How Should the Night Feel?

By Amanda Merpaw

I understand it could be dangerous going to Ben’s place like this. I knew I would agree to meet him when I recognized his voice upon hearing it, our only phone call after weeks of emails and texts, when I could tell it was the voice that should be his, nasal and gruff. I could tell in spite of the risk that I would have to come.

It is March, after all. Almost spring in Montreal. The sidewalks are more walkable than they were last week, the snow now a ghost of itself. It is warm enough tonight to remove my toque, shove it in my pocket, hope it doesn’t fall out. It’s obvious. It’s time for something. It is late, the sky is black—the true magic hour. I could pull the night down, right here, like this, slip my arms in its soft leather, rub my fingers along its cracks, inhale along my shoulder for that rust, that smoke.

Anticipation is pervasive. Nearly everyone agrees.

Sure, this is the kind of meeting I fear most: hovering just beyond logic, the malicious potential of stranger danger. The cashier and the barista at the café on Milton this morning—did they give me the right change? Did they spit in my coffee? Or that tall blonde guy newly dating my neighbour? Last night we rode the elevator up to the sixth floor together, his snappy chihuahua decked out in an extra-extra-small red puffer jacket. Will they bite me next time? Either one of them is capable. My sister bit me as a child, drew blood from my arms. I know it’s possible.

The cab driver here in the front seat, saying something about the upcoming end of term, the drudgery of picking students up from parties, from bars, from that noodle spot on The Main open past 3 am, cursing his years of learning how best to clean the back seat, the one I’m sitting in now. I draw my left hand out from under my thigh, smell it for a memory of vomit.

See? He watches me in his rearview mirror. No hint of sick.

I laugh generously, say that’s impressive, a real talent.

It’s a talent, too, to be kinder than you are, softer with men who have some power, like they’re driving you somewhere and you’ve told them where to go and they don’t actually have to take you there. Not if they don’t want to.

In real life, harm holds itself close. So caution carries me. It lingers. It can be easy to forget what’s real or maybe whatever persists is real or what’s real is whatever I watched on Dateline or America’s Most Wanted when I was 10 because the babysitter was cool and this was how she decompressed before bed and she said she’d give me one more snack if I stayed in the living room, kept my eyes on the TV. My sister was there too. As an adult, she still watches true crime to fall asleep. Sometimes she throws on an old Law & Order DVD.

I could never. I check the lock and bolt on my door at least three times before I go to bed. In the night, I wake and yell— who’s there? I’m convinced I’m not alone.

Not every night. Maybe two, three times a week.

Is this it? The cab driver points to a small apartment complex on the north side of Avenue du Parc, tucked between a Dairy Queen and a gas station. Three storeys high, maybe six units across.

I check the address on the sticky note in my purse. Yes? Yes. Thanks.

The lights are still on in so many of the apartments, warm yellow palms reaching out through the windows, grazing the narrow spiral staircases, the metal walkways between doors.

I tell myself again: strangers are tender.

While I count change to pay the fare, I admit I’m meeting someone I don’t know. Not really a stranger though, not like that. Only exactly like that, and yes, a man. I take the driver’s card when he offers it. I promise him I’m older than his daughter, definitely, nearly in my mid-twenties—oh, I guess not that far from 19, and I laugh and I swear I’m here because I want to be.

I’m here because I want something meaningful to happen to me. Something interesting, even if Professor Lawson says interesting is a nothing word with a nothing meaning, a word meaning nothing at all, and in using it I leave a blank space where meaning could be. His red ink charts my blankness across each essay I write for Modern Canadian Poetry— This word means NOTHING!! Pick a better word!  — and mostly I just like knowing he cares how I describe the world. Fine. I want something to swallow me. Spit me out, still wet, frothing. Extricate me from myself. Possess me. I want something to write about.

What I don’t want is to fuck anyone I already know. Or maybe no one I know wants to fuck me, except Olivia and her Hot British Husband—hot beyond the accent, hot like the lead singer in a folk band ready to serenade the crowd with some clap-filled song. We all know how that fucking would go, so each time they try to bring me home from a cocktail bar in the Plateau or a micro-brasserie in the Mile End, I tell them that I’ve forgotten to shave my legs, shit, again, sorry!

