Specimen & Other Stories (4 page)

She used a lighter to kindle a fire of
leaves and twigs and scrap wood. From a toolbox inside her shelter
she took a knife and crouched at the water’s edge to gut the
fish.

Stanley looked at his watch. It was 6:45, by
which time he’d usually timed his climax to match that of Isabel,
and was now catching his wind before setting homeward on his return
run. She must be wondering what’d happened to him, but had no
justification to phone his home. Undoubtedly, she’d call the office
before lunch and he’d get an earful.

The office seemed remote at this point. He
heard metallic thunder to the south and looked downriver to where
the Prince Edward Viaduct crossed the Don Valley. On a trestle
suspended beneath the vehicle bridge, a westward-bound subway train
had emerged from under Broadview station, enjoying half a minute’s
view of the valley before it bored back into the bluff below Castle
Frank station.

Stanley often sat in a window seat of the
subway train, looking down into the valley where in the winter one
could catch a glimpse of a blue tarp or some orange garbage bags
where the homeless had stitched together their tiny shelters. By
late spring, however, the foliage would erupt in a dense canopy
through which nothing could be seen from above, and the subway
riders would commute unaware of lives being lived out of sight and
out of mind.

A few months ago his department had
completed a study, using statistical methods, estimating 5,052
people homeless on Toronto’s streets, in ravines, parks, shelters,
health care facilities and correctional institutions.
Statistically, 666 of them lived in ravines and parks.

“What’s your name?” he asked as she laid the
split fish on a flap of heavy-duty chicken wire over her low-flame
fire pit.

“Callie,” she said without looking up.

“This is where you live?”

“This is just my summer place. I have a
condo in Yorkville.”

“Really?” Decent condos in Yorkville started
at $600K. Stanley and Martha had checked it out last year, thinking
to cash in on a decade’s massive appreciation on their Browning
Avenue house, and put Martha within walking distance of her
gallery. But in the end, the backyard garden had kept Martha
rooted. And just as well, Stanley reflected, since it would have
doubled the distance of his run to Isabel, leaving him barely
enough time for a premature ejaculation before he’d have had to
head home.

“My Beemer’s parked in the bushes back
there.”

“Uh-huh.” She had a sense of humor as well
as a sense of adventure. He’d pegged her as an edge-runner, one of
those William Gibson types who couldn’t stay put in her
demographic, migrating between categories, trying on different
lifestyles like a teenager with an identity crisis.

Her wet hair seemed beautifully cut, framing
a face with high cheekbones, thick eyebrows and those amazing eyes.
He could’ve sworn her dress was a Donna Karan, but there was a
ragged little flap at the neck where the label had been torn off.
She wore no jewelry, but had a tattoo around her left wrist, what
looked like Sanskrit characters. Her hands and feet were beautiful;
she could have modeled either for fashion photo shoots.

If she’d been in her twenties, he’d have
assumed a rich kid runaway, high on a cocktail of drugs and booze
and sexual freedom, rejecting ambitious parents who’d expected her
to go into medicine or law, going AWOL instead to freak them out.
Don’t tell me what to do with my life
.

But this woman was in her late thirties,
early forties. He’d seen her naked in the river, a full frontal.
Beautiful as she was, she was no kid. But do her hair and nails,
put her in heels with a clean dress, she’d look ready for a
business meeting. Give her a Blackberry, she’d take Bay Street by
storm, stealth or sheer sex appeal.

She removed the fish from the fire and
handed him a piece, keeping the head for herself. He hesitated a
moment, debating the wisdom of eating an anonymous catch from the
Don River. He didn’t even trust his local fish market, and
preferred to buy from Loblaw’s, where fresh flash-frozen filets had
neither skin nor tails to betray their origins.

“Something to drink?” She pulled on a cord
anchored to a tent-peg in her front yard. Up from the bottom of the
Don came a net bag with two bottles of wine. She selected one
that’d already been opened, pulled the cork with her sharp white
feral teeth and passed him the bottle.

