Chapter 7 Wild Enthusiasm #2
A few moments later we stopped for breath.
“He really likes you,” she said.
“Paul? He is carefully avoiding me,” I responded. “He didn’t even seem to want to come today, right? You had to talk him into it.”
“He’s avoiding you because he likes you.”
“He told me he just wants to be friends.”
Lisette gave me a funny look. “That’s what he said about you.”
Paul appeared around a turn of the road, grinning when he spotted us.
“I killed it!” Paul called to us. “I wrestled the porcupine to the ground for you, put it down like John Wick. No big deal. Chivalry and all that. Barely broke a sweat. Just don’t look up in the trees when we’re walking back.”
“Well done, Paul!” Lisette called.
“Look, a moose!” Paul pointed off the trail where a view had opened up, and for a moment we thought he was kidding. Then we walked to where he stood, and through a break in the trees we could see a distant lake where a tiny, antlered creature was visible as a dot.
“They’re real,” I whispered.
“It’s not the Loch Ness Monster, Abby,” Paul said, grinning.
“Let’s do a photo with it!” Lisette posed us in a selfie, with the brown dot barely visible behind us.
Paul was pressed to my side. I felt a little giddy as I looked at him.
This was even weirder than a crush, I realized.
Walking through the woods with Paul and Lisette was strange precisely because of how normal it felt.
After three weeks, it felt like we had known each other forever already.
We already had our inside jokes. We had a rhythm and rapport.
That never happened back home; my New York friends were all people I had known since we were in our twenties, back when we were malleable and optimistic and still thought fruit-flavored vodka was a sign of sophistication.
You didn’t just pick up random strangers in your late thirties and go hiking with them.
You could get killed that way, or forced to appear in TikTok videos.
I wondered if my Canadian friendships felt so effortless because they knew I was going to leave.
Lisette had joked about being a stray dog, but I felt like the real rescue.
Maybe it wasn’t a big deal that I was broken and cynical because they weren’t making a long-term commitment to me.
They could ferry me around and listen to my snarky American humor, knowing that in another few weeks they would be free of me for good.
My rental was up at the end of August; I was temporary.
Then Lisette threw her arms around my neck and said, “If you want to stay in Canada, I’ll marry you,” and my heart warmed. I watched Paul glance at us and then turn away to reorganize his hiking backpack.
After the hike, the three of us went home to shower and then met up again at Lisette’s place because she wanted to get a ride from Paul to do some shopping for items for her new apartment.
Calling it an apartment was a bit of a stretch, because it was clearly a very illegal sublet in someone’s basement with a couple of wobbly temporary walls and a thin rug rolled atop a poured concrete basement floor.
In one corner was a small refrigerator and hot plate, and behind a half-wall was a toilet and sink.
The shower was a hose adjacent to the sink that ran straight into a drain in the floor.
“My beautiful sanctuary,” she said to us when we came in. “Gives that Count of Monte Cristo vibe.”
“Does that mean someone will scratch through your wall and start giving life advice?” I ask.
“As long as it comes with a huge pile of money, I’ll take it.”
Paul looked around. “You know you don’t have to stay here.”
“I love it,” said Lisette. “No, seriously. It’s perfect because I can afford it, and it means I can actually save for a security deposit on a real apartment.”
“Do you want to stay with me in Charlotte’s apartment? I really wouldn’t mind.”
“Nah,” Lisette said. “Charity wears me down. It’s boring.”
“I understand,” I replied. “If it helps any, my first studio apartment had a bathroom so cramped that they had to cut a notch into the door to get it to close around the toilet lid.” She snorted with laughter while I drew her a diagram in the air.
We headed to a shop called HomeSense, which had the blank white cheerfulness of the furniture section at Target, and wandered the aisles pondering painted bits of wood with cozy statements on them.
“When archeologists dig up our homes someday,” I told Lisette, “they will date our sites to the early third millennium A.D. by the swirly script on cocktail glasses saying Wine Mom.”
“I must have it!” Lisette cried, placing the ironic glassware in her shopping cart. “For my dungeon lair.”
“You know,” I told her, “a lot of my childhood, we lived in terrible places. My mother wouldn’t pay the bills, and the electricity would go out. She would find a man and he’d pay the utilities for a few months and then he’d be gone again and so would the heat.”
