The Video Watcher (6 page)

But I poured all my attention on the road ahead of me. The radio began to play one good song after another, and I was able to avoid whatever I had started to feel.

When I finally got tired, it was around ten. The feeling that this was all a scene in a film was again there—at least for the time being—and I headed to the video store and rented
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
and the first
Friday the 13th,
before heading home.

When I got there, there was a message on the answering machine.

It took five listens, but finally I was able to decipher that the caller—a woman called Maria—was the girl from the airport.

 

 

 

 

 

3

 

 

T
he gabled house
was the third one in from the Drive. I checked the number I'd copied down again and shoved the scrap of paper into my pocket and unlatched the gate.

As I went through the yard and climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell, I still couldn't believe that the girl had called.

I was watching the sway of a woman's breasts on the opposite side of the street when the door opened behind me. I turned. Facing me was a man in his late twenties, very thin, dark-looking, scruffy.

“Hi. Is Maria here?”

“Uh.” He scratched his head. “Maria. Just moment.”

“Maria,” he shouted into the house. He wore an Argentinian football jersey, and his narrow face had a day's growth of whiskers.

After a woman's voice upstairs yelled back something in Spanish, he turned to me and said, “She changing. Come in.”

The living room was through an archway on the left, and I sat on one of the two threadbare sofas and looked at the high ceiling and the worn wood floors and a photo of a white family on the mantel. Something hit the floor in a room upstairs. The voice of a man passing outside shouted, “What I told him is—.” A grey cat meandered into the room, looked at me, left.

I was still trying to remember if Maria was good-looking when I heard footfalls on the stairs. She entered the room. The blue jeans looked tight on her. She wore with them a blue tank top and blue suede flip-flops on her feet. She was fatter than I remembered.

“'ola,” she said leaning down, and kissed my right cheek.

“Hola,” I said. I stood up.

I followed her out to the foyer where she picked up a small black handbag. The man who answered the door now reappeared. He said something in Spanish, and she slapped his shoulder and he laughed.

 

It took me awhile, because Maria's English wasn't very good, but I found out on the drive downtown that the family who owned the house had rented it to international students while they toured Europe. Maria, Fernando (the guy who answered the door) and two Japanese women were staying there.

When I asked her if she liked Fernando, she laughed.

Downtown, I wanted to know what Maria wanted to do, and she said she didn't know and we ended up walking through the crowd of late-afternoon tourists on Robson Street.

Every few feet Maria stopped to push her flip-flops back on her feet and when she did this the third time, I asked her if they were too small, and she told me that she'd washed them and—here she stopped and gestured with her hands that they'd become small.

“You mean shrunk? ” I said and imitated her gesture.

“What?”

“Shrunk—you know—got smaller?” But, of course, as I said this, I realized she didn't know.

“What's da word?”

“Shrunk.”

She repeated the word three times, then took out her notebook and wrote the word in it.

After we'd walked for a time, I became nervous. I felt certain that people were looking at us and that someone was going to stop us.

When we passed the clothing store Jacob, Maria said she wanted to go in and I followed her through the aisles. In lingerie, she stopped and held up a pair of transparent lacy panties.

I pretended not to notice.

“Do you want me to wait outside?” I asked.

She glanced at me with a concerned expression on her face.

“I go outside,” I said, pointing.

“Okay,” she said, nodding.

I walked down the aisle, but she followed me. She must have thought I was telling her I wanted to go.

We walked another block without saying one word, then she asked, “Are you desperate with me?”

I thought at first that she was talking about sex, but realized that this couldn't be what she meant, that what she was asking about was her English.

“No,” I said, laughing.

“Why you laugh?” she asked. I thought about telling her what “desperate” meant in English, but realized that I wouldn't be able to explain.

At the corner of Robson and Hornby, I asked Maria if she would like to see the exhibits at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“Yez. Pleaze.”

In the line-up she told me that she'd painted in Mexico. Her mother owned a small ceramics factory and that she worked for her.

Just before the admissions desk, she wanted to know if she should pay. I asked her what couples did in Mexico, and she said that the man pays, so I paid the eighteen dollars.

On the third floor there was an exhibition of Warhol's silkscreens, one of Elvis Presley and four electric chairs. In high school I had liked Warhol and wanted to be like him, in the centre of things without being affected by them.

In another part of the gallery there was a large photograph of a woman masturbating. Maria studied the picture, and I wondered if she was becoming aroused by it, or just disgusted.

 

When we returned to the house it was empty and Maria asked if I would like to come upstairs. We went to her room on the second floor. I sat on her bed. She took a cream-coloured photo album from a shelf and sat beside me. Inside the album were photos of her mother's ceramics factory and of her brothers, and Maria's modeling photographs. In one picture she wore a black evening dress. She was standing beside a pool, and she was pregnant. I looked up at her. She looked at me, smiling.

“Do you have children?” I asked.

She laughed.

“Do you?”

She shook her head and turned the page. In the next photo she wore hot pants and a T-shirt with the Penn State logo on it—she wasn't pregnant in this one—and stood beside a stack of oil cans, holding a sign that said something in Spanish.

We looked at two more photo albums. Then I said, feeling that the evening needed a conclusion, “I should leave now,” and went down the stairs and out on the porch. I told her as we stood together on the porch that it was nice spending the evening with her and thanked her. The cat I'd seen earlier reappeared, weaving itself between our legs.

