Tom, Jennifer, Maureen

T

he stewardess talks about where the breathing masks are and where the emergency exits are and what the temperature in Toronto will be, and even though Tom can’t see her over all the heads he imagines her lipstick mashing together as she talks. His girlfriend Maureen clings to his arm, and he removes her hand to reattach it, claw-like, to her armrest. He wants to drink, to run around, to beat someone up. His face wounds ache. He peers over the old lady on his other side to catch the ground drop off and shrink, feeling an involuntary, very slight physical limpness as the plane shakes around him, shaking loose jumbled memories of home—somehow colourless—as the glare of snowy prairies stays on his eyes.

He turns to the old woman beside him and slides into a conversation that can’t be pushed longer than a few minutes, touching on winter dryness and their respective destinations and smoking. She talks about the cigarette burns you’d find in clothing stores in Montreal, young folks converting shirts to riddled, useless, soft garbage. Everyone smoked everywhere, she says, and then they stopped. No they didn’t, he thinks, getting bored. After a while he pretends to read The Economist until she gets the point, closes her eyes, and rests her head back. He looks up from The Economist and counts nine different shades of gray in the plane, the seats and ceiling and fat storage areas overhead lit regularly with pillowcase-sized squares of high sun, with white sky. He doubts the plane’s still visible from the ground, and wonders, supposing he could see up through the ceiling, whether he’d see right up into space (No, Maureen would say, if she were actually talking to him, instead of clinging to her chair for dear life). Winnipeg, to Tom, was low buildings and wide flat yards and fields and big spaces between these buildings and more sun, all of which doesn’t superimpose well with his city memories, and somehow overwhelms them. The medical conference felt like a long age of laziness and self-effacement, of him trailing Maureen—Dr. Maureen—fucking her in private and pressing metal elevator buttons in public, staring at the loads of plants in that well-traveled restaurant terrace until he thought he’d memorized them.

He slips past the flight attendants on his way to the bathroom. Both sit with legs crossed, eating trays of pasta; both are older than they sound. He closes the hatch-like door and checks under his nose. No blood. He sits right on the toilet like a woman, feeling oddly planted, and takes his Blackberry out of his pocket. He scrolls slowly through thirty pictures, pulled from Facebook—they’re all from a dinner party three weeks ago; a dinner party he didn’t attend. Jennifer tilts her head and smiles brightly in each shot, her elbows straddling a plate of fish. All the pictures are of her, all taken from less than a foot away, which means her new boyfriend must have taken every picture, all thirty, sitting directly beside her, in the span of that one meal. Jennifer traded endless auditions for long hours of retail, waiting on cruel married women who don’t deserve her attention. He’s heard this guy’s in law school, or else he’s a vet. Tom scrolls through each picture one more time, savouring the uncharitable thought that maybe Jennifer would have thought of school if she weren’t so beautiful.

On the way back from the airport, Maureen takes a detour through the country. Tom watches a few flashing minutes of fence recede before a pleated cornfield, undulating like splintered wicker, and as he stares she asks him if she needs to worry about him. The snow, flecked with shrubs. He shakes his head, not looking at her, and she’s quiet. She asks if his mouth still hurts. He nods, and she takes his eyes off the road to fish a Tylenol 3 from her purse. He swallows it without water, and turns to watch the coronal flashes of goldenrod from his window, waiting for the pain to pinch off. The white-gray sky arcs over the highway. The trees swell with curved black birds. The tractor furrows; the spaces between fields and beneath hay bales are paper-white. The older you get the more you realize you don’t choose that much or change that much. Or maybe that’s a mark of the clarity of childhood, a possible reason for the defensive, explanatory tone Tom often took when speaking to Jennifer’s kids. When he was nine he never would have smoked cigarettes or lied to people he loved. He always thought he’d have friends around. He didn’t know how big the world was yet; he didn’t know how private people get. We don’t smile or sleep properly anymore. We never will again.

