“Incomplete classic migraine,” the eye doctor tells Madeleine. “Visual phenomena unaccompanied by pain.”
An ophthalmologist is not going to tell you that you are seeing your shadow. This kind of doctor will not say, “Don’t be afraid. Turn around slowly. Talk to it. It wants to tell you something.”
Comedy slowed down is terrifying. This is what is happening to Madeleine.
She was afraid to pull over because that would have been to admit there was something wrong. It was raining, her face was too hot against the cool window when she pressed her cheek to it, her heart was light and rapid like a propeller and she didn’t understand where she was going. She knew in her head where she lived, that she was going home in her car after the Friday night taping; she had all the knowledge of life that she’d had one second ago; but something had receded like a transparent layer. The thing that allows us to agree on all the pieces of the world. The thing that make things one thing. She was seeing everything separately, piece by piece. A street light nothing to do with a street. A sidewalk nothing to do with a curb. She didn’t understand why anything was anywhere. She saw what was behind everything—nothing.
Her heart accelerated, a creature trapped in her chest; was she going to die? An inky feeling like shame in her stomach. A person was hurrying toward her car from the gas station on the corner. Had he realized that she no longer knew how to be? No, he continued past.
Her heart slowed to a walk. The windshield wipers smeared light around the glass and she looked away, but the yellow smear followed her gaze.
“Maybe I just need glasses.”
“Has this kind of thing ever happened before?” asks the therapist.
The room is panelled in fabric and wood, soothing terracotta tones, spatial sedative. On a side table is a pitcher of spring water, a shallow box of sand with a miniature rake, and a box of Kleenex. There is a couch with a big pillow for punching, there are seashells, a crystal, an air purifier, several degrees on the wall, a Georgia O’Keeffe print. Madeleine takes a deep breath and mumbles, “Few weeks ago.”
She hears in her voice the sullen muffle of adolescence. Regression proceeding on schedule.
The therapist waits, serene in her swivel chair. Some sort of handmade-without-cruelty earrings dangle discreetly from her ears. Nina. Madeleine sits crunched in an armchair opposite. She is cottoning onto the therapy game: therapist oozes impersonal compassion until client can’t take silence any more and blurts, “I killed my mother!” But first the disclaimers: “I’m exhausted. After-Three is in production, plus I’m doing a workshop of an original alternative-theatre piece for no money—why? Because the director has pink hair.”
The therapist waits. At a dollar twenty-five a minute.
Madeleine tells what happened the last time she did stand-up:
The old Masonic Temple in downtown Toronto is packed. Light spills from the stage onto the heads and shoulders of the standing crowd. Ceiling fans spinning overhead do nothing to dispel the heat generated by hot bands, arid performance art, flaming flamenco and The Diesel Divas, a choir of heavy-set women in plaid shirts and brush cuts who sing a repertoire of sacred music by Bach. A sold-out benefit for a downtown battered women’s shelter.
Madeleine looks out over the mass of heads silhouetted and shading into darkness toward the back. Physically loose and mentally coiled, with her usual blend of butterflies and focus, this is the one place she feels thoroughly at home. The safest place on earth.
She banters with the audience, tailoring bits for them. Riffs on various news items: the search for the gay gene—“Why not search for something really useful like the stupid-driver gene?”—Reagan’s waxy nuclear buildup, Margaret Thatcher’s iron handbag, Prime Minister Mulroney as auctioneer. She takes shots at political correctness and Jerry Falwell alike, whips through Orgasms of the Rich and Famous, and Virginia Woolf Writes an Episode of Love Boat. Fizzy stuff, fun. They keep calling for “Maurice! Do Maurice!”
“You’re sick!” she calls back.
“Maurice!”
Now she knows how the Beatles felt. Bearded, high and tie-dyed, the crowd clamouring nonetheless, “‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’!”
“How’m I supposed to do Maurice? The outfit alone, come on.”
“Do the puppet! The puppet!!”
She is agile in a pair of U.S. Marine Corps surplus jungle boots. On top she wears a West German Army singlet with the eagle of the Bundesrepublik emblazoned on the chest, under which she is braless. Official Überdyke-wear.
