Story: The Scarf

Another short story from the archive

This one is from 2005. It’s actually a fragment from a longer piece that remained incomplete. It’s slow and subtle and more Henry James-like than anything else I’ve written. Quite unlike the short, minimalistic prose that I think of as my standard approach. There’s some autobiographical stuff in here, but the scarf is made up. I’ve always had a soft spot for this story because of the scarf, a strong concrete image. This has never been published. I submitted it to magazines, but none took it. Maybe too slow? Maybe to vague? The longer piece it was a part of was called “A Man,” and it was a portrait of a dude, trying to find his way. Not sure the dude came into focus, but the vagueness is the reason for the quest, no?

*

Simon pulled at the flap of his dark woolen overcoat. He’d wrapped the scarf around his neck. Tight. Now he pulled it up over his cheekbones. His office was only half a block from the subway, but the new condo towers funneled the wind in a way that froze exposed flesh in seconds. He wondered again about Jacqueline. It was nearly a year since she’d bought him the red-and-white candy cane scarf he still wore. A year since they’d stopped seeing each other. They’d kissed heavily twice. Maybe three times, depending how you measured heavily. Then her ex-fiancé called. She hadn’t wanted to see him, but did. Didn’t want to get back with him, but then didn’t want to see Simon any more, either. The way Simon remembered it, he’d enjoyed kissing her, and she’d enjoyed kissing him. And he’d felt – in moments – as close to her, as intimate, yes, he’d even use that word, as he’d felt with any woman. But Jacqueline had gone and done what she’d told him she’d sworn off ever doing again. She’d shared time with Terry, her ex. Against Simon’s counsel and her own initial judgement, she’d gone to dinner with the man who’d asked her to marry him, who’d all but ended her life six months earlier.

Simon and Jacqueline met in the corner of a downtown bistro. They’d both been invited to celebrate the birthday of someone neither of them really knew.

“How many times have you been engaged?” she asked him.

“Um, none. You?”

“Twice, actually.” The first had been right after high school; it had been more silly than serious. The other, more serious, had devastated her.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was hard, but I’m over it. I’m over him.” She sipped her white wine and allowed her eyes to linger on his. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Good questions deserve good answers,” she said. “Maybe you’re still in love with someone.”

“Aren’t we all?”

She said, “Men love their mothers.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“So, you don’t deny it.”

“Mothers deserve many things; most of all, the love of their sons.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.” Then she said, “But really now, who is she?”

He said, “There have been girlfriends. There just aren’t any right now.”

“There hasn’t been any special one, is that what you’re saying?”

“No. There was a special one.”

“What happened?”

“The simple story is – ”

“It didn’t work out.”

“Right.”

“I don’t want to hear the simple story. What’s the complicated story?”

“She had some other stuff she had to do. She had some travelling she had to do. She had some other relationships she had to have. The usual complications. Other places. Other people.”

“Maybe you’ll tell me more later.”

“Maybe. What about you?”

“Oh,” she said. “What can I say?” Six months earlier, she hadn’t wanted anything more to do with men. She’d felt unwanted, undesirable. Defeated, abandoned, half-dead. Consumed with anger, but also a deep self-pity. That was something she was starting to get over. “If you feel you are going crazy, you are. If you feel you can’t trust, you can’t. I finally realized there wasn’t any use trying to identify a failure in myself. He’s the one who had the affairs. He’s the one who made the wrong choices. He’s the one who caused the breach. I knew what was real, I just had to live it. The only thing that started to make me feel better was to tell myself over and over, like a mantra, that I loved him and that I would be leaving him. Those words felt like opposites, but the more I said them, the more they fused into a complete feeling, the new place I needed to go.”

She said she was watching the Olympics and heard one hurdler talk about how she visualized the race before it happened. The hurdler said she imagined herself running and jumping, and the more she did that the easier it was to run the actual race. Jacqueline told Simon that's what she did to get over Terry. She imagined the future and then moved into it.

She also told him she could drink him under the table, which proved all too true. They left the party together. Went to a bar by the subway. Talked until last call. He called her a cab. She kissed his cheek and said, “I want to see you again.”

*

On the subway platform, Simon unbuttoned his overcoat, unwrapped the scarf from his head. A slight fever had turned his cheeks a flush pink. Despite the onset of a cold, he looked healthy and in-control. It was two weeks into the new year. He was wearing a gold tie, one he’d picked up on impulse at a Boxing Week Sale three weeks earlier – in December, he’d seen his boss in a gold tie and thought it had suggested status, confidence. Only the day before, on his way home from work, he’d stopped at the $12-a-cut barber near his condo and had his blonde hair trimmed. A new year, a new attention to detail. A new attempt to blend in at the office, wear his double-agent uniform with assuredness. His stomach hurt. For lunch he’d eaten a bag of chips and a sipped half-a-cup of cold coffee. Meetings, even this early in the new year. They blocked up his calendar. A train pulled into the station.

