The Dancehall Years Read online

  How could we be interested, Percy? says Ada. Where would we find five thousand dollars? You’re not going out of the house in that, Gwen.

  Gwen straightens her black jersey top, surveys her parents over the rims of her cat eye glasses. In case they don’t know it, she’s scored a coup because a few poets are coming up from San Francisco, and Dr. Kerr’s asked the class to join him at that new ersatz club up Dunbar. After dinner, she walks the few blocks up the hill to the black-walled club with its orange and green paintings of broken-up musical instruments. At a small table, Dr. Kerr—Eugene, he says, they’re to call him Eugene—is leaning on his elbows on the rickety table. The poem being read is by Robert Creeley. She was the lovely stranger who married the forest ranger, the duck and the dog and never was seen again. She loves the way the reader sinks into the lines as if the images could slow down time itself. At the end of the event, Dr. Kerr says maybe they should go on talking over a bottle of wine at his place, which turns out to be a stucco bungalow on a weedy lot in Deep Cove which is a long way from the University of British Columbia. Suit jackets hang on what should be curtain rods. He opens the bottle of wine with a lethal-looking corkscrew whose arms get raised when the screw gets put in like someone having a dress dropped over her head.

  The next day, hoping she might see him, she sits with her books at the bus stop café, reading the same paragraph over and over in a book about existentialism he’d mentioned in class. First time she’s ever carried a book so people could see the cover. Dr. Kerr came up from Berkeley because he’d refused to sign a statement saying he was not now nor had ever been a member of the Communist Party. With his narrow face and olive skin, eyebrows slanting up to his salt-and-pepper hair, he strides down the mall, listing to one side with the weight of his briefcase, as if his right leg were shorter than his left. Why is this place called British Columbia? he says. Why isn’t it called its original name? And translations of peoples’ names instead of the Salish? I mean. Moon Dancer. Stalking Deer. We don’t go around calling Beethoven Beet Patch. Well, do we?

  Strange combination of courses to be teaching: anthropology and theatre, but that’s what he’s doing. It’s all she can do to find her way to her classes in the rain, learn to decipher the structure of Greek tragedy and Restoration comedy. The humanities are what keep people human, Dad, she says at the dinner table.

  Is that so? Is that something that, wink, wink, Dr. Kerr said by any chance?

  One night when she’s upstairs studying, she sees Grandma Flora coming up the walk on her father’s arm. When Grandpa Lyndon died and it became clear Grandma no longer knew night from day, her parents said thank goodness for George Fenn who was willing to caretake Scarborough because Grandma wouldn’t hear of selling it and they didn’t want to upset her even more when they had to move her to a home that wasn’t a home.

  I’m in the doghouse, she says when Gwen goes down to take her coat.

  Are you, Grandma?

  It seems she took a taxi to the Union dock and was found waiting for a non-existent Lady Alex. The care home called Percy at the office to say his mother was missing. Locating her was what he’d call an educated guess. In the end, they’ll have to move her far enough away she won’t be able to call a taxi to anywhere she knows, like having to reforest a cougar.

  As the weeks go on, Gwen spends more and more time in the comfortable, dirty Players Club green room above the stage of the university’s old auditorium, reading Alan Watts and talking with other students about expanding consciousness and becoming one with the universe. It says here that you have to submerge your life in a man’s by abandoning yourself and letting the man awaken you. It’s all about letting your mind go—where’s it supposed to go? They must know how it’s done, Lady Chatterley or whomever in For Whom the Bell Tolls. She wishes she could ask them. They’d probably tell her to read more carefully.

  You’re not angry enough, Gwen, Dr. Kerr says later in the spring when they begin rehearsals for The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre. She’s playing the First Fury. How could she not be angry enough? Her legs are tight and strong, she’s extending her wings like a giant bat so she can hurl herself across the stage to accuse Orestes and Electra sleeping innocently at the feet of what will be the statue of Zeus. (Right now a chair is standing in.) Herr Director looks as if he thinks they’re too young and inexperienced to be doing this play. They are. What the author’s trying to say, he explains, is that everyone has an inexpiable crime. Do they, she wants to ask at home at supper, but doesn’t.

