Sparrow Nights (11 page)

The memory of that evening is, of course, hopelessly compromised by alcohol, but after she’d moved out, when I waited second by second for her to telephone, when she knew I was waiting, I sometimes had the distinct feeling that it gave her pleasure
not
to call, to look at the telephone by her arm and
not
pick it up. On those few occasions when she did see me—emaciated and wild-eyed, so frightened of her I could barely string a sentence together—I had the feeling that she rather enjoyed her debilitating effect on me. Perhaps she was just a nasty little cunt after all and in her absence I had forgotten that.

Anyway, that evening on the beach in Thailand, she set something off in me. I was indifferent to the subject of childbirth, but something in her manner made me want to squash her in the debate, and I persisted so long that she rose and stormed away. Later, crawling into bed, I was still annoyed, so was she, but in the morning I felt a short, sick sensation when I awoke and remembered the whole foolish affair. What happens to those bad moments? Does sex wipe them away, like that damp cloth on the blackboard? Or do they remain in the heart, one added upon another, a tiff over the dishes here, a disagreement about bullfighting there, an accumulation of nicks and cuts until one morning she looks across the breakfast table and, like Anna Karenina, finds your ears too large or the crunching of your toast repulsive?

A month before she left, we were having lunch in the kitchen. I was hungry and I greedily gobbled up my tuna sandwich.

“I don’t want to make you self-conscious,” she said, “but you’re making a great deal of noise with that sandwich.”

She said it politely but in tones that alarmed me at some level. I apologized, but I remember thinking, Hmm, this is new, this has never happened before. One wonders a million things in one’s day, so I didn’t give it special weight, but I
did
wonder, fleetingly, does she not love me any more? Has she only now noticed this? Or has she only now decided to mention it? Perhaps I was indeed making an intolerable racket, but whatever the reason, something new had happened, I felt sure of that. And even though I didn’t think about the incident for months, not until well after she was gone, I have occasionally entertained the private thought that the day things
really
ended with us was not the day of the gently clinking coat hangers in the cupboard but the day with the tuna sandwich. And now, a few years beyond all of it, I’m not at all sure I was wrong.

“I should eat something,” I said to Passion. “I’m getting drunk.”

It’s snobbish to say we had a good time, but we did. A student from my Surrealist course came over and said hello and on the way out introduced his youthful mother. That my pupils might have parents younger than me seemed not so much haunting as vaguely implausible, and as they left the restaurant, watching them go, I again had that flat, unemotional recognition that my life was over.

It was very late when we came back up my street. I don’t quite remember the sequence of events after that. I know we had some cognac, after which Passion introduced a joint into the evening. She held it in her fingertips, like a piece of rare chocolate, and leaned her long neck forward to inhale it. Normally I stay away from that stuff, not for moral reasons but because it speeds up my brain to an intolerable level of negative introspection. But, muffled as it was by the blanket of alcohol, the groans and thrashings of my subconscious never made it to the surface.

I must have dozed off. I have a vague memory of the doorbell ringing, a taxi for Passion. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning on the chesterfield with a splitting headache, such a comic-strip hangover that I laughed giddily standing over the toilet bowl. I turned on the tap to help me, but the running water sounded like sneering English soccer fans. I looked in the mirror. My lips were caked with red wine. The flesh seemed swollen under my chin. The evening, which had seemed adventurous, now assumed a kind of frightening sordidness, as if I were en route to something from which I needed saving.

I opened the medicine cabinet, but I couldn’t find my codeine tablets, which was odd because I always left them in the same place. I checked on the floor, behind the toilet (bending over gave me the sensation of a large chunk of ice sliding forward inside my head); I even looked, inexplicably, in the bathtub. This was puzzling. I wandered into the kitchen and flipped through the cupboard beside the stove. I came across a near empty bottle of sleeping pills; I must have forgotten about it when I renewed my prescription. I shook a green capsule into my hand and went back to bed. I could hear a noise, a small clinking. It was the empty hangers in my cupboard, clinking together exactly as they had the night Emma left.

It came over me soon enough, the taste of bitter almonds, a sign the pill was seeping into my blood, seeping up into my brain. The headache receded and so did the sense of sin. I took a deeper breath. My body relaxed. The world’s dirty teeth loosened on my heart. I had not, after all, been privy to a sudden revolting
aperçu
of myself, as the bloated landlord of some discount store. No, I had simply drunk too much.
Il ne faut pas s’y tromper
. And yet, where a sleeping pill usually puts me out for four or five hours, this time I woke up an hour later, consciousness rising like a shark’s fin up, up through the dark water, breaking the surface. Yes, there
was
something wrong, I could feel it.

