Free Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay

the prospect of seeing the Cuban fern. “And Dinah is visiting,” she added, knowing their fondness for each other. But no, he had to take Fiona the milk for her tea. His long courtship of Fiona Chester was one of the first things Dinah told her about the neighbourhood. “He’s devoted to her,” she said. “He calls her Shortie.”
    Raising his cap, he continued down the alley to Fiona’s house, while Harriet turned right and headed home, walking as usual with her head down, and as a result she didn’t see Jack until she started up the walk.
    He had put on weight. A meaty man had become meatier.
    “I don’t like meaty men,” she would say to Dinah later, and no opinion could have been firmer. “I never have.”
    You would be able to hear him barrel up and down the stairs, she thought, and you wouldn’t like it. Wouldn’t like the thumping weight of him. Or, and she felt the peculiar pull she always felt with Jack Frame, you might like it.
    He stood with his back to her, so he must have rung the bell. And since there was nowhere to hide, she groped desperately inside herself and discovered, wonder of wonders, a teasing gaiety. “Good Lord,” she called to him, and he turned. “I know I’m irresistible, but what are
you
doing here?”
    “Harriet.”
    From the porch he watched her come up the walk, the only woman who had ever punched him in the nose.
    Rod Steiger, she thought, as she came up the steps. The same heft. The same sardonic look he had in
Dr. Zhivago
. She said, “Leah told us you were coming.”
    They hugged each other as Jane opened the door, and Harriet asked, “Is that a six-hundred-page manuscript in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” She was all too prescient. A few days later, after he’d settled into his lodgings, he came by with a seven-hundred-page novel for her to read. The man was without mercy.
    She let him into the house – this old friend and terrible stranger – and in pictures taken soon afterwards she looked radiant and keyed up, and she was laughing.

10
John the Baptist
    W hen Harriet first knew Jack Frame he was wild and woolly, a draft dodger, a jabberer about politics, a full-paunched graduate student with bushy hair and beard – one of Leah’s stepchildren acquired when she became Lionel Frame’s fifth wife. That was in Italy, that first meeting. She saw him again in Montreal after he’d fallen in love with the French professor who would become his first wife. Years went by and Harriet thought of him as her before-and-after man: bristling with politics, denuded by love. He shaved off his beard, trimmed his hair, lost weight for thesake of Sara Tremblay. Then that Sara disappeared and another Sarah took her place, to be replaced six years later by his third wife, Sally, from Chicago; she didn’t last either. (Just as another friend of Harriet’s went from David to David looking for the perfect one. He’s here right now, if you want to meet him, she told Harriet on the phone. He’s in the backyard and he’s perfect: handsome, well-hung, fabulous company. Harriet drove over and there he was, in the nude, chipped and on a pedestal, in among the lilies.)
    All of Jack’s wives laboured hard to pay the rent, since he had no real profession beyond that of novelist and part-time film critic and sometime rehab counsellor, but none of his wives was a writer or even much of a reader of fiction, so every few years he wrapped up his latest big, whopping manuscript and mailed it to Harriet, into whose lap it landed like a giant overfed cat. Over the years her response time lagged farther and farther behind, until she hit upon the bright idea of responding immediately: Received your manuscript, looks good, best of luck with it. Then she buried it, unread, in the farthest corner of her study and proceeded to write about him. Calling him Harry Juniper, she included him in the story about Leah, having him say behind Leah’s back that he couldn’t stand her company,