I was feeling depleted, as if I’d been divided in two and one half of me had run off. It’s important to remember this. If I had felt any other way, I would have stayed in my overheated apartment reading books by long-dead writers, turning pages like beads on a rosary.
Jesse knew the owner of the restaurant. It was her co-worker’s daughter, or something. That was the reason we were there. The building itself was cramped but stood four stories high, as if it had felt itself cornered in so grew in height, like a flower.
The girls were all beautiful. They had bought new dresses and wore them with conscious grace and one was newly engaged. Her fiancé sat silently at the table, looking like he was hewn from rock. He had mumbled a name at me, but I hadn’t heard.
I leaned into Jesse when we were at the table. “What’s his name?” I asked. But Oni was whispering to her from across the table, and Ismitta was whispering to her fiancé. Everyone was whispering to someone. I ordered a whiskey soda and sipped at it while watching the sun slip under the horizon.
The fiancé had just arrived from Nigeria, where both Oni and Ismitta were from. Jesse had met them on the bus one day, when they were lost and asking for directions. She had ended up spending that whole afternoon with them.
Not everyone is like that. It was something she didn’t have to do.
The two Nigerian girls now treated her like a queen, or maybe a lion. I think they craved her presence at all times but were also frightened of her. But I might be wrong about that. I only saw them a few times, in all.
They spoke of TV shows, and music. Jesse knew almost nothing about either, which delighted Oni and Ismitta for some reason, that they knew more about American pop culture than her. I smiled at no one in particular and took another sip of the whiskey soda.
More people were sitting down now. We were seated on the second floor, overlooking the sidewalk outside and the people filtering in and out of buildings down the block, deciding where to go next, flushed anticipatory excited faces bright like stars, and heavy like stars, and growing bigger, each year.
There was a group of people in their fifties or so sitting down at the table next to us. Three men wore expensive suits and one woman looked regally around the room. One of the men wore a golden watch around his wrist. I know this because he kept his sleeve rolled up. He saw me looking and smirked, as if he caught me doing something I shouldn’t be doing. I smirked back.
When I started paying attention to the conversation at our table again, the girls were arguing about where some building was. Jesse claimed it was downtown; she said this while feigning overwhelming exhaustion at having to deal with such clueless children. Oni and Ismitta squealed because they knew it wasn’t downtown, and they knew where it was, but they spoke too loudly and quickly and over top of one another to make themselves understood. So Jesse, I’m sure, went on believing whatever she wanted to believe.
The timeless fiancé sat with a frozen smile on his face. It seemed sincere, but who knows. Under the table, Jesse touched her knee with mine.
It was about this time, I think, that the man with the golden watch stood up. Oni glanced at me instinctively, though Ismitta calmly watched him. He delivered a final sentence to his table before heading to the washroom or wherever he was going, which was said in a low voice and received with enthusiastic nods by his listeners. He was a man, apparently, who was used to being listened to.
On the way past our table he bumped his arm, the one with the watch, against the back of Jesse’s head. She winced, and rubbed her head.
“Sorry little lady,” he said, looking at me for some reason (I didn’t seem to be understanding much that night, which happens when I’m feeling the way that I was), showing a healthy row of sharp white teeth.
After that, talk died at our table. Oni and Ismitta leaned into each other and murmured and Jesse kept touching my knee. The fiancé, stolid and silent, sat smiling and unmoving.
Moments later an expensive bottle of wine arrived at our table. We sat staring at it, almost bewildered. Slowly, I poured it out into five glasses and placed one in front of everyone. By the time I was pouring the last one, the man was standing next to me.
“Aren’t you a lucky guy,” he said, glancing around at the girls. He never bothered to look at the fiancé.
I looked up into his wrinkled face, the carefully groomed beard, his deeply blue eyes.
“I don’t think luck is what you mean,” I said.
Insanely, the man laughed. He laughed loud, and long. It doubled back off the walls and echoed against itself then descended the stairs to fill the dining room on the first floor before bursting out the doors and ringing down through all the streets of Saskatoon with the laughter of a man who is used to being listened to. Then he stopped. A look of unpolluted hostility passed across his face then smoothed back into his brand of loud charisma. He nodded once at us before returning to his seat.
I leaned back, took a sip of wine and swished it around in my mouth as if I knew what I was doing. “Not bad,” I said, fingering the label on the bottle with a crooked smile. “He didn’t have to do that.”
***
Later, we decided to go to a movie, just Jesse and Ona and I. Ismitta and her mute fiancé had retired into some fold of the night. It was a bad movie, but it made us laugh, and afterwards we were walking down the street in a good mood and Jesse was giving me looks and even Ona seemed to be vibrating a little and then a voice called out from the alley we were passing.
“My sister, where you from?” A young black man approached, visibly drunk. He had the same kind of accent Ona had. Jesse had already moved to the other side of the street.
“I’m the nowhere girl,” Ona said carelessly. “I’m from nowhere.”
“Where you from sister?” he continued. “Where did you find her?” he said to me. Before I could figure out what he meant, he added: “You’re a good guy.”
Am I a good guy? I wondered, angling this drunk away from two women I barely knew on a dead Saturday night on this wet, black street in Saskatoon. The drunk stopped me and turned me to face him. In my pocket, I pressed the button to unlock my car, which both of the girls were standing next to now. They climbed in and left me with him on the empty sidewalk.
His eyes were clear, black pools for the pupils and golf-ball white for the iris. He stunk of vodka. “I don’t want nothing,” he kept muttering, more to himself than me. “Didn’t want nothing from the sister. Just wanted to make sure. That you were a good guy, you know? Just wanted to know where you found her, where you were taking her. But I don’t mean nothing. Don’t even want nothing. I know where I belong, and it isn’t here. But that doesn’t mean anything. Tell her… For me, tell her…” And I left him there like that, beginning a sentence he’d never find an end to.
As I drove the girls home they were silent again, until Ona suddenly started talking about getting attacked on the bus. A man had come at her with a knife in the middle of the day, when she was sitting and looking out the window.
I swiveled my head around, shocked. “Were you hurt?” I asked. “Do you mean it happened here?” She didn’t answer. Her dark face flashed under rhythmic lights, silently. “Were there other people on the bus? Did they stop this guy?” It was like she heard nothing. Like she had turned into a statue. Her face heavy, stone, illuminated for a brief moment then lost again to the darkness of the night.
Jesse had been shot once. Just in the foot, above the ankle, but still. It was on Yonge St. when she was living in Toronto, just an innocent bystander in some gang shootout. It happened seven years ago, but if you google her name the incident still comes up. It would probably be the most significant thing she’d ever be a part of, in that sense, she joked. She told me all this on our first date.
We got to Jesse’s place and I dropped this girl and her friend off, a girl who I would only see a couple more times after this evening. A girl who frightened easily but would help two strangers on a bus. She got out with Ona but then bent back into the car again with me briefly and I thought, That’s okay, it’s something she didn’t have to do, not after a night like this. There’s always so much to apologize for. To atone for.
I drove on home, streetlamps pulsing overhead. I had discovered a new set of prayers. I’d declared a new rosary. It’s not something you have to do, but it beats capitulation. Besides, I was already beginning to feel like a whole man again, and that was the reason I was driven out in the first place, remember?
- Lonely Edgar
