Garbo Laughs (11 page)

His own not-so-secret wish was to run a slow-paced neighbourhood coffee shop. Harriet would make the pastries. She had actually offered. She would bake, she said, every night from six until ten, so long as she didn’t have to speak to anyone. Of course, what appealed to Lew, a sociable man caught in the coils of an unsociable wife, was the chance to visit with people all day long. There were times when Dinah thought the two of them oddly suited to each other: one fulfilled by little, the other unfulfilled by a lot.

“She can’t stand visitors,” he said, “except for you.” Giving her an appreciative look.

“We have fun with our movies.”

“Movies,”
groaned Lew. “That’s all she cares about.”

“Don’t be a jealous fool,” she teased, but to her surprise he didn’t smile.

Ah, she thought sadly, so that’s the trouble. He’s suffering from Rhett Butler syndrome: he wants his wife to fall in love with him.

T
hey were downstairs when the phone rang. It was the last Saturday in November. Lew answered, and said, “Leah!” To be exact, he said, “Leah!
Where are you?”

That was the clue. They knew more than one Leah, but only one Leah could have drawn from him such a resounding note of cheery panic.

Harriet, reaching for the coffee, froze in her tracks. Then, without a coat, she headed out the back door into the snow. She was wearing slippers. In her slippers she went around the side of the house, squeezed through the narrow passageway between verandah and wooden fence, got herself past the car parked in the driveway and around to the front. She came in the front door, removed her slippers, tiptoed upstairs, and pulled the blankets over her head.

Lew sat on the edge of the bed. “I saved you,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“With Jack’s sister in Chicago. It’s all right.”

“She’s not coming?”

“She’s coming, but not till January, like she said. She just wanted to complain about not hearing from us.”

“What did she say she’s doing? What is her life like?” Harriet could ask now that the immediate danger had passed. She was very curious to know.

“She said she spends all her time writing angry letters she doesn’t send. She said it’s a good thing she doesn’t send them. Then she read me one.”

“Right.”

Even a calm letter from Leah was like a missive from Liza Minnelli. Hectic, overemphatic, crammed with capitalized words and exclamation marks. It made you long to be a Quaker.

“I said we’d be happy to have her stay, but we always put a limit on guests of three days. Otherwise you can’t work.”

Harriet looked at him gratefully. “Except Jeff Bridges. If Jeff calls, he can stay for a week.” She reached for Lew’s hand, and he said to her, “You know, she’s a fund of information. Get her to talk about Hollywood.”

“I don’t believe a word she says. She trashes everybody. She hates them all. You remember what she said about Cary Grant?” Fixing him with livid eyes. “You don’t remember. Well, I’m not going to repeat it.”

“She’s lonely,” he said.

“She’s a bully and a lush. She leaves Attila the Hun in the dust.”

“You’re afraid of her.”

“Afraid?”
squawked Harriet. “Try terrified. Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, sitting up. “This is ridiculous.
I’m
ridiculous. When in January?”

“The first week.”

“Why would anybody come to Ottawa in January?”

Lew shook his head, equally confounded.

“She’s demented, that’s why.”

“I know,” he said.

Y
ou give in so easily, Ratty said to Mole. Harriet had been reading to Kenny and the words come back to her at three in the morning. Timid Mole and Imperious Ratty. She thinks of Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando in
Guys and Dolls
. She thinks of commanding figures and weak ones. She thinks of getting up, but she doesn’t. Her shoulders are cold. She lies in bed and worries some more.

Her class. She must prepare for tomorrow’s class. And Leah. She must build herself some armour.

In the morning, while the kids and Lew sleep in, she makes coffee and takes it to her desk upstairs, and there she sits remembering the previous week – the last week of November, when for a day or two it was unexpectedly warm and she became aware of the birds singing and the highway going on and the wind picking up.
Life isn’t so bad, though it would be better, it would be much better, without wind chimes. Listen to them. Listen to them ruining my life.
They sound like Auntie Muriel clicking and sucking her false teeth. To be twenty-one, to he at Covent Garden, to be listening for the first time in my life to
Carmen
and to have it ruined by my opera-singing auntie with the blue eyeshadow and the great crooked nose that turned black in the cold and the long fingernails painted red except where the paint had chipped away – to have it ruined by my dear old auntie clicking her teeth and humming over the arias. Is it any wonder? Is it any wonder that Iget depressed?

