by Jack Hodgins
Mrs. O’Sullivan’s hand is knotting at her throat. The sculpture has drawn a frown, a heavy sulk. “’Tis a queer lot of objects they’ve been making for the tourists, and none of them what you could put a name to.”
“But oh,” Carrie says, “he must be nearly the best in the country! Surely. And this is no tourist souvenir. I got it from an art shop in Cork.”
Mrs. O’Sullivan’s hand opens and closes, creeps closer to her mouth. “Oh,” she says. “Cork.” As if a lot has been explained. “You can expect anything at all from a city. Anything at all. There was people here staying in this house, ’twas last year yes, came back from Cork as pleased as the Pope with an old box of turf they had bought. They wanted to smell it burning in my fire if you don’t mind. What you spend your money on is your own business, I told them, but I left the bogs behind years ago, thank you, and heat my house with electricity. Keep the turf in your car so.”
Carrie is plainly insulted. Words struggle at her lips. But she dismisses them, apparently, and chooses diversion. “I’ll make a pot of tea. Would you like a cup with us, Mrs. O’Sullivan? The long drive’s made me thirsty.”
And Mrs. O’Sullivan, whose role is apparently varied and will shift for any occasion, lets her fingers pluck at her face. “Oh I know I know I know!” Her long brown-stockinged legs move slowly across the patterned carpet. “And Mr. Desmond, too, after his work. I was tempted to take him a cup but he shouldn’t be disturbed I know.”
“Work?” Carrie says. “Working at what?”
“I started the novel,” Desmond says.
“You have? Then that’s something we should celebrate. Before you go off wherever it is you think you’re going.”
“It’s only a page,” Desmond says. “And it’s not very good at all, but it’s a start. It’s better than the blank paper.”
Like some children, he thinks, he’s learned to make a virtue out of anything. Even a page of scribble. When he’d be glad to give a thousand pages of scribble for the gift of honesty. Or change. Or even blindness of a sort. What good is vision after all if it refuses to ignore the dark?
Because hasn’t he heard, somewhere, that artists — painters — deliberately create frames for themselves to look through, to sharpen their vision by cutting off all the details which have no importance to their work?
He follows the women into the kitchen, where cups already clatter onto saucers. “Maybe after tea,” he says, “I’ll get a bit more done.”
Pretending, perhaps, that the rest of the world sits waiting, like Mrs. O’Sullivan, for the words he will produce. Because his tongue, his voice, has made the decision for him. Desmond knows that he may only sit in front of that paper for the rest of that day, that he may only play with his pen — frustrated — until enough time has gone by to justify his coming out of the room. To read one of the books he’s bought. To talk with Carrie about her shopping in Cork, about her sculptor. To play with the children perhaps, or take them for a walk along the road to look for donkeys, for ruins. Desmond knows that the evening may be passed in front of the television set, where they will see American movies with Irish commercials, and will later try to guess what an naught is telling them about the day’s events, and that he will try very hard not to think of Mary Brennan or of the dozen Irish writers at Gougane Barra or of the tiny hermitage island which the famous writer loved. Deep Valleyed Desmond. He knows that he could be there with them, through this day and this night, celebrating something he’d come here to find; but he acknowledges, too, the other. That words, too, were invented perhaps to do the things that stones can do. And he has come here, after all, to build his walls.
The Sumo Revisions
I
IF NUMBER ONE on Mabel’s list of musts for their trip to Tokyo was sitting through this Kabuki play, the only thing on Jacob Weins’s list was a sumo wrestling match. All he asked was a chance to see with his own two eyes what he hadn’t been able to believe on the television screen: two naked tubs of lard with greasy topknots squatting nose to nose, stomping their feet like pile-drivers and clapping their hands while pulling ugly faces at one another. When they came together at last, after their ritual dance, he wanted to be there to feel that crash reverberate in air.
