“Why not find out for yourself?” I turned my head, and just as quickly she looked away, pretending to be studying the potted plants in the restaurant. She was sitting near two large green plastic pots of philodendron and yucca. I could not tell if these plants were made of plastic too. I pretended I was interested in indoor plants. Beside me were a benjimena ficus and a spider plant. A taxicab had just stopped outside the large picture window of the restaurant. I saw the plants move in the windshield, as the driver improved on his parking. And in the mirror there was a peace lily and a poinsettia, immediately behind me. I had never noticed these plants in all the weeks of sitting there, watching these women come and go. But now that I was aware of them, they gave the place a softer feeling, almost a romantic feeling, in spite of the cold light from the fluorescent cylinders. And they made the women more appealing; and made the restaurant like a sitting room in an apartment. The fragrance of freshly cut flowers, gladioli with colours raging like flames and yellow roses and pink carnations, and the smell of the restaurant’s hastily brewed coffee had the pungency of espresso. The chairs became soft and the arborite and the swivel and the metal became stuffed soft cushions and the chairs had backs against which I could lean and observe what was happening to me. She got up from the slot machine, snapped the wire aerial back into place, put the telephone back into her bag.
She was wearing white tonight. I have no defense against that colour. Nurses and girls going to their first communion, nuns in the hot West Indies, and brides who have not tried out the closeness of sex before their nuptials, doctors who are women, and who dress in white, have always extracted from me an obedience to their demands and orders, to their prayers and missives, to their needles jammed unrelentingly into my arms, whirring machines against my teeth, as I sit obediently in their chairs. For better and for worse: white dominates me.
And now this woman, standing before me, amongst the growing plants and those that could grow no more because they were delivered full-grown, and in plastic; she, in a pair of shorts made to look like panties, edged in lace, and fitting like an extra skin that rode on her hips with each step she took in careful measured enticement. On her wrist, a large black strap containing a watch that deep-sea divers, explorers, and navigators of airplanes use. I could not tell the time. The numerals were in Roman. A soft gold heart, in the cruel and sharp fluorescent light, swung at her throat. It was attached to thread-like links of gold. Her breasts were half-covered in white lace, worked into the top of her outfit, and that too was made of white, soft cotton. It was oppressive, irredeemably seductive.
When I recovered from the strong presence of her perfume and her body, and moved my eyes through the urging of her gait, her movement, her stride, her saunter, her walk closer to my table, I saw her legs. They were made more appealing by the long-legged white boots of patent leather, soft as the condom that had slipped out of her purse. Now, she is before me. Now, she is almost touching, close. Now, she is the scent of Evening in Paris, which is just a way of saying that she is overpowering me.
“I’m sitting beside you,” she said, placing both hands on her hips the way a woman does when she wants to sit, when she is wearing a dress made from a sheath of silk. “I’m going to sit down with you. Do you mind?”
“What’s the difference between one woman who make you pay for sex, cash on the line, and a woman who don’t, but makes you pay?”
“The difference?”
“Name one.”
“Well, for one thing....”
“Name one.”
“I’m trying to think.”
“While you’re thinking, let me tell you what the differences are.”
This was many years ago, in the West Indies; and I cannot even remember with whom I was speaking. However....
I was so nervous and self-conscious that when we crossed the parking lot, cluttered with taxis and their drivers, who spoke no English, I was so aware of their looks of acclaim and conquest that I could not decide whether we should walk on the north side of the short street to my home, or on the side where the senior civil service woman lived. Outside Mr. Tasty Homeburgers, which I had never tasted, I paused to make up my mind. On the north side, lived a lawyer. Beside him, a doctor, an actor, an invalid, a psychiatrist, a businessman of Columbian business, a millionaire who got jobs for temporary bums and short-term unemployed, a jet pilot of the Canadian Armed Forces flying between here and Bosnia, and then my house. If I should walk with her on the south side, I would pass all those cluttered but spying houses that reached up into the sky, higher than the maple trees that grew tall and silent below their prying windows. The house with the senior civil servant woman, then two that housed men and women halfway between society and prison and the mental institution on College Street; past four with tall windows through which they could peer at the parade of men buying women; past one from which no living person ever emerged, but where the newspaper boy pelted the door with his afternoon rolled paper, and then the parking lot that belonged to Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. This lot was always empty, always unsafe under the blazing gaze of a spotlight that chased men who chased women; and some who could not afford a room in the nearby Journey’s End hotel. We walked in the middle of the road.
She placed her hand in mine. I could feel the warmth, and the stickiness; and I had to decide whose anxiety was more telling. She walked with a jaunty bounciness which made me unhappy. It said to me that she was glad I was with her; that she had caught me; not in those terms, but the excitement in her walk made me feel there was a conquering satisfaction in her jauntiness. I started to wonder if this was the impression she gave off each time one of those cars I’d seen cruising the street stopped and they conducted the fast, almost wordless transaction. I was still nervous. And I had not even fantasized what I was going to do, and have done to me. This dramatically beautiful woman, whose perfume had struck me in the face, I could not make up my mind about her.
