side a, track 4
“3,000 miles from satisfied . . .”
Day 1
Southeastern Alberta
400 klicks gone
+30 Celsius, late August
2 o’clock
Hawksley probably hadn’t got my letter yet, and I didn’t have time to wait around for his response. His concert was on in Montreal in seven days’ time. So we left the next day as planned, barely prepared. As soon as we left those city limits, I got the familiar feeling that it was so utterly right to be leaving, it would have been wrong to stay.
Isobel said, “Allons Sud!” And my heart filled with joy at her oomph. Her oomph was one of the best things about her.
So south we went first of all, hoping for more sun and southern charms. We’d go east after Lethbridge. We knew it was shorter to cut through the States, but we didn’t have our passports, and besides, it was cool to keep it Canadian. I was driving the first leg of the day and was trying not to fall into a trance from the hypnotizing pulse of the road. I’d decided to quit smoking on the road because as much as I loved my cigarettes they weren’t helping the Problem. I’d taken long, luxurious drags off my last smoke early this morning. When I felt the smoke mingle with my adrenalin, I knew I was halfway there on the anxiety hellpath. The new me was on Chupa Chups lollipops instead, interchanged with watermelon-flavoured Jolly Ranchers. Isobel was smoking like a chimney, so I was matching her one for one.
Some time after Calgary, in an otherwise empty landscape void of anything but a flatlining horizon, any specks are a major event. Isobel was the first to notice a blob in the distance. As we got closer we could see it was a hitchhiker with a panama hat and a red bandana covering his nose and mouth and a cardboard sign with the message: PICK ME UP, I’M FRIENDLY.
We slowed down thinking it might be funny to have a hitchhiker. Plus the guy might have some food on him. The break from monotony got my heart pumping. I pulled Rosimund over to the verge, and Isobel got out to stretch her long legs. Shielding her eyes from the glare of sun, she sussed out the guy: “What the—how?!” I leaned farther over the passenger seat to look at the guy in case he was a wacko and she was in danger.
It was Finn! And Isobel was pissed.
“Get in the car, Finn. You’re in big trouble. What are you doing out here, in the middle of nowhere—like roadkill?”
“Whoa, Isobel, take it easy! He’s hitching, he could be going anywhere. Where are you going, Finn, and what’s with the bandit bandana look?” I asked. It had become our habit over the years to work a good cop/bad cop routine with men.
“I, well, I kinda thought I might go to Winnipeg. I gotta protect my Celtic fair skin—” he said, untying his bandana and running his hand through his red corkscrew curls.
“Winnipeg, mon cul! Annie, he’s following me!”
“Look, Iz, let’s go get some doughnuts together and talk this out.”
She made a sour noise, but she knew we couldn’t very well leave him out in the middle of nowhere, so we got back in the car and drove for a while. The Tim Hortons I thought I’d seen in the distance turned out to be a mirage and was just a billboard advertising a Woody’s World of Winnebagos lot off the highway. It was another fifty klicks to a service stop.
“I’m getting a heavy-duty canker sore. Ouch.”
“That’d be from the ten thousand lollipops you’ve had already,” Isobel I-told-you-so’d me.
“Excuse me, girls. Maybe we should stop on the side of the road? I gotta take a whiz—”
“Sorry, Finn. No can do—” Isobel said, passing him an empty juice bottle.
We drove on in mild discomfort because Finn had known we were going on this trip and it seemed like too massive a coincidence that he just happened to be on this patch of highway today. The last time I had seen him was the day she ditched him and he’d vomited on his pants. He’d probably managed to get a glance at my map markings at the Sugar Bowl.
Isobel looked like a trapped exotic bird with her face pressed up against the passenger window. The windows were shut and there was no air-con. We alternated having the windows open and closed because a fresh breeze came with unbearably loud highway drone. I could see sweat beading up on Finn’s forehead in the rear-view mirror. I was jealous that he had followed her all this way. I wished I inspired such devotion.
