Garbo Laughs (13 page)

“Do
you
laugh at
Cathy?”
demanded the Shawl.

“Sometimes.”

“Then I must be in the wrong class.”

“Give it time,” said Harriet.

“Not that I’m expecting a lot,” said the Shawl. “I read your book.”

Like Robert Falcon Scott, Harriet did not flinch. She turned to face Rod Steiger, who said that the last time he laughed aloud was over a book by Nick Hornby. That’s who we should be reading. Not Thurber. You read Thurber in high school. Thurber was outdated in 1950, for Christ’s sake. Why Thurber?

“Nick Hornby,” said Harriet. “Good idea.” She turned around and wrote in her notebook:
Who the fuck is Nick Hornby?

Then it was the Shawl’s turn.

The last time the Shawl laughed aloud was with her friend Leah. They were reading a review of a book called
Moonglow
and laughed to see it dismissed as “narcissistic twaddle.” Her friend felt vindicated because the author had written about her in an unflattering, untruthful, nasty way. She – the Shawl, that is – was taking this course out of curiosity. She was curious to know how writers justified their various betrayals.

The classroom was quiet. Harriet’s arms were folded. She rubbed her nose with her finger and left a white streak across the tip.

“‘Drivel,’” she said with a weak smile. “‘Narcissistic drivel.’ To be exact.”

She was remembering now where she had seen the Shawl. At Leah’s house, years ago. “Do you know each other?” she asked, looking from the Shawl to Jack.

“Since forever,” said Jack. “Emily used to stay every winter. She taught me how to swim.”

And so the chickens were coming home to roost. Under a shawl you could hide several chickens and many eggs. “But your name wasn’t Emily, was it?” No, her name had been Janice Bird, a name that brought nothing but bad luck. So now she was Emily Carr-Bird, after the painter.

The newly minted Emily said, “How do you writers live with yourselves? I’d really like to know. Using people you know in your stories.”

One person – Toad – spoke up. “But it’s not really the real person. You change them in the story. The story takes over.”

The roué said, “I wish my stories took over. I never get beyond page three.”

“Some stories,” Jack asserted, “are from life, every last detail.”

Silence again, save for the humming overhead of the fluorescent lights.

Toad made another good-hearted effort. “Any story that’s good
seems
as if it’s from real life, whether it is or not. That’s the paradox, right? We don’t want it to seem invented, we want it to seem real.”

“You’re talking about real fiction,” Emily said. “I’m not talking about real fiction. I’m talking about pretend fiction that isn’t made up.”

Harriet leaned back against the hard edge of her desk. What if it were summer, she thought. Or midnight? What if everything were the same, except for one crucial thing? What if she had never written about Emily what’s-her-name – for she had written about her too, as Leah’s friend, the latent lesbian, who moved like a large lake inside her clothes. So much soft flesh. So much fugitive typing in that complicated garden with the olive trees and the rosemary hedge and the games of Scrabble played on the lawn. But she looked different now. Illness? Could it be terminal?

It would seem that no one had escaped her pen, despite the fact that she had written so little. And now she would escape no one.

Her butt had gone numb but she didn’t move: her legs were too weak. She didn’t have Scott’s valiant desperation, or Hemingway’s grace under pressure. She didn’t have Atwood’s don’t-fuck-with-me wit. She didn’t have Richler’s raunchy intelligence. She didn’t have Carver’s lumbering goodness. She didn’t have Woolf’s teeming brilliance. She didn’t have Austen’s measured wisdom.

What
have
I got?
I’ve gotta get out of here
.

She unfolded her arms. She looked past Pencil Voice to Vanessa, and cleared her throat. She said, “Pauline Kael says that Warren Beatty
is
Warren Beatty, but Cary Grant
wants to be
Cary Grant. Who is more interesting to watch?”

“Warren Beatty,” said Vanessa.

“Look,” said Harriet, “every time you write something you do the best you can. You make mistakes. You wish you’d done some things better, other things differently. You learn, or you don’t learn. And you go on. You
want
to get better at it.”

“I don’t know what in blazes you’re on about,” North of England said. “What’s she on about?” he asked Vanessa.

“Mordecai Richler is a funny Canadian writer,” said Harriet. “Let’s read him.”

“Who?”
asked North of England.

