Greetings from the Vodka Sea Page 2

  The next morning, he wasn’t waiting at the fountain and did not come to class. Sondra began to worry that she’d been too aggressive, too direct. She found herself passing the fountain five or six times that day and the next and had almost given up on seeing him again, perhaps ever, when, later that evening, as she was returning to her car to go home, there he was. Sitting at the fountain, desperately not looking at her. He was in his shirtsleeves and seemed even from a distance to be shivering in the descending cold. He coughed, and, picking up the cue, Sondra went to speak to him again. This time she was more tactful. She’d missed him in class, she said, and had worried that something had happened to him. She told him the class valued his input and managed to make a lot out of a trifling thing he’d once said during a discussion on manic-depressive illness. He coughed again, and Sondra offered him a ride home. Avram sat for a very long time, measuring his frozen breath, before he wordlessly assented. The car ride was predictably quiet. Sondra made an effort to start a conversation, then lapsed into a monologue, then simply turned up Stravinsky on the eight-track. He almost seemed relieved when she shut up. He relaxed in his seat.

  “Do you think they’ll kill him?” he asked, after a long, long silence.

  Sondra was taken aback. She had no idea what Avram was talking about, and she found the question and the way he framed it with silence almost a threat in itself.

  “Kill who?”

  “James Cross. Do you think the FLQ will kill him?”

  Illuminated, Sondra relaxed, but before she could respond (the simple answer was no, but Sondra was prepared to give a much more detailed analysis), Avram stopped her. “I like your car,” he said. “I want to get a car like this someday. I want to get a car exactly like this.”

  And that was it. She dropped him off a few minutes later by a rack of student apartments near the bus station. He thanked her very politely, exactly the way, Sondra thought, his mother had taught him. And he looked at her again as he shut the door and kept his eyes on her as she drove off. He stood on the corner and watched as she drove away and did not move until the car was out of sight.

  In a note left in a garbage can for the reporters at radio station CKLM (the unfolding crisis was the last great radio news event in the country, perhaps the world), the FLQ took credit for the kidnapping of Cross, a “representative of the old, racist and colonialist British system.” In retrospect, the separatists’ demands were realistic: there was no call for the overthrow of a repressive political system, and while they did refer to the goal of “total independence” for Quebec, they clearly held no illusions that this kidnapping would further that end. What they wanted was the release of twenty-three “political prisoners” — men who’d been arrested for a variety of terrorist acts perpetrated by the FLQ over the previous ten years. Men like François Schrim, a Hungarian-born career terrorist and former French Legionnaire, who shot and killed the manager of the International Firearms Company during an attempted robbery, and Robert Levesque, a twenty-nine-year-old plumber who faced a string of convictions including armed robbery and bombings. Along with freedom for their comrades, the kidnappers wanted safe passage to Cuba or Algiers for themselves, the political prisoners and any family members who wanted to join them. They also wanted half a million dollars worth of gold bullion to help finance their new life, calling it a “voluntary tax.”

  The Cross ransom note was unsigned, but police already had a very good idea of who was involved in the plot. Central was Jacques Lanctôt, who had been picked up eight months earlier in a rented delivery truck carrying a sawed-off shotgun, a man-sized storage trunk and a press release announcing the never-perpetrated kidnapping of Israeli trade consul Moshe Golan. Lanctôt and his accomplice, charged at the time with possession of a restricted firearm and conspiracy to kidnap, disappeared into Quebec’s underworld shortly after they were granted bail. Along with Lanctôt, the police also had their eye on his sister Louise (who did not go to the Cross house) and her husband Jacques Cossette-Trudel (whose father had been named five days before to the National Energy Board by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), Marc Carbonneau and Pierre Seguin. Collectively, they called themselves the Liberation Cell.