I did kiss Olivia once, and her HBH after that, that night we drank too much with Nathalie at the new wine bar downtown, the one that opens out onto Sainte-Catherine. I kissed Nathalie too. She was jealous. I could tell. So, I kissed her after I kissed everyone else. It was good enough. When Olivia whispered, have you been with a woman before? I think you’d like it, she was right, I knew I would. That’s why I couldn’t do more. Not with her.

Thirty minutes ago, before hailing the cab outside an overpriced bourbon place on Crescent, I sat close to Olivia inside one of the dark booths. I’m so excited for you! She patted my thigh. Mally’s little adventure! I don’t let anyone call me that except my grandma and sometimes one of my nicer cousins, but that’s how Olivia thrives: teasing the boundary, dragging her nail along the threshold.

She knows the stakes of this night exactly. Two weeks ago, she encouraged me to write a dating ad— curvy girl seeks good company—backseat editing with her chin pressed to my shoulder. What’s the worst that could happen? She chided when I didn’t want to go through with it, when I whined, isn’t Craigslist kinda gross? Who reads these? I’d be open to the serendipity of a missed connection, hoping for a particular someone I’d spotted on campus, at the bookstore, at the café, on the bus, not just calling out for anyone, any person at all, but Olivia was all, oh my god, don’t be boring!

A few days later, Ben answered.

Standing at the base of his building now, watching the cab U-turn and head back downtown, I realize only the driver knows where I am. I could’ve given Olivia the address, but I wanted her to buy the ease on my face. I don’t want to live like I’m scared, even when fear makes me do that thing where I push my shoulders down until they seize. I’m working to feel free. If there’s such a thing as a perfect night in a perfect city, then I can be perfect in it, working to be the most myself I have ever been. Am I wrong that life becomes this huge, engulfing force? A pressurized spin. Life is so big. I know I’m right to want to be free in it.

I don’t text Olivia the address on my way up the stairs or across the walkway to his door. I tell myself: I am allowed to prioritize the possibility of pleasure. Maybe an orgasm. I have this feeling that if I put my body’s needs above all else, it’ll happen. I’ll be the truest version of me.

When Ben opens the door, before I register the accuracy of his face, his cleft chin, his slate blue eyes behind wire frame glasses, his tight mouth, his body, his softness, his height, how he’s shorter than he said—they’re always shorter than they say—before I take off my heeled black boots, hand him the wool coat my mother thinks is too light for this weather, before I let him offer me a beer and drink it, I note the patio door straight on from the front door, in what seems to be the bedroom. We’re only two floors up. A Juliet? A full balcony? I could leave that way if I had to, fall into the yard below, rip these old tights, sprain this or that ankle. Some consequences are necessary. A lot of serial killers wear glasses like his. At least they’re not aviators. The second exit is a relief.

The beer is Miller Genuine Draft. Ben’s favourite.

We stand in the open space between the kitchen and the living room, all one big room, really, and there’s no kitchen table so the eating must happen here, at the island, or maybe there, on the couch, from his lap.

I lean against the island, press my lower back hard against the edge. Ben sits on the desk that holds his laptop, two monitors, a mouse, a backlit keyboard, a tangle of cables not connected to anything. His desk chair is well worn, flaunts an imprint of his body. There’s nothing on the walls except an unframed poster of Spider-Man (from the comics, not the movies) and a clock, a real one with a small hand and a big hand. It makes a ticking sound and the time looks right—a clear red flag.

You’re not, like, a serial killer or something, right? I laugh, sip my beer. He smirks at me, maintains eye contact too intently. It’s not normal to look at someone so directly, so sustained. Maybe I’ve misjudged him. Maybe this is it, earlier than he expected, the moment I’ve said a stupid thing out loud, shown him I’m the kind of girl who walks into the curved jaw of a trap and taps my foot on the spring.

I brace my core, try to remember how to form a fist (thumb tucked under fingers?). I took a self-defence class in high school. I forget the best way to break a nose, how to exit the choke, become unseized. I remember Michelle skipped, went through everyone’s shit, stole my Alanis Morissette CD right out of my Discman in the change room. I remember the red and black and white lines on the gym floor formed a pattern, intersecting.