Lisette nodded. “We were also dirt poor.”
“We were dirt and poor,” I replied. “So whatever else you worry about, don’t worry that I’m looking down on you. You got yourself out of a bad situation. You’re my hero.”
“I mean, yeah. Obviously.”
Lisette glanced behind me, and I saw Paul listening to us, slightly embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just found this pillow with a porcupine on it, and I thought of you.”
“You asshole!” Lisette cried. “Of course I want the porcupine pillow.”
“I’m buying it for you,” he said. “Housewarming gift.”
When Paul dropped me off at the end of the day, he looked serious for a moment. “That stuff about your mother, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, my mother is dead, now. It’s a bit of a relief, which is horrible to say, but…
growing up, she was so funny. She was this force of nature, and I wanted to be exactly like her.
The sarcasm, the wit, the way she could hold your attention.
But by the time she died, she was so bitter and angry, and I was terrified I would become exactly like her. ”
“You’re not. A bitter person wouldn’t have become friends with Lisette.”
“She picked me up like a penny on the sidewalk. I got lucky.”
Paul looked at me, seriously. “You really don’t see yourself very well, do you?”
No, he didn’t get to do that. He didn’t get to be kind and sweet and confusing. I looked away. “So improv practice again on Thursday?”
He hesitated, looking like he wanted to say more. “Sure, Abby.”
My next improv practice was the one—and Lisette had warned me ahead of time this might happen—where I was really bad. I went in a little more confident, and then I had no good ideas. I found it hard to focus. Everything I did felt forced and stupid.
Our scene assignment was supposed to take place in a high school, and Lisette decided to act like a teacher, while I was her student.
“I am very disappointed in you,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“How could you have thought that bringing a live goat to school was a good idea?”
There were any number of things I could have said at that point. I could have suggested that the goat was intended for a ritual sacrifice. I could have said he was my new boyfriend. I could have explained that I had to give a talk about goat cheese. But no.
What I went with was, “I’m really sorry.”
Lisette was undeterred. (She’s always undeterred.)
“Cindy,” she said, “you’re my best student. And the worst part was that you let the goat eat your friend’s clothing.”
I could have explained that my friends wanted their jeans to look distressed. I could have explained that my goat had a learning disability. I could have explained that my goat was on a gluten free diet. Instead I said, “Well, it was hungry.”
Yes, I went for the most obvious, pedestrian answer every time. I was being safe, and I didn’t even know why. And on and on it went, the scene getting worse each minute. I could feel all the life draining out of it slowly, as Lisette gave me a detention, and my character said, “Okay, fine.”
Paul applauded when we were done, but it was polite applause. Mark said nothing.
“That was horrible,” I said. You see, I knew it, I thought. I knew I’d be bad at this. I knew my previous couple of times doing well were a fluke.
“You were trying to be logical,” Paul said. “When are human beings ever logical?”
I smiled. “I get it,” I said.
But I didn’t get it. Because then I went the other way. The next time I was up, I was playing a scene against Mark, and our location was a police station.
“Sit down, detective,” Mark said to me. “Tell me about the case.”
“Well, there were some clowns committing a murder,” I said.
“Literal clowns?”
“French mime clowns.”
Now I was determined not to be boring, so I was going to be wacky. I started acting out what the French mime clowns were doing as they murdered someone…only they murdered them with daggers shaped like bananas…
Hilarious, right?
No. Not hilarious.
Mark’s sheer deadpan managed to carry us through the muddle I was making, and at the end I sat down and looked at Paul for a long moment.
“Sorry. I know.”
He smiled affectionately at me.
“I’m deeply offended that you mocked French mimes,” Lisette said. “That is a part of my culture.”
Lisette was so endlessly encouraging that she barely seemed to notice how horrible I was. Mark knew and was saying nothing. Paul gave me a little smile, like he was charmed by how bad I was, which was annoying in its own way.
You’ve gotten the first great disaster out of your system,” said Paul. “And we’re all proud of you, Abby.”
I stood up and took a bow. “Now I’ll commit ritual suicide in Paul’s kitchen,” I added.
He gave me that little smile again. “Don’t use the good knife. I only really have the one that I like.”
At the end of the night, I was the first out the door. Paul came to see me off.
“You were hard on yourself,” he said.
“Only because I was terrible.”