Garbo Laughs (38 page)

She opened her eyes and said, “Revival House.”

“Film Society,” he said. “The Fern Film Society.”

She closed her eyes. “You’re right. That’s it.”

Two weeks more, and prim, conservative Ottawa took off its glasses and revealed its breathtaking summer face. Suddenly, it was lush, wild, profuse. Big bosoms of lilac barged forward, overmastering any sidewalk that stood in their way. Banks of honeysuckle sprang up on all sides, lilies of the valley perfumed the ground, Virginia creeper clambered up telephone poles and
across the wires. Surrounded by such greenery, Harriet felt the iron come back into her blood and the blood into her cheeks. There would be free movies on Saturday mornings at the Fern Film Society, with post-film discussions by Kenny Gold; a glassed-in crying room for mothers with babies; Saturday afternoons designed for old parents with young kids:
The Crimson Pirate
Meets
The Court Jester:
See What Your Folks Saw When They Were Young; weekdays planned around the schools: Mario Puzo Meets Francis Ford Coppola: Contrast and Compare Movie and Book.

One Saturday night in late May, Kenny undertook to make Fat Clemenza’s spaghetti sauce with meatballs and sausage. He said, “Once a week I’ll make Clemenza’s spaghetti.” He stirred vigorously. “No,” he told his mom, “the wine is last.” Spatters of sauce covered the stove. “Who’s the most famous actor living today?” he asked her.

“Marlon Brando.”

“Marlon Brando? Marlon Brando?”

“Who do
you
think?”

“Al Pacino.”

“Well, that shows there are limits to what you know.”

“But Al Pacino won an Oscar for
Scent of a Woman”

“So what?”

“He must have been good.”

“Not that good.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Now I know who your favourite actor is of all time. Are you going to deny it? Are you going to deny that Marlon Brando is your favourite actor of all time? For years I’ve been trying to find out who your favourite actor is and you’ve always
said you don’t know. Now you’ve admitted it. You’re disappointed now. You’ve finally given in. You’ve given in. You do not have the will, you do not have the power to restrain your answer.”

“Kenny,” said his mom. “Drop dead.”

Kenny would remember her fierce attachments and antipathies: that she couldn’t abide Jack Nicholson (he looks, she said, as if he’s about to pick his nose and show you the results) or Katharine Hepburn (that faker) or Steve Buscemi (I’ll call him when I need a rat catcher) or Nicolas Cage (stay out of his bed, whatever you do), but she had infinite patience for Cary Grant and Sean Connery, for Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, and Greta Garbo, congratulating herself on the latitude of her tastes and on her subtle generosity. Not a word would she hear against Peter O’Toole or Jeff Bridges, mounting the barricades on their behalf, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with anyone who besmirched O’Toole’s acting abilities, and writing furious letters to the editor when Jeff Bridges was dismissed as the forgettable star of another forgettable movie, “the overrated scion of a hack in a wet suit.”

Your reviewer, she wrote, should be made to watch
The Fabulous Baker Boys
over and over again until he admits he’s wrong.

Dear Richard Gere, she wrote. You should be forced to watch Cary Grant, over and over again, until you get it right.

These letters lay in piles next to the business plan on her desk, and one day Kenny would read them and be transported back to a boyhood when he never went anywhere without his bible, when he had a dad who knew all about the world and nothing about the movies, a sister who scolded him for wasting
water and being a filthy capitalist, and a mother whose friend got cancer and urged her to get herself checked, and the friend survived – but his mom did not.

The wedding happened on a cloudy morning in June, and Harriet realized exactly how much weight she had lost when she put on a dress. She and Lew were the first to arrive (best girl and ring bearer having gone to the wedding breakfast at a secret location). They went around to Dinah’s back garden and sat on folding chairs on the grass, and waited. A petal pathway ran like a pink-and-red carpet between the two rows of chairs and came to a halt under a trellised arbour threaded with roses.

Lew said to her, “We could do this too. We could have a proper wedding.”

“I’d rather chew glass,” said Harriet.

“But you’re happy for them.”

“Ecstatic.”

“Hattie.”

“Jack is awful,” she said.

