Heroine

by Gail Scott

  Chere Juliette. I am twenty-three. He is twenty-six. We’re in love, but nearly every night he stays out late. I wait in my room, which is done in blue silk. He becomes angry if I ask where he’s been. I’m afraid to go out or phone someone because he might try to call. Sometimes I’m so depressed, the filth piles up. That really gets him. Signed. Aimée.

  Your hand is drawing a little map on the Labatt’s 50 placemat. Little X’s marking the Plateau’s all-purpose restaurants, those advertising METS CANADIENS, ITALIENS, CHINOIS on their signs. I think of that surrealist game we used to play when me, the Haitian, and this suburban kid in the beret would meet in a café and throw a coin on the map of Montréal. To find out where objective chance would send each of us for an afternoon of automatic writing. You say the obvious: that the restaurant owner mustn’t know I’m working for the union. And the union mustn’t know I’m in the left, terrified as unions always are that revolutionaries in the ranks will cause their bureaucracy to lose control.

  I order another coffee. The door opens and Marcel the delivery boy enters on the run, his pearl purse over his shoulder and carrying a sprung oversized red thumb straight out at the belt. He disappears into the washroom. You say he’ll be helpful. A comrade recently saw him in a tulle dress on The Main. And F-group’s analysis of the current political conjuncture says a homosexual is objectively in a position of revolt. Marcel sits at the counter and sips another coffee. He always has one ready.

  ‘Get a move on, Marcel,’ says the Greek owner’s wife. She’s sitting behind the cash. ‘Oui, trésor,’ says Marcel, wiggling his ass. And he adds (for she doesn’t know French): ‘T’as une face à fesser dedans.’

  You pause, waiting for an answer. Something tells me I’m going to surprise myself. If I say no, God help me stick to it. I know, I’ll make a chart and every day I stick I’ll put another check on it.

  I smoke slowly, as if I’m thinking. The door opens. In comes Irene, the waitress. She’s been out washing the window. First soap, then cloth, then paper towel. But just as she came in, a big truck went by splashing slush on it and she had to go out and do it again.

  Now Irene is waiting on a client. Smiling at him with her made-up tired face and dyed hair. Somewhere finding energy.

  ‘Hallo there longtime no see yessir one Molson coming right up. How’s your truck: How you like driving in all this snow? Nice shirt you’re wearing. Let me feel. Ohhh. Oh. Mmmm. Lovely material. Me? Okay. A little tired. Don’t know what’s wrong with me these days. No energy. You don’t like my hair you say? Needs something softer? Well, I took this auburn colour because I’m completely grey. You’d never guess, eh? Big storm coming later, I hear? Don’t know how you drive on a day like this. Really, what time you finish? You’re not going under the Lachine Tunnel, are you? This terrible bus strike and all. Those damn unions. And my kid way over there on the other side of the city. If the storm comes I’m afraid I’ll never get home to her. You’re really looking good. New haircut, too, eh? Oh, I forgot. I’m not supposed to get on the seat like this with clients. Heh heh. Just washing the windows, boss. Forgot to take the fish out of the freezer, too. Don’t know what they’ll eat without me there. Hold on. Marcel’s giving me the eye. Nobody takes better care of their customers than I do. And all this pressure to parlez the ding dong. You don’t care, do you? Why should you, you speak both. Main thing is we understand each other. Hey, don’t do that, move your hand. The boss. What was I saying? Oh yeah, with the bus strike a ride under the tunnel these cold nights would sure be appreciated.’

  Your green spotted eyes are watching me.

  I smile wanly, wondering if you get the message.

  Somebody puts a quarter in the jukebox. First it lights up, then the snow starts to fall on the scene in the little ball on top. And Hank Williams comes on singing about a guy who says goodbye. Then goes poling his pirogue down the bayou, in search of jambalaya and crawfish pie and a filet gumbo.

  Free Woman and the Shadow in the Bank

  There’s a sound like a huge crack (spring breakup on the Castor River back in Lively). The heroine steps through a glass door. On the other side the colour’s grey, almost silver. Under the cement arch of the Park Avenue underpass the square grey buildings lean against the black clouds. A de Chirico city. A final ray of light slanting off the mountainside fills her with a not unpleasant emptiness.