There was almost no traffic. I couldn’t even remember the last car we came across. Eventually Finn broke the silence. “Alright already, okay, so I was jealous, I admit it. When I heard about you guys’ trip, I wanted to go on a road trip too. I figured I could hitch to a ride to Winnipeg for the festival there. I had no idea you guys would be on this exact stretch of highway at this time.”
“What are you going to do at the festival? Who are you going to see?” I asked.
“I thought I was on a roll after Bern, you know what I mean? And I thought I should keep up my infiltration of the rock journo world and try to get some interviews that I could write up for some weeklies.”
We drove on in silence for another ten awkward minutes. I could feel Isobel trying to decide whether she should stop pouting or not. I liked him being with us. He had good energy. Plus he might know how to check the oil.
“Sullivan used to like this stretch of the highway,” I said, trying to crack the silent bad vibes in the car.
“I think I should rig up some electrical device to shock you every time you casually mention his name in a conversation,” Isobel said.
“What, like a cattle prod?”
“Seriously, it’s worrying. Are you going to carry a torch for him for all of your twenties? He’s just a guy. Maybe we should burn an effigy. You need some kind of purge. It’s bagony for everyone,” she said. (Bad agony, Isobel word fusion.)
Day 1 cont.
600-ish klicks
4 o’clock
Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw, Regina
Rosimund seemed to be doing well on the road. For an old banger rustbucket already carrying five hundred thousand klicks, she was heroic. I took an exit off the highway near Medicine Hat and drove down a dusty back road for about five kilometres until we were deep into nowhere land. Corn fields on the left, prairie grasses on the right, blue sky above. There were no cowboys, no farmers—just an old, greying barn that stooped in the field on the right like a prairie version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“Oh, c’est triste!” Isobel said, gesturing at the barn, the general emptiness.
Telephone poles dotted the distance, carrying twenty-nine million people’s conversations from Victoria to Antigonish through the quiet prairie. Sparrows and some kind of bruiser birds, accustomed to dry heat and wind, sat spread out on the wires in tribes of twos and threes. On a blue-sky summer day, this kind of landscape looked like freedom, but on a white winter day this same scene could make a person weep due to the wrist-slashing isolation of it all, or not; depending on your mood. I wondered when the pioneers and homesteaders came here, why did they stop? Why didn’t they retreat or go farther west? What possible draw could this emptiness have? Had they bought land sight unseen and this is where it happened to be? How did they know they could survive minus fifty? It must have been summertime. Must have been a day like this one. Blue sky, yellow fields, and warm lover’s breath air.
I parked the car beside yet another wheat field in this breadbasket of the country. We got out to stretch our legs and have a pee. We picnicked on red licorice and trail mix I’d grabbed from my kitchen cupboards along with some of Finn’s homemade beef jerky. Finn spotted a long-tailed weasel in the grasses, telling us he knew it wasn’t a gopher because of the brown tip of his tail. He’d been reading up on his prairie flora and fauna. He told us the names of all sorts of creatures we could hope to see like prairie skinks, white-footed mice, black-footed ferrets, coyotes, badgers, whitetail deer, northern leopard frogs. I especially wanted to see a prairie skink, what a rock ’n’ roll name!
Driving through the flat bottom of Saskatchewan, we finally kicked into tranquil road-trip silence. It was liberating to realize we couldn’t possibly talk the entire way to Montreal or there’d be no more saliva left. We were driving in the big abyss. The weird feeling returned that cities were something from our past.
A best-of Joni Mitchell tape played on the deck, Isobel drove, and Finn snoozed in the backseat. We were down by Moose Jaw. Endless prairie fields passed us by. I was so numbed by the sameness and flatness that I barely registered the bales of hay and dusty sideroad turnoffs. I wondered how much flatter the world could get. I thought Alberta was flat, but, Jesus, Saskatchewan was unbelievable. I dangled my toes out the passenger window into the blasting warm air.
It was still light out at ten o’clock when we decided to stop for the night to camp just outside Regina.
“‘My father says that there is only one perfect view—the view of the sky straight over our heads,’” Finn loudly quoted ARWAV from his sleeping bag beside the car.
