Genest had palmed off my CV on them and introduced me as an adviser to the great museums of Montreal, whom I helped to find the successors to the Fortins and the Borduas in their collections. It all went very well. The next evening I even spoke to the PTA meeting, and I didn’t have to play the clown in order to be understood. Genest had correctly spotted, looking behind his petty bosses, the forms of thirst that could be roused.
It was ten p.m. when we headed for the souvlaki joint, on a road crunchy with northern snow that was new to me. It was like the Little Match Girl’s Christmas, cold enough to burn.
He was not for me, Genest. He belonged to distance, to the cohorts of adolescents who lived their lives through catalogues and television, who started drinking at fifteen, who couldn’t tell a fir tree from a spruce. When he’d first arrived there two years earlier he had established his authority by dissecting his own motorcycle with them, then reassembling it completely. After that it was a muskrat, which they’d scrutinized from the eyes to the liver. And the pierced ears and the hair dyed pink. And the weight-lifting. And the anatomy lessons, beginning with fashion magazines that were soon replaced with paintings by old masters. He cooked it all up after class, in the schoolyard or the basement of his bungalow nearby. Already a few boys and girls to whom he’d begun to lend books had emerged a little less bored.
He was from French Ontario and spoke like those who have been late to receive the gift of words. He never missed a comma or an agreement. He had settled in Sept-Îles for life, he was sure he’d meet there another immigrant from the interior who would know how to laugh and write and produce two or three children. We were alone in the restaurant that was lit up like a skating rink, the French buddy had concocted a soufflé which he shared with us, he dreamed of opening a bistro in Kuujjuaq and there gathering to himself the confidences of all those who were wild about the North — the most interesting people in the world. Genest had dark hair and brown eyes, he wore a jacket from Sears, I was gazing at a person who was clear and kind, I’d have given him my cat to dissect, my books to dispose of, my students to astonish. And myself, to overwhelm.
But that was the farthest thing from his mind.
For months he wrote me letters, always amusing, in which the one false note was the admiration I didn’t deserve. I was venerated without being loved, I lost myself in it, I wrenched my guts replying to him without letting my distress come through. Then his face blurred, I told myself that my love life was definitely a failure, and I experienced a few appropriate binges. A good thing to do, if one thinks oneself an intellectual, is to watch oneself live. The spectacle prevails over the pain, one knows one is pale, drawn, lonely, doomed to dirty glasses and sleepless nights, and one finally has the backdrop for disillusionment, without which there will be none of the detachment from which masters are made. I turned thirty certain I would transcend it. Which brought me some small consolation.
The rest, Vitalie, belongs to you. I am writing it here only to reveal you to the others, at last. And to let you once again take from my words the love I forbid you to change.
The following winter, when my students got on my nerves, I decided I would treat myself to something absurd and take a trip to Florida. I’d been invited to a Canadian studies symposium at the University of South Florida, I was to be responsible for the artistic part, a minor one, of the program. I’m sure there is no university uglier than USF, sprawling between two malls in the countryside back of Orlando. It rained on the millions of posters for Disney World, the American professors of Canadian studies wore red jackets in honour of the Canadian flag and the federal government grants, I stayed in a Holiday Inn on campus where the rooms smelled of the beer, sperm, and spray net of the young student couples who had progressed from necking to doing it, now that Seventeen magazine was running articles on birth control, explaining to girls that they could still be married in white, with blue eyelids. To make a long story short, I fled at dawn on the day after my performance, in a rented Pontiac Sunbird, without even looking at a map. All roads must lead to the beaches. But it was still raining and the radio was predicting frost in the orange groves.
There I was at the entrance to Disney World, I tuned in to the radio station that directs you to the parking area, nearly empty at this time of day. I mused that one could do worse, in this nowhere, than encounter the sixth degree of stupidity, and that I might get an article out of it, a very refined one perhaps, on the colours that comfort imbeciles and make them spend their money. I bought a one-day passport, the clerk gave me a funny look, Americans see pedophiles everywhere, after all, I was wearing a dark foulard and a raincoat as exhibitionists do, you never know.
