Garbo Laughs (17 page)

Harriet smiled. “It might be the nurse’s dedication, but what about the author’s sense of romance? The wounded man tended by the beautiful nurse is a most romantic situation.”

“Dedication,” repeated Fiona. “Not romance.”

But it seemed to Harriet that nothing was more romantic than Bill Bender tending to Fiona in his gentle, lumbering way.

When she stood up to leave, Fiona put out her hand and asked about Lew. How is he? she wanted to know, and watched with some concern as Harriet answered. But Harriet’s reply was casual, easy. He was well, no doubt he’d be over tonight to walk Buster.

So she didn’t suspect, thought Fiona. But then I’m the one who sees them together. All fall Lew and Dinah Bloom had dropped over most nights, Buddy in tow, to pick up Buster and take him along for an evening walk, and one night they were already out the door when she remembered that she was out of bread. She called after them and Dinah, turning too quickly, lost her balance and Lew reached out to steady her. He held her elbow longer than necessary, and Fiona nodded to herself: It’s as I thought. That poor man is in love with Dinah, but he doesn’t know it yet.

I
t was Friday, December 12. Movie night for the Fern foursome, since Dinah had insisted upon bundling up and coming over to escape Ida, who was beginning to drive her crazy, although what she really wanted, she said, was a smoke with her old pal Bill Bender. “The least, the last, and the lost,” they were fond of
saying whenever the two of them stood hacking and coughing on the sidewalk. “To quote the Salvation Army.”

“Give me some news,” Dinah commanded.

“I’ve rented
Two for the Road
from Tony,” said Harriet. (Tony was the owner of the only video store in town that had copies of
Trapeze
and
The Pajama Game;
a tiny man with an English accent who filed everything alphabetically, “excluding definites and indefinites.”) “We had a most interesting conversation. He told me the women men go for. Greta Scaachi. They see her once and never forget her. Charlotte Rampling. Kathleen Turner, for a while, and now this new one, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Ellen Barkin, even though she isn’t pretty, because she has something men respond to, a magnetism.”

“And women? Who do they go for? I know the answer.”

“Harrison Ford.”

“I knew it.”

“Brad Pitt. Gene Hackman. Paul Newman. Robert Redford. And last but not least, Sean Connery. How are you feeling?”

“So much better. I can’t tell you.”

“There’s more. I’ve got an idea that will make your fortune: a sure-fire beauty product.” Harriet ran her hands down the sides of her face. “Facial Brylcreem. I’ve got cowlicks in my peach fuzz.”

“You need varnish,” said Dinah.

“I have to keep smoothing my cheeks down. It’s driving me nuts.”

“What about my face cream?”

“It’s greasy. I feel like greasy Joan keeling her pot.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Lew coined a word:
greasome
. He calls me Greta Greasome.”

This was the night they beheld Audrey Hepburn in a swimsuit (“Quelle sight!” said Dinah) standing beside an equally sunburned Albert Finney. Dinah, stretched out on the sofa and wrapped in an afghan – since watching movies made her cold (a phenomenon that affected them all, this drop in body temperature, as if they were frogs at a January matinée) – Dinah said, “She gets the Fred Astaire Body Building Trophy, hands down. Peter O’Toole, Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire. Body Builders Unite.”

Harriet said, “All she ate for lunch was half a tomato.”

“Shhhh,” said Jane.

Outside, there was snow on the ground and a sharp wind, but they weren’t aware of it, for on the screen it was thirty years ago and Audrey and Albert were meeting and falling in love, then growing older and falling out of love, and with every shift in time and place Audrey had a new wardrobe, and what could be more wonderful than that. What a pleasure it was to see their beautiful, interesting, expressive faces, to watch them move and talk and joke around, to have them young again, and in Audrey’s case, alive again.

When the movie ended, Dinah drew the afghan close and said into the air, “What is the meaning of life, anyway?”

Harriet got her another pillow and tucked a blanket around her feet. “The meaning of life is good potato salad,” she said. “You should know that.”

“I forgot.”

“And I have the recipe. A boiled egg for every large potato, plus black olives, chives, paprika, salt and pepper, and plenty of Hellman’s. Hellman’s and nothing but Hellman’s.”

“That’s what I want in my final minutes,” said Dinah.

