It takes three more emails, including an elaborate two-page pitch plus one wheedling phone call to get Dean to agree to pay expenses. Her ace in the hole is the Hollywood movie, blessedly just released. Badly rendered on the whole, but beautifully shot, a veritable travelogue. Tourists are flocking as a result — flocking! she told Dean. She cribbed this from her conversation with Ned, who gave her to understand in no uncertain terms that any Newfoundlander worth his salt would wince like foot-meets-jellyfish at mention of the movie. Would bemoan the clothes (“Nobody dresses like that!”), the accents (“like a retarded Blanche Dubois”), the incest (“always with the goddamn incest”). Plus the actors, reportedly, had put on airs. And Ned’s brother had been hired for use of his boat and the bastards had hauled stakes for LA still owing him money.
None of this makes it into the three emails and one phone call with Dean. Just the movie, and the tourists, buying up the books, sweaters, CDs, and partridgeberry jam like it’s going out of style, which of course it is.
Was it ever in style to be a lady drunk, she’d wondered, back when she was nearing her thirtieth birthday and becoming recognizable to herself. From reading, Jane determined it was not. Good for Jane, therefore, iconoclast. She calls herself Jane in a roundabout homage to her heroine, the alcoholic novelist Jean Rhys. Jane didn’t like the name, however, the pinched sound of it — Jeen Rees — like eye-slits. Jean had been a terrible alcoholic. Which is to say, she was bad at it. Jane, on the other hand, is an impeccable drunk in her driven, type-A sort of way. Jean floundered about the streets of London and Paris, roaring up at Ford Madox Ford’s window, threatening her landladies, getting arrested. Men used her and she used them in return, but never managed to derive the same blithe satisfaction from it. She let herself get beaten down, let herself get poor and old and conspicuously smashed. Flattened into jeen.
She sees from the plane. Big clumps of wedding cake floating on the deep and endless blue. Reverse sky, jagged clouds.
“Oh, look, there they are!” she says to the seatmate she has ignored for the entire jaunt from Halifax. But doesn’t turn away to see if he is looking too. Now she can see the roots of them beneath the water, extending to who-knows-what depths. Of course, the bulk of these monoliths remain underwater. Hence the old “tip of the iceberg” saying. To mean: This is just the beginning. You think this is something? This is nothing.
Jane flops herself off Ned like a seal, grunting also like a seal. That’s what she feels like at such times. All torso, no limbs. A long, tapering creature, new and primordial, like something pooped out of something else.
All night since they met up at the bar it had been: Not gonna sleep with Ned, Not gonna sleep with Ned, until around one-forty-five in the morning when she decided, Ah why not. Now it is nine hours later, Ned stayed the night either because he is a gent or because it’s a nice hotel room. She is staying at the Delta. Ned had invited her to stay at his place, had insisted, had been appalled she would turn down a stranger’s pullout couch for a clean, well-lighted place with a sweeping view of the downtown and harbour beyond. Ned probably had that down-home hospitality beaten into him along with the holy catechism, she assumed.
He’d told her about that sort of stuff, once they were properly liquored. Catholic school. A teacher taking him aside punching him in the stomach when he was eight.
“That’ll learn ya,” Jane had smirked, looking down.
“It did learn me,” said Ned, brown-eyed and serious above his beard.
Jane wiped the smirk off her face.
“What did it learn you?” she wanted to know, being serious herself now, if not quite enough to correct her syntax.
“Fear,” answered Ned. “That’s what school’s for. To teach us to be afraid, right?”
“That’s what everything’s for.”
Oh it is horseshit that drunkards don’t have real conversations, don’t connect with others on any kind of significant level. Jane once had a boyfriend who joined AA just to shame her, because she wouldn’t go and he thought she needed to. Then he would come home and tell her everything he’d learned at that evening’s meetings. The thing that hurt her feelings the most was when he told her there was no point having a conversation with a drunk. Nothing they said was real, he informed her, nothing they could say had any depth or meaning. They could declare their undying love for you at night and forget they had uttered a word of it in the morning.
She looks over at Ned. Perhaps there have been little to no beautiful moments shared between them thus far, but Ned has told her a story that rubbed at her heart, brought her to the point of Ah why not, caused her to say something she would normally be far too slick to utter, to practically yelp it, eyes bulging, turning nearby heads.
“That’s what everything’s for.”
Almost giving away the farm.
Jean Rhys was always cold in England. Thus it is with Jane, who brought precisely the wrong kind of clothes for Newfoundland. It is May, which apparently is not quite springtime around here. She neglected to pack hats or gloves or scarves. Her ears glow the moment she steps outside. It’s a good wind.
Jean Rhys used to cuddle up under blankets in her own hotel and boarding house rooms — as many blankets as she could — placing an arm over her eyes (she mentions this gesture in several stories, the supine, defeated woman on the bed, arm over the eyes). Then Jean would drift into dreams of her island home, Dominica — imagine herself growing moist and sultry from the tropical sun, not the heat of her body under thick woolen blankets. At one place, she took hot baths so often the landlady made remarks about it. Indecent implications. What kind of girl, she would ask in front of all the other boarders, took so many hot baths?
