Red
Say what you want, but when you live up north, falling in love is different. It’s easier. And quicker. This new lover, back down south in the city, doesn’t get this. He texts every other weekend like a child of divorce and when he shows up, he forgets every time to bring me his mama’s cherry tomatoes. In this way, you can see there is something about a mitten-less boy who’d walk two kilometers in -54 degrees Celsius to nestle in beside me that sears through ballet dates and streetcar kisses.
Red wasn’t special at first. He didn’t even introduce himself when he met me, standing outside the newspaper office in a town of 2,000 above the 60th parallel. But a few weeks later, after I’d learned the thing to do to get to know people was to go to the bar, he walked home with me — both of us in coyote-lined parkas with our hands shoved deep in our pockets — and revealed he was staying at a writer’s house. I was intrigued. I wanted to be this writer. I hugged him goodbye, he started trembling and I was humbled. I flicked his chin hair.
He had red hair. The stuff of Anne of Green Gables. It was a head of oranges and carrots and peaches that I wanted to grasp and sip for vitamins. I thought he was gorgeous. When I called him Red, he said it reminded him of a neighbour from his childhood, one who taught him things about the land and called him out on his Norwegian ancestry. But that might have been a lie, too.
The first time we made love I was menstruating in a fury. He was the first partner I’d had who didn’t mind. “Is this really happening?” he whispered into my neck as he entered me. I left him ribbed in red lines across his stomach. Magical, he whispered, looking down.
After Red and I started, we couldn’t stop. That first nine months together, I could count on one hand how many times we went to bed without fucking. Maybe we were just trying to stay warm. I had my lemon yellow heels shipped up to me. I wore them and nothing else against his mouldy bedroom wall in the basement. He rarely cleaned his bathroom but he turned the shower on the hottest it would go one night, let me straddle and shave him, and I let him lay me down on that disgusting floor. I’d never do that now. X positions and 5 orgasms in a row. After sitting on his face, he’d say, “Well looks like I swallow, too,” and I would laugh and laugh. My lashes froze every morning that winter but I’d never been so blazing.
I didn’t want anyone to know. That should have been my clue. We snuck around, or so we thought — small, small northern town after all — dropping hands every time a car passed us on our walks. Bringing his dripping shoes into my room so my landlord wouldn’t guess. Hands over steaming mouths. So many whispers.
“So it’s just about the fucking?” my friends back in urbanity asked. I agreed for a time, even though we spent every night together, playing monopoly, planting tomatoes in the spring, watching every show I wanted to, cooking elaborate dinners. Then he drove 8 hours one night to see me rather than spend it in Yellowknife. And sang Brooks & Dunn while dancing me round the kitchen. I’d never been given breakfast in bed before him. Or camped by a waterfall. Or drove down a washed-out bush road to park in the long grass along Great Slave Lake under a buttery half moon, swatting what seemed like twelve dozen mosquitos and black flies after we climbed in the back seat.
There was just “us” for so many things up there. No restaurant dates. No movie theatre. It became a raw northern love. A picnic-in-the-jack-pines-and-fireweed love. A meet-no-one-else-on-the-one highway-out-of-town love. The thing is, there was only one road in and one road out.
Drives now into the city are full of curse words and cut-offs and tailgating. I miss the lonesome bumpy trek out to Pine Lake or to the Salt Plains to trace buffalo prints with our sneakers. I don’t want to take the new lover anywhere. Because I wouldn’t be able to smell wildfire. Because there are no bear cages on the walking paths here in the city. Because I don’t know how to strip down without the flush of a blizzard creeping up my throat.
After Red’s leaving, after I told him I didn’t want the embryo, I had an IUD inserted. There hasn’t been much menstrual blood since. You have the sensation of drying up from the inside out for a while. You have to learn to pay attention to the moon again. To talk to it. I still miss the vibrancy of my life-sustaining colour in the thick tangle of summer sex, though. The metallic smell peppered with sweat and my coconut shampoo.
I honestly don’t look for Red; there’s too many people here and it’s not his scene. Though I hear he’s in Surrey, so I don’t know if he even knows what his scene is. But I have his suspenders and the moose hide earrings with the green beads he gave me. I put them on every winter solstice and I think about hooking my teeth on icicle-covered carrots, his fingers in my fingerless gloves, holding a cigarette on the long, cold walk to work. How he’d flavour my coffee with the cheap hazelnut shit, and show up with all my favourite chocolate bars in his pockets at midnight. How he bought snap shirts just so I could rip them open.
You’ll either turn into a lifer or you’ll be gone in a year, the locals told me when I moved north. Red and I left in nine months. We thought we headed out together but our love stayed swaying atop the blue bicycle he left leaning against the garden fence with the wild Alberta roses, atop the green-and-peach-flowered sheets from the 90s my parents had mailed to me, thrown into the dump, along with glass jars and everything else. No recycling up there.
The thing about a northern breakup is it has nothing to do with two isolated human hearts. It’s a natural sensation, you see, a symphony on the river every spring. We place bets about when it will happen. When it does, we all look up from our computers and smile and we take our lunches to the lookout, watching ice unicorns in battle, castles falling and rising, the river opening its lungs in cat and cow yoga poses. Explicit exhales. It’s unstoppable and it’s hauntingly beautiful. You can’t get away from the breakup up north; you have to listen to it. Put away the snowmobile; get out the kayak.
Maybe I’ll take the new lover skating. Or maybe we’ll just go for tapas in a hipster hole in the ground where we can’t hear each other. And a luxury I’d forgotten: I’ll order real expensive wine. And it’ll be Red.
