CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

This was the beginning of my double life. But hadn’t my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupils glowing in the black sunlight of that other world. While I watched, locked in the actual flesh, the uninteresting dust and never-emptied ashtrays of daily life. It was never-never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, for I was more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many. The Royal Porcupine had opened a time-space door to the fifth dimension, cleverly disguised as a freight elevator, and one of my selves plunged recklessly through.

Not the others, though. “When can I see you again?” he asked.

“Soon,” I said. “Don’t call me, though, I’ll call you. Okay?”

“I’m not applying for a job, you know,” he said.

“I know. Please understand.” I kissed him goodnight. Already I was beginning to feel that I couldn’t see him again. It would be too dangerous.

When I got back to the apartment Arthur wasn’t there, although it was almost twelve o’clock. I threw myself on the bed, stuck my head under the pillow, and began to cry. I felt I’d ruined my life, again. I would repent, I would turn over a new leaf, I wouldn’t call the Royal Porcupine, although I was longing to. What could I do to make it up to Arthur? Perhaps I could write a Costume Gothic, just for him, putting his message into a form that the people could understand. Nobody, I knew, read Resurgence except the editors, some university professors, and all the rival radical groups who edited magazines of their own and spent a third of each issue attacking each other. But at least a hundred thousand people read my books, and among them were the mothers of the nation. Terror at Casa Loma, I’d call it, I would get in the evils of the Family Compact, the martyrdom of Louis Riel, the horrors of colonialism, both English and American, the struggle of the workers, the Winnipeg General Strike

But it would never work. In order for Arthur to appreciate me I’d have to reveal the identity of Louisa K., and I knew I couldn’t do that. No matter what I did, Arthur was bound to despise me. I could never be what he wanted. I could never be Marlene.

It was two in the morning when Arthur came back.

“Where have you been?” I asked, snuffling.

“At Marlene’s place,” Arthur said, and my heart dropped. He’d gone for consolation, and.…

“Was Don there?” I asked in a small voice.

It turned out that Marlene had told Don about Sam, and Don had hit her in the eye. Marlene had called up the entire editorial staff of Resurgence, including Sam. They’d come over to Marlene’s house, where they’d had a heated discussion about whether or not Don had been justified. Those in favor said the workers often hit their wives in the eye, it was an open and direct method of expressing your feelings. Those against it said it was degrading to women. Marlene had announced she was moving out. Sam said she couldn’t move in with him, and another debate began. Some said he was a prick for not letting Marlene move in with him, others felt that if he didn’t really want her to he was right to say so. In the middle of this, Don, who’d been out getting drunk at Grossman’s Tavern, came back and told them all to get the hell out of his house.

I was secretly glad of this uproar. Arthur could no longer consider Marlene the paragon he once had, and it took some of the heat off me.

“What about Marlene?” I said, with false concern. “Was she all right?”

“She’s outside the door,” Arthur said heavily, “sitting on the stairs. I thought I should check with you first. I couldn’t just leave her there, not with him in that condition.”

He didn’t say anything about the television interview though, and for this I was grateful. Perhaps he hadn’t seen it. It would have been a terrible humiliation to him. I hoped no one would tell him about it.

Marlene slept on the chesterfield that night, and the next night, and the next. It appeared she’d moved in with us. I couldn’t do anything about it, for wasn’t she in trouble, wasn’t she a political refugee? That was how she saw it, and Arthur did too.

During the days she negotiated over the phone with Don and, strangely enough, with Sam. Between these conversations she sat at my kitchen table, chain-smoking and drinking my coffee and asking me what she should do. She was no longer neat and tidy; her eyes were dark-circled, her hair stringy, her nails ragged from biting. Should she keep on seeing Sam, should she go back to Don? Don had the children, temporarily. As soon as she got a place of her own, she’d get them away from him if she had to go to court to do it.

I refrained from asking her when she was going to get a place of her own. “I don’t know,” I said, “which of them do you love?” I sounded exactly like the friendly housekeepers in my own Costume Gothics, I thought, but what else could I say?

“Love,” Marlene snorted. “Love isn’t the point. The point is, which of them is up to having a truly equal relationship. The point is, which is the least exploitive.”

“Well,” I said, “offhand I’d say Sam was.” He was my friend, Don wasn’t, so I was putting in my plug for Sam. On the other hand, I still didn’t like Marlene very much, so why was I wishing her on my friend? “But I’m sure Don’s very nice, too,” I added.

