Lady Oracle

  "Joan. At last I have founded you."

  "Who is this?" I said.

  "You cannot guess?" the voice said coyly. Now it was sounding familiar. "This is your friend Mavis." A flirtatious laugh.

  "Paul," I said. "Oh, my God."

  "I have read about you in the newspaper," Paul said, undaunted by my dismay, "I have recognized the picture, though it is not so beautiful as you. I have been so happy about your success, you do not need to write the Gothic Romance any more, you are a true writer. I have read your book. It is promising, I think, for a first book, by a woman."

  Behind me I could hear Arthur coming in the door. I had to get Paul off the phone, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings. "Paul," I said, "I must see you. I'd like to see you."

  "This, too, is what I desire," said Paul. "I know of a good restaurant...."

  I met him at it the next day, for a late lunch. Zerdo's, the restaurant was called. There never used to be restaurants in Toronto with names like Zerdo's, but now there were many. It was like Paul to pick a restaurant with a name like some sort of drain cleaner, I thought as I opened the door. It was a narrow darkened room with tables covered with checked cloths and lamps in the shape of candles. Artificial grapevines festooned the walls. At the back of the room was a pass-through hatchway covered with fake brick wallpaper and hung with copper pans.... The maitre d' bustled toward me, short and alert, gold-tasseled menus under his arm.

  "John," I said involuntarily. I'd know that soft moustache anywhere....

  "I beg your pardon, madame," he said. "My name is Zerdo."

  Paul was already walking toward me. Ceremoniously he kissed my hand and led me with gentle melancholy towards a table. When we were seated he did not speak, but gazed at me with reproachful eyes from behind his glasses, which were now, I noticed, tinted: a pale mauve.

  "This used to be called the Bite-A-Bit," I said. I didn't say I'd been the cashier, but there was my double behind the cash register, a heavy woman with bunned hair, wearing a black dress which showed her rippling elbows but not her bosom. One of my once-potential futures, in the flesh; Mrs. Zerdo, no doubt. At this moment I envied her.

  "Joan," said Paul. "Why have you fleed from me?" He'd taken the plastic rose out of its vase and was twirling it between his fingers, apparently unaware that it wasn't real. What could I say that would be appropriate?

  "It was all for the best," I said.

  "No, Joan," he said sadly. "It was not. You know I have loved you. I have wished to marry you, once you were older; I planned that, I should have told you. Yet you run away from me. You have made me very unhappy." He said this, yet I didn't altogether believe him. I noticed his suit, which was certainly a more expensive one than he'd once been able to afford; and he had an air of confidence that was new to him. The bitter, threadbare aristocrat had been blurred a little; superimposed on that was a layer of successful businessman.

  Zerdo appeared with the wine list. He was deferential to Paul, who ordered flawlessly. Paul took out a Gauloise, offered me one, and inserted one for himself in his cigarette holder, which was new and sumptuous.

  "I am pleased I have discovered you," Paul said, as we sipped our lemon soup. "Now we will have to think what to do, as I see you have married."

  "Paul," I said to change the subject, "do you live here now? Have you moved to Canada?"

  "No," he said, "but I am here often. On business. I am no longer with the bank since six years, I have another business. I am -" he hesitated "- importer."

  "What do you import?" I asked.

  "Many things," he said vaguely. "Wood carvings, the chess sets and the boxes for cigarettes, from Czechoslovakia; garments from India, they are popular now, and from Mexico. It is helpful to have a knowledge of many languages. I do not speak all myself, but one can always arrange." He didn't really want to talk about it. I remembered the revolver. Was that a slight bulge under his arm, could he possibly be wearing a shoulder holster? I thought, in rapid succession, of heroin, opium, atomic weapons, jewels and state secrets.

  "I have extracted my mother," he said, "from Poland, but she has died."

  We talked about that, and about his daughter, during the moussaka.

  "I read in the paper that your husband is some sort of a Communist," he said when we'd reached the baklava. "Joan, how could you marry a man like this? I have told you what they are like."

