Garbo Laughs (18 page)

Harriet laid down her pen and leaned back in her chair. She thought about Dinah. A beautiful, mouthy woman in terrible health, who only the other day admitted to having had cancer once before. But you smoke, said Harriet. Yes, said Dinah, but I don’t drink.

Dinah was too blithe, she thought, too hardened by journalism, a craft of short attention spans and rapid turnover, a profession for young women and coarse old men. She suspected that she herself felt things more deeply. She was more sincere than writers who were more successful,
that
was why her book had failed to sell more than a few dozen copies. Yet if she felt things so deeply, how could she have been so casually cruel? And down came Leah-Jack-Janice like an iron collar of guilt around her neck. On the other hand, she couldn’t be all bad or she wouldn’t be here, keeping Dinah company.

She leaned forward and added,
I do like her, however,
in The African Queen.

Dinah, undergoing the
CAT
scan, was thinking about her will, and then about Harriet and Lew. She had been fending for herself for so long that a woman like Harriet, largely dependent on a husband for support, struck her as near-exotic and worth scolding; but she didn’t have the energy to scold. She liked them both, and Lew she loved. She liked the way Harriet’s long,
too-slender body advanced at a tilt, as if it were folding up or unfolding and who could tell which? She loved Lew for being funny, smart, sexy, and humane.

On the way home, riding in the passenger seat, she said to Harriet over the music on the radio, “I want to get married.”

“Have you got somebody in mind?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t mean Jack Frame?”

Dinah looked out the passenger window at the suburban houses going by, the front yards, driveways, plate glass windows. Today they looked lovely.

“Dinah?”

“What’s wrong with Jack Frame?”

“He’s a lousy writer and he’s never done anything with his life.”

“The trouble with you,” Dinah said, “is that you don’t appreciate the wonderfulness of modest lives.”

“Are you nuts? Jack Frame isn’t modest!”

On Tuesday of the following week, in an appointment squeezed in before Christmas, a woman in slacks and a striped shirt took Harriet to the room that had the magic table. It was pink, and sunken in the middle. In the most sunken part there was a hole the size of a one-holer in the woods. She climbed a stool to get onto the table. She lay down, naked from the waist up, on her stomach, and dropped her breast through the hole. She turned her head to the left, as instructed, away from the action. Then they raised the table higher so they could work underneath her, locating the lesion and calcifications. They were going to take
tissue samples.
Strange how frightened I am. All around me people are in trouble. Dinah’s tumour might be inoperable; the Kosovars are burned out and burning up; and here am I, on my little hilltop, waving a flag in the air: over here! over here! over here! don’t forget me! I have a one in a thousand chance of having cancer
.

“You must feel like you’re working on an old Chevy,” she said aloud.

“We prefer to think Mercedes-Benz,” said the technician.

“Silver,” said Harriet.

“With the top down.”

“Red,” Harriet said. And then she was quiet for a while.

By the time she got home there was a dark patch of blood on her tan-coloured shirt. She took a dry face cloth, folded it in half, and pressed it on her breast for five minutes. The bleeding stopped. She got up and put on the kettle. The bleeding started.

She lay on the sofa, staunching the blood with her face cloth, and watched
The Empire Strikes Back
. Pauline Kael said it was the best of the three, so it was okay to watch it. When she met St. Peter at the gate, she would say, “Pauline said it was okay.” And then she would meet Pauline. The conversations they would have! Was Cary Grant gay or not? What other movies was Dan Dailey in besides
It’s Always Fair Weather?
Was Judy Garland in love with Gene Kelly? And how,
how
could you like Katharine Hepburn?

And then, together, they would meet Cary Grant.

She got up and found a king-sized bandage and slapped it over the Band-Aid provided by the hospital, then dug out her copies of
North by Northwest
and
Notorious
.

In the wakeful, painful hours that followed she wrote a long, rambling letter in her head to Pauline, inspired by the sight of Cary Grant’s sagging chest.
Remember? The scene when he’s in the hospital after pretending to have been shot dead by Eva Marie Saint, and he’s wearing only a towel around his waist because the FBI won’t let him have his clothes? Hitchcock tracks him from the side, in close-up, as he paces back and forth, and his chest looks aged and sagging. Then the camera pulls back, and it’s like someone sliding in their false teeth: once again he looks youthful and fit. Cruel Hitchcock with his sudden cameo-jolts of Hitchcock-reality
.

