CHAPTER EIGHT

He was definitely dead. And good riddance to him, thought A, who surely and finally put an end to the Pat Boones of her life when, one night, she accepted an invitation from one of them to an Evening with Mort Sahl at The Cave Supper Club - not a supper club at all, really, since almost no one ate there, but a place you could go to drink and be entertained by a variety of persons who ranged all the way from Mitzi Gaynor to Lennie Bruce. For some reason, the Pat Boone look-a-like had developed a crush on A who did want to see Mort Sahl and was willing to endure Pat's company in order to do so. What she was not willing to endure was the highschool gropings in the car following the performance. Pat seemed to regard A's enthusiastic response to them as the price she had to pay for the price he'd paid for their entry to the club downtown. The Cave was built to look like an actual grotto, its papier maché interior suggesting that all hope be abandoned upon one's entry. The denizens of club frequently included Vancouver's shabby imitation of the elite of Tinseltown: Jed Goldenblum, resident intellectual for the Vancouver Bun and his actress-wife Blanche. In the 50's, dermabrasion and facelifts had not become commonplace, and A was alarmed out of her ambition to be an actress and torch singer. A made do with occasional performances (on table tops at parties when she was drunk) of Love For Sale, The Man I Love, Ten Cents A Dance, Lover Man and Round Midnight, sung in the style of Carmen McCrae, Peggy Lee, June Christie and Doris Day (from The Ruth Etting Story ). She had, she felt, graduated from the Pat Boone class.

However, the Pat in the car beside her was not convinced. He persisted beyond the brief kissing session A felt was sufficient recompense for the evening's entertainment. Her need to extricate herself from his dogged grappling was made even more imperative by the two drinks she had consumed on an empty stomach which were now causing her considerable intestinal distress. When her polite efforts failed to persuade her persistent companion of her need to leave, A, in disgust, abandoned all pretense at civility, threw etiquette and caution to the winds and farted. It took only a few seconds of awful stillness for Pat to realize that A's protestations had been genuine. He leapt out of the driver's seat and opened the door for her departure, making no effort to delay her with a request for a final kiss. As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, A witnessed his futile efforts to fumigate his car of her sulphuric contribution to the evening. He was swinging the door on the passenger side back and forth as rapidly as he could. When she reached her bedroom, A glanced out of the window in time to see Pat pulling out the lighter he had lit her cigarettes with all evening. The explosion that ensued lit up the sky for miles, and A watched a face-blackened cartoon character climb into his car and drive off while bedroom lights went on up and down the street and the silhouettes of people wakened from their sleep by the blast appeared in the windows of the silent houses.

Evidently Pat saw the writing on the wall; he must have understood that the end of his fantasy relationship with A was at hand, for he retired to D's hotel to rent a companion for the rest of the evening, a service discreetly provided by D, not indeed his only connection to the demi-monde of the sororities. So it was with some dismay that D realized no discretion was possible in this instance. The police, when they arrived , were puzzled by Pat's blackened appearance and concluded that some sort of kinky sex game had backfired. Which wasn't far from the truth, had it been known. A, reading the paper next morning, and relieved to be rid of Pat, was not so unkind as to have wished death on him, and thought that his punishment had far exceeded his crime. The events of the evening had wound themselves beyond her ability to control them, however, as such things often do. Keeping her head down, peering through the dark glasses she adopted for a few days as a disguise in case anyone should suspect a connexion between Pat's death and her date with him. A did not know at the time what fate had in store for her when she left behind her forever the Pat Boone world and moved out of the frying pan into the meatgrinder.

Years later A would laugh in astonishment when D's chapter five and M's letter arrived in the mail on the same day. Both included references to the Ancient Mariner. Both saw A's chapter as analogous to that old codger's glittering-eyed, skinny-handed, obsessive grip. When she opened M's letter, there he was, the central figure of a cartoon aptly titled "Crossed Paths: Icarus Meets The Ancient Mariner." A dead albatross lay on the deck, arrow stuck in its chest, legs stuck up in the air. Definitely dead. The mad-eyed old man, cross-bow pulled taut, was taking aim at a young and already arrow-filled Icarus surprised in mid-flight. A couldn't believe that such a thing had happened by chance, despite her half-suspended disbelief in Jung's ideas about synchronicity, so she called M up to find out whether he and D had been talking to each other, but M said no, they hadn't. He seemed a little subdued, uncertain about whether A understood his careful cautionary note? A did. She wasn't surprised that D and M had come to the same conclusion, just surprised that they had both used the same metaphor and that their letters had arrived on the same day. She had been well-trained by G to recognize her limitations. She just didn't want to pay too much attention to them when the alternative was silence. She preferred, somehow, to continue rushing around like a fart in a collander until she found her own way of protecting herself. Or not. On the other hand, she didn't want to be seen as the killer bitch mother shooting down the ecstacies of the little joy-boys whose stories they were writing. Was she that? She might have known better. She did, but was not protecting herself with her disbelief.

