Crossings (4 page)

Another woman, big, with a large red face and house dresses starched so thickly she sounded like a nurse, said, ‘Like, on
Love of Life,
is that all written down?' She was looking at the pages on the table. Not reading them, just looking at them, as though they were artifacts of some strange world.

I didn't understand at first.

‘I mean, is it all written down for them, like this, all these words, so they know what to say?'

‘Oh, yes, they have a script.'

‘You mean, they have to learn all those words by heart?' I could see she didn't believe me. No one could learn all those words by heart.

‘I mean, I guess I just thought that was the way they were, in real life. You know. Like that Vivian Carlson. I mean, I bet you anything that's the way she
is,
I've seen her type before.'

And, ‘Like they pay you for writing it up, eh?'

‘Well, if I'm lucky. I mean, I don't know if …'

‘Like, what's this show?'

‘It's called
Festival
. They do different plays. Different stories. It doesn't carry on.'

‘Oh yeah.' She nodded. ‘CBC. My husband, he won't watch the CBC.'

I didn't know what to say. ‘Sometimes they have good things on,' lamely.

‘He says they don't ever finish. He gets so
mad.
So you just make it up out of your head, like. I guess you get a lot of ideas from books.'

‘Well, you're not supposed to.'

‘I don't know how you do it.'

‘Well, it's not really just out of your head. I mean, that one I did, I really know people like that. I mean, that did actually happen. They did break up, and she did go away with the best friend.'

‘You mean, like, people tell you stories and you just write it up in good grammar?'

‘Well, not …'

‘I could tell you some stories. Boy. If I ever wrote my life story, I'd make a mint. It'd be a best seller.' She laughed, slapping her thigh. ‘My old man'd kill me though,' sobering. ‘I don't know, though, nobody'd believe it. I mean, the things that happened to me! I should tell you and you can write it up, like in good grammar and good spelling. We could split it, we'd make millions. I'm not kidding. The things that happened to me.'

I think they pitied me, the women. I think they pitied the drabness of my house, the lack of doilies and leaping fish with ‘Campbell River, B.C.' on them. And my mugs, they pitied my mugs. They all had thin tea cups, in different patterns and shapes. And they pitied Mik, too, for the dinners I probably fed him. When they came, I wasn't baking bread. I would hear the horn go and I would rush around opening cans, getting the stove going.

‘Hey. I'm sorry. I forgot the time.'

‘Jesus Christ!' But at first it was a joke.

When I was working, it was Ben who cooked. Ben who cleaned. A plate would appear on my desk. Tea. Coffee. I would eat, drink. The plate would disappear. The telephone would ring. ‘She's working right now.'

That first morning, up in the forest, Mik endured much levity on the subject of my ill health. ‘They gave me a hard time,' said Mik, but he was pleased, he was grinning. ‘Bastards,' he said, but he was proud of himself. He'd screwed me so hard he'd had to call the doctor.

‘Oh bunk,' I said. ‘It was the damp and the mothballs.'

So we moved the bed into the big room, and we made love before dinner that night. Was that the night we ate in the cookhouse? Just Mik and I and the cook. Probably. When we came back down the path he says, ‘Did ya see them give you the eye?'

‘Who?'

‘The guys.'

‘But there wasn't anyone there. I didn't see anybody.'

‘They saw you,' he says and laughs.

 

TRYING TO SAY what Mik was like, I cannot use the ways of the world I live in. I cannot tell you what Mik believed in, or what he thought. I know he liked John Wayne movies. If you asked me, What was Ben's approach to Viet Nam, I would know. Ben did not approve. I always knew what Ben thought. He explained everything to me. We got married in church because it isn't right to hurt other people. My mother. But there is no sanction in the legal tie. Two honourable people (Ben and I) do not require the force of law to do the correct thing. ‘We'll have the part where you say “and obey” taken out,' Ben says. But he doesn't. If either of us wishes to leave, for any reason, the other must not attempt to stop him/her. We are not going to be possessive. ‘Jealousy is a manifestation of the private property ethic.' We were going to have the perfect marriage. It was a surprise to us, the way it turned out.

 

AND LAST NIGHT at the reception, Carla is shouting: ‘That bastard! That ingrate! I shall put the curse of the Slav upon him! I am furious. He could let Elton do one small bit from
Hamlet.
'

‘But what happened?'

Carla is hanging onto Elton protectively. ‘He won't let Elton do one small scene from
Hamlet
for the Congress!'

‘But has he that much power?'

‘Oh Vicky won't believe anything bad of Griffith,' she says to Linda, who is sitting languidly beside them.

Elton leans toward me and says, ‘I've told you. Griffith is not an honourable man.'

‘He has always seemed an ethical man.'

Carla begins to shout. ‘You can tell him for me, I am going to destroy him! I am going to put the curse of the Slav upon him, my grandmother's curse.'

‘But you haven't said anything yet that …'

‘Elton was his
friend
! He defended him for years. He stood up for him!'

‘You're a terrible nepotist, Carla,' I say, trying to make a joke.

‘I don't care! I'm loyal to my friends! I love my friends. I'm going to destroy the bastard!'

‘But what has he …'

‘Oh Vicky,' says Linda, smiling at me. ‘Don't try to be logical.'

‘You're so cerebral,' says Judy.

