And we are out in the puddled earth again, manoeuvring the coche, handing pesos to the boys in white shirts. I say, “What happens?”
“Federico wanted to leave, badly.” That’s Honey. We are outside the adobe noise, but my ears are stuffed with sodden mud straw.
Out on the late-night taxi streets again, Honey is sad about the young whores. I don’t make any of my customary jokes, just sit in the beaten French auto, thinking of the dark stones and lonely men on the corners we pass. I say one thing during the hour’s drive. “Una casa no es una morada.”
I did once have a strange adventure with two skinny ones at the same time. I told this story to a painter friend and he thought it was really funny, so I hope you do too. Maybe they weren’t all that skinny, maybe they were just the thin side of medium, one a little more than the other. Maybe this didn’t happen at all. But I remember it often, especially when I hear Nina Simone. When I hear Nina Simone singing I feel a little bug of fear crawling up the middle of my back. If I were alone with Nina Simone in a locked room, I would be mortally afraid.
I am like a lot of people, like my blind buddy Bob Small, for example. I like the idea of getting naked with two women and trying out this and that.
I have never had quite enough of either this or that in my long life.
One was a little thinner than the other. One was somewhat drunker than the other. One had bushy red hair and the other had no hair at all, none on her head, none anywhere else. I didn’t quite know who she was.
Red and the other one said they could use a ride home after the pub, and as this was back in the day when I thought I could drive my Japanese car after sitting in a public house for a few hours, I drove them home. They sat together in the back seat, Red and the stranger. Red had introduced me to the stranger a few hours earlier, but I never remember the names of people when they are introduced to me. Not even when the person has no eyebrows.
They seemed to think it was the most ordinary thing in the world that I would drive them across the viaduct and up First Avenue to Cotton Street and a couple blocks up Cotton Street and get out of the car and follow them into Red’s basement apartment, I think it was.
I don’t remember or I am incapable of inventing all the details here, but I know that we engaged in a lot of silly talk, Red and I. The other one was a little thinner and quite quiet, and about the time I saw the freckles across Red’s chest, I looked and saw that the other one was a matter of hairless skin all over her surface.
We would have had another drink of wine or something, but apparently there wasn’t any. I still, they let me know without saying so, had the option of going or staying. There was a double-sized brass bed with two pillows and one wrinkled sheet. I opted for staying, and though I was given no help, I was soon reduced to nudity.
“Five,” I said.
Red stepped out of her step-ins and looked at me curiously.
“Beers I had. But over about three hours.”
Red had good thick curly red hair, to make up for the stranger’s lack.
In a trice, or maybe after a little nap, who knows, I found myself lying flat on my back with a youngish woman on either side, Red on her back, the stranger on her front. How the heck do I manage this, I wondered. Neither of my bedmates was taking any initiative. I put my right hand on the stranger’s bum, and it made a quick and singular quiver, such as you notice a horse doing. I put my other hand on Red’s near thigh and with gentle fingers suggested she move it away from the far one.
According to earlier fancy, they should both have had hands or mouths on my apparatus. It was almost hard. But nooo.
I thought I heard Red snoring lightly.
Okay, while she’s sleeping I will enjoy the stranger, I decided.
She was pretty well awake, turned over and looking at me with those bald-girl eyes, not a sound from her mouth, though I thought I could hear, or I remember hearing, the breath in her nose. She gestured at my hands, and I thought I was complying when I put them on her nice little breasts, but she indicated that in one hand she was holding a length of silk rope. Oh, I see, I saw, and hurried to proffer my wrists, one of which was in another trice secured to one bar of brass at the head of the bed, and despite Red’s heaviness, the second was quick to follow. I was, as they say, naked, sweating a little because it was pretty warm in that basement bedroom, my arms in the shape of a why, my brain pretty well under the control of beer.
Speaking of which, what if I had to pee? But I didn’t. My perfectly ordinary pecker was getting harder by the moment. While Baldy was affixing my second wrist to the brass, her nipple slid across my face.
This is going to be so good, I thought. Whatever number of young women was awake would do totally welcome however frightening things to me, especially to my eager asparagus. I was really really hoping for Bob Small’s oft-described fantasy — two women, two tongues, one poor victimized lad tied as if to a mast.
The stranger now had perspiration gleaming on her head’s skin. She gave Red a little shake, held her steady to prevent sudden vomiting, and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. Red’s long curly hair was all over the place, filling me with hope. I began to take my fortune for granted. I think the notion of getting home flashed across the darkened back part of my brain.
Now they were standing, two naked women with perspiration between their breasts, just visible enough in the gentle light that came mainly through the door from the kitchenette. There was a candle somewhere in the room, but I was not looking around much. If my arms were getting sore and tired, so what?
