by Brian Moore
The tiger, having swatted down the fly of my objection, looked steadily across the room to where the men were sitting, at first ignoring the waiter, who brought our rognons, set them down in a great hurry, and began opening the half-bottle of Brouilly with his waiter’s pocket corkscrew, having trouble with the cork, saying a tiny ‘crotte’ under his breath as the cork came out broken, using the edge of his napkin to get the bits out, listening to Janice who, suddenly noticing him, informed him loudly for the benefit of her audience across the way, ‘Dommage, dommage, ces tire-bouchons, je me demande comme vous pouvez vous débrouiller avec ce machine là.’ The waiter nodding, saying meaninglessly, ‘Oui, madame. Ça chauffe, vous savez,’ while I sat thinking, that is it that heats, what does he mean, does it heat the bottle, the bottle-opener, or what? Why do waiters and workmen say these meaningless, menacing things about their tools when the tools fail them? But, while I thought this, I thought it in an automatous trance, the way people recited multiplication tables to keep their minds off something else. The something else was Janice smiling at those men across the way, her smile becoming a caricature, and I remember thinking that when women start worrying about their age or sex appeal, they fall into self-parody, for now the coquettish smiles and becks are sincere at last; the man, any man, is wanted. But even as this thought went through my mind I said to myself it’s not age in Janice’s case, she’s only thirty-three, she’s a good-looking woman, so it must be something else (is she sex-starved?). Oh, eat your rognons, I told myself. Drink your Brouilly. I drank it and it was sour. I asked Janice about Blair and Peg O’Connell (anything to distract her from coming on with those men) and it seemed to work for, at once, she started in on what was supposed to be a very funny story about Blair and some mad patient of his who developed a crush on Peg. (I think that was the story.) In the old days when I lived in Montreal it might have interested me. Now, it bored me. Blair and Peg are no longer part of my cast of characters, they are the past as Montreal is the past. When one rejects a city, one seems, by implication to reject the friends who have remained in that city and so, afraid that Janice would detect my inattention, I overacted my interest until, suddenly, shocked out of all pretence, I saw her, still talking, openly wink at the men across the way. Absolutely no sense pretending, Mad Twin screamed inside me, it is happening, it has happened and slap! like my hand coming down on the table, I heard my voice, ‘Are you trying –’ (That’s what I started to say, but when I am near my time of month, my rages alternate with an equally unreasonable terror that other people will injure me physically and so, faced by Janice’s cold tiger eyes, I felt myself flinch, in mid-sentence, felt a grin of fear form on my face, as, desperately, I tried to turn my accusation into a joke.) – ‘to, ah, to pick those men up?’
Her tiger eyes studied my grin. Did she sense Mad Twin’s anger underneath? Then she laughed, a great, gushy, gee-shucks laugh, which, by its spontaneity, managed to chase Mad Twin up a tree, leaving me up there wondering if, after all, I’d imagined the whole thing because, damn it, Janice is good-looking and of course men ogle her and, as for her peering around, remember she’s a visitor to New York, it’s all exciting to her and when I used to come down here from Montreal I was always peering myself, trying to suck all the juicy excitement out of every minute of my visit.
‘I’m kidding,’ I said and she laughed even more and then I said, ‘Pay no attention to me. After this morning I’m a nut on the subject of men.’
At once, she stopped laughing. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, looking upset, I had no idea why, so I said, hastily, that something unpleasant happened outside the hairdresser’s and told her about it and at once she was all sympathy and told me about a similar nasty thing that had happened to her and suddenly, what with this and that, we had finished our rognons and the wine and it was time for dessert and it seemed unfair of me to have worried about getting through a lunch with her, for if it wasn’t quite like old times, we at least had enough of a savings account of shared experience to last a few hours in each other’s company. We picked on chocolate mousse for desserts and ordered café filtre. Then, there was a pause. She looked at me significantly.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘If you do know, you’ve been very discreet. I’ll say that.’
‘Know what?’
‘About Charles. Are you sure you haven’t heard anything from some of our dear friends in Montreal?’
