by Gail Scott
‘Welcome to Montréal,’ I thought, feeling anything was possible. And I crossed the street to a place that said: BAR / RESTAURANT: LICENCE COMPLÈTE. The waitress held her back perfectly straight and her stomach flat under her pale green uniform. As she stretched over to polish the mirror beneath the red signs advertising CUISINE QUÉBéCOISE: TOURTIÈRE, FÈVES AU LARD, TARTE AU SUCRE, SOUPE AUX POIS, I wondered why French women have better posture. I tried to start a conversation. ‘Uh, je cherche un logement. Y en a-t-il dans le coin?’ I guess she picked up my English accent, because she answered me resentfully: ‘Pour qui tu me prends? Le Journal de Montréal?’ My love, you said I wasn’t modern, but you should have seen me then. It’s true, I took the bus to English Westmount as a temporary measure. The titillating note was what happened just as I stepped off. My nostrils were smarting from the odour of wet fur. Mink, raccoon, muskrat. One guy even had a silver fox hat with the tail still on it. Jane McVitty lived in a brick building that looked like a fort. I rang the bell. As she opened the door and I put my suitcase down on the floor, there was a huge explosion from across the courtyard. Then they interrupted CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada to say the FLQ had blown up the Westmount Armoury. I must have smiled. Back in Sudbury, a couple of striking miners used explosives on a company office when the bosses brought in scabs. At the sound of crackling stone and glass, the faces of everyone in the Ladies and Escorts of the Sudbury Hotel lit up. So I’m standing there, I guess, with a little smile tickling the corners of my mouth. And Jane’s husband, Bill, stops swirling his scotch in his chilled glass and stares at me aghast. Getting control, I say as sweetly as I can: ‘It’s only for the night, I’ll go tomorrow.’
The next morning I took a walk. ’Twas April, and in the wet snow my boots left slushy prints. After fifteen minutes my feet were soaked. Still, walking east on Sherbrooke, I felt so good, so free, I started looking for a café where I could sit and write about it. (I was a poet, my love, before I was with you.) There were only chic boutiques in Victorian greystone houses. Fancy rugs, glasses, lingerie in pink and black and purple. There’s nothing like a woman with lace next to her skin. Very classy, very French. I passed the Ritz. The suitcase was growing heavy. Suddenly the buildings were lower, sagging even, so they seemed to lean together. On a wall in fresh white paint was written: QUÉBEC LIBRE, AMOUR ET ANARCHIE.
I opened the next door. Its sign said: LA HUTTE SUISSE. In the semi-darkness, waitresses carried huge trays of drafts with their solid arms. The guys in the booths were skinny with tinted glasses. Little beards on pale skin. I could see the titles of reading material spread on the tables, Le Monde, Socialisme québécois, Liberté. I could tell this was a hangout for radical French intellectuals. It felt so good. I sat as near them as I could, trying to make eye contact. In the booth across from me was an English guy, some journalist trying to get a story on the new revolutionary generation of Québécois. He really stood out with his short hair and heather-coloured mohair sweater. One of the French guys raised his glass, quite aggressive, and shouted: ‘VIVE MALCOLM X, VIVE LE FLQ.’ Everybody laughed. Then he leaned across to the English guy and asked: ‘C’est vrai que tu travailles pour le PC?’
‘Oui,’ says the English guy, looking uncomfortable.
‘Le PC, veux-tu dire le Parti communiste?’ Everyone was smirking.
‘Non, la Presse canadienne,’ says the English guy. Now he was really blushing. All the others were holding their sides.
I was laughing, too, as I walked out. The April air was damp with spring and hope. Seeing a FOR RENT sign on a basement flat, I went down some stairs to look. Through the window, the floor was covered with garbage. I went up the outside stairs anyway and rang for the janitor. ‘I can’t go down now,’ she shouted. ‘I’m waiting for a phone call.’ A few blocks north, I found another one. It had a mint-green balcony, kind of crooked, where I sat when summer came waiting for Lucien.
