Garbo Laughs (9 page)

Now Jack gave her his fall, smart, easygoing attention. “That last scene,” he said, “with her photograph covering the wall?” Dinah nodded, remembering Jeremy Irons in dusty exile with Juliette Binoche’s face projected on his wall. “Every so often you meet someone like that,” he said. “Something happens to
them
and they can’t swallow it.” He put his hand around his throat. “They veer away, they go along the side of their lives from then on.”

“Yes.” Dinah nodded again, taken by his point, and wondering if he was thinking about his father.

Harriet saw the two of them share a look and a smile, and the very real pleasure of agreeing about a movie. But she couldn’t even remember the last scene. “You’re such romantics,” she said with genuine surprise.

“And you’re not?” laughed Dinah.

“Well, I don’t take movies
literally.”
And she actually thought this was true. She had the knack, she thought, for floating between the two worlds of real life and movie life without losing her perfect grip on sanity.

But Dinah gaped. “That,” she said, “is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.” And she chose that moment to tell Jack that Harriet would be teaching a course about comic writing, and he said, “Are you? Then I’ll take it.”

“Don’t. I’m just filling in for a few weeks.”

“I’ll learn something.”

“Have a shortbread,” she said.

“I don’t eat butter,” said Jack.

“Since when?” She was outraged at having her baking turned down. “Let me guess. Since you watched
Last Tango in Paris.”

“Now that’s a powerful film,” Jack said. “Brando was extraordinary.”

“You like Marlon Brando?” asked Kenny, as keenly interested as anyone who feels himself to be at a turning point.

“Not as a human being, but onscreen. Onscreen there’s nobody better.”

“And nobody handsomer when he was young,” said Dinah.

“He had a fat bottom,” said Harriet. “I know someone who met him when he was young, at a party for Harry Belafonte, and he had a fat bottom even then. This woman, the mother of a friend of mine, decided that the real Brando was her husband. Her husband was actually better-looking.”

“He didn’t have a fat bottom,” said Dinah.

“That’s right, he didn’t have a fat bottom.”

“Wives,” said Dinah with amusement, “they’ve got the best imaginations in the world.”

In the summer, after so many things were no longer the same, Harriet would write,
Dear Pauline, How do you know whether you’ve misjudged someone? Misjudged how far someone will go? There’s the never-ending doubt when you aren’t sure. When you won’t allow yourself to dislike someone and have done with it
.

What we persuade ourselves of: That a book is better than it is. That someone attracts us, who didn’t attract us at all. That e-mail isn’t so bad after all. That the death of letters doesn’t break one’s heart
.

But now, for some reason unknown to herself, after Dinah had gone home to nurse her cold, and Lew had taken the kids to their piano lessons, she went to the trouble of showing Jack
Frame the Cuban fern. “Ah,” he said, “a cryptogam. Do you know what that means?” His soft eyes held hers. “Hidden marriage,” he said.

He turned the fern over and pointed with his thick finger. “It was a big mystery for a long time, the sexual lives of ferns. They don’t have flowers, they don’t have seeds, so how do they reproduce? Spores. They reproduce by means of these beautiful spores.” He held it up to the window and the fine herringbone pattern was backlit by late-November light.

She asked him then how long he was staying and he told her a few months. The National Library had Lionel’s papers, he would be there much of the time, and then when Leah came in January they would pool their information and memories about Lionel. The book would be part biography, part family memoir.

“You’re really going to write the book with her?” Harriet couldn’t picture it.

“She’s doing the chapters about their life together, and I’ll handle the early life and the politics.”

“But I thought you couldn’t stand Leah.”

“She’s paying me,” he said.

And this time it was Jack and Harriet who shared a smile. “There’s another movie I like,” he added. “An old one with Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio de Sica. Directed by Max Ophuls.”

“The Earrings of Madame de
…,” exclaimed Harriet, and she gave him a long, startled look. “It’s one of my favourite movies.”

“I thought it might be.”

“It’s the most romantic movie I’ve ever seen. And the saddest. Men are so different from women.” She ran her hands through
her hair and shook her head. “Why did he reject her at the end? Did you understand it? She lied about the earrings, but so what?”

