In the Language of Love

by Diane Schoemperlen

  She took a detour to and from school until the work was done, the hole filled in and paved over, nothing left to look at but a large square of smooth black asphalt in the middle of the street.

  23. WOMAN

  woman n. 1. a female adult human being, as opposed to MAN. 2. women collectively. 3. a female servant. 4. a) a wife, b) a sweetheart or mistress; a female lover or sexual partner. 5. a man with qualities traditionally regarded as feminine, such as timidity, weakness, tendency to gossip, etc. 6. womanly qualities or characteristics; femininity. See also WOMANHOOD, WOMANISH, WOMANIZE, WOMANKIND, WOMANLIKE, WOMAN OF THE WORLD, WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

  24. COLD

  HOT. HOT. Of course it was hot when Joanna and Lewis began their romance. Joanna never thought of it as an affair. An affair seemed to her a tawdry thing, sleazy, hard-hearted, and contemptible.

  affair n. 1. a thing to be done; business; a concern, a matter. 2. [pl.] matters of business or commerce; public matters. 3. any incident or occurrence, esp. a scandal. 4. a social gathering or function.

  An affair was an enterprise embarked upon by fools and then abandoned abruptly without undue expenditure of emotion or anguish. An affair, it seemed to Joanna, had little to do with love.

  affair n. 5. a sexual, usually temporary, relationship between two people not married to each other; an amour.

  Always she thought of her relationship with Lewis as a romance, the long tender story of two fairly young lovers in which every little thing was significant, bittersweet, and heart-rending.

  romance n. 1. orig., a long narrative in verse, or later prose, relating the adventures of chivalric heroes. 2. an imaginative, fictitious tale of exciting and extraordinary adventures, esp. one set in a remote time or place.

  She liked to think that between them there would always be passion, kindness, and hope. They were hot. They would always be hot. They had not meant to hurt Wanda but they had been swept away by the heat. Sometimes Joanna liked to think it was nobody’s fault. It was fate.

  romance n. 3. a sense of mystery and wonder surrounding the mutual attraction of love. 4. Music, a short lyrical piece of an informal or sentimental nature. 5. a wild exaggeration; an inventive falsehood or fabrication with no real substance.

  It was August. Everyone said it was the hottest summer ever but the truth was it was the hottest summer in three years. (The collective memory for weather is uniformly short: a hot summer is always the hottest, a cold winter is always the coldest, a wet fall is always the wettest, and a late spring is always the latest ever.) The last hottest summer had been in 1979 when Joanna was living with Henry, and after three straight weeks of both heat and humidity in excess of the one-hundred mark, Henry said, “It’s so hot it feels like the whole world is going to implode.”

  Indeed it was the following spring when the Mount St. Helens volcano erupted. Was this a case of synchronicity or coincidence? Coincidence is usually perceived as flim-flam, a fluke, a device used in bad novels to manipulate the plot. Synchronicity, on the other hand, is regarded as evidence of the mystical union of metaphysical forces, a glimpse of the grand purposeful plan of the universe. Synchronicity carries in it a sense that all things happen for a reason, whereas coincidence produces a sneaking suspicion that they don’t, that everything is merely a matter of chance. What then about weather, volcanoes, love?

  This year all of July and August was drenched with sweat. Everyone felt battered by the remorseless sunshine. Joanna did not like the hot weather any better now than she ever had: it still made her listless and crabby, gave her heat rash and pimples, made her sticky, childish, and mean. The only saving grace now was that since overexposure to the sun had been determined as the leading cause of skin cancer, she was blamelessly released from the obligation to get a good tan.

  This year was like those forest fire summers twenty years ago when the oppressive heat became ominous and the unrelenting sunshine was clouded in the west by a layer of smoke. The heat hung on, the rain never came. Millions of acres were burning out of control. Small towns were evacuated. The smell of smoke was everywhere, in everybody’s clothes and hair. Sheets dried on the clothesline were smoke-scented and spotted with soot. When the wind changed for the worse, innocent travellers were stopped on the highway and, as if in a war zone, all able-bodied men were conscripted into the fire-fighting service.

