Through the darkness of the heavy shade, you could see a tree with solid branches low to the ground, moving up the trunk as close together as steps. This tree you climbed and sat on a branch with a U-shaped curve like a seat. The ground was carpeted in rust-coloured pine needles and the air was dark and cool. You leaned against the trunk and looked out at Ella sitting on the bench, gazing across the park at something you couldn’t see. That morning, you had sat on the toilet while she had a bath. She soaked for half an hour, running more hot water in when the water cooled. When she was ready to get out, she pulled the plug and stayed in the tub, humming, while the water got lower and lower. From where you were sitting, it looked as if she was rising up to the surface of the water, floating there.
She gave you presents when you left New York. A collection of poems by e. e. cummings, a Bessie Smith record tied with a purple ribbon, a plastic heart pendant, a stuffed walrus. Your favourite: a tarnished silver comb, embedded with tiny coral and amber stones, a family heirloom.
When you married your husband, you wore it in your hair. Something borrowed.
THE great ONE
There was a note involved, which helped set all this in motion:
She is the finest painting ever to hang on his wall. She stands before him, her young supple breasts bursting from her white buttoned sweater. He will steal her virginity, like virtue purloined from a nun. His loins are raging. He tries to feign indifference. But how can he? He knows that he will be the one to deflower her. Her miles and miles of legs and curves will be his. He is waiting. P.S. Don’t show this to your mum.
My mother’s friend Carl handed me this note the week after my nineteenth birthday. I had just decided that I wanted to be the kind of person who was fundamentally interested in things, and I was concerned at the prospect of existing forever as the opposite: someone interested in little more than getting through the day, someone for whom the world came alive only when injustice seemed virulently, inexorably, directed at her. Since the beginning of my first year at the University of Toronto, I had spoken to only two people in my classes and every day I ate a lukewarm peanut butter sandwich in a corner carrel at the Laidlaw Library at University College. All I thought of were the students around me, and whether they thought me appealing, possessed of a silent but certain intelligence; however, I was careful to appear as if they could scarcely be further from my mind. When I passed familiar faces in classrooms or hallways, I looked past them to an invisible point in the distance, as if I were sorting through complicated and impenetrable thoughts. Each person who sat next to me without striking up conversation made me steadier in my resolve to initiate nothing, to appear so indifferent to everything that the only conclusion anyone would be able to draw was that my life was so full I had no time for idle talking. In truth, I would spend days at school wishing someone would ask me even the most banal question about schoolwork. Most of all, what I hoped was that a man who seemed timid and serious, a man with a preoccupied voice and wavy brown hair, would see my face and perceive in me the insolent mystique that is a precursor to the purest, most elusive beauty.
The man who gave me the note was not this man. He was not twenty and careful with words. He was not slender and disarming. He was forty-five and he lived with my mother’s friend Linda. Once, he had told me that he could judge what a woman would be like in bed by the expression on her face while she exercised. I had just gone for a jog around the track at the YMCA and he was in the weight room doing bicep curls. Sweat dripped down his nose in a line that cut his face in two, and he looked at me as though it would be years before I could know about myself all the things he knew about me already. Two years before, he had lost his job as a life insurance salesman because, according to Linda, every day for two months he had shown up for work reeking of scotch. Linda was a divorced teacher with a tendency to self-medicate who had once, in a pinch, taken her dog’s prescription tranquilizers. After being married for twenty years to a horsy man with a legacy of family money and an inability to converse with people who didn’t look well-bred, she chose Carl for his blue-collar flair and a sexuality so coarse and dogged that it seemed downright entrepreneurial. Together, they ate Doritos for dinner, drank red wine until two o’clock in the morning, and kept the television in the living room. He called me the Great One.
He slipped the note into my hand while I sat in the back seat of the Jeep and my mother was perched high in the front behind the wheel, talking on her cellphone. He was wallpapering our hallway for extra money, and we were dropping him off at the end of the day at Linda’s apartment. That morning in school, I had learned the word lugubrious, and I asked him, didn’t he think that sitting in afternoon rush hour traffic engendered a lugubrious calm? He turned in his seat and said, “Engender this lugubriousness.” He wiggled his tongue at me. “Save that highfalutin BS for someone who’ll be impressed.” Then he said that university was making me think I knew more than I actually knew. I replied that when he had a real job, it was likely he would learn to appreciate the glories of the English language. He glanced at my mother to see if she was listening and said, “Oh, blow me get to know me, baby.”
And it came to me that I might.
So it was that I found myself standing in the doorway of his apartment on a warm Tuesday morning in March, determined to be interested in all life had to offer, while Professor Albertson, using a microphone headset, stood at the front of Convocation Hall lecturing my first-year psychology class about synaptic breakdowns.
When Carl opened the door, all he said was, “Well, if it isn’t the Great One.”
