Garbo Laughs Read Free Page B

she writes,
but I’m still no good at love
.
    Harriet puts down her pen and goes to the window. Her second-floor study juts off the west side of the house and runs its full width – a narrow, winterized porch with windows on three sides offering views south, west, and north of other sunroomsand sleeping porches and cases of chronic insomnia. Fiona Chester is up every night from three until five-thirty, when the voice of the morning man on CBC Radio puts her right back to sleep. Bill Bender rises at four to work on the book he has been trying to finish for twenty-five years. Dinah Bloom doesn’t turn off her light until two or three in the morning since, when it comes to reading, she is without self-control.
    Several days ago, standing here, Harriet saw at eye level a man in a mauve sweater painting the trim on Bill Bender’s window (a warm spell between cold snaps). He was applying blue paint to the white window frame against a backdrop of brown clapboard and blue sky when his ladder dropped. And so did he. A foot, before he caught himself. She opened her window and called out, Do you want me to come down? He was holding on to the ladder for dear life. No, he said, I called my buddy. And a young man came around the corner. It broke, said the man in mauve. What broke? The ladder broke. Something broke.
    Afterwards, there was a wild smear of blue paint on the brown wall, a foot below the window.
    I am wondering about something else – the endless romance in me that makes it a pleasure to watch the same movie many times, as if movies were animated letters with the white screen as the envelope and the movie as the love letter inside
. Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
of all things. I’ve watched it several times lately, in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and again on a grey Saturday morning with the kids, and the several times took me through delight to mild interest to greater interest to boredom to a new level of appetite. Appetite grows with eating, as they say in Quebec
.
    At a certain point, I am satiated and the movie is put back on the shelf. But I still have the memory of the appetite it aroused and satisfied
,
so that in a year or two my hand reaches for it again, and the same process begins of mild interest, increased interest, boredom, and some new level of appetite
.
    Perhaps boredom is the stage I’m in now, but it’s a boredom like winter, which is a preparation for spring. Premier Bouchard, our dark prince, says that to tell Quebeckers independence will never happen is to say that spring will never come. In the face of this, what can an Ontario girl do but watch George Peppard watching Audrey Hepburn and finally telling her (oh, reactionary thrill) that she belongs to him
.
    What are movies for, except these looks of love – requited, unrequited, latent, growing? I’m so ashamed, but there it is. They send a shiver up my spine
.
    At seven o’clock she rouses Kenny and Jane, and goes downstairs to make breakfast. Kenny comes down first, bible under his arm. “Mommy,” he says. “Who do you think was the best actor in a Billy Wilder movie? Would it be Jack Lemmon? Tony Curtis? Marilyn Monroe? Fred MacMillan?”
    “MacMurray.”
    “Fred MacMurray? William Holden?”
    “I’d say Jack Lemmon as Daphne.”
    “I don’t know. I like Fred MacMurray a lot in
Double Indemnity
. ‘Goodbye, baby.’ Bang! And then what about the guy with ‘the little man inside him’? What’s his name?”
    “Edward G. Robinson. He was great. Remember the ending? ‘I love you too, Keyes.’”
    “Is that your favourite Billy Wilder movie?”
    “No. My favourite is
Some Like it Hot.”
    By now Jane is downstairs too, dressed in black and white for the school concert. But the big sister is never a talker first thing in the morning.
    By eight they’ve left for school, and now it’s light enough to show Lew the unpleasant thing that happened while he was away. “Lew,” she calls from her study when she hears