Crossings (8 page)

It is called
Merry-Go-Round
and is all about a successful wo­man writer who lives in a big old house with her sloppy sister and her emasculated husband. She is beautiful and competent, and nags everyone about cleaning up the mess. Her husband sleeps all day and the beautiful writer comes into his room, picks up his canister of pencils and dumps them, crash! onto the floor. To wake him up. To make him feel guilty. When she isn't dumping canisters of pencils and nagging her sloppy sister, she is sitting at her typewriter going clackety-clack like a machine, making money. She keeps making logical statements with no regard for emotional truth. The husband brings her cups of tea. It is very funny and farcical and I would have given it an A too. Or an A minus anyway.

One day I hear Ben going on downstairs to both of them about the latest surefire way to do himself in. It fulfills all the require­ments: it is painless, allows no reversal of decision, and does not leave a mess for anyone to clean up. I come downstairs like Armageddon.

‘Look. Ben? Look. You just walk down to Granville Bridge and you just climb over the rail and you just push yourself off. I mean, I'm sick and tired of all this crap. If you want to do it, do it and get it over with.'

They are all horribly embarrassed for me. We don't know what to do with violence. We just feel so ashamed for the person. They don't know where to look. Ben gives me a pitying smile.

I register at the free clinic.

‘I'm destructive,' I say in my first session. ‘I told my husband to go jump off a bridge.'

About a month later, I am saying, ‘You've got to get out, Ben. I'm destroying you.' Full of disinterested concern, that's me. ‘I've talked to Ivan, he'll take you. Really, you'll be better off there.' It is all arranged. He is to leave Friday.

‘You keep the car, Vicky,' says Ben.

‘No, that's your car. You did the motor job.'

‘Then you keep the hi fi. And the cats.'

‘All right.'

‘After,' he says, ‘after, you can have the car back.' Meaning after he is dead.

On Friday morning I go out and stay away until noon. When I leave at eight the house is congealed. Francie and Jocelyn, where are they? I don't remember. When I get back, there is Ben, standing like a waif in the garden.

‘I can't,' he says.

‘You have to,' I say and go away for another four hours. When I get back, he is gone, and I am left with the hi fi and the thirteen cats. We did not believe in possessions. There was so little to divide.

Relief like a blessing pours through me. I go upstairs and work for a while. It is Jocelyn's turn to cook. At dinner, her eyes are puffy and red. Francie is in her bedroom. She won't come down.

‘I had to,' I say. ‘I had to.'

‘I know,' Jocelyn says. ‘But you just go upstairs and you … you're like … it's like you've got a steel trap for a mind. It's like …' and she stands there, her lips shaking. ‘I know you did. It's just …' And she leaves the room.

I could never bear being unhappy. That was always my trouble. I'm still that way. If I'm unhappy I think something is terribly wrong.

I went upstairs and I wrote and I forgot all about Ben. I was trying to write a story about a man who commits suicide. About his family, really. How they are, after. How they try to under­stand it.

‘You've got to stop giving him money now,' Jocelyn says later. That night. She has come down and said she was sorry. ‘Why can't he go on unemployment insurance?'

‘He's not eligible. He's in the executive bracket or something.'

‘The executive bracket?' said Jocelyn. ‘But that means he must have made a lot of money when he was working.'

‘Oh I don't think so. It just means he was on the managerial side or something.'

‘What was he making?'

‘I don't know. He never told me.'

‘Didn't you
ask?
'

‘No. I never thought about it.'

‘God.' We are drinking tea and there is a long pause.

‘I sneaked your play,' I say.

‘What did you think?' Jocelyn says before she remembers.

‘It's good. I liked it. It's very funny.'

‘Oh Jesus,' she says. ‘Oh shit. Look. Vicky. It's not really true, you know. I mean, that's not the way I really see you. I mean, you make it up, you know. It starts one way and then you make it up to fit.'

‘The form takes over,' I say. ‘I know.'

But it is true. Everything you make up is true. Too.

‘We'd better put an ad in,' says Jocelyn. ‘Francie can sleep with me.'

So we put an ad in and we get the actresses.

Francie leaves, though I don't remember how. Jocelyn goes to classes. The actresses go to rehearsal. I work on the suicide play. November 14. The day I would have had the baby. I go on a diet. I start to lose weight.

But that isn't how I remember it. I remember it more drama­tically. I remember a great rushing wind pouring out of me. I remember going down like a balloon. I've had to put in the diet, because that is also true. It is a fact. But

Somewhere in there Ben registers for teachers' training.

One night I wake. It is black in the bedroom. I can hear them making love in the other bed. Jocelyn and David. I lie there, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. They are making love, groan­ing and panting. The bed springs are jerking violently. How can she? In the same room. I lie there petrified with horror and shame.

The Nut Lady says, ‘Are you sure?'

‘I was right there.'

‘Have you asked your sister about it?'

‘No! My god. How could I?'

‘Vicky,' she says, very gentle with me in these days, ‘didn't this happen before?'

‘No. She's never done that before.'

‘Did you tell me about this before? When you were five? About your father and how he took your hands from your ears. How he said, “She's lying! She's awake. She's lying there listening.”'

‘Dear god. Then I am mad.'

‘Talk to your sister,' says the Nut Lady.

‘No! My god, Vicky, how could you think I could do it! Or David! David's so square he can't even dance with me in public. No! It isn't true.'

‘I heard you. I heard the whole thing. It was real.'

‘I swear!' Jocelyn says.

‘I know. I know. I know you weren't there. I know. I just heard you, that's all.'

‘What does she say it is?'

