Kevin decided to run for office.
He said: Well, I guess it’s time for me to dust off my copy of Atlas Shrugged.
You know, said Beta, who once had been his girlfriend but now was not, there are other books about politics that you could read.
But Kevin did not want to read other books about politics. The two years of his electrical engineering degree was enough with formal education. More so than schooling, after all, it was life experience that resonated with people. The ten years that he had spent working construction had given him, he thought, a common touch. People like Beta, with her degrees, could not understand.
Imagine, he said, gazing off to the horizon and holding his hand out in front of him, statesmanlike. Beta knew from this that they were not having a conversation anymore but instead embarking on what would be his stump speech. Imagine, he repeated, that your life’s passion is painting pictures. You buy the paint, you buy the canvas, you go and paint your masterpiece. No one bothers you at all. You hang your work of art on the wall and that is that. But (he paused here and peered out to his imagined audience), what if your passion is building houses?
The speech then touched about the stifling absurdity of regulations in place for home construction: the permits, the taxation, et cetera. Then that moved into a complaint about property taxes and, Beta thought but wasn’t completely clear, income tax in general. None of that bureaucracy, he repeated, applied to painting portraits. It was unfair. It hampered human creativity and freedom to have so much red tape. Society needed more freedom. Freedom must thrive. The individual must triumph.
Finally, he finished talking.
So, he said, eyes gleaming and back on her, what did you think?
Well, said Beta, unsure of where to start. Have you ever thought—she finally said, carefully—about how houses need to be connected to water lines, sewer lines, and electricity? That’s one way they’re different from paintings. Does your utopia involve a lot of port-a-potties?
I would much rather pay a monthly fee for a port-a-potty to a business that is doing good in the world than pay property taxes, Kevin said.
This is to say, Kevin and Beta, when they were a couple, were an odd couple. They met when Beta had a show upcoming in an art exhibit at one of the artist-run galleries in town. She had drafted an incredible and implausible proposal which was accepted. Immediately, she realized she was in trouble. The pitch had waxed about the decay of feminine corporeality and the essential unreliability of female subjectivity. Big words, big ideas. The piece was meant to be a silicone women’s torso that inflated and deflated infinitely. The plan had been to use the belly cast made when she had been enormously pregnant with her daughter. She unearthed the cast in her closet, where it was slowly eroding plaster of Paris particles into her sweaters, and figured out, much Googling later, how to make latex casts from the mould. That was the easy part. The flabby white shell that perfectly resembled her once-upon-a-time body, however, was a new challenge. She painted the latex to her own body’s colours. But she needed it to inflate. That is what the proposal had proposed. It was a problem. She had none of the tools. None of the know-how.
Then a friend had the idea of getting Kevin to assist. He had access to a CNC router through his work, so he helped to make a MDF frame for the latex cast, a hole cut silhouette-like in the board. Then they (read: he) devised a complicated series of fan and exhaust mechanisms so that the torso would inflate slowly for ten minutes, abruptly deflate, and then lay dormant for another ten minutes. Beta stencilled “UNSEX ME NOW” in Helvetica along the top of the board. It was perfect. The red letters dripped a bit and that made it even more perfect. She was thrilled. She couldn’t wait for opening night.
They were good collaborators. Beta had ideas; Kevin could supply solutions.
The romance, however, did not begin until the night of the opening. It was a sweltering mid-summer evening, one of those July nights that are crowded with concerts and K-days and endless parties. Beta brought her daughter, Milda, along. Milda was six. Milda enjoyed these events in part because they were mostly childless parties: people paid attention to her and gave her treats. On the walk from the LRT to the gallery, the two held hands, their skin slippery with sweat. Downtown was really melting. The sun was still nearly overhead because it was July. There was a zing in the air.
Beta had seen the other pieces in the show individually, but put all together they were really something else. Plus, there were the performances, which were new to her. When they arrived, a choir was singing a rendition of Guillaume Apollinaire’s bestiary poems. It was ethereal and disjunctive. It was called Le bestiaire/bách khoa về quái thú. The chanting was textural. The composer was a friend of Vietnamese lineage but who had grown up Francophone. Justin. He was also singing. Beta couldn’t understand, but hoped that was intentional. Beta began a slow circle of the gallery to take in the other art, letting Milda wander about.
