Imagine a six-foot blonde with power curves – the most buoyant breasts ever made- curled up on a small couch, pulling a thin white lacy sweater against herself. She stares up at you through smart and sleepy baby blues and purrs out: “You know, I just love Philip Larkin.”
She says it casually, but there’s an appetite there, not hunger, really, perhaps desire. I’m mesmerized, I lower my eyes and my cheeks are flushing. I’ve never heard of Larkin. No, not true. Heard of, probably. I can’t think at all right now. Whatever: it’s not too familiar. I’m hearing it now, and when Maevey mews like this, musing, you do what she tells you. You want it too, whatever it is.
“There is not one word out of place. He uses exactly the right words, and you need each one of them wholly,” Maeve is saying. “There are only enough, no more.”
The room is fuzzy, like a pale pink sweater enveloping me. The chaos of strewn clothing, dog- scattered debris, boxes packed and unpacked, and books all fades into a dizzy glow. The candles flicker. Maeve begins to read aloud.
“This was your place of birth, this daytime palace,
This miracle of glass, whose every hall
The light as music fills, and on your face
Shines petal-soft; sunbeams are prodigal…”
The first time I saw her, she was answering the door at my neighbour Crazy Paul’s house. How I was protective of him, asked her to explain herself. And so was she: who was I? Then we giggled, immediately recognizing maternal, sister things. Crazy Paul is another story. Suffice it to say just for some imagery that he fancied suit jackets cluttered with rhinestones and vintage doodads, cowboy boots and things of gold or burgundy tassel-ry.
Another time: with the insistently bright summer sky blazing blue behind her at my husband’s funeral. We all had huge sunglasses on. Tears on every girl’s face under those shiny glasses. Zoë. Maeve. Crazy Paul! So many widows.
“And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars…”
There are times when Maevey seems unsettlingly like Anna Nicole Smith. The generous buxomry, the warm yet bossy grip, the reckless parts of her, the breathy muchness. But she evades flakiness and that deadly brand of ditziness, in favour of dizzying study and work and play. She’s got the sugar of Marilyn Monroe, but is not nearly so tragic and could never have been her. Still, her lovers would say she exudes something of that beauty, there’s a way about her, and her smile is deep and generous. She is demanding, but loyal, blonde but dark, paler than white yet still a woman of blues.
For her birthday, I bought her a gorgeous tiara. (I must borrow it for my book launch!) My heavenly and infuriating Maevey. Infuriating because once I took her for the finest Indian cuisine in Toronto and she demanded to know why there were bones in the chicken. Heavenly because we share a few secrets that I’m sure someone somewhere would pay a lot of money for if we were even remotely famous! Heavenly because her favourite poem by me is “with all due respect Mr. Thompson”. This year, a Valentine, in the mail, how old fashioned and precious, because a friend is a forever Valentine.
“Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace…”
Once upon a time I called Maeve on a Friday night and asked what she was doing. She said, “I’m soaking in a steamy tub sending dirty text messages.” Maeve always asks how I’m doing. On that particular night, I was as fabulous as she was. I had just devoured a generous dish of grilled octopus in lemon and wine, and was sipping peach tea and reading. Reading in the bathtub! Oh, with wine, there is always wine. Oh, the oblivion you can fall into, this Larkin-tinged hypnotism. The oblivion of the beautiful, stunning, astonishing momentary lapses of reason. The flit of meaningful meaninglessnesses that alight and fade without our intervention. The poet, too, writes only of the extraordinary within ordinary things.
I pour the wine, I’m guzzling, Maevey’s sipping. Always the lady, which seems hilarious to those who know her. The lulling rhythms of Larkin’s enjambment and rhyme roll like marbles through the caress of her voice. Fittingly, some jazz flits lightheartedly in the background- Larkin wrote about jazz, as well as his poetry about death. Though he occasionally sounds Yeats-y, he swears liberally and has a caustic and bitter side. Maeve brings him alive, and I’m stunned at how many she has memorized, at this committed passion she carries. Writer Maevey. How she can study risk management and know insurance law inside out, memorize sonnets, and wear Hello Kitty pajamas when curling up with her enormous canine child. Maeve and I wouldn’t agree on any of the same TV shows or clothes or heroes or menus or cocktails or boys, not in a million years, and we don’t give a damn.
“The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough
To have the blind persistence
To upset an existence…”
When I stumble into the snowy night outside, the cold is bracing, alive. I weave merrily along until a taxi comes by. Maevey and I like our late night taxis, that’s for sure. We might not see one another without them! Like I’m 18 again, I’ve got half a bottle of cheap rose sloshing around in my giant it-bag, and I’m clutching The Collected Works of Philip Larkin in my hand. When I steal inside, it’s after two in the morning, but I pour a huge glass of vino and pretend I could still smoke cigarettes, and I read without ceasing.
Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
You can order her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, at her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. Take a chance: you’ll love it! It’s one of Maevey’s favourite books!