  "He's not exactly a Communist," I said. "It's hard to explain, but it's different here. Besides, it doesn't mean anything here, it's respectable, sort of. They don't do anything; they just have meetings and talk a lot, sort of like the Theosophists."

  "Talk is dangerous," said Paul darkly. "All such things begin by talk. They are good at talk, they are like the Jesuits. Poor child, this is how he made you marry him. You have had your brain washed out by him."

  "No," I said, "it wasn't like that," but Paul was convinced.

  "I can tell you are very unhappy," he said.

  This was true enough, and I didn't deny it. In fact I was enjoying the sensation of all this sympathy lapping around me, like warm washcloths. I'd thought Paul would be angry with me, but he was being so nice. I drank another glass of wine and Paul ordered brandy.

  "You can trust me," he said, patting my hand. "You were a child, you did not know your own mind. Now you are a woman. You will leave this man, you will divorce, we will be happy."

  "Paul, I can't leave," I said. He swam before me in a haze of nostalgia. Was this my lost love, my rescuer? My eyes filled with tears, and so did my nose. I blotted myself with the table napkin. Any minute now I was really going to cry.

  Paul's jaw tightened. "He will not let you. I see," he said. "They are like that. If you tell him it is I you love, he will.... But I have friends. If necessary I shall steal you."

  "No," I said, "Paul, you can't do that. That would be dangerous. Besides, people don't do things like that here."

  Paul patted my hand. "Do not worry," he said. "I know what I am doing. I will wait, and then, at the right moment, I will strike." His eyes gleamed; it was a challenge, he wanted to win.

  I couldn't tell him I didn't want to be stolen; that would be too rude, and painful for him as well, "Well," I said, "it's important that you don't tell anyone you've seen me. And you shouldn't phone.... Paul, did you phone me before, without saying anything?"

  "Maybe once," he said. "I thought it was wrong number." So it wasn't him.

  We got up to leave. Paul took my arm. "Do you still write Mavis Quilps?" I said, remembering. "I guess you don't have to any more."

  "I continue to write them, as a recreation," Paul said. "It is soothing to the mind, after a hard day's work." He paused for a moment, searched an inside pocket. "Here," he said. "I have brought a gift, for you. You are a specialty. I am alone in my life, no one else would care. But I know you would like it."

  He handed me the book. Nurse of the High Arctic, it said on the cover. By Mavis Quilp. The pink-cheeked nurse smiled winsomely from the nimbus of her parka.

  "Oh, Paul," I said, "thank you so much." I was touched, ludicrously; it was like the end of the whale movie, he was so sad, so trusting, so hopeless, consolation was so impossible. I threw my arms around his neck and burst into tears.

  Now you've done it, I thought as I sobbed against his shoulder. I had to stoop a little to do this. He was wearing Hai Karate shaving lotion, which made me cry even harder. How could I get out of it? I had been too encouraging, again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Paul wanted to put me into a taxi. It was part of his image that I should go off in a taxi, but I said I wanted to walk, so he got into the taxi himself. I watched as he was swept away, north on Church Street in the glinting metal traffic. Then I started to walk home.

  My eyes were still swollen and I was numbed and depressed. Paul's wish to rescue me was gallant but futile, as all gallantry now seemed to me futile. Besides, I didn't want to be rescued by him, but hadn't had the courage to tell him. Sullenly I would iron his boxe
r shorts and eat his caviar, in some tacky hideout, pretending to be happy and grateful; sullenly I would escape again, leaving him punctured and perhaps, this time, vengeful. I'd once thought I was in love with him. Maybe I had been.

  "There's magic in love and smiles. Use them every day, in all you do, and see what wonderful things happen," Brown Owl used to say chirpily, reading it from her little book. I'd believed that slogan, I'd believed that the absence of wonderful things happening had been due to my own failure, my insufficient love. Now it seemed to me that the name of a furniture polish could be substituted for "love" in this maxim without at all violating its meaning. Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I'd polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling.

