Part 2 (1/2)

John Aarons was a mooch and a liar. He paid his first month's rent and then proceeded to sponge off me.

He moved in with nothing but an air mattress, a laptop, some camera equipment and his clothes. Oh, and a single kitchen item: a French press coffee maker. That was it. No furniture. No stereo. No books. He showed up like a homeless person with his entire life heaped in a shopping cart, one that he claimed to have found on the street, but I'm sure he stole from the Sobeys parking lot. He also pretended to return it, but I saw it a few days later, parked next to the Dumpsters beside the high-rises on Lascelles Boulevard-it was missing a couple of wheels at that point, but I'm willing to bet it was the same one. He didn't even bring any bathroom products except for a stone-aged toothbrush and a jumbo bar of Irish Spring, the latter of which was placed on the upper built-in soap dish in the shower but never used. That bar never got any smaller, never even lost its Irish Spring logo imprint, although it grew less distinct over time because of the humidity. Obviously, he was using my pricey oatmeal soap from the health food store. He also helped himself to my very expensive b.u.mble and b.u.mble seaweed shampoo. I could smell it halfway across the apartment when he came out of the shower-strutting, of course, in the tiniest of towels-but he denied it. Not that I ever confronted him directly, mind you. I was too smitten. I think I said something lame like ”I can get a bigger shower caddy if you want to put some shampoo and stuff in there.”

He gave me his wise-a.s.s smirk, knowing exactly what I was getting at. ”That's really nice of you,” he said. ”But don't worry about it. I'm just going to use bar soap on my hair until I start making some cash.”

Yeah right. Bar soap. What a joke. His big credo at the time was that as long as he was subsisting on a grant from the Arts Council, he felt a duty to the hard-working taxpayers of the land to live as frugally as possible. Very admirable, I thought. So n.o.ble. But considering he was eating my food, drinking my beer, watching my cable, calling Brooklyn and Los Angeles from my phone, and slathering his curls with my premium hair products, who should the hard-working taxpayers of the land have been thanking?

Of course, it was because of John Aarons that I became rich enough to fill a swimming pool with b.u.mble and b.u.mble seaweed shampoo, but that's beside the point.

John

In the beginning, Amy turned out to be an even better roommate than I expected. She was neat and clean and pleasant to be around. And she wasn't around that much. She spent a good deal of time outside the apartment, and a respectable number of hours in her room with the door closed. When she watched TV it was good TV-Curb Your Enthusiasm; Louie; The Daily Show. Except for her abominable Property Brothers or Love It or List It lapses, she was reasonably discerning. She cooked delicious food and often shared it with me. Her braised short ribs were divine. Her tortilla soup, superb. She understood that I was an impecunious artist and didn't seem to mind if I used a squirt of her dishwas.h.i.+ng liquid or a capful of her laundry detergent. In the early days, anyway, when our love was, ahem, new.

The building, on the other hand, didn't measure up to my expectations. The elevators were maddeningly sluggish, and one or the other seemed to be always out of service. And every few days some s.a.d.i.s.tic p.r.i.c.k would set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night. I do not like to be roused from slumber. It makes me cranky. The only upside was getting to see Amy charge from her bedroom in her typical sleeping attire: tank top and a pair of men's-style cotton briefs. It was pretty. It was very pretty.

The first time we slept together was during one of those fire alarms. It was the third or fourth we'd had since I'd moved in. I was starting to get used to it. The noise would pierce my head like a knitting needle hammered in the ear. I'd lurch into a pair of gotchies and stumble hazy and adrenalized into the living room, at which point Amy, cursing like a knife-stuck sailor, would storm semi-clad from her bedroom. She'd hurtle out the front door, sniff the hallways and stairwells for smoke, then return, muttering and ranting. I'd follow her out onto the living-room balcony (where the cacophony was marginally less of an a.s.sault), and we'd look down upon the other balcony people, and the sprinkling of residents in their pyjamas and robes who had actually left the building-generally those with children-and they'd look up at us while we all waited for the fire trucks to arrive and make the horrible noise stop.

On that particular night, I told Amy, ”I know why this keeps happening and who's responsible.”

”Oh really,” she said, giving me a wry but flirty smile. There was a rising tide of flirtation in those early days. The levees were getting ready to burst.

”It's a man who lives in that building across the way. He sneaks over here, pulls the alarm, then runs home and waits for you to come out in your skivvies.”

Amy laughed.

”He's watching you right now.”

”Yeah, right. So in this day of Internet p.o.r.n, where you can not only get wide-open beavs at the click of a mouse but virtually any s.m.u.tty fantasy on earth, including plushy mascots doing it with dwarves-”

”Really? That's out there?”

”Don't pretend you don't know,” said Amy.

