The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  I spent the last night of the old year doing laundry and listening to the radio. Peter had picked up the dogs at the kennel, delivered them to our house, then gone off to a black-tie dinner at the Bessborough Hotel, so it was just Angus and me. We had pancakes for supper, then he disappeared into the den and started calling all his friends, comparing holidays, getting caught up on what he’d missed.

  About ten, I put the last load into the washing machine and went upstairs to check on Angus. The television was blaring. Dick Clark was standing in front of a room full of people in party clothes and paper hats sweating under the TV lights and trying to look as if they were having the time of their lives. Angus was curled up on the couch, sleeping the sleep of the just. I turned down the television, covered him with an afghan and went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

  New Year’s Eve at mid-life.

  I let out the dogs for a final run and sat down at the kitchen table. It was a magic night. The sky was bright with stars, and the moonlight made the snow glitter. A party night. Even the dogs seemed to be in a giddy mood; they chased each other through the snow like puppies.

  I thought of how happy my kids were, or at least how happy they would be if I let them, and I thought about how well the biography I was writing was going. With luck, by next New Year’s Eve it would be in the bookstores and I’d be safe in a tenure-track position in some nice but not too demanding university. And I thought of Sally sitting in the chair across from me that afternoon telling me how she and Stu and Nina had reconciled their differences over Taylor. It seemed as if everyone was, as we used to say in the sixties, in a good space.

  “All in all, not a bad year. Maybe the worst is over,” I said as I opened the back door to call the dogs in.

  They wouldn’t come. The backyard was deep, and the dogs were at the farthest corner, at the gate that opened on the back alley. They were barking at something. Going crazy. Kids, I thought, out late for New Year’s Eve.

  “Sadie, Rose.” I called the dogs’ names in the voice that let them know I meant business. “Come on, get in here.” They wouldn’t come. There were stairs leading from the deck to the garden. I went halfway down and called again. Next door there was a party. A woman screamed, then laughed. I went the rest of the way down the stairs and started walking along the path to the gate. I was wearing runners, not great for walking in deep snow, and my feet were getting wet and cold.

  “Damn,” I said, “get in here. I’ve had enough.” My voice sounded thin and vulnerable, but the dogs didn’t take pity on me. They just stood there barking.

  The woman at the gate didn’t make any attempt to leave when she saw me. She was rooted in the snow with her video camera pointed at me, recording me as I walked toward her. I could see her face clearly in the light from my neighbour’s garage. I could also see that she was wearing only a light jacket – not enough for December thirty-first in Saskatchewan. Suddenly, I was bone-tired.

  “Clea,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Time to wipe the slate clean and look ahead. Why don’t you go home and get a good night’s sleep. Everything will look better tomorrow.”

  “I’m not finished,” she said dully.

  “Not finished what?” I asked.

  “Filming the history of womanswork,” she said. “It should be recorded. All of it. Where it began. The women who helped.” She waved a finger as if to chastise me. “The woman who didn’t help. The record should be set straight. The gallery was a significant experiment. It deserves a memorial.”

  Seeing me talking to Clea apparently made her seem less of a threat to the dogs. They left us and went to the back door and waited. Without them, I wasn’t so brave.

  “Clea,” I said, “if you need a cab, I’ll go and call one for you. Otherwise, I’ll just say good night. It’s been a long day, and I’m tired.”

  She didn’t say a word, just turned and walked down the alley.

  I was shivering with cold and fear when I got in the house. I went straight to the kitchen. The package Sally had given me, her insurance policy, was still sitting on the kitchen table. I took it downstairs to the laundry room and hid it up high in a basket the kids had given me a hundred years ago for my sewing. No one, including me, ever went near it. I pulled my warmest sweats out of the dryer, walked down the hall to the bathroom and took a hot shower.

  When I went upstairs to the kitchen, the tea in the pot was cold, but the Jack Daniel’s bottle was still on the counter. I dumped the tea, made myself a bourbon and water, went down to the den and sat beside my sleeping son.

