Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Read online

  ‘I gathered.’ Was he fifteen or did he only look fifteen?

  ‘So I’ll have to ask you to leave the building for your own safety.’

  ‘And you’ll have my full cooperation just as soon as I locate my girlfriend.’

  He shone his torch around the room. ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Hence my difficulty in finding her.’

  ‘If she’s anywhere, she’ll be outside by now.’

  ‘What do you mean, “if” she’s anywhere?’ I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Do you think I’m referring to my imaginary girlfriend?’

  His boyish lips twitched. I folded my arms and held my ground. Or did, rather, until it struck him: one doesn’t have to negotiate with screwballs. ‘If you’ll just follow me, sir,’ he said. Then he too was gone, the light of his torch bobbing at speed into the distance.

  I caught sight of you just before you turned from Bloor on to Spadina. ‘Laura!’ I called. ‘Wait!’

  You didn’t.

  It was two blocks before I caught you up. ‘I’m sorry,’ I wheezed. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Bully for you.’ You wouldn’t slow down. Your cheeks were blotchy with anger and heat.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? The day we met?’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me what?’

  ‘I’m a prat. I could have sworn I told you.’

  You turned to me, briefly. Your eyes were filling.

  ‘Laura, I’m sorry. I really am.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you today?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m just… hot. That’s all.’

  You were outwalking me again.

  Say it. Just say it, nimrod. ‘I’m jealous!’ I called.

  A bloke walking past laughed into his takeaway coffee.

  You stopped and wiped your nose with your wrist. ‘Jealous? What do you mean, “jealous”?’

  ‘What people usually mean, I guess.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Jealous of who, for Pete’s sake?’

  I shrugged. ‘Of you.’

  ‘Of me? Of me how?’

  I smiled feebly at the pavement. ‘You’re too lovely.’

  You rolled your eyes.

  ‘You’re too well adjusted.’ I could hear myself, jingling all the loose change in my pockets. ‘You’re too kind.’

  You rubbed the sweat from your forehead.

  ‘And when you finally realize how lovely you actually are – which I don’t let you know about often enough for fear you will – you’ll leave me. You’ll come back here, to this pure and litterless land, and I’ll never see you again.’

  You sighed and looked at the pavement. ‘Prat.’

  ‘You’ll find I do answer to it.’

  You walked tentatively towards me. ‘The power’s out.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  Your hand found mine. ‘I mean everywhere.’

  And for the first time, I looked around. The traffic lights were out. There was a tailback of cars stretching back to Bloor and beyond. In the distance, there was a stranded streetcar. Horns were honking. A few brave Torontonians were venturing on to the street to direct traffic.

  I started walking. ‘Come on. I know a much nicer place than the Shoe Museum.’

  ‘Nathan, you know the airport.’

  ‘May all your needs be near…’

  You smiled reluctantly. ‘May your love of this little life carry you far.’

  Bloor and Spadina. By the Jewish Community Centre. I’d remembered rightly. Greg’s Ice Cream.

  Nor were my calculations in vain. The freezer was out of action. The air conditioning was down. A queue was already forming at the door. Between the power outage and the heat, they couldn’t give the stuff away fast enough.

  ‘Organic,’ said the lad behind the counter. His silver scoop was a blur of action. ‘No preservatives. No fixing agents. In an hour, maybe less, we’ll be at frigging sea in here.’

  Madagascar Vanilla. Extreme Chocolate. Peachy Keen. Coffee Toffee. Crème Caramel. Irish Cream. Champagne. You ordered two scoops of Roasted Marshmallow. I fancied the Figs and Port. ‘Straight up,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’ said the lad.

  ‘He’d like it in a dish. Two scoops. No cone.’

  ‘No cone?’ Again that look: you’re with this guy? But you reached for my arm, pulling it across your back and around your waist, in spite of the heat.

  Every cellphone network was jammed. The queue at the phone box outside was ten-people deep. There wasn’t a bank machine in the city that was working. News blew in like tumbleweed off the street. The power failure was bigger than Toronto, someone said. Bigger than Ontario. At eleven past four that afternoon, twenty-one power plants had gone down, as far south as New Jersey and as far west as Ohio.