“Sam is a swine,” Marlene said. When Women’s Lib had appeared, Marlene had dismissed it as bourgeois; now she was a convert. “It takes a personal experience to really open your eyes,” she told me. She kept implying I hadn’t suffered enough; in this too I was deficient. I knew I shouldn’t feel defensive about it, but I did.

When Marlene was off visiting Sam, Don would drop by to consult me. “Well, maybe you should move to another city,” I said. That was what I would have done.

“That would be running away,” Don said. “She’s my wife. I want her back.”

Then, in the evenings, when Marlene was seeing her children, Sam would come over and I’d make him a drink. “God, it’s driving me crazy,” he’d say. “I’m in love with her, I just don’t want to live with her all the time. I tell her we can spend important time together, significant time, much better if we live in separate houses. And I don’t see why we can’t have other relationships, as long as ours is the main one, but she can’t see it. I mean, I’m not the jealous type.”

With all the coming and going, I began to feel I was living in a train station. Arthur was hardly ever there, since Marlene and Don had resigned from Resurgence and he himself was trying to keep it going. Marlene was too distraught to help much with the cooking and cleaning up, and she was no help with the rest of my life either. Increasingly, I was daydreaming about the Royal Porcupine. I hadn’t called him yet, but any moment now I knew I would give in. I searched the papers for reviews of SQUAWSHT, and found one in the Saturday entertainment supplement. “A telling and incisive commentary on our times,” it said.

“How would you like to go to an art show?” I asked Marlene. The show was still on, it wouldn’t hurt just to walk through it.

“That pretentious bourgeois shit?” she said. “No thanks.”

“Oh, have you seen it?” I asked.

“No, but I read the review. You can tell.”

Meanwhile there was my literary career. The day after the television show, the phone calls had begun. They were mostly from people who’d believed me and who wanted to know how to get in touch with the Other Side, though some were hate calls from people who thought I’d been making fun of the interviewer, or Spiritualism, or both. Some thought I could foretell the future and wanted me to foretell theirs. None of them asked for love potions or wart remover, but I felt it would come to that.

Then there were the letters, which Morton and Sturgess forwarded to me. They were mostly from people who wanted help getting published. At first I tried answering them, but I soon discovered that these people did not want their fantasies destroyed. When I explained that I had no surefire contacts in the publishing world, they were outraged to be told I was powerless. It overwhelmed me with guilt that I couldn’t live up to their expectations, so after a while I started throwing the letters out unanswered, and after that, unread. Then the people started arriving at the apartment, demanding to know why I hadn’t answered their letters.

New articles were appearing every week, with titles like “The Selling of Lady Oracle” and “Lady Oracle: Hoax or Delusion?” And because of that first, calamitous television interview, which had made the papers – AUTHOR CLAIMS SPIRIT GUIDANCE – the other interviewers Sturgess had lined up wouldn’t leave the subject alone. It did no good for me to say I didn’t want to talk about it; that only whetted their curiosity.

“I hear Lady Oracle was written by angels, sort of like the Book of Mormon,” they’d say

“Not exactly,” I’d say. Then I’d try to change the subject, hoping that Arthur wasn’t watching. Sometimes they would be seriously interested, which was even worse. “So you think there is a life after death,” they’d say.

“I don’t know. I guess no one really knows that, do they?”

After these shows I would phone up Sturgess, in tears, and beg to be excused from the next one. Sometimes he would bolster up my sagging self-confidence: I was great, I was doing fine, sales were terrific. Sometimes he would act hurt and say it was our understanding when we signed the contract that I’d do a certain number of shows, didn’t I remember?

I felt very visible. But it was as if someone with my name were out there in the real world, impersonating me, saying things I’d never said but which appeared in the newspapers, doing things for which I had to take the consequences: my dark twin, my funhouse-mirror reflection. She was taller than I was, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my place, and by the time she did this no one would notice the difference because the media were in on the plot, they were helping her.

