Heroine. Gail Scott
you said: ‘That isn’t communist. What interests us is collective life.’ And I could hardly deny the veracity of your statement. The only solution was to find another way to pose the question. Marie said: ‘Nous sommes des femmes de transition. En amour, il nous faut éviter la fusion. Évidemment, this leaves a woman pretty empty. I see no other thing to do but write.’ I knew what she meant. Putting one word ahead of another on the page gives a feeling of moving forward. I started thinking of the novel I would do.
To get in the mood, when I get out of this tub I think I’ll go to that artists’ café. The young men sit there every day in black leather jackets and headbands, watching the leaves blow across the street. The bubbles coming from the coffee machine warm the cockles of a single woman. Have to be careful what to wear. In case I meet you and the green-eyed girl. No. The trick is not to be defeatist. Inside the café the smell of coffee is encouraging. A lesbian sings of love in a telephone booth. Her voice rings above the clatter of dishes. This morning an artist was screaming: ‘Those fuckers didn’t give me a grant.’ He meant the government. He was pounding the table with his left hand. Before smiling to himself and drawing circles on his movie program. Outside, an old woman was rubbing her stomach as if hungry. He flicked his cigarette at her. It stuck on the orange neon sculpture advertising the work of another painter. She threw back her toothless head and laughed.
My little room is so quiet now. You can almost hear the snow falling on the sidewalk. I’ll just turn on the radio. Tonight they’re doing that retrospective of women singers, maybe Bessie, Edith, Janis. All their biographies end badly. That won’t happen to the heroine of my novel. She was pretty sure of that when (at twenty-five) she climbed off the bus from Sudbury. The smoke hung stiff in the cold sky. At Place Ville Marie she found the French women so beautiful with their fur coats and fur hats under which peep their powdered noses. If anybody asked, she’d say she wanted a job, love, money. The necessary accoutrements to be an artist. She immediately rented a bed-sitter. Stepping off the Métro that night and turning a corner, she saw the letters FLQ screaming on an old stone wall. Dripping in fresh white paint. Climbing the stairs to her room she knew she’d come to the right place. She just needed some friends. She started looking in the downtown bars, working east to St-Denis. Then up The Main. It took a couple of years.
My love, those pictures you took of us on the Lower Main marked the start of my new era. In them I look so happy, so free. Even the dilapidated bars in the background have this silver glow. We’re walking from the Lower Main north, your camera clicking all the way. You take one of a guy at the corner of Ste-Catherine pissing in the wind. I remember wondering if it felt good. In front of the Lodeo some Anglo junkies I’d seen hanging around the art galleries wait for a fix. The next shot shows me explaining how artists from rich minorities like les Anglais du Québec need marginal lives in order to feel relevant. My black-gloved hand gesturing in the air. You nod, interested, backing up the street, your eye trained on me through the lens. We enter the Cracow Café. The women have pale faces and dark coats over their shoulders.
I could start the novel here. At the Cracow Café, but a little earlier. Just before we met. I felt something stir in me as soon as I walked in. You were sitting under a Polish poster drinking coffee from a thick cup. Lennon glasses on your pretty nose. From the end of every booth a wooden hand beckoned clients to hang up their coats. You had the sweetest smile I’d ever seen on a man. My first thought was this was exactly what I wanted. You and the others sitting there in wire glasses and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Obviously involved in some heavy intellectual discussion. Then the usual moment of doubt when a person naturally draws up a litany of why she’ll never rate. No class. Because in Lively, near Sudbury, a retired mining foreman is something but with an intellectual like you it would be less than nothing. At the time I wasn’t political enough to know of your attraction to the working class.
Anyway, I decided to act confident. Aided by the fact that at that moment the door burst open and some hookers came in. They had snowflakes on their hair and eyebrows. To keep warm one of them was dancing wildly. Left foot over right. Until she saw you had your eye on me. She stopped and stared angrily from under her wide pale brow. Very French. And I noticed she had middle-class skin. Therefore no hooker, just one of your socialist-revolutionary comrades dressed up to help organize the oppressed and exploited women of The Main. ‘Possessiveness reifies desire,’ called a girl with green eyes to her from the next table. So young I hadn’t seen her. ‘Right on,’ I shouted. What did I have to lose? My last lover was a journalist who wouldn’t take off his earphones. And his sheets were full of crumbs. The fake hooker cut her losses quicker than I could have. By lighting a Gauloise and launching into a political analysis of prostitution and the city administration. No doubt the better to get your attention. But I was so busy noting the exquisite beauty of her French brow, wide lips and dimple on the chin that I failed to see, my love, how you were smiling at her as sweetly as you smiled at me.
We get up to go. Or at least I do and you follow. This was an essential moment. Outside in the fog we can hear the gulls calling from the harbour. The cold wind cuts. We start walking. The smell of cappuccino is wafting from some restaurant. I love the smell of coffee.
We’re on rue Notre-Dame. Maybe you’re testing my revolutionary potential for going against the system. Because you say, smiling: ‘Let me teach you how to fish in a junk shop.’ In a display window your hand sweeps away the ropes of pearls. There, on a plaster chest, a purple amethyst. ‘Yours,’ you say, flipping it in my pocket. Outside you pin it on my sweater. My guilty grin is due to the voice of an old woman behind us in the fog. Someone has snatched her purse. ‘Le policier dit que quand il porte son uniforme, les gens arrêtent de faire des mauvais coups …’ she says squeakily to her friend. ‘Mais quand il est en civil …’ We can hardly see her. But we know she’s under some sort of statue. Someone else giggles nervously. The old woman’s voice again:
‘Tu ris comme une bonne soeur.’
The lens sweeps down the stone steps leading from the chalet toward a street opening bulb-like into the mountainside. A grey woman stands up, pushing away her bed of pine boughs. Her hair is silver. Her stockings are stained. Her skirt is a filthy undeterminable colour of suede. 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