Bluebeard's Egg (8 page)

The intercom buzzes as Loulou is hanging up her smock. She buzzes back to show she has heard, takes her hair out of the elastic band and smooths it down, looking in the round tin-framed Mexican mirror that hangs over the sink, and checks up on little Marilyn, her new apprentice, before heading out the door.

Marilyn is still having trouble with cup handles. Loulou will have to spend some time with her later and explain them to her. If the cup handles aren’t on straight, she will say, the cup will be crooked when you pick it up and then the people drinking out of it will spill things and burn themselves. That’s the way you have to put it for trainees: in terms of physical damage. It’s important to Loulou that the production pieces should be done right. They’re her bread and butter, though what she most likes to work on are the bigger things, the amphora-like vases, the tureens a size larger than anyone ought to be able to throw. Another potter once said that you’d need a derrick to give a dinner party with Loulou’s stuff, but that was jealousy. What they say about her mostly is that she doesn’t fool around.

Loulou flings her pink sweater-coat across her shoulders, bangs the coach-house door behind her to make it shut, and walks towards the house, whistling between her teeth and stomping her feet to get the clay dust off. The kitchen is filled with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Loulou breathes it in, revelling in it: a smell of her own creation.

The poets are sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Maybe they’re having a meeting, it’s hard to tell. Some nod at her, some grin. Two of the female poets are here today and Loulou isn’t too pleased about that. As far as she’s concerned they don’t have a lot to offer: they’re almost as bad as the male poets, but without the saving grace of being men. They wear black a lot and have cheek-bones.

Piss on their cheek-bones, thinks Loulou. She knows what cheek-bones mean. The poets,
her
poets, consider these female poets high-strung and interesting. Sometimes they praise their work, a little too extravagantly, but sometimes they talk about their bodies, though not when they are there of course, and about whether or not they would be any good in bed. Either of these approaches drives Loulou wild. She doesn’t like the female poets – they eat her muffins and condescend to her, and Loulou suspects them of having designs on the poets, some of which may already have been carried out, judging from their snotty manner – but she doesn’t like hearing them put down, either. What really gets her back up is that, during these discussions, the poets act as if she isn’t there.

Really, though, the female poets don’t count. They aren’t even on the editorial board of
Comma;
they are only on the edges, like mascots, and today Loulou all but ignores them.

“You could’ve put on more coffee,” she says in her grumpiest voice.

“What’s the matter, Loulou?” says Phil, who has always been the quickest on the uptake when it comes to Loulou and her bad moods. Not that Loulou goes in for fine tuning.

“Nothing
you
can fix,” says Loulou rudely. She takes off her sweater-coat and sticks out her chest.
Marmoreal
, she thinks. So much for the female poets, who are flat-chested as well as everything else.

“Hey Loulou, how about a little nictitation?” says one of the poets.

“Up your nose,” says Loulou.

“She thinks it’s something dirty,” says a second one. “She’s confusing it with micturition.”

“All it means is winking, Loulou,” says the first one.

“He got it out of Trivial Pursuit,” says a third.

Loulou takes one loaf out of the oven, turns it out, taps the bottom, puts it back into the pan and into the oven. They can go on like that for hours. It’s enough to drive you right out of your tree, if you pay any attention to them at all.

“Why do you put up with us, Loulou?” Phil asked her once. Loulou sometimes wonders, but she doesn’t know. She knows why they put up with her though, apart from the fact that she pays the mortgage: she’s solid, she’s predictable, she’s always there, she makes them feel safe. But lately she’s been wondering: who is there to make her feel safe?

