Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it,” Colin continues, “how when anybody starts to care about anything, somebody’s got to bring up money?”

  “It’s all related,” Jim says. His boyish cheeks are flushed with the wine he’s drunk. He just seems to get younger. Since they’ve had Marie-Ange, Jim has grown more concerned about his looks. He’s getting sixty-dollar haircuts at the Rainbow Room now. He never used to do that. When she met him, he was a Buddhist.

  “What’s all related?” Colin says.

  “Everybody’s money.”

  “Let me get this straight, the money’s all related so we can’t have a country?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I did not.” Jim is nonchalantly tearing the pulp out of a lemon wedge, but his face is getting redder.

  “How’s the documentary going?” Janine says to Claudine.

  “I’m stuck,” she says. “When you go there, what you see is exactly the same conditions that created the problems in the first place. It’s unbearable. It’s a pen to control the rate of suicides. There’s no programs, there’s nothing. Nothing.”

  Claudine is smoking now, too, smoking and looking at the sky through the dining-room window. She had asked to put Marie-Ange to bed, and would have stayed there until Marie-Ange fell asleep if Janine hadn’t put her foot down.

  The sky is framed by lace curtains Janine has just this week soaked in the bathtub with bleach. It was so satisfying to see the lace go from dusty grey to bright white. But Claudine would never have noticed that; she has contempt for anything domestic. She is so pale tonight. Her green eyes look glassy, her hand shakes as she lifts the cigarette to her mouth.

  “Do you want me to check on Marie-Ange?” Claudine says.

  “No, it hasn’t been ten minutes.”

  “But she sounds so sad.”

  Marie-Ange is crying out “Mummy, mummy, come check,” from upstairs.

  “The routine is,” Janine says, with exaggerated firmness, “that we check every ten minutes, and she usually falls asleep after the third check.”

  “Sounds like luggage.”

  It goes right in like a blow. As it was meant to. A payback for something, but what? Janine stands and starts piling the dishes. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but you don’t know anything about it. Kids need rituals. This is her ritual.”

  “You know what I’m starting to think?” Colin says. “I think people get what they fucking deserve.” He looks at Janine. “Where are you going? We haven’t even finished the wine. Sit. You don’t need to do that.”

  Trembling, Janine puts the dishes back on the table and sits down.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” Claudine says to no one in particular. “Point a camera, like that.”

  “Listen, Jim,” Colin says, “you want to be colonized by Americans and technology and live with swallowing the shit that comes with that, then fine. We get what we deserve. I don’t care anymore. You can’t care about the guy who makes his own noose, know what I mean? When I hear this shit, it makes me want to kick the chair. To boot it out from under, and see the whole fucking country hang.”

  “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it just a tiny bit?” Claudine says.

  “Yeah, you escalate so fast,” Jim says.

  “I can always count on you to back me up,” Colin says to Claudine. “That’s what I like about you, your unshakable loyalty.”

  “Ah come on, not everything is life or death.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Colin spits out. “It is life or death, and it’s clear what side you’re on, isn’t it?” His face has gone slack.

  Janine looks at Jim. Jim looks away.

  “Sure feels smug around here,” Colin says. “Pass me that there bottle of wine, Jannikins, I’m going to the back yard. I need some air. I need some life.”

  Claudine gets up to go with him.

  “Don’t fucking come near me,” he says. There is so much violence in his voice that even though he’s addressing Claudine, Janine feels like she’s been smacked on the back of the head.

  NONE OF IT MAKES any sense. These fights are never about what they’re about. “Are you okay?” she says to Claudine.

  “I’m fine, just fine,” Claudine says.

  Janine takes the dishes into the kitchen. She wonders what Colin means by “this country.” Being from Montreal where mon pays was something sandwiched between a bunch of islands to the east and what she imagined as a big flat plain to the west, she’s never said “this country” in her life. In Quebec they talked about “the rest of Canada” sometimes, as if it were a plate of unappetizing leftovers. They were vendues, Claudine and her. That’s what their father called them, mes deux vendues, because Maman had taken them out of French school and remarried English. Vendues. Sold-outs. Worse than assimilated. They didn’t have a leg to stand on in either place.

