Bluebeard's Egg (25 page)

I’ve been here long enough. I look around for the third wife, the one in charge, to say good-bye. I finally locate her, standing in an open doorway. She’s crying, something she didn’t do at the funeral. The first wife is beside her, holding her hand.

“I’m keeping it just like this,” says the third wife, to no one in particular. Past her shoulder I can see into the room, Joseph’s study evidently. It would take a lot of strength to leave that rummage sale untouched, untidied. Not to mention the begonias withering on the sill. But for her it will take no strength at all, because Joseph is in this room, unfinished, a huge boxful of loose ends. He refuses to be packed up and put away.

“Who do you hate the most?” says Joseph. This, in the middle of a lecture he’s been giving me about the proper kind of birdbath for one’s garden. He knows of course that I don’t have a garden.

“I have absolutely no idea,” I say.

“Then you should find out,” says Joseph. “I myself cherish an abiding hatred for the boy who lived next door to me when I was eight.”

“Why is that?” I ask, pleased to be let off the hook.

“He picked my sunflower,” he says. “I grew up in a slum, you know. We had an area of sorts at the front, but it was solid cinders. However I did manage to grow this one stunted little sunflower, God knows how. I used to get up early every morning just to look at it. And the little bugger picked it. Pure bloody malice. I’ve forgiven a lot of later transgressions but if I ran into the little sod tomorrow I’d stick a knife into him.”

I’m shocked, as Joseph intends me to be. “He was only a child,” I say.

“So was I,” he says. “The early ones are the hardest to forgive. Children have no charity; it has to be learned.”

Is this Joseph proving yet once more that he’s a human being or am I intended to understand something about myself? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes Joseph’s stories are parables, but sometimes they’re just running off at the mouth.

In the front hall the second wife, she of the mauve wisps, ambushes me. “He didn’t fall,” she whispers.

“Pardon?” I say.

The three wives have a family resemblance – they’re all blondish and vague around the edges – but there’s something else about this one, a glittering of the eyes. Maybe it’s grief; or maybe Joseph didn’t always draw a totally firm line between his personal and his professional lives. The second wife has a faint aroma of client.

“He wasn’t happy,” she says. “I could tell. We were still very close, you know.”

What she wants me to infer is that he jumped. “He seemed all right to me,” I say.

“He was good at keeping up a front,” she says. She takes a breath, she’s about to confide in me, but whatever these revelations are I don’t want to hear them. I want Joseph to remain as he appeared: solid, capable, wise, and sane. I do not need his darkness.

I go back to the apartment. My sons are away for the weekend. I wonder whether I should bother making dinner just for myself. It’s hardly worth it. I wander around the too-small living room, picking things up. No longer my husband’s: as befits the half-divorced, he lives elsewhere.

One of my sons has just reached the shower-and-shave phase, the other hasn’t, but both of them leave a deposit every time they pass through a room. A sort of bathtub ring of objects – socks, paperback books left face-down and open in the middle, sandwiches with bites taken out of them, and, lately, cigarette butts.

Under a dirty T-shirt I discover the Hare Krishna magazine my younger son brought home a week ago. I was worried that it was a spate of adolescent religious mania, but no, he’d given them a quarter because he felt sorry for them. He was a dead-robin-burier as a child. I take the magazine into the kitchen to put it in the trash. On the front there’s a picture of Krishna playing the flute, surrounded by adoring maidens. His face is bright blue, which makes me think of corpses: some things are not cross-cultural. If I read on I could find out why meat and sex are bad for you. Not such a poor idea when you think about it: no more terrified cows, no more divorces. A life of abstinence and prayer. I think of myself, standing on a street corner, ringing a bell, swathed in flowing garments. Selfless and removed, free from sin. Sin is this world, says Krishna. This world is all we have, says Joseph. It’s all you have to work with. It is not too much for you. You will not be rescued.

I could walk to the corner for a hamburger or I could phone out for pizza. I decide on the pizza.

“Do you like me?” Joseph says from his armchair.

“What do you mean, do I
like
you?” I say. It’s early on; I haven’t given any thought to whether or not I like Joseph.

“Well, do you?” he says.

“Look,” I say. I’m speaking calmly but in fact I’m outraged. This is a demand, and Joseph is not supposed to make demands of me. There are too many demands being made of me already. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because the demands exceed the supply. “You’re like my dentist,” I say. “I don’t think about whether or not I like my dentist. I don’t
have
to like him. I’m paying him to fix my teeth. You and my dentist are the only people in the whole world that I don’t
have
to
like.”

“But if you met me under other circumstances,” Joseph persists, “would you like me?”

