Garbo Laughs (10 page)

“I could say you’re lucky, but I’d be repeating myself, wouldn’t I?”

“You like him?”

“He’s a sweetie. And handsome too.”

Harriet cheered up immediately, and Dinah tried not to be too critical of a woman who couldn’t see what she had until someone else admired it.

“Well, at least I’m not as badly off as my Auntie Lottie,” said Harriet. “On her wedding night Uncle George put his head under the covers and sucked his thumb.”

“I think that’s endearing.”

“Endearing?”
Harriet looked at Dinah with wonder. “What a generous woman you are!”

“You don’t agree?”

“Are you telling me you wouldn’t mind a husband who sucked his thumb?”

“I’m just saying that’s love, isn’t it?”

“What’s love?”

“Feeling tender towards another’s weaknesses.”

“These tests of love,” said Harriet. “I flunk them every time.”

It being a Friday, when Kenny arrived home from school he called out to his mom, “Did you get a movie?”

She said yes. “It’s called
Nails
. It was made by the National Film Board, and it’s fascinating.”

“No, really,” said Kenny.

“Ninotchka
. Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. It’s a classic,” she said, seeing his doubtful face.

“Is Dinah coming?”

“She’s not feeling very well, but I persuaded her to come anyway.”

“Good,” said Kenny, heading upstairs and leaving Harriet to remember the Christmas when her mother, as a treat, borrowed a film projector and brought home some educational films to watch, among them,
Nails
, a documentary about the manufacture and production of miles upon miles of nails.
And you wonder what drove me into the arms of Cary Grant?

Garbo came on and they stared. No one said a word. Harriet thought, Her hair is flat. Her tummy sticks out. Her shoulders slump.

And that
hat
.

Ina Claire is better, thought Harriet. To Jane she said in a neutral voice, “Do you think she’s beautiful?”

“Yes.”

Surprised. “Why?”

“Her skin. Her eyes. Her mouth. Of course, it could be makeup. It’s hard to tell if somebody’s beautiful when they’ve got makeup on.”

Dinah agreed with Jane. “She’s marvellous. Look at her stride across a room. Nobody else was like her. Nobody came close. Even the smart ones didn’t have what she has behind her eyes.”

Harriet thought, She has herself behind her eyes. She makes love to herself.

The laugh was worth waiting for. To be accurate, the attempt to make her laugh was worth waiting for. How attractive of Melvyn Douglas to be attracted to a serious Russian and to want to make her laugh. “It sounds natural to me,” said Dinah. “It doesn’t sound dubbed. Does it sound dubbed to you?”

“She’s good at being in love,” Harriet said. “But she’s not in love with Melvyn Douglas. That’s easy to tell.”

“They wanted Cary Grant for the part,” Dinah said.

“Ah! That would have been a different story.” And Harriet imagined Cary in the part, and in other parts he had turned down. How different
Love in the Afternoon
would have been had Cary said yes, and
Sabrina
too. “You read that somewhere?”

“Jack told me.”

“Jack?”

“I saw him when I went for the pizza. He asked about you, by the way.” She looked at Harriet. “I think he likes you. But I guess you know that.”

Kenny said, “He’s good.” His eyes hadn’t left the screen.

“Melvyn Douglas?” said Harriet, feeling more pleased than she knew was sensible.

“What else is he in?” asked Kenny.

“He was in
Hud
. But he was no fun at all.”

“He
is
good,” agreed Dinah. “They’re good together.”

Harriet thought, No, they’re good apart. Later, she said, “Too bad Garbo didn’t choose to keep on laughing. She could have been a comedian, but she chose to be sad and lonely instead.”

Dinah said, “What makes you think comedians are happy?”

But Harriet just laughed, still mildly aglow from what Dinah had said about Jack.

After the kids were in bed and Dinah had gone home, she watched
Ninotchka
again. “‘The whites of your eyes are clear. Your cornea is excellent.’

“‘What kind of girl are you?’”

Then once more, a day later, by which time she had convinced herself not only that Garbo was beautiful but that she was in love with Melvyn Douglas. The falsity and strangeness of her acting fell away, and Harriet became accustomed to her mannerisms, which now seemed like truth.

J
ane said to her brother, “You’re wasting water, Kenny.”

They were standing side by side at the sink, and Kenny had emptied a glass, half full, down the drain, then filled it anew.