Do I look like a serial killer? He sort of does. So I say it, I say sort of, and he says it’s the glasses, isn’t it?

I’m not sure why he wears them if he knows, if his awareness is a reassurance or a warning.

Also, it’s his teeth.

I tell him, and your teeth, and he asks, what’s wrong with my teeth?

There’s not a single thing wrong with them, not a single thing, and he says alright then, hesitates, adds I had braces when I was a kid, maybe Grade 6 or 7, they weren’t always straight.

Did you have glasses then too? Of course he did. He stands, eyes on one of his monitors. He opens a folder, opens another folder, scrolls, clicks. It’s a picture of a child, clearly him, with a round face and blonde hair and then, too, wire frame glasses.

You look just like that kid from Jerry Maguire, have you seen it? He snorts, who hasn’t seen Jerry Maguire?

I had glasses like that as a kid too, only bigger and gold, not silver.

I first saw it on a bus, I tell him, one of those fancy ones with the bathroom at the back, on a school trip somewhere, I can’t remember now. Why can’t I remember? It must’ve been out of town? New York? Quebec City? Sitting next to Stephanie, writing back and forth in a secret notebook we destroyed the morning after prom, or was it later that summer?

Ben’s looking at me with his eager face and it’s clear I’ve missed something he’s said and I have to say sorry, what’s that? He repeats himself without changing his tone, without frustration, my mom always thought I looked like that kid from A Christmas Story.

I laugh at my highest pitch, an outright squeal. He laughs back with his mouth open, wide and soft, a laugh that shakes his stomach. I note this, his shaking stomach. I know I will have to document this playfulness later, the gentle joy of him, the small thrill, try to summon the hinge of his mouth, just like this, wide, yes, and soft, exactly. Wide and soft and shaking.

Your mom sounds great, I say. I finish my beer. He says yeah, she’s the best.

It’s obvious that he’s pleased and it’s obvious that it’s me who’s pleased him and it’s obvious that he’s not going to kill me because he wouldn’t have laughed like that if he was going to go through with it. I can tell now: Ben is not a very serious, melancholy man. He just pretends to be.

I decide to let him fuck me.

My mother always says I should trust my gut, that the gut is a kind of intelligence where the body meets the spirit. I’m not sure what that means or whether I believe in spirit or whether spirit is too religious a term. I do believe my body contains something beyond my mind and I do believe in a kind of knowing beyond my mind’s knowing. I believe in the gut and I believe my gut is telling me I can get laid tonight without worrying about dying, without worrying Ben will kill me, keep my body in his bathtub, and only when the taxi driver sees my face on the news, only when he connects a photograph of me with my live body in the back of his car, yes, dropping me off at a stranger’s house too late, would anyone know where to find me. My gut says: do it, kiss him. This must be how freedom feels in the stomach.

He can tell that something’s changed, that I’ve unlatched to him. He chugs the rest of his second beer, nearly half a bottle. He stands in front of me and he does seem tall here, extending his hand toward me, tucking my hair behind my ear, holding my earlobe between his thumb and index, applying pressure. You want me to kiss you, don’t you? He says it as a siren reaches us from the street, probably an ambulance, probably some freshman with alcohol poisoning.

He’s right, I do, and I must be looking at him in a way that says yes because he kisses me without waiting for an answer, and even though it would be better to wait, to hear it, yes, my yes, he is impatient for me and I savour his impatience. It’s been a long time since someone wanted me so immediately.

His lips are thin and he bites my tongue on purpose. Do you like that? He asks after the fact. I like whatever you like, I admit, I like saying yes.

Some women believe you can’t enjoy being agreeable, as though dominance is always an imbalance. There’s power in being desired when you want to be. There’s power in being perceived by someone who doesn’t know you, to upend the danger of their strangeness with the promise of their affirmation. The promise of being seen.

He’s looking at me and I want him to be looking at me. I’m looking at him and I want to know what happens next. Bite me again? This time it’s my neck. He presses hard enough to dent.