You aren’t crazy about Hitchcock and neither am I. These early movies, of course, but not the later ones when his seamy sadism ran riot. In
Notorious
Cary Grant was perfect because he held so exquisitely to the edge of his own and Hitchcock’s ambivalence. “I was a fatheaded guy full of pain,” he says. And then how did he put it when he finally admitted that he’d always been in love with Ingrid? “Long ago, all the time, since the beginning.” One of my favourite lines, though you have to hear him say it. You have to hear his voice and see his face as he finally admits how torn up he was about not having her
.

She was thinking about the disease of video love. How it had changed her life, perhaps more than anything else ever had. The ability to see Cary Grant’s face, a certain look on his face, over and over again. To see Fred Astaire, the “beautiful mover,” walking alone on a train platform and singing “All by Myself.” To hear the intonation Kevin Kline gives “I want you.” Or George Peppard gives “Will you marry me?” Or Humphrey Bogart gives “The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.”

More recently, the latest
Pride and Prejudice
had been her undoing. She had borrowed it from a neighbour, then ended up deserting her desk in the middle of the morning to watch long
Stretches of it, fast-forwarding through Wickham to get to Darcy. Why toil away on some story that was boring her to death when Colin Firth was waiting in the next room? She had confessed as much to Dinah, who said, “What is it about women that fills us with this terrible need for a contained beautiful world, where no ugliness intrudes? We need to tramp over great chunks of parkland and arrive at a welcoming cup of tea. We never have the chance. We all need our own five acres.”

Harriet told her that five acres wouldn’t do it. And she hadn’t been thinking about the landscape so much as the emotional line of the story – a man in utter control falls uncontrollably in love with a woman who very gradually discovers that she loves him. She also had a sudden understanding of the dreaded Leah and herself as she watched Charlotte Lucas hopping about to please Lady Catherine de Bourgh. There she was, scurrying to get a chair for Leah, dancing attendance, being servile, solicitous, ignoble.

Finally, she’d had to take herself in hand and return it. This required going out the back door, down to the foot of the garden, left along the alley, right along another alley, through to Sunnyside Avenue by means of a gravel driveway, and then right again, one, two, three houses to the neighbour who had lent it to her a week earlier. But yesterday she had gone to her and borrowed it again.

Harriet leaves the sofa – by now it’s one in the morning-drawn irresistibly to the
VCR
. In a moment Darcy’s eyes are spilling their bountiful love for Lizzy’s bountiful breasts. She watches him walk with his two greyhounds through the halls of Pemberley, his curt mouth moving in a barely perceptible smile-what a transformation! – back into the room where earlier in the
evening their voluptuous eye contact occurred, and where now, hand on the mantelpiece, he resolves in his mind to hie himself off to Lizzy first thing in the morning.

She presses rewind once again.

The next morning in the shower she cups her little breast with one hand. It looks like someone’s first attempt at making a dairy queen.

But she feels better.

Dinah, too, feels better, great quantities of fluid having been drained from her lungs. Her oldest mannerism is back in full swing: repeatedly she fools with her hair, using both hands to sweep it back, coil it around, then hold it in place with a long-toothed clip. Harriet notices the fresh roses in the corner of her bedroom.

“Jack?”

“The same.”

“He called me.” Harriet rubs her eyes behind her glasses, then settles the glasses back on her nose. Once again she’d been struck by the soft flatness of his voice – like an untoned thigh-asking her to do something. “He wants me to help him and Leah with their book about Lionel.”

“Are you going to?”

“I said no.”

At her
no
his tone had changed. It softened another notch. He said he had seen a movie she would like.
Bridges of Madison County
, he said. She reminded me of you. Meryl Streep? Yes, he said. You have certain things in common.
Like what?
You’re both
very direct. You fold your arms the same way. Your mouth and eyes are the same.

You need new glasses, she snorted.

He laughed a little. He said they would like her to be the editor. She was their first choice.

No, she said again, I don’t think so.

His voice was gentle. “Harriet Browning, you owe it to us, don’t you think?”

And she felt the inky letters of her name encircle her neck like a noose.