  Five minutes to midnight in New York City. It was raining in Times Square, but nobody seemed to care. Slickers soaked, hair pasted against their faces by the rain, the tourists mugged for the TV cameras. At the bottom of the screen, the digital clock moved inexorably toward the new year. I took a deep pull on my drink and moved closer to Angus. The electronic apple in Times Square had started to fall – in the east, there were just seconds till midnight.

  “Five, four, three, two, one,” the crowd in New York chanted. Beside me, my son stirred in his sleep. “Happy New Year,” screamed the people in Times Square. And in the room with me, the phone was ringing. I leaned across Angus to pick up the receiver.

  “Happy New Year,” I said.

  “Not yet,” said the voice on the other end. “There’s still an hour left.”

  “Clea, please, leave it alone. Leave me alone.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “All right,” I said, “if you’ve got nothing to say, I’m hanging up. I’m too old for pranks.”

  “This isn’t a prank. This is my life.” Her husky voice cracked with emotion. “This is my life. I need to talk to somebody about what to do next.”

  “I barely know you.”

  “But you know Sally.”

  For Clea Poole apparently that was recommendation enough. I closed my eyes and remembered Clea as she had been the night of Sally’s opening: delicate, carefully groomed, buoyant about the work she was showing at the gallery.

  “All right, Clea,” I said wearily. “But not tonight.”

  “Tomorrow, then. Here at the Mendel. I’m working in the education gallery on an installation. I’m going to work through the night. I don’t want to go back to my house. Holidays aren’t good times when you’re alone.”

  “No,” I agreed, “they’re not.”

  “I’ll tell the security man to let you in,” she said, and the line went dead.

  On television, Dick Clark was saying, “Remember if you’re driving tonight, make that one for the road a coffee.” I turned off the TV, went upstairs and poured myself another Jack Daniel’s. I wasn’t driving anywhere.

  The next morning as I walked across the bridge to the gallery I was tired and on edge. Peter had come home very late – not too late for an eighteen-year-old on New Year’s Eve, but too late for a mother who can’t fall asleep till she knows her kids are safe. And I wasn’t looking forward to spending the first morning of the new year with Clea Poole.

  The banners for Sally’s show were still up at the gallery. A solitary picket was out front. The others had drifted away during the holidays, but this one was vigilant. Sally called him the Righteous Protester, and every day he had a new sign. Today’s said, “Whatsoever a Man Soweth That Shall He Also Reap.”

  I waved to him as I ran up the steps to the gallery, but he didn’t wave back. I waited five minutes in the cold before anyone came in answer to the security buzzer. The guard who finally opened the door was young enough to be my son. On the breast pocket of his uniform, his name was embroidered: Kyle. He seemed surprised to see me. Clea Poole, he said, had not left a message that I was to be admitted; if I insisted on coming in and looking for her, he would have to accompany me.

  As we walked down the cool, quiet corridor toward the education gallery, I was furious. In all likelihood, Clea was safe at home in bed. To make matters worse, Kyle was dogging me in a way that suggested that i
f he left me alone, I would do unspeakable damage.

  Outside the education gallery, he suddenly became human. As he pulled open the door, he grinned and made a sweeping gesture of presentation.

  “Here we are. Hang on to your hat.”

  The room we were in was large and, except for one corner, dimly lit. In the area of full light, a naked woman lay on an operating table. Clea Poole was standing over her, drawing a scalpel carefully along the lower part of the woman’s stomach. When Kyle called her name, Clea looked up.

  “You can go,” she said to Kyle. “Joanne is here to talk to me.”

  “Go ahead and look,” Kyle said. “She won’t bite.”

  The figure on the operating table seemed to be made of some sort of soft plastic. She was lifelike, but if she had had a life, it had been a hard one. She was covered with neatly stitched surgical incisions. There wasn’t much of her that hadn’t been cut open and sewn up: her eyelids, the hairline between her ear and her temple, her nose, her jawline, her breasts, the sides of her thighs.

