Garbo Laughs (12 page)

“Why won’t you marry him?” she asked outright one day.

“Too many mirrors,” was the answer. And Harriet thought Fiona’s hearing aids had stopped altogether.

“How many?” she asked.

“I don’t know in total, but?” with that little swing in her voice, “in his bathroom there are three large ones.”

“He doesn’t look like a vain man,” said Harriet in some perplexity. “He doesn’t dress like a vain man.”

“That’s the trouble. He can’t get undressed fast enough.”

On Sunday mornings, Harriet always heads downstairs to catch the song detective, who comes on the air at twenty minutes to eight and provides, in the next twenty minutes, three stories, each with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s rather like hearing three little three-act plays. There’s the letter requesting a song that has meaning in the listener’s past, the search for the song, and then the song itself – a most satisfying progression.

The song detective doesn’t look a bit like his educated voice. Always knocking about in jeans and army jacket, no gloves, no hat. A smooth baritone with a mischievous laugh, but socially a misfit: a solitary, burly man who walks down the middle of the street never greeting anyone. Never, according to Dinah, stepping on a crack.

You seem to keep a close eye on him, observed Harriet one day.

He’s not my type, came the surprisingly curt answer.

Harriet heats milk for her second cup of coffee as she listens, the volume turned low so as not to disturb the others.
“The memory that has prompted this request goes back about twenty years when I played an old record for my son who was then about ten years old
…” It was the
William Tell
Overture, a Columbia recording the listener was given as a boy. Two large discs with blue labels. Harriet listens to the music and her thoughts wander to Bill Bender and his endless book.
Everyone is writing a book, have you noticed? And why? Because books are about to expire, that’s why. Any plant under stress puts out many blooms
.

No doubt writers will be the silent-screen stars of the 21st century – left behind – unable to make the leap to the next stage: books without paper
.

When I was little I used to visit the post office and go through the tall wire-mesh wastebaskets to find beautiful used envelopes and discarded business forms. What treasure. Once, coming home with my hands full, a little dog came out of nowhere and bit me. Papers everywhere. Tears, of course. And home
.

Books without paper, and, I should probably add, without readers
.

Later, under a sky that couldn’t make up its mind whether to snow or rain – such nervous, indecisive, Jack Lemmony weather – Harriet walks to the fruit store and looks up from the bananas straight into the eyes of Dinah Bloom, who is stocking up on oranges because she feels so run down. “It was in a store like this,” says Dinah, “a little smaller, that I saw Greta Garbo.”
They push their carts to the front, where it just so happens that the most beautiful woman in Ottawa is working the cash. While they wait in line Dinah asks if Kenny is still writing his Humphrey Bogart stories, and Harriet tells her he’s too busy listing reasons why he should see
The Godfather
.

“What a great kid.”

“Not everybody thinks so,” says the mother.

“Who doesn’t think so?”

“His teacher.”

“What’s her name? I’ll slap her silly.”

“Well, he can be hard to take. Sometimes he comes at you like something shaken up.”

“You mean somebody put some Benzedrine in his Ovaltine?”

“Exactly.”

“No,” Dinah says, “your kids are great. You’re adequate, but your kids are great.” Her face takes on a wistful look. “The first time I met Kenny and he said he loved Frank Sinatra, I thought, This is bliss. Where does he come from? And I wanted to see him grow up. I wanted to stick around long enough to see him grow up.”

She puts her two bags of oranges on the counter and the beautiful woman, working quickly, smiles and says, “Hello, my dear,” in her strong Middle Eastern accent. She is slender, dark-haired, olive-skinned, oval-faced. She works the cash only when the store gets suddenly busy, otherwise she sorts fruits and vegetables in the back, or sets them out on shelves. Always she wears a long blue apron over a straight black skirt, dark stockings, ankle socks, small leather boots. Yet she looks elegant. Harriet doesn’t know how she does this, except that it seems to require
no effort, but it must require some. Some lipstick, some rouge, some eye makeup. She has a beautiful smile and good white teeth. Her hands are work hands, rough from sorting through dry, wet, earthy vegetables at cool temperatures. “Do your hands ever crack?” Harriet asked her once when her purchases were being sped through, and she smiled and ignored the question the way beautiful women always ignore questions about beauty.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” asks Dinah.

