Over, Under, Sideways, Down: March 1985
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| A Song for Everything: The Yardbirds, Summer 1966 |
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly,
Singing about her head, as she rode by.
– Robert Graves
One quiet Thursday afternoon in January 1985, a bright young woman named Laura Clapperton walked into the Calgary offices of Carswell, the legal publishing company where I worked, to apply for a proofreading job. I was (sigh) only 27 then, still supervising textbook production, so my head was full of staff plans and schedules as I drifted into the lunch room for a coffee about 2 p.m. and saw her for the first time, sitting calmly at the coffee table, gazing straight at me. She gave me a warm, friendly smile, as if she knew me well.
She was tall and noble. Brilliant, straw-blond hair, warm green eyes and some crazy, sensitive curve in the shape of her mouth that I hadn't seen anywhere on earth before. It all hit me at once. For the first time in my life I understood the expression "bowled over," because that's what I was. Strike. Every pin down, or at least wobbling. A real, stinging beauty of a smile had just knocked me down.
I was just trying to remember who and where I was. First I had looked around to see who it was she was smiling at so intently, and when I realized it was me, a sort of white panic set in. I think I responded with some sort of feeble, makeshift grin before wandering back to my desk in a dire state. I needed a scotch. She was obviously "a very special kind of dame," but this was not a hardboiled detective novel, and I was definitely not Sam Spade at the moment. Coffee would have to do.
What was going on? This wasn't the first time a pretty woman had smiled at me, for Pete's sake. No, but this was different. Physically, I was disrupted, all out of kilter, as if I'd been trapped in a giant cocktail shaker for 2 or 3 minutes. Yes, and like a James Bond martini, I'd been shaken, not merely stirred. Mentally, I seemed to be floating in some sort of fairy kingdom I hadn't visited since childhood.
But I was an adult now, or so I thought, and when I found out the following Monday that she'd been hired, I decided I'd better play it cool, real cool. A guy could get hurt being on the receiving end of a smile like that. Besides, not only did she have that most splendidly patrician-sounding name, Laura Clapperton, but word had it she was from Mount Royal, the old-money neighbourhood of Calgary. So, as usual, she was from another world. I was friendly enough, then, but didn't exactly seek out her company. Okay, I avoided her. Talking to her, after all, was only going to make me more nervous and painfully aware of the difference in our backgrounds. No, instead I hung back in the shadows, humbly taking comfort in her mere presence, such comfort, in fact, that my day-to-day anxieties began to dissolve, allowing my mind to drift backward in time, groping for anything in my memory that might make this seem more familiar.
My daydreams took me back to the spring of 1978, my last spring in the Maritimes, where I had grown up, and my last defeatist semester at Acadia University, where I had stopped growing up. It was there and then that I had met another beautiful young woman from another Mount Royal, the Town of Mount Royal just outside Montreal. Her name was Barbara de Léry, and it was there and then, in succumbing to her unique and mercurial charms, that I allowed myself my first tentative glimpses of Love and Real Life.
Oh my, how dramatic, you're saying to yourself. Well, for me, back then, it was. For reasons still unclear to me, I had never thought of myself as quite real. Though successful academically, I had never cultivated the social or physical self-confidence I felt was necessary to exist in the real world. Perhaps, then, I had lived by default inside my own head for too long, because by March 1978, at Acadia University, the gloomy, self-fulfilling prophecies of failure and nullity I'd been nurturing for years had finally converged on my day-to-day existence to make me even less real than I had ever dreamed possible. I, Peter Enman, math whiz, Dean's list scholarship kid, was dropping out, for good this time. I had dropped out temporarily a year earlier, too, "for medical reasons," and all the subsequent antidepressants and psychotherapy seemed to have done was to nudge me right off the ledge of reality. Now, I was in a sort of free fall. I had stopped going to classes, and I didn't care. I chuckled at the irony. Since the age of six I had never really thought about anything besides getting good marks, indeed had never given much thought to the material I was learning in order to get the marks, and now that I was expected to DO something with all this material, I was simply flunking out, gleefully, it seemed. No excuses, either; it seemed almost physically necessary, as if some momentous force had got hold of me and couldn't be stopped. It seemed necessary to acquiesce, despite the quaint-sounding protestations of what was left of my pride, conscience and free will. The year before, I had been torn to pieces, in fact rendered suicidal, by this same conflict. Now, as I sat daily in the library perusing 30-year-old Time magazines, a curious sense of peace began to take hold.
It was around this time – the Ides of March, in fact – that I ran into Barb de Léry by chance at a university blood donor clinic. I was waiting in line to give blood, she was up front spinning records for Radio Acadia. We had been introduced to each other in January by my ex-roommate Phil Secord during one of his frequent dissolute drop-in visits. Barb and I had both hung out with him and his cronies for a week or so back then, but I never dreamed she would remember me. She smiled and waved and beckoned me, though, so I swallowed my surprise and made my way onto the platform to talk to her. When she confided that she had pretty much stopped going to classes, I confessed I had done the same. In fact, we figured out that we had both been in the same introductory philosophy class all year without knowing it! "You idiot," she punched my shoulder in fun, "look at what you miss by not going to class." We shook our heads, marvelling at how incredibly out of it we both were. I mentioned casually that I had vague plans to head out west to Calgary – "after graduation," I chuckled, slapping my knee in emphatic jest. Well, it so happened she had plans for out west too, and we half-jokingly tossed around the idea of going together.
She was facing me now, no longer talking to her radio audience between songs. I was starting to relax and remember from back in January how much I'd liked this Barb. In fact, I was starting to wonder how I could have forgotten how much I'd liked her. Well, I was doing that a lot these days, affection for real people becoming a rather wistful affair as I felt myself falling out of the real world. I still had something in common with this girl, though. I liked the way she clowned around all the time like me, funny and unpredictable enough (like me) to make people laugh almost at will. I also liked a certain manner she had about her, a suggestion of being always on the outside looking in. Maybe it was that manner, together with the pseudo-tough Montreal bite to her speech, that made her seem older than she was, older than I was. Yet here she was, still so girlishly beautiful, with all that rich, chestnut hair tied behind, cascading gently down her back and, in front, softly framing this ever-smiling, apple-smooth face and those luminous, impossible brown eyes.
