BY KEES KAPTEYN
Copyright is held by the author.
ALLINE IS a weather front at full spin tonight. We have a plan to go to a poetry reading, but first she’s making us dinner in her kitchen while I sit at the dining room table watching her. She pours seasonings and sauces into a frying pan of different vegetables, fungi and tubers and fills me on the abrasions of her day. She steps away from her cooking to snap an iPhoto of me sitting gormless at her table, and a minute later my phone informs me I’m on display in her social media. Michael: dinner and a show, the caption says, Happy Friyay! but even with her public effervescence, there are still many moving violations for her to purge from her week. Today’s infraction is the frequency with which men tell her she has beautiful eyes, as if it would make a difference to her, as if her only worth came from her appearance.
“I wish I could just dig them out so they’d have something besides my dazzling blue eyes to praise me for!”
So many women wish men would remember where their eyes are, but she wishes hers would be left alone. A bottle emerges and the wine starts to flow. She pours me a glass without asking if I want any, but of course I want some. It’s Friyay!
She does have beautiful eyes. I’m one of those men who have told her so. I’ve also noticed that she never responds to my praise. She doesn’t accept it as anything productive or helpful to her. To her, that stuff is invalid coming from me, so very unbecoming of me.
“They’d be afraid of you,” I say referring to her suggestion of self-mutilation.
“Yeah, men are afraid of women who take matters into their own hands.”
“I’m not afraid of you. That’s one of the things I like about you.”
“You haven’t made me want to gouge my eyes out.”
“Yet,” I add.
“Yeah, I guess.”
The look she gives me almost seems to say “please, don’t”.
I resolve not to. I know where I end and she begins. I know our sovereignties. I don’t need a lover. Those kinds of things have come to make me sick in recent years. I can be addicted to love it seems, so I have to avoid it now. It’s run me aground far too many times for me to survive a relapse. At this phase in life, breaching 50, I don’t like the pangs of love when it’s not reciprocated. It shines a light onto why I’m failing, why I’m still alone. Still, I’d rather decide to be alone than be rejected and left that way. These platonic times with her give me just enough of the lively humanity I need to get by.
“You know, there’s a story about St. Brigid plucking her eyes out to avoid an arranged marriage,” I tell her.
She looks at me, trying to remember the context of what I’m saying, then her eyes widen.
“Oh my god, you’re right! I didn’t even think of that!”
For some reason St. Brigid keeps popping up for her. Everywhere she looks is Brigid. It’s true that the goddess saint has an assumed but unspoken presence in Ottawa, but for her, Brigid is disturbingly omnipresent.
“I was just driving downtown the other day getting some yams and it was right there. St. Brigid’s Well, in that old church on Cumberland. It was like I was driving straight there! The goddess is stalking me!”
“St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts. It’s a really nice place. The Well is the pub they have down in the basement.”
“We have to go there. I want to see it. Maybe we could put on a reading there.”
“I’ll call and see,” I say.
“I’m going to want to use your big beautiful voice to read for me again, Michael. At least the harder pieces.”
“That’s fine,” I say.
We’ve done it before. We read together often. Actually, I read her stuff for her sometimes to an audience. She often asks me to be the avatar of her poetry. She loves how I read.
“You should do radio,” she’s said.
“I have the face for radio.”
“You have a great voice.”
Alline also thinks it’s hilarious when I read in the first person about inherently feminine things like menopause, reproductive rights and vaginal odour in my baritone timbre. Often when we attend a reading together, people think we are an item; so much so that if she goes anywhere alone, people ask her where Michael is. Why isn’t Michael with you? Are you guys OK? This annoys her as well.
“This world is crazy. I’m moving to Tuktoyaktuk,” she says as she brings a pair of plates to the table.
“Oh my god, it’s even more crazy in Tuktoyaktuk! I suggest somewhere in Peru or the Himalayas.” I get up to help her in the chore.
“Why is it crazy in Tuktoyaktuk?”
“Well, fifteen bucks for a bag of potatoes for starters!”
“Maybe Peru is a better idea.” She places a fork and knife for each of us.
