The Heart Begins Here

by Jacqueline Dumas

  THE HEART BEGINS HERE

  Copyright © 2018 Jacqueline Dumas

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  The Heart Begins Here is a work of fiction. All the characters, situations, and locations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or actual locations, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dumas, Jacqueline, author

  The heart begins here / Jacqueline Dumas.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-541-6 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-542-3 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-77133-543-0 (Kindle).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-544-7 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8557.U3954H43 2018 C813’.54 C2018-904351-2

  C2018-904352-0

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca

  THE HEART BEGINS HERE

  a novel

  JACQUELINE DUMAS

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  ALSO BY JACQUELINE DUMAS

  The Last Sigh

  Madeleine & the Angel

  This book is dedicated to Martha Gould

  and is written out of love for Mary Johannah

  The sun sets in a cloud

  And is not seen.

  Beauty, that spoke aloud,

  Addresses only the remembering ear.

  The heart begins here

  To feed on what has been.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  1.

  I AWOKE EARLY THIS MORNING—November 11, Remembrance Day. The date is appropriate, because I’ve been doing a lot of remembering. So much has happened this past while. It’s been two months since the shocking attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. And in my private life, Wanda finally fessed up to her affair with the much younger Cindy, which turned out to be more than an affair. Then, Cindy was killed and her partner Freddie beaten to an inch of her life, this before Wanda and Cindy could carry out their plan to move in together.

  They say tragedies come in threes, but through all the smoke and dust, I was forced to acknowledge a fourth: the final gasps of my slowly dying bookstore.

  WANDA AND I MET one bright spring afternoon seven years ago. The air that day was fresh and nippy, the snow half melted under a Norman Yates sky—the kind of prairie day that reminds me why we put up with our unrelenting winters.

  I was at my favourite table, sipping a latte as I tried to figure out why my outwardly perfect life wasn’t working. I had been married fifteen years to a supportive husband who still wanted to please me. I had entire weeks to do whatever I wanted, but filled them with nothing.

  Melancholy mingled with an indefinable yearning in the depths of my soul.

  The previous year, my husband Dan had talked me into quitting my teaching job in hopes that it would cheer me up.

  “No wonder you’re miserable,” he said. “Every morning for more than twenty years, you’ve been dragging yourself out of bed for a bunch of brats who don’t give a shit. Quit, why don’t you. It’s not like we need the money.”

  I read a lot, as I always had. I tried pottery, a yoga class. I even registered in a couple of university classes before realizing that the idea of studying and writing papers again only deepened my depression.

  Then one summer’s day, a couple of women moved into the rental house next door. They kept to themselves and were long gone by the end of fall, but not before I had developed a confusing attraction to one of them. I spent long hours pulling weeds in the vegetable garden, but there were not enough weeds to keep me from longing for the dark muscular woman who sunned herself every afternoon on the other side of the raspberry bushes. The more weeds I pulled, the healthier the carrots and peas, but the more I withered inside.

  I’ve never mentioned the next-door neighbour to Wanda. I never wanted her to know how needy I was when we met.

  “SO, WHERE DO ALL the other gay people hang out?”

  The voice had come from the next table. Was it addressing me? I turned to look. A woman gazed back at me with deep brown eyes. She had a small stack of books in front of her.

  “Supposedly, gay people are everywhere. So where are they? Where are the others?”

  I was about to apologetically point out that “Sorry, no offence, but you’re mistaken about me,” except that my insides were flipping right up into my throat. I was caught completely off guard. Like my former neighbour, this woman had long legs, a tanned complexion, and dark, short-cropped hair. My suppressed longings burbled to the surface. This woman seemed so self-assured, so within herself.

  I managed to find my voice. “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know.” I pointed to the stack of books. “What are you reading?”

  “I’ve decided to revisit some of my favourites,” she said. “Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Stephen Spender…. Here, have a look.” She handed me a hard-cover copy of The Common Reader. Mind if I join you?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, and as I thumbed through the book, she moved to sit beside me at my table.

  She introduced herself as Wanda from Winnipeg, a social worker who had come to Edmonton to work in the inner city. She had driven in just the week before and rented an apartment a few blocks from the café. The moving van was due to arrive the next day. Till then, she was sleeping on the floor.

  It was all I could do not to invite her home for the night. Dan would’ve been pleased enough. He was always encouraging me to make new friends. And he worked for a multinational corporation where he was known for rescuing strays, especially at Christmas and other holidays. We often put up house-hunting transfers from out-of-town and had spent many a weekend driving guests out for the obligatory tour of the mountains.

  But already in these few moments something inside me had shifted, and even the idea of inviting Wanda to spend the night in my conjugal home felt like a betrayal of my wedding vows.