Those eyes now had my full attention. Under their spell, not even having to think about it, I suggested she drop by my room sometime soon to peruse my record collection, which I was in the process of liquidating. I wasn't sure how this would go over, but I figured if she weren't really interested in me (a natural assumption, since I wasn't interested in me anymore) she would be interested in my records. "Sure. How about tomorrow night, about 8?" Well, okay then, that was easy. My week was suddenly looking a bit brighter.
Barb returned to her audience, I glided back down to Planet Earth to give blood and listen to her show. As a pint of vital fluid drained briskly from my outstretched arm, my Red Cross nurse turned to her colleague and muttered, "What on EARTH is she playing now? Sets my teeth on edge. You'd think she could play something relaxing." Ah, how narrow and thick are the minds of the masses, I thought. If only Barb could find some Captain and Tennille for this poor woman. I smiled over at Barb and gave her one thumb up for the tune, which I happened to like and had never considered particularly esoteric until now. It was Joni Mitchell's cover of Annie Ross's "Twisted," from the Court and Spark album.
My analyst told me
that I was right out of my head.
The way he described it,
he said I'd be better off dead
than alive –
I didn't listen to his jive,
'cause I knew all along
that he was all wrong,
and I knew that he thought
I was crazy, but I'm not, oh, no, . . .
Oh, yes, that JAZZ MUSIC will really get on a person's nerves, I muttered testily to myself. So, Barb and I were on the same side on this one, and, hey, it was even in my record collection. I fantasized just for a second that she had meant the song for me, for us, and how weird we were. Was she in fact weirder than I was? If so, it didn't seem to bother her, I mean, she wasn't walking around all depressed about it, as I had been for so long. And, hell, she was right; if feeling normal made "Twisted" sound avant-garde and abrasive, why, I'd just as soon stay weird for awhile.
A half hour later, I was down one pint and down one floor, playing pool in the basement of the SUB with my friends Gordon Johnson and Rob Gilmore. While Rob and Gordon were busy cutting each other up mercilessly as usual, I had one ear tilted upward to catch the closing minutes of Barb's radio show, which was being piped faintly through the loudspeakers. (Rob, in his typical mock-serious tone: "Peter, is your ear cocked ceilingward for a reason, or are you turning into a cocker spaniel on us? Look, Gord, the demons have got him again!" It was Rob's pet theory that I was dropping out because I was possessed by unnamed demons, his playful take on the contradiction between my dissolute alienation and his committed Christianity.)
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| William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar sets the mood for AR's 2nd album |
What I was hearing was not demons, but another song from my record collection, and this one spooked me because it was much less probable than Court and Spark. No, this one was no bestseller; it was the sole hit single in the entire history of that very obscure, very heavy English keyboard-based group Atomic Rooster. Now this was something; I had really assumed I was the only person deranged or depressed enough to listen to these guys. Let's face it, they were a tad gloomy. As Rob had quipped, they made Black Sabbath sound like Woody Herman, and I was the only person he (or I) knew who had any of their albums, let alone all of them. They just weren't that big at Acadia. The single, from their happy-go-lucky second album, Death Walks Behind You, was called "Tomorrow Night," and as I recognized it a curious half-thought flitted around my mind like a bat in the darkness: was this a coincidence, or was she playing it with us in mind?
Am I lying next to you?
Am I thinking I need to
really love you, do it right
tomorrow night?
Time goes so slow when you're gone;
days turn to years, it seems so long.
No, no, no, I had to banish such notions. I was impressed that she knew the song, but the timing must be a pure coincidence, and that's all there was to it.
Well, tomorrow night came, Barb arrived, and, yes, she was duly impressed that I had all of Atomic Rooster's extant works. She sat on my bed, I played records for her, and, though I was nervous at first, we had a delightful conversation that didn't seem to want to end. So it didn't. We talked about everything under the sun, from our ambivalent and nonchalant attitudes toward our courses to rock music to our families and backgrounds. Yes, she had grown up in and around Montreal, her father was vice-president of a subsidiary of Noranda Mines – a "martyr to the company," she called him. I sensed things were not completely rosy on that front. Yes, she admitted she had grown up in a world of affluence, privilege and old-money sophistication (she had a grandmother in Westmount, for crying out loud), but she was having trouble picturing herself ascending the ladder of worldly success. Heck, we figured, how wired into our families' expectations could either of us be, flunking out of university like this?
I wish I could remember everything we talked about, because it must have been pretty much everything – we just kept going all night, neither of us encumbered anymore by those annoying morning classes. I found myself in a place I'd never been before. Oh, yes, I'd had girls in my room before, even had girlfriends for short, bewildering periods, but nothing had ever really CLICKED, and my social and romantic experience was so limited that I couldn't tell what this was leading to, if anything. Probably nothing, I figured; I felt so whacked out, defeated and exhausted by my brief, feckless existence that to conceive of myself as any kind of raw material for a – gulp – love affair, especially with this mesmerizingly cool, fast-talking beautiful girl, seemed like an idle, impotent fantasy. Besides, this Barb was a lot of fun to be with. To take this new friendship to some other level would doom it, surely – not that I even dared to presume such a thing was possible, no, no, not me.
Morning was approaching, but we weren't tired. In fact, we were giddy and exhilarated, so we took a long, rambling walk outside the campus and into the enchanted Gaspereau Valley, where we watched the sun climb through the mist. Now this was something I'd never done with anyone before. No wonder dawns and sunsets are such a big part of romantic lingo, I thought, and then erased that thought immediately. Meanwhile, Barb had curled up in the middle of the road and pretended to go to sleep. I persuaded her instead to let me take her to breakfast. "Early birds get the worm," I quipped, "This is one morning we won't have to stand in line."
