Nice Lady

It's because of seeing him on the metro. That's why he has crept back into my thoughts. That, and a play he indifferently inspired that's been repping down the street.

On the metro, he was wearing a fedora and a suit jacket. He had his legs crossed, rather like a woman, one might say. I thought for sure he saw me, and I tried to meet his gaze while elbowing my friend bedside me. He looked out the window, either too busy in his head to notice, or trying to avoid me -either seemed possible. He had not aged at all, or, I guess the truth is, that men his age are now a regular part of my life, and so he did not seem old to me anymore.

It was more than ten years ago that I knew him. I've said a lot already, zined him, spoken publicly about him. I've come to see him as a symbol of all the stupid things I've ever done. He made me resent my naivety, even as I mourned its loss. He kissed me a few times, though I think it was the talk of how I inhabited his thoughts that shook me hardest.

He writes still, more than me, and about pop culture things like news headlines and television programs. His prose retains his trademark airy, cerebral quality, like the most offhand observation is ready for the pages of the Globe and Mail.

I'm not sure how to exorcise him from my thoughts. I don't understand why that brief encounter on the train stays with me, why I feel again like a 22 year old girl with a problem she can't manage.

He wanted to write a book about me, at one point. He let me call him Nice Lady, which was a joke only he and I understood. He confided he'd once done drag with a CBC celebrity. I knew enough small details about him to love him. And I did.

Green

It’s very hot. The air feels close and sticky, like the palms of my hands, and I think that Michael is right. “Such a metabolism!” he says when he rubs them, making me feel like my greatest insecurity is a testament to my power.

And so, yes, I think it is about metabolism, because yesterday there were only buds on the trees and today, a tentative green yelps from the tree branches. Tomorrow, there will be leaves. There are very few blossoms here. There isn’t enough time, because the growing season is short. The people respond by staying up until three, clogging the streets, absorbing all the stickiness and looking for others like them.

I feel the urgency too. I think maybe it is closer to my internal clock. I wake up knowing there can’t be time for everything, and the people on the street say, “Yes, you’re right. Depeche."

Michael loves the brave yellow-green of new leaves, but I prefer the heat and deep summer hues. I don’t mind the scent of death in them. I see the cyclic nature in full blooms. I like determination.

Someone wants me to describe him; because the world isn’t just about feelings and opinions. But I never really bother with the visuals. They are important, but they don’t really get in me like his voice. It’s old, sort of womanly, like a lady who knows the ropes. Like a lady who knows how to tie things down and shakes her head at the new girls who can’t walk in heels.

He has the voice of a drag queen, dresses like my grandpa, stares like a lion. He loves an audience; trouble. He’s most dangerous when he’s bored, and I’d have given up my baby teeth in a dirty deal with the tooth fairy, thrown in my wisdom teeth as a bonus, to have found him first. Or, I would’ve transplanted my baby teeth into him, to give him my irreverence for the sanctity of marriage. To have him say “I fuck her and I fuck you.” And have him mean it, without guilt.

He expects me to be harsh, to be all the alienating things about the future that magnetize him. But he knows too about the times when I can crawl into his lap. He wants the lickbitepurr that he deserves.

He can’t say it. So he creates to exorcise the guilt.

“Not like Lolita,” his fiction begins, “a non-sexual obsession.”

“No,” I whisper to the back of his neck, “Not like Lolita”.

When I see him next, I will be old, ten years past a Lolita. I will stand behind him while he sketches her, listing all the ways that I am not his Lolita. Once in a while, he will turn to face me, for a visual reminder of what she is not to be. I will see her unfolding in his eye, a translucent green slip of a girl with a mean look on her face.

He will turn back to his work, before he sees that I’ve been sketching too. A girl, no a boy, who looks just like me, we are so much the same, and underneath it
says:
I fucked him I fucked him.

That is what I think when he sends a message, “work is going too well, not returning calls from anyone.”

Ingesting the hollow comfort of being included in Anyone, I apply alternating streaks of avocado and moss eye shadows. I'm just anyone, so I go out to look for others like me.

It’s what I think about when the punk boy says he wants to kiss me. I smile, stifle a laugh and pull him by his studded belt onto my bed. It’s like we’re making a rock video. He takes my pants off to an emo band, removes my bra to a rock ballad, and kisses down my thighs to something hardcore but with violins. The camera angles shift, from over his shoulder, to close ups of my face. There’s a pause in the music.

“I have a condom if you want it.”

I smile and say yeah yeah yeah, losing myself in a chorus I’ve been singing since I was four. It goes na na na nana.

Then he gets ready to put it in me, and I expect it to be Slint, or Engine Kid, something fast and then slow, then hard and then soft. But it’s pretty much three chord punk. There is enough melody to warrant the pain, and it’s building to something, even if the surprise in the ending is just that it’s over.

The boy runs his fingers through his bleach blonde hair “I’m teething,” he says, swishing water in his mouth. “My wisdom teeth are coming in.” I laugh and tell him that he should try to keep them. Maybe we’ll need them when we’re old.

He falls asleep, twitching and thrashing, and holding on to me. When he leaves, I pull the covers back to see if there are stains. I know you’re supposed to bleed on the sheets. But the only marks are from the lube, still damp, making the flannel sheet a darker green.