The Handsome Man, page 11
I walk through Berlin, the wide streets and the döner shops and the Berlin Victory Column looking down on me somewhere near and the so many languages everywhere I don’t understand and I go back to the bar with the dog, with Georgie. The bartender says, “Hey, nice to see you again!” and I don’t see Georgie anywhere and I ask, “Hey, where’s Georgie?”
“Ah, he’s run off,” the bartender says. Oh no, I say, what happened? “He does this from time to time, he’s fine I’d bet. Little bird, that one, free as,” he says and he looks out the window like maybe he’s outside right now, maybe that’s him, and his eyes are searching. Georgie is gone.
The next day I go back to Toronto.
The Sword
i’m driving north around the great lakes and lake Simcoe and Perry Sound, past a place called Moon River and a place called Swords, past Horseshoe Lake and Killbear Park and Still River, the Lost Channel, I’m driving to the French River where Matt lives, him and his wife, Nancy, a woman he met and he left with and they disappeared together a few years ago, no goodbyes to anyone just gone, haven’t seen him since. It’s winter and it’s dark and the heat doesn’t work in this car that I rented because you can’t get to him any other way than by car and because you continue in life, no matter what, you owe that to someone, anyone, everyone. So I’m wrapped up in all the clothes I brought, two shirts, a sweater and a coat, a Mexican blanket, a black scarf with red roses wrapped around my face.
The last time I saw Matt he drove me and Rienne to a lake just outside Toronto, where we all lived then, the three of us, and Rienne and Matt had been together for a while, longer than I knew any two people to be together, they were in love I thought and I remember a great mist that day and we came to a bridge rusted red and brown and it was blocked off, signs saying Danger, Bridge Out of Order, and we walk to the middle of the bridge and we’re laughing like we could die, don’t die, and an old man comes down the path on the other end of the bridge and he walks over to us and he says, “Y’all fishin?”
“Nah, man,” Matt says to him. “You?”
“Not today,” he says, “not ever. I done enough fishin for my life,” and he says y’all have a good day and Matt says, “You too, careful on the bridge, yeah?” and the man says mmm hmm and keeps walking past.
“You know that guy?” I ask Matt.
“Nah, I’ve seen him here before though. I came out last week and he was here fishing.”
“I didn’t know you’ve been out here before,” Rienne says and Matt says mmm hmm.
Matt brings a piece of wood and some rope out onto the bridge, a handful of screws and nuts and a wrench and a screwdriver, a lighter, and he sits on the bridge building a swing and I swim in the water under the bridge with Rienne, the water cold and brown and Rienne says, “Is that a fish?” and I say no, no way, there’s no fish here and then Matt lowers the swing down to the water and he ties it to the bridge and he yells out, “Okay, try it out!”
“Is it safe?” I yell back up to him and he laughs like a hyena laughs and yells back, “Just do it!” so I pull myself up onto the wooden seat and the rope tightens but it doesn’t break and I swing back and forth, slowly, being careful in my movement, my eyes up to the bridge watching, waiting for something to break but nothing, my feet dangling above the cold water, and we swing back and forth, the three of us, toward and away from each other and away and back and forth between the red rusted bridge and the cold and fishless brown water and we leave the swing there for someone else to use up when we all go and I don’t hear from Matt after that for a long time. Rienne goes home and she doesn’t say goodbye when she leaves the car, Matt and I go to the Rainbow Bar that night and I see him talking to a woman and then he’s gone. People will tell me they saw him around the city a few times that week, every time with that woman, and then I hear they drove down to the Grand Canyon together and then I don’t hear anything else for a while. Sometimes I’d be out and I’d hear a laugh like his and it was never him and that was hard. Then Rienne leaves and she moves out west because it’s all too hard for her. She didn’t deal well with losing him. It was a difficult time and we weren’t ready for it, we all keep moving like pieces in a Rube Goldberg machine. Just me now.
