Tell it Slant. Beth Follett
there. The telephone receiver has the weight of a brick I want to throw.
Robin stands in the middle of the kitchen, rocking from one foot to the other. The robe she wears is torn at the armpit. I can see her breast beneath the terry cloth, can see her soft nipple hardening. Her short black hair rides high and stormy away from her forehead, her eyelids are sticky with mucus. She taps her spoon distractedly against the side of her cup.
She asks, What are your plans for tonight, Nora? She seems to need to approach the stretch of time between this question and my answer in the way of an aerial acrobat to the rope. I’m watching her, a stiffness gathering at the base of my skull. A voice in my head begins its whispering, Please come flying, but I don’t understand it at first, it’s just a bowdlerized distant singing. A severed and sudden wish for night descends upon me.
I’ll call you later, I tell her, but I know I won’t.
Please come flying, please come flying, these words rise up now into my mind, lettered fragments, and with these fragments the obsessive counting of minutes until I see Robin again.
Tonight she will not come home.
At twenty-two you move from Toronto to Montreal, you live in a tiny one-and-a-half above a Portuguese bakery. Graffiti on the side of the building reads: Dehors méchant. Your upstairs neighbour translates.
It meens de snot in your face.
How feminine the city of Montreal, you think. You are alone, without friends. You wait, and the emptiness you gather into your solar plexus is a decoy of magnificent proportions. You fill it with wine and the mechanics of taking a photograph and some anxious thoughts about time, you wait for the shape of your future to appear on the wide stretch of horizon you can see from the lookout atop Mont Royal. You wait, and while you wait you read the book Nightwood far into every night, shaping that Nora Flood’s mouth around words you whisper to yourself in the dark, trying to reinvent your life so that you might begin to read the world.
The problems of two people seem as wide as the world to me now.
Send Robin away, whole choruses rise up in exhortation.
Trust no one.
Last night: I lie awake in bed listening to her fumble with her key in the lock, I trace her movements along the darkened hall and into the small room where she sometimes succumbs to its divan. She draws back the heavy coats in the closet, the screech of hanger against metal rod waking the dead. She wrestles awhile with the wet and heavy wool and leather she wears. She is whispering something as she stumbles. My heart begins its night wandering: Please come flying, please come flying.
I remember now. This is Elizabeth Bishop, this is her invitation to Marianne Moore. Please come flying on this fine morning over the Brooklyn bridge. This is New York, and Djuna Barnes there too, in her little corner of Greenwich Village on Patchin Place, dragging small blood and her father’s laughter. I am in an hour out of history, out of memory, out of imagination. Something about my conversation with Myra this morning has put this fragment of a poem again in mind. And something about the suitcase, torn open last night in haste while an almost empty bottle of red wine is kicked over, its contents draining away beneath the bed.
Strange how Myra prohibits so many notions. About flying and bridges, I mean; and other things.
I am wearing the secrets Myra gave me, and her terrible frown.
She says, What are you doing tonight? and I tell her I will call her later. But I won’t call. And she will stay away. In the years we have lived together, her departures have become a steady increasing rhythm. Once I used to accompany her, into the smoky rooms where she moves from bottle to bottle, from table to table. But as time passes, I let her go alone: After a few hours, she neither remembers me nor wants me. Last night I packed a bag and stood over her, voracious, ready to eat her alive. What will it be, Robin? You choose.
She will never choose. But I take her bait every time.
You meet Robin at a New Year’s Eve dance. She sits with Rae, a woman offended by love. Rae and Robin chain-smoke and share a bottle of cheap Spanish wine. Rae waves you over.
We need to learn about respect and inclusion, Robin says. All this romance. It’s like we’ve become enamoured with death.
You might make every woman a death, Rae says, the way you refuse their hearts. I understand you. You’re so critical of your lovers.
I’m critical of everything! Listen, the papers say that the time of the lesbian arguing with the world is over. Too few of us continue to perceive the world’s manners as absurd. I’m one of the dangerous few, because I don’t accept things.
No. You’re not dangerous because you don’t accept things. You’re dangerous because you’re blind. Take away some women’s conformity and you take away their remedy.
You know this line, but it seems Robin is innocent of it.
That’s fucked. Me? Blind? It’s not me who’s blind. Might as well pluck out my eyes as ask me not to see how everyone is selling out one by one. I can’t stand the community’s simple answer: We’re here! We’re queer! Put us on the front page of the Gazette!
Jesus, Rae says. You’re hysterical.
A year or two in this oversimplified social strategy and your brain goes numb, Robin says, pointing to the couples dancing in the swirling light. Passivity sets in. Do you think one woman on that dance floor cares about sexual liberation? I hate our times, she says, drawing hard on each syllable.
Resistance exists, you think.
Rae crushes out her cigarette suddenly, scoffing, Smoking stinks. Robin thrusts her hands deep into the pockets of her trousers.
Rae says, Robin, this is Nora Flood. Nora, Robin.
Hello.
Robin looks at you and the lines around her eyes soften and slip. Then the clock strikes twelve.
Robin takes your hand and leads you to the centre of the dance floor. I do not want to be here, she says, then offers nothing more. She pulls you toward her, your bodies touching. You falter slightly, awkward and out of step: She waits for you. Her flesh is cool in your hand like a magnolia bud ripped from its branch in a pitching wind, the perfume her skin exhales the damp ground beneath that tree. Montreal becomes spring for an instant, for that moment in deepest December, for that moment in a smoky room within an abstract embrace. You think you should not look at her, for if you do you will become mere belly. Your appetite peaks.
You count the beats in a phrase, wanting the song to end. You can see Rae waving the bottle, beckoning you to come back.
Rae is one of my oldest friends, you offer to Robin as you move away from the dance floor. Rae’s heavy glare terrifies you.
Not for long, is what Robin says.
It would be so easy. So easy to lie down in the shadows of the clock striking twelve. We’re here! for this one hour only, the hour you first meet. The one and only hour self-contained in its own light.
Will you ever pick up a girl and take her home, promise her nothing, massage her feet, tell her she is beautiful and never see her naked again? Robin wants everything. She lacks nothing. She is unmanageable. She believes in her thoughts. She feels no shyness about her voice.
She needs you.
It is now ten in the morning, and she has finally gone to work. The two of you will not speak today. Don’t ask her when next you see her, Do you love me? From now on, only ask questions the answers to which you are prepared to hear.
Is anyone there?
You walk on the mountain. Robin has asked you out on a second date and now she asks as you roll a snowball, Have you always been afraid of women?
You would have given anything to be able to tell her all the things of your life.
I’m afraid of lies, you say.
Robin