Cadillac Couches (9 page)

There was no way I could eat my meal. Smoking and drinking were possible, but not eating, no way. The burger was repulsive. The bun looked like processed paper pulp, the meat was plasticky, the condiments gelatinous and leering. I let it sit there untouched, wasted. I ate one soggy fry and regretted it. He slowly, stupidly chewed on his burger. I could see that each mouthful was harder to chew. Mayonnaise seeped out of the corner of his mouth. I smiled tightly at him. I felt that stale fry sit in my stomach by itself, squirming.

I thought I was bluffing successfully but wasn't sure anymore why this was important. Now all I wanted was for him to eat all of his food. It was important to me that he had his dinner, I didn't know why.

Finally he was done. “Aren't you going to finish yours? Or start it even?” We both knew I wasn't going to, but he mustn't have been able to stop himself asking and going through the motions. I didn't say anything. He cleared the table and went to the kitchen. I listened to him scrape the plates, my burger made a thud as it hit the bottom of the garbage bag. He gulped down a glass of water and the leaky tap dripped.

When he finally came back in the room and sat down opposite me, I looked at him and said firmly, “Let me just start by saying: I know.”

“What?”

The tap dripped.

“I'm fully aware that I shouldn't have, but I did. I read it.”

“I read it,” I said a bit louder.

It was amazing how instant his reaction was. He clamped his hand over his mouth, gagging, and then got up and ran to the bathroom. I could hear him vomiting. It felt appropriate somehow, that deep retching noise, the appropriate soundtrack for this hell. It took him a while, and I went over and over the thing that stumped me, that I couldn't wrap my head around. I lit a cigarette and topped up my drink with more vodka. We weren't some stodgy couple with no romance left—we were still honeymooning. My guts ached. My insides felt like they'd been mugged and beaten to a tender pile of bleeding pulp.

Finally, he came out of the bathroom and sat down. After a few minutes of silence, he cried. I watched the candle on the table. I didn't say anything. He was howling. I wasn't. He leaned his head against the wall and then pulled away so he could bang it, trying to head-butt some redemption.

“Stop it. Please don't.”

“I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry—” He banged his head against the wall again in a horrible refrain.

I was glad to see a tangible sign of his regret, but I didn't like to see him hurt himself. And also I was angry, he was stealing my stupid thunder. This was, after all, my primetime victim slot. I could feel a horrible sarcasm rise up over the ashes of my broken soul. It beckoned me to feel the perverse kind of power that comes with being the hurt. I knew the hurter would have to go to Herculean extremes to win forgiveness. Was he entitled any pain of his own? I guess if he hadn't any, he'd just be an asshole.

Any of my other boyfriends would have been out the door over this: Bob, Joe, Clayton. But this was Sullivan, my wonderful Sullivan. That night of revelation, I drank more vodka, he smoked and cried. I don't know why, but we went to bed that night and fucked like strangers. I couldn't believe he'd done this with someone else. Me, who put chili in his cocoa, lavender on his pillow, and peppermint cream on his feet.

After sex, I got up off him and saw blood running down my thighs.

My period. I went to the bathroom and washed myself off. Then I went to the living room and grabbed my cigarettes before climbing into the bath in the dark and letting the water fill around me.

After soaking for ages, I let myself pee in the water. I was about to get up when Sullivan called from the bedroom, “Can I get into the bath?”

“Sure,” I said and got out.

We were diseased after Alicia. There was no cure. Like my friend Randy rudely put it: “You know, you try to get over these things, but there's no getting around the fact that when you go to bed that other girl's pussy is going to be there in the bed with you both. And when you wake up in the morning, guess what . . . her pussy still going to be there! And like they say: three's a crowd, baby.”

We'd almost crossed Saskatchewan and Blue Rodeo were long finished their B side so I hit stop on the tape deck and sat up. I would never be able to figure out why it had gone that way with Sullivan, why I hadn't been enough for him. But now that I'd lost him, I had nothing else to lose. The little guy in my heart bouncing on a trampoline—hoping, jumping, leaping, trying—had been in a hammock ever since it all ended, taking one long timeout until now.

