Bluebeard's Egg (7 page)

This was the most I had ever kissed him. It was safe enough: he was wounded. When he groaned a little I thought it was because I was hurting him. “Careful,” he said, moving me to one side.

I stopped kissing him and put my face down on his shoulder, against his neck. I could see the dresser, which matched the bed; it had a white crocheted runner on it, and some baby pictures in silver stands. Over it was a mirror, in a sombre frame with a carved festoon of roses, and inside the frame there was Buddy, with me lying beside him. I thought this must be the bedroom of Buddy’s parents, and their bed. There was something sad about lying there with Buddy in the cramped formal room with its heavy prettiness, its gaiety which was both ornate and dark. This room was almost foreign to me; it was a celebration of something I could not identify with and would never be able to share. It would not take very much to make Buddy happy, ever: only something like this. This was what he was expecting of me, this not very much, and it was a lot more than I had. This was the most afraid I ever got, of Buddy.

“Hey,” said Buddy. “Cheer up, eh? Everything still works okay.” He thought I was worried about his injury.

After that we found that I had rolled on the bag of cookies and crushed them into bits, and that made everything safer, because we could laugh. But when it was time for me to go, Buddy became wistful. He held onto my hand. “What if I won’t let you go?” he said.

When I was walking back towards the streetcar stop, I saw a woman coming towards me, carrying a big brown leather purse and a paper bag. She had a muscular and determined face, the face of a woman who has had to fight, something or other, in some way or another, for a long time. She looked at me as if she thought I was up to no good, and I became conscious of the creases in my cotton dress, from where I had been lying on the bed with Buddy. I thought she might be Buddy’s mother.

Buddy got better quite soon. In the weeks after that, he ceased to be an indulgence or even a joke, and became instead an obligation. We continued to go out, on the same nights as we always had, but there was an edginess about Buddy that hadn’t been there before. Sometimes Trish and Charlie went with us, but they no longer necked extravagantly in the back seat. Instead they held hands and talked together in low voices about things that sounded serious and even gloomy, such as the prices of apartments. Trish had started to collect china. But Charlie had his own car now, and more and more frequently Buddy and I were alone, no longer protected. Buddy’s breathing became heavier and he no longer smiled good-naturedly when I took hold of his hands to stop him. He was tired of me being fourteen.

I began to forget about Buddy when I wasn’t with him. The forgetting was deliberate: it was the same as remembering, only in reverse. Instead of talking to Buddy for hours on the phone, I spent a lot of time making dolls’ clothes for my little sister’s dolls. When I wasn’t doing that, I read through my brother’s collection of comic books, long since discarded by him, lying on the floor of my room with my feet up on the bed. My brother was no longer teaching me Greek. He had gone right off the deep end, into trigonometry, which we both knew I would never learn no matter what.

Buddy ended on a night in October, suddenly, like a light being switched off. I was supposed to be going out with him, but at the dinner table my father said that I should reconsider: Toronto was about to be hit by a major storm, a hurricane, with torrential rain and gale-force winds, and he didn’t think I should be out in it, especially in a car like Buddy’s. It was already dark: the rain was pelting against the windows behind our drawn curtains, and the wind was up and roaring like breakers in the ash trees outside. I could feel our house growing smaller. My mother said she would get out some candles, in case the electricity failed. Luckily, she said, we were on high ground. My father said that it was my decision, of course, but anyone who would go out on a night like this would have to be crazy.

Buddy phoned to see when he should pick me up. I said that the weather was getting bad, and maybe we should go out the next night. Buddy said why be afraid of a little rain? He wanted to see me. I said I wanted to see him, too, but maybe it was too dangerous. Buddy said I was just making excuses. I said I wasn’t.

My father walked past me along the hall, snapping his fingers together like a pair of scissors. I said anyone who would go out on a night like this would have to be crazy, Buddy could turn on the radio and hear for himself, we were having a hurricane, but Buddy sounded as if he didn’t really know what that meant. He said if I wouldn’t go out with him during a hurricane I didn’t love him enough. I was shocked: this was the first time he had ever used the word
love
, out loud and not just at the ends of letters, to describe what we were supposed to be doing. When I told him he was being stupid he hung up on me, which made me angry. But he was right, of course. I didn’t love him enough.

Instead of going out with Buddy, I stayed home and played a game of chess with my brother, who won, as he always did. I was never a very good chess player: I couldn’t stand the silent waiting. There was a feeling of reunion about this game, which would not, however, last long. Buddy was gone, but he had been a symptom.

