Heroine

  Even if it was Marie I wouldn’t let her in. She’s too snobbish. She doesn’t understand some artists make a choice to live like this. Or if it’s a bill collector for those winter boots, I could just get out and wrap myself in a blanket. Opening the door a little ajar. And when the guy says: Are you Ms. G. S., I’ll say: ‘Sorry, she’s not here.’ That’ll fix him. An artist can’t let the noisy laws of economics distract her from the stuff of fiction. ’Tis late spring 1976, and the heroine is really flying. In fact with all that energy (loved by two, as if when loved by one a woman can hardly get enough) a comrade has suggested her as editor of F-group’s paper.

  Sepia, the problem is, the happiness never lasts. When it has reached its height, you know it’s nearly over. Those were my thoughts sitting on the middle balcony later that spring. When, without warning, after feeling great, I started to feel weird. In front of me people on the mountain were celebrating la Saint-Jean, fête des Québécois. Under the dark leaves the crowd and grass were brightly coloured. All euphoric because it was still generally believed a form of independence would be achieved.

  I sat very still, trying to trace where the apprehension came from. True, my love, I’d been waiting for you for quite some time. But it couldn’t be that, for we no longer had a dependency relationship. Maybe the people out there, with their beer cases and their tight T-shirts, felt funny, too. They just had a different way of showing it. Seeing my agitation, my Greek neighbour and his family, whose flat opened off the second-storey balcony, offered Metaxa. We all sat and watched the gathering patchwork of brightly coloured people cover up the grass. You were probably somewhere out there among the peaked caps, brown skin, halter tops on full breasts. So what? The Greek, who always watched la fête from the quiet of the balcony, handed me another glass. Then said kindly: ‘Let him have his friends.’ Embarrassed, I waved my hand and answered: ‘Oh, it’s not that. I’m preoccupied with something else.’ To prove it, I started writing in the black book.

  June 24: I am sitting here in the style of my mother. Sober flowered skirt down below my knees. Quite thin. Darkish lipstick on my white face. A slight heel on my shoes. Very concerned with my appearance. On the hill are thousands of women in full halter tops. They look so free. I feel absurd. Last night I dreamed my house was on fire. Didn’t really burn, but smoked a lot. It was in a state of ill repair anyway. You, my love, were having a subtle flirtation with some woman. I couldn’t see her face.

  Just at that point the face of D, with its peach-brown skin, appeared on the outside stairs leading to the balcony. Followed by you, my love, and N. Under her well-cut shirt, I saw D’s breast bounce gently. Sensing danger, I immediately rejected it. Solidarity is better than competition. Besides, (although she didn’t show it) she was the one suffering in this situation. I mean, given the major affair between me and N. Still, my love, I couldn’t help noticing how you watched her light her cigarette. And she, rising to the occasion, stood up even straighter. Which wasn’t necessary. She already had the posture of a woman who as a kid was sent to ballet lessons. I loved how in profile the breast hung delicately from the perfect torso.

  We climbed the inside stairs to the third-floor balcony. I didn’t know why, but my face was the blush colour of the sky where the sun sets behind the billboard across the park. D said no to beer, no to coffee. I couldn’t help admiring how centred she is. The way she leaned over the balcony, her black eyes narrowing in concentration as she observed the crowd. She didn’t even notice N lean over and pat my bottom. Ramona Rodriguez was probably like that. Politics first. Below, a group of militant youth started shouting ‘Le Québec aux Québécois.’ D’s likely thinking about what the Parti Québécois will do now that it’s in power. Oppose worker interests, the better to establish Québec more firmly in continental capitalism? Or lean toward the left?

  For some reason, between the four of us the silence grows larger, more embarrassing. We watch the throng spread over the mountain toward a huge pink band shell at Lac aux Castors. We can’t see the large mistress of ceremonies inside it, introducing the first singer of the evening. But from up there in the pink light we can hear her voice, magnified enormously. I turn my head. Both of you are watching D. I can feel the energy of our little quatuor shift to her from me.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ I ask (sharply). Grabbing N’s arm, I propose we go in drag. You, my love, don’t notice, busy as you are admiring D’s large bottom leaning against the railing. Thank God you always say you like your women skinny. At last, with me in N’s leather pants and he in my skirt, we all set out. The music is deafening. Gens du pays c’est votre tour / de vous laisser parler d’amour. D marches confidently beside you. Mommy, Mommy, please tell me in French what’s happened to my name, sung by that redhead nationalist singer people sometimes say I resemble. My arm touches N’s in hope of some acknowledgement. But, through the crowd, I also keep one eye latched to the back of your light blue shirt. Let it go / let it go sings a jazz singer in my mind. There’s so much to feel and be / to love and touch and see right now.

