SCENE 31:
Life as Improv
She tumbled off the narrow couch in a welter of blankets and hallelujahs and the warm aromas of Christmas Day. Alma and Bettina, engrossed in the televised Christmas services from the Vatican, ignored her as though she didn’t exist.
“There, so beautiful,” Alma praised the televised Mass.
“Didn’t you get enough of that shit last night?” Loddy mumbled, as she made her way to the bathroom.
“How you say that? He the Pope,” Alma said.
“We’re waiting for the Queen’s message,” Bettina chimed in. “Then after dinner, we’re watching It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart. It’s my favourite Christmas movie.”
Loddy finished her first morning coffee and leaned over the sink with her empty mug drawn towards her lips, contemplating winter outside the kitchen window, and considered her life. She traced a finger tip around the wooden frame, felt the draft seeping through, and scraped the frost with her nails.
Alma seemed edgy as she fidgeted with setting the Christmas table, adding an extra place. Loddy was about to comment when they heard a hard pounding on the front door.
“Ah, he come,” Alma said and bounded down the steps. There was a muffled inflection of Lithuanian words, and then up the stairs again, Alma carrying a poinsettia plant and a box of chocolates.
“Nu, see what I get?”
It was the tenor from Alma’s church choir.
In the subdued hallway light, Adolphus removed his tweed overcoat and presented himself as a lean, tall wrangle of a man with shots of grey at the temples, well-defined cheek bones and a thin-lipped smile that displayed a smack of teeth that caused Alma to titter every time he laughed.
He extended his hand to Loddy, a personable greeting in their mother tongue.
“Do you speak Lithuanian?”
“My daughter no good with Lietuviu kalba,” Alma said.
“A bit. I understand it though,” Loddy said, countering with her own handshake. “I’m Canadian.”
Alma turned the TV off and announced: “Come, we eat.”
Dinner was a clot of personalities vying for attention, a lexicon of overlapping words in two languages around a Lithuanian Christmas table dressed in red linen. Loddy slouched deeper into her chair and tried to become invisible until the ordeal was over. She expected Adolphus to take his leave after dessert and before everyone settled in front of the television again. But he stationed himself for the night, it seemed, and Loddy could no longer bear the noise of nothingness around her. She vaulted from the couch and turned off the volume. It’s a Wonderful Life flickered without sound, James Stewart examining his misspent life, hanging onto the lip of a bridge, his angel convincing him otherwise.
“I have to tell you something, Maw.”
“After,” she said, her eyes touching the tenor as though he alone occupied the room, her life.
“I’m going, Maw.”
“What. So soon?”
“No, Maw, I mean, like, I’m leaving Montreal.”
“Ackk. What you say?”
Loddy faced Bettina. “I’ll keep in touch. You know if you need anything ...”
“You really going?”
“Yeah.”
“Fine, Loddy. Go. You always know how to spoil everything.”
“What do you all want from me? I have to go to keep sane.”
“I be alone,” Alma said, blowing her nose on an already damp tissue.
“You have Bettina, Maw. She was always your favourite anyway, and now you have ... you have your choir ...”
“But I never see you again.”
“I’ll write and visit. I will.” Loddy looped Alma’s long knit scarf twice around her neck, pulled up her boots. “Promise.”
No display of affection, just an awkward situation. Loddy felt compelled to hug them both. After all, they were her mother and sister.
Adolphus, instead, stepped forward, wished her luck. “When are you going?”
“New Year’s Eve. It was to be my wedding day. It’s a good day to go.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Ack, that no good artist. God tell you something and still you no listen to your mother.”
Loddy tore into the living room, boots caked with grime, scratched the old hardwood floor. She ripped into Alma’s knitting basket, released the stitches until the blanket Alma was knitting for the poor children in Africa was an unravelled mess of yarn and Loddy’s rage. She pitched the entire thing at Alma, charged down the stairs, two steps at a time, past the soundless bell, her chest heaving until she slipped on the snow-covered pavement and landed on her back.
The exterior door left open, she could hear Alma’s tirade against a daughter she never had and Adolphus’ tenor voice stroking her with candy-coated Lithuanian assurances. There followed a sudden shift in priorities: “But the turkey. Leftovers. She not take.”
Loddy rolled onto her stomach and into a snow bank to avoid the patches of hidden ice. She pushed herself up on all fours then got into an upright position and began to run. She kept running until there was only the sound of snow falling on snow and the squish of boots tracking her path. She prayed that, at this late hour on Christmas Day, there would be a cab at the taxi stand around the corner and, when it came into view, she almost collapsed in gratitude. It was as though someone had ordered it especially for her.