  Colin’s passion for “this country” makes Janine feel guilty. A part of her always ends up feeling whipped when he goes on his rants. She’s never cared about stuff like that. Has been trying to keep her head above water so desperately that it hardly mattered what pond she was in. Maybe Colin has to care. He’s a writer and nobody reads him. Janine tried to read him, tried to read the novel he wrote about a guy who went on drunken druggie escapades with other guys. Maybe it was because she was pregnant at the time, but she couldn’t stick with it. She did read She, and was slightly appalled at seeing her family history twisted and braided into his romance with Claudine and laid out for all the world to see. It was like watching something from the wrong end of a telescope. What had been huge and blunt as a club had been whittled down by clever phrases that had nothing to do with real life.

  One time Claudine said that their trip to Jamaica was ruined because Colin’s novel wasn’t in the airport bookstore. The whole time they were in Negril, she said, Colin kept going on about Danielle Steel. There he was, said Claudine, on the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen, and he was foaming at the mouth because all the women on the beach were reading Danielle Steel. It made Janine ashamed of loving Danielle Steel, as if she should hide this appetite, the way her mouth waters when she opens one of her books.

  She’d never admit this to Claudine. There are so many things Janine no longer admits to Claudine.

  They used to be one. Together they laughed at their mother, who never felt real, who kept saying a woman this and a woman that and a woman can’t and a woman must. They had to laugh at her. They had to invent something better. Together they moved to Toronto in the mid-seventies for no other reason than to escape the weight of betrayals they were always asked to commit in their parents’ orbit. It would never, ever stop, the pulling and pushing, the current of anger and hatred they had to carry from one to the other. And they helped each other get used to the new city, a strange city, a city that was, through newspapers and magazines, always exhorting you, guiding you, telling you what to do, explore, exploit. They tried to find downtown Toronto. They sat in the apartment they shared on Yonge Street and read piles of stuff about what to do, what to see, who to know, where to get stuff repaired, what to buy, what to eat, and felt like orphans left out of this huge repast. None of what was offered ever materialized. You could walk in Toronto and feel nothing at all. Toronto was like a blank tape, like something that had been erased, nothing called out to be answered. They thought they could start again. And they had, each in their fashion, but they suffered from the blankness of it all. Until time created its own shadows. Now things were wrong here, too.

  Such silence. Janine walks upstairs to check on Marie-Ange. She has fallen asleep, hands clasped around her stuffed monkey. Looking at her child’s pale, delicate eyebrows, watching her small chest rise and fall, Janine is filled with tenderness. She would like to fall asleep, too, curled around a new life. When Marie-Ange was a little baby,
and she carried her around in a Snugli, chin grazing the top of her delicate, fuzzy head, Janine felt strangely sated. It was if her daughter’s weight on her chest covered up a hole she hadn’t known was there.

  Tiptoeing to the window, she sees Colin sitting on the grass in the backyard. She can hear Claudine and Jim quietly scraping the remains of the meal in the dining room. What can she do, how can she make things better?

  Walking back downstairs she thinks, I could make him apologize to Claudine. Her hand feels warm on the stripped wood of the banister. She fills the kitchen sink with hot water and soap, dumps the dishes in, grabs her glass of wine and goes out into the yard.

  “YOU LOOK GORGEOUS,” COLIN says, and then sticks out his tongue as if he’s about to lick her. He is sitting by the flowerbed, cross-legged, the bottle of wine leaning on his left thigh. His long hair, which is usually dirty blond, is getting lighter, bleached by the sun. His soft denim shirt looks pale blue against the yellow zinnias. There’s not a trace left of the black anger that just rattled the dining room.

