Involuntary Bliss Read online

  Sometimes in the early hours of the morning she would awake and find herself slumped over the wheel of the Grand LeMans station wagon parked in the driveway, and it was this recollection of wakefulness, of disorientation, that delivered me from that state in which one is not yet quite fully asleep, that brought me back to the precipice of consciousness with the realization that James had told me this story the last time I’d seen him, shortly before Warren’s accident, the two of us together in a park at the centre of the city on a cold November night, seated on baseball bleachers before a deserted diamond and under a waxing moon, a bottle in a paper bag passed between us, James telling the tale of the unsettled infant, relaying his account with the kind of impressionistic detail that with time causes it to become more vivid as the specificity of its origin becomes diminished, so that though I could picture the child in my mind’s eye, the flannel sheet tucked in around it, the livid contortions of its plump and reddened face, hear the screams of the infant in my ears and feel the throbbing in my temples as if they were the temples of the child’s mother, I could not recall for certain whether the child in the story had in fact been James or Warren, or else a sibling or a cousin, or an infant existing only in his imagination, a child whose origin was speculative. It would not have mattered to him during the telling, James would have said, for those kind of details never mattered as much as the story itself, and when I opened my eyes, finally, I found myself in the train station, still seated on a bench, though the girl who’d lain nearby was gone, as was the newspaper that had rested on my lap, which was of no consequence, for James was walking toward me. I looked at my watch to discover that he was later than he’d promised but not so late as I’d expected, and I greeted him with genuine surprise. Were it not for his leather jacket and denim trousers, the mandola slung over his shoulder, I would not have recognized him, for he’d shaved off his beard and cut his hair since I’d last seen him. Most strikingly, beneath his open jacket he wore a dark blue vest and matching bowtie accentuating the paler blueness of his eyes.

  “I usually take it off as soon as I walk out the hotel door,” he said, tugging a loop of the bow with the thumb and forefinger of each hand and extending his chin, as if examining himself in the mirror, “but I thought that you should see.” As he tugged the corners of the bow, I noticed the bruises beneath his nails, a shade darker than the fabric.

  “Let me take your bag,” he said, and I would have thought he was playing the role of bellhop for my amusement had he not had every appearance of sincerity. He looked more tired than I felt and I declined the offer, but when he insisted, I did not protest. I thanked him and he took my heavy rucksack in exchange for Warren’s mandola, which I slung over my shoulder along with my leather satchel. Together we walked past the closed storefronts, down a mirrored hallway with marble floors, down an escalator and another empty hall, as James related an incident that had recently occurred during one of his breaks at the Auberge St. Eglise, when he’d sought a reprieve from the overly conditioned air to smoke a cigarette.

  He’d been standing outside, under the awning of the hotel’s service entrance, sheltering from the rain, apparelled in his shirt and tie and requisite vest, when a stranger had approached him. The man was thin with dark-rimmed eyes and there were no laces in the battered construction boots upon his feet. He was dressed in denim trousers and a denim shirt over which he wore an open parka with a fur-lined collar, in spite of the humidity, and his odour was profound. Long strands of hair clung to the man’s unshaven cheeks. He held a family-sized bag of , a tear extending down the entire length of the bag, so that the man left a trail of chips behind him as he approached. He thrust the bag toward James and offered him some chips, addressing him in slurred French.

  “ ,” said James, and when the man did not move, still proffering the greasy bag, James asked him if he’d like a cigarette. The man said nothing, narrowed his eyes and withdrew the bag. He reached inside the bag with his free hand, drew out a handful of chips and brought them to his mouth, crumbs clinging to the damp stubble on his chin and the fissures on his lips.

  “You think,” said the man in thickly accented English, “you are better than me. You think the bowtie gives you class,” he said.

  “No,” James responded. “I don’t think that at all.”

  “King James!” the man declared. James was startled by the sound of his name on this man’s lips until he remembered that he was wearing his nametag, that this man in the street could read his name just as well as the guests of the Auberge St. Eglise.

