by Gail Scott
Outside, the Côteau Landing Drum Corps passes.
The lens turns. In the chalet on the mountaintop they’re playing an interminable waltz. A flake falls. The tourist at the mountain lookout raises his collar up. Behind him, two pigeons are strutting on a stone railing, her first, him after, SHE hops around and struts the other way. HE follows. The scene repeats itself. She’s really getting into it, all that attention is so flattering. In fact this time she’s going to let him kiss her. She stops, ruffling her feathers and puckering up her beak. And turns to face him. But there’s no one there. He has flown off in pursuit of someone else. And she’s left looking foolishly aroused. Thank God (she thinks) nobody saw.
There’s going to be a storm. I love a fall of snow. In the silence of white is the element of safety. Also, for entertainment, I have the television bubbling in the corner of the room. Watching from my tub through the open bathroom door provides a nice distance to the decadent eighties images on the screen. On the radio Janis is singing that for losers freedom’s just another word.
Of course, a person doesn’t necessarily understand the deep meaning of such a phrase immediately. For at the time, my love (hot autumn, circa 1975), I thought freedom must mean having you and our other lovers, too. I even wrote a paper called ‘The Issue of Equal Access to Sexuality for Women in Non-Monogamous Heterosexual Couples.’ When I finished delivering my paper to the group, Comrade X got up and said, naturally, no one denied the principle. ‘Mais ce texte n’a rien à voir avec la politique. C’est plutôt hystérique.’ But standing there against the black cop-proof curtains in the storefront headquarters of the revolutionary organization, I was sure certain comrades found it relevant. Including you, my love, your face red though smiling approval in the autumn heat. Also, I was looking pretty good. Loose flowered blouse, well-cut jeans (bought in Europe). In the twilight my curls probably were magnificent.
I answered Comrade X: ‘Engels shows men have been polygamous, while expecting monogamy of women. This is oppressive. Things haven’t changed as much as you think. Therefore the issue, as all issues of oppression, deserves political debate.’ This seemed reasonable. I added: ‘Starting with a women’s caucus. Oppressed groups have the right to discuss their problems away from the oppressor.’ Comrade X was furious.
Then we all went into the street. Walking beside you, I marvelled at how you seemed so much better than other men. Yes, with the warm breath of autumn blowing on our faces, everything seemed perfect. Now I could surely be a woman who maintains her equilibrium. I said to you: ‘We’re lucky to have the politics to back our daring choices.’ You said you found me beautiful. Later, making love upstairs, it was exceedingly hot. Your member rose so high, so white in the night, I repressed the evil thought you were trying too hard. But you said (noticing the glint of humour in my eyes):
‘I really appreciate your new open attitude. Actually, for the moment, I’m not really interested in anyone but you. As long as it’s clear a person does what they want.’ Squeezing my arm and turning out the light. Then we were really going to it. Unfortunately, due to a siren screaming outside the window, I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t relax. A voice on the sidewalk said:
‘Kill the cat, the one she likes.’ It sounded like the landlord with the clubfoot. Most of the flowers in his shop were plastic. I learned later he was getting back at Evelyn, the janitor for our building and another one on The Main. Because she would never answer the door. She’d just lie there on the blue satin bedspread with a cat nuzzling on her stomach, and call out: ‘I can’t go now, I’m waiting for a phone call.’ After a while, we decided to give up. The sex having promised more than it delivered. Around the corner, Glen Miller’s Restaurant was nearly empty. Feeling your discontent fill our booth, I tossed my hair and lit a cigarette. Across the table, you looked the other way. The door opened and that filthy grey woman came in. Of all things, she held a herring in her hand. We also got a whiff of October heat and dust. So painful, so euphoric. I pushed my plate aside and ordered coffee. On the jukebox they were playing a jazz version of ‘Autumn Leaves.’ The door opened again, and in came this woman I knew from Lively.
‘Why, Kay, I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age,’ I said, feigning pleasure.
You, my love, were taking in her long blond hair and pale middle-class skin (her father’s management at the mine). As she slid in beside you across the Formica table. So that I got the profile of your cheek turned toward her the way you do when you’re interested in a woman. Personally, except for that lecherous space between her teeth, she reminds me of a nun. She scans the menu (taking her time while the waitress shifts from one foot to the other and back again). Then says to us:
‘Listen, my lover’s flaked out on the waterbed. But he has good dope and a great record collection.’ (Her voice sounds gravelly, considering the face is supposed to be that of a pink angel’s.) ‘So why don’t you come over?’
