“Amen to that.” Patrick nodded approvingly.
The arrival of our food helped to dissipate the soul-searching. Appetite has a way of banishing abstraction. Patrick and I ate chicken with our fingers and washed it down with beer from the can.
“Well,” said Patrick comfortably after he had rinsed his fingers under the kitchen faucet, “burp and scratch. That really hit the spot. And now I must move along.”
The day was winding down. I walked Patrick to the elevator, where we said goodnight and shook hands before he stepped into the conveyance. We seemed to make rather an issue of shaking hands, reconfirming with each salutation and separation that our relationship was purely professional. Whatever had passed between us had ended a long time ago.
Patrick and I met in men’s underwear. I had gone to one of the department stores to replenish my supply of jockey shorts, the ones advertising “comfo-crotch” without whose support I could not get through the day. I had not been living alone all that long and had yet to master several of the domestic arts: laundry, for instance. I speak now of that innocent age before ring-around-the-collar turned into a national issue. The fact remained that my underwear was decidedly tattletale grey, and one day I bleached it. Did I bleach it: fifty-fifty liquid bleach and boiling water. My jockey shorts came out looking and feeling like whipped cream, with just about as much tensile strength.
The garments disintegrated as I pulled them on. For a week I went to the office wearing underwear looking as though it had been stitched from fish net. Finally I made time late one afternoon to go shopping, an activity I thoroughly dislike unless I am looking for something frivolous.
As I searched through the department store shelves for my waist size, I noticed a man looking at boxer shorts. I looked again. Tilt! That truly devastating combination of blue eyes and black hair. I guessed he was probably Irish, the type of black Irish that always make me think of toora-loora-lay. As I checked him out I could tell he was sneaking furtive glances at me. Much more adroit at making pickups than doing laundry, I knew that anyone buying boxer shorts was not going to make the first move.
I edged closer, under the guise of looking at undershirts, which I have never worn.
“Does that brand have deodorant freshness in every stitch?” I asked. “One can’t be too careful.”
His startled look gave way to an uncertain smile as he realized my intentions were friendly. “My wife usually buys these for me, but she’s out of town.”
God bless her for that! I thought to myself before I spoke. “Unattached husbands can easily get into trouble. Let’s have a drink so I can keep an eye on you.” I was young then, and youth is unsubtle.
For a moment Patrick stood irresolute, like a figure in a comic strip with a tiny angel hovering over one shoulder saying, “No! No!” while above the other shoulder a diminutive devil whispers, “Yes! Yes!” The devil won.
On the way back to my apartment I learned his name was Pat and that he worked for a living. That was all. I figured along with the out-of-town wife he probably had a closet full of hangups.
We all start out with inhibitions of one sort or another; some of us shed them earlier than others. Patrick undressed with his back to me and slid furtively under the sheet. Even that brief glimpse was enough to show me he had a body most men would have been proud to flaunt.
Sex was at once passionate and perfunctory. It took him about seven minutes to shower, dry, dress, and disappear. The only traces he left were a damp towel and a scrap of paper on which he had written “Pat” and a phone number.
We met maybe half a dozen times after that. Once he realized I was not going to crack the code and invade his privacy he began to relax, but such conversation as we had remained cryptic. He was a truly masculine man, free of aggression and able to be active or passive, or both in tandem. What I remembered most clearly, far more than the couplings or the cliches of sex – “Oh, God! It’s so good. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop!” and “I’m coming!” gargled as though it had about thirty-seven syllables – what I really remembered were his eyes. They were the most extraordinary blue I had ever seen, deep, clear, the blue of fine china, lapus lazuli, an October sky. They were eyes into which one could easily tumble and drown, but in those days I was a strong swimmer.
As I opened another beer I found myself idly wondering whether Patrick still wore boxer shorts, surely the most asexual garment ever designed. To be sure, he never had them on for very long, but I remember the wide cotton legs billowing from the crimped elastic waistband like failed culottes. Take a man, any man, put him into a pair of boxer shorts, an undershirt – the white cotton kind before they went chic and became tank tops – add a pair of mid-calf socks held up by elastic garters, and you have a safe sex object that would turn off the devil himself. Maybe we should add boxer shorts to the growing list of safe sex devices, although the underwear lobby might balk at the suggestion.
Anyhow, the wife returned from the mother she had gone home to. There had obviously been an attempted reconciliation, which did not take. But, to give Patrick due credit, he did give it the old college try. We did not see each other again.
I settled into my Eames chair, and for a while wandered the grounds of Mansfield Park and listened to Fanny Price’s rather mean-spirited disapproval of what seemed to me like perfectly harmless amateur theatricals. Imagine disapproving of play-acting in the drawing room.
The old order changeth.
11.
AN OPPORTUNITY AROSE FOR ME to go to Toronto to clear up some business for the office, and I jumped at the chance. Ordinarily my reluctance to visit that metropolis springs not from negative feelings for Toronto itself, for it is a city I enjoy, but from the obligation I am under to see certain people who live there – my sister, for instance. Should she get wind that I am planning a visit, she will telephone long distance to inquire what night I am coming to dinner. I know perfectly well she doesn’t much want to see me, a feeling reciprocated with compound interest; but her code demands we meet whenever geography permits, like heads of state whose military alignment cannot totally conceal their economic rivalry.