“C'mon, Isobel, you should take a break, let me drive, I swear I won't pull over for any more hitchhikers.” It was then that Finn yelled, “Hills! Girls, girls, we're headed for hills.”

“It's a mirage, Finski, une mirage. It's time to camp for the night, on est tous un peu zinzin.”

It was dark by the time we parked in a field somewhere near the Manitoba border who knows where. We had a trusty pack of wet wipes for cleaning ourselves, a bottle of water, and some caramel popcorn and more delicious beef jerky for nourishment. We were practically pioneers. Finn slept diagonally in the car and we slept on my trusty air mattress, just beside the car. It was hot enough to sleep without the tent and not too many mosquitoes. I spotted my lucky Orion above.

side a, track 5

“so fuck you and your untouchable face”

“Untouchable Face,” Ani DiFranco

Day 3

1,567 klicks

800-ish to Ontario

The big green highway sign said
MANITOBA 50KM
in white letters. My lips were sore from shelling too many salty Spitz sunflower seeds. I was twitching for a cigarette. Licorice wasn't really cutting it. The road ahead was blurry with heat haze. It looked like we'd soon be driving through a giant vacuum bubble that might transport us up up and away to another dimension. If I could choose, I wouldn't have minded going back to Jane Austen's time, when a kiss was a major big deal, when love brewed slowly over singular moments exchanged in ballrooms and on the moors. Good conversations over infinite cups of tea discussing species of flowers in the garden. Wit and decency reigned in Austen stories. And I detected some good lust too, even though she never quite described it explicitly. All those brooding, swaggering horsey men though . . . Maybe I needed to move to England. Henry James said the English were the most romantic of all people. And you can really see that, with guys like Morrissey and D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster and Oscar Wilde, or actually wasn't he Irish, and Morrissey too—maybe it's the Irish I need. At least there were actual people over there, unlike here in this prairie void.

Finn slapped his thighs. “Okay, that's it then. Before I head home I think we need to check someone out. And then, poof, I'll be gone and it'll be your road trip again.”

I could see by the way she inhaled that Isobel was running out of patience with him. Earlier, I'd heard them having a just-friends discussion when I was pumping gas. She'd told him that it was our road trip and even though he was a great sport it was time for him to go. She squashed his remaining hope by saying she would never date him again, and that he had to move on. She invented a Québécois boyfriend who she said she was going to hook up with in Montreal: François Saucisse.

“Who wants to bring a sandwich to the buffet?” she said to me in the gas station can. We both knew the percentage of hot men in Quebec was astronomical. I was fond of Finn. It was mean to relegate him to the sandwich category after all he'd been through with us.

“If you guys come with me to the Winnipeg festival, there's this singer we can see. Apparently she's mind-blowing. Life-changing. Remember, Dan Bern told me she's the most dynamic live performer since James Brown,” Finn said.

“Who's that?” I asked.

“Ani DiFranco.”

“Is she Italian?”

“Maybe, I don't know, but I've been talking to people, and she's supposed to be unbelievable! Don't you remember Dan mentioning her during the interview, toward the end?”

Finn knew he could always woo Isobel and me with stories of some musician-god that we just had to see. He had witnessed and even participated in our ritual of getting new music and having listening sessions together. We had strict rules: Lie on the floor. Eyes Closed. No Speaking. Careful Listening to All Lyrics. Discuss and Replay to Catch Nuances. Lots of music was grower music, the kind you had to play over and over until it clicked. Sometimes it was that music you ended up liking the most. The kind you struggled to like at first. Other music was obviously just loin-dazzling, mind-whirling, kneecap-buckling on first listen. What we specialized in, what really got us going though, was pathos. Little notes that struck big portentous moods. Over-the-top Janis Joplin–type scratching voices, screaming with hunger. Yearning and moaning. Lying around listening carefully to music was what we did when we weren't at the cinema, or the bookstore. We'd been doing it since we were fifteen. Maybe that's why I fainted; it was such a habit to be lying down, to better hear the music.

