The first night she and Philip slept together, he was sitting in an armchair and she sat on the frayed arm, in a homey downtown bar.
The Last Tango in Paris
was playing on a snowy screen bolted above the bar. Brando with the butter. Maria Schneider, those breasts. Empty apartment. The French are forever living in empty rooms with high ceilings and open windows, curtains.
Sadie’s boyfriend, Maurice, has such an apartment. He wanders around it all day with a glass of something, and sighs, and writes something down, and wanders around the apartment some more. For this he gets a fair bit of money. As far as Eleanor can tell, that’s all he does, but Eleanor doesn’t speak French, so. Schneider’s heels clattering on the tiles, the butter. The last movie ever about pleasure, expansive, extravagant, expensive, anger-incited, dangerous pleasure. Or pain. She isn’t sure now.
At night in a hotel in Southern India, Bangor, monsoon rains drilling rivets in the corrugated tin roof, a week after the movie shoot; Sadie shook her awake. Sadie had opened her diary to an empty page. She was running her fingers through her hair and lice fell onto the clean paper. All those drowning dancers had lice.
We have them now, Sadie said.
Long shiny black ropes of hair floating in the aqua water, covering Eleanor’s face and arms as she dragged the drowning dancers to the poolside after each shot.
You have them, said Eleanor. I don’t have them.
The next day they were at a train station. Eleanor went to buy a drink and the train started to pull away without her. It was halfway out of the station gathering speed. Sadie’s voice from a dark window, already in the white sun of the countryside, Jump on, jump on.
Eleanor ran and a soldier in khakis with a rifle leaned out of the last car and offered her his hand. He pulled her aboard,
and she yelled into the countryside, rice fields flashing in the sun, I’m on the train, Sadie. Then she sat down on a sack of grain and hung her head, feeling her fast-beating heart and, at the nape of her neck, the crawling lice.
Eleanor opens her eyes and pulls the heel of her sandal slowly out of the mud. She has been out on the lawn most of the afternoon. She can feel the heat of a late summer sunburn. She turns, looks up at the bedroom window.
Constance and Ted have disappeared. And this is Ted’s story, she thinks. His stepfather woke him with the tip of a kitchen knife pressing into his windpipe when he was fourteen. Ted inching his back up the wall, his palms squeaking against the floral wallpaper, until he’s standing on tip-toe, the knife pressing hard into his throat. The most terrifying moment.
Ted says, My father died when I was three. After my stepfather arrived we weren’t allowed in my mother’s bedroom. That’s why I let the children sleep with us whenever they want. They just pile in, all four of them and the dog. Constance can’t stand it.
She hasn’t seen Ted or Constance for an hour or more. They must be making love. Consummating the marriage. All the guests on the lawn filling their faces. The wedding dress on the hardwood floor, a sinking angel food cake.
Ted’s brother Earl, a hulking rugby player, leans over the railing of the verandah, a champagne glass in his giant ginger-root hands, as delicate and incongruous as an icicle. Earl had gone to
New Brunswick with his wife after a bankruptcy; he had five children. He worked in a cola factory for a time and was electrocuted while moving an industrial appliance. Enough electricity to lift him off his feet, blow him across the floor, and smash him against the wall. The moment you came closest to death.
He says, I lived because I kept my eyes open. If I’d closed my eyes I would have completed the circuit, and self-combusted, and this is the truth of what happened, whether it’s scientifically true or not.
When Earl recovered he bought himself a small wooden table where he could sit and write poetry. He wrote several poems every day and understood his interest to have been ignited by the bolt of electricity. He called Constance late at night and read her the poems long distance, and she boxed up all her Eliot and mailed it to him.
Eleanor has imagined, ever since she first heard the story, that the electrical bolt had blown through Earl, back into his past, powering the restaurant he ran, the jobs he gave all his friends, including Eleanor (who once dropped a bowl of cod chowder down the back of another waitress), reached all the way back to the moment when his stepfather held a knife to Ted’s throat, and protected Ted in a web of blue crackly light. Because Earl, with his near seven-foot height and boulder chest, wasn’t a talker. Ted did the philosophy degree; Chad, the youngest, roamed the country with his thumb, became a clothing designer; and Earl protected, just as he was doing now, leaning on the verandah, the glass tipped, his eyes squinted against the glare of the lake.
Eleanor says, What do you think grace is, Glenn?
She’s thinking, if she could attain grace, even for a moment, everything would fall into place. The scenes of her film script would snap together like a Rubik’s cube, the scales would fall from her husband’s eyes, and he would recognize how lucky he was to have her; Frank Harvey would return to his wife, or at least call and tell her she had been right all along. All women would be right. Glenn is watching Earl too. He doesn’t speak until Earl turns and walks through the screen door, holding his fingertips against the wood frame so it doesn’t bang.