  A fire at a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania was to blame. No, it was a lightning strike at a generating station in Niagara Falls, someone said. ‘Could even be a goddamned squirrel that found its way on to the grid,’ said one of Greg’s customers from behind the Star. Whatever the cause, the whole of the Eastern Grid had toppled. Fifty million people in Canada and the US were without power. It was the biggest blackout in the history of the continent.

  At a table across from ours, a middle-aged couple turned up the volume on a wind-up radio. An energy consultant was speaking on CBC. ‘Minutes before it collapsed,’ he said, ‘the grid experienced a dramatic loss of voltage. That triggered automatic switches that shut down all the major power plants within just nine seconds. Like it or not, we’re all interconnected these days.’

  Behind your cone, you smiled. ‘I have to say, sir, you’re no slouch in a national emergency. The ice cream has saved the day.’

  ‘Miss,’ I said, waggling my eyebrows, ‘I hope that means you’ll allow me to take unspeakable liberties at the first opportunity?’

  Your eyes flashed. ‘I say’ – your accent was perfect – ‘steady on.’

  That evening, the city came strangely to life. Police patrolled the streets to ward off looters. Paramedics rushed to free people trapped in elevators. Buskers sang hymns. Lovers turned giddy. Old people wept in the dark for the lost and the dead. Teenaged drivers played chicken at the major junctions. Gamblers kept all-night vigils by their slot machines. Surgeons finished operations in the dark. Labouring mothers cried out, not for drugs, but for air conditioning. Undertakers guaranteed embalmed bodies for seven hours, no more. The staff of Big Daddy’s Crab Shack bestowed quality frozen shellfish on passers-by. At Florally Yours, prostitutes walked away with wilting bridal bouquets, while, all over Toronto, new life was conjured that night under the forgiving cover of darkness.

  The city had a pulse. We could feel it as we walked the streets. Not that we had an alternative. With no back-up generator at our bargain hotel, the electronic room key might as well have been a bloody Boots loyalty card.

  The night was sultry. We found that park bench in Bellwoods Park – was that what it was called?

  ‘Look,’ you said, and I turned my face skywards. ‘You can actually see the stars.’

  Then we lay down, pulling each other close to fit, and still we didn’t know how dark darkness is.

  III. July 2005

  This morning, it was only the usual domestic chaos. We’d both overslept. I’d forgotten to switch on the immersion tank, again. I shaved with cold water. You brushed your teeth, crowding me out of the mirror. When you started to floss, I ducked.

  ‘Ha ha,’ you said. ‘Very funny. What do you have on today?’

  ‘A twelfth-century Iranian harpy-shaped cup.’

  ‘What’s her problem?’

  ‘Nothing, I hope. The radiography’s just come back. I’ll check her for cracks or signs of corrosion and go from there.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what a lucky harpy she is.’

  ‘That’s a harpy for you. Never a word of thanks.’

  ‘I’ll ride with you. I’m going to Senate House. My dissertation
supervisor has a dentist’s appointment or something, so I don’t need to meet her now till three.’

  ‘Lovely jubbly…’ I threw down my razor, pulled on a shirt and grabbed my packed lunch. ‘Last one out of here is a rotten harpy!’

  You grabbed your rucksack. We passed the cat-lady on the stairs, pungent as ever. Outside we bumped into the postie who stuffed your hand full of mail from Canada. You sifted through it quickly. ‘Birthday cards,’ you grinned. ‘And still three days to go.’

  ‘Show-offs.’

  ‘I’ll just drop these back in the flat,’ and you were digging for your keys. ‘I’ll be quick.’

  ‘I was late yesterday, Laura!’ I called to your receding back. ‘And Monday!’

  ‘I’ll be right back!’

  I sat down on the steps and counted to ten. Then twenty. Then one hundred and three.

  ‘See?’ you said, tripping down the steps. ‘You hardly knew I was gone.’

  I grabbed your hand. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Oh-oh,’ you said.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I forgot to go to the loo.’

