In the Language of Love Read online

  They did not allow their fantasy to be tainted by the troublesome realities of finance or circumstance. Lewis never asked Joanna, “How will we afford it, both of us artists with no visible means of support?” Joanna never asked Lewis, “Aren’t you forgetting something? What about your wife?” In this fantasy, Joanna dealt with Wanda the way Esther dealt with photographs of herself that she didn’t like: she cut herself out with the manicure scissors and often sent the rest on to Joanna who had grown accustomed to receiving these odd-sized remnants of her parents’ lives.

  One day when Joanna happened to pass the old stone house on Pembroke Street, there was a For Sale sign out front. She nearly wrecked the car. She drove around the block four times to be sure.

  At home she could not call Lewis because Wanda was home from work that day, sick with the flu. (He had called first thing in the morning to tell her this, to say he would not be able to come over that afternoon as planned. He called from the drugstore where he had gone to buy Milk of Magnesia.) Instead Joanna called the realestate agent whose name was on the sign. She told the agent that she and her husband were interested in viewing the stone house on Pembroke Street. The agent said the asking price was $329,000. Joanna said that was no problem. They made an appointment for the afternoon after next (surely Wanda would be better by then).

  Lewis called again around suppertime. He was at the corner store this time, buying a newspaper and some ginger ale. Wanda was on the mend. Joanna told him about the house, the price, the appointment. He was silent. He was horrified. He was angry. He said, “Are you out of your mind?” He refused to go and look at the house.

  Joanna said, “Fuck you then. I’ll go and see it by myself.”

  When she arrived at the appointed time, the agent was waiting on the front steps. The real red shutters were open, the window boxes were overflowing, and the vine on the south wall was lush in the sunlight. Joanna waved at the woman and then drove away.

  After Joanna and Gordon have bought their big house on Laverty Street, they quickly discover that they are not especially good at household management. They have never been home owners before, and much as they are theoretically thrilled with their new elevated status they are terribly daunted by the realities of maintenance, upkeep, and repair. Joanna is surprised to discover that Gordon doesn’t know any more about these things than she does. She realizes that she has been nursing her own sexist stereotypes, assuming that all men are mechanically inclined, born with a basic knowledge of plumbing, electricity, and home heating.

  Much as they love their house, they are a little afraid of it too. Joanna is seized with a paralysing panic when things break down or might. She dreams of the furnace and/or the hot-water tank exploding, the wiring sizzling inside the walls, the chimney catching fire, the sewer backing up all over the basement. She never worried about such things when she was renting, as if her transient status effectively exonerated her from responsibility for the workings of the place and also, by extrapolation, from the threat of personal injury or possible death due to the malfunction of said workings. Now there is no landlord to call.

  Often she overhears other people (older, wiser people who have been home owners for years, women in camel hair coats in the grocery store lineup, red-faced matter-of-fact men in hunting caps at the bank) discussing such household catastrophes. Their voices thrill with the details of disaster. She speeds home afterwards, running yellow lights, with a knot in her stomach. She is convinced that when she rounds the corner of their street (brakes squealing), it will be to find several large firetrucks in the driveway, a dozen firemen in yellow hats scaling the walls, hacking the roof open with their silver axes to release mushroom clouds of hot black smoke. Each time this does not happen, each time she returns to find the house as she left it (patient, empty, and cool), her knees go weak with relief and she whispers small prayers of thanksgiving.

  She remembers five years ago when Henry’s friend Doug’s house blew up. A work crew had been digging up the street in front of Doug’s house when they hit a gas line. He said later that he had been lying on the couch watching TV when he felt the house grow suddenly cold and unnaturally still. He jumped through the window of the back door just as it blew sky-high. When Joanna and Henry walked over to have a look, they saw the side walls blown out, the roof collapsed, and the front wall lying flat in the front yard with the curtains still on the rods above the broken windows. Insulation lay in puffy pink bats all over the yard. There were also plants blown out of their pots, records whole but with no labels tossed onto the grass like Frisbees, a broken aquarium with no fish in sight, a Canadian flag tacked to what had been the ceiling, a stereo turntable with its guts hanging out, and a wooden door, closed, still in its frame in the wall which lay flat on the grass.

