Bluebeard's Egg

  She has another way of dating herself, which she uses less often. Once, when she was young but adult, she had a show of her paintings closed down by the police. It was charged with being obscene. She was one of the first artists in Toronto that this happened to. Just before that, no gallery would even have dared to mount the show, and shortly afterwards, when chains and blood and body parts in supermarket trays had become chic, it would have been considered tame. All Yvonne did at the time was to stick the penises onto men's bodies more or less the way they really were, and erect into the bargain. "I don't see what the big deal was," she can say, still ingenuously. "I was only painting hard-ons. Isn't that what every man wants? The police were just jealous." She goes on to add that she can't make out why, if a penis is a good thing, calling someone a penis-brain is an insult. She has this conversation only with people she knows very well or else has just met. The shocking thing about Yvonne, when she intends to be shocking, is the contrast between certain elements of her vocabulary and the rest of it, which, like her manner, is reserved and even secretive.

  For a while she became a sort of celebrity, but that was because she was too inexperienced to know better. People made her into a cause, and even collected money for her, which was nice of them but got in the way, she now feels, of her reputation as a serious artist. It became boring to be referred to as "the penis lady." There was one advantage though: people bought her paintings, though not for ultra-top prices, especially after magic realism came back in. By this time she has money put away: she knows too much about the lives of artists to spend it all and have nothing to fall back on when the wind shifts and the crunch comes, though she sometimes worries that she'll be one of those old women found dead in a pile of empty cat-food cans with a million dollars stashed in her sock. She hasn't had a show now for several years; she calls it "lying low." The truth is she hasn't been producing much except her drawings of men. She has quite a few of them by now, but she isn't sure what she's going to do with them. Whatever she's looking for she hasn't yet found.

  At the time of her revolutionary penises, she was more interested in bodies than she is now. Renoir was her hero, and she still admires him as a colourist, but she now finds his great lolloping nudes vapid and meaningless. Recently she's become obsessed with Holbein. A print of his portrait of Georg Gisze hangs in her bathroom, where she can see it while lying in the tub. Georg looks out at her, wearing a black fur coat and a wonderful pink silk shirt, each vein in his hands, each fingernail perfectly rendered, with a suggestion of darkness in his eyes, a wet shine on his lip, the symbols of his spiritual life around him. On his desk stands a vase, signifying the emptiness and vanity of mortal existence, with one carnation in it, signifying the Holy Ghost, or possibly betrothal. Earlier in her life Yvonne used to dismiss this kind of thing as the Rosemary for Remembrance school of flower arranging: everything had to mean something else. The thing about painting penises was that no one ever mistook them for phallic symbols, or indeed for symbols at all. But now she thinks it would be so handy if there were still some language of images like this, commonly known and understood. She would like to be able to put carnations between the fingers of the men she draws, but it's far too late for that. Surely Impressionism was a mistake, with its flesh that was merely flesh, however beautiful, its flowers that were merely flowers. (But what does she mean by "merely"? Isn't that enough, for a flower to be itself? If Yvonne knew the answer....)

  Yvonne likes to work in the late mornings, when the light is at its best in her studio. After that she sometimes has lunch, with various people she knows. She arranges these lunches from pay phones. She doesn't have a phone herself; when she did have one, she felt she was always at its mercy, whether it was ringing or not; mostly when it was not.

  She doles out these lunches to herself like pills, at intervals, when she thinks she needs them. People living alone, she believes, get squirrelly if they go too long without human contact. Yvonne has had to learn how to take care of herself; she didn't always know. She's like a plant - not a sickly one, everybody comments on how healthy she always is - but a rare one, which can flourish and even live only under certain conditions. A transplant. She would like to write down instructions for herself and hand them over to someone else to be carried out, but despite several attempts on her part this hasn't proved to be possible.