This was the first of a long series of atmospherically supercharged break-ups with men, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Blizzards, thunderstorms, heat waves, hailstorms: I later broke up in all of them. I’m not sure what it was. Possibly it had something to do with positive ions, which were not to be discovered for many years; but I came to believe that there was something about me that inspired extreme gestures, though I could never pinpoint what it was. After one such rupture, during a downpour of freezing rain, my ex-boyfriend gave me a valentine consisting of a real cow’s heart with an actual arrow stuck through it. He’d been meaning to do it anyway, he said, and he couldn’t think of any other girl who would appreciate it. For weeks I wondered whether or not this was a compliment.

Buddy was not this friendly. After the break-up, he never spoke to me again. Through Trish, he asked for his identification bracelet back, and I handed it over to her in the girls’ washroom at lunch hour. There was someone else he wanted to give it to, Trish told me, a girl named Mary Jo who took typing instead of French, a sure sign in those days that you would leave school early and get a job or something. Mary Jo had a round, good-natured face, bangs down over her forehead like a sheepdog’s, and heavy breasts, and she did in fact leave school early. Meanwhile she wore Buddy’s name in silver upon her wrist. Trish switched allegiances, though not all at once. Somewhat later, I heard she had been telling stories about how I’d lived in a cowshed all summer.

It would be wrong to say that I didn’t miss Buddy. In this respect too he was the first in a series. Later, I always missed men when they were gone, even when they meant what is usually called absolutely nothing to me. For me, I was to discover, there was no such category as absolutely nothing.

But all that was in the future. The morning after the hurricane, I had only the sensation of having come unscathed through a major calamity. After we had listened to the news, cars overturned with their drivers in them, demolished houses, all that rampaging water and disaster and washed-away money, my brother and I put on our rubber boots and walked down the old, pot-holed and now pitted and raddled Pottery Road to witness the destruction first-hand.

There wasn’t as much as we had hoped. Trees and branches were down, but not that many of them. The Don River was flooded and muddy, but it was hard to tell whether the parts of cars half sunk in it and the mangled truck tires, heaps of sticks, planks, and assorted debris washing along or strewn on land where the water had already begun to recede were new or just more of the junk we were used to seeing in it. The sky was still overcast; our boots squelched in the mud, out of which no hands were poking up. I had wanted something more like tragedy. Two people had actually been drowned there during the night, but we did not learn that until later. This is what I have remembered most clearly about Buddy: the ordinary-looking wreckage, the flatness of the water, the melancholy light.

Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language

L
oulou is in the coach-house, wedging clay. She’s wearing a pair of running shoes, once white, now grey, over men’s wool work socks, a purple Indian-print cotton skirt, and a rust-coloured smock, so heavy with clay dust it hangs on her like brocade, the sleeves rolled up past the elbow. This is her favourite working outfit. To the music of
The Magic Flute
, brought to her by
CBC
stereo, she lifts the slab of clay and slams it down, gives a half-turn, lifts and slams. This is to get the air bubbles out, so nothing will explode in the kiln. Some potters would hire an apprentice to do this, but not Loulou.

It’s true she has apprentices, two of them; she gets them through the government as free trainees. But they make plates and mugs from her designs, about all they’re fit for. She doesn’t consider them suitable for wedging clay, with their puny little biceps and match-stick wrists, so poorly developed compared with her own solid, smoothly muscled arms and broad, capable but shapely hands, so often admired by the poets.
Marmoreal
, one of them said – wrote, actually – causing Loulou to make one of her frequent sorties into the dictionary, to find out whether or not she’d been insulted.

Once she had done this openly, whenever they’d used a word about her she didn’t understand, but when they’d discovered she was doing it they’d found it amusing and had started using words like that on purpose. “Loulou is so geomorphic,” one of them would say, and when she would blush and scowl, another would take it up. “Not only that, she’s fundamentally chthonic.” “Telluric,” a third would pipe up. Then they would laugh. She’s decided that the only thing to do is to ignore them. But she’s not so dumb as they think, she remembers the words, and when they aren’t watching she sneaks a look at the Shorter Oxford (kept in the study which really belongs to only one of them but which she thinks of as
theirs)
, washing her hands first so she won’t leave any tell-tale signs of clay on the page.

She reads their journals, too, taking the same precautions. She suspects they know she does this. It’s her way of keeping up with what they are really thinking about her, or maybe only with what they want her to think they’re thinking. The journals are supposed to be secret, but Loulou considers it her right and also a kind of duty to read them. She views it in the same light as her mother viewed going through the family’s sock and underwear drawers, to sort out the clean things from the ones they’d already worn and stuffed back in. This is what the poets’ journals are like. Socks, mostly, but you never know what you will find.

