Heroine

  W’s almost shaking she’s so furious. Her fists are clenched on the table. ‘That Polly,’ she says, ‘defeats herself in advance by her fear of him. How did he find out where she was? Eh? I bet she told that friend who drove her here to the shelter that first day. Yeah, she probably set herself up by telling someone he could threaten until the beans were spilled. She has to fight to win this time.’

  Polly did fight. At least she went through the motions. Watching her stand there in court in her sober skirt (for the image) and neatly combed hair, I couldn’t get over how much she seemed like any of us. But, Sepia, it all turned out exactly as she predicted.

  The tourist walks faster. The snow has nearly stopped. Maybe he’ll go to that bagel place after all, it reminds him of New York. He’s back on The Main. Through a lighted window he sees a parrot. Behind it on a pale-blue bedspread a woman puts a cat between her breasts.

  He enters the restaurant called Bagels’. The waitresses have trendy haircuts, black ties, and black pants. The radio is playing jazz. On the next stool a young man with a shaved head is colouring a purple-and-white striped placemat black. He uses a felt pen, scribbling furiously. Stopping to stretch his cramped fingers, he says (unsolicited) to the tourist: ‘Had the highest IQ in high school. It was after the bad acid trip I decided to become an artist instead of a doctor.’ Then bends his head back, colouring darker and darker, harder and harder, more and more obsessively. ‘Have to get done with this by 5 a.m. That’s when Mr. Klein lets me in his pharmacy to scrub his floor. At that hour there are lots of gulls in the park. They’re beautiful. Very beautiful.’

  Outside, a shadow passes bird-like by the window. The grey woman stops in front of the store next door. Shivering a little. She moves closer to read the sign. STRAWBERRIES FROM SPAIN. Her shoulders shake and shake from coughing.

  They say illness in the lungs means sadness. Pneumonia, TB, the cancer from cigarettes people smoke to fill the emptiness. Maybe the pneumonia I got last winter was the cause of the final humiliation. Of course, a real heroine would never get dragged down like that. For, lying in her cold (then hot) bed in her little flat on Esplanade, she’d force herself to think positively: ‘I’m doing great, if I could just get rid of this damn cold.’ ’Tis November 1979. Due to her long illness, the kitchen cupboards are getting bare. On the windowpane the frost resembles a row of priests holding candles. She watches them grow as the fever rises. Then it plunges so fast she has to take hot baths to warm up. Then cold packs to cool her down. On the radio they’re saying a nuclear power station near the border is heating up dangerously. If it ever blew, there could be fallout over Montréal. Or over Drummondville, depending on the weather. Weak as she is she calls Marie and asks: ‘Uh, have you heard the news?’

  ‘Comment veux-tu que j’écoute les nouvelles?’ replies her friend. ‘Je suis tellement prise avec mon film.’

  Heroine: ‘Would you like to come over?’ (When Marie says yes, she’s going to ask for groceries.)

  Marie: ‘J’aimerais bien. Mais tu sais bien que je n’ai pas le temps. Besides, I can’t afford to catch that cold you have. I can hear you breathing over the phone. Shouldn’t you see a doctor?’

  The heroine hangs up. She would be angry if she had the energy. But Marie angry back could be really scary. The woman has a temper. Still, someone should point out to her that in the inevitable contradiction between sisterhood and the self-focused, egotistical requirements of art, she has chosen the latter. And under the circumstances it isn’t fair. True, Anne (who’s not an artist) hasn’t come either. But that’s different because she’s in Manchester visiting her family. Lying back on the pillows, the heroine notes how in November the windows darken so terrify-ingly early. But she won’t let it get to her. On the radio, the authorities are claiming there isn’t much radiation danger in the area. Then the environmentalists come on and say they’re lying. At night, she dreams of her former lover’s nice back. His nice back. It’s okay to have dreams like that. Statistics show even strong women have them, when there’s sadness from breaking up. Oh, the back’s so straight, so cuddly under his blue T-shirt. He also has a wonderful bedside manner (when he really loves someone). Bringing steaming cups of perfect coffee on his blue-and-white tray. A single maple leaf falls down outside. The heroine’s walking outside Polly’s trailer in a field of snowmen. On the ground are sparrows pierced with bows and arrows. In the background Mick Jagger is singing ‘Angie’ to the woman he still loves.

