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Authors: Elizabeth Hay

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BOOK: Garbo Laughs
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He showed her what it was.
5001 Nights at the Movies
, held together with an elastic band.

Dinah took the heavy book out of his hands and the past flowed into her eyes. She stood there, blinking hard. Then she said, “You really should write to her. She’d like to know that a young writer carries her under his arm.”

In fact, the old typewriter was back in the basement, and for long stretches of time Kenny barely said a word. But that wasn’t the case now. “So,” he said, coming to life, “what did you think
of Pulp Fiction?”

“I’m glad to see you haven’t changed.”

She walked him home, and he wanted to know if she was going to watch a movie with them later, since it was Friday, movie night. “As if you need to ask,” she said, but she would check on her house first, letting her tenants know that she was here. Then she inquired after his father and sister, and asked about their plans for the summer. Kenny said he was going to Italy for the summer. “Well, not the whole summer. The month of July.”

His voice had deepened so much she had to smile. “Jane must be excited.”

Jane wasn’t excited, she was jealous. She was staying here. He was going to Italy by himself. He was staying with Leah.

“Leah,” she said, and became aware of the world again.

Car horns were blaring in the distance – either a wedding or an accident, or both. Kenny, as if reading her thoughts, said, “Can you believe that Pauline Kael didn’t like
Chinatown?”
And the image in her mind sharpened and cut deeper, of John Huston’s kindly, horrifying leer as he reached into the blaring car to claim his granddaughter for himself. The transition to motherless. Motherless, and taken under the wrong wing.

An hour later Jim Creak looked out his upstairs window and saw what no one ever sees: a garden in the moment of blooming. Dinah Bloom, moving about in the openness of her old shade garden. The oak tree had been hauled away and loud Ray’s loud pool hummed next door, but Dinah was back. He stood transfixed, waiting for her to look up, or come over. But she went up her back steps and inside. He wouldn’t see her again until later
that night, when he looked out the window before going to bed.

What Dinah did next was drive to Metcalfe Street and buy an extra-large pizza from her favourite pizzeria. She drove back with it and carried it up the steps to the Golds. Kenny and Jane were home, but not Lew. It was just after six o’clock.

Another half-hour went by. Dinah was at the kitchen table, talking with the kids about Nova Scotia, when she heard the front door open. Then she heard voices. Lew and someone else. A colleague, who perhaps was more than a colleague. Valerie was bearing pizza too.

Jane would say later of this moment that it was like watching a movie. The girl who at the age of four sat on the grass in Riverside Park unable to take her eyes off the couple locked in a steamy embrace farther down the slope; the girl who shook off her mother’s hand when she offered her a sandwich with a “No, I’m watching a movie”; this girl was now fifteen and no less keen-eyed about the workings of romance. She saw her father’s sad face transformed by the pleasure of seeing Dinah, and she saw Dinah’s face respond. Dinah stood up, and her father wrapped her in a hug.

“You came back,” he said.

But then awkwardness took hold. They had supper together and there was too much pizza and too little talk. Valerie asked questions that Dinah didn’t feel like answering, and after a while the table fell silent.

Jane and Kenny insisted that Dinah stay and watch a movie with them. They wouldn’t let her leave, and so she stayed, while Lew drove Valerie (who didn’t care for movies) home.

Jane put on
Crossing Delancey
(despite Kenny’s plea for
This Is Spinal Tap)
and Dinah remembered her disagreement with
Harriet about how long they would last: Izzy and the pickle man. She remembered saying that Izzy would be ashamed of him. Every time they went to some literary party and she introduced him as her husband the pickle man, she would be ashamed. It’ll be over in two years, she’d said. “I don’t know,” replied Harriet. “He knows what
ambivalent
means, and he’s crazy about her. It’s a good dilemma too: falling for the wrong man, while underestimating the right one.”

Lew came back before long and watched the last half of the movie with them. “Finally,” he said, when Izzy dumped the writer-jerk for the pickle man. “It took her long enough.”

It was after that, after the movie was over, after the kids were in bed, that he and Dinah found themselves alone in the kitchen.

“Are you thirsty?” he asked. He got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water from the faucet. She wasn’t, but he was. “Where are you staying?”

“In my house. One of the tenants is away.”

She had told him this earlier, but he’d forgotten, either out of nervousness or fatigue, or both. She could see how tired he was.