The restaurants were already open. I lingered over an excellent hamburger as I watched the little families arrive, from Ohio or Quebec, with their broods of kids already freezing and whining, they’d come down with colds from standing in line at the base of the Ferris wheel. The sky was becoming overcast between the rides, the lamps stayed lit, the rain was turning to a viscous drizzle. An old lady slipped on her way off the train that runs from the ticket booth to the Magic Kingdom, her daughter upbraided her, holding on to her while the children got away. There was no husband, needless to say.
To kill some time I looked for newspapers and didn’t find them. So then I went through all the knickknack shops, telling myself I was compiling a list of symbols. I took a liking to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, picturing them beneath my seven of hearts: I would wound each one in a different manner and my lovers would imagine a voodoo spell ordered by the virgin-sorceress. But I was also tempted by a red bear in an RCMP hat. I’d never seen a red bear, I realized that our animals are always the colour of earth, another sign of the margins of history, of life in negative. Elsewhere though, in other cities equally far from Paris, the birds are multicoloured, the wild boars golden. I bought the red bear.
It was noon, the parents know that’s parade time. I was following the music, that of Sunday television when I was ten years old and happily watched Royaume de la Fantaisie in French translation on Channel 2. Mickey Mouse appeared, sloshing through the water. His heavy tread squelched and sprayed the children. I bent down to help a little girl make room for herself in front of a tall boy and I bumped into you. Why did I say “Pardon” instead of “Sorry”? I’m bilingual.
You replied, “Il n’y a pas de quoi.” I wish I could write that the sun then burst through the clouds, that the crowd fell silent for a moment, and that you smiled — the Mona Lisa found at last in the innermost depths of chance. But we were freezing. I don’t even remember the colour of your scarf, if you were wearing one, or the second act. I must have assumed a smart-ass tone to decree that Mickey Mouse was inane; you asked what I was doing there and I asked you the same thing. An airport conversation.
I deduce that it started raining again, that I didn’t have an umbrella, that we went for a coffee, suddenly relieved to no longer be two forlorn individuals, weird and suspect in the midst of all those families. You took your coffee black and so did I, Disney’s is like rust, that was our first common ground. And because you admitted it yourself without equivocation, I acknowledged that I was there because I used to dream about it on Sundays as a child. And that we’d been poor and it was impossible. No one on Mentana Street hopped on a plane to go somewhere. Walt Disney was the Angel Gabriel in black-and-white and a three-piece suit, who lived in no particular place. And when the first planes started leaving Montreal for Orlando, when excursion rates appeared in the papers, I was too old. You added that you were bored despite the books you’d brought on your vacation, that the beach at Clearwater was freezing cold and the horizon obstructed, despite your ocean-view room, and that you didn’t despise Americans. It was one way of meeting them.
I began to see you, slender and dark. Chestnut hair and eyes, the French say. But chestnuts are reddish-brown. Your brown eyes and hair are Prismacolor brown, and matte, a brown that no painter ca
n render, they always add a highlight of ash or gold. I thought you were elegant, with your high turtleneck, a hint of ochre on your eyelids, your pale cheeks. Your name was Marie.
And mine, François. We decided to try all the rides, now that we were two, we had no children, and we would never come back to Mr. Disney’s world. At three o’clock we’d downed some ice cream, out of duty. It tasted of the refrigerator, of failed holidays. At six, we were in the parking lot, night was already falling, the clouds were opening at last, and it was the moon that turned us into friends. You had a Ford from Budget, I had an Avis Pontiac, we were about to go our separate ways, the light was shifting because of the halo around the moon. “That’s a sign of snow,” you told me. We were so cold. I kissed you on the temple. I made sure that your car started, you told me you’d be at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg the next day at ten. It was a date.
