Uglypuss

Joel hates November. As far as he’s concerned they could drop it down the chute and he wouldn’t complain. Drizzle and chill, everyone depressed, and then the winter to go through afterwards. The landlord has turned down the heat again, which means Joel has to either let his buns solidify and break off or use the electric heater, which means more money, because the electricity’s extra. The landlord does this to spite him, Joel, personally. Just for that, Joel refuses to move. He tells other people he likes the building, which he does: it’s a golden oldie, a mansion that’s seen better days, with an arched entrance-way and stained glass. But also he won’t give the old rent-gouger the satisfaction. Becka could handle him, when she was still living here. All she’d had to do was lean over the banister while the old bugger was standing below, and use her good voice, the furry one, and up went the temperature; a trick that’s not possible for Joel.

He’d like to be someplace warm, but who can afford it? Too bad they made grants taxable, not that he’s likely to get another one the ways things are going.

Things are not going too well. He’s beginning to think street theatre should stay in California: up here you can only do it three months of the year, and some of that is too hot, they steam inside those outsize masks. Even directing is no picnic. Last summer he got a sunburn, on the top of his head, where he’s beginning to go bald. It was right after this that Becka caught him in the bathroom, standing with his back to the mirror, looking at his head from behind with a plastic violet-framed hand mirror, hers. She wouldn’t let up on that for weeks. “Checked out your manly beauty this morning?” “Thought about Hair-Weeve?” “You’d look cute as a blonde. It would go with the skull.” “Chest wigs yet?” “You could cut off some of your beard and glue it on the top, right?” Maybe he had it coming; he remembered getting onto her about spending twenty-five dollars at the hairdresser’s once, soon after she’d moved in with him. It was her twenty-five dollars, but they were supposed to be sharing expenses. He’d called it an indulgence. She remembered that he remembered, of course. She has a memory like a rat-trap: full of rats.

Joel’s fingers are cold. The apartment is like a football game in the rain. He puts down the black Bic ball-point with which he hasn’t written anything for the past half hour, stretches, scratches his head. He recalls, for an instant and with irritation, the Italian calligraphy pen Becka affected for awhile: an affectation that has gone the way of all the others. Then he turns back to square one.

The piece they’re working on is for two weeks from now: the Crucifixion according to Solemate Sox, with management as Judas. They’re going to do it right beside the picket lines, which will cheer the picketers up, or that was the general idea. Joel isn’t too sure about this piece, and there’s been a certain amount of debate about it within the group. The concept was Becka’s: she justified it by saying they should pick symbolism the workers can tune into, and most of these workers are Portuguese, they’ll know all about Judas, you only have to look at the statues on their lawns, all those bleeding plaster Jesuses and Virgin Marys with their creepy-looking babies. Though for the same reason some of the others felt that Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes, might turn out to be too much for them. There could be a communications breakdown. Joel himself had been uneasy, but he’d voted on Becka’s side, because they’d still been trying to work it out then and he knew what hell there would be to pay if he’d come out against her. Just another example, she would have said, of how he would never let her express herself.

He hopes it won’t rain: if it does, the giant sock will get waterlogged, among other things. Maybe they should scrap it, try for another approach. Whatever they do, though, they’ll probably have the assistant manager and the old boy himself coming outside and accusing them of anti-Semitism. This happens to Joel a lot; it’s escalated after the piece on Lebanon and arms sales to South Africa they did outside the Beth Tzedec on Yom Kippur. Possibly the portable canvas mass grave, filled with baby dolls and splashed with red paint, had been going too far. A couple of the troupe members had wondered whether it was in bad taste, but Joel had said that bad taste was just an internalized establishment enforcer.

Joel doesn’t believe in pulling punches. And if you punch, they punch back. It’s getting so he can hardly go to parties any more. Though it’s not all parties he should avoid, only certain kinds, the kinds where he will find his own second cousins and men he went to shul with, who are now dentists or have gone into business. Even before the Lebanon piece, they were none too polite. At the last party, a woman he didn’t know at all, an older woman, came up to him and said, “Instead of shaking your hand I should kick you in the stomach.”

“What for?” said Joel.

“You know what for,” the woman said. “You’ve got a nerve. Eating our food. Better you should choke.”

“Don’t you think there should be an open discussion of the situation?” said Joel. “Like they do in Israel?”

“Goys have no right,” said the woman.

“So who’s a goy?” said Joel.

“You,” said the woman. “You’re not a real Jew.”

“All of a sudden you’re some kind of self-appointed committee on racial purity?” said Joel. “Anyway, read the Torah. They used to stone the prophets.”

“Shmuck,” said the woman.

Joel tries not to let it get to him: he’s got his credentials ready. You want murdered relatives? he’ll tell them. I’ve got.

Then how can you betray them? they’ll say. Spitting on the dead.

You think they’d agree with what’s happening? he’ll say. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Then there’s a silence in him, because that’s a thing no one will ever know.

Joel’s head hurts. He gets up from his desk, sits down in the chair he thinks in, which is like the one at home that his father used to lie in to read the paper, a Lay-Zee-Boy recliner, covered in black naugahyde. Joel bought his at least third-hand from the Goodwill, out of nostalgia and a wish for comfort; though Becka said he did it to affront her. She could never stand any of his furniture, especially the Ping-Pong table; she was always lobbying for a real dining-room table, though, as Joel would point out with great reasonableness, it wouldn’t have a double function.

