Montréal, Québec, Canada 31.5.92: Churches and Walks in the Rain

A gray and drizzly Montréal day. We got up early and went to La Prairie to church, a church typically Québecoise. Then Stephen S. and Hillary C. came over for lunch, and after that, Steve and I walked up Côte St. Luc past the Oratory to Côte des Neiges, down Côte des Neiges a ways, back to Côte St. Luc and up to the Oratory, and then home. Two young men, both in their 20s apparently, accosted us separately to beg.

Got soaked coming back, as it began to rain again. Now waiting for supper, which Gregory is cooking—sweet-sour pork chops and red cabbage.

Tired. Did not sleep well last night, my stomach doing its old song and dance. Great emotional turmoil.

Montréal, Québec, Canada 30.5.92: Tons of Nuns and Old Farmhouses

Still in Montréal. A morning of sightseeing, in which we saw the old city and the McCord Museum of Canadian History (not impressive), and had lunch at an outdoor restaurant—viandes fumées (a chicken sandwich). Gregory and Shirley B., with whom we’re staying, very kind.

Just before we drove back to their apartment (where we are now) for a rest, we went over the Victoria Bridge to a working-class area of the city and a 17th-century farmhouse (1698) that had, I think the sign said, come to Marguerite Bourgeoys from Maisonneuve. But as 150 nuns were imminently expected, we didn’t stay to tour.

Emotionally, I’m a wreck—or dead inside would say it more accurately. . . . This feels like such a dreadful time for me, my heart swaddled in gray cotton wool. I feel I’ve lost all friends and family with what Belmont Abbey is doing to me—something brought home to me as I think of sending postcards—and have no real feeling about that loss, about touring, or about anything much, except a wish for it (or me) just to vanish.

Montréal, Québec, Canada 29.5.92: Giant Hot Dogs and Outmoded Ambulances for Sale

Left Boston at before noon, entered Québec about 4:30 after driving through New Hampshire and Vermont.

We’re now some 15 or 20 miles out of Montréal, and all is still that mix of little villages—all St. Périphérie de Chicamungee—and flat farmland with not much yet growing. The exuberance—and tawdriness—of it all. Just passed a giant statue of a man in a red shirt, COKE on his back, holding an enormous red phallic hot dog. Just down the road an ambulance from the 1950s seemingly, red light and all, by the side of the road, an à vendre sign in its front window.

Montréal, Québec, Canada 12.12.94: Winter Rooftops, Claustrophobic Apartments

In Montréal, watching steam (or is it smoke?) waft lazily out of chimneys in Snowdon on a rather cold (-20◦) morning. We’re in the 20th-story apartment of G. and S. Baum.

This is a difficult trip. In fact, I feel close to tears as I write, for no specific reason that I can identify. First, there’s the fact that things haven’t been good between Steve and me for weeks now, since Chicago and AAR.

There, Steve became distant, an old disappearing act. When this happens, it happens: no amount of anguished remonstration of fury can call him back. He recedes the more one rages. The receding confirms his cold power over me.

It’s not as if this distance marks every aspect of his relationship to me. That’s what’s maddening about it: it’s an inner inaccessibility that can go hand-in-hand with outer physical attentiveness.

I’m convinced, after enduring this vanishing-act business for years, that he doesn’t understand it, either—at least its roots. In the case of Chicago, I think one of its triggers was job interviews. They elicit all the old anxieties about how to identify ourselves in the workplace, and all Steve’s old strategies of blame, inherited from his father: if you weren’t attached to me (incubus to host), how I’d soar. What prancing white stallions would bear me on my mission.

Then, curiously (or not so curiously), when we went to the gay men’s seminar dinner at Chicago, Steve was wired. There was an element of forced gaiety about his behavior the whole evening.

So, long story short, we’ve spent the intervening weeks arguing fiercely, as we hadn’t done in some time now. In the Baltimore airport on the way to Montréal, got so bad I just walked away. He’s just not here, and when I try to share, he fidgets with a suitcase lock or blows his nose. Always.

Needless to say, then, being in G.’s and S.’s four-room apartment is painful in the extreme. The freak on exhibit. This is Steve’s country and not mine. This is where he betrayed me with R. and W. This is where he throve, to the extent that he tailored himself to straight male expectations, and I