“‘I expect your father has been reading Dante,’” I quoted back, yelling from inside the car. The warm air coming in the window smelled of ripe chokecherries. Iz and I decided to sleep reclining in our seats. I soon realized it was a big mistake for our necks and backs, all those restless sleepless body contortions in the chase for the perfect snoozing position.
Day 2
Regina–Winnipeg
1,046 km behind us
still 2,818 to get to Montreal!
We were so uncomfortable the next morning there was nothing to do but get started early, neck kinks and all. Got some gas station coffees and ice cream sandwiches to fuel us for the day ahead.
Seeing Regina from the highway, we thought it looked like a mini-Edmonton served up on a platter of extra flatness. It was still Isobel’s turn at the wheel and my turn to choose the tunes. I had only recently lifted the Blue Rodeo ban because of all the Sullivan associations. Through past experiments I’d discovered if I listened to a song enough times it would stop reminding me of him. This worked with most bands we’d listened to together. Blue Rodeo, though, being his favourite, was tougher to crack because they, more than any band, had featured on our canoodling soundtrack. I knew it would probably be okay because they hadn’t freaked me out back at the Folk Fest.
Normally I tried to keep a strict regime of letting my thoughts go Sully’s way only once in a while; when I was safe on my Cadillac couch. I’d learned to let out the angst now and then to air it. See if it had composted any. But maybe if I went for broke, I could purge him somehow like Isobel said I needed to. Lulled by “5 Days in May” I gave way to thinking about him. The landscape, the open road, all this space was perfect for cud-chewing. When the tape played “Diamond Mine,” followed by “Cynthia” and Jim and Greg crooned away, I surrendered to full-blown flashback mode, kind of like blowing your diet and eating a king-sized chocolate bar and then a block of cheddar cheese, a bag of nachos, and then Cappuccino Commotion ice cream—we’ve all had days like that.
Christmastime Three and a Half Years Ago
Mexico, December, +35 Celsius,
blue and cloudless = nuking sunbeams
Margaritas = icy cold and super fruity,
tequila arriba arriba
Under the zapping rays of Mexican noontime sun, Isobel snapped photo after photo as I struggled to write I Love You, Sully with my big toe in the sesame sand just above the surf. Behind us a band of eight sombrero-wearing, moustachioed mariachis played trumpets and guitarones and sang a song about a town called Guadalajara for a gaggle of Canadian tourists. Four times my I Love You message was erased by a returning wave. This was the spot on the beach where the sand was moist enough to have letters carved out in billboard size. I dragged my right foot and used my big toe like the tip of a giant ballpoint pen. When I finally got it right, Isobel snapped the photo just before the water came and erased it once more. We were on holiday in Puerto Vallarta for Christmas break, lapping up mangoes and camerones, stooging in hammocks under palm trees. Sullivan was at home in –30 Celsius, likely at the ice rink with his sister and her kids, being a good uncle. I hoped this sand note was going to make my coolest love message yet. I would frame it and give it to him for no special occasion.
He had hidden a card in my suitcase that I found when I unpacked the night before. The illustration on the front was of two penguins hugging.
Dear Annie,
I know we will be apart for a few days, really only six sleeps, but I will be sending you telepathic kisses and licks. Our bodies will be slip sliding soon.
Love, Sullivan.
six sleeps soon
We tried to outdo each other with love notes. I loved his gentle, loopy handwriting—curly like musical notes. He never used pens, always pencils. I guess he’d always had an erase clause.
It had been almost a year since we had collided in love bliss, and it had been some kind of sexual awakening for me. Sullivan and I had thundering sex in bathtubs, oceans, lakes, gas station cans, forest floors, mountainsides, trucks, motorcycles, hammocks, couches, chairs, and beds. We tried all those positions in that funny Indian book, even that outrageous one. My body was his to do with as he pleased; I had given it to him.
