It was near the bottom of the street that I noticed a one-storey brick building on my right. The Village Health Spa. I could see activity inside, the lights were on, a television flickered. I checked my watch. It was ten o’clock.
With a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a wall eye, the man at the reception desk looked like a seedy Jean-Paul Sartre. He seemed surprised to see me, although with that face he could have been suspicious or guilty or venal; I couldn’t tell. But louche, like that wandering eyeball.
“Are you open?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
An American sitcom was playing on the television set in the adjoining foyer, and its aggravating laugh track, ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, complemented the junky tones of the place, like something one might find on a tray of tin foil. A black girl emerged from a back room. She was attractive, but there was something not quite right about her mouth, as if her top lip had been split open and had healed badly. She was self-conscious about it too, covering her mouth reflexively when she saw me, and her shyness drew me to her. I noticed also that she was wearing the same leather bikini, complete with fringes, that I’d seen on Binky at the other place. There must have been a sale on them. She plopped herself on the chesterfield and swept up a magazine. I was on the verge of fleeing—the establishment was notches below par—when I smelt that strange sex pollen, the mildly sickening bouquet of baby oil, which had acquired a kind of Pavlovian appeal for me.
“Are you available?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Dr. Scobie,” I said, extending my hand.
“I’m Passion,” she said with a trace of amusement. Of course that wasn’t her name. It was an absurd choice, a sort of chronic masturbator’s daydream of a name, and she knew it.
It was a small enterprise, only two tables in the back. Not very clean either. I caught sight of a ball of crumpled toilet paper on the floor beside the massage table, semen-soaked, I imagined, from a previous client. Passion bent over with a swish of leather and fringes and swept it up. A wooden statue stood glowering in the corner. It was an Indian chief, human size, in full war paint and headdress.
“And what’s this?” I asked.
“Oh, him,” she said. “Someone stole his tomahawk.”
It was true. In a raised fist there was an unoccupied hole in which it had once perched.
“Now who would steal a tomahawk?” I asked.
“Stick around,” she said, and then with the weariness of a waitress at the end of a long shift she outlined my options: regular, topless, bottomless, nude reverse (“that’s where you do me”) or a slide.
I took the regular.
“Oil or powder?” she asked.
I replied. “Powder. At first.”
I won’t include all the things the Indian saw, but I will say that after I had given her my credit card and she had disappeared from the room to return with a steaming hot face cloth, after all those pleasant formalities, we remained in the cubbyhole, chatting. She had a dirty, funny mouth and the loyalty of a prostitute. She spared no details about her customers: the Greek with the stubby member (“it was like a cucumber”) who never tipped; a local actor; a police detective; a housewife who liked to watch her husband. Some liked their bums paddled, their nipples tweaked; some sniffed her linen; some required a medical inspection, some a mild bawling-out; for some, only a good smack in the chops would do the job. But if they tipped, they were okay. Rule of thumb was, the bigger the pervert, the bigger the tip. I had a sense of having heard all these stories before but enjoyed the fact of her telling me, the confidence. Thinking back on it, I must have been lonelier than I realized, but the truth is that I have a warm memory of that evening and its aftermath, the two of us smoking cigarettes and gabbing. When I left, I felt clear-headed and energetic and quite ready for a lecture preparation, a read, a drink at the corner, whatever the evening might afford me. It seemed like gravy now. On the way home I talked to myself in French, something I always do when I’m happy.
I went back to see Passion only a few days later and the same delicious ritual ensued. But this time, as I was giving her my charge card, I asked her a question. “How much of this do you get to keep?”
“The tips,” she said.
“What if you don’t get a tip?”
“Then I get fifteen bucks.”
“On a sixty-five-dollar massage?”
“Yep.”
She liked the feel of where this was going. I sat back down on the table.
“I have a proposition for you,” I said.
“Oh yes?”
“I’m suggesting that perhaps we could cut out the middleman entirely.”
She looked at me suspiciously.
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you were to come to my house …”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Hang on. You come to my house, you give me a massage there, but you get to keep all the money.”
“That’s against house rules.”
“We wouldn’t tell anyone. It would be a private arrangement between you and me.”
“I don’t know,” she said, but you could see a shard of venality glint in her eye. “Are you a cop?”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“An old one.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ll give you my name and my phone number and you can think about it. How’s that?”
“You live nearby?”
“Just up the street.” I handed her my card. She examined it. “My name’s not really Dr. Scobie.”
“What do you teach?” she asked.
“French literature.”
You could see her mind shuffling strange cards into a new hand. She removed the undersheet from the massage table and, taking a spray bottle from the nightstand, gave it a couple of squirts and dried off the plastic with the soiled sheet.
“All right, Professor,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
Several days went by during which I was unusually busy. A visiting professor from the University of Rennes delivered a good paper on Verlaine; nothing groundbreaking, but I liked the way he told us what we all already knew. I took him to dinner afterwards and we consumed a number of bottles of wine, after which the conversation turned, of course, to women. It still strikes me as curious that men talk of virtually nothing else.
