Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  I thought, I have to get a cheat book. There are too many Western songs.

  Uncle would have been enraged and I was shocking myself and I liked my own daringness. I learned to fend off lonely men. One night a drunk guy leaning on the piano said, Wanna meet later, wanna show me what’s under the dress, and I played softer and I looked up sweetly and said, Fuck off, mon ami, and kept playing. I must have sounded funny because a few men around laughed and he was startled and moved away. At the end of the evening I counted lots of money in my tip bowl and when I was leaving one of the waiters who was also a student said, Watch out for Mahsa, she might call you mon ami! I liked this new feeling of answering to no one. I was as happy as the goat who escapes the wolf.

  KATHERINE

  Five in the morning. Baby Bea was calling, and those two little sweet-faced boys were one on each side of me and damn damn damn Jimmie peed again that pee-stale smell on me and I was still tired. I climbed over Dexter and walked down the hall and picked up Baby Bea and she was already rolled over, holding the edge of her crib and her diaper was heavy. I unpinned it right there and dropped it on the floor and wiped her, chanted low and soft and slow so she would not wake up too much, Hey Sweet Pea, look at you, look at me, tempus fugue-it, baby, fiddly doo diddly dee, and pressed my lips into her soft skin. Let’s get you clean, and I picked up a warm white cloth and already she felt better, and I took her into the big bed with me and the boys, and I prayed please to the mother’s sleep-god for one more hour.

  Damn. T had promised he’d come home last night. I had a cup of powdered milk left and a box of cereal and some potatoes and that was it. The baby years were tough, no money and all that desire, my babies for milk and me for his mouth on mine. There was one pretty night when he came in and gently nudged the little boys over and set Baby Bea on a pillow and slid in beside me whisper-cursing too many bodies in our bed, making me laugh, and we made love and did not wake anybody up oh that was a beautiful dawn his eyes dark stars above me.

  I could not fall back asleep and the more I woke up, the more angry I was that he hadn’t come home again. I tucked them all in and got up and put T’s clothes in a brown paper bag and then I went outside to sit on the steps, to watch the dawn and think about the clubs and I wondered if I could ask Ma to bring me some powdered milk and about how I used to come home about this same time of morning and sleep. And I thought about grown-up perfume and aftershave and T ’n me playing together and all the things I was discovering when I was on the road with him and why was he still out there and I was here? We used to go so deep that people held their breath, listening, because when you go far away like that there might be a train wreck and this is what it feels like the split second before it happens, cars jamming and jack-knifing into the air and the music gets risky and beautiful. I wanted that again.

  But T was not coming home to fill me up or to leave money. He was going out to score. I was wondering how I could go on with the loud ticking of that man’s time bomb inside me and how could I go on without it.

  I did not mind anything he took except not what I needed to feed our babies. Then I saw him. Coming down the street in the grey dawn with the slow early-morning traffic and he was high.

  I need money for milk, I said into the half-light.

  That how you say hello? He reached down to take me in his arms the way he always did.

  T, you can’t do this. I gotta feed these kids.

  Babe, I am out there working every night.

  You’re out there playing on my back, T, and not bringing anything home and they are your kids too.

  Babe, I never asked for them.

  The air went black-silent and a cold took hold and I pushed away his arms.

  I have nothing to feed them, I told him. I cannot ask Ma again.

  I’ll get it.

  I got nothing for today. I do everything for you to play. What do you do for me to play?

  Then I said the thing neither of us had ever admitted, You’re using our money to score.

  Fuck, Katie.

  I ran up the stairs and locked the door on him. He never carried a key and he started to pound and yell, You can’t lock me out like that. Damn, Katie, you’re hardass like a man!

  The neighbours yelled, Shut up, and We’re calling the cops, and T turned around and started down the stairs. He was always afraid of the police. I opened the window and yelled onto King Street, T!

  He looked up and I threw the paper bag full of his clothes down onto the sidewalk.

  The kids were awake and crying and I was saying, Don’t worry, he’ll be back, and they watched cartoons and I mixed up the last of the milk and stretched it with extra water and added some sugar cubes I’d swiped from the hotel and warmed it up.

  That was the day I cleaned up our apartment.

  We’re going on an adventure, I said, and told the boys to get dressed while I dressed Bea and I took them on the bus up to Nan’s house and asked her to keep them for me while I got myself a job.

  It was a mistake to set up as old-fashioned married, him earning money and me doing everything else. T wanted to play and to have sex with me, in that order. I wanted my babies and sex with him and to play and to write all at the same time. I wanted to be recognized and get invited to play because I was good. I wanted to be more than a girl pianist. There is a too-narrow life that exists hidden under love and I escaped it because T pissed me off that dawn. I was no battermy-heart type. I was not going to submit and be contained. I wanted to be unholdable. Women can get unsouled by marriage and I was not going to let that happen to me. Four years at home with the babies! I complained to Ma, and she answered, You can’t break up a happy marriage.

