by Yann Martel
Mostly he went on top. I liked it that way; I could feel and watch and touch. We did it from behind, too. At first I was a bit reluctant. He would see ... I would be exposing my ... I think it's the area where one's sense of privacy fades last. But Roger had an anal fixation. Far from pretending it wasn't there, the first thing he did the first time was purr, "Nice asshole," and stick in a lubricated finger. After a moment of shock I found it quite pleasant. When he penetrated me I felt a double sense of fullness, something approximating capacity. I arched back farther, my shyness gone. A few times he outright sodomized me with his greased-up dick, but I took less to that. When my sphincter was intent on closing and he was coming, it hurt; and when I was relaxed and open, it felt as if I were shitting and I found I was not participating, but waiting. Although, at the same time, the sheer indecency of what we were doing turned me on.
When I was especially excited, I had an orgasm while Roger moved in and out of me. It always happened when he was on top and it seemed to come from nowhere. Usually, though, I came before or after his gush, to the fiddling of his fingers or the slobbering of his mouth -- these were the real volcano champagne bottle pops.
After periods of all-out repeated carnality I was sometimes so sore I could hardly walk.
That's such a long-ago feeling, to fuck so much I hurt.
I spent the summer reading Conrad and fucking. Roger gave me a key to his place. This time, whenever Sarah said, "We thought you'd never come back," I laughed. When the academic year started again we had to be discreet, but I still spent a great deal of time at his house (though far fewer nights, a sore point). Only when his children visited did I stay away completely. Leah was my age, Jeremy older -- the awkwardness would have been worse than with Tuesday. Better that I not exist in their eyes. Or in the eyes of others. Though surely many faculty and students knew, in public we behaved like near strangers and we never did social things together, even if we were both going.
It was in Roger's house, in his absence, that I wrote my dentures story. I found the place propitious for creativity -- something about the wood, the books, the quiet and the knowledge that my time was limited, that in a few hours, in a few minutes, he would appear and my writing would stop. The desk in his office being far too cluttered, I wrote the story on a small writing-desk in the living-room. It was slanted and the top lifted, much like a school desk's, but it was far more elegant: it had an inset leather writing surface and lion's-paw feet. Inside the desk I found old letters and odd papers and a small hardcover edition of Les Fables de La Fontaine. The book was about four inches by three and was falling apart. I secured the covers with tape and I decided that I would memorize one fable a day until I had finished my story. I got to the fifteenth fable of the third section, which means that I wrote my story in fifty-six sessions, varying in length from a few hours to a full day, with two more sessions to type it up on Roger's computer. I was careful not to repeat the mistake I had made with my novel; I did not overplan. I jotted down new ideas in a notepad that I carried with me, I had a sheet next to my draft on which I wrote reminders of an immediate nature; otherwise, I composed the story straight from my head.
I found that the more I wrote, the more I had to say, one idea leading to another. It turned out to be quite a long story, a little over forty pages. This was in part the result of research, which gave me hard facts around which I could weave my intent. I am in debt to a woman at the consumer relations office of a major American denture cleaner and adhesive company, who sent me reams of information, a complete historical synthesis worthy of Encyclopedia Britannica. I read more than I cared for or needed to on George Washington's wooden teeth, Victorian ivory dentures, the development of polymer plastics after the Second World War, the manufacturing process for dentures and artificial teeth and the proper care of your dentures. Facts, figures, insights, anecdotes -- this woman in Michigan produced them all for me, with every letter bearing the motto We Help You Keep Your Smile above a gleaming set of teeth.
