Anne is turning left, going up Park Road to Church Street.
“Can you let me off? I’ll take the subway.”
“Where’s your car, by the way?”
“It got towed away. Colin parked on Adelaide. Right in front of the sign that says from four to six.”
“What a drag.”
“I’m not getting it. He can go and get it.”
“He did it, he should go and get it.”
Yeah. But in the meantime she doesn’t have a car.
“I can drive you home,” Anne says. “You don’t look so good.”
“I want to walk, Annie. It’s okay.”
Anne stops the car by the Ontario Association of Architects building. The building reminds Claudine of Ben, the architect she lived with before moving in with Colin. It is such a simple building, a yellow brick box that says I am so much more than a box. Ben was like that. He kept saying you don’t know what you’re throwing away. Claudine reaches into the back seat and takes the tape out of the video camera, puts it in her big black bag and steps out of the car.
“I’ll talk to you later, Annie.”
She slams the door and looks down at her black sandals. She is standing in the leafy shadow of a maple. Up ahead, the sun bounces off the flat top of a privet hedge. The sky is achingly blue, with clouds that look like fish scales. She pulls her skirt down and starts walking towards The Bay as Anne drives off.
Then she changes her mind. She wants to go and sit in the green grass by the Architects building.
Claudine sits under the first tree she sees. There are sugar maples all around her, but she’s sitting underneath a honey locust with thin lacy leaves filtering the sun. She puts her bag down on the grass, crosses her ankles and looks around.
She is in a sea of light green. The grass is prickly; it was mown some time ago and there are little mounds of yellowed, dried grass floating here and there. She watches the intersection of Park Road and Rosedale Valley Road for a while, how the cars pause for the briefest of moments before moving on, and then she stares at a silver maple rising tall across the street. The wind bends its branches, flips the silver undersides of the leaves. It strikes her as such a sad sound, wind through trees.
Yawning, she watches ants crawling on her legs. It is ticklish and annoying but it feels like it’s happening to someone else. In a trance, she watches stunned bees bend the heads of clover blossoms with their weight. She stretches, lies down and uses her black bag as a pillow. She can feel the corners of the videotape, so she shoves it over to the side of the bag.
Safe here. As a child she wanted the whole world to be like water so she could dive into the earth, swim up tree trunks and feel the sun on her face among the leaves. She’s always looked for safety in a patch of green.
THEY BOTH SHOOK WHEN they first met. Shook and stopped eating. Of that time, Claudine remembers the taste of capers, which she could eat, of the fluorescent salmon, which she could not, and the feel of a salt-rimmed bloody caesar on her lips.
She doesn’t know why she had to match Colin’s drinking, drink for drink, but she did. It wasn’t so much a need to drink as a need not to miss anything, to be equal on all fronts, equal meaning the same.
She doesn’t remember much of anything lately. Her memory is reserved for working. When she’s putting other people’s lives in documentary films, she remembers every gesture, every line that comes out of her subjects’ lovingly photographed mouths. Living with Colin, on and off, has left her in pieces, pieces that know nothing about the other pieces. Colin keeps her so insecure that she spends most of her time thinking about him. It doesn’t matter where she is, her little wheels are turning inside her head, turning and pounding and grinding. In her steno pad, she occasionally writes things like, I am a forehead figuring him out, and then scratches them out.
She hardly remembers the Claudine Beaulieu of three years ago, when she met Colin. That Claudine had just turned twenty-nine. She’d been staring at her black, salt-stained suede boots in a Queen Street booze can when she felt someone gazing at her. Looking up, she thought the guy was familiar.
