Crossings (2 page)

What kind of truth is possible given the unreliability of memory and the constraints of point of view? Vicky is haunted by the inaccuracy of memory, often correcting and changing what she has already written, sometimes with a straight-up correction, sometimes ironically, with a sly, double-edged wit. For example, when a psychiatrist asks Vicky about her hysterical pregnancy, “You do realize, Mrs Ferris? You do
know
you're not having a baby?'” she replies, “‘Yes, I realize.' I wished he wouldn't smoke. It was bad for the baby.”

Lambert wrestles with language, psychology, and philosophy and gives us lovely meta-textual moments by having other characters correct or contradict the narrator and accuse her of dramatizing, fictionalizing, inventing, dreaming, of having hypnagogic spells.

The seventh version.

‘The unity of plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity.'

‘Vicky always dramatizes,' says my mother. ‘Must you always dramatize?'

Francie said, ‘But you
lied
!'

Jeff says, ‘You have fictionalized your whole life.'

…

Sister Mary Joseph says, ‘You have always been obsessed with truth.'

The Nut Lady [Vicky's psychotherapist] said, ‘
Why
did they tie your hands to the crib?'

‘Because I bit my nails.'

‘
Why
?'

Lambert was an intelligent, passionate, profound, potent and complicated writer, yet she was also delightfully irreverent, funny, and down-to-earth. “When they ask me later if I have been influenced by Bach, in the fugue-like contrapuntal technique, I want to say, ‘Actually, it was
I Love Lucy
.'”

The main difficulty in writing an introduction to this novel is that I want to quote every line to you. Better just to let you indulge in this killing, brilliant, and raw novel, the crime of its near oblivion put right by Arsenal Pulp Press and the city of Vancouver's 125th anniversary.

I TOOK THE CATS and flew up to the island. All the time I was getting ready to go, packing, neatly, like a lady, I felt frozen. As if the trembling had frozen into a single shrieking note, high-pitched on a violin, so high that no one could hear, only the mad dogs of the universe.

And I moved calmly, neatly, precisely, like a lady, a small poised smile on my face, cold with that shriek of terror. I was putting myself in his hands. I was going to his territory. I was going beautiful, a sacrifice.

‘You can't destroy me,' he had said. ‘I've been destroyed by experts.'

I rounded up the cats and put them, yowling, into the big Mexican basket. I put my typewriter in the case. I took enough paper for the last story.

The big plane flew low over the water and we came in. This was the end of the world but there was still another plane to catch. When the man opened the luggage compartment, Peter spat at him. He had gotten out of the Mexican basket. Sally and Lolly were still inside, huddled, afraid, frozen. But Peter was enormous, puffed out to twice his size with indignation. ‘I've got a tiger in my tail,' said the man and everyone laughed. I laughed too, and gathered Peter up, stroking him, saying, ‘It's going to be all right. It's all right, it's going to be all right.'

I found a taxi. He seemed to know all about it. We drove to the sea. I went down the ramp as if it were the most normal thing in the world. There was a man in a hut, at the bottom of the ramp. A little hut with calendars and a telephone. I hired the man to fly me to the island, as if it were something I had done every day of my life. I had just locked the door and walked away, leaving all my things, the fake Sarukhan rugs, the Renoir reproduction, all my stories, the bills that were going to come through the mail slot. I had walked away, as other people did, as Mik had done all his life. A shriek of freedom in my head. So this was what it was, freedom. To walk away and leave everything behind, to go to a man and say, Kill me.

A week before I had phoned him. It was a radio telephone and he had to take the call in the cookhouse. Everyone in the cookhouse could listen in. Everyone on all those lonely islands could listen in.

‘It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing,' I said. But he didn't understand.

‘What? What?' he said, his voice strange and crackling through the lost northern air.

‘I'm not pregnant,' I said. And everyone heard. He was humiliated.

