Janet?
Oh, that Janet. A prematurely flabby, vulgar broad (Eleanor’s evaluation), loud, but always cheerful. The crowning glory of whorishness, pronounced Eleanor, who went out of her way to make friends with her, fawned over her until she made her feel ill at ease. Eleanor measured herself and her rivals by the purity, the valour, of the love for the man who was the object of their self-effacement.
“Oh, Miriam, how can I live another second without Philip in this cold, dark world? My agony is killing me.” She has been sneaking off to church again, to L’église du Gesù for some reason. It must have had the right props. Only in church does she find peace now. I have to promise her not to tell anybody about this naughty habit of hers.
Did Eleanor go to church regularly or were her meetings with God always so clandestine? I suspect that, too, was an act. She set the stage, and the stage was a church. She then entered and performed, expecting God to play along. Her Love for God was not Pure, it was utterly mercenary.
There are three letters left. The next, a yellow envelope, was delivered by hand in February 1967. The stamp she has drawn features a coffin and a cross. It’s a childlike drawing.
“Time again for a self-centred letter. Do try to forgive me, Miriam, please, please! Somebody has to, and I know you will. You always do, that’s why I need you.”
She is still in torment because of Philip, whom she has not seen for a while. She fears he has sought refuge with his enduring wife. Or that he is still with Janet. Or Yvette or Helen or Carrie or Yolande. “Is there no limit to the degradation one can subject oneself to?”
It would seem not. Eleanor’s degradation was abject on the grandest of scales and stubbornly so. Never have I seen a human being so willingly subject herself to debasement. And why? In order to prove that her version of Love was more Pure than anybody else’s.
That was when I knew she was lost. Lost to herself, lost to her friends, lost to her family who knew nothing of what was happening. I could do nothing for her. She had no intention of letting compassion stand in her way.
She took to sleeping on the floor below the rumpled bed where Philip, if he had the energy, had blasé sex with Janet, who, like Eleanor, was merely another passing victim eager to save a poet’s soul through human sacrifice between unwashed sheets.
In the morning Eleanor would go down to the dépanneur on the corner and buy milk, eggs, and flour to make pancakes, nutritious food to make the gaunt Philip strong enough for a repeat performance the following night, if not with Janet, then with Yvette or Helen or Carrie or Yolande. Or somebody new. Sometimes the poor man would have to visit his wife for a bit of rest.
Each word in her letter is doubled over with pain. The pain is real. If it was not real before, it is now.
And she reveals the reason for her new torment: she is pregnant. The child is Philip’s.
He had already spawned three children, all boys. There were no doubt others with women forgotten. Men like Philip never do anything useful on this planet, but for some reason they reproduce with the ease of vermin.
“I dare not tell him. Oh, Miriam, how I want Philip’s child! Our love child. But not without a father. What should I do?”
Unfortunately my sympathy had run out by then. That I remember. It’s not something I’m proud of. Nor ashamed. She didn’t really want it.
Second to last letter. The once white envelope is smudged. It has no stamp, real or drawn.
It is March, cold and rainy. Eleanor hates the cold, hates the rain.
Yesterday she told Philip that she was carrying his child, hoping for some miracle no doubt, for her illicit friend God to step out of the shadows and put things to right.
Philip’s response was not unexpected. He became theatrical, derisive, his entire body staging a sardonic collapse. His eyes rolled heavenward in mock horror. He lamented. “Oh, the tedium of life! The tedium of love! The fucking tedium period!” Having thus performed, he borrowed twenty dollars and stormed out.
Whether it is from the shock of his lack of remorse, or something else, five days later Eleanor wakes up in pain. This time the pain is physical. She is having a miscarriage. Afterwards she takes a couple of sleeping pills and sleeps for two days alone in her room. She keeps the windows closed, curtains drawn, “to shut out the sound of children playing in the yard below.”
There was no playground anywhere near. No kids either.
She still loves Philip with the Pure Love that is her nemesis.
With her talent for Love it was sometimes hard to tell the pure from the tainted, the virtuous from the sinful.
