Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

“No. Vigneault! The famous fisherman’s son.”

  “But he’s saying the whole of—of New French Britain—isn’t—”

  “New French Britain!”

  “Well, what am I supposed to call this place?”

  “Em…Canada?”

  “Does he even call this Canada? Listen—he says his country isn’t a country, it’s snow and ice—nothing but winter—that’s exactly what Voltaire—”

  “Vigneault, not Voltaire.”

  “May I talk to him? Here, give it—hey!”

  “I’m hardly on the phone with Gilles Vigneault. Shut up while I put him on repeat.”

  My chorus is not a chorus,

  it’s a gust of wind…

  Half-awake, I attend the chansonnier’s wedding where the snow marries the wind. It’s a cold night. I try conjuring warmth from my fire-ships story, but Vigneault has ignited his ceremony of white fire instead, into which I slowly drift.

  “Quit thrashing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m feeling your military nightmares here.”

  —

  SUNRISE—TIME TO CRAWL OUT AND STRAIN my snail juice into a bottle containing salt and the night crawler I snatched when I wriggled out for my four-o’clock piss. With each sip I command my cough to arrest itself, as I gaze at the trees facing our camp.

  Do I recognize any of the tree spirits I see? Sophie professes I dream them. But they whisper on Avenue du Parc’s grand sweep downtown toward the Saint Lawrence. The first tree, crammed with women frozen in frenzied dance, seems unconcerned about my perusal.

  Is one of its captives my beloved Eliza Lawson?

  I can neither attain nor decipher the women in the trees…

  “Eliza, my frozen nymph!”

  No wonder Sophie ridicules me.

  An elm across the avenue intertwines his thighs, plants his roots in solid support of his body with its lewd orifices. His nipples, his tormented face—he makes me ashamed of myself for he draws on my cock and hardens it on this cold morning before I’ve found a cup of tea.

  Women trapped in the western trees have arched away, leaning toward their mother, the mountain. And the cars! Police vehicles flash lights red and blue; buses, and endless New World engines with their monotonous drone and their violent purr of rubber wheels, drive on a thin biscuit of pavement under which the trees’ roots gyrate. I sympathize with bicycles gliding toward me then gliding away—they alone proceed quietly, peaceful as gulls riding a thermal.

  Elms low on the avenue swerve ribbed and hairy: undulating, tormented beings, sexual, entrapped. A wailing woman hangs bound around a trunk in supplication and anguish, flailing to break free, her wail apparently inaudible to everyone but myself.

  My day begins.

  7 Gay Village

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

  MORNING.

  Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

  IT’S BEEN A YEAR SINCE my last visit to the hot tub at the Chinatown Y, and I forget what time it opens. There’s nothing worse than having to hang around an institution’s locked doors. Sophie, of course, insists the Y is not in Chinatown but in the Gay Village. But the village is a bit farther east. She accuses me of visiting it regularly. She spent our entire first autumn together on a line of investigation into what she called my repressed gayness.

  I tried back then to brush her off. “You’re like the Inquisition.”

  “You talk a lot about bodies of young male soldiers, whether they were well-made or not.”

  “It is something a general is bound to notice.”

  “You go on about someone named Elwyn in particular.”

  “Who?”

  “Elwyn. You moan in your sleep about Elwyn and how beautifully he was made, as if he were a purse, or a saddle or a hat from Henri Henri….”

  “You must mean George. George Warde is the beloved friend of mine who was more well-made than any soldier in Culloden or Quebec….”

  “No.”

  “Yes. George Warde, my boyhood friend in Westerham.”

  “Okay—you loved George Warde?”

  “I did.”

  “You were physical with him.”

  “We were very close.”

  “I mean were you intimate?”

  “We were as intimate as any two people can be. But I think you mean a different thing than I mean when you say intimate.”

  “Why are you talking like an idiot? I’m asking what kind of love you have for men like George Warde.”

  My body language betrayed me. There was no refuge from her questions. Even in silence I let things be known. I said only, “Anything I admit to you about George would fall short of what we had.”

