Lost Woman: September 3, 1986
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| To drink, perchance to dream: Waterhouse's Destiny, 1900 |
Don't know where to run to, don't know where to hideI see my future comin', like the rising of the tide . . .—Yardbirds, "Lost Woman," 1966
I was just such an exile myself, of course, Alberta having become the latest destination for Maritimers fleeing the stagnant economy of their homeland. What I had fled, however, was my personal sense of failure and confusion, my conviction that I did not belong. I had become, in a sense, a refugee from university, from adulthood, from wordly success. Now here I was, back at Square One, and I sometimes found that time was playing the same old tricks on me. In idle moments, walking between classes in the nostalgic light and shadow of a late winter afternoon, for instance, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I’d been here before, a lifetime ago. A different school, yes, but that same tremulous balance of exhilaration and gloom I felt as I watched the other students hurrying along. Also the same persistent intimations of some Platonic bubble of middle class happiness and security they lived in, some ultimate, ideal university and society, always there from this time to that. These feelings lasting only a few seconds at a time, I could never quite grasp them. Vague vignettes of happy cliques of bosum buddies sharing their secrets and dreams, proud parents snapping photos on graduation day, homecoming football games in the crisp of autumn, contented suburbanites washing their cars in driveways on lazy, sunny afternoons – sentimental, yes, but persistent, and at such moments much more real than anything I might aspire to. An eternal vision, from which I was excluded, or had excluded myself, and one from which mere geography, I now realized, offered no refuge. In fact, here in Calgary I had run smack into the very incarnation of that vision – Laura Clapperton, whose Mount Royal charms had lured me back from the afterlife to confront the very fears and insecurities that had vanquished me in my “previous life.”
What was that bit of wisdom about time and exiles? – “You can never go home again”? While that might be true literally in my case, it seemed that, figuratively, I could do little else.
Dr. Klassen went the full hour that first day – another good sign, I thought. The class ended and began to break up. Enthusiastic and pleased with the chance encounter with Jane that had led me to this class (just as a chance encounter with Monica in January had led me to Jana’s class), I put away my pen and notebook and stood up to put on my jacket.
I found myself face to face with the young woman who had been sitting beside me. I had been so focused on Dr. Klassen and taking notes that I had taken no notice of her. As a polite smile flickered between us, I saw now that she had bright blue eyes and remarkably thick, dark hair tied back. Also classically slender cheekbones, very striking dark eyebrows and then OMIGOD, SHOCK, she hit me all at once. She was the most beautiful girl in the history of the world. I felt my entire mind, soul and body, and whatever else was in there, twitching with some kind of involuntary electric current. I stood perfectly still, afraid that if I moved or breathed, I might wind up writhing on the floor. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice my trance-like state. She mercifully went on her way, leaving a stricken statue where I had stood just a few seconds before.
Perhaps it was that the sight of her had taken me completely by surprise. No time to get accustomed to those divine dimensions, no chance to summon any of those sensory filters that might have allowed me to gaze with impunity upon such an apparition. And now, time had stopped. My heart, caught napping between beats, unsure whether to come in again or not, seemed to be saying, “Is this it, then? I’m through for the day, I can go home early?” Then the clocks started running again and Old Faithful kicked in, struggling to catch up, just as I was struggling to remember what I’d just seen and figure out what had just happened.
She was lithe, slender and poised, I remembered that, the sort of woman who managed to look casually elegant in T-shirt and sweat-pants. From what I could recall, her face, which had just now short-circuited me so effortlessly, had a handsome, almost boyish quality, with that naturally blazing high colour in the cheeks so characteristic of athletes at play. Boyishly handsome, sure, until you were hit with the noble symmetry of her dark eyebrows, the Platonic perfection of her – dare I utter such an inelegant word in this context? – nose – the bewitching delicacy of her mouth and – here was the coup-de-grace – some crazy alchemy, some divine pact among all these features which seemed to me to awaken the possibility of an inexhaustible fount of truth hidden there. Hidden? Did I say hidden? No, it was all right there for the whole world to see, and I had just seen it. Well, perhaps it was partly hidden. For instance, I couldn’t imagine how such a creature could have been sitting beside me for an hour without my knowledge. That one glimpse of her, though, had been enough to send me tumbling downward, it seemed, into a vast, whirling riddle of some sort, a riddle I already instinctively knew I could never solve.
Yes, believe it or not, I really did think, or feel, or intuit all this in the space of a few seconds. It reminded me so much of my first sight of Clapperton that I was really spooked. I had never dreamed I would ever be struck by that sort of lightning again. And this time had been worse. If Clapperton had made me feel like a martini being shaken, this dark-haired girl had just run me through a blender. And whereas Clapperton’s beauty had seemed to me at first glance a pulsating, radiant star to marvel at from a distance, the beauty of the dark-haired girl had entered me, shot straight through me and exited, again like some sort of electric current.
