The Monkeyface Chronicles (22 page)

My penis swells, and then an image flashes in my mind of Adeline's father bursting into the apartment, flanked by his two dark-suited lawyers. I try to concentrate on the
National
Geographic
, but I hear the slap of small clothes hitting the floor. A moment passes.

Adeline calls out, “Philip, come in here. I need your help.”

I wander into her large bedroom and sit down on the canopied bed, hoping she won't notice the bulge in my pant leg.

“Sorry everything in here is so pink and girly.” She sighs. “Dad had the room redecorated before I got here. It's still a thousand times better than my jail cell at my mother's house.”

She is now wearing a pair of shiny, form-fitting black workout shorts, and a pink-and-black spandex top not much bigger than a bra.

“How does this look?”

I'm speechless. I just nod.

She turns around, bends forward. “Can you see any panty lines?”

“Not really.”

She turns, pushes her ass toward the mirror, looks over her shoulder and says, “Aw, shit, there
are
panty lines. I
hate
panty lines. Do you think my ass is too big? Should I get liposuction?”

“Jesus. No. You don't need liposuction!”

“I walk and walk and run and run,” she moans, “but I just can't seem to get it any tighter. It's gross. Slap it and see — it jiggles.” The spandex clings to her curves and crevices like a second skin. My erection pulses painfully. “Seriously, give it a slap. It jiggles like jello.”

I manage to say, “It looks nice to me.”

“One treatment, no more jiggles,” she says.

I, for one, do not mind a bit of jiggle.

She shrugs her shoulders and begins tossing other slight, clingy workout shorts from a dresser drawer and onto the bedspread. She shimmies out of the shorts she's wearing and surveys the others on the bed beside me. She is practically naked from the waist down. Her behind is round and smooth, an upside-down Valentine heart. A few dark pubic hairs poke out from under the thong.

“No panty lines now?” she says, after snapping the spandex shorts into place. “No bulges?”

There is one
major
bulge, but it's not on her.

“Adeline, is there a washroom nearby?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “The
en suite
is right behind you. I guess those beers are coming through you now, eh?”

My legs feel like rubber, and my heart is thumping like I've just run a relay race, but I manage to shut the washroom door behind me and drop my shorts just in time for the pearly fluid to gush into the marble sink. I rinse out the sink, then flush the toilet.

When I emerge, Adeline is turning in front of the mirror, pushing her breasts up, running her hands over her stomach and hips, evaluating herself one last time for bulges and jiggles.

“Philip, you need to come more often.”

“
What?
” I blurt.

“You should come to Toronto every weekend,” she says. “You're missing out on so much in Faireville.”

From her father's condominium, Adeline leads me along the monument-adorned boulevard between the north and southbound lanes of University Avenue. At Dundas, we stop to observe a tall, tapered sculpture of a featureless, human-like form stretching upward, holding an object that resembles the hood ornament of a late-1970s Thunderbird.

“What's it supposed to be?” I wonder.

Of course she was hoping I'd ask.

“It's officially called
Per Ardua Ad Astra
, the slogan of the Royal Canadian Air Force. It's supposed to be a tribute to airmen who won the Victoria Cross, or something like that. The local nickname for it
is
. . . ” she pauses as if waiting for a drum roll,

“ . . .
Gumby Goes to Heaven
.”

I have to laugh at that. The nickname fits.

“This whole section of University Ave, by the way, is filled with famous research and specialist hospitals — Mount Sinai, The Hospital for Sick Children, Princess Margaret . . . ”

“Should we go take a look?”

Adeline rolls her eyes. “They're just
hospitals
!” she says. “Unless you're sick, I've got something better to show you.” She turns onto Queen Street, and speeds past the Old and New City Halls of Toronto, then left onto Yonge Street. “The longest street in the world,” she says grandly.

I try to soak in as much of this new scenery as possible, but Adeline races forward, weaving around street signs, fire hydrants, and slower pedestrians like she's running an obstacle course. In my military-style shorts and clunky sandals, it's difficult to keep up with her, especially since her lipstick, credit card, digital camera and cell phone are crammed into my side pockets; there isn't a spare millimeter of cargo space in her own clingy shorts.

“There's the Eaton Centre,” she says, as we stride past the famous downtown mall.

“Can we look inside?” I ask.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she says. “Right now we're on a mission.”

The Eaton Centre is covered in colourful advertisements several storeys tall. They scream at passers-by:
Perfume!
Lingerie! Designer jeans! Lipstick! Cellulite-reducing cream!
You NEED them! You NEED THEM ALL!
We walk alongside a plywood wall erected between the sidewalk and a construction site. Despite the warning “POST NO BILLS” stenciled every few feet, the wall is plastered with overlapping posters and handbills, advertising every conceivable service and entertainment. One poster appears at regular intervals. It's printed on simple lime-green photocopy paper, with outline illustrations of male and female figures coupled in various imaginative sexual positions.

Toronto's
HOMETOWN
HARDCORE
HERO!
www.hornydennis.com

I pluck the staples from one of these small posters, fold and slide it into my back pocket. When Adeline gives me a strange look, I explain: “Dennis will get a kick out of this.”

