Way the Crow Flies (85 page)

M
ADELEINE REMOVES
a flesh-coloured bathing cap from her head—it sports a glued-on grey comb-over and a permanent sprinkle of dandruff—and places it on a Styrofoam head that stands, impaled and impassive, on the makeup counter of her dressing room. She takes off a pair of thickly rimmed men’s glasses, lenses fogged with dulling spray, and adds them to the blank face. Loosens and removes a narrow black tie with a mysterious smudge—egg?—then sloughs off a vast grey suit jacket purchased at Mr. Big & Tall. She slips shirt and suspenders from her shoulders in one motion, and the trousers—sixty-five-inch waist—drop to the floor. She steps out of a pair of men’s size twelve brogues—brown, permanently dusty—then reaches behind to undo the snaps of her prosthetic torso. The opposite of a corset, it encases her in sculpted foam-core fat. Being constructed of a non-breathing synthetic, it’s hot, especially under television lights. Good night Maurice. She steps into the shower.

Madeleine is entering her prime—like the moment known to film people as magic hour, that fifteen or so minutes in which there is no sense yet of the approaching evening, even though the sun has breathed its first sigh of descent. No one has died of cancer yet. No one has given up. Early sorrows feel like ancient history, and current crises are manageable. Madeleine’s father has heart problems, but they are under control—it turns out he doesn’t need the bypass. There is AIDS, but that’s a terrible aberration, and even it seems to be a plague of the young. Most straight people still feel safe, and lesbians feel safest of all.

Madeleine stands under the shower, allowing her short hair to melt and her shoulders to drop. She starts to sing. Assisted by the burbling of water past her lips, she does Louis Armstrong, “what a wondahful woild….”

She was a tragedian between the ages of eleven and seventeen. It began at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, with an inspired Saturday-morning
drama teacher called Aida. Aida was from the north of England—big-eyed, thin-lipped, with a raspy voice, a stricken expression and dyed red hair. She had been to RADA. She was Madeleine’s first grand passion after Miss Lang. It wasn’t a sexual attraction with Aida, however, but a passion of the soul. In Aida’s classes, Madeleine survived Auschwitz, a shoe her only companion; resisted cannibalism in a stalled elevator; decided who should live and who die in a rowboat adrift on the South Seas—“Wahtah wahtah everywheh, nor any drop to drink.” Aida didn’t reprimand her for using accents.

Madeleine lifts her face to the water. She always goes slow after a show, whether live or taped or somewhere in between. At all other times she is a moving target. It’s not possible to walk on water, but it’s possible to run. Just as it’s possible to dance on thin air. Keep talking and don’t look down. Move at the speed of thought, uncatchable as a wascally wabbit, swifter than a Road Runner,
meep meep!
She stands still, eyes closed, lips parted, allowing the water to love her.

When the McCarthys were set to move from Kingston, Aida took Madeleine aside, lit a fresh Gitane, inhaled and rasped, “Madeleine, you have a great gift, darling. But you’re funny. In the words of the immortal Dietrich, ‘you can’t help it.’ Don’t ever let anyone disparage you for it. Laughter bubbles from the well of tears, my cherub, and at the bottom of your well there is blood.”

Aida was the second person in Madeleine’s experience to invoke the top-hatted Deutsche Diva. Her inner eyes remained wide as saucers in awe-filled contemplation of the oracle. By the time she was a teenager, however, irony had loped in, lithe spike-collared beast, to ridicule the Aidas of this world. But when the mists of adolescence retreated, she recovered her memory and, though she still did not fully comprehend Aida’s prophecy, she recalled what she had always wanted to be when she grew up, and pursued it through her twenties. Funny. It runs on a harsh diet and requires a strong stomach. Popeye eats spinach to get his strength. A comedian eats the can.

“You coming for a drink, hon?”

Shelly stands in the doorway. She is reassuringly forty.

Madeleine pokes her head around the plastic curtain. “I thought we were doing notes.”

“We’ll do them at the bar.”

Shelly wrangles comedians. Makes them focus until something gets written, then shot on set. Like many producers, she seems not to have an iota of patience, but she could get a Chihuahua to double-ride a cat on a bicycle. She is trying to get Madeleine to write a one-woman show.