Kenny and Jane gave the same question serious thought. Kenny said if he had a choice between a milkshake and a Dr. Pepper, he would probably have a Dr. Pepper. Jane said she would have a tall glass of cold lemonade. Harriet said lemonade would be good, but she would rather have a cup of scalding tea and a date square.

“You and your square dates,” said Dinah. “What movie would you watch in your final minutes? Personally, I’d choose
Annie Hall.”

Kenny, who loved this kind of question, said he’d want to watch a comedy. “I’d want to be laughing. Probably
The Life of Brian
. Or maybe
Palm Beach Story
. Rudy Vallee was great. J.D. Huckensucker. Or maybe
The Crimson Pirate.”

“Top Hat,”
said Harriet.

“I don’t know,” said Jane. “Maybe I’d watch parts from a whole bunch of musicals. The night club scene in
Singin’ in the Rain
, and Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing the detective mystery in
The Band Wagon
. She was such a good dancer! I’d watch Judy Garland sing ‘Get Happy’ in
Summer Stock
, and the dance in the garage in
West Side Story
. I’d watch auditions too. They’re my favourite parts. The audition in
The Full Monty
and the one in
The Fabulous Baker Boys
. And
All That Jazz.”

“I’m so glad I raised you right,” smiled her mom.

Later, after Dinah went home and the kids and Lew were asleep, Harriet lay in bed thinking of
The Killers
. Burt Lancaster waiting for his fate. A black-and-white movie she had seen on TV at a friend’s house when she was a girl, and the suspense was terrific. Burt lying on his bed in that seedy room above the bar, knowing
they were coming to get him and there was nothing he could do about it.

Leah would be here in a month. The last time she’d seen her, five years ago, her aunt was badgering an old friend, a woman of seventy, who was flying to Italy for a holiday, badgering her to take two of her own suitcases back to Italy for her. The old friend agreed to take one. Leah insisted she take both. “Have pity!” cried the friend. “Pity?” said Leah with scorn. “You should have pity on
me.”

Harriet couldn’t sleep. And so she turned on the bedside lamp without disturbing Lew, put another pillow under her head, and began to read a magazine, coming to an article about cancer and thinking, as she began to read it, about Ingrid Bergman finding a lump in her breast as she lay reading a story about someone finding a lump: and she found a lump. The princess felt the pea under all those mattresses.

K
enny came downstairs in his gangster jacket and white shirt and messy hair. “Is it all right if I watch the rest of
Guys and Dolls?”

“It’s all right,” said Harriet.

“I don’t know who I am. Nathan Detroit or Sky Masterson.”

“Who do you like more? Vivian Blaine or Jean Simmons?”

“In this movie? Vivian Blaine.”

“Then you must be Nathan Detroit.”

That settled that.

In the afternoon they got the Christmas tree. Harriet sat in the car reading a book by someone much funnier and nuttier than she was – she liked the book enormously and she was jealous; so it goes, she thought, sue me – while snow fell softly on Lew and the kids and the young man sawing the bottom off the tree they’d picked out. He wore a Santa hat and a blue jacket and grey pants. Lew’s shoulders were hunched up. He was reaching into his pocket for his wallet and Harriet had to look away. She wouldn’t ask.

“Roll down your window,” said Kenny through the glass.

She rolled it down.

“This guy’s really popular. People keep coming by and saying hello to him. I wouldn’t mind having a job like that. In high school. Selling trees. Talking to people when they come by. Giving 25 per cent to the Humane Society.”

“Habitat for Humanity.”

“Whatever.”

Lew tied the tree that cost a fortune to the roof of the car with a jump rope and jumper cables. The alpha male of the seal pack, trussed up in a net and crunching on the roof. The snow kept falling, swirling around like the torn-up pages of a letter borne away by gusts of air.
Wouldn’t you agree that part of Danielle Darrieux’s generosity of spirit was her ability to tear up the baron’s love letter and let the pieces fly out the carriage window and drift away with the falling snow? All that love, which culminated in his inexplicable rejection – his punishment of her for her frivolous falsehood about her earrings, earrings which travelled from person to person, unifying the
story and directing it
. The Earrings of Madame de….
A movie you call perfection. I never would have heard of it if it hadn’t been for you
.

