No One

by George Bowering

  “Anything to drink for you, sir?”

  It was the flight attendant with a cart of liquids.

  “I’d like a tomato juice, please —”

  I leaned forward to read her badge.

  “— Debra.”

  When I was in high school there were a lot of occasions upon which we students were asked our ambitions in life, specifically what we wanted to be when we were finished with school. These notions would show up, for instance, in the high school annuals that would appear in second-hand stores decades later. The first time we were asked, around grade seven, I guess, I kind of fudged the questionnaire. I had spent years and years reading comic books in which costumed men and boys fought crime and kept the streets safe for little old ladies and toddlers. It did not take me long to forget about the idea of zooming around in a cape and mask, but I still wanted felons to be put away because how dare they, and who did they think they were, and people want to be safe on the streets. When I was in grade three, the caped champions of justice pitched in to win the war against Hitler and Tojo, but when the war was over, Spychaser took off his breeches and put on a suit and became Crimechaser. In a similar fashion I put off my daydreams about fighting crime with a big letter on my chest and began my plans to become a policeman. More like Dick Tracy and less like Bruce Wayne, I guess. But when it came to answering the question, I was too embarrassed to write “policeman,” or worse, “crime fighter,” and instead wrote “social servant.” I was never asked to be more specific. Then, when I was in about grade eleven, I saw two policemen beat up on a young native Indian man while forcing him into the back seat of their cruiser parked next to the curb at a restaurant on the main drag in Penticton. Soon after that I decided to be a newspaperman.

  A lot of the girls in my class wrote that they wanted to be nurses. An even larger number of them wanted to be airline stewardesses (which was the term back in those days of DC-6s and Convairs). Back then you had to graduate from nurse school to be a stewardess. You had no hope of being an airline pilot. But you could do medical things that most pilots couldn’t handle. What a good idea! But this was in the days before the skies above every continent and ocean were blackened by aircraft. Nowadays it would be impossible to graduate enough nurses to care for travellers all over the world, even in this time of drastic cuts in the numbers of aircrew, so the specs have been altered, and the stewardesses, now flight crews, are waiters rather than RNs.

  Well, they also explain the safety features of this aircraft while all the customers have their heads bowed and are adjusting the smartphones they may or may not put into airplane mode.

  There has been some progress. Flight attendants no longer have to be lookers, not even the male ones. Their outfits, except in some of the small-time airlines, don’t have to be provocative. It could be that graduating high school kids now want to be musical superstars rather than sky sweethearts, but I choose to think that the airlines have smartened up a little.

  Debra, though, was and probably still is a looker.

  I was, of course, a complete idiot all during the long weekend we spent somewhere near the lake in Toronto.

  “Fly me to the moon,” I sang while moving the palm of my right hand from her roundish hip to her roundish breast.

  “I have heard that one overly often,” she refrained from saying aloud.

  “There’s a bar in far Bombay,” I crooned as I put her flexed left knee over my right shoulder.

  “Oh, as if you aren’t the umpteenth dork to make that suggestion,” she said in the silence of her cranium.

  Still, she shifted her bum most satisfactorily while I nosed my unthinking member into her most lubricious coney.

  “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,” I sang as quietly as I could, thus proving that a person such as I could descend from a mental depth once thought to be unsurpassable.

  But Debra was kind as well as adept. She drove the stupidity out of me and soon had me expostulating rather than singing. At one point she put her mouth to my ear and said, “All right, slow was very nice. Now I want really hard.”

  (Hmm, now I seem to have forgotten why I introduced the adventure with Debra, why I chose it, for example, over Jackie or Karen W. or Nan. Or Miss Verge. She was just too much. I could not begin to tell you how exciting Miss Verge was and how much my small-town life was changed by her. Some of the later stories became a bit repetitive, like the images in adolescent porn. Is this the place to say that most of the items designated by their merchants as “adult” are really juvenile? I am reminded of the TV newsreaders who warn that the following pictures will be “graphic,” as if any pictures that are not graphic could be exhibited on television. I think that I am straying from the point here. Or am I beginning to fear that I am getting, for the first time, close to it?)

  “That was satisfactory,” said Debra, gently urging me off her.

  I guess I had collapsed and then drifted off.

  “Where were you?” she asked. “You seemed to drift away.”

  “Can you read my mind?” I asked, ready to believe.

  “Sure.”

  “What am I thinking right now?” I asked.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You are not the first man to win my charms.”

  I sulked for a while.

  “What’s your favourite Kirk Douglas movie?” I asked while she encouraged what I was doing with my fingers.

  “I think you probably know that,” she said. “I think we know why you asked. What’s yours?”

  “You are offering me a drink?”

  “No. Kirk Douglas. What is your fave Kirk movie?”

  In my head I was suggesting that I shut up or change the subject.

