Ellen in Pieces (23 page)

“It’s Esther!” Larry yelled in the phone.

He didn’t get out of the car. Because Ellen did bear a grudge. Larry knew for a fact that she did. From where he sat, he couldn’t see Ellen when she opened up, only the back of his mother packaged in her pale blue pantsuit, her hair like icing. It seemed they were talking. Then the door opened all the way and Esther stepped inside and the door closed again.

Larry snapped the phone shut. He gave them five minutes, max.

He reclined the seat while he waited and, though he tried to rest his eyes, he kept glancing over to see if Esther had been expelled yet. Gerhard’s video installation played in a continuous loop on one side. (Larry pictured the oft-visiting German, shuddered.) In the window to the right of Ellen’s, a life-sized knitted raccoon crouched. It was both demonic and kitsch, though Larry was beholden to the woman producing this bizarre menagerie for taking Ellen’s dog at this difficult time.

And in the middle were Ellen’s pots, which he’d looked at many times without really seeing. Even when Larry and Ellen were married, Larry had paid no attention to Ellen’s pots. He remembered
eating out of them—at that time they were much chunkier vessels—but he couldn’t recall any specific one because they were unremarkable. If one fell to the floor and broke to pieces, not even Ellen cared. She gathered up the shards and flung them off the back stoop, which overlooked a sheltered cove. Those were their hippy years, living on Cordova Island, when Larry was writing plays. The broken pottery landed on the rocks and became even smaller pieces that were then washed away—like Ellen and Larry’s two-and-a-half-year marriage.

At some point between then and now, when, Larry couldn’t say—he hadn’t even known Ellen was turning pots again; she’d mostly worked as a publicist all these years—Ellen had had a breakthrough. Something to do with the airiness of the pots, their uselessness. Too small to be practical, not to mention full of holes, this was what gave them value. Yet he’d always considered himself the artist, even after he’d gone in the other direction, leaving theatre for television because at least his scripts got produced. Ellen’s pots sold for as much as two hundred now, though the ones in the window she wouldn’t part with.

He rubbed his eyes, blurring the three white pots. Ellen’s pots that were, practically speaking, priceless.

Eleven minutes. Ellen and Esther made Gerhard, the gay German skinhead, and Larry, the Jew with a backache, look like a love match. Yet they’d been in the same room for eleven
—twelve
minutes now. Soon there would be shouting. Larry would have to rush in. And who would he placate? Back then, there was no question he would run to Mother—but now?

Esther was probably unpacking. “Here,” she was saying, “remember this? Remember when you phoned? When Larry was supposed to be staying with me?”

“When he was really in L.A. with Amy? And I was pregnant?”

“Yes. Here. Take it,” Esther was saying and she put the thing in Ellen’s hands.

Ellen held it up at eye level. It was dense, like a fossil. Larry couldn’t quite visualize it, but he could see Ellen with the scarf tied around her head, her face gaunt and beautiful. She’d lost so much weight she was as thin as when they’d met back in university.

ESTHER: All I ever wanted? What any mother wants.

Larry scrambled through the glove compartment for something to write on. He wouldn’t remember. He’d already forgotten the idea he’d had driving through the park. Something about the shape of a feeling. Under the insurance papers was an old mileage log. He found a pen just as the thing in Ellen’s hands transubstantiated to nothing. To air.

But Esther’s baggage does not lighten because it contains something that can’t be easily lifted out.

ESTHER: I know we don’t have the same God.

They argue about this while Larry takes it down. Ellen doesn’t believe in God, of course. She tells Esther she has proof.

ESTHER: What proof? What?

ELLEN: Esther. It’s in your purse.

Esther digs down until she finds it. She finds it and blinks back tears. And all she can do now is concede the truth of Ellen’s position. Because no just God would ever allow it, that his people would hunger and all that would be offered to them were little packets of pretzels impossible to open.

