Black Sheep, A Novel Excerpt

I leave quickly and my father doesn’t follow. I don’t make a scene. I roll my eyes at him and grab my mickey from the floor. I take a long swig and throw it in the shiny silver garbage. I flatten my dress against my thighs and leave. I press my fingertips against a tattoo that sits happily on my forearm.

Desiderium is written in black Franklin Gothic font. It is the alphabet my father stared at every day for forty years during his career as a newspaperman, the typeface that accepted him, the one set of symbols on earth that loved him as he was. 

I walk down the stairs and on my descent I slip back and forth in my high heels.  I am drunker than I thought, than I expected to be. I take off my shoes and hold them in my left hand, the banister in my right. From this elevated perspective, I see my mother. I drop my shoes, they crash on the wooden stairs and I yell out to her. 

“Mom! Mom! I was looking for you.”

She turns. She doesn’t notice that I am shoeless and braless.

Desiderium; “A yearning desire for something that you once had and now lost.”

Black Sheep, A Novel Excerpt

The day John F. Kennedy died, Frank was painting his mother’s window. He had just moved back in with her, having left Montreal, having left Patty, having left everything. In his mother’s old age, he’d wanted to keep her company. He also didn’t want to be alone.

It was November and it was cold. He pulled his windbreaker closer to his chest. He had just cropped his hair close to his skull. The colours had gone and so had the ability to see what ailed people. The leading feelings remained but he ignored them with a willful conviction.

Go away.

What replaced them was an empty, angry sensation that spilled through his organs and lived in his stomach. 
He put his brush in the white paint. The ballgame was interrupted by the following message.

“John Kennedy has died.”

“Fucking Protestants,” he said. He took the brush and put it against the window frame without missing a single stroke.

In following years, although he was fascinated by conspiracies of his death, he wondered why he was not surprised that the President has been assassinated. Why he never felt surprised about anything, not for a moment. He wondered if even though the leading feelings were hidden, hung in shame, it didn’t mean they that they weren’t somewhere. 

Maybe somewhere they were living in full bloom.

Even though he'd never admit it, that was a hopeful thought.

Black Sheep, A Novel Excerpt

We make small talk about nothing for another twenty minutes. As I’m leaving, he asks, “How’s Andrew doing? You know, if he’s ever…unhappy with his management, send him to me.”

I nod. “I will.” I gather my purse.

Andrew was a dedicated student of the Meisner technique in Toronto. The teacher, the guru of his class, was like his second father. Actors sit in chairs and repeat single sentences to each other, sometimes only words.

“Fuck.” “Fuck.”

 “You’re wearing a black shirt.” “I’m wearing a black shirt,” and so on. I never understood the benefit. I always thought it was a cult.

“Doesn’t it get old?” I’d ask him.

But now, having the word “Andrew” said to me countless times a day, I understand. My repeating it back elicits strange reactions that even I couldn’t predict. Pride. Jealousy. Sadness. Heart palpitations.
But strangest of all, is that after saying it a hundred times, it began to feel true.

My reality is now a Meisner exercise of my boyfriend’s name.

“Maybe you should get a tan,” my manager tells my back as I’m walking out of his office.

I ask the cab to drive the long way to my meeting. 

Pictures of You Pt. 2

I woke up the next morning and pretending not to be hung over, I told my mom about it.

"So, we still love each other."

"You do?"

"Yeah."

"So what's going to happen? Are you back together?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe we will be. I think so."

She smiled and then we ate breakfast together. She always thought Peter and I were meant to be and that we'd end up together.

I sent him a Facebook message later that day:

“I'm just writing because I want to tell you that you should be honest. I think we both have to be honest. I know it's hard, but we both have to do it because what do we have, if not the truth? I will love you until my heart stops.”

In retrospect, it's a ironic and hypocritical that I would encourage someone else to be honest, when my modus operandi was to lie about my feelings to everyone, especially myself. But maybe, my subconscious was wiser than I gave it credit for. Even though I addressed that letter to him, I was writing to me.

I spent the next few days going back and forth between feeling elated because we were still in love and on the verge of tears because we were still in love.

Pictures of You

You'll think this is crazy, but I did then, and for a long time after, believe that somewhere, in some alternate universe, that Kate, and the Peter that loved her, the ones that didn't live on earth anymore, not in the flesh anyway, just in their slowly fading memories, were together and would love each other, with a force and profundity for the rest of their days.

But I was young then, so much younger than I am now.

I didn't know that something could be untrue even if you really believed it.

Black Coffee Night

I have lost myself to love twice.

Three times, depending on the shaking nature of my memory that day. Lately, it moves like trees in the wind with light falling at random. Things get lost in the darkness.

...

Don't the hours go shorter as the days go by?

We were going to save the world that night, both his hands pressed around my neck, softly, careful not to hurt me. He poured everything he had inside into me.

I like it that way, almost but never quite in pain.

I wake up the next morning sure I was in the house of someone else, a man I knew once but no longer. I remember the trees where he lived. They met above the road, like a bridge.

What he will remember of me when he's old?

 It scared me right out of myself.

Sympathy For The Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt

He started crying. 

“What do you mean you don’t trust me?”

 Then I started crying.

“I don’t know what I mean.” 

Neither of us spoke for still minutes.

“So what are...what are the terms for this, if we work it out? How do you want it to be?” I asked, voice aching.

“I want you to accept me for who I am. I want you to love me enough that what I believe doesn’t matter.”

 Maybe that was our problem; I didn’t love him enough for what he believed to not matter. I could never love someone that much. But his strength was on Sunday, no place else. 

“Glenn, you don’t accept me. You want me to not ask questions. I’m always going to ask questions. I love asking questions, that’s all I ever do. Why did you think I would ever be okay with us never discussing the most fundamental thing in your life?” 

“Things are fine until you disagree with them.”

 “It’s the other way around, Glenn. I’m fine with you until I disagree with things. Do you just want me never to disagree with things?”

  He looked away, angry. 

“Why were you ever with me if you wanted someone without an opinion? Why me? Why’d we go though all this?” I asked.

 “Because I love you.” 

Silence.

“So I have two options; stay married to you and have parts of the world we can’t discuss, or break up?”

He didn’t say anything. 

People say of love that you never know what you had until you’ve lost it. I think that proved true for us both. We didn’t know the other until it was too late. I find it emblematic that our break up took place via machines and letters and people other than us. It pisses me off that I had to write him emails like a politician, that I couldn’t tell him to fuck off, that we couldn’t work things out how two people that are in love do.

But then, everything that went wrong exists permanently in black and white type. Maybe this way I’ll have to be more rigorous in how I remember things.

 In front of other people, I spend most of my time laughing about it. “I think it’s cosmopolitan divorcee at twenty-two!”

But I feel cheated. He and I were better than what happened. I alternate between believing that he lost his mind and that’s why he behaved how he did, and that I’m stupid and never knew him at all. The more time I spend with it, the more I think that sometimes things are Heaven sent.

I was never meant to see this coming.