Collected Stories
Collected Stories
Carol Shields
For the first time all of Carol Shields’ remarkable short stories – some previously unpublished – are gathered together in one volume.‘Carol Shields’ stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure’ Alice MunroIn the Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields’ original short-story volumes, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, as well as many stories not previously published in the UK, including ‘Segue’, her last work.In these stories the author combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that won so many readers to her prize-winning novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless.
The Collected Stories
CAROL SHIELDS
For Emma and Alden
Contents
Cover (#u83df48ca-95b2-51d3-8d61-f58da66d7802)
Title Page (#ufc233b8e-3b55-5db3-acfd-e864d470b831)
Introduction By Margaret Atwood (#uda13142d-6754-572d-bf35-58b5bc00cd0b)
Segue (#u7b319aa7-84ea-5325-b3ea-fe037f333c8d)
Various Miracles (#u3fe9af4e-5be3-5114-856d-6cb6fff11d36)
Various Miracles (#uf4f81001-2917-557c-8e64-098084128ebf)
Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass (#ue97716b7-2930-55e3-b736-96e96a2a4661)
Accidents (#u74883bfa-9106-5449-bc15-6145a84ecafa)
Sailors Lost at Sea (#ufda27c2e-b6c8-5f40-bd2c-80976d4bdcf2)
Purple Blooms (#u32bfa03d-bc70-5a03-87a2-b1f0c7a8557a)
Flitting Behavior (#uc54ed3bf-ff66-53fa-a007-4570ec4cec16)
Pardon (#ua5fb74f8-2953-53f5-9721-647bfd391095)
Words (#u62d54e0b-0b84-5e0f-a88b-82d9c835b21a)
Poaching (#ufdd5b4ad-36a1-572d-852f-93e3489ec912)
Scenes (#u3e4dd03f-04b6-53da-9cd7-6b3455d9c294)
Fragility (#uee45e55e-8cd5-5570-b26d-33d536f8e309)
The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On (#u15a2b5d1-7e66-51e1-a5e6-90bd3d295e5b)
A Wood (with Anne Giardini) (#u540b3f31-0f86-5c38-b54d-0f73e2193e1d)
Love so Fleeting, Love so Fine (#u5f26552b-9f13-555f-ac93-02f81fc66959)
Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls (#u0a37e745-5f56-5849-940c-61249d84d921)
Invitations (#ua151ff79-dbea-53f4-a83e-9044f221c6c5)
Taking the Train (#u7f7fc464-846b-5e74-8152-dfddef58790c)
Home (#u7ef97959-c25f-52ef-804c-a84c2a1626c4)
The Journal (#u41fc8ccc-4fd7-5fae-b0c5-e4d8f2d44055)
Salt (#uc75c2916-20b6-55eb-9d25-7325b951379e)
Others (#u5dd7d542-d0bd-59cd-bd8f-ff3cc03263c4)
The Orange Fish (#u6fde22f1-8333-5843-b0cb-1958f081cbd5)
The Orange Fish (#uffa66f1e-46cf-5912-907c-05bbd1912cdd)
Chemistry (#u2f04f2b4-ad15-596b-bc21-95dfe518c689)
Hazel (#ufae794a2-9723-5d7c-81ee-5b2c213db48d)
Today Is the Day (#uef865e63-5f91-5d82-8b97-52f6c1a11e86)
Hinterland (#u57e96fdf-aacf-505f-ac10-74a52dd79381)
Block Out (#ue39a23c3-bb5a-5e26-a031-9558946152e9)
Collision (#u3da586ea-944d-5c83-8085-a5842ff21853)
Good Manners (#u3cf3e8cb-06af-56b3-bcb9-8b45208a32fd)
Times of Sickness and Health (#uc7faaaf3-dc63-5443-ad35-b5e6e01324b3)
Family Secrets (#u0c72806e-96a1-5629-9f2c-78ea4d52170d)
Fuel for the Fire (#u589c0292-72d4-5f8c-8e01-4f20c9d52eac)
Milk Bread Beer Ice (#u4caddc7c-6998-589e-8e9e-59426b10aa68)
Dressing Up for the Carnival (#u8ca4f116-77ba-5644-a73f-9ddd67eb263e)
Dressing Up for the Carnival (#ue51ff9d9-3240-5c9d-9859-fb96daaf67c0)
A Scarf (#ua5ed81dc-6842-5296-ac86-8de8e9a08d83)
Weather (#u64681399-91db-5233-8ec7-64f0055caf80)
Flatties: Their Various Forms and Uses (#uae8c367e-0d62-504f-ba09-f726554af797)
Dying for Love (#u836a4d13-3152-53a7-b2eb-4b26f42e625b)
Ilk (#uaf8d8241-927a-5b43-b8eb-c28e0af16334)
Stop! (#u02c6315b-6b3e-5b16-9000-1871fe44cc50)
Mirrors (#u27b3526c-6cb5-5574-a381-fefca35be586)
The Harp (#u9612a118-aeb8-5f02-90a6-c50e71f52f5f)
Our Men and Women (#uaf85a35c-a5e2-5d7b-9a79-0dbdd94c1812)
Keys (#u98e40738-551a-5bda-a9f8-8b3e51076646)
Absence (#u29e5c107-4eb4-5912-8def-9895cad431b6)
Windows (#u05849be0-a633-5430-8718-91ab99b69cd1)
Reportage (#uf446aa43-d7a6-54b0-8e1a-1f80aaae7692)
Edith-Esther (#u7de93858-d75b-5f2c-824c-fd92e9a12323)
New Music (#ue66b9b14-ce37-52cc-906e-7a99ca26b2bd)
Soup du Jour (#u42858f89-25e0-5abb-8d0e-13c2e47bdc35)
Invention (#uc787f185-d691-5940-9955-f94e2c1dc49d)
Death of an Artist (#u5c08caa1-a001-5c22-9a0e-e25787faecf5)
The Next Best Kiss (#u7f10a547-0612-5fc3-85e2-85d3d24d867e)
Eros (#u3328b41a-4135-5ca6-b2d9-65303ba082bf)
Dressing Down (#u261e7cb0-0dc9-5be8-97e0-76fdc670d961)
About the Author (#u737ec195-c334-5392-87a4-eb78fec80a08)
From the reviews of Collected Stories: (#udf630d1e-bba7-5367-b5dd-ff536bd8b9cb)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#u7cf4f634-7b93-5ae9-b78b-576c65bff4fd)
Copyright (#u3374be86-8c9a-53b1-a4f7-cfa16fb4a530)
About the Publisher (#u84e24f33-3509-5696-94ef-cdde881c4585)
Introduction By Margaret Atwood (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
I began reading Carol Shields’s books many years ago, with The Box Garden. In that novel there’s a passage that made me laugh so hard I thought I would do myself an injury. It’s the chapter describing a mother with scant taste but a lot of energy, who spends her time like a down-market and rather crazed Martha Stewart, relentlessly decorating her modest house - papering and re-papering its walls, hand-painting its lampshades, dying its scatter rugs - much to the alarm of her adolescent daughter, who never knows what new, ferocious colour the house will be when she gets home from school.
This, I thought, was not only terrific satire, but fine comedy as well. Yet when I recently read the passage again, it no longer struck me as all that funny. Now - years later, and with several demented decorating episodes of my own behind me - I found it poignant, even faintly tragic. The mother is defeated by her house, in the end. She abandons her doomed attempts to make it into a work of art. She recognizes the futility of her efforts. Time claims her. She sinks down. She gives up.
This ability to strike two such different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’s writing - the iridescent, often hilarious surfaces of things, but also their ominous depths. The shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx.
Carol Shields died on 16 July 2003 at her home in Victoria, British Columbia, after a long battle with cancer. She was sixty-eight. The enormous media coverage given to her and the sadness expressed by her many readers paid tribute to the high esteem in which she was held in her own country, but her death made the news all around the world.
Conscious as she was of the vagaries of fame and the element of chance in any fortune, she would have viewed that with a certain irony, but she would also have found it deeply pleasing. She knew about the darkness, but - both as an author and as a person - she held on to the light. ‘She was just a luminous person, and that would be important and persist even if she hadn’t written anything,’ said her friend and fellow author Alice Munro.
Earlier in her writing career, some critics mistook this quality of light in her for lightness, light-mindedness, on the general principle that comedy - a form that turns on misunderstanding and confusion, but ends in reconciliation, of however tenuous a kind - is less serious than tragedy, and that the personal life is of lesser importance than the public one. Carol Shields knew better. Human life is a mass of statistics only for statisticians: the rest of us live in a world of individuals, and most of them are not prominent. Their joys, however, are fully joyful, and their griefs are real. It was the extraordinariness of ordinary people that was Shields’s forte. She gave her material the full benefit of her large intelligence, her powers of observation, her humane wit, and her wide reading. Her books are delightful, in the original sense of the word: they are full of delights.
She understood the life of the obscure and the overlooked partly because she had lived it: her work reveals a deep sympathy with the plight of the woman novelist toiling incognito, appreciated only by an immediate circle but longing for her due. Born in 1935 in the United States, Shields was at the tail end of the post-war generation of North American college-educated women who were convinced by the mores of their time that their destiny was to get married and have five children. This Carol did; she remained a devoted mother and a constant wife throughout her life. Her husband Don was a civil engineer; they moved to Canada, beginning with Toronto in the sixties, a time of poetic ferment in that city. Carol, who was already writing then, and attended some readings, said of that time, ‘I knew no writers.’ Undoubtedly she felt relegated to that nebulous category, ‘just a housewife’, like Daisy in The Stone Diaries and like Mary Swann, the eponymous poet who is murdered by her husband when her talent begins to show.
After obtaining an MA at the University of Ottawa, Shields taught for years at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, where she began publishing in the seventies. But this was the decade of rampant feminism, in the arts at least. Her early books, including Others, Intersect, Small Ceremonies, and The Box Garden, which examined the vagaries of domestic life without torpedoing it, did not make a large stir, although some of their early readers found them both highly accomplished and hilarious. She had her first literary breakthrough - not in terms of quality of writing, but in terms of audience size - in Britain rather than in North America, with her 1992 novel The Republic of Love.
Her glory book was The Stone Diaries, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Canadian Governor General’s Award, and then, in 1995, the Pulitzer Prize, a feat her dual citizenship made possible. Her next novel, Larry’s Party, won the Orange Prize in 1998. To say that she was not thrilled by success would be to do her an injustice. She knew what it was worth. She’d waited a long time for it. She wore her new-found prominence with graciousness and used it with largesse.
Unless, her last novel, was written in the small space of time she spent in England and France, after beating cancer the first time and before it came back. It’s a hymn to the provisional: the sense of happiness and security as temporary and fragile is stronger than ever. Those who had heard Carol Shields interviewed earlier were probably surprised by a frankly feminist strain in the novel - particularly the angry letters her protagonist, writer Reta Winters, addressed to male pundits dismissive of woman writers - because in conversation she was discreet and allusive. The little frown, the shake of the head said it all. Possibly feminism was something she worked into, as she published more widely and came up against more commentators who thought excellent pastry was a facile creation compared with raw meat on skewers, and who in any case could not recognize the thread of blood in her work, though it was always there. The problem of the luminous is that its very luminosity obscures the shadows it depends on for its brilliance.
Unless was published in 2002; although it was shortlisted for just about every major English-language prize, the Munro Doctrine, informally named after Alice Munro, had set in by then - after a certain number of prizes you are shot into the stratosphere, where you circulate in radiant mists, far beyond the ken of juries.
I last saw Carol Shields at the end of April. Her new house was spacious, filled with light; outside the windows the tulips in her much loved garden were in bloom. Typically for her, she claimed she couldn’t quite believe she deserved to live in such a big and beautiful house. She felt so lucky, she said.
Although she was very ill, she didn’t seem it. She was as alert, as interested in books of all kinds, and as curious as ever. She’d recently been reading non-fiction works on biology, she told me: something new for her, a new source of amazement and wonder. We did not speak of her illness. She preferred to be treated as a person who was living, not one who was dying.
And live she did, and live she does; for as John Keats remarked, every writer has two souls, an earthly one and one that lives on in the world of writing as a voice in the writing itself. It’s this voice - astute, compassionate, observant and deeply human - that will continue to speak to her readers everywhere. For who is better at delineating happiness - especially the sudden, unlooked-for, unearned kind of happiness - than Carol Shields? It’s easier to kill than to give birth, easier to destroy than to create, and easier for a writer to describe gloom than to evoke joy. Carol Shields can do both supremely well, but it’s her descriptions of joy that leave you open-mouthed. The world may be a soap bubble hovering over a void, but look - what astonishing colours it has, and isn’t it amazing that such a thing exists at all?
Such a world - various, ordinary, shimmering, evanescent but miraculous - is a gift; and it’s the vision of this gift that Carol Shields has presented us with in her extraordinary books. We give thanks for it - and for her.
Something has occurred to her—something transparently simple, something she’s always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we are still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.
—From The Stone Diaries
Segue (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
SOMETHING IS ALWAYS SAYING TO ME: Be plain. Be clear. But then something else interferes and unjoints my good intentions.
Max and I were out yesterday morning, Sunday, a simple enough errand in our neighborhood. We “sallied forth” to buy a loaf of good seed bread and a potted plant, chrysanthemums in our case, with the smashed little faces that our daughter so admires, that bitter bronze color, matching the tablecloth she was sure to be laying right that moment out there in Oak Park. Eleven o’clock; my husband Max and I would be expected at half past twelve. We always arrive carrying a modest gift of some sort.
There, at the market, stimulated, probably, by the hint of frost in the air, I felt a longing to register the contained, isolated instant we had manufactured and entered, the purchase of the delicious hard-crusted bread, the decision over the potted plant—this was what I wanted to preserve. But an intrusive overview camera (completely imaginary, needless to say) bumped against me, so that instead of feeling the purity of the coins leaving my hand, I found myself watching the two of us, a man and a woman of similar height, both in their middle sixties, both slightly stooped—you’d hardly notice unless you were looking—and dressed in bright colors, making a performance of paying for their rounded and finite loaf of bread and then the burst of rusty chrysanthemums.
Wait a minute. Shouldn’t there be a grandchild in this picture, a little boy or girl staying over with Nana and Poppa in downtown Chicago for the weekend? Well, no, our aging couple has not been so fortunate.
Our Sunday self-consciousness, the little mid-morning circle around Max and me, was bisected by light and dark. The day bloomed into mildness, October 7, one year and one month after the September 11 tragedy—event, spectacle, whatever you choose to call it. Max is a well-known Chicago novelist—he both loves and hates that regional designation—and he was, of course, spotted by other Sunday morning shoppers. That’s Max Sexton. Where? Over there. Really? A little buzz travels with my husband, around him and above him, which, I believe, dishes out the gold dust that keeps him alive. To be noticed, to be recognized. With his white beard, white swifts of soft hair swept backward, his old-fashioned, toolarge horn-rimmed spectacles, he is a familiar enough sight in our immediate neighborhood, and—allow me to say—in the national journals too, even to the point that he has been mentioned once or twice in the same breath with the Nobel Prize (as a dark horse, the darkest of horses). Not that we ever speak of this. It does not come up, we forbid it, the two of us. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer—we don’t speak of that either.
There we were, yesterday morning, a fine Sunday.
Accompanying the novelist Max Sexton was his wife of forty years—me—whose name is Jane; I had my right arm crooked loosely through the great author’s blue nylon jacket sleeve. Plain Jane. Well, not quite, God be thanked. My very good scarf gives me a certain look, not just its color, but the fact that it was knotted high up on the throat. Jane, the wife, the poet and editor, soon (tomorrow) to become past president of the American Sonnet Society—now known as Sonnet Revival—she with her hair in a smooth white pageboy and her reasonably trim body, c’est moi. Notice the earrings, handmade, Mexican. Wouldn’t you just know! Oh God, yes. Yesterday, at the Andersonville market in Chicago’s near-north side, Jane Sexton was sporting an excellent cashmere poncho-thingamajig, deep rose in color, and well-fitting black pants and expensive boots, which she always keeps nicely polished.
Let me say it: I am an aging woman of despairing good cheer—just look through the imaginary camera lens and watch me as I make the Sunday morning transaction over the bread, then the flowers, my straw tote from our recent holiday in Jamaica, my smile, my upturned sixty-seven-year-old voice, a voice so crying-out and clad with familiarity that, in fact, I can’t hear it anymore myself, thank God; my ears are blocked. Lately everything to do with my essence has become transparent, neutral: Good morning, Jane Sexton smiles to one and all (such a friendly, down-to-earth woman). “What a perfect fall day.” “What glorious blooms!” “Why, Mr. Henning, this bread is still warm! Can this be true?”
Max must surely hear the scattershot of my neighborhood greetings, so fond in their expression and so traditionally patterned, exactly what healthy, seasoned, amiable women learn to say in such chapters of their lives. He has, after so many years, a certain amount of faith in my voice, if nothing else, the voice that he’s married to, but then he doesn’t believe, I suspect, that the mystery of being is as deeply manifest in women as in men. The voice, as he perfectly well knows, is a social projection, an oral accomplishment, something I’ve created and maintained along with my feminine peers. I’m just being merry—that’s how I imagine Max processing my ebullience—I’m being cordial in a way that may be slightly dishonest but that keeps life from bearing down with its solemn weight, keeps it nosing forward, and overrides the worst possible story the day might otherwise offer, his story, that is, which could quickly turn dreary and strangulated without my floating social descant riding overhead on strings of nylon. Oh, do shut up, Jane.
Yes, there we stood: the morning’s excursion to the market, which we managed to stretch out an hour longer than it should have taken, then the taxi to our daughter’s house in Oak Park, her austere three-story brick cube on East Avenue (built 1896) where she lives with her film agent husband, Ivan, with its wide front steps and shrubbery and cement cupids—where we were to have lunch, as usual on Sundays, something hot and savory in the dining room, followed by fresh fruit (on French fruit plates, each one different in design, and accompanied by knives with ceramic handles) and afterward coffee, and then the journey home. Ivan, without a word of complaint, will drive us back to our downtown apartment, silently ferrying his mother-in-law, his father-in-law (he is a man who cannot drive and talk at the same time), eastward through the light Sunday traffic, taking Chicago Avenue as usual. He will actually back his old Packard out of the Oak Park garage, slowly, down the narrow overgrown driveway with its scraping branches, wincing as he hears his beautifully restored car suffering instances of minute damage.