  This year, once again, the heat became the enemy, insidious and omnipotent, building daily to some ultimate catastrophe. There was always the tension of a thunderstorm in the air, brooding and building but never breaking. Joanna couldn’t remember what it was like to be cold.

  In the middle of August she went to an opening at the Gallery Nouvelle downtown. Lewis and Wanda were there too. They had all known each other for two years.

  For two years the sexual attraction between Joanna and Lewis had sputtered and sparkled. It was an exhilarating tension which did not seem to require that either of them act upon it, an electrical attraction which, it seemed, could build and build and never break. Because they were both artists (Lewis did oil paintings which were intricate abstracts in unusual unsettling colour combinations with weighty intelligent titles like Plato’s Theory of Desire or Language and Reality), there were many opportunities for innocent-enough phone calls about grant applications, galleries, supplies, and the larger aesthetic questions. Sometimes they talked for an hour or more.

  Whenever possible, Joanna manoeuvred situations so she could see Lewis for a few hours, with or without Wanda, at openings, parties, lectures. She could no longer convince herself that she did not have ulterior motives. Once they went out dancing with a group of other friends. Wanda was not fond of dancing and did not seem to notice that Lewis danced with Joanna almost every song. Two or three times Joanna purposely went to a restaurant where Lewis had mentioned they would be dining with weekend visitors from out of town. No one seemed to find her sudden appearances unusual or suspicious.

  After such an encounter with Lewis, Joanna invariably felt enlivened and inspired. She felt she could cope with anything: malfunctioning household appliances, disagreeable store clerks, negative reviews of her work, poverty, persistent phone calls from the credit card company. Nothing fazed her. She could smile her way through anything and then forget all about it. Water off a duck’s back. She pictured perfectly round globules sliding gently down her iridescent feathers, shots of sunlight sparking off into the opaque emotional atmosphere. A fat blue duck in a rainstorm,quacking and smiling as the water drops rolled around it like precious gemstones in the grass.

  After an encounter with Lewis, Joanna was likely to have erotic dreams about him all night long so that in the morning she awoke wet between the legs, light-hearted and hopeful for hours on end.

  At the August opening, they all knew (although not especially well) the man whose work was being shown. His name was Walter Hicks and his paintings were large softly coloured nudes in magnified close-up, so that breasts, hips, and thighs were like sand dunes or clouds, pubic hair like tangled vines, and navels like shadowy magical caverns leading most likely to the eighth wonder of the world.

  As at all such events, everyone was kind to the artist, generous with their enthusiasm for the new work as the gallery owner brought him free drinks and steered him gently from group to admiring group. There had been a recent rumour that Walter Hicks was ill, terminally ill some said, but as everyone congratulated him, patted his arm, and gazed into his face for signs of disintegration, Walter Hicks looked merely tired and shy with black smudges under his eyes and a slight tremor in his hands, both of which could just as likely have been symptoms of the occasion as of disease or impending death.

  As the evening wound down, someone suggested they adjourn to a nearby jazz club, Baby Fat’s. Joanna said she’d love to. Lewis said he’d love to. Wanda said she was too tired and would just go on home, not to worry.

  Eight or ten people went across to Baby Fat’s and the others went their separate ways. Walking to the bar, Joanna was fussing si
lently about the seating arrangements: how to discreetly manage things so that she and Lewis could sit side by side. But when they arrived, it was easy. Everyone seemed to assume that the two of them should sit together. Joanna took this as a positive sign.

  They had several cool drinks and discussed the show, the heat, the rumours about Walter Hicks’s health, the heat, the music, the heat. The bar was not air-conditioned and all the doors and windows stood open, admitting the sounds and smells of the downtown streets: exhaust fumes, sirens, footsteps, laughter, and the murky humidity so thick it had a smell of its own. They were all laughingand sweating, their tall drinks sweating too as they held them against their flushed cheeks.

