Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub)

by David Gilmour

  For some time after that I had the distinct impression that the light was slipping, stealing out of my life, that the days were growing shorter and shorter. I got up, I had breakfast, I walked to the university, bantered with a colleague, gave a lecture, came home, napped, and when I awoke, the day was over. It occurred to me with surprising neutrality that I was dying, that I had already lived my life but my heart was still beating as if it hadn’t quite got the message.

  I went for a walk, drawn by the idea of lights and bustle on Bloor Street, but it was dinnertime, a lull in the activity of a main street, and I wandered toward the heart of the city, thinking What am I going to do? What? I had gone as far as Yonge Street and had turned south when I saw Emma Carpenter. She was standing in front of a movie theatre, looking at the marquee. I said hello and she replied with rather dreamy surprise, “Oh, hello, Professor Halloway.” Her hair was dirty and pulled back, revealing a ballerina’s chin line. I hadn’t realized how thin she was. On her feet she wore those curious black running shoes. She was going into the movie, she said, a Russian film, Gooseberries, and although I didn’t care particularly for Chekhov, I’d had enough of my own company for one day and I went in with her.

  It was crowded in the theatre and we had to sit near the front. During an obnoxious trailer for a summer film I whispered something amusing in her ear, but she appeared not to have heard. Her attention to the screen was absolute. Looking at her upturned face in the flickering light, I was uncomfortably struck with how delicate her features were, a fine sharp nose, full lips, dry and slightly apart. She really is lovely, I thought, and I was aware of feeling mildly sad, as if I had lost something.

  It was a surprisingly good movie. The actors, I’d heard, had rehearsed it for a number of years on their own initiative. I’d read the story a number of times when I was younger and had been bored by it, but for some reason, perhaps the condition I was in, I responded to it the way you do to a film on an airplane, where you find yourself oddly moved by moments at thirty thousand feet that might make you grimace with condescension back on earth. I was thinking about that when I noticed an odour of perspiration in the air. It was very strong but not at all unpleasant. In fact I found it sort of privately exciting. The notion that I noticed it and she didn’t wove a strange veil of intimacy around us.

  It was a very warm evening, even in the theatre. She wore a sleeveless summer dress; I was in shirt sleeves, rolled up. Between us stretched a wooden armrest. During a bright outdoor scene I observed with some embarrassment that I had left a glistening sweat stain on the wood. I was in the process of discreetly unrolling my shirt sleeve to wipe it away when Emma, who had been sitting with her hands in her lap, slid her naked forearm over exactly the place where mine had rested. It produced in me the most appalling sensation, a sense of absolute dread. For I was sure she had done it on purpose.

  After the film we took a walk through the neighbourhood. We stood in a small alley, talking across the hood of a car, and I noticed a discoloured brick in the wall behind her. I will remember that discoloured brick for the rest of my life, I thought. I walked her home, claiming, I think, that a friend lived in the neighbourhood, that we were planning a symposium on Martin du Gard and that maybe I’d just pop on by and give him a shout. Really, so starchy. And Martin du Gard, no less! But I was terrified, you see. Here I was, a middle-aged professor with a young woman who seemed to admire me. That’s what made it so frightening—that I might do something or reveal something that would diminish me in her regard. But she was delightful company, and when we got to her street we stopped for a moment in Sibelius Park and sat on a picnic table. We had talked for a matter of minutes when I suddenly experienced the most overpowering desire to kiss her. My heart positively crashed. I thought what any man would think in my place, that she was going to recoil with horror. Or worse, disappointment. I could almost hear her words in my ears: “Oh, Professor Halloway, you must have misunderstood.”

  Misunderstood indeed.

  But I had already let too many things slip from my fingers, and the notion that I might actually be with this young woman, that the only thing standing in my way was the fear that I might put out my hand and have it slapped, the notion that it was perhaps fear alone that stopped me from being happy, was something I knew would haunt me and grind me down for the remainder of my life. So I kissed her. And she kissed me back. And then you know what she said? She said, “Do you want to see my cunt, Professor Halloway?”

