Leonard, where are you, I'm almost seventy...

I recently revisited the two novels by Leonard Cohen. The Favourite Game, and Beautiful Losers.  It surprised me how good they were. I wasn’t expecting it. I think now that I read them at the wrong time in my life. I think male sexuality was defeating me at the time, moving in on me too quickly, before I had a chance to understand my own. Now almost a half a century later, Breavman and his amazing hormones are no threat to me. I enjoy seeing women through his eyes. I see myself as I was. We were encouraged to see ourselves through men’s eyes anyway. The book is copyrighted in 1963 when I was twenty, and very aware of myself as an object of interest. Breavman gives me insight into the problems I ran into. 

I read about the beautiful Lisa: “Breavman thought perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.”

Oh no, Leonard! I don’t think so! At least, not me! Try me... oh, try me! I knew nothing of well-appointed houses, could not imagine raising a brood. Of course I wanted to warm a man, but I never dreamed of a domestic setting. I don’t know what I did dream, except that the future was wide open. I called myself a humanist. I was enamoured by existentialism. That was before I realized that first I needed to take the rather long detour through feminism. I wanted adventure, I wanted an interesting life. My deficiency was that I didn’t see what was happening, never saw the web around me. Oh Leonard, you saw the web. You thought it was to my liking.

But I don’t want to go down that road.

Leonard Cohen walked me home one night, or so I now fantasize. It was somewhere back in 1963 or 4. I have read in magazines that there are a zillion women out there who claim to have slept with him. My claim is far more modest and, I admit, very, very likely a fabrication. 

I was so unhappy that night, and did what I did on many unhappy lonely occasions. I sat in a coffee house, and looked sad.  Possibly it was at the original Coffee Mill in Toronto, though I seem to remember going down the stairs at the Colonnade at Bloor and Bay. It’s unlikely that a young, attractive, single human being hoping for adventure is unaware that sitting alone looking sad might attract someone’s attention. But that night I truly wasn’t fit for company. Nevertheless I was aware of possibly starring in a French ‘New Wave’ movie. I could not get away from my own gaze, never mind the ‘male gaze’.

Earlier that day I had walked into my boyfriend’s apartment and found him with another woman. The woman scrambled up from bed to fix her hair with some bobby pins. I was immobilized. But reason told me this was drama, useful experience, an opportunity to discover who I was. For some reason, anger was not accessible to me. I felt sick at heart and terribly confused. All I knew at that moment was that I did not want to lose him. He’d been the first man I could really talk to. We had amazing conversations. What did I know about sex? I had thought I was at least adequate.

So, what was I to do? I asked if they wanted tea. I didn’t want to appear possessive. My boyfriend tried to convince me that nothing happened. I served tea. I can’t imagine what we talked about. I was noncommittal as to whether I believed him or not. Later I found hairpins between the sheets. And later still I was introduced to amazing male bullshit when my boyfriend denigrated the other woman and denied that anything had really happened. 

Deny, deny, deny! That was the mantra offered to guys when caught "cheating". A good friend, a therapist told me about a man who was caught by his wife on his own living room couch making out with another woman. The woman disappeared in a hurry, and the man boldly told his wife, "That was not a woman, that was a water-fall." How does one deal with that, supposing one loves the guy? My friend offered this as an example of what he called mind-fucking, all in the name of deny, deny, deny! Well, there's something wrong with the whole set-up, isn't there?

Back to the coffee house. Yes, somebody materialized out of the soft evening and asked if he could join me at my table. I said suit yourself but warned him that I would be very bad company, and besides, I was going home soon. He said he had nothing better to do. He was visiting from Montreal. He offered to walk me home. I said I didn’t mind. On the way home I told him the whole sorry story of my relationship with  my boyfriend. We walked slowly in the dark. Hard to say, but I lived maybe 3 or 4 miles uptown. Some of it was an uphill walk through sweet neighbourhoods with front porches and small gardens. It was a warm summer night and he listened quietly. I told him everything, about how my boyfriend had obsessions with other women's muscularity, their breasts, their hands, and their knees, for some reason. I was not aware at that moment that I was a feminist-in-waiting. The stranger said very little. Perhaps nothing at all because I was rambling about my unhappiness, my background, the differences between me and my boyfriend. Eventually we reached my house, and to be minimally polite I thanked him for his companionship and asked him his name. He told me. He said he was a school teacher in Montreal. I shook his hand and thanked him again.

I didn’t know anything about Leonard Cohen at the time. Nor was that the name the man gave me. Only when I discovered his poetry and saw his picture on the dust jacket, the thought came to me, because he had a strong resemblance to the stranger: same height, same dark hair and distinctive nose. And when I read the poetry, I wished it to be true. Oh yes, years later, somewhere in one of his many poetry books I ran across a single line: “Marika, where are you? I’m almost forty!”

I’m a realist. But I did wish that I was Marika.