I'm trying to archive stories lovely young companions have told me over the years. I want these stories to remember later, in the latter days of my life. It's always worth remembering the young companions of one's past and remembering a time when girls did tell me about their adventures and the days when they learned about men, sex, love, seductions, and how to experience and manage their encounters.
This is from a friend at McGill in Montreal, someone I miss very deeply. She should have an academic title by now--- a doctoral thesis on Nabokov, Mavis Gallant, and the literary idea of exile. She might be in Montreal tonight, or Toronto, or Vancouver...or London Town. She and I talked for years, all about books and music and Sixties fashion in nouvelle vague Paris and Swinging London. She told me all about Eastern European film in the 1960s and how much she loved sitting in shabby art house cinemas or in neighbourhood dive bars full of Russian emigres in Montreal. And she did tell me this story, from her teens:
Awkward meeting...happened when I was 16. Usually my internet relationships were always with people very far away (more exotic for me, also no chance of anything every happening). This summer I was shipped off to stay with relatives in a dreary suburb in the States. Relatives had no internet at the home so the only area of interest to me was the library (no friends of my own age in that dreary suburb!) to my surprise this one casual friendship I had struck up...well he lived in this same suburb. We talked on the phone, once, but it was incredibly awkward. Anyways, I plucked up the courage to meet him in the library. I didn't know what he looked like, so, overcome by feeling self-conscious (I wasn't quite aware of my abilities then) I left. I received an email, later, saying he saw me and knew exactly that it was me, he knew my hair and the little red summer dress with flowers that I had worn.
I started receiving presents from him. The first present, for my birthday, was a little package of Hello Kitty treats (stationery, wallet, etc). I remember he had asked me what my bra size was. I should've have known where this was going but it was a late-night chatting session so I simply told him (32 B in case you were wondering). Well..what should arrive in the mail but a pink-and-white striped Victoria's Secret box. (I was now back home, in Kanadia...we don't have Victoria's Secret so it seemed exotic at the time. I didn't realise that it was standard Mall Wear, but anyways). Now...the underwear was SEVERE. A black satiny bra and matching thong! The bra had a little criss-cross detail between the breasts, very S&M. So I went from Hello Kitty Material to Dominatrix. He lives in California now and every once in a while asks me to go to Shanghai with him because he gets some sort of discount on travel. He's 43 and really does not like Asian girls. Only white fair-skinned girls! What do you think of this?
She told me later that the man had expanded on the invitations to Shanghai.She wouldn't, he told her, be required to sleep with him, only to take a champagne bath with him in some expensive hotel on the Bund. She wrote that her immediate thought was how sticky a champagne bath was likely to be, and that she'd have to climb out of the champagne-filled tub (was it built to look like a champagne glass? the Chinese are not known for erotic subtlety...or good taste) and jump into a shower to get the champagne stickiness off herself.
And, she wrote, Chinese champagne just wouldn't be Veuve!
She wrote this to me once, too--- a memory from her late teens, of growing up in a small town in the Quebec countryside:
It is so cold and I am tired of winter and I just want to be back in summer. I want to be in last summer with Evelyn again when we just roamed days that stretched into weeks. We’d wait till her parents were finally asleep and then slip out the window in our long nightgowns. I felt just like we were woodsprites (or wood nymphs).
I miss Evelyn…
…She is taller than me, and very slim.
She is covered in freckles and has auburn hair.
After we slip out the window we run down the hill, breathless with the excitement and the danger of being young and free on a summer’s night.
The crickets’ song in the blackness of night makes our hearts beat faster. We run down the hill so fast, our little bare wood-sprite feet getting muddy. Hair and hem tangled in branches and twigs.
There’s a boy she likes who lives further down the hill. I thought she was being ridiculous because not only was he a boy, he was a boy younger than us. A mere child!
I help her throw rocks at his window, but he is asleep, like the entire town at this time of night. Finally, he awakes and they exchange a few feverish sentences. I wait, impatiently. A porch light turns on. Parents!
We’re laughing but we have to hold it in, trying not to explode. We run down the hill until we get to the river, and with jagged breaths we throw our nightgowns off like some offering to the gods. Evelyn’s bony freckled whiteness shines in the dark. We dive into the black river that never warms, not even on a midsummer’s night…
Evelyn was never shy with public nudity. At night we’d dare each other to flash truckers. There wasn’t much else to do. Life in a small town....
That's a fun story, and one that's easy to visualize. I do miss her. I miss that she could quote long passages of Dorothy Sayers' essay on Dante and Denis de Rougemont's "Love in the Western World" off the top of her head. I miss her tastes in French pop and how she could tell the difference between Russian and Icelandic vodka. I do hope she has "Doctor" in front of her name now, and that she did get to make her long hoped-for trips to Dharamsala and Socotra.
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