—Wow! Very Hollywood!
—But it wasn’t, Janet. Here where you live, it’s high gloss and everyone looks great and appears to care little about the deeper emotions. Here, people seem small-minded but thoroughly satisfied to be that way, determined to be that way. The doubts expressed here seem more nervous tic, chattery. And when the lights go out, folks drift into a dreamy sleep with hope for tomorrow’s phonecalls and gigs. The doubts I had were life-threatening. There was no gloss and that upset me. The deeper emotions I felt, the untouchable wants and faithless love and regrets that I believed good, enduring music would come from were ignored or mocked by bar musicians. Have a drink, they said, turn up the treble, and so I did and the pain got loud, shrill and ugly or went deeper and made a hole in my gut. It’s getting harder to breathe in here, but I like it.
—I don’t think you’re right about people in California. Turn around. I want to rub your shoulders. How did they get up so high? Relax a little. Let me slide my leg along there. Oops, sorry. They get in the way after five kids! Wayne and I have a pretty normal life, you know. We support each other. Hockey comes first for him. Actually, he says it comes first, second, third, and I come fourth! Ha!
—You think that’s funny?
—Oh, sure.
—Really?
—Oh, sure. That’s Wayne. He’s always been very focussed.
—You said when you were twenty-seven and marrying him that you might want two children. Here you are in your forties. You have a girl of fourteen and a toddler of two and three boys between them. Your work is domesticity and public relations. You cheer for Canadian teams. You sit a row behind Wayne and his staff at gold medal games and he does remember to hug and kiss you when they win, but only after he does it with Kevin Lowe, and then a couple of seconds late for my taste. He claims to value family. He’s delighted to have so many kids and worships his parents. And yet. Given the opportunity to coach a team in Arizona – California and Arizona look close on the map, but flights between LA and Phoenix are what? Five, six, seven hours? –
—We also have a home in Scottsdale. It’s not so bad.
—He told us all that he had to weigh his options: more time with family versus more time with hockey. This is a guy who’s been playing since he was two, Janet. Hasn’t he had enough time with the game?
—Oh, Wayne could never be without hockey.
—You’re missing my point.
—What’s this? I’m not going to press too hard there.
—Bone spur. Apparently I damaged my neck as a kid but I don’t remember when or how.
—Does this cause you pain?
—Not right now, but it does. If I knit too long, or sleep on a bad pillow.
—You knit?! Oh, I wish I did. You are a remarkable woman.
—So he tells the world he has to think it over: Family. Game. Family. Game. And then bingo: he’s decided. All the sports broadcasters, those who know him as Gretz and pretend the buddy-buddy bit, predict he will announce his intention to become coach. So even the fat and flatulent hockey writers know he’s going to pick the game over his family. And then there’s you saying it will be nice for your kids to see him doing what so much of his life was all about. Please.
—Yes.
—A man to whom you’ve given five children, your acting career, your name, your youth and your womanhood, your whole self, really. In his autobiography, he promised to return the favour of your sacrifice. When? Time’s almost up! A guy who caroused with the best of them in the Oilers caligulaic phase, the Playboy bunnies, the celeb tennis tourneys and post-game hot tubs, and whose most admirable quality, everyone concurs, is that he hates to lose. To some of us, that’s not an admirable quality, Janet. It’s not heroic: it’s childish and selfish.
—Yes.
—I watched him after that first game he coached against the Canucks. Each time the camera caught him, it seemed he was struggling with indigestion. After the game, he looked exhausted: his face was lined, his eyes blank and dull and mesmerized by what he’d just seen. He was clearly still having trouble with his stomach. I know his father had terrible ulcers; I’m wondering why this man would choose to re-embrace the dawn-to-dawn stomach acid, the weight of the hockey world on his shoulders, the banality of the twice-daily press conference, and not spend all his time being around gorgeous you and your gorgeous kids. It’s time to be the queen.
