Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  I was tempted to accompany Moïse (maybe the idea of letting him leave alone was unbearable), and we spoke about it the night before. “I’ll figure it out over there. Finish your studies, man. That’s what’s important right now. We’ll see when you’re done.” I felt relieved. My life in New York, my art history studies, all of it was important to me. But I couldn’t help thinking I was abandoning him. Then there were his parents, old and destitute, who wouldn’t have him around to support them. “You’ll be my link to them. If you really want to help, go visit them from time to time.” I learned he gave them a portion of his meagre pay. “They know it’s the right thing for me to go to Canada. They don’t judge me. But they’ll have a few bucks less at the end of the month, you understand?”

  I put my hand on his. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  He turned his head, his eyes wet. “You’re a real friend, man.”

  By the time we left the diner, the wind was blowing harder. The rain didn’t fall on us, it whipped straight into our backs. Armed with useless umbrellas, we walked to the Greyhound terminal at the Port Authority, on 42nd Street. We were an improbable duo, with our miserable faces and drenched clothes. Moïse, small and at least ten or twelve pounds lighter than he used to be, swimming in his dark suit soaked with rain, and his hair cut so short you could see his skull. And me, six feet tall, hair all over the place, about to burst into tears like a distraught girl. A few people looked at us as we passed, but no one could mistake Moïse for Dylan now. Not dressed the way he was and in these circumstances.

  “It’ll be okay,” Moïse repeated, his voice shaking. I nodded, my throat tight, trying to seem strong, knowing that once my friend was on the bus, I’d fall apart. With every step, our wet shoes squeaked, a pathetic noise that made us want to laugh and cry at the same time.

  I said, “A picture!”

  “What do you mean, a picture?”

  Enthused by my idea, I went on, “You remember, in On the Road, when Dean Moriarty returns to Denver after his first visit to New York?”

  His eyes brightened, a timid smile on his face. “Yes, man! Sal and Carlo Marx went with him to see him off. They go to Penn Station, where the Greyhounds used to leave from! They were saying goodbye.”

  We began looking for a photo booth; Moïse spotted one on the second floor. “Here, man! Here!” In the booth, he put his faded cloth suitcase on the floor, ran his hand through his wet hair, adjusted his tie, and forced a large smile. I tried to imitate him, hoping it’d be a winning smile, a snub to the tragedy affecting us.

  “So we’ll never forget each other, man. So we’ll never be alone, right?” And like in On the Road, Moïse delicately cut the still wet print with a Swiss army knife he pulled out of his pocket. We each placed our half in our wallets. More a grimace than a smile. I still have the picture, it’d break your heart.

  “Here’s two hundred bucks,” I said, handing him an envelope. “It should help you get started.”

  His eyes misted over. “Thank you.”

  “You’ll find John Kinnear’s information inside. You can count on him.”

  “You’re a real friend.”

  “You too.”

  We gave each other a long hug, fighting off tears.

  “Well, got to go now, man.”

  I watched him board the bus that would take him out of the great American game. My throat tight, I saw myself four years earlier on the same bus, scared to death. Moïse chose a seat in the back, far from the other passengers. He was alone in the world now. A whistling of compressed air like a plaintive sigh, and the door closed. The motor started with a rumbling like the end of the world and the bus began moving away. Behind the window, Moïse waved, forcing a smile. His face white with fear haunted me for weeks.

  6

  Two friends, each a refugee in the other’s country, trying to save their skins.

  In one of his letters, Moïse described our respective exiles: “You left a woman who you stopped loving after she broke your heart, and I’m the idiot still in love with a woman who dropped him like a turd and who still hasn’t understood what has happened to him.”

  Dana was touched by my suffering, though she didn’t quite understand its nature. “You look lovelorn, Romain.” It was true. I was learning that the loss of a friend could be as terrible as the loss of a lover. Moïse’s departure sent me into such a tailspin that Dana postponed the plan of forcing me to find my own place. It was strange to see her suddenly worried about me. Meanwhile, Burke had dematerialized. After three weeks, I packed my bags. Dana seemed surprised.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Burke is moving in next week. It’s time for me to go.”

