Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  The hall is deserted, fluorescent light bounces off the black and white tiles of the floor, paints the speckled glass of office doors grey and milky. The doors are right out of an old Raymond Chandler movie, but the names on the doors belong to her time, CompuGraphics, Industrial Age, Total Look, Tangredi Designs. Behind those closed doors, frantic searches for the authentic are taking place, menus and letterheads are being redesigned, spaces are being gutted and clad in industrial-strength materials, houses are being hammered into simulated nineteenth-century factories. Bits of funk from the once-rejected past are being recycled with a conscious edge.

  Claudine unlocks the door of the co-op, turns on the overhead lights, checks for mail in her cubby behind the reception desk, and turns in to the first editing suite. It’s stuffy, it smells of hash, with a hint of camel dung. There’s a little bit of burned hash left on the head of a pin of a button, beside a glass. She turns the button over. It says Union Carbide: Corporate Murderers. Andy must have been here, he’s the only guy who smokes hash in the co-op. Andy does videos of his friends talking while jerking off. In catalogues, his work is described as “extending the boundaries of the utterable.”

  Claudine props the window open with a brick. Streetcars screech along Queen. There’s a siren somewhere by the lake. The sky is navy blue. So hot. Such a hot, muggy, airless July, everything singed and drooping. She sweeps the table with her hand, wipes her hand full of ashes on her jean skirt, finds the field tape on the shelf above the suite, and sticks it in. It’s the manslaughter tape. She’s yet to look at the footage of Cindy at the correctional institute. In fact, ever since doing that interview, she’s been avoiding her work. It’s not a good state to be in. When she’s avoiding her work, she concentrates on Colin. He becomes the tape she wants to edit.

  Claudine pushes the play button, and then the pause button so she can contemplate the freeze-frame picture of Patsy Duncan, a moon of a face, condemned to life imprisonment for manslaughter. Lines bracket Patsy’s mouth, her eyebrows are pencilled in, her scalp looks sore from dyeing her hair ash blond. Her eyes are sad, beseeching. It’s a strong image.

  But Claudine already has too much material. Patsy Duncan will probably have to go. She pushes the play button.

  “I was asking him something,” Patsy says in her flat voice, “and he was watching hockey, just breathing heavy watching hockey. I said, I asked you a question. He didn’t answer. He had one of those big padded chairs, and it took up a lot of room in the apartment. I remember I wanted to push that chair right outta there, I wanted to push him out. That’s what I kept feeling, his weight in that chair. Like he was a ton. I wanted to push that chair out. Everything that bugged me was in that chair.”

  Patsy Duncan looks sideways and says, “Am I doing okay?” And Claudine hears herself, very concerned, saying, “You’re doing just fine.”

  Patsy Duncan closes her eyes. “You’re just like my daughter, eh, the way you talk to me. She always said, Jenny did, what are you puttin’ up with this for. It’s hard to say. It’s like I was crazy then. I’d raised the kids on my own, and I was gettin’ on and Rusty was a good talker. It filled up the place, the big talk, the drinking, the getting pissed off. Filled it up. But that time, there was nothing. He wouldn’t answer me. It was like I was invisible or something. I kept saying answer the question, answer the question. And he just stared, you know, and the sound of cheering on the TV was going on and I was screaming answer the fucking question. Answer the fucking question.”

  Patsy Duncan’s hand is gripping her knee, and then it’s just as if somebody had pulled a string, her whole body relaxes, the life drains out of her. After that she talks about her daughter visiting, and her granddaughter’s popsicle-stick house, in a sing-song voice.

  Claudine lights a cigarette, pushes the pause button, watches Patsy Duncan’s face through the blue smoke. Patsy Duncan stabbed Rusty to death because he wouldn’t answer her, because he hit her, because he told her daughter she couldn’t wear make-up, because he wouldn’t answer the fucking question.

  Her rage makes complete sense to Claudine. But something has gone limp in her, too, there in the editing suite on this hot, muggy July night. She presses the rewind button, watches as Patsy Duncan’s face reverses itself at top speed. Stops, presses play, hears herself saying “You’re doing just fine” in a kind, soft, reassuring voice. Something about her voice is so familiar. It is not her voice at all, it’s the syrupy actress voice of her mother.

