First Things First, page 28
Solange came to their house once or twice a month and Janice no longer found it necessary to manufacture excuses to avoid her. Now, instead of having suddenly to go to the grocery store, visit a sick friend, or do the laundry in the basement, Janice was quite comfortable to sit and have coffee at the kitchen table with Sam and Solange. After twenty-three years of marriage, there were still many practical matters they needed to discuss.
The divorce had been amicable enough and, in the settlement, Solange got both the house and the car. The house was a hundred-year-old five-bedroom limestone building which Janice thought of as a mansion, but she struggled to master her resentment over the fact that she and Sam lived in a small stucco bungalow with tiny dark rooms and a wet basement. She knew better than to ask what on earth Solange needed with five bedrooms, a sunroom, and a walk-in pantry the size of Janice’s kitchen and living room put together.
Solange had recently retired, but for the years of their marriage, she too had worked at the university, a professor of philosophy. Being a true intellectual totally immersed in academia, Solange had never much troubled herself with the trivia of daily living. Now she found running the household, not to mention the car too, a complicated and often overwhelming job. She came to Sam for help and advice. She could sit for hours at the kitchen table drinking coffee, asking questions, and taking notes.
“Should I buy radials or regular? Where should I buy them?”
“How often does the furnace need a new filter?”
“The toilet keeps running. Should I call a plumber?”
“What was the name of that piano tuner we always used to get?”
Janice would sit with them only half-listening, flipping through cookbooks and her recipe box, planning Sam’s supper. Solange, as Sam often pointed out when she wasn’t there and he and Janice were sitting down to yet another delicious and nutritious meal, was not much of a cook. Janice, on the other hand, was one of those enviable people who could throw any number of things together, toss in a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and produce a culinary delight night after night.
“Cooking, ah, cooking,” Solange would sometimes sigh. She had already admitted that she went out for dinner almost every night, and when she did eat at home she favoured wieners and beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, or those dehydrated dinners with a shelf-life of two years.
She began to collect cooking hints from Janice and some recipes that were supposed to be quick and easy: Skillet Spaghetti, Quick Western Rarebit, Chicken Dinner Omelette.
But there were always so many details to worry about:
“What’s the difference between dicing and chopping?”
“Does this mean fresh peas, frozen peas, or canned?”
“How much is a pinch?”
“How do you do it?” she would ask Janice with envy. “I just don’t know how you do it.”
* * *
In January, at Sam’s suggestion, Janice enrolled in a painting course two nights a week. He said it would be good for her to get out of the house, to get away from Celeste sometimes. Janice could not make him understand that she didn’t want to get away from Celeste. Even on a bad day, when Celeste was teething and fussing and crying, Janice could think of nothing else she’d rather do than be with her, cuddling her and giving her ice cubes to suck on or a raw carrot to chew on. Sam did not know how many afternoons, while Celeste was napping, Janice would sit on the floor beside her crib, just listening to her shallow sweet breaths, wishing she would wake up.
In the end, Janice took the painting class because she thought it would be good for Sam to have some time alone with Celeste. Maybe he would come to feel it too: the joy and the fear of loving her so much, the joy which suffused everything Janice did now, the fear which would strike suddenly, paralyzing in its intensity, when she thought about Celeste getting sick, getting hurt, dying, when she heard on the radio stories of child abuse, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a two-year-old boy in Toronto whose mutilated body was found in a dumpster behind the corner store.
The painting instructor was a man named Réjean Simard who had earned a considerable reputation for himself with his oversized flamboyantly coloured still lifes of apples and oranges twelve inches across, wine bottles three feet high, salamis the size of torpedoes viewed through the glass window of a downtown deli so that they became mystical, pregnant, out of this world. He was most often described as an iconoclast, a compliment or an insult depending on who delivered it, a variable term of endearment, celebration, or disapproval.
During the first few classes, Janice found her mind wandering. She could not concentrate on the advantages and disadvantages of each medium which Réjean Simard enthusiastically explained to them. She could not get a grip on the differences between watercolour, oils, polymer, acrylics, pastels, and tempera, as he carefully and energetically demonstrated them. She was intimidated by her fellow classmates, who all seemed to know more about painting than she did. She felt just plain stupid. She could not think of anything that she wanted to paint. She was terrified when Réjean Simard said that the first question they must ask themselves was why they wanted to paint. He said the only way to find the answer was to look deep inside themselves, to uncover their own sensitivities, and then to train those sensitivities so that they became even stronger, even sharper, even more demanding. Then and only then could they hope to find their own true subject matter.
On class nights, Janice would lie awake afterwards in bed beside Sam with a sick feeling in her stomach and the growing certainty that she did not have a creative bone anywhere in her body. But she was too disappointed and embarrassed to admit it, even (or especially) to Sam. He could sleep through anything anyway and so had no idea of her recurring insomnia.
