The Equations of Love (6 page)

At any moment, just by drawing the curtains and thus concealing the bed, the main portion of the room can become a living room. It is furnished with repulsively ornate chairs and a couch upholstered in a material which might be rose-coloured plush, but is not, and on this furniture are large pink cushions of a shiny satin which look as though they should not be leaned upon, but should be held upon the knees. A screen placed with seeming casualness across a corner hides various things. The two windows look out, between their flowered curtains, on Burrard Street. Burrard Street has three things to commend it, and no more. Its name belongs to the early
history of the north Pacific Coast, but Mrs. Emblem does not know this. It is wide. As you travel north on Burrard Street on a fine day you see at its northern end a disclosure of Inlet (also Burrard) and mountains fantastically beautiful; and as you travel south you come to a bridge across False Creek, wide, simple, yet romantically and with dignity conceived. But where you look out of Mrs. Emblem’s windows there is none of this; Burrard Street is only a street up and down which there goes too much vehicular traffic. There are no books in Mrs. Emblem’s sitting room because she does not read books. Books are untidy, and there is no need of them. There is a shiny wooden chest or bench in which there are all-story, fashion or movie magazines put away. It is easy to be funny about the furniture-store romantic appearance of Mrs. Emblem’s room, and for Myrtle to say that it is pink like a bad house. But it is not a bad house; it is a good house although it is only one room, and it is as much part of the essential Mrs. Emblem as her crinkly smile or her pink dressing gown.

Maybelle Slazenger who is part owner of the LaRose Beauty Parlour is Mrs. Emblem’s closest friend; but she has many other friends, both men and women, and they spend pleasant evenings in Mrs. Emblem’s room. When gentlemen come, they bring a bottle, one only. She does not admit Mr. Thorsteinsen or Mr. Jacobs separately, but she does admit them together, and they with other chosen members of the Bridge Club enjoy coming, very much indeed.

Mrs. Emblem’s three husbands have each contributed a little, financially, to her present state. She is a good manager, born to be a wife and a mistress; and to each of her three husbands she has been honest wife and true mistress. From time to time she works because she likes the extra money, and because although she is Mrs. Emblem and therefore a happy woman,
she sometimes feels a certain vacuity which is not filled by cleaning and polishing her room, shopping (which usually means walking through the shops with one of her friends), going to a show, and playing whist or bridge with Mr. Thorsteinsen, Mr. Jacobs, and Maybelle. She is hardly aware of the poignant communications of sky, of birds, of ocean, forest, and mountain, although she thinks Vancouver is a nice place. She does not see around or beyond the tangible male or female human form and its appearance and peculiar requirements. I think, in order to be perfectly happy, she still needs to look after someone. You cannot help liking Mrs. Emblem. She is so nice; she is perhaps too fat, now, to be beautiful; but she is – to Mr. Thorsteinsen, to Maybelle, to Mortimer Johnson and to me – alluring, and so she had been to the two sod cases and the divorce.

She and Maybelle can talk indefinitely, over a cup of coffee at Mrs. Emblem’s place, or over a cup of tea at Scott’s (where they will have their fortunes read) about themselves, their pasts and their futures, and what they counsel each other to do. Mrs. Emblem is not lonely – exactly. But she has enjoyed long and varied male companionship; that is what she is formed for, and that is what she – less ardently now – sometimes craves. And yet something holds her back. Perhaps she is growing indolent; perhaps she does not wish at her age to submit herself to a new elderly marriage whose intimacy youth no longer sanctions and makes charming; perhaps she has discovered the joys of privacy and does not wish to lose them, for at least she now owns herself.

She discusses endlessly with Maybelle the advantages and disadvantages of a further marriage, the feelings that she has about Mr. Thorsteinsen, and the opportunity she has for becoming an investigator – or what her niece Myrtle calls a snoop – in one of the large department stores. She would not
be a good snoop; she is too memorable, and her golden quality draws, usually, geniality and attention from those who serve her. She knows that she can always get a job at a certain downtown millinery store where she worked steady for two years but they would want for her all day, and she does not like that. Then Maybelle and she discuss Maybelle’s problems, which are similar and are also capable of being extended indefinitely over the tea-leaves. In theory she goes to church. But she does not go to church. Her son is married and lives in Lethbridge and she promises to go and visit there some day. The only relative that she has in Vancouver is her niece Myrtle Hopwood who married that nice no-good fellow Mort Johnson, and she likes Myrtle as little as anyone she knows. But she keeps in touch with her, because Myrtle is of her family, child of her own sister. She has watched Myrtle throughout her curious unsatisfactory years without being able “to do anything about it.” She is more kind to Myrtle than Myrtle knows, and is ready to befriend her.

