Joanne is suddenly there as well. “Who was that?”
“Just someone from home. Lives here in the city now.” She doesn’t mention seeing Quinn.
“Come on. Let’s go look at the fish,” says Joanne, now tired of ill-fitting clothes. Geneva follows without a word. They stare at neon tetras and silver lace, marble and opalescent angelfish. Green fuzz is growing on the ceramic castle and treasure chest and creeping up the corners of the tanks. Geneva thinks of Paul Klee’s paintings: Fish Magic, where the water is so dark that fish and plants reveal their colours in the lowest gradations of light—the more you stare the more you see—and The Golden Fish, large with scarlet fins and a pink flower eye, a superior fish holding sway, sending lesser fish toward the margins. Did Muriel Spelling keep her eyes open in the cold water of the bay? Did she shy away from some great golden fish, feeling belittled even in suicide?
“Ooh, it stinks. They should clean the tanks more often.” Geneva’s voice is wavering and shrill.
“I don’t smell anything,” says Joanne. “You must have a sensitive nose.”
Geneva holds her breath until they get outside and run to catch a bus back to Kelsey Hall. Their footsteps are muted; tires and engines are muffled. Snow is falling in large languorous flakes, accumulating on sidewalks and cars, coats and furry hats. Low-lying clouds subdue the afternoon sun. There’s strange comfort in tempered light, safety in a circumscribed view.
At night Geneva dreams of levitating; she sees colourful fish perch on tree branches, moons and stars slip into the lake below while a golden fish flies through the air, lands right on her chest, then flips back into murky water.
The next day, in her book, she studies Miro’s Dawn Perfumed By A Shower of Gold, where breasts can also be construed as eyes, where wombs and hearts hold the same spot, where red, blue, and black tendrils confuse fish with birds, where a phallic head bone also has eyes; biomorphic forms slipped from Miro’s subconscious and onto his canvas to defy logic, then showered with speckles of gold.
To Geneva this all makes surprising sense. Gone are her girlhood expectations, all replaced by compulsions of an equivocal mind and a disassembled heart. But she is looking for enchantment nonetheless.
Simon and Garfunkel are singing “A Hazy Shade of Winter” on the radio.
Vive la Révolution
ONE HUNDRED AND SECOND is cordoned off for the Edmonton Klondike Parade. Geneva walked along the avenue in the early Friday morning heat, down under the cool concrete bridge, and up to this amber brick building. In the waiting room she reads The Red and the Black, and coincidentally it is the part where the lowly tutor and would-be priest, the proud Julien Sorel, parades through the town of Verrières, high on his horse, as part of the honour guard for the King of France. His lover, Mme. de Rênal, has manipulated the situation; she has ordered his uniform, blue with silver epaulettes and saber, to replace his priestly black and convinced her husband, the mayor, to give Julien the honour for this special occasion.
Geneva reads The Red and the Black to while away the time in the waiting room and to fend off the accusing eyes of pregnant hausfraus. The nurse calls her in and before you know it she is sitting on the examining table in a green paper gown.
When Dr. Schulze comes in, Geneva holds the novel to her chest so his eyes immediately focus on it. He takes it from her, cradling it in his hands like found treasure, and waxes dreamily about his own fascination, in his student days, with “Le Rouge et le Noir and the incurable Julien Sorel.” Julien, propelled by both arrogance and insecurity, idolizes Napoleon and employs military-style tactics to achieve his ambitions, including, says Dr. Schulze, “the seduction of certain women.” He wonders if she has been in the grips of such an opportunist. “Is Stendahl not relevant today?”
She considers Quinn Munroe in such a light while Dr. Schulze motions to her to lie down and slide to the bottom edge of the table. He tells her to bend her knees so that her feet settle into the stirrups. His latex fingers explore.
“It’s deceitful, ya? All you need is love?” He looks up at her from the foot of the table.
She covers her eyes with the back of her hand and nods in agreement.
“I saw The Beatles play in 1960, before they made it big back in England. It was not where I would usually go, that part of the city, mind you, but my friend Gerhard talked me into it. Now you’ll just feel a momentary stab, and the loop will be safe inside you.” He slides a stainless-steel gizmo right to her cervix.
