Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  By three o’clock, she’s still dialling. She’s past the embarrassment of having to go through the operator at the front desk. She puts in a call every fifteen minutes. By four o’clock, she’s spiralled down to imagining Colin’s death, tried to grieve for him, but it was hard to do while plotting his murder.

  She had told him she wanted it to be over. But something in him had been scared, and he’d held on in the morning before she left and said don’t go, we can work this out. Call me as soon as you get there. Why does he say these things, why does he always do something to keep the hope alive?

  By five o’clock she is lying down on the bed, still as a statue, the hum of the air conditioning like cotton in her ears. The beers have worn off. She is in the throes of imagining scenarios for Colin. She has been split in two, part of her on the bed, part of her living out a phantom life. That’s what her documentaries are, phantom lives. That’s what living with Colin is like, his lies, his secrets, phantom lives she has to imagine, so that she can feel part of something. He used to call her a voyeur, and she is, but it is not a choice. She’s always had this, and only this, the ability to see inside other people’s skulls, and predict what will happen by becoming them.

  She can see him now, and Sally. Maybe he’s unhooked the phone, or else he’s letting it ring. They’ve been there all day. They’re tired now. She can see it all.

  SALLY IS SITTING CROSS-LEGGED on the bed. They’ve been in bed most of the day. They went out for lunch around three o’clock, spring rolls and beer at the Rivoli, where Sally waitresses part-time, when she’s not acting, which is often enough. They took her dog with them, Sally never goes anywhere without it, and now it is tied to the doorknob, sleeping peacefully in the heat of the hall. Colin didn’t want any dog hairs in the loft and he had to think up some excuse about allergies.

  Would he even think of that? Probably not.

  Now that it’s almost nighttime, Colin and Sally are weakkneed from spending so much time in bed. They’ve gone from flushed to enthralled to giggly to sad. As if they couldn’t absorb one drop more but are determined to be together until some very bitter end.

  The sky is bright pink through the large casement windows, and the place is full of bluebottle flies, huge ones, iridescent, buzzing around Sally’s sweaty head. Colin can’t be bothered to install the little half-screens Claudine bought at the hardware store. The sound of the traffic through the open windows is almost deafening, with buses exhaling like tired dinosaurs, and streetcars grating on steel tracks.

  Colin is eating a pear, cross-legged, facing Sally on the bed.

  “Pretty soon,” he says, “Twinkies will be healthier than fruit.”

  “I don’t think in that way,” Sally says. She’s twenty-three, and almost completely devoid of humour. “I,” she says, “eat symbolic fruit.” A fly lands on her hand. She looks at it for a while, as if it were a visitor from another planet. The tickle of its movement gets to her and she flicks her wrist up in the air. “I mean,” she continues, “and I know it sounds crazy, but I think that if you banish toxins from your mind, they don’t affect you.”

  “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.”

  “Are you calling me silly?” The fly lands on her breast.

  “No. I mean. Yes. I mean, what you said, not you.”

  “Don’t call me silly.”

  He looks at her as if she was very far away, a figure that should never have ended up in the foreground.

  “I just meant,” he says, trying very hard not to sound condescending, “that it’s silly to pretend that physical reality doesn’t exist.”

  She nods, then looks away. “I didn’t say it didn’t exist, I was talking about transforming physical reality.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “Through energy, through feeling, thinking energy. Things can change without our will. There can be chain reactions in the universe that may not seem connected to us, because we are changing, too, and can’t see the connections. But everything is connected, and what we think and feel has an effect on material reality.”

  “Sally.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kiss me. Kiss me here, and the energy will come out there. You are so beautiful, Sally. So beautiful. Long tall Sally.”

  “The way you talk,” she says, “makes me feel like I don’t exist.” She looks embarrassed. She wants to laugh. He’s like her father, who is forever quoting movie lines, or humming Gershwin while breaking the shells of lobsters on his wife’s special gourmet nights.

