Garbo Laughs (2 page)

She had the fern in her lap. Lew was telling her where it came from. A fern museum, he said, outside Santiago de Cuba, a small estate once owned by a fern enthusiast who, upon finding himself too old to look after it, had left it to the state. Now two
cuñados
ran the museum, and she had to ask the meaning of the word
cuñado
. One man was married to the other man’s sister. One of them, he told her, was also a circus performer. A circus performer? Yes. He divided his time between the fern museum and the Cuban circus, travelling the world; he had even been to Toronto, he knew all about the city. What does he do? she asked, and Lew racked his brain for the word. “Master of ceremonies?”

Lew told her these things, his skin smelling of the taxi, the airplane, and surely Cuba; he told her these things quietly. The
kids in bed, all the other presents given out, this one saved for last. Quietly, he dropped into her lap the information and the fern itself, letting her absorb how far away he had been and how different other parts of the world were. They agreed that that would be the perfect life, dividing your time between circuses and ferns, and they smiled at each other happily, easily, even she of the mournful countenance, who thought her husband smiled too much.

“Ringmaster,” she said.

“That’s the word.”

And they felt themselves expand, as if they had made a great discovery.

“Dinah will want to see this,” she said, turning her interested eyes back to the fern. “Fiona too. And Bill Bender. I’ll show it to them.” She nodded at the television on top of which, next to a dog-eared copy of Pauline Kael’s
5001
Nights at the Movies
, sat the video box showing the young Gene Kelly and the young Frank Sinatra dressed up in baseball uniforms and grinning like fools. She had nothing to hide. “Dinah was here on Friday. She and Kenny are still on their Frank Sinatra kick.”

“And you’re still on your Gene Kelly kick,” he said with the long, unguarded smile she wished he didn’t have. She studied his face – the large mouth, the tolerant, hopeful blue eyes – and thought, He’s not bad looking. Not Gene Kelly, but not bad.

He continued to smile, however, and she was on the verge of saying again that something unpleasant had happened, when he began to tell her something else, and again he dropped the information quietly into her lap.

In this neighbourhood where giant ferns used to flourish before glaciers came down and then retreated, leaving the puddle that is now Dow’s Lake and the rocky lip on which their house sits, there is, in a curving line, Lew and Harriet’s house, then the house belonging to the old newspaperman Bill Bender, who gardens naked except for his dressing gown, which is always falling open to reveal his long thing hanging down, then luscious Dinah Bloom, then horrible Ray with his one horrible wife and four horrible children. Just below, on the other side of a grassy alley, his knees wet in what ten thousand years ago would have been a glacial lake, lives the song detective in his defiant forest of Manitoba maples, and, next to him, Fiona Chester, the matriarch of the neighbourhood ever since Sybil Rump died. Fiona is learning Russian even though she’s deaf. Sybil Rump was one of the secretaries around Prime Minister Mackenzie King, typing up the declaration of war in 1939. Sybil never married but she had a wonderful sense of humour, people say, as they always say about unmarried old ladies. Just as they say about homely women: What beautiful eyes! or, What lovely hair!

I’m married, thinks Harriet, but I have no sense of humour. If I lost my husband would I gain a sense of humour? Or should I just change my name to Sybil Rump?

“I need a sidekick,” she has said to Lew more than once.

“You need to get out of the house.”

“I need to get out of the house
and
I need a sidekick.”

No one says of Harriet Browning, What beautiful hair! They say, Oh, oh, still not sleeping? moved by the sight of eyes so deep-set and weary that were you to cover the rest of her face with a book you would see José Ferrer (not Mel, who married Audrey
Hepburn, but José, who played Toulouse-Lautrec in
Moulin Rouge.)
Remove the book and you have Vanessa Redgrave’s jaw on Carol Burnett’s body. Harriet looks like a colt that grew, not into a horse but into a big colt. All angles, all overlong legs, all gauche embarrassment and mutinous radiance. A nightmare on the dance floor.