“Loulou is becoming more metonymous,” she’s read recently. This has been bothering her for days. Sometimes she longs to say to them, “Now just what in hell did you mean by that?” But she knows she would get nowhere.

“Loulou is the foe of abstract order,” one would say. This is a favourite belief of theirs.

“Loulou is the foe of abstract ordure.”

“Loulou is the Great Goddess.”

“Loulou is the great mattress.”

It would end up with Loulou telling them to piss off. When that didn’t stop them, she would tell them they couldn’t have any more baked chicken if they went on like that. Threatening to deprive them of food usually works.

Overtly, Loulou takes care to express scorn for the poets; though not for them, exactly – they have their points – but for their pickiness about words. Her mother would have said they were finicky eaters. “Who cares what a thing’s called?” she says to them. “A piece of bread is a piece of bread. You want some or not?” And she bends over to slide three of her famous loaves, high and nicely browned, out of the oven, and the poets admire her ass and haunches. Sometimes they do this openly, like other men, growling and smacking their lips, pretending to be construction workers. They like pretending to be other things; in the summers they play baseball games together and make a big fuss about having the right hats. Sometimes, though, they do it silently, and Loulou only knows about it from the poems they write afterwards. Loulou can tell these poems are about her, even though the nouns change: “my lady,” “my friend’s lady,” “my woman,” “my friend’s woman,” “my wife,” “my friend’s wife,” and, when necessary for the length of the line, “the wife of my friend.” Never “girl” though, and never her name.
Ass
and
haunches
aren’t Loulou’s words either; she would say
butt
.

Loulou doesn’t know anything about music but she likes listening to it. Right now, the Queen of the Night runs up her trill, and Loulou pauses to see if she’ll make it to the top. She does, just barely, and Loulou, feeling vicarious triumph, rams her fist into the mound of clay. Then she covers it with a sheet of plastic and goes to the sink to wash her hands. Soon the oven timer will go off and one of the poets, maybe her husband but you never know, will call her on the intercom to come and see about the bread. It isn’t that they wouldn’t take it out themselves, if she asked them to. Among the four or five of them they’d likely manage. It’s just that Loulou doesn’t trust them. She decided long ago that none of them knows his left tit from a hole in the ground when it comes to the real world. If she wants the bread taken out when it’s done but not overdone, and she does, she’ll have to do it herself.

She wonders who will be in the kitchen at the main house by now: her first husband for sure, and the man she lived with after that for three years without being married, and her second husband, the one she has now, and two ex-lovers. Half a dozen of them maybe, sitting around the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and eating her hermit cookies and talking about whatever they talk about when she isn’t there. In the past there have been periods of strain among them, especially during the times when Loulou has been switching over, but they’re all getting along well enough now. They run a collective poetry magazine, which keeps them out of trouble mostly. The name of this magazine is
Comma
, but among themselves the poets refer to it as
Coma
. At parties they enjoy going up to young female would-be poets (“proupies,” they call them behind their backs, which means “poetry groupies”), and saying, “I’d like to put you in a
Coma.”
A while ago
Comma
published mostly poems without commas, but this is going out now, just as beards are going out in favour of moustaches and even shaving. The more daring poets have gone so far as to cut off their sideburns. Loulou is not quite sure whether or not she approves of this.

She doesn’t know whether the poets are good poets, whether the poems they write in such profusion are any good. Loulou has no opinion on this subject: all that matters is what they are writing about her. Their poems get published in books, but what does that mean? Not money, that’s for sure. You don’t make any money with poetry, the poets tell her, unless you sing and play the guitar too. Sometimes they give readings and make a couple of hundred bucks. For Loulou that’s three medium-sized casseroles, with lids. On the other hand, they don’t have her expenses. Part of her expenses is them.

Loulou can’t remember exactly how she got mixed up with the poets. It wasn’t that she had any special thing for poets as such: it just happened that way. After the first one, the others seemed to follow along naturally, almost as if they were tied onto each other in a long line with a piece of string. They were always around, and she was so busy most of the time that she didn’t go out much to look for other kinds of men. Now that her business is doing so well you’d think she would have more leisure time, but this isn’t the case. And any leisure time she does have, she spends with the poets. They’re always nagging her about working too hard.

Bob was the first one, and also her first husband. He was in art school at the same time she was, until he decided he wasn’t suited for it. He wasn’t practical enough, he let things dry out: paint, clay, even the leftovers in his tiny refrigerator, as Loulou discovered the first night she’d slept with him. She devoted the next morning to cleaning up his kitchen, getting rid of the saucers of mummified cooked peas and the shrivelled, half-gnawed chicken legs and the warped, cracked quarter-packages of two-month-old sliced bacon, and the bits of cheese, oily on the outside and hard as tiles. Loulou has always hated clutter, which she defines, though not in so many words, as matter out of its proper place. Bob looked on, sullen but appreciative, as she hurled and scoured. Possibly this was why he decided to love her: because she would do this sort of thing. What he said though was, “You complete me.”