  “Sorry,” Colin says, and closes in on himself. He can’t help it. It is true that the lines come out of him like ticker tape, that he has no control over what was put in his psyche. Saying you are beautiful to a she is supposed to soften a she. This she, however, is young and prickly; she has yet to be defeated. Unlike older women, she doesn’t carry a lot of baggage that can be used to climb on. Her favourite words are clean and clear. That doesn’t leave Colin much room to manoeuvre.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” she says.

  “Yeah, I get it. I get it, Sally.” He wants to say rewarmed physics platitudes are not beyond my capabilities. There isn’t a soul on Queen Street who isn’t applying theories of physics to dance, performance art, theatre and poetry.

  “No, you don’t get it,” Sally insists.

  Ah shit. If it’s going to be this hard, he’d rather be writing. About her and what she does to him, about this moment here, with the pear slimy in his hand, with her sitting cross-legged on the bed, a strand of her blond hair falling over her mouth. He’d rather be imagining her as a schoolchild, sucking on a strand of hair in a classroom, mesmerized by the minute hand of the clock over the door.

  And then he realizes what it is about her that attracts him so. She looks like a Havergal girl. Now that he’s identified it, he can almost see the kneesocks, the bloomers. She has the snub nose and square jaw of those upper-class girls, the blunt look of privilege, teeth white and orthodontic, bones set by good food and expensive camps.

  He’d grown up with those trappings, going to school at Upper Canada College, dating girls from Bishop Strachan and Havergal, but the secret inferno of his parents’ marriage, his father’s drinking and shady financial dealings, the violence of his temper, had made a mockery of privilege. Dancing against those girls so long ago, he’d felt tainted somehow, not up to their pure, untouchable standards.

  While he had wanted to melt into them, he couldn’t cope with the other side of his lust, the side that anticipated rejection. His anger made him want to erase those straight white teeth and rip the gold charm bracelets full of baby booties and royal coins from their big field-hockey wrists. It had proved so easy to tarnish their clarity with the lies he carried.

  Is that true? Is that it?

  “What’s wrong?” Sally says. Her eyes are serious.

  “What do you mean?”

  She gets out of bed. She finds, then puts on, her white cotton underwear and her orange bermuda shorts. “Your aura is very angry.” Now she’s buttoning a short-sleeved white blouse with pearly buttons.

  “My what?”

  “You know what I said. Your aura. Do you know how broken it is? It’s full of holes, and right now your aura is, like, black and blue.”

  He laughs. “Sally, I had no idea. Must be the drugs. Must be all the acid I did.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. I know things you’ll never know. I could do things. To you.” It is dark now, there is something sad in the white light of the furrier’s workroom across the street, it is like an old winter feeling creeping into the August heat. Just as Sally starts to wrap a long black western belt twice around her waist, the phone rings.

  “I’m a witch,” Sally says.

  “I’m not here,” Colin says, “I’m not answering.”

  “I remember,” Sally says, over the ring o
f the phone, “being tortured. They made me chew and swallow a long rag because I wouldn’t confess. I had to swallow and swallow, and when they pulled it out of me, inch by inch, it was like being turned inside out.”

  “You remember? What do you mean, you remember?” The phone is still ringing, it’s the sixth ring, it must be Claudine checking up on him. “Excuse me for a minute,” he says and walks over to the phone, unplugs it, and crawls back into bed.

  He can feel Sally looking at him, it makes him conscious of his nakedness, his age, compared to hers.

  “I shouldn’t tell you these things,” she says. “You’re stuck in one version of the world.”

  “I’m a writer,” he says. “I believe in versions.”

  “There’s something dead in your eyes, you know.”

  Ah Christ. “I’m just tired,” he says. This is bullshit. He wants her to go away now, so he can relive the sex in peace. If she doesn’t stop this witchy bullshit soon, he’s going to have to start cutting her up in little pieces. He can feel himself going to that place with the paring knife and the crushing vocabulary, the place where his mind is cold, superior, elegant, dangerous as a trap waiting for delicate ankles. Only Sally is not delicate. He can see that now. He wanted the Havergal girl, and the Havergal girls are not delicate.

