Vanishing and Other Stories (15 page)

“What? Are you popping a zit in there or something?”

“No. I'm tweezing my private part.”

“Stop being weird, okay, Lise. I need to take a piss.”

I had lined my eyes with Karen's black Liquidlast liner and brushed on the Sweet Lust shadow. I had used a concealer under my eyes and, most importantly—most sacrilegiously—I'd put on Karen's Lady Danger lipstick. This was her favourite colour—a bright, deep red. Wearing her clothes was one thing, but I knew this was too much, this was too far. When I opened the bathroom door and Lawrence saw me, he looked like he'd been smacked in the face.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I was just goofing around.” I took some toilet paper and started rubbing the lipstick off. It looked like blood on the paper.

“Stop it,” said Lawrence.

I kept slapping at my mouth with the toilet paper, but no matter how much I rubbed, there was still a stain on my lips. I thought of when I'd visited Karen at work and heard her use her salesperson's voice.
It's such a great colour on you, and this product is very long-lasting
.

“Stop it.” Lawrence put his hands on my shoulders. “Please.”

Then he turned me around to face him. It was weird to have him touch me—we'd only ever touched when Karen was around, when we gave each other group hugs. His hands made my shoulders feel tingly, and I only let them stay there because I was wearing the makeup. With all this stuff on my face, I felt like a different person. And this person, this other me, was not afraid to be touched.

Lawrence picked up the Lady Danger lipstick and looked at it. It had been worn down to a stub and I wondered how Karen was managing to live without it. Then I wondered if maybe she wasn't. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe Karen was dead. Or rather, it occurred to me that maybe I could act like she was.

This thought must have occurred to Lawrence too, because he said, “Stand still.” Then he held my face with one awkward male hand and held the tube of Lady Danger with the other. Slowly, gently, he reapplied it to my lips. He didn't do a good job, and we both laughed when we looked at me in the mirror. But that didn't matter. We both knew the lipstick would get smudged anyway. He took my hand and led me to their—his—bedroom. That first time, and every other time, we didn't bother to take Karen's clothes off my body.

 

 

MONTHS PASSED
, and I stopped wearing any of my own clothing, using my own meagre hair and beauty products, or sleeping in my own room. I couldn't even stand to look at my old, single bed. So I went to a garage sale and bought a set of vintage
wooden chairs and a lace tablecloth. Then I pulled my bed out from the wall, covered it with the tablecloth, and arranged the chairs around it.

“Now we have a dining room,” I said to Lawrence. “Now we can have dinner parties.”

We put candle holders in the centre of the mattress and came up with an imaginary guest list for our first dinner party. This list included, but was not limited to: David Lynch, Frida Kahlo, Lord Byron, John Wilmot, and Jane Jacobs.

We talked about these dinner parties while we lay in bed—our bed—and I rested my cheek on Lawrence's chest. I was used to his smell now, and the taste of his skin, and the way one of his ribs dug into the side of my head. I was not only used to these things—I liked them. I liked them so much that I thought about them all the time. As I shelved books for eight hours every day, I thought about Lawrence's body and his laugh and the way air whistled through his nostrils very quietly while he slept.

It was while we lay in bed and talked about whether Van Gogh would accept our dinner invitation that I said, “It's better now. It makes more sense. Two rooms, two cats, two people.”

“For sure,” said Lawrence, and he reached his hand under the pink negligee I'd found at the back of Karen's old closet. “For sure it does, sweet pea.”

 

 

I
'
M NOT SAYING
there weren't things that bothered me. I didn't like to come home and find Lawrence listening to “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” and not just because of the song's implications. Karen
and I had loved Rod Stewart. He'd been our thing, our guy, and I didn't want to share him with Lawrence.

One other thing that bothered me was this: Lawrence never told his family that Karen had left. He said he didn't want to worry them. So when his parents phoned, he'd say, “Yeah, Mom, everything's fine. Same old, same old.” He said that while he was beside me on the couch, his hand resting on my leg. I sat completely still and completely silent, even though I'd started to cry. This was something I had always known how to do: I could cry without making any noise. My eyes would form only a few tears, and these could be blinked back before my liner got smeared.

“Yup, Karen's fine,” Lawrence would say. “She says hi.”

But Karen had not said hi. And I had not said hi, even though I wanted to. I wanted to get on the phone the way Karen used to. I wanted to say, the way Karen used to, “Hey, Mrs. T. How are ya?”

Also, I was getting sick of Karen's clothes. None of her shirts fit right, I didn't like walking to work in high heels, and I felt a little stupid in all that makeup. But I'd noticed that when I wore my own clothes—things that seemed so soft and girlish now—Lawrence's eyes passed over me as though I wasn't really there. If I wore my own flowing skirt or my own argyle sweater, at night Lawrence would run his hands through his hair and say, “I'm wrecked. Today's shift was hell.” Then he'd go into the bedroom and fall asleep before I'd even had time to floss.

