Feelings of Fear (16 page)

“No, no. I promise you. I won't make it later than nine.”

Without even saying goodbye, he pushed down the aerial and
dropped the phone into his raincoat pocket. He waited for a moment, licking his lips with indecision, but then he stood up and walked across the square and stood close beside her – closer than a stranger normally would. The little brown birds all flustered into the air, and perched in the branches of the nearest tree.

Anaïs turned and looked up at him, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the bright grayness of the afternoon sky. Her eyes were green, as green as laurel-leaves frozen in ice.

“Sorry to scare off your birds,” he told her. She didn't say anything, but continued to stare up at him, her hand across her forehead. God, she was beautiful. Even though she was wearing a trenchcoat he could tell that she had a good figure by the way that it was so tightly cinched in at the waist. All he could see of her legs were her ankles, in sheer black nylon. She wore shiny black patent shoes with unusually high heels.

“I was, ah, looking for the Rue de la Commune,” he said. “Somebody told me there was some kind of monument there – some kind of obelisk or something.”

Anaïs said nothing. She stared up at him for one moment longer, then she turned and pointed to the other side of the square.

“That way?” he asked her. Why didn't she speak? He was desperate to know what her voice sounded like, whether she was Québecois or American. But she continued to point, and she twitched her index finger a little to indicate that
oui,
or yes, that was the way to go. Her fingernails were very long and polished in dark maroon.

“Well, thanks very much,” he said.
“Merci beaucoup.
I have to say that I'm really enjoying your city. First day I've had enough time to take a walk.”

Anaïs turned away and tossed another handful of Saltine crumbs on to the ground. The first two or three birds began to twitter back down from the branches. George stood where he was until it was obvious that she wasn't going to turn back again.

“I – ah – it's kind of chilly, isn't it?” he said. “Maybe you'd like to join me in a cup of coffee. You know, just for the company.”

She didn't answer. She didn't even shake her head. George waited for a moment longer and then gave an exaggerated shrug. “Please yourself.” He started to walk slowly toward the Rue de la Commune.
Just once he stopped and looked back. She was still sitting there, among the eleven black lamps and the eleven trees, her head lowered over her sketchpad. George covered his mouth with his hand and felt that he could scarcely breathe.

He went to the Rue de la Commune although he didn't know why. He hadn't wanted to go there at all. He crossed it and found himself in a well-manicured, grassy square. The sky was still gray and overcast, but the grass was the same strong laurel-leaf color as Anaïs' eyes. On the right stood the obelisk honoring the first inhabitants of Montreal. In front of him stood an old customs house, its windows blind and its walls still streaked with damp from this morning's rain.

George felt that he had walked out of the world he knew into a new and different world altogether. He felt deeply changed. He had never realized that just
seeing
a woman could have that effect on him. But Anaïs was the girl that he had always wanted, if only he had known it. The girl he couldn't bear to be without.

It started to rain again, and so he turned up the collar of his coat and walked back to his hotel.

Two hours went by. George stood by the window in his hotel suite, drinking a Molson from the mini-bar and watching the rain ceaselessly dredging across the piers and cranes and grain-elevators of Montreal harbor.

The dark-tinted glass made his reflection look even more haggard than he really was. He was a tall, skinny, loose-limbed man of thirty five with brown brushed-back hair and a slightly gone-to-seed face, like a recently retired tennis-player.

He had been in Montreal seven weeks now, but up until today, he had been too busy to think about anything else except concrete and steel and structural analyses. He was an architect, the youngest and brightest partner in Novaks Safdie & Rain, and he was here to finalize his daring design for a new forty-two-story hotel on Sherbrooke Street West, a challenging competitor to Le Westin Mount-Royal and the Ritz-Carlton Kempinski. It would have over one hundred more rooms than either, more restaurants, a huge conference center and a state-of-the-art leisure facility.

The
pièce de résistance
would be a ten-story atrium, with bridges
to symbolize the city's position on Montreal island, and three waterfalls to symbolize the confluence of the Ottawa and the St Lawrence rivers.

