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.