  Joanna quickly discovers that a large part of home ownership involves calling repairmen (usually three or four times before she can reach them) and then waiting for them. She spends whole days stuck in the house when she might have been out. The truth is she probably wouldn’t have gone out anyway, she would have been working all day in her studio, but at least she wouldn’t have felt so trapped and impatient. She hates waiting. She gets angrier by the hour, but when the guy finally shows up at quarter after five, she wants to sink to herknees and hug his smelly overalled legs. She wants to say, “Marry me! Marry me!” But she is already married. To a man who knows nothing about home maintenance. She wants to say, “Adopt me! Adopt me!” With a man like this around the house, she imagines she would never be worried again.

  Lewis and Wanda’s house is not far. Joanna drives by it fairly often, almost without thinking, almost, the car, it seems, sliding into cruise control and automatically following that route, which is the fastest, least congested way to get to or from downtown. Considering that they are nearly neighbours, it is surprising how seldom she and Lewis run into each other.

  Lewis and Wanda’s house always looks abandoned. No signs of life. Dark brown brick, empty black windows, garage doors closed, the lawn in the summer brown and shaggy, a few untrimmed shrubs, no flowers, the driveway in the winter seldom shovelled, dirty car tracks, no footprints. The only evidence of habitation is the mail occasionally poking out of the box and the garbage in bags at the curb if she happens to pass by early on a Wednesday. Otherwise, the house looks deserted, expressionless, hermetically sealed with secrets, vacant or evacuated.

  Some days this makes her feel sad as she sails by with Samuel safely buckled up in the back, the radio blaring, the two of them humming along, or Samuel singing solo, off-key but enthusiastic. Some days, less charitable days, this makes her feel victorious, as if in the struggle to survive their calamitous romance, she has emerged the winner.

  Her house fairly bursts with exuberance. She thinks this as she drives by it, something she does fairly often, shamefaced, feeling foolish to be driving slowly by her own house to admire it from the outside, the way she imagines passing strangers do. “Gee,” Samuel teases as they pass, “I wonder who lives in that nice cozy house?”

  There are riding toys in the driveway, the shovel in winter stuck in a snowbank, the green hose in summer unravelled across the front yard, a sawhorse and some lumber from Gordon’s latest do-it-yourself project, bedding plants in flats ready to go into the ground, also the lawn mower plugged in, ready, clothes flapping on the line outback, the wheelbarrow filled with black dirt. All the windows are open like smiling mouths, emitting soft music and laughter. It is as if, Joanna thinks, the front door might be flung open at any moment and the lady of the house (her!) will be standing there waving and inviting you to come on in, have some coffee, fresh muffins, a cool glass of wine, strawberries from the garden, take off your shoes, lay down your burdens, have some more coffee, another glass of wine, bring the baby, the dog, your boyfriend, your mother, your husband, there’s always enough, more than enough, there’s always enough for everyone. In fact, she and Gordon live quite solitary lives but they do it because they want to, not because they hav
e to.

  11. BLACK

  THE COLOUR OF THE ROOM you would like to lie down in for a few days, maybe a week, a small perfectly black room, the black you fall into when you turn out the light and your eyes have not yet adjusted to the darkness, that pitch-dark blind-black just before the objects begin to assume their shadowy shapes again, the dresser, the bed posts, the window, the doorknob, the ceiling, reforming piecemeal until you are surrounded again. A small room, perfectly black, also perfectly silent, so that you do not have to hear traffic or voices out in the street, the furnace, the fridge, the phone, footsteps, sirens, music, another person breathing and believing in you. A small black silent room with nothing in it but a bed, where you could lie suspended, not sleeping exactly but floating in and out of consciousness, your own or someone else’s, for a string of unmarked hours during which you do not have to talk, eat, cook, clean, cry, dream, roll over, or go to the bathroom. A small black silent room where you never need anything, not forever, just for a few days, maybe a week, just long enough to find…long enough to find what? You’re not sure but you know you’ve lost or are missing something, perhaps you never had it in the first place, or perhaps you left it somewhere, or maybe it is just hiding, under the couch, behind the TV, out back in the long grass, or down in the bushes at the limits of the city, but all they everfind in the wilderness these days are the dismembered body parts of murdered women and the moss-covered skulls of missing children, so of course you’re afraid to look there for fear you might find a part of yourself you don’t recognize. It must be like love, this mysterious missing link, the way you’ve always been told: “Don’t worry about love. You’ll know it when you find it.” A small black silent room. You’ll know it when you find yourself in it.

