AS USUAL, ALMOST EVERYONE IN THE HUB was at least a decade younger than I was. The men’s voices were without any thickness and the women sounded like movie stars when they laughed. Lariats of smoke coiled through the air in this Wild West tavern, a perfume which engaged every human sense. Right in the centre of the campus, we gathered here each evening to feed on darkness and possibility.
I talked to Nicky, the bartender, who was a student himself, his choppy hair made blonde at the tips, wearing a small gold hoop through his left earlobe. I straddled the stool, lifted a pint of lager, and looked around. This is when I saw the girl.
Most British Columbia girls look like they just returned from an overnight hiking trip, skin glowing with health, wearing something useful for the scratchy bushes of the trail and sensible trekking boots that navigate gravel as easily as alpine grasses. They are a vibrant clan of Girl Scouts who can hang upside down from monkey bars or lift themselves to the chin a dozen times. With one hand pushed into the backs of their jeans, they drink girlish pink drinks, their faces shining with health and well-educated possibility.
This young woman had pale skin, almost white, a delicate geisha amongst the Olympians. Her face was long and thin, her hair almost black, and she was draped in a short green sarong skirt. Her small rounded belly was visible below the tank top, and clinging to her navel was a tiny emerald jewel. She stood with a group including two other girls in baggy cutoffs, and a muscular youth wearing oversized jeans who spoke loudly, stupidly, to make them laugh.
Except this smooth-faced girl was not laughing. She was looking at me through the haze of cigarette smoke. So with my smile I indicated the empty stool next to mine. Then I waited. I would see how she walked, for a woman who approaches a man must never take her eyes off him, never show fear or uncertainty.
This girl whispered something to her friends, who gave me bored glances, then she made her way towards me, hips swaying, and there was no self-conscious giggle or foolish shyness.
I straightened, took a deep breath, and felt every muscle sharpen.
I could smell her, dusted with some sort of rose fragrance which cut through the cigarette smoke.
“You are beautiful,” I said when she was close enough, for I had to honour this creature who dared step away from her clan.
She blushed, a slight pinkening of that soft, white skin. Her smile wavered only for a second.
I took a quick gulp from my beer, uncrossed my legs and stared at the whole of her, from her narrow feet clad in a pair of sandals, up the slender calves to her small rounded knees, the thighs, hips, belly, and the tight black top. She watched my watching with the easy amusement of a woman who is used to being admired.
“You’re pretty old for a student,” she said.
“This is because I am not a student. I am a writer, a poet-in-exile.”
Her hazel eyes narrowed. “I think I heard about you. Don’t you have an office in the tower?”
I nodded.
“I’m an English major so most of my profs are over there.”
She eased herself onto the empty stool and crossed one leg over the other, causing her skirt to ride high over her thighs. She did not make one of those fussy gestures that insecure women make, tugging the skirt in a show of false modesty.
“I’m Patty.” She held her hand out to shake mine.
Her wrist was encircled by half a dozen glass bangles, and when I shook her hand, we were not colleagues making a brisk transaction, we were a man and a woman touching for the first time. I held her hand, not shaking but gently squeezing. She didn’t pull free, but allowed this gesture to linger.
“And I am Carlos.” I let her hand drop, reluctantly. “Why did you come to me?”
“I thought you looked interesting.” She paused, running her tongue over her lips. “Older.”
Music pulsed out of the speakers, some electronic rhythm without words. Hanging from the ceiling on either end of the bar, giant TV screens played some quiz show: who is the current wife of Brad Pitt?
“Where are you from?” Patty asked.
As I told her she nodded, remembering. “I read about you in the paper.” She darted a glance back at her friends. “You were in jail or something.”
I shrugged. “In my country, when you create provocation against the government, they are not happy.”
She leaned forward, to hear better, and I stared at her breasts swelling above her skimpy top. With only a small effort I could have touched the flesh with my tongue.
“Did you write poetry that got you in trouble?”
I hesitated. I thought of the General’s nasty ear with its bitten off tip, as if in childhood a pet had lunged at him. The source of my trouble.
“My poetry is erotic, not political.”
She sat back, just a little.
“I do not want to speak of my difficulties,” I told her, giving a dismissive gesture with my hand. “This is just my sad, personal history. And I do not want to make you sad.”
Patty hesitated. “I’d be really interested in seeing your work. I took a minor in Comparative Lit last year.”
“Then I will read it to you. First in Spanish, then in English.”
“That would be so cool.”
“I invite you back to my house, on this perfect British Columbia evening, and I read you my verse from the lowlands of my crazy country.”
“Tonight?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Another day perhaps you will have forgotten me.”
I waited for Patty to gather her nerve, to be the woman I knew she was, and I hoped to hell Rashid wasn’t poking around the kitchen back home frying some stinky late-night meal. I could already feel my tongue sliding down her neck, and thought of how two nights earlier Rita had patted my thigh before leaving, humiliation thickening the air.
“I should get back to my friends,” she said, but her eyes didn’t move from mine.
I shrugged. For of course I would not force her.
“Matt’s pretty touchy.”
“Matt?”
“He’s my boyfriend, sort of.”
“That young man who wears his hat indoors?” I lifted my eyebrows.
“He’s actually pretty nice.”
I didn’t respond.
“Well…” She slid off the stool. “It was good meeting you.” She held out her hand to shake mine again.