  “Good Lord,” I said, “what’s it supposed to be?”

  “She’s a scalpel junkie,” Clea said. “An emblem of how society obsesses women with body image.”

  A half-moon line on the figure’s lower stomach gaped open, and Clea removed a piece of foam and stuck it absent-mindedly in the back pocket of her jeans.

  “She’s part of a triptych,” Clea said, although I hadn’t asked. “It’s an installation by an artist Izaak Levin is interested in. I’m just doing menial work, carrying out the artist’s plans.” She laughed. “No one better qualified than me for that. The junkie will be suspended from the ceiling. That,” she said, pointing to a double bed in the corner, “will be brought over and put underneath her.”

  Half the bed was traditionally bridal, soft-looking, inviting, covered with a satiny white duvet. At the head of that part of the bed was a pillow embroidered “His.” The other half of the bed was bare, just a frame covered with the kind of barbed wire used in electric fences to keep cattle confined. In the half light of the gallery, the wire hummed and sparked blue. The pillow on that side of the bed said “Hers.”

  “The camera will be moved over, too,” Clea said, pointing to the ceiling where, unheeded, a video camera whirred. “They’re going to tape people’s reactions to the junkie. The third part of the concept is a coffin. They’re delivering it at the end of the week.”

  Clea’s voice was curiously detached, the voice of a person who’d lost interest in her own life. Across the room the red light of the emergency exit glowed invitingly.

  “ ‘Skin-deep,’ that’s the name of the installation,” she said, walking back to the operating table. She picked up a darning needle and threaded it expertly with catgut. “They tell us all we’re good for is being caretakers of our surfaces. We’ve lost all the ground we gained in the seventies, you know. We’ve been battered, ghettoized by the sexual hierarchy.”

  She began stitching the incision on the woman’s stomach. She sewed mechanically and well, and as she sewed she talked listlessly about women and art and Sally.

  “History is repeating itself,” she said. “We have to reclaim our own terrain. It’s important that she’s with other women now. Not women like you. She’s a catalyst. She used to know what the male power machine did to women. She knew we had to get past male critics and dealers and collectors and create a nonjudgemental environment where women could show their work. She was wearing a T-shirt the first time I saw her. She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. The womanswork gallery was her idea. China painting, performance art, soft sculpture, murals, needlework, body art – we did it all. It was the best time of my life. The only time of my life. I thought it meant the same thing to her, but it didn’t. ‘Time to move along,’ that’s what she says. It’s my life, but it’s just a blip on the screen for her, like neo-expressionism or post mod. Time to move along. Time to let go.” When she stopped sewing and looked at me, her eyes were filled with tears. “She knows I can’t let go. Letting go is for people who know they won’t fall.”

  “Clea, how can I help?” I asked. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “What do I expect you to do?” she repeated. “I expect you to stop turning her against me. I’ve thought about this, Joanne. It’s no coincidence that Sally decided to sell our gallery shortly after you came back on the scene. You’re one of those women who’s been co-opted by the system. You don’t care about other women.”

  I tried to keep the anger out of my voice. “Clea,” I said, “that is so untrue and so unfair. I’ve never tried to undermine your relationship with Sally.”

  She finished sewing the incision, knotted the thread and snipped the catgut with her scalpel.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said flatly. “If I were you, I’d get out of here now, Joanne. You’re making things worse. Cut your losses. Isn’t that what people like you do when you’re in a no-win situation?” The tears were streaming down her face, but she didn’t seem to notice them. “Is loss-cutting a skill you’re born with?” she asked, her voice thick with pain. “I need to know this, Joanne. Is it too late for me to learn how to cut my losses? Have I missed the deadline?”

  I stepped toward her, but she raised her hand as if to ward off a blow.

  There was nothing I could do. “Good-bye, Clea,” I said. “Get some help. Please, for all our sakes, get some help.”

  At the door, I turned and looked. Clea was standing behind her operating table watching me with dead eyes. In her hand, the scalpel glinted lethal and bright.