H
E
wrote down other things. For example, that Ellen said he, Larry, was incapable of happiness. Untrue! He’d felt happy the last
few weeks. Ever since Ellen had phoned him on Cordova Island and explained her diagnosis—inflammatory breast cancer—and the grim treatment options. They discussed whether or not to tell Yolanda and Mimi. At first Ellen didn’t want them to know. Yolanda was busy with her kids—and Mimi? Who knew how Mimi would react. A week later Ellen did tell them, but during that first phone call, Larry had stopped listening. Because he’d already decided he would go.

Anyway, how happy could he be when Ellen was wretched? So not happy, no. Rather, he felt the way he used to in the middle of a play, as though life were dropping into his lap everything he needed to write it, and if he could just keep up his intensity of focus these gifts would continue flowing. Despite the fatigue, or because of it, he’d lived these last weeks in that same state, loving Ellen again, loving her all the way to remission.

Then he really had to get out of the car because reclining the seat hadn’t worked. Sit too long and you shall spasm: these were words he lived by. And if it happened that he spasmed, relief came only in the form of a small child walking on his back, preferably his grandson.

He stood beside the car to stretch and fiddle with the iPod. The store’s closing ritual had begun. The owner was moving the plants inside. The woman, Vietnamese probably, recognized him because Ellen insisted he buy something there every few days, as though she were personally responsible for keeping the seedy little place solvent. Larry voice-memoed this while the woman was inside. When she came out again, she smiled.

Esther spoke again and Larry repeated it into the iPod, adding his exegesis.

“‘Such promise he showed.’ Her point being that the only time I wrote anything worthwhile—the plays, I mean—was when I was with Ellen. As if
she
had thought of that. I told her as much myself.”
He crossed the street hoping to get a look in the studio, but the white curtain prevented him. Now he was close to the pots, face to face with them. She carved out the patterns freehand. With a tool, she’d told him, or a pin.

What you take away is more important than what you leave in.

He’d go around the block.

A lane ran alongside the row of studios. Larry had got that far when he heard a door opening behind him. It was the neighbour, the knitter with the forgettable name from next door, leaving with Ellen’s dog, a shin-high, black thing that reeked whenever it was brought to visit and barked in the night, always when Larry was just on the point of falling back to sleep.

“She didn’t even like
Talking Stick
,” he told his iPod. “Every time I mention it, she does that thing with her mouth.”

He tried to describe Esther’s mouth movements that had irritated him his whole life. According to Ellen, Mimi had inherited a version of it. Ellen had a term for it. What?

Later, when he replayed this monologue, there would be stammering and the sound of traffic on Fourth Avenue, where he was walking now among the flip-flopped mob streaming up from the beach to fill the restaurants and pubs. They looked so young, and were, he knew from their piercings and tattoos. Amber had a bruise-like mandala on her left shoulder, and in her right nostril, a stud. Once Larry had come across her in the bathroom with the stud out, picking snot off it.
What have I done?
he’d thought.

It was vaguely insulting, their youth and robust good health. “Speaking on behalf of pain sufferers everywhere,” he said into the iPod.

When he reached the end of the too-long block, he turned and left them to their pinkening sunset, their rosy futures.

Now a residential street lined with apartments. A woman three floors up was watering her plants. A man stood shirtless, in shorts, with a long fork in his hand, before a barbecue fixed to the balcony rail. Surely, surely, Esther and Ellen would be finished talking about whatever they were talking about, which Larry was beginning to suspect wasn’t him, after all. And as he walked he heard the laugh tracks of all the TVs surreally overlapping. Who was laughing? This was something he ought to know. Were there professional laughers? How much were they paid? And what was their suicide rate?

Ahead of him the weird, frizzy-haired knitting woman was returning with the dog. Larry deliberately slowed to prevent meeting up with her. Last time, he’d incited tears.

“What will I do?” she’d asked.

“When?” Larry asked.

“I love Ellen so much.”

“She’s going to get better,” Larry said.

“From Stage Four?”

And Larry lost it. “Have you ever been to a restaurant?”

“A restaurant?” she said. “Yes.”

“Have you ever ordered steak in a restaurant?”