Lots of wannabe participants had failed over the years, had been banned from our music-appreciation club over breaking the No Speaking rule. Not a lot of people were as devout as us, or as precious about it, I guess. And many people didn't like being shushed aggressively during our holy rituals. Part of our weirdness probably came from our parents: my dad was a Dylan fanatic and had every album, every bootleg recording, every interview, article, and book in print, and Isobel's mom was big into all the crooners, but especially Tony Bennett. We weren't churchgoing families; we were raised with this version of sacred.

Isobel glanced at me then in the rear-view mirror to ensure we were on the same page about going to the Winnipeg Folk Fest. I cherished our non-verbal way of communicating, but I saw Finn feeling excluded. I wriggled in my seat.

“Oui, on y va!” Isobel said. “We still have four days before Annie needs to be on that mountain.”

“Great, I think it'll be wild! I should be able to find some Edmontonians to hitch home with there too.” He would've sounded almost serene if he wasn't speaking so rapidly. Maybe he'd given up the idea that Isobel was going to fall in love with him again. He had literally gone the distance, almost sixteen hundred kilometres, to find out what he needed to know—that she had never been in love with him.

But he was acting with a kind of grace and generosity of spirit that made me want to make her love him, force her somehow. I loved that he organized adventures, even hijacking a rock star for us. I don't know why Isobel couldn't fall for him. He wasn't mysterious enough, I guess. He was an open book. A book with lots of great pages, though.

When I tried to psychoanalyze her, I never got very far. She was immune to men on some level I couldn't begin to relate to. I saw her detachment as the strength and independence that I was lacking rather than emotional incompetence.

She was driving because my foot was asleep and there was a strange nervousness in my stomach. I could feel the end of summer and the season turning in the melancholic winds of late August. When I was little I used to think of the last two weeks of August before school starting as two straight weeks of Sundays with the Monday doom looming over your head.

We mostly bypassed the small towns of southern Manitoba with Isobel reading and relishing the French-named places from our trusty roadmap: Portage la Prairie, St. Boniface, Dauphin. Manitoba was the country's heartland; even colder than Alberta in the winter and definitely hotter in the summer. I was starting to get sick of the drive, it was feeling like the Wednesday morning of the workweek. Our collective bums were numb and our joints were aching from sitting in the same position for hours.

It was the driest time of year. I was parched, and we were out of water and there was no gas station in sight. The sky was baking blue. I imagined the farmers, in their plaid shirts and
GWG
overalls, sitting on their verandas thinking about going out into the field to do one big collective rain dance.

We listened to Neil Young because it was Neil Young's province not just Winnie-the-Pooh's. We tried to imagine Winnipeg bars back in the day having Joni Mitchell and Neil gigging together. No wonder people made great art here, there was nothing else to do, nothing to clutter their young imaginations, just big sky. I watched the fields passing by. More prairie, endless prairie.

Finn stuck his head out the window like a dog—looking like happiness personified. Finn was the dog that yapped at everyone's heels, doing tricks, rolling around, playing dead—anything to win affection. From the backseat I could see Isobel look at him sunning himself out the window. She smiled; half amused, half irritated.

Eventually we found the festival, forty kilometres north of Winnipeg. It was in beautiful Bird's Hill Provincial Park. The whole layout had a great mellow vibe despite there being upwards of sixty thousand attendees. And the usual scene was there. Hippies, dippies, old-timers, Hacky-Sack-playing teenagers, toddlers, earnest folkies, patchouli girls, tie-dyed natty dreads, and hempy people. We roamed the grounds and sat down on the grass in the beer garden. Finn went off to get us beers and mini-doughnuts. I was happy to be lying still with the sun on my face with my best friend at my side. Lying on our backs always led to truth sessions—being horizontal meant being intense.