No One

by George Bowering

  Then she would lie on her back and let the blind boy climb her, moist as she was, well behaved as he was always. Sniff right there, she purportedly said, unless he was inventing for me. No, he never, as far as I know, did the latter.

  “She said she was glad to find a lad who did not have a bolt of shame or guilt up his bum,” said Bobby after I had pleaded with him to report the dialogue at least.

  “What in heaven’s name is she or you talking about? I am a sophisticate with hours of experience on three continents.”

  “Maybe the problem is that two of those were Antarctica.”

  “Did she say anything about my, uh, apparatus and skill?”

  “She said that you did try to be compliant. Compliant was the word she used.”

  I hadn’t even planned on staying at that rather skinny one’s place in Regina. Whoever was in charge had already reserved and paid for a hotel room for me, and I was supposed to get on a plane the next morning and head for home, but first remember to get a souvenir for Honey, maybe a bottle of expensive French wine. Sometimes that did the trick.

  I had spent the last three days at a writers’ and painters’ so-called festival in Weyburn, the Opportunity City. The City of Weyburn’s mission is to provide leadership for the creation of a common vision and goals for planned economic growth, efficient use of resources and a high quality of life in the Weyburn community. In other words, just about everything that writers and painters are not the least bit interested in.

  I had been making a minor nuisance of myself over the three days. I don’t have anything against Saskatchewan. Some of my best friends are from Saskatchewan. Good poets and painters have come from there — John Newlove, Brian Fisher, Dorothy Knowles, Roy Kiyooka. But somehow I got it into my head that there were squares trying to assert themselves. I called one woman, a country girl who was interested in describing the weather and its effects on protagonists, a realist, and she has never forgiven me. She was afraid she might be left off the contemporary bus, I guess.

  Well, I was a new member of the middle-aged crowd, my hair still dark albeit lank and poorly coifed, and artists were supposed to be interesting, so I drank some beer, a lot of beer, shared some mediocre pot, as it was called in Saskatchewan in those days, and made remarks.

  Some of the remarks were in the service of braggadocio, if you can imagine.

  Some were very serious observations on the art of composition, delivered as if you were supposed to smile and raise your eyes comically.

  Some were just plain dumb remarks to fair lasses, no age requirements.

  No common vision on the typical horizon of this poetry town.

  But a professor-poet from nearby Manitoba said to me, an innocent getting some September rays in a little concrete park, “Are you up for some dialogue?”

  “You bet,” I replied. “How’s your old straw hat?”

  “Funny you should ask. Salvador Dali filched it from my car.”

  “How do you know Dali?” I asked, feeling that I might as well.

  “He told me it all originated with his first lecture on surrealism in Spain, when the mayor, who was acting as chairman, fell down dead at his feet, almost as soon as he began — a windfall for journalists.”

  “That’s Mina Loy,” I said, then let my disgust show by the set of my mouth. “You should at least change the names of people and places if you want to turn literature into life.”

  “Is this man bothering you?”

  It was Hannah D., a short story writer very well known in Saskatchewan circles. I had never read any of her stuff, but I had seen her name in quite a few literary quarterlies — you know, the ones that announce that they do not subscribe to any school of writing but publish the best of the material that comes across their lintels or whatever.

  Skinniest short story writer I had ever seen. She was almost as tall as I was, and certainly taller than the guy who knew Dali or at least Mina Loy. And I don’t know, she must have weighed fifty pounds less than I did at the time, and I was pretty lean myself, enough so that older women were always trying to get me to eat a decent meal.

  “About your sentence,” I replied, “to whom does your demonstrative adjective refer, and to whom are you referring with that second-person singular or plural pronoun?”

  We were at a writers’ etc conference, after all.

  Hannah D. and I had been on a panel together: I never did get the topic of the panel straight, so I mainly repeated all the cute remarks I usually made when asked penetrating questions such as “How did you get started in writing?” and “Who is your intended audience?”

  But the Dali guy seemed to have understood the situation, maybe because he was from the Prairies and had seen Hannah D. operate before. He went through a pantomime meant to indicate that he had just seen a person who owed him twenty dollars, and took off in the direction of a doorway crammed with cigarette smokers.

  “I am not saying you shouldn’t be bothered,” she said. “But if anyone is going to do the bothering, I think it should be me.”

  “I,” I suggested.

  “Her too,” she said, and lifted her face toward the warming sun.

  I cannot say that I know a lot about such things, but it looked to me as if she was wearing a whole outfit of clothes that are usually called “undemonstrably elegant.” Expensive-looking light blue-grey tweed skirt with a cut up the side, expensive-looking stitching up the cut.

  I guess she was about two or three years older than I, but because she was used to living with indemonstrably plenteous money and I was not, she was more trim than I could hope to be, I with my mauve Chuck Taylor low-cuts.

  “How are you getting home?” she asked, as if we’d been talking for an hour.

  “Silver wings,” I replied.

  “I need someone to drive my car,” she said. “It’s not my car, really. I had to borrow my husband’s spare car, and it’s a wonder I got down here.”

  “Where do you and your husband live?”

