The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  She starts toward them. She is not the only one to harbour a pool of perfectly black water at her core, still as onyx, unreflecting of any light at all, whence, if comedy occasionally bubbles up, it is either hysterically funny or just plain ill. Or right on the line—like Maurice.

  Ron waves, Linda makes room, Tony asks if she got lost again; Madeleine adjusts her balls and says, in Tony’s voice, “I stopped on the way to drain the peg,” and they laugh. They have been meeting here for over a year and she still can’t find the place. Someone pours her a glass of draft.

  This watering hole of choice is loud enough for them to be able to hear themselves think. Madeleine squeezes into the banquette and yields to a bone-crusher from Tony, who outweighs her two to one. Good for a laugh, better than hours of therapy. Tony could make a fortune. He almost has; so have some of the others at this table—like Madeleine, poised at the brink.

  “You’re not finished that wing, eat that wing,” Maury says to her.

  “I ate it.”

  “You didn’t, look at all the meat you left, here, give.”

  “Take.”

  “I’ll show you how to eat a wing, you’re so obviously a goy, eating a wing like that.”

  Early thirty-something existential moment of truth, when you first realize that not everyone you worked with in your twenties is a genius, that some people are “wild and crazy” and others simply have a substance problem, that the alluring sexy-sad people are just depressive, that depression is rage slowed down, that mania is grief speeded up. The first great winnowing.

  Ron says to Linda, “The haunted house bit was funnier the first time—”

  “It was shit.”

  “No it was funny when you came on after I did the—”

  “When you do that thing with the lamp, it screws up my—”

  “No, you got a laugh!”

  “That was not my laugh.”

  “Shelly, she got a laugh, am I right?”

  These are the last immortal days, racing toward that next great good place, Your Life. Last days of travelling light, before slowing, turning and, with a hand shading the eyes, espying the moving van heaving into sight with all your stuff on it, finally being brought out of storage. Stuff you forgot you owned.

  They drink and eat and talk all at once; the men talk the loudest because they have bigger larynxes and millennia of entitlement. The women tell them to shut up and they do, chastened like terriers but, like terriers, only briefly. No one ever resents Tony for hogging a scene because he somehow seems generous even when he’s pulling focus; everyone knows Ron is a genius but Tony is the only one who can really deep down stand him any more, and everyone is in love with Linda. She has a strange beauty and is severely gifted at coming in under the radar, but her brand of comedy is easily trampled by a Ron. Maury is solid, especially in drag, Howard is the Art Carney guy, Madeleine walks a tight rope between writing for the company and taking too much space with her low-staus characters that nonetheless command centre stage. The six of them love one another, are suspicious of one another, can’t stand one another—they are a company. They can anticipate who’s going to bite whom next and how hard.

  “We should take Linda’s newlywed thing and—”

  “We should make a sequel—”

  “We should do the sequel first—”

  Out of this come the sparks for next week’s show, charted by Shelly on a tablet of lined paper in the form of squiggles and diagrams. The boxes and arrows remind Madeleine of her father. There is method in this madness. A map for improv that will lead to a script that will remain fluid until past the final take. Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead. Tonight, among the munchies, the beer and the noise, writing is what they are doing.

  “Someone should write this down,” says Howard—someone always says this at some point.

  “Madeleine, this one reeks of you,” says Ron—this is a devious way of sticking her with the actual writing. Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon. No one wants to do it—

  “He’s right, it stinks of you, McCarthy,” says Tony.

  —the sit-down kind, the stuff you do alone, Marlborough-man writing.

  “I’d rather apply this salsa to an open wound,” she replies.

  Shelly writes on her tablet. “Madeleine … ‘Breaking News’.”

  “How come, when it comes to writing stuff down,” Madeleine snarks, reaching for a napkin, “you’re all dylsexic?”

  Howard says, “I’m a hemophiliac, if I slip while writing I could die.”

