No One

by George Bowering

  “Did you enjoy a woman whose name starts with H?”

  “Of course, I am married to one.”

  “Doesn’t count.”

  This could be either my dead friend the California poet or my living friend the Ontario fiction writer.

  I do this alphabet thing in my head all the time. While I am lying in bed, waiting for sleep to soften my head, I think about cities I have slept in quite often — Amsterdam, Berlin, Calgary. Or the writers I have shaken hands with — Dudek, Davies, Duncan. Or the countries I have had a meal in — Egypt, France, Germany. See what I mean? You can do ten of each. You can do dead or alive. You can just zip through the alphabet one letter at a time. Honey, Ivanka, Jeanette.

  When I’m coming home on the 99 bus after gym, I look for the alphabet on the north side of Broadway and then Tenth Avenue. No parking. Dollarama. TD Bank.

  My friend Mike says he does this too, has been doing it all his adult life, which is a stretch. Once in a while we give each other a category. I have never asked him about women one gets lucky or loving with.

  All the last mentioned was a while ago. I haven’t been adding new names of late. I probably spend more of my attention on other lists, things to eat, makers of automobiles, I spy with my little eye.

  But there was a time when I may have sharpened my wits in the hope of winning a letter, to employ language from the varsity athletic novels I read when I was younger than Adam and Eve. Perhaps one day I will tell you what it took to squirm into a single bed with a lovely ringletted damosel named Goldie, but right now I tell myself that there is redeeming social value in the tale of Ximena.

  I mean to say, imagine a guy who uses the alphabet to arrange his sex life, to use the blunt term. I have read about such odd fixations, if that is what you want to call them. Did you know that such an august personage as Lord Tennyson went through libraries, his own and others, surreptitiously tearing page 36 out of all the books? He hated and feared that number so. If you have this knowledge or at least this number in mind when reading “Maud,” say, or (ahem) “Ulysses,” your understanding of Victorian verse will take a noticeable hitch. “I am a part of all I have met,” indeed.

  Telling you the story of Z is the last thing I want to do.

  You have probably already heard the story of O.

  Together, they would not likely tell the story of OZ.

  I told the story of O in French. It is sort of a New Testament tale re age.

  Which I have a lot of now. Though I am still, after all these years, under the rainbow. Another end of another alphabet. I love the alphabet: we know it by heart and organize our lives by it, but really, there is nothing logical or referenced in the order we have decided on for letters. And in the list of women who tried to keep me from getting home, there was no alphabetical order. I might have called each one U.

  Okay, the silliness is over; it’s on to the story of X. And while I try not to tell an X-rated tale, let me tell you how I crossed paths with Ximena Mendes. You would think, given that name, that she was from Xeres, Spain, or Xalapa, Mexico. Nope. She was from the Republic of South Africa, and though her father’s father was an ex-Catholic from Toledo, her mother’s mother was Western Sephardim, also from Toledo. She decided that her daughter would be a listener, hence the name. Maybe Simon says, but Ximena the Spanish Hebrew girl listens. I hardly ever stopped talking in her presence.

  Yes, but how did we meet? It was at another arts conference, this one in Ottawa, at one of the universities in Ottawa. I think it was. Not in Toronto, anyway. Somewhere north of Toronto. About the building where we all slept, it’s hard to remember. I can remember it in terms of north, south, east and west, being a guy, but was it a dorm or a hotel? Something in-between, it seems in my memory’s imaging. Anyway, we were one person to a room. I can’t remember where we went for breakfast if we went for breakfast, and I can’t picture the place where people were giving talks, readings and presentations. Nope, I can’t remember anything but Ximena.

  I think I knew her name a little, having seen it appended to articles in newspapers and magazines, and yes, I think she was covering this academic event for one of the Toronto papers. Anyway, she must have been one of the people I was having nightcaps with somewhere, wherever we were having drinks, and yes, I walked her to her quarters, which were north of mine on the same floor. At her door I made my accustomed suggestion about comfort and company. That is, I let her know my room number just in case, you know, you never can tell.

  “Well, I’m gay,” she said quietly.

  “That’s what I thought,” I replied. “But I would like to sleep with you. Or at least drowse.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  And I bid her good night and went to my own room. Before getting in between the sheets I left my door ajar just a little.

  I might fall asleep and lose my wallet to an academic thief in the night. I might get slain, fail to wake in a pool of B-positive blood. I listened for creaking hallway floorboards, and who knows? Maybe I fell to a shallow whisky sleep.

  I don’t think there was a floorboard creak. But my eyelids were open, and the former blackness of the room had been replaced by bits of light from here and there, from alarm clock and TV controls, from the little gap between the curtains.

  No floorboard creak, but a little metallic click as the door gently closed. From the outside behind a silent thief, or from the inside. Then in the faint light I saw a figure and knew that some kind of sleeping attire was falling from it. Thief or South African? I got out my side of the bed and pulled my jammy bottoms off. I was nude in the dark, slipped back between the sheets where some creature that smelled spicy was waiting for me.

  (Every time I leave some other room and head toward these pages, I think to myself, oh boy, is he going to enjoy some sweet touch today?)