“There’s lots of good hunting in Peru, I’ll bet. Coffee grows wild. Chocolate too.”
“Because I’m such a hunter,” she says. “Chocolate bars grow on trees and I think you’re confusing it with Brazil. But just think . . . no people, no bills, no hassles.”
“We can jig with the llamas and guinea pigs, assuming I’m included- but if you go, you’re taking me with you . . .”
“You can come. A small select group can come,” she shoots an emphatic index finger in the air, “but if anyone gets on my nerves, they’ll be voted off the island!!”
“Oh ya.” I nod decisively, laying down serviettes while Alline returns to cooking in the kitchen. “We’d have our own little uncontacted Peruvian tribe in the mountains. We’d shake our fists at passing airplanes.”
“And create some kind of pig Peruvian language no one will understand.”
“Can you imagine how awesome that would be?” I ask, almost whispering in wonder, “Our own language!”
“And we’d build strange altars where no one can figure out who we’re worshipping.”
“Everyone would worship themselves. That’s the way it should’ve been all along!”
“But we still need weird altars to foil the rest of the world. It’d just be fun for us.”
“We’d be tricksters in the Andean mountains.”
“Perfect,” she claps her hands to celebrate, “Let’s start packing! Can we hitchhike there? How do we get across the borders?”
“We’d cross borders the way everyone else does. Bribes.”
“Cos once we get the down there, what good is money, right? We’d be trading goats and fur and stuff.”
“Yeah! And empty promises.”
Alline scrunches up her face at the idea.
“We might get killed doing that,” she says.
“By the time we get down there we’ll be so lean and ruthless they would be stupid to mess with us.”
“Yep,” She does a little taste test from her creation and nods in approval, then points her wooden spoon my way. “I can see how badass we would be. Geesh!”
“Oh ya. It would be like frickin’ Mad Max!”
“Erm . . .” Alline makes another face. “That’s intense. It’ll be more like the Sound of Music for me. No one ever dicked with Maria and got away with it!!”
“You know, you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right!” she raises her glass high, “Den Family Von Andes!”
“Ich bin ein Andesberger!!” I toast her back.
“Ja! Gut!”
We sit and eat our vegan meal. The conversation turns to a Thailand vacation Alline wants to make in the next year. She wants to cuddle a tiger and bathe in a river with elephants, a lifelong desire finally turning from wish to plan. It’s been only a year since Alline walked away from her exhausted marriage. She simply has no aspirations to go back to being property, taking on another husband’s name, forfeiting her own a second time. It’s why she’s reverted to her maiden name. She publishes poetry chapbooks in her own name now, has herself introduced at readings as such. With her children grown to adulthood, there is no ballast in her life anymore and she can now float and sail where the prevailing currents and her will may go, with all the energy of a coiled spring that had just been released.
I spur her on. Tits to the wind, honey! Fucking fly!
After dinner, she has to change out of her work clothes, make her face up and fix her hair. She has an unruly nest of brunette Gaelic curls, but she’s let it grow and can do more with it, leaning into the mirror and strategically placing pins and barrettes to sculpt it into compliance. I take my place on the wingchair in the bedroom while she goes about getting herself ready to go. I came here dressed up, already wanting to impress.
“Guys never have to worry about things like this,” she says.
She has no idea about the trouble I went through shaping my spiked hair just the right way, shaving my jaw perfectly to be smooth rather than coarse. She obviously hasn’t gotten a whiff of the cologne I’m wearing, which she chose for me on a recent shared shopping trip. Molly, her cat, hops up onto my lap and wants me to pet her and I do. She loves a nice neck massage. Alline changes in front of me and it’s not awkward. There’ve been times when I’ve changed in front of her too. I sneak peeks at her because I’m a guy and because of Everest (she’s there), but no fucks are given nor offered either way. Molly the Cat suddenly turns around on me like she’s going to bite. Enough of that. I don’t want her on my lap anymore, so I roll her off. She gives me a feline stink eye, flicks up her tail to display her asshole and sashays away.
“Fuck, I can’t find my turquoise earrings now.”
