The other story will be a tongue-in-cheek documentary on Yorkville, I think, and this one will go to every Canadian magazine, journal and newspaper I can think of. Again, there’s not much likelihood, but then there’s not much point in not trying.
I hope the boat trip over wasn’t too rough, and you aren’t drinking too much. They say bad wine turns your teeth purple. I’m going to steer clear of writing mushy sentimental letters soaked in tears and blood. All I ask you to do is remember I love you and I always will. I honestly hope you don’t think I’m a fool for things I have said, but I’m so confused and upset right now that I don’t know which end is up. So I’ve chewed off an almost impossible goal to work for, and even if I don’t make it—I am pretty sure I won’t—then at least I won’t have spent all my time moping about you, which, apart from seeing you, is what I’d most like to do right now.
Keep away from those boys. Remember what I told you about me being the insanely jealous type! And if you run into Stewart, which isn’t likely, give him my regards and make him take you out for lunch.
Well, angel, I’ve got to sack out now. Tomorrow I write, knock on doors and generally keep busy until I get back to bed where I hope to collapse in a state of exhaustion so total I won’t have much time to remember when you used to lie beside me.
Don’t forget (this is a threat) that I love you, and we’re engaged. I haven’t told anybody yet, but the temptation to shoot my mouth off is pretty strong, so hurry home and make an honest man out of me.
Think about me always, and remember how much I love you. You’re my angel.
Love, George
P.S. I’ve now got writer’s cramp, and I love you. Dream about me.
* * *
—
Raffaello
July 4
Dear George,
How are you? I think I’m awful. I haven’t decided whether I like the idea of going to Europe. But Nick and Tammy are terrific. If you’re feeling down in the blues, they cheer you up.
The kids seem nice to talk to. The girls are all a lot of fun except for one named Liz and she’s in my cabin. She’s quite a child. But the other kids seem like a lot of fun. Robin has been great. It doesn’t appear she’s been after any boys. But it’s the girl Barb I really get along with well. We are so much alike. Both pinned, both getting married in a couple of years and both very lonely.
Oh Christ, it was just awful leaving. I’ll be so happy when I get back. I cried when you left but I was OK after a few minutes. But when I saw you in the coffee shop, that really set me off. I think I cried until we were up in the air. When we got to New York, I was OK. Quite lonely and feeling lost, but OK. We got on the boat and had lunch right away. Then some of us went out on deck to see the Statue of Liberty. I happened to be standing alone and I guess I must have looked awfully glum cuz Nick came up to me and said, “What’s the matter, Sal?” Well, that really set me off again. But he stayed with me and kept talking to me for a few minutes and then I was all right again.
Well, the first night Robin, Marywinn, Barb and I sat in my cabin and talked. We decided to go up to the bar for a nightcap before bed. That was good cuz it made me more tired after my sleepless (no kidding) night before. To top off the night, I cried myself to sleep.
Oh, it was awful. I just kept thinking about you and wondering what you were doing. As a matter of fact, I wonder what you are doing every minute of the day.
This summer is going to be so long. I think I can guarantee that it will be the last time I’m away from you. Oh, I love you so much. Please believe me when I say it. I’m going to remember what you said that when I get bored, I can start to plan our wedding. Will you start thinking about where we’re going to do it?
Well, I have to go to our daily meeting now. I miss you. I love you.
Sal
P.S. I just had a long talk with Nick and he was telling me that your trip in ’65 was one of the best he’d ever had.
* * *
—
189 Gordon Road
July 7
My Angel (I love you!)
Well, my pet, the word has leaked out through Marilyn’s father, the supreme postmaster of Maple. The Canadian mail strike will be a thing of the present as of July 17, so by the time you get this thing (it’s a love letter because I love you), you won’t be able to reply. But they say no news is good news, so if anything terrible happens, send a telegram. Otherwise, write if you like and I’ll get them all at once when the strike ends.
