In the Language of Love Read online

  But usually they started out all right, these phone calls, with Joanna wanting to talk to Lewis not because she was upset but because she wanted to show him she wasn’t upset. They talked calmly at first, reassuring each other, speaking in soft sad voices, a bit breathless but coolly articulate, reasonable, clement, politely philosophical. Then Lewis would start talking the new language he was learning from the counsellor. He would go on about how the worst part of it had been the lying. Depending on what level of maturity Joanna had managed to muster at that moment, she was or was not compelled to point out that Wanda might not see it that way, that from Wanda’s perspective maybe the fucking or the falling in love was the worst part.

  He would go on about how Wanda had been disempowered by not knowing the truth. Whenever Joanna heard this new psychological word, she thought of disembowelled instead. She pictured Wanda eviscerated, the ropes of her intestines dangling from her open but bloodless abdomen and there beside her was Lewis on his knees, trying to make amends, trying to save his marriage, trying to gather her guts into his hands and shove them back in. Meanwhile, the counsellor stood by with pompoms cheering.

  The truth, he told her, was empowering, enabling, ennobling. It was he alone, she thought nastily, who felt ennobled. Wanda might well be finding the truth unbearable.

  Ultimately, he said, the truth was liberating. “Ah yes,” Joanna replied sarcastically, “the truth shall set you free.” He, no doubt, had been liberated from some large portion of guilt, also from having to feel like a bastard all the time. Wanda had likely been liberated too, from an elaborate sequence of romantic delusions about love, loyalty, and the sanctity of marriage. And she, Joanna, had been liberated from him, whether she liked it or not.

  Now Lewis was saying, “I will never lie to her again. The lies were horrible. The next time it happens I will not lie. The next time it happens I will tell her the truth.”

  Joanna hung up. The next time. She went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. It happens. Over the sound of the water she could not hear the telephone ringing. The lies. She stripped and sank into the water. The truth.

  One evening she went so far as to fill the darkened bathroom with candles and classical music. She thought the ceremony would help but in fact it only gave her the creeps, as if she were a human sacrifice, a vestal virgin spread naked against the white porcelain in the flickering candlelight with the symphony swelling moodily towards its inevitable irrevocable climax: a heart eviscerated still throbbing, still dripping, perhaps her intestines too.

  Occasionally she indulged herself in a bottle of expensive blue bubble bath. She even tried aromatherapy, adding to the bathwater a thick orange liquid which promised to work psychological wonders. The smell of oranges was so strong in the steamy little room that she was nauseated.

  Usually she just squirted a bit of dish soap into the running water to make bubbles. This was what they’d always used at home, all three of them, Esther, Clarence, and Joanna regularly cleansed with Sunlight. Esther said it was all the same. Esther said they just put perfume in the bubble bath and charged twice as much. For years, they each bathed once a week. They did not have a shower because there were two cupboards and a window on the wall behind the bathtub. Joanna had hers on Sunday night. She looked forward to it. She liked it, playing, splashing, singing, except for the hair washing which was torture.

  There was even a photograph in the album of Joanna in the bathtub when she was five. Her dark hair is curly and damp, her shoulders are thin, there is a rubber duck in the water and His and Hers towels hanging from the rack. She is grinning and holding a large snowball in her outstretched hands. Clarence had brought it in for her from outside where he was shovelling snow in the dark while Esther did the dishes in the warm kitchen with the radio on. After the picture was taken, Joanna held the snowball in her hands until it disappeared.

  Later, when Joanna began to insist upon bathing and washing her hair every day, Esther complained that it was expensive and bad for her skin. Joanna argued that her hair only looked good when it was freshly washed. She did not mention that she was afraid she smelled. There was a girl at school who smelled. Like fish, the boys said, like she had a rotten fish between her legs. “What’s for dinner?” the boys taunted when she walked past. “Fish, fish, we want fish.”