  At the next rehearsal, Dr. Kerr asks her to think of a time when she was exceptionally angry. What about that time she’d wanted to go night skiing up Grouse; her mother said no, and she railed like a banshee until Percy cornered her in the den and slapped her face every time she stood up. When she finally escaped and started out the front door, he looked up from where he was sitting in his chair and asked if she’d ever forgive him. If I say no, will you hit me again? she said.

  She’ll think about how angry she was that night and see if it works. On stage at rehearsal, Dr. Kerr rushes up the stairs to the costume room and reappears with a pile of—is it steaming—black velvet he holds out to her like an offering. Wear this, he says, and try the speech again.

  Almost, is his verdict.

  After the others leave, he takes her chin in his hand, turns her head gently back and forth until her hair loosens down her back. His eyes are brown as amber, his skin warm as a Brahms sonata. When he touched her neck, her bones realigned, some moved forward, others back into a position that would fit him better.

  One night she gets up enough courage to drive over to his house. When she knocks, he comes to the door with the phone crouched on his hand like a toad. His three auburn dachshunds scratch up, lift their small elegant faces. The only light in, you couldn’t call it a room—later on she’d call it a loft, is a theatre spotlight on wheels.

  You’ve come, he says, taking her coat. On the couch, he pushes up the silver paper in his cigarette box, throws the empty box across the room for the dogs. Do you smoke? No, you don’t. The rain pizzicatos on the roof. Then his arms are around her waist, his head buried in her stomach; if she didn’t like him so much, she’d be alarmed, instead is thrilled to find she knows exactly what to do. She picks up her fingers as if she’d just discovered them, checks their tips, leans over as if picking his hair for lice. When they can’t get close enough to his scalp to find the exact touch he needs, she wants to throw them over her shoulders like tools that aren’t fine enough to do the job. Maybe the slight touch of her teeth at his hair roots.

  They walk awkwardly to the bedroom like a four-legged animal, but that’s not where he wants to be. His feet cross the floor so quickly on their way outside, he seems to be whirring in place like an egg beater. It’s dark out; grey clouds thicken with pent-up rain. When he gently bends back her dripping face as if he were looking for a second mouth in her neck, her dress opens over one wet breast as she catches her breath, loving him, loving the rain. Back in bed, his mouth is down on her, the pressure of his fingers and mouth just right, then not quite, as she loses what’s starting to build, like getting a wrong note playing the piano but keeping going anyway. He stops as if she should go back and get it right. There’s lots of time, he says. She catches, then loses it, but it’s okay because no one else is meant to do this. She loves his touch so much that everything closed in her body wants to open at once. The ends of his eyebrows are broken lines. Later, he gently slips off his condom and tenderly wipes the inside of her thighs. You need a little time, he says. That’s all. A little time. The dogs settle down, content that at last there are people here who know how to lie in front of a fire and breathe.

  One night, she and her dad find themselves in a lengthy discussion of the cold war. Dad, she says, the cold war ends with a lot of people making a huge profit from the proliferation of weapons, that’s what it’s all about. He doesn’t even bother to say what professor are you parroting now. What do you think kept ou
r house afloat and gave you kids reliable meals and warm beds all through the forties, Gwen? What do you think we were making all those years down at the plant? Ploughshares?

  She and Eugene go to see Hiroshima, Mon Amour at The Varsity. In the film, the lovemaking is mixed up with the porous, decapitated corpses. A blue flash, the bleached landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Legions of walking dead stagger in from the epicentre. People with flesh hanging off their bones, eyes puffed out of their faces. When she comes home, Percy is watching television in the den.

  I just saw a film about Hiroshima, Dad. I didn’t have any idea. The war was almost over, wasn’t it? Why did they have to detonate two bombs? Nagasaki as well.

  Hiroshima ended the war, he says coldly. You don’t have the faintest idea what it was like.

  You should see the film, Dad.

  Your mother and I don’t have time to go to films. Do you have any idea how frightened and panicked everyone was, Gwen?