  Under our feet the smell of earth. On every side the press of soaped and perfumed bodies. Tonight’s the night I’ll cross the bar of light. Progressive loving means not controlling others. N and I stop for a moment by Lac aux Castors. A guy has jumped in and got glass in his feet. Now the water’s turning pink. That happened to me once on la Fête de la Saint-Jean. I was on a rooftop with the high school history class from Lively to watch the parade. Except down below there were riots in the street. We had just seen the float with the little Saint Jean and his lamb go by. Then white cop horses were rearing and the crowd was throwing bottles at the prime minister. Somebody shouted: ‘Split, the cops are coming up the fire escape.’ But I’d smoked so much dope I couldn’t move. For there was glass on the roof and it seemed with every step the glass would go deeper in my feet.

  Anyway, N stops to pull this guy out. He takes too long. Because that’s when you, my love, and D escape from my line of vision. Looking up, I know we’ve lost you in the crowd. Unless at that precise moment it’s your shirt I see disappearing with D’s large bottom in a clump of bushes. After looking around a bit, N and I go home. In our bed, my love, N and I sleep fitfully. As dawn comes over the park, I stand discreetly by the window. Expecting to see your shadow on its way home. Feet scuffling through paper and old beer bottles. Pattering heavily on the outside stairs. Opening the door. Calling: ‘I’m here.’ As in any domestic scene of a loving couple.

  But you don’t come.

  Later, you say it’s because you were having too much fun.

  Love’s Eye

  Late November. Unseasonably warm. I’m waiting on the balcony in the fog. Suddenly I see the street lights shut off. (Can a progressive woman sink so low?) I light the fifteenth cigarette. Unable to believe it. Morning again and you’re not home yet. Then just as I’m thinking that your return, the thing I want most in the world, will never happen, a taxi arrives. Flicking on its overhead light as you get out. I love the way you enter a room. Filling the space with your straight back, your wide shoulders. Once I dreamed you wore silver boots. Oh God, I can smell her sex on you.

  ‘What, still up?’ you ask, furious. From the mountain all night long they’ve been playing that interminable waltz. I say: ‘Please, before we sleep, let’s walk in the park.’ Trying to feel okay. After all, you’re home with me. For a moment I feel free. With the wind in my eyes I can keep silent. Not say anything forbidden. Keep a lid on the strain. Discretion in love is all-important. Permitting the mystery to be maintained. Until it occurs to me, maybe next time you won’t come home to me again. D’s so beautiful. (Or is it someone else?) Deliciously round. That night of la Saint Jean, when already I knew you two would later disappear in the crowd, she suddenly said (proudly): ‘You’re so skinny. Chez nous les femmes sont faites comme les paysannes.’

  We cross the park. In front of us passes the poet who loves little boys. Probably coming from a party somewhere. Yes, becaus
e at the far end of the damp velvety green grass appears Québec’s most famous improvisational actress. In a pink silk pantsuit. Her red hair curled over her white forehead. Two magnificent Irish setters straining on a leash beside her. Also, with his long curls blowing back from his bald crown, the actor who later incarnated Riel. You can tell they’re really stoned. So crazy, so free. Ils savent prendre des risques avec le corps. I want to be like them, to hell with jealousy. Freedom is built on generosity. Leaning toward you, my lips graze your ear and whisper: ‘Let’s go in.’ We have to be fast. We have thirty minutes before that little Chilean girl we still look after now and then rings the bell. When you penetrate it hurts. Slowly, less from passion than from habit our skins warm. The orgasm’s not long in coming. Not long and not strong. ‘How was it?’ you ask, collapsing on my chest. ‘Wonderful,’ I answer, almost crying. The doorbell rings. Perfect timing.

