Ellen in Pieces Page 10

She gathered up her things and went inside to pay. They would never come out. You could die at your table, your face on the plate, flies swarming above you, and they wouldn’t come out.

  In the café bathroom, she combed her hair, which she had apparently neglected to do before leaving the gîte. She picked the grains of sleep out of her eyes.

  The walk back helped. Twice, she dropped Colette because she had to keep hoisting her stretched-out skort. Each time she bent over to pick up the book from the dusty roadside, her mood relaxed its hold a little. By the time she reached the campground, it was dawning on her that she had behaved badly.

  Surprise, surprise.

  Celine was in the pool. It was unheated, too cold for Ellen, she had discovered the first day when she dipped her hand in. Celine, though, was made of stiffer stuff, and there stood Jean-François, watching her ply the waters. Ellen watched him watching her friend’s long lithe body glide the blue length of the pool, his glasses trained on her, magnifying her, bringing her closer. Who could blame him? Celine looked thirty under water.

  Jean-François glanced up and, seeing Ellen, hurried over. “There was a dead mouse in the pool this morning. I didn’t have time to get it out. I came to tell her. But maybe I shouldn’t now. What she doesn’t know? Ça ne la blessera pas.”

  He followed Ellen away from the pool. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You are crying.”

  She blinked through the sudden tears. She was ashamed of how she had goaded Celine that morning—Celine who was like a sister to her. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.” Her skirt was hanging low on her hips. She yanked it up and Colette fell to the ground again. And Ellen remembered the last line of the book and her own harried face in the café mirror, uglier for never, ever being in the wrong.

  “I finished my book,” she told Jean-François as she bent to pick it up. “I didn’t bring another.”

  “We have books!” Jean-François guided her by the elbow toward the gîte. “English books. People leave them.”

  In the common room where they had eaten the night before, he pulled something off the shelf. Dean Koontz. He squeezed her shoulders, ran his hands up and down her bare arms as she clasped both books to her chest. When he kissed her, it was full on the lips, not alternate cheeks, and for a long time. He tangoed her against the bookshelf and lapped inside her mouth. And Ellen kissed him back like she had nothing to lose, which was true.

  Jean-François searched his pocket and came up with a scrap, a receipt it looked like. “Write your e-mail address. Here.” There was a jar on the shelf. “Here is a pen.”

  When she’d written her address, he took the receipt. Then he took her book, kissing her wrist as payment. “I am going to read this book about Colette.”

  “Actually, it’s about Chéri,” Ellen said.

  “It will be good for my English. Now I have to go back to work. You’re not leaving yet? Will I see you later?”

  “I sure hope so,” Ellen said.

  Upstairs, the shower was running, meaning Celine had probably walked right past the open door of the common room. Ellen lay on her bed. She could still feel it, the ridge of the bookshelf impressing itself into the small of her back, the fullness of two tongues in her mouth.

  The shower turned off. A few minutes later, Celine came in. Seeing Ellen, she made a sound. Disgust maybe. Or hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen said.

  “Oh, right,” Celine said.

  “I am.”

  Celine applied some kind of balm to her lips. When she finished, she asked, “Do you want to go or stay?”

  “What do you want to do?” Ellen said.

  “I don’t care either way.”

  But Ellen could tell that she did.

  “Let’s go then,” she said.

  THE last four days of the hike were on flatter terrain, much of it on roads. They felt almost merry, walking along, Ellen suffused with longing the whole way. She couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss and that maybe Jean-François would write. How glad she was that they’d left before she screwed him. Because sometimes a kiss was enough. The bittersweetness of it. He had picked her. Picked her like a fruit.

  In Ellen’s experience, the promise of love was usually more pleasurable than its fulfillment.

  She told Celine, “Thank you for bringing me here. I love it. I would come back in a second.”

  On the roadside, frequent casualties—les papillons (another word she knew!), their wings a startling blue, or variations of orange and brown. Flutter, flutter. All along the way, she took pictures of the inch-high daffodils and the bizarre beetles they encountered on the trails. She used Celine’s hand as a frame of reference.

  Otherwise no one would believe her.

