Garbo Laughs (21 page)

Harriet picked up the binoculars off the kitchen windowsill and trained them on the world outside. She saw air bubbles inside an icicle, the wood grain on the bird feeder, individual seeds under layers of ice, and not a single bird. Leah was in the study on the phone. Dinah had left. It was only three o’clock of the same Tuesday, according to the slow-moving clock on the wall.

“That was Janice,” Leah said, coming back into the kitchen. “Janice Bird.”

“You mean Emily.” Turning around. “She changed her name to Emily.”

“Whatever. You’ll have to drive me to see her. Not today.” Looking out the window. “But when this is over. Today I want to talk to you about the book I’m writing with Jack.”

“Why talk to me?”

“Because you know how to write. I want you to read what I’ve written so far. It won’t take long. It’s only fifty pages.”

Harriet raised the binoculars again and focused on the wire fence lacquered with ice, the two cars marooned next door, the maple tree transformed into glass, and – sweet Jesus, would she have no peace? – Jack Frame lumbering up the side lane, hands in his pockets, eyes on his sliding feet. Harriet watched him until the house next door hid him from view.

“Get Jack to read it,” she said, putting the binoculars on the windowsill and sitting down across from her aunt.

“We need an editor. I’ve got the experience. Jack is doing the research. You can be the one who polishes the prose. And don’t tell me you’re doing other things. I know what your life is like.”

Harriet unfolded her long body and stood up. Why was Al Pacino more ruthless than Marlon Brando? Because he was shorter. She stood over – towered over – her short torturer with the beautiful eyes. Then she went to the cupboard and rummaged for sustenance. “Here,” she said, putting Oreos on a plate. “This is what we’re reduced to.”

But Leah was reaching into her bag, taking out a copy of Harriet’s book, putting on her reading glasses. “As for you,” she said, “when are you going to stop writing these
little
pieces? I read your book and I wouldn’t know what to call it. It’s just bits
and pieces strung together.” Opening the book, she began to read aloud the scene describing an elderly woman with veined cheeks and grizzled hair who climbed drunkenly into bed with the narrator and nuzzled her neck and wept. Her aunt was going to punish her by reading aloud a story that a kinder person never would have written – but do people write to be kind? – and Harriet was going to suffer through it. She had written the story to free herself of Leah, but, instead, she had given her aunt an extra indelible life, a sort of amplified existence, from which she could not escape.

Leah lowered her reading glasses, and Harriet stood there, her arms suddenly too long, and said, “I read a horrible story last night. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

And then came a big knock on the front door.

She went to open the door and saw Jack in front of her, and the mail off to the right. “Jack,” she said, avoiding his eyes and reaching across to the mailbox on the side of the porch.

He grabbed her hand. He held it and fished out the letters for her. His face was inches from hers.

“You’ve come to see Leah.”

“I’ve come to rescue you,” he said.

For the next hour Jack took Leah off her hands. Kenny was especially glad to see him, since Kenny liked a man who liked to talk. Harriet was free to lean against the counter and watch. Jack, no less than Leah, she thought, liked to have an effect on people. His effect on her, at the moment, was not unpleasant.
Dear Pauline
, she would write in her notebook, thinking about the insidious nature of attraction,
Who are the most memorable lovers, and why? The ones we’re ashamed of, that’s who and that’s
why. The ones we’re angry at ourselves for liking. The ones who excite our resistance, which breaks down over time. The stronger the resistance, the more complete the breakdown and the more memorable the affair. Think of screen lovers. I do. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious.
Burt Lancaster and Gina Lollobrigida in
Trapeze.
Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid in
Casablanca.
Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in
Pride and Prejudice.
Now why are they memorable? Because the woman gets under the man’s skin. She puts him off balance and makes him angry: angry to find himself attracted to someone he’d dismissed
.

Jack Frame puts me off balance
.

That night Leah discovered the martinis in the freezer (five parts gin to one part vermouth, mixed ahead by Lew and kept in an old whisky bottle). She replenished her glass, then set it down hard on the living-room floor beside her chair.

“That’s what I can’t forgive Lionel for,” she said to Harriet. “What was he doing all that time?”

She meant those final years when she cooked his meals and wiped his bottom, secure in the knowledge that he was writing his memoirs and praising her to the skies. But after his death there was nothing in his study except blank paper, cans of tobacco, piles of cheap paperbacks.

So she would write the memoir. She would write something important, something lasting. Unlike Lionel, whose books were out of print, every single one of them. With sudden fury, she said to her niece, “Don’t let anybody tell you what to write about.”

Harriet looked at her in bewilderment.

“I mean it. I really don’t care if you write about me. Oh, I might for a bit. But so what? The important thing is to write. Do you know what it’s like, finding nothing but blank paper when you’re expecting a book?”

“Well,” said Harriet with a deep and sympathetic sigh, “I don’t always see the point of writing either.”

“THEN DON’T
!” The panther pushed herself out of her chair and stalked into the kitchen. Yanked open the freezer-compartment door. Refilled her glass once again. Then went to the window and stared out at the ghastly night.

Nothing was visible through the dark kitchen window, but you could hear the rain, like spittle, falling and sticking to itself, becoming more and more engorged, until by morning mosquito-sized raindrops would have bloated up into glass balls.

Harriet went upstairs to listen to Lew read Frank McCourt aloud to the kids. First, his “On the Town” piece about his landlady named Klein, who wasn’t Jewish, and then another chapter of
Angela’s Ashes
. She sat on the hallway floor, her back against the linen-cupboard door, while Lew sat in the doorway of Jane’s bedroom, doing the accents, and the kids chortled and guffawed in their beds about “sore arses” and “speakeasies.” Then Harriet took herself back down to Leah and found her weeping in her dressing gown, a kimono-like affair of patterned blue silk-weeping about her long, sad years without sex. After his first minor heart attack, when he was still in his sixties and she in her forties, and they had been married less than ten years, Lionel gave it up. “You know what Anglo-Saxon men are like,” she said. But couldn’t you have had an affair? asked Harriet. And Leah
cried out that she couldn’t have done that to him. “It would have killed him.” But did he have to know? I mean, it’s not as if
he
didn’t have plenty of women.

