by André Alexis
Time and space collapsed on themselves and left only the sound of the sea, her heart beating. And to think she’d spent her life acquiring what she already possessed. To think she had spent so much time trying to keep from others what they also possessed. And, if it came to that, was she not all people, and all people her? Yes, even Stanley. How had she ever believed otherwise? She had believed otherwise, had believed in her difference, but in a world so full of false corridors and empty rooms, it was easy to get lost. Now, however, she knew where she was, and a feeling of harmony overcame her. For the first time in her life, as far as she could remember, she possessed a truth that did not begin and end with her own needs. And she was certain that, when she awakened, she could hold to this joy.
And she did wake.
And she was as ecstatic as she had been while dreaming. It was night, and the world was One. There was no reason to hold on to her pride, her anger, her shame, her wounds, her place, her desires, her wants, her needs. She had discovered what she should have known long ago, but there was not even a hint of disappointment that this had not come sooner. It had come, and she was grateful she had been allowed to see the world for what it is: One, singular, forever whole, an endless bliss.
Her heart beat strangely, like a butterfly’s wings, and then stopped.
{17}
WANDERING
It was February, five months after Walter’s contretemps with Paul Dylan.
Walter had spent much of that time recovering from the damage to his nose, cheek, and ribs. At first, there had been blood in his urine and he could not comfortably lie on his left side. A concussion had wiped his memory clean for a few days, and that was bewildering, but his memory’s return was accompanied by violent headaches and that was worse. At first, he had no memory of the fray. He remembered washing his hands and walking about with a white towel fixed to his thumb, but after that there was nothing until his awakening in a room with thick white curtains, a woman’s face looking into his. After a day or two, he remembered Paul’s face. He could not remember who Paul was exactly, and then when he did, he remembered all that had happened, though he couldn’t think why Paul would attack him…except for…a little something at the edge of memory, something he preferred not to remember, something about a woman, a woman whose face returned to him, eyes first, along with a handful of names: Lucy, Luba, Louise…Laura, Lena, Lara…No, it was Louise, and Louise was married to Paul.
With Louise’s name, there came a sharp image of the Dylans sitting beside each other, Paul looking up, Louise looking down at the floor of someone’s living room. Then Walter remembered that he had slept with the woman. But he hadn’t felt anything for her, had he? The occasional wave of desire. You couldn’t call that betrayal. No, wait…that wasn’t true. He had felt, for Louise, something deeper. Yes, but it had all been an accident. He hadn’t meant to allow himself anything like deep feeling. It had all been a mistake, and he had broken it off. He’d stopped seeing Louise. To think you could be kicked to death for that…
If that was the reason. If. After all, it was hard to credit. Paul was such a reasonable man: even tempered, a gentleman. It was difficult to know what to think.
During his first weeks in hospital, Walter had been visited by a number of people: his fellows at the Department of Sociology, his teaching assistants, even the dean. There had also been his friends from other faculties, and a number of women with whom he’d once slept and with whom he was still on friendly terms. Henry Wing, François Ricard, and I all visited. And, in the end, so did Louise, though not Paul.
It seemed mysterious to Walter that so many people knew of his “accident,” as if there were a secret channel over which news of one’s misfortune came. But, of course, it was not really mysterious. Someone told someone who told someone else, and on it went until, after a time, anyone who knew his name had heard some version of events: he’d had his arms broken by loan sharks, the father of a student had broken his nose, he’d been roughed up by the police, he’d had a heart attack and fallen from the ambulance carrying him…
Walter treated all who visited with gratitude and silence. He did not want to talk about the beating or his “guilt,” so he kept quiet. He told no one who had done the damage. And in the end, all were convinced he’d been attacked by a lunatic, perhaps a lunatic on angel dust. And, come to think of it, he’d been fortunate to escape with as little damage as he had.
Louise Dylan had come on a weeknight, but she came as visiting hours were ending, and Walter was going under from the Seconal he’d asked for. He could barely speak. He held one of her hands in his and squeezed it convulsively while mumbling something that sounded like
– Leave me…leave me…
Louise was distraught to see Walter helpless and she was impatient to know what had happened to him. She would have stayed with him until he awakened, but he had asked her to leave and then the night nurse had done the same. So, there’d been no reason to stay. No reason but her own longing. In the months following their breakup, Walter had not even hinted at their feelings for each other. He had given her no hope that they might ever recover the intimacy they’d had. Seeing him like this, alone, brought out her feelings for him, but also her resolve. It made no sense to suffer by his bedside when, though he could barely speak he’d still managed to reject her. So, she left, and she put him out of her mind as best she could.
Walter’s (fleeting) impression of their encounter was entirely different. It was of a miraculous breakthrough, an awakening. He had, in his own mind, finally confessed his feelings. The Seconal had given him the courage to say
– Don’t leave me…don’t leave me…
but when he woke from his chemical sleep, he was not certain she’d been with him, not certain he’d spoken at all, and he could not bring himself to call her because of her husband (the embarrassment it would cause them all to talk of what Paul had done) and, oddly, because of his emotions, or his strange distaste for emotion, rather. He did not want the intimacy that contact would bring. From the moment he woke from unconsciousness, Walter felt no anger, no shame, no consternation: nothing of depth, not even desire for revenge. And that is how he wanted it.
