My mother, who was Laddie’s sister, knew I was going to Toronto to “see a girl” and that romantic streak in her, the streak that allowed her to stay with my father despite his infidelities (he fucked her best friend on the couch at Grassmere early one morning when he thought, incorrectly, she was asleep in the far wing of the house), let her drive me to the bus station in Huntsville. She was a woman who simply could never say no to love, even to her fifteen-year-old son.
I haven’t described Clarissa. I’ll leave that to you, except to say that with her black eye makeup, her short “French” haircut, she struck me, from the first time I saw her in the kitchen at a Christmas party, as a girl out of my league. And yet how odd it is that in only a matter of days she went from being a girl I could never “get” to a girl I assumed belonged with me.
Her good looks—and her “big shot” father—got her a job as a model at the Exhibition, a giant old-fashioned fair at the edge of Lake Ontario. On warm summer evenings, tingling with the excitement of the city, of being caught up in and fluent in its swirl, I rattled downtown in the streetcar to see her. Wandering under the huge gates of the Exhibition, through the crowds, the bangs and pops and shrieks and swoops of rides and games, I felt that I was being pulled toward the centre of life; and at that centre there was Clarissa Bentley, a human mannequin who stood motionless on a slowly revolving podium in the Automotive Building. Wearing a pink dress or a blue jumper or jeans with a candy-cane top, she was the object of scrutiny—would she blink, would she twitch, could you make her smile?—for the parade of humanity, men mostly, occasionally dragging their plump wives and bored children among the new-model Chevrolets and Buicks and Cadillacs. Having a beautiful girlfriend is a certain kind of delicious when you’re young, and that moment when the podium ground gradually to a halt, when Clarissa’s arms came to life, a smile crossed her heavily made-up features (“Johnnie, look at that!”), that moment when, carefully, she stepped down from the dais, one step, then another, then another, and came over to me, to me, that single moment quite lifted me from who I used to be and made me, I was sure, into someone new. The life I had always been owed. The summer advanced. I have a photograph from that time, a coloured picture taken in a booth, me in a candy-coloured jacket and a straw boater, Clarissa in profile. I put it in a plastic gadget that lit up when you put it to your eye and pushed a button. I carried it around in my pocket like a passport.
And then one afternoon a boy from school, Justin Strawbridge, took me to the Place Pigalle, a gloomy downstairs tavern where, he said, we could get “served,” the drinking age in those days being twenty-one. I hated the taste of draft beer, it made me shiver with disgust. But I loved getting “served” and I loved doing things with Justin Strawbridge and so I drank and drank and gradually it seemed to me I was a very interesting, daring fellow.
And after Justin left (he had an errand to do for his unpleasant mother), I wandered through the twilight bar, talking to people, even sitting down once at a crowded table until I found myself talking to the back of an engineering student. But I didn’t take it personally. I let the sweep of things take me here and there.
It was such a gorgeous night when I emerged hours later, the sky a luminous, inexpressible blue, a sliver of moon hanging over the lake. So beautiful I couldn’t stand to leave it, and I walked all the way down to the Exhibition. The moon rose in the sky, the stars came out, the city was wrapped in a bubble of density and meaning. Passing under the Exhibition gates (they loomed like a canyon overhead), I slalomed through the caramel-sweet air and children and exuberant young men. A double-decker Ferris wheel spun backwards into the night.
Clarissa waited for me outside the auto pavilion. She was chatting to another model, a girl in a red sweater with eyes too big for her bony skull; and it seemed to me that this girl spoke to me in a rather supercilious manner, as if she’d gone from not knowing me to not liking me in about forty-five seconds.
I wasn’t as indulgent this time as I’d been with the engineering student, and I must have said something (I had quite the tongue back then), because she walked off without saying goodbye to either of us.
“Somebody’s been drinking,” Clarissa said. We started across the midway, the Saturday night crowd swollen and somehow more aggressive than other nights. Drifting in and out of the mob, fifty yards ahead of us, was Clarissa’s old boyfriend, Bill Cardelle, coming this way.
