Flirt: The Interviews (5 page)

Libido is complex, he said. Perhaps she has a precipitous drop in estrogen and progesterone which allows testosterone to take over. Or, he says there's a study: they sprayed male sweat into one bathroom stall and left the adjacent one clean. Sure enough, most women peed in the sweaty stall. We're naturally attracted to the hormones. Sure, I said, but my character's not smelling these guys, she's watching them on TV. Still she wants to go
out and buy fancy underpants and jeans that dip below her navel. She wants to curl free weights, cross-train elliptically, so they'll notice her jiggle-free arms and be lured. My doctor says there's a Pavlovian response under those circumstances, where she sees them play, sees them on the bench and interviewed in the locker room and she associates them with the sweat. Also, he says, there's probably some disinhibition happening because the screen makes these guys seem safe and also available. Which, I guess, they're not.

Or are they?

—No, they're not.

—Okay, okay they're not. But why do you think a woman would think that way? You must get groupies.

—Your doctor knows best, but I think it gets back to that emptiness we talked about before.

—She doesn't feel empty, Markus. She feels full and alive and young and ready.

—Yeah, but she's bein' unrealistic and tryin' to be someone – what's the word? Implausible. She's pretendin'. I don't know a player out of the 700 I play with who would be attracted to the character you've described.
Maybe
Chris Chelios. Uh-oh. Stay still. Don't panic, just push on the sand bar with one end of your paddle and try to keep upright. That's it, push yourself out this way. Now you can touch bottom with your hand and push away from the bar. Okay, maybe not. Grab the end of my paddle then. Hold on and I'll pull you off.

How did you end up way over there?

Let's go find those seals you promised.

You're lookin' so sad. I'm gonna tell you a Swedish fairy tale to cheer you up. My little daughters love this one. It's about a man named Red Roderick of the Seals. One night Red Roderick was fishin' on a rock an' he heard the sweetest music. It was so sweet that he followed the sound until he came upon a musician playin' and a bunch of people dressed in fancy clothes dancin' to his tune. Close by, in the moonlight, he saw bundles on the ground – black and white like cowskins. He tucked one of 'em under his jacket.

Eventually the music stopped an' the dancers went to their bundles of skins, threw off their fancy clothes an' put on their hides. They all turned into grey seals. They flopped over the rocks an' swam out to sea. Except one beautiful girl. She rushed around frantically lookin' for her skin, cryin' and sobbin', clutchin' and grabbin' her hair.

So great was the girl's beauty an' so pitiful her cries that Red Roderick was taken with her, smitten, an' he asked her what was wrong. She said she'd lost her garment, an' Roderick said that if she would go with him he would get her a much better garment in town, which he did, even fancier than the dress she'd worn to dance.

Red Roderick's feelin's for the girl increased. So a priest was found to baptize her an' they were married an' reared a family of children. At last, however, the girl became lonely for her old life, her friends, an' the dancin' an' singin' in the moonlight. She asked for her sealskin back. The seals, she said, wouldn't touch her because of “the blessed water on my face an' forehead.” Then she asked that her husband never kill another seal for fear it might be her. Red Roderick agreed an' that night she danced in the moonlight with her old friends, although none would touch her. An' she swam away with them.

That one behind you looks like Mikka Kiprusoff.

—What?

—Like Kiprusoff when he tilts his mask back from his face, after a save or after a goal, doesn't matter. He resembles a calm wide-eyed seal, breachin' the surface, to consider those poor mortals stuck back on shore.

—They're everywhere. They're all around you. They love you.

—Listen to their breathin'.

—How do you stay so optimistic, Markus, even through shattered fibia and tibia and rabid press who ask you to be yourself and then hate it when you are, and through terrible losses and desperate and tormented friends and so far from home.

—The toughest thing to cope with is not injury, it's uncertainty. My wife's taught me a lot about stayin' calm an' positive. She has all the patience I don't have. An' my kids always have a great outlook. They've
shown me the power of sheer innocent joy. It's hard to be depressed when you're around little kids.

—My sister died, of course, and five years later I was living in a fishing village at the top of Vancouver Island. My then husband was a lay preacher for the Anglican church; he had stolen my skin so I couldn't dance.

—That's a nice use of metaphor.

—He was a fisherman, and one day my parents drove the long and dusty logging road to visit and brought my sister's ashes with them. We all took the box out in his little fish boat. The waters of Johnstone Strait flow and reach around the world and this idea made us happy, that my sister would be so international. On a calm Sunday morning, we set out with the box of ashes in my husband's green wooden lobster boat.

—Wait. There's lobster here?

—Converted boat.

—I see.

—He knew the strait and took us far from the bay out to the right spot. There, my mother opened the box and, with the boat coughing along at trawling speed, emptied it into the water and said good-bye to her favourite daughter. Some ashes blew back and lodged in the trim along the boat's side; I leaned over and flicked them into the ocean. As I did, a school of bright silvery fish came to the surface roiling all around the boat, thick and deep, and as they did, the engine cut out and the wind came up. We floated and bobbed as my husband tried to re-start the engine. How many minutes, I don't know, but when the fish were gone the wind went flat; the engine caught and started.

That scene probably means something to you.

—Of course it does. It should mean somethin' to you, too. It should mean you never have to feel alone or dismayed because there's always a higher power with you, showin' you the way, leadin' you through fog and into the clear. Makin' contact.

—It would have happened anyway, Markus.

—Sure. But imagine somethin' more.

—Do you smell chicken manure, Ms. Munro?

—The market's full of smells you don't get in the city. It's the smell of work and rich soil and humus. It smells like simple, plentiful life. You'll like it when we get to the berry tarts my friend Johanna makes. Every Friday night – from the first of the rhubarb to the last of the pumpkins – she's up till three in the morning and then awake again at six to get the baking done. Imagine working that hard at something. Call me Alice, won't you?