‘Something called a hypnagogic vision. Where you externalize.'

‘But why would you do something like that?'

‘Daddy caught me listening once. Well, I was trying not to listen, but he got mad at me. She thinks that's it.'

Jocelyn says, after a while, ‘Does it happen often? Do you get these things often?'

‘I don't know,' I say. ‘That's the trouble.'

But Jocelyn is still angry. ‘Well, if you want to
know,
we only do it when we're prepared to take the risk.'

‘What?'

‘We only do it when we're willing to get caught,' she says, her mouth tight, like my mother's. ‘That's what you believe, isn't it? That's what you think. You don't think it's right unless you get punished. Well, you can be satisfied about
that.
'

‘What?'

‘And we have never done it here, never!'

Oh Jocelyn. Oh my god.

 

I AM IN West Vancouver. The divorce is over. The play has gone on. The one about the suicide. The director didn't like the first draft. He has said, ‘Oddly enough, it's very competent. It's just crap.' And, ‘Tell me about your father.'

I tell him about my father and he says, ‘Now go back and write it again.'

I go back and write it again in two days and two nights, non­stop. I break once to watch
I Love Lucy.
When they ask me later if I have been influenced by Bach, in the fugue-like contrapuntal technique, I want to say, ‘Actually, it was
I Love Lucy.
' Last year I read a graduate paper on it. ‘The motif of sterility and death can be seen in the carefully worked-out images of …' I say, to the earnest woman student, ‘I can't tell. It seems right, I mean, I suppose that's all there, what you say about the images and so on, but I didn't work them out like that. I wasn't trying for that.' She has got a B and wants me to tell her why she didn't get an A. It seems both amazing and ludicrous for that play to be written about, with footnotes and a bibliography.

I am in West Vancouver doing housework.

I am cooking and cleaning and babysitting for Gladys, the wo­man from the radio station. She is giving a recital.

For years she has been saying, ‘I've wasted my life on that man.' I say, ‘Well, why don't you give a recital?'

‘I couldn't. It'd cost a fortune. We're living beyond our income now.'

‘Well, I've got money. I'll back you. I'll be your entrepreneur.'

Gladys laughs. ‘You don't have that much.'

‘Sure I do. I'm rich. I got a fortune for that play.'

‘It's too late,' Gladys says. ‘I've given my life to that man.'

‘You're singing better than ever. You told me so yourself.'

‘But I can't afford to get help in. His Nibs would have a fit if I weren't here to serve him hand and foot.'

‘I'll do it. I'll come and be your housekeeper.'

‘Do you think we could?'

We get all giggly and make elaborate plans. I shall do the catering and rent the gallery, we'll get Boris to make up the programs, and Paul to translate from the German. ‘Oh but He'll never agree,' Gladys says. She always capitalizes her husband.

But he agrees. ‘It was never me, you know,' he says on the QT to me, but I don't listen.

I come on Monday and I make a lot of mistakes. I throw out the
schmaltz
she was saving. ‘But it just looked like chicken fat,' I say.

‘Chicken fat!' Gladys says. ‘It
was
chicken fat!'

‘Would you put it back in the frying pan?' says the husband about the limp French toast. He is lying in bed, being a genius.

Gladys encourages me and on Tuesday I do better.

By Wednesday I have ironed all the genius's shirts.

By Thursday the house is running smoothly. ‘It hasn't been this clean in months,' says the genius. ‘Why don't you live here per­manently? ‘ says Gladys.

By Friday Gladys has her dress and everything is arranged.

And every night, I lie in their downstairs room and hear them making love upstairs. Or, I hear someone. Making violent love.

Saturday morning, Gladys screams at me: ‘You want me to fail. You've done this on purpose. You've planned the whole thing.'

I've arranged for a dozen red roses to be delivered after the recital. The card says, ‘See? It wasn't so bad after all.' She gets them before she goes on. Oh god.

I have missed a CBC cocktail party because of the housekeeping and Sunday a man arrives at the house to see me. ‘You were the guest of honour,' he says. ‘Didn't you know?'

‘I was babysitting,' I say.

‘Well,' he says, ‘if the mountain won't come to … etcetera.' He sits on Gladys's chesterfield and says extravagant things about the play. And offers me a job. A play for Festival.

After he leaves, Gladys comes out of the bedroom and says, ‘I can't stand the act.'

‘What?'

‘The innocent act. “Oh Mr Winters,”' she imitates, ‘“but I'm really only little me. I really couldn't write a big important play for Festival. I'm really no good at all.” I wish you could hear yourself. I wish you could hear how sickening you sound.'

‘Did I say that?'

‘And you bounced up and down and said “Goody!”'

On Monday morning I slip out of the downstairs room early. I haven't slept much, what with all the hypnagogic loving going on upstairs all night. Down on Marine Drive I get the first paper.

Gladys Turner has great sensitivity of phrasing. One could only wish she had a talent or at least a voice commensurate with that sensitivity
.

I go back up the hill to the still-sleeping house, pack my suitcase, and catch the bus to the clinic. All the buses to the clinic. I am sitting there, in my blue jeans and T-shirt, when the Nut Lady arrives.

‘You've got to put me away,' I say. ‘I'm dangerous.'

She gives me a pill and lets me lie down in the little green room for a while. A green underwater room. The nurse brings me a cup of tea. Then I go home.

I am sitting in the front room and Mik walks in the door.

It couldn't have been that day. That day I was wearing a blue skirt and a fussy blouse. The red suede slippers. The day Mik walked in and did the double-take. But it seems to be that other day. The day I came home from the clinic. It can't be, because of the blue jeans. But it was.