“Not recently.”

“But you have.”

“Probably.” She brought her chapped hand up to her throat. “I’m confused.”

“Medium rare? Well done? Well done, I bet.”

“Maybe I haven’t ever ordered a steak.”

“Well, I have. I’ve ordered a steak many, many times. Rare. A hundred times. A thousand times. Yet how many times have I received on my plate, in a restaurant, the rare steak that I ordered in good faith?”

“I don’t know where this conversation is going, Larry.”

“Never! Never! They say rare, but they don’t know what they’re talking about! Do you get it now?”

Behind the googly glasses, tears. “No.”

“Well done. Stage Four.
It’s just a thing they say!”

She ran off sobbing. That was two or three days ago. Now the dog arabesqued against a light post. They moved on and Larry, still halfway down the block, walked normally the rest of the way back to Ellen’s.

Maybe he should go in and rescue her. The thing was, he really needed to lie down before his back seized up. If he went in and lay on the floor of Ellen’s studio it would seem attention-seeking. He’d find some grass and lie there until Esther came out. The grass in front of the studios was a mere strip. If he lay there, people would think he was drunk and call the cops.

Across the street, behind the corner store, a monster of a laurel hedge towered. He crossed and went over to it, checking underneath it first for dog shit. Got down on his knees, crawled under the branches, positioning himself so he was at least partially covered. From the fiasco of his marriage to Amber he’d salvaged at least something. Some useful yoga exercises. His back settled into the hard ground.

Corpse Pose.

A
ND
his eyes flew open. He was back with Amber. No, he was in Ellen’s loft. No. He’d been interred in some dark, loamy place, unable to move. When he did, when he attempted to sit up, he got a stinging face full of branches.

He pulled himself to his feet grabbing handfuls of leaves. His back screamed.

Night. The house the hedge belonged to, the apartments—all of them unlit. The corner store, closed. Then he remembered Esther and quailed, a boy again, terrified of her wrath, yet unable to resist provoking it. Crippled, Quasimodoed with stiffness, he limped around the front of the store. Across the street, light bleeding palely through Ellen’s white curtain.

And something moved in his peripheral vision. Something lumbered. Down Ellen’s street it came, a shape. A shape or a feeling? He couldn’t tell in the dark, could only make out its long squat form, a blacker shadow, a sort of nullness in the night. If Larry dashed across—presuming he could move that fast—he’d more than make it, but fear gripped him. Fear, then strangely—What? What? Because, could it be that all these notes and scraps of conversation, these half-formed jokes, his pensées for Ellen, were actually—? Finally? A play? A
devastating
play, the kind an audience crawled away from and sat in silent commiseration, never to be the same again?

He turned to look at the thing. Gone.

Larry crossed over. He crossed over and opened Ellen’s door.

She’d left a light burning in the kitchen, the one in the range hood. The large main room, scant of furniture, looked like a stage. On it Ellen reclined in the dentist’s chair, her bare feet sticking out her pyjama bottoms, her bruised arms limp at her sides. Her head was twisted awkwardly, the kerchief half off. Not a comfortable position. He’d taken it for sleep but now he froze. And there was Esther, laid out on the couch with her hands folded on her chest. On the floor beside her, her shoes and handbag, neatly lined up.

Act Two.

And the black dog next door barked. Which was when he noticed, thank God, the breath rising in them both.

I
can’t go,” Georgia said.

This was the night before the Bentall Four memorial. Gary was sending last-minute e-mails from bed, confirming the details, the laptop open, not exactly in his lap—he didn’t have one. When he looked at Georgia, his eyes rivalled an upturned baby seal’s in the shadow of a club.

“You didn’t go last year either, hon.”

“I have this healing thing with Ellen, remember? Ellen and Celine. I told you about it.”

On the bedside table Georgia kept a pot of beeswax-scented cream, which she applied nightly to her face. By lifting her chin and working on her throat she could evade Gary’s hurt. “And even if I didn’t? I don’t think I could. Not when I’m so sad about Ellen.”