I have attempted in my life—at least in the last thirty years—to write one sonnet every fourteen days, and it is my especial (see Fowler’s on the difference between especial and special) pleasure to spread the work out over the available working days. On Mondays, usually in the early morning after the house has been set right, I decide on the form—Italian (for which I have a special fondness), Shakespearean, contemporary or what I, and some of my colleagues, call essentialist. Surprisingly, this choice precedes the subject matter. “But how do you decide what exactly to write about?” asked the Chicago Tribune journalist, Meg Alford, in her early spring article.
As though I would tell her—and the world—about the tiny spiral notebook in the upper-left-hand drawer of my desk with its crowded list recorded randomly in ink or else pencil, and even in one case lip-liner, of new and possible subjects: the smell of taxis, the texture of bread, sleep, chewing gum, Picasso, flints and arrowheads, the cello, the shape of coastal islands and the children who are born on islands, cabbage, shingle beaches, feet, Styrofoam, photographs of the newborn as they appear in the newspaper (with sleek seal-baby faces stroked in stone). Or a medieval wooden Christ image that Max happened upon at the Art Institute, brooms and brushes and dustpans and the concept of debris (how we half treasure what we can’t wait to throw away), a table set for eight (and its companion sestet “Table Set for Seven”), the beauty of coinage when neatly stacked on a counter, urban alleys after dark, and—a mere jump away—the commingling of hollyhocks and overhead wire, and then human faces and their afterimage—an afterimage not being anything like an aura, but possessing a different kind of density altogether. I’ve worked on this particular afterimage/aura construct for the last two weeks, finishing on Saturday afternoon (with a slight alteration round about midnight, two closing words pondered and then juxtaposed), and was more than usually pleased with my efforts, that feeling every poet knows of arrival home, the self returned to its self.
There is never a shortage of subjects, I explained to the Chicago Trib reporter, hoping my teeth were not projecting an idiotic over-gladness at the thought of such abundance waiting to be expressed, matter and ideas swelling forward, eager to be sonnetized.
For the next two weeks my writing will approach the subject of my aging body; I have attempted this subject before, but always with indirection, as though I were peering at it from behind a shrub, so that it could be anyone’s body. Now I must claim it, it seems, as mine. I see it close up: chin, breasts, stomach, hips and legs giving way to specific gravity, which will never relent, no matter what I do. The stars are speeding away from each other—we know that, so why are we surprised when the same thing happens to our various body parts, their willingness to spread and collapse and soften. My kneecaps, the skin that covers them, are as wrinkled as the fuzz of a poached peach, and sliding downward, always downward. But no one sees my knees anymore, so it doesn’t matter.
Sonnet writing—and this is what I wanted the Trib reporter to understand—no longer confines itself to the professing and withdrawing of courtly love, although I insisted that a nod to such love is always hovering, or rather nudging. Is this notion true or just part of my fussy exegetic self? Courtly love? Who knows what shadow of that instinct survives? To be honest (not that I was honest with the slender, leather-skirted junior reporter and her tape recorder), it’s only a suspicion borrowed from Max’s belief that every novel, whatever its genre or subject, is about death. I certainly have never bought that one, not for a minute. A novel is about everything it touches upon, and so is a sonnet.
I reminded the reporter that sonnet means “little sound.” “Oh,” she said, and I could tell by the way her pen jumped in her hand that she was charmed by the idea; people almost always are.
Sonnets are taken so strenuously, so literally, when taught at school, or at least they used to be, and the definition—fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter—hardens and ends up gesturing toward an artifact, an object one might construct from a kit. But if you picture the sonnet, instead, as a little sound, a ping in the great wide silent world, you make visible a sudden fluidity to the form, a splash of noise, but a carefully measured splash that’s saved from preciosity by the fact that it comes from within the body’s own borders; one voice, one small note extended, and then bent; the bending is everything, the volta, the turn, and also important is where it occurs within the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground,” to quote old Wordsworth. From there the “little sound” sparks and then forms itself out of the dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness.
Max’s novels, on the other hand, come as a communal roar, especially the most recent one, Flat Planet, which was published with exquisitely poor timing, last year, 2001, on September 10.
Of course, no one had time to read the ensuing reviews of Flat Planet, no one cared about social novels and novelistic dioramas during that pinched, poisoned, vulnerable and shocking time, and it must be admitted that the contents of Flat Planet, with its wrangling families and chords of memory, sounded rancorously in the face of Ground Zero. Flat Planet became a note in the margin: NOTED CHICAGO WRITER PRESENTS NEUROTIC FATHER (who tries his damndest to persuade his adult kids to come home for Thanksgiving, when they’d rather be out in the world making money or enjoying alternative forms of sex or fine dining.) One critic did go so far as to say that Max Sexton at least had the stones to resist the excesses of postmodernism. Stones; Max loved that, I could tell. Max also loves—has always loved—Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving of the old, weird America that lived in the woods or behind sets of green hills. He wanted so much for the book to sum up all that the word thanksgiving illuminates in America. But, really, what does the idea of thanks mean when a spectacularly fortunate country has been smacked in the chin? Has been flattened. Thanks to whom and for what?
Somewhere, someday, probably soon, a scholar will write a comparative thesis on pre- and post-World Trade Center literature. I can imagine her (or him), an intrepid young person in her early, awkward twenties (Columbia or else Yale), her hair flattened by neglect, her body unbalanced by bad posture and fad diets, perpetually in a state of flinching, just slightly overawed by her male supervisor (or the other way around), but determined (nevertheless) to identify the fulcrum that she knows, by instinct, separates the now-world, which has seen the end of Fortress America, and the notion of giving thanks from the “olden days”—separates real terrorism from the old excuse of vengeance, striking back when power is denied.
Max, with his shy, proud, leftish politics, would never reduce the ill-timing of September 11 to a career complaint, but I know he has felt the injustice of it. I understand exactly how he could have emended the book’s galleys, given a few weeks’ grace, even a few days’, and, having done so, he would have found himself credited by the literary media with a handsome sense of prophecy and the companionable embrace of now that shades, so subtly, toward the current state of inquietude in America at this moment.
Instead, he and his book Flat Planet have been swept into a cave of unfashionable hush, dismissed and somehow made to feel a triviality. Since Flat Planet (those quarreling family members and their generational rivalries and heroic accumulations of wealth), Max has stayed as far as he can from talking to me about his New Manuscript.
Ever since we were married (1957), since the publication of his early Lincoln Park Beatitudes, Max has always had on hand a New Manuscript. That’s part of what I married at the altar of Euclid Methodist Church in Oak Park. He had never made a secret of the fact that he intended to spend his life writing novels; it was certainly not a thing hidden from the new young wife—me—who had pledged herself to be Max Sexton’s muse, even though we never thought of employing the word muse. He believed in my support, and I believed in his ability to have, always, in the rim of his consciousness, a New Manuscript, the future offering, the work with which he was currently engaged and to which I would always take a second place. What did I pledge in return? Nothing, really, except my presence. My abiding presence, the value of which I have recently come to question.
The new, new, New Manuscript lives at this moment in Max’s orange vinyl briefcase (a souvenir bought in a public market in Paris, which he uses for luck), really a child’s 1960ish backpack, a cartable. The manuscript might comprise three pages or three hundred at this point. I haven’t asked. He takes it with him in the morning when he goes to his office, which is a small, comfortless room over a hardware outlet a mere two blocks away on Rush Street.
It is surprising to me that in a busy urban high-tech city we still need a place to buy screws and nuts, nails and hammers. We continue to require these old-fashioned items, as well as a place where they can be procured. You have to enter the revolving door of our very successful local hardware store, then walk by the rubber-smelling stock of garden tools and housewares, then up a set of stairs, to find Max’s office door, a plain gray-painted metal door that opens with difficulty, scraping hard against the cheap tiled floor. There’s a stubby window (glass bricks, gritted with dirt) high up on one wall. There’s a shared bathroom down the hall; Max formerly had to ask one of the cashiers downstairs for a key, but now he has acquired one of his own.
For my husband, Max, spartanness serves as a set of crossed fingers; he mustn’t give way to greed or a taste for luxury, or it will eat him up the way it ate Bellow and Steinbeck. Probably this explains why the two of us have never owned a car, certainly an eccentricity for our generation.
In the late afternoon, after a day at his word processor, he locks his office door with a sigh—or so I imagine—and totes his briefcase down the stairs, across the street and home, and then the two of us sit down in the living room for coffee.
I use freshly ground beans from the freezer, also beautiful Mexican handmade cups and saucers on a polished wooden tray; we deserve this after all our work, and after, in Max’s case, hours of self-denial in his blank cell. What do we talk about?
He seems—I can only guess at this from the way his face relaxes, his tongue caught in silence—to enjoy an account of my day of sonnet-making, as long as I remember to keep my merry voice, but he offers nothing in return about the contents of his briefcase and how the New Manuscript is progressing.
Our Andersonville apartment in the late afternoon catches the full orange of the western sun. This is the old Swedish immigrant neighborhood, now—who knows why?—a refuge for gays and lesbians. Look at us. We are two oldish, coupled heterosexuals drinking coffee after a day of writing, of transposing our thoughts onto the ephemera of paper. One of us speaks of it, and one of us doesn’t. I can’t be sure of holding his interest when I tell him of my daily progress, but he is always eager to hear about—and amused by—the latest news of our Monday meetings of Sonnet Revival. Today was the day when, after all these years, I handed over the society’s chair to another sonneteer, or sonnet-maker as we prefer to be called nowadays, a man named Victor Glantz. Max knows Victor and despises him, yet he inclined his head when Victor’s name came up, eager for details, and anxious, I could see, to avoid any reference to his own working day.
His side trips to the Newbury, his “research,” assure me the New Manuscript is going slowly—and that means badly. Research is a postponement, as I’ve heard Max say a dozen times. A novel is a whole world; there’s so much to get right, but you don’t get it right from reading encyclopedia articles. Sonnets, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter, those little sounds.
I work on my sonnets at a small keyhole desk in a corner of our blue-and-gray bedroom. I actually work with real paper, lined paper from a thick tablet, and a ballpoint pen, with a great many crossings-out and dozens of arrows and question marks and sometimes such marginal scribblings as “No!” or “saccharine” or “derivative,” or else I present myself with that bold command: “Make fresher?” Freshness is the most demanding task one faces when dealing with a traditional meter, no matter how forgiving that meter is.
The first several pages are a mess, but I like to allow the mess to flow and flower. I make it move, sitting back in my chair, rotating my shoulders every half hour or so; I try to unknot my muscles, go, go, go—as long as it is forward. Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy. Forget all that business about fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter; think of Leonardo and his sage wisdom: “Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom.” Or the problems that accrue from the “weight of too much liberty” (Wordsworth). Drown out the noise of rhyme and rhythm. Think only of the small dramatic argument that’s being brought into being—a handball court, or a courtroom itself, hard, demanding thick stone walls—between perseverance and its asymmetrical smash of opposition. Think of that rectangle, perfect in its proportions, that plastic cutlery tray in your kitchen drawer, with its sharp divisions for forks, knives, spoons. Or think of the shape of a human life, which, like it or not, is limited. I believe that humans are meant to live about a hundred years—after that the cells stop wanting to divide and replicate themselves. Chickens, if left alone, will live for thirty years. I wrote a sonnet once about a chicken in great old age, screeching into its decayed wing feathers. Every species has a probable life span, and this observation offers me a verification of sorts for my fourteen-line creations.
From week to week, the subject of my ongoing sonnet suggests itself. It’s as though there’s a small thread clinging to my sweater’s sleeve, always there, waiting to be picked off. I look up from my desk at the framed poster of Rilke’s “Sonnet to Orpheus no. 14” that’s fixed to the wall, and think: this is me. This is I—getting more grammatical, now—my surroundings being a fine-furred extension of myself. These moments of mental vacancy are mine too, and the smothering way, according to Max, I have of signing my letters with amities and my poems with the turn in point of view at about—more or less—the eighth line. Me, always me. My inescapable self with its slightly off-balanced packaging, benignly decentered by an altered view. When I announce my name, Jane Sexton, to new acquaintances, in circumstances formal or informal, my attempt at musical elusion is also part of me, riding up the “a” in Jane, as though a twinkly uncertainty waited, then plunging down into the plainness of Sexton, with its embedded salute to hard churchly labor—the sexton being only a sort of janitor, and wouldn’t I rather have a name like Bishop or Deacon? No, I would not want to lose my bell-ringing, steeple-climbing, altar-dusting self, unconditioned for awe, broken-tongued on the subject of reverence.
My aging is me too, as well as the subject of my current sonnet. Only two years ago the idea of aging belonged to the whole world. It was background. I hadn’t been touched by it then. Now I am. Because I’m tall and thin, I am conscious of my bones, especially my hips, which are so shallowly buried, and also conscious of their curvature and sharpness. Often I feel like a walking ossuary. Shouldn’t the exercise of staring at my body involve a little veneration? Well, yes. My knuckles have grown elaborate and curious, white and blue knobs in a setting of stringy flesh. I’ve learned to curl my hands in my lap, one inside the other, so that no one can see the wonder of their structure, no one but me.
I am more and more solitary, and so is my poor Max. Are we then starting to take responsibility for our own dying bodies? It seems that each of us will have to do this on our own.
For a long time I have been perfectly happy to chair the twice-monthly meetings of the Sonnet Society, known since 1988 as the Sonnet Revival. Every second Monday, noon to one-thirty. The time is manageable—an hour and a half every other week, and our location in Clark House behind the SUD Building is an easy walk for me. The other members of the society find their parking on the street, which they do happily, since parking rarely presents a problem on Mondays.
Until recently we had the wide, broad-beamed Clark House room on the ground floor to ourselves, our massive oak conference table and the files where we keep our archives, but a year ago the Oulipian Society became aware of our privileged location, and applied for the use of our official meeting room on alternate Mondays, which seemed only fair to me and not a great inconvenience. Several of our members, though, felt our space had been compromised. Those upstarts!
I tried to reason with my colleagues, explaining that there should be no conflict if we planned our calendar carefully. But, in fact, the sharing of the room has caused occasional confusion, since many of our ranks are getting forgetful with age. I made the mistake once myself not too long ago. I can’t imagine how I had mixed up the weeks except that Max and I had been away to Jamaica. In any case I arrived at the Oulipian Society meeting with my latest sonnet and bag lunch to find them in the midst of what they called their “combinatorial stratagems.” On that particular Monday they were doing poems in which every line was to contain two words with double consonants. Their chair, Douglas Pome, asked me to stay for their “workshop” (as an “honored guest,” he said) and I did, feeling a little awkward about being thought a forgetful type who mixes up the weeks, and not so much enjoying the session as thinking it would make a good story to tell Max over coffee, something new for a change—my ever-present itch of compunction.
The Oulipians were younger than our group and more raffish, especially Doug Pome, with his careful midlife beard and his joke of a name. (He does write a nice fleet line.) I noticed they had catered sandwiches instead of doing the brown-bag thing as we’ve done for years. Most of their poems had a kind of tumbling, jesting humor, which they richly enjoyed. Humor is something sonnet-makers do badly, if at all.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Oulipians. I understand that, at first glance, they might seem to resemble the sonnet revivalists in that they set up constrictive forms for their literary production. But—whether they pursue their experiments and practice under the ever-anxious gaze of consciousness or whether they use anagram or linguistic transplant or number series—they suffer the disadvantage that they can never repeat their forays.
A sonnet, on the other hand, comes with its coat of varnish. As Flaubert says, the words are like hair; they shine with combing. We can do what we want with a sonnet. It is a container ever reusable, ever willing to be refurbished, retouched, regilded and reobjectified.
“Congratulations,” I said to Victor Glantz today as I handed over the gavel and welcomed him to the head of the table, where I always sit. For the next three years he will take charge of the society meetings and newsletter, and after that he may earn himself another term. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)
“I promise,” he said formally, in his irritating way, “to carry on the mandate of our society and to bring the sonnet into greater and greater public usage.” (I do cherish my association with Sonnet Revival, but I sometimes wish we had fewer loonies among us, and not quite so much enthusiastic mediocrity.)
Because the meeting broke up earlier than usual, and because time is more and more a problem for me, I took a different route home, doubling the distance between Clark House and our apartment building. After all these years I know our Andersonville area well, but the darkening skies, or else the glare of city lights, confused me for a moment. I felt my hands trembling in my pockets. One of the familiar old buildings had been razed; that was what was confusing me, something as simple as that.
Nevertheless I recognized later that I had, in fact, panicked. Fear spread rapidly through my body and went with a rush to my head, so that I thought I might faint. What was the matter with me? I had simply turned right when I should have turned left. There was a coffee shop on the corner. I had seen it many times, but had never entered. Now I went in, sat down at a small table by the window and ordered a cup of hot tea. Here I am, I said to myself two or three times, here I am, here I am, sipping at the edge of the plastic cup. I am five blocks from home, an aging woman who has lost her bearings. But now it’s all right. In fifteen minutes I’ll be home.
I didn’t tell Max about getting lost, but I did tell him what Victor Glantz had said when taking over the meeting, his hopes that the sonnet would gain in public usage. Max laughed at that, laughed harder than I had expected. I gave him a small smile in return. He stopped laughing then and gulped his coffee, struggling to straighten his face. We have to be terribly careful after forty years together. We are both so easily injured.
On Mondays, even on Sonnet Revival days, I try to get one or two lines down. Today I did what I do every day, exactly the same. I start at the beginning, the first line, the first word, and then work my way through to the end, thinking: this is familiar, oh yes. This—if it is to mean anything—must be familiar; familiarity is the point, after all. Spring and counter-spring. April, May, June, July. Then August, then September, straight through the tunnel of the chilly calendar. I am not thinking, in this early stage, of octave-sestet divisions.
Everything I need is within reach—my notes, my dictionary and thesaurus, my Leonardo quote taped to my desk, and, in fact, except for the steady accompaniment of good light, what else am I likely to require as I move from space to space, other than this tough little pad of paper and the stub of my pen?
