Girlfriend

                      Girlfriend


   As a young man I attended the university for two years. This was a big mistake. I was interested in ideas and intellectual inquiry and university is not the place for someone like that. Universities function as a finishing school for those about to go into the professions. If you are not interested in being finished or becoming a doctor or lawyer they are a waste of time and money. After all, the patina of ideas and language attained from three or four years at the university could be achieved by three or four months of reading at the public library. As for intellectual enquiry, aside from the odd ray of sunshine here and there, the hallowed halls are devoid of it. No matter how much they say otherwise, holding desperately to the last, fraying straw of the Socratic tradition, they have long ceased to ask any other than purely technical questions for the simple reason that they already have all the answers.

   I was living in the old downtown in a converted Victorian mansion. It must have been a very wealthy merchant who owned it in its heyday for it was truly monstrous – four stories with a full basement. Each floor contained twelve large rooms, two small, and the basement six small rooms, a kitchen, a laundry room, a boiler room and assorted storage rooms. A city planning major, who was interested in such things, looked up the building plans for me at city hall. Originally the first floor was an immense ballroom, other than for a serving room at the back and a cloakroom at the front, occupying the entire floor. It would have held, comfortably, two hundred people. When I lived there, of course, it was divided and partitioned. The planning major told me that such a house, just after it was finished in 1878 would have required a minimum of fourteen servants. The sole job of one of them would have been to cut and stack firewood in the warm season and to feed fires and haul ashes in the cold. The expenses, translated into modern money, would be over a million dollars a year.

   I lived in a room beside the boiler room which cost fifteen dollars a week. The boiler room contained a gigantic octopus of an oil fired furnace with a boiler large enough to power an old time British battleship. This boiler fed heated water out through a series of pipes into radiators. The advantage of living alongside it was warmth. In those old buildings warmth was a precious commodity for they were drafty and had little or no insulation. Too much warmth could be dealt with by opening a window. Too little was a much more difficult problem. Complaints to the caretaker were useless. He was a dispenser of placebos. He might bleed your radiator, or wave his pipe wrench over the ganglia of pipes in the corner closet, but the place would still be freezing. Although some time ago the firebox had been changed from wood to oil, other than this it was an ancient conglomeration which one hundred years of operation had settled into a certain set of wrinkles and eccentricities. That the caretaker could do anything to remedy these was a hopeful delusion.

   The disadvantage of living alongside the boiler was noise in the pipes. I was ignorant, except in a vague way, of how the system worked. But I do know this – an integral part of it working were hissings, clangings and groanings in the pipes. The closer you were to the boiler the louder they were. Those accustomed to living in modern houses with the slight hum of the furnace, the slight rush of hot air through the registers, would not believe the ruckus these old boilers could make. In the fall, when the furnace was first fired up, they were truly stunning. It was as if the old pipes had settled into hibernation in the warm months and were now protesting their cruel master’s insistence they get to work for yet another winter. Bang, bang, bang. Ssiss, ssiss, ssiss, ssiss. Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang. Eeweeooh, eeweooh, eeweooh. Ssiss, ssiss. Bang, bang. After a few days of this they would settle down somewhat, but all winter, besides a regular, more sedate cacophony, they would occasionally break out into a horrendous racket, capable of raising the dead.

   This is why my room was only fifteen dollars a week. Rooms the size of mine on the upper floors were thirty dollars. The caretaker, a business student himself and much given to ideas of upward mobility, would ask me each time an upper room became vacant, if I would like to move up. I always declined. I became accustomed to the banging, clanging pipes and eventually slept through all but their worst displays. Being a student and always broke, the cheap rent was attractive. I even developed a sense of pride that I was a man who could live alongside a cantankerous boiler and remain happy and well rested.

   But there was, besides the warmth, another advantage. There was a spot on top of the boiler where the insulation had worn off where I kept a kettle of water. Ten steps out of my room and ten steps back brought me both a brewing pot of tea and a full hot water bottle. In the communal bathroom at the end of the hall there was always enough hot water for a deep luxurious bath. In the summer while the upper floors, especially on the south, were sweltering, my room, deep in the earth and surrounded by field stone walls three feet thick, was deliciously cool. The room was twelve by twelve. In one corner was a small closet. Along the wall adjoining the boiler room was the bed, stolen for me by my girlfriend from the parental garage.

