by Ursula Pflug
(12/22/99)

He had red hair. He said: "Here are two keys." He gave me a piece of paper with an address. "Go up five flights of stairs. At the top, two doors. Unlock and relock each door." I felt like the heroine in a spy novel, only I couldn't remember my mission.

People used to say it was the partying that caused the short term memory loss, but now I think it was the sewing machines. There were two, and I still have them both. My short term memory still sucks. I'd get rid of them if it wasn't for what Nancy said one night.

In a half empty warehouse building, I followed his instructions. At the top of the five flights of stairs, through two doors, a row of lockers and change rooms. Behind an opened door I glimpsed a wall of mirror tile. Perhaps it was a dance company's rehearsal space; there were so many dancers then.

One locker door too stood open; on the bottom shelf I saw a pair of blue shoes. They were a little worn but very nice and they fit. I put them on and ran down the hall past a short haired woman sitting at a sewing machine.

"But who will get in trouble about the keys?" I thought I heard her call as I ran down the stairs, back out the street door. Within a day I'd forgotten how I'd acquired the shoes.

I spent the week living inside my life, experiencing textures of happiness I'd never previously dared. Everything went well for me; I believed it was my blue shoes. Ariel and I had always been fond acquaintances; suddenly we were close friends. It began this way; we ran into one another on Spadina twice a week; we'd go for hot and sour soup. It was January and we had our sore throats; ginger helped. Her smile over soup a small gift of brightness, evidence too, I was sure, of the talismanic quality of my blue shoes. She was an artist like everyone else I knew: talented, mostly unpaid. Some were dancers or writers, but really, that's being an artist too.

"The eighties," she said, "are gobbling people up like lunch meat." Someone else had just died, hit by a truck, riding his bicycle home drunk. I vowed to hold Ariel close. If I had fewer acquaintances and more true friends, less people would die, my blue shoes seemed to tell me.

We gossiped and wrote in my notebook, little metaphysical jokes. It was that kind of winter. We were happy. "Manifest toes," I wrote, and turned the book around to face Ariel. She read, smiled, picked up the nice black Pilot Fineliner to write. She turned the book back around to face me.

"Manifest fingers," she'd written.

That January I'd just returned from California, a post break-up vacation. As always I'd bought a new notebook to begin a new chapter of my life, a turquoise Chinese brocade in hardcover, small, with red lined pages and chrysanthemums in the corners of the pages. I lived in an empty loft; endless new space deliciously echoing both inside and outside. The lease was held by an artists' collective, but they were renting a larger warehouse for their winter show, and needed cash towards their original space. During the day I painted and wrote, lived on my savings, threw shoes at cockroaches. The loft has the biggest cockroaches I've ever seen outside of the tropics. I think they must be a hundred years old, to have grown so large. Thankfully, being so old, they're very slow and easy to kill. The kitchen scurries at night with quick small browns but I'm used to those from all of David and my apartments; they don't make me nearly so nervous.

Ariel and I went to a party. I brought a mickey of Johnnie Walker Red; she had just one shot. I'd split up with David just before I'd gone away, thought I wanted a new boy already. Silly, really. Robert leaned against the bathroom door, gave me a smile of such humanity, a knife bright in the dark.

"What's up with you, Robert?" I asked, considering his handsome face, his swards of dark hair. Robert was a bartender and poet I'd known for years. We'd been friends but never lovers.

He leaned. "Passing through time, like a disease of the senses; in a coffee cup the hours are defiled to a timeless zero as though your eyes had always been here. And always will. Our life just the moments that fill in between the coffee cups."

I answered: "Time is a Chinese puzzle, and like a crystal on a string it hypnotizes, but only love can break the spell."

He raised his eyebrows, considering. The look on his face changed, as though someone had thrown a pellet of dark dye into a clear fountain. Not Robert I thought, even if his poetry reverberates, resounds. Not ready for that darkened hunger, a need I suddenly felt would defile me.

Better to run through snowy alleyways with Ariel, duck into basement Vietnamese restaurants with Ariel. In the winterlit afternoons we climbed stairs together, looking for things. A condemned loft building, full of the debris of uprooted lives. Everyone had moved out, left their junk behind. "I like the clear plexi bathtub up on the platform with blue stairs leading up to it," Ariel said. "We could take pictures. Make a little narrative about these unknown departed lives."

We bought film for my Polaroid and went back to that building and photographed things that reminded us of our lost homes.

"How can our homes be lost?" Ariel asked when I suggested this was what we were doing. "We had homes," she said, "we grew up in families."

"The families were broken; we were always ducking plates, knives, fists,groping hands," I said.

