Sparrow Nights (9 page)

Anyway, I’d catch myself thinking about this sort of thing as I neared my appointment
avec les demoiselles;
curious, distracting thoughts, almost as if I were trying to wreck it for myself, this simple, straightforward pleasure.

Let me backtrack. Midway through my Thursday-night lecture on
Le Médecin malgré lui
, I would find myself daydreaming about the evening ahead, about the bare-breasted girl, her cotton dress unbuttoned at my request, standing beside me at the massage table.

“May I touch you there?” I’d say.

“If you want.” They talked to you in a quiet, soothing voice, those girls.

“Or there?”

“I’m not supposed to, but okay.”

Anticipating this scenario, I would find myself dizzy and somewhat distracted at the front of my class.
Yes
, I pointed out to my students,
Molière was an early champion of women and you can see that in
… And sometimes I’d drift off, jaw slightly open while the hushed class waited for me to toss a fresh fish into the net. Other times just thinking about those baby-oil girls made me crave a cigarette as one might after witnessing a bank robbery. But I never indulged myself. At my age a cigarette de-sexes you, as if the blood is cut short to your groin, is bumped onto a shorter, shallower track.

It was February now. A hard cold lay on the streets; smoke rose from chimneys in blue puffs that hung momentarily in the air and then scattered quickly, chilled and impatient to get away. The city was locked in a vise. In that terrible stillness you felt somehow in danger, like Napoleon’s men trudging back from Moscow.

Concluding my lecture, I fled the building, deferring until “later” the after-class discussion that I had myself suggested. The nasal-voiced geek with the prominent Adam’s apple, the untidy girl with the troublesome landlord, the blue-jeaned baby who’d do anything for an A (“Have you thought of
studying
, Angie?”)—it all fell from my shoulders as I raced through the exit doors. I hurried as if I might miss something, as if there was a terrible urgency. What if the large-breasted Janie was already with a client? Or green-eyed Margie was playing hooky again? By the time I reached Bloor Street, my stomach was in a knot. I was like a famished man who has settled down at a feast only to suspect someone is going to snatch away his plate.

I hurried along the street, a gloved hand covering my mouth and cheeks, past the Medical Arts Building, the Faculty of Education, the health food store. But in the act of crossing Spadina, I noticed that something had changed. I was no longer driven by the same excitement. Somewhere back there the desire had slipped away, vanished into the cold air. My brain fussed and jumped with irrelevant concerns: money, my mortgage, a slight at work, a student who dropped my doctoral seminar for Serrault’s. Like an ecstatically planned vacation that, as it approaches, seems somehow to lose the very magic that inspired it in the first place, the closer I got to the massage parlour, the less compelling, the more pedestrian, even sordid the whole thing seemed. Where had they gone, those stomach-plunging fantasies, now that I was almost on top of the place where they could be realized? What was this debris floating like junk in my head? What had happened in those blocks between Molière and Spadina?

I arrived at the door to the low-rise and hesitated. There didn’t seem any
point
now. The spell, the fit, whatever it was that had afflicted me like a flu bug in the lecture hall, appeared to have passed. But I knew that if I turned around and went home empty-handed, so to speak, it would all start up again. The green-eyed girl with the open dress would gather heat and urgency in my imagination in direct proportion to the distance I moved away from her.

I got out of the elevator and moved along the hallway as if on wheels, the thick scent of baby oil hanging in the air. I went in without knocking; the fish tank gurgled soundlessly; the hostess emerged; I kissed her on both cheeks,
à la française;
I went down the hall to my usual room, took off my clothes, peeped naked through the blinds. Outside on the street, people passed to and fro, hunched in the cold, toques and scarves and long coats hurrying back and forth under the window. Somewhere out there, ten blocks away maybe, I imagined Emma in her kitchen; she was straightening a magnet on the fridge while she talked on the telephone. But why would I think about that now? It was perverse, as if my own imagination were throwing chairs in my path …

There was a knock at the door. I sat down quickly and rested my hands in my lap. It was Margie. Green-eyed Margie in a green dress.