It’s another day, and Loulou is on her way to seduce her accountant. She’s wearing purple boots, several years old and with watermarks on them from the slush, a cherry-coloured dirndl she made out of curtain material when she was at art school, and a Peruvian wedding shirt dyed mauve; this is the closest she ever comes to getting dressed up. Because of the section of the city she’s going to, which is mostly middle-European shops, bakeries and clothing stores with yellowing embroidered blouses in the windows and places where you can buy hand-painted wooden Easter eggs and chess sets with the pawns as Cossacks, she’s draped a black wool shawl over her head. This, she thinks, will make her look more ethnic and therefore more inconspicuous: she’s feeling a little furtive. One of the poets has said that Loulou is to
subdued
as Las Vegas at night is to a sixty-watt light bulb, but in fact, with her long off-black hair and her large dark eyes and the strong planes of her face, she does have a kind of peasant look. This is enhanced by the two plastic shopping bags she carries, one in either hand. These do not contain groceries, however, but her receipts and cheque stubs for the two previous years. Loulou is behind on her income tax, which is why she got the accountant in the first place. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t kill two birds with one stone.

Loulou is behind on her income tax because of her fear of money. When she was married to Bob, neither of them had any money anyway, so the income tax wasn’t a problem. Phil, the man she lived with after that, was good with numbers, and although he had no income and therefore no income tax, he treated hers as a game, a kind of superior Scrabble. But her present husband, Calvin, considers money boring. It’s all right to have some – as Loulou does, increasingly – but talking about it is sordid and a waste of time. Calvin claims that those who can actually read income-tax forms, let alone understand them, have already done severe and permanent damage to their brains. Loulou has taken to sending out her invoices and totting up her earnings in the coach-house, instead of at the kitchen table as she used to, and adding and subtracting are acquiring overtones of forbidden sex. Perhaps this is what has led her to the step she is now about to take. You may as well be hung, thinks Loulou, for a sheep as a lamb.

In addition, Loulou has recently been feeling a wistful desire to be taken care of. It comes and goes, especially on cloudy days, and mostly Loulou pays scant attention to it. Nevertheless it’s there. Everyone depends on her, but when she needs help, with her income tax for instance, nobody’s within call. She could ask Phil to do it again, but Calvin might make a fuss about it. She wants to be able to turn her two plastic shopping bags over to some man, some quiet methodical man with inner strength, and not too ugly, who could make sense of their contents and tell her she has nothing to worry about and, hopefully, nothing to pay.

Before Loulou found this particular accountant, she spent several afternoons window-shopping for one down at King and Bay. When it came right down to it, however, she was so intimidated by the hermetically sealed glass towers and the thought of receptionists with hair-dos and nail polish that she didn’t even go in through the doors at any of the addresses she’d looked up in the Yellow Pages. Instead, she stood at street corners as if waiting for the light to change, watching the businessmen hurry past, sometimes in overcoats of the kind the poets never wear, solid-looking and beige or navy blue but slit provocatively up the back, or in three-piece suits, challengingly done up with hundreds of buttons and zippers, their tight tennis-playing butts concealed under layers of expensive wool blend, their ties waving enticingly under their chins like the loose ends of macramé wall hangings: one pull and the whole thing would unravel. The poets, in their track suits or jeans, seem easier of access, but they are hedged with paradox and often moody. The businessmen would be simple and unspoiled, primary reds and blues rather than puce and lilac, potatoes rather than, like the poets, slightly over-ripe avocadoes.

The sight of them filled Loulou with unspecific lust, though she found them touching also. She was like a middle-aged banker surrounded by sixteen-year-old virgins: she longed to be the first, though the first of what she wasn’t sure. But she knew she knew lots of things they were unlikely to know: the poets, on their good days, have been nothing if not inventive.

Loulou doesn’t think of the accountant she has now as a real one, by which she means a frightening one. He is not in a glass tower, he has no polished receptionist, though he does have a certificate on the wall and even a three-piece suit (though, Loulou suspects, only one). She discovered him by accident when she was down on Queen Street buying fresh chicken from A. Stork, the best place for it in her opinion, especially when you need a lot, as she did that day because all of the poets were coming for dinner. Heading for the streetcar stop with her sackful of tender flesh, Loulou saw a hand-lettered sign in the window of a dry-goods store:
INCOME TAX
, and underneath it some foreign language. It was the hand-lettered sign that did it for Loulou: badly lettered at that, she could do much better. On impulse she’d pushed open the door and gone in.