I didn’t know if they’d seen each other since he dumped her, but she wouldn’t look at him, kept looking around the crowd as if she was expecting someone. But Bill, being Bill, eased his way through it, wasn’t put off by her one-word answers, his hair falling just so over his forehead, his white chinos fashionably high up on the ankle and a pink shirt which, on anyone else, would have looked, well, you know. And after a while they fell into a conversation, friends in common, other couples, and the three of us, at my suggestion, made our way over to the Ferris wheel.
There was a messy lineup, couples changing their mind amidst a great deal of hilarity, teenagers butting in. I struck up a conversation with a grey-haired man and his wife. I did it, I think, to show Clarissa how easy, how confident I was with people, my gift of the gab. But it was my undoing, this gift of the gab, because while I was talking, Clarissa and Bill somehow got onto the Ferris wheel before me; down went the bar, clank, and the wheel moved up a notch. I got on. Clank. Then behind me the grey-haired man and his wife, who seemed not so interesting after all.
The ride started. Up, up, up we went; all the way to the top, where you could see the yellow clock tower of my school, like an owl’s eye, staring at me. And then with a rush of screams and exploding lights, down we went, around and around and around. I could see in the chair just above me that their heads, Bill’s and Clarissa’s, were bent close together, as if to hear better; she was asking him questions; he’d answer and then pull his head back to see her reaction and then she’d look at him, not saying anything. I sensed that I was in terrible danger; panic whipped through my body like a pinball. Around and around and around we went. It went on forever, this infernal ride, and with every revolution I could feel her moving away from me.
They got off first, and when I joined them, staggering a little theatrically, I could see that they were waiting on something, she looking at him, Bill looking down at his loafers. And my mouth went completely dry.
Bill was dim but he wasn’t vicious, and so he stood off at a decent distance while she told me. “I want to be with Bill now,” she said, and there was, Clarissa being Clarissa, a hint of impatience, the same I’d heard in her voice when she asked me, Was I coming down to see her in the city, as if, in this case, she wanted to get this part of the evening over with (me) and “get on with things.”
Bill drove me home to my uncle’s. Just the two of us sitting in the car, driving up the same big street I’d walked down only a few hours earlier. How could everything have changed, my whole life, in so brief a time?
“Is this your car?” I said.
“My dad’s.”
“It smells new. Is it new?”
“Is what new?” he said.
“The car. Is it a new car?”
“I think it is.”
“I like the smell of a new car,” I said.
We drove over the train yards, up through Chinatown, the moon in the rear-view mirror. A streetcar rattled by, empty now.
“Hard to believe it’s already August,” I said. I don’t think Bill found much of anything hard to believe. But he nodded cooperatively. He took his right hand off the wheel and rested it on the seat between us. His “petting” hand, it occurred to me.
“I always like the idea of summer,” I said. “But somehow it always ends up sort of a disappointment.”
Pulling to a graceful stop in front of my uncle’s house, Bill turned his handsome, almost feminine features to me. Even in the light from the street lamps, I could see the splash of blood in his cheeks. (My blood, it seemed to me.)
“I’m sorry ab
out all this,” he said. And in his way, he was. I got out of the car, ran up the flagstone steps, made a small theatrical production of looking for my key, but when I turned to wave I could see from his face in the car window that he understood exactly how I felt but that in five minutes he wouldn’t be thinking about it anymore. On his way, no doubt, to Clarissa’s house. Her parents, she’d mentioned earlier, were at a film festival in San Sebastian.
When I awoke in the morning, birds chirping outside my window, the room bathed in yellow sunlight (the wrong kind, the too-early kind), I hovered for a second the way you do, on the verge of remembering: a corpse you can almost make out in the mud. Oh yes, that. A foul taste in my mouth, my head aching from the beer as if I had an arrow clean through both temples. My girlfriend gone.
