by Gail Bowen
I started to say something, but at that moment, two women began to sing a cappella and the casket was brought in. It was covered in a quilt with a clitoral pattern, peach and ivory. All the pallbearers were women, and it stirred something in me to see them, strong and handsome, carrying a sister. When the singing ended, there was silence, then a thin woman in designer blue jeans and a white silk blouse came out of the front row, laid a hand on the casket and began to speak.
The thing you noticed first about Vivian Ludlow was her hair. She was younger than me, perhaps forty, but her hair was white, and she wore it shoulder length and extravagantly curled. It was very attractive. She was very attractive: good skin, no makeup, a full-lipped, sensitive mouth. She made no effort to raise her voice, yet she commanded that room.
“Like all of you here today, Clea Poole lived a life of risk and confrontation and inherent subversiveness,” she began. “To be a woman is to live every day with the knowledge that the personal is political. It is to risk everything and to gain everything. It is to know the radically transgressive power of gender, but it is also to experience the moment of incarnation as self becomes flesh.”
Beside me, Sally’s voice was low with disgust. “They think they invented it, you know. Clea made me go to a meeting once, and at the end the speaker jumped on the table and invited us all to have a peek at her uterus.”
In spite of everything, I started to laugh. No one else was laughing. At the front, Vivian Ludlow was asking Clea’s friends not to turn their eyes from the broken woman she was at the last because to do that was to devalue the purpose of Clea’s life. Every eye in the place was on us now, and Sally was gazing back defiantly. Around us little brush fires of hostility were breaking out. At the front, Vivian Ludlow had moved to a safer topic, Clea’s delight in Christmas, and I felt myself relax.
“Remember,” Vivian Ludlow said softly, “how every year as the holidays began, Clea would make each of her friends a gingerbread house, small, perfectly crafted with love, an exquisite work by woman for woman, a reminder throughout that family time that we are family, too.”
There was sobbing in the room. Beside me, Sally said in disgust, “And all she ever asked in return was that you crawl into the little gingerbread house with her and live happily ever after.”
“Sal, for God’s sake, shut up,” I whispered. “You’re going to get us lynched.”
She glared at me, but she lapsed into silence until the pallbearers brought the casket down the aisle. On the way out, the other mourners gave us a wide berth, and as we left the women’s centre and stepped into the brilliant January sunshine, I thought we were home free.
I was wrong. There was an old bus parked across the street from the centre, and as Sally and I stood on the steps, people began pouring out of it. They knew what they were doing. As they hit the street, a woman gave each of them a sign, and they crossed toward us. The messages on the signs were Biblical, but the selections showed a distinct bias toward Old Testament retribution; verses about sin and punishment and death seemed to be the favourites.
“The revenge of the Righteous Protester,” Sally said mildly, and she waved to them. They didn’t wave back. Councillor Hank Mewhort was leading them. He was still wearing his “Silver Broom: Saskatoon ’90” ski jacket, but the old green Hilltops tuque had been replaced by a tweed cap with ear flaps. The hat was an improvement, but the face under it was still smug and mean. He started to say something to Sally, but suddenly his jaw dropped and he fell silent. I turned to see what had stopped him.
Behind us, the doors of the women’s centre had opened and the pallbearers were bringing out the casket. When I saw them, I knew why Hank Mewhort had frozen in his tracks. The pallbearers had changed their clothing. During the service, they had been wearing street clothes; now they were all in black – combat boots, skintight pants, leather jackets – and they were wearing gorilla masks, big toothy ones, the kind you pull right over your head.
Beside me, Sally snorted. “Just what this party needed, the Guerrilla Girls.”
“What?” I said. The world was getting too complex for me.
“It’s a political thing some women who make art in New York started. I guess these dopey souls think they’re the road company. It’s supposed to be a protest against tokenism and chauvinism and sexism and paternalism – all the isms. It’s ridiculous, but of course Clea thought it was swell.”
