Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  “I gotta be going,” Sally says. “I work lunches at the Rivoli? And I start rehearsals tomorrow.” She is standing up now. Her eyes are a deep brown. Claudine is fascinated by her face, the light on the planes of her cheeks, her arms, muscular in her cut-off T-shirt, the slip of a snake ring on her baby finger. She is seeing her through his eyes, it’s a kind of erotic thrill she can hurt herself with in the half-blur of her drunkenness. But there’s something about the dog. She wants to know about the dog. She doesn’t want to let up about the dog.

  “Is that your dog out there?” Claudine smiles. “Concentrate, Sally. Is that your dog?”

  “Yes, that’s my mutt.”

  “You shouldn’t leave a dog like that out in the rain. It’s not right. It’s cruel.”

  “I didn’t know,” Sally says. “I didn’t know it was raining.”

  They are looking right through each other. Sally swallows.

  “Well, I’ll see you,” she says, and lowers her eyes, and then gives Colin a quick look, very precise, of you’ve got a sticky problem here and it’s not mine and wash it yourself in whatever river you can find.

  Colin watches her leave. Claudine looks for Dan to order another draft. Dan is wiping the bar at the other end.

  Colin lights a cigarette, looks at himself in the mirror behind the bar. “That was ugly,” he says, “really ugly.”

  “What?”

  “‘What?’ You should hear yourself. Honestly. You sound like Jackie Kennedy talking to a servant. Pissing from a great height.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why? I just want to know why.”

  “Well, she’s a dyke if you’re bothered about that. Dan, bring us another couple of drafts.”

  “Don’t say that, don’t say dyke like that.”

  “Yeah, some of your best friends. Listen. I just met her, okay? Right here. Didn’t you see her T-shirt? I love dykes, I want to give them my balls for breakfast.”

  “I saw you, Colin.”

  “What? What did you see?” He’s gone back to watching the TV, the big bold graphics of “The Journal” announcing themselves like the second coming. Barbara Frum is interviewing pollsters. They’re predicting a majority for Mulroney in September.

  “Good riddance,” Dan says. “About fucking time, eh, Colin? That new guy Mulroney, he’s going to get those Liberals, am I right?”

  “It’s not good, Dan,” Colin says.

  “Colin?”

  He turns to her. He is slack-faced now. “I can’t help you, Claudine, I can’t live for you. You got to do that yourself. If I don’t go with what I’ve got, I die.”

  Well die then, she wants to scream. Die.

  “I don’t know the difference,” she says, “between loving and hating.”

  “Bullshit.” He takes her face in his hands. “This,” he says, “is loving.” And tries to kiss her.

  “Don’t touch me,” she says. “You’re hell, you’re low-rent hell.”

  He laughs. “Low-rent, eh? And what does that make you?”

  “Stupid. Crazy.”

  “Stop fighting it. Look at me.”

  She looks at him. His drunkenness is taking him somewhere else now, to a floating place.

  “We belong together, you and me,” he says, gently, as if talking to a child. “It’s a hard fit, but it’s the only fit worth having. I’m going to watch you grow old and love your old bones. And we’re going to have babies, lots of them.”

  “The world doesn’t need more babies like us.” She’s shivering.

  ODETTE

  ~

  July, Jamaica

  There are voices in Odette she would rather not hear. She doesn’t know where they come from, these seizures of filth while she lies, brown, oiled, in a one-piece spandex royal blue bathing suit that moulds her “still good chassis,” as Walter puts it. Still good at fifty-four, and she hasn’t had thigh tucks and tummy tucks and eye tucks like all of her friends. “This is me,” she often says to Walter, “without a stitch on.”

  She lies under a blue and white beach umbrella, on a rubbery navy pad, on a white-slatted chaise longue. She is trying to drift back into the dream she had last night. Vague images flutter past her eyelids.

