Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  When I opened my eyes, I could still feel her right hand pushing into me, but her left had quickly unbuttoned her blouse, her small dark nipples poking over the lace of her bra. Her skirt had ridden up so that I had a tantalizing view of her white panties. She was drenched, but the shower spray couldn’t have reached her there.

  “Are you sure…?” I was looking towards the door back to the changing rooms.

  “We’ll be all right,” she told me. She withdrew her hand only to unzip her grey skirt and slip it off, tossing it with a lazy throw towards the entrance. Here in our private rain-forest, her fingers were back inside me, and the steady rhythm was at first deliciously pleasurable and then the tingle of my very first orgasm began in my thighs and rushed through me. “Uuuhhmmm! Eeeeeuuuhhhmm! Eeeeuuuhhh!” The sensation I couldn’t feel when Bobby Drake put his cock into me with a bull-in-a-china-shop force in a friend’s rec room, taking my virginity and leaving me hollow. This was different. Ecstasy.

  I watched my teacher slither down into the shallow lake of shower water, me so ignorant, so naïve and without a clue, until she put her mouth on me, and I didn’t recognise myself from my moans. As I lay there afterwards, panting and spent, she sat up and smiled, her face so cheerfully grateful that she could give me this, rivulets of water slowly running down her flat belly and the tops of her thighs, a sheen of light on her golden brown breasts now completely visible through the soaked bra. The tuft of her black fur was a vague cloud behind the wet panties, and it was the slight protrusion of her hipbones, such a girlish detail, that made me want to take her.

  I lay there as the water sloshed up against my shoulder blades and flowed around my ass and heels, and I stretched out a hand, my eyes thanking her, telling her I wanted to give love back.

  “Come home with me,” she said. Then she smiled and added, “But not just yet.”

  She rose to her feet and slipped off her panties, unhooked her bra, and I beheld the fullness of her, the full flowering of this mature woman. Her straight black hair trailed like a mane all the way down to the small of her back, accentuating the beautiful curve of her round ass. She was incredibly exotic to me. I got to my feet, and I took a bar of soap in my hand and lathered her buttocks. She seemed to swoon and put out her hands against the tiles, and I ran the soap around to her belly and lathered her breasts. We kissed for the first time in a soapy wet embrace under the pounding of the shower water, and it was another first for me. Lips that yielded to mine, that let me coil my tongue around hers in a dance and didn’t invade my mouth with a masculine brutishness.

  I remember afterwards her buttoning her suit jacket to cover her drenched blouse and squealing over the chill of the wet cotton on her skin. Her skirt was dry enough for us to “escape.” I remember her driving me back to her house, both of us very quiet. I remember my first impression of her décor, a mixture of Indian curios, like the multi-armed statue of Shiva, and Fifties-style furniture. You wouldn’t think they would go together, but she had blended them well. I didn’t know much about Indian culture then, still don’t to be honest, but I noticed briefly the depictions of the Indian god Krishna on the walls. He was blue in some framed pictures and black in others. “Those belonged to my ex-husband,” she explained. “I should really get around to buying some new things to hang up.” But two whole walls in her living room were already completely covered in books, one shelf devoted to feminist literature, another to novels by Hanif Kureshi, Arundathi Roy, Salman Rushdie.

  I asked her about a couple of books, still foolishly calling her Miss Ogis, and she smiled and replied, “I think you can call me Karen here.”

  I was seventeen. I was still in the stage where I blurted out everything that came into my head. “You don’t have an Indian first name?”

  “Sure I do,” she answered. “But I don’t use it. I was born here, grew up here, and I’m kind of between two cultures. White people just mangle our pronunciations anyway. Karen’s easier. If I get to know you better, maybe one day I’ll tell you the other name.”

  I felt a peculiar shock of hurt. But I was young, holding on to the foolish teenage assumption that intimacy was a leveller, that it made us equals. One minute we were lovers, the next I naturally deferred to her.

  “Would you like some tea?” she asked politely.

