How to Get Along with Women (8 page)

I was on my own for the weekend because my parents were visiting people who had a cottage. A friend of my Dad's was supposed to be checking in on me at night. Since I had the house to myself, I decided to learn how to wax my bikini line. There was the pot of wax, goopy and hot on the stove. The whole place smelled like the kind of candles you buy at the health food store. I was upstairs in the bathroom listening to Iggy Pop and I could hear shoes on the kitchen tile floor. I thought it was my Dad's friend and yelled, Don't come up here!

Why? Jamie said.

Oh my God, Jamie, is that you? You have to come up here.

What is this shit in the pot?

Jamie, I can't do it, you have to help me. I had the bathroom door open and I was leaning just my neck and head out of it. He was still standing down in the kitchen.

I'm waxing my bikini, I yelled. I've got wax all over one side and I can't pull it off, I'm too scared.

No.

Please!

I could hear his feet on the stairs. Slow, like in a suspense movie.

I'm covering my eyes, he said. I don't want to see myself do this.

Just one toe and a hand came into the bathroom. Where are you? Jamie said.

I was standing with one foot inside the bathtub and one foot out of it, on the linoleum floor. I had my jeans on only one leg. Jamie felt his way into the room with one hand trailing along the wall.

This is the worst thing I have ever done, he said.

No it's not, I said. Pull!

He still had his hand over his eyes, but with the fingers apart, like a kid who is cheating at hide and seek.

You're fucking it up, I said.

I said, Man up, please. Pull out my pubic hair and I'll make you a Bloody Caesar.

Jamie took his hand off his face and looked down. He got one hand braced on my hip. Put your leg up on the wall, he said. This is going to work better if I can see what I'm doing.

I put my leg up and he ripped the wax off and I kicked him in the jaw. Sort of by accident.

Sorry, I said. That really hurt.

Jesus, Jamie said. He was on the floor holding on to his jaw. Do you not own a bathing suit?

Hey, I said. That looks pretty good. Maybe we should do the other side so I can match.

You're lucky to have found a guy who'll put up with you, Del said. We were sitting out on a bench on Yonge Street. It was me and him and Jamie. A group of pigeons were hanging around, trying to look nonchalant but really waiting for us to drop food. They were like a bunch of guys leaning on a bar, pretending not to look at the blonde girl who just walked in. There were maybe six of them. The street smelled a lot like pigeon. Del and I were on our lunch break. I think Jamie was hanging out with us just so he could tell the waxing story.

You're not telling this story to anyone else, are you? I said. Because I think most girls go to a professional.

Del picked at a crumb on his wrist. He was eating plain crackers. You could really see all the bones and veins in the back of his hand. They snagged off each other as he moved. It looked like it hurt to use his hands.

He said, If I were a guy, I would have told you to fuck off a long time ago.

You are a guy, I said.

And yet you've never asked me to wax your twat.

That's what makes me so special, Jamie said. He straightened a pretend bow tie.

You know, I said, in only a few short months I will be gone from this city and the two of you will have nothing left to laugh about. I had applied only to universities that weren't in Toronto.

I said, You will be reduced to lamentation.

After that they spent the rest of the break pretending to cry whenever they talked to me.

Just you wait, I said to Jamie. You can barely cope when I go away for the weekend.

I wasn't sure if this was true, but it was how I liked to think of him. I felt the same way when he had to wait for me to get ready to go out somewhere, or to close up the store at the end of the night. Sometimes I found a few little extra jobs to do, to slow myself down. You know you're in a very safe place when someone is sitting in a chair and complaining at you to hurry up. I said, You're going to miss me like crazy. You don't even know.

Sniff, Jamie said. Sniff, sniff.

There was a place on Charles Street where we liked to drink coffee. It was the end of May and the sun was finally good enough. If you wore black, you could sit outside and feel really warm. We got the coffee in styrofoam cups and walked down Yonge past a strip club. There were a lot of full colour pictures in the window. You know. For promotional reasons. Jamie said he knew a girl who worked there.

