The Spectacular Read online

  So, growing up, sex wasn’t something I could use to rebel. I was expected to seek it out, to be curious, to experiment. So naturally I didn’t want to, until a little later than most. And my body cooperated. It was like I had a defective puberty switch that made me look like a teenager but still feel like a girl. My friends had stories about humping their stuffed animals and playing doctor with the neighbour kids but I never did any of that.

  The last doctor I tried was at a private clinic in the West Island near my grandmother’s house. You got to the clinic by going around the side of a giant stone house on a residential street near the airport. I used the student Visa card I kept in my freezer for emergencies. It was my last shot at getting a yes. I assumed the doctors would be used to taking demands from rich people who didn’t want to use the free and relatively excellent public health system like the rest of us. But that doctor also wasn’t having it. “I didn’t want kids when I was your age either. Now they’re the reason I get up in the morning. You’ll regret it, I promise you.”

  But I knew I wouldn’t.

  Since I was in the neighbourhood, I decided to visit Granny. I got on a bus that took me to the village where she lived. I checked in on her every now and then, made sure she was keeping the place up and doing okay. I brought her a bag of oranges, some tea, a carton of milk, and a fresh loaf of bread from the store at the end of her street. The last time I visited, she’d been using powdered milk for her tea, and I worried she wasn’t able to get to the store as easily anymore. She’d never tell me that herself. I pulled a printout of my tour schedule out of my canvas shoulder bag and taped it to her fridge. It was still a month or two away, but I wasn’t sure I’d be back to visit her before I left for tour.

  We sat in her living room and exchanged our usual ripostes: her in the armchair and me sprawled on the sofa in a way that she used to say was unbecoming of a lady when I was a teenager but had since given up commenting on. She asked me a few questions about what I had been up to, about my music, if I “had a boyfriend yet.” And, in turn, I informally tried to quiz her to make sure she was remembering things. Are you still teaching the boy with curly red hair, what was his name again? She was, as always, sharp as a tack. Yes, Jonah still comes every week. In a moment of rare straightforwardness, I told her what I was trying to do.

  The look on her face told me that was a mistake.

  “I don’t even understand. That is an operation women get once they’ve had children already, or because they have cancer. Why would you want it? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m being practical,” I said, a defensive tone coming into my voice before I could stop it. “I don’t want any mistakes.”

  “You’ll change your mind! Your generation is just so angry.” She laughed. “It’s ironic. You have so much freedom, you have no idea. Your feelings on this will change. Wait till you find the right man.”

  Any time I shared problems with her, she ended her advice with and then you’ll find the right man, which is sooooo ironic because she never did.

  My granny doesn’t know what it’s like to be twenty-one and unattached on purpose. I’ve never asked her but if I had to guess, I’d say my grandmother probably never enjoyed sex in her life. I’m not sure if her life in particular looks sad, or if all people have lives that look sad from certain angles, and she’s just the only access I have to the really old version of sad. Granny immigrated from Turkey (but she’s British/the whitest person on earth, long story) with a husband who moved his mistress into a house down the block without telling her. Yet she’s always telling me that marriage is the only way for a woman to be happy, which seems insane.

  And then there’s my mother, who thought she was so liberated on the commune, with the lack of conventional expectations, but it was always the women crying in the sunflower patch, and the men shrugging and using words like We agreed on this, You’re so uptight, This was your idea, It didn’t mean anything! They talked a good game, the women on the commune, but I could see that sex wasn’t for them.

  Now I’m the age my parents were when they started Sunflower, their intentional community, and I don’t want a community at all. I want to cross the country with the freedom of any man my age. I want to experience every spectacular, vivid detail of life on the road, to play our best songs, to jump out into the crowds, to fly on top of their outstretched fingers, to kick one leg in the air during the endless final solos, to be grabbed and kissed by the life of it all, to have a great time.

  A great time like I’m trying to have right now. With Bernie. He plays the bass in our opening band, from the first stretch of the tour. This is his last night with us, so I figured he was fair game.

