-A novel in progress
ZELDA AND Maria hadn’t left more than five minutes when my phone began to ring. I was still sitting at the round café table looking out my window at the billboard of the half-naked girl on a sunny Caribbean beach. It was way after four, and I could hear the din of weekend traffic on the freeways beside the lakefront about a mile to the south. These periods with Maria and her mother, whether at their house or at my studio, always left me in a pensive, lethargic mood, as if I was experiencing and relinquishing pleasure simultaneously. My ringing phone was like a faraway sound in an amorphous future. It was like my own S.O.S summoning me to rescue myself. I had had the phone hooked up in a narrow space, about three feet wide and eight feet long, made by the protrusion of a defunct old warehouse freight elevator next to a wall at the end of my studio. Sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up beside rolled up failed canvasses, cardboard sheets and cylinders, plastic, torn billboard posters , and other potentially useful rubbish, glancing back at the studio’s bare open space always gave me the feeling of a life like a blank page waiting to be filled with writing.

“Pronto!” I answered, like I was in one of those precious black-and-white Fellini or Antonioni films with Marcello Mastroianni.  Monica Vitti, or Alain Delon.
“Pronto yourself buddy!  Get over here pronto and tell me some more stories! Don’t you like my *****  anymore? It’s dying to have you in it again.”
“Annabella you know how I feel about you, but I had to leave early this morning, I told you I had to keep my daughter today, she just left with her mother.”
“I know I know! But darling I want to cook you some dinner. How about some shepherd’s pie, then cherry pie with ice cream for dessert? Then later I’ll grind some Blue Mountain Jamaican beans and we’ll sit up in the loft with a Thai stick and watch one of those old Film Noirs they’re running late nights. Tonight it’s ‘MACAO’.”
“‘MACAO’? With Mitchum and Jane Russell at their best!”
“You saw it?”
“Of course I did. It’s got an interesting production history. Apparently Mitchum and Russell got its director, Josef Von Sternberg, fired halfway through the film because he was such a controlling totalitarian freak and censored their freedom on the set. Nick Ray took over the direction, but his name doesn’t even appear in the credits.”

“Tell me about it when you come over later, OK?”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll be by around seven.” And suddenly I felt a craving for Annabella again. I was seeing her round ‘apple’ with its faint russet down bent before me as she tucked in the end of her bed sheet; I was seeing her luscious moist pink lips as she flung back her long fiery hair while adjusting the TV on her knees; I was seeing her face, like her body, rising and falling before me, my hands sliding up and down the deep curves of her hips. All this advertised itself like an antidote to the listless depleted feeling I felt within for something. . . something. . . a family, a child, a home curtailed,  I suppose. Their pleasure returning only in bits and pieces, not in the conventional continuity I had come to know over four years of married life, during which I could never dedicate myself domestically as much as I had dedicated myself to inanimate objects made of canvas, and paint, and words on paper, or to moving images of humans and the world projected on screens; the very vocation that had introduced Zelda to me by making an impression on her. Of course I could always buy Maria children’s books, take her shopping for clothes and toys, popsicles and cracker-jack and bubblegum. . . and to Maria at six, that was the experience of happiness and love she enjoyed about me, along with these strange places, these studios  — this wasn’t the first, just the first that was mine alone —  the funny  deserted  industrial areas I lived in, the funny pictures I made, the funny bed — the hammock — I slept in. . . and I was dedicated to her happiness, I was grabbing it with both hands now. The very separation my social failures were causing us to endure now also became the terms of our endearment. Yet it would be Zelda, with perhaps some future husband, who would finance Maria’s formal education, and perhaps she would grow up to be one of those trendy girls in the art world, familiar with Paris, London, New York, Venice, perhaps settling somewhere affluently remote, and I would perhaps by then be a childhood memory, accessible, but left alone. . . in the same way that my parents in this city now, a phone-call and subway ride away, had become. . . like an outgrown need for that first experience of love we biologically knew in childhood. I was here in this city, this country because of them, having experienced like them all the negatives they had feared would ruin their concept of their country, after the violent political and racial upheavals, the destructive arson of the 1960s, and stifling early post-colonial one-dimensional justifications had driven the educated entrepreneurs and merchants, the intellectual culturati, to sell out their cinemas and bookstores and nightclubs before fleeing to Barbados, or Canada, or the USA, or the UK.