“I worry,” Lew has confessed, taking into his arms a woman so saturated with old movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Her last office job was during the era of the manual typewriter. Her sense of direction is nil. Kanata is Timmins to her, Nepean the Russian steppes. Highways appall her, computers enrage her, paying the bills is beyond her ken.

“What about?” Unfurling her boniness from his (rather like Audrey Hepburn, came the happy thought, dislodging her limbs from Peter O’Toole.)

“You don’t sleep,” was all he found it wise to say. “You suffer so.”

“Suffer?”
This was too much. “What do you mean
suffer?
Lepers suffer. Victims of ringworm suffer. I don’t suffer.”

Then, feeling herself to be unfair, a frequent feeling that was both her salvation and her doom, she relented. She smiled. The effect was like a woman in the movies who finally takes off her glasses.

After fourteen years of marriage, Lew still enjoys her face for the contrasts it offers up, the moments when her thin-faced melancholy gives way to a smile. Somewhere, halfway between the one extreme of lentil-fed sadness and the other extreme of movie-fed rapture, she is nearly pretty. He likes to watch her good looks come and go.

Were he to die, how she or their children would manage he doesn’t know. They would watch old movies, but what about the real world?

“You met a
blind
photographer?” she repeated, weighing this new piece of information.
“Blind?”

Lew was feeling the full extent of his exhaustion, weeks of meetings and almost no sleep. For a moment he lost track of the conversation, overcome by a wave of indescribable weakness. As a boy he fainted so often he had to give up baseball. The feeling was like that, but confined to his heart.

“Tell me,” he heard Harriet say, but her face was receding from him.

She observed his gentle smile and resisted snapping her fingers. Lew was not an aggressive man except in this, offering part of a story, then refusing the rest until he was questioned. One day she was going to whack him over the head.

Lew smiled at her, but now he couldn’t even remember her name. Then slowly he felt his strength return, and with an effort he explained.

They’re pictures of objects he knows well, things he can touch. His cane, for instance. He leans it against a wall beside a bucket. He has people arrange the objects for him, according to his directions. He knows from the feel of the sun on his face how much light there is, and he adjusts the light meter accordingly.

She was taking all this in, the fern-and-circus man, the blind photographer, when he remembered one more thing. He had visited the beach where they went together twelve years before on holiday, “but it was unrecognizable.”

“Oh?”

Even twelve years before, he knew Havana well, first from photographs and then from visits as an architect working to preserve old cities. Back then the beach was empty except for a group of muscle-bound men in swimsuits: the national wrestling team, of all things. “It’s completely different,” he said.

“All the tourists?”

“Not exactly.”

He paused, and she thought again what a good if infuriating storyteller he was.
He
should be the writer.

“It’s like a brothel,” he said.

He said it without emotion and she looked at him, startled. He went on. The beach was full of Canadian and Italian men with young Cuban women hanging off them. “They don’t let the women into the hotels,” he explained, “not during the day. But you go outside and they’re waiting in a throng. I couldn’t walk down a street in Havana without getting hit on at least once or twice.” This is real life, he was thinking. Forget the movies.

“How can that be?” she demanded. “Why do they allow it?”

He didn’t know. A few years ago they said it was poverty. There wasn’t enough food on the island and women were desperate. But there was enough food now.

The fern was dry and fragile. Like tissue paper, she thought, turning it over in her hands and drawn forward, for a moment, to Christmas.

Then she put an end to their enchanted mood, already complicated by his description of prostitutes, with a question. She prided herself on her questions, imagined obituaries where she was described as having had an inquiring mind. “She wasn’t a
prolific writer,” the obituaries would say, “but often the best writers are not.”

She mentioned the present he had brought for their daughter, wondering if it was appropriate. “Is it appropriate,” she asked, eyeing him, “for a father to give a daughter entering puberty such a suggestive gift?”