“I have no idea,” I say. “I can’t imagine any other circumstances.”

This is a room at night, a night empty except for me. I’m looking at the ceiling, across which the light from a car passing outside is slowly moving. My apartment is on the first floor: I don’t like heights. Before this I always lived in a house.

I’ve been having a dream about Joseph. Joseph was never much interested in dreams. At the beginning I used to save them up for him and tell them to him, the ones I thought were of interest, but he would always refuse to say what they meant. He’d make me tell him, instead. Being awake, according to Joseph, was more important than being asleep. He wanted me to prefer it.

Nevertheless, there was Joseph in my dream. It’s the first time he’s made an appearance. I think that it will please him to have made it, finally, after all those other dreams about preparations for dinner parties, always one plate short. But then I remember that he’s no longer around to be told. Here it is, finally, the shape of my bereavement: Joseph is no longer around to be told. There is no one left in my life who is there only to be told.

I’m in an airport terminal. The plane’s been delayed, all the planes have been delayed, perhaps there’s a strike, and people are crammed in and milling around. Some of them are upset, there are children crying, some of the women are crying too, they’ve lost people, they push through the crowd calling out names, but elsewhere there are clumps of men and women laughing and singing, they’ve had the foresight to bring cases of beer with them to the airport and they’re passing the bottles around. I try to get some information but there’s no one at any of the ticket counters. Then I realize I’ve forgotten my passport. I decide to take a taxi home to get it, and by the time I make it back maybe they’ll have everything straightened out.

I push towards the exit doors, but someone is waving to me across the heads of the crowd. It’s Joseph. I’m not at all surprised to see him, though I do wonder about the winter overcoat he’s wearing, since it’s still summer. He also has a yellow muffler wound around his neck, and a hat. I’ve never seen him in any of these clothes before. Of course, I think, he’s cold, but now he’s pushed through the people, he’s beside me. He’s wearing a pair of heavy leather gloves and he takes the right one off to shake my hand. His own hand is bright blue, a flat tempera-paint blue, a picture-book blue. I hesitate, then I shake the hand, but he doesn’t let go, he holds my hand, confidingly, like a child, smiling at me as if we haven’t met for a long time.

“I’m glad you got the invitation,” he says.

Now he’s leading me towards a doorway. There are fewer people now. To one side there’s a stand selling orange juice. Joseph’s three wives are behind the counter, all in identical costumes, white hats and frilly aprons, like waitresses of the forties. We go through the doorway; inside, people are sitting at small round tables, though there’s nothing on the tables in front of them, they appear to be waiting.

I sit down at one of the tables and Joseph sits opposite me. He doesn’t take off his hat or his coat, but his hands are on the table, no gloves, they’re the normal colour again. There’s a man standing beside us, trying to attract our attention. He’s holding out a small white card covered with symbols, hands and fingers. A deaf-mute, I decide, and sure enough when I look his mouth is sewn shut. Now he’s tugging at Joseph’s arm, he’s holding out something else, it’s a large yellow flower. Joseph doesn’t see him.

“Look,” I say to Joseph, but the man is already gone and one of the waitresses has come instead. I resent the interruption, I have so much to tell Joseph and there’s so little time, the plane will go in a minute, in the other room I can already hear the crackle of announcements, but the woman pushes in between us, smiling officiously. It’s the first wife; behind her, the other two wives stand in attendance. She sets a large plate in front of us on the table.

“Will that be all?” she says, before she retreats.

The plate is filled with cookies, children’s-party cookies, white ones, cut into the shapes of moons and stars, decorated with silver balls and coloured sugar. They look too rich.

“My sins,” Joseph says. His voice sounds wistful but when I glance up he’s smiling at me. Is he making a joke?

I look down at the plate again. I have a moment of panic: this is not what I ordered, it’s too much for me, I might get sick. Maybe I could send it back; but I know this isn’t possible.

I remember now that Joseph is dead. The plate floats up towards me, there is no table, around us is dark space. There are thousands of stars, thousands of moons, and as I reach out for one they begin to shine.

The Sunrise

Y
vonne follows men. She does this discreetly and at a distance, at first; usually she spots them on the subway, where she has the leisure to sit down and look about her, but sometimes she will pass one on the street and turn and walk along behind him, hurrying a little to keep up. Occasionally she rides the subway or goes walking just for this purpose, but more often the sighting is accidental. Once she’s made it, though, she postpones whatever she’s doing and makes a detour. This has caused her to miss appointments, which bothers her because she’s punctual as a rule.