Ottawa has done this to me. Ottawa has sucked the juices from my brain and the marrow from my bones. But I can’t say so or Lew’s eyes will light up and he’ll exclaim: Montreal. Cuba. Brazil
.

One night earlier in the week, when they were lying in bed together, she said, “I am one-third my mother and two-thirds my father. One day out of three I work hard, everything interests me, I am glad to be alive. Two days out of three I rot. I sulk. I’m incapable of anything but self-pity. My mother should have married someone else. She should have married an Asian.”

Lew, only half listening, said, “You think you’d do better if your dad was an agent?”

“Okay. My mother should have married an Asian agent. Then my book would be a howling success
and” –
returning to her own point – “I wouldn’t have so much body hair.”

The hair on her legs was thickening as was the hair on bucktoothed beavers in their lodges and glutted raccoons in their holes. It would continue to grow and flourish until the end of April, when the summer harvest would begin. Then she would take a razor to her legs and the yield would be enough for a little fur coat. She could sell these coats, she thought. If
that
failed, if worst came to worst, and no doubt it would, she might develop a line of gum makeup. She had acres of gums. Voltaire on Canada?
Nothing but a few acres of snow? Well. Check out these few acres of gums.

She tried out her idea on Dinah. “You’re a career woman,” she said, “what do you think?”

“A career woman? I was fired ten days ago.”

“Dinah.”

“Not to worry. I’ve already lined things up. Dinah Bloom, speech writer.”

“So you’re all right?”

“And as a career woman with a new career, I think gum makeup has a great future, so long as you do a little modelling on the side.”

They had watched
Bells Are Ringing
not long ago, and as soon as Judy Holliday began to sing about the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Factory, where she did a little modelling on the side, Harriet took a page from her daughter’s book and said, “I’m her.”

“You can’t be Judy Holliday,” said Dinah. “You’re Greta Garbo.”

“I can be Judy. I have room for
many
enthusiasms.”

“Okay. Have it your way. But I’m Audrey Hepburn.”

“We’re
both
Audrey.”

Dinah looked at Jane and Kenny. “Your mother,” she said, “is out of control.”

Dear Pauline
, wrote Harriet the morning after
Bells Are Ringing. Now I’m in love with Dean Martin. Tell me. What is it, exactly, that makes him so sexy? Dinah says he has the look and manner of someone from her father’s generation, the sort who only has to say, Hi, dollface, and you feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven. But Dinah is cruder
than I am. To say nothing of older. I would say it’s his relaxed but ardent humour, his easy good looks, his perfect timing, and unabashed appreciation of quirky, good-hearted, funny women who loosen up and relax in his company. I don’t suppose you’ve watched many Dean Martin movies in your day; you don’t even include
Bells Are Ringing
in your
5001 Nights at the Movies,
a clear sign of disfavour. I hope I’m broadening your mind
.

H.

Eeyore is more interesting than Mole, Harriet tells herself at her desk: self-pity beats timid charm any day. Her mother introduced her to Eeyore.
My mother exactly
, her mother had said, laughing and shaking her head at Eeyore’s prickly gloom as she read aloud to Owen, the youngest of the six and the one for whom she had time. The only one she read to. Harriet discovered Eeyore that way. She was a witness to the cozy hilarity on the sofa.

Her mother had a sense of humour. She used to laugh over Mark Twain until tears streamed down her cheeks. Her mother insisted that Harriet’s father, Martin the Martinet, also had a sense of humour. “A great sense of fun. Don’t you see it?” Harriet didn’t see it, so busy was she avoiding the back of his hand. Her mother never accused her morose daughter of having a sense of humour. She accused her of being just like her own mother, the one who was just like Eeyore.

Now here she is, proving her mother right. Sunk in gloom at her desk because who was she? She was Harriet Browning, who taught writing sporadically, and for peanuts. How she hated the donkey work of preparation and the unspeakable slave labour of reading her students’ weekly efforts. How she hated being
reminded that what she knew would fill a thimble. How she hated pretending that what she knew would fill more than a thimble. The truth was, she was fooling her students and her students were fooling themselves – what was it Elizabeth Bishop had said about students of creative writing? “I wish they wouldn’t.” She hated her diplomatic lies. What else did she hate?

