China Blues

by David Donnell

  I ball the blue&yellow jersey, soft, heavier than the shirt I used to wear over my shoulders before going on the court, into a sort of blue&yellow puppy, I jam it a bit between my fists. Then I bury my face in it, smelling I don’t know what, a woman’s perfume, cigar smoke, not sweat. The room goes completely dark. Naturally, I’m blind, right. I can feel this big jagged thing like a tin-can lid coming half-loose in my stomach, up around my chest, where the heart pounds. My mouth feels dry, and my eyes are wet. I wipe the crumpled balled-up jersey across my face and eyes. Catch a trace of it. But I don’t cry, still staring down into the crumpled big flat ball of a jersey. Boys don’t cry. I wish I could, Jackamo, Jukamo. Truly and really. But I can’t.

  PHOTOGRAPHS OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR

  I THINK I KNEW THAT SARAH WAS GOING TO MARRY SOMEBODY ELSE THE FIRST NIGHT WE SLEPT TOGETHER. We fell in love at my friend Pete Carter’s birthday party. It was at his parents’ place on South Drive, there were 2 big living rooms and a huge French provincial kitchen that gave onto a large backyard green as glass dark. This was when we were leaving college. I think it was a rite de passage. She was in 2 of my classes at Trinity College, we had noticed each other a lot but we had never really talked. She was sitting on a couch by herself in the front living room tilting a glass of beer and looking very aesthetic. Maybe the French comes from the fact that the Carters had this big French kitchen.

  I remember we sort of lost each other somehow after we got into the swing and anarchy of the evening. There was a savage discussion about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir going on in the blond oak rec-room downstairs in the basement. Somebody had put a girl’s bra on one of the moose heads. I don’t know where Cart’s father got those moose heads. I don’t think he shot them, he’s a big red-faced plump guy, he’s a corporate lawyer, he’s bland and pleasant but he doesn’t talk very much. I don’t think Mrs. Carter shot them, maybe it was her father, so it’s a sort of class-perpetuation kind of thing. And there were pale green squash pies laid out on one of the kitchen counters. Nils Effren and his friend Doug were doing coke over and over, they were making it last, doing it in very small hits, in the ground-floor washroom, and Carter told them to get their ass downstairs into the basement can because there were respectable people lining up and wanting to piss. But we started talking and important things were said, over large amounts of food out in the kitchen, late, sometime before the party ended. And we stayed up and drank coffee and small glasses of brandy or Grand Marnier or something until around 4 or 5 in the morning.

  We went out together maybe once a week or so for the first couple of weeks and then we slept together for the first time. It was summer, school was over, everything seemed wide open. I was planning on staying in Toronto for most of the summer, but I was going up north with The Cambodian Rebels, a punky homemade group from East Scarborough. I’ve got a BA in pre-meds now, which I think is pretty useless. I’m not sure if I can possibly fight my way through 3 years of med school. And stay sane. It seems unlikely. So I’ve got a degree, and I’ve got thousands of photographs, I’m a photographer I’ve decided that’s what I am, so I’ve made a basic life decision fairly early when you come right down to it, come on, admit it, I’ve been clear and decisive. All my photographs are punk, of punks, of musicians, of clubs, specific neon signs, ones I like, I climbed 15 storeys of the Grover Hotel in Detroit, up the back stairs to an equipment room where there was an open window just to get a shot of a huge 60ft pink&skyblue flamingo that was on a Dutton Travel Lines building down the street. I could have taken the elevator, I could have tried to use a pass from the front desk and shoot from an unoccupied room, or the roof perhaps, but no, it just wouldn’t have been the same thing. It wouldn’t have been an adventure, it would have lacked principle, it would have been cheap and vulgar and commercial. I got my photograph.

  She was going away for August, to England, to see her mother’s parents and go to plays and go hiking, the same time I was slated to go up north with The Cambodian Rebels, so we fit together like two perfect design concepts, I said to her, and she said yeah, we make sense.

