Place Nouveau (edit 1 with an incomplete ending)

“How did we manage this?” I say to Garth as we stand in front of the sliding balcony door in our eighth floor corner suite with its wall-to-wall windows north and east. “It’s like the sunrise of Mount Nemrut.”
“I’ve never been to Turkey,” he says.
“Nemrut’s in Turkey?” I say. Garth has a penchant for conversation. He has favorite topics: serial killers, ancient religions, science, deviant behavior, anti-heroes, and always, money. He wants to know why a woman would even think to shove a wine bottle up her anus and the wide end at that. “Well maybe she had a gift,” I say. And then he moves on to what would motivate someone to discover such a gift. I just love when he leans back, his hands folded across his high belly, his face like a kid, smiling and relaxed. “Maybe she was a sometime porn star, getting it up the ass and her fucker noticed he had room to spare which she took as a compliment and had this epiphany about hooping being her god-given gift.” I learned the word epiphany from Garth who goes about his life having them, like spontaneous orgasms. Garth wasn’t convinced, so I threw a few more scenarios at him, causing him to recall the broad with the blossoming anus that could take in a ripe cantaloupe. “So you’re telling me she just opened her fridge one morning, said ‘that’ll do’ and history was made?” “Something like that,” I say.

When I lived on Indian Road, I memorized some details about termites from the New York Times magazine section so I could slide in some captivating termite trivia when Garth and I were necking in the parking lot across from the apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Georgia and her mother. Usually I’d kiss his lips that still amaze me with their soft fullness, let my tongue play around in his mouth for while, and then twist my head away which always unnerved him, just so he could sling my head like an Underwood carriage back to center. That night in the parking lot, I freed my head and started talking about termites, like how they work around the clock and twice as fast when there’s heavy metal playing. He stared at me with such a stunned look that I laughed. “You sure know how to break a mood,” he grumbled and let himself out of the car. “Piss-ass putz,” I swore as I drove off.

I want a man who’ll talk to me while we fuck, maybe about punctuation which is always more interesting than termites. I’d be on my back with my legs over his shoulders and he’d be ramming away, and I’d say something disparaging like “you don’t put a cap after a colon,” and then to his “what are you saying, girl?” I’d answer “you’re always putting a damn cap after your colon” and kiss him on his smooth lips with those few odd freckles on them like my Garth has and of which he’s so proud.
“Fucking right,” he’d say.
“Chicago says otherwise.”
And all the while he’s above me, pounding and pounding until I can’t catch my breath. When I live with Garth I never fuck anyone else; I don’t even think about it. He consumes me.

We stand side by side, my five and one-quarter to his six and three, and I lean my head on his shoulder. Looking out at a Mount Nemrut sunrise has a way of making you acquire height. It’s only as you go about with the weight of the world that your spine compresses.

I never thought I’d like living in a box. I had fears of our living in one in those salty days with Stephen, and I was raised to rebel against sameness, not that they, my father and mother, ever had precise words with me—my self just tunneled her way through my skin. With the rise of every day, I gave birth to this self, I refused to stay inside growing and festering like other selves did, instead I executed all that on the outside which is maybe why I made so many mistakes.

Garth says when we were in the Gossamer house, he prayed. “Let me find my family a home,” he said.
“You said that? My family. My family, a home?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I was raised an atheist, you know. I even won a public speaking contest in grade six—‘Why There is No God.’” I want to tell him how my heart opened for him when he said that, but we’re misers, Garth and I, when it comes to sweet words, and I know that’s not a good thing, hiding and hoarding these morsels the way we do.

The first thing I do when walls change is set my canvases against them, shuffling them around like a deck of cards. I didn’t do that in The Manor or the other apartment hotel, the ones we snuck out of in the middle of the night, Stephen’s Scottish business partner, the ex-soccer player with busted knees who got a bum deal when he sold his rent-a-car shops to Thrifty’s, keeping the motor idling in his van while we loaded our plastic green bags. In this condo cocoon, I hang my life: “Something About Boundaries,” “My Heart is So Unruly, Truly,” “Patchwork,” “An Elephant Never Forgets,” “Blue Moon or I Saw You Standing Alone,” “Harlequin Romance,” “Just an Old-Fashioned Love Saw as She Charged Her Way to Heaven,” “Hard Times in the Old Town Tonight,” “When Winged Creatures are Grounded,” “You’re Interfering with my Pump.” By the time I leave this womb, there will be over sixty paintings on and against these off-white walls. I set up my studio in the kitchen, in the sunroom with sliding doors off the kitchen, then back to the kitchen. Garth buys himself a massive black wood desk that suits a man his size and lodges it in the horizontal part of the L-shaped living-dining room. Kitchen tables aren’t important to him as they are to me.

