CHAPTER FOUR

She didn't really know them at first. At first, she just saw them sitting in the Georgia, spilling their beer and tomato juice all over the girls they had conned into accompanying them into the Ladies and Escorts so they could look at and impress other girls, steal them from the tables of the fraternity boys, gather glory for "not fitting in" - and they did; they gathered glory and girls, stole the women, robbers, outlaws, bandidos - still operating out of the cowboy ethic. They imagined they were rescuing. And they were - those who wanted to be rescued. They gave a focus for the need to be rescued from the bland boredom of buttoned-down Brooks Brothers' shirts, though Elvis had the idea first. In the Fifties it was important to choose between Elvis, the Bad Boy, and Pat Boone and his white buck. She balanced one on each shoulder for a while, but when A was fourteen, the choice was made for her.

A was in love with a boy on the highschool basketball team because he had the eyes of Rupert Brooke - whose eyes, for A, were archetypal poet's eyes. And so, one night, after one of those basketball tournaments which cause the players to cry in the showers and the cheerleaders to be given the job of comforting them, A went to a party that she was much too young to go to. She went with another boy to be near to David-with-the-poet's-eyes. Her first drink put her out until she was awakened, along with three remaining team members who had also passed out, by two police constables called by her mother who'd thought A must be dead in a ditch somewhere. During the police interview, in hot defense of the respectability of the boys and herself, A answered the red-faced young constable's questions about whether or not she'd had sexual intercourse with anyone during the evening with "Of course not! What kind of girl do you think I am?" (A had read True Confessions and knew that she wasn't that kind of girl). Protesting the innocence of the basketball players in intellectual and artistic terms, A proclaimed, "He reads Pogo! " "He plays trumpet in the band!"

It didn't help. There was a trial anyway. The boys were charged with contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. A was on their side, not on the side of a righteous community, not on the side of the cops, but that meant A had to lie for them. She was terrified, not morally (A had her moral priorities straight), but by the formality of the proceedings. Standing in the witness box, clothed in coat and scarf - A had some idea it was like church and you had to cover your head in court - she perjured herself in a small voice in response to the judge's questions until she heard him say, "Will the witness please remove her outer clothes." Appalled by her ignorance of court protocol, A hastily stripped off her coat and scarf as a young constable moved the witness box (which was on wheels) nearer to the judge's bench. Her mother, mystified by A's inappropriate striptease, told her later that what the judge had actually said was, "Will you please move the witness box closer."

Well, A's mind was made up for her, not only by these events, but by what followed. A was the high school intellectual - not the best student, but the smartest, and had learned long, long before, in the poverty of her childhood, that what saves one from disgrace is being smart. For that reason, A was the darling of her highschool English teacher, Miss Yule, who also happened to be the girls' counsellor. Unmarried though she was, she had street smarts that A's mother, a girl brought up in Victoria by a domineering and protective Scottish mother, did not have. Miss Yule got right down to business when she called A into her office: she advised her to shed her tight skirts and sweaters and adopt puffy sleeved dresses with full skirts. A felt bad about that. She had a morning ritual that involved bath, teeth, make-up and hair curling, ironing sweater, skirt, bra, panties, slip, white bobby socks, brown paper lunch bag, and putting white shoe polish on her white bucks and their laces. A had ironed her black skirt until it was shiny. That was the uniform. There was more. Miss Yule (who smoked) also advised A to run for a position on the student's council, try out for cheerleaders, and take part in the high school operetta - and so A did, though her tastes ran more to blues and torch songs and country music. She was a kid who listened to San Francisco jazz stations, radio pressed to her ear in bed, late at night when all the local stations had gone off the air: Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Carmen McRae, Chris Conner, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Mingus and Monk. Magical names, magical songs: Night in Tunisia, Lover Man, The Man I Love, 'Round Midnight, Love For Sale, Ten Cents a Dance - A went to The Ruth Etting Story and loved it. A always figured if university didn't work out, she could be a torch singer, sang up and down the streets to keep in practice, always in a minor key. Thirty years later, A's sister told her that one of the neighbours still remembers A with fondness, singing down the night streets of that small town. The neighbour was European, and as A found out many years later - rush of remembrance in 1985 Berlin as two girls rode by on their bikes - kids sing in the streets in Europe. Her sister and A sang while they did the dishes - harmony Les Paul and Mary Ford (The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise), Got along without ya before I met ya, gonna get along without ya now (Who did that?); happily they sang:

