No One

by George Bowering

  No One

  George Bowering

  Contents

  No One

  About the Author

  Copyright

  He is walking up Tenth Avenue, slower than he used to, checking out the scene, especially the women and girls. He often seems to find himself out on Tenth Avenue about the time the girls in their private school uniforms are about. He’s been in this neighbourhood for almost half a year, still getting used to it.

  He sees that he is approaching a short woman who is walking down the sidewalk, and so he has to make the usual decision — pretend he’s wrapped in thought, looking at the ground, feigning interest in something back there down the hill, or look at her and smile a hello. By the time they are just about to meet he sees that she is looking right into his eyes, and she is not smiling. He takes that as a signal not to smile himself.

  They pass one another, and he continues up the hill, to the library, to the mailbox. The small persistence with which she looked at him nags at him. Was she challenging him to recognize her? Did he recognize her? Yes, now he thinks she looked as if she could have been a certain woman he has wronged. But this one has grey hair. But she had looked sort of challengingly at him.

  In the following days and weeks he thinks about the way she looked at him. It could have been her, couldn’t it? She could have gone grey after they stopped seeing each other. Maybe she went grey for a reason he doesn’t like to imagine. The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks it was the woman he wronged. She hadn’t said anything, though. Maybe he was supposed to. Maybe she heard he was living around here now, and was walking with purpose on this sidewalk. He had not seen her there before that and he had not seen her since that time.

  It must have been her. She must have wanted to see him once, or more likely she wanted him to see her, with her grey hair.

  If he wants to he could find out where she lives, find out what has happened in the meantime. Or he could just forget about it. Sure.

  Well, “he” was I.

  He will be I for a while here.

  Though maybe not throughout.

  I just know you are going to be tempted to throw this book away when I start off by comparing myself with Odysseus, or Ulysses, if you like. He is, I know it, the first great hero of our Western culture, and the epic voyage is the first great type of narrative we have. I don’t even look right. I remember Odysseus looking like Kirk Douglas in his prime, what with those naked thighs and that chin your knuckles would break against.

  Remember when Kirk finally got home, and there were all those assholes hanging around Penelope, waiting for her to finish knitting so they could compete for her hand, and ass and property? Kirk gets back and shoots an arrow through a bunch of circles for some reason, goes on a bloody killing spree, wiping out all those suitors at top speed — that’s what I remember, the speed. And one guy, Kirk grabs his head and splits it on a double-headed axe that was in a chopping block. Errgh, we squirmed in our seats at the Lawrence Theatre.

  I didn’t look all that bad when I was twenty or thirty or even fifty-five, but I was no Kirk. There have been some more recent Odysseus movies, and all the heroes have had meatier chests than I ever grew. But I didn’t look all that bad.

  And I did resemble the guy in one important way. No matter how many adventures I was forced to have, no matter how long and zigzagged the voyage, all I ever wanted to do was get home and be with my wife.

  Her name was not Penelope, of course, though that was the name of one of the other ones. Her real name was Harriet, still is, I guess, wherever she is now. But everyone called her Honey. It was kind of funny, because that meant that I had one less pet name to call her by. Also, all my friends called her Honey, which was funny at first, but I got used to it. She never got used to me, though. Here’s what she called me more often than not: Asshole. I would always answer to that, I can tell you.

  I’ll bet Penelope never called Kirk an asshole.

  Honey could always be counted on to be clear about her opinions. In her shop she kept up a steady stream of observations, opinions and remarks, not to mention analysis and characterization.

  She would occasionally read one of my new poems. I am one of those painters who write poems. The country is full of them. Us.

  “Who’s that about?” she would ask, not quietly. “How old is she? Old enough to vote?”

  Nine times out of ten the poem would be about her.

  I spent most of my free time courting Honey. I would come by the shop with an orange-peel-and-ginger chocolate from the so-called Belgian place up the street, and offer it to her.

  “Give it to one of your skinny ones,” she would say. “You know damn well I am trying to lose a few kilograms.”

  But I had seen the mess in the kitchen that morning. A giant empty Ruffles bag lay on the tiled floor beside the wastebasket.

  I don’t remember any of them as being particularly skinny. In fact, one of the best was a little on the heavy side. She had a king-sized mattress, and it was on the floor of a room the same size as a king-sized mattress. The idea was that you took your clothes off just outside the room and left them there while you went in, on your hands and knees.

  She was usually shiny. Even before we started, even before she got that fine layer of sweat on her round muscular well-tanned body, she was shiny. She was what they call toned, I think. Everything on her was somewhat bigger than average, and she was really fit. It was a little intimidating if you were a bit sinewy and pallid such as I was, especially when she started the breathing and grunting.

  She seemed to be enjoying herself so much, as if someone had had her on a chain all day and now she was let loose to exercise her physicality. This was Danaë.

