We live on the eighth floor of a concrete and glass apartment building on Cote St. Luc Road. A doorman opens the door. The main foyer has marble floors. The apartment is furnished in Danish modern. Abie goes to university while I wait for the bookshelves and sofa to arrive. I wait for three months. I eat. When I was fourteen I won the Golden Spool award at Camp Manitou-Wabing for my black and white portrait of a Lauren Deckelbaum who never went through an awkward stage—she slipped through those years looking like she’d just woken up on a hazy morning or she was the hazy morning—and a snap shot of Bernie Hashmal canoeing solo, grinning and waving his paddle just before he tipped. I taught Abie everything I knew and he took it from there. The enlarger and trays are arranged on a wood plank over the bathtub. A glowing red bulb above the door frame signals he’s in his darkroom mode and not on the toilet reading Playboy with his worn-out underwear hanging like a sagging belly around his ankles while he’s taking a shit. He likes doing series: my flat wide feet with bunions poking through like spring bulbs; nudes of me sleeping, waking up, getting dressed with my left foot poised at the entrance of my underwear; doors with rusty hinges from the days when we’d break into deserted country houses. On these days when I’m a bird bathing in the sink, he calls me his little Faigele, my mother’s Yiddish name, and I pour cold water on his head. We take showers together. He fucks me after the late show and he slams in again around six in the morning. “You have entitlement issues,” I tell him.
We have brown ceramic dishes that pile up on the counter. My mother sends Angelina over once a week. Angelina vacuums and reminds me of home. She used to wrap up her long hair in a bun, but she’s cut it now. “I’m too old to fuss with long hair,” Angelina says and I say, “I understand because my hair gets so knotted even Houdini couldn’t break out and Abie has to comb it out for me." “Who is Houdini?” Angelina asks, so I tell her. What I don’t tell her is I’m like my hair, all tangled and tied-up.
I wet my hair and put olive oil on it. On my eyelids I paint a glittery black runway that takes off at the edges. “Hey, what colour are my eyes?” I really wonder about that sometimes. Abie tilts my head to the spot light. “Green,” he says, “no, hazel with emerald.” He takes photos of me, black and white: one with me holding my old guitar; one with me in a bath towel and holding my hair up with one hand; and one, one where my grandmother’s white shawl from the Weaver’s in St. Agathe is draped over my head. “Show me starry night with your eyes,” Abie says. All my life I wanted to be an actress. It’s what I do best. Constance Brown loves my photos. According to Abie, she says they’re better than the ones at the agency, and she loves my look─ethnic is in, she says.
I write every day. I write I cannot grow on a still pond. Abie says it’s always the same thing. One Saturday spring morning, we climb Mount Tremblant─we take the chair lift to the highest ski peak, but Abie insists we continue to the top. “You’re wearing your Tyrolean hiking boots, the cleats will hold you,” he says. “We couldn’t afford the cleats,” I yell. He kicks the earth with the tip of his boot to make climbing ledges, grabs stumps, and takes off his belt so I can grab hold. “Don’t look down,” he says, but I look down anyway and I’m thinking I’m going crash like that American diver in Acapulco and the whole time he’s saying how beautiful it’s going to be at the top and how we will stand together at the top of the world.
Abie's walking in the forest behind Lake Alverna. He's like an animal in the woods and I love that about him. Trees are like long lost relatives to him. "Jan," he calls out, "a white spruce, and that one, black, black spruce, tamarak, and that . . .” He walks over to an eastern hemlock. "You gotta see this!" he whispers, pointing to a dead rabbit and her five mewling babies. He wraps them in his chamois shirt and on the way home, he turns the heater on high. We buy an eye dropper at the drugstore across the street from our building. “Don’t forget to put the clock near them,” he says as he walks around in his torn underwear and turns on the TV. I open the cedar chest and take out the extra scraps from the beaver coat my grandmother gave me for my twenty-first birthday. It’s a family custom. My coat is in storage at Holt Renfrew, and my mother, who has a lamb-lined coat and a new Kolinsky, mails me notes reminding me to have the coat delivered.
"Your mother has a mink,” Abie says and I tell him, “No, it’s a Kolinsky.”
“When are you going to wise up? What animal is called a Kolinsky? You ever hear anyone say ‘Oh look, it’s a Kolinsky!’?
“So maybe it’s one of those rare animals, you don’t know everything,” I mutter.
“They’re just embarrassed because they’re rich ex-commies,” he says. “And your sister with her dead seal hanging on her bony back thinks she’s hot shit when she’s just a dumb-ass housewife with a big nose.” I picture shit steaming on the stove and served steaming on my grandmother's Wood & Son’s china plates.
“I’m putting them on the fur,” I say, “to remind them of their mother."
“Don’t forget the clock,” he calls out from the bed.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I’m really tired and also I’m pissed off because Abie throws out orders and ideas like ball practice while he’s watching TV or reading Playboy or Esquire. He’s a magazine freak. He doesn’t study much because he says he’s in the top two percent and remembers everything he reads. Mensa sent him a personal invitation which he refused─on account of his not being an elitist, “not like your family” he always adds, and I tell him his mother is the one who prices out her artwork and furniture when guests visit.
In the morning I can’t find the baby rabbits.
“My rabbits, my little rabbits come out, come out,” I croon. “Wherever you are.”
“They died,” Abie says. “Must have been the fumes from the cedar chest.”
“But they weren’t in the cedar chest.”
“The fur was,” he says.
“So where are they?”
“In the incinerator.”
“What!”
“I put them in a green garbage bag and threw them down the incinerator.”
“Did you ever think to ask, maybe I would have buried them, they were so tiny such little things. I was up most of the night, I even made them formula . . .”
"And tell me, whose idea was the formula? Who went out in the middle of the night and bought all the ingredients?"
“They’re dead, Abie. We should have left them in the forest. And why didn’t you wake me up and tell me?”
“Because you’d overreact, same as you’re doing now. They were all stiff anyway.”
“See what I mean, see? Maybe you have good intentions, but it hurts just the same.” I go into the bathroom and lock the door. He rattles the handle.
“Come on out,” he says.
I crouch against the door and rock myself. And while he’s asking me why are you so quiet and what are you doing, I’m checking out shapes forming and rearranging on the marble tiles beside the bathtub. I take off my clothes, lie on the cold tile and stare at the stucco dots on the ceiling. And then everything inside me is still. When I put on my jeans with the homemade paisley inserts and venture out, Abie’s in the bedroom watching TV.
“Coming round?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Coming round.”
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