Garbo Laughs (35 page)

“What are you looking at?” she asked him, as he studied her face that morning.

“A beautiful woman,” he said.

And that was all it took.

“I love to watch you come,” he said afterwards. “Your nipples go hard, your tits jump, you shake, and you get so warm.”

Then, moving in his mind from one sensuous pleasure to another, he described the meal he’d had the day before in Mexico City. He started with a cold beer, and then he had broad-bean soup with
chipotles
floating on the top, then
nopal
salad, then mushrooms in a hot sauce, then
romeritos –
fresh rosemary sprigs cooked in a sauce – then
guanabana
ice cream and
café de olla
. How delicious it was, he said, lying on his back, his gaze on the ceiling. Then, putting his arm around her, he returned to the mild and rainy present of this early spring.

Over the next few days Harriet would remember their brief exchange the first night he got home, and her irritation: the thing he said, and her reaction. Her love expanded after that. But was that the reason? That sad little thing he’d said that made her feel so annoyed and contemptuous at the time, but not later? Perhaps many things have been happening for a while before you realize they’re happening at all. In our minds. In illness. Out of sight. Then there they are, already formed.

Her love came with a wide, almost soft feeling of loss and rolled over their usual routine. Every night he called from his office to say he was on his way and to ask if he should pick up anything for supper. Usually she said no. Sometimes a baguette. Then she would wait for him, glad that he was coming, and thinking in the back of her mind (not painfully, unless there was some unaccountable delay) of how one night he might not arrive. She thought of pioneer women whose men went out into
the woods with an axe, and the daily miracle when they came back in one piece. Jane was reading all the books in the
Little House on the Prairie
series for the third time. Jane, who was large enough to wear her mother’s black cashmere sweater but was still dreaming her pioneer dreams.

The sad little thing he’d said was, I can lose interest too. He said it after she hunched away from him in bed, too tired, too indifferent to even talk; and his words irked her.

He’d turned out the light. A few hours later she woke bathed in sweat and he spoke to her the way he usually did, calmly, unresentfully, to help her fall back to sleep. He was a little achy, and wakeful too, but he soothed her, and slept again. He was the baking soda that cancelled out the sour soup, the ointment on chapped hands, the good coat she counted on, the quiet man who never snored. I
can lose interest too
. And lying awake, she’d felt touched by his sad honesty. Early the next morning she’d brought coffee upstairs and found him standing in the doorway to her study. He turned and looked at her thoughtfully. When she asked him what he was looking at, he told her. And she’d taken his hand and led him back to bed.

It was what Rhett Butler waited for in vain. A wife who fell in love with her husband.

Now she let her glance linger on his dark-grey corduroy jacket and striped shirt, on his tired, intent, scholarly face as he went over receipts, numbers, tax forms – and she thought, No wonder women fall in love with capable men; what could be more reassuring and restful than watching a man pay the bills and figure out the taxes? His long wrists came out of his jacket sleeves, his long fingers sorted papers, his wristwatch was neither too tight nor too loose.

She found herself doing things for him, and stopped. That way lay doom. No, he must continue to do things for himself, and she things for herself, and things for each other as they had always done, no more, no less, in order to avoid the sloppiness, the loss of shape, the artificial smoothness of early love. She stopped in mid-gesture and put the carrot into her own mouth.

Then one day Lew came home early and said, “I don’t have great news.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Come into the kitchen and I’ll tell you over tea.”

“Let me go turn off my computer.” And while she was upstairs, she thought, Either he’s been fired or some colleague has been fired: there’s been a shake-up at the university; or he’s ill; or his friend Duncan has died. And as she walked through the dining room to join him in the kitchen, she called out, “So what is it? Tell me.”

“Kenny’s new teacher called me. She tried calling you first, but nobody answered.”

“I must have been out buying food.”

“She wanted to know if we had any idea that Kenny is being bullied by three boys in his class.”

Harriet stood rooted to the spot.

“She said she’s suspected for a while. This morning she called him in to ask him about it, and he was visibly upset.”

“What are they doing?” She was afraid to hear the answer.

