by John O'Neill
An image came into his mind, a photograph he’d once seen in a nature magazine of a female polar bear that had been tranquilized. It was lying spread-eagled in the snow, the pinkness of its sex prominent amidst all the dirty whiteness. Beside it were two men in ratty down vests. Both were smoking cigarettes and grinning. One held a tranquillizing gun. The photograph was a study in vulnerability and crassness. He tried to block it from his mind, watched the strings of incense smoke wind toward the ceiling.
“What?” Alison asked, lifting her head a little.
“Nothing,” he said.
He moved to her thigh again. She leaned down, touched the back of his head, pulled him up. Leonard concluded she was annoyed by his distraction. He lay at her side, was about to ask her if something was wrong.
She said: “I can’t wait to kiss,” and started to work her tongue around his neck, behind his ears. He had a sense he was being groomed.
She laughed, said: “I’ve left lipstick all over. You look bruised. I have beautiful eyes.”
Leonard leaned away, propped his head on his hand.
“Sorry?” he said.
“I have beautiful eyes.”
“You do,” he said. “Aren’t I supposed to say that?”
“You would have.”
“Kind of makes me redundant, doesn’t it?” he said, laughing.
Alison laughed, lifted her legs in the air, put her hand between them and began to touch herself, exaggerating the motion.
“Leonard, it’s never been like this with anyone else, oh Leonard, I’ve never felt like this before.”
Leonard fell onto his back, rolled his eyes in mock frustration, decided she was mean. But before the notion could fully form, before he could decide if he was merely pretending to be offended, she’d pushed against him and put her hand into his shorts, outside his underwear. She sat up, undid the buttons of his fly, yanked down his shorts and boxers. Put a hand under his balls, weighed them. Giggled. Leonard trembled, embarrassed, wanting to curl away from her; he wondered if his balls were acceptable, if they carried the appropriate heft. She lay beside him again, ran her fingernails along the shaft of his penis, encouraging transformation. She began to dip her fingertips between her own legs, this time solemnly, transferring the wetness onto Leonard.
“You know, the cunt is overrated,” she said, her lips against his ear. “It’s a privileged thing. Was born in Rosedale. Old money. Lives there still. Has fences around it, wired with alarms. Doesn’t need to work. Only goes out on formal Saturday nights. A little bored. Trophy wife. Has a six-figure bank account.”
Alison shifted, put out her tongue, touched his lips.
“Ahhh, but the mouth. The mouth is blue-collar. Was born in Scarborough. Lives there still. Can go anywhere, can dress in sweats or evening gown. Is unavoidable, soft or hard. Can shape itself for mystery, can give out or take in. If neglected, slow to return. The mouth ennobles, yet is always right there. You know?”
Leonard didn’t know, and was unsure how to proceed. He had no idea whether Alison was quoting something, was mocking him, or both. Perhaps she always launched into such pretentiousness when intimate, when nervous. He thought he wanted to make love to her, but suddenly her cunt – it bothered him when she said the word – seemed a thousand miles away, far below him like a planet to a space walker. He felt as if he needed to explain that he wanted both it and her mouth, that they brought the north and south of the body together.
He said, laughing unconvincingly: “You know, it depends who you’re talking about. Some women are pretty blue collar with theirs.”
“Yea, but don’t you see, the mouth’s everything, all the time. The mouth even listens. Watch the mouth, you can see the brain. One can forget about the cunt.”
Leonard, distracted, said: “What?”
“I said, the mouth lets you see what the brain ...”
“I heard that part. I didn’t hear ...”
“I said, you can forget about the cunt.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“No, I don’t mean you as you. I mean the big you, in general ...”
“I didn’t know you were in a band,” Leonard said. “I saw you on TV last night. I couldn’t believe it. You were great. You guys looked great. Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t believe what a good drummer you are.”
Alison sat up on the bed, shifted to its foot. “Thanks. That was ages ago. We’re not together now. It was a cable show, they filmed a bunch of independent bands. We could really only play one song.”
“How long you been drumming?” Leonard asked, feeling life return to his penis.
“Off and on around five, six years. I sold my drums to help pay for my documentary.”
Alison was lifting her legs, flexing her feet. Leonard sat up and put his arms around her, kissed her on the shoulder, reached around and began to tug at her skirt. She turned, swung her legs back over the bed, pushed him down. She flopped on top of him, her face against his. He went to meet her lips, but again she pulled up, curving her back.
