Be Ready for the Lightning, page 8
NINE
At the end of the summer, we all went to Montreal for Al’s wedding. Al and his fiancée, Marie, were already living in New York, where she worked for a publicity firm. A year out of his master’s degree at Calgary, Al had recently quit the banking job he hated and was trying for his real estate licence.
It was surreal seeing Al standing at the front of the hotel banquet hall, his thick dark hair combed back. Conrad was a groomsman, last on the right, slight beside the two men standing between him and Al. The others were friends of Al’s from university, men I’d never met. Ted wasn’t even in the wedding party, though he’d come along as a regular guest. So much for The Five.
The ceremony was non-denominational, with Persian details orchestrated by Al and Annie’s mother. At one point, Annie had to go up to help hold a silky white canopy over Al and Marie’s heads. Annie said the canopy-holders were supposed to be married women, but Al didn’t have any married friends. “That’s what he gets for being a child bride,” she said. But when she stood there at the front of the hall, I saw how carefully she stretched the fabric above Al, as he and Marie sat down.
Then one of the university friends read a poem I didn’t know and only caught part of. It was nice, what I heard. I caught the line “We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours,” and I looked at Al and was amazed that this was his wedding, that he was standing tall and straight beside Marie, not stifling a laugh at the mushiness of it all. Al had always been the steady one, self-assured enough to let Annie and Ted, the extroverts, outshine him. I’d felt like we shared something there, like background actors rolling our eyes together at the antics of the stars, but this poetry, this depth of emotion and commitment, shook me.
A blond bridesmaid read something in another language. I guess it was Dutch, Marie being Belgian, since it wasn’t French.
There was a little routine where Marie pretended she wasn’t going to say I do, leaving Al hanging for awhile, which was apparently a jokey Persian tradition. But then finally, they’d said it, and one of Al’s aunties brought up a little jar of honey for him and Marie to dip their fingers in and feed each other—for a sweet life, as the aunt explained it. And then, to raucous applause, Al pulled Marie in for a long kiss, her hands on his face and his in her hair.
—
After the ceremony, we moved to another room in the hotel for the reception. There was a cocktail hour, while Al and Marie and the wedding party took photos, and Annie had to go too, because she was family. I stood with Ted while he made champagne disappear, and I had to remind myself not to get a drink whenever he did, or I’d be unconscious by the time the actual reception started—a lesson I’d learned the hard way, after he’d come home to Vancouver.
A couple of Marie’s slinky Montreal cousins joined us, asking how we knew Al, chatting about Marie, whom they didn’t seem to have met more than once. One of them laughed and put her hand flat on Ted’s chest, one finger trailing into his open collar.
“Can you hold this?” I said, thrusting my drink into the girl’s hand, startling her. “I have to go to the washroom.” Then, of course, I had to actually go, and Ted caught my eye and laughed, as I walked away.
After dinner, the dancing started up, and I was drunk enough to grab Annie and do all the terrible wedding dances, the electric slide and the chicken dance and the twist.
When we were out of breath, we went and leaned against the bar, pulling our long hair up off our sweaty necks, watching Al and Marie dance, how he kissed her on her nose and neck and mouth and brushed her light brown hair back, even though it was pinned firmly into place, and how she looked up at him, her head going back and forth just a tiny bit, like she was reading some piece of news she could hardly believe.
“She seems really nice,” I said. “Do you like her now?”
Annie had been picking apart Marie, whom she barely knew anything about, back in Vancouver and had persisted on the flight over, the cab to the hotel, and while we were getting ready in the hotel room. She hadn’t said anything to Al, but whenever we were alone, it seemed Marie could do nothing right. Her clothes, her Belgian accent, the music and food she had picked for the wedding—according to Annie, it was all either frumpy or tacky, neither of which described Marie, a polished, lithe girl who seemed to me bright and a bit cool.
“Oh yeah, she’s a sweetie. I just figure it’s my duty as a sister to hassle her a bit. But Al’s so happy.”
