Next Year, for Sure Read online

  Kathryn doesn’t mind either way. She is ready to go home. She has something to say to Chris. It is starting to take up space in her mouth. She wants him to be happy. What is her worst-case scenario?

  CHAPTER 3

  Weekend Projectionist

  Chris has never asked someone out on a date before. On the last day of junior high, when it had become clear that he would never ask her, Cynthia Welland had asked Chris to see Ghostbusters with her, and he had been happy to go. He liked movies and he liked watching them with people, and when they emerged from the theatre into the blinding day, he could suddenly think of a whole list of movies they should see together.

  They saw one matinee a week for the entire summer and when school started again in the fall, Chris and Cynthia were generally considered boyfriend-girlfriend, which was how things stood until the following spring, when Chris accidentally fell in love with Cynthia’s best friend, Robyn Joffe, who had come along on most of their dates and who argued good-naturedly with Chris about everything. Chris enjoyed arguing with Robyn. He liked it when she said, That’s a very good point, and then went on to make an even better point of her own, and he liked the feeling of his mind being changed. Chris would phone Cynthia every night and, more often than not, Robyn would be there, sitting beside her on the bed, offering comments, little provocations, until Cynthia handed over the receiver and the two of them, Chris and Robyn, would talk until it was time to hang up.

  Chris did nothing about these feelings for Robyn, of course. It’s possible it never occurred to him that he might do something. But then, while Chris was crying at his grandmother’s funeral in Prince George, Robyn and Cynthia had a long talk, and when he got back to school he found he was now boyfriend-girlfriend with Robyn, and it was Cynthia Welland who gamely tagged along on their agreeably chaste dates.

  Chris and Robyn had decided to wait until they were married—or at least until university, which they applied to together, editing each other’s admissions essays in Cynthia Welland’s basement—not because of any religious compunction, but because sex, along with alcohol, had made their classmates into insufferable idiots whose only form of conversation was recounting, in fantastic detail, the drunken escapades they professed to barely remember. That’s what Robyn said anyway, and that seemed right to Chris. He didn’t much like anyone at school, except Robyn and Cynthia. And so, to distance themselves from such barbarism, Chris and Robyn and Cynthia Welland spent their Friday nights reading to each other from course catalogues and designing elaborate flowcharts of which classes they would all take together and which they would take separately and then teach to each other.

  On long weekends, they went on campus visits, which is how Chris met Celeste, a twenty-two-year-old French Lit major at the University of British Columbia who smelled like spice drops and had interesting things to say about everything. (Robyn was touring Reed that weekend, because it was decision time and they were being strategic—travelling separately, then coming home with detailed reports.)

  Celeste was a student ambassador in charge of the Student Life portion of the tour and, as the afternoon progressed, seemed to be directing her comments to Chris alone. Later that night, while Chris slept in a guest dorm with three drunk football players, Celeste somehow put an orange on his pillow with the word Want? inscribed on the rind in ballpoint pen.

  Chris did not sleep with Celeste, not then, but what he did do was not go home. What he did do was move into Celeste’s off-campus apartment with her bowing bookshelves and her despised roommate, Rajika, and spend the rest of summer drinking plum wine from their neighbour’s trees and reading Rimbaud and having long, circular arguments on the phone with Robyn in which he said there was no reason she shouldn’t still come to Vancouver and take the classes they had planned together, that he wanted her to come, that he would help her find a place to live, and Robyn said, Have you been drinking? Are you drinking right now? Chris did not enjoy these arguments the way he had at home. And in September, Robyn went to Evergreen and Cynthia Welland sent Chris a letter saying he was an asshole.

  Chris felt despicable and punished himself for months. Celeste said that (a) nobody should marry their high school puppyfriend, and (b) Chris had done the poor girl a favour if she didn’t understand that, and that (c) guilt was a self-serving neurosis that was making him boring. Roommate Rajika said that (a) no one should marry anyone, because it is a system of ownership, and (b) Chris had done himself a favour, as we all do in life, and if Robyn was as smart as Chris claimed, then he should trust her to find her own happiness, and that (c) guilt, properly realized, could be the first step toward becoming a better person. Celeste and Rajika disagreed about everything, and more and more Chris found himself siding with Rajika. He wanted to be a better person and Rajika had a lot to say on the topic.

  The year went badly for Celeste and when she finally moved out in a fury of broken dishes and academic suspension, she said that Chris was a slow poison and that he had betrayed her, that he and Rajika had formed an alliance against her, and that the two of them were clearly in love. Rajika said that the only poison was the psyc­hoph­arma­ceut­icals that Celeste swallowed willingly and the vast quantities of plum wine she washed them down with, and that obviously Chris and Rajika were not in love but simply like-minded—two people who liked the dishes done and the compost taken out instead of rotting on the kitchen counter.

