Heroine

by Gail Scott

  The empty lounge is decorated with stuffed birds. I push a table near the fireplace. Feeling terrible although a resentful corner of my mind says it’s okay to insist on reassurance. No, no, that’s not the way to win. Behind my head the stuffed eagle, some owl that’s almost extinct now, and a pretty blue little warbler watch. I just have to Let it go, let it go, as the jazz song says. But what if you love her more than you love me? With her jet-black hair and her breasts so white. In the dream, my love, she was floating through the room naked on her stomach and you floated right out after her. When I told it to the shrink at McGill, she said:

  ‘Ha ha, Gail, she’s really the temptress, isn’t she?’

  The little warbler has tiny eyes, so bright, yet painful. Why do I spontaneously identify with (her?).

  The grey woman sloshes through a piss puddle and climbs some stairs. In the park the little girl crouches in the children’s climbing box. Panting heavily. Her warm crotch touches the cold ground. Among the branches the sandwichman flutters like a lost bird.

  From my little tub now I can smell the incredible aroma of coffee. I’ll drink some soon because my widow’s peak’s about to quiver. Then I can get out. Oh yes, white froth, it’s coming coming – please stay warm as a sperm river. On the radio Janis is singing that she’s tough, so take a little ‘Piece of My Heart.’ Not too feminist, due to the era. But you could tell, by the way she moved onstage, she was coming on to women, too.

  Except yesterday I became afraid feminism as an issue was being superseded by hunger again. The scene was across from a café on The Main where I was drinking my second cup of good espresso. The door of a little flat opened and they threw a tenant out. He had two bags, recent sneakers, and a thin but neat blue nylon jacket. High Indian-looking cheekbones like my brother. In the face I recognized the tension of a man who feared no matter what he did, he would never make it. Standing on the step he doused a cigarette. Carefully against the wall before he put the other half of the butt back in his pocket. Then picking up his bags he walked south.

  Maybe he’s a tragic personality. Marie tried to put me in that slot once. ’Twas the late seventies (not long after Mont Laurier) and we, my love, had just decided to live apart, the better to be ourselves. If anybody asked, we had an answer: PRIORITY LOVERS WITH SEPARATE RESIDENCES. Anyway, Marie came into my flat on Esplanade. I’m sitting on the white rug, knees sideways, very thin in a pale-blue sweater and tight jeans. With a blue band around my forehead holding my wild orange curls. And she says: ‘Mon Dieu, tu es belle quand tu es triste.’

  I have to admit I found that kind of weird. To look so cool when I was behaving so unmodern. For, glad as I was to see you move (due to the terrible accumulation of fatigue from waiting up at night), the quietness of my empty room was disconcerting. Sometimes I’d do this shameful seduction dance when you dropped in. Letting my pink forties-style satin bathrobe slide off one shoulder until you couldn’t resist. You loved the line leading from my shoulder to my neck. On those particular nights, we had a lot of sex. Or else I’d do the opposite and pick a fight. A very tense evening (I wrote in the black book). Partly I brought up a lot of shit after discovering there were more in your life than D. You were going on about how important the girl with the green eyes was to you, how it’s a friendly but very physical relationship. Blah, blah.

  Sepia, the truth is, I’d sunk so low that at the precise moment Marie came in, I was in the act of throwing the I Ching. So obsessed I couldn’t bring myself to stop and kiss and hug her (although anticipating the sweetness of her presence) until I’d read I Ching’s answer: You are powerless and powerful. Deep down, friend may love you more than you love him. But he is currently a spoiler.

  We took our coats and went out. Walking beside her in the January snow I suddenly feel better. Even calm, content. The big flakes falling almost veil the lit-up triplexes along the sidewalk. And in the cold air, as we move close, I catch a whiff of the impeccable grooming under her red cloth coat. Why, despite the cold, she’s probably wearing perfume high on her thighs this very minute. Oh, the beauty of Québec. Of course, due to semi-colonial infrastructure, the pollution is abominable. I was thinking of writing a children’s book about a small bird that lost its song on account of the air quality. What I missed, my love, in periods when you and I saw each other less, was being able to share my little projects immediately, spontaneously with you. This very morning when I saw the large sticky snowflakes adhering to the dirty pane, I wanted to phone you about my idea. Knowing you’d be impressed by the direct message in it. But what if you weren’t alone?

