Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language
Loulou is in the coach-house, wedging clay. She’s wearing a pair of running shoes, once white, now grey, over men’s wool work socks, a purple Indian-print cotton skirt, and a rust-coloured smock, so heavy with clay dust it hangs on her like brocade, the sleeves rolled up past the elbow. This is her favourite working outfit. To the music of The Magic Flute, brought to her by CBC stereo, she lifts the slab of clay and slams it down, gives a half-turn, lifts and slams. This is to get the air bubbles out, so nothing will explode in the kiln. Some potters would hire an apprentice to do this, but not Loulou.
It’s true she has apprentices, two of them; she gets them through the government as free trainees. But they make plates and mugs from her designs, about all they’re fit for. She doesn’t consider them suitable for wedging clay, with their puny little biceps and match-stick wrists, so poorly developed compared with her own solid, smoothly muscled arms and broad, capable but shapely hands, so often admired by the poets. Marmoreal, one of them said – wrote, actually – causing Loulou to make one of her frequent sorties into the dictionary, to find out whether or not she’d been insulted.
Once she had done this openly, whenever they’d used a word about her she didn’t understand, but when they’d discovered she was doing it they’d found it amusing and had started using words like that on purpose. “Loulou is so geomorphic,” one of them would say, and when she would blush and scowl, another would take it up. “Not only that, she’s fundamentally chthonic.” “Telluric,” a third would pipe up. Then they would laugh. She’s decided that the only thing to do is to ignore them. But she’s not so dumb as they think, she remembers the words, and when they aren’t watching she sneaks a look at the Shorter Oxford (kept in the study which really belongs to only one of them but which she thinks of as theirs), washing her hands first so she won’t leave any tell-tale signs of clay on the page.
She reads their journals, too, taking the same precautions. She suspects they know she does this. It’s her way of keeping up with what they are really thinking about her, or maybe only with what they want her to think they’re thinking. The journals are supposed to be secret, but Loulou considers it her right and also a kind of duty to read them. She views it in the same light as her mother viewed going through the family’s sock and underwear drawers, to sort out the clean things from the ones they’d already worn and stuffed back in. This is what the poets’ journals are like. Socks, mostly, but you never know what you will find.
“Loulou is becoming more metonymous,” she’s read recently. This has been bothering her for days. Sometimes she longs to say to them, “Now just what in hell did you mean by that?” But she knows she would get nowhere.
“Loulou is the foe of abstract order,” one would say. This is a favourite belief of theirs.
“Loulou is the foe of abstract ordure.”
“Loulou is the Great Goddess.”
“Loulou is the great mattress.”
It would end up with Loulou telling them to piss off. When that didn’t stop them, she would tell them they couldn’t have any more baked chicken if they went on like that. Threatening to deprive them of food usually works.
Overtly, Loulou takes care to express scorn for the poets; though not for them, exactly – they have their points – but for their pickiness about words. Her mother would have said they were finicky eaters. “Who cares what a thing’s called?” she says to them. “A piece of bread is a piece of bread. You want some or not?” And she bends over to slide three of her famous loaves, high and nicely browned, out of the oven, and the poets admire her ass and haunches. Sometimes they do this openly, like other men, growling and smacking their lips, pretending to be construction workers. They like pretending to be other things; in the summers they play baseball games together and make a big fuss about having the right hats. Sometimes, though, they do it silently, and Loulou only knows about it from the poems they write afterwards. Loulou can tell these poems are about her, even though the nouns change: “my lady,” “my friend’s lady,” “my woman,” “my friend’s woman,” “my wife,” “my friend’s wife,” and, when necessary for the length of the line, “the wife of my friend.” Never “girl” though, and never her name. Ass and haunches aren’t Loulou’s words either; she would say butt.