  Perhaps because Joanna had never acquired the habit of showering when she was young, she never did come to enjoy it. A shower first thing in the morning was too abrupt, too invasive, too violent. The spiky water took her breath away. The feel of it pummelling her sleepy shoulders made her want to sink to her knees and weep. Italways made her remember a drunken university party during which an unhappy young woman had tried to drown herself in the shower on the fifth floor of the women’s dorm. They were all laughing as they fished her out and fixed her another drink.

  So while Joanna tried to get over Lewis, she soaked and soaked and soaked. But just as Esther had warned, all that water was bad for her skin which itched and flaked, especially on her shins which she scratched in her sleep till they bled. Especially in the middle of her back which she could not reach except with a plastic ruler that left long red scratches which, under another circumstance, could have been made by fingernails. As she scratched compulsively, she contemplated how your elasticity decreases with age. She was nearly thirty. It took much longer now to snap back. From hangovers, broken bones, colds, and the flu. Also emotional upset, broken hearts, and dry skin.

  64. COTTAGE

  GORDON AND JOANNA ARE SPENDING the August long weekend at the cottage of another couple, Allan and Barb Bousquette. It was an unexpected invitation which Gordon had accepted eagerly—they needed a break but couldn’t afford to go anywhere exotic. They are driving out in Allan’s car Saturday afternoon, returning early Monday. Joanna is nervous about spending the whole weekend with people they hardly know. Gordon knows Allan from work. Allan is the sales rep for the company. Joanna has met them previously only at parties. In fact, it was at a party at Allan and Barb’s house where she and Gordon first met two months before. Allan and Barb are a notoriously sociable pair who are always giving and going to parties, having people over for brunch or dinner, once an all-night video party featuring the films of Wim Wenders. They are always organizing evenings out for everyone. They pride themselves on having so many friends that their social calendar is booked solid for the next three months. Joanna suspects that the root of this convivial frenzy lies not so much in the fact that they are genuinely gregarious but, rather, in that they do not want to be alone together. They have no children or pets.

  Joanna, who is not the outdoorsy type, hasn’t been to a cottage for years, maybe only once or twice since that time in high school when she went to Stanley Evans’ parents’ cottage on Buck Lake with Thomas Hunt and his penis went soft in her hand. Back then, back there, such summer places were not called cottages at all. Instead, people said they were going to camp, no matter how lavish or expensive the place might actually be.

  Allan and Barb’s cottage is on Mud Lake, a good 1500 kilometres from Buck Lake, but it is just the same. There is the same musty odour when they first enter, the same dilapidated couch with rough upholstery the colour of dried blood, the same battered pots and pans, mismatched dishes, tarnished cutlery, the same braided rug in the main room, the same selection of board games (Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble), and the same calibre of reading material (romance novels, murder mysteries, fly-fishing magazines, and last winter’s Sears Catalogue). In the night, Joanna suspects, the mattress will be lumpy, the threadbare sheets will be clammy, and there will be sand at the bottom of the bed. There will be buzzing herds of homicidal mosquitoes and the scritching sounds of small animals in the ceiling.

  These suspicions prove correct. As do her suspicions about the unhappy marriage of their hosts. All through the preparation of the Saturday night meal (barbecued hamburgers, potato salad with too much mayonnaise, a listless bowl of lettuce, tomatoes and bean sprouts with bottled dressing),
Barb directs herself exclusively to Joanna while Allan takes Gordon for a long stroll by the water and then, after lighting the barbecue, engages him in a rousing game of Scrabble laced with liberal amounts of Canadian Club. At dinner outside on the picnic table, Allan and Barb speak to each other only when necessary (pass the salt, the burgers, the buns). Afterwards, over coffee and more whisky, they get really relaxed, they open right up and start sniping, but still without addressing each other directly.

  “Isn’t he charming, scratching his balls like that?” says Barb.

  “Isn’t she pleasant with a mouth like that and those ugly yellow teeth?” says Allan.

  “He never was much for manners.”

  “She never was much to look at.”

  “He never could get it up.”

  “She never did turn me on.”