  “I’ve left Burke.”

  She spoke without regret, almost amusement in her voice.

  “Why?”

  “It was a mistake. With him, I would have buried myself alive.”

  She laughed. With cheerful enthusiasm, she took my bag from my hand, opened it, and began putting my clothes back in my closet.

  “You’re not doing this for me, are you, Dana?”

  She laughed out loud and said, a hint of anger in her voice, “Burke is a widower who became an old bachelor. He’s full of annoying habits. Let me give you an idea. He needs a daily portion of steak, potatoes, and peas or else he thinks he won’t have enough protein. Beneath his calm appearance he’s an anxious man. A few times, I had to calm him down like I was his mother because he thought his anxiety was a symptom of a heart attack. How about this: all his underwear is exactly the same. Blue. And filled with sadness. The same kind his mother bought him when he was a teenager. I tried to get him to wear something a bit more sexy — even bought a pair of silk ones from Bergdorf Goodman. He never wore them, not once, but he still put a label on them, like the rest of his clothes. You’d think he was a boy scout off to camp.”

  I burst out laughing, thinking of Jurke in his scout’s uniform, carefully folding his labelled underwear in a drawer.

  “I would have gone mad. Or thrown him out of a window.”

  I started feeling better once I heard things weren’t too bad for Moïse. At first, I received dispatches about his goings-on from John Kinnear; Moïse didn’t want us speaking directly over the phone in case the FBI was listening. “All draft dodgers are paranoid, man,” he wrote in his first letter. He found a room on L’Hôtel-de-Ville Avenue in Montreal in the house of a friendly old woman, though she was a bit cracked, he told me, speaking every night to her husband, who had been dead for twenty-five years. “At least she’s got someone to talk to; solitude is the hardest part.” But it didn’t last. A couple of blocks away he found Ricky Jenkins, a draft dodger from Connecticut who had founded the war resisters committee that John had spoken of. They quickly became friends and Moïse began working with Jenkins, welcoming new arrivals in his busy living room, filled with paperwork. Moïse was doing well, all things considered. Fulfilled by the work he was doing, he’d never felt so useful.

  A growing number of young desperate men were arriving from the States, and the committee was becoming bigger. Jenkins, Moïse, and other volunteers needed to find a larger space. They found one on Saint-Paul Street in Old Montreal. A whole team now worked full time, helping incoming draft dodgers. Within a few months, Moïse began receiving a salary, thirty-five dollars a week, enough to pay for his room at the old woman’s place. In fact, he wrote to me, he lived better in Montreal than he used to in New York. Life in Quebec was cheaper and not as stressful. “You should see the girls, man! Prettier than in New York. And far less shy. They love draft dodgers! No need to pretend being Dylan, they think we’re heroes!”

  He wrote pamphlets — “Ok, so the novel isn’t going to make me famous” — that the committee clandestinely sent to university campuses in the United States to spread the Good News about Canada. “And fuck Joan Baez!”

  His aversion
for Baez and Dylan! He would leave a party if their songs came on. “Highly irritating this habit that Québécois have — we don’t say French Canadians anymore, Romain — of welcoming us with music from the U.S. As if it would help us better tolerate our exile!” Once he heard Joan Baez play in Toronto — she’d been invited to a local church that supported the TADP, the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme. Members from Montreal’s committee made the trip, and Moïse agreed to go with them, without great enthusiasm. The night before he was to leave, we spoke over the phone. He said sarcastically, “What new idiocy will she tell us this time?”

  “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating, Moïse?”

  I loved Joan Baez — even today, I sometimes listen to her old albums, and they touch me as deeply as the first time I listened to them. Moïse couldn’t tolerate her public disapproval of the dodgers’ exile. “If David Harris, her husband, wants to go to jail, that’s his choice, man! He gets so much media attention, you’d think he was a movie star or something. She’d better not lecture us!” Her visit to Toronto would put the final nail in the coffin for Moïse when Joan Baez invited dozens of draft dodgers to return to America to continue resisting there.

  “Grow up a little, Romain,” he wrote me after he returned to Montreal. “Dylan, Baez, they’re straight out of a children’s book. Instead of dressing up and going to grade school, they talk to the crowds as if they were made up entirely of eight-year-olds.”