  But once Celeste had blown out of their lives, it turned out they were in love. Ecstatically for some months, and then happily enough for almost a year, during which Rajika began to suspect that Chris was also in love with their Film Theory TA, Val, who was five years older than them and whose tutorials openly subverted Professor Stillman’s brittle lecture notes with blistering counter-analysis from feminist film theory. Val frequently led a cadre of young disciples to underground screenings in downtown industrial buildings. Chris and Rajika were regulars. They watched unwatchable films of men eating human feces and South American cows being slaughtered in slow motion, and felt duly fortified against sentimentality and creeping hegemony. But Chris was not in love with Val. His crush on her was strictly academic. He didn’t want to see her naked; he wanted to read her thesis and then read everything she cited in her thesis. And it is probably true that Val was not even aware of Chris’s feelings until Rajika went on the attack.

  Chris lived with Val for three years in graduate housing with an illegal cat named Cleo. Val taught Chris how to drink a single glass of wine in a way that made you feel smarter, not dumber. She took him to dinner parties with professors and deans where they engaged in long, rigorous debates about normativity. She played him Bessie Smith records, and Ethiopian jazz, and unlabelled cassettes that strangers sent her in the mail.

  Val got Chris a job as the weekend projectionist at the local film society, where he spent the early nineties projecting the films of Laura Mulvey and trying not to fall in love with Penny, the volunteer coordinator, who every night after the last screening took all the volunteers across the street for a drink, where she and Chris would deconstruct the movie as the volunteers tried to keep up, then faded and filtered out.

  It was in this bar that Val had shown up to say in firm, even tones that she was done with this and that Chris should not come home, and in fact she would like his key. She said he might want to take a look at himself and this pattern of his. She said that part of being in love with someone is not falling in love with someone else.

  Chris had cried there in the bar with Bonnie Raitt playing on the sound system because he still loved Val, and he still loved Rajika, and Robyn, and maybe even Celeste, because they had been his best friends and he didn’t like anyone as much as he liked them, and because Cynthia Welland thought he was an asshole and probably still thought so. He cried because he could not figure out how to be a person who did not hurt people. And then he went home with Penny—because where else could he go at one in the morning?—but he did not sleep with her. He slept instead on her floor, refusing that f
irst night even a pillow or blanket.

  When he did finally crawl into Penny’s bed—after six months of reflection and self-flagellation—Chris made a private vow that this was it, that his heart was closed, forsaking all others, forever amen. And for four years, it worked. For four years, he was absolutely mule-hearted in his devotion to Penny, despite growing evidence that they were not compatible outside of a darkened movie theatre or too-loud bar.

  Penny could be combative and belittling and was frequently mean to people. She was prone to categorical statements that unnerved Chris, like, Sex is always about power, or, Your dad is never going to change.

  Still, Chris was resolutely in love with her and was adored by her friends and was probably going to marry her when he met Kathryn. Kathryn the Amazing. Kathryn who was perfect in every way. Kathryn who he nobly ignored for a year. Kathryn who nine years later came home from mattress shopping and said, I want you to ask this Emily on a date.

  —

  PHONE CALL

  SATURDAY 10:09 AM

  CHRIS: May I please speak with Emily?

  MAN: Hmm. A fine question. [then, to the room]

  Is Emily even here?

  ROOM: I’m not sure she came home last night.

  Someone came in around two.

  Yeah, I heard the kettle.

  Was there bossa nova?

  [The voices laugh. The man sighs into the phone.]

  MAN: Hold on.

  [The man is walking with the phone. The man is climbing stairs, maybe two or three, now stops.]

  MAN: EMILY?

  [There is an interval of silence. They all listen, Chris and the man and the voices in the room, together.]

  MAN: We think she might be asleep.

  CHRIS: I can call back.

  MAN: Do you want to leave a message?

  CHRIS: [He does not.]

  QUESTIONS

  Is 2 a.m. a normal time for Emily to get home? Do they often hear her come in? Do they sleep with their doors open or closed in that house? Do they come down for breakfast dishevelled and pyjamaed? Is her mouth minty? If they thought she hadn’t come home last night, where would they think she’d be? A boyfriend’s? A girlfriend’s? (Her letter gave no clues.) Or was she lonely? Was she staying out for one last song, one last drink, in case the person she was looking for—the person who would see her for who she is—was about to walk through the door? Was last night the night she finally found that person? Chris could have called yesterday. He could’ve called last week, when Kathryn first told him to. Instead, he spent the week sitting with the phone in his lap. Until Kathryn said, of her patience, Act now, supplies are limited.

  —

  PHONE CALL

  SATURDAY 4:47 PM

  CHRIS: Is Emily there?

  WOMAN: She was.

  [In the background, people are singing. There is a piano, possibly a banjo.]

  WOMAN: I don’t see her coat.

  CHRIS: I can call back.

  WOMAN: Sorry, is this Chris?

  CHRIS: Uh. Yes.

  WOMAN: Oh my god. How’s it going?

  CHRIS: It’s going okay.

  WOMAN: The shows are good?

  CHRIS: Uh.

  WOMAN: Where are you tonight?

  CHRIS: I don’t think I’m that Chris.

  WOMAN: Who is this?

  CHRIS: I’m a friend of Emily’s. From this summer.

  WOMAN: Oh, I thought you were Chris.

  CHRIS: Maybe I’ll call back.