  Rather than answer my question — well, it was like asking a woman who her favourite Stooge is — she somehow wound up sitting on my unclothed person for a while, and then when she saw that I was beginning to rest, she somehow flipped me onto my knees right behind her where she was on her knees with her lovely chin on the pillow, and exertion became my middle name. It was like that all through the long weekend for George Exertion Delsing. To tell the truth, I didn’t make it to many of the seminars and lectures I was meant to attend. Debra would make me exert myself indoors for a few hours, and then out we would go, swimming at the Miles Nadal centre, renting bicycles for a ride to the Beach, walking the seawall while dodging roller skaters, and so on. During all these activities I noticed two things: how well shaped her thighs were and how ill equipped were my lungs and legs for the physical life.

  You are, I told myself.

  Then I leaned the top half of my body forward in order to rest the palms of my hands on the tops of my knees.

  Definitely in the part of your life called “old.”

  But I was interrupted by a tall flight attendant who was throwing items of her athletic costume to the corners of the broadloom.

  “Come with me,” she insisted. “I need to be penetrated.”

  I felt an unusual reluctance, but you have to admit, it was a novel sentence to be uttered by a beautiful woman.

  “I don’t know.” That was as far as I got. I did have my T-shirt and shorts on, but her hand was under my crotch, lifting.

  “I require sweat to join my sweat,” she said, in a voice that suggested we were not negotiating.

  “God help me.”

  “I could handle that,” said Debra.

  Kirk Douglas was born in 1916, exactly four months after my mother was. She was born four months after Glenn Ford was.

  I slept all the way home on the Air Canada Boeing 747. How I miss that plane, all those engines, that lump on top, those aisles you could do a double jig down. I didn’t find out the flight attendant’s name.

  I was still sleepy, my leg muscles drained of oxygen, so I blew a couple of sawbucks on a taxi. I swore for the first time that I would find a suitcase with wheels on it and bu
y it fast, screw the expense.

  I did not resemble Kirk Douglas in the least. I could not have raised an axe or a longbow as high as my shoulder.

  The house was empty except for our poor old cat with the missing ear. The place smelled as if she had been inside for a while.

  I didn’t try to get the suitcase upstairs. I tried to get myself upstairs, but failed, then I opted for the long low couch in the living room, a large quadrangle seldom occupied save at moments such as this. I decided to read the note on the kitchen table later.

  I was thirsty as all get-out, but I was closer to the couch than to the kitchen taps. Face down I went.

  Shoes on. Eyeglasses all over my face. Probably snoring. Didn’t let the cat out.

  Who knows what time it really was when I woke up in stages? I was back in Pacific Standard Time, I had no idea how many hours had passed while I was visiting another oblivion, and there was a chance that all this was really some kind of narcotic dream.

  I could tell that the big house was empty except for me, and the cat if I had neglected to let him out. You know that empty-house feeling? Either the house was empty or my cranium was. I found the remains of my glasses and got them onto the front of my head and rose to a pretty poor sitting position.

  Behold, the hero returns!

  Eventually, after casting about for my leathern shoes before noting that I had them on my feet, I rose, a bit at a time, and headed for the kitchen and its precious cold-water tap. I slurped out of that tap for about a minute and a half before thinking of making a cup of coffee, and then I postponed coffee when I spied the sheet of paper on the kitchen table, right beside a tomato that had turned into a malformed pile of fruit-fly food.

  Oh hell, I plugged in the kettle and stuck a filter over a cup and dumped a spoonful of Italian grind into the filter, and sat down. This is what was carefully handwritten on the sheet of paper:

  Freddie — bratwurst

  Uncle Louis — cucumber

  Carlos M. — tamal

  Kenny — frankfurter

  Yves — saucisson

  Oroville — carrot

  Uncle Milton — horseradish

  Gordy — Cohiba

  Eddie V. — salami!

  O [TBA]

  Rex — fish finger (har har)

  George’s best friend — butternut squash

  ------ (overleaf) -------------------------------

  Eddie H. — popsicle

  Dennis — zucchini

  Eddie L. — kielbasa

  Lenora — well, we were a little drunk

  Stephen — yellow crookneck squash

  Ivan — long john (mmm, chocolate)

  Norm — breakfast link

  George’s former student — chorizo

  The kettle announced that it contained a supply of boiling water. I poured, and thought for the longest time. Who was Oroville?

  I had a cup of good coffee and then I had more than I usually do, caffeinating my ears a little farther from my skull, making my eyes try to get around my glasses, forcing my fingers to tap each other on the fingernails. Jittery I was at that kitchen table, wondering whether I could make the telephone work if I had the nerve to use the telephone. Whenever it rings I let it ring, hoping it isn’t a call from some hospital. I could not hold a pen in my hand, so I sat at that table and started a list in my head, of some encounters I had forgotten or was less proud of, or is pride something to feel about those waylayings off the road homeward?