Lord help the mister
Who comes between me and my sister
And Lord help the sister
Who comes between me and my man

learning the words from The Hit Parader. Daytime was for pop music and country and western - The Sons of the Pioneers. Jazz made mother nervous. So did the hit parade, especially Elvis Presley. And she was too snobbish to admit that she liked country and western music, though sometimes she sang "Be Nobody's Darling But Mine, dear". She listened to Saturday Afternoon at the Met with Rudolph Byng and sighed a lot. For years A could not listen to opera without associating it with the smell of damp washing, the Saturday pot roast cooking and the sound of her mother sighing (she had recently ended an unhappy marriage). Later, A loved it, and even then, singing Handel's Messiah in music classes and choir was pretty good. Music was taught by a wonderful little Mennonite man with corrugated hair who wore a white sports coat and a black bow tie over pink, white, or blue shirts and shiny black unfashionable pants. His name was Albert Wedel, and he lived outside of town in the Mennonite community nearby. He sure gave that highschool class some terrific music to sing. He ran the operettas, and so A became Miss Rowena and learned to sew, though she'd failed sewing in Home Ec, and made puffy sleeved dresses. "It's a matter of camouflage," Miss Yule said. She was right, too. It worked. But A knew, and was cynical about its working.

So A was on the Elvis side, and A learned deceit-as-camouflage. And dreamed for years of walking down the upper hall of the high school with the whole population of the place lined up on either side pointing at her and whispering about that court case and what a bad girl A was. And waited for the walls to fall, walking the gamut in slow motion. They did whisper too. A had "a reputation." She learned to mask her intelligence by becoming (publicly) what we now call a bimbo. She had two friends who knew her; one became an actor and singer; the other became a television news director. They knew they were weird and had to hang onto each other. A was always an opinionated lecturer on every subject under the sun, but hid her real intelligence except in the papers she wrote for her English courses. She was in love with T.S. Eliot's The Waste-Land and Baudelaire. All that gloom flashed with brilliant images, the twist of the writing hand inscribed in heart, brain; felt thought, the good of the intellect, all that taking her through her own dark ages - fourteen to eighteen. The only time A was ever ashamed of Miss Yule was when she mockingly read out e. e. cummings's poems in class and laughed at them. A wrote a paper on The Waste-Land to avenge herself on this betrayal of art to a class she knew were mostly yahoos. As, much later at university, she would likewise do in defense of William Carlos Williams's Paterson. So A became a secret outlaw. The writing was on the walls, inside her skull. It was a matter of interpretation and camouflage.

When she was living in the dorms at the university among the sorority girls and their fraternity boyfriends and brothers, adopting their camouflage, going out with those camouflaged boys pretending to be young in the recommended way, the one that would prepare them to be the businessmen they would become, A watched the others, the outlaws, closely. First she shed the engineers and the boys from the forestry department, then she ferreted out from among the fraternity boys the ones who formed a group that imitated the Hi Los, and then she began to hang around a jazz club called The Black Spot, listening to crazy (even then) Al Neil and Scott somebody play piano with the various saxophonists, bassists, drummers and trumpet players who wandered in and out, sometimes bringing in whores from the notorious Penthouse - beautiful blonde baby-faced newly transformed Cinderellas - all pink and white fluff. A fell in love with Cary, a nineteen-year-old alto saxophonist because the first thing she heard him play was "Night in Tunisia." And then "Lover Man." And so on. After a while, the saxophonist couldn't be bothered with this little hick from the sticks of Vancouver Island who was going to hang onto her cherry until she was married, so he dumped her. A lay on her bed in the dormitory staring at a spot on the ceiling for the whole exam period. Nothing moved.

Finally, A's best friend, a sensible girl from Toronto, dragged her down the cliffs to the Point Grey beach to get her drunk, snap her out of it. Six cases of beer, something A never drank, and six bottles of Manor St. David's Bright's White Table Wine (85 cents a bottle) later, they managed it. The last thing A remembered in the black hole of that two-day drunk was trying unsuccessfully to do up her pants after peeing on the beach and falling flat, laughing, into a mouthful of sand. A was no help to the others hauling empty beer cases and bottles up the cliff, except in the way of entertainment. She recited for those labouring others (evidently) the whole of The Waste-Land, which she punctuated randomly with Gregory Corso's phrase "Fried Shoes!" at the top of her lungs. She went straight up the hill, collapsed when they told her to stop, got up when they had caught up with her, and resumed her recitation where she'd left off. Keeping her quiet proved to be as difficult as it was necessary - those were the days before coeducational university residences, when girls were expelled for abusing the curfew, for drinking, for sneaking their boyfriends into the dorms, the days when scandal was still possible. A remembers clusters of girls gathered outside Mary Bollert Hall to look at the dirty foot marks up the whitewashed wall under the window of a girl who was expelled, hushed stories of lesbian activities, the friend of one of the senior girls who used to sneak into the dorms at night after sleeping with her boyfriend in the men's residence who told us wonderful sophisticated stories about her sex life. As far as A knew, none of the other girls had one. Her daring in talking about it was more impressive than what she told them. One of the dons had been stripped naked and tied to her chair all night; Chester the Molester was on the prowl around the campus and on the beaches; various exhibitionists paraded their wares for the titillation of sunbathing girls studying on the grassy cliffs overlooking the beach. There were notices all over campus about these ominous threats to virginity. None of A's acquaintances took them seriously.