  It was good to step outside into the sunshine of an ordinary day. It was even a relief to see the Righteous Protester making his lonely rounds. Bizarre as he was, he at least seemed connected to a recognizable world.

  As I stood looking at the deserted street in front of the gallery, I started to shake. The encounter with Clea had disturbed me more than I realized. I didn’t make a conscious decision to cross Spadina Crescent and walk up the block to Stuart Lachlan’s house. Reflexively, I did what I had done a thousand times when life overwhelmed me. I went to Nina.

  She came to the door herself. As always, she was immaculate. Her dark hair was brushed into a smooth page boy, her makeup was fresh, and she was wearing a black knit skirt, a white silk blouse and an elegant cardigan, black with a pattern of stylized Siamese cats worked in white.

  When she saw me, her face was radiant. “Oh, Jo, come in out of the cold and visit. This is the best surprise, especially because I have a surprise for you, too. Let me take your coat and then we’ll go and see an old friend.”

  I followed her into the living room. “Now, look,” she said. “How’s this for bringing back the memories?”

  In front of her was the drop-leaf desk she’d had in the sitting room of her Toronto house. She was right. It did bring back memories.

  They weren’t all pleasant. The desk was Chinese Chippendale, lacquered black with gilt trim. Nina used to keep a lacquerware water jar on it. Painted fish swam on that jar – perfect, serene in their ordered, watery world. When my mother was at her worst, I would come to Nina and she would tell me to sit at that desk and try to close out everything but the smooth passage of the bright fish as they swam around and around the jar. It always worked. That desk had been my refuge, and Nina had been my rock. None of my mother’s dark hints about Nina’s character or my blindness to her faults could erode that.

  Behind me, Nina, her voice vibrant and affectionate, said, “We’ve weathered a lot of storms at this desk, haven’t we, Jo? I’m leaving it to you in my will.”

  I felt a chill. I put my arm around her shoulders and breathed in the familiar fragrance of her perfume.

  “Well, when you leave, I’m going, too. My world would be a desolate place without you.”

  She laughed. “Don’t break out the crepe, yet. I’m not planning to leave the party for a long time.”

  We brought coffee and some still-warm banana bread into the living ro
om and sat at a small table near the front window. There was a bouquet of white tulips on the table, and the sun bathed them in wintery light. This bright and civilized room seemed light-years removed from Clea Poole’s dark and pain-filled world, but it was of Clea we talked as the good smells of coffee and fresh baking surrounded us and the crystal purity of one of the Brandenburg Concertos floated in from another room.

  I told Nina everything, and as I talked I realized how much Clea had scared me. “She’s in the middle of a terrible breakdown,” I said, “and she’s unreachable. I think all the things she does – phoning Sally fifty times a night, stalking us with her camera, working on that extraordinary exhibition – I think all those things seem logical to her, and what terrifies me is that I don’t know what might seem logical to her next. I think she’s reached the point where she’s capable of anything. She’s even made some oblique threats to me.”

  Nina frowned. “Jo, I’ll give you the same advice someone should give Sally. Stay away from Clea Poole. Stuart’s had some dealings with her in the past, and he thinks she could be violent. If she sees you as a rival, God knows what she’ll do. Sally’s used to dealing with people like that, but you’re not. Be careful, Jo. Please, be careful.”

  “Nina’s right,” said a man’s voice behind us. “I can attest to the fact that Clea Poole is a nasty enemy.” I looked up and there was Stuart Lachlan. I wondered how long he’d been standing there. I had expected the prospect of Taylor’s leaving to devastate him, but he looked fine. He was wearing a black and white pullover that was obviously the masculine version of the cardigan Nina was wearing, and as he bent to embrace me, I thought I smelled the kind of lemony fragrance she liked on him. She was having an influence.

  He sat down beside her on the love seat and looked at me earnestly. “I’m serious, Jo. When Sally and I were first married, Clea did some amazing things.”