that land inside us … Yvon — shy, but firm — nothing coy. He has just pierced again my flank, emancipated me again from my ironsides … and I have just swallowed him eyeballs first. The pact is simple, frank, immutable. This then is disaster … the complete, instant immersion in another. No holds barred. Absolute accessibility. And it is disaster … consequence of my desertion of all I hold dear — the requisite Disaster…. “Il me faut cinq piastres … je suis commerçant.” My head roars … senses close — I turn to grapple with that Judas-kiss…. Everything left in me focuses my deception … my eyes muster my accusation, and as I look at him we are imbedded along the line of looking; his eyes flow into me again, and I accept their need, and my own.
Walk the greystone street from the bar, the same side of La Place as my petite place … down towards the harbour … along a grey way of stone houses … flanked by them each side, till we are in front of a fine Regency stone home, now for tourists … up the curving cast-iron steps two flights, from whose top I can see the white new dome of the Marché Bonsecours, the rippling cupola of the City Hall … and if I step to one side, the towers of Notre Dame, with the Bank of Montreal behind. The front door is bullworthy — no battering would breach its stolid convolutions of wood panel and applied pilasters. Inside everything clean, in place … a snugglery amidst these Georgian townhouses that are become everything but what they were — boutiques, tourist homes, warehouses, brothels, antique shops. I can only chuckle … if only the Regency gentlemen of old Montreal could see this … or the Historic Sites Committee today.
Yvon’s room … an extension of the bunnycoats I saw in the tavern. Those parkas canadiens which no English-Canadian male nor even she-male would be seen dead in alive. A kind of blatant cuteness. The walls bleu-pale, of dribbly plaster pattern; crucifix on the wall (after all — I met Yvon at the foot of the altar!) flowers potted on a low star-spangled coffee table (Air Canada styling!) — they are plastic, but I scarce note that except by mental recollection, they seem so right … live flowers here would be fake! All warmly cosmetic. Yvon reporting to his “colleagues” (think that is the academic term) in the basement.
… what the Hell am I doing here? What are the chances of getting out? There was a murder in this block a few days before I arrived — my cleaning woman told me all the details … I scout the innards of the cupboard — no one there. On the table, beside the potted plastic flowers three colour photos of Yvon … in each one he has the same intent, diffident look. In each one he shields his eyes from the probe of the camera … never really letting the camera see what I have already seen in him, through his eyesite. How can I possibly believe him conscientious accomplice to murder. His innocence is so articulate in these photos … his self-consciousness.
Yvon back — close the door … lock it carefully — turn, look at me … it is a warm looking. A male prostitute — he patently likes his métier — his clean bluejeans already taut as he stands akimbo, gentle, awaiting — nothing slut, nothing brazen, nothing aggressive, nor weak. He is simply there … all there. And he wants to be there — that’s what he is there about. What’s more, he expects me to be there. I watch this open and absolute salutation in silenced admiration … this complete self-presentation. My presence acknowledges him … gives birth to him. God — this métier of his, it is divine. No actor could approximate this extraordinary gift of self that the $5 conceals. This boy simply wants to give and to be given. The five bucks … give it to him now … hand it to him saying “You can go now if you want.” Yvon folds the bill carefully in his shirt, looks me up and down — is it reproach? And then steps forward, unbuttons his checked shirt and draws my thighs to him gentle and hands on my back kneads me into him … I watch us wary … not a false move. What Yvon does comes from within him — from some inner law he follows now flawlessly, while his eyes palp mine. I watch intently for the slightest failure in that law — at the slightest deviation from it I would be released, and would flee … There is none. This boy is an artist. And he sells his body the way artists do, only they do it at once remove, on canvas, or sculpted … his art is consummate, direct….
Yvon jabs cocked pants now steep into my thighside … thrust him back and eat his body wholemeal through my eyeballs. Still he awaits. And as though unveiling virgin I part his bluejeans and complete our divestiture, till we are naked in us…. His body proffers so naturally — so freshly — the virginity lying in the renewed wonder it reveals for him so clearly now.
Imbedded together I man his rood that fulfils my palmed handling … firm in the hand … the rediscovered heritage. Yvon eyes always follow me through mine, always completely there, always implicating my own, so that what is done at manrood is already assured in eyesite … once only do I avert my eyes, and as I do the thunder of my ear dies and I am alone. I panic, and my eyes turn quick to filch him at cockhead, and as they light thereupon I see his eyes again, ears open, and again I feel steep inside of me.
“Comment veux-tu arriver?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Yvon’s eyes summons us … “Je ne l’aime pas dans le trou….”
I feel my disappointment … because there is a negative in us now. Then I see his eyes — they are not negative; they are only the look of a boy about to take Communion. Run my rood along his, lying us askewer, touching us together for the first time, thus, lightly, run it along, till our cocklips touch, run it down the firmed centre of his manhood (simple statistic: he has 10 fine inches of gift), and slowly creep my cocktip up to his, his eyes on my cockhead, then his eyes clamped in my own, we eyesite each other, till with easy implacably concision the cocklips kiss again and I am inflorescent, bathing his rood in liquid moonstone. Yvon’s eyes close in a Mona Lisa smile of the line of the lids, and as he lie so immersed in my harvest I gather his root till it blurt sperm bolts clean up to our breast.
His eyes open, incredulous with wonder … dresses as I watch him. “Where will you go now?”
“je rentre au club … je vais danser….” Yvon smiles, pats the $5 … I know that although our conjugation has been tentative, yet I will always remember Yvon, because he restores to me an entire world … suddenly he reincarnates me after twenty years of meticulous self-destitution. For twenty years I have adhered meticulously to the code of the latent Civil Serviceable. For twenty years I have flirted with sterility. Now, at the final moment, I have broken. Yvon breached me at the moment of final closure. I am free to be myself responsibly … free to know the world I have so conscientiously extruded.
For that Yvon is blessed … I look at the crucifix on the wall. “I met you in the Church … yet you are … you are” (I couldn’t say, or didn’t want to say “prostitute”) He sees my difficulty … as I stumble out my compromise word “you are promiscuous.” Yvon smiles “oh non, tu vois, je suis Catholique.”
Wonderful variation of a theme — “non anglised angeli” — “not promiscuous; catholic….” Out of the mouth of babes.
As we go out, the door of the next bedroom is open. The same reality to it: definably French Canadien — incredible “bad taste” … but incredibly complete bad taste … nothing out of its own taste — all of a piece. And that piece is of podgy flesh paste … a plaster-of-Paris incorporation! Polychromatic! Like those same plastic flowers hung beside a same Christ. All of life as some bloody waxy image … with all artificial colouring — like margarine, maraschino cherries. Pinks, powdered blues … star-dust! It loyally revulses me….
And in a wicker armchair, in the corner….
“Bonsoir Pierrot … je m’en vais au Rock.” Yvon is gentle, polite … saving him from a kind of smugness, from a holier than thou so clearly produce of his fortune with me … his duty done for the day. A kind of sainting for sinhood.
“C’est Hughes,