That first summer we were together, we were separated for a month because he got a gig working as a production assistant on a film set in Calgary. As many times a week as possible I would drive a hundred and fifty klicks south to the Glenn’s diner in Red Deer on Gasoline Alley, the halfway point on the highway, and he would drive a hundred and fifty klicks north to meet me. We would go off the main road and park alongside a prairie field of spear grass and wild barley. I would climb into his truck and we would kiss and make each other come, and exchange mixed tapes and love letters and kiss some more. On nice days we’d roll around in wheat fields and have picnics. Sometimes we only had an hour to spend together, but we did the three-hour round trip regardless. The whole way back to town I would listen to his mixed tapes and indulge in flashbacks and desperately look forward to getting home to read his liner notes.
On holiday in late August, we discovered new hideaways all over Alberta. My favourite was Black Nugget Lake. It was our own private lake, only as big as a backyard pool and probably as deep, but it was sweet, isolated, and warm enough. After smoking a little reefer, we spent the afternoon naked on two water mattresses gently floating on the miniature lake. Encircled by bulrushes, we dozed in the sunshine like frogs basking on lily pads. Both evenings we camped there we spent in front of the fire, getting high, eating chocolate, sipping whisky, talking music, looking at the stars, hoping for northern lights. I was converted to the church of Sullivan and his way of doing things.
After I got home from Mexico I felt a subtle shift in him. I couldn’t describe it to Isobel at the time; it was underground. He was still doing sweet things like leaving tulips in my apartment when I wasn’t there, singing goofy love songs on my answering machine. But right from that first hug at our airport reunion—he’d come to give Isobel and me a ride—there was a new space between us even though our bodies were smashed up against each other. I tried to hug him harder, to wriggle closer, but we were as close as was possible. My stomach ached.
On the drive home I asked him: “How was your holiday?”
“It was great, you know, I did a lot of writing, some reading, saw some old tree-planting friends from out of town, played hockey with my nephews. I missed you. I wrote about ten pages in a journal . . . But how about you guys? Que pasa en Mexico?”
“Great, you know, mariachis, margaritas. Oh and Isobel had a fling with a rancher from Montana, Cowboy Bob,” I said, nodding to Isobel, who was sandwiched in between us in the front of the truck. “You’re not normally a journal writer, Sullivan, are you?” I asked.
“I needed to write some stuff down. You’re always talking about your journaling and how it helps you think. I really want to think about moving. I’ve got to focus on my film stuff this year. I might have to head out east at some point. There’s so much work in film being done out there . . .”
He was trying to work in TV and film production and learn as much as he could so he could make his own shorts one day when he rounded up enough coin. When he wasn’t with me, he was working on film stuff; that and hockey. And it was hockey season all right. I stared at the blowing snow drifts on the black highway. The cold wind felt abusive after the lush moist warm Mexican air. It was the first I’d heard of him moving cities, and the way he never said we in his plans made me nervous. I wouldn’t bring this up though, because I spent a lot of effort cultivating being the girlfriend who never laid the big heavy—it wasn’t sexy.
But once the first suspicion was triggered, I couldn’t stop fixating. I lost all power to divert my thoughts. Which old friends had come to visit? That girl who he shared a tent with platonically for six weeks that summer before we met? That old friend? The mysterious actress? In the past he had spoken fondly of her from time to time when his tree-planting stories came up, and I’d thought about Alicia but only seriously wondered on bad premenstrual days. But why had he suddenly taken up writing in a journal? It felt like he was taking out a press release that he had secrets.
Two weeks or so after being home from Mexico, on a weeknight, we were making dinner and I finally let myself relax. He was clearly devoted to me. He had gotten my favourite rice, was making his chicken à la Annie dish (chicken breast with ginger and pineapple), and he’d rented a foreign film I really liked that I had seen once on TV months ago and had mentioned in passing. He was so attentive, there was no reason to doubt his love; it was just me being neurotic.
