The Same Woman (2 page)

“Your books are girls?” Ruby was careful to ask this in a way that sounded bright and amused, masking any irritation at his anachronistic choice of words.

“I GUESS THAT DOES SOUND KINDA DESPERATE!” And then, maybe to inject some deep intellectualism into his loveless dope image, he said, “I'M REALLY INTO POST-MARXISM RIGHT NOW, ESPECIALLY CONTRA GERMAN EXISTENTIALISM.” Ruby rolled her eyes at the trees whipping past the window. And then she exhaled wearily, blowing her cheeks up with expelled air, and tsk-tsk-ed at herself for being so eager to be mean.

Tariq hummed whenever he was happy or relaxed. He hummed and ran his finger along the top of the rubber lining at the base of the window, watching it collect the dust that had lived peacefully for years in the car's interior. Ruby put the crown of her head in the crook of his neck and tried to sleep. He liked the feeling of this warm, unconscious lump, filling the spaces on the left side of his body.

She half-opened her eyes and saw the time on her watch. The little metal bits on the watch face that marked offeach hour caught the sun and sent it spinning around. She felt dizzy and dislocated. Why did she mollify Tariq instead of putting into words the sickening combination of things that she felt swirling inside her heart?

She was overwhelmed simultaneously by grief, joy, bitterness, and the heady, longing pressure of his warm muscular thigh against her own. Is it possible to feel so much at once? Is this why people
have heart attacks? The city loomed ahead of them, too far away to see on the horizon, but ahead of them nonetheless. It was like a magnet, dragging her back to the home of catastrophe. Sometimes the thoughts we think shock us and Ruby was stunned to hear herself think: is it better to leave Tariq than to endure the work of making new love?

Ruby leaned her hot sticky cheek against the hot sticky seat and morbidly began counting the number of steps involved in walking out now. She just had to wait until the car slowed at a turn-off, then she would feel for the front seat lever, stick her leg past the doubled over seat, push the car door open in the sunlight, scramble down the highway shoulder, and leave Tariq sitting alone, dismayed.

She placed her hand over what she guessed was her diaphragm, and tried to breathe into it and take comfort from the strong, real feeling of her own hand.

Tariq felt her shift and take a deep breath. “Are you okay?” He wrapped his fingers around the nape of her neck and let his thumb become tangled in her frizzy hair.

Bonds between people form with the creeping slowness of a tree growing next to a fence, until the fence is embedded in the tree, or the tree is embedded in the fence. It is slow but fierce, and by the time you want to make a choice about staying or leaving, by the time you realise a choice needs to be made, it is too late. His fingers travelled around the other side of her neck and tugged absent-mindedly on her earlobe. She imagined the open car door, the imprint of her body left on the seat, the look on his face.

But, she thought, I couldn't leave this. It is not possible. And then this time she really fell asleep.

At the height of the summer, the sun was slow to set. Even after it finally made its reluctant exit, the sky stayed stained with the sun's memory for another hour — pink and red turning to streaky blue, paling to grey, and finally succumbing to deep dark blue. The highway refl ected these changes. Headlamps sharpened and the white lines on the road learned how to fly, and seemed to leap up every time light hit them.

“So where are you coming from?” The driver's voice pierced the quiet whizzing darkness and Tariq jumped.

“I just, we, I went to Ruby's parents' to pick her up.”

“Oh yeah, meeting the folks for the first time?” He asked slyly.

“Oh no. Well, yes actually, but I didn't go to meet them.” Tariq stumbled over prepositions, and thought of how Ruby teased him for always speaking to men in a deeper, huskier voice than he used with women. “We've been split up for a while, me and Ruby.” He babbled unnecessary details to this stranger. “She moved back with her parents while we were separated. I just went to pick her up.”

“Wow, so this is a historic occasion I'm witnessing, a happy reunion?”

“Uh, yes, mmhm.” Tariq flustered.

“So you guys live in the big city.”

“Yup.” Tariq wanted to ask the driver where he lived, but the driver was a quick draw with questions.

