I don’t know what he thinks when he looks at me but I want to touch him. Touch his wrists, hold his head, smooth the lines around his eyes and mouth with my thumbs.
MARGARET removes the bedspread from the bed.
The plane is ten then thirty minutes delayed. The current between us is steady. Anything is possible but then the stewardess—out of courtesy—comes to get him and escorts him on board first. When I enter the plane I see that he is seated at the back. We never speak. When we land he is gone. I collect my luggage. I never see him again.
MARGARET throws a beautiful red fabric over the bed.
When I am at home in bed I think of the pilot. I think of his face, his shoulders, his wrists. I remember when I looked away how it felt to feel his eyes on me. I imagine not that we sit together on the plane but that somehow by some magic we are both at the taxi stand waiting silently side by side. Still without speaking we get into the same cab. He asks if I would like to go to dinner with him but I say, “I… am… so… tired.”
MARGARET sits on the side of the bed. She slides the dressing gown off her shoulders, revealing her naked back. She slides modestly between the sheets.
Then like that we are in the hotel room, naked under the sheets. I forgive myself for however it is that I came to be naked with this man with those eyes that fuel me.
MARGARET moves in the bed, curling her body.
We fold together our soft bodies radiating warmth. He takes my breasts in his hands, his lips, his breath warm on the back of my neck.
MARGARET moves her hair to expose her neck to his mouth.
I say,
“Tell me about her.”
I imagine that she died of breast cancer just when they were sure she was going to live. He describes her vitality, her dark hair and how he slept with it under his head always. Tears slide out of my eyes and down my nose.
MARGARET moves as she speaks.
I move slightly so my hand can slide between our bodies. I reach down and touch his penis, which is hard with his desire for me to be her.
MARGARET does these actions as she talks. MARGARET sits on the bed in such a way that only her back is revealed in the low light.
I turn towards him and press him onto his back. I climb onto him, my hips settling on his hips. I stay upright, adjusting the pillows at his back until he can easily take my breast into his mouth.
MARGARET offers her breasts to him, first one and then the other.
And he does, his mouth so new, the feelings so buried. I begin the story of John. I describe his way of laughing and the first time I knew that I loved him. I describe the night we woke on the same breath when, at the very moment I curled my hand around his, John’s light, John’s dark left our bed. So long, John. (meaning time)
MARGARET turns her head so that her face is briefly revealed.
So long, John. (meaning goodbye)
She turns back.
I feel the space, my body light with it.
MARGARET's hands slide down her body and she shifts her hips a little.
His hands leave my breasts and he slides them down to my hips, lifting me until we are connected and we have poetry of sex, sex of poetry until our edges and the edges of the dark sky break with brilliant orange.
MARGARET makes a deeply pure sound as the ice cracks open.
WALLACE: The river is moving
The blackbird must be flying.
stanza xiii
it was evening all afternoon
MARGARET: I hire a tradesman to bring light into my house.
And he does.
So… much… light.
I have tea ready for his breaks so that I can look at his hands cupped around the mug. He holds them out to me—turning them over and back so I can see the nicks the scars the dents of hands used to make a living.
“I am not very good with the ladies, would you like to come for a walk with me?”
We walk. He is a man who has lived his whole life pushing his body to stay upright. In the last year of his marriage he woke every morning with his arms spread eagle and numb. I tell him that it is a beautiful metaphor of a man in a loveless marriage waking each morning, his arms open to wrap around someone but empty, numb with longing.
No. I don’t say it. I write it down. Not a poem. A story that wants to be a poem.
He kisses me. He says, “That was good, woman.”
Woman.
He calls me “missus”—testing, I can see, how I take this word his father said to his mother, in the way that his foot playfully bounces newly rigged scaffolding before he gives it his full weight to bear.
MARGARET lies down fully clothed on the bed.
“I like your bosom,” he says.
Bosom.
I feel it, a small thrill of vibration around words again.
How long has it been since I felt this?
The nerve endings on the surface of every part of my body rise and ripple under his touch, my thoughts are iron filings rising too, to this magnet that cannot be resisted. I let my mind go.
We walk. We capture fireflies along the shore.
