Watching Over

Exiting at our bus stop she smart-stepped past me as if unaware of my existence. I can’t say I wasn’t hurt a touch, though I do understand that we are not our best selves on the outside. And we should be judged only at our best. I suspect she would agree with that sentiment.

On the odoriferous ride from city centre (a smothering potpourri of sickeningly sweet scents, bad bodies, the day’s socks and such), I’d had to keep my eyes on the passing display above the heads opposite. “Display” because “scenery” would be glorifying our ride eastward out of downtown Oleum through the typical wasteland of small industrial parks and cut-out condo buildings. But why eyes averted? Because a number of weary women sat opposite with knees drifted apart and I didn’t trust myself (risk of public exposure). Preferably, and especially at this time of year and day when inside lights are turned on earlier, I try to get a forward-facing window seat, and thence to sit and wonder about the lives acting out on those lighted stages. As it was though, my seat was one of two sideways benches, like facing church pews occupied by dreary congregants.

No sooner had the bus doors parted on better air and safer visuals than I recognized her shuffling forward in the rush, her purple toque topped by a pink ball (a gaiety that didn’t suit), and a drab cloth jacket of pale blue. I scooted (such as I could) so as to belly round the crowd, and thereby casually position myself for a seemingly chance encounter.

Hurt because I’d begun to believe we’d arranged a quasi-relationship in our buildings’ scant garden. I’d even been dreaming we’d negotiate a greater intimacy before the onset of a winter that would cancel the chance of further outside meetings. So, offended some by her breezing by me, yes, and hurt a touch, if mostly just disappointed.

Or perhaps she was truly distracted by her recent man troubles. I did have some eye-witness evidence for that supposition, but sufficient to support only a “perhaps.”

Perhaps I should never have broken through the fourth wall. But since my cat, Felix Culpa, died six months ago, after fifteen years of two-way unconditional love, I’ve not been my best self, or at least not wholly my old independent, isolated, anti-socializing self.

He is tall, dark, and handsome, with an athletic build. He arrived first time (as far as I could determine) with flowers, calla lilies, I believe, like a fisted bunch of beatific trumpets announcing his cinematic self and declaring her good fortune. But I suppose one cannot look as he does and not be vain. He didn’t proffer the bouquet, she took it from him, then laid it on her dining room table, oddly enough. As oddly, they talked without taking seats. Instantly they were arguing, with him gesticulating and her raising halting palms at him, at first to calm but then clearly to ward off. He had drawn back his right arm as though in preparation for a backhand. I was stunned. She should have been alarmed, but she merely backed against her tiny table in the small dining-room space. I was half beside myself. He went for her, but not really, he brushed past, snatched up his lilies and exited, leaving the door wide open.

She closed it slowly, standing with her left hand on the doorknob and the right flat on the door near where she’d pressed her temple (either cooling her face or listening, or both). Stood pensively so for a short spell. Then opened the door, took its edge in her right hand and swung-slammed it shut. No little relieved by her bravura, I assumed that would be the end of him. Let him take his stinking lilies to his own damn grave.

Now she enters her apartment in a false air of obliviousness, like she doesn’t know I’m here (I’d hurried to beat her home). She knows though, which justifies my seeing her detachment as feigned, even as affected, at worst as hypocritical. She could be exhibiting such ersatz disregard to prick my vexation, because I can see that she’s truly all alertness, with her head falsely poised and her whole body less elastic, as if tensed for a blow or from the stress of such dissembling disinterest. You would think we were long-time partners living together and had had a fight. I could well have missed something I’d done wrong, like many the long-time male partner. I’d forgotten to turn out the balcony light (I never would, that would be game over), I’d left the curtains wide open (please), I’d stood too close to the glass—all such minor complaints that partners never vent when still in love.

But I don’t wish to presume too much. She really may not always know I’m here, since I don’t make my presence known by sight or sound (the second would be highly ineffective anyway).

Per usual, I attend intensively to her airs and expressions, facial and bodily: she repeatedly palms her abdomen, likely in a recurrent dysmorphic delusion that she’s getting fat; ergo she’s worried. And I am angered, she angers me, maybe because I see this latest fretting over how she looks as an effect of the new boyfriend, man-friend, what have you (the so-called “frenemy”? stalker-friend? We shall see what we shall see). Otherwise, I really do not know why I’m suddenly tipping towards such inappropriate rage. … Likely something hormonal, since a small benign tumor was found on my pituitary gland some half-year ago, and the symptoms are intermittent emotional swings, which can range widely and quickly from depression to rage. It’s manageable, but I do not like to think of my spirits as so determined by material causes.

Regardless, I confess to being far from infallible in my daily exegesis of her silent moves. For instance, only a couple of weeks ago I suspected she had a toothache because for an hour she had her right hand clamped to the side of her distressed face. So I completely missed that a phone call had upset her so much that she kept to her bedroom for the whole weekend, door fully closed. I was beside myself with concern—over a toothache! I’d had to take a few cold showers to keep from going to her then and there and offering to call my dentist. But of course it had proved to be caused by the second appearance, virtually, of the new man-friend, the imminent harasser. He’s the one had driven her into hiding with his phoned demands and threats, that seclusion I’d taken personally. I know it was the stalker’s phone calls did it because when she finally emerged from her bedroom, she walked circles in her living room for hours on end, the phone again pressed to her far ear (but of course! never a toothache), occasionally pleading with the absent stalker, her left hand clawed at her temple.

At present the near-set sun shines into her living room, and when it does I don’t miss much or make mistakes. Unless her curtains are closed, of course, which amounts to a blunt rebuff like a cuff to the back of my head. In such an event I really do have to wonder if she likes being watched at all! Because I do believe—based on all the time we’ve been together—that she may like it (which I say mainly to head off your understandable reservations—okay, repulsion). She may even be a bit of an exhibitionist, which would make us a match made in Peeping Thomas heaven. Regardless, I am not the harasser/stalker in this, and there is nothing criminal going on here, as far as I can see.

