Sparrow Nights (18 page)
C H A P T E R
15
D
uring my undergraduate year in Toulouse, I was frequently broke, and that Christmas a distant aunt sent me a money order in lieu of a present. But she sent it to the wrong city, to the Crédit lyonnais in Marseilles, which was some three hundred and fifty miles away. News of the mix-up got to me on a Thursday afternoon, a four-day holiday beginning the following afternoon at two sharp. My irritation, not to mention my self-pity, kept me tossing in my bed until sometime after midnight, when I leapt up in a shaking rage and decided to hitchhike to Marseilles. It was an extraordinary night: the small towns, the smell of the ocean, the bleak stretches of highway at four in the morning. But such an adventure, such a quickening of my spirit. I had a job to do, a place to be, and a deadline. A real one, this time.
I was young, I had a friendly face and I made it to the bank by ten o’clock the next morning. Such a warm, soft winter day in the south of France, students milling about in the streets. Anyway. I picked up my money, two hundred dollars American—
“Tenez, vous êtes vraiment bourré,”
said the teller in a southern accent—and I went out to the docks and sat on a wooden bench. An American aircraft carrier clogged the harbour. It was on its way out, so a student told me, but it appeared not to be moving at all. Just frozen there, like a painting, until I looked away, following the progress of a toddler stumbling and teetering along the boardwalk while his bored mother trailed behind. But then when I looked at the ship again I could see it had moved, maybe an inch or two. For a half-hour or so it was like that, a matter of inches here and there, until one time I looked and by God, it was gone. All of it.
Which is, I suppose, a rather precious way of explaining how that business with the body went, the aftermath. A fitting title, that:
The Aftermath of Donny Most
. But it’s true. There were terrible middle-of-the-night pacings; occasions where I was so tense from waiting, from worrying, that if the police had come to the door and taken me away I might have been relieved. Three months later I went into the emergency section of Women’s College Hospital with an ulcer. But I remained mum. I didn’t crack. I laid off those snoozy pills too and I think that helped a lot. And gradually the distance between the hot insomnias grew and grew, and then I noticed I was thinking about something else first thing in the morning, a lecture, an overdue bill, and then a rather homely student who stayed after class. At least I
thought
she was homely at first, but perhaps that’s because she liked me so much. For a number of months I saw her occasionally, until one Saturday night she didn’t call to make our usual rendezvous. I ran into her a few days later and when I expressed some unhappiness at the inconvenience of a wasted Saturday night, she was, it seemed to me, in not such a great hurry to mollify me.
“But I’d like to see you tonight,” I said, and to my astonishment she replied that she couldn’t, she was busy for the next few days. I walked away from the conversation with the eerie conviction that something had changed between us. She left a message on my answering service a day later, complaining about an essay she was doing, the hours in the library, and rounding it off with a cheerful
I miss you
. But she didn’t sound sufficiently fractured. I punished her, of course, by not calling back. But she surprised me: she stopped phoning. I waited for two weeks, the phone by the bed, but she still didn’t call. And then one night, on my way to the opera, I saw her coming out of a fashionable restaurant with a short young man, stocky, red-haired, in a green raincoat. It was as if I’d been stuck into a wall socket. She was chewing gum, I remember, and, glancing my way, she blew a small pink bubble, popped it professionally with her tongue and disappeared into the back of a taxi. I saw nothing of the opera; I couldn’t seem to efface the image of her snapping her gum like that, the autonomy it suggested. So I called her the next day. She sounded happy—but not ecstatic—to hear from me and inquired if I wanted to come over to her apartment that night. Which was not at all our habit because it had always been she who came to my place. But I got dressed up, the pinstriped suit I reserve for Board of Regents’ meetings, and after many, many scrutinizings in the mirror I walked the full three miles to her apartment, a bottle of wine in my hand. And how delicious she was, how unhomely she seemed that night.
You’re probably wondering about Passion, about what happened to her. Well, there’s a story there too. Some six months after our daughter was born, my wife and I took a small vacation. We went to the Caribbean, back to that island I told you about earlier. How lovely it was, to be with her and the baby (a sleeper, thank God), how delightful to go back to the places, even the bookstall in the hotel down the beach, where I’d been so unhappy. It felt like a triumph to return. I promised myself, as one always does when one is happy, to never again take my despair so seriously, but I knew that when it came, nothing would help, it would always seem like the first time.
We came home on a late flight, the baby was fussy, we were both a bit tired, and I may have been a little short with the customs agent, because he sent me into that special room where they go through your luggage.
“Would you unzip your suitcase, sir?”
It seemed to me there was something familiar about the voice. And when I looked up, immaculate in her inspector’s uniform, a badge on her breast where once had danced the frills from her bikini, there was Passion.
“Would you open your shaving kit, sir,” she said. She shook the shaving cream can, dabbed a little baby powder on her wrist and smelt it expertly. She moved aside some dirty shirts and gave the bottom of the suitcase a tap with her knuckles. Then looking me straight in the eye, without so much as a blink or a pause, she said, “That’s fine, sir.” She scribbled a red initial on my landing card and returned it to me. “Show that to the gentleman on the way out.”
I did.
Of course you know what I’m saving till the very end. I
did
see Emma once. It was the following winter, a snowy, snowy night. By now my wife and I were separated (eventually we divorced), but being Thursday, it was my turn to pick our daughter up from daycare. It was a cold night, the Christmas lights up, and we were just passing through Chinatown. I was holding her over my head; she was flying through the air in her little red snowsuit, her eyes bright as beads, her cheeks red. “You are so
beautiful,”
I said, and she put out her little arms like she was flying, and there, just out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Emma Carpenter. She was wearing a black coat and a black tulip hat, and she was standing on the corner waiting for the light to change. I thought to myself, I’ll look over in
just
a moment. But suddenly my daughter shrieked with pleasure; she opened her mouth and a little drop of drool spilled out. “Yes,” I said to her, “you
are
, you simply are so beautiful I just don’t know
what
I’m going to do with you.” And then, when I did look over, the air that Emma had occupied was empty. She must have already crossed over. Or gone down the street in the other direction. I can’t imagine where she got to.
A U T H O R ’ S N O T E
A
number of people spent a lot of time helping me with my professor. First, I’d like to thank Prof. John McClelland for sitting still and for guiding me through his days. Thanks also to Prof. Bob Farquharson for an early and perceptive reading. As always I salute Prof. Paul Bouissac for his inimitable style. All three of these men taught me in the late sixties and again in the late nineties.
I want to thank my excellent editor, Anne Collins, for her good taste; Michael Flaxman from the BamBoo, for the extraordinary story he told me over dinner; and Tina Gladstone—for everything else.
Let me express also my gratitude to the ladies of the Gold Hat Health Club (not its real name, naturally) for their patience and inexhaustible sense of humour.
D
AVID GILMOUR
is a novelist who has earned the praise of literary figures as diverse as William S. Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and from publications as diverse as the
New York Times
and
People
. His novel,
Lost Between Houses
, was a national bestseller in Canada. Gilmour was a film critic for CBC-TV’s
The Journal
and
The National
, and host of
Gilmour on the Arts
, a Gemini award-winning talk show. He is currently the weekend host for the Documentary Channel. Gilmour lives in Toronto with his two children.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION
, 2002
Copyright © 2001 by David Gilmour
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House
Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2001.
Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House of Canada Limited
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gilmour, David, 1949–
Sparrow nights / David Gilmour
eISBN: 978-0-307-36925-3
I. Title.
PS 8563.I56S63 2002 C813′.54 C2002-901635-5
PR9199.3. G543S66 2002a
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