—Man, it must be a hundred degrees out here. I wish I'd worn a hat like yours. I like how the straw makes your face sparkle. You had three kids and a husband in a beige city. Still you managed to write your first collection of stories, some of the most powerful stories by anyone, any time.

—Well, my girls would nap –

—Jesus, Alice. I'm so sick of that anecdote. Can't you give me something better? More honest? Something that doesn't make us all feel like slugs? When I started to write stories, coping with a bipolar pregnancy full of worry and woe – in my mid-thirties and blooming late in all regards – I read that you'd written
Dance of the Happy Shades
while they slept. I took comfort.
Well
, I thought,
that seems okay
. The baby will sleep and I'll get at it, I'll write the best of my prose, full of deep feelings and great details. It will be a lovely internal time. And then I'll be patient when the baby wakes up, because I'll have had creative fulfillment for the couple of hours, peace, and then I'll dance with baby around the kitchen singing Supremes songs with “baby” in the lyrics. Art heals, you bet, and I anticipated this new, better life, its riches.

Anyway. One critic says you are able to compress without miniaturizing. Comment?

—Here, have a plum. This will knock your socks off. Bernie gets these off a tree planted by his great great grandfather, Jeremiah Glover. He's
given everybody grafts, but no one's plums taste quite as earthy and sweet as Bernie's.

—He has a crush on you.

—Oh, no.

—Yes, he does.

—Well, I see what you mean – the thumb and forefinger to the cuff after he takes my money, the left eyebrow raised slightly instead of hello, the other hand in and out of the back pocket, and obviously the spitting into the handkerchief, that's sexual. No harm, though. People flirt, that's all there is to it. Maybe it's flirting you smell, not manure.

—I'll get a bag of those plums on our way back. Even the colour seems too good. So the baby's born: gorgeous. And I cheer up quite a bit, even though I'm living with the staff writer for a local weekly who keeps hideous hours.

—This is the baby's father?

—Right.

—You should be more precise.

—The baby's great, and after some breast-feeding problems –

—Such as?

—Well, the latching on was flawed, the midwife didn't catch it, so blisters and cuts and excruciating pain whenever the little fatso wanted to feed, every ten minutes or so.

—What exactly did that feel like?

—Stabbing.

—Stabbing with what.

—Okay, stabbing with a chainsaw.

—That's not possible.

—Exactly. And not only did she want to stab me with a chainsaw every ten minutes, she did not nap.

—That's not possible.

—You're wrong about that. Bedtimes were good, no problem. But she would not nap during the day and for the first four years, she'd be up with your friend Johanna at the crack of dawn. So she'd get cranky and floppy by afternoon, and I'd put her in the crib in the little room at the back of the
house and play a sugary lullaby tape and do everything right, I swear. She'd let me leave the room, make a cup of Earl Grey tea and find my favourite ultrafine felt pen. I lowered myself into the couch, laid my favourite pad of tiny-lined paper across my knees, and took my first look out the picture window to see what the world had to talk about. “Come get me, you slut,” she'd whimper, wail, yelp. Time's up, no art today. Every day was like that.

—Surely your husband –

—Not married.

—Surely your man would give you some time?

—I hated art by six o'clock. I was the one at home, and our story was looking pretty traditional by this time, so dinner was up to me.

—Weekends then. He takes the baby to the park for a nice swing and you scoot up to the library on the bus while the washing machine's running.

—Listen, Alice. If I'd really
really
wanted to be writing at thirty-five with a newborn I could have figured out a way to do so. No debate. I know it's possible to argue that I was a lazy, whining, good for nothing loser mother who couldn't sweep the floor without getting sad. Women writers in history who made the most of their brains and talent and kept writing: the list is long. Kids got diseased and still the 1000 words a day. I know. I'm just saying, you set me up to expect one kind of life with that write-while-they-sleep bullshit anecdote. And I got another kind of life.

—But the stories came eventually.

—They did.

—So it all worked out.

—Okay. Hey pooch.

—Those are Bernie's dogs. They'll follow until we get to the organic dog treats then head back. The little one seems stuck on you. See the man selling tomatoes, the one with the dirty grey ponytail down his back and the rotten teeth?

—He's got a dachshund under his arm and the hair on his chest's coming up in a nice tuft from the blue shirt?

—That's him.

—What?

—Roy. His wife Stella teaches at the university – she might be Associate Dean by now; no one tells me anything – and you wouldn't believe how few weeds they have in their two-acre garden. The Muscovy ducks help, but she's out there in her coveralls every evening from April 1st. She just published a startling 900-page encyclopedia of disappearing languages in the several South American countries she's taken her kids to – no, the youngest four. The eldest two are in South Africa working in the townships, something to do with AIDS and cooperative housing. You have no idea. Look at the green of the basil next to the red of the tomatoes. I'd like a silk blouse with those colours.

—I suppose you still write all day every day and find time to stare out the window with a cup of great coffee for, say, eight hours.

—You seem angry right now. You do. Look, you've annoyed the dogs. Have I said something accidentally to make you so angry or are you one of those women who's angry all the time? I suppose it could be the heat. You don't get this humid heat in British Columbia and the linen probably seemed like a good idea this morning but now you're finding it sticky around your underarms. Still, it's pretty for a day in the country. Or maybe you've got a bad hip from the sports you played as a child, and the market's big enough and we're doing so much walking that you've got a little pinch just above the coccyx and you're having trouble feeling pleasant. Your hip flexor's tight. Let's take our muffins into the shade and sit. Better? Yes. Now. Was this your first marriage-type relationship, the one with your baby's father?