After Réjean Simard had covered the more mechanical aspects of the art form, he moved on to broader theoretical concepts which he called “the elements of art.” He taught with a frenetic energy, always in motion, pacing dramatically and flinging his arms towards the back wall as if a gallery of great art hung there. He scrawled words and shapes across the blackboard so wildly that the chalk often broke in his fingers and bounced across the room. He pontificated in italics.
“Colour is everywhere,” he said. “We cannot escape it. But what is it? What is it? Green. What is green? It is not enough to know why the grass is green. What is green?”
“In nature,” he said, “there is no such thing as a line. Scientifically speaking, no such thing. But how can we possibly recreate nature, how can we reproduce the world, without lines? We cannot. We must have the horizon in order to survive.”
“What does the word texture mean?” he asked. “Even the dictionary does not know. The dictionary does not know what you think of when I say gravel, a brick wall, newly mown grass, skin.”
“Your paintings must have balance,” he said. “How many white daisies does it take to balance the weight of one black ball? How much blue sky does it take to balance the weight of three tall trees? How can a mountain equal the sun?”
Janice, finally, was inspired. Now, when all the other students were nodding into their notebooks, she was riveted. One night at coffee break she overheard two women muttering to each other:
“What is all this airy-fairy stuff?” asked the first.
“Yeah, really,” said the other. “We didn’t come here to think, we came here to paint.”
Now, on class nights, Janice lay awake afterwards with her head full of pictures while Sam slept on beside her, flat on his back, snoring.
They had stretched their canvases now and they had finally started to paint. Réjean Simard would flit among them, swooping down on one easel after another, exclaiming, adjusting, occasionally drawing the whole class around one painting to have a closer look.
Janice began with a painting of eggs, three white eggs submerged in a glass bowl of water. The perfectly oval eggs and the slightly cloudy water were rendered in an opaque shimmering light so that the total effect was one of otherworldliness, a submerged universe complete in itself, elliptical and promising.
If Janice’s eggs were derivative of Réjean’s own work, he didn’t seem to mind. “These eggs,” he said, “are more than eggs. These eggs, in the act of imagining them, have become important. These eggs are the truth.”
Janice suspected the successful picture was little more than a happy accident but she was encouraged by Réjean’s admiration and began to see things in the painting that she hadn’t known were there in the first place.
Each student was required to complete one major painting for the course. The rest of the class was painting landscapes, flowers, their mothers, their cats. Janice stretched another canvas, a larger one, and began. She painted nine pregnant women in various poses, sitting, standing, lying flat on their backs, so that their big bellies were like planets emitting pure light and their shiny faces were like reflecting moons.
Réjean was impressed. “Beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful. Perfect. Power.” He wanted to know where her vision had come from, but Janice couldn’t tell him, could not remember.
“Ah yes,” Réjean said softly, and rested his hand on her shoulder. Janice noticed for the first time his swarthy skin, his black flashing eyes, and the gentle strength of his broad shoulders inside his tight t-shirt.
When she took the painting home, Sam liked it too. Yes, he agreed, most definitely they must frame it and hang it in the living room. She was talented, yes, brilliant even, to have conceived of such a thing. “But,” Sam said, “what does it mean?”
* * *
Josh’s mother called to say she and her husband were going to a do at the Legion, one of his fellow employees was retiring, their other babysitter had come down with the flu, could Janice please keep Josh for the night? Janice agreed before she remembered that it was Wednesday, a class night. But she did not want to let Josh’s parents down. They were such nice people. It took some convincing but finally Sam agreed that he was quite capable of looking after Celeste and Josh both for the evening. Yes, it would be all right, he finally conceded. There were some things he’d been researching anyway, for Josh, the questions he’d asked last week about the rings of Saturn.
“Did you know,” Sam asked her, “that although the rings of Saturn stretch over 65,000 km, they are only a few kilometres thick?”
“Yes, I knew that,” Janice said.
“Distant stars shine right through them,” Sam said, but Janice wasn’t listening. She was putting on her red coat, lacing up her black winter boots.
“What time will you be home?” he asked plaintively as she went out into the snowy night.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll come right back. I’ll be home by 9:30.”
That night’s class was especially stimulating. They were talking about composition now, how a painting when completed would have become more than the sum of its parts. Réjean used the analogy of human beings being more than the sum of their parts too, so that if you mixed together all those things that make up a person—water, blood, bone, and skin—you still wouldn’t have a person, you’d only have a big mucky mess. Janice could see exactly what he meant and she was imbued all evening with that rarely reached sensation of everything falling into place, absolutely everything, so that all of her questions had answers and the whole world felt friendly.
When the others said they were going for a drink after class and Réjean made a special point of inviting her along, Janice changed her mind about going straight home and went to call Sam. Just for an hour, to go to the pub for just one hour, an hour and a half at the most, that’s all she wanted, surely he wouldn’t complain, she wasn’t really asking for much.
Réjean and the others waited in the foyer while she stood at the bank of telephones and dialled. She could see the snow still falling outside, the night through the glass doors looking black and white at the same time. Réjean wore a black beret (of course!) and a red wool scarf wrapped twice around his neck. The phone was ringing, five times, six, seven, eight. She let it ring twenty times. She hung up and dialled again. No answer.