I tried to get back to sleep, but like a diver with an air pocket in his suit (she’s gone!) I couldn’t get back under the surface. (How awful it is, more than forty years later, to recall those moments.)
I lay for I don’t know how long staring at a crack in the ceiling over my head, a long, lightning-shaped crack, the kind you see over a lake in the summer. And the events of the previous evening, the girl in the red sweater, the Ferris wheel, Bill Cardelle looking down at his loafers, seemed, at the same time, nightmarish and inevitable. As if a handful of cards had been thrown in the air and come down in their precise numerical order. While I was lying there, too stunned to do much except stare at the crack in the ceiling and plan to go downstairs to brush my teeth but unwilling to leave my bed, as if by my moving, and with that movement officially beginning the day, the situation would only become realer, I heard, for the first time since I arrived at my uncle’s, a knock on my bedroom door.
“Yes?”
The door opened, my father came in, and the horror of everything, the unfairness of it, tumbled over me like a stack of wooden chairs. I’d forgotten: fresh from the hospital, determined to make up for “lost time” and “bad behaviour,” he had made a plan to take me clothes shopping for the new school year.
In his little blue Morris, we drove uptown, passing on the way the deep ravine on the other side of which I could see Clarissa’s white apartment building where, I imagined, in her parents’ giant white bed, the silk curtains stirring just so (like the hair on Bill’s forehead), the two of them, Clarissa and a boy with blood on his cheeks, stirred, side by side, in their sleep.
I watched the ravine retreat in the mirror and we turned onto Eglinton, still too bright in that awful summer sunshine, and went into Beatty’s Store for Young Gentlemen.
It was a day that went on forever. Perhaps, to this day even, the longest of my life. My father, shaky like all alcoholics about their “former” behaviour, asked me questions as if reading from a manual. My answers barely interested him, except for one. “I hear that you have a beautiful girlfriend.” We bought a blazer, which had to be fitted, grey flannels, which had to be measured, button-down shirts, a belt, a house tie, a school tie, gym socks, dress socks; it went on and on and on; at one point, excusing myself to try on a sleeveless grey sweater, I went into the dressing room, closed the door, sat down with my back to the mirror, and wept into my hand.
Two weeks later, I went into boarding in the same squat brick building I now stood in front of. A boarder! One of those guys, along with the chronic masturbators and pimple squeezers and unloved children whose parents plied the civil service in Nairobi or Senegal or East Timor. Those dandruffy, never-have-a-date, sad sack pooches you saw doing their homework on a Friday night! All my life, all my friends, we were “day boys,” we went home after school, we took off our ties, we watched television, we slept in on Saturday mornings and we never went to church. But that, too, was gone now. My parents (could they have made a worse decision?) sold our house in the city, other people lived there now, and moved up to our summer cottage. “Less stimulation,” my father’s doctor recommended. Well, everyone got that.
I shared a room with a boy no one else wanted to room with, whose skin was white as cream and who enjoyed prancing around the room stark naked, flexing his muscles and emitting whoops of laughter. He also had an enormous, uncircumcised unit; it looked like a giant worm and I had an uncomfortable sensation that he found his own nakedness arousing. The window over my bed looked out onto the courtyard and a gloomy statue—the courtyard where I now stood decades later.
A little chamber of horrors, it was. I nearly went mad from the bewilderment of it all. I couldn’t get over the notion: when I went up the Ferris wheel, I had a girlfriend; when I came down, I didn’t. How could this be? What kind of a world was it where things like this could occur? What are human beings really like? Is language simply a disguise, a way to keep people off the scent of who you really are and what you really want?
After lights out, I took out my little plastic viewer and put it to my eye and pushed down on the button—and there we were.
There we were.
I ran away in the middle of the next night. I slipped out the window into the courtyard and scampered past the statue into the shadows.
It took me all night to hitchhike to the American border crossing. By then the sun had come up; cars streamed by in the brilliant sunlight.
“Where are you going today?” the customs agent said at the mouth of the bridge.
