Ai ended up staying in Toronto, and Tuyen suspected that it was all an attempt to be the centre of things, and if she really thought about it, Ai didn’t have the backbone to go off on her own. She had been tied to Tuan and Cam ever since that night in the bay.
None of them could see themselves without the others set in that particular tableau. There was an invisible string between them beyond the pull of family as Tuyen knew it. Something had slipped out of their hands; they would always feel absence. It was this overwhelming sense of regret that Tuyen had fled. It would descend on her if she spent any length of time at the house in Richmond Hill or in the too-long presence of any of the family, even Binh.
There were moments, then, when Tuyen had to go somewhere to be seduced. Openly seduced. And seduced in no way imaginable within the confines of that family story.
Pope Joan was a bar on Parliament Street. A bar that stood as the last eastern outpost of gay life in downtown Toronto. It had had several reincarnations, the previous one being the Rose, where they played Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” at the end of each night. It was primarily a lesbian bar, though a few gay men and a few voyeuristic straight couples could be picked out on any given night. There were several pool tables on the lower floor where butches expressed their angular prowess and their sartorial charm. They drank strictly, and voluminously, beer. And they hogged the pool tables, treating any women who didn’t measure up with cold dismissal. Their dates were usually upstairs dancing or slumping on the leather sofas, smoking and eyeing each other pointedly bored.
Generations and variations of butches had occupied the lower floor and the pool tables in the relatively short life of the club on Parliament Street. So quick, so incandescent was the life of the women who came to the club, it could only be measured in months. There was an urgency to the place and a packed force. All that couldn’t be lived outside was lived in here, in the six or seven hours between when the doors opened and when they closed. The meetings, the courtships, the marriages, the break-ups could be done in the small public space of the Rose, or Pope Joan as Tuyen knew it. The butterfly lives lived here, the sweet-winged existences—the telephone operator, a real-estate broker, a welfare mother, a girl from North Bay, or the woman from Timmins who knew the place as the Rose, a woman from Regent Park, any woman—anyone could become invisible, whole and erotic, on this dance floor. Any woman could drop her necessary defences to the city, put her legs up on a stool, and drift.
It was from Pope Joan’s that Tuyen brought women home. Women who smoked too much, drank too much, did too much dope. Women, therefore, whom she didn’t have to keep. Or women who were professionals at something—lawyers or real-estate brokers who were fascinated that Tuyen was an artist until they saw that she really was an artist when they woke up in the mornings in Tuyen’s dishevelled bed. Or women who thought of Tuyen as the Asian girl who could share certain bizarre erotic secrets with them. Once she laughingly told Carla that those women didn’t know that she was so much not what they imagined.
“Why would you sleep with them?” Carla asked.
“We’re not sleeping, all right? We’re fucking. Jealous?”
“No, but why?”
“Because they’re interesting.”
“How?”
“They’re just people, Carla. It’s fantasy. You learn things about yourself.”
“Like?”
“Like … like, Carla … like having sex is just human, you know, experiencing your physical self, your flesh, like I feel like I’m in life. My skin is alive, all my senses are open. You feel it right here,” she said, tracing her hand up Carla’s abdomen to between her small breasts.
“Well, whatever.”
“Sure you’re not jealous?”
She used to ask Carla to come with her to Pope Joan, to cover for her in case there was someone she couldn’t shake. But she’d stopped doing that. Oku wouldn’t come with her because despite their friendship he would not go that far, and Jackie vainly told Tuyen that Tuyen wouldn’t get any action if she came along. Tuyen actually invited Carla in the hopes that some lever in Carla’s mind would switch on, some desire discovered. That Carla might recognize herself in the lean girls against the bar, the girls in slender-cut suits with silver rings on each finger and thumb who looked so compact and secretive, so much as if all their essences were perfectly locked and kept, and only if you managed to please them could you unlock their fingers and pry them out. They smelled of a different perfume, they never quite met your eyes except in a swift and thorough appraisal whose conclusion you became aware of immediately when their eyes averted without the longed-for approving smile. You longed to go with them to secret apartments in the suburbs or condos on the lakeshore and there have their fingers brush down your back and have their maroon mouths kiss your thighs.
Tuyen entered Pope Joan’s looking for a woman like that. She didn’t want to go home tonight, back to the image of Quy’s face. The Quy she had imagined. The music was techno, the deejay was the regular Thursday night deejay, Angela. She played house and techno music. She stood on the raised dais, earphones to her left ear, held there by her shoulder, her hand moving from one album to another. Tuyen felt relief at the pounding, fast, whirling music and thanked the song for replacing the frenetic buzz that had taken over her head for the last two days. She moved to the bar and ordered a beer above the music, sizing up the women at the rail, looking for that one with the coolest, most-remote look.
