No One

by George Bowering

  I was a bit blurry from my hours in the pub, and if the truth be told, I should not have driven my Toyota from downtown to this party, but I was in a strange mood. The same mood had me leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette, my eyes half-closed, in imitation of the way I used to present myself at parties when I was in my twenties and mysterious. It did occur to me that people might laugh behind my back, but I just considered the company I was keeping.

  Just to be where Fé was. Not with any hunter’s design. For some reason I just wanted to look at her.

  And who wouldn’t? Yes, she had a French name, one presumed, but she had that Irish colouring that some people devote their romantic life to — white white skin, abundant black hair, and wide-open blue eyes. When she smiled, her smile wrinkled her nose, as in the song.

  “Won’t you please arrange it?” I said very quietly when I found myself standing behind her, or rather leaning on my wall.

  “What?”

  I felt as if I were talking to a member of the family, eh? Familiar, not a fence in sight.

  “Just remembered a song I haven’t thought of for years,” I said.

  But she was already talking to someone, Melanie or Meredith or Melody. Melissa.

  Well, you know house parties. They go on and get boring and then they come to a close, and people whose brains have been inhabited by chemicals drive their cars home.

  “I can’t drive,” I heard Fé say, and maybe it was just luck that I was close by.

  “I’ll gladly see you home,” I said, not leaning now.

  I thought she would look at me funny and decide I had had too much of something. But she took my arm and laughed lightly. Well, I am a good friend, I told myself.

  I had had a lot of practice driving homeward while drunk, and usually I made it all right. Once in the Downtown Eastside I blew two tires by driving fast along a route that had not been a street for some time. I went through years of Friday nights with good luck, and that is what sustained me this time, a beautiful woman sitting beside me with her flowery skirt not covering her white knees. I kept my eyes on the road, or roads as they became when I lost focus for a bit, and once I put my hand on her knee in a reassuring way and I guess she understood it as such.

  And when we got to her little white house I just shut off the engine and followed her up the front steps, which was all right with her.

  Well, we talked, and laughed some, and found most of a bottle of Merlot, and maybe it was around this time that we had a taste of LSD. It may have been earlier, at the party, or maybe later, in the early morning. I really cannot remember, and probably could not then. Not having had much experience with acid, I did not know how it was supposed to interact with red wine and whatever else I had had.

  The night would probably have been as jumpy without it. We were not in a hurry, and maybe we were putting it off because we shouldn’t be here together in her place for all the various reasons, so we did this and that, mainly Fé playing the piano. She started, no music sheets, playing what she knew, and eventually what she was just then learning, and louder and louder, and I bet the neighbours in the next house could hear. Fé’s white hands lifted high and then smashed down on the keys, again and again and again, while I looked unabashed on her lovely little bum on the shiny black piano bench.

  There was blood on her fingers and on the white keys, and she reacted to it by smashing harder, and I was so gone that I didn’t wonder what this was about, just knew it was and it was there and so we were. What a thing. I stood then behind her and reached my arms around her narrow shoulders and held her small breasts. She played without violence while I lifted her skirt, raised her little bum to allow me to pull the silky cloth up and over her head, her hands one by one raised while the other played, I thought I recognized Mendelssohn, and then I removed her slight bra and she raised her little bum again as I pulled her tiny underpants over her knees, and then she was a boy’s slender naked dream sitting lightly on a piano bench while one leg reached out so that her foot could touch the pedal, and I took my clothes off pretty fast.

  I stood behind her and then up against her back, yes, leaning again, I could lean that way forever.

  But I was so strong back then, strong and gallant. I picked her up and felt her cool skin on my chest as I carried her into her bedroom, thankful that she saved the bedrooms upstairs for writing and guests. Her arms around my neck were the sweetest cooperation I could imagine.

  At last, I thought, at last. I thought this would never . . . I felt as if I had sailed the most difficult seas . . .

  “Why are you standing there?”

  “I want to see as much as I can,” I said.

  “Ah yes, the painter.”

  So she relaxed and smiled. She was white on a blue sheet. The walls were blue. Her eyes were blue. There were tiny blue veins on her chest just above her cute little breasts. Her eyes.

  “One of your eyes is bright blue and the other one is greenish blue,” I said, almost reproachfully.

  “That happens among cats,” she said, and her hands made come-here movements.

  I lifted one of her ankles and kissed it, and then I ran my tongue’s tip up the inside of her leg. I lifted her foot so that up was down and I was both. I put my tongue inside her, then all the way in until I felt both her hands on my skull. I was on my knees and my cock was parallel to my trunk. “I haven’t forgotten about you,” I said.

  “I should hope not,” whispered Fé.

  “Not talking to you.”

  “What are you doing to me?”

  Now I held both of her ankles and lifted her legs to my shoulders. My heart was pounding. “Lie surging,” I think I said.

  “What?”

  “Acid. I think I see a hundred colours in your eyes.”

  I lifted her little bum and then I was the only place I wanted to be. Wet and narrow. I cooperated.

