Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  Reading English that sounded just like the English she heard spoken, and seeing herself as a romantic figure in her own city, had been the bright vein in an adolescence otherwise defined by fighting Walter’s authoritarian regime. She learned English like a guerrilla fighter learns to recognize mines. It felt like her life depended on it.

  With Odette and Roger, they’d mostly been abandoned to their own devices; Walter was another story. Odette took a backseat, said ask Daddy to everything.

  Walter would correct Claudine when she began a sentence with I feel. “You do not feel, Claudine,” he’d say, “you think.” He grilled her, and grounded her and suspected her of all the right sins.

  He’d stand at the dining-room table with an electric carving knife, sawing a thirty-dollar prime rib roast, and talk about the country falling apart under that pipsqueak Trudeau. Trudeau, who gladdened the hearts of the girls by making their trying bilingual fate official, was nothing but a poufster. He had no respect for what had made this country, he was letting the rabble in, he was letting the rabble rule. The mahogany table shone in the reflection of the crystal chandelier, the silver salt cellar had a blue glass lining, the silverware sparkled, flowers from the greenhouse grazed the centre of the table. “In the old days,” he’d say, “the darkies never walked on Saint-Catherine Street. And they never walked on Sherbrooke. They walked on Dorchester, they knew their place.” Fires raged down south around this time, fires of rage at people just like Walter.

  Claudine couldn’t hear that and hold her tongue like Odette, who pretended she’d always lived with that kind of contempt, who said oh Walter, as if he were a boy going too far. It was almost as if Odette put her head on the block to show them what a good sport she was. Why was she so embarrassed by them? Why couldn’t she fight for them? After leaving Roger, Odette had had moments of being direct and firm and understanding. But it had all slipped away; the moment she’d stepped into that house she had disappeared. She had to pay attention to the boys, who were rigid with grief over their mother.

  Claudine could see that Walter liked to argue, that something quickened in him when she accused him of bigotry, that he liked her fighting spirit. And she wanted his love. That was the hardest thing. Underneath it all, what she most wanted was for him to love her.

  HER HEAD IS ACHING now, as she walks past the red-painted barbershop that was below the after-hours club where she met Colin three years ago. It is gone now, the club, and the barber-shop has closed down to make way for a dress shop displaying gaunt silver manikins with hunched shoulders, stumps for hands and feet. A white van parks just ahead of her. An ambulance wails somewhere on Spadina. There are patios now along Queen Street, where people sit and drink while men and women with plastic bags huddle in condemned doorways. She thinks of calling Colin to say meet me at the Rivoli, but she knows he won’t be home. She knows she’ll stand there, in a phone booth, listening to the rings over and over again, and the bottom will drop out of her, as it always does.

  It’s so hot and muggy, the air is like a suffocating blanket. She stops by the guardrail of the terrace of the Rivoli, looks inside out of habit, always thinking she will catch Colin out in a corner with a blond waitress. Did she dream this, or did something really happen with a blond waitress? The image is so vivid, Colin reaching over to grab the waitress’s black money belt, and the cool waitress with blond hair and a tight black skirt swatting his hand like a fly, and laughing, and then extending a finger to touch his finger like in the painting of Creation. Must have dreamed it. She thinks of a cool beer, of the feel of it going down her numb throat, and it is so real that she figures she’s already had it and moves on.

  To the next bar. Is that what she’s doing, looking for him? Is that why she didn’t want to drive, so she could hop down this stretch of road and catch him out with the woman with the dog? Is that who she is now? A dog-catcher? The cool detective going for dirty pictures, looking for the final proof she carries inside her anyway. She feels ridiculous. She will have that beer after all. She will sit in a corner and drink and feel for eyes looking for her eyes, and catch a pair, and feel other possibilities for herself.

  She walks back to the Rivoli. There is an empty black table inside. She orders a draft. It comes with cool frost on the glass. The perfect coke-agitation antidote. She drinks it down quickly, and orders another.

  The light is dim with pale orange streaks coming from rounded deco wall fixtures. Her glass of beer leaves a ring on the black Formica. Claudine draws spokes like sunbeams from its watery circle. A man with short hair and a pale blue short-sleeved shirt comes by with a deaf-mute card, and she gives him two dollars. He smiles and tips the card to his head, saluting her. His gesture is framed by the huge lithograph behind him, where native men walk on the high steel beams of skyscrapers. It is a picture. The pale blue shirt, the black girders like a web behind him, the pale orange of the light hitting his forearm.

  Claudine looks down at the hand signals on the card. Perfect hands that appear stamped, crooked fingers for listening, fists opening and closing for heart. She thinks of Janine on the phone saying I miss you, and washes the thought away with a gulp of beer.

  So much of that time, the time of the tyranny of Walter and his boys, seems locked in glass, seems to have nothing whatever to do with her life now. But Janine died there. And Claudine had something to do with that.

  She knows it, has always known it.

