Love Enough (3 page)

Needless to say Lia continues to ring Jasmeet’s cell-phone. No answer. She imagines her calls bouncing off satellites, the great telescopes of the desert, the Pleiades. She’s sent texts—after the first week: “How is it? When?” Ten days later: “If you tell me where you are …” Next, after three weeks: “Mrs. Cho freakin’ out.” She’s called Jasmeet’s parents; they become as anxious as she is. Now Jasmeet will hate her for alarming them but Lia doesn’t care. Lastly, after the fourth week: “I’ll be on the island!”

On weekends, she and Jasmeet had gone often on the ferry over the lake to Ward’s Island. She had loved the lake putting volume and distance between themselves and the city. They would walk naked, where you could walk naked, on the beach at Hanlan’s Point. Jasmeet, decadent, except for beaded strings around her waist and
mehndi
on her hands and feet. The last time, Lia had asked to borrow a waist string and Jasmeet had removed one and placed it around Lia’s waist.
Wouldn’t it be great to live here
, Jasmeet had said, and Lia agreed. Jasmeet had talked about her travels through the world so far, going to all the spiritual places. She’d already been to Varanasi, went to
aarti
on the ghats for five nights and bathed in the Ganges. Then she went to Rishikesh and studied the Bhagavad Gita with Swami Sivananda. It was such a relief to listen to Jasmeet. Like breathing air. She was like someone from another world. So far away from the world Lia was used to, a world full of the emergencies of a small life. Jasmeet had said these places were power places, where the magnetic fields were strongest and she could feel their sheer power pass through her, and now she wanted to go to Peru for the Mayan apocalypse. Everybody was going, she had said, and Lia should go too, to recalibrate her qi.

Mrs. Cho’s certainly wasn’t a ‘power place,’ no magnetic fields above Dundas street. The only phenomenon registering over the cracked ceilings, the cracked linoleum, the peeling paint in the hallway, is Mrs. Cho’s quarelling:
These young people. Artists! Always short with the rent. They always want light fixtures fixed and toilets fixed and hallways swept. They want snow removed when it piles up at the bottom of the door. They are lazy and don’t do it themselves. They leave the door open when it snows so the snow rises one flight of stairs. They think it’s funny. Soon, soon …
Mrs. Cho threatened. Ward’s Island. That’s a power place, Lia thinks. She’ll find a place there and when Mrs. Cho sells the building it will probably be replaced by a condominium, like Jameet said. They’ll wipe away any sign of Lia and Jasmeet and put hoardings up advertising tiny overpriced units.

Corporate shit, like Jasmeet said.

Lia only has small desires: like finding a first true friend, like waiting for Jasmeet to call up from Dundas Street for the keys. And for weekend nights in drum and base dance clubs, and rides on the ferry together away from the city. But mostly she wants not having life change up on her all the time. As in the life she’d had before. When they met,
Jasmeet was ahead of her already. They could have been lovers. She should have gone but she didn’t. Sometimes you have to catch a feeling right away, but nothing in Lia’s life so far has made her trust this idea.

A
ll cities are ambiguous and not just in fog or snow or rain. There is sometimes the inability to make a thing out. Fog, here, can make the next block a mystery, snow disguises the known topography. And rain, something a poet once called the happiest of weathers, rain can make life doubtful. Anyway such is the changeability, the indefiniteness of this city, a plain day is never plain. So even though it’s summer, it’s that kind of a day in the city. In fact it’s not quite day. Everything is still perfect. June sits up in bed. She’s heard something on the radio that wakes her. “One hundred musicians?” she says. “Great!”

“Musicians?
Policemen
. One hundred
policemen
.” Sydney’s been lying beside her, awake, contemplating the highway commute. She rolls over, places her feet on the floor.

“He said
musicians
.”

Sydney laughs, “Sweets, you’re still asleep, dreaming.”

“Pianists, maybe then, that would make sense, I swear I heard pianists.”

