Cease to Blush Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Chick at the Back of the Church

  Going Down Swinging

  One

  AS WE PULLED UP TO THE CURB I COULD SEE THEM A LITTLE ways off, gathered around the grave like long black shadows. The sky was the blue of a cheap paint-by-number. Leonard tugged his door handle to get out. Sitting in the passenger side, I squinted behind sunglasses and sipped my vodka tonic from a travel mug.

  “Viv?”

  “Let me be for a minute.” I reached up and shoved the sun visor, pulled it so it blocked the ripping afternoon glare. “Wish to hell it had rained today.” Contrary to its ceiling now, the city’s floor was one big sog after an onslaught of rain falling in sheets and drizzles and sheets again. Today was the first sunny one in three weeks. Timing is everything. Len sighed, closed his door.

  I had shown up at his apartment an hour ago so we could head out together. His building is less than a block from mine. Len liked my mother. She liked him too, as much as she was capable of liking a guy. Frank, on the other hand, didn’t care for my mother, which was appropriate because she loathed him. She had loathed my choices in lovers pretty much across the board.

  “Wow. Bright,” Len had said at first sight of the stoplight-red skirt and jacket I chose for the occasion. He was wearing his navy suit, a little beat up, shiny in spots, the only one he owned. I always thought if I won the lottery, the first thing I’d do is take Len shopping. Len deserves the things he can’t afford.

  “I need a drink. Have you got anything?” I stood in his living room, clenching and unclenching, gulping breaths and heaving them out like garbage.

  “Ah—” he touched at his suit as if patting himself down for cigarettes “—sure. I think we’re running a little late though.”

  My hands jumped to shore off demands and questions, flicked him off toward the kitchen. “We’re already too late. It’s a funeral.”

  Unscrewing a bottle from the cupboard over his stove, he stopped on the verge of pouring. “Scotch or vodka?”

  “Vodka.”

  He rescrewed the cap and grabbed another bottle, poured. “What the hell,” he muttered and poured a shot in a second glass. Dumped tonic in both. I sat on the couch and gawked straight ahead at the blank wall. He’d painted over the mural that had been there before.

  “Hair of a mongrel, madam?” He handed me the drink and I looked some more at the nothing in front of me. Yesterday there was floor-to-ceiling rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Now it was blank with eggshell white. He must’ve done it after I left last night.

  “What’s with the blank wall?”

  His brows hopped. Off my blank stare he said, “Come on, you’ve been drunker. Last night. You kept bitching about it.” He swapped his tone for a whiny shrewish imitation of mine. “I hate that ugly Spider-Man with his dink hanging out.” He shrugged. “I want to do something else there anyway—You sat right there while I painted over it.”

  I nodded. Last night I had wanted to drink myself to tears as though the tangibility of drunken rivulets might shove me past the gauzy void, up against some nice flinty edge. But it was more like anaesthetizing a corpse. Part of me had an urge to turn the stove on high and slap my hand on the burner and part of me thought, Christ, millions are doping themselves up with antidepressants every day to get this sensation, maybe I got a good thing going.

  “Frank never showed up this morning,” I said.

  He looked at his watch. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. Probably still in bed, jerking off to porn.”

  “Ach …” Leonard raised his hand against the image. “Please.”

  Len’s a bit precious when it comes to things too raw in the sex department. When we were eighteen, out of curiosity we rented Deep Throat. I was no virgin but still sat with my face screwed up in skepticism: “Gross, he can’t stick it in there.” “Girls don’t have clits in their throats either.” Len, meanwhile, clutched his head like a Vietnam vet experiencing flashback, shock searing its way though his frontal lobe. I suggested we fast-forward to the story part. There was no story part. We pressed eject. Len rolled a joint and sketched my feet the rest of the afternoon.

  “Don’t you think it’s just this side of obscene not to accompany your girlfriend to her mother’s fucking funeral?” I asked.

  “You told him you didn’t want him there. At least that’s what you said last night. They didn’t like each other, you said, so why put on a big phony show.”

