Canada

Amazing how beautiful she was. But what I didn't understand was... something about her smell, the smell of the pine forest. I couldn't describe it.
Smells were impossible to describe. I didn’t know where the smell came from. It could have been her breath or her body odor. I didn't know—whether it was the smell of a forest when I was in Quebec. It triggered a free association of an image, but I could have argued about that forever.
The smell reminded me of a forest. No, no, no. It didn't remind me of a forest. It made me feel repulsed. Repulsed. The only thing I could think of because I had to give an answer—was the forest: This forest smell. No it was just pure negativity. Forests represented pure negativity. I asked myself if it was a class thing. I hit something there.
I ran into this girl in Charles de Gaulle airport. I was in Charles de Gaulle for about eight hours waiting for the airplane. Five minutes before my plane was supposed to take off, I get in line, and there was an announcement made. The plane would be delayed eight hours. The pilot was ill.
They directed the passengers to go to a restaurant to get free food, and information about the flight would be presented to them later. So everybody started walking in the direction of the restaurant, out of the terminal into the main part of the airport. I turned to the first girl I saw. It was pure impulsive behavior. I started talking to her.
I asked: “Do you want to walk with me?” Of course we're talking in French. She said, sure, I'll walk with you. And we started talking. We went to the restaurant together for the free food that the airport had promised us.
I told her of my adventures, my travels. She told me things about her self, that she was a hairdresser, lived in Quebec, owned a horse. She lived at home with her parents. Then we went to a bar. She bought me a beer.
Then I bought her a glass of champagne. She made a call to her parents. I called my parents. Next we were lying on top of each other trying to keep warm. The body heat, something happened.
On the plane I changed my seat to sit next to Maxine. Maxine had the window seat. I had the aisle seat. Two isles over was a beautiful girl much better looking than Maxine. Maxine was pretty.
Maxine was ugly compared to this girl. Maxine was very pretty in the pictures I took of her, but the girl two aisles over, was absolutely stunning. She could have been on a cover of a magazine.
And the whole plane ride I was tempted to go over and talk to her, and ditch Maxine, and take the empty seat next to this beautiful girl. During the whole trip I was eyeing her. She was eyeing me. Every time Maxine was looking out the window I'd wink at this beautiful girl, and she'd wink back. We were smiling the whole time.
The beautiful girl I was looking at was giggling every once and while. I should have ditched Maxine! I regretted not being able to become two people at once. I tried taking a little walk, but she was in plain view. I would have been spotted immediately.
No. My designs would have been known, wrecked everything, because of guilt and fear. I didn't follow my gut, which was to ditch Maxine. Take up with the other girl. Maxine's smell made me have a doubt.
I arrived in Montreal so late that I couldn't come to Boston. Maxine’s parents immediately picked her up. I had to go to a hotel, wait till the next morning, and get up real early with an alarm clock. I had to wake up at 5:00 AM. I woke up without an alarm clock. I slept about two hours.
I left at 6:30 AM and arrived in Boston around 7:30. I get a call from Maxine. I didn't remember much. I had a terrible memory. She called about a day later. This was around the end of January. Back in Boston.
Then I made a reservation to go up four days later to Quebec City. I didn't make a reservation. I was trying to look into plane fares and they were so expensive. I took the bus to Montreal. Nine hours. Thirteen hours in all.
To get there! To Quebec City. Because I had to go from Boston to Albany New York...I forgot. I blocked it out. Thirteen hours of bus ride. On the way back it was only 4 or 5 hours. I didn’t get a direct bus ride. I might have asked. But there were none that day. I arrived in Quebec City at 1:30 AM.
She picked me up at the bus station. She knew I was coming in. I had called her. We went to her house. But she took me for a drive around town first.
She drove me quickly around the town. The streetlights were glowing. I would have liked to stay in the center of town, but instead we went to the country, the suburbs, housing developments, boring. Except it was hilly. There were forests.
I couldn’t remember whether they were two story or one-story houses. Barely two-story. Ranch style. And so the whole idea of her being out in the country was exploded. It was the beauty of Quebec and the wilds of Canada and everything—it turned out—she lived in this housing development. And her horse was not down the road.
I didn’t see the horse. I didn't get what I wanted. I imagined that it would be in the pure countryside...Forests. And behind her house would be this horse running around with a fence around it...Mountains in the distance.
Instead it looked like disgusting suburbia, which I hated! I traveled thirteen hours to get to this ugly little suburb outside of Quebec. And the horse was not behind the house.
I arrived there. And her parents were asleep. She picked me up in her own car. And so I walked into the house—a sleeping house—in the basement. That was where she lived. She had moved down to the basement where her brother used to live. Her brother didn’t live in the house anymore.
We crawled into bed. I was only in my underwear. She put on these thick cotton pajamas, with these cows, cartoon cows all over the pajamas. And I didn't understand why she was wearing these pajamas. I was in my underwear. Maybe she was cold.
She started kissing me, and holding me and getting me really horny and I tried to take off her pants and she had these big cow—cartoon—pajamas on, and I couldn't get her pajamas off. Finally I realized she didn't want to take them off. But she was giggling the whole time. And this went on, I trying to take off her pants, and her giggling, for about three hours, making out. I barely slept a wink.
We finally woke up at around 11:30 AM. Her father had gone to work. Her mother was a housewife. And the father worked in Insurance. I was not sure.
I couldn’t take it in. Some boring suburban job...conventional, conservative, but barely middle class. Yes, I had a sense of class superiority.