What he also said was that he’d fallen in love with her name. All the poets have done this, one after the other. The first symptom is that they ask her whether Loulou is short for something – Louise, maybe? When she says no, they look at her in that slightly glazed way she recognizes instantly, as if they’ve never paid proper attention to her or even seen her before. This look is her favourite part of any new relationship with a man. It’s even better than the sex, though Loulou likes sex well enough and all the poets have been good in bed. But then, Loulou has never slept with a man she did not consider good in bed. She’s beginning to think this is because she has low standards.

At first Loulou was intrigued by this obsession with her name, mistaking it for an obsession with her, but it turned out to be no such thing. It was the gap that interested them, one of them had explained (not Bob though; maybe Phil, the second and most linguistic of them all).

“What gap?” Loulou asked suspiciously. She knew her upper front teeth were a little wide apart and had been self-conscious about it when she was younger.

“The gap between the word and the thing signified,” Phil said. His hand was on her breast and he’d given an absent-minded squeeze, as if to illustrate what he meant. They were in bed at the time. Mostly Loulou doesn’t like talking in bed. But she’s not that fond of talking at other times, either.

Phil went on to say that Loulou, as a name, conjured up images of French girls in can-can outfits, with corseted wasp-waists and blonde curls and bubbly laughs. But then there was the real Loulou – dark, straight-haired, firmly built, marmoreal, and well, not exactly bubbly. More earthy, you might say. (Loulou hadn’t known then what he meant by “earthy,” though by now she’s learned that for him, for all of them, it means “functionally illiterate.”) The thing was, Phil said, what existed in the space between Loulou and her name?

Loulou didn’t know what he was talking about. What space? Once she’d resented her mother for having saddled her with this name; she would rather have been called Mary or Ann. Maybe she suspected that her mother would really have preferred a child more like the name – blonde, thin, curly-headed – but had disappointingly got Loulou instead, short, thick, stubborn-jawed, not much interested in the frilly dolls’ clothes her mother had painstakingly crocheted for her. Instead, Loulou was fond of making mud pies on the back porch, placing them carefully along the railing where people wouldn’t step on them and ruin them. Her mother’s response to these pies was to say, “Oh, Loulou!”, as if
Loulou
in itself meant mud, meant trouble and dismay.

“It’s just a name,” she said. “Phil is kind of a dumb name too if you ask me.”

Phil said that wasn’t the point, he wasn’t
criticizing
her, but Loulou had stopped the conversation by climbing on top of him, letting her long hair fall down over his face.

That was early on; he’d liked her hair then. “Rank,” he’d called it in a poem, quite a lot later. Loulou hadn’t thought much of that when she looked it up. It could mean
too luxuriant
or
offensive and foul-smelling
. The effect of this poem on Loulou was to cause her to wash her hair more often. Sooner or later all the poets got into her hair, and she was tired of having it compared to horses’ tails, Newfoundland dog fur, black holes in space and the insides of caves. When Loulou was feeling particularly enraged by the poets she would threaten to get a brushcut, though she knew it would be pushing her luck.

When she has dried her hands, Loulou takes off her smock. Underneath it she’s wearing a mauve sweatshirt with
RAVING OPTIMIST
stencilled across the front. The poets gave it to her, collectively, one Christmas, because a few weeks before one of them had said, “Why are you so grumpy, Loulou?” and Loulou had said, “I’m only grumpy when you pick on me,” and then, after a pause, “Compared to you guys I’m a raving optimist.” This was true, though they made fun of her for it. In a group they can laugh, but it’s only Loulou who has seen them one at a time, sitting in chairs for hours on end with their heads down on their arms, almost unable to move. It’s Loulou who’s held their hands when they couldn’t make it in bed and told them that other things are just as important, though she’s never been able to specify what. It’s Loulou who has gone out and got drunk with them and listened to them talking about the void and about the terrifying blankness of the page and about how any art form is just a way of evading suicide. Loulou thinks this is a load of b.s.: she herself does not consider the making of casseroles with lids or the throwing of porcelain fruit bowls as an evasion of suicide, but then, as they have often pointed out, what she’s doing isn’t an art form, it’s only a craft. Bob once asked her when she was going to branch out into macramé, for which she emptied the dust-pan on him. But she matches them beer for beer; she’s even gone so far as to throw up right along with them, if that seemed required. One of them once told her she was a soft touch.