  Claudine puts her head back on the padded swivel chair and starts picking at her nails.

  Everything is in pieces, she can’t find the glue to put this thing together. She’s stuck. She’s stuck in the dead place before something kicks over and insists on being born, before the joy of making takes over. It makes her dizzy. She feels like she’s going to faint. She hears her mother’s voice saying put your head between your legs.

  She doesn’t put her head between her legs. She rewinds some more and erases Patsy Duncan.

  ASCENSION

  ~

  1950s

  Odette at twenty-six sat in a makeshift dressing room on a wingback orange cloth chair. She was wearing a blue dress with raised white polka dots. She kept smoothing the dress down over her knees, feeling the polka dots like grains of sugar on her fingertips. She licked her lips. Her lips looked better wet and glossy, and she hated the way the lipstick dried them out. While licking and tasting the red-perfumed taste of the lip-stick, she checked for smudges on her teeth in the mirror of her compact.

  That morning Claudine, who was now four, had told her mother that her teeth looked like corn on the cob, and Odette debated again whether to have them capped by Docteur Joly, who did all the girls’ teeth at Audrey’s agency. It would cost a fortune. Odette still used baking soda every day to bleach them. The taste of Arm & Hammer in her mouth, just before she left the house, always made her feel weak because that’s what her mother had given her when she was sick.

  Odette enjoyed leaving the house, all dressed up, carrying her beige make-up valise edged with dark brown crocodile skin. In the valise, there was order, there was purpose. The brushes, the pencils, the pancake make-up sticks were all tucked away in little satin pockets with elasticized trim, and the lipsticks had their own little elasticized loops, where they could stand like soldiers, ready for action at a moment’s notice.

  Sometimes the make-up valise got messy, and then everything had to wait until she lined up her lipsticks and her powders and her make-up sticks. And there was the pleasure of getting cheques, fat ones, Roger called them, adding up in her bankbook with the liver-coloured cover and a cut-out window for her account number. Odette never tired of opening it and looking at the deposits. My money, she said to herself. Mine. Roger couldn’t be counted on to make any. He’d defrauded his father at the flower shop, borrowed against something he didn’t even own. At least that’s what Odette thought had happened. Roger just cursed his father and stopped going to the flower shop. Monsieur Beaulieu called Odette and said, “Le vaurien a des dettes dans tous les bars d’la ville, pis moi, là, je paye pus rien. I pay nutting, no more.” And the bills piled up. And the collectors kept coming to the door. Odette felt such shame, and nobody lifted a finger to help her.

  It was February. Not the time to wear a blue puffy-sleeved dress with polka dots, but that’s what the producers had wanted. All morning and afternoon soft snow had been blowing around the city, blinding pedestrians and drivers. Looking through the window of the high school locker room that served as backstage, Odette could see fine powdery snow falling as if sifted from above. Fine snow, like thin hair, but lots of it. Odette always regretted the flat plane of her head at the back that needed to be corrected with a teased nest of hair.

  The producer of “Les Jérémies,” the comedy TV show she was doing the commercial for, had to go down to neighbouring businesses and see if he could pay employees for an hour or two so he could
get an audience for the live show. You would have thought nobody in their right mind would come out in this kind of weather, but they did, they came and shook the snow from their woollen overcoats and beat their hats against their hands and sat down in the Jarry auditorium as if they’d been sprung from jail.

  From the skit she was hearing, Odette could tell that she had about four minutes before walking out in front of the television cameras and all those people to do the live commercial of the Plymouth. She imagined her walk, over and over again, heart beating, armpits sweating, hands clammy, saw the polka dots blowing against her thighs like a snowy dream.

  The three men who made up the comedy troupe called Les Jérémies were doing the skit about Edith Piaf. Odette had seen it in rehearsals that morning. Gérard Pelletier was on his knees, singing, “Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien” in a whiny, nasal voice while the other guys did terrible things to him. They threw flour over his suit, smashed a pre-smashed tennis racket over his head, tied a noose around his neck, pretended to kick him in the crotch. “Non, je ne regrette rien, ni le bien, ni le mal qu’on m’a fait, tout ça m’est bien égal.” Bash. Kick. Odette could hear the audience laughing. But when she saw it in rehearsals, a little space opened up inside her, very still, very bright.

