When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  She believed that Eden could make the night into something she herself could not, a place of magic and illicit secrets that revealed themselves only to him. It created a well of longing in her she could not understand, nor make an object of, the way he seemed able to. But the seams in the illusion they had built for themselves were beginning to give.

  “Come to the bar with me tonight.”

  “But it’s men’s night.”

  “We’ll fix you up. Come on. It’ll be fun to see if we can get away with it.”

  They cut a sheet into strips and flattened her small breasts against her chest. He slicked her hair back and tucked it under a skull cap. Loose jeans, a baggy T-shirt, and men’s shoes her size he had picked up at some fancy vintage clothing store.

  “Well, you don’t look that great, but you do look like a boy,” he said.

  “They’re going to be able to tell if they just look at my arms,” she protested holding out a skinny wrist, fist clenched.

  “Lots of Oriental boys are very slender. They won’t bat an eyelash.”

  She looked uncertain.

  “Bet you anything some rice queen tries to pick you up!”

  The doorman gave her a slow once-over that made her cheeks flush. He nodded at her, and she had the distinct feeling that he knew, but had decided not to say anything. The bar was packed and redolent with the animal smell of men. They towered above her. She never felt tall walking down the street, but here she felt like a dwarf in the land of giants. There was not the mediating presence of women to make a gradation between them and her.

  They pushed their way to a table at the back where Eden had some friends. Tom, who had come to her place with Eden for drinks once, recognized her and winked. She winked back. Eden pushed her a bottle of beer and someone offered her a cigarette, which she was about to take when Eden leaned over and whispered, “Don’t. Your hands will give you away.” It was true. She looked at them and marvelled at their smallness, like a child’s. She had never really thought them extraordinary before, but now, looking at her companions’ large hands as they drank and smoked and gesticulated, her own seemed wonderful and strange.

  Eden pulled her onto the dance floor, and some of the other guys from the table came too. Under the pulsing lights she melted into the music, closed her eyes, imagined her body as boyish as she could, and hoped her hips wouldn’t give her away. When she opened her eyes there was a man staring right into them. She stared back crossly, but instead of being embarrassed the man just smiled and continued to stare.

  “Someone better teach you how to cruise fags properly,” yelled Tom above the music, “or you’re going to find yourself in trouble.”

  “Yeah, no shit. So what do I do?”

  “Well, that guy is going to be over here any second now. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  “Tom, come on. This isn’t funny.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  She couldn’t read his eyes. Was he amused, or was he angry that she had invaded a territory not meant for her and wanted to see her get whatever she had coming to her? She looked around for Eden but he had gone off a song and a half earlier with a man who looked like Rutger Hauer. The man with the stare was manoeuvring slowly through the crowd towards her, inching, sussing out the situation. She glanced nervously at him from moment to moment, wanting to know where he was, where she could run to.

  “Don’t keep looking,” said Tom. “He’ll think you’re interested.”

  The man crossed the path of an old friend who grabbed him playfully from behind, and they danced together the way old pals do, hamming heat and passion with a kind of affection that has long since moved beyond those things. Not that they didn’t look for action elsewhere. In the meantime, Eden resurfaced.

  “Can we go now?” Artemis asked.

  “She’s chickening out,” said Tom.

  “Were you giving her a hard time?” Eden asked him, getting protective.

  “Of course not, Daddio.”

  They moved on to a bar that had once been gay, but had slowly been infringed upon by heterosexuals until gay people stopped going there. The man who looked like Rutger Hauer came with them. In the back seat of the car, modestly concealing her activity beneath her coat, she unbound her breasts and shook her hair loose.

  It was hard to find a table, but after several turns around the bar, they finally found a spot at the counter overlooking the dance floor. A waitress came by and Eden bought a round. As he pushed a pint down the table to his new friend, there was a look in his eyes that made Artemis disappear entirely from the room. She was shocked by her own absence. It was a look of longing. A look of conspiracy. Caught up in her own sudden invisibility, Artemis did not feel the gaze of the woman dancing on top of one of the four pillars that delineated the dance floor. If she had cared to look she might have seen a well-muscled stomach undulating smooth as water beneath a little T-shirt cut off at the midriff, small dark eyes watching her, and a small nose twitching.

  Someone else was also watching from across the dance floor – a young man with dyed black hair offsetting his pale face. She looked back with ease because it was so much less complicated than the man who had thought she was a man but she only half welcomed the gaze. The unnatural darkness of his hair, while appealingly glamorous, concealed its true colour, and she thought of it more as a lie than as a secret. As he approached her, a kind of relief flooded her veins.

  “Dance?” A single word tossed up in the smoky air.

  She laughed because no one did that anymore at this bar, asking you to dance. If you wanted to dance you just got up and did it. She was not sure if he knew this and was flying rebelliously in the face of the not-so-new convention, or if he was a recent arrival from the suburbs who was still living light years behind. There wasn’t any point sitting here with Eden and old Rutger, she thought, so she followed him to a place under the black lights.