“You’re always talking about bourgeoise,” she’d say, which wasn’t true. “But that chair is the essence. Eau de bourgeoise.” She pronounced it in three syllables: boor-joo-ice. Maybe she did this on purpose, to get at him by mutilating the word, though the only time he’d corrected her (the only time, he’s sure of that), she’d said, “Well, excuse me for living.” Could he help it if he’d spent a year in Montreal? And she hadn’t. He couldn’t help any of the things that he had and she hadn’t.

Early on, he thought they’d been engaging in a dialogue, out of which, sooner or later, a consensus would emerge. He thought they’d been involved in a process of mutual adjustment and counter-adjustment. But viewed from here and now, it was never a dialogue. It was merely a degrading squabble.

Joel decides not to brood any more about boring personal shit. There are more important things in the world. He picks up this morning’s paper, from where it lies in segments on the floor, in which he knows he will read distorted and censored versions of some of them; but just as he’s settling down to the purblind and moronic “Letters to the Editor” section, the phone rings. Joel hesitates before answering it: maybe it will be Becka, and he never knows which angle she’ll be coming at him from. But curiosity wins, as it often does where Becka is concerned.

It isn’t Becka though. “I’m going to cut your nuts off,” says a male voice, almost sensuously, into his ear.

“To whom do you wish to speak?” says Joel, doing his best imitation of an English butler from a thirties film. Joel watches a lot of late movies.

This isn’t the first phone call like this he’s had. Sometimes they’re anti-Semites, wanting to cut his Jewish nuts off; sometimes they’re Jews, wanting to cut his nuts off because they don’t think he’s Jewish enough. In either case the message is the same: his nuts must go. Maybe he should introduce the two sides and they could cut each other’s nuts off; that seems to be their shtick. He likes his where they are.

Joel’s elocution throws the guy and he mumbles something about dirty Commie bastards. Joel tells him that Mr. Murgatroyd is not home at the moment; would he care to leave his name and number? The coward hangs up, and so does Joel. He’s sweating all over. He didn’t when this first started happening, but the ones at two A.M. have been getting to him.

Joel doesn’t want to turn into one of those paranoids who dive under the sofa every time there’s a knock at the door. No Gestapo here, he tells himself. What he needs is some food. He goes out to the kitchen and rummages through the refrigerator, finding not much. Of the two of them, it was Becka who’d done most of the shopping. Without her, he’s reverted to his old habits: pizza, Kentucky Fried, doughnuts from the Dunkin’ Donuts. He knows it’s unhealthy, but he indulges in unhealth as a kind of perverse rebellion against her. He used to justify his tastes by saying that this was what the average worker eats, but he knew even at the time that he was using ideology to cover for addiction. He must be getting middle-aged though, because he’s still taking the vitamin pills Becka used to foist on him, threatening him with beri-beri, constipation, and scurvy if he dodged. He recalls with some pain her roughage phase.

The truth is that even Becka’s normal cooking, good though it was, made him nervous. He always felt he was in the wrong house, not his, since he’d never associated home with edible food. His mother had been such a terrible cook that he’d left the dinner table hungry more evenings than not. At midnight he would prowl through his mother’s apartment, stomach growling so loud you’d have thought it would wake her up, on bare criminal feet into the kitchen. Then followed the hunt for the only remotely digestible objects in the place, which were always baked goods from stores like Hunt’s or Woman’s Bakery, apple turnovers, muffins, cupcakes, cookies. She used to hide them on him; they’d never be in the refrigerator or the breadbox, not once she’d figured out that it was him who’d been eating them at night. Carefully, like a safe-cracker turning a sensitive combination lock, he’d dismantle the kitchen, moving one pot at a time, one stack of dishes. Sometimes she’d go so far as to stash them in the living room; once, even in the bathroom, under the sink. That was stooping pretty low. He remembers the sense of challenge, the mounting excitement, the triumph when he would finally uncover those familiar sweet oily brown-paper bags with their tightly screwed tops and their odour, faintly stale. He has an image of himself, in his pyjamas, crouching beside the cache he’s just dragged out from under the easy chair, cramming in the Chelsea buns, gloating. Next day she’d never mention it. Once or twice he failed, but only once or twice. She never mentioned that, either.

Now, prodding the shambles in his own refrigerator, Joel can’t find anything to eat. There’s half a pint of yoghurt, but it’s left over from Becka and, by now, questionable. He decides to go out. He locates his jacket finally, which is in the nest of clothing at the bottom of the hall closet. Things somehow don’t stay hung up when he hangs them. The jacket has Bluejays across the back and is ravelling at the cuffs; it has grease on it from where he crawled under the car, years ago, trying to prove to someone or other that he knew why it was leaking; a futile exercise. The car had been completely irrational; there was never a plausible explanation for any of the things it did, any of the parts that fell off it. Joel felt that driving it was like thumbing your nose at the car establishment, at car snobbery, at the Platonic idea of cars; he refused to trade it in. This was the car that finally got stolen. “They were doing us all a favour,” said Becka.

Becka once threatened to burn his Bluejays jacket. She said if he had to wear a stupid macho label, at least he could pick a winner; which goes to show how much she knows about it. Expos she could live with. By that time he’d started ignoring her; the text anyway, not the subtext. In so far as that was possible.

As he’s doing up the zipper the phone rings. Joel thinks it may be another nut-cutter; he should get a telephone-answering machine, the kind you can listen in on. But this time it really is Becka. The small sad voice tonight, the one he never trusts. She’s more believable when she’s being loud.