“You mean my class?”

“Jack said he’s going.”

“You saw him?”

“I told you I did.”

His name drops like a sexual pebble into the stream of their conversation, and for a moment they both look down. Beyond them, on the other side of plate-glass windows painted with enormous red cherries and yellow bananas, falls the first snow of the day. November 30. It gathers on the roof of the unfinished-furniture store across the street, and on the trees beyond.

Dinah says, “Just remember what George Cukor said. ‘Don’t panic and don’t wilt.’”

“What’s left?” asks Harriet.

They take the long way home, heading over to the Rideau River and passing the Strand on the way, the old movie house abandoned to bingo, and then abandoned by bingo. Located just beyond the fruit store, it sits empty and faded in the falling snow.

“
I
t’s not that I’m funny,” said Professor Harriet, standing at the front of her Monday-night class. She was wearing the long black sweater, shapeless and already streaked with chalk, that was passed on by a late cousin once removed. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her brain had tightened in alarm because Rod Steiger was in the front row.

“But I’d like to be,” she said. “I’ve decided,” she went on, “to take a serious approach to comedy. I call it the Buster Keaton approach. This way we get to have our cake and eat it too. We get to be serious
and
funny. We don’t have to be funny all at once, or all the time. We’ll read Calvin Trillin, James Thurber, Beryl Bainbridge. We’ll figure out what makes them funny and then we’ll steal from them. We’ll steal like raccoons. We’ll watch movies too, or at least scenes from movies, since life isn’t worth living without them. Why is Cary Grant funny here and not here? You could spend your life figuring that one out.”

She saw Jack Frame looking at her the way a vegetarian looks at meat. Desire? Distaste? Who could tell?

“Three weeks,” she reminded them. “I’m just filling in for three weeks.

“You see,” she went on, “I think it’s the need to relax and the impossibility of ever doing so that makes for comedy.” Now she was reading from her notes. “The struggle to keep going in
the face of humiliation, the mounting dismay until you either laugh or go nuts. In other words, seriousness heading off the rails is funny. A deadpan attitude towards the outrageous. Laurel beside Hardy. George Burns beside Gracie Allen. Lily Tomlin beside Lily Tomlin.

“This is my approach,” she said.

“What is?” asked someone she pretended not to hear.

“Now,” she said with great firmness, “open your notebooks and, for ten minutes, write about the last time you laughed out loud.”

They looked at her. Eight people seated as far away from each other as chocolate chips in a no-name cookie. I could bicycle between you, she thought. You could be my paper route. In her nervousness, she could not absorb, let alone remember, any of their names.

There was (1) A short, squat young man who looked like Toad of Toad Hall. (2) A middle-aged roué who arrived late, his face soft and dark from lack of sleep. (3) A woman in her sixties who looked like Vanessa Redgrave without the neck. (4) A young Asian woman who wrote with pencil, since by now they were all writing; this was the miracle. They were all, without exception, writing.

There was (5) A woman in her thirties whose skin was the colour of Cheerios. Her sweater was the colour of Cheerios. Drop a Cheerio and you would never find it again. (6) A man in his seventies with a North of England jaw and a North of England nose.

“I’m saying,” North of England announced to the room, “that I can’t remember the last time I laughed aloud.”

“Perfect,” said Harriet.

They were united by the delicate knowledge that none of them knew what he or she was doing, including Professor Harriet. Thank God, she thought, for courteous obedience, even if it did lead to Scott’s death at the Pole. How would a Norwegian teach this class? she wondered. What would Amundsen have done? He would have started with the first comic writer the world produced – Euripides? Did any of the Greeks have a sense of humour? – and worked forward, training himself in every step of comical progress mankind had ever made. She knew this because Kenny was doing a project on the race to the Pole. Kenny had very decided views on the matter. Amundsen, he said, was a hothead. He liked Scott.

Just wait, Harriet cautioned. Read some more before you make up your mind.

But Kenny had to be on someone’s side all the time. He had to commit himself, and he had to know whether you were on the same side.