Loulou doesn’t know anything about music but she likes listening to it. Right now, the Queen of the Night runs up her trill, and Loulou pauses to see if she’ll make it to the top. She does, just barely, and Loulou, feeling vicarious triumph, rams her fist into the mound of clay. Then she covers it with a sheet of plastic and goes to the sink to wash her hands. Soon the oven timer will go off and one of the poets, maybe her husband but you never know, will call her on the intercom to come and see about the bread. It isn’t that they wouldn’t take it out themselves, if she asked them to. Among the four or five of them they’d likely manage. It’s just that Loulou doesn’t trust them. She decided long ago that none of them knows his left tit from a hole in the ground when it comes to the real world. If she wants the bread taken out when it’s done but not overdone, and she does, she’ll have to do it herself.
She wonders who will be in the kitchen at the main house by now: her first husband for sure, and the man she lived with after that for three years without being married, and her second husband, the one she has now, and two ex-lovers. Half a dozen of them maybe, sitting around the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and eating her hermit cookies and talking about whatever they talk about when she isn’t there. In the past there have been periods of strain among them, especially during the times when Loulou has been switching over, but they’re all getting along well enough now. They run a collective poetry magazine, which keeps them out of trouble mostly. The name of this magazine is Comma, but among themselves the poets refer to it as Coma. At parties they enjoy going up to young female would-be poets (“proupies,” they call them behind their backs, which means “poetry groupies”), and saying, “I’d like to put you in a Coma.” A while ago Comma published mostly poems without commas, but this is going out now, just as beards are going out in favour of moustaches and even shaving. The more daring poets have gone so far as to cut off their sideburns. Loulou is not quite sure whether or not she approves of this.
She doesn’t know whether the poets are good poets, whether the poems they write in such profusion are any good. Loulou has no opinion on this subject: all that matters is what they are writing about her. Their poems get published in books, but what does that mean? Not money, that’s for sure. You don’t make any money with poetry, the poets tell her, unless you sing and play the guitar too. Sometimes they give readings and make a couple of hundred bucks. For Loulou that’s three medium-sized casseroles, with lids. On the other hand, they don’t have her expenses. Part of her expenses is them.
Loulou can’t remember exactly how she got mixed up with the poets. It wasn’t that she had any special thing for poets as such: it just happened that way. After the first one, the others seemed to follow along naturally, almost as if they were tied onto each other in a long line with a piece of string. They were always around, and she was so busy most of the time that she didn’t go out much to look for other kinds of men. Now that her business is doing so well you’d think she would have more leisure time, but this isn’t the case. And any leisure time she does have, she spends with the poets. They’re always nagging her about working too hard.
Bob was the first one, and also her first husband. He was in art school at the same time she was, until he decided he wasn’t suited for it. He wasn’t practical enough, he let things dry out: paint, clay, even the leftovers in his tiny refrigerator, as Loulou discovered the first night she’d slept with him. She devoted the next morning to cleaning up his kitchen, getting rid of the saucers of mummified cooked peas and the shrivelled, half-gnawed chicken legs and the warped, cracked quarter-packages of two-month-old sliced bacon, and the bits of cheese, oily on the outside and hard as tiles. Loulou has always hated clutter, which she defines, though not in so many words, as matter out of its proper place. Bob looked on, sullen but appreciative, as she hurled and scoured. Possibly this was why he decided to love her: because she would do this sort of thing. What he said though was, “You complete me.”
What he also said was that he’d fallen in love with her name. All the poets have done this, one after the other. The first symptom is that they ask her whether Loulou is short for something – Louise, maybe? When she says no, they look at her in that slightly glazed way she recognizes instantly, as if they’ve never paid proper attention to her or even seen her before. This look is her favourite part of any new relationship with a man. It’s even better than the sex, though Loulou likes sex well enough and all the poets have been good in bed. But then, Loulou has never slept with a man she did not consider good in bed. She’s beginning to think this is because she has low standards.
At first Loulou was intrigued by this obsession with her name, mistaking it for an obsession with her, but it turned out to be no such thing. It was the gap that interested them, one of them had explained (not Bob though; maybe Phil, the second and most linguistic of them all).
“What gap?” Loulou asked suspiciously. She knew her upper front teeth were a little wide apart and had been self-conscious about it when she was younger.