And that wasn’t all. Now that I was a public figure I was terrified that sooner or later someone would find out about me, trace down my former self, unearth me. My old daydreams about the Fat Lady returned, only this time she’d be walking across her tightrope, in her pink tutu, and she’d fall, in slow motion, turning over and over on the way down.… Or she’d be dancing on a stage in her harem costume and her red slippers. But it wouldn’t be a dance at all, it would be a striptease, she’d start taking off her clothes, while I watched, powerless to stop her. She’d wobble her hips, removing her veils, one after another, but no one would whistle, no one would yell Take it off baby. I tried to turn off these out-of-control fantasies, but couldn’t, I had to watch them through to the end.

After Sam left one afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table, drinking Scotch. Marlene was out seeing a lawyer; she’d left her breakfast dishes on the table, a mound of orange peels and a bowl half full of water-logged Rice Krispies. Her healthy eating habits had gone down the drain. So had mine. I was a nervous wreck, I realized, and I’d been one for some time. My home was a campground littered with other people’s garbage, physical, emotional; Arthur was never there, for which I didn’t blame him; I’d been unfaithful to him but I didn’t have the courage either to tell him or to do it again, as I wished to. It wasn’t willpower that was keeping me away from the Royal Porcupine, it was cowardice. I was inept, I was slovenly and hollow, a hoax, a delusion. Tears trickled down my face, onto the crumb-strewn table.

Pull yourself together, I told myself. You’ve got to get out.

Marlene came back from her lawyer, teeth clenched, eyes glinting; visits to her lawyer usually had this effect on her. She sat down and lit a cigarette.

“I’ve got that prick,” she said.

I wasn’t sure which one she meant, but I wasn’t interested. “Marlene,” I said, “I have a wonderful idea. This place is really too small for the three of us.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s a little crowded. I’ll be moving out as soon as I can find a place of my own.”

“No,” I said, “we’ll move out. Term’s almost over. Arthur and I will go away for the summer and you can stay here. It’ll help you get things sorted out.”

Arthur wasn’t enthusiastic when I told him. At first he said we couldn’t afford it, but I told him my aunt had died and left me some money.

“I thought your aunt died a long time ago,” Arthur said.

“That was my other aunt, that was Aunt Lou. This was Aunt Deirdre. We never got on that well, but I guess she didn’t have anyone else to leave it to.” The truth was that I’d sold Love, My Ransom for a reasonable sum. My own life was a mess, but Louisa K. was doing all right.

“What about the magazine?” Arthur asked. “I can’t just dump it.”

“You need a rest,” I told him. “Marlene will take it over again. She needs something to get her mind off everything else.”

I told Sturgess my mother was dying of cancer and I had to go to Saskatchewan to look after her.

“What about all those appearances,” he said, aggrieved, “and the trans-Canada tour?”

“Postpone them,” I said. “I’ll do it when I get back.”

“Could you at least do an interview in Regina?”

“My mother’s dying, remember?” I said, and he had to make do with that.

It was Sam who suggested Italy and gave us Mr. Vitroni’s address. He’d got it from a friend. Arthur wanted to go to Cuba, but we couldn’t get visas in time.

We took a plane to Rome and rented a red Fiat, which we drove to Terremoto. I navigated, using Sam’s friend’s directions and a map. The gearshift knob came off a few times, but Arthur always had trouble with cars. We moved into the flat, and there we were, away from everyone, ready to sort out our life.

I suppose I’d been hoping for a reconciliation, or at least for a return to the way things had been before Lady Oracle, and in a way this did happen. My tortuous Fat-Lady fantasies disappeared. Away from the Resurgence group, Arthur was sweeter, more pensive. I made coffee in the mornings and passed it out to him through the kitchen window. Then we would sit among the pieces of broken glass on the balcony, drinking it and practicing our Italian from the fotoromanzi or just gazing out over the valley. We went for walks on the hills above the town and admired the view. Arthur wanted to do some field work, as he called it, dealing with the system of land ownership, but his Italian wasn’t good enough, so he let the project drop. From time to time he scratched away at an article for Resurgence, on the difficulty of making feature films in Canada; but he seemed to have lost his fervor. We made love a lot and visited ruins.

One day we went to Tivoli. We bought some ice-cream cones, then went to see the Cardinal’s gardens, with the famous water-work statues. We went down a staircase bordered with sphinxes, water shooting from their nipples, and wandered from grotto to grotto. At the end we came to Diana of Ephesus, the guidebook said, rising from a pool of water. She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though afflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at the top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with spouts, but several of the breasts were out of order.

I stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, for myself.