Self (10 page)

I don’t recall what else we said that day, but we must have said more for I left the school happier than I had been in weeks and months, knowing her name and knowing she was my friend.

One of the happiest moments of my adolescence was the first time Sonya called me. I had called her earlier but she wasn’t home. I nervously left a message with her father, who didn’t seem pleased at the notion of a boy calling his daughter. I was convinced she wouldn’t call me back. When the phone rang a little later in the evening and my mother said, “It’s for you,” my heart jumped. “Hi, it’s Sonya,” came a voice from the receiver. I barricaded myself in my room and we talked for two hours.

We went on long walks, weekend peregrinations through Ottawa, often to Parliament Hill, where we would examine the statues, or look over the river from behind the Parliamentary Library, or try, as we did once, to get into the Langevin Building, where Prime Minister Trudeau had his offices; or along the Rideau Canal and then Sussex Drive, past the War Museum and the Royal Mint, into that windswept, wide-open space just after the curve in the road, where one catches from a height the dazzling sweep of the Ottawa River, and beyond, past the Department of External Affairs, past City Hall, to reach 24 Sussex Drive, where we would peer between the
metal fence-posts, trying to see the house, hoping to see movement in spite of the vegetation; or in Rockliffe, neighbourhood of the rich and diplomatic; or on the grounds of Rideau Hall, official residence of the governor-general, which grounds were at the time still open to the public; or to various museums, the one I remember best being the Museum of Science and Technology, especially the room built at a 30-degree angle from the horizontal with the furniture all out of proportion — the point being to jar our notions of perspective — where Sonya and I laughed and laughed and laughed. And all the while, during all this walking, we talked.

After she was gone I went on these same walks on my own, but I had not realized how much of their pleasure lay not in the historical sights or in the exposition of a great future political career, but in the company. I missed Sonya terribly. The statue of D’Arcy McGee, one of the few Canadian politicians to suffer the apotheosis of assassination, now left me indifferent. I wandered through Laurier House, home of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, without looking at a single photo. Though I did not catch it at the time, this was my first hint that I was not suited for public affairs, that my interest in politics would never extend beyond a constituency of one.

Sonya’s mother had died when she was little. Her father, a tall, balding, bearded man who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, was strange and Catholic, Catholic and strange. He had promised his only daughter five thousand dollars if she never kissed before getting married. As older teenagers we might have laughed at this lucrative interdict and disregarded it, or our hormones might have overwhelmed us; in either case, we might have done something and then lied about it,
but as obedient young teenagers she took it seriously and therefore so did I. We shared our every thought, we held hands in secret, when we lay in bed we lay very close to each other, feeling each other’s heat — but kissing was out of the question. And since the touching of lips and the greeting of tongues are the doorway to the house of passion, we sat meekly on the threshold.

I felt no frustration over this since I still did not make the connection between the human and the ecstatic. They ran parallel. I loved Sonya, as she loved me, and it came out in our words and in our closeness — and then at home I indulged in my secret pleasure. Only once she was gone did I start to dream of linking one with the other.

Things came to an abrupt end. An unexpected offer of a promotion for her father, but not here, far away, and right now — an alacritous response in the affirmative — and suddenly Sonya was moving to British Columbia. School had just ended and we had thought we had the summer. The last time we saw each other in private, we cried openly in each other’s arms. She kissed me on the side of the mouth, coming perilously close to giving up five thousand dollars and her lease on a wisp of cloud. We made plans for the future, desperate definite plans. Then she was gone.

I cried in my room. I became snappy and aggressive with my parents and isolated myself from them. I wandered about the house, the neighbourhood, the city, but found nothing to make me happy.

