Going Home Again (6 page)

He’d been gone only five weeks and already had a girlfriend who was talking about forever. This must have been some sort of campus record. Or did that happen here all the time? Maybe it was par for the course at a university like McGill. All the schools I was looking into at the time had their own particular reputation. Some were preppy, others were party schools; there were the heavily academic ones, and
those devoted to granola and Birkenstocks. You heard about a few for the sheer number of beautiful girls who strolled between the buildings wearing tight jeans and adorable smiles. I’d heard there were a lot of pretty girls in Montreal. But this was off the charts.

Her pale complexion made the freckles on her face stand out, and the dark brown of her eyes—large and full of life—was flecked with gold.

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know!” she said, smiling.

I noticed the collection of pins on her lapel. “I guess we like the same bands,” I said.

The left breast of her army surplus overcoat was clustered with music pins and two small flags, one British, the other German. It was a sort of postpunk tribute by the look of it. The Waterboys, Kraftwerk, the Smiths—the sort of mideighties stuff we were all listening to in those days. She didn’t quite look the part, aside from the army surplus jacket. Tying her hair back in that ponytail seemed more preppy and clean-cut than anything. But I liked her taste in music because, well, it reflected my own.

What did I feel that day when I learned of their living arrangements? Envy, if not outright jealousy, I suppose. My best friend, a
peer
, was already living with a beautiful woman and enjoying what I could only imagine was the sort of boundless sex that surely went along with the rest of it. Technically Holly shared a room on campus with a Bermudan girl named Georgia and still made an appearance there once, maybe twice, a week. But this hardly dampened the wonder
I felt for my friend’s situation. That his girlfriend was willing and able to sleep in his bed five nights out of seven impressed me terribly. I just couldn’t believe it. He was the luckiest eighteen-year-old kid in the world. We’d talked endlessly about such things, of course—girls and women—but that he’d come as far as this in so little time was nothing short of miraculous. It was something to beat your chest and crow about. Miles, however, did no such thing. He hadn’t even mentioned her on the two or three occasions we’d spoken on the phone while setting up that visit. For that reason he seemed all the more mature. It was as if the position he occupied now, that of the freshman with the beautiful girl on his arm, was a place he’d occupied all along and I’d just failed to notice.

After the introductions we walked through downtown on our way to my friend’s apartment. The sidewalks and outdoor cafés were busy with people. The sky was clear and bright, and the October air pleasant. Shadows moved on the shops’ plate-glass windows. Pretty girls were everywhere. I felt the excitement of the approaching weekend, the longing for sex, the promise that something in my life was going to change. I wondered if Miles and this new girl were already in love or if by some stroke of luck he’d stumbled upon a girl who sought out sex for its own sake, just because she liked it. I couldn’t get over his good fortune. If fate could shift so swiftly for him, then it surely might offer me some similar opportunity that weekend. It was as if he had always known that something was waiting for him on the other side of the life we’d led back home,
as if all the dreaming we’d done was little more than a preamble to the bigger and more interesting game that awaited. And it seemed he was right. In the splendor of Holly’s feminine presence, and the fact that they were together now, I saw that he’d been right all along.

I tried not to stare that first day in Montreal. But I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering back to her again and again. She smiled easily, and the light scattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose and high cheekbones made her look as wholesome and cheerful as a summer’s day. Her ponytail bobbed delicately as she walked, the way I imagined a ballerina’s would.

In the heart of one of the student ghettos, the building they lived in was a three-story flat-roof town house of dull, tobacco-colored brick. On weekends, he said, it was usually just one big party up and down the street.

“Sounds like fun,” I said.

“Oh yeah. You’ll see.”

