Self

by Yann Martel

  "You're nervous," said Tom.

  "I've" -- pause -- "This" -- pause -- "is my first time." A lapse in saying it, but right away in my mind: "But it's all right."

  I came close to him again and kissed him, my tongue going out.

  He ran his hands over my body. I placed my hands against his chest, his unequivocally male chest.

  He unbuttoned and eased off my blouse. I removed my bra.

  He took his shirt off. There were swirls of black hair. He's a man. This....

  We embraced again, warm skin to warm skin. My nipples were erect and aware of every brush against his chest. His hairs were soft. One of his legs was pressed between mine. I could feel my wetness, could feel that peculiar nag for attention from down there. Would that my heart would stop beating so hard. Would that he would go down on me. He lowered his head to my breasts. He alternately caressed them with his hands, slightly cool, then with his mouth, a jump in temperature.

  I brought a hand down to between his legs and squeezed. It felt hard. Tom pulled away and began to undo his pants. He brought them down with his underwear in one motion and kicked them off. In two motions, his thumbs like hooks, he got rid of his socks.

  I could not take my eyes off what I was looking at. Beneath a small, neat patch of dark, bushy hair stood an erect penis. My breathing was shallow and intense. I mechanically brought my hand out. Surrounded it. Squeezed. Pulled to and fro. It was so warm! Nearly hot. I could no longer stay on my feet. If it wasn't the bed, it would be the floor I collapsed on.

  I quickly removed the rest of my clothes, yanked the top sheet aside and dropped onto the bed. He lay beside me.

  We rolled about in each other's arms, pressing our bodies together, caressing, kissing. I was aware of every touch of his burning erection. I took hold of it again and propped myself up to look at it. I pulled the soft skin back and forth gently, exposing and covering the head.

  "I don't have any condoms," he whispered.

  "Oh. Nor do I."

  My fertility? It was the last thing on my mind. The notion that I might get pregnant seemed unreal. I couldn't even imagine it. Anyway, to stick this thing into me seemed a crazy idea: it was definitely too big to fit comfortably, however wet and craving for attention I was down there, and the pleasure from the proposition seemed dubious. A finger, a tongue -- that was all I needed.

  I was thinking of taking it in my mouth. The very idea sent shivers down my body. In my mouth. His cock. Oh!

  I stopped thinking about it when Tom glided his hand to right where I wanted it. Oh good! I lay back and closed my eyes. I let go of his penis, but slid right up to him so that I could feel it against me.

  I can't say he was outstandingly adept at what he was doing -- a little too fast, too hard, not enough beating around the bush, so to speak -- but in its very imperfection lay the perfection of the moment. It was a male hand, that's what turned me on.

  He stopped. I opened my eyes, alarmed. He couldn't stop now. Not at this point of ache.

  "I'll just go in a little. I promise I won't come."

  "Okay." This held promise too.

  He moved between my legs. He leaned down. I could feel his hard bluntness pushing at me -- too low -- there -- there -- that was the right spot, I thought -- AH! But it hurts!

  It's not like breaking a bone, but to hurt, to tear, where I usually had my most exquisite pleasure made me jump as if I'd been jolted by a power line.

  "It hurts!" I whispered urgently.

  "Sorry. I won't go so deep."

  He played with his inch or so of leeway, backing off when I began to push him away with my arms.

  He eventually withdrew.

  "I'm sorry," I said. I wondered if he might be upset.

  "Oh, don't worry. I didn't mean to hurt you. Man, I'm tired."

  He laughed and flopped down beside me.

  I wanted to do something for him so I thought again of taking him in my mouth. I moved down and took hold of it with my right hand. Up and down I went, lightly. I'd forgotten about that funny line underneath the penis that looks like the seam along which it's been sewn shut. When I squeezed, a clear bead pearled up from the slit.

  I opened my mouth and took him in. At first I tasted me; then not much beyond a faint sour taste. I went about sucking. I liked it, the lewdness aroused me, but it was tempered by difficulty. My teeth were in the way, my lips were soon aching and sometimes I gagged.

  Tom's penis began to go limp. I was disappointed. I looked up at him.

  "Tell me what I should do."

