Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  When we saw the signs for the border, my nervousness returned. They looked like soldiers lost in the pastoral landscape of the Eastern Townships, a real postcard of valleys and homes of the descendants of Loyalists. Louise said solemnly, “Those American colonists loyal to King and Country found refuge here, during the American Revolution.” I had a kind thought for those divorcees of America living peaceful lives, having children who lived peaceful lives of their own. Yes, it’s possible. Our stories of exile, yours, mine, they might not be so extraordinary after all. They’re two among thousands and thousands of stories just like them that were written on the line that has separated our two countries for the past two hundred years. Despite what we believe, we’re just cogs in History, passively following the order of its implacable determinism.

  “From now on, you’ll be Doug,” she told me. We were only two miles from the border.

  “Doug.” I chuckled stupidly. “Always thought it was like a dog’s name.”

  She laughed. “I won’t say that to Doug Naylor. You’re lucky, I could have been his girlfriend and told him everything.” She winked at me; it felt like an invitation, but I just stared at the long road covered in snow, paralyzed by fear.

  You should know that Doug Naylor is a Canadian volunteer on the committee. He lent me his driver’s licence. Luckily, there’s no picture on it. But let me tell you, I look like him like Robert McNamara looks like Happy in Snow White. Returning to the States as a Canadian. Then back to Canada as an American. That was the ploy. Louise hid my papers in the trunk, I didn’t know where exactly, but she assured me the border guards wouldn’t find them. Meanwhile, we had to pretend to be lovers off trekking in Vermont, at Smugglers’ Notch, with our snowshoes and boots and winter coats and pants (Doug had lent me his) — all our stuff visible in the back seat, you know. All that was missing was snow-covered pine trees and “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago, man, let me tell you.

  We got to the border before eleven. The border crossing is a small red-brick building, flanked by pretentious white columns that patrician America loves. Around us, nothing. Empty. Snow in its virginal immensity, sullied by the presence of these two guys at the border, two fat Yankees with suspicious eyes. “Don’t say a thing,” Louise said. They asked the usual questions, and she answered all casually, the two guard dogs circling the Beetle, barking orders, “Get out of the car! Open the trunk!” We were outside, shivering, glancing at the two baboons going through our car. I started trembling. Uncontrollably. My heart was beating so hard you could hear it on the vast white plain. And my teeth started chattering. Clack! Clack! Clack! A sinister woodpecker shattering rotting wood. I saw Louise go white. She gave me a hard look, making it clear I should get a hold of myself. But I couldn’t do it. Man, I just couldn’t do it. And then she grabbed me by the collar and pulled me towards her and stuck her warm tongue in my mouth. Ooooh, man!

  The guards were annoyed, “Hey, you’re not at a motel here!” The other one, the fat one, whistled, “Whore!” Not at all abashed, Louise came near them like a queen of light. She said, putting on the voice and face of a girl caught in the act, “You’ve got to forgive us, sirs. We’re getting married in a week.”

  “Just go on,” said the first. “And obey the speed limit.”

  Starting the Beetle, Louise returned to her professional air, a sublime Mata Hari, “The first step. We’re not out of the woods. There are cops everywhere.” I was blown away. Just blown away.

  I was back in my country, but I didn’t know this part of it at all. Tiny villages filled with invisible souls, houses, their fronts like the sad faces of abandoned children, car graveyards, and cemeteries, as if people died here more than in other places. This is America. Real America. Not Manhattan. Not the one out of Cecil B. DeMille’s movies. I wouldn’t have known it if it weren’t for the American flags everywhere.

  We drove west, straight west, towards New York state. Lake Champlain offered up its frozen beauty impudently, peppered with wild islands. I thought of the incident at the border, Louise’s mouth tasting of peppermint, an ancient glacier on an erupting volcano, and that goddamn swelling between my legs.

