THE VIRGIN SPY
KRISTA BRIDGE
THE
VIRGIN
spy
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE
Vancouver/Toronto
Copyright © 2006 by Krista Bridge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-162-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-926706-94-8 (ebook)
Editing by Jennifer Glossop
Cover design by Jessica Sullivan
Cover photograph by © Images.com/CORBIS
Credit for lyrics quoted in “What You Said You Wanted”:
From “Black Dog” by John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on
Led Zeppelin IV by Led Zeppelin (Atlantic, 1971, SuperHype Music Inc. ASCAP)
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
Versions of some stories have been published in the following periodicals and anthologies: “Crusade”: Toronto Life; “A Matter of Firsts”: Descant, Journey Prize Stories, and 05: Best Canadian Stories; “Cockney Sunday”: Prairie Fire; “Retention with Afterflow”: PRISM international.
For my mother
contents
THE VIRGIN SPY
EXPECTING
A VERSION OF LOVELINESS
RETENTION WITH AFTERFLOW
A MATTER OF FIRSTS
THE GREAT ONE
COCKNEY SUNDAY
CRUSADE
WHAT YOU SAID YOU WANTED
Acknowledgements
Stories
THE virgin SPY
As a girl, I was a spy. The virgin spy, my brother called me. To me, a window was something begging to be looked through, from the outside in. Where I lived with my mother and my brother, Jamie, all the houses were wide, flat bungalows, and I prowled their perimeters, through the prickly hedges and small, fussy gardens, the well-swept stone paths, through the deadlock of lawns and low rusting fences and those minor, hopeful flares of personality (the stone dog by a front door here, the red door there), looking for secrets. A secret, to me, was just about anything one chose to do in private. Although I lacked specific malice, I was unrelenting, as well as malignantly curious, and when I came upon something, I was absolutely euphoric; these qualities, combined, made me dangerous.
Early in summer, I had stood on my toes and watched as my friend Trudy spoke intimately to our last year’s class picture while sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed. She cradled the photograph in her hands and spoke lovingly, at times emphatically, to it, then delicately placed it on her night table and spent the following twenty minutes writing into what I presumed was a diary. I had seen the mouthy private-school boy from across the street argue with his mother over a bag of new clothes, then cry and hug a large stuffed dog when she slammed the door and left. I witnessed a younger girl treating the curtain rod in her bathroom like the monkey bars in the playground, while she was naked and the bath was running. Another girl I caught twirling in front of the mirror in a long red velvet dress, a fraying, oversized dress of her mother’s or grandmother’s. Other girls I had seen simply trying on lipsticks, boys putting gel in their hair. It was exhilarating and appalling how much people did in their bedrooms, and with the curtains wide open.
What was wrong, really, with playing dress-up in front of the mirror, or putting on lipstick? I was twelve, and the people I spied on were not much younger or much older. Weren’t these the things we were supposed to be doing? I had done these things myself, countless times. I had done things far less suitable for my age. No doubt, that was part of it. My closet was full of old dolls, which I pretended to have discarded, and I played with them on the far side of my bed with a book nearby, so that if someone came into my room, I could shove them quickly away and pick up my reading. My own keen sense of guilt made me ruthless—and undiscriminating. Whatever I saw, I meant to use.
The first-floor windows of several houses were too high for me to see into on my own. Sometimes, I persuaded my brother, Jamie, who was two years older than me, to come along on my hunts. On these days, I headed straight for the high windows. Jamie had a greater sense of politeness than I had, but his politeness also made him accommodating, and although I was burdened by his reservations, I could get a better view with him there. Hoisted up on his shoulders, I could see through the windows that otherwise eluded me.
“I think I hear something,” I would say to him. “Crying or yelling. Get me up there.”
More often, we didn’t hear anything from outside, and the still face of a window made me only more certain that behind it was taking place something so glittering and obscene that the good of the entire neighbourhood was at stake. I stood facing that window, temptingly close and still impossibly out of reach, my stomach in somersaults and a nagging tickle spreading downwards and inwards, as a girl might stand in an alleyway facing a flasher who is taking far too long to whip open his trench coat.
On days when Jamie refused to lift me onto his shoulders, I tried to get leverage on a jutting brick and climb up to the window myself. And he did sometimes refuse. (Why had he come along? I would ask accusingly. Simply to torture me?) Eventually, though, my struggles to get up the brick wall would become undignified enough that he relented. This would be the last summer I thought of Jamie as someone unskilled at sticking with refusals.