‘No, what?’ I asked (in my trembly mood, people beating about the bush, mysteries, I can’t stand them). ‘What?’ I said. ‘Please tell me, what is it?’
‘Charles is having an affair. I suppose it’s self-centred of me but I thought, his being in and out of New York and all that, that you might have heard about it.’
‘I never see him,’ I said. ‘We just assume he’s busy when he’s here. After all, those news shows are pretty hectic, I guess.’
‘Not hectic enough,’ Janice said. ‘He brings his poppet with him. Or so I’m told.’
I looked at her.
(I remember I was trying to think what I would say to her.)
‘Don’t feel sorry for me,’ she said. ‘He’s not going to have it all his own way. I came down here for revenge.’
‘Revenge?’
‘Perry’s here now, remember? Two can play at that game.’
Perry Grandmaison works at the UN. He’s something in the Canadian delegation. He was Janice’s first love; they lived together for a while. Perry’s wife wouldn’t give him a divorce so he and Janice split up on Janice’s twenty-fifth birthday. I remember her telling me about it, long ago and oh, I didn’t want to hear any more of this, revenge, who is revenged by revenge of this sort, what did she mean, revenge?
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Surprised?’
‘About you and Perry?’
‘No, about Charles. Charles of all people. It’s as though he’s suddenly taken leave of his senses. I mean, he never looks at another woman, never has.’
Charles. If surprise was the reaction she’d wanted, she had it now. Was it possible she could remain blind all these years to the dog eyes of foolish lust Charles turns on every presentable female in sight? I remember the meaningful grins which met me when I went to do my first show at the CBC and said Charles Sloane had hired me. The Casanova of Casting was their nickname for him then. Surely Janice knew, surely some gossip had come back to her over the years? Surely she couldn’t be so innocent, so self-deluding?
But as I looked into her tiger’s eyes, those eyes fixed always on a world which, for Janice, spins endlessly around the axis of herself, I thought, yes, she could ignore the truth about Charles if that truth doesn’t suit her fantasy.
There is a madness, autopsychosis, a disorder in which all ideas are centred around oneself, and (I don’t know why) it jumped into my mind at that moment in a joke headline: Lecher Saved By Spouse’s Autopsychosis and there I was, beginning to smile, the smile becoming a giggle while Janice, shocked, sat beside me, her mouth forming an O of outrage.
‘What are you laughing at?’
‘Nothing, I’m sorry.’
‘I suppose it’s funny to you that my husband’s planning to leave me?’
‘Oh, Janice, are you sure? I can’t believe it.’
‘It’s true, he is. He never comes home any more. I suppose that’s funny to you too.’
‘Janice, I’m sorry. Really I am.’
‘No, you’re not. For some reason, you’re glad, for some reason my bad luck gives you a big laugh. I suppose you hate me. I suppose that’s the truth of it.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Well, then, why are you laughing? I hardly think it’s a laughing matter.’
I sat there, not knowing what to say, autopsychosis wasn’t one bit funny, of course, how could I explain it? And then because I could not, I wound up, idiotically, saying something worse.
I leaned towards her, and put my hand on her wrist, trying to calm her. ‘Janice, listen. Charles has always had an eye for the girls. That�
�s not new. It’s well known.’
‘Well known to who? To you? Was there something between you and Charles?’
‘Now, that’s a silly thing to say.’
‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘I know he’s always saying how pretty you are. Come to think of it, he got you started on your career as an actress, didn’t he?’
I felt Mad Twin jump in my skin, felt new shakes, adrenalin shakes, anger shakes. ‘Leave me out of it,’ I said.
‘Why should I? You’re the one who brought it up.’
‘All right,’ Mad Twin said. ‘If you won’t take my word for it, forget it. Your husband’s a letch, everybody knows that. Everybody except you.’
‘A letch?’ she said. ‘You mean he sleeps around, is that it?’
‘Look, I don’t know. Now can we drop it?’
‘Fine. Yes, fine. You perform a complete character assassination on my husband and we’re supposed to drop it? Good. You, well, according to you, you don’t know one single person he’s slept with. Yet you call him a letch, that’s a lovely word by the way, how would you like it if I said your friend Terence is a letch? Which he is. Of course, come to think of it, I’m not as experienced as you are about whether men are letches or not. I haven’t been married three times.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. (After that remark she could go to hell.) ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Shall we drop it?’