“Hurry up, McCarthy.”

“Order me some of those deep-fried—those fried—something fried, okay?”

It’s Friday. Dress rehearsal, then shoot in front of a live audience, then drink, debrief and start hatching next week’s show. Friday is fun, the peak of the week. It follows marathon Thursday, which is about rewriting, rehearsing, starting over, envying the misery and terror of the set and costume people, who are envying the misery and terror of the performers, and being grateful for a private dressing room with a bathroom of one’s own. Monday is full of laughter at new sketch ideas, Tuesday you work on the new ideas and no one laughs at them any more, on Wednesday only Shelly can tell if anything’s still funny. Saturday and Sunday are the days off, and the only ones free of gastrointestinal disturbances. Madeleine has the same mixed feelings about it all as the others do: she loves it.

Shelly leaves and Madeleine puts on an iridescent blue polyester bowling shirt with “Ted” stitched on the pocket, a low-slung pair of vintage pinstripes, a pair of battered orthopedic Oxfords so square they’re hip, and an Indian Motorcycle jacket of expensively distressed leather—she pictures a supermodel, clad only in the jacket, being dragged behind a Harley over gravel to achieve the fashionable patina. She feels what she often feels after a show: that she has removed one costume in order to don another. She spikes her hair, despikes it then gives up. Switches off the lights around her mirror, turns off the overhead and closes the door. It locks behind her.

The pieces of Maurice remain in her dressing room, ready to be reassembled and restored to life next time. But the flesh-tone bathing cap with the stuck-on grey hair that she fashioned herself—not with great craft, but with conviction; the black-rimmed glasses, perched now on the bridge of the rudimentary Styrofoam nose, smudged lenses obscuring blank eyes; the wide grey suit hanging limp from the rack next to the foam-core carapace of guts; and the
big empty brogues, yawning caverns just right for hiding Easter eggs; these pieces of Maurice seem never to deanimate completely, no matter how far apart they are kept.

On some nights, when Madeleine pulls the door of her dressing room closed, she enacts a small ritual that she has never tried to explain to herself or anyone, because it is so trivial: she makes certain not to turn her back on the room until she has closed the door. She looks from the slack grey suit to the Styrofoam head, making certain to exhale through her nose as she does so, and to refrain from blinking as she pulls the door to. Then she tries the lock three times,
click click click
, turns, breathes and leaves. A harmless tic.

She performs similar rites when leaving her house: touch the doorknob three times, this assures her that she did indeed turn off the stove—an indispensable prerequisite to road trips, which are otherwise interrupted by a U-turn halfway to Buffalo, and it’s back to Toronto to find, “Of course I turned it off.” Her footfalls between the cracks of sidewalks are at times subject to baroque calculations, and when drinking a glass of anything she is careful never to exhale onto the liquid before sipping, and is often compelled to inhale first. If you say these things out loud, you sound nuts.

She looks more like a tired twenty-year-old than a thirty-two-year-old, which goes to show that low-grade obsessive compulsive disorder is good for the skin.

The television studio is located way up in the ’burbs of Toronto. She is the last one out, as usual. She says good night to the security guard and exits into the street-light sharpness of the April night, the hard gloss of manicured grounds, newly green. She jaywalks to an island in the middle of the six-lane suburban “street,” makes it to the other side and sets out across the parking lot of an immense mall which, like a mountain, seems to get no closer with her approach, as though she were moonwalking in place, until suddenly it’s on top of her and she can no longer see the entrance. She looks right, then left down the massive exterior, which might as well be featureless, its endless illuminated signs an optical cacophony. Light bleeds into the black sky and she closes her eyes, squeezing the yellow orb that appears on her inner lids like a lemon. Then she opens them again and sees it: the giant pickle.

Madeleine started stand-up by accident, when she was twelve. It was Jack’s idea. She was in a public-speaking contest. He had helped her write her speech, on the topic of “Humour: Its History and Uses.” She forgot her lines halfway through at the intramurals and had to improvise. He said, “Let’s build it in.”