“No, remember, we’re preserving that,” she said, and then slid down.
Her feet smacked the dresser. He waited for her to take him in her mouth. He was prepared to tell her no. But she stood up, and said, “I have to go. I’m meeting some friends.” Her black mesh top and leather skirt and black nylons looked, suddenly, like a uniform, standard issue. Alison was someone, something, being done to him.
He found his underwear and shorts. Alison had already shed the black, was squeezing into her jeans. For a moment, with her back to him, she was naked from the waist up. Leonard thought he saw stars, blinked them away. He leaned against the dresser, tried to sound matter-of-fact.
“I’ll get going then,” he said. “So, who are you meeting?”
“Just friends,” she said. “Some people I met last year at the Film Festival.”
Film Festival Friends. Not good. People, obviously, on the cutting edge. People who didn’t live in the suburbs.
“Alison,” Leonard said. “Both times we’ve been together I haven’t. We haven’t. Don’t you? Aren’t you unsatisfied?”
She was wiping makeup from her face, biting down on a tissue.
“No. Half the pleasure’s in the anticipation. The idea of it. I sort of like things to be, I don’t know. I like thinking about it, more than doing it. I’m sorry. I sense you need more. We’ll see. And your situation. How’s your mom?”
Leonard was annoyed that she’d changed the subject. He didn’t want to think about his mother.
“Dad said she’s the same. Still spitting up. My sister is taking my dad out tomorrow, to give him a break. I’m staying with Mom. I don’t know if I can stand it. I love her, but it’s pretty bad. Can I see you, tomorrow night? ”
Alison turned away and began to fold her mesh top and leather skirt into a drawer.
“Everything’s up in the air. I’m starting to shoot my film. I rely on others. So I’m not sure, but. I’d like to see you. Don’t know about tomorrow. Why don’t you call? It might have to wait till, maybe Thursday.”
He steadied himself against the door of her room, leaned up against her bathrobe hanging there; noticed, peeking from underneath it, a poster image, French New Wave: Jean-Paul Belmondo, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Then saw that the bundle of incense sticks Alison had ignited earlier had not yet burned even a third of the way down.
14
MY BEST TO YOU
The next afternoon, after a painless escape from the basement (Cynthia had gone to her mother’s), Leonard arrived at his parents’ apartment. His sister and father sat at either end of the couch, watching The Price is Right. Ruth looked suicidal. Their father was already wearing his Toronto Blue Jays jacket and baseball cap.
“Am I late?” Leonard asked. Ruth scowled.
“No,” she said. “Dad’s impatient. He put his coat on a half-hour ago. I told him you weren’t coming till one.”
Dad snapped at this: “Goddamn
it, I’m cold.”
Ruth rose and helped their father up.
“Dad, it’s August. This place is an oven. We could cook a roast on the coffee table.”
“My blood-thinner makes me cold, you know that.”
“Does it make you impossible, too?”
“No, that does. You try living with that.”
He jabbed a thumb toward the bedroom. Leonard had been aware of the spitting sound as soon as he’d arrived. His father yelled: “For Chrissakes, Margaret, stop it.”
“She can’t, Dad, why can’t you understand that?” Ruth said. She turned to Leonard. “There’s some lasagna in the fridge. Enough for you and mom. She won’t come out of the bedroom. She doesn’t understand why Dad’s going out. She’s been spitting worse than usual. The doctor said it’s in her head. Thinks she’s angry about moving down from the lake. Or she’s aware of her own illness; it’s her way of getting attention. He doesn’t know. We’ll be back tonight, around seven-thirty. Like your t-shirt. Good luck.”
After they’d gone, Leonard went to the bedroom, found his mother sitting on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a yellow nightgown. All the lights in the room were on and the curtains were open, the afternoon sun blasting in. Leonard’s mother looked ghostlike, obliterated, like a vampire in the process of slow disintegration. Veins protruded, blue trees on her arms, on the backs of her hands. Her skin had tightened on her skull, and her hair was in a wave, almost straight back. She held a tissue over her mouth. Once again, the floor was a lake of discarded tissues.
“Hi, Mom, how are you?”