“Just an ounce,” he said.

“Ken, do you know that farmers don’t have enough water for agriculture because it’s being
taken?
By city folk? For bottled water? That’s wasting water, Ken. Just because I touched the glass, you don’t have to throw it out.”

“It’s just an ounce,” he said again.

“But it adds up. If we had a social scale, you’d be lower on it than I am.”

This occurred after school. Before supper Harriet said, “I just looked in the mirror. That was a mistake. I’m looking less and less like Julie Christie every day.”

“So is she,” said Lew.

They were all in the kitchen, the table covered with homework spread far and wide, and the air full of bickering about who would clean it up.

“Who’s Julie Christie?” asked Kenny.

“A famous movie star.”

“Then why haven’t I heard of her?”

“Because you’re dumb,” said Jane.

During supper, eaten around piles of homework, Kenny said to his mom, “Remember how you said after you watch a movie you feel emptier than before?”

“Not always.” Remembering, and qualifying what she’d said.

“It’s true. Except for two movies.
My Life as a Dog
and
The Black Stallion
. After they were over, I felt great.”

“But you said
My Life as a Dog
depressed you.”

“The thing is, it had some very depressing moments, but it had a very happy ending.” She nodded, and then he said, “Name a movie star who was good at dancing, singing, and acting, all three.”

Lew reached for
Canadian Architect
. Harriet said, “Gene Kelly and Judy Garland.”

“I agree,” said Jane.

“And not Frank Sinatra?”

“He was good at singing and acting,” said Harriet, “but not so great at dancing.”

“Have you heard the new scandal?” Kenny had a twinkle in his eye. “They finally discovered that Gene Kelly never really sang. And his feet were computer-animated.”

“And Frank Sinatra was dubbed,” snarled Jane.

“Now that joke isn’t funny,” Kenny protested. “Now it’s not funny any more! You ruined the joke!”

He pushed aside his plate and stomped upstairs. In his room he put on his gangster jacket and his fedora, sat down at his small desk, and began to type, two-fingered, on the old typewriter he’d lugged up from the basement.
I parked my Rolls-Royce and walked into the bar wearing my light-brown tweed jacket and my black fedora, smoking –
“What’s the name of a cigar?” he yelled to his mom,
who was coming up the stairs. “White Owl,” she yelled back –
a White Owl cigar. That’s a typical outfit for me because I’m so underpaid I can’t afford new clothes. The Rolls-Royce is my late sister’s. She left it to me in her will. At the bar I saw the Sinatra sisters. They were each having a drink. For Dinah Sinatra it was Scotch. Same for Harriet. I went over to the counter and got myself a bourbon. Then I got another bourbon. I went up to the Sinatra sisters and said, “I think your father’s better in the movies than he is singing. I especially like
High Society, On the Town,
and
Guys and Dolls.
How about you?” But when I looked up they were gone
.

In the basement Lew heard his son typing away. Lew was wearing one of his father’s shirts since he, too, was looking for inspiration. Any design problem, and he put on his father’s old plaid shirt; mixing drinks, and he wore his father’s polka-dot shirt purchased in Miami Beach in 1947. How to create a small office as efficient and exact as a small boat? That was the problem he had to crack, this son of a melancholy building inspector whose nervous breakdown at fifty-four had delivered young Lew and his brother into the tender hands of their grandparents for several summers, in this very house.

Late one night, when Lew and Harriet were folding the tablecloth after a dinner party, Lew said, “A beautiful colour. My father’s favourite colour.”

“Coral,” she said.

“Salmon. My father would have said salmon. One time at dinner we were eating lobster and he kept picking up different pieces and saying: This is the colour. No.
This
is the colour. He was trying to find the shade to paint our house. That was the same night he cut his hand on the broken jar and said afterwards
That was the colour
. The colour of blood dripping down his hand.”

A pebbled-glass orange juice jar, used for storing water in the fridge: it slipped out of his grasp on a hot, humid night and he caught it as it smashed on the floor. A shard of glass severed the tendon between finger and thumb, and a hand surgeon with the memorable name of Dr. Nailbuff repaired the deep wound.