“What do you do there?”

“Well Ruby was on her third degree: studying to be a midwife. She was going to school out of county but she decided to take a break when we split up. I think she's going to look for a midwifery program in the city this fall.” He hoped that Ruby had slept through his disclosure of so much personal and pointless information about her.

The driver laughed. “So now that I know everything about your girl, what do you do man?”

“I'm a draughtsperson.” Tariq said shortly, afraid to expose anything else.

“Oh yeah? How did you get involved in that?”

“I went to art school but it was a little too abstract for me. I wanted to do something with my hands, but something that didn't contribute to, you know, global evil. So that's what I settled on.”

“Yeah, I totally dig that man. There's nothing like being able to work on something that you can hold in your hands. Last year I visited my cousin on a tree planting site. He's worked on sites all over the world. This summer he's at a spot in the mountains where you have to be helicoptered in...” Tariq listened to the driver's story, glad to be relieved from speaking duties. He allowed himself to be lulled by the darkness and the whirring of the motor.

“...I mean, then there are the people who will say that tree planting enables deforestation, but some people are just never happy. They always want to make trouble — thar she blows!”

Tariq snapped to attention, realising that the driver wanted a response for the last comment. He was pointing out the first highway signs that signalled they'd reached the city. He turned on the radio, maybe to alert his cargo that it was time to get ready. Ruby was woken up by a syrupy voice oozing its way into the quiet car.

“Pine Condoms Tip #34: Talk to shy, lonely girls at parties. A little kindness goes a loooong way...” The voice trailed off and transformed into high pitched female moans.

“Whoa,” their driver said, pushing the dial towards the university station. “Not in the company of ladies,” he turned head as he said this. He was smiling but the rushing headlights illuminating the wind-screen got in Ruby's eyes and she couldn't tell if he was looking at her. She looked away. His attempts to protect her were demeaning — but how was she going to explain that to him? He was just trying to be nice.

Traffic began to thicken as four lanes of cars squeezed into twolane exits.

“If you switch the last two letters in exits, you get exist.” Traiq noted, exit signs soliciting them as they flew by.

“Not a coincidence.”

“Not a coincidence?”

“Have you not noticed that car commercials almost always revolve around existential questions?” She dropped her voice a little at the word existential, fearful that their driver might try to lecture them on Heidegger.

”What do you mean?”

“Car commercials promise that their product will help you realise your humanity.”

“Give me an example.”

“There's one commercial that claims that driving their car is exercising your free will. Then there's another one that defines happiness. It's a classic strategy: target the fundamental aspects of being. Also car buying, car driving, and car washing are often linked to empowerment. I'm telling you, it's a massive conspiracy.” She tapped the side of her nose and winked at him.

“Are you in on it?”

“If I told you I'd have to kill you.”

At night in the summer the city glistened artificially, like an oiled bum on a tanning bed. They passed the downtown skyscrapers, eerily empty at this time of day, the smattering of monuments, the clean streets for the benefit of tourists, the parks with one-person benches — the fierce individualism of the city written into its public seating. The car kept climbing from downtown to uptown and the buildings shrank. The affl uence persisted until they were about halfway across the city, and then the street lights became less bright and the road became more bumpy. Convenience stores with fluorescent lighting, instead of the soft track lighting of the downtown boutiques. Grubby, disorganised shops that sold alarm clocks, electronic equipment, hardware supplies and other debris of modern convenience that only had momentary value: when someone wanted to buy them. The rest of time they just miserably took up space, as store clerks shuffl ed them from shelf to shelf. Houses that were thrown up as the neighbourhood gained momentum, houses that now leaned to one side, looking tragic and comical at the same time. Small unglamourous restaurants run by immigrants, whose menus were “exotic” downtown; here they were just foreign.

And finally they were there. The car pulled up at the top of a narrow street, crammed with multi-family homes. An abandoned warehouse, cinematically decrepit, seemed to watch them through its smashed-out window eyes, as they wriggled their luggage out of the trunk. The sign on its front said “HOT PROPERTY.” They thanked their driver again and again, only now realizing how unreasonably nice he had been to drive them so far.

