And now she is what? Philip
might
be leaving. How will she support herself and Gabrielle? She has to finish her screenplay. She could get at least three or four thousand in development money if she tried. Even if the film went nowhere, four thousand. There are avenues. A little low-budget video thingy. A seventeen-year-old girl in Stephenville going to art school, old army barracks buried in snow, the El Dorado Lounge, the Grim Reaper, losing her virginity, her father’s death.
The most erotic moment without touching: watching the nineteen-year-old boy, the first guy she’d ever slept with, sculpting a clay torso. Squeezing water from a sponge over the breasts, making the clay shiny like licked chocolate, a drip
hanging on the nipple, the slosh while he dips the sponge, the water hitting the clay with a patter; he talks to her while his muddy hands smooth the muscles in the torso’s belly, the ribs, the clavicle. He sponges the curve of the torso’s neck, and Eleanor’s hand creeps up by itself to her own neck, and they both notice and laugh. They laugh, but she is blushing, hot.
The screenplay was taking forever. The penultimate scene, a Halloween party in a sprawling bar. That much would be cheap enough to shoot. Sometimes she still thinks about feasibility. She used to think about it always. But the more true the script becomes — the closer she is to describing the loss she felt with her father’s death — the less she cares if it’s feasible. Sandra, the lead, is drunk in the penultimate scene. She has made up her mind to lose her virginity. The town is buried in snowdrifts; it’s a white film. White. Oh, the young girl Eleanor imagines playing the lead. Beautiful because she’s that strange mix of child and adult, a changeling, like all sixteen-year-olds, but ordinary-looking too. The camera will always be close up on her face. The boy Sandra has decided to sleep with, a student at the school, is dressed as the Grim Reaper. He goes to the bar for beer and another Grim Reaper comes to her table and takes her by the wrist.
Eleanor looks for Sadie, who is supposed to be at this wedding party but who is late. Always late. She’s in picture-lock, the message on the answering machine said. The film she’s working on; they’ve got the final edit. She won’t miss the potluck, she promises. I’ll be there, okay. She’s bringing Peach Melba isn’t
she? How could she miss the potluck? But it’s almost over already, the potluck, and there is no Sadie.
She and Sadie were not killed in the desert by talent scouts as Eleanor had thought they would be! Instead they were extras in a Bollywood movie. They met a harem of dancers. Women who had been trained in the art of classical Indian dancing since they were five years old. Women who wore pale pancake makeup to lighten their dark skin. Kohl around their eyes. Plump, luscious women who fell asleep on wooden benches at one o’clock in the afternoon, dressed in brown calico housecoats. The Vamp (in the dance number, she peeks coyly out from behind a palm tree, searching for the Prince she’s about to seduce away from his virtuous wife) had chased Sadie around the change room. Sadie letting out yelps, leaping over benches, the Vamp trying to pinch her bum, the other dancers squealing, shrieking. Sadie backing her bum into a corner, bent double with giggles. Moments later the dancers huddled together, whispering, and they turned as a group. What, Sadie demanded. The Vamp stepped forward: You both must shave your underarms, it’s terrible. To appear on film like that. Have you no shame?
There had been a poolside scene; a long line of dancers held striped beach balls over their heads and then fell sideways into the water, one after the other, like dominoes. Sadie and Eleanor among them, arms raised over their heads. Gloriously hairy armpits. They stood in line, the smell of chlorine and the burning sun, the music bursting into action, the Vamp shimmying to the water’s edge, tossing her gorgeous black hair, slitting
her sexy eyes at the camera, and one by one, the dancers fell into the water. None of them could swim. They began to drown as soon as they hit the water, the revved-up, hysterical music droning to silence, long black hair floating on the water, choking, coughing, panic. The cameramen reaching over the edge of the pool with poles. Sadie and Eleanor dragging the young women to the side, saving their lives after each take.
Eleanor walks across the lawn toward the house. She hears Dawn Clark’s voice above everyone else: I
know
the Net. You’ve got a demographic of nineteen-year-old males, what are you going to do, sell them walking canes? I don’t
think
so.
