With nowhere else to go, I end up at his back door again. No surprise there. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from my years of living in Vancouver without paying rent, it’s that I’m a back-door kind of gal.
“Didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” says Nate, when he opens it up.
“Yeah, well.” I hesitate, feeling somewhat guilty I hadn’t even sent him a text when I left. “Can I crash with you?”
“Depends,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. “You gonna pay the toll?”
I look past him at the flyers scattered on the kitchen table for Kevin’s annual Angel’s Night rally. The room is filled with a surprising mix of young people, except that in addition to the social studies students, there is a fresh group of earnest young men and women in cargo pants and fringed ponchos.
Ah, hippies.
I know them well, because the west coast is like their Mecca and each summer they come in droves to wander around in their own stench, hefting their heavy backpacks, ostensibly searching for clean water and fresh beginnings but too stoned to find any or even make a real attempt. But poverty hasn’t ground them down yet and they still spew words like “that’s so meta” and “the universe is trying to tell you something.” I’ve chosen to interpret that as a cue from the universe to get the hell out of that conversation, but it doesn’t seem to matter to them. They just shrug and continue on, clad in hideous sandals and high as fuck.
I have an almost magnetic repulsion to hippies, but can’t stop picturing Nate’s cool, silent studio beyond the door. “Want me to put up posters?”
“Nah. They got these guys for that,” he says, jerking a thumb toward the motley crew behind him. “From you I want something else.”
I give him a hard look at this, but his smile isn’t salacious. I’ve witnessed flirting enough times to know when it’s happening, but it’s not something that I’m well familiar with on a personal level. My interactions with Alastair, Kovaks’s surly bartender, are a testament to my lack of skills in that department.
Nate’s smile disappears. “I want you to come sing with me, that’s it.” He steps back to let me inside. “You’re free to say no. I just like your voice, is all. I want to work with you.”
My hesitation is brief, but the draw of what he’s offering overwhelms any remaining reservations. It’s my soft spot he’s appealing to now. The desire to sing again, which I cradle so closely. And I can’t stay in the doorway forever. Somebody behind Nate has just said, “If you put it out there in the universe, that energy is gonna come back, like, a thousand times.” Which is my exit cue.
“Sing what?” I say as he leads me downstairs to the blessed silence of the basement studio.
“What else?” he says after shutting the door behind us, handing me the lyrics to the song he’d played at the open mic night. The same one he’d been plucking his way through in the bathtub while I fell asleep.
There are some people who are so persuasive that you will ask them a favor and subtly end up on the hook for far more than you’d reckoned. It is only when we are in the bathroom together, me in the tub and him sitting beside it with what has to be a four-thousand-dollar microphone between us, that I start to remember why I don’t ask for favors. But I’d be lying if I said it’s unpleasant to be here. I am tired, my throat is sore from all the chatting I’ve been doing, and I’m far too aware of his body so close to mine. The mic, a silver condenser, has an old school look to it, and even though it’s rather large it does nothing to sever the thin line of tension that vibrates between us now.
“We’ll have to share,” he says, holding up a pair of headphones, the newfangled ones where the ear cups rotate outward so that two people can comfortably listen without smashing their heads together. He kicks the door shut and now it’s nothing but us and his music. So we put our heads together as that slow burn of a guitar intro starts up. He takes the first part and I can’t get over how rich and buttery his full voice is. I join him on the chorus, my tone so much lower, thrumming just underneath. His falsetto on the hook is like cotton candy, so airy and light it practically floats through the ceiling. Then it’s my turn on the second verse. We spend about half an hour like this, singing to each other and listening to the playback on his laptop.
“Still liked the first one the best,” he says, stretching out the kinks in his back. We’ve run out of bottled water, so for the time being we’re done. Neither of us wants to venture upstairs to scrounge around for some more.
“First time can be magic.”
An awkward pause follows. Neither of us is pale enough to blush, but I’m sure that the blood rushing to my face is giving it a shot.
“If you make it big, will you ever leave Detroit?” I say, to fill the void.