She points to another poster stapled onto the plywood wall:

tick, tick, tick
ROBERT RAYCROFT
and the
RUSTY RAZORS
at SNEAKY DEE'S
This Fri and Sat
buzz, buzz, buzz

“That's the band I'm taking you to see tonight,” she says. “Robert Raycroft is amazing. I've seen him three times already. He's a great guitar player, his lyrics are thoughtful and intelligent, and he's an awesome singer. God, I love him.”

“You
love
him?”

“Okay, I love his
music
,” she says, shrugging. “Don't get jealous.”

She blasts off again, practically burning sneaker rubber. I swat sweat from my brow as I rush to keep up with her. We've probably walked a couple of kilometres by the time we reach Carlton Street, where a flashing red “Don't Walk” signal momentarily interrupts Adeline's Olympic speed-walker pace. She points to the right and says, “Maple Leaf Gardens is just a couple of blocks that way.”

This is something that my brother Michael, a life-long Toronto Maple Leafs fan, would enjoy seeing. “Really? Let's go take a look!”

The signal changes to “Walk” and Adeline is already half-way across the street when she says, somewhat impatiently, “Maybe later.”

“What's the big hurry?” I ask. “I've never seen any of this before.”

“Just follow me. We're on a mission.”

So I just follow her.

As we approach a street called Wellesley, the landscape changes to sandwich and falafel shops, tattoo parlours and tarot card readers, shops selling sex toys and cheap lingerie, knock-off sports jerseys and rock band T-shirts. Same-sex couples walk together, hand-in-hand. Adeline announces that this is the epicentre of one of the world's biggest gay communities.

“The Tabernacle wouldn't get many signatures on their trailer in this neighborhood, eh?”

“Don't remind me,” she says. “It's too depressing.”

My stomach growls. All this walking has made me hungry again. Adeline must be starving by now. “Want to stop somewhere for a snack?” I suggest. “I've never had a falafel.”

“No time for dawdling,” she says. “If we want to get any aerobic exercise, we've got to keep up a pace of at least 120 steps per minute. For actual weight loss, it should be 140.” She weaves around a heavy, slow-moving woman. “It's hard to get going that speed with all these street cattle in our way.”

“Adeline, are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” she snaps, “but I don't want to stand in front of Robert Raycroft tonight looking like a beached whale. So let's keep it moving.”

We eventually cross Bloor Street, and the atmosphere changes again: manicurists, estheticians, upscale boutiques, quaint cafes and little restaurants with cutesy names.

“The Annex and Yorkville are just to the west, and Rosedale is to the east,” Adeline says in an acidic tone, “home to the city's rich girls and trophy wives. Born beautiful, fashionable, and skinny. I hate them all.”

As we stop for another “Don't Walk” sign, Adeline sways from side to side. First I think she's just doing it to keep her leg muscles moving, but then she takes a couple of awkward steps backward. She stumbles toward a sign-post, grabs at it and misses. She is just out of my reach as she tumbles onto the sidewalk, arms spread wide, one leg folded behind the other.

I drop to the pavement beside her. “Adeline? Adeline?”

I got her to her feet and walked her to the sidewalk patio of a café. I've managed to get her to drink most of a bottle of orange juice, but her pupils are still dilated and her eyelids are heavy.

“Eat this,” I tell her, holding a cinnamon Danish in front of her lips.“No no no,” she slurs. “I'm okay. Feel better. Don't need food.”

“Eat.”

“No no no,” she burbles, “Not hungry.”

“Your eyes look like two piss-holes in the snow, Adeline. Eat.”

She takes a small nibble from the Danish. Then another. She gestures toward the bench. “I just want to be like her,” she says hazily.

Across the street is an advertisement that depicts a bikini-clad model astride a blatantly phallic palm tree, which sticks out of the white beach sand at a forty-five degree angle. Her behind is raised to create the illusion of curves on her bony body, and she sucks seductively on the straw in a tropical drink. The advertisement is for some sort of “skin revitalizer.”

  “She's probably about to pass out from starvation, too,” I say, “so you're already alike in that respect. At least the sand will cushion her fall. Have another bite.”

Adeline takes another nibble from the Danish.

“You can't walk this distance at the pace we've been going on the energy from a few leaves of lettuce,” I tell her.

She waves the remainder of the Danish away. “That thing is worth two starches and two sugars on the Barbie scale. Not worth it.”

“I'm not walking a step farther with you until you eat it.”

“Fine,” she says, “but it's going to go right to my ass.” She reluctantly takes the pastry from me, and gradually eats the whole thing. The colour starts to return to her face. She glances at the model on the park bench ad again. “Compared to her butt, mine should have a sign on it that says ‘wide load.'”

“You don't need to look like that!”

“
Need
has nothing to do with it,” she counters. “I
want
to look like that. I like the way that men look at me since I've lost weight.”

“Exactly — you look great
now
.”

“I want to look
better
. The only difference between the girl in the ad and me is ten pounds. I want to look like that.”

“That's what all the companies selling cosmetics and diet pills and workout clothes and gym memberships and diet consultations and all that other crap
want
you to want to look like. That's why the standard they set is so impossible to attain.”

“You think it's
impossible
for me to ever look that good?”