Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  But now that she’d done it, brought life into the world, she was surprised by her moody tiredness; there was tenderness, yes, but it was mixed up with resentment and loneliness and a curious sensation of defeat.

  They lived in a third-floor apartment on Côte-des-Neiges until the duplex in Montreal-Nord was ready. It was one of Monsieur Beaulieu’s duplexes. He was going to let them have it for free on condition that Roger show the other duplexes and try to sell them. Roger was managing his father’s flower shop until then. It was called Les Fleurs de Louisa, a name Roger had chosen to honour his mother.

  The flower shop wasn’t very far from the Côte-des-Neiges apartment, but Roger never came home for lunch. He was gone all day, and sometimes he was gone for a good part of the night, too. When he did come home, he smelled like a boozy funeral director; the scent of carnations and roses had gone right into his pores. He always said j’ai rencontré Jean, or j’ai rencontré André, juste comme ça, imagine, on est allé prendre un drink. Odette didn’t imagine. She was too tired to imagine. At night, she refused to get up when the baby cried, so that he had to. She screwed up her eyes tight while he dragged himself barefoot into the kitchen and fixed formula and carried Janine until she fell asleep again.

  “T’as pas de fun avec ton bébé,” Roger said on weekends. And he smiled and he cooed and sang songs to Janine. “T’as pas le tour. Relax.” Easy for him to say. She was too tired to have fun. She was too scared to have fun. She feared harm from every source. The wall that jutted out by the bathroom had once been perfectly innocuous. Now it raised spectres of cracked skulls. Odette was scared of the car exhaust at baby carriage height, of dropping Janine when she bathed her, scared of loud noises, of Janine’s breath stopping, of her feet freezing when they went out in the February weather.

  Worse, she feared the dangers she carried within her, the great swelling waves of anger, the moments when she slipped out of herself and would have done anything to keep Janine from crying. Nobody had said anything about that. Nobody had said anything about the broken feeling inside. Her mother said it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  Now everybody looked right through her and said the baby is beautiful. And she, Odette, twenty-one years old, was not supposed to have any more life. All the people, they looked right through her as if she didn’t exist anymore, except as a mother, whom they could judge. Odette gone. Pouf. She disappeared. Just like she did when she was five or six and her mother brought her from Halifax and left her in Montreal. A breaking feeling like that.

  Time to get up now. Odette tore herself from the great softness of the bed with the pink satin coverlet and tiptoed into Janine’s bedroom. She stood above the crib and watched her breathing, the little chest going up and down in a flannel nightie. Janine was not an easy baby. Odette found she loved her baby the most — her pudgy hands, her tiny fingernails, her soft cheeks — when she was fast asleep. “Oh, my beauty,” she whispered, “my pumpkin, my angel, my sweet, sweet pea.” To die for. To die for, she thought.

  She should have been washing the diapers, which were soaking in ammonia in the pail in the bathroom, but she was so tired that she went back into her bedroom and lay down on the soft bed and started to think about her labour again. Three months later, and she was still trying to get over it.

  NOTHING HAD EVER PREPARED her for what happened the night she gave birth at the Royal Victoria hospital, Roger gone missing somewhere in a bar, drinking and eating peanuts like a starved squirrel.

  Remembering that long night, Odette’s body stiffened on the bed. She felt weak, and thought she must be hungry, but there was nothing to eat in the house, just formula and some bread and milk. She was going to go shopping when Janine woke up. Watching the little peaks on the white ceiling, watching the grey mackerel light of the February sky through the window, she imagined a green island where men and women entwined like the roots of cedar trees. She had seen this picture once, in National Geographic, of a green island, and this other picture of cedars in a swamp, their roots braided together, and it reminded her of the way her limbs felt sometimes, wanting to curve around something safe and secure.

  She could not see the ceiling in the hospital. There was too much light in her eyes. But she went up to the ceiling when she couldn’t stand it anymore. The pounding was like being hit from inside, over and over, with nobody to help her, nobody to protect her, just the doctor at her feet, her feet strapped down in the stirrups, the searing pain and blinding white light driving her out of her body.

