Sparrow Nights (4 page)

She took a moment, looked at the floor to assemble her thoughts, and said, “I am leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more.”

To this day I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of such a bizarre notice of termination, ever.
Leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more
. But I had spent too many sweaty nights, smoked too many cigarettes, lost too many pounds to allow for any ambiguity. And so I said, slowly and deliberately, looking at her pale and beautiful face, “Does that mean you
don’t
love me any more?”

“Yes,” she said crisply. She
was
prepared.

“Does that mean you don’t want me any more?”

“Yes,” she said again.

“These are terrible words, Emma.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone else?” I asked. “Or did I lose you all on my own?”

“All on your own,” she said with a smile.

She offered me a sexual favour, which I accepted, but I had just begun a new medical prescription and I could not see it to completion. She stayed a while longer, although I can’t imagine what we talked about.

“I shan’t walk you downstairs,” I said as she hovered in the bedroom doorway. Those were my last words to her. I lay in bed, looking down on the park, and I heard the front door close and then creak open. She came back and pulled it to firmly. I fancied, a few moments later, that I heard the rattle of her bicycle chain as she unlocked it and pulled it through her spokes, circling her saddle with it and locking it again. Yes, the window was open, I must have heard it. Then absolute silence, a parking lot reaching all the way to the horizon.

^{C H A P T E R}        
4

F
or the first few days I wandered about in a state of relief. At least I
knew
. But then it started up again, waking in the morning too early, imagining her in bed with her boss, spread-eagled in ecstatic, name-calling abandon. I knew enough about bodies and their predictability to know that no matter how much a woman adores you, she will invariably end up repeating her favourite repertoire in the bed of the man who replaces you. A thought that, when it struck, made me want to sit down in the street.

I went to the doctor and got a dose of stronger sleeping pills. My appetite was gone and I continued to lose weight. Students began to comment on it. I told them I had taken up jogging. I began to worry that lack of sleep and weakness were going to cost me my job. At a spring book sale a chap from the Department of Semiotics took a photograph of me and pinned it up in the faculty lounge. With uncharacteristically high cheekbones and sunken eyes, my horror dwelt in plain sight.

Women were strangely drawn to me. On the subway one evening I noticed a dark-haired woman staring at me. Normally I’m very shy, but I struck up a conversation with her. It didn’t matter what she thought of me. When we arrived at my platform, I invited her with breathtaking nonchalance to take a coffee with me. Of course she accepted. We talked for an hour, she came back to my house and we went to bed. It went quite well. Aha, I thought, this is how to do it: cure a sexual wound sexually. But when I saw her a second time a few days later, I didn’t like her face when she laughed, her prominent pink gums. I wondered how I’d missed them in the first place.

Soon afterwards a high school teacher solicited my attention in the corner grocery store. I’d seen her many times before, a narrow-shouldered woman with skin so pale it was almost blue. Living with Emma, I’d often watched her wander up the street after school, always dressed in black, and I’d entertained some rather guilty daydreams about her. There was a particular thing I wanted to do to her.
En tout cas
, I took her to dinner at an Italian restaurant on Baldwin Street. We had a bottle of wine, then another. I drank most of it. It went splendidly, and near eleven, the wine glowing on my face, she drove me back to my house and parked her car in the driveway. We came in the side door, and something about the way I moved, the series of habitual movements from sticking my key in the doorknob and turning it simultaneously to pushing open the door, which made a very particular squeak, to clicking on the hall light with my right hand, the keys making the same jingle they always made, suggested to me, to my body, rather, that I was coming home with Emma after another night at our local restaurant. And suddenly the notion that I was taking
another
woman through this sacred ritual struck me as obscene and indecent. But I was too frightened to be left alone with my own thoughts, so I offered her a drink and we settled in the living room, on the same couch where Emma had read
Anna Karenina
. But when I kissed her, the high school teacher, when she leaned forward and closed her eyes in a manner I thought a trifle theatrical, she smelt funny. I don’t mean bad. I just mean odd. Different. The French get most things wrong, but they’re right about love: it really
is
a question of smell. And when I did that thing to her that I had daydreamed about doing, I was shocked at how extraordinarily different women’s bodies are, one from another.

She left shortly after that, but we stayed friends. We even had a drink together every so often until she got a boyfriend, and then things dried up and blew away the way they do.

It was the strangest thing, though; it was as if women could see the pain on my face and were drawn to it. I think they felt safe with me. Whereas men, men I avoided. They meant well, but in showing me they understood, they said terrible things. I know they were trying to lighten things up, but they did more harm. Once, at the end of an evening of cards, the host walked me to the door and, just as I was about to set off up the street, stopped me.

“How are things with Emma?” he asked.

I spluttered, I made light of it. I felt myself growing smaller and tighter with each sentence. Picking up on my mood, my host scrutinized my features with wide-eyed delight.

“One
does
move on,” I said finally, with a certain successful elegance, but even as the words issued from my mouth, I saw the image of her boss’s quivering bottom, complete, of course, with Emma’s ghastly “you’re-just-a-bad-boy-with-a-big-hard-cock” soundtrack.

I walked home double time, as if the motion of my body might stop the images from coming into too clear a focus.

It seemed as if I were radiating some peculiar kind of pollen. I went to New York to see an opera and came home with the stewardess from the airplane. Never in my life had I had such extraordinary luck with women. I can’t remember her name, I never saw her again, but when she left my bed, I lay in the dark in the unfamiliar smell of her perfume and felt a shiver of excitement, like a prisoner granted a new trial.

I slept like a dreamless dead weight that night, and in the morning I was famished. I hurried down the street and took breakfast in a new restaurant. I chatted happily to the owner, offered insights into the neighbourhood. In the middle of a sentence I looked out the window and saw a bicycle locked to a fire hydrant and thought to myself, Look, look at this, I’m looking at a bicycle locked to a hydrant, I’m not thinking about
that other thing
at all.