  I stared into my glass and sloshed the fizz around. “He should want to be there for me.”

  “What?”

  Taking a gulp, I looked past him to the blank wall again. “So, what are you going to paint there. Did we decide?”

  “How ’bout I paint you?”

  “You’re done then. It’s a masterpiece of photo-realism.”

  Leonard slid the pads of his fingertips up and down the steering wheel. When he finally spoke again it was to remind me, “She never liked this car.” I’d tossed my keys to Len feeling too shaky to drive. He tapped at the push-button transmission.

  “She thought it looked like some old Valiant she sold when she first moved here,” I said. “And she didn’t like the colour.”

  My car is black. Like the guy I bought it off. Though he had a kind of pimped-out affectation he was actually a student/actor I’d met on set. He was about to drive back home to New Orleans, when he decided to sell the car and fly instead. I hadn’t made up my mind whether the car was my style or not and met up with him on campus to have lunch and another look. He was flirtatious but I wasn’t much interested. Then, outside the Student Union Building, we ran into my mother. Between the guy and the car—the look on her face!

  I wrote the cheque immediately and the moment I touched him it was like being shot out of a cannon.

  I reached forward now and yanked the chrome lock in the middle of the glove box. As the little door dropped open with a clank, I felt around inside.

  Leonard watched me. “What’re you looking for?”

  “I left a joint in here somewhere.”

  “Come on, I don’t want to get stoned here. It’ll freak me out.”

  “So, don’t.”

  “Vivian,” he said plaintively. “I don’t want to end up babysitting you.”

  “Don’t. I’m fine.” I slapped the glove box shut.

  “We’ve missed half the service as it is.”

  “We’re here, aren’t we? Look, if you want to go, go.” I took another deep swallow from my mug. I could feel him taking a deep breath, a different tack.

  “I want to say goodbye to your mum. Come with me.” His eyes had gone moist and mournful and I wanted to pound him for it. My own were stingy and dry. I thumped the mug down on the dash and yanked open the passenger door.

  Standing there on the green close-cropped lawn of the cemetery I stared toward the gravesite, my feet tarred in place. I could sense Leonard coming round the back end of the car toward me as the heels of my pumps slowly sank in the soggy grass. He held out a hand as if ready to catch me in the event that I might fall trying to unsuck my shoes. Squeezing at my purse straps, I dug fingernails into my palm and pulled myself tall. I couldn’t feel them though, my nails or my purse straps. “I can’t breathe,” I whispered, wishing so bad that Leonard would take my hand. But he’s not good at that sort of thing. He’s not a toucher, generally speaking.

  Most of them glanced furtively as we got closer. All except Sally. She glared long past the moment I met her eyes, and, after giving me the once-over, shook her head just enough to show me, and anyone looking closely, her disgust. I stared down through dark legs to the coffin. A couple of crows squawked as they settled on telephone wire in the distance and a new l
uxury car shushed past, its old-money motor whispering away from us.

  I had never been to a funeral. I’d never really known anyone who died. There was Mrs. Eisman about six years ago but she was Leonard’s friend. For lack of a better descriptor. No one close to me has ever died.

  Len was right, we’d missed the meat of the thing; they’d finished with the committal, the talking was all done. We were now observing a minute of silent prayer or something. The sun’s heat sank into the back of my head and shoulders. I unbuttoned my jacket. Those who could see without turning or making a spectacle of themselves let their eyes flick to me once more. Go screw yourselves, I thought. She would have liked this suit.

  My heels sank again as someone said amen. I tried to push my weight forward onto my toes. The effort under the insistence of that high sun wilted me and I gave up, let my heels relax into the ground. A moment later, my mother’s coffin was lowered.

  Sally made her way out of the crowd, travelled around the outer edges and came to where the minister had stood a second ago. She had a shovel in her hand now and, clutching the wooden handle with both hands, she addressed us.

