Heroine

by Gail Scott

  What a fool I was.

  Natalia and I leave the square and turn onto newly renovated Prince Arthur Street. Before gentrification, drunks and the left used to sit together in the backroom of a restaurant there. Watching the rain drip through the roof into the soup. It was clear that we could change the world. Now the seams of Capitalism were getting paved under terracotta sidewalks and fancy street lights. Never mind that, Natalia’s eagle eye is watching me. What can I say? Standing on the balcony at that party, I knew, despite our principles, I had to stop you for one more night. Because I just couldn’t stand things going on under my nose.

  Inevitably as the bee is pulled to honey, I had marched through the party crowd and put my hand on your blond muscled arm (wondering why my hand seemed possessive, when D’s right there beside it didn’t). And said: ‘Excuse me, but I’m not feeling well, I’d like to go home.’ Your eyes have tiger spots like Dad’s (it took me several years to notice the resemblance). But at that precise moment, I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the expression in them. I mean, I knew it and I didn’t. D’s head was thrown back with laughter coming out of her big mouth. Suddenly it stopped. In the air an embarrassed silence. Finally you said: ‘So go, you know the way.’ Maybe I’d been too halting in stating my desire. As if I didn’t have the right. But I said, sinking even lower:

  ‘It’s okay, I can wait.’

  All the way home you walked a block ahead.

  At the bottom of the stairs to our little flat, Natalia says: ‘Salut’ ironically. In the kitchen, my love, you’re cooking garlic pork. One of your favourites. I can’t stand the way it spreads grease all over the kitchen. Also the discreet yet questioning smile on your beautiful lips is irritating. What business is the caucus of yours? What is there to say? We begin to quarrel.

  Y, the Tunisian comrade who later became a lesbian, said the same thing happened at her place. He, her lover, had prepared for her ‘un truc très originel.’ While eating it, she picked a fight with him.

  Running hard, the little girl in the yellow raincoat enters the park. The near-bare trees feel like orange teeth in the falling dark. Far behind drifts a sandwichman, his boards clacking something like ‘dare-to-bare, dare-to-bare.’ The tourist abandons his telescope and heads downhill.

  In my little tub I’m shivering. More from nerves than anything. The trick is not to get upset at past errors by giving in to melancholy. It’s just that after we broke up, I couldn’t face losing all the things you’d offered me. I even thought: ‘God it was my one chance and I really fucked up. Why couldn’t I be more accepting of who he was?’

  It was a stupid thing to think. But it was that day last September after I’d seen the girl with the green eyes walking on the mountain. She had her feet in the leaves. And was wearing a Norwegian sweater with a leaf pattern probably knit by some woman in your family. Behind us was the chalet with the wooden squirrels sitting silent in the rafters. Watching her walk with her shoulders back and her feet in solid shoes I felt like gently sparring. Still, walking down the path I knew I didn’t hate her. I just wanted to touch the arms of the woman who was my opposite.

  Now on the radio that Dr. Schweitzer is talking about a patient called Miss Beauchamp, who, due to her difficulty with synthesis of what she knew, developed a double personality. On her wild positive side, she was a distinctively aggressive person. So much herself she didn’t care for rules and regulations. Then suddenly she would get dismal and change to melancholic. This stage was accompanied by an exaggerated respect for all conventions. The creep. Doesn’t he know she maybe started to get like that because of all of the contradictory demands people made on her. I met this women’s bookstore owner who said women often go in drag. She noticed that because the weirdest people would come in and buy the funniest books. Rich matrons who stuffed books on witchcraft in the bottom of their purses. Some old ladies clearing out the shelves on lesbianism.

  My love, I have to admit, for a long time I kind of felt split between two different sides myself. On one hand there was the positive movement of our collective, revolutionary struggle to change the world. This was a feeling of control. Then, suddenly, I would be at home waiting for you, or something, and this melancholic space would open up. Making me want to put that song by Janis, ’Get It While You Can,’ on the stereo.