  “Sure,” I whispered nervously. And I clumsily stepped forward to kiss her again.

  “We have time,” she said. “Try to relax. I need to change.”

  She lived in a bungalow in an upscale part of Scarborough, and when she stepped into her bedroom, my eyes could follow her. I saw her strip off her wet blouse and then slip once again out of her skirt and her underwear. For a moment, she stepped naked in front of a full-length mirror and, seemingly bothered by something about her appearance, she brushed her long hair. I watched covertly as she put on a lacy red bra and a pair of red panties with a flowery pattern in the mesh. I took this as something done for me.

  She pulled on a T-shirt and put on a long navy blue skirt with a high slit up the side and then padded back out to me in bare feet, and I was captivated by the mere idea of her lingerie under her casual clothes, by the easy grace of her movements and by the sway of her skirt. When we sat down to drink our tea, she curled up on the couch, and the skirt fabric slid away to give me a view of one gorgeously shaped leg.

  “I’m glad you came with me,” she said, and we held hands for a moment.

  “So am I.”

  “You’re going to have to be careful, you know,” she advised.

  “I would never…”

  “No, no, not us,” she said. “I’m sure I can trust you. I meant Erica. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”

  “I’ve forgotten all about Erica.”

  “You’re sweet,” she told me. “And you have to learn to be a better liar. You’re in love with her, and it’s excruciatingly obvious.”

  I was past tears but I still shuddered with embarrassment. “I’m so stupid. Deborah’s gonna blab this all over school—”

  “No, she won’t,” said Karen flatly, and I heard the steel in her voice. “Deborah will do no such thing. I’m going to get up in a minute and place a call to Mr. Isham.”

  Mr. Isham was a history teacher and the vice-principal. It had always been assumed that because they were friendly, Isham and Karen Ogis were having an affair. Now I knew differently.

  “He will call Deborah at home, and he will explain that you’re very upset, and that she shouldn’t talk about that episode to anyone,” Karen went on. “If she does, we’ll hear about it, and she’ll find herself not only out of the girls’ basketball team but having lost her credits for the semester. They’ll be incomplete, and she’ll have to spend another year in high school.”

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered.

  But she was doing the right thing for me. For all of high school kids’ urgent political liberalism, it’s still the most relentlessly conservative enclave on a social scale. I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming out in school and trying to be who I was. Everyone had heard about a white boy a year ahead of us who came out and said he was gay, and he was beaten to the point that when he could walk on his leg again he ran away from both school and home.

  Karen did get up and place her call, pulling her bedroom door to as she spoke in a hushed voice to Isham. The next day Deborah avoided me as if I was one of the girl bullies, and it was only days after she stopped imitating Erica that she quit hanging out with both of us altogether. Erica, of course, had always felt a bit embarrassed by her hero worship. As far as she was concerned, Deborah wouldn’t be missed.

  When Karen returned to the couch, standing for a moment over me, I reached out and stroked her bare leg exposed by the slit in the skirt. “You’re right about me…”

  She stayed in place, enjoying my caress, and she said, “Sweetheart, it’s not too difficult to figure out.”

  “So how am I supposed to get over this?” I pleaded. “Shit, why would you want me when you know
how…?”

  “I’m your teacher,” she said softly.

  “What does that mean?” I demanded, getting irritable. “Haven’t you ever been in love? You said you were married and—”

  “That was arranged. I was sixteen when I got married. He was okay for a while, but that wasn’t love. I thought I found love when I was a little older than you are now, with this girlfriend I had for a while, but…Michelle, it’s just too hard. To want someone so badly? Losing yourself and having to negotiate all the time to keep the other person happy? It’s just not for me.”

  “God, you sound like Erica when you talk like that.”

  “Erica’s a very shrewd young lady.”

  “So if you think that way, what is this?” I asked.