"That's what you mean. They were homes but everyone in them was lost. And now we duck an ever-present death that's come to some we know; we try to resist the temptation to die, to not ride our bicycles so drunk we can't see oncoming traffic," she replied.

"Indeed," I said. The thought of Ariel dying frightened me more than a little.

What did we take pictures of? Looking out the smudgy window into an air shaft we saw that a lone tree grew. It was an ailanthus, a tree of heaven. They'll even grow out of concrete; I recognised it by the shape. Someone had tied silk ribbons to the bare winter branches, in gold and green, winter leaves. I was astounded. Ariel stood very still while I focused past the smudgy window. I thought she was as moved as I was.

A sewing machine stood abandoned on a table. Beneath the foot, a beautiful applique underwater scene of fish and brain coral.

"I've always wanted a sewing machine," Ariel said.

"Plug it in, see if it works," I replied. We did, but the power in the building had been turned off.

"We could take it home. It must work because she was still using it," Ariel said.

"Unless she just put the applique there for decoration. A miniature installation piece--"

"--Inoperative sewing machine sews," Ariel finished my thought for me. "Help me, Veronica; I want this sewing machine."

We carried it down the stairs. That's the thing about living and working in warehouse buildings: there are always stairs, so many breath-stealing stairs. On the wall of the stairwell someone had even sketched stairs in cobalt chalk.

"Where do those stairs go?" Ariel asked, setting the sewing machine down on the landing, pausing for breath. She traced their outline, her finger climbing.

"Up five flights," I said, "through two locked doors. A row of lockers there, a woman at a sewing machine." The image emerged like a lost fragment of dream.

I couldn't remember its source, but Ariel said, "That sounded nice. It's a poetic winter, isn't it?"

"Very." I paused to admire my friend. She wore a midnight blue Russian hat atop her gold curls, a thrift store black borg. She had the kind of lips that are always so red, never need lipstick. Or maybe it was just winter.

She checked me out in return, smiling secretively. When her eyes reached my feet she said, "You never told me where you scored your blue suedes. I've been admiring them for weeks." She lifted up the sewing machine, passed it to me. "It's your turn."

"Okay." I was cheerful. "Let's go for soup after. More than soup, I'm starving. You know, I don't remember where I found the shoes."

"Drunk, maybe, Veronica?" Ariel asked. "So drunk you forgot? Hope you didn't steal them from someone at a party; they had to walk home barefoot in the slush."

"They could have worn mine. Same size, obviously."

"After they figured it out," Ariel said, "four in the morning, upset. But it doesn't sound like you. Even drunk, you're never mean, even inadvertently."

We took turns carrying the sewing machine all the way to Ariel's little rented room on Bathurst Street. She unlocked the door and I, who had taken the last turn, set it heavily down on her table. Ariel made tea, put Nina Hagen on, found bagels and cream cheese in her tiny bar fridge. Her bed was unmade, her floor heaped with clothes. I'd never seen how she lived before. My loft always looked tidy, mostly because it was so large it swallowed my few possessions. Clothes, art supplies, a new futon. A forties ashtray in the shape of a jaguar I'd bought at a junk store in Grass Valley, brought home in my luggage, wrapped in T-shirts. I kept my change and earrings there. The space had come with an iron and an ironing board, a dresser and a mirror. I used the iron; it seemed an incredible luxury, a luxury of order after years of David. He'd sprouted chaos like other people sprout windowsill herbs.

In the piles on Ariel's floor I saw things I'd always loved her in. It made me feel closer to her, as though in her clutter she exposed her vulnerability. Folded neatly in a closet I'd never have seen her beaded shawl spreading in green waves across last week's jeans and sweatshirts. I felt a window opening, of possibility. I mentally asked my blue shoes what it meant, and they seemed to say our relationship was changing. We looked at one other, considering.

I know shoes can't really talk, or send telepathic messages. But feelings accrue to objects, and perhaps even knowledge, for those shoes always seemed to impart a wisdom beyond my own. For some people it's a jade ring, or a painted silk scarf, or a framed photograph of their grandfather. For me that winter, it was the blue suede shoes.

I hugged her good-bye, went home and slept on my giant new futon alone.

Winter continued.

The sewing machine was a nice old black and gold Singer, one of the first electrics, with a big wheel to turn. I'd dropped in on Ariel for tea and bagels, cream cheese and Nina. "These are the very best sewing machines," she said, demonstrating, "they never break down; they're indestructible."

"You were right; it was a good score after all. My savings have run out," I sighed. We'd reached the point where we could discuss our money troubles. I knew Ariel was an exotic dancer.

"You could be one too," she said.

"Maybe," I said. "It's not that I think it's wrong, but it's never really seemed like my kind of thing."

