Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Lives of the Poets

Lying on the bathroom floor of this anonymous hotel room, my feet up on the edge of the bathtub and a cold wet washcloth balled at the back of my neck. Bloody nosebleed. A good adjective, it works, as the students say in those creative writing classes that are sometimes part of the package. So colourful. Never had a nosebleed before, what are you supposed to do? An icecube would be nice. Image of the Coke-and-ice machine at the end of the hall, me streaking toward it, a white towel over my head, the bloodstain spreading through it. A hotel guest opens his roomdoor. Horrors, an accident. Stabbed in the nose. Doesn’t want to get involved, the roomdoor shuts, my quarter jams the machine. I’ll stick with the washcloth.

The air’s too dry, that must be it, nothing to do with me or the protests of the soggy body. Osmosis. Blood to the outside because there’s not enough water vapour; they keep the radiators going full blast and no switch to shut them off. Cheapskates, why couldn’t I stay at the Holiday Inn? Instead it’s this one, pseudo-Elizabethan motifs tacked to a mouse-eaten frame, somebody’s last-ditch attempt to make something out of this corner of the woods. The outskirts of Sudbury, nickel-smelting capital of the world. Can we show you around, they said. I’d like to see the slagheaps, and the places where the vegetation has all been scorched off. Oh, ha ha, they said. It’s growing back, they raised the stacks. It’s turning into quite a, you know, civilized place. I used to like it, I said, it looked like the moon. There’s something to be said for a place where absolutely nothing grows. Bald. Dead. Clean as a bone. Know what I mean? Furtive glances at one another, young beardy faces, one pipe-smokes, they write footnotes, on their way up, why do we always get stuck with the visiting poet? Last one threw up on the car rug. Just wait till we get tenure.

Julia moved her head. The blood trickled gently down the back of her throat, thick and purple-tasting. She had been sitting there in front of the phone, trying to figure out the instructions for calling long distance through the hotel operator, when she’d sneezed and the page in front of her had been suddenly spattered with blood. Totally unprovoked. And Bernie would be hanging around at home, waiting for her to call. In two hours she had to give the reading. A gracious introduction, she would rise and move to the microphone, smiling, she would open her mouth and blood would start to drip from her nose. Would they clap? Would they pretend not to notice? Would they think it was part of the poem? She would have to start rooting around in her purse for a Kleenex, or, better still, she’d faint, and someone else would have to cope. (But everyone would think she was drunk.) How upsetting for the committee. Would they pay her anyway? She could imagine them discussing it. She raised her head a little, to see if it had stopped.

Something that felt like a warm slug crawled down towards her upper lip. She licked, tasting salt. How was she going to get to the phone? On her back, creeping supine across the floor, using her elbows and pushing with her feet, a swimming motion, like a giant aquatic insect. She shouldn’t be calling Bernie, she should be calling a doctor. But it wasn’t serious enough. Something like this always happened when she had to give a reading, something painful but too minor for a doctor. Besides, it was always out of town, she never knew any doctors. Once it was a bad cold; her voice had sounded as if it was coming through a layer of mud. Once her hands and ankles had swelled up. Headaches were standard: she never got headaches at home. It was as if something was against these readings and was trying to keep her from giving them. She was waiting for it to take a more drastic form, paralysis of the jaw muscles, temporary blindness, fits. This was what she thought about during the introductions, always: herself on a stretcher, the waiting ambulance, then waking up, safe and cured, with Bernie sitting beside the bed. He would smile at her, he would kiss her forehead, he would tell her—what? Some magical thing. They had won the Wintario Lottery. He’d been left a lot of money. The gallery was solvent. Something that would mean she didn’t have to do this any more.