But there will come a moment, possibly today—I came close early this morning—when my faith in my miniature art collapses. I can count on that; everything will be going well, the words adding themselves up, gorging on themselves, and saluting the friendly gathering of half-rhymes (which is what I favor these days), then the slow sexual stroke of the iamb arrives, and then, for reasons undisclosed to me, I will be stopped in my working tracks, unable to complete more than six lines. For the first week, the sonnet lives underground, where delay and containment are my chief concerns. It is as though I am looking at it with one eye squeezed shut. And then—this can happen quickly—by the second Monday, I have, mostly, managed to set up my scaffolding for all of the fourteen lines, but it is a scaffolding with several bits unnailed, and nothing yet committed. There are pressures working on particular words, but mostly I try to silence what I think of as a foot pedal of a piano, which is ever ready to stomp and shout and take an easy ride home. I want space for strangeness to enter—not obscurities or avoidances, but idiosyncrasies of grammar or lexicon, so that the sound is harsh, even hurtful.
Half a dozen syllables in the third line are being withheld from me, so temptingly, a few feet out of sight, suspended on the other side of the desk lamp. Or else they are unwilling to freeze themselves in the particular posture I have prepared for them. I refuse, possessing as I do a kind of preternatural sprezzatura, and this presents another hurdle, to invert the structure of ordinary spoken English, attaching adjectives to the end of a line for the sake of rhyme. Here’s an example from the literature of sonnets: “With strange new hopes and fears and fancies wild.” “Wild” to rhyme with “smil’d” (Wilmon Brewer, a ferocious old sonnet-writer, whose book, awful, was published in 1937, Sonnets and Sestinas). If I were at the helm, Wilmot Brewer’s line would have to go “With strange new hopes and fears and wild fancies,” and where would you find a rhyme for fancies? In any case, I don’t believe fancies is a word I’ve ever used in a sonnet.
And I want, also, that short introductory beat, the primary iamb, followed by the heavier second beat, and I won’t have it any other way, though many sonnet-makers give in at this early point, as though they are inserting a trumpet into the verse and daring it to blow.
My brain stem is ready, the iambic grasp of knit/purl engaged, and is so close to matching the rhythm of my breath that I don’t even think of it. Its motor hums in the joints of my shoulders and wrists, knit/purl, knit/purl, ten items arranged on each clean glass shelf, though I don’t like to be overly prescriptive when it comes to meter.
Sometimes I look around whatever room I happen to be in as a way of steadying my thoughts. It is seven o’clock now. After our coffee ceremony I moved from the living room to the kitchen, with its fused aroma of afternoon coffee and tonight’s roasting chicken and fresh pepper. My little notepad occupies the clean edge of the corner table, and I have just heard a woman on the radio say to her interviewer, about a local celebrity murderer, “There was something about that man that made the hair on my spine stand up.”
After a minute I pick up a pencil and jot down the word spine. Then spinal. No, spinal is an anapest. I turn the radio off. Color in its array of tints moves forward in my mind, but not the words I need. Spinal fluid. Not quite.
It is my aging body I want to write about, this oiled goatskin I live inside of. The body that rises now, a little creakily, though I attempt to disguise this lack of limberness with an effort of will. I lean over from the waist as smartly as I can (as though a witness were standing next to me taking notes) and check the chicken in the oven and the pair of baking potatoes, darkening in their hides. Max is reading the newspaper. I hear him turning over the pages in the living room and think how he has deprived himself all day of this pleasure. He’s always been strict about the avoidance of the newspaper earlier in the day, he is like a puritan in that way: first he must perform his daily task, getting down onto hard disk or paper his own five hundred words, which tomorrow he may or may not delete. In ten minutes we will sit down at the dinner table, just the two of us. Are we to share the future or no? I’ve never made a fuss of things—why would I begin now?
Oh, these duo dinners! They’ve grown so hard for us. We’ll be talking about the Middle East tonight, the two of us. Or else the obscenity of CEO salaries in America. We already know each other’s views on these subjects; we speak in order to keep the silence away. It’s as though we reheat these issues in our very dear little copper saucepan—so battered and beloved—hoping by accident to stir in something new. But we are inoculated against surprise. We can no longer make each other laugh. We can’t even startle one another. We are both abashed at this imposed duty at the end of every day, even though we’ve done it for years: each of us is obliged to eat a meal in the presence of a stranger, and yet each is determined to be a self, a singular self. Music helps; this is something we’ve both noticed in the last year, and I can hear Max now, rising and shuffling among CDs on the shelf where we keep them. What’s it to be tonight? Ah, Mozart. Good!
After dinner, which includes a single glass of red wine, sipped slowly, grape-sized sips, I will phone our daughter in Oak Park to see how she got through her day, to try to gauge from her voice her level of vitality. I can hear myself being distractingly glib in order to blunt all that I resist. Is she bearing up? Will she manage another day of effort as she tries to see through her life’s obscuring clutter? I have to know before I can tuck myself into our queen-size water bed, where I will read for an hour or more, while Max in another room watches a documentary on television. I am reading a short, bleak Irish novel and he is watching something to do with elephant tusks, needless slaughter and corruption in the international market.
Sleep arrives early, and my arm lifts, as though under hypnosis, to switch off the bedside lamp. My last thought before drifting off collapses into a kind of formula of information directed to the center of my cortex, where a question awaits. What am I now? What is my position in the universe, in the fen and bog of my arrangements?
The reply comes promptly, mocking my tone of high seriousness: if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.
Various Miracles (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
Various Miracles (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
SEVERAL OF THE MIRACLES THAT OCCURRED this year have gone unrecorded.
Example: On the morning of January 3, seven women stood in line at a lingerie sale in Palo Alto, California, and by chance each of these women bore the Christian name Emily.
Example: On February 16 four strangers (three men, one woman) sat quietly reading on the back seat of the number 10 bus in Cincinnati, Ohio; each of them was reading a paperback copy of Smiley’s People.
On March 30 a lathe operator in a Moroccan mountain village dreamed that a lemon fell from a tree into his open mouth, causing him to choke and die. He opened his eyes, overjoyed at being still alive, and embraced his wife, who was snoring steadily by his side. She scarcely stirred, being reluctant to let go of a dream she was dreaming, which was that a lemon tree had taken root in her stomach, sending its pliant new shoots upward into her limbs. Leaves, blossoms and finally fruit fluttered in her every vein until she began to tremble in her sleep with happiness and intoxication. Her husband got up quietly and lit an oil lamp so that he could watch her face. It seemed to him he’d never really looked at her before, and he felt how utterly ignorant he was of the spring that nourished her life. Now she lay sleeping, dreaming, her face radiant. What he saw was a mask of happiness so intense it made him fear for his life.
On May 11, in the city of Exeter in the south of England, five girls (aged fifteen to seventeen) were running across a playing field at ten o’clock in the morning as part of their physical education program. They stopped short when they saw, lying on the broad gravel path, a dead parrot. He was grassy green in color with a yellow nape and head, and was later identified by the girl’s science mistress as Amazona ochrocephala. The police were notified of the find, and it was later discovered that the parrot had escaped from the open window of a house owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who claimed, while weeping openly, that they had owned the parrot (Miguel by name) for twenty-two years. The parrot, in fact, was twenty-five years old, one of a pair of birds sold in an open market in Marseilles in the spring of 1958. Miguel’s twin brother was sold to an Italian soprano who kept it for ten years, then gave it to her niece Francesca, a violinist who played first with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and later with the Chicago Symphony. On May 11 Francesca was wakened in her River Forest home by the sound of her parrot (Pete, or sometimes Pietro) coughing. She gave him a dish of condensed milk instead of his usual whole-oats-and-peanut mixture, and then phoned to say she would not be able to attend rehearsal that day. The coughing grew worse. She looked up the name of a vet in the Yellow Pages and was about to dial when the parrot fell over, dead in his cage. A moment earlier Francesca had heard him open his beak and pronounce what she believed were the words “Ça ne fait rien.”
On August 26 a man named Carl Hallsbury of Billings, Montana, was wakened by a loud noise. “My God, we’re being burgled,” his wife, Marjorie, said. They listened, but when there were no further noises, they drifted back to sleep. In the morning they found that their favorite little watercolor—a pale rural scene depicting trees and a winding road and the usual arched bridge—had fallen off the living-room wall. It appeared that it had bounced onto the cast-iron radiator and then ricocheted to a safe place in the middle of the living-room rug. When Carl investigated, he found that the hook had worked loose in the wall. He patched the plaster methodically, allowed it to dry, and then installed a new hook. While he worked he remembered how the picture had come into his possession. He had come across it hanging in an emptied-out house in the French city of St. Brieuc, where he and the others of his platoon had been quartered during the last months of the war. The picture appealed to him, its simple lines and the pale tentativeness of the colors. In particular, the stone bridge caught his attention since he had been trained as a civil engineer (Purdue, 1939). When the orders came to vacate the house late in 1944, he popped the little watercolor into his knapsack; it was a snug fit, and the snugness seemed to condone his theft. He was not a natural thief, but already he knew that life was mainly a matter of improvisation. Other returning soldiers brought home German helmets, strings of cartridge shells and flags of various sorts, but the little painting was Carl’s only souvenir. And his wife, Marjorie, is the only one in the world who knows it to be stolen goods; she and Carl belong to a generation that believes there should be no secrets between married couples. Both of them, Marjorie as much as Carl, have a deep sentimental attachment to the picture, though they no longer believe it to be the work of a skilled artist.
It was, in fact, painted by a twelve-year-old boy named Pierre Renaud, who until 1943 had lived in the St. Brieuc house. It was said that as a child he had a gift for painting and drawing; in fact, he had a gift merely for imitation. His little painting of the bridge was copied from a postcard his father had sent him from Burgundy, where he’d gone to conduct some business. Pierre had been puzzled and ecstatic at receiving a card from his parent, a cold, resolute man with little time for his son. The recopying of the postcard in watercolors—later Pierre saw all this clearly—was an act of pathetic homage, almost a way of petitioning his father’s love.
He grew up to become not an artist but a partner in the family leather-goods business. In the late summer he liked to go south in pursuit of sunshine and good wine, and one evening, August 26 it was, he and Jean-Louis, his companion of many years, found themselves on a small stone bridge not far from Tournus. “This is it,” he announced excitedly, spreading his arms like a boy, and not feeling at all sure what he meant when he said the words, “This is it.” Jean-Louis gave him a fond smile; everyone knew Pierre had a large capacity for nostalgia. “But I thought you said you’d never been here before,” he said. “That’s true,” Pierre said. “You are right. But I feel, here”—he pointed to his heart—“that I’ve stood here before.” Jean-Louis teased him by saying, “Perhaps it was in another life.” Pierre shook his head, “No, no, no,” and then, “Well, perhaps.” After that the two of them stood on the bridge for some minutes regarding the water and thinking their separate thoughts.
On October 31 Camilla LaPorta, a Cuban-born writer, now a Canadian citizen, was taking the manuscript of her new novel to her Toronto publisher on Front Street. She was nervous; the publisher had been critical of her first draft, telling her it relied too heavily on the artifice of coincidence. Camilla had spent many months on revision, plucking apart the faulty tissue that joined one episode to another, and then, delicately, with the pains of a neurosurgeon, making new connections. The novel now rested on its own complex microcircuitry. Wherever fate, chance or happenstance had ruled, there was now logic, causality and science.
As she stood waiting for her bus on the corner of College and Spadina that fall day, a gust of wind tore the manuscript from her hands. In seconds the yellow typed sheets were tossed into a whirling dance across the busy intersection. Traffic became confused. A bus skittered on an angle. Passersby were surprisingly helpful, stopping and chasing the blowing papers. Several sheets were picked up from the gutter, where they lay on a heap of soaked yellow leaves. One sheet was found plastered against the windshield of a parked Pontiac half a block away; another adhered to the top of a lamppost; another was run over by a taxi and bore the black herringbone of tire prints. From all directions, ducking the wind, people came running up to Camilla, bringing her the scattered pages. “Oh this is crazy, this is crazy,” she cried into the screaming wind.
When she got to the publisher’s office, he took one look at her manuscript and said, “Good God Almighty, don’t tell me, Camilla, that you of all people have become a post-modernist and no longer believe in the logic of page numbers.”
Camilla explained about the blast of wind, and then the two of them began to put the pages in their proper order. Astonishingly, only one page was missing, but it was a page Camilla insisted was pivotal, a keystone page, the page that explained everything else. She would have to try to reconstruct it as best she could. “Hmmmmm,” the publisher said—this was late in the afternoon of the same day and they sat in the office sipping tea—“I truly believe, Camilla, that your novel stands up without the missing page. Sometimes it’s better to let things be strange and to represent nothing but themselves.”
The missing page—it happened to be page 46—had blown around the corner of College Street and through the open doorway of a fresh fruit and vegetable stand, where a young woman in a red coat was buying a kilo of zucchini. She was very beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and she was also talented, an actress, who for some months had been out of work. To give herself courage and cheer herself up she had decided to make a batch of zucchini-oatmeal muffins, and she was just counting out the change on the counter when the sheet of yellow paper blew through the doorway and landed at her feet.
She was the kind of young woman who reads everything, South American novels, Russian folk tales, Persian poetry, the advertisements on the subway, the personal column in the Globe and Mail, even the instructions and precautions on public fire extinguishers. Print is her way of entering and escaping the world. It was only natural for her to bend over and pick up the yellow sheet and begin to read.
She read: A woman in a red coat is standing in a grocery store buying a kilo of zucchini. She is beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and it happens that she is an actress who—
Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
OH, MRS. TURNER IS A SIGHT cutting the grass on a hot afternoon in June! She climbs into an ancient pair of shorts and ties on her halter top and wedges her feet into crepe-soled sandals and covers her red-gray frizz with Gord’s old golf cap—Gord is dead now, ten years ago, a seizure on a Saturday night while winding the mantel clock.
The grass flies up around Mrs. Turner’s knees. Why doesn’t she use a catcher, the Saschers next door wonder. Everyone knows that leaving the clippings like that is bad for the lawn. Each fallen blade of grass throws a minute shadow that impedes growth and repair. The Saschers themselves use their clippings to make compost, which they hope one day will be as ripe as the good manure that Sally Sascher’s father used to spread on his fields down near Emerson Township.
Mrs. Turner’s carelessness over the clippings plucks away at Sally, but her husband, Roy, is far more concerned about the Killex that Mrs. Turner dumps on her dandelions. It’s true that in Winnipeg the dandelion roots go right to the middle of the earth, but Roy is patient and persistent in pulling them out, knowing exactly how to grasp the coarse leaves in his hand and how much pressure to apply. Mostly they come up like corks with their roots intact. And he and Sally are experimenting with new ways to cook dandelion greens, believing as they do that the components of nature are arranged for a specific purpose—if only that purpose can be divined.
In the early summer Mrs. Turner is out every morning by ten with her sprinkling can of chemical killer, and Roy, watching from his front porch, imagines how this poison will enter the ecosystem and move by quick capillary surges into his fenced vegetable plot, newly seeded now with green beans and lettuce. His children, his two little girls aged two and four—that they should be touched by such poison makes him morose and angry. But he and Sally so far have said nothing to Mrs. Turner about her abuse of the planet because they’re hoping she’ll go into an old-folks home soon or maybe die, and then all will proceed as it should.
High school girls on their way home in the afternoon see Mrs. Turner cutting her grass and are mildly, momentarily repelled by the lapped, striated flesh on her upper thighs. At her age. Doesn’t she realize? Every last one of them is intimate with the vocabulary of skin care and knows that what has claimed Mrs. Turner’s thighs is the enemy called cellulite, but they can’t understand why she doesn’t take the trouble to hide it. It makes them queasy; it makes them fear for the future.
The things Mrs. Turner doesn’t know would fill the Saschers’ new compost pit, would sink a ship, would set off a tidal wave, would make her want to kill herself. Back and forth, back and forth she goes with the electric lawn mower, the grass flying out sideways like whiskers. Oh, the things she doesn’t know! She has never heard, for example, of the folk-rock recording star Neil Young, though the high school just around the corner from her house happens to be the very school Neil Young attended as a lad. His initials can actually be seen carved on one of the desks, and a few of the teachers say they remember him, a quiet fellow of neat appearance and always very polite in class. The desk with the initials N.Y. is kept in a corner of Mr. Pring’s homeroom, and it’s considered lucky—despite the fact that the renowned singer wasn’t a great scholar—to touch the incised letters just before an exam. Since it’s exam time now, the second week of June, the girls walking past Mrs. Turner’s front yard (and shuddering over her display of cellulite) are carrying on their fingertips the spiritual scent, the essence, the fragrance, the aura of Neil Young, but Mrs. Turner is as ignorant of that fact as the girls are that she, Mrs. Turner, possesses a first name—which is Geraldine.
Not that she’s ever been called Geraldine. Where she grew up in Boissevain, Manitoba, she was known always—the Lord knows why—as Girlie Fergus, the youngest of the three Fergus girls and the one who got herself in hot water. Her sister Em went to normal school and her sister Muriel went to Brandon to work at Eaton’s, but Girlie got caught one night—she was nineteen—in a Boissevain hotel room with a local farmer, married, named Gus MacGregor. It was her father who got wind of where she might be and came banging on the door, shouting and weeping. “Girlie, Girlie, what have you done to me?”
Girlie had been working in the Boissevain Dairy since she’d left school at sixteen and had a bit of money saved up, and so, a week after the humiliation in the local hotel, she wrote a farewell note to the family, crept out of the house at midnight and caught the bus to Winnipeg. From there she got another bus down to Minneapolis, then to Chicago and finally New York City. The journey was endless and wretched, and on the way across Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania she saw hundreds and hundreds of towns whose unpaved streets and narrow blinded houses made her fear some conspiratorial, punishing power had carried her back to Boissevain. Her father’s soppy-stern voice sang and sang in her ears as the wooden bus rattled its way eastward. It was summer, 1930.
New York was immense and wonderful, dirty, perilous and puzzling. She found herself longing for a sight of real earth, which she assumed must lie somewhere beneath the tough pavement. On the other hand, the brown flat-roofed factories with their little windows tilted skyward pumped her full of happiness, as did the dusty trees, when she finally discovered them, lining the long avenues. Every last person in the world seemed to be outside, walking around, filling the streets, and every corner breezed with noise and sunlight. She had to pinch herself to believe this was the same sunlight that filtered its way into the rooms of the house back in Boissevain, fading the curtains but nourishing her mother’s ferns. She sent postcards to Em and Muriel that said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got a job in the theater business.”
