Everything Was Good-Bye (22 page)

He sat down, his body turned to mine as if he were settling into a long conversation. “It’s not as interesting as yours.”

“Try me.”

“I had a girlfriend for a few years and well, it just didn’t work out.” “

Why?”

“We just grew apart, wanted different things.”

“Like?”

“Like… I don’t know… Do I have to know?”

“Well, yes. Don’t you want closure?”

“No such thing.” He took a sip of his wine. “You and I are proof of that.” I paused, surprised and frightened by his honesty. “So, if you’re not here for closure, what are you here for?”

“I don’t know.” He stared at me until I looked away. “When it comes to you, I never knew.”

“Did you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“I don’t know.” I sat up, as if my posture could straighten our talk and keep us in line. “Your photographs,” I said, changing the subject. “They’re great. I always knew you’d make it.”

“Well, I’ve hardly made it. Half the time I have to tend bar to pay my bills.”

“Is that what you did after high school, bartend?”

“Yeah, among other things.” He was playing with the remote control and accidentally turned on the cd player.

He turned the music up. “I still can’t believe that the new wave, post-punk, alternative girl I remember married a guy who listens to PuffDaddy.”

I reached for the remote. “I guess that’s because I wasn’t the same girl you remembered.”

He held the remote away from me. “And are you now?” He asked it like a dare, turning the music off when I didn’t answer, when I wouldn’t be affected.

I shrugged and got up. “I don’t know; I’ll let you decide… That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“I guess I just always wondered what happened to you.”

“Well, you left and my life moved on.”

“I only left because I couldn’t stay.”

“And I only stayed because I couldn’t leave.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

“Both… I did try. I went looking for you the next week, but you were gone already.”

“Would you have really gone with me?” When I told him that I would have, we both fell silent until I let what might have been fall away from us. “Is that why you ran away last night?”

I nodded. “You said you’d wait.”

Liam stood up and knotted his fingers into the belt loops of my jeans, pulling me closer with just a look and a slight tug. I felt his breath on my neck and watched his thoughts grow in the slow up-and-down movement of his larynx. Only small words could escape him.

“Can I stay?”

I saw him every night for the following two weeks, and each night resembled the night before. We made feverish love. Quiet and violent. Sometimes on the floor, other times up against a wall, or on a table, pants around our ankles, shirt buttons undone, arrested arms and legs, knocking paintings sideways and oriental vases from their decorative stead. We never talked after. We straightened the couch cushions, put on our clothes, not quite able to look at each other as though we were surprised by what we had done, surprised by what we could do to each other. At other times—usually early in the morning, when we were only partly ourselves, surrendering to the consciousness of waking dreams—we made love slowly, deliberately, fingertips tracing the shadowed portions of our bodies. His collarbone, the curve of my hips, the slope of his back, every bit to be memorized and remembered—until the phone rang, alarming us and reminding of us of our reality. Neither of us moved; we both knew it was Sunny. Liam rolled
onto his back, turning away from me, his silhouette outlined in darkness. “When will he be back?”

“Soon,” I answered.

3.5

L
iam was staying in a converted-factory studio above a string of barred-windowed shops that never seemed to open. In the day the cobblestone alleys were full of sleeping homeless men, and at night the space filled with the sounds of cheap, high-heeled prostitutes and drunken men speeding away in cars. “You get used to the noise,” he said one night, after police sirens and flashing lights had startled me awake. I lay back down, listening to his breath overlap mine, following the flashing lights that flickered over his face and crawled across the dingy walls dotted with dirt-squared outlines where pictures had once hung. I wondered if they had been his pictures or someone else’s. Aside from the row of boxes stacked by the wall, very little in the apartment was actually his. Even his couch was a hand-me-down from the landlord. When I’d first come over, I was unnerved by his barren living style and his half-packed life, and I opened and closed cupboard doors looking for some permanence—only to find his locked suitcase in an empty closet. I hadn’t asked him about it but I hadn’t stopped wondering why he lived as if he were on his way somewhere.

