My father let Berthe go when I was thirteen because he said I did not need her anymore. She anticipated this and by the time she left she had taught me to cook for myself, to do my own laundry and homework. After school the thin winter sunlight disappeared into early darkness in our lonely apartment. I used to sit wrapped in a big eiderdown, reading under a single lamp with a chipped shade, the room’s eclipse of the moon. I tried to get Papa’s attention by letting my wild hair go wilder, wearing the tightest jeans, being the cleverest girl in my class. I bought some wire-rimmed granny glasses that neither helped nor hindered my vision. I told him I was going to friends’ houses and sneaked into blues clubs until one night the owner of a little hole in the wall club in the north end stopped me when I was trying to slip in to hear Willie Dixon sing “I Ain’t Superstitious.” The doorman brought me to the manager’s office and he called my father to come pick me up. Papa parked the car, walked past drug dealers and prostitutes and blues fans to the office, where I was studying musicians’ signed photographs in cheap wooden frames on the manager’s wall. On the drive home I told him it was unfair that I could not go inside, I had been taking the metro for years, listening to the blues for years. He nodded in a neutral way without taking his eyes from the road and said, It won’t be long now.
I wanted him to say, I will take you. I will listen to music with you.
He hired Charlotte, one of his students, to tutor me in Latin, and as chance and my father had it, she liked the blues too and she started taking me along. I was an escaped green and yellow budgie protected by a flock of wild sparrows. Charlotte and her friends closed around me, standing in line for clubs, hiding this dangerously bright-feathered creature thrust upon them. And for a long time I felt that this was not an unsatisfactory way to grow up.
3
The snow the winter I met you was always blue. You came to fetch me on your old Harley at twilight, at the end of my dull days at Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s. The girls there spoke only English and were never allowed to come with me at night. They were mothered girls who invited me to spend weekends with them because I gave them cigarettes and told them about the clubs. I played recordings of Etta and B.B. for them in their chintz bedrooms with canopies and shelves of dolls and china. Their parents took us to the Ritz for Sunday brunches. But after I met you, I could not wait for the school days to end, to see you leaning against your bike in your worn leather jacket watching for me. I was always first out the door and I liked the girls’ envying eyes on my back.
I swung onto your motorcycle and put my arms around your waist and we drove to the Yellow Door and listened to folk music and we drank coffee from thick mugs and I opened my books and did my homework and you marked sheets of math. One evening the back wheel of your bike skidded out on a bit of black ice. It crashed and I fell off and landed on my left shoulder. You jumped and landed upright and you lifted me quickly, then pulled up the bike and together we pushed it to the side of the road, where we shook ourselves off like a pair of pups. Our bodies were so light. Anything could send us hurtling through the air, steal us from each other, a patch of ice, a bit of bad luck. We got back on the bike that slippery night and kept riding, up the mountain to look at the city lights, down to the river to watch the ships.
What we shared was so simple. I remember thinking, I am so awake.
I came in late and my father said, The school called. They say he picks you up every day now. He is too old for you.
I shrugged, Not really. Boys my age m’ennuyent. You never mind when I go with Charlotte. She’s older.
Your tutor, he said. That’s different.
Oh, I said. Because you chose her?
My father studied me briefly. His beard had grayed. He turned away and said, Have you seen my glasses? He got up from his reading chair and walked toward the kitchen table.
I said, They’re on your head.
He raised his right hand to put them back on his nose and I saw his beloved shy smile. He sat down again in his chair and looked at me over the half-glasses and said, You still live under this roof. You must listen to what I say.
When I was a child my father never argued with me. He would say absently, Go ask Berthe. But once, when I would not go to bed he said, All right then. Come sit with me. I will show you how many bones there are in a foot.
I remember his tenderness that night, his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot, listening to the soft wonder in his voice. He said, No one has ever been able to duplicate the human gait. All we can really do is keep a person upright.
My father did not foresee what was going to become of me as a result of living with his drivenness. My father, my love, never stopped believing that he could lose everything at any moment, the curse of poverty. I was in danger of getting distracted from school, of not succeeding, of not marrying well. I think he believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb. He was afraid of my turbulence at sixteen.
I said, He is not too old for me. You do not even know me.
He said, No one talks to me like that. When did you become so cruel? Go to your room. Out of my sight.
I had no mother to turn to, and what I had learned from her was urgency. What I learned from my mother was that those we love can disappear suddenly, inexplicably. And then there is nothing.
4
You were so cool in your white shirt, speaking English and French with your band. You were on lead and there were three others, Luc on drums, and two brothers from Westmount, Ray on bass and Mark on a Hammond organ. You played covers of Santana and the Beatles, mixing it up with Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. I sat near the back and I watched the girls in the room watching you. When a boy asked me to dance I shook my head and Charlotte said, I will, and drifted away with him. You cradled and caressed the strings of that cheap guitar and I imagined your arms around me. At the end of the first set you came down from the stage and sat with me and I liked the eyes of the room on me too. You wore black jeans and your body was coiled-up energy and you were excited to be seen with me. Before you went back for the last set you leaned into my hair and said, I’m going to play something for you.