As the Guerrilla Girls loaded the casket into the hearse, Councillor Mewhort’s friends stood dumbstruck. They looked as if they had seen the beast with seven horns and ten heads from Revelation. When the hearse pulled away, the Guerrilla Girls raised their leather-jacketed arms in a solemn salute.
Beside me Sally said, “Makes you proud to be a woman, doesn’t it?”
One of the Guerrilla Girls heard her and she gave Sally the finger. Sally went over to her and ripped the mask from her face.
“I should have guessed you wouldn’t miss out on this one, Anya,” she said. “Look, why don’t you do the art world a favour. Find some nice guy, settle down and forget about painting.”
One of the other Guerrilla Girls reached toward Sally and shoved her.
“Cat fight,” yelled Councillor Mewhort from the sidewalk. A Guerrilla Girl ran down the stairs and grabbed him by the collar. Then the fight was on. I didn’t wait to see who won. It’s hard to care about who wins a fight between moralists who want people to be struck down and feminists who wear animal heads to celebrate womanhood. Hank Mewhort had fallen to the sidewalk, and there were three Guerrilla Girls on top of him. Sally was trying to pull them away when I came up behind her, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her toward College Drive. I thought I heard a man’s voice yell thanks at our retreating backs.
“Why were you trying to save him?” I asked.
“Three against one,” said Sally. “Even if you’re an asshole, those aren’t fair odds.”
I gave her shoulder a squeeze. Then without another word, we walked home.
The story has an addendum. That night after I’d driven home half of Angus’s basketball team, I dug out my lecture notes for the next day and opened a bottle of Tuborg. Angus was having a shower, and Peter and Christy were downstairs studying. I went into the living room, put on an old recording of Dennis Brain playing the Mozart horn concertos and started to look over my introductory lecture. I had crossed out a couple of references that were no longer current and added a few that were when I heard someone at the front door. I looked out the window and saw Sally’s Porsche at the curb.
It was a bitter night, and when I opened the door Sally walked past me into the house. She was carrying a packing case.
“Here,” she said, leaning it against the wall, “this is for you. I’m sorry about this morning. I’m not much good when I feel cornered.”
“I remember,” I said.
She grinned. “Right. Anyway, open your present.”
I started to wrestle with the box.
“I’ll do it,” she said. She bent over the box, and with a few strong, sure movements, she had it open and was holding the painting that had been inside.
“Let’s take it into the light and see what you think,” she said.
The picture took my breath away. Part of it, I guess, was seeing a piece of art that had a six-figure value casually propped against my kitchen wall, but the real impact came from the subject matter.
The scene was a tea party in the clearing down by the water at the Loves’ summer cottage. The picture was suffused with summer light, that soft incandescence that comes when heat turns rain to mist. In the foreground there was a round table covered with a snowy cloth. On either side of the table was a wooden chair painted dark green. Nina Love was in one of the chairs. The eyelet sundress she was wearing was the colour of new ferns, and her skin was translucent. The light seemed to come through her flesh the way it comes through fine china. She was in profile, and the dark curve of her hair seemed to balance exactly the pale line of her features: yin a
nd yang. Across the table from her sat a girl of fifteen, very tanned in a two-piece bathing suit that did nothing to hide a soft layer of baby fat. The girl’s braided hair was bleached fair by the sun. Her expression as she watched Nina’s graceful hands tilt the Limoges teapot was rapt – and familiar. The girl’s face was my own thirty-two years before, and it glowed with admiration and love.
The woman and the girl bending toward one another over the luminous white cloth seemed enclosed in a private world. In the distance beyond them, the lake, blue as cobalt, lapped the shore.
There were other figures in the picture, and I knew them, too. Under the water, enclosed in a kind of bubble, were a man and a young girl. I could recognize the slope of Desmond Love’s shoulders and the sweep of his daughter’s blond hair as she bent over the fantastic sand castle they were building together in their little world under the waves.
Sally had been watching my face. Finally she said laconically, “Well?”