“Oil or powder, Professor?”

Sometimes, if it was a slow night, I stayed on for a bit, had a cigarette with the girl. They were mostly single mothers. We talked about babysitters and daycare centres, bad husbands and going straight. They all wanted to go straight, and some did. It was a surprise. You’d go to the dentist and he’d introduce you to his new receptionist and it’d be Binky, who’d charged you eighty dollars for a slide. (That’s when they oil themselves up and slide up and down your body.) Or you’d be going through Customs at the airport and when you looked up from your open suitcase, it’d be Passion going through your underwear. As if she hadn’t seen it before, folded neatly on top of your clothes on a chair.

^{C H A P T E R}        
8

A
word or two about Passion, if I might.

It was a Monday night and I took the long route home. I’d had a nap in the afternoon that had left me splendidly refreshed. I was eager to do something and rather hoped to run into a friend, a colleague, someone to have a drink with. The weather was still cold. Women pushed by, their faces buried in their coats, sometimes holding scarves to their mouths and looking worried or angry. Turning up Euclid Avenue, I thought I might drop in on Serrault. He and his boyfriend had a house at the top of the street and, although one normally doesn’t drop in on a Frenchman, I had a morsel of gossip for him. The wife of a colleague whom we both despised had run off with a rather famous clown from a German circus. Serrault was partial to circuses, I knew that. He’d written a book about them,
Vers le langage des clowns: Étude sémiotique
, and when he was a young man in France, after securing his
maîtrise
, he had worked as an assistant to a legendary lion tamer, cleaning cages, feeding the animals and so on. Later (and here I’m telling stories out of school), Serrault had tried to create a Canadian circus, borrowing here and there, even from the faculty. The enterprise had ended in debacle, leaving him with a debt that took a decade to pay off but also with a bear, which for a period of weeks dwelt in his garage. This same four-hundred-pound animal he walked late at night through one of the city’s more affluent neighbourhoods on the end of a chain.

I knocked on the door of his flat, but there was no response. I went to the front window to see if I could catch a glimpse of him through a split in the curtains, which I did, for there was M. Serrault dancing in the middle of his living room, not wildly or lewdly but rather playfully, his tie slightly loosened. I gather his companion was in the room, perhaps just under the window frame, because he appeared to be addressing someone. He danced well, and he knew it, his torso quite still, his narrow hips moving gracefully, but there was a disarming casualness to it, a throwaway self-deprecation that one wouldn’t have suspected from so rigorous an intellect. (Indeed, he was becoming quite famous.) I stood at the window watching a moment longer, but some things one does not interrupt and so I slipped back out to the street, leaving Serrault dancing under the winter moon.

Returning the way I came, I found myself feeling oddly comforted, as if I had just had a social encounter and could now return to my house and my book (another Elmore Leonard, I’m afraid) with a clean conscience. A life lived with sufficient fullness and so on. In fact I felt a small surge of pleasure when I realized I still had a hundred pages to go.

It was near the bottom of the street that I noticed a one-storey brick building on my right. The Village Health Spa. I could see activity inside, the lights were on, a television flickered. I checked my watch. It was ten o’clock.

With a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a wall eye, the man at the reception desk looked like a seedy Jean-Paul Sartre. He seemed surprised to see me, although with that face he could have been suspicious or guilty or venal; I couldn’t tell. But
louche
, like that wandering eyeball.

“Are you open?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

An American sitcom was playing on the television set in the adjoining foyer, and its aggravating laugh track,
ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha
, complemented the junky tones of the place, like something one might find on a tray of tin foil. A black girl emerged from a back room. She was attractive, but there was something not quite right about her mouth, as if her top lip had been split open and had healed badly. She was self-conscious about it too, covering her mouth reflexively when she saw me, and her shyness drew me to her. I noticed also that she was wearing the same leather bikini, complete with fringes, that I’d seen on Binky at the other place. There must have been a sale on them. She plopped herself on the chesterfield and swept up a magazine. I was on the verge of fleeing—the establishment was notches below par—when I smelt that strange sex pollen, the mildly sickening bouquet of baby oil, which had acquired a kind of Pavlovian appeal for me.