When she read G's chapter the next day, she laughed and laughed and then she cried and cried. This porridge is too hot for me, she said to herself, remembering the silver dish she'd had as a child that pictured Goldilocks and the 3 bears on the bottom when you'd eaten all the porridge. She still had it, and though its bottom was tarnished now, you could still see the group gathered around the breakfast table. Though she'd said in letters to D and M the previous day that she thought the albatross was a little redundant, after reading G's chapter, she didn't think so anymore. A is G's albatross. And it is A, now, who is the arrow-filled figure - spiked on their wit. There is no room for me in this writing, she said. This bed is too hard. This chair is too big. What happens to Goldilocks? Do they take her in? A wanted to be taken in. And she was - repeatedly. But would they take her in? They were scarey, but familiar, and There is no room for me in this writing, she said.

G had written a protective persona for her - the jolly joking cloak he wore which garnered him affection and afforded him protection now covered her. What could she be but a ponderous kill-joy if she protested? Or the thing on which they worked their wit? An occasion for a joke (which she, like the rest of them, didn't know how to take). G turned her memory of The Books of Knowledge into a joke: Oh yes, A had read The Odyssey by the time she was five, you know. This strange double compulsion to protect and attack at the same time is something she doesn't understand in men. Perhaps they are protecting the scars of their own babyhood for which they blame the mothers they are attacking. Maybe it is their recognition of their own cowardice and vulnerability that lies back of the insult they hurl at each other: Motherfucker. I'm outnumbered, A thinks. Sclerotic means scarred. And we all have many scars. G would like A to develop more protective scar tissue for her many wounds.

Her friend taught school in Buffalo Creek in the interior of British Columbia where she had a student named Mary Many Wounds. Her friend was herself wounded there, multiply, when, after being raped by another student's father, she was told by the police she called that they would tell her dying father (who did not know) about her illegal abortion if she tried to press charges against her rapist. They promised she would never get another teaching job in Canada or the U.S. She moved to England after she married, had her first child, became an alcoholic, moved to Singapore, gave birth to a second child, moved to Texas, went back to school, became a political scientist, lost one husband, moved to Florida with another, where she managed a health club, left the second husband, lost her job, joined A.A., helped to establish a women's centre, is now teaching black children in the Everglades, and has sworn off drink and men.

Back then, when A knew them all, her friend was losing her baby in the apartment where A lived. G and his friend were waiting for A to get ready to go to the party across the street. G's friend was the one A called Trombone, and he had just come back from 2 years in Japan, sent there by his millionaire father's effort to rid his son of his suicidal Japanese girlfriend who had, amazingly, lived through World War II in Manchuria, picking lice from the seams of Japanese soldiers' uniforms, washing uniforms in boiling water, the unheated warehouses in which the children worked so cold that their hands and feet, wrapped in rags, were bleeding. She had narrowly escaped being in Hiroshima with an aunt when the American bombs fell. One of her friends had been raped by either Russian or Chinese soldiers when both were moving into Manchuria as the war was drawing to a close. The friend had committed suicide, and Fumiko was dressed like a boy and hidden in an attic after her father had convinced a Chinese neighbour to offer his daughter's would-be rapists money to let her go. The transaction ended her father's friendship with the Chinese, and the fishboat on which her father had arranged her passage to Hiroshima was late arriving. She told A these stories years later, in Mexico.

Trombone married her in a disgusting ceremony at his father's house. The bride, dressed in a traditional wedding costume sent from Japan by her father, handed around the sushi while Trombone's father expatiated on the price and symbolic meaning of the embroidered gown, mispronouncing all the Japanese words. G and A were present at the ceremony. G got drunk, flirted outrageously with a young wedding guest, and turned pale green. A knew that he was going to be sick. He threw up on his shoes in the garden soon afterwards.

