Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  She took a long drink, her hands shaking. “My parents? You know them. If I’m still with Howard, it’s partly because the marriage is important to them.”

  I shook my head. “You’re twenty-six, for God’s sake! Who gives a shit what your parents think!”

  She drew back, lowered her eyes to the ground. “It touches me to see you lose your temper for me.”

  Except that she didn’t seem touched. She seemed elsewhere. It was late by the time she left. I slept poorly that night.

  The next morning over breakfast, I questioned Moïse. He was on the defensive, “I didn’t know how you’d react. Louise and I, well, we crossed paths with Gail a few times over the summer. We never saw each other in Montreal. I thought it was best not to tell you, I didn’t want to stir up old memories. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “She has friends?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t really know her.”

  “She told you about her husband?”

  “She talked to Louise about it. Louise is trying to get her to leave, but it seems to be complicated.”

  I had a headache and had barely slept a wink. “She’s taking all sorts of medication, Moïse. She must be, to let that bastard keep beating her and not fight back. All drugged up, no wonder she doesn’t.”

  Moïse put his cup on the table and gave me a worried look. “No, man, don’t tell me that.…”

  “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even think anything.”

  “Yes, you did. And you shouldn’t. She’s too fragile. And you’re more fragile than you think too.”

  Gail and I spent the next afternoon walking on the beach and talking in the warmth of the heavy sweaters Louise had knitted, sitting comfortably in large chairs on the veranda. Her hands weren’t trembling like the night before, her eyes had recovered some of their sheen, but she was still a broken woman, defenceless, who needed protection. She told me surprising confidences, without shame — their unhealthy sex life complicated by the infirmity of her husband, his legs paralyzed by polio. He wanted children; he harassed her. She didn’t want any, didn’t let herself be touched on the critical days of the month. So he beat her. She said, as if it was a clear victory, “It’s the only power I have, to make sure he doesn’t have children.” I didn’t try to contradict her. She spoke of their life in public, her being forced to parade on his arm and look like a loving and devoted wife. Sometimes, a few hours before a society event, she numbed herself with Valium and barbiturates and ended up in such a fog that Howard left without her, furious, promising to show her when he got back home. Her mother-in-law commented on her flat stomach every time she saw her. She used crude words, one time, “You just have to spread your thighs, my girl. It’s a question of willpower.” Another time Gail inadvertently picked up the phone and caught a conversation between her husband and his mother, as he gave her a detailed report on their sexual interactions and their frequency.

  I was shocked. “Why did you marry him?”

  “Because I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You said the same thing about Don Drysdale. But you didn’t marry him.”

  “I … You can’t understand. I don’t want to talk about it.…”

  She went quiet. I wasn’t going to force her to confide in me, what she had said already was difficult enough to hear.

  The wind was rising, clouds were gathering on the western horizon, black almost, heavy with rain. “When Frank Brodie came to my house that morning, why did he mention rape?”

  She stiffened. “I’m sorry, Romain. I had nothing to do with that. My father sent him.”

  “Why rape? Who spoke of rape? You?”

  She protested, hurt, “No!”

  “Who, then?”

  “My father learned we slept together that night. And he went mad.”

  “You told him?”

  “No! He deduced it. Remember — the dog, poor Locki … And my shouts on the veranda…. The Riddingtons heard me shout, and they saw you running on the beach. They alerted my parents at the Tees’ place.” The air was getting cooler. Gail shivered. she sought warmth from her own arms. “When my mother and father came home, I was in such a state of shock, I could barely breathe. Locki wasn’t dead, he was choking on his own blood. I was staring at him, crouched down, powerless, terrified. My father took me by the shoulders and ordered me to go back inside. I saw his work through the window — he took Locki’s head in his hands and broke his neck in one swift motion. To stop his suffering. I cried so much, Romain, I cried and cried. It was simply awful.”