  Her eyes were wide open and her whole white body was moving. I had never thought I’d —

  “You’re fucking me,” she said, as if it was a wonder.

  “Ahh,” I said in reply. “Ahh.”

  We continued and continued, as if both of us had been waiting for this with no realistic hope but with secret wishing.

  You know all the standard positions, so if you are imagining this, just go in whatever order you like.

  Inside my head, a surprised voice said, I’m fucking her.

  It took me, because I am essentially a shy man, a while to ask her whether I could put this still rather stiff item into her mouth.

  “Maybe next time,” she whispered.

  My luck had not run out. There was a next time, in another city, where I stayed all night and found myself feeling a little proprietary. Where there was Pinot Gris rather than LSD.

  “If you promise not to put it in a book,” she whispered.

  My little home town of Lawrence is not the prettiest spot in the valley. There is a little lake sort of in town, and a few other little lakes just a bit north, and a river that used to wind its way south toward the Columbia, until it got straightened by some well-meaning town councillors who thought they were onto the latest thing. On the eastern and western edges of town are some brown hills with very few pine trees on them, and back of them are some blue mountains that no one will ever put a ski resort on.

  The brown hills on the east side are in what was called an Indian reserve when we were kids. My buddy Bob Small and I spent a lot of time up there, especially in the summer, which in that part of the world runs from April to October. When we were very young we played in Manuel Louie’s barn. Manuel Louie was the chief on that reserve, and in his barn we found eagle feathers, we thought, turkey feathers in all likelihood.

  Bob Small and I were not juvenile delinquents. We just liked exploring. We loved abandoned buildings and half-built buildings. We liked the caves we found on both sides of the
valley, and we liked the scattered remains of a long-gone mining town where we found coloured bottles and buttoned shoes.

  When Bob’s father found things Bob had to do, or when I felt like having my dog for company instead of my friend, I would wander the hills without my second in command, trying not to get a cactus in my ankle, keeping my ears open for rattlesnakes.

  Way up behind the reserve was Blue Mountain, which Bob and I climbed once with his dog. Up on top there was no sign that human beings had ever been there. Our elevation was something like five thousand feet, we thought, and from the ridge we could look down and see another valley that had no river, no fences or buildings in it.

  But between the foot of Blue Mountain and the irrigation ditch and the dirt road that ran along it, there was a big brown elongated lump that we called Big Rock Candy Mountain. It was about an hour’s climb or less, and there were no footpaths. There were a lot of rocks on this lump that itself looked as if millions of years ago it had been a gigantic rock that fell down the slope of Blue Mountain. I tried to imagine what the last ice age had done about this odd brown hunk of stone and couch grass you can now see from my brother’s dining room window.

  We never saw anyone else climbing Big Rock Candy Mountain, and unlike the hills west of town, the ground showed us no rusted sardine cans or pieces of leather. There were a few trees, some of them higher than a boy. There were the usual wildflowers, lady’s slippers, bleeding hearts, buttercups. My dog Caesar found lots of things that aroused his curiosity. I always brought a drugstore paperback novel, and for an hour or two I enjoyed the sensation of being all alone listening to insects, so near to my small-town life, reading about some made-up USAmericans, cowboys or space explorers.

  All my life till then I had been interested in the solar system’s slow long time, in erosion, for example. During my solo climbs I would help erosion out a little by clambering up a shale slide, moving fast enough not to become scree myself. Or rolling a rock down a hill.

  That wouldn’t have happened for another thousand years, I would tell myself.

  If I saw a dead broken branch on a dwarfish ponderosa pine, I would pull it off the tree and fling it out into the air. “Glad to be part of the process,” I might say out loud.

  This one time, up on Big Rock Candy Mountain all alone, no loyal companion, no household pet, just friendly dragonflies making their wonderful noise as they helicoptered by, I let my attention remain on a boulder I had seen many a time before. People often say that something like that is the size of an automobile, but as much as I like to remember it so, this boulder was only about half the size of a baby Austin, a car that was pretty numerous around Lawrence and nearby orchards because of all the English immigrants clogging up our valley.

  “Delsing at nature’s work,” I said out loud. Across the valley I could see a huge white scar on the side of the brown hill, where trucks had been driving away with loads of silica all my life.

  It was not yet light when I drove away from Fé’s, a smile pasted on my face. It is nice driving around that early in the morning, so little traffic, too nice to go straight home, but why did I drive to the unnamed poet’s house? Why did I get out of my Toyota and walk around the walls of the unnamed poet’s house in the dark? Surely he was not going to come to the door and invite me in, out of the dark. Why did I turn and walk backward along the back wall?

  Then I was alive, lying on my back, and I saw that I had fallen down the concrete steps to the basement door. I had a terrible pain in the back of my head, and my right wrist.

  I drove home using my left hand only, and managed to get onto my bed. Satisfied to be alive, happy to go to the hospital later in the day or early in the next, lying in bed with someone’s blood on my chest.

