Besides the reception area there are two other rooms, one for changing, one for my work, and a lavatory that I share with the accountant next door. I show Patrick my table, which I’m proud of, as it took me months to find. It’s from the 1930s, and very beautiful and functional. Patrick stands by it for a few moments, absently rubbing the grain of the black leather with one forefinger. Then all at once he hops up onto the table and rolls onto his stomach. He smiles at me, invitingly.
But I am unable to move. In this space, where I am at deep levels of intimacy and relaxation with my clients, I find I can’t stand next to Patrick without feeling dizzy. I lean back against the cabinet doors, my arms folded. After a few moments, he swings himself off the table.
“You’ve got a great space for yourself here,” Patrick says. He checks his watch, glances at his reflection in the small round mirror in the waiting room, smoothing his hair with his hand.
“Lunch date?” I ask.
“No,” Patrick says, mumbling, almost embarrassed. “Meeting with some TV people.” And he’s out the door as Dorothy comes in, shaking her umbrella.
She looks curiously at Patrick’s back moving down the corridor. “I didn’t know you had a booking,” she says. “I could have stayed in.”
“Not a client,” I say. “An old friend stopping by.”
“A lovely man,” she says. “You just want to touch him.”
I wince. “I don’t usually agree to give massage to my friends,” I say. “I need the separation.”
Dorothy, pulling out her keyboard tray, rubbing her hands together to warm them, gives me a look I can only describe as pitying. Sometimes I’m jealous of her. I hear, from my inner room, the rise and fall of voices in the waiting room, and I know that she is offering, out there, her own line of therapy. That my clients are disclosing to her what they do not tell me. Hence the gifts.
I imagine confiding in Dorothy. “It’s as if,” I say in my imagination, “I was imprinted at birth, and nothing can erase that neurological magnetism.” Though when I was born, it occurs to me, Patrick was still a pair of gametes, growing separately in the caves of his parents’ bodies.
I will not confide in Dorothy.
IN MY APARTMENT, the top floor of a small east-side house, I move around in the dusk, closing the blinds. In the basement suite, the tenants are having their meal. I can hear the subterranean rumble of their voices, clanking of pots, burst of laughter. I sit down to a plate of lettuce and a wedge of cheese, and my usual evening catechism.
Why aren’t you happy now that Patrick is back in your life? What is it that you want from him?
Not crumbs. Not a business relationship.
But what? Do you think he is going to just turn up and leap into bed with you?
No. No. Though I would have gone to bed with him in a minute, even a year ago, it almost seems too late for that now, between Patrick and me. The humidity, the carnality of sex. My desire feels to me now an ancient tree, beautiful in its bleakness.
Do you want domestic intimacy? To make his coffee? Wash his socks?
I look around my small suite, my shabby rugs and furniture, the quirky things I have on the walls. It is a private space, hard-won. I have few visitors. I do not often long for company, after a long day of emptying myself.
Long ago, I used to have a fantasy about Patrick: He’d become ill – something serious and wasting, but not too serious, not AIDS or anything like that, and he’d have to stay with me, and I’d take care of him, sponging his body, taking notes while he dictated delirious amendments to his script. In my fantasy, he’d take my hand and look up at me, his eyes feverish, and whisper, “It’s a gift, what you do.” And I’d be safe, preserved forever in my usefulness. But I have learned something, in the last few years, about giving and owning.
Recognition? Is that it? You want to go about socially as a couple? Attend Patrick’s premieres, have your picture with his in the entertainment section of the newspaper?
I am incapable of even imagining that.
There’s a knock on my door then, and I hear after the fact the sound of footsteps ascending the outside staircase to my back door. When I open it, it’s Mrs. B, from downstairs, with a steaming, covered bowl.
“I hear again no cooking,” she says.
It looks as if she will stand there until I eat, so I get a spoon and sit down, and she sits, watching. It’s a good soup, more of a potage, full of barley and rich juices. When she takes the bowl and goes back downstairs, it’s as if I have been thawed and brought back to life. Everything aches, but I am weepy with relief.
I FIND MYSELF WAYLAYING Dorothy after the last client one afternoon, as she’s putting on her coat and scarf. I want to have him; I want him to love me. I know I cannot own him. But I want, I want. How is it that one can love and not be loved in return? How is it that one can find in another person the precise complement to one’s soul, one’s missing half, and yet not appear that way to the other? I am unable to get past this, but I must move on. I say all this as though confessing a mortal sin. She must give me comfort, advice. Absolution.
Her pouched old eyes glitter at me. “Oh, shame, shame,” she says, mockingly, over her shoulder, as she walks out of the office.
Old sibyl. Old witch.
But for a moment or two after Dorothy leaves, the room shakes, as if it’s been hit by an earthquake or a bomb. It’s a tremor from the construction going on next door. I reel against a high cabinet; a package leaps from its shelf and I am baptized in a shower of plastic spoons.
I understand now what I have been seeking. I know very well that I’ve withheld my touch from Patrick out of self-protection, so that I would have something of myself that I had not offered to him. I see now what I require, what is required of me.
