Noun as a Verb
by Leah Mosier-Farquharson
Allen told her that accidents didn’t exist, that everything happened for a reason and any mistake was at least subconsciously accounted for. He called them a guilty plea of idiocracy or a will for violence. He told her this in his convertible in the direct sunlight of the Macdonald-Cartier after they had eaten too much foie gras at an over-serviced bistro and she felt like puking as they queued behind a wreck. He had no nuance for timing.
Allen had been wearing a kind of carnation on his lapel that she had found stupidly charming in the same vein as his off-key renditions of “Come Together.” It stung then that that bitter fragment of the afternoon was all that lingered, his drugstore perfume diction. Saskia remembered that pull after she had bought a vintage heart-shaped toothbrush holder from Value Village and it fell from her bathroom counter, shattering into a mess of dust and edges. She cried despite having no feelings toward the item, that looked like a misshapen balloon if she considered it, but was wrenched thinking about how it had managed to stay intact all these decades, fragility flanked by time, surviving only through transitory tenderness, and within less than half a week of ownership, she broke it.
“Wouldn’t you be embarrassed?” her mother would mutter in Saskia’s messy teenage bedroom; the years seemed far away like Russia, but were, in actuality, some exotic South American neighbour. She thought she might be embarrassed. It said something about her instincts, she imagined, like when Saskia had been put in charge of her brother’s shorthair for the weekend and it had to go to the animal hospital after eating plastic. The glass counter was slanted, which she knew before placing the ceramic, and she thought of Allen’s dogma feeling antagonized. The only Allen she used to care about was Ginsberg.
Saskia’s mother told her that she had an old soul, suggesting she date in the pool of 40-year-olds since she needed someone from the intelligentsia. Her mother didn’t use words like intelligentsia but the point stood from that particular vantage. They had been eating soggy tacos in a dive, the IPA pitcher consumed between them exacerbating the gawk of Saskia’s laughter at the advice. Her mother snickered at the youthful drunkenness of Saskia’s reaction, boatneck tee drooping to reveal her old Japanese tattoo that she had thought, at the time, meant ‘love’ but said ‘verb.’ At a more sensible time, she had warned Saskia against liquors above forty percent.
“I’m sure you think I should just hand out calling cards,” Saskia said, tipping her head in the general direction of the other diners in an attempt to defer attention from her flushed cheeks. Among them was a hunched couple in cashmere, three pot-bellied middle-aged men wordlessly watching the Maple Leafs, and a handful of eclectically raincoated solitary characters. Dim air blanketed the poignant scene like the tarp over a fresh body. The bartenders talked dispiritedly about new management as an old man sat in the corner with his arm in the air, looking like he was wielding a resistance symbol.
“Gypsy” by Fleetwood Mac began playing on the overhead speaker and her mother laughed harder and told Saskia, “It’s you.”
It was at a new Indian restaurant off Harbour that Saskia asked Allen if she had left her tights at his place. He said maybe he was wearing them with an offhandedness that caused her to choke on her club soda, its carbonation prodding the back of her throat like the eager pulse of an itch. Coughing and spooning the raita, looking at his blank face, Saskia thought about how interesting it was that itches are characterized by discomfort yet are synonymous with desire.
The last time she and Allen had been together was at his place on King, but they tended to hang out at her Kensington apartment if conditions allowed her two roommates to be out. They hung out in Kensington despite the fact that Allen had to hunch his back under her shallow basement ceilings. He would flip through her poetry books and magazines, asking what one or the other’s contents meant. “Slingbacks,” she told him, “are shoes.”
Lying in outer space print sheets and looking at her slate gray walls on which the suggestion of a sun danced, Allen said that her apartment reminded him of a “better time,” that period of “poverty and perversity of spirit.” She recalled, after that admission, how he had praised her as being more “together” than those in her age bracket, his intonation seeming not to figure the word in its strictest sense but like an abstract concept, stretching the vowels like a toy. “Maybe it’s just that you can stand with a proud posture under these goddamn ceilings.”
There had been a handful of times at King, none punctuated by sobriety or daylight (missing tights, evidence no. 1). The whole place smelled like jasmine, which reminded Saskia of anesthetic in the strangely comforting way she always got excited for laughing gas at the dentist’s office. In his entryway were these stupid glass grapes that, in their uselessness, seemed symbolic of adulthood and which, each time she saw them, reminded her of when he had bought big cotton candy grapes that she had eaten watching the midnight traffic from his floor-to-ceiling windows wearing only her earrings. He offered Saskia, at another time, a silver statement necklace shaped like a bloated pebble—“stamped nine-two-five and everything,” he said. It conjured vague memories of half-wading in the ocean, the strange friction of the seafloor stones that prod your toes. She got a bunch of little cuts on her feet last summer from the blunter ones. The piece was kind of ugly but she learned to love it, like a scar with an interesting enough story. She wore it to the Indian restaurant, accentuated by a cowl neck dress, the sateen of which looked pushed down by the weight of the rock.
The restaurant had a bright carnation logo, something Allen might describe, in one of his stranger moods, as a “full circle moment.” The brand identification was hard to miss given the big turquoise mural backgrounding him in their intimate setup. Saskia remembered when so much casual intimacy made Allen react like a hypochondriac. Her friend Jeremy always said, “People surprise you,” never under the guise of the same narrative, but one of those idioms you hold close to your chest, hoping that repetition engenders manifestation, sunk-cost fallacies retained like loose change. Before, it had been like terrorizing a child, the threat of love. Saskia had abused it as a joke, but it lost its fun.
