Liberation

At approximately eight-fifteen on a mild Montreal morning, a black LaSalle taxi pulled up to to 1279 Redpath Crescent, a large, three-story house in a quiet neighbourhood that claimed, by right of affluence, a view of the city from half-way up Mount Royal. Three men got out of the taxi, one of them carrying a wrapped present, and asked the driver to wait. There was a long flight of stairs to the front door, so the taxi driver could not see the men as they approached the door and rang the bell. He could not see the Greek maid answer the door and could not hear the young man say, in broken English, that he had a birthday present for Mr. James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner to Canada. A receipt was required.

The driver could not see the woman hesitate — why would anyone need a receipt for a birthday gift? — and missed the part where the three unmasked gunmen pushed past the clucking housekeeper and forced their way in toward the bathroom. The radio was on, and the driver could hear, but paid no attention to, Janis Joplin, who’d died that very morning of a drug overdose. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. . . . The driver was engrossed in his paper. He liked to keep up on the news.

The detail “unmasked” is not superfluous, since the gunmen were supposed to be masked — the plan clearly called for the men to wear hoods to cover their faces — but in their excitement the kidnappers forgot to put their hoods on. It was a serious mistake in an episode in which one serious mistake followed another. They’d encountered Cross just as he stepped out of the bathroom, wiping the excess shaving cream off his face with a dry towel. “Get down on the floor,” one of the men caw-cawed to him, displaying his gun like proud plumage, “or you will be fucking dead.” Cross complied.

The gunmen handcuffed Cross, then pushed him — comfortably dressed in a checked sports jacket and slacks — toward the front door. It was a mild Montreal morning, a Monday, and the three young men took it as a sign that fate was on their side. Not God. He had been exorcised from their province ten years ago and now clung only to old women and curates, tapettes mostly: fairies. They stopped at the door and told the commissioner’s wife that they were members of the Front de Liberation du Québec and that they were taking her husband hostage. It was the twelfth terrorist kidnapping in the West since September 1969 and the first outside Latin America. It was October, 1970. Revolution was in the air.

Two details stuck in Sondra’s mind. The first was the checked jacket. Every single reporter went out of his way to mention that Cross was wearing a checked sports jacket at the time of his abduction. One guy on the TV even gave great detail about the jacket, describing the size (42 short), the fabric, its texture, the brand name; he went to a men’s clothing store and found another jacket of similar colour and style and tried it on for the benefit of any viewers at home who could not at that moment go to their own clothing stores and try on similar jackets for themselves. Considering that it was off the rack, Sondra thought, it fit the reporter well, accentuating the breadth of his shoulders while masking somewhat his slight hunch and little potbelly.

The second detail was the birthday present. Was there actually something in the gift-wrapped box, Sondra wanted to know, or was it empty? And if there was something in the box, what was it? These were the sorts of questions a man would never ask. They were more interested in times and dates and jacket sizes, the measurable data. Objective reality.

She was studying the Polaroid picture of James Cross in the paper and thinking of the difference between photographs and statues. He was seated on a wooden crate, looking up at the camera. He wore a dark work shirt, obviously a gift from his captors, and played a game of solitaire. Sondra would have liked him to move the jack of hearts onto the queen of clubs. Statues, she concluded, are an imposition of history, an attempt to lock the past into the present, the past imperfect, so to speak. Photographs, specifically snapshots like the Cross photo, freeze the present and pull it outside of history. (There are, of course, historic photos, that is, photos of historic significance — the Cross photo is only one example — which exist almost wholly outside history.) Photographs are a kind of literature, in which attention must be paid to character and setting and voice and tense and the powers of light and darkness. Cross was looking up, neither smiling nor frightened, appearing, in fact, a little peeved for having had to stop his game and pose.

James Cross had laid his cards on a battered storage trunk used as a makeshift table and sat on a wooden crate turned on its end. On closer inspection, Sondra saw the word “dynamite” stencilled on the side of the box. She wondered if the photographer had asked Cross to smile or say cheese, or did he just call his captive’s name and catch his subject, as lovers sometimes do, off guard. She wondered if James Cross was comfortable, seated on the box, and thought that perhaps he might like a cushion.

. . .

