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Authors: Chris Gudgeon

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Greetings from the Vodka Sea (2 page)

BOOK: Greetings from the Vodka Sea
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It was Étienne who encouraged her to take Avram as her lover. He looked on it as a challenge and maintained that, without engaging in such adversity, the human spirit, to use his perfect term, calcified. Of course, she immediately became suspicious. When a woman encouraged her partner to take a lover, it was because she was utterly tired of having him in her bed. But when a man suggested it, it usually meant he was about to sleep (or had slept recently enough that he still felt remorse) with someone else. Étienne sensed her concerns and protested that, with her and his wife, he already had more women that any man could reasonably handle. He assured and almost convinced her that he had only her best interests at heart. In fact, he said, he found the whole idea of her taking a young lover rather erotic.

Now, it's one thing to decide to take on a lover and another thing entirely to actually take that lover on, although in Sondra's experience, the woman always had the upper hand. It was a matter again of subjectivity versus objectivity. Approached by a woman who offers to take him to bed, a man never looks beneath the surface.
Of course she wants to take me to bed,
the man tells himself, regardless of how unappealing he considered himself moments before. A woman in the same circumstance will always ask herself why. Why me? Why now? By the same token, a man has much less capacity for turning a woman down because objectively, based purely on the observable data, it doesn't look good. Does he find her unattractive? Well, surely, after a point, that doesn't matter. Is he afraid he doesn't measure up? Is he a homosexual? Rarely does a man want to explore this subterranean universe, so he almost always takes the easy way out. If a woman asks him to bed he says yes. Society demands it, the fraternity of men demands it, the cock demands it.

But Avram was not so simple. Being an introvert, he was less inclined to be swayed by the forces of society and fraternity, and being grotesquely shy and (as Sondra surmised) ambivalent about his own sexuality, he was disinclined to follow the capering of his sex organ.

“Why don't you take him to one of your little orgies?” Étienne suggested. He was teasing, of course. It was something she noticed that older men often did to younger women, tease them, a subtle way, she supposed, to reiterate their dominance.

“They're not orgies, they're encounter groups. And I'm afraid this boy's ego isn't ready for such an intense experience as that.”

Sondra favoured the direct route. One morning, on the way from her car to her office, she stopped at the fountain and invited Avram to join her for coffee. That's when he did it: he looked directly at her for the first time. That's also when she realized how beautiful he was: brown-black hair which fell into his eyes and nearly reached his shoulders, black eyes, unblemished skin the colour of weak tea, lips as thick and tender as a young woman's, and recognized too that his discomfort (he was visibly embarrassed; his face and ears flushed, his hands shook, his voice quavered as he almost whispered, “No”) enhanced his beauty for her. His vulnerability excited her, and her own aggressiveness in the face of this vulnerability increased. She noticed how her body language changed in response to Avram's passivity. She stood more erect, her shoulders fully back, and her eyes were as unwavering as his were unfocused. And suddenly she understood why men didn't need foreplay: the chase was stimulation enough.

The next morning, he wasn't waiting at the fountain and did not come to class. Sondra began to worry that she'd been too aggressive, too direct. She found herself passing the fountain five or six times that day and the next and had almost given up on seeing him again, perhaps ever, when, later that evening, as she was returning to her car to go home, there he was. Sitting at the fountain, desperately not looking at her. He was in his shirtsleeves and seemed even from a distance to be shivering in the descending cold. He coughed, and, picking up the cue, Sondra went to speak to him again. This time she was more tactful. She'd missed him in class, she said, and had worried that something had happened to him. She told him the class valued his input and managed to make a lot out of a trifling thing he'd once said during a discussion on manic-depressive illness. He coughed again, and Sondra offered him a ride home. Avram sat for a very long time, measuring his frozen breath, before he wordlessly assented. The car ride was predictably quiet. Sondra made an effort to start a conversation, then lapsed into a monologue, then simply turned up Stravinsky on the eight-track. He almost seemed relieved when she shut up. He relaxed in his seat.

