Garbo Laughs (8 page)

“Sometimes,” Dinah said, “you are funny.”

Harriet looked at her with hope mingled with hopelessness before dropping her head into her arms and mumbling something unintelligible.

“What?”

“I said my letters are funny.” Raising her head and looking sideways at Dinah. “I can be funny in letters. I don’t know why.” Although she guessed. Writing letters pulled her out of herself, gave her an occasion to rise to, made her connect with the rest of the world. “The trouble is I don’t write letters, I mean real letters, unless I’m travelling.”

“It sounds,” said Dinah, “like you’d better take a trip.”

“I’m going away,” Harriet said. “I’m going in search of my sense of humour and I’m not coming back until I’ve found it.”

She headed to the corner store.

“Bon voyage,” said Dinah.

At the corner store Bill Bender was buying his morning papers and horrible Ray his daily allotment of chocolate bars. Three papers so the one could find mistakes “sprinkled like parsley” on every page; six chocolate bars so the other could poison himself to death, though not soon enough for Harriet. The moment she came through the door, he pinned her with his expressionless eyes. “Last night you and Dinah were watching movies again.”

She looked at him.

This was Ray’s style. He watched you and told you what he saw, not because he was curious but because he wanted you to know that nothing escaped him. He was the neighbourhood spy, the sort who would provide the necessary evidence to have you sent to the Gulag as a social parasite.

Harriet said, “Did you happen to see who threw the egg at my window?”

His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch.

She thought there was a good chance he might know, since he was the one who had warned her about the dirty old man next door. Just days after they moved onto the street, he pointed to the upstairs sunroom at the back of Bill Bender’s house. “You know he waters his plants in the nude?” Keeping his eyes fixed on her. “Heather – she used to live in your house? She had two little girls? She had to shield their eyes because he likes to garden in his dressing gown, which has a tendency” – his eyes were flat but glinting – “to fall open.”

Now he asked, “Which window?” And then, being a high-school math teacher who couldn’t bear to be without the answer, “University students,” he said.

Harriet escaped to the back of the store and stayed there until he left, then joined Bill Bender at the counter, a stooped old gent in his eighties, big-shouldered, white-haired, whose pale old eyes looked at her and momentarily drew a blank. She helped him out. “Harriet Browning,” she said. “Our sunrooms overlook each other.”

“Oh yes. Very good, very good, very good.”

They walked home together, taking the alley and avoiding a wide van by stepping over a low snowbank into someone’s little backyard. “They shouldn’t allow cars,” muttered Bill Bender. “Should be just for walkers. No cars.” He was one of the neighbourhood’s oldest eccentrics, draping his living-room wall with the Quebec flag, erecting a weather vane in the shape of a maple leaf. Opinionated, contrary, abrupt. “Be off with you,” he’d say when he tired of your company, whether you were six years old or sixty. “Go away.”

“Let’s ban cars. Let’s blow up Bronson Avenue,” Harriet said.

“Yes, count me in. Count me in.”

“We could establish a car-free republic.”

“Dominion!” thundered Bill Bender. “A car-free Dominion.”

They reached their street and she invited him in for coffee, enticing him with the prospect of seeing the Cuban fern. “And Dinah is visiting,” she added, knowing their fondness for each other. But no, he had to take Fiona the milk for her tea. His long courtship of Fiona Chester was one of the first things Dinah told her about the neighbourhood. “He’s devoted to her,” she said. “He calls her Shortie.”

Raising his cap, he continued down the alley to Fiona’s house, while Harriet turned right and headed home, walking as usual with her head down, and as a result she didn’t see Jack until she started up the walk.

He had put on weight. A meaty man had become meatier.

“I don’t like meaty men,” she would say to Dinah later, and no opinion could have been firmer. “I never have.”

You would be able to hear him barrel up and down the stairs, she thought, and you wouldn’t like it. Wouldn’t like the thumping weight of him. Or, and she felt the peculiar pull she always felt with Jack Frame, you might like it.

He stood with his back to her, so he must have rung the bell. And since there was nowhere to hide, she groped desperately inside herself and discovered, wonder of wonders, a teasing gaiety. “Good Lord,” she called to him, and he turned. “I know I’m irresistible, but what are
you
doing here?”

“Harriet.”

