Sam White is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s MA in Creative Writing program. His work has appeared in Sequestrum and is forthcoming in Broken Pencil. His story “Tesseract Man” was shortlisted for the CBC’s Short Story Prize
He picked me up at the bookstore downtown while I was buying an early Christmas present for my mother. Actually, that’s not accurate: the cashier asked me for my phone number so she could call up my rewards account. Later, I got a text from someone I didn’t know:
“When I saw you ahead of me in line, everything about you was intriguing. The way you hold yourself, the pins in your hair, even the book you purchased. You seem to me a reader. One who is ever seeking, and not content to live in the day to day. I am the same way, and wanted to introduce myself.”
I felt self-conscious. As I walked to see my mother, I looked around at the faces on the street. I wondered who else was watching, who else was listening to me in such a public place. It was snowing. Everyone was bundled in their coats, their faces down at their phones, thinking about what they were going to eat for dinner, their masturbation routines, I don’t know, themselves, but not me. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. People meet each other in all kinds of crazy ways in this world. What’s so different about a text like that than a message to an online dating profile?
“Red flag,” Daniel, one of my roommates, said to me when I got home later that night. “What kind of creep just eavesdrops a woman’s number instead of talking to them? Total danger sign.”
Of course I knew it was, but I had already texted the number back.
“Maybe he’s shy.”
. . .
Christophe wasn’t shy. From the first time I met him, he put it all out there. He took me to the Randolph, a two-story steakhouse in the financial district. Everyone at all the tables had perfect posture, incredible hair, ostentatious laughter, Christophe included. He told me he wanted a relationship, was willing to take it slow, but was sick of the games that everyone was playing in our age. I think he was six or seven or ten years older, I couldn’t tell. He had flecks of gray in his beard, tailored clothing, and never carried a bag of any kind. As I finished my first drink, I was ready for the date to be an anecdote for Daniel and Siobhan, my other roommate, to consume as we finished our second bottle of wine later that night.
Then something weird happened: Christophe asked me about my work, and he listened. He only interjected ever so often, with questions like a tailor’s pin, about the safe injection site I managed, the stresses of the job, real empathy for the people on hard times who ended up there—the addicts who I now knew by name and considered my friends. I ordered another drink and told him how I moved to the city. He also felt its absurdity, how the people whom I worked for were shunned and mocked by the bankers who walked the same streets, then retired to snort cocaine and spend money on designer clothes from the internet. It’s a different type of addiction, he said, but no more noble, and he was right. No less worthy of our care, I admonished him, and he raised his hands with the look of a criminal about to be captured, but happy to be captured.
Right then I decided I was going to kiss him. After dinner and a few more drinks, I did. We were standing in an alcove a few blocks south, with the snowmelt dripping down, and his arms around me in his big warm coat. He refused when I suggested we go to his place—something I took as gentlemanly at the time.
. . .
Christophe worked in marketing for a number of high-profile brands, and everything was a perk. The brand new pattern-blocked sneakers he wore on our second date. The dinners at palatial restaurants funded by millionaire rappers that would shutter in months. The weekend trips to Montreal and New York and Lisbon. He did experiential marketing. I didn’t have a clue what that meant, but I knew they paid him at least partly in experiences. Those markers of status didn’t impress me, but it was fun, and that’s what I was looking for at that time. That and someone who listened, which nobody else seemed to want to do. It was tough to get him talking at times, that’s how interested he was in my day. In my job, in what I noticed about the places he took me. That the service at the restaurant was all over us. That you could see the moon was a day past full from the slightest slice that was carved away.
It was all flattery, but I didn’t care. I always thought that the best relationships were ones where you pared away all pretense to a kind of childlike intensity. When we were alone it was like that, wrestling and tickling on my couch, babbling and laughing like goofs, calling each other whatever we wanted, even if it wasn’t a name. That happened surprisingly fast. The sex was fine. He would fuck me slowly, with a look of great seriousness on his face. Either he was trying not to wake my roommates, who didn’t care, or imagining my subjectivity to the point he forgot his own. It’s no wonder he went soft a few times. I didn’t care about that either. I knew I was desirable. I cared that he didn’t endlessly apologize, didn’t marshal justifications, just said “next time,” with a slight bashful look, and carried on. Who knows what experiences he was harbouring, what hangups. Even the moment you feel closest to someone is only a flashing glimpse of the smallest molecule of what’s going on inside them, almost all of which is opaque even to themselves. I’ve always believed that. Christophe gave me no reason to change.