  Sally has suddenly gone white. She’s shivering. “Something stops in your eyes,” she says. “There’s eyes you can look into and it’s like opening one window after another. I thought you had that.” Her teeth are chattering. The dog starts whimpering from the other side of the door. “I’ve got to take her for a walk,” she says, turning away while adjusting the straps of her straw bag on her shoulder. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he says. Now that she’s going, now that her face is pale and vulnerable, he wants her to stay a little while longer. There’s something so sad and tired in both of them, something he doesn’t want to be left alone with. He grabs a roach from the ashtray by the bed.

  “I have to go and be by myself,” she says.

  His body feels glued to the bed as she walks towards the door. She seems to get bigger, not smaller, as she does this. He lights the roach, inhales deeply. He could turn it around, in the old days he would have had the energy to turn it around.

  “Sally?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where you from? Originally, I mean.”

  “Leaside,” she says, and starts closing the door behind her, but then opens it again. She’s transformed, there’s colour in her cheeks, she’s beaming with the friskiness of her dog, who is leaping up on her. “You should answer your phone,” she says, “you never know what you could be missing.”

  She slams the door. And then, in his stoned state, Colin thinks he hears her skipping down the hall, like a little kid. But it isn’t skipping. It’s her dog’s claws clicking and sliding on the cement of the hall.

  Colin is exhausted now. Never used to get so exhausted. If he’d said the right things, or done the right things, he could have kept Sally from going, he could have kept her enthralled, the way he had in the beginning, with his shiny intelligence, his experience, his burning honesty, but mostly with his uncanny ability to stick pins and burrs into her confident exterior. She always came back because he was the only one who could remove what had hurt and stung and scraped by offering the flipside of the equation, the most idealized, glamourized portrait of herself Sally Richfield could ever have wished for.

  Who are we talking about here?

  But he’s getting sloppy now. Thirty-five. Too old to care that much one way or another. It was all material. All of it.

  He used to be able to do anything, used to be able to turn any situation around. Nowadays, though, things are tougher. Everything looms large and heavy as a tanker, and everybody knows how long it takes to turn a tanker around. Turning a tanker around is one of Colin’s two most favourite analogies for life. The other is how the Viet Cong would lie down across barbed wire as a causeway of flesh their comrades could cross. He often sees himself as that human causeway, flattened and bleeding on the barbed wire, a sacrificial offering to Canadian culture, a creator who is making it possible for future generations to thrive, generations who even now, if Sally is any indication, have no inkling of how empty and dull and dead colonial Toronto used to be before his generation, well maybe not his exactly, but close to it, seized the day.

  Lying in bed, sweating, Colin can sense something stirring in him, a wave of words swimming into the yellow light of low-wattage bulbs around him. With a lazy arm and hand, he feels for the Player’s by the bed, takes one, lights it. Feeling the short panting breaths of his stoned lungs, Colin takes out his green spiral notebook, uncaps his pen and writes Witches of Leaside at the top of the page. He underlines it. He takes another drag of his cigarette, inhales, and realizes he’s exhausted. He got the title. He needs a little nap now, to dream the story.

  Sally’s parting words have stuck in his mind. He plugs the phone back into the jack, crawls into bed, bunches up the sheet into a ball, hugs it to his sweaty chest, and drifts off.

  LYING ON HER HOTEL-ROOM bed, Claudine dials one last time. It is five-thirty in the morning, the light is pearly white outside her hotel window. She got it all wrong. There’s still no answer.

  ODETTE

  ~

  August

  Wesley is a jumpy driver. He has a skinny neck and long skinny limbs and puffy eyes that fail to read the protective colouring of Odette’s wealth. Instead of waiting for a red-plated regulated taxi to come from Hotel Americana, Odette hailed the first gypsy taxi she saw while standing at the Villa La Mar gates, and now she regrets her impatience. She’s stuck with Wesley in a car that pumps exhaust through the floor, and the heaviness that’s plagued her for the last while is back, pinning her limbs to the car seat. So tired. She wants to mail the letters she wrote to Claudine and Janine, cheery letters telling them she misses them. They never write. They never phone. They never even remember her birthday.