I noticed bicycles chained up everywhere outside and in the entrance by the tenant mailboxes. The flat itself was small and dumpy and smelled vaguely of other people’s food. The afternoon light falling through the windows turned its walls and the bamboo curtain separating the kitchen and living room a beautiful rich orange. The only object of any size familiar to me from Miles’s house back home was his desk. It sat to the left of the door that led out to the small balcony looking over Rue de Bullion. I recognized it from his bedroom and knew its bottom left drawer as the place he’d stored his copies of
Hustler
and
Penthouse
. He didn’t
need to rely on those magazines anymore, though I still did. That was my first thought when I saw the desk, that he was miles ahead of me when it came to knowing anything about women.

“Welcome to the garret,” he said.

I had already noticed the poem he was referring to, ten or fifteen lines called “The Garret” by Ezra Pound, scribbled out on a slip of brown paper taped to the wall beside a Pink Floyd poster. I imagined the handwriting was Holly’s.

We started drinking early that afternoon. We smoked a joint Miles had pulled from a jar he kept in the freezer and listened to some of the records he kept in milk cartons stacked in a corner. We listened to the Buzzcocks and New Order and The Jam and later made a big pot of spaghetti and ate it sitting on the pullout couch that had been designated mine for the weekend. I told them I didn’t have any fake ID when Miles mentioned going out to the bars. He was turning a ball of pasta on his fork. “Not to worry. This, my friend, is Montreal.”

We ventured from one end of downtown to the other, the city lights shining down over our faces and leather jackets as we passed old-time taverns and flashy new clubs along Saint-Laurent. In my memory I see a kid I barely recognize now—a tall, skinny boy at the beginning edge of his life, obviously underage, full of nervous expectation. The doormen and bouncers that night didn’t care at all that I looked so young,
just waved us through as if we’d been there a hundred times before. Each doorway was a portal leading into a world of beautiful girls. Of course I didn’t know the names of any of the streets or bars or clubs we visited that night, but these would soon become familiar to me after I moved to Montreal the following year. Nor do I remember much about the band we saw at a club that night. I’d heard them on the radio once or twice playing a catchy song about life in the suburbs. What I do remember clearly is watching Miles kissing his new girlfriend as they danced next to the small stage and feeling happy that my best friend had everything you could ever want.

We finished the leftover spaghetti and tried to keep the fun going when we got home; but we couldn’t drink anything more, and five minutes later I was passed out on the pullout couch. I don’t know if I’d been asleep a few minutes or a few hours, but I woke up when I heard footsteps cross the apartment floor. I was disoriented. My head was pounding, and my ears were ringing after a night of loud bars and music. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, and then when everything came clear again—that I was lying on Miles’s couch in Montreal—I felt that something was going to happen. What I was hoping for surprised me. I hoped it was Holly standing there on the other side of that flimsy bamboo curtain and that she wouldn’t go back into the bedroom she shared with my best friend. I wanted her to silently slip in beside me on the couch. I imagined her warm legs against mine and the taste of her lips and the feel of her hand reaching for my cock. I held
my eyes closed and wished with all my heart that it was her and that she knew something about me before I knew it myself.

“You asleep?” Miles said.

“Yes.”

He sat down on the floor, his back up against the pullout. “Come on. Wake up.”

I ignored him.

“I’m too wired to sleep. My head’s on fire.…”

After he didn’t say anything for a few minutes, I began to think he’d fallen asleep propped up right there against the couch. I saw a faint light shining in the window when I opened my eyes.

He turned and looked at me over his shoulder. “You were walking with a cute girl last week. I talked to Anne a few days ago. She told me she saw you.”

I used to call on Miles every morning on my way to school before he went off to Montreal. His mother—whom he sometimes called by her first name, Anne—usually answered the door holding a blue coffee mug and a cigarette. She was a secretary at some sort of electrical parts manufacturer. Miles didn’t remember much about his father, only that he’d taken off when he was a baby. On Sunday mornings I used to see a different car in their driveway, and sometimes a man—rarely the same man twice—hovering about, watching the street from the front window as if he were expecting someone to drive into his life and complicate matters.

“A cute girl?” I said.

“That’s right. Cute.”

“That would have been Sandra.”

