In Which It Is Something To Come Home To

You can find the archive of our Saturday fiction series here.

I Have to Tell You

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

"Where are you?"

"Just out walking."

"You're lying, Steve. You're shopping. You're looking at a couch right now. Or like a light oak end table, right, with an empty plastic TV on top of it."

"How can you tell?"

"Your voice – it's got that particular Ikea tightness to it."

"....."

I knew I was right: he was pushing a cart through the bowels of Ikea, through the deep black catacombs thrumming with canned sound, past trapezoidal friezes of furniture with their bright bursts of color – purple baskets, flowered pillows –  past dozens of bedroom, kitchen, living room, dining room, patio, basement, hallway, den, and office permutations, pushing his cart one-handed, chewing his gum in my ear. Draining his meagre identical twice-monthly paycheque, maxing his credit cards (back when we were really dating, I declined to merge checking accounts; we fight over it every single time we're drunk.)

"I can come and help. Will you still have stuff to do at like six tonight?"

I glance at the depressing stacks of boxes packed into my new bedroom, all different kinds of brown and tan, stained and taped with different tapes. "Probably," I say.

Right now I'm unpacking my boxes of creative stuff, and one is full of heavy stacked pages of sketches and photographs and notes, and I'm going through it with trepidation. I'm an artist – that's what I do. Of course I make my money differently, but. But.

Someone several boyfriends ago lent me Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet in a massive photocopied wad, eleven stapled sections bound up with a stale overstretched elastic band. Section seven or eight is sitting in my lap and I'm spacing out at it. The text on the page bends to the left – the photocopied page was rolled beneath the book, capturing the black gap of the machine beneath; this produces a dizzying reminder of depth, of captured motion, of someone photocopying the page in San Diego somewhere, pausing as the light runs along it, then lifting the lid. Rote movements, up-down, fueled by that day's particular chemical confluence of meals and sleep, the photocopying machine scattering light-particles within the corridors of controlled light in the library in San Diego somewhere, so the actual position of the sun is as unknowable as the time of year was, as the photocopier herself is. But from her handwriting [darkest hr of night? Lie to self? subjective tho? ask later] and from the poem she scrawled on the second-last page [He picks me up and pulls me down /the bedroom around is/full of sound, take my/face my tits my life] I wonder if her thoughts, the form of them, and she herself were halted, hindered by the way she looked – her writing sort of frozen and myopic, sealed up in itself.

But how would I be perceived, through my writing? What kind of shorthand would distill which elements within my writing, and how would I appear? it's unfair, isn't it, how we capture ourselves by accident…

"I'm inviting Mark," I say, wincing: Mark, his friend from work, his much older friend, his grizzled programmer friend Mark is his friend, not mine – although he enjoys my company much more than Steve's, and not just, I think, because he wants to fuck me.

There's still some morning left and I go buy lemons, wine, and bread, and on my way back from the store I walk past a bar, with its seats up on the long wooden tables, sun-soaked and abandoned, with last night's sweat, care, and spilled beer long evaporated and already swelling in the late summer heat, and I feel sadness for Steve, and tremendous anxiety at shedding the responsibility of his happiness. In the beginning he kept speaking about our astonishing similarities, but this felt frightening and not true. We're really, really very different, I told him through the wine haze as we sat on a splintering bench in the black trees, and I hope he listened. Of course he didn't, not because he isn't extremely gentle and sensitive and highly intelligent, but because I suppose he is so, so young, and eager to secure ongoing care, eager to canonize me, to understand me through the matrix of his needs: worldly but unscarred, capable and firm and nurturing, but gentle and feminine, intelligent but not combative, and so on. When he kissed me in earnest in my bed, with smooth, rhythmic assuredness and hungry pokes of tongue, I become unbelievably aroused – I couldn't believe it. Shyly, but not as shyly as I'd have thought, he explored downwards, touching gingerly in circular patterns, asking me if I liked this or that, eventually rubbing me gently but with surprising confidence. Within days I became so attracted to the same specificities which initially repelled me a little: his funny gait, his gawky height, his habit, when talking, to tilt his forehead forward, and his effusiveness too, his indomitable energy. One sunny morning, one of those early spring days when we were falling in love – twitching and dizzy from it – he related a fairy tale he'd read: an old man works with children to create a giant kite, a kite built from a pastiche of whimsical things, a kite big enough to seize by the tail and escape with – everyone is only always running, the children are always running back and forth – and he cupped my breast in his hand, and I felt terrified. Were men my age always so young? So delicate, so in need of protection? I told him, You're very, very lovely. Have you been told this before? And I meant that, but I also meant: you've had women touch you and you haven't been changed – or have you, and how have you been changed? And he looked down and said a bashful yes, and I told him I felt an urge to protect him, and I meant that, but also: from me. Because when I was like you, nobody said this to me, they just took and took. They saw me in terms of my utility, as a kind of natural capital, and I just gave. And I was changed. And now I'm afraid for you.