*****
Morning was approaching, but I wasn't tired. I chuckled to myself at my naive, mystified delight that morning almost seven years before – was it SEVEN, really? – and now here I was alone in my apartment, with the same vague flutterings of anticipation, this time for a woman I didn't know, had barely even talked to, in fact. At least Barb and I had had our long sleepless night of clowning and conversation, and our one long walk. I had no intention of talking to this new beauty from this new Mount Royal. Then why couldn't I stop thinking of her? Well, why wouldn't she stop smiling at me, even though I scuttled away like a frightened mouse every time she did?The questions had no answer; they just spun around in my head like the music I had on the headphones all night, music that followed me around all day, just like – what had it been? – that Yardbirds instrumental "What Do You Want?" that had haunted me in March 1978 after I met Barb. It hadn't been so much the title as the relentless, nagging momentum of the thing, asking its unspoken question over and over again, with that furious, hypnotic bass line, Jeff Beck's silken, sliding pyrotechnics and all those clashing cymbals. I was still new to the Yardbirds back then, of course, and that hypnotic number was positively addictive, just like this New Anthem of February 1985, the T-Bones' cover of Slim Harpo's "Got Love If You Want It," retitled, appropriately, "Quit Teasin' Me Baby." Appropriate because it took just two lines from the original and repeated them over and ever, interwoven with hypnotic, sinuous harmonica:
Quit teasin' me, baby
Quit teasin' me, darlin'
Quit teasin' me, baby
Quit teasin' me, darlin'
Got love if you want, babe,
Got love if you want it.
Also appropriate because these guys were new to me, even though they had directly followed the Yardbirds into the Saturday night slot at the Marquee Club in 1965. Almost seven years, and my thirst for that certain strain of mid-60's R&B still hadn't been slaked.
There was another thirst that hadn't been slaked, either, but it was harder to pin down. The music certainly pointed to it – it was an excitement of the heart, an agitation of the soul, and it was profoundly romantic and insistent in character. It had arisen only rarely in my life, and when it had, it had seemed to point to a destiny for me of profound otherness – that was the only way I could describe it – something wonderful and unimagined, just around the corner or behind the curtain. Then again, maybe it wasn't so rare; perhaps it was always there, but I only noticed it on rare occasions, when women from places called Mount Royal were around me or something.
It had happened, too, when I had discovered this new music, this furious English R & B. What an epiphany, that first taste of Five Live Yardbirds in March 1976! I felt like I'd stumbled onto the Holy Grail of musical excitement or something. Come to think of it, my poor nervous system had never been the same since. And now here it was, acting up again, keeping me awake all night and focused on something, or someone, whose importance or relevance to me I could not fathom. Or ignore.
And yet, when something did happen in my life that transformed me to any degree, I barely noticed it, perhaps because I was too busy . . . er, being transformed. Such was the case when I joined Carswell in 1981 and found my vocation as editor, and when I met Alison Irvine in 1982. Why, falling in love with Alison had been utterly marvelous and of ultimate significance, and yet it hadn't been attended by all this weird, anxious, subterranean excitement. Hadn't Alison lovingly, with patience and diligence, acculturated me to the Real Life I had assumed all along I would miss out on? Things like etiquette, social self-confidence, table manners, how to dress myself (I was no longer "Mr. Brown," as Alison used to call me), all that basic stuff I thought I'd never get? (Heaven knows, my family did their best, but for some mysterious reason, I had remained unteachable.) Indeed, it was as if I belonged to two families now, my own and the Irvines. And the Irvines, weren't they as stylish, witty and urbane as anyone I had met or was likely to meet, Barb and this Clapperton woman included?
So what was the deal? Where was the unfinished business? Could it be Alison's gentle let-down the previous fall, just after our trip to Europe? (Trip to Europe?! I, Peter Enman, Master of Inertia and Unreality, had been to Europe! With Alison, who, make no mistake about it, had turned many a head over there . . . ) Yes, Alison had loosened our ties, citing in the gentlest, most tactful manner possible, that perhaps I hadn't quite made the grade after all. Still too many rough edges, or maybe not enough edges, period. Well, at least she'd been honest and we were still close friends. I guess I hadn't been as surprised or dismayed as I might have been. There were other unnamed tensions there, and besides, I had always had trouble believing I could really "measure up."
Could I ever really "measure up," for instance, to the bright, charismatic smile this Clapperton was forever bestowing on me? Talking to Alison, even to Barb, had been easy from the very beginning, but the only conversation I'd had with Laura had been brief and stilted. On the day we'd moved to our brand new offices at Rocky Mountain Plaza, there was a brief seminar for all employees on the new, ultra-modern phone system. Clapperton more or less cornered me afterward, intent on conversation, and this time she won. The conversation, however, revolved around telephones, the only thing I could think of at that moment, how complicated they had become, needlessly so, we agreed, and wasn't the new office neat, and we progressed no further. "Well, heh, see you around," I smiled weakly.
Gawd, was I turning into an adolescent again? I made vague plans to talk to her, especially after those frequent sleepless nights, but I always backed out. Too busy. Too nervous. Couldn't think of anything to say, and yet eagerly collecting any bit of second-hand information anyone might let drop about her. English honours scholar. Father a noted doctor of athletic medicine. Laura herself a serious athlete, a squash player of national calibre. Everything I had suspected, and so much more.
I contented myself with vague, adolescent fantasies of meeting her on the way to work some day – she, after all, lived on Frontenac Avenue, a mere 5–10 minute walk up the hill from my little basement suite – I lived underground, for Pete's sake, in "Lower" Mount Royal, how obviously appropriate – and, after all, our routes must coincide eventually. Yes, one morning I would walk with her and all those superficial pleasantries we had exchanged would give way magically to a spontaneous, engaging conversation, one that would forever unlock my destiny from this restless nocturnal dungeon. Pathetic.