When I get to Matt’s trailer I knock on the door, puffed up with clothes like a hot marshmallow, I imagine him opening the door and that laughter but no one answers and I knock again and nothing. I look through the window and there he is, Matt, sleeping on the couch in his underwear the TV on, the TV glow makes neon his near-naked body. I knock on the window and he doesn’t move, still dreaming there alone. I go to my car and I sit in it and I sound the horn over and over, one loud blast of cold sent out after another, cold horn blast over and over, into the dark and cold winter forest, over the frozen lake and only I can hear it. I think about Rienne and I consider calling her because I miss her too but she’s so far away now. I spoke to her a few days before, a few hours after Matt sent me a message saying,
hey, yer boy is a Papa now
and I said
lol what?
and then he told me, the marriage, the baby, everything, he said,
come visit, come see her.
I called Rienne soon after that, she said, “Hey! So nice to hear from you, what’s up?”
“Nothing, I just thought of you, wanted to check in and see how you’re doing.”
“That’s sweet, I’m doing okay. I’m walking home right now. I might go to yoga but I don’t know, it’s been a long day and I’d love to lie down instead.”
“Yoga is kind of like lying down.”
“Not the kind I do, bud. Hot yoga. It gets pretty sweaty in there, it’s like a whole body workout. You sweat everything out, everything that’s good and bad inside of you, you just leave it as a pool of water on the floor. It’s really freeing, you just let everything go and then you’re fresh, you can be whoever you want to be after that.”
“Who do you want to be?”
“Well, I met this woman the other day, she’s part of this scooter club where her and her friends rent scooters and drive around the city together. She invited me to do that later, it’s kind of dorky but I don’t know, I might want to be that right now. Plus I’m pretty sure she’s into me and she’s hot. I haven’t been on a date in a while so maybe it’s time I be dorky scooter me.”
“Oh, I thought you were dating someone.”
“You mean Alex? We broke up about a week ago.”
“Oh wow, I’m sorry, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I mean it wasn’t fun but it was for the best. He just wanted a lot more than I wanted. He’s getting to a point where his friends are getting married and having a wife and kid are really important to him. I just wasn’t into it. Not with him anyway. I love him, I love his guts but I just didn’t see doing that with him.”
“Do you ever see doing that?”
“Yeah, of course. I mean, I thought I’d do that with Matt but since then I’ve just gone in a whole other direction. Like, maybe I could do that with someone else but if I never do I won’t die, I’ll just keep doing whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it,” and she laughs and she sounds a little defeated and a lot happy too and I ask her do you ever talk to him? Matt? and she says, “No. I’ve thought about it. Maybe someday. I’ll wait until the time is right,” and we talk a little more and I don’t tell her about Matt, that he has a family now with someone else, because it’s hard to tell someone that the thing in their heart so fearsome they can’t even breathe it has found the sharp breath of life and it’s winged and it’s a beautiful thing that the rest of us will celebrate. And I’m outside Matt’s trailer, in the winter, in the dark, in the snow, my toes are losing their feeling and I get a rock, ready to break Matt’s window and he opens the door half sleeping.
“Hey!” he yells. “Quit fucking making noise and come inside, Jesus it’s cold!” and he dances there in the doorway in the cold as I go to him.
“What are you doing in all those clothes!” he says, in his underwear. “Give me some of them!” I take off layer after layer of coat, sweater, shirt, and I throw them all at him in this warm trailer, burning wood fire makes the air warm and dry and he puts on my sweater and he puts on my jacket and we laugh and he says, “Oh man, that’s better, it was so cold in here. You want a drink or something? Come in, bud.”
We sit at the dining room table which is an arm’s length from the kitchen and a step away from everything else in his small home and we drink whisky, what little he has left from his wedding, he says, “Nancy’s dad gave me this big bottle of good whisky I guess, I don’t know, it’s okay,” and he laughs and his laugh is different now, deeper, more guttural, still animal but different.
“Where is Nancy? I’m excited to meet her.”
“Oh she went to her dad’s place for the night.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, her dad gets lonesome sometimes because her mom died a couple years ago so she likes to visit a couple nights a week.”
“What happened to her?”
“Her mom? She killed herself.”