  But it’s not working. I’m not going to come thinking about all those doctors, remembering the stressful weeks leading up to the start of the tour. I’m trying. Bernie isn’t completely without skill. I close my eyes tight, lean my head back. There’s not a lot of room in this tiny bunk and all I can think about is whether Bernie is going to pull out in time.

  He fucks like a bass player. He smells like spicy arboreal cologne, and after developing some banter and flirting all day, we’d curled up to watch Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense on the little monitor in the back of the bus that had a half-working VHS. The tape kept getting stuck whenever the bus hit a bump. One thing led to another. I like the feeling of the motor under the bunk, the whirring vibration, the feeling of his bare chest against mine.

  He’s wearing a condom, but I don’t like to chance it.

  “Are you there yet,” he whispers.

  Nah, but it’s cool.

  I’ve had the same sexual fantasy since I was seventeen or so, when my body finally woke up. By fantasy standards, it is pretty tame. In it a man leans over and kisses my neck, whispers baby girl, and then lifts my long skirt up slightly and tugs at my underwear. And that’s it. It always stops there. Of course, as I got older I had much more intense daydreams or imaginings, a rotating filmic clip of images or words I responded to in pornography. But I often think of that image right before coming, always works.

  I conjure it now, but it doesn’t do anything.

  I love sex, but I’ve never come with another person in the room.

  Bernie makes the same face when he fucks as he makes when he’s playing bass. Up close it is monstrous. He’s about to come, his teeth are clenched, his eyes floating off his face. I can see it in his expression, hear it in the speed of his breath, the things he’s starting to mumble.

  Like most, I can’t come just from being pounded, no matter how skilfully, but fucking feels better than a lot of other things I could be doing, and I like the way their faces look when they come, like you’re giving them the thing they’ve been desperate for since they first drew breath.

  Chapter 2

  carola

  the detective called, “Carola Neligan?”

  I heard his voice like a background beat, a nebulous whir. I was transfixed by the television chained to a high corner of the room, watching my daughter on a late-night variety show. I had not seen her in years. Her face had changed. Contracted. A woman’s face.

  I kept forgetting about Carola. My name had been Juniper since my early twenties. I was going back to Carola but hadn’t acclimated yet. My daughter had scrawled Pro-Choice across her midriff. I felt both proud and embarrassed when I saw that. She had a grown-up body to go with her face. The last time I saw her, her limbs were all mismatched sizes. She looked so much like my sister, Marie. She had that Neligan nose. The young receptionist with the eggplant-coloured hair was singing along. She knew the song already. She tapped her pencil to the beat against a stack of papers. That Melissa had changed so much in my absence made me feel like I was on drugs, though obviously I knew time couldn’t stand still, waiting for me, my slow brain, my anemic heart. The music had no melody I could discern but the volume was low. She stood up from her cello and waved the bow around, and was now shouting into a microphone, touching the side of her head to
the lead singer’s shoulder. Her hair was blue and white-blond. She had so much energy, I was reminded of when she would jump off the roof of the barn into piles of neglected hay. How she made all the adults watch her dance to Janet Jackson’s nasty-boys song over and over in grade five. She sang the chorus with her eyes closed. She was a mess, but so beautiful. The camera kept favouring her. She could really command your gaze. The rest of the band looked like cut-outs of the same greasy boy but with differing haircuts.

  “Carola Neligan?” This time it registered.

  “Yes, sorry, that’s me. I usually go by Juniper.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he said, more to his buddy than to me. “But your ID says Carola Neligan.”

