Saying goodbye to Erik leaves me fragile and I stay home for the rest of the weekend, but Monday morning arrives with new canvases from Loomis and I figure if I can deal with Erik, I should be ready to face the studio and whatever is behind the door.
Time to be brave.
It takes me until Tuesday.
6 a.m.: hand to doorknob, turn, push, enter studio.
Yep, it’s wild.
And scary.
Even at the height of my “extravagant” phase, I never painted anything this reckless or chaotic. It’s an outrageous mess of color and texture, mostly abstract, but with jarring little pockets of realism. The strands and clumps of hair are truly disturbing and the whole thing feels overly personal.
Lucas would have liked it, but it makes me wince.
I roll my shoulders and get to work, moving all six pieces to lean on the far wall, facing backwards. I can’t look at them and maintain any kind of focus.
I trudge to my front hall, carry my new supplies back to the studio, mix colors, and sit down to work.
What’ll it be?
I get a vision of bubbles—big, soapy bubbles, like the kind the kids across the road played with when I was six. Bubbles are circles and circles are symmetrical and I will put the whole hair-painting event behind me.
Blues and whites then, and maybe some silver...
I begin.
I surface at 4 p.m. and realize I haven’t eaten, haven’t peed, haven’t even touched the coffee that’s sitting, now cold, to my right. I’ve also barely covered a corner of the canvas, and at this rate it’ll be spring before I do. Nevertheless, I stop for the day and go inside to check my messages and e-mails.
Hugo has emailed. “Our first date?” is the subject line and the text says:
“I love ‘not dating’ you. When can we ‘not date’ again? Can we also ‘not kiss’ again in the front seat of my car? And maybe ‘not’ do a few other things? Seriously, can’t meet tonight, but can I ‘not’ make you dinner and ‘not’ introduce you to Pollock this weekend? Maybe Friday?
Yours truly,
Not me.”
I reply:
“Let’s definitely not.”
And smile for at least ten minutes before worry sets in.
Making dinner is serious. Introducing me to his dog—that’s really serious.
And we’ll be alone again, alone in his apartment. My erogenous zones hum at the thought, but of course it’s not that simple.
Logically, there could be someone normal out there who will stick by me no matter how screwed up I may be sometimes,
and people get more than one chance at love,
and we are not doomed to repeat our mistakes,
or the mistakes of our parents,
or to linger forever in a half-life filled with guilt and grief and fear.
We are not.
I am not.
I don’t have to be.
Alone in my bedroom, I purse my lips and let out a long breath.
All of this is true. So what do I do about the fact that I’m walking around convinced that the sky is going to fall? Is it shrink time again?
No.
No, I can deal with this myself, heal myself, take action.
Because if I want a life, if I want Hugo (and I DO!) it’s time to get my shit together.
So, for starters I will go out alone.
Every day I’ll go somewhere new. When the fears crash down on me, I will breathe deeply and—I wrack my brain for advice from Dr. Phil, Oprah, anybody!—I’ll breathe deeply and wait. I’ll just stop and wait. Or take a book and stop and read.
I’ll tell Bernadette the full extent of my leaving-the-house problem.
I’ll be honest with Hugo. Mostly.
I’ll stay away from Erik.
I’ll...
I bite my lip and shut my eyes. I can do this. I will let go of Lucas. Somehow.
Deep breath.
Ten counts in, ten counts out. Repeat.
Five in, ten out. Repeat.
6 p.m.: microwave frozen dinner and eat.
7 p.m.: leave message for Bernadette.
7:01: pick up phone to call Hugo, then put it down. Needy. Too needy.
7:04: check e-mail again.
7:05: sit on floor in front of closet.
7:10: still sitting.
7:11: listen to traffic.
7:12: reach hand toward box filled with letters and photos.
7:13: chicken out, close closet door, walk away.
7:15: put on shoes and coat.
7:16: walk out front door.
Nothing like fearing something inside to get me outside.