I knew better than to comment on the reversal. “I just can’t believe he’s really married. I didn’t think any of us would get married for years. It almost doesn’t feel real.”
“Well, Al never really felt like he was part of our little clique anyway,” said Annie.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on, Veda.” Annie tilted her head to one side. “What are you talking about?” she repeated in a simpering voice. “He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It sucked being supporting cast to your little trio.”
“Trio?”
“Connie and Ted, best buds. Looking out for sweet little Veda and having adventures. Poor Al.”
“We all love Al,” I said. “You know that. We just all kind of drifted apart in high school. Not you and me, but the boys.” It was true that Al had taken summer jobs in Calgary during university, that he hadn’t really been home since high school. When he came home at Christmas, though, we’d all hang out, same as old times. Or I thought it was the same.
“I know you love him, V. In your own way.” Annie grabbed two flutes of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray and handed one to me. With her free hand, she rubbed my bare arm, an Annie-version of an apology. “God, you’re so soft. I mean, you’re literally soft, it’s stupid. It’s like baby skin.”
“Like my dad. Thin skin, like tissue paper. I’ll be wrinkled as fuck when I’m sixty.”
“Not me,” said Annie. “I’ll look amazing.”
“I know you will.”
“And I’ll still be invisible to any guy I’m interested in, somehow,” said Annie, raising her drink in a mock toast. “Isn’t life funny?”
“Annie, why didn’t you ever say any of this back then? Or in school? Or ever?”
Annie looked past me, suddenly seeming quite sober, quite calm.
“I slept with Conrad,” she said. A new paragraph, as if I hadn’t asked her a question. “I didn’t know if you’d want to know or how—if?—to tell you. Anyway. It’s all ancient history now, so.”
“When?”
“A couple of times, you know, the cabin and stuff. We were just having fun. It wasn’t like you and Ted.”
Attempting levity, I said, “Ted and I don’t have fun?”
“I don’t know. Do you? I bet he’s dynamite in bed, though. But you—you’re like one of those Catholic paintings with the heart exposed. You’re like a little bunny.”
“Those don’t really go together.”
“Well, you know what I mean. A Catholic bunny.” Annie slurred on the word Catholic.
A thought struck me, an image of a teenaged Annie, hips swirling by the campfire, mesmerizing. “Did you ever sleep with Ted?”
At this Annie threw back her head and laughed, attracting admiring glances from several wedding guests I didn’t recognize, part of Marie’s Belgian or New York or Montreal contingents. When she calmed down, she said, “First of all, I would never do that to you. Am I the worst friend ever? Come on. What kind of bitch do you think I am? And second, I’m not that kind of masochist. If I ever looked at Ted back then, it was only trying to see what you saw, and I sure as hell never did. Or worrying about you getting hurt.” Her lipsticked smile dropped, and the person I recognized re-emerged, her large eyes anxious. Annie drew me into a hug, her hand cupping my head. “Oh, V,” she said. “I’m a drunk bitch.”
“No,” I said. “I’m drunk. And you’re supposed to be drunk, it’s a wedding.”
“Yes, I’m sure my parents are thrilled with their pasty white daughter-in-law and their drunk daughter.”
“They seem to love Marie.”
“Yeah, no. They do.”
Annie’s mother, who had indeed been embracing Marie just a moment earlier, came over and joined us.
“Anwar,” she said. “Take it easy on the champagne.” Then to me, “You look lovely, Veda.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Nassar. So do you. And congratulations.”
I’d always thought Annie’s parents were both kind of glamorous. They had season tickets to the symphony and the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and attended the literary festival every fall, things my parents would never do. Mrs. Nassar was a senior administrator at the hospital, and Mr. Nassar had some sort of government job I’d never understood. They were forever redoing their house, squabbling happily about finishes, despite the fact they both favoured expensive minimalism. They always hired my father’s company for the renovations.
“And how is your job?”
