The Ravine (9 page)

“You know, I just got through repeating my Visa number about forty times. My mouth is incapable of sexiness.”

“You want
me
to talk dirty, then.”

“Dirty, or sexy? I mean, I could probably talk dirty. Like I say, I just got through saying my Visa number over and over again.”

“Okay, so go. Tell me what you like.”

“Uh …”

“Like tell me what you’d want me to do if I was there. What kind of thing? Do you like to have your cock sucked? ’Cause I would
love
to suck your cock.”

“Well, yes, I mean, that can be very pleasant.”

“I could lick your asshole.”

“Uh-huh. Um … sure.”

“What would you do to me if I were there?”

“If you were here? Hmm. I’d probably be incapable of actual physical intimacy.”

“Oooh, baby.”

“What?”

“Sorry, that was just kind of a habit kind of a thing.”

“I suppose I could feel your breasts. I could try to do that very tenderly. You might enjoy it.
I
would
really
enjoy it, think what you will of me.”

“I’d like it if you felt my titties.”

“I suppose it’s kind of adolescent of me.”

“Do you always analyze all this shit?”

“I think so.”

“So you’re gonna feel my titties, ‘the twins,’ I like to call them, and I should tell you, they are awesome.”

“Awesome. I would fall down before them on trembling knees.”

“And what else?”

“Well. Good question. I guess I could, um …”

“Lick my pussy?”

“Just so.”

“Tell me how you’d lick it.”

“How much variance is there?”

“You know what, you have to just take a deep breath and give yourself
over
to this.”

“Huh?”

“There are as many ways of licking pussy as there are tongues and pussies. An infinite array of motion and sensation. No other tongue has ever felt like yours, nor will any tongue feel like yours again.”

“Uh-huh. I’m falling asleep, aren’t I? I’m drifting off.”

“And the contact cannot help but be intimate. We will connect physically. It will be both fleeting and eternal.”

“I am most definitely passed out here.”

“Hang up the phone, darling, or this is going to cost you a fortune.”

“All right. All right. Good night.”

I FIRST LAID EYES UPON HER WHEN I WAS THIRTY-ONE YEARS OLD. I WAS
a young playwright who had met with some success, although in any other career this success would translate as dismal failure. My plays earned me very little money, and given the time I spent working on the things, my actual hourly wage likely didn’t top a buck. But my life was thoroughly enjoyable, because the theatre is a world that allows, even encourages, transitory, superficial relationships, the kind I liked best. And these relationships were typically with actresses, pretty and shapely and deeply insecure. It was hard not to hurt these women, sometimes it seemed avoiding it was impossible, so I had acquired a reputation as a rake and a cad, a reputation that gave me some small satisfaction.

I was also reputed to be a prolific writer, churning out two or three plays a year, although at this period in my life I seemed to have dried up. Really, though, I hadn’t dried up, I had rather become all too sodden, liquor-logged. I would rise around noon, read newspapers and magazines until around six (a torpid activity to which I gave the name “research”), and then around six o’clock I would go out to eat, although I almost always headed directly for the Pig’s Snout, a pseudo-English pub that offered only pickled eggs and potato chips as comestibles. There I would find a table full of my cronies. Gig
Withers, for example, an actor. Gig was a kindly man, burdened with such a malevolent aspect that he portrayed only serial killers, axe murderers and ghouls risen from the dead. He worked a lot and his face was well-known, although this only served to get him arrested once or twice a week, overly zealous cops leaping upon him as he strolled down the street. And there was Joanne Wenders, a poet, although she now lives in Mississauga and raises children and bull terriers. She had a bull terrier back then, a mangy brute named Kingsley who was allowed his own seat at the table. I was very attracted to Joanne, but never had a physical relationship with her, largely because Kingsley hated me. He glared at me and let it be known that he would be pleased to bite off my balls.

Then there was Bob Hamel, the most boring man in the universe. I don’t mean that as an insult. Bob Hamel would agree that he was the most boring man in the universe, it was almost a point of pride to him. Bob Hamel worked for one of the big insurance companies, in some capacity that none of us could begin to fathom. He wore blue three-piece suits and hauled around an enormous briefcase everywhere he went.