“The gap between the word and the thing signified,” Phil said. His hand was on her breast and he’d given an absent-minded squeeze, as if to illustrate what he meant. They were in bed at the time. Mostly Loulou doesn’t like talking in bed. But she’s not that fond of talking at other times, either.
Phil went on to say that Loulou, as a name, conjured up images of French girls in can-can outfits, with corseted wasp-waists and blonde curls and bubbly laughs. But then there was the real Loulou – dark, straight-haired, firmly built, marmoreal, and well, not exactly bubbly. More earthy, you might say. (Loulou hadn’t known then what he meant by “earthy,” though by now she’s learned that for him, for all of them, it means “functionally illiterate.”) The thing was, Phil said, what existed in the space between Loulou and her name?
Loulou didn’t know what he was talking about. What space? Once she’d resented her mother for having saddled her with this name; she would rather have been called Mary or Ann. Maybe she suspected that her mother would really have preferred a child more like the name – blonde, thin, curly-headed – but had disappointingly got Loulou instead, short, thick, stubborn-jawed, not much interested in the frilly dolls’ clothes her mother had painstakingly crocheted for her. Instead, Loulou was fond of making mud pies on the back porch, placing them carefully along the railing where people wouldn’t step on them and ruin them. Her mother’s response to these pies was to say, “Oh, Loulou!”, as if Loulou in itself meant mud, meant trouble and dismay.
“It’s just a name,” she said. “Phil is kind of a dumb name too if you ask me.”
Phil said that wasn’t the point, he wasn’t criticizing her, but Loulou had stopped the conversation by climbing on top of him, letting her long hair fall down over his face.
That was early on; he’d liked her hair then. “Rank,” he’d called it in a poem, quite a lot later. Loulou hadn’t thought much of that when she looked it up. It could mean too luxuriant or offensive and foul-smelling. The effect of this poem on Loulou was to cause her to wash her hair more often. Sooner or later all the poets got into her hair, and she was tired of having it compared to horses’ tails, Newfoundland dog fur, black holes in space and the insides of caves. When Loulou was feeling particularly enraged by the poets she would threaten to get a brushcut, though she knew it would be pushing her luck.
When she has dried her hands, Loulou takes off her smock. Underneath it she’s wearing a mauve sweatshirt with RAVING OPTIMIST stencilled across the front. The poets gave it to her, collectively, one Christmas, because a few weeks before one of them had said, “Why are you so grumpy, Loulou?” and Loulou had said, “I’m only grumpy when you pick on me,” and then, after a pause, “Compared to you guys I’m a raving optimist.” This was true, though they made fun of her for it. In a group they can laugh, but it’s only Loulou who has seen them one at a time, sitting in chairs for hours on end with their heads down on their arms, almost unable to move. It’s Loulou who’s held their hands when they couldn’t make it in bed and told them that other things are just as important, though she’s never been able to specify what. It’s Loulou who has gone out and got drunk with them and listened to them talking about the void and about the terrifying blankness of the page and about how any art form is just a way of evading suicide. Loulou thinks this is a load of b.s.: she herself does not consider the making of casseroles with lids or the throwing of porcelain fruit bowls as an evasion of suicide, but then, as they have often pointed out, what she’s doing isn’t an art form, it’s only a craft. Bob once asked her when she was going to branch out into macramé, for which she emptied the dust-pan on him. But she matches them beer for beer; she’s even gone so far as to throw up right along with them, if that seemed required. One of them once told her she was a soft touch.
The intercom buzzes as Loulou is hanging up her smock. She buzzes back to show she has heard, takes her hair out of the elastic band and smooths it down, looking in the round tin-framed Mexican mirror that hangs over the sink, and checks up on little Marilyn, her new apprentice, before heading out the door.