I slept in a neat and tidy motel somewhere along U.S. Highway 19, which leads to the Dali Museum. The water was hot, the air dry, the TV clear. I devoured a pizza in the restaurant attached to the service station next door, while reading the St. Petersburg Times whose weekend edition had a feature on “Fragonard and His Friends,” an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts which I’d have to visit as well. Tomorrow I would invite you to dinner. Life had some happy detours.
To Dali and Fragonard we added Velasquez and the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. On the second day, I moved to your Best Western in Clearwater, a ground-floor room with a view of the pool, we had drinks on your balcony, the weather kept turning a little milder, a little less grey. I drove, you deciphered the maps. You unearthed antique stores in Tampa, a vast antiquarian bookstore among the thrift shops of St. Petersburg. I gave you my red bear and you bought me a blue one.
The story is that of a man and a woman who meet and who then think of nothing else. It took five days to kindle, like the sun in the alleys of Tampa where cats and azaleas and little American girls with the eyes of Ramona grow. In a Puerto Rican restaurant we blazed with all the spices that make every mild fish sing, we toasted our imminent farewells with an inexhaustible American wine, we were drunk even on black coffee. It was in my Pontiac, I think, where we sat and waited to sober up as we told each other the stories of our lives, that the most syrupy of Neil Diamond’s songs made us get out and start dancing in the narrow parking lot, I kissed your neck all the way to your heart and you were vibrating. Don’t leave me. I’ll suffocate if you take me away from you. It’s hot but I must cover you, I’m only a little taller, you just have to get under my skin.
I can still hear the silence as we drove home, no music now, windows open on the night that was finally warm. I drove like a little old man past the endless parade of malls, my hand in yours. If there’d been an open drive-in I’d have taken you to the movies where I’d have laid you across my chest and contented myself with dying of desire, I was so afraid. To lie down and find again the ways to love a woman, or to deceive you gently, or to not know what to do, or to lose you. I couldn’t tell you the truth, you’d have run away or let yourself be taken as you closed your eyes to other bodies, with a shred of sadness in your pleasure. But you amassed miracles.
“We’ll play wedding,” you said on the threshold of your room. We took the time to bathe ourselves and to perfume you, to dress you in your long white cotton nightgown and then undo each of the fifteen buttons, and you insisted that I enter you at once, like children who know nothing yet about mouths, about breasts, about kisses between the legs, about drinking sweat before the ultimate pleasure. Instead of gazing into one another’s eyes you forced me to watch with you the movements of pleasure, our two roots joined that had now found their rhythm, I came in perfect innocence, the innocence that just then and for the first time, I regretted that I had lost.
Did you know, had you guessed that I needed to enter you without caresses, so that I could think of nothing, so that I could go on? Today you say no, you say you too had images to keep at bay, loves less full to erase. You say that you wanted to avoid words, words eternally the same, the distraught gazes that are less truthful than the body. I removed your nightgown afterwards. Only in sleep did I possess you fully naked, your beauty so disturbing it was interrupted at dawn. We started again and it was the same. I couldn’t get over it.
I went to get breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. I felt frightened again, seeing you wolf down the over-sweetened orange juice, the toast with overly salty butter, the overly watery coffee. Everything was too much. You drew up the day’s program, which was not to move, to bask for a while in the sun that had finally come for a brief stay, to walk on the beach, to read, and to love one another again around noon, and after. You said nothing about planes, yours was tomorrow, already, Tampa-Montreal. I panicked. In my room when I went to change, the order there made me fall apart. I had laughed, chatted, moved, loved from afar and then from up close all week long, I’d found treasures in the heart of the silliest America, whose pavement I would now have gladly kissed. I’d never been so happy, a forbidden word in my oasis. No one was happy, everyone knew that if they were able to read, knew that simple feelings lead to the worst, they make fools of us, and knew that one doesn’t do an intellectual’s work in the moonlight. And thus I had never been so unhappy.
