When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  It was a wonder she could sleep, surrounded by all these people and creatures with their passionate faces and questioning eyes. Once, when he didn’t come home at night, she had dragged her sleeping bag out of the living room to his neglected bed, but the stale smell reminded her of a time she didn’t want to remember. She had staggered back out to the couch with its uneven springs and lumpy cushions.

  Tonight there was a note on the fridge. “Call your mother.”

  *

  “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  “I’m grown now, Mom, I can take it.”

  “Are you? I’m not so sure.”

  “You called to tell me something.”

  “Your biological mother contacted me this week. She wants to meet you.”

  “You don’t like the idea.”

  “It makes me nervous.”

  “Me too.”

  Afterwards, Artemis couldn’t sleep, turning the problem around in her head like a math problem with no solution. Eden stumbled in at three a.m. smelling of scotch and cigarettes. He flung the lights on before he realized she was there on the couch.

  “I forgot you were there. Shit. I’m piss drunk.”

  “Never mind. I wasn’t sleeping.”

  He came and sat at the foot of the couch. “I saw Mercy tonight. She asked about you. I told her I’d get you to call.”

  “She calls herself Ming now.”

  “Yeah, well. Call her, okay? Don’t make a liar out of me.”

  “I talked to my mother tonight. My real mother is looking for me.”

  “You have a real mother. What do you need another one for? Oh Christ, I’m going to pass out.”

  “Do you think I should let her find me?”

  He slumped gracelessly over the coffee table.

  “She hasn’t had anything to do with me for twenty years. Why should I be interested?”

  The slumped figure heaved. Sighing, Artemis pulled back the covers, sat up, and placing a hand under each of his arms, helped him to stand. She guided him across the creaky wood floor that groaned with their weight, a rough, clumsy noise against the cool silence of three in the morning. She led him into the bathroom and helped him kneel over the toilet, where he violently and copiously vomited. The tile was cold on her feet. She did not mutter soothing words or stroke his hair as she might have in the past, but sat on the edge of the tub watching, as though from a great distance. When he was done, she filled the toothbrush cup with lukewarm water and handed it to him to rinse.

  A stranger in the supermarket told me I was beautiful. A man with millions of freckles and a bushy moustache rather like my own tail. I met him in the fish section. He was buying prawns at twenty-three dollars a kilogram.

  “For a special Thai dish,” he said.

  “Seems awfully expensive for something you’re going to spice the flavour out of.” His moustache was lovely, the way the fine hairs lay just so against one another and fluttered a little in the minuscule breezes generated by the meat cooler.

  “Oh, but the spices don’t diminish the flavour at all. They enhance it.”

  I shrugged and pretended to look at a pair of trout laid head to tail against black styrofoam. But their eyes were dull, and even through the clear cellophane wrap I could smell that they weren’t too fresh. I passed them over in favour of a special on free-range chicken.

  But afterwards, I wondered what he meant by “beautiful.” In my human form I may seem compellingly real to most people, but I am careful to avoid mirrors. For you see, I have no reflection. I assume I’m no more or less attractive than most. People don’t cut circles around me in public, or give me that pitying eye the way they used to long ago in the Western market when I occupied that good-hearted but hideous body.

  Beside a shoe store, I spotted one of those instant photo booths. To be honest, I’ve always been a little afraid of photographs. I hate the bright lights, the funny chemical smells. But the man with the mustache had sparked my curiosity. I glanced surreptitiously about before stepping behind the little blue curtain and sitting in front of the hazy mirror. Of course there was no reflection. I dropped in coins that I had filched from Artemis’s travel bag when she wasn’t looking, and then stared into the glass, keeping as still as possible. The lights flashed four times, nearly blinding me. Then I stepped out of the booth, feeling foolish as I waited the five minutes for the photos to drop out of the little slot.

  No luck. All I got were four identical pictures of the backdrop: white clouds on a blue background.

  A bathhouse seemed an odd place to meet someone with whom you were trying to repair a flagging friendship, but Ming insisted on it. “Nothing in my life has ever been ordinary, but now I’m in control of it,” was all she offered by way of justification. The bathhouse was a modest Victorian three-storey walkup that had once been the property of the now-derelict church next door.

  “One kind of cleansing to another,” said Artemis, glancing over the plaque beside the front door that gave a brief history.

  Ming scowled, taking the remark as a dig at her religious past, which, Artemis discovered, had become a touchy subject.

  They left their coats on brass hooks in the foyer and paid their seven dollars admission, which Artemis found excessive. The walls in the front room were pale pink and lit by lamps that protruded from wall mounts, casting a soothing light. It made her think of the hotel restroom where, half a year earlier, she and Diane had celebrated their little heist and Diane had cut up the credit card. The brick floor was pleasantly heated, warm against her bare feet after she removed her shoes. Against one wall was a rack of cubicles in which women stored their belongings; there were no lockers.

