Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Toronto is a big dresser with big drawers, and this is a golden time when there is room for everyone to fight for room, enough funding for the arts to seem as though there is not enough funding for the arts, and massive immigration in flight from an increasingly dangerous world.

Down Spadina and along King Street, old textile factories — ex — sweat shops years away from loft conversion — are presently incarnated as cavernous rehearsal spaces and illegal live-in artists’ studios, where thousands of straight pins can be found in the cracks between the floorboards. It’s in one of these — the Darling Building — that Madeleine is working with Olivia on a piece called The Deer . A bewildering, glacial process called collective creation. She feels as foreign to it as those women from Hong Kong must feel when rumpled regulars of The Bagel set themselves down at the counter and ask for knishes.

Olivia asked Madeleine to be part of a group of actors with whom she is creating this feminist revision of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia .

“Why don’t you call it Death in Venison?” said Madeleine.

“I think it’s about colonialism,” said Olivia, and Madeleine nodded sagely.

The “alternative theatre” is about as far from the comedy scene as you can get, but Christine encouraged her to do it, and Madeleine jumped in, if only because Olivia has a piquant way of both idolizing her and disagreeing with everything she says. The Deer is set on a shifting landscape evocative of the fence at Greenham Common and a rainforest. Olivia is working with a composer on a score inspired by baroque music and Latin jazz which incorporates text from Dr. Strangelove . Last night they improvised a scene in which the deer was caught in car headlights and interrogated in Spanish and English. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Sandinista party?” “Are you tired and listless? …” It all makes a strange sort of sense to her, but she is reluctant to admit this to Olivia. The deer itself — Madeleine — is an entirely physical role.

“Why do you want me to be in this?” Madeleine had asked.

“Because you’re good with story and character.”

“I thought it was supposed to be avant-garde, non-narrative, non-fun theatre.”

“You see why I need you.”

They had gone to the Free Times Café and Olivia had bought her a beer and was asking her opinion on everything despite Madeleine’s protestations that “I don’t know much about art, but I don’t know much about art.” Olivia is a gorgeous, if slightly punked-out, egghead. The reverse of the classic 1950s secretary whose boss says, “Miss Smithers, take off your glasses. Now remove that bobby pin from your bun.” And voilà , bombshell. Madeleine listened and allowed one eye to cross toward the other — her way of declaring herself allergic to the kind of intellectualizing that Christine and Olivia love to get up to.

“But Madeleine, you are an intellectual.”

She responded with her best puppet face, and Olivia laughed but didn’t back down until she had drawn out and dismantled Madeleine’s most dearly held prejudices. “You deal with ideas all the time, your work is about something.” Olivia’s eyes are hot crystal-cut blue, the irises limned in black, they make her olive skin glow.

“I hate arguing, why am I arguing with you?!”

Olivia countered reasonably, “We’re talking, I’m asking you questions about yourself, you love it.”

At the corner of her mouth there is an indentation — not so much a dimple as a bracket — that lingers after she smiles. Shades of the face she will age into, eroded by happiness.

“What.”

“What ‘what’?” says Madeleine.

“You just zoned right out.”

“Oh yeah? Well … you’re not the boss of me, kid.”

Madeleine decides to stop for a coffee. Olivia resides in the top two floors of one of these festively decaying houses, over a bar and grill. Christine is a TA at the university and Olivia was one of her students. Being a few years younger, she has enjoyed waif status, Christine insisting on feeding her, even at times dressing her—“Here, you can have these, I plan never to be that thin again.” But Olivia has a fixed address now, and last month she had them over for dinner. She cooked a vegetarian chili, and they sat at a long sawhorse table with the five grungy housemates. Madeleine has never understood the appeal of communal living and, although Christine respects vegetarianism, she woke up starving in the middle of the night, made BLTs and teased Madeleine, “Olivia’s got a crush on you.” Madeleine knew better. “She’s way more interested in you, babe. Besides, she’s not my type.”

Madeleine finds a nice birdshitty table outside at the Café LaGaffe and orders a cappuccino. She discovered, during the vegetarian feast that Olivia’s mother is Algerian and her father is a United Church minister. She has blue eyes and speaks French with an Arabic accent. Madeleine doesn’t have to explain contradiction to Olivia.

Marianne Faithfull croaks over the speakers, “It’s just an old war, not even a cold war, don’t say it in Russian, don’t say it in German….” Madeleine reaches down for an empty matchbook from the pavement and wedges it under one wobbly wrought-iron leg. Success without Colleen promises the cover. She blinks. College . “Say it in bro-o-oken English….”

She can see the CN Tower over the shingled roofs and between the skyscrapers beyond. She can smell the four corners of the earth. The old guy whose pet parrot rides on his head and swears walks by.

“Hi George,” she says.

The parrot swivels his head and replies genially, “Fuck off.”

Madeleine laughs, asks the waiter, “Have you got a pen?” And reaches for a napkin.

In Jack’s hospital room, the cardiologist told him and Mimi, “In these cases, we have three options. One is to extend the life of the patient through surgery. Two is to improve the health of the patient through drugs. Three is to stabilize the patient and increase his comfort through drugs and … oxygen … et cetera. In your case, Mr. McCarthy, the first two options are not open to us.”

The doctor looked about twelve.

Jack’s face felt tight. He thought, You’re sending me home to die, thanks for nothin’, buddy . He nodded and said, “Fair enough.”

Mimi said, “You can do better than that.”

“I’m afraid we can’t, Mrs. McCarthy. But there’s no reason your husband can’t enjoy—”

Mimi said, “C’est assez, merci,” and turned her back on him.

He flushed. Jack winked and gave him a complicit smile. “Well. We’ll see you soon, sir,” said the young doctor, and fled.

It was not a case of getting a second opinion. This was the third opinion — Mimi hadn’t stopped until she had pulled every string and found out who was good, who was the best and who was a butcher. She turned back to Jack and said tartly, “Well Monsieur, what am I going to do to you?”

He grinned at her; she almost managed a smile, squeezed shut her eyes, clenched her hands until she felt the nails dig into her palms and, just as tears breached her lids, felt his arms around her.

“You’re not supposed to get up.”

“Who told you that?” He chuckled in her ear, holding her as close as he dared, careful of the intravenous tubes at his wrist. She felt warm. Hairspray and Chanel. Still so soft.

What is it to end a love story after forty years? So many nice times. So many remember-whens. Remember, Missus? I remember— -je me souviens .

What is it when so much of what is precious is so far past? Like a drawer sealed for so long. Open it, up wafts memory, love, no sorrow or recollection of hardship. How can this be? They lived through the Depression. They lived through a war. How is it that it was so sweet? How is it that the scent rises fresh as lilacs and cut grass? That sunny place. Post-war. Let’s have kids. Let’s be the ones who do it right.