  There are various roads. She starts walking. Soon a hard rain is falling. She thinks of the brownish polluted drops as capitalist and patriarchal. She comes to a restaurant on a corner. One of those nearly empty places with a couple of longish tables, bare white walls, fluorescent lights, and plastic hot dogs for pictures. Anne, a British feminist with long blond hair, is inside waiting. The heroine shakes out her damp red curls and sits across from her. Her black sneaker boots so wet from walking it will take coffee to stop shivering. Through the window hovers the great stone l’Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste in the grey dimness of rue Henri-Julien. She puts her thin hand in her pocket and says to her new friend, grinning wryly: ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ It’s a picture taken of herself sitting in a gazebo like a birdie in a cage. Grey and skinny, with the collarbones sticking out of her white scoop-necked blouse. And a long unevenly hemmed red flowered skirt. She says sarcastically: ‘The last stages of love.’ Anne looks at the picture through twinkling blue eyes (Welsh on her father’s side), exhales some smoke, and says in her soft voice: ‘Oh, we’ll have to fatten you up.’ Her incredible pink mouth smiles warmly.

  A lonely teenager at the next table in tight jeans, brown hair, and heavy makeup puts another quarter in the jukebox. Edith Piaf comes on singing ‘Je ne regrette rien.’ The teenager gives it a kick because it isn’t what she wanted. Anne takes the heroine in her arms and they begin waltzing among the tables. The legs of the heroine lost in the folds of Anne’s long Indian skirt. And her head on Anne’s well-padded chest. People were freer then.

  But the music stops. The heroine steps out again. A damp March wind is blowing. She likes to feel it on her face. Walking up St-Dominique, she tries to absorb the rhythm of the street. Factory smoke. A ragged hustling queen, dressed like a lady pilgrim except for her lipsticked mouth, which is chewing something sweet. Graffiti strewn on walls like music notes. Le MONDE SUCE. O-i-i-i-i-i. I’M COOKING, CoCotte. O O O BE CLEAN SHEEP!

  The heroine turns west, making a wide arc toward Park Avenue. Above the tacky neons, the clouds are racing black. She strolls by the Greek Workers’ Centre where one night recently (they were celebrating something) she went in and danced like crazy. Ate lamb and green beans and drank retsina. Talked with a beautiful dark woman about how the socio-political situation in Greece is changing. All the pleasure quickly dissipating a deep-inside feeling that even if she left him, he was the one who had brutally pushed her away.

  Yes, she’s pleased at how she’s recovered from this broken love affair.

  She crosses the street. At the fountain in the park a man in a toque, preaching something incomprehensible, holds out his arms to her. High, high above a drugstore, stands a billboard with a little girl in a yellow raincoat on it. She ignores a quick black flash somewhere in her mind. Yes, she’s pleased at how she’s learning to write over the top of things. Whatever that means.

  She laughs and focuses on walking jauntily. Remembering after a while how some (French) feminists are saying women, gay and straight, should live together. The better to create, dans l’absence du mâle, a culture where the feminine can be reflected whole. Well, it’s true she does enjoy getting up each morning without him there. The ritual of throwing open her windows and breathing deeply. Today the light in the park made the new grass blades lime-green under the trees. The blue sky was hard-edged with white clouds as in a hyper-realistic painting. Sitting on the windowsill, she lit a cigarette. Below a woman in a wide-brimmed flower-printed hat, with paper sweet peas also pinned on it, propelled her buxom body past. In life before feminism the heroine would have considered her ridiculous. But no
w she finds such overstated feminine presence in the midst of concrete and urban racket quite delightful. Maybe it is possible to have a set of female (non-patriarchal) standards to judge the world by. (Although she also loves the many facets of the city.)

  She could develop this feminine angle for her novel. Of course the process of setting standards is collective, so she’d have to have a community of women. She might even take up the offer Anne made last week in that Greek restaurant which still has Christmas tinsel hanging in its window. Actually, their lunch hadn’t been as cozy as she’d hoped. First, it was a grey day. And the waitress, whose black skirt ballooned over her bulging stomach, had such a sad face it spoiled the atmosphere. Then, just as the heroine was hoping to launch into a good, nourishing discussion about the relationship between art and feminist politics. Anne’s kind round face creased. And she started talking about some pain of love she’d had. How, walking into a room, she’d found le genou – and more – de Claire in her lover’s bed. The heroine felt unreasonably impatient. Sitting there among the plants, with the smell of retsina and the jukebox playing ‘Never on Sunday,’ she was beginning to think she’d have to remind her friend how melodrama, that ubiquitous trope for North American culture, is death for feminists. When Anne, a tough woman, thank God, wrapped it up by saying: ‘… to hell with him.’ Taking another bite of souvlaki and swallowing her pain at the same time. ‘I’ll just devote myself to the women’s shelter.’ She munched thoughtfully. Her blue eyes looked up, a little puffy (she’d probably been hitting the booze lately): ‘If you wanted to be around feminists more, you could join us. (Ironically.) Now that you’ve left the left.’