Talon has his own room with a black metal bunk bed because he likes black same as his father. And a bathroom right beside his room. The bedroom that is Garth’s and mine has a hallway with a mirrored closet on each side opening into a rectangular bathroom that is long enough to lie down in and then some. The white tiles magnify those accumulations of dirt and dust that hang around in corners like earwax, so the first thing I do when I walk in the front door is remove my contacts. The one exception is when I’m on the lookout for one of Garth’s epiphany’s as I peer at the heavens from our northeast window—at which time I wear my tortoise shell rims and Garth’s black Casablanca Dance Karaoke Staff t-shirt with Security written on the back, all caps.

Glass and Sunflowers (edit 1, erotic memoir)

I plant sunflowers at the northeast end of the garden. I don't know much about gardens except that sun is like protein to a builder. In the Gossamer basement studio which is one part of the house I actually love, the other being the walk-in closet where Garth sometimes ass-fucks me, not that I adore ass-fucking although I sure talk about it a lot, adoring the idea of it as I do, it just speaks to me, personifying what it is about Garth and me that I love, our dynamic as I call it—“when we lose our dynamic”, I say, “we’ll be lost.” But I’m straying again, this mind of mine being in a constant state of wander lust. That basement art studio gave me a sink, counter, cupboards, space. It was meant to be a bar, but when I first set eyes on it, I leapt into its arms and it carried me over the threshold. There was no need for ceremony. I set up house right away, sorting my Tri-art vials and Golden jars I’d bought at Woolfitts when it was on Dupont beside Rent-a-Wreck and later when it moved south in the world to Queen Street just across the street from the Drake Hotel. I even had some brushes from Gwartzman’s on Spadina. I used to go there when Lisa was in Leo Beck and Caroline was almost downtown at Sunnybrooke. Gwartzman had a rep for being perfunctory, you had to sort through the dark little shop yourself or if you’d ask Gwartzman you knew he was doing you a favor and wasn’t pleased about doing it either.

I never worried about Gwartzman. In those days my hair was wild and waist-long and I wore a white man’s shirt, one of Abie’s ties, tight jeans tucked in tan knee-high cowboy boots with round toes, and my old Army coat. I didn’t have my muscles back then, not in a massive way, but I had style. So I’d mozy up to Gwartzman with that dazed earnest look of mine and ask him about brushes and what the difference was between hot and cold pressed paper and one-hundred or two-hundred pound test and Liquidex and Windsor-Newton, and he’d come out from his spot behind the counter and teach me. Sometimes I’d meet an artist in a bakery or some fruit store, people notice when hands are multi-colored, and we’d talk shop. “Gwartzman served you?” they say, which is how I found out about Gwarztman’s notoriety and the immediate status of anyone for whom he left his perch behind his scratched old counter.

When I set up house in my studio, I sorted my paints, one shelf for each colour and stashed my Canadian and American Artist Today magazines on the counter, giving contents of nine boxes what I thought might be a home and gentle resting place. At first I didn’t know what to paint, but Garth had graduated from floozies to constellations as his desktop background and I guess I just absorbed those photos so full of hope and wonder. I paint like I go through life—on the fly, jumping skyward to catch an idea floating by and bleeding my whole soul and heart into it until my veins are parched. Empty doesn’t faze me; I drive my car the same way—thrilled with full, running to empty, then daring the gods to see how far it’ll hold out. I paint without my glasses because I can imagine better than I can paint. You can be walking beside me and say “Hey Janice, there’s a man on the sidewalk” and I say “yeah so?” “Yeah, but he’s on a horse.” And I swear he’s there, half a block away, sitting straight and pretty on a horse rearing up in its hind legs.

I fall in love and lust when I paint. I think I’m in Paris, the woman in that black and white photo—he’s got his arm around her and she’s leaning into him. Maybe it’s nighttime, they’re standing on the corner and kissing. Or it’s broad daylight. I slip into my canvas, I’m in love color and design, when balance walks in and makes itself right at home or slams the door and leaves. I'm enthralled with how the soul simply enters and slides into a work.