  Two more minutes of sitting on the cloth chair backstage in an old locker-room with chipped stone floors, waiting for Victor the stage manager to say “Madame Beaulieu, s’il vous plaît.”

  She wanted to swear, to let out the steam that was building in her. Maudite cochonne de vie. What I have to do. Ce que je dois faire. Maudit Crisse. She was muttering. She didn’t know where the voice came from.

  In the last commercial six ten-year-olds had gathered to sing a song about Mapo Spread, the maple syrup butter that tasted like the metal of the can it came in. Some of the children were off-key, one of them had spent a good deal of the song trying to straighten out his underwear, poking out his bum, fishing cotton out of his crack. The boys wore blue pants and red bow ties, the girls wore blue dresses with red bows. Janine and Claudine could have done that, sung “Mapo Spread, c’est délicieux,” all together, wearing the same kind of dress, the mother and her two daughters, holding hands in front of the cameras, and people would think how amazing, so young that Odette to have such big girls, so beautiful, just like their mother. But the fantasy collapsed with a vision of Claudine biting Janine’s arm on stage, the way she’d been doing lately, while Janine yelled je vas être malade, Maman, je vas être malade, and described, like she did last night, how her heart felt like it was going to come out with the throw-up and land in the toilet. There was nothing Odette could do to reassure her. And Roger, who had come in late and half-cut as usual, was pouring himself a scotch, and then he put Tommy Dorsey on the hi-fi and said les girls, on pratique notre jitterbug. He got them all wound up, and by the end of it Janine was white and hiccupping because Roger was paying more attention to Claudine. He always paid more attention to Claudine because she was dark like the Beaulieux, and Janine was blond and delicate like Odette. It wasn’t fair. But there was nothing Odette could do about it. Claudine was fearless; Janine was scared of her own shadow. When it came time to throw someone from jitterbugging hip to jitterbugging hip, Claudine was right there, screaming with laughter, making faces that made everybody laugh. Even Odette was drawn to her high spirits. And Janine fought back with sickliness and hysterics.

  Here was Victor now, Victor with the thick brown eyelashes she could kill for. “Wasted on you,” she said to all the men with good eyelashes. She had to curl hers, and spit on dark mascara powder and apply coats and coats of the stuff to look like she had eyelashes at all.

  “J’ai tellement froid,” Odette said. “Victor, si tu savais comme j’ai froid.” Victor said pauvre madame, and started the count-down. From the wings, Odette could smell the damp coats of the audience, the scent of old mothballs coming to life now like roses blooming in water, the dry heat of silver radiators drawing out the smell of soup and cigarette smoke and fast-order grills from people’s clothes. She had to start walking now, in a straight line, without making too much noise in her metal-tipped high heels, straight to the gleaming convertible with the red vinyl inside as if this were the most natural thing in the world for her to do.

  FROM HER COLDNESS, THERE was great stillness. A hush. She walked right by Les Jérémies, who were standing in front of microphones that reminded her of golf clubs. Odette was afraid that they’d make fun of her behind her back, that they’d raise their eye-brows, mime va-va-voom with their lips. She could feel the bright lights on her, on her blond hair, on her pearls; Audrey at the agency always said get a trademark, it doesn’t matter what it is, and Odette had chosen pearls. Classy, Audrey said. Like Grace Kelly.

  Now one of the Jérémies started to read the advertising copy. And she wasn’t even standing by the car yet. She rushed a bit to make the sweeping gesture, elegant, fluid, that said consider the whole car. Then she saw her hand, so pale in the lights, with the red nails gleaming, coming down to caress the red vinyl seats. She caressed where the shoulders would rest, then she had to turn towards the camera and smile, showing teeth and openness. She had to stop herself from licking her lips even though she could feel them drying. And then in a swirl that made her dress lift a bit to show knee she walked towards the trunk of the car, pressed a button and opened it. She had to do this quickly, suggesting roominess and plushness because there was no camera behind her. The pleasure in her face had to be the camera.