Eleanor goes inside, gets herself another beer from the fridge. She thinks, This beer will be the ruin of me. But it’s cold; the frost smoking off the lip of the bottle cheers her up. There is Philip. She walks over to him and lays her hand on his neck. He turns and looks at her, smiling while he talks. He has forgotten, for the moment, that he wants to leave her. Whatever he is telling Constance is more important. Eleanor and Philip are together at the potluck. They might go on forever. They are surrounded by friends. The rowers glide past on the lake. The room is full of flowers. The children are playing in their fancy clothes. Gabrielle waves to her from the lawn, the long grass combing her lemon dress.
Philip telling Constance about his book. Constance holding her forehead in her hand, elbow on the table. She taps a cigarette. She’s listening to globalization, still in the wedding dress.
The Swedes moving traffic from the left to the right side of
the road, Philip says, without a hitch, overnight. Things can change overnight.
Eleanor has an overwhelming urge to pour her beer down the back of Philip’s shirt. How dare he think of abandoning her. She has given up travelling the world with Sadie for him. They had promised to travel all their lives together, she and Sadie, no matter what. She has given up jungles, and rides in rubber dinghies in murky lagoons, and pyramids. Why had she ever given up being who she was to love Philip? (He knows everything, everything, and is handsome, his big hands on the cheeks of her bum, last week she came in from a rain that bounced like ball bearings on the pavement, the house booming with Glenn Gould, so loud it was tactile, in the banister, in the linoleum, the Goldberg Variations, she yelled his name, and waited, and yelled again, but he couldn’t hear over the music and the shower and the rain and up the stairs two at a time, her coat, a boot, her sock, her shirt, the jeans — dropping them as she went — the other boot, the sock, the underwear, the bra, and she stood on the other side of the shower curtain, waiting, listening, the bathroom foggy and hot and the leaves of the spider plant on the windowsill trembling from the music, she got in silently, he was standing with his eyes closed, his hands resting on his chest and she cupped his balls and his eyes flew open and he screamed. He scared her so much she screamed, and they stood as if electrified, her hand on his balls, screaming into each other’s face, then laughing, then fucking, the wet slap of their bodies.) He thinks it’s wrong to stay in a relationship if you are
in love with someone else. He does not believe in
weathering through
, or
for the children
, or
because you promised
. He believes, simply, in doing what you want.
First of all, Philip doesn’t believe in anything. He believes strongly in not believing in anything. He believes Eleanor’s whole problem is that she wants so desperately for there to be a
right
way. She has been too chicken-shit to shed this last vestige of her Catholic upbringing: the desire for a universal moral code, which, once understood, leaves only the small matter of putting it into practice. If he were to believe in something, it would be: admit what you want; get what you want. This line of action requires great stores of bravery. Apparently it’s not as easy as it sounds. But to do otherwise, Philip believes, sets in motion a whole chain of actions and events which totally fucks up not only your life but everyone’s life with whom you come in contact. To do otherwise is to act dishonestly.
There is something so blazing and committed about this baldly self-centred stand that Eleanor loves him all the more for it. She refuses to love him less. He’s stuck with her. He is what she wants.
Eleanor goes back out on the lawn. Glenn Marshall is where she left him. She’ll tell Glenn Marshall about the Taj Mahal, the warm marble and smell of feet. They’d seen a man levitate in front of the Taj Mahal.
But Glenn loves Newfoundland. He doesn’t like heat, prefers cool weather. He wouldn’t want to be on top of the Pink Palace with lithe monkeys. She has told him before, she suddenly remembers. She has told him that story before, about the
Bollywood movie. Glenn Marshall had been mildly interested. He had listened, but he shook his head and said he’d never go there. Why would he? He loves Newfoundland. As if there were just the two choices: the Taj or Little Island Cove. He loves being in the woods by himself, he has a cabin, can build a leanto, set snares; he does some ice fishing, he likes the quiet.
Who is she kidding, she could never love Glenn Marshall. But if she slept with him. Maybe if she slept with him. Things can change overnight. The entire city of Stockholm, was it? Driving on the other side of the road as though they always had.
Frank Harvey says, And I had an epiphany, alone in Bannerman Park on a Sunday afternoon. I realized it was
okay
to be an asshole. I rushed out to tell my wife about the affairs I’d had, you see, I had already forgiven myself.