Sepia, I didn’t have much choice if I wanted the experience. Because in that particular period, Québécoise was beautiful, leaving a low premium on Anglo women. Also we had a different relationship to time. Or so it seemed, waiting. He had such a beautiful face, with lips that moved easily with emotion under his clear brown eyes. Generally, it was love in the afternoon. I’d put on my black skirt all ready for the night shift at the wire service where they’d hired me as translator. And drink beer sitting in the wide old-fashioned window cavity. Sometimes he didn’t show up for days and the circle of empties joined on the other side of the room. Once he came in and I wanted to say: ‘You’re late.’ But he was standing there in perfect jeans and some kind of a soft brown shirt, his words reaching me in a crooked line across the tense grey air of the room.
‘Bonjour, ma belle, t’es bien belle aujourd’hui. Sit down, I’ve got something to tell you. Mais écoute-moi. C’est assez drôle ce que j’ai à te raconter. I was filling up my tank at a gas station on the way over. When a woman crosses the street from her apartment building and says: ‘T’es bien beau, toi. Pourquoi tu ne montes pas avec moi.’ So I go up there and we make love and just as I’m putting my clothes on, her husband comes in and says: ‘Thank you.’ He’d been watching through a crack in the door. He gave me fifty dollars for my trouble. We’re rich, let’s have dinner!’
I laughed, so happy yet so sad. Loving his decadence even if it hurt. He said I just needed to learn some spontaneity. He’d learned his by racing Formula 1’s. Because if you’re not present every minute, with the speedometer rising like an orgasm (those were his words), you’re gone forever. Sitting beside him in his race car, I admired the way his tight thighs in their well-cut jumpsuit hugged the leather seat on fast curves. Through the slightly opened window, the intoxicating smell of summer dust filled my nostrils. Tentatively I put my hand on his leg. But then lying in the field only a soft-hard point came inside me. In the ecstasy of hayflowers my singing body couldn’t get enough. As if it were being penetrated by a butterfly. He got up and lit an Export ‘A,’ grumpily. Then he disappeared toward the lot of car wrecks along the field’s edge his friend owned for selling parts to car buffs. In the distance you could hear the motors revving on Mont Tremblant’s raceway. The field took on that dusk-dark green I saw in a movie once about a murder in a park. Blow-Up. But no matter how hard they looked on that dark grass they couldn’t see the body. I threw my shoulders back. Who’s scared? This is the city. Far far away from the heat wave magnifying snowdrops and bleeding hearts along Her sidewalk. Recalling the thing She loved, a wedding, and the thing She hated, marriage.
Autumn Leaves
The city. Hot autumn. In an apartment a couple are sitting at a table discussing revolution. Through the open balcony door a warm breath blows a dust ball across the floor. Below, a narrow street of two-storey red brick flats culminating in a mountain with a cross on top.
She’s one of those attractive sixties-type women with small breasts under her T-shirt, tight jeans, and kinky red hair. He smiles at her sweetly although inside he’s angry because she’s not interested in sex recently. She’s frustrated because he leaves his towels on the floor. How can a woman live on the edge if she’s constantly saying pick up this, pick up that? Also she doesn’t like the way he behaves as a lover. Why should his orgasms always be stronger? In her diary it says: Before I was with him nothing good really happened to me in matters of love. Now I am cared for. But with all his sexual demands (or is it my jealousy, never wanting him to go out without me?) I never feel free.
There are dark arpeggios on the radio. With his hand on her knee (she’s the creative one) she writes a poem:
Sunday afternoon
with the coffee cup
between my fingers
passe-moi la bouteille
sec
- - -
on Highway 31 the cars slide by
tri-colour birds are mating in the Easter sky
passe-moi la bouteille
sec
Oh, my love, was that really us? With me at the centre
and you watching from the margin of the picture? So what went wrong? I mean, how did I slip out of focus in your retina? Shhh, cut the nostalgia.
’Tis a grey day. As if time has stopped. But you know it hasn’t because it just keeps getting greyer and greyer until it’s dark. Still, for a minute I wondered, because looking out my little window earlier I saw this woman pass. She was wearing an old checked coat and carrying an orange shopping bag. An hour later I looked out again and she was passing in exactly the same place. As if nothing had changed.