  One night lying on Eugene’s couch, she’s seized into a spasm that has nothing to do with him; the intensity takes her so far away she’s surprised after it’s over to find herself in the same room. So that’s it? she says. He looks as if he might congratulate her. She can’t fall asleep at his place, though, she has to go home. The porch light is still on, and her mother is sitting in her father’s chair.

  Why are you waiting up like this, Mom?

  We couldn’t reach you, Gwen. The phone number you gave us rang and rang. It’s your grandma. She managed to take a taxi to Horseshoe Bay after all, got a ride on the new launch they’ve started for hotel guests, said she was a guest. You won’t believe it after the number of times we’ve said it was an accident waiting to happen, but the yacht hit the rocks on Miss Fenn’s island. Quite a few were rescued, but Grandma Flora drowned.

  No!

  She did.

  Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry. Where’s Dad?

  Over there of course.

  She puts her arm around her mother’s shoulders. I’m so sorry, Mom.

  We should have moved her here, says Ada. We did the wrong thing.

  Gwen doesn’t see Eugene again until after the service. We’ll rehearse around you, he says on the phone. On opening night, black-tighted legs ready to spring, she stands in the wings waiting to go on. Turns to Herr Director for a good luck kiss, expecting him to whisper softly even if it’s break a leg, but he suddenly raises the back of his hand quickly to the side of her face. He doesn’t nick her, but it’s that close.

  Her mom and dad are in the audience. Afterwards in the lobby trying to talk to them, she keeps looking over their heads trying to find Dr. Kerr. They say they think it’s an awful play, and look at her in alarm. After everyone’s gone, she goes back to sit in the auditorium. He comes up the aisle.

  If you ever do that again, I’ll leave the play. I’ll leave you.

  I heard you were good. I had to do that. You weren’t angry enough.

  You weren’t there, she says. You weren’t in the audience. I could feel you not in the audience. I can’t stand it if you’re not there.

  Why?

  I don’t know.

  Her parents say it’s time they met this man she likes so much. What if they had him over for supper? At the table, Percy looks at Eugene accusingly. If you hurt her, we’ll kill you. Ada puts out the good silver and gives him the best view of the rhododendrons. Make it so they like each other, Gwen thinks. Make it so my loving him is all right.

  I hear you didn’t think much of the play, Eugene says.

  It was different, Ada says.

  There’s a level people might not have understood. The play was first produced in France during the Occupation. On one level, it’s an invective about the price of the citizenry going along with the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. Taking advantage of an expedient situation because it’s the path of least resistance. The cost of that. The punishment for that kind of thing.

  Why didn’t the playwright say so? asks Percy.

  He couldn’t. He had to say it was about ancient Greece in case he was persecuted. He had to use a code.

  Did he? says Ada. Well, we wouldn’t know anything about that kind of thing. Her dad asks if Eugene is following the Lions. Strange how he misses playing football, he says, the contact with the other players on the field. Eugene gets up, goes around behind him and picks Percy up off his feet.

  He’s nice, says Ada, after he leaves.

  He’s not as smart as he thinks he is, says Percy.

  Knows more than you do though, Gwen thinks. I expect you’re wondering if we’re going to get married, but it doesn’t matter all that much.

  Doesn’t matter? Who told you that?

  We probably will, Dad. We’ll never leave each other if that’s what you’re worried about.

  If there are children, it will make a heck of a difference if you have legal protection or not, my girl. But that’s a long way down the line.

  Buttonhole That Man

  34.

  March, 1963

  One of her favorite parts about being at Eugene’s is prowling around his heaps and shelves of books. A file of periodicals turns out to be an old record of areas around Howe Sound. She takes it home and reads late into the night, unveiling what life on the coast was like in the old days, the fog stretching to shape and reshape the humps and islands into constantly shifting forms. There was a god who could take himself apart and put himself back together in different shapes depending on his whereabouts.