That was the problem: they needed the money. They had always needed the money, for the whole four years they had lived together, and they still needed it. At first it hadn’t seemed so important. Bernie was on a grant then, painting, and after that he got a renewal. She had a part-time job, cataloguing in a library. Then she had a book published, by one of the medium-sized houses, and got a grant herself. Of course she quit her job, to make the best use of the time. But Bernie ran out of money, and he had trouble selling paintings. Even when he did sell one, the dealer got most of it. The dealer system was wrong, he told her, and he and two other painters opened a co-operative artists’ gallery which, after a lot of talk, they decided to call The Notes from Underground. One of the other painters had money, but they didn’t want to take advantage of him; they would go strict thirds. Bernie explained all this to her, and he was so enthusiastic it had seemed natural to lend him half of her grant money, just to get things going. As soon as they began to show a profit, he said, he would pay her back. He even gave her two shares in the gallery. They hadn’t started to show a profit yet, though, and, as Bernie pointed out, she didn’t really need the money back right at the moment. She could get some more. She now had a reputation; a small one, but still, she could earn money easier and faster than he could, travelling around and giving readings on college campuses. She was “promising,” which meant that she was cheaper than those who were more than promising. She got enough invitations to keep them going, and though she debated the merits of each one with Bernie, hoping he would veto, he had never yet advised her to turn one down. But to be fair, she had never told him quite how much she hated it, the stares of the eyes, her own voice detached and floating, the one destructive question that was sure to lurk there among all the blank ones. I mean, do you really think you have anything to say?

Deep in February, deep in the snow, bleeding on the tiles of this bathroom floor. By turning her head she could see them, white hexagons linked like a honeycomb, with a single black tile at regular intervals.

For a measly hundred and twenty-five dollars—but it’s half the rent, don’t forget that—and twenty-five a day for expenses. Had to take the morning plane, no seats in the afternoon, who the hell goes to Sudbury in February? A bunch of engineers. Practical citizens, digging out the ore, making a bundle, two cars and a swimming pool. They don’t stay at this place, anyway. Diningroom at lunchtime almost empty. Just me and a very old man who talked to himself out loud. What’s wrong with him? I said to the waitress. Is he crazy?

In a whisper I said it. It’s okay, he’s deaf, she said. No, he’s just lonely, he’s been real lonely ever since his wife died. He lives here. I guess it’s better than an old-age home, you know? There are more people here in the summertime. And we get a lot of men who’re separating from their wives. You can always tell them, by what they order.

Didn’t pursue that. Should have though, now I’ll never know. What they order. Was looking as usual for the cheapest thing on the menu. Need that whole hundred and twenty-five, why waste it on food? This food. The menu a skewed effort to be Elizabethan, everything spelled with an “e” at the end. Got the Anne Boleyn Special, a hamburger with no bun, garnished with a square of red Jell-O and followed by “a glass of skime milke.” Do they know that Anne Boleyn’s head was cut off? Is that why the hamburger has no bun? What goes on in people’s minds? Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted. The symbolism of the menu, for god’s sake, why am I even thinking about it? The menu has no symbolism, it’s just some dimwit’s ill-informed attempt to be cute. Isn’t it?

You’re too complicated, Bernie used to tell her, when they were still stroking and picking at each other’s psyches. You should take it easy. Lie back. Eat an orange. Paint your toenails.

All very well for him.

Maybe he wasn’t even up yet. He used to take naps in the afternoons, he’d be lying there under the heaped-up blankets of their Queen Street West apartment (over the store that had once sold hardware but was now a weaving boutique, and the rent was climbing), face down, arms flung out to either side, his socks on the floor where he’d discarded them, one after the other, like deflated feet or stiffened blue footprints leading to the bed. Even in the mornings he would wake up slowly and fumble his way to the kitchen for some coffee, which she would already have made. That was one of their few luxuries, real coffee. She’d have been up for hours, crouching at the kitchen table, worrying away at a piece of paper, gnawing words, shredding the language. He would place his mouth, still full of sleep, on hers, and perhaps pull her back into the bedroom and down into the bed with him, into that liquid pool of flesh, his mouth sliding over her, furry pleasure, the covers closing over them as they sank into weightlessness. But he hadn’t done that for some time. He had been waking earlier and earlier; she, on the other hand, had been having trouble getting out of bed. She was losing that compulsion, that joy, whatever had nagged her out into the cold morning air, driven her to fill all those notebooks, all those printed pages. Instead she would roll herself up in the blankets after Bernie got up, tucking in all the corners, muffling herself in wool. She had begun to have the feeling that nothing was waiting for her outside the bed’s edge. Not emptiness but nothing, the zero with legs in the arithmetic book.

