No One

by George Bowering

  And what a surprise — when I figured out which of my car’s doors was the driver’s door and got in, there was Scotty sitting in the passenger’s seat. That was enough to sober me up, or at least that was my opinion at the time.

  “Did I know this was going to happen?” I asked, while finding the right place to insert my car key. This was back in the day. I would never drive a car after drinking beer nowadays.

  “Well, I surely didn’t, so you must have,” she replied in a voice as small as her handwriting on the back of an examination booklet.

  “Are you going to be in any of my classes next fall?” I enquired while backing my Citroën carefully.

  “No,” she informed me. “If I were going to be in any class of yours in the future, I would not be here now. That would be —”

  “A problem in ethics,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  It turned out that she lived on the North Shore, so this was going to be a late-nighter, which meant — wait! I thought in my head where there was not a lot of room, I suppose you are going to tell me that this is not a problem in ethics?

  “This is just me being a good guy and giving you a ride home,” I said out loud.

  “Of course,” she said. “What else could it be?”

  “Well, you could be the immortal Calypso,” I rejoined. “You could lay a feast before me and find a way to make me think you more exciting than the mortal Penelope.”

  “Calypso?”

  “Well, you are more exciting at the moment than the mortal Penelope.”

  “I am more of a rock-steady girl.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “It’s a little joke. You don’t have to get it.”

  “My favourite kind.”

  I had been wondering about her. When I first imagined going through the early manoeuvres, I’d thought she played the simple girl, the straight-ahead citified naïf. In braids. But now I was beginning to enjoy the prospect of a girl with wit, and please forgive me for saying girl.

  She was innocent and bold at the same time. Does that make sense? At a red light I leaned as far as my seat belt would let me and kissed her neck. She put a small hand on my knee, or rather the corduroy that clothed my knee, as if this were necessary while leaning a little toward me to kiss my unshaven cheek before the light turned green.

  So you will not be surprised to know that by the time we reached the Second Narrows Bridge, she had opened my zipper, and before we were halfway across the inlet, her lovely but now obscured face was in my lap, and her head was bobbing up and down. Have you ever looked into another driver’s sedan and seen a woman’s head arise from such an engagement? I have often seen such a sight in our automobile-dedicated city, and now here I was in an uncertain jurisdiction, lifting an art history student’s head to explain to her that I didn’t want to go off half- (oh no, I refuse to utter such an easily found pun) before even enjoying a tour of the maiden’s place of residence.

  She seemed all right with that, did up the zipper with care, and patted the bulge. Then she put her pointed tongue into my ear and whispered, “I need you. In me. Please. Sir.”

  When she whispered that last word, the bulge moved of its own will. She whispered and gently grunted directions through the North Shore darkness to her abode, which turned out to be one of those unimaginative apartments of the time — small, wall-to-wall carpeting in some colour probably called “wheat,” small sliding windows meant for a Prairies clime, and track lighting. Oh, yes. I was in a forgiving mood.

  Some muse or good angel or conscience or whatever was looking at me reproachfully in the dark shadow of a bay bush as I followed Scotty from car to door.

  “Not my fault. I was just planning on going home,” I whispered.

  “What?” asked Scotty.

  “Just committing your cuteness to memory,” I replied.

  “I am not cute,” she said.

  “Okay, sweetness.”

  “Not that, either,” she said, taking me by the wrist and using all her strength and guile and so on to get me through the door and into the elevator.

  “Did you ever make love in an elevator?” one of us asked.

  “I’ve gone down in one,” the other answered.

  Then the elevator door opened and I forgot about home for an hour or two. And here is the reason for my choosing this little anecdote over a lot of others. Scotty was another young woman I indulged my curiosity about knots and limbs upon. I didn’t do any of that corny bedpost routine, but just used the only available stuff in the little apartment — a length of fine cord, maybe plastic, to tie her wrists together behind her — just so I could experience something –– what was it? Power? I don’t like to think so. Maybe just a touch of power and more than a touch of the forbidden. Not all that forbidden, because she did not resist at all when I made her kneel on her bed while I took off her white shirt and her minimal white bra.

  Here is the nice thing that happened when I tied her wrists together behind her. That made her shoulders, remember that they were bare, pull back, and I think she was helping this out, now that I remember. She also lifted her chin and opened her mouth and opened her eyes wide. You see, when she pulled her shoulders back that way, her small elegant breasts lifted, and then lifted into my hand, and then lifted to my mouth. Maybe it was power, but I thought of myself as paying homage. Do we really want these abstract nouns here?

  Think about that question while I remove my clothes. I considered leaving my black socks on, but no, we were not making an eighty-dollar movie. I took off everything while she kneeled on the bed with her breasts gleaming so beautifully as to erase all memory of other breasts from a man’s mind. The last thing I took off was my underpants, which I carefully placed on top of the other things because I did not want any embarrassing search for gaunch later in the night.