  TONY got her postcard.

  “I kissed someone,” she told him at her next appointment. “Doesn’t that count? Against a bookcase. I almost slipped a disc. And Tony? It was a French kiss.”

  Tony said, “Oo-la-la!”

  TWO weeks after they got back, Celine phoned to say that Jean-François had e-mailed.

  “I didn’t realize you exchanged addresses,” Ellen said, perhaps in a give-away tone, because Celine clammed up after that.

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. Just hello. Anyway, I should go.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Ellen said. She was already checking her own e-mail. Nothing from Jean-François, just a long complaining message from Mimi in Toronto.

  Georgia called fifteen minutes later. Ellen was still at her desk, rooted there in shock. “What happened on your trip that you didn’t tell me about, Ellen?”

  Ellen had wanted to savour Jean-François a little longer, to keep him a secret, to see what might happen if she didn’t charge at a man for a change. But it had never been secret. Celine was in on it, though she hadn’t mentioned, or even hinted at, seeing Ellen and Jean-François kiss.

  “Celine just phoned me,” Georgia said. “She’s got a thing going with some guy there.”

  In the background, Gary called, “Get the details!”

  Obviously, Jean-François had kissed Celine too, in between ogling her in the pool. He had wooed Ellen in town, then driven back to the gîte to woo Celine. That kiss, which Ellen had cherished as a rarity, a curiosity, a delicate and precious wonder, it meant nothing.

  “He was nothing,” she told Georgia. “Just French. It made him seem more attractive than he really was. And you know what? I’m never travelling with Celine again. She has to have her way with everything. Where we stayed, where we ate. But she’s never up-front about it. You discuss it and, lo and behold, you’re doing what she wants every time. She’s the same here. All because of a dead baby.”

  There. She had said it. And shuddered in triumph.

  “Ellen,” Georgia said.

  “You know it’s true. Even now when I mention Mimi or Yolanda, she tenses up. How dare I remind her of her loss! Unless it’s something bad. Mimi’s drug troubles? It was all Celine could do not to rub her hands together in glee.”

  “What happened to Celine was awful.”

  “And it was a long, long time ago. Enough is enough. What was it called? What it died of?” Ellen, still at the computer, tried to type it in.

  Mr. Google said: Did you mean anencephaly?

  “And Ellen?” Georgia said. “I got your postcard. What did you mean?”

  A picture of an anencephalic baby popped up on the screen, a little saucer-eyed alien, its head flattened just above the eyebrows, staring out at Ellen. Ellen stared back, unable to close the window or turn away. Grotesque, piteous, the creature looked right into her empty place. And Ellen shuddered again to think what it saw there. Yet the body was normal and human. No, look. Oh, Christ! The poor little thing had no fingers. No fingers on its tiny little hands.

  She pressed her forehead to the cold desk. “Georgia. I’m hanging up. I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  “JEAN-FRANçOIS believes in desti
ny. Like I do,” Celine told Ellen later that summer.

  “Oh, puke,” Ellen said. “You hardly know the guy.”

  “We e-mail every day. Several times.”

  “You should be careful,” Ellen said. “You can get cancer from too much screen time. Horrible tumours all over your face.”

  “You’ll find someone too, Ellen. As soon as you renounce your negativity. So will you come, or will you stay home and pout?”

  “I think I’ll come and pout,” Ellen said.

  She goes to Celine’s dinner party even though she doesn’t like Celine’s food. Once Celine served three different potato dishes in the same meal, another time fried-tofu bologna. Anyway, Ellen is trying to keep off those eight pounds that she unexpectedly dropped on the trail in France, and the ten she lost after her father killed himself, so why not? She brings two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  Jean-François leaps up from the couch when Ellen comes in the door, bestows the triple kiss—left cheek, right cheek, left cheek. Unfortunately, he looks better than she remembered, mostly because she’s been downplaying him in her mind all day. The unflattering glasses, the beige hair. Dean Koontz! In her imagination his hair had thinned more and more until his not-so-innocent scalp shone through, which only makes his hair seem thicker now. Also, his glasses are new, the frames smaller and rounder, she thinks. He looks so plaintive.