With this story I clearly remember the moment of conception. It had to do with Roger's vasectomy. Roger liked it sometimes when I played with his erection from behind, that is, when I held it from between his legs. One day in mid-September, a Saturday or Sunday, I was indulging him in just such a way. We were lying on our sides on his bed, I was behind him and lower down, my arm running between his legs, and my head was resting on his side, watching what my hand was doing. Already a little semen had oozed out and my to-and-fro motion had frothed it up. He ejaculated. It always surprised me how this production -- the heavy breathing, the gurgling and groaning from deep down, the tortured expression, the tensing and trembling of his body -- resulted in only a few dashes, maybe three millilitres. While he lay there, recuperating from his pleasure, I looked at the blobs on the bed-sheet. At that moment, thinking about how this laughably minute quantity of goo could be so powerful, though not in this particular case, the words "toothless ejaculation" came together in my mind.
The final product had nothing to do with vasectomies or ejaculations, but that was its origin.
My story was about a young woman who has no teeth, and the relationship between her and her dentures and a much older, healthy-toothed former prime minister who becomes her lover. I had a picture in my head of a beautiful, toothless young woman in bed with her ageing lover, the two of them naked and lying together like spoons, she the inner spoon, both looking at a glass of water with her teeth in it. I divided the story into chapters, sixteen in all, each with its own title. This allowed me to vary the narrative voice. Some chapters were descriptive and omnisciently narrated, focusing on an event -- the cleaning of her teeth, for example, with the fizzing of the cleaning tablets and her careful brushing. Others were carried out in an 'I' voice, either his or hers. Still others were nearly pure dialogue. At the heart of the story I had a simple tension: the love affair must remain secret because the young woman's lover is very famous and much older, and this secrecy increasingly bothers her. She feels powerless -- hence the symbol of the dentures.
It was a perfect story, by which I humbly mean that everything was fully intended, every ambiguity precisely circumscribed. I was happy with the result.
I dared to bid for the world's attention. I selected a well-known literary review in the United States -- since I felt that to be published down there was the real thing -- and mailed off my story. The celerity and curtness with which it was turned down -- within eight days of my dropping the envelope in the mailbox, I received a one-paragraph, rubber-stamp-dated "Dear Writer" form letter -- made me feel that I had shot a flimsy old arrow over the border into the American jungle, and that within a second a bullet had whizzed by my head in riposte. Such was the rush of the editors to expel my story from the U.S. that they did not even properly stamp the self-addressed envelope I had dutifully included. Since it is impossible to buy American stamps in Canada, I had paper clipped to my envelope an International Postal Coupon which could be exchanged at any post office for the appropriate postage. The editors did not sweat over such niceties: it was the coupon itself, a most unstamplike green piece of paper, that acted as the passport home for my story, clumsily taped in the corner where I expected the Stars and Stripes or an American bald eagle. I tried other American reviews, from the big and famous to the small but esteemed. None matched the speedy abruptness of the first, which I came to regret. As months passed by and I heard nothing about my darling story, I realized that it was better to suffer a lynching than an interminable stay on death row. Long after my story was not only published in Canada but anthologized, I received in Montreal a scuffed, rerouted, world-weary postcard from Mississippi kindly informing me that, with great regrets, they could not accept my story but that I should try them again.
I had better luck in my home country, eventually. A literary review in British Columbia gave me the nod. A form letter with filled-in blanks, much like a birth certificate, informed me that I was born, with a handwritten P.S. elaborating on the matter. Th
ere was the pleasure of galleys and, upon publication, a little money. I now had the bare minimal qualifications to call myself a writer. I didn't tell anyone at Ellis -- not even Roger, though I sent him a copy of the review from Montreal -- but in my head it was the big news around town. When the story was reprinted in an annual collection called "Best Canadian Short Stories", a real book put out by a real publisher, I felt that well-documented satisfaction that the writer may die but she will live on, if only in one story in an anthology.
I thought of dedicating the story to "R.M." -- the tribute even made it to the galleys -- but by then I had left Roetown and Roger was over. I felt no resentment towards him, but I saw no reason to flatter him, even in so minor a way. I struck the dedication out.
To get my three-year Bachelor's degree I needed to take two philosophy courses (I chose philosophy of language, and philosophy and the sciences), but I also opted for Roger's Conrad course. So the activities of a summer -- Conrad and fucking -- were prolonged for a whole year. What with my private creative efforts and the necessities of sleeping and eating and a little swimming, it was a busy year.