I walk up to the Danforth and turn left. Looking down, afraid of faces, I see my feet. My feet and the sidewalk and the occasional dog, which makes me think of Hugo, which makes me want to turn around and go home to see if he’s e-mailed back. Or walk all the way to his place and strip his clothes off and strip my clothes off and run my hands over his shoulders and belly and legs, and let him tickle my skin with his curls and nibble my shoulder and grip my hips and take me to his bedroom and do slippery hot things to me all night long.
But I would have to cross the Bloor viaduct and there are hundreds of people who have jumped from it, smashed their heads open like pumpkins on the highway below. There was that guy who threw his four-year-old over and then jumped after her.
Horrible.
There could be someone there now, ready to jump, even though they put that wall of cable up to try to stop the suicides. Could I talk them down? Or would I make things worse and then have to watch them fall and then maybe lose my balance, one hand trying to hold on, losing grip, hanging, sliding, flying, falling ...
Stop!
Stop it right now, Mara.
I try inhaling, exhaling.
Thinking. What was it I was going to do?
Read a book. Forgot to bring one. Breathe. Yes. Look around. Right. Okay. No heads smashed on concrete. Only cafes and furniture stores, people hustling about.
I am not on the Bloor viaduct watching anyone plunge to their death. I am not plunging to my own death. I’m panting and sweating, but I am free and safe for the moment. I can go to the bookstore, buy myself dinner, rent a movie, draw murals on the sidewalk, skip ...
Oh, sure, skipping is a great option. Lots of people skip on the streets of Toronto.
Ha. There, I’ve made myself laugh.
Whew.
Now what?
I promised myself an hour outside the house, but what do people do?
People shop. Walk their dogs. Have dinner. Take yoga classes and boxing classes and spinning classes. They sit on patios, even in the brisk fall weather, and play chess. Talk on cell phones, jog, read the paper, drink coffee, drink martinis, drink green tea, wheatgrass, soy milk, rice milk, almond milk. They smoke outside. Go to movies. Get involved, get stressed. They stand on corners and talk to each other, or talk to themselves, or talk to people who don’t want to talk to them.
“Spare change, miss?”
They beg for money from strangers.
“No, sorry,” I say to the woman huddling by a planter box filled with purple and white icicle pansies. I step past her, but I look at her. I don’t avert my eyes because I read somewhere that the worst thing for homeless people (aside from being homeless) is that they begin to feel invisible. So I look and try to smile.
“Have a nice day, cunt,” she says.
“Thanks, you too,” I say out of reflex, and keep walking.
Holy shit.
It’s not funny, but I want to laugh.
I could laugh and cry too.
Jeez, I need to go home and stay there.
I need to do something.
I duck into a store and buy every newspaper they have—one of each. I add four candy bars, an art magazine and put it all on debit. I take out some cash and plan to give it to the hostile woman outside, but when I get back out on the street she’s gone.
I look at my watch.
I’ve been out for twenty minutes.
***
Three weeks.
You’ve memorized his face and body, learned his gestures, looked at his work. You’ve brought your own paints and canvas and work as he works, but he makes no comment, shares no wisdom. You silently will him to give you more.
He doesn’t.
It might take something different.
One morning you stare at his back as he makes coffee. His shoulders are wide, almost like he’s wearing football pads, and he holds the right one higher than the left. He has nice proportions, a good body, if a little skinny in places and a little soft in others.
“Caleb?”
“Yo,” he says without turning around.
“You have a girlfriend?”
Now he turns. His eyes meet yours for a moment before he looks away.
“No,” he says.
“Boyfriend?”
At this he gives a short, sharp laugh. “No.”
You lean forward with your elbow on the counter and your chin in your hand. His back is to you again. You watch his body for clues. He takes an apple from a bowl and begins to slice it.
“You know, I’m legal,” you say as the knife slides toward the core of the apple and then straight through without pausing.
He turns the apple so it rests on its flat, cut side and gets ready to slice again.
“Legal for what?”
“You know.”
He puts the knife down and you see the muscles of his shoulders tensing.
“No, I don’t know.”
“Figure it out,” you say.
