Hunger's Brides (49 page)

A night of masquerade. By now I was the practised one, the initiate of masques. And in our disguises Carlos and I stopping at every
pulquería
in the city. The harlots, the humble broken faces crudely painted … Watching the dawn together from a rooftop after a night of gazing for the first time through a fine telescope Carlos had built himself. Hearing his vow of undying friendship when I so needed a friend; the unspoken offer of much more, when I had hurt everyone I had ever loved. It was a night that changed his life far more than mine. His whole existence had been in the city, mine in the country, and now he wanted to know everything about that countryside—because of
me, for
me. But this was precisely what I had left so completely behind. Figures not so easily painted on glass.

These past years I have fancied that my ideas about the changeability of life were progressing—for of course metaphors for poets are very fine. From broken threads to broken books, from everlasting fire to an
hojarasca
, a scattering of leaves. From panes of crudely painted glass to the projections of a camera obscura as detailed and complete as anything a mirror receives. But I have had occasion to wonder if this is really the way to part the veil over one's destiny—to cut the threads of the past only to become tangled up in them, and perhaps stumble on someone else's path.

S
EA
C
OW

I
F
B
EULAH AT DINNER
, over our Chateaubriand, had just expressed a few of the things she was to write in her journal afterwards, maybe matters could have taken a different turn. On that night and others. I do remember her saying something she has omitted from her account. Something she said at the car, on our way to the motel.

It was a clear winter evening, the sky heavy with stars. I had never seen her before in a dress. Over it she was wearing just a light coat, and shivered slightly as she spoke. “I bet people like you …”

“People like me,” I said, agreeably, as I bent to unlock her door.

“… see all that dark,” her voice came softly now with her head craned back, “see all that
night
as just absence of light.”

Here at least was a topic more congenial to the occasion of Valentine's. Yet I found I had no answer.

She had, I'll admit, a sharp eye for the conflicts and contradictions my accidental career had led me into. Early success took me in directions I couldn't have expected, wouldn't have chosen or wanted. Mark Twain had been one of my best sources for a wry look at James Fenimore Cooper. But though on Cooper's failings as a writer Twain was devastating, his critique of Cooper as historian ultimately revealed more of Twain's biases than Cooper's. So I found myself quickly backing away from that aspect of my study about which I'd been in earnest—Cooper as liar—and while opportunity still knocked got serious instead about what had been pure knavery on my part: literature as negative way to truth. I had Mark Twain to thank for what came next.

People in distressing numbers assumed that I valued and even enjoyed the good yarn, the tall tale, the whopper. I can't begin to count the number of keynote addresses I firmly declined to give at conventions of oral historians and storytellers. A personal low point was my invitation to be a race marshal at the Calaveras County Fair. At first I felt affronted, then simply annoyed—no doubt these people imagine the forensic psychiatrist chooses his field out of affection for homicidal mania. Or the virologist because he likes a good, brisk pandemic.

Over the years such
ressentiments
passed.

And she was perceptive about my special dislike of a certain brand of fiction. Eliot was quite right that Joyce had spoiled poetry for ladies. If only he had done half so much for fiction's kitsches of the past. The stagy accents, the ‘lexical curiositie shoppes'—though I don't recall putting it quite so colourfully—and more distasteful still, all the nodding and winking and the chest-thumping pieties over lying with one's facts straight. Her citing Shakespeare as a practitioner of historical fiction, or as an argument for truth in anachronism, changes nothing. The gentle folk who really cannot wait for the mini-series will still insist on taking such fictions as History lite.

All this pales, however, beside my horror of magical realism. The whimsies of Imagination's triumph over rolled steel, all the fabulist tigers in the pantry, the retreat into private worlds—Truth slowly reduced to rose-garden psychosis. Even the colossal fabulations of a Melville at least are a massed force in the field, whereas, yes, rooting out the lie in Latin America means bringing the battle house to house. That much she recorded accurately.

All of the foregoing to say that I am a scholar, or was. So, where possible, I prefer to approach certain aspects of Beulah's story as one would an accident reconstruction. Scientifically, methodically. Tarmac conditions and weather bulletins, witness statements and pathology reports, flight plans and scatter grids—these are my materials—her journals, the fragments. I can only assemble them for you, put them in some order. Somewhere in the wreckage lies a black box….