She glances up at the neo-Gothic mouldings of the Masonic Temple. “I think it fitting that we are gathered this evening to raise some filthy lucre for a feminist cause here in a former bastion of the patriarchy.”
Applause.
Her hair is soaked and she can feel sweat trickling down her back, but someone must have switched on the air conditioner because she is suddenly chilly. She listens for the telltale laugh-killing hum of the cooling system but can’t hear it over the crowd. She takes a sip of water from a plastic bottle.
She allows her eyes to unfocus and bulge. Her chin retracts, gut swells. The audience laughs and chants, “Mau-rice! Mau-rice! Mau-rice!”
You never know what people are going to fixate on. Maurice isn’t even that funny. Someone throws a pair of panties onto the stage, but Maurice doesn’t take the bait. She releases him, puts the underpants on her head like a balaclava, then slingshots them into the wings.
She takes another sip, allowing the water to trickle down her neck, and showers with the rest, removing her shirt with masculine insouciance and using it as a towel. It’s easier to take your shirt off if you have small breasts—Madeleine wonders if she’d have the nerve to do it if she were stacked, rack and pinion. It’s also easier to come out as a lesbian if you look like the girl next door, and have a prime-time television show—it’s not like you’re going to lose your job and your apartment. Madeleine has a long list of why it’s easy for her, she keeps no account of how it’s hard.
Taking your shirt off is a cheap shot but it works—the rubber chicken of feminist comedy. She squeakily unscrews, polishes and oils her nipples, then screws them back on. The audience goes hysterical and she takes the opportunity to catch her breath—she must be tired. She doesn’t do a lot of stand-up any more, and she didn’t really have time to do this gig but was reluctant to say no to a good cause.
She paces herself. Happily this is a smoke-free venue; since it’s a feminist event, the organizers have tried to make it a hospitable environment for the smoke-intolerant. Feminism is as yet only ankle-deep in the new wave of “intolerances,” which include perfume, lactose, yeast and the presence of others enjoying a beer—part of the inevitable splintering of a movement that has achieved so much—perhaps because it has achieved so much.
Friends are here tonight. Olivia—she of the pink hair. She is an alternative-theatre director, tastefully pierced, whom Madeleine met when Christine got her to direct a Komedy Kabaret for International Women’s Day. Also out there somewhere is Madeleine’s high school friend Tommy, as is her main After-Three man, Tony, along with friends from many of the circles that overlap and proliferate to make community. Christine is not here—“You don’t mind, do you, sweetie? I’ve seen that material before and I’ve got a paper due.”
Madeleine waits till the crowd is quiet, then breaks into her trademark evil-out-of-synch-ventriloquist-puppet laughter.
They are still laughing when she experiences an odd sensation: as though she has just come to. She wonders how long it’s been since she did the puppet-laughter thing. It can’t have been more than seconds, because the laughter is just peaking, but she feels as though it were ages ago. She continues grinning demonically and takes the opportunity to look for a square of light under the exit sign. There must be a door open, admitting the sharp April night—it’s freezing in here, her sweat has turned icy; then she becomes aware of a collective motion out there among the dark heads and shoulders, small shapes
fluttering like leaves—people are fanning themselves with their programs.
She blinks the sweat from her eyes and feels the salt sting. “If these walls could talk, eh? I wonder what the Masons talked about that was so secret. Or maybe it’s the idea of secrecy, it gives you power. That’d be so typical WASP, not even to have any secrets, just let the rest of us keep jamming our ears up against the wall with a glass, hoping to hear how to invest or which judge is going to hear our case or how to get our Yorkshire pudding to come out right. Maybe they just bowled in here. Did the secret handshake.” She does a secret handshake that takes over her whole body.
“Masons aren’t the only ones to have a secret society. The Vatican is loaded with secrets. And they’ve got money too, right? They’ve got everything, they got an army, a bank and a passport office for war criminals….” She peers down her nose at a passport in her hand. “‘Hmm, Dr. Mengele’”—stamps it with a kchunk, then, smiling—“‘have a nice trip sir.’ I don’t get how it’s like this whole country—the Vatican—run by these guys in robes and tall pointed hats with crosses and no women or Jews, like are we talking Ku Klux Klan?”