  Whatever, as they say, or so I am told, for the first time in I don’t know how long, I remembered the woman who called herself Zingara and made me sleep with her in a mess of wolfskins, or at least that’s what she called them, called herself a poet, this was somewhere in the Niagara Region, as they called it there. She was kind of interesting but I wasn’t in the mood, really, what a waste I must have seemed. Not my only strange skin. There was the long tall tattooed Sally in Minneapolis, said she was wearing the skin she had taken off a guy who maligned her family. I didn’t believe her for a minute, but it was fun looking around that nice prairie city with the giant spoon on the lawn. What you looking for, she asked me, and what a set-up; I said, A giant fork on the lawn. Better than “how’s about it” any day. If you don’t believe the efficacy of that one, try it a few times before you abandon hope. I also remembered all of a sudden a succession of dreadful kidnappings, how can I be doing this, I asked myself, it can’t just be because you are drunk, and you are for sure better than this. Their names will remain secret or uninvented, the retired political science professor with the globular veined breasts, the redhead who looked like Batman’s Joker, who squirted all over me, and I had thought that was an old army story, the overlarge amateur poet up north and the grouchy minor poet in Toronto, the one who forced me and the one who shamed me.

  I just want to go home, I would wind up mewling, some hero.

  All right, all right. I am here now. I may be all alone, but I am here. I may be sitting here with a foulsome list in front of my abashed eyes, but I am home and maybe this time for good if there is any good in me, a sober-sided but still failed manipulator of images, willing to once more for the last time, for the very last time once more, give in and say you win while not saying that I lose, and asking whether you would like to be my only honey for whatever time remains on this my island kingdom. I hope, I hope, I tell myself, that she will act as if there is such a thing as beginning, and say yes.

  I girded my loins, not quite sure what those are, and took a long long walk all the way down to her shop.

  She was not there.

  But her assistant, a very fetching thin young woman with a new haircut, told me she had been expecting to see Honey for the past four days, all the while, I calculated, that I was in Toronto the still good.

  I figured that as I was not a customer but the technical husband of the craftsperson, I could look around the place.

  So that eventually I saw a folder that seemed to have pages and pages of something inside it, and this word on the outside, in what looked like 4H pencil: petticoat.

  I couldn’t resist giving the new haircut my fatherly sex-object smile as I left, saying bye bye, the folder in my possession, my feet pointed one after the other toward the nearys, I mean nearest coffee shop.

  Where I sat with a skyscraper latte and an unusually thick slice of lemon loaf and cracked my knuckles preparatory to reading the sheaf in the folder. I knew from a quick thumb in the middle of it that it was in Honey’s rather pretentious handwriting. How interesting, I thought, that while I was out having heroic adventures on my hard way home, she was sitting there writing. Making a text. Something textual. Tied, somehow, together. Honey the technician of the diurnal, I supposed. I bit a semicircle into the lemon loaf, delicious. Technically, working with her hands while I was losing my footing on slippery coastal boulders. Weaving her tale, whatever it could be, a diary perhaps, of waiting for the returning sailor, home in the sea. The texture of her story something creative writing professors never mention because they can’t show you an example. A textile salesman has an easier task.

  Enough of this obvious foolishness. I would sit and read my way through or at least as far as I could sail, then I would forgive her everything, haul my bloodied frame to her door, our door, and ask with light irony whether I can come in, and she would let out one of her great sobs and say Yes. I unfolded the folder.

