Maidenhead (12 page)

‘I mean, where would it have been better for Elijah to piss?’

‘I’m not naive, Myra.’

‘What’s wrong with some piss? It comes out of everyone.’ I was trying to make her laugh. The ravine was electrically green. ‘I mean, the shock of it shocked me. Fuck, come on, Lee. Why are you upset?’

Lee rolled another joint. ‘You didn’t
ask
to be pissed on.’

‘Yeah, so? Come on. How the fuck are you supposed to ask someone to piss on you?’

Lee sucked in like a horse. ‘A woman can ask for anything she wants.’

She didn’t pass me the joint.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t know ... ’

Lee looked at me, eyes bulging, fluorescent. ‘You don’t know what?’

‘I found out I liked it even if I didn’t ask for it.
You
said that. You’re the one who said it was okay for me to want these kinds of things to be true.’

‘Well, that’s not what I was saying. That’s not what I meant.’

‘Can I have some, please?’

Lee held in her smoke for as long as she could and then breathed it out slowly, like the line of a song in the air.

‘You didn’t know this guy’s motives, am I right? I mean, you still don’t know why he did it. Not just the piss, but like why did this guy want to be with you in his place when he already had a girlfriend. What about her? I mean she was there, right?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t lie, come on.’

‘No. She wasn’t there when he pissed on me.’

Lee finally passed me the joint, shrivelled and halved. I smoked and I thought.

Smoking was good for thinking. I had scrubbed my whole face for Elijah with chamomile soap. I still used toothpaste on the last little bumps on my cheek. Lee had never commented on either my cheek or my makeup. My father, who’d come up from his lair in the basement for takeout, had coughed in shock when he saw me without makeup. ‘I told your mother you had to go to the doctor about that,’ he said. ‘No one ever listens to me.’

‘I went to Bernhard
twice
,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t hurt anymore.’

Then my father the zombie surprised me. ‘Your friend Jen called here,’ he said. ‘She told me about some kind of disturbance outside your school. She said a man was with you, a man she didn’t know.’

‘God. I can’t believe she called you.
She’s
the disturbance.’

‘She was worried, Myra.’

My dad was drowning in his pyjama pants.

‘Myra, listen. Your friend was crying on the phone. She said that the man threatened her and Charlene.
Who
are they talking about?’

I started laughing. Like, all of a sudden I’m going to tell my dad things? Just because my mom’s not here he wants to have a relationship?

‘Next time Jen calls, you can tell her to mind her own fucking house.’ I wasn’t worried about swearing around him now.

My father stamped his foot on the carpet. It was the most alive I’d seen him in a while.

I tried to hold in my smoke like Lee, to control it like she did coming out, but I coughed and coughed and it all came out flat.

‘You know, I had this feeling that first time we met that you were going through something really heavy,’ Lee said. ‘Aaron did too. I mean, he’s really discerning. He’s an autodidact. He only likes girls with brains.’

I handed back the J to Lee. A dog barked somewhere far off.

‘This is what I think,’ Lee said. Then she waited for silence, until a buzzing sound stopped. ‘Girls are completely naturally receptive. Someone so receptive is easy to be silenced. I mean, our openness can get fucking crushed.’

‘You know what just occurred to me?’

‘What?’

‘Birds don’t chirp at night.’

‘Fuck, man. You’ve got to speak up with guys, Myra. It’s frustrating. You’re allowed to speak up, you know. Fucking
give
it to them.’

I wasn’t tough like Lee was. I wasn’t as blunt or succinct. Being stoned with her in the ravine made me feel shy but poetic, like I could light a match inside myself and see what it was that I even wanted to ask for.

‘I was willing in that motel room, you know. I was open like a book.’

‘Yeah?’ Lee seemed impressed for a moment. ‘Well, I think some of us are even more open than that.’