  QUESTIONS

  How many people live in that house? Do they all use the one phone? How many times will that phone ring today? How many of those rings will be for Emily? How many will be someone calling to ask her out? Does everyone ask Emily out? Does she need one person in her life who doesn’t ask her out? Chris could do that. He could be that person. Because why do this? Why put everyone through this? When was the last time Chris was up at 2 a.m.? This is what he tries to explain to Kathryn over dinner. Why do it at all? Why stand into danger? Why risk disaster when everything is fine as it is?

  One date, Kathryn says. Then we’ll talk.

  —

  PHONE CALL

  SUNDAY 11:31 AM

  CHILD: This is Himsa.

  CHRIS: Hi there. Is Emily home?

  CHILD: He wants Emily. [this, to someone nearby]

  ADULT: [indistinct]

  [The child is being coached by someone. Chris wishes he had someone to coach him. He feels out-manned.]

  ADULT: Ask him if it’s important.

  CHILD: Are you important?

  CHRIS: I can call back.

  CHILD: We’re having pancakes.

  CHRIS: Pancakes, wow.

  CHILD: Emily doesn’t get any because she stayed up toooo late.

  CHRIS: I’m sure she’ll be sad.

  CHILD: No, she’s not sad. She’s happy.

  CHRIS: Why is she happy?

  [The child has already hung up the phone.]

  QUESTIONS

  What makes Emily happy? Does the smell of pancakes filling her bedroom make her happy? Does living with all those people make her happy? Does having children in her life make her happy? Do waterslides make her happy? Do sleeper cars on trains make her happy? Does she love the little fold-up sink? Does reading in bed when it’s raining outside make her happy? Do small things make her happy, like a miniature Tokyo made of paper on a gymnasium floor? Or do big things make her happy, like a giant heart you can crawl right into and disappear? Does seeing him make her happy? Is he imagining it?

  —

  PHONE CALL

  SUNDAY 5:35 PM

  CHRIS: Is Emily there?

  EMILY: Hey! I was just talking about you.

  CHRIS: This is Chris.

  EMILY: I know!

  CHRIS: Chris Deming.

  EMILY: I know, I know! I was just telling my house about you.

  CHRIS: Really? What?

  EMILY: That amazing dish rack you built.

  CHRIS: Oh.

  EMILY: We want to build one like it here.

  [In fact, it was Kathryn who built the dish rack. She took a woodworking class to do it—knew exactly what she wanted to build and then went and learned enough to build it—and he will tell Emily this, but right now she is so glad to hear from him and she is telling him about her weekend, a weekend dominated by three best friends with competing birthdays who can never agree on just one thing to do. She ate three dinners in one day. She saw a friend’s new play and it made her angry because of the way it portrayed schizophrenia and she is still debating whether she should say something to the friend about that. They talk about the responsibility of the artist, and the best food to eat on your birthday, and about little things, things you don’t talk about when you bump into each other on the street because they feel too small to pull out on a busy sidewalk where you might get jostled. After an hour, one of her housemates needs to use the phone.]

  ANSWERS

  There are six people living in the house. They might be looking for a seventh. Dim sum makes her happy. Thoughtful graffiti on billboards makes her happy. Everyone in fake moustaches makes her happy. 2 a.m. is somewhat later than usual. She would love to have dinner with him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tandoori Oven

  I have another rule, Kathryn says. She is sitting on their bed, watching Chris get ready. He is wearing his magic sweater, and no pants.

  Kathryn says, Don’t tell her things about me.

  What things? Chris says. He is pacing. He can’t decide which pants to wear.

  I mean, don’t not talk about me. I want to exist, she says. Just not private things.

  I think that goes without saying, K.

  It should all go without saying, Chris, but here we are.

  She isn’t being exactly fair, she knows, snapping at him like this. The date was Kathryn’s idea. And she wasn’t going to be this way. She was going to be cool and evolved, like a Joni Mitchell song. She was going to be magnanimous.

  Ch
ris sits down beside her on the bed. Of course you’re going to exist, he says. He holds her. He says he loves her. Most of the time Kathryn knows that. He’s her person. He’s not going anywhere.

  I can cancel, Chris says. And he could. It’s still an hour before their date.

  I don’t want you to cancel, Kathryn says.

  She has watched him planning for it all week. He has made notes in a little book that fits in his pocket. Things to talk about. Questions he might ask. Places they could go afterwards to just sit and talk. Kathryn has read these notes. They’re sweet.

  And Kathryn has her own plans. The house to herself and too much wine, a dumb movie, and a pint of strawberry ice cream. Chris is allergic to strawberries.

  I’m just saying there are rules, Kathryn says. Rules have been dribbling out all week. Has Chris written those in his little book?

  He is pulling on his grey pants when the doorbell rings. Why is the doorbell ringing?

  —

  I’m early, Emily says. Am I too early?

  No, this is great, Chris assures her, though he is barely in his pants.

  I’m terrible, Emily says. It’s just I hate being late. She is beaming at Chris, and then at Kathryn, like a searchlight. You must be Kathryn, Emily says, and she steps in her sock feet across the room. Can I give you a hug? she says.