Self (22 page)

The only interruption in my vista was the window, one landscape breaking in on another. I tended to gaze at this second landscape when I was in search of inspiration and resolve.

I placed my desk and chair in the centre of my office, clear of any wall, so that I could glide over the topography with ease. Which is what I did week after week, month after month, for hours at a time. With my eyes I would hover … hover … 
hover — and then swoop down and catch an index card. I would transport it to my desk and work on it, spilling over onto another card, or two, or three, despite my efforts to make my handwriting microscopic. In some places on the wall where I found myself with much to say but little space, the land became hilly and the river broke into rapids and waterfalls.

I should have taken photographs of my office when my walls were in full bloom. The Artist and Her Studio: A Novel in Twelve Kodachromes.

The truth was, I had no idea how to write a novel. I was a Doctor Frankenstein who had accumulated an impressive collection of body parts, and I even knew how they would go together, what parts went where, but the secret of life still eluded me. At regular intervals I sensed that an essential act of conception had not taken place, but I don’t recall much misery or anxiety over the matter. I was a happy spectator of my own device. I talked out loud, waved my hands, acted out scenes and when a brilliant new idea struck me — such as a lovely scene in an empty church of a dog watching a girl playing with a chalice — I captured it like a passing butterfly and cheerfully pinned it to the wall.

My novel was a dream — and it had the value of a dream. It was a form of rehearsal.

As planned over the course of three or four phone calls (each time a shock at hearing her voice, which triggered a tumble of memories), I spent Christmas and New Year’s in Philadelphia with Ruth and her family. I met the famous Tuesday, Sandra and Danny (but not Graham). Of each I had formed a precise mental picture, having transformed Ruth’s descriptions into photographs. But Ruth’s testimony proved to be as accurate in
describing her small tribe as the shape of clouds would be in describing a landscape. Her children neither looked nor behaved anything close to what I had expected. Colour of hair, expression, height, weight, dress, tone of voice — I had created pure fictions. Having heard strictly the maternal angle of things, I had imagined them child-like. Having only heard of them second-hand, I had made them passive, spirits that would disappear as soon as we weren’t talking about them, as they had for me in Turkey. But Tuesday and Sandra certainly weren’t children, and Danny wasn’t passive. In that house — which wasn’t actually in Philadelphia, but in a suburb — there were unmistakably four live human beings. Tuesday was a year older and a year ahead of me, an economics/sociology major seemingly untouched by the existential monkey. Sandra was in grade 12, friendly but restless and testy at times. Danny was a ten-year-old American kid, graceless, loud and whiny; on several occasions I wanted to kill him. And I was the “friend” their mother had met in Greece and travelled with in “Turkey!”

The dynamics were a little odd. It was with Tuesday that I should have had the most in common. We talked about Ellis and Simon Fraser universities, about our different majors, about Roetown and Burnaby, about movies — we traded in all the aspects that made up our common student culture. Yet it was clear that it was with her mother that I truly connected. Before Tuesday’s eyes the twenty-odd years, that chasm that separated Ruth and me, would vanish, and her mother would appear to her as a stranger. It would be during the telling of an anecdote. We would become animated, we would laugh, we would interrupt each other either to refute a little jab with humorous indignation, set the record straight, or the contrary, to
exaggerate a point for dramatic effect. The sheets were so dirty they were as rigid as plywood! The ice-cream was like chewing gum, you just couldn’t finish it, you had to spit it out! The bus trip lasted forty-eight hours! Cost forty-eight cents! That we knew each other very, very well, our foibles, our strengths, our sore spots, our funny-bones, was evident. Suddenly Tuesday
was
a child, and Ruth and I would set the agenda of conversation, direct it, apt to shoo the child away if she became too obstreperous a spectator. Then she would comment apropos, with a touch of sarcasm, usually, as miffed adults are prone to do, and Ruth would reply and landscapes would indefinably shift, currents would change, winds would turn — an earthquake just beyond the range of the senses — and Ruth would become a stranger to me; she would play that role, source of joy and exasperation, through which she by and large defined herself. I would think, “She could be my mother too. She is double my age and some,” and I would notice her wrinkles, her mature hands, her manners, the chasm between us.