  The walls should have had mattresses on them too. She would come at me all dangerous and hungry, on her hands and knees, breathing that turned into singing, and what was I supposed to do? I lay on my belly with my feet together, and she landed on top of me, weighing more than I did, her breasts muscular, large and globular on my back.

  She rolled off and easily flipped me over.

  I guess there might have been one or two who were skinny. There was really short, really tall, really hairy, really loud. But now that I mention it, I could have really gone for skinny. You could lift skinny up and move her. Come to think of it, that puts me in mind of that one in Regina. She held on to the shower-curtain rod without having to worry about bringing the curtain down.

  But that is not what I am on about today. If you want to read about a number of women and interaction, call it that. You should read the novel I was reading last night. It is called Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, and all the important characters are women. There isn’t any odyssey, really, unless you include wandering the world to look at archeological ruins. Well, I guess you could say that. Anyway, it is not the easiest thing in the world to read this novel, but one thing that does come through — women are interacting just about any way you can imagine.

  There is also a lot of talk about fiction.

  If you can imagine.

  I once spent an evening with the author of Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon in a roadhouse somewhere along the Bayou Teche. It was a huge old wooden place, including a dark bar with bright advertising lights, a big dining room crammed with long tables, and the biggest room of all, the dance hall, with a stage at the north end. On the stage was my favourite local band of all time, drums, accordion, steel guitar, banjo, stand-up bass with a pickup, piano, triangle and washboard. Plus a skinny old lady in a dress that had been washed three hundred times, and a violin that was only occasionally tucked under her chin. These were all white people, and so were the dancers.

 
Above the dancers, about eight ceiling fans rotated out of time with the music.

  As you know, when Honey made a crack about one of my “skinny ones,” it was coloured by the fact that she herself was a little hefty. Not the way Danaë was — Danaë was round everywhere in bunches, muscles all over her, swelling calves and shoulders and so on. Shiny and tanned. Honey was more like an ordinary girl with very white skin who had got wider from whatever angle you saw her. Her ankles and wrists were still dainty, but her waistline and various other lines were of more size than they had once been.

  It wasn’t that she was a rail when I first met her, when we were first an item. She was regular size, but a kind of delicate regular size. She never had much money, and in fact she owed money here there and everywhere when I met her, and her wardrobe was not extensive, but what she did have was kind of expensive, or at least I thought so. She liked her long coat the best of all, I think. It fell from her shoulders in a tall A, stopping halfway between her knees and her feet. You would never never think of reaching up inside it, it was so elegant.

  One time, about half a year after we had met, I asked her if I could lay her on that coat spread on the floor. No, she said, and she hung it up carefully, but then she got down on the floor.

  “How did you like that?” I asked, reaching around her still body for the cigarettes.

  “Shh,” she said. “Don’t talk it away.”

  “I have never appreciated this floor properly before,” I said.

  “Shh,” she said.

  There were two filter-tip cigarettes in the pack. Perfect. We used the package for an ashtray. We were always smoking in those days. We economized on groceries so we could smoke tailor-made cigarettes.

  I had lain on floors before then, and I have been on floors since, but never before or since did I become unaware of how hard a floor can be. Later, when Honey became more, let us say, upholstered, she couldn’t be talked into lying on the floor. As the years went by she became less interested in having fun outdoors too. Things became a lot more ordinary as time went by, and less frequent.

  I remember that in our first apartment we had fun in all four rooms plus the little bathroom. But later, when we had a nice big house, it was a rare occurrence when she would come to my room. Yes, my room.

  And every time she declined fun, she would mention that I was getting my fun elsewhere. Well, eventually I did, from time to time. But I didn’t want to have to. Mainly I wanted to rest in the hive. I wanted to be home, in my home, to buzz there. But they kept trying to kidnap me. Some wanted to use me. Others wanted to make me their prisoner. They would often laugh when they read the tattoo on my ass.

  “Remember the floor in our apartment before you moved in?” I asked her.

  “Yes, I do. That was a wonderful floor,” she said. “That was before you were an asshole.”

  Sometimes I imagined being with her on the floor at her shop. I am not good with the names of fabrics, but anything on the floor in that shop would have been fine.

  After shopping hours, of course.

  Most of the dancers were skinny old folks, or maybe in that watery part of the world grown-ups look older than they really are. I am not a big fan of shit-kicking music of any kind, and I would not want to listen to Cajun music every night, but I loved standing there, beside the stage, watching these old Louisiana white people, been dancing with their partners all their lives, they knew how to make every turn under those turning fans, not a bead of sweat on their temples, no dust on their leathern shoes. I think back and know they could have been rural Quebec people brought down here and stuffed inside bayou clothes, and the music told me it was right at home, as it had been along the lower St. Lawrence River, and is right now on Belle-Île-en-Mer, and sounded out of the fog in unrememberable Brittany.

