Garbo Laughs (33 page)

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Let me tell you a story. For two years, when my Sarah had her daily
TV
show in Toronto, she’d fly home to Montreal on the
weekend, and every Sunday she’d fly back to Toronto, and Jack would ask, Why Sunday? Why not leave early Monday morning so we can have the weekend together? But no, she had to be there the day before to get ready. Of course, she was having an affair with the producer. This went on for two years.”

“You said that.” Harriet’s voice was scalding, but it had no effect on her aunt.

Leah said, “She broke it off when Jack found out, but he left her anyway. He couldn’t trust her. And she’s been scrambling ever since, trying to get him back. He’ll never go back to her. You should pay more attention to Lew, or you’re going to lose him.”

“What a moralizer you are,” Harriet said. “You’re like a kindergarten teacher.” Her arm was throbbing and so was her head.

Leah sucked air through her teeth. “You’re not the first person to be disappointed in her husband. Anne, I mean my Anne in Chicago, she thought she married the wrong man too.”

“I married the right man,” said Harriet. “He married the wrong woman.”

Leah smiled. Insecure women were her specialty. “How’s your coffee? Shall I tell him to bring you a fresh cup?”

Harriet shook her head.

Leah signalled the waiter and asked for the bill. But Harriet said, “I haven’t had dessert.” And the waiter stopped in his tracks.

“You invited me for coffee and dessert,” she said stubbornly, determined to get something for her pains. “I haven’t had dessert.”

Harriet took her time over the menu, and she took her time over dessert.
Had I seen you, I would have paid close attention to how you dealt with Leah. I would have told you that Kenny is reading your
reviews now. And I would have explained why I like your writing so much. It’s because I see you reacting to things on the spot. Being over-critical and overgenerous, but thinking, feeling, reacting
.

Leah eyed the slowly disappearing hazelnut torte.

“Is it good?”

“It is.”

“Let me taste.” She reached across with her greedy spoon, and Harriet drove her fork into the back of her hand. She wasn’t one of six children for nothing.

She didn’t draw blood, not that she would have minded drawing blood, but she certainly got a response – a yelp, a retreat, a widening of those remarkable eyes whose beauty she once commented upon. “Leah, you have the most beautiful eyes,” she’d said to her years ago. And Leah had said, “I’ve never noticed. People tell me that, but I’ve never noticed.”

But she noticed the fork in her hand. Her eyes were as surprised as Sean Connery’s in
The Next Man
when Cornelia Sharpe raised a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thereby putting an end to an Arab with a Scottish accent. Also, to a very bad movie that Harriet sat through twice after getting her wisdom teeth pulled.

“Excuse
me!” said Leah.

Harriet went on with her cake. “That’s all right, darling.”

“You’re cruel.”

“Not cruel,” Harriet said. “Heartless.”

“Unfeeling.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I told Kenny.”

Harriet put down her fork. “What did you tell Kenny?” she asked softly.

They were alone in the dining room except for an elderly couple drinking tea in silence. Show tunes were on the sound system. Doris Day. Frankie.

Leah said, “I want to talk to you about my will. I want you to know what you can expect.”

“Leah, I don’t expect anything.”

“I don’t mean you,” she said. “I mean Kenny.”

S
pring came earlier that year than ever before. The warmth began in February, causing a long and thorough melt that followed Dinah’s surgery. Doctors opened her chest and removed the tumour, after which her recovery was slow and painful. On the first weekend of that remarkable month, Harriet and Lew paid a visit to Dinah in the hospital, then drove to Gatineau Park and followed a trail so littered with fallen ice that walking on it was like treading on broken chandeliers. Around them were all the battered trees. Rather than dark branches reaching up and out, snapped white arms were hanging low. Everywhere. Torn tree flesh like long pieces of white chicken meat.

During that month, when they went to see Dinah, first at the hospital and later at the rehab centre, they crossed paths every so
often with Jim Creak. But it was Jack Frame who was invariably there. He couldn’t have been more attentive, standing for long hours by Dinah’s bedside without ever tiring. “I was made for this,” he said. “I have the stamina of an ox.” During one of these visits, Harriet asked him what it was like to talk to Pauline Kael, and he said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” That was how she learned that she’d been right all along, though wrong to think she’d been wrong.

