I feel stupid, as I did when he asked me to try on my cashmere winter coat, to stand and model it for him. I bought the cashmere winter coat at the Goodwill store. But I will not tell him this. It is my secret, my front, my image of respectability. So, too, will I not tell him why I do not work.
“Doing well?” he asks me. I can feel the fatigue in his voice. “Car? House? Investments?” he says, as I nod my answer to each of his questions. This makes him ask, “Doing so well, and no goddamn wife nor thrildren?”
“Car. House. Few investments …”
“Amurcan or European car?”
“Benz. House in Rosedale,” I say. “What’s Rosedale? A housing-project? Community-housing?”
“You could call it that. Rosedale is sometimes like a community-housing project. I never thought of it that way, but it could be. It is …”
“What did you see, when me and you was sitting down, back-there on the beach, wearing our make-believe bathing trunks, some fifty years ago, and looking out into the goddamn sea? What did you see? When you looked out in the sea? What did you see in the sea? What did you really see?”
“Ships.”
“Ships? Nothing else?”
“And clouds.”
“Ships and clouds?” He says this as if it is the echo to my memory, as if it is an echo, time and place here in this bar going back to that time with no change in the time or in the place, as if there is no alteration, and the bar is the beach; and the way he says it tells me that he too is travelling back over all that time, perhaps not in a ship or in the clouds in a plane, but in something, in some frame of mind, medium, attitude, that has the same dependence upon the wind and the movements of water and waves. I look at him after he has echoed the word ship and the word clouds and I see him as he was then, and as I was then, as we are, then. And then he says, “I saw three ships come sailing in …”
“Come sailing in, come sailing in,” I continue. And we laugh aloud. The three women near to us, in this bar, now almost empty, laugh and smile with us, as strangers smile in exchange of happiness and relief, and safety, in a bar.
“Those two old geezers,” one says, loud enough for me to hear.
“What do you think they do?” another asks.
“Priests?”
“Lawyers,” the first one says.
“How old you think those two are?” the second one says.
“Not a day past forty-nine,” the first one says. She is the one wearing the silver pantyhose.
“Ship sail?” John says.
“Sail fast,” I say.
“Hommany men on deck?”
“Nine!” I say.
“One more! One more than nine, leff-back,” he says, “and I’m not telling you much about this one, about him. But that’s why I’m here. I been at the Sick Thrildren’s Hospital.” And he says no more. But the grief, and the deep concern surrounding the hospital and the little boy is on his face. And I do not look into his eyes to stare at it.
The snow is still coming down, as if a white sheet has been drawn against the windows, like the snow falls and shades the figures in the showcases of stores outside along Yonge Street, figures of trees and angels and bells, blocking our vision from the people passing outside, from looking outside, from seeing the whiter darkness. I think of the mock battles we used to play in John’s house, games sent to him by his father’s brother, who spent all his life in America working on a ship; and when he came off, when he got shore leave, he refused to come home, and jumped ship in America. But he sent toys and pens and shoes which were brogues and brown, and heavy, and which John was not permitted to wear to school as part of his uniform, because of the colour.
“No thrildren, eh?” he asks me. “But I axe you that, already.”
“No children. You asked me that three times.”
“Goddamn! You got me a little confuse, if you see what I’m saying. Thinking in one part of my mind that you may be bordering on the queer, or something, if you see … like I mean, on the homosexual … see what I’m saying? Some men, in later life, men your age, sometimes change their preference, if you see what I mean. Happens to women, too. Not that they’re really-and-truly switched-off from women, and turn on to men, but they prefer the companionship and the company of men to the company of women. Companionship takes over from sex in later life.”
“I don’t need a companion,” I say; and I give off a laugh, a nervous laugh, which causes him to look more steadily at me, into me, into my thoughts.
“It won’t bother me if you was one,” he says. “Some men are born and some men die without knowing that they are. If they are left-handed, or right-handed. It won’t split no difference in our friendship.”