   “Won’t they notice?” I asked her at the time.

   “I doubt it. It went in there five years ago. Normal people would have thrown it out or given it to the Sally Ann. They are packrats and hate to throw things out. If I asked for it they would have said no. My father would have said he was just about to resurrect it when he knows he’ll do nothing of the kind. They lean toward the miserly side.”

   She also stole an arborite table, two wooden chairs and an old stuffed armchair. Her father owned a brand new town car which in those days were immense. She told her father she needed it for a project at the university. When her father was at work and her mother at some church function, we loaded the furniture into the trunk and brought it to my place. It took two trips.

   “What if they look in there?”

   “I’ve arranged it so that it’s not obvious. They are not the brightest. If I moved their bed to the opposite wall of their bedroom they probably wouldn’t notice. Besides, even if they did they would assume it was a thief. Then my father would file a claim and bore everyone by going on about how he got money from the insurance company. He claims they are gangsters and extortionists.”

   We were driving in the car, so large and wide that a tall man could stretch out comfortably on the rear bench seat. The engine bonnet spread out for miles in front of us but my girlfriend drove this monstrosity with the ease of a crane operator dropping a load with one hand while eating a sandwich with the other.

   “He used to read in that chair until my mother declared it hideous and threatened to set fire to it. Now he has a lazyboy where he watches television and dozes. He’s deteriorating rapidly, I’m afraid. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t bore every one with one of his insane rants. He claims Jesuits are ruining the economy. He claims the dark races are destroying civilization with an evil combination of magic and eroticism. He’s getting worst every day. His brain is turning into jelly.”

   There was a side door into the basement. When we had everything in we sat down for a cup of tea at my new kitchen table, looking around appreciatively at the new furniture. Before I was sleeping and eating on the floor.

   “We’ll have to make sure your parents don’t come here. If they do we are in trouble.”

   “My parents come here? Are you kidding? They wouldn’t be caught dead in a beat up old flophouse like this. My dad has a few low rentals but it’s his managers who go into them not him. He might catch a disease or become infested with lice.”

   “Surely it’s not that bad.”

   “You’ve never listened to my dad.”

   “A few times.”

   “True, but for you he produces the expurgated edition. On the other hand his lovely, sweet, innocent, virginal daughter must be given the straight poop about the evils of the world. If he found out that I sleep here twice a week instead of at my girlfriends, he would probably have a heart attack.”

      She looked at the bed. “Well, at least we have something to sleep on. Better than that musty old foam and smelly old sleeping bag.” We had also stolen sheets and blankets to go on the bed.

   “And if he finds out?”

   “My girlfriends are all expert liars.”

   My girlfriend came from the other side of the tracks, the one conventionally thought of as the good side. I, on the other hand, continuing the conventional image, came from the bad side, the shantytown of peeling clapboard shacks and stovepipe chimneys. Although it is always difficult to say what others are thinking of you, I do believe they were a little suspicious of my background. That I was a student held their suspicions in abeyance to some degree. After all a student today could be the CEO of a major corporation tomorrow, no matter what his social background. Not that that was going to happen to me, mind you, but they didn’t know that. They would have preferred their daughter to date and eventually marry a nice boy from the neighbourhood. They had a point. Such alliances make things much less complicated. But my girlfriend had nothing but distain for the boys from her neighbourhood.

   “They are all impotent.”

   “Surely you exaggerate?”

   “And how would you know?”

   She had me there.

   My girlfriend slept at my place Monday and Saturday nights. Slept is an euphremism. Mostly we ate and talked and screwed. Sometimes we went for a walk or took in a movie. About three in the morning we would fall asleep and not wake up until noon the next day. Neither of us had classes on Tuesday morning. Sundays she went for twelve thirty family dinner at her parents. That she didn’t go to church with them was bad enough. To miss dinner was verboten. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, always, she told me, unless Christmas fell on a Sunday then turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. I went with her once a month. She often spoke disparagingly of Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding but it was youthful rebellion. In five years she would be making it herself which was OK with me for I love Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, especially with the sirloin roasts her mother served, so tender they melted in your mouth.