He tried to lock eyes with her, but she wouldn’t oblige. At first. She was too tired, her eyes too blurry from watching the same images over and over again in the editing suite. Besides, she’d recently settled into unhappiness with Ben, in his blue apartment with hand-painted clouds on the high ceilings. She’d ended up there like a stray. Was doing that a lot in those days. Moving into men’s lives and treating their apartments like hotels. Nothing was supposed to matter but work and wearing black. She did both vengefully. What looked like botched, haughty indifference to others was, to her, something more profound. She was going to take the bad-boy artist myth away from men and shove it back in their faces. See how they liked it. Waiting up. Waiting for phone calls. Sitting through artistic tantrums. Being the doormats of female genius. Trouble was, she always ended up feeling sorry for the men and wrapped the pity around them as if it was love. And the men always thought she was frail, no matter how she behaved.
“Are you angry?” sweet Ben asked about twenty times a day.
“No,” she would say. “What makes you think that?” And her voice box felt squeezed, as if someone had slipped a choke collar around her neck.
Their romance had been very compressed. He’d rescued her from a messy apartment with ringed coffee cups in every room. After three weeks of intense lovemaking and lyrical outpourings about her beauty — he did portraits of her that looked like architectural Mount Rushmore renderings — he asked her to move in with him. He had a beautiful profile, soft eyelids, clean-shaven cheeks. She liked to watch him sleep. He was so open when he slept.
Three months after she moved in, Ben started to complain about her housekeeping. “It’s an aesthetic thing,” he kept saying as he followed her around, picking up the clutter she dropped in her wake. She tried to pay more attention, but she couldn’t keep the apartment the way he liked it, tidy with things in rows. He lived with his eyes. The apartment had to be the clean showplace of his architectural soul. After he tidied, he would sit and watch what he had done, like God contemplating his creation.
Eventually, she pretended not to hear the scolding in his voice. And then he started telling bedtime stories about previous lovers, and Claudine, a voyeur by profession, listened and folded the jealousy away somewhere; she couldn’t use it just now, but might someday need the force of it to pry her out of a stalemate.
The man who wanted to lock eyes with her was standing by the shuffleboard, thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. Christmas lights blinked above his black leather jacket. It was snowing outside, and the people coming in to the booze can, the ones who’d manoeuvred two doors and a bouncer with membership cards or contacts, had rosy cheeks and snowflakes melting on their coat collars. It reminded Claudine of Montreal, the way people sparkled there with innocence anytime snow framed their faces. Odd how in Toronto there is no romance of snow.
Of anything. People came from all over Canada to do the Toronto huddle, sneering in insecure bunches not at what they’d left behind, but at what they found. It was a way of making themselves feel better about ending up alone in a city they’d dreamed about. For years, Claudine sneered, too, the special Montreal-to-Toronto sneer. Now she was looking for a tribe. Any tribe would do.
For outsiders, the pickings were slim. There were the people she worked with and Ben’s designer friends, that was all. Ben’s friends wore wonderful clothes and lived in wonderfully weird places where people sat around like props approving or disapproving of the other props. You had to behave as if your life were a piece of performance art.
Between shots, the guy in the jeans and the leather jacket was pushing against the shuffleboard with his thighs. He was tall and lean, with longish straight hair he kept pushing out of his face. He seemed to like his face, and liked his hands, but he didn’t like the res
t of himself much. He was playing against a guy with dreadlocks and a great, warm laugh. “Yeah, mon,” the man said every time the guy in the jeans overshot the stone. “Dat’s more like it, Colin.” And every time that happened, Colin looked for Claudine’s eyes, and she looked back, just a beat, before looking away.
She hadn’t drunk quite enough beer yet to want to play with that, even though the music was loud enough, her black jeans tight enough and her black suede boots just high enough to give her the illusion of being bright and apart from the small, frightened rhythm of herself.
She finished her beer. To Marianne Faithfull, inhaling a cigarette, mouthing what are you fighting for, what are you fighting for, it’s just an old war, not even a cold war, Claudine walked to the shuffleboard and parked herself by the middle line. Say it in broken English. Broken English.
“You want to play?” Colin asked.
“You’ve already got a partner,” she said.
Colin’s friend laughed and said, “He’s getting slaughtered. Why don’t you give him a hand?”