It was true. For eight and a half months she was an usherette in the Lamar Movie Palace in Brooklyn. She loved her perky maroon uniform, the way it fit on her shoulders, the way the strips of crinkly gold braid outlined her figure. With a little flashlight in hand she was able to send streams of light across the furry darkness of the theater and onto the plum-colored aisle carpet. The voices from the screen talked on and on. She felt after a time that their resonant declarations and tender replies belonged to her.
She met a man named Kiki her first month in New York and moved in with him. His skin was as black as ebony. As black as ebony—that was the phrase that hung like a ribbon on the end of his name, and it’s also the phrase she uses, infrequently, when she wants to call up his memory, though she’s more than a little doubtful about what ebony is. It may be a kind of stone, she thinks, something round and polished that comes out of a deep mine.
Kiki was a good-hearted man, though she didn’t like the beer he drank, and he stayed with her, willingly, for several months after she had to stop working because of the baby. It was the baby itself that frightened him off, the way it cried, probably. Leaving fifty dollars on the table, he slipped out one July afternoon when Girlie was shopping, and went back to Troy, New York, where he’d been raised.
Her first thought was to take the baby and get on a bus and go find him, but there wasn’t enough money, and the thought of the baby crying all the way on the hot bus made her feel tired. She was worried about the rent and about the little red sores in the baby’s ears—it was a boy, rather sweetly formed, with wonderful smooth feet and hands. On a murderously hot night, a night when the humidity was especially bad, she wrapped him in a clean piece of sheeting and carried him all the way to Brooklyn Heights, where the houses were large and solid and surrounded by grass. There was a house on a corner she particularly liked because it had a wide front porch (like those in Boissevain) with a curved railing—and parked on the porch, its brake on, was a beautiful wicker baby carriage. It was here that she placed her baby, giving one last look to his sleeping face, as round and calm as the moon. She walked home, taking her time, swinging her legs. If she had known the word foundling—which she didn’t—she would have bounded along on its rhythmic back, so airy and wide did the world seem that night.
Most of these secrets she keeps locked away inside her mottled thighs or in the curled pinkness of her genital flesh. She has no idea what happened to Kiki, whether he ever went off to Alaska as he wanted to or whether he fell down a flight of stone steps in the silverware factory in Troy, New York, and died of head injuries before his thirtieth birthday. Or what happened to her son—whether he was bitten that night in the baby carriage by a rabid neighborhood cat or whether he was discovered the next morning and adopted by the large, loving family who lived in the house. As a rule, Girlie tries not to think about the things she can’t even guess at. All she thinks is that she did the best she could under the circumstances.
In a year she saved enough money to take the train home to Boissevain. She took with her all her belongings, and also gifts for Em and Muriel, boxes of hose, bottles of apple-blossom cologne, phonograph records. For her mother she took an embroidered apron and for her father a pipe made of curious gnarled wood. “Girlie, my Girlie,” her father said, embracing her at the Boissevain station. Then he said, “Don’t ever leave us again,” in a way that frightened her and made her resolve to leave as quickly as possible.
But she didn’t go so far the second time around. She and Gordon Turner—he was, for all his life, a tongue-tied man, though he did manage a proper proposal—settled down in Winnipeg, first in St. Boniface, where the rents were cheap, and then Fort Rouge and finally the little house in River Heights just around the corner from the high school. It was her husband, Gord, who planted the grass that Mrs. Turner now shaves in the summertime. It was Gord who trimmed and shaped the caragana hedge and Gord who painted the little shutters with the cut-out hearts. He was a man who loved every inch of his house, the wide wooden steps, the oak door with its glass inset, the radiators and the baseboards and the snug sash windows. And he loved every inch of his wife, Girlie, too, saying to her once and only once that he knew about her past (meaning Gus MacGregor and the incident in the Boissevain Hotel), and that as far as he was concerned the slate had been wiped clean. Once he came home with a little package in his pocket; inside was a diamond ring, delicate and glittering. Once he took Girlie on a picnic all the way up to Steep Rock, and in the woods he took off her dress and underthings and kissed every part of her body.
After he died, Girlie began to travel. She was far from rich, as she liked to say, but with care she could manage one trip every spring.
She has never known such ease. She and Em and Muriel have been to Disneyland as well as Disneyworld. They’ve been to Europe, taking a sixteen-day trip through seven countries. The three of them have visited the south and seen the famous antebellum houses of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, after which they spent a week in the city of New Orleans. They went to Mexico one year and took pictures of Mayan ruins and queer shadowy gods cut squarely from stone. And three years ago they did what they swore they’d never have the nerve to do: they got on an airplane and went to Japan.
The package tour started in Tokyo, where Mrs. Turner ate, on her first night there, a chrysanthemum fried in hot oil. She saw a village where everyone earned a living by making dolls and another village where everyone made pottery. Members of the tour group, each holding up a green flag so their tour leader could keep track of them, climbed on a little train, zoomed off to Osaka, where they visited an electronics factory, and then went to a restaurant to eat uncooked fish. They visited more temples and shrines than Mrs. Turner could keep track of. Once they stayed the night in a Japanese hotel, where she and Em and Muriel bedded down on floor mats and little pillows stuffed with cracked wheat, and woke up, laughing, with backaches and shooting pains in their legs.
That was the same day they visited the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. The three-storied temple was made of wood and had a roof like a set of wings and was painted a soft old flaky gold. Everybody in the group took pictures—Em took a whole roll—and bought postcards; everybody, that is, except a single tour member, the one they all referred to as the Professor.
The Professor traveled without a camera, but jotted notes almost continuously into a little pocket scribbler. He was bald, had a trim body and wore Bermuda shorts, sandals and black nylon socks. Those who asked him learned that he really was a professor, a teacher of English poetry in a small college in Massachusetts. He was also a poet who, at the time of the Japanese trip, had published two small chapbooks based mainly on the breakdown of his marriage. The poems, sadly, had not caused much stir.
It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation. His domestic life had been too cluttered; there had been too many professional demands; the political situation in America had drained him of energy—these were the thoughts that buzzed in his skull as he scribbled and scribbled, like a man with a fever, in the back seat of a tour bus traveling through Japan.
Here in this crowded, confused country he discovered simplicity and order and something spiritual too, which he recognized as being authentic. He felt as though a flower, something like a lily, only smaller and tougher, had unfurled in his hand and was nudging along his fountain pen. He wrote and wrote, shaken by catharsis, but lulled into a new sense of his powers.
Not surprisingly, a solid little book of poems came out of his experience. It was published soon afterward by a well-thought-of Boston publisher who, as soon as possible, sent him around the United States to give poetry readings.
The Professor read his poems mostly in universities and colleges where his book was already listed on the Contemporary Poetry course. He read in faculty clubs, student centers, classrooms, gymnasiums and auditoriums, and usually, partway through a reading, someone or other would call from the back of the room, “Give us your Golden Pavilion poem.”
He would have preferred to read his Fuji meditation or the tone poem on the Inner Sea, but he was happy to oblige his audiences, though he felt “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” was a somewhat light piece, even what is sometimes known on the circuit as a “crowd pleaser.” People (admittedly they were mostly undergraduates) laughed out loud when they heard it; he read it well too, in a moist, avuncular amateur actor’s voice, reminding himself to pause frequently, to look upward and raise an ironic eyebrow.
The poem was not really about the Golden Pavilion at all, but about three midwestern lady tourists who, while viewing the temple and madly snapping photos, had talked incessantly and in loud, flat-bottomed voices about knitting patterns, indigestion, sore feet, breast lumps, the cost of plastic raincoats and a previous trip they’d made together to Mexico. They had wondered, these three—noisily, repeatedly—who back home in Manitoba should receive a postcard, what they’d give for an honest cup of tea, if there was an easy way to remove stains from an electric coffee maker, and where they would go the following year—Hawaii? They were the three furies, the three witches, who for vulgarity and tastelessness formed a shattering counterpoint to the Professor’s own state of transcendence. He had been affronted, angered, half-crazed.
One of the sisters, a little pug of a woman, particularly stirred his contempt, she of the pink pantsuit, the red toenails, the grapefruity buttocks, the overly bright souvenirs, the garish Mexican straw bag containing Dentyne chewing gum, aspirin, breath mints, sun goggles, envelopes of saccharine, and photos of her dead husband standing in front of a squat, ugly house in Winnipeg. This defilement she had spread before the ancient and exquisitely proportioned Golden Pavilion of Kyoto, proving—and here the Professor’s tone became grave—proving that sublime beauty can be brought to the very doorway of human eyes, ears and lips and remain unperceived.
When he comes to the end of “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” there is generally a thoughtful half second of silence, then laughter and applause. Students turn in their seats and exchange looks with their fellows. They have seen such unspeakable tourists themselves. There was old Auntie Marigold or Auntie Flossie. There was that tacky Mrs. Shannon with her rouge and her jewelry. They know—despite their youth they know—the irreconcilable distance between taste and banality. Or perhaps that’s too harsh; perhaps it’s only the difference between those who know about the world and those who don’t.
It’s true that Mrs. Turner remembers little about her travels. She’s never had much of a head for history or dates; she never did learn, for instance, the difference between a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine. She gets on a tour bus and goes and goes, and that’s all there is to it. She doesn’t know if she’s going north or south or east or west. What does it matter? She’s having a grand time. And she’s reassured, always, by the sameness of the world. She’s never heard the word commonality, but is nevertheless fused with its sense. In Japan she was made as happy to see carrots and lettuce growing in the fields as she was to see sunlight, years earlier, pouring into the streets of New York City. Everywhere she’s been she’s seen people eating and sleeping and working and making things with their hands and urging things to grow. There have been cats and dogs, fences and bicycles and telephone poles, and objects to buy and take care of; it is amazing, she thinks, that she can understand so much of the world and that it comes to her as easily as bars of music floating out of a radio.
Her sisters have long forgotten about her wild days. Now the three of them love to sit on tour buses and chatter away about old friends and family members, their stern father and their mother who never once took their part against him. Muriel carries on about her children (a son in California and a daughter in Toronto), and she brings along snaps of her grandchildren to pass round. Em has retired from school teaching and is a volunteer in the Boissevain Local History Museum, to which she has donated several family mementos: her father’s old carved pipe and her mother’s wedding veil and, in a separate case, for all the world to see, a white cotton garment labeled “Girlie Fergus’s Underdrawers, handmade, trimmed with lace, circa 1918.” If Mrs. Turner knew the word irony she would relish this. Even without knowing the word irony, she relishes it.
The professor from Massachusetts has won an important international award for his book of poems; translation rights have been sold to a number of foreign publishers; and recently his picture appeared in the New York Times, along with a lengthy quotation from “A Day at the Golden Pavilion.” How providential, some will think, that Mrs. Turner doesn’t read the New York Times or attend poetry readings, for it might injure her deeply to know how she appears in certain people’s eyes, but then there are so many things she doesn’t know.
In the summer, as she cuts the grass, to and fro, to and fro, she waves to everyone she sees. She waves to the high school girls, who timidly wave back. She hollers hello to Sally and Roy Sascher and asks them how their garden is coming on. She cannot imagine that anyone would wish her harm. All she’s done is live her life. The green grass flies up in the air, a buoyant cloud swirling about her head. Oh, what a sight is Mrs. Turner cutting her grass, and how, like an ornament, she shines.
Accidents (#ulink_9f0423ff-4d87-507c-93a8-15f1981470cd)
AT HOME MY WIFE IS MODEST. She dresses herself in the morning with amazing speed. There is a flashing of bath towel across the fast frame of her flesh, and then, voilà, she is standing there in her pressed suit, muttering to herself and rummaging in her bag for subway tokens. She never eats breakfast at home.
But the minute we hit the French coast—we stay in a vacation flat owned by my wife’s brother-in-law—there she is, on the balcony with her bare breasts rising up to the sun. And she has breakfasted, and so have I, on three cups of coffee and a buttered croissant.
Her breasts have remained younger than the rest of her body. When I see her rub them with oil and point them toward the fierce sunlight, I think of the Zubaran painting in the museum at Montpellier which shows a young and rather daft-looking St. Agatha cheerfully holding out a platter on which her two severed breasts are arranged, ordinary and bloodless as jam pastries.
One morning something odd happened to my wife. She was sitting on the balcony working on her new translation of Valéry’s early poems and she had a cup of coffee before her. I should explain that the dishes and cutlery and cooking things in the flat are supplied, and that this particular coffee cup was made of a sort of tinted glass in a pattern that can be found in any cheap chain store in France. Suddenly, or so she told me later, there was a cracking sound, and her cup lay in a thousand pieces in the saucer.
It had simply exploded. She wondered at first if she had been shot at with an air rifle. There was another apartment building opposite under construction, and at any time of the day workmen could be seen standing on the roof. But clearly it would have required an extraordinary marksman to pick off a cup of coffee like that from such a distance. And when she sifted through the slivers of glass, which she did with extreme care, she found no sign of a pellet.
The incident unnerved her. She put on her blouse when she went out on the balcony later in the day, but I noticed she kept a cup of coffee in the middle of the table as though daring a second explosion to occur.
I knew, though I’m not a scientist, that occasionally tempered glass fractures spontaneously. It’s thought to come about by a combination of heat, light and pressure. It happens sometimes to the windshields of automobiles, though it is extremely rare and not entirely understood.
I told all this to my wife. “I still don’t understand how it could have happened,” she said. I explained again, knowing my explanation was vague and lacking in precision. I was anxious to reassure her. I reached down and put my arms around her, and that was how my accident occurred. She turned to look at me, and as she did so, the back of her earring tore the skin of my face.
It was surprising how long the tear was, about four inches in all, and it was deeper than just a scratch, although the blood oozed out slowly, as though with reluctance. We both realized I would require stitches.
The doctor in the Montpellier clinic spoke almost perfect English, but with a peculiar tonelessness, rather like one of those old-fashioned adding machines clicking away. “You will require a general anesthetic,” he told me. “You will be required to remain in the hospital overnight.”
My wife was weeping. She kept saying, “If only I hadn’t turned my head just at that moment.”
The doctor explained that since the hospital was full, I would have to share a room. Always, he said, gesturing neatly with both hands, always at vacation time there were accidents. A special government committee, in fact, had been established to look into this phenomenon of accidents de la vacances, and someone had suggested that perhaps it might be the simplest solution if vacations were eliminated entirely.
I speak French fluently, having grown up in Montreal, but I have difficulty judging the tone of certain speakers. I don’t know when someone—the doctor, for example—is speaking ironically or sincerely; this has always seemed to me to be a serious handicap.
While still under the anesthetic I was put into a room occupied by a young man who had been in a motorcycle accident. He had two broken legs and a shattered vertebra and was almost completely covered in white plaster. Only his face was uncovered, a young face with closed eyes and smooth skin. I put my hand on my own face, which was numb beneath the dressing, and wondered for the first time if I would be left with a scar.
My wife came to sit by my bed for a while. She was no longer crying. She had, in fact, been shopping and had bought a new pale yellow cardigan with white flowers around the neck, very fresh and springlike. I was touched to see that she had removed her earrings. On her ear lobes there was nothing but a faint dimple, the tiny holes made, she once told me, by her own mother when she was fourteen years old.
There seemed little to talk about, but she had bought a Herald Tribune, something she normally refuses to do. She scorns the Herald Tribune, its thinness and its effete news coverage. And it’s her belief that when you are in another country you should make an attempt to speak and read the language of that country. The last time she allowed herself to buy a Herald Tribune was in 1968, the week of Trudeau’s first election.
The young man with the broken legs was moaning in his sleep. “I hope he doesn’t go on like this all night,” she said. “You won’t get any sleep at this rate.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Do you think we should still plan to go over to Aigues Mortes?” she asked, naming the place we try to visit every summer. Aigues Mortes is, as many people have discovered, an extraordinary medieval port with a twelfth-century wall in near-perfect condition. It has become a habit with my wife and me to go there each year and walk around this wall briskly, a distance of a mile. After that we take a tour through the Tower of Constance with an ancient and eccentric guide, and then we finish off the afternoon with a glass of white wine in the town square.
“It wouldn’t feel like a holiday if we didn’t do our usual run to Aigues Mortes,” my wife said in a rather loud cheerful voice, the sort of voice visitors often acquire when they come to cheer the sick.
The man with the broken legs began to moan loudly and, after a minute, to sob. My wife went over to him and asked if she could do anything for him. His eyes were still closed, and she leaned over and spoke into his ear.
“Am I dead?” he asked her in English. “Did you say I was dead?”
“Of course you aren’t dead,” she said, and smiled over her shoulder at me. “You’re just coming out of the anesthetic and you’re not dead at all.”
“You said I was dead,” he said to her in clear carrying British tones. “In French.”
Then she understood. “No, we were talking about Aigues Mortes. It’s the name of a little town near here.”
He seemed to need a moment to think about this.
“It means dead waters,” my wife told him. “Though it’s far from dead.”
This seemed to satisfy him, and he drifted off to sleep again.
“Well,” my wife said, “I’d better be off. You’ll be wanting to get to sleep yourself.”
“Yes,” I said. “That damned anesthetic, it’s really knocked me for a loop.”
“Shall I leave you the Herald Tribune?” she asked. “Or are you too tired to read tonight?”
“You take it,” I told her. “Unless there’s any Canadian news in it.”
That’s another thing we don’t like about the Herald Tribune. There’s hardly ever any news from home, or if there is, it’s condensed and buried on a back page.
She sat down again on the visitor’s chair and drew her cardigan close around her. In the last year she’s aged, and I’m grieved that I’m unable to help her fight against the puckering of her mouth and the withering away of the skin on her upper arms. She went through the paper page by page, scanning the headlines with a brisk professional eye. “Hmmm,” she said to herself in her scornful voice.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Well, here’s something.” She folded back the page and began to read. “Gilles Villeneuve is dead.”
“Who?”
“Gilles Villeneuve. You know, the racing driver.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s see. It says ‘Canadian racing driver, killed in practice run.’ Et cetera. Always claimed racing was dangerous and so on, said a year ago that he’d die on the track.” She stopped. “Do you want to hear all this?”