Marilyn is still having trouble with cup handles. Loulou will have to spend some time with her later and explain them to her. If the cup handles aren’t on straight, she will say, the cup will be crooked when you pick it up and then the people drinking out of it will spill things and burn themselves. That’s the way you have to put it for trainees: in terms of physical damage. It’s important to Loulou that the production pieces should be done right. They’re her bread and butter, though what she most likes to work on are the bigger things, the amphora-like vases, the tureens a size larger than anyone ought to be able to throw. Another potter once said that you’d need a derrick to give a dinner party with Loulou’s stuff, but that was jealousy. What they say about her mostly is that she doesn’t fool around.
Loulou flings her pink sweater-coat across her shoulders, bangs the coach-house door behind her to make it shut, and walks towards the house, whistling between her teeth and stomping her feet to get the clay dust off. The kitchen is filled with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Loulou breathes it in, revelling in it: a smell of her own creation.
The poets are sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Maybe they’re having a meeting, it’s hard to tell. Some nod at her, some grin. Two of the female poets are here today and Loulou isn’t too pleased about that. As far as she’s concerned they don’t have a lot to offer: they’re almost as bad as the male poets, but without the saving grace of being men. They wear black a lot and have cheek-bones.
Piss on their cheek-bones, thinks Loulou. She knows what cheek-bones mean. The poets, her poets, consider these female poets high-strung and interesting. Sometimes they praise their work, a little too extravagantly, but sometimes they talk about their bodies, though not when they are there of course, and about whether or not they would be any good in bed. Either of these approaches drives Loulou wild. She doesn’t like the female poets – they eat her muffins and condescend to her, and Loulou suspects them of having designs on the poets, some of which may already have been carried out, judging from their snotty manner – but she doesn’t like hearing them put down, either. What really gets her back up is that, during these discussions, the poets act as if she isn’t there.
Really, though, the female poets don’t count. They aren’t even on the editorial board of Comma; they are only on the edges, like mascots, and today Loulou all but ignores them.
“You could’ve put on more coffee,” she says in her grumpiest voice.
“What’s the matter, Loulou?” says Phil, who has always been the quickest on the uptake when it comes to Loulou and her bad moods. Not that Loulou goes in for fine tuning.
“Nothing you can fix,” says Loulou rudely. She takes off her sweater-coat and sticks out her chest. Marmoreal, she thinks. So much for the female poets, who are flat-chested as well as everything else.
“Hey Loulou, how about a little nictitation?” says one of the poets.
“Up your nose,” says Loulou.
“She thinks it’s something dirty,” says a second one. “She’s confusing it with micturition.”
“All it means is winking, Loulou,” says the first one.
“He got it out of Trivial Pursuit,” says a third.
Loulou takes one loaf out of the oven, turns it out, taps the bottom, puts it back into the pan and into the oven. They can go on like that for hours. It’s enough to drive you right out of your tree, if you pay any attention to them at all.
“Why do you put up with us, Loulou?” Phil asked her once. Loulou sometimes wonders, but she doesn’t know. She knows why they put up with her though, apart from the fact that she pays the mortgage: she’s solid, she’s predictable, she’s always there, she makes them feel safe. But lately she’s been wondering: who is there to make her feel safe?
It’s another day, and Loulou is on her way to seduce her accountant. She’s wearing purple boots, several years old and with watermarks on them from the slush, a cherry-coloured dirndl she made out of curtain material when she was at art school, and a Peruvian wedding shirt dyed mauve; this is the closest she ever comes to getting dressed up. Because of the section of the city she’s going to, which is mostly middle-European shops, bakeries and clothing stores with yellowing embroidered blouses in the windows and places where you can buy hand-painted wooden Easter eggs and chess sets with the pawns as Cossacks, she’s draped a black wool shawl over her head. This, she thinks, will make her look more ethnic and therefore more inconspicuous: she’s feeling a little furtive. One of the poets has said that Loulou is to subdued as Las Vegas at night is to a sixty-watt light bulb, but in fact, with her long off-black hair and her large dark eyes and the strong planes of her face, she does have a kind of peasant look. This is enhanced by the two plastic shopping bags she carries, one in either hand. These do not contain groceries, however, but her receipts and cheque stubs for the two previous years. Loulou is behind on her income tax, which is why she got the accountant in the first place. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t kill two birds with one stone.