  The truth is, the words Sophie used were inadequate. Her version of my love for George had me peep through a door ajar, slip one toe on a vestibule tile, when in fact I had dwelt in an innermost chamber of the building.

  “How long were you lovers? Was it only when you were soldiering together?”

  At moments like this I was tempted to scan the street-corners for someone else, anyone other than Sophie, in whom to confide. Though, as she sometimes had to remind me, her job was to insist on the truth.

  “Yet,” she went on, “you were engaged twice, to women.”

  “I was.”

  “And the first one you say you loved.”

  “I adored Eliza.”

  “And your mother put a stop to it because Eliza had no money.”

  “Eliza had nearly twelve thousand pounds a year.”

  “Not enough for Henrietta. And your so-called fiancée, Katherine Lowther, whose portrait you carried to Quebec and had set in rubies and topaz to the tune of five hundred pounds, you never loved.”

  “Not in the same way.”

  “But you agreed to marry.”

  “Everyone knows that. That’s not news. Why do you insist on going over the same old—”

  “But why, exactly, does everyone know?”

  “You’re exhausting me.”

  “Everyone knows about Katherine Lowther because your mother used her to shush the story going around about you and George.”

  “Nobody else has said that. I’ve never heard that anywhere except here in your tent.”

  “Katherine Lowther was a cover-up story, like the marriages of gay men to respectable women since time immemorial.”

  To test her theory, Sophie took me to a couple of Montreal strip clubs that first September, one on the Main and the other in the Gay Village. We took seats in a place called Stock Bar and watched a parade of young men dance around a pole. When the second fellow began to dance, Sophie said, “I like his physique better than the first one.”

  The first man had been muscle-bound, substantial, and completely uninteresting to me, but not because of his body. He wore tight shorts that he never removed entirely—he simply pulled the backs down so his haunch jutted out. He did this as if casually, as if he was alone in his bedroom getting ready to put his pyjamas on and therefore needing to take the underpants off. But lo and behold, halfway through removing the underpants he was reminded of something that made him pause—a misplaced note from a lover? A lost coin—where had it gone?

  He circled the pole and looked quizzically into an imagined half-distance that stopped short of our eyes. Meanwhile his pectorals shimmered, his buttocks—round and concentrated—orbited with the beat of his music.

  This second dancer was far more agile. He bent like a sapling but the beauty was all in his body—none flowed from his mind, which he kept from us, guarded, behind a mask of boyish innocence, and I did not blame him.

  We were early and there were fewer than thirty men in the room, and only one spectator had gravitated to the stools hugging the catwalk: a dignified old man in a good wool coat and a cravat—his gin-and-tonic at hand. He had the air of a man who frequented the opera, had a Persian cat at home, and came to the bar in a fit of reminiscence about what it had been to be young and splendid in body—he had not fallen into despair because
he had not succumbed to any fallen idea of himself, but remained glorious. Perhaps he read a lot, or was an academic, respected and perhaps once loved but bereaved of that lost and cherished and good love. He had fallen on solitary times yet did not seem to mind. He did not mind being the only man who had pulled a stool up close to the dancer, and he did not appear to lust so much as reminisce. I had the impression that if one were to check his pulse, it would not have quickened: it would indicate nothing but a slightly melancholic reverie.

  The third dancer was the first one returned, this time with no underpants, his cock at a kind of half-mast that appeared sustained with the help of a metal object, part of which I perceived glinting behind his testicles. I have seen similar contraptions at Smithfield market on beef cattle waiting to be bought and killed.

  “That contraption,” I told Sophie, “reminds me of the failure of all cosmetic falsehood.”

  “Stop putting on airs.”

  Even in that first September, Sophie knew all about my five months of dissipation in London after Mother forbade me to marry Eliza. Sophie also knew of my whores and my opium and my syphilis. I’d told her about the night I nearly died in the Thames after renting myself to the poisonous descendant of the first Baron of Wigmore. She knew I’d woken more than a few mornings in face-paint and a stythe of civet and musk. But I do not think Sophie understood how the cock-ring on the dancer disturbed me. Its constant violence produced only half an effect: his cock bobbing halfhearted as a forced hyacinth in a cruel April gale.