Suicides in the dorms were hushed up - no one knew about them until much later. G's girlfriend Trudy was the don of the dorm next to A's. She was known to be very strict. When Vicky Hunter's friend snuck out with the pseudo-writer Liam Chutney (composer of "Poem of a Man With A Puce Clarinet") the girls delayed getting help when she cut the tendon in her knee climbing out a basement of Trudy's dorm. The tourniquet, fashioned of scarf and coat hanger, may have saved her leg, but A never did find out. Dissolving forms, disappearing into mist, outlined briefly like the rock islands in the seamless sea and sky of the West Coast. Blotches on a personal landscape. Hamish. Perhaps it was Hamish Redfen she was sneaking out with, whom Vicky loved, though he loved her older sister Alex. Everybody loved Alex - Thadeus Young pursued her relentlessly, helplessly, poor woman-mad Thadeus, saved A's friend's epileptic son from a swimming pool death at school and died of AIDS thirty years later. Or was it Snowy, Alice Spireia's older sister, Hamish loved? Eight-pound roast beef dinners were provided by the wealthier parents; it kept the poorer ones fed. Their places in Shaughnessy were bright spots for warm dinners and wine, parties and gorgeous boys, 4:00 o'clock tea parties with the light falling, the girls' heads bent, talking, talking, Snowy's pale blonde head lifted, up, back, withholding, intent on separation; Alice's defiant red hair, her Katherine Hepburn voice and gawky manner. What became of that appalling innocence of that Great Gatsby world, the shine of hair, the shimmer and strain of possibility, of those elegant boys and girls?

Alex married her fraternity boy, Alan McNeil, fired from his position as principal of a boy's private school in a scandal that surfaced thirty years later. A sat opposite her in a haircutting place while she bragged to the assembled ladies and stylists about how many times they'd been robbed, twisting enormous diamond rings on her fingers, her blue eyes straining wildly out of their sockets. Vicky began saving trees in the Carmanah Valley. A sees her on television sometimes. Those girls whose fathers went to college with A's mother got caught in social fictions. A was determined not to be caught in fictions made up by others.

So A watched those boys at the Georgia and eased her way into their world slowly. That summer, she worked at the main branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia during the day and went every night to the jazz clubs around the city: The Cellar, The Harlem Nocturne, The Black Spot. In those days you had to be a member at some of the clubs, and you brought your bottle in a brown paper bag and kept it under the table. The Cellar stayed open until 4 a.m. some nights, if there were enough people. After they closed you went to the Harlem Nocturne on East Hastings where black musicians jammed until dawn. A spent the whole summer sleep-deprived: in at 7 a.m., up at 8, if she slept at all, to work by 8:30, on No-Doze pills until noon, sleep for the lunch hour, get someone to wake her up, work on No-Doze for the afternoon, then back to the apartment to sleep until 7:00 or so, then bath and hair and out at 8:00 until seven in the morning again. Her life and eyes and ears were full of music and the romance of being out in the "real" world, away from home, the blurred images of those sweating black musicians at the Harlem Nocturne; Tommy King playing "Harlem Nocturne" at her as dirty as he could (alto sax, same as Cary, trying to get A away from him), Art Pepper at The Cellar, feet tangled in the stage wires, so stoned, high on heroin, playing badly; the skinny Scandinavian bassist kid, Bob Neilberg, in his brown business suit, straight from the bank, shooting up in emulation, thought it would make him a great jazz bassist - short cut; one black woman at the Harlem Nocturne, so fat she couldn't dance, standing there moving her mountainous body with great subtlety, making it dance for her, all that flesh jiggling to the jazz, teaching A what "jelly roll" really meant, and the seventeen-year-old boy with acne dancing with her, in love with that flesh. When A went into the toilet, his girlfriend was vomiting her brains out into the sink. And seven o'clock in the morning coming home, kissing in the rain in the middle of the tree-lined summer street, umbrella rolling away behind her and who cared?