  She prefers small restaurants with tablecloths; the tablecloth gives her something to hold on to. She sits opposite whoever it is that day, her large green eyes looking out from behind the hair that keeps falling down over her forehead, her chin tilted so that the left side of her head is forward. She's convinced that she can hear better with her left ear than with her right, a belief that has nothing to do with deafness.

  Her friends enjoy having lunch with Yvonne, though probably they wouldn't enjoy it as much if they did it more often. They would find themselves running out of things to say. As it is, Yvonne is a good listener: she's always so interested in everything. (There's no deception here: she is interested in everything, in a way.) She likes to catch up on what people are doing. Nobody gets around to catching up on what she is doing, because she gives the impression of being so serene, so perfectly balanced, that their minds are at rest about her. Whatever she's doing is so obviously the right thing. When they do ask, she has a repertoire of anecdotes about herself which are amusing but not very informative. When she runs out of these, she tells jokes. She writes down the punch lines and keeps them on filing cards in her purse so she won't forget them.

  She eats out alone, but not often. When she does, it's usually at sushi bars, where she can sit with her back to the rest of the room and watch the hands of the chefs as they deftly caress and stroke her food. As she eats, she can almost feel their fingers in her mouth.

  Yvonne lives on the top floor of a large house in an older but newly stylish part of the city. She has two big rooms, a bathroom, a kitchenette concealed by louvred folding doors which she keeps closed most of the time, and a walk-out deck on which there are several planters made from barrels sawed in two. These once contained rosebushes, not Yvonne's. This floor used to be the attic, and although Yvonne has to go through the rest of the house to get to it, there's a door at the bottom of her stairs that she can lock if she wants to.

  The house is owned by a youngish couple named Al and Judy, who both work for the town planning department of City Hall and are full of talk and projects. They intend to expand their own living area into Yvonne's floor when their mortgage is paid off; it will be a study for Al. Meanwhile, they are delighted to have a tenant like Yvonne. These arrangements are so fragile, so open to incompatibility and other forms of disaster, so easily destroyed by stereo sets and mud on the rugs. But Yvonne is a gem, says Judy: they never hear a peep out of her. She's almost too quiet for Al, who would rather hear the footsteps when someone comes up behind him. He refers to Yvonne as "The Shadow," but only when he's had a hard day at work and a couple of drinks.

  Anyway, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Al and Judy have a year-old baby named Kimberly, who is at day-care in the mornings and Judy's office in the afternoons, but if they want to go out in the evenings and Yvonne is in, they have no hesitation about leaving Kimberly in her charge. They don't ask her to put Kimberly to bed herself, however. They have never said she's just like one of the family; they don't make that mistake. Sometimes Yvonne comes down and sits in the kitchen while Kimberly is being fed, and Judy thinks she can spot a wistful expression in Yvonne's eyes.

  At night when they're lying in bed or in the morning when they're getting dressed, Al and Judy sometimes talk about Yvonne. Each has a different version of her, based on the fact that she never has men over, or even women. Judy thinks she has no sex life at all; she's given it up, for a reason which is probably tragic. Al thinks she does have a sex life, but carries it on elsewhere. A woman who looks like Yvonne - he's not specific - has to be getting it somehow. Judy says he's a dirty old man, and pokes him in the midriff.
r />   "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Al says. "Yvonne knows."

  As for Yvonne, the situation suits her, for now. She finds it comforting to hear the sounds of family life going on beneath her, especially in the evenings, and when she goes away Judy waters her plants. She doesn't have many of these. In fact, she doesn't have much of anything, in Judy's opinion: an architectural drawing board, a rug and some cushions and a low table, a couple of framed prints, and, in the bedroom, two futons, one on top of the other. Judy speculated at first that the second was for when some man slept over, but none ever does. Yvonne's place is always very tidy, but to Judy it looks precarious. It's too portable, she feels, as if the whole establishment could be folded up in a minute and transported and unfolded almost anywhere else. Judy tells Al that she wouldn't be surprised one morning to find that Yvonne has simply vanished. Al tells her not to be silly: Yvonne is responsible, she'd never go without giving notice. Judy says she's talking about a feeling, not about what she thinks objectively is really going to happen. Al is always so literal.