People assumed, when they heard Sondra was a feminist and unmarried, that she was a man-hater. Of course men reacted this way, particularly the older ones who’d grown up when notions of paternalism went unquestioned, but women too, and not just some women but most women. That she had been married was irrelevant (indeed, it only offered further proof of her hatred, or better yet, it clarified her bitterness — not that she was bitter, but she’d heard the talk and mapped the logic on her own). The fact was that Sondra was not a man-hater. The fact was that she loved men. Her own father, for example, she’d loved dearly, although he’d died when she was barely a teenager. And others, many others. The only difference between her and other women was that she’d made a conscious decision to free herself from the archaic thinking that allowed a man to behave as he pleased while a woman had to suffer by another standard. Her decision to take a married man for a lover, for example. She was not Étienne’s mistress, as no doubt others (and no doubt he) thought. She chose him exactly because he was intelligent and elegant and married, and in that way could offer her everything she wanted from a relationship without bringing into it expectations greater than she was prepared to manage. And the others. Her position at the university, not to mention her private practice, afforded her plenty of opportunity. No. She wasn’t a man-hater. She loved men, and she respected them. If they saw something they wanted — a job, a car, a lover — they didn’t pussyfoot. They took it.

She was discreet and as honourable as she needed to be. Patients — clients, as she preferred to call them — were generally off limits, as were students. Generally. Avram was an exception, and there had been other exceptions who typically fell into one of two categories: men who were particularly together, who entered the relationship, like her, with their eyes wide open, expecting pleasure and novelty and temporary companionship and nothing more; and those who were apart, who seemed in need of the sexual attention of a woman who was particularly sexually attentive. These were not, to use the vernacular, mercy fucks, but carefully crafted therapeutic interventions. Then there was a third, much smaller category, which in actuality consisted entirely of Avram, a category reserved for men (and, up to this point, a man) who, unlike men in general, whom Sondra loved, not despite the fact they were men but because of it, she found herself loving in the particular. To be clear, these three categories applied only to men with whom Sondra had relationships, as opposed to men (like Étienne) with whom she had a relationship. So while she was in love with Étienne, a respectable heart surgeon with a quiet, sturdy wife, a man with whom she was having a relationship in a very specific sense (and within the very clear, in her mind, criteria she had set up) and was comfortable with that, she had found herself falling in love with Avram, with whom, by her own definition, she was not having a relationship, and with whom she would never, for a variety of reasons (his age, her intellectual needs, their long-term sexual incompatibility), have a relationship. This was unprecedented, and it concerned her. More than anything, she disapproved of the indiscretion. The photograph. That was a mistake. A tactical error that captured Sondra in a moment of weakness and froze it in time. She had resolved to get the photograph back. Not ask for it back, as a woman might. She had resolved to go to his apartment herself. She would go to Avram’s apartment and take it back, like a man.

She hadn’t noticed him at first. He was one of those boys who sat at the back of the class with his head down and his mouth shut. He had never once raised his hand to ask a question, and Sondra had quickly learned not to bother asking him one. He would stare at his notebook without answering. Not that he wasn’t attractive. When you finally noticed him you realized that he was beautiful, with fine features and smooth skin, still wrapped in the androgynous petals of adolescence. But he was shy to the point that Sondra suspected he was suffering from some manner of neurosis, perhaps stemming from a deep-rooted sexual conflict. He was, no doubt, a virgin. And she was content to let him remain one, deciding almost consciously to pay no attention to this student who clearly did not want attention to be paid. There were plenty of other young people in the psych survey course, many of them quite eager and a few of those, she suspected, rather brilliant.

One morning, though, on her way from her car to her office, she noticed him — Avram — sitting at the edge of the fountain. He had his head lowered, as if he were reading a book in his lap, and remained almost motionless. His long hair fell before his eyes, and Sondra had the feeling that he was peering through this brown veil, watching her.

He was there again at the end of the day when she walked from her office to her car, and again the next morning, and so on and so on for days, his head down, the invisible book open. She began to notice him in class too, not that was he taking a more active role, but that he seemed to concentrate his energy on not looking at her. But, and this is critical, she did not sense any aggression on his part. There was this tremendous, pervasive passivity in his body language, which reminded her of clients who were victims of physical or sexual assault. He shared the impassive affect, the lack of eye contact, the centripetal gravity that drew all the extremities inward, sucking him into a fetal ball. There was one significant difference between this boy and her clients, though. What they lacked was the aura of innocence that encircled Avram. They had been corrupted, spiritually speaking, by their experience with the world; he had yet to open up to that experience; he had yet to be corrupted.