It ended in the same weather and the same state of seeming depopulation as it had started in: a studentless Roetown in the hot humidity of summer. Yet again he had been "tricked" into teaching a summer course. I knew he wouldn't be back before nine in the evening at the earliest. I stopped up the bathtub and the bathroom sink, plugged the excess-water drains and turned the hot-water taps on. Roger had great water pressure; his taps were gushers. As the carpet in the corridor was turning a darker shade of red, I wrote FUCK YOU on his bed with his shaving cream. Downstairs, as I was finishing choosing which of his books I would steal -- as many as I could carry, including the small Fables de La Fontaine -- his staircase was becoming part of a fountain, with a rippling effect that was very pretty. I left just ahead of the water. You may think that, having confessed to these immaturities, I feel apologetic. Quite the opposite. I was too young to have the daring to burn his house down; that's my sole regret. A fire is the only suitable punishment for a man with a cold, selfish heart. The worst he came back to was a house flooded with Congo water, with bloated floors that did not creak, for once, as he splish-splashed across them and up the staircase. I am sure he did not seize upon the small detail that this cold water had once been hot.
I will not go so far as to say he was a fraud. But to live with such a discrepancy between intellect and physical passion indicates a lack of integrity. I was supposed to be a secret not only to others but to Roger himself. I couldn't be seen by family, professors and students; most important, I couldn't be seen by Joseph Conrad. I was something neatly and conveniently bowdlerized from Roger's mind. To him I was no more than terrific sex. The passion suffused no further than his loins, certainly not to his heart -- which is what he wanted to hide, this chasm between cold indifference and wild abandon, this lack of communication between what he felt and what he did. Surely Conrad would not have approved, he who detailed the twists that humanity can put itself through while he was securely moored to his Jessie. When Roger dressed he made himself presentable not only to the world but to himself. He put on a garb of civility and introspection that was exquisitely tailored to reflect the folly of the human condition as lived in trading-posts and on ships in the distant Malay Archipelago -- but not in Roetown. In Roetown, everything would be orderly and on his terms. Thus we fucked on his schedule, at his absolute convenience. He had not only no interest in visiting, say, South America, the very thought of which sent my mind into dream-mode overdrive, but no interest in deviating one inch from his chosen path. If Roger had been out buying milk and I had been on the other side of the street and I had told him that, if he didn't cross over, things would be finished between us, he would have shouted, "No, I'm going to buy milk," and he would have continued.
Meanwhile, not realizing that I was as replaceable as a litre of two percent, I invested myself in him. I never felt I was compromising because it was always a pleasure to be with him. Being the undisciplined student that I was, I always had free time for him. It was only when I understood what little magnetic draw I had on him -- none -- that I saw it all as a compromise, saw how there was never any balance, only a master and his pet, a dot with a circle around it. The sex we had was amazing, I can't deny that. The memories of it still crackle in my mind like a dry wood fire. But in barely a moment I went from "When next?" to "Never again." Between the last time of carefree carnality and my near-destruction of his house there passed no more than a few days and one conversation, which started when I turned to Roger in bed, when we were reading, after, and I asked, for the first time, "Roger, what are we? I mean, you and me, what are we? What is our relationship?" It was a conversation he would rather not have had. Words, with their precise meanings, even if hedged and taken back, would trap him. They did. When I silently turned back to my book and stared at the page, two feelings swirled in me: surprise and confirmation. My mind was busy going over events, reassessing exchanges, understanding things.
After that I couldn't do it any more. His dick was the same, but something in me had changed. He was a vulgar man -- how can you fuck vulgarity?
