How to Get Along with Women (7 page)

On the way home he tried to kiss me in the school playground, standing up on the log fence. It had been raining and the top of each log was slick with October frost. When I saw Jamie's open mouth coming at me I wasn't surprised. It was slippery, but I'm a master of the head-turn. We'd been friends for a long time.

Back in high school I worked at a bookstore that specialized in rare and pricey things. That was upstairs, where my friend Del sat behind a big desk. Del had black muttonchop sideburns and loved science fiction. I don't want to tell you what kinds of authors he liked, because I can never remember the difference between the good science fiction and the bad stuff and I might make a mistake and say the wrong name. That would feel like libel. Downstairs, where I worked, were all the regular books: self-help and business and a wall of popular fiction. There was a guy in a grey suit who liked to wait around outside the door until whoever else I was working with stepped out for a coffee. Then he'd slink in and ask for recommendations. Have you read this one? he'd say, and hold up the Marquis de Sade or Anaïs Nin or whatever else he could find lying around. I was sixteen when I started working there. He wore the kind of tie that has little golf clubs on it. Or sometimes bull terriers.

I was the only kid at that store. The owners didn't want teenagers. Del was thirty when I met him. The first day we worked together, I was sitting down behind the counter and he came up behind me and started massaging my shoulders. He pressed his thumbs into the hard spots. First I thought, Here we go again. But then I thought about Marguerite Duras and how I could learn a lot from an older man, and my shoulders really stiffened up.

Del said, Relax, honey, I'm not a perv. I'm just an old fag. He wore a wedding band, which wasn't common in those days.

We used to go to dinner all the time, but the sicker he got, the less he could eat. We went to Ginza and he sat in the restaurant and let his bowl of soba noodles go cold. It was my last year of high school. We'd known each other for a couple of years. I just talked and talked so we could both pretend not to notice how much he wasn't eating. I'm going to borrow my mother's car on Sunday, I said. Isn't this wallpaper nice?

Del's boyfriend was a hairdresser who worked out of their kitchen on Church Street. We came in after dinner one night with bottles of mix for margaritas and Jeff was standing over a TV host I recognized, clipping away. Skinny lines of coke on the Formica tabletop. I asked Del if he minded the coke. He said No. He can do what he wants with his nose, is what he said. Del's problems had started after Jeff hooked up with some other guy at a rave, but Jeff wasn't sick. Just Del was.

I once smoked a joint that was laced with crack, I said.

How was that? Del said. I didn't know if he meant, how did that happen, or how was the high.

The same I guess, I said. I didn't really notice. Someone told me later. We were at a party, I probably only had a couple puffs.

Nah, don't lie to me, Del said. You're a coke queen. You know it.

We sat in Del's bedroom until the kitchen turned back into a kitchen again. We had the blender with us and Del was chipping frozen lime mix out of the cardboard tube with a spoon. It was scooping out in tiny chunks, chink chink, against the blades in the bottom of the blender.

Del said, What am I doing? I'll just throw it up anyway.

We thought we'd try the margaritas for fun. At least you'll be drunk, I told him. Those were the days before they gave you free pot just because you had AIDS.

After Jamie tried to kiss me in the schoolyard, we walked home like nothing had happened. I went inside and he got on the bus and that was it. I watched some TV and ate a piece of cornbread. Jamie's family lived in a very big old house near High Park, and he did bizarre things. Like if you went over to his house he might make you a pear omelette. He was probably my best friend from high school. He had a hookah that Del sold him after a trip to Morocco, and sometimes we'd cook a little hash in it and pretend it was opium.

Hanging around Del always made me feel like I was very sophisticated about drugs, but mostly I smoked a little grass between classes and that was it. At my high school, rolling was a very gender-specific activity. I'm still not much good. It's one of my biggest regrets. So a guy could pass you anything rolled into a joint and you would smoke it. My friend Larissa claimed that she'd had the best sex of her life after we smoked that crack. I was on the ceiling, she said. And I could see my body down on the floor. I was looking all around the room.

