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.