I slipped out of bed and opened up one of the boxes, sifting through his books and photographs. There were postcards of blue-water beaches, some postmarked and others not, some written on and others not. There were photos of him with long hair in Montreal, pictures of him with a shaved head in who-knows-where, pictures of people I didn’t know, women I
didn’t know, pictures of him acne-faced in junior high school and even pictures of me then and now, all of them piled together in loose stacks of memories and moments that had no sequence, chronology or currency. The previous day, after Liam had developed some of his pictures, he’d handed me one that he’d taken on one of our morning-afters. I was wearing a black slip, sitting with my knees pulled up to my chest, my head against the window as if I were looking for someone, longing for someone. “This is how I’ll remember you,” he said. I smiled, even though for him I was already becoming a memory.

Now as I leafed through his belongings, letting each picture fall care-lessly into the box, I wondered how long it would be before that picture of me was placed on top of the pile, something to be remembered and forgotten, something to be boxed and collected and carted around from city to city. “Meena, come back to bed.” Liam threw his leg across the blanket where he expected my body to be.

“In a minute.” I stared out the window, thinking backwards and looking down at the street, which was lit only by a flashing vacancy sign. I wondered if Harj still lived in the area. I hadn’t received a card from her in years and though I had no reason to think harm had come to her, every time a woman was reported missing in the Downtown Eastside, or an unidentified body washed up on the shores of the Fraser River, I worried helplessly that it was her. Even now I wondered if I’d recognize her if I passed her on the street. Perhaps I’d walked by her dozens of times with nothing but a vague sense of familiarity. I rested my head against the cold window, my fingers running along the crack in the glass, listening to the wind that whistled through it until I couldn’t distinguish the sound from Liam’s breath. An hour later, Liam lumbered out of bed and turned on the coffee maker, going through his usual production of yawning and stretching as he went. “Did you even sleep?” he asked, sitting down across from me and looking, like me, at the sliver of opaque moon that was woven behind the lightening sky.

“No, not much.”

“What’s wrong? What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing.”

I sat up, sighing and stretching, weary-boned, as if I my skin had been wearing me and no longer fitted. “I was just thinking about Harj, wondering where she is.”

He was quiet for a minute. “Have you ever tried to find her?”

I shook my head and curved my back like a cat before slumping back into myself.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m scared… I mean, what if I found her and realized she’s not who I remember? What if nothing I thought or felt about her was true and all these years I’d built her up in my mind to something she never was?”

Liam got up and put on the T-shirt that was lying on the couch where he’d thrown it the night before. “Are we still talking about your sister, or are we talking about us now?”

I didn’t answer and went back to staring out the window.

“Is that why you were looking through my stuff?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I expected to find.” I got up and poured myself a cup of coffee. “I don’t know much anymore,” I said, taking a sip.

We spent the rest of the day meandering through Stanley Park taking pictures, sitting on benches and drinking coffee out of to-go cups. While Liam took pictures of people who passed by, zooming in on their faces with discreet lenses, I sat nearby writing about him in my journal, occasionally watching the way he examined the angles and shifted his perspective. “Depth of field. It’s all about depth of field,” he yelled when he saw me looking on. “Come here. I want to show you.” I tossed my coffee cup into the trash bin and wandered over. He held the camera in front of my face, adjusting the lens for me. “How far away things are even when they’re close up and vice versa.” He held his hand over mine and pressed
the shutter release. He pulled the camera away and showed me the picture we’d taken of a young woman pushing a baby carriage. Her eyes were tired, almost vacant.

“She looks sad.”

Liam zoomed in on the image. “Really? I don’t think so. I think she looks thoughtful.” He put the camera down and smiled at her as she walked by with her sleeping baby. “Thoughtful. For sure.”

“Do you want kids?” I asked.

“Yeah. Definitely.” He lifted his camera up again and took a picture of me. I pulled strands of hair away from my face and smiled. He put the camera down. “No smiling for the camera, remember. It looks forced.”

“Sorry.” I frowned. “Is that better?”

“How about you—do you want kids?”

“Sunny can’t have kids.” I looked away, distracted by a group of tourists taking pictures at the nearby lighthouse, all of them smiling.

“That’s not what I asked,” he said. “If you could have kids, would you?” He was holding the camera, poised to take a picture.

“I don’t know. I want to and I don’t.”