I stared at her. So, she would go to her sort-of boyfriend in the T-shirt which advertised some resort in Cuba, and after drinking another drink they would neck in his car, and he would release her magnificent breasts from the flimsy fabric, and because she was a polite Canadian girl she would do as he asked.
I could not let this happen to a beautiful woman who knew she was meant for much more.
Ignoring her outstretched hand, its delicate wrist circled by bangles, I said, “I am sorry, Patty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The arm lowered and she hooked a finger through the waistband of her skirt. Now she did not look so certain.
“When you walked towards me ten minutes ago, I saw a woman who was not afraid of her body.”
“I hope that you are not shy of your desires.” I felt like an old man saying this, giving advice. Perhaps she would laugh.
Patty’s mouth opened, revealing a pink tongue and her small white teeth. Of course she had never heard one of her Vancouver boyfriends say such a thing. It took her a moment to decide how to reply.
“I have no idea who you are, Carlos, or what you might do.”
“I think you know exactly what I might do.”
A pause. The noise of the music pulsed between us, all around us, an animal rhythm.
“Whatever.”
She was leaving, her back to me now, her friends watching, and the boy, Matt, glaring, waiting to discover if I had insulted his girlfriend.
Insulted. That’s what they call it here, when you tell a woman she is attractive.
I swallowed the rest of my beer. Perhaps I had had too much to drink: I was becoming too much myself. Suddenly I couldn’t stand all the innocence and young, unseamed faces. They looked like burn victims, flesh pulled tight across their cheekbones.
“Put it on my tab,” I instructed my good friend the bartender, and before he had a chance to protest, I got up to leave.
I pushed through the crowded room, pressing my way between damp, sweaty bodies, perhaps the only one who wasn’t laughing at some shared joke, and I felt her coming, following through the knot of people. I heard her impatient voice mutter “Excuse me,” yet I didn’t look back, kept moving up the short flight of stairs, pushing open the heavy door until I’d escaped into the night.
There I waited for her, lighting a cigarette while I leaned against the concrete wall, breathing in nicotine and the rich fishy ocean smell that washed over the campus when the sun was down. It was the most familiar smell I could imagine. In my city you can still walk down to the port at night and see the nets spread out to dry and the gleaming torches of fishermen making their repairs.
“Carlos?”
I pinched the match until it was extinguished, then tossed it on the ground.
She looked almost frail now, her skin pebbled by the breeze.
“Maybe we could see each other some time, for coffee.” She was panting a little from hurrying up the stairs.
“Come here.” I beckoned her closer.
After a small hesitation she obeyed, and I slowly reached to touch the side of her neck where the pulse throbbed. It seemed to calm her and after a moment I lowered my hand to the neckline of her top, following the rules of gravity. Then I stopped, flicked my cigarette to the ground and tipped her chin so she was looking straight into my eyes. “Do you want this?”
I waited for an answer, our bodies barely touching, a distant thud of bass beat sounding from the cellar bar.
She would hear her own voice make its demand. I could see her surprise that this man did not dissolve before her beauty like all the others.
“I do,” she said. “For sure.” Her words made her electric to herself.
I began to kiss her then, nudging her soft lips open, and felt her tongue instantly alive against mine. Below, her naked belly leaned in tentatively but I didn’t press back, not until she insisted by becoming bolder, scooping my ass with her hands. This was a Patty she’d only guessed at, dreamed of. My hands touched her hair, her neck, her small ears, nothing hurried, no frenzied boy’s passion. Each inch of her body would be honoured. I lifted her chin and saw that her eyes were closed, her cheeks deeply flushed and I kissed her once on each eyelid. She rocked from side to side, that firm belly now locked against mine.
“What the fuck’s going on here, Patty?”
The sound was grotesque, a fart in the princess’ bed chamber.
We hadn’t heard the door swing open. We’d missed the ten seconds of released smoke and music. And we certainly hadn’t heard his steps across two metres of concrete. The boyfriend emerged from the depths, eyes wild and bewildered, pants hanging halfway down his hips.
Reluctantly I pulled away while Patty’s fingers trailed up my spine.
Her voice sounded sleepy. “It’s no big deal, Matt.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” His long arms hung at his sides, his bow legs astride the pavement, and he still clutched a beer bottle by the neck.
She went over to him and settled one of her thin arms over his shoulder, and he stiffened to prove that she could not lessen his anger so easily.
“Who are you?” The beer bottle stuck out towards me.
I told him my name, unapologetically.
“Well Carlos whatever, get the fuck out of here.”
Patty’s arm moved up and down his back, reassuring, but still he refused to acknowledge her presence. She looked bored now, her chin settling on his shoulder, waiting for the performance to lose steam, and then she would take him by the hand and lead him home.
I pretended to look at my watch, though it was too dark to see the time.
“It is late,” I said. And I gave the smallest bow to the woman who had almost been my lover.
Behind the boy’s back she lifted a hand and returned a small wave. I believe she was laughing.
I lay on my bed in the married students’ housing, where the walls are leavened with the moss of ocean air, vegetal barriers like Communion wafers, and I listened to the medievalist fuck the anthropologist on the other side of this thin wall, mimicking a position they’d learned while visiting some obscure tribe up the Amazon. And I knew that this is how I would spend endless nights in Canada, listening to mating cries from a remote kingdom.