July 09, 2004

Everything marvelous happens at once. First Zorianna came, bringing with her cake and wine on Monday evening.

“Martha’s coming tomorrow,” I told her, anticipating awkwardness, “and I have an insatiable need to spend a lot of time with her.”

“How did this come about?” she asked while we drank the wine. I told her how intense and wonderful people are — so intense they make me sweat uncontrollably.

I was still sweating the next morning after breakfast and cartwheels on the lawn. We still had a few hours to kill before Martha’s arrival, so we rushed to Cambridge to jump fences and stalk herons. And because it was a sunny day, we drank tea by the fountains in St. George Square, our feet drenched by the mist.

“Don’t the water jets look like ejaculations?” she asked, and I smiled sublimely — Cambridge is throbbing with sperm, beauty, and gasping orgasms.

And I too was throbbing to get back to Kitchener, so we rushed back, stopping on the way to get flowers for Martha and to drop off Zorianna at her friend’s house. I started sweating again and I feared I might pee on Martha’s leg in excitement if I didn’t empty my bladder beforehand.

I got to the station just as she got off the Grey Hound and we leaped at each other — I was glad to have her in my city.

“Everything feels unreal,” I told her, and I started babbling nonsense until reality finally set in and things felt fantastic.

We made our way to St. Jacobs to get away from the rush-hour traffic and madness. There, trees leaned seductively over the dam, and we balanced ourselves on tree trunks watching the scum stagnate on the surface of the water. Martha is a cat-like creature with marvelous balance.

She also has a way of making incredible things happen unexpectedly, like our sudden walk on the dangerously narrow beams that support St. Jacobs’s rusty railway bridge.

“It’s harder than it looks,” I said barefoot, trying to keep my balance on a beam.

“I know. That’s why I’m here and not on the beams,” she said.

But by the time I made it to the first pylon, she took off her sandals and gracefully caught up to me. The bridge was exhilarating! We stopped occasionally to look at the river floating beneath our feet — in the distance, with the sun reflected off the murky waters, it looked as blue and as clear as a dream.

And we quickly fell in love with that river and that bridge. We found ourselves in the middle of the rusty skeleton, suspended above the floating water and listening to the church bells murmuring down in the village. And we were ecstatic and relaxed, our bodies pressed together for support. We watched our shadows on the water and talked of drifting downstream with straw hats and a token black man.

Even the pigeon shit we encountered on our way back to the shore suddenly seemed lovely beneath our feet, as did the rush back to Kitchener to save Zorianna.

With Zorianna in our car, Simon drove us to Elora to watch the sunset, but instead we skipped barefoot over rocks with elegance, clung to each other over precipices at dusk, and swam in the darkness at the quarry. There was beauty in the night.

We left Elora shivering and sleepy, Martha’s head resting tenderly in my lap as we traveled through the dark.

The shivers stopped when we got home to a night of wine, Jazz, and candlelight. On my bedroom floor we listened to tormenting instruments and stared like flies into the flames, until I spilled red wine on the carpet in awkward attempts at tenderness.

The spill looked like a red dolphin with a painful erection. “Pour salt on it to absorb the wine,” the Internet said, and armed with table salt we struggled against the dolphin and each other on the carpet. The dolphin was beautiful and purple beneath the mountain of salt and soon the night itself tasted salty and seductive.

The morning brought cherries and coffee, and after breakfast and tenderness Zorianna, Martha and I drove towards Guelph under a gloomy sky. The storm sent us hiding inside the Cathedral and we heard thunders echo beneath the vault. Outside, on the steps overlooking the city, Martha and I touched wet lips and ran down the steps in the rain to find food, and I felt wonderful and good.

In a daze we found our way back to Cambridge where Martha’s uncle gave us a tour of UW’s School of Architecture. The school is a complex and wonderful work of art with corridors of light that span the entire building. Large windows offer glimpses of city and river, and the building has astounding potential.

Deeply impressed, we left to drop off Zorianna at the Grey Hound station. Afterwards, storm clouds gathered over the city as Martha and I took a thousand wrong turns before we reached her father’s workplace. He was waiting to pick up his daughter for nearly two hours. We quickly said goodbye and the sky became melancholy and restless.

“Don’t get all sappy and sentimental, fucker,” I told myself driving home, “or you’ll frighten the poor girl!”

But the storm started as soon as she left, and I couldn’t help feeling sappy and full of longing. But I was also immensely thankful that my lovely cat-like people invaded my city for a day to sprawl on my floor and across railway bridges, leaving wine stains on my carpets and flowers in my kitchen.

Posted by Tudor at 09:21 AM in Friends & Lovers | TrackBack