“Heading to Jane and Finch?!” Sydney laughs again.

The radio’s red numbers burn the early morning dark of the room. June is positive. The radio show she wakes to every morning on CBC never fails her. It said one hundred musicians or pianists or flautists or guitarists, but definitely something to do with music.

“That’s going to be amazing.”

“Dream on. You think they’re sending anything but cops up there?”

June feels as if she’s inhaled water. God, the idea of one hundred musicians in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood! Fucking perfect. “It’s genius!” she calls to Sydney who is moving toward the bathroom.

“For crime control, June. Why the hell would they send one hundred musicians?” Sydney’s voice is slightly exasperated now. She turns back to June on the bed, just to make
sure June’s not talking in her sleep. June’s hair is in sleep disarray, her hands in a splayed open gesture. June is sitting straight up and now she sounds combative, “Why not?”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Sydney only wants to go to the bathroom, shower, get on the 400 and get to work, ninety-six kilometres north, in Barrie, on time. Sydney doesn’t want an argument, especially not a ridiculous one.

“I heard, distinctly, the city’s sending one hundred musicians to Jane-Finch. You didn’t hear it, so don’t just dismiss it.”

Sydney really just wants to say,
good morning, honey
, and decides to say, “Good morning, honey.”

“Don’t be patronizing,” June says, “I’m only saying ‘one hundred musicians’ is what the radio said and I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

Sydney looks at her patronizingly.

“Okay, fine,” June says, “listen, they’ll repeat it, you’ll hear.”

“Honey, it’s extra police for the gangster shit up there, it’s not kindergarten.”

“Musicians,” June says emphatically. She’s intransigent now.

It’s too early. Sydney doesn’t want a fight. It’s five-thirty in the morning. The sun’s not even out yet. If it shows up at all today. There was thunder around four a.m.

Sydney remembers that once, June spent all of breakfast, the whole bloody morning, talking in Tamil. That was because the before lover was Tamil. And once, in the middle of the night June woke in Spanish. That was because of the Chilean lover in the 70s and the Nicaraguan lover in the 80s. So now these musicians. Was June seeing a musician on the side? June carries remnants of people, of things, of the world, with her. We all do, but June carries hers on the surface, her skin is iridescent with these glimpses and glances. And certainly her dreams are lustrous. Where others would filter out, June takes in. She never says who she really is though, or how she arrived in the city. Maybe she was born here, maybe not. Perhaps when she arrived she was carrying so many remnants that her true self became obscure to others. She’s vague about her past but she’s curious enough about other people’s. Sydney suspects her of polyamory but wouldn’t dare ask her. Anyway, if she did, June would say something vague or something that felt like knives and that would be the end of it. June can be vague and then again can be something like knives, and sometimes Sydney, being the lover, wants to risk all of it, like now.

“Okay, let’s listen.” Sydney sits mercilessly on the bed. Though actually another half hour can’t be wasted like this. Already cars heading north on the 400 are tight like a huddle of penguins, the 401 highway running east and west is buckling with steel and rubber megadytes, but living with June is not like living in the real world. “It’s policemen,” Sydney says resolutely.

“Musicians,” June says childishly.

Sydney is becoming intolerant. “What would musicians do?”

“Play,” June says. “Soothe the turmoil, calm the heart. Those ‘gangsters’ are children, they’re wrecked. Music would make them happy.”

“Don’t be naive. They’re gunmen. They’re sending police for the gunmen.”

“The gunmen are children. They need music. They could use some bicycles, some painters, some soccer balls, some fucking trees. The place is pure postindustrial dreck. Who wouldn’t want to murder somebody? A hundred trees, a hundred teachers, a hundred trips out of there, a hundred anything—not a hundred policemen. Why are you so fucking pessimistic?”

Sydney has lain down and has nodded off through this bizarre dawn inventory. The word “pessimistic” pierces her senses though.

