clicks her tongue.
“Back at Regis, you and Lukas were so close,” I say. “But he said you had a falling out or something? I guess I wondered if—”
“You’re asking did he assault me? The answer is no. Lukas never tried anything with me.”
“Okay,” I say. “That’s good to know.”
“Seriously. He never tried anything,” she says, her voice lower now. “And I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, but at some point, I wanted him to. We were both single in our last semester, and everyone kept asking why we weren’t together. But it never seemed like that was what he wanted. Maybe it offended me after a while, you know? I was used to getting what I wanted. I thought he was waiting until school was done, until we were travelling alone, but then he cancelled that trip, so.”
“He had some emotional issues back then,” I say. “I’m pretty sure he was in love with you. For what it’s worth.”
Sue gives me a look that I can’t totally understand.
“Has his lawyer contacted you, by the way?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Should I expect that?”
“I don’t know. You were with him the night that Megan was allegedly assaulted, so I just thought maybe they’d want your side of the story to corroborate his.”
“My memory of that time is pretty hazy.” She looks at me in a way I recognize, with a slight narrowing of the eyes, like she’s peering at me through smoke. I guess when I used to get that look from her, she was peering through smoke. It’s a look that is searching for agreement, so I give that to her, nodding, urging things along. “I can’t say much about that night, Ros,” she continues. “But I will tell you that I was extremely surprised by the allegations. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true, understand? But the Dutch I knew wasn’t like that. And nothing about Megan Main’s story made me be like, Oh, wait, you know what? That makes sense. Like the whole thing makes very little sense to me.”
“So he never talked about her?”
“Not that I recall.”
“The night she went missing, do you remember it? You told me that after you left Megan in Courtney’s room, you went back to your room to smoke up with Lukas and Stefan.”
“That sounds about right,” she says.
“Do you remember if Lukas spent the night in your room with you, or is it possible he went back to Courtney’s room?”
“I don’t think he went to her room. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have been a pretty clear suspect?”
“But there were no suspects then, remember? Because we didn’t know about the assault, there was nothing to suspect.”
“Look, you’re telling me this, Ros, and it is sort of coming back, but I really don’t remember much.”
“You told me that you woke up to Courtney and Stefan hooking up that night.” I feel myself blush, both at the memory and the puerility of remembering it. “Was Lukas in the room then?”
“You know Court and Stef dated for, like, ten years or something?”
Did I know? It seems like something I should have known, and yet I’m pretty sure Lukas never mentioned it. I want to repeat the question about Lukas in the room, but I feel too ridiculous. I wait for her to say something more, but she doesn’t.
“Do you remember the story in the Ragged Regis about me?”
She squeezes one eye shut in a pantomime of reflection. “Remind me?”
“I was crowned the worst person at Regis? The ‘Frost Queen’? One of your pictures was in it.”
“I don’t remember that, but I was always giving Dutch photos for stories.”
“It said I was responsible for Megan going missing.”
She lets out a breath. “It was a mean little paper. I always said it was beneath him.”
“But did it ever seem like Lukas wanted to humiliate me in particular?”
“I doubt that was his goal, Ros.” Her tone is slightly admonishing, as if I’m the one who is self-obsessed. “He was just writing the story people were hungry for. Someone went missing, people wanted the story.” Sue glances down at her phone in the bag next to her. I feel that I’m losing runway.
“But did you think it was my fault?”
“What was your fault? That Megan got assaulted?”
“No, before we knew that part.” I’m trying not to sound annoyed. “Did you think it was my fault that she went missing?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
This conversation is beginning to remind me of the one I had with Lukas the first time we talked about Megan. I wasn’t sure I completely believed him when he claimed not to remember the chronology of her disappearance, or anything about how I was treated in the aftermath. But what Sue seems to be saying is that the whole drama—one that ended with a girl returning safely—was genuinely a passing memory in the grand scheme of four years at Regis.
“Do you remember why I left Regis?”
Sue shakes her head. “Not specifically. I would have probably said it had to do with the Megan thing, but honestly, Ros, I’m barely keeping it together in the present tense.”
“I get that it’s a weird time to be asking all this.”
“Am I meant to be an expert on that time period?”
“It’s more that you were friends with Lukas.”