“Garth?”
“Yes?”
We used to talk that way. I’d say “Garth” like we were fucking and I had a mind for something, maybe sixty-nine or sitting on facing the other way around while I sat on his cock so I could kiss his calves and his feet. I think he liked when I kissed his feet. His was temperamental cock, given to mood swings and it always perked right up when I licked his calves, insteps, and toes, which is not to say he bore any resemblance to Iqbal, Garth’s cock just had a wider range of that’s all, not just high and low. I’d say “Garth” and he’d answer “yes?” in his easy low voice. So I took to talking like that when we were on the outside, I even detailed what I was doing. You can’t assume anything with Garth. Either he’s with you or he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. He could sure smell trouble from a mile away, but unspoken nuances of love eluded him although he always made a mental note small favors.

“I want to see a witch,” I say. “You remember Varda the skinny Israeli with the bulbous belly? She calls psychics witches, says she knows one who lives in Mississauga. So we’re going to go, Varda and I and Violet her young Greek training partner, the one with the pimples and rich father. I can’t figure out why she doesn’t take Acutane. Anyhow we’re going, the three of us. ”
He tells me he knew a psychic in Guelph, a real nut case, belonged in a loony bin. I wince. “Sorry,” he says, “but the gifted ones usually are.” That man is really spiritual, which not many people realize, what with him being so big. There’s a stigma about being big and black.
“I think you’re here to help me with my spiritual side,” I say, climbing on his lap and leaning in to kiss his soft lips that I tell him are as smooth as my cunt the same day he shaves it and the day after. “You think most women let their men do that? I say, although I know his answer. I absolutely adore compliments. From what he’s heard, Garth says, most guys go to prostitutes because they can’t get this stuff from their wives or girlfriends, things like shaving, ass fucking, sucking off and swallowing. Swallowing is big. Maybe they did it before they were married or when they just started going out, he doesn’t know why these same women become so tight and proper. “Hey, I do all those things!” I say and punch him on the shoulder. When he shaves me, he’s a conscientious worker, slow and methodical. He pays attention to detail which is why my lips resemble his. And anyhow I know why those females shift gears: they’re rebelling that’s why and when they’ve finished rebelling they’re just like the straight generation before them. “That and maybe they didn’t like it in the first place,” he says.

“So why do you want to see a witch?” he says, his good right eye looking straight at me, his left stays in line like he trained it, not wanting anyone to know his business.
“I want to know how it all turns out.”
“My life. Ours. Also Caroline’s. And my Lisi’s.”
“And will that help?”
I lie my head on his chest. “No,” I say, “but at least there won’t be surprises.”
When I sleep surprises creep up on me, I can feel their shape and thickness, so I sleep with my back pressed against Garth who turns his black quilt into a sleeping bag. Some nights I wake up with a start and sit up waiting for him to miss me. When he doesn’t, I give his frame a shove and then another.
“Come,” he mumbles, opening his quilt and patting the space next to him.
“You don’t mind? It’s not going to disturb your sleeping?” I say sliding into the space he’s made for me.
“Garth?”
“Now what?”
“I need to ask you something. Do you still love me?”
“I love you now as much as I always have and always will,” he says.
I tell him his arms too heavy and settle in, spooning into the warmth of him, and I think to ask him if fat people hold more body heat and how I can broach the topic without mentioning his excessives which he says are subcutaneous and not intramuscular like ordinary people’s fat.

The next night I sit up and he looks me over through lowered lashes. “You want to sleep with me?” he says creating space in his cocoon.
“Yes, please.”
I lie on my side, my entire length against his, ostrich-toe nails imprinting the flesh on the side of his quads. I press my face to the crushed silk skin that cushion his lats.
“You’re crying.”
“Am not.”
“Why are you crying?”
“They took her upstairs.”
“So that’s good right?” I know he doesn’t try to figure me out; he just asks and waits. How long he’s willing to wait depends. In our seventh year, he’ll threaten to break up because of all the time he spends waiting while I talk. “It takes up too much energy,” he’ll say.
“They had all her belongings piled high on one trolley, two orderlies, and the blond nurse she’d formed a bond with holding her hand.”
“You wanted her out of the dungeon.”
“But they whisked her off, like she was being moved from one pen to another. They said they had a bed on the second floor in the group wing. But she knew her room, see? And who the head nurse was and how to get to the cafeteria with money in her pocket. She liked the head nurse, you know the one that let me cross the picket lines. I said my own father had been a union organizer so I understood, but I was a single mother, which I am you know, and I had to see her. I would say something to the press about how generous they were, taking into a account the plight of a hard-working mother with a kid hidden away on the lowest level. They let me by then, ‘you mean the dungeon’ they said and let me through no problem, telling me to use what name and what phrase.”
“You didn't want her to stay.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just that she was there for six months. They made her serve on tables which wasn’t so bad, I guess, it made her feel like staff maybe. Maybe not.”
“Here,” he grabs the black bath towel on his side. Maybe he thought a good ass-fuck would clear my passages. “I’m taking a bath in your tears and snot.”
I turn away.
“I was only trying to slip some lightness in.”
“There is no lightness. They put her in a glass cubicle, maybe six by four, one of those lumpy mattresses you see in prison movies. Observation, twenty-four hours. Standard procedure they said.”


