Self (18 page)

I eased myself beside her. I pressed myself against her, one of her legs between mine, trying to feel as much of her body against mine as possible. I felt as if I were drunk. I didn’t think I had ever felt so intensely while doing so little.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she said, smiling, short of breath.

“It’s nice,
very nice,”
I replied, burying my face in her neck.

“I’ve been masturbating the last couple of nights thinking about you,” she whispered.

“Really?” I looked up. I loved it that she had used that word.

“In fact, when you suggested that we get a room together my first thought was
Oh no, where am I going to masturbate?”

We laughed. How extraordinary that the same thought hadn’t occurred to me. I masturbated every night before falling asleep, and always in bed. Yet the inconvenience of having Ruth in the same room had never crossed my mind. We kissed again.

Finally to break with Elena. To desire someone else.

“Have you slept with other women?”

“No. Once, long ago, probably before you were born — God I feel old.”

“Yes?” I nudged.

“This friend and I kissed and fooled around a bit. But that was it.”

We fell silent.

My drunkenness got a keen edge. I was feeling incredibly horny. I was holding on tightly to her leg and rubbing myself against her. I was wet right through.

She smiled, a knowing smile, and turned to face me, propping herself up on an elbow. She cleared the hair from my face and gently drifted her fingers down from my forehead, kissing me in their wake. She ran her hand over my body, lingering over my breasts and pressing between my legs.

She suddenly got up. “Too much light,” she said. She closed the shutters and pulled the curtains. The penumbra of intimacy. She checked the door, and stood looking at me. I was on my knees on the bed. I was nervously, deliciously tense.

She came close to me again and, while we kissed, hands began to act of their own accord. Hers slowly unbuttoned my shirt, undid my bra, held and caressed my breasts. Mine wavered in the air, accommodated the removing of clothes and then settled on her shoulders. I stood on the bed, my pants and underwear were assisted off — and I was completely naked. Ruth gently took one of my breasts into her mouth. She glided her hands over my back, from bump of shoulder-blade to curve of bum.

I did not so much help her remove her clothes as trail my hands behind the task as it was done. As soon as she had removed her pants and underwear — I can see it still: she bent over, steadying herself with a hand on my hip, first one leg,
then the other, then standing straight — I touched her between the legs. Her light brown hairs were silky, softer than mine, and she was wet, wet at the first touch. What an incredible feeling, a sameness that is someone else. She caught her breath.

She pushed me onto the bed. We lay body against body, skin slightly cool at first, soon very warm. We spoke little; our sentences were short and practical — secondary language. Mostly we spoke with our hands. A communication that even had the structure of a conversation: she spoke with her hands, and my body listened without interruption, then my hands replied on her body.

Such a lovely form, the feminine form — so soft, so open, so receiving. Ruth had small breasts, smaller than mine, with nipples that had fed two girls and a boy. Her euphemistic tummy, which had produced three babies, twenty-seven months’ hard work, had a little bulge, which she hated, which I loved. I always placed my hand on it, as one would on a globe, which is exactly what I thought her belly was like — a slight curve that traced a history and a geography. A globe representing the planet Tuesday (I was young and eager: I wanted to put
everything into
words. My metaphors — which I worked on hard — made Ruth roll her eyes. “A planet! Oh, what next? College students!” she said, and laughed, and kissed me. Always a kiss). My body was fit only for plain adjectives: young, slender, nimble. I liked it plenty, don’t mean to say the contrary, it has always been faithful to me — I had nice breasts, not large but pleasing in their shape, and though my legs were a little thin, I was well proportioned — but it was barren ground for rich metaphors. I hungered for a sexual history.

Ruth ended up speaking the most that first time. With her hands, I mean (later she would speak to me with her mouth, oh me oh my). I lay on my back, she on her side, right next to me, her legs tucked against my bum under my legs. Her fingers roamed, eventually drifting to the gravitational centre of my desire.

When I came, I squeezed my legs together and pressed my hands onto her hand, to keep her there, on me, in me. It was amazing and perfectly ineffable. That floaty feeling.