“I am not so,” I say.
“Really?” he says. I am beginning to regret meeting him. I laugh again, and he becomes more serious. He does not laugh. And I wonder why I have to say that I am not homosexual, and why he would think that I am.
“I treats all kinds o’ therapies. It’s the latest thing, like a fashion. The in-thing in society, men playing they are women. They even make movies about it. But you not queer? No skin off my teeth, you know what I’m saying?” He is not smiling; and the cigar is stuffed into his mouth, between his teeth; and his lips are round, round the cigar, tightly pressing on the cigar; and smoke is coming out, it seems, from his clenched eyes. He looks tough. Menacing. I have never seen him look like this. And it frightens me; and makes me self-conscious, that perhaps, deep down, very deep down, there might be this spectre of evidence to prove his speculation; but what the hell! No! Still, his gaze frightens me; and I try to take my mind off it, and take his mind off the pressing speculation, from what he is thinking, back to his concern about his mysterious son in the Sick Children’s Hospital; perhaps, off anything; and I say, “I had a woman that I loved very much, once; but she …”
“Goddamn!” he says; and his face becomes smooth and warm, and his lips relax, and he looks like a child sucking a large nipple of a feeding-bottle. The tip of the cigar glares and I can smell its strong beautiful aroma.
“It was a bad experience. Once …”
“Tell me about it. In my profession, I have to listen to everything.”
“She is Chinese.”
“You told me about that one, already. But you said she’s dead. Didn’t you tell me she is dead? In the photograph you showed me?”
“She’s not dead.”
“You said she was dead. Goddamn. You sure you’re not talking about the same dead woman? How’re you using ‘dead’?”
“She is very bright and intelligent. A beautiful woman, lovely in a way. She is a refugee. But before that, in Shanghai, she was a law student; and then she became a law student here. Tiananmen Square?”
“Tiananmen Square was a motherfucker. I saw it on CNN. In Europe, I used to walk-around with my personal copy of Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’! Saw the whole thing on CNN. But one thing about Chinese women, those Chinese women I hear, are …”
“I always become closer to her in September, when the leaves change.”
“Didn’t Tiananmen Square take place in November?”
“Always in September. The day we met at a bus stop, on Yonge Street, this very street where I also met you, she was …”
“Are you sure Tiananmen Square didn’t take place in November?”
“… she was wearing a white cotton dress with a yellow scarf round her neck, loose-fitting; you could hardly make out her shape under the dress, but you could see that she had nice calves, the legs of a woman who spends time, lots of time, in dancing, or walking; and I always remember her white dress, that dress I’ll always remember coming down to six inches below her knees. That long white cotton dress, with a sash at the back that was not tied. She wore that white dress as if it was her best dress, as if it was the only good dress she had; and I kept thinking, months after I met her, the way she wore that white dress was as if it was made or bought in her home town, and that she was remembering t
hings when she wore it … perhaps Tiananmen Square.”
“You been Shanghaied, brother! You been took! Obsess.”
“She was taught to do translations in China from Mandarin to English, and she spoke English with an English accent, picked up from listening to the BBC shortwave, a real Oxford-English accent even in China. But why wouldn’t she? In China, before she was a law student, she had all her Chinese translated to English; but she didn’t finish studying law in China, but here at York University. We met the first time fifteen years ago, when she could have been twenty-one, or thirty-one. I could never tell the difference from her face. This beautiful woman who is so bright has something like a computer-mind, and can talk about anything. After we got close we used to walk from my house all the way to the Chinese market, and all over the city; and although that was a long time ago, fifteen years, this is the woman I am walking to meet and waiting for, and hoping to meet when I walk the streets. After all these years … she comes in and out of my life, and in and out of my dreams … all the dreams I dream are dreams about this woman.”