  “My God, Canada is pretty far away if you have such a distorted vision of what’s happening here. You remind me that I was right to leave.” I played a game sometimes by telling him about what his disgraced ex-idols were doing. “Please,” he’d reply. “They’re passé. Talk to me about Leonard Cohen, a real poet. And Robert Charlebois. You should give a listen to him sometime.” And he added, “The only thing that’s missing is you, man.”

  And each time I felt emotion grip me.

  I missed him terribly too.

  A month after Moïse left, Dana found me a job at the Museum of Modern Art’s ticket booth. I got the job through one of her contacts, one of the museum’s wealthy donors. Blema Weinberg was a woman wider than she was tall, so covered in jewellery she looked like Tutankhamen. Blue eyelids, and lips as red as an Andy Warhol painting. She spoke endlessly, moved with small determined steps, filling every room she walked in with the smell of her heady perfume. Blema Weinberg was anything but invisible. She was richer than King Midas. Paintings by the great masters covered the walls of her Fifth Avenue apartment — Picasso, Dalí, Matisse. Sculptures by Giacometti and Henry Moore watched over the massive rose bushes at her mansion in Amagansett, in the Hamptons. To earn her place in heaven, as my mother would say — though with Blema Weinberg, guilt probably wasn’t a motivating factor — she gave a part of her fortune to the MoMA, was a patron to many young female artists, and helped more established ones find a place in New York’s museums. In 1959, she had pushed for the candidacy of Louise Nevelson and Jay DeFeo, the only two women to participate in Sixteen Americans, the legendary exposition at the MoMA, beside such names as Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.

  She and Dana were thick as thieves from the day they met. Blema Weinberg invited her to lunch one day and made her an offer. She had loved The Next War and wanted to publish a book just as powerful about women and art.

  “You know what Hans Hofmann said about Lee Krasner’s work?” she asked Dana.

  “Jackson Pollock’s wife?”

  “Oh, Dana! Let me tell you, you just fell into the same trap as everyone else. Doesn’t Lee Krasner exist by herself? Must we name her husband to give her importance?”

  “You’re right. And what talent she has.”

  “Exactly. So, listen to this: Hans Hofmann, who taught her the principles of cubism, said, ‘It’s so good, you wouldn’t know it was painted by a woman.’”

  “Disgusting!”

  “That’s exactly my point, Dana. And you’re in the perfect position to help me out.”

  Dana returned to Harperley Hall filled with enthusiasm. “Find your best shoes, Romain, we’re going out tonight to celebrate.” In front of an enormous steak, she told me about their conversation, their shared indignation, and she spoke of the unlimited confidence she had in Blema Weinberg. The next morning, she threw herself into this new project.

  My work at the ticket booth at the MoMA, in addition to my university courses, kept me busy. I worked Wednesday afternoons and weekends. At first, Dana seemed to have doubts about my ability to keep that pace going over the long term, “Are you sure you can handle it?” I was surprised at how easy my first year at NYU had been. My second year was just as smooth — an A average, with only a couple B+s. Dana seemed surprised, “No homework? No reading?” No. Darren had taught me everything. I was lucky. The lectures in the large amphitheatres filled with students could have bored me to death, but instead every one was like a miracle. I listened to my professors attentively. They had a talent for capturing my attention and amazing me. My favourite was Martin Valenti, a theatrical man, a joker with bulging eyes. The whole class roared with laughter at his analysis of Salvador Dalí’s paintings with objects melting like chocolate in the sun, making a parallel with the sexual impotence of the artist. It was fascinating.

  That year I left the nest that was Harperley Hall. (Dana was so busy with her work she barely noticed — completely the opposite of Rosie who, in an unexpected moment of tenderness, had taken me in her arms and hugged me tight, her pale eyes blurry with tears.) With Ethel’s help, I found an incredible deal on Perry Street in the West Village — an artist’s loft with all the modern conveniences and a closed bedroom. Ethel found me a couch, a table, two chairs, and, as a mattress, a large ten-foot-by-ten-foot piece of foam that would undoubtedly impress the girls I’d manage to bring back home.