We sat on the couch while the rice simmered on the stove and the chicken baked in the oven. He fired up an already rolled joint. Smoking dope amplified my appetite for everything, not just food. Music and sex were even more ecstatically enjoyable. Those days I was smoking a lot more pot but wasn’t worried about it. Dope was another thing that he’d brought into my world. It wasn’t like he corrupted me; before him, drinking and smoking were pretty much my favourite pastimes. With the added bonus of dope, every day was a celebration, a never-ending honeymoon. I took a big hoot and sank into the couch, revelling in the strange noises from the Asian-Arabic fusion music he had found on his travels before we met. The basmati smells fused with the music. I imagined us wearing ornamental silk outfits, sitting in one of those howdah things on top of an elephant making our way through carpet markets, passing men in tents sitting cross-legged, smoking hookahs. I wondered what Sullivan was conjuring.
The phone rang and jerked us out of our lazing. It was Jim calling. He was stuck in a Safeway parking lot on the north side of town. He needed a boost. He’d spent too long shopping and it was too cold for an old car not to be plugged in. He could have called a cab to come and give him a boost, but he knew Sullivan would do it because Sully was everybody’s helper guy.
He left the house just as the music stopped. Alone, I could sense uneasiness creeping up on me. I couldn’t concentrate on choosing more music to play. I flipped through his vinyl collection. I couldn’t find the right tunes for my mood. I went to the bathroom and brushed my hair. I dabbed on some peppermint lip balm and put more eyeliner on my glazed eyes. My hands weren’t so steady from the dope. I smudged it three times in a row and had to take a break so I wouldn’t get overly compulsive about it.
Dope paranoia had kicked in. I thought about Sullivan saying two weeks ago how he’d kept a journal. If I just read it, I could put my doubts away for real, once and for all. Peace of mind might be worth a minor sleazy transgression. I stared hard at myself in the mirror. I wiped off the eyeliner; it wasn’t helping. I knew the doubt would only get uglier and infect everything. But I thought of my own journal and how if anyone read it I would be gutted.
I went back to the couch and sat down. I lit a cigarette and contemplated the sleaze factor. I was no longer stoned; I had scared myself straight. Sullivan would be gone for at least forty minutes. The chicken was cooking in the oven, the basmati was simmering. Reading his journal would be for a greater good—safeguarding the purity of our love. But I didn’t want to. It was wrong. My stomach hurt.
But maybe he actually wanted me to read it, why else mention it? I went around in a loop.
The phone rang. Sullivan said, “Listen, honey, it shouldn’t take too long, we’ve got the car started finally. He’s out of gas too, so I gotta go get some, but I should be back by nine. Can you check on the chicken?”
“No worries.”
I got up off the couch and went to his bedroom. I scanned the room. I saw his navy blue backpack lying on the floor. I was drawn to it. Everything felt pre-scripted. I could anticipate my own melodrama unfolding as I just followed along the obvious path.
I reached my hand into the backpack and pulled out a binder, a mixed tape, a little baggie of dope, a mottled banana, and a recycled paper notebook with a purple cover. I peeked inside and saw several pages of pencilled words.
It was so easy to find, must’ve been fated that I read it. I paused and took a breath.
December 26
Annie left today for Mexico. I was sad. But kinda glad. Could use a little time alone. Didn’t tell her that, she’s a great girl. Had a good going away party with a fantastic hut. I don’t know, guess sometimes I worry she just loves me too much. I love her a lot too, I do . . . But it almost feels like she wants my soul, she wants to climb right in. I don’t know. We connect well though . . . Am excited about seeing the old crew from Avola. Tree planting that summer was crazy. Have to admit it’ll be nice to see Alicia again too. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, since she sent that letter I guess—
I paused and reread the name Alicia. My brain felt foggy. I reread the word. It started with an A, but no matter how many times my eyes shuffled the letters they never spelled Annie. I closed the journal.
My guts ached. I exhaled.
December 27
Christmas was fun. Annie called. She’s having a blast in Mexico with Isobel, drinking margaritas, having mariachis play for them.
Heading over to see Alicia now at her cousin’s place.
December 30
Holy Shit!!!