Toronto also harbours a friend from childhood, one of those sentimental barnacles that attach themselves to our lives and cannot be scraped loose. Larry, or Lawrence Townsend II, has never outgrown the idea that he was put on this earth to have a good time, all very well. Now in his late fifties, he still thinks of good times as those he enjoyed at twenty-five, as evidence of which he wants to turn my Toronto visits into three-day drunks. The result is that I find myself sneaking in and out of the city, coat collar turned up, hat brim pulled down, like one of the ten most wanted men. I walk the streets in fear, lest I bump into someone at Bay and Bloor who will betray my unheralded presence and earn me a dressing down on the long-distance phone.
On this weekend, however, I would be able to stride along University Avenue with head held high. Having so recently endured my sister over Sunday dinner at Mother’s, I was under no obligation to see her, telephone her, or even be obliged to offer an excuse as to why I did not. Furthermore, Larry Townsend was spending two weeks in Nassau, ostensibly soaking up sunshine and rum, and, I strongly suspect, getting the lay of the land. I do not know whether it is better in the Bahamas, as the ads suggest; but if anyone can find out for certain, it is Larry. I only hope he is being careful.
The result was that I could enjoy the luxury of a weekend in Toronto, first-class hotel with reduced rates, and no obligations beyond those of a little business I could easily mop up on Friday afternoon.
Perhaps the reason I have always enjoyed Toronto is that I do not waste time comparing it with Montreal. The two cities are as different as chalk and cheese, to borrow a threadbare analogy; although having once tasted chalk as a child, to the teacher’s predictable and boring dismay, I am not certain I don’t prefer it to that goat’s milk cheese with which Greek restaurants encumber salads. For comparisons with Toronto one should look to major American cities, Chic
ago, or Houston. Montreal is less a city than a cluster of neighbourhoods. The old loyalties of English, French, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish are giving way to alliances based on whether you approve of the Olympic Stadium, where you go to buy pâté campagne and Boursault, and in what part of Florida you own real estate.
I flew to Toronto and, perhaps unwisely, asked for a seat in the no-smoking section. In future I will risk death from secondary fumes and request the smokers’ part of the aircraft. Smokers keep to themselves. Along with cigarettes, those who smoke carry briefcases and portfolios, books and magazines. They puff and drink and read and do not strike up conversations.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the woman by whom I was trapped against the window. She was one of those meek who shall inherit the earth because they trample all civilized defenses, refuse to read body language, take no for an incentive. By radiating a kind of determined helplessness, she coerced one of the other passengers into folding her coat trimmed with Hudson seal and stowing it in the overhead compartment. Then she squeezed her adipose hips into the centre seat, under which she made several unsuccessful attempts to wedge her plastic shopping bag. Next, she unzipped her galoshes and managed to dig me in the ribs three times as she fished around for the ends of her seat belt. From a large, ugly chintz knitting bag she took an unfinished baby sweater, in one of those unpleasant pinks which has too much blue, and began, ostentatiously, to knit.
I could see her trying to catch my eye as I turned the pages of my national news magazine. I was just as determined not to be caught.
“They say that’s a good magazine,” she said out loud to no one in particular. “I don’t read it myself. Don’t have time to read magazines.”
She gave her strand of pink wool a tug, causing the ball to pop out of the knitting bag and land in my lap. I handed the ball of wool across the arm of the seat without looking at her, but that small gesture provided all the opening she needed.
“Thank you. That was clumsy of me. But I have to finish this sweater and make another one too. My daughter’s just gone into labour, ten days early, and they say it will be twins. We were that surprised. There’s no twins in my family, or my late husband’s. But they can tell nowadays if it’s going to be a boy or a girl – or twins. The X-ray, you know. Anyhow, there I was, halfway through a batch of chocolate chip bran muffins, when they telephoned to say she had been taken to hospital and could I get on the plane and come right up. And me without a bag even packed.”
And she was off. Nor could I turn her off. Once started, she needed no further encouragement than the sound of her own voice, nasal, petulant, incantatory. By the time the coffee trolly had rattled to a halt beside our seats, she had moved beyond the unfolding birth to the trials that lay in store. “And I always have the same argument with my daughter, but she will put powder in the washing machine. I use the liquid myself. Spot soak the stain before I put it in; always do. But she claims the powder is more economical. Maybe it is if you buy them big boxes nobody can even lift. And she will use a dryer, even in summer. I always say you can’t have fresher clothes than those as is hung on the line, in the good fresh air.”
I sat there, stoically trying to read about surrogate motherhood, but my mind kept returning to that scene in a James Bond movie where the villain is sucked through the broken window of a plane. However, I suppose it would be difficult to pull off a similar stunt on a crowded aircraft without attracting attention.