  By now, my English was pretty good. I barely made mistakes and didn’t have a noticeable accent. Sometimes girls at the museum would flirt with me, finding me, in their own words, “charming,” though it was always painful to hear them absolutely flay my name with a sorry air, Ro-main Car-ye, as if they had pebbles in their mouths.

  “Sweetheart?” Peggy and Betty, two regulars at the museum, spry eighty-year-olds, their hair always impeccable and their makeup perfectly done. Every Wednesday they had their weekly “cultural visit,” as they said. I enjoyed taking care of them, offering my arm for the stairs or taking their coats. They would sit on a bench in front of the same few paintings, chatting softly. “Sweetheart?” And, “What if we called you Roman instead? What do you think?” Soon, everyone at the museum began calling me Roman. Roman Carr, like Lucien Carr, Kerouac’s friend.

  Moïse welcomed my new name. “Yes, man!” He said with a name like mine, I was sure to become famous.

  Moïse wasn’t trying so hard to be famous anymore. He’d found something better — love. And this time, it was mutual. Louise Morin was her name. She volunteered with the war resisters committee and was a driver for the draft dodgers who, like Moïse, needed to get their papers in order. To do so, they had to be driven out of Canada and back in, as if it were the first time. The FBI knew about the ploy and had agents all along the border.

  “I didn’t sleep for days, man….”

  The day he was to go through the process, he lay sleepless on his mattress waiting for a knock on the door. That was how he met her, and he told me all about it in a long letter.

  You shoulda seen the girl who rang my doorbell. An Amazon. Long shining hair like whale skin. A beautiful squaw’s face illuminated by eyes of gold. And a voice, man, a voice that caresses you like a warm wind. I was petrified, nailed to the spot, I couldn’t say a goddamn word. And you know what she said when she saw me like that? “Oh, so you were expecting a man to drive you?”

  “No!” I howled as if my ass was on fire. And she burst out laughing so hard I was laughing too, like a desperate hyena, much too loud, like Jerry
Lewis, you know what I mean? An idiot!

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She told me we had to pretend to be a couple on a lover’s tryst in Vermont. Shit! What more could I ask for! But what do you think your idiot friend did? His face turned red. Red like a fucking girl! And after? You know what I said? Oh, man, sometimes… I said, as if I didn’t care, or worse, as if it bothered me, “Only for the day, I hope.” You read right — only for the day, I hope!

  She answered, like a little insulted, “Don’t you worry.” And what did your idiotic friend add to that?

  “Gotta do what you gotta do. Anyway, I don’t have much of a choice, right?” Oooooooooh.

  Honestly, I wasn’t as anxious about crossing the border as I was about her! I was as scared and confused as a little boy who just pissed his bed and didn’t know how to hide it. Sitting in the Beetle, I looked at the scenery go by in a Shakespearian state of panic and doubt, to hit on her or not to hit on her, with a visceral fear that I was about to screw everything up. My brain was moving at the speed of rust, my mouth was betraying my thoughts. So I shut it to prevent further damage, so as not to look like some dumb fucking American. The silence was so heavy, man, it hurt. No kidding, I still got bruises.

  We drove like that for an hour. Oh, she asked me questions all right, from time to time — where I came from, what my life in New York was like, but I was so afraid of saying something ridiculous that I answered with very few words, the worst clichés, and she seemed disappointed. Oh, man! It was getting worse and worse as the Beetle drove towards the line where my fate was to play out, on the snowy roads of Quebec.

  As we got near the border, she began fidgeting with the radio buttons. “An American channel,” she said. And then Johnny Cash came on, man, his warm, comforting voice that brought tears to my eyes. Louise noticed it and she became all emotional too, I could see it in the way her golden eyes shone. It was magnificent, man. Johnny Cash made an appearance in the Beetle like a genie out of a lamp. It was marvelous, immense, it floated over us, his baritone voice like a thick cover over two lovers’ entwined bodies on a winter morning. I got some confidence and looked Louise straight in the eyes and hummed in time with Johnny. She blushed, man! All I had to do was make a wish now.