   I am afraid that when I went to her parents I did an imitation of a bright young man on his way up. In my defense I would ask what other role could I play? Mephistophelian dispoiler of their daughter? Her parents were simple bourgeoise people. Her father owned an electronics firm and dabbled in real estate. Her mother ran a household consisting of her husband, my girlfriend, two younger brothers, a dog, a cat, and an impeccably appointed, superclean, rambling six thousand square foot house in an older suburb built in the 1920’s. A perspective son in law was first and foremost a breadwinner. Men went out into the world and by dint of will, energy, cunning and discipline, carved out a place for themselves. The profits they lay at the feet of their Beatrice, in my case their daughter. How could it be otherwise? Any other arrangement would be unthinkable, the devil’s talk, a cause for anguish.

   What I really cared about was reading books, talking about them into the wee hours of the morning, drinking beer, writing truly terrible poems a la Charles Baudelaire, sleeping, screwing and eating.

     The three Sundays my girlfriend went to her parents alone, I had Sunday dinner at my parents. There I met my brother and sister, one a carpenter, one a clerk at Eaton’s. I enjoyed myself for my siblings were lively and energetic, interested in almost everything, loud talking and argumentative. I could say what was on my mind without being considered a heretic of some kind. My father was a quiet man, a man of few opinions but he enjoyed the leaven and the conversation. My mother loved to feed people and have her family around her so she was in her glory.

   This, along with drinking beer with friends on Friday night, two shifts a week at a warehouse to make money and two days of scattered classes at the university, was the extent of my obligations. This left me plenty of time to read, argue uselessly with acquaintances at a few seedy taverns, write poems, and take long walks devoted to a combination of sobering up, exercise and thinking about literature. When I rose in the morning for two hours I wrote terrible poems, which at the time I thought of as great masterpieces. I read them on Saturday and Monday nights, to my girlfriend. She liked them but this was no corroboration of my talent for my girlfriend was a literary ignoramous. She read psychology and sociology, for the most part only things required for her courses. Occasionally she read a novel I suggested deriving from it psychological insights rather than literary pleasure.

   In those days I particularly liked the fall weather when the leaves were down from the trees and strewn in dirty, ragged layers over the streets and sidewalks and the air had to it the beginning bite of winter gilded with the deep night fogs coming in off the North Atlantic. I loved walking on such nights through a world half observed, half imagined, shrouded in mist and sometimes rain. Bundled up, equipped with rubber boots and umbrella, I would ramble the streets for hours most often through the warehouse district. This was strung out along the waterfront which in those days was dilapidated and ramshackled, crumbling old wooden docks jutting out into the filthy harbour water like a long line of rotting teeth.

   Sometimes my girlfriend would join me but when she did we had to limit our excursions. She was not what you would call skinny but she was rather thin and chilled quickly. She once told me that her small breasts were like two fried eggs, which when she was laying on her back on the bed in the half light, was accurate enough, but I didn’t mind. Perhaps it is a female obsession to think that all men are fatally attracted to bodice bursting breasts. And then, even among the young and firm, sex is more a matter of passion and imagination than one of perfect form. When she said these disparaging things about herself, immediately afterwards she would smile showing a set of even, brilliantly white teeth. I never asked but I’m sure when she was a young teenager she had orthodontic work for they were too perfectly aligned, too even, for this to be mere happenstance. I myself had a false plate. When she found this out she insisted I remove it during sex. She liked to run her tongue over the empty gums and made many jokes about how it was much safer to have a toothless man performing cunnilingus.

   Although she was slim my girlfriend had a great fear of growing fat. I don’t think it was the thought of being suddenly and actually fat which bothered her but what this might lead to, what it might mean. This was, of course, becoming overweight and sexless, a kind of anonymous being stripped of sexuality and power. Her fear led to constant dieting and the eating of food portions which seemed to me more appropriate for a bird than a human being. If I had to do for a day on her calorie intake for a week I would have collapsed. Her idea of a snack was five sugarless jelly candies and three celery sticks. She sometimes carried with her a bag of Italian olives which she considered a scandalous and shameful luxury. She would eat them in bed before and after sex as if to fortify herself for the rigours of the campaign. If I asked for one she gave reluctantly, not because she was mean, on the contrary she was the soul of generosity, but because she had calculated her caloric intake exactly and my munching messed things up. Eventually she took to carrying two bags and if I asked for some she would take out the second bag and with a  triumphant smile drop it into my lap.