“Hi, Becka,” he says, carefully neutral. “How are things going?” She was the one who walked out, though “walked” is too mild a description of it, so if there’s conciliation to be done she can do it. “You want something?” he adds.

“Don’t be like that,” she says, after a short evaluating pause.

“Like what?” he says. “What am I being like that’s so terrible?”

She sighs. He’s familiar with these sighs of hers: she sighs over the phone better than any woman he’s ever known. If he hadn’t been sighed at by her so often, if he didn’t know the hidden costs, he’d fall for it. She dodges his question, though; once she’d have met it head-on. “I thought maybe I could come over,” she says. “So we could talk about it.”

“Sure,” says Joel, sliding into an old habit: he’s never refused an offer to talk about it. But also he knows where talking about it leads. He pictures Becka’s body, which she always holds back as the clincher; which is what he calls lush and she calls fat. Some of their first arguments were over this difference of opinion. “I’ll be here,” he says. If it’s an offer, why turn it down?

But after he puts down the phone he regrets his easy acquiescence. So they go to bed. So what? What’s it expected to prove? Is she working up to another move, back in? He’s not sure he feels like going through the whole wash and spin cycle once again. Anyway, he’s hungry. He types out a note – writing would be too intimate – saying he’s been called out suddenly, to an important meeting, and he’ll talk to her later. He doesn’t say see. He opens the back door, which is the one she’ll use, and tapes the note to it, noticing as he does so that someone has thrown an egg at his door: the remains are oozing down the paintwork, partly solidified, the broken shell is on the sidewalk.

Joel goes back in, closes the door. It’s dark out there. Someone has taken a lot of trouble, going around to the back like that; someone who knows exactly who lives behind his door. It wasn’t just a random shot, someone who happened to be passing by with an egg in his hand and got a sudden urge to hurl it. He has choices: maybe it’s one of the nut-slicers, an idea he doesn’t relish. Maybe it’s the landlord: that’s what he thought last week, when he found a nail hammered through the back tire of his bicycle. He doesn’t think it’s anyone official. He’s suspected the RCMP of bugging his phone, more than once, he knows that squeaky-clean sound on the line, and no doubt he’s on their list, most people who do anything at all in this country are. But eggs they wouldn’t bother with.

Or maybe it’s Becka. Throwing an egg at his door, then phoning him to make up because she feels guilty about something she’ll never confess to him she’s done, that’s her style. “What egg?” she’ll say to him if he asks, making her innocent chipmunk eyes, and how will he ever know? Once, when they were at a party together, they heard a gossipy story about a woman who’d recently split up with a man they both knew. She’d gone to the post office and filled out a change-of-address card in his name, redirecting all his mail to a town somewhere in the middle of Africa. At the time, and because he didn’t like the guy much, Joel had found this hilarious. Becka hadn’t, though she’d listened to the story more carefully than he had, and had asked questions. It strikes him now that she’d been filing it away for future reference. Now he tries to remember the rest of the story, the other things the woman had done: intercepting the man’s shirts on the way back from the laundry and cutting off all the buttons, sending funeral wreaths to his new girl friend. Joel is safe on both counts: no laundered shirts, no new girl friend. It’s just the mail he’ll have to watch.

Now he’s wondering whether going out is such a good idea. Becka still has a key, which he’ll have to do something about pretty soon. Maybe she’ll be in his apartment, waiting for him, when he gets back. He decides to take his chances. When she finds he isn’t there, she can stay or she can go, it’s up to her. (Leaving it up to her has always been one of his best tactics. It drives her mad.) Either way, he’s made his move. He’s shown her he’s not eager. Any effort put out this time around is going to be hers.

As he searches for his wallet in the jumble of paperbacks, papers, and socks beside the bed, Uglypuss brushes against his legs, purring. He scratches her between the ears and pulls her up slowly by the tail, which he’s convinced cats like. (“Cut that out, you’ll break its spine,” Becka would protest. But Uglypuss was his goddamn cat, to begin with.)

“Uglypuss,” he says. He’s had her almost as long as he’s had his Lay-Zee-Boy recliner and his Ping-Pong table: she’s been through a lot with him. She turns her odd face up at him, half orange, half black, divided down the nose, a Yin and Yang cat, as Becka used to say during her organic-cereal and body-mind-energy phase.

She follows him to the door, the front one this time; he’ll leave through the communal vestibule, walk down the steps, where there are street lights. She meows, but he doesn’t want her going out, not at night. Even though she’s spayed, she wanders, and sometimes gets into fights. Maybe the toms can’t tell she’s a girl; or maybe they think she is, but she disagrees. He used to make pointed analyses of Uglypuss’s sexual hang-ups, to Becka, over breakfast. Whatever the reason, she gets herself messed up: her ears are nicked, and he’s had it with the antibiotic ointment, which she licks off anyway. He thinks of distracting her with food, but he’s out of cat kibble, which is one more reason for going out. He takes the container of dubious yoghurt out of the refrigerator and leaves it on the floor, opened for her.

Joel wipes his mouth, pushes the plate away. He’s stuffed down everything: weiner schnitzel, home fries, the lot. Now he’s full and lazy. The back room of the Blue Danube used to be one of his favourite places to eat, before he moved in with Becka, or rather, she moved in with him. It’s inexpensive and you get a lot for your money, good quality too. It has another advantage: other people who want cheap food come here, art students, in pairs or singly, out-of-work actors or actresses, those on the prowl but not desperate or rich or impervious enough to go to singles bars. Joel wouldn’t want to pick up the kind of girl who would go to singles bars.

