Garbo Laughs (3 page)

Harriet puts down her pen and goes to the window. Her second-floor study juts off the west side of the house and runs its full width – a narrow, winterized porch with windows on three sides offering views south, west, and north of other sunrooms
and sleeping porches and cases of chronic insomnia. Fiona Chester is up every night from three until five-thirty, when the voice of the morning man on
CBC
Radio puts her right back to sleep. Bill Bender rises at four to work on the book he has been trying to finish for twenty-five years. Dinah Bloom doesn’t turn off her light until two or three in the morning since, when it comes to reading, she is without self-control.

Several days ago, standing here, Harriet saw at eye level a man in a mauve sweater painting the trim on Bill Bender’s window (a warm spell between cold snaps). He was applying blue paint to the white window frame against a backdrop of brown clapboard and blue sky when his ladder dropped. And so did he. A foot, before he caught himself. She opened her window and called out, Do you want me to come down? He was holding on to the ladder for dear life. No, he said, I called my buddy. And a young man came around the corner. It broke, said the man in mauve. What broke? The ladder broke. Something broke.

Afterwards, there was a wild smear of blue paint on the brown wall, a foot below the window.

I am wondering about something else – the endless romance in me that makes it a pleasure to watch the same movie many times, as if movies were animated letters with the white screen as the envelope and the movie as the love letter inside
. Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
of all things. I’ve watched it several times lately, in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and again on a grey Saturday morning with the kids, and the several times took me through delight to mild interest to greater interest to boredom to a new level of appetite. Appetite grows with eating, as they say in Quebec
.

At a certain point, I am satiated and the movie is put back on the shelf. But I still have the memory of the appetite it aroused and satisfied
,
so that in a year or two my hand reaches for it again, and the same process begins of mild interest, increased interest, boredom, and some new level of appetite
.

Perhaps boredom is the stage I’m in now, but it’s a boredom like winter, which is a preparation for spring. Premier Bouchard, our dark prince, says that to tell Quebeckers independence will never happen is to say that spring will never come. In the face of this, what can an Ontario girl do but watch George Peppard watching Audrey Hepburn and finally telling her (oh, reactionary thrill) that she belongs to him
.

What are movies for, except these looks of love – requited, unrequited, latent, growing? I’m so ashamed, but there it is. They send a shiver up my spine
.

At seven o’clock she rouses Kenny and Jane, and goes downstairs to make breakfast. Kenny comes down first, bible under his arm. “Mommy,” he says. “Who do you think was the best actor in a Billy Wilder movie? Would it be Jack Lemmon? Tony Curtis? Marilyn Monroe? Fred MacMillan?”

“MacMurray.”

“Fred MacMurray? William Holden?”

“I’d say Jack Lemmon as Daphne.”

“I don’t know. I like Fred MacMurray a lot in
Double Indemnity
. ‘Goodbye, baby.’ Bang! And then what about the guy with ‘the little man inside him’? What’s his name?”

“Edward G. Robinson. He was great. Remember the ending? ‘I love you too, Keyes.’”

“Is that your favourite Billy Wilder movie?”

“No. My favourite is
Some Like it Hot.”

By now Jane is downstairs too, dressed in black and white for the school concert. But the big sister is never a talker first thing in the morning.

By eight they’ve left for school, and now it’s light enough to show Lew the unpleasant thing that happened while he was away. “Lew,” she calls from her study when she hears him come out of the bathroom.

He’s wearing his father’s plaid dressing gown – soft and baggy from age and from never having been washed – just as he wears his father’s shirts and ties. A sentimental, practical, nearsighted man.

“Look,” she says.

“What?” He comes to her side.

“I opened the blinds the other morning and couldn’t see out.”

He steps up to the window and “Bull’s-eye!” he cries with gusto. Across the glass, covering most of the west-facing window, is a wide smear of snotty yellow goop.

“Did they mean it for me?” she asks in a stricken voice.

“Yes! They found out where you live, and they came here in the middle of the night and lambasted your window with an egg. Why didn’t I think of it?”

“Somebody who didn’t like my book,” she says. “Somebody
in
my book.”

