Self (32 page)

Right from the start, we spent all our nights together. It went without question. A night without him was a night in a cold bed. Even our sleeping bodies did not brook distance. We would fall asleep in our own little spheres of space — Morpheus seems to be a timorous hunter who only preys upon solitary quarry — but I don’t think we ever made it through a whole night without one of us reaching out. Invariably we would wake up in the morning with at least one point of contact, a leg, a hand or an arm, me wrapped in him or pressed against his back. As if our skins were gossips who
were keenly intent on pursuing their chatter in the still of night.

Whoever was closer to that point where somnolence becomes uncontrollable would make the effort of saying “Goodnight” and reach out for a kiss, which the other, only slightly more alert, would echo. Only after those two words and that kiss did we let ourselves dip into sleep. They officially signalled the end of our day.

He lived in Park Extension, farther north, so when we did something downtown we tended to sleep at my place. On weekends or on quiet nights we stayed at his. His apartment was larger and better set up than mine.

I had a schedule in my life now, time imperatives that I had to contend with. There was Slave-Work Time, Novel-Work Time, Miscellaneous-Things Time and Tito Time. I had to juggle to fit them all into my day. I adapted myself to Tito’s innate early clock. He had to be at the depot to sort his day’s mail at six in the morning. Most weekdays I awoke with him at five. It sounds painful, but it’s a matter of habit. I am thankful for all the sunrises I witnessed. And it made for blessed naps together in the mid-afternoon. I usually spent the morning working on my novel, worked the lunch-hour shift at the restaurant, met Tito at two or two-thirty for our nap and spent the evening either working on my novel again or doing something with Tito, depending on how we felt. Breakfast and evening shifts varied the schedule. We usually went to bed a little before ten.

Paradoxically, the more pressed I was for time, the less I thought about it, unlike most resources. As a result my time with Tito seemed to go by in an instant. And I have difficulty remembering the order of things. In my memory the past and
present tenses do not measure out temporal sequence, but emotional weight. What I cannot forget repeats itself in the present tense.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 67: I slowly rise to consciousness, sensing that on the seashore someone’s beckoning me from my deep blue floating. I surface unwillingly and crack open an eye. Sure enough, Tito and his two wide-open eyes are inches away. He removes two protective strands of brunette seaweed from my face and tosses them onto the pillow. “Are you awake?” he announces. I categorically refuse to answer and my oyster of an eye snaps shut. I go back to work on the pearldom of sleep. I know it’s Saturday and we don’t have to get up.

I’m on my side, facing him. The sheet rises — he’s looking at me. I feel an exploratory finger climbing the slope of my thigh, reaching the summit of my hip, sliding down to the saddleback of my waist, then moving up along the ridge of my ribs until the predictable fall to my breast, where four more fingers join in on the fun. Then the solitary finger ventures south, lingering over my stomach and plunging into my belly button before moving down to scratch my hairs gently. Bitch of a nipple betrays me and starts to get hard. “It
is
one o’clock in the afternoon, you realize,” says Tito. “What?” I moan, falling for it, and I make the colossal effort of turning over and peering at the alarm clock. I sink back into the pillow. “It’s six-thirty in the morning. You turned the clock upside-down.” “Oh, sorry,” he says. I turn onto my back. He moves closer, fitting himself to me. “Big sandstorm last night,” he says. He gently rubs the corners of my eyes, removing the grit. His hand, this time a band of merry fingers, goes softly traipsing over my body again. I feel with my hand and seize his erection. I sigh. “Et tu, Brute?” He laughs. I look at him through
weary, bleary, love-shot eyes, and I stretch. He buries his face in my neck and kisses me voraciously. He brings his mouth to my ear. In an explosive whisper, all wind and hot breath, he makes me an indecent proposition. I laugh and nod. His head disappears under the sheets.

Thus is the night banished. Thus does the sun rise.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 15: We’re on a walk up the mountain. It’s a radiant spring day. A man appears on the path with a dog on a leash. It’s a big, grunting bulldog, complete with stubby crooked front legs, no neck, a flat face and a dreadful underbite. I erupt into giggles and make a beeline for it. The creature’s bulging eyes go into orbits of delight as I bend down and play with its multiple folds of skin. The owner benignly assents to the attentions I pay his pet; he must be used to it. The dog’s enormous chest is balanced by such a puny rear that I’m surprised he doesn’t keel forward, back legs frantically beating the air, as I pat him on the head.