  ‘Keep walking,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not late you said.

  ‘I hate rushing,’ I said.

  ‘Then let’s not.’ Your foot was on the step again, but I pulled you back.

  The electronic barriers weren’t working at Harrow. The queue was slow-moving, restive. From far below, we could hear the hissing of distant brakes. At last we broke through, ran into the blast and squeezed aboard a train as the doors slid shut. The seven fifty-seven had been and gone. This was the nine past eight. Standing room only. Arrive at King’s Cross at eight thirty-three. Change to the Piccadilly Line. One stop to Russell Square.

  ‘I’m bursting,’ you whispered through the press of bodies.

  ‘Try to think about something else. Look – there’s a poem up there. Do you want to meet up for a coffee later?’

  ‘Talk of diuretics isn’t helping, Nathan.’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Um, yes…’ You were reading the poem overhead.

  The world began with a woman,

  shawl-happed, stooped under a creel,

  whose slow step you recognize

  from troubled dreams…

  ‘What time?’ I said, reading over your head.

  ‘I don’t know…’

  … You feel

  obliged to help bear her burden

  from hill or kelp-strewn shore,

  but she passes by unseeing

  thirled to her private chore.

  You grabbed hold of the pole, steadying yourself as the train pulled into Wembley Park. ‘Ten-thirty? Eleven? You say.’

  Ten-thirty? At the tearoom?’

  ‘Of course at the tearoom.’ You turned briefly, your face a mock-frown, as if I’d been disloyal. It was an unspoken pact, and I could hear your thoughts, chiding. If I could be casual about our tearoom, might I some day forget our first cup of tea together? If I could forget our first cup of tea, would I also forget the sun and the moon over Bow Hill? And the Bronze Age dead dreaming underground and the nightingale singing? Would I forget the Persian prayer? And Greg’s Ice Cream? And the stars teeming over Bellwoods Park?

  ‘That’s what I said.’ I kissed the top of your head. ‘The tearoom at ten-thirty.’

  Your smile reappeared. ‘Okay.’ You glanced at your watch. Eight twenty-two. ‘But I’m getting off at King’s Cross to find a loo. I’ll hop the train after that.’

  You leaned into me once more as the carriage swayed into motion. A warm inertia descended on us. It was hard to think about moving from that spot; about our bodies separating in the eventual rush for the platform. Your hair smelled of vanilla. Your bottom nestled in my groin.

  Then we were both drawn back into the final stanza of the poem.

  It’s not sea birds or peat she’s carrying,

  not fleece, nor the herring bright

  but her fear that if ever she put it down

  the world would go out like a light.

  *

  It did. A hundred feet underground. A white, searing shock, and the bright, ordinary world was extinguished.

  ‘She was going to meet me this morning.’ I’m staring at the reference number in my hand. ‘There’s a tearoom near –’

  ‘Yes,’ the WPC says. ‘I’ve noted that.’ The line is tinny. In the background, I can hear sharp fragments of many voices. ‘But I still need a description. Can you do that for me? Can you describe her, briefly?’

  ‘She’s a student… Post-grad. She’s –’

  ‘White? Black? Asian? Other?’

  ‘White.’

  ‘British?’

  ‘Canadian. But she lives here… With me. I mean, we live together.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘She’ll be twenty-eight. In a few days.’ You will be.

  ‘Height?’

  How can I say I won’t have you reduced to your vital statistics? ‘Could you possibly just check her name against your lists?’

  ‘I’m afraid there are no lists yet.’ I hear a colleague mumble something to her. For a moment I lose her. She returns, distracted. ‘Um, maybe there’s someone else I can speak to?’

  ‘No…’ My hands are cold. It’s July, for God’s sake, but my hands are so cold I can hardly hold the phone.

  ‘Do you know her height, Nathan? Roughly?’

  No, I want to tell her, I know your height specifically. ‘Five ten and three quarters.’

  ‘So five eleven…’

  And on your feet, I want to tell this woman. On your sturdy feet.

  You’re walking.

  In a slow, stumbling queue.