I lay in bed, my eyes still closed, running over the events of the evening: the phone call, the massage, the dinner, even the off-colour remark about the skin trade. What else? We’d talked about her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, the bank robber. How exotic it had seemed, me out in the world dining with a gangster’s girlfriend, a black one at that. A little piece of film noir that had unspooled itself in my head throughout the evening, during which, with each successive glass of wine, I had become more and more the angular leading man. I recalled with a slight shudder the encounter with my Surrealism student and his mother and the private pleasure I’d taken later in how I must seem to them, how surprised they must have been, talking and talking and talking about me afterwards. What an interesting fellow I was! One would have thought starchy, stiff, but there I was, a professor of French literature out on the town with a black woman, easy as can be. Even the waiters knew my name.
Another half-litre, Professor Halloway?
A man of the world.

How sordid it seemed now in this February light, a crow cawing down by the lake, the world so still, as if waiting for something, the sky pearl-coloured, the sun dull like polished silver, creeping through a crack in the venetian blinds. How odd that the sun would pick this very moment to sit at exactly the only place in the sky where it could break through the only break in my venetian blinds. But I was doing it again, delaying, putting off. What was it, what was the
problem?
What was bothering me?

I retrieved my dressing gown from the floor, where it lay like an executed man, and went cautiously into the living room. At first I noticed nothing wrong. I looked around the room. A candle burnt down to the nub, the wax hardened on the hardwood table. Sloppy but fixable. A smell of stale cigarette smoke. Two wineglasses, one on its side but unbroken. No wine stains on the carpet, no cigarette burns on the tabletop. Nothing permanent. I had just bent over to right the wineglass when I noticed, on the table beside the couch, a clear circular spot the size of the bottom of a glass. A light film of dust covered the rest of the table. My house, largely because of the fireplace, was very dusty; it gummed up my computer mouse, my CD player, watered the eyes of allergic guests. Except for this round space. Because I was hungover, a kind of glue coated my thoughts and stuck them shapelessly together. For that reason it took me some minutes to understand what was going on. There had been something on that table, something with a round base. But what? I couldn’t remember, the way that sometimes, when pressed, you can’t remember your phone number or where you left your car. I stared at the table and then the whole sickening picture came into focus. A frosted glass statue of the Madonna, a foot tall and very pricey, was gone. I’d inherited it from my mother; it was the only thing of hers I’d kept. I looked on the floor beside the sofa, under it. And then I noticed the other things. A cigarette lighter, my gold pocket watch (which Emma had returned), a Mexican ashtray, all missing. A pewter flask from the sideboard, a delicate bracelet from a long-departed sleepover, all of it gone. I saw clearly now the image of Passion getting out of the taxi with that over-large handbag. It was black velveteen, with red markings like lightning on the side.

Then I remembered the clank I’d heard down the hall, the sound I couldn’t identify. Of course: it was the medicine cabinet opening, the glass door banging against its hinges. The bitch. She’d even swiped my codeine tablets.

^{C H A P T E R}        
9

M
onths passed and with them the winter. Buds popped on the trees, the air turned soft and you could smell the wet earth. I went to a conference in Toulouse, my old stomping ground. The town was almost unrecognizable to me. I looked for old cafés and they were gone. I tried to look up my old Spanish roommate, but I couldn’t even find the street I remembered he lived on. Entire neighbourhoods seemed switched about.

I gave a paper on a new poem, allegedly by Rimbaud, which had recently turned up in a forgotten literary journal; there had been only one or two issues before it went under. After only one reading I was convinced it was a hoax; there was a kind of hothouse feel to it, the images too jammed together to suggest the effortless imagination of this young truant from the north country. In fact, on my second evening in Toulouse, I was having a drink after dinner when it came to me that there was something oddly familiar, not in the language but in the rhythm of the poem’s final rhyming couplet. I’d heard it somewhere before—and not in Rimbaud either. I stayed up much of the night flipping through Baudelaire, through all sorts of poets, anyone who might have had an influence on Rimbaud. By three that morning I came to the conclusion that Paul Verlaine, his lover, had written the poem as a parody and submitted it under his friend’s name. It was just the kind of thing those two might well have got up to one drunken afternoon.

I presented the paper the following day. It was greeted apathetically, as if I were a sort of spoilsport, except by Serrault, who was there to give a paper on “The Clown as Social Transgressor.” He agreed with me. Besides, he said, it was a second-rate poem anyway.