  Yes, on certain days, especially in late autumn, all movement seemed like that of the hookers dancing in the Cracow Café on The Main. I mean, going in two opposite directions at the same time: first left foot over right; then turning and doing exactly the reverse, right over left. Maybe that explains our disastrous reconciliation last winter. For first we’d broken up and I was flying high, going to New York on a train along the Hudson River with Marie. Outside the wide flat river between its lush muddy banks reminded me of Huckleberry Finn. Coming back into Montréal’s Gare Centrale in my New York raincoat, the sun was shining. It was autumn. And though I didn’t know it yet, underneath a hidden hunger was leading directly to the line of pain. This was recorded in the black book: Oh God, re: this reconciliation. I think you want youth, naivety in me. Because when I project it you feel better. Since I can’t be both naive and the strong woman I was becoming at the same time, I have to fold myself up smaller and smaller. For us to get along.

  Marie was furious when she came into my room just after that and found me reclining pale and tired against the pillows on the rug. She said: ‘Tu m’inquiètes. If you can’t handle his polygamy, drop the whole thing.’ I didn’t tell her that choice should have been made four years earlier. I mean, on that beautiful July morning back in 1976. When we were about to board the westbound train for our Olympic Vacation. And you confessed to me you had another lover (you wouldn’t say who). All the way to Vancouver, I waver between two contradictory aims:

  1. To ignore it and write poetry in this gap of summer air between the endless grime of heavy struggle against the deathly laws of capital.

  2. To get you to stop.

  But what hurts most of all is being in the space between the two. In the interest of figuring it out I buy a black book and inaugurate a diary:

  Olympic Vacation, Montréal-Toronto: Pulling out of la Gare Centrale. Can’t afford to spoil even one beautiful day like this. IfI go on acting such a possessive ass, I’ll end up like a wrinkled prune. So tight. These old conventional love patterns have to be unlearned. Somebody help me fight.

  Now I’m not sorry I gave you a little infection while making love. The seed, planted by me innocently enough, just grew and grew. Ha, your prick is blossoming so you won’t be able to make love with anyone. Shhh. Toronto Stopover: Graffiti near Union Station: IN TORONTO THERE ARE NO CLASSES. JUST THE MASSEYS AND THE MASSES. Then a theatre marquis: No Sex Please. We’re British. A Hilariously Funny Play. Toronto-Winnipeg: Perhaps your difficulty with emotional self-expression will be improved through these other encounters. And what you gain from it will be fed back into our relationship. So there, I should go along with it. Unless this is all part of the dynamic of the dissolution of our love?

  I’m so anxious. This train seems to be going nowhere fast. Yet nobody complains about the two-hour delay in Kapuskasing. No voices of protest against the freezing air-conditioning. When they turn it off the heat pours out. Outside it’s sun-sparked birch leaves, flower boxes on little station windowsills. At midnight a guy opens a novel across the aisle. Four hours later he’s advanced about four pages due to the wild party around him. He looks up and smiles wryly at the partiers every once in a while.

  On the radio, Johnny Cash is singing ‘I Walk the Line.’ Back when love was the only answer things were easier. I keep putting off writing because, because …

  Winnipeg Stopover: Calm for the first time since the ‘news.’ Feeling in love today. Ready to embark plus à fond on the great poetic adventure, i.e., living the contradiction between (the need for) love and freedom. The solution as a comrade says here (I think he’s a virgin) is not to be burdened. Reading the Russian futurists, about
Mayakovsky in his yellow shirt. Out by the lake where we went there were some yellowheaded blackbirds, such as we never see back east. West from Winnipeg: Johnny Cash still on the tape in the bar car. Some Québécois came in wearing T-shirts that said: I’VE BEEN IN JAIL. They’re on their way to pick fruit in the Okanagan. Yesterday while sipping beer, a cowboy showed me a pornographic snapshot with a ruby crotch on it. Then he talked about the devil. A little girl from the east, hiding behind a seat, said she’d never heard of the devil.

  There was a thunderstorm, bright in the night. Lighting the black prairie after the fantastic twilight. Heather hues of purple, white, mustard yellow. The rivers wound round and round. Like snakes. I was hoping the thunder would wake you up. So we could talk about how to combine my well-being with your new relationship. ‘Sweetheart,’ I’d say, gently stroking your smooth arm. ‘We have to talk.’ This made you sleep even harder.