If I were a lip reader (a skill I really have thought of acquiring), I’d be able to interpret what she says to the stalker and betimes to herself, and so have known that time that she was indeed being harassed by a threatening phone call and not worrying a bad tooth. It is nonetheless quite possible, though, that the repetition of a softly pleading please could be addressed to one’s dominating pain as well as to a stalker whom one had made the mistake of encouraging by permitting his stinking lilies in the door! Calla especially stink, worse than the smelly train, because associated with the churchy odour of sickening candle grease, perfumy funerals and dank death.

I talk to myself continuously, of my various pains and complaints, a sort of living parenthesis. I have no choice, there’s no one else. There never has been.

Regardless, the visual clarity and detail at sunset are so good that I could read her lips if I were able. (I do hate it when people mumble to themselves in what I always suspect is a slighting of me, my girth, my height, or lack thereof actually: I’m five-foot-two, two hundred and fifty pounds; and, since I’m divulging, fifty-five years old). Why else would people turn away and lower their voices in that infuriating way if not indulging unpleasantness? People, face up to your dislikes, your disagreements and dissing judgements! … Or is it that I’m so overbearingly rational that people just dislike me, the way I talk as well as look (a sort of uber-stout Mr. Spock with chronic adenoidal infection)? I’m not saying that happens a lot, the whispered dissing, but it does happen, maybe once a month. There would be many others, a supposition which is based on the pollster’s evidence that public protesters represent ten percent of the secret sharers of similar views.

We have confronted one another a few times in the course of our years together, if mostly lately. These encounters have always occurred in the narrow garden space between our twin buildings, which stand some thirty feet apart windows-to-windows. A strip of tarmac walkway runs between, with some few feet of poor grass and nothing else. Long ago there had been an attempt at bushes and trees, but as no sunshine ever finds the area, all that remains of that green dream are a number of rusted corrugated iron rods like markers of where the bodies are buried. Perpetually empty park benches staple either end of our green sp—no, brown, our brown space.

Regardless, it is good to get outside for a bit on hot days, as we don’t have central air. It was she made the overture, slowing in front of my bench, if addressing the air more than me:

“Do you live here?”

I paused with the straw of the extra-large Frappuccino still reflectively on my lower lip and quickly flipped through the hermeneutic possibilities of her question. (Also for the full-disclosure info file, given such a jawbreaker as “hermeneutic”: I possess an Honours B.A. from Oleum’s College of Science and Practical Arts, Major in English Literature, Minor in Creative Writing.) Let me see. Do I live here? She thinks me an invading street person? She’s insinuating ground rules in this our first real encounter respecting a phony anonymity for any future real relationship? Even that she is punning on live, as in Who could live here? And thereby inviting neighbourly complaint.

“You know I do, G—” I’d just caught myself from addressing her as “Good”! That’s what she’d become in my pet nomenclature, Good, a diminution of Good Book. I’d been repeating the abbreviated nickname to myself for years, per the question that routinely caps my après-dinner arrangements. Lights (remembering the balcony’s) out. Curtains drawn wide on the world. Standing still as a preying panther. Become nothing but eyes in my darkness. I always speak it aloud, even in mini-soliloquy aside (I’m a big fan of the Bard): And what is my Good Book reading this evening? Really, I should grow a wide moustache whose waxed tips I could twist. I am such a character.

In the garden that first time, she raised her brow in intrigue, then walked along to the mirroring bench at the other end of the black walkway. She sat, crossed her legs, and opened an actual book. With her attention thus engaged I could look freely. At distance I could determine only that it was a slim colourful paperback. Regardless, that was an improvement on the obese popular tomes non-readers read on the bus, the diminishing few who yet can leave off thumbing their phones for a fanciful flight with Harry Potter or to intrigue and romp in some Game of Thrones or other. She really can be such a tease, my literate Good, which I mean figuratively and affectionately.

I didn’t regret the bold thing I’d said, though I had been half beside myself at her forthright address. Regardless, I felt an inexplicable desire to make it up to her. This was only a short time after my first observing the visit of her gentleman caller/stalker, and unlike me I was dying to offer comfort and protection. I’d rehearsed it: If ever you need help with anything—anything at all—please don’t hesitate, etcetera etcetera.

I idled up to her (or should that be “sidled”?), though it was the longer way, the wrong way, back to my place. She didn’t look up, so I could peer. She was reading … a Nancy Drew book? Yes, an actual fucking Nancy Drew book! Good, Good, Good, wherefore art thou Good? … Ah well, in this one narrow, if important, respect—Good as reader—it could be written off as but a minor misreading on my part. That misreading would not be permitted to disturb my faith in my global reading of her. It merely revised a footnote, so to speak, or appended a codicil of sorts, a caveat clause, something metaphorical like that. And better Nancy than Trixie Beldon, I suppose. Or Pottering or Throne-Gaming. And more full disclosure: in my ignorant youth I too had read some Trixie and Nancy. I’d always been fascinated when, after being caught out in the rain or following a comic dunking, a change of girly clothing was particularized.

When next I casually looked out one hot late-afternoon and spied her sitting on the bench I used, I hurried out to her, doing my belly-breathing routine all the way.

“Hot day.” Just say the word, oh downcast Good, and I will kill the harassing stalking Evil One.

She smiled small in acceptance of my apology (or could it have been a smirk? No, surely not). Up close in daylight for only the second time, I could confirm what I’d often surveyed and surmised: that she has mousy-coloured hair styled unremarkably, pale blue (maybe light grey) eyes, scant breasts (unless asexually suppressed), little fat (a high metabolism or worry worry worry? That I could not know), and longer than average legs (insofar as they showed). She was wearing a sky-blue sundress (I think, I’m not good on colours) that would likely have come to just above the knees (maybe lower) were she standing; her elegant legs were crossed high enough to reveal real rounded flesh as in a modern-ish sculpture (Henry Moore?), which I mostly had to imagine in my disciplined not-looking. I had better get away, I was sweating like a pig.

She confirmed: “Very hot.”

“Did you know that pig in the expression sweating like a pig is not speciesism but a term from metallurgy?” If you look directly at me, Good, I will tolerate it and read it as a signal to rid you of the literal stalking pig. Or should that be metaphoric?

She looked away and actually snorted. I can’t say that I blame her, why should a healthy youngish woman care about etymology?

