Way the Crow Flies (90 page)

Toronto is a big dresser with big drawers, and this is a golden time when there is room for everyone to fight for room, enough
funding for the arts to seem as though there is not enough funding for the arts, and massive immigration in flight from an increasingly dangerous world.

Down Spadina and along King Street, old textile factories—ex–sweat shops years away from loft conversion—are presently incarnated as cavernous rehearsal spaces and illegal live-in artists’ studios, where thousands of straight pins can be found in the cracks between the floorboards. It’s in one of these—the Darling Building—that Madeleine is working with Olivia on a piece called
The Deer
. A bewildering, glacial process called collective creation. She feels as foreign to it as those women from Hong Kong must feel when rumpled regulars of The Bagel set themselves down at the counter and ask for knishes.

Olivia asked Madeleine to be part of a group of actors with whom she is creating this feminist revision of the Greek tragedy
Iphigenia
.

“Why don’t you call it
Death in Venison?”
said Madeleine.

“I think it’s about colonialism,” said Olivia, and Madeleine nodded sagely.

The “alternative theatre” is about as far from the comedy scene as you can get, but Christine encouraged her to do it, and Madeleine jumped in, if only because Olivia has a piquant way of both idolizing her and disagreeing with everything she says.
The Deer
is set on a shifting landscape evocative of the fence at Greenham Common and a rainforest. Olivia is working with a composer on a score inspired by baroque music and Latin jazz which incorporates text from
Dr. Strangelove
. Last night they improvised a scene in which the deer was caught in car headlights and interrogated in Spanish and English. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Sandinista party?” “Are you tired and listless? …” It all makes a strange sort of sense to her, but she is reluctant to admit this to Olivia. The deer itself—Madeleine—is an entirely physical role.

“Why do you want me to be in this?” Madeleine had asked.

“Because you’re good with story and character.”

“I thought it was supposed to be avant-garde, non-narrative, non-fun theatre.”

“You see why I need you.”

They had gone to the Free Times Café and Olivia had bought her a beer and was asking her opinion on everything despite Madeleine’s protestations that “I don’t know much about art, but I don’t know much about art.” Olivia is a gorgeous, if slightly punked-out, egghead. The reverse of the classic 1950s secretary whose boss says, “Miss Smithers, take off your glasses. Now remove that bobby pin from your bun.” And
voilà
, bombshell. Madeleine listened and allowed one eye to cross toward the other—her way of declaring herself allergic to the kind of intellectualizing that Christine and Olivia love to get up to.

“But Madeleine, you
are
an intellectual.”

She responded with her best puppet face, and Olivia laughed but didn’t back down until she had drawn out and dismantled Madeleine’s most dearly held prejudices. “You deal with ideas all the time, your work is
about
something.” Olivia’s eyes are hot crystal-cut blue, the irises limned in black, they make her olive skin glow.

“I hate arguing, why am I arguing with you?!”

Olivia countered reasonably, “We’re talking, I’m asking you questions about yourself, you love it.”

At the corner of her mouth there is an indentation—not so much a dimple as a bracket—that lingers after she smiles. Shades of the face she will age into, eroded by happiness.

“What.”

“What ‘what’?” says Madeleine.

“You just zoned right out.”

“Oh yeah? Well … you’re not the boss of me, kid.”

Madeleine decides to stop for a coffee. Olivia resides in the top two floors of one of these festively decaying houses, over a bar and grill. Christine is a TA at the university and Olivia was one of her students. Being a few years younger, she has enjoyed waif status, Christine insisting on feeding her, even at times dressing her—“Here, you can have these, I plan never to be that thin again.” But Olivia has a fixed address now, and last month she had them over for dinner. She cooked a vegetarian chili, and they sat at a long sawhorse table with the five grungy housemates. Madeleine has never understood the appeal of communal living and, although Christine respects vegetarianism, she woke up starving in the middle of the
night, made BLTs and teased Madeleine, “Olivia’s got a crush on you.” Madeleine knew better. “She’s way more interested in you, babe. Besides, she’s not my type.”