Maybe you should have kept looking down, I said. What was your body doing that was so good? But Larissa said her body was the same; it was the crack that made the difference. I was pretty sure her boyfriend had made the crack story up. Who did they even buy it from? They had a hard enough time getting decent grass.

The boyfriend's name was Bill. He and Larissa spent a lot of time fighting. Bill had a car and he liked to drive to other cities and party with other girls. That was a sticking point. I dragged Jamie around with me wherever I went, which gave me some protection against losers because most people weren't sure if we were a couple or not. Every now and then he'd go to hold my hand or rub his cheek against my neck or something and I'd have to say, Slow down, Chaka Khan. We're pretending, remember?

I decided that I'd better call him and make sure he got home all right. The phone had to ring nine times before anyone even picked it up.

It's two in the morning, Jamie said. You woke up my Mom.

Oh, I said, I'm not really used to people living at home anymore.

Jamie didn't say anything to that. I thought of something else.

I guess I just wanted to make sure you're okay.

Okay, like how?

Just okay, I said. Like, you know.

Like how, Jamie said. Is there something you want to talk about?

I switched the phone to my other ear.

Okay, like you totally put the moves on me again and I denied you. Okay, like that. I waited for him to answer. There were some crumbs from the cornbread stuck under my fingernails and I fiddled them out.

Yeah, Jamie said. That's whatever.

I just don't want there to be misunderstandings, I said. I mean, I think you were just drunk and these things happen. I told him about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and how after food and shelter, sex was the very most important thing. So it's not really your fault, I said. Your drunk brain is just doing what it thinks it should.

Holy, Jamie said. You're a real piece of work, you know that?

He said, It's totally fine. You don't want to get laid, that's totally fine with me. I have another girlfriend anyway. I have six other girlfriends.

You don't have six other girlfriends.

In fact, I do.

Anyway, I said. I was never your girlfriend, Jamie. You get that, right?

Yes, he said. I get that. Can I go to bed now?

One of us hung up, but I don't remember who.

I used to bring boys I liked into the store so Del could tell me which ones were worth my time. I mean, before he got too sick to work. He always liked the ones I only wanted to be friends with, which annoyed me. I knew a guy that rode a motorbike, but he was the wrong kind of guy with a bike. He was very compact and cheerful and the bike was a Suzuki. Del loved him. His name was Brett Furnival, he used to pick me up at night and we'd go riding through the bike trails along the Don River. There were no lights at all except the light on the bike. At the entrance to the trail was a big sign with a picture of a motorcycle crossed out: No Motorized Vehicles. I waited for Brett to say something about how we weren't supposed to do this, but all he said was, This is really fun! Are you holding on?

We never got caught and we never hit a tree. Brett would never have taken any chances on a ride like that.

Someone else that Del loved was Jamie Nash. I suspected that Del was coaching him. On my last birthday Jamie had come into the store and bought me these whopping big art books, hardcovers I could never afford because I spent all my money on other things. Daumier to Picasso: The Pleasures of Paris and Karsh: A Sixty Year Retrospective. I was stuck behind the cash and Jamie and Del were hidden in the stacks, talking loud and dropping things. I stuck out my tongue at them, but then an old lady wanted to talk to me about dictionaries.

Jamie didn't give me the books until we were at his house. We were going to hang out and watch Belle de Jour, because I liked to pretend I was French. It was a movie I had picked, and Jamie didn't like it. This is stupid, he said. And you've seen this before? Why would you sit through this twice? We were lying around in his room watching the movie, and I was arguing with him because there was nothing wrong with it. At the end of the night, he put my car keys down his pants. You've got to be fucking kidding me, I said. Are you serious? Seriously, this is what we're doing now?

Jamie said, Come and get them.

We hadn't even been drinking.

I stood up on the bed.

You can't go home, Jamie said. I've got your keys.

You know what? I said. I don't want my keys.

What I wanted to do was be very hard-assed and silent, with just my open, waiting hand to make him feel guilty. But instead of that I started yelling.