“No, that’s enough.” I felt the news about Gilles Villeneuve calmly, but I hope not callously. I’ve never really approved of violent sports, and it seems to me that people foolish enough to enter boxing rings or car races are asking for their own deaths.
“It’s sad to die so young,” my wife said, as if required to fill the silence I’d left.
The young man in the next bed began to sputter and cough, and once again my wife went over to see if she could do anything.
“You mustn’t cry,” she said to him. She reached in her bag for a clean tissue. “Here, let me wipe those tears away.”
“I don’t want to die.” He was blubbering quite noisily, and I think we both felt this might weaken the shell of plaster that enclosed him.
My wife—I forgot to mention that she is still a very beautiful woman—placed her hand on his forehead to comfort him.
“There, there, it’s just your legs. You’ve been sleeping, and you’re only a little bit confused. Where do you come from?”
He murmured something.
“What did you say?”
“Sheffield. In England.”
“Maybe I can telephone someone for you. Has the hospital sent a message to your people?”
It was an odd expression for her to use—your people. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use that particular phrase before.
“It’s all right,” he said. He had stopped crying, but my wife kept her hand on his forehead for another moment or two until he had dropped off to sleep.
I must have dropped off to sleep as well because when I opened my eyes she had gone. And after that it was morning and a nurse was opening the shutters and twittering something at me in French. The bed next to mine was empty, and she began to strip off the sheets.
“Where is he?” I asked her in my old, formal schoolboy French. “Where’s my comrade with the broken legs?”
“Il est mort,” she said in the same twittering singsong.
“But he can’t be dead. His legs were broken, that’s all.”
“The spinal cord was damaged. And there were other injuries. Inside.”
A minute later the doctor came in and had a look under my dressing. “You perhaps will have a little scar,” he said. “For a woman this is terrible, of course. But for a man …” He smiled and revealed pink gums. “For a man it is not so bad.”
“I understand that he’s died,” I said, nodding at the stripped bed.
“Ah yes. Multiple injuries, there was no hope, from the moment he was brought in here yesterday.”
“Just a young man,” I said.
He was pressing the bandage back into place. “Les accidents de vacances. Every year the same. What can one do? One should stay home, sit in the garden, be tranquil.”
When my wife comes for me in half an hour or so, I will have prepared what I’ll say to her. I know, of course, that the first thing she’ll ask me is: How is the young man from Sheffield? She will ask this before she inquires about whether I’ve had a good night or whether I’m suffering pain. I plan my words with precision.
This, luckily, is my métier, the precise handling of words. Mine is a profession that is close to being unique; at least I know of no one else who does the same sort of work on a full-time basis.
I am an abridger. When I tell people, at a party for instance, that I am an abridger, their faces cloud with confusion and I always have to explain. What I do is take the written work of other people and compress it. For example, I am often hired by book clubs to condense or abridge the books they publish. I also abridge material that is broadcast over the radio.
It’s a peculiar profession, I’m the first to admit, but it’s one I fell into by accident and that I seem suited for. Abridging requires a kind of inverse creativity. One must have a sharp eye for turning points and a seismic sensitivity for the fragile, indeed invisible, tissue that links one event with another. I’m well-paid for my work, but I sometimes think that the degree of delicacy is not appreciated. There are even times when it’s necessary to interfere with the truth of a particular piece and, for the sake of clarity and balance, exercise a small and inconspicuous act of creativity that is entirely my own. I’ve never thought of this as dishonesty and never felt that I had tampered with the integrity of a work.
My wife will be here soon. I’ll watch her approach from the window of my hospital room. She still walks with a kind of boyish clip-clop, as though determined to possess the pavement with each step. This morning she’ll be wearing her navy blazer; it’s chilly, but it will probably warm up later in the day. She’ll probably have her new yellow cardigan on underneath, but I won’t be able to tell from here if she’s wearing earrings. My guess is that she won’t be. In her hand she’ll have a small cloth bag, and I can imagine that this contains the picnic we’ll be taking with us to Aigues Mortes.
“And how is be?” she’s going to ask me in a few minutes from now. “How is our poor young friend with the broken legs?”
“He’s been moved to a different place.” I’ll say this with a small shrug, and then I’ll say, quickly, before she has a chance to respond, “Here, let me carry that bag. That’s too heavy for you.”
Of course, it’s not heavy at all. We both know that. How could a bag containing a little bread and cheese and perhaps two apples be heavy?
It doesn’t matter. She’ll hand me the bag without a word, and off we’ll be.
Sailors Lost at Sea (#ulink_eeb0ef67-0935-5abf-9cad-3360e8f8b1d1)
ONE AFTERNOON, OUT OF CURIOSITY or else boredom, Hélène wandered into an abandoned church. A moment later she found herself locked inside.
This was in France, in Brittany, and Hélène was a girl of fourteen who had been walking home from the village school to the house where she and her mother were temporarily living. Why she had stopped and touched the handle of the church door, she didn’t know. She had been told, several times, that the little church was kept tightly locked, but today the door had opened easily at her touch. This was puzzling, though not daunting, and she had entered bravely, holding her head high. She had recently, since arriving in France, come to understand the profit that could be had from paying attention to good posture, how she could, by a minor adjustment of her shoulders or a lifting of her chin, turn herself into someone who had certain entitlements.
She and her mother were from Canada and, despite her Manitoba accent—which she knew seemed quaint, even comic to French ears, funnier even than Québécois—she was regarded with envy and awe by the girls in the village school in St. Quay. That she was from a place called Winnipeg, the girls found exotic. “Weenie-pegg,” they said, with a giggling way of hanging on to the final g. Her mother said this was because St. Quay was an out-of-the-way sort of place.
This was true. It was a fact that only two girls in her level had ever been to Paris, which was just five hours away by train, and a surprising number of them had never been even as far as Rennes. Also impressive to these girls was the fact that Hélène’s mother was a poet, a real poet, who had published three books. Trois livres? Vraiment? Their eyes had opened wide at this, and they weren’t giggling any longer. (“That’s one thing about the French,” Hélène’s mother told her. “They respect writers.”) The girls at l’école Jeanne d’Arc were forever asking Hélène how her mother was getting on with her poetry. “Ta mère, elle travaille bien?” Their own mothers were the wives of fishermen or shopkeepers. Hélène had been presented to some of these mothers in the village streets: thick-ankled, round-faced women wearing old woolen coats and carrying groceries in bags made of plastic net.
Hélène and her mother had never intended to spend the whole of the year in St. Quay. They had planned to travel, to drift like migrants along the edges of the country. (La France has the shape of a hexagon, Hélène has been taught in the village school; this fact is repeated often, as though it carries mystical significance.) Instead of traveling, they had attached themselves like barnacles—this was how Hélène’s mother put it—to this quiet spot on the channel coast, and Hélène had enrolled in the local school. There was a very good reason for this, her mother surprised her by saying. “The only way to get the feel of the country is to become a part of it.” Of course, as Hélène now knew, and as her mother would soon discover, it was not possible at all for them to become part of the community. Everywhere they went, to the boulangerie, to the post office, everywhere, there was a rustle and a whisper that went before them, announcing, just behind the weak smiles of welcome, “Ah, les Canadiennes!” It made Hélène feel weak; she always was having to compose herself, to imagine how she must look from the outside.
In St. Quay there were a number of old churches, though the largest, a church dating from the thirteenth century, had been torn down ten years earlier. It had been replaced with a brown brick building that was square and ugly like a factory, and distressingly empty, distressing, that is, to the local priest, a Father Dominic. He was an old man with creased yellow skin and a stiff manner, but he was the only friend Hélène’s mother had so far found in St. Quay.
“Alas,” said Father Dominic, rubbing his long chin, “Brittany was once the most religious corner of France, and now it has become, overnight”—he made a zigzag in the air to signify lightning—“secularized.” He said this in his loud, lonely voice, speaking as though there could be no reversal.
“The church,” he said, “has lost out to television and motorbikes and modernism in general, and it has all happened in a flash.”
Well, this was not quite the truth, Hélène’s mother explained later. The truth was that during the French Revolution Brittany had been filled with ranting anticlerical mobs who tore the statues out of church niches and removed stone chunks (heads chiefly or the fingers of upraised hands) from the roadside cavalries that dotted the Côte du Nord. Quel dommage, Hélène’s mother said, in sly imitation of Father Dominic, her only friend.
The particular church where Hélène found herself imprisoned on a Thursday afternoon was one of these small, desecrated churches, statueless and plain, its heavy doors shorn clean of carving and its windows replaced by dull opalescent glass. The church was officially closed. She knew that; it had been closed for many years.
Father Dominic had explained to them that it was no longer served by a priest. Nowadays there was but a single Mass celebrated here each year—it was he who had the privilege of serving—and that was on a certain spring day set aside by tradition to honor sailors who had been lost at sea. On that particular Sunday in early April, the doors would be thrown open and people would enter carrying armloads of spring flowers; after that, a procession would wind over the rocks and down the beach itself.
When Hélène’s mother heard Father Dominic talking about this festival, her eyes had softened with feeling, and she had nodded as though she too had had occasion to pay tribute to lost seamen—which, of course, coming from Winnipeg, she had not.
“That will be something to see,” she said to Hélène, and wrote the name of the festival in her notebook. At that moment, seeing her mother writing down the details of the fete and imagining the blond sunniness of this festive day, Hélène truly understood that they would be staying here the entire year, that their drifting, which she had loved, all ten days of it, was not to be resumed.
The old church stood just outside the village on the rue des Chiens, the same street where they had found a house to rent. “We’ve installed ourselves in a cheap stone house on Dog Street.” Hélène’s mother had written this in a cheerful letter to a friend back home, as though having an inelegant address gave them an unconquerable ascendancy over the difficulties the little stone house presented. There it stood, surrounded by drenched shrubbery, a dragging lace of rain falling from the corners of the steep roof. The landlord, a scowling, silent widower with three teeth in his head, lived in the basement, and his presence cast a spell of restraint over them so that they tiptoed about the house, his house, in bedroom slippers and spoke to each other in hushed formal voices, more like a pair of elderly sisters than a mother and daughter. The bathroom stank despite the minty blue deodorizer Hélène had bought and attached to the wall, and the kitchen was damp and without cupboards. The two armchairs in the living room were covered with ancient, oily tapestry cloth, badly frayed. In the morning her mother made coffee, carried it to one of these repellent chairs and sat down with her notebooks. There she spent her time, scarcely getting up and looking out at the sea all day. Hélène knew without asking that the poems were not coming easily.
By good fortune the Canadian government had seen fit to award her mother a sum of money so that she could come to France for a year in order to write poetry. She had long desired—and this was explained at great length in the application—to touch the soil where her ancestral roots lay. (But these roots, she now admitted to Hélène in one of their long whispered talks, were more deeply buried than she had thought. Her forebears had gone to Canada a long time ago, first to Quebec, then making their way to Manitoba.) And she was not entirely certain which region of France they had come from, though it was generally believed to have been either Brittany or Normandy. Now she was here, breathing French air, eating French bread, drinking bitter black coffee and taking weekend walks on the wild wetted path that went along the coast, but what really was the use of this? What had she expected? For the so-called roots to rise up and embrace her?
It seemed to Hélène that her mother had childish notions about the magic of places. A field of oats was a field of oats. The blackberries they’d found along the coast path had the same beaded precision as those at home. Her mother had a way of making too much of things, always seeing secondary meanings, things that weren’t really there, and her eyes watered embarrassingly when she spoke of these deeper meanings. It was infantile, the way she went on and on about the fond of human experience. What was the fond but carrying home the groceries, trying to keep warm in the drafty stone house, walking down the dark road in the morning to school, where the other girls waited for her, admiring her warm wool sweaters and asking her how her mother, the poet, was doing.
Recently Hélène’s mother, as if to make up for the lack of poems, had latched with fevered intensity on to particles of local lore, prising them out of Michelin guides and storing them up in notebooks—not the same notebooks the poems went into, but pale green spiral-bound books with squared-off pages, notebooks (meant for young school children) that she bought in the village at the Maison de la Presse. In one of these notebooks, she had recorded:
There are two legends surrounding the founding of St. Quay, stories that contain similar elements but that occupy different sides of a coin. In the “good” story, a fourth-century Irish saint called St. Quay arrives in a stone boat to bring Christianity to the wild Breton coast. A bird flies ahead to tell the villagers of his imminent arrival, and the women (why just women?) joyfully run to the shore to greet him, bringing with them armloads of flowers and calling “St. Quay, St. Quay,” guiding the boat to safety with their cries.
In the second version, the “bad” version, the same bird arrives to say that a stranger is approaching in a stone boat. The women (women again!) of the village are suspicious and hostile, and they run to the shore with rough stalks of gorse in their hands which they brandish ferociously, all the time crying, “Quay, quay,” which means in old Gaelic, “Away, away.”
Her mother asked Hélène one day which version she preferred, but before Hélène could decide, she herself said, “I think the second version must be true.” Then she qualified. “Not true, of course, not in a real sense, but containing the elements, the fond of truth.”
“Why?” Hélène asked. She saw the shine on her mother’s face and felt an obligation to keep it there. “Why not the first version?”
“It’s a matter of perspective,” her mother said. “It’s just where I am now. In my life, I mean. I can believe certain things but not others.”
Because of the way she said this, and the way she squeezed her eyes shut, Hélène knew her mother was thinking about Roger, the man in Winnipeg she was in love with. She had been in love before, several times. Love, or something like it, was always happening to her.
But now something had happened to Hélène: she was locked inside a church, chosen somehow, the way characters in stories are chosen. The thought gave her a wavelet of happiness. And a flash of guilty heat. She should not have entered the door; it should not have been unlocked, and she should not be standing here—but she was. And what could she do about it—nothing. The feeling of powerlessness made her calm and almost sleepy. She looked about in the darkness for a place to sit down. There was nothing—no pews, no chairs, only the stone floor.
She tried the door again. The handle was heavy and made of some dull metal that filled her hand. She set her school bag on the floor and tried turning the handle and pushing on the door at the same time, leaning her shoulder into the wood. Then she pulled the door toward her, rattled it sharply and pushed it out again.
“Open,” she said out loud, and heard a partial echo float to the roof. It contained, surprisingly, the half-bright tone of triumph.
“I’m fourteen years old and locked in a French church.” These words slid out like a text she had been asked to read aloud. Calm sounds surrounded by their own well of calm; this was a fact. It was no more and no less than what had happened.
Perhaps there was another door. She began to look around. The windows, high up along the length of the church, let in soft arches of webbed light, but the light was fading fast. It was almost five o’clock and would be dark, she knew, in half an hour. Her mother would be waiting at home, the kitchen light on already, something started for supper.
High overhead was a dense, gray collision of dark beams and stone arches, and the arches were joined in such a way that curving shadows were formed, each of them like the quarter slice out of a circle. Hélène had made such curves with her pencil and compass under the direction of Sister Ste. Adolphe at the village school, and had been rewarded with a dainty-toothed smile and a low murmur, “Très, très bon.” Sister Ste. Adolphe gave her extra pencils, showed her every favor, favors that, instead of exciting envy among the girls, stirred their approval. Hélène was a foreigner and deserved privileges. It was just.
It occurred to Hélène that there must have been a reason for the church to be open. Perhaps there was a workman about, or perhaps Father Dominic himself had come to see that the church was safe and undisturbed during its long sleep between festivals.
“Hello,” she called out. “Bonjour. Is there anyone here?” She stood still, pulling her coat more closely around her and waiting for an answer.
While she waited, she imagined two versions of her death. She would be discovered in the spring when the doors were flung open for the festival. The crowds, rushing in with armloads of flowers, would discover what was left of her, a small skeleton, odorless, as neat on the floor as a heap of stacked kindling, and the school bag nearby with its books and pencils and notebooks would provide the necessary identification.
Or some miracle of transcendence might occur. This was a church, after all, and close by was the sea. She might be lifted aloft and found with long strands of seaweed in her hair; her skin would be bleached and preserved so that it gleamed with the lustre of certain kinds of shells, and her lips, caked with salt, would be parted to suggest a simple attitude of prayerfulness. (She and her mother, in their ten days of wandering, had visited the grave of an imbecile, a poor witless man who had lived as a hermit in the fourteenth century. It was said, a short time after his death and burial, that a villager had noticed a golden lily growing from the hermit’s grave, and when the body was exhumed it was discovered that the bulb of the plant was located in his throat, a testimonial to his true worth and a rebuke to those who had ignored him in his life.)
It occurred to Hélène that her mother would blame herself and not France. Lately, she was always saying, “One thing about France, the coffee has real flavor.” Or, “At least the French aren’t sentimental about animals,” or, “You can say one thing for France: things are expensive, but quality is high.” It seemed her mother was compelled to justify this place where she had deliberately settled down to being lonely and uncomfortable and unhappy.
It had all been a mistake, and now her mother, though she didn’t say it, longed for home and for Roger. “A man friend” is what she called Roger, saying this phrase with special emphasis as though it was an old joke with a low wattage of energy left in it. Roger loved her and wanted to marry her. They had known each other for two years. His first wife had left him. “He’s very bitter,” Hélène’s mother said, “and for someone like Roger, this can be a terrible blow, a great humiliation.”
He was a chef at the Convention Center in downtown Winnipeg. When he was a young man, he had been taken into the kitchens of the Ritz Carleton in Montreal, where he had learned sauces and pastries and salads. He had learned to make sculptures out of butter or lard or ice or sugar, and even—for it was an arduous apprenticeship, he tells Hélène—how to fold linen table napkins in twenty classic folds. Would she like a demonstration? She had said yes, despising herself, and Roger had instantly obliged, but he could remember only thirteen of the twenty ways. Now, at the Convention Center, he seldom does any cooking himself, but supervises the kitchen from a little office where he spends his time answering the phone and keeping track of grocery orders.
On Saturday nights he used to come to the apartment in St. Vital where Hélène and her mother lived, and there in the tiny kitchen he made them veal in cream or croquettes or a dish of steamed fish, pickerel with white mushrooms and pieces of green onion.
“Tell me what you like best,” he’d say to Hélène, “and next week I’ll try it out on you.”