“No worries! I need to assuage my car guilt. You know how it is.” He shook Ruby's hand and bowed his head. He slap-grabbed Tariq's hand and said, “Take it easy, bro!” And Tariq giggled because he wasn't used to being called “bro.” Ruby watched his tail lights blend and disappear amid the other sets of lights that all streamed forth to other roads. She had the sudden feeling that she was being left behind by all these cars, who were still undetermined, whose paths were open-ended up until destination. Her heart felt heavy.

Before Ruby was conscious, she was conscious of the soreness in her hips. Her entire left side from her ear to her ankle, ached. She was lying with Tariq on a blanket on the floor. Her left side had attempted to conform to the floor, only to find the floor's flat shape incompatible with its own curve. She turned onto her back and it throbbed with relief. Carefully she pulled back the flowered sheet they were using as a blanket, freeing her thighs from summer night sweatiness.

She was in a time warp. She hadn't noticed this last night, when their barefoot and Heidegger-loving driver dropped them off. Last night herself, Tariq, and his best friend Nal had sat on Nal's front porch and drunk cheap liquor and watched the street in a stupor. But in the clearness of the morning, she wasn't anywhere but here.

Strange transformations had occurred while Ruby'd been gone. Tariq used to live in this room, but he had taken leave from work and left the city more than a month ago. After he was gone, Nal converted the room into a living room. The bed was gone, along with Tariq's paraphernalia: underpants, plants, books, mysterious crunched-up
papers, unknown substances cemented to mug bottoms. But it was still the same room, the thick yellow paint in uneven patches on the wall, the door to the vestibule that made a very distinct clicking, sucking noise as the draft outside pulled it to and fro, the grey faux-leather couch that strongly resembled an elephant.

In the room on the other side of the door Ruby heard movement. She heard the dry thud of Nal's feet hitting the floor, as she swung them off the bed, and the dragging sandy sound of Nal pulling her yoga mat out from underneath the bed. The floorboards squeaked slightly as Nal began to balance her body in impossible positions, depending solely on the strength of her magnificent muscles.

And then an inelegant scuffling interrupted the serenity. Nal opened her door. Ruby immediately shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep, why, she didn't know. A tubby grey cat stumbled into the room, Nal pushing his backside with her foot. The door shut behind him. He recovered quickly from this outrage, and walked over to Ruby's body. He crossed the sheet, stepping around her legs, and onto Ruby's stomach, unblinking. She struggled to breathe under the cat's unreasonable weight, and focused on the ceiling.

How well we know our lovers' bedroom ceilings is a good indication of how close we are to them. The morning of the night that Tariq and Ruby began seeing each other, they had laid side by side quietly in her bed, as the sun fought its way through her curtains. He had said, “I could stare at this ceiling forever.” It had seemed like a declaration of undying love.

Tariq's ceiling had always been good for staring at. Circles of stucco looped around endlessly and Ruby played an old game where she tried to follow their path and figure out which was the first circle to be formed.

Had Frankie played this game?

Just like that, the evil question slipped in. How well had Frankie known this ceiling? How many times had she slept here? How many times had she slept here before Ruby knew about it?

The questions were both intolerable and indelible. We expunge questions by asking them — once we ask them their answers eclipse them. But Ruby could not ask these questions, and she could not let go of them because she could not ask them. Instead she carried
them around in her heart and her throat, like food readying for regurgitation.

It had been a bad idea to come back to the city. It had been an absurd idea to come back to this bedroom. She stared at the ceiling miserably, at the stucco circle game whose innocence was lost forever, replaced by Frankie's presence printed across it with the permanence of a tattoo.

Her breathing began to speed up. She could not get enough oxygen into her lungs. And the weight of the enormous cat was not helping at all. Using two hands Ruby gave its backside a hard, mean shove. The cat was knocked unceremoniously to the floor in a skittering of claws. He regained his grace, and walked off, flicking his tail.