A year ago I was fortunate enough to have my first book published. I was 46, and though I'd lost touch with the craft for years at a time during my 20s and 30s, I had been a hopeful writer since I was a teenager. Not too long after the book launch (a modest affair at a coffee house in Montreal), I was added to a small list of authors which our publisher sent out on a book tour. It required taking two weeks off from my day job, and, for the most part, was two weeks of travelling just to do small readings at bookshops and public libraries to audiences of 5 to 20 "somewhat" interested listeners.
As anticlimactic as the tour was professionally, on a personal level, it was an adventure, and a rediscovery of someone, and something, I'd lost a long time ago.
The book tour began in Vancouver. The four of us on the tour flew in from our various locations around Canada separately, and were booked into the same hotel for the Sunday night. We did the tour's first reading at the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library on Monday afternoon, but we met for the first time over breakfast at the hotel on Monday morning.
Now, I did know that she was going to be there. The publicist had told me the names of the other authors early in the process, the emails we received included her name, advance publicity had her picture, and, well, she was the "star" of this tour, promoting her 5th book, with two of her earlier titles legitimately described as best-sellers, while two of us were promoting our first, and the other was promoting his second. So, as I went down to breakfast that morning, I knew that Marissa would be there. I knew what she would look like, I knew how her voice would sound, but, after approximately 21 years, I didn't know how it would feel to see her again.
She kept me waiting.
The publicist was at a table in the morning sunlight when I arrived. She was in her late 20s. I had the impression she was the junior publicist out on her first cross-country tour, while the senior publicist stayed in Toronto working on other projects. Her name was Eileen. She was tall, perhaps 5'10, with shoulder length dirty blond hair, smallish breasts from what I could tell, and a busy, "let's work out the details" expression always on her face. She looked up from her cell phone when she saw me, and stood and gave me a hug.
I had been indecisive in the hotel room about what to wear, and had chosen to dress "up" a bit. I was wearing black dress shoes and slacks, an iron grey dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons left undone, and no tie. Eileen had dressed nicely as well, a black lace pencil skirt and a tight fitting sleeveless blouse. Steve arrived wearing the jogging pants and T shirt he'd apparently just been jogging in on the treadmill. Steve was younger than me, a 29 year old travel adventure writer whose first book about Southeast Asia had been a fairly successful title for our publisher. After Steve, Mary arrived. Mary was probably the oldest of our group, 50+ and, like me, a first time author. She had been a stay-at-home mom and/or an office administrator off and on over the years, but had never given up on her writing, and what she was promoting on this tour was something in the vampire romance arena. Her hair, once red, was fading to something in the blond area. She wasn't an athlete, but she would come to mention long walks, and I guess they account for the general aura of health that she radiated, her smile probably helped with that as well. She was perhaps 5'5, and about 160 pounds.
And so, Eileen the publicist, Mary and myself, the rookies, and Steve the "jock", we waited, for our star, for the woman I'd known 21 years earlier, for Marissa.
When she arrived, the first thing I was aware of were hands on my shoulders, a presence behind me, and then long dark brown hair flitting before my eyes as soft lips left a polite "peck" on my cheek. "Hello everyone," she said, moving to her chair, her eyes finding mine for the first time. "Hello Nathan."
Marissa had gone basic black, with a one piece tight fitting sleeveless dress that ended several inches above her knees. The breasts I'd once cupped and held were still firm, swelling the top of her dress, her long raven-black hair fell loosely past her shoulders, and her thin face with those piercing eyes cast me back a long time, when we had been much much younger.
Steve was the one who demanded an explanation for Marissa's greeting to me, and so we told them, with smiles and humour, while we drank coffee and nibbled on toast, how Marissa and I had gone to McGill together; how I had been the star of the various creative writing classes we'd been in together, and how she had been the star of the women's swim team, and I the stubborn but hopeless swimmer she would pass over and over again in the lanes during open swim hours.
We didn't tell them about the lost moment that had haunted me for 20 years. The time we had both found ourselves invited to a dinner party at a professor's house, how we had been young, and alive, and how we somehow maneuvered ourselves into a quiet bedroom, where my lips touched her neck as I stood behind her, and my hands found her breasts, and how soon she was lying back on the bed with her legs dangling over the edge, her dress bunched up above her waist, as I knelt at her feet, nibbling and licking my way up her inner thighs, and my tongue just barely finding her when the door opened, the light came on, and our professor's wife lost her mind at what was happening and kicked us out of her house.
After that, the moment that night was lost, and being the end of the spring term of our final year, we never found it again. I fairly quickly left the city for a summer of hard work in northern Ontario, and she eased into the unhappy marriage that would produce two children, but end in divorce in her early 30s.
After breakfast, Eileen gave us instructions for meeting at the library at 1:30pm, and then quickly became engrossed with her cell phone. Mary wandered off for one of her walks, and Steve seemed to suddenly realize how beneficial a shower might be. Marissa and I were left alone, in the hotel lobby, dressed well enough for a dinner date, and with nothing to do. "Nathan," she said, "you look like you still swim."
"I do."