  It sounds flippant, but it’s a delicate negotiation: Madeleine taking on the “dirty work,” while the others play down their need of her, keeping resentment in check. In turn, she plays down her ability and pays her dues, contributing to the ensemble to make up for her starturns. It may not be fair—Ron doesn’t pay dues—but the truth is Madeleine can write and, like many writers, will only write with a gun to her head so it’s just as well … plus, this way she gets to be a solo act in the bosom of an ensemble. The best of both worlds. She makes notes on the napkin, then reaches for another. Shelly knows better than to offer a sheet of paper. That would be too much like writing.

  Shelly has three kids. Madeleine wishes at times that she were one of them. In a sense, though, she is. All six of them are.

  On the way back to their cars in the parking lot of the silent studio, Shelly asks her, “What’ve you got for me?”

  “A shameful craving to see you naked but for a clipboard.”

  Shelly is like a hard-nosed version of dear old Miss Lang. There are really only about five people in the world.

  “I’m not going to talk you into this, Madeleine.”

  Shelly has brokered a U.S. network option on Madeleine’s idea for a one-hour special. A pilot for a series starring a real live out-of-the-closet gay comedian called Madeleine. This could be my big bweak, doc. So far she has written three words. The title: Stark Raving Madeleine.

  “The others’ve got their own stuff going too, you know,” says Shelly.

  “I know.”

  It’s inevitable that the After-Threes will evolve careers in their own right. Some have already soloed, and hived off in various combinations for film, TV and live gigs in New York and L.A., making life backstage at After-Three tense, and life on stage even more of a feeding frenzy. Madeleine has wangled a coveted green card, thanks to a recent stint on Saturday Night Live after Lorne Michaels saw her at Massey Hall in Toronto. She entered the bear pit for three adrenal weeks. She wrote and grew pale like the other crypt-dwelling writers. She lost ten pounds and Christine told her she had an eating disorder, but it was pure speed—the metabolic kind. She had an affair by accident—bold production assistant, empty office—but virtuously avoided the coke, the only recreational drug she has ever truly enjoyed. She told Christine about her stalwart abstinence but not, of course, about the headset-wearing drug-substitute who, in the scheme of things, mattered not at all. Really.

  Lorne is putting together a new “less famous” cast for next season and has asked her to come back, and bring Maurice, Roger and Lou—lose weight in front of the cameras this time, which, when you’re writing, always seems easier. Her producer, Shelly, has congratulated her but warned her about trying to join “the boys’ club. You’re a dyke,” she says, “so it helps you get buddy-buddy, but you’re not going to sleep with any of them and, no matter how good you are or how much they like you, you’ll never be one of them. You’ve got your own stuff going on, like Lily, except …”

  “Except what?”

  “She doesn’t need all the crutches and bullshit you do.” Shelly has been pressuring Madeleine to shed the props and costumes.

  “What about one-ringy-dingy, what about Edith Anne, the hair, the chair, gimme a break!”

  “She doesn’t need that stuff to do them.”

  “Well I don’t need the costume to do Maurice—”

  “So do him that
way.”

  “My point is, you can’t do The Cone Heads without cone heads.”

  “So do cone-headesque stuff for the rest of your life.”

  Regardless of which way Madeleine goes, she is poised to join the “Canadian invasion.” Funny Canucks who head south of the border because, while it’s no longer impossible to get anywhere at home—Canadian-content laws having begun to pay off, not to mention tax breaks that have turned Toronto into Hollywood North—there is no limit to how far you can go by leaving. This makes sense, Canada being small, but performers are also targets of the Canadian syndrome: the cultural inferiority complex that prompts their fellow citizens to confer authenticity on those who blow this northern Popsicle stand. Because, if you’re so great, why are you still here? And its inverse: what kind of lousy Canadian are you, up and leaving like that?