I walked away in dire throes of self-loathing, half-blinded from the coursing forehead perspiration, with my pits fairly trickling-tickling it down my sides like a sweating pipe under serious internal pressure. Inside my place I fell backwards across the bed—a crack like a spring breaking—and belly-breathed for a bad fifteen minutes. I am Gregor Samsa! Humbert Humbert! Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter. I suspected that she, the Drew aficionado, would get only two of those references, at best. Regardless, my severe dis-ease (incommensurate surely) could well have been the benign tumour acting up with its voodoo of pranking hormones. But Lecter my ass, O unsympathetic lecteur! Hypocrite lecteur!

In our few coincidental real meetings since, we seldom voice a greeting, just awkwardly smile a little recognition and look away. The two attempts at actual communication in the garden were a mistake, we’ve tacitly agreed. I sense that like me she is not adept at small talk anyway, and even finds it irritating, like a tongue canker (I’m plagued by them). Though respecting me “adept” is generous; more like “atrocious.”

I could have said something about her mother! … But then, I couldn’t very well, could I, without putting us in the dreaded exposed position of a cover torn away?

Regardless, by then the stalker had taken centre-stage in our lives, pretty well on the heels of her mother’s permanent exit. He could well have provided unintentional relief by taking her mind off Mom’s death. Thus, per usual, I excuse myself of myriad social failures. If nothing else, I’m at least brutally honest. And there isn’t much else.

Mother was stout like me—like I I I, Mr. Honours B.A. English with minor in Creative Writing! Though not as vertically foreshortened. But still more like I than like Good who, if taller, like Mom has a compressed torso, a pronounced pelvic spread and, as said, good legs (unlike Mom). But then Mom began to lose weight rapidly, and being short began to disappear. Then did. Subsequently Good has had only me to watch over her. … From here. From across an unbridgeable divide. We have met in the middle, but could I, dare I, ever cross over?

On his next witnessed visit to her place, he was of course still tall and dark, but no longer as handsome. Such change in so short a time, and such a show of disrespect showing up in that condition. I couldn’t make out the footwear (not without standing on a chair to get the needed downward angle, a most risky tactic, I knew from experience), but he wore black baggy sweatpants, a shirt that looked slept in, and a bed-head like an exploded mattress of dark horsehair.

Of course, I also couldn’t know what case he was making for himself, but he soon abandoned his leaning-in demands and slumped into a resigned pleading with extended palms. She was steadfast in facing down the first and was all patience in meeting the second. Good, Good. But her passivity re-excited his aggression, to the point of his advancing a step on her, which she met bravely with two towards him. I was alarmed, the man was mentally unstable, likely even psycho. Then they were gripping each other’s forearms in a face-to-face showdown of barely controlled rage (I do not know how Good did it, but she gave as good as she got), fairly spraying each other with threat and counter-, it looked. It was all I could do not to bang on my window and shake a fist at him (they wouldn’t have heard anyway). It ended with her pleading and, I’m fairly convinced, crying, as it often ends for the female in such tableaux vivants. But when he saw he wasn’t getting his way, or could attempt such only by greater force, he swung away and slammed the door behind him (I don’t think I only imagined the vibrations).

Going by much experience at work and from TV docs (and earlier throughout school), I knew that wouldn’t be the end of the bullying or the bully. I resolved that someone would have to contact the authorities. Her of course. Action would have to be taken. She would have to take action. I stood there suffering so, knowing my sorry situation well from past paroxysms of passivity bordering on the catatonic when so pressured by the pressing-in world to move out of my head and beyond the pane (not to go all bad-Shakespeare punny).

An aside, which actually addresses the subject directly.

Nowadays, pornography swamps our lives as do toxic Oleum air and dust mites our lungs and sugar our blood. I don’t refer to graphic depictions of sex only, but also to the violations of advertising everywhere, that commercial porn. But in these porno-plenty times you might think the fetish of voyeurism unnecessary, that it would long since have left the stage, so to speak. Or perhaps you, O lecteur dissimilaire, don’t think much about this sort of sordid activity? (That’s my lame attempt at some humour, which is already lost of course when I have to explain the ironic tone.) Or you don’t want to think about it (thus the beauty of looking away, or cyberwise of the delete key). But you do think about it nonetheless, as studies have shown. Like, all the time (males more than females, supposedly). But peep shows? Please, you say. Voyeuristic fiction? Ditto. Since the advent of cameras and movies and the internet and smart phones, who needs wordy descriptions of Niagara Falls and the Taj Mahal, of ejaculant and monster breasts? For that matter, who needs any literature, let alone the pornographic?

Many of us still do, that’s who, we remaindered real readers. We hold that a good thousand words can tell us worlds that no picture, moving or still, ever can. For God’s sake, read some Shakespeare, any Shakespeare, and then please recommend the moving pictures that even come close to doing justice to those thousand words, if you can, because you can’t. Here to edify you and advance my point are a few lines from Troilus and Cressida, spoken by my fave Bard character, Pandarus. It’s the last speech of the play where, after being dismissed from the action, he’s taking pleading leave of the denigrated audience:

Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths:

As many as be here of panders’ hall,

Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;

Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,

Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.

Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade, …

Such archaic wordy literature will live on—audience as pimps! readers as peepers!—if to an ever-dwindling coterie of the literate able. But my point here is this: there’s as much chasm of difference between pictures still or moving and a handful of Shakespeare’s words as between pornography and love. Not that I would know anything about healthy, normal romantic-sexual love. Or visual pornography for that matter. I am suggesting a similarity between the distanced engagement of watching over and reading.

I’ve always avoided watching the grotesquely graphic antics of the Olympic sexual athletes (porno). I prefer my minor home game, this watching over, because mine gives uber-private moi the occasion intensely to imagine another, a separate, reality, even unto partaking of. I much prefer the empathetic miracle of projecting beyond my walléd mind into another reality, as no animal and only the most fully human can.

I am strange, I admit it, to state the obvious. But I didn’t make myself, so refuse responsibility and consequently guilt over my literal perversion. In like fashion, I didn’t choose this unfashionable body, which has gifted me such grief most of my life (I discount infancy only). If it had been a choice, this figure of mine, I should have been locked up long ago and forever for that act alone. As the poet Irving Layton wrote autobiographically in one of his braying prefaces: at some early point in this man’s life my entelechy was perverted. Perverted in the literal sense, that is, as in bent out of true normal. Who was to blame? My father of course. My mother too. And who was to blame for them? Regressus ad infinitum…that’s who.