“Is she goddamn dead, or living? I must know. And you must decide. It’s an obsession. Chinese women can do that to a man, if you see what I’m saying. What is the name of this Chinese woman that has fucked-up your mind? She must have a pretty name, and a prettier body, if you see what I am saying. Names is everything when a man’s mind gets fucked-up like this. Names of women. Names of songs that the two o’ you listen to, before you was fucked-up. Delilah? Helen of Troy? Cleopatra? How about Chermadene?”
“We used to take trips every Saturday morning to the Allen Botanical Gardens and to all the other places where they grow exotic plants and flowers, and have plants in hothouses, which is one of the things she loves. Used to love. She loves plants, all kinds, tropical plants, equatorial plants, and knows the names of all these plants, can recite them off the top of her head, in English and in their horticultural names; and in her apartment, which I visited only two times, she has three plants in reddish plastic pots. In her small apartment, all the windows are closed, and the three plants are ignored and almost dead. From lack of water and light and plant food, I tell her. No, she says, from love. You can’t love a flower in this environment. And the plants can’t love you back. She lives in a basement. But does she love plants! In public gardens and city parks and especially in a place out in the suburbs near the Scarborough Bluffs, a hotel with an English name and an English garden which encourages the arts, where artists go, we have walked all these places, to and from. We walk all over the city together, looking for plants and flowers to smell; and one summer afternoon we went to this hotel whose name I cannot remember, and we posed for a picture beside a lion; and then another summer afternoon, I can’t remember the year, I was in my backyard in my garden chasing squirrels from my tomatoes and parsley, which they were devouring, and was using my Black Flag on the wood-ants, when the telephone rang. I did not go to the phone immediately, as a line of five big, black wood-ants stuck together were taking my mind off the phone, and I wanted to kill them first before I went to answer the telephone. The top of the can was stuck. I was transfixed by the quintuplets of ants, and by the damn squirrels which my neighbour feeds dog food to, on an aluminium pie plate. They were eating my beefsteak tomatoes. I had to squirt the ants dead first, and then shoot the squirrels with Black Flag, and blind the sons-o’-bitches. It was quiet after I killed the ants, and peaceful, and I could hear the leaves blowing; and the two squirrels had vanished. And then I thought of the telephone. It was still ringing; so I walked through the house, through the French doors, took up my Scotch on the way into my study where the telephone is. And then it stopped ringing. The room was suddenly still. I could hear the trees in the backyard blowing. I sat down and tried to remember how many times the telephone rang, was ringing and ringing … and ringing … and why I thought of the squirrels and the wood-ants …”
“And you been here, patient-as-ass, listening to all the crap I been talking, while all the time …”
“I never did get up from that chair for hours and hours, thinking of all the calls I have missed in my life. The ice in my Scotch melted, and it turned warm, like soda water with no fizz. And thinking about it now, years later, this thing about time … I am always missing time, time is always passing me; so I sat in that chair for hours and hours without moving, just sitting. Hours and hours passed, and I never rose from that chair. That was fifteen years ago. On the ninth of July, to be exact, fifteen years ago. She was too young at the time, even though she was a woman, in mind and body, to be laden with the burden of matrimonial love. So, I was keeping her, keeping her in her virginity for the right day and the right time.”
“Keeping her virginity? Is it something for you to keep?” John’s eyes widen. I see the confusion in them. And then I see the disappointment. And this turns to disgust. “But, but …,” he begins, “but you tell me before that you …” His exasperation prevents him from going on. “You even requested divine intervention to help you out!” he continues. “You didn’t take it? You didn’t take her?” He drops his shoulders, in a gesture of resignation at the mixed messages I had sent him. “You never had sex with this woman? You didn’t tell me the exact opposite? When you tell me about getting down on your knees and then ask God for five more minutes when you thought paradise was lost?”
“I was keeping her, keeping her in her virginity for the right time …,” I begin to say.
“Fine! Fine, fine!”