She rushed right past Réjean and the others still standing there smiling stupidly. “I can’t come, I can’t come!” she called as the snow fell on her face, her bare hands, down her naked neck.
She could not remember where she’d parked the car. She ran around the parking lot with the keys in her hand. There it was. The tires spun in the snow and then she fish-tailed away.
No answer. No answer. Where was Sam? Where were the children? The house was burning down. The house had burnt down to the ground. Someone was dead. They were all dead.
She hit the snow-covered caragana hedge as she skidded into the driveway. The house was still standing. The lights were on. Where were they? They were at the hospital. Someone was sick. Celeste was sick. Josh was sick. Someone was dead. They were all dead.
Sam was stretched out on the couch, flat on his back, snoring. The first thing Janice saw clearly was the bottoms of his feet propped up on the arm of the couch in those pathetic grey socks.
“Wake up, wake up! The children, the phone! If you couldn’t even hear the phone, how could you hear the children if they cried? You stupid bastard, wake up!”
Sam stirred and grunted but did not open his eyes. “Sleeping,” he muttered and started snoring again.
There was a half-empty glass of Scotch on the coffee table beside him.
Janice grabbed it and threw it in his face. She sank to her knees and sobbed into her red coat still covered with snow which was melting now and dripping to the floor all around her.
“What the hell—” Sam sputtered, struggling to sit up. “What the hell is going on here?”
“What the hell is going on here?” Janice sobbed.
The children heard nothing, slept on.
In bed an hour later, Janice was calmer. She’d had a glass of Scotch and a hot bath. Sam had rubbed her back and told her she was overreacting. She was chastened, ashamed now of her own bad behaviour. She curled against Sam’s back like a child in her white cotton nightgown, her hair on the cool pillow still damp from her bath. She tried to match her breathing to Sam’s, which was already becoming deeper and slower. Breathe, breathe, breathe.
“Please, will you talk to me?” she asked.
“Mmm.”
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes, of course.” Sam patted her patiently and sighed.
“Why do you love me?”
She kept asking different questions and getting the same answer. The children slept on and knew nothing.
LOVE IN THE
TIME OF CLICHÉS
(1990)
. . . it was love at first sight . . .
Shortly after Carmen falls irretrievably in love with Abraham, she notices that she is often at a loss for words. This is unusual for Carmen, who has been told many times that she’s been blessed with the gift of the gab. She supposes that she inherited or appropriated this gift from her mother, Maureen. Most of Carmen’s childhood memories feature the sound of Maureen’s lilting voice running as an undercurrent through everything, the melodious background music to their daily lives.
There, for instance, was Carmen, already a devoutly practising insomniac at an early age, tossing and turning in her narrow bed till the sheets were twisted like seaweed round her ankles. She could hear her mother in the living room, talking to her father, Frank, who never said much in reply, who was in fact probably stretched out on the couch half-asleep, not even listening, but Maureen didn’t seem to notice or mind much. Carmen was on the tip of being a teenager then and often coaxed herself to sleep with fantasies of what it would be like to have a man, a full-grown, not-too-hairy man beside her in the bed, a man who would sleep all night long with his arm around her waist, his hand between her legs, not caressing, just cradling and holding her close, quietly.
It was not until Carmen took on the surly self-absorbed silence of adolescence that she began to wish Maureen would just SHUT UP. She never had anything important to say anyway, Carmen fumed silently. Especially first thing in the morning, Maureen was just like a magpie: yack, yack, yack. She just loved the sound of her own voice, Carmen thought, and closed her long-suffering eyes while her oatmeal congealed.
It was almost ten years later, long after Carmen had surfaced from beneath the iceberg of adolescence, had finished university, moved away from home, and settled into her own eventual adult life, that she understood how her mother’s sometimes manic loquaciousness might actually have been compensation for the fact that she knew she had nothing important to say or, if she did, for the fact that she was afraid to say it.
Now Carmen finds she can afford to be sympathetic and doesn’t mind admitting that, in terms of volubility anyway, she is her mother’s daughter. It is an inheritance which serves Carmen well, both in her teaching job and in her personal life.
She is often admired for her ability to talk to anyone about anything. She can talk to her students about their families (who don’t understand them), their boyfriends (who are collectively uncooperative and afraid of commitment), their wardrobes (which must look stylish but not too studied), their hair (which must be easy to take care of and yet look perfect at all times). She can talk to her fellow English teachers about the existential commitment in Macbeth, the symbol of the green light in The Great Gatsby, and the passage of time in the novels of Virginia Woolf. She can even talk to people she doesn’t particularly like about things she isn’t the least bit interested in. She talks to the jocks about football, to the math teachers about sine, cosine, and tangent, to the cashier in the cafeteria about the occupational hazard of breaking your fingernails on the cash register drawer, and to the foreign students about the price of tea in China. She is seldom stuck for a snappy answer to anything.