  She grew up the daughter of an unkempt doctor and his unfaithful wife. From the former she inherited a strange slobbishness, strange because, à première vue, she seemed so immaculate, her body anyway, like a Chinese reed, slim, green-eyed, with that mop of straight blonde hair. But if you looked longer you noticed her slightly stooped posture, a button missing from her shirt cuff, her red sweater pulled up at the back; she was a woman who could leave a wet towel on a bed, so to speak. It must have been from her mother (we never got on) that she inherited a sensuality the like of which I’d never really encountered before. Not in so extreme a form anyway. Her lovemaking—and don’t worry, I’m not going to embarrass either of us here—was a sort of schizophrenic experience. An authentically transforming event. Really, she carried on like a madwoman. She whispered, she swore, she blasphemed, she made demonic requests in a voice that was not her own. “Do you want to see my cunt?” Nice talk, indeed! Imagine taking that to the Governing Council dinner. Once, at the opera, she whispered in my ear, “Do you want to know what we used to do at pyjama parties in Ottawa?” Ottawa of all places. Our nation’s capital! Or that time in the foyer of the chancellor’s house—“Do you want to take me from behind?” No, Emma, I don’t want to take you from behind, I want to have Christmas pudding with my colleagues. Really, it was unimaginable that it was the same mouth that, only an hour before, had wished her grandmother a happy eighty-seventh birthday. I’ll put it this way: sometimes, after going to bed with Emma Carpenter, I wanted to call for an exorcist.

  To be honest, it could make her somewhat exhausting, this capacity to be so taken over, this substitution of personalities, as if, in the process of revealing herself, she was exposing to the sunlight an organ so delicate that it seemed still moist from its sheer internalness. And while she claimed to have been the one to terminate all her previous romances, I have always harboured the private suspicion that at least some of those men may have been rather relieved to see her go. One couldn’t have a comforting little screw with Emma just before one’s afternoon nap. No, it was the full spinning head and pea soup, so to speak.

  But you quickly became addicted to it. You didn’t want her carrying on like that with anyone else. Indeed, she told me a story once that had the curious effect of raising the hair on the back of my neck for a number of years. I was quizzing her about old boyfriends, of which there seemed to be a respectable baker’s dozen. (She saved the old-girlfriend stories for only the most inappropriate circumstances. To this day I cannot remember a single bar from the third act of Tosca, so steamed up was I with prurient speculation.)

  But let us return to the boyfriends. Once you start asking about those things, you can’t stop; you must have all the details, no matter how scary the whole thing becomes. There was, as I recall, an actor, a lawyer, a football player, a Scottish scientist (here she did a perfect imitation) and so on. And then there was her boss one summer. That’s the story that terrified me, as if I were hearing the tale of my own crucifixion. We were walking down a lovely side street in Rosedale. It was a damp day, the leaves smeared on the street. “Have you ever,” she began, “made love so much you fainted?”

  It was, as my students are fond of saying, a rhetorical question, a sort of trampoline. Sensing trouble, I said no, I hadn’t. She gave me a quick sideways glance, and I had the sensation of watching a tail disappear into a hole: if I wanted the beast I would have to grab it now.

  And thus it began, a simple enough story from anyone else, but from her slightly dry lips it positivel
y seethed with menace and lechery. “I had just broken up with my boyfriend,” she began. “He was a playwright (she named him, a handsome, lush-lipped creature whose face haunted me in theatre lobbies for years after). I liked him, we adored each other’s bodies (here I winced), but he was insanely jealous. Just about everything. And after a while I couldn’t stand it any more. So I broke it off. Anyway, a little while later I moved into his brother’s house. I don’t know why, convenience maybe (ha!). He had a spare room, something like that. Anyway, one Friday afternoon I went out for a drink with my boss after work and we ended up back at my place. At my new place. We spent the whole weekend in bed, condoms all over the room, not even getting up to eat. We just fucked all the time.” Here I steadied myself on the hood of a car. She looked at me again to see, I think, how the story was taking hold.

