the tubs

Eddie walked in and through the apartment to the fridge door. Her roommate’s green parsnips and coriander leaves would trestle down to ones that were already shriveled up on her barren bottom shelf, which was masking taped and marked Eddie. She let the door slide, her unfinished tin of Carnation evaporated milk in hand. The few people left were just her roommates sprawled out into a pipe-thin forest. Using up the whole cream-coloured couch. That couch could have been the center of the universe.

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A toilet flushes. A river flowing through all this.

Eddie tore in there like she had to use the washroom. Found herself sitting on the edge of the bathtub facing this guy, both feet out.

What are you doing here? she asked.

I got bounced out of a punk show for spitting beer at the band.

He obviously was doing something with the guitar on his lap, though so it was one of those dumb questions. It was then that he leaned over and whispered through curled fingers holding a cigarette, The bathroom has the best acoustics. You try it. Say something.

She thought of the others.

He started bending some strings for her. Made her see this image of him smashing guitar to its wooden bits to toothpick the soul. The faucet kept dripping like one annoying tear a second.

Eddie’s head all bendy and not sure what to do, let the guy grab her as they were out the back door.

Now there is something about Montreal apartments in the Plateau area because a lot of them have these porcelain bathtubs with legs that curl under, and this backyard had a few old ones just sitting there.

They swirled down the fire escape, appearing in one of the bathtubs. There was some light coming from the apartment windows, but there was no worry of her roommates looking out the window at them, not even Kent. It was as if those guys couldn’t see as far as their fingerprints let alone out the window. Except maybe Kent who was planning the next ten years.

The guitar case was there beside them, but she didn’t remember hearing it land. There was duct tape around that and everything. His elbow, his boots. Through glances away from the ground, Eddie noticed him lighting a cigarette with a Zippo. He had stringy hair.

She looked back at his guitar case on the tufts of grass and tried to think of something to say.

So I guess you want to be a rock star then, is that it? she finally murmured.

If I was a rock star, I’d scatter white roses all over this bathtub for you, and maybe you’d only notice the green leaves. He exhaled.

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He spoke in his throaty way, I see us in a bathtub on the closest thing there is to seaweed, but not close enough. Those buildings are all the same box houses just sitting in their square of ice cube tray like fat Jell-O. And pretty soon the sugar will start pouring through the chimneys into the TV sets and there will be lonely shivering people on the couches trying to fall asleep by these static windows.

When he glanced back at Eddie, he looked like he was sorry, he’s just been around the Plateau too many times.

He wore a trashy olive green leather jacket and was called Toad.

Look up there. She pointed to the neighbour’s cement sun deck. See those plants and statues of the sea horses and big stones. The rusted grill over the charcoaled wok. The scattered cigarette packs. That landlord and his old lady are wild. They stole most of the plants and the flower pots from a graveyard.

And he said, God, you’re right, they even have a pink flamingo.

[She was looking at their circle of sun chairs.]

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Toad watched Eddie. This girl would hardly talk, figuring things like lather. Made him reach for yet another cigarette.

He seemed to be steadying himself, trying not to let the words come out too jump, I live alone, right, and that gets – Well, once I showed up early at some friend’s party with a paper shopping bag full of my posters and a lamp and practically all my little shell-shaped soaps.

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He asked her, Do you believe in mutual suffering for a couple or non-suffering with recognition of the other person suffering?

I’m starting to believe more in sounds, she said, and so I would say I believe in lying down on white sheets and hearing the sound of someone you love splashing around in the bathtub not too far away.

The living room couch came crashing off the balcony and over their heads.

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Toad was watching Eddie, who was trying not to look at the couch. It didn’t seem like she even heard the thud after it went down.

If there were water in the tub, there’d be those concentric circles that seemed to break before they reached her.

Toad helped her turn around, and now she was lying with her back against his stomach. She grabbed her belt with her hands to hold on, trying to make that calming effect in her stomach.

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He was already in the bathtub and she saw herself standing outside gazing in. He was whispering, Sink or swim. Sinkorswim. Sinkerswum. And she was trying to toss herself in.

One toe in and she felt herself turning to stone. Eddie had thought about swimming many times. But pools were always way too cold. There were these girls she knew who made an effort to go to the “baths” all the time. The idea was to get control by exercising. One girl confided to Eddie once, when freaking out, she would tell herself, Go swim. I’d be doing laps steaming up my goggles, she told Eddie, it was ridiculous, crying.

And Toad was just lying there waiting for her in the tub, feet up on the rim. The muscles inside his boots throbbed through the skin like lungs, in, out. In and out.

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It was his beat-up boots with duct tape suspended there that made her finger down the sides of the tub covering some of the rust spots making it more and more white.

Toad took out a can of beans and balanced it on the rim at the front of the tub. He said, You should see me on a road trip: I warm cans up on the dashboard.

Eddie looked at him. Well a tub is a vessel.

