Blaine
FYI: all names have been changed.
Holly, my girlfriend at the time, lived in Vancouver. She worked with a friend, Karen, who had a daughter, Jenny, who lived in Toronto with an actor named Jim, who was going to perform in a play in Montreal. Jenny and Jim, along with two other actors in the play, were hoping to rent a house for the two months they would be in Montreal. Jenny mentioned this to Karen, who mentioned it to Holly who asked me if I could find such a place. I told Holly that there was little hope, but mentioned it one night to a friend. As fate would have it, she had a friend who was leaving for an extended sailing trip in the Caribbean and was trying to rent her house while she would be away. Her departure was going to coincide with the arrival of the actors.
Perfect!
My friend contacted her friend who agreed to the arrangement. Then my friend gave me the address and told me the rent and the date available. I relayed the information to Holly, who told Karen who told Jenny who told the others. They agreed to take the place. Jenny called her Mom who told Holly who told me to tell my friend to tell her friend that the deal was on.
And that is the convoluted set of coincidences and circumstances that, in early February, led me to be expecting a phone call from someone I had never met.
* * * * *
"Hello."
"Is Ron there?"
"Speaking."
"Hi, Ron, it is Blaine, Jenny's friend? You found a house for us?"
"Yes. I've been expecting your call. Where are you?"
"Central Station. I have taken the train down by myself. The others are driving this evening."
"Oh, O.K. umm, Have you got a lot of stuff?"
"Yeah, a fair amount."
"Will it be alright if we take a cab then because I don't have a car?"
"Oh, sure, that's no problem."
"Good. Now, where to meet... Can you see the information counter from where you are? It has a big green light over it."
"Ah, oh, yeah."
"Good, I'll meet you there. How will I recognize you?"
"Well, I am blond, about five-ten, and wearing a brown suede coat with a fur collar."
"And I am six feet, blond and I'll be wearing a blue corduroy trench. I should be there in about ten minutes."
"O.K. See you then. Bye."
"Bye."
Arriving at the station and walking towards the information desk, I noticed her right away. She seemed to see me but then looked away, pretending not to be aware of me.
“Blaine?”
“Ron.” She offered her hand and I helped her with her bags. We walked out to the taxi stand, hopped into a cab, and headed for the house.
"Wow, this feels strange...It must be ten years since I was in Montreal."
"Did you live here?"
"Yes, I studied at McGill."
"Really, so did I. What year did you start?"
"It would have been 1965. Sixteen years old. Straight from Regina. God, such a long, long time ago."
We were passing fairly near the campus and she was looking out the window at the buildings as we went by.
"This area has changed a great deal," I said. "They've torn down many of the old grey stones on Sherbrooke across from the campus and erected steel and glass. Too bad, really."
"Umm." She seemed lost in thought.
"What did you study," I asked.
"Sorry?" She turned to look at me.
"What did you take when you were at McGill?"
"Pre-med." She looked away.
"From medicine to acting. How did that happen?"
"In my second or third year, I was in a terrible accident and spent ten months in the hospital. After that, I didn't want to be a doctor anymore. A fellow I knew was starting a theatre in Toronto so I joined him there after I recovered."
"Really, it was that simple? Had you been into acting before that?"
"School plays and the like."
By this time, we were nearing the house. It was in an older, ethnic part of Montreal.
"Jesus, St. Urbane. I remember this! I used to live in an apartment just a few blocks from here along Milton. Oh, and what's the name of that street that has all sorts of little shops and delicatessens?"
"St. Laurence?"
"Yes, right."
"It's just two blocks east of here."
The address we sought was the second unit in a row of six older attached houses. A friend of the owner was waiting for us. She handed the keys over to Blaine and gave us a tour. She told us that the owner normally had several housemates staying with her to help cover the mortgage costs. One of these had taken a hammer to one of the kitchen walls, stripping it to the brick.
There was a functioning bathtub at one end of the kitchen. Another housemate had decided to remove the walls around a bathroom and then had found the tub too heavy and awkward to remove. The upstairs bathroom had been finished in cedar shakes.
There were plenty of bedrooms upstairs and down.
As I left, Blaine promised to have me over for dinner one night after the others had arrived and all were settled in.
