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Prologue
Forget love, his rule be damned, the power is too skewed, the warplanes too loud. I am setting up a new kind of relationship in my life without the asshole. Let’s call the shift from Pas de Deux ⎯ performance art for autonomy.
Scene 1
‘This is not a discussion or conversation. Sit down. Please. Nod if you’re comfortable enough. Speak only when I’m done, and I say so.’ He makes a silly face as he nods consent.
I take a slow deep breath in and out, ‘This is a performance about you, for you, with you. A world within a world. It is also about me; I am driven to show it to you. It reveals glimpses of our paths of coupling or more accurately our lack of partnership, my not-so-charming one.’ I stand up, walk across to the unlit fireplace in the living room of my birdhouse towards the audience of one, the other, my ex-lover. He’s short, a 72 -year-old very Jewish (Is that a bald spot or are you wearing a yarmulke?) aspiring Buddhist and photographer, who yelled ‘WTF’ last Sunday afternoon after scraping his Porsche SUV’s driver’s side door, trying to park in my two-car garage. (Does this city fellow drive an SUV because his neighbours do?)
‘You’re just not into me. You are listless and lustless. I get it. It hurts ⎯ squeezes my heart so that it falls like a deflated balloon. I wanted you to want me, as much as I wanted you.’ My mouth tightens into a line. Sparks from my eyes throw daggers. He is blank-faced.
‘Truthfully… I wanted more than mutuality. I wanted you to lavish attention
towards me.’ I was a middle child who craved attention.
This striptease has no music.
I sit down in front of Loner and slowly remove my too-tight Lululemon leggings, cotton Jockey underpants, and a holey ‘No Sweat’ shirt arranging each item on the chair with precision, as punctilious as he would. ‘Please undo my bra.’ It drops to the floor with my breasts’ sagging to my bellybutton. The late February daylight from floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides makes this an age-revealing scene.
Standing three feet from him, goose pimples prickle self-consciously on my curved back. The full-length mirror wall reflects my front genitalia’s loss of hair, my belly’s significant bulge and two truly ugly feet. The Two Sisters Mountains are reflected clear and snowy behind this nudity… ‘Your discerning fingers spent most time circling my T-5 ⎯ the deformed vertebrae.’
I twirl around, sit down, cross my legs and look into his hazel eyes that look away from me. Has he ever made eye contact? ‘You missed exploring my other scars, bruises, and disease. You are unbelievable. I still don’t believe you.’ I place my hands into prayer position and seek my reflection in his eyes, ‘I want to thank you for making our encounter ONLY 8 weeks. It could have been so much more humiliating had the seduction been a drawn-out affair, like your peculiar ‘attrition warfare’ strategy to Scrabble. I appreciate this opportunity to tell my side. Although I didn’t give you an option.’
I get up and present a 2023 calendar, in consideration of the time we will NOT spend together in the coming year. He nods clearly annoyed.
‘Please follow me to the bedroom.’
Scene 2
I jiggle my butt-cheeks in front of his eyes the 11 upstairs to the bedroom. The clickety-clack sounds are a reminder that he wouldn’t stay overnight. This sensitive little prince couldn’t sleep in the Downtown Eastside because the train and mental health screams of poverty would keep him awake. If I wanted to spend a night together, it was left for me to come over to Shaughnessy and sleep surrounded by his multicultural swag.
On the sane/insane scale he claimed to be the rational one of we two. He being a trained lawyer judged me as too something, never saying what specifically that was. He, on the other hand was a walking advertisement of Planet Spoiled; he never worked a day in his life.
On my queen-size bed my clothes are positioned flat like a body imprint.
‘Lie down.’
He does what I ask: stretches out clothed on the top of my bed beside my clothes. I dress with fresh clothes as if we just had sex, leaving my clothes’ shadow beside him. It’s hard for me to get my head around the fact that I had willingly, enthusiastically touched this pasty, white, hairy-chest, slime ball. What was I thinking? Was I feeling?
‘You withhold.’ I squeeze my fist. ‘It could have been a fine beginning…but you decided differently, you switched off. It was on the way to the theatre before the Animals of Distinction’s dance event.’ After hours of wasted time looking at him, while he shopped for new eyeglasses that he never bought, he grabbed the umbrella out of my hands in the parking lot and would not look at me in the theatre. Instead, he spent the time before the dance in a cozy chat with a stranger on his left. (Or did he buy her a ticket too?) ‘The whiff of your disregard deeply embarrassed and inflamed me. This account ends in me reeling in self-doubts.’
‘If I were to mimic Sophie Calle’s show of 107 women chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret a recording of us in the underground parking lot, and in the theatre and ask, ‘Understand this for me. Respond for me.’ What would they say? It’s all about subtext, even when there is no subtext. Why did he do this? Why did he change from a reasonable human being to a rude monster? What did you do to provoke such a cold shoulder?