And he said, No, it’s not. It’s a holding tank.

If Eddie knew how, she would grab friends from the world like bands grabbed musicians. You’re an excellent trumpet player, stand here. Toad was looking at her like she wasn’t considering something.

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Look, I can’t sing, she finally said. I’ll croak. We couldn’t busk it out on the road or anything, so I hope you’re not souping up some great duo.

He started to stroke her hair, and she realized she had already gotten him under her skin.

She asked him, If the love song you write about me is shit, will you think it’s not really love?

It wouldn’t really be shit if I was in love.

She was thinking, Maybe we can sleep here while I vessel into dream . . .

Toad hugged her more so that she wasn’t looking at the falling leaves but at the lights around that went ballistic.

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She was walking down St. Catherine Street, and she came upon a hot dog vendor on the corner at Union. He was standing there alone beside his hot dog cart. He told her he could cart off at any time, he built the wheels himself, but he’d always be outside. He apologized profusely for the runny ketchup. Then he leaned over and whispered something, but someone else’s words were coming through.

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Will you go to the ocean with me?

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She was back in her grade 13 chem class and her lab partner was lighting up the Bunsen burner with a Zippo, telling her he needed her help, he couldn’t wait for her forever, she’d better snap out of it. Her chem. teacher was at the front of the class reclining with a smile, Don’t forget to boil all the water off slowly. We want residue. Pure residue. What do we call this? Precipitate. He had pen dots all above the top of his lab coat pocket where he kept sticking his pen. He said, We are all flat road holy toads. Now remember class, if you stick a frog in hot water, it will jump out right away. But if you stick it in lukewarm water and slowly turn the temperature up, you’ll have a nice blown up frog in the pot.

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Toad couldn’t sleep and was lighting another one of his Export A Green cigarettes, the kind some call Green Death.

He looked over at Eddie. Soon the sun would make everything white, and Eddie would be shuffling her papers for school.

He left looking at the tubs dotting the grass even though every morning he had poured out little puddles of milk for the cats on his green linoleum floor hoping for a scene like this one.

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When Eddie woke up, she had black lines on her cheek and ear from his eyeliner. It was all she had as a note from him.

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It begins with the piece of paper in your hand and the handwriting. I asked my dad if I could have his signature style for my own and he said: Behind the signature of a person are so many incidents and crazy times and you want your own, don’t you? And so I was thinking when this guy and I were whirling down the fire escape, did that affect my H’s? Because if you think about it, a capital H could be like two people touching hands. And meeting this guy, it was like how I first saw an envelope being opened in a whole new way to my perception of the way things were done: from the side instead of the top. The folded pages come out like sea-shells from a paper shopping bag instead of sideways like a presentation. And when he bent down to kiss my hand like some other time than so do you want to rent a movie or do the restaurant thing again: that would have had to be a lower case h situation. The h started things, and you didn’t know what was going to happen to him and her and still don’t.

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Instead of going up the fire escape, she went around to the front and up the stairs. It was a gray Saturday. There might be mail because Phase and Kent would just leave her mail in the box if it had her name on it. When she peered in, there was a white business-sized envelope addressed to her. She tore it open from the side. It was from her dad.

She was always tearing into the apartment like she had to use the washroom and then was always sneaking back out like she didn’t buy anything.

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So Kent e-mailed me from school: Well, this teacher is only giving me an A-. All alphabet stuff. I mean, some of my friends were all of a sudden using e-mail and would constantly ask, Are you using? I sent them each a pen.

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They found a dead rat in Phase’s room. They kept talking about the maggots and not the rat. Even when things die, they’re still talking about the presentation, Eddie thought. Phase wouldn’t stop sobbing so finally Eddie went and got some toilet paper and handed her some.

They’re just white things, Eddie said.

They’re hardly white, Phase replied. And anyways, white is a lie.

Eddie went to the tubs to wait, told herself, Believe in white till the end.

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Before that night, she had only seen the tubs from behind a window. She brought Phase’s carpetbag full of party favours. She hoped he’d bring a bag full of tuxedo shirts and bloated books from times that he fell asleep in the tub at his place. She took off her shoes. She let her toe sink into the skin-coloured sand by the side of the tub whitening and whitening, thinking I still want to get letters –

By now she was attracting the leaves as they pattered down on her, covering. Pretty soon she was wishing for Toad so much that she saw a key-lime Pacer trickling towards the expressway to the ocean and maybe he’d take her along.

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When her roommates finally stomped into Eddie’s room, Eddie was already gone. Kent with his parasitic eye for business saw the letter on the floor and picked it up.

Mom had a tiring day visiting. She went to bed early and was getting ready for tomorrow. She was last seen eating popcorn and reading a harlequin romance.

Dad.

And who knows where the hot dog vendor’s words were now but then he had whispered to Eddie, When all is said and done, it’s the wind that blew like handwriting.