Free Crossings by Betty Lambert Page A

I heard the whole thing. It was real.’
    â€˜I swear!’ Jocelyn says.
    â€˜I know. I know. I know you weren’t there. I know. I just heard you, that’s all.’
    â€˜What does she say it is?’
    â€˜Something called a hypnagogic vision. Where you externalize.’
    â€˜But why would you do something like that?’
    â€˜Daddy caught me listening once. Well, I was trying not to listen, but he got mad at me. She thinks that’s it.’
    Jocelyn says, after a while, ‘Does it happen often? Do you get these things often?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I say. ‘That’s the trouble.’
    But Jocelyn is still angry. ‘Well, if you want to
know,
we only do it when we’re prepared to take the risk.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜We only do it when we’re willing to get caught,’ she says, her mouth tight, like my mother’s. ‘That’s what you believe, isn’t it? That’s what you think. You don’t think it’s right unless you get punished. Well, you can be satisfied about
that.
’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜And we have never done it here, never!’
    Oh Jocelyn. Oh my god.
    Â 
    I AM IN West Vancouver. The divorce is over. The play has gone on. The one about the suicide. The director didn’t like the first draft. He has said, ‘Oddly enough, it’s very competent. It’s just crap.’ And, ‘Tell me about your father.’
    I tell him about my father and he says, ‘Now go back and write it again.’
    I go back and write it again in two days and two nights, non­stop. I break once to watch
I Love Lucy.
When they ask me later if I have been influenced by Bach, in the fugue-like contrapuntal technique, I want to say, ‘Actually, it was
I Love Lucy.
’ Last year I read a graduate paper on it. ‘The motif of sterility and death can be seen in the carefully worked-out images of …’ I say, to the earnest woman student, ‘I can’t tell. It seems right, I mean, I suppose that’s all there, what you say about the images and so on, but I didn’t work them out like that. I wasn’t trying for that.’ She has got a B and wants me to tell her why she didn’t get an A. It seems both amazing and ludicrous for that play to be written about, with footnotes and a bibliography.
    I am in West Vancouver doing housework.
    I am cooking and cleaning and babysitting for Gladys, the wo­man from the radio station. She is giving a recital.
    For years she has been saying, ‘I’ve wasted my life on that man.’ I say, ‘Well, why don’t you give a recital?’
    â€˜I couldn’t. It’d cost a fortune. We’re living beyond our income now.’
    â€˜Well, I’ve got money. I’ll back you. I’ll be your entrepreneur.’
    Gladys laughs. ‘You don’t have that much.’
    â€˜Sure I do. I’m rich. I got a fortune for that play.’
    â€˜It’s too late,’ Gladys says. ‘I’ve given my life to that man.’
    â€˜You’re singing better than ever. You told me so yourself.’
    â€˜But I can’t afford to get help in. His Nibs would have a fit if I weren’t here to serve him hand and foot.’
    â€˜I’ll do it. I’ll come and be your housekeeper.’
    â€˜Do you think we could?’
    We get all giggly and make elaborate plans. I shall do the catering and rent the gallery, we’ll get Boris to make up the programs, and Paul to translate from the German. ‘Oh but He’ll never agree,’ Gladys says. She always capitalizes her husband.
    But he agrees. ‘It was never me, you know,’ he says on the QT to me, but I don’t listen.
    I come on Monday and I make a lot of mistakes. I throw out the
schmaltz
she was saving. ‘But it just looked like chicken fat,’ I say.
    â€˜Chicken fat!’ Gladys says. ‘It
was
chicken