  We stopped in Champlain, just before the border. Louise grabbed my papers out of the trunk. “Whatever else,” she said, “don’t lie.” She made me repeat what I needed to say to Canadian immigration. I had a copy of a letter of employment from the Montreal Star. I’ve been working there as an assistant for a few weeks already (in addition to the work with Jenkins). A boring job, but it might pan out into something else. We’ll see. The Star sent a letter to my parents in Brooklyn, and they forwarded it to me. This is the other part of the ploy — getting into Canada with an employment letter sent to an American address, like an economic immigrant. To increase my chances, it was written to give the impression that I was going to be a journalist.

  I looked behind me, whipped by icy wind, before climbing back into the Beetle. The place didn’t look like a country I was leaving — an empty white plain like a clean plate. Not exactly the type of image you want for your last look at home. I cried a tear or two, and I prayed that time wouldn’t fade my memory too much, the only photo album I’d bring with me.

  After that, everything went quickly. First, the interview with the immigration agent, a guy with soft, sincere eyes. He took my documents and disappeared into another room where we heard him type on a machine. After half an hour, he returned, a warm smile on his face, wishing me welcome to Canada. I almost burst into tears.

  Then, on our way back, to my new life as a Canadian permanent resident — yes, man! In five years I’ll be as Canadian as you — I asked Louise to stop. She smiled a complicit smile, and I knew she wanted the same thing I did. We took a small country road lined with pine trees. We stopped the car on the shoulder. We laid down on the back seat and made love, in the middle of nature that welcomed us with open arms.

  The tension was gone all of a sudden. When we got back on the road again, I had no fear, no regrets. It was the start of a new adventure, and Louise is its most beautiful promise.

  Your friend forever,

  Moïse

  7

  I was seeing a girl, too, but it wasn’t the same. Judy Stern, who worked as a guide at the MoMA. She was small, with short brown hair, pretty and brilliant, and she gazed slowly and intently at everything, as if a secret lay beneath all things — a chair, a piece of trash in the street, a Mark Rothko painting. She analyzed the world through extra-clear eyes, devoted, fierce affection for Nietzsche, her conversations sprinkled with, “As Nietzsche said,” “According to Nietzsche,” “Nietzsche believed.” A real intellectual. With diplomas. Together, we spent a lot of time just talking at my place especially, in my ten-foot-by-ten-foot bed, covered with a pretty Indian spread I had found in a store in Greenwich. In bed too, everything was slow and measured; she could spend hours over me, inspecting me like a dissection in a laboratory, with precision and attention to detail. She never laughed. She said that humour was offensive to intelligence, a loathsome aspect of human nature. “There is only one world, and it is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, and without meaning.” Nietzsche, of course. “Obviously,” she said. “Nietzsche claims that man suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. I know, I know. But, you see, this is why I don’t laugh. Because I look at the world the way it is. I don’t need medicine to tolerate it. It is there. I am here. That is all.” My eyes closed, I listened to her words while her hands took care of me, and I felt I was the subject of some divine experiment.

  In my letters to Moïse, I described Judy differently. I said she was tender, joyful. I described our relationship as being serious (“a little bit like you and Louise”). I knew Moïse. If I told him the truth, he would have said, “Except for fucking her, man, I don’t know what you’re doing with a girl like her. She seems like a manic-depressive to me.”

  What attracted me to Judy was her knowledge. She was bril
liant and intuitive and knew so much about philosophers and their schools of thought. I loved listening, and drinking my fill of all the incredible things her head contained.

  She encouraged me to apply for a part-time guide position at the MoMA. This was in May 1967; I was in my third year at university, and classes were getting harder, forcing me to study for long hours.

  “Why don’t you drop a few of them?” Judy suggested. “You can take them next year.”