  English Canadians; stealth Yankees. Yanks in sheep’s clothing. People who seem perfectly American but who know that Medicine Hat is not an article of apparel. People who can skate, holiday in Cuba and speak high-school French; people who enjoy free health care, are not despised abroad and assume that no one in the restaurant is armed. Cake-eating-and-having Americans. After-Three is straining under the pressure of its own success. Madeleine has no reason to feel guilty.

  “It’s not that I feel guilty.”

  “Then what?” says Shelly. “Shit or get off the pot.”

  “You’re so sensitive and nurturing.”

  Shelly’s hand is on the door of her station wagon; she looks exhausted, her kids will be up in six hours, she says to Madeleine, “You’re my pony, you’re the one, I want to see you go for it.”

  Madeleine hugs her, wishing she harboured a shameful craving to see Shelly naked but for a clipboard. The fact that Shelly is straight and Madeleine is in a long-term relationship are details they could work out later.

  “G’night Momma.”

  “G’night Mary Ellen.”

  Madeleine gets into her old Volkswagen Beetle. Dirty white eggshell with red interior. She turns the key, coaxing it to life with a prod of the gas pedal, tender release of the choke. She pats the dashboard, “good little car.” She turns on an oldies station and heads home to Christine.

  On the way, the thing happens again. When it first happened, a week or so ago, during a live performance, she wrote it off as nerves or flu, or—most reassuring—a small stroke. But what does one call “the thing” when it happens during a drive on a quiet city street, toward home in a light rain?

  THE STORY OF MIMI AND JACK

  THE OVER-ARCHING SHAPE OF TIME is always there, like the unseen sunny day above the clouds. And above that endless day, an infinite darkness into which our warp of time loosens and drifts, the slow dispersal of a jet stream.

  Ruptures in time. When they lost Mike. When their daughter announced that she was gay. “I know, it’s a horrible word,” said Madeleine, grimacing. “Lesbian. All snaky and scaley.”

  Mimi was crying, Jack had compressed his lips and was looking down. Their daughter made a living out of being different, being flippant.

  “I’m not taking this lightly,” Madeleine said, biting her lip, grinning. “I feel sick.”

  “You feel sick,” said Mimi, “you are sick.”

  That was 1979, Mimi remembers the date, two weeks before they got the kitchen redone. Her son ate standing up at that counter, hugged his mother goodbye standing on that spot. Retiled now.

  It’s important for Mimi to be able to take responsibility so she can cope. One child gone, the other blighted. Mimi is a modern Catholic mother. She knows it’s all her fault.

  Copers also need to cherish what remains. My husband. The part of my daughter that still shines. Faith that the damage is not irreversible. “Viens, Madeleine, I’ll take you shopping.”

  “It’ll end in tears.”

  Scrabble. Food. Shopping. The things they can share.

  “Maman, why don’t you come to Toronto one weekend and we’ll go shopping?” But Mimi cannot set foot in that apartment. Not while her daughter is living that way with another woman. That is not a home, that’s … not a home.

  Something must have happened to my daughter to make her like that. Jack is no help there. He refuses to discuss it with her.

  After all those years of unwrapping Jack’s gifts to her, saying, “It better not be a you-know-what,” one Christmas it was. But she no longer wanted a mink coat. She wanted what she’d had. She wanted to want one.

  For years she longed for him to confess his stumble. She didn’t know how to tell him that, if anything, she would love him more if he shared it with her, took it away from that woman in Centralia, made it theirs alone. She longed to say, “It’s not your fault we lost our son. I forgive you.” But those two sentences didn’t add up. And he never mentions Michel’s name.

  Sometimes she fails to tell him when she has topped up his cup with hot tea, or fails to readjust the driver’s seat if she has used the big car, fails to notice that he has immaculately trimmed the hedge and ingeniously solved the bird-feeder-versus-squirrels problem. On these occasions, he takes her out for dinner.

  He teases her about how she always makes friends with the waiter or waitress, but in fact she does it for him. He’ll end up talking about everything under the sun with the chef, the owner, other diners. The old Jack—the young one. Otherwise, he reads his paper. Pretends not to hear.

