In the Language of Love Page 2

  The next time Clarence and Esther came to visit, it was Christmas. Joanna was seeing a man named Lewis, but he was married, gone away for the holidays with his wife. Nobody mentioned the hasty whispered calls at all hours, the way Joanna lunged at the telephone whenever it rang, the mysterious presents under the tree from this man who never materialized, three beribboned boxes which turned out to be a book, a tape, and a black lace camisole.

  Shortly after this, Esther died, suddenly, of a heart attack.

  After that, Clarence came to visit more often, arriving at least once a year, usually at Christmas, always looking surprised when he got off the plane and walked into the terminal where Joanna hugged him hard and he smelled like dry cleaning. Maybe he was surprised that he’d made it from his airport to hers. He still didn’t like travelling, had no faith in flight, but he didn’t want to drive all that way by himself, got motion sickness on buses, and the train took too long. Or maybe he was still surprised that Esther had died on him. Just up and died on him, right when, as Esther had once told Joanna on the phone, they seemed to be falling in love all over again. Or maybe it was Joanna who surprised him by having grown up when he wasn’t looking.

  During these visits, Joanna realized that one of the great pleasures of living alone was being able to go into the kitchen at ten o’clock at night to make a salami-green-pepper-and-mozzarella sandwich withouthaving to say, “I’m going to make myself a salami-green-pepper-and-mozzarella sandwich—would you like one?” Wanting the second night of her father’s visit to fix herself a plate of cheese and crackers and garlic sausage, Joanna discovered that she was seething with resentment, thinking that she really should ask him if he wanted some too, wishing she was the kind of assertive independent person who could just get up and do it without either asking or feeling guilty about not asking. (Of course, she would be gracious enough to offer him some once she’d fixed it and gone back into the living room where he was watching Miracle on 34th Street, and he would see that there was really only enough on the plate for one and say, with just as much grace, “Oh, no thanks, I’m fine.”) Feeling so invaded and defeated by the whole thing that she couldn’t be bothered getting up to fix the snack anyway, she said instead, “I’m going to get a beer—would you like one?” and was just as angry when he said, “No thanks, dear,” as she would have been if he’d said yes please.

  Joanna no longer wondered what her mother had always been so mad about. Now she wondered why she’d never exploded. Just as she no longer asked her divorced friends why they’d left their husbands. Now, after listening to their stories, she asked, “Why did you stay so long?”

  The next time Clarence comes to visit, Joanna is going out with Gordon. Clarence appears to like Gordon, although it’s hard to tell. Clarence talks to him about baseball, cars, hunting, fishing, and poker. Gordon has no interest in any of these things. He thinks baseball is boring, cars are perhaps necessary but not worth worrying about until they break down, hunting and fishing are blood sports, and he is no good at cards. But Gordon is a good listener and Clarence doesn’t seem to notice the one-sided nature of these manly conversations. Gordon comes over for supper nearly every night. He sits at the kitchen table peeling potatoes, chopping onions, or slicing mushrooms, nodding and smiling while Clarence chats on about calibres, carburetors, RBIs, and the astronomical odds against drawing four aces two hands in a row.

  Joanna hopes her father will appreciate her new culinary skills. She tramps all over town in the heat, ferreting out the firmest vegetables,the prettiest fruit, the most tender cuts of meat, and the freshest homemade pasta. She feeds him cleverly constructed gourmet meals with carefully co-ordinated (occasionally flaming) desserts. She tries to explain that creating the perfect meal is like creating a work of art. He just looks at her. She changes tactics. She tries to explain that it is like doing a puzzle: if you put all the best ingredients together in the right proportions in the right order, if you follow the instructions to the letter, then what you end up with is truly an achievement, a masterpiece maybe, certainly a creation which is more than the sum of its parts, a domestic synergy. Clarence just looks down at his still empty plate, as if wondering what the hell is taking so long. She does not explain to him that she has lately come to see all this cooking as a sensual and meaningful expression not only of her creativity but of her sexuality as well.