  Waking up, the gesture of calling him is barely conscious. He comes almost immediately with a comrade who’s a doctor. He’s also bearing a fish tank to keep her company. When her pneumonia is better (he warns) she’ll just have to pay for the expensive little motor that keeps the air going through the water. So the fish can breathe. And, she mustn’t imagine his coming like this means anything. They’re only friends. Falling asleep, the caption of the fever dream is a cold fish (as she writes later in the black book): Something’s gnawing at me. I fall asleep and it turns into a fucking fish story. I dream you and Venus, that swimmer from Vancouver they say you’ve been seeing recently, are standing together in a fish tank. Upright on your fins. All shiny. All silver. It makes me so angry I try to drown you. Then I remember you both like having your head held under water. BECAUSE YOU’RE FISH.

  Shhh, if the heroine keeps up like this she’ll be sorry. I’ll work better out of the tub. I’ll have more distance. Especially if I leave this place and go to one of those all-night cafés. What can I wear now that winter’s here? The olive-green jumpsuit is kind of thin. Over it I could put the old fur coat that used to belong to Her.

  Still, I don’t know if a real heroine would do what she feels like doing next. Probably because her resistance is very low. They say pneumonia is often followed by depression, making a person needy for affection. Anyway, she hits an unexpected down, just as she’s on the mend, due to a surprise visit from an F-group comrade she used to know. The woman comrade is lying on the floor, smoking a joint and admiring her own short fat foot waving in the air, when she suddenly pronounces a fatal sentence: ‘I hear things between Jon and that swimmer from Vancouver are very serious.’

  Even in her weakened state, the heroine keeps her cool. Although she knows, with her habit of delayed reactions, her defences might crumble any minute. ‘Uh, what’s she like?’

  ‘Beautiful. I saw a picture of her. She looks like that statue of Venus rising from the waves.’ The heroine says nothing. Just smokes a cigarette (against the doctor’s orders), thoughtfully. When Comrade C leaves, she whispers to herself:

  ‘The trick is not to panic. For I don’t want him. But it wasn’t nice of him not to tell me.

  ‘I need some additional information.’

  Due to an early winter thaw, late December 1979 has that cold damp air hardly breathable. The heroine is waiting in the shadow of a house, her feet in the slush. At last the door of the red brick flat opens (French style, directly on the sidewalk) and he comes out. Followed by the girl with the green eyes. The heroine holds her breath, slipping farther back. Watching as her ex and his platonic friend, the girl with the green eyes, looking less like a woman than like a perfect, rich, Latino boy in her short curls and hand-woven poncho, retreat in the night.

  But there in the shadow something awful suddenly occurs to her. There’s safety in numbers. So if the girl with the green eyes is a dyke, and D (as the grapevine reports) has truly receded from his life, that in fact only leaves Venus. Not that it matters given she, the heroine, and Jon are through. She just has to prepare herself for all the gossipy eventualities. So her face won’t slip if somebody comes along and says: ‘Oh, have you heard, he is moving to Vancouver, the better to be with her?’

  From the corner of the house the heroine watches them move along in the fading light, and disappear around the corner of l’Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste (where they still give out petits pains to the poor June 24, as per the expression: né pour un petit pain).

  Crossing the str
eet, she thanks God she’s working under cover of dusk. The key she has from before turns quickly in the lock. Her feet patter up the dark stairway. She KNOWS there’ll be love letters from the Pacific. Even though he’s told her it’s a LITTLE relationship. She opens another door. It smells of gas and there’s a dirty blue rug on the floor. On the bed, the beautiful scrunched-up colours of an African blanket. (He never buys anything tacky North American unless he has to.) Antique pine bookcases and a blue-and-white slot machine from the early fifties. Sure enough, in the open bottom drawer of an oak filing cabinet, a letter sticks out. Victoriously, she grabs it. Reading once rapidly for the juicy parts; again carefully, for the nuances.

