I MET MARION IN A BOOKSTORE, a big place with lots of magazine racks, on Queen Street West, where else? This was when I first came to Toronto and I used to hang out a lot at some of the clubs around Queen & Spadina, which used to be the centre of the old garment district but is now clubs, restaurants, bookstores, and a lot of young trendy clothing stores, Kimono, Africa, places like that. That was at least 2 years ago, more probably, I don’t want to think about it. We haven’t really gone out together for a year & a ½. I shouldn’t think about it. I have other stuff to think about.
We met in Pages, which is a really good bookstore across from Le Bistingo, a restaurant none of us could afford to eat in. She was reading some magazines, copies of Vogue, Elle, I don’t know what all. I was glancing at some of the, uh, literary magazines. Not that I have any pretensions of wanting to be a writer or anything like that, but I did a number of English courses when I was at college out west, before coming here to live in the big city, multiculturalism, millions of people, money floating up and down in the elevators of 60-storey buildings. Anyway our eyes met, I was standing fairly close to her. I’m here in Toronto to show them, after a while maybe, what a Manitoba boy can do in regard to business, and of course I’m interested in meeting people, right? So, our eyes met.
Her’s are huge and blue, now that’s a cliché, it’s also what they call a received image. But fuck it, some people do have large blue eyes. Marion really does. They’re huge and blue. Not huge and blue and innocent. Her face is innocent, I guess, most girls have innocent faces when they’re nineteen. I’m 26 and I look at least 28. She’s 19 and she could be any age from 17 to 30. One of those faces, ineffable, that’s a good word, and just a shade common, not that I’m anything special, I guess, beautiful and sort of knowing, with these huge cool faintly speckled blue eyes.
So our eyes meet, and one of us laughs, and we start talking. I ask her if she’d like to go for a beer and she says sure, let’s go to the bar at Garbo’s, which turns out to be this fairly swank place, normal prices at the bar, and the bar itself in question is a huge long solid dark wood bar from the original Grand Hotel in Brussels where Greta Garbo stayed at least once or twice and perhaps drank at this very bar, and where Sarah Bernhardt used to stay and where she too perhaps leaned forward on her elbows and drank, I don’t know what, Belgian beer perhaps or maybe cognac.
This was the beginning of my infatuation, correct word, I think, with Marion. I don’t know what love is. I know what sex is. I think infatuation is hard to define but it means you’re impressed with the other person, and curious about them, as if they have tricks you’re impressed with but you don’t quite understand. Pete Wilkins used to pitch for my high school team in Manitoba. He had tricks, he had a pitch that he called the floater, for example, it was like a sneaky pink lady gin drink of a pitch. But I wasn’t infatuated with Pete, I just admired him in a way. Anyway.
So we started going out together. And I was shocked after the first or second night by how sexually uninhibited she was. I guess I should have been pleased. Well, I guess I was. But I was also shocked. She did things with total abandon, casualness, and great pleasure, that I had only read about. Innocent guy, what can I say? But I wasn’t that innocent, not really. She was extreme. She was hot. She was a scorcher.
And drink? She would get up out of bed, we would be at my apartment over Donaldson’s Hardware store on King Street, and stroll as casually as a relaxed sleepwalker over to the kitchen counter area, after an hour or more of all-out fucking and sucking, and stand there at the counter relaxed, leaning forward slightly or raising one graceful white arm to the top cupboard, weight on one angular hip, looking as cool and calm and perfect as a model in a fancy Vogue ad, or Elle, perhaps, one of those magazines she was reading that day we first met, in Pages, dressed in a loose western shirt unbuttoned to the point where you could see most of one breast, a pair of faded black jeans with pink ankle socks, and a fairly useless print cotton skirt over the jeans. She was beautiful. Sometimes in certain light she would really look, I thought, like one of the great beauties in the history of the world. In bright afternoon sunlight she looked commoner. She had magnificent, write-your-movie-magazine-a-fan-letter eyes. She had an almost perfect body and, strangely, that often seemed one of the lesser sexual aspects about her.
You can probably see this story, or its first main point, coming from a mile away, like a bunch of cattle hoving up in the landscape somewhere west of Winnipeg.