It was cool to the touch, not like it’d come
from the fridge in the LCBO, but acceptable. Stanley read the
label. A Niagara riesling, he’d had it before. Although he wouldn’t
bring it to a friend’s dinner party, the price/value equation made
it perfectly suitable for home consumption.

They ate with their bare hands and drank
from the bottle. Stanley had never had fish, let alone wine, so
early in the day, and he chalked it up as a novel experience.
Fearing a fish-provoked gastro, however, he drank perhaps more wine
than was necessary.

He looked at his watch. It was 7:15, by
which time he usually left home to catch the subway. He knew that
if he went now, he could jog home and shower and arrive at work
only an hour late.

As he was thinking about that, she leaned
forward to take the bottle for another swig, and he looked right
down the décolletage of her dress. He saw her bare breasts loose
within the shadow of the fabric and he didn’t know what came over
him. He leaned forward at the same time, like a moth drawn by the
green fire of her eyes, and put his lips on hers.

All the air went out of him and he felt
breathless and dizzy and excited at the same time, like some little
kid taking his first ride on the roller coaster. They fell sideways
onto the ground and his hands groped her, one going for a breast,
the other going for the ass that had caught his eye in the first
place, luring him into this insanity.

She responded with an enthusiasm that
startled him. In moments she had the better part of him out of his
running shorts. Wary of being caught
in flagrante delicto
,
even though Martha was now at the airport, and Isabel on her way to
work, he inched toward her makeshift dwelling as she clung to him,
her mouth fastened on his neck like a remora, her hand fist-full of
his manhood.

Inside the shelter was a sleeping bag on a
piece of foam, and it was on this flying carpet that Stanley was
transported to heaven. In moments they were completely naked, and
entwined together like snakes in a fever. Her skin was hot, her
body muscled, her molten core as tight and buttery as a teenage
prom queen. After half an hour, Stanley let out a groan that could
have been heard all the way downtown, and collapsed beside her in a
spastic post-orgasmic heap.

He awoke an hour later with a headache, his
mouth tasting like a fish drowned in a barrel of cheap wine. For a
moment he wasn’t sure where he was. Or wasn’t sure if he wanted to
know where he was. He felt for his penis to make sure it was still
there. From what he remembered, there’d been a terrific struggle,
and he wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been torn off in the process. To
his relief, it was still intact, and responded to his touch by
raising its head, like an extreme fighter after a severe beating,
but still game for more.

Beside the bed was a bookshelf fashioned
from bricks and wooden planks. Stanley rolled on his side and
examined the titles.
The SAS Survival Guide
.
An Idiot’s
Guide to Astrology
.
The Female Body: An Owner’s Manual
.
Sexual Palmistry
.
Fodor’s Guide to India
. The rest
were novels: a mix of mysteries, thrillers and erotica.

Stanley got dressed and looked at his watch.
It was 9:30. He had no meetings on the agenda today, and had in
fact planned to simply hunker down in his office to read a thick
report from the provincial government on the sustainability of
social assistance programs for the homeless, whose numbers were
considered suspect by his boss.

In fact, their department of Social
Statistics was one of the last way-stations in the vetting process
for large budget programs. “Vee are from zee SS,” his boss Joan
liked to joked with her non-Jewish departmental colleagues, “and
vee are here to count you.”

She was vacationing this week in Muskoka,
with no expectation of her calling in for any reason. If he’d had
his cell phone with him, he could’ve called his assistant Gary to
say he’d stayed home to read the report undisturbed. But in the
absence of such a call, his staff would simply assume he’d taken a
vacation day. Let’s face it, you could bring a carton of doughnuts
into a government office during the summer, and scarcely anyone
would surface for a nibble.

Stanley crawled out of the shelter. Callie
sat cross-legged, still naked, on a square of folded blanket with
eyes closed and hands folded in her lap. She appeared to be
meditating and he didn’t want to break her concentration, so he sat
there quietly, just watching her. In repose, her face had a
timeless quality to it, reminding him of statues from Indian
temples, of goddesses whose inner bliss was reflected in their
outer beauty.