  I just need to get calm enough to sleep. First, though, through half-closed eyes, I watch you pull the tight jeans over the flat stomach (and lovely bulge below). Admiring the virility of your body. How without rest it can work all day on increasing shots of coffee. Turning out little black-and-white images for the revolutionary newspaper. The comrades loved that sequence you did on east-end Montréal. The silhouette of a girl with huge breasts on front of the topless bar; the highway being built over smashed two-storey flats; the pretty curtains of the little house next to the city dump. I wanted you to make a collage of them. But you said: ‘The masses need linear to get the message.’ Damn, Marilù, the little brat, is pulling at the heap of blankets you left at the end of the bed, my love, when you jumped out to dress. I guess I’ll get up and take her out. First wrapping her warmly due to the runny nose. The trick is to wear her out, then we can both sleep later.

  Outside the air is leaden grey. We’ll walk to the corner where I sometimes see that woman waiting with her tiny daughter. Nervously rubbing a piece of brightly coloured cellophane between her thumb and finger. While looking constantly to the left. The newspapers blowing about her shins. Eyes rimmed in purple, slightly hennaed hair. Her white-faced kid is usually eating a bag of chips. Tensely amusing herself by fingering the pattern on a drainpipe. Knowing, the way kids do, there’s no point talking to mommy until she gets her fix. There are many kinds of junkies as THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF PIMPS (sign I saw, carried by a former stripper in a feminist demonstration). My love, since you’ve taken up with other women, I can’t get enough unless I have you every minute. But when I told this to that shrink at McGill, a real personality girl with her round dimpled face and short grey hair, she only said:

  ‘Gail, you never ask for love, you only ask for sex.’

  Times are growing colder. Maybe I should’ve asked Marie to close the door when she was sitting there on the nice Indian throw I put on my little sofa. But I didn’t want to obstruct my view of her. I needed to know her formula for success, I should say for feeling good. Back when I cut the profile of a winner, we were sitting on her bed. And suddenly she’s on such a narcissistic trip, she forgets I’m there. Instead she’s pirouetting around the room, cupping her perfect breasts under her cranberry sweater in her hand. Smiling with cranberry lips at her reflection in the mirror. I was so jealous she loved herself like that. No. I should give myself more credit. It was my acute political consciousness that made me ask: ‘Is egoism required for a woman to exist?’ And she said: ‘Hélas, oui.’ And I said: ‘But what about our collective responsibilities as part of feminism and the left?’ She replied:

  ‘On ne doit rien aux hommes de la gauche. Ils ont la mentalité d’hommes petits. As for us, our responsibility is to write.’

  But if a woman thinks only of career isn’t she too male? What about the intrinsically revolutionary female qualities like love and generosity? Except if I’d asked that, she’d say on that score we’ve already done enough.

  From my tub, I watched as her white hand with the curved nails reached for her purse lying on the sofa. Then it extracted another cigarette from its pretty case. Every movement of her arm causing, as usual, an ostentatious rattle of her silver bracelets. For a minute I thought: ‘She’s also going to smooth her hair.’ She didn’t have to. Because she always fixes it so perfectly in the morning, there’s no need to pat or run her fingers through it later. This bugs me. The way she acts as if her shell of elegance could protect her from I don’t know what. Yet it’s part of her essential toughness. Still, watching her sit there like la reine d’Angleterre, I felt like saying: ‘Eh, Marie, old girl, speaking of protecting one’s interests, how about giving the bathroom door a little kick before all the fuckin’ heat flies out.’

  The better to remind her she’s no lady any more than I am. Given her father ran a dépanneur in St-Henri. A distributor of groceries. While mine (after he quit the mine) worked in the supply room of that army bunker outside Lively dispensing ammunition.

  I watched her ringed and braceleted hand put the cigarette to her mouth. She could even blow the smoke out without getting her lips all thin and puckered up. That convent she went to briefly must have given her lessons in comportment. But I needed to know, could a woman present such a perfect surface to the world, yet have a deep and perceptive mind at the same time? I was just about to decide no when Marie astounded me by saying:

  ‘Actuellement tu te prends pour une prolétaire. Mais tu te conduis plutôt comme la reine d’Angleterre.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I almost forgot and asked out loud. She said: ‘C’est ça que je trouve hypocrite chez la gauche anglophone. You live like bums, knowing some relative will offer you a good job when your little crise de jeunesse radicale has passed. Then you expect us Québécois to do the same. Sauf qu’avec la colonisation, un Québécois ou une Québécoise de ma génération ne peut pas compter sur un réseau aussi bien nanti. Une vie mal démarrée est facilement échouée. Autrement dit, vous consentez à notre martyr. Moi, j’appelle ça ENCORE de la colonisation.’