Loulou is behind on her income tax because of her fear of money. When she was married to Bob, neither of them had any money anyway, so the income tax wasn’t a problem. Phil, the man she lived with after that, was good with numbers, and although he had no income and therefore no income tax, he treated hers as a game, a kind of superior Scrabble. But her present husband, Calvin, considers money boring. It’s all right to have some – as Loulou does, increasingly – but talking about it is sordid and a waste of time. Calvin claims that those who can actually read income-tax forms, let alone understand them, have already done severe and permanent damage to their brains. Loulou has taken to sending out her invoices and totting up her earnings in the coach-house, instead of at the kitchen table as she used to, and adding and subtracting are acquiring overtones of forbidden sex. Perhaps this is what has led her to the step she is now about to take. You may as well be hung, thinks Loulou, for a sheep as a lamb.
In addition, Loulou has recently been feeling a wistful desire to be taken care of. It comes and goes, especially on cloudy days, and mostly Loulou pays scant attention to it. Nevertheless it’s there. Everyone depends on her, but when she needs help, with her income tax for instance, nobody’s within call. She could ask Phil to do it again, but Calvin might make a fuss about it. She wants to be able to turn her two plastic shopping bags over to some man, some quiet methodical man with inner strength, and not too ugly, who could make sense of their contents and tell her she has nothing to worry about and, hopefully, nothing to pay.
Before Loulou found this particular accountant, she spent several afternoons window-shopping for one down at King and Bay. When it came right down to it, however, she was so intimidated by the hermetically sealed glass towers and the thought of receptionists with hair-dos and nail polish that she didn’t even go in through the doors at any of the addresses she’d looked up in the Yellow Pages. Instead, she stood at street corners as if waiting for the light to change, watching the businessmen hurry past, sometimes in overcoats of the kind the poets never wear, solid-looking and beige or navy blue but slit provocatively up the back, or in three-piece suits, challengingly done up with hundreds of buttons and zippers, their tight tennis-playing butts concealed under layers of expensive wool blend, their ties waving enticingly under their chins like the loose ends of macramé wall hangings: one pull and the whole thing would unravel. The poets, in their track suits or jeans, seem easier of access, but they are hedged with paradox and often moody. The businessmen would be simple and unspoiled, primary reds and blues rather than puce and lilac, potatoes rather than, like the poets, slightly over-ripe avocadoes.
The sight of them filled Loulou with unspecific lust, though she found them touching also. She was like a middle-aged banker surrounded by sixteen-year-old virgins: she longed to be the first, though the first of what she wasn’t sure. But she knew she knew lots of things they were unlikely to know: the poets, on their good days, have been nothing if not inventive.
Loulou doesn’t think of the accountant she has now as a real one, by which she means a frightening one. He is not in a glass tower, he has no polished receptionist, though he does have a certificate on the wall and even a three-piece suit (though, Loulou suspects, only one). She discovered him by accident when she was down on Queen Street buying fresh chicken from A. Stork, the best place for it in her opinion, especially when you need a lot, as she did that day because all of the poets were coming for dinner. Heading for the streetcar stop with her sackful of tender flesh, Loulou saw a hand-lettered sign in the window of a dry-goods store: INCOME TAX, and underneath it some foreign language. It was the hand-lettered sign that did it for Loulou: badly lettered at that, she could do much better. On impulse she’d pushed open the door and gone in.
There was a tiny bald-headed man behind the counter, barricaded in with bolts of maroon cloth, a rack of cheesy-looking buttons on the wall behind him, but he turned out not to be the accountant. The accountant was in a separate room at the back, with nothing in it except a wooden desk of the sort Loulou associated with her grade-school teachers, and one other chair and a filing cabinet. He stood up when Loulou came in and offered to take her sack of chicken and put it somewhere for her. “No thanks,” said Loulou, because she could see there was nowhere for him to put it – there was a fern on the filing cabinet, obviously on its last legs – and that he would merely get more flustered than he already was if she said yes; so she went through their first interview with a bag of still-warm cut-up chicken in her lap.