“Yes, but I’m not sure if our memories are the best way to understand who someone really is.” Sue stirs the smoothie again in her pretentious, contemplative way. What a different trajectory I had been following, tagging along behind Sue. What would I have become if I’d stayed in her shadow? I feel deprived of knowing. I feel this even as I decide that I don’t like Sue. It could have been my decision to walk away from this pompous person.
“Do you remember why we stopped being friends?” I feel my blood pressure rise as the question comes out.
“Well, you left Regis,” she says.
“But before then?”
She looks off at another table. “There’s one thing coming back to me,” she says. “I don’t know how to say it, exactly. Just, like, an inauthentic vibe?”
She sticks that pin so easily. I swallow, try not to look as injured as I feel. “Was there anything specific or—”
“I don’t know…You just didn’t seem to know who you were. Like, didn’t you pretend to be vegan or something? Stuff like that.”
“Oh,” I say. “That was just a silly thing. Lukas told me that Adam Linsky only dated vegan girls, which wasn’t even true, but I wanted to date Adam, so I thought it would help if he thought I was.”
She glances behind her quickly and then lowers her voice, like there’s someone other than me that she could embarrass. “You seem like a pretty normal person now, but that’s sketchy.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be—” I try to find the words. “It was harmless. It wasn’t like cultural appropriation or something like that. Not that we really knew anything about cultural appropriation back then.” She opens her eyes wide in a way that says, Don’t speak for me. “Or I didn’t. And I think insecurity was part of it, too. The Adam thing was kind of specific, but I always thought that I had to be someone else in order for people to like me. Does that make any sense?”
“Not really,” Sue says sharply. “We’re all insecure at eighteen.”
“You weren’t.” Hadn’t she just said that she expected to get what she wanted? When in my life have I ever, ever felt that way?
Sue laughs. Someone looks over from a laptop a few tables over, and I think this is what she wants when she laughs like that. “Are you kidding? I was just about the only brown girl at Regis, do you think that was easy?”
“Well, you were very confident. You were the coolest girl I knew.”
“It was a full-time job. Trust me.”
I nod, pretty certain that there’s no other correct way for me to respond to what she’s told me, but since there’s more I need to know before I can finally call off this conversation, I wait for a few respectful seconds before saying, “I’m sorry, Sue. Can I just ask one more small thing?”
“Go ahead.” I sense that she is already scripting the story of this meeting to tell people later. Will I be a punchline? Or will her delivery be all head-shaky and sad. Either way, I’m sure I’ll be made to look obsessive, unhinged. And quite possibly like a Karen.
“Do you remember that whole thing about Megan’s purse?”
Sue wobbles her head impatiently. “Nope.”
“The cops found her purse from that night hanging in her closet, but I can’t figure out how it got there since she never came back to our room. Do you remember if Lukas ever said anything about it?”
Sue laughs again. “I don’t mean to laugh, it’s not funny. But this is so totally beyond what I could ever remember.” She motions at the half-eaten scone on the table in front of me and asks impassively, “What did you think?” She’s done with me.
“Good,” I say.
She looks at me like she thinks I’m exhausting. “But not great?”
“No, I like it.”
She doesn’t buy it.
“I think maybe a cheese—something like fontina—could really balance it?” Now that I’ve said something, I feel like an ass.
“Hmm. We don’t like to be too conventional.”
Is fontina conventional? “Sure.” I crumble off another piece.
She lifts her phone from her purse, then puts it down in front of her. “I just have a minute, I’m afraid.”
“No worries.”
“So, did I hear you work at the college Lukas was at way back? Do you love it?” She asks this in a bored tone. Did she look me up? Did Lukas tell her all this? Does she assume that I lack the imagination for something better than my ex’s ex-job?
“It’s worked out well,” I say, with a forced smile. “But I’m actually making some career changes. I’ve launched a catering business in Felsbridge. Baked goods, mostly.” It’s a massive exaggeration to say “launched a business,” but she’s not about to check for me in the yellow pages—not about to call my mom. It seems like she’s barely listening.
“Do you wear a hat?” Sue asks with a lazy smile. She mimes a puffy hat around her head.
I told her about the baking to show off, to convey to her that I am also creative, also entrepreneurial, and that I know a thing or two about scones. Now I see that I’m a joke.
