Lady Oracle (30 page)

“It’s dynamite,” said Sturgess. “And isn’t she a great little lady? We’ll have a great cover. Four-color, the works. Do you play the guitar?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “Why?”

“I thought we might do you as a sort of female Leonard Cohen,” said Sturgess.

The other two were slightly embarrassed by this. “Of course, it will need a little editing,” said Morton.

“Yes,” said Colin. “We might take out the more, well.…”

“A bit of it could come out, here and there,” said Sturgess. “I mean, there’s some of it I don’t understand too much: for instance, who’s the man with the daffodils and the icicle teeth?”

“I sort of like that,” Colin said. “It’s, you know, Jungian.…”

“But the part about the Road of Life, well.…”

“I like that,” Sturgess said. “That’s clear, that’s something you can get your teeth into.”

“Well, gentlemen, those are details,” said Morton. “We can clear all that up later. It’s evident that this is a book that has something for everyone. My dear,” he said, turning to me, “we would be most happy to publish your book. Now, do you have a title for it?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I haven’t thought much about it. I guess I didn’t really think it would ever get published. I don’t know much about these things.”

“What about this bit, right here,” Sturgess said, thumbing through the manuscript. “This sort of caught my eye. Section Five:

and so forth.”

“Yes,” said Morton, “that’s resonant. That reminds me of something.”

“What I mean is, here’s your title,” said Sturgess. “
Lady Oracle.
That’s it, I have a nose for them. The women’s movement, the occult, all of that.”

“I don’t want to publish this book if it isn’t really any good,” I said. I was on my third grasshopper, and I was beginning to feel undignified. I was also beginning to wonder about Arthur. What was he going to think about it, this unhappy but torrid and, I was feeling now, slightly preposterous love affair between a woman in a boat and a man in a cloak, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire?

“Good,” said Sturgess. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about good. We’ll worry about good, that’s our business, right? I know just the way to handle this. I mean, there’s lots of good, but this is
terrific.”

“A
rthur,” I said, “I’m having a book published.” I said this while Arthur was watching the eleven
P.M.
National News
on the CBC, hoping he wouldn’t quite hear me. But he did.

“What?” he said. “A book? You?”

“Yes,” I said.

Arthur looked dismayed. He turned down the volume on the news. “What’s it about?” he said.

“Well, it’s sort of, you could say it’s about the male-female roles in our society.” I was uneasy about this; I was thinking of Section Fourteen, which had the embrace between the Iron Maiden, smooth on the outside but filled with spikes, and the man in the inflated rubber suit. But I was trying to think of something he’d find respectable, and this seemed to be all right, as he stopped frowning.

“That’s good,” he said. “I’ve always told you that you had the ability. I could look it over for you, if you like. Fix it up for you.”

“Thank you, Arthur,” I said, “but it’s already been edited.” This was true: poor Colin Harper had been over the manuscript several times, scratching things out and writing
delete
in the margins. He had
tried to be tactful, but the book obviously embarrassed him. He’d used the word “melodramatic” twice, and once he’d said “Gothic sensibility,” which gave me a fright –
he knew.
But it was only a coincidence. “It’s already at the printer’s,” I told Arthur. “They want me to be on television,” I added, I suppose to impress him.

Arthur was displeased again, as I knew he would be. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“You’ve been so busy,” I murmured. “I didn’t want to bother you.” This was true enough, as Arthur had met a whole new group of people and was into a fresh upward spiral of activity.

“Well, that’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ll have to read it. We should go out to celebrate; there’re some people I’ve been wanting you to meet anyway.”

Arthur’s idea of going out to celebrate was the Young Lok Gardens on Spadina. “It’s the way Sai Woo’s used to be,” said Arthur, “before it got famous.” What he meant was that it was cheap. We’d eaten there once before, and the food was good; but for me a celebration should have drinks at least, and candles if possible. Young Lok Gardens didn’t have a liquor license.

But Arthur was feeling touchy, so I didn’t suggest anything else. We walked over to Spadina and took a bus. Arthur still refused to let us have a car; wasteful, he said. I knew he was morally right; he was always morally right. This was admirable, but it was beginning to be a strain.