‘No, we will not drop it.’ And of course she wasn’t going to drop it, she wanted to talk about it, it was her great drama, she was here in New York to sleep with a man in order to get revenge. Her husband had taken up with another woman. This was drama. Her life wasn’t boring at the moment. In fact, in all its horrid fascination, being cuckolded was the biggest thing that had ever happened to her and I, like a fool, had opened up a new lead for her to explore and explore it she would, she’d discuss it, analyse it into the ground. ‘All right, now,’ she said. ‘You can tell me, in fact, I think you owe it to me to tell me anything you know at this point. I had no idea Charles was the sort of person you say he is, but then, perhaps, there are none so blind as those who will not see. I mean – did anything happen between you and Charles? I won’t be angry. Just tell me.’
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I said. ‘Word of honour.’
‘Mary, I think you’re trying to spare my feelings. When was it? Was it the time you worked with him at the CBC?’
‘Do you mean, casting couch?’ Mad Twin blurted out. ‘Is that what you mean?’
She dropped her glance to her plate. ‘Well, wherever,’ she said mulishly.
‘Do you want to know the truth?’ Mad Twin asked.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘The truth is I couldn’t bear to have him touch me.’
She glared. ‘Then why do you say what you do about him? If he didn’t make a pass at you, how do you know?’
‘Janice, there was a joke at the CBC when I worked there. Charles’s office was called the free feel department.’
‘Charles?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why didn’t some of those girls complain? Brewster or Conrad would have fired him.’
‘Oh, Janice, grow up. Nobody took him seriously. Besides, if men were fired for making passes at girls, most of the men we know would be out of a job.’
‘I suppose you’d know more about that than me,’ she said. ‘I’ve always felt most passes are made because the man suspects he’ll have some measure of success.’
‘Thank you.’
And after that we sat looking at each other, saying nothing. Her face seemed rouged, for her anger showed in little slaps of red between her cheekbones and her ears. Silence at such times is more dangerous than spoken insult: silence builds hatred as invective never can. In those moments as Janice and I sat side by side, the voices of the other people in the restaurant, the crash of crockery in the kitchen, the noise of a bus going past in the street outside, each sound was amplified as though to draw attention to the silence it replaced. We sat like that for, perhaps, thirty seconds.
Then Janice opened her purse, removed her billfold and laid a ten-dollar bill beside her plate. ‘I have an appointment,’ she said. ‘Would you mind paying? This should take care of my share.’
I nodded. She put on her white gloves and stood up, clumsily using her thigh to push the table away from the banquette, the table making a harsh scraping noise as it moved. She eased herself past me into the aisle, then looked down at me, as in afterthought. ‘Do you know what people say about you?’ she asked.
I did not answer. I did not look at her. ‘You know what someone called you?’ she said. ‘The Un-Virgin Mary. You have sex on the brain, don’t you? That’s why you left Hat. Poor Hat. Talk about being a letch. You, God! Look what you did to him when he was down.’
Standing over me, her big hat shielding one side of her face, one tiger eye glaring down at me.
‘You were late,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
She walked away. I saw the three businessmen looking at her as she went towards the door, looking at her bottom and at her legs. One turned to his companion and smiled. The smile could have meant anything; approbation, dismissal. Janice did not see it.
Look what you did to him. That’s what she said. Had she gone? I looked down towards the restaurant foyer where Owner-Headwaiter stood at his little podium. Yes, she had gone, and now, four years later, I knew it was she who had told Hat.
Angus McMurty swivelled around in his office chair behind his desk on Redpath Crescent in Montreal, while I in the armchair opposite him looked over at the analyst’s couch, with the tidy detail of a fresh paper towel laid on the headrest, ready for the next patient, that couch on which Hat was spending so many hours, and now my friend Angus swivelled back and forth, his large hands destroying wire paper clips, picking them up from a little cardboard box, straightening them out, laying them on his desk, then looking at me, almost surreptitiously over his glasses, quick look, then back to straightening out another clip, his voice slow with a hint of Scots in it, although Angus was from New Brunswick and had never been to Scotland. And then, in that slow voice, the bad news, ‘Well, Hat seems to feel there’s someone else. Y’know, Mary, people are awful gossips.’
