Sparrow Nights (2 page)

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3

I
t must have been almost five years ago now, perhaps even to the day. I found myself standing in the middle of my living room. It was twilight, that rather sad time when curtains are drawn and the question
what shall I do
poses itself with unusual poignancy. I’d gotten up from the chesterfield and suddenly I couldn’t think what to do next. I don’t mean for the rest of my life or the next few years or for my summer vacation or for tomorrow’s seminar—I mean for
that moment
. I could go over to the window and look out; I could go back to the chesterfield; go out for dinner; turn on the television. But each choice seemed equally stale and unsatisfying. It was like looking… let me explain this properly. You may have noticed that, at the onset of winter, city dwellers cover the shrubs on their lawns with burlap sacks to protect them from the ice and hail. Viewed at twilight, just before the street lamps go on, these shapes acquire a kind of baggy sameness. Standing in the middle of my living room, rocking slightly on the balls of my feet, I saw the upcoming events in my life rather like these vague silhouettes on a cold evening. All slightly different but essentially the same. Indeed for some time I had had the impression that people saw
me
as one of those bagged shrubs.

For some time after that I had the distinct impression that the light was slipping, stealing out of my life, that the days were growing shorter and shorter. I got up, I had breakfast, I walked to the university, bantered with a colleague, gave a lecture, came home, napped, and when I awoke, the day was over. It occurred to me with surprising neutrality that I was dying, that I had already lived my life but my heart was still beating as if it hadn’t quite got the message.

I went for a walk, drawn by the idea of lights and bustle on Bloor Street, but it was dinnertime, a lull in the activity of a main street, and I wandered toward the heart of the city, thinking
What am I going to do? What?
I had gone as far as Yonge Street and had turned south when I saw Emma Carpenter. She was standing in front of a movie theatre, looking at the marquee. I said hello and she replied with rather dreamy surprise, “Oh, hello, Professor Halloway.” Her hair was dirty and pulled back, revealing a ballerina’s chin line. I hadn’t realized how thin she was. On her feet she wore those curious black running shoes. She was going into the movie, she said, a Russian film,
Gooseberries
, and although I didn’t care particularly for Chekhov, I’d had enough of my own company for one day and I went in with her.

It was crowded in the theatre and we had to sit near the front. During an obnoxious trailer for a summer film I whispered something amusing in her ear, but she appeared not to have heard. Her attention to the screen was absolute. Looking at her upturned face in the flickering light, I was uncomfortably struck with how delicate her features were, a fine sharp nose, full lips, dry and slightly apart. She really
is
lovely, I thought, and I was aware of feeling mildly sad, as if I had lost something.

It was a surprisingly good movie. The actors, I’d heard, had rehearsed it for a number of years on their own initiative. I’d read the story a number of times when I was younger and had been bored by it, but for some reason, perhaps the condition I was in, I responded to it the way you do to a film on an airplane, where you find yourself oddly moved by moments at thirty thousand feet that might make you grimace with condescension back on earth. I was thinking about that when I noticed an odour of perspiration in the air. It was very strong but not at all unpleasant. In fact I found it sort of privately exciting. The notion that I noticed it and she didn’t wove a strange veil of intimacy around us.

It was a very warm evening, even in the theatre. She wore a sleeveless summer dress; I was in shirt sleeves, rolled up. Between us stretched a wooden armrest. During a bright outdoor scene I observed with some embarrassment that I had left a glistening sweat stain on the wood. I was in the process of discreetly unrolling my shirt sleeve to wipe it away when Emma, who had been sitting with her hands in her lap, slid her naked forearm over exactly the place where mine had rested. It produced in me the most appalling sensation, a sense of absolute dread. For I was sure she had done it on purpose.

After the film we took a walk through the neighbourhood. We stood in a small alley, talking across the hood of a car, and I noticed a discoloured brick in the wall behind her. I will remember that discoloured brick for the rest of my life, I thought. I walked her home, claiming, I think, that a friend lived in the neighbourhood, that we were planning a symposium on Martin du Gard and that maybe I’d just pop on by and give him a shout. Really, so starchy. And Martin du Gard, no less! But I was terrified, you see. Here I was, a middle-aged professor with a young woman who seemed to admire me. That’s what made it so frightening—that I might do something or reveal something that would diminish me in her regard. But she was delightful company, and when we got to her street we stopped for a moment in Sibelius Park and sat on a picnic table. We had talked for a matter of minutes when I suddenly experienced the most overpowering desire to kiss her. My heart positively crashed. I thought what any man would think in my place, that she was going to recoil with horror. Or worse, disappointment. I could almost hear her words in my ears: “Oh, Professor Halloway, you must have misunderstood.”

Misunderstood indeed.

But I had already let too many things slip from my fingers, and the notion that I might actually
be
with this young woman, that the only thing standing in my way was the fear that I might put out my hand and have it slapped, the notion that it was perhaps fear alone that stopped me from being happy, was something I knew would haunt me and grind me down for the remainder of my life. So I kissed her. And she kissed me back. And then you know what she said? She said, “Do you want to see my cunt, Professor Halloway?”

