Girl Unwrapped (35 page)

“I’d like to come up,” Toni manages to mumble.

“Uh-uh. Not a good idea. I’m not feeling motherly right now. Virgins are famous for falling in love with whoever brings them out. Instant enchantment, like in
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Snap, and you’re in love with whoever flicked your switch. It gets too personal and complicated, see? All I want is a fling, an easy fuck, not to have to feel responsible. Oh shit, don’t look at me like that. Why weren’t you upfront?”

“I’m not a virgin.”

Toni feels herself blush to the roots of her hair.

“Your nose is growing. Men don’t count. If you’ve been fucked by a man, it doesn’t count.”

“I won’t fall in love. I promise.”

Toni grabs Robin’s sleeve.

“You must think I’m full of myself,” Robin says, gently pulling herself free and taking a step backward. “I’ve just seen a lot of intensity lately. And I don’t believe in love anymore. It’s a trap, makes people possessive. Slaves.”

“Just this once. I’ll go home right after … ”

She tries to think of a promise to convince Robin that the need ripping through her body isn’t dangerous. Other nights, when she stood on the doorstep of someone willing, she was the one to turn away, overwhelmed by her desires. Yet it was nothing to what she feels now. Terrified. Incandescent. Filled with a hot white light. Sure in her bones that only good can come of this. Unable to say it out loud.

“Aw, look at you. You make me feel like a bitch. All right then, Goofy, come on up.”

Does she just feel obliged, Toni wonders, as one would feel obliged to take in a stray cat? But the hand that reaches out and grasps Toni’s is sure and firm and transmits a more heated invitation than words alone could do. Toni’s heart hammers harder. Robin in the lead, they ascend the long, snowy staircase toward a red wooden door at the top. Inside, they creep down the hall so as not to wake Robin’s roommates, and arrive at a tiny bedroom whose narrow space is almost entirely filled with a wide, low bed. Robin lights candles, one after another until the room is ablaze, then pulls Toni down. They swim into the deep warm sea of a kiss.

“What do you like?” Robin whispers when they are naked. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” Toni confesses, amazed to hear herself tell the truth. “It’s my first time … like this.”

She shuts her eyes and waits for Robin’s reaction, the I-knew-it accusations about Toni’s virginity. Everything could be over before it has begun.

“Right, your first time.”

Robin sighs, producing a long, warm, tickling breeze that sets everything inside Toni a-quiver.

“Well then, we better go slow. The first time is really important.”

She has left the known world. She is waving goodbye, this time for real. Behind her, the certainty of pyramids. Before her, the wilderness, the dry, brown earth, crags and thorns. No shelter here. No history to hang onto. Only space and silence and the freedom to be naked. She is no longer the chosen. She chooses. The flood of heat. The thunder of her heart. She is home.

chapter 27

They never use the “L” word. Banished is the sentiment that creates mountains of expectations and sinkholes of grief: Love. Ooey-gooey love. Beware the romance industry, Hallmarks, Harlequins, the patriarchal capitalist plot, the cleaving that turns women into docile imbeciles, emotional weaklings, slavish consumers of everything from overpriced lingerie to washing machines. Love equals monogamy equals aping the straight world’s idea of marriage (egotism
à deux
, imprisoning domesticity).

Though they have excised the word “love” from their vocabulary, “lover” is okay. Lovers can be bold, sexy, sophisticated, spontaneous, non-exclusive, free. Lovers don’t wallow or cling. Lovers aren’t “in” anything. They are just themselves.

Toni, the lover, strides across campus toward the Ghetto. Walking tall. She
is
tall. She is stretched out to her full glorious height, never again to shrink into herself like a faint-hearted turtle. She wants a gift to bring her honey. But what? Flowers?
Verboten
. Flowers to Robin would be like bacon to a rabbi. Chocolates? Another romantic cliché. She follows the trail of dirty slush into a grocery store and cruises the aisles. Beans, par-boiled rice, instant mashed potatoes—the staples of student diets. There must be something. Finally, she settles on a Sara Lee banana cake from the frozen foods cooler. It has a thick, golden layer of frosting. Sweet and sensuous, yet neutral. But will Robin be pleased? Toni hurries from the store plagued by doubts over the hard, icy package tucked under her arm.