‘Okay,’ I think. ‘Tomorrow.’ Tonight we have to get to bed early. In the morning we’re selling F-group’s paper outside the hospital. ‘Tomorrow,’ I say out loud.
‘Oh, how about now?’ chorus both she and you, my love, at the same time. Laughing as people do in incidences of complicity. If I say no you’ll just say: ‘Okay, I’ll see you later.’
So we go out into the velvet night (I, clothed in a small smile). Above us the round moon climbs cheekily across the blackened sky. My love, you’re always wild when the moon is full like that. Behind us, the restaurant owner shouts: ‘Get rid of that female impersonator.’ He means the grey woman. The busboy pushes her out and slams the door. It’s 1 a.m. Warm leaves rush along the sidewalk. On balconies and front steps people escape the heat of their apartments. In the Hasidic neighbourhood (where we’re walking) the bearded men move slowly. Wearing felt hats and silk suits despite the heat.
But you two are walking quickly, talking about a film called Sacco e Vanzetti. In the night light, Kay’s blond hair glimmers down her back. Following behind, I can hear her say she hated the execution scene of the two American anarchists. As she walks, her milk-white tits are no doubt bouncing under her pink T-shirt. Under her perfect jeans her bare feet are thrust in leather sandals. At school she always had the whitest socks and panties. You listen carefully as she explains how useless and politically unfruitful the sentimentalism of the execution scene is. Whereas a good political movie should bring out the fight in people. I say nothing, being a person who cries at movies.
Funny how I remember the number on Kay and Barry’s door: 6264. And the blackness of the leaves hanging so heavy over the sidewalk that the Hebrew school with the Star of David across the street is obfuscated. Barry’s on the waterbed. His head leans against a crazy piece of plaster-moulded flowers on the wall. (Their all-white, old-fashioned flat is full of crazy details, typical of Montréal houses from the early century.) On the stereo Jagger is singing ‘Dancing with Mr. D.’ About a guy in a graveyard. Barry passes us a joint. On the window the curtains flare open in the heat. I could get into this. The avant-garde red-headed woman who’s ready for anything. A person just has to let go of her hang-ups. My eye runs up to the ceiling where plaster cherubs cavort across the roof. Kay, who’s already reclining on the undulating bed, invites us to join them. No. I mean, first I want to look around.
In the room off the balcony is a sofa and TV. I lie down, trying to focus on the euphoria. Everybody does what he wants. Now the Rolling Stones are playing ‘Angie,’ about a guy who wants to say goodbye. Then I must be dreaming because I walk up to you, my love, through a crowd of dancers at some party. Elsewhere in the dream, She is sitting on the veranda waiting. But when She sees you and Kay dancing cheek to cheek, She stands up from her rocker and says: ‘Kissing leads to intimacy.’ You, my love, turn white. It’s Kay who faces Her: ‘You might as well know, for a long time there has been sexual tension between us.’
How long? I sit bolt upright on the sofa. All is quiet in the waterbed room. What are they doing? A progressive no
n-possessive woman wouldn’t interfere. Yet in a flash I’m standing there. Things could be worse – your clothes are still on and Kay, in the middle, has one of her legs entwined in the leg of EACH man. Mick Jagger is singing ‘Time Is on My Side.’
Humiliated as I am, I try to look natural. Turning my pretty profile with the kinky red curls to best advantage, I say: ‘Uh, sorry to disturb you. But, Jon, we have to talk a minute.’ In the kitchen, with the back of my chair warming against the water heater, I use anecdotes to show how Kay’s mother, the boss’s wife, was particularly haughty and unfeeling to miners’ families back in Lively. Wearing a new mink coat to church in the middle of a strike. Everybody hated her.
You say: ‘So what does this have to do with Kay?’
I open my mouth to explain. But just then she walks into the room, followed by Barry. Soon we’re all laughing and drinking coffee. In fact, I’m thinking maybe I exaggerated the whole business. Because everybody’s acting as if nothing happened. That is, we three. As for you, my love, for some weeks after, your face is white and thoughtful. Of course, I’m very nice. Constantly reassuring you Kay’s an exception from our general rule of non-monogamy. Given she’s from Lively. Little by little, we get the contradiction covered.