—Yes, but I’ve always been that. Wayne’s always made me feel that way. We’re very close and it doesn’t take a 24/7 living arrangement to prove our love and his devotion to me and the kids. Even the queen likes to have time to herself.
—Guys don’t play for two teams at the same time.
—He’s not playing; he’s coaching. And coaching’s kind of what it’s like to be a parent. So he’s coaching two teams, and I think that’s just lovely. If anyone can make it work, Wayne can. Your shoulders would be much lower if you didn’t get so serious about things. And that would make your neck appear longer.
—Do you and Wayne ever dance when you go out?
—Ha!
—What?
—You’re kidding?
—No. You’ve always been a dancer. You appear to dance even when you walk. Your limbs are long and lithe, even your fingers are astonishing. Did you land a guy who would dance with you?
—Hockey players don’t dance.
—What about in the kitchen? Do you ever get into your jammies and, late at night, kids asleep, do a few twirls in each other’s arms around that oak island, you singing softly into his ear and him holding you close at the waist? God, you’d look gorgeous, the two of you.
—Maybe when we were younger and coming in from a party. People in Canada shouldn’t worry so much. I think we’ve proved that we’re pretty solid as far as being a loving family and the love we have for each other. We make sure we have a good time.
—Regrets?
—None really. Except my husband and I wish we’d both been able to attend college.
—Or university.
—Yes. We’ve tried to give our kids one thing over everything: a good education. Both Wayne and me were working so young, on the road, and high school was not a priority and we know we missed out. All our kids speak more than one language and their studies come first.
That’s just the right heat now, don’t you think? Imagine all the poison coming out through those pores. Let the poison go.
—Does Paulina have a tutor when she’s on the road modeling and singing and dancing?
—No, but she doesn’t do a lot of that. We just want her to have every opportunity if something comes up. We want her to be prepared to excel.
—You could still go to school, you know.
—Ha!
—I ended that string of guitar players with a clean cut: no more music, no more booze, no more Vancouver. With a few thousand dollars from my grandmother, I returned to university at thirty years old. I stumbled at first, tried to find a man too soon and lost concentration. Time management was a challenge. Then I went quiet and close and studious. Alone in my white apartment, the hardwood floors, some Dutch-Indonesian waitressing on weekends. I fell in love with my brain again. I read Chaucer out loud with the wonky swerves of Middle English, and wrote short stories on my little couch with the bright coastal light singing through the big windows. I read four novels a week just to keep up and made hearty soups every weekend. University was a safe place to reinvent myself. They give nice grades for hard work. All the people there are not just like you and your friends and so your life takes on a different sort of colour, maybe not so bright but more appealing. Plenty of people older than I was had gone back to school with the same pleasure in mind: listen to smart people talk. You like athletes because they push their bodies to the limit; you could push your brain and get the same thrill.
—I think it’s too late for me. Five kids!
—William Kittredge, travelling Arizona, wrote, “find the good books, not just the guidebooks … read t
hem, mark them up, use them as tools, carry them with you. No place can be real emotionally unless we’ve imagined life there, and our imagining is not likely to be very substantive if not informed.” Read the books, Janet. Take a course on the peoples who lived in Phoenix thousands of years before the first blondes arrived, who prayed hard not for a clearcut breakaway in overtime, but for rain. Some believed they became clouds at death and brought rain to their people as a reward for life lived and lost. Help them resist the white man’s dams. Forget the handicapped kids; do good for a civilization on the downslide. You’re near the Salt River where the Pima people believe they descended from the Hohokam, 300BC. They farmed and built canal irrigation systems throughout the valley, a system still in use. Imagine. The Pima are ingenious basketmakers, too. Willow shoots, cattails, and devil’s claws are split, trimmed and shaved to just the right thickness. In the shadow of Red Mountain, twelve thousand acres are under cultivation – cotton, melons, onions, potatoes. Life is a maze, the Pima believe, a search for balance – physical, social, mental and spiritual. In the middle of the maze are found a person’s dreams. The Sun God is waiting there to bless us and let us die. This maze isn’t all about finding the way out; it’s about finding the way in. You reach your dream at the middle of the maze. Life is a maze, Janet. It’s a puzzle to respect, happy or sad.