  Clarence obligingly eats everything she puts in front of him (except for the Tofu Stroganoff—he has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead) and he never says a word either way. Joanna realizes that he would be just as happy with fried Spam and Minute Rice as he is with her Spinach and Feta Cheese Quiche with Veal Piccatta and Cucumbers in Sour Cream. She refrains from pointing this out to him, but the next night they order pizza.

  After the dishes are done and Clarence is settled on the couch with the newspaper crossword and the TV on, Joanna and Gordon often go out for the evening. Sometimes they go to a movie, sometimes downtown for drinks or dessert. Usually they go to Gordon’s place and make love because Joanna has warned him long before Clarence’s arrival that she will be completely incapable of having sex under the same roof as her father.

  Afterwards they go walking through the hot streets, smelling of sex, nodding amiably at strolling strangers, stealing pansies from the beds in Patterson Park and giggling. One night they stop in the park and make love again in the cool grass beneath a large elm tree with the traffic noises all around them, and Joanna is so excited that she comes even before Gordon has pulled down her underwear.

  Back at her apartment she finds her father at the kitchen table with the pieces of her broken fan spread all around, a screwdriver in one hand and the instructions in the other. He waves and says, “Justthought I’d make myself useful,” as she backs down the hallway into her bedroom so he won’t see the green and white stains all down the back of her dress.

  After Gordon and Joanna are married and their son Samuel has been born, Clarence is more than happy to babysit when he comes to visit them in their big house on Laverty Street. Sometimes they go to a movie, sometimes downtown for drinks or dessert. Most often they just go walking through the quiet neighbourhood. One night they stop to pick pansies in the park and without a word Gordon leads Joanna to the big elm tree and they lie down on the cool grass. Joanna pulls her summer skirt up around her waist and her thighs are white in the darkness. Gordon comes when she puts her hand on his belt buckle.

  When they get home, they find Clarence sitting in the kitchen in the dark with Samuel sleeping in his arms and the baby bottle empty on the table. It is an antique oak drop-leaf table with smooth curved corners, carved legs, and six matching chairs with needlepoint seat covers: pictures of red roses, green leaves, graceful stems, no thorns.

  Clarence looks up at them, surprised and shiny-eyed, as if he’d been expecting someone else.

  2. DARK

  JOANNA HAS ALWAYS been afraid of the dark.

  dark adj. 1. a) partially or entirely without light, b) neither reflecting nor transmitting light.2. a) nearly black, b) not light in colour; of a deep shade.

  Esther said she was just being a big silly baby and would not let her come into their bed on scary nights. Clarence said he understood but there was nothing he could do. The dark was just one of those things she had to get used to and when she grew up it wouldn’t worry her any more.

  dark adj. 3. difficult to understand; obscure. 4. dismal; gloomy; sombre; hopeless. 5. angry or sullen.

  Even now with Gordon in bed beside her she is sometimes frightened. All noises seem to be amplified by the dark, as if having the lights on muffled everything, filled up all the spaces where scary sounds lurked. She tries to look bravely into the darkness and then closes her eyes to get away from it. Of course this doesn’t work.

  dark adj. 6. sinister; wicked; evil. 7. unenlightened; ignorant. 8. rich and deep, with a melancholy sound.

  By way of consolation, Gordon tells her that he used to be afraid of the dark too but he g
ot over it. This does not help.

  dark. n. 1. the state of being in darkness; the absence of light. 2. nightfall; night. 3. a dark shade or colour.

  All of them have dark hair, including Samuel who is born with a full head of black curls. Joanna remembers Esther singing her the nursery rhyme:There was a little girl/Who had a little curl/Right in the middle of her forehead,/ And when she was good/She was very very good,/And when she was bad/She was horrid!

  For the first two months of his life Samuel is one of those upside-down babies who thinks night is day and day is night. Joanna learns why sleep deprivation is an efficient form of torture.