  She looked down at me and rested her hands on my shoulders. “This is solace. This is companionship and adoration. This is friendship. You’re a beautiful girl, Michelle. You’re smart, and you’re clever, and you have a good heart. I find you very attractive. Yes, I want you, and we’ll see what happens…That’s if you can accept what I offer. And believe me, it’s something a little more grown up than love.”

  “What if I fall in love with you?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Trust me, you won’t.”

  I stroked her leg, parting the curtain of her skirt, and she looked at me with an amused curiosity. I pretended that I saw the lace panties for the very first time, and I moved from the couch to the rug, kneeling in front of her. I tugged the fabric away and admired her flesh. I breathed in the odour of her, so different from my own scent. When I made her come with the gentle flickering of my tongue, prompting her to joke I was a fast learner, she staggered forward a step, her knees buckling.

  We moved into her bedroom, and she seemed even smaller to me now, as if I could gather her up completely in my arms. I needed to take her this time, running my fingers through her sheets of black hair as I nibbled her ear and felt her breasts. I needed my hand inside her so that I could put my face close to hers and examine her eyes shutting tight, her mouth opening and letting out a kittenish mewling. It was the first time I had made a woman come, seeing how the rapture expressed itself on my lover’s face after only feeling it for the first time myself earlier. Her black hair spilling onto my shoulder and arm, she held me tight as she fell asleep. I stayed awake and listened to her breathing and worried about school, worried about Deborah’s big mouth and Erica’s budding career, whether my best friend’s dreams would come true. I could never see into my own future, to imagine just what I would be doing with myself.

  I became part of Karen’s carefully composed life. She had her books, her Indian friends and her non-Indian friends, her classes with us. She still went regularly, to my surprise, to the temple in Toronto, a brief walk from the Yorkville district, where the local ISSKON chapter held its services. What you and I know as Hare Krishnas but what is really not a cult, but a legitimate branch of the Hindu faith worshipped by thousands.

  White people didn’t get second looks, but I got polite nods of astonishment the one time Karen brought me along, a young black chick here on a visit. “Hare, hare, hare, Krishna, Krishna…” And people danced, a line of Indian girls in saris as young as me bopping up and down in front of us as if they were at a techno-pop concert. A man came around with a kind of lamp, and Karen made waving motions of the heat to her face, leaving a donation of a couple of dollars.

  “You all right?” Karen asked, enjoying my reactions to the vivid colours and the thick incense.

  “Well, it’s not gospel wailing, but it’s fun,” I laughed.

  “Worship should be joyful,” she commented. “Only white people make it into a tedious drag.”

  I returned the favour by taking her to a service of the Second Toronto Baptist Church on College Avenue, which I think must have been an equally surreal experience for her. Karen taught me about literature. She took me to French and Italian movies at the repertory cinema in the Annex district. She opened my mind to all kinds of intellectual stimulation. And on weekends, I rang the bell to the house and once I was quickly inside her short foyer, we kissed like lovers reunited after I’d been gone on a trip.

  I celebrated graduating high school with dinner out with my parents and brother, and I celebrated again that weekend with Karen when she took me away to a bed and breakfast in the Ottawa Valley. I told my folks I had won an essay contest to visit the Canadian Parliament under teacher supervision—you don’t have to guess who my chaperone was. Looking out the window at the rolling hills of the valley and feeling the silkiness of Karen’s golden skin, I knew I had proved her wrong. I was in love with her. And we had cleared the hurdle. I was a graduate, our relationship no longer a risk for her professional career. But I had also been accepted at Yale (Fisk as well, but I wasn’t crazy about college in Nashville). My parents were adamant that I should go to a prestigious American university and not settle for Queens or Carleton, or God help me, the University of Toronto, none of which could open as many career doors for me.

  “Go learn something,” Karen told me at the airport, smiling bravely.

  “I’ll email you plenty,” I promised, hugging her close.

  “Look, you have to do this, it’s all right,” she said, using these words instead of I knew I would have to give you up one day.

  When they called my flight, I said softly close to her ear, “I love you, Kamala.”