Already it's late afternoon, and Steve is sitting on my balcony and the sun lights up his fair face and the white hairs on  his nose, his chin, his ears, below his lips glow with the sun, and his hair shines with youthful health, and he is magnificent.

"…I don't know, he'll get here when he gets here. Why do you keep asking?"

My face is flushed from sun and wine. "Because it's my fucking house."

"Every time you're drunk you just want to fight," he says, and I lean in awkwardly, dragging my chair behind me, and kiss his cool, tightly shut lips.

"When I'm drunk it just becomes clear that you're here to talk about yourself. To get reassurance," I say. "You're just here to get away from your dad and the creepy childhood stuff in your bedroom. Do you even like me at all anymore?"

"Are we just airing all our paranoia, now? Is this what we're doing? Because, OK, I've been unpacking and lugging all your shit and helping you set up the balcony and drinks and thinking all the while, fuck, You're here to hang out with Mark," he says.

"I'm here because this is my fucking house," I say.

We sit quietly and drink. I say:

"Sometimes I look down, over this railing –"

—cars zipping tiny and soundless, the roads curling and the roofs speckled with white-hot skylights, dark mottled patches of repair, no stakes, no people, no noise –

" –and I consider jumping. Sitting on this railing with my legs dangling over the side, and sliding right off."

He looks at me, his intelligent eyes flicking to my face, my chin, my hand on the railing, the space behind me, the plants, back to my face again.

"It's not like I want to. But I consider it."

"You consider it, then reject it. We consider everything, right? You're reminding yourself how important you are."

Earlier, in spring, we passed someone's garden, and you paused over the bright red tulips, and with your hand on the soft part of my side, you said, "flowers and women, I love them, how beautiful and important they are." Are you ever critical of how I matter?

But of course I'm being unfair: he's precious to me too.

I say,

"You're depressed. You've transferred all your depressive need from me to drinking to shopping. What about me? I'm depressed too."

"Maybe you should move home for a while."

"It's sure working out for you, isn't it?"

"As long as you love me, I'll be fine."

"You've never been fine as long as I've loved you. What did you buy today?"

He sighs, leans his elbows on his legs, pressing his chin into the railing, shifting his considerable weight onto his knees: "An end table, a new pillow because of the bunchy old one, a multi-purpose adapter so I don't need to carry as much to work. Then I was like screw it, and bought this spice set I wanted. It's for my dad to use, mostly. Then the smells in the store, they… I got a big sushi lunch. I texted with you then."

"In the restaurant."

"Yes."

I wonder if the problem is that he's meant for somewhere else: it's such a strain on him to live in the city. He winces when metal screeches against metal, when strangers touch him on the streetcar, when landlocked pedestrians yell at each other, when the press of bars and rundown restaurants spark his claustrophobia.

There's a muffled knock, and I turn and squint back through the dim stuff of my apartment. Mark is here, waiting in the white hallway, making a blank face at the other side of my door. Sweat springs immediately under my arms, on my back. I get up.

I close the door behind Mark and he turns to watch, his back to the sun angling in from the patio and the lines in his face shining with sweat. "You've had Amsterdam before," he says, raising the enormous box of beer he's carrying. Not "is this OK?" not, "have you had Amsterdam before?" I shrug and nod, like, of course I have. Like, our lives vibrate with deeply felt similarities. Typical cheap bar stuff.

And as the sun sets we gulp back our slick burning drinks, slop out more, and wipe our mouths and start sipping again, the three of us, and as I drink one more plastic glass of my tart sun-heated wine and I feel a tiny gasp of my life leave me as I light a cigarette, as we"re talking about office dynamics, as the day passes into grey evening all the while – I feel such joy. Such sick excitement.

Because I feel my life pulsing around with my heart and my swallowing, but it's pulsing outward, it's leaving me slowly, as my body oxidizes, as I – drunk and stern and briefly in the bathroom – quickly examine the wrinkles around my mouth and the dullness around my eyes, and come out again, settling in the warmer outdoors, the clean up-high air. It is passing and this is exciting, it is passing and through this passing I will pass on to something new, I will create new things, meet and bond with new people, and become a better person, fix myself, but this passing is required – until there's nothing left to pass.

While Mark stands with his back to us and pours beer into new glasses, twelve feet away and drenched in the kitchen shadow, Steve and I lean together in the heat of the sun, and he puts his lips to my ear: "You're ignoring me." I sip my drink and sigh, and he asks: "How could you be so selfish?"

"I'm selfish? You're just here to milk me for reassurance," I say, and his eyes widen. "That's not true. I came to support you, to help you unpack," and I realize, murky and sluggish and too-late, that he's probably telling the truth. And I wonder how often I've misunderstood him like this.

