Garbo Laughs (14 page)

He took hold of her arm with both hands, and squeezed.

“Whoa,” she said. He loosened his grip but continued to hold on, and she felt her arm get heavy, and then it started to ache. She smiled gamely, but it was like being electrocuted. Next time, she thought, I’ll offer him a block of wood.

F
riday nights, upstairs with his mandolin, Lew would hear them laughing down below and remember a time when Harriet was more like Dinah. When she edited books on economic theory for a small left-wing press. When she was so fearless in her job that she got herself sacked. When she even read Proust.

“Remember when you read Proust?”

“I never read Proust.”

“But there were volumes beside the bed …”

“I borrowed them from the library and returned them unread. I was just pretending.”

Since then – those intellectual glory days – movies had engrained her with Peter O’Toole’s every wrinkle and Sean Connery’s every hairline. Sometimes she joked that she was
another Miss Havisham. The clock had stopped when Cary Grant died.

In the first week of December, when Dinah wasn’t answering the phone or returning calls, something she did periodically, Kenny had the idea to invite Jack Frame to the Friday-night movie club. They had dubbed their club the Fern, in honour of Dinah’s old movie house. “He knows movies,” Kenny said. “He really knows them.”

Lew said, “And he never lets you forget it.”

“But you like him?” asked Kenny, with the anxious tone he brought to such matters.

“I like him fine.”

“He talks too much,” said Harriet. “Talks too much? He writes too much, that’s his problem. Actually, it’s my problem.” And her voice was savage. “No,” she said. “He’d want to see movies I couldn’t bear to watch and I’d end up wringing his neck. We’re not having him.” And she stomped upstairs.

Lew said to Kenny, “She’s worried about her class.”

“Yeah.”

“Kenny, did Dinah say she was going to be away?”

“Is she away?”

Upstairs at her desk, thinking about Jack’s simple eloquence in person and his gassy grandiloquence on the page, brooding about his treacherous presence in her class, Harriet wrote,
Something happens. He can’t be direct when he writes. He can’t even be grammatical. But it’s not the first time I’ve noticed this paradox. Someone sad in person will be funny in print, or gallant in person, brutal in print. As if the act of writing puts him in touch with his other self. But wouldn’t it be nice if it put him in touch with both selves? This
new novel is like the others. Incest, amputation, and suicide play a queasy role, and every character is a fat cartoon that triggers his disgust. Writing brings out the worst in him, yet he’s dedicated to it, indefatigable. The sort who papers his room with rejection slips while becoming deeply, deeply bitter
.

Who is he going to take out his anger on?

After a moment she added,
You see, he sends his books to me. I am his reader. It’s like being his mistress
.

And then the phone rang, and it was for her.

She picked up the extension in the hallway and heard his soft voice. “Harriet, this is Jack.” An unnerving voice, the tonelessness of which she only noticed on the telephone. In person he sounded full of life, a smart, massive, opinionated, inordinately talkative man-between-wives. As they conversed, however, she realized that he was waiting for her. The more she warmed up the more did he. She became talkative, then, almost flirtatious, teasing him, and he responded in kind, until he said suddenly, “I’ve been angry at you.”

“Angry?”

“I thought we were very close, and you didn’t stay in touch.”

This bear of a man, who only drank tea. No coffee. No alcohol. He knew all about tea. He could be boring about tea.

I’ve been angry at you
, and the pieces fell into place. There had always been something sexual between them. The time he lay on her bed in that small room in Italy, asking her to wake him in half an hour, and when she did he reached for her hand. On some level she’s been running away from him ever since. All their subsequent encounters seemed to flow from that moment on the bed, when she realized that he had interpreted her punch in the nose as her way of making a play for him.

“I’ve been reading
Don Quixote,”
she said. “Have you read it?”

“You’re changing the subject,” he said softly.

“We’ve been out of touch for a few years. That’s not so unusual. It happens.”

“I saw the show and it broke my heart.”

“The show?”

“Man of La Mancha.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why did it break your heart?”

“Watching him go mad. Watching him pursue a love that was completely unattainable – that broke my heart.”

She was struck by the sad force of his answer, the grave sentimentality, and suddenly she felt grateful to him for quickening her interest, even though she still wanted desperately to get off the phone.

He said, “I dreamt about you last night.”

“Did you?”

“We were making love. Sally was furious.”

There was a pause. Then Harriet asked, “Was it nice?”

“It was fabulous.”

There was talk of a windmill on Dow’s Lake, a gift from the grateful Dutch that nobody wanted. Harriet wanted it. She wanted to hear through the hot summer nights the thud of heavy wooden sails turning in the wind just as they did in that old Hitchcock movie with Joel McCrea, the one where he realizes something is wrong because the sails are turning
against
the wind.

One morning she found herself in a coffee shop on Bank Street, having ordered the wrong thing: something small and expensive instead of the larger special that came with free coffee. So busy was she trying to figure out what a Turkey Temptation might be, and how it might differ from the Herby Turkey Bagel, she hadn’t seen the simple word
special
on the counter. Too many words, she thought, too many highways, and not enough dreams of recognizable places. The loss of a free coffee hurt.