She’s seen him twice since then. He takes more time with her than he really needs to, maybe because he’s not what you would call all that busy. He also talks to her more than he needs to. By now, Loulou knows quite a lot about him. Getting started is harder than it used to be, he’s told her. The dry-goods store belongs to his father, who gives him the office rent-free, in return for doing the accounts. The father is first-generation Czech, and he himself knows two other languages besides English. In this district – he spread his hands in a kind of resigned shrug while saying this – it helps. He does a couple of local bakeries and a hardware store and a second-hand jeweller’s and a few of his father’s old friends. Maybe when the recession is over things will pick up. He has volunteered, too, that his hobby is weight-lifting. Loulou has not asked whether or not he’s married; she suspects not. If he were married, his fern would be in better shape.
While he talks, Loulou nods and smiles. She isn’t sure how old he is. Young, she thinks, though he tries to make himself look older by wearing silver-rimmed glasses. She thinks he has nice hands, not like an accountant’s at all, not spindly. The second time, he went out into the main store and came back with cups of tea, which Loulou found thoughtful. Then he asked her advice about a carpet. Already she felt sorry for him. He hardly even goes out for lunch, she’s discovered; mostly he just gets take-out from the deli across the street. She’s considered bringing him some muffins.
These topics – carpets, weight-lifting, food – are easy for Loulou. What is more difficult is that he’s decided she’s not just a potter but an artist, and his idea of an artist does not at all accord with Loulou’s view of herself. He wants her to be wispy and fey, impractical, unearthly almost; he talks, embarrassingly, about “the creative impulse.” This is far too close to the poets for Loulou. She’s tried to explain that she works with clay, which is hardly ethereal. “It’s like mud pies,” she said, but he didn’t want to hear that. Nor could she find the words to make him understand what she meant: that when she’s throwing a pot she feels exhilaration, exactly the same kind she felt as a child while making a terrible mess of her mother’s back porch. If he could see her the way she really is when she’s working, guck all over her hands, he’d know she’s not exactly essence of roses.
The second time she saw him, the accountant said he envied her freedom. He would like to do something more creative himself, he said, but you have to make a living. Loulou refrained from pointing out that she seems to be doing a sight better at it than he is. She’s much more tactful with him than she’s ever been with the poets. The fact is that she’s starting to enjoy his version of her. Sometimes she even believes it, and thinks she might be on the verge of learning something new about herself. She’s beginning to find herself mysterious. It’s partly for this reason she wants to sleep with the accountant; she thinks it will change her.
The poets would laugh if they knew, but then she’s not about to tell them. She did announce his advent though, that first night, while the poets were all sitting around the table eating chicken and discussing something they called “the language.” They do this frequently these days and Loulou is getting bored with it. “The language” is different from just words: it has this mystical aura around it, like religion, she can tell by the way their voices drop reverently whenever they mention it. That night they had all just finished reading a new book. “I’m really getting into the language,” one said, and the others chewed in silent communion.
“I’ve got myself an accountant,” Loulou said loudly, to break the spell.
“You’ve got him, but have you had him yet?” Bob said. The others laughed, all except Calvin, and began discussing the accountant’s chances of escape from Loulou, which they rated at nil. They went on to detail the positions and locations in which Loulou could be expected to finally entrap him – under the desk, on top of the filing cabinet – and the injuries he would sustain. They pictured him fending her off with pens.
Loulou gnawed grimly at a chicken leg. They didn’t believe any of this would happen, of course. They were too conceited: having known them, how could she stoop so low? Little did they know.
Loulou approaches the door of the dry-goods store, whistling Mozart between her teeth. Partly she’s thinking about the accountant and what his body might be like under his suit, but partly she’s thinking about tomorrow, when she has to start work on an order of twelve slab planters for one of her good customers. Either way, it’s a question of the right placement of the feet. Like a judo expert, which she is not, Loulou is always conscious of the position of her feet in relation to the rest of her.