There was Christmas and the litter of bright gift-wrap paper — Ruth gave me a book on how to work one’s way around the world, from
vendang
ing in France to teaching English in Czechoslovakia to kibbutzing in Israel to modelling in Japan to sheep-shearing in Australia; I gave her Kazantzakis’s
Zorba the Greek
— and there was the great dinner with the hullabaloo of its communal cooking — I made the mashed potatoes, extra-garlicky — and there were a few visits to Philadelphia between Christmas and New Year’s. My tourist preparation for Philadelphia was to read a lengthy essay by Octavio Paz on Duchamp’s
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
. I saw the
Bride
at the Museum of Art, with her chocolate grinder and the cracks in her glass, accidental but oh
so appropriate, and I might even have got a sense of the Bachelors, of their intents, but for Tuesday, who wanted to get going, I could tell. I take for ever in museums. Her mother used to get impatient with me too. We saw a movie in a cinema the size of a shoebox in a mall the size of a city, with parking lots that had horizons (but the movie was unexpectedly good and funny,
Splash
by Ron Howard, and I laughed my head off). We played games, canasta among adults, Monopoly with Danny, who won every time, wouldn’t you know, even when I had hotels on Atlantic, Ventnor and Marvin Gardens, Pacific, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Park Place and Boardwalk
and
I controlled all four railways. Ruth told me that Danny didn’t like losing.

All the while I was feeling that some dial within me, having nothing to do with the year reaching its end, was rolling towards 999, about to turn over.

My room was directly opposite Ruth’s. This might have been meaningful, but it was just where the guest bedroom was. It was a small room whose bare beige walls felt slightly oppressive, as the only window was so high up one needed a stepladder to look out. I shared this bottom of a well with the sewing machine. I mention this because I find these machines intriguing, and I remember Ruth’s clearly. At night, after I had clicked off the bedside lamp, light would seep in from the window and dilute the darkness enough that I could make out the sewing machine. I would consider it. What a curious, unmistakable outline. A mechanical woodpecker. I had read that sewing machines were highly intricate pieces of engineering that had required great ingenuity in their development. I imagined that the Singer who had made millions was the semi-worthless grandson of the humble, hardworking
inventor whose device would free nineteenth-century middle-class women from household drudgery and enslave nineteenth-century working-class people in factories, but I have no idea, I’m just saying that. Then, after other, less determined thoughts in which I was uncertain what words to match with what emotions, I would fall soundly asleep. Having no home of my own, I always sleep well in other people’s homes.

For several days after my arrival Ruth and I communicated through glances and slight smiles at moments when they would go unnoticed by the others. The few times we were alone together our glances were steadier, but our talk was still vague. If these glances could have spoken, I’m not sure what they would have expressed. Longing? Lust? Anticipation? Farewell? Finally, late one night when everyone was safely asleep, our two doors quietly opened at the same time, like two eyes, and we stood in our doorframes and looked at each other. I was wearing a T-shirt, Ruth a nightgown. I can’t really say what happened then. There was desire — if she had beckoned me, I would have gone; when I retreated backwards into my room it was partly in the hope of drawing her in — and there were memories of ache and release and salty skin and there was resistance — I am forty-seven, a mother, I have a family, it cannot be; I am twenty, a student, I am a foreigner, it cannot be — but amidst that complex swirl there was still something else, a surprise, a small but harbinger emotion that whispered in me: ambivalence. At that moment I could see Ruth whole, not as a Turkish lover or as a Philadelphia mother, but whole. And I did not want.

We looked at each other for a minute or so. We spoke not a word. In part it was out of fear that the least syllable would awaken Tuesday. But what was there to say anyway? After our
eyes greeted each other, they floated for some seconds before we returned to our gaze of old, eye to eye, smile to smile, memory to memory. Then, with serene, goodbye smiles, we backed into our rooms and into our roles, she to her wide heterosexual bed, I to my uncertain single bed. It was over. We must let things pass. I slipped into the sheets. I felt a flash of regret, a sudden push towards tears. What have you done? What have you thrown away? Go to her now. Crawl up, curl up. Bring out your right hand and let it glide down naturally. Kiss. No. Stop. I fell back in bed. My eyes on the sewing machine, I sifted through my confusion.