  Ming undressed quickly, feigning nonchalance. There were tattoos on her arms, tattoos that revealed the road to her reinvention of herself – a dragon and phoenix, a yin-yang symbol, a lotus flower in full colour, delicate pink and yellow. Tattoos that American sailors docking at T sim Sha T sui for the first time would get, Artemis thought. Ming’s body was long and thin except for the belly, which bulged out in a low curve, as though there were a cantaloupe weighing in the bottom, like the bodies of courtesans in pornographic Ming dynasty paintings. Her legs were short, but smooth and well shaped, rounding out at the calf. In spite of Ming’s bravado, there was a nervousness in her movements that made Artemis wonder if Ming knew just how obvious it was she had been brought up to use closed dressing stalls if available and a judiciously placed towel if not.

  Politely attempting not to look and yet looking just the same, Artemis had a moment of recogition that had nothing to do with Ming’s appearance. It was the name.

  “Are you the same Ming that Diane used to talk about?”

  “She told you about me?”

  “Just a bit.” She turned her back to Ming, more nervous than she had thought she would be about shedding her clothes in front of an old friend. But then, this was no longer the same girl.

  “She told me about you too.”

  “What did she say?” They moved into the next room to shower. The hiss of water and steam drew the conversation to a halt for a while as they washed with the medicinal-smelling pink soap that came out from the plastic wall-mounted dispensers.

  The hot tub was square and almost filled the whole room, except for the border of blue and white tiles just wide enough to walk along. A number of women lounged in the swirling depths. Steam rose from the surface, obscuring their faces. Ming sank her body in directly, slowly but with a firm determination. Artemis stuck a toe in, then sat down on the lip of the tub, letting her feet grow accustomed to the temperature.

  “So what did Diane say? She just disappeared, you know.” Artemis suspected it might not be a good idea to pursue this further, but it was too late.

  “She said you stole her guy and ran off with the dresses that she was going to sell to get her mother to Hong Kong. She said you knew how important it was that her mother make it there for her own father’s funeral.”

  The
steam rising off the pool had rendered her limbs languid. It was impossible to feel outrage at the accusation. She looked at Ming dumbly, as though she had been drugged. “What? But the smocks were mine. Eden gave them to me.”

  “You stole them after she gave you the idea.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “She said you would probably lie about it afterwards.”

  Across the pool, an Asian woman rose from the water, a woman with long black hair with the remains of a blonde dye-job trailing at the ends. Her little nose twitched once, giving her away, should Artemis have cared to notice, which she didn’t. The woman rose to standing, then kept rising, the hair billowing about her. She hovered above them for a moment and then rose through the ceiling.

  “And how do you account for sleeping with her boyfriend?”

  “I had no idea she thought of him in those terms. Besides, for all either of us knew, she had left town when it happened. She had vanished from our lives.” A long black strand wafted through the water and tangled in Artemis’s toes. She pulled her feet out and picked it off with disgust. “Diane has a lot of problems, you know. Her brother disappeared and then was killed. Not that that gives her any right to go around making up stories.”

  “What happened to her brother?”

  “He was murdered in High Park in Toronto.”

  “How horrible.”

  “Yes, well.…”

  There was the wet sound of footsteps. Another woman entered the room. Ming turned her head to see who it was, then grabbed Artemis and pulled her into the water.

  “What are you doing, for fuck’s sake? It’s hot.”

  “Quick. Hide your head.”

  She said it with such urgency that Artemis’s action was automatic. “What?” she whispered.

  “It’s her. I don’t want her to see me with you.”

  Artemis raised her head to catch sight of a woman who was almost decidedly Diane stepping through the far doors into the next room.

  “If she saw us, she saw us.”

  “Shit,” said Ming.

  They sat in silence for an uncomfortably long minute. Finally Ming said, “I’ve got to go.”

  “But we just got here.”

  “Stay if you want. I’m just saying, I’ve got to go.” Her body was flushed red as she pulled herself out of the hot water. The dragons pulsed. “You coming?”

  “I just paid seven bucks. I think I’ll stay for a bit.”

  “Suit yourself. You can call me if you want.” She tried to walk off jauntily, but her flat feet flapped against the tiles.

  It was too hot in the pool to be hurt or disturbed by this turn of events, although Artemis suspected she would be both a little later. She sank down into the bubbling depths, comfortable now that she had adapted to the temperature.

  “You must have done something nasty,” said a voice through the fog. She squinted her eyes to focus on the hazy figure in the direction of the voice. At right angles to her a little way down a woman floated horizontally across the surface of the water.

  “None of your business,” she snapped.

  “Sorry. I couldn’t help overhearing. And knowing the party in question –”

  “What do you know?”

  “That Diane is a gifted twister of the truth.”

  “What happened between Diane and I wasn’t at all what Ming implied.”

  “Although the facts do have some basis in reality.”

  “Yes. But it wasn’t how she said.”

  A silence fell awkwardly between them. Neither of them could relax, even in the moist, soothing heat.

  Artemis pulled herself out of the hot tub, wrapped up in a towel, opened the glass double doors, and stepped out into the open-air patio where women sunbathed in the summer. It hadn’t been swept that day, and the grey flagstones were littered with lacy leaves in orange and brown. It was starting to rain. There was no one else out there. She sat down on one of the long wooden benches that surrounded the courtyard and propped her chin in her hands. A cool breeze rushed through her. The glass doors clicked open again. It was the woman who had floated in the hot tub.

