Christine turns and goes back inside. Madeleine experiences guilt, fear, pathos — the food groups. The beaded curtains sway provocatively in Christine’s wake, a housewarming gift from Olivia.
Madeleine has spent the afternoon writing, having promised to come in with a revised shape for the “Breaking News” sketch. She’s working on an idea for a war criminal thing — it’s all over the news, a recent rash of decrepit Nazis arrested while pruning their rose bushes in suburbs across Canada. She has also sworn to give Shelly a paragraph for Stark Raving Madeleine, and has a good excuse to figure something out because she told her friend Tommy she’d do five minutes at an AIDS benefit next Monday—Love in the Time of Latex. Conveniently, she has no time to write because evening workshop sessions have been scheduled this week on The Deer.
“Bring Olivia over after,” said Christine this morning.
“We’re working till midnight.”
“I thought you were finished at nine.”
“The schedule changed. I’m sorry, sweetie, it’ll all be over soon.”
Christine smiled. “Wait, stay in bed, I’ll bring your coffee.” She paused at the door in her burgundy robe. In the light filtering through the blinds, she looked just as she had when they met. For that first date they had planned to go to a film festival movie — Madeleine had already bought the tickets — but they didn’t make it out of Christine’s apartment for three days. They saved the movie tickets. Put them in the album with the photos that traced seven years. Holidays, birthdays, friends. The Story of Madeleine and Christine. “You know what?” said Christine. “Everything’s going to be okay. All your work. This project with Olivia is exactly what you need right now. It’s going to feed into the thing you’re working on for Shelly. It’s going to help give you your new show. And that’s going to change everything.”
“Come here.”
Christine snuggled back next to Madeleine.
But that was this morning. And who knows by what series of incremental snags and toe-pinching minutiae the day progressed to the point where they fought over a wretched barbecue?
Madeleine is due at the Darling Building in ninety minutes. No time for paella — what was I thinking? Having no time to write is almost as important as having all the time in the world. She had all day. She procrastinated elaborately, virtuosically. While cleaning the fridge, she noticed an overdue bill stuck to the door with an Emma Goldman magnet. She dutifully wrote a cheque, and stepped out to the post office for stamps.
She and Christine live in the top half of a Victorian house in the Annex, a leafy downtown neighbourhood of artists, students, immigrants and lefty yuppies. On her way down Brunswick toward Bloor she breathed deeply of spring, and noticed that the sidewalks were packed with look-alike couples. There were identical lesbians with neatly pressed sweatshirts and big glasses. There were gay men with matching sideburns. There were straight couples in khakis and windbreakers — stick a canoe on their heads and it’s anyone’s guess. Twinsexuals. At the post office in the back of the pharmacy, she reached into her pocket for money to buy stamps and found a “Final Notice” for a delivery — funny how one never receives a “First Notice.” She handed it across the counter and the elderly Korean lady gave her a brown-paper package about the size of a cereal box. She opened it — a bran flakes carton, mummified with masking tape. Inside, a dozen stale muffins and a note in her mother’s hand, “Ma chérie, bon appétit. No news, love and prayers, Papa et Maman. P.S. Remember Mr. McDermott across the street? He died. Papa bought a new Olds.” Madeleine smiled in private oblation to love and absurdity.
She doesn’t really have time to do the AIDS benefit, but doesn’t want to say no to a good cause. And Tommy is persuasive. She went to her high school graduation prom with him. Tomasz Czerniatewicz. She’d had paralyzing crushes on two people — Stephen Childerhouse and Monica Goldfarb — but was too shy to approach the former burnished god, and her desire for the latter dark lady simmered behind a fire-curtain of denial. It was not hip to be queer, it was perverted, and not a single rock star had yet admitted to bisexuality. She tried to escape the “bad feelings” but it was like outrunning a cartoon bullet that passes you, skids to a stop midair, turns and nails you. She saw The Children’s Hour at fourteen, while babysitting, and went home with a temperature and stomach flu. She had watched, bathed in shame, yet riveted by the desire palpable in the boarding-school air between Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn. Shirley felt so “sick and dirty” she hanged herself, freeing Audrey to seek solace in the manly embrace of James Garner. Madeleine sought solace in James Garner’s manliness too, but couldn’t quell the broken record of svelte Shirley sobbing, “I feel so sick and dirty!” Like George’s parrot, “sick-and-dirty, sick-and-dirty, grawk!” Supposedly the film is a metaphor for the Communist witch hunts of the fifties. Tell that to the lesbians.
She had intended to boycott the prom and spend the evening scoffing at it with Tommy and the other marginals from the drama club, but she was so shocked by his invitation that she said yes. Her mother was thrilled and worked for weeks sewing Madeleine a formal. “Ah, Madeleine, que t’es belle! We’ll take a picture to show your brother when he comes home.” Tommy wore a baby blue tuxedo with a hot pink cummerbund, anticipating disco by a good few years.
They had bonded over the fact that Madeleine was not allowed to wear jeans to school and he was not permitted to grow his hair, even to a length acceptable in the Dutch army. He wore glasses that made him look like a physicist, which was what both his parents were at the National Research Council. The whole family wore identical Nana Mouskouri glasses, and they all had short hair except for the mother, who wore a scraped-back bun. Mr. and Mrs. Czerniatewicz were Polish immigrants, they had survived the war. So much for the sixties; the older Czerniatewicz brothers listened to classical music, excelled at math, wore flood pants, and had pocket protectors and bone structure to die for. They were at university, but had played high school football with Mike and, like him, were all-star athletes. Except for Tommy, who’d been born with a hole in his heart—“that’s why I got piano lessons.”
He reminded Madeleine of Gordon Lawson — a perfect gentleman, with the hanky to prove it. But with a wicked streak of humour; when she went to his house after school and met his parents, he told them she was Jewish, and she could hear their chiselled smiles atrophy with a clink.
She suffered torments of guilt, but Tommy begged her to keep up the ruse and soon she was in too deep to back out. Mr. and Mrs. Czerniatewicz grew fond of her, queried her about her culture and beliefs, and it was all she could do to fend off their desire to meet her wonderful parents who had survived the camps and changed their name to McCarthy to facilitate immigration. Stymied in their efforts, the Czerniatewiczes struck up a friendship with a Jewish scientist at the stark lab where they hunted for particles, and wound up at a Passover Seder the following spring. Tommy pranced and clicked his heels together: “We’re like the Littlest Hobo and Lassie, spreading love and understanding.”
He tutored her in math, and they spent hours belting out Broadway tunes while Tommy pounded the piano and Madeleine danced like a Gumby Gwen Verdon.
Her best friend, Jocelyn, went to the prom with the captain of the football team, the impossibly good-looking, strong and silent Boom Boom Robinson. His sandy curls lapped at the collar of his midnight blue tux, and before dawn, when she and Madeleine ditched their formals and dived into the backyard pool, Jocelyn confessed that he was nice enough but he “didn’t even try anything.” They dried off and ate a loaf of Wonderbread fondue: take a slice of Wonderbread, squish it into a ball, dip it in a bowl of melted chocolate chips.