I knew what she was talking about. Lee and Wils were best friends and lovers. From the little I’d seen, their relationship seemed really open, like they could tell each other anything. It wasn’t like how I’d seen Jen be with her boyfriends, coy and always scheming. The problem for me was that I didn’t want Aaron. I wanted Elijah. I wanted to be pissed on. I wanted to enact all my porn.

I’d be more open than a book too. My spine would crack, I’d fall out in halves.

I wanted to say that to Lee, but the moment had passed.

§

I walked into Filmore’s Hotel, a four-storey brick building with a painted-black front. In the windows, oblong, hung thick orange curtains. There were seagulls yelling at the edge of the roof.

The reception was empty inside, enclosed in glass. An orange couch with an ashtray beside it was frayed at the bottom and cloud-shape stained.

Filmore’s was in the east end of the city, near the place where the streetcar tracks curved. A car had slowed down as I walked up to the hotel and a man rolled down his window on the passenger side: ‘You need a lift?’ The guy was older, with a beard, he looked like a dentist or something. I was wearing my shortest pink skirt, my white boots, my jean jacket.

‘I don’t need a lift, thanks.’

I was practising my practice, Lee’s practice, of saying what I was thinking. Of being succinct, ‘giving it’ to men. You are supposed to ask for what you need, Lee had said. What do I need? I need this man to drive off and leave me alone. I need to be inside the hotel. I need to see my beautiful Elijah, a musician who I met in Key West. I need to be dirty for him on my knees.

I am asking to lose my virginity.

I walked past the reception, up two flights of carpeted stairs and down a nicotine-stinked hallway of painted brown doors. Every door had these longish Y-shaped gold handles and a tiny ringed eye in the centre for seeing out. A pattern of cigarette burns struck the wall outside Room 316. At the end of the hallway there was a fire exit and a grey windowpane. I walked the whole length of the hallway to get to his room, 303.

I knocked once. No one answered. The Y-shaped gold handle had a slit in the centre. I was about to knock again.

Elijah opened. His hair was out of his turban, it was electric, in all four directions. He was half-naked, a pair of blue underwear shorts. He looked ready for this. I felt my uncovered cheek. It was finally time and I wanted to scream: I’m ready I’m ready I’m ready for this!

‘I can’t believe you came here,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually travel all this way up here and I was waiting for you, I waited for you!’

I felt like a child, so serious and eager, finally asking for what I wanted.

‘I seriously, seriously never wanted to do anything with anyone until we saw each other again, I mean, I want to come in, let me in, I want to come in there and see you!’

Elijah touched his chest, smiling.

‘She ready?’ A voice croaked from inside the room.

I took a step backwards. That woman was here.

(GAYL: Sorry for interrupting. But yeah, that was me. I was there with my man in your sin-infested city. We hitchhiked all the way. I didn’t realize you Canadians were wallowing in sin.)

‘Who is that?’

‘My girl Gayl,’ Elijah said. Now his smile felt mean.

I turned to go back down the hallway. I felt my thighs under my skirt. ‘I thought you were going to come up alone!’

Elijah came out after me, walking faster than my running. At the dirty cigarette burns he got me and pushed my back up against the wall. The ceiling was buckling. It felt too close to my head.

‘Don’t you leave,’ Elijah whispered, his face right up in mine.

‘But I thought you were going to come up alone!’ I was crying, not looking at him.

‘I came this far.’

‘I thought you wanted to see me!’ I was really trying to wrench myself away.

‘I did. I did. I like what I see.’ He was blurry. His palms pinned my shoulders.

‘You lied. You said you wanted to see me and touch me.’

‘Come back to our room.’

‘No!’ I was struggling but he was stronger than me. Elijah dropped his head into my neck. He rubbed his sharp locks on me, butting forward. I squirmed around and he was sweating and shushing my noises or whatever they were.

‘I’m here,’ he whispered. ‘It’s okay, I’m right here.’