  NO. None of that is going to work on me anymore, not that it ever really did, I told him I was the worst news he ever heard and he ought to turn the car around and drop me off right now tonight but he had this image of himself as a square-chinned hero rescuing damsels, and yes there had, I didn’t dream it at the time, had to be plural damsels and yes I do know what that word used to mean back in the day and that might be the last yes you ever see, damosels they used to call them, this was no damosel either, sir, she was a virgin, no,
you are not likely to see my wager on that account, I would have more faith in the moral uplift in the life of his lonesome dog, always coming to the house soaking wet and stinking of things he’s rolled in or penetrated, what a lovely word that is, anyway his mutt whimpering at the gate, at least his son knows enough not to come home from college for the long weekend, probably looking for some damosels to rescue, I should have made it clear to him that I did not need or want rescuing, but I was not so sure myself, certainly I was not out of distress when I flounced around the fraternity house with Blazer Billy the police sergeant’s son, who was as handsome as any damosel rescuer in the books my mother bought for me when I was a girl in a pinafore, but Billy was, he didn’t know it, though, waiting to be rescued by a muscular fellow, it didn’t matter how ugly he might seem to the regular world, no I would never in my life get undressed with a boy as handsome as Billy, but Billy would never get it up for a female person, much less get it up in a female person, if you don’t mind my being a little blunt, no, no Billy for me, though I remember a few times lying on my back with my finger where Billy ought to have been, I have never been averse to a long wrangle in bed but it would seem nonsensical to have a long wrangle all by oneself, only to sniff these fingers later, perhaps whispering a name in the dark, ah, I am so romantic and that is not what this little story is about, as he will find out, the philanderer, nice old word, suits me fine, not that I give two finger flicks who he does it with, and I can hear him shouting whom, whom, many is the time, and he is vetting my punctuation right now, I hope, the time, speaking of sniffing, I have got a whiff of one of his secret coves, including the time early on when he came to crawl all over me to share the smell of that rich man’s daughter who played with him like a new vehicle, the fool, did not even try to guess that I had a poor boy’s scent all over my bare back and cooled tummy, we were one of his beloved baroque quartets in those snarled sheets that night, I can tell you, and if he smelled anything unusual he kept it a secret from me, thank goodness, because I did not want to tell the narrative of that poor boy’s come dried and silver on my bottom, the kisses that came later and elsewhere, I was glad, as they say, that I got ’em, no, not the ones that came from hubby and landed on the top of my head while I was sucking his ear the way he liked so well, in fact he was not likely to come unless I got my teeth on his lobe, though how much of that was due to the fact that he was spending in some trollop’s furnace door earlier in the evening, no, he may have done it for the lucky trollop but not for me lately, so I did it for myself, or you might say, given my powerful strength of imagination, that poor boy did it again, and it wasn’t till now that I thought the words poor boy and imagined that wonderful long thick sandwich I had in New Orleans with the oysters in it, I was glad to get that inside me, I’ll tell you plain, but I have just reminded myself of the best line I fed hubby one night when he thought he was playacting, he says, because I am lying there with my hand over my little tuft and he is on his back with Mr. Midnight swaying in the air, he says you are taking your time to get started tonight, you are, a demonstrative smile in his voice, and I count to three and then say, a grin in my voice, it’s just that I haven’t thought of anyone yet, I got that from some book probably, though I cannot tell you which, there are a lot of books in shelves and in piles on the floor in our well-rubbed house, well, I don’t know for certain whether he got my witticism, but Mr. Midnight got my left hand, whose fingers I wrapped around his girth just above the ovaloids, and my right hand, whose fingertips held his knob as if it were a champagne cork, and right there and then I began to count aloud, not making it to twice ten before he spurted, maybe for the first time that twenty-four hours — well, look at me, going on about the nun’s favourite sin, a girl I was so sweet, so innocent, so stupid, really, so that I did not recognize what it was the United Church minister was doing in the boot-cluttered cloakroom, didn’t know enough to say no but it didn’t last long, as long as a comma but not as long as a full stop, and to tell the truth, if that is my job here, I somehow learned to fix my fantasies on churchmen, especially the Catholics I patronized for a year or two and then pretended I came from that world for some years after that, even with him, I mean, remembering the time I sat with a middle-aged priest with his short wiry grey hair in the semigloom of a front pew and whispered my confusion and guilt to him while I let my long tapering fingers work their silent way under his cassock where they found no undershorts but a very large standing thing, I could feel the vein pumping blood up that fearful hot brute of a third leg, I continued to whisper my contrition as I reached down to cradle his mighty balls, who would expect such a thing of a priest, and then seize that hot column and yank upward, hardly knew what I was doing, till I leaned my lips close to his ear and changed my speech to low breathing, till I felt the hot flush over my fingers and wrist and heard the air stream into his nostrils, I kept tugging till his bottom rose above the pew and I seemed to lift him, now whispering all the dirty words I knew, while my nipples thought they might break through the silk blouse within which I was constrained, well, that was one of my favourite moments, whether a fantasy or a mysterious ministration of mercy, and there I was or dreamed I was, wishing