I’ve figured out that if I run the bath for 10 minutes on full heat and two minutes ice-cold, the water in my clawfoot tub will reach the perfect temperature. Scalding, sort of. Steaming.
I’ve figured out that if I get out of work around 17:00 and walk three blocks to the train station and catch the southbound line that comes through at, or around, 17:07 and take it for five stops I will get off at, or around, 17:19 considering there are no major delays. It takes another 12 minutes to get to my apartment building and two minutes to check the mail and only one minute to climb three flights of stairs and so I can usually make it home before 18:00, considering the fuck-ass old lock on my door opens on the first try and I don’t run into one of my geriatric neighbors who I am certain hate me. If I make it home around 18:00 that only leaves four agonizing hours of conscious living and then at 22:00 I’ll allow myself my daily allotment of 150 mg of Trazodone that will allow me to jump right into tomorrow.
I no longer light candles or listen to music while in my clawfoot tub. I set a face towel and the book I have been reading and my cigarettes and the various accessories needed on top of the closed toilet lid, which lies just enough outside of my reach that I will have to rise and kneel and strain my arm to retrieve anything.
I only have four hours, three days, and 17 weeks of bearing my teeth and grinning through it until my contract is up and I can put in my two weeks and quit in a way that is respectful but firmly absolute; so I can use Angie as a reference for jobs in the future. Then I can get the fuck out of this city, get the fuck out of this country and break this awful spell I’m under.
I moved here in June, freshly graduated from my prestigious coastal elite just-as-much-preppy-as-it-was-party New England university that had severely insulated my worldview and gave me the connections needed to get this ‘lucky break’ of a job.
I remember how excited I was to see my work visa in my passport and telling my fellow graduates with a condescending glee that I had landed this big-shot job abroad. I mean yes, Canada is still continental, but Montreal was exotic! Francophone, Quebecois. While you losers were stuck in America, I was getting the fuck out of dodge.
I’ve figured out that about half a cup of lavender bath salts is just enough for the water to feel smoother and smell nice, but not too much that it leaves a gross film on my clawfoot tub and my skin. I am standing while my clawfoot tub fills up and pacing up and down the bounds of porcelain in attempts to dissolve the bath salts sooner and after a while my legs won’t be able to bear the full heat of the tap and I step out for a second and my feet and calves are a stinging bright red.
I moved here not knowing any French, the company I work for is based out of Vancouver and so all of business is done in English anyway and I was hired on to bring an “American perspective” and so I thought I would get by just fine and everyone here speaks French and English. In my pompous American perspective, I had made this fatal assumption that I could get by with merci and excuses-moi and si vous plait and if anything my foreignness would be charming and exotic and I would be accepted, even as a stranger in a strange land. I have made little to no progress on my French. I find the accent here to be ugly and offensive.
I’ve been living here for about eight months give or take and I have been taking baths in my clawfoot tub every day after work beginning in November, at first in an attempt to beat the
oncoming frigid Canadian winters and supplement the less-than-par heating system in my apartment and apparently baths are supposed to regulate internal circulation or something like that and I guess it’s nice to meditate and relax. But then my days began to drag on longer and longer and I could feel each agonizing minute and second pass me by and I began to feel so desperate for the day to end and for me to sleep and skip to the next day and bring myself closer to getting out of here and I was so desperate to distract myself and fill my time and quiet, if not entirely eradicate, my internal monologue and so desperate to fill the time in a way that did not involve leaving my apartment and feeling the curious and condescending eyes of everyone around me and feel the dread of being watched and so sure that everyone was looking at me. So there wasn’t much else to do in my 45 m2 apartment besides spending more time in my clawfoot tub.
I crank the temperature knob all the way to cold, lean back and stretch my bare feet, which are even more red and the red is even more bright and the stinging is even worse, under the freezing water, which is just as pleasantly uncomfortable as the scalding water.
I learned that zero is freezing, and ten is not. Twenty is pleasant, and thirty is hot. I still cannot visually conceptualize a kilometer.
I moved here with the expectation that I would have at least a few coworkers my age, hoping for a Canadian camaraderie with my professional peers. I’m the only one in the marketing department who is both under 30 and unmarried. Christophe, the project leader I seem to always be working under, refuses to wear his wedding ring and compulsively degrades his seemingly gentle and perfect wife and is hellbent on taking me out to experience "true Montreal nightlife." He disgusts me.
I turn off the tap and the water line is so high that if I move too much or too abruptly water will spill out onto the floor and so I just sit there, hugging my knees into my chest and not reaching for my book and not reaching for my cigarettes and just staring, staring at the wall and trying to only feel the heat of the water and the bones that protrude out of my hands and elbows.
I’ve figured out that if you point and nod and feign shyness with the old women who work in the bakeries by my office they won’t take your American accent as an excuse to stumble through a numbingly boring story about some trip they took to Miami with their husband god knows how long ago and ask you about Trump and your barbaric health care system and the bloated sense of self-importance my motherland carries within the international community.
I moved into this apartment specifically for the clawfoot tub. I was so charmed by it, that I signed the fucking lease before even seeing the place in person and before seeing the nearly century-old windows that don’t close all the way which let snow blow in all winter long. Before knowing there was neither a garbage disposal, nor a dishwasher, nor a single clothes dryer in the entire building. I was sure I would never see a clawfoot tub like that ever again and so I signed the lease.
I can feel the water in my clawfoot tub becoming lukewarm and so I’ll drain it about a quarter of the way and fill it back up with scalding hot water and this time I do not put my feet under the running tap.
I’ve figured out that I am completely alone and I’m trapped until the end of that stupid fucking contract and I signed up for it and I put myself here and I was just an undergrad who was so blissfully unaware of how hard it really was to grow up and I’m trapped in an apartment that makes me feel claustrophobic in a way that infects me with hatred and malice and resentment and all the different synonyms for angry.
I’ve figured out that the only reason I am here and hateful and unhappy is because of decisions I made and that I have overestimated my independence and resilience and ability to “make it” in a country I will never call home.
I am beginning to see goosebumps on my legs and feel my chest tighten and my hair stick to my back and the water in my clawfoot tub has shifted from lukewarm to outright cold.
I’ve figured out that humans are not solitary creatures and we need people and more importantly I need people and this bath is the next best thing I’ll have to a warm embrace from someone whom I love and who loves me.
I pull the rubber stopper out of the drain and lay it on the tile floor and listen to the whirl of the drain and lay my head back on my clawfoot tub and feel the water line slowly recede across my body mimicking the feeling of fingertips as it moves lower and lower. My clawfoot tub will be empty and I’ll lay there and water will drip from my hair onto my skin and I’ll stare thoughtlessly at the ceiling until my back begins to feel numb.
By then I won’t need a towel.
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