  "It's all right. Here, come here." His voice was friendly and undisappointed, his hands reaching for me. I slid up beside him. "Do you hear the birds?" he added.

  The window above the futon revealed the paling blue of a dying night, with here and there a chirp bringing on the morning. We knelt at the window, which I opened farther. A cool breeze blew against us. The day was developing rapidly, yet with indescribable subtlety. I couldn't remember when I had last seen a day break, with its hazy brightness and its increasingly vivid palette of colours. It's an image that has stayed with me: Tom and I kneeling naked on my futon with our elbows on the windowsill, numb with exhaustion, looking out at the new day. He ran a gently scratching hand over my back. We talked of dressing and going out for a walk and an early breakfast, but our resolve didn't go beyond words. Instead he glanced at my breasts and brought his mouth to them.

  We flopped down onto the bed, covered ourselves and fell into a few hours of fitful sleep. He held me from behind. Even when we were not touching I was aware of his presence. Glad of it, but incapable of sleeping for it.

  In the morning, or rather, later in the morning, we took a shower together, which I liked very much. We kissed until the water turned cold. It felt strange to get dressed, to see Tom disappear behind piece after piece of clothing. And then, our accoutrements of normality back on, to step out of my room as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. The dressed Tom felt like someone else now. I wondered what Sarah would say.

  But there was no one home except for Karen, who rushed up from her basement room and grabbed breakfast on her way to rehearsal. She may have thought that Tom had arrived a few minutes earlier. She may have thought nothing at all.

  We had a coffee and then went to Morrie's for a greasy-spoon breakfast. And then to movies, the last day of Canadian Images.

  Tom and I spent the next week together. In Roetown and in Toronto, which he didn't get to see very often. On one of those days -- I can remember the bed, the room, the circumstances, but not the date -- I lost my virginity, my anatomical virginity, an event which I would qualify as an uncomfortable act of physiology, more than a little painful -- less so than the first try, thanks to a stinking lubricated condom and a coordination of effort, but certainly no source of pleasure. There was blood, too, more than I expected, and even some the next day; it was like having a mini-period. Right after, while Tom lay in dreamy repose, I took a shower, blood trickling down my thighs. I remember thinking, "So there we go. I'm twenty and no longer a virgin," and shrugging to no one but myself.

  My pounding heart being the scribbler of my memories, I remember more clearly meeting Tom, I remember more clearly my first night with him and my last, I remember more clearly walking along Bloor Street with him, holding hands.

  At least the room was memorable. We were staying in a dive of a hotel just off Spadina Avenue. It was shabby, sordid and exciting. It didn't smell, not at all, not one molecule of odour, but in view of the colour and feel of the carpets, the state and style of the furniture, this was suspicious. It was a room that ought to have smelled.

  We stayed in that room for five nights and five lazy mornings. I masturbated Tom several times; I took him in my mouth three or four times in the shower, to slightly improved effect, though he never came; I had my first orgasms with a man thanks to a system I instituted in a few hurried words, whereby a touch downward on his forearm meant a little harder, a touch upward a little gentler; w
e scratched and massaged each other methodically; we spoke volumes and laughed gales; we kissed; and we did it twice more, on the last night and again the next morning.

  After my first experience of intercourse, I was inclined to give it a rest, especially the next day and the day after that and onwards, may the subject simply not arise, thank you, but it, Tom's it, arose all the time, to our mutual pleasure, and eventually, while I was playing Horowitz on Tom's forearm -- fortissimo! ... piano ... piano ... fortissimo! -- he brought up the subject of what we could do with it, and finally, in an advanced state of lascivious dissolution, I thought, Oh hell, let's try it again. How pain and blood can transmute into pleasure, I can't see. It's a pity you don't ejaculate through those nice fingers of yours, but let us deal with that drooling dick before it goes mad with misery. In it goes. Only this time it didn't hurt. No pleasure, still, but no tearing either, no nerves jolting, none of the edgy is-it-nearly-over selfconsciousness. A relaxing of the body and the mind. Just a guy pumping in and out of me, bizarrely. I settled down, moving my legs to get more comfortable. I took in the tawdry room, I day-dreamed a little, I listened to Tom, I ran my hands over his moving bum. This time, when he made his strange, dying noises in my ear, I smiled. I could possibly get into this, if it makes him so happy. Hadn't done anything for me, not really, not like the magic finger-work, not like if he went down on me, which he hadn't yet but I must mention it to him, it would be oh! -- but in a way this slippery contact had done something for me. Something close and intense, that generated heat. And attachment.