That electric current, wherever it came from, had told me two things, of which I was already certain, without knowing how or why. The first was that this girl and the Clapperton experience were connected, both part of the same mystery (if whatever it was emanated from outside me) or pathology (if it came from within). The second was that, just as in the Clapperton experience, I would never succeed in getting to know this woman, no matter what I did. As these crazy certainties gradually receded and my own will and common sense regained a foothold, I muttered to myself as I finally left the class, “No, sir, no way I’m nibbling at this bait, uh, uh,” and then, abruptly switching metaphors to baseball, “I’m not swinging at this pitch. Looks like a slider, and a nasty one at that. Just gonna let it go by, and if it’s a called strike two on the outside corner, then so be it.”
I never sat in the back row again.
December 13, 1986—Final exam day
I had picked up a mean little virus at the hospital a few days before, and I felt myself getting sicker and sicker, sinking into physical as well as emotional quicksand. By the time my first exam rolled around at noon on Saturday the 13th, I was still feverish and taking codeine for a searing earache I had developed. I should have been home in bed, but I was just too stubborn and miserable by this point to do anything but tough it out. Besides, the exam figured to be the easy part of the day. Afterward, I was due for a late lunch with Jana and her parents, who were returning to Medicine Hat immediately afterward. So if I could just get through this exam and then one more tense, doleful visit with them, then a few more exams and I would be off to Toronto to spend Christmas with my folks and I'd be out of this quagmire for a little while. The thought of my impending "escape" was all the momentum I had left.
The exam was held in our regular classroom. I arrived in time to plop myself languidly into a front row seat, where I assumed I wouldn't have to worry about being distracted by, ahem, any of the "other students," in particular, those who sat in the back row. Again, how naive of me. Reversing for the very first time on this very last day the regularity of her habits, the Serene Dark Beauty took the next seat but one to my left. If there was someone between us, he or she must have been transparent or invisible, because for the following two hours, the amazing, magical face of that girl was the only object my bleary, swollen eyes seemed to be able to focus on. "I think I'm writing an exam," I recall saying to myself, "but what I'm really doing is absorbing as much of this girl's divine beauty as I can. I'll probably never see her again. I'll definitely never be this close to her." How much could I take in with each brief, secretive glance? Enough, I hoped, to enable me to piece all the glances together afterward into an image of her I could carry around in my imagination forever. One glance would try to capture her eyes, the next those noble, dark eyebrows, then the bewitching mouth, then the hair, oh, her delicious dark hair, not tied back today but tumbling thick and lustrous about her shoulders, well, the hair alone took up four or five glances, in fact I quite forgot for awhile what I was on about in my essay.
Yes, her hair pretty much skewered my essay on urban social policy in the 1930s, littering my FOOLscap (a word whose curious etymology was now taking on a personal ironic twist) with an aimless hodgepodge of catch-phrases and half-developed ideas scarcely more coherent than your average newspaper article. At least, that's how I saw it as I handed in my paper with a sheepish idiot grin (and I believe Dr. Klassen must have concurred, since I wound up with a B+ in the course after an A paper).
As my writing skills deteriorated, my feverishness and earache all but disappeared, so soothed and uplifted was I by this unexpected and unprecedented gift. For, while my glances were scrupulously timed and very discreet, I was treating myself to a rather sustained dose, perhaps an overdose, of a beauty I had never dared dream of, indeed an entire reality which, with each incremental glance, I found it harder and harder to envision myself ever leaving. My resolve was weakening, my defences were sagging, so that by the end of the exam I had convinced myself that it would be churlish, after all, not to try to exchange a few words with her on the way out. It wasn't that I thought she had had that in mind when she sat where she did. I assumed her choice of seating to be the product of chance, a little sign, perhaps, that fate was leaning my way just a bit on this last day. There was, too, such an innocuous topic of conversation at hand on this last day – the exam, the course in general. Surely even I, besotted as I was by her serene radiance, could keep such an exchange afloat for a few precious moments. As the class began to break up, I tried to compose myself into a vision of casual friendliness.