Below Constance’s bedroom window, the sunroom window. She sees a white streak that might be Philip’s shirt.
Weasels don’t come in white, Glenn says.
The one in my mother’s house was white. It might have been a mink. Like spilled milk. My mother stood on the kitchen counter and it ran through the rungs of the chairs under the dining-room table.
I don’t believe it, he says.
But you believe Leonard Cohen and the squashed breasts? You believe Amelia Kerby?
Amelia, Eleanor overheard while getting her beer from the kitchen, has also made a smallish fortune designing aromatherapy atomizers to squirt (mist, was the verb Amelia used) in the faces of colicky babies to shut them up (encourage serenity, Amelia said). The gold lame dress was shipped from Paris; it had been packed in helium.
What have you got in those atomizers, asked Constance. Agent Orange?
Amelia’s uncle was a marine biologist. She had written a novel about eco-conscious cyborgs, a moral tale as yet unpublished because Amelia hasn’t decided who to go with, apparently. She had bumped along the floor of the Atlantic in a two-person craft. There was nothing much to see down there, she said. It was dark.
Eleanor wants to tell Glenn Marshall she remembers him touching her back at the Ship Inn. Does he remember it? His hand on her back, a pulse of neon lighting up her bones, her hip, her ankle, all through. Once she heard Leonard Cohen dedicating a song to all the people who had conceived children listening to his music. The elegant arrogance of it. But Gabrielle was conceived that way. An attic bedroom in Toronto during a heat wave, a fitted bedsheet working its way off a coffee-coloured futon, she and Philip satiny with Toronto sweat. The whole day walking Yonge, crowds, bursts of music, exhaust, neon in daylight, sex shops with things she’d never seen before, battery-operated vaginas that could smoke a cigarette, the smell of hotdog stands. A food wrapper blew against her shin, squiggle of ketchup. Pastry shops. Even the breeze was hot. The sidewalk where they lived covered with blossoms. All part of their lovemaking, and Leonard Cohen singing about Joan of Arc.
Make your body cold, I’m going to give you mine to hold
.
They had a tiny fan jammed in the window that did nothing but make a noise that she felt on the edges of her teeth. This was the cement of her love for Philip: this attic room, the swelter of summer, Newfoundland a gazillion miles away. She
went with him to write her first film script. She’d written a naked skydiver. Swinging like a lazy pendulum beneath the big red bulb of a parachute, the sky behind utterly blue.
She had dreamed a skydiver, and he compelled her to make him real. The room she and Philip shared was so small that when they both sat at their desks the backs of their chairs touched. He went to the university during the day, and when it started to get dark outside she would listen for his footsteps on the sidewalk under the window. Listen for his key, the sound of his knapsack hitting the floor, the zipper of his jacket, the Velcro of his sneakers, the cats rubbing against his legs. She anticipated him. Tried to piece together who he was, and he was this: the cracked leather of the knapsack, dusk, clammy heat, the sound of coffee beans being ground in the kitchen. The unrelenting desire to fuck. She promised herself all day she would wait for the little things, the kiss, to take his earlobe in her teeth, unbutton his shirt, take a long time between each button — but her desire leapt all over itself, and she would want him inside her, couldn’t wait.
Glenn?
He might have fallen asleep. The children are throwing a Frisbee at the edge of the lake.
Eleanor says, I want to be full of grace. Then she’s embarrassed. What is she talking about, at a wedding? She is clearly drunk. She firmly reminds herself: You can’t be sexy and maudlin at the same time.
Glenn says, Grace is bestowed, you can’t will it.
Grace is bestowed. Everything worth anything is like that, she thinks. You can’t just know what you want and go get it, as Philip says. You wait. She closes her eyes. Watches the lake through her lashes. Wait for it to come to you. She can see the children, silhouettes, standing on the rim of the lake as if they will upend it. It’s only late afternoon, there’s still the evening, there’s more drinking to do. There’s a lot more drinking.
Frank Harvey says, It’s about identity. My wife started to think of herself as us. What we made up together.
Frank is right. You have to be able to be alone. If only she could sleep with someone else. Once at the Ship Inn she could have gone home with Glenn Marshall. That first time with Philip she thought: I will spend the rest of my life with him. She thinks, I have never questioned this, and I have acted upon it. I have built a twisted organic life around the assumption that Philip was meant for me. She imagines the great coral reef around Australia as her life — as if Philip is Australia and she has accrued around the fact of him. Coral accrues.
But she’s afraid to be alone. Gabrielle had been afraid last night too. What was it? Can she guess her father might be leaving them? (But he’s not leaving Gabrielle, he has explained this patiently to Eleanor several times, she keeps forgetting. But you’re leaving, aren’t you? I might be leaving, yes. You might be. Yes, and Gabrielle will come with me half the time. Gabrielle will go with you? You’re leaving and Gabrielle will go with you. Sure, she can be with me half the time. In some
apartment. Yes. So it’s me you’re leaving. I might be leaving you, he says. And you think that will be good for Gabrielle? He shrugs. It won’t be a good thing, he says, maybe a necessary thing. Gabrielle will be fine, he says. He turns back to the computer. He doesn’t let one thing overlap with the other. He might be leaving, but right now he has to work on his book about globalization.)