After Mrs. Emblem came in from Myrtle’s on Tuesday night she took her time and, moving ponderously, gracefully, and slowly, she went to bed, drawing her curtains apart and allowing some fresh air, and noise, to come in from Burrard Street. She did not take off her make-up the way it says to do in the paper, because there might be a fire, or a burglar, or she might die, or might be ill or have to have the doctor, and she would not like to be discovered without her make-up. She just reduces it and freshens it a little. But in the morning she can, and will, take it all off, and, later, put it all on again.

Mrs. Emblem made some cocoa, and this she sipped at leisure as she looked idly at the least important page, that is to say the front page, of the newspaper, which necessitates no turning. You cannot turn the pages of a newspaper in bed
and drink cocoa at the same time with complete comfort and safety. But she has some cookies and she will nibble these when she gets to the real page-turning part. The front page has sometimes a good murder which develops on see page two. Apart from that it is very uninteresting, as it deals in long words or in meaningless initials such as opa, uno, tuc, fbi (everyone’s gone mad), and with countries who do not seem to be able to get on together and have no particular bearing on her life (or so she really seems to think), and with elderly men who have no news value for Mrs. Emblem. The same applies to the editorial page but that is worse. It is a dead loss, except occasionally for the correspondence. The same applies also to the sports pages and to those pages devoted sometimes to church and to music and the drama.

First of all (have a cookie) she turns to the Society page. She does not regard the Society page with the feeling, which must surely be suspicion by the way it works in her, of Myrtle. She likes the people who figure there for her entertainment. She wishes she knew far far more about them and the interesting congenial lives which they lead. She likes them to get married. How they rush about (little she knows) to meetings, to luncheons, to teas, to cocktail parties, to dinners, to more meetings, to Harrison Hot Springs, and to California. More power to them. She has no snobbish admiration for these people who so industriously and sometimes vainly spend themselves, and are so prodigal of their smiles, and rush about so much; but they give her vicarious pleasure and are part of the same show which includes the movie advertisements and the funnies. Mrs. Emblem has one or two favourites among those people who rush about; she likes to see their pictures. She says to Maybelle “I didn’t think that picture of Mrs. H. Y. Dunkerley did her justice, did you?” She really is a darling.

She then turns to the funnies. She has her favourites there also, which seem to touch obscurely on something in her own long experience or in her imagination. Sometimes her eyes crinkle and vanish in a smile (have a cookie). Little Orphan Annie, the eternal little girl who never grows up, is profoundly identified with herself. Annie is the normal person, always right in motive and performance and endearingly young, the little monster. Who would not be Annie? Things are not made too difficult for those who read about Annie. Look at the new character who makes his abrupt appearance in the picture. The lines of his jaw, his brow, at once disclose good or evil. You know exactly where you are: would that one’s own acquaintance were so marked. The line of his jaw invites your apprehension or your confidence; but beneath it all, you do not worry. Annie will be all right. Mrs. Emblem passes on down the page, slowly perusing all the funnies, including those funnies which exhibit life in its more debasing forms and are anything but funny. And then she turns to the Personal Column and this is the newspaper’s climax (have a cookie).