  As they grew more animated, Joanna’s and Lewis’s hands kept falling to each other with apparently casual touches on forearm, shoulder, kneecap, thigh. They were sitting on an ever-increasing slant, all of her body leaning in towards Lewis and his towards her. The triangle of negotiable space between them grew smaller and smaller, a mere slit finally of smoky air. A latecomer joined them uninvited around midnight. He pulled over a chair from an empty table and thrust it right between them. Lewis glared at him so hard that he went and sat somewhere else.

  Joanna went down the basement to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face and neck, even into her hair and underneath her cotton dress. When she came out, Lewis was standing in the alcove at the end of the dimly lit hallway. They kissed for a long time with Joanna’s back, bare in her sundress, pressed against the cinder-block wall and the cool jazz trumpet playing just over their heads.

  Upstairs the party was ending. People were paying up and wandering away in groups of two or three. Joanna said she had a bottle of good scotch at home, would anybody like to come over? Lewis said he’d love to. The others said no thanks.

  In the living room they shared a drink. Lewis lifted the skirt of her sundress and gently buried his face in her thighs. They made love on the couch half-dressed. Then they took off all their clothes and Joanna spilled the drink. Lewis licked it off and they made love again in the bedroom. Lewis got up at four o’clock and had a shower. They made love in the bathroom. Lewis had another shower, got dressed, and went home.

  The next day there was no contact between them. Joanna spent the morning in bed, trying and failing to sleep. She spent the afternoon walking around downtown in a morass of guilt, regret, and arousal. She spent the evening in her studio, trying and failing to work. She could not imagine what Lewis was doing.

  The next day she called him when she knew Wanda was at work. She said she wished it had never happened. He said he wished she didn’t feel that way. She said they were treacherous sinners, whetheror not they believed in God. He said she was probably right. She said she couldn’t go on with him, it would be too hard seeing him with Wanda, watching them always walking away. He said he wished she’d reconsider. She said no. He said he’d like to come over and talk about it. She said no. He said all right then.

  She called him back. He came right over. They made love in the bedroom three times in a row. She cried and said she loved him. He said yes, he loved her too.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “What else can we do?” he asked. For a long time she thought he was right.

  The heat continued without pause. It really was the hottest summer ever. Day after day all-time high temperatures were recorded, marvelled at, and barely endured. Day after day Joanna and Lewis made love all afternoon, sweating and sliding all over each other until Joanna, happily, could no longer imagine what it was like to be cold, lonely, or calm. She’d read a theory somewhere that people can never remember what sex is really like and so they have to keep doing it over and over again. It might have been Henry Miller who said this. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps people’s memories for sex were no better than for weather.

  It was a summer strafed with accidental, random, and meaningless deaths. Each week there seemed to be yet another victim, all of them young, unprepared and completely surprised in the act of dying. There were teenagers killed instantly in head-on collisions with transport trucks at three in the morning on winding empty country roads north of the city. There were young fathers in power boats and hip-waders drowned while fishing on the long weekend in small hitherto harmless lakes to the west. There was a mother of two hit by a bus, a baby suffocated on a water-bed, an innocent bystander shot to death during a drug deal, a ten-year-old girl killed when her mother’s car was hit by mistake in a high-speed police chase. Through no apparent fault of its own, the whole city that summer seemed to be in mortal danger.

  Each week in the newspaper there were detailed articles about these people who had died, sad stories in which these poor victims were invariably described as very outgoing and personable…a dearfriend to everyone…a model student loved by all…always kind to animals…always giving…always loving…always happy…always hopeful.

  Only the good die young. Or was it that only the young in death might become good so that everything which had gone before was transformed and perfected by the phoenix of their own mortality?