My hand trembled at the wrought iron gate, so I tried with my left hand. It was no better. She shunted me, aside, gently, and on her toes (she was taller than me), and without noise, she opened the gate.
“Gimme the key,” she said. I felt she felt we were old friends. I liked her self-assurances. “You’re too nervous,” she added. I hated her self-confidence. But I gave her the key, and was about to tell her to wait, because there was an alarm, when she said, with the same casualness, “Take off the alarm first. I don’t want the cops coming!”
Back in the West Indies, we sat under street lights at night, or under sandbox trees during the heat of the day and the heat of our imaginations, and talked about women. They were always older women. And an older women was any women more than five years our senior. I remembered our conclusions and realized the danger I had got myself into.
“Was it last Friday, or Saturday?” She wondered aloud. “It was Saturday, because I had my first coffee break in the restaurant around ten, and then I had to come right here, across the street, to go to my car, ’cause this bastard was giving me, was trying to give me a hard time, the son-of-a-bitch! So I had to get my piece. I was parked right there. In front of your house, and I could see you from the road. You should close your curtains. People can see you from the street. Or turn the lights off.” She gave a short chuckle. In her laughter, I was thrown back over the past few days, and there I was returning home with five bottles of red wine and champagne; lugging the large plastic bag of laundry from the cleaners, opening the door about five times to welcome guests, guiding them later into the same parking lot she was talking about; and eventually, at three in the morning, mounting the stairs alone, peeping through the curtains to see if there was anyone standing in the shadow thrown by the young maple tree. I could not remember if the light was left on, last Saturday night.
“And I was scared as hell, in case you were a cop, and I was carrying my piece. But I checked you out through my old boy friend. He’s a fucking cop. So, I knew you were clean.”
We were insid
e the hallway, and I was still nervous, more nervous: her intelligence connections, her ability to order things which were confused, scattered, unnerved me. “Tell me something,” she said, wedging one heel under the other heel of the white boot, slipping it off, and tossing it under the winter coats on the pegs, below the shelf with the scarves and the gloves. “Tell me something. Would you tell me the truth if I asked you? What are you really doing in the restaurant night after night, sitting, pretending you’re not checking us out? We see these things. We got to. You’re like those men we see watching us all the time, and can’t make up their goddamn minds about what they want.” She slipped the other boot off. With a fling of her foot, it landed beside the first one. She pointed at two imitation leather ladies’ Wellingtons that had been left behind several months ago by a friend. That’s what I told her, “Just forgotten by a friend,” and she made herself comfortable.
I went back to those days under the sandbox tree, when we’d declared our intimate knowledge of these things in fantasy and in invention. “You can’t indulge in foreplay,” Mickey said, who had an older brother who was a seaman, and who had read books from the adults section in the Public Library. He knew everything about the anatomy of a woman, mentioning the names of private parts, the names of menstrual periods and the causes of those periods, and making us uneasy and queasy with his technical language. She stood up. I was nervous and could hardly talk. When she brushed by me in the hallway, walking in her bare feet, she was taller than I was. Then she sat in a chair, her legs relaxed, spread-eagled before me, and I could see lace and the thick belt, like the belts weight-lifters use, and when I looked up, my eyes met more lace. White. And there she was, this young woman, in my house, dressed in white, with the youthfulness of her body before me, for me to do what I liked.
“Am I sitting in your favourite chair?”
“I don’t have any favourite chair.”
“But which chair do you sit in?”
“I sit in them all.”
“You must sit in one more oftener, then.”
“This one,” I said, standing beside a red chair.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?”
I was going to say that since I was the only person who lived in the house, I had no favourite chair. But I was too nervous.
“So, what you want? What’s it gonna be?” She glanced at her explorer’s watch. “What’d you want?”
“Could we just sit and talk?”
“Talk?”
“Would you like some coffee?”
“You have Chinese tea?”
She got up and went into the kitchen, and soon I could hear the sound of things indicating her efficiency. I was beginning to like her.
Mickey had warned me of this years ago. “The most worst thing in the whirl,” Mickey had said, eating with flourish a slice of coconut sweet bread, “the most serious thing in the whirl that man can do, is to tell a woman who picks fares, he want to talk and not to foop!” It sounded so simple that I understood now that I had perhaps brought her into my house under false pretenses.
“Mugs, or teacups?” She sounded the way I imagined a wife would sound, her voice softer than it had been while we walked the dark street, making the house itself softer, and the atmosphere in the sitting room, the dim lights, dim from their forty watt bulbs, just like a room I had seen in a movie, a salon, except that room had thick curtains made of velvet, fleshy and soft as a leaf from the spinach vine in our kitchen garden. The curtains in my house are transparent.
We’ll use cups. I love bone china. Got any lemon? Oh, here it is! You sure you don’t have some broad living here with you? Or some broad from Molly Maid, cleaning for you? I can smell a woman’s presence in this place! You sure?” There was no shrill to her voice, not like the night when she had stormed into the restaurant and said, “What the fuck!”