  “ ” asked James, but the man had already turned and begun to walk away, berating James as he made his way down the street. James said that the irony of the situation was lost on the man. He’d wanted to tell him that he wished he were the one who was drunk, that the last thing he wanted to do was to finish smoking his cigarette and go back inside and arrange tables and chairs ad infinitum, that under different circumstances, he would have gladly removed his bowtie and shared some potato chips with the man. It saddened him that the man should perceive him as the management of the Auberge St. Eglise intended for him to be perceived, possessed of a servile and obsequious dignity, a tenuous self-respect derived from pandering to dress codes and the whims of paying guests.

  “Where are we going?” I finally asked. To the Metro, said James, and when I told him we’d passed several signs indicating the entrance to the metro station some time ago, he admitted he hadn’t been paying attention. When we attempted to retrace our steps, we came to the reception area of an office tower. The walls were devoid of decoration save for an engraved plate listing the corporations that occupied the building. A resonant whine filled the empty room as a denim-clad custodian slowly pushed a power buffer across the marble floor. The night watchman sat behind the reception desk, his hands resting on his paunch, his attention directed at the polished trail the buffer left in its wake, as if it fascinated him, until he noticed us.

  “ ” the watchmen yelled.

  “ ,” James replied. Without removing his folded hands from his stomach, the man nodded toward the glass doors that led to the street, which were impossible to miss. James proceeded to perform for the watchman an elaborate and rather condescending bow. It struck me that the act of bowing brought James’s bowtie decidedly closer to the man, so that if the man had not noticed it before, he must surely see it then.

  “ ,” said the man, and to my surprise, he smiled at both James and me a smile if not entirely genuine, then with sarcasm so subtle and controlled as to be virtually indiscernible. The interaction strangely seemed to energize us both and once out in the open air, I found myself agreeing with James’s suggestion that we walk. I don’t remember much of the walk to the Latin Quarter, save for several bouncers attempting to cajole us into clubs with promises of “full contact,” a proliferation of velvet ropes and black leather jackets, flashes of exposed skin and stiletto heels beneath street lamps and neon lights. James spoke with enthusiasm about the quality and accessibility of the marijuana in his new hometown, of the cheap beer and bad wine available in the on every corner, of the notorious beauty of this city several decades past its prime, a subject upon which he’d expounded at length in his letter. He seemed genuinely taken with the city, his one reservation the difficulty he’d had sustaining relationships, romantic or otherwise, since settling here, his new feline companion being the only notable exception. He’d named him after the pseudonymous author of the Peruvian novella, and though the creature’s formative years were a mystery, James assumed that he’d been separated from his mother much too early, for he’d never mastered the delicate art of bathing himself with his tongue. Resistant to baths imposed in sinks, Señor Mosca derived immense enjoyment from standing outside on the second-storey roof of James’s building when it rained. His odour would take some getting used to, he warned me, but he was confident that my generous nature would allow me to come to appreciate his peculiar charms before I left on Mo
nday morning. James then directed my attention to the half-constructed mid-rise condominium across the street, the lower floors of which were obscured by a plywood barrier enclosing the perimeter of the site. He was constantly gauging the construction workers’ progress, he said, for he was determined to complete the manuscript of “The Maundering Harlequins” before the first of the mid-rise condominium’s residents moved in and made themselves at home. I congratulated him for thinking up such an ingenious way of imposing a deadline upon himself.

