You know how the song goes: “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard….” That’s how I’ve always felt with Suzanne. I try to hide it, but there are times when my insecurities emerge low in my viscera and refuse to go away. We’ll be at a dinner party and I’ll glance across the table at her and catch her talking with another man. She’ll be bright and animated and wholly engaged. She’ll be that sparkling jewel I fell in love with, but she’ll be that sparkling jewel with everyone she meets. When my insecurities are at their worst, I wonder to myself: what if she meets another man who wants to hoard that jewel for himself? I tell myself that, as a matter of prudence, I should assume all men are as ill-intentioned as me.
Please don’t laugh. I entertain a fantasy. It’s not a fantasy really. One thinks of fantasy as an expression of hope or desire, whereas the scenario which plays itself out in my brain is an expression of fear. Please don’t laugh, I worry that one day Leonard Cohen will seduce my wife. He’ll speak to her with that golden voice and call her his sister of mercy and set his hands between her thighs and move on from there. Suzanne will find herself overwhelmed by his larger-than-life persona, and will surrender her perfect body to his wandering tongue. In my fantasy, I’m looking on the scene from the other side of a window and I am helpless to do anything about it. I feel insignificant and powerless. For her part, Suzanne grows and grows so that by the time she achieves orgasm she’s as big as a house and I’m no more than an ant scrabbling at her foundation.
You can imagine my consternation then, when on a Friday afternoon I called Suzanne on my way home from work to ask if there were any groceries I should pick up and she advised me that Leonard Cohen was sitting in our living room. I tried to keep my voice steady as I said: “That’s nice, honey,” but I’m sure she could hear the quaver.
I’ve never been able to get from Suzanne the precise details of how Leonard Cohen ended up in our living room. It’s not as if we move in the same circles. There he is, a man of international reputation, who has devoted his life to filling the hole in our culture. And there I am, a guy nobody’s ever heard of, who trades in secured instruments for a bank. I even look like I trade in secured instruments for a bank—with my blue blazers and striped ties and male pattern baldness. I don’t have a poetic bone in my body, though I secretly play the guitar, but only when the house is empty. Suzanne doesn’t even know.
Notwithstanding my lack of ties to the arts community, there sat Leonard Cohen in my living room, sipping on a G & T with my Suzanne and talking to her in that gravelly voice of his. Suzanne greeted me at the front door with a peck on the cheek. I whispered: “What the hell is he doing here?” But she shushed me and led me by the hand into the living room. She felt my raw jealousy and met it with a look of annoyance—a subtle twist from the corner of her mouth. “Leonard,” she said, “I’d like you to meet my husband, David. David, this is Leonard.”
He rose from his seat to shake my hand. No. That makes it sound too smooth, as if his movements were invested with a natural grace. In fact, he heaved himself forward and thrust with his arms; he grunted and wheezed and groaned; and when at last he took hold of my hand, he let a grimace fall across his face. He gave a contorted smile and made a comment about aching in the places where he used to play. From the photos I had seen, I assumed Leonard (“Can I call you Leonard? Lenny?”) was a tall man with lanky limbs, and he may well have been such a man in his younger days, but the man before me now was older and stooped and worn out. He had a two or three day growth of grizzle on his face that was grey and seedy, and a trace of spittle had dried in the crease of skin where his jowl began. I noticed, too, that he smelled. It was the smell of somebody who hasn’t bathed or changed his clothes in several days—not as pungent as the smell of riding on a subway car with a street person in mid-July—but it was a smell of the same order.
“Leonard was just telling me how he was in Vermont and drove up to Montreal for a reading last night, but had to be in T.O. this morning, so after closing time, he started to drive but couldn’t keep his eyes open, so he pulled off the highway and slept in his car ’til dawn, then finished the trip this morning.”
By the time she was done with Leonard’s triptych, Suzanne was breathless and beautiful. When she drew in a fresh lungful of air, her breasts rose like the swell of a rising tide. She wore a low-cut V-neck sweater, and a strand of her hair had fallen into the cleavage. I watched her breasts rise and fall. I wanted to touch them. I wanted to kiss them. Suzanne sometimes accuses me of having a breast fetish. I laugh and answer that I’m no different than any other straight man on the planet (which raises an interesting semantic question: if everybody does it, is it really a fetish?) Leonard looked up at her and smiled. He was sitting in a wide armchair and Suzanne had settled herself on the left arm so that her buttock brushed against his elbow and her nipples hovered at the level of his eyes. I wanted to pull her sweater up and over her head and lay her down on the Persian carpet and take her there on the living room floor while Leonard watched.
Something must have shown on my face because Suzanne caught it and asked what I was thinking.
“Nothing,” but I wasn’t convincing.
“Oh, come on.”
I would have to improvise. “I was wondering if you’ve invited our guest to stay for dinner.”
Leonard raised his hands in a defensive posture, saying “No, no, no” and inadvertently(?) brushing the back of his left hand past Suzanne’s right nipple. “I couldn’t possibly impose.”
You already have, I thought to myself, but said aloud: “Not at all. Not at all.”
Suzanne slid from the arm of the chair and crossed the living room to the door that led to the kitchen. There, she paused and turned and called me to join her. I excused myself and hoped Leonard would overlook the erection that was beginning to press itself against the cloth of my grey trousers. If Leonard had overlooked it, Suzanne certainly hadn’t. She nestled up to me and pressed against the bulge in my trousers and wondered if that was for her.