  We went out together maybe once a week or so for the first couple of weeks and then we became a serious couple. That means we felt seriously about each other. I’m not really sure what else it means or meant. We clicked in a big natural way, as if she were something I’d always wanted, and as if I were someone she just couldn’t get enough of, or couldn’t see too much of. We talked about going to Ireland together, we talked about going to Italy together. We had great sex, we went out with other people quite a bit, I almost had an accident with her father’s car, but, I didn’t, I didn’t roll it, it was on 2 wheels for what seemed like an unusually long time going around a very long curve on the way to Grand Bend one afternoon, but I didn’t roll it.

  It was great. We were great. That’s what we said to each other, sitting up in bed with the last of our wine, talking after making love, and slowly working our way through her massive album collection. Blues, Dylan, Baez, Randy Newman, a Dory Previn album I’d never heard before.

  We almost never spent time at my cluttered 2nd floor apartment down in Kensington Market. Because of my roommates, both of whom were slobs, that’s true, or for some other reason, whatever.

  But she would ask me questions sometimes about the groups I was listening to. She would say, Well you like the Sex Pistols. How can you listen to stuff like that? They just bray, like donkeys. And I would say, O well, I listen to a lot of odd stuff. I think, when I look back on this, that in some respects she didn’t really believe that I took all these punk groups seriously. She would probably say to one of her girlfriends, O well, Doug just has these vague secondary interests, you know, not affectations, but yeah, sort of like affectations. Whereas the truth is, I like a lot of punk. I don’t like any garbage punk, I get tired of really good stuff after listening to it for too long, but, in general, O yeah, I like a lot of punk.

  We were having dinner at a little place down in the Yorkville area, they call it Yorkville Village, which is really a bit trendy, it’s not a village, for Christ’s sake, it’s just both sides of 2 east/west streets and a small section of Avenue Road, where the new Dakota apartment building is going up, if New York has a Dakota, which is old and grainy and atmospheric, then we have to have a Dakota, which will be new and perfect with lots of new sandstone techniques and techy hunter-green steel exposed and so on, but anyway, it’s an okay area, this was a restaurant called A Passy, with an outdoor patio, and we had had some very good chicken.

  They had fresh peaches with raspberries on the menu and I asked the girl if I could just have a bowl of sliced peach halves, or quarters, whatever, with some cream poured over them. Nothing like simple, and this struck me as a perfect simple dessert, after the chicken and with some coffee.

  So we’re sitting there with our coffees and desserts, there’s a bit of wine left, I cashed a cheque for about $450.00 the other day for some publicity shots, she’s got a really neat little fruit flan and I’ve got my bowl of peaches.

  I took a large peach half dripping with 10% cream on my spoon and I said, Sarah, isn’t this peach, just by itself, outlined against the dark night, it was dark, it was night, and there were cars of course, I told you, this is Yorkville, you’re sitting in these outdoor patios with white tablecloths and black railings or whatever and there is a steady stream of cars, isn’t this peach beautiful? And she smiled, she looked embarrassed, maybe she thought it was an off-colour allusion, something like Rupert’s comment in Women in Love about the fig, and then he tears it open, savage beast savage beast, one of my roommates, Colin, who is quite gay, always says, during that scene, and he proceeds to eat.

  In this way, perhaps, Kate Millett was born, ripped prematurely out of her mother’s womb at the very idea of a man, even symbolically, wanting to eat, to eat means to consume, and then of course there is all this stuff about the act of eating being aggressive of and by itself, although lovers often bite or nuzzle, kiss and graz
e with the teeth.

  I don’t really think her reaction had anything to do with this. I said, No, it really is beautiful, isn’t it? And you get real contrast holding it up to the dark but under the light like this.

  And Sarah said, You really are a bit of a hippie or something, Doug, sometimes I think you’d be really happy living on a farm somewhere outside of Toronto, complete with your roommates, and maybe some dogs, she added.

  So the great and perfect love of our graduation summer was not perfect after all. It was obviously meant to flare up, gestate some real red and blue flame colours, I like that image of Sarah, red lips, blue eyes, and hot all over, silken skin that almost in the summer burns you when you touch it for a second.

