Love Story

Everything is sexy and thrilling when I share my first cab with Carole Corbeil. Her name dazzles me. I’ve seen it in the Globe & Mail for a couple of years. It carries an allure of mysterious glamour. I read her and am amazed. She speaks to me in Saskatoon where I have a bad case of outpost envy. We see everything being noted, honoured and rewarded in Toronto. We feel ignored. It is an ordinary Canadian malaise. It’s not that I hate Toronto, but they get all the plums and we get the dried cod. Carole Corbeil through the organ of a national newspaper lights a fire in me. I never expected to be riding in a cab with her. But here I am an almost hick from Saskatchewan and we were on our way looking for her boyfriend who is going to be my new boss.

We have been drinking white wine in a bar on Queen Street. We are waiting for her man to appear. I’ve been falling into her eyes for a few hours. She has this smoky look and low melodious voice and she more than matches the hype. To sit with her is to fall for her. I can see I’m not the only one. It’s the forgetful way she holds the stem of a wine glass, the way she smokes only an inch of her cigarette. I just want to be nowhere else; for the first time I am content to listen and learn, and she is a great teacher. In my mind this is the best table I could be sitting at in the country. I’ve sat in a lot of Canadian bars and none have made me this happy. These are the eyes I want to be lost in. But I’m afraid of her intelligence. I don’t know why? She isn’t a show off. I listen to her story. It’s a good one.

She’s married to an American architect who moved to Toronto to work on the CN tower. They’ve raised each other and then she can’t stop herself. She cheated on him and feels terrible about it. It all comes from growing up between two fathers, one an English Canadian and the other a French Canadian. Her mother was a beauty who’d ripped Carole and a sister away from their French father and later, in desperation, married a powerful English doctor from Westmount who was 25 years her elder.

Carole tells me every pleasure for her means a betrayal for somebody else. She finds on average that she can stay monogamous for 3 years. After that her attention wanders, not her loyalties, but her attention, she suffers badly for it. It’s simply biological now. She wants a baby, her body is crying out for it. She needs to love unconditionally. She is ready to be a mother and a good one. She’s had the bad example of her own parenting to not follow.

But men love to fence with her, courtship is a game of sparring with her mind. It all bores her now. She’s looking for someone who isn’t threatened. She’s found him in my new boss. She loves him more than the others. When he walks into a room she feels like a mother would when a child comes to view. He arouses her dormant passions, ones she’d long ago locked away. He’s beautiful to her and has the finest mind. His intelligence is sharpened by alcohol and the lovemaking is rapturous.

I wish she was talking about me and listen drinking wine and forgetting more and more the object of all this praise is my new boss.

As time passes and the boyfriend is not appearing Carole loses enthusiasm for her subject. We switch to literature, which I call books.

I tell her how I read Dostoevsky in Northern Manitoba in 40 below weather. I was broke, hungry, holed up in a motel room, nowhere to go back to and no way of going forward, at that time I thought I’d understood the author’s Russian fevers. I was waiting to go down into a nickel mine, a job (like her boyfriend) which never materialized.

I keep talking, telling my story. I don’t want her to go and I don’t want her to think about her missing boyfriend.

There’s a certain period of time when the sugar in alcohol feeds me and when inhibitions are lowered sufficiently so I can speak with some confidence on any subject. I don’t need to know much about it, in fact the less the better. I feel I need to protect this magical femme from any embarrassment. It is an honour to be with her. I can’t imagine making her wait for me. I turn to the subject of her writing and how she has fed and taught me in that small prairie town so far away. How her take on art has inspired me to come to Toronto and learn more. She is my teacher.