What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

alleyway, get into his silver Beamer, and drive away. She should have given him something, she knew, some show of recognition, if not affection or support. She’d done what she could.

Poised in this reflection, her inky hands pulling the hair at her left temple, Tuyen didn’t hear Carla come in.

“Hey, I just saw your brother. God, he’s gorgeous.” Carla was standing at the door, and Tuyen felt a minute pang of childish jealousy.

“You just don’t know how to say that I’m gorgeous.”

“Probably, you’re so alike.”

“We are? How do you know?” She said this, half questioningly, half certain. “Alike”—the word revolted her; it gave her some other unwanted feeling of possession. To be possessed, she thought, not by Binh only but by family, Bo and Mama, Ai and Lam, yes them, and time, the acts that passed in it, the bow, the course of events.

“Did you say you probably think I’m gorgeous?”

“Wow, that’s gorgeous!” Carla was looking in awe at the large hanging Tuyen had been working on. “That’s beautiful.”

“Not yet”—Tuyen came to stand beside her—“it’s not finished.”

The longings seemed to race down the drape of cloth on the wall.

“I have to make some translations too, I want to put different languages. I’m going to fill it with every longing in the city.”

“The hideous ones too?” Carla’s voice sounded shivery.

“I’ll have to, won’t I? Otherwise it would be a fake.”

“Ah.” Carla made to leave.

“Hey, where you going?” She touched Carla’s face.

“Nowhere.”

“Then stay with me.” Her fingers stroking Carla’s cheek. She always felt like covering Carla’s mouth with her own. Especially now. “Help me write them? Anywhere you like.”

“Okay, but not the perverse ones.” She took her face away from Tuyen’s fingers. “What about the lubiao? What’re you doing with that?”

“I haven’t decided. This new idea came to me and I’m trying to make it fit but.… Maybe the lubiao is a relic, maybe I’ll use it as a contrast. We’ll see. Here’s the book—choose the ones you like and tick them off when you’re done.”

The hideous ones. Those were the longings about bodies hurt or torn apart or bludgeoned. No one had actually confided details to Tuyen. She had intuited these, perceived them from a stride, a dangling broken bracelet—a rapist’s treasure, each time he rubbed the jagged piece he remembered his ferocity—a muttering, a woman off her head sitting on a sidewalk—her longing for that particular summer in Beausejour when she was between leaving that life and coming to this sidewalk.

Some Tuyen had got from newspaper articles—one about twin brothers dying at a karaoke bar: Phu Hoa Le and Lo Dai Le. The four men in bandannas came into the bar and started shooting. What were their longings—the ones dying and the ones shooting? Or, on the same page, the owners of a puppy farm with a hundred puppies mistreated in a filthy barn. Their longings would certainly surprise—she knew how people lived two lives, one most times the antithesis of the other. And the previous week she’d scoured the newspapers to find that Janakan Sivalingam was dead too; he was slashed in his belly with a machete in front of a school. She’d written down his longing for almonds and his attackers’, which were for the sight of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. And looking at the whole page of the daily newspaper—several deaths, a kidnapping, a pathologist’s report, a man charged with having an “up skirt” video—all surrounding a photograph of the Stanley Cup with adoring boys decked out in hockey gear. The longings of the page designer, the editor, what were those? For relief? From killings, from misery? Or was it from multiplicity? Vass, Kwan, Hyunh, Sivalingam, Shevchenko—those were the names on the page of the dead or the vicious—the editor’s relief from the cumbersome, the unknown, the encroaching. They might all be encroaching on the city, encroaching in the editor’s mind, on the pure innocent ideal, violating the heroic Stanley Cup, the cherubic faces around it, pushed to the borders tenuously. Perhaps she could put that page itself there, somewhere, among the longings.

They worked in silence for an hour.

“Tuyen … Tuyen …” Carla had been repeating her name for several seconds.

“Yeah!”

“You can really disappear, can’t you?”

Tuyen grinned. “I guess. Break?”

“I’m gonna leave you.”

“No, stay. Want to go for dinner? My treat.”

She wanted to be in Carla’s company; she always felt a deep pleasure in her presence even though she knew Carla’s quiet was not quiet at all. But it would be good to drink some wine and maybe find herself later in Carla’s bed, her arm around her middle, her lips on her neck.

“Since that’s a rare thing, I’ll take it.”

Did Carla feel as attracted to her? Sometimes, like now, she sensed that was true.

“It’s gonna be good, huh?” Carla was looking at the wall of cloth they’d been working on.

“Yes, I think it’s gonna be.”

She was looking at Carla, not at the wall. It was going to be good, she thought. She wrapped herself in her oilskin and followed Carla down the stairs. It was balmy outside. She really didn’t need a coat; she let it fall open. Binh had been mollified by his trip in search of nothing, Carla was yielding in some way, the installation was coming together fabulously since she’d set on the idea of the longings of the city. She felt a bliss.

THIRTEEN

IT SEEMED AS IF JACKIE had avoided him deliberately. He’d gone to Tuyen’s and Carla’s frequently over the last two weeks. He even spent a few nights, but she hadn’t appeared, and when he asked Carla or Tuyen, they said she hadn’t called. Why didn’t he simply call her, they asked, or go by the store on Queen Street?

He should be able to do those things, after all, what about the Lula Lounge? Why couldn’t he simply leave it at that, though? One night—a shared high. And fucking. People did that every day, casually. Jackie felt nothing for him. Nothing or simply amusement. Coming on to her two weeks