  Wanda’s parting touch, a lingered squeeze of the shoulder, sent daggers of desire to the core of my being.

  That night I tossed and turned, for once not out of anxiety, but desire. In the morning, while Dan showered and got ready for work, I lay in bed pretending to be asleep, hotly reliving that single unnerving feel of Wanda’s fingers.

  The next day, she was at the same café at the same table. “I knew you’d be back,” she said.

  From there, things moved swiftly. A mere fifteen days after that first encounter, Dan went out-of-town and I spent an entire blissful weekend in Wanda’s apartment, one of those weekends in which night
extends into morning into afternoon into evening into night and into morning again.

  What a middle-aged innocent I’d been. I went to Wanda’s in hot but apprehensive anticipation, yet everything came so naturally that I marvelled at having drifted so long in such ignorance. Until then, I had never had an orgasm that wasn’t self-administered—something else I’ve never admitted to Wanda—but that weekend, I gushed like a pressurized fire hydrant, soaking Wanda’s fist and arm and half the bed.

  “I tried calling you all weekend,” said Dan on his return. “Where were you?”

  I started in with my rehearsed excuse that I had gone to visit my mother in the country, that my mother’s phone was out of order…. But my new-found bliss gave me courage, and I interrupted my own lie midstream and confessed. I braced for his admonitions.

  His reaction was unexpected.

  “You mean you’ve been getting it on with another woman? Wow, I didn’t think you had it in you.” He drew me close, poking his tongue in my ear. “Our sex life could use some spicing up. This may be just what the doctor ordered.”

  I pulled away from his all-too-familiar touch and wiped my soggy ear. I ran to the phone, imagining a Wanda eager to rush in and rescue me.

  No answer.

  Who was I kidding anyway? There had been no promises, no words of love. Just straightforward, pure lust. Nevertheless, I persisted, dialling and redialling until finally reaching her later that night.

  Was there a note of hesitation in her invitation to stay? Perhaps the seeds of our unravelling were present in that moment.

  The following few months are a muddled blur of insecurity, of self-loathing, of slamming of doors, of crying on my old friend Trish’s shoulder, mixed with almost unbearable desire for Wanda whenever we were apart for more than a day. When I finally told Dan that I was leaving, I tried to reassure him that it had nothing to do with him.

  “Don’t be insulting,” he said. “It’s bad enough that you’re leaving me for a woman, and not just a woman, but some bull-dyke who picked you up in a yuppie coffee shop of all places.”

  I explained that regardless of Wanda, I had to leave. I now knew the source of my malaise, and there was no going back.

  “So that’s it? You’re ending our marriage, just like that?”

  I burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Dan. I’m so sorry.”

  “Spare me the melodrama,” he said. “Just go. Get the hell out.”

  And so, as it so often goes, my betrayal of Dan has been repaid by Wanda’s betrayal of me. Justice has been served.

  2.

  THE BOOKSTORE WAS WANDA’S IDEA. She even chose the name: Common Reader Books, which recalled both her love of Virginia Woolf and our first meeting. For years, she had dreamed of a lesbian hangout that was not in some dingy basement off some seedy back alley. And it made sense to me. I needed something to do and going back into the classroom was out of the question. And despite the fact I lacked business experience, my divorce settlement had provided sufficient seed money.

  “You’ll see. Your love of books will take care of the rest,” said Wanda. “And just think. Yours will be the city’s first feminist bookstore.”

  “Brilliant,” gushed Trish. “You’ll get to have author readings and everything.”

  “Right,” I said. “Readings are an obvious way to attract customers.”

  “Yes, you’ll be able to expose people to books they’re not used to seeing. You should start out with a bang. Put on an event that attracts all kinds of people. Just don’t be close-minded about which writers you invite.”

  Wanda scoffed at the idea. “I thought Common Reader was going to be a women’s bookstore,” she said. “A safe space for lesbians, to be specific.”

  “It will be that kind of space,” I said, and then echoed Trish’s arguments. “But it can also be a space for any open-minded people. What’s the point of preaching to the converted?”

  It was our first fight.

  Now I think of it, I don’t remember Trish ever attending one of these vision-expanding events, although in the early days, still blinded by new love, I suppose, Wanda did attend—and diligently, at that.

  COMMON READER BOOKS OPENED to little fanfare, and I set about looking for ways to attract customers. The first event fell in my lap, which in itself should have been enough to arouse suspicion. A poet named Peach approached me with a proposition: If Common Reader would provide the space, he and his group of Kamikaze Rhymesters would take care of the organization, the promotion, and even the refreshments. In other words, the event would cost me nothing in time or money. Given that I myself had no experience to draw on, I could barely believe my luck.

