How ever am I going to get any sleep, I wondered.
I tried leaning my shoulders forward, my hands supporting my weight, my toes hooked at the bottom edge of the thin mattress. But no, I thought, if I let myself fall forward I will wake and crush her. Hmm. What if I put the backs of my hands, which I know so well, on the cool sheet, then slide one hand under each buttock? I have never been crazy about that noun, but I was and am fond of its referent. I performed that action, and now I was holding a satisfactorily globular item in each hand. Thoughts of sleep went away like snow on a stove. I lifted that weight to my face.
Am I, I asked myself, her director or her servant?
Happily I served and served, and oh my, her breath was fast after a while.
The next day we flew together as far as Sydney, but then she left me a virgin of sorts, and went alone, I think, to Bora Bora to swim and smoke and drink for a while before returning to her island home, which she liked to call Aiaia, for some reason. I wasn’t going to waste my one stopover on the way home, so I went with two U.S. scholars to Tahiti and its littler island Moorea. There we lived for a few days in a thatched shack on stilts, and swam around in a pool into which coconuts would sometimes fall. The tropics are okay, I told myself and them, as long as the sea breeze is wafting.
Cissy and I were tangentially in the same racket, so we occasionally met at conferences and the like, and yes, we sometimes spent time together away from the eyes of others. There were quite a few photos taken that might suggest some kind of relationship, and I did not go a long way out of my way to fend off unspoken rumours, if there are such things. Once, on a ranch in the Alberta foothills, we took our plates away from the campfire and ate our immense T-bone steaks in her room, dripping gravy all over each other’s bare chests and midriffs. Then did what you would suppose.
I would sometimes hear stories about her husband, and occasionally I would ask her about him. I had heard that he was quite a few centimetres taller than I am, and that he had a theatrical temper. Cissy called him her prince of Colchis, which is apparently a county or something in eastern Tennessee.
“Don’t worry. I can take care of the prince,” she would tell me.
My own mother’s family came north to freedom from some dismal border of Arkansas, so I pretty well knew there were no princes in Tennessee.
“Does he carry a gun?” I would ask.
“Not all the time.”
See, her hubby the prince was a fairly well-known poet as well as being a thespian, damn it, big guy, wore long scarves and peculiar boots, was rumoured to have trouble fending off professors’ wives and student volunteers while he was on a reading tour back east or across metropolitan sections of Saskatchewan. I had met him at a few festivals and debates, and was duly impressed by his long angular legs and the way he disported with them on stages and in front of classrooms. He was the author of Dangling Berries, which was a finalist for an award that carried lots of honour to make up for the fact that there was no moolah involved.
His poems were filled with messiah babies pointing chubby fingers at the clear blue April sky and writing there with flames. We painters often say of the poets that they fan a more sacred fire, but what we really think is that they have a thin, easy job compared with ours, and yet they get the bulk of the delicious travel grants and invitations to interesting venues. It’s apparently the same in other countries. I was once surrounded by multilinguistic poets in a hall in Los Mochis, a particularly poetic city in the state of Sinaloa.
So, while he was flying into Montreal or Cleveland with his cape fluttering in the Ionian wind, I snuggled with Cissy here and there, more and more, off and on.
She was a devotee of intricate cocktails, which she bought for me with her mad money. I tried to catch her emptying a vial into my drink, but I never quite did. I drank hundreds of dollars’ worth of her concoctions, and sure enough, I got dizzy and disappeared into a text I hadn’t written. One time I looked at my watch and was astonished to learn that it was two days later than I’d thought.
“Things will be difficult when I get home,” I said.
“Then don’t go home,” said Cissy, and pressed her oddly exciting chest against my upper arm. That always worked.
“I am on a life’s voyage,” I said. “Shouldn’t my life’s voyage be linear? I seem to have been zigzagging for years, and now here you are, zigging me.”
“I know all about your life’s voyage. I have seen all your zigging and all your zagging, chum.” Her voice was a sweet whisper in the fog around my head.
“Not possible,” I said, unable to supply the rest of any suggested sentence.
“Much more than possible,” she whispered. “If I find you tiresome or in any other way unsatisfactory, you might find yourself living in the encircled mud on some farm you don’t know the geography of.”
I think it was the constant sense of threat that made me want to be in Cissy’s presence. She represented a kind of vibrant power, but she liked to tell me how her family had come down in the world just in time for her childhood. They had been upper-crust folk with a big house with many windows on the bank of the Hudson River somewhere in early USAmerican literature. Then things went south, and the family was down to selling their furniture and furs. Being a boy who had eliminated his body waste in a bucket for a while, I was amused. But I did everything she told me to do. I could not be watching her phials and goblets at all times.
I was a prisoner, if you want to know my psychological state. During the heavy writers’ festival season her prince was often away on the weekends, and I took the mist-shrouded ferry across the secret water to her realm. Sometimes we met in a midtown motel, where a wine bottle got emptied or spilled. There we spent our time as naked sorceress and eager caitiff. I remember her bent knees especially — she liked to lie on her back, with her knees drawn tight to her chest, as if she were starting a cannonball dive. I liked this as well, as her bum would lift and she became as open as can be. I was part of her orb, and just for fun I would snort a little.