Becka never liked this place, so he gradually eased out of the habit of coming here. The last time they ate together it was here, though: a sure sign, for both of them, that the tide had turned.

Becka had come back from the washroom and plunked herself down opposite him, as though she’d just made an earth-shattering discovery. “Guess what’s written in the women’s can?” she’d asked.

“I’ll bite,” said Joel.

“Women make love. Men make war,” she said.

“So?” Joel said. “Is the lipstick pink or red?”

“So it’s true.”

“That’s supposed to be an insight?” said Joel. “It’s not men that make war. It’s some men. You think those young working-class guys want to march off and be slaughtered? It’s the generals, it’s the.…”

“But it’s not women, is it?” said Becka.

“That’s got nothing to do with anything,” Joel said, exasperated.

“That’s what I mean about you,” said Becka. “It’s only your goddamned point of view that’s valid, right?”

“Bullshit,” he said. “We aren’t talking about points of view. We’re talking about history.”

As he said this, the futility of what he was trying to do swept over him, as it sometimes does: what’s the point of continuing, in a society like this one, where it’s always two steps forward and two back? The frustration, the lack of money, the indifference, and on top of that the incessant puerile bickering on the left over who’s more pure. If there was a real fight (he thinks “guns” but not “war”), if it was out in the open, things would be clearer; but this too can be seen as a temptation, the impulse to romanticize other people’s struggles. It’s hard to decide what form of action is valid. Do you have to be dead to be authentic, as the purists seem to believe? Though he hasn’t noticed any of them actually lining up for the firing squads. Maybe he’s chosen the wrong mode; maybe street theatre doesn’t fit in up here, where the streets are so neat and clean and nobody lives on them, in shacks or storm sewers or laid out on mats along the sidewalks. Sometimes he thinks maybe they’re all just play-acting, indulging in a game of adult dress-ups that accomplishes nothing in the end.

But these moods of his seldom last long. “Wars are fought so those in power can stay there,” he said to Becka, trying to be patient.

“You don’t think you’re ever going to win, do you?” Becka said softly. She can read his mind, but only at bad times.

“It’s not about winning,” Joel said. “I know whose side I’d rather be on, that’s all.”

“How about being on mine?” Becka said. “For a change.”

“What the shit are you talking about?” said Joel.

“I’m not hungry,” said Becka. “Let’s go home.”

It’s the word home that echoes in the air here for Joel now, plaintively, in a minor key. Home isn’t a place, Becka said once, it’s a feeling. Maybe that’s what’s the matter with it, Joel answered. For him, when he was growing up, home was the absence of a thing that should have been there. Going home was going into nothingness. He’d rather be out.

He looks around the room, which is smoke-filled, bare-walled, his gaze passing over couples, resting longer on women by themselves. Why not admit it? He’s come out tonight because he’s looking for it, as so many times before: someone to go home with, to her home, not his, in the hope that this unknown place, yet another unknown place, will finally contain something he wants to have. It’s Becka’s phone call that’s done it: she has that effect on him. Every move to encircle him, pin him down, force him into a corner, only makes him more desperate to escape. She never came right out and said so, but what she wanted was permanence, commitment, monogamy, the works. Forty years of the same thing night after night was a long time to contemplate.

He sees a girl he knows slightly, remembers from the summer, when they were doing the Cannibal Monster Tomato play down near Leamington, for the itinerant harvesters. (Cold-water shacks. Insecticides in the lungs. No medical protection. Intimidation. It was a good piece.) The girl was a minor player, someone who carried a sign. As he recalls, she was getting laid by one of the troupe; that was the only explanation he could think of at the time for her presence among them. He hopes he was right, he hopes she’s not too political. Becka wasn’t political when he first met her. In those days she was doing art therapy at one of the nuthouses, helping the loonies to express themselves with wet newspaper and glue. She’d had a calmness, a patience that he’s since realized was only a professional veneer, but at the time he’d settled into it like a hammock. He’d enjoyed trying to educate her, and she’d gotten into it to parrot him or please him. What a mistake.

In recent years, he’s come to realize that the kind of women that ought to turn him on – left-leaning intellectual women who can hold up their end of a debate, who believe in fifty-fifty, who can be good pals – aren’t the kind that actually do. He’s not ashamed of this discovery, as he would have been once. He prefers women who are soft-spoken and who don’t live all the time in their heads, who don’t take everything with deadly seriousness. What he needs is someone who won’t argue about whether he’s too macho, whether he should or shouldn’t encourage the capitalists by using under-arm deodorant, whether the personal is political or the political is personal, whether he’s anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-anything. Someone who won’t argue.

He pushes back his chair and walks over, ready for rejection. They can always tell him to go away. He doesn’t mind that much, he never tries to force the issue. There’s no sense in being obnoxious, and he doesn’t want to be with anyone who doesn’t want to be with him. He’s never seen the point of rape.

This girl has reddish hair, parted in the middle and drawn back. She’s crouched over her noodles, pretending to be absorbed in a large but paperbacked book that’s propped open beside her plate. Joel goes through the openers: “Hi, good to see you again. Mind if I join you?”

She glances up, with that little frown he’s seen on their faces so often, that coming-out-of-the-trance face, Oh, you startled me, as if she hasn’t been aware of his approach. She’s been aware. She recognizes him, hesitates, deciding; then she smiles. She’s grateful, he sees, for the company: it must be all over with what’s-his-name. Relieved, he sits down. Even though he knows no one is really watching him, it still makes him feel like an idiot to be sent away, like a puppy that’s made a mess.