  12. MUTTON

  RHYMES WITH BUTTON. Button, button, who’s got the button?

  Esther saved buttons in an old biscuit tin. Although she never talked about having lived through the Great Depression, this button-saving habit was part of that legacy. Whenever an item of clothing wore out or no longer fit, she carefully snipped off the buttons and put them in the tin. She also saved zippers, picking out the stitches one by one with her silver seam ripper, then putting the zipper in a bag already filled with others of all sizes and colours, curled around each other like benign snakes. The pieces of fabric were cut into squares and used as rags until they fell apart.

  Occasionally Esther found a use for the old buttons, replacing those which had fallen off and been lost. But most often it was Joanna who dipped her hands deep into the button tin, pulling up whole handfuls and then letting them drop through her fingers like jewels. She could spend all afternoon playing with the buttons, counting and sorting, arranging and rearranging them by colour or size all over the kitchen floor. Sometimes she pretended they were money and played store.

  Her favourites were the tiny pearl buttons, of which there were many, and one flat metal button, gold-coloured but hollow. On it was the raised figure of an ancient soldier, Greek or Roman, down on one knee in a tunic and a winged helmet. His left arm was outstretched, holding a small round shield. Hung from his right shoulder was a long stick or sword. Esther could not remember what garment this button might have come from.

  Esther’s habit of economy extended to many areas. She saved used paper bags, tinfoil, waxed paper, cardboard boxes of all sizes, wrapping paper, TV dinner trays, egg cartons, and string. She practised the three R’s, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, long before they became politically correct. She abhorred all manner of waste and extravagance. Later Joanna will appreciate this but at the time she found Esther’s habits annoying (as if she was just being stingy) or embarrassing (as if they were so poor they couldn’t afford to throw anything away).

  Esther was only extravagant when it came to winter coats. If she must live in this God-forsaken frozen climate for six months of the year, then at least she would do it with style. She owned a magnificent fur coat which she kept in cold storage over the summer and when the temperatures began to drop in the fall, retrieved and wore proudly all winter long. It was a mouton coat, so heavy that Joanna could barely lift it. One night when there was a power failure for eight hours three days after Christmas, Esther covered Joanna, asleep, with her mouton coat. When Joanna woke up in the morning she was sweaty and, with the weight of the coat upon her, she could hardly get out of bed.

  It was a long time before Joanna understood that mouton was a fancy French word for mutton, which meant in fact sheep. She had imagined that a mouton must be a very rare and precious animal from which such elegant garments were made. Perhaps it lived in Antarctica, perhaps it was ten feet tall, perhaps it was like a unicorn with fur. Eventually she came to understand that the coat had been made from sheep, those fat dirty slow-moving animals she saw from the car when they drove in the country. She felt she had been tricked.

  By this time Esther had a new winter coat, Persian lamb, with deep rolled cuffs and a stylish flare at the hem. Joanna was shocked. It was bad enough to have learned the truth about those diagrams of lambs she had coloured in the old cookbook. Now she had also to consider the fact that lambs were skinned and made into coats. She could not imagine how many little lambs had been killed before she knew what was going on. She could not imagine the extent of the brutality that went on in the world behind her back.