Okay, slut. He says it in a charming way like you’d say sweetie or beloved or someone’s name when you like how it slips against your teeth. He says it earnestly and I know I can be whatever slut he wants me to be—ideally safe slut, disclosure slut, slut with boundaries she communicates in advance.

I like to be a snuggle slut most of all, but not every time, not anymore, definitely not in that way I used to ask Cole to drape himself around me, enshroud me with his arms, his legs. Cole was my first everything. I needed him to be close to me after, each time more cocooned than the last. I needed him to stroke my hair softly, sometimes for hours, with Damien Rice or Snow Patrol playing from his laptop. When we were especially aligned, really truly reaching for or beyond the intimate, he’d play the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Always “Take Five.” That one made Cole cry.

Show me your bedroom? I hate to be kissed standing up unless it’s a greeting or a goodbye. It’s boring. I don’t know where to put my feet. At some point, desire requires escalation. Range.

He takes my hand, walks me to the couch. He sits back into the brown suede, lowers me onto his lap. I’m here. I’m straddling him. I guess what he might like next, offer my mouth again. He licks my lips each one at a time. First the bottom, then the top. There has been too much kissing already. I bite his bottom lip harder than I might otherwise. No, he scolds, I don’t like that.

It’s a relief when he finally undoes the buttons on my blouse, tosses it onto the floor. It’s cream, will clearly gather dust, but whatever, we’ve stopped, we’re not kissing anymore, we’re not doing anything at all but sitting here, him below me, me above him, staring. He puts his hand up to my throat, barely. Almost a shadow of his hand. He uses the other to push me off.

He walks to the kitchen, grabs another beer, says wait, sorry, I’ve gotta piss. He takes the beer with him.

I’m alone on the couch and topless. I’m alone on the couch near the front door and I do not leave.

My purse is right here, on the floor. I slip my phone out and text Olivia his address, just in case, and she replies right away, text me when you get home, if I don’t hear from you by 10 tomorrow morning I’m coming over there. She’s a good friend. She means it.

He’s back now, standing in the kitchen saying something like all good? or you good? I am, yeah, of course.

What else is there? I’m here, wanting to be wanted and wanting to want back. Hoping the wanting will lead to pleasure, that the pleasure might change me. Soothe me. Undo me in an easy way. Unfurl me. The wanting is good. I want the wanting to make me good. I walk to him, tuck my index finger into the waistband of his jeans, follow its curve to the left, the right. Well, I say, what now?

It’s exactly what he must have imagined before I arrived, before I decided to come here. Didn’t I also picture it? His bedroom, finally, unlit and cluttered with still-packed moving boxes. His hands confident and firm, pulling down my wool skirt, my black tights. He’s quick to work us both down to our skin, throws me not-that-lightly onto the bed. The weight of him, finally, unambivalent above me. Pressed, caving, not just floating. The weight what I came here for, regardless of the rest, regardless of what it takes to get here, suspend this moment, bear it, yes, right here, in the dark, a cold white light peaking in from the hall, maybe from the bathroom, maybe I left it on when I peed just before making my way to bed, finally, stopping first to check that everything was in order, that I was in order, the whole time desperate for him to make me feel small or not small but consumed or not consumed but contained or still something else entirely. Right here, in the dark, sinking into the thin sheet with his hands on my wrists, his stomach wide against mine, his mouth wet against my turned cheek, everything about him unfamiliar and distant, I want to be nothing but air. 

Really what I want is to disappear. I want someone else’s body to release itself, like Ben’s, here it comes, and fall on me heavy, unselfconscious, and when the body’s face’s mouth searches for my cheek, my forehead— thanks, that was great, you were great —finds  me gone, finds me unfindable, finds a strand of my hair, dark and long and frizzed up on the pillow.

Where would I go and how fast?

They would text to ask, what happened to you last night? We’d go for a walk and I’d tell them something honest, like the time I told Cole I was scared he’d leave me for that skinny girl who bought weed from him even though everyone knew she never smoked it or how I once told Olivia she had a face like a statue of a goddess, the kind you cross the line to touch when the museum guard isn’t looking.

It never actually happens. I’m always right there when they notice I’m still below them. I’m always still there when they roll over. Nothing is as miraculous as I want it to be.