That wasn't all. Things got worse that winter, and maybe winter was to blame. Those coastal Januarys are awful in their mild way: there's no sun, there's always rain, and the mould along the windowsills really starts to assert itself. Maybe that's why Lawrence started to act funny. He called in sick to work so many times that
his manager had to talk to him. He never did dishes or picked his dirty laundry up off the floor. I had to work so much at the library to make up for his lost shifts that I didn't have time to clean either, so our place went from being pleasantly disordered to plain disgusting. He had no desire to see any of our friends, and he didn't care about our dinner party anymore. When I suggested that we add Leonard Cohen to the list, he said, “Who cares? Who cares about a stupid fantasy?”

And once, I came home from work to find him at his computer in only a pair of boxers and unzipped jeans, scrolling through pictures of models on the M•A•C website. He was looking at the Fall/Winter Trends, jerking off to girls with sculpted eyebrows and glossy, open mouths. He was so captivated by those Perfect Pouts that he didn't hear me come in.

“Lawrence,” I said.

“Hold on.” He didn't even look at me. He wanted to finish. So I took off one of the stilettos I was wearing and threw it at him. The heel caught the side of his head and he jumped up, tucked himself back into his jeans, pressed one hand to his temple. “What the fuck? What's your problem?”

“My problem? My problem is that we have bills to pay! My problem is that we have dishes to do!”

I'd never screamed at anyone before. I'd never even raised my voice. It felt even newer and stranger and better than sex.

“My problem is that I'm the one who does everything around here!” I took off the other shoe and threw it, but he managed to duck. “Do you think it's easy? Do you think I like looking like this?” I tore off a set of fake eyelashes, dropped it, and ground it into the carpet with my toe. “It's like I'm ripping off a layer of my
own skin, Lawrence. Every single day I'm ripping off a layer of my own skin.”

This was true and it was also not true. There was part of me that loved looking the way I looked, loved wearing those clothes and those eyelashes. But there was another version of me who couldn't breathe under all that foundation. This was the me that was screaming. The me that was crying so hard she could barely breathe. This me didn't give a shit about her eyeliner.

“I wish you had killed yourself.” That wasn't true, but I liked saying it. “I wish you'd killed yourself the way Jerry would have.”

Lawrence didn't say anything. He just slid his jeans down—he hadn't had a chance to zip them up—and kicked them off his feet. He did the same with his boxers: dropped them down his legs and left them on the floor. He wants to fuck, I thought, and I hoped he would spontaneously combust.

But then I realized this was the first time I'd seen him without anything on. He slept in underwear and a T-shirt and that's what I was used to. It was the first time one of us had been in front of the other entirely naked. He stood there, slouched and quiet, and let me look at all the flaws of his body, all the things makeup could never hide: patches of uneven hair on his abdomen, arms that were too skinny, feet that were too big, and that stupid-looking thing between his legs.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Then he bent and picked up a pair of tights I'd left on the floor. They were red, and Karen used to wear them with flats, an A-line skirt, and her beret. Lawrence put them on and pulled them up along his calves, over his thighs, above his hips. He was about the same height as Karen, so they fit him better than they fit me.

Then he slipped on the shoes I'd thrown at him, placing one red foot in, then the other. They were too small for him, and he looked pained and wobbly in them. He looked idiotic in the whole getup. He looked like a pale, straight man in drag. A pale, straight man in drag who missed his girlfriend. “Lise,” he said. This was the first time in months he'd used my name. “Lise, I'm sorry.”

And he might have said other things too—other sweet, kind things—but I interrupted him. I walked up, stood on my tiptoes, and pressed my mouth against his so hard that I thought our teeth would crack.

 

 

THINGS GOT BETTER AFTER THAT
. Spring arrived, the rain was replaced by sunshine and cherry blossoms, and we scrubbed the mouldy windowsills with bleach. Lawrence got fired from Blockbuster, but that turned out great because then he got a job at the independent video store. This video store was beside a farmers' market, and he would bring home something delicious every day—heirloom tomatoes or goat cheese or local pears. I gained a bit of weight, but Lawrence said he liked that, and it meant that I was beginning to fill out Karen's clothes. In fact, I didn't even consider them Karen's clothes anymore. They had been worn against my skin so often that they even smelled of me.

And I think Lawrence felt the same way about me as I felt about him. Sometimes he woke me in the middle of the night, gripped me in his sweaty arms, and asked, “You aren't going to leave me, are you, Lise? Promise?”

Of course, I promised. I had spent six years on the outside, excluded from this kind of love, so I knew I would never leave. Especially because I couldn't foresee any serious problems for this new, other us. I knew that Karen would eventually come back for her stuff, but I imagined that Lawrence and I would greet her together. I imagined that we'd hold hands, invite her in, and seat her at my old bed. “This is our dinner table,” we'd say. “This is our life.”