I looked out the high window and saw darkly clad legs making their way along the given paths on the snowy quad.
I was afraid to lie down on the narrow but tidy bed, because I thought I might fall asleep and who knows, maybe not even wake up when knuckle or steel tapped on my door.
A second or two later I woke in my jacket on the narrow bed as the sound of knocking cut into my dream about fighter pilots pulling heavy G-force over a darkened London. I combed my longish hair with my left hand as I reached for the doorknob with my right hand. I opened the door inward and though my glasses were crooked on my nose, I saw Cecil, snow on his toque, or whatever they called it down here.
“Head’s in the car,” he said.
“What?”
“Take your time. Wake up slowly. I said the head of the English department is in the car, keeping warm.”
Oh, I thought, probably a formerly hopeful poet, neither obsequious nor lordly, a perfectly tactful fellow in a corduroy jacket, but then what the hell am I, an elsewhere local poet and draftsman hired by a fairly new university in the sticks, not even their sticks.
“Let me have a post-nap pee,” I said, and so I did, and soon we were thumping down the staircase, then walking carefully on the new snow. The head of the English department was a shadow in the back seat, and I was again directed to the death seat beside Cecil, and off we went. Upon saying our hellos, I learned that the head of the English department was a woman with a slight accent I could not nail down and an old-fashioned first name, which I got right when I looked her up the next morning. As for this night it was something like Theresa, but just to be safe, I did not utter it.
I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember that we were in a dimly lit room next to another dimly lit room, in what was once a grand house and now had a name that was vaguely French. The waiter wore black slacks and a white shirt and tucked his order book into his pants, high on the back. I was not paying for anything, so I had a cocktail and my share of the wine, something dark red and French-tasting. The three of us exchanged the usual visiting-artist inanities, and I managed not to spill much on my shirt front, I remember that. Maybe I had boeuf bourguignon. I usually did.
For the first half hour I avoided looking as if I were eyeing the head of the department, but eventually I got round to using my eyes when I spoke to her, looking back and forth, actually, between Cecil and her. Theresa, maybe. When you are telling a story such as this, it is generally thought that you should tell your readers what the character, person, was wearing. The head of the English department, as well as I could tell in the lighting available, was wearing the female equivalent of what she would be wearing if she were a male head of the department. That means that her jacket fitted her the female way, and the shirt under the jacket was made of silk and coloured, I think, lilac or mauve or burgundy, something in that range. She was sitting, so I could not tell whether she was wearing slacks or a skirt. I forgot to look when she walked through the semi-darkness from the washroom back there somewhere.
I didn’t have any dessert, even though it was French and I wasn’t paying for it, but I had good European coffee while turning down a liqueur. Did I have hope in my heart or something?
Anyway — credit card, turn up collar, snow, cool car seat, thank you, and I was back in my room, jacket and shoes off, diary out to make a list in, and is this what you were hoping for? A fingernail knock at my door. I opened it to a silhouette I liked.
“Oh.”
The light went out.
“Hello, again.”
The blinds were down and the curtain was closed.
“I can’t see a thing. Is that the way it is supposed to be?”
“Define ‘it.’”
“Keep talking, or I will have to use echolocation.”
“To do what?”
“To sound you out.”
“I thought that was what you were doing in the restaurant.”
“Not at all. I am a normally shy person.”
“That is not what I’ve heard.”
“From who?”
“Whom.”
“Oh yes, you are an English teacher. I won’t be able to get away with anything.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“No, really, I don’t go looking for trouble.”
“Visiting writers at any school can be a problem. Oh, you don’t have a shirt on.”
“I wasn’t expecting visitors. What are you doing, exactly?”
“I don’t want you causing any of our female students to do this.”
“Oh!”
“Cornell was the first Ivy League school to go coed.”
“I did a little reading before coming here. I know that women found it hard here for a long time.”
“That is what I am hoping.”
“Oh!”
“Or the young men. I don’t want you causing any of them to do this, either.”
“Do you always start humming when you do this?”
“What makes you think I always do this?”
“Happens I know what you are humming. It is early in the alto part of Schumann’s Neujahrslied. You are a month or so early, aren’t you?”
“Opus 147.”
“One forty-four.”
“Engrossing.”
“Okay, that is terrible. No, not that. That is quite all right. I mean the pun.”
“I did set you up, didn’t I?”
“Do you mind if I . . . ? Ah, there!”
“It is almost totally dark in here. Don’t be afraid to take everything off.”
“My everything or your everything?”
“Never mind your stalling tactics. I’ll do it.”
“Is this still part of the stuff you don’t want me to cause your coeds to do?”
“Mphgh. Glmph.”
“Slowly. Slowly.”
“More about that later. I am just going to take this last bit off.”
“You can leave your ankle bracelet on.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Saw it in the restaurant, while I was trying not to make eye contact.”
“‘Who riseth from a feast / With that keen appetite that he sits down?’”