An incoming e-mail pinged, acknowledging her winning response. What could he say? Cancer trumped everything.

He leaned in to comfort her, his beard rasping her honeyed cheek. It smelled, by contrast, sourly of the tacos they’d eaten that night. While managing not to recoil, Georgia did stiffen like a
toy soldier in
The Nutcracker
, the way her little community centre troupe had last month when putting on their Christmas show.

Gary said, “I understand.”

But, of course, he only thought he did.

F
OUR
men were working that day, January 7, 1981. Four men on Tower Four. (Only later, in labour circles, were they referred to as the Bentall Four; it made them sound like terrorists, Georgia thought.) Donald, Gunther, Yrjo, Brian. Ordinary working men standing on the almost-finished roof. A sunny day by all accounts, the sky mirrored back in Towers One through Three.

Georgia was eighteen in 1981 and dancing for Judy Marcuse. Gary was in law school. They wouldn’t marry until the next year. And Ellen, who was so much in Georgia’s heart these days, who seemed so intrinsic to her life, her right-hand friend, amazingly Georgia didn’t even know Ellen then. Ellen was living on Cordova Island.

The four men were pouring concrete when the fly form—a sort of movable construction mould—collapsed. In all Gary’s twenty-nine years of organizing the annual memorial, he used the same words to describe the accident. The men had “trusted” the fly form. They’d been working on it for months. Apparently people in the building trades had relationships with their tools and equipment despite the fact that the very screwdriver snugged in its leather loop, the fly form they balance on, verged daily on betrayal. And while Georgia didn’t know anything about such bonds, she couldn’t help thinking that neither did Gary. Not first-hand anyway.

She would never make light of the accident; it was a terrible thing. But the steady pitch of Gary’s earnestness over the last
twenty-nine years had left her just a little bit sick of it, especially now that Ellen was unwell. Gary had never even met those men.

Besides, all over the world, possibly every minute, people fell.

T
HE
next day Georgia waited in the rain outside Ellen’s studio. Celine’s car wasn’t there yet and Georgia didn’t want to intrude until she had to. She should have stayed in the car, except sitting was not her forte. She needed to
move.

She did some side stretches in front of the studio window, her five-foot reflection seeming more diminutive under the sunflower-patterned umbrella, hair massed in grey shoulder-length helixes. The window itself was empty, all Ellen’s beautiful pots sold or, knowing Ellen, given away.

Then the door opened and Larry stepped out counting a handful of change. For a second Georgia saw Larry, but not vice versa—baggy jeans, flapping shirt, silvering curls ebbing at the hairline. A melting weakness overtook her and she remembered all those years ago, not here but in Ellen’s North Vancouver kitchen, how he had glissaded out of the way so Georgia could set down her platter of blintzes.

He stopped short of a collision. “Georgia. Go in. I’m just getting some milk.” And he dashed across the street, hunched to delay the wetting, feet moving in comical side-to-side jetés.

Georgia stepped inside the studio. It smelled of clay, lilies, the sickroom. Ellen reclined on the couch surrounded by pillows, wearing a brightly patterned kerchief, which seemed to match the vases of flowers, fresh and unfresh, all around the room.

“What’s wrong?” Ellen asked before Georgia had even slipped off her rain boots.

“Nothing.”

Georgia hung her raincoat on the rack with Ellen watching, took a breath, came and perched on a chair across from her friend, her back to the door.

“Did you see Larry?”

“Yes. Just outside.” Georgia cleared an obstruction from her throat, a hard bead of emotion. An image popped into her head—a jawbreaker. The different layers of colour as you sucked, the anise seed in the middle, which, as a child, she’d spat out because she hated it. She was always surprised it was there, like the grain of sand in a pearl of sweetness, so bitter.

“Did he say something to you?”

“He said to go in. Why, Ellen?” Her hands flew up on their own, like flushed birds, so she sat on them.

Georgia had been about to change the subject, to ask Ellen how she felt about this healing thing with Celine, when the door opened behind her. Larry back from the store. Distracted by the heat coming off him as he entered, by the flustering air, her tongue stalled.