“I’d go play other places, sure. But this is where my roots are. My aunt, she was a singer here, too. Still comes back, time to time. My family, we’re scattered all over this city. It ain’t perfect, but it’s our home.”
Apart from this studio and Kovaks’s bar, Nate’s home doesn’t seem that great to me, but what do I know?
“You ever think about leaving Vancouver?”
“No,” I say, after a moment.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. We all have to be from someplace.” He stares at his computer for a bit, then says into the screen, “I’ve been thinking about why you’re here. Figuring about your dad and all that. Seems a bit crazy to me, but I get it. My mom’s side of the family is American born and bred, but my dad was an Indian man from the Caribbean. He died of a heart attack when I was about fifteen.”
I can tell from his tone that sympathy is not what he wants right now. He doesn’t expect me to apologize because his father is dead. Doesn’t even want to hear it. “He was Amerindian?” I didn’t know that they were still around in the Caribbean anymore.
He shakes his head. “From India. I think the Amerindians were wiped out, mostly. Indians came to the islands as indentured laborers after Britain abolished the slave trade. They called them coolies. When my dad was growing up in the Caribbean he used to ask his parents where they were from in India, about their parents and his grandparents. They told him that his people were merchants, but he always thought they were lying. Nobody wanted to be associated with coolies because they were like slaves. Nobody wanted to be so poor they were almost black. Even though that’s why they came to be there in the first place. So he never knew where in India his folks were from. That part of their history was lost.”
I’m well familiar with this kind of creative reconstruction. For a long time in school I used to tell the other kids that my dad was in the army so he couldn’t ever pick me up in the afternoon. When they asked about my mother I would say that she was a nurse and she worked the night shift at the hospital. I had no idea what it really meant at the time, I just heard some other kid say it in relation to her own mother’s noticeable absence at school functions and it had sounded good. Then my foster brother told everyone in the schoolyard that I was an orphan while he held me up by my throat and shook me. As soon as I was free I punched his lights out. I learned how to keep my mouth shut after that. Reinventing yourself has its downsides. For me it was my foster brother. For Nate’s family, it was a breach of trust when his father realized that they were liars. Pretense can only take so much scrutiny before it comes apart.
He puts on our song, which is how I’ve come to think of it. The conversation falls away while we listen. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard my voice recorded. It’s not false modesty to say that I can sing. It’s a fact. This is the one thing that you couldn’t take away from me if you tried. Nate can sing, too. Even better than me, maybe. Right now I’m amazed at what we sound like singing together. I want to ask what he intends to do with the song, but don’t want to spoil the moment. Like the pretense of our pasts, what I’m feeling now can’t be held up to the light. After a while, he sifts through his Motown Records collection, a throwback to the heyday of soul music in Detroit. I watch as he puts on some Marvin Gaye.
We all know what that means.
Vaginas are stronger than you’d think. They can be stroked. Petted. Filled. Hold on to or expel unwanted objects with a surprising muscularity. They can shed uterus linings and combat disease with the militant efficiency of CD4 cells. They can be locked away, waiting for the love of a good man or even a decent night of romance. They can also be cosmetically rejuvenated, revitalized, or surgically reconstructed after trauma. And I can lock this reconstructed vagina away forever, paid for courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer, or I can finally take it out for a real test ride. Just this once. To see how it takes the turns.
Halfway through, Nate pulls away. “You’re not with me.”
See, this is the problem when you don’t get your lover from the Internet. The expectations aren’t clearly spelled out. I want to say: Yes, I am. I’m right here. But he means something else, I guess. And the spell is already broken.
We leave it unfinished, me undone, and go back to the song. We listen to it once more. I want to dislike it now, after what has passed between me and Nate, but it’s too good and I just don’t have any hate in me at the moment. I’m fresh out of emotions—all of them. The house has gone silent now. The students and activists and hippies have disappeared. I don’t know how much time passes, don’t even remember moving to the couch and falling asleep. But I do remember the blanket he pulls over me and that, before we stopped, I had been taking the turns okay.
Better than I thought I would, anyway.