  Rain had begun to fall, tearing the still surface of the river. I was thinking of Louis, my fists tight, Why had he gone after the dog, for God’s sake?

  “Remember, I was naked under the sheet. I couldn’t think straight, I didn’t know where I was, what I was wearing. At first they were alarmed, then they became furious. They mentioned you, asked if you were responsible, for the dog, I mean. I swear, Romain, I told them nothing, I denied everything. But they didn’t believe me.”

  She was shaking all over now. Her revelations weren’t unexpected. Still, I was deeply moved, embarrassed when I thought of the insensitivity I had shown, preoccupied with my own misfortune, never hers.

  She snuggled into her chair, looking for heat. “My father wanted to scare you, to push you away as far as possible since the marriage with Don was getting closer. He succeeded, didn’t he?” Her voice was filled with derision. “What comforts me, the only thing, is that you’ve made it. I envy you.” She gave a small, resigned laugh. “For me, everything went downhill from there. A bad dream I’ve never woken up from. But I asked for it, didn’t I?”

  Our conversation stirred something in me. In the disorder of my inner life, I felt a responsibility towards her. “What sort of responsibility?” Moïse asked later, concerned. It was hard to say. Maybe because she didn’t have the same opportunities I did. She never met someone like Dana, someone who could have helped her. “It isn’t a good idea, man. She needs psychological help, not a good guy like you. You’re naive if you think you can save her.”

  On the second night, we made love. Gail was tender, soft, affectionate, and it made things more confusing. “Sex gives the worst advice,” Moïse warned me. Perhaps.

  But I invited her to come with me to San Francisco. “I have money. You can get a law degree, like you always dreamed of. After that, you’ll be able to make your own decisions, and not depend on anyone. I’m not asking you to love me, or even live with me like an official couple. You’ll be free, freer than you’ve ever been. Like I’ve been, since the summer of 1962.”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m serious, Gail.”

  8

  In San Francisco, we emptied out my Tenderloin apartment in a single day. The next day we moved into a place on Telegraph Hill, far more spacious and luxurious, its large windows looking out onto the bay. If you craned your neck a little and looked west, you could see Alcatraz on a bright day. Gail would shudder when she looked at it, or laugh, depending on the day. A beautiful apartment on Calhoun Terrace, with high ceilings and rooms filled with sunlight. So it was far too expensive, four hundred dollars a month, but why not — I had the money — and Gail seemed to be happy there, at least at first.

  I realized soon enough that she was in a pitiful state.

  She cried often and couldn’t explain why. She could sleep twelve, fourteen hours a day, barely getting up. Other mornings, she’d jump out of bed like a dynamo, ready to go out and conquer the world. I dreaded those mornings. She insisted I accompany her to all her “activities,” which this time, she assured me, would be “the right ones” — yoga, meditation, purification, prayers and incantations, hypnotherapy, mystical clubs.… In a childish voice, she begged me to call in sick at the Chronicle — where I’d been moved over to page layout, a job I enjoyed — and she dragged
me out of the city for a rejuvenating hike or a treatment at Shasta Abbey. She abandoned her designer clothes from Holt Renfrew for cheap peasant dresses and knitted shawls into which she disappeared like an old woman hiding from the cold. The pills she’d brought with her ended up in the toilet — Valium, Tofranil, barbiturates, drugs that kept her in a zombie state but regulated her moods. At home, she imposed new diets — tofu, algae, vegetable concoctions. With single-minded enthusiasm, she experienced every type of guru California had to offer, convinced she’d end up finding the panacea that would heal her of despair.

  During that time, I stopped writing. I just didn’t have the time or concentration to do it, and Bobby criticized me.

  I quickly began regretting my decision. Regularly, and kindly, I hoped, I suggested she should begin thinking about applying to a university, but she always put it off, always something else to do, to try, a need to claim her newfound freedom, or so I guessed.