  “Look,” I said. “Let me introduce you to Bouncing Billy.”

  “Why do all men give names to their things?” she asked.

  I thought for a while. “You are right. Women don’t give names to their, uh . . .”

  “We don’t externalize the way men do.”

  “But I know that poets like to make the external internal,” I said.

  “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

  “We are not in school right now, Scotty.”

  “Here, you can touch these,” she said, pulling her shoulders back another inch.

  “Yes, to heck with poetry,” I said.

  And then I let the eager palms of my hands rub those young breasts, my rosy fingers down and across and around, and then I let my lips and tongue loose on those nipples, which grew to touch me in return. Billy was bouncing but we ignored him, or at least I did. To heck with poetry, I told myself and knelt in front of her, touched my chest to hers.

  “I’d like to put my arms around you,” she said.

  “Legs,” I said. “You are the white-legged goddess.”

  “No poetry,” she said.

  So I reached for the scissors on her bedside table and snipped the string, and she seemed, in the dim light, more exciting than ever with the bits of string hanging from her wrists. Her freedom was going to gainsay mine.

  “How am I doing?” she asked.

  “What? Look at him bounce!”

  “My husband says I’m mediocre at lovemaking. I want to be really good.”

  “Husband?”

  “He’s gone with someone else. We got married when we were twenty. He thought he knew everything when he was twenty.”

  “I was a virgin when I was twenty,” I whispered.

  “Lie on your back,” she non sequitured.

  As I so often did when I was being forbidden to recommence my voyage homeward, I obeyed. Then she did all the things you are fancying, and did them more slowly and carefu
lly than you normally imagine. I especially liked it when one set of her fingers held my tender scrotum and the other was wrapped about the nearby shaft. I refrained from saying anything meant to be witty.

  “Ah, yes,” was about the extent of my verbal output.

  When she clacked her teeth a centimetre from my glans, I neither shrank nor dodged. Ah, brave Billy!

  Still, I was a little nervous about this husband business. I can’t honestly say whether it made the events of the night more exciting or a little too much confused. I did imagine becoming part of a North Shore murder story, blood all over the drywall, teeth loosened again, never mind about that. I lay on my back and let her at me, and I was glad that I did.

  Do you know how the seats in a rowing scull operate? The shell is as narrow as they can make it, and semicircular if seen in cross-section. The little seats slide while the crewmen are rowing, and all this makes for two things — speed and instability. Also beauty. Chances are that you will never have the experience of sculling on the Thames or wherever, but you can get a minimal version of the experience in one of those rowing machines at your gym.

  Well, I was put in mind of — if you can grant that my mind was working at all during this activity — a racing shell by Scotty’s activity, with me as boat, perhaps, and she as rower, or perhaps me as river, and oh no, I am getting lost here. What I want to say is that with me lying there on my back and Billy highly available, she negotiated the length of my body in a way that reminded me of a champion sculler on his sliding seat. This had never happened to me before, and I was singularly impressed. I liked it so much that I regretted it when I finally came, but then we men always do feel that way, don’t we? We want it to happen and we want it to wait a little longer.

  Scottie was smooth with sweat and I was almost weeping with my happiness, midnight forgotten, early morning a wisp of memory, the traffic was no longer thin and the living room was bathed in light when I went to sleep on the couch.

  And Scotty? Once in recent years I thought that I spotted her on a city bus, art-school cardboard in her lap, and I don’t know whether she was looking at me and wondering whether I would recognize her or noting my surreptitious glance and getting nervous, a total stranger.

  And, Scotty? If you ever happen to read this, I want you to know that your husband was an idiot. You were the best I was ever lucky enough to experience. My Ned Hanlan, my Nausicaä.

  What has this Big Rock Candy Mountain got to do with those (selected) experiences with princesses and goddesses and vamps who delayed me on my quest for home and hearth? If I knew that, I would not have had to tell about them. If I had known how hard it would be on my old heart, I would not have decided to come up here, where I sit with torn and stained clothing, a heaving breast, as they say, and blood on my legs. When I was young that blood would clot almost as soon as it was exposed to the air. Now that I ingest blood thinners every evening before going to bed, it makes lines down my calves and shins.

  No pain, no gain. Isn’t that what they say?

  They didn’t mention that mainly what you gain is pain.

  Here above the plain once visited by armoured riders from Spain.

  I would sing for you, but I will be out of breath for the next hour or two.

  You know, one of the things that authors like to do is — well, I am not really claiming to be an author. Let’s say a person who has been telling a story or two and maybe making some of them up. One of the things that real authors like doing is answering questions eagerly put to them by people who describe themselves as “great readers.” Authors like to take those simple questions and give back answers that sound like contradictions, paradoxes, mysterious and truth-brimming aha! moments.

  Where do you get your ideas?

  I start writing something that begins to look like a story, and I dive in, hoping to find an idea somewhere. I have no ideas when I start. If I had an idea, I would never start. Wouldn’t need to.