  It seems that the buffer zone which Gordon and Joanna were supposed to create has, through no fault of their own, sprung a leak, several leaks, been punctured repeatedly, shot full of holes, like the ozone layer now, perforated and dribbling lethal ultraviolet rays indiscriminately over everything in sight. The way Allan and Barb look at each other—or rather, the way they refuse to look at each other—makes Joanna’s skin crawl. She hugs herself against their relentless vituperation.

  Soon they abandon the coffeepot and bring the bottle of Canadian Club to the table. Both Joanna and Gordon drink too much whisky (what else can they do?) and then they go to bed early. They can hear Allan and Barb still going at it in the living room. The argument, if that’s what it is, does not appear to be about anything in particular. Rather it is an unfocused ebullition of pure hatred, like projectile vomiting with words. What Joanna and Gordon can hear is a diffuse spewing of bad language, juvenile name-calling: “Whore cunt bastard prick motherfucker asshole cocksucker slut pig fuck off fuck you go fuck yourself nobody else ever will.” Joanna remembers looking bad words up in the dictionary nearly twenty years ago with Penny and Pamela, snickering and swearing gleefully at each other. Joanna remembers that time at the other cottage, she and Thomas Hunt primly playing cribbage while Stanley and Louisa made out noisily in the bedroom, Stanley moaning, Louisa’s shrill voice steadily rising until at the ultimate moment she hollered, “Fuck me, fuck me!” and Thomas Hunt blushed furiously while pegging twenty-nine.

  When Joanna lost her virginity a year after that, she was very excited but she did not moan or yell bad words. She gave herself, as they say, quietly, to a young man named Michael Hill, a fellow university freshman. The whole thing was her idea. Michael would have been just as happy to stick to the heavy petting they had been perfecting for the previous three months but Joanna said she wanted to “do it.” Michael said he was flattered to be “the one.” He kindly put a green bath towel beneath her in case there was blood. They were in his tiny furnished basement room. The bathroom was across the hall.

  It hurt but not too much. There was only a little blood. She didn’t have an orgasm but then she hadn’t expected to. She was not so much disappointed as relieved to have it over with. Afterwards they read in bed together and then they went out for Chinese food. They continued to date and sleep together for another six months, at which time Joanna broke it off because Michael was too serious, always phoning and following her around. He was hurt, of course, but he took it rather well. He took it like a man. At least this is how her memory tells her the story now. In fact, it might well have been messy, painful, and time-consuming for all concerned.

  Now in the bedroom she cuddles in closer to Gordon. Allan and Barb are silent. In the middle of the night Joanna is awakened by the sound of them making love with exuberance—as if the foul language they had smeared each other with had been a form of linguistic fore-play, a set of terms of endearment which had roused them to new heights of passion.

  Gordon and Joanna are at that blissful stage of their relationship where she is one hundred per cent sure that they will never fight. They are not living together yet, but are planning to. Not planning to exactly, but expecting to, cohabitation being the next logical step. For the first month Joanna was always warning Gordon that she wanted to go slowly. But now she is not so afraid and the future looks kind or, anyway, she can look at it kindly. Love not being completely blind (despite all rumours to the contrary), Joanna is realistic enough to foresee that they are bound to disagree eventually. She imagines an amiable, rather amusing discussion as to who left the cap off the toothpaste tube, after which they will make love and then laugh.

  When they do have their first fight, a surprisingly short time later, it is also surprisingly vehement, not the least bit amusing, a complete blow-out over the fact that Gordon has arrived for dinner two hours late. The crab quiche is tough, the salad has gone limp, and Joanna has already drunk most of the expensive white wine. Even as she is shrieking at him, Joanna remembers Allan and Barb at the cottage and is stunned by despair at the thought that they too had probably once imagined they would never fight. Suddenly she knows for a fact that everyone thinks that. This is a revelation she would rather not have had.

  Gordon, perfectly reasonable, is asking, “Why are you getting hysterical over nothing?”

  Joanna is yelling, “I am not hysterical, you bastard!” rushing at him with her fists up, pounding wildly on his chest and wailing, “Bastard, prick, you bastard, asshole, prick!”