I looked past his shoulder into the apartment. The living room had the look of an invalid’s lair, that dull morning darkness, the healthy world rejected. From the front door, I could see that the curtains were drawn against the daylight, the couch was pulled out into a bed, and the sheets were tousled, as if someone had spent a restless night there. The air inside the apartment was too warm and smelled like dirty hair, which I supposed came from him, standing a little too close to me, with that smirk on his thin upper lip. I did not know at the moment that, for years, whenever I heard the words bedroom eyes, I would think of a man with glazed blue eyes, just a touch bloodshot, squinting down to my breasts, then up to my mouth, as he licked his lips in a darting motion. I did not know that associations such as these are sneaky and seldom truly defeated. At that moment, taking in the smells, the heft of the air, I felt prepared. I did not wonder why I had come. The man who gave me the note was not, after all, a man who asked questions.
He stood back and motioned me inside, and when I crossed into the vestibule, I was choked by a kind of excited morbidity, a sense that had begun to creep up on me as I drove north in my mother’s Jeep on St. George, wound itself around my stomach as I made my way across Bloor Street, then west, west to High Park, grew bold and tight as I parked in the visitors’ lot of his apartment building and rose skyward in the elevator, and entangled me utterly as I looked at his lined face and felt absolutely, defiantly certain that what I was about to do was so inappropriate, so self-destructive, that it was almost formidable, even prophetic. I had had sex with no one. He had reportedly had sex with sixty-seven women. I did not find him handsome, with his grey buzz cut and oily skin. He failed even to have a ravaged kind of sex appeal, a worn-out, smoky exhaustion that I might restore to its original vigour. But I knew that he would ask no questions, and I knew that he would deliver the thing that I wanted finally to be done with.
I did not know it, but at that moment Professor Albertson was breaking my class down into groups of eight for the group projects he had been promising all year.
“Do you want coffee?” Carl asked.
I never drank coffee, but it seemed the proper, adult prelude to what was about to happen to me, so I nodded. He reached up to the cupboard to get the coffee grounds, and with that movement came the bitter stab of BO. The apartment was overheated, and I could see by a damp circle on the back of his grey shirt that sweat was pool
ing in the small of his back, and I was afraid that when he turned around there would be pearls of sweat forming on his upper lip. I reminded myself that when it was all over, I could go home and eat Ben and Jerry’s chocolate brownie ice cream, the reward I had promised myself. He set a tall tin pot on a burner and sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
“Now it just needs to percolate,” he said. “Our coffee machine broke last week, so we’re using this old thing. It’s out of date.”
I had never heard the word percolate before, but I nodded appreciatively, and thought that was the kind of thing he meant when he said that I thought I knew more than I did.
“How was your birthday?” he asked.
“Amazing. Lots of fun.”
I couldn’t tell him that not one person outside my family had called me all day, not any of my friends from high school, not even one, and how my mother bought me four hundred dollars worth of presents to make up for all the things she anticipated I wouldn’t be getting from other people, and how each present I unwrapped before the audience of my parents and younger sister made me sink a little further into myself. I didn’t tell him about how my former best friend Kate called from McGill three days later and didn’t mention my birthday but read aloud the notes written phonetically in baby talk that her boyfriend posted around her residence room. I didn’t mention how I had handled all of it with very little grace, storming out of the dining room when my mother marched out the birthday cake, trilling a “Happy Birthday” solo in her high, atonal voice, and quite deliberately crying myself to sleep while Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son” played on repeat in my dark room.
He leaned back in the plastic chair. “I remember I porked two best friends on my nineteenth birthday. The morning comes, the blonde leans over to the brunette and slaps her. ‘You bitch,’ she says. ‘You sucked his dick for twice as long as we agreed.’ She’s all crying and still a little drunk. ‘There were rules,’ she sniffles. ‘We made a contract.’ So I porked her again later to keep her happy.”
“Lovely,” I said. The word porking made me think of farm animals wrestling in the mud: a riotous, rural earthiness.
“Well, she was no Great One, but I was nineteen. I’d put it in a snake if it would hold still long enough.”
The coffee was ready, and he poured me a mug without adding milk or sugar. As I sipped slowly, I could feel it pooling in my stomach. He talked about how, when he was in high school, he and his friends used to brush their hands up against girls’ breasts in the crowded hallways. There was a dot of gummy white spit on the centre of his lower lip that stayed put the whole time he talked. It stretched into a line when his lips parted, and sprung back into the perfect dot when his lips closed. I stared at it, thinking, what will come of that when it all starts. I felt all of what I considered necessary—the intimacy and the revulsion, the grandeur and the wreckage. I wanted in my body bacteria that were not my own.
He smiled, and I saw a black speck like a ground of coffee between his bottom front teeth.
In my psychology class, the students were collecting their knapsacks and gathering into their assigned groups on the field outside Convocation Hall. They were sitting in circles playing name games and jotting down phone numbers in their day planners.
I walked over to the sink and poured my coffee down the drain and filled the cup with water, took a gulp, swished it around in my mouth, and spat. I looked at Carl.
“I think it’s possible that I might go through my entire life without having sex.” I tried to sound reasonable, as if I had assessed alternatives and extracted the most sensible conclusion.
He let out a smoker’s laugh and looked from my mouth to my breasts, then back to my mouth.
“It probably wasn’t true when I said that you were the last person on earth I would willingly sleep with.” I had said this to him months ago, before the note, before university.