Funny how funny can also be tender.
Or murderous, you might say. When I was with her we loved to play rôles, and so we did on the day she finally invited me to her big house with the wide lawn in the leafy residential neighbourhood she shared with her theatrical prince. The latter was striding across a stage somewhere in the Maritimes, now with the time zones involved, perhaps bending his long thin legs under the raised coverlet of an honour student’s narrow bed. I do not know whether this house was as large as her childhood home on the Hudson, but I expected that she had managed to collect enough furniture for a prince and his protectress.
She went first into her mansion and I lurked among the ancient cedars in her estate. I counted to twenty-three, my favourite prime number, and mounted her porch, where I called her name just once. I was expecting a liveried servant, but Cissy herself flung wide the door, a blaze of light like a corona around her blonde head. She gestured without a word, and bade me follow her down a long hallway to a resplendent parlour. There she touched a switch, and a fire sprang to life in the ornate fireplace. On another of her gestures I took the chair she offered, and allowed her to slide a footrest under my heels.
We still did not speak as she filled a heavy glass with something from a bottle, some bubbling liquid from another bottle and a little handful of ice cubes. I lifted an eyebrow when I saw that she had not made a drink for herself. But I raised the heavy glass and drank, not putting it down until it held nothing but ice cubes.
It was time for her to lift her own blonde eyebrows. I smiled back, like a captive who had not succumbed.
Then we resorted to weapons. She took a stick that had been leaning beside the fireplace and struck me twice as I scrambled to my feet, once across the fronts of my thighs and once across my buttocks.
“Down in the sty with the rest of them!” she whispered. “I will hear you snort.”
But I drew my steel sword and flourished it, stopping only when I held it across her lovely throat. She fell to her knees before me, her arms around my legs.
“Whoever you are, whatever kingdom is yours,” she whispered, “I ask you to put your sword in its sheath, and come upstairs with me to do likewise.”
“Enchantress, it is by great fortune or perhaps something more noble that I stand here as a man on two feet, and it is likely that my virtue protected me from your pestle. Not all men are swine, good-looking. I will follow you upstairs only if you forbear dark magic and promise that I will leave this house satisfied and undamaged.”
“You got it, handsome. Come up and swive me.”
I found myself whistling, as is often my wont, as I followed her up the winding staircase. As sometimes happens, I was whistling “You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You.”
Her bum inside a tweed skirt was pretty impressive as I watched it indolently. A lot more impressive than that front of her starched white shirt, though I think I have made it known that I liked her the way she was.
“First,” she said, and made a sweeping gesture toward an ornate bathtub with brass claws. It was on a kind of dais, two steps above the floor, and it stood in front of a big square window. One could see a few rooftops among the trees.
She climbed the stairs and turned on the water and made it bubble. She gestured toward my belt, and though I felt as shy as always, I simply took off all my clothes and piled them on the blue-tiled bathroom floor.
“Those are called azulejos,” she said, no longer whispering.
“No,” I said. “The Mexicans call them huevos, or sometimes cojones.”
“I was referring to the blue tiles.” She was smiling, perhaps like a seductress, perhaps like a venomist.
“Means bluebird,” I said, stepping one foot into the white froth.
She waited while I sat myself down. I must have had a question on my face.
“Yes, it is two-way glass,” she said. And she had a scrub brush in her hand.
“Take your shirt off,” I suggested.
And she did. What a lovely moment it was. You have been told to relax from time to time. Almost all of me was relaxed for the next fifteen minutes. There was a bit of soap foam caught in her hair. I started falling in love. You know how it is. I almost acceded to the urge to pull her into the water with me. I kissed the erect nipple in the centre of her nearest tiny breast.
“Get out,” she said, her voice again a whisper, but a bit hoarse now.
And she dried me the way my mother did when I was three, except that my mother never had a great big Hollywood towel. She was exactly careful enough with my huevos, and then she took my hand and led me into her chamber.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be silly. You have beclouded my mind. You have inflamed my body with need for you,” she said. Somehow she had rendered herself naked save for a trace of silk at her triangle.
“Very well, I will consider it. But you must promise to do me no harm,” I said, the finest bargainer ever to have graduated from Southern Okanagan High School.
Thus did I enter her flawless bed of love.
Well, it was something, I could tell you. But it’s not my purpose to report the details of that kind of splendour. Let’s just say I cleared her beclouded mind, became her energetic slave and drew from her one more promise.
“The rope may begin to hang the butcher, and the rat may begin to gnaw the rope, and the cat may take a shot at the rat,” she murmured. “But you shan’t get home tonight.”
“Mmmph,” I replied, because that was all I was capable of at the moment.
“If you really desire to get home,” she said, an actual bit of trill in her voice, “you must be prepared to take a roundabout course, and during that course face several distractions and perils.”
“None the equal of you, my lady,” I managed to say.
