“I think that’s why my songs are so sad,” he said. “There’s always despair there. It just comes out.”
“It must be disappointing for you that Annie cannot take away the loneliness.”
“I think she makes it worse. She’s there, but not really there. She’s often my lover but she’s often not my friend.”
If the playoff series against the Caps went seven games, completely unthinkable that the Canadiens would get that far, it would coincide with Evan’s coming out as a performer at a loud and crowded rock club called The Close Pin. When Evan broached the topic with the record label, he was told: “We never cancel shows.” The Habs did the unthinkable. They beat Pittsburgh, then went to six against Washington, setting the stage for a seventh game the night of his first concert.
He and Annie watched the game, Evan thinking only what was waiting for him a few minutes from home once the final siren sounded. There would be no sound check until after the game and he knew, win or lose, the audience was going to be in no mood for an Anglo folkie after the seventh game of a playoff series.
The Habs put it away in the third for the first miracle of the evening. Then Evan drove with Annie to the club to find about 300 people jostling and drunk, spilling out onto the sidewalk, still flying from watching the game on the bar’s six screens accompanied by untold pitchers of beer and Red Bull. The place was a zoo. But Evan was riding a high, tinged with a fear burrowing into his bowels.
“What the fuck am I doing here?” kept popping up as he watched the sound crew from the label wrestle with cables and mics and speakers.
He was launching a singing and songwriting career to a room full of inebriated, French-speaking hockey nuts. It was more than surreal. His friends had turned out, lost in the mob, but they were there, mostly theatre people. They knew the fear, understood the beast that could be an audience and wanted to shared his adventure.
It was a baptism by booze. He knocked back a couple of shots and when the wires were plugged in and the mics hot he climbed on stage and tried to say a few words but people ignored him or looked at him as if he had descended from Pluto.
“What the hell was he doing there?” they wondered. As did he. He looked at the guys in the band and decided the only way out of this was to put the pedal to the metal and pretend it was a rehearsal and play. And he did. He would look down at the audience between tunes and there was some applause, some looks of dark mystery — he was an invading army puncturing the balloon of a good hockey drunk; some just regarded him with curiosity. He did his set. Face, body, hands coated in sweat. But he did it, often looking at Annie smiling at him to the left of the stage, often at his friend Meredith, who sat by herself in the back of the club, smiling at him. She had told him: “Just go and have fun, don’t worry about anything.”
Yes, the Canadiens beat Washington, Evan beat his fears. Pretty amazing on both counts. Evan was proud as hell of himself. He had written the songs, he had sung the songs and he had looked the tiger of drunken indifference in the eye and came out smiling. There would be no audience tougher than that night. When they got home around midnight, Evan in a daze, it had all been unreal, Annie, said she had to get to bed. She had a lot of work to do tomorrow. Evan fell into the sofa with the cat and stared into the memories of the evening. He had faced the audience and his fears and came out ahead. They listened, they applauded, people came to shake his hand, say a few kind words over the din. For a few moments between songs he looked out at Annie, staring at him, smiling. She loved to see him perform. He thought: Why did she? She had been just a face in the crowd, now a body in their bed, her ambition to be prepped for her ritual morning run and a day in front of the screen. His pride at having written and performed all those songs was his alone. She could not share it. He thought of that between songs. In front of the audience she didn’t matter. And now, alone on the sofa, feeling good about himself, she still didn’t matter. Things had changed. Of course, he had no idea just how much.
He spent most of his time in the country alone by choice. The loneliness that was his life-long companion was often preferable to being around Annie. Of course, he wasn’t always alone.
Evan met a woman in the Laurentians at a reading of one of his plays.
“I love your CD,” she said. “I listen to it all the time. It really touches me.”
Before he knew what he was saying he had invited her over to the mountain house. He played a few new songs for her over a bottle of wine.
Her name was Patricia, a sculptor and filmmaker, her hobbies were knife throwing and hunting with a crossbow. A hard woman, but all woman. She wore a soft tie dyed cotton top that was scooped out, revealing the tops of her breasts, and tight black jeans with patches. Her long hair was braided. She slipped behind him on the sofa and ran her hand under his sweater and along his back as he sang. The touch was cool and sensual and erotic. And chillingly depressing. He realized he had not been touched like that in years. He hadn’t even realized it. Annie and he had sex, but there was little tenderness or sensuality involved.
Patricia’s soft touch jolted him. He put the guitar down and wrapped his arms around her and they made love on the sofa. It was slow and tender and Evan lost himself in it. Patricia was responsive to his touch, she moaned and sighed and came with a rush, her eyes rolling back, a smile on her face, her arms crushing him to her. He followed and buried his face in her neck.
He smiled to himself. Yes, Annie, some women do have vaginal orgasms.
They lay like that for several minutes. Lovemaking for Annie was always coming and going back to work or to sleep. Post-coital languor was not in the vocabulary. He relished it now. They lay together in silence. Patricia was soft and warm and Evan pushed Annie out of his mind and let himself go with it.
They had a hot tub and went back and made love again. Then Patricia dressed as he watched.
“You’re involved with someone,” she said.