I gotta write this stuff down. My head hurts. I went over to Alicia’s on Thursday. Her cousin had left for Calgary for a couple of days, so it was just her there with an apartment to herself. It was so easy to be with her. She looked great. She’s got this gorgeous long red hair and sexy, slightly bucked front teeth and those different coloured eyes of hers . . . She made a pot of peach tea. We smoked a little cone. She played me Tom Waits’ new album. We took a shower.
I stomped on my emotional brakes and stared hard at this line and reread it like it was my biggest enemy and I could outwit it by scrutinizing it to death. Then we took a shower. We took a shower, we, shower, took. We took a shower. We. WE? I wondered if there was any possible way he meant they took one after another. I jumbled the word order in my mind, trying to translate all possible meanings of an obvious phrase. I could feel adrenalin gaining momentum in my veins, bypassing the roadblock of denial I was trying to cauterize myself with.
It just happened.
I knew what had happened. I felt a sick thrill. The excitement of something important happening. Like an accident scene. My own personal accident scene. I kept reading, to get the facts, like a vicarious witness; I read on as my heart fell to the floor, leaving me hollow inside.
We soaped each other and made love in the shower with the steam all around us. Like water animals. I love Alicia. It was seriously hot being with her like that.
Had to leave her to pick up little Jack at his hockey practice for his mom, but as soon as I dropped him off, I went back to her house. Rolled around all night. I was in a fog. A good fog for three whole days. She’s got this hard to describe angel-like quality. I don’t know what it is. Think I’ll always love her. No matter what.
Said goodbye this morning. She was headed back to Ontario, back to her boyfriend I guess. And Annie comes back in two days. Don’t know what I’m gonna tell her. Probably nothing. I mean, I can’t explain it, I just, I don’t know. It’s that old thing, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. I hope . . .
I examined the little doodle sketch he had done of Alicia. She looked like a Venus de fucking Milo with long curly princess hair. I put the journal back in the bag by his desk. Sitting on the desk was a framed picture of me and him in Jasper. Smiling ear to ear, both of us. Blue sky above and noble Mount Edith Cavell shouldering us in the distance.
I walked to the kitchen on wobbly legs. My eyes blurred and twitched. I remembered to stop holding my breath. I gripped the counter, determined to stay standing. I poured myself two-thirds of a glass of vodka and then topped it up with orange juice. I could almost laugh at the melodrama but not quite. I just knew I somehow had to stop myself from falling to the bottom of a well.
I turned the TV on, volume low, got the phone and called Isobel, and before she could say hello, I said calmly: “Listen, Isobel, don’t worry, I’m fine. I am fine. I just need to stay on the phone with you and not cry. Okay. I don’t want to cry. That’s the thing: not to cry.”
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? Do you want me to come over?”
“No, no. I’m not at home. I can’t tell you right now. Sullivan will be here any minute. It’s just really important that I don’t cry. Talk to me. I just need you to talk to me. Tell me anything. Tell me about your day.”
“Let’s see . . . I was dog sitting today for Frank, t’sais. So I went to Whyte Avenue with Cona and walked around. She tried to mount some poor woman on her lunch break. Got her paws all over her silk trench coat. Very bad. Though what she was doing wearing a silk trench coat on a cold-ass January day I don’t know!”
As she talked, I thought about the water sex thing and how I had assumed it was something Sullivan and I had invented. “So then, Cona took an obnoxiously large dump right in front of Army & Navy and I didn’t have any plastic bags, so I seriously had to hightail down an alley and run a few blocks so I wouldn’t get chased by a cop on a mountain bike and get a fine!”
I heard the kitchen back door close, and Sullivan saying, “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Then there was a cacophonic clanging of pots. The basmati must have been annihilated. The chicken probably nuked as well. For the first time I noticed the burnt smell and smoke filling the living room.
“Look, Isobel, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Sweetie, I’ll come see you tomorrow. It’s gonna be okay, ya?”
“See ya.”
Sullivan walked into the living room where he found me smoking a cigarette and drinking my orange juice, oblivious to the kitchen crisis. I looked up from Brian Dennehy on TV and smiled. “Mind if we go to my house and pick up something to eat on the way there?”