"Me either," she said. "But it pays quite well. You have time to paint, to write, to be with your friends, save money to travel."

"Isn't it icky?"

"We're young for such a short time," she said. "It'll soon enough be over; I can worry about whether it's been icky then. Just come see me at the Silver Dollar tomorrow afternoon, you and Robert. You'll see."

Ariel in apricot satin, appliqued with brain coral, with pipefish, with sea dragons. I supposed she'd pocketed that little underwater scene that day, worked it into her outfit, too good to waste.

"Look," I said to Robert, "she has the sewing machine on stage with her."

She began her set leaning over the old Singer, blonde curls fallen forward, the power cord snaking beneath her feet, across the floor into the little dressing room behind the stage. Her silk satin gown fell open, showing off the curve of her breast. Yet the tableau she'd created was so lusciously intimate; she seemed not an exhibitionist but a beautiful woman alone in her room, sewing. I felt a voyeur all the more.

She sat on a plain white painted wooden kitchen chair, pumped the foot pedal in time to Nina, turned the sturdy black wheel. The machine hissed and snarled, the tension setting gone awry. I realized she had done this on purpose, deftly, as though the machine had foiled her purpose all on its own. How she must have studied and practised to get that move right, and, I thought also, that she was sacrificing her machine to this performance, for one can only tangle with a tension setting so often before it breaks down for good. The audience, used to more traditional fare, seemed not quite as taken as Robert and I, with our art school backgrounds, enthralled by her originality.

She stroked the machine, whispered to it to be kind, to be gentle. She lifted one short little leg, bent at the knee over the curve of the engine casing, let it rest there a moment, began to rub it back and forth as though this gesture might coax the recalcitrant machine into performing for her. The other high heeled foot pumped the pedal; her little ringed hand turned the wheel persistently. Her back arched against the chair, head thrown back for a moment, mouth opened; the machine purred into life; sewing her secrets for her. The satin gown slipped askew, off her shoulders.

"It's real satin too, 1940's silk satin and not polyester satin as they make it now. So much more comforting against the skin, so much more real," I whispered to Robert and he laughed.

"Only a woman," he whispered back, "would deconstruct the fabric content of a stripper's costume."

"And her shoes are Capezio tap pumps, not cheap stilettos that damage your feet. It adds to the sensuality, good fabric and shoes. Because she's happier; her sexiness less faked."

"I've always thought Capezios are the sexiest shoes ever, it's true," Robert agreed, ordered us two Black Labels from the passing waiter. "Her legs are a little short," he observed, "fleshy in places where yours, long and bony, are not," but I, the only woman in the audience, was thinking how we were the same as no two others in the room.

"And for all that," I whispered, "it's still her difference that attracts, the ways in which she is not me."

Robert sucked his breath in beside me. It seemed completely out of character for him, distanced and streetwise as he claims to be. But her power over him in that moment intensified my feelings too, and I was drawn equally to Ariel and to Robert's willing surrender: a sharpened breath, breathing desire. Which of them did I want more?

Making love, part of my arousal is self-reflexive; I insert myself into my partner's pleasure in my body: women are so beautiful. I'd never been to see a stripper before, and Ariel surprised me; she seemed so completely transcendent of all the cliches.

What if I got up there with her? Climbed the little rickety wooden steps up to the platform, took my clothes off, embraced her, my tongue running down her neck, along her beautiful plump white arm to the hand turning the sewing machine wheel, enclosing it with my own, forcefully making her sew faster and faster so that our lives might be sewn together and not come apart, as David's and mine came apart, as everything and everyone comes apart. But I didn't dare.

Ariel unwrapped her cherubic legs from the machine, lowering them to the floor, ending our view of her hand sewn satin G-string, with craftily attached seashells in decorative places. Fine to dance in but crunchy to sit on, you'd think. She must be careful with it. Real seashells, just like real satin.

For her third song she straddled the sturdy machine, collapsible into its own table, and quite heavy as I'd experienced. I was glad, knowing it would be able to handle her weight. Satin clad crotch tight against the machine's sleek black and gold back she stroked the wheel with her hand, leaning forward, her breasts almost touching the machine, almost caressing it; a crunching sound accompanied the shedding of broken seashells. Ariel arched backwards in an unlikely bridge, planted her arms behind her; drops of sweat rolled down her neck and onto her breasts; her long gold curls were damp and frizzy, snaking down her well-muscled back. The motor's vibration was her lover, bringing her, by the end of this fourth song to an orgasm which seemed not at all faked. Robert and I stared at one another in astonishment as the last slow tune began, unwinding her like thread from a spool. No wonder, I thought, she isn't as tired as I am on all our endless stairs; she works out at her job every day.