Simon found a seat beside the window. Two teenaged girls stood over him. Both wore skirts, baring their legs, despite the frigid temperature outside. They were soon talking about a boy named James and a party planned for the coming weekend by a boy named Kurt. The first girl, blonde with curls, said Kurt had said he liked her and she’d made out with him New Year’s Eve, and she sort of liked him back, but not as much as she liked this boy Christopher who was supposedly seeing a girl named Cindy, which he was, except the blonde with curls had seen Christopher at this New Year’s Eve party, too, and they’d shared a cigarette and he’d flirted with her and she was pretty sure he’d wanted to do something more, except Cindy was at the party, too, and then Kurt had come and started kissing the girl with curls, which had been a fine thing, and she would have even gone further, but they didn’t have anywhere to go, but now she wasn’t sure what she was doing and didn’t know if she was going to the party Kurt was planning, because he hadn’t called her, and she was maybe getting a little tired of parties anyway. The second girl, a brunette with thick lips, said the girl with curls had to go to the party Kurt was holding the coming weekend because a boy named James would be there. The brunette had met James at a party in the west end. A party with a lot of older people, where she’d seen someone doing cocaine. The blonde with curls asked what clothes the brunette bought over the holidays.

“None,” the other said. She’d gone out with a girl named Veronica and a girl name Tina, and the other two – “Holy! So much!” –  had spent a substantial amount.

“I’m not a impulse buyer,” said the brunette.

“I so am,” said the girl with curls.

“I’m so not,” said the other.

Above them, Simon was staring at his reflection in the subway window, thinking about Jacqueline. The pink in his cheeks brought out the blue in his eyes. He closed his eyes. His temples burned from another nine-hour day of staring into a back-lit computer monitor. Radiation poisoning, he had. He was sure of it. Cancer of the eye socket. Cancer, not even of his brain, but of his brain-waves. Cancer of his thoughts. Cancer so deep down his throat it had infected his words. His eyes were closed, his head was swathed in pain, when someone poked him in the shoulder. He didn’t respond, but the poke was repeated, then repeated again, this time sharply.

“Please, move,” a voice said.

Simon opened his eyes and turned his head. He saw a rotund woman on an electric wheelchair reach towards him with an umbrella. A red toque dwarfed her head, nearly burying her eyes. She had a ruddy face, fat cheeks, a damaged complexion. Her right hand gripped the controls of her vehicle loosely. Her umbrella had a metal tip. She held the prod in her left hand and pressed the tip into his shoulder.

“Move, please,” she said, raising her voice.

“Please, move.”

Simon nodded and started to stand.

He shifted to his right, and the umbrella stabbed again into his shoulder. The woman did not lower her weapon.

“There was no need to poke me like that,” he said after he’d maneuvered around her machine.

“I said, ‘Please,’” the woman said.

“You stabbed me a half-dozen times.”

“I said, ‘Please,’” the woman said again.

“I heard you the first time.” He would have liked to have heard the woman apologize, but her attention was already on the next task. She motioned to him to lift the seat, the one he’d been sitting on moments earlier. “Could you lift up the seat, please.”

He reached for the seat and lifted it.

“My pleasure,” he said, flatly.

“Now you’re being rude,” the woman said.

“No, my lady,” he said.

They were talking past each other, and the woman had again moved on, gesturing to the man in front of her to lift the seat opposite the one Simon had just lifted. The two seats now folded back into the body of the train, the woman lurched forward in her vehicle and began the slow task of parking in the newly vacated space created by the two folded-back seats.