  Wanda, to her credit, foresaw disaster from the beginning.

  “Kamikaze Rhymesters? Sounds like a bunch of sexist yoyos to me.”

  “Some of the poets are women,” I answered defensively. “And they’re young.”

  These young women would surely benefit from exposure to the books I was selling. Anyway, wasn’t feminism about inclusiveness? Was not its goal to encompass all of humanity?

  “Are you nuts?” said Wanda. “Feminism encompasses Anita Bryant? The Ku Klux Klan? The Pope?”

  But as I had not yet hired anyone and was still on my own in the store, she offered to help out.

  Wanda’s pessimism did little to dampen my enthusiasm for my first ever literary event. I splurged on eight folding chairs so that some in the anticipated crowd would be able to sit, and I brought in a collapsible card table and tablecloth from home for snacks and refreshments. Between serving the few odd customers during the day, I tidied and vacuumed, and by late afternoon, had rearranged the space in anticipation of my initiation as literary impresario.

  And come they did.

  Wanda arrived just as the first poet showed up with a box of cherry jambusters, which he nonchalantly placed on a hardcover copy of Georgia O’Keefe. He was followed in by a young woman who plopped a plastic tray of Ritz crackers and processed cheese cubes on top of the Cultural Studies display, which was made up of expensive trade titles from university presses. The two poets embraced, oblivious as Wanda pointedly relocated the sticky jambusters and oily cheese tray to the card table.

  Next through the door came an older male with a shaved head and his female entourage, followed by another young male who produced two boxes of wine—the kind in cardboard containers with plastic spigots—from under his oversized coat. Then a rush of people arrived at once. Wanda and I frantically moved stock from the tops of the middle bookcases to accommodate the foodstuff, but there really wasn’t room in my small store for the sum of poets and their messy assortment of snacks. Before long, the bookshelves were littered with bags and trays of doughnuts and other gluey desserts, reeking barbecue chips, and assorted edible petroleum by-products.

  Peach was last to arrive, accompanied by an older woman carrying a blue Rubbermaid container. “I’m Peach, and this is my mother,” he said. He handed Wanda a bag of Timbits.

  “Look,” she said. “This is a bookstore, not some cheap doughnut joint.”

  To my relief, Peach appeared not to hear. “Thank you,” he replied as he looked around to check out the assemblage.”

  His mother took an embroidered tablecloth from the container and snapped it open. “This should brighten up the place,” she said.

  “What? The store’s full of books with bright covers,” said Wanda.

  But Peach’s mother tossed the tablecloth over the faced-out books in New Fiction, which had the effect of shrouding the store’s bestselling titles. And in the time it took me to scrape a crushed jambuster from the carpet and for Wanda to soak up a wine spill, Mrs. Peach had managed to blanket over the few book fixtures that had been left without food trays. I trailed along behind, unveiling books as I went along.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” said Wanda. “This bunch isn’t the least b
it interested in your books. And at least the tablecloths will help protect them from all the sticky fingers.”

  It seemed the crowd would be content to guzzle cheap wine together all night, so I asked Peach to get things moving. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a long shriek that would’ve had Wanda’s cat Snuffles with his claws out, but everyone did quiet down.

  While Peach was introducing Fang, the first poet of the evening, a young woman plunked down on the floor in front of Health, flopping back as if the fixture were a giant cushion and not a bookcase filled with valuable books. Others followed suit, and when I whispered to those closest to me to please be careful, they did wriggle forward, only to be pressed back into the books a few minutes later.

  Fang proudly announced that he had read nothing but his own work for the two preceding years. “I want to avoid any outside influences,” he said.

  He then recited a series of what to me were incomprehensible poems, copies of which he offered to sign and distribute for free at the end of the readings.

  Fang was followed by a poet infatuated with superheroes, who was followed by one Birch Bark, who claimed to have discovered his true native name after eating mushrooms in a cow field in Mexico. Of the two women, one read a sad poem about an old dog, and the other, as far as I could make out, finished with a simulated orgasm.

  “You should dispatch the lot of them to the men’s washroom at the Greyhound bus depot,” muttered Wanda as she refilled her paper cup with some of the boxed white wine.

  By this time, I no longer cared who heard what Wanda said.

  At last, Peach rose from one of the stools to close out the evening. His first poem was a long, sentimental rebuke to his departed father (unclear if he had died or skipped town), and the second a short description of a lonely woman who spent her days embroidering tablecloths and her evenings in the bingo hall. The last line, which judging by his delivery was meant to be funny, portrayed the lonely woman crookedly applying lipstick to her sad, thinning lips.