Lady Oracle (33 page)

With all the coming and going, I began to feel I was living in a train station. Arthur was hardly ever there, since Marlene and Don had resigned from
Resurgence
and he himself was trying to keep it going. Marlene was too distraught to help much with the cooking and cleaning up, and she was no help with the rest of my life either. Increasingly, I was daydreaming about the Royal Porcupine. I hadn’t called him yet, but any moment now I knew I would give in. I searched the papers for reviews of SQUAWSHT, and found one
in the Saturday entertainment supplement. “A telling and incisive commentary on our times,” it said.

“How would you like to go to an art show?” I asked Marlene. The show was still on, it wouldn’t hurt just to walk through it.

“That pretentious bourgeois shit?” she said. “No thanks.”

“Oh, have you seen it?” I asked.

“No, but I read the review. You can tell.”

Meanwhile there was my literary career. The day after the television show, the phone calls had begun. They were mostly from people who’d believed me and who wanted to know how to get in touch with the Other Side, though some were hate calls from people who thought I’d been making fun of the interviewer, or Spiritualism, or both. Some thought I could foretell the future and wanted me to foretell theirs. None of them asked for love potions or wart remover, but I felt it would come to that.

Then there were the letters, which Morton and Sturgess forwarded to me. They were mostly from people who wanted help getting published. At first I tried answering them, but I soon discovered that these people did not want their fantasies destroyed. When I explained that I had no surefire contacts in the publishing world, they were outraged to be told I was powerless. It overwhelmed me with guilt that I couldn’t live up to their expectations, so after a while I started throwing the letters out unanswered, and after that, unread. Then the people started arriving at the apartment, demanding to know why I hadn’t answered their letters.

New articles were appearing every week, with titles like “The Selling of
Lady Oracle
” and “
Lady Oracle:
Hoax or Delusion?” And because of that first, calamitous television interview, which had made the papers –
AUTHOR CLAIMS SPIRIT GUIDANCE
– the other interviewers Sturgess had lined up wouldn’t leave the subject alone. It did no good for me to say I didn’t want to talk about it; that only whetted their curiosity.

“I hear
Lady Oracle
was written by angels, sort of like the Book of Mormon,” they’d say

“Not exactly,” I’d say. Then I’d try to change the subject, hoping that Arthur wasn’t watching. Sometimes they would be seriously interested, which was even worse. “So you think there is a life after death,” they’d say.

“I don’t know. I guess no one really knows that, do they?”

After these shows I would phone up Sturgess, in tears, and beg to be excused from the next one. Sometimes he would bolster up my sagging self-confidence: I was great, I was doing fine, sales were terrific. Sometimes he would act hurt and say it was our understanding when we signed the contract that I’d do a certain number of shows, didn’t I remember?

I felt very visible. But it was as if someone with my name were out there in the real world, impersonating me, saying things I’d never said but which appeared in the newspapers, doing things for which I had to take the consequences: my dark twin, my funhouse-mirror reflection. She was taller than I was, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my place, and by the time she did this no one would notice the difference because the media were in on the plot, they were helping her.

And that wasn’t all. Now that I was a public figure I was terrified that sooner or later someone would find out about me, trace down my former self, unearth me. My old daydreams about the Fat Lady returned, only this time she’d be walking across her tightrope, in her pink tutu, and she’d fall, in slow motion, turning over and over on the way down.… Or she’d be dancing on a stage in her harem costume and her red slippers. But it wouldn’t be a dance at all, it would be a striptease, she’d start taking off her clothes, while I watched, powerless to stop her. She’d wobble her hips, removing her veils, one after another, but no one would whistle, no one would yell
Take it off baby.
I tried to turn off these out-of-control fantasies, but couldn’t, I had to watch them through to the end.