On the subway, Yvonne takes care not to stare too hard: she doesn’t want to frighten anyone. When the man gets off the train, Yvonne gets off too and walks to the exit with him, several yards behind. At this point she will either follow him home to see where he lives and lie in wait for him some other day, when she’s made up her mind about him, or she’ll speak to him once they’re out on the street. Two or three times a man has realized he’s being shadowed. One actually began to run. Another turned to confront her, back against a nearby drugstore window, as if cornered. One headed for a crowd and lost her in it. These, she thinks, are the ones with guilty consciences.

When the time is right, Yvonne quickens her pace, comes up beside the man, and touches him on the arm. She always says the same thing:

“Excuse me. You’re going to find this strange, but I’d like to draw you. Please don’t mistake this for a sexual advance.”

Then there’s an interval, during which they say
What?
and Yvonne explains. There’s no charge, she says, and no strings. She just wants to draw them. They don’t have to take their clothes off if they don’t want to; the head and shoulders will do nicely. She really is a professional artist. She is not mad.

If they’ve listened to her initial appeal at all, and most do, it’s very hard for them to say no. What does she want from them, after all? Only a small amount of their time, so that they can let her have access to something only they can give. They’ve been singled out as unique, told they are not interchangeable. No one knows better than Yvonne how seductive this is. Most of them say yes.

Yvonne isn’t interested in men who are handsome in the ordinary way: she’s not drawing toothpaste ads. Besides, men with capped-looking teeth and regular features, men even remotely like Greek gods, are conscious of the surface they present and of its effect. They display themselves as if their faces are pictures already, finished, varnished, impermeable. Yvonne wants instead whatever it is that’s behind the face and sees out through it. She chooses men who look as if things have happened to them, things they didn’t like very much, men who show signs of the forces acting upon them, who have been chipped a little, rained on, frayed, like shells on the beach. A jaw slightly undershot, a nose too large or long, eyes of different sizes, asymmetry and counterpoise, these are the qualities that attract her. Men of this kind are not likely to be vain in any standard way. Instead they know that they must depend on something other than appearance to make an impact; but the mere act of being drawn throws them back upon their own unreliable bodies, their imperfect flesh. They watch her as she draws, puzzled, distrustful, yet at the same time vulnerable and oddly confiding. Something of theirs is in her hands.

Once Yvonne gets the men into her studio she is very delicate with them, very tactful. With them in mind she has purchased a second-hand armchair with a footstool to match: solid, comforting, wine velvet, not her usual taste. She sits them in it beside the large window, and turns them so that the light catches on their bones. She brings them a cup of tea or coffee, to put them at ease, and tells them how much she appreciates what they are doing for her. Her gratitude is real: she’s about to eat their souls, not the whole soul of course, but even a small amount is not to be taken lightly. Sometimes she puts on a tape, something classical and not too noisy.

If she thinks they’re relaxed enough she asks them to take off their shirts. She finds collar-bones very expressive, or rather the slight hollow at the V, the base of the throat; the wish-bone, which gives luck only when broken. The pulse there says something different from the pulse at wrist or temple. This is the place where, in historical movies set in mediaeval times, the arrow goes in.

When Yvonne has arranged her materials and started to draw, she goes quickly: for the sake of the men, she doesn’t like to stretch things out. Having been subjected to it herself in her student days, when people posed for each other, she knows how excruciating it is to sit still and let yourself be looked at. The sound of the pencil travelling over the paper raises the small hairs on the skin, as if the pencil is not a pencil at all but a hand being passed over the body, half an inch from the surface. Not surprisingly, some of the men connect this sensation – which can be erotic – with Yvonne, and ask to take her out or see her again or even sleep with her.

Here Yvonne becomes fastidious. She asks if the man is married, and if he is, she asks if he’s happy. She has no wish to get involved with an unhappily married man; she doesn’t want to breathe anyone else’s black smoke. But if he’s happy, why would he want to sleep with her? If he isn’t married, she thinks there must be some good reason why not. Mostly, when these invitations are issued, Yvonne refuses, gently and continuing to smile. She discounts protestations of love, passion, and undying friendship, praise of her beauty and talent, claims on her charity, whining, and bluster; she’s heard these before. For Yvonne, only the simplest-minded rationale will do. “Because I want to” is about all she’ll accept.