  I feared there might be problems with her husband, but to my great surprise, he made himself known only once, through one of his lawyers he sent to San Francisco. Gail told me about it after the fact, as if it was a detail, of no importance. She met with the lawyer one afternoon at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel; he presented her with a pile of documents, divorce papers, and she’d signed them without reading a word. “What did you do?”

  “I broke my chains. He’s out of my life.”

  “And he’s not giving you anything? You didn’t negotiate at all?” She shook her head, victorious.

  “I don’t want a penny of his dirty money.” I was astonished and sceptical; I never knew whether she told me the truth or had invented the whole story. With Gail, I couldn’t be sure.

  Her relationship with her parents was a total catastrophe. The few times she called them, they hung up on her. She learned through a cousin that to save face (after all, hadn’t Gail followed her “rapist”?), they told people their daughter was staying at a retreat in California to treat severe depression — something she did indeed suffer from. Her charming family attributed her depression to “her infertility that makes her suffer so.”

  “What they didn’t know,” she said, disgusted, “is that I had to climb on top of Howard like an animal to satisfy his needs.”

  She sent them wild letters, filled with rebellious poems. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Gregory Corso. “They say I’m crazy. I’ll prove them right.” She wrote that she took drugs and loved getting raped in the streets of San Francisco. It made me mad. I no longer knew whether she was playing a game or truly falling into insanity.

  In the evenings, she’d sit in front of the television to watch the news with an unhealthy obsession. I couldn’t understand what she was getting out of it. She would sit straight up on the couch, hands on her thighs, rocking softly like an autistic child, as she watched, eyes wide, the chaos flashing on the screen — bombings in Vietnam, dead, mutilated bodies, antiwar protests that turned to violence, the Weather Underground’s bombs. One day, a bomb blew up not far away from our place, in the parking garage of the federal building on Washington Street. Two employees, two young women, were seriously injured. It was all they talked about for days on television and in the papers. Gail was terrified. “How can they target innocent people? I don’t understand this country, Romain, it scares me.” Her whole body was shaking, as if she had a fever.

  “It’ll end soon, Gail. It can’t last forever.”

  She cringed, “I don’t think so. This violence isn’t a temporary aberration. It’s rooted in this country.”

  One of the young women died of her wounds. Gail stared and stared at the pictures of her that appeared on the front page of the Chronicle, a pretty young woman, twenty-five years old, a mother of two young children. Underneath her picture were the photos of the three Weathermen the FBI was looking for, though their responsibility was never confirmed. She said, scared, “It could have been anyone. Including us. Do you understand?”

  “And we could die just crossing the street.”

  She gave me a dark look. “You’ve been living here for too long. You don’t see how sick it is.” She turned her head, bit her lower lip, “I want to go back to Montreal.”

  I’d been expecting it for weeks but, strangely, it angered me.

  “You’re serious?”

  “I want to go home. All this scares me too much.”

  “You’re not going back to Howard, are you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Gail, you’re not going to go back to that son of a bitch?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were sightless, as if lost in the fog of her mind. I got on my knees and took her hand. “Okay, I’ll take care of it. If that’s what you want.”

  She never mentioned going back to Montreal again. She even began the process of enrolling in the law faculty of the University of California at San Francisco. I would pay for everything, we’d agreed.

  She made a friend, Susan, whom she met in an art school in North Beach — a young, energetic woman with red hair and a loud, kindly laugh. They became fast friends. Susan gave watercolour and pottery classes at the school. She had fled her husband, a controlling man who didn’t allow her to work. She’d been devastated when the court gave him custody of their children. Adultery was a rather big word for what she’d been accused of — a few times she had gone to a neighbour’s house in Dale City for comfort, when she just couldn’t handle being with her husband anymore.

  One night, Gail said, “Susan left, she was afraid of nothing. She even abandoned her children.” Her face darkened, “Abandoning your children, do you know what that does to someone?”

  I was confused. How could I know? How could she know? We didn’t have children, either of us.