At the bottom of the long outdoor staircase leading to the magical red door of Robin’s apartment, Toni pauses to catch her breath, compose her face, think of casual opening lines.
Hi, doll. How’s it going?
Brought a little something for dessert.
At last she can wait no longer. The staircase shakes beneath her bounding feet.

“Oh!” Robin says. “It’s you.” Her brown eyes register the guarded surprise of someone who finds an uninvited guest on her doorstep. Panic stabs Toni beneath the breastbone. Did Robin forget their date? But the impish face breaks into a grin. “Kidding. Just kidding. Jeez, you’re so easy!”

How lovely Robin appears, a woodland sprite in a plaid flannel shirt and men’s work socks, her glossy, unpinned hair spilling over her shoulders. They sit on the edge of Robin’s bed in the small, overheated room, and all Toni’s efforts to calm herself come undone. They’ve been going out (if that’s what it’s called) for more than a month and still Toni trembles as she did the first time. She swabs her sweaty brow with the back of her hand. Robin apologizes for the overheated room, says the window is stuck. Toni leaps up, glad to have a chore to perform for her sweetheart. She yanks and pummels the stubborn sash until a cool hand touches her arm.

“Hey, Goofy. Save your energy for something better.”

Robin’s eyes are wide and dark. And tender. So amazingly tender.

They tumble upon the bed.

How is it possible, Toni wonders anew, to penetrate that soft vulnerable place in Robin and deliver not pain but pleasure? A miracle. Her lover’s body arches, the navel smiles, a deep-throated groan echoes through the room. They take turns taking all they need from one another, then they fall into velvet sleep.

Later, howling with laughter, their naked, unequally sized bodies wrapped together in a bed sheet, they lurch across the hall to the bathroom. The walls are painted metallic red—the red of accidents, of lipsticked temptresses—and there are candles, incense holders, and ashtrays. There’s a poster of John Lennon in wire-rimmed glasses, another of Janis Joplin in feathers and beads. Robin squeezes gobs of raspberry bubble bath into the gush from the faucet of the big clawfoot tub. Mounds of foam swell as the water pounds. Clouds of steam fog the window, shutting out the winter night. Robin has bath sports to teach, games with washcloths, soap, toes. Where did she learn to play so deliciously? With other girls? Jealousy!
Verboten
.

They soak until their fingers pickle, passing a soggy joint from hand to hand.

“I think I’m starting to corrupt you a little,” Robin says.

Later still they attack the Sara Lee cake. They eat straight from the aluminium container, clashing forks, letting the flavours explode on their tongues and in their marijuana-soaked brains. Mesmerized, Toni watches Robin’s buttercream-shiny lips move in rhythmic chewing. Her own mouth moves in exactly the same way, the same pace, as if drawn into a dance. How wonderful. One mind in two bodies. The union of souls.
Union? As in marriage? Hush. Shush. Don’t spoil the
moment.

Toni explains the magic of photosynthesis as exemplified by chains of formulas and diagrams of cells packed with chloroplasts. She rhymes off the multi-syllabic molecules proudly, as if she had discovered them herself. Though she can see Robin’s face has gone stiff with boredom, Toni talks faster and faster. Her lover yawns mightily. She hops up from the bed, away from Toni and the fat, densely printed textbook between them.

Robin is into arts, drama in particular. She has no head for facts and formulas, and like much of the ill-informed world, finds science a bit sinister despite its usefulness. Science run amok leads to nuclear bombs and lobotomies, she argues. Look at her dad, a doctor, and a prime example of cold, patronizing hubris. Plus, she feels sorry for the rat in the maze, the dog in the cage, the chimp attached to wires. She almost wept over the experiment on the nurturing-deprived rhesus monkeys. The photo in Toni’s psychology text showed a deranged baby monkey cowering in a corner and rocking on its haunches. Toni had to admit she too was disturbed by the forlorn expression on the animal’s face, but how else is science to advance?

Now, with a flick of her toe, Robin flips open the lab notebook Toni left on the floor and grimaces. The page shows diagrams of dissections including one of the urogenital system, with vaginal flaps pinned back to expose the cervix.

“Poor kitty!” Robin’s voice throbs with tragedy.

“It was a mouse, not a cat. Anyway, it was long dead. We didn’t hurt it.”

Robin doesn’t look convinced.

“One day I might discover the gene for gayness,” Toni jokes.