  Claudine grabbed the language of their new house, said terribly, oddly enough, quite, of course, however, ate it all up. The English language held possibilities of salvation out of the desert, she bit into it and wrestled it into the muscles of her mouth. A way out. It was a way out of the misery, chaos, emptiness. A way of controlling what she had no hope of controlling. A language that killed the past, buried it, where you could dance on graves with your nose up in the air. A steamroller of a language, flattening out old pains, covering up shame forever. Newborn. However, quite, I should say, nevertheless, of course, mysteries of qualifying the world until it came out pale and controllable. No memories. No detonations. The language in that house was the language of power, of the powerful, of reality, of how it was, of how it would always be, of refusal, of no to all the sadness that crept and seeped into the cracks of French. A language of slaps, of cuts, of chiselling, of blocks, of building, of rising above the petty, petty world of feeling, the language of abstraction, history, commerce, of art that hid and hid, and turned seekers into spectators.

  She had been so ripe for it. All that had been previously problematic — her bookishness, her determination to slice the world and herself into manageable parts, her anger — were perfectly appropriate in the old wood and ticking clocks of Walter’s Westmount house, where suffering was an embarrassment, love a parsimonious event to be hidden in the creases of private lives, where joy, such as it was, could be crushed by superior wit.

  Janine died there. She could not make the switch. She died a thousand deaths and Claudine witnessed it, and saved herself, and let her drown. Janine was emblazoned in feeling, could feel the sap moving in trees, her throat moved in liquid sympathy with the warble of birds, her toes in the thick Oriental carpet could send her into inarticulate rhapsodies. Janine could not survive the contempt, for her being, her body, herself.

  And Claudine moved over to the boys. And let her fail, and let her drown. At night, in the room they still shared even though there were enough rooms in the house for them to have two rooms apiece, Janine said je t’aime, Claudine. And in the new language they practised with each other, “You are the most important ting in my life.” Claudine looked away. She said, “You have Nivea on your face. Wipe it off, it bugs me. And you should work on your th’s.”

  CLAUDINE FINISHES HER BEER, holding on to the last sip now warm against her palate before swallowing. Low rumbles from the dark sky shoot fear into her belly. She should get going. She pays for her beer. The waiter has a ponytail, a
diamond stud in his left ear and a paperback copy of Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me, Bob Hope in his back pocket. He gives her a flash of hazel eyes before pirouetting away with her money.

  The beers buoy her until the downpour comes, right at the corner of Spadina and Queen, rain like a bucket of water soaking her hair, her face, her clothes. Within a few minutes, dark puddles of oil-slicked rain gather in every depression of Spadina. Streetcar tracks are overflowing, water flows down with the sound of sea-pools into the dark holes of sewers.

  The sky flashes electric white every few seconds, obliterating the image of the rain slanting against the halo of streetlights. The surprise of it, the cool violence of the storm rattles Claudine. Her first instinct is for shelter, but she pushes that away, wants to give in to what is coming down, to give her body up to the water. So she walks, tries to walk as if the rain and the lightning weren’t things to fear. She walks across Spadina, tries not to run, like she’s in a movie where she has to keep on walking through rain until the scene is over. She could huddle beneath the awning of the doughnut shop at the corner, but she doesn’t, she keeps walking, water streaming down her face, inside the collar of her T-shirt, soaking her thighs, her sandals. She ploughs right through puddles, squishing soaked leather between her toes; she welcomes the rain cascading in sheets from green awnings.

  And then, just as she is beginning to enjoy her body’s embrace of the rain, she sees what she’s been looking for. The fluorescent light of the Kentucky Fried franchise on the corner of Augusta bounces off the wet street like a white arrow to the yellow fire hydrant by the Duke. And there, tethered, is a dog. A soaked, yelping collie.

  The dog is lying down, must have laid its soft body down on the sidewalk to keep a bit of ground dry. Claudine kneels down. The dog smells of wet dust and warm flesh. Its paws are crossed under its muzzle, and it is whimpering while licking its nose.

  Lightning flashes across the sky. The dog and Claudine look at each other. Her heart swells for a moment. “Pooch,” she says, “are you scared? Don’t be scared. There’s nothing to be scared of.” The dog licks her hand, over and over, the rough tongue furls along her palm as if he is drinking the rain from her hand. The pressure of the dog’s warm tongue is almost unbearable. Claudine forgets where she is, pats the dog’s head with her other hand. “Okay, okay,” she says. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Opening the poster-covered door of the Duke, she is hit by the smell of yeasty beer and urine.

  She doesn’t like the Duke much. So many nights she’s sat at the bar while Colin talked to Dan, the bartender. She watched Colin probing Dan’s life, listening to his language changing to accommodate Dan’s inexhaustible stories about his liver, about his kids, who were always in various states of arrest, detention, probation. At first, she’d admired Colin’s ease, his compassion. But then she saw that Colin was only interested in using Dan’s life, a life wound up, like so many others, by a bad start, as a template from which to reject the sufferings of those who were more privileged — especially women. In Colin’s worldview, all women, no matter their origins, were middle-class. That was his ace, the most important card in his seduction deck. He could pull the ground from under any woman’s feet by saying middle-class. They all crumpled at that.