"Please, make him leave," he begs.

"I won't," I say, my chest tightening as if from truck fumes. "And I'm sorry that I invited you over and wasted your time. I wasted a lot of your time, and maybe you're as fucked up as me, now. But you got something from it, didn't you? I hope you did. I think you did."

"You still love me," he says.

"Of course. But there's many, many different kinds of ways to love."

His whole body jerks and I hope suddenly that he'll slap me. Instead he stands, shoving his chair back – it slams against the railing – and marches back through the house. Mark turns and they have a brief electric moment of sizing each other up, not speaking, their ribcages lifted and ready. I close my eyes and hear the door slam.

And as I press my fists into my eyes I see an evening earlier this summer, a day Steve and I both skipped work to get drunk, and escaped the hot city for Toronto island. The beach was small and the water was choppy – they've brought the sand here I think, he said – and he led me into the water, and I looked down into the silt and the weeds – some reached the surface and spread bright green and open across the brown surface, some wriggled beneath –and he sheltered me and allowed me to sit on him, weightless, and we jumped up and down together, splashing almost indecently loud in the evening quiet. The sun blazed close to the horizon, dipping down against the trees and lighting up the water, and a gray-orange dimness spread evenly through the woods behind us, and we thrashed back to shore. We shivered dry on the bench by the water, and I looked down at the goose-bumps on his legs for an ages-long moment, trying not to touch him – he's like a cat, sometimes he shrugs me off, focusing hawklike on something else, something through a tunnel, just beyond my understanding. He wanted to make a sandcastle with a pink abandoned castle-mould we found half-buried in the wet part of the beach, and I bit back my hunger and tiredness and made the towers, stinking with river and fish, and stuck flowers in their grainy tops – playing the girl – and he dug a channel and built a dam with sand and rocks and sticks, blocking the castle from the gentle lake waves, playing the industrious boy. We often talk about how we'd be friends as children – though he'd be bossy and I'd be shy, we were both intense and focused and sensitive children, I think, coming up with never-shared worlds that time eroded, or that wilted immediately in the white-hot presence of other children our age – and he looked back as we towelled off and left, as the castle shrunk into four asymmetrical lumps and the darker splotch of dam receded, and he choked back tears. I think he was thinking: It might have been like this.

Mark comes back and all of a sudden, I need to share it with him.

"Mark, I have to tell you. Mark."

"Amy."

"He's not coming back. That was it."

Mark shrugs easily. "I don't know about that."

"No, he won't, because." I pause. "I'm really depressed."

"Well Steve, I mean, he's not the happiest guy, right? Like misery loves company, is all I'm saying. You know?"

"No, like. Yes, but."

"....."

"But I've been awful to him, I think. Awful and impatient."

"You should see him at work, like we had a party for this guy Luke's birthday last week. He just stood around taking these little sips of the same beer, just waiting to leave. He's like that all the time – just waiting to leave. It would wear out anyone."

"Wear, yes. Mark, I'm so tired."

"…"

"Like sometimes I look down, over this railing –"

—I can't look down this time, instead hearing the gentle shh of my neighbor's patio door,  watering her plants, singing softly to herself –

"–and I consider jumping. Sitting on the railing, looking out for a while, then like. Sliding right off."

He's looking at me but I'm looking out at the dying orange sun, meeting the water and illuminating the train tracks, which go on forever until they are swallowed by the big boxy factories, the sparkling Toronto waterfront.

And he looks away, saying:

"They've found that people who jump from bridges, they regret it as soon as they jump."

"How can they tell?" I ask.

"Like from their brains. The more intact ones, I guess."

"The ones who drown post-jump?"

"Exactly, and from interviews too. With survivors."

And then it's over, it's left me, that vibrating important thing, and we're sitting and not talking. As intelligent as I think I am, I'm young and vital, and cannot grasp not-living, non-life, maybe not ever – yet.

"I don't know what it is, Mark," I say, "but I've been dreaming about sex nonstop; about thick cocks and fucking."

He looks at me.

"Last night I dreamed I watched a couple of men play soccer, and one of them, his thick hairy body was coming out of his uniform all over, and I watched his thighs and we saw one another and he stopped trying to keep himself in his clothing and told me, sort of strangely, 'You're twenty-seven, just full and heavy with longing, all grown,' and I thought, just fuck me, please, come inside of me, please, please, please."

He kept listening. He wasn't handsome, he was much older than me. How I like that.

"I want grateful needy fucking, tender amazed lovemaking, I want to have my face cupped between hands, I want to be told 'You're so beautiful, I'm so lucky,' and believe it, do you understand?"

"…."