In the weeks that followed, there were times he wept, but you wouldn’t have called that deep feeling. It was something his body did when he wasn’t looking. It was like rain on a sunny day. He was grateful to have escaped with the injuries he had, grateful when his memory returned, and grateful there were, after the first weeks, fewer and fewer visitors to see his agony.
But was he really grateful for his memory?
Yes, in a way; though the more he thought about it, the more disappointed he was that his were the memories that returned to him. It was absurd, but he felt he’d missed an occasion to become someone other than Walter Barnes. The thought wasn’t as amusing as it should have been. So, along with the weeping, the pain in his ribs, the difficulty eating, the blood in his urine, and the headaches, there was now the insufferable question of who he was, given the memories that persisted: his mother’s robe falling open at the dinner table, the sound of his father’s car coming up the gravel driveway, his fingernails cut so close to the quick it hurt to pick things up. Who was there in all that? The question was not at all amusing and there was, finally, no release from it.
Then, after three weeks in hospital, drifting in and out of speculations and sleep, Walter was set mercifully, unexpectedly free. On the night of October 17, 1984, days before he was to go home, Walter woke suddenly and opened his eyes. He had no idea where he was or when, but in the light of his semi-private room he saw, in profile against the indigo of a curtain that had been partially drawn around his bed, the head, neck, and shoulders of a young woman: a nurse most likely, but out of uniform, in street clothes, if you could call them that. She wore a dark yellow dress with billowing sleeves on which three dark palm leaves were embroidered. Around her neck there was a necklace of amber beads, from which a s
ingle pearl depended, nested in the hollow of her throat. The back of her neck was accentuated by the way she wore her reddish-blonde hair: held up in a white kerchief that covered her ears and emphasized the curve of her forehead.
Like all visions of beauty, there was something unpleasant about her. Not the slight bump at the bridge of her nose, nor her thin lips. No, it was something to do with the woman herself, an uninflected presence, as if she were simply there, at the foot of his bed, reading his chart before going off to a place where she was expected, or perhaps wanted. She was gracefully unselfconscious, perfectly unaware of him, and though this added immeasurably to her beauty, it annihilated him. For the first time in his life, briefly, for as long as it takes, say, flame to rise on a wick, Walter Barnes was aware of a woman as a woman, distinct from anything he may have wanted of her, with her, from her.
He was not freed by a woman or a vision or love. Rather, the idea of “woman” distracted him from the thorny idea of “self.” Why had it taken him so long to see a woman in this way? There was something in the purity of his vision that suggested an exile, an exile not from “woman” exactly, but from something deeper, from the “Feminine,” let’s say. That was the idea that took hold of him. How had he lived so long without realizing he was in exile, so long without realizing there was a world beside his own, a world to which he must once have belonged?
Exile from the Feminine? Now what could that mean (if, in fact, it meant anything at all)?
First, it did not mean that he wished to be a woman. He was depressed, it’s true, and if he could have chosen which woman he would become, he might have agreed to the transformation. But, for the most part, he was resigned to his masculinity. Second, he felt no pressing need to return to the womb. Well, not to the womb from which he’d come, in any case. That would have meant a return to his mother’s care, and that was worse than the exile that now fascinated him. Still, if he was now in exile, he must once have lived in the realm. It was, perhaps, a home on the shore from which he’d set out, and, despite himself, he did remember a beatitude that had his mother’s face to it. No, not her face, her being, a being almost indistinguishable from his own; a time before he was himself and knew his mother for the woman she was, a time that followed the womb but preceded his earliest memory.
Finally, he did not suddenly believe women superior. It simply didn’t follow. They had all of them set out from the same place, men and women. And though it was true women might hold a key to the place, that made no difference. They could not return to it themselves. The realm was beyond them as well. Had to be, didn’t it?
But what did he know about women, exactly?
Now there was a question. He had slept with a community of them. With, beside, atop, among, beneath. On average, four a week for twenty years (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday): four thousand, one hundred, and sixty. Greater than the population of Lobo but somewhat less than Chatham. He had been industrious but unmindful. He could remember few faces, fewer names, and even fewer of the other details: voices, hair, smell, and taste. When you came right down to it, he knew as little about women now, after twenty years of fornication, as he had when he lost his virginity to a woman whose name was…Erica?
Erica, if it was Erica and not Ruth, had rubbed against his late-blooming self in a bar off Metcalfe. She had paid for his drinks, walked him up and down the canal, and taken him to her apartment on Cooper. Despite the alcohol, pleasure had been intense (almost mystical) and, when it was done, and done again, she had yawned and shown him the door. It was, when you thought of it, miraculous he remembered that much about her. He had tried to find her again, to express his gratitude and his willingness to repeat the procedure as often as she wished. He had haunted the streets and taverns, trawling in a two-mile circle whose centre was the public library, but he never saw her again. Now that he thought of it, in fact, she was, aside from Louise, the woman to whom he was faithful longest. Weeks passed before he had intercourse again, this time with a woman of whom no trace remained in memory.
