Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,75

an alleyway and pulled a joint out of her wallet. James laughed stupidly at himself: “That kind of smoke,” he said. How long had it been since anyone had invited him to smoke pot?

He studied her face as she lit up: slight lantern jaw keeping her from prettiness, and a kind of a put-upon sadness that was unappealing. But she was sympathetic, too, because she was trying so hard. He took a long, deep drag, and another.

Nearby, a small crowd of people were doing the same thing, two guys and a girl. A pretty girl with black hair, smiling at him as she exhaled, lifted her fingers in a wave. Emma.

She walked with her hips forward. Her jacket was tight around her breasts, and came out from her waist like a bell. As she moved, she was backed by the muffled sound of the band, frantic and ominous (an organ? did they bring out a goddamn organ too?).

“My God. How weird is this,” she said it like it was a good weird. “I see you everywhere.”

Ruth, if James wasn’t mistaken, looked a little annoyed. Her hand was extended into space, waiting for James to take a drag.

“I don’t – this is Ruth.”

“I think I know you. Were you at Yoshi’s book launch?” asked Emma, peering at her.

Ruth shook her head no, suddenly a bumpkin, and the difference between the two women glared like a lantern in the darkness.

“Do you want—?” Ruth thrust the joint at Emma, who plucked it from her fingers and inhaled.

“Where’s your wife?” Emma said, as if she knew Ana. She was bolder tonight, perhaps buoyed by the frisson from the club, the pot. She passed the joint to James, who was feeling the widening of his sensations, but inhaled deeply anyway.

James gave Emma a back-story: a few hours earlier, she had come from her father’s place in an Edwardian in the north end of the city. There, in one of her two childhood homes, she had sat through a long meaty dinner, enduring a simpering lecture from her stepmother whose face was so chemically altered that she resembled a bank robber with a stocking over her head. On her way out, Emma stole a handful of Xanax from the master bathroom, chewing them up on the subway platform. So probably she was afloat right now, even higher than he was. James watched her burning electric, like a neon-coloured cartoon character outlined in black ink.

What James couldn’t remember later was how he got separated from Ruth. He didn’t see her forlorn expression, her stubbed out half-joint gingerly placed in her wallet for later, her trudge inside the club to the tune of a slow morbid song, the organ and the saw. While James was in the alley, Ruth re-entered the bar, searching the crowd for Ana’s blonde cap, nowhere to be found.

James, at that moment, was in an alley crushed against the body of a woman eighteen years younger, the scent of urine clouding his ankles. He pushed her to the wall and it all came back to him, what to say, the slow constant patter – You’re so beautiful, you’re so, so – and his hand, and then his fingers, all this with her coat on but opened and the feel of her soft bra, black in his mind’s eye but even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see much, just shadows. But he had mapped the body in his mind so often that he knew where to go, and found her wet beneath her clothing, moving until she shuddered in his hand. Then she had her hand on his buckle and he thought of his belly hanging over the edge of his jeans, but it wasn’t repulsive enough to stop her sliding down the wall, getting on her knees. He could no longer hear the music then – they were far away – just the white noise in his head, a string between the noise and the feeling of her warm mouth around him, her tongue and a slight nibble that he found both painfully self-conscious and unbearably good, so much so that James put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her mouth off him just in time, the wet mess remaining on his pants, far from her face looking up at him, the chewed lipstick on those thick lips. He looked upon the strangest grin, a smudge of destruction and shame and pride.

James backed away, the two of them returned to their own