Heroine

by Gail Scott

  I said: ‘Uh, what do you mean?’

  You said: ‘For example what if I said yes, I love somebody else (too)? You’d go crazy.’

  Oh God what does that mean?

  March 8: Today I woke up feeling furious with your sick attitude regarding relationships. And decided to go for brunch with an Anglophone student I’d met at some demonstration. Flirting a little to make the situation between you and me more symmetrical. The guy is doing a doctorate in a branch of semiotics. So, we’re sitting in a Spanish restaurant on Park Avenue talking about how the French modernist scene is different than the English, etc. Smoking cigarettes and drinking sangria. When suddenly I can’t remember how to get to the end of a sentence. Each time I start, it’s as if the memory of the past (the noun, the sentence’s beginning) wipes out the present (verb). So I can no longer move forward in the words. This is so scary I run out of there around the corner to the shrink at McGill. She says (sitting in her wicker chair): ‘Gail, the problem is, you’ve lost your boundaries … Caught as you are between wanting to be your own self AND the object of his affection.’ I say that’s obvious. But how to define those boundaries yet have love, too? She wouldn’t or couldn’t answer, which really made me laugh.

  March 15: Sometimes I think we’re going to make it. A few days ago things seemed almost normal, my love, between you and I again. We sat on the edge of your bed talking about a trip you were going to take to Chicago. You said you would like to take me with you, but … Then looking at me, you started laughing. I said: ‘Why?’ You said a streak of very black anger had just passed through my eyes. Making me very beautiful. Naturally a woman has mixed feelings about compliments like that. We took a cab to the Iroquois Hotel to hear Big Mama Thornton sing the blues. Songs like ‘Big Red Rooster.’

  Back home we made love wonderfully well. You said you hadn’t had such a good time since, since – you refused to finish your sentence.

  April 4: A bizarre thing happened this morning. I dreamed that the fish couple was dying in the tank. When I woke up the Papa Moon you gave me was really dead.

  April 9: Early in the morning. An April rain falling. Sometimes I wish we could go back to when you used to pour out all that tenderness on me. In the fish dream last night, you were standing on your fins. On second look they were shiny silver boots. I moved even closer and saw the boots were made from silver paper. The caption was FEET OF CLAY. That was a funny thing to say about a man like you.

  April 13: Grey day as in the film Clockwork Orange. All that violence, the boys in white beating up everyone. Then outside the cinema, green and orange cars parked. Hate is orange. I realized that very clearly when we had dinner after the movie with two friends of ours who also know Venus. In fact, it was while she was a guest in their house that you fell madly in love with her. So naturally I wanted to be on my best foot. To prove you and I are a better couple (or loving friends, or whatever your new definition of us is) than you and her. At the table I was nervous and euphoric. Trying to keep the conversation going, I got on the subject of how I thought women from your country were too silent despite their sexual freedom. Qu’elles n’avaient pas la parole. And you got mad and said to lay off your family like that. And I said I wasn’t really referring to your family, but talking in general. And you went off to the other room to sulk before they even served dessert. I felt so furious at your refusal to validate our couple even a little, every sentence I thought up was like a black drill moving round and round deeper and deeper into the ground.

  April 23: At 2 a.m. I was in a bar with Anne and some of her coked-out friends. One of them said to me: ‘Be thankful this ain’t the suburb of Dollard. Enjoy the agony.’ And gave me a sniffof what he had to offer. Everything turned blue. Then the colour sepia.

  I leaned back on Anne, wearing the dark-green wool dress with gold studs across the chest that once belonged to Her. Feeling numb, but relatively all right. Because suddenly I could see how survival for a woman is a little like the negative of a photo. She just has to pick the place in it where night (her deepest self) and day (reality) are combined in the right synthesis of light and dark for her. Even if it’s not quite (I started laughing) socially acceptable.

  I was laughing. Anne’s beautiful lips brushed my ear: ‘I’m relieved,’ she said, ‘to have you back.’ Those incredible lips whispered closer: ‘You just went through that silly reconciliation because you’re guilty about who you really are.’ I laughed harder, thinking of George Sand. Who once described the space she’d picked by saying (without a modicum of shame): I’m so difficult; that’s why I’ve been through so many men.

