the park Charles takes a folded sheet of plastic out of his pocket and spreads it out to cover the wet bench. He sits down and bangs his cane on the carpet of grass at his feet. I walk over to look at the circles. The plastic flowers are fading. The wood of the picture frames weathering. The Mason message jar has already been knocked over and the Tonka trucks are covered in dirt, disturbed by a cat or a raccoon. I step back and count. Un, deux, trois. There will be more.
“Hélène,” Charles says when I perch on the bench beside him. “When my wife and I had a house we hired the neighbour kids to mow the lawn and trim the hedges. And after Meredith passed away I moved into the condo and hired someone to look after the cleaning.”
Charles takes his handkerchief out of his pocket and dabs the sea mist from his forehead.
“I’m not a nature person. I’m a numbers man, so I might not know how to do this, and you’re an elegant French lady, so I can’t expect you to dig in the dirt.”
“Certainly not,” I concur.
“But I believe somebody has to start looking after these memorials.” He rests a warm hand on the top of my thigh. “I think we should do it.”
I look at Charles. His glasses are covered in mist.
“Everything is deteriorating, Hélène,” he says with a thud of his cane.
“It’s inevitable.” I remember how dashing Charles used to look in his suit. He was a man you’d notice walking into a bank or restaurant. It must have been difficult for him to retire, become invisible. I know. When an elementary school vice-principal walks into a room, people look up in attention. When they see a silver-haired woman with shaky hands, they think, “I hope she doesn’t fall down our stairs.”
“Let’s make it anonymous,” I say.
“Our secret?”
“Of course.”
The only thing I wish right now is that Nikky could be by my side, too. I think of him as we walk back. Nikky and Charles. My two good men.
In the elevator I dig around in my pocket for keys.
“Would you like to come to my place for B&B today, Hélène?” Charles asks, taking my arm and guiding me onto our floor and toward his door. “For a change of scenery?”
It’s my first time in Charles’s place. I admire his large bookcases stacked full of hardcovers. His antique globe. Three wooden ship models. The floor plan is identical to mine.
“Now,” says Charles, fumbling in the kitchen, “I don’t have anything fancy. I drained my liquor cabinet of its sugary temptations. But I can make you a cup of tea with honey and lemon.”
“That sounds lovely.” I try not to notice the long row of medications on the counter behind him. I sit down at his fine oak dining table and place my hands under my knees to prevent them from shaking.
Nik does his best painting after midnight. That’s when his three roommates sprawl out on the second-hand sofa. Ilana and Kendall begin fooling with each other’s long, stringy hair. Aaron watches them and paws at Ilana, his girlfriend, while he tells all the same stories — the semi-fictional ones that begin, “one night when I was totally high” or “one night after I took shrooms.” That’s the part of the evening when everything used to happen. But the girls are a shadow presence. Interlopers. Distractions. And Aaron is absorbed in their games. Now Nik goes into his room, locks the door behind him, and paints Jennifer.
The girls didn’t bother Nik as much when Jennifer was still around. Jennifer used to be a regular at the Rumble Shack. She was a revolutionary. A force. She was the one who named the apartment, which reels and sways because of its rail-side proximity to the SkyTrain. She was a dance and choreography major: rapid and restless. He could draw by the light of her eyes.
She was the only girlfriend Nik ever let call him Nikky, like his family does. The only girlfriend who made him feel simultaneously comfortable and panicked. The only girlfriend he clung to while they were sleeping, the only one he brought a glass of water to after she woke up. Jennifer was the only girlfriend who mattered.
Nik has had a lot of girlfriends. He has to think hard to remember all their names. Jennifer is the only one who reverberates in his mind. Like part of her lives there.
Nik paints Jennifer one body part at a time. A dissection. Conjuring Jennifer whole is too ruptured. He dabs black paint on a white canvas. He is painting Jennifer’s right eye, the brown one, except each segment is detached from the rest, as though the eye is glass, slowly shattering. He has already sketched the retina, cornea, iris, lens, and blood vessels in pencil. This is a more literal rendering than the one of Jennifer’s blue eye, which Nik depicted as a cobalt smudge in a glass of water. He is planning to paint her optic nerve next.
On the other side of the door Aaron is banging on something and shouting. Nik turns his iPod on, inserts earbuds. Ambient electronica pours in. Jennifer’s right ear was one of his first paintings in this series. It fills an entire wall in his room, as though her auditory canal is a giant snail shell. Big enough for Nik to curl up and fall asleep in. He gazes at the ear mural and sips a ration from the bottle of Crème de Cacao his grandmother gave him. At four in the morning Nik realizes he might as well keep painting and stay up for his nine o’clock class. He has one amphetamine left.
During Cultural Theory, Nik draws the bridge of Jennifer’s nose in his notebook. He writes the due date for his next assignment beside it. The only reason he is passing this course is because Jennifer was helping him write his papers. That was something they used to fight about.
“It doesn’t make sense that I need to know how to write in art school when all I want to do is draw and paint,” he would say.
“It’s part of the business,” Jennifer said, which made Nik feel agitated.
“I shouldn’t have to explain what my art is about,” he said. “People should see it and feel it.”
She always sighed and told him to think realistically about his career. She said that what everybody always said about being an artist was true. You need to have more than talent. She believed in fame and success, sacrifices and selling yourself. Nik would analyze the curvature of her bottom lip as she spoke, or the philtrum groove underneath her nose. Then he’d get back to work. He began to think Jennifer would always be there to do the writing. But then Jennifer started talking about taking big risks. The importance of growing and changing. He didn’t know what she was planning, or what she wanted. It scared Nik enough to cut his reading week break short and return to Vancouver. He wanted to hold her in his arms and keep her there, safe. He had promised his grandmother he would look after her. He replays in his mind how much his grandmother’s hands shook, how her voice quavered when she asked him. It wasn’t like her to get emotional — she had always taken care of him — and her frailty startled him. His agreement made him feel, for the first time, like a man. But what his grandmother was saying was there was a right way to be in the world. He didn’t ask her how. He felt like part of his promise was to figure it out.
Late one night, a few days after he returned from the island, Jennifer laid out her tarot cards on Nik’s futon mattress. He didn’t want his cards read again, but she said it was time to tell her own fortune. She piled her thick, dark hair onto the top of her head and fastened it with two chopsticks. She sat cross-legged at the foot of the futon and adjusted the placement of the cards with delicate arms. Nik watched