Harriet was agog as she listened to the details. From the first, she had reminded him of his father. Intent, serious, easily hurt. Tempestuous, susceptible, blunt. Kenny had some of the same qualities, perhaps too many, while Jane was more like his own mother: capable, determined, energetic, yet subject to various physical afflictions, as was he. He didn’t always understand it, this marriage of his. He loved a crowded house. Harriet hated company. He loved plump, fall-bodied women. Harriet was tall, bony, rangy; given to insomnia and sadness, which she doctored with old movies; often embarrassingly direct, and furious for no good reason. And what held him? Oddly enough, the way she left him alone.

His dad used to kiss him on the mouth. Ancient fatherly affection. Unembarrassed. Without guile. He loved his sons. No one was good enough for them, not their wives, not the sons themselves. For Lew he had had the highest hopes, imagining a fine career with a large firm, and it hurt him – Lew knew that-to see his sons refuse to climb the ladder from which he himself had fallen. He spent his final years typing bitter letters to the editor with two long fingers, his lips moving in silent battle with the old enemies in his head. But Lew’s ambitions had never been material. Teaching, offering his services to international heritage
committees, an occasional high-paying private job for extra money. And his designs were invariably simple. As a boy his favourite word was
room
. After that,
boardwalk
, from playing Monopoly. What is it? he had asked his dad. A wooden walkway by the sea, came the answer. And Lew thought, No wonder it’s the most valuable property on the board.

“I fell in love with his room,” Harriet answered, when Dinah asked her how it happened that she fell in love with Lew. “He’d made everything himself – desk, bed, shelves – and everything was placed – arranged – with an eye for proportion and balance.” Dinah nodded. Yes, she thought, there was an atmosphere around Lew of nothing being too much trouble.

He rarely watched a movie. Harriet liked to joke that the last one he’d seen was Bertolucci’s
1900
made in 1977. Once, she’d asked him what movie star he drooled over as a boy. He thought for a time, then said, “I liked Marilyn Monroe.” How old were you when you first saw her? “Thirty?” he said.

He was the sort of man who mended the tears in a map. Who spent hours pressing cloves into an orange to hang from the rearview mirror and dispel the car-stink that made his daughter want to puke. The only one who had the patience and dexterity to put her tiny pierced earrings into her ears.

“If it hurts, you let me know, okay?”

“Okay.”

He turned the light to its brightest setting. “Come on, get through. If it hurts, you tell me. Is it hurting?”

“No.”

“It’s not going through. Let’s try the front. Turn your head. Now it’s through. The hole is still there. There it is. Right through.”

So tender-hearted that when he picked apples in an orchard he picked them all, scabby, small, lopsided, unable to leave any behind. He came home with boxes of apples and Harriet went through them and said, “Did you wear your glasses?”

A man so kind and calm that when he was less than that, it took your breath away.

A year ago she was in New York doing some research for her magnum opus,
Mapping Canadian Self-Doubt
(a title that Dinah told her had to go: “I would never, and I mean never, buy a book called
Mapping Canadian Self-Doubt”)
, and one afternoon she called home collect. Lew answered. She heard the operator ask him if he would accept her call, and through the domestic chaos in the background she heard him say, “I guess so.”

A day later she called again and heard the same tepid answer.

I guess so? I guess so?

And she felt everything that had ever been between them fall instantly away.

“You want advice about Harriet?” Dinah asked gently the morning she stood outside in her red coat and learned the correct name for her braided black fasteners.

“She’s up all night,” he sighed, “and awful all day.”

“Is she up now?”

“Now she’s in bed. She might be sleeping. I hope she’s sleeping.”

“You’d better get a new mattress. A good mattress makes all the difference.”

Dinah, observing his tired face, remembered her first impressions of him: the tender voice, the sexiness of his domesticity, his
easiness in any situation, his courtesy. She pictured him making the lunches and getting the kids out the door, and she felt sympathy but not pity. Her mother would have felt pity, but Dinah belonged to another generation. Her father, too, had been a devoted dad. She used to think all Jewish men were the same, but then she went to New York and discovered that there were poor Jews and bad Jews. Lew’s Jewishness lay easily upon him, like an invisible cloak. He worked hard, but never talked about how hard he worked. “It used to be,” he said, “before everybody was in such a rush, that the first question people would ask was
Who are you?
Meaning are you Jewish, French, Italian, Puerto Rican? Then,
What do you do?
Meaning are you a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief? Now they ask
Are you done yet?”