Sometime over the next half year we met for a drink at a downtown hotel in a Canadian city we were both visiting, and she told me a story about that no-longer-flawless bed. Somehow her prince got wind of the caitiff’s adventure and performed one of his best theatrical actions ever. First he opened wide the marital bedroom’s balcony windows and wrestled their king-sized mattress out onto the balcony and then over the rail to its flight down to the lawn. There it lay undisturbed for a half hour while he went from room to room in the house, gathering every copy of all my books they owned and all my friends’ books and every book I had illustrated, and carried them outside, dumping them in a messy heap on the centre of the mattress.
Then he went back inside and retrieved a box of kitchen matches.
Yep, not a dramatic blaze, but a smoky and illegal fire just the same.
I don’t know what happened next. Who cares?
Aw, the last time I saw Cissy she was standing naked and thinner in a Vancouver doorway, and there were tears like rain sliding down her face and onto her flat freckled lovely breast.
A year or two later I sat across a table in a Toronto restaurant while tears fell from the sad eyes of a woman whose name you don’t need to know.
Later still I saw tears all over the face of a short woman with luxurious wavy hair, that hair that “he” later saw on the street in West Point Grey. Or at least thought “he” did.
Rope, rope, hang butcher. Butcher won’t butcher cow. Cow won’t give milk. Milk won’t feed cat. I don’t have a clue what will happen tonight.
That is what I was saying out loud as I made my lone way from my brother’s house up over the irrigation ditch and onto the first flatland of the reserve. I was walking pretty slowly, partly because I am kind of old now and partly because, just as I used to do all those decades ago, I walked with my eyes to the ground in front of me and my ears tuned for the sound of a rattlesnake’s tail.
I did not see or hear any rattlers that sunny day. I saw little piles of cubic horseshit and the circular dried cowshit I had always thought resembled butterhorns, or at least those flat pastries my mother and her friends called butterhorns. I always wondered where the horns were, until decades later I saw pictures of something labelled butterhorns, and they were some kind of rolled and wrapped sweet bun. Anyway, if those cowflops got dry enough we could use one as a Greek Olympics discus. We invented a lot of Okanagan sports, my friend Bob and I.
But this time I was alone, old and a little worried that the young Okanagan guys, on horses or with pickup trucks, would inform me that I was trespassing on native land. Rat won’t gnaw rope. The barbed-wire fence I had found my way past didn’t have any stiles.
It took a lot longer than I had thought it would to get to the base of Big Rock Candy Mountain. Distances are deceiving to the homeward traveller. But there I was at last, well away from the parallel dirt tracks that constituted a pickup-truck road.
Matterhorn? No, butterhorn.
I could have used a butterhorn then, or now.
If I looked to my west, I could not see my brother’s place, but I had a pretty good view of the valley, not the river, but the brown knobby hills on the other side. I could hear thousands of insects nearby and the odd semi engine up or down Highway 97. I was not carrying a cellphone or any other weapon, only my wallet with my health card in it, and a pen in my shirt pocket. I was looking for an eleven-year-old kid. I knew he was not looking for me.
The little mountain would not have been called little in Southern Ontario, for example. But it did not look easy to climb. Boy, boy, climb mountain. I don’t think so. I wasn’t there to get to the top. I was there specifically to be at the bottom. That’s where some boulders the size of trucks and cottages were standing in the couch grass a small distance from the first rise of the mountain. Didn’t look like candy at all. Some could have been there for a thousand years, maybe since before the little ice age. Maybe a few could have been there for five or six decad
es. One had a baby pine tree growing out of it.
Okay, one of them could have had an Okanagan Indian man or boy under it.
I had a good look around, on the side of the mountain where I had done what I had done. I certainly did not see any little cross, the kind you see beside the road where an inexperienced or drunk young driver had misdirected a car. I did not see any signs that anyone in the past had started trying to dig under a boulder or cause a boulder to move. After a lot of walking around and watching for snakes, I sat down on a smaller rock and breathed. All right, I might have spoken a kind of apology prayer. I am telling you this corny stuff because it seems to make me a better person. Then I checked my location — my rock was far enough from the mountain’s wall to be hit by a much larger boulder bouncing off a cliff above and falling fast in the sunshine.
I sat there all afternoon. I didn’t even have a book with me. From time to time I would sing a song I knew when I was a boy. A lad. If Bob Small had been there, we would have sung in harmony, or as well as we could. I looked upward once in a while.
“This is one of the stupidest afternoons and early evenings I have ever spent,” I said out loud. It would be more dramatic — no, more legendary — if I did this standing up straight, I told myself, so I did, till I got too tired. Maybe around two hours before sunset, while I was standing straight, a man and his dog walked by, probably a hundred metres away. The dog started toward me, but the man called it back, and they walked on by, south toward the reserve road.
When it started to be dusk, the insects got louder and soon they were joined by the first frogs along the river, calling for company, I suppose. If I stayed there till it was really dark, I would hear the first coyotes, but it is not a good idea to be a lone old guy in the dark where there is no real road.
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