In the beginning, Sondra overlooked the boy’s attentive non-attention. She was almost flattered in her way; one never knew how to react when a student had a crush on oneself, and surely that lay at the root of his behaviour: an adolescent, biochemically charged infatuation, perhaps inflaming his ambiguous sense of sexual self. In time — and not a long time, frankly — she found herself growing more irritated with Avram. She’d catch him in the middle of class with his head lowered and turned away from her. If she was on the right side of the room nearest to the door, he turned his head left, toward the window. If she strolled to the back of the class, as she now sometimes did almost to observe to what absurd lengths Avram would go to avoid looking at her, he would avert his eyes to the front of the room, concentrating on a square of tile near the blackboard or the metal wastebasket by her desk. And then she found herself angry at him. It was Étienne who first pointed out the significance of this. They were having lunch at the hospital commissary — they were very open about their relationship, or as open as one could be when one was having an extramarital affair in Toronto’s airtight atmosphere — and she was going on about Avram. She was saying that she might report him to the department head or even ask to have him removed from her class when the elegant doctor, beads of potato soup condensing on the tips of his old-fashioned moustache, remarked that she had now been talking about Avram for, by his watch, a full thirty-eight minutes.

“There must be something very special about this young man that he should arouse,” Étienne spread the word like warm butter, “your passion so.”

That stopped Sondra cold.

“I’d suggest,” he said goodnaturedly, “and bearing in mind that I’ve seen inside more hearts than any man I know, that you’re harbouring some feelings for this student, and I’d suggest further that your anger stems, as anger usually does, not from the boy’s behaviour per se but from your inability to control his behaviour. No — I see that look and I agree. Control is not the right word, or rather, it is the right word but the wrong connotation. Let me put it this way. You are frustrated because he is just a child, yet he has out-manoeuvred you through the deliberate manipulation of his inattention. By not wanting to look at you, he has made you want him to look at you. Of course, he has carried it to a ridiculous extreme because, I think, as you do, that when you get right down to it, he is rather disturbed.”

It was Étienne who encouraged her to take Avram as her lover. He looked on it as a challenge and maintained that, without engaging in such adversity, the human spirit, to use his perfect term, calcified. Of course, she immediately became suspicious. When a woman encouraged her partner to take a lover, it was because she was utterly tired of having him in her bed. But when a man suggested it, it usually meant he was about to sleep (or had slept recently enough that he still felt remorse) with someone else. Étienne sensed her concerns and protested that, with her and his wife, he already had more women that any man could reasonably handle. He assured and almost convinced her that he had only her best interests at heart. In fact, he said, he found the whole idea of her taking a young lover rather erotic.

Now, it’s one thing to decide to take on a lover and another thing entirely to actually take that lover on, although in Sondra’s experience, the woman always had the upper hand. It was a matter again of subjectivity versus objectivity. Approached by a woman who offers to take him to bed, a man never looks beneath the surface. Of course she wants to take me to bed, the man tells himself, regardless of how unappealing he considered himself moments before. A woman in the same circumstance will always ask herself why. Why me? Why now? By the same token, a man has much less capacity for turning a woman down because objectively, based purely on the observable data, it doesn’t look good. Does he find her unattractive? Well, surely, after a point, that doesn’t matter. Is he afraid he doesn’t measure up? Is he a homosexual? Rarely does a man want to explore this subterranean universe, so he almost always takes the easy way out. If a woman asks him to bed he says yes. Society demands it, the fraternity of men demands it, the cock demands it.

But Avram was not so simple. Being an introvert, he was less inclined to be swayed by the forces of society and fraternity, and being grotesquely shy and (as Sondra surmised) ambivalent about his own sexuality, he was disinclined to follow the capering of his sex organ.

“Why don’t you take him to one of your little orgies?” Étienne suggested. He was teasing, of course. It was something she noticed that older men often did to younger women, tease them, a subtle way, she supposed, to reiterate their dominance.

“They’re not orgies, they’re encounter groups. And I’m afraid this boy’s ego isn’t ready for such an intense experience as that.”