Larry headed to the kitchen. Ellen followed him there with her eyes and her besotted smile. The two of them, Ellen and Larry, giddily, show-offedly, in love.

It occurred to Georgia then, horribly, that Larry was going to stay for the healing meditation. Even his ensuing kitchen noises incapacitated her. How could she meditate with him in the room? She looked up and saw on Ellen’s face a subdued version of the smile she’d given Larry. Ellen seemed to be offering it, love’s residue, to Georgia as they waited for Celine.

More and more these visits trickled into silence. Even when Larry brought from the kitchen two mugs, which he set on the coffee table, toppling the get-well cards, none of them spoke. He
kissed Ellen’s mouth, kissed the kerchief on her head, went for his coat. Came right back and kissed her again while he was putting it on. Celine knocked. Of course Larry wouldn’t stay; those two couldn’t stand each other. He let her in, squeezed past. Gone.

Georgia untensed with relief. Her whole little body had been coiled like her hair.

“Is that coffee?” Celine whisked it away to the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “No coffee, Ellen. I’ve prepared a remedy. I’ll leave it on the counter.”

She bustled back, kissed Ellen, then gestured to Georgia to lift the vase of flowers while she pulled the coffee table away to make room on the floor. “Cross-legged,” she said.

First, the trial of sitting up. Georgia dashed over. After three tries Ellen managed to stand. “Can’t she lie down?” Georgia snapped.

“I’m okay sitting.” Ellen sank back onto the couch and let Georgia buttress her with pillows.

Normally, Ellen was the skeptic. Last summer when she announced her illness to them over lunch, she’d ended up savaging Celine, who did espouse some offensive beliefs, such as negative thinking caused cancer. Something turned that day in their stunned conversation. Ellen started hissing accusations—that Celine was glad she had cancer because it proved her dingbat theories. Now Celine could give her
herbs.
Ellen kept saying
herbs
derisively over and over until Celine fled the restaurant in tears, leaving Georgia to mediate their reconciliation with a dozen phone calls back and forth. Since then Ellen had submitted to the savagery of chemo and radiation and been rewarded by a seemingly miraculous remission. Then, at Christmas, back pain—the cancer resurrected in her bones. Now, with more chemo ahead, Ellen had opened herself to dingbattedness.

Georgia and Celine got down on the floor. Celine asked them
to close their eyes, to bring their attention into their bodies. “Feel the body you’re sitting in.”

Georgia opened her eyes to see if Ellen’s were closed. They were. She looked beautiful in the gypsy scarf, her skin tanned-looking, darker around the eyes. Celine wore a pale grey drapey sweater over leggings, her near-white hair gathered in a clip.

“Feel the substantiality of your physical body,” Celine said. “Its weight. Feel gravity acting on that weight. Pulling it down.”

Which reminded Georgia of what gravity had done to those four men. She checked at her watch; the ceremony had started. Gary would be lining up to lay a rose on the memorial plaque. Rain would be spattering the lenses of his glasses, concealing the fact that he was crying.

She glanced at Ellen again, hoping their eyes would meet this time, that Ellen might roll or cross hers so that Georgia could gently rebuke her with a furrowed brow.

“Receive the solidity of the body,” Celine said.

During the years of their friendship, Ellen had always been the solidest. Lately, though, her extra flesh had fallen away. She’d stepped out of it and kicked it aside as she undressed for death. What a terrible image. A burlesque.

“Breathe in and sense the strength and mass of your different parts. Head, shoulders, arms.”

When Celine referred to the body as “earthen,” Georgia suddenly smelled Ellen’s clay again. Then newly cut grass. She felt herself pressed down, only partially by gravity. This naturally made her think of a grave and how Ellen was probably going to die, and that she, Georgia, was bewildered by the specifics of it.

“Feel the torso, its mass and weight. The earthen quality of this body in which you live.”

The body, the body. The body on top of hers.

