How to Get Along with Women (19 page)

The other editors are there: the news editor, the sports editor, the entertainment editor. The programming director from the campus radio station is there. She is the only girl. They eat Cheetos and drink canned beer.

Between fights she tells them a story. A man dies, she says, and in the afterlife he finds himself sitting at a table with a beer in his hand and a girl on his lap. There's another man sitting on the other side of the table, same deal. The dead guy says, This must be heaven! His friend says, Nope. Hell. The dead guy says, How can you say that? His friend says, Easy. There's a hole in the bottom of the beer, and no hole in the bottom of the girl.

When she gets home he is in bed watching an old movie with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tap dancing and singing about potatoes. Astaire doing his best Russian accent. The one where they are on a boat.

Who's that, she says. On screen, Ginger Rogers on rollerskates.

Knockout? he says.

The newsroom is an old boys' club, she tells him, crawling in.

On Saturday night he goes out for coffee with Claire. Claire is short and curvy with curly hair, she grew up in Orillia and for years was a lifeguard at a provincial park and wore one of those red shirts with a big white cross on it. She has a boyfriend who drives in every two weeks for a couple days. She wants him to explain the boyfriend. They've got a box of those round, powdery donuts between them, what the coffee shops used to call leftover donut holes.

Why does the boyfriend always want her to masturbate in front of him, Claire wants to know. Why does he want to ejaculate in her face. She has a little powdered sugar caught in her hair.

It's that you are probably so sweet to him, he says. He can't imagine anything sweeter than you, so he can't imagine anything dirtier than coming in your sweet, sweet face.

Claire nods slowly, chewing. She chews one donut hole for a long time.

I'm really sorry, he says.

Later he walks Claire back to her room. They practice their German for the oral exam.

Wie geht's dir?

Geht's mir sehr gut.

Willst du noch ein Kaffee?

Danke schön.

Bitte schön.

He calls home but she isn't there.

The house where his parents live has three stories, a bathtub on every floor. Where she grew up there was one bathroom, a shower stall, no grass. All her parents' money went back home. Her father sent money orders in US dollars to the orthodox Popa and trusted him to use it for the village. Every summer they went back to Europe and stayed for six weeks.

We'd arrive in Paris, she says. As soon as the plane touched down, we'd start driving. We flew all night and then my father drove all day. Once I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up my father was slapping himself to stay awake. He wouldn't let my mother drive the car because it was a standard and he was afraid she'd stall it at the border crossing and draw attention to us.

They drove from Paris to Switzerland, and then to Austria, Hungary, and into the Ukraine, staying with relatives in every country.

Everyone went west, she says. As far as they could. But no one came as far as us.

You couldn't get coffee behind the Iron Curtain. You couldn't get chocolate. Her aunt in Hungary didn't go to church because her uncle had joined the party.

In Austria we stopped at the Metro store and loaded the car with coffee and chocolate, to bring as presents, she says. There was one whole aisle of just chocolate. In Ukraine my mother always thought someone was following us. The public pool was a natural bath and the water was dark brown from iodine.

She shows him a picture of herself at sixteen.

Wearing a wedding dress.

It's not a wedding dress, she says. It's my debut. I was a debutante.

The picture was taken in the ballroom of an old hotel. There are fourteen other girls, also wearing wedding dresses, and a number of men in their early twenties wearing tuxedoes.

They hire these guys, she says, from the university or somewhere, to be escorts for the debutantes.

This was your date? he says, pointing to a short man wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

Yeah, she says. But I really liked this guy. Pointing to a blond vampire.

Her friend's escort.

He was from Biarritz, she says. My friend told me, If you steal my date, I'll never speak to you again.

That's too bad, he says. I'm sure he was quite a gentleman. He's seen a lot of her pictures. She doesn't seem to have had any real boyfriends. He lost his virginity when he was sixteen to a girl he'd been dating for a year. He's told her that story, and the one about the Texan girl the winter he was a ski instructor, her half-shaved head and swimmer's shoulders, how she could hold him down.