Sondra favoured the direct route. One morning, on the way from her car to her office, she stopped at the fountain and invited Avram to join her for coffee. That’s when he did it: he looked directly at her for the first time. That’s also when she realized how beautiful he was: brown-black hair which fell into his eyes and nearly reached his shoulders, black eyes, unblemished skin the colour of weak tea, lips as thick and tender as a young woman’s, and recognized too that his discomfort (he was visibly embarrassed; his face and ears flushed, his hands shook, his voice quavered as he almost whispered, “No”) enhanced his beauty for her. His vulnerability excited her, and her own aggressiveness in the face of this vulnerability increased. She noticed how her body language changed in response to Avram’s passivity. She stood more erect, her shoulders fully back, and her eyes were as unwavering as his were unfocused. And suddenly she understood why men didn’t need foreplay: the chase was stimulation enough.

The next morning, he wasn’t waiting at the fountain and did not come to class. Sondra began to worry that she’d been too aggressive, too direct. She found herself passing the fountain five or six times that day and the next and had almost given up on seeing him again, perhaps ever, when, later that evening, as she was returning to her car to go home, there he was. Sitting at the fountain, desperately not looking at her. He was in his shirtsleeves and seemed even from a distance to be shivering in the descending cold. He coughed, and, picking up the cue, Sondra went to speak to him again. This time she was more tactful. She’d missed him in class, she said, and had worried that something had happened to him. She told him the class valued his input and managed to make a lot out of a trifling thing he’d once said during a discussion on manic-depressive illness. He coughed again, and Sondra offered him a ride home. Avram sat for a very long time, measuring his frozen breath, before he wordlessly assented. The car ride was predictably quiet. Sondra made an effort to start a conversation, then lapsed into a monologue, then simply turned up Stravinsky on the eight-track. He almost seemed relieved when she shut up. He relaxed in his seat.

“Do you think they’ll kill him?” he asked, after a long, long silence.

Sondra was taken aback. She had no idea what Avram was talking about, and she found the question and the way he framed it with silence almost a threat in itself.

“Kill who?”

“James Cross. Do you think the FLQ will kill him?”

Illuminated, Sondra relaxed, but before she could respond (the simple answer was no, but Sondra was prepared to give a much more detailed analysis), Avram stopped her. “I like your car,” he said. “I want to get a car like this someday. I want to get a car exactly like this.”

And that was it. She dropped him off a few minutes later by a rack of student apartments near the bus station. He thanked her very politely, exactly the way, Sondra thought, his mother had taught him. And he looked at her again as he shut the door and kept his eyes on her as she drove off. He stood on the corner and watched as she drove away and did not move until the car was out of sight.

In a note left in a garbage can for the reporters at radio station CKLM (the unfolding crisis was the last great radio news event in the country, perhaps the world), the FLQ took credit for the kidnapping of Cross, a “representative of the old, racist and colonialist British system.” In retrospect, the separatists’ demands were realistic: there was no call for the overthrow of a repressive political system, and while they did refer to the goal of “total independence” for Quebec, they clearly held no illusions that this kidnapping would further that end. What they wanted was the release of twenty-three “political prisoners” — men who’d been arrested for a variety of terrorist acts perpetrated by the FLQ over the previous ten years. Men like François Schrim, a Hungarian-born career terrorist and former French Legionnaire, who shot and killed the manager of the International Firearms Company during an attempted robbery, and Robert Levesque, a twenty-nine-year-old plumber who faced a string of convictions including armed robbery and bombings. Along with freedom for their comrades, the kidnappers wanted safe passage to Cuba or Algiers for themselves, the political prisoners and any family members who wanted to join them. They also wanted half a million dollars worth of gold bullion to help finance their new life, calling it a “voluntary tax.”

The Cross ransom note was unsigned, but police already had a very good idea of who was involved in the plot. Central was Jacques Lanctôt, who had been picked up eight months earlier in a rented delivery truck carrying a sawed-off shotgun, a man-sized storage trunk and a press release announcing the never-perpetrated kidnapping of Israeli trade consul Moshe Golan. Lanctôt and his accomplice, charged at the time with possession of a restricted firearm and conspiracy to kidnap, disappeared into Quebec’s underworld shortly after they were granted bail. Along with Lanctôt, the police also had their eye on his sister Louise (who did not go to the Cross house) and her husband Jacques Cossette-Trudel (whose father had been named five days before to the National Energy Board by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), Marc Carbonneau and Pierre Seguin. Collectively, they called themselves the Liberation Cell.

