So yes, Jackie had a point, Tuyen thought. Carla had been more than plain to her after the last drunk. When in the morning Tuyen had playfully kissed her, held her as Carla tried to get up, Carla had pulled herself away abruptly, saying, “Shit, Tuyen, I told you I’m not into that.”
And Tuyen, stung, had said to her, “Well, you coulda fooled me.” She inferred more than actually had happened. She picked herself up from Carla’s futon and left, slamming the door in a tantrum. Then, thinking that she was being childish, she returned to Carla’s, finding her in the bathroom. “You think because it’s not sex, it isn’t desire,” Tuyen told her. Carla paused in brushing her teeth, stared at Tuyen, and then continued vigourously. “It is, you know.”
“Look, I have no desire, okay? You have to have desire, don’t you?”
“How can you have no desire?”
“I just don’t. For anyone.”
“Or you’re afraid of it.”
“Okay, Tuyen, think what you want.” Carla rinsed her mouth out.
“I mean, having no desire might mean something deeper, you know. Like, who doesn’t have desire? And if you have none, how do you know? How can you be sure? Like everybody has desire … so …”
“I know what I like and what I don’t like …”
“Yeah, but you just said you have no desire, right?”
“Well … that’s how it is, all right? It’s not my thing.”
Tuyen sensed that Carla felt trapped, so she let up. Trying to make the moment light, she said, “Okay, you breeder, I’ll leave and let you get going to work.”
Carla acknowledged that she was being let off the hook and pelted water from the running tap at Tuyen’s face. Tuyen grabbed her, kissed her on the ear, letting her tongue linger there softly, and left for her place. That was the week before Jamal’s lawyer called. Since then she had not had a chance to broach the conversation again, and now Carla had gone into a depressed cocoon. The doors to their apartments, which were adjacent, were usually left open, but in the last few days Carla had kept hers closed and had talked little to Tuyen about what was happening. Just when she thought she had a slight advantage, a glimmer, Jamal had grabbed all the attention from Tuyen by getting himself arrested.
FIVE
A yellow mote of sand dreams in the polyp’s eye;
the coral needs this pain.
The poet Kamau Brathwaite wrote this. It could be this city’s mantra. It could escape and mingle with the amplifying city, especially on Mondays.
A yellow mote of sand dreams in the polyp’s eye;
the coral needs this pain.
Though it becomes more and more worrisome as it’s repeated against the busyness, the sweat and nerves of Monday morning, when rheumy-eyed students blunder up St. George toward the university and workers stand outside the hospitals in cliques of two or three, smoking cigarettes, blowing gusts into the wide air of the avenue, breathing in the exhaust of six lanes of traffic before running back inside to children, cancer patients, and the fickleness of nature and fortune—broken bones, broken teeth, broken muscle, saturated livers, ill-fed brains, fatty hearts, and hungry blood. Meanwhile the crowds of people at the centre of the city itself feel like another kind of storm. There are men eagerly trying to catch the attention of other men. The air now filled with their voices saying “yeah, really” and “right, right” like the chorus of an “excellent, sir” song. The “pick me, sir” lyric, of young execs who’d spent the weekend snorting coke in the bathrooms of Richmond Street generation-next clubs to get ready for the hard week of cutthroat office ahead of them. There are people who don’t look at anyone and hurry to deadly lunches or top-priority errands that simply have to be run today or else the world will stop. The world here is full of self-consciousness and seething animosity. Young people come to the downtown to be in the world, or to run away from abusive homes in small towns like Sarnia and Fenelon Falls and Minden, or from suburbs like Vaughan and Malvern. They hang out in doorways, looking dreamy with drugs or alert with wanting. There are old regulars too, who stay here because it is the centre of life and because they cannot find their way back to anywhere.
At Yonge and Bloor, the very heart, the corner is stacked six or seven lemming deep as usual, waiting for the traffic lights. Spike Lee’s 25th Hour is playing at the Uptown. A man wearing a shalwa kamese and a Muslim skullcap is carrying a briefcase in one hand, in the other, he fingers light brown wooden prayer beads in their circle—in his entreaties. To what? His face is beautiful, thoughtful, as if it were the most ordinary thing to do, to pray to Allah in one hand, to attend to the gods of money in the other. He’s going west, a sweet peace is on his face. A huge distracting billboard above the southeast corner flickers an ad for a car—a woman smiles from it, and reaches her hands out to her billboard driver.
Tuyen’s family is rich, newly rich. They have a giant house in Richmond Hill, where rich immigrants live in giant houses. Richmond Hill is a sprawling suburb outside of the city. It is one of those suburbs where immigrants go to get away from other immigrants, but of course they end up living with all the other immigrants running away from themselves—or