She wipes her forehead with the heel of her hand while they laugh. Squeezes her eyes shut and sees yellow trails, the lights have lost their edges, making a shadowy mess of the audience.
“I’d be so pissed off if I were Mary,” she says, suddenly too aware of her own voice. “First of all, she gets married to a really sensitive guy, a ‘feminist man’ with like no money, can’t afford a hotel—at Christmas!” It’s as though there were a slight delay between the time the words leave her mouth and the moment she hears them. It’s fine, they’re laughing, she’ll power through this, then go home to a Neo Citran.
“So she gives birth in a barn and all these guys keep barging in with useless presents—myrrh? ‘What’m I gonna do with that?!’ Not to mention the presents are all for the baby. Then the Church comes along and says Joseph wasn’t even the father. God was. Plus, she was a virgin. Hello? The worst part, though, is that the Church Fathers—the pointy-hat guys—sit around all grizzled and serious and holy, debating whether or not it hurt when Mary had the kid.” Numbskull anchorman voice—“‘What do you think, Augustus?’ ‘Well Fluvius, I don’t think it hurt a bit. What do you think, Farticus?’ ‘Oh I don’t think it hurt, what about you, Thomas?’ And Thomas Aquinas says, ‘Oh, um, what he said. Didn’t hurt.’” Madeleine takes a beat, then “It did-n’t hurt?” Gapes at the audience. “It hurt!” Manic—“She was in the stable pushing out a baby the son of God he was bi-i-i-ig! He had a big holy head he was Go-od! It hurt! It fuckin’ hu-urt!”
Normally at this point the laughter is drowned by Iggy Pop, who blasts over the speakers while Madeleine pogos and improvises a series of lazzi—an old commedia dell’arte term meaning physical comedy turns: schtick. She’ll trip over the microphone cord until the series of falls escalates to a mad imbalancing act with no longer a bone in her body. Gumby and Pokey on bennies.
But tonight she stands frozen. The darkness, the laughter, the clapping and hooting are no longer friendly or warm, they are not anything. Out there, the silhouettes and lights are as strange as a landing strip at night. Numbness travels from her hands to her elbows, the smear of lights begins to waver and she loses a piece of the world to her left. A wedge from her field of vision is gone, sealed over as though it had never been there, the exit sign has simply disappeared.
She gets home somehow. Driving slowly, trying to stay alive, fearing not an accident but something she cannot name.
“Maybe it was just stage fright.”
“Is that what you think it was?” asks the therapist.
“That’s what Christine said it was.” And in answer to Nina’s silent question, “She’s my girlfriend. Partner. Thingy.”
“Panic attack” does not describe it, although that’s probably, officially, what it was. The total and complete loss of the known. The sudden inarticulable strangeness of the familiar; the appalling observation that one foot goes in front of another. The realization that one thing is not related to another. A finger bewildered by a hand.
Madeleine continues, thinking all the while, this rinky-dink therapist is going to tell me I’m having panic attacks and I’m going to tell her to fuck off. She finishes by saying, “Panic attacks, right?”
Nina says, “Is that how you think of them?”
Clever, doc.
Nina asks if anything has occurred recently in Madeleine’s life, any kind of change.
“You think I need an excuse to go off my rocker? I’m a comedian, I’m halfway there at any given moment.”
“Is that true?”
“That’s the cliché.”
“Is it useful?”
“Chicks love it.”
Nina says, “I’m wondering if something triggered the … thing.”
“I’m probably just burnt out, wouldn’t be the first time. It’s how it’s done; you work yourself into the ground and you make it look easy and you get somewhere.”
“Sounds as though you have to be pretty stable in order to do that.”
Madeleine shrugs, gratified but unwilling to show it.
“Why are you here, Madeleine?”
Madeleine summons irony but it falls back like a vampire at a whiff of garlic. She fights the sensation that she is turning into a velvet painting, brown eyes going treacly, throat swelling with tears—why? Oh no. Emotion taking hold … got to … swim away…. She looks at Nina and says reasonably, “I keep having these urges to skin puppies and violate young children.”
Nina’s calm, attentive expression doesn’t change. She waits.
“I cried at Loblaws.”
“Which aisle were you in?”