After the performance, she found Justin hanging out with Milda on the patio. The evening was becoming one of those that never cools. It was so pleasant. Everything was so pleasant. The sun was gentle amber. She thoroughly praised the event and his work. There was a barbecue set up and ice coolers full of drinks. She took a sparkling water which opened with a spritzy hiss.
Ultimately, I wanted it to be, said Justin, a commentary on colonialism. I translated parts of the Apollinaire into Vietnamese, just my part at first, but then the others start singing it, too. Did you notice? By the way: Is this okay? I’ve been feeding her. She says she’s hungry.
He was slicing up an enormous kielbasa on a paper plate. Beta was a vegetarian. She didn’t care so much what Milda ate but, because Milda was with her most of the time, Milda didn’t eat much meat, either.
Yeh maybe half of it, though? I mean, I thought that was what you were doing, with the Vietnamese. It was gorgeous.
Justin laughed. You realize, he said, this is her third sausage?
On cue, Milda grinned cutely, stabbed her plastic fork into another hunk, and crammed it into her mouth.
She eats meat like Fantastic Mr. Fox, observed Beta. Impressive. She leaned over and made Fantastic-Mr-Fox guzzling sounds, shovelling imaginary handfuls with both hands. Milda laughed, showing off a mouthful of partially unchewed meat.
I wanted to consider the bestiary as a moralizing device, animals as the exotic other, but when overlaid on the history of French colonialism in “Indochina,” Justin started to say.
A terrible whizzing sound interrupted him. It was unmissably loud, and Beta quickly realized the source. Her eyes popped big and she clutched the composer’s elbow in her hand. Please, she said, hold that thought. I promise you I will be back.
◊ ◊ ◊
She did not come back. She rushed to her installation and saw that a hole in the latex torso had torn open. It was a half-moon-shaped mouth, near the left hip. Now air wheezed through, persistent and unhappy. The torso drooped from the wall, defeated.
Well, said Beta aloud to no one in particular, I guess this is terminal femininity. Total collapse, right?
She debated for a minute just letting it be part of the performance. That would work, right? But then Kevin came up and convinced her otherwise. It wasn’t a hard fix, he insisted. They rushed out to get the supplies from her apartment. By the end of it, by the time the sculpter was fixed, the gallery was a full party, everyone was toasting the success of everything. It wasn’t hard to be sloppy and glad.
◊ ◊ ◊
For a few months, their relationship sustained itself. Sure, he wasn’t her type, but that was during a period of Beta’s life when she was floundering about what her type was, exactly. A construction worker living in a dingy walk-up could be, no? Her previous relationship, with her daughter’s father, had illustrated to her that a geeky introvert with emotional problems was not her type. Kevin was the opposite. He did not believe in introspection. He was loud and enjoyed yelling at cars and strangers when they got in his way. For Beta, this was somehow invigorating. She would never.
Physically, too, he was unlike. Whereas Beta and her daughter’s father (and consequently her daughter) were tall and thin, Kevin was short and not soft, just stout. They were darker, with messy dark brown curls, and he was fair, with straight blonde hair. At first, too, she was impressed by things like his subscription to a daily newspaper. (Who did that anymore? It was so retro! she marvelled to herself.) They also had mutual friends, punk musicians and vegans and Marxists, which made the lack of common cultural territory between Kevin and her seem less absolute. Plus, he adored her. He was handy and practical. Things were easier with him around.
Soon, though, she did begin to wonder. Those newspapers, how did he read them so quickly? No one could read that fast at breakfast. He just stood at the table, flipping through, not even sitting down, as he ate buttered toast. Then, one day when they were ordering food at the vegan bar that Beta loved and Kevin loved less, Kevin, passing the menu over, asked her to read it for him.
I, he said, need reading glasses to make out type that small.
But, said Beta, you never wear reading glasses. Wait. Do you even own reading glasses?
◊ ◊ ◊
Or how one day he told her he was sick of her bad jokes.
Puns are the cheapest form of humour, he told her one day.
As if he had access to a secret supply of expensive humour, thought Beta. As if.
