Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

only steady well-paid job he has ever had, why doesn’t it say so? You would think he came out of the bush now and then to fling them scraps of wisdom, to give them a demonstration of what a real male
writer
, a creative
artist
, is like; you would never think he was a practicing
academic
. I don’t know if he was a lumberjack or a beer-slinger or a counterman, but I do know that he was not a telephone lineman. He had a job painting telephone poles. He quit that job in the middle of the second week because the heat and the climbing made him sick. It was a broiling June, just after we had both graduated. Fair enough. The sun really did make him sick, twice he came home and vomited. I have quit jobs myself that I could not stand. The same summer I quit my job folding bandages at Victoria Hospital, because I was going mad with boredom. But if I was a writer, and was listing all my varied and colorful occupations, I don’t think I would put down
bandage folder
, I don’t think I would find that entirely honest.
    After he quit, Hugo found a job marking Grade Twelve examination papers. Why didn’t he put that down? Examination marker. He liked marking examination papers better than he liked climbing telephone poles, and probably better than he liked lumberjacking or beer-slinging or any of those other things if he ever did them; why couldn’t he put it down?
Examination marker
.
    Nor has he, to my knowledge, ever been the foreman in a sawmill. He worked in his uncle’s mill the summer before I met him. What he did all day was load lumber and get sworn at by the real foreman, who didn’t like him because of his uncle being the boss. In the evenings, if he was not too tired, he used to walk half a mile to a little creek and play his recorder. Black flies bothered him, but he did it anyway. He could play “Morning,” from
Peer Gynt
, and some Elizabethan airs whose names I have forgotten. Except for one: “Wolsey’s Wilde.” I learned to play it on the piano so we could play a duet. Was that meant for Cardinal Wolsey, and what was a
wilde, a
dance? Put that down, Hugo.
Recorder player
. That would be quite all right, quite in fashion now; as I understand things, recorder playing and such fey activities are not out of favor now, quite the contrary. Indeed, they may be more acceptable than all that lumberjacking and beer-slinging. Look at you, Hugo, your image is not only fake but out-of-date. You should have said you’d meditated for a year in the mountains of Uttar Pradesh; you should have said you’d taught Creative Drama to autistic children; you should have shaved your head, shaved your beard, put on a monk’s cowl; you should have shut up, Hugo.
    When I was pregnant with Clea we lived in a house on Argyle Street in Vancouver. It was such a sad gray stucco house on the outside, in the rainy winter, that we painted the inside, all the rooms, vivid ill-chosen colors. Three walls of the bedrooms were Wedgwood blue, one was magenta. We said it was an experiment to see if color could drive anybody mad. The bathroom was a deep orange-yellow. “It’s like being inside a cheese,” Hugo said when we finished it. “That’s right, it is,” I said. “That’s very good, phrase-maker.” He was pleased but not as pleased as if he’d written it. After that he said, every time he showed anybody the bathroom, “See the color? It’s like being inside a cheese.” Or, “It’s like peeing inside a cheese.” Not that I didn’t do the same thing, save things up and say them over and over. Maybe I said that about peeing inside a cheese. We had many phrases in common. We both called the landlady the Green Hornet, because she had worn, the only time we had seen her, a poison-green outfit with bits of rat fur and a clutch of violets, and had given off a venomous sort of buzz. She was over seventy and she ran a downtown boardinghouse for men. Her daughter Dotty we called the harlot-in-residence. I wonder why we chose to say
harlot;
that was not, is not, a word in general use. I suppose it had a classy sound, a classy depraved sound, contrasting ironically—we were strong on irony—with Dotty herself.
    She lived in a two-room apartment in the basement ofthe house. She was supposed to pay her mother forty-five dollars monthly rent and she told me she meant to try to make the money baby-sitting.
    “I can’t go out to work,” she said, “on account of my nerves. My last husband, I had him six months dying down at