CHAPTER THIRTY

What price safety, I asked myself. I was sitting on the balcony in my underwear, covered with towels, taking a steamy sunbath in the middle of nowhere. The Other Side was no paradise, it was only a limbo. Now I knew why the dead came back to watch over the living: the Other Side was boring. There was no one to talk to and nothing to do.

Maybe I really did drown, I thought, and this whole thing, the hours on the plane – I’d watched Young Winston, without the earphones – the Hertz Rent-A-Car, the flat, my trip to Rome for the hair dye, was a kind of joke perpetrated by the afterlife. The soul sticks around the body for a while after death because it’s confused, or that’s what the Spiritualists said. In that case I should’ve been hovering somewhere near the oily surface of Lake Ontario, slightly east of Toronto Island, not allowing for the currents. Or they’d fished me out, I was unidentified, I was lying on a public slab; or I’d been cut up for spare parts and this panorama was going on because some other body got my eyes. My entire life didn’t flash before me the way it was supposed to, but it would, I was always a late bloomer.

Learn to live in the present, take life as it comes, that’s what they told you in the improve-your-head manuals. But what if the present was a washout and the life to come was a bog? I was feeling marooned; the impulse to send out messages, in bottles or not, grew every day. I am still alive. Stuck here, have not sighted a ship for days. Am tired of talking to the local flora and fauna and the ants. Please rescue. I was here, in a beautiful southern landscape, with breezes and old-world charm, but all the time my own country was embedded in my brain, like a metal plate left over from an operation; or rather, like one of those pellets you drop into bowls of water, which expand and turn into garish mineral flowers. If I let it get out of control it would take over my head. There was no sense trying to get away, I’d brought them all with me, I could still hear their voices, murmuring like a faraway but angry mob. It was too late to rearrange the furniture, I couldn’t keep them out.

Where was the new life I’d intended to step into, easily as crossing a river? It hadn’t materialized, and the old life went on without me, I was caged on my balcony waiting to change. I should take up a hobby, I thought, make quilts, grow plants, collect stamps. I should relax and be a tourist, a predatory female tourist, and take snapshots and pick up lovers with pink nylon ties and pointy shoes. I wanted to unclench myself, soak in the atmosphere, lie back and eat the flapdoodles off the tree of life, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I was waiting for something to happen, the next turn of events (a circle? a spiral?). All my life I’d been hooked on plots.

I wondered whether Arthur had gotten my postcard yet. Would he join me, would we start again, would there be a fresh beginning, a new life? Or would he still be angry, had he really been the one …? Perhaps I should never have sent that postcard. On the other hand, he might just tear it up, ignore my plea for rescue.

I lay back in my chair and closed my eyes. There was the vegetable man standing in the doorway, his arms full of, what else, vegetables; overgrown zucchinis, artichokes, onions, tomatoes. He smiled, I ran over to him, he crushed me in his shortsleeved olive arms, there was tomato juice all over the floor, we slipped in it and tumbled in a heap among the squashed zucchinis, it was like making love with a salad, crisp and smooth at the same time. But it wouldn’t be like that, he’d appear in the doorway and instead of running over to him I’d remember my underwear draped on the chairback. “Excuse me while I pick up a few things.” What would he think of me? I’d scuttle around the room, gathering, concealing. “Won’t you have a cup of tea?” Incomprehension. His smile would fade. What did I ask him here for anyway? And besides, he would tell everyone in the village, the men would leer and creep around my house at night, the children would throw stones.

I sat up in the plastic chair and opened my eyes. It was no use, I was jumpy as a flea on a skillet, I couldn’t even have a sexual fantasy without anxiety. I needed a drink and I was out of Cinzano. And the children were already throwing stones; yesterday one had almost hit me.

I got up and wandered into the flat. I still had no routine, and there seemed less and less reason to do anything at any given time. I went into the kitchen, shedding towels along the way. I was hungry, but there was nothing to eat except some cooked pasta, drying out already, and a yellowing bunch of parsley in a glass of water on the windowsill. There was something to be said for refrigerators. Although they inspired waste, they created the illusion that there would always be a tomorrow, you could keep things in them forever.… Why had the media analysts never done any work on refrigerators? Those who had refrigerators surely perceived life differently from those who didn’t. What the bank was to money, the refrigerator was to food.… As these thoughts dribbled through my head I began to feel that my whole life was a tangent.

I noticed that something was wrong with the ants. I examined their saucer of sugar-water: I’d forgotten to add water and the solution had thickened to a syrup. Some of the ants were nibbling at the edges but others had ventured out onto the surface and were trapped, like saber-toothed tigers in the tar pits. Now they were dead or waving their antennae feebly. I tried to rescue the still-living ones with a matchstick, fishing them out and leaving them on the side of the saucer; but mostly it was no use, they were hopelessly glued. I was always bad with pets. SOS, I wrote in sugar-water. Do something.

I went back into the main room to put on one of my baggy dresses. I no longer needed the scarf with the pink Mounties: I’d dyed my hair the day after I’d gone to Rome, and it was now mud brown. It had none of the promised sparkling highlights. In fact it looked terrible. Why hadn’t I bought a wig instead? I knew why not, they were too hot, I’d cook my head. But a nice gray wig would’ve looked better than the hair dye.