Gabrielle sobbing at the foot of their bed, her upper lip shiny with mucous. Eleanor let Gabrielle drag her down the hall. They stood in the doorway, she and her seven-year-old daughter. Eleanor saw the streetlight hit the dull glass of the hobbyhorse’s eye. She saw a rust-coloured flare thin as a needle in the button. Sinister and pulsing. Gabrielle terrified. It’s alive. It’s
thinking
. A horse’s head on a stick. The wind blew hard against the house, the windowpane rattled, and the fierce light, deep in the horse’s button eye, faded and went flat. Shadows of leaves tumbled over each other on the wall above the bed, like galloping hoofs, a spooked herd all turning at once. Gabrielle’s hand sweaty in hers, her face wet, nose running.
Eleanor thinks, I’m such a
dupe
. The shame she feels is so overpowering she could throw up all the red wine she’s been drinking, and the beer, and the goat cheese thingies. She could throw up over the red dress with its folds and beads. She decides she will go in there and kick Amelia Kerby and punch her, knock her teeth loose. I will cut her into pieces and wear a chunk of her around my neck on a rope until it rots. I will not speak to her, I will not notice her, I will be aloof, condescendingly
kind, I will invite her to dinner parties, rise above it all, befriend her. I’ll sleep with her myself.
Her skin gets cold, and she thinks just as suddenly, It’s not so bad. I’ll go to China. No one there will know Philip has left me. A clean, simple life in China. They’ll never hear from her again. Someone had gone to China already, that doctor whose wife left him. There was a rumour he’d remarried, he was happy, had new children. Chinese children. The rowers have lined up next to the buoys. A team of women in orange tank tops. They just float while the coxswain harangues them. A shrill whistle. Eleanor thinks, it’s very unlikely that I will go to China. Instead. Gradually, over time, I will get over Philip. My passion for Philip will cool. That’s what happens. People
get over it
. They eventually get over it. This is the worst thing: to imagine normal without him.
Someone places her hands over Eleanor’s eyes. Eleanor reaches up and touches the wrists. Sadie! Eleanor is so happy she feels sharp little tears.
You’re here.
Did I miss anything?
Amelia Kerby. She’s over there tossing back champagne.
The gall!
Gold lamé, the ponytail.
She looks short to me. Am I right?
Ecofeminist.
Hefty, I’m thinking.
Here on scholarship.
What’s with the tinfoil dress? How Walmart.
You think?
Sure I think!
She’s into aromatherapy.
Of course she is.
And bungee jumping.
He’ll get tired real quick.
Naked, they bungee jump on the West Coast.
Real quick.
Eleanor hadn’t taken the scene of the naked skydiver to the pitch meeting. She’d had a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and when the producers looked at each other and told her, as kindly as they could, that
a big record producer from the mainland sweeping a local girl off her feet
was a cliché, the cup trembled in Eleanor’s hand. She spilled hot coffee on her thumb. And she’d said, with her voice all funny, Well, originally he wasn’t a record producer. He wasn’t? No, not originally. What was he, originally? No, it’s too silly. Tell us. It’s expensive. Tell us. It’s impractical, dangerous, you couldn’t get anyone to do it. But originally you had something different? Well, I see him falling from the sky. This beautiful man. He’s handsome, strange-handsome not ordinary-handsome, and he’s got a beautiful body. Beauty is good. We should celebrate beauty, and he’s naked, that’s the hard part, he’s naked. Naked skydivers, they have them. There are such things. There was an ad in the
Telegram
, and my friend, Sadie, she decided she wanted to jump when she saw the ad. She wanted something big and dangerous. Just their bums in
the paper with the parachutes wafting behind, a promotional ad. Sadie had to do a one-day course, how to land, bend your knees, and then there she was hanging on to the wing, the guy in the plane yelling at her, Jump, and her yelling back, Jump? And him yelling, Jump! And her still yelling, Jump? And finally the guy in the plane, he leaned out and he just edged her feet off the step with the side of his shoe, he basically pushed her feet off the step, and she let go, and that was it. So Sally — my character, Sally — is driving along a country road and she pulls over because she sees something, she gets out, and it’s a naked skydiver. The whole thing is about fate. Big theme, fate. Sally feels fated to be with him. She watches him fall, her hand over her eyes to block the sun. And he lands, and rolls, and gathers up the parachute, and lopes over to her, he’s loping. He’s out of breath. Buck naked. A naked babe. There’s this big field behind them and the sun, you know, going down.