”OK. Busted. It's my homepage.”

”Uh-huh. Right. So highly unlikely that buddy over there is going to leave his home and go to all that trouble just to see a skinny chick in her underwear.”

”Not just any skinny chick,” I said, inching closer.

Sirens could be heard in the distance as Amy and I, still looking down upon the scene, slid toward each other along the balcony railing, pressing first our arms together, then our heads and finally-as the fire trucks screamed into view-our lips. Very rom-com except for the nauseating racket.

It was a strange sensation having s.e.x with Amy. She was so much bonier than any woman I'd ever been with. Usually I am aware only of the pressure of flesh. Now there seemed to be rib cage and elbow and kneecap involved. It was different. But I liked it. I liked it a lot, not least because of Amy's incredible responsiveness-a rousing thing to behold.

The alarm ended almost immediately after we did, which, in our giddy state, caused much hilarity. We got up, ate cold chicken and Fudgeos, and then f.u.c.ked again. After, she tickled my back. I remember that very clearly. It was the first time she did it-trailing her long cold fingers up and around my spine. It felt sublime and struck me as more intimate than anything Julianne had done in the three years we had been together. I conked while she was at it, just before dawn. I woke up at noon, alone under Amy's floral duvet, which smelled faintly and pleasantly of lemons.

It was three weeks to the day after I'd moved in.

Eldrich

There are only two mistakes you can make on the road to Truth. Not going all the way, and not starting.

John Aarons was my friend. Together we embarked upon the road to Truth, but John did not go all the way. His pa.s.sion became misdirected. He let Shakespeare's green-eyed monster into his heart, and in this darkness he lost his way.

John Aarons left the Inst.i.tute in January 2013.

John Aarons is not to blame.

Amy

I think he got the idea early on.

In the first weeks that we lived together, and even after we slept together, I guess a couple of months after he moved in, John was hanging out more with Eldrich than he was with me. I thought it was bizarre. I mean, back then I had pegged Eldrich as some pot-addled mental deficient who happened to live across the hall. I would see him all the time around the building and also in the park, where he played his weirdo instruments, but we weren't friendly. In fact, the only time I ever spoke to him was when I was kicking him off my private rooftop terrace, accessible, unfortunately, from the stairwell beside my apartment and not directly from inside my apartment. I would ask him to leave and please never return. He would grin and agree, and then two days later I'd find him out there again. I didn't even get angry because I thought he was r.e.t.a.r.ded. I really did. I figured head injury or something. He had that slow, ponderous way of speaking, and that perpetual almost-smile that made him look like a tipsy golden retriever. The way he dressed was ridiculous, everything mismatched and tattered, and his mother-I a.s.sumed it was his mother-came around every few days with CorningWare ca.s.seroles or plates of food covered in foil. I figured he was a simp, beating his congas for spare change in the park and surviving on some kind of government disability fund while Mommy kept him fed and very occasionally bathed.

I couldn't have been more wrong. And the fact that he continued to appear on my terrace, even though I'd had the locks changed on the giant steel entrance door, should have been my first clue.

John

It didn't take long to insinuate myself into the ambit of Eldrich. I expected to encounter him mainly in the building, but our first real exchange occurred out of doors about a week and a half after I'd moved in. To get from our apartment to the better stores and subway you had to first pa.s.s through a park. A winding concrete walkway bisected it. On one side was a playground bubbling with toddlers and their Filipino nannies, a non-functioning splash pad and two weedy tennis courts. The other side was just gra.s.s and trees and benches on which lovers lolled and derelicts loafed. This is where Eldrich set up shop, so to speak, on a bench beside a prodigious willow in the crook of the path.

Eldrich, I discovered, was a busker. He played (I use the term casually, as none of his musical meanderings were evidently melodious) a variety of instruments, all of them unusual. He slapped happy on a Peruvian box drum, hammered a Chinese dulcimer with bamboo sticks, and bowed something called a nyckelharpa that looked like a violin with a set of wooden keys grafted onto it. But the strangest contraption, and the one I liked best, was a tripod with a chunk of wood at the top, and a thin, flat wooden tongue clamped horizontally atop that. There was a long overhang (think of a ruler held over the edge of a desk), and the tongue was made to vibrate by striking or bowing it. A wedge of fretted wood pressed against it controlled the pitch. The wooden tongue was interchangeable for different sounds, and these objects were very beautiful-smoothed into curvy shapes that reminded me of faux-African sculptures from a 1950s rec room. The thing sounded like nothing I'd heard before. It was unearthly, kooky, like the background music to a crazed parade of Dr. Seuss characters, and it provided the perfect opening to conversation in the park on a sunny day.

”Wow. That's nutty. What is that thing?”