Then, just as suddenly as she had started, the woman stopped, as if someone had pressed a switch. The adrenaline-fuelled excitement of flying towards grandmotherhood dissipated itself. In moments she had fallen asleep, the knitting lying in her lap. I had to prod her awake so I could get off the plane.
An excellent lunch at Fenton’s went a long way towards restoring my good humour. An hour or so in a handsome office overlooking the University of Toronto campus took care of the business I had come to transact, and I stepped into a mild afternoon, a suggestion of spring softness already in the air.
With no schedule and time on my hands, I walked down to Dundas and along to the art gallery. I did not go into the special exhibit, or even the permanent collection, but headed, as I always do, straight to the large hall housing the Henry Moore Collection. I love this room, hushed, tranquil, with the huge, spectral, yet benign figures who seem to communicate with one another in a language I can sense but not hear. To stroll among these monolithic, gentle presences is to enter a dimension of time suspended. Much as I love the large reclining Henry Moore at the northwest corner of Dominion Square in my own city (drive past it and watch how fluidly it moves), it stands alone, stripped of the resonances that here echo from one figure to another, each in itself a whole and at the same time part of a greater whole. Although I have never meditated, I should imagine that the ease and tranquillity of spirit attained are not dissimilar to what I experience in this extraordinary room.
The small group who had been visiting the Henry Moore Hall when I entered now left, and for a few precious moments I had the place to myself. From a corner of the room I turned for a new perspective just in time to see a man walk through the door. Even distant he seemed familiar; a moment passed before I made the connection and recognized him as Charles Grant, the young man slated to be best man at my niece’s wedding.
I confess I felt a small pang of regret. Unless I were to crouch behind the nearest pedestal and duck from exhibit to exhibit, like someone in a counter-espionage movie, I would have to make my presence known and step back into time as motion. The greeting would break the spell.
Often against my better judgement, I remain a social creature. I walked across the room until I was close enough to Charles to speak in my normal volume. To call out in this room would be unthinkable, bad manners at their most uncouth. These giant figures were my hosts; as mere intruder and guest I must tread softly, speak low, tender courtesy.
“Charles.”
He turned, registered who I was, and dissolved into a grin. “Uncle Geoffry! I mean, Mr. Chadwick. The last person I expected to meet.”
I could not resist his grin and smiled as we shook hands. “This is where people of taste always meet. Now, as I am neither your uncle nor your employer, why don’t you call me Geoffry.”
“I’d like that. You’re into Moore too, eh?”
“Love it. A trip to Toronto always includes a visit.”
“I wanted to be a sculptor,” said Charles, “but I didn’t have the money. And I didn’t want to become a Canada Council bum, existing from grant to grant. It takes money to be an artist. There’s nothing ennobling about being poor. Maybe I should find myself a rich patron.” He laughed. “But it would help if I looked like Rupert Brooke, not Dylan Thomas.”
I too laughed at the analogy. Charles Grant was attractive, moreso than he realized. He had the glow of youth and such an abundance of vitality one could feel him without touching.
“From what I’ve heard about Dylan Thomas, I wonder when he found time to write poems. Do you come here often?”
“Whenever I’m in the area. I’m a gallery member, so I can duck in and out. You’re in Toronto on business?”
“That’s the excuse. Business, and a bit of goofing off.” I glanced at my watch. “It’s perhaps earlier than I usually start drinking, but one ought to break training once in a while. Are you at liberty to join me?”
“Love it.”
“Tell you what. You just arrived and would like to look around. Let’s meet at the front desk in, say, half an hour. That will give me a chance to roller-skate through the permanent collection and whatever else has been laid on. By then we will both have earned our drinks.”
“The Protestant ethic speaks?”
“Correct. Thirty minutes. Let’s synchronize our watches.”
After half to three-quarters of an hour in any picture gallery anywhere in the world, I find my rapt contemplation interrupted by lower back pain and a pressing need to find the men’s room. Charles w
as already in the foyer when I got there, clutching his down-filled parka as though it might at any moment take flight. A short taxi ride brought us to my hotel, and soon we were seated in a corner of the bar off the main lobby, amidst wicker chairs and silk ferns, where a cocktail waitress with crimped hair and purple eyelids brought us drinks I am convinced she measured with a teaspoon, not a jigger.
I poured soda water into my glass, which I raised. “To the wedding!”
Charles made a wry face as he lifted his glass. “I suppose.”
“You sound a bit glum for someone who’s going to see a good friend get married, to a radiant bride, in white, on the happiest day of her life. To judge from your expression, she ought to be wearing black bombazine.”
“Maybe she should. I don’t think Doug should get married.”
“May I ask why not?”
“That’s one question I didn’t think you’d have to ask.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” I fibbed glibly.
“I think you do. I think you have gone through your life with your eyes open. You are old enough, and smart enough, to know which end is up.”
“You mean, only the young die good?”
In reply he smiled. I always drink my first highball quickly, and took a moment to snag our waitress’s attention before I continued. “Could you be referring to that same sensitive side of Douglas’s nature that compelled him to design the wedding rings?”
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