I could induce him, in a church or in the mud behind the church, to drive that monster thing up me, and now I argue with my memory every once in a while, the two of us wondering whether I was experiencing religion or the Devil’s guiding hand, for I have always taken the spiritual world seriously whether reading about it in the Eleusinian mysteries or falling to my knees in total sunlit isolation and pleading for mercy from a barely possible saviour, sometimes when I am alone in my shop I start to say a novena and sometimes make it to the fourth day, trying to keep my hands busy with the inventory, and I wondered in my spare time who needs all this God stuff or who is always thinking of it, the good or the sinful, is that not fulfilling the Lord’s plan, after all he it was who set it all up, original sin, envy, jealousy, powerful appetites, all human failings and fallings and yet I was never able to imagine Eve trudging her way out of that garden without getting a glimpse or two of the muscles in that archangel’s thighs, not that she was tired yet of her hubby, that gent so ambitious to find more holes in her that he could ram that thing into, and he was so handsome with his uncombed hair, how could she say no to any of them — well, I have learned to say no, and I repeat it the answer is no and will be forever though I would like him to imagine my saying yes with a catch in my throat and then trying to put something else down there, and speaking of the Eleusinian mysteries, I just want to get a gripe off my chest because here I was, supposed to be the talented wife of an artist, and he never understood a thing I was talking about once it came to the Classical World, no, he didn’t know the Eleusinian mysteries or any of the mortals and semimortals and immortals concerned with them, Homer meant, I am certain, only a hit better than a triple to him, so what would any woman do but seek out someone she could discuss the mysteries with, and perhaps she might become sidetracked as I may have become with my lovely raven-head aboriginal boy who won my attention and perhaps something more when I found out that he could fly, fly in the dark, whether it was the dark of his powerful tricky bird’s hair or the dark of the night sky or a darkness that was inside his head, how he came to tell this story to a woman twice his age I do not think I know, but how I came to feel the mystery in every nerve of my being when he commenced to fly on my back, how he enjoined me without making a sound save some little groans in his throat when I fell to my knees not in sunlight now, nor in isolation this time — or was it? he was too beautiful for a man, even a boy such as he presented himself to be, perspiration among the scant hairs of his chest, I wanted to tell one or two of my women friends what went on between us, but they would think me daft, they thought I dwelled in a distant time and land enough as it was, but then when I asked the boy whether he could take me flying with him over the sea and the trees, he said he could fly with me only here, here on these tangled bedclothes, so I closed my eyes and followed him eve
n when he alit, feet fast on the ground, wax melting a little down his sides, then in a week he was gone, northward in the dark, up some inlet I could never learn the name of, with his people or his flock, or his murder — and my husband? Zethes, perhaps, snow on his wings, snow I would find myself covered with if he ever flew on my back, which I sometimes offered, my face between my hands on a pillow, trying to dream of my black-haired boy, his fingers around my neck, his breath in my ear, “lift, lift,” he whispered, but this Zethes, or some brother, said not a word, only increased his thrust until it was time for sleepy sleep, no, I said inside my grey flannel self, no, I would never let him forget the song he sang in our kitchen when we were first domiciled: I’ll be feeling you in all the old familiar places and I don’t mean where your face is though your tits aren’t big as Grace’s, and when I asked who Grace is or was, he claimed she was a character invented to be compared with in an old standard, whereupon I asked him whether he had any and he fired his finger pistol at me and awarded me a point, what a lucky girl I was, though not as big as Grace, though at that early and innocent time I did not have the sense to enquire as to when size became the standard, if we are to rest on that term, and if we were he was not going to come in first place, I can tell you, and in fact if it is himself reading these words I will tell him or you that in the size department he comes perhaps fifth behind the demigod in first place, an individual I detest, though before detestation I could have offered awe mixed with pain because yes he did stand in front of me in that generic hotel room where I sat on the edge of that generic king-sized hah hah bed and watched while he took it out in both hands and let it sway in its verticality for what must have been numerous minutes while the biggest little drop I ever saw appeared at the cetacean’s blowhole, I was afraid to reach out, and I squeezed my eyes closed as if I were about to be clubbed over the head, and in fact with my eyes closed I felt that great thing bounce hard off my forehead and nose and lips, I think I said “please,” though it may have been a “please don’t,” I decided to keep my eyes closed, and they were closed as I felt his power as he grabbed me and flung me down on the bed and pushed my knees apart with his and shoved that whole damned thing up me, and just listen to my crude unadorned language, well, I bit his shoulder till in my blindness I thought I tasted blood, and at the same time I thought I felt that mammoth knob wrenched loose and me thrown on my face among the anguished bedcoverings, then my head pushed to the linen and my bum shoved high and something entered where no one but the archfiend should go, so then I opened my eyes but all I could see was linen with fluids already all over it, and all at once that huge meat was beside my face and something even bigger impaling me and I wish I could say that I passed out and if not that I wish I could say that all at once a light came on and I began to like what was being done to me, all the while the brute’s deep voice only