I felt giddy with life, overflowing with it. If I had taken hold of a light-bulb at that moment, it would have lit.

“Good?” said Ruth.

I broke out laughing. For once I didn’t try to put things into words. I turned and kissed her and kissed her breasts and glided my hand down. She was so wet, so so wet. As I rested my head on her chest, and her hand, whose fingers smelled of me, distractedly played with my hair, I titillated that wetness. As her breathing grew more urgent, I held onto her more tightly. When her body tensed and she burst with inner pleasure, I closed my eyes. In the dark I could see fish darting about.

I remember that first time with Ruth, in that liquidly dark white stage of a room in Greece, as a moment of perfect felicity.

After Methoni, Koroni. After Koroni, Kalamata. After Kalamata, Mistra and Sparta (“Is this it? Is this
really
it?” said Ruth in disbelief, looking at a stump of rock nearly overgrown with grass, typical of the few remains of great, ancient, masculine Sparta. “Yes, but don’t worry,” I replied. “You’ll like Mistra. The Byzantines were wonderful”). Then down the Mani. Then over to Monemvasia. At every step Ruth enjoyed further
pushing the openness of her airplane ticket. I don’t recall any discussions as to
whether we
should proceed, only as to where. Ruth called Philadelphia regularly to touch base with Tuesday, Sandra and Danny (Graham was staying with his father, in Baton Rouge). The three kids would share the phones in the house. Tuesday, the woman in charge, home for the summer from Simon Fraser, told her mom that Danny repeated word for word what she told him to whoever cared to listen; so that when Ruth said, “We’re in, uh, Rhodes, like the Colossus, and we’re leaving tomorrow, uh, by boat for a place called Marmalade, or something like that, in, uh, Turkey. Oh! It’s called Marmaris,” Danny would tell everyone, “Mom’s in, uh, Rhodes, like the Colossus, and she’s leaving tomorrow, uh, by boat for a place called Marmalade, or something like that, in, uh, Turkey. Oh! It’s called Marmaris.” He repeated the words aloud even when he was alone, Tuesday said, “like a mantra,” until she called again and gave him a new one. “He doesn’t even know where Turkey is or what the Colossus of Rhodes was,” she added. There was a little spite in her voice, Ruth said. I guess they were right in wondering what their mom was up to, whose two-week-or-so trip was into its second month, with no end in sight. All hell broke loose at the mention of
Turkey!
, which they always pronounced as if it were written with an exclamation point, land of would-be Pope-killers and the Midnight Express (“But I’m neither the Pope nor a drug dealer and the Turks are actually very nice, nicer than the Greeks, in fact, and I just got you a beautiful carpet,” said Ruth; “but Mom’s neither the Pope nor a drug dealer and the Turks are actually very nice, nicer than the Greeks, in fact, and she just got Tuesday a beautiful carpet,” said Danny said Tuesday said Ruth to me). Still, she, we, travelled. The phone calls to Philadelphia
got longer the longer we were in Turkey, and Ruth carried around a carefully wrapped kernel of maternal guilt about Danny, but still we travelled.

We heard that the Greek islands were overrun that summer with tourists, mainly British, so we decided to step around them and go to Crete. We backtracked from Monemvasia to the ramshackle port city of Gytheion — where, in a tiny open-air cinema, projected against a bed sheet to the loud clatter of the projector, we watched what must be the worst American B-movie in history, a piece of such outrageous but deadly serious badness,
The Sudsy Massacre
, starring blonde nobodies, that it stayed with me for years, exactly like great art — and from Gytheion we caught a ferry to Crete.

We walked through towns, we rented mopeds and sputtered into remote mountain villages (one during its annual festival), we caught vistas that were vast, rich and green, we lay on deserted beaches (one so inaccessible that we stripped and swam naked), we hiked through the Samaria Gorge, we visited museums and archaeological sites, we caught noisy, crowded buses, we had Ruth’s camera fixed in Heracleon, and every night, every day, we made love and slept together in cheap hotels.