She’s thinking about the astounding breakthroughs of recent years, electron microscopes, the structure of the DNA molecule. Because of such leaps in technology and knowledge, Toni Goldblatt, a mere first-year biology student, might be better equipped to someday unravel the mysteries of the organic world than Einstein could in his era.

“Then what? Aborted fetuses? Exterminations of defective carriers?” Robin’s tone is combative. She pulls a sweater over her head in frowning silence. With a stab of panic, Toni realizes that Robin is about to depart.

“Can I come watch your rehearsal?” Toni pleads. She ought to study, but she’s not ready to let Robin out of her sight just yet. And she knows Robin always likes an audience.

“Sure.” Robin offers a faint but forgiving smile.

Toni wishes she had words to convey her love of biology. The bigness of the field drives her, the depths, and the mysterious intimacy too. She once read a heart surgeon’s memoir. The surgeon described an outdated technique for saving patients in cardiac arrest by cutting open the patient’s chest cavity and manually massaging the failing organ to restore its rhythm. An incredible sensation, the memoirist wrote, to hold a quivering heart in one’s bare hands. Yet all of biology is like that, Toni thinks; it’s a breathtaking closeness to the essence of life. True, most of her course work is drudgery. The number of interlocking mechanisms in a single cell alone staggers the mind. She reviews and memorizes and digests, but every so often is struck by pure astonishment. You go down, down, down to the basics—atoms jostle against each other, electrons skip out of their orbits, new bonds are formed, complexity grows. Out of unfathomably tiny bits of matter and energy comes a whole universe. And life? Surely it’s more than the sum of inanimate parts. Will that mystery someday be unravelled? The quivering truth within?

Although enrolled in English literature at McGill, Robin’s real passion is an experimental troupe called the Oh Theatre. Several evenings a week, the eleven members of the troupe meet in an empty loft near the harbour in Old Montreal. They rehearse a piece, written by the director, about a family hiding out in a bomb shelter in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Robin plays an angry daughter who argues for going up to check on what’s left of the outside world. Her lines are impassioned pleas for freedom. A theme song plays between acts: Dylan’s “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.”

The lone spectator, Toni sits in the shadows on a heap of old rolled-up carpets as she watches, entranced. How can Robin give so much of herself in public? How can she make herself transparent to people she hardly knows and eventually to an audience of strangers? Robin rages, falls on her knees, digs her nails into her scalp, and sobs in a heart-wrenching manner. Toni wants to leap up and put her arms around her darling. Before she can do so, Robin lifts her head and she asks in a weary voice, “Overdone?” Toni is indignant when the director nods in the affirmative.

After rehearsal, she and Robin stroll through the narrow streets of Old Montreal, past all-night jazz joints, head shops, art galleries, basement cafés. Robin has introduced Toni to this chic part of town that not so long ago was just a drab business area by day and a den of crime by night. The district, with its old stone buildings, has a European feel. Toni confesses her dream of taking Robin to Vienna someday. She can speak some German, and remembers her father’s stories; she could act as a guide, showing her sweetheart the Imperial Palace, the boulevards, parks, the street where the Jews had to scrub the sidewalks, the bookshop where her father once worked. She imagines how Robin would ache with sympathy.

“Let’s go next summer,” Toni enthuses. She takes Robin’s hand and slips it into her jacket pocket so that their two hands can nestle together.

Robin laughs lightly and pulls away.

“Next summer is a long way off.”

“So tell me about him,” her mother says casually.

The command fails to register at first. The words are as meaningless as the dripping of the tap at the kitchen sink, the muttering of the 7 a.m. news. In a fog of weariness, Toni nurses her second cup of coffee. Her mother sits opposite in the breakfast nook, dressed for work in a smart wool dress adorned with a bright silk scarf. Lisa more or less manages Shmelzer’s Ladies’ Fashions these days. She supervises the sales staff and the seamstress, handles transactions with suppliers. Months ago, she changed her hairstyle yet again, dying it black with one dramatic wave of white in the front to remind the world of her losses, yet still appearing chic. The elegant hairdo frames a face with eager eyes and a bright, coaxing smile.

“
Nu
?”

Him? Uh-oh.

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I’m blind? You think I don’t see what’s obvious, not just to me who reads you like a book, but to the whole world? My little girl is in love.”