  “How long until they’re done?” I asked. We’ll have to take a closer look, he replied, gesturing with his eyes, and for a moment I thought he meant that we should break into the site. He grinned when he saw what could only have been my wary expression and he pointed to the far side of the street, toward the blackened stone facade of an aging three-storey tenement. I glimpsed the exterior for a moment and discerned that the building had once been a dwelling of some grandeur that had fallen into a state of disrepair. Then James unlocked the deadbolt and I followed him inside, where we were met with the odours of must and cigarette smoke and the heavier scent of incense no doubt intended to mask the other two. Both the vestibule and the stairs leading upward were carpeted in what had once been a luxurious dark-red shag. The walls were papered in a pattern of lilies with a synthetic sheen, silver and grey, and above, dangling from the ceiling, illuminating the vestibule below with its pallid glow, a decrepit chandelier missing half its crystals and all but three of its bulbs. Señor Mosca greeted us at the door to James’s flat, and though it was immediately apparent that he was neither well mannered nor well groomed, he nevertheless possessed an irresistible charm, with his persistent promptings for the touch of hands upon his mangy fur.

  The flat befitted the vestibule of the building, give or take a decade. The entire floor, from what I could make out amidst the piles of laundry, the unmade bed, the stacks of books and records, was covered in dark-green linoleum. Though there was no kitchen sink, there was a dishwasher and an oven at one end of the apartment, near the entrance, and the refrigerator, a remarkably similar shade of green to the floor, was positioned at the other end, by the window. Beyond the stove was the bathroom, the floor of which was also covered in green linoleum, Señor Mosca’s litter box taking up much of the space between the shower stall and the door. The walls of the apartment were painted a deep, dreary yellow, as if they had once been whitewashed and since uniformly stained with the smoke of innumerable cigarettes. His landlord, James explained, had been enthusiastic about the prospect of James painting the walls, offering to deduct the price of the paint from the rent, provided James chose a lighter shade. James had intended to take advantage of the offer, but shortly after moving in had laid claim to a poster he’d salvaged from a dumpster outside a bar where he’d been employed as a busboy at the time.

  The image featured a woman’s foot in a deep purple, knee-high leather boot with a prodigious stiletto heel. A reptilian tail arched around the shapely expanse of leg, curling playfully at its spaded tip. Beneath the boot appeared the bright-blue label of a particularly distasteful brand of beer. The insipidity of the image and the alarming size of the booted foot greatly appealed to him, he said, and he’d taken pains to hang it squarely in the centre of the wall, directly opposite the entrance to the apartment. Who even notices the walls, James reasoned, when the decoration is so striking? I agreed that the effect of the image was undeniable. I asked if the noise of construction so close by bothered him and he said that the apartment was located at the back of the building, so that he couldn’t see or hear the street. His one window, he explained, looked out onto the alley, and the second floor of the building extended farther than the third. He and Señor Mosca could climb through the open window out onto the slightly sloping roof. He had, in effect, a private balcony, and I seized upon this feature as one I could remark upon with enthusiasm and did so with a lack of restraint that betrayed the nature of my true feelings toward his flat as a whole.

  I sat on the edge of the futon and flipped through a milk crate of LPs as James described how he’d recently acquired several albums from the previous occupant of the second-floor flat, who’d been evicted for non-payment of rent. The best of these albums, explained James, was a record by a baritone saxophonist who’d made a name for himself in the fifties as a sideman, but whose solo career as a band leader and sometime composer had never taken off. He handed me the sleeve as he cued up the record on his turntable. The cover featured a pale woman with a boyish haircut in a semi-reclining pose. Her eyes were closed and her lips slightly parted. She wore a transparent negligee, which covered her arms to her elbows and her legs to her knees. Her right arm crossed her abdomen, fingers poised beside her left leg, while her right hand caressed her neck, as if she’d been photographed mid-swoon. Suspended in the air beside her was a tenor saxophone twice her size. The sax’s bell was directed toward her mid-section, a butterfly with ornately patterned wings perched on its rim. Blue text across the top of the sleeve identified the album as , featuring Sam (The Man) Taylor and his Orchestra. Among the tunes listed on the cover were “Harlem Nocturne,” “September Song,” “Don’t Take Your Love From Me,” “Bluer Than Blue,” and the title track, “Blue Mist.”