Quick look over his specs, pause, then pick up another clip. I said nothing.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘whoever it was told him is no friend of his. They have no notion how serious a worry like that could be for Hat. In my judgement, he’s very near the edge, just now.’
At the time Angus said this, Hat and I had been back in Montreal for two months. Nobody in Montreal (nobody anywhere) knew about Terence and me. The only person who had ever seen Tee and me together was Janice Sloane and that had been an accident, her meeting us in Central Park that day when I went down to New York on a morning plane and was home the same afternoon so that Hat never knew I had gone. Janice, who happened to be in New York, met Terence and me as we came out of the park exit at 72nd Street. Janice knew nothing. As far as she was concerned, Terence was merely someone I introduced her to, very briefly. There was no reason for her to jump to any such conclusion.
So I told Angus that day, I thought it was merely Hat’s way of dramatizing his fears and I said we both knew what a self-dramatizer Hat was. Angus nodded, broke a paper clip in two, then looked directly at me for the first time in our interview. ‘Aye, but is there somebody else, Mary?’ I said, ‘Yes, there is.’ ‘Well,’ said Angus, ‘in that case you’ll just have to take my word for it that somebody has spilled the beans to him.’
‘But, that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Nobody knows about it. You’re the first person I’ve told.’
Angus shook his head. ‘Not so. You must have told somebody else. A thing like this is very hard to keep under the rug, you know. So, if you don’t mind a word of advice, try not to upset Hat with it, at least for a month or two. He’s very near the edge, as I said.’
Afterwards, when I phoned Terence in New York, he suggested that maybe Hat had
engaged a private detective to follow me. We didn’t even think about Janice Sloane, but the point is, it was Janice. I cannot prove it but I know it. I know it because I read it in her eyes that moment in the restaurant when she said, ‘Poor Hat. Talk about being a letch. You, God! Look what you did to him when he was down.’
And, of course, in those days, Hat was down. Nobody knew about it, though. We had come back to Montreal from New York for Hat’s one last good chance at a job. He stopped drinking and worked hard but he got depressed, very depressed, and went quietly to Angus for psychotherapy and pills. He hoped and I prayed that Angus would pull him out of it. ‘You, God! Look what you did to him when he was down.’
Yes, it was Janice, all right. But, as I said, even though Angus warned me that someone had blabbed to Hat, I didn’t believe it. And that was why, a week later, I risked telling Hat that I was going back down to New York for a few days. Which ended it.
There, in the restaurant, I remember that I did not feel anger or a wish for revenge. What I felt was a heaviness, a feeling much like the one I have when I leave an airport and drive back to town after seeing someone off on a plane. It’s a Down Tilt, it’s the knowledge that someone has gone off on a journey and that you have stayed behind. They have gone; you have stayed behind. It’s hard to describe. I am thirty-two: I do not forgive easily. I do not make friends as once I did. I sat there and in the slight muzziness from the Bloody Mary and the wine, I felt dull and misunderstood. I thought if someone called me the Un-Virgin Mary, then it does not matter if I am promiscuous or not. They say it, therefore I am. It was the same at school. If I refused to neck with boys, sometimes they revenged themselves by telling other boys I had gone all the way with them. As later, I guess, men who never touched me have boasted to other men that they slept with me. As those three men, sitting across from me in the restaurant, were probably saying something filthy about me. Janice had flirted with them, but she had left and I was the one they were talking about and when one of them looked over and caught my eye I knew what he was thinking, he was thinking, I could fuck you, baby, yes he was. Oh, I was sad, I sat there in an old brown study, my sadness, almost without my knowing it, settling into that dull, mindless gloom which is depression. Depression is when things are not the world’s fault, they are your fault. Maybe I am not promiscuous, but I have been married three times and I am only thirty-two. Maybe, without my knowing it, I am old Dan Dunne’s daughter after all.