  “Josie and I used to talk about how different cultures have different ways of celebrating life or, in times of loss, giving themselves closure. And so, ah … well, it probably, ah, might come as a bit of a surprise for most of you, but I come from a Jewish background. I was never—my family was never observant, but I do know that one custom at a Jewish funeral—and maybe others too—is that, as mourners, we each partake in the burial of the person we’ve lost, and this way we help ourselves to understand that our loved one’s body has passed and we can say g—” she swallowed and smiled, brushed a hand under her brimming eye, cleared her throat “—goodbye now.” Tears popped and dropped down Sally’s cheeks. Clear cosmetic-free tears. I don’t think I’ve ever seen makeup on Sally. The eternal earth-child hippie goddess.

  Bending toward the earth, Sally stuffed the shovel in, turned, mumbled something that sounded like Hebrew and tossed the dirt down into the grave; followed by the thud of clumps hitting the coffin. Silence. The crows started up once more in the distance. Sally’s jaws worked and her eyes welled again as she handed the shovel to the woman next to her and walked a few unsteady paces away from the grave.

  I’d last seen Samantha Barnes, one of my mother’s colleagues at the university, on the news discussing the academic’s perspective on sex trade workers. She was a sleek dyke of the urban designer-wear, Annie Lennox variety, in the midst of writing a big fat book on the history of strippers in Vancouver for which she’d received a hefty government grant, making her a target for neo-conservatives across the country. She’d looked as though she’d grown more robust on controversy. Or perhaps it was the resulting adoration that fed her.

  But now, a shovel in her hand, a friend in the ground below her, she looked muddled, as if she didn’t quite know how shovels worked anymore. Letting go of her girlfriend’s hand, she pushed the square emerald frames of her glasses closer to her charcoal-lined eyes, moved in and took a half bladeful, then let it hover above the grave before slowly turning it over. More dull thumps as dirt dropped onto lacquered wood. Some small terror pulled at Samantha’s face as if she couldn’t believe she’d just done such a thing. She handed the shovel to her girlfriend and staggered off toward Sally.

  I watched, unfolding and folding my hands, clutching my purse, feeling eyes on me, inching along as a line formed to the head of the grave. Len’s face was suddenly at my ear. “You okay?” I reached back for his hand, but they were rammed in his pockets. I hated the hell out of Frank at that moment. And Leonard too. Everyone’s so fucking neurotic. My hands drooped empty and pathetic. And then the shovel was pushed into them.

  I stared at the wooden handle a moment and then into the face of the young man whose grip it was still in. I didn’t know him. He looked about twenty-four, twenty-five. Probably one of her students. Another one of these fake feminist ponytail-wearing bullshit artists who take gender studies and feminist literature classes for the sole purpose of getting laid. He peered into my face as though he knew me from somewhere then let the handle go. I glanced into the squared-off hole that held my mother’s coffin. I tried to get some sense of her. As usual, I wasn’t careful what I wished for and the disintegrating cancerous image of her hit, from six days before she died—the last time I saw her. The looming sense of that dark toothy thing—down there with her still, in that box, eating her from the inside out—slammed me in the solar plexus and sent my stomach flying throatward. “No,” spurted from my mouth and I dropped the shovel. Sure that I was about to throw up, I backed from the hole into the thick of the headstones around us.

  Behind me, the thump of the shovel was followed by gasps. I slowed and looked back, seeing the confusion and fright on their faces, the minister stepping forward with reassurances. Len leaned far into the hole and pulled out the shovel.

  I reached a blue marble headstone sculpted into a bench and sat down, my back to the grave.

  “Nice of you to show up.”

  I turned. Sally.

  “That was quite the performance. Terrific getup too.”

  As if I were fourteen again, I blurted, “What is it to you what I wear? I like this suit. And she liked it on me.”

  Sally’s hair was a furious mass of copper and grey snakes. “It’s always about you, isn’t it? Everybody look at Vivian. Why be respectful or appropriate when—”

  “Oh fuck, here we go.” Suddenly I was bellowing. “She didn’t like black.”

  “Because it was dark, like a funeral.” Sally’s voice was flat but loud, like that of a teacher trying to quell a classroom. “Well, guess where we happen—”

  “Hi,” Len interjected, calm and easy.