  Soaking wet, water pouring into her eyes, hand tingling from the dog’s tongue, Claudine pushes back the wet hair from her face and looks around.

  It’s the laugh she recognizes first. There is a flash of blond hair by the laugh’s side.

  Colin is sitting at the bar. He’s commandeered the clicker for the TV above the bar, and he’s clicking channels. The blonde is trying to get the clicker away from him, and every time her hand gets near it, Colin shoots his hand above her head and changes a channel. “Uh-uh,” he laughs. “No way. It’s mine. You can’t have it.”

  “Okay,” she says. And pretends glazed boredom, and takes a mouthful of her beer. Then she reaches over and strokes the small of his back with her hand. He turns to her. “Oh,” he says. “Oh,” she says, and slips her fingers under the waistband of his jeans. “No fair,” he says.

  It’s as if Claudine is watching a pantomime from very far away. The sound of pinball machines from the dark, smoky back of the bar is muffled now, and the lights around the bar are surreally bright.

  She has to do something before she’s seen.

  She wants to run away, but she is moving forward, one step forward, in her squishy sandals, dark hair dripping on her shoulders, black T-shirt pasted to her breasts.

  Dan sees her, and waves, and looks at Colin.

  She climbs onto the stool beside Colin. “I’m thirsty,” she says to Dan.

  Colin’s got the clicker up above his head. He turns slowly, brings it down.

  “Will you just look at what the cat dragged in,” he says. He’s very drunk. He points the clicker at her and pretends to change the channel, and then laughs.

  “It’s really wet out there,” Claudine says, ignoring his gesture. “Dan, can you bring me a draft?”

  “Oops,” Colin says, “sorry, I don’t know why I did that,” and puts the clicker down on the bar, and turns towards Claudine, blocking her view of the blond woman. Claudine would like to go to the bathroom and do a line, sharpen the bright steel of her mind, but she doesn’t want to leave them alone.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” she says.

  “Certainly.” Colin pulls away from the bar. “Claudine, Sally. Sally, Claudine.” Sally smiles. She looks all of twenty-three, blond hair cut blunt with bangs. She has silver arrow earrings, wears a pale blue sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves and letters that say Wommyn’s Sound Festival, Tanglewood. She has beautiful, strong arms.

  “Sally’s a brilliant actress,” Colin says.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Claudine says. “I saw you in something.”

  “I was in the Restoration take-off, at the Theatre Centre?”

  Claudine has a vague memory of breasts, milky white and slightly marbleized with veins, pushed up in a satiny dress, and a shep-herdess’s bonnet.

  “And I played Nina in André Traverse’s Seagull.”

  “Barely out of theatre school,” Colin says, “and she’s getting all these wonderful parts.”

  “That’s great.” Claudine gulps down half her beer.

  “Janine called,” Colin says.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “She said we were supposed to be there for dinner. You didn’t even tell me.”

  “I did tell you.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Anyway, she was mad.”

  “I know. She got hold of me at the co-op.”

  Sally’s watching the TV now, vacant and demure.

  “They’re really tight,” Colin says to Sally. “Claudine and her sister.”

  Sally smiles, a broad smile like a woman who is used to being watched, who doesn’t mind eyes moving across her wide face and full lips. Claudine notices parsley stuck between her eyetooth and her front tooth. It’s a small thrill. They can’t be that intimate if he hasn’t told her about it.

  “I haven’t seen you here before,” Claudine says.

  “This is her first time at the Duke,” Colin says. “She likes it, don’t you, Sally? She’s doing a Walmsley piece next. She’s researching.”

  “Really?”

  “I saw your film about prostitutes,” Sally says. “They showed it at theatre school. We were rehearsing Genet’s The Maids? It was sad.”

  “Sad?”

  “Yeah, like all that waste.”

  “Sorry, I can’t hear you.” Somebody’s put money in the jukebox, and Patsy Cline’s “Back in My Baby’s Arms” is so loud it’s distorting the speaker.

  “All that waste,” Sally shouts. “Waste of talent.”

  “Whose?”

  “I
mean they could act, those women. They could really talk.”

  “It takes some skill,” Claudine says, pushing away her wet hair from her face and lighting a cigarette.

  “Yeah,” Colin says. “Claudine is a brilliant listener, a genius when it comes to listening. Show us how you listen, Claudine. Is it like this?” He leans the palm of his hand on his cheek, then switches sides. “Or is it like this?”

  How can he do this to her? Why is he doing this?

  Sally laughs, embarrassed. “I know what you mean,” she says, in a breathless voice. “When you’re on stage, the most important thing is to really listen. Even though you’ve heard it a hundred times before, it’s got to be like you don’t know what’s coming next. Like the audience has to feel you thinking and listening. That’s the trick. Total concentration.”

  “Is that so?” Claudine says. “Tell me something, Sally. Is that your dog out there?”

  Sally looks at Colin. Colin is watching his fingers doing a drumroll on the bar.