He looked at her. Then he said, “That’s the trouble with Ottawa,” and he was vehement and angry.

“You don’t mean that’s the trouble with Ottawa,” she returned. “You mean that’s the trouble with me. You aren’t talking to Ottawa. You are talking to me.”

That’s the trouble, and he continued his thought, not shifting his weary, saddened, aging-by-the-minute eyes off his honest needle of a wife. “People here don’t know how to enjoy their bodies. They don’t know how to relax.” And more than ever he was struck by the contradiction in her, the contradiction between her old-fashioned scruples and her licentious ease with movies: she was a puritan addicted to Hollywood, and she was leading their kids down the same brainless path. “In Cuba everybody dresses like that,” he said stubbornly. “They don’t expect anyone to come on to them just because they do. They all walk down the street like that.”

Harriet saw the street. She saw what he was seeing. The dark, humid,
relaxed
air where they themselves had walked twelve years before on the
Malécon
, the wide sidewalk that hugged the harbour with the ocean on the left, Old Havana on the right, the colonial fort a large, dark bulk far ahead, and so many people walking because so few had cars. He was seeing that and seeing her long, pale, bony severity curled up on the old loveseat in the same brown sweater she had been wearing when
he left, in front of a fireplace without a fire. She saw thick tropical air and fine smooth female skin, and still she thought the present inappropriate and said if her father had given her such a thing – of course he never would have – it would have confused her mightily. The comparison didn’t hold, as she knew perfectly well, since between Lew and their daughter there existed a complete and easy love, while for her father she had felt nothing but fear. But that wasn’t true either. She had been aware of her father as a sexual being and a complicated man. Martin Browning the dentist, who forbade candy, movies, and soda pop.

The spear-tip fern was in her hand. Dryness made it rough, though no rougher than her winter fingers.

“You’re such a prude,” he told her.

She didn’t deny it, and still she questioned his gift.

The present was a skimpy crocheted top, more brassiere than top, made with loose looping stitches except for the solid little cups designed to cover little breasts. Jane had put it on, thrilled and giddy, then turned around so that her father could do up the back. Young Kenny said she looked like Sandra Bullock …

“You’d better have a sexy gift for me too,” she had said, earning a pointed if amused look before he reached into his bag to bring out a jar of Alicia Alonso face cream and a bottle of perfume so stinky she would use it once and not again. Cuban cosmetics, she thought. Only Lew would bring me Cuban cosmetics.

The fern was raspy between her raspy fingers and between husband and wife the atmosphere was also raspy. A sudden coldness that made her heart cold. “I have the right to my opinion,” she said. “To state my uneasiness.” But she knew her opinion went to the heart of his identity as Lew Gold the loving father, and to the heart of their shared geography, this cold country it
had been such a shock to re-enter. He would rather be in Cuba. Come
with
me, he had said.

“So did you go with any of the women who hit on you?”

“No,” he answered immediately. “How could I?” And he spread his hands. “There’s nothing appealing about it. It’s ugly. It’s exploitative. How could I?”

“But you don’t want to be here with your old wife.”

“I do want to be here. I want to be with you.” And he left the rocker and sat beside her on the loveseat.

In the morning, at her desk, she touches the spear-tip fern. She asked Lew its name but he hadn’t written it down and couldn’t remember.

A delicate roughness, not the equal of a whiskery cheek or shaven leg: too delicate for that.

Did you sneak it when no one was looking?

No, the circus man broke it off and gave it to me. I asked if I could keep it and he said I could.

She sits with the lamp on and her notebook open, a great early riser, a tremendous second-guesser, thinking how rapidly something wonderful can turn to shit.
Dear Pauline, For a few minutes I felt as close to Lew as I’ve ever felt, then I stepped onto an ice floe and pushed myself out to sea. I’ve seen a thousand movies
, she writes,
but I’m still no good at love
.