“Honour,” said Jack. “Pride. She made him look foolish.”

“That’s what I mean. A woman would never let pride or honour get in the way of love.”

Late in the afternoon, back from his piano lesson, Kenny said to his mom, “I like Jack Frame, don’t you?”

“Sure.” But in a tone so tentative that he stopped and stared at her.

“You don’t like him?”

She looked at his face – young, eager, quick, intent on not being fooled, but foolhardy. What a boy he was for sentimental attachments. “I like him,” she said, and his face relaxed. “I like him. But not as much as you and Dinah do.”

And Kenny was satisfied.

At dinner Lew resurfaced from the basement, where he’d been for the past hour working on his design for an office down there that would include his drafting table, desk, radio, bookshelves, armchair. He asked Harriet where Jack was staying, and she told him in an apartment on First Avenue, an exchange with somebody who was using his place in Chicago.

“And you survived the visit?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said.

This he would never get used to, the breeziness that followed hard on the heels of her panic.

Harriet took off her glasses and laid them on the table. “He’s entertaining,” she said, rubbing her eyes and drawn
onto the rocks of being fair. “I always forget that. I don’t know why.”

Then having dispensed with one worry, she had room for another. She put on her glasses and turned to look at Lew. “My mother saw your ghost,” she said.

S
he noticed herself looking for him. A sort of quickening when she entered stores, or passed restaurants or barbershops, or when she went for a walk. Down every aisle. In every window. From behind every tree. She expected to see his big, bushy head pop into view.

Even as she reached for a grocery cart, she turned to survey the mounds of fruit and vegetables, expecting to see bent over bananas, sorting through persimmons, bagging potatoes, that big figure in the soft grey sweater.

On a walk through the Arboretum she not only looked for him, she listened for his voice.

“Brook!” she heard.

“Brooklyn!”

“Camille!
Camille!”

“Wayne!”

Having reached the topmost level of parkland, she had an unbroken view of dogs and dog owners on the treed and snowy slopes. From here Ottawa rose up on the opposite side of the canal like a small city on the far side of a plain to which the traveller is destined to go. She liked, at night especially, to stand in her boots, or on her skis, and stare across at the ribbon of city lights, the visible rooftops, the lighter evening sky beneath the darker night sky. It was lovely. “Except for Bronson Avenue,” she told Jack in her head, detecting its roar in the distance. “One of these nights, under cover of darkness, I’m going to hijack one of those contraptions – what are they called, those bulldozers? Six lanes!
Six
. I’m going to plough a trench from Dow’s Lake to Fulton Avenue. I’m going to flood that sucker.”

“Flood what?” Horrible Ray was at her side. She had been talking out loud.

She gave him a furious look. “Bronson Avenue.” She waved her hand in that direction. “It’s time to reclaim the landscape. Your dog.” She jerked her head towards the little white dog barking incessantly at a German Shepherd. “German Shepherds don’t like little dogs.”

Ray went to the rescue of defiant Fluffy and Harriet made her escape, striding across the top of the steep sliding hill that children hurtled down all winter long, courting concussion and death. A big black poodle crossed her path. The poodle’s owner looked to be retired, a gent in a tweed cap and velvety brown corduroy pants.

“Felicity,” he called anxiously.

“Felicity?”
he implored.

It happened when she was thinking about something else. She had gone to the post office on Fourth Avenue and proceeded to the supermarket on Bank Street. It was the last Friday in November, and she was thinking about
Ninotchka
, the movie they were going to watch that night. She came down the potato chip aisle, her eyes fixed on the rows of chips, only dimly aware of a large man staring intently at the shelves of canned tomatoes and beans. She looked around his dark-green back at the various brands, and beyond, hoping something better lay ahead, but it didn’t. She glanced back up the row of chips then down the row again, and recognized the man in the dark-green jacket.

“Jack,” she said.

Then he looked at her. He said her name without surprise. She guessed he had seen her from the first. He said her name in full.
Harriet Browning
.