  The beach of the Villa La Mar Condos is deserted, as it usually is in July. Much too hot for everybody except Walter, who insists this is the best month, but then sits in the air-conditioned condo most of the time. The others leave. Summer in Maine. In New Hampshire. In Vermont. In the Muskokas. Everybody but Odette dear. And the man in 38, Arnold Osmond, who practises the fox-trot every day, alone, arms extended, ageing legs spidery on the edge of the waves. He has the grace of the blissfully unselfconscious. Arnold says he is curing himself of cancer by dancing. The cancer is in his palate. He whispers with inflection.

  But Arnold is not dancing on the edge of the waves today. The beach has been freshly raked, the white chairs face the sun, the white tables have been wiped. From the beach bar, Odette can hear a blender, crushed ice mixing with bananas and sweet canned juices. It is a lovely morning. Nobody around but Odette and the black workers doing their chores. It is impossible to avoid hope on a morning like this, not to think yes, everything can start again. The air is fresh, the water inviting, the sky still pale with streaks of a sunrise. The groundskeeper has swept the terraces in front of the low-rises that make up the beach view part of the compound, and now he is watering the bougainvillea that cascades over the tall stone fences with a pink watering can. From where she sits, Odette can see the sparkle of water drops on the shiny leaves. He’s young. He wears white pants. He is singing something that sounds like body move, everybody, body move.

  It is Odette’s favourite part of the day. By noon, the heat has killed hope of anything, the sand is too hot to walk on, the air smells of burning vegetation, the water looks like a mirage, the island dogs bark at the slightest provocation.

  Listening to the waves rippling onto shore, Odette tries to find the thread of her dream. Something about losing her two babies overboard. Yes, that’s it. She was on a big cruise ship with Roger. She didn’t want to be with Roger. In the dream she knew she was with Walter and shouldn’t be with Roger, it was a sin, a betrayal to go back there. Janine and Claudine were barely walking. Odette kept losing track of them, they were crawling through pipes in damp rooms in the hull of the ship. Roger wouldn’t help. He was playing shuffleboard with an orange kitten.

  The girls fell into the water just as Odette was emerging onto the deck and seeing that there was no railing on the back of the cruise ship.

  She woke up crying mes bébées, mes bébées, sweating and crying. She thought her ribs would crack open from sadness. Mes petites filles, mes pauvres bébées. She could smell the baby in them again, the tender skin in folds, the small arms around her neck. In the dream there was so much guilt. Had she really broken the hold of their arms again and again? They wanted so much. Everybody did. Everybody had always wanted a piece of her.

  No, she had always loved them like this, in a fit of grief. A good mother. A loving mother. Walter said so. Walter said you worry like a good mother.

  But there was something here she had never wanted to face, that her tenderness had always been mixed with the grief she caused them. She had always wanted to gather them up against the slings of herself. The dream brought up this first form of loving — with guilt, with pity. “Je t’aime, Janine, je t’aime, Claudine, je vous aimes, si vous saviez comment je vous aime.”

  “You don’t know,” she said to Walter, who woke up, large, annoyed, “you don’t know how much I love them. I love them so much it hurts. You can’t know what that’s like.”

  Walter did not see “good,” did not see “innocence,” did not see a mother’s heart-breaking love. He saw a woman who was taking her suffering for a ride. On a carousel. Up and down. Lying about the horse she was riding on. Trying to find
a way to blame him.

  “Yes, Odette dear,” he said. “You do love your two daughters. Now go to sleep.”

  And that calmed her. She laid her head on the pillow, and a goodness came over her face. But she couldn’t sleep, had gotten up in the dark and felt her way to the living room and tried to call Claudine. Claudine would understand, she’d always understood her. As a child, she’d hold her hand and say pauvre Maman. So mature, she was.

  It took a long time to get a line out, and then Colin answered, a gruff voice that opened up once he knew it was her, such a charming voice he had, and that had felt good, and it had drawn her out of her dread. He said Claudine was on the roof. The roof? What roof? But he was gone and then the line went dead. When she tried again, the Ocho Rios operator said there was malfunction, ma’am. The electricity down. What did that have to do with phones, Odette wanted to know.

  THE WAITERS ARE SITTING behind the thatched bar. They wear black pants and white shirts, and every once in a while one of them swats at a fly with a flipper. No one ever uses the snorkels and the flippers on this compound, they’re all too old. They fear cardiac infarctions on the reefs, the last breath: a blue gurgle.