At last, coming home on the bus one day, I watch the clouds bank quietly in the sky and think: ‘Things are finally fine.’ (Even if I’m still picking in a corner of my mind at how a woman can be progressive while defending her own interests.) The bus crosses Dorchester. Past the exotic butchers and the strip joints. On the corner of Ste-Catherine and The Main stands a hooker eating a sundae. Waiting out a few flashes of rain. At home, my love, I find you and Barry at the kitchen table. I take off my beret and fluff my curls. A satisfied woman, no longer embarrassed by past errors. Except B says sarcastically: ‘So you’re a REAL COUPLE, eh? That’s like money in the bank.’
Immediately I feel your restlessness.
Later, in bed, I say: ‘We should have told him, quality doesn’t come in numbers.’ You reply: ‘Yeah, but you can’t force it either.’ With my caresses you start to relax. You have skin like a woman’s. No hair on your chest and soft shoulders. I also love your mouth. Soon sex will do its work, there’s no need to worry. Moving from that rooming house on Bishop to this flat on Esplanade is proof of your commitment.
I butt my cigarette and cough.
Life goes on together. Breakfast, dinner, supper. ‘More coffee?’ I ask. Butting another cigarette. And taking up my pen to write. It’s easier when we’re harmonious. Your spotted eyes are watching me. I bet you’re thinking: ‘I told her not to smoke so much. At least it keeps her skinny. I love the way her small breasts make tiny points under that T-shirt she’s wearing. With clouds floating back and forth across it like in a blue sky. And under her tight jeans, that incredible bum. Damn it, just when I start to want her, she begins to work. She’s stubborn all right. I’ll put my hand on her thigh. That often gets her. Sometimes if I just absent-mindedly run my hand along her leg, she’ll get into it. Now she puts down her pen for a minute. I guess she wants to show me her poem’:
Sunday afternoon
with the coffee cup
between my fingers
on highway 31 the cars slide by
tri-colour birds are mating in the twilit sky
passe-moi la bouteille
sec
- - -
green shoots force through ice
sap in veins maybe it’s
unisex for me
two-one can’t
the telephone put a cross
on the road touche pas
the lode is heavy + ripe
with frustration
II
(I Was a Poet Before I Was You)
The first day of spring. March 21, 1976. In the blue dusk the cross shines from the mountain over our little flat. Everything’s okay. Earlier, I had a little trouble concentrating on my writing. I went to the park where there’s a water reservoir. They just put it in, I don’t know why. That crazy grey lady was leaning over the edge. In the brown reflection her tangled grey hair down to her shoulders looked like vines around her beautiful face. She’s lucky. All alone like that with no worries. When my work gets disturbed by your slamming the door or hanging up the phone, I wish I were like her. I want to break out completely. What scares me is the intensity of my anger. How ready I am to blow up the edges of my existence. For nothing, really.
No doubt it’s the weather. These spring nights, the air’s so erotic. Also, at least once each March or April, a suicide swings from a branch in the park. Earlier, I felt great walking on The Main. Wearing the pink lenses I call my glasses of objective chance. They help me do that little surrealist exercise aimed at FINDING THE STRANGENESS IN THE BANAL. Not that it’s hard around here. I’m strolling along in the cool bright morning. And my eye registers a round kid in a fur coat and fancy trousers. Very fancy, brocade almost, as if from another century. Trotting along the sidewalk beside his father who’s carrying a life-size doll. Some little hockey-playing jocks stop their game to stare. An artist has to be receptive to anomalies like this. For they break through the hypnotic surface of our media-determined existence. As harbingers of the future, due to their power to change consciousness.