She called me about a week later. Spaghetti dinner was on. I arrived early, and re-acquainted myself with Jenny, the daughter of Holly's friend.
Blaine seemed occupied with preparing dinner, so I spent my time talking with the others. The previous night they had gone to a local club where they had had drinks with the band which was headlining that week. They had invited the band to dinner as well. The singer and the lead guitarist arrived a little later.
Blaine appeared to have the hots for the lead guitarist. At dinner, she stroked the back of his head. He ignored her and I could not tell if he was embarrassed or annoyed.
After dinner, some of us decided to go to the club where the band was playing. We broke up into several groups, arriving at different times. After waiting in the lineup, I was seated with Jenny and Lynda, the girlfriend of one of the actors. Some of the group sat at another table. Others came and went or changed tables as the evening progressed. At one point, Blaine was sitting across the table from me. She did not take her eyes off the stage even when she was girl-talking with Lynda.
A handful of us stayed to the end and wandered out into the cold air to fetch a cab. Lynda wanted to walk so I volunteered to keep her company.
"I feel like I have been playing counselor all night," she said as we walked. "One of my friends is having marital problems and the other is trying to get laid by the band!" I figured the first friend was Jenny, who had had a tiff with Jim, and the other was obviously Blaine.
It was late by the time we entered the house on St. Urbane to find Blaine in the living room with her arms and legs wrapped around Lynda's boyfriend. They were "just cuddling" and there were others in the room, but I saw a hint of annoyance cross Lynda's face.
Someone made tea and passed around cookies. By about 4:30 a.m. I was beat and stood to go. Blaine suddenly came to life and walked me to the door saying that I would have to come over again sometime when there weren't quite as many people. Perhaps we could go to a movie.
When I had my coat and boots on, she kissed me. She stuck her tongue in my mouth. After several seconds, I reached up and pressed my hand against her breast. She didn't flinch.
"Is this an invitation to spend the night?" I asked.
"Do you want to?"
"Yes."
Off came the coat and boots. I felt everyone's eyes on us as we passed the living room on our way up to her bed.
The next morning, I had barely opened my eyes when Blaine left for rehearsal. By the time I did get up, Lynda and Jenny, the non-actors, were the only ones in the house. They made me breakfast. Jenny knew Holly and I was not sure how she felt about me falling into bed with Blaine. We talked about everything except what had happened the previous night. It was close to noon by the time I left.
I cannot remember if Blaine phoned me or I phoned her, but she came over for dinner a week later. I had told her about Wendy.
Wendy was a dear friend of mine whose drug-addled boyfriend had hit her upside of the head with a beer bottle. She needed a place to stay, and I had a spare room into which she had moved a few days before.
That night, Wendy stayed at another friend's, and Blaine and I had a chance to talk. I got to know more of the woman who had sparked my interest on our first meeting, but I still could not quite figure the Hi-how-are-you-let's-fuck woman of our second meeting.
"What makes you orgasm?" I asked.
"Oh, just about anything...riding on a bus, for example."
"No way."
"Yeah. I also had one when I was rehearsing a particularly emotional scene. I felt myself starting to come, so I just let it happen. The director loved the effect. Kind of hard to repeat though."
We saw each other once or twice more before things became complicated. First, the phone in the St. Urbane Street house was disconnected and for a variety of bureaucratic reasons, it took several weeks to get reconnected. Then Blaine began noon to midnight, seven-day-a-week rehearsals. Communication and contact between Blaine and me became all but impossible.
Furthermore, Holly came to visit for Spring Break. Holly and I had two rules. While apart, we did not need to be monogamous (my rule), but Holly was to be informed as to with whom I had slept (her rule). Holly had brought some things to give to Jenny, so we went over to the house. Blaine was there. Holly acted normally, I guess. I was very uncomfortable.
I also had to deal with Wendy and her problems, academic pressure, and my male insecurity. I wondered how Blaine felt about me. Had I just been a pleasant lay? Was she seeing other people? Was she sleeping with one of the others in the house? Anything was possible.
The next time I saw Blaine was at opening night of the play. She had reserved tickets for Wendy and me. At the after-performance party, I was hoping to reconnect with Blaine, but I did not want to leave Wendy on her own. Every time I looked over in Blaine's direction to get her attention, she was talking with someone else.