   Bloody was the saltiest word she allowed herself. For parts of the body she used clinical words, penis and vagina for example. If she was angry she didn’t attack, she retreated. If, on occasion, she did attack to defend herself against one of my analytical diatribes (shades of her father’s rants), she used sarcasm and irony. In these modes she was a master and I was a little in awe when this small, savage tear appeared in her usual mask of serene benevolence. She could be quite forthright. On the subject of her parents she could be withering. She was not afraid to say what she liked in bed and I do believe, although she never actually said so, that she was a believer in the Freudian doctrine that deep sexual satisfaction could act as a substitute or corrective to wars and violence.

   In many ways we were well suited to one another. If you scratched off the patina of modern enlightenment which had settled as light and airy as mere moon dust upon our traditional Celtic Christianity, you would find two liberal puritans who had transformed their love of God into notions of social reform and the humanizing effect of literature.  Neither of us were that kind of punchy, demanding person who spends their life searching out grievances and ascribing blame. On the whole we were kind to one another and enjoyed one another’s company. As two people having an affair we could have gone on for a long time but we were not having an affair but instead were looking for a partner. People having an affair find in it a respite from the demands of social context but those searching for a partner are also searching for the intimates with whom they will live out their lives and if they do not find them then all kindliness and love between them will eventually die.

   There was a couple who were friends of hers and acquaintances of mine from the university. We sometimes went out with them to a movie and dinner. They were decent people but deadly boring. They were engaged and spent much time discussing trousseaus, dream houses and sets of china. They would describe in excruciating detail a 19th century wardrobe they had just acquired and had cool, vicious, analytical arguments about armoires and the square footage necessary for a civilized dining room. To allay death by ennui I took to inserting the antiques they described into my poems. This gave me a reason to listen to their long descriptions with careful attention. I would ask questions about colour, size, design. Sometimes the man would make drawings on a spread out restaurant napkin. If you write Baudelarian style poetry it is easy to find a place for antique furniture.

   This couple dressed immaculately. When we met them, say in the lobby of a movie theater, it was as if they had just emerged from a complete makeover in a combination male haberdashery, exclusive female boutique. Shirt and blouses were ironed. The skirt was perfectly pleated. The exact lie of the creases in the man’s slacks made it seem as if his legs had been broken to accommodate them. The shoes were polished, the hair coiffured, the fingernails immaculately manicured. When they sat down they first made a careful inspection of the chair, bench, whatever. If there was anything untoward about it they corrected it, had it corrected or sought out another sitting place. This done, they pulled at, hitched and arranged their clothes in a series of neat, precise movements which were so fascinating to me that I would later, alone in my room, try to replicate them, unsuccessfully. When they were satisfied with their preparations, they bent their knees and using the slack as a kind of spring they launched themselves, discretely and unobtrusively, of course, upwards into a slight, brief soaring. When they had reached the high point of their soaring they floated down into the seat as if they were a cloud descending, happy and entirely satisfied at the completion of what must have been a laborious and exacting ritual. When both had accomplished this, my girlfriend and I, already seated and looking on, they would begin a discussion of colours in the bathroom, the proper use of three season rooms, or the type of leather to be installed on the seat of a handcrafted baby chair.