The secrets I gathered while spying didn’t stay secrets for long. I would gather the neighbourhood children on our lawn for an impromptu assembly. There, I would expose Trudy’s conversation with the class picture, Kelly’s gymnastics on the curtain rod, Ben’s sampling of hair products. My skill was in making any act committed in privacy seem the dark secret of one’s soul, the shameful exploits of a twisted mind. I was shrill and lordly, parading back and forth on our front porch, filled with delight so deep and strenuous that it couldn’t even manifest itself as glee. Like many guilty people, I was puritanical. While I trotted out secrets from my perch, Jamie stood by looking embarrassed, but also guarded and alert, like my bodyguard. But never was I faulted for spying in the first place, too reduced were my victims, too certain that I had indeed identified something vile in them. Nor did it ever occur to my friends (none of whom stopped speaking to me) to shut their curtains when they played.
I was always one to be on the inside of injustice.
Jamie called me a peeping Tom, but the name failed to capture the seriousness of my curiosity, the extent to which I was driven and exultant. I didn’t become the Virgin Spy until August, when spying started to be about something else. When it started to be about sex.
Next door to us lived an older girl named Celia. On the few occasions when our mother went out, Celia babysat for Jamie and me. Even on a Saturday night, she would sit at our kitchen table doing homework while we watched the TVOntario movies hosted by Elwy Yost, and sometimes, long after we were in bed, but still awake, her boyfriend, Graham, would arrive with snacks, and they would sit in our living room reading aloud to each other from children’s books like The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Jamie and I called her the librarian bec
ause she wore owl glasses with frames that reached halfway down her cheeks, spoke just decibels above a whisper, and had dull flat hair whose mousy hue served only to further blanch her pale face.
For three years, Celia and Graham, a white-blond, rickety-legged, soft-spoken display of androgyny, presented an assault of blandness on our street. Never did they kiss or hug or make a public fuss over each other, which at that point in my life I understood to be the principal point of dating. Even when I eavesdropped as they read to each other in the living room, there were no sounds to indicate that anything other than reading was happening—no break in the rhythm of words, no sly laughter. The only sign of their romantic involvement was chronic hand-holding. As they walked here and there, holding hands, their faces and bodies seemed to have no association with what was going on at the end of their arms. It was a utilitarian grip, as if they were brother and sister ordered by their parents to stick together while crossing the street. But he never let go. He would raise his hand to point out birds in the sky, a child who had fallen across the street, a flowering bush in someone’s garden, a spot on his own shirt, and with his hand went hers, never dropped. The closest they ever came to a full-bodied amorous show was sitting on a park bench, reading, hands held and knees touching.
One night Jamie and I were on our way back from a friend’s house, cutting through backyards, when we heard noises coming from the shed behind Celia’s. The noises were not immediately suggestive of sex. They lacked the painful edge I expected, the warring notes of terror and rhapsody, and that solitary pierce like nails drawn down a chalkboard. It sounded more like last breaths were being taken, and for years after that I thought that to engage in sex would be to teeter on the edge of a heart attack, that a carnal invasion would be enough to finish you off if you were not strong. But I knew what the sounds were. We crept over and looked in the cloudy window of the shed. I caught a flash of bare male bottom, even though they had covered themselves with an old afghan. At one point, they changed positions and I saw Graham’s face, the serious, almost angry, expression on it. During the act itself, he didn’t look as if he felt any affection for her, although when it was over, they lay side by side and he kissed her hands and nuzzled his face into her neck and they laughed. I had never seen anything resembling sex itself on television or in life, but still there was nothing in any of the motions that surprised me. What did get me was what looked like the sheer work of it. The brute, panting physicality. The librarian and her boyfriend were transformed by it, flushed and glistening and disoriented. But it didn’t look like a pastime.
Jamie and I walked home in silence. Desire wasn’t something you could have a friendly laugh about. From then on, we regarded the librarian with a new repulsion and respect. And I looked for sex when I went out to spy. Jamie sometimes came too. It was around this time that he began to call me the Virgin Spy. I liked the name and thought it sounded dignified and mysterious; it wrapped me up in a way that made sense. Years later, when I was leaving home to go to university, I decided that there had been mocking in it, as if Jamie had been somehow alluding to my lack of desirability, which was so great that I needed to spy on others, but by then I was in the process of re-evaluating everything about Jamie, everything about our childhood together, by then I was sorting through the muddled patchwork of my life with considerable paranoia.
After several weeks of creeping together, quietly, around the streets as late as we were allowed, Jamie was invaded by misgivings about me and came to my bedroom one night after I had gone to bed and made me promise not to tell anyone about the librarian, about looking for sex. I did have a big mouth, I was known for it, so it wasn’t surprising that he was worried. But my brother was the one person whose secrets I did keep. My other friends would extract from me a promise on my life or the life of my mother, but Jamie did not press me for a contract. He was the kind of person who began with trust.