Red walked with a little clumsiness to the boom box on top of what must have been her dresser, and pushed buttons. Then she joined her sister in abduction and gave her a big kiss. Their mouths were open and noisy and their adorable youngish bodies were pressed against one another.
Then came the music. From the boom box some drums and bass and quick brass. Oh, the night of brass, I thought, filing away a title in case this became literature. Then three singers — Marvin Gaye, Red and the stranger — sang some soul, sometimes in key, sometimes not. Once there was a knocking on the floor above us.
But on and on they went, singing song after song, dancing as the mood took them while the late night became not mine so much as theirs. I tried numerous times, but could not free a wrist. My vegetable friend stayed where he was. Maybe he was happy. I let myself dim out.
I woke up because someone was untying my rope.
It was the wide-awake and chipper stranger. She gave me a generous little smile and indicated that my clothes were in a fairly neat pile on top of my shoes on the floor. After a serious visit to the bathroom, where I sat down to be sure, I got dressed, my socks right side out, and blew kisses to the sleeping Red and the still-naked stranger. Though my headache reminded me of the time I had my cranium in a vise on a dare, I afforded myself a last male gaze at a slim tanned naked beautiful torso in the morning kitchen window light, and went out to see whether my car was still there.
When I got home Honey wasn’t up yet. When I finally did see her in the early afternoon, I told her I had for safety’s sake slept on someone’s couch again. It was just about true, and I had done just that a number of times on pub night.
She didn’t say anything, just continued messing with her garden.
I felt, not for the first time, like a dead louse.
I’m trying to imagine Kirk and his triumphant return to Ithaca. All right, he shoots that arrow through all the circles, he slays all those suitors, he clasps his grown son’s tanned torso. Then it’s up with the background music, lots of strings for sure, and he and Penelope look for a little privacy.
There they are, in the kitchen. She’s got her elbow up, stirring something, doesn’t look all that appetizing. It’s probably not for him anyway.
He’s sweating like crazy, his shirt all torn off his shoulders, a sword mark across his chest. His breath is
coming in great gulps. He drops his bloody weapon on the stone floor. This is where she is supposed to forget about the discomfort of all that blood getting on her nice outfit. Supposed to press her needful quaint against his thigh.
“That Calypso. Nice and skinny, is she?” Pen sneers.
Now it happens that Calypso is better looking than Mrs. Odysseus, and he did let her distract him for a while, maybe too long. But he was home now, wasn’t he? He knows what he likes, and he knows where he wants to be, even if his friends can’t figure that out.
“Hey, if you’re not going to stick around, do you mind if I take a shot at her?” asked a drinking buddy.
Kirk slapped him upside the head. “Show some respect. She’s not some slut,” he told him.
Penelope has her back to him now while she runs water in the sink.
“Why didn’t you just stay with your slut?” she asks the window in front of her.
Kirk is standing there, dripping, his chest rising and falling. A lot of women would cream their jeans to be in the same room.
“She doesn’t mean anything to me,” he tells his wife. “I am where I have always wanted to be right now.”
“Well, except when there’s a beautiful blonde needs rescuing.”
“I was helping out a friend. She was his wife, after all.”
“But you were fucking her before and after he was. Tell me, when you tore down that city and rescued her for your friend, did you bonk her for old times’ sake?”
He feels like going out and looking for some more suitors to kill. He hears their ghosts departing, squeaking like bats as they go out of hearing. He can’t figure out why he isn’t being treated as a hero, being so used to it. He catches a glimpse of two of Penelope’s ladies-in-waiting and imagines their sweet young bodies under their white chitons.
“I had a speech to make,” he says. “To celebrate our victory.”
“Oh yes, you are famous for your speeches,” she says. “You talk your way into a lot of beds with your famous speech, you fucking asshole.”
That’s right. Penelope calls the son of Laertes a fucking asshole.
In my imagination, I mean.
The grey hair bothered him for weeks, for months.
Had it just been that long since he had seen her, and her hair turned grey during the interim?
Was it his fault that her hair had turned grey? Is that why she had been walking in his neighbourhood so that he could see her?
Was her hair really grey back when they were going to bed together, before he had wronged her? Had she been dyeing it? No, that didn’t seem like her. But how often had things turned out differently from the way he had thought they were?
Is that asshole out there mowing the neighbour’s lawn with a gas mower ever going to get it finished? Is he going to start with the power edger after the mower?
She was not particularly exceptional in any other way, but her hair was wonderful. It was long and thick, and it curled upon itself in waves of chestnut colour. He loved to run it through his fingers, and he loved to feel it spilling onto his bare stomach. When he saw her, if he did indeed see her on the Avenue, that hair was still abundant and what the advertisers call rich. What had been chestnut was now grey, and when the woman walked, that hair still moved splendidly.