He walked over to the drawing-board that was set up in the middle of his living-room, and switched on his angle lamp. He hesitated for a moment, then he lifted aside his sketches for the hotel's elevator doors, and flipped back the cover of a white cartridge drawing block. Choosing a soft black pencil, he began to draw.

He had never been particularly good at likenesses. For instance, he had never attempted any portraits of Helen or Charlie, but his first portrait of Anaïs flowed from his pencil as if she were drawing herself. He sketched her head and shoulders, the way her hair swung along her jawline, her slightly pouting lips. She came to life from the page and stared at him in the same way that she had stared at him in the Pointe-à-Callière, aloof, disinterested, but with a very subtle hint of slyness in her eyes.

This was when he named her Anaïs. It was after the French erotic authoress, Anaïs Nin, but it was also a reminder of the perfume that his last girlfriend had worn, the girlfriend who had left him just before he met and married Helen. Anaïs Anaïs, a sweet flowery fragrance that always reminded him of being in love, and of being hurt.

Under the sketch, he wrote, “Today, in the Pointe-à-Callière, I met Anaïs as arranged. She was sitting on one of the six benches, feeding the little birds. Immediately she saw me she stood up, came toward me and put her arms around me. She knew that she couldn't ask me where I had been, but her green eyes filled with tears, and she said, ‘George … you don't know how much I suffer when you leave me. I miss you so much that my heart feels as if it is being crushed in a terrible fist.'

“I kissed her forehead and whispered to her not to make a scene in public. Then I told her to open her raincoat. She was about to protest. The square was busy that afternoon in spite of the rain. But then, with lowered eyes, she unbuckled her tight belt, and unbuttoned her coat. She stood with her arms by her sides, her eyes still lowered, because she knew that I would be angry if she tried to look challenging.

“I reached out with one hand and opened up the coat a little way. Underneath she was completely nude except for a black lace garter
belt and black silk stockings with lace tops. Her full white breasts were veined with blue, and in the chilly afternoon air her wide nipples crinkled and tightened. In her belly-button I noticed with satisfaction the gold ring that I had given her the last time we met. She had shaved her dark pubic hair into a shape like a flame, or a serpent's tail.

“I ran my middle finger down between her breasts, and then further still, pausing for a moment to tug at the ring. Then I told her that she could fasten her coat. She was to meet me at nine o'clock at my hotel. She begged to know why she couldn't come with me immediately. I like it when she's so distressed. I lifted her chin and kissed her on the lips and told her that it wasn't possible. She would have to wait until I was ready for her.”

He tore off the page, and on the next sheet he drew a full-length portrait of Anaïs standing in the square with her raincoat open, exposing her naked body. He gave her a crushed, vulnerable expression; a look of entreaty. He made her breasts much bigger than they probably were, but this was only a fantasy, right?

He sat back and finished his can of beer. Anaïs looked back at him. He wrote the date and the time of their meeting on the bottom of the drawing, and signed it. That evening, restless, he went for another walk. A south-west wind had picked up and the rain had been blown away north-eastward. The sidewalks along St Laurent, The Main, were rapidly drying. The city glittered with lights and echoed with taxi-horns.

He passed the Montreal Pool Room, where a fat cook in a white apron stared mournfully out of the window while an array of hamburgers broiled in front of him; and the Brasserie Alouette, where old men with berets and crumpled faces sat drinking Molson and smoking Gauloises. He turned right at Maisonneuve and made his way toward the Rue St Denis, where he found himself shuffling along a crowded sidewalk past cafés and bars and bistros, art galleries and L'Axe Disco Sex Club,
avec Couples Érotiques.

At last he reached the Rue Notre Dame, where St Denis became Rue Bonsecours. The brightness and the brashness was left behind. He descended a steep cobbled incline and found himself confronted by the Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours Chapel. He stood still for a moment, breathing in the wind, breathing in the atmosphere.
Then he continued, and he knew where he was going, back to the Pointe-à-Callière, in case by some impossible chance she was still sitting there.