“She’s my daughter,” I say to the orderly in bright whites. “She’s sick. You think they drag patients with cancer or heart disease into solitary like that?”
“It’s not my fault, ma’am. I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules.”
“Where did I hear that before?” I hear my voice rising, which is alright. I just wish I could sweet talk the quavering, just to hold it off long enough.
“You have to wait out here,” the orderly says.
“She’ll be fine. We’re watching her.” the nurse from dual-diagnosis says and I glimpse the snake living inside her dulcet voice.
“Do you know where the advocate’s office is?” My throat burns, flames leap up, scorching my words, suffocating them. “I need to see the advocate.”
“Do you what you have to. That’s my advice,” and she walks away.

I walk over to the window and start banging on it. I remember banging on a door’s glass pane in Lake Alverna until glass shattered, one shard lodging near the vein behind my wrist. I coveted the thin-edged scar that hides from me now as I bang on this pane.
“I will not leave until I can see my daughter. I must see my daughter.”
My palm approaches the glass yet again and the door opens.
“I must sit with her. She’s afraid, this is not where she belongs. No one told her, you see, she doesn’t know. She was in her room downstairs and now she’s locked up with glass around her.”
“You can sit with her.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much. She’s just huddled there on the floor, you see, and I—I can’t leave her this way.”
“I know.”
“It really hurts. I want to take her home. This is not her life, in here.”
“Yes. I know. You can sit with her now.”


I don’t remember the nurse, what she looked like, whether she was young or old, what the color of her hair was. Her voice wasn’t loud. There was no edge to it. When I walked into that closet of a room, Caroline was sitting in the corner. Close by was a single thin mattress. There was no sheet on it. The air was thick with the stench of urine. I know I sat beside her and that I must have put my arm around her. I’m sure I cried. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m not leaving until you’re in a room with a warm bed and your rose quilt from home. I’m here,” I said. “I’m not leaving. Your mother’s here.”

We didn’t stay long in that room after that. There was another room across the hallway, also with glass walls, a room with a bed and blankets. I wanted to know where she would change her clothes and where the bathroom was, and when she’d have her own room. We sat on the soft bed, Caroline and I, until she fell asleep. And then I left because I had to go to work, to train those women, the ones who grabbed at their flesh and wondered what to this and what to do about that.

Same Old (edit 1, erotic memoir)

Vertical rows of green and red numbers flash from the screen.
“Whatever you do, don’t leave this chair,” he says, sliding his desk chair back so he has enough room between the chair and desk to raise his frame.
“What if I need to go to the bathroom?”
“Call me,” he says. He says there’s a casino on Steeles West where patrons stay glued to their seats, day and night, opening to closing time. I ask “so what do they do when they need to take a piss?” “Wear diapers,” he says and I say, “Yeah right, well, no way am I wearing Depends.” Of course he thinks everyone a price and he’s right.

Garth has figured out this scheme; if the trade goes seven points above or seven points below, we cash out. Whether we go long or short, that’s the rule. Lately he has this thing for currencies. We’re paper trading, playing the Canadian dollar which is at sixty-five cents. We watch the trades real time on the Bridge Information System. Garth says just about everyone has a platform going, but this one, this Bridge one is the best going. I want to know what happens if our computer crashes or if the broker has too many lines going. And also, what about sex? “Money is better than sex,” he says, so I lay out this picture of fucking in front of the green and red lights and coming on the green. “Could work,” he says, so I crawl under the desk, slide up his old gray shorts that need a wash only I don’t care since I’m crazy about the smell of his cock, and nuzzle my way in.