Regardless, the germane point here is not your understanding, sympathy or judgement (welcome as the first two are) but that there is nothing threatening in my watching Good, in my, I insist on expressing it so again, my watching over her. What do I get out of it commensurate with the risk of full-frontal exposure (my sweatingest fear)? I really have no idea, honestly, analyze the situation and psychology of it though I have, no fixed idea. Even after much compulsive self-analysis and much reading in the phenomenon of, well…. Let’s call it peeping, because I like that folksy word for my vicarious fixation, and that it originates in the Lady Godiva legend. Even if “peeping” does make it all sound a bit too cutely innocent, which it’s not, it’s far more masterful empathetic art than masturbatory game, I insist.

Regardless, I know only that I have to do it, that’s a fact. Even that I am compelled to it. Even ordered by some ‘on high,’ as was the Angel Gabriel dispatched by the Almighty to bring the equivocal news to the Virgin Mary. (Self-aggrandizing delusion? Perhaps. You are free of course to conjure other angels.)

Now that I think of it, consider at least that that seminal moment of Christianity was pretty strange too, stranger than fiction, as they say, certainly unnaturally stranger than my innocent practice. Perhaps the angelic enunciation was secretly watched over by future pater Joseph through the paneless window of Mary’s whitewashed mud house. Yosef may even have overheard, as undoubtedly no lip-reader himself, the messenger/intermediary, and thus eavesdropped on the momentous intercourse (as t’were) between natural and supernatural. No harm in imaging that, the imagined patron saint of carpentry and cuckoldry watching over the Blessed Mother and waiting for his marching orders (to Bethlehem for the Roman census). Or perhaps you’re one of those who think that Zeus did it better when in the guise of a swan he physically forced himself on Leda? (Fancy that, the tearing beak, the awkward pinions, etcetera.) I mean, what was that all about? Me, I’m more congruent with the cuckold story.

Ah, cuckoldry. I hear it’s all the rage on porno sites. From whom did I hear? From no one, to be truthful: I overheard it in the lunchroom at work. I was busy spooning sugar, with my back to the all-male coffee klatch. The pathetic practice wasn’t being roundly scouted by my fellow workers but snickered over in that way D.H. Lawrence called “winking.” And I’m the pathetic pervert? But it did engage my interest, so I guess I am. Were he musing today on pornography, Lawrence would write “wanking.”

End of aside.

Now when heading out to work, arriving home, at home, Good is distraught. Mornings she is lethargic, only a few sips of coffee, doesn’t even gesture towards eating the so-called (originally by Kellogg itself) most important meal of the day. Returned home she all but undresses at the door before donning the well-worn baby-blue sweat suit. Her black mascara is often smeared. She will move about unshod, the long feet pale like bleached concrete. She’s frequently frantic looking for her phone. You would think she’d stop answering his calls. Is nothing preferable to loneliness? Always alone, I’m often lonely. So, in a sense (the literal), nothing is preferable.

Upon drawing my curtains, I’d thought she’d fallen asleep on the floor near the door, which was slightly ajar. Confused…then it hit me: he’d knocked her down and stomped off! This must end. It will. And I, I am the only one who can will it, end it, short of her death, I’m afraid. I must act, out there, in the world.

We’re both of us no longer young, Good and I. I’ve watched her through youngish womanhood: the cramps, curled fetally all day on the couch, bulky sweaters and hot-water bottles. Her various sufferings—I’ve long suspected she’s a touch hypochondriacal—weren’t so bad when Mother was still alive and living with her. I never did see her father, which was just as well—or no, once I did witness him come in and throw his arms about like a car dealership’s inflatable tube man. Likely he was exercising his rights as the apartment’s legal lease-holder or as husband or pater familias or something. Obviously the parents were divorced, and mother and daughter, standing together at this featured event, feared him.

I’ve watched over her through her twenties and thirties. She lost (sacrificed? gave up?) her virginity late, with a pimply university boy who left her bedroom something like a tomcat hugging a wall, and quickly slunk out the front door with backpack in hand; he visited a couple more times then stopped. She’s had few other gentleman callers, only two in fact, and those briefly. Recently she cried for nights and days when Mom passed. I was distraught, but we managed. Now she sights middle-age and maybe is experiencing early-onset menopause (evidence? Erratic behaviour, indecision about simple matters such as which coffee mug, compulsive rearrangements of the furniture, lots of vacuuming). I could say I’ve loved her through the years, because I have in my way, and because devoted attention is a kind of love. So I still do in my way, if at a distance (that’s another lame joke, a peeper’s play on the romantic cliché of troubadour love).

I have watched her through life’s minor failures too: the rowing machine that docked permanently as dust lubber under the bed, the knitting group that never knit, the various charitable gatherings that gulped much white wine before disbanding without having done anything practical (not that I could see). The periodic exercise jags couldn’t have been for the purpose of losing weight (barring dysmorphia) but more likely for building muscle. She has no biceps sinew and her thigh muscles (hamstrings?) when she crosses her legs either flatten or rupture to the side like that aforementioned Moore-ish sculpture. But boy when she did exercise, it was with a vigour that could be mistaken for seizure (the old joke: Was she keeping fit or having one?). Perhaps she’d been encouraged from overhearing something at work (the Government of Canada Building on Main Street, where I also spend my working life; she at Canada Post, I at Oleum Sea Cadets). I know how that works, the pretend-private insult intended for her exquisite ears. If so, if she overheard some painful remark from a yuppie-twee colleague who makes twice-daily visits to the gym…. Well, I do know how that hurts, and it would drive one to hyper-exercise, if never this one.

The isometric paroxysms and the rowing, as if in prep for some regatta on Tecumseh River, never lasted more than a few months. (Could the choice of a rowing apparatus have been intended to signal desire for connection with a certain someone in the Sea Cadets office? I merely put it out there.) Then she’s back on the couch in front of the TV with her bag of microwaved popcorn and diet Fresca avec straw (never a glass or bowl, always just the can and greasy bag), and much snuffling depression, I fear. I cannot countenance for long the possibility of her self-loathing, as I can take her pain only so far without risk of my own periodic dive into the black hole.