In a Burger King at noon, I talked. It’s easier between two mouthfuls of fries to say for a start that there’s no official girlfriend, that I should in fact say no boyfriend, because, you see, for some years now I’ve been more involved with boys. The sweeper goes by, two children already obese spill a Seven-Up on the next table. You assume a detached air as if I had just described the outline for my courses or a book. I dared not even detect the retreat in your eyes, I know it’s over, I know you will gently send me back to my Persian cat. You pick at your fries, you say they need vinegar, I go to fetch some, I meet the sweeper again, Americans are as clean and smooth as their floor-tiles. The air is very conditioned. You tell me you’ve never made love with a woman, though one summer you were troubled by a waitress who became your friend, who had straddled a man, a casual acquaintance, in front of you in a kind of shed that was also the water tower in your northern town. You wonder if it was a little because of her, of her perfect orgasm before your very eyes, that you finally left your Slavic husband, he was handsome and kind, he was preparing to make children with you, the light in your house was blue also, in the bungalow that he’d surrounded with an openwork fence, white, like those in Dallas where he wanted to go and live.
I devour an apple dessert but in my eyes I am kneeling, you are the Mary of the Hail Mary who bestows grace, but you’re far more beautiful, brunette among all the darknesses held out to me by the darkness that is auspicious for allaying my pain. I go to get coffee, the sweeper has left, he’s having his lunch, the waitress is built like your friend, she says, “Have a good day.” Americans have a talent for good days. “Come out on the terrace,” you say. We eat hot food under the cruel sun. Don’t pray for us poor sinners, for the Virgin Mary does not deal in forgiveness, she understands nothing of it, we are together amid the light of the innocents. It’s time to go for a swim.
***
I don’t want to die. I want to go back to your house as it was that March, when we were both wrong about each other. Under the comforter we’d become crazy, the walls crackled from the cold, the fire was out, I told you that you still smelled of the sun, and I said it again. In the darkness that was just turning to the grey of dawn, there was only your voice:
It is found again.
What? - Eternity.
It is the sea
Gone with the sun.
I have not read all the books but by chance I identified Rimbaud, who had no business under your frost-covered window, who changed the tone of our games and the texture of your words. I was lying at your back, I believed I was commencing another life, finding you here again every day, in your neighbourhood of entrenched Anglos, grinding your coffee, carrying th
e bags to the market, counting the days till summer when I would fuck you in their parks, beneath their foliage at midnight, when they’d all have gone inside to sleep to the sound of their air-conditioners. I had found my island, I was circling it now, I would set foot there soon. Rimbaud was an intruder, Ferré’s lyricist, and I hadn’t talked about your sun just so he could run away with the sea and lose himself in our eternity.
You told me, you announced, that you’d bought the house in order to sell it, to have your own garden that you’d remember when you were in Abyssinia, that you didn’t really like Rimbaud but that you’d decided, just like that, during the eight-hour journey between your two lives four years ago, that you needed the green of coffee trees and the hyenas of the suburbs of Harar to be done with aspens and soft-water sparrows, and winter.
I didn’t believe you, I still don’t believe you. “In any case, Ethiopia is at war,” I told you, going along with the game. But you weren’t going to Eritrea or to the deserts, you would teach French to the rich beauties of Addis Ababa, the most magnificent women in the world, who languished in the presence of any foreigners able to take them away from the purgatory that is their land. “They’ll go north and we’ll meet along the way.”
I laughed at your flight, which was so obvious. I thought I was already strong enough to get you back, I thought you were trying a little too hard to leave, and for nothing — your Slavic husband and one troubled summer, already so remote. And there you have it. We were going to tie up the loose ends, I was perfectly willing, just for fun, to buy Abyssinian coffee and even to model myself too on Rimbaud, who had loved men before he loved women.
Affairs of Art Page 7