The truth is I’m growing kind of partial to this trading shit, peering intently at the screen and like a sportscaster calling out the plays to Garth, who decides to take out three contracts on the Deutch mark. I’m watching the screen and yelling out on those seven points, and it’s really cool. And then the world stops. Well, it doesn’t stop but it’s moving so slowly that Garth is getting restless. The market’s got her legs crossed and won’t give him one more point. When he asks me what he should do, should he stay or get out, I say, “I don’t know, it’s your thing.” I look around the room, at this Gossamer house I never liked all that much, it being so close to the house on Bluffwood Drive, and this address, this drafty four-bedroom place in the suburbs, suddenly becomes dear to me.

And then the market collapses. I know this because Garth’s one seeing eye grows big, he gasps, once, his mouth opens, and he freezes. He’s like a third-rate actor registering shock. The market has walked out on him and he doesn’t know why. He closes the account, the door of this office room, walks downstairs, out the front door, and drives off into the night.

All I know is Garth’s scam-stash was one-hundred thousand, the rent is three-thousand two hundred even though we sneered at Stephen with his three-thousand seven hundred chunk for his Teddington house, our year is almost up, and we have enough for two more months—rent, food, first and last. I circle ads, create one- to five-star lists, call, cross out, the cover of one notebook ripping from its coiled spine, replaced by a yellow steno pad. When I hooked up with Garth, I took the deepest breath I could and dove underwater into an artist’s heaven. At first I was astonished, but now with water pressing in, I gulp for air and breathe in water instead.


I can’t breathe. Although she says she’ll see me. Today she sits in a loose brown checked flannel dress, the chapel window’s cerulean blue washing her face and folded hands. Fresh-faced missionaries standing in small quiet groups outside the chapel doors hand out glossy Missionaries for Africa pamphlets.

Caroline hooks her arm through mine. “My foster mother is visiting me today,” she tells the nurse who smiles and raises her eyebrows at me. We communicate in small gestures, pleased one-syllable sounds, and tentative phrases.
“Where shall we go today?” I ask. She likes the shimmering red jello in the cafeteria, also the sealed ribbed plastic cups of apple juice. Cheesies thrill her. We walk along arm-in-arm down one hallway, up an escalator, and down another hallway with gleaming floors. I nod and smile at nurses and patients and occasionally return a wave. A stray sob escapes my lips.

In the foyer of the main building, we pass an oversize portrait of the Whitby Health Centre. Below a primary-blue sky sits a modern glass and beige brick facility centered in a horizontal span of spring grass and flanked by a ridge of evergreens. In the background lies a varnished motionless lake. Caroline and I tour the span of grass above the shoreline. We are surrounded by Canada geese. I guide her past old and fresh bird droppings. There are rocks at the cliff edge and I worry about letting go of her hand. We stop and look out at the water. “Look at the horizon, honey,” I say, passing my hand through her hair which the wind has caught and blown across her eyes. I rotate my body in the direction of that line separating water and sky so she will turn with me and I think maybe she hears me, maybe she is watching that space Lisa defined for me when she was four, possibly five. We were in a car, the red firebird after the Caravan had been repossessed, the sun glowing low in the sky and talk turned to horizons and country.

“I miss the country,” I said.
“All you have to do is look at the horizon.”
I think I was quiet, then. “The country,” she said, “is where the horizon and the sky touch.”

That day Caroline and I breathed in Lisa’s country as we did many times over the next twenty-one months, together and solo. Of course, I’m not sure whether her eyes stayed still and sharp enough to see a country where she might breathe and fill herself with clean air, but I’m hoping she caught a glance.

Sometimes I wonder what I learned in those trying times. I learned about freedom, I guess—that I was and she wasn’t, and that when she was and if, I would never forget the time she wasn’t. I would never forget, Jew that I am. I used to closet myself in the bathroom when she stood spewing words. “I need some time,” I’d say. And she’d vomit incomplete sentences outside the door as she rattled the handle. I should have been better I say out loud and cloak myself with warm phrases. I pile them on, but I’m never warm.