Only the other day she had gone to a book club, by invitation, and it was apparent to her, as soon as she walked in the door, who liked her book and who didn’t, and who would tell her so at some point during the evening; she recognized the averted stubbornness in one woman’s face. Only a fool would have come.

She braced herself, but it was still depressing to be told how angry and unforgiving she was. She tried to make light of it.
“You’ll be glad to know I’m writing a comedy now,” she said, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief and passed the peanuts.

But none of those women would have lobbed an egg at her window. Who did she know with a good right arm? What Mickey Mantle of the literary world had she offended so deeply?

Lew got dressed and went outside. From the shed at the foot of the garden he took their ladder, set it up against the side of the house, and climbed up to the window with a wet rag to scrub off most of the congealed egg, the temperature just above freezing and the sky an even grey. When he was finished, the window looked like a child’s dirty face scrubbed with a mother’s spit.

“Somebody keeps phoning,” she told him when he came into the kitchen. “I pick up the phone and there’s nobody at the other end. Do you think it’s a burglar?”

“In Ottawa?”

He was used to her exaggerations; he was even tired of them. He poured himself a cup of coffee and Harriet watched him take a sip.

Then she said, “There’s a letter from Leah.”

This was the point. Now he understood.

“Poor Hattie.” And he sat beside her at the kitchen table and took her hand. “How’s Leah?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t had the courage to open it.”

He stroked her hand, and she swept her gloomy eyes across the room. “I can hardly wait till I’m dead,” she said.

Harriet didn’t want to be serious. She wanted to be funny. But she couldn’t help being serious. She sat down at her desk and seriousness sat down beside her.

Even Dinah Bloom kept telling her to get out more. Lew kept telling her to relax. Whenever he said
relax
, she told him to dry up. Piss off. Drop dead.

The night before, he’d undressed next to the closet door and she was so drawn to the shape and dusky colour of his soft penis hanging down like a softly dark thing, more greys, browns in its colouring, less red than usual, an old-leaf colour, she thought, and saw soft old leaves on the sidewalk. And his balls too were darker and hanging down. The room was warm – warmer than usual – she wished she could describe those colours better. All she could really think of was the various shades, the velvety-looking darkness of a horse’s penis, but not as dark as that, the dusky greys, the long length (though not as long as that), the soft shape, the way it hung down. In bed they’d found a new position. She wondered if they’d ever find it again. It had to do with the way he cradled her so that he was the rocking chair and she the rocker, though you have to picture the rocking chair on its side, its upper part raised off the bed and her legs up on his shoulders. Well, it was very nice until she yelped.
Ouch!

Still, there was life in the old wife yet.

And something more curious. Leading up to orgasm, inducing it, were her thoughts about her father. An image of her father in the middle of the night coming naked out of the bathroom as she came out of her bedroom, his hand immediately over his groin like a fig leaf, yet the suggestion of something swinging behind and below his hand, and his proximity and smell as they passed each other in the hall. Would her daughter be the same? Was it usual?

She would have to ask.

H
arriet was an asker, and always had been. An inquisitive, reckless, fundamentally timid woman given to strange blurtings that got her into trouble. There were people who no longer spoke to her. Dinah Bloom was not among them, perhaps because she hadn’t known Harriet very long.

“Harriet Browning,” Dinah repeated the summer night they met. “That’s what Greta Garbo called herself whenever she went incognito.”

“Harriet Browning?”

“Harriet Brown. I saw her once. In New York. She was buying persimmons in a fruit store at 53rd and Second.”

“I hate persimmons. Wait a minute. What are persimmons?”

“You do look a little like her.” Surveying her with amused brown eyes.

“I do?”

“Your eyelashes,” she said. And Harriet lost her heart to Deadpan Dinah. “They were so long,” said Dinah, “that people used to ask if they were real, and she would tell them to pull.”

“Pull,” ordered Harriet, removing her glasses.

Dinah Bloom, who was a journalist and therefore ruthless, pulled. “I wasn’t wrong,” she said, examining the long dark eyelash on her fingertip.

Harriet, putting her glasses back on, asked if Garbo was still beautiful then or was she too old.

“She was marvellous,” Dinah answered. “She was wearing a helmety sort of cloth hat, an army jacket, ski pants, sneakers. She must have been seventy, but she was the most radiant woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Lipstick?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“And you call yourself a journalist.”