  Play It Again, S

  Dawn. It’s snowing out. The street is so quiet, I feel like I’ve stepped through a glass. Now I can keep the whole picture in my head walking to Bagels’ for breakfast. Eggs over lightly. Paprika potatoes. Coffee. Extra bagel to keep me going. So where was I in the story?

  Oh, yes.

  This is the city. November 1, 1980. Five a.m. Suddenly the little girl minus her yellow raincoat emerges from behind a parked car. She’s been hiding there for hours, nearly frozen. But too scared to move in case the sandwichman is lurking. Upstairs in an empty room her mother’s crying. Unaware her daughter is so close. The positive note is, soon they’ll be together. In the street, the snowploughs are cleaning up their first load of winter snow. And on the radio they have the press clips for early birds. What Ronald Reagan has for lunch. What scientists say about the fatal levels of chemicals in the food chain. And for gays, a warning about a new disease more fatal than any environmental poisoning. All treated in the witty language of a joke.

  The heroine raises her head from the Arborite table. Half awake, she sees a dream-face still looking through her window. Strangely familiar. Vines around its neck. Glistening as though it has risen from the sea. But outside (actually at the bottom of The Main) only a large brown river runs. On the table lay the blue pages where she has copied passages from her diary. Open at the entry: When I woke up, the Papa Moon you gave me was floating on the water.

  The window fades to dawn. The heroine stands up. Drawing her blanket close, she takes the blue sheets and puts them on a violin stand beside the television. She steps back. Now they’re at a distance. She smiles, liking how those pages on which she’s written pain in curved letters change the context of the room. Making Janis’s It’s all the same goddamned day so clear. She looks around at last night’s storm flashing on the television screen. At her own veined, slightly swollen feet standing on the old linoleum. Elements for a novel. But first she needs to eat. In the cupboard there’s a hole where the tile’s off. It’s a wonder a rat hasn’t come through. Never mind. She’s not about to become one of those former revolutionaries hanging around health food stores, stocking up on engevita, ginseng, calcium, rice, fibre, and verbena. Then finally moving into condominiums. Not yet anyway. She’s got other things to do.

  She searches for winter boots, finding only sneakers. Over the faded olive jumpsuit (it’s a bit silly to dress so badly) she puts on the old fur jacket. Then steps out onto the front steps covered with green turf rug and a layer of snow. The rooftops are growing ever clearer in the grey dawn. High up, in an arc, a snow blower blows its charge. She walks forward on the white sidewalk (still faintly in the shadow of the night), then stops. Under the glass balcony that grey woman is waiting for Patchwork Rosanna. Mornings she always does that, waits under the balcony until Rosanna comes out and looks. Then big Rosanna in her patchwork robe goes back in and puts the kettle on to make them tea. A door swings open into Rosanna’s dark courtyard. The grey woman steps in mumbling something like: ‘… typical bailiff.’ The heroine stands behind trying to hear. ‘“The money,” said he,’ mutters the grey woman, ‘or I’m taking your Christmas tree.’ The dirty muggins (she’s talking rapidly in a low excited voice). They were taking off the lights the turkey came out of the oven the children were hiding under the table he put his beefchopper on my button breast. He said: “Madame, the rich
get rich and the poor get poorer.’” Then the grey woman throws her long grey tangled hair back and sings a little ditty: To Schwartz’s Smoky Meat / And to all the ragshop policemen on the street / Montréal International Sheets / Lyrical Linen at Prices Most Discreet / Lolly lolly jolly jolly / I know you love me / Because I’m a stuffed hen in taxidermist’s shop - -- Seeing the heroine she stops short.

  The heroine keeps walking. Wondering why a woman can’t get what she wants without going into business on every front. Social, political, economic, domestic. Each requiring a different way of walking, a different way of talking. She looks instinctively for her own reflection in a store window. But it’s as yet too dark to see clearly. What if Marie is in Bagels’? Film crews often breakfast there after working late. Looking tired, rumpled, yet chic in their designer jeans and jackets. She grins provocatively at her own tackiness. Marie a horreur du cheap. Once the heroine said to her: ‘Don’t you ever watch a soap opera, turn on popular music, read the comics or the horoscope? I mean even in the interest of sociological research?’ And Marie answered: ‘Je n’en ai pas besoin. J’ai grandi avec le quétaine.’