My clients sometimes ask me if it is true that the human body isn’t designed for walking upright, that we’re not quite evolved enough from our ancestors who carried their bodies on four limbs, parallel to the earth, that our spines are subject to intense stress because of our unnatural gait. It’s a myth, I tell them. While it is true that most adult humans suffer from pain, and the pain seems to stem from that attenuated question mark, the spine, our spines are, in fact, perfectly engineered for our posture. The balance of our hips and ribcages, the swing of our shoulder bones, the rotating suspension of our hip sockets are all miracles of engineering design. We are as beautifully and ergonomically put together as trees.
The problem is our heads. They are much too heavy, with their solid bony brain cases, their double handful of dense grey material inside. It is the weight of our heads that compresses our disks, that locks our joints, that seizes up our limbs.
I reach for Dorothy’s appointment book, and the telephone.
THE DAY THAT I am to see Patrick, I experience almost debilitating stage fright. It’s been years since I’ve touched his body. Will the experience be too poignant? Will I forget what I do?
When I come into the room where I work, he lies prone on my table, wearing only the white towel. I warm my hands with scented oil, greeting him, as I greet all of my clients, with questions: Is the room warm enough? The background music acceptable?
I must start. I begin, as I would begin with any new client, by reading his body with my fingers. He has filled out somewhat, my fingers see, though they recognize the texture of his skin, the map of his tendons and muscles, almost instantly. The last five years are a mere sheen of oil between my hands, his skin.
And when I touch him, Patrick falls into his story with a kind of gracelessness that is grace, like a child falling into water, or leaves, or bed, and I recognize that at last it is himself he is offering.
“When I found my grandfather’s house,” he says, “I decided to knock on the door.”
“Yes, of course,” I say.
“And the woman who opened it,” he says, “was my second cousin. Imagine it: My family was still living in the same house that my grandfather and great-grandfather were born in.”
There’s a pause, and then Patrick says, “My own face.”
I can see her, in my imagination. The same spade-shaped face, the same full curving lower lip, the brows like smears of machine grease.
“But dark-haired,” Patrick says, his voice travelling an unimaginable distance, and in his voice I can see her, leaning in an ancient doorway, her lips curving. I can hear her skewed, seductive English. The romance of history, of the familiar seen awry, the self on another trajectory – she would have had it all. And in that one instant Patrick would have believed that he was seeing the person he had been searching for all his life.
I could tell him something about recognition, about being transfixed by the geometry of a face, a voice. “Did she recognize you?” I ask.
“Not really,” Patrick says. “People over there aren’t looking for their roots, you know? If a relation turns up from America, they think you’re rich, they think you can help them immigrate.”
I understand his new, flat, careful intonation, now. I know now why he has sought me out, though I doubt he realizes it yet. We are citizens of the same country, now, or non-country. We’re fellow exiles.
I HAD BOOKED PATRICK for the last appointment of the day, and when we finish up, Dorothy has already gone home. Patrick emerges from the changing room just as I’m done with my tidying, and we walk out of the building together. It’s dusk; the rush-hour traffic is already thinning, and we walk down the street towards the Skytrain station, towards the Italian and Portuguese shops, the bakeries and tile stores and photo labs. Our arms brush, our strides match. We carry our silence as a comfortable burden.
Spread out below us, to the north and west, the city’s lights are springing, reassuringly, to life. At night they form a huge dished web, torn at one edge by a black space where the ocean is, but for now the outlines of buildings and streets can still be made out; the city is still intact. Poised on a fault line, it is; cratered, rigged to trip, fibrillate, detonate. But how it glitters, how it connects and illuminates, an illusory web, but, at night, really all that we have.
VAGINA DENTATA
AFTER THE CONFERENCE, in which we distinguished ourselves modestly on a number of issues – the colonial, the survival, the post-colonial, the post-survival, the structuralist, the deconstructivist, the Freudian, the feminist, the body, and the post-body – the organizers – that is, those of us who always do the shit work around here – took the stragglers, those who were not sufficiently important enough to have other conferences to attend the next day in Toronto or Montreal or Corner Brook, to a lake in the mountains, where one of the indefatigable and perpetually subjugated organizers had organized the loan of a cottage.
We went in a cortège of vehicles, half of which were grey Toyota Corollas, two of which were blue Honda Civics, one of which was a shabby minivan. Some of us who had lived in the city and taught at the institution for seventeen years had never been to this lake before, which others of us found surprising, as it is a mere half-hour drive from campus, and surprisingly cool and fresh in the summer. Some of us wondered if this lacuna was attributable to mental rigidity and/or disaffection, or whether it was an indication that some of us had more cosmopolitan lives than others, and spent summers at more distant, up-market lakes, or perhaps not at lakes at all – perhaps entombed in the subterranean archives of old British universities, or kayaking with only a giant bottle of mosquito repellant and a waterproof clipboard up inaccessible northern rivers.
