Garbo Laughs (36 page)

Lew looked up from his book. “What’s that?” he asked.

Jane answered, “Audrey Hepburn’s worst line in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

And Harriet said, “She was talking in her sleep.”

Later, resting on their bed before going out into the warm, dark, crumbling city in search of supper, Harriet and Lew heard the movie talk continue in the adjoining room.

“Everybody in
The Godfather
was good,” said Kenny. “And they were all unknowns. Except for Marlon Brando. Even Diane Keaton was an unknown.”

“Everybody
was
good,” agreed Jane.

“Except for Diane Keaton. I didn’t think she was so good.”

“I don’t know,” said Jane. “Maybe the role?”

“What are your top three endings?” he asked her. “I’d say
Godfather, Part II; Some Like it Hot; Local Hero.”

Lew spoke from his pillow into Harriet’s ear, “Movies and comparing. And comparing movies. When will this stage be over?”

Perhaps never, she thought.

“I wonder what they’re looking for,” he said, “what they find in those old movies.”

“What’s your guess?” she asked.

“I really don’t know. In Jane’s case, I suppose it’s the dream of doing that herself. Of being an entertainer. And in Kenny’s case, I just can’t say. Maybe it’s knowing everything about something. Knowing who’s who and having an opinion.”

But she remembered herself at that age and what she’d been looking for: glamour, sexiness, excitement. And they find it, she would think later.
They know Frankie. They know Ava. They feel electrified by the things they do and say and wear, and how they carry it all off. It’s more real to them than life
.

There’s a price to pay, of course. Watch
Guys and Dolls
in the afternoon, and the price you pay is evening gloom
.

I caught up with
Rio Grande
a few weeks ago, and watched John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara being very effective together What a beautiful face she has, very strong; and at times the camera made her almost plain – pale, and almost plain in her expressiveness. Kenny sat beside me and couldn’t help remarking on how racist it was, and sexist and silly, but he liked it too, and wanted to know if I did. That itch he has to talk and compare that baffles Lew – it’s how he keeps himself entertained. But it’s not just that. It’s how he makes the movies apart of his life, and his life a part of the movies
.

Now she heard the two of them talking about their top three beginnings, the opening scenes of
Nashville, Get Shorty, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and she couldn’t help herself.
“The Godfather, Part II
also has one of the best beginnings,” she called through the open doorway. “The funeral in Sicily, remember? It paves the way for the final scene when Michael is all alone with his ghosts.” She laughed at herself and turned back to Lew.

And the conversation turned to love.

“What about you?” she asked. “What search are you on?”

“You think I’m searching for something?”

“I think you might be. I think you might be looking for love.”

“Oh, I’ve found that,” he said.

“Where?”

“Right here.” And he pulled her towards him.

For a while they lay like that, in each other’s arms. She said, “Tomorrow Dinah starts her chemo.”

“Yes,” he said, holding her tighter. But he didn’t say anything else and she was left to wonder what he was thinking. She could have asked, but she didn’t ask.

That week they would hear the slap of sandals on marble floors, the tremendous bang of a door slamming repeatedly in
the wind, the crash of old moulding falling from a great height, and the long, tuneful siren of an ambulance, as if a parade were going by. Since it often took so long to be served, they developed the habit of going to restaurants before they were hungry, and taking their books along to read while they waited. “Recommend some books to me,” Jane said to her mother.

“There’s Alice Munro. There’s all of Steinbeck.”

“Olive Steinbeck,” Jane said, and wrote it down.

“Mommy?” said Kenny. “What ever happened to Jean Simmons?”

“Lord knows. Don’t ask.”

But he was relentless, a master especially of the unanswerable question. “Which would you rather be right now, as cold as an icicle or as hot as a burning log?”

“Why don’t you ask me something I can answer?”

“All right. Who would you rather have dinner with, Kevin Costner or Tim Robbins?”

She thought for a second. “How about Kevin Kline or Sean Connery?”

“Okay. Who would you rather have dinner with, Kevin Kline or Sean Connery?”

She thought again. “Sean Connery.”

“All right! Now! What about Sean Connery or Cary Grant?”