  Sometimes I get so unhappy I can’t talk anymore. Then I think I’m going neurotic. Then I talk and my throat hurts with the words coming out. Or you get upset. I feel like I’m speaking another language.

  This trip is like a long dark tunnel. When we get to Vancouver, I’ll see, maybe, how to be free.

  But this is the city, 1980. A heroine can’t just be sitting on some train writing in a diary. It isn’t modern. As a setting, my little television-lit room is better. On the table sits a package wrapped in red-and-white polka dots nostalgic of the fifties. Marie must have left it. I can’t deny I like her savoir-vivre. Once in her house (I was taking in her glowing pine table, the perfect cream walls, the brandy-coloured cut-glass decanter, and other turn-of-the-century decor popular in the seventies), I blurted out: ‘Why must you surround yourself with so much beauty?’ She answered: ‘Pour me distraire du mal.’ Sepia, at that moment I saw for the first time the terrible sadness in her eyes. And felt I was beginning to know what modern was.

  Some people use little fifties objects of nostalgia to dull the pain. Take those kids running the restaurant called Bagels’ on The Main. They have fifties suits, lime-green fifties Formica tabletops, fifties music, fifties shoes. Yet you can tell by the way they move they keep a distance from the old fifties melodramatic values. All their world’s a stage on which they’re cool ironic players. Maybe a nice touch would be to have the eighties heroine walking into their nostalgic fifties restaurant:

  The heroine, une Anglaise haïe par l’Histoire (for social context), mais aimée par quelques amies, opens the door. On the black glass in white letters is written:

  BAGELS’

  UN DINER [DA-Y-NÈRE] – (the French way to pronounce the English word, in concession to the law which says signs shall be in French only).

  OUVERT 24 HEURES

  She sits down at a green table. The clear oval glass of the window has a red neon. The theme is movement. In the air a bubbly jazz song. A flock of pigeons makes a low circular swoop over the square outside. Under a bright blue sky the leaves are blowing. A Jehovah’s Witness family holds up their booklets beside the iron fence. Older male, kind of heavy. Attractive younger wife in tailored skirt. In the beginning the little girl (all dressed in red) is really enthusiastic. All kinds of people pass: a punk with white hair, a sad-looking larger lady, a guy dragging his bare foot behind him on the sidewalk. But nobody looks at the red, green, and orange-covered books they’re holding up. The little girl glances at her mommy and her daddy. Wanting to tell them what she’s noticed. At the same time wanting to be obedient. The heroine’s observations are distracted by a draft. The restaurant door has opened, letting in a woman with reddish hair almost the colour of her own. She’s dressed in a longish skirt and wearing laced rubber boots. What’s weird is she is carefully carrying (as if it held a bird) a birdcage with nothing in it. She says to the waitress:

  ‘I’m on welfare, I want a coffee. I’ll pay you next week.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says the waitress, ‘we don’t do that here.’

  The redhead’s furious. ‘What’s wrong?’ she says, her voice rising. ‘You jealous?’ Then to the empty cage: ‘Come on, we’re leaving.’

  The heroine trembles a little as she raises her coffee to her lips. Thinking she senses how a woman can end up like that. By being a slave to love until she hates herself. Through the coupole in the painted glass above her table, she sees the woman with the cage disappear down the street. In the background Bessie Smith is singing Nobody cares for me. The heroine likes the paradox: that in singing those words Bessie Smith made herself loved by everyone. As if the poetry in her could help a melancholic woman move forward. Oh, my love, on the trip to Mont Laurier, I clearly saw that option. I mean a woman just has to walk that tense line between the sadness (past) and the beauty (future). But some fiend in me made me do the opposite.

  ’Twas the late seventies and snowing hard. Already you could feel the bottomlessness of the eighties. Coming out of the Métro I see this kid running away from home. For some crazy reason I want to go with him. He’s hardly visible in the thick flakes. Still, he has a hockey mask completely over his face. So tiny there with his light knapsack on his heavy snowsuit. Where is he going, already so far into the city?