She sat down, and again placed one leg over the arm of the chair, and I was exposed to all the beauty and the touch and the beating seduction she knew her thighs would bring me. And as she settled in that position, holding the teacup and saucer in one hand, and a cigarette in the other, I found myself sitting forward, leaning towards her, as a student is attentive to a stimulating teacher. Her eyes were constantly moving. From the carpet to the tables to the books that surrounded us, as the plants in the restaurant had provided a surrounding softness to the glare of the fluorescent tubes.
“You read all these books? You like books? I don’t read books. I hardly read at all. What I do is watch television.”
I was going to tell her that the books were placed in their shelves with precision, and arranged and rearranged by me almost every day, particularly at night, when the house is quiet; and I was going to tell her that it was cheaper to buy pre-cut boards from College Lumber and make the shelves myself than it was to decorate with wallpaper and to choose, but she did not give me time to say these things, she was talking again.
“You know what I really enjoy watching?”
“Movies?”
I just got that in.
“What I really dig doing,” she said, “is to watch a movie in French, especially late at night. When I come off my shift. I mean, when I come off the street.”
“Did you learn French in school?”
“I didn’t take French in high school. And in two semesters of college, I didn’t take French, either. I don’t speak French. But I like watching movies in French, with the sound off. I find it so exciting. I can sit there and imagine what they are saying. And follow the story. It’s nothing. It ain’t no big thing to watch a movie when you don’t understand the language. All movies have the same plot. A man kills a woman. A woman kills a man. They get into bed. They fuck. They like it. Or they don’t. It’s like life. That’s all it is. No big thing.”
“What kind of movies?”
“French. Like I said. Sitting there, in my housecoat, with my feet up, and watching. And a can of beer. Sometimes I turn the sound up, and listen to the words. But I don’t understand one damn thing. But I’ve learned a few words by watching so many movies in French. Late at night, when I get home, I just sit there watching a movie by that fellow with the thick glasses who tells weird jokes. You know who I mean?”
“I know who you mean.”
“Him!”
“Yes.”
“So, what you want me to do?”
“A drink?”
“Nothing hard, though. My shift’s not....”
“Beer? Or wine?”
“Never drink beer, except when I’m watching a movie in French. Wine for me.”
“Red, or white?”
“No white unless it’s with fish!”
“Bordeaux, or?”
“You got a good Sauvignon...?”
I was watching her legs. She was relaxed. She had taken a comb out of her hair, and her hair fell freely upon her shoulders. She was passing her fingers through it, spreading it out, the action as sensual as I imagined it would be if she were pulling the thin soft silkiness of pantihose over her feet and legs and thighs. My eyes followed the strokes she made through her thick hair, and I felt the passion rise within my body, and it was mixed with anger and frustration, and not a little embarrassment. She was not caressing herself the way I have seen some women pass their hands over their breasts, squeezing the nipples a little to stimulate them and the eyes of the man watching; or how I have seen some women pass their hands over their thighs, slowly, slowly, rubbing faster and then faster still, and slapping them; or even as I have seen some women pass their fingers through their pubic hair to their vaginas, even opening the lips, and doing little stimulating, destroying things to a man’s balance. All of these things that women do, I have seen in movies. No. It was not like this. She was just drawing her hands through her hair, a natural function, and that naturalness made it more enticing and betraying and seducing.
“Let me pour the wine.” And she was like a woman who had not yet indulged in that ancient practiced custom, that ancient function o
f preening, the preparatory part of the ritual before the bath. “I can find the glasses. I already saw the wine in the rack.”
I was almost beside myself, doubtful of my manhood, convinced I was a prude, someone stunted by birth at birth, someone who had swallowed too many pages of preaching in Sunday school, at matins and at Prayers in high school, someone who had listened, secretly, and out of the hearing of mother and older boys and girls, to the technical talk of Mickey who perhaps had given us too much instruction in this kind of thing, alarmed that I was about to lose my manhood, that raw, undefinable thing that told me, without logic, without instruction, what a man was supposed to do, if he was going to continue calling himself a man. “You ain’t no blasted man, man!” A curse levelled at me many times by Mickey. And it was said also, at times of anger, by my mother. Now, in this house, so many miles from that street lamp and from the overhanging leaves of the sandbox tree, I was sitting in a house with a woman whose presence in the house was the consequence of the myth that I was a man. Am a man.
Outside, a car passed, straining the gears. A siren followed. When the siren passed, she sat upright for a moment, I saw her head tilt toward the restaurant where we had been sitting. Then, nothing at all happened. I thought I could hear the wind. We were on the second bottle of wine. I did not know what we were drinking. Both legs thrown over the arm of the chair, the heavy black leather belt she had worn was buckled around her neck. She had taken her large watch off. And it lay beside her on the end table. The necklace with the heart-shaped drop of gold, remained round her throat.
There Are No Elders Page 9