  The one named Areth was definitely not skinny. Improbably but somehow sweetly named Areth. She was from New Brunswick, so she pronounced the first syllable of her name in a way I could never imitate. I try it now, all these years later, and I still can’t do it. It’s a little like the way English people say “Harry,” and I can’t say that either, even though Harry is my middle name. When I pronounce it as I do, hairy, the English people scoff at the colonial, the American.

  When I was a kid in the orchard valley, I looked forward to being an American, having American chocolate bars and cigarettes, leaned toward American spelling and pronunciation because in that way I could distinguish myself from the English, the Limeys that surrounded me, who sometimes hired me to pick their apples.

  But there I was, in Montreal, trying to get home by a circuitous route, and so was Areth, the Maritimer. I was, I thought still, miscast as a part-time professor, and Areth seemed an unlikely student. She could have been trying for some kind of show-business role. She had conventionally beautiful hair, dark and softly curling and lustrous, and a lovely white face with blue eyes and red lips and rosy cheeks. She looked like a starlet except that she was a wee bit short and a wee bit plump. Just a wee bit. Oh, and she had large globular breasts, as were then popular in the less hip magazines and movies and social circles. It was the time when beatniks were morphing into hippies, and it was considered cool that boys and girls looked like each other. When you got a glimpse of Areth you wondered whether she was bucking the trend or hadn’t heard of it. How small was that town in New Brunswick?

  Of course I often smiled at her when we met in the hall or wherever, and maybe I offered a little free badinage based on her place of birth. Often her face and body would appear in my fancy when I was standing in the shower. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly normal. I did spend most of my social time with those hippie women, remember.

  I mean I also spent a lot of time thinking about ground balls, of moving over and snaffling them and making overhand throws to first. How did Kirk Douglas, I wondered, stave off temptation? You can’t have wax in your ears all the time.

  She could not have gotten that shirt tighter, I thought, and then I paid attention to the art-history paper I was marking. It wasn’t even her paper. I wasn’t an old man then, but I was in danger of being a dirty old man. C plus, for one of the Sandies, both of whom wore oversized black sweatshirts.

  “That’s not a bad-looking nose, considering how blue it is.”

  “Least I’m not a herring choker.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “What do you choke?”

  “Don’t choke. Just joke.”

  “That’s how a lot of people back home say joke.”

  She emanated a peculiar innocence, at the same time giving me the sense that she knew a lot more about the erotic life than I did. She certainly knew a lot more than I had known at her age — what? twenty? — but her knowledge had to be a narrow one. I had read the Greeks, for heaven’s sake. She learned everything she knew in Moncton or some such place.

  It was wonderful, or should that be alarming, when spring finally came to Montreal. Now instead of tight sweaters she wore blouses that did not close all the way up. I don’t know what it is about cleavage, but I join the male majority in looking down on it. Areth was the only student I knew who wore high heels to school, and she had to be conscious of the effect, had to be.

  I imagined that she slept with many pillows and wore nightclothes made by generous larvae undergoing total metamorphosis, and that sounds a little like classical literature, doesn’t it?

  At the time I was fairly new to adultery, and most of my adulterous experience had been accidental or marked by shortcomings. But whenever I had adulterous thoughts about Areth, they were coloured by my inescapable feeling that the situation, or at least her contribution to it, was comical. I don’t quite know what I mean, but when it comes to Areth or the memory of her, meaning is not my priority.

  Things came, if you will pardon the expression, to a head one poetry night. Every second Friday night we, three friends of mine and I, hosted a good poet at the university, some of whom had long been my friends, others famous pe
ople I had never met, in a series of readings that has never been equalled in the country. Nowadays, when everything is “amazing” and “unique” and “iconic,” these visitors would be called “great poets.” Well, we thought that Dante was great and that Muriel Rukeyser was really good. In fact, Muriel Rukeyser was the visitor on the night in question.

  The reading in the faculty lounge was very satisfying, and now people were milling around a little before going out to a bar or to the party for the poet at my friend Harold’s house. I had to get something from my office, or pretended I had to, and wouldn’t you know it? Areth wanted to discuss Muriel Rukeyser, so came upstairs with me. When we got inside my office either she or I closed the door, which was designed to lock when that was done.

  Okay, I did begin to give in to her blandishments, what with all the poetry in the air and the low-cut bodice of her unacademic garb. I let her kiss me, or I kissed her a little. She was, I guessed, influenced by these words from Muriel Rukeyser: “Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.” And more specifically that night:

  Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,

  who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,

  whether it is the crash of lips on lips

  after absence and wanting : we must close

  the circuits of ideas, now generate,

  the leap in the body’s action or the mind’s repose.

  And she was somehow on her bare knees, her fingers at the front of my corduroy trousers, an almost unimaginable dream, my office light on, my friends perhaps looking for me, her eyes looking happily at whatever expression was on my face.

  “Well, no,” I said. “I am flattered and tempted, as you can feel in that hand, but no. At least not now.”