As we walk away, Tito says, “What a monstrosity. I can’t believe you liked it.”

I look at him and laugh.

“What?” he asks.

“Well, I was thinking about dicks.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You see,” I manage to say, still laughing, “the penis, it’s so graceless, wouldn’t you agree? When it’s cold and shrivelled up, it looks like W. H. Auden in his old age; when it’s hot, it flops and dangles about in a ridiculous way; when it’s excited, it looks so pained and earnest you’d think it was going to burst into tears. And the scrotum! To think that something so vital to the survival of the species, fully responsible for 50 per cent of the ingredients — though none of the work — should hang freely
from the body in a tiny, defenceless bag of skin. One whack, one bite, one paw-scratch — and it’s just at the right level, too, for your average animal, a dog, a lion, a sabre-toothed tiger — and that’s it, end of story. Don’t you think it should get better protection? Behind some bone, for example, like us? What could be better than our nicely tapered entrance? It’s discreet and stylish, everything is cleverly and compactly encased in the body, with nothing hanging out within easy reach of a closing subway door, there’s a neat triangle of hair above it, like a road sign, should you lose your way — it’s perfect. The penis is just such a lousy design. It’s pre-Scandinavian. Pre-Bauhaus, even.

“But at the same time I’m thinking dicks are so pathetic and deficient, there’s something endearing about them. You can’t help but feel tenderness for them. You see what I mean? So I’m thinking all that when” — I’m starting to laugh again — “when this dog appears and that was it, it was perfect. A walking dick. With its masses of foreskin.”

I’m bent over laughing. Tito has his mock deeply offended look.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 193: Joe tells me in a letter that he and Egon are HIV-positive. They’re “all right”, he says. I don’t know if he means it emotionally or medically. I drench the front of Tito’s shirt with tears.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 125: My Christmas present.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 242: Hot day’s cycling in the country. In the shade of a tree, in solitude, Tito cups my breasts under my T-shirt and finds them as cool as yoghurts, as he puts it. “What’s it like having breasts?” he asks.

“It’s like having two small warm companions,” I reply.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 1: “I can’t imagine sleeping with a man.” We’ve just seen a movie at a repertoire cinema. It’s not
in the movie — it’s a couple in front of us. As the lights are dimming, a young man turns and kisses his boyfriend on the mouth. It’s quick and quiet but passionate, with heads that move and eyes that are closed. Just as he turns back into his seat, his eyes and mine meet. He is happy. He is in love. Tito says it without judgement.

“Really?” I say, smiling. “You can’t imagine fucking a man? Sucking him? You can’t imagine kissing a man?”

“No. I don’t think I’ve had a homosexual thought in my life.”

I laugh and take hold of his arm. We walk away.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 186: We make a day-trip to Ottawa in Tito’s lawnmower Lada for our first visit to the new National Gallery. It’s a beautiful museum, both the building and the collections. We have a wonderful day.

FILM LOOP NUMBER 54: “What do you mean, you don’t like hot mustard?”

“I’m just not that crazy about it.”

“I thought you loved hot mustard.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why do you keep eating it?”

“Because you keep buying it.”

“But Danny said you loved hot mustard.”

“How would she know?”

“Are you telling me you don’t like hot mustard?”

“I am.”

FILM LOOP NUMBER 118: Yet again the man has buttoned up his coat wrong. Sometimes I do wonder where he has his head. I come up to him and undo the buttons and do them up right. “There you go.”

He looks at me, the beginning of a smile on his lips. “You treat me sometimes as if I were ten years old.”

“Ten? You flatter yourself. Seven is more like it.”

There are countless such film loops in the archives of my memory. They break me into pieces inside.