“Where to?” the driver said, swivelled around for a closer look at his flushed-faced, panting passenger.
“New York City.”
xxx
Loddy arrived home to find a note taped to her door from Dewey and Ulu:
Come to the party. Everyone will be there. Our place.
With nothing to lose except another night of solitude, she crossed the street and followed the music dinning from every drafty orifice of the flat. The door was unlocked. She tapped with the tips of her fingers, and it cracked open.
Ulu saw her first. “Hey, everyone, Loddy’s here.”
Merry Christmases abounded, thrown like party streamers, culminating into a mound of affection from The Garage Theatre troupe — Aretha, Percy, Jacob, Danny, Stanley, Ulu and Dewey.
“Merry Christmas everyone,” she said with true sincerity.
This was family. Real family.
Ulu handed her a glass of bourbon as Let It Be spun on the record player. Percy was on a marathon of wine tasting while Danny could be heard in the background shouting: “Turn that shit off.”
And Aretha counterattacked: “But it’s The Beatles. And it’s appropriate.”
“Did I interrupt something?” Loddy said, noticing an unmistakable melancholy among the group.
“Hon, you haven’t been around so you don’t know,” Dewey said. “Some of us are moving out. Moving on. This last crisis with the army in the streets and what happened to Fury. I’m sorry, Loddy, I don’t want to bring it up, but we think it’s going to get worse.”
To keep from breaking down, Loddy stared at the floor — as though nothing else could be more important than the oriental pattern in the carpet.
“Where’re you going, Dewey?”
“I’m heading for B.C. in the spring after my contract is up with The Star. Some guys, these draft dodgers I met at the Hut, told me about this place near Nelson. Nakusp. Thought I’d check it out.”
“And you, Ulu, you going too?”
“Didn’t get a chance to tell you, what with everything that’s happened. I’ve been offered a position at Sir George Williams teaching Women’s Studies. Dewey and I, well, he’s like a little brother to me so I’ll be hounding him forever. Eh, big boy?” The old playful Ulu resurfaced for a moment, ruffling his already unruly hair into a mop of kink.
“Really?” Loddy said. “That’s fab.”
“And I’m going to Paris to study mime and masks,” Percy said. “And Aretha here is going to Toronto. The big time.”
“I’m just thinking about it,” Aretha said. “Nothing definite.”
“At least you’ll get work,” Dewey said. “The way things are going, there won’t be anything here for English artists anymore, and learning another language is not something a lot of us can do. Especially for an American like me.”
“Maybe I’ll go to California,” Danny said, just for something to say. “It’s warm there. No more bloody cold winters.”
“You don’t want to go there,” Dewey said, filling his shot glass with the last bit of bourbon. “People go there to die. If they can’t make it anywhere else, they go to California.”
Then everyone dived in; a babble of discordant, overlapping voices, blood pressures rising, a constant drone: If only the Quebec government had just released the imprisoned FLQ terrorists, none of this would have happened. They were convicted criminals, not political prisoners. They had to be brought to justice. Well, they didn’t have to arrest everyone just to find them. They let Marcel go. Where is that bastard anyway? Did you see the For Sale signs in Westmount?
Loddy had a headache. “Shut up, everyone!” They all turned to her. She whispered: “I have to go. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
The room went dead and Ulu brought her a platter of cookies.
“Oh, Loddy-Dah, you must be tired. Here take this with you and I’ll see you tomorrow, okay.”
“No, you don’t get it. I came over to tell you I’m leaving Montreal too. I’m going to New York City.”
“You too?” Stanley said. “Shit!”
She caught Jacob’s fleeting expression. He knew about the business card. Loddy had sworn him to secrecy.
“You’ll be great, Loddy, great. Just remember the back of the wall,” Jacob said.
xxx
She filled the days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve hauling furniture and Fury’s clothes to the Salvation Army; destroying personal effects; storing books, albums and Fury’s unfinished canvases in Ulu’s basement for safe keeping. She purged every ounce of her former self except Fury’s paint-stained, red plaid shirt and the birthday painting with the card. They would always accompany her like a good-luck charm. Ulu purchased the motorcycle and, although Loddy considered selling the Omni, she decided to drive it to New York — another fear to overcome.