Salvation, if it can be called that, came through an eating disorder of sorts. It was in early August. The weather complemented my mood: it was hot and heavy and I was bored and
listless. I had embarked upon one of my regular exploratory forages through the house, hoping to discover something new, something forbidden, something exciting. My parents, having moved so often in their lives, didn’t tend to accumulate things, and my expeditions usually yielded nothing either new or exciting. But this time I was richly rewarded. In a cluttered corner of the basement, in three stacks, I came upon forty or so old
Playboy
magazines. Catching sight of these magazines made my heart stop. I had never gone through one, but I knew well enough what
Playboy
was about. My father had been a reader in the late sixties, when the magazine seemed to be in the spirit of the times, a time of great music and stormy politics, sunshine and Vietnam. The magazine was full of polemical articles on this or that, interviews with the likes of Fidel Castro, Barry Goldwater, the leader of the American Nazi Party (interviewed, deliberately, by a black reporter), opinions by U.S. senators, profiles of various personalities, short stories by incredible writers — Nabokov, Updike, Böll — round tables on various subjects, photo essays, and of course pictures of young women whose nudity seemed to symbolize the Age of Aquarius. A few years later, when times changed and
Playboy’s
claims to be at the forefront of sexual liberation and other good things appeared dubious and it began to acquire an unsavoury reputation, my father stopped reading the magazine. But he had never thrown out his old copies, and so they lay dormant until they exploded into my life. For this was exactly the impact they had on me — an explosion. As I reached for the closest one, feeling like Ali Baba as he entered the den of the forty thieves, Sonya faded from my memory. By the time I caught sight of the first picture, with a thrill that whistled through my mind, she was
forgotten. These pictures, these magazines, would be my companions.

Thus was I introduced to that poisonous Western concept: the beautiful female body. Thus did I start my ingestion of naked paper women. I was always in mortal fear of being found out by my parents, so it was a secret, paranoid activity, performed with my ears cocked for the least signal of their unexpected early return from work. In direct contrast to the headless, colourless bodies from the volume on sexuality, which gave my imagination the minimum fuel with which it could fly, the pictures in
Playboy
sent me sky high. These disrobed young women displayed a beauty that was truly incredible to me, yet there they were, smiling, laughing, prancing, looking pensive, speaking of themselves and their families, of where they lived and what they did, of their favourite books, singers and movies. That these monthly beauties were from the American sixties, from an era that seemed so colourful and momentous, gave them an added degree of attraction. I ogled not only their breasts, but their hippyish ways and dress, their lingo, their politics. Masturbating while looking at these young women was far and away the most powerful, sensuous experience of my adolescence. I remember how one time, after a particularly intense moment of gratification, I came up from the basement and stumbled outside. I was in a daze. I lay on the grass, looking up at the sky. It began to rain, at first gently, then with the unfurling waves of a storm. I didn’t move, but stayed there till I was soaked through and through and my teeth were chattering.

My desire went in cycles. Sometimes I would spread out several magazines and masturbate compulsively, as much as three times in a row. Like a sultan going through his harem, I
would flip through the
Playboys
searching for just the right smile, just the right breast, to push me over the edge. As I got to know my Playmates I became pickier, flipped longer. At other times I felt bloated with overconsumption; it came with a feeling in my stomach, a pit of solitude. Then I masturbated to a single picture, or none at all, using only my imagination.

In this erratic hunger for paper women — I want many! I want none — I might have perceived the real poverty of my diet, an intimation of what it was doing to me, but the pleasure was too great. It’s the way I see myself then: I binged on paper women, stuffing my mouth, then I vomited them out violently. Can you see a boy on his knees over a toilet bowl, a finger down his throat, vomiting pictures of naked women? That’s me. A boy suffering from pictorio-sexual bulimia. Although, in truth, that’s not the way it went. At the time, I ate. It was so good, so amazingly good. It’s now that I vomit. Now, when I see pornography, I am instantly seized by nausea. It’s beyond my control. My stomach flips and my mouth waters unpleasantly.

I was busy (there was school, there was exercise, I read books and saw movies, I watched plenty of television — no longer an enemy but the companion of my lonely hours — there were my furtive minutes of ecstasy, there were all the moments of anguish, idleness and discovery that make up adolescence), but I would say that my busyness took none of my time, for the one thing that truly consumed me was emotions — and my consistent approach was to shy away from the greatest source of these emotions.