"I want him to want to shield me from his thoughts, his rough crushing needy thoughts, his desire for my hot wet pussy, his desire to fuck me roughly and to hear my noise and grab my hair and smell how different my skin smells all over my body –"

—my waxy forehead, my bitter-banana nipples –

"—and think, if you only knew. If you only knew about me imagining this, imagining and producing your otherness and in this way exactly the same as you, reflecting you back. Us, one and the same, shielding one another from our fantasy-other, but the illusion producing tautness."

"…."

He's old, older, his face wrinkled, and thank god. Not a boy-man like Steve, peach-furred and amazed at his new hard body, his height in comparison to his father's kitchen cabinets, his nervous wet mouth-lick, his knowledge fresh, his heart open or a bitter bud – but a man-man, a ripe man, weathered and nipped at his edges like August leaves, like September nights. And I, no longer a fresh flower but an early-August evening like this one, heavy and fertile and wet.

"I need fucking friction, I want a man whose mind I love, a man I make wait, a man amazed. I want us to imagine one another naked many times before I finally show him my breasts, and guide his mouth over them, and tell him to pull and suck at them, and moan in his hair, in his ears."

"…"

"I want to tell him how wet I am, wait until he's hard as stone, put his hands on my ass, harden his grip, let him imagine, let him burn to thrust. I want to place his thumb on my clit, tell him to rub it, moan and talk, get him sitting up against a wall, ease around him, squeeze his cock all the way down, feeling myself for wetness as I go, imagining what he feels. Ask him over and over, what is it like."

"…."

"Pressing my breasts into his mouth, moaning at it, telling him how good it is. Naked, no condom. Tell him how fertile I am. How I want his cum—"

I'm possessed by this! Swollen with wetness like a teenager again, storming with need!

"He might gasp a little already, at the effort of holding it back, especially if I'm riding him right, squeezing my pussy and ass and thighs, rubbing and pulling and soaking him all the way over his thighs. I'll say something like, make me pregnant. Don't you want to? Don't you think I'm sexy and young and kind and smart and bursting with health? And I've chosen you. I know it's just our first night, but you feel how I long for you, you feel how strong this is – you feel I've chosen you. So do it. So come."

And suddenly, I realize the price of my selfishness: the claustrophobic blankness waiting for me the next time I'm alone. I have ruined my ability to be alone, dissolved that special sacred part of myself that centres my me.

"You'll hate me," I say. "You'll go away and it'll happen. You'll talk to Steve at the office, and you'll both hate me."

"I don't think I will," he says.

"You will, and I just want hear it. I don't want you to go away and change your mind. Just tell me now."

He looks at me. "Is that what you want?" he says.

"Please, please, please," I say, starting to cry, not sure whether I'm crying to provide relief after that show of assertion, or if I really need to cry. But something changes, something breaks as soon as I cry, and he leans across the flimsy patio table and holds me. And he lifts me from my seat, pressing one arm under my knees and one supporting my limp sweaty back, and shoves aside garlic and elastic bands and plastic cups and puts me on the kitchen counter, kissing my wet face. I lace my hands around the back of his head, tighten them over clumps of hair, run them feather-light over his back for contrast, as far as I can, slicking off sweat. Kissing him, light and gently, needy and full of tongue, nibbling at his ears, all the while taking him in and out and grinding at knowing changing tempos, agonizingly slow, then fast and hard, letting him push me onto the floor after a while, his need taking over, his need to fuck hard and finish, to twitch and fill me and stay in, kissing. He holds me until I start crying again, and then he tolerates me crying, sudden and devastated, filled and emptied, angry and grateful and alive, yanked crying to life.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about a lovely couple. She is a writer living in Toronto. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Images by William Tillyer.

"Anyone Can Fall In Love" - Kindness (mp3)

"Bombastic" - Kindness (mp3)

The latest LP from Kindness is entitled World, You Need A Change Of Mind.

In Which They Were A Lovely Couple

ghada amer, "Trini", 2005

Ready For Me

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

We’re lying and talking in bed, and the late afternoon sun stretches long into the room.

But you know, childhood is extending. Thirty is really young now, you know? he's saying. We have time.

You think you have time. We have the same amount of life as ever, and it isn’t much.

Oh, don’t be dour. You mean, what? Like we feel young just because we like automatically adjust and seek older and older elders?

Well, yes, actually. And also like, I don’t know. You’re a man; you can take fifteen more years to find yourself, you can wait til you’re forty and get married whenever you want. In that way I’ll age faster than you, I say, and he nods gravely, patiently, like a teenager during an unending wedding speech.

Don’t you wish you were a kid again? I ask, then realize I’m being cruel: if he agrees, he’s being a Millennial baby; if he disagrees, he’s lying — because don’t we all wish for this? Or at least, don’t we all wish to cycle between ten and twenty-five, then snap right back again?

He pauses, then: I wish I was a kid, with you.

I think about it. When I was a kid I was catching dragonflies (buzzing in my clenched hands like little machines) and frogs (until one, plopped triumphantly in a bucket filled with water, went fleshy and dead in the white noon sun.) And what else? I had a broken front tooth for years, I masturbated with pens. I was once so in love with Star Wars I thought I would die if I stopped.