"D'you think she really came?" I asked.

Robert didn't say anything, too moved to speak. I had a sudden urge to climb up on stage with Ariel, bury my face in her satiny crotch, jealous of the sewing machine. Show them, it must be unheard of in a strip club, the second time in one day, real passion and not fake. But the song was over and Ariel climbed down off the machine, slipped on her gown and disappeared into the dancer's change room.

Meanwhile I realised the show wasn't quite over. From inside her dressing-room she unplugged her machine: a mermaid costume slipped out of the machine's teeth to the floor, perfect in every detail, its French seams finished with an exactitude only a master tailor could produce. Her self love had sewn a peach satin mermaid outfit with tiny delicate zippers everywhere.

"How d'you teach it to do that?" I asked, when she came and sat with us on her break, sipped desultorily at a Black Label. Robert seemed confused and happy, too nervous to look Ariel in the face.

"You saw it do that?" she asked, wistfully.

"Incredible," I said.

"Not many can see it."

"Why does it make you sad that I can?" I asked her.

"It means things are changing. It means our window is closing. It means we won't have the affair after all, that we've been flirting with having."

This puzzled me. I thought what we had was the romance of friendship, not of possible sexuality. But there had been that moment in her room, when we'd looked into one another's eyes, and something new had entered. And I'd left. Perhaps I was in denial, a supposedly straight woman. Confused, I didn't say anything.

"It means..." Ariel persisted, and then gave up, not getting any help from me.

"Robert, how did you like my show?"

Robert had seen nothing of the magically sewing sewing machine, only her remarkable act.

"Strippers seem so cynical so often," he said shyly, "but you were different. You're not the best dancer I ever saw but you're very beautiful so it doesn't matter, and to make love to the machine was so original. It was very funny and very sexy all at the same time. And you emanate warmth."

"I try to make them happy. They're so sad. If I'm only going to be on stage for twenty minutes I want to make them happy."

"Admirable," Robert said.

"Will you be able to always do that?" I asked.

"Probably not," Ariel answered.

"Quit when you can't do it any more," Robert advised.

"Do you get to wear the costumes it makes you?" I asked.

"Oh be quiet," she said, glancing Robert's way. "What did you think, Veronica?"

"It seemed a pleasant bohemian way to spend a darkly overcast afternoon."

We put on our winter bundling and left. "So what's up tonight?" she asked casually, as we walked along the snowing street, lighting cigarettes.

"Party on King Street," Robert said. "Dancers, theatre people."

She touched my hand. "You should have stayed."

"Stayed when? Stayed where?"

"Stayed off those stairs."

I knew she meant the five flights, the two locked doors; my prize for having faithfully followed a mysterious stranger's instructions: a pair of blue suedes that seemed to make my life magic. Where had he given me that scribbled address, whoever he was? Even though I'd forgotten all the circumstances, I'd done it anyway, because it seemed so intriguing. Done what, the question remained. It seemed unlikely he could have sent me all that way just for a pair of shoes. What had my mission been, that I'd so carelessly forgotten? Drunk maybe, Veronica? As usual, I kept my fears and my confusion to myself, in spite of being with my supposedly two best friends.

The three of us went out for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant and headed to the party afterwards. Aladdin was there. He had a bottle of Glenlivet and motioned for me to sit beside him on the decrepit grey couch. Robert and Ariel disappeared onto the dance floor.

"An item?" Aladdin asked. Everyone gossiped so much.

"Them?" I swigged from his bottle, gratefully. "He watched her at work today. I think maybe you're right, that maybe he fell in love."

"Everyone thinks you're a couple," Aladdin said.

"Me and Robert?"

"No. You and Ariel."

"Why would they think that?"

"You're always together since you're back from California. You neck at parties."

"We do?" Then I remembered. We had. Twice this past month. Delicious delicious delicious.

Presently half the bottle of scotch was gone and I left Aladdin to exchange pleasantries; in seemingly superficial party chitchat meanings sprouted everywhere. When I look back on that winter this is what I think still: our lives weren't profligate, wasteful; they were full of meaning. Something in the snow that year, in the hit songs, the soup, the coffee, the parties. When you finally grow up, where does that romance go? And is it even possible to have both, to face one's delusions, one's denials, and to hear bells in the wind that aren't there? Bells at the ends of ribbons, tied to winter trees in airshafts. To search for and find an impossible grace in a dissolute lifestyle; is that so wrong? However fragile and temporary a grace it's doomed to be, however selfish and careless, it still seems to me a better thing than to have never experienced it at all.

A woman with very short red hair rushed at me out of the crowd. "D'you have them on you?" she asked.

"Have what?" She looked vaguely familiar although I wasn't sure where from.