  Odette is having a tired day. She shifts on the navy foam pad on the white wooden lounge chair. That’s what she said to Walter this morning. “I’m having a tired day.” He looked up from The Gleaner, the Kingston newspaper, and nodded. She is the youngest here, twenty years younger than Walter, thirty years younger than some of the retirees, but sometimes she feels older than all of them. What she’s seen, what she’s seen and felt compared to these people who’ve been living in bubbles, in perfect bubbles of charm most of their lives.

  But people are always telling her that she looks good, and she knows that she’s been in the bubble too these last twenty years and that it has had an effect on her, too, that she has worn herself down to an upper-class contour, smooth, polished, almost impermeable. She’s worked very hard at standing off anything that stuck out, everything that used to cling to her.

  She is still blond, but toned-down blond, old-money-silver blond. Early on, she spotted the danger of being blond in upper-class Anglo Montreal, how you could be mistaken for Florida French-Canadian, brassy, brash, braying with loose sunburned breasts. Nobody ever looked down on Grace Kelly for being a blonde. That’s the kind of blonde Odette had wanted to be. Pure, golden, transcendent; not the other kind. Why couldn’t they see that? Why did she always feel like she was sticking out somewhere?

  Still felt that, even after all these years of trying so hard not to stand out.

  That was the cardinal rule. Never stand out, except on the golf course, where the men can wear floral pants and wild pink shirts, and the women can wear lime green culottes and crushed strawberry sockettes with pom-poms sticking out the backs of their white golfing shoes. She is used to it now, to the sight of these Wasps bright as Froot Loops walking through brilliant greens, but when she married Walter she was flabbergasted. Oh my god, she thought, and it’s these people been calling us Pepsis.

  Ten o’clock. Too early for a drink. Odette shifts on the chaise longue, skin sticking here and there on the rubber pad, and reaches down for a Marlboro in her see-through plastic beach purse. The morning is already partly ruined. The heat. The sweat. The smoke now, so good, filling up the hole her dream left in her.

  Some people drink in the morning and are not alcoholics. They just like the taste. And then have a swim and pop a mint, and it’s nothing, really, just a natural thirst in this heat. But she can’t bring herself to call the waiters over just yet. She’s afraid of what they would think of her, so she just smiles at them.

  She stubs her cigarette out in the sand, watches the pink lipstick stain around the white filter before pushing it all the way under.

  In the house she came from, nobody ever hid collapse the way wealthy people hide it, smelling sweet, laughing with gold teeth on putting greens, colostomy bags hidden beneath bright pants. That is what is so strange about wealth, the way it contains and covers human misery. You’d never know it if they were rotting from the inside with gangrene the way her father had been after two strokes. That was the summer he was having an affair with Francine at the cottage on Lake Memphremagog. He had the strokes in August when the chill of fall was already in the air. Her mother had left by then, and it was Francine who found him, paralysed on the dock. Francine had done what she could, and then Julia had taken him in again, to nurse him, because the whiff of death had scared Francine off, and there was nobody else.

  Near the end, he’d had both legs cut off because the poor circulation had invited gangrene. He sat watching TV with a clicker in his hand, in his big La-Z-Boy in the Cartierville apartment Julia had rented after selling the Sainte-Famille house. He didn’t care where he was. He expected Julia to pick up the pieces. He expected to be served, even then. A buddy had given him a bar scotch dispenser, so between switching channels he could push a glass underneath it and serve himself. There was a lambskin under what was left of his legs. Nobody was allowed to touch the clicker. He kept on watching TV when she went to visit with the kids. The kids had never seen a clicker, they wanted to play with it, but he wouldn’t let it out of his hand.

  Odette had been ready then, ready for something, ready for the answer to what she’d done wrong.

  But he just watched TV and threw his anger in their faces until he died the next fall. The poor man, angry to the bitter end.

  She can feel herself coming to that, to a kind of death. Scared all the time now, of dying. It scares her, the force inside that wants to let go, the voices she hears out of the blue.