—You must miss the music.
—Why is it, do you think, that athletes would never choose a woman like me and always go for someone like you. What’s the difference between you and me?
—How does that feel? Turn around, look at me now: the only difference I can see is that I’m maybe a bit more positive than you are. I’ve learned to always see the good, to always trust that good things will happen and that I can handle any situation. And I never dwell on what’s gone wrong, whether it’s one of the kids being late for a piano lesson or a loss in an important tournament. Hockey players will teach you this: always look forward to the next game, never dwell on the mistakes of the last one, don’t even think about that shot you missed or the check that blew by you. Look ahead. We teach our kids this. You can learn, too.
—You don’t think we’re different in other ways? Is your waist still twenty-two inches?
—Listen. You don’t seem like a girl who’s interested in surfaces, in the superficial. So why should it matter that I look like this and you enjoy a different beauty? You loved that boyfriend of yours, the Lithuanian, despite his flaws. You had a connection that was based, maybe, on something other than surface beauty. You’re a very pretty woman. You should make the most of that and never doubt that men notice you. You might want to rewrap the towel now. My husband’s going to come and get us when he’s in from the airport and we can all have a glass of wine by the pool. Let me tuck it: there. Stunning. This colour blue is wonderful against your skin and hair. And see what that extra tuck does for your curves? See?
I Flirt with MICHAEL ONDAATJE
—You look like that border collie, the one rounding the curve, fancy scarf.
—That’s an Aussie Shepherd.
—Pardon?
—Oz. Ee. Shep. Erd.
—Right, sorry, I should’ve known that.
—You mean what with all the grey in all this hair, the shaggy beard, my white-blue eyes?
—And the work ethic. The intensity. The constant editing. You make us all want to write, you know. I’m having trouble understanding you, Mr. Ondaatje. Maybe turn my way just a little and try not to speak into the wind. The grass feels damp but we get a good view of the ring from down here, down at pooch level. Say: if you were a dog, what breed would you be?
—These are working breeds and I’ve always preferred spaniels or hounds. A more reclining breed, less busy. Fragrant paws but the ability to lick them clean and then fall asleep. I must say the idea of bestowing a prize on a dog – on anything, especially writers – doesn’t sit well with me. Still, the Aussie Shepherd looks pleased with his ribbon. Or is it the biscuit? Or is it cos of the attention from his master, though I don’t much like the length of her skirt for an outdoor event this time of year? Or does he know we’re all watching and now admire him? I do like this part, when they parade, and the winner grins and looks so immensely pleased.
—Spaniels for me, too. A liver and white springer as a child and then, the year after my sister died when I turned sixteen, another springer which I named Thurber.
—Nice. A hint of the highbrow and comic.
—You once had a spaniel named Flirt, didn’t you?
—My personal life, my past personal life, my present one: these I won’t discuss, even with a dog lover like you.
—I was sixteen and gone dumb from the death of my sister, and Thurber was a gift from my sad parents, a way to keep me in the world with a soft hairy neck to weep on. I bussed tables that summer in Stanley Park, a thousand acres, where my sister had worked, and I bagged leftover bread crusts at night and came early the next morning and fed the ducks and swans at Lost Lagoon before my shift. I was sixteen and dumbed by loss. My hair was long and straight and I didn’t wear make-up. I listened to James Taylor and loved Glen Campbell, even then, the variety of his licks, both vocal and instrumental, the new poetry of John Hartford and Jimmy Webb, words we hadn’t heard before and the fingerpicking, the bluegrass laid over pop psychadelic in its own way.
—Yes, Webb’s poetry. But not the “someone left the cake out in the rain.”