But I squealed because I was choking. The necklace he made me became too tight. I tried to push him off me so I could scream. Hot and red from not breathing, I felt Elijah’s finger. He reached into the space where the leather cut my throat. My talisman against violence. He ripped it right off. It pinged against the wall. When a talisman breaks into pieces it’s a terrible sign. I wanted to scream for my wayward mother. Elijah put his hand on my mouth. An old woman stuck her head out into the hallway to see what was going on.

‘You have to shut up,’ Elijah said calmly.

My Rastafarian talisman against violence was gone.

I had a man’s salty palm on my mouth. I couldn’t keep my voice asking for what I needed strong.

LEE:
Shit.
Now it’s my turn. I have nothing to say.

§

Jen and Charlene were threatening me. Jen sent me an email saying that she’d had no choice but to call my father. She wrote that if I didn’t talk to her about that guy on the street that she was going to call my father again and tell him exactly what Charlene saw.
I miss you, Myra. I wanna drink with you again and we can talk about what is going on.

What a fucking contradiction. I didn’t write back. That made her mad.

Charlene stepped it up in another email:
It’s racist, Myra. It’s totally fucked up what you did with that black dude. He looks crazy and I’m gonna tell your dad what you did even if Jen won’t.

Right. I was racist. What the fucking fuck.

Then came their final joint email, a multiplication of lies:
That weird dude followed us after he left you. He was calling us beautiful and telling us to come to his hotel. He’s a fucking perv, Myra. Just sayin’. You should be careful.

There were only two more months of school till summer. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky, my History and English teachers, called me in for a meeting at lunch. Ms. Bain said they were sorry to hear about my mom. It was totally embarrassing. I looked at the floor. I couldn’t believe that my dad called the school, that he would’ve told them about
that
. Then Ms. Bain said that she understood that finishing school would be hard for me this year and so she offered, along with Mr. Rotowsky, that I could hand in one joint essay assignment for them both instead of doing tests and taking final exams.

‘You will still need to attend my class,’ said Ms. Bain, acknowledging that I’d only been there once since March Break. ‘We’re on Asia next week. The Japanese-Korean war.’

‘And I expect you will not skip my class either,’ Mr. Rotowsky added. We’d been reading the Beat Poets in his class, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. ‘I want you to use this academic opportunity for your benefit, Myra.’

‘I will,’ I said. Because I knew immediately what I wanted to write about. I was going to write about those Korean sex slaves, like in that book my mother had been reading in Key West. We were on the Japanese-Korean war. My mother was lost in Korea.
Testimonies of the Comfort Women
was about sixteen-year-old girls being taken from their homes and raped by soldiers repeatedly. The rationale of the Japanese government was that their soldiers needed women for sex, sex was comfort in times of war. I was going to connect the Korean sex slaves to the stuff that Aaron had been lending me, like Giorgio Agamben,
Remnants of Auschwitz
, and Georges Bataille,
Inner Experience
. I wanted to write about women and slaves. I mean, in a harrowing life-or-death situation, do people, essentially, have to become slaves? Aaron said that all the European intellectuals were now into Agamben, that they were creating radical cells and writing communally. Aaron said that communal writing was the way of the future. Stoned in Aaron’s room, I read Agamben’s whole book about the Holocaust, about the Jewish slaves in concentration camps, about these half-dead, half-alive people who were called
Muselmann
. What would have happened if the Korean comfort women could have written communally while they were enslaved? And what about the porn girls? Were those teenage-looking girls in my porn clips slaves? I remembered that exhibition from our trip to Key West, The Last of the Slave Ships. The chains around the people’s feet, those emaciated slaves. My mother had been more disturbed than me. I knew how to get my porn clips from the net now by subject. I ordered sado-masochistic porn:
Teengirltied, Ballandcunt, Slutinchains
. The Japanese soldiers raped the Korean comfort women, who were now demanding compensation. How could you compensate a slave? Why did I want to be Elijah’s slave?