Try telling a thing like that to Mabel Weins. She’d never heard such nonsense, or so she said. Had he crossed the entire Pacific with no other purpose in mind? He had no taste. Even worse, he had no gratitude. Her daughter Jill in the Embassy had put a good deal of thought and effort into this holiday for them, the least he could do was give her plan a try.
He knew he hadn’t a hope. If giving this play a try was the least he could do to show he wasn’t ungrateful, then giving this play a try was what he would do. The least the cast of this play could do, on the other hand, was speed things up.
Speeding things up, however, was not the Kabuki style. By the end of the first long hour the woman below had finally swallowed the poison her husband had given her, but it hadn’t done a thing to quiet her down. Staggering around the stage in her hobbled bent-kneed manner, she tilted her white face up to squawk her complaints to the heavens — or to Mabel and Jacob Weins at the balcony rail — and showed no sign of expiring, or even of getting tired. Her white hands clutched at her throat, tore at the breast of her dark-blue kimono, sprang out to grab at the air. Her eyes raced along the balcony rail looking for help and stopped, almost certainly stopped, when they lighted on him. Worn out from waiting for something to happen, he was hardly the person to look to when you wanted some sympathy.
Mabel beside him, however, was a softer touch. “Oh lady,” she sighed, “don’t I know how you feel!”
The hell she did. Or was she teasing? Even given his reputation for being hard to live with, she was overstating the case. The idea that Jacob Weins could bring himself to poison her, like that strutting husband in the play, was ludicrous. Had he ever raised a hand? Or even threatened? The problem was that this theatre was primed for melodrama — with that peculiar music and the clacking wooden sticks and that woman’s unceasing falsetto voice — to the point where someone of Mabel’s suggestible nature was prepared to believe almost anything. As for himself, what he was prepared to believe still waited to be revealed. As he said to Mabel, leaning down close to her ear: “Too bad the whole damn cast didn’t take a swig of that poison. Save everyone a lot of trouble, including us.”
Would he last the full five hours, or fall asleep like the fellow across the aisle? Neither if he could help it. He needed to stay awake in order to look for a chance to make his escape. The woman down on the stage, however, was expected to do her part. Now that she’d swallowed the poison, how long would she take to die? He would let her death — five minutes from now or an hour — be a signal he’d done his duty. When she dropped he would stand, when she breathed her last he would flee; Mabel could stay here and watch the rest on her own. It was already after noon and somewhere out in this city there were wrestling matches starting. It was up to this woman to give him a signal to show he’d been freed to go see them.
That he’d chosen a foolish signal became evident soon enough. The woman wasn’t given to rushing things. From one end of the stage to the other she shuffled, complaining; down on her knees she went to comfort her baby, a doll with a mechanical wail; up and swaying again she threatened to last forever. There was little she could do with her face to show how she felt — chalk-white with tiny dark lips, it was painted to look like a mask. Even those eyes, under their high thin questioning brows, seemed incapable of expressing anything but her helpless innocence. Her voice kawkawed those foreign words as if she were slowly measuring out the lyrics of a song without ever getting around to singing them. What she relied on most to get her message across was her hands; held out to the sky they invited or begged for mercy, up to her face they showed horror; groping around her large elaborate hair-do they seemed to be seeking reassurance that she hadn’t fallen apart. If he was forced to sit through her slow demise — tied, so to spea
k, to her fate — he might as well make an effort to understand what she was trying to say.
The fact that she was really a man inside that kimono didn’t help. The idea, if he thought about it, could make him sick. How any male in this world could let himself be painted up like a doll and do that bent-kneed shuffle on the stage like a cringing geisha was more than he was prepared to understand. What must his father think? Not being a father to boys himself (only to girls, including Mabel’s daughter Jill by an earlier marriage) he could only imagine. And what he imagined, if a son of his own did something like that, was killing himself. What other choice did he have? Listen to how that high squawking voice went on, look at those hands. Where he came from, a man who was capable of this would be hooted out of town, expected to drown himself rather than show off like this on a stage for the world to see. Not a modern attitude, he supposed, but there you were. In Japan what you had to do was try and forget what you knew, though you couldn’t resist suspecting some kind of fraud. Didn’t a person have the right to know what he was looking at? With a sumo wrestler, now, there wouldn’t be any doubt. Was it because they were stripped of everything but their own thick fat and a tiny cloth between their legs that he wanted to see?