  From up on the ceiling she saw herself strapped and screaming no, no, no, don’t touch me. She saw herself screaming but she wasn’t screaming. She saw a man in white cutting the flesh between her legs with a small knife, pulling at her insides with gleaming pliers. The doctor said push, push, come on that’s a good girl, hush now and push. The part of her that was on the ceiling thought he was right to say these things. She was a good girl. She wanted to be a good girl. But the body on the delivery table didn’t want to be a good girl, that body wanted to scream. And then she did scream, and it was so loud and scary that the nurse brought a mask down on her face, and in the sharp intake of ether the lights turned red and yellow and purple, spun in circles around the clearest picture of her father’s face in a captain’s hat like the one he wore in Halifax.

  Then she heard voices from far away, the doctor talking to the nurse saying let’s sew her up now, I’m going to give it an extra twist, make the husband happy. And he laughed, a long cackle reverberating in ether.

  When she woke up in her room, there was no baby, just Roger holding on to a cigar, lighting it with the lighter she’d given him for his birthday. It was gold-coloured, with a rhinestone star. “Une belle p’tite fille,” he said, and kissed her on the lips. “Mon Dieu, que t’as l’air fatigué, ma pauvre Odette.” He said that he had come and had heard the screaming from the delivery room, and he had to leave, he couldn’t stand it. “Je suis trop sensible pour ça, Odette. Pis a part de ça, personne parle français au Royal Vic.”

  Then he asked her to close her eyes. And she did, and she heard him go out in the hall. He was laughing with somebody. The door banged open and he said okay, Odette, tu peux t’ouvrir les yeux. And she did, and there was André Laurendeau, one of her old boyfriends who was now a friend of Roger’s, standing behind a stretcher covered with vases of flowers. There were lilies, and roses, and daisies and gladiolae that came, Roger said, all the way from la Floride. The room was filled with their scent, sweet and cloying in the radiator heat.

  “Un instant, pitou,” Roger said. “C’est pas fini.” Odette tried to smooth her hair for André, she bit her lips to make them red. Roger went and stood with André and they sang, “Auprès de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.” It was off-key, and they were so funny, the way they stood, pulling at their shirt cuffs to make themselves look show-biz. All the nurses came from their stations to see this and Odette had to laugh, it felt like she was in a gay heiress movie.

  But afterwards, when all the flowers were positioned on the windowsill and on her bedside table and on her food tray and in the bathroom, she felt exhausted. The nurses kept saying Monsieur Beaulieu, c’est magnifique, and he loved it. She was embarrassed by his flirting and was glad when they left. She was even more relieved when André left after drinking half a bottle of champagne. “Aimes-tu mes arrangements?” Roger kept saying, going from one bouquet to another.

  She said oui, oui, Roger, c’est beau. And he kissed her on the eyelids, on her cheeks, on her mouth. Then she asked for her baby and he said he would go and get the nurse, but the nurse walked in just at that moment with a menu. Odette said I want to see my baby. The nurse said you have to rest, dear, then you can see the baby. She’s a beautiful, healthy baby girl. No need to fret. Odette could hardly keep her eyes open. She ticked off roast pork, applesauce, tapioca, a glass of milk for the calcium. The nurse said are you breast or bottle? Odette didn’
t know. She said she wanted to try breast.

  And she did try for a while. Sitting on the hospital bed, smelling the sweet scalp of Janine, the winter sun through the venetian blinds throwing bars of light on her lap, she gave the baby her breasts. But it hurt too much. One of the girls who’d modelled with her at Eaton’s had said, “Don’t nurse, whatever you do. They suck everything out, and then you’re left with these tiny, sagging sacks.” So she had given it up. And the nurse came and wrapped her breasts in tight bandages, and something would leak sometimes out of her breasts when Janine cried, but it was too late by then, the nurse said you’re almost dried up. With the formula, the doctor said, you could be sure that the baby got all the nutrients. And that made her feel better.

  Now, clutching the pink satin coverlet of her bed, Odette thought, I did all right. I was all right.