When Trombone was living with G on the third floor of an old house overlooking False Creek, they took turns having their girlfriends stay. It was a lovely old house that swayed every time the wind blew and its lights went out. Running, wrapped in a sheet, to the bathroom across the hall where the stairs to the floor above came through was an adventure in not being caught. A often opened the fridge to find neat packages of sushi leftovers. Trombone spent most of his married life trying to keep his wife alive. She jumped off bridges into water, out of hospital windows into the street, bit her tongue half off, stabbed herself in the stomach, swallowed lye, liquor and pills, vomited them up and survived. She was finally successful in shaking off her painful mortal coil after the divorce had gone through. From time to time she called A, complaining madly that Trombone was stealing her alimony money. Mary Many Wounds. Her daughter became a cop. Trombone is going blind and prays for the convent-schooled soul of his wife in Catholic churches all over the world.

But at that time, while A's friend was losing her baby in the bathroom, delirious with fever because back then, abortionists did their cutting and scraping and sent their clients home to lose the foetus and then call the hospital - Trombone and G were waiting in the living room of the apartment for A to finish getting ready to go to the reception being held at G's former girlfriend's place across the street. They were laughing and joking and looking out of the same window A had been looking out of a few months earlier, waving goodbye to G, who was standing in the street, skinny and beautiful in his old blue airforce shirt and jeans, waving goodbye to her, waiting for his friend Tenny to pick him up. A's heart bloomed with love and then with horror. G stepped out into the path of Tenny's car as it drew up to the curb, bounced four feet into the air, got up, waved again and disappeared into the little Austin which disappeared into the line of traffic moving down Broadway. A stood at the window, shaken with what she did not then know was her future.

But at this time, A's friend called from the bathroom, and when A went in, her friend held in her hand a little beginning-to-be-shape, primordial E.T., and asked - strained eyes, flushed face - Is this it? A said she thought so and called the-woman-who-cannot-be-named because she cannot-be-implicated. She was A's landlady, and her sister was a nurse who worked for and was having an affair with a big name, married lawyer. It was a romantic story. The lawyer's wife was an invalid and the landlady and her sister spent long weekends on the lawyer's boat with his daughter and her new husband. The landlady told A about the time the daughter, water-skiing behind the boat, lost the top of the bikini she had bought on her honeymoon in Fiji and had to ski bare-breasted behind the boat until they got close enough to shore for her to discreetly descend into the waters, to wait for a towel to cover her nakedness. The landlady also told A that her sister slept in her brassiere to prevent her breasts from falling. Now she told A to get the two men out of there - go to the party across the street - not to come back until much later. Conspiracy of women. How could A make sense of these relationships of men and women? She had no one to tell her how, and she felt bludgeoned by experience she could admit only as fragments, images of horror she steeled herself against, learning a new world her mother knew nothing about, or did not speak about. So she became her friend's mother, not knowing, then, how power worked, how her friend would hate her for it.

Out of her depth in this new female world, A obediently went to the party with G and Trombone and tried to get drunk, but she could not, though she was sure one of her major attractions for G was that she was such a cheap date. It took only two drinks to get her drunk, and she was willing after one, but that was for love, not drink. This was September, three and a half months before G and A got married. Everyone else was getting very drunk. The civilized proceedings earlier at G's former girlfriend's elegant father's house in West Point Grey had been too much for the arty farty crowd, so now they were really tying one on. A always suspected that G's former girlfriend had married her painter husband shortly before G and A's own marriage to get even with G for not coming back to her when she decided she wanted him back after all. This happened soon after A and G fell in love.

She tried other things. Like inviting A over to her apartment, built onto her father's house because her stepmother who was a famous composer hated her. She had arranged a ceremonial meeting to give A her photographs of G which were photos of G and herself. She cut them in half before handing A the half of the picture in which G appeared. A silently cursed her mother for not properly preparing her to deal with this side of things. She understood that G's former girlfriend was exercising the only power she had left, which was to claim G by giving him to her, but she remained silent, complicit. She even understood why. The girl's father was the most beautiful man A had ever seen. No wonder his daughter could not live with any of her other 8 stepfathers. No wonder she tried to make her father jealous of all her boyfriends. No wonder she told her father (who paid for it) and G that the child she was aborting was G's. Neither her father nor G believed it, but G pretended he did. He even bought the girl a ring. She laughed when she gave it back and called G a fool. Her wedding present to G and A was a white woven bedspread, which, A later found out, was the one she'd slept beneath with G. Her other present, a broken black leather chaise longue, was the one G had slept on when he stayed over. She gave G a drawing of Paganini that hung in his study for many years until someone stole it. A was finding out about variations on the Oedipal problem she hadn't conceived of before.