  This pissed me off. But if I pointed out to her my contacts weren’t that great, she’d probably say what she’d said before:

  ‘Ma mère me disait toujours: marie-toi avec un Anglais.’

  I watched (almost pleased) as her shoulders grew round from a second of discouragement. Then her eye looked nearly (but not quite) down at me. And she said: ‘Je t’aime, tu sais. But I can’t stand the way you’re letting your melancholy ruin you.’

  Sepia, that’s how I blew it. Determined as I was not to speak until she took a gander in my direction, I said nothing. When I should have asked my burning question: how melancholic can a heroine be? I mean, can she be modern and still lose face?

  Example, the way I did at that F-group women’s caucus, letting my jealousy get exposed. I’ll never forget it. In fact, it was I who’d pushed for us to have a separate meeting from the men (flashing my feminist credentials at everyone). The better to discuss how two women could have comradely solidarity while being rivals for the limited affection available in one man.

  ’Twas still November. We F-group women filed one by one into the flat of that beautiful comrade from France. And sat in a circle on her dirty rug. (Except D who handled it by not coming.) The place reeked of cat piss. At first, the atmosphere was kind of strained. Finally, a comrade opened her mouth and said: ‘The problem is male possessiveness.’ Then she told an anecdote to prove her lover’s jealousy oppressed her. Another did the same. The comrade from France, holding a cigarette between her pretty lips, complained her boyfriend was too sexually demanding since she took a second lover. She’d had to ask him to sleep alone. I’m nodding and smiling like an idiot. But this isn’t turning out like I expected. Looking around the circle, they all seem so cool, so in control. As early as possible, I get up to go.

  Outside in the dusk, the elegant grey houses around Carré St-Louis are lighting up. A couple of hookers stroll by in their knee-high boots. Another, carrying an umbrella, leans into a silver Buick and gives a wad of money to a pimp. You, my love, will be home w
aiting for a report. And maybe even cooking something nice for dinner. I love such quiet gestures of affection. I walk more quickly. But Natalia (she’s central council) catches up. And starts doing this number on me. While I, to keep my distance, eye the ridiculous pointed breasts in the stiff bra under her turtleneck sweater.

  ‘Eh bien, comment as-tu trouvé la réunion?’

  I know this is a trap. So as we walk along in the quiet winter night I adopt my analytical approach. Alluding to Marx and Freud, reinterpreted in the light of contemporary feminism.

  ‘Everybody there,’ I say, ‘appeared to feel no pain. What were we protecting if not our bourgeois couples? As an oppressed group within the left, we women should trust each other. Instead, we hide our problems to be loyal to our men. Thus playing into the hands of Capital which seeks to divide dominated groups.’

  Natalia’s lip twists. ‘Ouaiii, mais à ce sujet tu as déjà été inconséquante toi-même. I saw you interrupt something very beautiful and spontaneous between Jon and D at Gérard’s party.’ She grins victoriously, her gums showing. ‘Quelque chose de très beau, de très spontané.’

  Oh God, she saw that? Yet, the party room was dark, with comrades dancing. Or sitting on the floor enjoying the warm complicity linking people of the group. For in our heads alone (we believed) stir visions of the future. Except I, feeling weird, went out and stood on Gérard’s balcony, looking down at the lights on avenue du Mont-Royal, the cheap shoe stores, the Habitant hamburger joint, a porn movie house. Knowing full well that in the next room you and D were laughing your heads off, gently touching each other’s arms. That’s the part that got me. The gentleness of your touches. I couldn’t bear watching it. Standing on Gérard’s balcony (below, the neon breast of a dancer blinked on and off). I thought of how I’d told you, on the train going to Vancouver, I was against monogamy in principle. But it was politically incorrect for you to hide your lovers from me the way you sometimes did. ‘Just keep it open and honest and I promise, it’ll be all right,’ I said.