  Finally Gordon loses his patience with her. “It was an accident!” he cries. “A mistake! I’m sorry! I’ve said I was sorry! What more do you want from me? Blood?”

  “Yes,” Joanna says weakly. “Yes,” Joanna whimpers. “Yes.”

  Afterwards they do make love but then they aren’t laughing later. Later Gordon is snoring (since when did he start snoring?) and Joanna is lying awake beside him, replaying the stupid argument over and over and over in her head. Finally she puts the pillow over her head, trying to block out the disgusting noises coming from Gordon’s mouth and nose (burbles, snorts, snuffles, and wet gurgles). Trying to shut up the still-angry voices inside her own head. No luck. She puts the pillow over his head instead and prays that he will suffocate or choke to death on his own saliva.

  65. SWIFT

  JOANNA HAS NEVER SEEN A SWIFT. At least, not to her knowledge. She knows only the basics of birds: sparrows, starlings, sea gulls, crows. Canada geese, of course, when they fly north or south in the V. Two raucous blue jays who spend a lot of time in the big tree out front and sometimes the sound they make is like a squeaky old clothesline. Once she and Samuel saw a cardinal in the backyard. In Branding Park near her parents’ house there used to be ravens, and after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds, she was afraid to walk through the park for fear of being attacked. Clarence says the ravens are gone now, he hasn’t seen one for years.

  Joanna wouldn’t know a swift if she fell over one. Or if one flew right into her face. As if her face were like the picture window of her parents’ house which birds flew into often: a thump, a few feathers stuck to the glass, a plump dead body still warm in the flower bed, sothat Esther would go outside with her rubber gloves on and retrieve it, wrap it in toilet paper, and drop it into the garbage can out back. Birds, she said, were covered with germs. You must never touch them with your bare hands. Birds (beautiful, graceful, coasting on air currents) were, like many things, not to be trusted, not what they seemed, riddled with microbes of danger, invisible, deadly, unclean.

  When Joanna hears the word “swift” she does not think of birds. She thinks of other words which echo in her head: Savage. Ravage. Relentless. Revenge.

  She thinks of a line which may or may not be from a poem she read somewhere once: Swift and savage, soothe the beast. She imagines this line to be about love. It could be from a song. Swift, savage, stolen kisses, swollen hearts, swords, knives, mortal danger, sudden death. She thinks of that old proverb: The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.

  66. BLUE

  THE COLOUR OF ALL SAFETY and sleep, sinking down into soft blankets, praying for wis
dom, strength, and peace of mind, praying for a dream filled with oceans and sky, no horizons, no worries, no fear, waking up with your thumb in your mouth as if you are a child again and your mother is waiting just around the corner with clean clothes, a hot breakfast, and a hug, humming.

  The colour of all sadness and lost love which the old bluesmen have let loose from their saxophones, and you’ve got to live the blues to sing them but you are not musically inclined, you cannot even carry a tune, and you wonder if you could, where would you carry it to, and so you try keeping your own blue counsel until you feel yourself so full of it that you are surprised upon looking into the mirror to find your face still white. Perhaps you have been wallowing not in a tub of the blues but of bluing, and now you’re simply whiter than white and you still cannot carry a tune.

  The colour of the baby your mother had years before she had you, a blue baby born dead, a phenomenon which mystified you as a child and which, now that you are pregnant yourself, you worry about with a passion. You are also worrying about each aspirin you’ve taken, each glass of wine you’ve sipped, each cup of coffee you’ve gulped, each nutritious and delicious meal you’ve skipped, and every mean and nasty thought you’ve ever had for which now you may be punished. You consider the possibility of a baby with the blues so bad it couldn’t breathe. You wonder exactly what shade of blue that dead baby was: indigo, navy, royal blue, slate, midnight blue, turquoise, powder blue. Baby blue is for boys but you don’t know if it was a boy or a girl and your mother is dead now too, so you can never ask her and you can never ask your father either because he might not remember.