“I don’t know why. But I had chosen her. She was the one. Fifteen years when I first started to walk this street, Yonge Street, and looking for this woman. And imagine, in all the time I was sitting down in the chair in the study, ants, you wouldn’t believe it, wood-ants came out in armies and passed me and passed me, going along on their business, while I am sitting there, after the telephone had stopped ringing hours ago. I was always one for walking every day after I stopped working because of an injury. Just an injury. I sued because I had the injury while at work. I don’t like to talk about it, the injury. Suffice to say, it was the kind of injury I could sue for. Not a physical injury. They injured me. They injured me. In a way that never heals … But after that telephone call, I started walking the street, day in, day out, religiously, every day, Yonge Street especially, for another reason and for a kind of atonement; and if anybody, anyone out of the thousands of people who see me walking this same street every day, winter and summer, walking this street, without knowing me, they would surely think I am queer or mad, or going off-in-the-head, which may be a point; so, I leave the house down in a ravine not far from where we are sitting now, and walk up the slight incline, and pass the Main Reference Library, that takes me back to those Saturday mornings when we went into Town to the Public Library. And you know something? I never, I have never gone through those doors of the Main Reference Library in this city! I pass it every day. But never enter. Not even to borrow a book. Or look at the pictures on exhibition, and that is a strange thing for a man who back home lived off books. So, I pass the Main Reference Library every day, on Asquith Avenue, turn left on Yonge Street, pass Bloor, pass St. Mary, Wellesley, Gloucester, Wood, College, McGill, Gerrard, Dundas, and on and on, down Yonge Street to the Lake, right down to the Lake … I walk those goddamn lonely streets, as you would say; and I stare at the people coming towards me …”
“Goddamn! I got it! She lived in Paris! I knew I goddamn knew her! Simone! Nina Simone!”
“Who?”
“The lyrics! The words you just said remind me of a song by Nina Simone! And about your obsession with streets and walking those lonely streets …”
“… and the only thing that happens to me when I walk, the only people that recognize me are people who push little pieces of paper into my hand. I take them and read them when I get back to the house, and I do not throw away any of them; I keep them as bookmarkers, or to write telephone numbers on. One I still carry with me is twelve inches long by five-and-a-quarter, with a
large question-mark, the symbol for a question-mark on the front. ‘The Most Important Question in the World.’ That’s the title. Folded in three, and I read the front page, and opened it, hoping to find the answer as I opened each fold, but it gave no answer. It is only a religious tract about death. It does not give me any answers. So, when I had-first-met her, we used to take this same walk; or I would meet her on the way to my house. For the last five years, every day including Sundays, we took the same route; and sometimes, considering the number of Chinese now living in this city, wherever and whenever I take this walk, I see her face recorded in the faces of all the Chinese women I pass. I see her face; and I see more; and I think I see her, and I am on the point of going up to her, to ask her how she is, and apologize about the telephone call, and explain that I did go to answer it, but I didn’t answer it in time. Her message was not recorded on the answering-machine, and her face is never recorded in the million faces I meet. And then a message came on the tenth, one day after the ninth of July, fifteen years ago; and I thought it was a joke, that it was a joke, a joke that somebody was playing on me, as how some people change their voices on the telephone, and leave messages about false sadness and false joy, and fear. It was one of those messages that came on the tenth of July. And later in that same week, I am standing over her coffin, and there are flowers all around, for she liked flowers; and five of us – her nephew, his wife, an old woman she rented her first room from, the landlord of her basement apartment, and me – five of us are standing around the rectangle of the hole at which I am looking down, in which is her coffin, with a sprig of the white flower in the pattern of the white dress she first-was-wearing when I met her when I would meet her after work at the same bus stop as the first day. I am standing over her as she lies in her coffin, and I see her in her coffin, I see her face, I see her face every day when I pass Chinese women on Yonge Street; and I see her face every day in my dreams; and it is still a beautiful face, and her hair is still beautiful hair, black silk, long and soft as the fingers of waves that come up and that flow back out along the sand on the beach we used to sit on, and look out into the sea, long as the wave which rolls up along that whole section of the beach, her hair was like a …”
The Origin of Waves Page 16