  Janine was crying. Sounded just like a kitten. Odette clung to the pink coverlet. Not yet. She couldn’t get up just yet.

  The doctor had said you’d better have another one soon, you’ve got a tipped uterus, you better give it another shot before the tip’s permanent. She had beamed at him. “I’m so happy, yes, I want another baby, Doctor, desperately.” But she was full of dark-ness inside.

  Odette got up and walked into Janine’s bedroom. Janine’s face was red. She was hiccupping from crying so much.

  “Oh, my poor little baby,” Odette said, and set about changing her diaper. She took off the plastic pants and unpinned the soaking diaper, and put on a fresh one. Janine looked at her. Her eyes were still blue. She was quiet now, as Odette powdered her with Johnson’s baby powder. Such a sweet smell. “Now baby, I’ll get you a bottle,” she said, and carried her back to the crib.

  But when she got to the kitchen, she saw by the clock that it had been only two hours since the last bottle. Every four hours, the doctor said. Don’t spoil her, her mother said. Odette was so hungry. She opened the fridge door. Thought of making some toast, went back into Janine’s room and said it’s not time yet.

  And then, as if she were moving in a dream, she put on her sheared lamb coat and her black fur-lined rubber boots over her flat shoes. As she closed the apartment door, she could hear Janine crying, but there was nothing she could do. So she went to the épicerie around the corner and bought some Salada tea, lamb chops, a can of creamed corn and a copy of Echo Vedette. Then she stopped at the patisserie and picked up a mille-feuilles.

  All the way there and back, she felt something in her belly stretching and breaking, like an elastic that had lost its bounce. Janine was quiet when she got back. She made herself some tea, squished down the glazed, marbleized top of the mille-feuilles with a fork and saw the custard pop out at the other end. Odette scooped up the custard, brought it to her lips. From an ad in Echo Vedette, she saw that Tino Rossi was singing at Le Grand Palais, and that the comedian Bourvil was held over at the Vendôme. Maybe if they got out like they used to. She could wear the blue-grey taffeta dress and pearls, put up her hair, show off her long neck, and have drinks afterwards at the Nuit Bleue. She imagined herself in that dress, and swallowed the flaky pastry that was melting in her mouth. By the time Janine started crying, she’d washed all the diapers and everything was good again.

  CLAUDINE

  ~

  July

  There’s someone else again. The way Colin’s eyes almost pop out with fake innocence. The shiny look on his face, as if he’d just gotten away with something.

  It’s hot and humid and miserable and Colin’s home before the bars have closed, looking happy. Something’s up.

  He’s sitting at the round table by the windows of their place on Adelaide. Claudine, who’s just filled a vase full of water and set it down on the table, watches him through the spear-like leaves and salmon blooms of the gladiolae she bought on her way home. She was so surprised to find him here. She’s usually home first. Lately, she’s been trying to outdo him, to stay out later than he does. But it’s exhausting.

  “How was your day,” he says, feet up on the table, holding a beer.

  “Fine. I couldn’t get an editing suite until four this afternoon, though. Too many people making videos.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  She can’t tell how many beers he’s had. You can’t tell with him until it’s way too late. He can drink and drink and show no effect, and when it kicks in it can go in all directions, funny, angry, outrageous, even romantic where he mythologizes their relationship as if it were being written about twenty years down the line. And then he has what Claudine calls ancestral drunks, when he talks about being the last in a mad line playing crack-the-whip, blaming the force of his ancestors’ denials for whipping him out into the darkness. The ancestral drunks embarrass Claudine even more than the romantic drunks. There’s so much luxuriousness in his self-inflicted doom, especially considering the fact that he squandered the fortune his father made in luncheon meats. There is something in her, from a long time ago, that wants to spit on the idea that the rich English could ever be dignified by suffering.

  “What’s the matter?” he says. “You look funny.”

  “Nothing’s the matter.”

  “I had an excellent day,” he says.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “There’s nothing in the fridge. Have a beer.”

