No One

by George Bowering

  I might do this again, give it another chance, I thought. But I never did.

  He goes out onto Tenth Avenue at least once a day, to walk the dog, even though the fellow doesn’t like the loud buses and crowded doorways. There are a lot of poles to sniff, and they both enjoy that, you might say. Sometimes he takes a book or two to the library to put on their cheap-buy shelves. He actually pretends to himself that it is interesting to decide what books to drop off — should he decide to stop keeping Philip Roth books after he has read them? Toni Morrison books? Ismail Kadare books? Is it time to let the Timothy Findley books go? No, not yet. Not yet. He goes to the post office once in a while, to mail a book he bought for less than the stamps that will send it on its way. If it is summer, he looks at the bare legs of women and girls. If it is winter, he wears his wide-brimmed blue hat.

  Someone said that living in West Point Grey is like living in a village, what with the few blocks of cafés and stores. There’s the bakery. There’s the chocolate shop. There used to be a movie theatre and there used to be a bookstore. But it is not like living in a village. He has lived in a village, and when you live in a village, you know the names of people. Almost everyone on the street is familiar to your eye. Here he knows the pharmacist and the women at the clinic. But his dentist’s office is on the other side of the city, and so is his optometrist’s office. Every time he goes to the sandwich shop there are new people selling sandwiches. Signs appear on lampposts once in a while, declaring that this is West Point Grey Village.

  He tried this once: “Hello, fellow villagers. Isn’t it a pleasant spring day?”

  His fellow villagers drifted sideways on the public path.

  He used to look for the woman he’d wronged while walking up or down the Avenue, but he doesn’t do that anymore. If she shows up with her grey hair, it will be a surprise and he will wonder afterward whether he were imagining things, in the subjunctive, for heaven’s sake. There are two other images of her that cohere. In one she is climbing the long staircase to her somewhat furnished apartment above a curiosity shop on a popular street in the east end. He is following her up those stairs, or rather he is following her bum up those stairs. He’d like to have been looking up her skirt, as such was his predilection at the time, but she always wore long skirts narrow at the ankles. She was of the opinion that her legs were unattractive, which opinion he consistently opposed by allowing her to close them about his rib cage.

  The other image involved a length of waxed rope and an open kitchen door. The rope was held up in the middle by the door’s top, and its ends were employed to tie the nude woman’s wrists together and hold them above her head. Usually he — oh, to hell with it, usually I pulled her luxurious hair down over her face and her breasts with their erect nipples. These nipples were erect because I had been nibbling on them while one of my hands held her ass toward my face and the other found lots to do with her cuneiform part. This last was a little parted because her feet were just barely touching the wooden floor and her knees were able to flex a tiny bit.

  (If you are put off by this, or bored by it, skip the rest of this episode.)

  Sometimes I would fall to my knees and my tongue would become a wedge, reading or perhaps writing an ancient story.

  There are, it turns out, a lot of things you can do with a kitchen door and a length of rope. This particular human being complied with every one I suggested, even helped me, with her agreeableness, to get past my customary shyness. I even think that it was for the benefit of my self-image that she said something like “Oof!” when I lunged into her while kneeling behind her kneeling form on her mattress on her floor. She once said “Oof!” ten times in a row, and may have said so many more times, except that her ninth “Oof!” made me expend that night’s supply of human seed.

  I went up those stairs often and for a long time, though I know she would have liked to have welcomed me to her home more often or maybe altogether. Sometimes it was as if my visit to her very neighbourhood was an end-of-the-night desperation, and I felt guilty about that. Wouldn’t you? I did not want to be a cad, but I knew and know that I could very well have been seen as one. She was a good person who was pretty well in love with me. I was careful not to tell her that I loved her. But once in a while I would say that I loved the way she did something, or loved the look of something, or I complimented the light that spilled down the length of her hair. I fear that I allowed her to expect, and that had something to do with the fact that I came home with her less frequently than she would have liked. I never stayed till dawn’s rosy fingers, but I did get to my lonely Ithacan bed quite late some nights. Why, I asked myself, did I have to disappoint two women with my behaviour? Why disappoint them serially?

  If only I had known what I was later to find out.

  I would drift off to sleep, like a West Point Grey neighbour drifting across the sidewalk, drifting while I pictured Honey’s long white hands tied together with waxed rope.

  It had been my habit of long lying to imagine sexual postures instead of the alphabet while waiting to drift into dreamland. There was a time when I would alternate sex images with artistic success images. But I had sometimes received enough of the latter. Of the former I have never found enough. My reputation, if I ever had such a Shakespearian thing, might suggest otherwise.

  Or what about some kind of opposite? You may very well be thinking that that is what I am doing at this very moment, that none of the women I have described has ever come within ten metres of me. That I make up the actions and especially the dialogue, including this conversation with the woman at the kitchen door:

  “Are you uncomfortable?”

  “A little bit. It’s a little bit hard to stand on my tiptoes this way.”

  “But it makes the fronts of your thighs stand out in a nice way.”