  I kissed him and I hugged him with my arms and legs as he lay heavy and still on top of me. We fell asleep. In the morning, it happened again.

  Then he left. Telling me at the station, while we were waiting for his bus to the airport, that, ahem, he didn't mean to hide it from me, ahem, he liked me a lot, but, ahem, he had a girlfriend in Halifax. Not that things were always peachy with her, but, ahem, she was, she existed.

  Oh, that's all right, I said, rushing to his defence, nearly mentioning Ruth, but she wasn't, she didn't exist, not any more, so I repeated, that's all right. The open invitations to stay with each other in faraway Halifax and faraway Roetown were understood to mean "just as friends". Whoever mentioned the word "relationship" anyway? That's all right. He smiled, and when the bus was there he kissed me goodbye on the mouth. And my pounding heart engraved that in my memory, his straight, bee-line kiss for my mouth, lips puckered.

  On the bus back to Roetown I remembered how he had reacted when I had shown him my office, my inner sanctum, my novel. A "Huh" and a look around that bordered on the uninterested. Not one step forward to look more closely at the index cards so that I would have to say, No, no, no and shoo him away in mock horror. And he was a little pompous, taking his Slocum-Pocum self very seriously. And he had never gone down on me, the selfish boor. And who would want to spend a summer in Halifax? Might as well spend it in Belleville.

  When I saw Sarah in the kitchen she smiled slyly and said, "We thought you'd never come back."

  "I'm back."

  "And?"

  "And what?"

  "Well, how was it? Did you have a good time?"

  "It was fine. Interesting exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum."

  Sarah's Martin was another man who took himself very seriously, this time as a hero of the Catholic working class. She told me once that she was completely in love with him. I can see the shake of her head to emphasize the completely, her black silky hair echoing the movement. She would eventually have a child by him, since he didn't care for contraception. We in the house didn't care for Martin. As for Tom, I told myself that I was certainly not in love with him, neither completely nor even a bit. He had only been a week-long frolic. Must get back to my novel.

  A while after, on a late night, I told Sarah about Tom's girl-ahem-friend. She was very nice, said sympathetic words. Thank you, Sarah.

  I had a few more affairs before I met Roger (or rather, met him anew). By "a few more" I mean three. But nothing worth going into. How it came about, what we did -- in each case my heart pounded, but after, in the collapse of fulfilled lust (mostly his), my mind would perk up again, like a parrot when the cloth is thrown off its cage, and it would say to me, "Who is this guy? Do you know him? Do you care to know him? Why is there silence now? Forget it, I say, forget it," and memory would dutifully wipe the slate. What strikes me now is not how much I've forgotten, but how little I care to remember. They were pleasures of an instant, like fireworks. Beyond the lust there was no enchantment, nothing to talk about, nothing to share.

  There is only one image, one urge, that I naturally remember: I'm beneath this really big swimmer guy, as dumb as an ox but with a swimmer's chest covered in blond hair, and it's hot and we're both glistening with sweat and he's so big that I feel quite alone beneath this gorgeous chest, his straight arms like two Corinthian columns, and I'm hanging on to him feeling like a sloth hanging from its Amazonian branch, only with considerably less peace since this swimmer guy is grunting and thrusting in and out of me, right through me, actually, and it's vigorous and fantastic and getting better every second and I'm thinking, "I could really, really get into this, oh yes."

  I was determined to have intimacy again. At night each of Sarah's whimpers seemed to echo in my room, reverberations of my loneliness.

  Summer and the end of the university year came. Students dispersed to home towns. I decided not to travel. I couldn't imagine that I would have the same luck as last time, and my novel gave me the perfect excuse: I would stay in Roetown and finish it. Sarah and I were the only ones to remain in the house. The other rooms we managed to sublet.