Yvonne’s studio is right downtown, near the waterfront, in an area of nineteenth-century factories and warehouses, some of which are still used in the original way, some of which have been taken over by people like her. In these streets there are drunks, derelicts, people who live in cardboard boxes; which doesn’t bother Yvonne, since she hardly ever goes there at night. On the way to her studio in the mornings she has often passed a man who looks like Beethoven. He has the same domed forehead, overgrown brow bones, gloomy meditative scowl. His hair is grey and long and matted, and he wears a crumbling jeans suit and sneakers tied on with pieces of parcel string, even in winter, and carries a plastic-wrapped bundle that Yvonne thinks must contain everything he owns. He talks to himself and never looks at her. Yvonne would very much like to draw him, but he’s far too crazy. She has a well-developed sense of self-protection, which must be why she hasn’t landed in serious trouble with any of the men she picks up. This man alarms her, not because she thinks he’s dangerous, but because he’s a little too much like what she could become.

Nobody knows how old Yvonne is. She looks thirty and dresses as if she were twenty, though sometimes she looks forty and dresses as if she were fifty. Her age depends on the light, and what she wears depends on how she feels, which depends on how old she looks that day, which depends on the light. It’s a delicate interaction. She wears her bronze-coloured hair cut short at the back and falling slantwise across her forehead, like Peter Pan’s. Sometimes she rigs herself out in black leather pants and rides a very small motorcycle; on the other hand, sometimes she pins on a hat with a little veil, sticks a beauty mark on her cheek with an eyebrow pencil, and slings a second-hand silver fox with three tails around her neck.

She sometimes explains her age by saying she’s old enough to remember garter belts when they were just ordinary articles of women’s clothing. You wore them when you were young, before you were forced to put on girdles and become rubberized, like mothers. Yvonne remembers the advent of panty-hose, the death of the seamed stocking, whereas for younger women these events are only mythology.

She has another way of dating herself, which she uses less often. Once, when she was young but adult, she had a show of her paintings closed down by the police. It was charged with being obscene. She was one of the first artists in Toronto that this happened to. Just before that, no gallery would even have dared to mount the show, and shortly afterwards, when chains and blood and body parts in supermarket trays had become chic, it would have been considered tame. All Yvonne did at the time was to stick the penises onto men’s bodies more or less the way they really were, and erect into the bargain. “I don’t see what the big deal was,” she can say, still ingenuously. “I was only painting hard-ons. Isn’t that what every man wants? The police were just jealous.” She goes on to add that she can’t make out why, if a penis is a good thing, calling someone a penis-brain is an insult. She has this conversation only with people she knows very well or else has just met. The shocking thing about Yvonne, when she intends to be shocking, is the contrast between certain elements of her vocabulary and the rest of it, which, like her manner, is reserved and even secretive.

For a while she became a sort of celebrity, but that was because she was too inexperienced to know better. People made her into a cause, and even collected money for her, which was nice of them but got in the way, she now feels, of her reputation as a serious artist. It became boring to be referred to as “the penis lady.” There was one advantage though: people bought her paintings, though not for ultra-top prices, especially after magic realism came back in. By this time she has money put away: she knows too much about the lives of artists to spend it all and have nothing to fall back on when the wind shifts and the crunch comes, though she sometimes worries that she’ll be one of those old women found dead in a pile of empty cat-food cans with a million dollars stashed in her sock. She hasn’t had a show now for several years; she calls it “lying low.” The truth is she hasn’t been producing much except her drawings of men. She has quite a few of them by now, but she isn’t sure what she’s going to do with them. Whatever she’s looking for she hasn’t yet found.

At the time of her revolutionary penises, she was more interested in bodies than she is now. Renoir was her hero, and she still admires him as a colourist, but she now finds his great lolloping nudes vapid and meaningless. Recently she’s become obsessed with Holbein. A print of his portrait of Georg Gisze hangs in her bathroom, where she can see it while lying in the tub. Georg looks out at her, wearing a black fur coat and a wonderful pink silk shirt, each vein in his hands, each fingernail perfectly rendered, with a suggestion of darkness in his eyes, a wet shine on his lip, the symbols of his spiritual life around him. On his desk stands a vase, signifying the emptiness and vanity of mortal existence, with one carnation in it, signifying the Holy Ghost, or possibly betrothal. Earlier in her life Yvonne used to dismiss this kind of thing as the Rosemary for Remembrance school of flower arranging: everything had to mean something else. The thing about painting penises was that no one ever mistook them for phallic symbols, or indeed for symbols at all. But now she thinks it would be so handy if there were still some language of images like this, commonly known and understood. She would like to be able to put carnations between the fingers of the men she draws, but it’s far too late for that. Surely Impressionism was a mistake, with its flesh that was merely flesh, however beautiful, its flowers that were merely flowers. (But what does she mean by “merely”? Isn’t that enough, for a flower to be itself? If Yvonne knew the answer.…)