Her last letter is dated April 22, 1967. The envelope is the shade of dead leaves and feels just as fragile. The first sentence is a news headline.
“Situation with Philip resolved.” There is mention of a man named Ben who “is a dear, dear friend, who’s been there for me through the entire ordeal with Philip.”
I remember Ben. Normal, friendly Ben. He was a violinist with considerable talent. Yet he was a friend of Philip’s. One of the numerous friends, who for inexplicable reasons always burdened themselves by paying for Philip’s wine and cigarettes, letting him sleep on their couches and puke in their toilets (or on said couches), screw their girlfriends and eat their food. Who would say, “Well, fucking Philip. You know what he’s like.”
Why were they so malleable with him? Was it pity or contempt?
Eleanor longs for summer. Suddenly she wants to live again. She has finally had enough of Love. She now craves Culture, she longs to Travel, go to London and the National Gallery, Paris and the Louvre, Madrid and the Prado.
I wonder if she ever went to any of these places?
In August that year I moved to the West Coast. I flew back to Montréal for a visit the following Christmas, expecting nothing to have changed in so short a time.
I did plan to call Eleanor during my visit, but I ran into her at a party my second day back. The change in her was drastic and complete. She had grown so thin her face consisted of nothing but eyes, new eyes bruised and hard. She was no longer wearing glasses, peering blindly at a world she no longer wished to see. Only sharp, cutting edges remained of her body. When she opened her mouth, her teeth appeared smaller, sharper, rodent-like, ready to bite. Her every gesture was threatening.
It was as if she had annihilated the Eleanor I had known, turned her to dust. The daughter of dust wandering in dust. Is then all that remains of my friend Eleanor the words left behind in these nine letters?
People at the party whispered about how she was slowly killing herself. It was, of course, over Philip. Once in a while he would take her back to further humiliate her, ease his boredom by seeing how low he could make her go. And each time she would bow her head, touch her forehead to the ground like a contortionist, accepting whatever obscenity he chose to dish out, as if he did it out of kindness to help her build character.
Fucking Philip.
No doubt Eleanor suffered, but she considered suffering an Art. Who knows what she got out of it? Who knows which she loved more, Philip or the pleasing image of her own martyred soul?
I was happy that Christmas. My happiness was of a bland and contained nature, but visible all the same. Feelings of that calibre were new to me and I no doubt handled them with inelegance. Three months earlier I had met Anthony, my future husband: he was the cause of my clumsy bliss. Anthony accompanied me back home to meet my parents, and managed to charm them, even my snobby English mother of the bloodline.
Eleanor tried (and failed) to seduce Anthony at the party, cornering him in the bathroom. It was, he said, a cold and uninspired attempt, driven by a need so blind that it was as if she did not even see him. (Without her glasses she probably did not.) The incident left him feeling perplexed and insulted.
I tried not to let her see the pity in my eyes. She would have despised me for it.
When we parted that night, Eleanor gushed her “indescribable joy” over my newfound love, badly mimicking the person sh
e imagined I would have preferred her to be.
It was the last time I saw her.
According to rumours, Eleanor at some point moved to New York in pursuit of something or other. Whatever it was, it was not Philip. He had committed suicide a few years later. I found this out through Ben, whom I ran into on a visit home shortly afterwards.
He shot himself at a party. (What is drama without an audience?) But, as Philip’s wife had reminded Ben at the time, Philip had the soul of a poet, so it was hardly surprising that he came to a sticky end. She blamed his downfall on all the pathetic women who constantly demanded his attention, preventing him from putting the brilliance of his wisdom into immortal stanzas.
“And that bitch Eleanor!” Philip’s wife had become apoplectic at the memory. “Remember? That scrawny, nearsighted bitch! Having the nerve to show up at the funeral! At my husband’s funeral! Did you see the way she acted like she was the widow, dressed all in black, an actual veil and the whole bit, gliding up the aisle with her head bent, hands clasped in prayer? I mean, can you believe the nerve?”
I can.