He stood up, came towards me, and put a hand on my waist. I thought this was passion, doing things no one would ever expect you to do. Flares of unpredictability. No traceable line between the things you express and the way you behave. I was worried, though, because there was no sensation between my legs. It seemed that there had never been less sensation between my legs, and I had counted on my body to understand what my mind wanted. He buried his nose in my hair and pressed his groin into my thigh. Then he pulled his head back and looked at me hard, shaking his head slowly back and forth.
“Oh, Great One, what are you doing?”
I looked at his chin. “It’s time,” I said. “I kept that note you gave me.”
“God, kid, I was drop-dead drunk when I gave that to you. It never occurred to me. It absolutely never occurred to me.”
He groaned and pushed himself against me again, then nuzzled his nose into my cheek and started kissing me. He flicked his tongue in my mouth, then nipped my lower lip. The smell of hair was stronger now, so toasted and scalpy that I could almost taste it. My arms were crossed at my waist and he grinded himself against my thigh. The absence between my legs wouldn’t recede.
“Oh, kid. What a beauty you are.”
He grabbed my hand and led me through the kitchen to the living room. He paused in the doorway and leaned against it, pulling me into him. Then he motioned at the darkened living with one hand.
“‘Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,’” he whispered.
I could hear a light rain against the window. Downtown, it was only cloudy at U of T outside Convocation Hall, with spots of sun, and girls were rolling up their pants and the sleeves of their shirts, leaning back in the patches of rough yellow grass as if they were sunbathing.
“Do you sleep out here?” I asked, pointing to the unmade pullout.
“Linda and I had a fight last night,” he said. “I went to our neighbour’s last week. She’s this great big Jewish beauty. She wants me to pork her. In the end, we just necked a little. Her breasts had no meat. When her bra was off, I had to hold them up just to keep them at chest level. But God, she’s a beauty, though, with her clothes on. So, anyway, she tells Linda about it, Linda gets pissed, I sleep on the couch.”
While he said this, he walked me backwards towards the bed. With one arm wrapped around my waist and the other hand on my forehead, he pushed my head back so that the length of my neck was exposed. He moved his tongue down the bony back of my esophagus. Then he lowered me to the bed, running his tongue over my teeth, and he snaked his hand up under my shirt to my breast, then around the back to unhook my bra. He pulled my shirt over my head and sat up to look at me.
I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, since the week before when I had decided I would do it. As I would for a school test, I had thoroughly planned for this moment when I would be on a bed with the upper half of my body exposed and the lower half becoming insistently more and more numb. Nowhere was the kink in my stomach that came when I saw other people kiss, the flash that had surged again and again when I had watched The Exorcist in the summertime with Kate’s older brother and he had stroked my palm with his index finger. Kate had given me a vibrator for a joke when we graduated from high school, and I had buried it at the back of a desk drawer so my mother wouldn’t find it, but consciously, very consciously, not thrown it out. I had taken this vibrator out a week before in anticipation of this moment lying on the bed, and when I had turned it on, I worried the whole neighbourhood would hear its sound like a distant lawnmower. I used it over my underwear and forced myself to think about him and held it there and even began to rock it back and forth while I forced myself to think of him, and before long, I found that I could think of nothing but him. And there was degradation, even in my mind. And in my mind it had worked, it had helped, to know it all. His sour sweat, lukewarm on my face, trickling over the side of my lip, its taste like salt and wine. His breath, sharp and bacterial, with an undercoat of cigar smoke and a weedy sting. And I could think of nothing but him.
But I felt none of that internal rush now, n
one of that rushing all through me. None of it (as Professor Albertson walked from group to group asking for names).
I could feel his eyes on me even though my own eyes were closed. He touched his lips lightly to my eyelids and held my fingers up to his mouth. When I looked up, he was watching me sadly, as if he didn’t want to go ahead but had no choice. I squirmed out of my pants and underwear, and he reached over to the window and drew back the curtain.
“I want to take in all of you,” he said, pushing my arms out to my sides, his hands clasped around my wrists.
I lay like this while he turned his eyes over every part of my body. He passed his hand over my breast and rubbed his thumb in circles on my nipple. The sun had come out, and I could feel it all along the right side of my body while he looked and looked. And while he looked, his face seemed to get smaller and tighter, his eyes narrowed, and his lines deepened. His chin was clenched and resolute, as if he was perfectly matched in an arm wrestle, and determined not to be the first to relent. I had wanted pursuit, the smashing of propriety; I had counted on rough handling to be a respite from loneliness, but I hadn’t anticipated looking, being looked at. I had been confident in my ability to forget the hard cyst on his back, his thin lips grabbing at my nipples, the inevitable pain. These things seemed the necessary tests I would have to withstand in order to become equal to something better.
What had never occurred to me was that my body would become a part of someone’s memory.
He stood and removed his clothes slowly, as if trying to entice me with a striptease. I had never been, and have never since been, so aware of my breasts. Flabby and untidy, spilling everywhere. I crossed my arms over my chest. He straddled my lower stomach and uncrossed my arms.
“Even better than I imagined.”
The Virgin Spy Page 13