Now for the book: that’s always a good way in. He turns it so he can see the title. Quilt-Making Through History. That’s a hard one: he knows nothing and cares less about quilt-making. He guesses that she’s the kind of girl who would read about it but would never actually do it; though opening up with a statement to this effect would be far too aggressive. It’s a mistake to begin by putting them down.

“Like a beer,” he says, “or are you a vegetarian?”

“As a matter of fact I am,” she says, with that superior tight mini-smile they give you. She hasn’t got the joke. Joel sighs; they’re off to a roaring start.

“Then I guess you mind if I smoke?” he says.

She relents; evidently she doesn’t want to drive him away. “You go ahead,” she says. “It’s a big room.” She doesn’t add that it’s full of smoke already, and he likes her better.

He thinks of saying, “Live around here?” but he can’t, not again. “Tell me about yourself” is out too. Instead he finds himself shifting almost immediately, much sooner than he usually does, into social realism. “This day has been total shit,” he says. He feels this, it’s not fake, the day has been total shit; but on another level he knows he wants sympathy, and on yet another one he’s aware it’s a useful ploy: if they feel sorry for you, how can they turn you down?

Becka used to accuse him of having a detachable prick. In her version, he unscrewed it, put it on a leash, and took it out for walks, like a dachshund without legs or a kind of truffle-hunting pig (her metaphor). According to her, it would stick itself into any hole or crevice it could find, anything vaguely funnel-shaped, remotely female. In her more surrealistic inventions (when she was still trying to live with what she called this habit of his, before she switched to compulsion, when she was still trying to be humorous about it), he’d find himself stuck somewhere, in a mouse-hole or a dead tree or an outside faucet, unable to get loose, because his prick had made a mistake. What could you expect, she said, from a primitive animal with no eyes?

“If I got you a sheep and a pair of rubber boots, would you stay home more?” she said. “We could keep it in the garage. If we had a garage. If it wasn’t too boor-joo-ice to have a garage.”

But she was wrong, it isn’t the sex he’s after. It isn’t only the sex. Sometimes he thinks, in the middle of it, that really he’d rather be jogging around the block or watching a movie or playing Ping-Pong. Sex is merely a social preliminary, the way a handshake used to be; it’s the first step in getting to know someone. Once it’s out of the way, you can concentrate on the real things; though without it, somehow you can’t. He likes women, he likes just talking with them sometimes. The ones he likes talking with, having a laugh with, these are the ones that become what he refers to privately as “repeaters.”

“How come I’m not enough for you?” Becka said, soon after the first two or three, when she’d figured it out. He wasn’t a very good liar; he resented having to conceal things.

“It’s not important,” he said, trying to comfort her; she was crying. He still loved her in a simple way then. “It’s no more important than sneezing. It’s not an emotional commitment. You’re an emotional commitment.”

“If it’s not important, why do you do it?” she said.

He wasn’t able to answer that. “This is just the way I am,” he said finally. “It’s part of me. Can’t you accept it?”

“But this is just the way I am,” she said, crying even more. “You make me feel like nothing. You make me feel I’m worth nothing to you. I’m not even worth any more than a sneeze.”

“That’s blackmail,” he said, pulling away. He couldn’t stand to have love and fidelity extracted from him, like orange juice or teeth. No squeezers. No pliers. She should have known she was the central relationship: he’d told her often enough.

This girl’s name, which he’s forgotten but which he digs out of her by pretending to almost remember it, is Amelia. She works, of course, in a bookstore. Looking more closely, he can see she’s not quite as young as he first thought. There are tiny shrivellings beginning around her eyes, a line forming from the nostril to the corner of her mouth; later it will extend down to her chin, which is small and pointed, and she will develop that peevish, starved look. Redheads have delicate skin, they age early. She has a chain around her neck, with a glass pendant on it containing dried flowers. He guesses she’ll be the kind of girl who has prisms hanging in her window and a poster of a whale over the bed, and when they get to her place, she does.

Amelia turns out to be one of the vocal kind, which he likes: it’s a tribute, in a way. He’s surprised, too: you couldn’t have told it by looking at her, that almost prissy restraint and decorum, the way she tightened her little bum, moved it away when he put his hand on it as she was unlocking the door. Joel doesn’t know why he always expects girls with pierced ears and miniature gold stars in them, high cheekbones and frail rib cages, to be quiet in bed. It’s some antiquated notion he has about good taste, though he should know by now that the thin ones have more nerve-endings per square inch.

Afterwards she goes back to being subdued, as if she’s faintly ashamed of herself for those groans, for having clutched him like that, as if he’s not a semi-stranger after all. He wonders how many times she’s gone home with someone she barely knows; he’s curious, he’d like to ask, “You do this often?” But he knows from past experience they’re likely to find this insulting, some kind of obscure slur on their moral standards; even if, like himself, they do. Sometimes, especially when they’re younger, he feels he ought to tell them they shouldn’t behave like this. Not all men are good risks, even the ones who eat at the Blue Danube. They could be violent, into whips or safety pins, perverts, murderers; not like him. But any interference from him could be interpreted as patriarchal paternalism: he knows that from experience too. It’s their own lookout; anyway, why should he complain?

