Love Enough Read Online Free PDF Page A

again, June did not understand the mysteries of intimacy, the mysteries of a woman like Galina, or, as open as he was, a man like Trevor. Now June would say, it’s not the mysteries that she doesn’t understand, it’s the conventionsshe refuses. She had first met Galina when Trevor invited June and the other dancers to Galina’s small cottage in Cabbagetown to watch pornography. June went feeling that if she didn’t it would confirm all their assumptions that she was either naive or a prude. And she was not a prude. Trevor made martinis, which June had never had. Nevertheless she drank three in a row simply to seem sophisticated. Trevor giggled and told her she was cut off. Galina chuckled in a self-satisfied way, as if June had finally proven how gauche she was. June averted her eyes from the pornographic screen when one or another of them wasn’t looking at her to see her reaction. She was embarrassed and bored at the same time. She could not feel aroused as they all seemed to be by the spectacle, and it seemed to her farcical, the pumping of penises into vaginas. When June said this aloud, the dancers all said that she was not an adult, and Galina and Trevor laughed and looked at her with pity. There was no reason, June thought, for Galina’s derision. What had June done, except be young, that Galina hated? What had she done except dance with Trevor, except have young, strong legs, except have an erect backbone where Galina’s was turning to powder?
    When Trevor broke off with Galina, June noticed all the time she had spent taken up with Galina, and how Galinahad insinuated herself into June’s daily thoughts. It was jealousy of course, jealousy of an enigmatic kind since neither she nor Galina ever had sex with Trevor, but their claims on him had a sensual charge. All sex is not physical, June knows.
    June left the dance troupe because she couldn’t fly. She woke up one morning, a morning just like this morning with the radio, and thought, “The end of dance is flight and I can’t fly.” Trevor could fly. He could soar across the studio. And he was heading always to New York. He laughed at everything. June remembers his laugh, like some cascading bird laugh with a gurgle in it like a baby’s. When he left for New York she felt as though she’d lost something—a big part of the day, a chunk of air. He left her his clay dishes, his clay jug, as if giving a child a sweet to hold her until he returned. June has pieces of those clay dishes even today. In that picture where June is dancing with Trevor, and the troupe, the sky is wide open and blue to all of them. It’s summer. July. Energy is burning in their torsos. They were about to go on tour, they were about to break open the world of dance in the country, they were all beautiful, black hair, black limbs, red beating hearts. After the dance they were going to wander around the crowd and drink some wine and lie in the grass.

FIVE
    “I t’s another country.” Ghost.
    “It’s not.” Bedri.
    “Trust me, it is. I went there once.”
    “You never went anywhere.”
    “One time. I went one time. ‘You can’t just be cool, you have to know shit.’ That is the only good thing she said to me.”
    “Your mother?”
    “Yeah. Mercede. So trust, I know shit.”
    “What you see there?”
    “Things …”
    “Things! I know you didn’t see
nothing
. You don’t even know the way.”
    “They talk a different way.”
    “Talk a different way? Who don’t?”
    “You’re an asshole, they talk a different language. They got French.”
    “Ghost, you’re the asshole. I knew I shouldn’t have gone with you.” Bedri’s sentence hung on the windscreen. It was the first time doubt had sprung up between them. Through everything. The first time, real doubt. Not just daring or put down, but doubt.
I shouldn’t have gone with you
 … Their friendship hung in the sweating air of the car, rough and harmful.
    It was four in the morning. They drove west across