But then—surprise!—I do not like the whole culture of exercising, with the nuisance joggers looking like they are desperate to keep a few steps ahead of the black-clad scythe-wielding gentleman. My co-workers when they deign to respond to such of my risky ribbing: “C’mon, big guy, we just wanna grow old in good health.” I’m confident you’ll die fit as a climate-controlled Stradivarius, I don’t rejoin. Indeed, I’m beleaguered at work by such fitness culture. It would seem to be the thing we do most and best in the Governments of Canada, Ontario, and Oleum: repetitive activity to no realized end. Whether I’m on the way to work or getting home from, it’s push-and-shove and out-of-our-way because we’re doing a virtuous thing, we fast walkers/joggers/cyclists. And it’s not because I’m short and over— Ok, fat, fat, obese! But when I think on it, my supreme distaste for physical activity, I believe it’s because such exercise figures the contemporary adoration of the body without any other goal or purpose (call it health-consciousness or some such if you like, it’s all the same). What morally immortal purpose will your mortal bod serve when you finally get it where you want it, other than to do more of the same? The exercise cult is but another form of porno.

I did like it that exercising Good, having begun ambitiously in the baby-blue sweatsuit, when finished her intermittent fits, would be down to her modest underthings. However, before stripping off the dampened gear she reflexively closes her curtains, and I am made to work the angles on whatever curtain cracks, hers and mine, have been left me (your salacious crack can go here, lascivious lecteur). Of course that, her stripping, could be erotic, after all I’m not a machine. But truly I just wanted to see her mostly naked, and especially from the back (as the great Leonard Cohen sings).

As you might imagine (well, I’ve said as much), the rebuff of drawn curtains is a curse on one such as I. But luckily our units are so positioned (as t’were) in their twin buildings as to be mirroring corner apartments, paired units, with no windows on the solid side walls and three each front-facing, including matching balconies with sliding glass doors. Thus situated, we both have only one real neighbour to contend with, as those above scarcely count and the hallway buffers the others. Her one real neighbour is a doddering old woman who was installed the day the place was finished. Ventures outside maybe once a month, with a walker that comes up to her bent shoulders, looks like she’s hopping a cage along. Mine is a harmless old widower who’s been no trouble since his keening ceased (pitifully thin drywall, and going from my forced exposure to developments on Coronation Street—that opening lugubrious trumpet!—he must be deaf as a tombstone).

When Good’s curtains are drawn, the mirroring architecture allows of my going to my kitchen or bedroom window to see what I can see, though that is at an increasingly obtuse angle. To get anything I must slide leftward along the sill until my sight is either blinded by solid interior wall (mine) or I fall (as I have slapstickily; go ahead, laugh, it’s not like I’m unused to it). One saving grace in her obscuring curtains: they never come together tightly; heavily they bump on meeting and bounce, and leave a gap, sometimes of inches. And a second salvific thing, deo gratias: she’s no fan at least of the blinding blind, neither roller nor Venetian.

I white-lied about there being little of the literally sexual in my pastime-cum-obsession (I won’t say perversion again), if yet nothing sordid and only occasionally masturbatory (yuck, I concur, but that is the inappropriate appropriate word, I’m afraid). Anyway, it’s healthy, you know. Regardless, any disrobing (hers, as I am always loosely attired) and I am near beside myself in heart-racing wonder and mayhap get carried away. I rarely get to watch her actually undress, but even to know, to be aware, that she has done so out of sight can be enough. Enough what? you wonder. Enough of wonder for me.

But here’s the thing: more than that, more than watching her disrobe, is to see her simply sit on the pale corduroy couch. I’ve vacillated over the years between determining if it’s pale blue or grey, as sans binoculars—which I refuse, they introduce but another glass barrier—colour assessment at such gradations and this distance must remain indeterminate. But more than enough, I insist, is to see her sit and slump a touch, with anticipation of relaxation on her long, pale, wearied face, like easing into a bubble bath. First, she will alternately rest ankles on knees and remove her colourfully banded socks, which make for rainbow-prideful pieds, or reference the curling-up feet of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Could she be gay, my witchy woman? Of course she could (can’t anybody? I’m not), but if so she would have to be sitting on a Vesuvius of repression, given her unconsummated lifestyle. Regardless, I’ve no visual evidence of such a proclivity, unless utter failure in the hetero arena infers so—which could be confirmed for us now with the new stalker’s presence turning thumbs-down on ‘normal’ sexual relations. Likely demonstrative absent Dad is also to blame for her cloistered mess of a love life.… She has such long narrow feet, prehensile-looking toes like the lesser fingers they are, pale as cloistered cream; uncovered, the feet display like secret creatures she won’t expose to the repeated assaults of the wider world, that outside other place where my male gaze has no say. I like that about her too.

But to forestall once and for all any two-bit analysis: this is not about sex, or power (or that silly word “empowerment”), or psychosexual compulsion, or anything else socio-politico-gendero-philosophico-sicko! To state the obvious emphatically: This is about me.  Which is the one reliable thing I or you or anyone can say: This, is about, me. Though even that focus, the talk-show disclosure-cum-confessional, is not my main intention either, I don’t think. Then what is this about? I’m stumped (damn your eyes and ears!). Other than to say, maybe this is just my wordy insisting on my different being, my doing life my way under the physical deprivations you are always so alert to notice (as per my preceding parenthesis). This is my saying: I am here too, like this. I’m hurting no one. I may even be on the threshold of saving someone. I think I’m interesting, and with this I’m providing you privileged access to another’s strange soul. You don’t have to peep, you can read and weep (for me, for Good, for thee). Of course I could be wrong about many things, including you. (I apologize for my parenthetical presumptions.)

Or more practically, maybe this is all to the purpose of convincing you to make the deserving V the lucky thirteenth column in that acronym of the endlessly aggregating aggrievéd: LGBTQQIP2SAA…V! For voyeurs victorious!

A further venturing to joke? You will decide its success.