In the meantime, I rode a roller coaster of reverie and repression, at the mercy of these irrational yearnings and certainties. I quit smoking. I bought a second-hand guitar. I jumped at the chance to move into a house in April with Jane, a Carswell colleague, and Jamie, her fiancé, who were moving to Japan in the summer. Tired of living underground, all of a sudden? Hadn't lived in a real house since I'd left home. Time for a change, really. I even began to balk at the obscurantist management style at work, which seemed to involve more and more gratuitous lying. I found by chance and read a book called The Oppressed Middle , by Earl Shorris, on the totalitarian milieu of North American corporate life and the traps it created for middle managers like me. I hadn't bothered to read anything this challenging since university. My eyes were being opened; my peripheral vision still couldn't quite pick up this Laura Clapperton and what she meant for me, but it was widening a bit. I just kept waiting for that magic morning, and the longer I waited, the more convinced I became that our destinies were entwined, embraced, locked up in that scene.
On Monday, March 11, 8 a.m., walking to work, 8th Street and 12th Avenue, I looked up ahead and heard the faint click of the tumblers inside the Time Lock as the Door of Destiny creaked open for me. There she was, waiting for the walk light. No time for nervousness now. Besides, it was all set up, just like Barb at the blood donor clinic, remember? All I had to do was show up and pretend to be normal for a few minutes. Be witty, make her laugh, intrigue her. Get this show on the road.
I caught up with her before the light changed. We said our good mornings, she flashed me that life-transforming smile of hers, and I let her charisma wash over me like the fresh morning breeze. As we crossed 12th, my eyes widened at the headlines blaring from the newspaper box: CHERNENKO DEAD. So, it had finally happened. My mind flashed back for just a second to my family visit to Toronto in December, where I had spontaneously stupefied several of my uncles with a 10-minute monologue on the post-Chernenko world. They hadn't heard of Gorbachev, so I filled them in on who he was and what he was going to do: free Europe from Communism, end the cold war and the arms race, open the world up for some genuine progress. When I finally shut up, I remember asking myself, "Where the hell did all THAT come from?" And it hadn't crossed my mind again until I saw the headline. In fact, since this Clapperton woman had shown up, I'd hardly glanced at a newspaper or the television. The world was just too far away and complicated to concern me these days. Well, I guess I'll get to see whether my prophecies come true now, I thought. Heck, one prophecy already had, this morning. Here I was talking to her, and it would be at least another 15 minutes before we got to work. A new era was about to begin in the world. I felt certain one was about to begin in my life as well.
"So how are things with you?" I asked expectantly, anxious to get the conversational ball rolling. By now I had heard so much about her from others I almost felt embarrassed asking. Her reply: "Great, but very busy. Lots to do, finishing up at school. And I'm getting married in a month, so there's lots of wedding stuff."
Married. Married??!! I gasped inwardly, as I felt my insides being sucked out of me by the tremendous vacuum her words had just created. Getting married! Now why hadn't anybody bothered to tell me THAT?! Well, what a silly boob I was. So much for all my magical intuitions. As we boarded the C-Train on 7th Ave., I did my best to regain my composure, only vaguely listening to Laura as she clinically and obliviously catalogued her busy schedule, which I gathered also involved a tremendous regimen of physical training. She was a superbeing; how could I have dreamed even for a minute that I could be part of her world? I felt sulky, like a little kid who assumes he's getting a new bike for his birthday but winds up with the usual dorky new shirt instead.
Still, she was bright and witty, and very striking, and that smile was lighting me up like a Roman candle again. So I hadn't totally deceived myself. She was charismatic, and I was genuinely stuck on her. The Door of Destiny had just slammed shut in my face, that's all. That smile had never been meant for me; it was just part of the way she was, her good nature, her high spirits. Okay, I was just getting used to this concept when the conversation began to veer off in an unexpected direction. I was putting myself back down in my place as subtly as possible, telling Laura that I doubted I would ever get married, that I would ever be able to make such a momentous decision. Her expression changed, her smile vanished, she was staring at some imaginary point five miles behind me as she intoned in a tired, absent, trancelike voice: "It was a very quick decision."
I didn't quite know what to do with that piece of information, so I clumsily changed the subject to baseball, since we were almost at work anyway. I said it was the only sport I played or watched, and I was in awe of people who knew so much about so many different aspects of sports and physical fitness. "You're probably lucky it's the only sport you understand. My fiancé does nothing but sit around watching sports on TV." Well, that didn't sound right, but we were at work by now, so her fiancé was pretty much left hanging there, in a rather unflattering position.
We found ourselves talking together a lot more that week, at lunch, on the way to work, whenever, but she never mentioned HIM or the wedding to me again. When I overheard her talking to others, though, that was ALL she talked about, and it was always HE and HIM; she never called him by name, e.g. "My father can't stand him; it's going to be a real problem at the wedding,'' and "We saw A Passage to India last night; I loved it, but HE was so bored he fell asleep," and so on.
Much to my relief, our conversations were about other things. On Thursday morning, on the C-Train, for instance, we talked about our favourite movies, or should I say movie, since for both of us it was Doctor Zhivago. Now that was interesting, because its director was the same as A Passage to India's –David Lean – and both stories were about FATE in a big way. I had liked Zhivago so much when I saw it in high school that I had bought the novel, read it twice and even wrote an essay entitled, fatefully enough, "The Role of Coincidence in Doctor Zhivago." Let's face it, I'd said then, a lot of things had to go right in order for Yuri and Lara to finally realize their fated love – maybe too many to be believable. Now here was this Lara – excuse me, Laura – sitting across from me, except that she didn't look so much like Julie Christie as Meryl Streep, a beauty at once more expressive and elusive, anyway, this Laura seemed to like me, and her very presence thrilled me, but here she was about to marry someone she didn't seem too thrilled about. Things weren't going right here at all. What could I do? The clock was ticking. There wasn't time enough for a fateful skein like Pasternak's to unwind itself.
We also talked about my job a few times, and the clock was ticking there, too. Laura picked up on it right away; I had hardly begun before she interrupted: "And now you're ready for something else." Yes, I was ready for just about anything else. I had recently refused to back down in a confrontation with my superiors about lying, and it was all coming to a head that week. I had myself two real situations now, and I didn't quite know how I would (or should) handle myself in either one.