You slide off your stool and walk up beside him. You pour yourself a mug of the fresh coffee, then reach out and take some of the apple from the cutting board.
“Thanks,” you say, and turn and walk down the hall to the studio. Your can barely breathe and you feel like you’re going to pee your pants, but you take a careful bite of your apple, chew, swallow, put your coffee down and then begin to work.
All morning, you can’t look at him. You feel him trying not to look at you. You paint nothing but lines—squiggly, curly, tangling lines.
As you’re leaving for the day he says, “I won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Uh, I have a...I have something...I won’t be here,” he says.
You feel your cheeks burning and you look down at your hands so you don’t have to meet his eyes.
“Okay,” you say.
You fucked up, you really fucked up. He got your message and he doesn’t want you and now it’s awkward.
And what about the day after tomorrow? Next week? Better not to ask.
You give him what you hope is a normal smile. You wave, turn, and walk toward the stairs. His door should be shutting behind you, but you haven’t heard it. You look over your shoulder. He’s still there, watching you.
“What?” you say.
He shakes his head. “You’d better go.”
***
Bernadette’s at camp and you have no one to tell, no one to help you interpret Caleb’s words or the look in his eyes when he told you to go. All the way back to your dad’s you play the scene over in your mind. What next?
Next turns out to be Dad on the sidewalk in front of his building with all of your collective belongings.
“Dad?” you call out, and run towards him. “What happened?”
He looks up at you from his perch on the edge of an old, hardcover black suitcase.
“Moving,” he says.
“Hunh?”
“S’all right, we’re moving.”
“What happened?”
He looks away and hangs his head.
“S’not my fault. Th’fucker.”
“What fucker?” you ask.
“THE FUCKER WHO EVICTED US!” he jerks up onto his feet and shouts, suddenly crystal clear in his diction. “THAT FUCKING FUCKER, CHUCK!”
***
Dad’s latest girlfriend invites you to crash at her place with Dad.
She believes the story about Chuck cashing his rent checks and then denying he paid.
The women Dad dates are all idiots, but you thank her nonetheless. She is, after all, saving your father from homelessness and offering to do the same for you.
But you can’t quite see yourself crashing on a futon for the rest of the summer.
“I think I’ll stay with Bernadette for a few days,” you say.
Dad doesn’t know she’s at camp. He looks relieved and watches you pack a small knapsack.
The rest of Bernadette’s family is in Prague and house is locked and the alarm system is armed. You stash your stuff under the wicker furniture on the back porch, get on the bus, and head back downtown.
On the dark street below Caleb’s front window, you stand for a long time before getting the courage to go up and knock on his door.
He might find you intriguing and perhaps even attractive, but he’s not your lover and not your friend and may not even like you. Most likely he thinks you’re a precocious teenager with a bit of talent and nothing to do all summer. At best, you’re a charity case.
But pain drives you and need drives you and you have no place to stay tonight.
So you knock.
He takes a long time to get to the door.
While you wait, you drag your thoughts away from your father, sitting pathetic and drunk on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. You try not to think of Mom’s house, cold and unwelcoming, and Mom, apparently unconcerned since she shoved you onto the front doorstep weeks ago. Certain memories, certain thoughts, are holes...holes ripped in you, through which precious things escape and leave you wanting, needing, gaping open. Laughter and belonging and comfort gush out, leaving their tracks but not their substance. And you are left empty, a skeleton, a shell with wind rushing through you and a sensation of sinking, barely existing...a few bones, no blood.
And then he opens the door.
“Help,” you want to say. “Help, I can’t feel my body.” But you just look at him.
He looks back at you, shoves his hands into his pockets.
“I don’t work at night,” he says.
“I know.”
“No lessons either,” he says.
“You sure?”
He turns and walks inside, leaving the doorway clear for you to enter. You come in and shut the door, then follow him to the kitchen.
He gets himself a drink but doesn’t offer you one. It doesn’t stop you from getting a glass from the cupboard and pouring one for yourself. He leans against the counter on one hip and watches you as you take a sip.