Regardless. (Yes, a fave conjunctive adverb of mine, “regardless,” though literally it could describe a hellish vision for me.)

She is in the garden before me, and in obvious distress, wearing slippers and the baggy baby-blue sweats—outside?—a black cardigan over a white T, and for the first time ever a baseball cap with punkish much-curled…visor. Uh-oh. What happened when I wasn’t watching? I go out.

I stand before her—ecce homo—the soul of patient waiting. She seems to raise her face to me reluctantly, like she’s not aware I’m there, again. She has two black eyes! It’s not just crying mascara, I’m pretty sure, or mostly so.

She reaches for but halts from touching the left shiner with fingertips. She bows her head and talks into her lap:

“That was a mistake. I should just let him do what he wants, good riddance and to hell with him. There’s nothing I can do anyway or—.” She snickers poorly as she raises her face and looks directly at me: just watching and waiting, her too now. And no doubt wondering: What will he do? What can such a poor specimen of the male of the species do? It’s discomfiting, I tell you, to say the least, to be looked at that way. And I’m pretty sure that is the way she’s watching me: the female gaze, the challenge to be a man.

Regardless, two things are definitely determined, if there was ever any doubt about the first: she is being stalked and harassed by that man—and now is being physically assaulted.

“It always is, Good, the world is always too much with us. It makes us unnatural in our personal private relationships. Just look at us two.”

“You think that’s good?… You sound experienced, Mr.… I’m sorry but I don’t even know your name. I’m—”

“I think, Good, that giving bad people a second chance is always a mistake. In my experience, things never get better. But I’m not experienced in matters of the heart, to put the matter litotically. There’s not much call on the dating sites for five-foot-two three-hundred-pound loners, losers, what have you.”

Half-distracted, she looks yet more puzzled but doesn’t contradict my self-erasure. I love her all the more for that. In fact, her genuine honesty is worth more to me than a thousand dates with tolerant women who have no truck with body-shaming (even if exclusively as regards themselves).

She says, “It’s worth it though if it’s finally over, and I think it is—I hope so—he’s … Well, I take him seriously and at his word, but I don’t think he’d actually… It’s just that, well, especially since Mom….”

I compress my lips and nod to signal sympathy and affirmation. “You really should have called the police?”

“What? The police? And say what? It’s not a crime till it happens, and then it’s impossible to prove, and useless by then. I mean, the so-called victim isn’t around anymore, is he? It’s the survivor who bears the blame. I mean, since Mom’s death I’m the only….” She seems to realize she’s mostly talking to herself via me. “But how do you know about all this, Mr.…? Are you watching me or something from across the way? —Oh, I’m sorry. Is it that you suffer from depression yourself, is that it? Suicidal tendencies? If so, I really am so sorry, I do apologize for my blundering confusion.”

Distraught, not thinking straight, not the right time for this heart-to-heart, poor thing. I must have made a pained face. Because I too do suffer from the black dogs, am hounded often, and, well…I love you. Good, my unattainable, though it’s not unrequited love I suffer from. I mean, what could the likes of I do with requited romantic-sexual love of a Good? Regardless, I do suffer, alone, I suffer alone from loneliness. What could be more pathetic, more depressing?

Fool that I am I point, as if maybe she didn’t know: “The eyes?”

“Huh?” Her shadowed face crinkles so sweetly, like she’d just stepped off the fetid bus and spotted me. “What? I’s what? You w… Oh, eyes?” She removes the cap and smiles beatifically, and the black eyes have disappeared. “Why do you ask?”

I’m processing with the speed of a Deep Blue, if too discombobulated to come up with a mating move. Obviously I’ve misread the board, her position, our situation, my mistake in reading black eyes, which can be credited as an effect of the beak-curled cap’s penumbra. Or could it be that my spell-casting Good really is of the wiccan persuasion and shape-shifting so? This time the comic thought fails to provide a path of egress.

“Regardless, I’ll keep an eye out,” I blurt to cover my move towards a hasty exit.

  With a twitch forward, she makes towards staying my offer of vigilance but says nothing. I walk away. She calls after me: “What?…Uh, okay, thank you, kind sir…I guess. But better keep two eyes out,” she snickers. Calls more loudly: “No, seriously, thanks for your concern, Mister! I mean, I don’t even know you! Anyway, I’m hopeful we’re okay now—him, I mean, he’s better now!” I hear the rest as tailing off: “I mean, Tom’s really so sorry for what he almost really did, he’s really sweet and loves me too much ever to hurt me intentionally that way, it was an accident, and he’s already getting help. We’re good on that.”

  The heavy exterior door crashes behind me on the that. … Whew. We’re good? Or was that a question? Isn’t that always the way it goes, round and round right up till the story appears on the local news? The initial assault, the unmanly tearful promises of repentance and reform and submitting to treatment. Repeat, again and again, wash, rinse, and repeat. I’ve watched the documentaries, the crime shows. So: I will indeed keep binocularly bug-eyed for you, Good, for your own good, whether you know it or want it or not. Since Mom died, yes. … Tom? Sweet Jesus, the tomcat!

And matters have not improved at his next appearance just as the sun’s going down, his subsequent stalking harassment/assault. His literal appearance has deteriorated too, he’s so unshaven he could have been Van-Winkling since I saw him last. Careless personal hygiene, as the bed-head now looks like something soiled solid and sculpted awry, like the coif of a dirty Ken doll. But what’s equally concerning is that he’s brought a gift … a proffered box of chocolates, I believe I do spy with my little eye. A peace offering? That interpretation relieves my worry a little but leaves me anxious still that she will accept the sweets and be lured back into whatever looping love story they are composing together. The phrase “Stockholm Syndrome” comes to mind.

It doesn’t help when she crosses over and hugs him, extending the embrace so that it can be described as her holding him affectionately. Such familiarity as I’ve not previously witnessed, dear me. Have I missed a visit? Then there’s a reticence on her part, which morphs into awkwardness for both, as when men hug with butts hyper-retracted (so I’ve witnessed). She doesn’t know how to disentangle from this imposed lover’s clinch, what to do with her hands, the poor girl who’s had so few boyfriends—lover is definitely not what he is, I won’t have it! … Maybe it’s just the boxy gift pressing into her…well, her sternum.