  “Go on,” I croaked.

  “When we finally got out of bed and went for something to eat, I fainted on the sidewalk. Just dead away.”

  For a while I didn’t say anything. My stomach was positively churning. I could see Emma getting out of bed, that bony body—it was so extreme, her nakedness, no one ever seemed quite so undressed.

  “But, Emma,” I said, with escalating heat, “didn’t it occur to you that the playwright’s brother must have heard you making love, must have told his brother? Can you imagine? I mean, my Lord, he was jealous to begin with. That must have killed him.”

  It sounded as if I were lecturing her, my voice up an octave and out of breath. But it wasn’t moral indignation I was experiencing; it was the realization that I had bitten off perhaps more than I could chew, that here was a woman who could destroy me with no other weapon than my own imagination. I was suddenly aware that a domain of vulnerability existed beneath my feet like a trap door.

  “It was over!” she protested.

  “How over?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of weeks. Besides, I was twenty.”

  Twenty.

  It was a ridiculous answer, it didn’t explain anything; but when you’re starving, it’s remarkable what will pass for nourishment. I thought about this story for years afterwards, the image of her boss’s humping buttocks. Lord! It became a kind of masochistic daydream: I saw myself, ear to the wall, listening to a hoarse-voiced Emma in the next room saying those things. God, how awful!

  Anyway, how did I get started on that? I can’t remember. But early on, our second or third date, I met her for dinner. It was an upscale restaurant, the second floor of a steak house up near St. Clair Avenue. She ordered a steak, which she left untouched. “I can’t eat when I’m around you,” she said. “My stomach’s too tight.” She left a bleeding mouthful at the end of her fork. I knew this was a prelude to something, and after a glass or two of wine she leaned forward and cupped her sharp chin in the palm of her hand. “I have a present for you,” she said. I could sense a career-ending opportunity on the horizon and I looked about for witnesses.

  She withdrew a ragged T-shirt from her shoulder bag; it had a worn neck and a hole under the arm. “You might need this,” she said.

  I looked at her and then at it. I must have seemed puzzled. I was. It was obviously a significant gift. But what did it signify?

  I sniffed it discreetly. “Ah,” I said.

  “I just came from the gym.”

  You see what I mean? An old-fashioned dirty girl, I guess. Or a desk with many drawers, depending on how you see the world. She liked hard-core pornography, read girlie magazines with her hand down her jeans, abused herself on a nightly basis (“I’ve got it down to a minute. Want to watch?”), lured me into bouts of phone sex, once on a cellphone when I was lunching with a group of visiting professors from Munich. (“Yes, that does sound lovely, and we’ll chat about it more when I get home.”) I don’t believe for a second that she was bulimic, but after a half-bottle of wine it gave her a flush of visible pleasure to tell strangers that “For four years I had my finger up my cunt or down my throat.” Vous voyez?

  One evening she borrowed a pullover from me. It was a cool night, the rain had just ceased and I was walking her home. A couple of days later I checked my answering service. After a slightly strangled pause, I heard her say, “I just committed an unnatural act with your sweater.”

  But it wasn’t all good times. She could be, for example, peculiar about her body. About her thinness, which I so adored. Her heart beat at a furious rate; I could hear it sometimes when I had my ear pressed to her chest. It wore her down, I think, the strain of being Emma, and it showed in her hands. She had the hands of an old woman, delicate but colourless. Unhealthy hands. She could lose weight during an afternoon walk down Yonge Street.

  One evening, a few months into it, we met at a restaurant for dinner. She was late, which always irritated me, but when she came in the dining room she looked so lovely I forgot my displeasure. I simply couldn’t keep my hands off her, nor could I stop talking, and in the course of things I said, “You must order something hearty, anything you want, it’s my treat, roast beef, mashed potatoes, something to put some meat on you …”

  She opened the menu and I remember thinking, Oh, she didn’t hear me, I must be talking too much. But then, in a voice I had never heard before, she said, “I’ll thank you not to make personal remarks about my body.”

