Fermentation
Continuing the ten-year nostalgia is a new girl who showed up at work one day. She was five foot nothing, had a Greek face with curly brown hair, and looked about 15. Like most co-workers we smiled “hello” to each other, but nothing more. One day I looked up from my desk and saw her aiming an elastic band in my direction, smiling. I put on my meanest look and mouthed “don’t even think about it” before getting back to work, projectile-free.
After work that day I was in Indigo Books and saw her sitting in that seat between the biography and fiction sections, reading an art book. So I went over to say “hi,” we finally introduced ourselves (Sophie, and she was actually in her 20s), and started talking. She was looking at a book of photography taken of adolescent boys. I pretended that I didn’t think it was the weirdest thing ever, and she explained some bullshit about the art behind it. Years later she told me that it was possibly the most embarrassing moment of her life and she’d been looking at it because she was amazed that it existed; I still think she just wanted an excuse to look at naked adolescent boys in public.
Turns out Sophie also lived in Laval and gave me a lift home. Coincidentally, she lived half a block away from my best friend (a triplet—she knew them as “the fat one,” “the other one,” and “the girl”), who lived a block away from my family’s first apartment in the city. She ended up becoming my concert buddy (living in a suburb + having a concert buddy with a car = awesome) and invented the horrible “count the creepy old men checking out Matthew” game one night on a walk from the Cabaret back downtown to her car. She got to five before I made her stop. I blame the bleached blonde hair.
One day near my birthday (another coincidence, it’s her birthday today) we were at Indigo, looking at the sale tables. I picked up fermentation and used hand signals (couldn’t talk, too excited) to call Sophie over. The jacket flap describes it as:
fermentation is an erotic novel about carnal pleasures, desire, and one woman’s insatiable appetite. Set in Paris during a relentless heat wave, this is a surreal and sensual tale about pregnancy, heat, dreams, and cheese.
An erotic novel about cheese! I had to own it, but there was no way I could buy something like that for myself. So we made a deal: she bought me fermentation and I bought her a pair of socks (winner = me).
Each chapter is named after a different cheese the protagonist eats and the ensuing erotic dream; that scanned page is from “Brie”:
“Brie should feel slightly plump and supple. It should have a mild flavour and ideally its body should be of a rich, pliable consistency. Eat at room temperature and avoid cheeses that are inflexible, have a chemical smell or any that are rheumy.”
The dream starts with a women milking a cow, and the sexy farm hand who makes her get on her knees and lick up the milk she accidentally spills; then they have sex. That’s the least absurd scene in the entire book; though, admittedly, I only got about halfway through before my brain shut down and wouldn’t let me continue. Also, the awkward amusement of answering “what are you reading?” with “um, an erotic novel about cheese” wears off pretty quickly.
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