7   18 Sept 88   Daniel is seventeen today. A man at last. Every Sunday afternoon, since coming back from New York, he has been seeing a woman, someone he met on the train coming back from New York. She’s a nurse at MCH, meaning another “older” woman. They have been going to museums and galleries, he said. Yeah, sure, as Betty would say. Today is no exception. But this evening there will be a little party at home with his closest friends. I am glad that Daniel is getting his first experiences with women who are older and presumably experienced. I could never be grateful enough to M. Daigle. I seduced him, it’s true, but he responded. It was a big risk for him. Legally it was all right (I was almost 16, and in Canada the age of consent is still 14) but he was my teacher. And married. It was the first year of secular education in Québec, and if the bigots of the Union Nationale (like my parents) had found out it might have been a weapon in their war to bring back religious schools. Fortunately it happened on our class trip to Montréal, at the end of the school year. Once we were back in Rimouski I tried to keep it going but he resisted firmly. I grudgingly admired him for it. I was not in love with him. But if Etienne Palombe had been my first I would have been a different woman. Once D has had his experiences with older women he will probably begin to date girls at NAA. Lucky girls, whether they know it or not. Etienne did not know at first how lucky he was that I had been initiated by M. Daigle. (I always called him M. Daigle, never René, even in bed.) He realized it only when we were in college (we were in the first prom graduating class of the cégep de Rimouski!) and began to go with other girls without my experience. In my adult life, since 20 or so, I have generally preferred older men, from Jean-Marc and then Miki to GK, except SZ and WP. Wayne Phillips. I haven’t thought about him for a while, except for a flash or memory, almost subconscious, each time I listen to an opera. A memory In the flesh more than in the mind, of making love, when I had a free afternoon, while listening to one of his many, many opera LPs. It was Wayne who got me to love opera… George Kenner. There have been more calls from him. He proposed a weekend away. This time I am holding firm. But I cannot help admiring his persistence. It is a big ego boost for me, knowing that he could have any number of other women. Tina (who slept with him a long time ago) says that he probably does, but I don’t care. So why am I resisting, my journal? Here I go again, asking you questions. You are doing your job of reflecting them back to me. So I have to answer myself. Let me indulge myself in a bit of autopsych self-analysis. There were times, when I was between liai relationships, when I resisted in order to prove to myself that that I could function just fine without a man. I believe that I have overcome that need. No, my journal, this time it is specific to GK. He is so dominant, so self-assured, so alpha, that I need to demonstrate that he cannot dominate me. To demon prove it to myself, not necessarily to him. That I am mine own woman, well at ease.   Aptitude   Angie and Daniel continued to meet for museum or gallery visits every Sunday afternoon. Their third Sunday happened to be his seventeenth birthday, and when he informed her of that she said, “It so happens I have a present for you. Not to give you but to show you.” She went to the bathroom and came out with a pill dispenser, like one that Gen had shown him, from which two pills were missing. “We don’t need to use a rubber any more.” From that point on sex with Angie became even more enjoyable for Daniel than it had been with Gen. It may have been because Angie seemed to enjoy it more. Shy as she was, she had evidently not experienced it as much as the outgoing Gen, who, despite the lack of obvious physical allure, seemed to have no difficulty in attracting men, and even had a “sort of boyfriend,” as she put it, a Puerto Rican merchant seaman who would come to New York every few months and stay around for a few weeks of what she said was “like one long fuck.” Daniel surmised that Angie got her scant dose of sex when and where she could, probably – as he imagined on the basis of medical gossip he had heard from his mother – with older married doctors (the likes of George Kenner) or with overworked residents at the hospital. She let Daniel know in no uncertain terms that a young, handsome, ardent lover like him was a treat for her. Daniel would have liked to see Angie more than once a week, but the demands of school took precedence. Since he had committed himself to early decision at Columbia, the application, the school transcript and the letters of recommendation had to be submitted as soon as possible. He also had to take the examination that was called Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, at the earliest possible occasion, on the second Saturday in October. He wondered what this “scholastic aptitude” might be. He remembered learning about scolastique in Secondary II: it was a rigid, pedantic way of learning practiced by medieval theologians. Was that what Columbia expected of him? He looked up scholastic in his new Merriam-Webster, and learned that one of the meanings coincided with the French one, but that it also meant simply ‘of or relating to high school or secondary school.’ He felt relieved. After regular school hours Ms. Casey conducted an SAT preparation workshop for those who would go to university (or “college,” as she taught them to say) in the States, and so his weekday afternoons were full. It was just as well that the band was no more, and he had to forgo playing soccer as well. He physical exercise was limited to regular gym classes. During his previous years at school Daniel had occasionally overheard boys, especially seniors, talking about their sexual exploits, real or fictitious, but he did not pay much attention to such locker-room talk. This time he felt that perhaps, being now a sexually active senior himself, he ought to participate in such talk. But he was put off by the overweening style of the conversation. The other guys’ emphasis was almost exclusively on the hotness of the chicks they had banged or made out with, not the pleasure they might have experienced, let alone given. It seemed to him that some of the teachings Gen had given him – such as “As long as she comes first, whatever comes afterward, you will have a happy girl!” – would be quite foreign to them, not to mention such other maxims as “Stay away from drugs or drink if you want good sex.” She conceded that this one was specifically aimed at teenagers, not adults. Among the ten or so kids in the SAT workshop was a very pretty girl named Vivian Alvarez, whom Daniel remembered from tenth-grade English when he first started at North Am. She was one of those who called the school Northam, and when Harvey questioned her about it one day at lunch, she justified the pronunciation by saying that when you say North American at a normal pace, the first two syllables sound like Northam. “It doesn’t work like that,” Harvey argued. “Since Lockerbie we’ve been hearing about Pan American Flight One O Three, or Pan Am Flight One O Three. Has anyone heard of Panam?” The rest of them laughed, and Vivian chuckled grudgingly. In Grade 10 several of the guys told Daniel at the time that Vivian was a stuck-up little bitch who even as a ninth-grader had dated only senior boys. On occasion Vivian would smile pleasantly at Daniel, as if to signal that once he was a senior she might be interested. And this was what seemed to be happening: she was now definitely interested in him. He was not sure what that entailed, since he had not dated a high-school girl before. But she was, with her movie-starlet looks, just the kind of girl that guys bragged about in the locker room. Daniel had to admit to himself he was not as indifferent to those looks as he had thought, given his predisposition. True, he had had pleasurable sex with two women who were decidedly not pretty, but the prospect of doing it with a nubile beauty brought an altogether different kind of excitement. He could not deny that the lust for beautiful women was a universal of the human male since time immemorial, and he did not want to deny himself a share in that experience.   On the Friday before the SAT the participants in the workshop discussed what they might want to do as a release after the tests. Looking at Daniel directly, Vivian said that there was a new movie that she wanted to see, a horror comedy titled Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. He was intrigued, and after the workshop – it was the final session – he approached Vivian and asked her if she would like to see it with him. “Sure,” she said, as if she had fully expected him to ask her. Since the test would be at McGill, they agreed that when it was over they would just hang out downtown and have something to eat before seeing the movie. That evening he began to wonder if he was being, somehow, disloyal to Angie. She was not his girlfriend, of course. Their relationship consisted only of meeting on Sunday afternoons to spend an hour or two looking at art and then another hour or two in her bed. What either of them did outside these hours was, in principle, of no concern to the other, unless it involved – Gen’s teachings were still on his mind – risky sexual behavior. Since Vivian gave the appearance of promiscuity, he would have to be careful. Having women on his mind miraculously dissipated any anxiety that Daniel might have felt on the eve of the SAT. He slept well, had a hearty breakfast, and took the metro to McGill thinking more about his date with Vivian than the examination. Being in a relaxed frame of mind, he breezed through all the tests, at times marveling at how ridiculously simple the questions were. Vivian, who was applying to several American universities including Stanford and Duke, did not seem nearly so sanguine about her performance. Through most of the afternoon her manner was pouty. Her mood changed