From the porch he watched her come up the walk, the only woman who had ever punched him in the nose.

Rod Steiger, she thought, as she came up the steps. The same heft. The same sardonic look he had in
Dr. Zhivago
. She said, “Leah told us you were coming.”

They hugged each other as Jane opened the door, and Harriet asked, “Is that a six-hundred-page manuscript in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” She was all too prescient. A few days later, after he’d settled into his lodgings, he came by with a seven-hundred-page novel for her to read. The man was without mercy.

She let him into the house – this old friend and terrible stranger – and in pictures taken soon afterwards she looked radiant and keyed up, and she was laughing.

W
hen Harriet first knew Jack Frame he was wild and woolly, a draft dodger, a jabberer about politics, a full-paunched graduate student with bushy hair and beard – one of Leah’s stepchildren acquired when she became Lionel Frame’s fifth wife. That was in Italy, that first meeting. She saw him again in Montreal after he’d fallen in love with the French professor who would become his first wife. Years went by and Harriet thought of him as her before-and-after man: bristling with politics, denuded by love. He shaved off his beard, trimmed his hair, lost weight for the
sake of Sara Tremblay. Then that Sara disappeared and another Sarah took her place, to be replaced six years later by his third wife, Sally, from Chicago; she didn’t last either. (Just as another friend of Harriet’s went from David to David looking for the perfect one. He’s here right now, if you want to meet him, she told Harriet on the phone. He’s in the backyard and he’s perfect: handsome, well-hung, fabulous company. Harriet drove over and there he was, in the nude, chipped and on a pedestal, in among the lilies.)

All of Jack’s wives laboured hard to pay the rent, since he had no real profession beyond that of novelist and part-time film critic and sometime rehab counsellor, but none of his wives was a writer or even much of a reader of fiction, so every few years he wrapped up his latest big, whopping manuscript and mailed it to Harriet, into whose lap it landed like a giant overfed cat. Over the years her response time lagged farther and farther behind, until she hit upon the bright idea of responding immediately: Received your manuscript, looks good, best of luck with it. Then she buried it, unread, in the farthest corner of her study and proceeded to write about him. Calling him Harry Juniper, she included him in the story about Leah, having him say behind Leah’s back that he couldn’t stand her company, “not even for ten minutes,” before making a move to wheedle more money out of her.

Why had she written about him? Because she didn’t trust him. But in writing about him so transparently she had made herself untrustworthy. And now they were gathering like Iroquois at the gates, the people she had written about.

Inside, she hung up his winter coat while he pulled off his boots and socks, a man who always made himself at home.
He padded into the kitchen in bare feet, baggy pants, soft grey sweater, and Harriet introduced him as Leah’s stepson from Chicago.

Dinah said, “You still haven’t told me who Leah is.”

“A terror,” said Lew.

“My father’s fifth wife,” said Jack, who had never taken to Lew, a man he found irritatingly thin. For his part, Lew thought Jack a grandstander, a peacock, a self-infatuated scribbler. Say no, he told Harriet when another manuscript arrived. Send it back. But he doesn’t include postage, she cried. Do you know how much it costs to mail a parcel these days? You could buy a mink coat!

“And who’s your father?” Dinah asked him.

“Lionel Frame?” Inviting her to recognize the name. “A friend of the Hollywood Ten. Blacklisted in the fifties, so he went from successful screenwriter to unpublished alcoholic.”

Kenny, who was all ears, saw his opportunity. “So, what’s your favourite movie?” he asked.

Jack replied as swiftly, “That’s an awful question.” By now they were at the kitchen table, except for Harriet, who was leaning against the counter, and Lew, who was in his study but within earshot, going through sheaves of music. “Endless movies run through my mind.”

“All right. If so many movies are running through your mind, what are your three favourite movies?”

Head back, staring at the ceiling. “Okay. To get you off my back, I’ll answer.” And he began to list movies.

As far as Harriet could tell, Jack made no allowances for anyone. He sat in his bare feet, seemingly not feeling the cold, and rocked back on his kitchen chair – something she was always
telling Kenny not to do – and named one movie after another that curdled her blood.

“Blue Velvet,”
he said.
“Leaving Las Vegas. Apocalypse Now. The Deer Hunter. The Godfather
movies.”

