Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

Or you could leave after being called into the office and told behind a closed door that your time with the company was over. Here is your last cheque. Please don’t sit on the stairs outside the office and weep. Try to control the sort of look that you’re going to have on your face as you leave this place.

The second was the way that Violet assumed she would leave. She had always had so much pride — but still she sought out humiliation. She would be a chorus girl until they wouldn’t let her be a chorus girl anymore. Until they kicked her out, like Forester had done.

In every city where they played for more than three nights, Violet would fall in love with a different man. She belonged to a certain strange subspecies of man. She was attracted to men who were still children. She liked men who didn’t make a fuss when you didn’t clean up or when you were too drunk to wake up. She admired others who were half asleep and living in a dream world, just like her.

There were certain men who lasted longer than others. There was Alexander, a dashing fellow who played the piano and toured with the troupe. She never knew when Alexander was going to show up. That’s what she liked about him. He would climb up the fire escape to her hotel room in New York and knock on the window. He would have to be very quiet because she didn’t want the concierge of the hotel or the director of the company to know that she had a man come spend the night. Although they probably guessed it, she wanted to keep them guessing.

She was so happy when he would creep in through the window and come into her bed. Their happiness was so rich because they knew it could never last. It had all the same effects on the body as suffering. They lay in bed after making love, completely stunned, as if they had been dealt some terrible, terrible news. Their love was like a death in the family.

“I like the way you break my heart every night around nine p.m.,” she told Alexander while they were in bed one night. “You are the most dependable man I have ever met.”

“Violet, you’re too crazy for any man.”

Alexander was looking for a rich woman. He was sick of poverty. He told Violet one day that he had gotten an heiress pregnant and that he was going to marry her. She closed her eyes so that she didn’t have to see him walking out the door.

Violet’s mother had liked ugly, mean men. There was nothing that she could have done about it either. Life is too short for us to fix our flaws. By the time we realize what fools we have been, we are, unfortunately, already dead.

But Violet realized that her taste for handsome, feckless men would end up giving her as much trouble as her mother’s tastes had given her. The handsome men she dated were terrifying. They were so light that any wind might blow them away in another direction. They could disappear over a weekend. At least the ugly, mean men Violet’s mother had dated had been able to put a roof over their heads. At least they had been able to take them out to restaurants and buy them enormous pieces of steak and great glasses of wine.

Maybe it was because of Forester that she was attracted to shiftless men. She blamed Forester for this too: for sticking her with his opposite.

The other chorus girls said that it was a pity she didn’t sing well. It meant that you were expendable, that your position in the line was vulnerable, and that you didn’t have a future. It was 1929, Violet was twenty and she was beginning to feel old.

Then the troupe was going back up to Montreal. She didn’t like the idea of it because of the possibility of seeing Forester and his friends, but she did long to see home again.

The winter wind knew that Violet was coming back. The sky was holding its breath, and when it saw Violet step out of the train station, it finally exhaled and beautiful snowflakes began to fall. Children all over the city were noticing the gigantic snowflakes that were stuck on their mittens. They had been specially designed to impress Violet. The winter wanted Violet back.

She went for a walk in the east end. The gargoyles wanted to crawl right down off the buildings and put their arms around her. She was the only one who had loved them and who had thought they were beautiful. She was the only one who had chosen this neighbourhood over Westmount.

She walked into a small tavern with a blue door that she and her mother used to go to. She sat down on a chair at a table in the corner, but before she had even managed to settle in, a person had sat down beside her. It was a young man with fair hair who held her hand and kissed it and introduced himself as Pierrot.

The other chorus girls said that Violet fell in love for stupid reasons. This was true. She fell in love with Pierrot because he whistled when he got dressed in the morning. He had the intelligence and mannerisms of a very polite eleven-year-old boy. They went for a walk in the park and he walked on the cement border around the pond. He started swaying uncontrollably, as though he were about to lose his balance and fall in. Violet stood with her arms out as if to catch him, laughing and yelling.

Pierrot was broke and came to stay with Violet in her hotel room and ate her food. The other girls in the chorus were shocked by this. Violet said she didn’t mind at all. He kept telling her that he was going to come into loads of money, but she couldn’t imagine how. He said that he was waiting for his partner to come to town so they could make a venture together that was guaranteed to make him flush.

She just thought that Pierrot was a big talker. She liked men who made plans that they never followed through on. This might seem like a trait that was impossible to admire, but Violet liked it. It was as if he were a little boy who was making plans to be a knight and an ambassador.

“Let’s try to keep secrets from one another for as long as possible,” she told him one night. “That way, things will always be romantic.”

“Of course, my wonderful girl.”

But then one night she came home and Pierrot told her his venture had been successful. They went out and ate steak and potatoes at a fancy restaurant. He was able to pay the rent for that month. She stopped working as a chorus girl. All the pretty girls stood in a row as Violet bid them goodbye at the train station. She kissed Marigold, Tulip, Magnolia, Pansy, Daffodil, Petunia, Rose and Lily adieu. And then she stayed in Montreal for good.

For a month or so, things went really well for Violet and Pierrot. He bought her some pearls. Every time she wore those pearls, it started to rain. One night Pierrot was arrested and a detective came to see her and said that the pearls were stolen. So she gave them back.

She went to see Pierrot in prison on Sundays. It was a three-hour ride and it was an expensive ticket. They had cut Pierrot’s blond hair short and it made him look older. He had a lovely last name: Bazil. She might like to have a name like that for her own. She hated having her father’s ugly last name. He was the one who had started this dying business in her family.

“Will you write to me every day?” he asked.

It was the only promise to a man that she ever kept, but she found that she didn’t do it out of obligation. She liked writing these sad and joyful letters that were filled with lies. She had a strange, funny sort of inkling that it was the one thing she was good at. She felt that she had an ease with writing that she didn’t have with tap dancing or singing or trying to twirl a baton. When she would sign her name at the bottom, she would have the feeling that it was the only thing she knew how to complete.

Was a piece of paper with a daydream transcribed on it any more concrete than the daydream itself?

What would she do with Pierrot once he got out of prison? He would have no money. Does it feel better to have someone with you in a lifeboat when you are cast away at sea?