After Sam left one afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table, drinking Scotch. Marlene was out seeing a lawyer; she’d left her breakfast dishes on the table, a mound of orange peels and a bowl half full of water-logged Rice Krispies. Her healthy eating habits had gone down the drain. So had mine. I was a nervous wreck, I realized, and I’d been one for some time. My home was a campground littered with other people’s garbage, physical, emotional; Arthur was never there, for which I didn’t blame him; I’d been unfaithful to him but I didn’t have the courage either to tell him or to do it again, as I wished to. It wasn’t willpower that was keeping me away from the Royal Porcupine, it was cowardice. I was inept, I was slovenly and hollow, a hoax, a delusion. Tears trickled down my face, onto the crumb-strewn table.

Pull yourself together, I told myself. You’ve got to get out.

Marlene came back from her lawyer, teeth clenched, eyes glinting; visits to her lawyer usually had this effect on her. She sat down and lit a cigarette.

“I’ve got that prick,” she said.

I wasn’t sure which one she meant, but I wasn’t interested. “Marlene,” I said, “I have a wonderful idea. This place is really too small for the three of us.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s a little crowded. I’ll be moving out as soon as I can find a place of my own.”

“No,” I said,
“we’ll
move out. Term’s almost over. Arthur and I will go away for the summer and you can stay here. It’ll help you get things sorted out.”

Arthur wasn’t enthusiastic when I told him. At first he said we couldn’t afford it, but I told him my aunt had died and left me some money.

“I thought your aunt died a long time ago,” Arthur said.

“That was my other aunt, that was Aunt Lou. This was Aunt Deirdre. We never got on that well, but I guess she didn’t have anyone else to leave it to.” The truth was that I’d sold
Love, My Ransom
for a reasonable sum. My own life was a mess, but Louisa K. was doing all right.

“What about the magazine?” Arthur asked. “I can’t just dump it.”

“You need a rest,” I told him. “Marlene will take it over again. She needs something to get her mind off everything else.”

I told Sturgess my mother was dying of cancer and I had to go to Saskatchewan to look after her.

“What about all those appearances,” he said, aggrieved, “and the trans-Canada tour?”

“Postpone them,” I said. “I’ll do it when I get back.”

“Could you at least do an interview in Regina?”

“My mother’s dying, remember?” I said, and he had to make do with that.

It was Sam who suggested Italy and gave us Mr. Vitroni’s address. He’d got it from a friend. Arthur wanted to go to Cuba, but we couldn’t get visas in time.

We took a plane to Rome and rented a red Fiat, which we drove to Terremoto. I navigated, using Sam’s friend’s directions and a map. The gearshift knob came off a few times, but Arthur always had trouble with cars. We moved into the flat, and there we were, away from everyone, ready to sort out our life.

I suppose I’d been hoping for a reconciliation, or at least for a return to the way things had been before
Lady Oracle
, and in a way this did happen. My tortuous Fat-Lady fantasies disappeared. Away from the
Resurgence
group, Arthur was sweeter, more pensive. I made coffee in the mornings and passed it out to him through the kitchen window. Then we would sit among the pieces of broken
glass on the balcony, drinking it and practicing our Italian from the
fotoromanzi
or just gazing out over the valley. We went for walks on the hills above the town and admired the view. Arthur wanted to do some field work, as he called it, dealing with the system of land ownership, but his Italian wasn’t good enough, so he let the project drop. From time to time he scratched away at an article for
Resurgence
, on the difficulty of making feature films in Canada; but he seemed to have lost his fervor. We made love a lot and visited ruins.

One day we went to Tivoli. We bought some ice-cream cones, then went to see the Cardinal’s gardens, with the famous water-work statues. We went down a staircase bordered with sphinxes, water shooting from their nipples, and wandered from grotto to grotto. At the end we came to Diana of Ephesus, the guidebook said, rising from a pool of water. She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though afflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at the top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with spouts, but several of the breasts were out of order.

I stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, for myself.

A
lmost as soon as we got back from Italy, I called the Royal Porcupine. He didn’t sound surprised. “What took you so long?” he said.

“I was away,” I said ambiguously. “I tried to call you before I left, but you weren’t there.”

