Now I have done it, unbelieving even as it happens, as I enter, as her face is rearranging itself. Detached and watching the act, a neutral lens, this saves me from conscience, for it can’t really be happening. We moved from her living room to an old fashioned sagging bed. We have everything off but I don’t know how. I’m getting a delayed impression of her small underwear barely holding onto the cusp of her hips, viewed from the side, close to my face, a brain-chemical flashcard. Then one leg moves just slightly, enough. I am being unfaithful, not just necking or flirting but actually taken in by someone else, knees in her iron-posted bed and seeing how she stares at first and stops staring later and thinking of her as a serious alternative to the Intended. I’m not sure, however, that she wants to be an alternative. I think she’s just collecting me. I’m a project.
I’m nervous as hell, but I want to stay with her. This changes things, this sentiment can’t be underestimated. She is different. Each person is new. I pause. I have to stop for a minute.
In bed with me, Waitress X says, “I was an au pair in France when I was 17. Just before I met my family, the family that hired me, I was attacked by a man at the airport. Maybe I looked like an easy mark, a little lost lamb. The family in France was quite prosperous, had their own orchards, workers. Their son, the family’s son was adopted. The parents beat him, beat him regularly. I adored him. When I had to come back to Canada at the end of the summer the child was screaming for me. My name. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the boy with them, I wanted to call the gendarmes, my mother, someone, perhaps God. Another man chased me in the airport. I got on the stupid plane. I flew back to Canada. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t take him with me.”
She is in tears now beside me. I want to stay with her, change my ways.
“I flew back to Canada. I still wonder what happened to that boy. He was adopted and they hated him.” She pauses, she has to stop for a minute.
“Of course the father came on to me.”
Yes, of course, I think.
Her closet door is wrecked where her boyfriend Will threw her recently. Are they broken up or not broken up? She and Will exist in that orphan hinterland of the blood. Nice old apartment, a piano in shadows, peasant blouses heaped on her messy bed, an orange cat that is permanently asleep or stuffed, framed pictures of her and her boyfriend grinning happily on a beach in Hawaii. Am I the only Albertan who has not been to Hawaii?
Waitress X’s cracked closet door reminds me of Bonita years and years ago in downtown Edmonton, her bathroom door broken. Bonita told me some of it in a cryptic phone conversation but I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t tell what she meant, what had happened; she said there’d been some trouble with the police. I thought the police were after her and her nightclub friends. I didn’t understand. I thought it was her usual “hijinks” with her downtown crowd. But that night I closed the bathroom door behind me and saw how the old brown wood of the door was broken with a long vertical fissure. Not until then did I realize how serious the assault was. She must have barricaded herself in the bathroom, the bolted door cracking as he threw himself at it. He had a steak knife. He lived in the same building as her. She’d spoken with him once in the laundry room. Perhaps he followed, her detergent (New! Improved!), plump towels folded and underwear fresh from the dryer. A trajectory. I felt I should go knife him. Old Testament, eye for an eye. Have a look (the team yells, Have a look!).
Her parents were split up. She told me she’d been in a psych ward on the southside of town not long before we met, but she seemed rock-steady. I was a teenager. My best friend thought I was in over my head; and he was right I guess. School could not prepare me for this. I thought I was listening but I didn’t understand.
I can recall few details except my adolescent stupidity. Bonita was so happy one Saturday morning playing on the warm sunny floor with her kittens. I was happy to wake up in her room and watch her in the sun and not be on a team bus or in my parents’ basement. I felt sophisticated waking up downtown. My new girlfriend. I knew I’d remember that scene and do seventeen years later. It was just days before she was attacked.
Below her open bedroom window was a construction site, the oil boom in full swing knocking down my childhood landmarks: the radio station, candy stores, record store, bookstore, post office, court house, theatres—knocking down everything—excavators and tilting dumpers and front-end loaders beeping in reverse, the very first time I heard that warning sound; it later became an oil-boom anthem. I lay in her bed listening to them energetically smashing my childhood city and I was happy. They sold it all out from under us.
A cream trolley rolled me home thirty blocks, delivered me from downtown and back to the venerable neighbourhood, past my ex-girlfriend’s rambling house across from the museum. The sight of my ex-girlfriend’s brick house seemed funny. I’d gone past so many times before, could imagine her family moving lazily through the large rooms, snacking, calling to each other, seeing if the Habs were on yet, or down in the basement destroying each other at ping-pong. I was slouched in the trolley wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. I felt I was now in a different world. Two worlds and I liked them separate. How could they be the same, linked?
Bonita didn’t want to see me much after she was assaulted. She wasn’t so happy, didn’t want to talk. A month later I was playing junior hockey on the coast. She told me she’d move out to the coast, join me, but she didn’t move to the coast. She said her landlord wanted her out, wanted her to pay for the wrecked door. Two doors. Apparently some guy who did the mannequins at the Bay carved up the outside door. This made her seem the problem. There’s a depressing Neil Young line: I waited for you winter-long. We wrote thick letters for a while. I got to like the coast, got used to the clouds. She landed a good job with the provincial government, a coveted job. She became busy (“Have to run!”) and I lost track of her. I dreamed of living with her under the marble clouds and trees of eagles.
Waitress X arrives in white shorts over a blue spandex bathing suit.
“You look space age,” I say. She looks good in the Jetsons suit. “She’d hate you,” I tell her.
She knows who I mean. She undoes the ties in the sun, drops the front to work on her tan. It’s summer on the black and red willow prairie. We’re on an open porch on the front of someone else’s condo.
“Bite them. Harder than that.” Four fingers under her, thumb over front. She murmurs. She likes it a bit rough. Later, a lawn chair scrapes on a deck above, a neighbor giving herself away. Has she heard us all this time? Is she spying? Women stick together—she’ll tell the Intended. But if women really stuck together would Waitress X be with me? An uneasy alliance.
“Give me a boo,” she says to me from the car door.
On her closet door is faded blood from her boyfriend’s fist. Waitress X was crouched inside the closet while the boyfriend threw his boots at the door. Thirty minutes later Will doesn’t remember smashing his hands, wants to go out for Chinese food with her, wants to be a happy couple again.
Give me a boo, she allows, smiling from her car, eyes crinkly, her mouth tasting of menthol cigarettes. My Intended doesn’t smoke. On the other hand.
Waitress X calls her friend Frederico to come over. He works at the restaurant I think. Frederico says sure, I’ll be over this aft but then he goes jogging with some model he just met and snubs Waitress X, leaves her hanging. Waitress X breaks up with her boyfriend for the 300th time. He punches her. She can’t phone me. I’m at home with the Intended and she can’t call me. She does her evening shift and walks home alone to her cat, thinking Everyone’s with someone. She holds this against me. Depressed, she can’t stay in her apartment, goes out. I go out to buy more milk just to phone her from the Black Cat Grocery, just to hear her voice. No answer at her apartment. No voice. She’s always out, I think, out fooling around. We’re all floating in limbo, out there with the unbaptized infants, the suspicious chrisoms.
She rises in the morning, does her Jane Fonda.
I rise in the morning inexplicably bleak, unable to snap out of it, dragging myself to the kitchen kettle. I’d forgotten these black moods. When seeing someone, involved, heavy dating, whatever you call it, I go up and down on a yo-yo, a ride at the Stampede. I really had forgotten. Marriage or common-law is so much less manic, smooth as yogurt. I don’t know if that is good or bad. A moronic dog was waking me all night, talking of its tether, its throat, its inarticulate tongue. There was yelling on the avenue: People needed to tell each other important things. Waitress X meets me at the same café to talk; the staff gossips, eyes us knowingly and we agonize over parking spots.