The Hungry Ghosts (17 page)

“Shivan, you know how I feel about that.”

I nodded, feeling bad at the pained look on Ronald’s face.

“It’s a cesspit,” he said gently, taking my hands. “You will fall easy prey to those vultures and make your life a piece of trash. Promise me you won’t do that.”

“Yes, yes, I promise, Ronald.”

“You must think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he whispered.

“No, no.” Then, feeling I had to make recompense for my slip-up, I added, “I don’t think you’re crazy at all, Ronald. In fact, I think you’re a very kind person. You’re so good to me. You really are. Other people wouldn’t have bothered with someone like me.”

“Ah, no, Shivan, don’t say that.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “You have so much to offer the world, you do. You’re so charming.”

“Really?”

He chuckled at my plea for validation and took my face in his hands. “So fucking handsome, and you don’t even know it.”

I grinned happily, but when he did not let go of my face and his look became searching, my grin pulled tight. He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. “So, beautiful,” he murmured. His lips felt cold and wet against mine. He moved his hands down to my shoulders. “Do you mind that I did that?” I was surprised at how vulnerable he looked, as if he was going to cry.

“It’s alright, Ronald, it’s alright.” By which I meant it was alright he had forgotten himself.

But he took my words for permission, and he leaned forward and kissed me again. His tongue nudged my lips and I opened them. He slid his tongue in, moving it about languorously. I felt myself growing hard. I began to kiss back desperately, pushing myself into him. I pushed so hard, we nearly lost our balance. “Whoa!” Ronald grinned. “Shall we go upstairs?”

I nodded, yet I couldn’t move from where I was. Ronald took my hand in both of his and led me up the stairs, his smile gentle.

The bedroom was done all in white. Its king-size bed was higher than my waist. I had lost my erection and now had an overwhelming desire to urinate. Ronald pointed out the washroom, which was massive, with both a Jacuzzi and a glass shower stall. “Take your time,” he said as I went in.

When I came out, I stopped, disoriented, in the beam of the washroom light. The room was dark, the heavy curtains drawn.

“Over here.”

Ronald was under the bed covers, his head and naked shoulders visible.

“You can leave the washroom light on if you like.”

I nodded and made my way cautiously across the room. When I got to the bed, I reached out to pull the covers back and Ronald laughed good-naturedly. “Aren’t you gonna get undressed?”

“Um … yes … sure.” I turned away and began to take off my clothes.

I did not know how naked Ronald was under the covers, if I should keep my underpants on or not. Would I seem too eager if I took them off?

He was propped up on his elbow, a small smile on his face, watching me, waiting. I took my time slipping under the covers so he could tell me to remove my underwear, if that was the way things were done. But he said nothing. He settled down on his side to face me.

Ronald put an arm around my shoulders. I did the same to him.

He breathed out. “Wow, your hands are freezing.”

“Um … are they?”

He laughed to say he understood it was just my nervousness. Then he shifted into me, his hand slipping down my back, drawing me close. We began to kiss. I slid my hand down Ronald’s spine. He did not have his underwear on. But by now it did not matter, for he was pulling mine down to my knees. He drew himself in even closer and held our erections together.

After we were done, Ronald asked if I wanted something to eat or drink before we went to sleep. He put on the bedside lamp and I saw he had a hairy paunch and his chest was flabby, his nipples pointed.

“I … I have an early class tomorrow, I must go.” Something was crashing within me.

“Do you?” he fondled my ear and looked at me quizzically.

“Yes,” I declared, my voice cracking with the desire to escape. “I have left my books at home. So I must get them.”

After a moment, he nodded and his lips set in a thin line. He gestured for me to get out of the bed.

As I got dressed, I could feel his cold stare on me. When I was done, I turned to him. Ronald was seated, bolstered by pillows, arms folded. “Shivan, have I been a good friend to you or not?”

“You have, Ronald, of course you have. I am so grateful for everything you have done for me.”

“Funny way you have of showing me your gratitude.”

“But what have I done?” I pleaded. “I have no choice but to go home.”

“You don’t have a class tomorrow.” He said it with such certainty that I couldn’t contradict him. “You return my friendship with lies. Is that how you show your gratitude?”

“Please, Ronald.” I came and sat on the bed. “I … I must go home.”

He picked at a nub on the duvet. Outside, I could hear a couple passing in the street, the raucous joshing of the man, the woman’s sexually charged laugh.

I stood up and began to fumble with my shirt buttons. Then I took off my trousers and underwear. When I was in bed again, he slid down on his side and tugged at my shoulders for me to turn towards him. He slipped one arm under my ribs and stroked my hip with his other hand. “I know exactly how you’re feeling,” he whispered. “It’s okay to be frightened, to even be repulsed by what you have done. But you need to recognize that they are your feelings and not transfer them to me. Okay?”

I nodded. “What about my family?” I asked as a last appeal. “They will wonder why I have not come home.”

He picked up the phone from the bedside table and set it between us.

Fortunately, no one answered, and I left a message saying I was staying over at a friend’s house. Ronald watched me with grave approval.