The last letter I sent you (also the first) might have sounded a bit confused and I guess it was. But things clouded up mentally after you left, and I figured I couldn’t last a whole two months without seeing you. I guess things are still like that a bit: in fact I’m sure they are, so I’m still killing several hours a day puttering around doing unimportant things, and at present, not making any money. But I’m not going to give up until either I have the money and get to go abroad or I reach July 26, my final day and don’t feel I can afford to go anywhere.
But this way I’ve got a month killed and should be pretty numb emotionally, a state of mind that I shall maintain until you come home to me.
So well as all that crap (so much for ambition) in the Rome letter, I am employed painting the house a shiny smelly white and chopping down the tree.
I think of you always, and am just getting settled in to being lonely and forlorn for another two months.
Don’t remember if I told you or not, but CHUM-FM plays nice music with dirty words and all, and there are almost no commercials. But the batteries have died tonight in “la petite radio,” so I’m forced to entertain myself by playing the kazoo. I’ll bet you never knew I could play a kazoo. (Whether you know it or not, kazoo is not a dirty word).
What else is new?
Graham sold his bike for $650 and is now looking for a car, so I’ve got a ride to school next year.
At school next year I will be writing a column at large, talking about whatever I fancy, so you my pet, are going to have to tone up your sense of humour. You shall be the butt of countless verbal slings and arrows. But they will all be because I love you, which I do very much.
Heard yesterday that there are 100,000 students unemployed in Toronto so I’ve got company in spirit, but not, mind you, in flesh.
Speaking of flesh, watch out! Mike was telling me about some of the boys he knows on your trip, and according to him, their idea of hand exercises would really turn you off (I hope).
Unfortunately, the tone of your boyfriend has been “I don’t trust you” and that’s not true. I trust you only because I love you and any obnoxious noises I make about the boys on your trip are out of loneliness.
At this point in the letter, I’m lost for words. Apart from repeating myself for the millionth time and saying I love you, and I’m GOING to marry you, I’m lost. I know nothing I can say can make you come home one second earlier. If it could, I’d write eight letters a day, each one 5,000 words long telling of my love for you, and how I feel after not having made love to you for the two or three weeks between when you left and when you read this.
While painting today, I almost fell off the house roof. Fortunately for the geraniums directly below, I had a rope tied to my waist and the chimney. But unfortunately for my waist it was a bristly rope, and unfortunately for the geraniums, I spilled a bit of paint. But no harm done. However, if anything does happen to me (which I promise it won’t), I’m going to make them paint on my cast in large red letters “THIS BROKEN LIMB WAS CAUSED BY A BROKEN HEART.” Then I’ll telephone you and tell you I’m dying and that you had better hustle your bottom back here as fast as you can.
As near as I can make out, at this very moment it is 7:30 your time and you are somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea approaching Naples. I hope you won’t think I’m cruel if I say that I like the thought of you having a rotten time, because that’s pretty much what I’m having. Besides, I’d get as jealous as hell to know that you’re cavorting and screaming a
round with “other people.”
Sorry if that last bit wasn’t too nice, but that’s how I feel right now. But you have found by far the most effective way of ensuring our love, if you’ve got any left. To take off and leave a boy hung up for two months is, these days, a sure promise that he’ll be faithful in every way.
Because to live with you is to be able to laugh, neck and even blow up at you when the circumstances call. But to live without you is like living in suspended animation, where nothing happens, and where time does not move. Believe me, time has literally ceased to pass since you left. Five days since you took off. And it feels like you should be coming home tomorrow. But you’re not, dammit.
During the day when there are constructive things to do to pass the time, I can see the uselessness of moping around, wishing I were with you. But at night, I sit here and actually feel my mind coming loose from its daytime point of view, and the little seeds of jealousy and self-pity come out and glow. This feeling of actually having a mental point of view becomes warped. While I can do nothing about it, it is one which I have never experienced, and is actually most uncomfortable, apart from the thoughts themselves.
I don’t know if you understand, but then by going away you showed there a lot of things you don’t understand.
In the second paragraph, I referred jokingly, and only that way, to my coming to Europe. I would give my left leg to do it, but apart from the money, there are many problems.
But now, forty minutes after writing the second paragraph, I can see clearly the logic of my getting a return flight ticket to London or Paris and seeing both you and Europe on my own for two weeks.
