“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“It’s all right if you’re a grateful person, but I’m not. So I look for faults. I find things wrong with him. I blame him for not arousing enough love in me to make up for all my bad qualities. It would be a relief to be with someone rotten.”
“Not for long,” said Dinah.
And once again, Harriet felt glad to have Dinah in her life. Usually with people you were in one element and they were in another. You were a fish mouthing words to fowl. But Dinah was a fish too. They swam along comfortably, side by side. Harriet said, “I just wish he wouldn’t smile so much.”
“But why does Mr. Bingley smile? Why does Jane Bennet smile? Because they’re happy? I don’t think so.”
Dinah had Harriet’s attention. “You don’t think so?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re as bad as Lew. What do you think, you infuriating woman?”
“They smile to ward off their ridiculous families. Jane Austen was surrounded by hypochondriacs. She knew how people protect themselves.”
“I should have thought of that,” said Harriet.
That night, when she lay down beside Lew and turned out the light, he said into the darkness, “I love you.”
“What prompted that?” she asked.
“I felt you drifting away.”
“When?”
He didn’t answer.
“Now? Earlier? All the time?”
“Just now. Earlier. Like there’s nothing between us.”
“And then we drift back,” she said.
“That’s why I said I loved you. To bring you back.”
Sometimes, passing through the living room, he sees her curled up on the sofa, bathed in the flickering blue light that makes her grow, irrevocably, away from him.
Tropism
. He remembers the word from school.
What he can’t remember is the moment when she first began to watch videos alone, taking pains to make sure he wasn’t in the room, though less overt than she is now with her suggestions that he go elsewhere. “Weren’t you going to bed?” she’ll say. Or,
“You should be in bed!” But he suspects the trouble goes back a long way, to the years they lived in New York City (where he worked for a small architectural firm, but only part-time, since even then architects were going the way of trains and letters), and their ground-floor apartment was so dark and narrow it could have been an art cinema. They set up their first
VCR
at the midway point of this long, dark passage. On the other side of the
VCR
were the pigeons in the air shaft, and beyond the pigeons, five feet away, the peeling wall of an abandoned building. As luck would have it, the best video store in the city was just down the street, and for Harriet, he remembers, this was Shangri-La.
She told people it was like an old-fashioned library, every movie encased in a neat black box and filed on shelves that went from wooden floor to high ceiling. Droopy-eyed Don worked behind the counter. He knew every movie ever made. Once he had actually shaken hands with John Wayne, and another time he’d gone to a party where Hermes Pan was the special guest. “What was he like?” she asked, and not of John Wayne. She was working her way through the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers oeuvre and knew that Hermes not only choreographed the dances but practised with Fred, filling in for Ginger until they perfected the moves, at which point Ginger was allowed in to practise. “A flaming gay,” said Don. “And Fred?” “Who knows?” he answered. “He had two kids with his first wife and he was devastated when she died. Have you watched
Picnic
yet?”
It was in New York where she first began to watch the same videos repeatedly, giving herself up to the lengthy seductions made possible by the new steam engine of romance.
A Room With a View
, for instance. She rented it on a Friday and watched
it that night, then thought about it all weekend while they visited friends in the country – the scene on the hillside when George Emerson comes to Lucy through the waist-high barley and takes her in his manly grip; the scene in the hotel when he comes down the corridor as she opens the door, and their faces leap with desire. She thought about the scenes and anticipated the pleasure of watching them again, for such was the beauty of this new invention that multiple viewings were possible, and at will. But how to rent the movie again right away without appearing to be what she was? A lunatic? She would control herself. She would be indirect. She would read the book. “Ah,” laughed Lew as he passed her reading in bed, “the movie again.”
The trouble was, the book diluted the movie. The movie had covered her with a patina of romance, and now the book lay heavily upon that and made her want to see the movie even more, to shake off the book. No, she would have to wait for Lew to go away and then rent it again. His first trip, and she was out the door like a shot. Liberated – starved even – but ashamed of herself. She was no better than the blue-rinse ladies who used to hang out with the sourpuss librarian in her youth and hog all the Harlequins.
