She starts walking toward The Main, hugging a fence along a demolition pit. DOWN WITH GENTRIFICATION, says the graffiti. She turns the corner. The narrow street curves gently along a row of red brick flats. In some cases the paint on the doors is peeling off. Those with new cedar windows were recently bought by politically progressive university professors. The grey woman heads toward an empty lot and sits down on a cement block. WAIKIKI TOURIST ROOMS, CHAMBRES AVEC CUISINE, says a blinking sign.
On the bottom floor to the left, I’m lying in the bath. Watching how in the green five o’clock shadow the conflicting patterns on the rug and sofa dim. With the television flickering in the corner beyond the half-open bathroom door. It could be a scene from an old Hitchcock movie. For this is the eighties, but there is a terrible nostalgia in the air. People are buying those fifties lacquered tables with round corners for their kitchens. The couple is also back in the form of the new woman and the new man.
Except us, my love. Because sinking below the line of pain the way I did after we broke up (spring of ’79), then reconciled last winter, it nearly drove me crazy. I wrote in the black book: One night a little tipsy and we’re together again. I love you but there’s no spontaneous outpouring of the warmth I need so much. I drink. I want to take pills and run away. As-tu vraiment peur que je te mange, comme dit Marie? A little later, we had to break up again.
Shhh. Watch the depression. The solution is not to be burdened, as an F-group comrade told me back in ’76. When I got drunk and confessed to him I couldn’t handle it when the girl with the green eyes put one hand on my arm and the other on your bum. As if she were the shock centre through which passed our love. We were in Vancouver. Nature was so beautiful with the hibiscus blooming loudly. I wrote in the black book: Olympic Vacation, July 23. Arrived by train. The end of a long black corridor. Now I know joy is what I’m looking for. Learn to laugh. No matter what the circumstances, being burdened only makes things worse. Don’t be such a Protestant. At the time we were sitting in some wisteria eating a salmon a comrade had lifted from a fish vendor. In the photo I had a nasty frown between my eyes because of trying to explain why it was wrong to steal from the little guys. The comrade answered: ‘Under capitalism, you get it while you can. It’s sure as hell none of them is going to give any of us anything.’ From a transistor on the grass Janis’s voice rose up seconding the motion, singing grab love when it comes along, even if it makes you sad: ‘Get It While You Can.’ Actually, I feel fine as long as no one disturbs my peace. A knock at the door really makes me tense. After all, it could be anything. The welfare lady looking for a reason to stop my cheque. ‘Do you live alone? We hear you have a boyfriend?’ And I’d say just to get to her: ‘Nope, a woman.’ God I hope this place isn’t tapped like the one on Esplanade. With the RCMP listening in on every conversation. Of course it isn’t.
I’m probably just upset due to Marie’s visit. Six months’ absence and she walks in as if it were nothing. Being a woman who never looks back. Maybe that’s what Janis meant by it’s all the same goddamned day. Going with the flow. That Québécoise I overheard in the Artists’ Café had the right attitude. ‘It’s over,’ she told her friend.
‘Oh yeah?’ her friend responded from across the table. ‘Depuis quand?’
‘Depuis un an.’
‘Oh, I hadn’t noticed. No bitterness?’
‘Non, pourquoi?’
My love, I wanted to be that way. The better to save me from embarrassing moments like that time with all we women comrades. A woman’s party, I think. ’Twas near the end of the reconciliation and it was important to be cool. The girl with the green eyes came in looking sad and skinny. With a shock I noticed her hair was cut and with the side part she exactly resembled your mother. That’s how I began to think she was after you. ‘Women get old,’ I told her, ‘so they won’t be attractive to their sons.’
It was a stupid thing to say. But I was trying to control the darkness so I wouldn’t do something ridiculous. In my pocket was the blow-up of that article where Prince Charles, in announcing his engagement, said by way of explanation: ‘Diana will keep me young.’ I was thinking of pinning it on your door. Clandestinely, because when you saw it you wouldn’t find it funny. The idea came as I got up one silver morning, the snow melting so fast a Québec poet had written ‘Time is slush’ and printed it in the paper. You were coming to get the little Chilean girl we were looking after (her parents being illegal in the country). But what to my surprise did I see, as I peeked out the window of the flat on Esplanade, but the girl with the green eyes waiting on the sidewalk. Her smile was surprisingly warm. Still, it couldn’t have been easy. The eyes looked small and swollen as if from crying. And the mouth stretched, almost, in the pale face. I saw the large penis slip between our lips. I felt the soreness of the jaws after a while. This was just before that beautiful April scene where the two of you walked up the street like lovebirds. So when you came up for little Marilù and I asked you how come the girl with the green eyes was also at the bottom of the stairs so early in the morning, you said: ‘We’re all friends, we three, so why are you acting suspiciously?’
I said, the words sticking painfully in my throat: ‘Does friendship include, uh, sex?’
And you said: ‘We’re friends. And you’d know more if you asked less.’
Out the March window I checked her face once more. She looked scared she wouldn’t win. Just like I probably did in that last period of our love. The same face exactly. Except I knew my star was falling and hers was rising. That’s a defeatist way to see the picture. Actually, my love, when you said you were just friends, I believed you. For people were saying she was a dyke. Besides, creeping through a corner of my mind was that funny little slogan: ‘To the victor belongs the spoiler.’ I should have said that to the shrink from McGill who said: ‘We need to find the darkness in you that makes you tolerate such a situation. A woman who loves herself doesn’t put up with a man who deprives her of affection.’
Instead I reminded her for the n th time a political woman has to be open. I repeated once more that the problem with therapy lies in its lack of social analysis. She listened as I pointed out how in coming up the winding oak stairs to her office I’d noticed the panelled walls of the English-speaking school of social work forbade protest with signs that said: ‘NO POSTERING; PAS D’AFFICHAGE.’ They had the same signs except only in French and pinned on the cement block walls at l’Université du Québec. But over there no one paid attention. The place was covered with graffiti. QUÉBÉCOISES DEBOUTTE. SOCIALISME ET INDÉPENDANCE. LE QUÉBEC AUX OUVRIERS. People were freer then.
The shrink, a jolly Aries with a round grey Beatles haircut, asked: ‘Is there any more you want to say before you leave?’
I decided to tell her about the dream. Because there were three birds but I couldn’t see the third bird’s face. Try as I might. It was very frustrating. The first one was a nightingale, very modest, sitting in the long grass in the grey dawn singing a beautiful song representing infinite poetic possibilities for the future. The second was attached to the first by a string. It flew up into the blue sky where the world could see. A painted bird, trendily attractive, chattering madly. But its song was thin. The third was sitting on a tree with its back to us. Fully developed and a beautiful singer. But we couldn’t see what kind it was.
The shrink said: ‘Gail, I think it’s pretty obvious, don’t you? The first one is the darkness, the night in you we talked about earlier. Still, it’s very beautiful when not obfuscated by the image of the second, the painted bird you are choosing to show the world.’
‘Very deep,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Anybody who has been a sympathizer of the surrealist movement can tell you how to read manifest dream content. The point is we have to create new images of ourselves even if at first they’re superficial, in order to move forward. Otherwise we’re