  And she began crying. There was something painful she couldn’t bring herself to tell me. Like a secret. Gail had a secret? When she got hold of herself and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand, she said, “If Susan wasn’t afraid, why would I be?”

  “Afraid of what, Gail? I don’t get it.”

  “Afraid of everything. Of other people. Of not having enough money. I don’t trust myself. I don’t think I can do it by myself.”

  “Do what? Your studies? You’ll be fine. There’s no reason for you not to succeed.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I don’t doubt it for a second.”

  But I didn’t believe what I was saying. Maybe at one point I had thought I could help her, but I knew now she was a lost cause.

  By the summer of 1972, Gail still wasn’t enrolled.

  We hit the road with Susan in my Westfalia, for a sort of Woodstock in Ahwahnee, in Madera County, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. A great gathering of hippies. I abhorred their sexual and communal promiscuity, but Gail was enthusiastic about going.

  The party, if you could call it that, brought together a menagerie of half-naked and intoxicated hippies. We were supposed to celebrate the summer solstice according to some druidic tradition. The festivities were to last three days, and I couldn’t see how I was going to make it all the way through.

  “Romain, stop pouting!” Gail chided me. “You’ll see, you’ll feel much better afterwards.”

  And that’s what worried me, this naive belief that we would emerge from this masquerade purified and energized. I don’t know who had convinced Gail that these ridiculous rites — which were, to me, only a pretext for these insufferable hippies to get high and fuck — would make our lives better or show us the path to our dreams.

  “Why do you always have to criticize everything, all the time?” she asked. “Just look around you.”

  She was right. The site was magnificent. Hills covered in grass the colour of gold, sparse vegetation, ash-green trees and shrubs, almost muted, and soil the colour of blood. In the hollow of the valley, a swollen, bubbling creek, around which a few cows grazed, answering each other’s calls, w
hile Yosemite’s Blue Mountains hung in the distance with their serrated peaks, slashing the radiant sky. We got out of the dusty Westfalia and were welcomed by a bare-chested guy with long hair and dirty fingernails trailed by two children as dirty as he was, their blond locks washed out by the sun.

  “They’re adorable,” Susan said, melancholy in her voice, “Are they yours?”

  The man snickered, pushing his hair back behind his shoulders. “Children aren’t our property.” He played with one of the boys’ hair. “They’re individuals in their own right. The community is their true family.”

  To my great consternation, Gail nodded. Later, she said, “What he said was beautiful, wasn’t it? He saw the truth of it — children aren’t the property of their parents.”

  “Do you know why he said that?”

  She stiffened. “What sort of idiocy are you going to come out with this time?”

  “He said that because he can’t claim paternity over them.” She shrugged and turned to Susan to tell her not to listen to me. “It’s true! With hippies, and their stories of free love, mothers are the only ones who know who their children are. The guys, well, they’re never sure of anything, so they comfort themselves with meaningless phrases.”

  “Oh, you’re just speaking nonsense!”

  In the hills, dozens of tents had been erected. Between them, children were running and playing. Branches and cut-up bushes had been piled here and there, pyramids of dried vegetation that would be set alight once darkness fell. “The summer solstice,” Gail was repeating, excited, “marks the victory of light over darkness.” All night, these pyres would light up the sky.

  We began a series of processions and ridiculous rituals. We had to fill a basin with cut flowers, and place them in another basin at the other end of the site. Women got naked and wandered about to ensure their fertility. The smell of marijuana and hashish was floating everywhere. As the sun set, we were told to run, hand in hand, around the tents, yelling, “Light! Light! Light!” until the sun, reddening, disappeared behind the copper-yellow hills. Then the men lit the pyres, and the sky blazed, bringing cries of astonishment from children’s throats. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Gail asked. “We are going to spend the night under a fiery sun.” She took my hand. “Come!” — and dragged me towards a series of more modest fires next to the river. A bunch of naked hippies were walking over scattered embers.