I was not in love with him, I must make that clear. Despite what romance novels claim, love, like any living thing, settles where it feels it has a future. I never thought Roger and I had a future. I never envisaged settling in Roetown with him in some permanent domestic arrangement. There were too many differences, not so much in ourselves as in our lives. He was fifty, I was twenty-two, he was established, I was not; and so on. So our pleasures were of the moment. My mistake was to believe that he had faith in that moment. He didn't. His vasectomy, that little scar on his scrotum, reflected not only the output of his penis, but that of his heart. If I were not there, if I drowned in the river Wade, he'd find himself another fresh young cunt. I doubt she'd get the key to his house, though.
I left Roetown in a single motion, a single breath. I walked from Roger's place to mine, loaded with books, pausing only to throw his key into the Wade (did he think I kept it? Did he have his locks changed, fearing my return?) I packed my things, dashed off some goodbye letters, made a few phone calls, said goodbye to Sarah, forfeited my part of the rent for the rest of the summer, donated my futon to a future resident of the house, sold my desk and chair to Martin for a song, left some old clothes to fend for themselves, loaded up a taxi like a mule -- but he wouldn't take my bike, so I cycled to the bus station while the car rode empty -- and departed for Montreal.
It's only when you're young, or living near a volcano, that you can uproot in under three hours. I arrived at my aunt's house in Montreal not in catastrophe, only unexpectedly, and quite tired. And I didn't stop there. By the time I finally allowed myself to catch my breath and think, I was in Mexico, the cheapest exotic destination I had found at short notice.
(Some may wonder at the short treatment I give my only living relative. My childless aunt -- and she exuded childlessness, like her husband -- was a conventional woman. Her life had flowed like cement: it had been changeable only when it was fresh, for once it had set, she had set. Life to her was a mould, not a moult. I remember coming down one morning to find her ironing some of my clothes. She had been ironing her dog's winter coats, she told me, and thought she'd use the occasion to smooth out these few items of mine. Beside two tartan dog coats (it was a Scottish terrier) lay a carefully folded blouse or two, a skirt, a pair of pants and a man's shirt. She had laid them in two piles: the blouses and skirt in one, the pants and the shirt in the other. When she had finished with a last blouse, I thanked her, pointedly stacked her two piles into one and carried my clothes away. This was as close as we came to broaching the personal matter of sex. Our smiles were the glue that held up our masks: behind hers was an older woman who was shocked and scandalized; behind mine a young woman who was quite happy with who she was. Her husband, a retired engineer, mostly kept himself busy in another part of the house.)
At the
Cancun airport the question "What in the world am I doing here?" struck me hard. I thought of scurrying back to Roetown to try to patch things up with Roger, but I steadied myself. I spent two and a half months in the land of the Maya. I met Francoise, a French woman, and together we explored every Mayan site we heard of or read about, which, considering the paucity of public transportation and the remoteness of many of the smaller, less-known ruins, involved a lot of walking, some insistent waving at the occasional passing truck, car or mule, and the odd night in the open air in our sleeping bags. Once we got a ride on the back of a truck with farm workers being driven to the fields. Our presence elicited smiles and shy laughter from these friendly, unassuming men. I idealize them when I say this, but I felt they lived simple, whole lives. They were grounded, their toes like roots, and when they lifted their hands above their heads with their hoes, they touched the blue sky. I envied this.
My most lingering memory of Mayan civilization is of an isolated site whose name I forget, just a few ruins struggling to survive in the jungle. Francoise and I had the site to ourselves. Atop a small hill lay the remains of a square temple. The hazards of decay had resulted in the caving in of all four walls of the ground floor, with only the corners holding things up, and the entire collapse of the second floor except for one expanse of wall. The result was a structure that looked remarkably like a huge chair, a chair for the gods. I thought of Joe's painting. In that setting, though, alone on a hill looking up at the sky, surrounded by a strangling jungle, this chair, empty for centuries, struck me as a symbol not of expectancy but of death. In the other Mayan sites we visited, I could never quite imagine the people who had once hurried in and out and about. But looking at this ruin, transformed into something new, unintended and outsized, I felt in a forceful way the ceaseless passage of time and the silence of those it leaves behind.
