Inland Passage Read online

  “If Lee wanted to come home to me, I’d…” I began.

  “I’m so sorry. She doesn’t want to see you. I’m sure she’s…well…ashamed of all the trouble she’s caused.”

  When I picked up Carol that afternoon, I looked at her soft dark cap of hair, her watchful dark eyes and could no more bear the thought of losing her than of losing Lee.

  What craziness was it in Lee to have thought I would be allowed Carol?

  “Your grandmother’s here,” I said. “She’s going to take you and your mother home to Winnipeg until she’s better.”

  “Then do we get to come back here to be with you?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I hope so.”

  Carol was quiet then until we got home. She came with me, as was now her habit, to walk Rocket, who did not take her customary long circlings in the bush but stayed with us, bumping clumsily and persistently against us on the narrow path.

  Over dinner Carol said, “Mommy said you’d take care of me if anything happened to her.”

  “She’s going to be fine.”

  “You should make her go to school. Even kids have to go to school.”

  “She was only having a rest.”

  “That’s when she always gets sick.”

  First her mother and now her child were tattling on Lee, for whom I felt a pointless, painful loyalty.

  “Can I take my doll furniture?”

  The next day there was no trace left of either Lee or Carol. I did not even think to ask for their Winnipeg address. Lee had taken my life, if not her own, in a way that I had never meant to give her.

  Though it has often seemed obvious to me that troubled friends are in need of psychiatric attention, I have never known what I would say to one about myself, except perhaps that I have too often been mistaken and don’t seem able to learn from life as I believe I sometimes do from paintings and poems, even occasionally from a novel.

  Lee Fair wrote a novel, part of which is based on or takes off from those brief passionate months we spent together. It is always difficult to know, even when one is not personally involved, how much feeling and judgment really reflect on the raw material of life. Perhaps I would more easily and resignedly accept the portrait of me in it as Lee’s real view of me if she hadn’t also dedicated the book to me. Am I a muse or a villain? For the artist there may be no clear distinction. My name as a character is Swete, and I am very like the other preying lesbians about whom I compulsively read for several years after Lee left me. Swete seduces the main character and robs her of her child’s affection, then of her financial independence, and finally of her will to study and write until finally her only way to regain her own life is to take it. The main character recovers to marry her psychiatrist, as Lee also did, though she divorced him not long after the book was published.

  Lee is now one of Canada’s best known lesbians, that first novel something of an embarrassment to her. To her credit, she used it as an example of how we have been raised to trash each other and seek our salvation in men. Carol’s two sons keep Lee from the extremes of separatism. Lee and I exchange Christmas cards, and we have dinner together occasionally when she is in Vancouver to give a reading or lecture. I don’t ever attend them, and she has never asked for an explanation. Perhaps she remembers that I don’t go to Wilson’s either.

  I have long since given up fantasies of nursing either one of them in old age. In any case, I will sooner need that attention than either of them will whose bones are not so well acquainted with sea mists as mine are.

  What I have come to understand about myself is that I am interested in art rather than artists. Those who blundered into my life under the mistaken impression that I had either something to give or be given have only threatened my pleasure in their very real accomplishments.

  So many people seem to draw their nourishment directly from passion as plants take nourishment directly from the sun. I have been only badly burned by such heat. Yet the art that has been made from it has sustained me all my solitary life.

  I still prefer those arts which don’t require the presence of human beings: literature, painting, sculpture. Films are less threatening to me than live theatre, and I prefer my music canned.

  After Lee, I encouraged neither men nor women in any sort of intimacy; yet I have gone on being for one artist or another a symbol until I’ve become something of a legend myself. It is not really respectable, in western Canada anyway, for a poet to pass thirty without having written a poem to me. I have been muse, witch, preying lesbian. I have also been devouring mother, whore, Diana, spirit of Vancouver, daughter of the tides.

  In a sense my life has been lived for me in the imaginations of other people, and there is nothing dangerous about that if I don’t try to participate, for in that way disaster lies. My real companions, in my imagination, are my counterparts throughout history and the world who, whatever names they are given, are women very like myself, who holds the shell of a poem to her ear and hears the mighty sea at a safe and sorrowing distance.

  HIS NOR HERS

  THE VIRTUE OF A reclusive husband is the illusion of freedom he may provide for his wife once the children are old enough for school and social lives of their own. Gillian’s husband did not like her to be out as many evenings as she was, raising money and/or enthusiasm for one good cause or another. She irritated him also when she was at home, either being far too noisy and playful with their two daughters, already inclined to giggle, or busy at her typewriter clacking out right-minded letters to the editor, to her Member of the Legislative Assembly, to the Prime Minister himself. But, when she asked him what he wanted her to do, he couldn’t say. Gillian suggested that his image of a wife was a warm statue, breathing quietly in the corner of the couch, not even turning her own pages to disturb his reading. It was a far less offensive image to him than it was to her. A quiet presence was what a wife should be, but increasingly he had to settle for a quiet absence.