Fucking take them out of your pants and wash them! I said. I'm going home! I jumped up and down with both feet on the mattress. Jamie was on the ground in front of me, which made him shorter than usual. He ran backwards and forwards like he was a football player doing warm-up exercises. Come and get them! Come and get them! he kept saying. I was waving my arms like a crazy person and stomping his pillows. I wanted something dramatic and feathery to occur, but the pillows were Polyfill, so I had to be happy just making them flat.

Eventually Jamie gave up and handed me the keys and I backed down the driveway doing sixty. The squealing tires made it sound like I was still yelling.

I only ever had one boyfriend in high school, and it wasn't Jamie Nash. His name was Max Shapiro. It lasted about six weeks. Del used to call him Ponyboy, and asked me not to bring him into the store.

Max was like the captain of the football team for stoners. Everybody knew him. He had long black hair in a braid down his back and a brown suede jacket with fringe along the shoulders. He was twenty-one in grade thirteen. Everywhere he went, he said things like, Hey cat, got any bread?

People couldn't get enough of him.

Max was one of those guys that will do anything to get high, just anything. I once watched him carve a water pipe out of a little kid's bath toy. Another time, at a party, he and his friends sat around in a circle eating chunks of raw nutmeg. What are you doing? I said. The nutmeg looked really chewy and they were forcing it down with lots of water.

Max said, You can totally get high off nutmeg.

They looked pretty pleased with themselves. For about five minutes. Then the vomiting began. The guy whose house it was ran around in circles trying to get them all to stop throwing up on his Mom's carpet. He had a roll of paper towel and he kept throwing sheets of it toward the floor so he wouldn't have to get too close. Jeez! he yelled. Jeez!

I never had a lot of luck getting high school boys to ask me out, so I really liked being Max's girlfriend. In grade eleven a boy named Spilios Roumeitis tutored me in algebra for free. That was the closest I got. We met in the school basement early in the morning and I sat on the concrete floor with the textbook open on my stretched-out legs. Or he'd pass me his notes in English class. The math wasn't too hard, as it turned out. The last thing I heard, Spilios Roumeitis had a lacrosse scholarship to the University of Michigan and was studying to become a neurosurgeon, so probably I should have acted dumber or giggled more or something. I don't know.

With Max, other girls would come up to me when I was trying to have a quiet smoke behind the athletics hut and say, Are you really going out with Max Shapiro? And if they meant, was I having terrible sex with him in other people's basements, then yes sir, I was dating him. One time we were all over at Larissa's house, baking potatoes in the fireplace and playing strip poker. Part of the trick with this game, if you were a girl, was that they never really wanted to teach you the rules of poker, so we had crafted a bylaw whereby if you were down to your underwear you could opt to do some jumping jacks instead of taking off your bra. Larissa's brother came home and said, I missed the jumping jacks again? He was fifteen.

Max was usually pretty sharp with the cards but this time things weren't going so well for him. He went into the bathroom for a long time. When he came out he played a bad hand. Don't ask me what it was, I don't know anything about poker. He took off his boxers and started streaking around the room but there was something pink stuck to him. Is he wearing Lycra? I said. Oh my God, Larissa said. That's my mother's girdle. I came from a house where no one ever wore a girdle, so I didn't know what the pink thing was.

At the end of the six weeks we had an enormous fight at a party. Max lay on his stomach on someone's mother's bed and said, Betrayed, betrayed. At the end of the night he got up and I shoved him down the hall. Then I drove home drunk and high as a kite and in the morning I had to get up and look out the window to check that the car was really in the driveway.

After I dated Max, I didn't see Jamie as much. It became something we had to work at. Before that, being friends had been an easy thing. We hung around together in an accidental sort of way, out in the alley or drinking coffee down the street when I was supposed to be in German class. He'd come by the store and hang around for almost a whole evening shift, showing Del his photographs and bugging me. I didn't care so much whether or not Jamie came and saw me, but Del started looking thinner and needing to sit down more, and I thought me and Jamie joking around all evening would really cheer him up. I left Jamie voicemail messages. You never come over, I said.