When he looks at you, your body is there again. It’s good. It would be even better if he touched you.
“Have sex with me?” you ask.
“I’m thirty-four.”
“Oh, so you can’t do it?”
He puts his glass down on the counter and you hear the clink of glass against ceramic. You put your glass down too. In two steps he’s in front of you with his hands on your hips and pulling your pelvis toward his.
He’s only a couple inches taller, but he still looks down into your eyes. He glares. He doesn’t want to want you, yet he does.
“I’m not your boyfriend.” His breath is hot on your face.
“I know.”
“And I don’t love you,” he adds. His dick, through his jeans, is hard up against your stomach.
“You don’t have to.”
You put your hand on him and squeeze.
He shuts his eyes and says, “Damn.”
He pushes you up against the kitchen counter and peels off your shirt and then your bra. He rakes his hands up and down your body, brings his teeth to your shoulder, and rubs the sharp stubble of his chin on your breasts.
You unzip his jeans and he pushes you to your knees in front of him. You like the pain in your kneecaps, the ache in your jaw—they mean you are alive.
Soon the cold of the kitchen floor is on your back. Caleb pulls your shorts off, looks at your naked body, then steps back and walks to the bathroom. Something of you slides away.
But he comes back, and with a condom. He puts it on and you pull him in, pull him deep, and wrap your arms and legs around him, so he won’t be able to leave you again.
You move together, and you keep your eyes locked on his and your attention on the feel of his hands on your hips and the friction between your legs.
With every in and out, the cold, the sadness, and the ripping, aching, screaming fears that live with you, ride on your shoulders. But you drive them back. You drive them back and Caleb drives them back.
You rage together and defy yourself to feel anything, to think of anything, besides this.
***
“Where are your parents?” Caleb asks later. “I mean, will anyone be looking for you?”
“No one’s looking for me.”
“Why not?”
You run your hand up the inside of his leg. “Are you almost finished with that drink?” you ask. “I’d like to see your bed.”
***
You lay sleepless and listen to the sounds of the city. You have been on Caleb’s bed, watching him, wanting to wake him and make him fuck you again, but he already complained after the second time that he was an old man, not a sixteen-year-old.
It’s hard not to think about how alone you are.
You slip out of bed, grab a T-shirt and tiptoe to the kitchen.
By the light coming from the window, you look into cupboards until you find a glass and something to drink. You pour an ounce of something, sip, and enjoy the burn as it slips down your esophagus.
You see the phone and find yourself staring at it. After another shot of the burning liquid, you pick up the receiver and dial. Mom picks up after six rings.
“All right, asshole, now you’re starting to piss me off,” she says.
You were going to hang up after you heard her voice, but now you don’t.
“It’s four o’clock in the goddamned morning, what the hell do you want?” she says.
You grip the phone, lick your lips.
“What, are you going to start breathing heavy now?” she says.
She’s scared and now you are too.
“Mom? It’s okay,” you whisper. “It’s okay, it’s just me.”
“Mara?”
“I dialed your number by accident. Sorry I scared you. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, some asshole’s been crank calling, that’s all. Who were you calling in the middle of the night?”
“No one. Bernadette.”
“Everything okay?”
“Fine. Perfect.”
“You’re at your father’s?”
You look down at your naked legs. “Sure, of course.”
And then there is The Long Pause. The long, awkward pause in which the unsaid everything rears up and then is shoved aside, ignored.
“Your room is a mess,” Mom says after the pause.
“Really?”
“Next time you’re here we should do a big cleaning.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re probably due for some new clothes. We’ll go shopping.”
So it’s safe. Safe for now, at least. Mended, supposedly mended, by omission, by a careful gliding over.
You shiver with need yet hold onto fury and the desire to punish her by staying away, now that she wants you back. You’ll go, but not tonight. Because now you have something of your own to keep you alive and wanting.
Two somethings, actually—art and Caleb.
***
It’s odd to wake up in bed with a man, and the morning light makes the lines on Caleb’s face seem jagged and deep. He suddenly looks pale, skinny, and old.
