China Blues (13 page)

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.

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.

You can probably see this story, or its first main point, coming from a mile away, like a bunch of cattle hoving up in the landscape somewhere west of Winnipeg.

We lasted for about 3 months. It was pretty close to 3 months. She slept around, I think, just about every night we weren’t together, and that was quite a few because I was working late until 8 or 9 o’clock Wednesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Fridays as well. I don’t think she even cared that much who she slept with. They were people, I came to realize, that she met on the street, on streetcars, in cafés, sitting outside in the warm weather or sitting inside reading a book, usually a biography of somebody like Edie or some Monaco princess, or bars of course, or clubs. I was working
for the Coles book company. They’re a franchise. They own dozens of soup-to-nuts bookstores across the country. I started off in the head office, went to the main warehouse for inventory training, I didn’t need any, and was then put in charge, significance, of the downtown Yonge store for what turned out to be a long time before I was promoted further.

So our eyes would meet. Those huge yellow-flecked blue eyes, like big flowers of some kind, wild flowers, and she would say, “Oh, nothing, I just hung out for a while with Cora.” Or Pat, or Jane, or Serena.

And then she moved in with somebody, a guitarist, by the name of Steve, I’m not sure if he has any other name. But we would still see each other. Nothing to do with borrowing money or anything like that. And not exactly what you would call emotional support. I mean we wouldn’t have conversations where she would say, “No, I’m not doing very well,” and then I would say, “How can I help.” No, it wasn’t like that.

I would get off work around 9 o’clock and meet Marion for coffee, a snack, she has acquired strange eating habits, or maybe a drink, at this club or that restaurant, nowhere special, and we would just talk. And she would often seem stronger on me than ever. Sometimes we would go back to my place and fuck. She would get up from the bed and stroll over to the kitchen counter area with that languid walk, reach one slow lazy perfect white arm up to the cupboards and pour herself a big snifter of cognac from the bottle I kept there, 2 or 3 of them actually, mostly because I thought it was classy, like other little things I do to make myself a bit more distinct, less of a cowboy, red braided leather belts, galluses, that’s what they call them in Toronto, yellow paisley galluses, in Manitoba we call
them braces but in Toronto the big moose call them galluses. She would drink it slowly but without interruption, standing with her back to me, 4, 5 ozs, rolling her lovely blonde head slowly from one side to the other, releasing a short clear gasp of pleasure after the last sip. Then she would come back to the bed, put one knee on the mattress, lean down and say, “It’s late, I guess I’ve really got to go now.” And I’d say okay.

There’s a whole area of Toronto which I think is committed to the establishment of a world-state stock market backed up by major engineering companies, big hospitals, mining concerns, giant Mies van der Rohe office towers and so on; and there is also a whole area of Toronto which is a sort of neon Rome, committed to the destruction, the scorch and burn of puritanism in their own lives, a sort of casual and graceful surrendering to the moment of pleasure.

I’m working at a respectable job for the moment. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I wear a white shirt and a loose blue smock-type jacket to work every day. I read a bit, I take streetcars, I don’t have a car, I listen to 1000s of songs.

Marion wakes up in the morning, which is usually around 2 in the afternoon; a piece of toast slathered with butter & jam, a telephone call, she’ll sometimes use a whole tube of shampoo in the course of one shower, a trash magazine, a $10.00 copy of
Vogue
, she just surrenders, glides through, rubs up against, sniffing, turning her head this way or that, strokes her own body, her lithe stomach, rolling her hips against the door frame as she talks to somebody.

I go through a lot of mental reasoning at work. I do klutzy telephone-operator scenes out of Lily Tomlin, just for my amusement, for Paul’s or Harry’s amusement, I really like her, I think she
is really an incredibly talented remarkably brilliant woman, slowing things down, putting in unnecessary gaffes and hooks, the whole bit, one of the secretaries comes back from the washroom and she says, “The washroom’s in a real mess.”

Whereas Marion just pads across the bare green lino tiles of my apartment over the hardware store on dark King Street above the lake as gracefully as a punk model. She hasn’t had an assignment for about a year, except for a couple of underwear ads a few months ago. She’s 20. She has a perfect mind, no concepts, but at the same time infinite, blue like the sky, housed simply as an observation point behind a lovely face at the top of a casual body.

I’ve been reading some of the books at work,
I’m OK, You’re OK
, that’s an old one, I think, I read that a couple of weeks ago, but yeah, I’d like to shake things up a bit, I don’t know what. I’m too restless to sleep all day, you have to have money, even South American wristwatches with funny umbrellas on the face cost money. I go on working, and listening to music, because that’s where it’s at, but I don’t even go to clubs very much in the evening. Marion goes out and comes home late, I’m not always sure where she goes. “O God, I’m not doing a thing with myself.” Or, “One of these days, my parents are going to kill me.” She likes to illuminate the perfection of her life, even the act of eating a piece of cold pizza out of the fridge at 4 o’clock in the morning for supper by stressing tension with her parents. They’re 2nd generation Ukrainian. Hard-working yokels who have made good money, in the restaurant business, and retired to Richmond Hill at the far north edge of Toronto. Lots of room and a well-earned backyard. Who keep waiting for Marion to become a fashion model.