Serafim and Claire (28 page)

À acheter pour chez Claire

—
Borax

—
Lysol

—
Babbitt's Cleanser

—
Ammonia

—
New,
sharp
scissors

Claire stayed in
bed most of the morning, the curtains drawn, the even light from the overcast Saturday seeping in around the edges of the window. Feeling drained, she lay and watched her arm extend from the covers, limp and heavy. She found it interesting that she didn't feel more disappointed by what had happened. True, her scheme had failed, and she wouldn't have the excess of money that she needed to bribe her way to stardom. But instead of disillusionment, she felt impatience. All she wanted was to know, with certainty, that she was never going to be implicated in the affair, that she was safe, and could go on with her unglamorous life much as before. And she wanted to know this now. She wanted release — if only to be granted the freedom to head back to the drawing board and try once more.

If she was honest with herself, she realized, her fatigue went even deeper than that, clawed further down, fastening her to the mattress. Claire felt she was growing weak, strangely enough, from always being strong, focused, and inspired. She found herself wishing for a rest from her own ambition. She wanted to just sit still and silent for once, without being bent on some greater aim that she was sure was waiting for her, somewhere out there in the dazzling world. There had been a time in her life when, she recalled, she felt less ambition, a time when things had been simpler, clearer. She wanted just a few moments of that time, now.

It was around noon when she finally pried herself from the bed, made a cup of black coffee, and drank it down while sitting in the curtain-drawn dark of her flat, a sanctuary with its own gloomy weather. She switched on the radio, turned up the volume, boiled some water, and poured a bath, where she spent a great deal of time shampooing the new, almost shaven feel of her scalp, finding clumps of hair where she hadn't cut quite close enough. During her bath, over the sound of the radio, she heard a muffled bump coming from one of the adjoining apartments. It was a fairly normal occurrence, and no cause for alarm. But when she was standing on her bath mat a few minutes later, drying herself off, wiping a bit of steam from the mirror, she noticed the space under the bathroom door behind her. The interior of her apartment was now swathed in natural light. Someone had opened the curtains.

Claire held the towel against her body, listening for movement over the drone of the radio. The floorboards creaked and an indistinct shadow passed along the light under the door.

Mouthing a curse, she looked round her cramped bathroom for something to defend herself with. There wasn't much. She wrapped the towel around her chest, tucked it tight, and grabbed hold of the only implement in the bathroom that she would be able to swing — a plunger. She raised it over her shoulder, a hand on the glass doorknob. Again she heard footsteps, which seemed to stop near the bathroom, listening. Terrified, Claire raised the plunger higher, nudged the door open — and was met with laughter.

“Do you mean to beat your sister to death with a plunger?” Cécile doubled over in hysterics. “Whatever are you doing? Look at yourself. You're preposterous.”

“How . . . did you get in?”

Cécile, recovering, dried her eyes with the sides of her hands. “You wouldn't answer my knocks, and with the radio on I knew you were home, so I let myself in the back. The door was locked, but the window next to the latch was cracked open. And what a dreadful place it is!” She walked to the window, sliding it up. “I'm sure it hasn't been properly aired in months. And your kitchen sink is fetid. Revolting.”

“How did you know where I live?”

“Darling, how many times do you think I write out your address every month? I practically know it better than mine. Though if I'd known such a warm welcome was awaiting me, I really would have come sooner.”

Claire lowered the plunger. “I'm sorry. This . . . It's a bad time for me.”

“Not anywhere near as bad as for me. That's why I dropped by, why I'm in Montreal. Something has happened and . . . in truth, I need your advice.”

“Cécile, I really think I'm the last one you should listen to.”

“Which is why I've come to you. So why don't you get dressed and I'll fix us some lunch from that wretched icebox of yours.”

“Breakfast.”

“My dearest sister, you're a disaster.”

As Claire got dressed, she found herself annoyed by the clanks and bustle in the kitchen, by the presence of her competent sister, whose company she usually looked forward to but which now, given her current situation, only felt intrusive and inopportune. Claire wished to be alone. The very last thing she wanted was to be offering guidance or support to someone else.

While they ate, Claire pressed her for news of the family, trying to avoid delving into either her or Cécile's problems, asking instead about their parents, and how their grandmother was holding up. It turned out her grandmother wasn't doing so well; Cécile thought she didn't have long to live, though she saw this more as a mercy than a misfortune.

When they finished eating — one of them sitting on the only chair, the other on an end table they'd moved into the kitchen — Cécile cleared the plates away and returned to stand behind Claire, running her fingers through her new haircut. “This length looks good on you, but, if I may, it looks as if a gardener did it. Can I clean it up?”

“Please.”

She found some paper scissors in a drawer and began to carefully snip the unevenness out of Claire's new haircut. After the first clip she clicked her tongue and walked over to a list she'd written out, of cleaning products Claire needed to buy. She added the words “New, sharp scissors” to it, underlining the word “sharp.” As she put the pen down, she exchanged a glance with Claire that meant she intended this list less as a criticism and more as a simple, handy reminder. Claire returned a look that indicated she would likely just throw the scrap of paper away.

Cécile smiled and returned to stand behind her sister, dull scissors in hand. “So,” she began, “I'm here in Montreal for the usual reason: to see him. You know, it's been going on for so long it's become quite comfortable for both of us. We have our hotel, our little rituals. He's married now, though still without children, like me. Neither of us (we've talked of it often) has ever felt the least bit guilty about it. Being true to oneself supersedes any vow of being true to another, is the way I see it, anyway.” Snip. A light brush of her hand across Claire's shoulder.