  The first time Samuel sleeps through the night, Joanna wakes at 7:00 A.M. and panics. She leaps out of bed and grabs his white wicker bassinet beside the dresser. She and Gordon have agreed that Samuel will sleep in their room for the first six months. The bassinet has wheels, and when Samuel sleeps during the day Joanna drags him from room to room with her so he won’t die when she’s not looking. Now she shakes the bassinet so hard that Samuel wakes up wailing.

  Gordon smiles sleepily as Joanna brings the baby into their bed and puts him to her breast. Her long dark hair, which is always wildand comical in the morning, floats all around him and they doze together till the alarm clock rings.

  3. MUSIC

  “NOW YOU’LL HAVE TO face the music,” Esther always said after learning about yet another of Joanna’s transgressions. Major or minor, all crimes and sins, it seemed, must eventually be confronted with musical accompaniment.

  Joanna imagined musicians lined up like a firing squad against a black horizon and she, not being musically inclined, was helpless before them. While she stood naked and trembling in the white sunlight, they tuned and aimed their instruments, blasting her to bits with a trumpet, a tuba, a saxophone, and a trapezoidal electric guitar. The notes rained down upon her like bullets and then the violinist finished her off, wielding his bow like a bayonet. The strains of a harp accompanied her to the afterlife.

  There would be, she imagined, a different kind of music for each category of sin. Country-and-western laments for crimes of the heart, unrequited love for thy neighbour’s wife, horse, or four by four. The sultry smoky piano blues for crimes of passion, marital infidelity and all other consummated lusts. Rabid rock-and-roll for rebelliousness, vandalism, drug use, and petty theft. Cool watery jazz for crimes of detachment, lack of compassion, errors of omission. Classical music for lofty intellectual crimes, failure of integrity, betrayal of ideology, plagiarism, and pettiness. Opera would be reserved for the most heinous crimes: terrorism, international drug trafficking, child abduction and abuse, rape, and murder. Esther always said all that caterwauling sounded like someone being tortured.

  In those high school days, Joanna loved the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Carole King, Janis Joplin, Three Dog Night. In the grip of adolescent angst she was sure that this music was the closest she would ever come to passion and its incumbent exquisite imperative pain. She endured the inevitable skirmishes with Esther over volume and frequency of play. As in: “If you play that song one more time, I’m going to scream!” As in: “Turn that damn thing down this minute or you’re grounded for a month!”

  Sometimes Joanna sat on the floor of her bedroom with her ear pressed to the speaker, listening to the same song ten times in a row, a little louder each time. Once Esther caught her with her mouth pressed to the speaker. She was trying to swallow the sound or something, trying to feel Mick Jagger’s full lips on her own. Esther hollered over the music, “Now what the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?” Joanna resisted the impulse to remind her mother about facing the music.

  In university she listened solely to female vocalists: Carly Simon, Maria Muldaur, Joni Mitchell, Helen Reddy. They were strong independent women, unabashedly sexual, wise, intense, and loving. They loved men, yes, but they also loved themselves. When she grew up, she was going to be a strong serious self-respecting self-sufficient woman too.

  When Joanna moved away from home she took her record collection with her, even the ones she seldom listened to any more. Esther went to Jerome’s, the music store downtown, and bought herself albums by Janis Joplin, Helen Reddy, Carole King, and also Rod Stewart. She told Joanna this in a letter. She wrote: I missed your music after you left. So now I put them on when I do the housework. They make me feel better.

  Joanna tried to imagine her mother boogying through the house with the vacuum cleaner, Janis Joplin wailing over its roar. Or her mother down on her knees cleaning the oven, scrubbing at the gunk in the back corners while Carole King crooned all around her. The oven, with Esther’s head in it, was full of toxic fumes and Carole’s mellifluous lament. In her return letter Joanna said she thought it was great that Esther liked good music after all (ha ha!). She did not ask her mother what it was that she needed to feel better about.

