Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch

Author:Sheree Fitch [Fitch, Sheree]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Published: 2019-02-25T21:44:24+00:00

Chapter 38

If a person were to commit the act of adultery in the small city of Odell, it would be as desperate and passionate, as sweaty and crotch-tingling, as unbearably pleasurable as the pulsating cadence of a Leonard Cohen song or the sultry streets of New York in summer. Clandestine rendezvous in the Odell Hotel could be every bit as steamy and experimental between two plain-faced octogenarian lumpen-bodied souls as among those who were young and in their prime or those exquisitely small-jawed, thin-wristed women and tapered-fingered men wearing matching windbreakers, creased trousers, and genuine leather deck shoes in complementary colours.

Many a furtive Odellian lover could put to shame those airbrushed, spray-tanned actors with bad hair and giant mango breasts, penises hard as stalagmites, grunting with fake lust and performing tongue-defying, finger-fluttering acrobatic acts before the cameras. Not that Mercy Beth Fanjoy had ever watched anything close to a pornographic movie, except by mistake, that once, pressing the wrong button on the remote in a hotel room. Still, Mercy knew Odell had its fair share of philandering husbands and wives mixed in with the rarer breed of the steadfast and true. If anything, she felt compassion for the transgressors. She often pondered how it was, in a city the size of Odell, almost as transparent and quiet as a snow globe, they managed not to get caught.

Midnight found Mercy listening to the best of Leonard Cohen and contemplating sex. The subject of sex. The possibility of sex. The impossibility of sex. The distant memory of sex. She was ready to tackle item number four: Destroy incriminating evidence (RP letters). She started a fire. She would read each letter one last time, tear them up, burn them all, forget the man, erase the history.

Dr. Raymond Piper was a small, bearded, bespectacled man. His students referred to him as Professor Pepe Pee-u, because of the crescent moons of perspiration that rimmed the armpits of his beige dress shirts. For the problem, he took baths in Epsom salts, tried acupuncture, shaved his armpits—his wife’s suggestion—and received mail-ordered heavy-duty only-for-men roll-on deodorant. For the anxiety created by the problem, he meditated, swallowed pills, and drank far too much, especially when he went out of town.

He did not like travelling, he told his wife and others. It was hectic and exhausting on the road. But since the publication of his first book of poetry, Home of the Beaver, its subsequent short-listing for major awards, its positive reviews in the Post, Globe and Mail, and Winnipeg Free Press, he had new opportunities to embrace. He was in demand. He was being asked to do readings at universities on a fairly regular basis.

Normally, he taught The Poetry of William Blake, Myth and Symbolism, and The Bible as Literature. Dr. Piper studied under the famous professor and literary critic Dr. Northrop Frye. This meant at one time he lived in Toronto—“a necessary evil.” Yes, he preferred small towns and staying close to home, really, but an audience of listeners, however small, was simply too hard for Dr.

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