The balcony railing was iron, painted white once but now chipped where the winter salt had eaten through to the raw metal. I leaned against it, only slightly, I had never been good with heights, and I looked down eight floors to the parking lot. The pavement wet from rain that had stopped hours earlier. The lights from the streetlamps and pools of black puddles. Beyond the lot the city opened out. The low blocks of the Plateau giving way to the bright scatter downtown and then the dark rise of the mountain with its cross still lit against the sky. It was early June but somehow still chilly after dark. Cold enough to make the skin on my arms tighten under the thin wool of my sweater.
I had come out here after the others went to bed because the apartment felt too close. The television in the living room still on with the volume low. Someone had left a half-empty bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. I lit the last cigarette from the pack I had bought at the depanneur on the corner as I had arrived earlier that evening. The smoke rose straight for a moment. The wind catching it and carrying it out over the drop. Three months. That was the interval they said you had to wait. Three months ago and the clinic on Sherbrooke had drawn the blood and marked the calendar and sent me home. The call had come that afternoon. The results were ready. They told me to come in person.
Just over three months earlier, downstairs in the same building, was a get together, a party, with music too loud and a kitchen counter sticky with spilled beer. I had arrived late, slender and vaguely gothic in black jeans and a voluminous gray sweater that made me look even smaller than I felt. The kitchen was full of them. Rugby players from McGill. Elliot’s friends. They filled the space. Large animals in a pen, shoulders brushing the doorframe, voices loud with the easy confidence of men who knew exactly how much space they took up. I saw Laurent first at the counter pouring something into plastic cups. His hair was closely cropped, the way they all wore it, has gold against the pale skin of his neck. There was reddish stubble along his jaw, it caught the light when he turned his head. His forearms were thick, veins standing out under the rolled sleeves of his shirt, the muscle shifting as he twisted the cap off a bottle.
Another big blond, I never learned his name, looked up as I came in. He glanced at me and grinned. Hey, sweetheart. Turning to his friends, You bring the girls or what? The others laughed. It was the kind of joke they made. Bonding over nothing, men enjoying the edges of a line they did not actually cross.
I was used to it. I smiled back, quiet and careful. Laurent glanced over then and our eyes met for the first time that night. Electric. He was a viking in boat shoes. Thick thighs in chinos, the fabric stretched tight. I felt the familiar pull, the thing I had carried for Elliot longer than I cared to name. Laurent did not correct the blond. He just smiled and handed me a red plastic cup and said, Drink this, it’s cold. This was my first encounter with Laurent in the kitchen.
They talked the way they always did, loud and physical, shoulders bumping, hands clapping backs. Someone told a story about a tackle that had left a guy with a broken collarbone. I imagined the scrum as a wall of meat and bone. The humor turned on the gay jokes, easy and relentless. The humor that let them touch each other without consequence. Pass the beer, princess, one said to Laurent, and Laurent shoved him hard enough to make him laugh. Watch it or I’ll make you mine on the pitch tomorrow. They roared. There was a sense of capacity for violence in all of them, a controlled power they could unleash in the game. Laurent caught me looking once. He did not look away.
The pills came out later, small and white, passed around casually. Amphetamines, though no one said the word. It made the lights sharper and the hours compress. Everything moved faster. The conversation. The decision. Laurent was there and I was there. He clapped me on the shoulder the way they all did and we talked about nothing in particular.
The speed made it hard to tell who noticed what or how we arrived. Laurent’s room was two floors down. The window was open to the street. No discussion of anything. No pause. His forearms pinned me down with no particular force, just the weight of what he was, and I let it happen because it was close enough to what I wanted. Afterward he had clapped me on the shoulder again, a teammate. I walked home through the empty streets feeling nothing in particular. Just the cold. You took what was offered. It was close enough.
Elliot knew nothing. Or perhaps he knew everything. It was hard to tell with Elliot. He had left the party early that night with someone else. I had stayed. It was the pattern. You substituted what you could get for what you could not have. Now the seams were showing.
Then three ordinary months of in between. I went to class. I met Elliot for coffee sometimes on the Plateau, the two of us sitting at the small tables outside the cafés where the wind cut through even in late May. He would stretch his legs under the table and I would watch the way he moved, the same easy confidence of the other rugby players, playing on or off the field. Laurent came up in his stories sometimes,his teammates a loose circle around Elliot’s life. You should come to a game, he said once, and I pictured myself on the sidelines.The metaphor was not strained.
I waited for the test results. Three months. In the meantime the city went on. Snow melted into slush on the streets. The mountain stayed dark at night except for the cross.
My cigarette burning down toward the filter. The words came to me: for some problems, dodging a bullet is less about finesse and more about speed. The words had come to me weeks earlier, a half-remembered line from a conversation I could not place. They fit the moment. The speed with which everything could come apart.
I had been turning the same thought over for weeks. I dropped the cigarette over the railing. It was not quite out. A bright orange ember spiraled away into the black, turning end over end as it fell toward the parking lot eight floors and down. I watched it until it blinked out. The railing felt colder now against my palms. I stayed there anyway looking out at the lights of downtown.
The wind picked up. I thought about the way the veins of Laurent’s forearms had stood out when he poured the drinks that night. I thought about the blond player’s casual sweetheart and the laugh that followed.
The apartment behind me was quiet. The others would wake in the morning and make coffee and talk about the party three months earlier as if it had been nothing. Elliot might call later. He might not. Laurent might appear in some story Elliot told. The city lights held steady against the mountain. I stayed on the balcony a while longer.
The stories we tell ourselves are never quite the stories that happen. We impose a line on disparate images. We are shifting scenes and letting the embers fall, an augur watching a spiralling cigarette butt and making sense of it. I had done that with Elliot for years. I had done it with the night in Laurent’s room. I would do it again with whatever the clinic told me. The speed had been the illusion. The bullet had already been dodged or it had not.
Either way the night went on. I went inside eventually. The living room smelled of stale smoke and wine left out. I did not turn off the television. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. The cross on the mountain still burned behind my eyes. In the morning I would visit the oracle.