  Joanna and Lewis read these newspaper articles together, hidden away in her quiet apartment where they could feel horrified, frightened, and sorry, but still safe. Joanna supposed that Lewis must read them again at home with Wanda too, perhaps over supper, perhaps later over coffee and sweet liqueur, perhaps later still in bed when it was too hot to sleep. He probably comforted Wanda just as he comforted her. Joanna supposed all this but tried not to dwell on it as she reread the stories alone after Lewis had left, studying them carefully for signs, premonitions, portents, warnings, reason. Such randomness was beyond contemplation, filled her with a malignant lump of fear. If only she could figure out why these things had happened, what these poor people had done wrong, what they should have done instead to better their chances of attaining long, if not eternal, life. If only she could convince herself that such tragedies could have been prevented, she might not have to come to the conclusion to which all this evidence was pointing: she might not have to realize that life itself was beyond our control, beyond all of our cleverly erected and carefully tended scaffoldings of power and safety. She was not ready to abandon the illusion that if only you did the right thing at the right time in the right way, that if only you could figure out what the rules were and then obey them word for word, your life would go the way you wanted it to and you would be exempt from tragedy, catastrophe, and random death. Then you would also be exempt from fear.

  Forever after, her love for Lewis would be mixed up in her memory with these meaningless deaths, with all loss and leaving and fear, with the unbearable ominous heat.

  Walter Hicks died that summer too. He was thirty-four years old and he died of pancreatic cancer. The day of the funeral Wanda was away. Lewis said that he and Joanna could sit together at the service but they could not go there together. Joanna often did not follow these fine calibrations of acceptable behaviour.

  There were things Lewis would do and things he would not. He would meet Joanna, as if by accident, for a drink downtown but he would not arrive at the bar with her. He would meet her for a drink but never for lunch. He would kiss her in parking lots but never on the street. He would not ever hold her hand in public. He would lie to Wanda about where he’d been all afternoon but he would not lie to her in the evening.

  There were lines he would cross and lines he would not. He would tell Joanna when Wanda was going out of town but only after she was gone, so as not to seem too happy about it. He would tell her what he and Wanda had done on the weekend but never beforehand, so as not to hurt her too much. He would tell her when they had an argument, but not what it was about, who started it, who cried, or who won.

  There was a great deal of fancy footwork involved which Joanna was forced to follow. It was like learning ballroom dancing from an intricate pattern of footprints and arrows drawn in chalk on the floor. Although she did not always understand how these lines were drawn, she did understa
nd that they were the measures by which Lewis convinced himself he was not a complete bastard.

  So she agreed: they would sit together at the funeral but they would not arrive together. Lewis would come to her apartment an hour early and they would have a drink. Then they would leave her place separately and meet downtown at the church. Joanna wondered what difference it could possibly make. She assumed that everybody knew they were lovers anyway. Lewis said it made all the difference in the world. He was sure nobody knew. He seemed equally sure nobody would ever know unless he told them.

  When Lewis arrived at three o’clock, Joanna was ironing. She had been ironing for an hour in the heat. She was sweaty and miserable. She had ironed six different outfits because she could not decide what to wear. It was still hot, very hot, too damn hot for black. Besides, she hadn’t really known Walter Hicks that well. It might be presumptuous of her to don full-scale mourning. Lewis said, “What does it matter?”

  She could see he thought she was being trivial. She could see that he had always thought she was above such petty concerns. Sheremembered the afternoon he had arrived unexpectedly to find her vacuuming. He had watched her with wonder and said, “I could never have pictured you vacuuming.”

  She laughed at his incredulity and said, “Well, who did you think did it? I do dishes and toilets too.”

  “Well, yes,” he’d said stupidly, “I suppose you do.”

  Joanna had to admit she was flattered by this image he had of her as some hothouse flower or an exotic bird whose hands were never contaminated by evil chemical cleansers, whose thoughts never sank to the menial drudgery of groceries, housekeeping, and the endless eradication of dirt, and whose whole brilliant mind must never be sullied by the ineffable tedium of daily life.