When I was a Builder (edit 1, memoir, literary erotica)

I live my life in five buildings: the Gossamer house, The Promenade, Whitby Mental Health Center, Dalemount Public School, and Strictly Fitness Gym. I carry my gym bag. My muscles I wear. I don’t give a damn what clothes cover them, as long as the muscles shine through. My muscles take me through life, propping me upright, and standing in for me when words claw and catch in my throat.
Sometimes I get pissed off when I train: I’m getting ready for my two-hundred and twenty-five pound deads, and this little chick in pink and gray is gabbing to her friend—“and then he says—and I say—and like who does he think he is!” Things like that piss me off.
“Listen,” I say. “Could you do your talking somewhere else? This is a heavy weight if you haven’t noticed. And I’m not in the mood to injure myself.”
They sashay off, elbowing each other and giggling.

I’ve got my knee wraps tight, crisscrossed over the knee once, twice, three times and then tucked under, my favorite belt from my training days at Golds on Eglinton and Victoria Park pulled tight. I’m warmed up—a quarter each side for ten reps, stretch my quads and hams, maybe lower back, maybe not; one plate each side for six to eight; a plate and a quarter for four, unwrapping and stretching. Then I set up two plates a side, two-twenty five which isn’t bad. Fuck I’ve seen mediocre builders showing off with two plates. I like to train beside those guys. Sometimes I correct their form. “You’re rounding your back,” I say. “Your back’s too low, forty-five degrees is all.” “You’re leaning back at the finish. Don’t lean back.” I’ll even stop my own training to guide them through the form, start to finish. It’s just the way I am. Later I complain to Garth. “Did they ask you?” he says. “No,” I say. He makes me laugh.

Of course I’ve been injured—rotator cuff when I was just a rookie, showing off at Gold’s and smacking forty-fives on my bench; a pulled hamstring at Gold’s in Ajax when my peroxide blond sous-coach was teaching me to do the splits, standing me against the wall and lifting my first my right, then my left leg higher and higher until I could touch my toe to the wall—the sort of flexibility that came to me on Nina Street as I racked my legs over my head until my upper and lower body were sandwiched against each other so Garth could ram away the way he liked and which I appreciated in spirit, until the pounding became too prolonged and insistent. Still, I thought I was cool and once he told me as I lay cooing at his cock, “I have to tell you this is the greatest sex I’ve ever had. Ever.” I asked him how many females he’d had and it wasn’t much, but still I was flattered since he knew hookers from his bouncing days and women have always confided in him. And he had his porn business which didn’t make him the cash he’d hoped for and which he dropped before we moved to the Overbrooke house where he returned to his first love, stocks and bonds, options and futures.

Once Garth fouled up on a spot on my eighth rep of a barbell preacher curl and I pulled a bicep tendon which more than six months to heal and even after eighteen months still didn’t feel quite right. In our second year of training, I was about to do a one rep max of two sixty-five—I was standing in front of the squat cage beside the Smith machine after repping out on two-twenty-five around six o’clock when all the builders were out.
“I going heavier,” I grinned, throwing off my belt and unraveling my knee wraps.
“Sure,” Garth said. “How much?”
“A quarter each side?”
“Why not?” he said.
I slipped off the collar on both sides, snagged two quarters from the squat rack, and added one on one side of the bar while Garth did the other side. It’s like that. You work together.
“Getting a drink,” I said. I like to walk across the gym to the fountain before doing a tough set. The stride is purposeful and thoughtful, like a doctor before an operation. If I see a builder I know, I nod. I don’t chat and pass the time of day. Mostly I walk straight. My mind is clear. The walking does the work. Garth knows to be quiet.

First I wrap my knees. Then I tighten my old training belt still with me since John and our Gold days. Slinging the straps of my wrist wraps around the bar, I roll my wrists until the material cuts hard into my skin and force my thumbs around and over the straps. I set my feet shoulder width a part, and squat down, not in a squat though—my ass sticks out, back at a clean forty-five, shoulders over the bar, bar touching my shins as I stare ahead, checking myself out in the mirror. I breathe in. Three times I breathe in and out. Then I close my eyes. Garth waits. Beneath my lids I’m swearing "fuck what a weight, no angel cake this goddamn weight, two sixty-five is fucking concrete." but I’m holding on and with these glutes, hams, quads, back, all, I’m on my way, standing, standing, standing. And up.
“Wait,” I say, unraveling the wraps.
“C’mon Janice.”
“Hey I’m lifting, you’re not.”
He says it’s only two plates and a quarter each side. He does five. I tell him, “You weigh, what, four-twenty? And I’m weighing in at one-fifty-five these days. I wasn’t ready, that’s all.”
“Don’t freak yourself out. It’s not such a big deal. What you even wearing your belt for?”
I swing around. “What!”
“You heard me. I never wore a belt or wraps.”
“That’s you,” I say, because he’s like some comic book anti-hero, Spawn maybe or Venom, names I never came across until I met Garth my cold defender who loves me enough to assume I can lift two and a quarter on each side without a belt.
“Hey, you’re stronger than most of the guys here.”
“Yeah, squats and deads sure, and leg press,” I say, remembering the week before on the forty-five degree leg press, warming up and adding on —“lay on another plate, man”—until I was pressing eight plates a side and not those prissy reps in the shallow end either.
“Anyway, I’ve been wearing my belt and wraps since the beginning. No fucking way am I taking off this belt.”
“It’s your call,” he says and turns away. I hate when he does that. I don’t know who is watching. Building is like a small town; everyone knows everyone else’s business. Right now there’s one circle with only two builders in it, and Garth is about cut through its perimeter with his massive arm and walk away.
“I’m keeping my knee wraps on,” I say as I fling off my belt.
“I said it’s your call.”

