Spots of rain had started to appear on the tablecloth just after lunch, and by 1 o-clock it was pouring. The wedding guests had good-naturedly moved themselves into the warmth of the house. An orchestra of voices wafted through the warm, damp breeze: joking, helping, concerned, relieved. Running children were caught and dried with towels and women checked their makeup in the hall mirrors. Throughout the night, relatives came to congratulate me. It comforted them to do so. Outside, the sky was dark as the storm deepened. Flower arrangements drooped defeatedly in the rain, contorting in the weight of its own wet flesh. When I was a kid, and whenever something bad happened, I had a stoic philosopher’s trick of looking up at the sky and remembering that the sky will outlive me, and that it exists forever, eternally and peacefully, and it would remind me that my troubles too, would be guaranteed to pass. I searched the sky for that familiar sense of relief, but only found an empty grey paleness without purpose.
The worst thing I ever did was kiss my brother’s girl. Her name was Jo and the first thing you notice about her is her smile. It made me feel like a kid, long before I had realized there were limits to who I could be. Then, her long hair down to her waist tumbling and crashing like waves when she moved. I remember the heat when she looked at me, how she made my bones feel like molten steel. I was seventeen then. Seventeen is a dangerous time to fall in love because anything is possible.
The first time I saw her, she was sitting next to a box of open band-aids, and wrapping one around her big toe. The curves of her calves and thighs silhouetted against the rust-coloured rug. Two dark eyes peered through her long parted hair. For a moment when she saw me she looked ready to fight, but she smiled and said my name. My brother and her would disappear into his room or out into the night. To tell the truth, I hated being in the same house as them when they were together, but it didn’t stop me from dropping by his room, asking about some really important question. Sometimes I would find her sitting in his arms, listening to the CD player. How easily her limbs fit inside his. It was all I could do to wait for her to call my name again.
My brother’s name is Theodore but everyone called him Theo. Even though he was older, I was almost a foot taller than him. I thought he was just like the hero of a 80s blockbuster movie. From the moment the opening credits roll and you see his messy hair and the fire flickering in his blue eyes and he starts running out the house, you know whose side you’re supposed to be on. He’s the guy you set your bets on, the one you give your heart to. When we were kids we reenacted our favourite movies and Theo always made the bad guy sound cool so I would want to play him, and I fell for it every time.
The first time I kissed Jo was on the floor of a dorm party. People were drinking and talking about people as if I knew them but I didn’t. I found Jo on the couch, the only piece of furniture on the entire main floor, sitting next to some girls, wearing blue stockings and a navy shirt with a square collar. Guys hung around the sides of the room. She recognized me and waved, and I smiled back. I felt like my face was contorted like the Joker, that’s how much I couldn’t control my smile seeing her, it’s like my smile was smiling. I tried to stop it, but it only made it worse. I signalled to the beer I was holding, and she nodded yes. She came with me to the bathroom where the bathtub had been turned into a icebox. She got up and followed me and I fished her a bottle out of the melting pool of ice. The edges of her nails gliding across my hand for a moment. I wiped off the perspiration on my sweaty palms on the thighs of my jeans, hoping she wouldn’t notice. Watching her take a drink, I was reminded of those coca-cola commercials, a rare glimpse of perfect innocence in a cold world.
I sat on the edge of the tub and she was standing, half facing me and half turned towards the mirror and fixing her makeup.
“Theo’s been talking to his ex.” she confessed after a minute of silence. The steady way she said it unsettled me, as if she was trying to decide if she hated me too.
I shrugged and pretended to be surprised, as if I hadn’t been the one talking up his ex to him the whole time. It wasn’t manipulation because he’s the one that did the reaching out.
I quickly changed the subject. “You have to give me some tips on surviving college, it’s a really big change, really. I learn things about myself and some of it is just awesome, but other times it’s terrifying.”
She softens and nods in curiosity, so I keep going. “Sometimes I get the impulse to walk out of class and never come back. My mind won’t focus and it worries me.”
“What are you scared of?”
“That I’ll die being a nobody”
Suddenly I really wanted to cry in front of her, have her hold my face in her hands. I wanted to so badly, but I was repulsed by the thought of it just as much.
She slid down against the wall until she landed on the floor. People walked in and out grabbing refreshments and paid us no mind. “No one is important,” Jo stated. “It just doesn’t make sense. What did you do to deserve being born important? Nothing. You can do important things, but no one starts out important.” She paused thoughtfully. “So many people aren’t doing what they really want to because they’re scared of losing something they don’t even have to being with.”
The way she looked at me, I felt like I couldn’t run away and keep pretending to be all the people I was tonight. I knew what I wanted, yet my body was a prison and my hands stretched out beyond the bars only so far as they could. What I wanted was wrong, yet her presence was like a solution to every question I ever had. So I leaned in and kissed her. I kissed her and forgot what laws I had broken this night.
