I went through the double glass doors and walked to the far wall, where a small elevator waited. The doors rolled open with a clang and I got in, pushing a button for the top floor. We lurched upwards, small square portals giving view to colourless hallways, before coming to a stop at level number three. A bear-shaped man, Slavic I assumed, and his bear-shaped wife (keep the Kalashnikov out of her hands) got in. They must have been the cleaning staff. The doors closed and we proceeded upwards. Realizing they were going up, not down, the man lurched forward, slapping the buttons with the heel of a meaty hand as if the carriage were whisking the three of us to our deaths. The wife, who was wearing a faded purple coat, looked at me with considerable embarrassment, although I thought I detected a hint of something else in her sympathetic features, as if she knew where I was going and wished me to know that while she understood my being a man and all, there was still something unattractive about it. It unnerved me, this glancing regard, because it made me feel as if I were carrying my soul on the outside of my body, the more easily to be bruised, even scarred.
I experienced a moment of short, stabbing doubt. Surely I should have done better than this with my life. Had I not scoffed at people like me in my early twenties? Felt sorry for them, ached for them, those middle-aged men talking too energetically to young women on a street corner or in a café. Yes I had, it’s true, but those were unforgiving years. I had scoffed at everything. I had assumed in the privacy of my own darting thoughts that everyone wanted to be me but lacked the vigour, the courage, the élan. The only thing in common between those years and now, I observed unhappily, was a capacity on my part to find a persuasive explanation for anything I chose to do. In other words, viewed from my own eyes, I was seldom on the wrong team for very long.
The lurid draw of the ad in the back of the tabloid seemed a long way off now. Its spell had worn off like Novocaine, and I saw a discomfiting image of myself as a chinless dentist led by the nose into a Mexican brothel, where in the space of an hour I would be fleeced for several hundred dollars’ worth of drinks for the señoritas, jacked off into a dirty washcloth and sent out the door minus my passport.
With a kind of numb dread I got out of the elevator on the fifth floor, the Russians staying on board, and I picked my way down a mucous-green hallway, passing the night dentist’s office where a nurse sat in full view, door open, cap and whites on, watching with mild contempt all those who made their way to the Gold Hat Health Club.
I tapped my knuckles on suite 501 and as the door swished shut behind me I found myself in a dark, heavily carpeted foyer. Chocolate rugs, chocolate walls, wall hangings, paintings, all virtually indistinguishable under subdued track lighting. Latin pop music issued from invisible speakers. A large fish tank gurgled in the corner, in which one almost expected to see a human head, the hair swishing slowly back and forth like seaweed.
I was not alone long. A door opened and a tall young woman with a bony face and crimped hair emerged from a back room.
“Yes?” she said.
“Could I get a massage here?”
“Oh,” she said, pleasantly surprised, and revealed a set of small pointed teeth. “Didn’t I just speak to you on the phone?”
“Yes, that was me.”
“You certainly got here fast.”
“I wasn’t far away.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No, actually, I haven’t.”
“It’s sixty-five dollars for a forty-five-minute workout. Plus any tip you might care to leave, of course.”
Workout?
“Of course.”
Opening a door on her right, she led me into a narrow hallway. A heavy musk hung in the air. She knocked softly on a door and went in. It was a small, immaculate room with drawn curtains and a linen-covered massage table at its centre.
“Is there anyone you’d like to see?” she asked with professional sunshine.
“What are my choices?”
“Well, there’s Cindy, Minky, Sally.” She paused coyly. “Or me, of course. I’m Wendy.”
I looked at her long bare arms.
“Are you available?”
“I am.”
“That would be lovely.”
She smiled her pointy-toothed smile again. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get yourself ready.”
The door shut and I was alone again. I took off my clothes and laid them neatly on a chair, like a schoolboy. I looked around for a towel, something to wrap myself with, but there was nothing, just a small nightstand at the head of the table with a box of Kleenex, a can of baby powder and a large bottle of baby oil. I lay on my stomach on the table, but not without first examining the sheet for unsavoury stains. There were none, not that I could make out much; it was very dark in there. I must have been nervous, I could smell myself. Well, not exactly myself. This was the second time it had happened. I smelt like Emma. That sharp, almost frightened animal smell came out from under my arms. I sniffed again. By now the whole room smelt of her.
The door opened and I jumped.
“Would you like oil or baby powder?” Wendy asked. She was wearing a pair of fluttery black trousers, imitation silk, and a matching sleeveless top.