Of course, he often stayed the night. He was astonishingly neat, never leaving so much as a toothbrush in the bathroom. On Sunday mornings he made them poached eggs on toast—ducks in their nests he called them. He had a trick with the eggs, lifting them from the simmering water with a spatula, then flipping them onto a clean, cotton tea towel, patting them dry, and then sliding them onto buttered triangles of toast—all this without breaking the yolks. He had learned to do this at the Ritz Carleton when he was a young man. “It would not have been acceptable,” he said, “to serve an egg that was wet.” He does it all very quickly and lightly, moving like a character in a speeded-up movie. The first time he did it for Hélène—she was only twelve at the time—she had clapped her hands, and now he’s made it into a ceremony, one of several that have unsettled the household.
“Come here, little duckie,” he says, flashing his spatula. “Turn yourself over like a good little duck for Hélène.” Hélène, when he said this, found it hard to look at her mother, who laughed loudly at this showmanship, her mouth wide and crooked.
Later, after Roger had left, there were a few minutes of tender questioning between them. Hélène’s mother, settling down on the plumped cushions, talked slowly, evenly, taking, it would seem, full measure of the delicate temperamental balance of girls in their early adolescence. About the disruption to the household, she was apologetic, saying, “This is only temporary.” And, saying with her eyes, “This is not how I planned things.” (“Shhh,” she said to Roger when he became too merry, when he was about to tell another joke or another story about his apprenticeship.) “How do you like Roger?” her mother asked her. Then, instead of waiting for an answer, her mother began to talk about Roger’s ex-wife, how vicious she had been, how she left him for another man.
“I hope I’m not barging in,” Roger said, if he dropped by in the middle of the week. He was always bringing presents, not just food, but jewelry, once an alarm clock, once a coat for her mother and a silk blouse for herself. (“I don’t know what girls like,” he’d said abjectly on this occasion. “I can take it back.”)
This is what made Hélène numb. She couldn’t say a word in reply, and her silence ignited a savage shame. What was the matter? The matter was that they were waiting for her. They were waiting for her to make up her mind, just as the girls in the schoolyard with their cartables and their regulation blouses wait for her to arrive in the dark mornings and bring some improbable substance into the cement schoolyard. “Tell us about Weenie-pegg. Tell us about the snow.”
It was growing very cold inside the church, but then even the churches they had visited in September had been cold. Hélène and her mother had carried cardigans. “You can never tell about the weather here,” her mother had said, puzzled. This was a point scored against France, a plus for Manitoba, where you at least knew what to expect.
And soon it would be dark. Frail moons of light pressed like mouths on the floor, though the walls themselves were darkly invisible. Hélène reached out and rubbed her hand along the rough surface. This was—she began to figure—this was a fourteenth-century church; twenty centuries take away fourteen—that left six; that meant this church was six hundred years old, walls that were planted by the side of a road called rue des Chiens in a village called St. Quay, which was hidden away in the hexagon that was France. And her body would not be found until spring.
O Mother of God, she said to herself, and rubbed at her hair. O Mother of Jesus.
She tried the door again, putting her ear to the wood to see if she could sound out the inner hardware. There was only a thickish sound of metal butting against wood and the severed resistance of moving parts. She was going to perish. Perish. At fourteen. The thought struck her that her mother would never get over this. She would go back home and tell Roger she couldn’t marry him. She would stop writing poems about landscapes that were “jawbone simple and picked clean by wind” and about the “glacé moon pinned like a brooch in the west.” She would sink into the fond, and her mouth would sag open—this was not how she had planned things. And whose fault was it?
By now the church was entirely dark, but at the far end the altar gleamed dully. It seemed a wonder to Hélène that she could summon interest in this faint light. What was it? There was no gold or ornamentation, only a wooden railing that had been polished or worn by use, and the last pale light lay trapped there on the smooth surface like a pool of summer water.
O Mother of God, she breathed, thinking of Sister Ste. Adolphe, her tiny teeth.
She ran her hand along its edge. There was something at one end. Altar candles. The light didn’t reach this far, but her hand felt them in the darkness, a branched candle holder, rising toward the center. She counted the tall candles with her fingers. Up they went like little stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six and then down again on the other side.
There might be matches, she thought, and fumbled at the base of the candle holder. Then she remembered she had some in her school bag. Her mother had asked her to stop at the tobagie for cigarettes and matches. (At home in St. Vital they had refused to sell cigarettes to minors, but here in France no one blinked an eye; a point for France.)
She felt her way back to where she had left the bag, rummaged for the matches, and then moved back along the wall to the candles. She managed to light them all, using only three matches, counting under her breath. The stillness of the flames seemed of her own creation, and a feeling of virtue struck her, a ridiculous steamroller. She thought how she would never again in her life be able to take virtue seriously.
Astonishing how much light twelve candles gave off. The stone church shrank in the light so that it seemed not a church at all, but a cheerful meeting room where any minute people might burst through the door and call out her name.
And, of course, that was what would happen, she realized. The lit-up church would attract someone’s notice. It was a black night, and rain was falling hard on the roof, but nevertheless someone—and soon—would pass by and see the light from the church. An immediate investigation would be in order. Father Dominic would be summoned at once.
This might take several minutes; he would have to find his overshoes, his umbrella, not to mention the key to the church. Then there would be the mixed confusion of embracing and scolding. How could you? Why on earth? Thank God in all his mercy.
Until then, there was a width of time she would enter and inhabit. There was nothing else she could do; it was laughable. All she had to do was stand here warming her hands in the heat of the twelve candles—how beautiful they were really!—and wait for rescue to come.
Purple Blooms (#ulink_b3067f88-1624-58a2-a72a-ba217dcaedf1)
THERE IS A BOOK I LIKE by the Mexican poet Mario Valeso, who, by coincidence, lives here in this city and who, in the evening, sometimes strolls down this very street. The book is entitled Purple Blooms and it is said to resolve certain perplexing memories of the poet’s childhood. It is a work that is full of tact, yet it is tentative, off-balance, dark and truncated—and it is just this lack of finish that so moved me the first time I read it.
I gave a copy of the book to my friend Shana, who’s been “going through a bad time,” as she puts it. People who meet her are generally struck by her beauty. She’s young, well-off and in excellent health, yet she claims that the disconnectedness of life torments her. Everything makes her sad. Lilacs make her sad. Chopin makes her sad. The thought of rain falling in a turbulent and empty ocean makes her sad. But nothing makes her sadder than the collection of toby jugs that her mother, the film actress, left her in her will.
More than a hundred of these sturdy little creatures fill the shelves of her sunny apartment. I myself find it unnerving the way they glisten and grin and puff out their pottery cheeks as though oblivious to the silly pouring lip that deforms the tops of their heads. Knick-knacks, Shana calls them, willfully denying their value, but she refuses nevertheless to part with them, though I’ve given her the name of an auctioneer who would guarantee a fair price.
It could be said that she encourages her sadness. It could be demonstrated. On her glass-topped coffee table she keeps a large vase of lilacs and an alabaster bust of Chopin and, since last Saturday, my gift of Mario Valeso’s book Purple Blooms. The denseness, the compaction of the closed text and the assertive angle with which it rests on the table suggest to me that she has not yet opened its pages.
I have also given a copy to Edward. He is attractive, my Edward. I’ve spent a considerable number of hours staring at him, hoping his handsome features would grow less perfect, more of a match for my own. What does he see in me? (This is the question I ask myself—though I like to think I put it rhetorically.)
“Purple Blooms,” Edward murmured as he slipped the gift wrap off the book, and then he said it again—“Purple Blooms”—in that warm, sliding, beet-veined voice of his. His father, as everyone knows, sang tenor with the Mellotones in the late forties, and some say that Edward has inherited something of the color of his voice. Edward, of course, vehemently denies any such inheritance. When he hears old records of “Down by the Riverside” or “I’m Blue Turning Gray Over You,” he cannot imagine how he came to be the son of such a parent. The line of descent lacks distinction and reason, and Edward is a distinguished and reasoning man. He is also a man attentive to the least sexual breeze, and the minute he pronounced the words, “Purple Blooms,” I began worrying that he would find the poems not sensual enough for his liking.
“These poems are about the poet’s past,” I explained to Edward, rather disliking myself for the academic tone I was taking. “Valeso is attempting to make sense of certain curious family scenes that have lingered in his memory.”
Edward, wary of dark sublimities, examined the dust jacket. “It won’t bite you,” I said, joking. He placed the book in his briefcase and promised he would “look at it” on the weekend or perhaps on his summer holidays.
“If you’re not going to read it,” I said, testing him, “I’ll give it to someone else.”
For a minute we were pitched straight into one of those little arched silences that lean inward on their own symmetry as though no exterior force existed. Edward took my hand sweetly, then rubbed his thumb across the inside of my wrist, but I noticed he did not promise me anything, and that made me uneasy.
As always, when I’m uneasy, I go out and buy my mother a present. Sometimes I bring her roasted cashews or fresh fruit, but today I take her a copy of Purple Blooms. “A book?” she shouts. She has not read a book since she was a young girl.
Fat and full of fury, she stands most days by an upstairs window and spies on the world. What possible need does she have for books, she asks me. Life is all around her.
To be more truthful, life is all behind her. At eighteen she was crowned North America’s Turkey Queen at Ramona, California, and wore a dress that was made up entirely of turkey feathers. She has the dress still, though I’ve never laid eyes on it since she stores it in a fur vault in San Diego, once a year mailing off a twelve-dollar check for storage fees and saying, as she drops the envelope in the mailbox, “Well, so much for misspent youth.”
How I plead with her! Go to a movie, I say. Invite the neighbors in. Take a course in French conversation or gourmet cooking or music appreciation. A year ago she stopped the newspapers. When the picture tube went on the TV, she decided it wasn’t worth fixing. It seems nothing that’s happening in the world has any connection with the eighteen-year-old girl carried so splendidly through the streets of Ramona with a crown of dusky turkey feathers in her hair.
“What do I want with a book about flowers,” my mother growls. Her tone is rough, though she loves me dearly. I explain that the book is not about flowers (and at the same time imagine myself slyly trading on her innocent error at some future gathering of friends). “This poet,” I tell her, “is attempting to recall certain early scenes that bloomed mysteriously and darkly like flowers, and that he now wants to come to terms with.”
This is rather an earful for my mother. She pulls at her apron, looks frowningly at the ceiling, then out the window; this last I recognize as a signal that she wants me to leave, and I do.
Later that afternoon I find myself in the park. Almost everyone knows about the very fine little park at 16th and Ossington—a gem of a park with a wide gravel path and a sprightly round-headed magnolia and smooth painted benches by the side of a bowling green. A cool, quiet place to sit and read, but today it is filled with people.
I stop and ask some schoolchildren what the excitement is about, and a little boy in a striped sweater tells me that Mario Valeso is autographing copies of Purple Blooms over in the shady spot under the magnolia tree. There is a great deal of pushing and shoving and general rowdyism. Everyone, it seems, has brought along a copy of Purple Blooms for Mr. Valeso to sign. Shana is there with Edward, her arm slipped through his, and they both tell me they have “been greatly helped and strengthened” by reading the poems. “It’s all a matter of making connections,” Shana says in her breathless way, and Edward says, “It’s discovering that we all share the same ancestors.”
Then, to my surprise, I catch sight of my mother ahead of me in the crowd, and it pleases me to see that she has put on her best cardigan and her white shoes and that she is holding forth loudly to someone or other, saying, “Letting go of the past means embracing the present.” Someone else is saying, “The seeds of childhood grow on mysterious parental soil,” and an old man in a baseball cap is muttering, “We are the sum of our collective memories.”
The crowd grows even larger, and again and again I find myself pushed to the end of the line. I realize it will be hours before my turn comes, and so I pull a book out of my knapsack to help while away the time. It is a new book of poetry, untitled and anonymous, which appears to be a celebration of the randomness and disorder of the world. We are solitary specks of foam, the poet says, who are tossed on a meaningless sea. Every wave is separate, and one minute in time bears no relationship to the moment that precedes or follows it.
I read on and on, and soon forget about the people crowding around me and reading over my shoulder. The bowling green fades into dimness, as do the benches and the magnolia tree and the gravel path, until all that’s left is a page of print, a line of type, a word, a dot of ink, a shadow on the retina that is no bigger, I believe, than the smallest violet in the woods.
Flitting Behavior (#ulink_ff978fd3-7da2-552d-b08b-de8d1a6c4107)
SOME OF MEERSHANK’S WITTIEST WRITING was done during his wife’s final illness.
“Mortality,” he whispered each morning to give himself comfort, “puts acid in the wine.” Other times he said, as he peered into the bathroom mirror, “Mortality puts strychnine in the candy floss. It puts bite in the byte.” Then he groaned aloud—but only once—and got straight back to work.
His novel of this period, Malaprop in Disneyfield, was said to have been cranked out of the word processor between invalid trays and bedpans. In truth, he wept as he set down his outrageous puns and contretemps. The pages mounted, two hundred, three hundred. The bulk taunted him, and meanwhile his wife, Louise, lingered, her skin growing as transparent as human skin can be without disintegrating. A curious odor, bitter and yellow, stole over the sickroom. Meershank had heard of the odor that preceded death; now he breathed it daily.
It was for this odor, more than anything else, that he pitied her, she who’d busied herself all her life warding off evil smells with scented candles and aerosol room fresheners. Since a young woman she’d had the habit of sweetening her bureau drawers, and his too, with sprigs of dried lavender, and carrying always in her handbag and traveling case tiny stitched sachets of herbs. He had sometimes wondered where she found these anachronistic sachets; who in the modern industrial world produced such frivolities?—the Bulgarians maybe, or the Peruvians, frantic for hard currency.
Toward the end of Louise’s illness he had a surprise visit from his editor, a vigorous, leggy woman of forty who drove up from Toronto to see how the new manuscript was coming along. She came stepping from her car one Monday afternoon in a white linen jumpsuit. Bending slightly, she kissed Meershank on both cheeks and cried out, “But this is extraordinary! That you can even think of work at a time like this.”
Meershank pronounced for her his bite-in-the-byte aperçu, very nearly choking with shame.
He was fond of his editor—her name was Maybelle Spritz—but declined to invite her into his wife’s bedroom, though the two women knew and liked each other. “She’s not strong enough for visitors,” he said, knowing it was the smell of the room he guarded her from, his poor Louise’s last corner of pride. “Maybe later.”
He and Maybelle sat drinking coffee on the veranda most of the afternoon. The weather all week had been splendid. Birds sang in the branches of Meershank’s trees, and sunlight flooded the long triangle of Meershank’s side lawn. Maybelle, reading slowly as always, turned over the manuscript pages. Her nails were long and vivid. She held a pencil straight up in her hand, and at least once every three minutes or so she let loose a bright snort of laughter, which Meershank welcomed like a man famished. He watched her braided loop of auburn hair and observed how the light burned on the tips of her heavy silver earrings. There was a bony hollow at the base of her neck that deepened, suddenly, each time another snort was gathering. Later, at five o’clock, checking his watch, he offered gin and tonic. For Louise upstairs he carried cream of celery soup, weak tea and an injection for her hip, which the visiting nurse had taught him to administer.
“Are you feeling lonely?” his wife asked him, turning on one side and readying herself for the needle. She imagined, rightly, that he missed her chatter, that her long days spent in drugged sleep were a deprivation. Every day she asked the same question, plunging him directly into blocky silence. Yes, he was lonely. No, he was not lonely. Which would please her more? He kept his hand on her discolored hip and mumbled the news—testing it—that Maybelle Spritz was thinking of coming for a visit.
She opened her eyes and managed a smile as he rearranged the pillows. He had a system: one pillow under each knee, one at the small of her back and two to support her shoulders. The air in the room was suffocating. He asked again, as he did every day, if he might open a window. No, she said, as she always did; it was too cold. She seemed convinced that spring had not arrived in its usual way, she who’d always been so reasonable.
Downstairs Maybelle stood in the kitchen drinking a second gin and tonic and heating up a noodle pudding she had brought along. She had occasionally been a dinner guest in Meershank’s house, but had never before penetrated the kitchen. She set a little table on the veranda. There was a breeze, enough to keep the mosquitoes away for a bit. Knives and forks she discovered easily in the first drawer she opened. The thick white dinner plates she found stacked on a shelf over the sink. There were paper napkins of a most ordinary sort in a cupboard. As she moved about she marveled at the domesticity of the famous, how simple things appeared when regarded close up, like picking up an immense orange and finding it all thick hide on a tiny fruit. She wondered if Meershank would ask her to spend the night.
————
They had only once before shared a bed, and that had been during the awful week after Louise’s illness has been diagnosed.
The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns.
The word terminal had floated out of the young doctor’s wide pink face; it was twice repeated, until Meershank collected himself and responded with a polite nod. Then he put back his head, counted the ceiling tiles—twelve times fourteen—and decided on the spot that his wife must not be told.
The specialist laced clean hands across flannel knees and pressed for honest disclosure; there were new ways of telling people that they were about to die; he himself had attended a recent symposium in Boston and would take personal responsibility …
No. Meershank held up his hand. This was nonsense. Why did people insist that honesty was the only way of coping with truth? He knew his wife. After thirty-five years of marriage he knew his wife. She must be brought home from the hospital and encouraged to believe that she would recover. Rest, medication, country air—they would work their healing magic. Louise could always, almost always, be persuaded to follow a reasonable course.
The following day, having signed the release papers and made the arrangements to have his wife moved, Meershank, until then a faithful husband, took his editor, Maybelle Spritz, to a downtown hotel and made plodding love to her, afterward begging pardon for his age, his grief and his fury at the fresh-faced specialist who, concluding their interview, had produced one of Meershank’s books, Walloping Westward, and begged the favor of an inscription. Meershank coldly took out a pen and signed his name. He reminded himself that the Persians had routinely put to death the bearer of bad news.
Home again, with Louise installed in the big front bedroom, he resumed work. His word processor hummed like a hornet from nine to five, and the pages flew incriminatingly out of the printer. During the day his brain burned like a lightbulb screwed crookedly into a socket. At night he slept deeply. He wondered if he were acquiring a reputation for stoicism, that contemptible trait! Friends stopped by with gifts of food or flowers. The flowers he carried up to Louise’s bedroom, where they soon drooped and died, and the food he threw in the garbage. Coffee cakes, almond braids, banana loaves—his appetite had vanished.