completely once they saw the movie, which was very funny in a Saturday Night Live sort of way. On their way back to the metro she took his hand and, as they were walking, began to quote some of Elvira’s lines, beginning with innocuous ones (“Revenge is better than Christmas!”) and going on to ones that were risqué (“My name’s Elvira but you can call me tonight!”) and even salacious (“Grab a tool and start banging!”). Her stop was three stations before his, and before she got off the train she gave him a good-bye kiss on the lips. When they saw each other at school, they made another movie date for the following Saturday. What this meant was that Daniel was now, in high-school terminology, “dating” Vivian Alvarez, though he knew that when two adults were reported in the media as dating – as, for example, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, or Pierre Trudeau and Liona Boyd – something different was meant. But with each successive date the adult definition was being – almost asymptotically – approached. When they kissed good night on the second date she slipped her tongue between his lips. On the third – they were in his car – she took his hand and ran it over her clothed breasts, and on the fourth inside her blouse, with her front-snapping bra opened. As he was caressing her classically perfect breasts he remembered thinking, when he first saw Angie’s bosom – shaped like two small stub-topped mounds – that it was so unlike Gen’s twin balloons that it might as well have belonged to a female of a different species, and also feeling that the one didn’t excite him any more – or any less – than the other. He had the same feeling with Vivian. Daniel didn’t mind embarking on his sexual liaison with Vivian slowly, stage by stage, since on the following Sunday he could always release his pent-up energy with Angie Accorso. But when he was with Vivian he always had a condom with him, just in case.   With the end of October the weather turned frosty. On the first Sunday of November the pile of his clothes next to Angie’s bed was twice as high as the week before, and the lengthy undressing – as well as the tactile memory of Vivian’s thigh, and the demesnes that thereadjacent lie, the evening before – made their first bout of intercourse more frantic than ever. As they were lying side by side afterwards, it occurred to him that this was their tenth consecutive Sunday together. It then struck him that since the first time Angie had never, as far as he knew, had a period. Trying not to sound worried, he asked her about it. Angie chuckled and stroked his chest. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m going to have one tomorrow.” “Are you sure? How do you know?” “You see,” she said, “with the pill a woman regulates her period so it’s exactly four weeks, and I fixed mine so it runs from Monday to Friday and doesn’t interfere with our Sundays.” “That’s nice,” he said, relieved. He wondered why Gen hadn’t informed him of this detail. Or maybe she had, and he hadn’t paid attention. He thought of asking his mother to confirm it, but then he told himself that Angie was a nurse, after all, and ought to know these things. The following Saturday, in the backseat of Daniel’s car, it finally happened. To put it in locker-room language, he banged a hot chick his age. And it was, like, a total fuckin’ letdown. Later in the next week Pierre-Joseph Bouchard died. His death was a relief in several ways – his own from the pain of his illness, Mireille’s from the discomfort of being unable to speak with him, Daniel’s from that hostile presence that rejected his flesh and blood. The funeral was on Saturday, and Mireille and Betty went – reluctantly, especially Betty – to Rimouski. Daniel took advantage of their absence by inviting Vivian to the house. It was too cold to go out, so they watched television. And then, on his bed, they did it again. And while it was more comfortable this time, it was no better. The simple fact was that Vivian, though she had wanted it, gave no indication of enjoying it in the way that Gen and Angie did. Gen’s “She comes first” dictum did not work with her. She seemed to have no interest in orgasms or her own pleasure; sex, to her, was just a means of control. No wonder that her liaisons did not last, though it always seemed as if she was the one to break it up. In Daniel’s case, the absence of her enjoyment precluded his, and he quickly lost all interest in dating her. He began acting surly with her, half-intentionally provoking her into a confrontation. By the end of November she decided to break up with him, and almost immediately took up with Harvey Berman. Harvey, of all people, Daniel thought. But Vivian’s intention had obviously been to spite Daniel. He now began to have midweek after-school meetings with Angie, about once a week, on those days when she had the afternoon free. Her shifts were quite variable, but she always knew on Sunday which day that would be – a Tuesday, a Wednesday or a Thursday. And her place was a brisk fifteen-minute walk from North Am.