“Fine, thanks. The ENT specialist said if I go back and get my master’s in audiology, I’ll probably be able to train there, and they’ll keep me on, if it all works out.”
“That’s wonderful, dear. We’re so proud of you kids.”
“You must be very proud of Annie,” I said, somewhat dutifully.
“Absolutely we are.” Mrs. Nassar smiled beatifically at her daughter. “And Altaf as well, of course.”
Annie made a noise into her champagne flute.
“Well,” said her mother. “I’ll leave you girls to dance.”
She wandered away, and I told Annie I was heading up to the room we were sharing.
Annie hitched her strapless dress up into her armpits and said, “Don’t wait up.”
In the room, I took off my fancy dress and hung it up and peeled off my thong underwear and strapless bra, sweaty from dancing, and I wiped off my makeup with a disposable cloth. I looked at my body in the mirror and thought it looked pretty good, a little flat-chested and round-shouldered but smooth and tan, except a little tummy, and maybe I should cut it out on the beers with Annie all the time. I still had blunt bangs cut across my forehead, like I’d had since high school. Too young, I decided. I’d grow them out. I’d start doing yoga maybe. Get some muscle. I’d do push-ups, real ones with my knees off the ground, every day.
I threw on one of the hotel robes, and with it hanging loosely open, I thought of Annie’s comment about the painting. My glowing heart. I saw it, a dark corona of empty space around the red-red of it in my chest, the slowly pulsing light. I was a little drunk from the wedding, more than a little. I was wearing a hotel robe and seeing a bright heart exposed in my naked chest. The rest of the room felt dark. Oh, I hadn’t turned on the lights. I was high up, above the glittering, flashing city of Montreal. I was looking at my heart.
I didn’t know what painting I was thinking of, to picture this glowing heart, or where I would have seen it. It’s not that I didn’t like paintings or art or that sort of thing. But I didn’t go to art galleries or anything, not since they’d taken us on field trips in school. I realized I could, though, if I wanted to. I was a grown-up, and nothing was stopping me. I decided I would, and maybe go to fancy theatres and the ballet like Mrs. Nassar.
It occurred to me I wasn’t picturing a painting at all, when I saw the glowing heart, but a box of matches my father had kept beside the fireplace. It had a picture of Mary with her hand up and her heart showing in her chest, or on top of it, sort of. Or maybe it was Jesus. With their long hair and flowing robes, I couldn’t really tell the difference. I’d always figured the matches were just something cheap my father had grabbed from a dollar store. But the box must have run out; it had been there so long, as long as I could remember. He must have refilled it. Why would a lapsed Catholic keep a box of matches with Mary or maybe Jesus on it? I’d never asked that question before. I wondered how many other questions about my parents I hadn’t asked, while I poured my mental energy into Ted and Conrad and school and boys. And why I was asking it now, alone in a hotel room, mostly naked and partly drunk.
A knock on the door brought me out of it. Annie had forgotten her key.
But it wasn’t Annie. It was Ted.
“I missed you so much,” he said. “When I was away.”
He had indeed sent me a tape of the song he wrote in Limassoll (though not the one about me), and I’d liked it a lot, even though I knew it was probably about another girl. I had wiped away the knowledge of the other girl and listened to it all the time. I didn’t ask about the song about me, if there ever really had been a song about me.
Ted looked miserable right then, in the doorway, even though he was in a tuxedo, and his charm was cranked up to eleven and all the pretty cousins in the ballroom downstairs had danced with him, rubbing their hips against his, while I watched from the bar.
But because I was drunk, or because I was twisted up about my father’s matches, or because I’d just seen my own heart glowing in my chest, or because he had been gone six years and I’d been waiting, I said, “You’re like the sun to me.”
He said, “I think you just sort of saved me.”
I didn’t bother myself with the lopsided nature of those statements. I let him in.
TEN
After Al’s wedding, back in Vancouver, Ted told me that he had been fired from the cruise line for drinking too much.
