CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Almost as soon as we got back from Italy, I called the Royal Porcupine. He didn’t sound surprised. “What took you so long?” he said.

“I was away,” I said ambiguously. “I tried to call you before I left, but you weren’t there.”

We met at the Red Hot stand in Simpson’s Basement. The Royal Porcupine explained that he was even poorer than usual and this was the cheapest place in town to have lunch, as you could get two hot dogs and an orange drink for a dollar. I found his cape a little incongruous in Simpson’s Basement, and the sexual fantasies I’d been having about him drooped slightly. Still, there was something Byronic about him. Byron, I remembered, had kept a pet bear in his rooms and drunk wine from a skull.

He borrowed a subway token from me and we went back to his place. “I have to explain something first,” I said in the freight elevator. “We have to keep this light.” Arthur, I said, was very important to me and I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt him.

The Royal Porcupine said that was fine with him, and the lighter things were, the better.

At first they were very light. Finally I had someone who would waltz with me, and we waltzed all over the ballroom floor of his warehouse, he in his top hat and nothing else, I in a lace tablecloth, to the music of the Mantovani strings, which we got at the Crippled Civilians. We got the record player there, too, for ten dollars. When we weren’t waltzing or making love, we frequented junk shops, combing them for vests, eight-button gloves, black satin Merry Widows and formal gowns of the fifties. He wanted a sword cane, but we never did find one. We did find a store in Chinatown which had button boots for sale, left over from 1905. They hadn’t sold because they were odd sizes, and I had to sit down on the curb and let the Royal Porcupine try to cram my feet into each pair, beautiful halftones, white glacé kid, pearl gray. I felt like Cinderella’s ugly sister. The only pair I could get on were black lace-ups with steel toes, washerwoman boots, but even these were desirable. We bought them, and later a pair of black net stockings to go with them.

I soon discovered that my own interest in nineteenth-century trivia was no match for the Royal Porcupine’s obsession with cultural detritus. Whereas I liked antique silver and snuffboxes, he lusted after green Coca-Cola bottles, worn Captain Marvel comic books, Mickey Mouse watches, Big Little Books and movie star paper dolls from the twenties. He didn’t have very much money, so he couldn’t buy everything he wanted, but he was a walking catalog of ephemera, of the irrelevant and the disposable. Everything, for him, was style; nothing was content. Beside him I felt almost profound.

Unfortunately the lace-up black ankle boots gave me severe pains in the feet if I wore them for more than half an hour; but it was enough for a couple of good waltzes. When we’d tired ourselves out we’d go to the Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the corner and order a bucket and two Cokes. These we would eat in the warehouse. The Royal Porcupine wanted to save the chicken bones, boil them, and glue and wire them into a sculpture, which he would call “Joan Foster Kentucky Fried”; he wanted to exhibit it at his next show. It was a terrific idea, he said. The black shoes would be called “Foster Dances #30,” and he’d cover a Mantovani record with clumps of my hair and call it “Hairy Foster Music.” And if he could have a pair of my Weekend Set underpants, he could.…

“That’s very creative,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” he said, a little hurt.

“Arthur would find out.”

“Arthur,” he said. “It’s always Arthur.”

He was beginning to resent Arthur. He made a point of telling me about his two other women. They were both married, one to a psychologist, the other to a chemistry professor. He said they were both very dumb and no good in bed. The chemistry professor’s wife used to leave baked goods for him beside the freight elevator, without warning. We would lie on his grubby mattress, eating the damp pumpkin cakes and the flat high-protein bread (she was a health-food freak) while the Royal Porcupine talked about her deficiencies. I began to wonder whether he did the same with both of them, about me. I minded, but I couldn’t afford to.

“Why do you see them, if they’re so boring?” I asked.

“I have to do something when you’re not here,” he said petulantly. Already he’d decided they were my fault.

Occasionally I would have an attack of guilt about Arthur and cook special meals for him, which failed even more miserably than the meals I usually cooked. I even toyed with the idea of telling him, trying openness and honesty as Marlene had; but then, it hadn’t done any wonders for her, and I was fairly sure it wouldn’t do much for me either. I was afraid that Arthur would laugh, denounce me as a traitor to the cause, or kick me out. I didn’t want that: I still loved him, I was sure of it. “Maybe we should have an open marriage,” I said to Arthur one night as he was hacking his way through a pork chop that I’d put under the broiler and then forgotten about. But he didn’t even answer, which might’ve been because his mouth was full, and that was as far as I got.

When we’d returned from Italy, Marlene was no longer in our apartment. She’d gone back to Don. They’d “worked it out,” they said; but she was still seeing Sam. Nobody was supposed to know, but of course Sam told me immediately.

“Where does that leave you?” I said.