  I had known Roger since the first week of first year. Everyone at Strathcona-Milne knew Roger. He was the previous Master of the College and was still very much involved in its affairs. It had been during his mastership that the university considered closing the two downtown colleges and centralizing everything on the main campus. This had provoked the closest thing to armed insurrection in the history of Ellis University. There were meetings, marches, petitions, sit-ins. Barricades were erected around S-M's main building and for a while they were manned day and night. This was meant to be symbolic, but unfortunately for the university administrators the theatre crowd at Ellis was centred at S-M, and they took to building these barricades with revolutionary fervour. They looked like the real thing. You had to get within a few feet of the barbed wire to realize that it was knitting yarn. Students dressed in rag tag pseudo-military uniforms kept vigil and shouted, "Hark! Who goes there? What is your business here?" at the approach of anyone associated with The Enemy, pointing their wooden rifles at the poor enemy's chest. Enemies who were sufficiently vile would be escorted by two "soldiers" who made it their business to be as hilariously obnoxious as possible.

  The one who had done the master-minding, the demanding, the refusing, the urging, in defence of the downtown colleges was Roger. When the university backed down, a cartoon came out in The Gadfly, the student paper, with Roger riding in a chariot dressed as a triumphant Caesar and the university president following behind him in chains. All this had taken place two years before my arrival at Ellis, but its energizing effect on the downtown colleges had been long-lasting. It had even become folklore: during my first year there was a play at Artspace that celebrated the events. The actor who played Roger was made up to look like Che Guevara.

  When my year met Roger he had resumed being an ordinary professor of English literature, specializing in Joseph Conrad, but he was one of those people you seemed to see all the time -- standing talking to someone, walking in and out of this or that building, having a coffee in the dining-room, playing go in the college pub, and so on. Everyone knew Roger.

  Yet, curiously, hardly anyone really knew him, among students at any rate. When I got close to him, I discovered that this putative revolutionary, stormer of the Bastille, trumpeter at the walls of Jericho, guerrilla in the jungles of Bolivia, was in fact an old-fas
hioned aesthete who cared not a jot for any kind of politics. I don't mean anything pejorative by that -- old-fashioned -- only that it came as a surprise. It shouldn't have since, when I got to remembering our conversations, I realized that they had always been about art. My first memory of Roger is of overhearing him talking to someone about Nostromo, which I hadn't read at the time. My first conversation with him was about The Secret Agent; my hesitant quibbling about it was interrupted by his final, "No. It's a perfect novel. I can't think of a single flaw in it. A drama in which the central, motor event is never described, a presence that is an absence, like a stone that provokes ripples but is long gone, an entire construction with at its centre nothing -- I've never seen anything like it." The first step that led to a common bed was when I came upon him in a deserted cafe, musing over a paragraph of Almayer's Folly. And the last time I saw him I was thinking how Kurtz's Intended couldn't have known Kurtz very well if she believed Marlow's lie.

  For that was the beginning, the middle and the end of Roger: Joseph Conrad, ne Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 1857-1924. That was the one strand that twined through his whole existence, from age twelve to forty-nine, for longer than he had known his ex-wife or his kids. Only his parents could claim greater longevity. Roger was one of those lucky people who had found that he could make a living doing what he enjoyed. The author of his boyhood adventure stories in Indiana became the subject of his doctoral study at Oxford became his passport to a life in academia. Roger loved Conrad in ways that changed as he changed. So when he was young he sailed the sea in his armchair with The Nigger of the 'Narcissus,' with Typhoon, with Tales of Unrest, with Victory. Then he matured into Lord Jim, which in time he found strained and a little tiresome to teach, and into The Secret Agent. When I knew him, it was around the key insight of Heart of Darkness -- too well known, too little understood -- and around the monument that is Nostromo and around Conrad himself that his thoughts tended to collect. If there were politics and revolution in Roger's life, they were only those he witnessed in Nostromo and Under Western Eyes. He derived his untested dislike of disorder from Conrad's overtested dislike. Just as humour is absent in Conrad, Roger rarely sought to see things in a humorous way, which is not to say that he was heavy, dour or cheerless, only that laughter was not an exit he favoured. He felt it was a weak catharsis. Roger was serious in a positive sense, as serious as life is serious. He was the first intellectual I met who had little use for irony.