I’m sorry to keep pushing this thing of me coming there, but now you know how it is. And I’m afraid you won’t know definitely until you get to Interlaken, Switzerland.
At this point, I must assume that you cannot read my writing. Hope you can.
Also at this point, I must announce that I am deeply and totally in love with you, and have written roughly one thousand, four hundred scrawly words tonight to prove it in this letter…
Well, darling, this little essay is now calling for my beauty sleep, so I’m going to sign off. Remember, if you can, how many times I’ve told you I love you. I still do, as much as ever, and I always will. I promise. Be good and write often, mail strike or not. And remember, if there’s the least excuse for you to come home early, the very smallest excuse, and you don’t take it, then I’ll personally beat the living crap out of you, just to show you how fantastically much I love you. Answer this question in your next letter in plain words: “Will you marry me?”
I love you. I love you. I want to live with you, and make beautiful children.
Forever and forever,
Love, George
EIGHT
Eruption
On the Naples pier, I was hanging out with Sally in the infernal triple-digit heat, blasting like an open pizza oven. Our four Volkswagen minibuses from West Germany were late. Squinting at the active volcano of Mount Vesuvius rising like a purple boil five miles distant, we puffed our Viceroys until at last our four chariots pulled up, to a general cheer. To break up cliques, Czar Nick planned to rotate our bus mates and roommates as we moved from city to city.
Our baggage stacked in the back, we clambered inside, seven bodies per bus, the sexes distributed in two-three-two configurations in the front, middle and back benches. The Volkswagen, Nick reminded us, was Hitler’s pre-war “car of the people” and the spinoff Type 2 minibus was conceived in 1950, the same year most of us were born. We were to travel in four boxes on smallish wheels, not terribly stable or heavy, equipped with sun roofs, sliding doors, and rear-mounted, air-cooled engines.
Together with Nick and Tammy, three of the boys—Dave, Stu and Steve—were designated as drivers, granted permission by their parents. My licence was suspended, so I didn’t qualify. The previous summer, my predictably unpredictable mother had placed the keys of her Buick Skylark into my sixteen-year-old hand, smiling and waving as I drove off to cross Canada with two classmates. Too much freedom, too fast—we were lucky to escape with our lives when I smashed the car into a tractor trailer in Saskatchewan.
Nick delivered a quick primer on the free-form European driving style: “The right of way is on your right, use your horn and don’t be afraid—might makes right, and they will respect you.”
Designating the person riding shotgun as navigator, Nick supplied maps of the highways but not the cities; for those, he instructed us to stay in convoy, look for Centro città notices, then follow the hotel signs. I did not yet know that Dave had never used a stick shift and hastily practised for twenty minutes in a parking lot. Nor did I notice that the buses lacked seat belts.
I was in a bus with Sally with Stu at the wheel, our baggage blocking the view through the rear window. Witty and self-deprecating, Stu was one of our two token Catholics, adorned with snazzy aviator sunglasses, blood-red beret and buttoned driving gloves. On the road to Sorrento, a stuttering ascent up a serpentine cliffside road, he ground the gears like nervous teeth. My eyes slid from the azure sea and sky of the spectacular Amalfi coastline down to its low stone walls and the fatal drop onto the rocks below. The sputtering box powered by German hamsters was all dead weight as honking Fiats zipped past. “It’s gutless!” Stu swore, afraid of stalling on a hill and rolling back, ending the lives of seven teenagers.
Our hotel, the Mediterraneo, hugged a seaside cliff just outside Sorrento, and I was rooming with Dave for the next three nights. The cracks of the shower tiles oozed ants—I imagined them pouring surrealistically out of the shower head—but I couldn’t have cared less. Rushing to change into our bathing suits, we took the elevator that slid down the sheer cliff face to a narrow strip of pebble beach. Sally was wearing a flowered bikini, and together we slipped into the tepid greasy water, my first taste of the ancient salt sea of Middle Earth. When a perfect brown turd floated between our heads, Sally cried, “Grrrrrr-oooooo-ssssss!” and we paddled back in, laughing. This wasn’t the fresh water of the De Grassi sandbar, let alone the chlorinated purity of a concrete pool. This was old. This was dirty. This was real.