And so she did. Sawdust sticking to the sweat of her hands, saying zen to the stone, she slid the stone, pulling back with her pelvis at the very end, willing the stone to hang back on the lip. It worked almost every time. She played out his game and won it for him. His friend, Rocky, pretended to swoon with masochistic pleasure. “She’s a killer,” he kept saying. “A killer.”
“I’ll buy you a beer,” Colin said. And Rocky winked and disappeared.
It wasn’t until much later that Claudine realized that Colin had drunk a lot more than she’d thought. He held on to her hands and said where have you been, and while it embarrassed her, it also pulled her out of her tiny self and plunked her down on the huge stage of his hungry eyes.
Colin was a writer, a novelist and a poet who was beginning to get a reputation. That’s where she’d seen him before, in the newspapers. There had been interviews lately about a book he’d written, something about guys on a druggie escapade in northern Ontario, bonding on Nembutal in the bush.
She’d heard of him. He’d heard of her. They talked. He had a remarkable ability, it was a gift, really, of making people’s lives interesting to themselves again. It was a form of flattery and it was bewitching.
It was five o’clock in the morning when they left. The light was greyish blue, Queen Street covered in snow. He guided her to the entrance of a barbershop. “Let’s get a haircut,” he said. He turned her collar up. She was leaning against the glass, her back pressed against the faces of men in short, slicked-back hair. She kissed him. For a long time. The city started to come alive with streetcars and snowploughs as they held each other and kissed and read each other’s eyes. Their breath rose around them like smoke.
Finally, she pushed her hands against the skin of his leather jacket and said oh god, what am I doing? And laughed, because she’d told him about Ben, and the thought of giving in to what she was drawn to made her feel guilty and wicked.
“Come home with me,” he said.
“I can’t.”
Ben was pretending to be asleep. But he sat up in the dark room and screamed, “Where the fuck have you been?” It terrified her. She could almost see a rolling pin in his hand. She said I was walking, I needed to clear my head.
Two weeks after this, she was out of the blue apartment with the hand-painted clouds, out on the street where Ben had thrown the six green plastic bags of her possessions.
Colin lived in an apartment above a dry cleaner and a bakery. It had a sharp yeasty smell, very little furniture, a mattress, a desk, an antique chesterfield and two chairs, heirlooms, he called them. He had no chest of drawers. Piles of clothes on the floor completed the decor. He took her in, even though he said not much of a dowry when he saw her green plastic bags. She laughed. They lived together, or rather they slept together, and he wrote her into his next book of poetry. She was the you, she was the she, he even called the collection She. He wrote about everything. He wrote about meeting at the shuffleboard table, he wrote about what she called the melodrama of her parents’ life, poems that named them, Odette and Roger, for the world to see. She felt robbed and anointed both at once. When her sister read it, she said he got one part right, the part where you say you don’t remember anything.
STANDING IN FRONT OF the United Cigar Store in the underground mall by The Bay, Claudine reaches inside her bag to get her wallet out for a subway token, but instead she grabs the tape with Cindy on it. She wants to hold it in her hand as she walks towards the train. In the mirrored columns, she can see herself walk by. She would like to have the courage to stop and really look at herself, instead of sneaking these partial looks and trying to put these patches together in her mind.
But she must never look vain, like her mother, who could not walk by a shop window, a toaster, a kettle, a mirror, the chrome of a car without twisting herself to sneak a look, who sat at kitchen tables facing windows so she could look at herself talking, who took her compact out in restaurants before dinner, in between courses, after dinner, furtively looking for food between her teeth, who looked at herself in three-way mirrors, lost, in a trance when she took the girls shopping.
No, Claudine can’t admit that she wants, with all her body and soul, to look into that mirrored column and assess just how awful she looks, as Anne so kindly put it.
She is hugging the tape to her chest now. Walking by a white moulded plastic trash can attached to moulded plastic chairs, Claudine feels an urge to throw the tape in the garbage.