On the last Saturday in February, Harriet walked to the Arboretum and found, piled high, bundles of prunings from the damaged trees. To stand in the tall spruce grove was to imagine herself in a barbershop on a floor covered with dark curls of hair. A week later, at 5:40 a.m., she heard a robin and looked up from her book. It was March 7. She’d been reading about the history of early movies, and it occurred to her that what they’d been through in the ice storm was something like the rough passage of silent movies to talkies, and, just as happened then, there were many casualties. Leah had flown back to Italy on Valentine’s Day, after a sour farewell. She spoke to Harriet on the phone as if she were the last person she wanted to see. It was Jack who took her to the airport.

March was unnaturally warm, more like May two months early. Dinah was home again, and Ida had returned to look after her. The prognosis was good, and they thought the worst was over. In the middle of March Lew went away for two weeks, to Mexico and Chile, and while he was gone Jack phoned Harriet several times.

“I don’t have your e-mail address,” he said to her the first time.

“I don’t have e-mail.”

“Ah, but you should. E-mails are much less invasive than telephones. It’s like whispering. You can say, ‘I love you, darling,’ at two in the morning.”

“I miss letters,” she said doggedly.

“Oh, they’re
gone.”

He called her for the name of a restaurant. Someone’s phone number. The distance from one town to another. Was she his secretary? His voice flat, cool; and a phone call every other day, until she thought, He’s calling because he wants to hear my voice. And deliberately she made her tone brisk and clipped, as you might turn your face to show its most unattractive side to someone whose interest in you is certain to vanish at the first minor test.

Outside, the early warmth brought buds to the point of bursting. She could hear them popping in the night like tiny fish leaping out of water. Pale sources of minuscule light.

Soon colour washed over them. A hat of colour descended over the bald head of winter.

Harriet knocked on Dinah’s door. “Put on the kettle,” she said. “I have something to ask you.”

Bristly old Buddy made the hallway nearly impenetrable. It was like going through a carwash, without the car.

“Why won’t you give Jim Creak the time of day?” Harriet said, once she achieved the kitchen and discovered that she and Dinah were alone.

“This is what you wanted to ask me?”

“I’ll get to that.”

Dinah spread her hands wide, but before she could speak Harriet said, “I’ve come to like him so much. It’s true he can be
stubborn, and he’s not the fastest knitter in the world with those surprisingly small hands of his, but he’d have no trouble washing out the insides of jars. Besides, he’s kind and interesting. And I think he’s really devoted to you.”

“That’s the trouble.”

“What is?”

“He’s much too serious about me.”

Harriet studied her. “What are you afraid of?” she asked.

Dinah could have answered, since she knew the answer. If she was going to be involved with the wrong man, then let him not be too earnestly in love. She said, “They’ve scheduled my chemo. It’s going to start the week after next.”

“That’s what I was getting to.”

Harriet had been leaning against the counter. Now she sat beside Dinah at the kitchen table, and asked what day they were starting. “April 8? But we won’t be here. We’ll be in Havana.”

“Don’t worry. My mother’s here,” she said. “And Jack will take me back and forth to the hospital.”

There were so many birds now that when Harriet stood up and went to the window, she expected to see a flash of colour. All she saw was a big ugly starling on the porch roof. But there were crocuses at the foot of the garden, like a line of purple feathers: near the fence, a semicircle of purple feathers like an Indian headdress. She said, “I don’t trust Jack, but I guess that’s obvious.”

“It isn’t obvious. Sometimes you seem to like him very much.”

“He unsettles me.”

“Jack’s good at that.”

“So he unsettles you too?” Turning away from the window.

“No. He doesn’t.”

“But Lew does.”

A sound came from Dinah’s throat – the almost-laugh you make when you recognize, out of the blue, an old tune from childhood that you haven’t heard in years. Then she said, “Not everybody can have Lew.”

And with those gentle words a thorn was removed from Harriet’s heart.