On stage you unwrapped a long-necked two-stringed Khmer guitar from a piece of brightly dyed fabric. You sat cross legged on a bench and lay the round body of the instrument on your lap. You looked into the crowd and joked, I am one of about seventeen Khmer in Montreal. People chuckled at your wry smile. You pulled the microphone down in front of the strings, said, But you’re stuck with me. This is called a chapei, and we’re going to play a song by Sin Sisamouth called “Don’t Let My Girlfriend Tickle Me.” You played a short, sweet melody, the hard calluses on each finger of your left hand pressing and releasing and sliding on strings over bone frets, your right hand loose, stretching out to pluck the notes. The band hit twenty funky electronic beats of guitar and chapei and organ and you sang campy rock and roll from the dance crazes and psych rock you had left behind in Phnom Penh. Your face smoothed around the Khmer words, and your voice slipped into a five-tone scale as you beat out a simple rock rhythm with your body and hammed it up.
You were a novelty, a charismatic Asian guy with a young white girlfriend and you sang from the open throated cool of the stranger. Young women were drawn to the gloom and glory of your exile, and Charlotte whispered to me, See that guy over there? He’s a draft dodger. He’s rattled by your new friend. Every eye in the room was on you. I wanted an exotic past too. You played your own version of “Black Magic Woman,” half English, half Khmer, and then you put down your chapei and stood and lifted your hands and clapped to get the crowd moving and you said, This is “Lady Named No,” and you sang in Khmer both a man’s part and a woman’s part in a thin falsetto, and no one knew what the words meant but we could all hear in your teasing voice a parody of asking and refusal. People were dancing and swaying and loving you. At the end of the set you said, This is a blues song I wrote in Khmer called “Sugarcane Baby.” T
he words go something like: I can’t get enough of your sweetness, baby, I’m just a boy peelin and suckin on white sugarcane.
People laughed and you knew you sounded charming speaking Khmer and French accented blues English and you looked down into the crowd at me and said, Je le joue pour Visna who is here tonight.
You picked up your chapei and you stopped camping it up and sang a sweet ballad in a voice that cracked and it was a song of love and it was the first time I heard the words oan samlanh. At the end Charlotte said, I have to fly. I think he likes you.
This was new, a man wrapping his feelings for me in a song.
People disappeared into the city night, left empty chairs twisted at odd angles from tables that smelled of beer. I waited for you in the doorway and breathed in the chill clean air. A few girls waited while the band packed their instruments, wound up wires, disconnected speakers. I put myself where I knew the light from a street lamp shone through my hair and when you came to me carrying your chapei and your guitar you were still excited from being on stage. You set down the guitar but holding the chapei you wrapped your arms around me from behind and said, Did you like your song?
I said, Who is Visna?
Visna means my destiny. The tune is a lullaby my mother used to sing to me, but I made up new words for you.
I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law. Everything was animal sensation and music. You were my crucifixion, my torture and rebirth. I loved your eyes, the tender querying of your voice in song.
After you left me under the stairs that night I ran up and through the front door and I did not want to break the spell of you but Papa called from his bed, You are spending too much time with him. Bring him to meet me Sunday afternoon.
I did not answer. People do not like to think of love as a crucifixion but I know now, thirty years later, that if a person is tough enough for love nothing less than rebirth will be required.
We walked past the front door to the musicians’ entrance on rue St. François Xavier and the manager laughed when he saw us together and said, Hey, you found each other. He offered us a joint and we stood together looking out to the sidewalk. I can still see the manager’s face, pock-marked and pale, and his nicotine-stained fingernails. He said to you, I listened to that chapei music you gave me. It’s blues, man. Bring one of those guys here and I’ll give him a show.
Inside, two old men sat in the hall, and we squeezed past them and found a table close to the stage. Thin university girls without bras blew smoke into the stale beer air and the place filled up. People were excited that night, waiting. The house lights dimmed and two spotlights made a thin halo over two wooden chairs. An old man walked from the back through a scatter of tables toward the stage. Another old man held the tail of his shirt and shuffled in behind. You said with reverence, There they are.
The two old men at the door.
One was near blind, the other lame. I watched them settle, adjust silver mikes, grumble at each other; one picked up a guitar, the other a harmonica, and with the thump thump thump of a hard shoe on the plank floor, air through metal and wood, fingers on tuned strings and a voice shout-singing, Whoo ee, whoo ee, the two stiff old men turned into the nimble, golden-tongued blues gods they were, playing for their worshippers, embracing and breaking the hearts in that room, and I could see how the world goes with no eyes.
My shoulder touched yours, transformed by what I heard that night, syncopations, sound unbound and riffing, chat and jokes and insults between left hand and right, between strings and harp, slapping laughs and love moans and I heard things I did not yet know but would, stories of humiliation and brawls and seductions and nights gone bad and women weeping for men and men lost and alone, music epic-great, born of sex and police beatings and the stale beer stink of dark bars far away from the churches of the towns.