  At that moment it seemed to me impossible that anyone could ever really love anyone, or if they could, that anything lasting or fine would come of it. Love was the pursuit of shadows, and I was a shadow for Paul, doomed to flee before him, evanescent as a cloud. Some cloud, I thought, already my feet hurt. He probably didn't want me at all, he wanted the adventure of kidnaping me from what he imagined to be a den of fanged and dangerous Communists, armed to the teeth with brain-suction devices and slaughterous rhetoric, I in their midst bound hand and foot by jargon. Once he had me he wouldn't know at all what to do with me. He hadn't been able to live with me before, he couldn't stand the mess, and the years hadn't made me any neater. I Was not the same as my phantom.

  When I got home there was another anonymous note, something about coffins, but I scarcely glanced at it. I climbed the stairs to the apartment, slowly; I had a blister on one foot. I hoped Arthur would be there so I'd have at least the comfort of a familiar body; but he wasn't, and I remembered he'd said he'd be at a meeting. The apartment was empty and desolate, as it would be, I thought, without him. I'd better get used to it; any day now the Royal Porcupine would get tired of his game and escalate it.

  I went into the bathroom, ran the tub full of warm water, added some Vitabath and climbed in with my Mavis Quilp. The bathroom had always been my refuge, it was the only room in the house, all the houses, where I could lock the door. I'd wallow in the tub like a steamy walrus while my mother cleared her throat discreetly outside the door, torn between the grunts and shouts of the body she refused to admit she possessed and her unwillingness to be explicit.

  "Joan, what are you doing in there?"

  Long pause. "Taking a bath."

  "You've been in there for an hour. Other people might want to use the bathroom too, you should be more considerate."

  I covered myself with bubbles and submerged myself in Nurse of the High Arctic. Why had Sharon ever left her comfortable hospital in England to come up north where there were no conveniences and where the handsome doctor sneered at her every time she dropped a scalpel? She sped over the ice floe in her runaway dogsled, pursued on foot by the grouchy doctor. Stop, you silly little fool. I can't I don't know how. I knew what would happen, I was familiar with Paul's style.... Only when the doctor saw her upside down and covered with fur would he realize how much he loved her, and after that he would have to earn her love in return. He would have an accident, or she would have an accident, one or the other. Pure ice, pure snow, chaste kiss.

  I longed for the simplicity of that world, where happiness was possible and wounds were only ritual ones. Why had I been closed out from that impossible white paradise where love was as final as death, and banished to this other place where everything changed and shifted?

  The phone rang, but I let it ring. I wasn't going to get out of the bathtub and leave puddles on the floor to listen to someone breathe; I would stay here with Sharon and Doctor Hunter. He touched her cheek, brushing away a strand of hair. Brusquely he told her that she should keep her hair pinned back: didn't she remember her training,? Seductive ringlets, tendrils and strands, they always featured in Paul's books, as in Milton's. Sharon blushed and turned away to hide it.

  Three quarters of an hour later, as the helicopter with the rescued Eskimo was touching down (any moment now, the declaration, the embrace), as the water was getting tepid for the second time, I thought I heard someone in the next room. I listened, careful not to make a ripple: there were definite footsteps, crossing the main room and heading towards my bedroom.

  I froze in the bathtub; I went rigid with fear. For a moment I lay there like a giant popsicle; visions of knife-wielding rapists, their fangs dripping blood, flashed before me, visions of burglars, dope-crazed and lethal, visions of perverts who would chop me into pieces and leave choice cuts in every trash bin in the city. There was no bathroom window. Perhaps if I stayed quiet he would simply take what he could find, which wouldn't be much, and leave the way he had come. I could have sworn I'd put the catch on the window that opened onto the fire escape, and he hadn't come in the door, it squeaked so much I would have heard it.

  Slowly I eased myself out of the bathtub. I didn't pull the plug, it would've gurgled. I spread out the bath mat, then knelt on it and applied my eye to the keyhole. At first I could see nothing. The mysterious visitor was out of sight in the bedroom. I waited, and he crossed the doorway. His face was turned the other way, but he was short and he looked familiar.

  It was Paul, I decided. I hadn't been expecting him quite so soon. There were some rummaging sounds, a few mutterings: what was he doing? He was supposed to be looking for me, not going through my closet. I felt like calling out, "Oh, for heaven's sake, Paul, I'm in here." I wrapped my torso in a bath towel; I'd have to go out and have a serious talk with him, apologize to him, tell him I was sorry but he'd misunderstood me, I was happy with my husband and the past was the past. He could hardly carry me off after that. Then we would become old friends.