Instead, she retorted: Puns are pins on the map tracing the path from word to world.
Now that Kevin was a politician, however, he needed to start doing politician things. For one, he needed to collect signatures endorsing his candidacy. Before long, he called on Beta to help him. He had already asked everyone he could think of and he was a lot of signatures short of the minimum required. Maybe she could get some of the other parents at school to sign? Milda was in second grade and still liked to be picked up after class. She could ask the other parents to sign, right? This was a real opportunity.
Beta agreed eventually but only because it was not endorsing him, only his ability to run for office. Let democracy take care of the rest, she thought. Theirs was a famously left-wing riding. The incumbent was well-regarded and capable. Kevin’s candidacy would, if anything, split the right-wing vote. She reluctantly took the clipboard to pickups.
She approached a group of mothers from her daughter’s class. They stood under the shade of an elm tree, discussing homework assignments. Beta walked up and deftly changed the subject. She said: You’re not saying you agree with him, or that you’d ever consider voting for him, just that he should be able to run for office. Let democracy take care of the rest.
Even still, the mothers on the little grassy knoll were immediately appalled. For one, it violated the unspoken edict of never speaking about politics in mommy gatherings. For two, no one was remotely libertarian.
Sorry, not the Libertarian Party, said one. Not ever.
Ha! cried another. I thought you said Liberal at first!
One openly lied that because she worked for the government, she wasn’t allowed to declare her political affiliations in public. (Well, said Beta, this isn’t quite that. You’re, you know, not endorsing him. And this isn’t really public. The other mom shook her face jaggedly, as if about to become enraged, she was a lifetime civil servant, Beta knew this about her, so Beta let it be.)
Later that day, Beta returned the sheet to Kevin with just two more signatures. One of the names was the openly climate-change denying wife of a public health doctor. (The husband frequently appeared on local TV and radio segments, speaking about vegetables and daily step counts. His cheeks were shiny apple cheeks. Beta had never been able to figure out if the wife was ideological or just ill-informed. Maybe she had a wretched sense of humour?) The other was Fatima, who had been a government economist in Bangladesh but now worked at Tim Hortons while her husband did his second PhD at the university. Fatima was outrageously smart but her English was not great. Beta wasn’t sure if she was a Canadian citizen yet, either, or even whether that mattered. She suspected that Fatima was largely unfamiliar with this particular camp of right-wing thought and, well, it didn’t really matter in the end because the point was Fatima clearly agreed that Kevin was only hoping to exercise his democratic right to run for elected office.
◊ ◊ ◊
You know, said Kevin as she delivered the clipboard of mostly unsigned papers to his walk-up apartment, most girlfriends would agree to be their guy’s campaign manager. I’m still—he shuffled through the pages, glanced down at the two that Beta had collected and scowled—over 60 signatures short of 100. And you have your master’s in political science. You’d be really good at managing my campaign. If you only tried.
Beta did have a master’s degree in political science, this was true. But she had studied political theory in relation to aesthetic philosophy and had taken the maximum number of permitted courses in fine arts. These studies had a vast nothing to do with managing political campaigns. Her thesis was on the class implications of the aesthetic of the English garden. She had drawn on Kant and Locke to show that every act of aesthetic judgement was inherently a statement of political identification. Moreover, while she believed she could elbow grease a lot of things in life, campaign management was not one of them.
I’m not your girlfriend, she said instead, which was also true.
This is to say, disentangling herself from Kevin was proving harder than Beta expected. He called her a lot, always wanting to hang out and do things that were reasonably fun. She had a tough time saying no. Plus, Kevin cried when he was sad. But then he made comments like teachers were altogether overpaid, or women definitely shouldn’t work out of the home until their children are in school, and not speaking to him was easy. In fact, she had mostly perfected this art when the business about running for office came up.
◊ ◊ ◊
The night Beta met Guy, Kevin had insisted that they meet to discuss his campaign. Beta had the night off of parenting and didn’t feel like cooking. They went to the vegan bar and Beta ordered a plate of BBQ “chick’n” wings, which were tasty, but she didn’t mind food that tasted a little bit like rubber. Her arm, she miserably observed, was also rubber.