Alline rummages through the ceramic bowl on her night table where she keeps her jewellery but can’t find what she’s looking for. I like the sound it makes with those precious metals sliding and tinkling over its inner surface. I get up and find them in the bathroom, sitting on the marble sink.
“God, you’re psychic,” she says.
She cleans them off and slips them in her earlobes.
“It’s the grace of St. Anthony. Saint Tony is my homie.”
“Oh, him again.”
She takes a final swallow of wine and heads to the kitchen for a refill. I sit still in her bedroom, awash in the wake of perfume she’s left behind. I close my eyes and swoop my hand through the air to draw a plume of her to my face, breathing in a deep, contented Zen.
“Want some more?” she calls to me. I notice that I’ve been sitting with this empty stemware all this time, so I get up and walk to her to offer it for another glassful.
The drinking. If this keeps up, we’d be a danger to ourselves if we ever wandered out of her apartment.
“Why do you think Brigid keeps creeping up on me?” she asks after taking a sip and leaning back on her kitchen counter.
“The goddess is trying to tell you something.”
“Yes, the goddess. It can’t be the saint because the Church and I don’t talk.”
“You’re like strangers in the room that immediately don’t like each other.”
“Yeah so it must be the Goddess. I wonder what she’s telling me.”
“She’s putting herself in your face a lot. Maybe you need to be paying attention to her. She’s telling you something.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not the one she’s talking to.”
“What does your homie say?”
They say that St. Brigid is only a misappropriation of the pagan goddess, one of many things the Church has pillaged from the original religions. My patron, Anthony, was a Franciscan monk in thirteenth century Portugal who was a gifted orator.
“Man of God,” she chortled when once we talked about it. “That’s a contradiction of terms.”
“An oxymoron of sorts.”
“Yes, and no.”
She has an attitude against religion. Her father was a minister of some denomination I can’t remember, who preached the most saccharine platitudes and at home could not have cared less about her or her mother. His pretentious faith in God convinced young Alline that God couldn’t possibly exist and she has never suffered any insincerity since because of it. Oddly however, she doesn’t have this kind of vitriol for her ex-husband. She always said he was just the guy that had the misfortune of marrying her.
“You know what terrifies me?” she says, steering the conversation on a severe left turn, “Being ordinary. I’ve spent my entire life being ordinary but not wanting to be. I’d always been trapped in a normal life.”
“Well, now you’re out.”
“I’m out there! Way out there!”
She sweeps her open palm into the air and tries a silent whistle to suggest something flying, then that hand falls at her side.
“I’m a little tipsy,” she says. She indeed is starting to sway luxuriously.
“Maybe we’re past the point of making it to the reading,” I say.
She opens another bottle and pours again into my glass, meaning she wants me to stay, so we place our full glasses within reach on her coffee table, and arrange ourselves on her couch to try and choose a movie to watch. I sit down first with my back against the couch arm and she lies between my knees, leaning back against me. I then tuck my forearm under her breasts and she rests her hands there to cuddle. I’ve told her before that I love her and she already knows. I’ve said this to her many times before and she’s said it back to me. We love each other. There are different kinds of love and we mean different ones, yet still remain loving each other. She hasn’t wanted a romantic relationship since she broke up with her husband a year ago. Soon she’ll be able to divorce him and their separation can be executively complete. There have been men that have tried to court her but their own faults have always betrayed them and she’s torn and injured them with the sheer weight of those failures. Indeed, she has a jagged coastline where few have ever reached the beach.
We choose a Turkish movie called The Wild Pear Tree and watch it like a pair of cats who have found a good sunbeam. As a collaborative warmth builds between us, our clothes and our promises maintain a secure boundary, though we know, of course, that love, like the warmth between our bodies, knows no bounds.
***
Kees Kapteyn has a published chapbook Temperance Ave. through Grey Borders Books as well has been published in such magazines as Camel Magazine, NonBinary Review, Flo Magazine, Blank Spaces, Wordbusker, Dear Booze and various other publications. His short story “A Hierarchy of Needs” was shortlisted for the Gilmer Prize in 2024. He has also self published two novellas: individe and Holocene, available at keeskapteyn314@gmail.com. Kees was raised in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and now lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where he works as an educational assistant.