  Georgia and Gary were invited too, so the conversation turns political. Luckily, Jean-François is a Green, which keeps the shouting to a bearable level. European politics—left, right, left—who can figure it out? Ellen sips her wine and smiles, pleased by how little she actually feels after her day-long snit. Every time her eyes and Jean-François’s cross paths, she forces herself to blink.

  Before dessert, she comes out of the bathroom—”Ah!”—to find Jean-François lurking in the hall.

  “Sorry,” Ellen tells him. “You should have knocked.”

  “I was waiting,” he explains. “Waiting to speak with you.”

  Ellen is a little drunk. In the bathroom, she was wondering whether, if she stopped drinking now, she could still drive home.

  “I thought I was writing you,” he says.

  He means help me, and glances back down the hall to the dining room where Celine is dishing out rubbery squares of tofu cheesecake.

  “I gave you my address,” Ellen hisses.

  “I lost it! I had to look for it in the guest book!”

  “What guest book?” Ellen says. “I didn’t sign any guest book.”

  Jean-François lifts his shoulders, his Gallic, tragicomic shrug flowing into a lean. He leans into Ellen and she responds, so they meet in the middle of this terrible gap of geography and misunderstanding. Then, instinctively, she puts out her hand. Drunkenly, with a strength she doesn’t even know she possesses, she smacks it flat against Jean-François’s chest, pinning his eager heart beneath her palm.

  This way, she holds him back.

  BECAUSE, when Yolanda was born, Celine was the first to cradle her, even before Ellen. Celine, who kept sniffing the top of the baby’s head, the dark, pasted-down fluff. Celine was a week overdue then.

  She told Ellen, “I can’t wait. I just can’t wait.”

  4

  DIVINATION

  The triplex Ellen moves into that September is old. Eighty years old, even a hundred (what is time?). Three shops stood here once, but now they’re artists’ studios, green-shingled with large windows, in the heart of Kitsilano. Time has played a trick on the neighbourhood too. Once Kits was the Cordova Island of Vancouver, a hippy paradise, but after four gentrifying decades only pockets of this patchoulied past remain.

  The studio is about a quarter the size of Ellen’s former house in North Vancouver. She’s had to sort and cull her life’s artifacts down to a cruel minimum. Unloading her car that first day, backing up with a box of books she couldn’t bear to part with, she crashes into her new neighbour Gerhard standing too close behind her. She bounces off him, one of those large, incompressible Germans with a shaved head, unnerving blue eyes, and chains. Jangling, he stoops to gather the fallen books, then carries them into the studio half filled with her scant cardboard-boxed possessions.

  And won’t leave. He stands like a monolith in the middle of the empty space, talking about his work. Ellen, flustered, locates the espresso machine in a box, fires it up. She knows by the display in his window that video is his medium, the wilderness his muse, as it often seems to be for Germans. (Ellen, who has never been to Berlin, where Gerhard says he’s from, pictures it in black and white with beautiful soot-dark buildings, a city without chlorophyll.) The video monitor in Gerhard’s window shows a forest clearing, static except for the occasional meanderings of a squirrel or the winged interruption of a bird. This may draw crowds in Berlin, Ellen thinks, but here?

  After she brings out the coffee and they settle on the floor to drink it, Gerhard explains the significance of the penises.

  Ellen says, “What?”

  She leaves him sitting cross-legged, a position he struggled into, the espresso cup in his big hand like a part of a doll’s tea set, and goes outside to look in his window again. There they are, rearing up from a dozen trees, wooden phalluses that she somehow missed on first glance. She wants to watch longer in case a hiker or a school group accidentally stumbles into the clearing, but she can’t; she has company.

  When she returns, Gerhard’s lengthy, blue-eyed appraisal causes her to blush. Can he see it? Forty-seven years piled on her face, her nervousness making this move?

  “And you, Ellen McGinty?” he finally says. “Tell me about your art.”

  “I’m a potter.”

  Is she even allowed to say that when, except for last summer’s refresher at the community centre, she hasn’t actually thrown a pot for twenty-five years? She points across the terrifying studio space, past the tiny kitchen. There’s a tumble-down garage out back.