I don’t think we’d have been friends, I say, but he as he rolls his big body over and up, throwing his legs over the bed and squeezing his armpits shut, I feel how wrong this is.

I sit up beside him. We’d have been friends, I say. I’d have made you marry me in my backyard playhouse. Then maybe we’d have hot dogs.

We’d have cared for each other, he says, because we like each other now, and people don’t really change. I run into people all the time when I visit home, and even if I haven’t seen them since we were seven, there’s still this little hidden grain of themselves that kind of...radiates outwards. I recognize them right away.

I mean, listen — I wish we’d been friends, I say. I was too shy to make friends, and then when I figured out how, I only picked rotten people. Like Tara — we ran into her like two weeks ago. Remember, I ran out of the store?

He looked down at me and I looked up at him, imagining us little. My red-headed husband, seven hands high.

ghada amer, "The Roses" 2002 Maybe childhood is always a little lonely and frightening; bursts of anxiety and surprise and delight peppering long, long stretches of nighttimes, parental dinners, and Sunday afternoons. I remember the first day I slept at Tara’s house as late fall, but it wasn’t. It was freshly May, the breathless time before the insects and the blankets of heat, and plump unsheathed maple leaves were shivering all along the street. We sat on the sidewalk curb and she dragged circles in the junky rain-soaked maple blossoms, and I watched her talk, amazed at the body glitter sparkling on her downy arms. "My dad only watches war movies," she was saying. "They have him in Latvia now, and he’s using like machine guns and stuff. But he’ll be back in six months, and you’ll see – he looks out for me. When we go out for Halloween, he’ll follow us a block behind."

I nodded — "My dad looks out for me too." She frowned, and I felt that lonely coldness again: we didn’t really like each other, I understood that then. But we had nobody else.

She stood up. "Let’s eat," she said.

The kitchen was cool and dark, and I knew that the rest of the house was dark too, and that Tara’s mother would sleep upstairs until probably the next morning. She wrenched open the fridge and put a plate on the table — engraved with knife marks, it looked like china but was actually plastic, like the plates at Swiss Chalet. "I’ll feed you, OK?" she said.

She opened the Styrofoam containers of leftover Thai food — slick crunchy mango slices peppered with ground nuts, and chicken globs set in thick cold peanut sauce, and chalky rice perfectly shaped to the inside of its container — splatting it out on the plate, saying Eat, now — and I did. She threw open the cupboard doors, pulling out dried apricots and sleeves of crackers, dipping them in cream cheese and margarine and getting it on her fingers after a while, passing them to me, and I kept eating, not stopping, unbuttoning my pants a little as the weak cloudy May afternoon trickled into the kitchen. And then ice cream, bending the spoon and freezing my teeth in my haste, and then apples when there was nothing left, breaking their skins over and over, spreading the white flesh under my meaty fingertips, crunching down to the seed-flaps, the wooden parts, and starting again, a new sick roundness in my palm, a gastronomic analogue to the hellish perpetuity of my childhood – inscrutable afternoons like this, lasting and lasting. The dead house air pressed in ocean-like on my ears as I listened to the rhythmic click of my own jaw. To this day I chase pleasure to lead myself into punishment, maybe to recapture the ill giving-up frisson of the sick stay-at-home days slung alongside days like this. She paused to throw away the ragged apple cores.

"Now you’ll have diabetes," she said.

Did she?
Did she what? I ask.
Have diabetes? Wait — no. That’s a dumb question, whatever. Continue.

We watched Halloween as I controlled my nausea and Tara made comments in a different-sounding voice, perhaps repeating things her dad had said as they’d watched the tattered VHS tape together ("It’s dumb because all her blood is drained out but she’s still flesh-colored," etc.), and right before bed we pressed our faces to her mother’s fish tank. "Look at the gourami," she said, pointing at the biggest, fattest, pearl-bodied fish, and I yelped. All the other fish were attacking it, darting and churning the water, eating its gauzy fins nearly away. We rescued it in a shallow bowl of water to die alone, leaving bright fin-flakes scudding at clay castle-level (she gave clipped directions, and I whimpered the whole time.) We peered into the bowl for a moment, watching its disc-like body spin gently as if with the momentum of its thwarted will to live, its little puff of life energy seeping in the dark. I thought about it dying as we lay chatting in our sleeping bags, its mouth still opening and closing with nobody downstairs to watch it, with no lights on. I started thinking about my parents, and began to cry.

"You're very sentimental," she said to me, her cold eyes assessing, and I took it first as a compliment, then later as an insult — but really it was neither. She was simply gauging the difference between her and I; the oozy sadness between my ears, clouding in front of me. Even then I understood that she’d shut off when nobody was there, that she could flick through people like books and create herself for them.