Still, I wondered why he never invited me over to his apartment. It had been six weeks.
“Total red flag,” Siobhan said as we unpacked the latest date in front of the TV. Daniel was rolling a joint beside her. He pointed at me with a crumby finger:
“Red flag. I said the same thing. The whole situation is full of them. Maybe he’s one of those man-children who only has one towel that smells like his body smelled four years ago. Maybe his bed doesn’t have sheets.”
“Maybe he’s married.”
“He’s married,” Siobhan said definitively, and sparked it. “Any man who won’t show you his place is either a man-child, or doesn’t want you to see his wife and tiny sad children, so which is it? You said he was rich, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s an art thief. Maybe he doesn’t want me to see his stash.”
“Have you asked?”
“To see his stash?”
“To go over.”
“I’ve suggested it, but he always has something more exciting for us to do.”
. . .
Everyone has their thing, and it always comes out eventually. Some people are unable to be held. Others have tempers that leave them punching telephone poles in frustration at missing a bus. Others will sit and hear you out while you tell them you don’t want to be casual anymore, will cradle your face in their hands, will kiss your eyes and tell you they’re serious, too, then go outside for a cigarette and never contact you again. Everyone has their thing, and it always comes out, so why not have fun before, and maybe after? I’ve seen weirder things than an inability to bring you home. But still, my curiosity led me to force the issue, and my cowardice led me to concoct a scheme with Daniel and Siobhan instead of bringing it up outright.
I met Christophe the next night outside his apartment. The plan was to meet downstairs, then go to the next experience, which was floor seats at the basketball game that he’d been comped, though he never explained any work in the sports industry. The building was as beautiful as I’d imagined, art deco with small gilded roaring lions above the revolving lobby doors. I stood outside in the sun and peered through the windows at the concierge—a concierge—as I chugged a liter of water because I didn’t want to lie to him. No sign of a wife surreptitiously slipping away, of a family, or any families, really. Everyone coming in and out the doors looked like Christophe: upwardly mobile, young, carrying themselves with nonchalance to mask a deep anxiety about the world, and their place within it. Wondering how they ended up in this position and making a decided effort to look like they didn’t care. Then I noticed that one of the silent figures striding through the lobby was Christophe himself, walking with a bounce that must have been nerves. I finished my water and dropped it on the curb as he took me in his arms and kissed me deeply.
“I have to use the bathroom.”
“Oh!” He checked his phone and looked around. “We’re so close to the arena, I don’t want us to be late.”
“Please,” I told him and smiled. “Can I just run up? I’ll be five minutes.”
“Let’s just get going.”
I saw by the plaintive and panicked look on his face that my plan was crumpling like a cheap suit—the plan that Daniel and Siobhan and I had arrived at, with perfect simplicity, after two stoned hours of speculation and machination. Now it was collapsing into what it was: a fear of honest communication yielding to transparent absurdity. Except now I really had to use the bathroom. That, and his refusal made no sense either: what’s a relationship for if not to be ridiculous, together?
“Please?”
He hugged me deeply like he was saying goodbye.
“Of course.”
Knowing the relationship was somehow over, I greeted the doorman and walked to the elevator and up to the fifteenth floor, down the soft-carpeted hall to his apartment, wondering why he didn’t even bother coming up, and if I was going to be murdered, before I opened the door.
I’ve seen all sorts of things in bachelor apartments: dusty bongs on pizza-stained coffee tables that never saw a change of water. Dish towels that smelled like they’d been keelhauled under a pirate ship. I’ve opened the fridge to a small plastic container of live white mice that an ex then fed, after we had sex, to a closet-imprisoned boa constrictor that went missing some time around Easter and was never found. But none of it prepared me for what I saw in Christophe’s apartment:
Nothing. I don’t mean nothing out of the ordinary, I mean there was nothing. No furniture, nothing on the walls, no lamps, carpets, books, or TV. I walked along the hardwood floors, looked up to the high ceilings, the exposed brick, the view of the skyline out the large east-facing window. Everything about this place was perfect except it was completely empty. I went into the bedroom. There was a mattress on the ground with a Macbook Pro, sitting closed, upside down, and a small pile of crumpled clothing. There were no dishes in the kitchen cabinets, no food in the fridge except two styrofoam boxes of stale steamed rice. The bathroom had one roll of toilet paper, a toothbrush, and five slivers of bar soap stuck together. My footsteps echoed in the cavernous living room as I tried to imagine what this place cost, tried to picture the branching pattern of choices that would lead to this living arrangement. You couldn’t even call it minimalist, because even minimalism has a minimum, but evidently Christophe didn’t.