Simon gripped a nearby pole and slid in beside the two teenaged girls. What had he been thinking about? Cancer. Poison in his brain. Jacqueline. His reflection in the subway window. His gold tie. This figure in the window that was him and not him. The boy he’d been, and the man he’d become. He glanced at the teenaged girls, the blonde with curls and the brunette with thick lips and thought he’d once been afraid of girls like these. Grade seven. What was her name? It stared with an ‘s’. Sheryl? Maybe. Stacey. No. Sheri. He sat behind her in home room. Said no more than two words to her all year. Felt her presence there, inches away. In their class’s year book picture, she wore a skirt with a small slit on the right side. This he remembered without even being sure of her name. And they were in the same home room the following year, too. Though not seated together. And he loved her no less; had never loved her less; felt he could love her in an instant if he should see her again. But seeing her was never the point; it had always been love from a distance. They were how old then? Thirteen. Now, he was thirty-six. Twenty-three years later what he remembered was, just to be in her radius was enough. Never once did he come close to declaring his feelings. Never once was there any suggestion of a connection between them. He couldn’t have been more Quixotic. More love-sick. More lost in an unreality. The deepest connection he could remember between them was when she signed his year book. He didn’t remember what she said, but remembered it was generic. “Good luck next year.” But he’d seen her signature in a friend’s year book. “I hope to see you over the summer.” Nothing was possible now! Nothing would ever happen between them! Was he as sensitive as that? Yes. He was only a child then, closer to being a toddler than being a man, but knew he hadn’t felt like a child, in that ancient past. He’d had a pure thirteen-year-old heart – and its core remained, truth be told – though once it had been free of worry, free of heartbreak, heavy with a single hunger: a lust for beauty untarnished by human debris. A lust for female flesh uncomplicated by actual female flesh. He had yet then to hear Nieztche’s casual dismissal of risk: “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It would be years before he heard it. And years more before he knew as surely as he knew anything that the German philosopher had been wrong. Some things don’t kill you, but they leave you devastated. Some things don’t kill you, but they scatter your life into a thousand pieces. Some things don’t kill you, but they knock you beyond the assistance of all supports, navigation charts, all routes back to port. “I don’t agree with that,” he said now, whenever someone said it: “As Nietzche reminded us . . . .”

His thirteen-year-old life had been full of nouns – hard, concrete details; people, places, things – and not just an idealized love that existed in his memory and nowhere else, though that love was no less real than the music lessons his mother drove him to weekly nearly two-and-a-half decades earlier, no less real than the Blue Jay games he’d watched on TV, no less real the Ping-Pong games he’d played, the school assignments he’d completed, the clothes he’d worn, the sheets he’d stained. His love for Sheri was his reality, his truth, his secret. And one of the building blocks of his life. The first of a series of idealized loves, was the conclusion he’d come to many years later. A conclusion not fully understood. A conclusion resisted and fought with. His life was a series of unconnected events strung together through time. It was the search for sex, his friend Norm had said. Every man’s life was the search for sex. It was the biological imperative: To procreate. It was the psychological glue that bound together all other motives, all other choices. This wasn’t something he had believed when Norm had said it, back when they were seventeen. It wasn’t something he had believed when he was twenty-one, or even in the year he turned thirty. But it was what he believed now. The search for sex is the thing that had remained constant in him since he was thirteen. Even when he had been too young, too innocent, too naïve; sex had been at the forefront of his mind. So much else in his life had changed. Losing his virginity had altered nothing. Having relationships with women had altered nothing. Having sex had altered nothing. The desire for more, more, more kept pounding within him. Along with the certainty that this desire would never be quenched.

Norm, when they were seventeen, said, “It’s nothing special, and at the same time it’s everything. It’s just what people do. It’s no big deal. You make too much out of it. You think too much about it. You make it into something bigger than it is, something bigger than it needs to be. It’s just something that sells magazines, sells cars, sells chocolate bars and whatever. But that’s just the image of it, the fantasy. The real thing is just going for a jog. It’s a workout, except you’re with another person. It’s like you’re talking to each other, but you’re not using words. When it’s good, it’s like that. When it’s not good, you might was well be by yourself. You might as well be alone with a porn magazine, you hear what I’m saying?”

*

What happened was, Terry came back.

“He heard about you and his pride motivated him,” was what Jacqueline told Simon.

“He was jealous, too,” she added. An afterthought.

“You’re just doing to me what I did to you,” Terry told her on the phone. That was the message that broke through Jacqueline’s resolve not to meet him.

She told Simon, “I want him to see that there is no connection. I have no relationship with him any more. I’m free to do what I want. Whatever crazy thoughts he has are his problem. I have nothing to do with whatever he’s feeling, because it’s over between me and him. I’m not cheating on him. He cheated on me, because we’d made promises to each other, but those promises are all off.”

But what she said when she got back was, “He broke down halfway through dinner. He was crying right there in the restaurant, and I realized I still have feelings for him. I feel a passion for him that I don’t feel for you.”

“How could you?” Simon asked. “I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pain stirs up more than pleasure.”

She said, “I don’t believe that.”

“I thought you were over him.”

“I thought so too.”

“What happened to imagining the future?”

They were at her place for this last conversation. She’d opened a bottle of wine. Turned off the radio. Outside, he heard a streetcar rumble past.

“Simon,” she said. “I don’t think we should see each other right now.”

They sat next to each other in silence on the chesterfield, his arm behind her shoulders. She sat with one leg folded under the other, the folded leg resting on his knee.

“You’re a nice man,” she said. “You deserve a good woman.”