He took me behind the stage and fingered me under my dress, she says.

But your friend.

I knew she'd speak to me again.

The next Saturday fight night, she comes home drunk. He is sitting in the kitchen with a plate of crackers and Hungarian salami and reading a science fiction novel.

Hey baby, she says. Can I try your salami? She is wearing one shoe and peels her sweater up over her head.

I'm pretty tired, he says, and she stamps her shoe on the linoleum, hard.

I work with nine guys every day of my life, she says.

He says he knows.

I don't know what's wrong with me, he says.

In the spring he gets a night job and they move into his parents' basement in Toronto. She likes it because it's a good neighbourhood and she can pretend she's their daughter and not a refugee. She lies in the backyard hammock drinking coffee and looking at the big red canoe turned bottom up against the fence.

His cousin Jessica gets her a job but she quits after two days.

They said I was overqualified, she tells him. They said I'd be really bored.

She doesn't know how to get along with women, Jessica says.

His father likes her. His brother likes her. At dinner his brother says she is like the sister he never had and his cousin Jessica says, Watch it. The brother has an opera-singing girlfriend and a diabetic cat. When it's spring break he fractures his collarbone and can't comb his own hair. He waits to take a shower until everyone else has left the house, then finds her in the living room, reading. Would she comb through his wet hair. He holds a towel around his waist, bare feet sinking into the carpet. His hair comes past his shoulders.

I want to wake up and find you already inside me, she says. Like you don't even care that I'm sleeping. Do you think you could do that?

I love you, he says. And that sounds like rape.

There's a radio conference in Ottawa. The program director at her campus station invites her, puts her on a panel as an expert on student activism. It's you and three white guys with beards, the program director tells her. She waits around afterward to talk to the moderator, a media studies professor named Julien Paré. There are three students with him and she is aware of her flat, ugly shoes. Why did she bring these shoes to Ottawa? One of the students asks if he has seen the new movie about cross-dressers hitchhiking their way through middle America and she interrupts without thinking. We're so busy congratulating ourselves, she says. Everything new is boring.

I'd like to buy you a drink, Paré says.

She orders a Campari-soda and talks to him about student media, foreign film, her ideas about subtitling. What she really wants is to write and produce radio documentaries, but she doesn't know how to get in at the CBC. She describes her apartment in London. Paré once taught a session at Western; he lived in the same building.

You have one of those L-shaped one-bedrooms, he says.

A two-bedroom, she says. We wanted more space.

So you already have a room for the baby, he says. How about a station wagon? Do you have that, too? He looks at her intently. All her plans are childish.

Come on, he says. I'm only teasing. Young women have to be serious. I rely on you. If the young women cease their seriousness, we are lost.

We're living in Rosedale for the summer, she says. We're very different. He grew up with one of those names everyone knows how to pronounce.

He takes her to a strip bar. The waitresses are all topless.

I hope you aren't uncomfortable, he says.

I wish my breasts were closer together, she says, chewing on her straw.

I'd like you to write me some letters, Paré says. Will you do that?

They are in his parents' kitchen frying onions for pierogy. Listen, she says. There's something I want to ask you.

Cher M. Paré,

A few evenings ago I had a dream about you. We were in the largest music library in the world. You were talking to me about libretti. I was carrying a boning knife.

She doesn't cry when she chops onions because her contact lenses protect her eyes. He is wearing an apron so that the flour doesn't get everywhere.

I want to know how you'd feel, she says. I have this opportunity. To sleep with a much older man, just for the experience, would that be all right with you? If it was just sex. Just for the experience.

He's got the bowl of dough under one arm and a wooden spoon tight in his fingers. It takes more strength than you'd imagine to mix dough by hand. All the tendons in his forearm stretched and tingling. He stops stirring and thinks for a moment.

No, he says. No, I don't think that would be all right.

I think he knows but he doesn't know, she says. But if he knows, why doesn't he ask any questions.