His swollen jaw, he knows, and his mottled eye, and the three pulpy gaps in his mouth make it look like someone kicked Tom’s ass in Winnipeg. But you could also look at Tom, at his tough face and his big shoulders and think, man. I wonder what happened to the other guy. Some testy surgeon, he’d told Maureen, got on his nerves when he was having a drink at the hotel bar. The kind of jerk who blasts through medical school just to make money, the type of cold-blooded surgeon you have nightmares about; a slender-necked bitter prick with hands permanently a little pinker from deep red gore. They get talking about medicine or something, about women, and then about being attracted to people you shouldn’t be—exes, coworkers. Then the guy, this surgeon jerk, he mentions running into a tall, brown-eyed redhead he thought he’d never see again—Maureen. Their hands touched by accident at a sandwich tray that day during a policy talk, and he gazed after her, vibrating with aroused recognition. They’d worked at the same hospital a couple years back, too long ago for her to remember him probably, but he sure as hell remembers her. Well shucks, Maureen had interjected, running a towel under hot water as Tom sat on the edge of the shower, bleeding down the drain, greenish with hotel light as he talked. Tom lets slip his knowledge of Maureen to the surgeon—innocently, chivalrously—and the guy gets mad when he realizes who Tom is banging. Tom, realizing he’s inadvertently prodded this jerk into slippery, drunken anger, tries to reason with him. Hey man, it’s late, let’s hit the road, it’s on me. He looks around for the bartender but can’t find her, and then, before he’s turned back around, the prick punches him in the mouth.

Where’d your tooth go? Maureen had asked dumbly, stunned at the sight of him. It dropped right into my drink, he’d said; it’s the funniest thing. He hurls the reddening whiskey in the surgeon’s face, and after a stunned moment, whiskey and blood and tooth shards splatter and skitter as the drunks cling together and fight. Tom has never hated anyone like he hates this man struggling hotly against him, his sharp little fists smashing Tom in the ribs, the eye, until Tom can’t even see and clings to a barstool instead. He wakes to find the bartender poking him, saying something. She wanted to shake him awake but wouldn’t touch him, on account of all the blood.

He begged me for mercy, Tom had told Maureen, as she was calling the front desk for an ambulance. She’d nodded, then fell silent. “Franklin,” she’d said at last. “I remember him, sure, but I don’t think we ever spoke.”

The next day—the morning after Winnipeg—Maureen leaves for work before Tom is really awake. She’s on the phone, her brow furrowed, and he catches “… malignant?” as she goes from the bathroom down the hall. She brushes a kiss on his cheek, and he registers pain, feeling her physical warmth. He slips into sleep again, and wakes when it’s past noon. He worms through the sweaty sheets over to the window, and pokes his fingers through the blinds, peeking out at the cold and white afternoon. It dawns on him that Maureen didn’t believe his bar-and-surgeon story. Maybe—maybe probably—she thinks he wanted to kill himself.

He gets dressed while sitting as much as possible. He finds the Tylenol-3s in the bathroom and takes one, then two more, then drops another into his palm and swallows it with water. He wonders if they could all dam up at his throat, and he’d be found dead with white fizz all over the floor. Maureen would find him at night. Good thing they don’t have any pets.

Before they set in completely he knows he has to get out of the house. He needs to talk to Jennifer.

On Mondays she starts work at two. If he hurries, he’ll intersect with her while she’s waiting for the bus that comes an hour earlier—the one she’d always take. Jennifer’s weekly use of the 1:03 Church and Gerrard bus is something he’s known for a year. He stands inside the door of the Coffee Time across the street from Jennifer’s bus stop, then turns his back to line up in front of the counter, an orange wall, and a grimy clock—12:32—and orders a donut, gumming it down plucked bit by plucked bit, watching the buses sidle up and hiss down, belching. He has paid 89 cents to be as vigilant and uncomfortable as the people working here, both parties leaning respectively across table and counter, midsections divided in half, staring at the dingy squares of life outside.

And she comes.

