No One

by George Bowering

  A year after I left the air force I started keeping the poems I wrote, and I started keeping a diary. But from time to time I would throw out all my paintings and drawings, standing and watching the flames in the backyard barrel and feeding its appetite, all the while hoping that some invisible director was getting this on film.

  And I started keeping books after I had finished reading them. For a while I kept moving from city to city, Calgary to London to Montreal to Vancouver, and I hauled my books with me. I am not much for buying clothes; I am infamous for wearing shirts and socks that are thirty or forty years old. But books? Well, books are not things, not stuff. If it is absolutely necessary to buy a pair of shoes, I pace up and down in front of the shoe store for hours spread out over days, till I can go in, and then sometimes I hustle on back out because no clerk has come near me in the first three minutes. But books? Well, if I am in Portland I go to Powell’s and grab things I will never see at home, and then I feel justified because I shopped just one room. But I have to get a couple bags of books through customs at the Canadian border.

  Mostly second-hand books, I point out. Duty-free, no?

  Often I pile up forty books I really want to buy, and just take eight of them. Honey would take forty, without qualms. On the same day in which she got three new pairs of shoes.

  So I had to keep buying bookshelves, and then houses in which I had bookshelves built for the walls. Bedrooms, kitchen, living room, dining room, foyer, den. I didn’t like it getting messy, but what could I do? I had to shove books in sideways on top of other books, books in various piles, on top of the bookshelf, on the floor, in the staircase.

  So I started to narrow down. I started leaving books in libraries, at bus stops, in coffee shops. I liked to imagine someone finding a book I’d left.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, When She Was Good, the only Philip Roth book I haven’t read! This is my lucky day!”

  Though I knew, or guessed accurately, that most of them were tossed out along with that day’s newspaper pile when the coffee shop closed for the day. Still, you can suppress such images, and imagine that there is a beautiful middle-aged woman in glasses sitting down with a cup of green tea and reading Philip Roth. You are probably imagining this while buying the new Murray Bail book.

  I think the Australians pronounce it “Bile.” He knows, by the by, how to write about paintings, and he knows how to write novels about non-artists.

  While refilling her cup from the iron teapot on the kitchen counter, she keeps her glasses on to read the thermostat before turning it down a couple of degrees. She likes Philip Roth because of the slight breath of amusement that runs through his storytelling. That amusement is, in turn, sexy enough at times to make her nipples rise, which they are doing now, so she swiftly removes her crisp white shirt and reaches behind herself and unclips her bra.

  How am I able to see this, them, those pointing breasts, not big enough to hang, the nipples almost pointing upward, where am I that I can see these and how she now is wearing nothing at all, a slightly thin middle-aged woman, but she is, after all, wearing her glasses, her hair still high on her head, her long neck most inviting of all? Where am I that I can see her smile as she continues to read the book that had been for three decades in my own library?

  The book I am carrying, for I always carry a book, bears these lines in italics:

  Muse,

  tell me of this man of wit,

  who roamed long years

  after he had sacked

  Troy’s sacred streets.

  Always carry a book because sometimes one gets into a lineup before the drugstore postal counter, and some little old lady up ahead is buying a single postage stamp after enquiring about its price, and fumbling coins out of her scented change purse.

  To continue in the interrogative voice, how is it that I am in the room with her, the beautiful middle-aged woman wearing glasses and reading the book that used to be in my possession, if you can truly speak of possessing a book? I think she senses my being there, though I have eased off my loafers and approach her from behind in my stocking feet. She shifts a little in her reading chair, resulting in a rise of those dear light nipples, and for a second or two I am arrested in my silent tracks. But I feel as if I have permission, not lustful so much as companionable, as she lifts her arms and Roth’s shiksa above her blonde head, so that with my last step forward I put my hands about her and hold those shining breasts in my palms, the erect nipples seeming to go beyond permission to suggestion.

  I lean over her head and give her a big soft kiss right in the middle of her forehead.

  How, I ask, did she put down the novel and the glasses, and what happened to whatever it was she was still wearing, whatever had held her hair in place before she turned and looked straight into my eyes with her green eyes? I held her close to my almost fully clothed self, and felt what happened when she stood on tiptoes. I wanted to avoid any awkwardness, any crudeness while I listened to her whispers. Her murmuring was mostly sweet breathing, and I had no idea what language she was using. It could have been ancient. It could have been all vowels.

  I heard an almost soundless encouraging dialect as she took my hand and walked with me to a room with a king-sized bed in it. She lay me down. I didn’t lie down — she lay me down on my back on top of the white feminine bedcovers and adroitly lifted a knee over me until she was astride, looking straight at my face, which must have been registering shock. With one adept hand she put my excited member into her and leaned forward, then back. Then she was still, and I wanted to move.

  “Keep perfectly still,” she said.

  “How do you expect me —?”

  “Perfectly still.”

  “Can I —?”

  “Still.”

  So I set myself to do the impossible. Because I was perfectly still I could feel what was going on where we were closest. My hard flesh was being held tight all round. And then she squeezed. I mean it squeezed. I had wanted this all my life.