That's pretty precocious, he says, then thinks about it. You are very sentimental.
Better that than blank. I say.
There’s only two choices?
For me, maybe. I pause. Probably people can change a lot, if they want to.
Did she?
I laugh. Not a bit.

About two years ago I visited her house, for the last time — she shared a run-down home in Chinatown with four other people, girls whose personalities she’d merged and then dominated.

"You caught me in the shower," she sang through the half-open bathroom door, oozing steam and fragrance — "just make yourself at home." Reluctantly I walked past the bathroom into the kitchen — she was rubbing oil over her legs, her hair twined up in an elaborate towel. She grinned at me in the mirror, and I blushed: I didn’t mean to look, but I knew she wanted me to, to witness her perform her gleaming health, her luxurious youth. The sun whitened the whole kitchen, blazing through the grubby curtains, gleaming off a shifting mass of fruit flies hovering over the garbage. I filled a mug with lukewarm water. Christopher’s in the living room, she called through the door — go say hi, OK? My heart sank. OK, I said.

The old warped-up wood floor had creaked enormously as I walked, but Christopher, sitting with his knobby knees together, looked up from his laptop as if he was surprised. His twiglike, brittle-yet-potbellied body was sealed in a tight, tight blazer studded with pins (Get Bent, one of them said) and a silly hat, the kind with a brim in the front. The whole ensemble had a musty, mismatched Value Village feel (his most recent employment before he left Vancouver, whose clothing selection, he had claimed, was — as all things were — better than that of any Toronto locations). We said hello, and he patted the dingy cushion beside him. I sat, glancing furtively at his laptop screen. A dozen Microsoft Word documents were arranged across the desktop, a constellation of Millennial self-entitlement, all named things like ‘i tossed my smoke to the ground.doc’ and ‘she said, honey let’s go.doc’ and ‘belfast second ending, no victim.doc.’ "How’s the play going?" I asked.

He ignored the question. "She’s going to break up with me," he said. "Today, when you leave."

This was likely. "We’ll probably never see each other again," he added.

"You and I?" I asked, and he nodded, toying with his clumsily large lip ring, pouting his wet lips, making a sort of frozen expression I could tell he practised in the mirror.

"Well relationships, you know," I said, and then elaborated: "They don’t just end, sometimes they wear out and end like a couple times. You guys probably still have some time together, and maybe some of it will be really nice."

"I don’t think so," he said. "The thing is, she’s discovered she’s bisexual. She has to explore that."

Despite her enormous appetite for people — she wanted to claim and consume everyone, men and women, it didn’t matter — I knew this wasn’t true. Still, when she swept into the room, I felt my chest throb with sick excitement.

Shit like that cheapens real queerness, he says.
Exactly! I say, and he brightens.

Tara came in, her hair still twisted in the towel, and we chatted performatively about school, drinking, quitting drinking, smoking, quitting smoking, people we’d lost touch with, and people we were looking to shed. Christopher watched, sullen, rubbing her palm with both hands. Finally he said, "You know, it’s interesting about gossip. You need it for bonding, don’t you? Like, you and I have these things in common, we’re not like these other people, who are undesirable for reasons A, B, and C."

"Yeah," I said, and Tara rolled her eyes and went to the bathroom, and Christopher turned to me, radiating need. I got up — "I’m just going to grab more water" — and brought my empty mug to the kitchen, aching with pity. On my way back to the living room, I passed the bathroom again and caught Tara’s reflection in the mirror — she wasn’t ready for me this time. She was staring at her own face, the towel coming loose, her hair dripping out, her mouth hanging slack. Her arms hung limp and folded in the sink, like they weighed a hundred pounds, like she’d suddenly sprouted five extra feet of arm and was baffled by it. She looked overwhelmed, as if she knew she’d get lost on the way to adulthood, sensing she would, as my mother would say, grow up funny, lingering and fucking up and receiving parental rescue over and over, a child-monster in the body of a beautiful young woman. Her eyes snapped over to mine and she straightened up and smiled, but not before a spasm passed over her features. It could have been surprise — she was startled, she wasn’t expecting me. It could also have been hate.

"It’s awful when you just agree with people like that," she said. "He was being disparaging about women. You didn’t really mean it."

Christopher came tearing up the hall, his ears burning — "No I wasn’t!"

I thought about it, holding her gaze in the mirror. "At least that’s the worst thing about me," I said.

"Leave her alone," Christopher demanded.

"Oh, of course you’re defending her — you’re in love with her, aren’t you?" she said. "When you just agree and listen and smile and make things OK all the time — who wouldn’t love that? She’s blank. She’s nothing."

"You’re wrong," he said. (I hope he was.)

"Your hat is stupid," she said. (It was.)

"You’re getting fat," he returned. (She was.)