Then there was (7) A woman in a shawl who looked strangely familiar. Beware of shawls, thought Harriet, after the woman gave her a deadly look.

And (8) Rod Steiger.

Her glance went back to the Shawl, who chose that moment to look up. Their eyes locked briefly, because that’s all Harriet could stand. She looked away. Then, hunched over her notebook, she wrote,
Dear Pauline, What would you do?

When Harriet discovered Pauline Kael years ago, that cold fall in New York, she was in the middle of another crazy time, trapped as she was with two kids in a tiny apartment. That fall, Pauline’s old movie reviews were the only things she could read. Reviews of
movies she had never seen, most of which she never would see, but what did it matter, so captivated was she by her sharp tongue and uncanny grasp of the shape of a movie and the pitfalls into which actors and directors consistently fell. The greatest trap, she gathered, was wanting your audience to like you. A mediocre actor in an unlikable part would always find a way to figuratively wink at the audience: this lousy person isn’t me, I’m really quite lovable. A great actor, on the other hand, threw himself into the part, no holds barred. Brando never winked.

You would square your tiny shoulders and glitter with dark wit. You wouldn’t droop. You wouldn’t need to be liked. You would brass it out
.

Professor Harriet girded her loins and looked once more at the Shawl. Something about her was so familiar. Had they met?

“It’s time to stop,” she said, and everyone stopped. “Now I’ll ask you to read your pieces aloud.” And she turned to North of England directly on her right.

North of England, as he had warned, couldn’t remember the last time he laughed aloud, but he remembered the last time his wife did not. They were at the weekly meeting of the Society of Friends. Quakers, he explained, whose meetings of worship were held in silence so that every sound your poor body made was audible to all but the stone deaf. It was summertime and the meeting was in someone’s home in the country. They walked up to the front door, and, before knocking, he turned to his wife and said to her, “This is your last chance to fart,” not realizing that the windows were open and his voice carried like a bell. Or so said his furious wife.

Everyone laughed – no-neck Vanessa laughed the loudest – and Harriet led the clapping. A round of applause after every
reader. That was her strategy. Plus homemade cookies (the shortbreads), which she would produce during the break.

The roué was next. The last time he laughed aloud was at a Bill Murray movie, and his girlfriend didn’t laugh at all. They broke up after that and his personal reasons for being in Canada evaporated. For some reason he stayed. He had always wanted to be a comic writer and most of the comic writers come from Canada. “Why is that?” he wanted to know. “And the three authors you mentioned, are any of them Canadian?”

“Good point,” said Harriet. “Nothing is written in stone,” she said. “Let me think about that.” Like Scott, she would improvise her way to her doom.

Cheerio-woman spoke up: “Who did you say we were supposed to read? Somebody Bumbridge?”

Harriet wrote the name on the board with such vigour that the chalk snapped in half and bounced off Jack Frame’s desk. He picked it up and handed it to her, producing, she could feel it, a violent blush.

“Beryl Bainbridge,” said Toad, looking at the board. “I think my mother reads her.”

“How would you like a kick in the pants?” muttered Harriet.

“What?”

“Next.” Nodding to Cheerio-woman, who said the last time she laughed aloud she choked. She was drinking a glass of water and the man she was with had to thump her on the back. Why was she laughing? Because he’d told her a dirty joke.

“Yes?” said Harriet, her insides expanding with hope. “Go on.”

“I’ve written the first part down.”

“Yes?”

“But I can’t remember the ending.”

The Shawl snorted. “I knew this would be a waste of time.”

“That’s the trouble with jokes,” commiserated Harriet.

The Asian woman who wrote in pencil read so softly that no one could hear her. Pencil Voice, thought Harriet. “May I read it for you?” she asked. But the writing was too faint to decipher. “I wrote in pencil until I was twenty,” Harriet said, and she gave Pencil Voice a pen.

No-neck Vanessa said she laughed aloud that very morning. Over
Cathy
, the comic strip.

“Not
Cathy,”
protested the Shawl.

“I love
Cathy,”
said Vanessa.

Harriet intervened, perhaps too quickly. “Remember,” she said in her shapeless chalk-streaked sweater, “that humour is subjective.”