I had to work the next afternoon, and I got home to find that Ronald had called and left a message. I did not call him back. Over the next few days he telephoned often and left messages, but I never returned them. By now my mother and sister were starting to look at me oddly, wondering who this person was. To allay their suspicions, I called Ronald from a pay phone at York. I begged him never to call me again.

“You are a sly, calculating person who uses people,” he shouted down the phone at me. “You didn’t even have the decency to call and dump me until I had humiliated myself by calling so many times.”

I was so frightened that I hung up.

One of the bookstores I frequented had a help-wanted sign in its window. I went in to apply and got two shifts on the weekend and one during the week.

When I left the bookstore, a warm autumn breeze was blowing up from Lake Ontario. Gauzy clouds scuttled by at a tremendous speed, casting a lively
play of light and shadow onto the busyness and colour of Queen Street. As I stood there in the crush of pedestrians, my shirt flapping against my skin, a busker played a catchy tune on a harmonica close by and the smell of roasted coffee beans wafted out from a nearby café.

It had been a month since that final phone call with Ronald and I felt recovered from the encounter, sure that good changes were coming.

The following Friday evening, I went down to Isabella Street. I had by now discovered the gay newspaper
Xtra!
and found out that there were a couple of bars here. Komrads was on the second floor and there was a line to go upstairs to the dance floor. As I stood in the queue I listened to patrons talking around me and realized I was one of the few men who had come alone. I kept glancing over to the group in front of me, the one behind, hoping to be included in their conversation, a polite, willing smile on my face. But they ignored me, and when I happened to catch the eye of one of the men, he returned my tentative smile with a haughty glare. He whispered something to his friends and they glanced over and giggled.

When I was finally in the bar, I stood in a corner for what seemed an interminable amount of time, looking at the passing men, watching a drag queen twirl fans on the dance floor. Finally a man stood by me and introduced himself. He was about fifty, with grey hair and a lean, sharp face. I was so grateful for his attention that, even though I did not find him attractive, I went to his apartment and had sex with him.

It did not take me long to realize that in a community so devoted to the worship of beauty, I was generally not considered good looking because of the colour of my skin. In the meat market of 1980s gay bars, I was not prime steak. I did not, however, lack for attention. I attracted the old and the ugly, and because I had come to the bars looking desperately for love and companionship, I took what was offered to me, though none of these liaisons lasted very long, some barely a night. My foreignness was often my appeal, and these white men ascribed both a submissiveness and feral sexuality to me, one man begging me to put on a loincloth and turban that he had in his closet.

There was a smattering of other non-white men at the bars, but I avoided them as if fearing contagion. Occasionally, an Indian man, and even once a Sri Lankan, would strike up a conversation with me, mainly to share his problems. I always kept these conversations short and moved on, not wanting
to see in their haunted faces a reflection of my condition. We did not belong in the gay world because of our skin colour, yet spurned by our own people, we had no choice but to linger on its fringes.

For a while I stopped going to the bars, but soon my loneliness became too acute and I decided to attend a coming-out group.

The very intimacy of the gathering, the fact that we were supposed to share our lives, only made me feel more lonely. These men knew nothing of Sri Lanka, and their earnest interjections of “cool” and “neat” when I found myself having to explain the world I had come from grew tedious and produced a bleakness in me. I tried initially to be witty, hoping this would win some admiration. The rest of the group responded with dutiful laughter, but I could tell that Sri Lankan humour was different from theirs in some way I could not name and they were merely being polite. Or perhaps I truly failed to be witty, because when I spoke in the group I was very conscious of my accent, hearing my voice as if in a lagging echo.

Dating was forbidden. The group leaders, who were older social workers, wanted to create an atmosphere that was different from the bars. Yet under the guise of all this earnest sharing, the same hierarchy of the bars existed. The person everyone wanted to know, to be paired with during one-on-one discussions, was a blond boy who, with his plaid shirts and straight-acting manner, looked like he had stepped right off a farm.

There was a black man from Trinidad in the group. I sensed, in that way we well-bred post-colonials from the old British Empire recognize each other’s social markers, that his family back home was rich. But here he had moulded himself to fit white expectations, become more street black, more ghetto. He was immensely popular in the group and everything he said was hailed with great good cheer or serious attention.

The group was only for eight weeks. At its final meeting, we learnt that this black man and this blond boy had been carrying on an affair all the while. I received the news with a sickening lurch in my stomach that went beyond mere jealousy. The black man had slipped through the tight fence into the world of the charmed, the happy. I did not know how he had done it; I did not know what he had that I lacked, and I felt anguished at my ignorance. Without knowing what was wrong with me, how could I change or fix myself?

10
 

T
HE CULVERT HAS COME TO AN END
at a field, where it disappears underground through a concrete tunnel. I scramble up the slope of the gully and find that, even though it is late, there is a surprising number of people in the field: young couples with their arms around each other; parents with a child who runs in hectic circles, brought here, no doubt, to wear herself out; dog walkers patrolling the periphery. A corridor of electrical towers cuts through the centre of the field, making us all appear diminished and fragile against this row of hulking pylons that stride the field like robotic monsters, massive limbs planted in the brown mud.