Ben grinds his teeth in his sleep. He’s not worried I might stab him or rob him or leave in the night and not close the door behind me. Who sleeps in these conditions?

I stare out the patio door, a false balcony after all, with no curtains to pull across it. I count the needles on the pine tree brushing the glass. Pine is a good tree, one of the best. It’s that smell, the earth of it. I can invoke it now, dream it into my nostrils, imagine my face outside against it, both of us alive. I say thank you, a whisper, not to wake Ben, thank you.

I recall the events of the night to myself, build a list along my fingers:

1. Left thumb, it’s dangerous to come here,
2. Left index, the taxi hurtling through the night,
3. Left middle, I’m here, I’m up the stairs,
4. Left ring, grateful to spot this patio door,
etc.

I make it to ten, start again, try to be more specific.

It is almost spring. I removed my toque. My neighbour’s boyfriend’s dog has a new coat. The clock and its ticking and its ticking right through the night. A beer, a joke, a laugh, a kiss, a bite, a kiss, a couch, a kiss, a bite (no good), a piss, a chance, a text, a bed, a body, my body, a body, his body. I do not disappear.

I repeat until the light outside softens, until I see the outlines of pale clouds against Mont Royal, beyond the tree.

The alarm wakes Ben. He snoozes once and I’m already up, I’m dressed, he’s getting out of bed and I’m saying thanks, that was great and he’s saying again sometime, yeah?

I open the door for myself while he makes coffee in a cheap single-serve pot. He’s wearing white briefs and a brown hoodie. He does not watch me leave.

I’m out on the staircase. I’m out on the sidewalk. The first floor of the building is a furniture shop. I didn’t notice last night, the space unlit after dark. There are leather couches, dining sets, hutches, just like the ones in my grandparents’ shop, only their shop was smaller, clearly family-run, with a backroom where Tara and I played hide & seek when we visited in the summer. They always hoped someone would take it over, Dad, maybe, though he didn’t, and none of his sisters either. It closed one day. We had a celebration, red wine, even as teenagers, then something else moved in. A travel agency? I want to come back here, test the couches, stroke the tables. Figure out if this is a coincidence or a sign.

It’s cold out. Freezing. I really should wear a thicker coat.

I wait for the bus near the Dairy Queen, cup my hands to my mouth to keep my fingers warm, my breath hot and full-stink. My breath? I lick the back of my hand, smell it. Yes, mine: last night’s beer and before that last night’s fries and after that Ben’s stale bedroom air.

Did he kiss me goodbye? I can’t remember. I’ve asked out loud, into the rising sky, grey as it is. The sky gives nothing away.

The bus comes quickly—a small mercy.

I’m through my building’s front door, up the elevator alone, I’m in my apartment. I sit down on the red couch, my outdoor clothes still on. It’s 8:09 am.

I text Olivia, I’m alive!! Fingers defrosting as I type. She’s awake, of course, asks how was it?? I say good, actually.

I’m not sure why, not sure it was good, except that I didn’t die, except that he wanted me, except that it happened nearly exactly as I expected. I’m turning it all in my mind now, circling it, spinning.

Olivia replies I knew it would be. She always knows.

I say maybe I’d even see him again, we’ll see, which is the first time I’ve considered going back.

Wouldn’t I, if he asked me? Wouldn’t I see him again to know what happens the second time, the third, the fourth, to find out whether I’m still desirable, still there in the morning, to check on the clock?

Olivia says Mally!! I love this for you!
​
Probably, yes. Probably, I would. 

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Amanda Merpaw is the author of the collection Most of All the Wanting and the chapbook Put the Ghosts Down Between Us. She has been a finalist for the Montreal Fiction Prize, The Fiddlehead Fiction Contest, and the Poem of the Year contest. Amanda’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various literary magazines, including Arc Poetry Magazine, The Capilano Review, The Fiddlehead, Riddle Fence, and elsewhere. She is currently Associate Poetry Editor at Plenitude Magazine and a member of the editorial board at Anstruther Press. You can connect with her via her website at amandamerpaw.com or via Instagram @amanda.merpaw.