Questions of sexual fraud were obviously not on the minds of the little old couple beside him. With bowls and cups and little cardboard packages of food laid out on the rail in front of them, they gave more attention to their lunch than to the play below. Maybe they knew it by heart. The tiny wrinkled lady held her rice bowl up under her chin and made those chopsticks fly like a pair of knitting needles. Slurping and sucking, she still managed a bit of a bow when she noticed that Weins was watching her. He gave her a bow himself. If she expected to engage in conversation he wondered what he could tell them about himself that would make any sense. Assuming they knew the language. If he told them that back home on Vancouver Island he’d been a mayor of a little town for fifteen years would they be impressed? What if he told them the only reason he was free to wander the world like this at an age when most men were still tied to their jobs was that several months of rain and a giant mudslide had wiped his town right off the face of the map? Would they believe him? Probably not. They’d want to know what else he had found besides travel to take the place of the town and the job he’d lost.
Nothing. By the time that mudslide had finished pushing his home and income and elected position into the sea he had already started plans to sink savings and private pension and collected debts into a truck and camper. If permanent homes could slip out from under your feet, then maybe mobile homes were more dependable. Out on the road you weren’t putting your faith in a single piece of the earth. From stay-at-homes he turned them into gypsies. A little beach cabin outside Victoria served as home base when they needed one but he’d never been able to stand it there for long. Off they went through the Rockies into Alberta, to poke around in dust for dinosaur bones. Down to Montana to visit a smelly old bachelor cousin who lived in a falling shack and drooled while he talked about buffalo he’d never seen. Right across the country for a look at southern Ontario. Down to Nevada; up to the Kootenays; right up the Alaska Highway, end to end, with three blown-out tires and a shattered windshield to show for it. A few days at home between these trips and he’d get all tight, he couldn’t sit still, off they would go again. Down to Mexico, across to . . . he couldn’t remember them all. As soon as he got where he was going he wanted to head back home; as soon as he got back home he thought of some place else he wanted to go. Never satisfied, never content; retirement had turned out to be hell.
It was Mabel who’d got him off the road and onto a plane to Tokyo. If retirement was hell for him, she said, it was even worse for her. On top of all that ridiculous chasing around there was also the guilt she felt. When your husband was unhappy you felt there must be something you ought to do. In Oregon, when he’d set up camp in a beautiful park in sand-dune country, instead of giving in to the familiar urge to move on, he’d stripped off his clothes and plunged to the bottom of the lake. Once there, he decided to stay. With his feet dug into sand and his hands wrapped around weeds he couldn’t claim that things looked any clearer there, but he did agree with himself to live, so to speak, with his fate. Dragged to the surface and revived, he discovered his fate had already been decided. After all this senseless wandering, she announced, it was time she paid a visit to her daughter in External Affairs. Since External Affairs had recently posted her to Japan, it was a way of getting him off the truck-and-camper routes. They couldn’t begin to afford it, she said, but neither could they afford a repeat of this. She indicated the lake.
In the library book which Mabel had brought him to read on the plane, a handful of tourists in Mexico sat staring into a bullring, much as he and Mabel were staring down at this stage. What went on in that smelly sandpit was a damn sight faster and bloodier than what went on on this stage, he recalled, but the people in the book saw everything but the bullfight they’d paid to see. They looked inward to see themselves or backwards to relive the past or sideways to make guesses about each other. No two of them saw the same thing. “There’s a man in there that reminds me a lot of you,” Mabel had said. Who had she meant? Nearly half-way through the book already, he couldn’t imagine which of the tourists was him. If he had paid out money to see a matador flapping a rag at a bull he’d make damn sure he didn’t miss out on a minute. You could do your dreaming later. Since what he’d paid out money to see was a woman who refused to die, however, he could forgive himself for drifting off for a while.