Then one cold day, in the fall of the year, thumbing through bad books about Hollywood in the movie stacks of the library, she came upon the writings of Pauline Kael.
Have I ever told you the story of how I discovered you? How one Saturday morning at the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library, when Jane was hopping about in pre-ballet at the 63rd Street Y, I opened up one of your books and found your essay about Cary Grant: “The Man from Dream City.” Within seconds, I was beside myself with joy. So this is allowed! I thought. So it isn’t altogether stupid! You loved Cary Grant
too, and unashamedly. But you loved him in a hardbitten way, condoning our addiction and wondering at it and mocking it, but above all understanding it. A woman with the courage of your romantic, skeptical, humour-filled convictions. That’s when I began to write to you, sometimes on paper, often in my head, your company as freeing as the movies, but more bracing, and without the aftertaste of guilt
.
For the most part Lew leaves her alone with her movies, but occasionally, late at night, he’ll stand for a moment behind her, or sit to one side with the paper, aware of her discomfort as she holds herself still, willing him to go away, and as testy as someone who wants to be alone with a lover. He could write a treatise on the effect of
VCRS
on romance and marriage: to bring the unattainable into your home, to watch it repeatedly, to fast-forward to the hot spots again and again, to press the zinger of romance until you were well and truly electrocuted – all this he could write about at length.
One morning, on the bus headed downtown, he saw a young man reading a book called
1001 Ways to be Romantic
. He was on Number 66: Flowers. A fellow of average height in a long tweed coat, light brown boots, dark hair, moustache, wire-rimmed glasses. He held a briefcase in his left hand, the book in his right – open to Number 66 – and leaned against the pole for balance. Lew looked over his shoulder as he squeezed by.
“What did they cost?” she asked, arranging the roses in a vase.
“Price is no object,” said Lew.
“Now that’s a silly thing to say,” she said.
A woman without a romantic bone in her body, until she sat down in front of a movie, that is. Context is everything, he thought. Or proximity. Hang Picasso in an art gallery and you have a masterpiece. Hang him in the shed, and it’s a scrawl by Percy the neighbourhood nose-picker. In the wraparound presence of a movie, his wife yielded every ounce of her common sense. After the movie ended, she was even tarter than before. Tart, peevish, out of sorts.
“If you do this again, I’ll skin you alive.” She often spoke like that, overdramatic and savage, but what did it amount to? The first time they met she was so fierce he couldn’t have imagined her present retreat from the world. They met in Italy the summer she was nineteen. She was working in the kitchen of her Aunt Leah’s villa, a film institute with a guest house where he was staying for a week, when one morning Leah’s stepson, beefy Jack, insulted Leah (who wasn’t even there) and Harriet punched him in the nose. Ice had been necessary. Later that night, while all the other guests were beside the pool, she said to Lew, “I don’t even like Leah. She’s an awful person.”
“But you like Jack?”
“Jack?
I like him even less.” Her bewilderment touched him, and her temper bewildered him.
Ten years later he saw her again. This time she was reading a biography of Sean Connery and blushed crimson at being caught. They were in Montreal, in a café so crowded he asked if he might share her table. She looked up at his oddly familiar face, glad to return to reality since the book was so terrible.
(Thinking about all the movie-star biographies I’ve read, I have to ask
if they’re so bad because bad writers write them, or because movie stars are so boring? I wish you’d take over. Please get cracking.)
For his part, Lew was amused by her book and beguiled by the blush, since it vanished as reluctantly as a headstrong sunset. Rather shyly, she explained that although Sean Connery was her first love, she also had room in her heart for Fred Astaire. In other words, she had an open mind.
The third time he saw her, which was the very next day, blood was running down her fetchingly long, slightly knock-kneed legs. She was standing on the porch of her first-floor apartment on rue Crescent as he came up the sidewalk, and he asked her what happened. She came down the steps, smiling, and held out her hand, which he took.
“Your legs!” he said.
She looked down. “Oh. I shaved them in your honour. Aren’t they beautiful!”