“Oh wow. Sorry to hear it.”
“Yeah. It happened like right before I met Nancy actually. She was kind of a mess about it so I was just there, you know? And my dad had died and I was kind of fucked up too. Anyway her dad is awesome, he’s a welder. He makes swords! He gave me this awesome sword at our wedding!” and he pulls out a great broadsword, long as a man is long, and he swings it around and says, “I’ve been practising with it. I can cut a fuckin pumpkin in half.”
“Careful, you got a kid, better keep it away from her.”
“Oh yeah!” he says and he runs three steps to the TV almost falling over, almost falling onto the sword, and he pulls a picture frame and throws it to me like a frisbee I fumble with and when it’s in my hand I look and there’s a photo of him and the woman I saw him with at the Rainbow Bar, older now, his wife, Nancy, and he’s holding a baby too.
“Her name is Juniper Loup.”
“Wow, congratulations. What a great name. How old is she?”
“Just a couple months. Nancy wasn’t hot on the name at first, it took some convincing. Do you remember? It was where we stayed at the Grand Canyon, when you and me went there a few years ago.”
“Oh whoa, right, I remember yeah,” we sit at his kitchen table in his home, the home he owns with his wife and child, full of love, far away from the Grand Canyon, him wearing my clothes. He asks if I want to watch a movie or something. I say yeah, whatever, man, I’m your guest and he says, “I have some MDMA too, we could do that if you want,” and I laugh and I say don’t you have a kid? and he says, “Well, the kid ain’t here.”
We each take a little bit and we watch a movie and the movie is about a man who falls in love with a woman, he and his friend and the woman move into a house together and then the woman falls in love with the friend. It’s hard but they work it out, they all stay together and the relationships change and then she falls back in love with the first man and I wonder if the two men will fall in love too and we’re both pretty quiet through it and it’s warm and my breathing is changing slowly, slowly I go from light nervous breathing to normal then deep breaths, every few minutes, my heart moving to the front of my chest, sighing and yawning. Now Matt is laughing and I’m laughing and he says, “Oh man, I can’t do this, this movie is so bad. Let’s go outside, I gotta show you something.”
We dress up real warm, warm sweaters, warm coats, already sweating and Matt looks terrifying and beautiful as he moves through the night like a scarecrow with his sword under the moon under the mountain, him swaying back and forth like the gentle roses in the flesh-coloured vases of the bars we used to roam and he brings me walking down a path through the woods behind his trailer, still dark, and he leads me to what looks like a great, long, and winding flat field of snow but no it’s a frozen body of water, the river I suppose, and we watch together, watching down the river into the clear open horizon framed by two forests, frozen river, and sky as the full moon looks back at us like a huge blue mirror. We lie down in the snow, the silence of the forest everywhere and dark, just our hearts and then there’s a howl in the distance and Matt laughs and he says, “I think that’s just a dog.”
“It’s not even cold out here.”
“I know, it’s fucked, I’m still sweating.”
“We could sleep here, I bet.”
“Yeah, but I got a kid.”
“That must be crazy.”
“Not really,” he says. “Like it just happened. Nancy was pregnant and she wanted to keep it and I said alright, let’s make a go of this, so we did. And then it just happened.”
“What was the birth like?”
“Oh man, that was crazy. Like we planned out everything, we did it at home in our bed, Nancy had been working with a doula for a few months, she was ready. Then it happened and it was like there was blood everywhere and all this stuff, it was like Nancy wasn’t there, she would scream like fully scream and then her eyes would roll into the back of her head and she would go completely silent, it was so intense. Then she’d start screaming again. It was like a witch’s ritual, like it was really dark and out of control. And she doesn’t remember anything! It’s fucked. Like we thought we were ready but then when it happened it was like we definitely weren’t ready for that.”
“What was it like seeing Juniper for the first time?”
“I don’t know, man. Like I didn’t see any point in having anyone else in my life anymore, I really let go of everything once I saw that kid. Oh man.”