In Sondra’s estimation, two discoveries had advanced the cause of women’s independence above all else: the pill and the Polaroid camera. The pill granted women power over their own reproductive cycle and in an instant turned the traditional patriarchy on its head. Women were now free to enjoy sex without having to worry about its consequences. While Sondra was certain that motherhood was one of the greatest joys a woman could experience, she was equally certain that the demands of motherhood — the burden of taking responsibility for a child — forced women into subservience. Meanwhile, the Polaroid camera was helping women move to the next stage of evolution: for the first time, women could not only create and distribute images of sexuality that appealed to them directly (and specifically, these instant pictures gave every woman the power to be her own pornographer), but they now had the power to objectify men as men had historically objectified women. And that was not necessarily a bad thing, for the key to the liberation of female sexual expression, and therefore the key to the political and socio-economic emancipation of women in general, lay in their ability to objectify men, to see them as sex objects.

It was this political inclination toward Polaroids that led Sondra to pose for Avram. Even at the time she had her reservations but convinced herself that they were hypocritical. In the encounter sessions she led, Sondra often encouraged participants to strip down and photograph one another, literally tearing away their boundaries and baring themselves before the unwavering eye of the camera. It was Sondra’s belief that people had to become comfortable with their bodies and with the image of their bodies they carried inside their heads, before they could become comfortable with minds and egos and souls.

So Sondra agreed to pose, although “pose” is an extreme exaggeration. They had only just finished making love for the first time (Avram coming, almost the instant he’d entered her, under the stern watch of Che Guevara ) when he caught her unawares. He’d gotten up on the pretext of going to the washroom, and Sondra saw the flash a moment later. Avram stood like a guilty child as Sondra’s eyes adjusted to the light.

“I want . . . I want to have a picture to remember you.”

And that was Sondra’s opportunity. On the one hand, she felt violated; on the other, there was a certain charm to his passivity, to his fear. So Sondra did not object and did not, as she easily could have done given the circumstances, the photograph from his hand. Instead, she let him keep it but insisted that he must now pose for her. She made him lie on the bed with his head on the pillow. At first he tried to cover himself with the blanket, but she kicked it aside roughly.

“Put one arm behind your head,” she told him, adding, when he did not immediately respond, “quickly now. And now lift your leg a little. The other leg, please. Just let your foot lie on the bed.”

He seemed willing to comply with her every instruction, and with each order and response she found herself growing more forceful.

“Now touch yourself, with your free hand. Not there!” She leaned down and positioned his hand over his tired cock. “I want you to play with yourself. Close your eyes and play with yourself. And keep it up until I finish taking the picture.”

How she’d finally got him into bed was another story. It took weeks of gentle manipulation to get in a position where she could make her move. Eventually, he allowed her to come up to his apartment. They stood by the doorway for a very long time, but each time she leaned forward to kiss him, he would recoil and turn his head. She would retreat, and he would turn to look at her again with his soft eyes. Advance, recoil, retreat. Advance, recoil, retreat. Finally she’d had enough. She pushed him back against the door and kissed him hard on the lips. When he tried to turn his head, she held his chin firmly with one hand. Soon she pushed her tongue into his mouth, and she could feel his body responding. That’s when, and this is the funny part, she picked him up (surprised at her own strength, her own force) and carried him into the apartment. She looked around the barren room and saw, under a huge black-light poster of Che, a thin mattress lying directly on the floor. She dropped him on the mattress, which served as his bed and, no doubt, his couch and kitchen table and work desk, and ordered him to undress. And when he didn’t, she started to do it herself.

Sondra did not keep the photograph. It neither aroused nor disturbed her but only de-eroticized the experience. This skinny boy caught in the unflattering shadows was not the beautiful young man she’d taken to bed. She tore up the picture to give the moment entirely back to memory.

Étienne had laughed when she told him about the picture Avram had taken (laughed, that is, not in a condescending way, but with empathy, from the perspective of one who understood completely the pitfalls of taking a lover). He laughed again when she told him he she was going to get it back.