Sullivan looked at me and must have seen something like quiet hysteria in my unblinking eyes. I could tell my smile was twisted. He didn’t ask about why I had let the food get wrecked, or why I wanted to go home. “Sure,” he said.
He must have known I knew, that I read it. Or he would’ve asked why I let everything burn.
Outside it was pitch-black except for the white snowbanks and the lit road ahead of us. We drove past the neon sign by the funeral parlour that always had the temperature listed. Minus 26 in big digital orange letters. The truck’s vinyl seats had rigor mortis. But I wasn’t tensed up from the cold. I was sitting comfortably as we drove across town, crossing the frozen river on the High Level Bridge. I chatted aimlessly, oddly determined not to let any of the horror out. “Brian Dennehy, you know he’s not a bad actor, but he’s always playing these overworked cops . . . except for that movie about his belly, you know in The Belly of an Architect, he was awesome in that. But that’s it, I mean, otherwise it’s these bullshit movies of the week. I wonder if he minds . . . It’s like . . .”
Sullivan kept taking his eyes off the snowy road; I could feel him looking at me, no doubt trying to gauge the damage. I knew he was anxious; he was scratching his chin. He knew I knew. Had to. But he was keeping a lid on it for some reason. I could hear him scratching, couldn’t stop himself. I took a peek at his profile. He looked seedy to me then, like a squirming rat. But he had such beautiful eyelashes. I jerked forward as the car swerved on the black ice under the snow. The truck was shimmying up the street. I didn’t care. Sullivan gripped the wheel, his arms rigid. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.
All that was important to me was that I hold it together until after dinner. I was divvying up the future in increments: dinner, home, eat, reveal, break up. Only once I was on my home turf could I act.
When he got to a snow-cleared street he fiddled with the radio tuner until he got the university station. It was angry music hour. He went to turn it off.
“No, leave it on, please.”
It was jolting, loud, screeching heavy metal full of primal screams and lots of Satan references. I’d never been a metal fan, but I found it suited me—it was animal enough for my mood.
We went through a drive-through A&W. He got a bacon double cheeseburger and fries, I got a cheeseburger and a Root Beer. “You sure you don’t want some kind of sundae? Like the kind with broken cookies that you like?” he yelled to me over the music.
“No, thanks. I’m FINE.” I lit my third cigarette of the truck ride off the end of my second. Chain-smoking was my only solace. I pledged myself to cigarettes for the rest of my life. They were my mercy. And now heavy metal too, apparently. I could relate to the headbanging urge. Nihilism was the clear way forward.
I didn’t know how to look at him. I was so used to looking at him with love, with lust, with curiosity. What now? Loathing? It was all disbelief and confusion because, somehow, somehow I could still feel his love. It just didn’t make sense. I focused on the sweetgrass hanging from his rear-view mirror.
We pulled up in front of my five-storey brick walk-up apartment building on 105th Street, one of Edmonton’s only truly steep hills. Once inside, I put Peter Gabriel on the stereo, turned on the string of Christmas chili pepper lights. Together we arranged the food on the coffee table. I pulled out my duty-free vodka from Mexico and made us both a cocktail.
There was no way I could eat my meal. Smoking and drinking were possible, but not eating, no way. The burger was repulsive. The bun looked like processed paper pulp, the meat was plasticky, the condiments gelatinous and leering. I let it sit there untouched, wasted. I ate one soggy fry and regretted it. He slowly, stupidly chewed on his burger. I could see that each mouthful was harder to chew. Mayonnaise seeped out of the corner of his mouth. I smiled tightly at him. I felt that stale fry sit in my stomach by itself, squirming.
I thought I was bluffing successfully but wasn’t sure anymore why this was important. Now all I wanted was for him to eat all of his food. It was important to me that he had his dinner, I didn’t know why.