Amelia lies against him, head on his biceps, red hair spilling across his arm, her mouth relaxed; he’s grateful for her simple physical presence, the animal warmth. Women don’t like the term “muff,” he knows that; but for him it’s both descriptive and affectionate: something furry that keeps you warm. This is the kind of thing he needs to get him through November. She’s even being friendly, in a detached sort of way. He can’t always depend on them to be friendly afterwards. They’ve been known to hold it against him, as if it’s something he’s done all by himself, to them instead of with them; as if they’ve had nothing to do with it.

He likes this one well enough to suggest that maybe they could watch the late show on TV, which isn’t an experience he’d want to share with just anyone. Sex yes, late movies no. He wonders if she’s got any food in the house, some cake maybe, which they could eat right off the plate while watching, licking the icing from each other’s fingers. He’s hungry again, but more than that, he wants the feeling of comfort this would bring. There’s something about lemon icing in a dark room. But when she says without any undertones that, no, she’d like some sleep, she needs to get up early to go to her fitness class before work, that’s all right with him too. He puts on his clothes, lighthearted; this whole thing has cheered him up a lot. He has that secret feeling of having gotten away with it again, in the bedroom window and out again without being caught: no sticky flypaper here. He remembers, briefly, the day he figured out his mother was hiding the cookies, not so he wouldn’t find them, but so he would, and how enraged, how betrayed he’d been. He’d seen the edge of her green chenille bathrobe whisking back around the corner; she’d been standing in the hall outside the kitchen, listening to him eat. She must have known what a rotten cook she was, and this was her backhanded way of making sure he got at least some food into him. That’s what he thinks now, but at the time he merely felt he’d been controlled, manipulated by her all along. Maybe that was when he started to have his first doubts about free will.

Amelia has turned on her side and is almost asleep. He kisses her, says he’ll let himself out. He wonders if he likes her well enough to see her again, decides he probably doesn’t. Nevertheless he makes a note of her phone number, memorizing it off the bedside phone; he’ll jot it down later, out in the kitchen, where she won’t notice. He never knows when a thing like that will come in handy. Any port in a storm, and when he’s at a low point, a trough in the graph, he needs to be with someone and it doesn’t much matter who, within limits.

He pisses into her toilet, flushes it, noting the anti-nuke sticker on the mirror, the pots of herbs struggling for existence on the windowsill. Then he goes into the kitchenette and turns on the light, taking a quick peek into the refrigerator in passing, on the off-chance she’s got something unhealthy and delicious in there. But she’s a tofu girl, and reluctantly he’s out the door.

He’s not thinking about Becka. He doesn’t remember her till his key’s in the lock, when he has a sudden image of her, waiting on the other side, black hair falling around her face like something in a Lorca play, large wounded eyes regarding him, some deadly instrument in her hand: a corkscrew, a potato peeler, or, more historically, an ice-pick, though he doesn’t own one. Cautiously he opens the door, eases through, is relieved when nothing happens. Maybe it’s finally over, after all. It occurs to him that he’s forgotten to buy cat food.

His relief lasts until he hits the living room. She’s been here, all right. He gazes at the innards of his Lay-Zee-Boy, strewn across the floor, its wiry guts protruding from what’s left of the frame, at the hunks of soft foam from the sofa washing against the fireplace as if it’s a shore, as if Becka has been a storm, a hurricane. In another corner he finds all his Ping-Pong balls, lined up in a row and stomped on; they look like hatched-out turtle eggs. Some of his underwear is lying in the fireplace, charred around the edges, still smouldering.

He shrugs. Histrionic bitch, he thinks. So he’ll replace it: there’s nothing here that can’t be duplicated. She won’t get to him that easily. She hasn’t touched the typewriter, though: she knows exactly how far she can go.

Then he sees the note. Want Uglypuss back? It’s in a garbage can. Start looking. The note is pinned to the big orange art-shop candle on the mantlepiece, one of the first things she gave him. It’s as if he’s finally had a visit from Santa Claus, who has turned out to be the monster his mother was always warning him against when he showed symptoms of wanting a Christmas like some of the other kids on the block. Santa Claus brings you lumps of coal and rotten potatoes. What do you need it for?

But this was no Santa Claus, it was Becka, who knows just where to slide in the knife. Dead or alive, she doesn’t say. She’s never exactly loved Uglypuss, but surely she wouldn’t murder. He fears the worst, but he can’t assume it. He’ll have to go and see. He hears the claws scrabbling on metal, the plaintive wails, the mounting panic, as he does up his zipper again. Finally he knows she’ll stop at nothing.

He walks in a widening circle through the streets around his house, opening every can, digging through the bags, listening for faint meows. He shouldn’t be spending time on something this trivial, this personal; he should be conserving his energy for the important things. What he needs is perspective. This is Becka controlling him again. Maybe she was lying, maybe Uglypuss is safe and sound at her new place, purring beside the hot-air register. Maybe Becka is making him go through all this for nothing, hoping he’ll arrive on her doorstep and she can torture him or reward him, whichever she feels like at the moment.

“Uglypuss!” he calls. He tells himself he’s in a state of shock, it will hit him tomorrow, when the full implications of a future without Uglypuss will sink in. At the moment though he’s thinking: Why did I have to give it that dumb name?

Becka walks along the street. She has often walked along this particular street. She tells herself there is nothing unusual about it.