  Dear Jon: I’m so glad we saw each other again. And realized how serious things have grown between us. When you whispered ‘I love you’ on the phone the other day, it sent shivers all over me. You have the most beautiful body I’ve ever seen in a man. And politically, I can learn so much. I love your group’s let-them-eat-cake theory regarding the effect of organized sports on the ordinary spectator in capitalist society. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never met someone who interests me like you. I keep having these erotic dreams which get interrupted by the alarm for swim practice. Please come soon. We’ll go to the mountains or we’ll go to the sea… He calls this a ‘little relationship’? The woman has nerve, not afraid to show how much she cares. No wonder she’s winning (at least that’s how the heroine would feel if she and Jon were still together). A man always has to be reassured, no matter how confident he appears.

  The heroine puts the letter back in the drawer, trying to remember how it was folded before. Tossed in there as if he’d shown the girl with the green eyes his little trophy. She bets he did. Her body is full of something sugary-vinegary. Glowing with satisfaction because her intuition was right. Yet feeling evil for what she’s done. Hurrying down the street, she is dying to tell Anne. She enters the restaurant on the corner with the plastic hot-dog pictures where, earlier, the two of them had danced. Now the jukebox is playing Willie Nelson in Québécois. Very sentimental. Anne listens. Then says in her wonderful soft voice: ‘I’m afraid reading his letters is only hurting you.’

  NO. I can’t let her disintegrate like this. Racing toward the final humiliation (the reconciliation) as if she can’t resist the blackness in her. It would be better if that dark smudge of desperate need for love after the pneumonia hid something more essential. More socially progressive. Yes, that’s it. Naturally absorbing the pain from the air and from the streets, until it meets up with that sad (unidentified) gap in her own self. The way that children do when those they love are hurt. This even happened once with little Marilù. We were in a Spanish restaurant. And over my café au lait I was telling some friend how you (my love) were killing me with your affairs. My stomach hurt so much I couldn’t swallow. Little Marilù started eating bread. Slice by slice in greater and greater panic. Until she’d eaten nearly the whole loaf. As if trying to absorb a maximum of my pain into her little body.

  Anyway, the heroine has decided nothing drastic yet. She’ll wait until the pneumonia, that malady of sadness, has run its course. Before plotting a possible return to him. The scene could be his little flat. It’s full of comrades. Luckily, she’s had a few glasses of cognac. Also her hair looks great: shorter than usual and behind her ears to show the beautiful square lines of her face. Over her tight jeans, an old tweed suit jacket of her dead mother’s found in a trunk. ’Tis January 1980 and she’s knocking on his door. She can tell from the smile on his face he knows why she’s there.

  They climb the dark stairs to his kitchen. The comrades (ex-comrades for her) are drinking from his mother’s gift of schnapps. She sits on his knee doing imitations of politicians. Everybody’s laughing. They love self-directed females who aren’t afraid. Then, one by one (out of discretion) they get up and leave. Shielded by the huge plants he put in his kitchen to hide the view of falling sheds, they start to make love. With her head against his chest, she smells the faint odour of sweat. Skin like a girl’s except no tits. Exactly what she likes in a man. Her veins run sugary-vinegary with pain and sweetness. His penis rises white in the night. She strokes his neck with the hand of a professional. The better to keep a distance. He’s whispering he loves her, but he just wants to make it clear this time his life doesn’t start and end with her. Never mind that. A woman only satisfies her needs by standing outside them. She knows how not to panic if her partner refuses (sometimes) to fill the emptiness in her. When he sees how cool she is he won’t fear her.

  She will even keep the jealousy (like what she feels looking over his shoulder at a photo of the girl with the green eyes on the table) to her diary. As if, in order to survive the eighties, she had to lie, too. After they have sex (his penis is huge) she goes home, opens her black book, draws a thick black line in it and gives it the title UNDER THE LINE OF PAIN. We are together again. My fragility I guess after my sickness. And the knowledge he was with somebody else drove me to his door. Well received. Although I can tell he’s not totally convinced. I can’t stand it, but I’m pretending to.

  No, that isn’t right either. Now I’m out. I’ll just wrap myself up in the blanket and sit at that Arborite table until dawn comes. A real heroine wouldn’t cover her feelings the better to please a man. It would only drive her crazy. Unless she’s obsessed with living dangerously. The better to find, in the dark gap behind the hurting masks, the real voice of story in her.