  It wasn’t the punk stuff by itself, it was the combination, I think, of the punk interest, the photography, and my other interests.

  I would turn up wearing funny clothes, wildly multicoloured long shorts, running shoes with no socks, magenta sunglasses, t-shirts with exploding black suns and esoteric slogans, that I thought were really neat, and Sarah would say, God, you look bizarre, and then we would sit and talk or have a drink or collapse into bed. But I don’t think it was the punk by itself. I think she wanted one of the parts by itself, or, to begin with, she liked me physically quite a bit, and it was summer, and she wanted one of the parts by itself.

  All of which is just life, and the summer rolled on, and it was rich with the smell of flowers and bees and stuff like that. We had more good times, moonlit swims, at least 2 or 3, parties, long talks about stuff like family, How do you feel about leaving college, How do I feel, that sort of conversation And I would say, I feel really great about leaving college. No, I never want to go back, cement fortress, isolation discipline, forget it. And she would say, You should accept challenge, you should stay in meds, even though she had laughed at all my doctor jokes when we first met. I went up north and did some wild photographs of the Rebels singing in northern trees, out on northern lakes in rowboats, and so on, and she went to England and saw some plays and went hiking.

  But now, after being home for a couple of weeks, and not having seen Sarah since she got back from England, I get Mrs. Carter on the phone. Hello, this is Mrs. Carter. She’s in her 50s and she tilts her head back about 4 or 5 inches every time she starts a sentence. It’s a nervous thing, neuro, like people who are always playing with their earlobes.

  And Mrs. Carter tells me that Sarah is engaged now and they would like me to come to the wedding. I say, O, when is the wedding, next spring? And she says no, no, the wedding is in October, which is cool if you like getting things done in a hurry. I say, That’s cool, Mrs. Carter, October is one of my favourite months. The leaves are gorgeous and one of my friends was born in October.

  Any way you look at it, it hurts a little bit, like a singing electric wire pulled out of the wall. But any way you look at it I’m going to enjoy going to the wedding. The guy she’s engaged to is in meteorology. I know, these stories about the heart, capsizing or flying straight up like a red white & blue helicopter, have always been strange; but as society densifies, and the cities go into grid-lock, then our stories about the heart become even more bizarre. I know this guy slightly. His name’s Grant Purnow. We went to Northern Secondary together, and I think I played ping-pong with him once or twice.

  If she was engaged to a doctor I could wear a black t-shirt to the wedding with a neat slogan that says something like, Doctors are a medical lobby group. They are as far as I’m concerned. Great healers of broken arms and babies that cough too much. But a weatherologist? Okay. A guy, I guess he’s going to lecture on weatherology, or he’s going to become a weather analyst, and they’ll go camping a lot in the summer, build their own U-hitch trailer and go white-water rafting and stuff like that. I always thought she was more into sitting around and listening to Baez sing “Pity The Poor Immigrant,” but of course that’s not really where I’m at anyway, as duly noted, okay?

  But I am going to enjoy going to the wedding. Sarah phoned herself, naturally, about a week later, and we talked, and it was wonderful, and she said she’d really like me to take pictures, because I’m such a wonderful photographer. But I said, No, no, I don’t think so, I think you should get a studio guy, someone who does wedding pictures. I do stuff like a Grateful Dead fan falling out of a tree, or half a dozen meds students with towels and boxer shorts dancing to Jane’s Addiction, a tough LA-based group I’m really keen on, or a really nice picture I got of Sinéad O’Connor at a little outdoor restaurant in Toronto called Oblivion way down southwest of the railway tracks in an area of old factory buildings, and she was leaning forward waving away smoke from a guy’s cigarette while she was talking to him, heavy-set guy, jowls, smoking Gitanes. It was at night and I got a perfect picture, she didn’t mind, of her leaning forward with this wonderful look in her eyes, smoke like evanescent cotton batten, and her mouth open as if really surprised at something being said, No, I’m not sure at what.

