Sparrow Nights (10 page)

Suddenly my ears began to buzz and I had the feeling that I had entered into her thoughts as sure as if I had put my hand through the wall of her chest and clutched her heart.

The garden hung in frozen icicles; they gleamed under the yard lights. I dropped my cigarette, and when I leaned over to pick it up I exhaled a gust of frozen breath that darted away like a thought. I exhaled again and could see the momentary shapes of an island, a boat, a field, even Brazil. My imagination was like an independent living thing, like a reef or the earth itself. And in one of these exhalations I saw with the detail of a well-lit film the image of Emma walking along a wintry street. She was talking with great animation to a short, grey-haired man. I’d never seen him before, but at one point she stopped dead in her tracks and turned to him and said, I’m so
happy!

It was as if her soul was speaking to me, to my soul, as if she were saying,
Stop thinking about me. Please. Leave me alone
.

I was still rocky the next day—at my age hangovers are two-day affairs—but I had a number of administrative meetings to attend. University departments are run by dictators who surround themselves with committees; it gives things the aura of democracy, and you have to turn up. There was a full afternoon with the Course Content Committee, which provided an opportunity for new faculty members (those without tenure) to second-guess the pleasures of department head Camille Dupré.

Let me say off the top that Dupré was not the college’s first choice. That went to a Harvard man, a white-haired gentleman with an international reputation (Montaigne). We were thrilled to steal him away (and only five years from retirement, no less). But during orientation week there was an incident. To put it mildly. He went to a local pub with a bunch of freshmen and at closing time invited the group back to his rented house on the Toronto campus. More drinking ensued, the hour got late and students drifted off home, until there was only one left, a strawberry-haired boy from Manitoulin Island. The young man, fresh to the city, had drunk considerably more than he could hold, a situation the learned professor handled by stripping him naked, fucking him in the ass and then pissing on him.

After that Dupré looked like a positive
catch
. He was a consummate second-rater; everyone knew it. After twenty-eight years in North America he rigorously maintained the affectation of barely speaking English. All shrugs and pouts he was, traits that made him seem like “the real thing” in our community. In the staff lounge he made a great show of shuffling through the papers in his briefcase, ordering and reordering them into fresh stacks, as if some great activity were in full flight. Serrault, of course, despised him; thought he was a joke as a scholar, a decade “behind the coup,” as he put it. One day he caught me laughing perhaps too heartily at one of Dupré’s modest asides and quickly lowered his eyes. It made my cheeks flush with embarrassment for precisely the reason that Serrault had tried to hide it from me. He was a complicated man, but the spectre of human abasement, no matter how passing, was not among his pleasures.

There were other matters to attend to as well. The Standards Committee had been called into emergency session. A fourth-year student had somehow slipped through the net and all but secured his undergraduate degree by taking twenty
first-year
courses. He’d taken them at various colleges and skilfully muddied his tracks. It was the
Alice’s Restaurant
approach, a strategy we’d been aware of since the late seventies. How did it happen? Whose responsibility was it? Should the student be denied his degree because of administrative incompetence? The meeting droned on into the evening, Serrault, naturally, taking the student’s side and alienating, as always, a portion of the faculty with the crisp observation that the difference between a fourth-year and a first-year course was negligible.

“Speak for yourself,” Dupré said with a wintry smile.

“I am,” replied Serrault, and shrugged his shoulders. One wants to cheer at those moments. Self-deprecation among the gifted leaves me breathless with admiration.

It was well after ten at night when I got home. I poured myself a glass of wine and lay down on the couch in my study. Looking at my desk littered with papers, pencils, correspondence, academic journals, memos stuck to the computer, I felt a tingle of curious pleasure. Then the phone rang.

It was Passion. She was downtown for the evening. Perhaps I wanted to get together. Yes, I said, that would be splendid. It had rather the aura of a date. Twenty minutes later she got out of a taxi in front of my house with a large handbag. Very large indeed. She came inside and looked at my bookshelves with a show of appreciation. It struck a slightly false note.