I walk on. My special glasses see, in the window of a photo store, a picture of a girl and a soldier holding hands under a big tree. But the soldier is X’d out and underneath is written: Ecartez le soldat. In the next picture the soldier is effectivement écarté. There’s just the girl. What I like is the anti-militarism of the sequence (for there’s revolt in Portugal). Also, the refusal to acknowledge the soldier’s tragedy. Surrealism hates nostalgia, a key ingredient of war. (But where are you, my love, this minute? And why are you so angry?) Never mind that. I have to be prepared to take what comes. Letting each passing minute bear its fruit. A chance meeting of two lovers, as of two images in a poem, produces the greatest spark. Like André Breton who by chance met Nadja and took her as his génie libre. The better to see the world through the vision of her madness. Then he wrote a great novel. Except I don’t like the way he used her. Oh, I’ll have to test the guys in my surrealist group on the women’s issue.
‘Speaking of anomalies,’ I say (later, as we’re sitting around the table in their apartment on St-Denis), ‘speaking of anomalies, what if you’re going along a sunny street. And suddenly from a dark alley this jewelled hand comes out. In a black glove. And pulls you in. Then it’s, uh, rape?’ Looking at me with his red-spotted face (he has some nervous disease) and round John Lennon spectacles, R says, really embarrassed: ‘A person should probably know self-defence.’
I keep walking. Passing shops and delicatessens. Montréal Lyrical Linen, Schwartz’s Smoked Meat. In Schwartz’s window, the smoked chickens are juxtaposed on the reflection of a leftover St. Patrick’s float that’s driving up the street. Its tattered gold paper banner reads: LET TRADITION BRIDGE THE GAP. What a collage we could make by cutting the word ‘TRADITION’ and replacing it with ‘SEDITION.’ Not, of course, forgetting the chickens. I breathe the spring air and smile like Mme. Lafargue. Why not knitting needles, too? The need for emancipation of the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course. To end up mingling with the necessity of general emancipation. In this process the artist’s voice at first seems a crazy song. But not for long.
I descend a hill onto a dark part of The Main. From a Tourist Rooms’ courtyard steps a tiny thin man. His face is crooked, like in a crazy-house mirror. He’s wearing a children’s snowsuit jacket, only bigger. I turn east and climb some cobblestone steps into an alley. Surrounded by greystone apartments and a fire station overlooking St-Denis. I knock on a door. Pierre steps out of his black bedroom to let me in. On the adjoining kitchen table is a poem he’s written. It has light in it, glinting off coffee spoons. And the alienation of love. Not the soap opera of the heterosexual couple, but love as in the son of a poverty-stricken Abitibi woman who tried to gas her kids. I’m e
nvious he can write from within all this. I mean, at the point where the personal joins the need for a Québécois revolution. Even the view from his kitchen is pertinent. Looking as it does through bushes down onto the small cafés, librairies rouges, new restaurants, and the dope pushers of St-Denis. At the stove, Mary, Buffalo’s Queen of Scots with the wild hair, is making her fifth pot of espresso. The first time she saw me she poured me a cup and said (giggling): ‘Better than a shot.’ R’s tousled beard appears from his room, named, by him, Nagasaki. A new surrealist comes in, very young, his white face and black tam signifying the desired message: ‘J’arrive de Paris.’
We all go out. On the sidewalk a small dark woman with long curls twirls round and round, ecstatically. Like one of those tiny jewel-box dolls. After a while, she comes into our café and orders coffee. Smiling with her red lips, the red barrette holding back her thick hair as she turns her head slightly toward admirers. At our table, R is tossing a coin up into a dusty ray of light. We wait as it comes down on the map of Montréal spread on the faux-marble tabletop. Pierre leans his shoulder next to mine. Sex is in the air. And coffee bubbles. And jazz music. By the fire-place are gathered some frozen coke junkies.
R’s coin comes down on the map. In our game, la cartographie du hasard, the person goes where his coin lands. It could be anywhere in the city. Later, we come back to the café with automatic poems we’ve written in the neighbourhood where Sister Chance has sent us. Voyeur that I am, I want to go east. Where the tiny restaurants and little red brick houses are as yet ungentrified. Last time, on rue de la Visitation, I saw a courtyard opening vagina-like on a middle-aged woman tottering on platform heels. Clown-faced and holding a balloon. What was she doing there? Around her, windows with lace curtains covered with little bags. Poches à Bingo, said the sign. Behind us in the street, the thin legs of old ladies waiting for the church door to open under the shadow of a cross. I loved the dominance of femininity. But R said my text was full of symbols of despair. What seemed exotic to the colonizing nation was often a representation of oppression.