She grew up the daughter of an unkempt doctor and his unfaithful wife. From the former she inherited a strange slobbishness, strange because,
à première vue
, she seemed so immaculate, her body anyway, like a Chinese reed, slim, green-eyed, with that mop of straight blonde hair. But if you looked longer you noticed her slightly stooped posture, a button missing from her shirt cuff, her red sweater pulled up at the back; she was a woman who could leave a wet towel on a bed, so to speak. It must have been from her mother (we never got on) that she inherited a sensuality the like of which I’d never really encountered before. Not in so extreme a form anyway. Her lovemaking—and don’t worry, I’m not going to embarrass either of us here—was a sort of schizophrenic experience. An authentically
transforming
event. Really, she carried on like a madwoman. She whispered, she swore, she blasphemed, she made demonic requests in a voice that was not her own. “Do you want to see my cunt?” Nice talk, indeed! Imagine taking
that
to the Governing Council dinner. Once, at the opera, she whispered in my ear, “Do you want to know what we used to do at pyjama parties in Ottawa?”
Ottawa
of all places. Our nation’s capital! Or that time in the foyer of the chancellor’s house—“Do you want to take me from behind?” No, Emma, I don’t want to take you from behind, I want to have Christmas pudding with my colleagues. Really, it was unimaginable that it was the same mouth that, only an hour before, had wished her grandmother a happy eighty-seventh birthday. I’ll put it this way: sometimes, after going to bed with Emma Carpenter, I wanted to call for an exorcist.

To be honest, it could make her somewhat exhausting, this capacity to be so taken over, this substitution of personalities, as if, in the process of revealing herself, she was exposing to the sunlight an organ so delicate that it seemed still moist from its sheer
internalness
. And while she claimed to have been the one to terminate all her previous romances, I have always harboured the private suspicion that at least some of those men may have been rather relieved to see her go. One couldn’t have a comforting little screw with Emma just before one’s afternoon nap. No, it was the full spinning head and pea soup, so to speak.

But you quickly became addicted to it. You didn’t want her carrying on like that with anyone else. Indeed, she told me a story once that had the curious effect of raising the hair on the back of my neck
for a number of years
. I was quizzing her about old boyfriends, of which there seemed to be a respectable baker’s dozen. (She saved the old-girlfriend stories for only the most inappropriate circumstances. To this day I cannot remember a single bar from the third act of
Tosca
, so steamed up was I with prurient speculation.)

But let us return to the boyfriends. Once you start asking about those things, you can’t stop; you must have all the details, no matter how scary the whole thing becomes. There was, as I recall, an actor, a lawyer, a football player, a Scottish scientist (here she did a perfect imitation) and so on. And then there was her boss one summer. That’s the story that terrified me, as if I were hearing the tale of my own crucifixion. We were walking down a lovely side street in Rosedale. It was a damp day, the leaves smeared on the street. “Have you ever,” she began, “made love so much you fainted?”

It was, as my students are fond of saying, a rhetorical question, a sort of trampoline. Sensing trouble, I said no, I hadn’t. She gave me a quick sideways glance, and I had the sensation of watching a tail disappear into a hole: if I wanted the beast I would have to grab it now.

And thus it began, a simple enough story from anyone else, but from her slightly dry lips it positively seethed with menace and lechery. “I had just broken up with my boyfriend,” she began. “He was a playwright (she named him, a handsome, lush-lipped creature whose face haunted me in theatre lobbies for years after). I liked him, we adored each other’s bodies (here I winced), but he was insanely jealous. Just about
everything
. And after a while I couldn’t stand it any more. So I broke it off. Anyway, a little while later I moved into his
brother’s
house. I don’t know why, convenience maybe (ha!). He had a spare room, something like that. Anyway, one Friday afternoon I went out for a drink with my boss after work and we ended up back at my place. At my
new
place. We spent the whole weekend in bed, condoms all over the room, not even getting up to eat. We just fucked all the time.” Here I steadied myself on the hood of a car. She looked at me again to see, I think, how the story was taking hold.

“Go on,” I croaked.

“When we finally got out of bed and went for something to eat, I fainted on the sidewalk. Just dead away.”

For a while I didn’t say anything. My stomach was positively churning. I could see Emma getting out of bed, that bony body—it was so extreme, her nakedness, no one ever seemed quite so undressed.

“But, Emma,” I said, with escalating heat, “didn’t it occur to you that the playwright’s brother must have
heard
you making love, must have
told
his brother? Can you imagine? I mean, my Lord, he was jealous to begin with. That must have
killed
him.”

It sounded as if I were lecturing her, my voice up an octave and out of breath. But it wasn’t moral indignation I was experiencing; it was the realization that I had bitten off perhaps more than I could chew, that here was a woman who could destroy me with no other weapon than my own imagination. I was suddenly aware that a domain of vulnerability existed beneath my feet like a trap door.

“It was over!” she protested.

“How over?”

“I don’t know. A couple of weeks. Besides, I was twenty.”

Twenty
.

It was a ridiculous answer, it didn’t explain anything; but when you’re starving, it’s remarkable what will pass for nourishment. I thought about this story for years afterwards, the image of her boss’s humping buttocks. Lord! It became a kind of masochistic daydream: I saw myself, ear to the wall, listening to a hoarse-voiced Emma in the next room saying those
things
. God, how awful!

Anyway, how did I get started on that? I can’t remember. But early on, our second or third date, I met her for dinner. It was an upscale restaurant, the second floor of a steak house up near St. Clair Avenue. She ordered a steak, which she left untouched. “I can’t eat when I’m around you,” she said. “My stomach’s too tight.” She left a bleeding mouthful at the end of her fork. I knew this was a prelude to something, and after a glass or two of wine she leaned forward and cupped her sharp chin in the palm of her hand. “I have a present for you,” she said. I could sense a career-ending opportunity on the horizon and I looked about for witnesses.

She withdrew a ragged T-shirt from her shoulder bag; it had a worn neck and a hole under the arm. “You might need this,” she said.