  I got a gig at the Baptist Church playing their services because I could take the kids with me. I played ballet classes and I picked up some students. I made enough for rent and food and got my life grooving again. Lots of days I was mad as hell about it. Ma gave me our old record player and I started listening again.

  The first time I heard Coltrane’s Quartet play “My Favourite Things,” I was unpacking groceries and I was listening and listening and I had to listen more. McCoy Tyner was genius. Baby Bea was slowly taking the eggs out of a carton I’d left on the floor by the fridge and she was breaking them one by one. She was absorbed and worked with attention, feeling that sticky yolk, and I did not stop her so I could listen and listen and listen and not be interrupted, and when I am dying I will not think about the mess of a dozen broken eggs but how I heard Coltrane and Tyner talking to each other in “My Favourite Things.” That sax sounded like a man getting up out of his chair to take a woman’s hand to say, I wanna tell you something I don’t have words for, da-daa-da-daa-daa, da-daa-da-daa-daa, then going deepdown inside, deedle-leedle-leedle-lee, those musicians’ minds inside their instruments and the music catching at the passing phrase, each playing separate but together, tune inside rhythm, beat inside melody. I listened and listened and each man was absorbed in what he was finding to say, each hearing what the other three were doing and by some miracle—there is no other word—all playing together, though it makes no sense, how can two, three, four play solos together? That day I listened twenty times to “My Favourite Things” and when I felt quiet and whole and sated I lifted up the needle and put the record back in its sleeve and we were all fine. I told the boys to put on their coats and rubber boots and I mopped up the sticky mess of eggs and wiped off Bea in the kitchen sink and we went outside to walk along the mountain brow. The light was fine and the steel mills were majestic and the kids slipped their hands into mine. I was not lonely with Coltrane and Tyner inside me. I thought, This music is what marriage could be, playing solos at the same time and ending up together.

  MAHSA

  Over my desk I taped Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom when the kidnappings started but I was accustomed to city violence. Everyone here was shocked by tanks in the streets. Montreal felt more dangerous than Karachi. There were checkpoints on bridges and bombs in mailboxes
. A cell of terrorists took credit for bombing the stock exchange. I hoped they would not close McGill because Jean had stayed through my entire last lesson. I had always played the raga scales by ear and now I could write them. Raga accidentals began to drop into my improvisations and in this I found a whisper that must have been my own voice because it was not in any tradition that I knew, and this pleased me. Uncle wrote that he was reading about the libération de Québec and said that Aunt asked if I was safe and she wanted me to know that in Karachi people were chanting roti kapda aur makaan—food, clothing, shelter—and the Peoples Party would not give up power. His letters irritated me and I wanted Aunt to write her own letters but writing was difficult for her and how would she get a stamp? Sometimes I saw other girls bent over letters from home, absorbed, smiling as if the person were there. I tossed Uncle’s letters aside. Even his penmanship was harsh. Monique wanted me to go to the Université du Québec to protest but I wanted to practise. Never until now had I been able to practise as much as I wanted. On television I saw a reporter ask the prime minister to discuss the kidnapping and I was surprised that he was not pushed away by soldiers with guns. The prime minister asked the reporter, What would you do? I studied Coltrane’s “My Favourite Things” and listened to McCoy Tyner’s long solo over vamps on the two tonic chords, E minor and E major. I loved their rhythms. A man’s strangled body was found in the trunk of a car. People criticized the police. How determined these Canadians were about their freedom. I played in my little practice room, running up the steps past the big statue of Queen Victoria, saying, Bonjour queen, locked myself in at least four hours a day. I was finding things inside my heart. There was the Bhola cyclone and on television, sad pictures of bodies in water and villages broken and long rows of people walking, looking and hoping for anywhere to go. I saw these things as if they were not my own people. I felt removed and I had been gone only a few months. The police found the terrorists in the north end of Montreal and they did not shoot them or put them in prison but flew them to Cuba as they had promised. At home they would have been killed. I was absorbed in my music and I was observing from a different perspective the violence of the world.

  Monique liked to lie on my bed, smoke dope and read me bits of de Beauvoir who she called Simone. We spoke French because I wanted to learn and she said, Tant mieux, tu va en avoir besoin si tu reste ici. She was directing L’école des femmes and writing her own feminist plays. She said, Listen to this: Simone says that a woman’s vital interests are divided.

  Her vital what?

  Her interests. Simone says a woman is afraid of missing her destiny as a woman if she gives herself over entirely to things.

  What destiny?

  She must mean children. She never had any. She loved Jean-Paul and they both had lovers.

  I think she is right.

  You think so?

  Well, do you think Jean-Paul would have changed the baby?

  Merde, non!

  Monique’s latest boyfriend came in without a shirt and we laughed. Aunt would have envied my freedom. Uncle’s peace of mind would have been destroyed. Boys in our rooms. Condoms and birth control pills in every girl’s underwear drawer. Me playing in hotel lounges. I glimpsed a new possibility: I could fulfill my own needs. Outside marriage. Outside tradition. Alone, like the girls here.

  Monique said, Let’s move out, I found an apartment.

