Flirt: The Interviews (10 page)

—Yes, Webb's poetry. But not the “someone left the cake out in the rain.”

—I read books about the American civil rights movement, especially keen on Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers and wanted to Seize the Time but not sure why, given where and how I lived. And a woman I babysat for gave me
The Female Eunuch
and I read that, too. At the job in evergreened Stanley Park, I was stupid with grief and with a new morality that said a) take what you want and b) anyone can and will die. My boss, a twenty-nine-year-old married man, fell for me.

—Ah.

—You've known the same heart-scandal, the illogic of emotion that can make those numbers add up, the sado-masochism of illicit romance.

—Huh?

—Infidelity. You were a teenager lured and loved by an adult. You were nineteen; she was thirty-four and married. Sure you were Oxford-educated and serious and matured by dislocation, but you were a teenager.

—I've never cared for the sameness of these Scottish Terriers. This could get boring.

—Maybe no smoking here.

—I'll just hold onto it. That guy's sure proud of his tight little shorts at this time of year.

—I remember not much about the affair, except his sailboat moored at False Creek, his golden retrievers – Sally and Sarah – his funky green, bulbous fendered Ford pickup, a dog show we attended in Seattle, and his kindness. I remember the day I attended a school-sponsored screening at the Ridge Theatre of Franco Zeffirelli's “Romeo and Juliet” –

—The best version really. 1968. Shot on location in Italy and so the lighting is gorgeous, like plums and honey. Sixteen-year-old Olivia Hussey as Juliet. The cinematography won an Oscar. The costumes, my god. The brilliant bit of nudity on the after-marriage morning. Very sixties counter-culture romantic. What a film. I'd like to see it again, maybe this afternoon. Think about it.

—I saw the movie on a west coast wet and grey afternoon and was moved by the double suicide since I was already beginning to understand the kiss of escape and death's happy alternative. My manfriend picked me up at the theatre in his dog-stink truck and chose that time to say our relationship – it had been a year – was off. His wife wanted him back now. He drove me home and dropped me off.

—Uh-oh. That movie was good enough that you'd have a hard time separating yourself from it cos it would be like your life was the movie's next scene, or a replay of previous scenes. And what with your long dark hair, I'll bet you did some identifying with Juliet's beauty and predicament.

—That night, I swallowed a bottle of 222s, thinking that simply by willing myself to die, an inept medicine would be transformed into lethal. “All suicides all acts of privacy are romantic” as your own Webb says in
Coming Through Slaughter. It's still a good idea
, writes another. I took to bed and played Jim Croce's Greatest Hits over and over on the big turntable in my dead sister's room.

—I knew it. “Time in a Bottle?”

—I preferred the up-tempo even while bereft. Leroy Brown.

—Your parents?

—Not home or not present. During the evening, Thurber barked and fretted at the front door and I floated filmically downstairs to settle her. I looked out through the sidelight windows and there on the lit porch sat a gorgeous golden cocker spaniel, wet and whimpering. I opened the big
door. “Go home,” I said, stern and drugged, “Go. Home.” and closed the door and went back up to bed's final frontier, to the south side of Chicago. An hour passed, I went back down – clearly the stupid meds were not working – and opened the door again. The lovely dog shot past my legs into the hallway and folded down onto my mother's favourite turquoise Indian rug, exhausted. Thurber did, too.

—A ghost.

—Exactly. That's what I thought. So I took this dog as a sign that I was meant to carry on. That there were beings in the world that wanted my care.
We who have considered suicide take our daily walk/with death and are not lonely
. Again, a Webb.

—There's no better smell: wet spaniel on a hard night.

—Those kilts; I like how they flip up around the turns and show a bit of hamstring. But they seem redundant next to all the Scottie dogs.

—And the Fair Isle sweaters. Certainly not flattering to the mature bosom.