  Her murmuring turned to light breathy laughter. Oh, I will stay with her forever if I get this squeezing all the time. Now she was whispering something I could not understand, some faint rustling language, and I didn’t care. I was happy to be illiterate as long as the squeezing continued. I lost my concentration for a moment and thrust my groin upward two times.

  She stopped whispering and stopped squeezing. “Once more, and I am going to dismount,” she said.

  “I’m a horse?”

  “Get down, I mean.”

  “I think that’s what we are doing,” I said.

  She slapped my face. “Any more stupid jokes or any more movement out of you, and it’s over,” she said, those wonderful scary eyes nailing me. “I can take care of myself.”

  I froze. No, I lay perfectly still. She whispered in her odd language and squeezed and squeezed.

  I may not have moved, but something in me did, and then it was in her, and she squeezed until I screamed, or was it she?

  I am glad that my visit to Ithaca, New York, took place in the winter. There is a big square in the middle of the Cornell campus and you can get up above it and look down, and in the winter there will be snow on the grass. It looks like a giant version of that pie game we played whenever it snowed in Lawrence when I was a kid. There are paths in the snow, diagonal and straight on. I think the students see this big white Union Jack as a campus tradition, a duty for anyone who jealously guards the university’s position in the Ivy League.

  I don’t know exactly how residents along the south shore of Lake Ontario feel about the country on the other side, but once in Cleveland I saw a printed designation of the Lake Erie area as “America’s North Coast.” As a Canadian, of course, I mock, every chance I get, the geographical acumen of these people who can’t locate on a world map the countries they are currently bombing or invading.

  Okay, but how often do Torontonians g
ive a thought to the communities on the other side of their lake? In years to come I would drive along the Turnpike and lesser roads of the area, mainly to attend baseball games in places such as Batavia and Syracuse. In the smaller towns you see U.S. flags in front of just about all the houses, because the War of 1812 is still happening around there, I guess.

  There are other reasons to wander the region. In Buffalo, which looks like one big run-down neighbourhood, there is the great Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Anchor Bar, where Buffalo wings were invented. Both these sites make you think that the USA is almost redeemable. Around that part of the world the weather is all right for a couple of days in the spring and a couple of weeks in the fall. But the summer heat and humidity make you rethink the idea of continuing life, and the winter? Well, it is usually winter.

  Buffalo experiences something called “the Lake Effect.” This means the cold snow-filled wind from the west squeezes all its unhappiness into the eastern point of Lake Erie and covers the desolate city with its burden. There is deep snow on the roofs, and wind-driven snow against the sides of houses. The best-selling postcards in Buffalo convenience stores depict “The 1947 Blizzard” and “The 1964 Blizzard” etcetera. Every once in a while it stops snowing and the ice gets its chance. Older people with brittle legs fall down a lot. Chevy Biscaynes slide sideways down McKinley Parkway.

  It was on such a day, in what could have been early spring in a decent topography, that I left proud Toronto and headed for Cornell University. First I took to the rails from Union Station, a “westbound” train that wound up going eastward from Hamilton to Buffalo. Somehow, I found my way from the train station to a bus station, and eventually boarded a bus bound for Rochester. As winter buses and buildings usually are in the eastern part of the continent, the Greyhound was engorged with internal heat. The city of Rochester was once in the National Basketball Association or whatever it was called back then, but now I saw that it had just one tall skinny building in the downtown.

  David McFadden taught me: when you are in Dublin, look for people eating chocolate bars; when in Rochester, watch for people taking family snapshots.

  I looked for my ride, the guy I had been corresponding with, one Cecil Giscombe, and I intended to ask him whether I should pronounce his first name the way Brits do or the way USAmericans do. I did find out that his predecessors had come to the U.S. from the Caribbean, but I don’t remember which way to pronounce his first name. In his books he goes by C.S.

  I was also going to tell him about a northernish B.C. ex-town called Giscome, which I did, and a few years later he went there and wrote about it.

  But to the day in question, or the day I was going to ask the question. I was standing at the door of the bus station. A chubby guy with boots up to his knees looked at me with attention, so I smiled and asked.

  “Cecil? Or Cecil?”

  “Neither, thanks, I just had lunch,” said the guy. He was short and a little overweight and his jacket had a belt on it.

  Then the guy I was looking for showed up. He was a little-magazine editor sitting in a ten-year-old Mercury four-door — a chromified USAmerican car as long as your front walk. I had gone from airplane to train to bus to get this far. What was I expecting?

  “You look like the picture on your book,” said Cecil the editor. “Hop in.”

  For the ride of your life, I said inside my head, catching sight of the hook at the end of his arm, which, I thought, would be hard to hold to one arc of the big steering wheel that would spin when the front tires did on the snow-turned-to-ice on Rochester streets, and then there was the highway south.

  “Are you making a run-on sentence in your head?” enquired my driver and all-around Ivy League host.

  “Do it all the time,” I said, tossing my little suitcase on the back seat and climbing in. I looked for a seat belt. No such luck. Am I being punished for Big Rock Candy Mountain or the bad thing I did in Toronto on the way here, I wondered.