  It is ten-thirty. Still too early for a drink. Her smile was mistaken for a summons and now one of the waiters stands before her, casting a shadow on her thighs. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t need anything at the moment, thank you. So sorry.”

  The blue Caribbean flashes before her in a blink as she opens and then closes her eyes. It is hard to look upon nothing. And the nothing is guarded on either side by men in bamboo towers and by barbed wire fences that keep all other life out of the white clearing. Sometimes at night Odette hears shots, but nobody ever talks about it in the morning. “Something must have backfired,” Walter says.

  “It’s a safe investment,” he always says, “now that Commie Manley’s gone.” In town, someone has sprayed the walls with a red slogan: Seaga = CIAga.

  AS A CHILD, ODETTE spent a lot of her time imagining what it would be like remembering what she was going through. It was a habit like a tic or a stutter. She was always doing it. Whatever it was that she was going through, she would put herself somewhere else, imagine herself remembering what she couldn’t bear to undergo in the present. She would think, I will be rich, I will be sitting on a beach in a white terry robe, rich, famous, married, and I will remember doing these dishes in this greasy water in this old house on Sainte-Famille Street. I’ll remember the soap eyes ringed orange with tomato soup, my father’s eyes on my back, the feel of my underwear through his stare. I will remember these things and they will mean nothing.

  Many times she must have said I will be on a beach, because she is starting to remember a lot of things now. Most of them can’t be true.

  This afternoon she has to golf with Walter. Has to. Always this having to, snaking like a thread through the cloth he calls their life.

  “You can do whatever you want,” Janine used to say when she lived at home. On the very rare occasions when Janine calls now, she says things like “I’m so sick and tired of hearing you say you have to. You don’t have to do anything.”

  “But Daddy says,” Odette would say, and Janine would sigh, and in that sigh Odette would hear her own mother, spitting in a hankie and wiping tears from her cheeks. One time, Claudine, who was a cruel adolescent, screamed, “He’s not your father, stop calling him Daddy.”

  “I know,” Odette said. “What do you take me
for? He’s your Daddy.”

  None of them knows. None of them knows what it’s like to live in jail.

  Odette is too hot now. She needs a drink and she doesn’t care if it’s ten-thirty on a July morning in 1984, doesn’t care what the waiters will think, what Walter will say smelling her breath.

  The young man smiles. “Yes, ma’am,” he says.

  “I’m so thirsty,” Odette says. “Could you, could I, please have a tall glass of orange juice with ice?”

  He turns to go.

  “Oh,” she calls out. “Might as well add a tiny bit of rum. Not too much. Just a tiny bit.” Smiling, she holds up an eighth of an inch between thumb and forefinger.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says.

  She watches him walk away in the sand, dust obscuring the shine of his black leather shoes. The waiters have made a little sand trap on the beach by the bar, and one of them has a nine iron out, he’s practising getting the ball out of the trap. The sand sprays up and falls down over and over again as the balls pop up and fly into the sea. Odette relaxes now, waiting for her drink. She lights another Marlboro. Life is good.

  Some people have started complaining at finding golf balls in the surf. But it’s the waiters who pick up the balls when they come back with the tide. So Odette doesn’t get it. Why it matters. It’s as if the sight of a black man with a golf club in his hand enrages them.

  Odette must have been thirty-five the first time she went golfing at the Kahnawake Golf Club, Walter’s golf club on the outskirts of Montreal. After they got married, he said you’re going to have to learn to play golf. Blacks and French-Canadians couldn’t be members of his club then. Being married to Walter took the frog part of her away, washed it clean, made it exotic, cute, Parisian. They didn’t like Jews either, Walter’s friends at the Kahnawake Golf Club, the kikes they called them, but they were more careful about saying Jews weren’t allowed to be members.

  Odette knew many Jewish people. They made a lot of the clothes she modelled in her pre-Walter career. The rich ones all belonged to the Montreal Golf Club. When she mentioned Kahnawake to Mr. Young, who made copies of Yves Saint Laurent suits, he made a face. “All the caddies at Kahnawake are Indians, I’m gonna pay for that?”