Garbo Laughs (29 page)

It was safe in here, the door closed tight, the
TV
in the control room turned low, earplugs in her ears, video camera chronicling in shadowy black-and-white her movements in bed, as well as any comings and goings into her room so that no one could sneak in and throttle her, and no interruptions. Not alone, but not interrupted. Safe. Like Virginia Woolf. Or like Mrs. Dalloway as Virginia Woolf described her, in her cell of a
bedroom at the top of the house, sleeping in a narrow single bed so that her husband wouldn’t disturb her. It was his idea, fretted Mrs. Dalloway. But not a bad one, it seemed to Harriet.

Across the city, in the Château Laurier, an ecstatic Kenny and Jane were stretched out on the bed with Leah, watching
The Godfather
, while the man who didn’t watch movies sat in an armchair and read
Jewish Currents
to keep his mind off what had happened earlier. They’d had dinner in the piano restaurant downstairs, Dinah, the kids, Leah, himself, and it was not a success. Leah sent back her soup, saying it was inedible. Then she said to Lew, “Lionel and I never quarrelled. Maybe we should have. They say it’s healthy to quarrel.”

“We didn’t quarrel,” said Lew. “Harriet wanted to have some time to herself.”

“In a freezing house?”

Dinah said, “She’s probably opening up a bottle of champagne right now,” and her laughter effectively sidelined Leah, and not for the first time.

Lew, smiling across at Dinah, saw her as having the sort of relaxed down-to-earth gracefulness that comes from having survived many difficult things without bitterness. The absence of self-pity made her very beautiful.

It was when they were almost finished the meal that he suddenly felt overcome by weakness.

“Are you all right?” asked Dinah in alarm. “Is it the food?”

“I will be,” he said, leaning back in his chair but keeping his hands spread out on the table for support.

“You’re green,” said Leah.

Quickly, Dinah stepped over to the bar and asked the waiter to bring a glass of water right away. Then she grabbed a mint from a large bowl, unwrapped the cellophane, and gave it to Lew.

“What does it feel like?” she asked him after he took a deep breath and thanked her, and had a few sips of water, and put the mint in his mouth. The kids and Leah were watching him with considerable interest, and he gave them a reassuring wink.

“It feels,” he said, with an amused and weary smile, “as if my life is very far away.” He spread his arms wide to show how far. Several feet. “It’s as if everything drains out of me, and all that’s left is weakness.”

Leah spoke up. “That’s not exactly specific.”

He smiled again. “That’s what the doctor said.”

“What
did he say?” pressed Dinah.

“That it wasn’t a lot to go on.”

“I should have been there,” said Dinah, her voice suddenly hoarse. “I would have hung on like a bulldog until I got more out of him.”

“Her,” said Lew, looking spent but not unhappy.

“I’m serious. I ask every question I can think of and I write everything down.”

Ten minutes later Lew felt well enough to get up and leave the restaurant. On their way to the elevators he stopped to look at the Karsh photographs on the walls of the inner lobby. Go ahead, he told the others. The others went ahead, except for Dinah, who stayed with him and looked too – at Georgia O’Keeffe in profile, Pablo Casals from the back, Stephen
Leacock with a big smile and eyes so crinkled up they were closed. Surely that was a mistake, she said. She would have liked to have seen the humorist’s eyes.

They stood in front of Einstein, and Lew said, “He looks calm.” He leaned against her. He said, “I guess that’s what a good photographer does. He makes his victims relax.”

He was thinking of Harriet. Hoping she was all right. He would call her when he got upstairs. He looked at his watch: it was eight o’clock.

Dinah asked if he was feeling better, and he smiled at her and said it always took a little while to recover. He said it was like fainting away around the heart. He saw himself and everything around him at a distance, with clarity, while he went still and small and hung on for dear life. If he were to make any effort at all, to carry on talking or eating or moving, he would die. And then it passed.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “They’ve done tests. There’s nothing the matter except a heart murmur, which is common.”

“Unless it happens at the wrong moment,” she said. Turning to confront him. “Suppose you’re driving, Lew. What then?”

“Then I pull over.”