Laura's words seemed to have fateful, multilayered significance to me, but by now, of course, I was all strung out and in an almost hysterically suggestible state of mind. So suggestible, in fact, that I fished out of my wallet a business card someone had given me earlier in the year. "Lorna Levett, Psychic Consultant" – she had been the thing du jour among a certain clique in the office for a while. I fingered the card idly. What harm could it do? I made an appointment for Thursday after work and showed up at her office, up three flights of stairs in an old downtown business block. A very film noir setting, it seemed to me. She shared the third floor with an enigmatic outfit called "THE TIME CENTRE" I didn't want to know what that was all about.
I had no idea what she was all about either, but I figured this exotic interlude would distract me from my situation for an hour or so if nothing else. And, if nothing else, Lorna was exotic, as it turned out. A striking, statuesque middle-aged redhead, with a placid smile and a deep, well-modulated voice, she was obviously very good at what she did, whatever that was. I seemed to recall my colleagues had been all ga-ga about her past life readings, but that sort of thing seemed irrelevant and carnival-ish to me. She said she could offer advice and intuitive impressions, so I told her about my work situation. Her impression was that the nature and behaviour of my superiors were not about to change, and that feeling strongly as I did, I should leave, but only after the present crisis had passed, so that I could leave on my own terms. Her impressions about my supervisor ("Perhaps, after all, she's someone even Christ couldn't get along with . . . ") and about me ("You're very good at your work, but you need a vocation where you can be more dynamic, more in charge of your own destiny. You are, after all, an Aries and, under the Chinese horoscope, a Rooster.") seemed accurate enough, and by the time my hour was up, I felt calmer, like I had some perspective on the work situation. Since that was all we had time to talk about, that would have to do for now.
But Lorna wasn't quite finished with me. As I began to collect my things and prepared to pay her, she interrupted, almost nonchalantly, "And what about the woman in your office who's in love with you?" Whoah, there. My heart skipped a beat. She had me dead to rights. I settled back in my chair and let it all out, only I insisted it was probably that I was in love with her, not that it mattered anyway, since she was getting married soon. Was this just some sort of random gambit on Lorna's part, I wondered briefly, something she could say that might be true, and if so, would "magically" confirm her "psychic" abilities? But why should she have bothered, I reasoned, if the hour was already up? Maybe she really did have some kind of inside dope on the Clapperton situation.
Upon hearing my stumbling litany of infatuation, Lorna was even more insistent that, yes, her feeling, her impression, was that Clapperton shared my strong feelings, was indeed very attracted to me, but was waiting for me to take action, she being overwhelmed by her impending wedding and in no position to initiate anything. But what could I do? I admitted I felt like I was drowning, that my throat had felt strangely swollen and constricted all week, as if I were trying to swallow something too big, and now I was even beginning to stutter again, something I hadn't done since I was six or seven. Lorna might or might not be privy to Clapperton's feelings, but she had certainly put into words what I had suspected all along but had never dared to believe outright – especially since Monday morning's revelations.
Did I dare believe it now? "We often are afraid and confused precisely by what we need and want most in life," Lorna continued, "and your physical and psychic distress comes from what you want to say but can't, or won't. But it's clear to me that you must say it, at all costs, as soon as possible. You must leave no stone unturned. This is of utmost importance to you and you must not deny this situation, these feelings, any further." This she said with such deliberate and resonant emphasis that I was, strangely, both shocked and relieved at the same time. She strongly recommended that I phone Clapperton at home that evening to arrange some sort of face-to-face meeting where I could make my feelings explicit. I pleaded that it was too soon, I didn't know her well enough, I didn't feel comfortable phoning her at home, and so on. It just seemed so unlike me, this whole situation seemed so unlike anything I'd ever experienced, that I couldn't picture myself taking an active role. And yet Lorna was right; if I didn't, I might always regret it. What if all my recent intimations had been on the money? And Lorna assured me they were. "Never doubt those sorts of intense intuitions. Always trust your gut feeling when it's that powerful."
I came out of there 90 minutes after I went in, feeling that maybe, just maybe, I would do something, something out of character, bold and surprising, that might change my life forever or make me look like a complete idiot.
That evening, I tried to make the call many times, but only succeeded in getting to the point of automatic drill, where I knew exactly what I was going to say under every possible circumstance. Practice makes perfect. After a certain amount of repetition, though, I began to realize I would make it. It would just have to wait until after breakfast on Saturday morning. Yes, for some crazy reason my colleague John McDermid, a sensitive and witty guy who knew something of my plight, wanted to take me out to breakfast. He seemed to sense that something big was going down for me. So I let him, and proceeded to fill him in on my various "situations." I had already told him on Monday, "There's trouble, John. Big trouble for me. With the blonde, the noble blonde, Clapperton." Now I had to tell him I might be leaving Carswell, and Alison might be leaving me, even though she'd already left me, whatever that meant. I probably didn't make a lot of sense, but he voiced his concern and, more to the point, his confidence in me and wished me luck on all fronts. He gave me a timely boost – I realized I wasn't completely alone or completely crazy or completely helpless. Maybe he and Lorna were right; maybe I deserved a shot at Clapperton before she floated back into the fairy kingdom she'd come from.
John dropped me back at my apartment sometime before 10, but it was at least 10:30 before I was finally able to close my eyes, focus my will and dial the number. All the inertia, all the negativity I was used to living with had to be swept aside for a few seconds, just long enough to dial and get an answer. Then, of course, the new situation would create its own momentum.
Laura's mother answered, I left my endlessly rehearsed message with her, and within 10 minutes my phone rang. It was Laura. Well – gulp – here goes nothing. I had double-dared myself to jump, and now gravity had taken over – I was in mid-air. "Hi, it's Peter from the Carswell office. I was wondering if you would like to have coffee with me sometime this weekend." She answered without hesitation, which rather surprised me. "Sure. How about this afternoon?" We agreed on 2:30 at RyDen's Deli on 17th Avenue. I'd done it. It had worked. It seemed almost as if she'd been expecting it. I had no doubt now that I was going to tell her what was on my mind. Would she be expecting that, too?