  As the record played, the tenor sax sounded a throaty parody of sultriness, overpowering the accompaniment. A piano tinkled in response to the call of the sax’s phrases, while the background orchestration—a string section, a rhythm section—was saccharine and overwrought. There was nothing at all laid back or sophisticated about the album’s sounds or their connotations, and it was little wonder to me that the recording and its composer were obscure. James’s flat had become noticeably stuffy and I opened the window so that the sound of rain mingled with the sound of the recording. Señor Mosca leapt up on the sill with a surprising gracefulness, and after tentatively sticking his head out of the window, he swished his tale at us, as if waving goodbye, and stepped outside. James said that Señor Mosca had an unusually loud purr that sounded like a moped surmounting a steep hill, and that if it were not for the music and the sound of the rain, we’d be able to hear him purring as he paced on the roof. Eventually Señor Mosca would lie down on his back and roll from side to side, said James, while the thick hair on the underside of his belly became so waterlogged that it would not dry for days. Cats purred when they were contented, he said, but also when they were in pain. He went to the refrigerator and took out two bottles of . He placed a bottle in my hand and sat on the edge of the futon, lit a cigarette and let the smoke drift out the window.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said, undoing his bowtie so that it hung loosely around the open collar of his shirt. He offered to let me sleep on his bed and I declined, stretching out on borrowed blankets on the floor. When the first side of the record ended, James got up and flipped it over and switched off the lamp, so that the only illumination in the room was the dim light that streamed through his window, and sometime after, I fell asleep, but not before I’d seen his hands upon his ears, and if I dreamed at all that night, I did not remember my dreams when I awoke the next morning when Señor Mosca licked my hand. James was not in his bed but had risen and was sitting in the sunlight on the second-storey roof, attired only in denim cut-off shorts, smoking a cigarette and strumming Warren’s mandola, as if composing a song. When I remarked that I’d never seen him up so early, he explained that the early morning shifts at the Auberge St. Eglise had made him a habitual early riser even when he didn’t have to be at work. He offered to make breakfast, but when he looked inside his fridge, he decided that it would be best if we ate out.

  As we left James’s building he said that were it not Sunday morning, there would no doubt have been a group of construction workers standing in front of the half-constructed condominium across the street. One must not be fooled by their seeming idleness, said James, as they stood about with their coffee cups and cigarettes, their eyes tracing the shapely forms of female passersby, f
or this too was part of the process of construction. It was a mistake to be lulled into a false sense of security by the workers’ seeming sloth, for their iron wills reconstituted themselves with each nicotine inhalation. No matter the duration of their cigarette breaks, the seeming relentless inefficiency of their operations, the mid-rise condominium was bound to be finished. He then directed my attention to a sizeable billboard affixed to the barrier around the site, featuring a depiction of the building as it was to be upon completion, a gleaming mid-rise of polished glass and pristine concrete, the structure’s edges softened in the artist’s idyllic rendering. The image was a promise that the construction stage was only intermediary, that sooner or later the plywood and the scaffolding, the unsightly machinery and the chain-link fencing would vanish, said James, the cacophony of creation giving way to the quietude of the quotidian, the workers having willed the structure into being. This was what he was up against as he endeavoured to match the workers’ output with his own.

  We then walked uphill for several blocks. James seemed pleased as I expressed my enthusiasm for what I took to be the European quality of the narrow one-way streets, the aging tenements with their winding wrought-iron staircases. We crossed a major thoroughfare, passing several restaurants and cafés before we arrived at the diner. The waitress greeted James with familiarity as she took our orders, and as we waited for our eggs and toast and hash browns to arrive, James remarked that it was unfortunate I had to leave for Toronto the following morning, urging me to prolong my visit for a few more days. I explained that I was anxious to get settled before my graduate seminars began, that I would come and visit him again soon, and that he, of course, was always welcome to visit me. Then I pointed out that he’d not yet told me how he’d met Madeleine, whom he’d mentioned in his letter, or how he’d come to be in the employ of the Auberge St. Eglise. The two events were related, said James, in ways he’d only recently come to understand.