The moral of this story is that I need to stop writing movie scripts and fairytales. Stop the plans, hopes and/or fantasies that leave me lost and loverless.’ It was all in my head; it was all in my head! I worry with a mixture of self-pity and anxiety that I may not dream again, while his dreams will have the luxury to multiply. He has stolen only playtime?
Scene 3
‘Let’s go up.’ It’s 13 stairs to the loft bed where I sleep alone within three walls of windows. It is too cold to go onto the sun patio that he has never set foot on. Too bad, it is the best view of the city. It looks over the ocean, the mountains, the city core, the active port and the railway tracks.
‘Last Friday after we played an excruciating Scrabble game, you told me about calling the police on your ‘gangster’ son in your ex-wife’s home. I have serious questions about your late-model parenting. Then you told me that solving my water leak problem gave me a purpose in life. You are clearly from an alien planet? What an absurd, arrogant and belittling thing to say!’ My words spit carrying defeat and exhaustion. I am unsuccessfully holding back the ‘out’ in outrage. His spear operates with a sense of touristic irresponsibility, mirroring the limits of a very narrow field of vision.
‘Lie down here. Let the chocolate on the pillow melt in your mouth.’ One breast brushes his forehead. ‘Think about how you bend the world and how the world bends you. I do not like being around a withholding, judging human like you. It brings the worst out in me.’
Loner twists, turns, says nothing.
‘With your next woman, you might want to remove that black fedora thinking. Please take the 55 steps down to your car. Lock the door when you leave. Never speak to me again.’
Scene 4
Re-organizing my cosmos
Back in touch with my muse
Content just where I am
Free from the pas de deux.
Goodbye plenty of fucking fish
Tales that take one no where
Dance solo on my own planet
Free from the pas de deux.
So What?
Thanks for staying with me dear reader; I retell the story, allowing myself to become a heroine of sorts, and unhooking that creepy connection. No more heebie geebies! Depending on your current coordinates, you might consider my steps in the dance: weak, repetitive and self-pitying – a perfectly logical judgement, accurate from another’s perspective. The Marina Abramovic-like performance re-established my agency that I should never have given up in the first place. There is clearly something wrong with me. I still don’t know how to live my life. I didn’t know how to control the narrative: I was like a pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive.
Loner had no sense of humour, no participatory spirit, he was shopping for new eyeglasses to bring the best out of himself. I clearly didn’t do it for him. Fair enough!
My aging- female insecurities are raw and real – all of them were up close in front of him. There were some slivers of kindness and candor don’t you think? He didn’t have to feel what I felt, however the performance is now on the record. Gripped by anger at myself as much as he, I needed to perform as much as I needed to write this record of it. But really the culprit, in hindsight is something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in the bike path that tripped me this summer and landed me on the operating table in hospital surgery, when I was innocently cycling.
Miles Davis’ ‘So What?’ plays in my head. I jumped the gun; I should have been smarter, measured my responses to an odourless stranger, instead of being so hungry that I imagined a scent. We all pretend; but men such as he, with erectile dysfunction (ED) can’t communicate their truth any more than I can. It’s possible he has redeeming democratic qualities that I missed, nevertheless I have given up my infinite extending benefits of the doubt. Positive spins cannot be detected through my shame. There is an intimate connection between anger and depression. Yes, I got the blues with a permanent scowl and I snuck in a sheepish smirk. I just had to call it off with some strength.
There were reasons why I had remained celibate for two decades until this time. My ex-husband sexual nerd cravings for threesomes left me considering sex a form of punishment, not a language at all. Then I became invisible, hearing impaired, with leathery and spring-less flesh. I live in a worn-out body within an atmosphere of ageist crushers. I don’t matter at all in today’s news, even though I have much to share with the next generation.
I keep my dreams closely revolving at my surface. I keep my dreams tiny. And hey, there’s depth, texture and understanding in the choreography of old-age obscurity.
Some days it seems to me as if the good luck, which my childhood taught me to consider a birthright, has been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real. Wars, poverty, the unfairness of suffering, climate catastrophes, the death of democracy and pain in the world. I keep waiting for its wrongness, its fraudulence, to be exposed, and for the world to be set right again, so I can have the old age I expected. Here’s yet another instance of my fantastic thinking.
My life will soon be over. I have made many, many mistakes. The litany of faux pas means I don’t have a claim on that good luck. Then there is my annoying tendency to dwell in self-pity, but you don’t want to hear any more of that. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. We know that I’m only going to get what I put into the performance and not an iota more. Art is like that. There is such a thing as a reckoning.
Patricia Morris
When people speak about their identity, some include a dry sense of humour. Me? An art school dropout and a Harvard grad, I have a damp sense of death. (I live in a rainforest.) I lived in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver Canada since 2001. I wrote facing the Lions Mountain and looking over CRAB Park and the Port. I listened to the trains. I crave darkly comic fairy tales of our time. I read and write stories to quench this need.