“Do you think they'll kill him?” he asked, after a long, long silence.

Sondra was taken aback. She had no idea what Avram was talking about, and she found the question and the way he framed it with silence almost a threat in itself.

“Kill who?”

“James Cross. Do you think the FLQ will kill him?”

Illuminated, Sondra relaxed, but before she could respond (the simple answer was no, but Sondra was prepared to give a much more detailed analysis), Avram stopped her. “I like your car,” he said. “I want to get a car like this someday. I want to get a car exactly like this.”

And that was it. She dropped him off a few minutes later by a rack of student apartments near the bus station. He thanked her very politely, exactly the way, Sondra thought, his mother had taught him. And he looked at her again as he shut the door and kept his eyes on her as she drove off. He stood on the corner and watched as she drove away and did not move until the car was out of sight.

In a note left in a garbage can for the reporters at radio station CKLM (the unfolding crisis was the last great radio news event in the country, perhaps the world), the FLQ took credit for the kidnapping of Cross, a “representative of the old, racist and colonialist British system.” In retrospect, the separatists' demands were realistic: there was no call for the overthrow of a repressive political system, and while they did refer to the goal of “total independence” for Quebec, they clearly held no illusions that this kidnapping would further that end. What they wanted was the release of twenty-three “political prisoners” — men who'd been arrested for a variety of terrorist acts perpetrated by the FLQ over the previous ten years. Men like François Schrim, a Hungarian-born career terrorist and former French Legionnaire, who shot and killed the manager of the International Firearms Company during an attempted robbery, and Robert Levesque, a twenty-nine-year-old plumber who faced a string of convictions including armed robbery and bombings. Along with freedom for their comrades, the kidnappers wanted safe passage to Cuba or Algiers for themselves, the political prisoners and any family members who wanted to join them. They also wanted half a million dollars worth of gold bullion to help finance their new life, calling it a “voluntary tax.”

The Cross ransom note was unsigned, but police already had a very good idea of who was involved in the plot. Central was Jacques Lanctôt, who had been picked up eight months earlier in a rented delivery truck carrying a sawed-off shotgun, a man-sized storage trunk and a press release announcing the never-perpetrated kidnapping of Israeli trade consul Moshe Golan. Lanctôt and his accomplice, charged at the time with possession of a restricted firearm and conspiracy to kidnap, disappeared into Quebec's underworld shortly after they were granted bail. Along with Lanctôt, the police also had their eye on his sister Louise (who did not go to the Cross house) and her husband Jacques Cossette-Trudel (whose father had been named five days before to the National Energy Board by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), Marc Carbonneau and Pierre Seguin. Collectively, they called themselves the Liberation Cell.

In Sondra's estimation, two discoveries had advanced the cause of women's independence above all else: the pill and the Polaroid camera. The pill granted women power over their own reproductive cycle and in an instant turned the traditional patriarchy on its head. Women were now free to enjoy sex without having to worry about its consequences. While Sondra was certain that motherhood was one of the greatest joys a woman could experience, she was equally certain that the demands of motherhood — the burden of taking responsibility for a child — forced women into subservience. Meanwhile, the Polaroid camera was helping women move to the next stage of evolution: for the first time, women could not only create and distribute images of sexuality that appealed to them directly (and specifically, these instant pictures gave every woman the power to be her own pornographer), but they now had the power to objectify men as men had historically objectified women. And that was not necessarily a bad thing, for the key to the liberation of female sexual expression, and therefore the key to the political and socio-economic emancipation of women in general, lay in their ability to objectify men, to see them as sex objects.

It was this political inclination toward Polaroids that led Sondra to pose for Avram. Even at the time she had her reservations but convinced herself that they were hypocritical. In the encounter sessions she led, Sondra often encouraged participants to strip down and photograph one another, literally tearing away their boundaries and baring themselves before the unwavering eye of the camera. It was Sondra's belief that people had to become comfortable with their bodies and with the image of their bodies they carried inside their heads, before they could become comfortable with minds and egos and souls.