“Teasing him about his hair, his clothes, the way he talks, the books he reads. She said she asked him if he’d talked to us about it and he said,
oh no
, as if he didn’t want us to know.”

They stood looking at each other, dismayed and unprepared.

“Doesn’t he have any friends?” she asked. “Doesn’t anybody stick up for him?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Did she say what we should do?”

“She said the school would handle it. There’s a strict procedure they follow – the three boys will be sent to the vice-principal and given an ultimatum. She advised us not to talk to him about it, since he doesn’t want us to know.”

“Can that be right?” asked Harriet. “Surely we have to talk to him.” They stood there thinking, worrying. She said, “Wouldn’t it be unnatural to pretend we don’t know? It’s always better to bring things into the open.”

“I guess she doesn’t want us to make it worse. To make it bigger than it is.”

An hour later, Kenny came home. All he seemed to have on his mind was their imminent trip to Havana. He could hardly wait. “Let’s go to the Hotel Nacional,” he said. “That’s where Frank and Ava stayed. And the Hotel Riviera built by Meyer Lansky. Let’s go there.”

“How was school?” asked Harriet.

“Fine. Do you think we’ll be able to see the room Frank and Ava stayed in?”

“Do you think they stayed there together?” she asked. “Or at different times?”

“It had to be together. Frank would never stay there after they split up if Ava stayed before. I know Frank. When Peter Lawford went out with Ava he didn’t talk to him for five years.”

“He held grudges.”

“You follow my logic?”

“I do.”

After supper, when they were alone in the kitchen, Lew broached the subject. He was washing the dishes, Kenny was doing his homework at the kitchen table. Lew said simply, “I hear there are some kids who are giving you a hard time.”

“Only two,” Kenny answered immediately, quite ready to talk, and eager to minimize the problem. “Ms. Neff says they’re doing it because they were the new boys last year and I’m the new boy this year.”

Lew asked what sorts of things they did, and Kenny told him. They took his things. They took his books and hid them. They flicked water at him. They left mean notes on his desk.

“Well, you can’t give them the pleasure of seeing you squirm.”

“One of them,” said Kenny, “is really big.”

The next day, at her desk, Harriet heard a dragon breathing fire and looked up from her notebook. Then she went to the window and watched a hot-air balloon rising off the open field at Carleton University.
They loom up like something out of Stephen Spielberg’s imagination, if his imagination were peaceful, since the balloons are bright, beautiful, and without incident
.

You had a spectacular enemy in what’s-her-name, the one who also wrote for
The New Yorker
and said everything you’d ever written, every last word, was without merit. Renata Adler. In a way, that’s the best kind of enemy to have. The mouthy, self-immolating kind. But how did you defend yourself?

She had dropped in on Fiona Chester earlier in the afternoon, and because nothing else was on her mind she found herself talking at length about Kenny’s troubles. To her surprise Fiona
said, “You need to be aggressive if you’re going to have a satisfying life.” The tiny Scot said there was an art to not being bullied, and an art to bullying back. Kenny would have to learn how to stand up for himself. And then she talked about her years as a union organizer. After she left the Sun Life Assurance Company, she spent six years unionizing garment workers in Montreal. She said it was the best job she ever had.

Kenny is aggressive, but not in the way she means. He is aggressive in his questions and frustrations, and in his enthusiasms. I’m thinking of the utter pleasure he derives from hearing something praised
.

Last night I was reading your essay about trash, art, and the movies, in which you say the romance of movies isn’t just in the stories and the people on the screen, but in “the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.” And I thought of my son, and wondered what it’s like to be a boy who’s filled to the brim with old movies that none of his schoolmates has ever seen. There was the day last year when Jane brought a friend home and said to her, “Let’s watch
Rear Window,
it’s by Hitchcock.” And her friend replied, “Who’s Hitchcock?”

Harriet had called Kenny’s teacher that morning to find out more, and learned that it was two girls in his class who had come to her a few days ago and said, You should know what’s happening to Ken. Boys were taking his pencil case and throwing it, so that he had to run to get it. Or his hat – they were throwing it around until
they
decided to give it back to him. He would have to run – this was at Brewer Park – to get his hat.