We moved in together our first summer, the summer of 1986. On July first, to be exact, that fateful date in the majority of Montreal residential leases, the day when most love affairs and roommateships officially start or end and the whole city seems to be on the move. I vacated my squalid hole that I had liked so much and moved into Tito’s place in colourful, undeveloped, vaguely disreputable Park Extension, a neighbourhood which I came to love, where the neighbours were friendly and talked to each other from balconies, where Greeks, Indians, Sri Lankans, Italians, Africans, West Indians and, let us not forget them, a few Hungarians, rubbed shoulders with other Canadians and struggled without pretence towards respectability.

I kept a room in my old apartment building as an office. I wanted a space separate from home where I could work, where I could do nothing but work. The building was not far from both the restaurant and Tito’s route, so it was a convenient place to meet Tito and to work before and after my waitressing shifts.

Leo, the caretaker cum accident-prone taxi driver, showed me a studio he always had difficulty renting. It had been vacant for a year and a half. It was a box with a window that gave onto the fire exit — a cage to live in, but just the right place to let my imagination run free. It was a floor up from my old apartment, but at the other end of the building. The kitchen was more concept than reality and there was no fridge, but there was a gas stove and the bathroom had a small bathtub. I bargained the rent down to 125 dollars a month and Tito and I
repainted the place with paint that the landlord paid for. I chose not to install a phone, for perfect peace, and I heated the place with the gas oven rather than with the more expensive electrical floorboard heater. It was the cheapest office space next to working on a park bench. And it was a room of my own, which I entered, after the symbolic effort of a small journey, for the sole purpose of writing.

At first, out of a purist work ethic, I decided not to have my futon in the room, but making love on my desk was uncomfortable, besides messing up my papers, and a floor is an impossible place to have a nap. So I relented and it became both my workroom and our nap room.

In winter I would often turn the oven up to full blast, for there is nothing less conducive to creativity than cold temperatures. We repainted the walls and ceiling a shimmering golden yellow. However bitterly cold it was outside, my office always felt like the inside of the sun.

I finished my novel. It was a bad novel. It didn’t work. I sent it off anyway, to a small and therefore select, not “commercial”, publishing house, hoping that they would see genius where I saw none. I never got a reply. I tried another publishing house, equally small. Within five weeks I got my novel back with a letter thanking me for letting them read it, which they had done “with pleasure”, but their fiction list was full for the next two years. The thick elastic band that held my manuscript together still covered the same line of text as when I had mailed it, and the tiny scrap of pink paper I had put between pages 20 and 21, like a rose petal added to a love letter, was still there.

I let go of it progressively, at first promising myself that I would return to it; then that I would salvage parts and incorporate
them into my next novel; next that I would tear off pieces and turn them into short stories. Finally I told myself that it belonged in the proverbial bottom of a drawer.

Tito cautiously pried into my novel, like a goldfish peering over the edge into the deep, where I was doing shark’s work. I didn’t tell him what it was about while I was working on it, and when it was finished I wouldn’t let him have it. I was afraid that, once he had read it, I would have no more secrets; I would be painfully transparent to him; worse still, what was revealed would turn out to be mediocre and he wouldn’t love me any more. I let him read it eventually, and he said all the right things: that indeed it wasn’t so excellent as my dentures story or my Norwegian story, though parts were; that the idea was bold and brilliant; that I was young, twenty-three, which didn’t mean immature, he quickly added, but simply that I was in the infancy of my art — what writers started so young? Rimbaud, Mailer and a few others, yes, but they dimmed quickly or completely; that this novel wasn’t my only idea, I was now free to start something new; and that of course he still loved me, what a question.

I burst into tears once in his arms, a few times on my own. Then it was over.

As in any relationship, there were moments of withdrawal, of a slight pulling away. But it was in the normal course of things. It did not indicate doubt or fatigue. It was like the painter who steps back from her painting to see it as a whole and then moves close again to continue work.

Sometimes I would get to bed tired and empty and glad not to be touched. Tito would be quiet, maybe even asleep, our good-nights said. I would soak up the solitude around
me. When I had had enough, when I was bloated with solitude, I would sometimes move down and gently take hold of Tito’s warm and dormant penis. It would grow slightly swollen while his face remained impassive and his breathing deep and easy. I would fall asleep holding onto it, as if it were a paintbrush and I were working on a detail between his legs.