And when all the rooms were spotless and bare, she had one final task. She stepped into Fury’s sunless, vacant studio, her eyes shut, she felt his spirit. Dormer had presented her with a cheque from the sale of Fury’s paintings, more than she could ever imagine, enough for a year of frugal living in New York City. She had learned from a skilled teacher how to live on pennies. She examined the Eclipse of the Sun and remembered how she and Fury had whitewashed the Rising Sun, the red sun, dawning in her cockroach-ridden basement apartment. This time, alone, she covered the black sun with a roll of Snowball paint. Fury would have approved of her decision to leave Montreal. It was the right thing to do. The Eclipse of the Sun took twice the number of coats required to whiteout the red Rising Sun. Sorrow took longer to heal than pain.
xxx
New Year’s Eve. It was the white light, the kind people with near death experiences rhapsodize, that convulsed her from a deep slumber of dreams. The winter sun slashed through every uncovered window in the now-empty flat. On the floor, on her back, in a sleeping bag, she didn’t want to get up. She would be travelling light — one medium-sized suitcase, a carry-on bag and a tote now held her life.
Loddy bid Montreal farewell: stopped by Ben’s for a final smoke meat platter; drove by the former Garage Theatre, a For Sale sign stapled onto its boarded-up box office window; past the Limelite-A-Go-Go, now a parking lot. She wandered along the boardwalk in Verdun, and applauded the Christmas decorations on Wellington Street. She headed back to downtown St. Catherine Street and parked the car near St. James United Church and envisioned her wedding: she and Fury stepping through the black double doors, arm-in-arm with a cascade of confetti at their backs. She traipsed through wet snow to Phillips Square and paused on a bench to soak in the anticipation of a new year as Montreal buzzed around her, clogging traffic in preparation for a night of revelry. She crossed the street to Eaton’s corner window, captivated, as always, by the Christmas display of mobile stuffed mice and teddy bears, passengers on a train to nowhere in a traffic circle of toys.
“A good window display is like staging a play,” Fury had once told her. “It’s a slice of life.”
A final stroll through McGill’s Roddick Gates and the campus with all its memories of youthful naïveté and rebellion. When she reached Milton Street and Lorne Avenue, she ran with long confident strides in the middle of the street until she reached her old flat. She fought an urge to peep inside the basement window.
Loddy drove to Old Montreal, the finale. She stood in the centre of Place Jacques Cartier, rested on the lip of the fountain, pennies now buried under ice. Fury. Fury. Fury. She joined the sparse group of worshippers in Bonsecour Church, lit candles for Alma, Bettina and the children in Africa, and prayed to Mary, just in case there was a God. The pews would be overcrowded for evening Mass around the time she would be crossing the Champlain border into Plattsburgh.
She took a long walk in the cold. A coat of snow, like paint, concealed the narrow, cobbled streets and the overhead street lanterns now guided her way. Ahead of her, at a familiar corner, she could see Fury packing up his easel and portfolio, an expulsion of frosty air, like fog, surrounding him.
“Fury!” she rushed towards him, slipping on hidden ice. “Fury! Wait!”
The artist looked up.
“Sorry,” Loddy said. “You reminded me of someone.”
The artist continued packing his wares until Loddy spotted a charcoal sketch of St. Joseph Street with its surrealistic snarl of spiral staircases.
“How much?”
“For you, fifty dollars,” he said with a trace of a French accent.
“Pour vous.” She knew of an artist’s struggle to make a living wage and handed him five twenty-dollar bills.
“Merci, merci, merci,” he said, cheeky grin, broad and strong. Was that a dimple? Fury. Fury. Fury.
It started to snow, a light dusting of crystallized rain. Loddy wandered by the expensive boutiques, the bistros and jazz bars she and Fury had frequented. She stumbled across an antique shop with its clutter of ancient models, sailing ships trapped in bottles, vintage china, vases, glassware, a mangle of antiquated dolls, obsolete comics, music sheets and other collectibles drooping over restored furniture. She cupped her hands over her eyes like a visor and peered inside. That’s when she caught The Blonde peeping back. Loddy hadn’t seen the girl since the encounter in Room 1742 and the Bed-In for Peace.
She stepped back and The Blonde stepped back. She twisted around in an effort to scare her away, but The Blonde remained steadfast, reflected in the shop’s window. A malfunction of the retina, Loddy thought, perhaps she needed glasses. She drew closer, touched the window pane — a convergence of hands — every facial tick identical, simultaneous, a smile, a frown, a scowl, a laugh. She stepped onto the curb and caught her own reflection in the window, abutting with The Blonde’s.
A sudden fierce wind unbalanced her, punched her backwards across the street, now a sheet of ice. She could not stop sliding until she reached the other side. Snow whirled about her like a miniature tornado and then everything stopped. She looked up and the sky spilled out stars. At a nearby bar, a door opened and then closed in a muffle of voices singing Auld Lang Syne. She tightened Alma’s scarf and pulled up her collar. I am beautiful, she kept repeating as she walked to her car. I am beautiful.
And, with that, she knew she would be all right.