But she wasn’t meant to question these confessions, or let on that she’d heard them already, years ago, in another kitchen, martinis in the glass, alas.

Harriet led her aunt to bed. Then upstairs, reading the fifty pages that her aunt had entitled
The Way We Were
(while Lew slept peacefully beside her), she thought of the hold Hollywood has on all of our minds, even on tough Leah’s, so that everything, finally, is a cliché. Her pages, peppered with name-dropping, laced with bitterness, larded with wishful thinking, were a cliché: good woman rescues hounded genius, and theirs is a true romance. But it was nothing like that, not really. She remembered the villa, the garden, the way her aunt used to shower Lionel with savage compliments.
Listen to him
, she would say whenever he played the piano.
Is there anything he can’t do? It’s disgusting!
More furious than proud, because he did so little. It was Leah who kept them afloat; Leah who’d had the idea to go to Italy after Lionel was deported from the U.S., a Canadian citizen, as was she; Leah who’d had the idea to trade on his friendship with Roberto Rossellini and buy a rundown villa behind a high stone wall and turn it into the Frame Institute for Politics and Film, an institute that paid handsomely for many years by drawing on the bottomless guilt of the North American Left, a pitcher that never emptied.

Now her aunt was using the phrase
our romance
. “Our romance,” she wrote, “was like something out of Hollywood, right up to the end.”

But Harriet had known her to stop in the middle of a crowded sidewalk and cry out,
There have been people who loved me unconditionally. Who adored me
. And she certainly didn’t mean Lionel. Raising her face in wet appeal, spreading the tears across her cheeks with the side of her hand, she had wailed over the traffic,
But they’re all dead!

Leah Margaret Frame. Who hadn’t spoken a word to Harriet’s father in twenty-seven years, not since they quarrelled about how much money the family cottage was worth. Who prided herself on being a radical but wanted to be rich. Who nursed Lionel into his nineties, having seen his influence wane and his friends fall away even before he died, but especially afterwards. And that was the end of
The Way We Were
.

Harriet reached for her notebook on the floor and wrote,
Dear Pauline, The ability to watch movie stars whenever we want to and for as long as we like – what has this done to our minds? Pickled them. We are pickled in the juicy brine of movie love
.

Sounds came from below. Coughing, muttering, tossing, turning. Leah stewing like sauerkraut. Fermenting. In her crock.

Yes, everyone is writing a book. Leah too. But at the same time I’ve spent years watching people who want to write avoid writing: Leah too. She’s stuck, and now she’s come to me. We spring away from the page as if it’s a trampoline. Fear, self pity, laziness – that’s the trampoline we bounce upon, while down below, fading from view in a sickening fashion, is the grassy, private paradise of writing
.

T
hat night Harriet dreamt she was walking with Chevy Chase down a wide sidewalk in Paris. She kissed him and left black lint on his lips. They were going to the Oscars. But when she looked more closely he wasn’t wearing a tuxedo, but rather a black and silver vest. She had been wrong about their destination. Lew stirred beside her and she told him her dream, and he responded by telling her his. “I was in Paris too, working on some newsletter or magazine. I was in my twenties. We all were. In the office I had my eye on a woman and hoped we would find ourselves alone. And suddenly we did. I was in bed and she got into bed with me.”

“What did she look like?”

“Short. With curly hair and a wide face.”

“That sounds like Dinah,” she said. “But I’m not worried.” Then she wondered why she had bothered to say that, even jokingly.

It was early Wednesday morning, barely light. She turned on the radio beside their bed, thrilled to discover that they still had power, and kept the volume low since no one else seemed to be up. The announcer said another wave of freezing rain was on its way, and went on to report about broken hydro lines and thousands of people without electricity. Lew was lying beside her, eyes closed, but awake. She said, “How old do I look?”

“Your age,” he said, without opening his eyes.

When he regained consciousness, she was saying, “Seriously, I want to know. What do you like about the way I look?”

“Let me see.” He sat up and turned her face towards him and studied it for a while. “Your eyebrows,” he said, and she dissolved in laughter.

Afterwards, stretched out beside each other with a towel covering the wet spot, she said, “I do like a laugh.” But then she heard Leah moving about downstairs and moaned aloud.

Lew said, “I like what Groucho said.”

“What did Groucho say?”

“Time wounds all heels.”

Kenny poured Cheerios recklessly into a bowl and Harriet, standing at the stove, heard them spill from counter to floor like a broken string of pearls. “Kenny,” she groaned.

He picked some of them up and said, “In this magazine’s top-100 list,
Casablanca
beats out
The Godfather
. Do you approve of that?”

Leah came into the kitchen in her dressing gown and Harriet poured her a cup of coffee. “It depends,” she said. “One has a claim on the heart…”

Leah took her coffee over to the kitchen table. “Tell me about that friend of yours,” she said. “That reporter. Who does she work for?”

“Dinah? She freelances and writes speeches. She used to work for a magazine.”

“Magazine writing. That’s like being a cigar roller eighty years ago.” Leah settled herself into a kitchen chair. “Something
written on paper and delivered through the mail? What future has it got?”

Kenny tapped his mom on the shoulder. “You should have an opinion,” he said. “You have to have a preference. You can’t like them the same.
Casablanca’s
number two.
The Godfather’s
number three.”