“You’re a good woman,” he said.

She put her hand on his knee. Shook her head.

“We haven’t even slept together yet,” she said. “You don’t know me. You know so little about me. You don’t know what I’m like when I get down. I’m a different person. I can be difficult to live with. A real meany. More demanding than you’d ever imagine. I make a good first impression, but I can be horrible sometimes. Terry was a big help to me. We went through some things together that were – ”

She paused. He said, “Terrible?”

She shook her head. “Profound is the word I was searching for. I don’t mean the affairs. They were terrible. I mean there were times when he helped me, when it was the middle of the night and I was crying.” Suddenly, she said, “I don’t want to get into it; I just brought it up to say that you don’t know me. I’m not what I seem.”

“Who is?”

“Let’s not get into it. I’m not interested in getting into it. I’m not interested in talking to you about it like this, like we’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”

He could see she was trying to be nice to him, while also moving towards telling him she didn’t want to see him any more. He wanted to tell her that she was making a mistake. That she was right to think her relationship with Terry was over. She was right to try to move on. She was right to think that he, Simon, was a good guy, a guy worth getting to know. Worth the investment. But he also saw her emotions were spent. Terry had made a withdrawal, and she wasn’t interested in anyone else making a deposit. To talk to her in this way would only aggravate her more; she would just tell him again that she didn’t want to talk to him about these subjects, stop talking to him altogether, or show him the door. So he just nodded and said, “Okay,” and sipped his wine. She pulled herself up on her knees beside him and ran her fingers through the hair on the back of his head. “I do like you,” she said. “I was even thinking that I might seduce you tonight, but I don’t want to do that now. I just want to remember this as being nice. I want you to go out and find a fabulous, fabulous babe and be totally happy. Fill the world with beautiful children. A big buxom babe. Is that how you like them?” Jacqueline was small-breasted.

He said, “You don’t know me very well, do you?”

“No.”

“We could have had a good time together.”

“Will you kiss me?”

He turned his head towards her, and she leaned in and kissed him.

“That was nice.” She smiled and laughed a little. “Now, get out.” She was kidding. He made a hurt face.

He put his hand on her breast. Cupped it softly from the side. Massaged it gently. “Do you like that?”

“You’re wicked.”

“Do you want me to remove it?”

“No. That’s nice.”

“Are you going to go back to him?”

“I just think I need time now. More time. I thought I was ready, but now I don't think I’m ready.”

“Will you take off your shirt?”

“I don’t think I should do that.”

He let his hand slide down her torso until it came to the edge of her shirt, which he lifted. He felt the soft skin of her stomach. His hand rose again against her torso, this time under her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

She said, “I’m serious that I want you to leave soon.”

“You said something about a seduction.”

“Simon, no. I don’t want to. I want this to be a nice goodbye. Don’t try and make it into something else. Let’s just be nice to each other and say goodbye and be happy that we met. You’ve been good to me. You’ve made me feel trust again. You’ve helped me like men again, not just feel needy of them or angry at them. You’ve been making me think that I have feelings for you, too. So, it’s probably right that you would feel a little angry at me – ”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s okay that you would. I would, if I were you.”

“I don’t.”

“You stoic men are like that, aren’t you?”

“Unfeeling?”

“Yes, unfeeling!”

“Okay, I’m a little bit mad at you. I’m attracted to you and I think you’re attracted to me, and I don’t see what the problem is.”

“There’s nothing happening here.”

“I’ve got the picture.”

She brushed his hand away, out from under her shirt, and pulled herself to the far end of the chesterfield. “I don’t want to feel guilty after this,” she said. “So don’t leave here feeling like I owed you something.”

“You owe me nothing, Jacqueline. You owe yourself more, though – ”

There was silence then. One minute, then five, seven, ten. They each drank their wine. When Jacqueline emptied hers, she went to get the bottle, refilled her glass, then his. After Simon emptied his glass a second time, he stood and reached for his jacket and the scarf she’d given him a week earlier, the day after he’d gone down on her and she’d wrapped herself around him in tears. “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” she’d said, tears falling off her cheeks onto his. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

He’d held her head against his and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, just cry, let it out,” and soon she’d stopped crying, but something had changed, and not for the better. She had revealed something about herself that she hadn’t wanted to reveal, something she had wanted to pretend didn’t exist. So when she had called him the next day to say she’d decided to meet Terry for dinner, he wasn’t surprised.

In her apartment, he threw the scarf around his neck and buttoned up his coat.

“I guess I’ll go,” he said.

Jacqueline looked up from the chesterfield.

“Okay.”

He turned down the hallway toward the door of her apartment. He thought about leaving the scarf on the coat rack on his way out, but didn’t.