  At two o’clock, when the lights went up just as surely as Cinderella’s coach turned into a pumpkin, he handed her a matchbook with his name and phone number on it. “Call me for coffee?” Under the strident yellow lights, his skin looked sallow. His eyes were red and the dark hair greasy.

  Diane called several days later. A week had passed since the burning incident.

  “It’s all peeling. Looks disgusting.”

  “Will you come see me?”

  “Doctor says to stay home and rest. He thinks the accident was the result of some nervous disorder.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  *

  She didn’t call the matchbook man until a week later. She and Eden had made plans for dinner and she called at the appointed time, but Eden wasn’t there. He had been doing that a lot lately, making dates with her and then standing her up. Exasperated and restless, she dialled the number on the matchbook.

  He lived in the basement of his mother’s house. He was waiting at the door when she arrived.

  “Don’t mind the posters and stuff. My mom’s into some hippy feminist shit. She thinks she’s cool, but she’s kind of crazy.” On the walls were a poster for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival and several others for various demonstrations and conferences. In the kitchen was a calendar with bright full-colour photographs of bare-breasted brown-skinned women with an explanation in tiny letters underneath saying what they were doing and where this activity fit in the cycle of their lives. She followed him down the stairs beside the fridge.

  “I used to live on my own, but a poor person can’t support himself out there these days, you know. Only the capitalist pig dogs.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said.

  “My mom’s all right. She’s a little crazy, but she doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  The basement was sparsely decorated and cold. There were two guitars on stands in a prominent place against the front window. There were posters on the walls of bands like the Gang of Four, the Clash, Art Bergmann. The futon lay open and un
made. There was nowhere else to sit, so she sat there.

  “You want a beer?” He had a little bar fridge containing nothing but. He handed her one and then came and sat next to her, put his hand on her breast, and tried to kiss her ear.

  “Hey, not so fast.”

  “Isn’t this what you’ve come here for?”

  “No. I don’t know. Not like this.”

  “Like how, then?”

  “I don’t know. I thought we could talk, maybe.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Later she couldn’t have said why she felt compelled to tell him things she had never spoken of before. But they tumbled from her lips as if of their own accord: the unexplainable airless nights on Eden’s bed, her fascination with his disappearances, the feeling that she was being watched but never knowing by whom or from where, the whole mess with Diane, the burning, the old quilt with its thick odour of mothballs, the single, never-again-mentioned kiss, and how Diane was beginning to drift away. And then the man in the men’s bar and not understanding what had driven her to go there in the first place, except that it was more than a vicarious curiosity about Eden’s life.

  “You ever sleep with a woman?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Maybe you should try it.” He leaned towards her and kissed her mouth. His breath was thick. His hands were cold and clumsy. Only his dark hair was reassuring, but when he undressed his pubes and armpit hair were a brilliant and alien golden-red that glinted in the pale beam of the streetlight coming through the squat window.

  She left him without waiting for morning to come. Truth in the dark was one thing, under the scrutiny of the sun it was something else again. She didn’t want to wake and gaze down the length of their bodies, to observe her own blue bony limbs flush against his sallow ones with their fine coat of red down. She did not want to breathe in the stale smell of the night’s contact or feel the sweat of his sleep running between her breasts. She returned to her own apartment, where the ghost of Diane lingered, even though almost three weeks had passed since the burning accident.

  I have big feet. In this century, I’m glad to have them. It makes it a lot easier to balance in these heels I’ve got, shiny red leather dreamt into a perfect shape. For a while, it was a problem. I spent weeks on end in the graveyards waiting for lily-footed dainties to pass away before their time. I could go nowhere with the long paddles left to me by the poetess, although they served her perfectly well in her own time. But starting with the courts of the khans up until very recently, I might as well have worn an olisboi beneath my skirts as gone about on my obscenely masculine feet. It fact, it was around the time of that first visit by the young Venetian and his two uncles that I stopped visiting male scholars except in those very temporary bodies I found in the hills and managed to animate for a night or two. I focussed my attention instead on the courtesans who wrote beside the river under the full moon, or the nuns who sat out in the courtyards with their ink blocks after the rest of the clergy had gone to bed. They were puzzled by my lean, squarish jaw and plain dark robes that betrayed nothing but my amusement with the game of dressing. What seemed to relieve and reassure them was the sight of my feet, their phallic length. And then it was “Tea, elder brother?” Or “A game of rhymes, perhaps?” If they discovered later that I was a woman after all, by then it did not matter so much.

  But occasionally I made errors. One night, passing through a neighbourhood near the Western market, I noticed a young woman sitting by a candle in the window, brush poised in her elegant hand. I was tired and hungry and on my way to visit the Saracen cloth trader who kept a yard full of plump chickens. The old rooster, great grandfather to the eldest of the hens, was randy again. I could hear his unfortunate love of the moment squawking in consternation. The woman glanced every now and then out the window, and the longing in her eyes was more than I could resist. I reknotted my hair, smoothed my robes, and approached the door.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, evidently surprised to see me. “Are you his brother?”