And the sheets aren’t clean.
A feeling of nausea, a pit of self-disgust, forms deep in your belly and it gets hard to breathe. You ache to be in your bedroom at Mom’s, under your own clean sheets, blankets and duvet—safe from the things you are discovering about yourself and the world.
And you can go back. After your conversation with Mom, you know you can go back.
You sit up, trying not to move the covers.
You will go. Right now.
You will go to her and she’ll smile her soft smile and hug you, tell you how she’s missed you and how she wishes you’d never fought. She will protect you because she is your mother and she loves you and surely she will see that you need her and she will fix everything.
You will wear your flannel jammies and sleep in your own bed and you will not invite strange, tortured artists into that bed even if you are tempted to, because Mom would kill you if you did. And therefore you will never wake up feeling this way again.
You just have to get out of this bed.
And find your clothes.
You edge toward the side of the bed, keeping your eyes away from Caleb.
As your foot touches the floor, a warm fingertip touches your back, then slides down your spine. You freeze.
“Where’re you going?” Caleb asks, his voice thick and low with sleep.
The mattress shifts and his arms come around you. He draws your body back to his.
“I...”
He moves you back down, so your head is on the pillow again, and pulls his body onto yours. He is hard. Pushing. Grabbing at you.
“Oh,” you say.
You want to push him away, roll out from under him, but you don’t—you asked for this, you brought it on. You lie still at first then you begin to move your hips with his. You let his legs slide between yours.
And then he stops. He rolls to the side and braces himself on one elbow and looks at you.
“Ah,” he says finally.
“What?”
“Not such a big girl today.”
You look away.
“Let’s try something else,” he says.
You don’t want to try anything. You want to go home, you want your mother, you hate this man, you hate yourself for being with him.
You say, “Okay.”
He puts his hand on your stomach. You shiver. He moves it to your hipbone and rests it there. He watches you and you look back at him. Your skin, under his palm, begins to heat up.
You close your eyes.
He moves his hand over your torso, palm down, staying in place until your skin warms and then moving again.
You might not hate this. In fact you might...
He straddles you, placing the weight of his hips on yours. His fingertips stroke your neck, the hollow of your throat, the path between your breasts. He watches, listens to your breath, sees you flinch and shiver and then relax.
You find yourself moaning. No one has touched you like this, looked at you like this. Heat moves deeper, from your skin down into your belly and thighs.
He turns you onto your stomach.
Lips to the back of your neck, the crook of your elbow, the inside of your wrist. He touches your palms, your fingers, nibbles on the pad of your thumb. He lies on your back, slides his hands under you and rubs your breasts.
Oh. Oh wow, you can hardly breathe.
And now you know what it is to really want...
You move against him, you have to have him.
He holds you still and says, “Not yet.”
It gets worse when he squeezes your nipples and growls in your ear.
“You didn’t want me last night,” he whispers.
“Yes, I did.”
“Not really,” he says, then trails his tongue down your spine and sucks on the skin at the small of your back. “Admit it.”
“I didn’t know,” you gasp, looking down at the pillow. “I...thought I did.”
“You didn’t want me a few minutes ago either, but you were willing to do it.”
“Yes, but now I...”
“I want you to want me,” he says, and slides his fingers between your legs.
Holy-mother-of-everything, you’re going to fucking die if he doesn’t...
You want to roll over to your back, make him finally do it, but he holds you in place with his body while his fingers torture you.
Nothing will ever fill you up, nothing will ever, ever feel this good and this bad at the same time.
“Do you want me now?” he asks.
He pushes into you with, it feels like, his whole hand.
“Yes!” You shove back against him.
“Good,” he says, and then all the warmth of him is gone.
And you are lying, face down, panting, squirming and waiting.
You hear him behind you, his breathing coming in short, sharp gasps, and then the floor creaks under his feet.
“Time to paint,” he says.
You roll over and stare at him.
He can’t intend to leave you like this.
He can’t expect you to work like this.
He grins and walks out of the bedroom.
The bathroom door closes and locks.
The bastard.