Some of us who came up to this lake every year, though, wondered insecurely if we should be spending our summers in more exciting ways – if we had been wasting our meagre summer terms on unimportant, unexciting, and unproductive activities. Some of us wondered if that should be blamed on our spouses.
Some of us marvelled, as the vehicles we were driving or passengering wound higher into the hills, that the slopes surrounding the lake were thickly wooded, lush, velvety, dense with many shades of jade and emerald and perhaps also jadeite and peridot and malachite. Some of us reasoned out that these hills must be the backsides of the sere bluffs that can be seen from the university college campus. Some of us felt that distinct sensation of decompression around the diaphragm which accompanies the realization that one has been, for a substantial length of time, excluded from a desirable experience, compensation, or recognition, such as invitations to the dean’s sailing trips or access to the bargain sales of chops by the meat-cutting school on Thursdays.
All of us were impressed to find that the rented cottage was stocked with fishing gear, canoe, kayak, inflatable rowboat, air-mattresses, children’s inflatable devices not to be used as life-saving devices, and beach towels, as well as a full complement of cookware and dinnerware and two barbecues. All of us observed the sign on the door that read, in a non-scanning iambic couplet: If there’s sand between your toes/kindly use this hose. Many of us read it aloud. All of us winced, though some inwardly, at the dropped scansion, which some felt, synesthetically, as a bodily sensation of tripping.
Some of us noted, with disappointment, that there was not actually a beach, but that the lawn ran down a rather steep slope from the cottage to a reed-choked foreshore. Some of us noted that there was a substantial dock, which extended past the reeds, for lounging on and swimming from. Some of us helped carry coolers full of cold drinks and meats, and plastic bags full of buns and condiments and paper plates and napkins into the cottage. Some of us unfolded outdoor chairs and began inflating devices with a foot pump, or our lips. Some of us appropriated the wooden Adirondack chairs immediately, and some accepted lesser chairs of aluminum tubing and polypropylene webbing.
Some of us began to strip down to our bathing suits, and some of us felt trepidation, perhaps even horror, at the prospect of observing and being observed by our colleagues, many of whom had behaved to us in the past, especially in Faculty Council meetings, in ways that did not make us feel emotionally safe in their presence, in a state of undress. Some of us observed silently that the greater power an individual enjoyed in the professional context, the more clothing he or she removed. Some of our female colleagues wore unflattering loose cotton capri trousers and shirts, and large-brimmed hats, and we remembered with discomfort their radiation treatments – was that four or five years ago now? Some of our male colleagues wore black socks with shorts and sandals, and some of us wondered if it might be time for them to retire and relinquish the helm to younger, more energetic faculty with more current research interests.
Some of the younger, more energetic faculty, who were competing for tenure-track positions, had not slept the past week, what with dealing with last-minute cancellations by presenters, “miscommunications” with the caterers, the printers, and the room-booking office, and a grant funds cheque requisition that was buried on an accounts payable clerk’s desk. Nevertheless, these faculty, even though their contracts had expired and they weren’t being paid, helped make salads and open new bottles of ketchup and mustard, and were cheerful and kind to each other. Most of them wore short denim cut-offs or long cotton sundresses with their swimsuits underneath, or board shorts. But although they looked like twenty-four-year-old Californians, they were, in fact in their mid-thirties already and wondering when they would be able to buy houses and get parental leave benefits.
Only two of the group were children – siblings, and offspring of one of the indefatigable organizers. Children were not generally encouraged at this institution.
SOME OF US WERE SURPRISED to see how plump the plenary speaker was, when she came out of the cottage wearing a shiny black one-piece and an unstructured kimono printed with gingko leaves. Some of us reflected that her publicity photo must be at least fifteen years out of date. Some of us thought of the popular novels she published under a pseudonym, featuring a slim elegant workaholic female detective. Some of us repressed thoughts that her novels were more interesting than her literary criticism. Some of us repressed thoughts that her detective novels
, and in fact detective novels in general, are reactionary, or at least passé. Some of us wondered if we could dash out a detective novel in the remaining two months of summer, and thus at some future date, perhaps even as early as the next fall, be able to afford not to teach four sections of introductory composition.
Soon, all of us were on the dock. Most of us looked different, smaller in the outdoors. Some had the sleek, well-developed calves of runners, and a very few had boxer’s abs and biceps – who would have imagined it! – while more had the spindle-shanks and hollow chests of older men. On some, the flesh on the ribs drooped, as if losing to gravity, and even the aureole of the nipples was pulled down and to the side and formed the shape of oblongs on the diagonal.
Among those of us who were women, there was more variation in shape and size. Some of us older women wore skirted Full Body Slimming suits that appear to be held up by whalebone – as our grandmothers would have worn – and, spider veins and upper-arm flaps notwithstanding, were nearly covered up sufficiently by our swimsuits to have appeared without embarrassment in front of our classes. One of us, a professor of contemporary Quebec literature, wore a crocheted string bikini and a navel ring. In general we tried to pretend that we did not have bodies, and to contribute to the intellectual tone.
Echolocation Page 3