  Oh, she was a sweet warm monkey and future saint, that one. I could have loved her, maybe even did a little, more than a little. Have you seen the wonderful French point guard who plays for the San Antonio Spurs, used to be married to some famous singer or actress, his name the melodious Tony Parker? Well, Ms. Mendes had a head just like his, clearly round, as they say, meaning a lovely orb, and like his, almost without hair, maybe a light brush of hair, hardly noticeable when I rubbed it with my free hand. I had never seen her without her hair. Usually she had a black pageboy hairdo, which was now presumably back in her room, perhaps adorning a light bulb or coat hook, unless she carried a shape-preserving artificial head with her on artistic pilgrimages.

  I kissed her head, kissed it and kissed it, and let her know by that fact that this was my only intimate gesture for the moment, that I was sensitivity itself lying carefully beside her.

  I couldn’t stop kissing and eventually licking her head with its soft stubble. Why did she have a bald head, I wondered in the middle of my happiness, did it have something to do with her sexual placement or self-assignment or whatever it was called, her being a tanned daughter of Sappho, or was she —

  “Are you perhaps Orthodox?” I asked with my lips on her skull.

  “Not in any way,” she replied. “I am Jewish, as you know, but I could not live under the hegemony of those old bearded sheep-prodders in the fields near the Sea of Galilee.”

  “It’s not really a sea, is it?”

  “Nothing is what it seems. That is what I have learned over the years.”

  I was now holding her in my arms, and for comfort fixed it so that she lay half on me. Somehow the palm of my right hand was on her bum, and I was pleased to note that it was as round, as orbic as her head, and nearly as firm.

  “You are definitely lesbian in your proclivities?” I asked.

  “I am a sexual creature whose desires are for the female when it comes to an other.”

  I was feeling a little academic, despite the fact that my male organ was perhaps mistakenly preparing for its favourite activity.<
br />
  “Can you call her, really, an ‘other’ if she shares your physical appearance vis-à-vis sex?” I enquired.

  “Let me,” she said after a short silence, during which somehow a nipple had found a place between my lips, “come at this discussion from another angle. Here you are bare skin to bare skin with a person who has the same sexual ambitions that you do, who is of the same gender, therefore, as yours. Doesn’t that in some way modify your self-identification as a heterosexual Christian lad?”

  “In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me, / And his arm lay lightly around my breast — And that night I was happy.”

  “Who wrote that?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “Running my hand up the inside of your lovely firm left thigh,” I said.

  “I mean ‘now’ in a slightly broader context. This room this evening. This very small group of people.”

  “I want to look forward to a time in which you are my friend. A friend who will lie bare-bodied with me late at night before a day in which I have to be lucid and quick-witted in front of friends and strangers.”

  “What’s this? Is this what you mean by friendship?”

  She was, of course, holding my rather stiffened yoo-hoo. You will have to imagine the questions that swirled around inside my brain or facsimile. For sure I was not picturing a boulder bouncing down a rock face. She’s gay, I told myself. She might as well be a boy. This is just a friendly grasp, I told myself. For a while she just held on, not moving her hand or any other part of her body. Philosophical considerations marched through my head, keeping unwelcome fear outside my window — our window. As I thought in abstract terms and complete sentences, the hand I had on her upper, inner, firmer thigh moved as of its own accord upward (in terms of the body it belonged to, not the room it was in) and inward, in a sense, and purposefully, if not firmly, and finally wielded a few fingers that brushed bare skin all the way to the edge of her music box, oh my god Hermes the thief!

  She didn’t moan, all you cliché fans out there, she didn’t groan, she did not say shocking words. But I heard a deep southern hemisphere breath come out and fill the space around and above us.

  What are you doing?

  I asked myself this inside my head.

  She is a happy and established Amazon.

  What are you trying to do? Are you going to change her?

  Show that your appeal is stronger than any habit, any defence?

  No. No. I just want to be with her, as close as it may turn out to be.

  To touch.

  I did not put my fingers right in. I did not want it to appear that I was the penetrator, Delsing the Destroyer. I just felt as if I were, well, I was going to say home, maybe because if a person were to check the etymology of home, as I had done for the paper I was going to give tomorrow afternoon, one would see that it means the place where one may lie down.

  Then she was on top of me, or maybe I was on top of her. Either I forget now or I did not clearly know then, and my stiff member was right there where one begins, and I could tell, I could tell, we both wanted it to be in. But first with gentle strokes and then with almost gentle strokes, we tried, yes we did, while I kissed her head, yes, but her flower remained closed, and I slowly desisted, my arms around her, so she must have been at least now above me, and then she kissed my forehead, where she must have tasted my light sweat.

  She kissed me and kissed me, and I lay on my back in gratitude and confusion, feeling as if I were a boy new to sex and so old I was learning to fail in the last days. I was almost in awe of this little creature. Remnants of my sexual fantasies were slipping by the edges of my sight if it was not my fancy. Mmmmm, she hummed a little, and slipped without effort or discomfort, down, kissing my thin chest and holding my ovals now in both hands, raising me as if water from the creek, to drink, and there was my ache right inside her mouth. And now she taught me.