  Janine sits down, drapes her pink cotton dress over her bent knees, which she hugs with her arms. He watches her do this as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world, as if he was watching a great blue heron land on a rocky shore. It makes her a bit self-conscious, this being watched so closely, but the soft breeze fluttering the pink cotton of her dress around her ankles feels nice.

  “Sorry about the explosion,” he says. “Things are tense right now. Claudine’s not happy with her documentary. She always takes it out on me.”

  Janine sips her wine. She wants to say tell her you’re sorry, but the evening air has erased what she came here to do.

  It is getting dark now, and in the half-light she can make out Marie-Ange’s bright sand-toys in the sandbox at the back of the narrow yard. She thinks she should cover it so cats don’t shit in it, but she’s too tired to move.

  “Your hair,” he says, “is different.”

  “I was sick of being a frump, I streaked it.”

  “You look soft,” he says.

  “I was really blond when I was a kid, and then I was dirty blond, and then it got really dark after the pregnancy.” She laughs, thinking for some reason that he would find the word pregnancy embarrassing.

  After the heat of the day, the breeze is like a blessing. It makes them feel innocent, able to really see each other for the first time now, in the grey-blue half-light, sitting on the grass, caressed by a wind that feels like a breath. It reminds Janine of how the world seems so full of strong colour after sweating through a fever.

  “I’ve always had a thing for blondes,” Colin says.

  “I don’t,” Janine says. It’s a passing loyalty to Jim, who has dark brown hair, but her eyes are smiling. She sees his hand, pale, freckled, with long fingers leaning on the grass, and all she can think of is wanting to touch it, all of her is trying to will his hand to lift itself from the earth and take hers. Must be crazy, she thinks, must be imagining this. This is not real. I’m a mother, I should cover the sandbox.

  “Say that again,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Say you don’t have a thing for blondes.”

  She laughs. “I don’t.” She’s half-drunk, half-transported; it is like being in a Danielle Steel novel all of a sudden.

  “Again.”

  “I don’t have a thing for blondes.”

  “You’re just like your sister. You can’t stand the truth.”

  Something in Janine plummets, it’s like an elevator dream, she’s plummeted to the ground floor.

  “I’m not,” she says. Her heart is beating very fast. “I’m not like Claudine. We’re very different. She’s the smart one. I’m …” She wants to say I’m the kind one, but it doesn’t seem weighty enough.

  “Really?”

  “Claudine is so competitive. I’m not like that.”

  “I like mothers. You’re so …” He can’t think of the word for a second. “Soft.” And then he takes his hand and touches her cheek. She covers his hand with hers and makes his hand touch and feel her entire face. It is like a convulsion, the need for her face to be touched, it’s as if she could never get enough of this. “Oh god,” she says. And then they are kissing, and his lips feel as hungry as hers, and the hunger scares her, stops her.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” She laughs. “Really, I’m not doing anything.”

  “There’s a lot going on in this nothing.”

  “We can’t do this.” Her lips feel swollen. She takes his hand and puts it on her belly.

  “You’re right,” he says. “To do what feels good is a slap in the face of common sense.”

  “My mother always said I was the one with the common sense. Just like her. Claudine used to say the thing about common sense is that it’s sooo common.”

  “Your mother’s sweet,” he says. His hand climbs to her breasts.

  “Oh no,” she says, and stands up quickly, and starts smoothing the creases of her dress to make the feelings go away.

  “Come back,” he says.

  “I’ve got to cover the sandbox. Can you help me?”

  THE LIGHT IN THE kitchen is very yellow when they come back in. Jim is doing the dishes. He’s wearing yellow plastic gloves. He’s singing “Why’d you do what she said,” mimicking Marianne Faithfull’s voice, which is blasting out of the cassette player on the green Formica table. His face is set in a slight snarl that takes on her anger, “Why’d you let her suck your cock,” he sings, baring teeth, circles of soap bubbles round his arms.

  It shocks Janine, coming in from the soft dark and hearing this, and smelling marijuana, with its skunk-like after-smell.

