CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The problem is that A is sitting here trying to be everything at once: person and storyteller and character and reader. She doesn't like the character they've drawn for her and doesn't seem to know how to invent one. That's anybody's problem of course, not particular to her. She isn't the Snow Queen, the Compulsive Lecturer, or Goldilocks, or the Killer of Little Joy Boys, but how can she wade her way through this morass of male bonhomie to anything that seems remotely authentic? Authenticity isn't even something that matters to them. It matters to her. That's the problem. What's upsetting is that she's beginning not to like them much - all that bafflegab about their little oolicans, measured in fractions of yards, comparisoning off each other's personae. All that triumphetting, disappearing into their own stories - the ones they make up and the ones that have been made up for them.

"IAMB!" says Angela-Misplaced-Belonging to David-At-Sebastopol and George-Oliver-Delsing and Mike-Omigod-Greatheart. AMB, DAS, GOB, MOG? Only Connect! Flotsam and Jetsam of Medieval morality play rites, Samuel Beckett or Kafka, the difference being in the amount of flailing about we do. Dregs and debris, brief lives, evidence of our beginnings or watt? Sheep in a blanket-toss and blank misgivings. What AMB is suffering now.

She supposes DAS is right about narrative. He is also right about AMB talking GOD into presence - or trying to. She is never successful. He is wrong about her not becoming anxious and depressed though. GOD was beginning to disappear into his own stories a lot. He was somebody else for everybody. What there was of him for her was only her own fiction. His words went into his writing or into others. She never knew when he would next write himself out of her life and into someone else's bed. She knew when he was disappearing. He was an endless supply of black holes into which he could disappear and become someone else's story. He claimed to have no control over it, though AMB didn't believe that was true of any one of them. So she talked to other people on the telephone, in coffee shops, at kitchen tables, later in various therapists' offices when she felt she herself was disappearing into her nightmares. They got transported in their stories. She just got misplaced. Or displaced. They seemed able to replace themselves with their writing. AMB could never do that, though she was transported by talking.

More and more, they seem like alien creatures to her. She doesn't think they inhabit the same world at all. Sometimes they pretend to when they want to seduce you, but it is all an invention. Isolato GOD used to call himself. He took pride in that, to AMB's surprise.

When he didn't come back after going out to get the newspaper, A became depressed and anxious. She called all their friends and acquaintances, but everyone claimed not to have seen him. A's powers of invention were sorely tried as she conversed with Rhonda Toogood. Sometimes she and Rhonda would sit around drinking iced tea and lemonade laced with white rum all afternoon when G was gone. Rhonda was a good friend. She sat and listened while A went through the ritual invention of G. First of all, she had to piece together the bits and scraps he'd given her all those nights they were necking in the car, and out of the few encounters she'd had with his family, out of what his friends and enemies said about him, out of their gestures - reachings and leanings across pub tables - while he leaned back in his chair, laughing, inventing himeself - a distance, slippery as an oolican, impossible to catch. There were other fish.

But what if he had been caught, she thought. What if he was in trouble? She tried to console herself by thinking about the time he'd gone out to pick up a cheque and had come back in the evening with purple-stainéd mouth, stained with Al Purdy's home-made blackberry wine. They'd been drinking it all day. G and A were very poor at the time. He was reading scripts for the CBC, and A was waitressing at the Vancouver Yacht Club for a dollar an hour and no tips. You left me all day with no food, she said. No cigarettes, she said. You don't care about me, she said. You didn't even think about me. You didn't even care enough to come home and give me some money, she said. He threw his money at her. Fuck off, she said. He did.

That next day, he still wasn't home and A was going a little crazy, calling all the people she thought were their friends. Nobody had seen him. Carol told her he'd hitch-hiked to San Francisco. The woman poet from New York chastized her for her lack of cool. Oh God, A thought, all the ways men have conned women into thinking there's something wrong with them: You're not cool, hip, existentialist enough. He'd once said, I want a woman who will suffer indignities. He thought it was self-mockery when it was the simple truth. Tenny finally told her he was at Carol and Ebbe's place after all, stoned on peyote. Tenny drove her down there in curlers and housecoat and she'd fallen on G's chest weeping with relief while he, up close, smiled and smiled and said over and over again, Don't hassle, baby. Don't hassle.

