Cadillac Couches by Sophie B. Watson Read Free Book Online

broken we were.
    â€œYou look a little funny, darling. You okay?” Isobel asked.
    â€œThe guy vomited on his pants. Finn was sick to his stomach,” I told her.
    â€œHe didn’t?”
    â€œHe did, when he was driving home from Pizza Hut.”
    â€œOh,” she said, and then quoting A Room with a View : “‘I shall never forgive myself, never to my dying day.’”
    She got up to open another bottle of wine.



side a, track 3
    â€œI am writing
    graffiti on your body,
    I am drawing the story
    of how hard we tried;
    . . . your bones have been my bed frame,
    and your flesh has been my pillow
    . . . the old woman behind the pink curtains
    and the closed door
    on the first floor
    she’s listening through the air shaft
    to see how long
    our swan song can last . . .”
    â€œBoth Hands,” Ani DiFranco
The Couch Sessions
    Unplugged & Horizontal
    The next day I stayed in bed way way too late. Late to the point of self-disgust. No one sleeps like the depressed. It was two in the afternoon when the doorbell rang. All I saw when I opened the door were flowers bursting with happy colour, and lots of them. And some guy’s hairy legs under them. His face, hidden by the sheer mass of petals and stalks. They smelled gorgeous.
    A delivery of twenty-four yellow-and-plum coloured tiger lilies. At last, I thought, at last. Romance! For me! My heartbeat sped up and my face warmed. I smiled bashfully as if I was at an awards ceremony. The delivery guy looked a bit nervous.
    â€œUh, I’m sorry, these are for the girl next door. She’s not, uh, home. Would you mind keeping them for her?”
    I took them in and put them in some water. Good karma, I thought. It really didn’t help my mood though. I’d been lying in bed, thinking about Finn, Finn and Sullivan, me and Sullivan. Sullivan and the Amazon girlfriend. Sullivan and Isobel. Fixating in a vortex of Sullivan, I could feel myself going down that dark road, the one I know better than to go down. Sometimes, I can’t resist the sick pleasure of it.
    I related to Finn more than I wanted to—fellow underdogs of love and all. He was still in the throes of love angst, but I wanted to think I was well beyond all that—Sullivan was ancient news. But it was true that I still did, on dark days, spend hours and sometimes whole days pinned to the couch, mulling over our history.
    I could stare for hours at my posters of Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits: the Holy Trinity. Smoking dope taught me the joy/Zen of just sitting, or just lying down. Just staring. Just thinking. I excelled at mining old times to relive them, digest them, like an animal that has two stomachs and regurgitates food to eat things twice. I wasn’t a hermit, my Isobel was coming over later for drinks.
    Sullivan was the first person I met who actually loved Alberta. He never bitched like the rest of us in winter when it was minus thirty with a wind-chill factor of minus fifty during a two-week cold snap. He cross-country skied to work through the river valley trails. He made me paintings on bark. Most people dreamed of leaving Edmonton, for the coast or somewhere cosmopolitan like Montreal, but Sullivan saw the beauty in our frozen prairie city. He had a black Labrador always at his side, he canoed on the river, he made igloos in the winter with his friends.
    He was woodsy. I was lipsticky. He basically introduced me to nature. And oof! what a discovery nature was: the wind, the stars, the air, the smells, the great outdoors. Sullivan showed me how to camp properly, how to start fires without matches, how to scope out the ideal site in the wilderness, how to cook over the open fire, how to smoke pot and sit naked on a mountainside just in time to catch alpine glow.
    I loved the feeling of a breeze on my butt as I squatted to pee in the woods, the long grasses tickling my nose. Skinny dipping in mountain lakes.