In the lineup at the school cafeteria, Carolyn once got close to me and pressed one of her breasts against my arm in a way
that penetrated even a shyness as obtuse as mine. I feigned not to notice, then masturbated about it at home. Some time later, when I first saw her holding hands with Graham, I felt all the pain of dashed love. When they languorously kissed by their lockers for minutes on end, eyes closed, heads gently moving, I pretended to be busy at my locker but in fact stood there in cold misery. She was so pretty, Carolyn, as pretty as a Playmate. I knew well enough the pleasure she could give as a picture, but what I wanted was the pleasure she could give in person, her soft lips pressed to my lips, her glossy paper body pressed to my body.

If you’d asked me then what love was, I would have replied in terms of a deep, upsetting beauty-hunger, with at its centre, the tang of it, lust; and I would have said that love was my favourite emotion, though I was far less familiar with it than I was with desolation and frustration.

In 1979, at the age of sixteen, I entered Mount Athos School, an all-boys boarding school. This unexpected turn of events came about because the powers that be had decided that there was a need for more women ambassadors, and so my mother had been plucked from relative juniority and appointed Canada’s representative to Cuba. My father, who by then was sick of the civil service and gladly accepted a golden handshake, was going to run from Havana his Ediciones Sin Fronteras/Editions Sans Frontières, which would specialize in the two-way translation of Quebec and Latin American poetry, an affair of little profit but great love. But the rub was that there was no secondary school for foreigners in Castro’s republic. Thus, with funding from the Department of External Affairs, the un-Canadian option of boarding school presented itself.
My parents were heart-broken at the idea of being separated from their son, but I jumped at the idea.
Boarding
school! It set my imagination on fire. What an adventure it would be!

I passed the stone and iron gates of Mount Athos on a sunny September afternoon. I had a trunk and two suitcases, I had a name tag in bright red letters tirelessly sewn onto my every item of clothing by the ambassador-designate to Cuba, I had three new blazers, a smart new trench-coat and a fine selection of my father’s ties, I had bright hopes and great expectations.

The vista that offered itself as we drove up the long, curving driveway was promising: expanses of green lawns and playing fields bordered by great leafy trees, a well-integrated assortment of grey-stone and red-brick buildings, some old, some new, a number of neat gravel paths, a chapel with stained-glass windows, and one large stone cross in the centre of the grounds; and the village we had just come through was one of the prettiest I had seen in central Ontario.

My room, my new home, was a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of two cupboards with drawers, two beds, two desks and two wrought-iron windows with a third-floor view, from atop a hill (the said Mount Athos), of a rolling apple orchard and, in the distance, Lake Ontario. I was assigned the right half of the room. This parcel of territory delighted me. I tested the bed. In my hand I had a thick manila envelope containing all sorts of information on the school, omen of further promise.

I felt my life was beginning.

I don’t have fond memories of my two years at Mount Athos. As a school it was good enough. We learned our calculus and
biology well, that sort of thing. But what I mainly remember is the climate of disrespect that pervaded the institution, a disrespect that often descended into emotional savagery. Just about the only delicacy I can trace to my Mount Athos days is the fact that when I pass through a door I hold it open for anyone coming through behind me.

TWO REASONS WHY I HATE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:

(1) I asked Gordon, the returning boy who was showing me around, what my roommate was like. “Croydon?” he said. “Oh — he’s nice.” But in saying this he looked away. I should have taken note. Instead I rolled this odd name around in my mouth, taking a liking to it, already considering it that of my best friend.

Gordon’s reply contained another sign of things to come: the propensity of boys and masters at Mount Athos to call the boys by their last names. For Croydon was a surname, and Croydon was Croydon, not John. The intimate first name disappeared, was reserved for only the best, closest friends. To others one became an impersonal last name, like a brand name, a turtle with a word painted on its shell, a wall with a single window too high to look into.