Greedy Little Eyes (16 page)

In the bathroom I turned on the hot water in the tub. I fingered my hair in the mirror and wondered if I should let it grow wild and tangled again.

I opened the cupboard over the sink. Picking up Thomas’s prescription, I rattled the few little blue pills on the bottom. They had worked at first. Perked him right up down there. At first. Then nothing worked. I added in some sexy showers and lingerie, hot oil massages.

He was embarrassed, apologetic. “It’s just stress,” he said.

I tried to talk to him about it. He doesn’t like to discuss sex. “It’s prurient,” he said.

“Is that bad?” I asked and laughed.

He threw me a look of distaste, sucked back the rest of his seventh can of Coke that day and chewed on what was left of his plastic straw.

They say there are ways to tell if a situation like ours is emotional or physiological. I woke in the night once and reached for him, ran my fingertips along his hip, the inside of his thigh. It was only a few moments before he was raring to go. He woke to find himself in my hands, my mouth, to see me sliding back up the length of him, and as his mind cleared, he shrunk back and pushed me away.

“What if I did that to you?” he asked, as though I had crossed some obvious line. It was a violation, he said, a kind of rape.

It wasn’t until Thomas stopped touching me that I looked up the lyrics to “My Funny Valentine.” They aren’t kind.

I closed the cupboard door now, opened a drawer and rummaged for more dead watches. I found two.

After waiting three days, I brought in another. “Maybe it’s time I resuscitated this poor orphan too,” I told the watchmaker, “while I have the money.”

He asked if I could leave it with him and pick it up in the morning. I glanced around at the other people in the store, told him I could wait, that I’d really like—and I lowered my voice—to watch. His cheeks pinkened a little and he set my watch behind him on the shelf.

I offered to go and get him a coffee while he took care of his other customers. He nodded and did this thing where he averted his eyes, lowered them and then cast his dark pupils straight into mine for a full-on eye-lock. It just killed me.

Slinking into his shop with the last of my watches, I explained that I’d found this one last summer at the park; I had put ads in the paper but no one had claimed it. With this third broken body, I had become obvious.

He read the engraving, jeweller’s loupe cuddled by his eye socket. “
Madge from Jim 1940
. Wow. That’s a lot
of time.” He shook his head, the tarnished strap looped across the fingers of his right hand, while my eye hooked on the polished gold band on a single digit of his left.

“Do you think it’s worth hanging on to? Fixing, I mean?”

“Well”—he peered more closely—“it’s gold fill. If it were karat, I’d say definitely. On the other hand, it is a good solid Swiss watch.”

He looked up at me and set his mouth a moment as though he had something serious to say. “I cannot fix it today.”

I nodded, looked down at the glass counter and imagined the closed door of Thomas’s office.

The watchmaker called me a couple of days later to tell me that Madge and Jim’s lost watch was breathing again: fixed. His voice sounded funny. He said he would be in for another hour and then he would be nipping out for a coffee.

“I’ll come by,” I said and hung up.

I stared at the phone. My skin felt ticklish for a few seconds, itchy with guilt bugs, and I scratched my arms hard before I walked past Thomas’s office. He was out but his door was open. Thomas isn’t fussy about privacy so long as he isn’t working.

I paused and looked in. Walking to the middle of his room I stared at the walls, his framed National Magazine Awards, his signed Chet Baker album cover, his signed
Blossom Dearie. I breathed in the air, wishing for some answer to come out of its thinness.

I sat in his chair. His laptop yawned open. Tracing my finger over the keys, the monitor woke from sleep mode and displayed Thomas’s Facebook page. He’d been in the middle of a conversation with someone before he left. The last message displayed was his: “Don’t tempt me, you little fox. The things I could do to you, twist you into a slick pretzel and taste every part.”

Heat rushed up and down my neck. My guts shifted. I glanced over my shoulder, and back at the screen and then clicked the previous message. Her picture was there. She was young and wore a pink camisole with a black bra underneath, hoisting her little breasts up as far as they’d go. Her bangs hung in her eyes like something from the cover of
Barely Legal Magazine.
Her message said: “You’re not bringing the Excess Baggage, are you? Tell me you’re going to come here alone and make me scream.”

Thomas was supposed to fly to Toronto next week.

My hands shook as I clicked back over the thread of messages. There were nineteen.

Before the last I went to the bathroom to throw up. When nothing came, I put a finger down my throat.

I sat down across from the watchmaker at the café next door to the watch repair shop. His face fell into a strange look of pleased fear. He said hello as though he were
choking on it and told me he hadn’t brought the watch with him. That it was back at the shop.

My hands had not stopped shaking. My voice quavered when I said, “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“We could go back to the shop. I mean I could—Are you okay?”

I nodded, eyes aching. “Allergies.”

“Maybe, you should have coffee.”

He glanced at the clock on the wall and then at his wrist and finally at the table. He ordered something milky with coffee and chocolate from the barista for me.

I stared at the froth when it arrived, my palms up on the table.

He peered at me and then down at one palm. “You have a tremendously deep heart line.”

I sucked a breath as he reached over, tentatively pushing the tips of my middle and index fingers down against the table and thereby stretching out my palm. He swallowed and his brows flicked up a smidge. I could feel him like a fork in the toaster. And yet the pain of him was a gentle, easy one, his fingertips jolting something warm and jittery up and through and down into my pelvis and down some more—the way I feel liquor on an empty stomach.

Thomas was back in his office by the time I returned. His door was open. When I came in he swivelled in his chair and came to rest, staring at me. He took a heavy breath.

We stayed that way a few seconds until I said, “Are you sleeping with her?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve never said those words to me. You said it was
prurient
,” I shouted.

His body seized at the sound of my raised voice. He nodded. He put one hand across his eyes. “I met her once two years ago and she friended me on Facebook last month. It’s just talk.”

“
Excess Baggage
?”

“It’s just a game. She wants to intern at the magazine.” He clasped his hands and began to crack his knuckles one by one. “I have a problem. You don’t know”—he shook his head—“the half of it.”

We talked until two in the morning. “Didn’t you ever notice the phone bills?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “Calls to that little twink?”

He shook his head. “1-900 numbers are blocked.”

When Thomas had first moved to Vancouver from Winnipeg, he was alone. He called 1-900 numbers. Each night, for hours, he was on the phone with a new voice, a new orgy of raunchy debauchery.

The telephone company contacted him after his first bill came through. He owed over three thousand dollars. “We’ve seen this before,” they said. They offered to block 1-900 calls from his use. Block temptation.

In the beginning, he paid to look at websites with bodies and sex, and then as the Internet opened up there was so much for free, he no longer needed to. He didn’t have to pay and nobody would ever have to know.
“It’s not like—” He paused. “I never touched anyone.”

“And can you, I mean, do you get hard like that?

When you see girls ‘twisted into slick pretzels’?”

He winced. “Don’t talk like that.” He looked at the floor. “I used to.”

For the next four days, the watchmaker and I met after work, at 6:15 exactly, for half an hour. We’d meet and swallow creamy, sweet espresso drinks and say very little. Neither of us told our secrets. Instead I would lay my palms out for him, letting him touch them, trace a course down my lifeline, a fingernail across fate. I let him bend my hands up, buckling the flesh on the insides of my wrists, counting the creases there and at the sides of my pinkies, pricks of sweat rising from the pads of my fingers—everything thickening, liquefying, nosing closer under my clothes, swelling to be touched.