He had decided that his own hair, which was thin and overly fine and badly cut, was now grey. When he looked at his imperfect face in most bathroom mirrors, the image’s hair still looked light brown with silver edges, but when he saw photographs, snaps of himself, his hair looked white. He thought that maybe people were just using cheap and impatient cameras.
That was her face under and behind that grey hair, wasn’t it? He had looked harder than one usually does, but not so hard as to frighten a stranger, and she had looked back at him impassively. Hiding her anger, her resentment?
He had seen and heard women break into tears when he wronged them, but he had never turned anyone’s hair grey before.
Or was this woman a stranger? He should have turned and followed her, but this had all happened so suddenly. He had continued walking, up to the library. If he had followed her, would he have looked at something besides her hair, checking for her short legs and unfashionable clothes?
If he had caught up to her and she had stopped and looked at him with her big steady eyes, would he have tried to get out from under the thin layer of remorse she had so suddenly placed over his grey head?
At least I felt as if I had wronged them. I must have, because I had never come to tears while thinking of them. I had sat in a Toronto restaurant, terribly uncomfortable because of the tears in the eyes I was trying not to look at too much, had in another city lain naked in a friend’s upstairs spare room while a nude and newly thin woman wept in the doorway.
The woman in the restaurant had been my agent during the fleeting success I enjoyed in my middle age. In those days the way things worked in Toronto was that fairly chic women circulated around the publishing business, working as book editors, magazine editors, agents and memoirists. For some reason one of these women took a chance on a fiction manuscript I had surprisingly finished, and luckily she worked for one of the biggest publishers in the city, those people who referred to themselves as “professional” as opposed to the little literary presses I usually hung out at.
“What will I do?” I asked her. “I think I need an agent, but I have no idea how you get an agent.”
“Didn’t they teach you that in your creative writing classes?”
“Don’t get me confused with those professionals,” I said.
“Here, make a phone call,” she said, scribbling words and numbers on a square of paper, the kind I always thought I should have on my person if I was going to be a real writer. I read the news.
“Rocky? She’s a boxer?”
“Her real name is Rowena. She dropped it when she came to Canada. For obvious reasons.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Give her a call. Tell her I suggested it.”
Dropped it when she came to Canada.
They are always coming to Canada from Europe, or they were. Now I guess they mainly come from China or other parts of Asia. I don’t know why, but I have always just loved Europe. I didn’t get there until I was thirty, but I have been back a fair number of times in the many decades since then, and I often say I should have spent my time in Europe, or at least half of my time. Some people do that. Some of my heroes did that.
I watch French and German and Italian movies, and yearn for those cobbles. I even smile fondly when I see intelligent women lighting cigarettes in every scene. Halfway through my life I sat for weeks in European hotels smoking cigarettes and drawing in sketchbooks. When sirens went by on the street below, they were those two-pitch sirens that are so evocative in French movies.
Every few years I would fall in love with a young woman who had come from Europe to be a student or au pair or secretary for a year or two. Almost all of them spoke some kind of German as a first language. Few things are as endearing as being spoken to in a German accent by a young woman with her shoes off.
Germany. Switzerland. Austria. Lichtenstein, for heaven’s sake!
I have been lucky enough and pushy enough to get four teaching gigs in Europe, one in Bologna, one in Bergen, one in Lyons and one in Berlin. More properly, West Berlin.
At that time, I remember, everyone wanted to have sex, as they say, with Fé. When I first knew her she was married to my new friend Taylor, but they had separated, he to take up with a tall young woman from some other habitation, and she to become a poet at last. I mean she likely knew all along that she was a poet, but when you are with Taylor, it is Taylor who is the poet. Now Fé was not only a poet in town like the rest of us, but a poet with a book published by an arty press in Toronto, and so there were people across the country who wanted to have sex with her.
&
nbsp; If you write non-fiction, there is a chance you will get a big cheque some time. If you are a poet, you expect other kinds of rewards. But I had always told myself that I was never going to be on a bed with Fé, partly because of my innate modesty and partly because she was, on and off, a friend of Honey. Once in a while they would go to Seattle and buy outrageous clothes, or they would get a couple bottles of Veuve Clicquot and spend the afternoon and evening in Honey’s room with the door closed to kids or adults.
I am not the kind of person to go after revenge tail. It’s just that for some reason Honey was out of town at a conference or maybe a “conference,” and I went from the pub to a party in southern Kerrisdale rather than home.
The house belonged to a woman whose name I barely knew, and it was full of people who were not exactly my friends, but friends of people I knew. You might know how that works. And I guess if the truth be told, I was there because I had heard that Fé would be there, she being a good friend of the woman who partly owned the house. It was what passes for a hip house in Kerrisdale. I think there were some artifacts from a one-time fishing vessel on walls or floors.
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