  Her eyes were moist with tears, and she couldn’t speak, her pose of detachment reduced to an emotional fiction. If she hadn’t broken in that moment, I do think I would have moved on. Not that I didn’t take other lovers, but I always came back to Karen when I visited home, staying at her place, in her arms, briefly picking up where we left off and then parting again. It’s why it was so much harder for us later.

  Mentor

  In the month that I flew out to Connecticut and accepted my room at the dorm in New Haven, Erica boarded a Greyhound bus and rode for about twelve hours on a bumpy seat with shedding upholstery to the Big Apple. The bus wheels turning as she softly sang along with Bob Marley through her earphones: Open your eyes and look within. Are you sat-is-fiiied—with the life you’re living? Uh!

  She stepped into New York at Grand Central Station with her demo tapes and a grocery list of maybe five contacts in the city and no booked hotel room for the night. She says she walked for hours with her pack slung over her shoulder, amazed at how compact Manhattan was. From American television beamed across the border into Canada, you never got the impression that the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were so close together, the extent that those lions of the public library commanded a great swath of Fifth Avenue, or how you could look down from the low hill of Madison somewhere between Midtown and the upper sides and see the Twin Towers, because they were still standing back then. Erica Jones was here, but she hadn’t yet arrived.

  I’ve always had trouble trying to convey to Americans what it’s like to be a black person growing up in Canada, what an interesting milestone it was in Erica’s life to come to New York—or in mine. Hell, it’s hard enough trying to convey what it’s like to come from Canada. There’s an old joke that a Canadian will pick up his Coke from a vending machine and say, “Thank you.” They think of themselves as middle-class, polite, moderate people. For a long time, my Dad tells me, the most right-wing Canadian politician was still left of any American Democrat. After all, we’ve got a national health care scheme borrowed from the British. The founders were British and French who never really got along, and the music…The music is so painfully white.

  Bryan Adams and Shania Twain, the Crash Test Dummies and Rush, Céline Dion and Avril Lavigne and Nelly Furtado and Nickelback and the patron saint of Celtic introspective bleating, Sarah McLachlan. The radio by law has to play a substantial portion of Canadian music in a desperate attempt to keep the national culture from going flatline, and to be fair the music industry itself was strong and thriving. But Erica and the rest of my friends hardly ever listened
to the radio, because you were either hearing American pop tunes or the tongue-in-cheek Barenaked Ladies or folkie angst. Erica and I spent our weekends hunting for clubs that would play stuff for us. They were small scenes that we did our best to support even when they were clearly derivative and amateurish, just to have something. You never got a vibe that someone would break out and hit it big. So you couldn’t pretend to be cool in recognising them first and having them to yourselves.

  I don’t know how to convey what it was like. We came from the second-largest country in the world, but the population is only about 35 million. Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities you can go to—Chinese, Hungarian, Somali, Argentine, Iraqi, Polish, Jamaican, you name it, it’s got it. And it’s actually the seventh most expensive city in the world to live in, and yet…There was no homegrown black music that could rise to the top and stay on the pop mainstream. If it was black and really popular, it came from Down There. Nothing talked about where we were, what our lives were like at home, it was all Compton ’hood glory or Destiny’s Child wannabes.

  Around High Park, just off the Polish neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Avenue, Erica and I had both gone to a high school that was predominantly white. So we laughed at the white kids who got their gangsta patter from Eminem and American crime shows, sneering in disgust at them and saying, “Do you honestly believe anybody talks like that? And talks like that around here?”

  It wasn’t so much the incidents of bigotry I recall back home, not that they didn’t happen. My father worked as a construction carpenter, and he didn’t suffer too often from racism at work or over his hiring—he was just too good at his job. And Erica’s father, being a dentist, said if someone had a problem with his black hands going into their mouth, fine, let the bastard’s teeth rot. No, what springs to mind is how badly Erica was needed because our kind back then—as far as the popular cultural mainstream mattered—were, for the most part, simply not there.