Chapter 2 in the novel The Erotic Writers Festival
"He finds himself with his mouth open, trying to remember the rest of the sentence. He sits down on the ground and begins to eat the mango."
-- from
Oryx and Crake
, by Margaret Atwood
My lover lives just outside Paris, Ontario, on the road to London, in a region known as New Sweden and -- oddly, perfectly, strangely, enough -- the last person who lived on her piece of property called it Bangkok.
We did not know it was called Bangkok, in the beginning. We did not know it had a name. It was a little place on the edge of a forest in the hills outside of Toronto. Bangkok seemed like an unlikely place for that little part of Canada, but, we discovered, the name described that place perfectly.
There was no Asian community in the area, except in Toronto, but there was a new Thai restaurant in the closest little town. Their pad Thai noodles and chicken in coconut sauce were terrific -- hot, spicy, sweet, all at the same time (just like my lover). I liked their menu because it had an item called Vegetarian Vegetables. Apparently, something was lost in translation. My lover said some of the dishes seemed authentically Thai and some of them were really Canadian versions of Oriental dishes.She liked a lot of them and was quite happy such an exotic restaurant had opened nearby. I liked phoning in an order to take-out, driving into town to get it, and eating it at my lover's place, in front of the fire, on a cold winter evening or in the springtime, which was a long time in coming.
They always said the same thing: "It will be ready in ten minutes."
No matter what you ordered, on the phone or in person, for take out or to eat in, it was always ready in ten minutes.
The restaurant was just a cubicle in a strip mall, beside a suntanning place, next door to a general store run by a Korean family, across a small parking lot from a McDonald's.That Mickey Dee's didn't get much traffic, it seemed, but there were always a few cars parked in front of the Thai place.
It had blown up photographs of the Thai countryside on the walls as decoration and a shrine to a Thai goddess with oranges added to it. Sometimes the oranges were fresh and sometimes it looked as though they had been there for a few days.
I asked my lover about that, as she had been to Thailand several times and knew a lot about Hindu gods and goddesses. All I knew was that Bali was part of the Republic of Indonesia, was south of the equator in the Indian Ocean.
S. pointed to one of the pictures on the wall and said, "That's Gunung Agung,"The Majestic Mountain", revered as the navel of the universe, the stepping stone of the gods and the goddesses when they descend from heaven."
I asked her which of the gods or goddesses were given the oranges in the little restaurant we were in. "Is it Shiva or Shakti?" I wanted to know.
She said it was probably Ganeesha, but it didn't really matter because, she said, "All Hindu gods and goddesses are the same god or divine energy, nameless and without form, really ...."
I loved my lover's brain. It turned me on that she knew so much about so many things. I told her so and she said, as usual, "I don't know much. I just have a magpie mind -- holding on to shiny bits and pieces of things I find."
She seems very Canadian, sometimes -- the way she deflects compliments and keeps her ego small despite the fact she is beautiful, brainy, gifted in so many ways, so talented .... Religion, cooking, restaurants, and lovemaking were all on the long list of things she knew a great deal about.
While we were waiting ten minutes for our coconut chicken, pad Thai, and vegetarian vegetables, we talked about politics and history. I turned the conversation towards my favourite subject: sex.
"It seemed to me," I said to her, "that this part of the world, with Paris right beside Bangkok, on the way to London, not far from Toronto, is the sexiest interpretation of that old Canadian dream of multi-culturalism, the ideal version of the grand vision of Canada's most idealistic prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, back in the Sixties, who said, "the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation".
She said, "Your liberal, lusty, fun-loving, adventurous, PM, seemed so gay, but he dated Barbara Streisand, and he was married to a hot woman who hung out with The Rolling Stones .... He saw this country as a place that could put together the best of all sorts of places around the world, didn't he."
"Yes," I said. "I wonder if he ever even knew about Bangkok, near Paris, in New Sweden, on the way to London, Ontario. He would have loved it."
She said, "Nova Scotia is one thing, New Brunswick and Newfoundland are something else, British Colombia is a hot hybrid on the left or west coast, but the Swedish, Parisian, part of Ontario, with its flavours from the Far East and the swinging heart of the West, is an amazing amalgamation of influences that flies in the face of the old, conservative, uptight, anally-retentive, Ontario, with all its old scarcity issues."