  Her damp sneakers continue up The Main. Moving beside her in the grey early winter light: the snow blower. And a kid coming from a pharmacy carrying a sketchbook. His pale-blue eyes trained on the sky, gull-searching. But it’s not 6 a.m. so the light is still quite dim. He’s headed toward the park where in the summers of the eighties, the seventies men stroll with ever younger brides. Where I saw you (my love) at the end of our reconciliation, pouring adoration over the girl with the green eyes. The birds were singing wildly. Which really shocked me, for I thought you’d left me to be with Venus. In a way I felt you’d lied.

  The heroine crosses northward at Rachel Street. A block behind her the grey woman is sitting down on a cement block drinking Rosanna’s tea. She keeps walking. Suddenly, up a staircase to her left, a mother screams for joy as her freezing little daughter falls against the door. The heroine takes it all in, her face a divided map of the present moment. One side savouring the sweetness of existence: the waking street, the kid’s blue eyes gull-searching in the sky, Rosanna’s tea. The other smarting against something vaguer. Something like what lies behind that song, popular in periods of unemployment, blasting forth as she opens the door of Bagels’: If you’re blue / and you don’t know where to go to / why don’t you / go where fashion sits / puttin’ on the ritz.

  Eating, she thinks that in the eighties a story must be all smooth and shiny. For this pretends to be the decade of appearances. Like a photo of the silhouettes of figures passing on the street outside the restaurant window. Or the beautiful faces of those women (Marie’s colleagues?), lit by a small light at one of the diner’s tables. She actually loves the ambiance of the period.

  But walking back down The Main, just past the staircase where the mother hugged her lost girl, she thinks: ‘Yet I feel this terrible violence in me.’ In any story, it will break the smoothness of the surface.

  Looking up she notices she’s standing in the shadow of a building that broke the zoning laws when constructed, because so high. Leaving the surrounding smaller houses eternally in deep shade day and night. Once she, with another woman friend, joked about blowing it up. They talked and talked about how to do it. Obsessively at restaurant tables over cups of coffee. Each one knowing the other wasn’t serious. Each one also knowing they needed something to salve their incredible frustrations with the left as well, they said, as with capitalist society. (Her friend is married to a doctor.)

  Now, standing there in the shadow of the cold wall of grey, with gulls circling overhead and the mother’s joyous scream still threaded through her mind, the heroine feels that old desire for a terrible explosion.

  She thinks: ‘Maybe I should talk to someone.’

  Startled by a sudden glimpse of her reflection in a window, she thinks: ‘Maybe I should get a job. Then I could buy one of those second-hand men’s coats trendy women wear this year. I could probably get one cheap. Or else one of those beautiful espresso pots I saw in the window up the street.’

  She walks a little farther, wondering.

  She passes the grey woman sitting in her long skirt on the cement block.

  She thinks: ‘Maybe I should talk to her.’

  She thinks: ‘The question is, is it possible to create Paradise in this Strangeness?’

  In the grey light, she’s standing on the sidewalk (snowy, of course), her pale red curls her one sign of beauty. Looking to the left, the right.

  She –

  About the Author

  Gail Scott is an experimental novelist. The Obituary (New York, Night-boat, 2012; Coach House, 2010), a ghost story set in a Montréal triplex, was a 2011 finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de la Ville de Montréal. Other novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in late twentieth-century Paris, Main Brides and Heroine. Spare Parts Plus 2 is a collection of stories and manifestoes. Essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs and la théorie, un dimanche (translated as Sunday Theory from Belladonna, 2013). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 2001. Scott co-founded the critical French-language journal Spirale (Montréal) and is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Toronto: Coach House, 2004). She is currently completing a memoir based in Lower Manhattan during the early Obama years.

  The author thanks the Coach House staff and especially Alana Wilcox for impeccable editing and all the other work that makes a piece of fiction a reality in our bizarre contemporaneity.

  Typeset in Walbaum

  Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Foreword by Eileen Myles

  Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover design by Zab Hobart

  Lyrics on pages 115 and 180 are from ‘Love To See You Smile’ (PM Records, 1979) by Kathryn Moses, courtesy of Kathryn Moses

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