An hour passed. Stanley got antsy. He wanted
to go home, take a shower, have a coffee, give Isabel a call. If
Callie didn’t wake up in the next minute, he’d leave. It was
starting to get a little creepy, this deep meditation. She was off
in a world of her own, and didn’t appear to be coming back any time
soon.

He stood up, taking a last look around. It’d
been wonderful in a strange sort of way, but it was time to go.
Maybe it was just the fish, or the wine, or the ecstatic sex, but
he was starting to feel queasy. He felt like he’d been teleported
away and back, returning slightly out of sync, like Jeff Goldblum
in
The Fly
, needing coffee to wash down his sugar. He needed
to return to familiar surroundings – home, office, head space –
before she woke up and mesmerized him again.

He felt a sudden
frisson
of panic,
and the hair stood up on the back of his head. It’d been fun, but
now he had to run. He crept quickly through the undergrowth,
heading for the safety of the trail back to Pottery Road. He
berated himself for having been such an idiot, having sex with an
unwashed wood nymph. What had possessed him? He’d better see his
doctor right away, get a morning-after shot of antibiotics or
something.

He paused to relieve himself beside a small
bush that bore clusters of tiny red berries. No sooner had he done
so, he felt a wave of relief. His panic attack had passed. So had
his desire to return to Pottery Road, Riverdale or life as he had
known it on Browning Avenue.

He looked back toward the Don. The path
though the bushes was a tunnel into the trees, and at the far end
of it a warm light glowed and pulse. Probably it was just some
trick of the eye – sunlight reflected from the river onto the
underside of the leaves, the breeze in the foliage, clouds
shape-shifting...

She was reading a book when he returned to
her. She looked up at him and smiled. “Feeling okay?”

“I had to go for a leak.”

“You could have gone in the river. It’s what
I do.”

“For
everything
?”

She frowned. “I have a latrine. I’ll show
you later.”

He had mixed feelings about that. Her tone
implied he might be around for awhile. However much he doubted
that, he didn’t know whether to be flattered or frightened. He
still hadn’t figured her out. Was she an escapee from a psychiatric
ward or just a sun-worshipping tree-hugger who’d taken her love for
the environment to its logical extreme?

“Sit down.” She patted the ground in front
of her. “Show me your hands.”

He sat cross-legged in front of her and held
out his hands. As soon as she took his right hand in hers, an
enormous current went through his arm, across his heart and into
his groin. He laid his left hand over his crotch in case his
erection burst through the fabric of his jogging shorts.

She traced her finger across his palm. She
might as well have tickled his scrotum, it was all he could do to
stifle a moan of pleasure.

“Long straight head line,” she said.
“Post-graduate degree, a scientist or some sort of
number-cruncher?”

“PhD in statistics,” he admitted.

“A branch off your head line curves down to
the heel of your palm. Ever been treated for depression?”

“Self-medicated.” Seven years into his
marriage with Martha, he’d hit the wall of a mid-life crisis,
mourned his lost freedom, fell into a spell of drinking and
pot-smoking that had lasted two-and-half years. Luckily, he’d never
let it show at work.

“Your heart line is short, takes a sharp
turn under your middle finger. Makes you a bit of a horn-dog, not
particularly ethical.”

“
Carpe diem
, that’s my motto.” He
wouldn’t admit that to anyone else, but what did it matter, he’d
probably never see her again.

“Life line swings well out into the palm.
You’re very healthy.” She lowered her head to look closer. “But
there’s a line that branches off to meet your fate line, and a
little fish at the end of it.”

“A fish? What’s that?”

She didn’t answer him, but concentrated on
measuring his life line with the middle phalange of her little
finger. “You’ll have some sort of spiritual epiphany around age 50,
jump the tracks and go AWOL.”

“That doesn’t sound likely.” Stanley had his
sights set on retirement at age 60, a nice government pension
fattened on 30 years of service.

“How old are you now?”

“Fifty.”

She let go of his hand and cocked her head
toward the river, as if she’d just heard someone call her name.
When she turned back to him, her green eyes swept his face like a
searchlight.