Everyone assumed that Ruth was my mother, and we let it go since it made things easier. But it became a running joke between us that each time this happened Ruth muttered under her breath, “I-am-not-your-mother.”

We landed upon Crete’s left end. When we reached its right end, we needed a new destination.

It was I who suggested Turkey!, so close and so enormous, and surely with fewer tourists. We hesitated — the country
did
have a bad reputation at the time — but we decided to go
for it. After a night in Rhodes, we embarked on a nutshell of a boat for Marmaris, reassuring ourselves that if things got bad, Ruth’s credit card would be our magic carpet out of the place.

We were nervous at customs — we’d both seen that movie — but it was the Turkish passengers who had all their luggage opened and thoroughly searched, while we were waved through with big smiles. Our passports received such thunderous stamps as to cripple them for life. Mister Hairy-Armed Official was so gleeful in delivering the blows that I thought
he was
one who should have been checked for drugs.

We crossed a threshold and advanced a few steps. The sunshine was warm against my face. I noticed a young man who was trying to catch my eye.

Which I let be caught.

“Are you looking for room?” he asked, with a smile that was neither menace nor malice, just friendly.

“Yes,” I said, my first word in Turkey.

Ah, what a country! Strange how a place so big, such a maelstrom of history, can yet fit into my heart.

The room we were shown was clean and rustic, with bright bed-covers and carpets, in a four-hundred-year-old family home with a doorframe only five feet high, and very cheap.

When we were alone we sat on one of the beds. “This is nice,” said Ruth.

“Yes,” I said, again.

We had an unpleasant encounter a few days after arriving. We were on a quiet, deserted beach when some American soldiers appeared. When they realized that we spoke English, and one of us was American to boot, they came over to talk to us. Friendliness is a good quality, but it should be accompanied
by other qualities. Otherwise it is like gift-wrapping an empty box. These boys — I say boys though they were all older than I — were posted at a NATO base in Turkey and were “R’n’Ring” for a few days. They hated Turkey. Nothin’ to do, nothin’ to see, miss my girl, miss my wife, miss my football games — they had thick necks, and brains that wouldn’t have overflowed a thimble. One in particular stuck in my craw. Perhaps he thought I was feeling left out. To reassure me that I was no orphan, that really I too was part of the Great American Family, he told me that there was no difference between Americans and Canadians. He was from Michigan, was his evidence. Same language, same TV, same culture, same everything. He wore mirror aviator glasses so I couldn’t see his eyes, he imposed his scrawny white chest on me as if it were a work of Michelangelo, his tone of voice made it clear that he was speaking the plain universal truth and — as if that weren’t enough to whip my internal rage to a froth — I could think of little to refute his border-erasing arguments. I pointed out that both Australians and New Zealanders spoke English, yet they were from different countries. Yeah, but New Zee, as he called it, could have been a part of Australia if it had wanted to, like Tasmania. Or like Hawaii with the U.S. They just used the ocean as an excuse to have their own country. Or look at Austria and Germany, he persisted, a bulldozer of reassurance. I was posted in the south of Germany, was his evidence. There’s no real difference between the two. Or no more than there is between the north and south of Germany. Austria could perfectly well be a part of Deutschland. Really. Same language, same culture, same country, that’s what I say, he said.

I was at a loss for words. I searched among the icons of the Canadian
Gestalt
— maple syrup, beavers, niceness, the Queen,
no guns — for an essential difference, an originality, something to War-of-1812 about. But the only irrefutable difference I could come up with was that I
wanted
to be different. I looked at my hegemonic comforter and I thought,

I deflected things by asking him what he did in the army.

The air force, he corrected me. He was a mechanic for military jets.

They eventually left. With their Frisbees, footballs, ghetto-blasters and beers, which they offered but no thank you.

“They’re not very nervous about being in Turkey, are they?” said Ruth.

“No.”

She patted my thigh. “I could tell you were upset by that mechanic.”

“I’m not American.”

“Of
course
you’re not. Nor am I your mother. Canadians are very different from Americans in lots of small, important ways. I’d
never mistake
, you for an American.”