Madeleine laughs. “Ethnic foods,” she replies and weeps. “Holy shit.” She chuckles. “See? This is weird, is this like … really early menopause or something, should I be shopping for yam extract?”
She explains her recent bouts of incontinence: ambushed by tears at the sight of a woman in a sari putting a can of chickpeas into her cart. The yelp of a dog reaches her on a breeze, her hand flies to her eyes, she stops as though struck by a stray Frisbee, and weeps. Plummeting sorrow at a child’s anguished resistance to a sun hat; at an old man in a soiled tweed vest behind her in the bank lineup, as he keens the words “Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye.” At cooking shows, at special offers of twenty-five golden hits, These magic moments can be yours for only … !
“Is that why you’re here?” asks the therapist.
“Yes, I need to curb my daytime TV intake.” Nina waits. Madeleine hears herself say, “My dad had another heart attack.”
She feels her face tighten in the smile of grief. She reaches for the Kleenex and plucks several. “Few months ago. It’s not like he’s dying.”
And he isn’t. I’m lucky, he told her in January. It’s the rich man’s disease. The stuff they can do nowadays, they don’t even have to open me up….
“Are you close to your father?”
Madeleine nods, opens her lips, tries but fails to get out the words. Nina waits. Madeleine says, “He’s my best….”
“Your best what?”
Madeleine shakes her head. “It’s stupid. Don’t know why I can’t say it, so corny.” She straightens in her chair, inhales and says, “My best old buddy.”
There.
But her cheeks contract again and her eyes continue to weep. She shakes her head. She is in worse shape than she thought. Or maybe she is just too good a performer—I’m sitting in a therapist’s office, I must be cracking up, therefore: crack-up. Do I get the part?
“What’s the pain, Madeleine?”
“Well.” Madeleine sighs. “It’s not as bad as having a pubic hair caught in the adhesive strip of your panty-liner. But it’s worse than a fork in the eye.”
Madeleine made the January drive from Toronto to Ottawa’s Heart Institute in four hours and fifteen minutes, door to door.
“Holy Di
nah,” chuckled Jack, “what’d you do, fly?”
He was sitting up in bed reading Time—she was immediately reassured. Electrodes led from his chest beneath the blue hospital gown to a heart monitor, intravenous tubes ran from his wrist and an oxygen mask was slung casually around his neck. He winked and gave her the thumbs-up, past two young nurses who were joking and making a fuss over him as they changed the IV bags—one of fluids, one of blood thinners. Madeleine smiled, worried her face would shatter and fall, proud for one unreal moment of having the handsomest, youngest-looking dying father on the ward.
The nurses introduced themselves, told her not to make her father laugh too hard, said they loved her show and “your dad is so proud of you.”
They left, and Jack continued smiling so broadly she could see his gold tooth.
“How are you doin’, Dad?”
“Oh I’m fine, they’re turnin’ me loose tomorrow.”
“What about—? You’re having surgery—”
“Naw.” He waved his hand. “Don’t need it. Witch doctor shook some rattles over me and said, go on, get out of here.”
“How come they’re not operating?” Her voice dull and metallic like flatware.
“’Cause I’m better off without it,” he said, jaunty.
“Is that true?”
He chuckled, incredulous. “’Course it’s true.” What snake under the bed?
Mimi was down the hall in the washroom. Madeleine took a slow walk along the corridor with her father and his IV stand. His blue gown gaped in the back, exposing his white Stanfields. He lowered his voice discreetly—it didn’t need lowering, it had thinned along with his blood—saying, “These people are really sick.” Patients who looked much older, cadaverously thin or mountainously fragile, moving gingerly as though lodged deep within their bulk was a bomb.
She told him about the option on her one-woman special. He laughed at the title—carefully. There was a bomb in his chest too. But apparently it was getting better. They returned to his room. She sat on the edge of the high hospital bed and he sat in the armchair, one hand relaxed around the IV stand as though it were a fixture of long standing, no big deal. As usual, he asked her how she was fixed for cash, and she consulted him on whether she ought to move to the States. He reached for the napkin under his plastic juice cup and drew two columns, Pro and Con. As they made the list, she said, “Sometimes I feel like I’m not doing any good in the world.”