The band from the spaghetti dinner night arrived (someone had invited them to a "pass-the-hat gig"). We began dancing. Upon Wendy's insistence, I danced a couple with Blaine. She seemed cool and we did not talk much.
With rehearsals over, Blaine and I still had trouble connecting. I was in class during the day and she, acting in the evenings. The one night she had off was the one I had a class.
She called me near the end of the show's run. We went to lunch in Old Montreal on the day she was to leave. After lunch, we went to the Musée des Beaux-Arts. I showed her the mummified head which had both fascinated and terrified me during an elementary school field trip many years before.
The whole afternoon felt like a first date. There were things I wanted to say, but could not. As we left the Musée, I asked her if she wanted to come over to my place.
"I'd love to," she said with a smile. "But I still have some packing to do and my train leaves in an hour." She gave me her address in Toronto and I waved as the taxi drove off.
A week and a half later, with most of my exams out of the way, I sat down and wrote her a 2500-word letter. I told her how weird our "affair" had been, how things had been moving at an almost out-of-control pace in my life, how I had not in any way understood what had gone on between us. She wrote back that she too had found the situation strange. She mentioned Wendy, Holly's visit, and the difficulty in getting in touch with each other.
I left to spend the summer with Holly in Vancouver. I returned with her to Montreal. We had planned that she would take a leave of absence to live with me during the last year of my master's degree.
At the end of the academic year, my relationship with Holly dissolved and she went back to Vancouver. I began a year of unemployment and sexual promiscuity during which I fell into despair and ended up in therapy.
Blaine and I had continued a sporadic correspondence. Around the time Holly and I were breaking up, she was hired as the Manager of a Theatre in a Small Town. At the end of the year of unemployment, the fates drew us together again as I was offered a temporary contract at the College in the Small Town.
One day in early summer, I borrowed my parents' car to drive down and look for an apartment. I had arranged to meet Blaine and she took me around. By this time, she had met and moved in with a guy who worked at the College.
Sexually she remained a mystery. She mentioned that she had been to a conference recently and had hopped into the sack with a man she had found attractive. Once she had come home early from a trip to find someone in bed with her boyfriend. These things did not seem to bother her.
Within a month I was living in the Small College Town often commuting on weekends to Montreal where I had friends and family. I saw Blaine and her boyfriend a few times. I went over for brunch once. I would see her boyfriend around on campus, but seldom ran into Blaine.
Just after Christmas, I received a phone call from Blaine asking me over for dinner. She had broken up with her boyfriend. That night we made love and the affair was on again.
She would come over for dinner; I would go to her place. A couple of times we spent a Saturday together, but she was often busy and I still went to Montreal occasionally. Once we drove out to the theatre and she showed me around. We would talk. I learned that she had been married nine months before the car accident which changed the course of her life. Her husband had been driving and had been killed.
It was not long, however, before things between us started to deteriorate. I took her to a semi-formal function at the College. About half an hour through the dinner, Blaine got up, gave me a peck on the cheek, mumbled something and walked off. A few minutes later I went looking for her and found her car was gone.
The next day, she called to apologize. She was not sure why she had behaved so strangely. I was left with the impression that she had felt ignored by me, that she had felt out of place at the dinner.
Sex started to become less than satisfactory. One night I felt she really did not want to, but we did anyway. There seemed to be something left unsaid.
Near the end of the school year, I asked her to help me with a role-playing exercise in an evening course I was teaching. Afterwards, we went out for a late dinner. The grievances came out. She seemed to be pissed off with my lack of involvement in our relationship. She said she felt as if she were someone I was simply "seeing on the side". Well...yeah, I thought to myself. Was that not what she wanted? I did not react much to this and she became more angry. When she dropped me at my place, she shouted something about wanting to tear my face off.
A phone call the next day confirmed the irreparable split.
* * * * * * * *
At a dinner party several years later, I learned one of the guests was the current manager of the Theatre in the Small College Town.
"Did you know Blaine?" I asked.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," he answered. "She was the manager before the person I took over from, but yes, I know her well."
"I was friends with her when I was working at the College."
"Really? Well, it's a small world."
"Yes."
"She's managing Another Theatre in Another Small Town."
"Oh."
"Did you know she has Multiple Sclerosis?"
"No, I didn't."