She steps back. He pushes the gawdy box at her (okay, maybe a token of remorse for the slamming exit and unwitnessed violence since) and says something: For you, honey, g’won take it, open it. Some such aw-fucking-shucks mugging. She looks down at the plain brown box of chocolates, smirking and slightly shaking her head, then gesturing refusal with both hands pushing air: I can’t, Tom, I won’t have it. She commences talking rapidly, which I take from the jawing of her jaw. He reaches across the box with his right index and flips the reversed lid open on his sorry offering of sweet treats. Her hands fly to her face in feigned delight—no, it’s horror she’s expressing, she’s terrified! What? Has the psychotic gifted ‘his girl’ a box of dynamite?

He retracts the woody-looking box to his own sternum, she reaches weak fingers for it or him, holding the box in his right hand he brushes her arm aside with his left, she persists with a stronger right arm, he knocks it sideways viciously, and she takes to pleading with both hands elevated when fast as a striking cobra he backhands her face and sends her reeling against the dining-room table. Dazed she slumps for a spell.

He makes no move towards assistance, just watches her broken there.

She collects herself. With the beaten side of her face in her left hand she raises a straight right arm and points at the door. One need be no lip-reader to interpret: Never, ever, come here again! This time I mean it, Tom. Some such. But before he can obey or disobey she brings a fist down and knocks the box out of his hand—it bounces when it hits the floor and a gun tumbles out. Nor do I have to hear to know that she screams jumping backwards, where she bounces off the selfsame table. He snatches the gun and charges her.

I’m out the door in a flash, acting all unthinkingly.

2

Much that affects me personally has transpired in the world out there. I am awaiting what should be a quick hearing and dismissal. After all it was all a misunderstanding, an unhappy happenstance, as it was too for poor misunderstood Actaeon. Yet I am also now pursued by the hounds of legalistic hell. My lawyer, Mallory (“Call me Mal”) Sullivan agrees with the all-a-misunderstanding defence strategy as justification for my bursting into Good’s unit and charging the presumed (we must allow) blaggard, and like the human ball I am, bowling him over. The gun lay by his head until with backhand I bashed it against the baseboard heater, where it fired—her scream reverberating in my head that instantly had felt encased in gum. I grabbed a good hank of bed-head and repeatedly slammed his face on the pale parquet floor, smashing him into unconsciousness. A veritable action hero, c’est moi!… Or so I’d briefly felt until she managed to get hold of a fist of my thinning rug and pulled me off him. The understandably distraught Good commenced shouting at my deafened self hysterically. She soon recovered the presence of mind to call an ambulance and the police. After two tries, there was no further use in attempting explanation.

The paramedics, dabbing and bandaging his messy face, surmised that he was concussed, the poor fellow—her brother! Who was stretchered out. I was taken away in handcuffs. We’d attracted a small audience (a gunshot and police will do that), a short gauntlet of the slovenly attired, and I knew why newsworthy culprits cover their faces.

But yes, yes, yes already! Of course. Like that gun in a drama’s first act that must go off in the fifth, it all makes logical sense, now: recently deceased mother, her brother, mentally ill and threatening suicide.

End of story.

Or not quite.

My one call was to the only person in the world who cared about me personally and could help: my union rep at Oleum Sea Cadets. I still had to spend a few perfectly terrible hours in a cell before the appointed Mallory Sullivan appeared. You wanna talk loneliness, isolation, existential-ontological threat? … Of course you don’t. Who does? Regardless, arrest and imprisonment was as bad as TV has helped us imagine it to be: the dim narrow cell with its actual real-life black bars, the dank and petrichorish odour of basement, the bare cream-coloured metal cot, stainless-steel sink and seatless steel toilet. Left alone I had an explosive bowel movement, squatting over the dehumanizing device, fearful I was about to cry.

Mal caught me hoisting trou, which was frightfully embarrassing. She made a face like sinus pain at the foul odour? Herself she had a stout air about her, in heightening heels, a cuttingly creased pantsuit, a snooty head of stiff dyed-blondish hair. She stood back in the hallway, as if fearful I might expose myself intentionally. Fancy that! After she left to arrange the Release Order, I spent my time looking out the one window giving on another wing of the county jail. It was night by then, so the rooms were lighted. I watched men lie and sit and walk in tight circles, many with hand-heels to temples, men only, and seen only from the waist up, because I’m below ground. Second floor would have offered a better angle, even the first. Regardless, the lighting was good.

Malpractice Mal frowned at my Actaeon reference and asked for explanation, which I was happy to provide. She's confident the case will not proceed to trial. But there will be disgraceful procedures called “Discovery” and “Deposition,” until (she is also confident) an eventual “Summary Judgement” for dismissal. There will be the shame of some public exposure, and the dicier business of professional censure from my Oleum Cadets administration. Regardless, the incident will forever rank as the only mano-a-mano ‘fight’ I’ve ever won. “Fight” is ironized here because the straight word would dignify my youthful failures to resist being bullied, bloodied, humiliated. Ditto of course the regular beatings from my oh-so-deeply-disappointed Daddy dearest who, as I’d be pulling up my wetted pants, would sniffingly insist were for my own good. Yes, I’ve spared you my very own aggrievéd victim’s tale, of my having survived that mad model of a man/father/human being. Mommy dearest too, his enabler. Regardless.

Lawyer Mal came by my place a couple of times—I wouldn’t venture out, she was making an exception with the house calls, she let me know—the first visit to gather information for the upcoming discovery proceeding, and the second time to inform me that, pending the outcome of it all, the Oleum Sea Cadets had put me on paid leave.

“So I’ll be able to pay your bill.” Snickering twit, unmanned no-man, peeping creep, I am.

She smiled small at this jocular presumption of professional intimacy. “No bill, Norman, I’m on the public purse.” She smiled her most human, a pretty good approximation: “But tell me, Norm, honestly now”—a we’re-in-this-together smirk and nod—“for how long had you been watching her?”