Joy and desolation. Finally giving up to it one night, ditching a date with the actor who did Shakespeare soliloquies for her, who had bought a bottle of gin for the party they were going to. But they went to The Black Spot first and there was Cary, arms around her, kissing A's neck, and she was gone with her paycheque and John Stark's bottle (A owes you an apology and a bottle of gin, John Stark, wherever you are), gone to make herself drunk so she could say yes, gone to Stanley Park where, sitting across Cary's lap in a car hidden under a weeping willow tree that hung to the ground (like the one called the kissing tree, which stood in A's mother's yard, where A used to neck, hidden from her gaze, ignoring her voice calling her daughter in) gone, A gave up, gone into God knows where, remembering nothing until halfway home hearing herself screaming at him not to tell, thinking "Maybe it doesn't count, maybe my hymen hasn't broken and it's O.K.," but at home, when she saw her bloody underpants, A knew it counted - everything - the angel he saw in her face that arrived there after her conviction that it couldn't possibly go in dissolved into desire and wonder, the certainty about the foolish cheat of the taboos when she thought: "What are they talking about?" the soft voice, the gentle hands, the slow deliberation, the blood that came in the amnesia darkness, blotting out ecstasy, the re-emergence in hysteria. Everything counted. And when, next time, in Tommy King's mother's white lace bed, Cary's nose bled all over the white pillow, A thought how fitting it was that he was bleeding for her as she had bled for him. Years later, a man pleading with A, having lost all hope of success, was startled out of his humiliation by the arrival of a wet facecloth and her sudden acquiescence: his nose had begun to bleed. She cannot remember now the song that Cary gave her name to, but A remembers perfectly the silent moment, like the moment before fall birdflight, the gathered hush that precedes flight and absence, the beauty that was there, the heartbeat and the rush of wings. A cannot remember how it ended, only that it ended when A understood he didn't love her. That dizzy life had no focus, or its focus was revenge on women, clamour for them, for the lost child of his high school girlfriend's abortion. A didn't think, soft voice, soft hands, he knew A had shed her childhood skin. A mourned his loss for a year, going back to repeat the year she'd lost, weeping every night for him for a year - which is a long time when you are nineteen. A has always been devoted to her losses.

When A went back to the Georgia, they were still there, and A watched them, eavesdropped, listened to them talk about poetry (Baudelaire, Charles Olson, the Roberts - Creeley and Duncan, Ginsberg); about Marxism and philosophy (existentialism - Sartre and Camus - A had been hooked on Camus from the first), film-making (A had seen Raymond Radiguet's Diable au Corps two years before when she had first come to UBC and fallen in love with Gerard Phillipe, even though he was only a tiny image on a television screen; they talked about Truffaut, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Agnes Varda, Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, the French New Wave, and about the antinovelists - Nathalie Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet especially, and Ebbe Coutts gave up talking about Baudelaire after enduring and tenderly ministering to the suicidal attempts of a girl called Marie, and took up drugs instead; A endured Larry ( later Laurence E.) Koerner's glib hype about his film-making when everyone knew it was the only way he could get girls to take off their clothes for him, endured his exposure of his fat white belly and his hairy black belly-button that looked like an asshole.