Finally he was done. “Aren’t you going to finish yours? Or start it even?” We both knew I wasn’t going to, but he mustn’t have been able to stop himself asking and going through the motions. I didn’t say anything. He cleared the table and went to the kitchen. I listened to him scrape the plates, my burger made a thud as it hit the bottom of the garbage bag. He gulped down a glass of water and the leaky tap dripped.
When he finally came back in the room and sat down opposite me, I looked at him and said firmly, “Let me just start by saying: I know.”
“What?”
The tap dripped.
“I’m fully aware that I shouldn’t have, but I did. I read it.”
“I read it,” I said a bit louder.
It was amazing how instant his reaction was. He clamped his hand over his mouth, gagging, and then got up and ran to the bathroom. I could hear him vomiting. It felt appropriate somehow, that deep retching noise, the appropriate soundtrack for this hell. It took him a while, and I went over and over the thing that stumped me, that I couldn’t wrap my head around. I lit a cigarette and topped up my drink with more vodka. We weren’t some stodgy couple with no romance left—we were still honeymooning. My guts ached. My insides felt like they’d been mugged and beaten to a tender pile of bleeding pulp.
Finally, he came out of the bathroom and sat down. After a few minutes of silence, he cried. I watched the candle on the table. I didn’t say anything. He was howling. I wasn’t. He leaned his head against the wall and then pulled away so he could bang it, trying to head-butt some redemption.
“Stop it. Please don’t.”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—” He banged his head against the wall again in a horrible refrain.
I was glad to see a tangible sign of his regret, but I didn’t like to see him hurt himself. And also I was angry, he was stealing my stupid thunder. This was, after all, my primetime victim slot. I could feel a horrible sarcasm rise up over the ashes of my broken soul. It beckoned me to feel the perverse kind of power that comes with being the hurt. I knew the hurter would have to go to Herculean extremes to win forgiveness. Was he entitled any pain of his own? I guess if he hadn’t any, he’d just be an asshole.
Any of my other boyfriends would have been out the door over this: Bob, Joe, Clayton. But this was Sullivan, my wonderful Sullivan. That night of revelation, I drank more vodka, he smoked and cried. I don’t know why, but we went to bed that night and fucked like strangers. I couldn’t believe he’d done this with someone else. Me, who put chili in his cocoa, lavender on his pillow, and peppermint cream on his feet.
After sex, I got up off him and saw blood running down my thighs.
My period. I went to the bathroom and washed myself off. Then I went to the living room and grabbed my cigarettes before climbing into the bath in the dark and letting the water fill around me.
After soaking for ages, I let myself pee in the water. I was about to get up when Sullivan called from the bedroom, “Can I get into the bath?”
“Sure,” I said and got out.
We were diseased after Alicia. There was no cure. Like my friend Randy rudely put it: “You know, you try to get over these things, but there’s no getting around the fact that when you go to bed that other girl’s pussy is going to be there in the bed with you both. And when you wake up in the morning, guess what . . . her pussy still going to be there! And like they say: three’s a crowd, baby.”
We’d almost crossed Saskatchewan and Blue Rodeo were long finished their B side so I hit stop on the tape deck and sat up. I would never be able to figure out why it had gone that way with Sullivan, why I hadn’t been enough for him. But now that I’d lost him, I had nothing else to lose. The little guy in my heart bouncing on a trampoline—hoping, jumping, leaping, trying—had been in a hammock ever since it all ended, taking one long timeout until now.
“C’mon, Isobel, you should take a break, let me drive, I swear I won’t pull over for any more hitchhikers.” It was then that Finn yelled, “Hills! Girls, girls, we’re headed for hills.”
“It’s a mirage, Finski, une mirage. It’s time to camp for the night, on est tous un peu zinzin.”
It was dark by the time we parked in a field somewhere near the Manitoba border who knows where. We had a trusty pack of wet wipes for cleaning ourselves, a bottle of water, and some caramel popcorn and more delicious beef jerky for nourishment. We were practically pioneers. Finn slept diagonally in the car and we slept on my trusty air mattress, just beside the car. It was hot enough to sleep without the tent and not too many mosquitoes. I spotted my lucky Orion above.