Madeleine finds a nice birdshitty table outside at the Café LaGaffe and orders a cappuccino. She discovered, during the vegetarian feast that Olivia’s mother is Algerian and her father is a United Church minister. She has blue eyes and speaks French with an Arabic accent. Madeleine doesn’t have to explain contradiction to Olivia.

Marianne Faithfull croaks over the speakers, “It’s just an old war, not even a cold war, don’t say it in Russian, don’t say it in German….” Madeleine reaches down for an empty matchbook from the pavement and wedges it under one wobbly wrought-iron leg.
Success without Colleen
promises the cover. She blinks.
College
. “Say it in bro-o-oken English….”

She can see the CN Tower over the shingled roofs and between the skyscrapers beyond. She can smell the four corners of the earth. The old guy whose pet parrot rides on his head and swears walks by.

“Hi George,” she says.

The parrot swivels his head and replies genially, “Fuck off.”

Madeleine laughs, asks the waiter, “Have you got a pen?” And reaches for a napkin.

In Jack’s hospital room, the cardiologist told him and Mimi, “In these cases, we have three options. One is to extend the life of the patient through surgery. Two is to improve the health of the patient through drugs. Three is to stabilize the patient and increase his comfort through drugs and … oxygen … et cetera. In your case, Mr. McCarthy, the first two options are not open to us.”

The doctor looked about twelve.

Jack’s face felt tight. He thought,
You’re sending me home to die, thanks for nothin’, buddy
. He nodded and said, “Fair enough.”

Mimi said, “You can do better than that.”

“I’m afraid we can’t, Mrs. McCarthy. But there’s no reason your husband can’t enjoy—”

Mimi said,
“C’est assez, merci,”
and turned her back on him.

He flushed. Jack winked and gave him a complicit smile. “Well. We’ll see you soon, sir,” said the young doctor, and fled.

It was not a case of getting a second opinion. This was the third opinion—Mimi hadn’t stopped until she had pulled every string and found out who was good, who was the best and who was a butcher. She turned back to Jack and said tartly, “Well Monsieur, what am I going to do to you?”

He grinned at her; she almost managed a smile, squeezed shut her eyes, clenched her hands until she felt the nails dig into her palms and, just as tears breached her lids, felt his arms around her.

“You’re not supposed to get up.”

“Who told you that?” He chuckled in her ear, holding her as close as he dared, careful of the intravenous tubes at his wrist. She felt warm. Hairspray and Chanel. Still so soft.

What is it to end a love story after forty years? So many nice times. So many remember-whens. Remember, Missus? I remember—
-je me souviens
.

What is it when so much of what is precious is so far past? Like a drawer sealed for so long. Open it, up wafts memory, love, no sorrow or recollection of hardship. How can this be? They lived through the Depression. They lived through a war. How is it that it was so sweet? How is it that the scent rises fresh as lilacs and cut grass? That sunny place. Post-war. Let’s have kids. Let’s be the ones who do it right.

They sway ever so slightly.
That’s why, darling, it’s incredible that someone so unforgettable, thinks that I am unforgettable too
.

They stood like that for a while. From outside the hospital room, through the big window that looked onto the corridor, it would have been difficult to say which one was weeping. Jack held his wife and experienced such a powerful sense of déjà vu, it felt like a blessing, and he had never been so grateful in his life.

Mimi wanted to tell Madeleine the truth. Jack said, “You’re the boss. Let me do it, though.”

When Madeleine arrived at the hospital later that day, Jack told her, “They’ve sprung me. No need for surgery.”

When Mimi returned to his room after fixing her makeup, she could see from her daughter’s face that her husband had told her nothing at all. She got out the Scrabble. She pressed on.

They discouraged their daughter from visiting again too soon. Jack didn’t want to alarm her with the sight of an oxygen tank—she was busy, she was young; better that he and Mimi should get used to his new “lifestyle” first. “Wait till I’m back on my feet,” said Jack over the phone in February, “and we’ll go for a big juicy steak. That is, if Maman lets me.”

In March they said they were driving down to see her in Toronto, but at the last minute Jack phoned to say Mimi had the flu. In April they said, “We’re thinking of going to New Brunswick next week, why don’t you plan on a weekend in May?”