  “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Claude.”

  “Artemis. We met in the spring.”

  “Yes. In Chinatown. You were with that man.” She paused. The silence began to get tense.

  “The smocks were mine to do what I wanted with. They were given to me. And Saint, she didn’t want anything to do with him. I didn’t either, really. It was just one of those things, you know.”

  “You don’t want to go home with all that buzzing through your head. Why don’t you come have coffee with me?”

  In her street clothes, Claude seemed softer, more ordinary. The clean smell of soap wafted off her skin.

  They stepped into the Pofi Bar up the street, a small Italian-run café with bright orange arborite seats and pine veneer tables. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of wet wool from all the chess players with tied-back hair, budding goatees, and Ecuadorean sweaters. Claude ordered a cappuccino. Artemis ordered decaf. The chess players, for some reason, preferred the artificially lit tables along the inside wall to those by the windows. Maybe it was warmer there. The two women slid into seats at the only table available, a long one beside the window.

  “Have you ever felt as though you were just on the brink of learning something important about yourself, and then had it all fall away in an instant?” said Artemis.

  “It hasn’t fallen away.”

  “How could you know?”

  But Claude could know. One could tell by the way she listened. Her eyes were the kind that one could be sure of, attentive and open. Artemis looked at her in a way she had not been able to at the bathhouse, out of self-consciousness and also distraction with Ming’s story. Her body was broad, somewhat muscular. Her grace was that of a dancer, although she had none of a dancer’s slenderness, but took up space comfortably, without worrying how much of it she occupied.

  “What’s bothering you?” Claude asked. “It’s more than this business with Diane, isn’t it?”

  *

  The grey sky got greyer and they finished their second cups of coffee and still did not want to break the stream of talk that bound them together like fishing line, almost invisible and yet able to bear whole, live wriggling things without strain.

  “Come to my house with me,” said Claude finally. “I’ll make you a bowl of noodles.”

  No one had offered her noodles since her falling-out with Diane. Diane was good at it, arranging the vegetables, green onion, slices of barbequed pork, and boiled-egg halves artfully on top of the dry noodles before pouring the soup on so that the condiments floated, just beneath the surface.

  When they stepped outside, it was still drizzling but not quite dark. They walked back down to the bookstore in front of which Claude had locked her bike.

  “Double you.” Claude said it like a dare.

  “How’s your balance?”

  “You won’t fall.”

  Artemis sat side-saddle on the aluminum rack above the rear fender, holding Claude’s waist as they wheeled silently through the wet dark. The road went on forever and the darkness belonged to just the two of them. Even though the bike wobbled a little under the extra weight, Claude did not lose her balance. The echoes of childhood scoldings for the dangerous act of riding double were barely audible.

  The apartment was a ground floor suite with the entrance at the back of the house. They used to call this kind of apartment a basement suite, but with housing prices rising and landlords trying to make a buck, it became “ground floor.” The door opened into a tidy kitchen with a low ceiling. It was small but had enough room for a kitchen table. Claude wheeled the bike into the hallway and propped it up against the radiator. Artemis hung her wet coat on one of the hooks behind the door, pulled one of the padded vinyl chairs out from the kitchen table, and sat down. Claude was already rummaging in the fridge for things to go with the noodles.
/>   “What do you know about this woman you said is trying to find you?” asked Claude as she tossed half a daikon and a styrofoam take-out box up onto the counter. They could hear the wind pick up outside and the rain come harder.

  “My mother. God, I just can’t think of her that way. I know she’s into Greek stuff, Homer and Plato and all that. That’s how I got the name. It’s hard to decide who to resent more for having made a little living, breathing colony of me as a child.”

  “You think you were colonized?”

  “I don’t know. Diane once said something to that effect, but I didn’t know what she meant. Now I’m trying to make sense of it, but there isn’t much to make sense of. Do you have a normal family?”

  “What’s normal? My dad’s a crochety old bugger who works as a mechanic. My mum owns a little French restaurant.”

  “French? Why not Chinese?”

  “Because French makes more money. But the food isn’t very good, except the fois gras.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Easy. It’s true. Want some goose liver?”

  She rustled in the fridge for a cellophane-wrapped package and nudged it onto a plate. The water she had put on the stove began to boil. She dropped in noodles and slices of daikon.

  “You have siblings?” Claude asked.

  “Naw. I’m an only. You?”

  “I have a brother. He’s an actor. He plays gangsters and nerdy intellectuals and shit like that. His best role so far was a cop who gets shot in the first five minutes of a two-hour B-movie. I hate him.”

  “Why?”

  “Tell you about it later, maybe.”

  There was a long pause, then for some reason they both began to laugh. It started with a little smirk on Claude’s part, then a thin giggle on Artemis’s, and then the dam burst and they laughed until they shook.

  “It’s a relief to be here with you.”

  They slurped up the noodles and downed the thin slices of pork and translucent disks of daikon. Outside the rain descended and blew into the side of the house. Artemis scarfed down the last noodle just as all the lights in the house crackled and went out.