  Things like this take time.

  But I know you, Laura. I know you.

  You’re on your feet. In that slow-moving press of people.

  You’re making your way to the surface even now – even now – hungry for daylight, for its ordinary blessings.

  Sacred Heart

  In a lifetime it will beat almost three billion times, yet it is capable of more than twice this. Unravaged, the human heart would beat for two hundred years.

  Naomi does not know this. She is nineteen. She knows only that the man beside her on the bench was blue when she turned to him – blue, a colour which up to now was no more than an idea for the sea and the sky. Blue and bloating. A party balloon for a face. An ECG flatline for a mouth. He didn’t belong – not there under the horse chestnut outside the High School for Girls. Hadn’t she been there every day this week with her lunch, her magazine, and the bench all to herself?

  He was already rigid, she explains, when she lifted his hand. Now, he’s so stiff they can’t unfold his arms to clear the way to his heart, or even lie him flat on the bench because his knees are swollen and locked. He’s a human seesaw from an old-fashioned comedy routine, and still, still, they’re getting a heartbeat, irregular and remote, unreal as an echo, but a heartbeat none the less. Somewhere in the cold meat-locker of his chest, under the brown tweed jacket and the pullover vest, below the faded shirt he’d buttoned to the neck, he’s clamouring for release. A man who looked at her only the once, moving over only slightly, as she sat down with her plastic sandwich box and the women’s magazine she’s been buying each month to know what it is to feel like a woman. He’s in there now running from death, knocking to be let out, to please God be let back into the world again. Only fifty-one, breathes the paramedic, fumbling with a driving licence, but fifty-one seems not unreasonable to her. And the corner of her new bias-cut skirt is wet because something was seeping from him, that’s what made her turn, and, in this moment, she can still feel the chill of his hand branded on her palm where she touched him. Even the hairs of his knuckles, starched as they were with the cold of him, go on bristling at her fingertips. And she wants him dead, she wants him still, like she wants old people sexless, so disgusted is she by the force of the human heart.

  The smell of him trails her on the hem o
f her skirt as she walks back to work. Her knees feel like two china plates balanced on a busker’s sticks. Her chest flutters. She stops at M&S to collect herself, to feel strong and clean again under the bright, false lights of retail. She has ten minutes. She threads her way through Childrenswear, past Linens and into the decorous calm of Houseware. He’ll be on a steel table somewhere by now. Maybe in a cold drawer.

  Had she known he wasn’t going to move over, she would have found another bench. What kind of a man moves without really moving at all? She’d had no choice but to cross and recross her legs so theirs did not touch. She’d had to balance both her magazine and her lunch on a single knee, with her handbag and her can of fizzy orange on the ground at her feet, so little space had he yielded her. She was wearing shimmer tights. How her legs must have shimmered for him in the bright light of noon.

  And when she’d moved her hand to swat away a buzzing of bluebottles, everything had nearly toppled. He would have seen her struggling. Did she hear a choked apology or was it a cough? She’ll never know. She remembers only his ankles, and his trousers rolled up in thick, fraying bunches. Here was a man on his own who couldn’t shop for himself or sew, a man who knew only what his shaving mirror showed him. And what was that? She can’t remember his face, only the pale blue balloon of it knotted at his neck. She struggles for the detail, tries to see again his eyes. Blue or brown? Light or dark? And were they wide or squeezed tight when the pain kicked in the door of his heart? She can’t remember, and she can’t understand why she can’t remember. She’d stared at him, she’d had no choice, flat as he was at last under the paramedics’ white paddles. Yet the look of him has vanished into the hazy mirage of her mind, like when Jason went away last summer on the Outward Bound course, only two weeks after they’d started going out, and she’d confessed to Carrie at the salon that she was embarrassed, she felt unfaithful, because she couldn’t remember what he looked like. She wanted to picture him, to linger over the thought of him, over his face, his eyes, the dimple in his chin, the funny bit where his beard didn’t grow, she really wanted to, but he kept disappearing on her. All she could see was the thick wave of his hair. ‘That’s why you can’t,’ said Carrie.