  Sophie had already brought me, on a previous occasion, to a place on Boulevard Saint-Laurent, similar to Stock Bar save that women licked the pole, crawling up and down it pretending themselves in heat. I had felt little then, and I did not feel more now.

  It was raining outside and Stock Bar’s door hung open. I watched silver stripes pelt past the lamp posts on Saint Catherine, rose-coloured balloons strung up and neon-lit the length of the Village.

  A few city saplings lowered their gowns and as I watched their leaves drip and smelled ozone shift in the night air, and as street air swirled in to us carrying its fragrance of drenched sidewalks, Sophie said, “Your pupils just dilated a bit.”

  “I love the rain,” I said. “I’m charged by wet bark and shining leaves. By a wet street. By the thought of getting out of this sad place and walking down that street alone.”

  “No, you’re having a response here, with men, that you never had when we went to watch women.”

  “You are not correctly observing the evidence.”

  “I’m trying to get you to admit something about why you’re clinically depressed and why you can’t even begin to function in the real world. Did you or did you not hire me to investigate?”

  Sophie and I watched the next dancer whilst turned away from each other with our arms folded. I liked this one least. His face wore an expression I found irrelevant to his movements, incongruous. He had an agenda outside this room, beyond this world, but I knew as I watched his face that he’d never reach a place where he might fulfill that agenda. He knew it too, I think. He hated every last man of us in the room.

  The old man at the front took this in. He was interested. He had been similarly disillusioned, but long ago. Love, or beauty, or tenderness, or whatever it was, had gone. The old spectator now blew the dancer a kiss and laid a hundred-dollar bill on the boards. Some entity had replaced the thing he had lost. A new animal had replaced it. I knew that animal. I knew it from London. I knew it from back rooms of certain houses that I had visited during my worst vapours. They were rooms to which I’d vowed not to return.

  “You find men well-made,” insisted Sophie, “but not women.”

  “Women’s bodies are less firmly held together,” I admitted. “But how many times do I have to tell you it is not these dancers’ bodies I find informative or arresting? Can you not decipher their faces? What’s real up there now, with that one? His anger or his innocence? Are both true? Is one a fable? Has any of us ever owned innocence? Help me look at him and decide—the constant changing of his face fascinates and unsettles me—who is he?”

  “You want me to read his face?”

  “Yes! I’m trying to…”

  “You’ve been looking at the dancers’ faces this whole time.”

  “Yes.”

  Sophie took a swig of her screwdriver and thumped back in her seat. “Jimmy B, no one cares about their faces.”

  —

  IT WASN’T AS IF I’D NEVER had a lover. Still, I have never found a way to explain to Sophie how dead the strippers seemed to me. The body of the one she liked best was bright and unblemished but emanated no energy. Waxy, it held in light for itself and would not share that light. His cock bobbed and nodded, no more alive than a silicone cock on the wall in one of the sex shops down the block. My teeth have more life in them, broken as they are—at least they quicken when I run my tongue over their enamel.

  Paid dancers are nothing like Elwyn. Elwyn’s lips were cut plums, bruised against his white teeth. Elwyn trembled like an aspen. His hair lay like wrens’ breast-feathers and his skin was a sheet of water entrapped with flecks of gold.

  Everything about Elwyn was latent, poised and infuriating, an eyelash away from a trigger I never found.

  Elwyn was tantalizing yet had no sharp centre, no wick. None of this was a function of his body, although his body and face, his eyes and his dark hair, were of great beauty.

  Whereas I am ugly and pale-bellied, a beanpole, and not a bit erotic.

  Saint Catherine Street beyond that club door reminded me of Elwyn.

  The street at night is a place for me to hide, a mystery to visit and never plumb. It poses no obstacle to the soul. The street has a body but it quivers, full of glimmering night. It shares the glimmer and every mote sings. The spaces between the motes are vast, and in those spaces I love being lost.