We talked about Paris, Ontario, for awhile. "I like it because it's not too far from Toronto, which has a population four million and is still growing fast, with lots of immigrants from around the world, including the largest community of Tibetans outside of Tibet, for instance," my lover said.
The Dali Lama had recently been to Toronto and got a lot of publicity for Tibetans.
"And Toronto is the home of the CN Tower, the tallest freestanding structure in the world, right beside the SkyDome, the big stadium with the retractable roof. Some see Toronto, with its impressive communication tower, as the throat chakra of the world" I added. "Others see the world's tallest freestanding phallic symbol beside the big yoni as a symbol of a different kind of communication."
That's when our food came.
My lover and I had a little miscommunication, last week, about our intentions for the next weekend. I had a sore throat from a dry cough and my feet hurt after playing soccer. Every step I took was painful and every couple of hours I coughed so hard I thought I would choke to death. Aside from that, I felt quite ecstatic. My lover had a lot of things to do on the weekend, including work and some family obligations for a big get-together. When we talked about getting together on the weekend, we played a little game we called "The Gift Of The Magi" and wound up giving each other just the right present at the wrong time. We decided we would not get together for the first time on a Friday night in the nine months of our amazing relationship.
When Friday night rolled around, I thought I was getting messages from the universe that I was going in the wrong direction. My plans for Friday and Saturday kept falling apart. Three different groups of people canceled plans with me.It reminded me of the old saying about the universe giving us three roses and then a Mack truck. In fact, I pray for this, asking the universe to send me gentle messages instead of the kind that can't be ignored. The belief is that if you ignore the subtle messages, you'll get hit with a big one. I took the changes in my plans with other people to mean I should be heading down south to see my lover. I was still wondering what the sore foot and the cough were all about.
I took a little risk and gave in to my desire to jump in the car and head down south to see my lover on Friday night. Instead of planning and packing, I just jumped in my car and headed south. It seemed like the right thing to do, when I got into my little car; it felt right and the route was like an electro-magnet or my car knew the way all on its own.I didn't feel as though I was driving through the late spring landscape, I felt as though I was just going with the flow, like a drop of water in a river in freshet.
It was the end of April but it looked like the end of autumn, up north, as it had snowed, recently, and the cold weather so late in the year was holding off spring like an old-fashioned virgin holding off a hot lover. The further south I drove, crossing the natural borders marking the difference between Northern Ontario and southern Ontario, the more it seemed as though I was driving into springtime as the landscape got greener and greener. Fields looked green but the leaves on the trees had not popped out, yet. I contemplated the late spring instead of focusing on my fears of showing up unexpectedly.
I am not a droppy-inny sort of guy. People don't drop in on me and I don't drop in on other people, and I like it that way.Entering into a friendship with me means adopting that social contract. Maybe I was trying to ignore another little fear I had left over from another relationship in the past, which fell apart the first time we skipped a weekend together.
I phoned my lover from a nearby town and asked her how she was doing, how things were going, and reminded her that she had said something about being happy if we got together even though she was so busy.
"Yes!" she said, "but you said you had some things you had to do and you haven't been feeling so hot ...."
"I'm in Paris," I blurted out.
She laughed heartily and happily and said, "Well then hurry over to Bangkok, lover! I'll be so happy to see you!"
That was a relief, I thought, and an affirmation from the universe that following my instincts and intuition this time had been correct.
"Phew!" I said to myself, after hanging up the phone.
I found some Stargazer lilies in a couple of colours that seemed particularly fragrant and full, a copy of a new Blaze Harlequin with a sexy title, and, instead of candy for my lover, the traditional present, I got some cold drugs for myself -- cough medicine with echinaceae and throat lozenges with herbal remedies.
My lover had an amazing present waiting for me. She had told me a bit about it, earlier in the week, mentioning she had noticed a little sex shop in a place she passed all the time. "I did a u-turn on the highway, cut into traffic, and headed back there," she said, "because it seemed strange I had never noticed this place before."
She spent a long time in the boutique, looking at everything, and picked up two things, she said, before she had to leave because she was feeling so horny.