“Niagara Falls,” I said.
“For how long?”
“Just the day.”
“Why aren’t you in school today?”
“It’s a scholars’ holiday. Do you want to see my student card?”
“Not particularly,” he said, amused by his own dryness. “Away you go.”
I walked twenty-five, fifty, a hundred yards along the bridge; I looked down at the river crashing below me; the wind picked up; it blew my hair on end. I was seized with the desire to start running, to run and run and run. All my life I had had the suspicion that I was a bad boy and that I was going to be punished for it, that one day a kind of giant fly swatter was going to come down on me with a terrible whap. And now here I was, being truly bad, midway across the bridge, a rule breaker of the first order, a middle finger extended to law and order and . . . and nothing. There was no fly swatter. No God, no hell, no punishment. Nobody even paying attention, much less punishing. A blind man came tapping his way along the bridge toward me, heading to the Canadian side, his black suit flapping in the high wind from the river. I waited till he got past me and then I broke into a run. I ran all the way across the bridge and when I landed at the very end, when I stepped onto an American sidewalk, I swear I was a different boy than the one who had started on the other side.
The sun had set now behind the school’s clock tower, its round face slowly yellowing. The door to my old dormitory burst open, and a crowd of teenage boys spilled raggedly out into the courtyard. They looked at me quickly—I could have been a pole or a bicycle rack—and hurried across the flagstones. It must have been dinnertime. I waited till the last one had gone up the steps and into the building; from where I stood, you could hear them moving down the hallway toward the dining room, those high, excited voices.
I looked again at the window of my old room. The student who lived there must have turned off the light and I could see only my reflection in the window.
I lingered in the growing darkness a little longer. There was something more I wanted; there always is. I was trying to imagine what I might have thought that night as I slipped into the October darkness, running from shadow to shadow, running across playing fields and bridges, what would I have said if someone had told me that one night many, many years later, when my hair was grey, when I was older than the teachers who teach here (strange notion), that I’d end up back in this courtyard.
And why, I’m not sure, but leaving the school property (I could see two paunchy old boys heffing around the track), I felt a great tenderness for that young boy darting into the night. I found myself thinking that he was, above all else, more than reckless, more than daring, more than naive, something more.
Some extraordinary quality that I no longer possess. The lack of which, when you think about it, is probably a good thing at my age.
And who would have believed it—that Clarissa Bentley would be my great liberator? The dispeller of superstition. A cruel little girl who grew up to be a dishonest adult but who, more than my mother who adored me, more than an English teacher who inspired me, gave me the rule breaker’s freedom for life. A blessing from a monster.
2
Everything Frightened Him
When I was twelve years old, my father, then a successful stockbroker, bought me a gun. It was a .22 rifle with a mahogany stock and a short barrel. He taught me how to use it; how to negotiate a farmer’s field, how to climb over a fence without putting a hole in my forehead. It was a small gun, but it could kill, I learned that from the beginning. Imagine then his extreme displeasure when my teenage brother, Dean, shot out half the windows on the ground floor of our country house while my parents were in the city one weekend for a funeral.
I was innocent, of course; even I had the brains not to point a gun at a window and pull the trigger. Especially when it was your own house and your parents were coming home the next day. Still, I didn’t snitch and took the blame along with him, although now at the age of sixty, having raised two children myself, I cannot imagine why. Perhaps I thought I was in a movie. I often did during those early years. Beau Geste, maybe, the 1939 melodrama where a young Gary Cooper confesses to a crime of which he’s innocent—the theft of a valuable jewel—and joins the French Foreign Legion where he dies a hero’s death. Exactly my kind of story.
The punishment for the shot-out windows was somewhat less compelling. Instead of sending Dean to a psychiatrist, my parents instructed us to learn Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” by heart (my mother’s idea), which was a snap for me because I had a magpie’s memory and I rather fancied the poem. For Dean, though, it was a struggle, as everything was.
The Perfect Order of Things Page 2