  In Sondra’s estimation, two discoveries had advanced the cause of women’s independence above all else: the pill and the Polaroid camera. The pill granted women power over their own reproductive cycle and in an instant turned the traditional patriarchy on its head. Women were now free to enjoy sex without having to worry about its consequences. While Sondra was certain that motherhood was one of the greatest joys a woman could experience, she was equally certain that the demands of motherhood — the burden of taking responsibility for a child — forced women into subservience. Meanwhile, the Polaroid camera was helping women move to the next stage of evolution: for the first time, women could not only create and distribute images of sexuality that appealed to them directly (and specifically, these instant pictures gave every woman the power to be her own pornographer), but they now had the power to objectify men as men had historically objectified women. And that was not necessarily a bad thing, for the key to the liberation of female sexual expression, and therefore the key to the political and socio-economic emancipation of women in general, lay in their ability to objectify men, to see them as sex objects.

  It was this political inclination toward Polaroids that led Sondra to pose for Avram. Even at the time she had her reservations but convinced herself that they were hypocritical. In the encounter sessions she led, Sondra often encouraged participants to strip down and photograph one another, literally tearing away their boundaries and baring themselves before the unwavering eye of the camera. It was Sondra’s belief that people had to become comfortable with their bodies and with the image of their bodies they carried inside their heads, before they could become comfortable with minds and egos and souls.

  So Sondra agreed to pose, although “pose” is an extreme exaggeration. They had only just finished making love for the first time (Avram coming, almost the instant he’d entered her, under the stern watch of Che Guevara ) when he caught her unawares. He’d gotten up on the pretext of going to the washroom, and Sondra saw the flash a moment later. Avram stood like a guilty child as Sondra’s eyes adjusted to the light.

  “I want . . . I want to have a picture to remember you.”

  And that was Sondra’s opportunity. On the one hand, she felt violated; on the other, there was a certain charm to his passivity, to his fear. So Sondra did not object and did not, as she easily could have done given the circumstances, the photograph from his hand. Instead, she let him keep it but insisted that he must now pose for her. She made him lie on the bed with his head on the pillow. At first he tried to cover himself with the blanket, but she kicked it aside roughly.

  “Put one arm behind your head,” she told him, adding, when he did not immediately respond, “quickly now. And now lift your leg a little. The other leg, please. Just let your foot lie on the bed.”

  He seemed willing to comply with her every instruction, and with each order and response she found herself growing more forceful.

  “Now touch yourself, with your free hand. Not there!” She leaned down and positioned his hand over his tired cock. “I want you to play with yourself. Close your eyes and play with yourself. And keep it up until I finish taking the picture.”

  How she’d finally got him into bed was another story. It took weeks of gentle manipulation to get in a position where she could make her move. Eventually, he allowed her to come up to his apartment. They stood by the doorway for a very long time, but each time she leaned forward to kiss him, he would recoil and turn his head. She would retreat, and he would turn to look at her again with his soft eyes. Advance, recoil, retreat. Advance, recoil, retreat. Finally she’d had enough. She pushed him back against the door and kissed him hard on the lips. When he tried to turn his head, she held his chin firmly with one hand. Soon she pushed her tongue into his mouth, and she could feel his body responding. That
’s when, and this is the funny part, she picked him up (surprised at her own strength, her own force) and carried him into the apartment. She looked around the barren room and saw, under a huge black-light poster of Che, a thin mattress lying directly on the floor. She dropped him on the mattress, which served as his bed and, no doubt, his couch and kitchen table and work desk, and ordered him to undress. And when he didn’t, she started to do it herself.

  Sondra did not keep the photograph. It neither aroused nor disturbed her but only de-eroticized the experience. This skinny boy caught in the unflattering shadows was not the beautiful young man she’d taken to bed. She tore up the picture to give the moment entirely back to memory.

  Étienne had laughed when she told him about the picture Avram had taken (laughed, that is, not in a condescending way, but with empathy, from the perspective of one who understood completely the pitfalls of taking a lover). He laughed again when she told him he she was going to get it back.

  “To the victor go the spoils,” he said, perhaps to tease her, or perhaps because he knew that, at that moment, he needed something elegant to say. And he laughed one more time, almost to himself, and again, not to put Sondra down but in simple appreciation of her adventure.