  Mimi does a lot of volunteer work. The Heart Fund, the Liberal Party, the Church. She took a refresher course and went back to work, too, and she still plays bridge. She enjoys Ottawa, the fact that she can shop and get her hair done in French, enjoys the outdoor concerts in summer and skating on the canal in winter—she even gets Jack out now and then. She has a lot of friends, but that’s just it: they’re hers not theirs. Numerous ex–air force people, old friends from previous postings, have retired in Ottawa, there are card parties, dinners, curling. But Jack declines to “live in the past.”

  They used to go to Florida every year. He had his first heart attack down there, on the golf course. It was expensive; thank goodness for Blue Cross. Mimi goes to New Brunswick two or three times a year to visit her family in Bouctouche, but her husband hasn’t come with her since Mike went away. Her sister Yvonne is widowed now, she spends most Christmases with them in Ottawa, and Jack likes being spoiled by her. But Mimi rarely has people over any more. It takes too much out of her. Placating him, dreading that he may withdraw into himself once the guests arrive, enduring his criticism of them in advance, his muttered hope that “Gerry won’t plunk himself down at the head of the table again, and foist the photos of his latest trip to the Galapagos on us,” and that “Doris won’t rattle on about her grandchildren.” “Not Doris, Jack—Fran.” Then the guests arrive, and Jack laughs and chats and teases Mimi about being uptight when she brightly directs the guests to their place cards at the table—interrupting her to say, “Sit anywhere you like, Gerry.” He has a wonderful evening—and is irritable for days afterwards.

  They are still an attractive couple. Jack hit sixty with scarcely a grey hair. Mimi still has a twenty-six-inch waist when fully dressed. She dyes her hair, having no intention of looking older than her husband. Fine lines are visible through the makeup but she has avoided the full extent of the smoker’s crenellated upper lip by forty years of careful puffing and moisturizing. Calves still very good, hands still soft, nails perfect. Extra folds of skin at the elbows and knees—that’s what sleeves and hemlines are for.

  She has never told anyone about her daughter’s “lifestyle.” She hasn’t had to. Everyone’s read about it in the national newspaper—the Entertainment section.

  She has a job as staff nurse at the National Capital Commission downtown. She is the confidante of the entire department. A woman in accounting recently “came out” to her; “You’re the only one I can talk to about this, Mimi.” She gave Mimi a coffee mug with a Chagall print on it, in gratitude: “I could never talk to my mother like this.”

&nbs
p; Mimi knows that had she never left New Brunswick; had she never entered nurse’s training and earned money of her own; never married a handsome Anglais, learned to give cocktail parties and wear clicky high heels; had she never danced beneath a chandelier, and had her wedding dress remained her only ballgown; had she remained Marguerite—God would have blessed her with a third child, who might in turn have had children by now.

  At least He would have allowed her to keep the two she had.

  Eventually, there comes a time in Jack and Mimi’s life when the television is always on, even when they are not watching it.

  HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED THERAPY?

  Italian patient, circa 1890s: “Doctor, I’m suffering from melancholy. I’ve lost my joy in life, my appetite for food, for love, I don’t care if I live or die. Please, tell me what to do.”

  Doctor: “Laughter is the best medicine. Go see that wonderful clown, Grimaldi.”

  Patient: “I am Grimaldi.”

  WE ALL NEED to look under the rock from time to time. We are all afraid of the dark, and drawn to it too, because we know that we left something there, something just behind us. We can feel it now and then, but fear to turn lest we catch sight of what we long to see. We wait that critical moment, allowing it to flee before we turn, saying, “See? It was nothing.” We are scared of our own shadow. A good comedian scares the shadow. Aided and protected by speed, comedians can turn so quickly that, from time to time, they actually glimpse the shadow as it flees. And so we do too, from a safe distance. If you had to make Dante’s trip into the Inferno nowadays, would you go with Virgil or John Candy?