The following morning I was slightly ill and neglected to eat breakfast. By mid-afternoon I was starving, I had a raging headache and, after a student seminar on Boileau, I intended to rush home and get something to eat. The paper was presented by a young girl with a sort of Cleopatra hairdo. Short bangs, long at the back. She was Russian, I think, for I detected just a dusting of an accent. I had to remind her several times to address the class, not me, but when she did, she revealed a profile that was almost unbearably beautiful. I wanted to reach over and touch her neck, to feel her skin, which was so soft, I imagined, that it would be like putting one’s fingers in a bowl of cream. And yet I noticed that when she faced me front-on the effect was diminished somewhat, and I felt the relief that you experience sometimes when you find a flaw in a too gorgeous woman.
Still, after the seminar I meandered slowly down the front steps of the university with the ridiculous hope that she might be there, waiting for me. But she wasn’t. I saw her riding her bicycle up the middle of the snowy street. I wanted to call out for her to be careful, but it was too transparent.
I suddenly remembered how hungry I was. It would take too long to go home and cook a meal, so I stopped off at a large grocery store in the Manulife building to pick up a heated roast beef sandwich. I was so famished, I think I would have gunned my way to the food counter if necessary. I was rushing across the floor—I had just passed a rack of barbecue chickens, the smell from which made me even more impatient—when I looked up and saw Emma Carpenter. She was standing by a fruit tray, an orange in her hand, and she appeared to be discussing the orange with a tall, angular-featured man.
A face that could wear hats.
I broke stride for a moment. It had, after all, been more than a year since I’d seen Emma. Sensing some arrhythmic movement in the room, she looked up. And recoiled. There’s no other way to describe it. It was as if someone had thrown a glass of water on a cat. She edged closer to her companion, like a child stepping behind a parent. It was all quite involuntary, and that’s what made it so shocking. It was as if she had encountered a man who had beaten her or raped her, as if her body had remembered on its own an assault and had responded intuitively. My God, I thought, so that’s what she thinks of me. And yet—I don’t know how to say this without sounding pathological—the notion that Emma thought of me at all was something of a comfort. You see, my body remembered too.
In any event I ran into Serrault on the street shortly afterwards. He was shopping for a meat thermometer (he was quite the cook) and, to his surprise and mine, I began to tell him about this odd sighting of Emma. Midway through it my heart began to pound and a sensation of thinness overcame me, as if I were somehow lying, as if I were suggesting that the sheer violence of her response implied that she was somehow still in love with me. It got worse. Describing my reaction to her, namely, walking out of the store sans rien dire, without even a nod, I seemed to be suggesting, however coyly, that while it was she who had abandoned me, it was now I who kept the door locked. I kept on. I insisted, my voice almost an octave higher now, that sometimes it made me even happy to think about her, to bathe in the knowledge that I had, in fact, recovered. Totally. But the more I tried to explain all this, the more self-deluding, the more obsessed I sounded. (Even now I feel a tad too insistent.) By the end of it I felt as if my body had been poisoned, and I was in a foul mood.
Serrault, of course, had no response whatsoever except for mild sympathy. “Tiens,” he said, and ducked into a kitchen supply shop. A turkey baster had caught his eye.
That evening I sat out on the back patio in a coat and hat, smoking cigarettes and staring into the garden. And after a while I remembered, comme ça, a picture of Emma rushing down the basement stairs with a load of laundry. Why that image? I don’t know. It’s just that there was something slightly sad about it, as if somehow I should have put my arms around her to stop that nervous rushing, that agitated way of being. She behaved sometimes, I now recalled, like a kid afraid of “getting in heck.” I think she may even have used that phrase once. Getting in heck.
Suddenly my ears began to buzz and I had the feeling that I had entered into her thoughts as sure as if I had put my hand through the wall of her chest and clutched her heart.
The garden hung in frozen icicles; they gleamed under the yard lights. I dropped my cigarette, and when I leaned over to pick it up I exhaled a gust of frozen breath that darted away like a thought. I exhaled again and could see the momentary shapes of an island, a boat, a field, even Brazil. My imagination was like an independent living thing, like a reef or the earth itself. And in one of these exhalations I saw with the detail of a well-lit film the image of Emma walking along a wintry street. She was talking with great animation to a short, grey-haired man. I’d never seen him before, but at one point she stopped dead in her tracks and turned to him and said, I’m so happy!
It was as if her soul was speaking to me, to my soul, as if she were saying, Stop thinking about me. Please. Leave me alone.
I was still rocky the next day—at my age hangovers are two-day affairs—but I had a number of administrative meetings to attend. University departments are run by dictators who surround themselves with committees; it gives things the aura of democracy, and you have to turn up. There was a full afternoon with the Course Content Committee, which provided an opportunity for new faculty members (those without tenure) to second-guess the pleasures of department head Camille Dupré.