  It was a good idea, but I had to run it past the folks at the local draft office. It was said they followed your progress carefully and could, if they didn’t think it up to par, take away your 2-S status whenever they wanted. I scheduled a meeting on West 61st, my designated draft board, and found myself before two unfriendly grey-haired men in their sixties, volunteer civilians doing their patriotic duty, like on every board. They were committed to war, though some of them denied it. They listened to me, their faces hard, took my file from a cabinet and examined it carefully, impassively. I attempted to explain as calmly as possible that I needed to work to pay for the rest of my studies — which wasn’t entirely a lie. In the end, my arguments won out, and they gave me a reprieve.

  I’d just won another year in New York. I got the job as part-time museum guide and dropped two courses.

  I would have never thought so, but I enjoyed speaking in public. I liked the attention. Young and old, housewives and businessmen, workers and tourists, they all listened to me with almost religious attention, their brows furrowed, hands behind their backs. I was more than a simple museum employee, I was a somebody! Somebody who knew more than they did, who had knowledge they would never have. Sometimes they were like children, trying to impress me with their questions and comments. “Excellent point,” I answered. Or, “A very judicious remark.” If I felt like flattering someone, “Oh, dear me, we have an expert here. Are you an art historian, by any chance?” The person would deny it, a triumphant smile on their face, and discreetly offer me a few dollars at the end, “Oh, Roman. I had such a wonderful afternoon. This is for you. You deserve it.”

  My favourite moment? When I gathered them around a Jasper Johns painting, his series on American flags. Immediately, I noticed the mocking looks — This is art? I would grab the attention of a man in a suit or an older woman who I thought might have voted for Nixon. “What do you feel when you see an American flag? Pride? Patriotism? A sense of belonging to a great nation?” Eyes rooted on the piece, they nodded enthusiastically, while the rest of the group — young people, blacks, students, hippies, foreign tourists — stiffened. I turned towards them next, “And you? What do you see? Our engagement in Vietnam? War and the dead? Racial segregation?” And they would nod in turn, glad to have their thoughts validated, as the other group looked on, confused. The more my protégés let themselves be taken in, the more success I had with my little routine. “And yet it’s just art!” I said to make the atmosphere less tense. “And that’s Jasper Johns’ genius. Through the representation of an ordinary object, so present in our lives, he manages to stir up such contradictory, powerful emotions. Come, now, follow the guide.…”

  It was going well for me, as it was for Moïse. He’d left the war resisters committee, and was working full time for the Montreal Star, where he’d become a reporter. He moved in with Louise, in her apartment on Hutchison, in Outremont, and was waiting for the right moment to ask her to marry him. “Can you imagine, man! Me, Charlie Moses, joining the ranks of married men!”

  I envied Moïse. Louise was beautiful. A healthy, pretty woman, you could see it immediately in the pictures he sent me. There was one, so touching, of them holding each other — Moïse, blissfully happy, eyes like fireworks, the perfect image of matrimonial bliss.

  As for me, why exactly was I with Judy?

  “Come on, man. Send me a picture of her.” I can’t remember how many times Moïse asked the same question, and each time I answered that Judy hated being photographed, a sort of reflex — even her mother didn’t have a picture of her as a child. “Bullshit,” Moïse replied. “It’s got to be one of two things — either she doesn’t exist, or you don’t love her.”

  Dana liked Judy. “Supremely intelligent,” she declared, “though a little ethereal.” Once, after supper at Harperley Hall, Dana pulled me aside in the kitchen. “With Judy, it’s as if gravity has no effect on her, as if her head is about to float off her body, you know, like a Chagall character. Are you happy with her?”

  “Do I look like I’m not?”

  She looked at me, surprised. “If you’re trying to be convincing, you probably shouldn’t answer a question with a question.”

  Was I happy with Judy? The sex was okay, our discussions amazing — enough for me to become attached. But happy? I didn’t know. In love? No. For now, it was good enough. It suited me.