At the bar, Kevin complained, as he always did, that everything had the not-quite-normal taste of soy. He was also sour that Beta wasn’t more invested in his campaign. The real problem with you, he declared, more cantankerously than was necessary, is that you don’t love freedom.
He dipped a sticky wing into cashew “rawnch” dressing and made a face.
Listen, said Beta, who had heard so much about freedom since Kevin had decided to run for office. I don’t even understand what you mean from that. Do you mean freedom from, like freedom from strife and encumbrance? Do you mean the freedom to do whatever you please? If so, how does that freedom interact with the millions of other thusly unfettered and autonomous freedoms in our society?
Kevin immediately took on a sullen air. He didn’t offer a response.
Meanwhile, there was a performance of drag kings that night, which they hadn’t known about in advance. At once, there was a boom of exciting music and the show was on. Beta had never seen such a thing. She felt nothing strongly about drag queens, which is to say, they were okay, but she was immediately struck by the spectacle in front of her. Drag kings were tremendous. Take the emcee, for instance. He was a stout king in a grey three-piece suit, scuzzy sunglasses, and a deliberately pervy painted-on moustache. He took the stage and started telling jokes.
Is it a man or a woman? A man or a woman? he asked the audience. (A beat.) Liz, the answer is no!
The room barely responded. A spattering of clapping, one cheer. For the eight people out there that got that joke, said the emcee, give yourself a round of applause. For the rest of you, this is going to be a long seven minutes.
Even though they were seated at the bar, territory neutral for not laughing, Kevin groaned. Did you want to get out of here? I’m not sure I can handle this.
Beta shook her head. No, she said, I’m staying. This is great.
Then Guy LaGuy came on. He arrived in a tornado of heavy metal, Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” flipping across the stage, a flurry of long ashy hair and face paint. His nipples were little jagged lightning bolts. His cape was a bolt of red. Guy landed in front of the microphone, fist in the air and began lip syncing: When there’s lightning, you know it always brings me down. Cause it’s free and I see that it’s me. The audience started pumping fists in the air. The noise and movement were transcendent. When he finished, there was a madness of screaming and applause.
◊ ◊ ◊
After the performance, Guy came to sit at the bar to watch the rest of the show. Or it was Guy without most of his makeup, someone completely different. Beta was one of the only women sitting alone (Kevin had made his exit promptly and as promised), so they started chatting. It took a minute for Beta to recognize who she was speaking to. Makeup does do magic. She found out that Guy’s real name was Ghislaine, pronounced “Gee-lahn,” but she had swagger and so often went by Guy off the stage, too.
Beta had this unflappable knack of conversation, unflappable with anyone. She found out in short order that Guy had come to Alberta on her way to pick fruit in British Columbia five years earlier. Loved Edmonton for the culture, which was entirely the first time that Beta had heard this from someone who had Montréal as a point of reference, but then she found out that Ghislaine was from Chicoutimi. Chicoutimi! This was, Beta understood almost immediately, not a place that Guy would ever live again. By day, Guy now worked at the federal government, working as a passport clerk.
Turns out those were good jobs. She was one of those workers who set out the little blue sign indicating that she was bilingual. It wasn’t much more than simple administrative work, she confessed, her rural Québecois accent the sort that rings like bells, but she was paid well enough and had benefits and a pension. The government always needed more native French speakers. You just needed to be patient with people.
But that, said Guy, is nothing about my passion. This, she waved her hand towards the stage, where nothing was happening at the moment, though a topless, much less exciting, king had just finished their performance, is what I live for. It is a man’s world—drag is still so much built around the male gaze—but I do what I can. The queens have become confections, capitalistic consumables on TV, but the kings are still radicals.
So they talked about that instead, which was more interesting anyway.
◊ ◊ ◊
When Beta got home to the main floor of the house that she rented for her and Milda, having put Guy’s number in her phone and having promised to meet her later that week, it wasn’t late. She set to cleaning, unable to stop thinking of Guy, feeling that jangly inner electricity that she always felt after a loud bar show without drinking. After meeting someone new. Cleaning meant addressing the detritus of childhood that consumed space rhizomatically. She collected toys and went through laundry. She took Milda’s jacket and emptied the pockets: a series of small stones, the pinkish one that looked like a heart, a little chunk of something that might have been quartz that she had insisted was a diamond. A nub of a crayon. A piece of string. A quarter. A small, mangled feather. An unwrapped guava hard candy from the vegan restaurant. A roll of love notes.