Let me say off the top that Dupré was not the college’s first choice. That went to a Harvard man, a white-haired gentleman with an international reputation (Montaigne). We were thrilled to steal him away (and only five years from retirement, no less). But during orientation week there was an incident. To put it mildly. He went to a local pub with a bunch of freshmen and at closing time invited the group back to his rented house on the Toronto campus. More drinking ensued, the hour got late and students drifted off home, until there was only one left, a strawberry-haired boy from Manitoulin Island. The young man, fresh to the city, had drunk considerably more than he could hold, a situation the learned professor handled by stripping him naked, fucking him in the ass and then pissing on him.
After that Dupré looked like a positive catch. He was a consummate second-rater; everyone knew it. After twenty-eight years in North America he rigorously maintained the affectation of barely speaking English. All shrugs and pouts he was, traits that made him seem like “the real thing” in our community. In the staff lounge he made a great show of shuffling through the papers in his briefcase, ordering and reordering them into fresh stacks, as if some great activity were in full flight. Serrault, of course, despised him; thought he was a joke as a scholar, a decade “behind the coup,” as he put it. One day he caught me laughing perhaps too heartily at one of Dupré’s modest asides and quickly lowered his eyes. It made my cheeks flush with embarrassment for precisely the reason that Serrault had tried to hide it from me. He was a complicated man, but the spectre of human abasement, no matter how passing, was not among his pleasures.
There were other matters to attend to as well. The Standards Committee had been called into emergency session. A fourth-year student had somehow slipped through the net and all but secured his undergraduate degree by taking twenty first-year courses. He’d taken them at various colleges and skilfully muddied his tracks. It was the Alice’s Restaurant approach, a strategy we’d been aware of since the late seventies. How did it happen? Whose responsibility was it? Should the student be denied his degree because of administrative incompetence? The meeting droned on into the evening, Serrault, naturally, taking the student’s side and alienating, as always, a portion of the faculty with the crisp observation that the difference between a fourth-year and a first-year course was negligible.
“Speak for yourself,” Dupré said with a wintry smile.
“I am,” replied Serrault, and shrugged his shoulders. One wants to cheer at those moments. Self-deprecation among the gifted leaves me breathless with admiration.
It was well after ten at night when I got home. I poured myself a glass of wine and lay down on the couch in my study. Looking at my desk littered with papers, pencils, correspondence, academic journals, memos stuck to the computer, I felt a tingle of curious pleasure. Then the phone rang.
It was Passion. She was downtown for the evening. Perhaps I wanted to get together. Yes, I said, that would be splendid. It had rather the aura of a date. Twenty minutes later she got out of a taxi in front of my house with a large handbag. Very large indeed. She came inside and looked at my bookshelves with a show of appreciation. It struck a slightly false note.
It was odd to see each other outside our usual context, a bit like running into a high school teacher during summer vacation.
“I don’t have my stuff,” she said, and touched the narrow white scar under her nose.
“That’s all right.”
“Do you want to do it here? On the couch?”
“It’s a bit exposed,” I said. “What do you normally do?”
“I don’t normally make house calls.” Again the hand to the lip.
I went to the bottom kitchen drawer and shuffled about in the party napkins and stray forks and bits of string until I found a black candle. It had been a while since I’d entertained anyone. I set it in Emma’s bronze candlestick, lit the wick and turned out the lights. The melting wax gave off a scent of black cherries.
“That smells nice,” Passion said, meaning, I think, that she liked the candlelight better. In the shadows she looked quite lovely, and I realized I had never had a black woman in my house before.
“Are you comfortab
le?”
“Yes. You?”
“I’m asking because you said you never do this.”
“You never know,” she said.
“But this time you did.”
“You seem okay,” she said. “I knew that much.”
We sat for a moment in silence.
“How’s your time?” I asked.
She looked at her watch. “I have a friend coming to get me at midnight. Can I smoke in here?”
“Certainly.” I got up to get her an ashtray.
She lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke in my direction.
“How’s the wine?” I asked.
“It tastes like blood.”
I took a taste. It was a Merlot, with an excellent bouquet, but she was right: it seemed to have come from the throat of a butchered animal.
I also noticed that I was getting a bit drunk, that things were starting to assume a sort of new and convincing order; as if I’d stepped into a movie, in medias res, and accepted, from the moment of entry, the logic of the story. What story? I’ll get to that. Suffice it to say that over the past six or seven months I had caught myself slipping rather quickly into a dreamy world where ideas occurred to me that were not at all appropriate. Comments I should make to colleagues, subjects for academic scrutiny. Sometimes I wrote them down and the following morning, when I deciphered the handwriting, they seemed, at best, rather thin, at worst (and more and more frequently) touched by a kind of insane sparkle. I have long learned to stay away from the telephone when drunk, but the world has changed and I confess that some mornings I have woken up and dashed to my computer to check that the previous evening, while caught up in one of these “stories,” I had not composed an imprudent communication to a woman or a friend or a student. I hadn’t made a slip so far, but it worried me. I feared that one of these nights I would drink too long. I want you to know that I saw the seeds sprouting early on; I knew those vines when they were like little snakes just stirring in a warm nest.
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 8