Читать книгу Métis Beach - Claudine Bourbonnais - Страница 8

“You’re not saying anything?” Ann asked in the Pathfinder.

In front of us, Laurel Canyon Boulevard was paralyzed by a long line of stopped vehicles, their brake lights diluted in the fog.

“We can’t know about Gail,” I said. “It might be another of her tantrums.”

She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, more surprised than indignant. “A tantrum? You don’t call people to your death bed for a tantrum. How can you say such a thing?”

She turned the radio on, cycling through the stations. Traffic reports, the same as usual; streets were clogged throughout the city. Then a couple of ads shouting at us. Exasperated, she lowered the volume and continued, “What you just said about Gail is pretty terrible, isn’t it?”

Yes and no. Gail wasn’t easy to live with. She always thought of herself first and expected everyone to yield to her suddenly changing moods. A woman of fifty-one now, perhaps she’d softened with time. I turned to Ann, “You’re right. But things were complicated with Gail. Not like they are with you, honey.”

And that was true. With Ann, there never were any real fights. We had a bond that our married friends admired, a fulfilling sex life — just like they talked about on the covers of women’s magazines. Of Gail, only a memory of something unsound, a thin crack in a windshield, a misunderstanding, long-winded shouting matches to get her to come to bed with me, one of those women whom despair and anger light like a match, distress a constant in her eyes. I always came away from her unnerved.

Ann measured her smile, not wanting it to be triumphant. I knew her, she wasn’t jealous or the type to delight in easy flattery, not like they are with you, honey. At least she wouldn’t show it.

Ann. Lord, her beauty had cast a spell on me seven years earlier, when we first met at the art gallery on Rodeo Drive, where I worked to help pay the bills. Her mother, a regular customer of the Kyser Gallery, had introduced us. “My daughter studies film at UCLA. I thought you might give her a few tips.”

“Tips? You know, I might not be the best one for.…”

“Come now! Don’t be modest! Sure, there’s your talent, but there’s also that nice mug of yours, young man.…” Followed by a hearty wink. Meanwhile, behind her back, her daughter rolled her eyes.

Laureen Heller was a small skinny woman, moved by the morbid fear of gaining any weight at all, her face worn smooth by too many facelifts. Her taste in art was exuberant — charged, gaudy, garish, like the décor in her large Tudor home in Brentwood. She was a great customer and Ted Kyser, the owner, couldn’t afford to lose her. She bought two or three paintings a year, sometimes more, a welcome relief in the summer of 1988, when business was particularly slow because of the seemingly endless writer’s strike.

While her mother scampered about the gallery, Ann spoke into my ear, “Can I take you out for a drink?” Stunned by her advance, I burst out laughing, charmed by this young woman, so sure of herself. We ended the night a bit past sober in an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach. I was enchanted by her eyes in the flickering candlelight, her jokes and funny faces, her brown braids, thick and heavy like hemp rope.

Seven years later, Ann no longer looked like that young slip of a girl who had so easily charmed me, but she was still as beautiful, with more sensible hair, her pearl grey suit and her immaculate blouse. She’d gained a warm maturity, acquired a profound sense of responsibility. We were a couple, yes, and also business partners in In Gad We Trust. Without Ann, none of it would have happened.

She continued, going through her bag, “We’re going to be cannon fodder for Dick. Not sure we’ll make it out alive this time. One hour late. And maybe two if we don’t start moving soon. Why can’t we just have a phone in the car?”

“Because it’s the only place I can get a moment’s peace.”

My tone had been unintentionally dry. Ann hunkered down in her seat, sighed. Yes of course, a phone. It would certainly be safer. And with all the complaints we’d been getting at It’s All Comedy! you never knew, there were all sorts of crazies in this country, like the guy who’d shot Lennon in New York, and the other one, something like Hickey? Hinckley? Who’d almost got Reagan in Washington to impress Jodie Foster, like in Taxi Driver. There were crazies by the barrelful hearing voices and not seeking help.

I told Ann, “Okay.”

“What, okay?”

“For the phone. I’ll take care of it. I promise.”

That’s how it was with Ann. Simple, easy. I drove in silence and thought back to the time Gail had come to live with me in San Francisco. Nineteen seventy-one. All of it seemed so very far away now. The large apartment on Telegraph Hill that cost me an arm and a leg, an aberration so that Gail might live comfortably, so that she wouldn’t feel too much out of her element. But she didn’t care. In fact, she cared about very little at all. With her, I was constantly navigating some tortured roller coaster. In the dizzying highs, she could disappear for days. Or drag me against my will and with five minutes’ notice to some nudism and primal scream expedition somewhere in the Sierra Nevada. Or force me to follow her to a retreat at Shasta Abbey, the Buddhist monastery in northern California where all the hippies loved to go back in those blessed days, in order to “learn how to accept one’s sexual impulses without surrendering to them or suppressing them.”