  Claudine is sitting at the kitchen table, and she’s singing along while drawing with Marie-Ange’s crayons. Her drawing looks like orange and red faces of women stuck in the bottom of a turquoise swimming pool.

  “We’ve just covered the sandbox,” Colin says. “I didn’t know that cat shit was dangerous. Janine was telling me that they can carry microscopic worms that can get into the sand and if kids eat this they can carry this kind of parasite.”

  Claudine doesn’t even look up from her paper. Jim carries on singing.

  “I read about it at the Children’s Storefront,” Janine says. Her voice feels loud. “They had this article tacked to the bulletin board. It really scared me.”

  She knows that they both sound good-tempered, that her body has gone into some sort of overdrive, and she doesn’t know what to do about it, so she walks over to the freezer, takes ice cream out and says, “I forgot dessert. For dessert, there’s strawberries and ice cream.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Claudine says. She yawns. “I’m pretty tired, actually.”

  “Nice guy,” Colin says to Jim, “smoking my joint without me.”

  “There’s a good-size roach left in the ashtray,” Jim says, still scouring the clay pot.

  “Are you going to have some?” Janine is holding out the strawberries like an offering.

  “I’ll have some ice cream,” Jim says. “And then I’m going to go check out this listing on Howland.”

  “Oh. This late?”

  “Yeah. There’s this agent from Royal LePage, he’s going to show me the house I was telling you about.”

  “I wouldn’t say no to ice cream,” Colin says, and sticks out his tongue. He looks at her as if they were still in a circle of conspiracy. She breaks the stare reluctantly and, grateful for something to do, searches for the ice cream scoop she stole from the kitchen store on St. Clair where she worked years ago.

  Colin sits beside Claudine and lights the roach. She looks at him smoking. Her eyes are dark and dead.

  “What’s your problem?” he says. She doesn’t answer. “Have a toke
, relax, the night is young.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Hey everybody, Claudine is sulking. Everybody watch Claudine sulking.”

  The tape chicks and goes dead. The word sulking hangs in the air. Janine stares at the two scoops of vanilla ice cream in the bowl she’s been filling, at the strawberries in her hands. She’s never noticed before that those spots on a strawberry are seeds. Jim wipes his hands on the dishtowel.

  “I’ve got to go now,” Claudine says, standing up. “I’ve got to go now. Oh my god, I’ve got to go.” She picks up her large black leather bag and walks out of the kitchen. They watch her, stunned by the weak, collapsed sound of her voice.

  “Wait,” Janine says. “Wait.” Claudine’s slender shoulders are up around her ears as she walks down the hall to the front door. She doesn’t look back. She keeps on walking. She slams the door.

  “You’ve got to go after her,” Janine says to Colin. Her face has settled into a serious mother mask, she’s conscious of that, and of the large smile that wants to split that mask in two.

  CLAUDINE

  ~

  July

  Is she making this up?

  No one would make this up.

  She can’t be. You can feel these things, surely to god you can. He’ll flirt with anything, even her sister.

  Claudine is walking on College Street. Her temples are sweating, her jaw feels wired shut. She expected steps at first, and looked behind her, down tree-lined Brunswick Avenue, but there was nobody, just some kids on skateboards. Now she is walking past the red brick building Colin used to live in, up above Quality Bakery and Four Star Drycleaners. Across the street, the clock tower by the fire station says ten-thirty. She used to rely on that clock when she went over to Colin’s place all those years ago. She was cheating on Ben, she had to parcel out her lust to the tick of that clock. Weak-kneed, stomach pitted with guilt, she’d spring from his bed and look at that big clock face and gasp oh my god, it’s one o’clock, and she’d run to the shower, and dress while he kissed the back of her neck and her shoulders, while his hands roamed all over her body. “Stop,” she’d plead, laughing, wanting to fall back into bed. He would walk her down and they would kiss on the last steps, leaning the full length of their bodies against each other.