Self (27 page)

Roger’s peach clapboard house was tucked away between two larger houses that were closer to the street, down a
cracked cement path, behind a massive bush. It looked more like a cottage, what with its veranda, the large windows and everything made of wood. It was a dream of a sunlit lair. I loved it the moment I laid eyes on it. It was small — Jeremy and Leah, Roger’s children, still had to sleep in the same room when they came for a visit — the floors were hardwood, the furniture was all renovated antique, it was a mess of books and papers, and everything creaked: the floors, the bed, the tables and chairs, in a wind or storm the whole house,
everything
. You had to remain still to understand someone on the phone or to hear the television properly. The groans and cries of tortured wood make up the soundtrack of my memories of the place. That, and the groans and cries of two beings gluttonously fucking.

The garden was as untended as the house. Years earlier, before Jeremy and Leah were born, Roger and his wife, Penny, had been to Mexico, to the forest where the monarch butterfly breeds. They had been there when the monarchs were coming out of their cocoons. “Millions of them,” said Roger. “Every leaf in fact a butterfly. Black and orange all around you. It was like being in a cool fire.” He showed me photos, but unfortunately they were black and white, not black and orange. When he read that his green lawn was a monoculture inimical to the monarch, Roger ripped up his backyard and spent a summer orchestrating wilderness. He transplanted golden-rod, dandelions, asters, Queen Anne’s lace, thistles, blood-root, may apples, hepatica, anemones, campanulas and whatever else he could find in country fields. When he saw his first monarch, solitary and tentative, he exulted. This was long ago. Wilderness had since found its own maestro and its own repertoire. Every summer Roger scythed clear a spot here
or there. On a blanket, surrounded by the rustle and
bzzzzz bzzzzz bzzzzz
of nature, we did it there too.

Roger had had a vasectomy — “I want my pleasure to be without consequence,” he said (I should have taken note) — so we never had to worry about that, were free to do it when and where we wanted. It’s strange how there are
classes
of memories, memories that relate to the same person yet do not mix. On the one hand I remember a profound Conrad scholar who influenced me in many ways, whose encounter had intellectual ramifications for me, and on the other, quite distinctly, I remember a tenured satyr and his potent, sterile dick. Facing these two personae I felt I was the same. Naked or dressed, I was me. But he — clothes made all the difference. Clothes, or their absence, changed the man.

On the sofa, on the desk, on the floor, against the wall; in the living-room, in the shower, in the corridor, in front of mirrors, in the kitchen, on the bed (more sponge than mattress, that); in the garden; once late at night in the S-M sauna (he blanched and nearly fainted. I had to drag him out and let him rest for forty minutes); in a movie theatre he worked a hand down to my juice button and imposed an almighty one on me while I had to stay perfectly still and quiet, torture it was; once in Little Lake Cemetery, but disturbed; once a blow job minutes before class, the taste in my mouth throughout and the wonder, the worry, about my breath; slowly; quickly; our eyes closed; our eyes open — there must be some trace chemical exuded by the skin, some combustible pheromone we gave off. Roger once said he wished I were three inches tall — that way he could put me in his mouth and lick me all over. He licked me all over anyway, with the determination of a dog. One of my indelible memories is of the two of us on his
bed. Top sheet and blanket have vanished. I am on my back; Roger is on his knees. With one hand he is playing with his erection, with the other he is holding onto the ankle of my right foot. He has my toes in his mouth — nibbling them, licking them, playing them like a harmonica. Sometimes the whole front of my foot disappears into his mouth, with tooth-marks later to show how far he went. My foot is drenched with saliva. Roger is devouring me with his eyes as I masturbate while looking at him. He has an expression out of
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
and is making the noises of a famished cannibal. I am about to come, but I hold myself back. It is a feeling both frozen and melting. Then the room goes dark, not because of an eclipse but because I am letting myself go and narrowing my eyes. At that moment, with a gurgly groan and a sharp bite on my foot, sperm shoots through the air over me. I see it like a shooting star.

It mattered not a bit if I was menstruating. On the contrary: it excited Roger, the idea of it, and afterwards to have at the base of his flagging erection a circle of clotted blood, and on the sheet streaks of blood neatly delimited by the diverging lines of my inner thighs, looking, amidst the vastness of the sheet, like the work of a fevered minimalist painter.

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. There 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.