“Me too,” said Jess.
“Like, I’m as certain about that as I was that I didn’t want to have a baby then.”
“Because two things can be true at once,” said Jess.
“Which is what a lot of people don’t seem to understand. They think it’s simple. And it makes them crazy.” Clara told Jess about the clinic just a block from their campus that had been firebombed in 1992.
Just seven years ago. “I had no idea,” said Jess.
They were lying in bed. The sky had no colour, and Jess watched dull pigeons on the roof of the dining hall through the window. She was wondering how the birds could stand the cold. “But doesn’t that almost make it worse,” she asked, “that I’m feeling bad right now, because isn’t it kind of anti-feminist to feel sad…after…you know?” She still couldn’t say the word. Everything Jess knew about feminism she had read in a book, but she was beginning to understand that real life was less straightforward. “And I also keep thinking, what if this was my only chance, and I threw it all away?” This was an idea she only dared to put into words because of the comfort of Clara’s room, her bed, Clara’s arms around her as she started crying again.
“You’re going to get other chances,” Clara promised. “Chances for everything. Life is long, and you’re going to change your mind a million times. You have no idea.Ihave no idea. But I hope. The only thing I know is that nobody has to have it all figured out and settled when she’s my age, and I really didn’t know that when I wasyourage. I mean, Alex and I were practically common law. It was madness. Jess, you’re going to want so many things.” Clara was holding her even tighter, and Jess buried her face in Clara’s neck, wondering if this could be enough, the obvious thing in front of her.
Years later, Jess would reflect on these moments. The line they never crossed but they could have. She would have, she thought, if Clara had made a gesture, a particular touch, her hand on her shoulder and drifting. There was something about Clara’s body that invited such thoughts, her sumptuousness, the ease with which she carried herself. Jess had never been so aware of another woman’s physicality, outside of all the usual comparisons to her own.
Someone had scrawled “Rape all Dykes” on the sign outside their building with a Sharpie, and Muffy and the others stopped asking Jess and Clara to join them on nights out, had stopped paying them attention altogether. Jess, who wasn’t sorry, confided to Clara, “They think we’re lesbians,” and Clara raised her chin, defiant: “What if we were?” Jess aspiring to be as brave as that, even pretending she was. But this was as far as it went. A yearning was missing, Jess would have admitted, to have one thing lead to another. She knew too that if the line was crossed they could never go back, and so here they were in the moment, bodies entwined, but for comfort instead of desire, and Jess was starting to think maybe comfort was enough. It could be everything. She and Clara were going to move off-campus and get a place together next year, which made the future seem fixed and limitless at once.
Except they hadn’t signed a lease, and Clara wouldn’t confirm that she’d be in the city for the summer, so their plans were still up in the air with just eight weeks left before the end of term. And Jess had to keep a lid on her anxiety, on all her spiralling, because she didn’t want to wear on Clara’s patience. Clara had her own struggles. The weather was bad, her classes were difficult, and she hadn’t stayed this long in one place since moving out of her parents’ house years ago. Even if Jess hadn’t been wrapped in blankets and listening to depressing music on repeat, Clara would have gone looking for a diversion.
“I’m auditioning for the Drama Society,” she announced on the Monday before Valentine’s Day, coming into her room, her winter coat sopping from rain.
Jess sat up in bed for the first time that day, unwrapping Clara’s scarf a few times, the beginning of her sloughingoff her cocoon. “Auditioning for what?” The first she’d heard of such a plan. Up until now, Clara had shunned campus life entirely. And this was what Jess had been dreading since the evening she’d found her way into Clara’s regard: the moment when it would become clear that everything between them had been a misunderstanding. She’d always suspected that Clara would wake up one day and wonder what Jess was doing in her life, never mind her room, her bed.
“The director’s in my philosophy tutorial. I thought it might be fun,” Clara was saying. “A way to meet people. You could come too.”
“You want to meet people?” Jess’s voice sounded feeble to her own ears.
“Well, surely some of them are worth meeting,” said Clara. “Isn’t this the kind of thing that you’re supposed to do in university?”
“It’s not the kind of thingyoudo.”
“It would be if I did it,” Clara said. Her urges were expansive, which is why Jess wanted something in writing, a contract, an apartment lease, to confirm their future together. All Jess ever wanted, in addition to everything, was to know that she and Clara would always be friends.
—
The play was an original production calledA Blandishment of Porcupines, written by Brett Bickford, this guy from Clara’s class who was older than even Clara.
“He seems interesting,” Clara told Jess. She was more tolerant of men than she was of women. Poor Muffy had received no clemency, but Brett Bickford got to beinteresting.
“The script doesn’t make any sense,” said Jess, who had followed along to audition because she was afraid that, otherwise, Clara might fly away.
Clara dismissed her concerns. “It’s abstract. The story will look different on the stage.” She was determined to believe in the show. And then she won a leading role, so it was imperative she believe, even though her love interest would be played by Brett, a man as oily as he was arrogant.
“And how are you going to pull that off?” Jess asked.
Clara said, “That’s why they call it acting.”
Jess ended up in the chorus—a blessing, she thought, because then she would have to take no responsibility for the play being so bad. As rehearsals began, however, she was surprised to be actually having fun. It felt good to be in the world, to be part of something larger than herself, larger than her and Clara—even if being in the chorus entailed standing on risers that flanked the stage and watching Clara in the spotlight.
It helped too that now it was March, and spring was beginning to emerge. And while Brett Bickford was indeed a pretentious lech, and the entire production was his vanity project, the others were okay, worlds away from Muffy. More like what Jess had imagined when she’d pictured being away at school: fun, smart and creative people who made her want to belong. And sometimes she felt she did, like when she was standing in the back row beside Clayton Kerr, whispering snarky comments about Brett, his inability to move on from undergraduate productions.
“I heard he once auditioned for an off-campus play,” Clayton muttered at rehearsal one afternoon, talking out of the side of his mouth. Clayton was an incorrigible gossip. “And he didn’t even get in the chorus. They offered to make him stage manager.”
“Stage manager is a very important job,” Jess replied out of the other side of her mouth. All the Drama Society’sshows were stage-managed by Emily Holt, who was in love with Brett Bickford and had sex with him twice a year at the closing night cast parties. It was a Society tradition.
The conversation paused. Their part was coming up, where they had to warn Lord Tortoiseshell (Brett) that Lady Jocelyn (Clara) had lost her maidenhead, and cheer when he vowed to avenge her honour. And at the end of the scene, the chorus took a break and everyone headed outside to smoke. Jess carried a pack of cigarettes in her bag now and borrowed Clayton’s lighter. “It’s just social,” she’d explain when Clara pointed out that Jess’s smoky coat made their room smell. But at that moment Clara was somewhere else, going through her lines with Brett, so Jess didn’t have to deal with her expression of mild disdain.
Outside, Jess took her place in the group of cast members, smoking and getting wet in the drizzle, and she leaned in close to Clayton, who would sometimes put his arm around her if she was cold. Everybody was dressed in the same vintage uniform, flared jeans with soggy hems, second-hand suede and leather jackets, and that smell of wet coats mixed with cigarettes would, for Jess, ever after be a time machine.