  “With my hands tied up there above my head, my breasts stand out in an unnatural way.”

  “I think I would like to lick them.”

  “Which? Breasts or thighs?”

  “Sounds like my choice at a chicken dinner.”

  “You’re making me hungry.”

  “Later for you. I think I will start with this breast. Yum.”

  “I’d like to hold your head, but my hands are tied.”

  “Yum, llghmff llghmff.”

  “Sorry, did I poke you in the eye?”

  “I am going to do something like that to you later. Right now I think I’d like to lick those thighs.”

  “If you feel that you must.”

  “Would you like me to go upward or downward?”

  “Inward would be acceptable.”

  “There’s no rush. Oh, yum.”

  “Why do you still have all your clothes on?”

  “Don’t you find it interesting? Once I spent an hour nude in the company of two women wearing business suits. One of the most interesting afternoons of my life.”

  “I would kind of like to watch you undress. I have never seen you undress without help from me. With my hands tied, this could be a new kind of thrill.”

  “Thrill? I am a middle-aged man, not a boy athlete glistening with olive oil.”

  “There is some baby oil there on the kitchen shelf. Why don’t you apply it to me and/or yourself. I could watch.”

  “Llghmff.”

  “Slowly.”

  (Pause.)

  “Like this?”

  “Ah ah.”

  “This dialogue is getting a little minimal.”

  “I know something that isn’t.”

  “You are a bad girl.”

  “Not a girl.”

  “Bad woman. Witch.”

  “If we were fictional, the reader or viewer might feel as if he were reading or looking at pornography.”

  “He or she.”

  “He.”

  “Not memoir?”

  “Worse
than pornography.”

  “If you would try to lift yourself a little on your toes, and move your legs a little farther apart, I could perhaps put my tongue in there.”

  “Not unless you remove your clothing. And don’t you dare keep your black executive-length socks on.”

  “Okay, here goes my shirt. Here, give my chest a little lick.”

  “Shoes and socks. Right now.”

  “Okay. One. Two. One. Two.”

  “Belt. Good. Zipper. Excellent. Down. Well!”

  “Sorry. This was a no-gaunch day.”

  “It’s actually bouncing. Is that what you would call it? Bouncing?”

  “I have always called it Archie.”

  “Why do men do that? Women don’t give names to their muffins.”

  “I am going to address that one as Muffin — with a capital M.”

  “Shouldn’t we be doing something with each other’s critter, so that this pornography would have something other than dialogue?”

  “With you hanging from that door, I would call this an open-and-shut case.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Whenever I take my pants off and the little fellow starts bouncing around, you always say, ‘Oh, please.’”

  “Aha! Dialogue inside dialogue.”

  “Leading to Archie inside Muffin.”

  “Take me down from this platitudinous captivity. I see a bad boy that needs a good licking.”

  “All right. But first I would like to try something.”

  “Have I ever forbade your wishes in matters such as this?”

  “What do you think? If I put a few fingers inside here, do you think I could lift you with one hand?”

  “If you cannot, I will give you good marks for trying.”

  “Marks? With what?”

  Is there some rule concerning narratives that you have to get down, eventually, to some subject you have brought up or hinted at? For example, if I have alluded to something bad I did to her sometime before I thought I might have seen her on the street, do I have to reveal what that bad thing was before we are finished here?

  I am asking because right now I have become more interested in that rope-and-wrists business. I have seen, and wish I hadn’t, photographs of really ugly things done to naked or nearly naked women with ropes and chains binding them somehow. Bondage, I guess, is sort of like sadomasochism. It can be exciting if there’s just a little consensual bit, but horrible when taken to extremes. I suppose there is a sliding scale, you might say, a changeable limit of consent.

  I knew a guy who passed off a John O’Hara story as his own when a creative writing deadline arrived too soon. A young woman with a pretty face and ears that stuck straight out to the side slapped my face when I suggested to her that she had no chance of becoming his love object. Later he had a good steady job at an old university on the prairies, and later still he died during the first mysterious arrival of the AIDS virus. He never did publish a book of fiction, but his pen name and post office box number were listed in a famous underground book, the worldwide guide to heavy sadism providers. There were a lot of specialty devices built into his big heritage house nigh the river, I heard at the time.

  He was a very tall, raw-boned man who never lost the Kentish accent of his youth, and wore polished motorcycle boots with blunt square toes. His hands were very large, and I was glad they were never applied to my person except for the occasional forceful handshake.

  So no, I was not interested in thumping or being thumped by men or women, and I was not interested in the catalogue of painful items that could apparently be attached to their bodies or mine. Over the years, of course I managed to suspend a long-haired woman from a door, gently, kind of gently, and I did allow or persuade a few dates to tie my four extremities to bedposts and explore the possibilities of gentle power.

  For instance, Scotty. Scotty was one of those young folk who remain silent in the classroom while a handful of students are doing the little amount of talking I managed to allow them. All semester long Scotty must have been thinking sort of forbidden thoughts, but I never picked up on any vibe that I recall. But after thirteen weeks of my oracular wisdom came the end of semester and the final exam.