  Leaning out her apartment window in the early morning light, an image of the shelter floats across the heroine’s mind. Breezes ruffling a curtained door. And potted plants. The soft contours and bright clothing of the dykes and radical feminists working there. Safe and warm so a woman can really be herself. The image is so accurate that later, entering the Shelter the first time, she gets a sense of déjà vu.

  Anne had said: ‘Oh, come on. You’d love the staff. There’s H, a surrealist poet. And Céline, whose brother’s in jail from 1970. Very exotic.’ She had taken another bite of souvlaki and concentrated. Over her head hung a faded Christmas bell. ‘I know. We’ll get money from the Public Works Program to pay you.’

  The heroine throws the match from her cigarette over the sill. It floats past an early-bird happy couple going by. The woman has long hair pinned back on one side, long dress, flat Chinese shoes (Québécois hippy style, circa 1972). A little round. He, paler, thinner with a short beard, is nuzzling her neck. Obviously crazy about her. Watching them, the heroine gets this feeling of failure in relationships (only briefly). It also comes to her at parties. When feeling shy, she talks too much. Making too many self-conscious little comments. Leaning on the edge of her desk, her ex having said (his vocables cool and round in the grey air): ‘You have relationship problems because your personality’s too strong.’

  But now all that’s over, surely she and he can still be friends. If she doesn’t sleep with him he can’t hurt her. She smiles slightly. It’s amusing that since she has withdrawn sex, people say he isn’t seen with other women either. (Apart from the girl with the green eyes, but she’s no problem now that she’s a dyke.) When he is, she’ll have to be careful not to mind too much. She has written in her diary: He’s just far enough away now that I can let down my defences a tiny bit and sense my real affection for him again. Instead of all that energy-sucking resentment. But I cannot permit myself to get any closer. It’s too dangerous.

  Behind her the furniture is piled and the walls are being freshly painted. By herself of course. She’s into a total reorganization of her life. Soon there will be plants. She’s amazed at how quickly her slim form has filled the space vacated by his clutter, his politics, his coming home late at night. When she finishes painting, she’ll go to Chinatown and buy a white teapot with roses on it and matching cups. The better to invite her women friends.

  The tourist turns onto St-Denis. He’s been here before. The sloping sidewalk, the high cobblestone terrace to the right unfold before him like a dream. Yeah, mid-seventies sometime. He was walking right here with some other brothers and that crazy Québécois with the wild grey beard they met in some bar. His T-shirt was covered with Labatt’s 50 caps. Said he was a tourist guide specializing in du tourisme pour révolutionnaires. He even had a card. They’d walked over here. Up to the right, the guy had said, pointing to the flats on the cobblestone hill, used to live an early félquiste. But he’d been found murdered in Paris. ‘Motive unknown,’ said the cops. No one believed it.

  Oh, my fingers are getting waterlogged. I should pull the plug, make coffee, and sit at my little table. Except that big black crack in the Arborite really bugs me. Reminding me as it does my little novel has certain inconsistencies. Given how the heroine’s inner time is fractured between light and dark, so she seems to move in circles. Leaning first one way, then the other: the free woman coming up to the city, then the happy lover slowly slowly disintegrating into melodrama, finally the free woman again. Although Cassandra in Greek mythology also began to think of time as circular while lying down contemplating the stars on Troy’s cement ramparts. Watching the movements of the heavens, with illuminating points in the dark waste, she realized things go round appearing to repeat themselves, but not really. She was so absorbed in how this observation helped her intuit future possibilities that she never died from pain of love. (Which history says, in her case, was considerable.) This was partly due to confidence: she was the king’s favourite daughter. Also, being a prophet, her angle was the future.