She winces.
“Your father called while you were out,” says Geneva’s roommate Joanne. “Called just to say hello then wondered why you were out so early in the morning.”
Geneva usually sleeps until noon. She works nights as a hostess, just for the summer, at the Waikiki Restaurant—she wears a halter top, a polyester grass skirt, and a ring of silk flowers on her head—where the waiters make jokes in Cantonese or glare at her if she guides too many customers to another’s section of the floor, and where Eddy Wong completes transactions from his bartending post in the lounge. Occasionally Eddy’s girls (some Native posing as Asian) arrive in person to get instructions from Eddy. Geneva has finally clued in on the nature of the transactions, because the coat-check girls have spelled it out for her.
Geneva calls Mr. Roberts back. “Well really, Dad, if it was so early you might have woken me up.”
He sounds lonely. “I was just reminiscing. Do you remember the time I took you hunting for pheasants and we got chased by a bull?”
“Yes, I sure do,” she says. Geneva’s lie comes in when she explains where she has been—down, of course, along the parade route—and leaves an assumption hanging in the air. It’s a coincidence that her appointment with Dr. Friedhold Schulze landed on parade day, though not at the same time. His office was along that section, right near the finish, where Klondike Kate would belt out “Hello My Baby” from a floating saloon and dance hall girls would flash their garters, doing the cancan.
When she still lived in residence, Geneva had succumbed to the horny advances of Quinn Munroe and Joanne had pressed Geneva about birth control, scolded her like a parent and then gave her Dr. Schulze’s number. Recently from Hamburg, he is said to be more sympathetic, more progressive than Canadian doctors about the lives of liberated university students. She finally made it there, but it was no parade.
She puts on La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz and lets her mind wander with the music. For some Jungian reason she recalls The Shadow who was said to have the power to cloud men’s minds. Then in a flash she thinks of Quinn Munroe, who seems to have clouded hers.
She was first introduced to The Shadow back in Bradshaw with her best friend Darla Collier. The girls, then in Grade Six, were routing through the mysteries of the Colliers’ basement while Darla’s parents were at the beer parlour and found Mr. Collier’s stack of Shadow paperbacks. The covers told the story and asked who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow was weird. He appeared rescuing 1930s voluptuous glamour queens, their hair curled and coifed Jean Harlow style, arched brows affecting surprise, with bright red lipstick and luscious breasts bursting out of silk lingerie. Black garters curved along thighs, holding up black hose. Shoes were irrelevant, not revealed, but you could imagine those four-inch heels. There was sometimes a suggestion of imminent torture; on one cover there was potential entrapment in metal and glass, beyond anything Geneva and Darla could imagine and maybe explaining why Mrs. Collier eventually ran away. With his arms full of a woman, so to speak, The Shadow aimed his colt .45 at the evil hordes: lawbreakers, mad scientists, and supernatural creatures, characters weirder than The Shadow himself. With the collar of his red-lined black cloak pulled across to conceal his mouth (what was he hiding?) and his eagle-beaked nose, he seemed oddly immune to their glamour-puss charms. At the time Geneva preferred Archie and Reggie and Betty and Veronica, even Jughead, with the
ir adolescent conflicts and crushes.
Quinn Munroe, who is not weird but also a bit of a crusader, likes to talk about the evils of pollution (he’s a biology major) and about American civil rights and the Vietnam War, but in reality spends more time seducing “chicks.” And his mouth, impudent like Mick Jagger’s, is never covered up. His hair, curly and a lighter shade of brown, is unlike the slicked-down black of The Shadow. He and The Shadow differ, and maybe Dr. Schulze is right, he and Julien Sorel jibe. And maybe Geneva is identifying with adventurous sexy women who rely on some screwball crusader or even with Quinn himself, who has the freedom to screw around. After all he got her started and now she pines for more.
She turns the radio on—Berlioz is getting heavy. We have already reached a record 95 degrees for this parade day in July. Let’s bring on The Kinks with “You Really Got Me,” from the summer of ’64. She fans the air with a Klondike flyer as sweat runs down her face.