The men went into the forest and the women stayed in the compound. It was forbidden to go into the forest if you were a woman. Once I climbed the road into the forest, the cats leaping in and out of the trees beside me, running ahead and then dashing back, suddenly elemental, or following me, as dogs do, then rushing away again, their tails fluffed absurdly, scuttering back to the forest and leaping at me, the prey, arched-back, stiff-legged, doing the sideways daring dance of Siamese. I walked up into the forest until I saw them, the men, in their great yellow machines, grunting and roaring, tearing at the earth, ripping and gouging. I hid behind a tree and watched them, men alone in their secret world, and I was afraid. Men engaged in their mysterious rites, tearing great holes in the earth.

The ground shook beneath them. I felt the shudder in the tree I was hiding behind. Like creatures from some fantastic world, the men moved, grunting, laborious, in metal helmets and thick boots. No one human could have such large feet, it was impossible.

But that was later. Now I was going to the island, I was putting myself into his hands, great thick hands, hands that grasped you and brought you down, hands like weapons. Not fists. Nothing that looked like that could be called ‘a fist.' A fist is small, with knuckles, the bones shine whitely through the skin. Thin and delicate. Mik's hands were weapons.

‘You can't destroy me,' he had said. ‘I've been destroyed by experts.'

Sometimes at night I cry God, God, and before my mind can stop it, He comes and holds me. Over each nipple is a tattoo: one says
Cream
and the other says
Coffee.

Later, that day in the forest, I crept away, unseen. I went back to the compound and had tea with the boss's wife. She made doilies.

‘How do you get them to stand like that?' I said. It was all mys­terious to me, the world of women. Women who wait in com­pounds for men. I belonged nowhere.

‘You starch them,' she said.

They were curved and bowed into elaborate arches and scallops, and they were everywhere, on the backs of the chairs, on the back of the sofa, on the arms, on the radio, on the side tables, everywhere. In their centres were ceramic fish or ashtrays, bowls and figurines. They said ‘Campbell River, B.C.' or ‘Victoria, B.C.'

But now the little plane is taking off. Inside it is wired. The chair I am sitting on is actually wired to the floor. Peter is yowling in the back. Lolly is mewing plaintively. Sally is stoic, resigned. I think, Held together with baling wire, just as the books have promised. This is ‘baling wire,' and I am delighted to meet it at last. You never meet a brickbat, for instance.

‘But what
is
a brickbat?' I said, nineteen and clever, all those years ago.

The old Marxists looked at me with scorn. But they never told me.

The world below us stretches deep and green and blue, miles of forest and sea and mountains. We thud through the great empty sky, and the white and the blue and the dark green ignore us. The man beside me is chewing a match. He drives the plane as if it were a car, as if it were nothing, as if every day he took someone like me to the island to be killed.

The wings go up on one side and down on the other. My stomach lurches, as if my body still cares for itself, as if it can still remember, and I am amused, as one is at a child who cries out in the dark. ‘There, there, it's all right,' but the child too will die, one way or another.

Like a swallow, we come down toward the inlet. The forest rises to meet us, alerted now. The sun glints sharply through the glass and the man curses, ducks his head. I am wearing my grandmother's wedding ring. And here we are, an insect of wood and metal, moving calmly through gentle ripples to the dock.

Mik comes down the path to meet us. But he was not waiting. He must have heard the plane circling, but he is not waiting for us. He comes down the path now that I am on the dock. The man with the match hands out the typewriter, the Mexican basket, the suitcase.

Mik is filthy. Unshaven. Dressed in unfamiliar khaki and great tan boots. Even his face is grimy, streaked with grease. I know. He is so like me. I know everything. He wouldn't clean up, he wouldn't shave, he would not come down to the dock when he heard the plane circling in the sky. How could he? If he shaved, if he cleaned up, if he came running down, it would not be me. It would be someone else. I would not have come.

I don't think he says anything to me. He goes ‘Hunh!' and picks up the basket, typewriter, suitcase, managing them all easily. I don't hear the plane leave. The world is deephued with gold from the dying sun, gathering now into navy blue shadows. We go up the dock, up the path. The stones are sharp under my elegant brown shoes. Alligator shoes, very expensive, someone gave them to me. Who? Oh yes. Barney. She said, ‘They hurt my feet.' They hurt mine too, but I am so pleased to be wearing size five.