“Pessimistic! Me, I’m pessimistic! Lord, why am I having this conversation?” She springs up.

“Yes, pessimistic! Why would you say ‘one hundred policemen’?”

“I’m not saying it! He said it! The guy on the cee-bee-cee!”

“No, he didn’t. You did. What are they? An invading foreign power? For god’s sake, they’re children! They’re suicidal, nihilistic, but they are
children
.”

“Murderous, more like it,” Sydney says under her breath. Sydney never expected to wake up in the heat of a guerrilla war. Who does? Unless you live with June. June’s voice becomes hectoring, “You really don’t understand these things do you? Beatriz would.”

“Oh fuck, here we go with Beatriz again!” Beatriz was the Nicaraguan.

“But …?” Sydney hears a suddenly plaintive note in June’s voice but will not be taken in and bolts for the bathroom. June turns up the radio, waiting for the news.

“No imagination … none …” June is capable of this harsh tone as regards Sydney. She is ruthless when she wants to be right.

The voice begins reading the news and June raises the volume again. It says, and June unquestionably hears, “The
mayor has decided to send one hundred musicians including flautists, guitarists, bassists, saxophonists, drummers and pianists to the Jane-Finch corridor of Toronto to help curb the violence in the neighbourhood. The plan was approved by City Council …”

“Yes!” June yells toward the bathroom door.

People hear what they want to hear. Right then Sydney is thinking, June hears what she wants to hear, believes what she wants to believe. As if she’s not living in the same time as the rest of us.

On a wall in the bedroom, there’s a picture of June dancing in a park among a troupe of dancers. The men are dressed in black, the women, including June, are in orange. June was sixteen then and thought she would dance on Broadway some day. She isn’t yet who she is now.

Even back then June’s righteousness was patent. No one told her secrets, perhaps they saw perpetual virtue in her face, as if any failure would shock her. None of the women among the dancers trusted her. They had secret lives she suspected, lives secret to her at any rate. She was aware of these secrets, though not in any concrete way, but by the way conversations stopped when she approached, and how their laughter seemed to contain the esoteric knowledge of
some requisite carnal pain that her laughter lacked. Her demeanour stopped anyone telling her a dirty or dark secret; no one confided any sordid material in her. She felt anxious, always, as if she were forever missing out on the details of what was happening in front of her very eyes. Her face was too reflective. It bothers June to this day. Her face is still a liability that way. She was also, back then, very impressionable, and perhaps she still is: she only has to hear a word or see an image or have a word conjure an image and she will be taken up with it for days. So the dancers weren’t entirely wrong in not confiding in her. All their confidences would have stayed with her; scored her. June cannot ignore hard things. Not June then, not June now. But June back then was in her timid life, and dancing was her greatest rebellion.

She remembers the day in the photograph, the sun, the orange skirts of all the other women and the music. Trevor is beside June in her orange skirt. He is young too. He is bare chested. Nothing hidden or sad about him. He is open, naked. All his desires are on full display. He wants to dance through life. And he will. He parties all night, sometimes with the other dancers, the women, sometimes on his own. He comes to class with a smile saying, “Oh, I had a terrible night,” his hand over his eyes, his mouth grinning. His
terrible is joyful. He is always looking for drama, for fun. He got June and the other dancers in on starting a speakeasy with him. He thought it could be a speakeasy at night and a dance studio in the daytime, and he could also live in the back room. And they did that for a while. But the dance studio didn’t work out: none of them had any money in those days, the ceiling was too low and he could not jeté around the small room. But he was saving to go to New York to try out for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He was going to leave the city because there were only small parts for him and he was going to New York, which was bigger and lighter. June remembers him so well, bright, glittery. His body gave off sound waves. You could see all the graceful mechanics of his skeleton. He was like a taut wire dressed in muscle, but his humour made him pliable. He loved himself, he loved his arms and his legs and his neck and his torso.