"The keys. He needs the keys back. You were supposed to give them back that day. Remember I yelled at you?"

Oh, so that's who she was.

"I'd rather give them to him myself," I said. Whoever he was.

"Suit yourself," she said. "It was a good opportunity to get it out of the way. Finish with unfinished business."

"The sewing machine sews forgetfulness," I said, fishing for new meanings, for missing pieces.

"But unnecessary things forgotten make room for new, necessary things in your brain," she said. "And things so long forgotten they seem new again."

"Brain coral grows," I said.

"Now you're getting it," she laughed.

"But what colour is his hair?" I asked.

"Red like mine. He's my brother. How come you don't know that? I guess it was dark when he gave you the keys." She was wearing a tight striped tube top with a white cotton oversized man's shirt open over top, black jeans, and the ubiquitous cowboy boots. Hers were red, matching her hair.

"I guess." She headed to the dance floor, motioned for me to come join her, but I smiled in declination, sat back down with Aladdin, his warm bottle. I said, "I guess it's been dark all my life; I've never really been able to see anything."

"How come we all talk like this?" he asked.

"Maybe it's the sewing machines," I drank from his liquid gold.

"Do explain."

"Replacing the brain cells, the memories we lost by drinking too much."

"Replacing them with what?"

"Poetry."

"Of course."

I told him too about Ariel's machine, the abandoned one we'd found in the condemned loft building that afternoon, another drizzly, slushy, overcast one. It was the cold that made us love one another, I think now, that made us run into one another's arms.

"That day changed everything," I said.

"How?"

"I'm not sure yet, but I know. The blue shoes told me."

He looked at my feet, and then at me, questioning.

"They tell me things. They're like a telepathic amulet. I look at them and I have a thought I'd never have had otherwise; I'm sure of it."

"That's how I feel when I look at you, Veronica," he said, but I barely heard him. All the time I thought I was Emma Peel, but I was really just another small time heart crusher. Aladdin shrugged; I guess he'd learned how by then.

Just then I saw Ariel through a gap in the crowd, still partnered with Robert, dancing so differently: very well but demurely.

"She's an amazing dancer," Aladdin said, watching too.

"Robert and I went to see her work today. She says I should dance; I need a job."

Aladdin said, "I don't think you're the type, 'Rica. It would hurt you."

"What about Ariel?" I asked defensively. "It doesn't hurt her?" Ariel always seemed so soft, so feminine. I was supposed to be the hard edged one.

"She's different," he said.

"Different how?" I asked, feeling dared.

"She's a mermaid. She can always go back in the water from whence she came."

"Maybe that's why she doesn't need to smoke or drink like I do; being so watery she can live unarmored. I'd like to be like that too," I whispered. "Never get hurt."

"It's not that she doesn't get hurt; it's that she can dive in the pool of forgetfulness, wash all her sins away. The pool of Lethe, in the Greek myths."

"Other people's sins," I corrected.

Aladdin raised his eyebrows, considering. "I think maybe you're right."

Presently Aladdin was gone, and I couldn't find Ariel or Robert. I was pissed, or maybe it was the sewing machine sewing stitches on my mind. I hated those moments, the thought of walking out onto King Street alone, hailing a cab, hoping I didn't throw up in it. The red haired girl called me by name like I was an old friend, said there was another party, just a small one, on the top floor. "The fifth floor," she said. "You still don't remember my name, do you? It's Nancy."

"Okay," I said, thinking I could sober up with them for awhile before I went home. "But wait for me, I have to pee."

I peed; when I came back out there was no sign of Nancy, or of Ariel and Robert. I felt surprised by prongs of jealousy, but which way did they prick? I felt I'd be excluded, that our convivial threesome would be over, I'd be odd woman out. If any of us were going to do it, I suddenly felt sure, it would have to be all three together. That way, if it caused an ending as a sexual aspect often does to what has been a friendship, it would be an ending that would include all of us.

The door at the top of the stairs was locked. I remembered the keys in my pocket, the keys I'd taken off the jaguar ashtray and put into the pocket of my black jeans tonight, as though I'd known unconsciously it would be the same building. A slipstream moment, a dropped stitch in time. Short term memory loss: how come I hadn't recognised the brick facade?

I unlocked the door, walked twenty paces, unlocked the second, sticky in exactly the same way it had been the first time. Very private, these fifth floor people with their locks, very secretive. Maybe they dealt heroin or sewing machines or something.

In the hall I listened vainly for the sound of a party. I called out Nancy's name, but there was no answer. I knocked on all the doors; there were six, and no one came to open any of them. Big factory windows faced an air shaft; dawn light illuminated silk ribbons tied to the bare winter branches of a tree.