The people we were going to meet, Arthur told me, were Don and Marlene Pugh. Arthur and Don taught in the same university department and shared the same views. Arthur respected Don’s mind, he told me. He was very good at respecting people’s minds, initially. But he would always manage to find some flaw, some little corner of dry rot. “Nobody’s perfect,” I would tell him. Not even you, I increasingly wanted to add.

We walked into the Young Lok Gardens, which was crowded, as usual. A couple sitting against the far wall waved at us, and we squeezed ourselves through the tables to reach them.

“Joan, this is Don Pugh and his wife Marlene,” Arthur said, and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I knew Marlene. I’d gone to Brownies with her.

She hadn’t changed that much, she was still a lot thinner than I was. She was wearing a faded-denim jacket and jeans, with a flower embroidered on the jacket pocket; she had sparse blonde hair, worn raggedly about her shoulders, and round silver-rimmed glasses. She was slim and muscular, with chunky silver rings on all four fingers of her left hand, like knuckle dusters. I could tell she’d flown up to Guides, covered her sleeves with badges, gone on to take modern dancing, Gestalt therapy, karate, carpentry. She smiled up at me, cool and competent. I, of course, was wearing fringes: a shawl, a dangly necklace with which I could easily be strangled, a scarf. My hair needed washing, my fingernails were dirty, my shoelaces felt untied, although I wasn’t wearing any.

Wads of fat sprouted on my thighs and shoulders, my belly bulged out like a Hubbard squash, a brown wool beret popped through my scalp, bloomers coated my panic-stricken loins. Tears swelled behind my eyes. Like a virus meeting an exhausted throat, my dormant past burst into rank life.

“Great to meet you,” Marlene said.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

I headed for the ladies’, followed by their astonished eyes. Once there, I locked myself into a cubicle, where I sat, helpless with selfpity, snorting and blowing my nose. Some celebration. Marlene my tormentor, who’d roped me to a bridge and left me there, a living sacrifice, for the monster of the ravines; Marlene the ingenious inquisitor. I was trapped again in the nightmare of my childhood,
where I ran eternally after the others, the oblivious or scornful ones, hands outstretched, begging for a word of praise. She hadn’t recognized me, but when she did I knew what would happen: she would have a smile of indulgence for her former self, and I would be overcome with shame. Yet I hadn’t done anything shameful; she was the one who’d done it. Why then should I be the one to feel guilt, why should she go free? Hers was the freedom of the strong; my guilt was the guilt of those who lose, those who can be exposed, those who fail. I hated her.

I couldn’t stay in there all night. I wiped my face with a damp paper towel and repaired my makeup. I would just have to tough it out.

When I came back to the table, they were eating a whole sweet-and-sour fish, complete with bulging, baked eyes. They hardly noticed my return: they were deep into a discussion of United States cultural imperialism. Another man had joined them, sad-eyed, sandy-haired and balding. I gathered that his name was Sam, though no one bothered to introduce me.

I sat and listened as they batted their ideas back and forth like Ping-Pong balls, scoring their various points. They were deciding the future of the country. Should it be nationalism with a socialist flavor, or socialism with a nationalist flavor? Don, it appeared, had all the statistics; Arthur had the fervor. Sam seemed to be the theoretician; it came out that he’d trained as a rabbinical student. Marlene pronounced the judgments. Self-righteousness was hers, I thought. She was even more self-righteous than Arthur. She had all the aces, she’d once worked in a factory, which impressed hell out of the others. No one said anything to me; Arthur might have mentioned my book, I felt, but maybe he was protecting himself. He didn’t want to say anything about it before he’d read it; he didn’t trust me. The only one at the table I had any hope of communicating with was the baked fish, now reduced to a spine and a head.

“Let’s get some fortune cookies,” I said with forced cheerfulness. “I love them, don’t you?” Arthur ordered some, with the air of indulging a spoiled child. Marlene gave me a look of contempt.

I decided to tackle her head-on. I might as well know the worst, right now. “I think we went to the same Brownies,” I said.

Marlene laughed. “Oh, Brownies,” she said, “Everyone went to Brownies.”

“I was a Gnome,” I said.