I rode the elevator down in a daze. Maybe he was some kind of communist, but he spent money freely and often bullshitted about the potential for companies to do good in the world despite the structural incentives not to. Maybe he had just moved in, but he told me he’d been in the city for years. Maybe the place was a pied à terre and he had a family somewhere out in the sticks, but why not bother with furniture?
I walked back through the lobby and saw him through the window in his big coat, with his perfect posture, scrolling on his late model iPhone. It felt like the whole building, the whole city, was a Potemkin village with nothing behind it. I almost left right then, but there was something about his sad smile when he greeted me, something about my curiosity, that made me want to see what he had to say for himself. He certainly didn’t owe me anything.
“Now you see who I am,” he said, after a moment of walking in silence. Once again, I was consumed by the feeling that I was living this moment for the future laughter of my roommates, to have yet another story to tell about dating in this abominable city. I didn’t want to feel that way.
“Do you realize there’s nothing in your apartment?”
He rubbed his hands together, blew on them, as we joined the crush of people filtering into the arena.
“Of course I realize it.”
“Do you have another place? Do you have a wife and kids somewhere?”
“I promise you, I don’t. You’re the first person I’ve dated in months.”
“Where does—I just don’t understand. Where does it all go? All of the things that you buy, the things that you’re given?”
He stood beside me in line. His eyes were staring straight ahead at the flabby neck of the man in front of us.
“It’s consumed.”
“What does that mean? Christophe, a relationship is built on trust. How can I trust you if you don’t give me some kind of explanation? Please.”
The words were true, though I could tell on his face that I was fingering a wound that was open and raw. We went through the metal detector and inside, where he bought us two cocktails and a plastic plate of sushi. Right when he handed over his credit card, he turned to me.
“I have nothing,” he said. “That’s the whole explanation. I don’t have anything.”
. . .
An addict is afflicted by the ability to make the abnormal normal, the uncomfortable acceptable. I like to joke that they’re some of the best-adapted people on earth, when you see the conditions in which they’re able to survive, the absurd difficulties that they learn to accept. Of course, all humanity carries this burden: show me a single person who hasn’t accommodated some wretched state of affairs. An addict is just often one of the most visible, and for that we mark them as socially inferior. Why don’t they try to fix their lives? Well, why doesn’t anyone, when it comes down to it?
My parents divorced when I was eight. My mother got the house, and my father got the cottage upstate, where he moved to figure out the next phase of his life, and drink. He died when I was fourteen. The circumstances don’t matter. I just remember driving up to empty out his place, my mother and I, because at that point he didn’t have anyone else left. I remember opening up the clanging screen door, smelling the stale wood smoke and old food in the fridge. My mother told me to start bringing stuff to the dumpster we had rented, and to be indiscriminate.
It only took a few minutes to realize my father had been living like some kind of animal. The floor was covered in leaves, the bookshelves weighed by snowy dust, the bedsheets full of mouse droppings. The recycling was all empty canned beans and frozen pizza boxes. Outside, among the duff in the woods, was six years of accumulated rotting garbage that became more liquid and hellish the further down I dug.
I had only visited him twice a year. Whenever I’d told my mother about his messiness, she had always shown pity for the man she had married. He was moving through a transitional phase of his life. Now I saw that some people never exit the transition.
I returned to the cottage to wash my hands. On the table there was a half-finished crossword puzzle from a two-year-old community newsletter. I began to cry. In the absence of his body, alive and pulsing with knotty muscle and sweat, the fact was bare: He wasn’t just an old bachelor unused to living on his own, but someone who had made a choice not to see anything outside the four walls of his skull. There was something willful in it. It wasn’t a lack of cleaning skills, it wasn’t a lack of motivation, it was a deliberate choice to let nature gradually reclaim what it had produced. Everything from the sun-faded, curled-up photos of me by his broken computer, to the rotting firewood by his stove, to himself. That was his accommodation. I still regret that I never found out if it brought him any peace.