some foul cursing from his benighted throat, no, I said, but my voice was a semiconscious child’s squeak, and beside my face that awful instrument squirted and squirted again and I wept until sleep caught me and the next time I was conscious it was very early morning and something was broken inside me; at this point, if I were not writing this in order to avenge myself against the mate who is his own kind of asshole, I would describe the way the early morning sun played its way down the curtain and how in the centre of my pain, pain worse than childbirth, I can tell you, that man’s fist like a heavyweight boxer’s, a smile tried to turn my smeared lips, or is this my wretched and grateful duty, this narrative, because he thinks nothing can happen without his knowing, though he seemed most incurious about my absence for the day I spent at the clinic and the way I limped my way to the toilet on the few occasions of my absence from my bed, well, he was behind closed doors with a pencil in his hand as always, here on a day when I wondered how I was able to drive my little car all the way home through three municipalities, the sun sliding away like sperm on a leg and the rain beating its indecipherable message on the roof over my head; that pencil I used to enjoy in various features of my body while he was musing on the drawing half-finished, well, he did a lot of that kind of musing, and not always with a pencil in his hand, no, and I have to say, if he is listening, or rather reading, that won’t bring you happiness when you’re growing old, which is going to happen before long, oh, and speaking of long, I’ve seen longer, and more than seen, chum, not that I am wallowing in revenge, I mean I do recall some better moments, no doubt about that, even the times I was laughing in bed, not at him but with him, as they say, when for example he was telling me all the words for that thing, when I was an innocent newlywed the only word I knew was wiener, and this because all the girls at school said that and then tee-heed, and I was not in the habit of reading modern American or Irish literature, as they say, and you didn’t find such a vocabulary in Plato or Euripides, so dork, well, I knew you called a person that but I didn’t know it was another word for wiener or the ones I was now tee-heeing to under the covers with my fingers around one, pecker, and I could never picture one pecking like a chicken, joint, and he mentioned two statesmen making a joint statement and one of them says the prime minister has a nice joint, and so on, you can imagine the dialogue, and now I am not sure whether he told me all these or I picked some up in later beds, unless I am making that all up, fiction is so tricky, johnson, and now it turns out that they get men’s names, first names or last, a fellow has to wee and he says he’s going to point Percy at the porcelain, and I think that must be an Irish one or at least English, well, cock and prick, I would have learned those in quick time, yard, but that I eventually found in an eighteenth-century novel, rod, pretty boring, little red rooster, that’s from a song, and it reminds me that all men seem to have names for their own appendages, he called his the Midnight Visitor, and he was pissed off when I asked him about his soft ice cream cone, bone (and to tell the truth, I had thought there was a bone in it, wishful thinking, I suppose), trouser snake, John Thomas, one-eyed bald friend in a turtleneck sweater, dick, bird, pocket rocket, dong, wong, wang, dink, willy, knob, schlong, skin flute, dipstick, middle leg, tallywhacker, hot pork injection, okay, you name it, keep ’em coming, and a funny thing was that I was not picturing these mighty or cute objects, though there was a semihard one in my left hand, I was enjoying the sounds as who wouldn’t, I should think, I can’t even remember whether he inserted his length into my whatsit afterward, not important, this was one of the best nights of my married life, and I would like to go back there, but such is not to be, and I suppose I could make a case for the idea that it was cancelled out by the time I got to the mail before he did and there was an odiferous letter from someone named Damyana, if you can believe it, I know because I opened the envelope and extracted the rather thin message and read it through, well, I had to stop once to go to the little Turkish dictionary in his study and look up emmek, and I am, no, I’m not, sorry if this is the first time he’s (you’ve) heard about this, well, I did get to read a few letters over the years, even though he probably got most of his mail at work, so I learned from this experience that I should tell my dates not to write me at home or at all, though he probably would not open my mail, he liked to appear a polite proper moralistic twerp, or should I say pecker, about little things and thus justify breaking the bonds in foreign climes and alien beds, I will admit that I took to leaving my step-ins with alien peckertracks on the floor, imagining that he would pick them up for a sniff, but I never knew for sure, or is that important? he was not an underwear freak like Fé’s first husband, who used to wear her jismed undies to work, I mean what if he got hit by a bus, I asked her, and she just said she had that covered and I never did find out what she meant, I don’t think Delsing cared whether I wore granny underpants or bikinis or French or nothing at all, no, which is exactly what I wore when we sat for tea high above the westward Atlantic I guess it was halfway up Gibraltar, because I had just plain run out and I was about to sniff my way through all the gaunch I had used to find the most acceptable, when I thought to hell with it,