Mirrors do not always conceal the horror beneath.
²²

19 Mar 93 [Calgary]

SeaCow rises through thermoclines of hot and cold. Sails steams drifts, a continent through dark waters. A vast, blubbery seaslug sub—Leviathan—flabbiest float in the mayday mayday parade, the manatee idylls in the shallows, oil-slick eddy coiling in her wake…
.

Wake slow from dream, reluctant, nauseated, nauseous—light filters weak, thin, through green polyshades drawn tight against sun. Glance down over bulbous form swelling in-gloom, roll out, rolypoly igloo. Press dimply knees for purchase, push to stand. Pull nightie down, waddle to bathroom. How soaringmorningglorious it would be to soak it off in a vast scalding bath. Look with disgust at the tiny tub. But how graceful we seem in a tank, how frolicsome there the dugong/sport.

And on waterbeds.

Run the shower, cold, colder—feel the invigorating shock—
colder
.

Lufa sere and stern behind broad neck, under meaty arms, across pendulous breasts, abrading tips. Do not flinch. Single out navel and soft netherfolds of interthigh for special care. Tender hinterland. Scour for clues and errors. Under the cold flood everything burns. Rub softened scabs off fingers, study all pink wounds for signs of life. What's happened to your hands? he asked, refilling a goblet.

Turn off shower, step out. Feel queasy belch escape lips, watch darksome blur slouch across the glass. Through a swipe across the misted surface stares back his eentsy
debauchée
—
su libertina bailarina
—bloodshot eyes, pigpink cuts. See the blotchy body scrubbed a mottled pink in broadclawd strokes—cruel Miss Strawberry in the kindergarten play. Pinchpinchpinch—
there
and
there
—a pound there, another here.

From the bedroom's half-dark a counter digital owlblinks baleful orange. Hit playback, start to strip the wine-stained sheets.

Hello? Beulah? Honey, it's me. I promised not to call so much, I know. I've been good, haven't I? It's just—I want to take you out for lunch. Something simple. Jonas is out of town, I feel like a little company.
Say it Grace—you can't bear to be alone
. Just a simple meal. I promise. Call me back if you'd like to come. I'll just let you call
me
, this time. Please call….

Such a feast we shall lay you, your Royal Thymus—sweetbreads of hearts and spleen, our gall's ripest harvest … spiced with humorous asides phlegmatic nods enchanting philtres to decant our bile. Rotted pots of ripened flesh laid bare / fresh-gummed parsley for our halitosis / flowers for our hair. And so we'll sit and sit—blades whetted, blood-wed to bone-handles daintily clutched, flint hearts on plates / a waxen sheen on each sallow face. My sapper's dissent just one wafer-thin membrane from blowing full migraine—a radioactive bloodspot in the yoke of your sunny subjugation.

God bless the family meal—blud-simple gut-thick. Gutappetit mine heirs! Grand unifying theory of the nuclear family / blood thicker than deuterium. Gut-blocked plague vector that is this family flea circus.

Say grace—give thanks for your surfeit and my lack. Let's raise a toast—goblets clenched by knucklebone stems—hoistem high! two high hearts furiously beating. Callow the youth, craven the elder—resonant glugs from copious cups of resin and mead. God bless this meal—the tithes that bind the lies that blind. Thanksgiving for our harvest.
God bless this meal that gobbles us, his daily bread—gullet-stuffing delectable well-fed. Gobbets we—all abob in his giant crop. Lord lord it over us with a riding crop.

Art thou meekly meetly swallowing whole?

God blast this meal.

M
UMMY

21 Mar [1993 Calgary]

B
EULAH, HONEY, IT'S YOUR MOTHER
. Insistent visitant mother of all migraines pounding pouting at the door. Beulah? Beulah please. A little louder why not so everyone can hear. The trouble with letting mummies in is you never know who you're opening up to—mummy
capaz
or mummy
capo
. Can't know till she comes unravelled.

Beulah I know you're in there—please don't make me stand out here disturbing the neighbours.