When I woke up I was still horny. She finally took her pants off. I just put it in and I, it was, pre-ejaculation. It was premature ejaculation.
Not again. It was terrible. In Mexico I had great sex, sustained. There had been too much titillation the night before. She didn’t seem to resent that. No, she said she thought it was funny. This was a great girl.
We went and had this big American breakfast, which made me feel better, but then I wanted to have a nap. Actually I wanted to get her back in bed to try again. We didn’t even go into the center of town. We didn’t go to Quebec City. We were still in the suburbs, Suburbia, the land of nothing: Lots of snow though.
There was tons of snow. It was frigid. It was absolutely freezing out. I didn’t bring long underwear. No, I didn't.
We bought some film and I took some photographs of her. I promised her that I wouldn’t post the photographs on the Internet. Then we get back in bed. That was when we did it! It was good, fast, animal sex. And we fell asleep.
We woke up at 4:45 PM. She had to go to work at 5:00 PM. I went back to bed. Before I went back to bed, before she left, she said: "you can wake up any time and go upstairs and my parents will make you dinner. Don't worry. They're nice."
I hadn't even met her parents yet and somehow she knew how afraid I felt. It was the look on my face that must have tipped her off. I was terrified of the idea of meeting them. Guilty. No, anxious the father would be protective of his daughter. I went back to bed.
I woke up at around 6:30 PM, and I lay in the pitch dark, feeling a little confused, and I couldn’t decide whether or not to go upstairs. Finally, after an hour, at 7:30 PM I went up and there they were. The parents: Just as I had imagined. I had found the courage. Though it took an hour to decide.
I must have felt something climbing those stairs. I became hungry. I was apathetic. I didn’t remember what I felt. I introduced myself. "How are you?" In French.
I went upstairs. It was exactly what I had been imagining for the past hour when I was in the pitch dark in her bed. What a let down. I imagined her parents watching TV, like any suburban, boring, conservative family. Glued to the TV: Hard to get their attention; very hard.
Immediately they gave me a plate of food out of the microwave, as I had imagined it, two hamburgers, with French fries, gravy and green peas. They must have heard me scrambling up the basement stairs in the pitch dark like some refugee seeking asylum. No ketchup for the Hamburger, none, only gravy. And the bread was soggy, and the French fries were wet and tasted of plastic. As I swallowed the fries, they felt like wax.
Not hot but warm. I had to admit it. It was food.
The food had a gray look to it. When I looked up from my chewing experience, the parents sitting on their overstuffed couch, which had no distinguishable color like the pallor of their skin, I had to admit that, everything was gray. With a sweeping look, holding my fork poised above my lips, I noticed warms and cools in the open kitchen-dining room area, connected to the TV den, were different shades of gray, as if I were in a generic model of the perfect quotidian suburban home. I felt a small unwelcome chill ascending my spine. It was fear. Fear was telling me something. I had to get away from here.
And I was hungry. I ate it but slowly. Their heads turned back to the TV. In between bites, I told them a little bit of what I was doing as if they really cared. Taking a year off from college and writing a book.
Tried to explain the book, but every time I explained the book to anybody I felt like I was eating my words. I felt like I wasn’t getting through to them. So I gave up trying to talk about my book, and ate my food.
Then I decided to call my father at 9:00 PM, as Maxine was coming back from work. My father told me that the cancer was worse. He was scared of dying. But Maxine was back. I told them what happened.
My father was fairing worse and I had to leave the next day. I was glad that I had talked to my father, and heard it was worse, because I didn't want to stay anymore. I didn't like Quebec. Forest smells. But it was more than that.
It was the smell of the country that began to bother me. But I had a good time. After having told them I was going to leave, Maxine brought this girl over called Veronique. The three of us went out to a gas station and bought some cheap wine, some beer, cigarettes and junk food, and the three of us went to Veronique's house.
But Veronique was really named Sophie, yet there were another two Sophies at the hairdressing salon. So, Sophie had to change her name to Veronique when she moved to the small suburban town.
Now, all her friends were connected with the salon. She was called Veronique by almost everybody in town except for her boyfriend who called her Sophie. We went over to Sophie/Veronique's place, met her boyfriend who was cool, and the four of us smoked hashish, and drank beer and wine. During this pleasant evening Veronique or Sophie called a gay hairdresser, one of their coworkers named Marko on speakerphone. Marko joined the evening.
He was in the bathtub having a bubble bath.
Marko was my favorite. Better than Maxine. He was witty. He was funny and full of life...in the bathtub. And he wasn’t there.
He stayed with us on speakerphone for about two and half-hours. They were all talking and at one point, I had my arm around Maxine, holding the phone up, representing Marko in effigy, Veronique/Sophie took a photograph of the three of us or two of us.
And then we came back home. To Maxine's home. Maxine and I drove back to her place, and I was stoned and drunk. And I was trying to go to sleep. I had my eyes closed, but she took off my pants and started to fuck me, and I was really not able to function properly, but my cock was hard.
She was riding me like a horse, but I succeeded in pulling her close to me, because she had been sitting on me while having sex with me, and I was able to pull her down, and holding her neck so she couldn't move, even though I couldn't move.
I had to get out of this. But I just tried to go to sleep and close my eyes, until she stopped fucking me. And she was having orgasms. She had two orgasms, with the tremors. And the cries, some sounds. Some moans. I tried not to listen.
I left the next morning. She took me to the bus. She drove me to the bus station. And she was being affectionate and I was being distant like it was too much for me. This thing about the country that bothered me, it was simply an annoyance. The smell of the country had begun to bother me.