I think she probably was. The awesome swell of feeling her magical presence invariably ignited inside me was no doubt more transparent than I suspected. When the fateful moment arrived at the Deli that afternoon, I said, flat out, "Look, I know you're getting married and all, but I have to tell you, I believe I've fallen in love with you." (Then I thought to myself, "GAWD, do people still do this? And if they do, should they?") She simply said, with a sort of thoughtful, compassionate deliberateness, "Oh. . .," and tried to look surprised, but she didn't, really. She then told me that she was very flattered, but she loved her fiancé very much, the wedding plans were all made, etc, the gist of it being that, no, nothing was going to happen here except me getting this off my chest and, presumably, her being flattered.
She seemed so poised, so very much in control of the situation, that it never occurred to me to question her as to the contrary signals she had been sending out all week. And, I thought later, what difference did it make if the "wedding plans were all made"? Had these plans, which, after all, hadn't even existed a few months earlier, now become more important than her real feelings? In my position, of course, I had little choice but to take her words at face value. She did think highly of me; not only was she flattered, but she declared, without affectation, that I was "a real neat guy." Needless to say, I ate that up; likewise when she expressed surprise that Alison and I had been a longtime item: "But you're so mellow," she declared, in reference to Alison's up-front high spirits. I thought inert might have been more accurate than mellow, but I wasn't about to argue the point just then.
As frustrated as I was with our situation, it was a great relief to sit there and tell her how I felt, to compliment and be complimented by her. For those few moments at least, my whole recent infatuation didn't seem quite so ridiculous. Then, of course, we moved on to more conventional topics – her studies, her athletic regimen (including running 10 miles every two days), her future plans ("I don't think life should all be based on plans," was her ironicallyintriguing remark here), the posh, exclusive Glencoe Club, where she worked at the reception desk and played squash with the moneyed ladies of Mount Royal and environs ("Most are very nice, but some of them are such amazing bitches!"), my future plans ("I can see you doing something completely different; I couldn't do what you're doing for very long . . ."), music ("I had to take flute lessons when I was a kid, and I hated it . . . now I just listen to the radio."), history ("I love history . . . I just took a course on the American Civil War . . . very shocking and tragic."), the sixties ("But that was twenty years ago!"), Michael Jackson (HER: "What do you think of these people who are calling him the Messiah?" ME: "Nonsense. If anybody's the Messiah around here, it's Keith Relf." ME TO MYSELF: "Where the hell did that come from?!" HER: "Who's Keith Relf?" ME: "The singer and harp player for the Yardbirds." HER: "The What-Birds?" ME TO MYSELF: "Here we go again . . ." ME: "They were Eric Clapton's first group. That any help?" HER: "Him I've heard of . . . anyway, what about this Keith?" ME TO MYSELF: "Hell, I'm not even sure what I meant by that . . . now how do I get myself out of this? ME TO HER: "I'm not really sure, you know . . . anyway, it's not important; after all, he's from the sixties . . . ) and so on.
Then it was nearly 4:30, and she had to go; she had a squash game at 5:30. As we walked to the lights at 17th Avenue and 8th Street, I thanked her profusely once more for being so kind as to see me, etc., and asked her was her game at the Glencoe. "No", she replied, "It's at Lindsay Park Athletic Centre. That's where I train, too." I said I hoped she wouldn't have to rush to make her game. "Oh, no, it's no problem. I run back and forth every day from home. Only takes 15 minutes." Yipes, I thought, she's one serious runner. "Well, that's convenient," I offered, blinking at her admiringly, "having your training venue so close by." We were stopped at the light, and she glanced away with that narrow, faraway look in her eyes again, just like Monday on the C-train. "Yes. I suppose everything's pretty convenient for me. . .", her voice trailing off wearily at the end. Well, what brought that on, I wondered, and what do I say now? "Hey, it's nice out, now," I clumsily changed the subject, "Right decent of the sun to come out while we were inside." But it didn't work; she was still locked into that strange meditative funk of hers: "Yes, and there's so little decency in the world. . ." – the last thing she said before we parted.
And with that mysterious remark, she turned herself back into an enigma, just as she had been in the beginning, when she flashed me that first amazing smile nearly two months before. The smile that had hot-wired back to life some part of my psyche whose keys had gone missing years, maybe decades ago. Some distant, muffled aspect of me was trying to get back into the picture. Oh, it had stuttered to life briefly before, but mostly it had lain there, neglected and rusting, somewhere in the corner of my emotional backyard. Now that this noble, shining young woman had appeared, and I'd made this bold, unlikely gesture toward her, was that old part of me was in gear again?
Now I had to confess to myself that I had avoided her for so long not only because her charisma made me feel nervous and inarticulate, but also because I was afraid talking to her would break the spell – she would say something that would burst the bubble, that would send me hurtling back to earth without a parachute. As it turned out, nothing – not even her now inevitable marriage – had diminished my fairy-tale fascination with her. She seemed even more like some kind of warrior princess, unreachably noble and glittering.
This avoidance strategy, which had just
backfired so unpredictably, twigged a nostalgic, ironic memory inside me. I
suddenly realized it had been exactly seven years before – March 16, 1978 –
that Barb de Lery and I had stayed up all night talking in my room at
It was late March. Phil Secord was back for another debauched visit – which I welcomed – and I remembered vaguely noticing, on the perimeter of my awareness, that whenever he was around, there was Barb, too. My shyness, masquerading as obliviousness, must have been curious and frustrating. The two of them caught up to me one evening at the student newspaper office (yes, I was finally writing for the paper in my "spare time"). As I got up to leave to cover a student council meeting, Phil appeared inside the doorway with Barb just behind him. "Peter, this is Barb," he said, Barb and I both laughing nervously at his pointedly ironic reintroduction. "She's a big Wishbone Ash fan, did you know that?" And he disappeared around the corner, leaving me alone to face this girl who was smiling so brightly I was almost afraid to meet her gaze directly. Well, at least Phil had left me with a ready-made topic:
"Wishbone Ash. Wow, I should have known. They're pretty much my favourites. Except for the Yardbirds, of course. Yeah, I love those twinned guitars. But I haven't been keeping up."