We drove around that summer and we parked at the beach, or drove out an hour to a park, and we made out and explored our bodies while the radio played Eric Clapton. Layla / you got me on my knees.
I run my hands over the skin of her warm back in amazement. We light cigarettes and watch the sun glow orange between the trees. The forest air is fresh and nourishing. She’s relaxed in a way I haven’t seen before, usually I sense there is an undercurrent of tenseness, something rough and solid and out of reach. She tells me a story about a fight she was in and how she made a girl cry.
“Now I’m scared you’ll make me cry. You know I’m really sensitive.” I tease her. “Why do you bother with a guy like me? You win at everything, it’s like you have no insecurities.”
She’s quiet for a long time as if replying, I know.
“Most people don’t like fighting, even though they’ll glorify the fight. They don’t even really care who wins. It’s like a secret that no one says out loud. The more I fight and the more I win at whatever I’m supposed to be good at, the more I feel like I’m losing. You really have to lose a little in order to have all the things worth having, but that’s the one thing I can’t do. I don’t know why. I think we’re similar that way.”
We’re silent and I feel the third person whose presence is there with us, the person we’re keeping secrets from. I wasn’t as careful as I could have been, I guess. I’m sure my brother knew, I just assumed he wouldn’t care. Or if he did, he’d get over it, like always.
I watched a documentary once about a city that used to be the most powerful and richest in the world. It had a port that opened the country to the ocean and back then, that made all the difference. The city built its dreams on the flawed impression that this prosperity would go on forever, so much so that it never attempted to invest in any backup plan, no secondary industries, and when the times changed, it couldn’t change with it. When you see the city now, there’s a sad, faded glory amid its heartbreaking poverty that makes you wonder if there was ever a dream here, what was it like, and if it was beautiful.
It started like a normal day. I tried to call her, but she didn’t respond. I thought to call back in an hour. I remember drinking orange juice and spreading butter on my bagel. I remember the silver gleam on the brand-new looking butter knife. The autumn morning air had a deliciously crisp bite to it. I remember the round shaped leaves glittering in the sun from the window. I remember how good it was because of the contrast to when I stopped feeling that way again.
I didn’t hear from her the rest of the day. Days passed, and days turned into weeks. Her roommate said that she transferred and didn’t know where. I skipped classes and I drove around and I searched and I waited. There were rumours she dropped out to work overseas or even that she was engaged.
My life as I knew it paused, then slowly and unwillingly picked up its pace, but I was never able to escape my obsession. Maybe I expected I would grow out of it but it somehow got worse as an adult than when I was a teenager. I saw her in the silhouette of strangers on the sidewalk, in girls walking by with rolled up shorts, in the coloured nails of cashier girls. I heard her laugh in the TV left on in the next room. I overheard her voice in conversations accidentally sounding out the syllables of her name–Joanne, Josh, Jane.
I met a girl that looked like her. Same long dark hair, medium build, smiles easily. Almost is good. One day I found my fingers in her hair, and the sun was fading orange like that day in the park, and I’m overcome by a powerful yearning. I ask her to marry me, and she says yes.
About a year after the wedding, I was driving home from a conference and got lost on the way back. I found myself in a part of the state I had never been before, when I see Jo’s car.
I get closer and it’s the same one with the same big apple sticker in the back window. The radio starts to go quiet on it’s own, even though I haven’t touched the dials.
I follow close behind her through the freeway and as she turns into the exit ramp. Neon crosses of roadside chapels hold the line of faith against the darkening skyline, while a woman on a perfume billboard turns her face away from the broken dreams of the city below.
“Jo?”
She looks up from the book she’s picked up from the bestsellers table. Her expression transforms from confusion to a deeper confusion.
We make some careful small talk. I want to ask her why, but I get nervous. It doesn’t matter anyway, it only matters if she’s still mine.
“I missed you,” I say. It hurts to say it. She says she’s missed me too. I ask her if she’s alone. She tells me she never married, I lie and say the same. She gives me a good hard look at the way I’ve aged. There is excitement at being reunited, and yet a painful imaginary glass wall between us. There was hurt and rejection here. I notice how good her dark hair looks short, framing the angles of her jaws. She often looks past me and seems to recede into the background. I want to follow her into the invisible unknown, into her disappearing act behind the veil of conversation.
We catch up for awhile until she’s tired. I ask her where she lives and we call it a night.
That night I don’t sleep at all. No matter what, my side of the bed is uncomfortably damp with perspiration. I was mad at her and hurt and so in love it was driving me insane.
Two nights later I’m knocking at her front door.