When she began writing long condemnatory letters to her father in Montreal, I knew she was entering one of her agitated phases. Or if she began sending him Allen Ginsberg’s amphetamine-laced writings and those of his artist friends — “the best minds of my generation starved by madness” — accompanied by a note in her muddled handwriting, “Your daughter’s doing incredibly well, she lives a quiet life in San Francisco, as you can tell.”

A disturbed young woman, unable to defend herself against her fate.

“Gail is an unstable woman, Ann. She might have decided, just like that, to.…” To what? I thought. “I can’t understand why she’s asking for me. Not after all these years.”

“She’s going to die, Romain! You talk about her like she was a stranger. You loved her, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer, I didn’t know what to think. Ann continued, “My God, if ever life drives us apart for one reason or another, the idea that you have so little consideration for me would be hard to bear.”

The Beatles were playing on the radio, a ballad that sounded ridiculous given the circumstances. “What happened to her, cancer?”

“Leukemia.”

“Didn’t you tell me she was so careful with everything she ate? Like a sort of religion, I mean? If a woman like her dies of cancer so young, what chance do the rest of us have?”

We were finally out of Laurel Canyon, and inching east on Sunset Boulevard. I couldn’t help but think of those cards Gail had continued sending me, best wishes, animal images, drawn and watercoloured by hand. Sometimes she would slip in pamphlets for animal protection groups or pictures of herself, more embarrassing than anything else, like the one showing her tied with old grey-haired hippies to some dam somewhere in Quebec, for some endangered fish.

A flash of guilt. That evening, with Dick and the others — Josh, Matt, and Michael Hausman, the ad director at It’s All Comedy!, and their wives. We were having supper and drinks at my place, and we discussed a few problems with In Gad and talked once again about the theme of abortion, certainly the most controversial element of the series. Chastity had had two abortions in the first season. Dick and Josh voiced their misgivings. It was an explosive subject, they said; people were killed in this country to prevent women from getting them. “So we censor ourselves?” I answered, annoyed. “Madmen kill doctors, so we’ll avoid offending their insane beliefs?” Josh had answered, “No, Roman, that’s not what we’re saying. But two abortions in thirteen episodes; it seems a bit unlikely, no, a little forced.…”

“Forced?” I laughed. “You really want to know? For me, each of Chastity’s abortions reaffirms the right of women to do what they please with their bodies.” And the women began applauding, their martini glasses still in their hands.

“And men don’t have anything to say about it?” This was Dick, already drunk, you could see it in his eyes. The discussion had become more heated, glasses being drunk faster and faster, and we eventually moved to the table, Dick walking towards it unsteadily but single-mindedly. And for whatever reason — I can’t remember now — Dick demanded that I share with the assembled guests some of the cards Gail sent me. “You got nice little bunny rabbits this year? Or mean little mice?” Before I could answer, Dick, both his elbows on the table, explained with perverse pleasure that “my first flirt” sent me sweet little cards with Winnie the Pooh on them every year.

“No, you imbecile,” I corrected, half-amused, half-annoyed. “They’re watercolours, like Beatrix Potter.”

“Oh, well, excuse me, good sir!” he laughed, acting offended.

Josh’s wife, a tall blonde with silicone breasts, asked, “You’ve got to be kidding. How old is she?”

“Your age!” Dick shouted.

The entire assembly laughed. Dick turned towards me, his face red. “Come now, Roman! We want to know! Rabbits? Mice?”

Around the table, the guests were becoming impatient. And, like a coward, I’d gotten up and grabbed a card out of my office. I knew for certain that Ann had put herself in Gail’s shoes, projecting herself as the potential future ex-wife everyone would one day make fun of. I sought out her eyes to try to reassure her, but she’d turned away from me. All these important people at my place, having a nice evening. At Gail’s expense.

Why cards? Why did Gail feel the need to keep a link with me, one I no longer wanted? Was there something I was missing? Or was it a way to force me not to forget?

“You have to go, Romain. You have to go to Montreal. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” In the Pathfinder, Ann had spoken with authority.

“Regret what? I can’t save her, she’s damned.”

“It’s not a tantrum. That seems clear.”

“The shoot.”

“Dick will understand, you’ll see.”