  We turn onto Park Avenue. Through the swirling snow I can see an owl on an upper sill of the meeting hall where we are headed. The strange note is, it’s been there since that Trotskyist War Measures Act meeting into which I accidentally stumbled. I remember the speaker behind the table saying: ‘This act proves that when you scratch the surface of bourgeois democracy, you get totalitarianism,’ just as I sat down. Then something made me look toward the window. And there was an owl sitting there with strangely stiff feathers. The speaker paused and said: ‘Camarades, I’d like you to welcome the member of la Gendarmerie Royale who just joined us.’ Sure enough, a guy with the only short hair and pressed shirt in the place was entering. Everybody turned and jeered. After, in the bar, a famous félquiste recently out of jail sat next to me. He had a beautiful fur hat and clear blue eyes. Later, they found him murdered (mysteriously) in Paris. On the way home that night I noticed the owl was fake.

  Marie and I enter a restaurant for takeout cappuccino. At least I do. She says: ‘Non, merci, j’ai déjà pris mon café.’ I can’t see what difference that makes. I mean, two coffees never killed anybody. While the Spanish waiter whips the white foam over the fragrant steaming cup, she leans against the bar and watches me carefully.

  We cross the street and climb the stairs to the meeting room. Opening the door, a disturbing mixture of perfume, fur, and wet leather fills our nostrils. The place is now a feminist drop-in centre, all carpeted and cushioned. I sit on the floor, leaning against the knees of a large lesbian who’s sitting on a sofa. She immediately begins to stroke my hair. The subject is La créativité des femmes: rapport entre le corps, le quotidien, le langage. I love their openness. A woman called Louise gets up and says even among her heterosexual friends, many have temporarily given up relationships with men. I prick up my ears. Feeling there is something very avant-garde about this statement. Also, says Louise, pushing back her permed blonde Afro-style hair, some feel we women should take total power over children (denying their paternity), the better to create a truly subversive community. One thing was sure: to maintain solidarity among themselves, the sisters in her particular group refused to abet male power by sleeping with the lovers of each other.

  Sepia, I like that so much I almost get up and cheer. Except the lesbian who has her hands on my head is shouting mockingly:

  ‘T’en es juste arrivée là. Ce sont des choses que nous autres lesbiennes savons depuis toujours.’

  I’m trying to adjust my mind to this even more radical-feminist line, when a woman with black curls and high-heeled boots says, a little timidly, that she really likes men, especially sex with them. It’s extremely rare for her that penetration feels like aggression (as the other sisters claim).

  ‘Too bad for you,’ another lesbian shouts. ‘Now when are we going to talk about our relationship to language?’

  Leaning forward, very excited, I say women must have a different way of speaking BECAUSE OUR LIVES ARE DIFFERENT. Somebody says Virginia Woolf wrote almost the same thing decades ago. But my words keep tumbling out. I say maybe we feel resentment toward men because there’s deference to the male in all sectors of society, including the left (a few boos). But this obvious exclusion at least points to the possibility we have another place to speak from (I got this from a book Marie lent me). And understanding this might even alter syntax. But it’s a collective process that will take utter concentration, hence t
he necessity of solidarity around issues like monogamy.

  Marie’s head is cocked, listening carefully. After in the quiet street (the snow has stopped), she says my speech was ‘très beau bien que pas spécialement nouveau.’ We keep walking in the damp silence of Park Avenue. My euphoria is phenomenal. I take her arm and lean my head upon her shoulder. Feeling like a new person. She opens her pretty mouth, about, I think, to praise again.

  ‘Gail,’ she says. ‘Tu ne prendras pas en mal ce que je vais te dire?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘J’ai compris ce soir qu’est-ce qui est tragique dans la vie d’une femme. Je l’ai compris, car je l’ai vu très clairement chez toi.’

  ‘What?’ (as nonchalantly as possible).