  Al and Judy have two cats, which are very curious about Yvonne. They climb up to her deck and meow at the french doors to be let in. If she leaves her door ajar, they are up her stairs like a shot. Yvonne has no objection to them, except when they jump on her head while she's resting. Sometimes she will pick up one of them and hold it so that its paws are on either side of her neck and she can feel its heart beating against her. The cats find this position uncomfortable.

  Once in a while Yvonne disappears for days, maybe even a week at a time. Al and Judy don't worry about her, since she says when she'll be back and she's always there at the time stated. She never tells them where she's going, but she leaves a sealed envelope with them which she claims contains instructions for how she could be reached in case of an emergency. She doesn't say what would constitute an emergency. Judy sticks the envelope carefully behind the wall telephone in the kitchen; she doesn't know it's empty.

  Al and Judy have incorporated these absences of Yvonne's into the romances they have built up about her. In Al's, she's off to meet a lover, whose identity must remain secret, either because he's married or for reasons of state, or both. He imagines this lover as much richer and more important than he is. For Judy, Yvonne is visiting the child or children Judy is convinced she has. The father is a brute, and more strong-willed than Yvonne, who anyone can see is the kind of woman who couldn't stand up to either physical violence or a long court battle. This is the only thing that can excuse, for Judy, Yvonne's abandonment of her children. Yvonne is allowed to see them only at infrequent intervals. Judy pictures her meeting them in restaurants, in parks, the constraint, the anguish of separation. She spoons applesauce into the wet pink oyster-like mouth of Kimberly and bursts into tears.

  "Don't be silly," says Al. "She's just off having a roll in the hay. It'll do her a world of good." Al thinks Yvonne has been looking too pale.

  "You think sex with a man is the big solution to everything, don't you?" says Judy, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

  Al pats her. "Not the only one," he says, "but it's better than a slap with a wet noodle, eh?"

  Sometimes it is a slap with a wet noodle, thinks Judy, who has been over-tired recently and feels too many demands are being made upon her. But she smiles up at Al with fondness and appreciation. She knows she's lucky. The standard against which she measures her luck is Yvonne.

  Thus the existence of Yvonne and her slightly weird behaviour lead to marital communication and eventual concord. If she knew this, Yvonne would be both pleased and a little scornful; but deep down underneath she would not give a piss.

  When everything has been smooth and without painful incident for some time, when the tide has gone out too far, when Yvonne has been wandering along the street, looking with curiosity but no great interest at the lighting fixtures, the coral-encrusted bottles and the bridesmaids' dresses, the waterlogged shoes and the antique candle-holders held up by winged nymphs and the gasping fish that the receding waters have left glistening and exposed in all their detail, when she's gone into the Donut Centre and sat down at the counter and seen the doughnuts under glass beneath her elbows, their tentacles drawn in, breathing lightly, every grain of sugar distinct, she knows that up on the hills, in the large suburban yards, the snakes and moles are coming out of their burrows and the earth is trembling imperceptibly beneath the feet of the old men in cardigans and tweed caps raking their lawns. She gets up and goes out, no faster than usual and not forgetting to leave a tip. She's considerate of waitresses because she never wants to be one again.

  She heads for home, trying not to hurry. Behind her, visible over her shoulder if she would only turn her head, and approaching with horrifying but silent speed, is a towering wall of black water. It catches the light of the sun, there are glints of movement, of life caught up in it and doomed, near its translucent crest.