He looked into her worried, questioning, unconvinced eyes and then he put his arms around her, and they stood that way, holding each other. They looked as if they’d been on a long journey and were taking strength from each other for the next stage.

A voice said, “There you are, you lovebirds.”

Lew let one of his arms drop, but brought Dinah closer with the other, and turned to face the formidable aunt.

“The kids want to watch
The Godfather
. I thought I’d better check, knowing Harriet’s dead against it.”

The next morning, at six, Harriet was wrenched out of a deep sleep by Danilo opening the door and saying it was time to get up. She woke up in earnest when he began to tear the tape off her face – neck – shoulders. Ow, ow, ow. Ouch!

When did you wake up?
the questionnaire asked.

When they ripped the tape off my face
, she answered.

She and the song detective left the hospital together. He had come by taxi since he didn’t know how to drive. “Are you a poet?” she asked him. She had never met a poet who knew how to drive.

“As a matter of fact, I am.” He looked exhausted, and said he’d had one of the worst nights of his life.

“I’ve never felt more rested,” she said. “I feel reborn.”

It was still dark when they pulled out onto Carling Avenue into non-existent traffic, but the weather had changed, and so had she. Her head felt deep instead of shallow. No longer was she skittering across the surface of a world that offered no purchase, her life all foreground and no background. Rather, she had come out of something – out of the most remarkable, dream-filled depths – and the back of her skull retained the feeling of territory occupied, filled, discovered by sleep.

She turned the car into his street, and he said, “I make excellent coffee.”

“Good.”

She had slept so well that she could actually feel the pouches under her eyes. Her eyes felt moist and more open, and even the pouches were relaxed.

She parked. It was ten to seven by her watch, which was five minutes fast. For the first time in a week the sky was clearing in the west.

He opened the door to an ecstatic Stella, the glamorous white malamute in his life. Then he showed Harriet into the living room, let the dog out the back door, and got busy in the kitchen. Harriet, seated in an old velvet armchair low to the ground and next to a row of windows, saw Pauline Kael’s
Deeper Into Movies
on the bookshelf; she reached for it and began to read a book that she’d had to borrow from the library because it was out of print.

He said, “I used to visit her,” and Harriet looked up in awe as he handed her a mug of his excellent coffee and set down a plate of toasted bagels.

In Berkeley, he explained, when his older brother was a graduate student and he went to visit him from time to time, he heard her movie reviews on the radio and went to the repertory movie house she ran with her husband before they separated. He said the two times he met her she was living in a bungalow. Her daughter was there: Gina, who was thirteen, and so lovely that he was prepared to fall in love with her. Well, he was only nineteen himself. His brother, who loved Hitchcock, was the one who’d had the idea to call up Pauline, and when he did she invited them to come over. “She
hated
Hitchcock.”

“That’s my Pauline,” said Harriet. “What did she look like?”

“I was too busy trying to think of what to say to notice.”

“Small, intense, opinionated, fearless.” Harriet supplied the adjectives.

“She wrote on a drafting table. I saw it in her living room. And she drank bourbon.”

Hunters in the Snow
was over his mantelpiece, the same reproduction she had in her own living room. On the near wall was a photograph of a woman seated and nude from the waist up. Harriet said, “She liked early Hitchcock. It was late Hitchcock she couldn’t stand.” Then she stood up and inspected the photograph more closely. The woman wasn’t as immediately beautiful as Dinah, but she had Dinah’s wide face, thick hair, full un-Garbo-like lips and breasts. Yes, men liked women with flesh on their bones. It was a well-known truth.

“But she isn’t knitting.”

“She couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Look at her hands.”

Her hands were folded in her lap but you could see that the right forefinger was cut off at the knuckle.

“But you’re on the right track,” he said.

“And was her name Stella?”

“It still is.”

“I like her face,” she said.

Even as a girl she had been susceptible to an interesting face: Nureyev; Trudeau; Lyndon Johnson more than Kennedy; Jackie more than Marilyn Monroe. The first time she saw Dinah’s wide, lush looks, she thought to herself, I could stare at you for a long time.