“Cary Grant.”

“All right! Who do you think was better-looking? Peter O’Toole or Cary Grant?”

“Which period? Which film?”

“Peter O’Toole in
How to Steal a Million
and Cary Grant in
My Girl Friday.”

“That’s hard.”

“Come on. You have one minute to answer.”

“Peter O’Toole’s face was better-looking, but Cary Grant’s body wins by a landslide.”

“Was Peter O’Toole his real name?” asked Jane.

“Yes.”

“Cary Grant wasn’t his real name,” Jane said. “His real name was Archibald Leach. Yuck.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Harriet.

“Leach! Yuck!”

“Archibald Peach,” said Harriet.

“Now,” trumpeted Kenny. “Who was the better actor, Peter O’Toole in
My Favorite Year
or Cary Grant in
Notorious?”

And Harriet reached forward and wrapped her hands around her son’s neck.

That week she felt a new exhaustion, and blamed it on the heat. Lew noticed, and urged her to lie down more often, and she did. One night, while she was resting after they’d changed out of their beach clothes, and before they went in search of supper, they wrote a postcard to Dinah. The kids told her about seeing Frankie in the Club of Fame, and drinking daiquiris beside the pool. Harriet wrote,
The Bacardi is swell, but the flies are driving Kenny nuts
, recalling how they’d eaten one day in a tiny restaurant on a slummy street, and when the ceiling fans stopped working the flies descended and Kenny fled. He stood in the street, shaking himself and stamping, and only recovered when they went back for another afternoon at the Hotel Nacional. She passed the card to Lew. His pen hovered in the air, and Harriet looked away. She heard the pen make contact, and before they mailed the postcard at the airport, she read what he’d written.
We love you. Hang on tight. Lew
.

(When Dinah got the card two weeks later, she would be struck by their different styles of handwriting: Harriet’s minuscule script, Kenny’s scrawl, Jane’s round printing, Lew’s tall, evenly spaced lettering. She tucked the card between the mirror and the frame of her bureau, thinking as she did so of Lew’s desk – his neat but expansive ways, his tidy but imperialistic papers spreading from study to dining room to basement, where his office was almost finished. Thinking he was a man divided between his radical inclinations and his enormous patience, representing to those who loved him a mixture of idealism and security. For children, and women over fifty, there was nothing more attractive.)

It was after they finished writing the postcard that the argument began, and for once it wasn’t about the movies.

Kenny said, “It would be interesting to watch a revolution, but I wouldn’t want to be in one. You’d be too worried.”

He’d been thinking about this for several days as they stepped over broken sidewalks and around mangy dogs and away from people who bothered them with requests to buy things or hire their taxis or give them money. People who were after your stuff. He knew about that. People who wouldn’t leave you alone.

“They want things to be both fair and equal, but that’s impossible,” he said. He’d been listening to Harriet and Lew. He’d been reading. “People want to use their abilities, that’s fair. But Castro wants everybody to be equal. So they
can’t
use their abilities, and that’s not fair.” Already he was worked up. “They can’t have both. If people are better at things they should make more money.”

Jane said, “Do you think it’s fair that the extremely rich use their talents on the stock market and make loads of money? Is that fair?”

“It’s fair, but it’s not equal.”

“I think it’s disgusting greed. You’re a disgusting capitalist,” she said to her brother, and Harriet, listening with keen amusement, thought, They’ll be all right, these two. No matter what happens. They’ll defend themselves.

“Hey! This is a statement!” Kenny was standing up, waving his arms now. “Everyone’s different. Some people are smarter. If someone’s good, if someone’s better than somebody else, it isn’t fair to hold them back.”

“Who is
good?
Are you saying the prime minister of Canada is good?
He
made it. Is he good? There is such a thing as doing something you love not for the money. Everybody can go to university in Cuba, right? University is free. Say you’re a doctor. You can do all sorts of things, work in a hospital or do research. You just don’t get paid a lot.”

“But that’s the point,” shouted Kenny. “You can’t do research because there’s no money to do it. That’s the paradox. You’re doing what you love but you can’t do it, because there’s no money to pay for it. My final statement.” He pointed into the air. “Eat or be eaten!”