These love notes. When her daughter had first learned to write, earlier that year, her best friend was Rebecca White. Her only pastime became writing Rebecca White love notes. Confetti of love notes. Stuffed into the heat vents and beneath cushions. Each one read the same: I LOVE YOU REBECCA WHITE. Milda hadn’t learnt lower case letters yet. Maybe this was a declaration that warranted subtlety, anyway. Beta set the stack on the table.
She dumped the rocks on the ground by the front door, having previously convinced Milda that rocks preferred to live outside in rock gardens. Milda took strings and tied her favourites to the porch railing so that they wouldn’t wander off. Beta threw out the whole wad of love notes, save for one. The gesture felt so brazen as to be cruel. Would Milda remember the magnitude of her affection? That love was the practice of love?
Hours later, Beta surveyed her living quarters. Cleaning was so much effort. Once Beta mentioned to another mother at school that she got cranky sometimes that when it was finally the weekend, and she just wanted to relax and hang out with Milda, it was time to start scrubbing toilets. The other mother looked at her blankly. I mean, Beta went on, doesn’t the sheer futility of it get you down sometimes?
Um, said the other mother, who had a spotless home, the sort that practically invited friends over by itself, like a feature spread out of Dwell magazine. We have cleaners come so, uh, it’s not something that really bothers me.
Then Beta felt stupid.
◊ ◊ ◊
Love was the practice of love. Throughout the rest of the summer and fall, Beta made a practice of watching Guy’s practices and performances. She witnessed the whole process. How the scribbly first draft performance contained a rough shape. How Guy developed that kernel. Then, how real audiences swooning to see Guy, flush and alive, deliver. Power was in eliciting desire. Guy was in a man’s world. She held power in a leather gloved fist. She was adored. Beta started to make videos of Guy, which racked up thousands of views online. The task was undoing the primacy of the male gaze. That unlocked desire, a free-flowing thing.
◊ ◊ ◊
Later Beta ran into Kevin while she was walking with Ghislaine and Milda. This was November. Spits of snow were swirling about. They were going from the playground to the coffee shop for hot chocolate. Kevin acted as if Beta’s absence at the Libertarian Party watch party, which Beta suspected might have been just Kevin, meant that she hadn’t followed the results. This was silly. Of course she had. She streamed the elections from home with Milda. Kevin lost, but that wasn’t a surprise to her.
He was glum that he hadn’t even received 1% of the vote. He seemed to blame Beta. The joke candidates, the guy running for the Rhinoceros Party, for instance, had almost the same number of votes.
Did you think you had a shot? Beta asked. She was trying to be gentle, but his hubris! Their neighbourhood was a left-wing stronghold. His platform made no sense. It was obvious to everyone from the start.
Well, he said, I thought for sure I’d beat the candidate for the Pirate Party of Canada.
◊ ◊ ◊
After that, Kevin kept calling and texting. Finally, Beta told Kevin that she had met someone. They weren’t going to get back together. Kevin sobbed over the phone. He said he would miss Milda grow up.
Who is it? he asked through tears.
Beta exhaled loudly. Guy. You remember Guy, right?
Kevin did not remember Guy. Instead, Kevin got mad. In his spare time, he tallied up how many dollars he had spent on her. The account sheet included every time they had gone for arepas on their way home from the gallery and he had paid. Every trip to the vegan bar. He charged her $400 an hour for the work he had done on Unsex Me Now. That was the going rate for engineering work right now. He had helped fix her fence once, had brought over his drill, which he billed at the same rate. The prize that she won for the work should have been divided in half and shared equally so he included that, too. The final number was formidable.
He drank in the places where she had formerly spent time. There, he ran into her friends and told each of them exactly how much money she had stolen from him. Stolen! He added that she’d cheated on him with “some guy” and he suspected he knew which one. Some of these people, mostly the crusty punk vegans who had a constitutional distrust of women anyway, were easily convinced. Kevin approached the girlfriend of the guy under suspicion as Beta’s new love interest and announced that her partner (Justin, the composer) was double-timing. The girlfriend, Chandra, was satisfyingly incensed. She assured Kevin that Beta would never show her face in the gallery again.