  ‘Tu sembles incapable de faire concorder la vie dont tu rêves avec celle que tu vis maintenant. You almost said it earlier: it’s as if the words or maybe even the syntax have to be invented to close the space between what you’re living now and future possibilities. Your life is an illustration of this problem. Yes, with you it’s very obvious, very painful.’

  She has no business putting me down like that. I tell her I disagree with her use of ‘tragic.’ That in modern times, tragedy has gone beyond the level of the individual to the human race. Why, now it’s proven that the American administration wants limited nuclear war, not peace.

  ‘Precisely,’ says Marie. ‘The Americans are caught in their own monologue. So they can’t see the way forward. Something we women have to be careful to avoid.’

  Yeah, well, I learned long ago how to deal with that. To see the way out of any situation, a person just keeps checking her performance from all the angles. So she doesn’t make the mistake of that kid in 1960 who wanted to win the SAVE OUR FORESTS poster contest. The kid worked all day, coming up with a great slogan. Then using the words to make a beautiful design in the allotted space. Carefully measuring the spaces between every letter she’d created. Colouring it so nicely with a little illustration on the bottom. Stopping only once when they came to take the school photos. But at four o’clock the teacher stood by the kid’s desk, looking down, and said: ‘It’s very nice but you’ll have to rip it up.’ ‘Why?’ asked the kid, tears flooding into her soft brown eyes. ‘Because your BUT YOUR BUTS doesn’t mean a thing. The butt you mean is spelled with a double T.’ Walking home in the snow past cans on the maple trees to catch the dripping sap, the kid wondered if some essential fault in her had made her take beautiful care of certain details while forgetting the essential. Her father hated the school picture. Couldn’t stand the way she’s biting her lower lip.

  The tourist turns onto The Main. It’s 6:30 p.m. Through the slant of snow falling he sees the abandoned doll Babe Ruth in front of the sausage shop. Of course he doesn’t know it belongs to Anthony Surtado whose father said: ‘What are you? Some kind of fag with his prick tied back? Get rid of that doll.’ On the frozen ground of the children’s climbing box lies a yellow raincoat. The little girl (Anthony’s friend) runs through the dark. At each breath her heart leaps painfully into her mouth. The tourist keeps walking. A guy comes out of yet another tavern. His pants are wet. In the theatre version they put a balloonful of water under the actor’s belt. However, the actor decided he wanted to really pee in public to see how it felt. As the hot pee hit the stage he nearly fainted. Because of course he couldn’t stop it. Surrounded by horrified mouths (they seemed horrified but maybe they didn’t even really notice) he felt as if time had locked.

  A heroine locked in time could be the ruination of a novel. Sitting in Bagels’, the heroine seems to think of time as moving more like in music than in a storyline. For she always wakes up with his perfect body glowing like the silver of illusion in a corner of her mind. While in another corner glows the free woman faintly outlined in the future. Even while still with him (therefore lacking distance) she wrote of this contradictory sonatina in her diary: Winter. Return of light (snow) and inspiration. And the sad-sweet combination of you and me in bed. Warmth, then battle. What is this revolt in me that must destroy (half-baked) love? The question is, if she’s fractured over time with the inner self shining bright and dark like that, from what angle can a person start the story? Maybe I could do like those kids down in Bagels’, pretending the angle is back in the fifties. One of them wears a dress (she also has bobbed hennaed hair) like Mother used to wear. I saw it in a picture. She is standing in the shadow of the station. The wool dress is dark green with some kind of gold studs across the chest. Her high cheekbones tinted pink. And a wonderful gold light shining out of her dark brown eyes. She’s leaning against our future father who’s in a dark uniform. The uncle who showed it to me on the trip to Vancouver said:

  ‘After marriage, she became a real bitch.’ I stared back into his fat born-again face and retorted:

  ‘Actually, She wanted to go to Africa.’

  Then he said I killed her with my wildness.

