He'd been good with words, then. He'd had several of his poems published in the university literary magazine, and in two little magazines, one of them not mimeographed. Seeing these poems in print, with his name underneath - he used initials, like T. S. Eliot, to make himself sound older - had given him more satisfaction than he'd ever got out of anything before. But he'd made the mistake of showing one of these magazines to his father, who was lower-middle-management with the Post Office. This had rated nothing more than a frown and a grunt, but as he was going down the walk with his bag of freshly washed laundry, on his way back to his rented room, he'd heard his old man reading one of his free-verse anti-sonnets out loud to his mother, sputtering with mirth, punctuated by his mother's disapproving, predictable voice: "Now John! Don't be so hard on him!"
The anti-sonnet was about Mary Jo, a chunky, practical girl with an off-blonde pageboy who worked at the library, and with whom Richard was almost having an affair. "I sink into your eyes," his father roared. "Old swamp-eyes! Cripes, what's he gonna do when he gets down as far as the tits?"
And his mother, acting her part in their ancient conspiracy: "Now John! Really! Language!"
Richard told himself severely that he didn't care. His father never read anything but the Reader's Digest and bad paperback novels about the war, so what did he know?
By that particular Tuesday Richard had given up free verse. It was too easy. He wanted something with more rigour, more structure; something, he admits to himself now, that not everybody else could do.
He'd read his own stuff during the first set of the evening, a group of five sestinas followed by a villanelle. His poems were elegant, intricate; he was pleased with them. The espresso machine went off during the last one - he was beginning to suspect Max of sabotage - but several people said "Shhh." When he'd finished there was polite applause. Richard sat back down in his corner, surreptitiously scratching his neck. The black turtleneck was giving him a rash. As his mother never ceased telling anyone who might be interested, he had a delicate skin.
After him there was a straw-haired older woman poet from the West Coast who read a long poem in which the wind was described as blowing up between her thighs. There were breezy disclosures in this poem, offhand four-letter words; nothing you wouldn't find in Allen Ginsberg, but Richard caught himself blushing. After her reading, this woman came over and sat down beside Richard. She squeezed his arm and whispered, "Your poems were nice." Then, staring him straight in the eye, she hitched her skirt up over her thighs. This was hidden from the rest of the room by the checked tablecloth and by the general smoky gloom. But it was a clear invitation. She was daring him to take a peek at whatever moth-eaten horror she had tucked away in there.
Richard found himself becoming coldly angry. He was supposed to salivate, jump her on the stairway like some deranged monkey. He hated those kinds of assumptions about men, about dip-stick sex and slobbery, pea-brained arousal. He felt like punching her. She must have been at least fifty.
The age he now is himself, Richard notes dejectedly. That's one thing Selena has escaped. He thinks of it as an escape.
There was a musical interlude, as there always was on Tuesdays. A girl with long, straight, dark hair parted in the middle sat on a high stool, an autoharp across her knees, and sang several mournful folksongs in a high, clear voice. Richard was worrying about how to remove the woman poet's hand from his arm without being ruder than he wanted to be. (She was senior, she'd published books, she knew people.) He thought he might excuse himself and go to the washroom; but the washroom was just a cubicle that opened directly on to the main room. It had no lock, and Max was in the habit of opening the door when you were in there. Unless you turned out the light and pissed in the dark, you were likely to be put on exhibit, brightly lit as a Christmas creche, hands fumbling at your crotch.
He held a knife against her breast,
As into his arms she pressed,
sang the girl. I could just leave, thought Richard. But he didn't want to do that.
Oh Willy Willy, don't you murder me,
I'm not prepared for eternity.
Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.
It was right after this that Selena came on. He hadn't seen her in the room before. It was as if she'd materialized out of nowhere, on the tiny stage, under the single spotlight.
She was slight, almost wispy. Like the singer, she had long, dark hair with a centre part. Her eyes were outlined in black, as was becoming the fashion. She was wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked black dress, over which was draped a shawl embroidered with what looked like blue and green dragonflies.
Oh jeez, thought Richard, who like his father still used the laundered blasphemies of the schoolyard. Another jeezly poetess. I suppose now we'll have more pudenda, he added, from his graduate-school vocabulary.
Then the voice hit him. It was a warm, rich voice, darkly spiced, like cinnamon, and too huge to be coming from such a small person. It was a seductive voice, but not in any blunt way. What it offered was an entree to amazement, to a shared and tingling secret; to splendours. But there was an undercurrent of amusement too, as if you were a fool for being taken in by its voluptuousness; as if there were a cosmic joke in the offing, a simple, mysterious joke, like the jokes of children.
What she read was a series of short connected lyrics. "Isis in Darkness." The Egyptian Queen of Heaven and Earth was wandering in the Underworld, gathering up the pieces of the murdered and dismembered body of her lover Osiris. At the same time, it was her own body she was putting back together; and it was also the physical universe. She was creating the universe by an act of love.
All of this was taking place, not in the ancient Middle Kingdom of the Egyptians, but in flat, dingy Toronto, on Spadina Avenue, at night, among the darkened garment factories and delicatessens and bars and pawnshops. It was a lament, and a celebration. Richard had never heard anything like it.