  Why did you tell that story?

  Because it’s there. Isn’t that the standard reply?

  No, that’s mountains. Why did you climb that mountain?

  You call this a mountain?

  No, you did. Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  That’s a song. I’d sing it for you, but I will be out of breath for the next hour at least.

  What does that so-called mountain have to do with the woman you saw on some avenue?

  Tenth.

  Tenth woman?

  Tenth Avenue. What does she have to do with the altitude I now find myself on, probably two thousand feet above sea level?

  Actually, what wrong were you supposed to have done to her?

  And here is the question you should be asking: what does that wrong have to do with the boulder you pushed off the mountain?

  What does that boulder have to do with this mysterious wrong you keep mentioning?

  Ah. Think back. Haven’t you been feeling a connection?

  Wait, I —

  Hmm?

  You think you might have killed somebody with that boulder. Was that woman on Tenth Avenue a ghost?

  Grey hair, remember?

  You didn’t —?

  You have proven once again that the scholar-critic knows more about the novel than the author does.

  Novel? There’s no novel here.

  Then how did you get here?

  Do you remember that a while back I was telling you about Honey (née Harriet), and said, “Wherever she is now”? This is not a fairy tale I am telling, not an odyssey, either, and not a family romance. Nope. I did not finally make it home and take to all Honey’s suitors with a broadaxe or whatever. I did not sweep her up and carry her to a cave with loud sentimental music playing as in that scene from a friend’s novel turned into a movie that everyone made fun of. I don’t have those stringy muscles that Kirk had back in the day, speaking of movies. In fact, to use the language most of my friends seem to favour as particularly contemporary, fuck the movies.

  And as for getting home — I was always getting home, though the word home, as I may have mentioned earlier, means the place where you can lie down. I did my share of that elsewhere, you would likely say, and when I did it at the house I shared title to, I tended not to have any company. I was more like a Labrador dog swimming out into the salt water to fetch a wet tennis ball over and over than a breadwinner hanging his fedora on the peg just inside the front door. I mean, who uses the front door? And who would not get tired of that joke, her husband hollering, “Honey, I’m home”?

  Anyway, do you remember my talking about the alphabetical lists I have always liked to make, especially when I am lying down at home and trying to get to sleep in my lonely bed? Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago. Austen, Burroughs, Calvino. Astros, Braves, Cubs. Australia, Belgium, Costa Rica. Austin, Buick, Cadillac. Sometimes I have committed them, peculiar words, to paper, in a scribbler, in my diary, on hotel stationery. So, one day I jotted down this one:

  Areth: Liked to kneel on the floor.

  Bonny: My only time on a horse.

  Cissy: Look! The Southern Cross!

  Danaë: Acres of shining sweat.

  Ellen: Across the threshold.

  Fé: I am a piano.

  Geraldine: Liked to do it in her dress.

  Hannah: Truly skinny, scary hip bones.

  Irina: God bless the Urals.

  Joanne: Those hands!

  Kelly: Totally imaginary.

  Lana: Had to be outdoors before dark.

  Monique: Taught me Quebec.

  Nora: Hung on tight and wept.

  Olivia: On the phone to her husband.

  Pamela: Huge veined globes.

  Q: Still available.

  Red: Part of a hilarious episode.

  Scotty: Her husband is an idiot.

  Theresa: Talk about department head!

&nbs
p; U: Looking for an Ursula.

  Valerie: Delicious, hints of basil.

  Wendy: Damn, I could have!

  Ximena: Talk about hitting the spot . . .

  Yolanda: I did it as a favour to an ex-teacher.

  Zola: Good editor, even better lover.

  and then I somehow left it beside the sink in my studio, just before heading to the airport. I had to go to Toronto (Eva) to meet some other old farts to decide which young visual artists (I always said “painters” inside my head) were going to get grants from the conscience fund of our biggest brewer.

  On the plane, I had this imaginary conversation with Honey.

  “Why is this skinny ugly Hannah child in the H place instead of me?”

  “I.”

  “No, the H.”

  “No, ‘I’ rather than ‘me.’”

  “Anyone who would say ‘of I’ is a moron. Not even a pedant. Just a moron.”

  “You want to know what? I am going to concede that point to you.”

  “You could also answer my question.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I thought it was a rhetorical question.”

  “I am guessing that you could have substituted Honorée or Helga or Hortense or Hillary or Heloise.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Hortense,” I said, stalling for time.

  “You have time. You are only a junior senior.”

  “All right. Here is the reason that some Hannah is on the list rather than Honey.”

  “‘Some Hannah’? That’s how you refer to your chosen companions?”

  “Okay, here is why Hannah Desrocher is on the list and you are not. It is because you are not just an initial in a list. You are extra-listial. The whole list taken all together does not measure up to you. If you were a city you would amount to more than everything from Antwerp to Zacatecas.”