I just re-read a novel I wrote twenty years ago. Hearts of Flame had been standing on my shelf—lined up there as one of the many, but with my name on the spine. I lifted it off. It had a certain weight. Its cover and design were freshly pleasing. A made object appreciated anew.
Sitting down to read it, I enter its world. The book is oddly familiar—“hauntingly familiar” are the usual words for this, but there are no ghosts here; its world is noisesome, rudely alive. It is a country I once knew intimately but now explore with surprise on every page. These are my people—Blair Bowker, the single mother with her fearful daughter Simplicity; Berenice, the Filipino nanny with her ability to find lost treasures; and Max Ostriker, the Bay Street lawyer who longs to be odd. I imagined them into life.
They are forty. They feel as if it is all over for them. People often do at forty, especially if they came of age in 1969, where, in Banff, “a quiet, seemingly enraptured row of hippies sat on the curb all along the block by the public washrooms.” Their past is one glorious midnight gig at Mount Norquay, before the band broke up and they all moved east, as westerners were wont to do in those days.
They live in Toronto, where they still insist they’re outsiders. They wait on subway platforms, sway in the wind in the glass towers and walk the ravines of Toronto the Good. They are held up by its subway jumpers. In the YMCA fitness centre, they indulge in public “self-gossip,” as Blair calls it. Now we would call it over-sharing. They go to parties, and have mechanical telephone answering machines. Simplicity presses replay and makes up dances to the sound of her mother’s “I am not available to answer your call” message.
Part of the experience of reading Hearts of Flame is revisiting their Toronto and making comparisons. I still walk my dog in the same ravine. But I miss the little café The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage on Toronto Island, destroyed in the expansion of the island airport. I pass Summerhill Station nearly every day and look up at the clock face. “Hands ripped off and without numerals, [it] gave the same wordless message as always. On the wall by the beer store was the old CPR beaver, carved in stone, like some modern hieroglyph.” The clock face still looks down from its tower, but time no longer stands still; it has hands, and it reads the hours as they pass. A VINTAGES liquor store and the nearby condos have elevated the tone—regrettably, I’d say.
Hearts of Flame is set in and reflects the three years in which I wrote it, the end of the eighties—era of excess. The fashion scene was thriving, the parties were big and noisy, the gossip columnists were hard at work. There was, however, a sense of an ending: Blair is told that what she needs for the nineties is grey hair and a baby carriage. I have not written a contemporary novel since. How bizarre, then, to see that today the book that was all about now is vintage. It has in fact become a historical novel. The characters are trapped in the amber of their time, innocent of what we know happened. But they do feel trepidation. A certain fin-de-siècle decadence has set in; the drugs and debts are taking their toll.
“That day, all over the city, people had appeared selling peacock feathers for one dollar each.” Blair wonders “where all the plundered peacocks were.” She says, “‘I’m not buying a single thing this fall . . . No money. I’m sick of being a consumer, anyway.’”
Ruby worries about how she is supposed to stay in business when everyone is spent. “Literally and figuratively.” She who has always been ahead of the game says, “‘I can feel it, you know? Something’s coming. Some . . . downturn.’”
Against this is the main event: a disappearance. The whole question fascinates me still. When a man drops out of his life it usually has to do with business failure or bigamy, the fact that he was living a double life to begin with. When a woman disappears, if we are to believe the many studies that treat this subject, it has more to do with a surfeit of dependencies and human ties that stand in the way of her finding her true self. Or, there is foul play.
There is no answer here. Instead, there are tropes: “Be odd on your own time.” “You’ll never find a nice girl in a trunk.” “Why? is the worst question.” A disappearance is an unsolved mystery. I’m not a big reader of mystery novels. I like the way mysteries unfold, but I have never liked the too-neat closings that explain everything in the last ten pages. This novel opens questions that keep opening for everyone who knew Ruby, the woman who decided she wanted to be reincarnated without dying. The rock drops in the pond and the circles radiate, making everything reflected there wobble.
Ruby’s people—the Hearts of Flame gang—are all gathered here, confrontational, idiosyncratic, vocal. They shock me a little. They question everything. They make crazy decisions. They discuss everything. Personal choices are publicly debated, like Ruby’s to date a married man. Their dinner parties are only fun if there’s a big argument. Everyone takes a stand, moral or otherwise. Baby boomers before they were really called that, they were just old enough to grab the tail end of the sixties. They were footloose in the seventies, they reaped the spoils of the eighties and are facing up to the consequences as the nineties hover into view. I know them well. They are my peers.
At the heart of the novel are two women, friends and rivals. They talk about everything—intensely, intimately, angrily. We don’t do that any more and I wonder why. Is it because we came through a wave of feminism, called each other to task relentlessly and eventually had to retreat? Feelings were paramount. We expected and got confessions, explanations. That was part of friendship, which is why Ruby’s decision shatters those who thought they knew her.
When I closed the book I had one final question about the woman who disappeared, lapsing into a silence that now spans two decades and three years. Where is Ruby today? And the people she left behind—who are they now? Do they still wonder and yearn?
Katherine Govier
June 2012