But he couldn’t drift off for long. A voice behind him screamed out something sharp, like someone in desperate pain. Or anger. Weins grabbed the arms of the seat and swung to look. Had someone committed a murder up in the seats at the back? Almost immediately, a voice at the far end of the balcony shouted too. Perhaps a challenge. A thrill of pleasant terror ran down his back. Maybe they were about to witness a riot, right here in the theatre. For all he knew he may even have caused it himself. These people were foreigners, after all, and capable of things you could barely imagine.
Mabel laughed at his surprise. Her daughter must have warned her of this, but of course she hadn’t bothered passing it on to him. “They scream out the name of their favourite actor,” she told him now. “Just to let him know he’s doing okay.” The little lady with the chopsticks, when he looked her way, nodded her confirmation. But knowing what it was all about didn’t mean you were any less surprised when the next scream hit you from behind. The next, when it came, sounded like “Enjaku!” and was flung from the back. If he knew who was playing the poisoned woman he’d holler too, and tell her to hurry things up. As it was he was hit by a screamed “Utaeman!” from a man who was only a few feet away. He seemed to be the father of a row of children who hung over the balcony rail, beyond the little couple devouring food. When he turned to look at his tribe his face was split by a grin. When his eyes met Weins’s eyes, however, the grin died altogether, replaced by a frown, or was it a scowl, perhaps it was even a “face” — he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a deliberate “face.” He felt the heat rise in his throat. Had he done something that offended the man? Did he think that Jacob Weins had no business watching this play? Did he think, perhaps, that this big-eared grey-haired westerner wasn’t capable of understanding the distress of the poor little housewife down there on the stage?
The poor little housewife, it began to appear after some time had gone by, was not about to drop dead from the poison at all. At least not yet. Instead of dying she’d only been badly disfigured. Whatever the poison had been it wasn’t the regular kind, or any that Weins had heard of, since it brought up a lump the size of an orange over one eye. A bald-headed man who seemed to be in every scene for no apparent reason — except to over-react to everything and get a few laughs — was trying to force the woman to take a look in the mirror. It wasn’t easy. She knew she wouldn’t like what she would see. But the silly old man, flapping his hands and leaping abou
t, could hardly wait for the fun of seeing her reaction when she discovered how ugly she was.
He wasn’t disappointed. Nor was the audience. For all her overreacting in the earlier scene, she still hadn’t shown what she was capable of doing. Now she pulled out all the stops. Weins had never seen anyone, even on television, carry on with such exaggerated horror. Did she think she’d been some kind of raving beauty before, with that masculine jaw? She glanced at her hand mirror and jumped back, stricken; she glanced again, and threw her hands over her face. She wailed, she complained, she took another look in case there’d been some mistake. There hadn’t. She staggered in her bent-kneed swaying manner around the stage and tried to get used to the shock. Kaw kaw kaw — her high voice measured out the rhythm of her despair. Up and down the notes of some imagined music. She held the mirror at arm’s length and eventually began to calm down, but another peek started her off again.
Down on her knees she went, with her makeup kit. Trying to repair the damage? Forget it lady, Weins thought, it’ll take more than makeup to put you back in shape. But no, she wasn’t trying to repair the damage, she was putting black on her teeth. The old man, when she looked at him now, flapped his hands in horror. The audience laughed; Weins nearly laughed but Mabel’s hand and a warning look restrained him. Did he think it was funny, she said, to see a woman ruined?
Of course he didn’t think it was funny to see a woman ruined, or anyone else. Surely she knew him better than that by now. How could any man who’d survived to the age of sixty-one see any humour in that? He wasn’t a vain man when it came to his looks — he’d never had any reason to be, with these huge ears — but he knew the fright a mirror could give you on certain mornings. You didn’t have to be a woman with a belly full of poison to know what was going on here.