Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay

moving in silent battle with the old enemies in his head. But Lew’s ambitions had never been material. Teaching, offering his services to international heritagecommittees, an occasional high-paying private job for extra money. And his designs were invariably simple. As a boy his favourite word was
room
. After that,
boardwalk
, from playing Monopoly. What is it? he had asked his dad. A wooden walkway by the sea, came the answer. And Lew thought, No wonder it’s the most valuable property on the board.
    “I fell in love with his room,” Harriet answered, when Dinah asked her how it happened that she fell in love with Lew. “He’d made everything himself – desk, bed, shelves – and everything was placed – arranged – with an eye for proportion and balance.” Dinah nodded. Yes, she thought, there was an atmosphere around Lew of nothing being too much trouble.
    He rarely watched a movie. Harriet liked to joke that the last one he’d seen was Bertolucci’s
1900
made in 1977. Once, she’d asked him what movie star he drooled over as a boy. He thought for a time, then said, “I liked Marilyn Monroe.” How old were you when you first saw her? “Thirty?” he said.
    He was the sort of man who mended the tears in a map. Who spent hours pressing cloves into an orange to hang from the rearview mirror and dispel the car-stink that made his daughter want to puke. The only one who had the patience and dexterity to put her tiny pierced earrings into her ears.
    “If it hurts, you let me know, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    He turned the light to its brightest setting. “Come on, get through. If it hurts, you tell me. Is it hurting?”
    “No.”
    “It’s not going through. Let’s try the front. Turn your head. Now it’s through. The hole is still there. There it is. Right through.”
    So tender-hearted that when he picked apples in an orchard he picked them all, scabby, small, lopsided, unable to leave any behind. He came home with boxes of apples and Harriet went through them and said, “Did you wear your glasses?”
    A man so kind and calm that when he was less than that, it took your breath away.
    A year ago she was in New York doing some research for her magnum opus,
Mapping Canadian Self-Doubt
(a title that Dinah told her had to go: “I would never, and I mean never, buy a book called
Mapping Canadian Self-Doubt”)
, and one afternoon she called home collect. Lew answered. She heard the operator ask him if he would accept her call, and through the domestic chaos in the background she heard him say, “I guess so.”
    A day later she called again and heard the same tepid answer.
    I guess so? I guess so?
    And she felt everything that had ever been between them fall instantly away.
    “You want advice about Harriet?” Dinah asked gently the morning she stood outside in her red coat and learned the correct name for her braided black fasteners.
    “She’s up all night,” he sighed, “and awful all day.”
    “Is she up now?”
    “Now she’s in bed. She might be sleeping. I hope she’s sleeping.”
    “You’d better get a new mattress. A good mattress makes all the difference.”
    Dinah, observing his tired face, remembered her first impressions of him: the tender voice, the sexiness of his domesticity, hiseasiness in any situation, his courtesy. She pictured him making the lunches and getting the kids out the door, and she felt sympathy but not pity. Her mother would have felt pity, but Dinah belonged to another generation. Her father, too, had been a devoted dad. She used to think all Jewish men were the same, but then she went to New York and discovered that there were poor Jews and bad Jews. Lew’s Jewishness lay easily upon him, like an invisible cloak. He worked hard, but never talked about how hard he worked. “It used to be,” he said, “before everybody was in such a rush, that the first question people would ask was
Who are you?
Meaning are you Jewish, French, Italian, Puerto Rican? Then,
What do you