"You’re a loser," she spat. (He was.)

"You’re a bitch," he yelped, and she threw her hairdryer against the wall.

"You’re old as shit," she screamed. (He was — to be dating her, at least.)

"You’re living off your parents," he yelled. (She was, and would for years.)

"You’re wearing eyeliner!"

"No I’m not!" (He was.)

"I’m smarter than you!"

"No you’re not!" (She wasn’t.)

"Your writing is terrible," she said triumphantly, and there was silence. I wanted to say, no Tara, that’s too much, he needs this — working terrible jobs for years, forever, always feeling the discrepancy between his middle-class childhood and his hand-to-mouth, minimum-wage adult life, nursing its unfairness like a deep wound in soft flesh. Writing about it was his only release, producing linearity and a fervent but as yet imaginary bond with countless others, writing their own plays about grocery-store-working playwrights tragically stricken with writer’s block, toiling away at their own greasy-screened laptops, swollen with promise and yet to be found.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the only good thing. She is a writer living in Toronto. You can find her website here.

Images by Ghada Amer.

"Flutes" - Hot Chip (mp3)

"Now There Is Nothing" - Hot Chip (mp3)

The new album from Hot Chip is entitled In Our Heads, and it was released on June 6th.

In Which Our Work Contains Such Tenderness

photo by Oliver Bacquet

Nearly A Woman

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

"Sarah's a woman, definitely," Joseph said, and immediately I pictured Sarah sitting in our class, her helmet-like hipster hair and pin-straight gaze. She was only a year older than me – twenty – but it felt like forever.

"How about Eliza?"

"Girl, definitely," Joseph said gravely.

"And Joan?"

"She’s a girl," Joseph decided, stroking his beard a little.

"How about Victoria?” someone else said. I don’t remember who was keeping this crap going – probably he was rattling on all by himself. My wine glass grew sweaty as I waited for his verdict. "Nearly a woman," he said, leaning back in his chair until it bumped, rather gently, against the grimy bar.

If this were to happen today, I’d probably suggest he refrain from this sexist bullshit in the future, and toss the rest of my wine on his lap. But of course, if this were today, I wouldn’t be hanging out with someone like Joseph. That’s the thing: no self-respecting twenty-nine-year-old woman would, so he preyed on the nineteen year olds in his shitty creative writing class. To my credit, I changed the subject.

"So what’re you writing for next week’s class?"

He nodded several times before responding. "Just, you know, short fiction. I’ll send it to you first."

At home that night, countering my wine-dizziness with drug-store chocolate, I refreshed and re-refreshed my inbox, and within a few hours I was reading "Breakables." The plot centered around a thirty-something husband and wife, Cameron and Melinda Givens, who dolefully drifted through a house that seemed rather beyond the means of, respectively, a poet and a flower-arranger, packed floor-to-ceiling with plot-device-y tchokches and photo albums. Typical of bad literary fiction, there was improbably gymnastic kitchen-sex; there was a broken-down grandfather clock that Cameron refused to fix – ("I don’t know when it stopped, but it won’t start again," he tells Melinda, meaningfully) – and there was a young writer, Virginia, who just couldn’t keep her hands off Cameron, despite his feeble attempts to resist. Virginia was a spunky, nineteen-year-old brunette – precocious and nubile and nearly a woman. Of course, I was flattered beyond belief. Even so, while I could tell that Cameron was supposed to be this total poetic genius, tragically hindered by existential languor and heartbreakingly wasted in a provincial family life – there was mention of children dousing their pasta in ketchup – something didn’t feel right. I realized much later that Joseph’s characters could only be as funny and as intelligent as he was, and as a result, they were neither. It’s also interesting to note that, despite the already dismal limitations on Cameron’s intelligence, neither Melinda nor Virginia could be as smart as him, because they were women. Subsequently, they said a lot of things like this:

“But what does it all mean?" Rachel shouts, her large eyes blinking back tears…

"Can you explain?" Virginia cries, her red lips falling open…

And so on – in fact, variations on this question comprise most of the stuff Rachel and Virginia say, allowing Cameron to drop poetic insights like this:

Why do the commitment-hungry forget, in a split second, the longest view?

and, my personal favorite:

For a while I felt like an abortionist, in the lightest sense of the word.

On my way to the creative writing class the next week, I decided that, despite the canonical immortalization of ‘Virginia’ the nineteen-year-old nymph, I didn’t like his story. What was I going to say? Did he expect me to fuck him now? My hands grew sweaty again as I cut through a park. It was almost November, and the leaves that still clung glowed golden throughout the woods.

I stopped abruptly: Joseph was sitting in his car, hanging out the window and blowing cigarette smoke up at the trees. He kept his cigarette in his mouth as he pulled his long black hair into a ponytail, still leaning several feet from the car, then rolled his sleeves higher on his thick arms. He spotted me and called me over, offering a ride.