So Sondra agreed to pose, although “pose” is an extreme exaggeration. They had only just finished making love for the first time (Avram coming, almost the instant he'd entered her, under the stern watch of Che Guevara ) when he caught her unawares. He'd gotten up on the pretext of going to the washroom, and Sondra saw the flash a moment later. Avram stood like a guilty child as Sondra's eyes adjusted to the light.

“I want . . . I want to have a picture to remember you.”

And that was Sondra's opportunity. On the one hand, she felt violated; on the other, there was a certain charm to his passivity, to his fear. So Sondra did not object and did not, as she easily could have done given the circumstances, the photograph from his hand. Instead, she let him keep it but insisted that he must now pose for her. She made him lie on the bed with his head on the pillow. At first he tried to cover himself with the blanket, but she kicked it aside roughly.

“Put one arm behind your head,” she told him, adding, when he did not immediately respond, “quickly now. And now lift your leg a little. The other leg, please. Just let your foot lie on the bed.”

He seemed willing to comply with her every instruction, and with each order and response she found herself growing more forceful.

“Now touch yourself, with your free hand. Not there!” She leaned down and positioned his hand over his tired cock. “I want you to play with yourself. Close your eyes and play with yourself. And keep it up until I finish taking the picture.”

How she'd finally got him into bed was another story. It took weeks of gentle manipulation to get in a position where she could make her move. Eventually, he allowed her to come up to his apartment. They stood by the doorway for a very long time, but each time she leaned forward to kiss him, he would recoil and turn his head. She would retreat, and he would turn to look at her again with his soft eyes. Advance, recoil, retreat. Advance, recoil, retreat. Finally she'd had enough. She pushed him back against the door and kissed him hard on the lips. When he tried to turn his head, she held his chin firmly with one hand. Soon she pushed her tongue into his mouth, and she could feel his body responding. That's when, and this is the funny part, she picked him up (surprised at her own strength, her own force) and carried him into the apartment. She looked around the barren room and saw, under a huge black-light poster of Che, a thin mattress lying directly on the floor. She dropped him on the mattress, which served as his bed and, no doubt, his couch and kitchen table and work desk, and ordered him to undress. And when he didn't, she started to do it herself.

Sondra did not keep the photograph. It neither aroused nor disturbed her but only de-eroticized the experience. This skinny boy caught in the unflattering shadows was not the beautiful young man she'd taken to bed. She tore up the picture to give the moment entirely back to memory.

Étienne had laughed when she told him about the picture Avram had taken (laughed, that is, not in a condescending way, but with empathy, from the perspective of one who understood completely the pitfalls of taking a lover). He laughed again when she told him he she was going to get it back.

“To the victor go the spoils,” he said, perhaps to tease her, or perhaps because he knew that, at that moment, he needed something elegant to say. And he laughed one more time, almost to himself, and again, not to put Sondra down but in simple appreciation of her adventure.

It was a season for adventure. The Cross kidnapping, the FLQ, the declaration of martial law, not to mention the waves of political, social and sexual liberation sweeping the country, made this Anglo-Saxon enclave where she lived seem almost cosmopolitan, almost dangerous. Everyone knew anything could happen (although certainly nothing would); Toronto — Canada — was growing up. Sondra found herself rather sympathetic to the FLQ. She saw in the kidnappers kindred spirits, not just in the larger political sense, striking a blow against oppression and the parochial status quo and its corporate-military sponsors, who espoused democracy while dictating a rigid social order, but also in the smaller, personal sense. They had come to reclaim what was theirs: their identity, their nationhood, their sense of self. That was her goal too. Both were victims of a conquest of sorts, the only difference was scale. They wanted liberation, the right of self-determination over their own land; she, on a political level, wanted equality and self-determination for womankind, which meant, in large part, the destruction of the artificial borders that define ideas of gender. And on a more personal level, she wanted self-determination over her own image; she wanted her damn picture back.

BOOK: Greetings from the Vodka Sea
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