She invites me inside and I sink into her like the Titanic, sinking ever deeper. I break in two, giving into the mystery of why then and why now. It’s terrible but easy, the easiest thing in the world.
We’re lying in the dark and the room is almost entirely black except for what moonlight can penetrate the closed, thin blinds, and the red symbols of the clock announcing 3:34.
“Why did you leave, Jo? What did I do wrong?”
She shakes her head, “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you about this.”
“Tell me”
“I’m not a good person. I did something terrible. I wanted to tell you but I can’t.”
“Tell me, please.”
She started to cry. “Theo told me I can’t–“
“Well what about me? You didn’t say goodbye. Do you have any idea what you took with you? This is who I am now, I have nothing. So I don’t care what it is, just tell me, please. I have to know.”
She spoke in a voice I didn’t recognize in her before, like she was a little girl and not a woman who was older than me.
“It happened the summer before I met you guys. I was working at the after-school program for the school in a subsidy housing area. There were kids there whose parents weren’t able to arrange for anyone to be home after school so we help them with homework and do activities and sports and pass the time. I liked it and the kids were crazy but they were the best. There was one kid who was older than the others, maybe he was held back. He was tall and skinny and was mixed. He was thirteen and the oldest of three brothers with different last names and I was so naive I actually asked why. It was obvious that he had a crush on me and one time he asked me if we could have sex. He said he was experienced and crazy stuff like that but eventually he stopped because I was uncomfortable. After that he was normal. I liked talking with him because he always knew what to say and when to listen. It’s a bad sign though, it means he’s been through alot. I was having a hard time back then and I was always trying not to feel so much pain, but around him I didn’t feel like running away. Well, one day he asked me to meet him after the program ended in the park next to the school. He wanted to show me something. It was something like brass knuckles, I’m not sure. I was too scared to ask him what he was gonna do with those.” She took a gasp for air as if it was being sucked out of the room. “Then we kissed.”
“When I think about who I was back then, I don’t recognize myself and it scares me. I just remember not being able to control myself at all in any way that mattered. I didn’t know that anyone knew about it but your brother found out and he threatened to have some really bad things happen for me if I ever talked to you again.”
Something inside me unhinged like the jaws of a snake about to devour something greater than itself. It loosened its grip on me and I started to cry. I had never cried like this as an adult, before or since. I thought about the way my brother felt unreachable in the years since then. He seemed to ignore my existence, then he’d crack a joke and I’d be relieved that I had imagined it all. Yet the way he said goodbye gave me chills for days afterwards, like he never wanted to see me again.
I go over to her place every week for two months. One day without warning, she didn’t answer. I tried to call and I couldn’t reach her. Stupidly, I wish I had asked for more, maybe to know where she worked, but I had refrained from prying in fears that she would ask me about myself. I couldn’t look her up anywhere. I worried that she had found out about my being married and was done with me. Worse, that she had met someone, or had been with someone this whole time.
I pour myself a second glass and feel relief as the liquid burns down my insides. Alcohol tends to make things simpler, things that are usually opaque, thoughts that usually slip through my willpower like fish in a river. My mother had just called from the hospital, informing me that my wife is in labour and the baby’s coming by this evening, wondering at the logistics of me reaching the hospital before 6 during peak rush hour. I finish the glass and I stare down at the letter I had been holding onto for nearly a year, received not too long after the pregnancy news. It was so folded and re-folded that it was beginning to tear.
It reads in Jo’s easy handwriting,
Dear Clive,
I knew you were lying to me but I just assumed you were angry. Don’t blame yourself.
I’ve often wondered who won at the game of love. The qualifications for winning changed ever so slightly with every year that passed, with every new game I played and lost or won. My conclusion is that it’s much more simple than I thought. The winner is whoever is having the most fun.
I’m not saying this to hurt you, I want you to be free but I’m trying to free myself too.
Reading it again made me angry, but couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I was angry about. I threw my glass at the wall and it shattered into a thousand pieces, scattering across the floor. For awhile I stood there feeling helpless, listening to the echoes of silence. The alcohol was making me feel sick, and I made my way into the bathroom. I flinched as I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I couldn’t remember the last time it didn’t hurt to see my own face. My eyes were rimmed with red veins and my skin had a yellow sheen. My large chin had grown more misshapen, as if the bones underneath had become softer. Suddenly I knew what was wrong with me all this time: I was born with a poorly balanced personality. I had all the desires of someone strong without the strength itself. I couldn’t blame myself at least, it wasn’t in my control after all.
Then an idea came to me that revived my hope. Being a man, I always had the comfort of knowing that no matter how smart she was, no matter how much better she was at figuring out the rules of life, that she would always be playing a woman’s game–a subset of a man’s game. I was sure of it, I chuckled to myself.
SUBLIME COURAGE 
Leave a comment