  She could feel the eyes of the audience on her, could feel the rhythm of their breathing. Sometimes she thought she could slip into those eyes, that breath, as if it were a warm blanket. She was coming to the end of the routine now, her mouth was dry, sweat was pouring into her dress in spite of antiperspirant and the white shields tucked like inverted wings under her arms. Thank god it was almost over. She was coming to the part where she always felt herself ascend like an angel to the grid of lights on the ceiling. At some point in her routines, she tried to give herself over to whatever force had brought her to expose herself, floating in the eyes of the people beyond the bright lights, on their breathing in and out like one giant creature focused on her alone.

  In front of the car, she had to make the sweeping gesture of this is my body, this is my blood, and, finally, project the thrill of buying the car by opening the door. She got in. Touching the steering wheel lightly, she pretended to turn the key in the ignition.

  Her back stuck to the vinyl as she got out. Leading with her legs, she straightened up with grace. Closed the door. Turned with elegance to walk back into the shadows from which she came, but was suddenly brought up short by a terrible wrenching. Her skirt had caught in the door.

  Opening the door quickly now, slamming it, that would cost her another car job, that slam, she started to walk away. She could hear their laughing. God damn this. She had broken the heel of her shoe in the wrenching pivot.

  From backstage she heard Gérard Pelletier singing “Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien.” The audience roared. It sounded like someone had opened a furnace door.

  ALL THAT TIME, SHE had to ignore Roger, pretend he didn’t exist. She ignored him, the humiliation of the work, did anything that came her way: Noxzema commercials, where she went ouch while exposing the white skin under the shoulder strap of her bathing suit; bridal layouts in advertising supplements; catalogue work for Eaton’s and Simpson’s; runway modelling for the big department stores and for the French couturier houses on Crescent Street. She impersonated women who golfed, who cooked, who water-skied, who sat by blazing fires in après-ski clothes, who skated, who had romantic thoughts in demure lingerie, who squirted mounds of Reddi-wip over Jell-O, who changed their hair colour without anyone knowing, who would bake cakes only with Monarch flour. And from the money she made, she got them out of the Beaulieu duplex and into a house she bought in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

  She had to
ignore Roger, and not wait for him to make money. The moment she counted on him, or egged him on, or prodded him, or shouted at him, she would get bags under her eyes and lose jobs she would have landed otherwise. He got a job at a respectable firm selling bonds and securities, but he hated to speak English and retreated to bars as soon as the Stock Exchange closed. It wasn’t too long before his wages were garnisheed for tabs he’d run up all over town.

  She had to ignore that, ignore his drinking and his cochonneries like the time he was so drunk he walked into the maid’s room and got into bed with her.

  She had the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce house painted a pristine white and painted old furniture she bought at auctions white and antiquey gold. By then, they were abandoning the moderne style and moving into antique. It was her idea. Everything, her idea. Even doing up the bathroom with little gold and white ceramic tiles that Roger and one of his drinking buddies had stuck in grout. They’d gotten so drunk that the little tiles departed on paths on their own, making curving lines around the sink. Every morning she was forced to look at it, the curved line of Roger’s incompetence.

  When he screamed now, it was that he was dying, that she was killing him with her contempt. Sometimes he made her call the priest to give him extreme unction. The girls watched from the foot of the bed, while the priest tried to convince him that he was not moving to the other world.

  Afterwards he would cry. He would open up her closet and look at all her clothes and say. “Et puis moi, j’ai rien. Rien.”

  “Tu fais rien, Roger,” she said, and slammed the closet doors.

  TANGO

  ~

  July

  The light on the phone is flashing on and off. Claudine notices it out of the corner of her eye. She is staring at herself bent over a tiny little piece of mirror with two coke lines drifting off like snow tracks. A rolled-up five-dollar bill is sticking out of one of her nostrils. She pinches her other nostril and snorts the coke back, taps the rolled-up bill on the corner of the mirror and picks up the phone, sniffling.