Oh, the water’s getting cold. I’ll have to get out soon. If I can manage just a tickle, it’s a sign I’ll write the novel. A certain rigidity of the body also precedes explosion. The bigger it is the more likely a woman is to cry after. Tears of joy with that window face watching. Don’t be silly. As I said, the window’s turning green. A sort of moss because the sun won’t shine on it until the spring. Now the American president is on the radio. Saying the United States is vastly increasing its nuclear stocks in order to have peace. Who’s worried? As a sympathizer of revolution I believe in les lendemains qui chantent. Why, already a new generation of young men are deploying their progressive feathers in anti-nuclear demonstrations. I met one who got arrested. He had a red pompadour and a pink silk scarf. I wanted to sleep with him but he thought I was too old. We were at a huge rally in the park. The city had ploughed the grass under in big furrows so the people couldn’t sit down.
After it was over, I walked up the street a little farther. Knowing full well I could have looked better. What a mistake that was. For you, my love, were standing at your door, smiling tenderly. I loved your mouth. It drew me to you when the rest of your body cut like a knife. And there, by the side of the wonderful new man you are, stood the girl with the green eyes shaking out an anti-nuke sign. The lucky woman, profiting from everything I taught you. Shh, bitterness will get me nowhere. I thought: ‘Too bad I’m wearing the olive-green jumpsuit. It’s so baggy.’ Maybe that is why the eyes of a former woman comrade who saw me at the rally filled with something I couldn’t identify. ‘Are you happy?’ she asked. I didn’t answer, knowing what she meant by that was something very traditional (despite her red flag with the white dove on it) – i.e., ‘Do you have a man?’ Whereas I’ve found another way to pose the question. Anyway, I’m wearing the faded olive jumpsuit so I walk on the shady side of the elm. That way you and the girl with the green eyes cannot see the wrinkles.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ you say, but your body stiffens. She takes your arm supportively. I feel like saying to her, ‘SOLIDARITY.’ The older feminist talking to the younger. Is it true younger women are more relaxed about progressive sexual relations than us? I hear they cut down on romantic expectations. The better not to worry if their lovers fool around. In the dream you slipped out of my arms and into hers. You were dancing to a waltz. The music was Schubert. I was shocked because they were playing something so romantic. Then I saw her laughing at my projection of how she was feeling. Whereas she knew better than to take the music seriously. Yes, she knew what I didn’t: that by going through the romantic motions while drastically reducing expectations, a woman’s safer. She can live and let live. I knew it, too, my love, but I felt so needy.
Stop complaining. The operative expression is: ‘live and let live.’ S, the Main Bride, who wore a black tam over her wiry auburn hair, had it for a motto. ‘Live and let live,’ she’d say (shrugging her thin shoulders) when I made a feminist criticism of some man. You had that motto, too, my love, but your words were different. ‘Everybody does what he wants,’ was the way you put it. Marie thought the ‘let live’ in ‘live and let live’ was redundant. A woman just had to concentrate on living for herself. Since she’s NOT RESPONSIBLE for the other, there’s no ‘letting live’ involved.
We were in some café last spring when she said that. Due to my depression toward the end of our reconciliation, I can’t remember the place’s name. But there was a poster of a German sailor leaning against a slanting tower shaped like a male member. Ha ha. The leaning tower of penis. His knife was drawn. In my pocket was a picture, my love, of one of your other women (the one I thought important). I drew it out to show her. But Marie shook her head. Said I was being self-indulgent. Said I should read the feminist literature of the decade. Then I’d know my love for you was only a displacement of some deeper trauma. She looked at me, her long-lashed eyes reproachful, before getting up to go. Staring at her expensive clothes, yellow silk shirt, designer scarf, I thought: ‘who’s indulgent?’ Although, I had to admit I’d just written in the black book: Not working. Hooked on soaps. Alain came and read my tarots, predicting a spiritual victory. Feel thoroughly defeated because things seem to be over with you, my love. This time for good. Down ray of hope, I won’t be so lucky again.
Anyway, Marie got up and walked out into the sunset. I should say she walked toward the reflection of dusk mirrored in the glass façade of the French National Bank building. So the sun, also going down behind us, seemed to set at both ends of the street. I stood there blinded by all that light, wondering whose definition of ‘live and let live’ was right. Almost missing S who was coming toward me hugging a construction fence on which it was written: I FLOW FOR YOU, BLOOD OF LEBANON. What a coincidence. Now I could ask her what she means by ‘live and let live.’ She’s a survivor of the street who runs a little art gallery on St-Dominique. Downstairs is a fish shop run by a Greek. He sits and gets drunk among his cod, wondering where all his clients have gone since his other fish shop on The Main burned down. Someone torched the building for the insurance. Now he’s on a little back street where nobody comes. A lot of garbage blows by his door. Dusk was falling and the weather was getting damp. S was wearing a second-hand man’s coat held shut with a belt. She also had a black beret and cranberry lipstick. Gaunt as marble, as befits a former addict. She often jokes: ‘Je suis une fille de la bourgeoisie qui a la nostalgie de la boue.’