There they were, acting on stage in the Old Auditorium - Fee McMannic in his famous old flasher's raincoat with his brilliant smile that would stop a Mack truck, and he knew it and used it, especially on girls, drinking in the green room - acting at the Georgia, acting the lives they wanted to become, full of hope and frenzy, wearing their smiles and costumes, pretending, as were we all, trying out fictional lives. But they really knew it, did it with daring, insisting on more than most of us did. M was Jacobean in his black velvet jacket and skinny pants, made stylized gestures in an apparently self-possessed and restrained manner. D was the most intellectually intimidating of them all. He was elegant and British, and, good little indoctrinated colonial that she was, A knew that "they" were superior to "us." After all, it was their literature the Canadians studied - from Jerry and Jane in their 1920's style polka dot dresses with the ballooning skirts, their sailor suits and tams, the Arthur Rackham style illustrations, wind blowing tormented trees, to Winnie the Pooh and all the other pooh-generated stories and poems to High Roads to Reading to Alice in Wonderland, and Through The Looking Glass. The Books of Knowledge belonged to them. The red on the maps belonged to them. A's grandmother's photographs, especially the one she took of Victoria and Albert and the Romanovs with little Anastasia looking like a baby pig, reminding A of the sneezing pig in the Duchess's arms in Alice told her that "they" were the owners of the world, the standard by which and by whom Canadians were measured. Later, seeing the Albert Memorial for the first time, A laughed at its earnestness, felt sympathy for Oscar Wilde, was startled out of illusion by that preposterous vulgarity. But then, A believed. All the evidence was on their side; the British school teacher who taught her dressed in British tweeds, had been in "The Great War", had a glass eye and a wooden hand which he encased in a thin black kid glove and rapped the desk with to call his charges to order; "the lily, thistle, shamrock, rose" told A, even if it was supposed to be a song about "the maple leaf forever," that Canada forever belonged to them. They had "it" in their bone and blood cells forever. And so D was wrapped in all the power and authority of A's grade six teacher's wooden hand, of the British Empire, British intellectual and cultural superiority. And so, when A was in the Creative Writing class and finally met them, though she was still only watching, D was the one she was most afraid of. The others were like her, but he might find her out - find out about the illiterate Finnish grandfather, the schizoid father who only had a grade eight education, the childhood poverty in a B.C. mining town, owned by his people, Lord Dunsmuir, coal baron, making his money out of Japanese, Chinese, black laborers; lost in his mines, only their numbers, no names in the lists of the dead; only white men had names, and they were his people too, Welsh and Scottish, British and Irish; she had heard the accents of the people with names, though one of them - Ginger Goodwin - was killed by the police for trying to organize the miners; he was a hero, her mother said, persecuted, like her mother's brother, who was not called to the bar of the law association during the McCarthy era because he was a communist. A's mother went to college in Lord Dunsmuir's Castle, and was called "the Duchess" because of her manner; she looked and bore herself like Nadine Gordimer. She said she was shy and was mistaken for a snob, but A thinks her mother grew up, like herself, with her allegiances split. Nevertheless, she lived true to her ideals, sometimes excessive in her demands of herself, saving years worth of string and elastic bands, refusing to eat meat, or earn interest on her money, giving to charities all over the world until finally it became too much for her and she settled for the study of Gaelic and Lallans poetry, writing articles, political and literary, devoting herself to the cause of Scottish Nationalism in a world that was making common markets wherever it could. All this complexity lay back of A's feelings about D, and so, when he asked her out, she agreed and then stood him up, in part, for much the same reasons she stood up Robin Niederstrasser, the Physics professor with the German name and the Scottish accent who'd been so enchanted when, in response to a question about what character in fiction A would be if she could choose, she'd said "Gruschenka." She really meant it, but she'd read The Brothers Karamazov when she was seventeen, in the way that a seventeen-year old would read such a novel; a year or so later she'd been captivated by Maria Schell's film version of the holy whore, Gruschenka, by the passionate turmoil of the allegorical family, that psychomachia of the Russian soul with Lee J. Cobb as the drunken old Karamazov, Yul Brynner as the glamourous misfit, Dmitri, Richard Basehart as the atheist intellectual Ivan and William (Star Trek) Shatner as Alyosha, religious mystic, along with Albert Salmi, epileptic Smerdyakov, Lord of Misrule; when she saw it, A knew she did not know as much as she needed to know, and that what she needed to know went far beyond the simpler schisms of her life, exceeded the limitations of her small town's description of things, and she wanted it, what she didn't know - that larger world. A also knew that Robin Niederstrasser had an inflated idea of what she did know, and so, when she didn't respond for the third time to his knock at the door and found his note in the mailbox next day - "Fuck you, you bitch!" - A was much relieved; she had time to find out. D's invitation had something of the same effect on her, though by the time A was to have met him, she had met G and forgotten about anyone else. A remembers standing on the steps of the library at the university with G, dazed with love, seeing D coming across the quad in his British trench coat to keep their appointment; shocked as she remembered what she had forgotten, A thought, "He's washed his hair and brushed it so carefully." Shamed by his care, she pretended she'd just run into him, and elegant British D pretended too; it was just a casual encounter.

A and her associates were all trying out who to be and how to be - impostors, poseurs. But G,D,M and their peers knew it. Their posturing required character, discipline. Required that they do something remarkable. They were courageous liars, and A knew that's what she had to learn to be. So she watched them and graded them, she separated the real fakes from the false fakes. All that witty lovely masquerade, the first serious attempts at disguise. They were looking for credible fictions. A had been looking for the truth - as if she could ever hope to know it - so they became writers and actors, and she watched them, admiring or dismissing them on the basis of their style and the dreams behind their sometimes anxious eyes, trying to see the faces beneath those faces, the skin stretched taut with the reach of their minds, through the flesh, the tightened skin revealing mind-reach. She was waiting for the collision of truth and fiction. And so were they.

"And how do you like your blue-eyed, brown-eyed boys, your green-eyed girl now, mister, as they step through the watery mirror?" A might ask, and continue: "I am your echo. I remember you all. I dredge you up. Sea-bed, earth-cave, shattered glass."