  “I’ll mostly be working in the garage. That’s where I’ll put the wheel and kiln. I’ll sell the pots here. Make some kind of window display, like you have. It’ll be wonderful. Every day, heaven.”

  “HELL,” she tells Tilda, months later.

  Tilda is a fabric artist, a knitter of iconic Canadian wildlife, who lives on the other side of Ellen in the triplex. Big round glasses on a gaunt face emphasize her waifishness, as do her hands, perpetually chapped from the wool. Tilda looks like a thirty-year-old Joyce Carol Oates who knits, rather than writes, compulsively.

  For Ellen, after the initial excitement of the move came the inevitable letdown: such is the human condition. Since then she’s been, creatively speaking, funked. On the plus side, she has some furniture now and a broad knowledge of Japanese penis temples, Thai penis amulets (Gerhard’s are displayed in small velvet-lined boxes), and the famous penis park in Korea. Thanks to Tilda, she knows the difference between a Townsend’s vole and a Short-tailed shrew and how one is much harder to knit. But the pots are giving her trouble. They are the irritants in what would otherwise be the life she saw in dreams.

  “I like your pots,” Tilda tells her.

  “Even in the way you say that. You might have said, ‘I like cabbage.’ I thought I would feel fulfilled. Creative. I’m just bored. Also, no one buys my pots.”

  “What is your problem?” Gerhard asks, carrying in from the kitchen a large bowl filled with water.

  They’re in his studio awaiting the new year. He sets the bowl on the coffee table in front of the women, checks his watch. “There is art and there is commerce. Which is making you unhappy? That no one buys your product? Or that you are not creating the art you yearn to create?”

  “Is it too much to ask that I create beautiful art that lots of people want to buy?”

  “Yes,” Gerhard says.

  “It sometimes happens,” Tilda says. “But do you need money, Ellen?”

  “Not really. I sold my house, remember?”

  She doesn’t mention the inheritance from her father
. Her years as publicist taught her that people in the arts can be resentful. Such, too, is the human condition when everyone is desperate for a grant.

  “What is your problem then, Ellen?” Gerhard asks on his way back to the kitchen.

  “I feel my pots are worthless if no one wants them. And if they’re worthless, I’m worthless. Also, there’s a space issue. Where am I going to put them?”

  “You are confused!” he calls.

  Gerhard returns with a lighter and a long, perfectly innocent beeswax taper. Ellen holds out her wineglass to be refilled. Tilda covers hers with her hand (headaches).

  “What is this thing you call ‘worth,’ Ellen? A perception. Make your worthless pots and sell them for a thousand dollars. More people will buy them than if you charge ten bucks. But are they worth more because of that? Are you worth more as a person?”

  “I would feel more successful,” Ellen says.

  “What is success?” Gerhard asks.

  “Why is it so hard to talk to Germans?” Ellen asks Tilda.

  “Answer me. Is success only to be measured in terms of money?”

  “If you knew how poor I was twenty-five years ago. Larry, my ex? He left me when I was pregnant. I had a two-year-old. I didn’t know how to do anything but read a book. Well, I knew how to throw a pot that wouldn’t wobble. You can guess how much use that was.”

  “Wa-wa-wa,” Gerhard says, rubbing his gargantuan fist in his Aryan eye. “Wa-wa-wa.”

  He can be too blunt, cruel, and his forceful, über-correct English makes the unilingual Ellen wither. But there’s a truth in what he’s saying too. She’s been holding onto that sob story for years. Even she’s tired of it.

  When he has finished mocking her, he says, “It’s almost time. Put on your hats.”

  Gerhard created penis hats for their first New Year’s Eve as side-by-side neighbours. They get along, the three of them, so much that Ellen turned down several invitations in order to stay home tonight. No doubt Gerhard will go out later, but he has chosen to be with Ellen and Tilda at the crucial moment.

  The unicorn horn of the papier-mâché erection juts from Tilda’s forehead. It looks to have been constructed around the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels, as does Gerhard’s, while Ellen’s is obviously built up from a measly toilet-paper tube.