Baffin Island
(from Nectar Fragments)
"Bring me some fish bones and watermelon seeds."
"And tuna out of a can."
"Ole!"
"Saul Sherman, get fucked!"
The young man looked up from his beer and turned languidly in the direction from which the imprecation seemed to come. Jane. He sighed. He smiled. "Well," he said, "maybe I will. I hope I will. I'll try. You know," he added with a yawn, "dishevelment suits you. I mean..." She was gone.
"What's that all about?" murmured Peter Elfmann, the sometime playmate of his childhood who Saul, two years older and a third year student, had unofficially taken under his wing.
Saul reached for the jug of beer on the table and refilled both their glasses. "Son," he said, holding up a finger suggestive of a significant thought on the way, "masturbation. Masturbation is the key, the solution, the... the…why, the Holy Grail, if you like. There is no reference to it in the Kama Sutra. I've checked. Pity. It's never been given its due. Well, I, Saul Sherman, hereby dedicate my life to giving it its due. Have you read Don Quixote? No? Elfmann, I've told you this before and I tell you again: you cannot restrict your reading to your scholarly discipline! You must branch out. Do you know who introduced me to the Don? I'll tell you: Professor O'Brien himself, and he one of Canada's greatest physicists. Okay? You see my point? Well. A careful reading of the text leads to an inescapable conclusion, which, however, has been escaped by generation after generation of critics and commentators: the Don was a sublime masturbator, a master masturbator. Oh, the orgasms he must have had, his eyes closed and his Dulcinea del - "
"Here are your fishbones, sir," said the waiter. "And your watermelon seeds."
"Thank you, many thanks. Just set them down anywhere. Hm. Where was I?"
"Dulcinea del..."
"Toboso. To be sure. That girl, Jane. Queen Jane, I call her, with apologies to Dylan. Once - I give you my word - she seized a carving knife, held it to her breast, and shrieked, 'Just give the word and I swear I'll plunge it into my heart!'"
"Well?" said Peter, when Saul suddenly fell silent.
Saul seemed not to have heard. He sat, head in hands, eyes lowered, apparently plunged in melancholy which Peter, apparently, knew him well enough to respect. He turned his attention to his beer. They were in a campus watering hole called the Cafe Ole, though coffee at this hour constituted a very insignificant part of the establishment's custom. One might have thought the shouts, laughter and music which filled the place an intolerable distraction to anyone seeking to lose himself in his thoughts, but Saul thought on, undistracted, and if Peter felt impatient he showed no sign, but sipped his beer with all the quiet contentment of a man whose good day's work has entitled him to the relaxation he now savors.
"She would have, too," Saul said quietly at last. "She would have."
"Really?"
"And I would have been her murderer, because it was on the tip of my tongue to say, 'Go ahead, do it,' - just calling her bluff, you know? I don't know why I didn't; it would've been so characteristic of me. Who takes a thing like that seriously? Would you have?"
"I suppose not."
"She's not much to look at, as you saw, but she's a hundred, a thousand times better than me because she is capable of love, real love, while I... while I...hm. What about you, Elfmann. Are you capable of real love?"
Receiving no answer, he went on. "Maybe I'll marry her. If I had an ounce of humanity in me, that's what I'd do."
"Marry someone you don't love?"
"What makes you think I don't love her?"
"You said, 'She's capable of real love, while I...'"
"You're too young to understand. You're right, though, I don't love her. I don't even like her. She's stupid, boring, incapable of a thought that isn't conventional and trite... Typical Jap."
"Jap?"
"Jewish American Princess. Only daughter of upper middle class parents, thinks the poor have only themselves to blame, and insists on going virgin to the marriage bed."
"She's a virgin?" Peter inquired incredulously.
"Oh, beyond the shadow of a doubt. You thought I'd slept with her? By no means. The portal is closed, the occupant deaf to my knocking."
Peter shook his head. "How'd you ever get mixed up with a case like that?"
"How does anyone get mixed up with anything? God knows. 'Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans' - who said that? Wish it was me! Maybe I'll split for a year - travel, wander around."
"You just got back."
"Listen. Supposing you had a whole empty year at your disposal, and money was no object. Where'd you go?"
Peter shrugged. "Africa, India, Athens, Paris. Where wouldn't I go! You?"
"Baffin Island."
"Baffin Island?"
"Don't ask me why. I have this craving to visit Baffin Island. Had it since childhood."