  Maybe you remember that about that time all the popular magazines and jokesters and serious radio arguments were talking about something called the G spot. This was a little area apparently inside a woman’s erotic channel, which, when stimulated, increased her fucking enjoyment many times over. Men all over the world were looking for it. They felt like failures if they could not find it. Women had another thing to fake in order to prevent depression in their husbands and lovers.

  After a decade or two talk about the G spot, interest ebbed, and attention was directed back to the clitoris. Handle that the right way, men were told in the magazines and health programs, and your mate will start hinting at things the minute you step inside the door.

  I don’t know whether Ximena was transferring her expertise about the G spot or the clitoris, but she located a most desiring spot on the underside beginning of the bulb of my little purplish-grey candy torpedo, oh, I couldn’t think straight though I knew straight where I wanted this to go, the confusion that is, you will see, in the poor control I have over my words. I had known about this hardly at all, only in the most general of ways, in my late adolescent desire to get to the end of this but not too soon, the same way we later, I am told, feel about death. Her mouth became her small hand and vice versa, while I disappeared around back of a planet no human had ever laid eyes on till this moment, if moment is what it was.

  “It’s all over,” she whispered.

  “I’ve heard that one,” I said, kind of groaning but knowing that I would quip again some day.

  “Oh, you.”

  “Ah,” I kind of gasped. “X marks the —”

  “If you finish that sentence, I’m out of here.”

  So I just lay on my back with that wonderful round head on my chest and slept till some time in the mid-morning, when I woke with a smile on my face and no companion. Of course. She had to fetch her hair.

  That afternoon while she drank green tea from a cardboard cup, I told her that I just about loved her.

  “Me?”

  “My first ever Jewish South African lesbian divine messenger.”

  “You would like to —?”

  “Take the pain out of visiting Toronto, if I live long enough to visit Toronto again, by coming to see you.”

  “I wrote my telephone number on your leg, in magic marker.”

  “I showered carefully,” I said.

  There were times after that when I almost felt as if I could have been home in her cool dark apartment above a barbershop on Bathurst Street.

  I have mentioned my backside tattoo, NO STEP, and I did have something to say on another occasion or page, if I remember aright, about high-heeled shoes. I was a superannuated virgin when I was among those aviators, or was it among those avatars? The word avatar means the god who has fallen to earth, and during my years in the air farce enough guys did that. I took pictures of whatever was left of their flying machines on the Manitoba flatlands, but I never saw their remains.

  Sure, I thought Ximena was a divine messenger, but I wonder about those pilots in their spacy outfits. Were they divinity fallen to earth or intruders in the sky, too stupid or prideful to know that the sun gets hot on the prairie provinces, and waxwings don’t do well there.

  But before I wax overly ornate here, let me return to the question of being in the sky. No, I am not a member of the mile-high club, though I am an associate member, if you can figure that out. As a sensible lad brought up pretty well on the surface of the planet, if you don’t count the atmosphere, I have been most of my long life afraid of flying. As a high school air cadet I got to go up and sit in the fuselage bubble of a crate that resembled the famous Flying Boat, this being another amphibious vessel that could stay in the air for a whole day, rumbling through the atmosphere at less than a hundred miles an hour. Then when I was seventeen, I took my first commercial flight, from Vancouver to Pat Bay Airport in a DC-3, because I
was going to go to college in Victoria, and my friend John Lundy, who was in the navy there, liked that little hop to the island. Later that year I got a lot of flying in before being fired from my provincial survey job up north.

  I don’t remember being scared. It was after I had been in the RCAF that I developed my fear of flying. If I was working with cameras out the windows and doors of loud rattling kites, I didn’t have the time or brains to be scared. But as an aerial photographer I had time for reading, and though I spent some of that time reading science-fiction romances, and some of it reading U.S. poetry, I also came upon aeronautical magazines and books in the base library. I read about the length of electrical and hydraulic lines in a typical transport plane, the number of parts that allowed a pilot to turn or raise his machine, and I let my imagination run away with the spoon.

  Meanwhile airline spokesmen were always attesting that flying was a lot safer than driving if you wanted to get from Vancouver to Edmonton, say, though who would really want to do that?

  “You were in the air force. Why would you be afraid to fly?” people would ask me.

  “I know the many things that can go wrong,” I would reply.

  Every time I hear a bump or a sudden change in engine sound, I start to sweat.

  My first experience of Pat Bay Airport involved dark air and sudden explosions. I didn’t see many movies when I was a small boy. The first I ever saw was Bambi, and it scared the hell out of me — once when Bambi’s father appeared, a supernatural powerful buck you had to look upward at, filling the screen, and another time when the deer hunters were coming. I didn’t go to movies much until I was a teenager with a beer-bottle income, but one movie I did see during the war was Commandos Strike at Dawn, which was filmed north of Victoria, among Norwegian fjords. Pat Bay stood in for an English warplane base.

  Things were a little quieter in 1953, when John Lundy and I rode for half an hour in the silver CPA plane with the flapping wings, into my short future as a college student. A year later I would be sitting on the metal floor in an RCAF Expeditor, wondering how I could arrange to live a life on the ground or not too many storeys above it.