  BLUE IS A FOCUS OF MEMORY

  I MET MARION IN A BOOKSTORE, a big place with lots of magazine racks, on Queen Street West, where else? This was when I first came to Toronto and I used to hang out a lot at some of the clubs around Queen & Spadina, which used to be the centre of the old garment district but is now clubs, restaurants, bookstores, and a lot of young trendy clothing stores, Kimono, Africa, places like that. That was at least 2 years ago, more probably, I don’t want to think about it. We haven’t really gone out together for a year & a ½. I shouldn’t think about it. I have other stuff to think about.

  We met in Pages, which is a really good bookstore across from Le Bistingo, a restaurant none of us could afford to eat in. She was reading some magazines, copies of Vogue, Elle, I don’t know what all. I was glancing at some of the, uh, literary magazines. Not that I have any pretensions of wanting to be a writer or anything like that, but I did a number of English courses when I was at college out west, before coming here to live in the big city, multiculturalism, millions of people, money floating up and down in the elevators of 60-storey buildings. Anyway our eyes met, I was standing fairly close to her. I’m here in Toronto to show them, after a while maybe, what a Manitoba boy can do in regard to business, and of course I’m interested in meeting people, right? So, our eyes met.

  Her’s are huge and blue, now that’s a cliché, it’s also what they call a received image. But fuck it, some people do have large blue eyes. Marion really does. They’re huge and blue. Not huge and blue and innocent. Her face is innocent, I guess, most girls have innocent faces when they’re nineteen. I’m 26 and I look at least 28. She’s 19 and she could be any age from 17 to 30. One of those faces, ineffable, that’s a good word, and just a shade common, not that I’m anything special, I guess, beautiful and sort of knowing, with these huge cool faintly speckled blue eyes.

  So our eyes meet, and one of us laughs, and we start talking. I ask her if she’d like to go for a beer and she says sure, let’s go to the bar at Garbo’s, which turns out to be this fairly swank place, normal prices at the bar, and the bar itself in question is a huge long solid dark wood bar from the original Grand Hotel in Brussels where Greta Garbo stayed at least once or twice and perhaps drank at this very bar, and where Sarah Bernhardt used to stay and where she too perhaps leaned forward on her elbows and drank, I don’t know what, Belgian beer perhaps or maybe cognac.

  This was the beginning of my infatuation, correct word, I think, with Marion. I don’t know what love is. I know what sex is. I think infatuation is hard to define but it means you’re impressed with the other person, and curious about them, as if they have tricks you’re impressed with but you don’t quite understand. Pete Wilkins used to pitch for my high school team in Manitoba. He had tricks, he had a pitch that he called the floater, for example, it was like a sneaky pink lady gin drink of a pitch. But I wasn’t infatuated with Pete, I just admired him in a way. Anyway.

  So we started going out together. And I was shocked after the first or second night by how
sexually uninhibited she was. I guess I should have been pleased. Well, I guess I was. But I was also shocked. She did things with total abandon, casualness, and great pleasure, that I had only read about. Innocent guy, what can I say? But I wasn’t that innocent, not really. She was extreme. She was hot. She was a scorcher.

  And drink? She would get up out of bed, we would be at my apartment over Donaldson’s Hardware store on King Street, and stroll as casually as a relaxed sleepwalker over to the kitchen counter area, after an hour or more of all-out fucking and sucking, and stand there at the counter relaxed, leaning forward slightly or raising one graceful white arm to the top cupboard, weight on one angular hip, looking as cool and calm and perfect as a model in a fancy Vogue ad, or Elle, perhaps, one of those magazines she was reading that day we first met, in Pages, dressed in a loose western shirt unbuttoned to the point where you could see most of one breast, a pair of faded black jeans with pink ankle socks, and a fairly useless print cotton skirt over the jeans. She was beautiful. Sometimes in certain light she would really look, I thought, like one of the great beauties in the history of the world. In bright afternoon sunlight she looked commoner. She had magnificent, write-your-movie-magazine-a-fan-letter eyes. She had an almost perfect body and, strangely, that often seemed one of the lesser sexual aspects about her.