  I looked to him and then away, the overblown holler of my words still clanging. Len unjammed his hands from his pockets and reached for one of Sally’s, awkwardly shaking it while stiffly holding her shoulder. Practically a hug. He repocketed them and moved back a couple steps. “You did a really nice … um, it was a beautiful ceremony … all those pussy willows and freesias. Is that what those are called? I remember Josie really liked those, yeah.”

  Sally forced up the corners of her mouth. “Yes. She did. Thanks. I never arranged anything like this, I didn’t know …”

  And asshole Vivian, I thought, Vivian wasn’t there. Vivian didn’t contribute, didn’t help, didn’t offer, didn’t didn’t didn’t. Bad, crummy, shitty old Vivian. Stupid, uncouth, slaggy Vivian in her red red red bloody suit.

  “She would’ve liked it … she, yeah … would’ve loved it.” Len’s chin bobbed to confirm his assessment. “You even had sunshine brought in.”

  Sally’s face gentled. Suddenly her squiggles of hair looked less menacing, and I caught a flash of how they seemed the first time we met. As a six-year-old, I was crazy about her. “You’ll be coming over to the house, then?” she said, addressing Len.

  My “Ah, sorry” trampled his “Of course.” He looked to me and blinked. Sally rolled her eyes.

  “All right.” she said, “Well, thank you so much for coming, whatever you decide.” And off she went to a small group of my mother’s colleagues a few metres away.

  Len wouldn’t look at me.

  “What?” I muttered.

  He shook his head, folded his arms in that way he has, as if cloistering himself.

  “Fine, yes. Of course I’m going.” We started back to the car.

  I asked Len to drive us around for a little while, downtown through Stanley Park so we wouldn’t have to be early. He obliged me. We drove in silence. By the time we got to my mother’s house, every spot on the block was filled with a car. I tipped the travel mug back and swallowed any last drops. “All right then, here goes nothin.”

  Len went ahead up the gravel path and I dawdled, staring up at the pale yellow wood of it, the white trim. The garden looked weedy. Once I moved out and Sally moved in, Sally had created a wild rocky English garden.
She’d always kept it lush but immaculate in the weed department. I supposed there hadn’t been time for that lately.

  The door was open. I filled my lungs: Showtime!

  Inside, the black shadows from the cemetery milled about. Sarah McLachlan crooned plaintively on the stereo. I walked at Leonard’s heel through the house. From kitchen to family room, pockets of my mother’s friends and colleagues, from UBC mostly, gobbled hors d’oeuvres and jabbered softly—geek-chic women like Samantha Barnes and her flapper-style girlfriend, as well as a handful of ineffectual tweedy men and Sally’s crowd from the community college where she taught sculpture and pottery with a side of textiles. You could spot Sally’s world-beat friends a mile away with their untucked heavy cotton shirts covered in embroidery or appliqué, getting in touch with their inner Indian and Afrocentrics whether their skins were brown or summer-cloud white.

  Vegetable platters, fruit platters, plates with crackers, pseudo-cheese and ersatz meat sat stationed around the room. The CD changer hushed over to Tracy Chapman. “I need a drink,” I said, sighing toward the liquor bottles on the counter.

  “You need a sandwich,” Len stated.

  I made a gagging catface at him.

  “You’ll barf for real if you keep drinking on empty.” He stuck a paper plate in my hand. “Or worse.”

  I obliged, spooning on a hunk of vegetarian lasagna. Len stuck a bottled water in my free hand and its chill seared my skin like an inverted burn. I gave a little yelp. “Can you get me some coffee instead?”

  He turned to the samovar, filled a cup and replaced the bottle in my hand. “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Thanks.”

  “Comes naturally.” Len’s money job was waiting tables for three or four different caterers around town.

  I stared at the fridge, my mother’s handwriting on bits of paper under magnets. I gulped the coffee, saying, “Do you think—” No Len. I glimpsed the back of one shoulder as he drifted through strangers toward the billow of Sally’s hair. Samantha moved in beside me.