"But how could that building be this building? That building was abandoned," I asked aloud.

Oh, of course, the artist moved here, or just did it here too. Probably airshafts all over the warehouse district sported beribboned trees.

In the corner under another window looking down onto King Street a dusty sewing machine sat on a table. I looked to see if it was sewing anything. Applique brain coral, mermaid costumes. But it wasn't Ariel's sewing machine; it was mine, and sewed nothing. Ariel had already tapped into her own creativity, so deeply her work was almost magical. I just didn't know it at the time, or chose to overlook it. The beautiful and sexy fill us with need; we think always of what they can do for us, how they and only they can make us feel, forgetting always their need to do for themselves. We become predators, and forget to be friends.

There was a note:

"Veronica: leave the keys here, take the sewing machine."

I placed the keys on the table, carried the machine down the stairs, very very carefully, because I was so drunk. It was another old Singer, an early electric. The very best sewing machines, Ariel had said. Without electronic memories, but the integrity of a well-made thing. The old machines were truth speakers, the new ones better at unstitching old, worn out ways of being, replacing them with new, happy, surprising endings, totally unforeseen. Perhaps there's one waiting for me out there yet.

I suppose it takes two sewing machines to sew a good life: one old, one new. I suppose I shall just have to be patient, wait for them to sew my dreams together out of these scraps and tatters I've made of life. Soon it will be the nineties; I look forward to them, thinking it's then we'll be able to change, become better people.

I carried it home along King Street to Spadina, slowly in the freezing dawn light. Up more stairs, hacking and wheezing.

"Keep the keys, give back the shoes," I said nonsensically, exhausted. Yet the loft seemed so lonely and I felt a crashing hangover coming so I scraped four dollars in change off the jaguar. Went back out, had a greasy breakfast up at our twenty-four hour Dundas Street spoon. I wanted someone to come in that I knew, a party face with a smile; we could exchange the night's stories.

No one came.

I went home to my enormous new futon to sleep alone.

Before sleep came I obsessed: wondered who did that, with the silk ribbons. Maybe it wasn't one person, but more than one, like a graffito that passes through many hands. I'd always wanted to do that, write an article about street art. No one had done that yet, that I knew of. There was a new entertainment weekly and I thought I might approach them. It was an excuse, really, to find out.

I didn't see Robert or Ariel that week, and when I heard about Friday's party it was from Nancy, who I ran into on Queen Street. "I'll bring Ariel," I said.

She made a face.

You don't like Ariel, I wanted to say but didn't. Afraid to, I guess. I told her my idea and she said it was a good one. "You would write very well about art, Veronica; you're one of the few people who's knowledgeable enough and also you have a way with words. I've read your stories in Z."

Zed had published two of my stories the year before. I'd been very happy. David and Ariel and I had gone out for Vietnamese food to celebrate.

"It seems so long ago now," I said to Nancy.

"David?" she asked, reading my mind. "You'll get over him. He was cool, but you know, you'll go further faster without him. He held you back. Debts all the time. Bad sewing machine deals."

"So everyone knew," I said.

She shrugged. "Look, here's their card, they're looking for writers; tell them you're a friend of mine," she beamed effusively. I felt honoured. Nancy always seemed so powerful and scary.

I went to the party. Nancy's brother was there, approached me out of the dance floor crowd. I knew it was him because they looked so much alike. "Thanks for the keys back," he said.

"No problem," I said. His face seemed familiar. When I remembered at all it had always been only the instructions, the colour of his hair, but not the reason, or the face.

"You found those blue shoes," he said, admiring my feet. "You're the perfect person for them. Why didn't you take the sewing machine the first time?"

"There was a woman working on it." I didn't tell him I'd forgotten, hadn't known the sewing machine was for me. Sometimes it seemed a little frightening, the forgetfulness.

"It was Nancy," he laughed. "No matter how many times you meet her you always forget. She's so offended; she thinks you're snubbing her. I'd told her it was for you but you left before she could give it to you. You did me that favour; the sewing machine was to say thank-you."

I didn't ask what favour, clueless as usual. He took my arm. "Come meet the editor at Tabula Rasa."

"Esoteric name," I said.

"Too much, don't you think? I'm going to tell them to change it. Maybe to X," he said.

"Or X-Ray."

"X-Ray is good. Or how about Night Vision?"

"Too poetic," I said.

"But it's that kind of winter. My name's Red, by the way. We never were properly introduced last year, when you and David got us that great deal on sewing machines with built-in memory."

Red introduced me to the publisher\editor, whose name was Evan, raving about me, which is, of course, the only way to be introduced. I told him my idea about the street art, the mysterious silk ribboned trees.