“I’m off,” he’d say to her groggy bundled back. She’d be awake enough to hear this; then she would lapse back into a humid sleep. His absence was one more reason for not getting up. He would be going to The Notes from Underground, which was where he seemed to spend most of his time now. He was pleased with the way it had been going, they’d had several interviews in the papers, and it was easy for her to understand how something could be thought of as a qualified success and still not make money, since the same thing had happened to her book. But she worried a little because he wasn’t doing very much painting any more. His last picture had been a try at Magic Realism. It was her, sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in the plaid rug off the foot of the bed, with her hair in a sleazy bun at the back of her neck, looking like some kind of famine victim. Too bad the kitchen was yellow; it made her skin green. He hadn’t finished it though. Paper work, he would say. That was what he spent his mornings at the gallery doing, that and answering the phone. The three of them were supposed to take turns and he should have been off at twelve, but he usually ended up there in the afternoons, too. The gallery had attracted a few younger painters, who sat around drinking plastic cups of Nescafé and cans of beer and arguing about whether or not anyone who bought a share in the gallery should be able to have a show there and whether the gallery should take commissions, and if not how it was going to survive. They had various schemes, and they’d recently hired a girl to do public relations, posters and mailings and bothering the media. She was freelance and did it for two other small galleries and one commercial photographer. She was just starting out, Bernie said. She talked about building them up. Her name was Marika; Julia had met her at the gallery, back in the days when she’d been in the habit of dropping around in the afternoons. That seemed a long time ago.

Marika was a peach-cheeked blonde, about twenty-two or three, anyway no more than five or six years younger than Julia. Although her name suggested the exotic, a Hungarian perhaps, her accent was flat Ontario and her last name was Hunt. Either a fanciful mother or a name-changing father, or perhaps Marika had adopted the name herself. She had been very friendly to Julia. “I’ve read your book,” she said. “I don’t find time to read too many books, but I got yours out of the library because of Bernie. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but actually it’s quite good.” Julia was grateful, Bernie said too grateful, to people who said they liked her work or who had even read it. Nevertheless, she heard a voice inside her head saying, Piss right off. It was the way Marika offered her compliment: like a biscuit to a dog, part reward, part bribe, and condescending.

Since then they’d had coffee together several times. It was always Marika who dropped over, on some errand or other from Bernie. They sat in the kitchen and talked, but no real connections were made. They were like two mothers at a birthday party, sitting on the sidelines while their children whooped and gobbled: they were polite to each other, but the real focus of their attention was elsewhere. Once Marika had said, “I’ve always thought I might like to write myself,” and Julia had felt a small red explosion at the back of her neck and had almost thrown her cup of coffee at her, until she realized Marika didn’t mean it that way, she was just trying to appear interested. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll run out of material?”

“Not material, energy,” she’d said, making it sound like a joke; but it had been true, that was her fear. Weren’t they the same thing? “According to Einstein,” she said, and Marika, having missed the connection, gave her a funny look and changed the subject to films.

The last time Marika came over, Julia wasn’t even out of bed. She had no excuse, no explanation. She almost told her to go away, but Bernie needed his black notebook, the one with the phone numbers, so she had to let her in. Marika leaned in the bedroom doorway, trim in her little layered look, dangling her handwoven bag, while Julia, with unwashed hair straggling over the shoulders of her nightgown, mossmouthed and blurryminded, knelt on the floor and scrabbled through Bernie’s discarded pockets. For the first time in their life she wished he would bloody well pick up his clothes. She felt exposed by them, though she shouldn’t, they weren’t her clothes, she hadn’t dropped them. Marika exuded surprise, embarrassment and a certain glee, as if Bernie’s dirty socks and trampled jeans were Julia’s soft underbelly, which she’d always wanted to get a look at.

“I don’t know where he’s put it,” Julia said, irritated. “He’s supposed to pick them up himself,” and added, far too defensively she knew, “We share everything.”

“Of course, with your work and all,” Marika said. She was scanning the room, the greyish bed, Julia’s sweater slumped in the corner chair, the avocado with brown-edged leaves on the windowsill, their only plant. She’d grown it from the pit of a celebration avocado—she could no longer remember the reason for the rejoicing—but there was something wrong with it. Tea-leaves, you were supposed to put tea-leaves on them, or was it charcoal?

The notebook was finally under the bed. Julia pulled it out; a dustball clung to it. She saw in her mind a small plaque, like the ones on historical houses: DUSTBALL. Once the property of Julia Morse, Poetess. With a few bored schoolchildren looking at it through the glass of a case. That was the future, if there was a future, if she kept on writing, if she became at least marginally significant, an obligatory footnote in someone’s thesis. Fragments left over after the general decay, classified, gathering dust, like the vertebrae of dinosaurs. Bloodless.