“He’s not good enough for her, but he’s not awful.”

“Lew, just say he’s awful. I want to hear you say someone is
awful.”

“He’s not so awful.”

And then they laughed, since it was obvious that his mild stubbornness was a perfect match for her miserable disgust.

Others gathered, but slowly, and while they waited Lew told her that he’d heard Garbo mentioned on the radio the other day. Someone who knew her had died. Some actor she admired. She
had gone backstage to see him once, after one of his performances, but when he heard who was waiting outside his dressing room, he refused to let her in until he had made himself up all over again. No, he couldn’t remember the actor’s name.

A sprinkle of rain fell and moistened the guests and the petal pathway. Fiona Chester opened her umbrella, and Harriet saw Jim Creak arrive in shirt and tie. She glanced at the back door of Dinah’s house, from which the wedding party would emerge, but no sign of activity yet, and she lost herself in the murky pleasure of uncharitable thoughts. It seemed to her that the bride, though hardbitten, was pudgy in her thinking: her weakness for Sinatra, for the royal family, and now for weddings. What was she thinking of, marrying Jack Frame?

Lew was talking again. Recently, he said, he’d learned about a new idea called “the complexity theory.” He began to explain what it was and she barely listened, until he made a wide gesture with his hands and said something about a flock of birds. As soon as he uttered those words,
a flock of birds
, her mind cleared. How oddly disjointed so much of life is, she thought, and how little it takes – a few words, arranged a certain way – for it to make sense again. Her eyes cleared, her heart cleared, her mind cleared. Here was Lew, dressed in his dad’s old linen jacket, explaining that a team of theorists decided to study a flock of birds to see how they managed to fly great distances towards a common goal, something every organization would like to emulate, and they discovered, he said, that the formation keeps to a route set by one or two head birds (who have read the wind and figured out what path to take), and holds its shape by virtue of each bird staying an equal distance from two other birds. They exercise
self-control, in other words, after accepting an overall direction.

But without the phrase
a flock of birds
, she would have missed everything he said. To her, complexity lay in the absence of anything she could visualize, and simplicity, disarming and life-restoring, in being able to see by means of images.

Her relief upon hearing
a flock of birds
wasn’t unlike Lew’s relief at accepting the general direction in which they were all headed: Dinah and Jack would be married, he and Harriet would stay together. With Dinah he had an understanding, vividly tender, that they could openly worry about each other, favour each other, seek each other out – appreciate each other – as a reward for not having an affair.

Jack came around the side of the house with the minister, and they stationed themselves under the arbour. Harriet thought more uncharitable thoughts: about sentimental weddings in general and unreliable Jack in particular. I give them two years, she said to herself. In that moment a burst of music filled the air and the back door of the house was thrown open. Then out came Jane in her polka-dot sundress and brand-new patent-leather shoes, and Harriet’s eyes welled up and over. Jane, all smiles, came slowly down the steps, but Harriet was rooting blindly in Lew’s pocket for his handkerchief. Kenny, in his gangster jacket, a rose in his lapel, followed Jane, and then Dinah, looking lovely, really lovely in pale blue with a wide hat, came out behind him. Tears gushed down Harriet’s face. Then stepping onto the petal pathway, Jane’s feet shot out from under her. She landed on her bottom with a thud, and her mother nearly keeled over with laughter.

Lew jabbed her with his elbow –
Stop it, you’re embarrassing her –
but try as she might she couldn’t stop. Her intrepid daughter
scrambled to her feet and carried on, and so did Harriet. She was helpless. In hysterics. Ignominiously, she had to abandon the garden for the front of the house, where she leaned against the porch and sobbed and wheezed with laughter.

It was the music, she would say later, congratulating the couple, and trying to explain what got her started. They were drinking champagne in Dinah’s living room. A friend of Dinah’s put on a
CD
and tears filled her eyes once again. “What a great song,” she said. “‘Moon River.’”

“Actually, it’s ‘As Time Goes By,’” said Lew.