"But that's a great idea," Evan said, lighting a bootleg Winston. "I don't know much about art. We need an art writer; we'll try you out on this idea. You come so highly recommended."

Red beamed. I suddenly remembered I'd known him after all. He'd had another name last year; it had been Halley.

"When's it due?" I asked.

"Comes out Friday. Typesetting's Thursday; editorial's Wednesday. Can you have it in Wednesday morning?"

"Okay," I said. "If I stay up all Tuesday night doing the final."

"Do it," he said, shook my hand and walked away.

I wrote the piece. Evan and Janice, his partner loved it. I could feel my life changing. I went to that weekend's party, and saw Robert. "I read your article," he said, "it was so great. You're a good interviewer."

"It was a lot more work than the waitressing I've done." I didn't tell him I'd never discovered the identity of the person who ribboned trees. Somehow it made me ashamed, a secret I wasn't virtuous enough to gain access to. "But I can't cocktail forever, and Evan gave me a check for two hundred dollars."

"That doesn't seem like very much," Robert said.

"I know. But it got my name out, and I've always wanted to get paid to write."

"I lost my bartending job," Robert said. "They fired me," he told me plaintively, "for not cleaning the floor."

"Where's Ariel?" I asked, feeling very badly that I hadn't invited her to last week's party.

"She went on tour in northern Ontario. She's always talked her way out of it before but I guess this time they really needed her. They said they wouldn't give her more town gigs if she didn't go."

"It'll be okay," I said. "She'll be back in three weeks, with tales of Kenora. She'll write postcards."

But she didn't. I never had time to say good-bye; we hadn't broken up, I told myself, because we'd never been together in the first place, not properly.

I was busy with my new job; it seemed I had a knack. Janice and Evan gave me a weekly column; to my surprise and delight I'd turned overnight into an art writer.

I bumped into Robert on the street; he was on welfare. I didn't think much of it either way. I was so caught up in my work I almost forgot Ariel.

Winter discontinued. It was spring. I bought new shoes, black cowboy boots that were a little late in coming but felt like heaven just the same.

I saw Robert on Spadina. Spring winds blew away our previous companionship. We didn't notice. He said, "Ariel fell in love with a man in Thunder Bay, a housing contractor. She's going to stay. She's pregnant. She says she's very happy. She's going to give the room to Nancy as a sublet, but she wants you to have the sewing machine."

"Nancy? I thought Nancy hated her."

"You're so dumb sometimes, Veronica."

"Did you and Ariel ever do it?" I asked, remembering the party I spent talking to Aladdin, neglecting my friends.

Robert just shook his head like I was a moron. "They fought over you. They both had crushes on you. But they were friends first."

"Really?" I asked, but Robert shook and shook his head at me; we parted ways.

I picked Ariel's sewing machine, from the little Bathurst street room. Nancy and I had coffee together, talked about the magazine. She's in advertising sales at X-Ray; it seems half the city works there now, in one capacity or another. Or at least half of our downtown arty crowd. And everyone who doesn't is envious. Be that as it may: Evan and Janice have done very well for themselves, and for us.

Now I have two sewing machines. I move from one to the other, hoping both will last longer that way, just as I trade my cowboy boots for my blue suedes.

Ariel's sewing machine has done nothing magical. I think now that it never did, that it was a figment of my imagination, or a slipstream moment where I linked minds with Ariel...that it was her dream, what she would visualize on stage to keep herself serene while she worked.

She was one of a kind.

It's winter again. David wants me to go back with him, but I won't; he's into heroin. We went to Chinatown for green tea and sweet buns stuffed with bean paste; I said: "Why don't you skip the heroin, just use the sewing machines? Not so addictive. Not illegal. Not painful. No withdrawal symptoms. You only have to learn how to sew memory and forgetfulness, and it's so much easier now, with the new machines, the ones with built in electronic memories. Sewing machines know how to sew the way home. Trust them. They make space so that the poetry has room to enter, which was all you really wanted the heroin for. To scrape away the scabby places where the poetry had been scarred over. Rip out the bad stitches, make new ones."

David grinned and nodded, sincere, heartfelt, agreeing with me. But it was the agreement of an addict. I knew why he'd chosen this particular Chinese bakery; his dealer lived just around the corner. Everyone knew.

He graciously let me pay. He had better things to spend his money on. I offered to give him one of my sewing machines, wondering if perhaps his just wasn't broken, but he said, too cool for words, "I've done sewing machines."

I was afraid to let him go, but I did. They all said the same thing: Ariel, Nancy, Robert; you can't save a junkie, don't even try.

I'm lonely but working hard. Parties don't seem to have the same allure. Something is different from last winter, when I came back from California after Christmas, something was happier. I have my turquoise notebook to prove it, with lines of beautiful poetry written by Ariel, by Robert: last winter's buddies.