My fresh new designs were immediately frustrated, however, by another young female classmate who now accosted me with a similar goal in mind. We had chatted occasionally during the semester; in fact, I had done her the favour of proofreading one of her political science papers and now, pleasant though she was, I silently wished she would do me the favour of succinctly wrapping things up and letting us both be on our way. But no, she was a real talker, one of those whose rapid delivery and formidable momentum allow only the rarest of pauses for interruption or escape. Trying to remain alert for such a pause and at the same time hide my restless distress, I watched out of the corner of my eye the dark-haired girl walking away with that exquisitely balanced, metronomic, Chaplinesque gait of hers, watched her out of sight and then beyond in my mind's eye, resigning myself to the fact that I would never catch up to her now and that, in any case, it appeared the girl in front of me was never going to stop talking and let me go.
A few moments later, my companion did pause for breath long enough for me to make my excuses and wish her well. Head down, I began trudging toward Jana's office, where I was to meet her within the hour. But then a curious intuition fell upon me. "The Coffee Company," I muttered to myself, realizing that the coffee bar in the Student Union building would still be open on a Saturday. "I could use a stimulant, and who knows, maybe SHE'LL be there." Like a puppet on a string, I felt myself swinging around and reversing direction.
When I reached the Coffee Company, the dark-haired girl was just leaving, coffee in hand. Wherever that hunch had come from, it had been bang on and just in time. Another few seconds and I would have missed her. I considered this a sign. I bought a coffee myself and followed her into the lobby of the Library Link. There she was, sitting in the corner by the window, looking as noble and serene as I'd ever seen her. It was now or never, but I couldn't make myself do it. I walked by her, grimacing at my own cowardice, and sat around the corner, out of sight, reliving in that single moment countless years of adolescent shyness and hesitation I had hoped were behind me forever.
"Now what?!" I asked myself. Now that I've obviously followed her here, I reasoned, I have to introduce myself, or at least acknowledge her. I tried to stand up, but my legs were made of cast iron. I was being held in place by some invisible force field more powerful than . . . well, more powerful than was necessary, certainly, given my natural inertia. This was clearly overkill. I nervously sipped my coffee, contemplating whatever factors might be at work over and above my residual adolescent skittishness around beautiful girls, how I still associated this particular beautiful girl with the Clapperton Experience, with all its weird, unforeseen intimations of mental instability on my part. If I really had come apart at the seams somewhat because of my reaction to Clapperton, shouldn't I adhere to my original September resolution and steer clear of this dark-haired apparition?
There she was, just around the corner, an oasis of truth, beauty, serenity. She always looked so composed, sensible, mature. Why should a miserable jangle of nerves and insecurities like me even be contemplating approaching her? And if I did dare to approach, might not the oasis turn out to have been a mirage? What if she had a really whiny, grating voice, or some sluggish, indifferent manner totally at odds with her countenance? Any faith I still had in beauty or truth would be shattered forever. On the other hand, what if the charm and grace she seemed to radiate turned out to be real? If she displayed even a fraction of what I guessed was there, I'd be in trouble again, catapulted off into some euphoric land of make-believe, draining whatever was left of my common sense into a slough of pointless reveries, each of them garnished, no doubt, by the corniest and most sentimental pop tunes of my youth. Yet if I didn't take that risk, I would never know her name, what her voice sounded like, or anything else about this creature who had affected me so strangely.
The moment of truth had arrived. It seemed I was about to speak to her. The moment had been prepared, sculpted for us, and all I had to do was fall into it. Problem was, a thousand similar moments from the past were crowding my mind, all those college dances when I'd dithered over approaching some girl I had admired all evening, the girl finally sitting there alone, willing, nay, verily pregnant with danceability, and me paralyzed with doubt. Ask her, ask her, ask her, I now pleaded with myself – not to dance (how deliciously peculiar that would be, I thought, scaring myself for a moment) – but simply how her exam went, the perfect, innocuous, tailor-made question, come on, get up, walk over there and ASK HER.
So for 10 minutes I veered from one side of my argument to the other, until I felt almost seasick. Finally, I mustered some perspective. Compared to what lay in store for me later that day, and, I presumed, for most of the rest of my life, this was a treat, a reward I would bestow on myself for passive suffering in the line of duty. I owed it to myself, that was it, yeah.
Time was running out. I would just address her casually, a friendly question about the exam. As I walked around the corner, she was already on her way out, walking toward me. Shocked once again by her beauty, I found myself merely nodding at her. As she passed by she slipped me a sidelong Mona Lisa smirk that seemed to indicate that she knew exactly what was going on, that she had in fact been listening all the while to my pathetic internal monologue. As in a tortured dream, I opened my mouth to speak to her and call her back, but no sound issued forth.
So that was that. I had failed again, and managed to look like quite a schmuck doing it, too. Was that what had happened? As I continued outside and watched her striding away, out of my life forever, I still couldn't figure out whether I'd just experienced a lost opportunity or a narrow escape.
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| Inertia versus agility: A last look down the road not taken? |
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