  Now that Joanna had no one to fight with about it, music was not a determining factor in her life. Like everyone, she had favourite songs and artists. She bought albums, but not excessively, and she never went to rock concerts because she didn’t like crowds. Henry played bass guitar with a local band, the Blue Notes. They rehearsed together two nights a week and, in between, Henry practised alone at home. He stood with his guitar in front of the stereo and played along to learn new songs. For one week straight he practised the first four lines of “Crossroads” from the old Cream album. He played it incessantly, lifting the needle with one finger, putting it down carefully back at the beginning. Until finally Joanna cried, “If you play that song one more time, I’m going to scream!” And then she did.

  With Lewis she listened to sad slow ballads about love and all other subdivisions of damage people inflict upon themselves and each other. Their favourite was Leonard Cohen. They listened to him before, during, and after making love. Lewis had a lovely voice and sometimes he sang along, softly, wetly, into Joanna’s ear while lying in her bed, stroking her thighs, massaging her back. Joanna also listened to Leonard Cohen alone and often crying after Lewis had gone home to his wife. Eventually she could not listen to Leonard Cohen at all.

  Gordon listens almost exclusively to classical music. At first Joanna is embarrassed to admit that she knows nothing about it. Gordon assures her that he came to this knowledge through no fault of his own. His parents were both avid listeners and their house while he was growing up was always filled with symphonies, concertos, and arias. No caterwauling there. This is neither the first nor the last time that Joanna keenly envies him his upbringing. She knows this is a betrayal.

  By way of consolation, he reminds her that he was the only child of intensely educated older parents: his mother, Millicent, wrote high school French textbooks and his father, Eugene, was professor of Medieval Studies at the university. While all the other normal boys his age were listening to Tina Turner and jerking off, he was appreciating Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 in F, Opus 93, studying declensions and conjugating highly irregular verbs. Now his parents have retired and moved out of the country, not to a trailer park in Florida, but to a villa in France. Mostly they leave Gordon and Joanna alone.

  Gordon loves classical music and is happy, he says, to teach Joanna what he knows. She cannot read music. He says this is notnecessary to appreciate the music. She can barely distinguish the sounds of the various instruments. She can pick out the piano well enough but the woodwinds and the strings are never clear to her ear. Thanks to Henry she can also identify the bass guitar, which is of course not useful in this instance. Gordon says she’ll learn. He says learning to appreciate classical music is like learning to read French. All it takes is time, practice, and patience. Joanna remembers Esther saying that French was just like English, only backwards.

  Joanna listens carefully to the music and to Gordon’s detailed explanations of it. But soon enough she finds herself longing to listen without having also to appreciate or understand. She points out to Gordon that it is not necessary to understand the operation of the gasoline
engine in order to drive a car safely and well. He says this is an illogical argument. He rolls his eyes and spouts off about the composition of Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

  Eventually she does come to enjoy classical music. She listens to it while she is working in her studio and also while she is doing the housework. She likes this picture of herself: woman baking chocolate chip cookies to the sounds of Schumann’s Symphony No. l, “Spring"; a serene slender woman in a clean kitchen, a pretty woman, but not flashy or overtly sexy, a woman who is obviously a mother, a happy mother, a good mother. She remembers Esther’s apron, the one with the musical notes embroidered around the band and the bottom. She herself has drawn the line at aprons but still it is comforting to imagine herself in one. She is not barefoot and pregnant either. She is wearing fluffy pink slippers and suspects that Samuel, like herself and Gordon, is destined to be an only child.

  But sometimes she gets restless. Sometimes she plays loud rock-and-roll all afternoon instead. She plays the old albums that used to be her favourites, rock-and-roll anthems of the past. She is repeatedly amazed to discover that she can still sing word for word the lyrics of songs she hasn’t heard in fifteen years.

  In the living room with the curtains closed she dances and sings at the top of her lungs. She thinks of this as her secret habit. She is careful to put the albums away afterwards, to turn the volume back down to a reasonable level. She does not go so far as to wipe awayher fingerprints, but still, it is as if she were committing shameful crimes against the sanctity of marriage and motherhood. She does not imagine that good mothers are supposed to do such things. She remembers reading a letter to Ann Landers once—someone complaining about a woman who had several small children and liked to go dancing in discos—and Ann stated unequivocally that a mother of small children had no right to be found in a disco.