  “The heater will work better when we get up to highway speed,” said Mr. Giscombe, and I now had something else to worry about. I don’t know how many miles southward and eastward we went, but every few feet of every mile had hard snow-ice on top of the pavement, and this long loose-jointed Detroit steel we were inside slithered along one side of the highway and then the next, faster and faster, it seemed, so what did I do? I made conversation — figured that’s the way to overcome fear or the odds, heard the clackety-clack of that metal end-of-the-arm device against the plastic of the spinning driver’s wheel.

  “Did you get my letter about the ghost town named Giscome?” I asked during the middle of a flinch.

  “Indeedy I did,” he said. “There’s an old family story that some uncle went up there past Prince George and started mining for something.”

  “I’ve always known about that place but never heard how it got its name.”

  “I don’t know whether it’s a ghost town. But I think a lot of people thought they might have seen a ghost when he showed up. First time some of them ever saw a black man in the snow.”

  “Well, I figure they named that town after him. Spelling kind of loose up there.”

  “Bit like that town in Arizona,” said Cecil, after a figure eight on the local snow.

  “That the one I am thinking of?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Town didn’t have a name till one day a famous African-American gunfighter came riding in and the peace-loving citizenry filled him full of holes.”

  “Life and death in the Southwest,” I said, nodding my head to get some verticality amid all the horizontality.

  “Said sorry we had to ventilate you, but to show our fairness, you can give our community its first and lasting name.”

  “Here it comes — I can tell.”

  “Dying desperado looks up at all the white faces and says, ‘You muh—’ and passes away in enemy arms.”

  “Okay,” I said, “if I am going to hear that kind of joke in Cayuga country, Cornell is going to have to double my meagre wages.”

  By the time we reached the picturesque town of Ithaca with snow on every roof, Cecil and I were friends. Till this time he had been editor of the magazine that was unlucky enough to receive a sheaf of my poems and one of my drawings, and an almost up-and-almost-coming poet on the U.S. scene. Years later and in the summer, he would become a prodigious bicycle pilot, hand and hook on handlebars across the land mass and up the trail to northern B.C.

  “Well, talk about towns and their names and how they got them,” I said.

  “If you went by the names of towns in New York State, you would think that we are living the Classical life up here.”

  “Down here,” I said.

  “Troy,” said my helmsman. “You ever been there?”

  “I think I bypassed it once. Looking for peace.”

  “Syracuse, you must have been in Syracuse.”

  “Went to a baseball game there in later life,” I said in my mysterious way. “I didn’t go to Sicily when I had the chance, a matter of husbands, you understand.”

  Clackety-clack went the steering wheel on Cecil’s metal hand. I noticed that both my hands were hanging on to something, tight.

  “If you went to the Baseball Hall of Fame, I’ll bet you went through Utica.”

  “Bypassed it too. When I am aiming to get somewhere, I don’t like to get sidetracked. Story of my life.”

  “Albion and Albany?”

  “Etymologically, I am thinking, that could be anywhere.”

  “You are a smart man, Delsing.”

  “Could be smarter,” I said, tensing my thigh muscles.

  Then we arrived over the town and then we eased in our rattling metal vessel down into the town. Ithaca was no island, was in fact the opposite of an island, and if there was anything like a sea it was a white sea of snow on the slanted roofs, faint light in the promise
of a dark fall. If I had a wife, she was thousands of kilometres to the west.

  If you have read this far, you are expecting a knock on the door. Bide your time. Wait for me.

  I thought that Cecil was driving me toward one of these cozy little houses, maybe his own. Maybe I would stay a week in the house where they filmed The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, my favourite movie employing a Greek Classical theme.

  No such luck. My boatsman turned us toward East Hill, and before I knew it, we were in the Hollywood idea of a traditional university, where the leaves were yellow along Hemlock Gorge wherein Fall Creek babbled toward Beebe Lake and the halls of learning. Cecil mentioned these geographical names as we passed, and then pulled the vessel to an illegal stop before a red-brick building where I was given to understand that I would be in residence for a week, those lucky undergrads!

  He led me inside, up a flight of stairs in whatever this was, a fraternity house or a dorm or a guest building, something with shiny brown wood and pictures of long-dead professors on the walls. I stood in astonishment as he reached into his pocket with his metal opposables, pulled out a key on a ring and used it to open my door. I would have thought he’d use his other hand, the one that was holding my suitcase, but then I figured this man had a right to show off. I had read a few pages of his poetry. He had a right to be confident too.

  “I will leave you to settle in, get a little rest,” said Cecil. “Be back around six, to haul you off to dinner with the department head.”

  I always liked this moment during visits to universities. I’d have time to write in my diary, knock off a few postcards, this being back in the time of postcards, and wash my feet. I have not told you about my feet, and I don’t plan to.

  My first Ivy League reading, I told myself. And as I would be conducting a creative writhing class for five days, a future opportunity to say, “I once taught in the Ivy League.”