She's a university student, he said. She's only dancing for the money.

He pointed to her picture. She's a really nice girl, he said.

I told him some good stories about parties he'd missed. I'd been to an acid party where a guy I knew showed up wearing a purple velvet suit. He was head-to-toe electric purple. Everyone threw stuff at him, I said. They threw stuff at him until he left. One girl cried and everything. I don't know why you never come out with me.

What about Ponyboy? Jamie said. He meant Max.

What about him? I said.

The guy's a superfreak, I'm not going if he's there.

Oh for fuck's sake.

I don't care if you fuck him, do whatever you want. I just don't want to talk to him. Guy's got nothing to say.

I'm not even fucking him anymore, I told you that.

I mashed up my empty cup and threw it at a garbage can on the street. The can was already full and my cup rolled around on the top of it and then fell on the ground.

Jamie had come out to Larissa's for only one poker game, back in the winter when Max and I were still seeing each other. I'd gone downstairs for a bit with Max, and Jamie claimed to have overheard us having sex. On the way home he kept smacking his hands together to make a slapping sound and shouting, What was this? What was this?

The air was cold and his hands got redder and redder.

I didn't mind so much just walking down Avenue Road, but when the bus came I told him to knock it off. I was never going to be able to live that one down and yet here was Jamie, clearly in love with a stripper, and did I say one word about that?

We went into an art store. I was looking for a print to bring with me to school, something I'd seen in one of the books Jamie had given me. There was a copy in a store uptown but it was more than I could afford. Down here near the art college we found a much smaller version, almost postcard-sized. Grasset's “La Morphinomane.” A hooker shooting up, Jamie said. Very nice. Good first impression for the new roommate. He leaned around me and thumbed through the rest of the prints in the same bin. His chin was on my shoulder.

I liked her. I liked the way her hair licked back off her face. I liked the face: its mix of apprehension and anticipation, ecstasy and disgust.

By the middle of summer, I couldn't wait to leave home. Del had split with Jeff and was living in a little loft in the Junction. I liked to go there and sit in the alcove in behind his bed and look out the giant windows and watch the freight trains with all their green and black and red cars go by. I brought my Grasset print with me to show Del and he told me where to have it framed for cheap. I was working full-time at the store, but my money was supposed to be for school.

I'm booked into a room at Casey House, Del said. They put me on their list.

We were drinking green tea with maple syrup stirred in. I had brought over some soup in a stainless steel bowl and Del put it in the fridge.

Casey House is a place for people who are dying. Del was a person I liked to go to lunch with. When you're eighteen, everyone you know is talking about the beginning of their life. What people are talking about is the city they want to live in, or when they can borrow a car and drive you to Ikea to look for a mirror. Del gave me a lot of details about how a hospice works. There are two kinds of beds: respite beds and palliative beds. A respite bed is one you get to stay in for a couple of weeks, until you're well enough to go home. A palliative bed is different.

Three months to go! Del said. He smiled like he was a tap dancer or something. He'd shaved off his muttonchops because he thought his hair was getting thin and he didn't want to look like a hag, but without the sideburns his face was hard and yellow. He smelled like brown vitamin pills.

That's morbid, I said. Stop that. Isn't there something about a positive attitude keeping you healthy?

Casey House was famous because Princess Diana had just spent some time there while she was on a visit to Canada. There was a picture of her on the cover of the Sun talking to a man in a wheelchair. He had a plaid blanket on his lap and Diana was sitting in front of a stained glass window. From the outside it just looked like a nice old house.

When he was younger, Del had studied art in Morocco and also had some wild times there. His studio was full of stacked paintings of bodies. I stood up and picked at the canvases. Some of his Morocco stories were really good.

What did you tell your parents? I said. Aren't they going to wonder where you are?

Pneumonia, Del said. You'd be surprised how much trouble I have with pneumonia.

And they believe that?

Del had his hands wrapped around the tea cup to keep them warm.

