John
Woolfrey 1089 words
1729
Rue de la Visitation
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
H2L
3C3
(514)
597-2189
Vers l’est du
gros Q
Copyright 2005 by Raymond John Woolfrey
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
Jacques was a
Gitanes-smoking Québec nationalist who
hated to speak English— “It hurts my mouth,” he said. He was a slim man of my
height (six feet) with a shock of thick, black unruly hair and a bony forehead
that sloped over thick eyebrows and piercing black eyes. His nose was hooked,
his nostrils flared, and a luxuriant moustache bristled over lips that were
hard but sensuous. He usually wore a Greek fisherman’s cap and a five o’clock
shadow. He made me think of Stalin.
He was twenty-six—so much older, it seemed
to me then, than my nineteen years. He picked me up at a gay dance at McGill
University late one November. He wasn’t my type at all. I tried to get rid of
him but he persisted and hauled me onto the dance floor for a slow one. Before
long he had a hard-on. I got one too—I thought this was so daring, having one
in public. He rubbed his against mine as we danced. Once I was aroused he had
an easy time getting me to his place in the East End. It wasn’t very far
in—just a few streets past Saint-Laurent Métro—but I’d been to very few guys’
places so far, and none in the east.
Through the cold night we climbed an
outdoor staircase that turned and twisted inside a brick cage up to his
third-floor flat. Once inside, Jacques turned up the flat’s only heater and
we made out before its hot, dry blasts.
To a boy raised in a suburban two-storey
house thinking the rest of the world had three bathrooms, everything about his
place seemed exotic. His bedroom was off the living room—not down a corridor
like West End apartments—and instead of a regular bathroom with toilet, sink
and bathtub/shower, a big, four-legged tub and the sink with separate taps were
in one small room, and in another, closet-sized room next to it stood the
ancient toilet with its wooden tank way up high that you flushed with a chain.
The kitchen contained one sole set of wooden cupboards above a low counter. The
free-standing sink was like a large laundry tub, and in a corner stood a grimy
gas-fired hot-water heater. And, though there was nothing behind the building
but an empty lot, the kitchen windows and the back door looked right across a
narrow court at the identical kitchen windows and door of the adjacent flat.
In the living room stood a magnificent
harpsichord. Over the next few weeks Jacques played for me, sometimes staring
at me so intensely I felt self-conscious and had to look away. But I could
listen to him play for hours. Today I still feel a special magic when I hear
it; I’m still not sure whether it’s because of him or because it really is a
magical instrument, speaking of ancient times of cold and misery and finding
hope and love through the mournful and joyous pieces written for it by
Couperain and Bach.
That night Jacques and I had sex in his
room on a mattress on the floor. We had to leave the door open to let the heat
in as we slept, and throughout the night his kittens came in pestering us to
play. In the morning Jacques poured rich-smelling coffee into bowls. I’d
never tasted anything as good before—I didn’t even put milk in it. I’ve often
had coffee like that since, at guys’ places in the East End, and in France.
He had an aroma that entranced me. I don’t
know how to describe it, because it was nothing I’d ever smelled before, nor
since, exactly. A mixture of Gitanes and his own musk, I guess.
He was the archetypal separatist—I don’t
know why he wanted an English boy like me from “the Town of Mount Royal,” as he
called it—he said it made no sense to call it Ville Mont-Royal because it was
so English. He only spoke English when I didn’t understand something, and then
he made a point to show his contempt for it.
He grew ashamed to be seen with me in
front of his nationalist friends. I had a hard time understanding what they
said—they all talked so fast among themselves, their words all running into the
other, consonants and vowels swallowed up. I couldn’t catch their jokes. I
tried to speak like them, but Jacques only disparaged me. A waitress scolded
him once for calling me a barbarian when I ordered a 50, a beer he considered
too middle class. He’d cultivated a “Bohemian” life, but he was from the upper
middle class like me (his father was a doctor); he was even circumcised.
After three months he’d had enough of my
adolescent obsession with him and he dumped me. He was my first boyfriend and
it took me nine months to get over it. From the time after Christmas when we
broke up, as I moped at my office desk, hoping he’d call or later in summer as
I floated on an air mattress on the lake, a scene from that first night haunted
me, and has ever since: The kittens had awakened me. As Jacques slept, I
raised myself to peer outside his bedroom window. Big, fluffy flakes of snow
were still gently falling. The twin rows of kitchen window sills and decrepit
wooden balconies flanking the view were covered with the dim, night-time white
of the snow that had fallen. Directly ahead, about three blocks away, through
the scrim of the falling snow, I could make out the fuzzy outline of the big
letter Q with its lightning-bolt tail on the Hydro-Québec building. To
me that Q represented the east end, with winding outdoor staircases,
rich-tasting coffee, the smell of natural gas, mattresses on the floor—maybe
even a harpsichord or viola da gamba—and black-haired men who know how to make
love with their bodies and souls.
It was still snowing the next morning as I
left his flat and trudged though the snow. Halfway along I stopped to look
around. Everything was so quiet, the air smelled so clean, the snow on the
curving staircases and rusting mansard roofs so white and pure, my footsteps on
the street the only tracks. The lovemaking that had reached so deep within my
soul the night before glowed right to my skin and I’m sure from my eyes.
Transported emotionally as well as physically, I knew I was coming back.