We lasted for about 3 months. It was pretty close to 3 months. She slept around, I think, just about every night we weren’t together, and that was quite a few because I was working late until 8 or 9 o’clock Wednesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Fridays as well. I don’t think she even cared that much who she slept with. They were people, I came to realize, that she met on the street, on streetcars, in cafés, sitting outside in the warm weather or sitting inside reading a book, usually a biography of somebody like Edie or some Monaco princess, or bars of course, or clubs. I was working for the Coles book company. They’re a franchise. They own dozens of soup-to-nuts bookstores across the country. I started off in the head office, went to the main warehouse for inventory training, I didn’t need any, and was then put in charge, significance, of the downtown Yonge store for what turned out to be a long time before I was promoted further.
So our eyes would meet. Those huge yellow-flecked blue eyes, like big flowers of some kind, wild flowers, and she would say, “Oh, nothing, I just hung out for a while with Cora.” Or Pat, or Jane, or Serena.
And then she moved in with somebody, a guitarist, by the name of Steve, I’m not sure if he has any other name. But we would still see each other. Nothing to do with borrowing money or anything like that. And not exactly what you would call emotional support. I mean we wouldn’t have conversations where she would say, “No, I’m not doing very well,” and then I would say, “How can I help.” No, it wasn’t like that.
I would get off work around 9 o’clock and meet Marion for coffee, a snack, she has acquired strange eating habits, or maybe a drink, at this club or that restaurant, nowhere special, and we would just talk. And she would often seem stronger on me than ever. Sometimes we would go back to my place and fuck. She would get up from the bed and stroll over to the kitchen counter area with that languid walk, reach one slow lazy perfect white arm up to the cupboards and pour herself a big snifter of cognac from the bottle I kept there, 2 or 3 of them actually, mostly because I thought it was classy, like other little things I do to make myself a bit more distinct, less of a cowboy, red braided leather belts, galluses, that’s what they call them in Toronto, yellow paisley galluses, in Manitoba we call them braces but in Toronto the big moose call them galluses. She would drink it slowly but without interruption, standing with her back to me, 4, 5 ozs, rolling her lovely blonde head slowly from one side to the other, releasing a short clear gasp of pleasure after the last sip. Then she would come back to the bed, put one knee on the mattress, lean down and say, “It’s late, I guess I’ve really got to go now.” And I’d say okay.
There’s a whole area of Toronto which I think is committed to the establishment of a world-state stock market backed up by major engineering companies, big hospitals, mining concerns, giant Mies van der Rohe office towers and so on; and there is also a whole area of Toronto which is a sort of neon Rome, committed to the destruction, the scorch and burn of puritanism in their own lives, a sort of casual and graceful surrendering to the moment of pleasure.
I’m working at a respectable job for the moment. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I wear a white shirt and a loose blue smock-type jacket to work every day. I read a bit, I take streetcars, I don’t have a car, I listen to 1000s of songs.
Marion wakes up in the morning, which is usually around 2 in the afternoon; a piece of toast slathered with butter & jam, a telephone call, she’ll sometimes use a whole tube of shampoo in the course of one shower, a trash magazine, a $10.00 copy of Vogue, she just surrenders, glides through, rubs up against, sniffing, turning her head this way or that, strokes her own body, her lithe stomach, rolling her hips against the door frame as she talks to somebody.
I go through a lot of mental reasoning at work. I do klutzy telephone-operator scenes out of Lily Tomlin, just for my amusement, for Paul’s or Harry’s amusement, I really like her, I think she is really an incredibly talented remarkably brilliant woman, slowing things down, putting in unnecessary gaffes and hooks, the whole bit, one of the secretaries comes back from the washroom and she says, “The washroom’s in a real mess.”
Whereas Marion just pads across the bare green lino tiles of my apartment over the hardware store on dark King Street above the lake as gracefully as a punk model. She hasn’t had an assignment for about a year, except for a couple of underwear ads a few months ago. She’s 20. She has a perfect mind, no concepts, but at the same time infinite, blue like the sky, housed simply as an observation point behind a lovely face at the top of a casual body.
I’ve been reading some of the books at work, I’m OK, You’re OK, that’s an old one, I think, I read that a couple of weeks ago, but yeah, I’d like to shake things up a bit, I don’t know what. I’m too restless to sleep all day, you have to have money, even South American wristwatches with funny umbrellas on the face cost money. I go on working, and listening to music, because that’s where it’s at, but I don’t even go to clubs very much in the evening. Marion goes out and comes home late, I’m not always sure where she goes. “O God, I’m not doing a thing with myself.” Or, “One of these days, my parents are going to kill me.” She likes to illuminate the perfection of her life, even the act of eating a piece of cold pizza out of the fridge at 4 o’clock in the morning for supper by stressing tension with her parents. They’re 2nd generation Ukrainian. Hard-working yokels who have made good money, in the restaurant business, and retired to Richmond Hill at the far north edge of Toronto. Lots of room and a well-earned backyard. Who keep waiting for Marion to become a fashion model.