  Instead I head home. Worn out, I guess, from the endless stress of holding on to you (while quietly writing from another angle in the black book): These boring years of ups and downs with you may seem useless. But they must give something for my writing. Like this odd feeling once in a while that it has really been you (past) who’s cared and I who wanted out. Yet loaded with guilt I always end up feeling I’m the rejected one.

  But will I find you there? Earlier, waiting for you at the cathedral, I was afraid you were with D. To be exact, it was outside l’Église St-Henri. I’d been waiting for a while. Thinking how as a kid I kind of looked like the red-cheeked girl on the Coca-Cola sign some rebel had tacked on the church’s wall. When you didn’t come, I took my feet wet with November slush into the church and burned a candle for us. You’d have killed me if you knew. Then I saw you walking over the pink snow. An old FLQ manual under your arm. Your baggy pants were blowing in the wind.

  How I laughed. You hadn’t been with D at all. Instead you’d been browsing through a second-hand bookshop. The manual you bought was a collector’s item from the sixties. Full of amateur directions for urban terrorism. Comment faire une bombe. Tu prends du fil. Ça coute dix cents, la valeur d’un Anglais. We repeated to each other that such actions are politically ill-advised. Though sentiments like that will be present as long as there are dominating and dominated people. From the slums of St-Henri (mostly French) we raised our heads to look at the mansions climbing up Westmount Mountain (mostly English). Between the two, separating the oppressed from the oppressors, a huge chasm that the Canadian Pacific Railway trains run through. Some ragged old woman stood down there watching. I said excitedly, leaning forward from the waist, and stretching my hand in a stage-like gesture:

  ‘And there you have the history of Canada in a nutshell.’

  You said you liked me best when I said intelligent, interesting things like that.

  We drew closer in the falling snow. I had on my big hat. Under, tightly tucked, the orange curls. We stopped to look in an antique window at an old painting called Veronica Washing the Face of Jesus. We turned onto St-Henri square. Past some painted gates held closed with rope. The sky was leaden over the houses with their little belfries. You pointed to one in which you said the organization printing press was temporarily located. The door opened and out stepped the girl with the green eyes. For the first time I noticed the dimple in her chin. The two of you gazed at each other lengthily. But rumour had it she’d become a dyke. On the next corner you said mysteriously: ‘See you later, I have to run a little errand.’

  This pissed me off.

  On the métro, then all the way along narrow Marie-Anne, with its flat roofs rising slowly toward the mountain cross, I wonder where you are now. Oh, Mama, why’d you put this hole in me? In the thick flakes, I turn the corner. And ther
e, to my surprise, my love, your sweet grin is waiting in the window of a rented car outside our house.

  ‘Come on, we’re taking a little trip.’

  I climb in.

  The road to Mont Laurier goes over mountains and through forests. It leads in the dark to a log motel with moose antlers over the door. I’m the-quite-happy (although in the corner of my mind lurks the shadow of the other). In our room, you take me in your arms, saying:

  ‘We needed this.’

  ’Tis only after sex on the orange bedspread that I ask sweetly (putting my hand on your arm and sounding – almost shy):

  ‘Does this mean, uh, with you and D it’s finished?’ Silence. ‘I mean, you told me a while back you’re mostly friends, with only a little sex now and then …’ Silence. ‘Is that still true?’ Oh, what a mistake I’ve made. I can feel your tension rising. Finally you answer: ‘In a relationship, as we decided long ago in Morocco, everybody does what he wants.’

  Rashly, I pursue it: ‘But what does she mean to you?’

  You (now your temper’s boiling): ‘I don’t know.’

  This really scares me. I was hoping for ‘not much’ or something neutral. Desperately I look around the room. Varnished log walls, a pale knotty-pine dresser, and a mirror surrounded by the same material. I’ve got to get control. Now that I’ve made you furious. And I, I’m upset because whenever we’re together she’s there, too, whether or not she’s mentioned. If I fuck this weekend up she’ll win points. Besides, a free woman isn’t jealous or possessive. Stroking your lovely hair (it still has a blond Northern European light in it), I say: ‘Sorry, we must both be overtired,’ and leaving you, go downstairs.