“Back where we started,” he said, “but with more experience.”

That was where Arthur and I seemed to be also. The trouble with me, I thought, was that I had experience all right, but I couldn’t seem to learn from it.

Arthur was back at his teaching job, and the Resurgence group had reunited, which should have made him happy. He wasn’t happy though, I could tell. Once I would have made a big effort to cheer him up, but I was beginning to resent the gray aura he gave off constantly, like a halo in reverse. Some days I felt his unhappiness was all my fault, I was neglecting him. But more often I tried to dismiss it. Perhaps he simply had a talent for unhappiness, as others had a talent for making money. Or perhaps he was trying to destroy himself in order to prove to me that I was destructive. He was beginning to accuse me of not taking enough interest in his work.

From this soggy domestic atmosphere the Royal Porcupine was a welcome escape. He didn’t make many demands; with him it was easy come, easy go. I began to get careless. I started calling him from the apartment when Arthur was out, and then when Arthur was merely in the next room. My work was suffering too: I’d completely lost interest in Costume Gothics. What did I need them for now?

When I finally went on Sturgess’ trans-Canada tour, the Royal Porcupine came along, and we had a lot of fun smuggling him into the motel rooms. Sometimes we dressed up in middle-aged tourist outfits, bought at the Crippled Civilians, and registered under assumed names. In Toronto I started going to parties, not exactly with him, but five minutes before or after. We’d get other people to introduce us to each other. These games were childish, but a relief.

It was at one of these parties that I met Fraser Buchanan. He came up to me, glass in hand, and stood smirking while I asked the Royal Porcupine what he did for a living.

“I’m a mortician,” he said. We both thought this was funny.

“Excuse me, Ms. Foster,” Fraser Buchanan said, extending his hand. “My name is Fraser Buchanan. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.” He was a short man, tidily dressed in a tweed jacket and turtle-neck sweater, with sideburns that he obviously found daring, as he turned his head often to give you the benefit of a side view.

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” I said. I smiled at him; I was feeling good. “This is the Royal Porcupine, the con-create poet.”

“I know,” said Fraser Buchanan, giving me an oddly intimate smile. “I’m familiar with his … work. But really, Ms. Foster, I’m more interested in you.” He sidled closer, wedging himself between me and the Royal Porcupine. I leaned backward a little. “Tell me,” he said in a half-whisper, “how is it that I never saw any of your work in print before Lady Oracle? Most poets, or should I say poetesses, go through an, ah, an apprentice period. In the little magazines and so forth. I follow them closely, but I never saw anything of yours.”

“Are you a journalist?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said. “I used to write a little poetry myself.” His tone suggested that he had since outgrown this. “You might call me an interested observer. A lover,” he smirked, “of the arts.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I just never thought any of my stuff was good enough to be published. I never sent any of it in.” I gave what I hoped was a modest laugh and looked over his shoulder at the Royal Porcupine, hoping for rescue. Fraser Buchanan’s thigh was resting ever so lightly against my own.

“So then you sprang fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus,” he said. “Or rather, from the head of John Morton. That man certainly has a nose for young talent.”

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was some very unpleasant insinuation going on. I laughed again and told him I was going to get another drink. It occurred to me that I’d seen him before, front row center at a television talk show, taking notes in a little book. Several talk shows. Several out-of-town talk shows. A motel lobby.

“Who is that strange little man?” I asked the Royal Porcupine later, as we lay exhausted on his mattress. “What does he do?”

“He knows everyone,” he said. “He used to be with the CBC, I guess everyone did. Then he started a literary magazine called Reject; the idea was that it would print only stuff that’d been rejected by other literary magazines, the more the merrier, plus the rejection slips. He was going to give a prize for the best rejection slip, he said it was an art. But it flopped because nobody wanted to admit they’d been rejected. He printed a lot of his own stuff in the first issue, though. I think he’s English. He goes to all the parties, he goes to every party he can get into. He used to go around saying, ‘Hello, I’m Fraser Buchanan, the Montreal Poet.’ I think he once lived in Montreal.”

“But how come you know him?”

“I submitted stuff to Reject,” the Royal Porcupine said. “That was when I was still doing words. He rejected it. He hates my stuff, he thinks it’s too far out.”

“I think he’s been following me around,” I said. What I thought was worse: he’s been following us around.

“He’s freaky,” said the Royal Porcupine. “He has this thing about celebrities. He says he’s writing a history of our times.”

That evening I took a taxi home early. I was suffering again from self-doubt. The difficulty was that I found each of my lives perfectly normal and appropriate, but only at the time. When I was with Arthur, the Royal Porcupine seemed like a daydream from one of my less credible romances, with an absurdity about him that I tried to exclude from my fictions. But when I was with the Royal Porcupine, he seemed plausible and solid. Everything he did and said made sense in his own terms, whereas it was Arthur who became unreal; he faded to an insubstantial ghost, a washed-out photo on some mantelpiece I’d long ago abandoned. Was I hurting him, was I being unfaithful? How could you hurt a photograph?