He sat back in his chair, fingering his patchy beard, trying as hard as he could to find this girl and her poetry trivial, overdone and pretentious. But he couldn't manage it. She was brilliant, and he was frightened. He felt his own careful talent shrivelling to the size of a dried bean.
The espresso machine did not go off once. After she'd finished there was a silence, before the applause. The silence was because people didn't know what to make of it, how to take it, this thing, whatever it was, that had been done to them. For a moment she had transformed reality, and it took them a breath to get it back.
Richard stood up, pushing past the bared legs of the woman poet. He didn't care any more who she might know. He went over to where Selena had just sat down, with a cup of coffee brought to her by Max.
"I liked your poems," he managed to get out.
"Liked? Liked?" He thought she was making fun of him, although she wasn't smiling. "Liked is so margarine. How about adored?"
"Adored, then," he said, feeling like an idiot twice over - for having said liked in the first place, and for jumping through her hoop in the second. But he got his reward. She asked him to sit down.
Up close her eyes were turquoise, the irises dark-ringed like a cat's. In her ears were blue-green earrings in the form of scarabs. Her face was heart-shaped, her skin pale; to Richard, who had been dabbling in the French Symbolists, it evoked the word lilac. The shawl, the darkly outlined eyes, the earrings - few would have been able to pull it off. But she acted as if this was just her ordinary get-up. What you'd wear any day on a journey down the Nile, five thousand years ago.
It was of a piece with her performance - bizarre, but assured. Fully achieved. The worst of it was that she was only eighteen.
"That's a lovely shawl," Richard attempted. His tongue felt like a beef sandwich.
"It's not a shawl, it's a tablecloth," she said. She looked down at it, stroked it. Then she laughed a little. "It's a shawl now."
Richard wondered if he should dare
to ask - what? If he could walk her home? Did she have anything so mundane as a home? But what if she said no? While he was deliberating, Max the bullet-headed coffee hack walked over and put a possessive hand on her shoulder, and she smiled up at him. Richard didn't wait to see if it meant anything. He excused himself, and left.
He went back to his rented room and composed a sestina to her. It was a dismal effort; it captured nothing about her. He did what he had never before done to one of his poems. He burnt it.
Over the next few weeks Richard got to know her better. Or he thought he did. When he came into the coffee-house on Tuesday nights, she would greet him with a nod, a smile. He would go over and sit down, and they would talk. She never spoke about herself, her life. Instead she treated him as if he were a fellow professional, an initiate, like herself. Her talk was about the magazines which had accepted her poems, about projects she'd begun. She was writing a verse play for radio; she would be paid for it. She seemed to think it was only a matter of time before she'd be earning enough money to live on, though she had very little conception of how much enough would be. She didn't say what she was living on at the moment.
Richard found her naive. He himself had taken the sensible course: with a graduate degree he could always make an income of some sort in the academic salt-mines. But who would pay a living wage for poetry, especially the kind she wrote? It wasn't in the style of anyone, it didn't sound like anything else. It was too eccentric.
She was like a child sleepwalking along a roof-ledge ten storeys up. He was afraid to call out in warning, in case she should wake, and fall.
Mary Jo the librarian had phoned him several times. He'd put her off with vague mumbles about overwork. On the rare Sunday when he still turned up at his parents' house to do his laundry and eat what his father called a decent meal for once, he had to endure the pained scrutiny of his mother. Her theory was that he was straining his brain, which could lead to anaemia. In fact he was hardly working at all. His room was silting up with unmarked, overdue student papers; he hadn't written another poem, another line. Instead he went out for gummy egg sandwiches or glasses of draught beer at the local beverage room, or to afternoon movies, sleazy double features about women with two heads or men who got changed into flies. Evenings he spent at the coffee-house. He was no longer feeling jaded. He was feeling desperate.
It was Selena who was causing this desperation, but he had no name for why. Partly he wanted to get inside her, find that innermost cave where she hid her talent. But she kept him at a distance. Him, and in some way everyone else.
She read several times. The poems were astonishing again, again unique. Nothing about her grandmother, or about snow, or about childhood; nothing about dying dogs, or family members of any kind. Instead there were regal, tricky women, magical, shape-shifting men; in whom, however, he thought he could recognize the transposed outlines of some of the regulars from The Bohemian Embassy. Was that Max's white-blond bullet head, his lidded ice-blue eyes? There was another man, a thin intense one with a moustache and a smouldering Spanish look that set Richard's teeth on edge. One night he'd announced to the whole table that he'd caught a bad case of crabs, that he'd had to shave himself and paint his groin blue. Could that be his torso, equipped with burning wings? Richard couldn't tell, and it was driving him crazy.
(It was never Richard himself though. Never his own stubby features, his own brownish hair and hazel eyes. Never even a line, about him.)