My parents are German and Italian, they have a farm, out in Manitoba, and, apart from the farm, they don’t have a great deal of money. I guess they spend it all on the cows.
What may start wearing off, I think, is the self-destructive thing. I was thinking the other day about how much vicarious pleasure I seem to get from Marion’s different attitude games of throwing herself down and seeing how beautifully she can get back up. Of course, she gets a cheque from her parents. But I do enjoy the way she flirts with excess. Not that she’s started turning up with dark circles under her eyes. She never shoots dope. Maybe that’s what I should do, come to think of it. Maybe I should get hooked on white stuff, horse, smack, quit my job, straighten out, and then write a book about music. I’m just a neat guy who failed bass Fender guitar in high school, or something. She snorts a fair bit, not at home, but I know she does with friends when she’s out, this club, that club, hangouts.
And she’s dependent, in various ways. Cool, but it turns out she’s dependent, first one, then the other.
That’s what’s different about Paul and Harry at work. They don’t hang around the clubs that much. But they are cool. And funny. And they’re not dependent.
We’re just crazy about each other, I guess. So maybe this is cool, or cool for right now. I seem to spend a lot of my time going back and forth to work on the King streetcar, reading magazines, listening to Jane’s Addiction on my Sony Walkman, and Parachute Club, and Cowboy Junkies. Cowboy Junkies are a Toronto group. They’re different, they’re very hot right now.
What she enjoys about me is, I think, the image she has of me coming from Manitoba, clean-cut vibrant young farm stock. O that’s me, clean shaven, and I even use a touch of Brylcreem to keep the cow-lick down. She likes that.
She likes to think of herself as beautiful and doomed. I sent out for pizza or Chicken Chalet one night, it was late, we had just made love. She was walking languidly across the green lino tiles of our main room saying something really non-sequiturial about “Tough pickers play from the hip.” That’s something about us. We both like music terms.
And I said, I was lying on the bed, naked, a cool breeze coming in off the lake or at least off King Street, ½asleep, “You mean young pickers play the blues down low.” And she said, That’s a nice phrase, yeah, I like that. So I kept it. They play down low and they call it punk, but it is a blues lament kind of sound, like a white dove with its throat cut released in darkness, that turns ice blue before it flies up into the light.
I turn 27 in December. My own concept of punk and the pleasure of flirting with excess, making danger, or death, or simply going over a line and coming back, into a substitute for living by a set of rules, and after all I obviously do live by a set of rules, is more of a cowboy image, an image of somebody who can do these things but not get lost in the pleasure of their own absorption.
But she’s beautiful, there’s no two ways about that.
Other things are hot right now. I get hot at work sometimes when certain things don’t work out right. That isn’t a very good sentence, it’s not very clear, not clear like some of the pictures in the art gallery I was looking at over the weekend, we went to see a friend do a performance piece, he read a short essay from some almanac, about chickens, with an egg in his mouth while he read. I guess that’s trendy. I walked around and looked at the pictures. I have to read more, I’m not going to give up my interest in music, but I have to read more. This is hot.
A certain indefinable scent, the sex is so good I find it difficult to motivate myself in certain directions. It’s easier for me if I think about certain things while I’m at work. I keep the Walkman on a large part of the time. I do take-offs on Richard Lewis for the guys in accounting when I go in to check an invoice against our computer inventory.
Marion is probably moving anyway. Who knows? Toronto is traffic city, it’s far out. Some of our jokes. She is the only person who takes my ex-philosophy major, for 2 years, heavy comments about Hawaiian influences on the Pixies, Frank Sinatra crossing over and being reborn as David Bowie, Sinéad O’Connor as a strangled choir girl, stuff like that, as opposed to my doing impressions, mugging, things I know I’m good at, seriously. So I would miss that, I think.
I only listen to music away from work for perhaps an hour a day. I almost never read the junk magazines. Ok, I sneak a look. I know I have to read more. It doesn’t matter what I want to do, I know I have to be more open to ideas. Sometimes when we’re making supper together, she’s got black spandex and a short skirt and one of my underwear vests on, some simple thing, putting rice and tomatoes in an oven dish, something like that, our eyes meet, and I start laughing, I’m in a good mood, my eyes are dark and a little strained, I’m always trying to come up with the right move, her eyes are like the ocean.