  “Do you know where your daughters are half the time?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” Gillian answered, for she knew what homes of friends they’d found more hospitable to their taste in music, their interest in their hair, their bursts of high-humored silliness.

  “Well, I don’t. I don’t know where you are half the time.”

  “Only because you don’t listen.”

  How could he pay attention through all their mindless morning gossip simply for casually dropped clues to their whereabouts, he wanted to know.

  “You can’t, darling,” Gillian replied. “And if we’re all resigned to that, why can’t you be?”

  Sometimes, when he remembered to, he studied Gillian’s clothes to decide whether or not she was dressing appropriately for where she said she was going. Since she inclined to suits without more adornment than a bright scarf at her throat, he thought it only fair to dismiss the idea of her being unfaithful to him. She was co-operative enough when it occurred to him to make love to her, and she had no cause to complain, as some women did, about an overly demanding husband. He had never been suspicious enough to try to check up on her. It would have seemed to him also somehow beneath him. He was not the kind of man to have married a woman he couldn’t trust.

  He wondered occasionally if he shouldn’t have allowed her to take some sort of part time job, something dignified and clearly low paying to indicate that it was an interest rather than a necessity. It might have used up some of her tireless and tiresome energy and made her more content to stay at home in the evening. But he was not the kind of man to marry a woman who wanted to work, and Gillian had never been forceful in such suggestions.

  “It’s good for your company image to have a wife active in the community,” Gillian reminded him.

  Gillian had the taste to do nothing strident, like marching for abortion or peace. She raised money for the art gallery, lobbied for better education for handicapped children, for scholarships for the gifted, and she supported the little theatres. She never asked him for unreasonable
donations, nor did she drag him, as so many other husbands were dragged, to the symphony or gallery openings.

  “With your interest in the arts, why don’t you want to stay home and read a good book?”

  “I’m a people person, darling. That’s all.”

  Clearly “people” could not include him, the singular and solitary man that he was. But he had to admit that she never discouraged him from fishing or hunting, even encouraged him to take longer and more expensive sporting holidays than he could make up his mind about for himself since he did not like the idea of being selfish.

  “You’re not selfish. You’re a very generous man. Why not occasionally be generous to yourself?”

  Away from his wife and daughters, he could stop brooding about them, stop feeling left out of their lives, for which he had no taste to be included. Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like to have a son, but he was even less easy in the company of men if there were no business topic to preoccupy them. He fished and hunted alone. What he would have enjoyed was knowing that Gillian was back at whatever lodge or cabin waiting for him. Yet that sort of wife might complain about being lonely.

  Sometimes when Gillian grew impatient with his complaints, she said to him, “You have a good marriage and two lovely children. Why can’t you just relax and be satisfied?”

  Gillian believed what she said. Long suffering was not on her list of virtues, nor did she think it should be. She complained neither to her husband nor about him. When she said of him, “He has a difficult temperament; he’s reclusive,” she was simply describing him to excuse his absence from plays, gallery openings—husbands weren’t expected to be on committees. Gillian considered herself as good a wife as her husband could reasonably expect and a good deal better than he might have had.

  He did not know that Gillian was not extravagant with his money because she had some of her own. She didn’t think of herself as secretive about it so much as keeping her own counsel. There was no need for him to appropriate what was hers as if it were some sort of dowry. She didn’t ask him the particulars of his financial life, about which he was also inclined to keep his counsel. Unlike him, she never suspected that he might be unfaithful. She knew that he wasn’t. He was far too fastidious a man to be involved in anything he would think of as messy.

  Gillian’s conscience about him was perfectly clear. She did do good works. She was a good mother. And she knew more clearly than he did that he would be just as irritated with her at home as he was with her for not being there, not because she was an irritating woman but because he was an irritable man.

  Gillian did not know how long ago it had first occurred to her that she would one day leave him, after the girls were raised and safely settled. Simply gradually her illusion of freedom made her feel she would one day enjoy the real thing. Gillian would not leave him for anyone else. It would be unfair to involve a third party in divorce. Therefore, whenever a third party became at all pressing about time Gillian did not have, emotional support she could not offer, long before there was any question of commitment, Gillian retreated into being a wife and mother with, yes, some feeling of guilt about the deserted lover but with a sense, too, that it was for the best since she refused to burden any lover with the guilt of feeling responsible for a broken marriage. When Gillian decided to leave, she would deal with the problem of her outraged husband by herself, for outraged she knew he would be, no matter how much he complained about her inadequacies.

  “Duplicity” was not the word Gillian would have used to describe her life, perhaps because she could move quite openly with a lover, go out to dinner, go to the theatre without causing a flicker of gossip. She could even invite one home, though she didn’t very often, out of loyalty to her husband really because invariably a lover asked, “How can you live with him?” For Gillian it wasn’t all that difficult. She knew women who stayed with husbands who drank, who beat them, who didn’t pay the bills. Her marriage in comparison was a solid, sane arrangement in which to raise children.