W
HEN MADELEINE GOT HOME
last Friday night after the taping—the night the “thing” happened in her car—Christine had cooked eggplant parmigiana. Madeleine wasn’t hungry but she said, “Boy, something sure smells good.”

She ate a slice and Christine ran her a scented bath. Madeleine was still fresh from her shower of a couple of hours ago, but Christine had put flower petals in the water.

“Thanks, babe.”

Christine handed her a glass of wine and began gently, sensuously, to wash her back. It felt like someone stomping around, rattling the things on Madeleine’s dresser. Something was going to fall and break.

“Um. I think I’m getting a cold.”

“Oh yeah?” said Christine sympathetically, brushing back a lock of her long wavy hair where the tips were trailing in the water.

“Yeah, my skin hurts.”

Christine dropped the washcloth into the tub with a plop and exited the bathroom.

Madeleine called after her. “It felt … great, babe, really—thanks…,” her voice sounding robotic in her own ears.

The death of desire is a bottomlessly sad thing. Books are written, documentaries are made and counsellors are paid to help people want each other again. Perhaps it’s just a momentary ebb in the tide of our relationship, let’s take this opportunity to see what treasures have washed up on the beach in the meantime. Get to know one another again. Take a holiday.

And perhaps it comes back, or perhaps it does enough for one party but not the other. Desire can be detected at such low levels that it’s difficult to say when it’s dead. The patient is on life-support “but she can still hear you.” When do you pull the plug?

Madeleine waited until the apartment was silent before getting out of the bath. If Christine was already asleep when she came to bed, Madeleine would be relieved. But it would be all she could do to resist waking her to find out if she was mad at her. If Christine wasn’t angry about the small “empathic break” in the bath just now, she was sure to be angry at having been awakened. Madeleine would exert a good deal of energy getting Christine over her anger; this might involve Ovaltine and cognac. Then, once Christine had reassured Madeleine that she was no longer angry, Madeleine might use the opportunity to punish Christine for having had the gall to be angry over nothing. This punishment would consist of a silent, innocent distraction—an absent glance toward the curtained window as she set down the steaming mug.

“What is it, Madeleine?”

“Wha—? Oh, nothing. It’s just … never mind.”

And Madeleine’s actual grievances would rear, not their heads, but a few hairs, apropos of nothing. Christine would never see what didn’t hit her, but she would intuit it all. At three A.M.

“You hate me, why don’t you just say it, Madeleine?”

“Christine, why are you so mad at me all of a sudden?”

And the cycle would begin again.

In fact, Madeleine loves Christine dearly, would feel gouged and left for dead were she to lose her—feels everything but the abiding
sexual interest that allows two people to grapple happily and hotly, then take each other for granted, in the nicest possible way, over breakfast. And to allow one another what is now called personal space, but is really just a new spin on an old virtue—privacy. Privacy is sexy.

They got together in their twenties; privacy was hypocritical then, a form of patriarchal frost. Madeleine is learning the difference between secrecy and privacy. With Christine she has no privacy, but plenty of secrets. Christine can smell them, like bones buried all over the house, and it drives her crazy. Madeleine has hidden them so well that she has no idea they are secrets. Mice dying behind the walls, dreadful smells wafting up the drain.

Christine will walk away and slam the bedroom door. Madeleine, in a rage at being shut out, will punch the wall, then her own head. She may, depending on the ferocity of leashed but ungrounded anger, open the cutlery drawer, find the sharpest knife and carefully wrap her hand around its blade, slowly squeezing up to, but not past, the point of laceration—because how did her life take her, step by step, into the domestic clutches of such a bitch? Then she will open the fridge to get a glass of water, and the sight of the leftover eggplant parmigiana will cause her to weep, because poor Christine cooked it innocently and with love.

As they played out a version of this that Friday night, it never occurred to Madeleine to tell Christine what had happened to her in her car on the way home.

“I’m not into ‘healing,’ okay?” says Madeleine at her next appointment, and places a cheque for six sessions in advance on Nina’s desk, next to a conch shell. “I don’t want you turning me into a vegetarian or—and I don’t want to be straight when I walk out of here, I want be exactly like I am now except able to drive again. And, you know, work.” She sits in the swivel chair, leans back and folds her hands.