Both of her hands are bare, and there’s blood on the right one and four thin lines of it across her cheek. In her right hand she’s carrying an axe. Actually it’s smaller than an axe, it’s a hatchet, the one Joel keeps beside the fireplace to split the kindling when he lights the fire. Once she liked to make love with him on the rug in front of the fireplace, in the orange glow from the candle. That was until he said there was always a draft and he’d rather be in bed, where it was warmer. After a while she figured out that he didn’t really like being looked at; he had an odd sort of modesty, as if he felt his body belonged to him alone. Once she tried flattering him about it, but this was a bad move, you weren’t supposed to compare. So then it was under the covers, like a married couple. Before that she used to bug him about keeping the axe in the living room, she wanted him to leave it on the back porch and split the kindling out there instead; she told him she didn’t like getting splinters.

It was looking at the axe that finally did it. Joel was gone when he said he’d be there. She didn’t know exactly where he’d gone but she knew in general. He was always doing that to her. She waited for an hour and a half, pacing, reading his magazines, surrounded by a space that used to be hers and still felt like it. The heat was off, which meant Joel had been antagonizing the landlord again. She thought about lighting a fire. Uglypuss came and rubbed against her legs and complained, and when she went into the kitchen to put out some food, there was the yoghurt she’d bought herself, opened on the floor.

She asked herself how long she was going to wait. Even if he came back soon, he’d have that smug look and the smell of it still on him. She’d have the choice of ignoring it, in which case he won, or saying something, in which case he won also, because then he could accuse her of intruding on his privacy. It would be just another example, he’d say, of why things couldn’t work out. That would make her angry – they could, they could work out if he’d only try – and then he would criticize her for being angry. Her anger would be a demonstration of the power he still holds over her. She knows it, but she can’t control it. This time was once too often. It was always once too often.

Becka walks quickly, head a little down and forward, as if she has to push to make her way through the air. Her hair blows back in the wind. It’s beginning to drizzle. In her left hand she’s carrying a green plastic garbage bag, screwed shut and knotted at the top. The street she’s on is Spadina, a street she remembers from childhood as the place where she would be taken by her grandfather when he wanted to pay visits to some of his old cronies. She’d be shown off by him, and given things to eat. That was before the Chinese mostly took over. It’s well enough lighted, even at this time of night, bamboo furniture, wholesale clothing, restaurants, ethnic as they say; but she’s not buying or eating, she’s just looking, thanks, for a garbage can, someplace to dump the bag. An ordinary garbage can is all she asks; why can’t she find one?

She can’t believe she’s done what she’s just done. What horrifies her is that she enjoyed it, the axe biting into the black naugahyde of that ratty chair of his, into the sofa, the stuffing she’d pulled out and thrown around, it might as well have been Joel. Though if he’d been there he would have stopped her. Just by being there, by looking at her as if to say, You mean you really can’t think of anything more important to do?

This is what he’s turned me into, she thinks. I was never this mean before, I used to be a nice person, a nice girl. Didn’t I?

Today, before calling him, she’d been sick of the taste of the inside of her own mouth. She’d had enough of solitude, enough freedom. A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Brave words, she’d said them once herself. That was before she figured out she wasn’t a fish. Today she thought she still loved him, and love conquers all, doesn’t it? Where there’s love there’s hope. Maybe they could get it back, together. Now, she doesn’t know.

She thinks about stuffing the garbage bag into a mailbox, the parcel kind, or a newspaper stand. She could put in the quarter, open the box, take out the newspaper, leave the bag. Someone would find it quicker that way. She is not heartless.

But suddenly there’s a garbage can, not a plastic one but old-style metal, in front of a Chinese fruit-and-vegetable store. She goes over to it, leans the hatchet against it, sets down the bag, tries to lift the lid. Either it’s stuck or her hands are numb. She bangs it against a telephone pole; several people look at her. At last the lid comes loose. Luckily the can is half empty. She drops the bag in. Not a sound: she sprayed in some boot water-proofer, which was about the only thing she could think of: breathing the fumes makes you dizzy. Kids at high school used to get high on it. The stupid cat clawed its way through the first two garbage bags, before she thought of tying it up in one of Joel’s shirts and spraying it with boot water-proofer to quiet it down. She doesn’t know if it went unconscious; maybe it just couldn’t get through Joel’s shirt and decided not to fight a losing battle. Maybe it’s catatonic. To coin a phrase. She hopes she hasn’t killed it. She pokes the bag a little: there’s a wiggle. She’s relieved, but she doesn’t relent and let it loose. Why should she have all the grief? Let him have some, for a change.

This is what will really get to him, she knows: this theft. His kidnapped child, the one he wouldn’t let her have. We’re not ready yet and all that crap. Crap! He’d always thought more of the cat than he did of her. It used to make her sick, to watch the way he’d pick it up by the tail and run it through his hands, like sand, and the cat loved it, like the nauseating masochist it was. It was the kind of cat that drooled when you stroked it. It fawned all over him. Maybe the real reason she couldn’t stand it was that it was a grotesque and stunted furry little parody of herself. Maybe this was what she looked like, to other people, when she was with him. Maybe this was what she looked like to him. She thinks of herself lying with her eyes closed and her mouth slack and open. Did he remember what she looked like at those moments, when he was with others?

She doesn’t close the lid on the garbage can. She leaves the hatchet where it is, walks away. She feels smaller, diminished, as if something’s been sucking on her neck. Anger is supposed to be liberating, so goes the mythology, but her anger has not freed her in any way that she can see. It’s only made her emptier, flowing out of her like this. She doesn’t want to be angry; she wants to be comforted. She wants a truce.