Even better, said Kevin.
◊ ◊ ◊
Some months later, Chandra ran into Beta at the grocery store, both of them picking through the same second-rate produce. Chandra confessed. It made no sense, she insisted, as if convincing Beta. For one, Justin had been doing a residency at the Banff Centre at the time.
Chandra had a Bettie Page-like haircut, black and thick with those bangs. She’d had this haircut all the time that Beta had known her, in and out of trends to do with bangs. Her allegiance to the look, pondered Beta as she compared the organic lemons to the ugly lemons, was something. Anyway, she said, she knew Kevin was saying all sorts of terrible things, so she wasn’t surprised.
◊ ◊ ◊
Kevin, Chandra said loudly, wielding bananas, has an anger problem. He was so furious, telling everyone you had cheated on him with some guy and stolen all that money.
◊ ◊ ◊
This is when Beta found out how much money she had stolen from Kevin. It was an incredible amount. It shocked her. You cannot, said Beta, propelled by a sentiment that could have transformed equally into laughter or tears, charge someone an hourly rate for being in a relationship with them! I could have charged him $400 an hour for consulting on his idiot campaign!
He would have owed a lot! agreed Chandra. No one voted for him in the end, did they?
He was beaten both by the Rhinoceros Party candidate and the one for the Pirate Party of Canada. No. Almost no one voted for him.
Ouch, eh?
Did beat the Marxist-Leninist, though. That, I think, was a consolation.
They continued talking through the aisles and then to tills and then walked outside together, clutching their cloth grocery bags. It was February, a Thursday. Monday the temperature without windchill had been -37°C. With the windchill, -51°C. Today it was raining. Chandra was catching the bus, so Beta waited with her in the bus shelter. Having finished with Kevin, Chandra had moved on and was talking about one of her upcoming choral performances, something by an emerging composer from Montréal. The work considered the plasticity of listening. It would challenge the musical function of sound.
Without preconceived narratives, what is music? It’s almost noise art, but more compelling, said Chandra. You need to come.
While they waited, Beta studied the tree growing in the concrete planter by the bus stop. The soil was crusted with gravelly snow and pressed with cigarette butts. A determined elm punched through the mess of it. She could not believe Kevin. How could he? They weren’t together when she met Guy. When would she reach the end of the flat earth and fall off from the territory of men, she thought. She imagined what it would be to be a tree. This tree, that tree, any tree. Make like a tree and leaf. Bid the tree unfix her earth-bound root and leaf. Leaf, leave. As she pondered this, Beta felt her feet become more moored to the ground, rooting downwards through the concrete pad to the infinity of soil below. The connection exhilarated. Guy was not some guy, she was her Guy.
Global warming, commented Chandra. Look at this, she said, holding her hand to catch a stream falling from the roof of the bus shelter in her palm. The sound of wet slurred beneath the plate of speckled gutter ice. The sidewalk glistened wet and promisingly. People think that it’s about the planet getting warmer, she said, but really, it’s about unpredictable weather patterns.
But, replied Beta, newly energized, a revelation unfurling inside of her like a blossom, every day is a blessing.
Notes
I’m grateful for the drag king heroes I found on the internet. The character of Guy is inspired by fellow Albertan Duke Carson, who is such a wonder: https://www.cbc.ca/arts/meet-duke-carson-the-hard-rockin-drag-king-sliding-into-the-hearts-and-pants-of-calgary-1.5000614.
The emcee was inspired by Murray Hill as they appear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47Ly5fVn94&t=156s.
The phrase “Puns are pins on the map tracing the path from word to world.” is from a Paris Review blog post by James Geary entitled “In Defense of Puns,” located online at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/15/in-defense-of-puns/.
M. Jay Smith is an Edmonton writer and poet. Her work has appeared in publications across North America, including Hazlitt, The Los Angeles Times, Readers’ Digest, Prairie Fire, and a myriad of small poetry journals. Her book of poems about the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, the eclipse, was published with Iguana Books in the fall of 2024. She has never run for elected office.