The former girlfriend invited A to the opera. Her family was musical and European. One of her grandmother's husbands had been Dorfendorf, a German composer who joined the Nazi party, having produced one son with the grandmother; the other was Bruno Hauptbuscher, friend of Albert Einstein, Jewish violinist, and father of the beautiful man who had produced G's girlfriend. The two sons fought on opposite sides in the second European war, sons of the house of Atreus. The first time A saw the girlfriend, she was at a meeting at one of the writing instructors' houses. She'd removed Dorfendorf's fur cape with a flourish and thrown it on the floor before settling herself on it. A was impressed, as G had meant her to be, when he told her these things.

The opera A went to with the former girlfriend, her grandmother, and the grandmother's husband, gay and 20 years his wife's junior, was Faust. There had been a little pre-theatre supper at the house -- broiled grapefruit and cold chicken. A had worn her little black Ann Klein dress, the only really good one she had. The former girlfriend offered A her mother's pearls to "brighten it up," cautioning her to be careful of them since they were worth $10,000.00. In her confusion and dismay at all this Jamesian anxiety and complexity, A spooned salt from her salt cellar onto the broiled grapefruit, disgracing herself completely. The former girlfriend smiled triumphantly. A's sense of shame was only partly assuaged when the German grandmother emerged from the bathroom after dinner trailing a couple of yards of shit-stained toilet paper beneath her white crepe dress. Bejewelled and ready, she turned away to allow her husband to drape her fur over her shoulders, which he did, and as she moved to the door, deftly stepped on the toilet paper's tail end. It came away fairly easily; he had disposed of it and was at the door in time to hold it open for her. His wife was entirely unaware of the tiny drama that had taken place behind her back. A left the house filled with a churning mixture of admiration (for the husband), shame (for herself), hatred (for the former girlfriend who was so intent on making her feel like a hick) and a wild urge to shriek with laughter.

When they got to the theatre, the two younger women had to sit in orchestra seats while their hosts ascended the stairs to the loges, the grandmother bowing, nodding and waving all the while to the buzzing seats below. When A looked a question at her companion, she was told that the grandmother had been a very beautiful and famous actress in Germany. A understood that the grandmother was lost in another time and place. No one knew her here. A began to wonder why she was here, but the opera was Faust and Mephistopheles was most satisfying in his swirling cape with its red satin lining. Margereta wailing and dying in her prison cell was a perfectly beautiful victim, her sad plaint and yellow braids all that A could have wished for at the time. Later when she saw Bonynge's Don Giovanni with her own mother, she realized that the Faust production hadn't been all that good. But she'd become a grown woman by that time.

At the time of the wedding party for the former girlfriend, the world was hyper-real, the way it is when someone dies, and A didn't know why she was there either. People were crawling out of second story windows, and as far as A knew, there was no balcony. The rooms were blue with smoke, and a lustful pair were fucking among the coats piled on the bed. This offended the bride who was vainly trying to get her new husband to haul them out: What are you? A man or a mouse, she uninventively demanded. He was a painter who had done a portrait of G, one of G's poems embedded in its thick oils. He looked miserable, but refused to uncouple the two lovers, so the former girlfriend had to do the job herself. G and A and Trombone heard her yelling at the hapless pair as they descended the stairs and walked past the used furniture store that occupied the lower storey of the building. People were still making a human chain from the window above to the street below; in the middle, his belly exposed in the stretch, was the beautiful dark-haired painter who looked like a soccer player. The newly married couple were divorced in less than a year, and the painter husband came to live a block down the street from the apartment where G and A and Trombone lived. He ran every morning on the beach and collected driftwood to heat his studio.

There are 8 million stories in The Naked City and this is only Vancouver. But stretch it is the texture A wants. Not the stories so much. The baffled thickness of creatures blundering about in words and paint not yet realized, their obstinate questions, their laughter. Idiot joy, trailing toilet paper and cloudy glory. The darkening edge they tumble toward, rose-lipped girls and light-foot lads. Out of romance and into the 20th century, fallings from us, vanishings. Though she writes from the other end of this fin de siécle world, even A's laughter endures and erupts, from time to time, like the lightning bolt that hit the pavement outside the Yew Street (1719) apartment, burning it black, summer, 1963. Writing diabolic in concrete, close to the wall where their bedroom was. Put the lights out. And someone threw ink through the window onto G's books.