“Hmm, that’s a theme for you.”

“What is?”

He smiled behind the lens. “Indecision.”

“Oh, shut up.” I took the camera from him, turned it on him and clicked offseveral shots before I saw Kishor Auntie waving in the distance, walking towards me in her salwar kameez and windbreaker.

“Shit.” I handed Liam the camera and took a step away from him.

“Surinder?” she asked.

“Hi, Auntie.”

“I thought that was you. I told your uncle: ‘That looks like Surinder standing there with that camera.’ And look, I was right.” She smiled and pointed backwards. “My nephew is here from India. We are showing him the sights.” I waved hello. “So, have you heard from your mother, from Sunny? You must miss them, hmmm?”

“Of course. But they’re fine. Everyone’s having a good time.”

“It’s been so hot. Record temperatures, so I’m told.”

“Yes. I heard the same.”

She looked at Liam and spoke in Punjabi. “And who is this?”

I shifted my stance, obscuring her view of him. “Someone I work with.”

When she smiled and nodded, eyeing him up and down, I could tell that she was suspicious and that nothing I said—none of my polite inquir-ies about her nephew—even registered with her.

“Okay, then. I will leave you to your work. Tell your mother hello for me.”

I didn’t exhale until she fell from sight. “Fuck.”

“Who was that? And why did she keep calling you Surinder?” Liam asked.

“It’s a long story. We should go,” I said, handing him his camera bag before walking off towards the car.

Liam threw the bag over his shoulder and rushed to catch up. “Meena, what’s the matter? Who was that?”

“She’s a friend of my mother-in-law and the world’s biggest gossip. She’s probably on her cellphone telling the whole world that she saw us together.”

Liam grabbed my arm, slowing my pace. “Relax, she didn’t see anything. It’ll be fine.”

“No, it won’t. You don’t know how she is. I can only imagine what people are going to say.”

“Who cares what they say?”

“Me.” I was yelling now and not sure why. “I care. I’m married, remember? I have a husband.”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And where does that leave me… ”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just Sunny. He’s… ”

He shook his head, pausing on a word before dropping his eyes. “He’s your husband. I get it… He’s your husband and you’re going to stay with him and I’m just what, some guy?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. You didn’t need to. You don’t need to say a fucking thing.” He started walking in the other direction, yelling backwards. “I thought you’d changed.”

“I have changed.”

“No, you haven’t. You still can’t make a decision to save your own life.

Everything is about everyone else.”

“You’ve got no right to say that,” I yelled, arresting him with my voice. “You’ve no idea what it’s like being me. Being Indian and all the shit that comes with it.”

Liam turned around. “You know what, your right. I’m not Indian, but you’ve managed to give me quite a fucking education in it, so I may as well be.” He grabbed my arm. “Meena, life is full of choices. That’s not about being Indian. That’s just life.”

I pulled back. “And what do you choose besides yourself? You never unpack. You never stay anywhere. Don’t you ever get sick of running away?”

“Don’t you?”

Liam and I didn’t talk much that night. We spoke in routine details: Which foreign movie to rent. What wine to drink with the takeout tan-doori that was too spicy. What time we had to work the next day. What… Which… How… All our questions, long or short, were dismissed with short replies. It wasn’t anger that quieted us—it was my doubt. He had no answer for it; it wasn’t a question.

3.6

I
waited at Serena’s front door, sniffing the ends of my hair, wondering how long it would take before I smelled of the curry and onions that seemed to punctuate the entire neighbourhood. Down the street, Sikh fundamentalists had turned another teardown rancher into a makeshift gurdwara. Most religions fractured into sects because of scripture interpretation, but this division of belief was based on tables and chairs: the moderates had wanted to sit on chairs in the dining hall, and the fundis had wanted to sit on the floor. Both sides rioted and drew their kirpans to settle the matter in an embarrassing display that caught worldwide media attention. I was amazed how many people became fundis after the riots. Even Serena’s mother-in-law became an Orthodox Sikh. When she returned from a pilgrimage to India, she was gursikh: she was reborn. She wore her kara and kirpan, but she had trouble with the kes and still went to get laser hair removal done on her face.