  Yvonne climbs the stairs to her apartment, almost running, the two cats bounding up behind her, and hits the bed just as the blackness breaks over her head with a force that tears the pillow out of her hands and blinds and deafens her. Confusion sweeps over and around her, but underneath the surface terror she is not too frightened. She's done this before, she has some trust in the water, she knows that all she has to do is draw her knees up and close everything, ears, eyes, mouth, hands. All she has to do is hold on. Some would advocate that she let go instead, ride with the current, but she's tried it. Collision with other floating objects does her no good. The cats jump on her head, walk on her, purr in her ear; she can hear them in the distance, like flute music on a hillside, up on the shore.

  Yvonne can think of no reason for these episodes. There's no trigger for them, no early warning. They're just something that happens to her, like a sneeze. She thinks of them as chemical.

  Today Yvonne is having lunch with a man whose collar-bone she admires, or did admire when it was available to her. Right now it isn't, because Yvonne is no longer sleeping with this man. She stopped because of the impossibility of the situation. For Yvonne, situations become impossible quickly. She doesn't like situations.

  This is a man with whom Yvonne was once in love. There are several such men in Yvonne's life; she makes a distinction between them and the men she draws. She never draws men she's in love with; she thinks it's because she lacks the necessary distance from them. She sees them, not as form or line or colour or even expression, but as concentrations of the light. (That's her version of it when she's in love; when she isn't, she remembers them as rarefied blurs, like something you've spilled on a tablecloth and are trying to wash out. She has occasionally made the mistake of trying to explain all this to the men concerned.) She's no stranger to addiction, having once passed far too many chemical travelogues through her body, and she knows its dangers. As far as she's concerned love is just another form of it.

  She can't stand too much of this sort of thing, so her affairs with such men don't last long. She doesn't begin them with any illusions about permanence, or even about temporary domestic arrangements; the days are gone when she could believe that if only she could climb into bed with a man and pull the covers over both their heads, they would be safe.

  However, she often likes these men and thinks that something is due them, and so she continues to see them afterwards, which is easy because, her separations from them are never unpleasant, not any more. Life is too short.

  Yvonne sits across from the man, at a table in a small restaurant, holding onto the tablecloth with one hand, below the table where he can't see it. She's listening to him with her customary interest, head tilted. She misses him intensely; or rather, she misses, not him, but the sensations he used to be able to arouse in her. The light has gone out of him and now she can see him clearly. She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the leve
l of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch.

  He's come to the end of what he's been saying, which had to do with politics. Now it's time for Yvonne to tell him a joke.

  "Why is pubic hair curly?" she says.

  "Why?" he says; as usual, he attempts to conceal the shock he feels at hearing her say words like pubic. Nice men are more difficult for Yvonne than pigs. If a man is piggish enough, she's glad to see him go.

  "So you won't poke your eyes out," says Yvonne, clutching the tablecloth.

  Instead of laughing he smiles at her, a little sadly. "I don't know how you do it," he says. "Nothing ever bothers you."

  Yvonne pauses. Maybe he's referring to the fact that, in their withdrawal from each other, there were no frantic phone calls from her, no broken dishes, no accusations, no tears. She's tried all these in the past and found them lacking. But maybe he wanted those things, as proof of something, of love perhaps; maybe he's disappointed by her failure to provide them.

  "Things bother me," says Yvonne,

  "You have so much energy," he goes on, as if he hasn't heard her. "Where do you get it from? What's your secret?"

  Yvonne looks down at her plate, on which there is half an apple and walnut and watercress salad and a crust of bread. To touch his hand, which is there in plain view, on the tablecloth a mere six inches away from her wine glass, would be to put herself at risk again, and she is already at risk. Once she delighted in being at risk; but once she did everything too much.

  She looks up at him and smiles. "My secret is that I get up every morning to watch the sunrise," she says. This is her secret, though it's not the only one; it's only the one that's on offer today. She watches him to see if he's bought it, and he has. This is enough in character for him, it's what he thinks she's really like. He's satisfied that she's all right, that there will be no trouble, which is what he wanted to know. He orders another cup of coffee and asks for the bill. When it comes, Yvonne pays half.