“Eat,” Maybelle commanded, loading his plate.
He loved noodle pudding, and wondered how Maybelle knew. “It’s in your second novel,” she reminded him. “Snow Soup and Won Ton Drift. Remember? Wentzel goes into the café at Cannes and demands that—”
“I remember, I remember.” Meershank held up a hand. (He was always holding up a hand nowadays, resisting information.) He had a second helping, ingesting starch and sweetness. This was hardly fitting behavior for a grieving husband. He felt Maybelle’s eyes on him. “I shoulda brought more,” she said, sounding for a minute like a girl from Cookston Corners, which she was. “I said to myself, he’ll be starving himself.”
For dessert she rummaged in the refrigerator and found two peaches. Louise would have peeled them and arranged the slices in a cut glass bowl. Meershank and Maybelle sat eating them out of their hands. He thought to himself: this is like the last day of the world.
“Ripe,” Maybelle pronounced. There was a droplet of juice on her chin, which she brushed away with the back of her hand. Meershank observed that her eyes looked tired, but perhaps it was only the eye shadow she wore. What was the purpose of eye shadow, he wondered. He had never known and couldn’t begin to imagine.
A character in his first book, Swallowing Hole, had asked this question aloud to another character, who happened to be his wife. What was her name? Phyllis? Yes, Phyllis of the phyllo pastry and philandering nights. “Why do you smudge your gorgeous green eyes with gook?” he, the cockolded husband, had asked. And what had the fair Phyllis replied? Something arch, something unpardonable. Something enclosing a phallic pun. He had forgotten, and for that he blessed the twisted god of age. His early books with their low-altitude gag lines embarrassed him, and he tried hard to forget he had once been the idiot who wrote them.
Maybelle, on the other hand, knew his oeuvre with depressing thoroughness and could quote chapter and verse. Well, that was the function of an editor, he supposed. A reasonable man would be grateful for such attention. She was a good girl. He wished she’d find a husband so he would feel less often that she’d taken the veil on his account. But at least she didn’t expect him to converse with wit. Like all the others, she’d bought wholesale the myth of the sad jester.
It was a myth that he himself regarded with profound skepticism. He’d read the requisite scholarly articles, of course, and had even, hypocrite that he was, written one or two himself. Humor is a pocket pulled inside out; humor is an anguished face dumped upside down; humor is the refuge of the grunting cynic, the eros of the deprived lover, the breakfast of the starving clown. Some of these cheap theories he’d actually peddled aloud to the graduating class at Trent a year ago, and his remarks had been applauded lustily. (How much better to lust applaudingly, he’d cackled, sniggered, snorted inside his wicked head.)
He suspected that these theories were leapt upon for their simplicity, their symmetry, their neat-as-a-pin ironic shimmer. They were touted by those so facile they were unable to see how rich with ragged comedy the world really was. But Meershank knew, he knew! Was it not divinely comic that only yesterday he’d received a telephone solicitation from the Jackson Point Cancer Fund? Wasn’t it also comic that the specter of his wife’s death should fill him with a wobbly lust for his broad-busted, perfume-wafting, forty-year-old editor? For that matter, wasn’t it superbly comic that a man widely known as a professional misogynist had remained happily married to one woman for thirty-five years? (Life throws these kinky curves a little too often, Meershank had observed, and the only thing to do was open your fool mouth and guffaw.)
At nine he checked once again on his wife, who was sleeping quietly. If she woke later, a second injection was permitted. He carried a bottle of brandy out on to the veranda. One for the road?, he asked Maybelle with his eyebrows. Why not, she said with a lift of her shoulders. Her upper lip went stiff as a ledge in the moonlight, and he shuddered to think he was about to kiss her. The moon tonight was bloated and white, as fretful as a face. Everywhere there was the smell of mock orange blossoms, which had bloomed early this year and in absurd profusion. Crickets ticked in the grass, like fools, like drunkards. Meershank lifted his glass. The brandy burned his throat and made him retreat for an instant, but Maybelle became attenuated, lively, sharp of phrase, amusing. He laughed aloud for the first time in a week, wondering if the world would crack down the middle.
It did. Or seemed to. A loud overhead popping noise like the cracking of whips made him jump. Maybelle slammed down her glass and stared. All around them the sky flashed white, then pink, then filled with rat-a-tat-tat fountains and sparks and towering plumes.
“Jesus,” Maybelle said. “Victoria Day. I almost forgot.”
“I did forget,” Meershank said. “I never once thought.”
A rocket whined and popped, made ropy arcs across the sky, burst into petals, leaving first one, then a dozen blazing trails. It was suddenly daylight, fierce, then faded, then instantly replaced by a volley of cracking gunpowder and new showers of brilliance.
The explosions, star-shaped, convulsive, leaping out of the other, made Meershank think of the chains of malignant cells igniting in his wife’s body.
He set down his brandy, excused himself and hurried upstairs.
Meershank, marrying Louise Lovell in 1949, had felt himself rubbing bellies for the first time with the exotic. He, a Chicago Jew, the son of a bond salesman, had fallen in love with a gentile, a Canadian, a fair-haired girl of twenty who had been gently reared in the Ottawa Valley by parents who lived quietly in a limestone house that was a hundred years old. It faced on the river. There was a rose garden criss-crossed by gravel paths and surrounded by a pale pink brick wall. Oh, how silently those two parents had moved about in their large square rooms, in winter wrapping themselves in shawls, sitting before pots of raspberry-leaf tea and making their good-natured remarks about the weather, the books they were forever in the middle of, the tiny thunder of politics that flickered from their newspaper, always one day old.
The mother of Louise possessed a calm brow of marble. The father had small blue eyes and hard cheeks. He was the author of a history of the Canadian Navy. It was, he told Meershank, the official history. Meershank was given a signed copy. And he was given, too, with very little noise or trouble, the hand of Louise in marriage. He had been stunned. Effortlessly, it seemed, he’d won from them their beloved only daughter, a girl of soft hips and bland hair done roundly in a pageboy.
“What exactly do you do?” they only once asked. He worked as a correspondent for a newspaper, he explained. (He did not use the word journalist.) And he hoped one day to write a book. (“Ah! A book! Splendid!”)
The wedding was in the month of June and was held in the garden. Meershank’s relatives did not trouble to travel all the way up from Chicago. The wedding breakfast was served out-of-doors, and the health of the young couple—Meershank at twenty-seven was already starting to bald—was toasted with a non-alcoholic fruit punch. The family was abstemious; the tradition went back several generations; alcohol, tobacco, caffeine—there wasn’t a trace of these poisons in the bloodstream of Meershank’s virgin bride. He looked at her smooth, pale arms—and eventually, when legally married, at her smooth, pale breasts—and felt he’d been singularly, and comically, blessed.
There is a character, Virgie Allgood, in Meershank’s book Sailing to Saskatchewan, who might be said to resemble Louise. In the book, Virgie is an eater of whole grains and leafy vegetables. Martyrlike, she eschews french fries, doughnuts and liver dumplings, yet her body is host to disease after disease. Fortified milk fails. Pure air fails. And just when the life is about to go out of her, the final chapter, a new doctor rides into town on a motorbike and saves her by prescribing a diet of martinis and cheesecakes.
There is something of Louise, too, in the mother in Meershank’s tour de force, Continuous Purring. She is a woman who cannot understand the simplest joke. Riddles on cereal boxes have to be laboriously explained. Puns strike her as being untidy scraps to be swept up in a dustpan. She thinks a double entendre is a potent new drink. She is congenitally immune to metaphor (the root of all comedy, Meershank believes), and on the day her husband is appointed to the Peevish Chair of Midbrow Humor, she sends for the upholsterer.
When Encounter did its full-length profile on Meershank in 1981, it erred by stating that Louise Lovell Meershank had never read her husband’s books. The truth is she not only had read them, but before the birth of the word processor she had typed them, collated the pages, corrected their virulent misspelling, redistributed semicolons and commas with the aplomb of a goddess, and tactfully weeded out at least half of Meershank’s compulsive exclamation points. She corresponded with publishers, arranged for foreign rights, dealt with book clubs and with autograph seekers, and she always—less and less frequently, of course—trimmed her husband’s fluffy wreath of hair with a pair of silver-handled scissors.
She read Meershank’s manuscripts with a delicious (to Meershank) frown on her wide pale brow—more and more she’d grown to resemble her mother. She turned over the pages with a delicate hand as though they possessed the same scholarly sheen as her father’s Official History of the Canadian Navy. She read them not once, but several times, catching a kind of overflow of observance that leaked like oil and vinegar from the edges of Meershank’s copious, verbal, many-leafed salads.
Her responses never marched in time with his. She was slower, and could wave aside sentimentality, saying, “Why not?—it’s part of the human personality.” Occasionally, she said the unexpected thing, as when she described her husband’s novella, Fiend at the Water Fountain, as being, “cool and straight up and down as a tulip.”
What she actually told the journalist from Encounter was that she never laughed when reading her husband’s books. For this Meershank has always respected her, valued her, adored her. She was his Canadian rose, his furry imbiber of scented tea, his smiling plum, his bread and jam, his little squirrel, his girlie-girl, his Dear Heart who promised in the garden by the river beside the limestone house in 1949 to stay at his side forever and ever. What a joke she has played on him in the end.
She has, Meershank said to Maybelle, taken a turn for the worse. He phoned the doctor, who said he would come at once. Then he handed Maybelle a piece of paper on which two telephone numbers were written. “Please,” he said. “Phone the children.”
Maybelle was unprepared for this. And she had never met the children. “What should I tell them?” she asked.
“Tell them,” Meershank said, and paused. “Tell them it could be sooner than we thought.”
One of the daughters, Sonya, lived in London, Ontario, where she was the new director of the program for women’s studies. (For those who trouble to look, her mirror image can be found in Ira Chauvin, post-doc researcher in male studies, in Meershank’s academic farce, Ten Minutes to Tenure.) Sonya did not say to Maybelle, “Who is this calling?” or “How long does she have?” She said, “I’ll be there in three hours flat.”
The other daughter, Angelica, ran a health-food restaurant and delicatessen with her husband, Rusty, in Montreal. They were just closing up for the night when Maybelle phoned. “I can get a plane at midnight,” Angelica said in a high, sweet, shaky voice. “Tell her to wait for me.”
After that Maybelle sat on a kitchen chair in the dark. She could have switched on the light, but she preferred to sit as she was and puzzle over what level of probability had landed her on the twenty-fourth of May as a visitor—she was not such a fool as to mistake a single embrace for anything other than a mutation of grief.
The tiles of the kitchen wall, after a moment, took on a greenish glow, and she began to float out of her body, a trick she had perfected during her long years of commuting between Cookston Corners and downtown Toronto. First she became Sonya, flying down an eastbound highway, her hands suddenly younger and supple-jointed on the slippery wheel. She took the long cloverleafs effortlessly, the tires of her tough little car zinging over ramps and bridges, and the sleepy nighttime radio voices holding her steady in the middle lane.
Then, blinking once and shutting out the piny air, she was transformed into Angelica, candid, fearful, sitting tense in an aisle seat at the rear of a plane—she had her mother’s smooth cheeks, her father’s square chin and her own slow sliding tears. On her lap she clutched a straw bag, and every five minutes she pushed back the sleeve of her blouse and checked her wristwatch, trying to freeze its hands with her will.
Next she was the doctor—springing onto the veranda, tapping at the screen door and taking the stairs two at a time. She drifted then into the amorphous body of Louise, where it was hot and damp and difficult to breathe, but where shadows reached out and curved around her head. Her hands lay surprisingly calm on the sheet—until one of them was lifted and held to Meershank’s beating heart.
She felt his bewilderment and heard with his ears a long popping chain of firecrackers going off. A window in the bedroom had been opened—at last—and the scent of the mock orange blossoms reached him with a rushing blow. Everything was converging. All the warm fluids of life came sliding behind Maybelle’s eyes, and she had to hold on to the sides of the kitchen chair to keep herself from disappearing.
In each of Meershank’s fictions there is what the literary tribe calls a “set piece,” a jewel, as it were, set in a spun-out text, or a chunk of narrative that is somehow more intense, more cohesive, more self-contained than the rest. Generally theatrical and vivid, it can be read and comprehended, even when severed from the wider story, or it can be “performed” by those writers—Meershank is not one—who like to gad about the country giving “readings.”
In Meershank’s recently published book, Malaprop in Disneyfield, the set piece has four characters sitting at dusk on a veranda discussing the final words of the recently deceased family matriarch. The sky they gaze into is a rainy mauve, and the mood is one of tenderness—but there is also a tone of urgency. Three of the four had been present when the last words were uttered, and some irrational prompting makes them want to share with the fourth what they heard—or what they thought they heard. Because each heard something different, and there is a descending order of coherence.
“The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.
“The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.
The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirt sleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”
All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.
The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.
Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”
“Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.
Pardon (#ulink_5ecf1573-441d-5f4f-ba8b-472d60535e26)
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON MILLY STOPPED at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law, whom she had apparently insulted.
“Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”
Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or a mind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.
“You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hotcakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”
“How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”
Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.
Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.
At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.
Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m really sorry to hear this.”
“And then,” Ernie’s wife went on, “a gentleman came in here saying he’d had an out-and-out row with his next-door neighbor who’d been a true-blue friend for twenty years.”
“These things happen,” Milly said. “Just this week my own father-in-law—”
“Seems the man and his neighbor got on to the subject of politics—in my opinion not a subject for friends to be discussing. The neighbor called my customer a stuffed-shirt fascist right to his face.”
“That seems a little extreme,” Milly said. “But why should he be the one to send a sorry card when his friend was the one who—?”
“Exactly!” Ernie’s wife held up a finger, and her eyes filled with fire. “My thoughts exactly. But later that same day who should come in but a sweet old white-haired gent who said his next-door neighbor had called him a pinko bleeding heart and he—”
“Do you mean to tell me he was the very—”
“You’re interrupting,” Ernie’s wife cried.
Milly said she was terribly sorry. She explained that she was feeling unstrung because now she would have to go all the way downtown to buy a card for her father-in-law.
“Well, if you’re going downtown,” Ernie’s wife said, “would you mind returning a pair of pajamas for me? I bought them in the sales last week and, lo and behold, I got them home and found a flaw in the left sleeve.”
Milly disliked going all the way downtown. She disliked waiting for the bus, and when she got on the bus she disliked the way a man sitting next to her let his umbrella drip on her ankle.
“I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t even notice. In a hundred years I would never have let—”
Milly managed a smile and made a gesture with her hand that said: It’s all right, I accept your apology. She was glad the umbrella hadn’t dripped on the pajamas Ernie’s wife had given her to return. Returning merchandise can be tricky, especially when it’s wet and when the receipt’s been mislaid. More often than not you meet with suspicion, scorn, arrogance, rebuff.
But today the gentleman in the complaint department was wearing a yellow rose in his lapel, and his eyes twinkled.
“We take full responsibility for flaws,” he said. “Head office will be sending your friend a letter begging her pardon, and I personally apologize in the name of our branch and in the name of the manufacturer.”
Milly, triumphant, took the bus home. The driver apologized, as well he should, for splashing her as she stood at the bus stop.
“It’s not your fault, it’s all this blessed rain,” Milly said.
The bus driver shook his head. “A regular deluge. But I should have been more careful.”
The instant the words left his mouth, the rain began to fall more heavily. The sky turned an ugly black, and soon rain was pelting down, loud and musical, slamming on the roof of the bus and streaming in thick sheets down its sides. The windshield wipers did their best to beat back the water, but clearly they hadn’t been designed for a storm of this magnitude and, after a few minutes, the driver pulled over to the curb.
“I’m awfully sorry, folks,” he announced, “but we’re going to have to wait this one out.”
Nobody really minded. It was rather pleasant, almost like a party, to be sitting snug inside a parked bus whose windows had turned to silver, swapping stories about storms of other years. Several passengers remembered the flood of 1958 and the famous spring downpour of 1972, but most of them agreed that today’s storm was the most violent they had ever seen. They would be going home to flooded basements and worried spouses, yet they remained cheerful. Some of the younger people at the back of the bus struck up an impromptu singsong, and the older folks traded their newspapers back and forth. The headline on one paper said TRUDEAU APOLOGIZES TO REAGAN, and another said REAGAN APOLOGIZES TO SUMMIT. By the time the sun burst through, many of the passengers had exchanged names and phone numbers and announced to each other how cleansing a good storm can be, how it sweeps away unspoken hostilities and long-held grudges.
Milly, walking home from her bus stop, breathed in the shining air. Her feet were drenched, and she was forced to step over several fallen tree branches, but she noted with pleasure the blue clarity of the sky. It was going to be a splendid evening. A single cloud, a fluffy width of cumulus, floated high in the air over her house. It was shaped like a pair of wings, thought Milly, who was in a fanciful mood. No, not like wings, but like two outstretched hands, wonderfully white and beseeching, which seemed to beckon to her and say: Sorry about all this fuss and bother.
Seeing the great cloudy hands made Milly yearn to absolve all those who had troubled her in her life. She forgave her father for naming her Milly instead of Jo Ann, and her mother for passing on to her genes that made her oversensitive to small hurts and slights. She forgave her brother for reading her diary, and her sister for her pretty legs, and her cat for running in front of a truck and winding up pressed flat as a transfer on the road. She forgave everyone who had ever forgotten her birthday and everyone who looked over her shoulder at parties for someone more attractive to talk to. She forgave her boss for being waspish and her lover for lack of empathy and her husband for making uncalled-for remarks about stale breakfast cereal and burned toast.
All this dispensing of absolution emptied Milly out and made her light as air. She had a sensation of floating, of weightlessness, and it seemed to her that bells were chiming inside her head.
But it was only the telephone ringing—without a doubt her father-in-law phoning to ask forgiveness. She hurried inside so she could sing into his ear, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Words (#ulink_17fef4b1-4e2d-5905-8021-14622e4cd7a6)
WHEN THE WORLD FIRST STARTED HEATING UP, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation.
Ian’s small northern country—small in terms of population, that is, not in size—sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate. She wore a terrible green dress the first time he saw her, and rather clumsy shoes, but he could see that her neck was slender, her waist narrow and her legs long and brown. For so young a woman, she was astonishingly articulate; in fact, it was her voice more than anything else that he fell in love with—its hills and valleys and its pliant, easy-sided wit. It was a voice that could be distinguished in any gathering, being both sweet and husky and having an edging of contralto merriment that seemed to Ian as rare and fine as a border of gold leaf.
