then you might look out the window (in the novel) at the startling fact of the world:
The tree skeletons have melted into the beautiful night sky.
Or:
…the blackness of the leaves hanging so heavy over the sidewalk that the Hebrew school with the Star of David across the street is obfuscated. Barry’s on the waterbed. His head leans against a crazy piece of plaster-moulded flowers on the wall. (Their all-white, old-fashioned flat is full of crazy details, typical of Montréal houses from the early century.)
Her camera heaves closer and closer into rooms and back out into the street. And even further. Who is the mysterious Black photographer, a tourist, who is sometimes seen shooting the world of Heroine from above, standing seemingly on one of the hills or the hill that Montreal is named for.
Heroine leads me out of itself to think about other books which also managed in their way to deploy the real experience of living in a precise time whether that was their intention or not. I think of Joe LeSueur’s memoir Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara which was LeSueur’s rejoinder to Brad Gooch’s City Poet which was my generation’s exploration of the O’Hara myth. LeSueur meant to set the record right and what he accomplished Gail does in spades here. She’s obsessed with time, cultural and local. If the 50s was a coterie time and the 60s were immersive and the 70s were a decade setting up networks but still kind of in shock that the totalizing previous thing (the sixties) had truly passed, what Heroine reveals about the 80s is so much cultural standing in the mirror and wondering if it was real or not, fitfully beginning (just as it was beginning to end) the obsession with decades. Everybody, whether they were engaged in political action in the streets, or in bed, or at dinner with their friends was also standing in the mirror holding one another and trying not to do it wrong whatever the present is. Because that present (and this is the unique almost fibrous knowing Heroine is made of) could see in a very non-techno way its own collective aura fleeing. So Gail’s novel-like thing, this masterfully transitional book, is the quintessential medium to be looking through at that. Which it is.
Act British, she admonishes herself while being watched by her lover and his other lover (a woman) as she steps dripping out of the shower. It was so matter of fact. In this book we know Gail’s ass. Like she knows it.
And the tub is cited in Heroine just as often as the novel. I’ve got to get out of the tub right this minute. Perhaps it’s the novel’s more earthly counterpart. Thank God for the tub.
And for clothes.
Over the faded olive jumpsuit (it’s a bit silly to dress so badly) she puts on the old fur jacket. Then steps out onto the front steps covered with green turf rug and a layer of snow.
She is movement. In cafés and cars with friends and standing out in the street observing the many hookers who also come into the cafes. Hookers are the chorus of this book. There are homeless people too, a single grey woman who returns again and again, but the hookers, all of them, are her other.
The hooker is radical. Her political other. Gail’s collective shadow. Exactly caught in the gate of capitalism, dancing, changing her clothes trying to be invisible, making a deal while being the most visible one of all, and somehow always they not she. Has the non-binary nature of sex work ever been explored. The notebook is here and open.
Sepia
Sir. You can on-ly put ca-na-dien monee in that machine. No sir. No foreign objects nor foreign monee in that macheen. It’s an infraction, you see. The guard’s finger runs tight under the small print. The wooden squirrels in the rafters are si-lent. The Black tourist descends the steps with an astonished stare toward the telescope aimed at the city skyscrapers.
I’m lying with my legs up. Oh, dream only a woman’s mouth could do it as well as you. Your warm faucet’s letting the white froth fall over the small point on the tub floor. Your single eye watches my floating smiling face in its enamel embrace. Outside the shops swing. The wind has turned the trees to yellow teeth. This is the city. Montréal, P.Q. I work here. I’m a c—
That is I worked here ’til one day. I was sitting in that Cracow Café on The Main with its windows and walls sweating grey against the winter. Eating steamies made from real Polish sausage. Suddenly I looked up and there was this funny picture. A cross stuck in a bleeding loaf of bread. You were sitting under it smiling at me through your round glasses. Sort of, with your wonderful mouth, so feminine for a man’s. And your beat-up leather jacket.
Some hookers were standing round drinking hot chocolate. One was so wired up she kept doing a high step still holding her cup. Right leg over left leg. Twice. Left leg over right. There was no point trying to stop her. Somehow you managed to slide out over the torn red plastic seat and sit down beside me. Without anybody seeming to mind. I loved the smell of your cracked leather jacket. From Europe with love.
No, I’m telling stories. Maybe these women were your socialist revolutionary comrades trying to get stopped for soliciting so they could expose the brutality of the city administration. Some of them had middle-class skin.
I mean solidarity. If anyone asks, instinctively I have the answer. Loving women. In my case two. That is, the same set of brown eyes twice. We’re side by side on her bed. Then I’m lying on top of her soft breasts. She pulls up her white nightshirt and pulls down her panties so our genitals will touch. I – I think I rolled off. Yes it was me who stopped. Knowing I’m a failure. No. Never admit. Never admit you’re a failure.
The smell of coffee. Real cappuccino. A few leaves rush by a real prostitute bending her knees ’til her pussy comes forward. Then putting her hand on it. The harsh note is in the next booth saying: ‘She should adopt a more self-critical voice.’ His woman companion nods but her answer’s drowned in the noise. ‘You have a relationship,’ the guy is saying, ‘and you learn something from it. Next time you select better, that’s all.’ He shrugs. We get up to go. I like how your glasses hang on a string. When you’re not wearing them. Later, looking at the photos, I notice we’ve seen it all the same. The pretty prostitute, her jeans just right snugly over the V-shape but not too tight – Um, your hands reassure me. Confidently clicking the camera. Together we’re crossing the bar of light.
Colder times are coming. The Black tourist sees the plain whiten beneath the skyscrapers. The scene shifts to that dome-shaped café full of hippies and women in cloche-shaped hats. The sign says BAUHAUS BRASSERIE. It only fills half the lens. Jane Fonda goes by on a horse spattered with the blood of Vietnam. A gay man is fingering my homemade leather blouse and saying: ‘Sweetheart, you look so much like Barbarella.’ The new man and I get up to go. As we step out into the snow a woman comrade cries: ‘How come you never kiss anyone but her anymore?’ I’m a bit scared. We’re standing in the harbour. The gulls clack in the fog over the old schooner. I can’t hear my breath. Maybe we’re coming in unison. The illusion of perfect fusion. ‘Gail’s friends are my friends,’ you say in a soft voice. I’m so relieved. It’s starting to snow. Of course I didn’t know what you mean when you say that. Until I looked back and saw her head on your shoulder. Across the room at Ingmar’s when the sun shining through the lead glass delineated that dark place under your chin where it felt so safe. I’d been running from chair to chair on those Marienbad squares asking: ‘Have you seen Jon?’ as if I didn’t care. Suddenly she’s standing in front of me saying: ‘Why don’t you just relax?’
She’s right, Sepia. What I learned from her is that the relaxed woman gets the man. That was in the summer of ’76. When the RCMP hinted our group should leave the city if we didn’t want any trouble.