The accountant is waiting for her, shadowy behind the dust-filmed glass of the door. It’s after six and the store is closed. Loulou said, slyly, that she couldn’t make it any earlier. She didn’t want the little bald-headed man lurking around.
The accountant unlocks the door and lets her in. They go back through the smell of wool and freshly torn cotton into his office, and Loulou dumps out her bag of receipts (done up in bundles, with elastic bands: she’s not without a sense of decency), all over his desk. He looks pleased, and says they certainly do have a lot of things to catch up on.
He brings in some cups of tea, sits down, picks up a newly sharpened pencil, and asks her how much of her living space can be written off as working space. Loulou explains about the coach-house. She doesn’t use any of the actual house herself, she says, not for working, because the poets are always using it. Sometimes they live there too, though it depends.
“On what?” says the accountant, frowning a little.
“On whether they’re living anywhere else,” says Loulou.
When he hears that they don’t pay rent, the accountant makes a tut-tutting sound and tells Loulou that she should not let things go on like this. Loulou says that the poets never have any money, except sometimes from grants. The accountant gets out of his chair and paces around the room, which is difficult for him because Loulou is taking up a lot of space in it. He says that Loulou is allowing herself to be imposed upon and she should get herself out of this situation, which is doing her no good at all.
Loulou may have felt this herself from time to time, but hearing the accountant say it right out in the open air disturbs her. Where would the poets go? Who would take care of them? She doesn’t wish to dwell on this right now, it’s far too complicated, and perhaps even painful. Instead she stands up, plants her feet firmly apart, intercepts the accountant as he strides past, and, with a tug here and a little pressure there, ends up with his arms more or less around her. She backs herself up against the desk for balance, puts one hand behind her, and upsets his cup of tea into the wastepaper basket. He doesn’t notice a thing; luckily it isn’t hot.
After a short time the accountant takes off his silver-rimmed glasses, and after another short time he says, in a voice half an octave lower than his normal one, “I wasn’t expecting this.” Loulou says nothing – she lies only when absolutely necessary – and starts undoing his vest buttons. When she’s down to the shirt he lifts his head, glances around the room, and murmurs, “Not here.” Which is just as well, because he hasn’t got his carpet yet and the floor is painted concrete.
He leads her into the darkened dry-goods store and begins sorting through the bolts of cloth. Loulou can’t figure out what he’s doing until he selects a roll of dark-pink velvet, unfurls it, and lays it out on the floor behind the counter, with a little flourish, like a cloak over a mud puddle. Loulou admires the way he does this; he’s too deft not to have done it before. She lies down on the pink velvet, reaches up for him, and after a few minutes of shaky-fingered fumbling with the clothes they make love, somewhat rapidly. This floor is concrete too and the pink velvet isn’t very thick. Loulou worries about his knees.
“Well,” says the accountant. Then he sits up and starts putting on his clothes. He does this very skilfully. Loulou wishes he would wait a few minutes – it would be friendlier – but already he’s doing up his buttons. Maybe he’s afraid someone will come in. He rolls up the pink velvet and inserts the bolt back into its proper slot on the shelf. They go back to his office and he locates his glasses and puts them on, and tells her he’ll have some figures for her in maybe two weeks. He doesn’t say anything about seeing her in the meantime: perhaps his image of her as a delicate artistic flower has been shaken. He kisses her good-bye, though. The last thing he says to her is, “You shouldn’t let people take advantage of you.” Loulou knows he thinks he’s just done this very thing himself. He’s like the poets: he thinks she can’t see through him.