  I unlocked the door and padded in my bare feet across to the bedroom. "Paul," I said, "I want to...."

  The man turned around, and it wasn't Paul. It was Fraser Buchanan, in his tweed jacket with the leather patches and a trendy turtle-neck sweater, plus a pair of black gloves. He'd been going through my bureau drawers, and it was obvious from his thoroughness and air of method that this wasn't the first time he'd done this sort of thing.

  "What are you doing in here?" I shouted at him.

  I'd startled him, but he recovered quickly. He bared his teeth like a cornered chinchilla.

  "I'm doing research," he said, very cool. Obviously it wasn't the first time he'd been caught.

  "I could have you arrested," I said. I can't have looked too dignified: I was holding the towel together at the back.

  "The fact is, I know a good deal more about you than you think. I know things I'm sure you would rather keep ... private. Just between us two."

  What had he found out? Who would he tell? Arthur, I thought. Anthur will know. My hidden selves, my other lives, unworthy. I couldn't let that happen.

  "What?" I managed to squeak. "What are you talking about?"

  "I think you understand me well enough, Mrs. Foster. Or should I say Miss Delacourt, Miss Louisa K. Delacourt, author of Love Defied and others?"

  He'd got as far as my underwear drawer, then.

  "I've read a number of your books," he continued, "though I didn't know at the time they were yours. They aren't bad, for that kind of thing. But they don't exactly go with Lady Oracle, do they? Wrong image, I should think. I don't expect your Women's Libber fans will be too overjoyed when they hear the news, though some other people I could think of might find it amusing. Not to mention the Braeside Banner. Those pictures of you are really fine. Tell me, how did you manage to lose all that avoirdupois?"

  "What do you want?" I said.

  "Well, that depends," he said crisply, "on what you've got to offer. In exchange, you might say."

  "Let me put on some clothes," I said, "and we'll talk it over."


  "I prefer you this way," said Fraser Buchanan.

  I was furious, but I was also frightened. He'd discovered at least two of my secret identities, and I was so confused at that point I couldn't remember whether I had any more. If I hadn't become a culture heroine it wouldn't have mattered quite so much, though I couldn't stand the thought of Arthur knowing about my previous life as Pneumatic Woman. And if he told the media people the truth about Louisa K. Delacourt, my brief interlude of being taken seriously would be over. Unpleasant as it had been, I'd discovered it was much better than not being taken seriously. I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

  I put on my apricot velvet gown, piled my hair on top of my head with a few seductive tendrils twining around my neck, and attached some dangly gold earrings. I put on makeup, I even put on some perfume. Something would have to be done about Fraser Buchanan, but I hadn't yet figured out what. I decided to admire him. As I entered the living room, I smiled at him. He was sitting on the chesterfield with his hands on his knees, as if waiting for the dentist.

  I suggested we go out for a drink, as there was nothing to drink in the apartment (a lie). He agreed readily, as I thought he would. He felt he had won and there was nothing to be discussed but the terms.

  The bar he chose was the Fourth Estate. He hoped a lot of journalists would see him with me. I ordered a Dubonnet on the rocks with a twist of lemon, he a double Scotch. I offered to pay, but he didn't go for that.

  "I also know about your little fling with that fraudulent artist, or poet, or whatever he calls himself," he confided, leaning across the chic round mirror-topped table. "I've been following you around."

  My stomach went cold. This was the thing I had feared the most. I'd been so careful; had Chuck told him? If he'd wanted to really hurt me, of course that's what he would've done.

  "Everybody knows about that. Even my husband knows about that" I said, with enough contempt to dismiss it as a negotiable item. "The man practically issued press releases. He sold two of my shopping lists in a sealed envelope to a university; he swore they were love letters. He filched them from my purse. Didn't you know that?" Selling samples of my handwriting was something Chuck had often threatened to do - he needed the bread, as he put it - but as far as I knew he'd never done it.