As she advanced toward the provincial finals, he would identify some point at random within the speech and, depending on what was in the news that day, or what they saw from the car windows on their way to the hall, she would pitch a topical reference and see how far out into left field she could go before bringing it all back home. “Just get up there and do it your way, sweetie,” he said. She was eventually disqualified for “extemporizing,” but they went out for ice cream afterwards and he did a cost-benefit analysis of her public-speaking career on a napkin. She came out ahead because experience was worth its weight in gold. “If you want to be an entertainer,” he said, “you have to take every opportunity to hone your craft.” He always said “entertainer” and, even after she came to know it as a hopelessly outdated term, she never corrected him.

She majored in Classics at McGill University in Montreal, and moonlighted in a Québec-separatist guerrilla-theatre troupe. This involved terrorizing law-abiding citizens in public places from a leftist perspective, and “exploring her sexuality” with a mandolin player named Lise who was into iridology. Her French improved, along with her tolerance for
dépanneur
plonk, and though she was welcomed by the Québécoises as a quaint and feisty Acadienne, Madeleine felt like an imposter. Something had to give. She moved to Toronto, where she could comfortably resume her long-time disguise as an Anglo.

She quit university with her father’s blessing. “Anyone with a decent brain and self-discipline can make a living as a doctor or lawyer or glorified bean-counter like me,” he said. “It takes a gift to make people laugh.”

Comedy. The brain surgery of the performing arts.

They went out, just the two of them, for dinner at a Swiss Chalet. He spread out a paper napkin. “What business are you in?”

“The funny business.”

“What are you selling?”

“Laughs.”

“No. You’re selling stories. Every joke tells a story. Every laugh is the result of a combination of surprise and recognition—” he wrote the two words down on the napkin, then enclosed them in boxes each with an arrow pointing to the blank middle of the napkin. “The unexpected and the inevitable”—two more boxes—“that’s what stories are made of, whether they’re happy or sad—” two circles, one smiling, one frowning, separated by a slash, connected to the blank centre by a wavy line. “It’s no good just making fun of things, even though it’s important to have all that mimetic talent and wit”—two more circles—“you have to have a point of view”—overarching heading—“and that’s what you’ve got.” He tossed the pen to the table. “A little different way of seeing the world. And the ability to let other people see it that way too. You take the familiar and tilt it. The ability to see things from multiple simultaneous points of view is a sign of genius.”

He had left the centre of the napkin blank, so she filled it in—STORY—and drew a circle around it.

He grinned. “That’s right. There’s your feedback loop.”

She looked at the mini-solar system. “It’s like a consolation,” she said.

He nodded. They had both heard her say “constellation.”

In those days, Toronto was a hair shirt, despite the best efforts of Yorkville with its coffee houses, its folk singers, and radicals; still Toronto the Good, WASP bastion. This was before pad thai, before spritzers and “Beemers,” when “pasta” was still spaghetti, before anyone “did” lunch, and when career women wore chiffon scarves with their pantsuits. But she found an apartment on Queen West, over a textile store run by an unsmiling Hungarian couple, and stumbled upon a rich vein of counterculture. A bar called the Cameron was a hothouse of art, music and theatre, a multimedia mecca where hipsters of all races drank side by side with honest-to-goodness Sally Ann hobos. She had a brief but pivotal affair with an intense alcoholic feminist, the publisher of an underground Marxist-Leninist newspaper, whose phone was tapped by the RCMP—it would have reflected badly on her if it hadn’t been.

She performed wherever she could, developing the gourd-like rind that every comic needs, and that a woman couldn’t live without if she was crazy enough to do stand-up. Phyllis Diller stood at the edge of the known world; beyond her were sea monsters. The new generation of brilliant funny women worked mainly in ensembles or in story-based one-woman-show contexts. Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, Andrea Martin, Jane Curtin…. There was safety in numbers, whereas stand-up was strictly kill or be killed.

How’d it go tonight?

I killed/I died
.

In the clubs, comics were like indentured servants, clawing their way onto the stage in exchange for a kidney, their first-born child, their left testicle, but the women comics—wait a second,
women
comics? At Yuk Yuk’s, the hook was used liberally and literally. The safest stuff was “blue,” mean and macho, but Madeleine couldn’t have pulled that off if she’d tried.