Cold poured off the tree when they brought it inside. They trimmed it, then watched the Marx Brothers in
Horse Feathers
, and then
Christmas in July
, the early Preston Sturges movie they had seen once before; the first not nearly as funny as they expected, and the second a delight. But when Harriet stood up to rewind it, and turned around, there was Kenny, water spilled on the floor, a nest of crumbs where he’d been sitting, his denial that they had anything to do with him, and her shouted commands. Sponge! Vacuum! His repeated denials. Lew’s admonitions to her, nipping at her heels like a pesky, good-hearted dog.

Who has the heart to write these things down? The way a parent ruins Christmas for a child. She flicked Kenny’s head hard with her finger, threw the sponge at his back. So furious, so suddenly furious, that she could have throttled him.

“Are you all right?” Lew asked her carefully. She had come upstairs and shut herself in their room, and now he was checking on her.

She had to look away. At the bedside table. Away from his careful self-control and everything he kept himself from saying.

“We’ll get through it together,” he said.

Later, she would try to make up for her sins by reading
A Christmas Carol
to the kids at bedtime. She read: “He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing there: perfectly winded.” Lew, on his way to the kitchen, said, “How can you
stand
in a sitting room?”

Harriet said, “I know someone who died in a living room.”

“You mean he was rubbed out in his drawing room?”

Then all her tension relaxed into laughter, and for the first time she thought he was like Chekhov in certain ways. Slender and mild and funny.

Lew had taken to calling Dinah
muchacha
. When she came over for their Friday-night movie, he said,
“Muchacha
, how are you feeling?” And he hovered around more than usual, and even stayed to watch the beginning of the movie. Tonight it was
Grand Hotel:
John Barrymore murdered by the blunt end of a telephone, and Garbo left out in the cold and never knowing why – never knowing why he didn’t join her on the train, in the kind of misunderstanding so awful it ennobles all the silliness that came before. Dinah slept through most of it. She woke up when it ended and said stubbornly, “I want to skate on the canal. I’ve been thinking about it for days. As soon as the ice is thick enough.”

Kenny said, “I think the canal is highly overrated. The ice is usually terrible, it’s overcrowded, and you have to wait twenty minutes to get a Beaver Tail.”

He was referring to the Ottawa delicacy of fried dough sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice, or spread with jam. A Beaver Tail was about the same size, and as flat, thought Harriet, as a large breast squished by a mammogram machine.

Earlier in the week, at the hospital, she had asked the technician about Clint Eastwood’s breasts. The technician was wearing three gold earrings, two in her left ear, one in her right. She said the machine was fussy today. She was just going to turn it off for a moment to make it smarten up. A short, stocky, red-faced blonde who lifted Harriet’s left breast onto a plate and spread it
flat like pastry, then lowered the plate above, removing her ringed hand as the plate came down.
Paddle
and
bucky
were the proper terms: the paddle pressing down until, to Harriet’s eye, her breast looked like a giant white strawberry that’s been stepped on. “What do you think of Clint Eastwood’s breasts?” she asked her, after she was able to breathe again.

The technician had been smiling all along and she kept smiling, but more vacantly.

“You haven’t seen his most recent movie?”

“No.”

“Nor have I. But they say he was unwise enough to take off his shirt.”

“I’ve done men’s breasts,” she said-. “That’s hard because they’re so muscular.”

“Not Clint Eastwood’s.”

“Well, you get all kinds. You get every kind under the sun. I’ve seen every kind of breast there is.”

A day later Harriet would be sitting in another hospital, in a small waiting room on the second floor. She was waiting for Dinah, who was having a
CAT
scan. Beside her sat a plump little white-haired woman who looked to be the picture of health, but had had one mastectomy seventeen years ago, and was having another now. She had rolling veins, she said, which makes it hard to draw blood. They put a needle into the vein and the vein rolls away. She made a large, easy motion with her hand like a dog rolling over.

The little woman went off to her appointment, and Harriet pulled out her notebook and began to write.
I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking about Katharine Hepburn, asking myself why I find her so embarrassing that I have to look away. She’s all
over her own face, somehow. So aware of herself and how smart and shiny she is. Always being seen. And I agree with you that she’s good, she’s often very good. But I can’t
watch her. Ida told me that she much preferred Barbara Stanwyck. We got talking this morning when I went to pick up Dinah. Ida confessed that when she was a girl all she wanted was to walk around – swagger about – as the older girls did, in open, unbuckled galoshes
.