“Are you available?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Dr. Scobie,” I said, extending my hand.

“I’m Passion,” she said with a trace of amusement. Of course that wasn’t her name. It was an absurd choice, a sort of chronic masturbator’s daydream of a name, and she knew it.

It was a small enterprise, only two tables in the back. Not very clean either. I caught sight of a ball of crumpled toilet paper on the floor beside the massage table, semen-soaked, I imagined, from a previous client. Passion bent over with a swish of leather and fringes and swept it up. A wooden statue stood glowering in the corner. It was an Indian chief, human size, in full war paint and headdress.

“And what’s this?” I asked.

“Oh,
him,”
she said. “Someone stole his tomahawk.”

It was true. In a raised fist there was an unoccupied hole in which it had once perched.

“Now
who
would steal a tomahawk?” I asked.

“Stick around,” she said, and then with the weariness of a waitress at the end of a long shift she outlined my options: regular, topless, bottomless, nude reverse (“that’s where you do me”) or a slide.

I took the regular.

“Oil or powder?” she asked.

I replied. “Powder. At first.”

I won’t include all the things the Indian saw, but I will say that after I had given her my credit card and she had disappeared from the room to return with a steaming hot face cloth, after all those pleasant formalities, we remained in the cubbyhole, chatting. She had a dirty, funny mouth and the loyalty of a prostitute. She spared no details about her customers: the Greek with the stubby member (“it was like a cucumber”) who never tipped; a local actor; a police detective; a housewife who liked to watch her husband. Some liked their bums paddled, their nipples tweaked; some sniffed her linen; some required a medical inspection, some a mild bawling-out; for some, only a good smack in the chops would do the job. But if they tipped, they were okay. Rule of thumb was, the bigger the pervert, the bigger the tip. I had a sense of having heard all these stories before but enjoyed the fact of her telling me, the confidence. Thinking back on it, I must have been lonelier than I realized, but the truth is that I have a warm memory of that evening and its aftermath, the two of us smoking cigarettes and gabbing. When I left, I felt clear-headed and energetic and quite ready for a lecture preparation, a read, a drink at the corner, whatever the evening might afford me. It seemed like gravy now. On the way home I talked to myself in French, something I always do when I’m happy.

I went back to see Passion only a few days later and the same delicious ritual ensued. But this time, as I was giving her my charge card, I asked her a question. “How much of this do you get to keep?”

“The tips,” she said.

“What if you don’t get a tip?”

“Then I get fifteen bucks.”

“On a sixty-five-dollar massage?”

“Yep.”

She liked the feel of where this was going. I sat back down on the table.

“I have a proposition for you,” I said.

“Oh yes?”

“I’m suggesting that perhaps we could cut out the middleman entirely.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you were to come to my house …”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Hang on. You come to my house, you give me a massage there, but you get to keep all the money.”

“That’s against house rules.”

“We wouldn’t tell anyone. It would be a private arrangement between you and me.”

“I don’t know,” she said, but you could see a shard of venality glint in her eye. “Are you a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

“An old one.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ll give you my name and my phone number and you can think about it. How’s that?”

“You live nearby?”

“Just up the street.” I handed her my card. She examined it. “My name’s not really Dr. Scobie.”

“What do you teach?” she asked.

“French literature.”

You could see her mind shuffling strange cards into a new hand. She removed the undersheet from the massage table and, taking a spray bottle from the nightstand, gave it a couple of squirts and dried off the plastic with the soiled sheet.