  I was delighted for Moïse, and he was delighted for me. But what had to happen, happened: our lives were so different now, and slowly we began to drift apart. Moïse didn’t know much about contemporary art, and I didn’t understand the country he was describing to me, my own, with its bombs, its F.L.Q., the dreams of independence, it all seemed so weird to me, as if he were talking about the Prague Spring. On the phone, our conversations weren’t the same, punctuated by awkward silences. Our letters took strange turns sometimes — “Ha! Ha! You’re stuck with that whore Nixon. We’ve got Pierre Trudeau!” Moïse absolutely fawned over the young Prime Minister, sympathetic to the cause of draft dodgers, having publicly declared that Canada should become a refuge against militarism. “Oh, man! The right hook he just gave that shit-for-brains Nixon!”

  But when Trudeau sent the army into Quebec, I would write to him, “Trudeau against militarism? And what about the tanks in the streets of Montreal? What are they for exactly? Your favourite Prime Minister’s new game?”

  He wouldn’t answer that one.

  Were we moving apart?

  “I miss you, man,” Moïse wrote at the end of each letter. I thought of the words a husband says to a wife he doesn’t love much anymore, yet tries to reassure. “Miss you too,” I answered, feeling a little bit sad.

  8

  I began my fourth and final year at NYU in a near panic. And after this? I had to start thinking about returning to Quebec — it was that or the draft, like every other boy of twenty or twenty-one with the ink on their diplomas still fresh, off to do office jobs in the Army. For us, an office job was as bad as being sent to Southeast Asia to kill innocents. No one wanted to contribute to this monstrous war.

  Complaining would have been indecent. I had the option of leaving, a back-up plan most people didn’t have.

  While my situation might have been better than most people’s, I was in a constant state of agitation. Though, in truth, who wasn’t in some form of distress or other in 1968? The murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, only a couple of months apart. Across the country, riots were sparked by King’s murder. Every night on the news more dead, more wounded, in the United States and abroad. Not to mention the endless aluminum coffins unloaded from planes. The quagmire thickening. A majority of Americans now said they were against the war, convinced that Washington was headed in the wrong direction. At NYU, despair was the commonest emotion on campus, classes emptying as young men and women abandoned classrooms to go out and demonstrate, most of the time with their teachers’ blessings. From time to time, a young man whose draft deferral was about to expire simply vanished. And while entire families were facing real tragedies, presidential candidates distributed handshakes, small talk, and warm — or falsely empathetic — smiles when snot-nosed babies were thrust in their arms. Nixon’s appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, over a laugh track, made us want to puke. A number of young people were now disgusted at having given him their trust when he’d promised he had a “secret plan” to end the war.

  In the middle of this maelstrom Dana completed her book, Women and Arts.

>   She was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, almost serene. A sea-change compared to her insecurities on the eve of The Next War; her editor at Harry N. Abrams had done solid work, been patient and confident, and she no longer feared the critics, “I’m not putting forward my own self. I’m highlighting the mission of a handful of artists and Blema Weinberg. It’s so much simpler!” And she laughed.

  Simpler? “I know, Romain. Times are tough. But art and beauty can help us pull through.”

  The book was spectacular. A large, beautifully bound volume with colour illustrations on high-quality paper and an audacious choice for the cover — Slightly Open Clam Shell by Georgia O’Keeffe, showing a shell that suggests the image of a woman’s vulva. The critics lauded her work, and the launch at the MoMA was a roaring success — some three hundred people including artists, patrons, journalists, New York celebrities like Jackie Kennedy and Gloria Vanderbilt, and, of course, loads of champagne. Her face burning with excitement, eyes as deeply coloured as a boxer in the twelfth round, Blema Weinberg waddled from group to group, the book cradled in her bejewelled arms, as if she were holding a child. Dana stood a bit apart from the crowd, slightly pale as a result of a cold she was fighting but happy and fulfilled, scanning the room with an amused air — all these people were impressed and awestruck by … her book? Judy spoke into my ear, “I’ve never seen her so beautiful.” And it was true. Dana was staggeringly lovely in her small black dress, flat shoes, hair back in a bun.