There was a tiny bald-headed man behind the counter, barricaded in with bolts of maroon cloth, a rack of cheesy-looking buttons on the wall behind him, but he turned out not to be the accountant. The accountant was in a separate room at the back, with nothing in it except a wooden desk of the sort Loulou associated with her grade-school teachers, and one other chair and a filing cabinet. He stood up when Loulou came in and offered to take her sack of chicken and put it somewhere for her. “No thanks,” said Loulou, because she could see there was nowhere for him to put it – there was a fern on the filing cabinet, obviously on its last legs – and that he would merely get more flustered than he already was if she said yes; so she went through their first interview with a bag of still-warm cut-up chicken in her lap.

She’s seen him twice since then. He takes more time with her than he really needs to, maybe because he’s not what you would call all that busy. He also talks to her more than he needs to. By now, Loulou knows quite a lot about him. Getting started is harder than it used to be, he’s told her. The dry-goods store belongs to his father, who gives him the office rent-free, in return for doing the accounts. The father is first-generation Czech, and he himself knows two other languages besides English. In this district – he spread his hands in a kind of resigned shrug while saying this – it helps. He does a couple of local bakeries and a hardware store and a second-hand jeweller’s and a few of his father’s old friends. Maybe when the recession is over things will pick up. He has volunteered, too, that his hobby is weight-lifting. Loulou has not asked whether or not he’s married; she suspects not. If he were married, his fern would be in better shape.

While he talks, Loulou nods and smiles. She isn’t sure how old he is. Young, she thinks, though he tries to make himself look older by wearing silver-rimmed glasses. She thinks he has nice hands, not like an accountant’s at all, not spindly. The second time, he went out into the main store and came back with cups of tea, which Loulou found thoughtful. Then he asked her advice about a carpet. Already she felt sorry for him. He hardly even goes out for lunch, she’s discovered; mostly he just gets take-out from the deli across the street. She’s considered bringing him some muffins.

These topics – carpets, weight-lifting, food – are easy for Loulou. What is more difficult is that he’s decided she’s not just a potter but an artist, and his idea of an artist does not at all accord with Loulou’s view of herself. He wants her to be wispy and fey, impractical, unearthly almost; he talks, embarrassingly, about “the creative impulse.” This is far too close to the poets for Loulou. She’s tried to explain that she works with clay, which is hardly ethereal. “It’s like mud pies,” she said, but he didn’t want to hear that. Nor could she find the words to make him understand what she meant: that when she’s throwing a pot she feels exhilaration, exactly the same kind she felt as a child while making a terrible mess of her mother’s back porch. If he could see her the way she really is when she’s working, guck all over her hands, he’d know she’s not exactly essence of roses.

The second time she saw him, the accountant said he envied her freedom. He would like to do something more creative himself, he said, but you have to make a living. Loulou refrained from pointing out that she seems to be doing a sight better at it than he is. She’s much more tactful with him than she’s ever been with the poets. The fact is that she’s starting to enjoy his version of her. Sometimes she even believes it, and thinks she might be on the verge of learning something new about herself. She’s beginning to find herself mysterious. It’s partly for this reason she wants to sleep with the accountant; she thinks it will change her.

The poets would laugh if they knew, but then she’s not about to tell them. She did announce his advent though, that first night, while the poets were all sitting around the table eating chicken and discussing something they called “the language.” They do this frequently these days and Loulou is getting bored with it. “The language” is different from just words: it has this mystical aura around it, like religion, she can tell by the way their voices drop reverently whenever they mention it. That night they had all just finished reading a new book. “I’m really getting into the language,” one said, and the others chewed in silent communion.