How can someone disquieting, who looks unprepossessing, who openly farts, become attractive to you? Time. Repeated viewing. Familiarity, but at a distance. And something more. You push against him and he doesn’t give. That’s what she liked. His massiveness was the massiveness of a solid steamed pudding: the very thing for winter.

She told him what she was looking for, and he replied that a certain brand was unquestionably the best. She chose the biggest bag of that brand, even though she didn’t trust its bright garish looks. Then he leaned over and brushed something off her face, just near her left eye.

“What have I got on me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But you look ridiculous,” he said, making her laugh. His tone was neither caressing nor rough, but somewhere
in between. In between familiar and intimate. In that place where things can go one way, or another.

Harriet looked up from Pauline Kael. “Have you seen
Rio Grande?”
she asked Dinah, who was stirring honey into her tea. It was almost four o’clock on the same afternoon. In a few minutes the hour would strike on Parliament Hill, much too far away from this part of old Ottawa South to be heard. It was the time of day when tones of red emerge from the dead flowers and wet grasses.

“John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara? They’re separated, but still in love. There’s a son who brings them back together.”

“Pauline says they’re very effective together,” said Harriet, “‘so that the viewer deeply wants the final reconciliation.’”

“I was at the
Winnipeg Tribune
when he died. They splashed it all over the front page. That never would have happened if women had been running the paper.”

“That’s a good storyline. ‘So effective together that the viewer deeply wants the final reconciliation.’ What are we going to do about your cough? You sound like a swamp.”

“Nothing
. I have this every winter.”

Harriet looked at her with concern, but thought better of making some remark about her smoking. She said, “I keep wondering if Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson are happy together.”

“No.” Dinah was very firm. “If he reforms enough to satisfy her, he won’t be happy, and if she corrupts herself enough to satisfy him,
she
won’t be happy.”

“No miracles,” Harriet said sadly.

But she was romantic and given to fond hopes. She continued to believe that Sky and Sarah were making each other deliriously happy in some fashion. In some fashion? In bed. She pictured them running a Salvation Army Thrift Store on the main street of a small town, and, above the store, a poolroom: corruption and goodness coexisting like a two-layer cake. She thought about
A Streetcar Named Desire
too, especially when she heard the song detective calling into the night, “Stella! Stell-aaaa.”

Stella was his five-year-old malamute.

About a year ago she had watched
Streetcar
with Lew (for once they watched a movie together), then afterwards she reread Pauline’s review in which she called Stanley part infant, part brute – a man without compassion. And surely this was true. But the image of Brando crying and on his knees, while Stella came down the stairs, drawn to him, drew her too. And against reason, she hoped for a happy ending. “Do you think she’ll go back to him?” she had asked Lew.

“Why do you care?” he had wanted to know.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day. Don’t you wonder what happens to people after the movie ends?”

“No.”

“I want them to be happy.” She had been wanting it all day.

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. No agenda. I just wish they could be happy.”

But she knew he didn’t quite believe her. She thought he must wonder, as she wondered herself, if a woman who was really happy with him would be so addicted to romantic movies. Perhaps he thought it was a phase she would get over. And it might be.
I go at movies the way I go at food. Only Cary Grant interests me, then only
Gene Kelly. The same thing over and over again until I’m sick of it. A serial enthusiast
.

“I’m funnier with you than I am with Lew,” she said to Dinah. “Why do you suppose that is?” She looked moodily out of the window. “I know why it is.”

They were talking about her comedy class now.

“I’m sad because he’s cheerful. If he weren’t so
sprightly
I’d have to lighten up.”

They can’t help it, thought Dinah, these married couples. But it broke her heart to see Harriet wasting Lew’s capacity for tenderness.

“Have you ever asked him what’s going through his mind? When he seems cheerful, have you asked him if he really is?”

Harriet felt suddenly foolish. But she defended herself. “When I do he’s evasive. That’s what gets me. He doesn’t
react
. Now Pauline Kael, there’s someone who’s not afraid of her own reactions. I can’t imagine her not knowing what she wants to eat for dinner.”