  Yes. At first (after the reconciliation) Marie liked the way my lips were swollen with sexual satisfaction. But then she said: ‘Tu me fais peur.’ (Because every time she came to visit, I was lying on the rug, waiting for you, my love.) She said: ‘Tu vas craquer si tu ne défais pas le noeud. S’il te plaît, FORCE yourself to write it. By your own words you may start to live.’ And her heart-shaped mouth parted in a slight smile.

  Sepia, she’s so beautiful when she talks of writing, you can almost feel the edge of freedom. As in a Cocteau film, circa 1940. A woman in a black skirt, black gloves, nipped-in waist is walking out a door toward a black-and-white café. Orpheus waits. From that moment, you know anything can happen.

  Jealousy: A Fish Story

  This is the line of pain. Like in Doris Lessing’s (black) notebook, I think. In my palm I imagine I see happiness, yet I fear what I must pay for this reconciliation.

  Jan.? 1980: Outside, it’s cold and white, but dates seem immaterial. I feel so weird, I take sleeping pills, I drink, I want to run away. Like brides feel, I’ve heard. Their white silhouettes isolated against the dark background of wedding pictures.

  The other night it grew mild, and I went out. Crying as I walked. Somehow ending up in St-Henri. In a Chinese restaurant I ordered fried rice. Then noticed everybody staring. I said I wanted pills and a woman showed me the doctor’s office around the corner. His receptionist said: ‘Hello, I’m Jane, the doctor’s wife’ (staking out her territory). After which the doctor (young and blond and from South Africa) told me I’m having a serious depression. Those computer cards he filled out scare me. I wonder if they give them to the Mounties? Outside the doctor’s house was a funny little square. With a shiny skating rink over which were strung crazy masks and little lanterns. I don’t know what for. The houses around it had turrets, gargoyles, balconies, curved and brightly painted stair railings. As if the architect, circa 1910, was doing acid. Standing there I really felt a part of it.

  Later, at home, when you came through the door, I smiled sweetly. Watching myself wanting you so much. As if we were in the theatre. Outside, still white and cold. Woke up this morning thinking I have to keep my little ego from folding up like a small triangle in the pit of my stomach whenever we’re together. The shrink from McGill said a lot of people actually love in triangles, despite the misery it gives them. Because they had to share their mothers with someone, so it’s familiar. I said nonsense, the only thing She loved more than me was God. The shrink smiled her personality-girl smile and waited. Sitting back in h
er comfortable yellow-painted wicker chair from New England.

  I am beginning to understand the powers of darkness. After what happened when I heard through the grapevine Venus was on her way here from Vancouver. In fact she was on the plane that very minute. I ran home and cut her out of a picture of a group of comrades you’d taken. Then, Sepia, just as the plane was about to land, I-I-I burned it. Smiling to myself as the flames engulfed her sweater, her curls, her horsey chin. Hoping the plane would – Never mind. This I can’t tell to anyone, even Anne. Although I did mention I was interested in witchcraft and she said: ‘Me, too. Except I’d be afraid it worked.’ I wanted to protest that using inner darkness in this negative way is the ultimate guile of the powerless. But in a sense she’s right. For nobody can exist entirely in darkness any more than entirely in the light.

  In that picture you took of me the weekend Venus was coming (it turned out to be a false rumour) I look forty. Wrinkles radiating up from my dry lips. Dark circles under my crazy unhappy eyes. Hair wild. Sitting there in a ski sweater, of all things.

  Feb. 12, so nearly Valentine’s Day. After a huge snowstorm that’s quickly melting, you came and sat on my rug. And we listened to a Kathryn Moses record you’d bought. The lyrics went something like: Your eyes say you are sad. Your mouth’s inclined to lie. / I’m sorry if that’s true ’cause I love to see you smile … Her high notes flying madly off the edge reminding me a woman has to be courageous. So I said: ‘The pain is like a grain of dust in an oyster. The layers of pearl are starting to grow over it into something beautiful.’

  You said that was very poetic. But you still felt I was pressuring you not to be spontaneous.