Lots of men are like that, Paré says, rolling over to look at the time. He has a meeting in an hour.

An old friend of mine, he says. Moved up to head of English programming for eastern Canada. I used to play hockey with him in the alley behind our houses. His father was Minister of Transportation in the seventies, we could go to the yacht club and eat all the cheeseburgers we wanted.

She has a file on her laptop of scripts, pitches that she has never sent to Paré.

Cheeseburgers and milkshakes, he says. Old friends are wonderful. I'll have to tell him I know a really sharp young writer he should be looking at.

She can't breathe.

One of my students, he says. Brought me a script on Friday. I've been coaching him from day one.

He folds himself over and sinks his teeth into her ass.

There is a house up the street from where his parents live now that he lived in as a child. They inherited it from his grandparents, so it's the same house the father grew up in. His parents moved down the street when he was fifteen.

We should buy that house, she says. Then when we have a boy, he could grow up there, too.

The idea of producing a boy, or of not being a boy himself, alarms him.

We could never afford it, he says, and she looks disappointed. Later he draws a little cartoon for her, two stick figures and a bassinet with a ? over top of it. He leaves it on her pillow when he goes to work.

She eats dinner slowly in the hotel bar, then takes the long streetcar ride back to his parents' house at night. His shift starts at eleven. He is already gone when she gets back. His mother and father are sitting on the porch. His father offers her a beer. His mother offers her canned peaches, ice cream.

He works nights on the cleaning crew at the hydro plant. Once when he was shoving garbage into a dumpster something sharp cut his hand and he had to have shots for hepatitis C. He wears a blue uniform with someone else's name on it, because he's just covering vacations. In September he is supposed to finish his degree but now that they're here, he doesn't like the thought of going back to London. It's a small town compared to what he's used to, and he likes it here. His old friends from high school and the same bars they always went to.

Before work he has a beer with Colin and Mercer and tells them about Claire, her boyfriend.

Colin's girlfriend won't let him come in her face, either. Mercer once pretended to slip in the shower so that his girlfriend would take it up the ass.

She kept saying she didn't want to try it, Mercer says. So we were doing it in the shower and I slipped.

I just wanted to try it once, Mercer says.

The constant negotiation for sex makes his friends tired. It makes him tired, too, but in a different way: he'd rather avoid her, sleep during the day than have to talk about it. The job at Hydro makes him happy. He knows when to show up, when to leave, what to do when he gets there.

When she goes down to the basement she finds a note, the little drawing on the bed. She flips her pillow so that the note falls off. She can pretend she hasn't seen it.

He gets home after seven in the morning and she doesn't wake up. He's been thinking about Mercer all night, and Colin, and what to say when she stamps her feet on the ground. She looks like a different girl, sleeping. Not pretty. She doesn't look sweet. Once she fell asleep watching Bugs Bunny with her head in his lap and drooled all over his pant leg.

He takes off the uniform with the other guy's name on it and folds it, then rolls it into a ball and throws it at the hamper. Nothing wakes her up until he moves into her. With her eyes open she looks much younger than she is. She looks like a kid in the schoolyard getting beaten up. She opens her mouth like she might say something, so he puts his hand over her face and keeps on.

You Know How I Feel

Ruby refuses to sleep until after Sudbury. I want to be buried in suds, she says. I want a bubble bath in Sud-Buried.

It's six hours in the car and they don't even stop. Gas, once. The car's a rental, small and zippy and silver. Great pick-up: what the rent-a-car man said, handing over the keys. You get out on the highway and give 'er. There's a bounce to the gearshift, or Sarah bounces it. Out on the highway she gives 'er, and they stay in fifth for three hours straight. They left at five in the morning so Ruby would sleep.

Sarah doesn't have a car seat for her. Why should she? They never take a car in the city. And Ruby's got to be forty pounds by now or close to it, and anyway, didn't we all ride across the country without car seats in the 70s?