I rotated my no-neck medicine-ball noggin to the balcony window. “Whose lawyer are you anyway, Mal? As I said,” continuing to address the outside world and Good’s empty apartment, “I happened to glance over that one time, it looked like murder. Surely as a woman …” O Good, my Good, wherefore art thou Good? Art thou Good, melted into thin air, leaving this wreck behind? Nor did I pressure Mal to hear me elaborate about Dad, because legally I didn’t need the overkill, we (as Mal put it) didn’t.

Does my uncharacteristic reticence, my failure to force a fuller disclosure, make you think better of me or worse? As a man and as a writer? At this point, could you think worse? (Ha-ha, that’s a joke, I hope.) It’s irrelevant anyway. I’m defending my atypical less-is-more style because of a rule I learned in my creative writing classes: one must not, aesthetically speaking, introduce new evidence at the end of a story, such as that of my brutish father and enabling mother. But of course, when it comes to art, rules exist to be broken. Regardless …

At the deposition, Good was no help (again to speak litotically), quite the contrary:

Yes, we’d exchanged a few words once or twice, but we could hardly be described even as acquaintances. I found him to be … oh, I don’t like to say it with him sitting right there … but creepy. … No, I never told him anything about my brother and his mental-health issues, or of his total dependence on me since our mother got sick, or of his going off his meds, or of his repeatedly threatening suicide. None of that. … How would I know how he came up with the delusional story about my father, but it definitely wasn’t from me. Like I said, I do not know the man. … No, it still scares me to think that he was likely watching my apartment all this time. You’re a woman, just think.

Lawyer Sullivan (with mock deference): No further questions, esteemed colleagues.

Prosecutor (with mock flourish): The prosecution rests, Your Honour.

A big joke. That’s how the judicial powers that be treat us when we’re at their mercy. My life was implicitly reviled by smiling asses, my secret life insensitively exposed, humorously traduced by the dim-witted. And please observe that I never treat others—whether neighbours or incarcerated felons—in that jocular manner that bespeaks apathy or, what’s worse, sociopathology.

At least the officials were soon feet-shuffling to conclude the legal travesty. Not she who, after her one speech, had remained seated with her hands gripping each other on full display, apparently wrestling with a thought. Now, as the rest of us moved to break up, she outed with it:

“Excuse me but I have something I’d like to add.”

Everybody halted and looked at her, all but I who looked out the high windows that framed a deep blue sky and what I fondly imagined as infinite space.

“I don’t want to take this any further, I’m sorry if that’s a problem for anybody.”

I looked, she was watching me. I didn’t like that, for obvious reasons I don’t like being looked at. I again looked away. Keep your eyes to yourself, Good.

“The prosecution has no objection.”

“Nor do we.”

Postscript

I did learn something, and you may as well benefit from it too. If literally discovered, one who habitually only watches his female neighbour as she undresses will at worst pay minimal penalties—a fine, no jail time—and is far more likely to receive a summary dismissal. Penalty and punishment are much worse if the pervert kept photographic or video record of his crime, or if—damn his eyes—children are involved. Voyeurism remains a crime, though, whether involving recording or not. Just in case you’re wondering, which I expect by this point some of you might be (studies estimate upwards of half the population peeps either occasionally or repeatedly). Regardless, I could now sign myself, Criminally yours, etcetera etcetera.

I’ve judged that our only crime-cum-sin was exegetical in nature. That is, ours was a private, even something of a literary-critical, malfeasance regarding differences in interpretation. Which is to say, both Good and I were guilty of misreading the other. But surely my misreading of her situation—given the strong evidence of Good’s familial psycho-dramas—would have convinced any sane reader/audience member to have concluded and acted as I did. Regardless, that misreading shows why I was wise not to pursue an M.A. in English. I was often encouraged to do so, if as likely so that Oleum College of Science and Practical Arts could get my money. My Creative Writing instructors also often messaged on my fiction assignments that I showed talent and should continue writing creatively. (Truth in this advertisement for myself: to a man/woman they also always suggested that I needed to tame the florid style and all the parentheses, whether between rounded brackets or dashes. As here, of course, though not too cutely, I trust.)

These drab days I’m back at The Oleum Sea Cadets office in the Government of Canada Building on Main Street. But not for long I expect, either by my choice or decree of dismissal on grounds of “moral turpitude.” Despite agreement that the sort-of sordid details of my ostensible transgression be kept hush-hush, the legal fuss got out (and lack of juicy detail only piques the prurient). Lawyer Mal(feasance) unenthusiastically offered to counter-sue broadly: the Sea Cadets, the City of Oleum, Rock Solid Construction (the apartment builder), Pyramid Inc. (its management company), The Government of Canada, Drapery-R-Us (for God’s sake!), and Good (Ms. Diana Bathurst, by the way). I preferred not to. Regardless, I don’t think I can stand any longer the looks of my co-workers, their smug knowing, as if I, the colleague voted most likely to fuck up, has proven up.

But yes, clearly Good has moved on, cleared out up-up-and-away, and I wish that super girl only the best. A gnarly old loner now ‘lives’ in her place, apparently not long for this world, if one can go by his increasingly embossed rib cage, which he looks fond of baring. Where it’s not white as paper, his skin is amber as a heavy smoker’s first two fingers, symptomatizing the terminal condition of his jaundiced liver. He has zero visitors. So likely no family, no loving loved ones still living. He himself may as well be dead, for all I can see.

He’s installed white roller blinds! The first evening post-installation that I stood watching him—with not a jot less interest than I did her—he approached his sliding door, stood watching me for a spell, deadpan yet knowingly, then drew down the blind. Still disturbed over the Good affair (I figure), I’d forgotten to turn off my living-room light! Game over.

For my own curtain call, here’s gift of a bit more Bard-as-Pandarus (do not imagine it filmed, please). In the last words of the play the syphilitic soul takes final leave of audience/reader, stage, and life. He begins, “Some two months hence my will shall here be made,” and ends:

Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

---

Gerald Lynch was born on a farm at Lough Egish in Co. Monaghan Ireland and grew up in Canada. His latest novel, Plaguing Jake, was published in 2024 by At Bay Press. He has published 10 books, 8 of them fiction, numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, as well as having edited a number of books. A winner of the gold award for short fiction in Canada’s National Magazine Awards, he lives in Ottawa.