  It was a season for adventure. The Cross kidnapping, the FLQ, the declaration of martial law, not to mention the waves of political, social and sexual liberation sweeping the country, made this Anglo-Saxon enclave where she lived seem almost cosmopolitan, almost dangerous. Everyone knew anything could happen (although certainly nothing would); Toronto — Canada — was growing up. Sondra found herself rather sympathetic to the FLQ. She saw in the kidnappers kindred spirits, not just in the larger political sense, striking a blow against oppression and the parochial status quo and its corporate-military sponsors, who espoused democracy while dictating a rigid social order, but also in the smaller, personal sense. They had come to reclaim what was theirs: their identity, their nationhood, their sense of self. That was her goal too. Both were victims of a conquest of sorts, the only difference was scale. They wanted liberation, the right of self-determination over their own land; she, on a political level, wanted equality and self-determination for womankind, which meant, in large part, the destruction of the artificial borders that define ideas of gender. And on a more personal level, she wanted self-determination over her own image; she wanted her damn picture back.

  Avram lived on the top floor of a three-story building with garbage piled up in front. The squalor was typical of not just the student slums but much of the ethnic quarter of inner-city Toronto. She could smell the food cooking on a dozen hot-plates: some chicken soup here, a curry there, something heavy, bacon perhaps. Radios and record players sang from every corner, rock music and arias and even a fiddle, as static-coated announcers talked excitedly about the kidnappers and the crisis they’d precipitated.

  Sondra knocked and waited. Avram had called her several times since the night they’d had sex; she could tell it was him because when she answered the phone there was no one on the other end. He hadn’t been to class either, but there was not much different about this. Sometimes he came, sometimes he did not.

  Sondra knocked again, then, finding the door unlocked, she let herself in. The light was on in the tiny bathroom, and Sondra could hear the shower running. Better for her; she could finish her work without causing a scene. She quickly searched the room. The dresser drawers were empty except for a few clothes. She found the Polaroid camera on top of a makeshift bookshelf, but the photograph was not with it. She looked in the bed and under the mattress and on top of the miniature fridge and in the coffin-sized Ardmore that served as his clothes cupboard and pantry. Nothing anywhere.

  That’s when she thought of the poster. She peeled back the yellowed tape and turned up the corner and then, in her shock, tore the poster down.

  She stepped back. The water was still running. She could hear him moving in the little stall: maybe he was thinking of her right now? Pleasuring himself, perhaps?

  Sondra counted. One, two, three . . .

  She stopped at thirty-six. Not because there were too many to count, but because she realized that the exact number was meaningless. Woman and girl and boy and man — all of them captured unawares, some covered, some half-draped, some fully naked. Some seemed surprised by the sudden flash, others angered; most smiled, the way we are conditioned to do whenever a camera is pushed in our face. Here and there — the younger ones mostly — had thrust their legs apart or moved their hands onto themselves. Already they were looking to the future, anticipating the pleasure this photograph would bring to the photographer. Individually, the pictures seemed poorly composed and constructed, with far too much shadow and black space, but collectively they held a certain unmistakable power. They were dark and sexual and cold, and every person (again, thanks to a quality of the light) blended into one.

  Her own snapshot was near the bottom, wedged between a much older woman, probably in her fifties, heavyset, who managed to smile just in time to have her picture taken, and a teenaged boy, still with his baby fat, the camera flash making a ghost of his white skin, apparently sleeping.

  Sondra looked toward the tiny bathroom. She thought of confronting Avram, of pulling him out of the shower by his ear, like a cartoon schoolmarm, and force him to explain himself.

  She felt now as if she were captured in a larger photograph, a moment glazed and mounted in time. She looked again at the collection. She wanted to reach for hers, in the bottom right corner, flanked by the old housewife and the ghost boy, but her hand would not go there. She felt a soft anxiety — guilt, perhaps, or a momentary wish for atonement — then began plucking the other photos from the wall. Avram could keep the one of her, it meant nothing now, just another image in a series of disconnected moments. The rest of them she’d take. She piled them neatly in her hand, careful not to crease the edges. This had been Avram’s secret. It belonged to her now.

  A Collection of Suicide Notes

  The coroner has one of the best collections of suicide notes I have ever seen. Of course, he has an in. That’s often what separates the true collector from the gifted hobbyist. My own assemblage is eclectic, with a few documents of historical interest and a couple pieces that I would call real gems from an artistic point of view. But all in all my collection is wanting. I don’t have the access.