“What's ‘cat' in Spanish?” I asked looking down at it, then back at her.

“El gato,” she said, staring into my eyes.

I repeated the words, and she smiled with her eyes still on me.

“I have a friend that might want to meet you,” I said, not thinking what I was saying.

“What?”

“My friend, he might want to meet you.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“
Buenas noches.
”

 

The bottle of Beefeater was on the counter when I opened the kitchen door. I got ice and Schweppes from the fridge and made a large gin and tonic. The air in the house was dead. I opened the window in the living room and went outside. I pulled a chaise longue close to the edge of the pool, facing it in the direction of the city, and spread out a towel and lay on it. The view from our backyard wasn't as good as the one from Cam's house, but you could see over the evergreens the lights of East Van, and the port area across the inlet. From down by the water came the distant sound of a freight train's horn. There was the smell of charcoal in the night air. I sipped my drink and gazed at the city and thought about Maria. I thought about being alone with her in her room and putting my hand on her breast and kissing her thick lips, and all that stuff—but it didn't seem to work.

The images that came to mind seemed ridiculous, like badly acted scenes in Duchovny's
Red Shoe Diary
or some other Showcase show,
and I couldn't imagine performing them; or if I did perform them, feeling any excitement about them.

It was the same whenever I thought of doing anything with Sadie.

I finished the gin and tonic, and went for another.

 

At about midnight, I headed in and lay on the sofa. The living-room stereo was on and I raised the volume and tuned to a station playing Chilliwack—my dad had liked Chilliwack.

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew the music had stopped and a talk show had taken its place. A male caller was asking the show's host, Dr. Dan, if he should feel jealous about his girlfriend working as a “phone-sex artist.”

“Well,” Dr. Dan said, sounding amused, “I guess that depends on how
man
you are?”

“What do you mean?” the caller said.

“Well, what does your girlfriend talk to these callers about? Have you ever listened in on a call?”

“Yes.”

“You have?”

“Yes.”

“And what are they like?”

“Some of them are like, you know,” the caller said,
“…sexual. But a lot of them, it's just like, some guy whose lonely, and they just want to talk to someone.”

“Amazing!” Dr. Dan said. “And people actually
pay
for these calls?”

“Yes.

“Can I ask how much?”

“Um, two seventy-five a minute, I think.”

“A minute?”

“Um, yeah.”

“The world gets stranger every moment. I can see with a real prostitute—there's something physical there—but to pay someone just to talk to you?”

The caller asked again if he should be jealous. But before I could hear the answer I felt an urgent need to urinate.

Getting up, knocking over the glass on the floor, I stumbled to the washroom. The erection I had made it difficult to let go. I leaned forward so that I wouldn't shoot through the space between the seat and the bowl.

When I got back to the living room, the program on the radio had changed. The host of the new show had a deeper and more serious voice than Dr. Dan. Strange dissonant music was playing in the background.

“Tonight on the show we will be talking to a man in the Northwest who identifies himself as a lycanthrope—in other words, though he himself does not like the term, a werewolf. This is Alan Jacobs. Stay tuned.”

I turned off the lights and lowered the volume. Lying on the sofa, I waited for sleep.

 

Cam contacted me that Saturday. He apologized for his “elusive presence.” He explained that he'd been seeing this girl who came from a very old and established family in Brazil. He'd met her at Grouse Mountain, where he now worked. That afternoon he was joining her at the beach, and he invited me to come with him. He would drive, he said.

As we drove downtown that afternoon, he told me how pathetic this city was. The women were hideous, and things were better in Latin America. By the time we hit the Lions Gate on-ramp, he was almost shouting. “Fuck! Look at this,” he said, pointing to the backed-up traffic. “The place is fucking paralyzed.”

I asked him how things were different in Mexico and he dragged phlegm up from his throat and spat out the window. “It's different,” he said. “It's just different.”

“Livin La Vida Loca,” began again on the stereo, the fifth time since he'd picked me up, and Cam raised the volume.

Ahead of us the lanes of traffic quivered in the July heat. A Volkswagen full of high-school girls idled next to us. I gave a whistle.

“What?” Cam asked.

“Nothing,” I said, remembering his post-Mexico view of Canadian women: back-packing, Birkenstock-wearing dykes.

“So,” Cam said, “tell me more about this little
amorous
adventure.”

I'd mentioned earlier my night with the Mexican girl, and Cam had been intrigued.

“Not much to tell,” I said. “We just walked around downtown a bit.”

“And in her room?”

“Looked at some photographs.”

“Photographs!” He sounded exasperated. “Please tell me they were
at least
nude ones.”

When I didn't reply, he said, “Mr. Patterson, Mr. Patterson,” and shook his head and slapped the top of the steering wheel. “With these women you got to
take them
. That's what
they
expect. It's part of
their
culture. You have to be
macho
.”

I laughed nervously.

“I'm
serious
. Don't tell me you're going to do what you did with that girl at university, the one you wrote me about—Sandy or whatever the hell her name was, that blond one you had the hard-on for—sit around, drive her to meet her boyfriends. Un
fucking
believable.”

“Do you want to meet her?”

He looked at me. “Me? Why me?”