My dial had turned over. I was at 001.

When Ruth drove me to the bus station on a cold sunny day in the new year, we kissed on the lips softly and said farewell with a sense of peace. I will always remember Ruth with great tenderness, and I wish her and her family nothing but happiness and good fortune. Graham, whom I never met — that poor ten-year-old boy who struggled to shore with the high-pitched words “Go, Graham, go!” ringing in his ears, while his mother sank — has haunted my imagination for years.

I slept once more with a woman — she came on to me and I went along on the spur of the moment — but it’s nothing worth the telling; all I remember is a yawning sense of boredom. Ruth and Elena retained their aura of carnal allure, but in the museum part of my memory, where they elicited smiles and a glow of fondness rather than a move of my hand to between my legs.

I’m not sure why, as a woman, I began to desire men. After a moment of surprise it became a matter of feeling — and I
acted upon that feeling, without reflection. It’s an odd thing to question desire.

On the outside my life didn’t change much. I worked a little harder at my studies, pinpricked by the possibility of rustication. I read
Moby-Dick
in sixteen hours, put my exhausted B-range thoughts in a C-range essay and got a D for it because it had been due before Christmas (but my first-term enthusiasm for Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne saved me from failing). Philosophy of religion I enjoyed, though with ups and downs. Berkeley and Hume helped me survive early modern. But even when my studies interested me intellectually, I had difficulty sticking to them. Somehow they always missed the point. My need was elsewhere.

I pursued work on my mural, which continued to give me satisfaction with only fits of torment. My walls were now so thick with index cards that I’m certain they insulated me from the surrounding world more than Proust’s cork walls did. I was no closer to producing a viable piece of fiction, but this was an observation I never cared to make, though I did spend more time gazing out my window.

In my first year, timid virgins used to hang around my room for hours on end, willing neither to leave nor to make a move on me, which was for the good since I was not at all inclined to sleep with a boy then, though I did enjoy their company, distractions from Elena that they were. The bolder, older ones, who made clearer their intent, I sent packing with outbursts of laughter and witty retorts, which, repeated a few times, put an end to their persistence. I suppose I acquired a reputation as hard to get.

Now I wished that some of them would come back, would think of walking up the street where the municipal jail was to pay me a visit. Unfortunately most of my friends were female, and those who weren’t were irrevocably gay. I once asked Joe if he had ever slept with a woman.

“Yuck! What a revolting thought.”

“What about a pig, Joe? Ever fucked a pig?”

“No. But I tried to sodomize a Norwegian elkhound once. At camp in the shower-room. At the first yelp I let it go. It was terrible being a virgin.”

My lack of romantic involvement began to frustrate me. Independence — from what? Freedom — for what? What stupidity To be on intimate terms with someone struck me as the only meaningful source of happiness. The mawkish, gluco-romantic aspects of my roommates’ relationships no longer repelled me. My way of going about it would be different, that was all. More like Joe’s and his boyfriend Egon’s, free of predetermined roles.

Never having desired men before, I went about finding out what exactly I found desirable in them. It was all very strange, this. I had gone through a process of induction where I had reached the general — men — without any reference to the particular. I began to look for the particular. I became vividly aware of male physique and symmetry, of manner, smile, walk, hair. I scrutinized my memories, examining the men in them in a new light. I started paying attention to men’s glances, those pestering glances that men give to women. I considered each one, if only for a fraction of a second, to see what it had to offer.

In most circumstances my imagination nourished my
vision, acted as a close counsellor to its testimony. But in this case my fancy was nearly empty and needed stoking before it could be fired up. The only advice it could give my eyes concerned a Turkish farmer met once on a bus, a body strong and hairy yet pliant, with a handsome head and a full erection rising from hair, something vague in outline but precise in its effect on me. This one ember glowed vermilion in my mind.