“See!” Kenny swung on his mom. And to Jack: “She won’t let me watch
The Godfather!
Can you believe that? Is that fair?”

“We watched
Jaws
a few months ago,” she said, to show she wasn’t a complete stick-in-the-mud. “We held hands,” and she twirled her hand to indicate the kids and Dinah and herself.

“Now that’s a
terrific
movie,” said Jack, rocking forward in his chair and planting his elbows on the table. He said, “Allow me to be boring for a minute.”

She looked for traces of Lionel in the son – the bushy eyebrows, charcoal black; the black, flashing eyes; the charismatic smile – but saw the big, crude, dominating person she had written about – Harry Juniper – and went cold at the thought. Had Jack read her book? He had never said so, but he must have. Must have read it. Unless he was completely uninterested in her, except as a reader of his own work, which was altogether possible.

He was describing the “wipe shot” when Roy Scheider is on the beach and the crowd behind him is a blur, when his vision is blocked and so is yours, when the only way to see is to lean forward in your seat – and then Scheider sees something, and it’s the fin! which turns out to be a hoax, while the real shark is bearing down on Scheider’s son, who happens to be swimming in the safe side of the bay. Or the moment when Spielberg – “he’s a genius, there’s no way around it” – has all your attention focused on the lower left corner of the screen, and the decapitated head bobs into view in the upper screen, giving you the very shock
that Richard Dreyfuss gets. Or the parody of being macho when Dreyfuss crumples up the Styrofoam cup.

Or the one-upmanship – now Harriet had joined in – between Robert Shaw and Dreyfuss about who has more scars, which Dreyfuss wins by baring his hairy chest and saying, Here! Mary Jane what’s-her-name. She broke my heart!

“Mary Ellen Moffit,” supplied Kenny.

Jack said, “They had a lot of trouble with the shark. It actually got loose and headed out to sea. And there they were, chasing their million-dollar shark.” He gave himself up to a great, mirthful belly laugh.

Kenny, who looked as if he had found the promised land, also leaned forward with both elbows on the table, and said, “What’s
The Deer Hunter
about?”

“Blood and guts,” said his mom, rolling her eyes.

“Ten to one she hasn’t seen it,” he said, cocking an eye at Kenny.

“I don’t have to.” And Lew, listening in the next room, began to worry. He heard her say, “It’s one of those big, violent, overripe movies all about men and meaning. No jokes. Nothing simple. Just pumped-up, self-important, very expensive nonsense. And there would be scenes that I wouldn’t be able to get out of my mind – ever. Depressing.”

Kenny said, “‘Expensive and depressing. I hate those words. I like the word
peppy
. And I like the word
cheap
. Peppy and cheap.’” He was quoting from
Soapdish
, and Jack’s mouth moved in a half-smile.

Harriet said, “I’m not alone either. Pauline Kael agrees with me about
The Deer Hunter.”

“Pauline Kael.”
He swung his big head in derision. “Wretched woman.”

These were fighting words. Lew almost headed to the basement. Kenny sat in shock. Dinah said, “We’d better hold hands again.” She took Jane’s hand and Kenny’s, causing them to giggle. But Harriet wasn’t paying attention.

“What you have to appreciate about Pauline Kael,” Harriet said, “is that she knows movies from beginning to end, from the silents through the talkies, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and since. Not just Hollywood but everywhere else. She’s smart, no-nonsense, incredibly well read, with a remarkable visual memory and a great writing style. You could learn a lot from her.”

“All right.”

“She has no time for bullshit.” Harriet paused, then went for the jugular. “Especially poetic bullshit.”

“Aye-aye, captain.”

He looked amused by her, the sort of man who says, I love it when you get angry. The sort of man who begins life as the sort of brother who takes his sister below the elbow and gets her to hit herself over and over again. Why are you hitting yourself? he laughs, until tears spurt from her eyes. And then he relents.

“I haven’t read her in years. You’re probably right.”

From his study Lew heard Dinah lead the conversation into safer waters –
All About Eve
, a movie everyone could agree on-and he felt grateful. She was saying, “When Anne Baxter makes a pass at Gary Merrill? And he says, ‘Don’t worry, just write it off as an incomplete forward pass.’ What a fabulous script. And what about
Damage
by Louis Malle? That’s a movie I’ve watched four times. Tell me why.”