  “But he’s such an impossible person!” came the protest.

  “Aren’t we all,” Gillian would ask, “one way or another?”

  But she liked to avoid such discussions when she could. Her lovers almost always befriended her daughters, sometimes even became their confidantes. Gillian enjoyed being able to include the girls in her happiness. Sometimes she even took them with her on a holiday with a lover, for their father couldn’t abide traveling with children but wouldn’t begrudge them the experience. Occasionally, Gillian thought, the girls mourned the loss of a lover even more than she did, but the period between lost love and restored intimate friendship usually didn’t last long. By now Gillian had what might almost be described as a community of ex-lovers who had become friends.

  With men such an arrangement would not have been possible. If Gillian had been attracted to men, her life might have been full of tension and deceit. As it was, she never had to lie to her husband about whom she was with and only very occasionally about where she was going.

  Only once her husband said, “That friend of yours, Joan, I think she’s a lesbian.”

  “She may be,” Gillian said lightly, “but she’s great, good fun.”

  “Doesn’t your own reputation concern you?”

  “Of course, but I’m not a bigot, and neither are you.”

  In fact, Joan was only a good friend. Gillian’s taste in women was for the feminine and sensitive. Her husband would never have suspected any of her lovers of being a lesbian. The idea would have offended his whole concept of womanhood. Her lovers might seem to him “flighty” or “neurotic” but never perverse.

  It was Gillian’s own behavior he would have suspected if he had ever seen her among her ex-lovers, for her bright scarf became an ascot, and she held her cigarette between her teeth when she lighted it. Her laughter was bold, and her eyes were direct and suggestive. Even the way she downed her beer, which she didn’t touch at home, would have shocked him.

  In this role, her daughters loved her best, for she was full of fun and daring. No matter what they were doing, there was the tension of excitement, which made them prance and whinny. They knew their mother was never like that around their father. They associated their mother’s mood with themselves away from him rather than with her friends.

  Gillian acknowledged the latent eroticism she felt for her daughters and they for her. It was one of the joys of mothering daughters. She would brook no criticism from her friends about it.

  “Why should I mind if they grow up to be lesbians?”

  But they were both growing up to be even crazier about boys than they were about their mother and her exciting friends. Gillian didn’t worry about that either, though it made her sometimes restless, aware of how empty her particular nest would be when they were gone and she had no buffer between her and her irritable and isolated husband. For, though he was critical of the girls, they had grown very good at teasing and cajoling him when it was necessary.

  Was it about this time, too, that the pattern of her relationships with other women shifted? Lynn, who had to be called Lynn Number Two or Lynn R.—it had gotten that bad, her friends teased her, such a string of women she’d had—instead of beginning to make unreasonable demands, was simply drifting away, busy when Gillian had a free night, not home at the hour she knew Gillian habitually called. Lynn finally confessed that there was someone else.

  Gillian felt both bereft and betrayed. She had never left a lover for someone else, as she wouldn’t leave her husband. There was something immoral about inflicting jealous pain.

  “Pain is pain,” Lynn Number One, who resented this new designation, said to her. “Don’t you think I was jealous of your husband?”

  “But why would you be?”

  “You sleep with him, don’t you?”

  “Once a month.”

  “You stay with him.”

  “The children,” Gillian responded automatically.

  “Gillian, you’v
e always wanted your cake and to eat it, too. Face it: you’re not getting any younger. What was in it for Lynn R.?”

  “That’s awfully calculating,” Gillian said.

  She began to drink too much, to get maudlin with old lovers about the past beauty of their relationships, their lasting loyalty. (She wasn’t speaking to Lynn R.) She often had to be forcibly sobered up before she was sent home, and she was later getting there than she had ever risked, even at the passionate height of an affair. The security of home, which she had never lost sight of in delight, seemed less meaningful to her in sorrow. Before, she could bring all her own nourished happiness in to brighten the gloom. Now, far more particularly miserable than her husband, she could not endure his bleak moods. When he approached her sexually, she turned him harshly away.

  “You are my wife,” he said, more shocked than angry.

  Gillian was shocked herself at how without generosity she was for him, how reckless of him. For she let him see how angry and out of control she was. She snatched up her coat and left the house.

  She went to a lesbian bar where her friends had sometimes gone, a place too public for the way she arranged her life. There she picked up a young girl, hardly older than her own daughters, and took her to a hotel for the night.

  “Won’t you even tell me your name?” her young lover pleaded in the morning.

  Gillian’s terror overcame her remorse. She fled as cruelly as she had from her husband, revolting from what she had done. She was not that kind of woman, to take advantage of a mere child and to compound it with deserting her. If Gillian had had the presence of mind, she would have left money on the dresser.

  Arriving home, Gillian expected to have the day to pull herself together and to figure out how to get back from the too far she had gone. Her husband had not gone to work. He sat in his chair in the living room waiting for her. She put a surprised and guilty hand to her mouth. She had not made up her face, and his eyes were appraising her sternly.