  I was prepared to be chastened, condescended to. Blue, the one who’d called a lawyer after we all found out about one another, told me they’d taken to calling us “the saggy titty ladies,” so this wasn’t the worst it could get. Even though Blue is only twenty-five and her breasts point skywards. I didn’t think we should involve the police, but the votes went eight to seven in favour. It was the hottest summer in years in New Hampshire. I replaced my sandals that had worn down under the big toe because the concrete was too hot, even for one toe. There was tension between town residents and those of us at the centre, sometimes. We had tried for years to build a chimerical peace. All it took was a temperature rise. We couldn’t help talking to each other about the heat. This was the kind of town that didn’t even have 9-1-1 yet; maybe the cops got an overdose, a fight over a stolen tractor, some kid with pot they stole and smoked with the other cops after work. That was it. If anything serious happened, cops came from another town. And this was deemed serious, or at least, noteworthy.

  What was happening would make the papers. A reporter had been parked at the gate to the centre for the last two days. Blue had given him our group photo from the spring picnic. Most of us didn’t read the news every day, trying to avoid the negativity. But this was turning into a big story, the kind of weird headline that made it into the jokes on David Letterman.

  But I wasn’t sure this was really newsworthy.

  If a bunch of people all happened to make the same mistake, whose fault was it? I had a lot to be forgiven for in this life, and I wasn’t expecting that to happen until I was in the next one. Who was I to judge? But at the centre we believed in consensus, in collective process. I didn’t want to hold the group back. Sometimes you have to do what’s good for the group, especially if your own feelings flit about like flies, the kind that only live for one day.

  I followed the cop into his office. I had said the word solidarity and hugged the women who were certain. A fan clicked uselessly. My father had been a cop. I never understood why they were always so angry, when they were quite literally in charge of any room they walked into.

  “So, this shaman guy,” he said, scrawling my name at the top of a piece of tea-coloured loose-leaf paper, stabbing a period at the end before looking up at me, “when did it get, you know, sexual?”

  Oh, he was ugly. The kind of repulsive that is just factual. I winced at first when I looked too closely at his face. But you can’t account for chemistry. It can build between any two people, regardless of how you’ve been taught to value a certain facial symmetry, to see beauty the way others do. It can change. I didn’t know that. So there was one valuable lesson, I suppose. That beauty isn’t fixed. It’s a comforting thought as one gets older.

  When he first touched me, I thought it was an accident. It was an outdoor yoga class in the summer of 1989. There were about twenty of us on the south lawn, and the sun was rising. I’d been at the ashram for a few weeks. It had recently been renovated and it was starting to look less like a ramshackle assembly of old buildings and more like a luxury resort. The staff and volunteers were barely able to handle the numbers of wealthy women coming for retreats. But it was an exciting time. We felt like we were building an empire, and we could see it growing day by day. Because I hadn’t packed much, I tended to dress in clothes left behind in the lost and found. I remember that day I was wearing a gaudy hot-pink tie-dyed T-shirt with a silver peace sign decal on the front.

  Our toes were wet with dew. My back hurt from the thin mattress in my bunk in the volunteers’ cabin. He came over to adjust my pose. Normally he just sat at the front of the class on an oversized pillow looking sleepy and revered, while his helpers demonstrated the poses. Often he gave short talks on the spiritual value of chastity before the class began. I didn’t see him as sexual, let alone a prospect. Plus, sex was something I thought I’d left behind when I moved away from the commune. I was at the ashram to be a whole person, to learn about who I could be as more than a body, a mother, a wife.

  When I’d first arrived, he seemed just like a normal person, albeit older than everyone else, so it took some time to understand all the small photos of him on the bedside tables of most female volunteers. Some had even set up homemade altars, along with sage and candles and little rocks. A still recovering Catholic, I was skeptical of idols, even ones who are teaching you to slow down, breathe, appreciate both the world and your smallness. I think he liked me because he could see that I didn’t glow, open faced and wanting, in his presence. I was a non-believer. They can spot you. But I decided to let go and see if he could teach me, the way he seemed to be giving the others a sense of purpose and inner peace. I certainly did not have inner peace. I’d woken up every morning for years feeling like death might be a welcome release. And by the thick of summer, I let go any vituperative feelings about those women and the psychic salve those tiny photos provided. By then, beside my own tidy bed, alongside my book of meditations, my green ceramic bowl of clipped herbs, my growing collection of crystals, was a photo of him. It wasn’t a real photo, but a glossy magazine-paper image inside a cheap frame that they sold in the gift shop. Occasionally I would hear Bryce’s voice in my head, telling me that Sunflower had been democratic, but where I’d landed now was a cult. What difference does it make? I’d ask him in these imagined arguments.