We come back to my house and open the mason jars in my bedroom. We lie on the bed watching the glimmers of light come and go.
Fireflies fly about the room, some land on the bedspread.
“We are inside a poem,” I tell him.
“I don’t know what that means,” he says.
It’s not a meaning, it is a sensation.
MARGARET gets out of the bed looking down—describes the scene so tenderly.
My mind steps out, stands away, looking down on the bed. I watch my body, how I move with him, how free my body is with his. The sounds I make as his hands, oh, move along my belly, breasts, face, hair, are joyful there is some slick-coated animal in my chest calling out. I want words. I listen but there is only the slow release of air from deep inside him.
I want words.
Then…… they… come.
Thrumming.
WORDS—they brim the world, beautiful words.
I shimmer with their sounds he does not hear.
I watch my body pull free,
MARGARET holds out her hands, taking the hands of MARGARET, pulling her free of the bed.
behind me his arms unfurl tendrils of his longing.
MARGARET leans down as though she might be pulled into the bed but she turns away. She walks to the stairs and climbs up to the desk.
WALLACE: It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
MARGARET’s pen drops to the page and the moment she begins to write she speaks.
MARGARET: in the darkness
the fireflies appear disappear
appear
the beating hearts of the words I write
made visible.
I love this moment. It is all I do love.
MARGARET writes as everything darkens, the fireflies moving about.
WALLACE stands far out on the point like a beacon. Fireflies move around him.
The theatre is awash with fireflies.
The end.
The playwright, with deep appreciation, acknowledges
The Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre Spring Festival of New Plays—director Tom Bentley-Fisher, actors Sharon Bakker and Rob Roy, dramaturges Heather Inglis and Colleen Murphy.
Tant per Tant—Elisabet Ràfols, literary director, and Tom Bentley-Fisher, artistic director.
Factory Theatre—actors Elizabeth Saunders, Rosemary Dunsmore and R.H. Thomson, dramaturge Iris Turcott and artistic director Ken Gass.
Cover artist—Karen Klee-Atlin.
Elizabeth Smart—for the title of stanza xi, which was inspired by a line in her novel The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals.
Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre—Jenny Munday.
Urban Curvz—for th
e workshop and their beautiful premiere of this script.
Playwrights Canada Press—Blake Sproule for his attention, care and good humour during our editing process.
Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal—Lois Brown, post-production dramaturge.
Tessa Mendel (always my first reader), Pamela Halstead, Margot Dionne, John Dunsworth, Mary Vingoe, Colleen Murphy, Florence Gibson MacDonald, Ruth Lawrence, Janis Spence, Marina Endicott, Philip Adams, Paris, Leah Hamilton and Claudia Mitchell.
Love to my children.
Author photo by Michelle Doucette Design and Photography
Catherine Banks lives and writes in Nova Scotia. Some of her notable plays include Bitter Rose, which aired on Bravo! Canada, and Bone Cage, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. Catherine received Nova Scotia’s Established Artist Award in 2008.
It Is Solved by Walking © Copyright 2012 by Catherine Banks
Playwrights Canada Press
The Canadian Drama Publisher
215 Spadina Ave., Suite 230, Toronto, ON, Canada M5T 2C7
phone 416.703.0013, fax 416.408.3402
[email protected] • www.playwrightscanada.com
No part of this book, covered by the copyright herein, may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from:
Access Copyright
1 Yonge St., Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5
phone 416.868.1620
For professional or amateur production rights, please contact:
Catherine Knights at Catalyst TCM
100 Broadview #310, Toronto, ON M4M 3H3
416-645-0935
Cover art, Red-Wing Blackbird by Karen Klee-Atlin
Cover design by Blake Sproule
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Banks, Catherine, 1957-
It is solved by walking [electronic resource] / Catherine Banks.
A play.
Electronic monographs issued in PDF and EPUB format.
Also issued in print format.
ISBN 978-1-77091-046-1
I. Title.
PS8553.A5635I8 2012 C812'.54 C2011-908746-4
Playwrights Canada Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the Province of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Media Development Corporation for our publishing activities.
It Is Solved By Walking Page 5