It was shortly after my return that I experienced a series of irritating bits of bad luck. It was not destiny fulfilling itself, nothing like that. Rather, it seemed like stubbing your toe two or three times on the same bedpost. Infuriating. I lost my Proust pencil, for example (for underlining the hardback version). Then I lost my wallet. Even after I’d cancelled my credit cards, I couldn’t seem to stop looking for it. In my shorts, in the back pocket of my blue suit, even in my shirts, as if you could possibly miss a falafel-sized wallet in the breast pocket of a shirt! I searched the clothes I’d worn the day before, the month before, I sniffed around my house, I looked in the African flower vase three, four, five times. It just went on and on, this crazy looking, as if I were some kind of mute animal that had lost its cub on the Serengeti. I looked and looked and looked, and I always ended up in a rage. I hurled the entire contents of my clothing cabinet onto the floor; sweaters, socks, towels, scarves I hadn’t seen in years, everything right there onto the floor. Including a pair of jeans that Emma had left behind. My, she had such a small waist. I laid the jeans out on my bed and for a second I stood there amidst the mess and the linen and the bundles of clothes and looked down at this set of jeans lying on the bed as if her body, her soul, had only seconds before soared from them. I lay down very carefully and I put my face in the crotch of the jeans. But they had been in the cupboard too long. She was gone.

I searched in my car, under the seat, under the dash. I banged my head on the mirror. To calm myself I sat very still and took a number of deep breaths. I could feel the magma changing colour in the centre of my head and I made a decision to let the wallet go, to go inside that very second and initiate the next tedious set of phone calls. I opened the car door and a passing Jeep, which had come up soundlessly during my reverie, took the door off at the hinges. The car screamed as if its arm had been torn away.

A half-hour later, after some belligerent give-and-take with a very unattractive woman—the driver of the car—I called a tow truck company, and twenty minutes after that a dirty-fingernailed, tabloid-reading thug pulled up in a half-ton with a crane on the back. He wanted to be paid in advance. I didn’t have a credit card, so I had to take a taxi to the fucking bank while he waited in the driveway with his meter on. His words, not mine.

I was making the hurried withdrawal, the cab still waiting, when the teller, a dark-eyed Pakistani woman, interrupted her calculations with an upward glance and a short, “Oh!” I had the unaccountable feeling that I should brace myself.

“Your friend Emma?” she said, her voice rising in a singsong.

I felt the blood leave my face. “I haven’t seen Emma for ages,” I replied coldly.

“Come
on,”
she said, and gave me an impertinent wink as if I were a well-known scoundrel contriving to pull a fast one.

“No,” I said quite deliberately, trying to control my voice, trying to control the impulse to punch her in the face, “I haven’t.” But the question—and my attempt, my need, to convince this
cunt
of my insouciance—left me quite breathless. I was sure she could hear it and I had the impression that my face was changing colour, a beacon to communicate to the world that I had been whipped raw by a young woman and that even the mention of her name still made me yelp with discomfort.

“Then you don’t know she’s pregnant?”

“How wonderful,” I said, and as the words came from my mouth I heard myself thinking, Good, I sound convincing, a lover of babies and forgiver of betrayals. And as for you, I thought, looking at the teller, at her bovine brown eyes, her beefy hips,
you
I’ll fix later. It enraged me that a teller had presumed to accost me on such a personal matter. Surely she had been seeking to wound me, to embarrass me.

“I suppose you’ll be sending your congratulations,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your congratulations to Emma for her pregnancy?”

I had the sensation of time slowing down as I’ve heard it does for a great athlete. A kind of murderous calm took hold of me. There was no hurry now.

“What I
can
tell you,” I said with deliberate slowness, “is that I don’t want to discuss my personal life with a teller when I come to do a piece of simple banking.”

She looked at me as if I’d just laid an exotically veined dildo on the counter alongside my bank book. Inexplicable as it may sound, I felt terrific, as if I had just struck a blow against an oppressor or scored a goal in the last second of a hockey match. They were childlike sensations of delight and surging pleasure. I was back in the taxi and ten blocks away before I understood what it was that had so pleased me. It was
relief
. For the first time since Emma left me, I had given public utterance to my rage for the pain that had been visited upon me. For the fact that she had never called or written or come to see me. That I could have been swinging from a rope in my house, my throat slashed, my shirt stiff with coagulated blood, and she had never so much as stopped by to see if I was alive. And that I should hear such a thing—she was having a baby!—from a teller. How curious an end stories and people and love affairs come to.

From a teller.

I came home, paid off the tow truck driver, fetched a bottle of wine, some cheese and a few cigarettes, and took them out on the porch for a bit of a think. I was waiting for the shock, I suppose, from the news of Emma’s pregnancy, the bang that comes from a sniper’s rifle a moment after you’ve seen the puff of smoke. But it didn’t come, and I assumed it meant I’d already given up on her.

It was rather interesting out there, actually, plopped in my wicker chair, feet on the balcony, watching the goings-on in the street: the neighbours coming in and out of their houses, cars parking, cars pulling away, dogs running down the street, children passing by. Like watching one of those educational movies of a plant growing. I found myself thinking about all sorts of things.