Sometimes the Personal Column disappoints. There may only be the working man who wishes to meet a respectable woman of between 30 and 40, no objection to one child, object matrimony. Mrs. Emblem dwells but idly on this working man; he does not tempt her, even in thought; his youth forbids. Her interest kindles at the sight of the Scandinavian gentleman well fixed, desires to meet widow fond of dancing and shows, object companionship and matrimony no triflers. She puts the Scandinavian gentleman through his paces and thinks there is no doubt something wrong with him. What Scandinavian gentleman well fixed could not find plenty of companions for shows and matrimony without advertising for them? He must have bad habits.
She considers the retired business man who would like to meet up with a single widow, and here she laughs. What does he mean by a single widow? Well, I am not a single widow so that won’t do. She is not too sure about the Canadian Catholic non-smoker, or about the English gentleman age sixty-five with means, Protestant, desires to meet sincere widow, although they sound the safest. She lives through each of these mysterious romances each night, weighs them and sometimes makes her selection. They are real life. But she would never dare. She will no more write to the English gentleman than Mort will slug Myrtle although he often declares that he will; these things happen in the mind alone; only the body acts; and Mrs. Emblem will never write to the English gentleman.

Maybelle once had a friend who did answer an advertisement and what that woman went through was terrible. Mrs. Emblem rustles the paper a bit longer, but she is getting sleepy, so she folds it up neatly, turns out the light, and settles to sleep at once like a beautiful old baby.

Myrtle’s cousin Victoria May Tritt has been asleep for some time in her room down on Homer Street. She too read the Personals including the cockroach remedies. She did not read her paper in comfort (and in any case it was not her paper but an old one borrowed) because her light does not hang above her bed. Her light, which has no shade, hangs small and naked in the middle of her room, and therefore she cannot read in bed. Vicky Tritt sits under it straight up on a wooden bedroom chair; she peers at it through her glasses; if she is cold she will put the comforter around her knees. Vicky Tritt does not know what it feels like to be a woman. Mrs. Emblem knows nothing else.

M
ort looked at Mrs. Emblem going down to Powell Street towards the car stop and then, because it was no good continuing to stand there, he turned and went slowly back up the stairs.

Myrtle had been prepared to flick him with a scornful look, to sulk a little, to put him in the wrong for being late for supper, and when she had reduced him to a proper sense of his own inadequacy, consider herself satisfied. But when she had beheld Mort returning home sober but gay, apparently unashamed though late for supper, smelling nevertheless of beer, presenting flowers first to Aunty Emblem and then, as an afterthought, to her – she had flared up into active anger.

Mort went back into the room, and there she sat, her eyelids contemptuous. The ineffectual flowers lay on the table and on the floor.

Myrtle’s nostrils expanded sharply to points.

“You been drinking,” she said coldly.

“Now, Queen …” Mort began, hurt, expostulating.

“Don’t call me Queen. I smelled you the minute you came in the room. Right away when Irma Flask told me she
seen you with Eddie Hansen I might a known what would happen. I might a known you’d get tight …”

“I’m not tight!” bellowed Mort resentfully, nor was he. “And what’s more I never even seen Eddie Hansen. If Eddie Hansen’s in town this is the first I heard of it. Who’s Irma Flask to go telling lies about Eddie Hansen. I never seen Eddie Hansen since he was down at New Year’s!”

“Yes, and you certny made a fool of yourself at New Year’s …”

“Quit that! Quit that now! Can’t you forget it!” But Myrtle had put herself in the wrong by assuming that Mort had been out with Eddie Hansen, and Mort in his turn was injured. “Eddie Hansen’s a good scout and I wouldn’t trade Eddie Hansen for all the Irma Flasks that ever went down the pike.” The conversation now turned on the relative merits of Irma Flask and Eddie Hansen. This led to a good deal of recrimination and old history, but it got Myrtle nowhere, so she side-stepped.

“And me fixing you a good dinner wasting and ruining food and sitting here waiting, and all the time you off spending good money drinking.”

“I have not been drinking,” shouted Mort very loudly. He began stomping about, and lifted up a chair and whanged it down again on to the floor. Up and down the room he stomped.

“Oh oh oh,” moaned old Mr. Raskob on the floor below, “I wouldn’t mind a leetle row just once ma way but every day every day this banging and banging, it’s too bad I say it’s too bad. If they’d only put down some carpets, if they’d only!”

“Them put down carpets!” exclaimed old Mr. Gluck glaring up at the ceiling. “They wouldn’t put down no carpets not if you gave them a pair from the Hudson Bay with frills
on free gratis for nothing! They wouldn’t put them down for spite!” It was true that Myrtle and Mortimer had no carpets and were indifferent to noise.