I reject the idea of daddy issues because of its misogyny. I think everyone should. But I do believe that experience can change and inform us. So as I sat there at the basketball game, as I watched Christophe order round after round and dish after dish to our seats, as I made small talk with his lovely friends, and laughed as he held my hand, I thought about his apartment and I thought about my father. I watched the goliath players blink up and down the court, their sweat and effort and excellence, and thought about Christophe’s place. Was it the same thing as my father, or the opposite? I wondered if it mattered.
“I just want to know one thing,” I whispered, as the crowd went silent to watch a free throw. “Are you as empty inside as your apartment?”
“Let me show you that I’m not.”
So began my own long accommodation.
. . .
Christophe made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone, like it was the most shameful thing in the world. It wasn’t, of course, although I had so many questions.
“Did you ever have a place with things?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“I can’t afford them anymore.”
“Have you ever thought about foregoing some of the Michelin Star dinners and buying, like, a couch?”
“I’m an experiential marketer. In my line of work, if I’m not seen to be having experiences, I can’t empathize with the client, and I can’t create anything.”
I knew he wasn’t one to build a home with. That much was obvious. Even the words “experiential marketing,” in certain contexts, made me quake with anxiety. But to be twenty-eight, and in the city, with an endless supply of dates, the furniture of new friends, felt like a gift. It wasn’t going anywhere, but nothing was going anywhere. I was always telling my patients to live in the moment. Recovery is a daily act. I bought Christophe a lamp, so at least he didn’t have to use his harsh overhead lighting. When I gave it to him he chuckled like I was giving him a CD. The months went by and I got promoted to an associate director position. Someone came in with their hands full of broken glass from trying to break a change jar to buy heroin. We went to farmer’s markets, concerts, art openings.
One weekend after the snow thawed, Christophe rented a car and drove us up to my father’s old cottage. It was now bare except the cast-off furniture from my mom’s house, the old utensils, the wooden placards that extolled the virtues of life by the lake. We fucked on the living room rug in total darkness, and afterward he held me and told me that one day, he would change. I told him he was kind, and good, and completely weird, which I meant as a compliment. All the things you tell someone in the dark.
It wasn't love, but I was obsessed. Obsessed with his lithe sinewy hands in mine. Obsessed with having an obsession, with opening up the throttle on a downslope into whatever miserable end we’d find. Obsessed with this strange man with nothing in his house who thought I was the most valuable experience in a city of five million. It’s hard to feel like an object when the one who desires you doesn’t have any objects to speak of. I felt exotic and valuable, like the fact of my every breath was a miracle for consumption.
One Friday night Daniel and Siobhan and I stayed in our apartment and got drunk and punchy, just the three of us. We listened to records, sat in a pile of blankets in front of the couch, and opened bottle after bottle of wine. I dared Siobhan to eat two spoonfuls of mayonnaise. I asked Daniel about the first time he masturbated. Siobhan’s eyes began to droop. Daniel fed her more wine, and she curled herself up into one of our big wool quilts and looked at me very seriously.
“I dare you to tell us what’s really going on with Christophe’s apartment.”
“That’s a truth, not a dare.”
“Come on. We planned that bathroom maneuver for hours. I’m going to start charging you for our services if you don’t give us the goods.”
“I went in. It’s very nice. It’s normal.”
“Fuck you. If that’s true, why hasn’t he had you over again?”
So I told them. I laughed at their shock, made it seem as though my interest was purely anthropological, like he was a subject of study, just as bizarre and fascinating as the myriad other weirdos we encountered in this city. But it failed. Too much time had passed. They knew me too well. Siobhan ambled up, rested her elbows on the coffee table.
“You like him, don’t you?”
“An empty apartment. That’s the biggest red flag in the world,” Daniel said. “That’s communist China. That’s Russia. That’s Turkey. Morocco. Vietnam.”
“I get it. I’m not so sure it is. He treats me well. I’m having fun.”
Siobhan popped a corn chip in her mouth. “He’s having fun. You’re in denial. His apartment is empty, Renee. He’s clearly not here for the long haul.”
“He’s been there for five years. He prefers experiences over possessions.”
“That’s even weirder,” Daniel said, and took a heady glug of wine.