Bob Hamel would sit at our table and grin at everything anybody said. He would laugh obediently when he thought something was supposed to be funny. Hamel himself would never state any thoughts or observations, knowing full well how dull he was, but he was vastly appreciative of our collective wit and wisdom. Oh, now that I think of it, Hamel did occasionally have something to offer: knowledge. Whenever our conversation ran aground on the rocks of ignorance (which was frequently), Bob Hamel would save the day by actually knowing something. For example, Hooper and I almost came to blows one evening while discussing the existence or non-existence of God. Bob Hamel interrupted with an apposite point (that Charles Darwin was ignorant of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics,
even though they were performed during Darwin’s lifetime) and then proceeded to give us a concise overview of the theory of evolution and its implications re theology. Of course it was dull, but I still remember much of what he said.

Bob Hamel was a handsome enough fellow, in that his features were regular and everything was about the right size. It was said that he had a huge penis. I have no personal knowledge of this, but Rainie van der Glick told me it was so. Rainie would show up at the Pig’s Snout every now and again, ostensibly to see me, although she would hardly speak to me. She would say that I looked like shit and then she would proceed to insult the other people at the table. She did this with no particular relish, but much of what we said was pretentious tripe of the first water, and Rainie was ever incapable of holding her tongue. On one occasion she hooked up with Bob Hamel, although I can’t remember whether this was after one of his displays of erudition or after an evening Hamel spent grinning like an idiot, toting his briefcase with him when he went to the malodorous head. Rainie referred to herself back then as Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Fucks, and I suppose either one of these situations might have summoned forth that tarnished angel.

The most regular of the Pig’s Snout regulars was the young novelist John Hooper, although at the time he had written no novel. He had written only titles. Oh, John implied that in his squalid bedsit there were reams of paper spackled with deathless prose, but we saw no evidence. We only heard that work was progressing well on, say,
They Both Were Naked
, or
Puke.
Hooper was conflicted as to what kind of titler he was, one given to poetry or to effrontery. A very good example of this would be the period during which he was labouring on something that he named both
Lissome Is the Naiad
and
Hellhag!
(He added the exclamation mark, not me.) I often
wondered, aloud, how something could have both titles (Hooper seemed legitimately to be working that time; he would show up bleary-eyed, his long fingers spotted with ink), but I gained some insight when he began to show up with this woman, this Veronica Lear, by his side.

There now, you see, I’ve done it already, I’ve written something catty. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t, that I would try to be fair-minded in my presentation of my estranged wife. After all, it wasn’t Ronnie who scuppered the marriage, it was me, acting with mind-boggling confusion, my enormous ego and smallish dick getting me into all sorts of trouble. So I will begin afresh; I will detail my first laying eyes upon her, when all was new and possibilities curled through the air like smoke from exotic cigarettes.

I was late getting to the Snout because I had stopped by to visit one of my girlfriends. That woman, Frieda, had advised me that I was an unfeeling scoundrel. She had actually employed that word, “scoundrel.” Mind you, Frieda was with the company at Stratford, so her word choice could be a bit Shakespearean. “Phil, you’re an arrant scapegrace.” I had answered in kind, or at least I will report that I did. “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,” I told her, “and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.”

I arrived at the pub tardy but cleansed. I was well into my first pint of ale when I noticed that there was a stranger sitting beside Hooper. Writers are supposed to be gifted with observational skills, but you can see that I have my limitations—the fact that the most beautiful woman in the world was nearby escaped my attention for a few long moments.