  It was across campus, on the road up the mountain, an old high-ceilinged place with an iron staircase to the front door. I did not have much to move, the suitcase I arrived with, and when the residence reimbursed Uncle’s money I had enough for almost two years’ rent. We sat on the balcony, looking into the trees, eating cupcakes Monique brought from the Ritz, and I said, I don’t know what will happen if Uncle finds out.

  You worry too much. Want to see my grandmother’s nightgowns? She gave them to me last year before she died.

  Her bedroom was scattered with boxes and bags, and she pulled out a full-length salmon silk tulle and a shorter lacy silk black organza. She slipped the black one over her T-shirt and jeans and said, I wish I knew when she wore this. She told me she got pregnant the first time she had sex, when she was seventeen. These are not the nightgowns of a woman who had seven children. She wanted to take these gowns to the hospital when she was dying but maman would not let her. She gave them to me. She must have had affairs. I think she wanted me to know something.

  I smoothed the silk, comparing it to Pakistani silk, and looked at the photograph of the tiny French-Canadian mémère on Monique’s dresser, imagined her in such a negligee. Monique began to plan our housewarming party.

  I wrote to Uncle that I would need to stay and study for the summer, and not to renew the residence because I would live with a girlfriend, and he imagined that I was moving in with her family and wrote back, Please thank your friend’s father. I am beginning to think about your future.

  During this anxious time I would awaken in the darkness thinking about home. When I was only half-awake, I sometimes saw Mor’s smiling face, tender and concerned, and I missed her but I no longer needed her. This was the beginning of understanding how we mourn for those we love in different ways all through our lives.

  The snow was silvery and at the end of the last class before holidays I followed Professor MacLennan to his office to sit in a wintry darkness that smelled like cinnamon, to give him the first paper I ever wrote that had my own opinion in it. We were to write about a Canadian story and I had chosen one called “Boys and Girls.” I was worried and he asked, What is troubling about your idea?

  I said to him, I wrote that the girl loved her father better than her mother even when he was skinning foxes and she called her mother an enemy even though she depended on her and this was like my aunt and I thought girls had separate solitudes. I said that I had never written my own ideas and they seemed dishevelled to me.

  He nodded seriously but also smiled and said, Do not worry. You have put a great deal of thought into this. Do you have somewhere to go for the holiday?

  I did not want to tell him that I was going alone to New York. I said, Back home there was a Christmas ball at the Beach Luxury Hotel and anyone could go, even non-Christians.

  His face was tired and the skin on his hands was wrinkled under the light of the green lamp on his desk. He asked, Don’t you have a young man waiting for you?

  I would rather be here, sir.

  Why?

  The man I love is far away and my family does not want me to see him.

  He looked out the window, slowly got up, pulled a copy of Middlemarch from his shelf, opened it to the last page and read, “For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” Here take this, he said, a Christmas present.

  I said, I think the nuns had his books at home. Thank you.

  The writer is a woman, he said. She herself found love with a married man.

  I flipped past the prelude and opened to the first chapter and read the beginning of the epigraph—Since I can do no good—and I became absorbed until he interrupted me and said, I am afraid I have an engagement this evening, Miss Weaver. Enjoy the book. Whatever god you pray to, pray that you do not miss love.

  KATHERINE

  Baby Bea was doing her little elbow crawl toward her brothers and Martin Luther King was speaking to people across America. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. He stood under the Lincoln Memorial, a carpet of a quarter million people unrolled at his feet and I wished I was there with my three kids instead of watching on television in a sweltering apartment. Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang, and King’s voice was like a bell over all those people, We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. My boys were playing matchbox cars on the couch. I had run into Mo on King Street and he let it slip that T had other women and one was pregnant. I was having a hard tim
e turning my back on the biggest, fattest love affair in the world and King was talking about urgency and whirlwinds and soul force and the people were listening together in an eerie silence. I was thinking about the way people looked at me and T and our kids on the street. I was thinking about King saying unearned suffering was redemptive, and I felt too scrappy to accept this idea. T’s unearned suffering was not redemptive. Ma’s unearned suffering was not redemptive. People learn to live with what they cannot change, or they die of it, but it is not redemptive. And I was watching and thinking about that speech and I heard Jimmie yell at me, Hey, Ma, look at Bea.

  My baby girl was pulling herself up on the couch. Her toes were spreading to balance and her smile shifted to concentration and I was thrilled all over again to see my third baby working out how to take her first step and I wished I was watching it with T.

  After the kids fell asleep that night, I sat by the window resting from their relentless love. That’s the lonely time when you’re on your own with children. I picked up Jimmie’s peashooter and some dried peas and blew as hard as I could. The first time the pea rolled out the end and fell on the sidewalk. I kept blowing peas until I learned to puff my cheeks and put some lungs into it, to get some distance and loft. I aimed for the cenotaph, Our Glorious Dead. It was far and high and I had about no chance. I pushed my whole body out the window and thought, You better not fall out. Who’d take care of them then? I could see Diamond Jim’s and the Palace Theatre and the Capitol. I could see Birks and the clock tower on the south side, and down the street, the Connaught.