He recognized her fit of tears and laughter for what it was too. Were she not so susceptible to emotion, he thought, she wouldn’t deride it so fiercely. Soldiers, he had heard, were the most sentimental of men, and Harriet was a sentimental woman who masqueraded as a soldier. Then, when she least expected it, she was ambushed by herself.

The wedding kiss was much commented upon. It lasted so long, and was so passionate, that even Jane had to look away.

T
he wind changed in the early morning. From her study Harriet saw hot air balloons receding rather than advancing, and when she stepped onto the porch to get the paper, she smelled
Thurso, the pulp-and-paper plant downriver. An east wind.

And then, at nine, a little rain.

Again, she had trouble finding a place to park. Again, she took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and this time she was alone in the waiting room, except for one other woman who was tanned and talkative. Her family had sent her to Paris for her fiftieth birthday, and she loved it. Italy next!

A woman in slacks and a striped shirt took her to the room that had the magic table. But they were looking in the wrong place. The trouble lay elsewhere. It was lurking in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

That summer Harriet had wooden blinds installed in her study, and awnings on every window. In her shaded room on hot afternoons she liked to think she was living in a rich part of old Havana. I could be Hemingway, she thought. In truth, she was more like Lionel, putting her papers in order by throwing them out, and steadying her life by clinging to a wobbly idea. I
was reading about Grierson’s efforts to get documentaries into movie houses and came upon your picture, the two of you seated together with Claude Jutra, the other judge at the 1962 Vancouver Film Festival. You’re wearing glasses, and your hair seems to be in a bun. You look like a librarian, but I happen to like librarians. I watched a documentary about Grierson too, and at that stage, a few years before his death, he looked like a cross between Gregory Peck and Blind Pugh. What a face. Like you, he was small, as was Claude Jutra, and now you’re the only one left, Jutra having jumped off a bridge into the St. Lawrence River, and Grierson dead of cancer at the age of seventy-three
.

Not long ago she had driven past the spot where the National Film Board got started in 1939 in an old sawmill next
to the Rideau Falls. The sawmill – gone now, of course – housed not just Grierson and Norman McLaren, but for a time a man called J.P.R. Golightly, a name not coined, as she’d thought, by Truman Capote, after all. She parked at the French embassy and walked over to the falls, feeling the stir of temperaments in the cold and empty air, those odd couplings in history that make you stop in surprise. And she thought of the winter past, the ice-storm winter, as a stage set crudely rigged for sound, which meant it was a transition, and also the end of something. The next morning she stepped out into Miami: the softest air. A sudden change that made her wonder about conversions in novels: “After that, nothing was the same.”
For a time, I want to say. For a time, and then familiarity and indifference settle around us once again. Life washes over most of us. It just keeps coming and washing over us; and, in time, we stop trying to stand up and sit down
.

After the wedding, Dinah and Jack went to Nova Scotia for their honeymoon, and to find a house to buy, since for years Dinah had been longing to live by the sea. No doubt they would move there for good, thought Harriet, and the neighbourhood would break up even more. Old Buddy they left in the care of the song detective (to lose the girl and inherit the dog!) and after a week of pining the old protector wandered off and didn’t return.

“I was looking forward to him biting Jack,” said Harriet, who was also sorry that they hadn’t been able to look after Buddy themselves, but her allergies were worse than ever.

She and Jack had shared fewer than a dozen words since he’d taken such elaborate measures to steal her groceries, but
that strange afternoon often floated into her mind. What had he really been up to? she wondered. Another notch in his premarital belt, or did he actually care for her in some peculiar fashion? The fern album haunted her too, bringing her one day to a pitch of sadness. Everything was sad, the way, in November, every remaining leaf is yellow. She could barely stand up. Barely lift a finger. She felt like Jean Harlow before she died, so tired she couldn’t lift her hand to take off her makeup.

She left her desk, took off her glasses, and lay down, and Kenny strolled in with a couple of movie books under his arm. “Is Paul Newman among your top five actors?” he asked her.

“You exhaust me,” she said.

“Come on. ‘Do it for me, Tony. For Riff.’”

“Why is it always too early in the morning when I talk to you, no matter how late in the day?”

“Just tell me.”

“The trouble is, I know what your next question is going to be. All right. He’s one of the top five.”