I will go comanche or commando or whatever there at the hoitsy-toitsy table under the oh so soignée umbrella and not even tell him, I wonder whether he would have been embarrassed or excited, turned on, as we used to say and maybe still do, there was a breeze as I take it there always is halfway up that rock, and I was sporting my Madagascar silk skirt that really called for my hands to hold it to my knees, but then after a while I thought what the hell, and then I took to slowly uncrossing and counter-crossing my legs, which are pretty darn good, and I did notice a few well-dressed older men and one woman having a good sly non-stare, I have to do this more often, I thought, while sipping my oolong, and once I dropped my napkin on the stone floor and bent to pick it up, ooh, as they say, la la, then I saw what would appear to be an Egyptian tourist drop his napkin on the floor, and I flashed him a Honey of a smile, which had the effect of making him blush an Arab blush and aroused my curiosity about you know what by now, but hasn’t the idea of Gibraltar always fascinated you, and look at the population, lots of Middle Easterners since the time of who were those traders on long ships or boats whatever going all over the world they half-knew, I think they are the Lebanese now, or I could be wrong, Phoenicians and all those, and then people from Morocco, Italy, Malta, lots of Maltese, but imagine this place, to drive onto Gibraltar you have to cross its landing strip, line up and wait while a Boeing 737 lands with a cargo of London newspapers and Scottish marmalade, made from oranges that might have been grown in Spain, I mean this big rock that sits up high and reeks in its tunnels of history not to mention the population of nasty monkeys that will be pleased to give you an infectious bite, well, I stayed away from them, and from those nice dark men because I was with my legal partner, watching to make sure he did not get away from me long enough to have a bare-skin adventure of his own, the asshole, no, when it came to a good tropical British dinner I ordered eel for both of us and offered him something to eat later that night, but he was either unconscious or pretending to be on a long sea voyage, while I checked his eyelids for REM sleep, well, I did myself the service, thinking of the Egyptian with the big brown eyes, they are what I think of every time I think of Gibraltar, for instance when someone sings that song or uses that simile or mentions that insurance company, not often, I will admit, but when I remember those eyes I get a little buzz, really, and if the truth be known, when hubby would favour me with a dip of his stick I would imagine or fancy or dream those Egyptian eyes and once I even came to bed with a veil on my face and he didn’t get the reference but it excited him all the same so that he was finished in no time and I had to let the Egyptian complete me, unbeknownst to him, though I confess that I often wondered whether he ever pictured me bending over to pick up my napkin, the dirty old beggar, eyes I saw once at a costume ball, can you imagine, we attended on the 4th of July at a mansion owned by some rich U.S. couple who knew our friends the Coopers in the art department, where we all had to dress up as famous USers, and hubby went as Ulysses S. Grant for some inexplicable reason, and I was his wife, I grant you, a good opportunity to show some bosom, even if it wasn’t accurate to the time or the daguerreotype, and the trouble was that those big brown eyes belonged to Mrs. Robert E. Lee, and hubby said we were not supposed to get chummy with the Lees, but I figured what Ulysses didn’t know didn’t hurt me, and Mrs. Lee and I did a short session of very heavy necking (and titting) in the fruit pantry, for always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known, now why did I think of those words, must have been something I had to memorize in school, what a trip that was, and really, I guess I have travelled more than most of the women I know, but nearly always with the same man, you know, what’s his name, Mr. Nothing, but no, I should not be so cruel, there have been moments, there have even been times, when I found him acceptable, even loved him, I suppose you would say, especially back in the time when I was doing it with him almost as often as he suggested it, and I will admit that he taught me a few things, though then of course I had to wonder where he had learned them, though don’t get me wrong, I am from the generation that was taught that men were supposed to be more experienced, but then, I wondered, was there just a small sample of women they could get that experience from, so if he wanted to show me how much better it works with two pillows under my ass, well, that was an early one and mild, you could say, and you could say that I never said no back then, in fact I got us started as often as he did for a while, for example at one of the big movie theatres on Granville when I opened his fly during the dark part of the movie, whatever it was, and while he was putting popcorn into his mouth with his right hand, I was pulling on him with my right hand with the serviette, that’s what I called it, though he tried to get me to say napkin, I think he was still shoving popcorn into his yob when his bum lifted off the seat and he spent, partly in the serviette and partly over the back of the luckily empty seat in front of him just about the time I noticed a young boy five seats down our row looking at us rather than the drama on the screen, and I gave him a big wink, don’t know whether he could see it in the semidark, and would you believe it, he wanted me to lick him clean that night while he fell asleep on his back, the big turnip, and I might as well tell you, I kept that serviette under my pillow for a week and some, so I could sniff him even when he was away somewhere, probably at some doxie’s now that I think of it, and now all these years later my hole doesn’t itch when I picture him anymore, only some of the lads who have come to my classes at the community centre, like for instance the Chinese lad with the tiny apparatus, he was a thankful little cuss, would do anything I whispered to him, put his tongue wherever I suggested, all because I found a way to get his entire sausage and eggs into my mouth and throat at once — and I would like to give you a list of all of them, including Hekka the Bull Moose and Thrusting William, but you don’t want to hear all those names and dimensions and specialties, any more than I cherish the memory of a list I found on his desk one time, well, it was his diary lying open to a page more than half-filled with a list of his own, cities and towns that start with the second letter of the alphabet, and so there was likely another mentioning Atlanta and Ashcroft and so on, this one satisfied to present Boston, Buffalo, Berlin, Bern, Bologna, Boston