  “He has many homes,” she said, and somehow she had my forearm in her hand and we were walking toward the conference centre. “I reside in Aeaea.”

  I scanned my childhood’s jigsaw-puzzle map, Saskatchewan the easiest piece.

  “Is that in this province, that Ayayay?”

  “I said Regina.”

  I can’t remember whether Kirk ever takes his shirt off in that movie about Vincent van Gogh. Wasn’t it a question of getting Hollywood stars who looked like van Gogh and Gauguin? I mean, now when I imagine Gauguin off there in Tahiti with his bare-breasted wahines, I see him as looking just like Anthony Quinn.

  I was in Tahiti once, sometime in the late eighties, I guess. Tahiti and that other little island you go to on a fifteen-minute flight in an airplane from the thirties, must have been piloted by Hotshot Charlie back then. Moorea. In Moorea they served you a large blue drink called a Boom Boom, and the deal was that if you could drink the whole thing, you got another one for free. The two idiots with me ordered one each and that is as far as they got.

  Coconuts were falling from the tall palms into and around the swimming pool, and these guys wouldn’t even notice if one landed right beside them. I ordered some orange-coloured drink, and let me tell you, I had to walk very carefully to make it out on the boardwalk on stilts to our thatch-roofed cabana or whatever you call them, out there in the morning sun that forced its way through the rattan and under your aching eyelids. It’s another bright sunny day on another island where you are a hungover captive. You just want to get home, slay the pretenders and bed down with Honey.

  Anyway, they aren’t wahines are they? I mean, do wahines have to be young, and aren’t they in Hawaii anyway?

  Anyway, I had written a long poem about English sailors in Tahiti and other such unlikely places on this wet globe, and I must have got their name right then. Beautiful brownish small women with tropic
al flowers in their hair, and I can tell you this: when I was sitting at lunch — some spread made of fruit and sea creatures — one of the lovely waitress creatures trailed her fingertips across my shoulders as she passed by.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  In the movie, of course, Kirk never gets to go to Tahiti. We hear him shoot himself in a wheat field in Southern France, close to a more familiar sea, the wheat field and everything else the colour of his paintings, as is he.

  You want a sentence? There’s a sentence for you.

  So there I was, driving a hypotenuse maybe, straight-line two-lane road to Regina dentata, my first time ever behind the wheel of a Cadillac, car’s as long as my house is wide, and the pilot’s seat is surrounded by control doodads. I couldn’t even figure out how to turn the headlights on, something I had been doing since before I drove to Veracruz in the early sixties.

  More interesting was the long long hood. Way out there in front of me, the doodad that held the hood closed was not doing its job. Why couldn’t I just ask the skinny woman beside me whether this was the usual situation? I mean, it had happened to me once on the freeway to Seattle, I was driving my girlfriend’s Hillman in the far-left lane when the hood came up and all I could see was hood, so I signalled and edged ever so slowly to the right, moving two or three lanes over, and finally got to pull off and not get killed and found some haywire and tied that sucker down.

  In the Cadillac I wondered whether there was a doodad on the display in front of me for closing the hood tight. That is to say, on this Highway 711, no kidding, there wasn’t much of what you could call a shoulder, and we did, as I recall, enjoy a bit of an elevation.

  But I didn’t want to appear a coward or a know-nothing, so I didn’t mention the hood bouncing up and down in front of my eyes. What the heck, I would be on a plane for home tomorrow, just had to fill in the time, staying alive.

  But come on. I was in a provincial judge’s big old Cadillac, with a judge’s wife beside me, just the two of us headed northwest on the flat prairie. I had just spent a weekend playing the part of a poet-filmmaker-painter. Surely this was a situation just crying out to be included in my biography. Once in a while a thought, or let’s say an image, passed through my brainpan, and I got a nubby on the smooth leather seat. I was still not that old in those days.

  “You’re staying at my place tonight,” she said. I didn’t know what she herself was thinking, or picturing.

  “Ah, they already paid for my hotel room, but thanks.” I just wanted the time to pass so I could get home, I told myself.

  “This is Saskatchewan. We pride ourselves on our hospitality here.”

  I like hotel rooms, and I liked them then. I would rather stay in a hotel room than in the spare room or basement den of some people I didn’t know in Brandon or Kamloops. Though the memory of the wolf girl in Welland or wherever comes back to me from time to time. Wandering poets on paid-for junkets have to endure a lot of different kinds of hospitality.

  “Nope, you are getting a hot supper and a warm bed and a ride to the airport in the morning,” said the judge’s wife.

  This would have been her moment to touch my arm or knee if she meant you-know-what, but she didn’t, or so it seemed, just watched the road disappear to a dot in front of us, beyond the bouncing hood.

  Who can remember the details of Regina? It seems maybe like a small town enlarged. Lot of cubic houses that look as if they are just sitting on the ground the way Monopoly houses do. Or really, it is Winnipeg that looks like that. I can’t, one cannot, remember what Regina looks like. So forget it. That’s only description.