* * *
—
We gathered at an outdoor café for dinner and a silky blend of banter and wine. I figured out my lire—1,600 to the Canadian dollar—and test drove my Italian. Buonasera. Sono canadese turista. Grazie. Prego. Magnifico. It’s a romance language.
The next morning, Nick introduced us to Rafaele, a tour guide employed by the Odyssey since the beginning, who escorted us to the base of the four-thousand-foot Mount Vesuvius. We rode chairlifts to the top of the lunar-like crater and crunched along a precarious path of pumice crust, absorbing the God-like view of the Bay of Naples. There were no guardrails. Wary of heights, I steered close to Sally on the lip of the volcano as jets of sulphur-scented steam shot up from fissures underfoot. With a scarf wrapped around her head and her sunglasses perched on top, she leaned down and lit a cigarette off a cinder, blowing a smoke ring half comically, half suggestively.
After lunch at Ristorante Vesuvio, we wandered into the mythic ruins of Pompeii under the unforgiving afternoon sun. Through the running commentary of Nick and Rafaele, we were conducted back to August AD 79 and the greatest natural catastrophe in recorded history—countless souls burned, suffocated and buried by a barrage of stones, poisonous sulphuric gas and molten lava. Only a single eyewitness account survived in two letters by Pliny the Younger, but Nick’s easy erudition brought to life the town of twenty thousand thriving and suffering in the Augustan Age of Pax Romana.
Ushered into the House of the Tragic Poet, we studied the atrium famous for its elaborate frescoes in which the gods celebrated a woman’s loss of virginity, her veil symbolically removed from her face as winged Cupids bore bowls of perfume. Rafaele explained that an ingenious eighteenth-century scientist made casts by injecting plaster into the cavities left by hundreds of decomposed bodies, preserved in their final postures of death,
running in terror, or shielding their heads with pillows and roof tiles. Loaves of bread stood in ovens. Graffiti scratched a schoolroom wall: “If you don’t enjoy Cicero, you’ll get a hiding” and “Do you think I’d mind if you dropped dead tomorrow?” We came across the form of a dog twisting on a leash. But it was the figures of two young lovers locked in passionate embrace, their death throes forever tied to that fateful August day, that most riveted my attention. I felt I had crossed a threshold into an uncanny, natural museum of sex and death.
Sotto voce, Rafaele called the boys over, separating us from the girls. He explained that when a sixteenth-century architect unearthed a massive collection of erotic art and objects celebrating Priapus, the pagan god of sex and fertility, he hastily covered it over, the puritan-ism of Counter-Reformation Italy trumping the libertine sexual mores of the ancient Romans who celebrated the phallus as a good luck symbol that magically fended off accidents and disasters. A nineteenth-century king of Naples was so mortified by the erotica that he locked it away in a secret cabinet, accessible only to the Grand Tourists of “mature age and respected morals.” The cabinet had been intermittently locked and unlocked over the past hundred years, and lucky us, it was now unlocked. Pulling out a skeleton key, Rafaele swung open the wooden cabinet door like a flasher to reveal the faded frescoes. On a weigh scale, balanced against a pile of fruit and vegetables, rested the Zeppelin-size member of Priapus; were there a caption, it would have read: Worth its weight in gold.
After two hours, I was undone by the intense heat, so Nick suggested I hold my wrists under a tap of cool running water, and it worked. As we assembled in the parking lot, word of Rafaele’s revelation had leaked out to the girls; Sally did not hide her resentment at the exclusion, and I could not blame her. I felt my guts gurgling audibly and I leaned on the hood of a car, trying to suppress the dirty little secret of my Crohn’s. Suddenly an explosive fart shuddered off the flat metal surface. Sally howled at the comic effect, and everyone else laughed too. “Farting is such sweet sorrow,” quipped Ross, and even I had to grin. For the first time, I was mad at her. Sometimes I was not sure if she was laughing with me or at me.
Dreaming Sally Page 7