Harriet stood up. “Let’s eat,” she said. “I’m weak from hunger.” And then, “Where did you learn the word
paradox?”

She meant it when she said she was weak. It had been a long day spent in markets and museums, and in old Havana, where Kenny leant against a pillar in the cathedral and said,
bugger, bugger, bugger
, just like Hugh Grant in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
. Then a taxi ride to the nearest beach, where Lew said to her, knowing she would be interested, “What you’re seeing is Cuban women with Canadian and Italian men. Or Cuban men with Canadian women.” A long day but not a bad day, until
they set out at eight in the evening to find something to eat.

The next morning Harriet opened her eyes in the darkness and whimpered with embarrassment and shame. For in her mind they were still following the tall Cuban who trod the ground like an Indian guide, erect and never varying his pace, down the middle of unilluminated streets away from his family-run
paladar
, which was closed, to another that he swore was open. Block after block after block, as she muttered and fumed, while the others bore up with better grace. At one point he crossed a street just as the traffic light changed, and now in her mind she returned to this sorry point: Kenny was directly in front of her and she gave his back an impatient push, meaning for him to head across rapidly, then plunged across herself. But when she reached the far sidewalk, where the Cuban stood waiting impassively, and looked back – there was her family, standing on the other shore. And she was flooded with shame.

Lew opened his eyes and took in her face. “You didn’t sleep,” he said. And she shook her head and turned, so that she was lying on her side, away from him. He wrapped his arm around her and her shoulders began to shake. Look at you, she said to herself with contempt, look at you trying to get sympathy. The tears kept coming, however. Ah, said Lew, and held her tighter. He asked what was the matter, and after some little time and a lot of effort she managed to say how ashamed she was of having plunged across the road, leaving him and the kids “on the other side.”

“Yeah,” he said in quiet agreement a few inches from her ear, and her heart contracted. Then, after a moment, he added, “Well, that’s not so bad. I’ve done the same thing.”

And her heart eased.

“Especially at night,” he said, “I get flooded with embarrassment about things I did a long time ago. Especially at night.” And then he told her a story from his childhood that he had never told her before.

The window above their heads was open. The sound of traffic, of singing caged birds, of a single, punctual rooster came in with the early-morning light as they lay on the blue sheet, resting their heads on flowered pillows in this semi-elegant, kitsch-filled room, while Kenny and Jane slept on in the adjoining bedroom. He was five or six years old, he said, and he had made a flower basket at school for May Day. You were to give it to someone as a surprise, and he decided to give it to his mother, even though he had to ask her to cut the flowers for him. She did, cutting him some daffodils and other spring flowers which he put in the cone-shaped basket before hiding it in the living room, under a book of all places. But in the morning, when he pulled it out, the handle tore off, and then he didn’t know what to do. You were supposed to hang it from someone’s doorknob, but without the handle the basket was useless. He couldn’t give it to his mother, and so he took it with him on his way to school with Stevie Brooks, thinking he would leave it at a neighbour’s house. But standing on the road next to the neighbour’s he thought, How can I leave it if it doesn’t have a handle? Stevie lost patience with him. I’ll show you what to do, he said, and grabbed the flowers and broke them in half and threw them on the ground.

He was laughing as he told the story into her ear, and she was laughing too, but still crying. “Do you want me to stop?” he asked, and she said no, keep going. Something echoed in her mind as he spoke, something to do with flowers, and it was
Marlon, she realized, Marlon Brando in the early-morning hours bending down to pick up a broken flower, which he put in an old tin can and gave to Jean Simmons in a tender, humorous gesture that itself had echoes of silent movies and of childhood. She knew the scene so well, its effect on her not unlike what she was feeling now. When he got home, said Lew, the first thing he did was attack his mom, lash out at her, say it was all her fault. There was no place in the house to hide anything. If he’d had a place to hide the basket none of this would have happened. So she got him a cardboard box to put in his room and promised she would never look inside it. Anything he wanted to hide, he could hide in there. “And that box was in my room for years,” he said, “and I never hid anything in it. But it was there for years.”