  13. COMFORT

  JOANNA WAS FEELING a lot better. The sound of Lewis’s name or the sight of a stranger on the street who remotely resembled him no longer caused her heart to dip alarmingly or her stomach to go hard as if she’d swallowed an apple whole. She thought she was almost over him now. It had been six months. She was feeling a lot better. She thought she might live after all.

  After six months of celibacy, sex had been reduced in her memory to a remote and unlikely configuration of body parts. She went to bed alone each night in her flannelette nightie and her socks, with a book and sometimes a snack, a plate of cheese and crackers, a piece of cold pizza, a bowl of pretzels or chips. Trying in vain to imagine a hard hairy body onto the unrumpled expanse of mattress beside her, she was left feeling wooden but renascently pure.

  For a time, she’d been convinced that she would never have sex again. She had imagined herself alone forever, dedicated to loving Lewis even though they could never be together. She would remain constant, chaste and faithful to him, to the memory of his love. She would be forever untouched by other human (probably sweaty and clumsy) hands. She would be like the woman in black at the end of the pier in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the motionless mythical Sarah Woodruff staring out to sea. However, her sense of humour often interfered with the perfection of this fantasy, frequently reminding her of an old cartoon she’d seen once which said that a tragic life was only romantic when it happened to somebody else.

  Now Joanna supposed that her life would eventually settle back onto her, resuming much the same shape and form it had taken before she’d fallen in love with Lewis. Now she supposed that there would be whole days some day when she wouldn’t even think of him, whole days when she might look back and think that nothing had happened, nothing had changed, and no, her life had not been ruined after all. Now she supposed that eventually she would have sex again but she could not quite yet imagine how all those squirming curves and bony hollows fit together in the first place. She worried that, if and when the time came, she wouldn’t remember how it was done. She’d heard that making love was like riding a bicycle: once you’d learned, you never forgot. Joanna never had been much good at bicycle riding, especially those ones with multiple gears and hand brakes.

  She worried that, if and when the time came, she would burst into laughter and ruin everything.

  She thought she wouldn’t take Lewis back now, not even if he came crawling and crying on his hands and knees. She played this whole scene out in her mind frequently, in exquisite and gratifying detail.

  Lewis would come to her door in the early morning or just at dusk, either one of those times when the light has gone te
ntative and watery. It might have been raining, so that the streets were slick and that hole in the eavestroughing over her back door would be dripping cold water right down his neck. He would be frantic, penitent, his hair rumpled with distress, his hands held palms up before him, trembling. He would say, “I’ve left her. I love you. I cannot live without you for one more minute. Please be mine forever,” and she would say, “No, thank you. You had your chance and you missed it,” and then she would quietly but firmly shut the door in his crumpled face.

  In the more vengeful version of this black fantasy, it was Wanda who had left him and, when Joanna politely refused to take him back, he was left alone to spend the rest of his meaningless life regretful and depressed in a rented room above a greasy spoon on the bad side of town.

  Now it was Saturday afternoon and she thought she’d walk downtown. This was a longtime habit but one she’d given up after losing Lewis. For the last six months she’d been spending Saturdays at home, doing laundry all morning in her ugly grey track suit (the kind she’d always said she wouldn’t be caught dead in), watching car racing, kickboxing, and golf all afternoon in the living room with the curtains closed, afraid to leave the house because she might run into them or because the phone might ring, it might be Lewis, he might be missing her and changing his mind. When the phone did ring, she was afraid to answer it because it might be Lewis or it might not be, and sometimes she just let it ring and then wondered all the rest of the day who it could have been.

  Today was a breezy end-of-summer afternoon. The sun was bright but not hot, beginning already to assume its autumn clarity and crispness. She thought she’d go to the art store and stock up on supplies. She’d had a new collage in her head for a week: this was a sure sign of her return to health. For six whole months, all during the wet fragrant spring and on through the humid green summer, it seemed she hadn’t had a thought in her head, creative or otherwise, only pain and anger and loneliness, all those unmanageable emotions which expand to fill the space available and then some.