Bruegel’s
Hunters in the Snow
was above her sofa. He looked at it while the tap ran in the bathroom. Then she was by his side again. She said, “Hemingway said he learned how to write about landscape by looking at Bruegel. What do you suppose he meant?”
Nothing she has done since then has lived up to those fiery beginnings, but he likes to think the potential is there.
Harriet is less sanguine. “You know what we’re like?” she said to him once, looking up from the book she was reading to the kids. “Jack Sprat and his wife. You won’t be sad, and I won’t be cheerful.”
But physically, they are similar. Tall, thin, built like greyhounds. He, an affectionate man whose wife commits safe
adultery with every movie star under the sun. She, a dreamy soul, deprived of movies as a child and making up for it now.
Outside, he catches sight of Dinah Bloom and they raise their hands in mutual despair about the weather. “I wasn’t made for this,” she says with her wild, beautiful laugh. “Just look at your heavenly tan.”
“Cuba,” he smiles.
“And you didn’t take me with you.”
Dinah is wearing a red winter coat fastened with several black braided loops. “Frogs,” he observes, illustrating his point by touching one, and sniffing, as if the loop were all that interested him. He hunches his shoulders against the cold. “Used to be common before zippers,” he says. An expert on materials of all kinds.
Sometimes, in the evening, they walk together, Dinah out with her dog, Buddy, and Lew (working off an affection for dogs thwarted by Harriet’s allergies) with Fiona Chester’s old collie, Buster. They’re a slow-moving foursome, poking along, noticing things on the street, exchanging horror stories about work, bits of gossip that Lew passes on later, if Harriet asks, and she usually does. On their walks they redesign the neighbourhood, replacing the epidemic of antique shops with a hardware store, a magazine-and-cigar store, a stationer’s, a grocery store, a theatre, a post office, a good bakery, a dance hall. Often Lew stops to examine the surfaces of things. “I get that from my dad,” he says, his dad having been a building inspector for the City of Montreal. “He was always stopping to point out the way bricks were laid, or stones.”
Now, with the northeast wind cutting right into him, Lew surprises himself by saying, “Dinah? What should I do about Harriet?”
O
f the few movies she managed to see, she recalls in most vivid detail
From Russia with Love
. One summer’s night, when she was twelve and her father was away (repairing the rotten teeth of native children on James Bay or of welfare kids in Vancouver: the charity work he did every August), her mother relaxed the reins and let her go.
It was evening when she went down the hill to the Berford Theatre on main street, and dark when she headed back up the hill, and darker still when she lay down on her bed, overwhelmed by the experience of Sean Connery’s hard, humorous eyes and hairy chest. There was the cruelty of the movie, the speed, the enormous fan. The flagrant sex, the glitter, the hard-edged tenderness followed by the near indifference. She had never seen anything like it, and yet it was familiar. That is, Sean Connery’s body was familiar.
When she sat in the dental chair under her father’s shadow and closed her eyes, when she opened her mouth wide for his fine, long fingers to prod, lift up, examine her tongue, teeth, and
gums, then there was something similar in his quick, decisive actions and his jesting, man-of-few-words manner. Once, in anger, he had taken a dental knife and whipped it at the wall, where it stuck fast. Her father went through many nurses.
Earlier there had been
The Country Girl
. Grace Kelly, William Holden, Bing Crosby. Which her mother took her to see when she was five. Miracles occur. Her mother, having given birth to her sixth and final child only two months before, was desperate to get out of the house, and on this first outing she elected to take along the last child but one – Harriet Lily – who had been displaced by the baby Owen. This time it was spring and they wore their coats.
Grace Kelly was very severe. She wore glasses. She slapped William Holden’s face. Her husband, Bing Crosby, was down on his luck, and a drunk. Or was Grace Kelly the drunk? Empty bottles rolled out from under the kitchen cabinet. All this happened because they had lost their beloved son under the wheels of a car when they weren’t paying attention. Grace Kelly could have gone off with William Holden, who was deeply in love with her, but instead she ran after Bing, in the rain? while William Holden watched from an upstairs window.