—If you want another cup of coffee, Michael, you say so. I can go for it if you'd rather not get up, but no more doughnuts for you, mister. Twenty minutes a day on the stationary bike would do wonders for that waist. The jowls are more bull mastiff than hyperthin sheepdog.

Some critics have explored the relationship between creativity and the death instinct in your work. Why, they ask, is the artist sometimes a killer, sometimes a suicide. They want to resolve the ambiguous nature of creativity in your work.

—Look over there: Jesus, that's not a dog, that's someone's failed poem about a dog. Where are the legs? The neck? Look here: I've said that the problems Buddy Bolden has – you're wondering most about him, right? – are the problems any artist has at some time. Uh-oh. The pretty redhead's lost the beat with her pup; she's right to pull out of the parade.

—How to escape art? How to be both creativity's slave and its master? Whether to choose madness as a way to restore order in the chaos of art?

—Well, yeah, okay. And how an artist strives for originality – innovation – and meaningful work in a society that values formulaic coversinging,
embellishment-heavy American Idols chosen over the phone by the screen-loving masses.

—Whatever happened to a simple melody?
Just sing it straight
, my Lithuanian boyfriend used to gripe.
More hot licks than a teenage nymphomaniac
, he'd say.

—How does a musician like Bolden, a man like him and with his appetites and the radical conversation he has with his mouth and music, with his hands and body, how does a player like Bolden survive in a time and place and landscape that rejects chaos and the improvisation that is its antidote. Art's consumers are all about plot, you see, and Bolden was not able to connect the dots. Fame has a high cost.

—Improv is anecdote?

—Ant. i. Dote.

—Tell me about Buddy Bolden. Describe his body, for example.

—You've read the book.

—Many times, and I've looked often at the band photo on the cover. So long and narrow, his hands fastidious on the horn even when posed. The smile: is that arrogance or flirting? He looks so great, so lean in those clothes.

—I . . .

—He is so erotic in the book, so unable to control passions. Both in love with women and contemptuous of them. In love with jazz and scornful of others who love it but want control. Wild about the street and also its victim. Able to disappear into sex and music but so powerless that both swallow him and refuse to spit him out. He is digested. So willing to be naked. So silent yet in love with words. I'd like to run my tongue over his abs, then his wrist.

—I . . .

—His conflict between form and shapelessness. His fragility and yet sinewy strength, like cat gut, or baling twine. He played the devil's music and hymns at the same time, he didn't choose: he merged them because, well, of course. And his falls into madness are erotic, linked to women and music's siren, a pushing of the body and mind past their frontiers and finally a long, high note of surrender and a crossing over into the dark, the silence forever.

—I . . .

—You?

—I . . . Listen. You shouldn't see the book as a prototype for your own relationships to art or to men or to the street. Cos it's not wise to have a crush on Buddy Bolden. Surely you deserve better, more tenderness, kinder men less concerned with their own reputation. A woman who loves the smell of a wet spaniel is entitled to romance that is not superficial or self-serving.

—Actually . . . here: my notes say it's you who loves the smell of a wet spaniel. My next suicide was landscape-induced. I left the city and headed up to a watery world and a long shoreline, to a husband, to musicians on the lam and living on boats at the breakwater. Thurber came, too, but would not venture to the beach across the road, would not slip her paws into the cold and whale-rich Johnstone Strait. The homesteading otters frightened her. When my new and short-term husband was home, she would quaver in her basket by the door. When he wasn't, she would climb onto my lap, though she was too large to do so. I was nineteen and when new husband sailed to fish up north, I again fell for an older, more married man.

—Well, the seventies allowed for this.

—You think? I don't. Betrayal is always about contravention, sadism, adolescence, carelessness. It's always ugly and cowardly. The misery of others is never fine.

—You were a teenager.

—This time it was James Taylor on the turntable.

—Which?

—“Your Smiling Face.”

—Irony?

—Yup. And then the pills, champagne, turpentine and the scalpel on my wrists, the back of my hands, any visible vein but never quite deep enough. See?