"Why don’t you just get out to smoke?" I asked, getting in.

We sat in the car, and I smelled the hot close car smell and watched three ladybugs crawl over the rear-view mirror’s Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear text – their yellow pointed claw-feet doubled and tiny; the road curling back into light-bending trees. Something solidified in me then, a sort of cold and slippery feeling.

"So," he beard-stroked, "what did you think?"

All of a sudden, I wanted to devastate him. So I shrugged. "I dunno. It was nice."

He blushed and started the engine, and we drove in silence.

The classroom, when we got there, was almost empty and full of sunlight. "Look who’s here," Eliza sang, gripping the end of her long red braid with one hand and flashing us a dazzling smile, and Joseph nodded briskly at her. Eliza and Joan had both been ballerinas at one point, and it showed. Our instructor arrived, all leather jacket and grizzled energy, and started the class at once. I shouldn’t reveal who he was, but many Canadians have read at least one of his books.

When it was Joseph’s turn to share his piece, I tried to catch Sarah’s eye in solidarity, and felt my stomach pound with excitement: surely our instructor wouldn’t stand for this crap. My print-out of "Breakables" had grown nearly transparent with sweat.

photo by Umberto Salvagnin

But Joseph left his story in his bag and took out a small leather-bound book instead, leafing through it slowly. "This is a little unorthodox and spur-of-the moment," he said, "but, if I may, I’d like to share a poem." Our instructor nodded, and Joseph cleared his throat and read aloud:

So I guess you’re my husband
she whispered the morning after, considerately
bringing me complimentary coffee and newspaper
and underlining our names on the marriage license with her finger
("Oh man," our instructor murmured),
Words don’t lie but poets do – I’m thinking –
Is there some way outta this now?
("Mm, m-hmm," our instructor went),
I’m a man, yes, torn between two worlds
Born and powerful in my own respect,
Proper appendages in proper proportions
and so, I am enough.

He closed the book, and all heads swivelled toward our instructor, who was gnawing on his fingertips. "Great piece," he said, leaning toward Joseph. "Great energy. Your work has such tenderness. And your women, Joseph – I mean, let’s just say: you’re a very sensitive man."

Joseph stroked his beard, and they smiled at each other.

"I’m actually working on a collection of poems, so this feedback is great," Joseph said, then looked over at me. "Maybe fiction just isn’t my thing."

After class, as we shuffled our papers, Joan leaned over to Joseph. "So you’re writing a poetry collection too," she said.

"That’s the idea," he replied, chuckling. I wanted to throw something at his head.

"How long is it," she asked, cupping her face in one delicate hand.

"Right now? You know, I’m not too sure," he said. "It’s in Word. Haven’t counted in a while."

"If it was me, I’d know every page of it," Joan mused, rotating her cupped head toward me. This was the first time she’d ever looked at me directly. "It’s so exciting – like where does it come from? It’s like nature, just coming from itself."

Then Eliza said, "I write poetry."

"Is that so?" Joseph said, smiling a cryptic little smile. "I guess we all write poetry." He leaned back in his chair.

"I – I read your blog," Eliza continued. "I love the poem you submitted for that contest," she added. "I can’t believe it didn’t win – but I’m so glad you posted it anyway." She half-glanced at me, and Joan cupped her face in her other hand, her expression inscrutable. The three of them left together.

I spotted our instructor standing outside afterwards, smoking and watching a couple of ladybugs crawl across the stone walkway. "Lots of ladybugs around," I observed, and he nodded thoughtfully. "There’s nothing for them to eat," he said. "All the other bugs are gone."

Poor hungry bugs, I thought, who dies first? The big yellow angry hornets, their brain-chips ripped apart by the frost? What do they eat – ants? Do all the ants die first? I imagined millions of ant-bodies under the ground, frozen mid-business, curled stacked little husks. I imagined squirrels seeking the ant-crypts in winter, burrowing through the glass-hard ground – white-gray, then brown-black, then black-black, yielding open tunnels at last.

"You know, Victoria," he said, "I didn’t say this in class, but the short story you wrote for this week…when you think about it in terms of its genre, it shows great promise."

My heart leapt. "Yeah?"

"Yeah!" he said, smiling a huge and genuine smile. "I mean, it’s such a smart move – people can’t get enough of chick lit right now. There’s a huge market for it – it’s just exploding! They just can’t read it fast enough. Good for you for getting in there."

"Oh. Thanks," I said.

"Yeah!" he said, clapping me on the shoulder, still smiling. "You know, I think you’re gonna do well."

On his way to his car he stepped on two of those ladybugs. I still wonder if he noticed.

Victoria Hetherington is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here.

"Night in the Ocean" - Young Magic (mp3)

"You With Air" - Young Magic (mp3)

"Yalam" - Young Magic (mp3)

photo by Elias Gayles