Foreigners (12 page)

He borrowed sexual lore as well. And one night, as he settled his nose between her thighs, he related to her the
particulars of an ancient
Playboy
article that had remained with him since his youth. The photograph, a two-page spread that accompanied the text, had burned itself into his inexperienced brain. A tangle of naked bodies—he'd counted twenty-three, always imagining himself the uncommitted extra man—all tongues and teeth and fingertips licking and nibbling and pinching strange nipples and nether parts. Many a night that sybaritic vision warmed the otherwise cold sheets of his bed. Forsaking verity, he performed a quick mathematical function, subtracting twenty gyrating torsos, so that the solution contained only himself and two eager yet unskilled coeds, hungry for tutelage in the more slippery arts.

He harboured no illusions about Kathryn's gullibility: it was doubtful that she believed his tales. Rather, she took from them only what she required. Just as had been the case when she'd sat across the desk from him that first time two semesters before and explained that she would need at least a B+ average in his CanLit 301 to get into the grad school of her choice. She knew what she wanted, and he had it to give. But things had gone on from there, much to Payne's surprise; a pleasant surprise. And soon he found that they each had something the other needed, though he did at times feel that she was after more than he. Especially in the bedroom, where he thought he might be gaining the upper hand, that is until she arched her back and in a breathy voice said, “You know, Harvey, that might be an idea.”

“What might be?” he asked, craning his neck, trying to see her face.

“You know,” she said languidly.

Payne lifted himself slightly and looked over the slight plumpness of her belly, but her generous breasts, even though somewhat flattened in repose, still hid her from view.

“No,” he replied, a quaver coming into his voice. “I don't know that I do.”

Kathryn raised herself on her elbows and smiled coquet-tishly down the length of her bare torso.

“Another body,” she said with counterfeit schoolgirl innocence. Then added, with the growl she'd taken to using since he'd told her of the trip: “Why, a little ménage à trois, my darling.”

Payne felt his excitement begin to slacken and then go limp, replaced by a flush of panic that was, thankfully, masked by the dimness of the bedroom. He suppressed the urge to ask what gender she had in mind, afraid, either way, of what her answer might be, and instead replied: “Why tinker with a good thing?”

Kathryn laughed and pressed her thighs against the sides of his head so that they covered his ears. Her voice came to him as if he were under water, and Payne had to wriggle free of her grip and ask what she'd said.

“I said, ‘You poor dear,'” she repeated, bringing her feet together midway down his back, “‘there's always room for improvement.'” And then, flexing her solid calf muscles, she forced him back down to business.

Payne closed his eyes, not out of tiredness but because with them open he couldn't keep from staring at the television monitors, watching and waiting for another minute, another
mile to tick by. He'd abandoned the address, for now at least. There would be time enough to finish it on the train, during that last leg to Hoogeveen. He turned his thoughts instead to Noel Gaynor, to his book, which he was now certain—as certain as he was that he was sitting in a KLM 747M 31,000 feet above the
Atlantische Oceaan
—would never be finished.

He'd brought his notes along, had packed his jottings and the three and a half chapters he'd rushed through in the weeks leading up to the trip, as well as the photocopies of the few unsent letters Gaynor had written to his wife, whom he'd left behind in England when he made his journey to the New World. All was crammed into the attaché case wedged in the overhead compartment.

Of Gaynor's slim volume of abandoned correspondence there were two letters in particular that Payne always found himself coming back to. They were written less than a week apart, and the last just the day before Gaynor disappeared into the dark forests of the Algonquin. These, and others, were found—along with the three brief novellas Gaynor had penned, only two of which survived burning—among his effects at the lumber shanty where he worked as a sawman. The first letter was manic in its composition, in terms of both language and the hectic swirl of the hand; a mind committed and raging:

Penelope,

All is nothing after the wilds. There is no truth, no beauty, in your world. In the world I once shared with you. It evaporates in the face of this wondrous nature I have found. Meanness and meaninglessness is all that
civilization has to offer. The toil and struggle of that world is for naught, for that is what it makes of a man. Naught. Knot. Not. The real truth is here. The nothingness of the bush, for that is what they say is out here: nothing but trees, nothing but beasts, nothing but savages.

I will not see you again, my wife. I am going away into the forest never to return. When they ask you, and they will, what became of your husband, tell them this: nothing.

Yours, etc.,

N.

Reading it that first time after he'd rescued it, along with Gaynor's original handwritten manuscripts, from a mouldering packing crate in the bowels of the National Library in Ottawa, Payne was struck by the perfect nihilism. He was elated; it was like finally finding the legendary pirate treasure of Oak Island. And to be sure, when Payne first contemplated Gaynor for his doctoral dissertation, his subject was as fabulous as that buccaneer loot. The only mention of him in academic texts was as a footnote, more often than not in reference to other writers of the time: Moodie, Traill, Richardson, et al. And as for his two slim fictions—
The Woodsman of the Northern Woods
and
The Shaman and the Sawman
—the editions published by permission of the poor destitute Penelope, in hope of somehow lessening the privation into which she'd fallen, they had long ago crumbled into dust.