When I was a kid, he said, they sent me to boarding school. I used to bring friends home for the weekend. My mother would find globs of spunk in the carpet and we'd tell her the dog puked.

Trust me, Del said. If she wanted to know the truth, we would have started talking a long time ago.

Del had been sick the whole time I knew him. I never knew him when he didn't take a ton of pills every day, or when he wasn't waiting for his boyfriend to get sick too.

Outside the window it was bright and cloudless. I wanted to be on the highway with my thumb out, wearing a cowboy hat and peeing in gas stations. I wanted to feel like everything I owned could fit on my body. There was a collective anxiety among eighteen-year-olds. Larissa went down to the States to see a Grateful Dead show and didn't came back. After three weeks her father found her in a parking lot in Kentucky. She was supposed to be working at a nursing home, mopping floors and being cheerful so the old people wouldn't kill themselves.

I told this story to everyone I knew, but then in August I went to France for two weeks with all the money I was supposed to be saving for school. I pretended not to speak any English, and I brought all my best clothes with me in case I got discovered. It was the kind of plan you make when you're fifteen. Sometimes I just sat on trains all day. I wore a big backpack and ended up sleeping in my clothes. I was really afraid of bed bugs.

When I got back, Del was much skinnier. He had a gap between his two front teeth like Lauren Hutton, and the thinner he got, the more you noticed it.

I came out to the Junction and buzzed for him to let me in. His voice was chopped up through the intercom. He sounded like china figures getting knocked off a shelf. When he put his hand up on the doorframe to steady himself, his wrists were twice the size of mine but the skin shrank away from his fingernails. He looked like he was wearing a costume underneath his clothes. He looked like he was made of heavy, heavy bones.

Del sat down on the floor and I opened the fridge. My bowl of soup was still in there and I poured it down the sink. I had to press my lips in and hold my breath to stop myself smelling it as it went down. A thin layer of congealed fat had settled on the top, with some mould growing on top of it. Bits of old chicken got caught in the drain with the fat and mould and Del didn't have any rubber gloves so I had to use my hands to scoop it out and throw it away. He had a bar of yellow laundry soap on the edge of the sink and I scrubbed my hands three times under hot, hot water, until they were all red and the cuticles were tearing away. Del's eyes were closed.

I didn't have anything to give him. I was leaving home for good and moving to a new town a couple hours up the 401. I didn't have a car of my own and I wouldn't have come back every weekend, anyway.

Jamie put his head next to mine and stretched his arm way out, camera in hand. We were on the boardwalk near the white Humber bridge, drinking lemonade and eating french fries. It was Labour Day weekend, so once the sun went down we knew we were going to be cold. We'd rollerbladed down from his house and made it to the east end and back but it had taken all afternoon. We liked to set these challenges for ourselves: Ashbridge's to the Humber, how long does that take? Jamie was staying in Toronto for school. I could have gone to Ryerson with him. I wanted to leave.

We were talking about where I'd be living, in residence. It's like an old house, I said. Half the people who live there are international students, and half aren't.

What do you count as? Jamie asked and I said, Shut up.

I was going to do a Master's degree in Senegal when all this was done, and write a thesis on griots.

You just want to hook up with some African poet, Jamie said.

So not true, I said. You don't even know me. You don't know one thing about me.

It was a little bit true. That summer when I was alone in Paris, I'd sat in a stairwell with a sculptor from Ivory Coast for about eleven minutes. His skin was almost blue and he had red, red eyes.

I told Jamie, I've never seen eyes that red before. I don't know where the stairs led to. They went down underground off the square at Les Halles. So, anyway, I don't need to go to Senegal to hook up with some poet. Already done.

Really I hadn't done much more than sit there and look at him, but Jamie didn't need to know that. The man's hands had felt rough against my face. After a few minutes I decided that I was probably making a mistake of some kind and I got up and walked away. Ivory Coast followed behind me for a while before giving up. Jamie knew plenty of stories that ended this way so I didn't bother telling him all the details.