Fields go back to forest, first love runs to fat. Lulu was alone when she left the theatre. In the cold night air beyond the stage door, she replayed that last scene in her mind: the private audience after the audience had left. The sound of him coming down the hall, calling to the four winds, surfing on his own hearty and unstoppable momentum, "Let''s see! Let''s see if she recognizes my voice!" She had swung around in her chair and there in her dressing room door was Orson Welles gone to wrack and ruin. "Lu," he grinned, "it''s Tony Lloyd." Milder shocks have turned a person grey overnight. The last time they had been together, in a sailboat on her lake of bays, his hips would have slid into Cinderella''s slipper. What a transformation from heartthrob to this: bloated face, shaggy white hair and beard, wild moustache.
"Honey, you''re a mess," she said, getting to her feet in amazement. "You should lay off those candy bars." Laughing, he engulfed her in a hug from their hippie days and her embarrassment burned deeper. "You saw the play," she said, and winced. But his sheepish smile. "I wanted to. I saw the ad in the Citizen , but I had a commitment I couldn''t break." He pulled up a chair and settled beside her, resting his hands on her forearms, lightly, in the old way, before letting them fall between his knees.
He was bulky in his winter coat, a man out of a tall tale. She had been crazy about him all those years ago, his way of being a bad boy but kind, living on coffee and cigarettes, wearing jeans without underwear, collecting books but never reading them, disarming her with eager loving that cost him nothing. Had he ever given her a present? Not even at Christmas. And now they were sixty-two years old and it was snowing again. She raised her collar, turned her back on the dark fortress of a theatre, and headed in the direction of Confederation Park and her hotel. The eerie quiet of downtown Ottawa on a Saturday night in March. Every time she had looked up these last few weeks it was snowing. On her walks to the river, dinning her lines into her head, snow came over her boots.
She remembered her mother saying that across the river, in Quebec, they call the snow that falls in March a broom that sweeps away the old snow. What a cunning way to soften the blow of the never-ending accumulation. This snow is helping to get rid of that snow. This broken heart is getting rid of that broken heart. Had she recognized his voice? Only after he began telling her about himself, how he was a businessman based in Asia, "although my business isn''t really kosher," he''d chuckled, taking her into his confidence in his old unabashed way. Listening to him, the play and her humiliation receded. The bare wire of the past touched the bare wire of the present and zapped her heart. 1979 then, 2008 now.
In the park she rested her eyes on the lampposts: snow globes turned upside down, their spotlit cascades sweeping sideways, then dashing down, then up again, then down, riding the nerve ends of every air current. Effortless, she thought. A beautiful performance for an audience of one. Despite the hour, she too was on the move. Her car was in the hotel''s parking lot, her suitcase in the trunk. She wasn''t driving back to Montreal, she was escaping to her lake of bays. Almonte, Middleville, Hopetown-- she had known these dots on the map since childhood. The two-lane road curved its way west, gradually rising into the Lanark Highlands.
On either side were sloping white fields, up late and reading themselves in the dark. Nan would be awake too, waiting for her, wanting to hear how it went, and what could she say? That she had muffed her lines and it was like falling from a great height: the bottom came up so slowly to meet her. What''s the line? The last one, yes, but what''s the next one? Come on. What''s the next line? Dry mouth, icy hands, the full-on horror of her vision going dark at the edges-- as if she were about to faint-- and all she had was a strange hyper- focus on not knowing what came next and the audience''s growing dismay. "Line! Line! " Until the prompter fed her Winnie''s next words in a theatre catching on fast. No more nodding off. An actor was coming apart at the seams. Afterwards, her trusty co-star Ferris jammed his woollen toque on his head and slunk out in his ratty brown jacket without saying goodnight.
And it washed over her afresh--the panic and shame, and letting people down. "There''s one thing actors have to do," she thought, "and that''s remember their fucking lines." At the foot of the Hopetown hill she turned south and climbed another hill she knew by heart, on past more fields, and what a relief to be driving mile after mile through the countryside away from the blazing confinement of her burial mound on stage. The role of a lifetime, Winnie in Beckett''s Happy Days , but the director was Richard and they hadn''t agreed on anything. "Play it for laughs," he kept saying. "Be funny, Lu. Just decide to be funny." "You be funny," she''d said.
Asshole. "O woe is me." That was the joke of it. Winnie--fishing for dear life in her mud puddle of a brain for the old quotations from school-- Hamlet , Milton, Keats-- desperate for anything to hang on to--terrorized, sun-addled Winnie couldn''t remember either. Alone in the spotlight, buried up to her neck yet still chirping away: the last gasps of a broken bird. Willie was there--Ferris--but she couldn''t see him until he crawled into view, dressed to kill, intent on scaling her mound and getting her gun and putting her out of her misery, no doubt. She couldn''t play it for laughs, not just for laughs. It should scald the audience, take their heads off, leave them changed, floored, done in.
And she thought of King Lear in London a few years ago: Cordelia and Lear at the end. How she couldn''t get up from her seat after that, not for a long while. At County Road 8 she swung right through rougher, emptier country to Watson''s Corners and Dalhousie Lake, up the long hill past the baseball field to McDonald''s Corners with its general store and church and scattering of houses, then windingly and more downhill than not towards Elphin, less hamlet than intersection despite its imposing church. She sensed what lay beyond her in the never-ending dark: the lonely woodlots and woodpiles, the split-rail fences, the rumpled fields interrupted by encroaching cedars, the small simple houses and every so often newer ones--suburban-looking and charmless--the sugar bushes, the bare rock, the unsung Canadian Mississippi. Off the beaten track and with place names peculiar to this part of the world--a village appearing where corners meet. The falling snow had subsided, the night was clear. Turning north at Elphin, she drove to the hilltop and ahead of her was the full moon flooding the valley with cold glittering light. Halfway down the long descent, the road flattened out before dipping again, then once more: "a nun''s pleasure.
" Another Quebec turn of phrase, but she hadn''t learned that one from her mother. At the bottom, the road hugged the edge of Stump Lake and continued on to the bridge over the curving Mississippi, and it was like going from room to room in a dark house without hurting herself, she knew it so well. It was like putting on her slippers and pouring herself a stiff drink. Now the stone house on the riverbank came into view and Lulu slowed down and pulled over, stopping where she usually did not stop. A tall and handsome landmark she always admired on her way by, having learned to hive it off from memories of being here with Tony. Imagine that: Tony Lloyd showing up again after all these years. Rolling her window partway down, she sat still for a while, the house and river on her left, the woods on her right. She had recognized his lips, unchanged behind that slop of beard, as were his attractively crooked teeth.
His old in-cahoots smile--surely it was more preening than it used to be. And his voice-- more self- satisfied as he filled her in on what had happened after he left her, how he went to Nicaragua to see what a revolution was like and befriended a mercenary who knew Spanish, but the guy turned out to have weapons and drugs in the false bottom of his suitcase, and they were both thrown in jail. "It was terrible. Mock executions, beatings. I couldn''t set eyes on a gun for a year without bursting into tears." After which he could see guns by the bucketload without blinking an eye? But she let him ramble on, playing up his innocence and expecting her to buy in. So he went to Asia, "where it would be peaceful," again scanning her face for sympathy, admiration even, and there he became a gold smuggler. No kidding.
To think he thought he was still recognizable. She wanted to grab a pair of scissors and snip the unruly hairs breaking free of his beard, doing handstands beside his nose. "I was thrown in jail in Asia too," he told her, "six weeks in Hong Kong, nine.