"You haven't heard their latest?
I had discovered Wishbone Ash and the Yardbirds on the very same day about two years earlier. Rarely a day had passed since that I hadn't listened to one or both of them. What the Yardbirds were to rhythm for me the Ash were to melody and texture – the Holy Grail. So Phil really knew what he was doing when he dropped them into the conversation. Our encounter was brief, since I was late already, but it made me realize that, far from thinking the idea of me and Barb ridiculous, Phil was actually trying to move things along. Then it all hit me at once: I was being an idiot, this wasn't just all in my head, it was real, and she was a Wishbone Ash fan, and she was as beautiful and hypnotic as their melodies, and she was standing right beside me, smiling up at me as if I were still somebody.
Incredibly, that still didn't quite do
the trick. That Friday, Barb accompanied me and Robbie Gilmore to
As far as I knew, we were still just good chums. We'd spent a solid 24 hours together, and once again I'd failed to breach the walls of chumminess. Given my hopeless behaviour the night before, I wasn't even sure how long that would last. But we made another date – to see Saturday Night Fever on the Monday evening.
Some element of our simmering attraction had turned back the clock on me, made me feel like I was 12 again. A remarkably dissolute 12-year-old, to be sure, but I suddenly felt as if I'd never touched a woman before. Thus, I had to pretty much recapitulate my entire hesitant, protracted sexual coming-of-age in the half-hour it took inside the darkened cinema to finally put my arm around her. Barb nearly jumped out of her seat in surprise. Then we kissed, briefly, lightly, softly, and leaned back in our seats with a mutual trembling sigh of relief.
*****
And so it had begun. We had become us, and once begun it couldn't be controlled or even navigated. We got much, much more than we'd bargained for – or knew how to handle. Our emotions became a ravening creature, a wildfire. Every glance set our cheeks ablaze. We would often just look at each other and ask, "What are we going to do?!" It eventually became our unconscious, unspoken refrain.
I loved everything she did. I worshipped her; I worshipped the fact that she existed. The morning after our Monday Night Fever, she was puttering around my room, singing aloud to herself – we shared that habit, too. "Hey, I know that one," I filled in the next line. It was "Green Earrings" by Steely Dan, as unlikely a singalong as I might have expected from her.
She scatted a lot, too, which made walking with her a bit of a celebration. She was a most unusual, delightful girl, and I told her so, but not often enough. We could never tell each other often enough. It was as if we were each trying to catch up to our racing vision of the other and slow it down with words, keep it from slipping away.
But words were powerless. So was sex, not surprising given our divergent frequencies, me practically a virgin still, a naive grade-school romantic, and Barb almost hyper-experienced, trying desperately, perhaps, to recapture simpler days. Maybe the fact that I hadn't grown up, had never really stopped being a little boy, was part of my charm for her. She would often hold my two hands in hers and say, "You are so good!"
I felt great, but not particularly good. I'd just flunked out of school, not even bothering to write exams. My parents didn't know this yet, but they knew I was about to head out to Calgary with someone they'd never met, with only a two-day stop in my hometown, Summerside, before hitchhiking with Barb to her hometown, Montreal – or, to be precise, the Town of Mount Royal. My poor parents must have been mystified and disappointed by me. My childhood eccentricities had turned into dissolution and weirdness, my nervous insecurities into morbid depression and failure. And now this.
When they came to pick up me and my stuff
at
On Saturday, April 15th, my brother Steve, who lived on his in-laws' farm just outside Kentville, had a party to celebrate his admission to the bar. So he met Barb too, as she and I spent the afternoon there playing poker with Ellen Robinson, the elegant and witty sister of Steve's wife Jennie and the only young woman who had ever fascinated me to the same extent as Barb. In my naive, hopeless fashion, I'd been infatuated with her since my arrival there for Steve's wedding six years earlier, falling in love with her sweetly smiling school portrait on the wall, Ellen herself being away at her flute recital that day. I'd since worked on the Robinsons' tobacco farm for portions of two summers in high school, for the experience to be sure, but being around Ellen didn't hurt either. She'd always liked me, too, but more as a little brother, and at times I had wondered whether I'd ever be anything more than that to anybody. But now here we were, Ellen with her wry, gentle wit, not knowing quite what to make of Barb with her big-city card-sharp tough-talk shtick, complete with the special visor she wore for such occasions. Two more different women I couldn't imagine.
Exactly a month had passed since Barb and I had connected at the blood donor clinic. April 15 was an ironic day for me; my brother had achieved yet another laudable goal, and here I was an utter washout in the real world – I'd stopped trying to measure up – and yet I suddenly had exactly what I'd wanted all along – Real Love, with a woman who was like no other – unique, like me. And I had neither expected it nor asked for it. No doubt about it, Real Life was a Real Puzzle. I just couldn't figure it out, but for once I was glad to be along for the ride.
*****
After that day, life seemed to move too fast for me to absorb it. The scenes, the memories all jumble together, crowding for their place at the front of the line. Barb and I up all night again talking and playing cards in Summerside – "What are we going to do?" – the long, frustrating waits on the hitchhike to Montreal, me singing and playing harmonica badly to try to amuse Barb – rescued by a lascivious, alcoholic furniture dealer driving a van to Toronto, propositioning Barb all the way ("You are an apparition," he kept saying . . .) – me, terrified, driving the van into Montreal after his second speeding ticket of the day – me, terrified, trying to navigate Montreal traffic and Montreal parking spaces in Barb's father's 1978 LTD – constant near-death experiences, Barb squeezing my shoulder after each egregious driving error and sighing, "Oh, Peter. . ." – my awkwardness meeting her Westmount relatives, afraid to say anything lest something stupid tumble out – more shocked awkwardness when Barb mumbled something about being adopted and declined to discuss it further (Was she serious? And if so, why not discuss it?) – our random afternoon stop at a Polynesian bar, where I sipped my smoking drink for 5 minutes ("tastes rather bitter, actually") before I realized I was drinking the smoking part, not the drink, thereby enacting what seemed a fairly apt metaphor for my approach to life to that point – meeting Barb's best friend's sister, Alison, and realizing she was the same quiet beauty Gord Johnson had dared me to introduce myself to at Acadia the year before (she apparently not recognizing me, whew) – seeing Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe in concert downtown and smoking the last of Barb's carefully hoarded weed on the way – Barb meeting male friends on the street and me feeling childishly jealous and inadequate – Barb saying, with increasing frequency, "I've never spent this much time with one person before. Every day, I mean," and yet tirelessly showing me her city, the soul of patience and generosity – her parents toasting us with champagne (another first for me) the night before we left, Barb's father even writing me a letter of reference – how exhausted we were mostly and how stupid little arguments cropped up out of my stubborn irritability, which I couldn't seem to curb (Barb: "No room left in your bag for some of my stuff? Look, there's tons of room, silly . . . ").