  But, Sepia, I know that isn’t true. For certain nights She came to me when I needed her. Once (I know this sounds weird) I even prayed to her and she answered in a dream. It was after that women’s meeting when I was feeling first euphoric, then kind of plunging down. And Marie wouldn’t come up (to the empty flat) for a drink or something. Because she had to work the next day. So on Park Avenue, I kissed her goodnight (offhandedly) and went home. Crawling into bed, I could really sense the darkness of the kitchen. To focus on something else, I opened the black book at the part marked: Trip back from Vancouver, 1976: Heading east over the dry gulches of Moose Jaw, I know I have to make a choice. But through Regina (where comrades said the Native ghettos would one day blow like Harlem or Detroit), then through Winnipeg and the forests of Ontario, I still can’t decide to say: ‘Okay, my love, ‘I’m sorry but we’re through.’

  After which, I was thankful to fall asleep. Then the bird-sweet voice of that lesbian in her telephone booth starts singing:

  ‘There are two tongues in every language.’ Laughing her head off. Everything is fine but is it the real telephone ringing? A wrong number or an obscene phone call? And getting back into bed, is that a real mouse I see on the floor? Soon they are on the bed and on the sheets, tickling me. Back in Lively the farmers put their bed legs in pails of water to keep them off. But I can’t do that since my mattress is on the floor. I answer the ringing phone again and Her cameo says I’m paying for unfaithfulness to my young officer. My love, that is too much. I show Her my eye which is turning black and blue. And the blood vessels bursting round my cheeks. There was a moment of silence. Then Her cameo concedes:

  ‘Okay, I see what you mean.’

  I awake at dawn with a terrific feeling of déjà vu. Making me laugh because of how it puts everything in context. Outside, the street is glistening with sun and piled with new snow. I’ll give you one more chance to talk. Although sometimes our conversations get confusing. Example, if I’m feeling weak and scared while you, sitting on the edge of my desk, are saying my personality’s too strong and overbearing. Maybe a special diet will help to clear things up. A woman’s magazine says excessive bile may be cured by no sugar, no coffee, no cream, no eggs, no meat. And I forget what else to clean the system out.

  I decide to go out. Walking down the winding stairs, I breathe the white air of the park, deeply. Enjoying the gargoyles on the housetops looking down at me. And the crunch of feet on the thick, protective carpet of snow. I’m headed toward the Golden Palace Grill. Forgetting to think consciously that you, my love, are sometimes there. (My policy being to avoid you mornings now you’ve moved, because God knows what bed you’re coming from.)

  Yes, you’re there. In the end booth, drawing a list of target restaurants for union organizing. I sit down, hoping you won’t see my black circles. Maybe the pinkish light shining through the red fishnet curtains will soften them. Making us glow as if we were in some corny religious painting. But your green eyes with the tiger spots scrutinize me carefully. A small smile grows on the beautiful mouth, as if you’re seeing me
for the first time and kind of like it.

  I smile back, feeling warmer. And say (the diet’s for later):

  ‘Some coffee would be nice.’ In the next booth a fleshy old woman is telling her companion: ‘I don’t know, dear, if only they would give us a morsel before we faint away.’ Her thin little white-haired lady friend tries to twitter an answer. But the obese one, with her white face and pudgy neck plunged in a short white machine-crocheted acrylic cape, has caught the eye of the waitress. ‘Let’s see, miss, what’ll it be. A tea, no, a rice pudding.

  Better start off with a little lasagna. Noodle soup, too.’

  You start to say something, smiling in a very friendly way. Then hesitate. I have a feeling you want to talk about us. You are improving. I wait. You clear your throat and say:

  ‘The situation of waitresses in Plateau Mont Royal is critical. That’s why the comrades were sure that, even if you’re resigning from the group as a full member, still, as a feminist and fellow traveller, you might want to help us in this important revolutionary task. Since you’re free this month (I’d taken a month from my translation job to write) the organization has suggested you take a job here at the Grill to start a union organization drive among the staff.’ Silence, then: ‘I’m sure you’ll still have time to write.’

  At least you have the decency to blush. I feel the black spot rising. For some crazy reason my eye wanders to a pile of your photographs lying on the table. Reminding me if I don’t do it, some other admiring woman will. I look closely at the top photo. A pair of legs reflected in a car mirror. Not solid enough for D’s. More like the girl with the green eyes. Don’t be silly. I’ve seen legs like that in a million cars parked on a million beaches. Besides, I’m always paranoid in the mornings. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up crazy. Like one of those women writing to Juliette in Le Journal de Montréal.