  Ah, those brave silent white-haired men with perfectly clean denim and suspenders and red-checked shirts, and their white-haired darlings so light in their arms, stepping like swampy princesses, some kind of pride in those stiff necks, they knew what they were doing, and as I watched the same couple come round for the third time I nearly cried and reached out to touch them, I wanted them to live forever.

  Okay, that is sentimental, mawkish, I know. I know that their grandchildren will have a terrible time getting a house loan from some Iberville bank.

  But if you can love complete strangers, love them without a trace of sex in the neighbourhood, that’s what I was doing there. I will admit there was some Blackened Voodoo beer circulating the blood system in my head, and I will admit I am a sucker for a quickstepping granny with ruffles in her blouse, but there has to be a reason for my keeping this memory without any gonadal provocation.

  Maybe it’s just me.

  I saw the author of Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon heading toward the door, so I followed her. I thought I could actually feel the coloured lights changing on the skin of my face, reflecting off my eyeglasses. I did not hit a chair or doorpost on the way out, though, and there we were in the parking lot full of Fords with dents.

  She was holding a pack of cigarettes in her hand, and offered me the pack before taking one herself, but I was quitting again, so I smiled and shook my head, and she lit one up with a swoosh of inbound air. Oh why, I asked myself, did you have to quit again just when you were going to be where it was the simplest thing in the world to buy a package of those delicious USAmerican cigarettes that burn away in seven minutes? Mmm, Old Gold.

  She was smoking a Camel now, hungrily. It had been an hour or maybe two since she had had one after getting out of the bus, and she was a Quebecker and a novelist, you see?

  I thought of things to ask her.

  Down-home music, eh?

  Did you feel like dancing?

  Is this going to show up in a book one day?

  Have you had a chance to practise your French down here?

  But I didn’t say anything. I was so happy to be standing beside this woman in this starlit jambalaya parking lot, where I didn’t even need a Camel cigarette as a prop or justification. The fiddle and the squeezebox were faint but actual in the night. If I were a novelist such as she is, I would have had the sound of an alligator slapping its tail in the black water around now.

  At last, with a cloud of smoke preceding her words, she spoke. I have told this story, and made a pretty good try at a French-Canadian accent, but you will have to supply your own if you need it here.

  “When I see something like that,” she said, “I almost forgive the human race.”

  Sometime in 1969 or 1970 I was listening to an FM station in Montreal, and sure enough, you will remember, if you are old enough, that back around then FM was different from AM when it came to music. On FM they would play a whole album side, at first jazz or classical, later rock and roll. But when they got to rock and roll they favoured what used to be called “concept albums,” the most famous of which might have been the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The disc jockeys were different too. On AM they were usually hyper, yelling and cheering, trying to make you enthusiastic about some nowhere cut by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, but on FM they hesitated and purred, and the idea was that if they were understated, cool, you know, then you probably were too, listening to them play something by Yusef Lateef, because you knew you could mention Yusef Lateef to the teenagers in the corner all-dressed-burger place and they wouldn’t know who you were talking about. Well, they wouldn’t know who you were talking about if you mentioned Martin Heidegger, either.

  Now the semi-whispering guy on the FM station was interviewing a guy I knew. He had been part of my poetry scene, as we said, in the late sixties, a hotshot Ottawa poet with no capital letters, made his way into the anthologies the older poets and editors were putting together to kind of scoop us in under their Central Canadian wings, mother hens who had lately and reluctantly scratched the ground where there weren’t any end rimes to peck at.
I don’t really know what I’m talking about here. I’m a painter.

  Anyway, my friend, call him Billy, had been moving in musical circles. Started by helping run a coffee shop, and you remember what was happening with coffee shops in those days — they started with poets reading hip new lyrics at people who were sitting at tables with wax-cascading Chianti bottles on them. Then the folksingers, because they were kind of poets of the common man, eh? And if folkies with guitars, why not local rock musicians with guitars? Before you knew it Billy was letting Ottawa rock youth play in his coffee shop, and before you knew it he was holding a guitar and singing with them.

  He was supplying the new songs for them, the words anyway. That was why the guy on the FM station was interviewing him, as a spokesperson for that band called the Offspring. He figured the guy who could write the lyrics was the guy who would be articulate enough to say more than “you know” and “like you know.”

  What I am getting to is the last question the FM guy whispered at Billy.

  “So, you were getting to be a pretty famous young poet, but then you switched over to rock and roll. Was this because there’s more money in rock and roll?”

  “Naw,” said Billy, whispering to show how cool he was. “In rock and roll there’s a lot more nookie.”

  I was fond of repeating that exchange to Honey, but it never got me anywhere. So there was a time when I was writing lyrics for a little rock band in Vancouver. Once, in the Odd Fellows Hall just off Commercial Drive, the band was up on the stage banging away and I was dancing with a young female human being I had met just that night.

  I said, “That song they’re playing? I wrote that.”

  “No kidding,” she said.

  This was during a time when dancers seldom came within a half metre of each other.