“It’s incredible. I don’t know what to say. The colours are wonderful – they seem to shimmer. And the way you’ve remembered us – not just the way we looked, but the way those days felt endless and hot …”
“And innocent,” said Sally.
“Yes,” I agreed, “and innocent. Sal, no one’s ever given me a gift like this. I don’t know what to say.”
She smiled and made a gesture of dismissal.
“Does it have a title?” I asked.
“Perfect Circles,” Sally said.
“Yeah, I guess that’s right, isn’t it. You and Des in one circle and then Nina and me. God, I’d forgotten how I idolized her. It must have been awful for her to have this fat little girl hanging on her all the time.”
“She loved it,” said Sally. “She loved your need.” And then she looked at me oddly. “I’m not being fair. Nina loved you, Jo. She still does. The one good thing I’ve ever been able to say about my mother is that she loves you.”
“And you, Sal, if you’d let her.”
For an answer she shrugged. “Anyway, if you ever decide to take up art, don’t paint over this one. It’s the only picture I ever did of Nina. She’s so beautiful I can almost forgive her. Anyway, those were good summers.”
“I can close my eyes still and see you and Des coming down the hill from the cottage with all the stuff you used to make your sand castles: shovels and trowels and spatulas and palette knives and sprinklers to keep the sand moist, and things to use as moulds and shapers. It always looked like you were going to work.”
Sally smiled sadly. “We were. Des was a wonderful teacher. He was a wonderful artist. He was a wonderful father …” Her voice broke.
I looked up, surprised. “Hey, can I buy you a beer?”
“Sure,” she said.
I went to the fridge and pulled out a cold Tuborg.
Sally checked the label carefully. “This one’s okay. I won’t spaz out on you.” She snapped the cap off and held the bottle toward me. “To old times.”
“To old times,” I said.
For a while we were both silent. Then I said, “That picture brings so much back. You know, a couple of weeks ago Mieka asked me what happened between us, and when I tried to tell her, I thought I didn’t really understand it myself.”
“You were Nina’s friend,” she said simply.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “You were the one who went away. After Des died and you went away to New York to that art school, you vanished from my life.”
“Is that what Nina told you?” Sally shook her head in disbelief. “Jo, there was no art school. I never went to any school after I left Bishop Lambeth’s.”
“Come on. You were thirteen. You had to go school. That was the whole reason Nina let you move down there with Izaak Levin.”
Sally roared. “Trust Nina to obey the letter if not the spirit of the truth. I guess I was at a school of the arts, except there was only one teacher, Izaak, and one pupil – me.”
“What did you do?”
She took a long swallow of her Tuborg and set the bottle down in front of her.
“Well, the first year after Des died, I was pretty wrecked so we travelled most of the time – just drove around the U.S.A. in Izaak’s shiny yellow convertible, seeing the sights, staying in motels.”
“Sal, I don’t believe a word of this. Why would a famous man like Izaak give up a year of his life to drive a thirteen-year-old girl around?”
She gave me a mocking smile.
“Sally, no. I know you said that you slept with him but … God, you were still a child. That’s a pathology.”
“Not such a child, Jo. It was a fair exchange. He got to have sex to his heart’s content with a hot, young girl, and I got to see the U.S.A. in his Chevrolet. It worked out.”
“How did you live?”
“Well, Izaak didn’t have to work in burger joints to support us. He had quite a reputation in those days, and every so often he’d just sit down and make some phone calls. Then he’d go to some junior college or ladies’ group, talk about art, pick up his cheque and we’d move along. He tried to make it interesting for me. You know, Vermont when the leaves changed and warm places in the winter. Once he did a class in San Luis Obispo for a month or so.” She smiled at the memory. “Oh, Jo, we stayed at this motel that had fantasy rooms – a real fifties place – the court of Louis, jungle land, the wild west, that kind of thing.” She shook her head and smiled. “Anyway, after a year we went to New York and Izaak wrote and went on TV and taught a bit, and I began to make art.