    My girlfriend was always dressed ‘properly’ in blouse, skirt and pantyhose and wearing one of those pair of shoes which seemed to me more appropriate for the planting of delicate, small blossomed flowers than the housing of human feet. In preparation for our date with the couple she would polish the shoes, brush the skirt (wool in winter, linen, summer), and perhaps iron the blouse. For the ironing she stole an iron and ironing board from the parental garage. As for myself, there was larger problem. A stained T shirt with a stretched neck would not do. A pair of running shoes, holed and filthy, would not do. Rumpled jeans with irregular patches of bleached out colour would not do. We shopped at the Sally Ann where we found a pair of blue slacks which I objected to but my girlfriend insisted were just right, a businessman’s white shirt with stiff, starched collar, and a sports coat brownish in colour which seemed to me to match my social position as a humble, slightly rumpled student. My girlfriend tried to interest me in a row of bluchers and oxfords but I went instead for a pair of black cowboy boots elaborately tooled on the upper part and barely scuffed in a few spots on the toe. Having won on the slacks she gave in graciously. Freshly shaved, showered, combed, ironed, brushed and polished we would step out onto the street and, walking proudly with heads up as if we were special ambassadors of unsoiled and shining youth, make our way to a restaurant or movie theater to meet our couple.

   Dates with our couple gradually diminished and finally ceased altogether. Not enough in common. No doubt my eyes glazed over when they described a series of enamels they were considering for shelves in the library or they thought my girlfriend’s attitude toward the placing of accent pieces in the vestibule to be too lighthearted or even disrespectful. They, not having any intellectual interests unassociated with furniture and dining rooms and thus ignorant of the possibilities of literary intoxication, would have seen me as a low life bum devoid of ambition and hopelessly ignorant of the finer things in life. My girlfriend was perhaps sex besotted and having her fling at slumming with a bad boy. The winding down was a relief to both sides. We still saw one another at the university, even having coffee on occasion, but the old magic was gone and no amount of artificial respiration could revive it.

   My friends were mostly bohemians and eccentrics. One, old and very close, upon meeting a female wearing bright red lipstick would start a conversation by speaking of the relationship between lips painted artificially red and the reddish colouring of the labia in the aroused female. Another talked obsessively of Marcel Proust who he was reading for the sixth time. He would go on for an hour on the deliciously depraved personality of that aristocratic warhorse the Baron De Charlus. He was in love with the Duchess Guermantes and thought Jacklyn Kennedy a fly blown floozy in comparison. Yet another began all conversations with a factual report on the latest discoveries in Astrophysics. He assumed everyone was familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If he discovered they were not, after holding his head in his hands for five seconds to show his complete shock, he would clasp their hands and preach chaos theory at them until they promised to read a list of books he was jotting down for them on a restaurant napkin. My girlfriend made an effort to like these pals of mine but they were not her cup of tea. She was far from a conventional person but she did not share the sense of outrageous rebellion which possessed them and indeed possessed me. She was never at home with them and found their passions and obsessions to be truly bizarre. She had been brought up to see conversation in its ideal to be light, polite and genteel. Bohemians, of course, insist that it carry more significance and meaning than ordinary social conversation is willing to bear.

  Parting with my girlfriend was a long, drawn out affair lasting almost a year. There was no definitive scene. If terrible things were said they were said to friends and confidants not to each other. Sex became awkward and infrequent. Dates were cancelled; calls unanswered. Visits were missed without explanation. We were both somewhat sad but knew there was nothing to be done. A cold water flat was not for her. A professional office was not for me. If we had met some years later it might have been different. Time and experience might have given us greater dexterity and savoir faire. But we were young, 19 and 20, and were incapable of the flexibility and subtlety required of us. Sometimes when I think of her I feel ashamed I let her down. I wonder if she feels the same? Possibly, but such feelings are useless now for all this was long ago, in the past, in another century even. Middle aged, engaged in other loves, other failures, all that is between us is wistful fantasy, quickly exhausted phantoms.

   The last time I saw my girlfriend was just after friends told me she had a new boyfriend. She was with him walking a downtown sidewalk across the street from where I was waiting for a bus.  The bus stop was crowded and I was at the back of the queue so even if they had looked my way they would not have seen me. But they didn’t look my way. They were too engrossed in one another, speaking excitedly as they walked along. The boyfriend was a strikingly handsome man you would have picked out of a crowd. He was going to law school. I was a bit jealous. I have to admit that I wondered if their sex was as good as the sex we used to have. But overriding this jealousy was a sense of relief. She didn’t kill herself. She didn’t go crazy. She picked up the pieces and found herself a proper man and now would have at least some measure of human happiness.