Geneva has plans to spend her night off with someone new; she resolves to forget Quinn Munroe, or at least try to. Dennis Hartman arrives early, in jeans and a black T-shirt and his Buddy Holly glasses, and waits while she has a shower. They met in Lister Hall. He approached her one day in the cafeteria and soon spilled out his plan to move to the coast to study architecture, to eventually come back and change the boring trend on the prairie landscape or stay in B.C. and incorporate expansive ocean with reclusive cedar on Vancouver Island properties. Coincidentally Geneva once thought she could be an architect, designing houses that cozied into the curved banks of the North Saskatchewan River. She imagined rotating variations of Frank Lloyd Wright’s L-Shape on regular city lots, until she acknowledged a weakness for, in fact a dread of, mathematics. Now she studies art history, including cathedrals and coliseums, though her heart is in the residential. As the shower pulsates in rhythm, she sings “Little Boxes” along with an imaginary Pete Seeger.
She comes out, in jeans and a tunic (braless), her long hair combed and left to dry its natural wavy way. Maybe the next best thing to being an architect is sleeping with one, she thinks. Where did that come from? And remember, Dennis intends to be an architect. Who knows if it will happen?
They skip Klondike honky-tonk and Scott Joplin rag and go to The Umbra to listen to jazz. Dennis explains contrafaction and the flatted fifth (she doesn’t understand), tells her to listen to changes in the rhythm section, and praises the trumpet player. Mostly they listen like a cool couple, sipping their beers and looking serious.
Dennis tells her they can listen to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock back at his place, but they’ll have to slip into his room quietly and play the music low as his landlady does not allow guests.
The room is tiny with a single bed and one small window. Dennis moves a pile of clothes and books off into a corner. While he sorts through his records, Geneva lays back and lets her mind wander. She envisions living with Dennis in open spaces of timber and glass and stone, overlooking the Pacific, their walls adorned with Matisse, Cézanne, Klee, and Frederick Varley—she nixes Picasso; his women, certainly without high heels, are always deconstructed. “Do you know Varley?” she says.
“I’m looking for Kind of Blue. Just had it here this morning.”
“Green! Varley did the painting Vera half in green. He painted one side of Vera’s face—she was his student and his mistress, did you know?—soft and sensitive, shadowed mostly in ochre and green, and the other side more assertive, in blue and taupe. Two-faced, but in a good way. He had this rationale on colours, like blue-green for spirituality and emerald green for purity. And cobalt blue for royalty and mystery. Of course he added other colours, so now who knows what it all means.” Geneva tells this to the ceiling with her elbows bent, hands clasped under the back of her head.
“Christ, it’s broken! My Miles Davis is cracked!”
They hear footsteps along the hallway. “Shh. Not so loud,” Geneva says and starts to giggle.
“Not funny,” he whispers.
“Sorry.” She pulls a corner of the bedspread across her mouth, covers it like The Shadow, to stifle her giggles. “Crime does not pay,” she whispers and starts in again, unable to control her amusement. She thinks about Julien Sorel, that plebian introvert who capitalizes on his lovers; first Mme. de Rênal, sweet and domestic, and now the young Mlle. Mathilde de la Mole, intelligent and independent minded. And he succeeds because of his suspicious and doubting nature and by playing hard to get.
“We could go out the window,” she teases (Julien Sorel climbed a ladder and went in through his lovers’ bedroom windows). They could also cuddle up until the house is quiet again, but Dennis is in a funk. They wait a short while, holding their breath, and then slink out the front door. Geneva, foreseeing anticlimax, has little more to say as Dennis drops her at her apartment door.
Geneva picks up The Red and the Black and continues reading chapter thirty-one. Julien Sorel, now in the midst of his tactics to subdue Mathilde de la Mole, comes up with renewed self-control and an idea—Frighten her!—hatched from reading Napoleon’s memoirs. He is energized by his latest solution to the challenge of possessing the haughty Mathilde: Always keep her preoccupied with that great doubt: “Does he love me?”