What was Glenn Marshall’s most erotic moment without touching? Eleanor can only think of the galloping moose. He had kissed her on New Year’s Eve and said, How do you like a moustache?
Ted says, Constance sent me flowers in the middle of a rainstorm — someone announced it over the intercom at the bookstore. I was in the back room tearing off the covers of old Harlequin romances. A big box of white roses.
Ivory, says Constance.
The salesgirls falling all over themselves to find a card, says Ted.
The first night Eleanor slept at Philip’s apartment; walking up the steep hill from Kibitzer’s, broken beer bottles glittering by the curbs, someone’s white bedsheets flapping on a line. She walked under the sheets, the damp cotton stiff with frost when it brushed over her face. She turned to watch him, a big hand bashing through, the clothespins pinging into the air, and then the rest of him tumbling, falling. They were twenty-one and he had a three-year-old daughter. A light came on in the row of public housing, then another. They were rolling down the hill in the sheet. Grass, mud, stones, sky, stars. The sheet wrapped around them like a cocoon they wriggled out of together.
A snowy afternoon at four o’clock; walking past the war memorial with his three-year-old child on her shoulders, Eleanor counting change for a block of cheese. They had the macaroni already. They were a family overnight, some sort of family. The change in her hand just enough! The child’s shiny red boots hanging beneath her chin. Dusk swooping down on Duckworth Street, the second-hand bookstore still lit. Slush seeping into her boots. Holding tight to the child’s ankles. Later, the steam rising from the pot in the kitchen, she and the child painted fish on the clear plastic shower curtain. The who-she-was disappearing fast, gobbled by the who-she-is.
Frank Harvey says his wife went insane with jealousy when he told her about the affairs.
I’ve avoided women like that ever since, jealous women. I can smell it, and if I get even the faintest whiff, I’m gone a
hundred miles in the other direction.
He sounds so right, Eleanor thinks. She vaguely understands that everything Frank Harvey says is informed by the year of silence he spent in a monastery in Korea. Frank Harvey, the mime, had not spoken for an entire year of his life. It helped, he’d said, that no one spoke English. Cut down on the desire to blurt, he’d said. You come to understand the sublime beauty of chitchat, the fragmentary, absurd, chaotic, feral meaninglessness of everything we say. Whatever else about Frank Harvey, he is a talented mime. He can do the glass wall thing, of course, and the Michael Jackson moonwalk, but he can also run on the spot in slow motion as if he were being chased in a nightmare, his bones melting, and then he is caught and devoured by some unnameable monster you can almost smell. He can hold invisible animals in his hands, quelling their struggles for escape. She loves how convincing Frank Harvey is. Convincing is the thing to be, Eleanor decides; it doesn’t matter what you’re convincing about.
I came to love talk, Frank Harvey says, I live for it. And I learned how to tell a joke, he says. You must never telegraph the laugh. Let the material do the work. The best joke I ever told, I waited a year to deliver the punch line.
What was the joke, Tiffany White asks. Tiffany is a bright, new nurse who has arrived from Thunder Bay. Eleanor realizes she is taking Frank seriously.
That was the joke, says Frank Harvey. You didn’t get it?
What was?
The joke was it took a year to tell the joke.
Frank turns back to Eleanor. We parted after that, he says, speaking of his wife. There was nothing left to salvage.
It’s some Buddhist idea of Frank’s, Eleanor thinks, we can’t possess each other. We shouldn’t even want to. She has an ache in her chest as if she had been Frank Harvey’s wife, the one he had cheated on a thousand million times. She wants to defend herself against his airtight argument, that jealousy is vile. What kind of man doesn’t talk for a year?
Constance takes a tray of honey garlic meatballs from the oven. The woman with the blond ponytail is sitting next to Philip. Amelia Kerby from British Columbia doing a PhD on Canadian ecofeminist novels. A gold lame dress: she had met Leonard Cohen in Greece, had somehow gotten invited into his limousine as it pulled away from a concert. Fans tearing open their blouses and squashing their breasts against the car windows as they pulled out of the garage.
She says, I put my hand on his crotch, he was wearing black leather pants, and the sun through the window made the leather hot. I couldn’t help myself.
Eleanor: Your hand on his crotch, that’s not without touching. It’s supposed to be an erotic moment without touching.