When I walked into the apartment that evening, I was still thinking about this. The Resurgence crowd was there in force; something exciting was going on. Sam was the only one who said hello. They had a captive union organizer there, a real one, backed into the corner. He called them “you kids.”

“If you kids want to get involved, okay,” he was saying, “but if the workers want to spit on policemen, let them spit on policemen. It’s their jobs. You kids can go to jail, you don’t have steady jobs, you can miss some time, but for them it’s different.”

Don started to argue that this was precisely why they and not the workers should do it, but the union organizer waved his hand in dismissal. “No, no,” he said. “I know you kids mean well, but believe me. Sometimes the wrong kind of help is worse than no help at all.”

“What’s going on?” I asked Sam.

“It’s a strike down at a mattress factory,” Sam said. “Trouble is, most of the workers are Portuguese, and they don’t buy our line all that much. Canadian nationalism means bugger all to them, you know? Not that we can get it across to them, we’re still looking for an interpreter.”

“Who spit on a policeman?”

“Arthur did,” Sam said, and I could tell from the smug yet chastised look on Arthur’s face that indeed he had. For some reason this annoyed me.

If I hadn’t just come from the Royal Porcupine’s, I wouldn’t have said anything; but he thought politics were boring, especially Canadian nationalism. “Art is universal,” he’d say. “They’re just trying to get attention.”

When I was with Arthur, I believed in the justice of his cause, his causes, every one of them; how could I live with him otherwise? But the Royal Porcupine took the edge off causes. It was the Cavaliers and the Roundheads all over again.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said to Arthur. “I suppose you can hardly wait to be arrested. But what’ll that solve, not a damn thing. You don’t live in the real world, you won’t join any kind of a political party and go out there and really change things, instead you sit around and argue and attack each other. You’re like the Plymouth Brethren, all you’re interested in is defining your own purity by excluding everyone else. And then you go out and make some useless, meaningless gesture like spitting on a policeman.”

No one said anything; everyone was too stunned. I was the last person they’d have expected such a tirade from, and come to think of it, who was I to talk? I was hardly saving the world myself.

“Joan’s right,” Marlene said, in a voice cold with tactics. “But let’s hear what kind of useful, meaningful gesture she’d like to suggest instead.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. I immediately started backing up and apologizing. “I mean, it’s really none of my business, I don’t know all that much about politics. Maybe you could blow up the Peace Bridge or something.”

I was horrified to see that they were taking me seriously. The next evening a small deputation arrived at the apartment. Marlene, Don, Sam and a couple of the younger Resurgenites.

“We’ve got it out there in the car,” Marlene said.

“Got what?” I asked. I’d just washed my hair, I hadn’t been expecting them. Arthur was off teaching his night class in Canadian Literature; he’d barely spoken to me that day, and I wasn’t happy about that.

“The dynamite,” she said. She was quite excited. “My father’s in construction, it was easy to pinch it, plus the detonator and a couple of blasting caps.”

“Dynamite? What’re you doing with dynamite?”

“We talked over your idea,” she said. “We decided it wasn’t such a bad one. We’re going to blow up the Peace Bridge, as a gesture. It’s the best one to blow up, because of the name.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you might hurt someone.”

“Marlene says we’ll do it at night,” Don said quickly. “We won’t blow it all up anyway, it’s more like a symbol. A gesture, like you said.”

They wanted me to hide the dynamite for them. They’d even thought out a plan. They wanted me to buy a used car, under an assumed name, using a fake address, the apartment of a new Resurgenite who was going away for a couple of months anyway. Then I had to put the dynamite in the trunk of the car and move the car around every day, from one street to another, from one all-night parking lot to the next.

“A used car costs money,” I said slowly.

“Look, it was your idea,” Marlene said. “The least you can do is help us out. Besides, you can get a cheap one for a couple of hundred.”

“Why me?”

“They’d never suspect you,” Marlene said. “You don’t look much like the dynamite type.”

“How long will I have to do this?” I asked.

“Only till we get the plan together. Then we’ll take over the car.”

“All right, I’ll do it,” I said. “Where’s the dynamite?”

“Here,” Don said, handing me a cardboard carton.

I never had any intention of carrying out their plan. The next day I took a taxi to the Royal Porcupine’s and stowed the box in the cellar. There were a lot of crates and boxes there anyway. I told him it was an ugly statue I’d got for a wedding present and I couldn’t bear to have it in the house any longer.

“I’d rather you didn’t open it,” I said. “For sentimental reasons.”