“Do you ever talk to Rienne?” I ask him and I wasn’t sure I’d ask him this because it’s difficult to ask someone to access a part of themselves that might be deeply painful but we’re high and something like love is flowing through me and I think okay, it’s okay to do this.
“Not really,” he says, “I sent her a message and apologized for disappearing like I did but she never wrote me back. I get it though. I hurt her bad. I think it would hurt both of us if I kept trying to contact her, you know? Like when she’s ready she’ll come to me. I miss her a lot, I think about her all the time,” and then he says, “When my dad died I freaked out a little bit and she didn’t get it. She became really cold to me, like really distant, she just didn’t understand why I was acting the way I was acting. It was like my entire past was erased, like everyone passes in and out of my life but my dad was always there, he knew me in every part of my life and now he was gone. I felt like a big part of me went with him. Rienne could only see this imaginary future we were going to share, she didn’t get it, she wasn’t there for me. I don’t blame her. But I met Nancy and her mom had just passed, I understood her and she understood me and that was it, I just went for it.”
I think about the pain I saw Rienne go through when Matt disappeared. I think, she knows now, she knows loss now. And also I get it, it’s okay. We’re all okay.
“Yeah, man,” he says. “Do you think you’ll have kids?”
“There was a point where I would have had kids,” I say, “but that moment’s gone.” I know loss now too.
We hear the howl again and we get up and we walk and Matt says, “I got this sword, we’ll be alright,” and when we get back to his trailer we take off all our warm clothes and we race out into the backyard in our underwear and we roll in the snow and it sticks to the adrenaline sweat of our bodies and we go back inside and we sit next to each other at the stove, our bodies touching, laughing like hyenas.
Late the next morning we’re drinking coffee at the table and Nancy is home with the baby, Juniper, and Matt takes Juni in his arms, cradles her there between his arm and chest and he’s shirtless now at the stove frying bacon dancing like he used to dance, dancing like a stripper, him and this child, him making faces making the child laugh, his wife laughing too and I think back to once when I knew Matt and he was with Rienne then and we were all drinking and it was late like it always was then and they were making this great, grand painting on this great, large canvas and they were making it together and Matt held Rienne, his arm around her shoulder, pulled her close and he seemed happier than he’d ever been then and he said, “Let’s have a baby together! All three of us! Do you wanna?” and Rienne laughed and she looked at him the way this baby was looking at him now. And all of that is gone now I suppose, these three laughing and dancing together with the ghost of that great painting under the moon, under the mountain.
Nancy, who is so kind to me and calm, she asks if I want to hold Juni and I say, “Sure.” She puts her child in my arms without teaching me how, just gives her to me and I’m not ready and she says, “She’ll trust you if you trust yourself,” and I’m holding her and I’m swinging with her and I’m ready and I’m letting go of something, looking at this baby thinking I could love you, I could love someone, I could let someone love me, okay I will.
The Australian
i get a job at the rainbow bar, i go in four sometimes five nights sometimes six nights a week, bartending, having fun, escaping. Friends come in and I give them free drinks and sometimes strange women flirt with me, sometimes strange men too, it’s nice, I never have to go anywhere to find love this is it, it’s always free shots and a kiss from a friend and a kiss from a stranger and a candle or anything on fire in front of me, every night is warm lights and candles and I don’t long for a single thing. And it is this way for a little while. In time, while the candles are still burning, mid-shot, the room gets a little smaller and the air gets a little darker and my friends move away or they stop coming in and sometimes it’s so slow that time stops and all the regulars who want to forget, they look at me with suspicion and they’re there now to be drunk and to forget and I’m there to take their money. Maybe the only difference between us in time is the exchange of money, I’m saving money for months on end, I have more money than I know what to do with and not much else, no daylight, all the faces of night blur into the morning the sounds of their voices still ringing through my bones. The people who are my friends now, the people I work with, go home to their partners and they drink so they fight a lot. As much laughter as I hear and tenderness that I see I also see crying, drinking, cocaine, no sleep, sober again wrapped in blankets and again and I go home my pockets full of money, an empty apartment. This kind of living, how long do I work there? How many months is this month? How many days?