She handed the notebook over. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked, in a voice meant to discourage.

“I don’t want to put you out,” Marika said, but she had some anyway, chatting brightly about their plans for a collective show, to be called “Up from Under.” Her eyes shifted around the kitchen, taking in the dripping tap, the smelly J cloth draped over it, the ancient toaster with the crumbs around its base like the debris from a tiny landslide. “I’m really glad we can be friends,” she said just before leaving. “Bernie says we have nothing in common, but I think we get on real well. They’re mostly men down there.” This could have been some ersatz variety of women’s lib, Julia thought, but it wasn’t: Marika’s voice stank of bridge club. “Real well.” How incongruous, with those three-inch platforms, that trendy bum. Marika’s visits made her feel like a welfare case. She wondered how she could get her to stop coming, without being too rude. She begrudged the time, too, she could be using it for work. Though increasingly there was no work.

Bernie didn’t seem to notice that she was doing next to nothing. He no longer asked to read what she might have written during the day. When he came home for dinner he would talk obsessively about the gallery, eating plate after plate of spaghetti and, it seemed to her, whole loaves of bread. His appetite had increased, and they had recently begun to argue about the food bills and who was supposed to do the cooking and shopping. In the beginning they had shared everything, that was the agreement. Julia wanted to point out that since he was now eating twice as much as she was, he really ought to do more of the shopping and pay more than half, but she felt it would be mingy of her to say this. Especially since, whenever they talked about money, he would say, “Don’t worry, you’ll get paid off,” as if she begrudged him the gallery loan. Which she supposed she did.

What time is it? Lift the wrist: six-thirty. The blood seems to have slowed down, but it’s still there, a thickening like sludge at the back of the throat. A teacher, once, in public school, who came into the classroom with her teeth outlined in blood. She must have been to the dentist and then not checked in the mirror, but we were all so afraid of her none of us said anything and we spent the afternoon drawing three tulips in a vase, presided over by that bloodthirsty smile: Have to remember to brush my teeth and clean my face carefully, a drop of blood on the chin might be disturbing to the audience. Blood, the elemental fluid, the juice of life, byproduct of birth, prelude to death. The red badge of courage. The people’s flag. Maybe I could get a job writing political speeches, if all else fails. But when it comes out of your nose, not magic or even symbolic, just ridiculous. Pinned by the nose to the geometric net of this bathroom floor. Don’t be completely stupid, get started. Stand up carefully: if the blood keeps flowing, call off the reading and get on the plane. (Leaving a trail of clots?) I could be home tonight. Bernie’s there now, waiting for me to call, it’s past the time.

She pulled herself up, slowly, holding on to the sink, and walked into the bedroom with her head tilted back precariously. She groped for the phone and picked it up. She dialled 0 and got the operator to place the call for her. She listened to the outer-space noises the phone made, anticipating Bernie’s voice, feeling his tongue already on the inside of her mouth. They would go to bed and after that they would have a late supper, the two of them in the kitchen with the gas oven lit and open to keep them warm, the way they used to. (Her mind skipped the details of what they would eat. She knew there had been nothing in the refrigerator when she left but a couple of aging weiners. Not even any buns.) Things would get better, time would reverse itself, they would talk, she would tell him how much she had missed him (for surely she had been away much longer than a day), silence would open, language would flow again.

The line was busy.

She did not want to think about her disappointment. She would phone later. There was no more blood, though she could feel it crusted inside her head. So she would stay, she would do the reading, she would collect the fee and use it to pay the rent. What else was possible?

It was dinnertime and she was hungry, but she couldn’t afford another meal. Sometimes they took the poet out for dinner, sometimes they gave a party afterwards where she could fill up on crackers and cheese. Here there was nothing. They picked her up at the airport, that was it. She could tell there had been no posters, no advance publicity. A small audience, nervous because they were there and nobody else was, caught out attending the wrong reading. And she didn’t even look like a poet, she was wearing a neat navy-blue pantsuit, easy for stairs and cars. Maybe a robe would help, something flowing and ethereal. Bangles, a scarf?

She sat on the edge of the straightbacked chair, facing a picture of two dead ducks and an Irish setter. There was time to be filled. No television set. Read the Gideon Bible?