“You’ve had a terrible year,” she said, as he drank down the water.

He ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “It’s still terrible. But people have been good. They’ve been wonderful.”

She thought his smile, while tender, meant to imply that the people who had been wonderful were the ones who had been on the scene – not far away.

“Hattie missed you,” he said. “We all missed you.” And he reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze, then turned and set his glass down beside the sink.
“Muchacha,”
he said. “I’ve got to
get to bed. You’ll be around for a few days? I’m so tired I can’t stand up any more.”

Dinah remembered then that she didn’t know where Harriet was buried, and she asked him. There wasn’t a gravesite, he told her. He and the kids had sprinkled her ashes in the garden, after the snow was gone.

“I like that,” she said. “I like that you did that.” And she touched his arm.

Her purse was hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. She picked it up, then opened the screen door onto the porch, and stepped outside. The door clicked shut behind her. And then she heard the rustle of leaves and felt a warm breeze.

She walked across the porch and down the steps onto the grass, taking the back way to her house. A dog began to bark and she half expected Jim Creak to come outside and call for Stella. She looked up at his house. There was a light on upstairs, and she saw movement in the window, and then the light went out.

Halfway down the garden slope she paused again, feeling the soft air on her face, feeling her own fatigue. All around her lay the dark garden, but it was city darkness. She knelt down and put her hand on the grass. By morning there might be dew, she thought. Even now it felt cool, a little damp. She pulled out a blade of grass, and it stuck to her fingertip. When she examined it, in this light, it looked to her like a long eyelash.

Acknowledgments

For invaluable guidance and support, my thanks to Ellen Seligman, Dawn Seferian, Jennifer Lambert, Peter Buck, Anita Chong, Mark Fried, and Bella Pomer.

For their generous help with the world of this book, I would like to thank the following: Sheila McCook, the late Rhoda Barrett, Isabel Huggan, Casey and Bess Swedlove, Bruce White, Alain Miguelez, Earl Crowe, Alex Fried, Stuart Hay, Bill Cody, Jack Holliday, Wayne Grimm, Pat Gorman, Adrian Shuman, Peter Harcourt, Gary Draper, Stuart Kinmond, and my two cinematic comrades-in-arms, Ben and Sochi Fried.

My thanks to
CBC
Radio and the National Library in Ottawa.

The idea for an album of pressed ferns that also includes pictures of early movie stars comes from
Basil Street Blues
by Michael Holroyd.

The song detective’s call-to-love on page 277 is taken from lines from one of Dennis Lee’s “Night Songs”
(Nightwatch
, McClelland & Stewart, 1996). Used with the author’s generous permission, and the permission of the publisher.

The lines of poetry by Anna Akhmatova are from
Poems of Akhmatova
, ©1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, published by Houghton Mifflin. Permission granted by Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman Literary Agents.

The Pauline Kael quotations from her reviews of
Nashville
©1975 and
Last American Hero
©1973, reprinted in
Reeling
(Little, Brown and Company, 1976), are used with the permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. The line from her essay “Trash, Art and the Movies,” reprinted in
Going Steady
(Marion Boyars Publishers, 1994), is used with the permission of the publisher.

Quotations from his stories “The Sinatra Sisters” and “Brackett Brackenwood” are used with the permission of the author, Ben Fried.

Quotations from “Our Footloose Correspondents: A Spanish Shawl for Miss Garbo” by E. W. Selsey, originally published in
The New Yorker
, are reprinted by permission. ©1938 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.

ELIZABETH HAY
is the author of three highly acclaimed, bestselling novels:
A Student of Weather
, a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Ottawa Book Award;
Garbo Laughs
, winner of the Ottawa Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award; and, most recently,
Late Nights on Air
, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Among her other publications is the short story collection
Small Change
, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award for her body of literary work.

Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa. For more information, please visit
www.elizabethhay.com
.

Copyright © 2003by Elizabeth Hay

Cloth edition published 2003
Emblem edition published 2004

Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency-is an infringement of the copyright law.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Hay, Elizabeth, 1951
Garbo Laughs

eISBN: 978-1-55199-432-1

I. Title.
PS8565.A875G37 2004        C813’.54        C2004-902327-6

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

This is a work of fiction and the characters and incidents are fictional.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

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