“Where did you get that?”
“The Merchant of Venice.”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that.”
“I go to the gym every day.”
“Oooh, ow! Careful with those teeth!”
“‘Appetite, a universal wolf.’ Troilus and Cressida.”
“‘’Tis not the meat, but ’tis the appetite / Makes eating a delight.’ Sir John Suckling.”
“Oh, you are a wicked student of the art.”
“Do you mind if for a moment I put my tongue lmphghm gyhmm luhmmluh . . .”
“Do you always talk so much when a woman is entertaining you?”
“Lllffghllmm. Huhuhummgmm grummmumoh oh.”
“If you can’t breathe, just pinch me somewhere.”
“Mmmmmmm mmmmmmm.”
“‘No member needs so great a number of muscles as the tongue; this exceeds all the rest in the number of its movements.’ Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Luhluhluh luhluhluh.”
“‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man / If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ The Two Gentlemen of Verona.’”
“How do you remember —?”
“Back where you were. You are doing fine.”
“But both hands around the back of my head. Mmmplh.”
“‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil.’ James 3:8. Oh. Oh. Ung ung ung, ahhh!”
“I know. You were the girl in school who could not sit still.”
“Let me catch my breath. I am a few years older than you. Do you mind if I do this whil
e I am catching my breath?”
“You may sit again, if you’d like. Yes, there.”
“I am thinking about crude things to say here in the dark.”
“I am imagining you saying them. And you a department head.”
“Hold still while I try to guess what you are imagining.”
“Maybe I am imagining the light on.”
“When you write about this, are you going to keep your readers in the dark?”
So, that academic woman with the enviable memory never got to see the tattoo on my ass. I think I have mentioned it, but I can’t remember whether I have described it before now. It appeared during the years when I worked among military airplanes, and commemorates that short time in my relative youth. There is no drawing involved, but simply uppercase sans-serif letters about two centimetres high, though we used inches back then. Sometimes we lied about the inches. Anyway, here is what the letters spelled out: NO STEP.
Not that it deterred all the aviators I have welcomed aboard.
I do like to see women in stiletto heels. I think they do terrible things to women’s feet, and I would never wear them myself, not even when I am dressing up in women’s clothes. It took me several decades to realize that high spike heels did certain things to the gluteal and thigh portions of female posture, and then I had to have it pointed out to me. I love to see them walk around, especially if they are also wearing skirts or dresses.
There was a time when I kept a stripper’s shoe on my computer — for inspiration, I said. This was after Honey started going wherever she went. But except for once, well, twice, I never went in for presenting myself as a surface to be walked on by high heels, black one time, red the other. High heels always made me shaky when it came to writing sentences, I am sure you have noticed.
I wish I could write about all the high heels I have known, but my muse has me on a short leash, believe it or not, and if you are experiencing an imaginary relationship between high heels and leashes, that is your own fault, mainly. And here is where I let you in on another compositional secret — I can’t remember why I introduced the subject of high heels and tattoos. Back when I was trying to fight my way past all those women and get back home, tattoos weren’t all that common. Not the way they are these days.
Unless we were to focus our attention on Damyana. Damyana’s husband is an architect, a man who builds very good and unpopular buildings in the less desirable parts of most cities in our part of the world. I have been in every one of them because I’ve made it my purpose to see them all. Damyana is a critic and academic who loves innovation in all the arts. She travels the world because she learned early how to write and produce papers for conferences on literature, the visual arts and music. Oh, and architecture.
Damyana is, as you will have guessed, an Italian. She’s a Roman, and I have seen her walking some of Rome’s cobblestone streets in high heels. Now, that’s something. That and the Borghese garden, where I once lay on a bench and looked up at the parrots for an hour.
I had recently lucked out on an application I sent in an hour before the deadline, and here I was, enjoying a sunny though rather small studio overlooking the Tiber River. Unversed in Italian waterways, I encouraged Damyana to call me a po boy instead of what she usually called me, which was something in Italian that threw aspersions on most of my family. Most important to me was the fact that I got to live in Rome free of charge for two months. Most important to Damyana, apparently, was that although she was visiting her native city while her handsome husband was overseeing the birth of a villa to be enjoyed for a few weeks a year by a wealthy Scots-Canadian, she got to attend to my less worthy needs.
“How can I,” I asked more than once, “apply water and colour to four-hundred-pound paper while you are dishonouring your marriage vows?”
“You told me to hold steel,” she replied, exaggerating her Italian accent.
“I distinctly said to hold still, and in the second place, I don’t think you can call that thing steel. Softwood, maybe.”
“I would hardly call that the second place,” she argued. “Fourth or fifth would be more like it.”
“Fifth? How is fifth even possible to the imagination?”