O
n the last day of December, Dinah sat on a wooden bench at the side of the frozen canal. She lit a cigarette out of sight of Ida – just to smell it – and watched a couple dote on their baby in a stroller. The father could have been the grandfather, except that the mother, once she raised her head from crooning over the baby, wasn’t much younger. In fur hat and twill trousers he arranged the blanket in the stroller, smoothing it like an artisan, while the mother put the smiling baby – such skin! – into a second snowsuit, then laid her on the blanket, folded the blanket, spread a down-filled bag over her feet, and lowered the clear
plastic windbreak over the stroller. They were a couple who couldn’t seem to believe their good fortune at having such a beautiful, patient, good-willed baby. Turning to her, asking her if she would kindly put out her cigarette, they moved to sit beside her on the bench and put on their skates. They would skate together, this pair, pushing the baby ahead of them in an outdoor display of pluck and luck and skill.

Dinah was husbanding her resources. In a while she would stand up and push off. She said to the couple, “I wonder what would happen if you came back and someone had taken your boots.”

“Oh, that
never
happens,” the woman said, horrified. “I’ve been skating for fifteen years and that
never
happens. Almost never.”

“I guess you’d walk home in your skates,” the man said.

Two miles away, at the other end of the canal, seated on a bench near the Laurier Bridge, Lew watched perfect stars, six-pointed and filigreed, land on his black corduroy pants. For several minutes he was completely absorbed by the tiny, weightless complexity of one snowflake, then another, then another. A dozen pairs of boots were beside the bench, all innocence and trust, and he felt a burst of affection for a city where you could leave your boots for several hours and return to find them untouched. It was almost Islamic, as if people had gone off to say their prayers in stocking feet, just as it was almost Japanese, the custom of shedding your shoes whenever you entered someone else’s home. It was four o’clock. He stuffed his boots into a gym bag (he was skating home) and slung it over his shoulder. Directly ahead, the canal was straight and narrow. It curved after it passed the University of Ottawa, then widened – opening itself
to every gusty headwind from the west – then narrowed again under the Pretoria Bridge, and widened again as it passed the many tiny lights of the Canal Ritz. It narrowed to skirt Lansdowne Park, narrowed more under the Bank Street Bridge, narrowed even more as it continued its curving way towards the end of a subdued sunset over Dow’s Lake. The ice was rough and uneven, but it would get better; the season was only beginning. By the time Lew reached the Bronson Street Bridge, half an hour later, the sun was down and light emanated from the surrounding city and from the snow and ice itself. Somebody was searching among the boots around the bench to which he was headed. He swerved over and came to a halt.

It was Dinah, and her boots were gone.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “They’ve stolen my boots.”

“No.”

“They aren’t here.” And she laughed in uproarious amazement.

“Sit down,” he said, taking her by the arm. “What do they look like?”

“Last year they stole my snow shovel off the front porch. I thought that was as low as you could get.” Her voice was its usual raucous, sexy self. “Navy Sorels, size six.”

He searched around the bench, holding on to the back with one hand to keep his balance, then farther afield among the snowbanks. “I’ll help you get home,” he said, sitting down to unlace his skates.

She looked with gratitude at his reliable face. “You’re a darling. I’ve always said so.” And when he offered her his arm, she took it. They made their way across the few yards of trodden snow to the wooden staircase, and up the steps to the sidewalk.
Cars whizzed by, the wind picked up. Lew felt waves of fatigue roll off Dinah as she leant into him. There was another bench next to the iron railing, he helped her over to it and she sank down, and then he knelt at her feet. “Enough already,” she said. “I’ll marry you.”

He unlaced her skates, pulled them off, shoved them into his gym bag. Then he got her to stand on the bench and climb onto his back. “I’m too heavy,” she said into his ear. She had her arms around his neck as he set off with a lurch, adjusting his walk to her weight, which was heavier than he expected. “I’m too heavy,” she said again. He grunted. Soon he was sweating. They had to wait for the traffic to thin before crossing Colonel By. And then two more blocks. He had his arms around her legs and the gym bag in his locked hands, a lean, wiry, surprisingly strong man who managed to carry her 131 pounds on his back like a voyageur, she thought, on a portage between canal and home.