Bar, Bellingham, Butte, Baltimore, Badajoz, Brampton, Blaine, Barrie, Belleville, Banff, Bakersfield, Borden, Burlington, Blue Mountain, Brandon, Barcelona, Bristol, Brighton, to be continued, and I had to think for about one and a half seconds to figure out what he did or got in each of those places, and Brighton, Bristol, eventually, wonder why his luck or skill didn’t hold up when he got to spend a weekend in Basel, doesn’t that sound like the name of a song, A weekend in Basel, A bedroom with you, It wasn’t a hassle, You ruined my shoe, all right I am not a natural-born songwriter but I am a dandy singer, and I know all the old verses though I have to say I shorten some of them such as the overly long My Lady’s Bower, the lovely lady sitting there, her lover at her knee, oh I will just bet, he used to go rhapsodic when I got to my knee, I can tell you that, couldn’t get his buttons unbuttoned fast enough, this was before I learned to say no, and say it again, no way no dice no chance no fishing no sir noli me tangere no no no Nanette no trespassing Mister No One, this cave is closed, I don’t care what your name is or the names of your children or as we call them your paintings because it hasn’t been often I have related to them, that’s a little jest for you, Mr. Whatever, I know you don’t like to be guilty of saying it out loud but you do care about reputation, about the way some of your painter friends have bigger reps than you do, and I am here to tell you yes some of them do have bigger ones than you do, and some of them know how to do my favourite thing right, your tongue is too flat, I might say, and I might be a tiny bit guilty of making fun of my husband behind his back, about his front, maybe in the middle of telling the joke about the call girl with the removable glass eye, a joke by the way that I heard from my friend Fé, who knew more about getting me excited than any man I have had on or in me, though I have been willing to welcome the competition if that is
what they think of it as, Fé is a little younger than I am, a little shorter and lighter than I am, and she does not have a flat tongue, I have been known to myself to imagine her while sharing some hanky-panky with individuals and once a small group of the opposing sex, and Fé did not know everything when we met, but after a few nights at her house or in my shop and under, as they say, the influence of counterculture pharmaceuticals we considered ourselves citizens of a breakaway nation populated solely by members of the tender gender, as if that were always true, but then I have always been a backslider, and a frontslider if you want to know the truth, but a backslider, and I do like to watch for a bulge in a pair of slacks — would I renounce all bulges for all time, no, I say no, but there are bulges and bulges, and there’s been many the time I wanted to put the front of my hand on a bulge and in fact many a time I have done just that, and yes some lovely times when I have done more than just that, otherwise how would I have tasted that gruel or dew, and that’s the only thing I did not derive from my nights with Fé but she provided a solace for that loss, yes indeed, and she satisfied a lot of my curiosity but strangely enough she invigorated my curiosity at the same time, I mean look at all the things and people and other beasts I have never tried and Fé told me about her curiosity and in fact about the one time she dressed up as tarty as she could, skirt that came down to just below her whatsit and net stockings left over from a costume party and the highest heels in her closet and drove to the stroll at Raindrop Avenue but the pros chased her away so she set up shop half a block from a street lamp not far from Falsie Creek, and smoked a cigarette while standing with her long thin legs somewhat apart with the light behind her, and sure enough a bald guy about sixty years of age shows up and it isn’t long till he is taking her up against a brick wall, it takes all kinds, and she giggled with her eyes squinted and her nose wrinkled as she told me, licking powder from her fingers, and I was certainly curious but not that brave, think of the things that can happen to you and that is definitely not part of the attraction, oh did I say attraction, I meant curiosity, and that night we moved a little furniture and she took me up against the wall next to her piano, as best she could and the best I could, and what followed was pretty good, and believe it or not we wound up talking about Aristophanes, and then she asked me whether I ever wished I was a man so I could see what it was like to walk around with this thing hanging down or sticking out and I admitted that I wondered what it was like to bear this thing so hard and yet so soft to the touch, especially at the end, sort of like the best part of an artichoke that has been properly steamed, and what it would be like to shove it up, say, Melany’s hole, and Fé says or her husband’s, and if I had had one of those things right then it would have risen about seventy-five degrees and bobbed awhile, but I don’t know, I think that if it had been Fé I would have fucked her up to her neck, and then I thought what if we both had one, would we still be as attracted as they say to one another, I think so, I would have loved sucking her off and I would have loved getting my knob behind her shiny white teeth, I mean if I had a knob, it is all very complicated this sex business, and I was almost thinking that I could forgive him his wandering, but the pretending, I don’t think so, and anyway I am out of here, maybe I will go back to the rock of Gibraltar, I mean if I can find him, and maybe I will rise from the glistening water like a naiad, no, they hang out in fresh water, anyway, I will ascend that rock a nereid soaking wet and glistening and climb my human geography, I will become an oread, I will cover him with my pools of fir, and will I ever descend and hie to my hubby, no, will I let him put his tongue once more into my wetness, no, as Allah is my witness, that wed wanderer will never again, no, never even see what I have to offer, no, no, my mountain flower is for other climbers, no, if you, no, I mean you, think I’ll be coming home to face your suitors, well, no, I say no I will not. No.