  That morning in the yoga class, he put his head close to my cheek and said, “Let go.” His voice was deep and commanding, which surprised me because his body was small and almost feminine. And as he said it, he ran his finger along the inside of my thigh. I shuddered, felt my whole body light up. He looked me in the eye, like a challenge. My body responded like it understood God for the first time.

  “You look lost,” he said. In any other context that might have felt like a line. But I was lost. And so I felt seen.

  The other women around me kept their downward dog poses but I knew they were listening. I didn’t care. I hadn’t felt seen since Missy was born. I was in my thirties then, but still felt physically in my prime. Watching everyone revere him, the corporeal ceased to matter. I suppose it was groupthink, but I desperately needed to be a part of it. I’d been needing it for years, and when I finally found it, I couldn’t leave. If you haven’t had a complete collapse of exhaustion, if you haven’t watched everything around you drain of colour and cease to matter, if you haven’t felt like slipping off into the chasm of your own pain, then you’re not going to understand my choices.

  I didn’t know how to say that to the cop.

  So I said, “I guess the first summer I moved to the centre, we became lovers.”

  He wrote that down, then looked at a photo of him and grimaced.

  “You wanted to become lovers? With this guy?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know by looking at him it doesn’t make much sense, but I did.”

  I felt like I was wasting his time.

  “Yeah, you’re wasting our time here, lady.”

  But then a cult expert came into the room. Her name was Miranda and she approached me with the gentle, patient demeanour of a kindergarten teacher. Her hair was a mess of grey-scale curls, kept in place by a pair of eyeglasses on her head. Clearly, she’d been listening to our conversation from the other room somehow. Was there a microphone in the room? I was feeling a
bit spooked.

  “Please keep talking. I want to know about how it all began, no judgments.” She leaned toward me. “I know this must be hard,” she said. It wasn’t hard, in fact. I wasn’t feeling particularly perturbed or upset by any of it. I was only here because I had made this commitment to the others and I had to honour it.

  “I began to look forward to seeing him, and would alter my daily routes to try to catch his eye. When he started paying attention to me, I felt chosen. Then he requested that I join his team of assistants.”

  “So it was like a promotion?” she asked, writing down something in her notepad before I had a chance to say yes or no. Despite her befuddled style, her nails were a faultless glossy red in uniform ovals.

  “Sort of. I mean, we were all volunteers. We brought him dinner at his house sometimes, did the gardening, tidying, ran errands in town, fed and cared for his goats and chickens. I didn’t realize right away that there were other women. I thought we had a secret relationship.”

  “A lot of women have reported that.”

  “Well, yeah, I know that now,” I said.

  I was supposed to stay for three months, be home in time for Missy to start grade eight, return to life at Sunflower. But after I joined his inner circle, I couldn’t imagine leaving. I knew it didn’t make logical sense. I knew it was morally reprehensible to leave one’s own child. But what about the impact of being around a child when you are a husk? That couldn’t be good either.

  “Your old life, it wasn’t working,” he whispered. I couldn’t do anything but agree.

  He took my clothes off, and then he knelt on the floor in front of the bed. The room smelled of geranium and lemons, faint amber incense. He didn’t pull the curtains closed. I think he liked them open. A dare.

  One time, when Missy was six or so, I made her some scalloped potatoes for lunch, and then I went outside to get washing off the line. While folding thick towels that had stiffened in the open air, I peeked in the kitchen window to see her at the table. She was looking at the scalloped potatoes with the biggest, most rapturous grin I’d ever seen.