There is Larry, then, in jeans and a fawn suede jacket, his taffy-haired head inclined ,towards Zenia, one of his hands on her arm. Little Larry! Serious little Larry, who would purse his mouth and frown at the very same time his twin sisters were laughing and pinching each other’s arms and telling each other they had big snots coming out of their noses. Charis has never been altogether comfortable about Larry, or rather about his rigidity. She’s always felt that a good massage therapist could do wonders. But Larry must have loosened up considerably if he’s been having lunch at the Toxique.
But what is he doing with Zenia? What is he doing with Zenia right now? He’s bending his face down, Zenia’s own face is reaching up like a tentacle, they’re kissing! Or so it appears. “Listen lady, you want a hot dog or not?” says the vendor. “What?” says Charis, startled.
“Crazy broad, shove off” says the vendor. “Get back in the bin. You’re bothering the customers.”
If Charis were Roz, she’d say, What customers? But if Charis were Roz she’d be in a state of deep shock. Zenia and Larry! But she’s twice his age! thinks the vestige of Charis that remains from the time when age, in female-male relationships, was supposed to matter. The present Charis tells herself not to be judgmental. Why shouldn’t women do what men have been doing for ages, namely robbing the cradle? Age is not the point. The point is not Zenia’s age, but Zenia herself. Larry might as well be drinking liquid drain cleaner.
While Charis is having this uncharitable thought, Zenia steps sideways, off the curb, and disappears into a taxi. Larry gets in after her—so it was not a goodbye kiss—and the taxi is sucked out into the current of traffic. Charis dithers. What should she do now? Her urge is to phone Roz—Roz! Roz! Help! Come quickly!—but that would do no good, because she doesn’t know where Zenia and Larry are going; and even if she did, so what? What would Roz do? Burst into their hotel room or whatever, and say Let go of my son? Larry is twenty-two, he is an adult. He can make his own decisions.
Charis sees another taxi and runs out into the street, flailing her arms. The taxi squeals to a stop in front of her and she hurries around, opens the door, and scrambles in. “Thank you,” she gasps.
“You lucky you not dead:” says the driver, who has an accent Charis can’t identify. “So, what can I do for you?”
“Follow that taxi,” says Charis. “What taxi?” says the driver.
So that is that, and worse, Charis feels honour-bound to pay him three dollars, because she did after all get into his cab, but she only has a five-dollar bill and a ten, and he doesn’t have change, and she doesn’t want to ask the hot dog vendor, considering what he just called her, so it ends with him saying, “Time is money, lady, do me a favour, forget it,” and there are bad feelings all round.
Luckily they are digging up Queen Street, yet again, and Zenia’s taxi is caught in the jam. After running down the street some more Charis manages to find another empty taxi, only two cars away from Zenia’s, and she flings herself into it, and together the two taxis ooze slowly through the downtown core. Zenia and Larry get out at the Arnold Garden Hotel, and so does Charis. She watches the uniformed doorman nod to them, she watches Larry put his hand on Zenia’s elbow, she watches them go through the brass-and-glass doors. She herself has never been through those doors. Anything with an awning intimidates her.
As she’s trying to decide what to do next, a bicycle courier starts swearing at her for no reason at all. Jesus lady, watch the fuck out! It’s an omen: she’s done enough for today.
She walks down to the ferry dock, buffeted as if by wind. Being in the city is so abrasive; it’s like dust blowing into your face, it’s like dancing on sandpaper. Although she’s not sure why, she minds being called lady even more than she minds being called crazy broad. Why is this word so offensive to her? (Listen, says Shanita’s voice, with amused contempt. If that’s all you everget called.~
She’s feeling baffled and inept, and slightly frightened. What is she supposed to do with what she knows? What is she supposed to do next? She listens, but her body tells her nothing, even though it was her body that got her into this, with its mischievous yen for caffeine, its adrenalin rushes, its megalomania. Some days—and this is becoming one of them—having a body is an inconvenience. Although she treats her body with interest and consideration, paying attention to its whims, rubbing lotions and oils into it, feeding it with selected nutrients, it doesn’t always repay her. Right now her back—for instance—hurts, and there’s a cold dark pool, an ominous pool, a pool of browny-green septic acid, forming somewhere below her navel. The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.
She stands on the ferry, leaning on the railing, facing backwards, watching the wake rise and subside into the notoriously poisonous lake, tracing and obliterating itself in the same gesture. Light glitters on the water, no longer white but yellowing; it’s afternoon and there goes the sun, there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it. She will never get any of those days back, including the ones she should have had but didn’t, days with Billy in them. It was Zenia who made off with those days. She took them away from Charis, who now doesn’t even have them to look fondly back on. It’s as if Zenia has crept into her house when she wasn’t there and torn the photos out of her photo album, the photo album she doesn’t possess except inside her head. In one single snatch and grab, Zenia stole both her future and her past. Couldn’t she have left it a little longer? just a month, just a week, just a little more?
In the spiritual world (which she has now entered, because the ferry, with its soporific motor and gentle sway, often has this effect on her), Charis’s astral body falls to its knees, raising imploring hands to the astral body of Zenia, which burns red, a red crown of flames like spiky leaves or old-fashioned pen nibs flaring around her head, with emptiness at the centre of each flame. More time, more time, Charis pleads. Give back what you took!
But Zenia turns away.
~IX
The history of Charis and Zenia began on a Wednesday in the first week of November in the first year of the seventies. Seventy. Charis finds both parts of this number significant, the seven and the zero as well. A zero always means the beginning of something and the end as well, because it is omega: a circular self-contained O, the entrance to a tunnel or the exit from one, an end that is also a beginning, because although that year saw the beginning of the end of Billy, it was also the year her daughter August began to begin. And seven is a prime number, composed of a four and a three—or two threes and a one, which Charis prefers because threes are graceful pyramids as well as Goddess numbers, and fours are merely box-like squares.
She knows it was a Wednesday, because Wednesdays were the days she went into town to earn some money by teaching two yoga classes. She did that on Fridays, too, except that on Fridays she also stayed late to put in her share of volunteer time at the Furrows Food Co-op. She knows it was November, because November is the eleventh month, the month of the dead, and also of regeneration. Sun sign Scorpio, governed by Mars, colour deep red. Sex, death, and war. Synchronicity.
The day begins as mist. Charis sees the mist as she gets out of bed, or rather off the bed, because the bed is a mattress on the floor. She goes to the window to look out. There’s a miniature transparent rainbow stuck onto the glass, though Charis did not stick it there: it was left over from the previous tenants, a batch of burned-out hippies who also drew pictures in Magic Marker on the flowered, faded wallpaper—naked people copulating and cats with halos—and played the Doors and Janis Joplin at top volume in the middle of the night, and left mounds of human shit in the backyard. They were finally kicked out by the landlord with the help of the next-door neighbours after a screaming acid parry, during which one of them set fire to a black plastic beanbag chair in the living room under the impression that it was a carnivorous puffball. The landlord—an old man who lives at the other end of the street—welcomed Charis and Billy, because there were only two of them and they did not have a big speaker system, and because Charis said she intended to plant a vegetable garden, which indicated some sort of decorous coupledom; and the neighbours were so grateful for the change that they didn’t even make a fuss about the chickens, chickens that may or may not be illegal, but this is the Island and strict legality is not the norm here, witness the number of house additions that go up without a permit. Luckily they have a corner lot, so there are neighbours on only one side.