Was God by Eleanor’s side in church that day? Was His hand on her elbow, steadying her as she walked down the aisle towards the dead object of her Pure Love?
Thinking back, it occurred to me that this happened around that same time that my dreams began. As if Eleanor, having removed her widow’s veil, hovered restlessly in her minuscule apartment, found my letters, perhaps by chance, untied the sturdy twine and, for something to do, read through whatever it was I had had to say. And then — amused or bored stiff, but at a loss — she had an idea and said to herself: “Now, here’s a place to hide and heal my wounds. Good old Miriam, my meek twin, she’ll help me out. I’ll go and dream a more worthwhile version of myself inside her sturdy head.” Knowing I would not have the heart to throw her out.
Feeling used, her last letter still in my hand, I rebelled. I gathered the letters and the notebook in a paper bag, marched out back and hurled them in the garbage container in the back alley. That would teach the bitch.
I had trouble falling asleep that night, turning this way and that in our nearly bare bedroom, attempting to get away from the image of Eleanor’s face the last time I saw her. Those sharp rodent teeth glimmering in the remnant of her face where predator and prey had become one.
At three in the morning I got up, put on my slippers and bathrobe and sneaked out to the back alley to retrieve what was left of Eleanor. Shivering in the damp night air, I hoped nobody was looking out the window to see good old Miriam rooting through the garbage, ass in the air like a full moon.
I found the bag with the letters and notebook a foot deeper from where I had thrown it, pulled it out and scurried back inside. In the kitchen I sat down and put the letters in the proper sequence before tying them together with a length of leftover red and green Christmas ribbon from my sewing box that I had yet to pack. I put these remnants of Eleanor in a plastic bag to protect them and tucked them away in the bottom of the sewing box, secure for the future, put the box in the bottom of a large cardboard box I had left out on the counter for the next day’s packing. The gesture was not so much altruistic as voyeuristic, but Eleanor would have approved of that.
DOING LAUNDRY ON A SUNDAY
* * *
THE TWO YOUNG WOMEN ARE ALONE in the Laundromat. They have just begun pulling staticky garments out of adjacent dryers, oblivious to the synchronicity of their movements, when The Perfect Beauty sashays through the door.
She is not wearing a sign around her neck announcing her as such; it is how they will think of her afterwards. They will do so separately and with vague resentment, never acknowledging to each other that they so much as glanced at The Perfect Beauty as she entered their lives that hot, humid Sunday afternoon.
Her sashay, cocky to start with, is made cockier still by a pair of taupe cowboy boots. She is not wearing any other western accoutrement — a cowboy hat, for example — as might have been expected considering her footwear. Instead she sports a round felt hat with a floppy brim. The brim shivers when her heels slam the floor. They slam hard as if she likes the noise they make. Her clothes match neither the boots nor the hat: she’s wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and a tight pink, nipple-revealing halter stained with what looks like a chocolate smudge on the front. An uninspired, tacky ensemble, but who is going to fault her for that when her beauty is flawless?
The hat’s soft brim drapes an indulgent shadow over a profile so exquisite it spellbinds Katrina, the taller of the two women, rivets her attention to the point that when the brim trembles, so does Katrina, imperceptibly, for that is the exact profile she has always dreamt of one day discovering in the mirror through some overdue miracle.
Having seen such ethereal features only in old movies, Katrina has always assumed they do not exist in the three-dimensional reality she is confined to. To discover otherwise in a Laundromat of all places is disconcerting to say the least.
Her friend Doreen pays no attention to the hat. Not a Stetson, it’s not her kind of headgear. Doreen’s gaze hovers at floor level, glued to the stitched pattern twirling over the boots. She is thinking, her heart leaden, that boots like that belong in stirrups.
This magnum opus of a beauty ought to have been preceded by heralds trumpeting a fanfare, followed by an entourage of fawning admirers tripping themselves in their zeal to kiss her saucy boots. Instead she has only a single yokel in tow, an acne-scarred, scrawny specimen. Maybe a younger brother or some adolescent stray enlisted to carry her cargo, a ripped garbage bag crammed with dirty laundry.