  You shift your legs, uncrossing them, crossing them the other way, and I can see that my revelation is making you uncomfortable. Maybe I’m kidding, or maybe the darkroom fumes have gone to my head and left me dizzy. That’s happened before. Like the Sunday when I’d been developing photographs all afternoon and I came out finally and poured milk on your sister’s head because I thought her hair was on fire. That, I’ll admit, was a legitimate hallucination. This time I’m telling the truth.

  The coroner says that it’s not always easy to get his hands on the suicide notes. They are, after all, evidence, although perhaps not evidence in the strictest legal sense; no real law has been broken. The notes are the unofficial certification that the deceased did in fact kill themselves and were not, as the coroner is always careful to establish, victims of foul play. So as you can see there is nothing truly illegal about our little avocation. It’s a bit voyeuristic, morbid even, but essentially harmless. No need to look alarmed; I assure you there is nothing of a sexually deviant nature to this hobby, speaking for myself in any case. I can’t honestly say what goes on in coroner’s mind.

  While my collection pales beside the coroner’s, I have over two hundred and fifty original suicide notes, and another five hundred-odd if you count certified photocopies. The very youngest writer was a boy of eleven. I bought his from a serious collector from Seattle, who’d found it pressed between the pages in an antique bible. The note is very old and simply reads: “I’m sorry I am not a better son. I only want you to be proud of me.” It is addressed to no one, so we can only speculate, and signed simply “Owen.” (A suicidal eleven-year-old is not as unusual as yo
u might think; the coroner says he often sees children as young as three and four who have taken their own lives, although, out of compassion, he lists these deaths as accidental.) The oldest writer in my collection is a man named Dolby, who, at the age of one hundred, shot himself in the head. This letter is definitely authentic, I bought it off the man’s grandson, although rather rambling and disoriented.

  What would your sister say? It’s not as if she’s without her own little peculiarities, is it? Everybody has secrets and collections. You yourself have your preferences, which I have been very tolerant of, and I don’t think I need to remind you of the way you used to collect baby things until you gave it up. And your sister — your sister used to boast, “I collected lovers like holiday spoons.” We’ve both seen her in action at the supermarket. Pretending there’s something wrong with her cart, or that she can’t reach the oyster sauce on the top shelf (“Could I just ask you to reach that down for me thanks I don’t know why they make these shelves so high a woman’s got to be some kind of amazon or basketball player to get things down it’s so hard to go shopping when you’re just cooking for one”), or, when all else failed, as it usually did, offering the delivery boy a little something extra for carrying her bags. It’s in our blood; we evolved from hunters and gatherers, and hunters and gatherers we continue to be. So don’t give me that what-would-my-sister-say look, please.

  Your sister once said something along the lines of, “I’m the type of person who remembers the lovers I almost had better than the lovers I did have.” Maybe you weren’t there, but I remember like yesterday. We were in Niagara Falls, the time before we were married that we went to the Falls, before I really knew you, in the days when I contemplated your sister. You remember. Your sister had just left the Spanish man, Carlos, in Montreal. Your sister had black hair then; this was several months before she became a natural blond. My cousin had the red Trans Am with the sun roof. He drove for a day and a half straight through by eating those little caffeine pills you’d taken from your father’s shaving kit. The four of us went to Niagara Falls to forget. You had gone to the wax museum with my cousin, and your sister and I were left on a beach together with nothing but our best moves. We did try to grope and grapple for a while, but then she told me about you. She said you were like the air inside a tennis ball. I laughed, of course, assuming that your sister, who was never one to wax philosophical, was somehow being sarcastic. But she wasn’t. “She has such secrets,” your sister said on your behalf. “No one knows what’s inside or how she keeps it there.” Of course, by the time you and my cousin returned from the wax museum I’d forgotten about your sister; I was over you like a plastic raincoat. You seemed surprised that someone would prefer you to your sister. And to her credit, your sister easily switched to my cousin. I’d like to know what she thinks now. Maybe I am one of those best remembered almost-hads; I’ve often wondered that.