I was heading down the hallway for a shower, intending to go over to Annabella’s apartment above her little Health Food store, when a feeling of undefeated communal optimism and ebullience came over me as I recalled that the very portable shower I had donated for the benefit of all the other artists whose studio doors I was walking by, had been a gift to me from a voluptuous blonde English girl. She was a stained glass artist I had been introduced to by an Italian girl, another stained-glass artist I had met at the Museum Of Fine Arts restaurant, and had my first brief affair with after separating from Zelda. For some reason I don’t remember now, I had found myself completing a few long narrow canvasses in the English girl’s bright sunny studio, its tall windows overlooking the lakeshore. One bright sunny morning I had strode into the English girl’s studio anxious to continue work on one of the large canvasses. She must have been in a good mood herself — a few days earlier she had introduced me to her boyfriend, who I knew drove an expensive Porsche and came from a wealthy family  — because as I bent over my painting which lay on the floor I realized she had been moving around behind me, and I assumed it was to do with one of the  stained-glass pieces on which she was working on a long table. But then I heard her voice unmistakably saying in a quiet confident and caring tone, “You want to —-?” I kept doubting my ears, working as though I hadn’t heard her, stunned by my own embarrassment, even though I loved the offer. I felt the moment stretch itself out to an exhausting length, until her statement or question evaporated into the atmosphere of passing time as though it had never been said. When we faced and spoke to each other again, it was indeed as if nothing had been said; yet her face glowed fiercely rose with the after effect of what she must have felt was rejection, or perhaps it was simply the biological state of need she was in, which by not being face-to-face when she said it, our incongruent positions must have rephrased and projected as MY desire HER true meaning, which by the guilt of her demeanour should have been phrased as: “I want to —-.”

I was thinking like this as I showered, remembering the beauty and comfort of her studio, the plush sofa,  the electric kettle for cups of Earl Grey tea, or cherry-flavoured Columbian coffee, the unopened packs of whole wheat cookies on a nearby table beside a
bottle of Grand Mariner and three tiny liqueur glasses. I was thinking I must have missed one of the best —- in my life. I imagined we would have used her sofa, which had probably been used that way before,  supposing she must have intended, hoped, imagined the whole event would be passionately scandalous, compelling her thick languid body to become agile, vulgar, and welcoming. It was what I would have wanted. She was one of those types whose body-hugging fashion was usually of thin colourful layers of exotic gauzy material, like Oriental fabrics, and I could see her allowing me to playfully rip it off her solid thighs with one gesture. Who did she remind me of? No English actress. . . no she was more like Hollywood dames, perhaps Kim Novak, or Carol Baker, or better yet Jean Harlow. Yes, that was it! Harlow. I would have had to fulfill her fantasy of a brown-skinned tropical exotic from one of Britain’s former colonies. . . that historical relation  of course could not be denied, but now she would willingly give back to ‘me’ as I had given to ‘her’, as I had been forced to.  Yes, it could have been that: She was returning the painful favour in the frankest pleasurable manner she knew after all her colonial prohibitions, opening herself on her couch, allowing me to make her cry out in sado-masochistic pleasure as she evolved towards an unravelling succulence beneath our rhythmically slapping bellies.

Alas, none of this occurred. But I did give her one of the first collages in the series that some senior artists and curators had suggested to me could win an Arts Council award. We became such caring friends based on that un-acknowledged and unconsummated moment, that when I finally found my own studio she presented me with the shower in hers, and had it delivered in a pick-up truck to the old warehouse building in which I was now enjoying its use.

I walked down wide, clean, and mostly deserted Adelaide St., its name above ‘Fashion District’ in purple letters on a metal plate at the corner I turned, heading north up wide Spadina, then east on Queen another three blocks, before turning north on McCaul, on my way to Annabella’s place a few corners away. The memory of the English girl had turned me on, I guess, though there was no flesh on her memory like there was on Annabella’s vision within me. I knew from experience what lay in store up in her apartment to which I was heading like a man bent on erasing the residues of a bitter-sweet day that had defined a familial pleasure that was mine, yet not mine. Perhaps I was being pushed or pulled to Annabella’s with the same unconscious logic that had made us attracted to each-other from the start. It was not until a month or so after we had started sleeping with each-other — the first three days we spent mostly in bed, going only to the refrigerator and washroom, she not even bothering to open her store below — that we started admitting that we had love for each other. We were seen on the sidewalks embracing in frosty weather; I in tight striped trousers, Sir James cream calf-skin boots, busted mitts with my fingers poking through, pressing her wide hips in tight black velvet trousers into my waist. A certain popular inter-racial couple on the downtown scene. It took  another month for us to confess our peculiarities: That the pints of semen I had already shot into her, indifferent to whether she would conceive or not, perhaps blindly desiring to replace my loss of Maria with another child, added up to nothing because of Annabella’s infertility caused by an old botched abortion, she finally admitted one night; that I had more or less been supported by my wife for years, while publishing essays in avant-garde periodicals and having art exhibitions, all of which made me admired, yet neither activities adding up to even half the amount of money her financial post provided. Annabella and I must have realised that our mutual deficiencies defined us as a matching couple by default. And of course our difference in colour and country was so passé,  it merited no consideration whatsoever by either of us.