“Richler, Mordecai Richler. He’s Canadian and he’s funny.”

“No, he’s not,” said the Shawl. “He’s offensive.”

“What
I
don’t understand,” said Cheerio-woman, “is this stuff about Cary Grant. I don’t like Cary Grant.”

“Didn’t you read the fine print?” said Harriet. “You’re not allowed in this class unless you like Cary Grant.”

“This is stupid,” said the Shawl.

Two classes left, thought Harriet. Three minus one equals two. She was walking home beside the canal and stopped to look up at the dark, city-softened sky, the muffled stars, and then around her at the curving canal with its dreamy, generous lights – a whole string of them, like white baubles, and tonight only one of them was out. It was inexcusable, that story about Leah and Janice and Jack, inexcusable and true, the things she had said in
the story. A runner jogged by on the other side of the canal. She heard footsteps behind her, and turned to see Janice coming towards her.

Harriet was much taller than Janice, and her Rollerblades were in her backpack. She could always club her over the head with them, the way Newfies club seals.

Janice stood in front of her.

“I’m sorry, Janice.” She had said this before, during the class, but if Bill Clinton was anything to go by, you can’t say it too often.

“Emily,” barked Janice. But her eyes were red.

Harriet heard the snuffle, as of a seal. She reached into her pocket for a tissue for Emily.

“Your story was so unfair,” Emily sniffed furiously. “You said I looked like a marshmallow.”

“I said your dog looked like a marshmallow. You look like Gertrude Stein.”

“I do?”

Ah. This was the way out. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

“I liked what you wrote tonight. It was energetic and tough.”

Emily raised her tear-stained face to Harriet’s. “Really?”

“You should keep writing. I mean it.”

And Emily smiled, despite herself.

Dinah, stirring a pot on the stove, heard a mighty banging on the door. “Buddy,” she coughed. “Have we got a gentleman caller?” Buddy hoisted himself upright, and the two of them headed for the hallway.

And here was Harriet.

Harriet saying, “I insist on having a heart-to-heart with Sara Lee.”

In the kitchen her eye alighted on Frank Sinatra, old and dying, in the upper right-hand corner of
People
. “Have you noticed,” she asked, flipping through the magazine, “that the young Frank Sinatra looked exactly like the young Glenn Gould?”

Dinah had her head in the refrigerator.

“Only when they were young,” continued Harriet. “Once they got old they didn’t look like each other. Or like themselves, for that matter.”

What transformations await, she thought. Her upper lip had begun to develop the accordion furrow that, of all signs, is the most telling. The robin of old age had dropped directly onto her face.

“I’m so glad I’m younger than you are,” she said, accepting the last piece of cheesecake. “And skinnier. I’m only eating this to save you from yourself.”

“Somebody’s class went well,” Dinah said to Buddy, who had thrown himself on the floor at Harriet’s feet.

“It was a disaster.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“After I finish this I’m going to strangle myself. By the neck.”

“I wish I had your nice long neck.”

“Lew’s the one with the Audrey Hepburn neck.”

“You’re the one with the long waist. When they were giving out waists, I must have had my nose in the cutlery drawer.”

“Well, you’ve got great legs. Nobody asks me to take off my pants and put on shorts.”

“You’ve got a great husband. Where the hell was I when they were handing out husbands?”

“We’ll share him,” said Harriet.

“Oh, yeah?” Dinah’s laugh was cracked and rollicking and almost pained. “Sure we will.”

Harriet finished the cheesecake, wishing she hadn’t said something so witless. “You’re cooking,” she said, looking intently at the stove. “It smells like – what
does
it smell like?”

“Beeswax.”

“Flowers?”

Dinah picked up the paint stick and stirred. “Face cream. I even have a name for it.”

Harriet peered into the pan. “If that’s gum makeup, I want a cut.”

“Bloomsbury,” said Dinah. “‘Face creams for smart women.’”

It was nearly midnight. Harriet stood on the sidewalk. There was nothing to see in the sky, and underfoot it was more wet than snowy. She walked with bent head towards her house, springing back when her foot came down on a dirty tissue, but it was a small clump of leaves. Once, in October, she had mistaken a few wild white roses next to a path for tissues balled up and tossed out by some jerk with a bad cold. It was one of those early-winter nights so damp it reminded her of England, the month she spent on British Rail with a mother so thirsty she fell upon every drinking fountain as if it were her last, and generally it was. They didn’t like water in England, not to bathe in and not to drink.