  Was the way I loved Elwyn due to his being a man? This is the thing Sophie insinuates. But I am not convinced of its remotest relevance.

  People are so eager to annihilate the divine space that makes up the vast, greater part of love.

  8 Doppelgänger

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

  STILL MORNING.

  Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

  “Regarde l’homme maigre, Maman,” cries a little boy to his mother on the avenue. “Il est comme un squelette!”

  It isn’t easy to describe me, thinner now than I ever was, hard as that is to imagine. The little schoolboy’s right; I’ve become a shadow, a skeleton in motion. I have to admit my reflection in Super Dépanneur La Cité resembles a fishbone with a flame on top, wavering and insubstantial. Could I lift a stone, tie the simplest knot in a bit of string? Or am I a wandering fish-flame incapable of leaving even a breath-bubble or singe-mark behind?

  “Je suis desolée….” The boy’s mama has gone pink.

  “Pas du tout, Madame—your son is correct. Regarde!” Beyond the gyrating trees looms McGill University’s hospital. “I’d make an excellent subject for surgeons to use while instructing their students about anatomy. Not a morsel of fat would obscure their view of my muscle, bones, or internal organs.”

  The woman’s hair is the tan of whipped chestnuts, like Eliza Lawson’s. She’d have startled me with her resemblance were she slightly taller. Sophie says my own thin, tall body attracted me to Miss Lawson, who was taller than all the women around her and very slender. Sophie calls this lovers’ narcissism—says it happens all the time. Couples do mirror-service to each other in the name of love, or what they mistake for love. Love is not love at all, Sophie says, if you’re only admiring yourself in a glass.

  The mother continues to chide her boy far too much, and I hasten to persuade them both I’ve not taken offence. “If I suffered every time even beloved friends comment on how thin I am I’d be perpetually aggrieved! Besides, I’ve never been vain.”

  I’m an idiot. What could be vainer than professing freedom from vanity? “What I mean is, it takes
a particular sort of shame to cause me grief….”

  God help a general who starts worrying how civilians might judge his decisions. I’ve rooted such sensitivity out of myself. But personal shame over moral matters is different. Real shame stems from dishonouring a mother or a lover or a friend—I dread that kind of shame more than I love life….

  Where has the woman gone?

  Is that her on the far side of the street? Is that her little boy running ahead of her to the Australian pie shop? And am I mad—talking to myself again about the difference between a soldier and an ordinary man?

  “The personal, smaller shame is really the larger,” I explain to the number 80 bus, whose engine drowns my argument as it labours uphill. “A soldier has a uniform to identify him. He has flags and drums, dye and hide—boisterous, deafening! We had red coats not only because red dye was cheap, but to make us forget how delicate we were; the faint blue of a young man’s veins.”

  Was there a poet among us? Had one of us made harpsichords in his village? Did we harbour a tapestry-weaver? Was I a fluteplayer who loved dogs?

  No. None of us was any longer the man he had been.

  But now, I see the opposite impulse everywhere: such aggrandizement of personal sentiment. Does no one understand larger duty?

  —

  IF ONLY I COULD PLUNGE this minute into the pool I loved at Bath. Scorch me, water! Wash away my self-recriminations. On the shortcut to the YMCA I pass tea shops, chemists, fashion outlets full of asymmetrical hems, the window of the store called Archambault, advertising musical recordings—but wait. I see through the glass a clerk with half his head shaved. He looks slightly familiar and I pop in, ask him about the fisherman’s son who sang a winter storm all last night in the tent.

  “Who?”

  “The famous Quebec singer.”

  “Ben là!” The clerk has piled what remains of his hair into a luxuriant top-knot. “There are a lot of well-known singers from Quebec.”

  “This one is—he’s beloved.”

  “Do you mean Leonard Cohen?”

  “I’d remember the name if I heard it again….”

  “Rufus Wainwright?”

  “No—the name is French.”

  “Jacques Brel? Charles Aznavour?”