AND EVERYONE IN HEAVEN WILL LOVE YOU

originally published in THE GRAVY

<<no.1: Everyone in Heaven will Love Us >>

We began our day thus: my lover laid in our bed, which was not much more than a sack on the floor, handmade and filthy but not infested by anything but the vermin that is love. He masturbated, toes seized and pointed, silent and finally limp. He was sore that I didn't lie with him and touch him and I felt the loss as well. I can't fuck people I love because porn and prostitution have drowned my sex desire, but I do love his urgency and his softness and his wiry hair and the way that he dissolves to sugar if I lick his droopy, precious balls. His moans then are involuntary, and though I never feel that rushing genital pulse and throb, somehow I know it precisely. I love him and I love to give him this. He got up sad, and I was really sorry. It would've taken a small gesture to make him feel beloved but I blew it.

Then we went to our usual place for coffee. We had rented bicycles the day before, matching and sporty, which seemed a bit preposterous. I felt like someone would point us out as frauds in the healthy lifestyle race as we sped to our destination, but we unlocked our bikes and put on our space age helmets and biked to have a coffee and a shared nonfat cinnamon bun. I read the New York Times review of books and my love read the Globe and Mail report on business, like he does each day with coffee. The only thing that gave the lie to our breakfast time charade was the fact that it was happening at four pm. After we finished our drinks, we saddled up and biked down to the ferry. It was pulling in as we did, and we stood in line with the inbreds and commuters who had reason to quit Halifax for Dartmouth till the green light flashed and the gates opened.

We had already argued; Trevor wanted to take the bridge but I refused. I was afraid! It's like a four-lane highway suspended a thousand metres above the glittering sea. They say you splatter when you hit, as though it's stone you're hitting. He was angry, really angry and sullen, and I felt bad because I got my way (not for the first time). I stroked and coddled, not without feeling but selfishly, and when we arrived on the other side of the harbour things were somewhat softer between us. So on our rented bikes we rode and joked and even kissed, till we arrived at our destination, a thrift store that's more like a huge department store, and I bought a button up shirt for our best friend Stephen, and a t-shirt for me, with a picture of a microscope and a caption reading “lab techs do it better”, and Trevor got a funny pair of navy swimming trunks and a pair of runners with velcro closures. When we shop together like this, I feel that we are beginning our slow and delicious descent into eccentricity and middle-age. It thrills me.

We re-boarded our bicycles and arranged to meet at “Bob and Lori's Food Emporium” for lunch. This time Trevor would not take no for an answer. He wanted the bridge, that hot dogger, and my cowardice was not going to detain him. I said it was fine, but both of us were pissed off, stupidly. It had nothing to do with the journey. It was our mutual refusal to bend to the other one's will that irked us both.

 

<< no.2: My Aim Is True >>

I biked up and down, up and down looking for him. I figured he'd be sitting in the window, and I also figured I'd arrive before him. I had the bike lock, but he had the keys and the money, so I didn't want to go in without him.

I have this trick of contracting my stomach muscles, a kind of bulimic belly dancing, the extrusion hula, which pushes recently swallowed food back out the mouth. Well that afternoon I found out that spitting out mouthfuls of yogurty puke while travelling at some speed on a bike can be very messy. Except when I'm quite drunk, I ususally manage to avoid getting my own vomitus on my body or clothing. Not so this time. I spit out partially digested nonfat vanilla yogurt, diet sprite and sweet pickles all over my hand and the rubber hand grip of my lovely rental mountain bike. So much for the myth of healthy living.

Needless to say I was in less than peak emotional form when I finally discovered Trevor, fully fed and rested, hidden deep in the bowels of Bob and Lori's morally and nutritionally upstanding Christian drop in detox food Emporium. I was ravenously hungry; the expelled yogurt sprite mix was the only food I'd had in about five hours, since the cinnamon bun we'd shared with coffee. I was also hot and tired and anxious about what I was going to eat. It causes me almost unspeakable anxiety to push any food past my teeth, and I spend what seems like twelve hours a day worrying it back up, but eating in restaurants is especially grueling, as this sad tale illustrates.

There was a something called a“vegan chef's salad” listed on the menu, and salads are usually safe as long as I ask for the dressing “on the side”. Not so in this case. It was brought to the table, a few small leaves of romaine lettuce quivering under big, delicious looking scoops of creamy pasta salad, glossy faux egg salad, velvety black bean pate, and golden hummous. The rehab centre guy sitting next to us looked up from his 12-step guide book to moan involuntarily. “They cook good here”, he said. I was cursing them for the same thing.