“I painted and we went to galleries and we fucked, and that was my school of the arts.” She laughed. “Not a bad preparation, when you get right down to it, I guess. Anyway, that went on till I was about twenty. Things were getting ugly in the States – Johnson, Vietnam, all that stuff. Izaak said he’d stuck it out through McCarthy, but he’d had enough. We came to Saskatchewan for the Summer Art Colony at Emma Lake and we never went back.”
“Sally, I’m incredulous. Where was Nina in all of this?”
She stood up. “Recovering from the tragic death of her husband,” she said coldly. “Look, Jo, I’ve got to motor. I’m glad you like the painting.”
I put my coat and boots on and followed her out to her car. I wanted the closeness to continue a little longer. As we walked down the driveway, our breath rose in ice fog around us. At the curb, the Porsche gleamed white in the moonlight, but as we got close to it, I noticed there was something wrong with the way it was positioned. It didn’t take long to discover why. Someone had slashed the tires. Sally and I went around and checked them out. They had all been attacked, and whoever had done the slashing had done it over and over again. I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach, and it didn’t have anything to do with the weather.
“Sal, let’s go back in and call the police,” I said.
She looked into the heavens. “Full moon tonight – Looney-Tunes time. The cops are going to be busy chasing down people whose eyeteeth have started to grow. They won’t get to us for hours.” She hugged herself against the cold. “So, Jo, it looks like you’re going to have to ask me for a sleepover.”
“Done,” I said. And we trudged through the snow to the warmth of the house.
CHAPTER
8
On the tenth of January I finished my class on populist politics and the Saskatchewan election of ’82 and walked across campus to my office in the arts building. From habit, I slowed up in front of the room where English 250 met. Mieka had been taking that class before Christmas, and it had always given me a nice feeling to walk by and see her sitting at her desk by the window, chewing the end of her pen, looking thoughtful. The desk by the window was empty now; Mieka hadn’t come back to university after the break. During the hours in which she should have been learning about Alice Munro and Sinclair Ross, she was stripping woodwork at the Old Court House and talking to suppliers. Her decision didn’t please me much.
When I walked through my office door, the phone was
ringing. It was Sally, and what she had to say didn’t please me much, either.
“Jo, do you have any free time this afternoon?” She was silent for a beat. “There’s news.”
“I have to pick up Angus’s skates over on Main Street the sharpener’s near the Broadway Café. I can meet you there in fifteen minutes.”
“The Broadway’ll be fine. I’m at Izaak’s now just around the corner.”
“Sal, is the news good?”
When she answered, she sounded infinitely weary. “Is it ever?” she asked.
It was a grey, sleety day, and the only parking place I could find was three blocks from the restaurant. By the time I walked through the front door, I was chilled to the bone and apprehensive, but the Broadway Café was a welcoming place for the cold and the lonely. It looked the way I imagined the café looked in Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: a shining counter with stools down one side of the room; dark wooden booths upholstered in wine-coloured leather down the other. The walls were covered with mirrors and blowups of pictures of old movie stars. Sally was sitting in a back booth under a palely tinted Fred Astaire.
When she saw me, she smiled wanly. “They found my gun,” she said without preamble. “Some kids were tobogganing down by the river and they found a gun and took it to the police. They say it’s the one that did the murders.”
The waitress came over and poured coffee for us. When she left, I turned to Sally.
“Okay, start at the beginning.”
Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she ran her hands through it in a gesture of frustration. “Tell me where the beginning is, Jo, because I don’t know any more. Do you know how often I’ve been down to the cop shop? But until this morning I thought it was all going to go away. It seemed as if everything was in limbo. Nothing got better, but nothing got worse, either. Well, now something has gotten worse. And, Jo, nothing’s gotten better: the police haven’t found the tape that was in the video camera at the gallery the night Clea was killed. They haven’t even got a sniff about who it was Kyle chased down the river bank. And I still don’t have an alibi.”