Evan said nothing.
“I can’t have an affair with a guy who’s attached. It was beautiful, you’re beautiful, but …” She was buckling up her jeans, still bare breasted. He wanted her again. But he said nothing. He walked her to her car, kissed her on the cheek and, after her rear lights disappeared down the dark road, climbed into the hot tub and stared at the stars and thought: Life can be good.
“I’m not a very good lover, am I?” Annie asked on several occasions.
“Not the most inventive,” he said. “But you’re fun.” He did love her so her lack of passion or ingenuity was excusable. Their intimacy was about love, after all, but he fretted often that the real thing would be a blessing — love with a good lover. Or was it unreasonable to want it all?
The few times they did go away, it was always about getting there. Stopping to stretch, to eat, to pee, to take a break, was grist for an argument. Annie always had to get there, usually as he drove and she stared at a map. She plotted the course and then plotted a different return course.
“I hate going back the way I came,” she always said. It would’ve made sense had she watched the scenery but she either slept, read a paper or stared at the map. She never seemed to look out the window.
Sex was also not about the trip, but the destination. Foreplay was simply to get the machinery in proper working condition. There was no passion in the warmup. It was the road toward the orgasm. Once hers was achieved, following the script, he was then offered her body. She was dutiful.
“I could be having intercourse with her, say from behind, and she’s like scratching her hair or shoulder or whatever, or even talking to the cat,” he told the therapist. “She’s just waiting for me to come so she can go about her business.”
“Might as well be jerking off,” she said. You want the straight truth, see an Irish therapist. “She doesn’t want to lose control. She can’t let go.”
So it wasn’t his imagination or lack of sensitivity. This wasn’t really lovemaking. Critic till the end, she would often start to analyze the performance w
hile he was still in the throes of orgasm.
He would be gasping and still enjoying his contractions and she would be manic: “Oh darlin’, that was great. Oh boy, was that good, did I come, that was terrific, you’re such a lover, oh man oh man, too much.” She didn’t really pay much attention to the fact that was still somewhere else. She certainly had a way of bringing him down to earth.
Even with women he hadn’t loved, lovemaking was fun and orgasm the denouement. Danny knew that.
He looked at his inbox one night, Annie asleep. It was a message from Danny. All it said was: “Olive oil?”
He typed back: “When?”
The response was immediate. “Now.” She included her address.
He wrote, “30 minutes,” climbed out of bed, and left.
Danny had lit candles all around her bedroom. It was the first time he had seen her new place; the first time he had seen her since they had met at the notary’s and signed away their house. She was dressed in a low-cut long black clinging dress.
She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.
“Just fuck me,” she said. “With my dress on. And don’t come.” And so he did. And didn’t. But she did. As she always did. Several times. It seemed to Evan there was no limit to the number of times her breath would catch, she would moan and her eyes seemed to disappear into her head. Then she laid him out and went to work on him for what seemed like 30 minutes. The only thing she said was: “Don’t come yet.”
The real trip was the foreplay, the tease, the touch, the arousal, the intimate exploration. If it was good and, as Robert B. Parker used to write, even bad sex was good. And that’s true. But good sex was great and good sex meant enjoying each other’s bodies and the giving yourself to someone else so that they could touch and taste and make you tingle. And in those moments, or hours, you were one with someone else. His loneliness was erased by sharing bodies with another. The two became one. Danny had mastered that art. And they kept it up for a year or so, Evan sneaking away or meeting her in a candle strewn motel room in the country. She wanted to prove she could still make him squirm, show him what he was missing. And she did. She took him places he was only too happy to go.
He couldn’t quite get there with Annie. It seems she couldn’t give it up. She needed to orchestrate the event or just offer herself, waiting to get back to work or go to sleep, the dutiful spouse. Sex was what a woman did to keep a man happy and to have an orgasm or two when needed. It was not about play.
In the stillness of the mountains, life was great. He was feeling great. He drank his scotch at night while he played and sang, the hills his only audience. And he killed off a pile of work. New songs, a new essay for the paper, a grant application, a press release for the CD the record label needed his approval on. And he rewrote a big chunk of a new play. When he got back to town he was glowing, memories of a few hours with Patricia renewing him and his faith in himself.
Sitting with Annie on the sofa after supper, the kitchen properly sandblasted, he relayed what he had done that week. He was looking for a pat on the back, some approval from the woman he loved. Was he still a little boy?
“You don’t really do all that,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, it’s not like you really do all that.”
“Well then, who does? It’s done.”
“It’s not like you do it at the same time.”
“What do you think I did it all this week?”
She grew quiet.
“What do you think I did this week?”
“I don’t know why I said that.”
It was something he would hear a few more times. He knew why she said it. She had to keep his ego in check.
Their first anniversary and he booked a table at a neighbourhood bistro. They liked it there. The hostess was a lovely young woman from France who kissed them each time they came and wore beautiful dresses and just the right amount of décolleté to elevate the experience. Evan and Annie admired her beauty. She was maybe 25.
They ordered bubbly to celebrate their first 12 months of being the perfect couple. They beamed at each other across the table. Against all odds they had found each other.
