Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ that have taken? I felt mighty as the sea, having worn it down like that with only my nervous energy. Now what? I would’ve asked Marie, but by then she had moved back to Renfrew. I was alone with the sound of the radiator and other lives coughing through the walls.

      Now and then my mother called from not-even-Oshawa, sounding more and more, to my sharpening ear, like a complete hoser. This appraisal treacherously failed to acknowledge her raising me on Anne Carson and Japanese stoneware and black lava salt, tastes that could only just be sustained with a single, part-time income in public health. She had looked into a lot of hideous mouths to see me through McGill, as she was so fond of reminding me. I’d taken a gap year in Mexico, followed by a second gap year nurturing an acquired taste for eighties telenovelas, and finally my mother said that if I didn’t use the tuition money to learn something she was going to take her girlfriend to see the Panama Canal.

      But I, too, dropped out of university, out of Life Sciences. In a misjudged effort at gratitude, I held out until mid-November: two weeks past the refund deadline. Making a farewell round of the preserved sea creatures and fetuses lined up in jars, their eyes and nostrils still sealed, I decided not to tell my mother, not yet. (I could pay her back, I promised her, inwardly. She would escape to Panama, after all.) I stayed on in the city, picking up a job folding towels and refreshing rooms at a fancy day spa I could never have afforded to visit. It was the best I could do, and maybe a little better than I could do. I might have fared all right in France, but I barely had enough French to be a waitress here.

      The job meant waking at 6:45 every weekday. The apartment next door would already be lit up with French radio. Proof of life over there, behind the complex alarm system that seemed excessive and out of place in our semi-decrepit graystone. Just what are they fortifying? I wondered. Meth lab. Snuff set. Storehouse for rare smuggled reptiles. But as far as I could tell the sole occupant was a flossy old thing who rarely left her apartment. We shared a balcony, though, and once or twice I’d seen her out there, wind lifting her hair to show a high forehead of dark-veined porcelain, the exiled contessa of some vanished nation. The first time we exchanged words, she’d shuffled out wearing only a quilted paisley housecoat to glare towards the mountain. Nearly all of the leaves had fallen from the trees, and now the view was clear to the lurid cross.

      T’es encore là? She spoke to the cross, not to me. To me she said, Il te faut un casque, and knocked on her fragile head.

      Marie had taken her helmet but left her bicycle, and each morning I carried it downstairs and clattered it over the fissured streets towards the day spa on a route that still took me past Leonard Cohen’s house. If my mother called I’d make a point of telling her this, that every morning I rode past Leonard Cohen’s house, evidence that I was still studying.

      I spent the first weeks of winter alone, wandering the apartment’s half-empty rooms. Its windows are the old sash kind that mean trouble in the winter, but in the kitchen there are panels of colored glass that shoot red and amber oblongs across the floor when the sun finds the sweetest angle, so it feels kind of warm even when it isn’t. One morning I stood there, moving my hand through red light to gold, thinking: This is the kind of window where if you just stand for long enough, somebody will come and put their hand on your shoulder. Whoever it is you’ve been waiting for. Then my phone rang, and my heart kicked, but it was only an automated female voice congratulating me on a free trip to the Bahamas. I listened to the spiel of promises, thinking how someone had gone into a studio and recorded these words, understanding how they’d be used. And someone had written the script, and someone had mixed the levels, and someone else … on and on. It made me bone-sad, this voice. I hung up on it and called Jody to ask how he was spending the off-season. There was no off-season, he said. But after five months of guiding tourists through the backwaters of Plaquemines Parish to shoot at floodlit gar, of tossing marshmallows at tame alligators to distract whiny tourist children, he’d about had it with Louisiana anyway.

      I tried to sell him winter. It took less than fifteen minutes to sell him winter. He’d never lived a real one, a northern one. Never owned a pair of ice skates or salted a driveway.

      Cheap post-rock concerts, I coaxed. Nuit Blanche. Poutine (this felt like groveling). The pastéis de nata at the Jean-Talon market …

      Okay okay okay.

      I should have been the one hawking Bahamas cruises.

      Jody mooched a series of Amtraks up at the end of December, with $600 U.S. and no true winter coat. I snuck a look at his arms when he put them around me at Central, deep in the belly of the overheated station. A little bothered inside the elbows. Aside from the gator, I mean. Not clean, exactly, but clean enough. (Newly clean. Was there ever a phrase cobbled from more idiot-hope?)

      Memory had slightened him. It wasn’t till I saw the two of us reflected in a drugstore window that I realized how much taller he was than me. I decided to take this as further evidence of an overall straightening out.

      He said that this winter’s work would be liquidating his dead father’s blues collection, he and his sister sharing the take.

      We’re selling them off piece by piece. Slower that way but you get more in the long run, according to Cass. Said she’ll wire my share every couple of weeks. Less administration.

      Administration, I said.

      Her very precious time. One of us is our dad’s child.

      Wouldn’t you two be, you know, sentimental? I asked. Though I knew he would not be. I’d first met him in a roachy hostel kitchen in Tamaulipas, OxyContined to his eyeteeth, making everybody sandwiches whether they wanted them or not. (You, he’d said, shaking a salsa picante bottle at me. You’re avocado and hot sauce.) Afterwards he’d told me about the meds racket he and a friend were trying to get off the ground. Those were the words he used: get off the ground. Ailing elderly Americans with prescriptions to fill. And he objected to the term racket, insisting it would be a civic service. Basically an NGO. He’d be addressing a gross deficit in the health-care system, assisting those who’d slipped down into its many yawning chasms. All you needed were a minibus and the right attitude, a wholesome-looking girl. (That was me: wholesome-looking. An invitation of sorts.) He existed in a constant state of somnambulism, a soothing lassitude, but now and again you’d catch the sharp glint of scheme in his pyrite-flecked eyes.

      Look, he was saying now. Dad was Mr. Corporate Law. Guy wore a suit to the beach. Wouldn’t have known Blind Lemon from Blind Melon, he just knew what things were worth.

      The records had been crated up in storage for eight years, and as Jody put it, someone might as well be spinning some joy from them.

      I admit I was skeptical. But every fortnight we’ve been charging glasses to Elzadie Robinson and T. Bone Walker; rare red wax and Parchman Farm; Ed Bell and his 1930 pressing of “Carry It Right Back Home.”

      Someone had taught Jody the nines thing, since the last time we’d slept together. I’d read about it before, tantric: shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow deep, so she—so I—could go along with him. He never lost count, must have gotten in a fair amount of practice. I didn’t really mind thinking of that. Whoever she might’ve been, she was far away, too far to be jealous of, practically imaginary. It was my name he’d shout, unfailingly, in the instant before coming. Typically American of him, I said. More than any other national. Americans all call your name out—it’s like they’re trying to stop you walking into traffic.

      Jody was nonplussed by this. Maybe hurt. Hard to tell.

      It’s just common courtesy, he said.

      Often his orgasm would carry СКАЧАТЬ