“That was before I’d met you,” said Dinah, “and knew what questions to ask.”

They have been watching movies together since then, that night in July. Not for Harriet and Dinah the intellectual stress and strain of a book club. They prefer ordering in pizza and eating it with potato chips on the side while splayed out on a sofa long enough for two skinny children and two growing women who indulge in rambling conversations about the glorious shortcomings of Robert Redford and Sean Connery. Or, as Dinah likes to call him,
Seen
.

Except when she calls him
Obseen
.

On this particular day, a Monday, they are drinking tea and eating no-name digestive biscuits beside the kitchen window in Harriet’s house when Harriet asks Dinah if she pictures her father’s penis when she screws. Dinah chokes on her biscuit. She waves one hand helplessly in the air.

“You need more tea,” Harriet says, filling her cup.

“My father’s penis?” sputters Dinah.

“Do you picture it?”

“Picture it?”

“Does it-” And now Harriet blushes. Even she takes a while to catch up to her questions. “Does it turn you on?”

“I try to keep my father out of it.” Gulping down her tea and holding out her cup for more.

It’s four in the afternoon. At any moment Jane and Kenny will barge through the door, and that certainty makes of this moment a well of peacefulness under the low kitchen light, while outside the day is losing ground. From the alley below you can see the two women in the kitchen, long-faced Harriet with her thin, dark hair held back by a crooked barrette, and wide-faced Dinah whose bountiful head of silver hair is the envy of the neighbourhood.

Harriet doesn’t stop, because nothing stops her once she gets going. “What do you think about then? I mean, what images do you concoct in your head to help you come?”

“Robert Redford?”

“Not Robert Redford.” She looks at Dinah in dismay.

“A joke. I never give Robert Redford a thought. Your father,” she adds after a moment, “must have had quite a penis.”

“He still has it,” says Harriet. “Well, I don’t just picture his penis. Sometimes I think about a horse. Or a bear.”

“In the zoo?” asks Dinah, since she has an eye for detail, “or in the wild?”

“In the woods,” says Harriet. “Next to a stump.”

At this point children barge through the door, one after the other, although there are only two. Jane and Kenny are not impressed by digestive biscuits and Dinah doesn’t blame them, but Harriet says they are her favourites, she even has them for breakfast. That is, when she isn’t eating date squares.

“George Washington ate pie for breakfast,” says Dinah.

“Maybe he had a mother like mine,” says Harriet.

“He weighed 350 pounds,” says Dinah severely.

“Maybe,” says Harriet, “he had a deprived childhood.”

Dinah has heard stories of Harriet’s childhood: the endless chores interrupted by elevenses when her mother, seated on the verandah, would apportion six cherries to each of the six children; the mashed turnip so full of strings and fibres she had to sieve it through her teeth; ditto the homemade pumpkin pie; the lack of television; the tragic, tragic absence of movies. Harriet’s mother, a Scot with second sight, believed that children should be outside acquiring bright eyes and rosy cheeks no matter how much they loathed the out-of-doors. She used to boot her kids outside and lock the door till mealtime.

Dinah, on her third no-name digestive biscuit, tells the kids they should call 911 unless their mother gets in a supply of chocolate chip cookies. But Harriet claims to be too old for chocolate.

“You’re not too old,” Dinah says. “You’re younger than I am.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-five.”

“I’m forty-seven,” says Harriet, “and I never dream about identifiable places. Do you?”

Dinah does. She often finds herself inside the movie theatre on Bank Street where she worked every Saturday of her childhood, the only daughter of David and Ida Bloom, who ran the theatre for twenty-one years.

“Is it still there?” asks Harriet.

“The Rialto. They tore it down a few years ago. It used to be called the Fern.”

“That’s odd,” Harriet says thoughtfully. “I’m not used to things leading somewhere.” And she goes upstairs to get the
spear-tip fern for Dinah. At her desk, struck once again by how beautiful it is, she stands for a moment and studies its pattern of spores so clearly etched they could have been drawn by hand. Downstairs, she lays the fern on Dinah’s open palm. “Lew brought it back from Cuba.”