Near eight I went down to the corner for a drink. I felt like being in the presence of human bodies, but I didn’t like the company there; something rather irritated me about the place, about the foolish opinions that spilled over into my range of hearing. Silly people with silly ideas. I drifted along Bloor Street, stopping here and there, never quite satisfied, when suddenly I threw up my arm and flagged down a cab. I had a hunch there was something downtown for me.

I got out on College Street and started walking west. Crossed that little street by the bank machine. Without knowing why, I went into an upstairs blues club. I hadn’t been there for years. The girl on the door let me in for free, a sign, I assumed, that I was meant to be there. I sat at a corner table. A band was playing. The air was thick with blue cigarette smoke and happy chat. At the table next to mine a young man, reminiscent of someone I had known in university, held forth, his companions, both boys and girls, leaning forward with a look of anticipatory pleasure on their young faces. How generous they seemed, giving over the floor to him; how unbegrudging, how uncompetitive, their open-lipped smiles, the girls tapping their cigarettes on the side of the ashtray and exchanging elated looks. I had the impression of treading water in a tank full of beautiful fish, red and gold and blue and silver. Such youth and beauty and energy, talking of love and boyfriends and girlfriends. Does anyone ever think of anything else? I wondered.
Is
there anything else?

I looked around at the beautiful children and their bright summer clothes and realized abruptly that I didn’t belong in this part of town any more. This was, as Dupré might intone, the domain of the becoming.

Still, I remembered. The soaring, the sailing upwards, like the boy at the spellbound next table.

I yawned abruptly. It was time to move on. But where to? Where was I supposed to go? The wind tugged at me. I went down into the subway. When I got to the southbound platform I noticed there was no one about except for a young woman only yards away. She was standing near the tracks, looking down, lost in reverie. About a boy, I assumed. Or maybe a girl. They were everywhere that spring night, those girls that make you slightly pale. She had dark, short hair, jeans and leather moccasins, and wore a silver necklace so delicate you could barely see it. I sat down on the bench and stared at her. Stared and stared. I think she knew I was staring and I expected her to move off, but she didn’t.

The train arrived. I heard it rumble at the far end of the tunnel, saw its bright central light snap into being; I got on board and sat where I could watch her. I imagined introducing myself. What would I say? I would say, Have you read Maupassant?
Pas du tout?
Why, there’s a story about a young girl just like you and a man on the train, just like me, who watches her. Watches her and watches her and … Well, I hope you’ll forgive this impertinence, but I’d like you to read it. Read it and think of me. And then I would give her my card:
Professor Halloway, Ph.D. (Chicago)
. I’d write my home phone number on the back. Dear me, what good joke could I make? Something about Baudelaire. Verlaine maybe. Perhaps even that bit about Jarry walking the lobster on a leash; that had never really had its proper day. And then, with slightly bashful goodbyes, we would separate, there on the subway platform. How smart I would be not to presume. Weeks would go by; I’d forget about her almost entirely. And then one evening, when the fall air blows under the back door and I have to lay down a rolled-up towel to keep the draft from blowing under the crack, on such a night as that, the children dressed as hobgoblins ringing my doorbell, on such a night as that she would call …

But I smelt of alcohol and I didn’t want her to think I was
that
kind of person. She looked up and tilted her head, just so, as if she were reading a slightly puzzling billboard across the tracks, or perhaps so I could see even more clearly how beautiful she was, her pointed chin, her wide forehead. I looked for a flaw, but the more I stared the more beautiful she became, until I felt quite ill. I imagined kissing her exquisite neck. I closed my eyes and imagined touching my lips to her skin, right there, below her ear.

A man in a brown suit and a wig got on the train. Standing discreetly to the side, he looked about, here, there, like a mouse in a dark room, until he caught sight of her, and then he too stared at her, the both of us. I had the impression that, coming in, he had seen her and found a place where, like me, he could observe with impunity. But each second I looked at her grew more painful; it said to me, you’ll never have her, never be with her, that part of your life is over. And suddenly I could hardly wait for her to leave the train.

She got out at Union Station. Looking this way and then that, she moved down the platform. The train started up. I tried to force myself not to look at her as we passed because I knew I’d be looking for her to be looking back into the train and she wouldn’t be, a clear sign that she hadn’t even noticed me. But as we drew abreast I had to look. What if she
had
been looking back? What if that was the point of the evening?

The train rattled on through into the tunnel.

It was half past eleven when I came up my street. In the park a clutch of teenagers sat on the knoll smoking cigarettes. The wind gently stirred the branches overhead; you could hear them whisper,
swish, swish, swish
. Suddenly I was very tired, my head ached, my eyes felt as if tiny grains of sand were rubbing against the insides of my eyelids.