We left the club in the first hour of morning and Sonny and Brownie’s affectionate squabbling on stage had sown in me an idea about what happens when people last together a lifetime, companionable grumpiness, separate cars, separate beds in separate rooms, but out on stage chat-singing, their feet pounding the same boards and their ears hearing the same rhythms.
You said, I don’t want to go home yet.
We rode your bike to the great river. Stars and water and night. Down the riverbank, wrapped in darkness. You led me along a dock where boats were moored in narrow slips and we jumped onto the deck of a sloop called Rosalind. You took a small key from your jeans pocket and unlocked the cabin door. I followed you down three steep steps into a tiny galley and you opened a cupboard door and took out a box of floating candles. You said, At home it is Sampeas Preah Khe, the night we pray to the moon. My grandmother always lit a hundred candles and sent them out on the black river.
Why?
To honor the river and the Buddha.
You handed me a book of matches and I lit them with you, one by one. We sent out the ninety-ninth and hundredth out together and watched the trail of small flames drifting away. You said, My grandmother told me in the old days young people did this and prayed for love.
Inside the sailboat through the uncurtained window, I watched clouds moving across a sinking moon. Then I turned to you. You crossed your arms and pulled your white T-shirt over your head. I remember the muscled lines of your torso. Outside, wings and webbed feet on the surface of the water and the autumn wind rising and water lapping against the hull. Anyone walking along the river would have seen a hundred floating lights but they would not have seen any light at all from inside the Rosalind. I remember caught breath and a feeling no woman had ever admitted to me and the sound of a man’s groan. I remember your eyes never leaving mine. I remember the roughness of the calluses on your left fingers on my skin and I remember how slow you were. It was early November on a night you called Bon Om Touk. I had not known there would be blood.
After, we slipped up to the deck naked. We jumped into the freezing water with small screams and came up laughing and trying to find our breath. Then we wrapped an old blanket around us and when I shivered you handed me my clothes and slipped back into yours and we rubbed our hair dry and you said, Look.
Our candles were still burning and drifting on the slow current, disappearing into the darkness where the river meets the sea.
My body pressed against your back, my arms around your chest, one of your hands on mine driving home that night, my cheek resting on your leather jacket. I did not go to my own bed in my father’s house; I went to your apartment on Bleury Street with you. Through the hours before morning I loved you again in your warm yellow room, melting into you, standing up and lying down, heart to heart, our bodies golden heat and melting snow. Our fingers like small wings traced over each other’s whispers all through that first night, the first night of life.
What is this scar on your temple? I asked, tracing its curve with my lips.
I fell on a rock at Sras Srang when I was teaching my brother how to catch frogs near the lake. That’s how I chipped my tooth. I love how you talk. Tell me your name again.
The one who loves me called me Visna, I said. Do you like the name my lover gave me?
I love you with or without a name, Anne Greves.
I traced the shape of the half-moon chip on your tooth and whispered, I like Serey.
It means freedom, you said and pulled me to you again. It means power and beauty and charm. Do you like the name my parents chose for me?
I liked the hardness of your arms but I pushed you away, play-wrestling, and asked, All that? Does it mean good lover too?
You looked surprised, then said with your charming smile, Perfect lover.
You used to say that before me no woman ever teased you.
You were beloved and firstborn and I loved even your arrogance because now I knew you naked and vulnerable. I loved you on stage and I loved you walking beside me. But you were most truthful in bed. At dawn I dreamed of a lover whose body knows things she does not. I had lost my voice and we were in a
restaurant called the Courthouse and I was calling for you but you could not hear. My father’s presence was somewhere on the edges of the dream. You woke me and smoothed my hair and said, You are calling my name. Do not worry, oan samlanh, I will always be here.
The ocean has one taste and it is salt. I believed your body but I knew the words were untrue.
5
What do you have to say for yourself?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Papa set down his book and looked at me. Then he said softly, Your mother liked to wear my clothes when we first met.
A girl wears her lover’s clothes because she likes his smell and she wears his clothes because she is trying to understand why she feels both freed and broken. Why does she feel whole when she has given away her body, her mind and her heart? Why is she not tempted to escape? She wants to smell her lover on her skin, and she cannot understand this feeling that imprisons, frees her. She does not guess that she will remember wearing her lover’s clothes when she is old. She tells herself that what she feels is forever. But she has already observed in the world that it is not.
I turned away from Papa to go to my room, to be alone to smell your shirt, and then he said oddly, Do you still love me?
Of course I do, you’re my father.
Then listen to me. He is not right for you.
Papa took off his reading glasses and wiped them on his sleeve and said, Your mother did not run around. Make a spectacle. Our neighbors talk. Your mother found invisible ways to get what she wanted.
I answered with intimate cruelty, Like the day she got pregnant with her professor and quit school. Like the day she left her baby and drove away in a snowstorm and never came back.
Kim Echlin Page 2