“I really can’t remember what I was,” she said. “I can’t remember much about it at all. We used to hide in the cloakroom afterwards though, and phone people up on the church phone. When they answered we would say, ‘Is your refrigerator running?’ and when they’d say yes, we’d say, ‘Then you better catch it.’ That’s about all I remember.”

I could recall this game very well, since they would never let me play. I was astonished at how much I still resented this. But I resented even more the fact that she hadn’t recognized me. It seemed very unjust that an experience so humiliating to me hadn’t touched her at all.

The fortune cookies came. Don and Arthur ignored theirs, but the rest of us opened them. I got
A new love awaits you.
Sam got one that promised riches, and Marlene’s said,
It is often best to be oneself.

“I obviously got the wrong one,” Sam said.

“I don’t know,” Marlene said. “You’ve always been a closet capitalist.” They seemed to know each other better than I’d thought.

“I got the wrong one too,” I said. Marlene’s, I felt, was meant for me.
It is often best to be oneself
whispered the small, crumby voice, like a conscience. But which one, which one? And if I was ever to begin, think how appalled they would be.

“What was wrong with you?” Arthur said when we were back at the apartment.

“I don’t know,” I said. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t go for Marlene all that much.”

“Well, she liked you, a lot,” Arthur said. “She told me when you were in the can.”

“The first time?” I said.

“No,” he said, “I think it was the third.”

Thank God for toilet cubicles, I thought, the only places left for solitary meditation and prayer. What had I been praying for? I’d prayed, with all my heart, that Marlene would fall down a hole.

During the following week, Marlene and Don, with Sam in their wake, practically moved in with us. Marlene became Arthur’s Platonic ideal. Not only did she have a mind he could respect, she was also a tip-top cook, mostly vegetarian. Don and Marlene had two young children, and despite the fact that it was Arthur who’d festooned our bedroom with every known form of birth-control device, urged me to take the Pill, grouched when it made me throw up, and turned guacamole-green every time my period was late, I was now silently reproached for not having any.

Marlene was the managing editor of
Resurgence
, a small Canadian-nationalist left-wing magazine, of which Don was the editor and Sam the assistant editor. Arthur quickly became a contributing editor, and wrote a carefully researched article on branch plants, which Marlene read, chain-smoking (her only vice), nodding thoughtfully, and saying things like, “Good point you’ve got there,” while Arthur beamed. The Muse, I thought angrily; she never bothered to help me make the coffee, I did it all. It was the least I could do, as Arthur said, and I was determined to do the least.

I was jealous of Marlene, but not in the ordinary way. It didn’t occur to me that Arthur would ever think of laying a hand on her skinny little rump, any more than a devout Catholic would palpate the Madonna. And it was soon obvious to me that Marlene was
having an affair with Sam, although Don didn’t know. I decided not to tell anyone, not yet. I was immediately more good-natured; I bought cookies, which I served with the coffee, and began to sit in on the editorial sessions. I was especially friendly to Sam; I could see that he was under a lot of pressure. Although one side of him was as dedicated and earnest as Arthur, he had a less intimidating side which he revealed only in the kitchen while he helped with the coffee. I liked the fact that he helped with the coffee, and that he was much clumsier than I was.

Meanwhile, the galley proofs of
Lady Oracle
had come from the publisher. I corrected them, with growing apprehension. On rereading, the book seemed quite peculiar. In fact, except for the diction, it seemed a lot like one of my standard Costume Gothics, but a Gothic gone wrong. It was upside-down somehow. There were the sufferings, the hero in the mask of a villain, the villain in the mask of a hero, the flights, the looming death, the sense of being imprisoned, but there was no happy ending, no true love. The recognition of this half-likeness made me uncomfortable. Perhaps I should have taken it to a psychiatrist instead of a publisher; but then, I remembered the psychiatrist my mother had sent me to. He hadn’t been much help, and no one would understand about the Automatic Writing. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used my own name, Arthur’s name rather; then I wouldn’t have had to show him the book. More and more I dreaded this. He hadn’t mentioned the book since I’d first told him about it, and neither had I. Though I resented his lack of interest, I welcomed the chance to postpone the day of judgment. Arthur wouldn’t like the book, I was certain of it, and neither would anyone else.