No, nothing too strenuous, she didn’t want to start bleeding again. In half an hour they would come to pick her up. Then the eyes, the polite hands, the fixed smiles. Afterwards everyone would murmur. “Don’t you feel exposed up there?” a young girl had asked her once. “No,” she’d said, and she didn’t, it wasn’t her, she read only her most soothing poems, she didn’t want to disturb anyone. But they distrusted her anyway. At least she never got drunk beforehand the way a lot of the others did. She wanted to be nice, and everyone approved of that.

Except the few hungry ones, the ones who wanted to know the secret, who believed there was a secret. They would straggle up afterwards, she knew, hanging around the edges, behind the murmuring committee members, clutching little packets of poems, extending them to her gingerly, as if the pages were raw flesh they could not bear to have touched. She could remember when she had felt like that. Most of the poems would be dismal, but now and then there would be one that had something, the energy, the thing that could not be defined. Don’t do it, she wanted to tell them, don’t make the mistake I made. But what was her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone.

Did I really believe that? Did I really believe that language could seize me by the hair and draw me straight up, out into the free air? But if you stop believing, you can’t do it any longer, you can’t fly. So I’m stuck here on this chair. A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Crisis of faith? Faith in what? Resurrection, that’s what is needed. Up from under. Get rid of these haunts, these fictions, he said, she said, counting up points and grievances; the dialogues of shadows. Otherwise there will be nothing left but the rest of my life. Something is frozen. Bernie, save me. He was so nice this morning, before she left.

The phone again, the voice flies through the darkness of space. Hollow ringing, a click.

“Hi.” A woman’s voice, Marika, she knew who it would be.

“Could I please speak to Bernie?” Stupid to act as though she didn’t recognize the voice.

“Hi, Julia,” Marika said. “Bernie’s not here right now. He had to go away for a couple of days, but he knew you’d be calling tonight so he asked me to come over. So you wouldn’t worry or anything. He said to have a good reading, and don’t forget to water the plant when you get back.”

“Oh, thanks, Marika,” she said. As if she was his secretary, leaving her with messages for the idiot wife while he. … She couldn’t ask where he had gone. She herself went away, why couldn’t he? If he wanted her to know where, he’d tell her. She said goodbye. As she put down the phone, she thought she heard something. A voice, a laugh?

He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s there, in the apartment, I can see it, it must have been going on for weeks, months, down at the gallery, I’ve read your book, checking out the competition. I must be feeble-minded, everyone knew but me. Trotting over to have coffee with me, casing the joint. Hope they have the grace to change the sheets. Didn’t have the guts to talk to me himself, water the plant my ass, it’s dead anyway. Melodrama in a parking lot, long stretches of asphalt with here and there a splotch of crushed animal, is that what my life has become?

Rock bottom in this room among the slagheaps, outer space, on the dead moon, with two slaughtered ducks and a stuffed dog, why did you have to do it that way, when I’m out here, you know it cripples me, these ordeals, walking through the eyes, couldn’t you have waited? You set it up so well, I’ll come back and yell and scream, and you’ll deny it all, you’ll look at me, very cool, and say, What are you talking about? And what will I be talking about, maybe I’m wrong, I’ll never know. Beautiful. It’s almost time.

They will arrive, the two young men who are polite and who do not yet have tenure. She will get into the front seat of their Volvo, and all the way to the reading, as they drive between the snowdrifts piled halfway up the telephone poles, the two young men will discuss the virtues of this car and the relative virtues of the car belonging to the one who is not driving but who is sitting in the back seat with his legs doubled like a grasshopper’s.

She will not be able to say anything at all. She will watch the snow coming at the windshield and being wiped away by the windshield wipers, and it will be red, it will be like a solid red wall. A violation, this is what she hates, they had promised never to lie.

Stomach full of blood, head full of blood, burning red, she can feel it at last, this rage that has been going on for a long time, energy, words swarming behind her eyes like spring bees. Something is hungry, something is coiling itself. A long song coils and uncoils itself just in front of the windshield, where the red snow is falling, bringing everything to life. They park the virtuous car and she is led by the two young men into the auditorium, grey cinderblock, where a gathering of polite faces waits to hear the word. Hands will clap, things will be said about her, nothing astonishing, she is supposed to be good for them, they must open their mouths and take her in, like vitamins, like bland medicine. No. No sweet identity, she will clench herself against it. She will step across the stage, words coiled, she will open her mouth and the room will explode in blood.