It was odd to see each other outside our usual context, a bit like running into a high school teacher during summer vacation.

“I don’t have my stuff,” she said, and touched the narrow white scar under her nose.

“That’s all right.”

“Do you want to do it here? On the couch?”

“It’s a bit exposed,” I said. “What do you normally do?”

“I don’t normally make house calls.” Again the hand to the lip.

I went to the bottom kitchen drawer and shuffled about in the party napkins and stray forks and bits of string until I found a black candle. It had been a while since I’d entertained anyone. I set it in Emma’s bronze candlestick, lit the wick and turned out the lights. The melting wax gave off a scent of black cherries.

“That smells nice,” Passion said, meaning, I think, that she liked the candlelight better. In the shadows she looked quite lovely, and I realized I had never had a black woman in my house before.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes. You?”

“I’m asking because you said you never do this.”

“You never know,” she said.

“But this time you did.”

“You seem okay,” she said. “I knew that much.”

We sat for a moment in silence.

“How’s your time?” I asked.

She looked at her watch. “I have a friend coming to get me at midnight. Can I smoke in here?”

“Certainly.” I got up to get her an ashtray.

She lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke in my direction.

“How’s the wine?” I asked.

“It tastes like blood.”

I took a taste. It was a Merlot, with an excellent bouquet, but she was right: it seemed to have come from the throat of a butchered animal.

I also noticed that I was getting a bit drunk, that things were starting to assume a sort of new and convincing order; as if I’d stepped into a movie,
in medias res
, and accepted, from the moment of entry, the logic of the story. What story? I’ll get to that. Suffice it to say that over the past six or seven months I had caught myself slipping rather quickly into a dreamy world where ideas occurred to me that were not at all appropriate. Comments I should make to colleagues, subjects for academic scrutiny. Sometimes I wrote them down and the following morning, when I deciphered the handwriting, they seemed, at best, rather thin, at worst (and more and more frequently) touched by a kind of insane sparkle. I have long learned to stay away from the telephone when drunk, but the world has changed and I confess that some mornings I have woken up and dashed to my computer to check that the previous evening, while caught up in one of these “stories,” I had not composed an imprudent communication to a woman or a friend or a student. I hadn’t made a slip so far, but it worried me. I feared that one of these nights I would drink
too long
. I want you to know that I saw the seeds sprouting early on; I knew those vines when they were like little snakes just stirring in a warm nest.

But I’m digressing, as I do more frequently these days. My memory, like my concentration, seems to be disintegrating like wet toilet paper.

“We should get started,” I said to Passion. “Would the bedroom be all right?”

“Sure. Do you want to take a shower first?”

I left her in the living room and went into the bathroom and undressed and turned on the shower and got under the hot water. I was quite excited. The evening, painted crimson now by the wine, had a compelling, adventurous quality to it. I don’t know how long I was under the shower. I know that afterwards, dripping wet, I tried to take a pee and stood there, God knows how long, staring into the toilet bowl, thinking about God knows what.

I came out in my dressing gown, a floor-length bath towel affair that Emma had bought me for Christmas. Taking the candle in hand, I led Passion rather unsteadily into my bedroom. I turned down the bed, the top sheet, dropped the bathrobe to the floor and lay down on my stomach. I heard the sound of shoes being removed, then a brush of material, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw that she had removed her shirt and was wearing a white brassiere and jeans.

“You might as well get the works,” she said.

“I’ve never been with a black woman before.”

I heard her laugh. “I wouldn’t exactly call this being with a black woman.” She put her hands on my back.

“You have a beautiful touch,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“No, really.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Can I roll over?”

“It’s your house.”

“Can you take that off?”

She undid her brassiere and her breasts with their large dark nipples came free. She put her hands on her hips. “Do you want me to do your chest?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“And then your legs?”