  This was a part of the year I really liked — the end of the semester meant that as soon as I was able to mark my way through a couple of dozen in-class essays about Cubism and a couple of dozen in-class essays about Imagism, I could look forward to a summer of ball-playing, beer-drinking and poem-writing, or maybe watercolours, or maybe a novel –– no, I would never again try to write a novel. Maybe a memoir. Maybe a long narrative poem about getting home and patching up a marriage.

  Join my vacation with my avocation.

  Was that it?

  Anyway, here is a little confession. While my young students were bent over their papers on their desks all in a row, I was feeling pressure slide off my shoulders, while I sat at my desk in front of them all as if I were the subject they were ignoring. Okay, I will leave that, just in case there is any sense in it.

  What I did on that day or those two days, a couple times a year, was to sit there at my front desk and look at the bodies of all those young men and young women, trying to look into their souls, or if that didn’t pan out, trying to see down the fronts of their shirts. I would have a serious scholarly look on my face, of course.

  On the occasion that I am very slowly getting to, I did some self-scrutiny. Was I sitting in a seat of power and enjoying my fancy in an inappropriate manner? That adjective had started to make its way through the campus as well as some offices downtown. It would often find its way into conversations and tirades that also employed the term politically correct. Suntanned cowboys often spit that latter term out while engaged in conversations in bars. It started with the various branches of communism and extreme socialism early in the twentieth century, as far as I know. Various leftist orators and journalists speaking to others among their camps used it as a way of keeping the argument within communist and socialist circles rather than letting the world know what was wrong with capitalist oligarchies (I think that’s what they called them).

  Anyway, it wasn’t long till the nattering classes within capitalist systems grabbed the term and started laying it on each other. It got a little subtle, maybe, or boringly complex, as the meaning began to bifurcate and slither away among sensible shoes. When the Leninists and Trotskyists fired it at each other, they did so entirely without irony. In their world, correctness of thought was not thought to be a comical concept, much less undesirable. But pretty soon the enemies of communist organizations started hurling the term at their fearful foes. So naturally it wasn’t long till the term politically correct was used negatively. In a number of ways that I am not going to get into here. Jesus.

  “Oh, her! She’s so goddamned politically correct.”

  And people such as your humble servant began to wonder whether it was ever appropriate to be politically correct.

  Anyway, I was sitting there at my desk, letting inappropriate thoughts go through my head, only to be replaced by last night’s basketball scores, and before I knew it I had a pile of exam booklets in front of me and the last cute little bum had twitched its way out the classroom door. I am guessing what you might be thinking about that observation.

  I did not mark those exams that night. I had a basketball game to watch and a bottle of Merlot to use in an appropriate way. But in the morning — that is to say, two in the afternoon — I started in. First I riffled them, taking out the ones I knew to be written by the best students and putting them on the bottom of the pile. I had inappropriate thoughts about a few of those students, including a young woman with braided hair who knew more than I did about pre–World War I Fauvism in the Balkans.

  On the very bottom of the last page — the back cover, in fact, in tiny letters on the very right corner — were these two words, hardly
distinguishable: love you.

  I’d been around. I knew the appropriate thing to do.

  If the words had been I will kill myself for you there would have been a conundrum. Do I tell the authorities? Who are the authorities? Will they start asking me questions about my behaviour around this person Scotty? Do I dare risk this young woman’s life? Should I just ignore it because volatile young people tend toward drama? I remembered the time I was a student preparing to jump off the Granville Street Bridge because of the freshman girl I loved and the new young artist she had found interesting. Was I really going to jump? Was I drunk enough to dare myself to go further than I had intended? What was psychologically correct at the time?

  By leaving off the first-person pronoun, I figured, Scotty was making the message smaller, easier to miss, ambiguous, less likely to be acted on. If I were to act on it, that would be an indication that part of the blame would be mine. Blame. No. But could it be, and could she know it would be, more likely to arouse at least my curiosity because it was so tentative?

  It wasn’t appropriate, that’s for sure.

  But had I given her the idea when I asked them to give me their exam booklets in stamped and self-addressed envelopes?

  All right, I did enjoy watching them bent over their exam papers, pushing hair back behind their ears, taking their shoes off, putting their weight on one buttock, then the other. I had never focused particularly on Scotty. What was her real name? Catherine or Caroline or something like that. It turned out that she wrote a good exam. She was one of those students who never speaks up during the semester, but who has been ingesting the world under consideration and becoming a beginner authority, if you follow that terminology.

  So what did I do, I the hero of this quest story? I sent her her exam with my comments on it, and likely some extra comment that I have no memory of now, and mentioned an upcoming pub night, maybe. I don’t know, but about three pub nights later there she was, with a friend, and what a coincidence, so I introduced her to my co-drinkers, and she introduced her friend, call her Catherine or Caroline, and so for a few hours the conversation around the table covered the usual subjects — poetry, baseball, painting, local politics, the summer semester, the condition of the men’s room, the current U.S. war, my poor taste in clothing, William Burroughs and more beer, among others.