Last week I did go out, to a party with Nancy and Evan and Janice and their crowd; a new different crowd. I left alone, too late as always, drunk, went to the coffee shop. Robert was there. He looked old, grizzled. Dawn crawled slowly up the windows. It struck me he was forty, too old to still be living his kind of life. He said,

"You should've kept the keys, not the shoes. Then you could've had both."

"I do have both sewing machines," I said, paying for my bootleg under the counter American soft pack Winstons.

"How many sewing machines does one person need? You have a cool new professional persona but you lost Ariel. I think you'll find it was too high a price. You needed her more than you let yourself know."

"Maybe she's happier now." I said, "it was time for her to quit anyway," and knew it was hot and sour soup with her I missed the most fiercely.

"You could've gotten her a gig at X-Ray," he said. "Writing about dance, street fashion, anything. They were just starting up; it was wide open. And Janice and Evan would do anything you say. You impress the hell out of them."

"What about you?" I asked. "Why don't you write for them? About poetry. You're the most insightful, informed person I know."

"I'm not ambitious that way," he shook his head. "I'll always be a boho bum. Soon to be an old boho bum."

"I'm going to cry," I said, meaning it. His faded eyes.

"Some of us are meant to stay under water, to never surface. I'm one of them. Don't cry for me, Argentina."

"Veronica," I whispered. "My name's Veronica."

"I'll never forget having known you, and I'll forgive you if, when you're famous, you pretend you never knew me."

"Now you're being cruel. I'd never do that."

"Oh, but Argentina," he said, looking out the window and not into my eyes at all. "You will. Just wait and see, you will. Not this year or the next, no. Maybe in five years or ten. I'll be sleeping in a box and you'll step over me. You'll say to your husband, "he looked like a man I used to know," but you won't go back, check to see if it was really me. Then you'd have to take me home, put me on your couch. I'd smell, and the children would be afraid of me. Don't forget that. There are things people do, for the sake of the children, they'd never have considered before."

"Robert, don't talk this way."

"I'll still be a brilliant poet," he whispered viciously under his breath, "scribbling on my box with pencil stubs, muttering. More brilliant than you, to whom success will come."

"Please, Robert."

"Good-bye, Argentina."

I went home. I stood, crying, stroked the peach satin mermaid costume hanging on the wall, believed at that moment everything he'd said would come true. It felt true that morning, a bad dawn and not a good one. A harsh chilly dawn, a dawn that aged us irrevocably.

I'd kept the loft as the artists' collective had moved to a bigger space. They could afford to -- I'd written a big feature article on them for X-Ray and it had attracted quite a bit of attention. A lot of people had wanted that cheap Spadina loft with the giant cockroaches, but they'd made sure it had gone to me. For the favour, and so I'd been paid much more than Evan's two hundred dollars after all.

I tried the mermaid on but it didn't fit; Ariel's much smaller than me. Still it hangs on my wall; that woman sure could sew. Or her sewing machine could. For me it only makes lined fringed scarves made from scraps of cloth from Spadina jobbers to give away as Christmas presents. I made one for Robert, keep him warm in the chilly cardboard box he has built around himself. I will send Ariel one, my missing soup partner.

She sent me a picture of herself, holding her new baby. She looks chubby, tired, wistful, unreachably happy. The photograph is double exposed, with winter trees, so she's almost not there. Yellow and green silk ribbons are tied to the bare branches of the winter tree, or maybe her hair, or maybe both. I thought it was a mistake; only lately do I think she double-exposed it on purpose.

I never wrote about her, and now it's too late. She never told me she was a brilliant artist and not just a stripper. The self esteem; where does it go? Who sewed it over, me or Robert?

Everyone played at being bi-sexual then; it was a fad, like cowboy boots; all the young bohemians had a same-sex affair to go with their Tony Lamas. But people, unlike boots, have feelings. When the fad is over, you can throw your boots or your blue suede shoes into the street, or into the back of a closet, but where do you put the lover who thought you were sincere, and gave you her heart honestly?

I thought my blue suede shoes were telling me secrets that winter, but really it was Ariel. Careless careless careless, she'd have said, if only I'd have listened. We did sleep together, just once. It happened, I remember it now, so very clearly, just before she went up north. I pretended it hadn't happened, or else I immediately forgot; perhaps it's the same difference after all. Why? Because afterwards she looked at me out of huge blue eyes, asked, "Will we be together now?" And I'd known, for the first time, that she wasn't just beautiful and sexy, talented and cool, but also frightened, needy, vulnerable. And I hadn't had the time for that, or was it the guts?