—Still, you have lovely hands. Working hands. Those are old scars now and the story they tell has moved aside for other, more unpredictable ones. I see the story of a garden in those hands, maybe the hint of guitar chords.

—I was flown to a psychiatric ward down-island and told by the mayor who was also the doctor to stay put until I could be more service to the community. He may have meant this kindly. I took my guitar. I fell there, too, this time for a shrubby yet handsome older alcoholic from Port Alice who claimed he was there because his wife, when she didn't find satisfaction with him, enjoyed an intimate relationship on the kitchen floor with their willing German shepherd. I kissed that man on the beach, truant from my room, the ward. The nurses were fed up with me. My doctor said,
of course. It's all about your father leaving you
. More James Taylor in the afternoon as I began to come around to pleasantness: “Shower the People.” Some difficult chords. And soon, back to the city, to a band, the bars, the road.

I can't begin to tell you about my relationship with music and how it broke my heart. I believed I could be original, an innovator and instead played the Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival in every dive joint from Port Moody to Prince George for the better part of a decade. In my head, I heard the tone clusters and eight part chords of Benjamin Britten, I heard his
War Requiem
and da Vittoria's clean melodies and gradual harmonies and wanted their complexity in the verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus of country music. Emmylou showed promise, but I was in the bars. My voice a broken record. The crowd an empty glass. My hands too small and inept on the night's high strings.

—You drank.

—I did.

—Christ, who wouldn't?

—And then that music died and me, too, just about. But it wasn't jazz and I wasn't a miracle so no one thought much about the misery of it: the music gone, Thurber left to live in another landscape, the men all old and stoned and hot for the next chick singer. It wasn't jazz. It was tawdry and simplistic country, no room for improv's antidote, no need for it really. So no one cared when I lost it and gave up.

—Yeah, but here you are, what? Twenty years later? And you have a dog?

—Yes.

—And?

—I have a dog, yes.

—And?

—The dog was his dog.

—His?

—Yes. The most recent, the fifteen-year
his
. The dog was his and then he found another woman – younger, happier, better breed, no art – and now it's my dog, our daughter's dog. He came to me and said, “I'm in a relationship with her. I want out.”

—Like a dog at the door.

—Yes, desperate to piss or for the ecstasy of chasing squirrels, maybe both.

—Well.
What are we whole or beautiful or good for but to be absolutely broken?
to quote that wisest Webb
.
You'll be whole again, maybe even broken if you're lucky.

—Our daughter plays horn, you see, trumpet. And her mouth is full of it, her hands automatic in their lust for her instrument. I see her smirk on stage as she flaunts the fedora and the rhythm and its partnering blues. I love that look. She goes to the bright side of the road and then hurtles back to the dark end of our street. Charlie Parker floats down the stairs from her room. His dog trembles with the sound of music. A dachshund.

—Like E.B White.

—Like Wayne Gretzky.

—Still, a hound.

—More terrier than hound. Separation anxiety, no road sense, angry at new lambs, dominant and hard on the cat. She tunnels under the covers at night and I wake with heat against the small of my back and believe he's still beside me, silent as our last years together. At night I dream of Buddy Bolden's form, his mouth. The weight of a hockey player's kind hand on my wrist. My father laughing at a cocktail party and saying, “I'm back.” I dream of happy young men with scarred jaws and eyes who desire older women in the new sexual order and I wonder what it was about your first wife – you were nineteen and she was thirty-four – that drew you into her arms and kept you there for so long.

—Great. The sporting breeds. The Irish setter looks tough to beat. Let's stay for one more round. I'd like to see a film this afternoon. You can drop me downtown and I'll find something.

—Are you cold, Mr. Ondaatje, or is it just me?

—That's the Pacific Ocean you can smell this evening. Will you stay in the wheelchair, Benjamin, or should we arrange a blanket and pillows on the grass?