The Perfect Beauty stops by a washing machine to count the change she digs out of a pocket in her cutoffs. Her nails are chipped, but the two women furtively sizing her up pay no attention to such an irrelevant detail. In between covert glances they are too busy pulling hard at their laundry, shaking it roughly, punishing it for something it did not do.
Katrina and Doreen always do laundry together on Sunday afternoons. It’s an arrangement that started some eight months back when Doreen, a pretty young woman, hobbled into the Laundromat on crutches, dragging a canvas bag. The only other person in the place, the thin, pale faced Katrina engrossed in a Marlene Dietrich biography, felt obliged to get up to help the newcomer load a washing machine. The woman on crutches — round-faced and cheerful, a head full of dark curls — introduced herself as Doreen Riley and explained her misfortune: she had recently been in a car accident.
Surprisingly, considering her cool demeanor, the tall attractive woman was quick to provide sympathy. She had once broken her left ankle slipping on the icy sidewalk, she said, right outside her apartment building, so she knew how it felt to be stuck in a cast. She introduced herself, “I’m Katrina Ferguson,” offering the additional information that she lived in the high-rise on Brock Avenue, not very far away, did Doreen know the one? Doreen said she did, but surely such a swank building had laundry facilities?
“Oh, there’s a laundry room, but it’s in the basement and has no windows. A creepy dark place. I had my sheets stolen once, if you can believe it. And by the way, if there’s anything I can do to help out, please let me know.” Katrina did not elaborate that she prefers this Laundromat because it’s always deserted on Sundays.Doreen, being a chatty sort, and touched by the kindness of the stranger, said that she had just two days ago moved into an attic apartment in a house a few blocks south, and yeah, no kidding, it was goddamn tricky getting up the stairs. “And thanks for offering to help. I just might take you up on that.”
Though they have done laundry together every Sunday since, they have to date not exchanged phone numbers.
Doreen’s attic is located on Halifax, in a big brick triplex owned by a friendly Vietnamese family who, judging by the aromas wafting up from their kitchen, spend their entire days preparing and eating various mouthwatering foods. When Doreen is too lazy to cook — about five days out of seven — she happily snorts these aromas while chewing bland peanut butter sand
wiches. She is convinced the weight she is gaining is from the aromas, not the sandwiches.
The best feature of her new home is the skylight in the living room. It gives her the impression of sitting under the stars at night. During the day it floods the room with enough light to enable fourteen potted plants to thrive directly below. They compete for space with a secondhand sofa and a brand new coffee table. Nine of the plants are cacti, some quite imposing. The rug underneath is the colour of desert sand. The walls enclosing the rectangular room are lined with framed posters advertising Westerns, close-ups of various men in Stetsons that obscure the vistas that go on forever behind them. Alan Ladd. Clint Eastwood. John Wayne. Weather-beaten, horse-riding men who are quick with a gun, should the situation call for it. Brave, silent men who know what they know but keep it to themselves.
Doreen is going to hook up spotlights above each poster to illuminate those manly, trustworthy faces at night when she sits under the stars among the cacti watching westerns on her VCR. She is saving up for a DVD player and a wide screen TV to do the scenery justice.
Off the living room is a kitchen the size of a chuck wagon. Tucked behind it is a small bedroom containing a twin bed covered with a Navajo blanket. Above the headboard she has mounted a guitar she doesn’t know how to play. Bought at a garage sale recently, two strings missing, the back cracked, it still looks right and that’s what counts. The ceiling slants like a tent. It does not flap when it’s windy outside, which is a bonus.
Doreen is already so devoted to her attic she has decided never to move again — just as well, as she is convinced, based on experience, that this is as close as she will ever get to her dream.
Doreen is prone to daydreaming.
She has not told her new friend any of this, nor does she plan to, convinced that Katrina would be far from impressed with someone who has recreated the Wild West in the attic of a triplex owned by a food-loving Vietnamese family down the far end of Halifax Street.
Leaving Berlin Page 8