“I really admire you,” Franklin had told him one night, in recovery from his imploded love affair. “You’re living proof that us old farts can find love and be happy, if there is such a thing as happiness. But you’re making it work. It gives me hope.”
Once dinner arrived the table was set for an issue that was burning Evan’s tongue. He had rehearsed how to say what he was sure had to be said. They wished each other bon appetit, Annie poked and prodded her food with her fork, making sure everything on the plate was dead. Evan ate a few bites of his gigot d’agneau and put his fork down.
“Annie, I love you but I thought we could talk about how … you’ve criticized just about every aspect of my life. What I read, how I work, how I exercise, the films I watch, how I write, how often I go in and out of the house, how often I eat, how much clothes I have, my shoes. Can you maybe cut back on the criticism a bit?”
She put her cutlery down, took a sip of wine and walked out. He waited a few minutes and paid the bill and left. The only imperfections permitted to be pointed out, it seemed, were his.
He stopped planning weekends with her, stopped planning vacations with her, stopped relying on her. It was too much stress. Each summer she said she was looking forward to the cottage on the lake Evan rented, but as the date approached, the time she could sacrifice shrank. It would be two weeks, then 10 days then maybe a week but it usually ended up a few weekends. But he had stopped caring. The last time she came up she spent a week on the computer at the dining room table, the radio on constantly. She didn’t want to eat on the table because her work was spread there.
She had no interest in going into town for a meal, no interest in taking a drive through the mountains, no walks to the back lake. She had too much work to do. She had moved her office from town to the mountains and Evan was again trying not to disturb her. She had a five-minute radio bit to do at the end of the week and she was stretching the research out to fill the week. When she told him not to eat lunch at the table while she was working, he lost it.
“Get your stuff,” Evan said. “I’m taking you to the bus. Go home. I’m on vacation and that includes a vacation from you. Let’s go.”
“I have a lot of work to do,” she said. “I need to …”
“I don’t care,” Evan said. “I’m on vacation. And if that means vacation from you and the radio and your need for quiet and your addiction to work, than so be it. You’re not fucking up my vacation.” He had no idea what she saw in his eyes but she put her things together, the papers, the clothes, the computer and followed him to the car. He drove her to the bus stop in Saint Sauveur and left her there. He had nothing to say.
“I’ll call you,” she said. Evan put the car in gear and didn’t look back. His fingers started drumming on the steering wheel, he started to sing and he smiled all the way back to the cabin.
He never asked her to join him at the lake again and never planned another holiday with her. But he ratcheted up his women shopping. His night time indulgence with the scotch bottle became increasingly important. And there was Danny. An e-mail or a phone call and she would come to the country. Danny got to prove to him over and over what he was missing and Evan immersed himself in the sexual abandon he craved. It was their unspoken pact. Evan felt no guilt. An evening with Danny was his reward for the multiple evenings with Annie’s disorders.
He was making dinner and turned to see her on the floor on her knees with her head in the freezer. She was in a panic, close to hysterics. There was too much food in the freezer, she hissed, and she began picking through it manically and sliding it along the kitchen floor. Frozen chops, steaks, sausage, a chicken were slid like curling stones along the hardwood, under the island counter, twirling into the dining room.
“What are we going to do with all this? It’s g
oing to just end up in the garbage. It gets freezer burn and then it’s useless. What is this? And this? It’s just going to go to waste, we’ll never eat it.” What would her audiences or her friends say if they could see her like this, her head in the freezer, on her knees, raving?
Evan took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. He could have explained that it was frozen for a reason but he learned it was best not to try and be rational during moments of obsessive panic. He pulled her to her feet gently, turned her around and hugged her, stroking her hair. She slowly calmed.
“Bad attack of freezer fear,” he said, smiling. “Killer freezer fear. We’ll have a barbecue, invite the kids, eat it all.”
“Freezer fear,” she said smiling. “Gets me every time.” She held on to him. Then they made a game of it, him sliding the slabs of protein along the floor to her and her putting them into the freezer, pushed as far back against the wall as she could so she wouldn’t have to see them.
As a fun stress-relief mechanism, he started baking cakes. His first carrot cake cost about $25 in ingredients but when he pulled it from the oven, steaming, he was jubilant. It smelled great. Looked the way it was supposed to. He was king of the kitchen. His first cake. Annie came in and took a knife from the drawer and cut it in half.
“It’s just going to go bad if we don’t give it away. I’ll give it to Francine, she’ll like it.”
Before Evan could say anything she was pulling plastic wrap from the cupboard and encasing his masterpiece. All he could do was stare. He wasn’t even sure who Francine was or why he should give her half of his magnificent creation. He was speechless.
They sat in the two white Ikea armchairs in front of the fire. She was watching him intently. He had asked to talk. And she was listening.
“You know when I was editing the magazine, I was the boss,” he told her. “I was the boss when I produced the radio show, when I was editor at the other magazines I worked, and I had people to talk to, work with, discuss ideas. I had some control. Now that’s gone. In our little publishing business you insist on controlling almost everything.”
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