So when he'd cut loose the stiffened string that had long bound the crate, and breathed in those first stale spores of
disregard, Payne felt as if he were breathing in a brilliant future rather than a neglected past. His hope soared even higher when he came to the final, unsigned missive:

My Dearest Penelope,

Paradise will be your reward.

As for me—I am at the gates:

Per me si va ne la citta dolente

Per me si va ne l'etterno dolore

Per me si va tra la perduta gente

How quickly all that confidence and hope had dissolved, Payne thought, nestling his head now into the small hollow created by his tilted seat back and the upright back of the empty seat between himself and his snoring companion. It had started to dwindle during his thesis defence.

He'd been so cocksure beforehand, as he sat on the hard wooden bench outside the examination room. But once inside, seated on an equally hard wooden straight-backed chair before his stern-faced inquisitors, he'd felt it all start to slip away. His argument—that Gaynor's nihilism, present both in his letters and his literature, could be viewed as a precursor to the French existentialism that followed some six decades later, because after all, what was an existentialist but a nihilist with an axe to grind?—fell on deaf ears. One of his examiners, a withered old professor with an incongruously dark shock of hair, went so far as to say, “This Gaynor, I wonder if rather than a nihilist, as you seem bent on contending, he simply had nothing to say. For that is the impression I draw from your thesis. But perhaps again,
Mister
Payne, it is you who are the
nihilist
.”

And there it began, Payne thought, opening his eyes once more to the static blue wash of the television monitors. Dante Alighieri, Noel Gaynor and Harvard T. Payne standing before the gates that lead unto the suffering city, unto eternal pain, unto the way that runs among the lost.

Payne couldn't bring himself to rent the video, so Kathryn did. He suggested that maybe they go to a different store, one farther away from his house, but she laughed and made her way into the partitioned adult section and left him standing alone beside a rack of computer games. He wished he'd waited in the car, and was just about to make his way back down the aisle toward the exit when she re-emerged, a wide happy smile curling her lips.

“I think you'll like this,” she said, holding up a cassette case that bore the picture of a great buxom blonde with her legs pulled up to her chest and wooden shoes on her feet. “See what it's called,” Kathryn smiled: “
Double Dutch.”

The title, as it turned out, was a trifle misleading. For while there were many instances of doubling up in the film, there was little about it that was Dutch. But the incongruity did not seem to bother Kathryn. She sat transfixed as scene after scene flickered by, each beginning innocuously enough with a mistaken identity, the ordering of a pizza, a hopeful job interview, then progressed, with alarming rapidity Payne noted, into myriad breathtaking coital acrobatics.

Each successive coupling was accompanied by Kathryn's low, shuddering groans, and more than once she pressed pause
on the VCR and pointed toward the frozen image, grinning a Cheshire grin. Payne, sitting beside her on sofa, grinned and groaned in response, but felt somehow let down by the whole thing. He noticed early on that not only the dialogue but also several of the visuals were running on a loop.

When Kathryn finally decided on a segment, rewound it and watched it twice, and said with her now customary throatiness, “Ooh, let's try that one, naughty boy,” Payne felt a shiver of fear run down his spine.

He remained sitting on the sofa as she climbed down onto the throw rug in front of the television and slipped out of her panties and bra. He marvelled at the determination on her face as she closely studied the frozen image on the screen, twisting her limbs so that they matched the rather uncomfortable-looking contortions of the actress in the video—the same actress, Payne realized, who graced the cover of the cassette. Where are her wooden shoes, he wondered.

“Well?” Kathryn said, her head turned awkwardly back over her shoulder, looking as if she'd just gone through a severe chiropractic manipulation.

“Sorry?”

“It's your turn now,” she said and grinned another grin, this one as crooked as her body. “I can't stay like this forever, you know.”

Payne stood up from the sofa and, as he slowly lowered his boxers, was gripped by an overwhelming sensation that seemed to come at him from the darkest shadows of his past. He felt himself back in the boys' locker room of his old high school
. We all shower, Mr Payne
, came Coach Foster's voice through the mist.
Now off with your drawers
.

“For Christ's sake, Harvey,” Kathryn said. “Hurry up. I think I'm getting a cramp.”

Payne took a deep breath and swallowed hard, then stepped out of his underpants, almost certain that the laughter and wet towel ends would follow in the wake of his old gym teacher's echoing words. He even flinched when Kathryn reached out and touched his shin.

“Come on, let's go,” she purred.

Keeping an eye on the television, Payne lowered himself onto one knee. The throw rug, he noticed immediately, was very rough against his flesh, almost as if he had just knelt on splintery wood. Already, in this the earliest stage of positioning, he appreciated the dexterity of the actor motionless before him. Then, stretching out his other leg to full length, in the same manner he remembered having seen a back catcher for the Baltimore Orioles do, Payne felt a tightening in the back of his knee, as if an elastic had been stretched to its limit. Still, he proceeded, and took hold of Kathryn's left ankle and brought it to rest on his shoulder.

“Almost there,” she whispered, as she fitted her right leg into the empty triangle of space created by his outstretched thighs. “Now, get in closer.”