—I read books about the American civil rights movement, especially keen on Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers and wanted to Seize the Time but not sure why, given where and how I lived. And a woman I babysat for gave me The Female Eunuch and I read that, too. At the job in evergreened Stanley Park, I was stupid with grief and with a new morality that said a) take what you want and b) anyone can and will die. My boss, a twenty-nine-year-old married man, fell for me.
—Ah.
—You’ve known the same heart-scandal, the illogic of emotion that can make those numbers add up, the sado-masochism of illicit romance.
—Huh?
—Infidelity. You were a teenager lured and loved by an adult. You were nineteen; she was thirty-four and married. Sure you were Oxford-educated and serious and matured by dislocation, but you were a teenager.
—I’ve never cared for the sameness of these Scottish Terriers. This could get boring.
—Maybe no smoking here.
—I’ll just hold onto it. That guy’s sure proud of his tight little shorts at this time of year.
—I remember not much about the affair, except his sailboat moored at False Creek, his golden retrievers – Sally and Sarah – his funky green, bulbous fendered Ford pickup, a dog show we attended in Seattle, and his kindness. I remember the day I attended a school-sponsored screening at the Ridge Theatre of Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” –
—The best version really. 1968. Shot on location in Italy and so the lighting is gorgeous, like plums and honey. Sixteen-year-old Olivia Hussey as Juliet. The cinematography won an Oscar. The costumes, my god. The brilliant bit of nudity on the after-marriage morning. Very sixties counter-culture romantic. What a film. I’d like to see it again, maybe this afternoon. Think about it.
—I saw the movie on a west coast wet and grey afternoon and was moved by the double suicide since I was already beginning to understand the kiss of escape and death’s happy alternative. My manfriend picked me up at the theatre in his dog-stink truck and chose that time to say our relationship – it had been a year – was off. His wife wanted him back now. He drove me home and dropped me off.
—Uh-oh. That movie was good enough that you’d have a hard time separating yourself from it cos it would be like your life was the movie’s next scene, or a replay of previous scenes. And what with your long dark hair, I’ll bet you did some identifying with Juliet’s beauty and predicament.
—That night, I swallowed a bottle of 222s, thinking that simply by willing myself to die, an inept medicine would be transformed into lethal.
“All suicides all acts of privacy are romantic” as your own Webb says in Coming Through Slaughter. It’s still a good idea, writes another. I took to bed and played Jim Croce’s Greatest Hits over and over on the big turntable in my dead sister’s room.
—I knew it. “Time in a Bottle?”
—I preferred the up-tempo even while bereft. Leroy Brown.
—Your parents?
—Not home or not present. During the evening, Thurber barked and fretted at the front door and I floated filmically downstairs to settle her. I looked out through the sidelight windows and there on the lit porch sat a gorgeous golden cocker spaniel, wet and whimpering. I opened the big door. “Go home,” I said, stern and drugged, “Go. Home.” and closed the door and went back up to bed’s final frontier, to the south side of Chicago. An hour passed, I went back down – clearly the stupid meds were not working – and opened the door again. The lovely dog shot past my legs into the hallway and folded down onto my mother’s favourite turquoise Indian rug, exhausted. Thurber did, too.
—A ghost.
—Exactly. That’s what I thought. So I took this dog as a sign that I was meant to carry on. That there were beings in the world that wanted my care. We who have considered suicide take our daily walk/with death and are not lonely. Again, a Webb.
—There’s no better smell: wet spaniel on a hard night.
—Those kilts; I like how they flip up around the turns and show a bit of hamstring. But they seem redundant next to all the Scottie dogs.
—And the Fair Isle sweaters. Certainly not flattering to the mature bosom.
—If you want another cup of coffee, Michael, you say so. I can go for it if you’d rather not get up, but no more doughnuts for you, mister. Twenty minutes a day on the stationary bike would do wonders for that waist. The jowls are more bull mastiff than hyperthin sheepdog.
Some critics have explored the relationship between creativity and the death instinct in your work. Why, they ask, is the artist sometimes a killer, sometimes a suicide. They want to resolve the ambiguous nature of creativity in your work.
Flirt: The Interviews Page 7