I walked up the hill to the market square. The road was scattered with handbills; perhaps there was an election going on, I’d heard sound trucks winding up to the square almost every day, playing catchy tunes and broadcasting slogans. I was outside it though, I was a foreigner, and there was something beyond that, something wrong. I was passing through a corridor of hostile eyes, the old black-draped women with their sausage legs no longer returned my bongiorno, they didn’t even nod, they stared through me or averted their eyes. One put her hand over the eyes of the little girl sitting beside her and made the sign of the cross. What had I done, what taboo had I violated?

I went to the macelleria and pushed in through the many-colored plastic streamers that covered the entranceway like seaweed. The butcher and his wife were a comforting couple, round as dumplings, both of them, wrapped in big white aprons and smeared with blood. The trays in the glass display case weren’t filled ostentatiously like those in the butcher shops in Toronto. What they sold was scarce enough: a few small pieces of veal-like beef, a lone organ: liver, a heart, a kidney or two; three or four oval white objects that I suspected of being testicles. Usually the butcher and his wife would lift, offer, suggest incomprehensible things, beaming all the while.

But today they weren’t beaming. When they saw me come in their faces went still and watchful. Was I making this up or did they seem a little afraid of me? They didn’t help me out with the terminology the way they usually did, and I was reduced to pointing. Even though I bought five tiny squares of tissue-paper beef, an extravagant number, they weren’t mollified. And I couldn’t even ask them what I’d done to offend or frighten them like this. I didn’t know the words.

To the bakery, the grocery store, the vegetable stand, money dripping from my wounded purse, and it was the same, something was wrong. Had I committed some crime? I scarcely had the courage to walk over to the post office, as I knew the policemen would be there. But I’d done nothing, I told myself, it must be a misunderstanding of some kind. It would be cleared up later. I would ask Mr. Vitroni about it.

“Delacourt,” I shouted bravely at the post office. There was no change in the woman behind the counter, since she was never friendly anyway. Soundlessly she extended a fat envelope. Brown manilla, Sam’s typewriter.

Outside I tore it open. It was stuffed with newspaper clippings, arranged neatly in order, the oldest one on top, and a typed note from Sam. “Congratulations. You’ve become a death cult.” I thumbed quickly through the clippings, SUICIDE SUSPECTED IN AUTHORESS DEATH, INVESTIGATION CALLED FOR, the top one read, and it went on from there. Some had the photo off the back of Lady Oracle, some the grinning boatside snapshots Marlene had taken on the day of my death. There was a lot of talk about my morbid intensity, my doomed eyes, the fits of depression to which I was apparently subject (though not a word about the Royal Porcupine, nothing about Louisa Delacourt … Fraser Buchanan was keeping a low profile). Sales of Lady Oracle were booming, every necrophiliac in the country was rushing to buy a copy.

I’d been shoved into the ranks of those other unhappy ladies, scores of them apparently, who’d been killed by a surfeit of words. There I was, on the bottom of the death barge where I’d once longed to be, my name on the prow, winding my way down the river. Several of the articles drew morals: you could sing and dance or you could be happy, but not both. Maybe they were right, you could stay in the tower for years, weaving away, looking in the mirror, but one glance out the window at real life and that was that. The curse, the doom. I began to feel that even though I hadn’t committed suicide, perhaps I should have. They made it sound so plausible.

My next thought was: I can never go back now. Here were all these people spewing out words like flowers on a coffin, collecting their usual fee for doing so, and being very serious. If I rose from the dead, waltzed back and announced that it was all a deception, what were they supposed to do? They’d be stuck with egg on their faces, they’d hate me forever and make my life a nightmare. Women scorned to the contrary, nothing matched the fury of a deceived death cultist. It would be like the reappearance of James Dean, thirty years older and pot-bellied, or Marilyn walking down Yonge Street in curlers, having put on fifty pounds. All those who were expressing regret and remembering my ethereal beauty would be extremely upset if I were to materialize in the flesh. I’d have to stay safely buried on the Other Side, perhaps forever. In fact, my death was becoming so profitable to so many people that they’d probably have me bumped off and cemented and sunk in the Toronto harbor the moment I stuck my snout above water.

What had become of my neat, quiet, well-planned death by misadventure? Evidence had come to light – whose? how? – that I did not fall, but jumped. This was ridiculous. It was true I had meant to jump, but in fact I fell, prematurely. And some reporter got to Marlene, who overdid it. She said they threw me a life preserver but I made no attempt to reach it and went down with barely a struggle. Of course there wasn’t any life preserver, she shouldn’t have invented one. But who had interviewed my father, and why did he tell them I was a strong swimmer? He never saw me swim in his life. I wasn’t a bad swimmer. I learned in high school gym class, it was one of the sports I didn’t mind, because I was mostly out of sight. My specialty was floating on my back, that and the breast stroke. I wasn’t much good at the crawl.

So they thought I jumped on purpose, refused the life preserver, and sank intentionally, and there was nothing I could do to prove them wrong, though an anonymous informant had volunteered the information that it wouldn’t have been like me to commit suicide, I loved life. And it wasn’t like me, at all.

Well, I thought, maybe I really did want to die or I wouldn’t have pretended to do it. But that was wrong; I pretended to die so I could live, so I could have another life. They were being perverse and it made me angry.

I walked back down the hill, carrying my bundles. I loved life, it said this right in the newspaper. So why would I want to do a thing like that?