Even at the time, the lingo of hippydom had seemed inadequate to A. Little shocks sounded inside, warnings of what was here and to come Death knell. And Gaston Helios, across the room, chanting: The horse with horns, the horny horse. Everything dissolved. There was no more anchor in her world. He came back home. They were careless people. Though they pretended to care. Those hippies of the sixties. Victims, they pretended to be. Some of them went mad and shot themselves. Or were beaten up and jumped off bridges. Or became acid-heads. Or nearly died on macrobiotic diets. Dropping wives and children along the way, they said, these boys, Don't hassle, don't hassle. The naive and sentimental and irresponsible lovers of the sixties that drove their women mad on acid or rotted their innards out with unattended venereal disease, or got busted, leaving babies, wives and girlfriends to manage as well as they could on welfare or the kindness of strangers. These flower-children stood on the steps of the White House and bravely stuffed roses into the barrels of guns with bayonets fixed to them, or held love-ins, smoking dope in the parks and eating brown rice and lentils out of disgustingly dirty dishes. Much of it was fashion, idealized. A despised their sentimentality. That cheap romance. Beautiful. Don't hassle. Ballin' my old man. My old lady. All ya need is love. Sloppy language. Sloppy morality. Sloppy art. The self-indulgence of spoiled children. They probably stopped the Viet Nam war, those children of the sixties, but what a price they paid. The good of the intellect, gone.

A, remember where we are in this dangerous story, where and when, they told her.

That's where you are, she told them. I have my own story to live, and you don't know the meaning of dangerous.

A is impatient with lost generations, though she read The Sun Also Rises and was enchanted by it when she was 18, like everybody else. She is too judgmental. She knows it. This rollicking of people who don't believe in characters is fun for them, but they seem to A not to believe in character either. At least not in their writing. A feels compromised. She doesn't like the way they talk about their women. About women. This bed is too narrow. She wanted to tell her story. G said he'd never thought of it as telling his story. It's just a lark, he said. It doesn't have to be Strindberg, a confession to your psychiatrist. It doesn't have to be serious. G accuses A of being Miss Julie a lot. But what if it is serious for A? What if it's not a lark anymore?

You can't holler down my rainbarrel;
You can't climb my cellar door.
I don't wanna play in your yard;
You don't love me anymore.

You can't dum-de-dum-de-dum-dum;
You can't climb my apple tree.
I don't wanna play in your yard
If you won't be good to me.

Why do you have to control everybody else's writing? G asks. Why don't you just control your own? A wonders why G thinks it's a matter of control. Is it? she wonders. It doesn't feel like that. It's meshwork, and it feels like a trap to A. Is narrative a trap? Like women? Like the unfolding earth, folding them in? Is that what they think? So they have to explode it, tangle everyone up in the holes. But they're the ones who keep insisting on plot. I mean what is this business about all of them being kidnapped anyway? Who do they think they are? Princes stolen from the cradle? Reared by gypsies or women unworthy of the task? A wonders whether she'd better just write herself discreetly out of the story into the direction of a black hole, come out on the other side of all this implosion-explosion-grail stuff. She doesn't want to be trapped inside this silly plot. She can see which way the cookie crumbles. She can read the writing on the wall.

Beware the frabjous jub-jub bird.
Beware the Jabbercock, my girl.

She doesn't care about the rising and falling of their divining rods. What do they think is in there anyway? Misguided Don Giovannis looking for love in all the wrong places. Giacommettis poking their women full of holes. Reviling them when they discover their mistakes about this one, they go after the next one and the next one. Boats against the current, part and parcel of America's dream of Hollywood starlets with silicone tits worshipping at their sceptres, rods, staffs. No comfort here. No rest for these wicked women, inadequate to the dreams of their heroes - which persist through the mockery, the self-reflexive exposure of their own bathos, their laughter. Where's Barbie? they cry. Where's Mummy? Where's baby? A feels uncharitable. She doesn't care about their Woody Allenish preoccupation with sex and death.

Does A really want to play in their yard? Maybe the best we can do is tell the other half of each others' stories. Out of the ashes of each other we rise, knives and forks poised over the corpse of love. A broken lance, an empty cup. How early in the morning we enter the Maramar caves now. Too young. Too hard to write about then with what we know now. Impossible task to unravel the past, be now what once we were, or even to remember. Flotsam and jetsam. Winsome and wontsome. And underneath the arches this enormous rage. Snap goes the endentata-ed trap.

I yam what I yam. What I yam? AMB cries. Watter we? Water all these liddel wee wees? Liddel Joyce-boys in Blunderland? Wattemeye? Explosions in the Iyambics of their Iamb? The lady vanishing? Banished in The Big Byambybang.