In the end, a contract wouldn’t have changed what happened anyway. The librarian would make her way so placidly around the neighbourhood reading books on benches, eating carrots with her boyfriend, and her composure provoked me. I ended up telling my friend Trudy about what we had seen and about what I was looking for. Eventually a boy named Dean instigated an official spying mission. A group of eight or nine boys and girls began to meet at dusk in our backyard and from there we made the rounds of houses where the neighbourhood teenagers lived. Sex hunts. When it came out that I had told, Jamie didn’t accuse me of betrayal, or even treat me coolly, and I was relieved to find out that he must not have been angry.
All I thought of at the time was that my revealing of our sex-spying was its own punishment. When Jamie and I had watched Celia and Graham alone, I had felt something quiet, a caving-in of my stomach. I sensed that there was something more authentic about the experience of watching something happen than there was in being involved. Something truer and grittier about standing on the outside, seeing the whole from a remove. And when I eventually had sex as a teenager, I realized this was true. You couldn’t see the cavorting indignity of sex, the gymnastics of it, when you were the one doing it. When the neighbour kids joined us, we lost something. They giggled and poked each other. Their voyeurism wasn’t reverent, like mine. They just wanted to be daring. And, in the end, we saw very little. Two or three older brothers and sisters gearing up for the start or lying in each other’s arms in what could have been the aftermath. Nothing like what Jamie and I had seen in the shed that night. The twists and turns, the flourishes, the grizzly affection. Eventually, the group dissolved, and I left off spying.
Marginal activities lose their edge when they become public and official.
THAT FALL WHEN JAMIE and I got home after school, our mother would often be in our living room with her group, seven or eight middle-aged women from our neighbourhood who had bonded through their common desire to renounce men and enjoy middle age as the time of their lives. Our mother had become their unofficial leader, though she was not middle-aged and preferred to stay young-looking. She was, however, the one woman who had no husband and she possessed the calm demeanour of someone not burdened by sex drive. The women met once, sometimes twice a week, usually at our house because there they would not be interrupted by prying husbands (although they had renounced men to some degree, they planned on continuing to be married). They applauded our mother’s long-term singleness, something that always struck me as odd, considering that our mother’s state was neither chosen nor desired.
Our father had died when I was four, Jamie six. It was a car accident, big enough to be in the papers: on his way home from work late one night in heavy rain, my father’s car skidded through the guardrail on the Gardiner Expressway and dropped thirty feet to Fort York Boulevard, where it landed on its roof. Our mother had told us about the accident with composure, scientifically, as if she were telling an item of interest about someone else’s life. She believed that withholding unpleasant facts was false protection, a failure to arm your children with the journalistic objectivity necessary to navigate the world. Several weeks passed before Jamie and I were able to connect the event with its consequences. We were used to hearing stories of loss. My mother liked to talk about disaster; it put a look of bleak contentment on her face. She pointed out the houses of people who had come down with cancer or experienced financial distress. There was no malice in her voice, simply the recognition that such information was relevant to our lives, that we could not know our own place without understanding the position of others.
Our mother, I felt, was not the least bit pleased to have been relieved of her husband, but when she was around the women, she spoke contemptuously of the time when she had been enamoured of our father—her contempt was not for the man himself, but for herself, the weak-willed, lustful girl she had been. Sex and grief were part of the same weakness. She was determined to be unaffected by either.
Although the group’s mandate was to extol the pleasures of aging and co-author a book about how to age gracefully, mostl
y all the women talked about were creams and home remedies and muscle exercises that would reverse the aging process. They installed an inspection station in the centre of our living room, and at every meeting, my mother would ceremoniously close the curtains while another woman turned off the lamps and flooded the room with the brightness of the unforgiving overhead light. Standing with their faces craned to the area where the light fell most harshly, they asked each other to judge whether their facial lines had deepened. “Break it to me gently,” they said, or “Tell me the damage,” their eyes closed. My mother brought down our bathroom scale and they stood in a line, stepping gingerly onto the scale one by one and recording their weights on a chalkboard mounted on the wall.
“I’m not sure they should be listening,” a woman named Agatha said once, pointing to Jamie and me. We usually loitered around the edges of the living room eating the baked treats the women had brought, or we sat on the steps that led to the bedrooms, passing a bag of chips back and forth.
Linda, one of the women, had just started talking about her husband. I vaguely caught the word position and I made my way over to her side of the living room, but my mother, at Agatha’s prodding, told us to go away. We went and sat on the steps in the darkness of the hallway, where our mother was able to tell herself we were out of sight, and therefore outside her jurisdiction. Linda often had tales of woe about her marriage, and this time, with some overeager encouragement from the women, she got to what was really bothering her. Her husband, Larry, made her engage in wild, distressing sex. Sex full of rabid need and reassurance. He insisted they engage in question and answer during the act itself. He would yell and she was expected to yell back.
Are these my tits?
Yes!
Is this your dick?
Yes!
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