“Well, it sure as hell isn’t for him. That much I know.”
Suzanne screwed her face into a wry smile and asked how I could be so certain of my desires.
“Jesus!” and I rolled my eyes.
While Suzanne got the wok heated and slid all the ingredients for a stir fry into the hot bowl, I set out three plates on the dining room table along with chop sticks and wine glasses. Leonard had finished his G & T and was floating amiably above his chair now, so I opened a passable bottle of Pinot Noir, but not our best, since I wasn’t yet certain I cared for our guest. I felt myself suspended somewhere amongst all the sounds: the sizzle of hot vegetables and the pop of a cork and the unabashed bubbles of Leonard’s farts.
Leonard cleared his throat and when I turned to face him, he smiled and said, almost as if he had written his words somewhere before and had memorized them for just such an occasion: “Women have been exceptionally kind in my old age.”
I tried to swallow my jealousy and speak in a magnanimous tone: “Suzanne has a generous heart.”
Leonard held his glass of wine by the stem and twirled it ineptly. His hands shook and a drop spilled on the lapel of his jacket. It was then that I saw, for the first time, that this man, this seducer of women, this troubadour without a bed of his own, this gypsy lover, was now a frail old man, with cataracts and shaking hands. I was suddenly ashamed of my insecurity. Maybe Leonard sensed the change in my heart.
“Did your wife tell you how I ended up here?”
“You’d been driving from Montreal?
He smiled. “I had to pee.”
“You had to pee? That’s how you ended up here? I don’t quite see the connection.”
“It’s a prostate thing.” He shifted in the arm chair. “I knew I wasn’t gonna make it and happened to be driving through your neighbourhood, so I chose a house at random.”
“A house at random,” I said in an abstract way. “That’s funny. A house at random.”
“We’re almost ready,” Suzanne called from the kitchen.
I pointed to the table in the dinning room. “Why don’t we sit down with our glasses and …”
Leonard sloshed a few more drams of his wine on the toe of his left shoe as he hoisted himself to his feet. He stretched and yawned and it was obvious he had shrunk since the days when he first bought his jacket. I expect there was once a time when he could almost have touched the ceiling, but now his shoulders were hunched and drawn up around his ears. The jacket hung loose from his shoulders like the stole of an apostate priest. He slunked into the dining room and struggled to pull out the chair I had shown him. It was even more of a struggle for him to slide the chair in close to the table. Throughout the meal, bits of zucchini and snow pea slid from between his chop sticks and either fell into his lap or slopped onto the floor by his feet.
Suzanne took her place across from me and smiled a brilliant smile that warmed me almost as much as the wine. I don’t remember much of the conversation, though I suspect it was smart and snappy. What I do remember is that Suzanne was sparkling and attentive, beaming across the table and passing me secret looks and grinning furtively whenever Leonard had bowed his head to examine the food on his plate. So it didn’t really come as a surprise when I felt a foot in my crotch. I started, of course; I’ve always found it difficult to relax at first when someone else is playing in the parts where I’m afraid to ache. But the toes moved with an exquisite gentleness and I had grown relaxed enough to be anything but relaxed. Suzanne gave me a sly smile and I knew that later in the evening the two of us would have a wonderful time on the Persian carpet in the living room.
By the time we had emptied our plates, I was boasting a painful erection that threatened to poke a hole through my trousers. I was worried Suzanne might ask me to clear the plates, so I prepared myself to deliver a long list of excuses. But my concern never came up. Suzanne pushed back her chair and gathered up the plates and carted them off to the kitchen. For a minute, I thought nothing of the fact that there was still a foot in my crotch gentling drawing me on to dessert. I looked at Leonard who was wiping a few grains of sticky rice from the corner of his mouth. He smiled at me but said nothing. I looked down to my lap and saw there a large foot in a black dress sock. There was a hole in the sock and a big toe sticking through it, and a tuft of hair growing from just above the first joint. Although I knew the foot could belong to only one person, nevertheless, I stared at it as if it was a disembodied foot with a will all its own. I was certain that if I looked under the table, I’d see both of Leonard’s legs folded genteelly beneath his chair, one whole, the other, footless.
By the time Suzanne had returned, the foot was back where it belonged. Leonard and I exchanged glances once, then we continued as if nothing had happened. After dinner and a dessert wine, Leonard took his leave. He had never intended to be such an imposition, he said. All he had ever hoped for when he pulled into our driveway was the chance to relieve his ever-shrinking bladder in a washroom that was clean. He was grateful for our hospitality. “The world’s a little colder than the one that I was born into,” he said. “It’s good to know that not everyone has hardened on me.”
“Ahhhh,” Suzanne said in her most sentimental voice, and she gave him a peck on his rough cheek.
As Leonard Cohen stepped down the front walk to the driveway, Suzanne called after him: “Look at me, Leonard. Look at me one last time.”
Leonard turned and waved, and precisely at that instant, a flash went off and blinded him. Suzanne had snapped a photo of him. Later that evening, she printed it off and trimmed it to a nice size and tucked it in the corner of the mirror above our mantel in the living room. Still later that evening, after we each had finished another glass of the Pinot Noir, we found ourselves naked on the Persian carpet, playing in the places where Leonard ached, while he looked down on us through jealous eyes.