  The judge did not seem at all pleased when his skinny wife showed up with a tall middle-aged poet. I thought ruefully of my empty hotel room. The judge was pretty rude, I thought, didn’t really say hello or do any talking after I was introduced to him and his only halfway fawncy house. What was it? Were he and the missus barely able to tolerate each other at all times? Was I the twentieth poet she had brought home? Was he pissed off because she wanted to be a writer with her name known rather than a judge’s wife?

  He didn’t even show up for dinner, which was, I don’t know, some kind of yardbird with creamy mashed potatoes and shredded green things. It was no great shakes, but then I probably would otherwise have had a cheeseburger after walking twelve blocks searching for the right hamburger place. I had then as now many ways of being a dope.

  He was, she said, at a meeting downtown, and would eat there. Would I like to watch the football game? She had taped it on automatic. If I had been in my hotel room, I would probably have turned on the television set and half watched it while reading whatever book I was reading. I am not going to pretend that I can remember what book I was reading at the time. Let’s just say I was reading Callahan’s Lady by Spider Robinson, published by Ace Books. Pretty good. Spider Robinson has a series of Callahan books, and while the word Callahan’s does not appear in every title, it occurs in enough to make you fret because you really don’t want to omit one because you think you have already read it.

  I would like to take this opportunity to say that if you haven’t read these Callahan books, you should give them a try. Start with Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon.

  So we watched the Saskatchewan Roughriders playing the Toronto Argonauts in Toronto. Didn’t even speed through the commercials or timeouts. She was sitting in one lazy person chair and I was sitting in another, the judge’s, I presume, well separated from one another. We had a couple of Scotch and waters during the game, and she even found us a bag of salt-reduced snacks.

  I was thinking that in about fourteen hours I would be home. Back in the well-tilled land of Ithaca. Vancouver.

  I have to admit that while I was doing all my alphabet games in my head while trying to get to sleep in a narrow bed in their little guest room in the basement, I sort of thought that maybe there would be a little tiptoeing, scary as it might be because who knew when the judge might come home. “Here come de judge,” I sang to myself in a whisper. I had no clue whether they slept in the same bed or even the same room, but I fell asleep and did not even dream about Miss Skinny.

  In the morning I saw two big fluffy blue towels and a facecloth on the chair beside my bed. There was also a big fluffy judge’s bathrobe, and I put this on over my skin because I could smell coffee. What I mean is that I crept up the carpeted stairs and peeked around the corner of the open doorway I found there, and yes, I was looking at the kitchen, the source of the lovely prairie-morning aroma, and oh yes, there was Hannah in a really expensive-looking bathrobe, her blonde hair grabbed up into a loose clump on the top of her head and held there by what looked like a couple of Japanese chopsticks.

  “Ohashi,” I said.

  “Gesundheit,” she replied, and poured coffee into a mug for me.

  “That was a kind of Japanese word,” I said.

  “The other was sort of German.”

  “Who won the war?” I sat on a stool and put a little cream into my coffee.

  “Very quick in the morning for a poet,” she said.

  “Has ––?”

  “Ah. He had to catch an early flight to Saskatoon,” she said. “Bacon and eggs?”

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” I said. “For breakfast.”

  So we drank our coffee, which was pretty damned good in that western prairie way I remembered from my days in the air force. We discussed poetry and prose and painters’ conventions and last night’s football game and the time I had to be at the airport.

  I explained that I could get the taxi ride paid for by sending my receipt to Ottawa, but she explained that as it was a bright day out there, she would be happy to Cadillac me to the airport. But first I had to have my shower and get dressed. And wouldn’t you know it? She followed me right into the bathroom. I was as shy as could be, but I just kept telling myself that in a couple hours I would be in
the sky looking down at the snowy Rockies.

  Here’s what I will do, I finally told myself. I will just act as if I am all alone. But first:

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  And she stepped out and let me close the door. I hung my robe over the hook on the back of the door and had a really good whiz once I had managed to get rid of the semi-woody that had come from somewhere. And I don’t know exactly why I did so, but once I had got the shower water going good and hot and before I stepped inside the curtain, I opened the door a little and left it ajar.

  She was even skinnier with all her clothes off. I had thought she would be a kind of provincial upper-class slender but no, she was just plain skinny, with those small breasts you can’t help loving, and knobby knees. Standing there in the steam, I used my right forefinger to count her ribs. She turned out to be as agile as a girl half her age, and the skinniness worked to my advantage when it came to palming her little ass and lifting her.

  That was a trip, as we used to say ten years before that, and I stopped listening for the front door to close. Then she said something instructive and that’s when she got hold of the shower curtain and encouraged me to lift even higher, and what do you know? Her skinny legs were over my shoulders and somehow she was rubbing coconut-scented shampoo into my longish hair.

  Afterward I asked, “Have we got time for another coffee, or should I have one at the airport?”

  Writers’ or painters’ conferences or retreats or jubilees or festivals or what have you don’t always turn out that way, though often they do. I have, as other people say, “got lucky” at those meetings fairly often. I don’t know whether I would characterize it as getting lucky. Usually a day after one of those things starts, in Halifax, say, or Springfield, Missouri, I am thinking of the time that has to go by before I can get on a plane and fly home.