Jennifer, walking with her ponytail-flicking and her body bent C-like against the wind, whipping up her legs and inflating her coat for a breathless gravity-free moment of descent as she sits on the bench, which is dotted—it’s clear to Tom across the street—with frozen gum. Oh Jen, Jen. He used to make her come with his mouth and hands. He taught her to swim, and told her the truth every time she gained weight. He’s seen her kids, asleep and awake. He sees her now, blank and tired, as she spots the bus rounding a corner, six blocks away.

She sees him as he’s halfway across the street and gives him a small, surprised smile. “What happened to you?” she asks, craning her neck at him, shivering, sliding away a couple of inches away. She thinks she’s being subtle but of course he notices, and focuses on not sliding after her. He opens his mouth and five stories crowd his throat, fighting to be picked:

‘… It was one of those cloudy days when I get all gloomy, you know? Remember those? I get thinking how fast years go, how fast all those Januaries stack up on each other, and my whole life like shrinks really small, like miniature almost. And it feels like the proper size, but it also scares me shitless, because it means all the other times I feel like time doesn’t go forward or like my life is big and important are wrong. I left the hotel to get a Coke. I remember her short black hair and her big lap in these white jeans. I looked at the car window reflection, and she, the woman in the passenger seat, was staring at my face. I wouldn’t have said anything to her if she hadn’t followed me into the store and talked to me first. It’s funny how dumb the whole process is when you’re not drunk—with strangers, I mean, especially right at the start of it. I think she actually asked me for the time. But I didn’t even touch her. I was pretty surprised by how bad she wanted it; guess she must’ve been really lonely—’

‘…Jennifer, sweetheart, I don’t know how much I should tell you, you know? (Can I still call you that?) It only happened the one time, and I didn’t even finish or anything—’

‘… That surgeon guy who gave me this? That was her boyfriend. She said he was abusive. He hit me first, but—’

‘… It’s funny how hard the whole process is when you’re not drunk—with strangers, I mean, when you’re nervous about getting caught. She shut the door and I felt this relief and excitement and guilt come up through me so fast I had to sit down on the bed. I kept thinking I got half an hour ‘til Maureen starts wondering, then fifteen minutes, then ten. And she was telling me her name, and she was like unpeeling those white jeans and they were too tight on her, I could tell—’

‘… Right away I say to Maureen, I had that prick begging for mercy, he didn’t have a chance. Might as well not have even said anything though because she was crying like a baby, you’d think she was the one with three missing teeth. I had to calm her down all night before we even got to the hospital, and I won’t lie, I miss your clear head so much sometimes—’

“Or do I even want to know?”

He realizes she’s giving him time, because he’s been sitting, mouth open, with nothing but his white breath coming out. The wind burns against his gums.

The bus comes.

They sit behind an old man. The top of his head is bald, and so white Tom thinks he’d lost his hair all at once, and recently. The old man is sitting close enough to hear everything Tom will say—but he still isn’t saying anything. His mouth has been opening and closing for ten minutes,

Do you like him better? Are you happy to see me?

and so Jennifer talks: “… Alison, she’s been the same all her life, you know, tough—she gets that from me, not Darryl—so I’m not worried about her. Starting Grade Five didn’t even faze her. I just dropped her off, gave her a hug, got a couple of jitters out of the way, and she loved it by the end of the day. And then I get a call that some little shit actually bit her. Bit her! They were both reaching for the same chalk—”

Why do you keep looking around? Are you embarrassed?

“—but whatever, because it’s never a good time to pick up a mortgage. If it were up to me I’d keep renting all my life and telling myself why I’d be doing it, month by month, and it would feel just as right all along. You know?” Of course he doesn’t—he’s barely been listening. He nods, and she nods back, wetting her mouth with a tube of lip gloss that he recognizes. She takes out her phone, reads a text message quickly, and then looks up to catch him watching. He thinks she’s teasing him.

“Maureen still, right?”