“Which would you recommend?”
“Some customers like the oil; others like the powder.” Seeing the uncertainty on my face, she continued, “We could start with the baby powder and save the oil till the end.”
So she began. I lay on my stomach and for the longest time her hands moved over my back, my neck and shoulders. I began to have the rather anxious concern that perhaps I’d made a mistake, that I might end up with nothing more than a, well, a massage. But why, I wondered, was she wearing that black sleeveless outfit? Surely professionals wore something more, I don’t know, appropriate. Her hands fluttered down to my buttocks. The brush of her fingernails made my skin rise with goosebumps. She moved lower and, while touching the inside of my leg, brushed ever so slightly a part of me that remains hors de combat in a regular massage. Was it an accident? I didn’t know, and the not knowing gave things an aura of titillating suspense. Her fingers whisked along the backs of my legs; they slipped around the side and ran up the inside of my thigh like a tarantula. It happened again and I let out an affected moan, more of a hint really, more of a You’re getting warmer signpost than a spasm of pleasure. I shifted my hips to make a necessary adjustment and observed that she waited with professional élan while things were being rearranged.
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable if you rolled over,” she said.
I did.
“Oh!” she said with practised surprise, catching sight of me. “You must know what comes next.”
“Not exactly.”
“Would you care for a hand release?”
A hand release.
“I’m not sure. Would I?”
“You’ve been here before?”
“No, I told you.”
“But you’ve been to places like this before?”
“Well, I’ve had a massage before.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Just close your eyes.”
I heard her move to the top of the table and then return. There was a squishing sound and her warm, slippery hand embraced me. She then executed a hand release, not a wasted stroke, which left me half sitting, my fists clenched to my temples.
After a moment I eased myself back down. Not knowing what to say (what does one say?), I said, “That was excellent.”
And then she did an extraordinary thing. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Slippery as an eel, still seeing stars, I stared at the ceiling while she went down the hall to fetch a hot cloth. I felt immeasurably better, as if a transfusion of bright red, highly oxygenated blood had been injected into my body. Better still, the smell was gone, Emma’s smell, replaced by the rather thick, cloying scent of baby oil that would later make my trousers feel as if they were sticking ever so vaguely to my skin.
Out on the street the night seemed brighte
r, the people lissom. I checked my watch and was indifferent to find that my long-armed friend with the beautiful touch had had me in and out of there in twenty minutes and still managed a twenty-dollar tip.
In front of me a young girl with a violin case walked along the sidewalk, her hair moving with the motion of her body. Such a graceful waist, such soft brown hair still streaked by the sun or lemon juice or perhaps by youth alone. At the corner, as if sensing the presence of something behind her, she looked quickly over her shoulder. Freckled cheekbones, green eyes. It was a lovely image, and I could look at it, admire it, without feeling despair at knowing I could never have her. I felt, for the next hour or so anyway, free not just from desire but, more important, from the worry that that desire would not be fulfilled.
So it began. I became a regular at the Gold Hat, turning up on Thursday nights for “a rub and a tug,” as the girls called it, right after my evening lecture (we had moved on to Molière by now). It was not an uncomplicated experience for me. Sometimes, hurrying along the street, I’d find myself thinking about Emma, about our final months together. I confess now that I made love to her every day I lived with her but even more, way more, near the end, when I felt the noose tightening around my throat, when I felt her young soul moving away from me. And as she withdrew, it was suddenly I who became the talker, who made the obscene requests, the memories of which can still make me blanch. I was like a rabbit in that sense, not the fraternity-joke rabbit but rather the rabbit with no memory. I seemed to have no accumulated familiarity with Emma’s body. I never got used to fucking her. When I smelt her in a movie or browsing through a store after dinner, it was as if my sexual memory of her had been wiped clean like a blackboard with a damp rag and her body was fresh and narcotically new to me again.
But I wondered now about those mornings when I had pinned her thin wrists to the headboard at the crack of dawn. Perhaps it had all been a bit much for her, a bit gross really, as if she were submitting to something. Perhaps her haste to get out of bed wasn’t always a hunger for an early start to the day but rather to avoid getting pumped by a soft-bodied, middle-aged man, who in the aftermath fell back to sleep like a drugged animal while she tiptoed about the house, trying not to rattle cutlery or drop the toilet seat lest she awake monsieur from his slumbers.
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 Frenchm
an, 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.
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 7