There is nothing quite as horrible in my experience of things horrible as having a waiter place in front of me a plate of something which a) I have ordered, b) I want very much to eat, and c) I know I will berate myself for days for having eaten. Now, to a person who doesn't suffer in relation to food (i.e. Trevor), the solution to this dilemma seems abundantly clear: stop berating yourself, eat healthy food that tastes good, don't keep eating after you're full, don't deprive yourself when you are hungry. It must be unbearably frustrating to know this solution in your heart, and yet not be able to transmit it in all it's common sensibility to the person you love best. How can I blame Trevor for saying, “For fuck's sake, Lil, just eat it! It's no big deal”. But I was dizzy, I was out of my head with hunger, and I was feeling swollen and heinous from the heat, so I thought about doing a violence to him.

I hurt him once badly in the past. I gave him a black eye with one of my blue and yellow wooden Ikea clogs, and my memory of that still haunts me. But sometimes rage descends over me like a mask, and when Trevor said to me “it's no big deal”, the rage poured down. First I thought “No, do not hit him, do not, absolutely do not”, but I had already started fantasizing it, how it would feel, how it would show him how out of line he was, and though the other voice was saying, “No, it'll just show him how out of line you are, you will poison something, every time you do a violence you kill something, that is the nature of violence...” my fist just flew out at him. I'd like to say it was unbidden but it wasn't. Not entirely. Blam! I hit him, my boy, my tender darling best friend boyfriend, right in the chops.

I had always imagined some kind of spongeyness to the face, but all I felt was bone. It was awful, really, really awful. Being able to feel his teeth so clearly articulated against my knuckles was especially horrible. I was sure I had knocked one out. I thought I felt the roots rip. I thought I felt blood vessels crunching as a tooth, maybe more than one, ripped loose from its moorings. I cannot deny that for a split second it felt good, but so quickly it turned nauseating, like a plum you've been saving till it's soft, but as soon as you bite it you realize it's gone all sick and boozey in its skin. Blood started to pour out from an orifice, I thought the mouth (the knocked out tooth theory) but soon I saw that it was his nose. I had given him a bloody nose. All he said was, “no, Lil, that's it” with a kind of dead finality. I started hyperventilating and sweating and just generally flipping out, and I was thinking with each new moment, each new thought I had, how anything I could say would sound like something an abusive husband would say: “It'll never happen again” “You made me so mad” “I didn't know my own strength” “Please don't leave me” “I don't deserve you”. and that was really creepy, having all my words, all my thoughts, stolen out from under me. I thought about what I could do, what I could tell him or give him, that would have a value or meaning equivalent to the destructive force of the punch . There was nothing. I thought about buying him something or giving him a lot of cash, cause let's face it, in many systems including the legal system, we believe in financial recompense. All those thoughts disgusted me further.

He had split out of there like a shot, leaving me whimpering and struggling to pick the change up off the floor where he had hurled it so I could pay the fucking bill. I had blood all over me, my hands and arms, but somehow I negotiated payment with the longsuffering Christian Vegan proprietor and got back on my bike. I biked fast and hard, exhausted from emotion, hating myself with a previously untapped vigour. I decided that the only conscienable thing I could do was get out. I didn't want to force him to be around me. I was still taking the model of the abusive husband as my paradigm, so I guess in some sense I was doing what I thought was manly.

Unfortunately, he beat me to it. By the time I got home and locked up my bike, he was already packing an overnight bag. He told me he was going to stay outside somewhere, which is something he likes to do. At first I just tried to be helpful, but when I realized this meant I was going to be left alone with my utterly soiled conscience, I became really agitated and begged him not to go. Somehow I knew that if I had been able to do what I had constructed as the noble thing, I could've tolerated the loneliness, but when I was forced to be the passive one, the waiter-at-home, it made me crazy. I begged him to please just talk to me for half an hour, and when he refused (as well he should have.), I threatened to follow him.

Anyway, eventually I did his bidding and left him alone. He found me after an hour or so, doing what I do best (binge eating and organizing implements with which I could make myself vomit with a minimum of bleeding from the throat), and he told me, as I clung to him like a five year old, that he was going to go get drunk. I knew he was; it's by far the most accessible escape for him, as eating is for me. He said he was going to “Homer's” which is an an absolutely horrible new bar here, a bar for people who think that glamour is still out. Trevor knows this. I think it's why he chose it, to go and listen to Soundgarden and Porno for Pyros and overhear patches of conversation that would at once make him cringe and relax, certain that even if our lives are webbed over with suffering, even if self-consciousness pollutes our every minute, we still have style. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe he chose it in order not to think those things. Maybe he chose it simply because he knew it was a bar in which a lonely looking man getting quietly drunk on draft beer would not be scrutinized.

 

 

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