He pulled himself together, got the papers marked, finished off an essay on the imagery of mechanism in Herrick which he needed in order to haul himself safely from this academic year into the next one. He took Mary Jo to one of the Tuesday poetry evenings. He thought it might neutralize Selena, like an acid neutralizing an alkali; get her out of his head. Mary Jo was not impressed.
"Where does she get those tatty old clothes?" she said.
"She's a brilliant poet," said Richard.
"I don't care. That thing looks like a tablecloth. And why does she do her eyes in that phoney way?"
Richard felt this like a cut, like a personal wound.
He didn't want to marry Selena. He couldn't imagine marriage with her. He could not place her within the tedious, comforting scenery of domesticity: a wife doing his laundry, a wife cooking his meals, a wife pouring his tea. All he wanted was a month, a week, a night even. Not in a motel room, not in the back of a car; these squalid venues left over from his fumbling youth would not do. It would have to be somewhere else, somewhere darker and infinitely more strange. He imagined a crypt, with hieroglyphics; like the last act of Aida. The same despair, the same exultation, the same annihilation. From such an experience you would emerge reborn, or not at all.
It was not lust. Lust was what you felt for Marilyn Monroe, or sometimes for the strippers at the Victory Burlesque. (Selena had a poem about the Victory Burlesque. The strippers, for her, were not a bunch of fat sluts with jiggling, dimpled flesh. They were diaphanous; they were surreal butterflies, emerging from cocoons of light; they were splendid.)
What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not.
By now it was summer, and the university and the coffee-house were both closed. On rainy days Richard lay on the lumpy bed in his humid, stifling room, listening to the thunder; on sunny ones, which were just as humid, he made his way from tree to tree, staying in the shade. He avoided the library. One more session of sticky near-sex with Mary Jo, with her damp kisses and her nurse-like manipulations of his body, and especially the way she sensibly stopped short of anything final, would leave him with a permanent limp.
"You wouldn't want to get me knocked up," she would say, and she was right, he wouldn't. For a girl who worked among books, she was breathtakingly prosaic. But then, her forte was cataloguing.
Richard knew she was a healthy girl with a normal outlook. She would be good for him. This was his mother's opinion, delivered after he'd made the mistake - just once - of taking her home with him to Sunday dinner. She was like corned beef, cottage cheese, cod-liver oil. She was like milk.
One day he bought a bottle of Italian red wine and took the ferry over to Wards Island. He knew Selena lived over there. That at least had been in the poems.
He didn't know what he intended to do. He wanted to see her, take hold of her, go to bed with her. He didn't know how he was going to get from the first step to the last. He didn't care what came of it. He wanted.
He got off the ferry and walked up and down the small streets of the island, where he had never been. These were summer homes, cheap and insubstantial, white clapboard or pastel, or sided with insulbrick. Cars were not permitted. There were kids on bicycles, dumpy women in swimsuits taking sunbaths on their lawns. Portable radios played. It was not what he'd had in mind as Selena's milieu. He thought of asking someone where she lived - they would know, she'd stand out here - but he didn't want to advertise his presence. He considered turning around, taking the next ferry back.
Then, off at the end of one of the streets, he saw a minute one-storey cottage, in the shade of two large willows. There had been willows in the poems. He could at least try.
The door was open. It was her house, because she was in it. She was not at all surprised to see him.
"I was just making some peanut-butter sandwiches," she said, "so we could have a picnic." She was wearing loose black cotton slacks, Oriental in tone, and a sleeveless black top. Her arms were white and thin. Her feet were in sandals; he looked at her long toes, with the toenails painted a light peach-pink. He noted with a wrench of the heart that the nail polish was chipped.
"Peanut butter?" he said stupidly. She was talking as if she'd been expecting him.
"And strawberry jam," she said. "Unless you don't like jam." Still that courteous distance.
He proffered his bottle of wine. "Thanks," she said, "but you'll have to drink it all by yourself."
"Why?" he said. He'd intended this to go differently. A re
cognition. A wordless embrace.
"If I ever started I'd never stop. My father was an alcoholic," she told him gravely. "He's somewhere else, because of it."
"In the Underworld?" he said, in what he hoped was a graceful allusion to her poetry.
She shrugged. "Or wherever." He felt like a dunce. She went back to spreading the peanut butter, at her diminutive kitchen table. Richard, wrung dry of conversation, looked around him. There was only the one room, sparsely furnished. It was almost like a religious cell, or his idea of one. In one corner was a desk with an old black typewriter, and a bookshelf made of boards and bricks. The bed was narrow and covered with a swath of bright purple Indian cotton, to double as a sofa. There was a tiny sink, a tiny stove. One easy chair, Sally-Ann issue. A braided, faded rug. On the walls there were no pictures at all.
"I don't need them," she said. She'd put the sandwiches into a crumpled paper bag and was motioning him out the door.
She led him to a stone breakwater overlooking the lake, and they sat on it and ate the sandwiches. She had some lemonade in a milk bottle; they passed it back and forth. It was like a ritual, like a communion; she was letting him partake. She sat cross-legged, with sunglasses on. Two people went by in a canoe. The lake rippled, threw off glints of light. Richard felt absurd, and happy.
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