  Personal remarks about her body? Lord, that’s all I ever did. My description of her, of how it felt to unbutton her shirt or slip off her socks, had become as graphic as anything she might come out with. I was astonished. And speechless. And embarrassed. There was, in her tone of voice, the implication that she was talking to a cretin.

  “Now wait a minute,” I said, in a slightly wobbly voice, but she interrupted me.

  “It’s not a debate, Darius, it’s a matter of manners.”

  Manners?

  The evening never recovered, and when she came back to my house she sat deliberately forward on the couch, a most uninviting posture, like a hockey player waiting to be called onto the ice. I put my hand on her back.

  “I’m not really comfortable with that tonight,” she said. “You’ve made me feel very self-conscious.”

  “How could I?” I protested. “I adore you.” I leaned over and tried to kiss her ear, but she pulled away with considerable irritation.

  “I said no, Darius. All right?”

  Oh dear. What a dreadful night. And then she added, “Go into the bedroom and take care of yourself, if you have to. I’ll wait out here.”

  Nice, eh? She was a little touchy, my Emma, sometimes I even thought her a little touched, those voices, the foul language, the overheated body, that unpredictable pricklishness. Really, like threading your way through a minefield. But I must say that before her, and I mean all my life before Emma, I had the slightly embarrassing sensation that I was saving myself for someone. I even had it during my marriage. During the actual ceremony I found myself wondering if such-and-such a bridesmaid might be at the reception afterwards. But when I was with Emma, I had the unmistakable feeling that the train had finally pulled into the station. I caught myself being happy.

  But we all have a shaming memory, no matter how well we have loved, and I have one too. Emma had gone to the hospital to have her gallbladder out. The day of the operation an article of mine appeared in a prestigious academic journal. I was very excited and rushed to the hospital with it in my hand. She was still groggy from the anaesthetic and was clutching a gold pocket watch. It had belonged to my father. The metal was dull, it no longer kept correct time, but it had a solid, reassuring weight, a beauty from a different era, and I had given it to her the night before for good luck.

  The surgeon had done a bad job on her and she raised her nightgown to show an ugly six-inch wound. “Why did they have to cut such a big hole?” she asked, her small blonde head shaking slightly, like an old man’s. She waited as if I might know the answer.

  But I wasn’t paying attention, you see. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my article and about a rendezvous I was abo
ut to have with a colleague, an event where I would be praised. And so I left the hospital. And when I said I was leaving, she went quite still, she appeared to be thinking about something entirely different. Or trying to sort through the anaesthetic to solve a simple mathematics problem. Why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she say, No, stay here. I need you?

  But she didn’t. She swallowed it and in so doing condemned us both.

  You don’t usually lose someone because of one thing. But that wound, in her stomach and in her heart, never healed. It gave her, I think, a new way of looking at me, that I was over there. After that night we were not on the same side any more.

  Life went on. We lived together, went on vacation to Thailand. She’d quit graduate school and now worked as a publicist for a small publishing house; I taught my classes. But eighteen months later, perhaps sooner, she walked into the living room late one morning. It was a warm day in winter; there was a high wind, it shook the bare tree branches outside the window, they bobbed up and down in a furious silence, and overhead the clouds whizzed by with unnatural quickness. The mood of the street swung back and forth from gloominess to sprints of sunlight racing down the face of the houses and across the lawns. You couldn’t tell if a storm was coming or going.

  I was fiddling with a lecture on surrealism, wondering if such and such an anecdote, that business of Alfred Jarry walking a lobster on a leash down the Champs-Elysées, would strike an amusing note for an undergraduate class. “And do you know what Jarry said when asked why he was walking a lobster and not a dog?” I waited an anticipatory second. “‘Because lobsters don’t bark.’”