“To the victor go the spoils,” he said, perhaps to tease her, or perhaps because he knew that, at that moment, he needed something elegant to say. And he laughed one more time, almost to himself, and again, not to put Sondra down but in simple appreciation of her adventure.

It was a season for adventure. The Cross kidnapping, the FLQ, the declaration of martial law, not to mention the waves of political, social and sexual liberation sweeping the country, made this Anglo-Saxon enclave where she lived seem almost cosmopolitan, almost dangerous. Everyone knew anything could happen (although certainly nothing would); Toronto — Canada — was growing up. Sondra found herself rather sympathetic to the FLQ. She saw in the kidnappers kindred spirits, not just in the larger political sense, striking a blow against oppression and the parochial status quo and its corporate-military sponsors, who espoused democracy while dictating a rigid social order, but also in the smaller, personal sense. They had come to reclaim what was theirs: their identity, their nationhood, their sense of self. That was her goal too. Both were victims of a conquest of sorts, the only difference was scale. They wanted liberation, the right of self-determination over their own land; she, on a political level, wanted equality and self-determination for womankind, which meant, in large part, the destruction of the artificial borders that define ideas of gender. And on a more personal level, she wanted self-determination over her own image; she wanted her damn picture back.

Avram lived on the top floor of a three-story building with garbage piled up in front. The squalor was typical of not just the student slums but much of the ethnic quarter of inner-city Toronto. She could smell the food cooking on a dozen hot-plates: some chicken soup here, a curry there, something heavy, bacon perhaps. Radios and record players sang from every corner, rock music and arias and even a fiddle, as static-coated announcers talked excitedly about the kidnappers and the crisis they’d precipitated.

Sondra knocked and waited. Avram had called her several times since the night they’d had sex; she could tell it was him because when she answered the phone there was no one on the other end. He hadn’t been to class either, but there was not much different about this. Sometimes he came, sometimes he did not.

Sondra knocked again, then, finding the door unlocked, she let herself in. The light was on in the tiny bathroom, and Sondra could hear the shower running. Better for her; she could finish her work without causing a scene. She quickly searched the room. The dresser drawers were empty except for a few clothes. She found the Polaroid camera on top of a makeshift bookshelf, but the photograph was not with it. She looked in the bed and under the mattress and on top of the miniature fridge and in the coffin-sized Ardmore that served as his clothes cupboard and pantry. Nothing anywhere.

That’s when she thought of the poster. She peeled back the yellowed tape and turned up the corner and then, in her shock, tore the poster down.

She stepped back. The water was still running. She could hear him moving in the little stall: maybe he was thinking of her right now? Pleasuring himself, perhaps?

Sondra counted. One, two, three . . .

She stopped at thirty-six. Not because there were too many to count, but because she realized that the exact number was meaningless. Woman and girl and boy and man — all of them captured unawares, some covered, some half-draped, some fully naked. Some seemed surprised by the sudden flash, others angered; most smiled, the way we are conditioned to do whenever a camera is pushed in our face. Here and there — the younger ones mostly — had thrust their legs apart or moved their hands onto themselves. Already they were looking to the future, anticipating the pleasure this photograph would bring to the photographer. Individually, the pictures seemed poorly composed and constructed, with far too much shadow and black space, but collectively they held a certain unmistakable power. They were dark and sexual and cold, and every person (again, thanks to a quality of the light) blended into one.

Her own snapshot was near the bottom, wedged between a much older woman, probably in her fifties, heavyset, who managed to smile just in time to have her picture taken, and a teenaged boy, still with his baby fat, the camera flash making a ghost of his white skin, apparently sleeping.

Sondra looked toward the tiny bathroom. She thought of confronting Avram, of pulling him out of the shower by his ear, like a cartoon schoolmarm, and force him to explain himself.

She felt now as if she were captured in a larger photograph, a moment glazed and mounted in time. She looked again at the collection. She wanted to reach for hers, in the bottom right corner, flanked by the old housewife and the ghost boy, but her hand would not go there. She felt a soft anxiety — guilt, perhaps, or a momentary wish for atonement — then began plucking the other photos from the wall. Avram could keep the one of her, it meant nothing now, just another image in a series of disconnected moments. The rest of them she’d take. She piled them neatly in her hand, careful not to crease the edges. This had been Avram’s secret. It belonged to her now.