He nods. Remembering Maureen pulls him down like a knapsack, soaks him through like paint, marks him, slips around inside of him. Cold. Warming. And suddenly they’re two streets away from the store, and Jennifer reaches up with a sinuous S-shaped motion to pull the stop-request wire, still looking up at him like she used to.

You feel this, don’t you?

“Too bad it took us so long to run into each other,” she says.

“I’ve been thinking about calling you for a while now,” he manages.

“OK.” She nods slowly, her eyes fixing on something ahead. “There’s Robert. He said he’d meet me with my work shoes. I forgot them at his place.” Her nodding stops; she leans back from him and looks up into his eyes again. “You’re going to meet Robert today.”

A shortish man stands by the store entrance with his head tilted up, scanning the dark windows of the bus. Tom wills the light to go red, for this guy to get a phone call, for the bus to sneak up over the curb—elephantine, slow, oh-so-gently—and crush him. The bus slows, Jennifer stands. Off they get. Tom can see her tensing to run into the guy’s arms. Tom looks down at the top of her head, and then he grabs her shoulders, one in each hand, and finds her mouth with his. The guy—Robert—yells wordlessly as Jennifer, unbelievably, kisses Tom back. Then Tom breaks the seal of their mouths to speak to her. He talks quietly so she must stay close to hear him.

“I’m sorry I did that,” he says. “It’s not what you think—I don’t want you back.”

“No?”

“No,” he says, realizing how true it is as he speaks it, nice and slow. “I couldn’t take it. You’d go to an audition or a party, and I’d be sure you’d meet someone better than me there. And you’d flirt with them like crazy not just because you’re good at it but because I frustrated you, and you wanted to know you could do better. Which you could. You’ve got it now, I guess.”

Jennifer pulls away from him. She goes to New Boyfriend and talks in his ear for what feels like ages. Her eyes flick back to Tom twice and he feels his face grow hot. Then she goes inside.

The two men stand as if sizing up the door, seeing if they might both fit through at the same time, and Tom knows the jig is up: New Boyfriend gets to go in, chat with Jennifer’s work friends, kiss her in front of them, and Tom gets to board the bus home. And so what? Maybe if he sat thinking about Maureen and forgetting Jennifer and the woman in Winnipeg, his head would clear up. The sun streams down and it’s the only sun there is.

New Boyfriend turns to face Tom.

“What the fuck?”

“I’m really sorry about that,” Tom says, closing his lips over his teeth and his un-teeth. “I’m on a lot of weird painkillers right now and I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

The guy looks at Tom’s face in almost the same way Jennifer does. She must have passed it on to him—amazing. “To be honest with you, man,” New Boyfriend says, “I’d still rather like to punch your face in, but it looks like somebody beat me to it.” He stops. Considers. “That said—I deal with animals, but if there’s anything I can have a look at—”

Tom shakes his head. “I’m well taken care of. Thanks, though.”

New Boyfriend takes a loud breath, then says, “All right. And … uh. Guess I don’t need to mention I’d prefer you stay the fuck away from Jennifer.” Tom shakes his head. He wants to hate this guy’s kind-looking face, how reasonable he seems, but it actually makes him pretty glad. New Boyfriend pauses, then yanks a reddish hand out of his pocket, and something very small drops out. He grips Tom’s hand in a sweaty handshake and Tom doesn’t even look at his face, doesn’t even say goodbye back, he’s holding his breath so hard. The guy then disappears through the glass doors and Tom crouches on the icy sidewalk, and picks the thing up. It’s the smallest bag Tom has even seen—so small he has to pinch it between the very tips of two fingers to read its little label: ALBENDAZOLE. He massages it over his palm until a quarter-pill slips out - dust-tiny, speck-tiny, no weight to it at all. For half a second he looks up and stares after the guy. Then he pokes his palm with his tongue and laps the speck up.