  I was puzzled for a moment, until I realized that she was not the lonely scholar of this sad little house, but merely some prostitute or courtesan, waiting for a man to return. Of course, I was disappointed, but then I should have known to trust my knowledge of this city by now. I knew every scholar, every priest, and every nun of every faith that was practiced in Chang’an. There were many, including some strange ones imported from way beyond the Gobi Desert. The priests worshipped their god as though he were the only one that existed, in spite of the evidence to the contrary right in their own neighbourhoods. I could never understand this, but humans are often a peculiar lot. And then I thought, if she holds a brush, she can write. What does it matter if she doesn’t own this little house? It was a pleasant and convenient place to haunt, old as the city itself and covered in climbing trellises.

  “His brother, yes, exactly,” I said, so as not to disappoint her.

  “You’d better sit down, then. I’ll get you some tea.” Tea was all these people ever drank anymore. I don’t know whatever happened to good old barley water, but I suppose tastes change with the times. It was much too hot and nearly burned my nose, which remains sensitive to sun even until this day. I was more than a little surprised when she noticed. Most humans do not have such a keen eye.

  “Perhaps you would prefer to drink wine?”

  I nodded gratefully. She took a bottle and two cups from the cupboard and poured generously.

  “Are you clever with couplets?” she asked.

  “Not as good as my brother,” I answered. I have never been particularly given to modesty, but in this case I thought it might round out my disguise. Especially given her uncannily keen eye.

  “Well,” she said, “my work is not so sophisticated that you should have trouble.” She pushed the scroll towards me. On it was written:

  The order of nature is never fixed

  The west is moving, the east cannot be still.

  Clearly she was disturbed by the visitors in the court of the khan. It was true he listened too willingly to their advice and bestowed too many gifts upon them. His scholars met their priests, who spoke of the one god as though it were a bag into which they wished to stuff everything they had learned of the Middle Kingdom.

  I picked up the brush and after considerable thought wrote:

  The nature of order is never still

  It moves not with the wind but with the will.

  “Very good,” said she, “although that end rhyme smacks suspiciously of Western influence.”

  “I have lived in their company for much longer than you,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You should not pass judgement on things about which you know nothing.”

  This remark made me raise an eyebrow. With her literary skill, there was already more to this woman than met the eye. But how extraordinary was she?

  She smoothed the fine hairs of the nib against the ink block, added a few drops of water and worked them through the ink until the brush was saturated again. Then she wrote:

  A strange guest visits the walled city

  and pushed it back. This was clearly a test of some sort, although I couldn’t be sure what she was testing for. I wrote:

  Ordinary ghosts roam the streets.

  “Ah,” she said, “are you afraid of death?”

  “Not at all,” I replied.

  The sheets are white, the streets are quiet.

  The guest is more afraid of wine than spirits.

  It took me a while to finish this one, but when I was done, I made the last stroke with a grand flourish and accidentally dropped the brush. Quick as a fox I was under the table to retrieve it, brushing my hand against her dainty three-inch foot as I did so. She was still blushing when I surfaced above the table again. She giggled when I leaned forward to kiss her, took her hand, and guided her towards the bed.

  “I hope my brother does not come back soon.”

  “If he does, I hope he will ha
ve the good sense to hide himself among the trellises for a while.”

  I cannot tell you now what made this such a hurried thing, since I am usually a creature of breath and careful pacing. But at the same moment we placed our hands in that telltale place between the legs and I discovered that she had something that I had not, and she discovered, since I had no olisboi with me that night, that I lacked something which she had. Being good natured creatures, we both fell to laughing and went on with what we were doing.

  When I finally got up to leave, she gave me her dainty embroidered shoe as a token of the evening, and I went home dreaming of all the possible disguises the future held.

  “I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

  “It hasn’t heen weeks, just ten days or so. I’ve been busy.

  What have you been doing?”

  “Reading. Playing Space Invaders.”

  “You should try to get out. Meet people. Ming says that people who stay home all the time are more prone to high blood pressure when they get older.”

  “Who’s Ming?”

  “It’s not her real name. Her real name is – uh, I forget – Charity or Patience or something awful. She says being called Ming makes her nervous, but it suits her so much better, don’t you think?”

  “How would I know? I’ve never met her.”

  Artemis grew afraid that Diane would disappear altogether into Ming’s world and never come out. Instead of looking for a summer job, she spent the long afternoons in the games arcade playing Space Invaders. As the aliens rained down on her head, she imagined Diane trapped under debris in a fort below the screen, and fired heroically from the gunner’s position all afternoon.

  Sometimes she went into the neighbourhood church, slumped into one of the back pews, and breathed holy air. Christianity did not particularly interest her, but she imagined the church to be a stone temple from the time of the Greeks with light streaming in through the high windows, and a marble altar with a stone bowl for the blood of the sacrifice.