By the time we arrived in
Oh, way beyond, Robbie, and fading
further away by the minute. And as my fragile charisma faded with it, Barb
blamed herself. "I'm sorry I'm such a bitch" became her refrain, but
her patience was wearing thin ("Why are you so nervous?" she asked, both concerned and embarrassed for me). Three
days without real sleep, and on Friday, May 5, we were finally deposited in
 |
| The Whirl of Time begins: Entrance to RMP, where Barb and I first set foot in Calgary, May 5, 1978. |
Barb and I were becoming uncomfortable
with each other by this time. Communication seemed hit-and-miss; we were
becoming enigmas to each other. We didn't know how to discuss anything, and I was especially thick in this
department. We didn't really discuss living arrangements; we lived apart, each
thinking that was what the other wanted. Discussion of our future plans
revealed that I wanted to stay in
We never even really broke up. We just
drifted apart. We saw each other occasionally, but it was
all too much to talk about. We were, I think, embarrassed and still a little in
awe of what had happened between us, good and bad. I was sure it had been all
my fault, and, who knows, maybe she thought it had been all hers. I last saw
her in late July outside the Central Library, across the street from Rocky
Mountain Plaza, where we'd first hit town only a few months before. She hit me
up for a $150 loan, and next thing I knew, her friends said she was in
Rather than learn from the affair, I fell
back on the usual vague feelings of resignation and bitterness toward myself. I
had been right in the first place. Anything I started was bound to wind up in
the wastebasket. Still, what else could I have done? As wrong as I'd known I
was for her, as shallow and inexperienced as I'd known I was, I still couldn't
resist. She had been too bright, too funny, too marvelous with all her scatting
and singing. The darker side came later, and just one glimpse had been enough
to show me that I was a mere child beside her. It haunted me, even terrified
me, just as her brilliance had blinded me. As I began to reconstruct some sort
of life for myself, a new record collection gathered, drop by drop, starting
with one Barb had recommended,
Germ of
darkness
Blind your
eyes.
I could not
help myself
And I did not want to try.
Okay, I admit, a bit melodramatic, but it helped me come to terms with what we'd had and lost. We had been up against a feeling so powerful it had grabbed us like a Wizard-of-Oz tornado and propelled us clear across the country before finally setting us down on Planet Earth again. I felt certain I'd never feel anything quite like that again. Until I met Alison four years later, in fact, other women seemed pallid and sluggishly conformist compared to Barb. But I had stayed where Barb and I had landed, in Calgary, ever since, had stayed long enough to encounter Alison, and now, in 1985, another radiant creature from another Mount Royal, long enough to arrive full circle at Rocky Mountain Plaza again, where another strange, inexplicable drama had just unfolded.
Coda
The
only continuous, linear sort of progress I made in those years between Barb and Alison involved my
growing attachment to Keith Relf and the Yardbirds. Once in
It didn't matter; I always seemed to be
listening to them and finding new stuff, the big find being the two-record (clear vinyl!) greatest hits compilation I was feasting on in 1979 when I got a message from
my ex-landlady that Barb had phoned and left her number. I was astonished and
electrified. She was back east again, going to school in
She paid back my loan and we corresponded for a year or so. Then, nothing.
A bit of a Yardbirds drought after that, too, until one night in December 1983 when Alison and I and our friends Sheilagh and Jeff got astonishingly high and I heard, for the first time, the mysterious and futuristic "Happenings Ten Years' Time Ago," a bonus track on one of Jeff's Yardbirds albums. Shelagh and I were dancing to this modal, Gregorian-chant type melody with an outrageously catchy, very modern guitar riff. "What IS this?" I was in heaven, hearing a Yardbirds song I hadn't encountered before and realizing it was EVEN BETTER THAN THE REST. I loved the haunting, enigmatic chorus:
Happenings
ten years' time ago,
Situations we really know.
But the knowing is in the mind
Sinking deep into the whirl of Time,
Sinking deep into the whirl of Time . . .
Maybe it was because Alison and I had
spent a week in
After all that time, it seemed hard to believe we were together again, in person. Barb's appearance had changed – short hair, much thinner, almost gaunt, and, occasionally, a curious sort of stutter which she attributed to unnamed medication. From the experiences she alluded to, in her usual abbreviated, absent-minded fashion, her recent life seemed to have been pretty much a cataclysm. She was only 25. I kept thinking of that line from "19th Nervous Breakdown":
She was still Barb, though, with that
amazing energy and bright, smiling face. We spent a carefree day tooling around
Waiting in line for the big roller coaster, which she dared me to ride with her, we marvelled at the fact that a chance meeting at a blood donor clinic on the Ides of March ("Beware the Ides of March!" Barb repeated, laughing) had led us here, six years later, to what we could hope might be a lifelong friendship. After the ride, which scared the bejesus out of us, she kidded me that at last we had achieved some sort of physical fulfilment with each other. "If only we'd known." I laughed. We both laughed.
Just before the ride started, I couldn't resist bugging her with one last, corny plug for my age-old hobby-horse. "The Yardbirds have a song for this!" I chirped, gesturing toward the roller coaster. "Over, Under, Sideways, Down."
"Damn Yardbirds," Barb muttered. "Got a song for everything."
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