‘But you've read William James.'

‘What's William James got to do with Kate Millett?'

‘No, I mean
The Varieties
.' I feel horribly embarrassed for Judy, an honours graduate in philosophy, up for promotion to assistant professor. ‘You know, you can't invalidate St. Theresa's vision just because she imagines St. Michael or who­ever doing it to her with a great ruddy sword.'

‘But Kate Millett is a bisexual!' says Judy again. ‘It said so in
Time. She
said so. You can't take a woman like that seriously. I mean, here she is, explaining
my
nature to me and she's a bisexual.'

I feel such anger that I do say it after all: ‘That's an
ad hominem
,' grinding it out, smiling fiercely, expecting her to drop dead with shame.

‘So I'm illogical. I don't care. That's just part of my feminine nature.'

Linda's husband, the turd poet, says: ‘You know your trouble? As a writer? You know where you go wrong? You're a rationalist.'

 

‘WE SHOULD SIMPLY PLEDGE ourselves to each other at the top of a mountain,' says Ben. The wedding has cost forty dollars and he is put out about this. We should have gone, simply, to the top of a mountain and pledged ourselves to live honourably together: I pledge to allow him/her to pursue self-actualization (but this can't be; this is from Maslow); I pledge never to become dependent, emotionally or financially, upon him/her; I pledge never to have children.

We did go later, that summer, to the top of Mount Rundle. On the shale near the top, Ben froze, clinging to the rock. ‘I can't,' he says, between clenched teeth. ‘I can't move.'

I go on, leaving him there. I am afraid too, but I am more afraid of being afraid. I go on and I come to the rim. I cling there, peer­ing over the edge, a mile below to the forest and the river. Through the bright clear air I fall, lazily, turning over and over slowly, down to the diamond river and the velvet forest. The wind tears at me, and I cling to the rock. This is only the lower cairn. Up above me is the real cairn. Really to have made it, I must go up there. But I am afraid, and, behind me, below me, Ben has his eyes closed. We do not get to the topmost cairn. We do not pledge ourselves to anything. I go back, pry his fingers loose, help him down.

No. I do say something. Yes. I don't want to remember. Yes. I call back to him from the edge: ‘It's only twenty feet!' Willing him to come. Shooting back down the shale the force of my will. ‘Come on, Ben. It's only twenty feet. You can't give up
now.
'

I wanted him so much the day of my wedding.

I was eighteen and a virgin. Ben was twenty-eight. Ten years older than I to the day. And a virgin.

Seven years later, Ben said, his voice shaking with indignation, ‘But you
agreed.
You
agreed
not to have children.'

And he took his sketches and tore them across. Throwing the thick creamy paper into the fireplace. The worst thing he could do. All his work. All those months. And on top of the paper he poured out his glass of tequila.

‘But if you wanted a baby,' said Edna later, ‘why didn't you just trick him?'

I wanted to ask how, but I said, lofty, ethical, disdainful of women who cheated and lied, who manipulated men, women without dignity, lives without honour, ‘I couldn't trick Ben. I've never lied to him. We agreed always to be honest with each other.'

My mother said, ‘But are you in love?'

He was to be an artist. I was to be a writer. At first, Ben said he would do nothing if it was not art. I got a job in a newspaper cir­culation office, selling subscriptions by telephone. After a week, they hired me to file. A week later, they fired me. The editor, passing through, remembered my applying for a job as a repor­ter. ‘We'd rather have a girl who'll stay on.' I got a temporary job selling shirts in the Hudson's Bay. The head girl was a big red-headed Brunnhilde. She told me off for letting my hem hang. She's still there. Still red-headed, curls piled elaborately on top of her head, as they were then. Still tall and bursting out of her clothes. When art jobs didn't materialize, Ben sold newspaper subscriptions door to door, the big plush bonus bunny under his arm. And cars, from a script: ‘The manager will break my neck for offering you so much on your trade-in, but …' He refused to take a permanent job. I was desperate for one. I knew it would be temporary.

My sister Francie says to us, ‘But we never
felt
poor.' It's true, all those years of Welfare, we did not feel poor. Now I felt poor. There was no soap to wash my white gloves. How did you look for work without white gloves? That was poor.

We had landed in Vancouver with eighty-eight dollars. We found a room in a West Georgia rooming house for eleven dol­lars a week. Hot plate. You washed your dishes in the bathtub. Or I did. I suppose other people carried basins back to their rooms. I counted the people who used the bathroom once. Twenty-eight. In the basement there were drug pushers. The Mounties broke down the door one night. It was all very ex­citing. I was sure I'd heard a shot, but perhaps it was wishful thinking. On the second floor, the two prostitutes lived. And Erica and Karl, six weeks out from Germany. Across from us on the third floor lived the Cinderella Man. That's what he called himself. Grey suits, old school ties—all the old schools, with an entree into any world you could imagine. Was I interested in becoming a journalist? He personally would speak to the editor of the
Sun
. Actually, don't tell anyone, but he was living here in­cognito, doing research on the drug scene for a series of articles. Did Karl want to be a bartender? Fifty dollars to sweeten the union steward. The Cinderella Man could fix anything. To our left, the son of a man who'd been murdered. A famous case. He showed us the book about it. His father had designed the Em­press Hotel. I felt I was really living at last. This was life.