“But late this morning,” Cécile continued, “I was caught in a moment of incaution. I have almost never displayed any kind of affection for him in public, but when we were setting off today in our different directions, knowing we wouldn't see each other for at least a couple of months, I couldn't help but kiss him goodbye. It was a telling kiss. Right in front of a hotel we'd unmistakably just exited. So you can imagine my horror when I turned to head for the train station and ran straight into one of Gilles's colleagues. He is one of Gilles's up-and-coming opponents, a potential rival — the kind of man who might very well use this information in a damaging way.” Snip, brush, pause. “And I am now at a complete loss as to what to do.” Her voice was beginning to break, and Claire turned round to face her, touching the sides of her knees. “All I can think of is what
you
would do. You would do something bold.”

“I would do something stupid,” Claire countered.

Cécile crouched until they were face to face, holding the scissors by the blade now. “Exactly. You would do something stupid. But in doing so, you would provoke a significant change. You would put yourself in a situation that
forced
you to live with what you'd done. You'd make a mess, no doubt, but in your mess, at least the consequences that you had to assume would be clear.”

“So you're thinking you should make a mess, like me?”

“Yes. I think I should ask Gilles for a divorce and live with the result, see my actions through to their end.” Cécile began tearing up then began to cry in earnest, leaning against her sister. “I will ruin him, regardless.”

Claire embraced her, and whispered lies into the side of her head. “No, you won't. Come, now.”

At each of Claire's empty encouragements, Cécile chuckled through her tears. Eventually she pulled away, wiping her eyes.

“I told you,” said Claire, “that this was a bad time for me as well. And while I don't want to get into it, I will say that for the first time I'm beginning to wonder if being bold is really the best way of getting what I want.”

Cécile let out a teary laugh. “Of course it isn't. It's probably the worst. But it's the only way to bring about change on a dramatic scale; and change of that nature rarely has anything to do with getting what one wants. In my experience, the only people who get what they really want do so quietly.”

“You must mean people who want to be pushed aside.”

“No, I don't,” Cécile said, standing up. She turned Claire around so she was facing forward again, took up the scissors by the handles once more, and combed her fingers through the hair above Claire's nape. “It might sound absurd to you, but I've seen it, again and again. It's like when Papa had that friend with the cutter, and in winter he would let you and me go for a ride to the top of the mountain with him. I remember there was just enough room for us to sit on either side of him, this bulky man with a deep voice, half buried under that heavy muskox pelt, the horse that was pulling us goliath in size to my twelve-year-old mind. All this brute strength and bravado, a commanding grip on the reins. But if you remember, it was our tiny requests that directed the sleigh. He only went where our little voices wanted him to, and avoided the places we didn't. Of course, if you'd asked him who was in control, there wouldn't be a doubt in his mind that it was him. But I wonder, was he really?

“This is something I see everywhere, in all the work I do. Even when it's just women dealing with women. There are these subtle pulls and sways that are always present, people who've installed themselves just
behind
the loudest voices, the brashest characters, exerting pressure by whispering from the sidelines. Sometimes I look at the network of organizations we've founded, and I think of the influence that women have already gained but which is unseen, unaccounted for, and which may not even be measurable by ballots or statistics.

“Or I think about the sermons we used to hear while growing up, all that preaching on how ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.' Of course, one way to interpret it is that we should all just bow down in unquestionable obedience to the Church. But I think another way is, maybe, that we should strive, and keep striving, endlessly, but in the shrewdest of ways, by clever, strategic attrition. Sometimes I wonder if revolutions might even be won that way. Sometimes, Claire, I wonder if the meek have already inherited the earth, and the loud have no idea.”

Claire didn't comment, but sat still and taciturn while Cécile finished clipping her hair, straightening the jagged lines around her cowlick. She found herself thinking about how much sense it all made. She promised herself that this was going to be the new way she would go about things — shrewdly and quietly. If she could somehow get away with her most brazen stunt to date, she swore, it would be her very last. If she could just manage to slip by unnoticed this once, she was going to change her tactics for good.

Claire checked the time on the clock that hung crooked on the wall. She still had a couple of hours before she had to head to work. She stared forward in her kitchen, listening to the squeak of the scissors, a rickety pendulum counting down to some near future that lay just ahead, as if in wait.

Medium:
Gelatin silver print

Description:
Woman emerging from Kit-Kat Cabaret

Location:
Montreal, Quebec

Date:
May 1929

A young woman has just stepped out of a cabaret and is pausing on the sidewalk to look around, as if for something specific, a car she's waiting for or a person she knows to be nearby. There is something in her air and posture that suggests how comfortable she is with this particular doorway, as if she were standing on the stoop of her own home. She is stylishly dressed in a well-matched ensemble, her cloche hat tastefully feathered.

The photo has been crudely folded twice. The intersection of the creases that meet in the centre of the image is askew, dividing the photo into uneven quarters. The only care that has been taken in the folding seems to have been to ensure that the young woman's face and the signage of the cabaret were not obscured. Both of these elements hover safely at the centre of the upper quadrants.

On the back of the photo, the white paper exhibits several stains and blemishes: a smudge of what seems to be an orange paste, a faint coffee ring, and a dark green fleck with a small halo of oil swelling out from its centre. The stains suggest that at some point in the photograph's life it was discarded into a refuse bin.