Oh yes. Wind chimes.

Escaping her desk in the middle of the week, she went outside to stand under the trees, and Fiona Chester came down the sidewalk, a look almost of sorrow on her face, as if about to tell a tragedy. “Oh, Harriet, it’s so beautiful,” she said with a catch in her voice.

She meant the day. It was so beautiful it was breaking her heart.

A mere wisp of a thing, this tiny woman with the grand appetite for knowledge. Bill Bender joined them, closing his front door on the four radios all tuned to the
CBC
from morning till night, since he hated to miss a thing as he moved from room to room between stacks of books so heavy there was genuine concern for his buckling floors.

“I’ve never asked you: have you got any books about Garbo?” Harriet said.

“I saw her once,” he said, jiggling some coins in the pocket of trousers worn white at the knee. He did his own laundry, hanging out a few shirts at a time and a pair of pants, from which sight Harriet concluded that he wore no underwear, ever. “In Central Park,” he said, staring down the street. “She was walking in the rain.”

In the rain, thought Harriet, imagining it.

“Under an umbrella?” she asked.

“No umbrella.”

And they stood there picturing Garbo getting wet.

“What about a hat?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “A wide brim. Dark green.”

“Sunglasses?”

He nodded again.

“Lipstick?” she asked.

“Pink,” he said. “Soft pink.”

That’s my man, thought Harriet. She knew more about him by this time – the photographic memory, the mild alcohol problem, the fine way of getting mad. According to Dinah, his wastebasket at the
Journal
was dented in a dozen places and there was talk of a telephone he had kicked to pieces. Also, absences of several days when he stalked out in a rage over some managing editor’s stupidity. Mainly, though, he was known for his brilliance and his rubbery posture, a physically eccentric and talkative man. Dinah loved him. She had moved onto the street because he was here, and still checked her facts with him. The name of the Catholic hospital in Winnipeg? Misericordia. The name of the beautiful old library across the street? The Cornish. The spelling of Freiman’s department store, long gone, on Rideau Street? The
e
comes before the
i
. The reason Mary Pickford visited Ottawa in 1948? To make an appeal on behalf of
UNESCO
. The reason she got along so well with Prime Minister Mackenzie King? She loved her mother too. Like most newspapermen he knew far more than he had ever put into print, and that was what he was in the process of correcting. His book, the newspaperman’s encyclopedia he had been working on for so
many years, would be a compilation of every story he had ever written plus its shadow story, all the embarrassing facts, deep background, and multiple connections he had never been allowed to make. Journalists write less than they know and novelists write more, he told Harriet when he learned she was a writer. A journalist will know the premier has a mistress kept in a hotel at government expense while his battered wife regularly visits the emergency ward, and not write about it. A novelist will not only write about it but come to sweeping conclusions about the nature of man. What fun they must have, he said.

Oh, I don’t know, said Harriet.

Nicotine oozed from Bill Bender’s walls. His bathroom ceiling, said Dinah, was speckled with brown bubbles the colour of old urine. A two-pack-a-day man from the age of twelve, and a meticulous documenter – he wrote the date beside every cigarette burn on his kitchen floor.

Harriet itched to ask Fiona Chester why she wouldn’t marry him, wondering which of his eccentricities might be the stumbling block, since there were more. There were, for instance, his long-running feuds with the sparrows who moved in on the swallows every spring; with Mort the squirrel, who led a guerrilla army against his tulip bulbs; with the song detective, whose ribald, rebellious backyard bordered his and produced the thousands of Manitoba maple seedlings that clogged his experimental patches of ferns and goldenrod. Against sparrows and squirrels he aimed his grandson’s pumped-up Super Soaker, and against the Manitoba maples he wielded a pair of clippers in the dead of night. They’re not maples, he told the song detective more than once, they’re box elders. WEED TREES, he said,
in anyone’s language
. Brittle, shapeless trees that multiplied like starlings.
But the song detective was no less stubborn, having lived in the treeless Arctic for twenty-two years, where, again according to Dinah, who seemed to know everything about everyone, he passed the long dark nights learning how to knit. (In retaliation, Bill Bender planted ragweed along their shared property line, since he knew the song detective was prone to hay fever.)