We met at the Red Hot stand in Simpson’s Basement. The Royal Porcupine explained that he was even poorer than usual and this was the cheapest place in town to have lunch, as you could get two hot dogs and an orange drink for a dollar. I found his cape a little incongruous in Simpson’s Basement, and the sexual fantasies I’d been having about him drooped slightly. Still, there was something Byronic about him. Byron, I remembered, had kept a pet bear in his rooms and drunk wine from a skull.

He borrowed a subway token from me and we went back to his place. “I have to explain something first,” I said in the freight elevator. “We have to keep this light.” Arthur, I said, was very important to me and I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt him.

The Royal Porcupine said that was fine with him, and the lighter things were, the better.

At first they were very light. Finally I had someone who would waltz with me, and we waltzed all over the ballroom floor of his warehouse, he in his top hat and nothing else, I in a lace tablecloth, to the music of the Mantovani strings, which we got at the Crippled Civilians. We got the record player there, too, for ten dollars. When we weren’t waltzing or making love, we frequented junk shops, combing them for vests, eight-button gloves, black satin Merry Widows and formal gowns of the fifties. He wanted a sword cane, but we never did find one. We did find a store in Chinatown which had button boots for sale, left over from 1905. They hadn’t sold because they were odd sizes, and I had to sit down on the curb and let the Royal Porcupine try to cram my feet into each pair, beautiful halftones, white glacé kid, pearl gray. I felt like Cinderella’s ugly sister. The only pair I could get on were black lace-ups with steel toes, washerwoman boots, but even these were desirable. We bought them, and later a pair of black net stockings to go with them.

I soon discovered that my own interest in nineteenth-century trivia was no match for the Royal Porcupine’s obsession with cultural detritus. Whereas I liked antique silver and snuffboxes, he lusted after green Coca-Cola bottles, worn Captain Marvel comic books, Mickey Mouse watches, Big Little Books and movie star paper dolls from the twenties. He didn’t have very much money, so he couldn’t buy everything he wanted, but he was a walking catalog of ephemera, of the irrelevant and the disposable. Everything, for him, was style; nothing was content. Beside him I felt almost profound.

Unfortunately the lace-up black ankle boots gave me severe pains in the feet if I wore them for more than half an hour; but it was enough for a couple of good waltzes. When we’d tired ourselves out we’d go to the Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the corner and
order a bucket and two Cokes. These we would eat in the warehouse. The Royal Porcupine wanted to save the chicken bones, boil them, and glue and wire them into a sculpture, which he would call “Joan Foster Kentucky Fried”; he wanted to exhibit it at his next show. It was a terrific idea, he said. The black shoes would be called “Foster Dances #30,” and he’d cover a Mantovani record with clumps of my hair and call it “Hairy Foster Music.” And if he could have a pair of my Weekend Set underpants, he could.…

“That’s very creative,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” he said, a little hurt.

“Arthur would find out.”

“Arthur,” he said. “It’s always Arthur.”

He was beginning to resent Arthur. He made a point of telling me about his two other women. They were both married, one to a psychologist, the other to a chemistry professor. He said they were both very dumb and no good in bed. The chemistry professor’s wife used to leave baked goods for him beside the freight elevator, without warning. We would lie on his grubby mattress, eating the damp pumpkin cakes and the flat high-protein bread (she was a health-food freak) while the Royal Porcupine talked about her deficiencies. I began to wonder whether he did the same with both of them, about me. I minded, but I couldn’t afford to.

“Why do you see them, if they’re so boring?” I asked.

“I have to do something when you’re not here,” he said petulantly. Already he’d decided they were my fault.

Occasionally I would have an attack of guilt about Arthur and cook special meals for him, which failed even more miserably than the meals I usually cooked. I even toyed with the idea of telling him, trying openness and honesty as Marlene had; but then, it hadn’t done any wonders for her, and I was fairly sure it wouldn’t do much for me either. I was afraid that Arthur would laugh, denounce me as a traitor to the cause, or kick me out. I didn’t want that: I still loved
him, I was sure of it. “Maybe we should have an open marriage,” I said to Arthur one night as he was hacking his way through a pork chop that I’d put under the broiler and then forgotten about. But he didn’t even answer, which might’ve been because his mouth was full, and that was as far as I got.