My hair is long now. And I am thin. I am small and thin and elegant in expensive clothes and alligator shoes.

Mik moves silently a little ahead of me, thick and silent, not looking back. It is time for the sun to go down. Now we are passing a large open shed. A man is working there. A Japanese. Caught in the last golden flash like a man on the stage. He straightens up, sees us, does a double-take.

Mik laughs. His great thundering laugh.

The first time I ever saw Mik, he did a double-take too, but then it was on purpose.

It is comical, this double-take, as if the Japanese has meant to do it, as if he saw at a glance the joke about us. But he hasn't meant it, he has just done it.

We have to cross a log bridge to get to the house. And the house itself is on logs, almost in the bed of the stream, only feet away from the lagoon. It is in deep shadow now, the house. I am to learn it is in deep shadow all the time. Morning, noon, and night. From the mountains and the forest. In the lagoon, jellyfish float lazily. Like blobs of semen slowly disintegrating.

Mik says, ‘You can't swim there. They get on you.'

There is tarpaulin on the floor. Bleached white. Mik must have poured gallons of Javex on it, but he says, ‘No, Dutch Cleanser.' It is powdery beneath my shoes.

‘I chunked the joint out,' he says.

There is a door. I can see the small dark room. But I don't go in.

This room has a large wooden table and a wood stove. Ornate. Glistening blue-black from some special polish he has used. It has taken him every night for a week to get the house ready, and still he didn't believe I would really come.

One wall is lined with open shelves. On the shelves are cans of food. Pork and beans. Meat balls. Spaghetti. Salmon. Cabbage rolls in tomato sauce. Ravioli. Whole hams. Whole chickens. Hundreds of cans. I don't see French beans or even peas. No asparagus. No soup.

A kerosene lamp stands on the table.

Mik opens the Mexican basket.

The cats leap out. Lolly still kitten soft and white, tips of brown on her ears and her paws, the end of her tail. Peter crouches beneath the stove, massive, black, snarling. Sally looks for something to eat.

Mik takes me outside to show me how to get wood for the stove. He is establishing how it will be. He will make the fire up this time, but from now on I will make it up, as women in this world do. It is not my world anymore and he is letting me know. It is not my world where men politely make up unnecessary fires in unnecessary fireplaces. He shows me the round block of wood. He shows me the axe. He lets me try.

‘Not like that!' He is disgusted. ‘You'll cut your hand off.'

He makes up the fire, showing me how to bunch the newspapers first, how to lay the kindling, little fresh white slivers of wood, so clean and new.

And all the time he is silent, brusque and silent, as if this were nothing. As if his woman came everyday to his house, to his world, as if I were just like the others.

He shows me how to light the wick in the lamp. You have to be careful or it will become sooty and then you must start all over again. And you can't just wash the lamp right away. It will be too hot and it will break.

Now we are out on the little porch at the back. Here is the toilet. ‘Watch out for the octopus,' says Mik, grinning. Grinning now because it is dark and no one can see him grin at me.

‘Are there octopuses?' I say. Not risking ‘octopi' right now. Afraid of him.

‘Come up and zonk right in there.' He laughs.

The world is very still. The sky has fallen, now there is only a great black hole.

There is a hole in the toilet too. You sit there and everything goes down into the stream. Toilet paper and excrement. Sanitary pads. Mik holds up the kerosene lamp and I can see it all below. Cans. A broken chair. An old mattress. Papers.

‘Oh!'

‘Well, I had to chunk the joint out,' says Mik. I have made him angry. ‘There ain't no garbage collectors here.' Yes, he is angry with me. I can tell because he is pretending to be stupid. Double negatives. I know he is going to punish me.

We come back into the house. Mik shuts the door. He laughs.

It is hard to remember sex. It is hard to remember in words. You only remember the words and the lighted places, and yet everything real goes on in the dark. You do not use words in the dark and so it goes. You do not say, as with baling wire, or brickbats, so this is feallatio. So this is cunnilingus. They are probably not spelled right, those words. I have just looked them up and the
Webster
's doesn't have them. Nor the
O.E.D
. Historical principles indeed.