He starts walking home, thinking about what has happened. Six blocks in he realizes that the ice is coming off the trees. It spills from the branches, catching the sun so intensely he closes his eyes. He veers off the sidewalk and his legs give out in a snow bank which gives way, turning to water under his hands, soaking him. He tries to vomit but he can’t open his mouth, so he staggers up again. The sun is setting rapidly, swelling and sliding like an egg down a wall, and no streetlights come on. He moans. He fumbles for his phone, almost dropping it, pressing the wrong side against his ear, then trying again.

He calls Maureen as dawn pokes its fingers up past the buildings, meaning to say something like: I don’t like how it works. We’ve been collecting all this experience—all this detail we can’t possibly keep—and churning through the present and sending it out behind us like hot rubber—events disappearing all the same and we’re left holding strings and strings and strings of memory. Help me. Know this with me. Ward off the great wink-out with me.

He gets her voicemail.

Maureen calls back.

“Where are you, Tom? I hear cars.”

Where is he? Here he is. Cars, yes, and sidewalk, stores, faces topping bodies. Night again. A bad place. He sees a park—an empty set of swings and troughs of ice, encircled by maple trees, their upper branches nearly thatched together, their blossoms coming unsheathed. Maybe this flitting day-night-day-night-day-night has something to do with it. He goes to them; he presses his back against one of their trunks; he pinches his eyes shut to block out the tremendous shutter-shifts of purpling dark, of pops of noon white, of curdling dawn—like sheets of oil oozing down through milk. It’s slowing down. Why?

“Better?”

“Oh, yeah—it’s almost completely quiet now.” Her voice reaches him like a fuzzy AM station, crackling against honks and yells and pulsing music such that he feels like it’s all a part of the conversation, all equally important and unimportant. “I’m dying,” he tells her, the listening voice amongst the noises. “Maureen—I’m dying.”

Tom watches a knot of green buds curl up from the blackening dirt, and sure enough their rich red petals arch back until they touch their stems—“Tom, where are you?”—and Tom falls silent, watching, barely breathing. “I’m here. But not for long. Staying too still for that.”

He has forgotten how to swim.

He hasn’t run for months.

He lifts himself up into a pained crouch, pretending to tie both shoes, spying on the tree above him as it bends heavy with unfolding leaves and nuts. Nests fly together with frightening speed, the crow and robin shadows flitting faster than he can think.

“Maureen. Read to me? Read the paper.”

“Tom, I don’t remember the last time I bought a paper. Should I get my laptop?”

“Yeah. Read the Internet.”

“Will that calm you down?”

“Please. Please.”

She reads to him about Theseus, a new robot mouse with a big brain and a glut of coloured wires. She reads that octopi make homes, that the females are bigger than the males, that the males strangle other males over the fattest females, who bear the most eggs. They mate, just once, and then they die.

He stops her.

“Maureen. Can you. Tell me what you did today.”

“OK.” She takes a breath, and he realizes she’s frightened, too. “Dr. Holloway kept me on the phone all the way to the hospital. Lymph node surgery at ten—I sort of recognized the woman. I didn’t eat all day except a couple granola bars in the car. Just sat in the parking lot, stuffing them down. Tess let someone die today. I don’t think it was her fault. Now Tom, listen to me: I want you to tell me where you are.”

“Maureen. I’m sorry I didn’t hold your hand all the way there and all the way back, in the plane.”

“Tom?”

She is as here as she can be, reading to him, talking to him, listening. He needs her.

Through the brightening grass dark knots thrust insistent yellow tips—daffodils, their heads twisting as they spread still-wet frills. Tom looks down into their fluted hoods, plastic-yellow in a neon flash of moon and his memories drop away, unnecessary as the things he leaves on his shelves but never touches, the things he must dust off before boxing every time he moves. Mice have wrapped their wires around his feet—he would trade his rich life to become a tree, just to keep living—wouldn’t he? In the morning Maureen will take time off from the hospital; she’ll come by the grove with a flashlight to unpeel him from the bark and vines and the wires, and see how it all happened. He’s not anywhere but here. He’s not anywhere but here.