“What’s his problem?”
“What’s your problem? When have I ever said boo about the men you two bring around?”
“We just have your best interests in mind.”
“Why not ask me if I’m even in it for the long haul? Who said I wanted my best interests in mind?”
Siobhan was plastered. She wobbled up, wrapped herself even tighter in her blanket, and crossed her arms. She stood in front of us like some kind of rescue from an orphanage fire, waiting in the cold to assess the damage.
“There’s nothing more powerful in the whole world than fantasy,” she said.
. . .
Christophe was a reality. One with aspects that made no sense, and that made it no different from any other reality I’ve known. In that way, my roommates were wrong. I was sure about that. The next night they were out at a concert. I finished work, and invited Christophe over for Thai food takeout. The sex we had on the couch was riotous and free, like a train had pulled into the station and we’d found tickets in our pockets. The seriousness was gone, and we couldn’t stop laughing—at the fact of each other, the sounds we made, two monkeys in an enclosure that was just for us. I asked him about the way he picked me up at the bookstore. He laughed, and covered his face. I pointed to the book on the table, told him that the ones I buy for my mother always end up back at my place.
“Is it good?” he said.
“Not as good as you,” I said, and that started another round. Even the corniest statement is different under the weight of hormones. We laid in my room naked afterward and talked for hours. I told him about my father, my mom, the cottage, the necessity of emptying out the things that had no care given to them in the first place.
“I lied to you,” he said. “I do feel empty inside, sometimes. Sometimes I feel like a hollowed out melon, an empty shell that I try to fill with the people around me. I know that you see that, and I know it must scare you.”
We were underneath my duvet, heads at the foot of the bed, in the shadows and the dull orange warmth of my bedroom lamp.
“It doesn’t scare me. I feel that way sometimes, too. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be thinking, if there’s supposed to be something more. But it always passes. There’s this core. This little orb of guidance. Sometimes it feels so dull and dim, but when I dig enough it’s always there. Sometimes months go by and I forget about it. I think I felt it first in childhood. So when I remember it again, it’s like I’m a child again. Or the most essential version of myself, without all the layers of bullshit and experience. Can I confess something?”
“Of course.” He put a hand on my hip.
“I think I feel it with you.”
He kissed me for a long time.
“Every part of you, everything you say, you are a wonderful experience.”
There was that word again—a mantra, a credo, a punchline. He said it so often I didn’t even know what it meant anymore, but in the dim lamplight of my overstuffed room that night, one thing was obvious: experience might stay with you forever, but it’s temporary. I imagined Siobhan was a shadow in the corner, in her blanket, burdened to carry the mantle of truth like she had for me for years.
“You say I’m an experience. In the whole time I’ve known you, you’ve never once talked about the future. You haven’t talked about staying together, or what might happen. I don’t mind,” I said, hating that I couldn’t help myself, “but I am curious. Is it because I’m an experience?”
We were no longer under the covers.
“Of course not,” he told me. “You are an experience, but you’re so much more. I haven’t said that because it hasn’t come up, not until now. Of course I see a future with you. You’re wonderful. It’s clear there is something good happening here. You told me I was good, and kind. You don’t know how far I can go on that belief alone. Meeting you has opened up my world. I just mean that I don’t know if I have an orb.”
“I love many people who don’t have orbs. It would just help to have some kind of signal.”
“Here’s the signal.” He kissed me again. “How much fun we have together. That’s my signal. The way you look at me. That’s my signal. You’re incredible. That’s my signal. You haven’t put me on the spot until now. I haven’t said anything because I’ve just been seeing how things go. I thought you were doing the same.”
“Of course I’m doing the same.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem,” I said. “I’m glad we had this talk.”
“I’m glad we had this talk as well. I’m serious. I haven’t known you for long, but I can’t wait to see what we can do together. There are so many things I want to do with you.”
“You too.”
“So let’s do them. I’m just going to go out for a cigarette, and then I’ll be right back.”
“A cigarette?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t smoke.”
He was threading his belt through its loops. “Sometimes I do. I’ll just be a minute, and then I’ll sleep over, and tomorrow the gallery?”
“Okay.”
He finished putting on his shirt. Then he leaned over, cradled my face in his hands, and kissed my eyelids, one at a time. Then he went outside. Of course I never heard from him again. Like I said before, some people never exit the transition.
•