  “I know there’s nothing in the fridge,” she says, untying the laces of her running shoes and kicking them under the table. “If I don’t shop there’s nothing in the fridge.”

  He swigs his beer.

  Maybe there’s an egg. She can have egg and toast. No. Too much trouble. Looking at his feet on the table, she notices some white hairs all around the bottoms of his jeans. “Do you know someone with a dog?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she says, “there are dog hairs on your cuffs.”

  “Pardon me, I’m not sure I heard this right. There are dog hairs on my cuffs? I didn’t even know I had cuffs.”

  “You know what I mean. On your jeans, there.”

  “Show me.”

  She shows him.

  “Gee,” he says, eyes round and innocent. “You’re right. There are dog hairs on my cuffs.” He brushes the hairs with his hand. “Must have run up against a stray.”

  “Ha ha ha,” she says, and picks up a cigarette. He slides his Zippo lighter across the table as if it were a hockey puck. She catches it and lights her cigarette.

  “You look beautiful tonight, honey. Really beautiful. You look so good when you’re suspicious. You come alive.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Here, come on, have a beer.” He pours the rest of his beer in her empty glass. He’s smiling now.

  She looks away. In the dark windows, she can see the reflection of the gladiolae, the milky orange skin straining in the light that falls from the green porcelain shade above the table. And she can see her face below that, dark bangs and chin-length hair framing what she thinks of as her too-round face.

  “At least I’m honest,” she says.

  “I don’t like it when you buy flowers,” he says. “You always start some sort of reform program when you buy flowers. Do you want to see what I did today? Look at this.” The round table is full of his papers. He gets about five lines to a page in his big loopy writing. He gathers them up and says see, fifteen pages today.

  “That’s great.” She walks over to the fridge in the kitchen island of the loft, opens the door. No eggs. She goes into the bedroom, takes off her damp jeans and puts on a long yellow T-shirt.

  “Sure, you’re honest,” he says when she comes back into the room. He gives her a conspiratorial look.

  “Well, I don’t start it.”

  “You mean,” he says, “I go tit, you go tat.”

  “That’s disgusting,” she says. She leans across the kitchen counter and rummages in the bread basket. There’s only the heel of a whole-
wheat loaf, mildewed around the edges. She pitches it in the garbage.

  “So,” he says, “is this an interview, because if it’s an interview …”

  “What?”

  He takes a drag of his cigarette. “I’d like to know about the time I was in Saskatoon, doing a reading, hacking with walking pneumonia, and I called you all night long. Remember that? No answer, all night long. Tell me about that time. Please. I’d like to hear about it.” He gives her a bright, false smile. “I’d like to hear about your honesty.”

  “It’s the straining for equality makes me do these things,” she says, and smiles back.

  “Convenient as shit, if you ask me, this equality business.”

  “Whenever I ask you anything, you throw the Saskatoon thing around. I’m sick of it. It was just that one time. And I even told you about it. Not like you. You like to sneak.”

  His face goes blank. “Well, we could count the dog hairs. Would that make you feel any better?”

  She doesn’t answer. He’s peeling the label off his bottle of Ex with serious eyes that say I am floating above your petty emotions, the petty woman stuff.

  “Lighten up,” he says, and walks over to her and puts his arms around her waist. He leads her back to the table, walking backwards. “Lighten up. That’s better.”

  “I’m crazy, is that it? I’m hungry, I know that much.”

  “You like to make yourself crazy,” he says.

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe she’s imagining things. She sits down. They’ve had their little sword fight, a little stagey flurry in an otherwise predictable show and, as usual, she’s left with everything in her belly. It’s a gut instinct, or she’s imagining things. If only he said yes and it’s so and so. That would have cleared up the infection of her jealousy. But no. He never takes the hook out.

  She takes a gulp of beer, sets her glass down.

  The round table is his, as are the strained, flowered brocade chairs they sit in. Horsehair sticks out of the frayed arms of his armchair. In the long view, she thinks, none of this matters. In the long view, these horses, now stuffing this chair, galloped once on the fields of Upper Canada farms.