We crossed over to the Artists’ Café where the young men sit every day. On the bench an old woman was rubbing her stomach and pointing to her toothless mouth. S bought me a drink. After, I followed her to a bar named Cargo. The hall was huge and dark. People were dancing to a New Wave band of four beautiful women with bright hair and pink cheeks playing rock. Yet moving their hands as if they were harpists. Strange angels. ‘That’s coke talking,’ S said. The crowd was in black so you could hardly tell the women from the men. Suddenly a dancer emerged from the mass, moving like a grasshopper. Skinny legs pointing high, one after the other toward the centre of his/her body. White sneakers rolling inward to the beat of synthesizers. Arms waving ecstatically. Around the neck a red triangle. It was love until I saw what followed. Eve. Yes, in black, too. Rayon skirt swishing round her legs. Dimpled body swinging back and forth to the music. Hard. So the momentum brought her pretty face over her right shoulder. I could take her from behind. My hand reached out and clutched the silky crotch of her tights. In my mind.
‘All the hets come here to get off on the lesbian couples,’ said a friend of S’s. Then the music stopped. Eve and her partner put their arms around a guy. They were all kissing. All three. So free. But there was a commotion on the other side of the room.
A guy violently shoving away a girl who was trying to kiss him. She tried again, this time throwing her thinly stockinged legs around his studded belt. He threw her to the floor. She laughed as if she liked it. Oh my God she liked it. A happy battered woman. As if feminism never existed. S said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a little S&M collusion.
‘You have to live and let live.’
The lens turns. The street shudders. The grey woman steps aside to avoid hundreds of demonstrating youth. She stands watching. She stares up at a window above the Dépanneur Maurice. A man in a bathing suit and a beautiful bronzed chest displays himself behind a window. ‘Androgyny is beautiful,’ she whispers to herself. ‘A hairless chest. But not hair around a breast.’ She laughs hysterically. The demonstration is bea
ring down on her. The street darkens. On the radio they say the earth is getting warmer. But in my heart the times are getting colder. Shhh, a revolutionary never admits discouragement. I just need to know who lied, my love, me or you? Actually, it was your silence that nearly killed me. Toward the end, you wouldn’t say a word. Nights I couldn’t sleep. Dawns, I’d walk the streets. Coming into a parking lot I saw the construction cranes resting their long necks against a sky of pink. The department store washroom wasn’t open yet. I stepped up to a telephone booth and dialled your number. (You’d moved out, but we were still priority lovers.) No answer. Meaning you’d been out all night. Immediately the sharpness in the esophagus. What if at this moment you’re falling in love with someone else? Who? I dial X’s phone. Her voice says hello. But I can’t tell if it’s pleasure-ridden or just plain sleep-sodden. I hang up. Later, in the black book, after we broke up and reconciled again, I drew a thick line signifying pain. So why did I go back if it hurt so much? Unless I needed love’s euphoria.
The novel could be a form of clarification, written through to resolution. In that café on The Main, the hookers are dancing. Then the new man (you, my love) and I step into the gently twirling snowflakes. I notice your classy profile with wire-rimmed glasses held by a string as you light a cigarette. After shoplifting on Notre Dame you smile at me with your beautiful mouth, and say: ‘It’s chilly here, how about Morocco?’ Pretending to be students, we naturally apply for a loan and go. Coming back from abroad we get heavily involved in organizing workers. Walking on The Main I’m aware of the second-floor textile factory windows where women immigrants work in terrible conditions. The exemplary note is how I’ve learned to turn sadness into anger. The better to fight. Because sentimentality is useless to the revolution. I even keep cool when cops raid the homes of F-group leaders. Although after, hurrying under the Park Avenue underpass I hug the walls when cruisers go by, afraid they’re following me. Still, with all that sense of purpose, a person’s really living. We hardly ever sleep. By hot autumn, with your affection, revolution, and even a little poetry, I’m euphoric. Especially in the evenings when we stop our work to drink.