The meditation took half an hour, then Celine had to meet a patient. “I’ll call tonight, Ellen. We’ll set up another session. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Ellen said, stretching out on the couch and moving just her fingers in that air-grabbing way babies say goodbye.

Celine and Georgia hugged at the door. By the time Georgia turned back, Ellen was asleep.

Georgia lifted her raincoat off the stand, slid into it. And Ellen spoke again. In a soft, slow voice, eyes still closed, she said, “Thanks for coming.”

“Oh, Ellen. Do you think it will help?”

Ellen turned her head. The colours in her scarf seemed to bring out the blue of her eyes, sharpening them. She looked right into Georgia.

“It will help Celine,” she said.

G
EORGIA
decided to take the Lions Gate Bridge on the way back. Their house in North Vancouver was almost due north of Ellen’s studio in Kitsilano, equidistant to both bridges. Gary only used the Lions Gate to go downtown; otherwise, out of principle, he went by the Second Narrows, which he always referred to by its newer name, the Iron Workers Second Narrows Memorial Crossing.

She chose perversely against Gary’s principles (her choice of bridge being, in her opinion, unrelated to her stance on workers’ rights), then ended up driving right past the Bentall Centre at noon. As the clot of cars she was trapped in inched forward, she glanced up and saw, reflected in the curved glass wall of a much taller tower on the east side of Burrard Street, a familiar building
wavering like a mirage. And forgot to turn. The Bentall towers were of unequal heights, but all of them were surfaced in black glass with vaguely Doric concrete friezes. Starting with recognition, Georgia looked from the mirage, across to the actual Tower Four. If anyone remained from the memorial gathering that morning, they blended in now with the ordinary, ungrieving passersby.

With the thought of grief, Ellen’s words came back.
It will help Celine.

But what would help Georgia?

Craning to take in the whole height of the tower, she nearly swooned with vertigo.

I
F
Ellen hadn’t been pregnant the first time Larry left her, she and Georgia and Celine would never have become friends. They were too different—Georgia shy; Celine, at that time, before her baby died, glamorous; Ellen so Ellenish, with her long, bedraggled hair and her long, sacklike skirts and her desperation to tell her sordid story, over and over.

The details of Ellen and Larry’s breakup shocked Georgia. Then, after Yolanda was born, Georgia watched Ellen scramble. She bore witness to Ellen’s bitterness. Some people thought Ellen drank too much. Georgia thought so, but would never say it because, who wouldn’t in those circumstances? All Ellen had got out of the absconding Larry was the North Vancouver house. Georgia was lucky, married to the kindest man in the world, a man with principles who had sunk onto the delivery room floor and sobbed because he was implicated in her pain, then sobbed for joy with his first-born son in his arms, ruining all the pictures. Sixteen years after Jacob, when Maximilian was born, Gary repeated this performance.

Back then, during their early years as friends, Ellen would phone and Georgia would listen. Late into the night, Ellen would slur her explanation of what had attracted her to Larry in the first place.

“I’m from Calgary. The closest I’d come to a Jewish man was
Annie Hall.
How is Calgary different from yogourt?”

Georgia yawned.

“Yogourt has culture,” Ellen said. “I’m surprised
Annie Hall
even played in Calgary.”

And Georgia would look over at Gary gurgling in his sleep, her very own Jew, but a
nice
one, and be suffused with gratitude.

This went on for years, close to eight years. Then one night Ellen called to say, “Guess what? Amy kicked him out.”

“Who’s Amy?” Georgia asked.

The hundred pounds of overwrought actress that Larry had married after Ellen.

Ellen’s elation was pure of tone, unsoured, which surprised Georgia, into whose listening ear Ellen had regularly poured her nighttime poison. Ellen should have been cackling with vengeful joy. So Georgia’s suspicions were aroused, for good reason.

Next Ellen announced, “Georgia? He’s coming back.”

“
Larry’s
coming back?”

Gary seemed to have heard her in his sleep because he suddenly convulsed, flipping onto his back.

“I know, I know,” Ellen moaned. “I retract everything I said.”