I get back into position, plant my feet, and wrap the straps tight, tight, shoulders over, ass out, set my Tyroleans again, look straight ahead. Breathe. I’m alone in this world with the air hanging heavy and thick around me. I pull and nothing happens.
“Shit,” I say.
“You pulled. Just stand up.”
John used to say that—stand up bitch. Just fucking stand up.
I smile to myself. I can do that, stand up that is and fucking too, although not at the same time. And I do. My ass does what it was trained for, hams and quads following suit, legs straightening, two-third straight, three-quarters, abs and lower back signing on, while inside, a training belt surfaces, wrapping around my innards like a mighty clinging vine, and I’m thinking hey man, I’m a living belt. And even though the thick band stretches, circles, then like a viper constricts, I continue my upright climb.
“Good one!” Garth says when I’m finally upright. “Three-hundred and sixty-five pounds!”
“Yah,” I say. “Listen, could you clean this up for me?” I’m whispering. Not that I mean to, it’s just that’s how it is. There’s no pain, but I’m scared as a stunt man on the wing of a plane in a loop and going down. “I gotta get out of here.”
“Janice?” he says, standing in front of me and blocking my way.
“I’ll meet you in the car and would you hurry up?” I say, talking low and serious. “I’m outta here,” I say. And I am. I should have known. Like at the Indian house, the day when I walked out, the weather complying with its clear Payne’s gray—I should have known but I forgot because I wanted something too badly or I needed something, and he happened to be there. That’s how it was. He just happened to be there. I did the rest, without a belt, lifting and life, both.

But the thing is I love him. I mean I was sitting on the toilet in the Indian Road house bleeding out these words: “Please god, give me passion in my life.” And so I have my Garth. You know that old Nina Simone song—“say he ain’t much for the looking sake, he’s crazy and no count as he can be, he’s got the kind of love for me.” And now I’m lying in bed and the pills are wearing off and I’m crying, holding myself in a fetal position, first one side then the other, and on my stomach, crumpled over on the toilet with my head in my hands, rocking back and forth and becoming more god-fearing by the moment, whining out old blues songs, baby please come home, when the automatic garage door rumbles like an underground subway, and I snap into bed, reining in my breathing as I swing into my fetal roll.

He thinks he can move without sound, but I hear him climbing the stairs. I listen for his breathing and feel the thickness of his shadow as he stands, looking down over me. A low vibration swells through the tunnel of my throat and I fling it at him.
“I thought you’d be sleeping,” he says, “the pills are supposed to last four hours and I’m here with ten minutes to spare.”
“Not everything’s on schedule, you know.”
“You look old.”
“Thanks,” I say, hoping I look ancient for him. Because it had hurt like the extremes of all seasons—a winter blizzard, a rain torrent in summer, an autumn bullying wind, relentless spring rain causing the earth to expand and crack as it makes way for new roots in spring. Then he gave me these pills and went into his Queen Street night.
“Talon is sleeping and the pills will hold you for the next four hours,” he’d said and made off. It’s true I was curled up, the pills like a cross guarding me from the searing across my belly and back and battered ribs. I kept my breath above the waves. I was afraid of being dragged under. Gradually I allowed myself to unravel and the waves to coat my body, and I breathed into them. For the longest while I lay there with the waves lapping at me, until an undertow caught me unawares and I called out for Garth. But he was on his Queen Street route, surveying the presence and reduced number of Queen Street hookers and checking out the state of the world from his corner in Tim Horton’s.