“It happens a lot,” he said. “We all get so bored. You can only look at even the nicest sunset over the ocean so many times. It wasn’t even for being drunk. It was literally for drinking too much—staff drinks were practically free, and they felt I was abusing the privilege. I was costing them too much. The guy was smiling the whole time he was firing me. He was trying not to, but he couldn’t hide it—he couldn’t believe I could drink that much and still play.”
“How much are we talking?”
Ted shrugged. “It was time to come home anyway.”
He smiled and leaned over and kissed me, and he smelled like his new smell, different from his teenage smell. Nowadays he smelled like a bottle of wine left open overnight. I don’t know why I didn’t care. I just wanted to lie against him, to stay inside the protective spell of him. But once Ted started kissing you, I’d learned since we came home from Montreal, you were going to bed. Or to the kitchen counter or the couch or the wall. I liked it, because sex was a kind of spell, too, and I’d gotten a lot better since the back seat of the Hearse and so had Ted.
—
Conrad, around that time, started going to another bar for poker. The owner there didn’t much like him and hustled him out if he looked askance at anyone, which prevented him from being in fights for awhile, and despite his pallor and the odd hours he kept, he started to look a little better. But then he fucked up even that, something to do with a girl at the table, as always, somebody else’s girl—why was there even a girl there anyway, and was it Marta still or some other girl? There was no trouble with the police, because nobody ever called the police in those places. But they wouldn’t let him go back, and then for awhile, he had nowhere to go, and it drove him over an edge. He was like a mad dog biting at himself in any and every way he could, the teeth he used being other people. I got his landlord’s number out of him, telling him I had a friend who was interested in the building, and I started paying his rent when he missed it. I didn’t say anything to our parents, or to anyone, and got behind on my student loan and ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches. For the first time, I was angry with him. I couldn’t keep myself from wondering why he couldn’t just stop. And maybe it was because by then I had forgotten about the boy in the woods at school, who held me down, who Conrad beat up after. If I remembered, maybe I would have been more patient with Conrad, felt like I still owed him some Sisyphean allegiance. I’d forgotten about our conversation on his bed. I’d forgotten sawing at my arm with the rock.
But I’d started doing something else. Or maybe it was earlier than that, back when Annie and I were in school.
I had started to cut little quarter-inch lines into the tops of my thighs. I’d do it when I was overwhelmed—or maybe overwhelmed is not the right word, but I didn’t have a better one. I’d do it quick, one flick, not a lot of hemming and hawing, like the girls in high school when we had to dissect frogs. I didn’t do more than one or two at once, and never anywhere else, anywhere people might see. It wasn’t like my arm and the rock in sixth grade. If I had remembered that, I would have been disdainful. Sloppy. If I remembered anything, it was that the cut had distracted from everything else, for me and for Annie and the teacher and everyone. The sleight of hand that pain could be.
I didn’t get carried away with it. It calmed me down, slowed my pulse. For a split second, nothing happened, and then the red came up. That split second made the act of it almost seem unconnected to the effect. Like it was just something my body did, or needed, like food or sleep, like a sneeze. When I did it, the world tunnel-visioned to the comfortably small vista of the tiny cut. Everything else was mercifully muffled. The seething heat, the dizzying-fast zoom-in as the world shrank to nerve endings. The freedom of that tiny focus, the way it shut everything else out. The way I was safe in it—how the process of hurting myself meant nothing else could hurt me just then.
By that time, that bad time when Conrad had nowhere to go, the little pale lines on my legs looked like marks on a prisoner’s wall, except without the strike-throughs. I thought maybe I should do strike-throughs. I thought that might be funny, and then I worried about what that thought said about me.
It looked like I was counting something. I just didn’t know what.
I heard about other people doing this, read about, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I didn’t go on Internet forums to talk about it; I didn’t read self-help books. I didn’t relate to those long, uncareful slash marks up and down girls’ (almost always girls’) forearms. They looked so haphazard. Almost gleeful. And so exposed. My own marks were small, studious. Businesslike.