“Vizinczey? The volleyball player?”

“Yeah,” I said, still half asleep.

“That girl has some serious legs.”

We spoke about Sandra for a little while longer, about her beautiful legs, and about some other people at school, girls and boys, and after Miles finally staggered back off to bed—I don’t know how much later—I did my best to think about Sandra’s legs. But all I could think about was Holly sleeping beside my best friend in the next room and what it must feel like to wake up beside a woman as perfect as she’d seemed to me that first day.

In the morning I found the note Miles had left on the kitchen table telling us when and where to meet him later that afternoon. There was a group project he was working on with some people from his biology class. He’d mentioned it the night before, but I’d forgotten this till now.

Holly and I went to their favorite diner for breakfast. We sat in a green booth at the back beside an old-time jukebox that no one put money in anymore. There were two ceiling fans that remained lifeless while we were there and a long desolate countertop where three old men sat and slowly turned their heads as the waitress came and went.

“It’s our place,” Holly said, opening the menu. “Greasy eggs galore.” She was wearing a red bracelet
on her left wrist and big blue earrings. Her eyes were shining and bright. She looked incredibly fresh and happy. “Best hangover eggs in town,” she said.

“I’ll be trying those, then. I guess you know all the best places in Montreal by now.”

“I like it better than where I grew up, anyway,” she said. I asked her where that was. It was a town back in Ontario I’d never heard of.

“I guess Montreal’s better than most places you can come from,” I said.

The waitress appeared again, this time with coffee, and asked if we were ready to order. Once she left, Holly said, “You know what? Your French isn’t all that bad. Better than mine when I got here. Anyway, I’m not staying in Montreal forever.” She put a teaspoon of sugar in her coffee and stirred it, then looked out the window for a few seconds before turning back to me. “There’s too much to see everywhere else in the world,” she said. “I really believe that. People like to stay where they are. That’s what I don’t get. All those people out there …” She paused again and watched the crowd passing by on the sidewalk. “They wake up in their beds and convince themselves that wherever they are is the only place in the world. I don’t get that.”

“That’s just natural, right?” I said. “Wanting to be comfortable?”

“Maybe when you’re old, sure. I get that. When you’re old you want to stop and think about all the things you’ve done in your life. That’s fine. But when you’re young? Do you want to hear what my worst fear in life is?”

“Shoot.”

“Getting old and being full of regret. Hating myself for not taking chances. I want to be able to look back on my life and not wish things had been different. You only go around once, right?”

The waitress loaded the table between us with plates and glasses of orange juice and refilled our mugs with coffee. By now it was probably noon, and I was starving and still slightly hungover, though not so badly that I wasn’t able to appreciate the comments Holly had made. She went on to explain that she thought people ended up living cruel or unsatisfying lives because they confined themselves to the present. It was a question of taking a longer view and regarding your world through the prism of your older self.

“Do you think you could actually do that?” I said. “It takes a lot of concentration to walk around all day wondering about consequences and what you’re going to be thinking forty years from now. It might take all the fun out of things, too.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy. I guess that’s the point, right? I’d call that an essential moral dictate. You’ve got to figure out how to live a good life.”

“Okay, whatever that means.” I had never heard anyone talk about essential moral dictates before.

“I’m reading a lot of Kant these days,” she said. “It’s sort of like his categorical imperative. Which hinges on the belief that the idea is inside all of us. You’ve got to recognize it and bring it to the surface and actually do something about it.”

She went on to tell me about her German classes.
She’d just finished reading
The Threepenny Opera
and
All Quiet on the Western Front
for a course called Twentieth-Century German Literature. The only German novel I’d ever read in my life was by some stroke of good fortune the Remarque novel. We talked about it a little, but mostly I listened. Her confidence and intelligence about books were something I’d never witnessed before. Excited and smart, she picked apart that Remarque novel in a way that made me want to read it all over again. When she mentioned Bertolt Brecht, I told her the only play I really knew anything about was
The Pajama Game
.