Months ago Lew asked her to take five minutes and draw a map of Ottawa. Okay. She sat down with a sheet of scrap paper and drew a line for their street with a circled X for their house; then the connecting alley to Bronson Avenue; then Bronson Avenue itself as multiple lanes peppered with crosses inscribed
RIP
. Beyond Bronson she drew the trees of the Arboretum with a big square for the chip wagon on Prince of Wales Drive. On the right she brought the curving line of the canal into Dow’s Lake, beyond which she drew the wavy lines of the Gatineau Hills. On the left she made the Rideau River curve unrealistically but protectively towards the Arboretum, and below it all, under a straight line, she wrote
U.S.A
.

This was his wife’s world. A world defined by water, trees, roads, french fries, and death. He scratched his head. “How do you manage?” he asked, truly wondering.

“By being with you,” she said simply.

At his request Kenny and Jane drew maps too, and so did Dinah. Research, he said, as part of the course he was teaching about urban design.

“Ask them,” Dinah suggested, “to draw a map of something important. Their first kiss, for instance.”

“Their first kiss?” said Lew.

“Draw a map of where it happened. That will get them thinking about the concept of place.”

It got Lew thinking. Dinah’s map was still in his wallet, folded up and not forgotten. She had drawn Bank Street, accurately locating and naming every single bar.

Harriet, in her coffee shop, was a block and a half north of Irene’s Pub.
Grabbajabba
, she thought, looking around her: it should be the name of a boxing ring.
Sing Sing
, as Audrey so perceptively said to George Peppard: it should be an opera house.

She had ventured out to purchase an undershirt, but she would never find one. Undershirts weren’t made any more. Central heating had taken care of undershirts just as electricity had taken care of peace and quiet. It was as noisy as a truck in here. Perched on a tippy stool, trying to read her book, thinking about streets devoid of bookstores, of movie houses, of decent five-and-dimes, she recalled reading something that Salinger had said: Write about what you love. But what about what you hate? Why couldn’t that get a little press? Because then writers wouldn’t have an out. I wrote out of love, they say, while their victims writhe in agony on the floor.

As if on cue, she heard her name:
Harriet Browning
.

Startled, she closed her book.

Jack perched one heavy buttock on the stool beside her, and took the book out of her hands. Then, with a frown, he put it down.

“I like Chekhov,” she said.

“You would.” Jack gazed at her. “He’s a very measured writer.”

His eyes were cool, inscrutable, and she smiled. Was this a compliment or a measured insult from the least measured writer she had ever met?

“You don’t like him.”

“I prefer others,” he said.

What she did next was not a big mistake, but it was a mistake. She pedalled forward instead of backward. “Maybe it’s time to give Dostoevsky another try,” she said. Guessing correctly that Jack was a
Crime and Punishment
man.

She was at home when Jane got back from school. Jane told her that her French teacher hadn’t bothered to teach today. She showed a video instead.
Gandhi
.

“In French?”

“In English.”

“Why?” asked Harriet. “Why was she showing you a movie in English?”

“I don’t know,” Jane said. “And I’m not going to ask. She doesn’t like me anyway.”

“She doesn’t?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not really myself when I talk to her. I’m not really myself when I talk to lots of people. Does that happen to you?”

“It does. It happened today.”

Kenny would remember that his mom ate her grapefruit standing up. That she used a nail to test a cake for doneness,
“since what do you think they used before toothpicks?” That she said no when he tried to buy an Oh Henry! bar. “Do you know what Nestlé is up to?”

Until one day, when they were driving south on Bank Street, they saw a great yellow truck sail by with
OH HUNGRY
? painted on its side, and remembered, in unison, the moment in
Desire
when Gary Cooper comes up with the right slogan for the new American car that Marlene Dietrich is going to steal from under his nose.

The boy with the movie brain knew the scene by heart. “His boss says, I can’t decide between these two: ‘I’m
delighted
to drive a Bronson 8’ or ‘I’m
glad
to drive a Bronson 8.’ And Gary Cooper says,
Delighted
. That sounds snobbish. It’s too snooty. Then the boss says, So
glad
is better? And Gary Cooper says, If I bumped into you in the street, I’d say, ‘I’m glad to see you.’ No, I tell you,
glad’s
the wrong word.” Then Kenny madea grand sweep of his hand to indicate the sign on the back of Gary Cooper’s car, and said, “‘I’m
happy
to drive a Bronson 8.’”

“Is that what it was? A Bronson 8? You have an amazing memory,” said his mom, and Kenny, taking advantage of this propitious moment, inquired if she wouldn’t like to see
Toy Story
2, and she said, “Does it have Cary Grant in it?”

Together they would walk to the library to pick up
My Favorite Year
and
Man of La Mancha
, since some secret philanthropist had recently left his sizable collection of old movies to the public library. At the checkout counter, Harriet talked to the librarian with the bum knee and friendly manner who read the English papers and kept her up to date on Peter O’Toole. “He’s back on stage, acting in a play in the West End,” the
librarian said. And how are the reviews? “Not bad, I think.” Thank God for that, said Harriet.

On the way home, Kenny said aloud to himself, “‘If you can’t sleep, it’s not the coffee it’s the bunk.’”

“What brought that to mind?”

“I don’t know. It’s from a movie.”

“Christmas in July
. Preston Sturges.”