“People surprise you” had merit, Saskia figured, when she considered that the last time she had seen Jeremy, he said he’d be 20 minutes late but was only 10. It had been at Lafayette, a diner whose upholstered booths, frayed by time, looked as though they had been cat-attacked, reminding her of the RKO movie about the Serbian immigrant cursed to turn into a panther if she satiated her desires. The destruction, though bordering extremity, worked in tandem with the eclecticism of kitschy Italian decor and digital slot machines. Cherry, cherry, cherry meant jackpot. They jokingly ordered cherry liqueur coffees for luck, the act assumably an unspoken attempt to efface all their cancellations within the last couple of months, like manipulating the saccharine to waive school absences.
She asked Jeremy if he had ended up graduating to fill the lull that had grown over menu dissection. He had told her that he deferred, an implication in his tone that Saskia didn’t need the three-act. She felt the secondary lull was a rather natural one, the whole of it neatly bracketed by crescendoing drip coffee machines and clacking plates.
“Men our age,” Jeremy said after the stretched beat, heavily enunciated as though fighting numbness, “express all their thoughts. They’re like peacocks. Paul drove me crazy.” He picked at the plastic lamination of the menu, inadvertently tracing picture borders. Jeremy asked if anything was going on with her, though she replied that she was too myopic to know. “There is,” Saskia eventually admitted, “but our communication is like neutered semicolons. I’m not sure we talk about anything real. I can’t even tell if we try. It’s like local radio.”
Saskia recounted, for broader context, a “stupid spat” she and Allen had had, omitting his name for a reason she couldn’t discern, when Allen told her that he hated when advice was “tucked in the wings,” saying that he preferred literal writing. She had told him the literal hardly existed. When he then warned her against umbrella statements, Saskia was feeling too nice of a buzz to point out his hypocrisy. Allen had this colouring adherence toward the defensive, which Saskia recognized, but to her, all of his defensiveness had the air of an exasperating teacher acting out the difference between ‘can I’ and ‘may I.’ A benign throb. Later, Allen began dancing to Canto’s live jazz, knowing she found it embarrassing, then asked her right in her ear, the music loud enough to be in her throat, whether he was dancing literally or figuratively. Considering his spirit seemed to feed off discourse, she imagined the answer was both. “He pisses me off,” she told Jeremy. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
As Saskia paid, Jeremy asked whether her neck was cramping from “that god awful collar,” causing their server to flit discomfited eyes between them. Saskia took her crescent-moon burger in to-go tupperware, but once they got outside, she decided to feed it to a golden retriever tied to the fence. She and Jeremy cooed while watching it sloppily chew, stroking its sun-kissed fur and relishing the heat of it on their fingertips.
Somehow, sitting in front of Allen and noticing his overt sunglasses tan was the moment Saskia began running the tip of her heel against his knee underneath their weighted tablecloth. The big blue carnation was pronouncing the wrinkled red skin of his temples like a newborn baby's. Saskia decided the long, draped nature of the tablecloth must be a veil of intention on the part of the proprietor, decorum seeming an elusive thing. Taking a bite, Allen stared at her through his lashes, which were really quite beautiful for a man, silky like Gary Cooper’s. She pictured running her fingers through them like ostrich fans.
“It’s only appetizers,” he intoned. She shrugged. It was still bright outside. Two months ago it wasn’t bright past four-thirty. “You don’t like it?”
Allen pointed his salad fork at her black cardamom rice. Saskia had eaten around its seasoned top and what remained looked like an ashtray. She had put her napkin over it, figuring that alone signified her position. “Thirty years ago, I’d be hit not eating that,” he added.
Saskia, in any other situation, would hum noncommittally, the same hum she had adopted whenever Allen mentioned the yellowed film which saturated the bulk of his experiences, palimony or investments, which curtailed their general dialogue and morphed it into something indistinct. The habit became so defined that Allen began calling her his “hummingbird,” saying “bye bye Birdie” every time he ascended the basement stairs. In this instance, though, Saskia got the impression that the statement lacked any passivity, and in fact felt the visceral weight of expectancy in the way his rounded eyes stared at her, waiting.
Saskia might, under a typical course of action, try and remember any headlines she’d read recently, merging in her mind like wet ink: Mar-a-Lago and missiles and stress tips. She could only focus on the dampness of her skin and how her dress clung to it, however, as she bent partly over the table and diligently set aside her cloth napkin. At the neighbouring table, a well-dressed woman talked about the weather. “It’s hot,” the older lady remarked, fanning the skin around her festoon necklace and taking in the glowing concrete outside, “It’s very very hot.”
“What’re you doing?” Allen asked. Saskia shook her head in lieu of a response, flashing the off-kilter smile caused by the retainer she had always neglected. That was the only prelude before she dug into the abandoned basmati, running her teeth against the fork to catch each grain. Big mouthfuls like a child. It reminded Saskia of the specks of weed she would inhale from her poorly rolled high school joints—she had never developed much of a palate or learned to roll.
Allen tenderly grabbed Saskia’s wrist to tell her to quit it when she began making a spectacle of scraping her fork against the bowl, a quiet reverberation accompanying the display like the preface to some toast. Allen left his hand there but no words surfaced, and they continued a lazy game of footsie in silence as they waited for the entrées. The steady cascade of the entrance fountain framed the act meditatively, like some ritualistic process.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Leah Mosier-Farquharson graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and English. Now residing in Montréal, M.F. continues to hone her writing, editing, and producing skills. M.F. draws from her love of rock music, geography, and highly stylized photography.
Instagram: @leahmosierfarquharson