She talked about the imagination a lot in her job, with her strong Italian accent, an accent that sounded as if she were putting it on for show-business reasons, but no, she had been trying for years to sound like your usual Canadian or USAmerican professor, flinging out words such as problematic as if it meant that the idea she was referring to had some problem or other, or hegemonic or synergistic or commodify, or paradynamic, for all I know. If literary criticism graduate students are anything like art criticism graduate students, they probably get good grades on their theses if they sprinkle in these words and avoid concrete nouns.
Sorry for the little rant, especially when the last thing you knew was the one Damyana was holding in her hand. I think it was her hand.
I was probably working on my hundredth watercolour of her lovely naked body, and though I was truly appreciative of the synergy whipping around in that sunlit room, I was fully clothed, as they say, or at least well enough clothed to amble a few minutes later about Trastavere with my model, looking for a shaded table at which to sit and nibble on something that used to rely on the salt sea for life.
“Can I show some of the pictures to Andrew?” she asked. Was she unconscious of the effect of the olive oil on her lips? One Sunday night, when most of the cafés and restaurants in my neighbourhood were closed, we walked into the only one that was open, a place I had eaten and sketched at alone many times. When we walked inside the room, we had to step along a path between exemplar plates of food on the floor, my favourite being the large whole artichoke on its stem. Damyana, of course, ordered the testicoli di capretto, and stared at me with wide-open eyes while she ate them, almost, you would not be amiss in saying, leering at me. I didn’t know whether or not it was a good thing that I was excited.
Olive oil on her lips.
She had a body that was made for oil, any kind of oil, but especially olio d’oliva. The same night of the unfortunate goat kid I ordered her to pose again, but this time in my tiny kitchen, where I applied the foundation of Southern cuisine to her from her forehead down to her instep. I filled my hands and caressed her up and down while she hummed, while she crooned a goddess’s voyage toward satisfaction. I licked the gleaming oil from the dimples above her buttocks. I pulled my black clothing off my own body and stood against her for the warm oil.
She poured some olive oil into her hand and lifted her hand under my nuts, gently lifting and lifting, and then she got some more oil and cupped her hand again and moved it slowly up to the velvet end of my cock. We should have been giggling. I should have made cracks about being a salad.
And so it went, as you can imagine. Sometime during that night I put my gleaming part where it had never been before, and in my dizziness I earned a new understanding of the term extra-virgin. I blessed the name of Agrestis Nettar Ibleo. I have to confess that for an entire night, and often in the days afterward, I forgot my objective to make the voyage home. Damyana with her olive lips and long breasts and off-white body would have tormented the memory of any Mediterranean god.
Desire and alarm contended for my emotions every time I was with her. At a conference in Spain a woman professor I had known for years had the fortune of sharing the next-door room with her husband in the Zaragoza hotel that hosted our presentations and meals. For at least an hour once and a half hour a while later, we pounded the bed against the wall, and Damyana announced her mood pretty loudly in three languages. Once, while her husband drove somewhere in the Nova Scotia night to get a pizza, she took care of my pepperoni on the risers because we could not make it all the way upstairs for our quickie, twenty minutes guaranteed or it’s free. In her Auckland hotel room another time, I tried to keep the noise to a minimum as I gobbled her legs and then
some while she phoned her husband long distance, thank goodness.
Once, while her bent old parents from Molise came to visit her Saskatoon home, Mamma and Papà were in the kitchen, disputing the proper herbs to substitute in the coniglio alla molisana, while Damyana and I were in the next room, in a full-body embrace. I peeked around the edge of the doorway and saw them shuffling between the cutting board and the oven. Damyana fell from my arms to the floor, where she stayed while she reached up and undid my pants. Talk about desire and alarm! At first my overworked little lieutenant would not respond, but then Damyana had him in her throat and began making choking noises on purpose. Then she lifted her large brown eyes to mine and began making the loudest slurping sounds she could. Somehow her shirt had disappeared and she was not otherwise dressed on the top half of her body.
I peeked around the edge of the door frame from time to time. I could only guess that elderly Molisians were hard of hearing. They did not even respond to the involuntary expostulations I made as semen left my body for the second time that day. Damyana smiled like a witch, put on her shirt over her long breasts, and went into the kitchen to make suggestions regarding the ingredients. I sat for some time on the floor before trying to stand and zip.
I don’t know whether he will ever figure out exactly how he had wronged that woman he saw grey-haired now on Tenth Avenue. And if he does, will he ever tell me, or you?
It wasn’t so much that she wanted to stop him from getting home; she wanted to be home, wanted to be the bed he slept in at night and the table set before him in the mornings.
“What do you want?” he asked her more than once.
“Have I ever said that I wanted something?” was her usual reply.
“A patient seductress, she obviously wants something.”
“You don’t have to use the feminine ending,” she said, sounding as if she were amused.
“Am I a user?” he asked, intelligence oozing around his words.
“I do sometimes feel that when you tie my hands and suspend me.”
“More suspense than suspension, that is my aim.”
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