“All right, Professor,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

Several days went by during which I was unusually busy. A visiting professor from the University of Rennes delivered a good paper on Verlaine; nothing groundbreaking, but I liked the way he told us what we all already knew. I took him to dinner afterwards and we consumed a number of bottles of wine, after which the conversation turned, of course, to women. It still strikes me as curious that men talk of virtually nothing else.

The following morning I was slightly ill and neglected to eat breakfast. By mid-afternoon I was starving, I had a raging headache and, after a student seminar on Boileau, I intended to rush home and get something to eat. The paper was presented by a young girl with a sort of Cleopatra hairdo. Short bangs, long at the back. She was Russian, I think, for I detected just a dusting of an accent. I had to remind her several times to address the class, not me, but when she did, she revealed a profile that was almost unbearably beautiful. I wanted to reach over and touch her neck, to feel her skin, which was so soft, I imagined, that it would be like putting one’s fingers in a bowl of cream. And yet I noticed that when she faced me front-on the effect was diminished somewhat, and I felt the relief that you experience sometimes when you find a flaw in a too gorgeous woman.

Still, after the seminar I meandered slowly down the front steps of the university with the ridiculous hope that she might be there, waiting for me. But she wasn’t. I saw her riding her bicycle up the middle of the snowy street. I wanted to call out for her to be careful, but it was too transparent.

I suddenly remembered how hungry I was. It would take too long to go home and cook a meal, so I stopped off at a large grocery store in the Manulife building to pick up a heated roast beef sandwich. I was so famished, I think I would have gunned my way to the food counter if necessary. I was rushing across the floor—I had just passed a rack of barbecue chickens, the smell from which made me even more impatient—when I looked up and saw Emma Carpenter. She was standing by a fruit tray, an orange in her hand, and she appeared to be discussing the orange with a tall, angular-featured man. A face that could wear hats.

I broke stride for a moment. It had, after all, been more than a year since I’d seen Emma. Sensing some arrhythmic movement in the room, she looked up. And
recoiled
. There’s no other way to describe it. It was as if someone had thrown a glass of water on a cat. She edged closer to her companion, like a child stepping behind a parent. It was all quite involuntary, and that’s what made it so shocking. It was as if she had encountered a man who had beaten her or raped her, as if her body had remembered
on its own
an assault and had responded intuitively. My God, I thought, so
that’s
what she thinks of me. And yet—I don’t know how to say this without sounding pathological—the notion that Emma thought of me at all was something of a comfort. You see,
my
body remembered too.

In any event I ran into Serrault on the street shortly afterwards. He was shopping for a meat thermometer (he was quite the cook) and, to his surprise and mine, I began to tell him about this odd sighting of Emma. Midway through it my heart began to pound and a sensation of
thinness
overcame me, as if I were somehow lying, as if I were suggesting that the sheer violence of her response implied that she was somehow still in love with me. It got worse. Describing my reaction to her, namely, walking out of the store
sans rien dire
, without even a nod, I seemed to be suggesting, however coyly, that while it was she who had abandoned me, it was now
I
who kept the door locked. I kept on. I insisted, my voice almost an octave higher now, that sometimes it made me even
happy
to think about her, to bathe in the knowledge that I had, in fact, recovered. Totally. But the more I tried to explain all this, the more self-deluding, the more obsessed I sounded. (Even now I feel a tad too insistent.) By the end of it I felt as if my body had been poisoned, and I was in a foul mood.

Serrault, of course, had no response whatsoever except for mild sympathy. “
Tiens,”
he said, and ducked into a kitchen supply shop. A turkey baster had caught his eye.

That evening I sat out on the back patio in a coat and hat, smoking cigarettes and staring into the garden. And after a while I remembered,
comme ça
, a picture of Emma rushing down the basement stairs with a load of laundry. Why that image? I don’t know. It’s just that there was something slightly sad about it, as if somehow I should have put my arms around her to stop that nervous rushing, that agitated way of being. She behaved sometimes, I now recalled, like a kid afraid of “getting in heck.” I think she may even have used that phrase once.
Getting in heck
.