She can remember, just barely, having had confidence in herself. She can’t recall where she got it from. Go through life with your mouth open, that used to be her motto. Live in the now. Encounter experience fully. Hold out your arms in welcome. She once thought she could handle anything.

Tonight she feels dingy, old. Soon she will start getting into the firming cream; she will start worrying about her eyelids. Beginning again is supposed to be exciting, a challenge. Beginning again is fine as an idea, but what with? She’s used it all up; she’s used up.

Still, she would like to be able to love someone; she would like to feel inhabited again. This time she wouldn’t be so picky, she’d settle for a man maybe a little worn around the edges, a second, with a few hairline cracks, a few pulled threads, something from a fire sale, someone a little damaged. Like those ads for adoptable children in the Star: “Today’s Child.” Today’s lover. A man in a state of shock, a battered male. She’d take a divorced one, an older one, someone who could only get it up for kinky sex, anything, as long as he’d be grateful. That’s what she wants, when it comes right down to it: a gratitude equal to her own. But even in this she’s deluding herself. Why should such a man be any different from the rest? They’re all a little damaged. Anyway, she’d be clutching at a straw, and who wants to be a straw?

She should never have called him. She should know by now that over is over, that when it says The End at the end of a book it means there isn’t any more; which she can never quite believe. The problem is that she’s invested so much suffering in him, and she can’t shake the notion that so much suffering has to be worth something. Maybe unhappiness is a drug, like any other: you could develop a tolerance to it, and then you’d want more.

People came to the end of what they had to say to one another, Joel told her once, during one of their many sessions about whether they should stay together or not; the time he was trying for wisdom. After that point, he said, it was only repetition. But Becka protested; Becka hadn’t come to the end of what she had to say, or so she thought. That was the trouble: she never came to the end of what she had to say. He’d push her too far and she’d blurt things out, things she couldn’t retrieve, she would make clumsy mistakes of a kind she never made with other people, the landlord for instance, with whom she was a miracle of tact. But with Joel, the irrevocable is always happening.

He once told her he wanted to share his life with her. He said he’d never asked anyone that before. How she melted over that, how she lapped it up! But he never said he wanted her to share her life with him, which, when it happened, turned out to be a very different thing.

What now, now that she’s done it? Time will go on. She’ll walk back to the row house in Cabbagetown she shares with two other women. This is about all she can afford; at least she has her own room. She hardly ever sees the other two women; she knows them mostly by their smells, burnt toast in the mornings, incense (from one of them, the one with the lay-over boy friend) at night. The situation reeks of impermanence. She got the place by answering an ad in the paper, Third woman needed, share kitchen, no drugs or freaks, after moving out of the apartment she still thinks of as her own, and after a miserable week with her mother, who thought but did not say that it served her right for not insisting on marriage. What did she expect anyway, from a man like that? Not a real job. Not a real Jew. Not real.

When she gets to the house she’ll be worn out, her adrenalin high gone, replaced by a flat grey fatigue. She’ll put on her most penitential nightgown, blue-flowered flannelette, the one Joel hates because it reminds him of landladies. She’ll fix herself a hot-water bottle and climb into a bed which does not yet smell like hers and feel sorry for herself. Maybe she should go out hunting, sit in a bar, something she’s never done, though there’s always a first time. But she needs her sleep. Tomorrow she has to go to work, at her new job, her old job, mixing poster paints for the emotionally disturbed, a category that right now includes her. It doesn’t pay well and there are hazards, but these days she’s lucky to have it.

She couldn’t stay with the troupe, even though she’d done such a good job of the headless corpses for the El Salvador piece in the spring, even though it was her who’d come up with Christ as a knitted sock. It would be disruptive for the troupe, they both agreed on that, to have her there; the tension, the uneven balance of conflicting egos. Or words to that effect. He was so good at that bullshit, the end result of which was that she’d been out of a job and he hadn’t, and for a while she’d even felt noble about it.

Becka’s four blocks away from the garbage can now, and it’s raining in earnest. She stands under an awning, waiting for the rain to slow down, trying to decide whether or not to give in and take the streetcar. She wants to walk all the way back, to get rid of this furious energy.

It’s time for Joel to be coming home. She pictures him opening the door, throwing his jacket on the floor; she sees what he will find. Now she feels as if she’s committed a sacrilege. Why should she feel that way? Because for at least two years she thought he was God.

He isn’t God. She can see him, in his oily Bluejays jacket, running through the streets, panting because he’ll be out of breath, he’ll have eaten too much for dinner, with whatever slut he’d picked up, plunging his hands into chilly garbage, calling like a fool: Uglypuss! People will think he’s crazy. But he will only be mad with grief.

Like her, leaning her forehead against the cold shop window, staring through the dark glass, yellowed by those plastic things they put there to keep the sun from fading the colours, at the fur-coated woman inside, tears oozing down her cheeks. She can’t even remember now which garbage can she put the damn thing in, she couldn’t find it again if she looked. She should have taken it home with her. It was her cat too, more or less, once. It purred and drooled for her, too. It kept her company. How could she have done that to it? Maybe the boot spray will make it feeble-minded. That’s all he’ll need, a feeble-minded cat. Not that anyone will be able to tell the difference.

In her either, if she goes on like this. She wipes her nose and eyes on her damp sleeve, straightens. When she gets home she’ll do some Yogic breathing and concentrate on the void for a while, trying once more for serenity, and take a bath. My heart does not bleed, she tells herself. But it does.