Her hair was an unsettling collection of hues, everything from
ebony to strawberry blonde. Her hair was also wild, flying off in all directions. This was not entirely natural; she was at the time acting the role of Ophelia—not in
Hamlet
, exactly, but in some Bizarro World version of the classic. I went to see the play the next evening, so I can report that it was vaguely Hamlet-like, although the male lead gave none of the famous soliloquies, replacing them with arrhythmic grunts and monkey-hoots. He also spent much of his time naked. Veronica Lear wore more clothes, but not a lot more. Her costume was an elaborate tenting of diaphanous fabric, and as she flitted about, the material would flounce, revealing glimpses of naked flesh. And so, while I am bolting ahead chronologically, at least in terms of what I was entitled to know, I will describe her breasts as perfect. Likewise her backside, which was so muscled that one could imagine that she had spent her childhood gambolling through the grasslands. But none of this was as breathtaking as her face, which was framed by the unruly and mottled locks. The thing to know about Ronnie is that her family history is cosmopolitan and complicated. Her father was Scottish and her mother Malaysian, but even those bloodlines were not quite pure, and there are evidences of everything from North American Indian to Nordic. So while her hair was enhanced in order to portray the Bizarro Ophelia, when the colouring was washed out the effect was not eradicated, merely muted.

Her eyes seemed like a painter’s palette; from a distance they were a startling blue-grey, but on close inspection (and I spent hours inspecting them closely) they were flecked with almost every tint. Ronnie’s eyes were large, and she had inherited from her mother epicanthal folds, which somehow made her seem ever on the verge of laughing or weeping. Her nose was ever so slightly flattened, just enough that one could imagine (or so I imagined, the first time I laid eyes upon her) that in the throes of passion the nostrils would flare and possibly even shoot out licks of flame. Then there was her
mouth; Veronica Lear had perfect teeth, dazzlingly white, and she had a nervous habit of bringing down the top set upon her lower lip, just for a moment but with conviction, and when she lifted them away the lip would blush with blood.

At that particular moment I would have rated my chances of dating this woman as maybe a thousand to one, so with typical male defensiveness I made a point of ignoring her. She didn’t seem to mind, mostly because she had yet to notice me. Hooper was in the middle of a story—I’d entered in the middle of a Hooper story, and he had made no great progress through the morass that was the middle—and Ronnie was listening, or half-listening, to him. She smoked and looked around the pub, and every so often something Hooper said would make her smile, but I could never detect any causal relationship. It was as though she were smiling at some mispronunciation or speech impediment. I couldn’t see how these smiles, slight but stunning, were related to whatever John was saying, which turned out, ultimately, to be a joke of the shaggy-dog variety. I was astounded that Hooper had been so reduced. Where were the fearless contentions that Shakespeare was a hack, that Samuel Beckett was twice the dramatist old Will could ever hope to be? Where were the stories about Mexican cantinas and toothless dogs, tales where even Death got drunk and Fate was feckless? This could only mean that John Hooper was in love.

At the conclusion of Hooper’s joke, Ronnie laughed with condescending politeness, but it was a glorious laugh nonetheless and I decided to tell a joke myself. Some of you may be noticing the ease with which I elected to betray my friend Hooper. You’re wondering if I lack a conscience. My response is that I do indeed have a conscience, I just like to make sure it’s got plenty to do.

So I decided to tell a joke. After all, I had nothing to lose. Not
only had this woman not returned any of my dark-lidded smouldering glances, she had yet to even look at me, to register my existence on the planet. I slammed my empty pint mug down as a cheap attention-getting device and launched into the old “chee-chee” chestnut.

You know it, of course you do. Three missionaries are taken captive by a tribe in some deep, dark jungle. The chief imperiously announces, “You have two choices. Death or chee-chee.” The first missionary, being a moral coward, elects “chee-chee.” He is taken away and all manner of sexual atrocities are performed upon him, leaving him badly damaged but still breathing. So the second missionary, when given the choice, likewise chooses “chee-chee.” He is subjected to brutal depravity, and then his body is tossed away, ruined but still functional. The third missionary, though, declares that he will have none of this. “I choose death.”

“You are a brave man,” says the chief. “So be it. Death. But first…
chee-chee.”

I believe I told the joke well. I was vague enough about the setting that I could lend to the chief’s voice a creamy yet acidic resonance without giving ethnic offence. (A crime for which Joanne Wenders would have been all over me, and Kingsley would have eagerly torn out my windpipe.) I was tactful yet graphic in detailing the treatment the missionaries received. And my delivery of the punchline, timing-wise, was perfect.