Then she turned her attention to
Hunters in the Snow
and, from this angle, following upon her deeply restful night, she understood perfectly what Hemingway meant. Into her mind
came the opening paragraph of
A Farewell to Arms –
the dusty road and dusty trees, the river, the hills in the distance – and here was the same detail and depth bringing your eye close to everything, no matter how near it was or how far away. He’d been thinking of this painting when he wrote that paragraph, she was sure of it.

“Would you like to borrow it?” asked the song detective, picking up
Deeper Into Movies
and offering it to her. She took it and flipped to the beginning. His name was written in the front and she said, “I thought it was
Creek
with a double
e
. But this is better.”
Jim Creak
. “On Sundays I get up early just to listen to you.” Then she closed the book and held it to her chest. “What about you and Dinah?” she asked him.

“I’ve been waiting for her to show some interest.”

These waiting men. Get cracking! “Somebody’s giving her roses. All the time. I think you should break his legs.”

Then at the door, her coat on, she said, “Why don’t you ask her to the movies? The Mayfair’s right around the corner.”

“When I go to the Mayfair,” he said, “I take a pillow.”

“I take two Tylenols.”

And it was at that moment – as they were thinking about the killer seats in the Mayfair movie theatre – that Harriet Browning had her idea, and she told him what it was. She would take over the empty Strand. She would run a movie house, like Pauline Kael. The movies would be old movies and they would be cheap. “You and Dinah can write the movie notes,” she told him. “Jane can sell tickets, Kenny can be the usher, Lew can design the renovation.”

“And you?” he asked.

“I’ll be the businesswoman.”

“Do you know about business?”

“I think I do,” she said. And in her bones she felt she did.

W
hen she got home, the power was still off. It was early; she was the first one back. But within minutes, as if giving their blessing, a lamp sprang to life and the refrigerator began to hum. Hallelujah! She took off her coat, put on a pot of coffee and a small saucepan of milk. Then feeling cold as she waited, she reached for Leah’s silk kimono, which was hanging on the back of a kitchen chair, and put it on. She had always admired it, and with good reason – the colours traced delicate maps of the Far East; and it was warm. The espresso maker began to bubble and whoosh and at the same moment the milk foamed up, so she reached for the milk with her right hand and the coffee with her left, and the long left sleeve of the kimono brushed against the gas burner and went up in flames.

Dinah would find her an hour later at the kitchen table, drinking the coffee she had made at great cost to herself. Invisible, inside a big-armed sweater, was her loosely bandaged arm, cut free from the kimono. She’d slapped out the flames
with a square potholder, then held her arm under the tap, then lowered her arm into the cold water, the soft flesh of her left forearm. Reaching for the baking soda, she’d poured it in, and the new area in the back of her skull darkened with pain. Then from the kitchen drawer, a pair of scissors to cut away the kimono.

“There’s coffee on the stove,” she said to Dinah, not getting up. And that’s all she said. Almost against her will – she could feel it happening – her brain embraced the histrionic underside of pain. She would perform a bitter little experiment. Who loved her enough to notice? Or would anyone notice at all?

“You must have frozen last night.” Dinah was pouring herself coffee. “I called to get you to come over, but you didn’t answer the phone. I was worried about you.”

“The sleep clinic had a cancellation. I was over there.”

“What did they give you? What’s the cure? Your eyes look so different.” Dinah had taken her coffee to the table and she was scrutinizing Harriet’s face.

“Sleeping alone. I felt like a nun.”

Then Dinah sat down across from her and told her that Lew was fine, but he’d had a strange attack of weakness at the end of dinner. Does that happen very often? And Harriet thought, She’s come over to talk about Lew, not to check on me.

“Every few months,” she answered. “And if he drops dead on me, I’m going to be extremely pissed off.”

Despite herself, she laughed. Despite herself, she was glad to see Dinah. But she still didn’t tell her friend about her burned arm, hewing to the dark logic dictated by unreasonable pain.

Dinah stared at her coffee. “Last night Lew and I were looking at Karsh’s photographs. It reminded me that I interviewed Celeste
Holm years ago when she was at the Château for some reason. I’d forgotten all about it. But she was beautiful.”