  She has not slept well. She dreamed that a big man was smashing the delicate louvres of their condo with big fists, and there was nothing she could do about it. In the dream, she kept trying to scream help, but nobody heard her. Nobody protected her. She shook Walter awake. “Something’s happening,” she said. “I don’t feel safe.” He told her to go back to sleep in a flat, groggy voice. “Maybe they poisoned the dogs,” she said. “And that’s why they’re not barking.” She’d read about it in The Gleaner, about thieves putting arsenic on raw steak for the guard dogs.

  But this morning everything looked normal.

  This morning she’d looked at the piece of coral she’d plucked from the reef, and felt a kind of secret pride there, that she’d swum with it all the way back to the beach. She decided to go somewhere, anywhere, without Walter. Walter never goes out of the compound unless he’s armed with a list that has at least five items on it. This morning he sat on the bed in his blue boxer shorts and held a large canvas shoe out in front of him. “Need new shoe-laces,” he said. “These are frayed.” And then he wrote shoelaces in his big script on a steno pad. That was the third item on his list, after nose drops and Pepto-Bismol, which he guzzles any time the housekeeper uses spices in her cooking. When there are five items on the list, they take the rented silver Toyota into town, which gives Walter the opportunity to scream at Jamaicans with impunity. In Montreal, he cursed the Pepsi pipsqueaks; in Jamaica, he curses the goddamn lu-na-tics. On these outings, Odette keeps her foot on an imaginary brake, pressing as hard as she can on the floor when Walter passes buses and minivans.

  But now she’s got the gypsy taxi to worry about, and Wesley, who is the first Jamaican she’s instinctively disliked. They are bouncing through the outskirts of town, behind a bus belching black smoke, stopping for chickens and goats and carts of melons and bananas. Wesley drives on the stop-start model, braking and accelerating his w
ay through the peopled road. Odette looks for his eyes in the rearview mirror. Her neck is whipping back and forth, surely he can see what his driving is doing to her. He is looking at her with bloodshot eyes, eyes that don’t see her, so she looks down to the long plush thing hanging from his mirror.

  She does not want to know what it is. It is all a dream, all of it, a technicolour dream magnifying her every fear. In this dream place, where everything grows at an alarming rate, where vegetation has to be burned, fought back, Odette survives by trimming down her own reality.

  Today, before leaving the compound, she had to talk to Mrs. Bryce about her cooking. Mrs. Bryce was sitting at the kitchen table listening to the obituaries punctuated with organ music on the radio. Mrs. Bryce looked up. Odette said, “Mrs. Bryce, my husband.” She couldn’t go on. She suddenly felt naked in her bathing suit. The kitchen is like occupied territory, full of mysterious bits of things wrapped in clean rags, bits of coconut flesh and packets of herbs. Odette tried again. “Mrs. Bryce, if you could please try and cook plain food for my husband.” Mrs. Bryce nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” And then she said, “Di master, ma’am, di master i’ full o’ bile. Pepperleaf wi bruk you bile,” and she handed Odette a packet of herbs. Pepperleaf, presumably. Odette smiled and said thank you ever so much, Mrs. Bryce.

  Odette closes her eyes, grateful for the Valium she took after her shower, leans her sweaty head back, and pretends she is in a carriage, going down an alley of poplars. She tries to imagine something fruity and falllike in the air, to imagine anything that will cut through the cloying heat, anything that will take her out of her sad, heavy self — the memory of leaves burning on Sainte-Famille Street, of apples falling in the neglected orchard on the road to the Magog cottage. The smell of those apples, and how as children they loved to walk on them, to crush the rotten fermenting apples beneath their feet; it was as satisfying as cracking the thin ice of puddles in winter.