Her arm goes out, she is holding the tape, ready to let it drop. She almost drops it. She wants to drop it in and then retrieve it. She imagines dropping it in the garbage can and walking away. She wants to do this so badly, as if her hand had its own life, at the same time knowing she won’t, couldn’t, throw such irreplaceable footage away.
Still clutching the tape, she goes through the doors heading into the subway, walks to the turnstile, puts her token in, walks through, faces another garbage can. The impulse again, a twitching in her fingers. She imagines dropping it in, going down the stairs to the southbound platform, running back and getting it just as an old man in a grey uniform is starting to empty the trash.
The tiles are very yellow by the platform. The Bloor trains have come in, a crowd of people is coming up the stairs from the east–west line and gathering on the southbound platform. A woman with blond hair steps in front of her. She smells sweet, it’s a familiar smell, Lily of the Valley by Yardley. Claudine stands right behind her. She wants to walk in this woman’s wake for the smell. The train clatters into the station, the doors slide open, Claudine follows the woman into the car. She walks to the centre pole. Claudine stands behind her, leaning against the doors.
Her hands are sweating on the tape. She puts the tape back into her bag, closes her eyes as the train pulls out of the station.
LIGHTS
~
1950
Roger waited for Odette in front of the Bell Telephone building where she worked as an operator. She knew he was waiting, so she took her time about getting ready. She changed her blouse in the green staff washroom, splashed Yardley eau de cologne on her neck and wrists. The light coming through the glazed windows bounced in the mirror over the sink, threw back a fine-boned face framed by a blond pageboy. The fresh blouse she’d brought with her had a wide pleated collar that made her feel open and summery, as if a breeze followed her, as if she were made to float in warm air, and she needed that, to draw all the voices asking for numbers out of her ears.
Odette hoped that Paulette and the rest of the girls would be standing at the bus stop when she came through the big revolving doors, so they could see Roger open the car door for her. They were. That felt good, to come out revolving, collar fluttering in the late afternoon sun, and feel them gawk a little as she walked towards Roger’s new Studebaker. She imagined her blond pageboy gleaming in the sun, her
small waist cinched in a pale blue skirt with a little flared pleat at the back.
Roger opened the car door for her. She smiled and got in, taking her time to settle in the big seat. Her nylons made a little whoosh as she crossed her legs. The car door sounded like the clapper on a movie set. She rolled the window down and gave Paulette a little wave. The other girls pretended not to see her, but Paulette rolled her eyes and blew her a kiss. And then Roger tried to kiss her, leaning over in the car, but she avoided that by bringing the visor down to shield her eyes from the sun. Just the same, he wore the girls and the work off of her by the time they turned the corner of Saint-Antoine Street. All he had to do was say, “Mon Dieu que t’es belle aujourd’hui, mon pitou.” And touch her knee.
It wore the work off her, but it made her shy.
After a seafood dinner at Pauzé’s, where she felt ancient and sophisticated from sucking on crab legs, Roger drove up Côte-des-Neiges and along the Boulevard, all the way to Summit Lookout. He seemed happy in his new Studebaker with silver sparkles on the upholstery, and when they parked and they looked at the view, he was amazed at the lights everywhere, as if he’d never seen them before, as if he’d never thought about all the juice it took to light up the city like a Christmas tree. He said he wanted to put those lights on her fingers, in her hair, those tiny lights twinkling below the Westmount mansions and around Jacques Cartier bridge, and all those lights spreading beyond the island. He said, “C’est-tu beau. Je veux te faire un collier de lumières.”
She smiled. He was so fanciful. She wanted to say that would make me look like a statue in front of l’Oratoire St-Joseph.
He sighed. The lights were like garlands to him, he said, strings of lights binding the city together.
She waited. He turned off the ignition. He looked at her profile and shook his head. Ma belle, belle Irlandaise, he said. He unscrewed his silver hip flask and took a long swig. She looked at him, curious now, and he shook his head again, as if saying I can’t get over you.
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