But Lew didn’t call while he was away. More than a week went by, and not a word. Harriet removed old leaves from the tender tips of tulips coming up. Examined the beautiful red of the rhubarb, pushing up like the red tip of a dog’s aroused penis, surrounded by cauliflower-ear leaves, wrinkly and almost black-green in colour.

Inside, she looked at two old pictures of Lew. One picture included her, the other did not. She put the pictures side by side. She compared his face in the photo that included her with his face in the photo taken ten months earlier, before they had met, and discovered that when she wasn’t in the picture he was entirely attractive to her, but when she was in the picture his attractiveness vanished. Is this why she liked movies so much? Because she wasn’t in the picture?

She could love someone who wasn’t looking at her, didn’t know her, hadn’t been shaped by her, but not someone whose face had been blurred and compromised by dealing with her.

Jim Creak was outside with his shovel, in shirt-sleeves, spreading the last vestiges of snow far and wide to melt even faster. She went over to tease him about his anti-snow avidity, then went on to the fruit-and-vegetable store, where her mind drifted to Jack Frame and his continued, inexplicable attentions.
They had their foundation, she was sure, in some sort of ill will generated by her resistance to his writing, a resistance crudely worded and guilt-ridden, but firm.
No
, she said, she wouldn’t read his first chapters about Lionel: find yourself a real editor. Dinah, she knew, had also told him to seek out a professional. But Dinah was Dinah. She could get away with anything, being straightforward and free of doubt. Being brave. For a moment, standing in the fruit store, everything Harriet disliked about Jack and everything she disliked about herself took hold of her with such force that she bent double over the green beans and apples in her grocery cart. Then she straightened up, and there he was, her date with fate, pushing his way through the turnstile.

He misread her blush. And why not? She was as revealed in her embarrassment as a shade plant suddenly exposed to the sun.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said, looking her up and down, until her blush deepened.

He bought bananas and a pineapple, and offered to drive her home.

“I always buy too much,” she said. “My eyes are bigger than my arms.” And her bags were indeed heavy.

In Jack’s car, feeling at a disadvantage, Harriet said almost nothing and then too much. She said yes, when he asked if Lew was still away. Then she said, “I dreamt about him last night. I don’t recall the particulars except that in a general way he was very nasty to me.” Her voice was rueful and only slightly amused.

“Where did you say he was?” Jack asked her.

“Mexico, then Chile. Or maybe Chile, then Mexico. I can’t remember. He hasn’t called.”

“He’s been away for a week and he hasn’t called?”

“Not once.”

And then she was telling him about the two times she’d called home collect from New York, when Lew answered the operator by saying, “I guess so.” The first time it was “I guess so.” The second time, “Well, I guess so.” She laughed, shaking her head about it all. Dream, husband, life.

In truth, she had wandered blind afterwards, sick at heart. And having stirred up the old memory, she felt heartsick all over again.

“I don’t mean to whip things up,” said Jack, “but that’s mean.”

And so we make our confessions to the wrong person, and bonds that we have no intention of forming get formed.

By this time they were in front of her house – he had pulled up to the curb and she was about to get out, her hand was on the door handle, when he reached over and slowly and deliberately ran his hand up her long leg, from ankle to knee. She was wearing black tights. Then he sat back and looked at her. She stared at him.

“I love your face when it gets worked up,” he said.

“Worked up?”

“When you blush.”

“That’s menopause,” she said dryly.

“I don’t think so.”

Again, she moved to get out and this time he grabbed her hand, and held it. Then he turned her hand over and his eyes fastened onto the scar tissue visible on her lower wrist. He pushed up the sleeve to see more of the shiny, corrugated flesh. Then he bent his head and kissed her wrist.

“What are you doing?”

“You could invite me in, you know,” he said, raising his head and looking at her.

Her other hand was still on the door handle, and some movie memory – the image of a woman’s hand hovering around the handle of a pickup door – pressed in as she turned away. But he tugged her back, and she remembered a party years ago when she sat on a sofa between two drunk Russian violinists. Every time she tried to stand up, they pulled her down again. They were wild, even if they did play classical music. Vodka. But once she stopped trying to get up, once she stopped saying she had to go, and waited for a few minutes, then it was easy to get up and leave. She took her hand off the door handle and sat back.