Loulou decides to walk back to her house, which is at least a mile away, instead of taking the streetcar. She needs time to calm down. On the one hand she’s elated, as she always is when she accomplishes something she’s set out to do, but on the other hand she’s disoriented. Is she different now, or not? Apart from the actual sex, which Loulou would never knock, and it was fine though a little on the swift side, what has it all boiled down to? She doesn’t feel more known, more understood. Instead she feels less understood. She feels nameless. It’s as if all those words which the poets have attached to her over the years have come undone and floated off into the sky, like balloons. If she were one of the poets, she would get something out of this: this is exactly the sort of thing they like to write about. A non-event, says Phil, is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means. For the poets nothing is wasted, because even if it is, they can write about the waste. What she ought to do is throw them all out on their ears.
Loulou reaches her three-storey red-brick house and notes, as she always does, the mangy state of the lawn. The poets are divided on the subject of the lawn: some of them think lawns are bourgeois, others think that to say lawns are bourgeois is outdated. Loulou says she’ll be damned if she’ll cut it herself. The lawn is a stand-off. She goes up the front walk, not whistling, and unlocks her front door. In the hallway the familiar smell of the house envelops her, but it’s like a smell from childhood. It’s the smell of something left behind.
The poets are in the kitchen, sitting around the table, which is littered with papers and coffee cups and plates with crumbs and smears of butter on them. Loulou looks from one poet to another as if they are figures in a painting, as if she’s never seen them before. She could walk out of this room, right this minute, and never come back, and fifty years later they would all still be in there, with the same plates, the same cups, the same crumby butter. Only she doesn’t know where she would go.
“We’re out of muffins,” says Bob.
Loulou stares at him. “Piss on the muffins,” she says at last, but without conviction. He looks tired, she thinks. He is showing signs of age, they all are. This is the first time she’s noticed it. They won’t go on forever.
“Where’ve you been?” says Calvin. “It’s past seven-thirty.” This is his way of saying they want their dinner.
“My God, you’re helpless,” says Loulou. “Why didn’t you just phone out for some pizza?” To her knowledge they have never phoned out for pizza. They’ve never had to.
She sits down heavily at the table. The life she’s led up to now seems to her entirely crazed. How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way. It isn’t that the accountant is normal, any more than the poets are; nor is he a possible alternative. She won’t even sleep with him again, not on purpose anyway. But he is other, he is another. She too could be other. But which other? What, underneath it all, is Loulou really like? How can she tell? Maybe she is what the poets say she is, after all; maybe she has only their word, their words, for herself.
“Pizza” Bob is beginning, in an injured tone. “Pig of a dog.…” But the others shut him up. They can see that something is wrong, and they very much don’t want to know what.
“Reify the pizza,” says Calvin to Phil. “You use phone. Is modern western invention of technology.” Now they’re pretending to be foreigners of some kind. This is a game they play more frequently when there is tension in the air than when there isn’t.
“Insert finger in possible small hole,” says Calvin. “Twist wrist.”
“With anchovies then,” says Bob, not joining in. Loulou hears their voices coming to her across space, as if they’re in another room. What she sees is the grain of the wood in the table right by her hand.
“Loulou thinks to reify means to make real,” says Phil to everyone, when he’s hung up the phone. They’re always talking about her in the third person like that, telling each other what she thinks. The truth is that she’s never heard the word before in her life.
“So what is it, smartass?” says Loulou with an effort, squeezing out a little belligerence to set them at ease.
“If Loulou didn’t exist, God would have to invent her,” says Bob.
“God, hell,” says Phil. “We would. We did it the first time, right?”
This is going too far for Loulou. Nobody invented her, thank you very much. They make things up about her, but that’s a whole other story. “Up your nose,” says Loulou.
“To reify is to make into a thing,” says Phil, “which, as I’m sure most of us will agree, is hardly the same.”
Loulou looks around the room. They are all in place, they’re all watching her, to see what she will say next. She sticks out her chin at them. “Why not?” she says. “What’s the big difference?” and they relax, they laugh, they give each other little punches on the shoulder as if they’re part of a team and they’ve just scored a point. That, they tell each other, is just like Loulou, and suddenly she sees that this is what they require of her, possibly all they require: that she should be just like Loulou. No more, but certainly no less. Maybe it’s not so bad.