“I saw that once. Last fall. And I wondered-”

This had been going on for months, in other words. No wonder he never brought anybody home. No wonder he was
quieter than he used to be. Dinah was right about that, if wrong about the reasons.

In the afternoon, when Kenny got home from school, she asked him if things were any better. He said they were, and he seemed greatly relieved. They weren’t bothering him now, not since his teacher spoke to them.

But the teacher had warned her that while the bullying might ease off for a while, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t resume. And so she pressed him for more information. “Who are they, these boys who are giving you a hard time?”

And he told her their names.

“Are there any kids you like?”

She wanted to know if he had any friends at all, any allies, and he answered defensively, “I don’t dislike everybody in my class.” Then he listed half a dozen names to prove it. But the list – several girls, a couple of boys – only confirmed her suspicion that he was quite alone.

She began to ask another question, uncomfortably aware that this sort of intrusive persistence was exactly what the teacher had warned them against, but he interrupted her. “It’s over,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

“But I need to know. I need to be able to ask you.”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Will you?”

“I’ll tell you if it starts again.”

“Or I’ll ask,” she said. “But just from time to time.”

She knew it was always possible that it wasn’t as bad for him as she thought it was. The other day she had been saying to
Dinah that she always felt so sad for Buster Keaton – there was nothing sadder than wasted talent. But Dinah got impatient. It’s sadder for us than for him, she’d said. It’s not sad for the person with the talent, it’s sad for the observer of the person with the talent. Maybe it’s the same when you die, she’d said. Awful for the people who care about you, but not so awful for you. “Maybe,” she had said, “it’s not so awful for the people who care about you either.”

“Dinah, what’s the matter?”

“Tests,” she answered. “Where would doctors be without their tests? They’d have to use their brains.”

And then they were in Havana, and it was nothing like
Guys and Dolls
. They rented two rooms in an apartment occupied by a large extended family (one of whom, an affectionate deaf-mute, uttered the most astonishing array of bird-like trills and ejaculations whenever she encountered Kenny and Jane in the wide hallway). A huge apartment full of ceiling fans, on the top floor of an old mansion. They arrived late at night, not realizing until morning that it had as many artificial plants and flowers as any little house on the barren rock of Newfoundland.

In their rooms there was a whole world in the fittings of each window, the workings that allowed air without sun, light without wind or rain, and this by means of a double ladder of wooden slats that opened at any number of angles, the slats covered by long glass inserts that also opened and closed, as did the entire window. It opened outwards, like French doors, onto a beautiful city riddled with decay, swept by hurricanes, and
inhabited by roosters that didn’t know the meaning of dawn.

They found Frankie the very first morning, in the Hotel Nacional’s Club of Fame, an airy glassed-in terrace overlooking an unused swimming pool. He was with Ava in the mural representing the fifties, and so was John Wayne, Nat King Cole, Mickey Mantle, Lola Flores, Yma Sumac, Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando. But no Jean Simmons. A mural for each decade, with Buster Keaton, Gary Cooper, Jack Dempsey, and Meyer Lansky consigned to the thirties; Fred Astaire, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and Churchill in the mural for the forties; García Márquez, Josephine Baker, Yuri Gagarin in the post-revolution sixties, Francis Ford Coppola in the seventies, Muhammed Ali in the eighties, and so on. They spent quite a while looking at these well-known faces, Harriet remembering something Lionel had said about the universal language of the movies. He was referring to silent pictures and the short, golden time when they made language unnecessary, when it was possible to believe that flickering images on a screen might bring everyone together, no matter what country they came from. And then, he said, that hope was lost, like every other.

They took an elevator to the upper swimming pool and paid the daily rate to lie in luxury, in swimsuits and sunglasses, on four cushioned lounge chairs. “So are you going to have a daiquiri, Alfredo?” Kenny asked his mom, and when the wind picked up and blew around the pool, he called out, “Fred? Where are you, Fred? It’s cold. The snow is blowing in.’”