He knew nothing about women, then. But his search wasn’t about women, was it? It was about a place no one possessed and none occupied: the Feminine. Better to call it a country, a land, an ocean; a place outside the cave, if you were Greek; the unsayable, if you were Austrian. Oh, but you could say as much about the Masculine, couldn’t you? Yes, but that was the shore towards which he’d been made to swim. It had a profile he could recognize. The other shore, the other land had long since disappeared, and he had not thought to look back.
So, it did have something to do with men and women?
Why, yes…But how would he get to the place that was an absence in himself? There were, it seemed to Walter, two ways to proceed. First, he might, through prolonged introspection, discover what he was, exactly, and then, subtracting what he discovered, discover what he was not. This road, though it looked straight and clear, was not the one he chose, as he was not inclined to look closely at himself or his life. The second way, more agreeable to Walter, was more complicated. If, as he reluctantly accepted, women did have something to do with the Feminine, mightn’t it be possible to observe them closely, to catch in their common trajectory a hint of the place that he had left? Observation? Yes, and this he could do methodically, with a degree of objectivity, of attentiveness, but only on condition that he learn to suppress desire, desire that would confuse matters. And, aye, there was the rub, because desire was a habit with him. It was a habit more than it was an instinct or even a reaction. That is, it was possible for Walter to desire a woman before he met her: any woman, any time. In a sense, he did not desire women at all. They were, rather, the accidental objects of a want, and it was suddenly clear to him that this very want was what had hidden women for so long. It was this that obscured the metaphysical texture women had in common.
Was it possible to unlearn promiscuity? That was the question at the heart of his vita nuova. He left the hospital on a Saturday. He prepared for a return to teaching, resuming his courses after a month’s absence. He cleaned the dust from his floors, counters, sills, rugs, and glasses. He returned to the world he’d known for some twenty years. True, he now avoided his friends, seeing no one. He was humiliated by the thought of community, embarrassed by his (secret) intimacy with Paul Dylan and his association with the rest of the Fortnightly. Thanks to his new pursuits, however, he did not miss them. It was his purpose to become chaste and to discover the Feminine.
After a week out of hospital, however, he felt as if he were mysteriously “off.” It was a chore to read, to teach, to cook, to go out. There was little pleasure in his return to the world. He did not sleep with a woman from October 20 to 27, but neither did he succeed in paying more than cursory attention to this woman or that: a waitress with a nose ring, a woman at a Becker’s whose knees were skinned, a student above whose left shoulder blade was the tattoo of a blue plant…meagre returns, despite having given a great deal of time and thought to his new pursuit.
Around the same time, he realized two things. First, he had never been quite so unobservant before. He had never actually been incapable of telling one woman from another. The particular details had not stayed long in his memory, but they had been there more vividly than they were now. So, he was, in fact, regressing, where observation was concerned. Second, now that he was at home, the idea of the Feminine began to seem, well, faintly ridiculous, an idea born of too much time. Moreover, he was almost certainly going about its discovery the wrong way, whether the Feminine existed or not. A collection of distinguishing physical particulars was, perhaps, interesting, but even if it were done well, that is exhaustively, it would bring him no closer to any essence. Deeper details, more personal revelations called for intimacy. He would have to talk to women and, surprisingly, this was something he now found intimidating. He could speak with female colleagues or female students about sociology, of course, but a woman speaking of Gregory Bateson or Paul Watzlawick was not a wo
man so much as an intellectual position with secondary sexual characteristics different from his own, or so he believed.
No, if he was going to pursue the Feminine, he would have to rethink his approach. Not only would he have to speak to a woman without mentioning the thing uppermost on his mind (sex), but he would have to discover a subject that led naturally to the most candid revelations, on their part. And was this possible? Yes, perhaps. And was it worth the deprivation? Yes, it might be. And would he stay the course? Yes, because something in him had changed. Yes, because his old life was unpalatable to him because, when he thought of it, which he did despite himself, he could think of little in his old life that had made him happy. So, he would, yes.
If he was despondent after the first week, he was near despair after the second and the third. During these weeks, a typical excursion went like this:
We are in a tavern, on Elgin. The lights are dim, but not enough to disguise one’s identity. Walter sits at the bar. Beside him, a woman, unaccompanied.
Walter:
Some weather we’re having.
Woman:
(turning, briefly, to face him) What?
Walter:
Some weather, eh?
Woman:
(turning away) Yeah.
Walter:
(pause) Can I buy you a drink?
Woman:
I’ve already got one.
Walter:
(pause) Maybe after that one?
Woman:
(unenthusiastic) Sure. We’ll see.