They were so kind to me, those women. How I would miss them later when the horror was gone from my face and they no longer
saw
me.

There were oddballs too, a hippie girl who followed me home from a lawn sale and after only the barest preliminaries asked me to spank her.

“How
old
are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-eight,” she said.

“Don’t you think this is, well, a little
much
for a first date?” She looked baffled. I went on. “Perhaps this is more like fifth- or sixth-date stuff.”

“All my friends do it,” she said.

“Is this a sort of generational thing?”

Her laughter spilt richly into the air. “How do you mean?”

“It’s a damn curious thing, that’s all. When I was your age …” But I stopped there. Just those words, this groaning overture, drained me, and I could feel myself fading, right in front of her eyes, like an old sign on an inn.

“That must have been some time ago,” she said. “No offence.”

I took none and obliged her, securing her feet to the bedpost with a Cambridge necktie, the rationale being that I might find in this unfamiliar landscape a distraction from Emma, the sensation of whose absence had returned like a toothache. Even as I lowered the young lady’s panties, even as I raised my hand to her backside, I was aware of Emma’s heart beating somewhere in the city. A parallel existence to mine.

When my little hippie left the house, massaging her smouldering pink fanny, she gave her hair a toss like a pony and asked if I’d buy a dog collar and a doormat for next time. “I have a fantasy,” she began, standing in the doorway. “I want to lie by your front door just like a big dog, an Afghan maybe, and wait for you to come home.”

“Really?” I said. This was astonishing, and for a second it really
did
stop me from thinking about Emma.

“When I hear something at the door,” she went on (it was all quite worked out), “I’ll jump up, like this”—now raising her hands to her chest and flopping them over like paws—“and if it’s just the mailman, I’ll be so disappointed! I’ll just have to go back to my mat and lie down and wait some more.”

I looked at her carefully. She didn’t seem insane. In fact, in her yellow summer dress, she was quite pretty, with a long face and freckles on her cheekbones. Perhaps it
was
a generational thing. Perhaps this was how young people got to know each other these days.

“I think you’re out of my league,” I said softly, and touched her gently on the elbow.

“Oh,” she said. “Goodbye then,” and she offered me her cheek to kiss.

A year later, when the spell had worn off and women were no longer drawn to me, I tracked her down in a small Ontario town and phoned her. Knowing ahead of time what the answer would be, still I asked her, a tad too gingerly, if she was planning on coming back to Toronto. No, she wasn’t. She was getting married. A local boy, no less, a pharmacist.

But that was still a long way off.

In the midst of all this a strange thing happened. Serrault knocked on my office door one afternoon and came in. He was wearing a dark shirt with a black knit tie, chic but not ostentatious, and I thought to myself, ah, he pays more attention to his clothes than I assumed. In a rather serious tone of voice—you could see he was uncomfortable—Serrault said, “Ah, look, Darius … Emma has phoned, and she wanted me to tell you to be sure to change the air filter on the stove.”

“What?” I said.

He waited a moment before answering. “Apparently there is some risk of fire if you don’t change it every year or so.”

“The air filter on
my
stove?
À moi?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s rather bizarre that she would call you about a thing like that.”

He shrugged tactfully. He was going to add something, a pleasantry I’ll bet, but thought better of it.

“Am I supposed to phone her back or anything?”

“She didn’t say, specifically. But perhaps yes, for clarification.” Here a smile. “You know where the filter is?” he went on. He tilted his hands into a box as if to show me. “Right above the grill, there is a—”

“Non, je sais, je sais.”

“Well then …”

“Still, it’s very mysterious.”

He did that thing that Frenchmen do with their mouths, and shrugged. Sensing his presence might provoke still more questions (for which he knew there could be no satisfactory response), he withdrew.

For a few days I waited with considerable urgency. I was convinced this business with the air filter signalled something important, a shift, a rope thrown between two ships. Perhaps it meant that Emma missed me so profoundly that she was seeking an excuse, no matter how indirect, to contact me. I thought of phoning her. Who knows? Maybe the danger was real. Maybe the thing might actually
catch on fire!

But it didn’t. It never did anything. I didn’t get around to replacing the air filter for years, five or six at least, and nothing ever happened. Nothing whatsoever.

A month went by. It was August. I wrote a paper on the irony of genius—I had Céline in mind—which was accepted by the
Harvard Quarterly
. But this time out it offered me only the most momentary distraction. I had forgotten about it by dinner of the same day.

Coming home one summer night, I opened my mailbox at the side of the house. By now I was waiting for a letter from Emma. It was maddening, but I knew I’d never be free of her, that I’d keep on waiting, stupidly, pointlessly, until I knew she’d slept with someone else. I was sure she knew that. When it happened, she’d tell me. But there was nothing there, and in a cloud of self-pity I kicked open the side door of my house. “I have a
shit
life,” I said to anyone who was listening.

To comfort myself I rented the video of
Gooseberries
, the first movie I’d seen with Emma. When I got to the part where I remembered her slipping her forearm over the damp armrest, I stopped the movie and retreated to my bedroom, from which I emerged moments later clear-headed and hungry. I dreamt about her
all night
and in the morning sadness sat on my chest. I could hardly drag myself from bed. I took the movie back to the store and dropped it in the overnight box like an out-of-date passport.

Around this time, after loathing him for years—a sissy and a momma’s boy—I found myself fascinated by Marcel Proust. I reread
Un amour de Swann
as if I were reading my own gravestone, obsessed to know, for I had long forgotten, if he got the girl in the end. For his fate would be mine, I was sure of it.