  When Eugene drives them up the Sea to Sky Highway to Squamish and they pass Horseshoe Bay, she regales him with the news that herring roe on cedar branches had been famous down there in what they called Ch’axhai. It takes her the whole length of Roger Curtis to Hood Point to pronounce the swallows and catches emitting from the back of her throat that name her own island, Xwlil’xhwm. Her heart pounds like the quick drumming ground that translates the name. Passage Island is Smetlmetlel’ch, how would you pronounce that? It seems Eugene’s interest is more or less academic; he wants to tell her about the highway in California that stretches from Carmel to Big Sur. How, when you’re driving it, the rest of the world fades to black and white compared to its Technicolor splendor. The locations in the Sound she’s speaking about are so psychically fragile they fade with his lack of interest. The only reason they’re taking this drive is so she can finish her paper (for him actually) so they can head out for a real city like San Francisco. He reaches for her thighs and tucks them closer to his own. His pants are different from other peoples’. Softer, more European looking. She wonders where he gets them.

  What a place for a highway, he says. Aren’t there avalanches?

  Sure there are avalanches, but people build anyway.

  I see that.

  They pass the gloomy foreboding wedge of Anvil and turn inland. Near Brackendale, they stop for lunch at a beaten up board-and-bat-ten restaurant called Cheekye where, the waitress tells them, a lot of black ash once swept down the mountain from Garibaldi. A few people survived the flood because they made it to the top of the extinct volcano that looms in the distance.

  Back at Blenheim St., she tells her parents they’re thinking of going to California for the summer to a place he’s rented in a canyon at Big Sur.

  We thought you were carrying on at Jasper this summer so you could go into teacher training. The years you’ve worked up there have paid off. We’re proud that you earned all of your tuition.

  I’m not going to do that, Mother. I’m in love with Eugene, and I want to be with him.

  You try living by your feelings and see where it gets you, Gwen, says Percy. You just try. Her parents look miserable and forlorn, but there’s nothing she can do about it.

  Sunny banks of pastel houses climb the hills down the coast of California from San Francisco through Daly City. Dry hills tufted with sage and pampas grass widen and deepen. At Carmel, they carve around a point of massive amber cliffs; turquoise swells in the ocean hurl themselves through
holes carved in the rocks. On the horizon, spume mists as the breakers crash.

  They turn away from the coast into a low grove of walnut trees. Further up the canyon behind a grove of bay leaf trees, they find the split-level rental built on stilts near a stream. Gwen puts potatoes in the oven and goes out exploring, forgetting about them until they start smoking. Eugene makes sandwiches to replace the wrecked potatoes, puts one on a plate beside her, but she’s so entranced with the bay trees she’s trying to describe in her journal, she forgets to eat, instead distractedly presses the bread with the flat of her hand until it’s like dough again. Returning to Carmel to shop, they emerge from the overhung canyon into the blue and white seascape, eyes blinking in the bright light as if they’ve been sprung from a theatre.

  She had no idea it was possible to be this happy. The sun is a constant benediction. Above the mattress on the floor, she memorizes the lines where his limbs sketch the air. When he’s up, it’s the opposite. He’s by the sink; he’s in the kitchen, leaves no trace of where he’s been. One minute, he’s soft and adoring; the next he’s leaping out of bed, standing at attention like a drill sergeant.

  Dear Mom and Dad, We had a glorious time in San Francisco. It pulses with light. The bells on the cable cars remind me of the milk truck that used to come down Blenheim. The hill to the square at Grace Cathedral is a steep slope with sections staired into the cement like the old ramp down to the Sannie wharf. I’m making notes about everything. You can’t swim, though, there are currents and sharks. In ways San Francisco’s like Vancouver because of the sea and the coast but the streets are narrower, more charming, and built up steep hills. It’s as if life here is in Technicolour….

  Logs flick blue streamers in the fire. Scales glow under a piece of wood lying face down, its arm stretched across the iridescent dome of a sloped ceiling. Beams burst into flames and fall. In bed, Eugene searches her body as if the answer to whatever he’s after is hidden in a touch of her flesh he hasn’t discovered yet. The pillows are God knows where. Sometimes she feels headless after making love. She doesn’t like to say so but she does.