He walked across the square, and of course the bench was empty. He reached down and touched the place where she had been sitting with the tips of his fingers. Then he circled around two or three times. He had to be realistic. He would never see her again in his life. He had never felt so bereaved.

“I opened the door and there she stood, her raincoat collar turned up. I stood back and let her walk into the room. Even before I closed the door I ordered her to drop her raincoat, which she did, so that she stood there in nothing but her garter-belt and her stockings and her six-inch heels. One of the housekeepers walked past and saw her, and looked at me, but said nothing. It was my privilege to show her naked to anybody I wanted, and she knew that.

“I closed the door and then told her to get down on her knees, which she did. I circled around her while she knelt silent and obedient, her head slightly lowered, her hands clasped together in front of her. I told her to keep her hands by her sides, I didn't want her to hide anything, and she mutely obeyed. I asked her if she had been touched by any other men since I had last seen her. Had any other man held her hand? Had any other man kissed her? Had any other man made love to her?

“Each time she shook her head, but I didn't know whether to believe her or not. I took hold of her hair and lifted her head so that she was looking me directly in the eye. ‘Just remember,' I told her. ‘You belong to me now. Completely.'

“I ordered her bring me a whiskey, which she did. ‘Now, undress me,' I said, and I stood with the glass in my hand while she loosened my necktie, unbuttoned my shirt and unfastened my belt. When I was undressed, I climbed on to the bed and lay back, and she climbed on top of me like a beautiful animal, her big breasts swaying. She kissed me and bit my neck, and dug her fingernails into my shoulders. She whispered how much she adored me and how she would serve me for the rest of her life. She said that I could do anything with her, body and soul.

“She rode up and down on top of me, delirious, her dark hair swirling from side to side. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted, sweat ran down her cleavage. She begged me to push it in deeper and harder. She begged me to hurt her, to punish her for being so jealous.

“I rolled over and forced her face-down on to the bedcover, with her bottom lifted into the air. She was wide open to me, and she reached between her legs and tugged herself even wider apart. I pushed myself into her, and I pushed myself into her so hard that she was gasping and screaming. When I was finished, I lay back for a moment to get my breath back. Then I got up, picked up her coat, and threw it at her.”

Another sketch, with Anaïs lying back on the bed, her face streaked with eye-liner. He had never drawn so well. He touched Anaïs' cheeks with a little pastel blusher, and touched in the laurel-green of her eyes. “Anaïs,” he whispered, out loud. He was still finishing off the detail of her hair when the phone rang and made him jump.

“George? It's ten after midnight. I've been waiting and waiting for you to call.”

“Oh … I'm sorry. I've been busy working on some drawings. Guess I got carried away.”

“George, are you all right? You sound different.”

“I'm fine. What do you mean, ‘different'?”

“I don't know, distracted.”

“I'm tired is all. It's been one of those days.”

A pause. Then, “George … if something was wrong, you'd tell me, wouldn't you?”

Goddamn woman's intuition. “What do you mean by ‘wrong'?”

“Well, if something was wrong between you and me.”

“Sweetheart, you know there's nothing wrong between you and me.

“You keep forgetting to call and you never say I love you.”

“Well, I love you, OK?” He couldn't help looking at Anaïs' eyes, Anaïs' lips. The lips said, “kiss me.” The eyes said “have me.”

He talked to Helen for a few more minutes and then he hung up. He covered his drawing-block with a sheaf of architectural schematics and switched off his angle lamp. He went to bed without
taking a shower, and he slept very deeply, without any memorable dreams.

“George, you're not listening to me.”

George blinked. He was having lunch in a heavy-duty French restaurant on the Rue de la Montagne with his partner Ken Safdie and two directors of Hôtelleries Québécoises. One of the directors had gone to take a phone call; the other had taken the opportunity to go to the bathroom. Ken had tried to take advantage of their momentary absence by asking George what he thought about their finance package, but George was staring out through the window into the street.

“George, you've been acting weird all morning. Are you pining for something?”