She looked up and her eyes focused, not on Leonard, but on the dresser mirror.
“I thought you’d gone,” she said.
“No, Mom. Dad went out with Ruth for a while. I’m staying with you.”
“I know, but why didn’t you go?”
“I’m here to visit you.”
“Don’t know what I’ll make for dinner.”
“Mom, I’ll make dinner. Come out, we’ll listen to some music.”
“It’s too late for dinner. Father needs to feed the dog.”
Leonard waded through the tissues, took his mother’s arm. Led her into the living room, helped her sit. Switched off the television. Put a Frank Sinatra CD into the boom box he’d given his parents a few years before to replace the old stereo, a curving piece of teak furniture from the 1960s that had claimed too much space in their cottage. Billy May and his orchestra roared into Come Dance With Me. As Leonard had hoped, his mother brightened at the sound and let the hand with the tissue fall. She began to wave her other hand, as if conducting. Then she spoke.
“It’s the way he draws out a line, pauses before a phrase, like he’s dreaming the line, living it, before he sings it. I learned everything about singing from him.”
Leonard had never really heard his mother sing. Not professionally. She’d sing My Best To You at family gatherings, at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, and she had a warm, natural voice, whose main feature was a sense of pride, even when she sang a sad lyric. She’d shape each syllable as if a lost or blurred one would degrade the heart of the composer, living or dead. And she always hemmed and hawed when asked to sing, as though the experience was a private slice of ecstasy, inappropriate to share.
Leonard had a few black-and-white photos of her singing, from the 1940s and 50s. She was usually positioned behind one of those large, square silver microphones. There was often the blurred image of a piano player behind her, or two or three rows of suited musicians, each settled behind a box stand that carried some symbol, like a saxophone shape or musical note. In one of Leonard’s favourites, his mother was dressed in a black hourglass gown, her small hands raised in satiny elbow-length gloves, a fat bracelet on her left wrist and her curly hair swept back from her forehead. The background was dark and there was no microphone, as if the power of her voice was enough. Just to her right, invading the frame, was a man’s leg, member of the audience, in cream-coloured pants and brogue shoe. Leonard liked to think it belonged to his father, and, as the leg interrupted the photograph, so he’d enter her life, interrupt her happiness with the demands of family, and the traditions of marriage in the 1940s. Leonard always tried to imagine how his mother’s voice had sounded then. He could only speculate on how time had roughened its edges, as it had straightened the curves of her body, pressed down her shoulders, broken her feet. And he saw how her smile, what seemed to him a strange anticipatory happiness, had been replaced with a severe mouth and a throat that emitted, rather than song, a liquid growl. Whenever he looked at these photographs, Leonard wished, fervently, he could return to their context, that he could steal a few moments from the past to watch her, as if the world in which she lived then was pure. Thus, he considered her decline a kind of poetic tragedy. In fact, he believed the whole latter half of her life was a debt she had to pay. All artists suffered, one way or another. He told himself he was a close and sensitive witness to a sad universal truth. Every time he saw his mother, his heart nodded knowingly, and there was comfort in this.
His mother rose from her seat, walked toward the music. She propped herself against a shelf, inclined her head toward the little set of speakers. The boom box looked insignificant, cheap, its moulded plastic frame not worthy of the music. Leonard also stood up, ready to take his mother’s arm, to lead her back to the couch. She began to speak again, resuming her reverie, more articulate than in Leonard’s recent memory.
“Summer Wind. This is one of my favourites. Johnny Mercer. The lyric has a sadness to it, but Sinatra gives it a, I don’t know, masculine sadness. And you can’t hear the dog barking.”
It had been ten minutes since she’d spit up. Perhaps only Sinatra had this effect, since they’d tried playing other music before. “She’s giving herself to a man again,” Leonard thought cynically. Would she still desist from whatever rebellion her spitting represented if he put on, say, Lena Horne, or Patsy Cline? Would the sound of a female voice remind her too intimately of the career she’d abandoned, conjure old feelings of competitiveness? Leonard felt the impulse to go and change the CD as a petty provocation.
She lowered her left arm and her nightgown slipped off. It swung across her body, hung from her raised right arm. Leonard caught a terrible glimpse of her naked back and buttocks, mottled pale flesh that resembled sun-baked earth. He was paralyzed, stunned by that landscape. Before he could move, his mother lurched toward the door of the apartment and yanked it open, dropping her nightgown as she strode into the hall. Leonard caught her before she’d taken three steps, guided her back. He swept her nightgown up, threw it across her shoulders, walked her to the couch.