“Sure.”

“And then we’ll see what happens.”

She didn’t cover her mouth.

“You’re quite beautiful,” I said.

“And I can’t believe you’re sixty years old.”

“I’m not.”

“You told me you were.”

“I’m fifty-four.”

“Why do you tell people you’re sixty?”

“I like the sound of it.”

“Do you want me to do your legs now?”

“Yes.”

“Tops, or bottoms?”

“Tops please.” My voice wobbled.

“Like that?”

“Yes, that’s great.”

“They feel a bit tight.”

“They are.”

It was silent for a while.

“You should open them up a bit.”

I shifted position.

“How’s that?” she said.

“Fabulous.” I covered my eyes.

“Don’t go to sleep on me.”

“Don’t worry.”

After a while she said, “Do you have any cream?”

“Ah, no.”

“My hands are dry.”

“That’s all right.”

She stopped for a second, spat into her palm and put her hand back on me. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Is that all right?”

“That’s fine.”

“You’re sure? Some guys are squeamish.”

“Shhh.”

“My, my,” she said after a moment, and sat back. “My, my.”

I opened my eyes. She sat motionless, her hands open like a surgeon waiting for his gloves to be put on.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Fine,” I said, “lovely.”

“Do you have any Kleenex?”

I pointed her down the hall. In a little while I heard the door close; that distinct rattle of the toilet-paper roller rolling over; the toilet flushing; then a sound I couldn’t place immediately, a sort of clank. A few moments later she returned, quite comfortable, it seemed, to meander about my house half naked, which rather flattered me.

“Would you care to go out and get something to eat?” I asked.

“Are you hungry or something? You’re supposed to be sleepy and relaxed.”

“I’m not, though. I’m famished.”

She hesitated. “I didn’t bring any money.”

“It’ll be my treat. But what about your friend?”

“I don’t have a friend coming. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a pervert.”

Feeling more wide awake than I had for months, as if I could blister paint on a wall just by looking at it, I got up and got dressed.

“Oh,” I said as we were leaving, “your bag.”

“I’ll get it when I come back.”

It was after eleven by now. The floodlights had long since been turned off on the skating rink, but there were still a couple of kids out there, soaring around in the dark, and you could hear the sound of their skates hacking into the ice in short, excited strokes. Passion, wearing an imitation red leather coat with a fur collar, walked with her head down, her hands in her pockets. It seemed as if the sound of our footsteps made us both self-conscious, but I realize now that there were other things on her mind. At the foot of my street we turned left and passed a half-dozen shops, a record store, a small grocery, an upscale soap store, a travel bureau. She stopped to look at the ticket prices in the window but quickly moved out of the light when I caught up to her. I picked a dark restaurant and we went in. It was Thursday night, late, and we got a good table near the front.

“Are you sure you want to sit here?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “This is my favourite table.”

“Your wife or something’s not going to walk by?”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“You’re an exception.”

“To what?”

“To all the people who go in that place.” She looked at the menu. “What can I have?”

“Anything you want. How about you?”

“What about me?” She was looking at the menu, but she was waiting for the next question.

“Are you married?”

“Not really.”

“Does he know what you do?”

“What do you mean, what I do?”

“You know, the sex trade?”

It was a stupid thing to have said. She put down the menu. “I don’t work in the sex trade.”

“Of course you do. There’s nothing wrong with it. You just do.”

“So you’re saying I’m a whore.”

“Good heavens, no.”

But she was right. I could feel the alcohol awakening a kind of careless aggression, and I suddenly remembered a foolish quarrel I had had with Emma in Thailand. It was about childbirth, about who had the more profound understanding of the experience, a woman who’d never had a child or a male doctor who had delivered hundreds of babies. Lord! It started during a blood red sunset, too gorgeous to express, and went on until after dark. What I remember is not who said what but rather a glimpse I got of Emma during it—as a sort of foul-tempered little sprite with a vindictive streak.