Quinn Munroe calls out of the blue. “Do you still love me?”
“As if I ever did.”
He laughs. “You never forget your first.”
“You have to start somewhere.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes?
“I’m coming over.”
“Oh.”
He smells of Brut, that intoxicating aftershave, and Listerine, originally a nineteenth-century surgical antiseptic and supposed cure for gonorrhea, now a promise to keep the mouth kissable—a confusing blend but inveigling just the same. He’s growing a mustache and letting his hair grow long. There’s something about his wiry frame and kinetic maneuvering that causes her to melt. They don’t have to talk.
Just as quickly Quinn says he has to go. The New Democratic Youth is planning a teach-in in the fall to protest Canada’s complicity in the war. He really does care about her, she thinks. He’s just involved in bigger things. They could live a simple life, join a commune, and then she wouldn’t have to watch the suits come into the Waikiki to close a deal with Eddy Wong or make high-handed requests for the best table in the house to impress a mistress.
Chapter 32. Mathilde is pregnant. Her father, the Marquis de la Mole, is furious. Like Geneva’s father he is sometimes his daughter’s confidant, but this was beyond his knowledge. He planned to see Mathilde rise, through marriage, to the level of duchess, not lower herself to become the wife of a clerk, a mere servant. He contemplates getting rid of Julien; he wishes for an accidental death, considers murder or banishment from France. Instead he chooses elevation; he creates a new birthright, promises money and a position in the military. All more suitable for his daughter.
“Thank God for Dr. Schulze,” says Geneva. What her father doesn’t know doesn’t hurt either. “Vive la révolution!”
It’s Tuesday. Dennis tells Geneva to meet him in front of the Arts Building, her usual haunt during regular semesters, for an architectural tour. She takes a bus across the High Level Bridge to the south side, stares out the window at the North Saskatchewan and daydreams about Quinn Munroe.
The campus is quiet with a smattering of summer students lounging and studying on the grass.
“This is where it starts,” Dennis says. “This was built in 1912. They tried to copy Cambridge and Oxford instead of designing something unique to the prairies.”
“But I like this,” she says. “It’s what I dreamed of, expected, of a university.”
“Just my point. This was nothing new.”
They scrutinize the ivy-covered building made of red brick and white stone. There are carvings representing and inscribed with disciplines such as historia, musica, and philosophia, and
a stone owl guarding the entrance that displays the university crest, Quaecumque Vera.
They track the other red-brick constructions that originally overlooked a grass quadrangle and end up standing before the Rutherford Library.
“Modified English Renaissance of the Wren period,” Dennis says. “Mid-seventeenth century for chrissake, yet built in 1951. This is supposed to be a place that nurtures new ideas.”
“But I like it,” she says stubbornly. “Better than the concrete and steel and anemic brick that is taking over.”
“Well, I’m not finished. I didn’t say I liked the new stuff here either.”
Geneva feels irritable, oppositional. She changes the subject. “I need something to drink.”
They go to Tuck, a rag-tag building if ever there was one, made up of fifty years of haphazard additions and extensions, its windows thickly framed with summer ivy; it is beyond analysis, percolating with conversation and coffee, cigarette smoke, wafts of cinnamon buns, and short-order cooking.
In one corner sits Quinn Munroe and next to him, not across from him, is a sleek-haired girl with wire-rim glasses and glossy lips.
Dennis waves. Quinn nods back and the girl flutters her fingers at them.
Geneva is unsteady; she doesn’t know where to turn. “You know them?” she says.
“Yeah. She was in my math class. Very smart. I mean really smart. Though I’m having my doubts, seeing her with Quinn.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s a magnet. Don’t know why but he breaks ’em in for others. What do you want to drink?”
“Anything cold.”
Dennis steers her toward Quinn and the girl. “How’s it going?”
“Hey man. Long time, no see,” says Quinn. He nods at Geneva.
“Mind if we join?” says Dennis.
“Sure, sit down. We’re heading out though. Just been working on some ideas for September.”
The girl smiles and leans against Quinn. Geneva fixes her eyes on the girl.
Dear Hearts Page 9