“That’s better,” he said. Then, in a more severe tone: “Mom, you can’t, please. Never, never leave this apartment.”
Her eyes welled with tears. Leonard shuddered, imagined what the neighbours might have thought: a naked old woman bolting from an apartment with a younger man in pursuit, all to the crooning of Frank Sinatra. He banished the idea, put an arm around his mother’s shoulder. Told her to listen to the music, said he was sorry he yelled.
As the last song on the CD began, Night and Day, she straightened up. She also lifted the tissue she still grasped in her hand, spit into it. Resumed a series of strangled noises, more awful for her having paused. The spell of the past, whatever the music represented, could not preserve her, and Leonard felt as if he’d witnessed her whole decline, 50 years packed into the space of a CD.
He phoned Alison, got her answering service. Told her he’d like to see her that night, no matter how late. He left his parents’ number, told her to phone if she got in before 7:30. Beyond that, he’d phone her again.
With a brief pause for dinner, his mother continued her spitting, but, seemingly aware of her son’s agitation, disappeared into the bedroom. His sister called to tell Leonard she wouldn’t be bringing their father back until later. Is that all right? We’re actually having a good day. Can you tolerate Mom a bit longer? H
e checked on his mother. She was under the bed covers, the spitting sounds replaced by a dull wheeze. He phoned Alison again, told her, again, that he’d like to see her, that now she could return his call up until 9. He did the dishes, watched David Suzuki wander the Queen Charlotte Islands, felt immensely tired. Dozed off on the couch.
White car. Cynthia driving. We’ve just pulled away from a Super 8 motel, no vacancies. Optometrist convention. We’re on the second-last day of a three-month driving trip and are exhausted, having driven for the last nine hours. The lights of the town vanish in the rearview. Only our headlights illuminate the corridor of trees – Southern Indiana in October. Cynthia lifts a hand from the wheel, pushes a cassette into the player. Leonard Cohen begins with The Guests. I peer out the passenger window, try to make out details. Nothing but the outline of treetops against the night sky. No moon. I close my eyes, begin to wonder how our photographs will turn out, evidence of our adventure. California Redwoods. Yosemite. Grand Canyon. A Navajo woman selling Kachina dolls by Canyon de Chelly. Cynthia sitting against a crop of red rock, sunburned hands in her lap. I open my eyes, pleased at the memory, see only darkness and the reflection of the dashboard dials. Then, by the highway shoulder, a floodlit patch of grass; two sections of benches and between them, moving down the grassy aisle, a priest in extravagant black skirts, tall and tapered like an evergreen. Swinging a silver censor. Incense smoke. Above the wooden seats the backs of heads, all white-haired, maybe a dozen worshippers. The priest swings the censor so vigorously it enlarges, comes within a foot of the road. Two minutes later, another clearing, crowd of men in a semicircle and, beyond them, a woman dancing. Naked. Thin back to the crowd. She moves with a twitchy rhythm, like a candle flame caught in a wind. Soon, another clearing, double set of benches, this time empty. The priest-like figure has his back to us. Drapery flows from his raised arms. There’s a host in his hands, big and bright as a moon. I can make out its shadows and craters, its mountains and valleys. No one lives there. “Would you look at that,” I say to Cynthia. “I know,” she says. Gasps. I look up at the windshield just in time to see the deer. Cynthia hits the brakes, wrenches the steering wheel. We skid across the highway, spin around. A boulder obliterates the car on the passenger side, lifts the door up into my face, throws glass in my eyes. I watch from above while they strap Cynthia onto a stretcher, fix an oxygen mask to her face. Slide her into the blinking ambulance. The line of flashing lights along the highway, the clutches of bodies in conversation, the troubled sense of occasion, reminds me of a fair I’d seen once, rising up from a dark prairie, the Ferris wheel like a new planet. I notice that, skulking by the edge of the woods, but caught in the flashing lights, on again, off again, are a number of animals, but not real ones: figures in big furry mascot costumes, like you’d see at a football game. Bear, squirrel, rabbit, skunk. I’m ...