  I like that. Using the future as an angle. It fits in with the idea of feminine standards. Still, to get in the mood, I could use a smoother writing table. There was a nice wood one in the flat on Esplanade. Going by there the other day I realized what a fool I was to let the landlord throw me out. At the end of our reconciliation (my love) I was too exhausted to fight back. I used to love how that tree trunk, against a background of green mountain, climbed skyward outside the middle of my window. When things got bad with us, I dreamed the tree trunk was exploding – but with no visible damage to the house. Anyway, walking along the street there the other day, I missed the place so much. Even the frozen grass under the park’s trees smelled fresh compared to elsewhere in the city. And turning on Duluth, I saw the same old slogans still crying from the hospital walls: LA NUIT AUX FEMMES; SOS FLQ. Albeit faded.

  The nostalgia made me want a coffee. In La Cabane, the artist with the liver line between his eyes (who’s always complaining they refuse him grants) was gazing at a Spanish-looking woman at the next table. She, ignoring him completely, began beating her breasts with her minuscule little fists. While staring at me. ‘Look,’ she shouts. ‘He did this,’ hitting herself in a quick staccato rhythm. She means her husband, not the artist.

  ‘On fait l’amour tous les jours mais il m’a menti. Il prend des drogues.’ She sticks her tiny fingers up her nostrils in a sniffing motion. C-cocaine. She’s from Peru. Got blacklisted for a university sit-in, so came here. Married this guy who said he had a good job. Only later did she learn the truth. Now she can’t go back and she can’t go forward. On top of it all, she misses her mother. This makes her so furious she beats her chest even harder to show me how he treated her when he came home that morning. I love how her hurt does not prevent her expressing anger. Here is a woman with good orgasms.

  The heroine wouldn’t let orgasms hold her to a man. Knowing as she does a woman can find other ways to transcend the emptiness. Under an April blue sky, she smiles slightly as she strolls, hands in pockets, small breasts under her Indian shirt, toward the sweet smell of a cookie factory. Next to it stands the battered women’s shelter where she’s working. The place has a secret address, the better to hide the victims from the husbands. Yet in the end, many clients return to the bastards. Her expression alters as she remembers how
he used to kill her with his vagueness. Making her stoop so low that once she even locked him in, the better to get him to talk. But their conversations were always the same. The air damp with tears and him: mute. She’d make an accusation just to break the silence: ‘You’re trying to rubber stamp me. To make me say yes to your fucked-up idea of a relationship.’

  Him: The thing I can’t stand is

  Her: You see my feelings pouring out, just raining, then they come up against this brick

  Him: Your questions. Always How come this and How come that

  Her: My body’s just crying for tenderness

  Him: It’s none of your business where I am

  Her: Yet you say it’s beautiful, sexy, fits like a glove

  Him: I can feel your resentment pouring out

  Her: I’d like to be able to phone you when I’m alone

  Him: There’s always something wrong. These urgent phone calls.

  Above her the gargoyles with their round mouths look like they’re blowing bubbles in the air. She laughs. At last, she’s caught him in his own contradiction. He can’t ask her why she’s withdrawn from sex because he’s always refused to explain anything like that. Of course she’s not completely impermeable yet. To prepare for any eventuality, she has even written in her diary: I feel so good, it scares me. Because I know he’ll try to get even by announcing he’s found someone more important. I’ll just have to be careful not to give in to such psychological abuse. She walks faster toward the warm coffee in the shelter office. Sniffing the air. So clear, so damp. In this city spring’s as fast as an orgasm. That word again. There is a tightness in the stomach. What’s it from? What’s it from? She can feel it under her drawstring pants. Feminist style, loose between the legs, so the crotch can breathe.

  Maybe the pain is from external considerations. She has this acute awareness of reality that penetrates. In front of the tenements she’s passing (probably built by some Frenchman from Marseille, for they have large interior Mediterranean courtyards), a group of black-dressed immigrant women are drawn together in a tight-knit circle. They’re reading a letter. She knows what’s in it. A friend of hers has the same landlord: Dear tenants: Due to the slum conditions these buildings over time have fallen into, we’re happy to notify you there will be renovations. You must therefore move by July 1. Tenants failing to comply will have their heat, water, and electricity cut off. But we are happy to offer you preferential options if any of you wish to sign for one of our new luxury condominiums. Signed D. Rose. LLD CA.