She had checked the clock on Dinah’s stove before saying, “I don’t have the self-respect to emerge from this sort of thing with any dignity.”

“You didn’t see her name on the class list?”

“She’s changed her name, and she looks different too, much thinner.”
Self-respect is everything, isn’t it? All the rest is shifting sand
. “She used to be Janice Bird, now she’s Emily Carr-Bird. I should call myself Greta Garbo and be done with it.”

“Somebody’s been sending me roses,” Dinah said. She dropped a pouch of crystals on the table and sat down. “Sticking them in my door at peculiar times. It’s spooking me.” She was wearing a thick blue turtleneck which she kept rolling up to her chin so that she spoke from behind battlements of blue – swooping, rapid talk punctuated with hacking coughs and flourishes of her beautiful, manicured hands. “I drop these all over town to get rid of the bad luck and I burn the paper the flowers come in.” Her silver hair kept falling out of the large clip she continually took out and put back in, pausing to take sips from her can of Diet Pepsi. Only cans, she said; bottles don’t taste right.
The Pepsi purist with the beautiful nails
, Harriet will call her in a letter to Pauline.
It isn’t anger that throws Dinah, it’s roses appearing out of nowhere
.

“I used to review books,” Dinah said. “I still do. I used to write about TV. People would cut out my column, take a razor blade to my face, and mail it back to me. I took it as a sign of success.”

“But you were writing about strangers.”

“Not always,” Dinah said darkly, wearily. “Some of those authors I’d met. One was a friend. The TV people? I knew some
of them too. Anyway, what you’re doing is teaching a class. They’ve come to you to learn about writing.”

“But I don’t know how to teach. Even if I knew how to teach, I wouldn’t know how to teach comedy.”

“Ask them questions. Ask them to write about the funniest person they’ve ever met. That will take their minds off you.”

Harriet loved a joke, especially at her own expense, so laughing – holding on to the table – she felt for a moment the sweet relief that comes from what the ancient Greeks called the last and greatest gift of the gods: a sense of proportion. “I love you,” she said to Dinah.

“If you love me, you can do something for me. I need a control for my face cream.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll have to use my cream on the right side of your face, and your regular cream on the left side. What’s your regular cream?”

“This stuff from Cuba that Lew gave me. Something Hydrating Cream. It’s supposed to protect your skin from external aggressions like wind, sun, and the U.S.A.”

“Will you do it?”

“Of course,” said Harriet.

Kenny called to his mom as she climbed the stairs. She went into his room, and he spoke from his pillow. “Where have you been?”

She sat on his bed and reached out to stroke his hair, but he took her hand and held it against his cheek. Where had he learned to do such a thing?

“Talking to Dinah,” she said.

“What about?”

“My stupid class.”

“It wasn’t good?”

Hearing his alarm, “It went fine,” she said hastily. “Dinah says I should get them to write about the funniest person they’ve ever met. I can’t think of the funniest person I’ve met.”

“You don’t have to.”

“You’re right. They have to.”

This was the room Lew had slept in as a boy. Sometimes, coming in the front door, he said he still caught a whiff of his grandmother: talcum powder and Dove soap. A house holds smells for a long time. He’d told them that on one of those childhood visits he got locked inside the cupboard in this room. Hide-and-seek, and his brother locked him in the cupboard and forgot about him. Where’s Lew? his grandma asked Artie, who by then was watching television. They found him where Artie had left him, curled up between the floor of the cupboard and the first shelf, patiently waiting.

“Can’t you sleep?” she asked Kenny.

He shook his head.

“Something’s worrying you.”

And then it came out that his teacher wouldn’t let him do his project on Scott and Amundsen because somebody else was already doing it. Rachel was doing it.

“You should have a race,” she said. “See who finishes first. Do you want me to suggest that to her?” No, he didn’t. “Well,” she sighed, “now you know how Scott felt.” She stroked his hair. “In the morning we’ll come up with another idea. Here.” And
she held out her arm. “Fill up my arm with your worries. Then you’ll be able to sleep.”