They played truant, missing half the study sessions, the two of them lingering instead over tall, cool drinks in the café they found on the Via Traflori. There, under a cheerful striped canopy, Isobel leaned across a little table and placed long, ribbony Spanish phrases into Ian’s mouth, encouraging and praising him when he got them right. And he, in his somewhat stiff northern voice, gave back the English equivalents: table, chair, glass, cold, hot, money, street, people, mouth. In the evenings, walking in the gardens in front of the institute where the conference was being held, they turned to each other and promised with their eyes, and in two languages as well, to love each other for ever.
The second International Conference was held ten years later. The situation had become grave. One could use the word crisis and not be embarrassed. Ian—by then married to Isobel, who was at home with the children—attended every session, and he listened attentively to the position papers of various physicists, engineers, geographers and linguists from all parts of the world. It was a solemn but distinguished assembly; many eminent men and women took their places at the lectern, including the spidery old Scottish demographer who years earlier had made the first correlation between substrata temperatures and highly verbalized societies. In every case, these speakers presented their concerns with admirable brevity, each word weighted and frugally chosen, and not one of them exceeded the two-minute time limitation. For by now no one really doubted that it was the extravagance and proliferation of language that had caused the temperature of the earth’s crust to rise, and in places-California, Japan, London—to crack open and form long ragged lakes of fire. The evidence was everywhere and it was incontrovertible; thermal maps and measurements, sonar readings, caloric separations, a network of subterranean monitoring systems—all these had reinforced the integrity of the original Scottish theories.
But the delegates, sitting in the plenary session of the second International Conference, were still reluctant to take regulatory action. It was partly a case of heads-in-the-sand; it was—human nature being what it is—partly a matter of political advantage or commercial gain. There lingered, too, a somewhat surprising nostalgia for traditional liberties and for the old verbal order of the world. Discussion at the conference had gone around and around all week, pointless and wasteful, and it looked very much as though the final meeting would end in yet another welter of indecision and deferral. It was at that point that Ian, seated in the front row, rose and requested permission to speak.
He was granted a one-minute slot on the agenda. In fact, he spoke for several minutes, but his eloquence, his sincerity (and no doubt his strong, boyish appearance, his shaggy hair and his blue eyes) seemed to merit an exception. Certainly not one person sitting in that gathering had any wish to stop him.
It was unfortunate, tragic some thought, that a freak failure in the electronic system—only a plug accidentally pulled from its socket—prevented his exact words from being recorded, but those who were present remembered afterward how passionately he pleaded his love for the planet. (In truth—though who could know this?—he was thinking chiefly of his love for Isobel and his two children.)
We are living in a fool’s dream, he told his fellow delegates, and the time has come for us to wake. Voluntary restraints were no longer adequate to preserve the little earth, which was the only home we know. Halfway measures like the old three-hour temps tranquilles were next to useless since they were never, or almost never, enforced. The evening curfew-lingua was ridiculously lenient. Abuses of every sort abounded, particularly the use of highly percussive words or words that were redolent with emotional potency, even though it had been established that these two classes of words were particularly damaging to bedrock and shales. Multilingualism continued to flourish. Wasteful antiphonic structures were actually on the increase in the more heavily populated regions, as was the use of elaborate ceremonial metaphor. It was as though, by refusing to make linguistic sacrifices, the human race had willed its own destruction.
When he finished speaking, the applause was prolonged and powerful. It perhaps held an element of shame, too; this young man had found the courage to say at last what should have been said long before. One after another the delegates rose to their feet, and soon their clapping fell into a steady rhythmic beat that had the effect of holding Ian hostage on the platform. The chairman whispered into his ear, begging him for a few additional words.
He assented. He could not say no. And, in a fever that was remarkably similar to the fever he had suffered as a child during a severe case of measles, or like the fever of love he had succumbed to ten years earlier in Rome, he announced to the audience, holding up a hand for attention, that he would be the first to take a vow of complete silence for the sake of the planet that had fathered him.
Almost at once he regretted his words, but hubris kept him from recanting for the first twenty-four hours and, after that, a kind of stubbornness took over. Isobel met him at the airport with the words, “You went too far.” Later, after a miserable, silent attempt at lovemaking, she said, “I’ll never forgive you.” His children, clamoring to hear about his moment of heroism, poked at him, at his face and chest and arms, as though he were inert. He tried to tell them with his eyes that he was still their father, that he still loved them.
“Leave him alone,” Isobel said sharply. “He might as well be a stranger now. He’s no different than anyone else.”
She became loud and shrewish. When his silent followers arrived at their door—and in time there were thousands of them, each with the same blank face and gold armband—she admitted them with bad grace. She grew garrulous. She rambled on and on, bitter and blaming, sometimes incoherent, sometimes obscene, sometimes reverting to a coarse, primitive schoolyard Spanish, sometimes shouting to herself or cursing into the mirror or chanting oaths—anything to furnish the emptiness of the house with words. She became disoriented. The solid plaster of the walls fell away from her, melting into a drift of vapor. There seemed to be no shadows, no sense of dimension, no delicate separation between one object and another. Privately, she pleaded with her husband for an act of apostasy. Later she taunted him. “Show me you’re still human,” she would say. “Give me just one word.” The word betrayal came frequently out of her wide mobile mouth, and so did the scornful epithet martyr.
But time passes and people forget. She forgot, finally, what it was that had betrayed her. Next she forgot her husband’s name. Sometimes she forgot that she had a husband at all, for how could anything be said to exist, she asked herself loudly, hoarsely—even a husband, even one’s self—if it didn’t also exist in the shape of a word.
He worried that she might be arrested, but for some reason—his position probably—she was always let off with a warning. In their own house she ignored him, passing him on the stairs without a look, or crossing in front of him as though he were a stuffed chair. Often she disappeared for hours, venturing out alone into the heat of the night, and he began to suspect she had taken a lover.
The thought preyed on him, though in fact he had long since forgotten the word for wife and also the word for fidelity. One night, when she left the house, he attempted to follow her, but clearly she was suspicious because she walked very quickly, looking back over her shoulder, making a series of unnecessary turns and choosing narrow old streets whose curbs were blackened by fire. Within minutes he lost sight of her; soon after that he was driven back by the heat.
The next night he tried again, and this time he saw her disappear into an ancient, dilapidated building, the sort of enclosure, he remembered, where children had once gone to learn to read and write. Unexpectedly, he felt a flash of pity; what a sad place for a tryst. He waited briefly, then entered the building and went up a flight of smoldering stairs that seemed on the point of collapse. There he found a dim corridor, thick with smoke, and a single room at one end.
Through the door he heard a waterfall of voices. There must have been a dozen people inside, all of them talking. The talk seemed to be about poetry. Someone—a woman—was giving a lecture. There were interruptions, a discussion, some laughter. He heard his wife’s voice, her old gilt-edged contralto, asking a question, and the sound of it made him draw in his breath so sharply that something hard, like a cinder or a particle of gravel, formed in his throat.
It stayed stubbornly lodged there all night. He found it painful to breath, and even Isobel noticed how he thrashed about in bed, gasping wildly for air. In the morning she called a doctor, who could find nothing wrong, but she remained uneasy, and that evening she stayed home and made him cups of iced honey-and-lemon tea to ease his throat. He took her hand at one point and held it to his lips as though it might be possible to find the air he needed inside the crevices of her skin. By now the scraping in his throat had become terrible, a raw agonizing rasp like a dull knife sawing through limestone. She looked at his face, from which the healthy, blood-filled elasticity had gone and felt herself brushed by a current of air, or what might have been the memory of a name.
He began to choke violently, and she heard something grotesque come out of his mouth, a sound that was only half-human, but that rode on a curious rhythmic wave that for some reason stirred her deeply. She imagined it to be the word Isobel. “Isobel?” she asked, trying to remember its meaning. He said it a second time, and this time the syllables were more clearly formed.
The light of terror came into his eyes, or perhaps the beginning of a new fever; she managed to calm him by stroking his arm. Then she called the children inside the house, locked the doors and windows against the unbearable heat, and they began, slowly, patiently, hands linked, at the beginning where they had begun before—with table, chair, bed, cool, else, other, sleep, face, mouth, breath, tongue.
Poaching (#ulink_24584c2c-5860-5852-9303-cc02f5be3e34)
ON OUR WAY TO CATCH the Portsmouth ferry, Dobey and I stayed overnight at a country hotel in the village of Kingsclere. The floors sloped, the walls tipped, the tap leaked rusty water and the bedclothes gave out an old, bitter odor.
At breakfast we were told by the innkeeper that King John had once stayed in this hotel and, moreover, had slept in the very room where we had spent the night.
“Wasn’t he the Magna Carta king?” Dobey said, showing off. “That would make it early thirteenth century.”
“Incredible,” I said, worrying whether I should conceal my fried bread beneath the underdone bacon or the bacon beneath the bread. “Extraordinary.”
The innkeeper had more to tell us. “And when His Royal Highness stopped here, he was bit by a bedbug. Of course, there’s none of that nowadays.” Here he chuckled a hearty chuckle and sucked in his red cheeks.
I crushed my napkin—Dobey would call it a serviette—on top of my bacon and fried bread and egg yolk and said to myself: next he’ll be rattling on about a ghost.
“And I didn’t like to tell you people last night when you arrived,” the innkeeper continued, “but the room where the two of you was—it’s haunted.”
“King John?” I asked.
“One of the guards, it’s thought. My wife’s seen ‘im many the time. And our Barbara. And I’ve heard ‘im clomping about in his great boots in the dark of the night and making a right awful noise.”
Dobey and I went back to our room to brush our teeth and close our haversacks, and then we lay flat on our backs for a minute on the musty bed and stared at the crooked beams.
“Are you thinking kingly thoughts?” I said after a while.
“I’m thinking about those poor bloody Aussies,” said Dobey.
“Oh, them,” I said. “They’ll make out all right.”
Only the day before we’d picked up the two Australians on the road. Not that they were by any stretch your average hitchhikers—two women, a mother, middle-aged, and a grown daughter, both smartly dressed. Their rented Morris Minor had started to smoke between Farrington and Kingsclere, and we gave them a lift into the village.
They’d looked us over carefully, especially the mother, before climbing into the back seat. We try to keep the back seat clean and free of luggage for our hitchhikers. The trick is to put them at their ease so they’ll talk. Some we wring dry just by keeping quiet. For others we have to prime the pump. It’s like stealing, Dobey says, only no one’s thought to make a law against it.
Within minutes we knew all about the Australians. They were from Melbourne. The mother had recently been widowed, and her deceased husband, before the onset of Addison’s disease, had worked as an investment analyst. Something coppery about the way she said “my late husband” suggested marital dullness, but Dobey and I never venture into interpretation. The daughter taught in a junior school. She was engaged to be married, a chap in the military. The wedding was six months away, and the two of them, mother and daughter, were shoring themselves up by spending eight weeks touring Britain, a last fling before buckling down to wedding arrangements. It was to be a church ceremony, followed by a lobster lunch in the ballroom of a large hotel.
The two of them made the wedding plans sound grudging and complex and tiresome, like putting on a war. The daughter emitted a sigh; nothing ever went right. And now they’d only been in England a week, had hardly made a dent, and already the hired car had let them down. It looked serious too, maybe the clutch.
Everything the mother said seemed electrically amplified by her bright, forthcoming Australia-lacquered voice. She had an optimistic nature, quickly putting the car out of mind and chirping away from the back seat about the relations in Exeter they planned to visit, elderly aunts, crippled uncles, a nephew who’d joined a rock band and traveled to America, was signed up by a movie studio but never was paid a penny—all this we learned in the ten minutes it took us to drive them into Kingsclere and drop them at the phone box. The daughter, a pretty girl with straight blond hair tied back in a ribbon, hardly said a word.
Nor did we. Dobey and I had made a pact at the start of the trip that we would conceal ourselves, our professions, our antecedents, where we lived, what we were to each other. We would dwindle, grow deliberately thin, almost invisible, and live like aerial plants off the packed fragments and fictions of the hitchhikers we picked up.
One day we traveled for two hours—this was between Conway and Manchester—with a lisping, blue-jeaned giant from Canada who’d come to England to write a doctoral thesis on the early language theories of Wittgenstein.
“We owe tho muth to Withgenstein,” he sputtered, sweeping a friendly red paw through the air and including Dobey and me in the circle of Wittgenstein appreciators. He had run out of money. First he sold his camera; then his Yamaha recorder; then, illegally, the British Rail Pass his parents had given him when he finished his master’s degree. That was why he was hitchhiking. He said, “I am going to Oxthford” as though he was saying, “I am a man in love.”
He talked rapidly, not at all embarrassed by his lisp—Dobey and I liked him for that, though normally we refrain from forming personal judgments about our passengers. He spoke as though compelled to explain to us his exact reason for being where he was at that moment.
They all do. It is a depressing hypothesis, but probably, as Dobey says, true: people care only about themselves. They are frenzied and driven, but only by the machinery of their own adventuring. It has been several days now since anyone’s asked us who we are and what we’re doing driving around like this.
Usually Dobey drives, eyes on the road, listening with a supple, restless attention. I sit in the front passenger seat, my brain screwed up in a squint from looking sideways. At times I feel that giving lifts to strangers makes us into patronizing benefactors. But Dobey says this is foolish; these strangers buy their rides with their stories.
Dobey prefers to pick up strangers who are slightly distraught, saying they “unwind” more easily. Penury or a burned-out clutch—these work in our favor and save us from having to frame our careful questions. I am partial, though, to the calm, to those who stand by the roadside with their luggage in the dust, too composed or dignified to trouble the air with their thumbs. There was the remarkable Venezuelan woman who rode with us from Cardiff to Conway and spoke only intermittently and in sentences that seemed wrapped in their own cool vapors. Yes, she adored to travel alone. She liked the song of her own thoughts. She was made fat by the sight of mountains. The Welsh sky was blue like a cushion. She was eager to embrace rides from strangers. She liked to open wide windows so she could commune with the wind. She was a doctor, a specialist in bones, but alas, alas, she was not in love with her profession. She was in love with the English language because every word could be picked up and spun like a coin on the table top.
The shyest traveler can be kindled, Dobey maintains—often after just one or two strikes of the flint. That sullen Lancashire girl with the pink-striped hair and the colloid eyes—her dad was a coward, her mum shouted all the time, her boyfriend had broken her nose and got her pregnant. She was on her way, she told us, to a hostel in Bolton. Someone there would help her out. She had the address written on the inside of a cigarette packet. I looked aslant and could tell that Dobey wanted to offer her money, but part of our bargain was that we offer only rides.
Another thing we agreed on was that we would believe everything we were told. No matter how fantastic or eccentric or crazy the stories we heard, we’d pledged ourselves to respect their surfaces. Anyone who stepped into our back seat was trusted, even the bearded, evil-smelling curmudgeon we picked up in Sheffield who told us that the spirit of Ben Jonson had directed him to go to Westminster and stand at the abbey door preaching obedience to Mrs. Thatcher. We not only humored the old boy—who gave us shaggy, hand-rolled cigarettes to smoke—but we delivered him at midnight that same day.
Nevertheless, I’m becoming disillusioned. (It was my idea to head for Portsmouth and cross the channel.) I long, for instance, to let slip to one of our passengers that Dobey and I have slept in the bedchamber where King John was nipped by a bedbug. It’s not attention I want and certainly not admiration. It’s only that I’d like to float my own story on the air. I want to test its buoyancy, to see if it holds any substance, to see if it’s true or the opposite of true.
And I ask myself about the stories we’ve been hearing lately: Have they grown thinner? The Australian mother and daughter, for example—what had they offered? Relations in Exeter. A wedding in Melbourne. Is that enough? Dobey says to be patient, that everything is fragmentary, that it’s up to us to supply the missing links. Behind each of the people we pick up, Dobey believes, there’s a deep cave, and in the cave is a trap door and a set of stone steps that we may descend if we wish. I say to Dobey that there may be nothing at the bottom of the stairs, but Dobey says, how will we know if we don’t look.
Scenes (#ulink_409d4041-fc89-5896-9a81-6e8c6df344f1)
IN 1974 FRANCES WAS ASKED to give a lecture in Edmonton, and on the way there her plane was forced to make an emergency landing in a barley field. The man sitting next to her—they had not spoken—turned and asked if he might put his arms around her. She assented. They clung together, her size 12 dress and his wool suit. Later, he gave her his business card.
She kept the card for several weeks, poked in the edge of her bedroom mirror. It is a beautiful mirror, a graceful rectangle in a pine frame, and very, very old. Once it was attached to the back of a bureau belonging to Frances’s grandmother. Leaves, vines, flowers and fruit are shallowly carved in the soft wood of the frame. The carving might be described as primitive—and this is exactly why Frances loves it, being drawn to those things that are incomplete or in some way flawed. Furthermore, the mirror is the first thing she remembers seeing, really seeing, as a child. Visiting her grandmother, she noticed the stiff waves of light and shadow on the frame, the way square pansies interlocked with rigid grapes, and she remembers creeping out of her grandmother’s bed, where she had been put for an afternoon nap, and climbing on a chair so she could touch the worked surface with the flat of her hand.
Her grandmother died. It was discovered by the aunts and uncles that on the back of the mirror was stuck a piece of adhesive tape and on the tape was written: “For my vain little granddaughter Frances.” Frances’ mother was affronted, but put it down to hardening of the arteries. Frances, who was only seven, felt uniquely, mysteriously honored.
She did not attend the funeral; it was thought she was too young, and so instead she was taken one evening to the funeral home to bid goodbye to her grandmother’s body. The room where the old lady lay was large, quiet and hung all around with swags of velvet. Frances’s father lifted her up so she could see her grandmother, who was wearing a black dress with a white crepe jabot, her powdered face pulled tight, as though with a drawstring, into a sort of grimace. A lovely blanket with satin edging covered her trunky legs and torso. Laid out, calm and silent as a boat, she looked almost generous.
For some reason Frances was left alone with the casket for a few minutes, and she took this chance—she had to pull herself up on tiptoe—to reach out and touch her grandmother’s lips with the middle finger of her right hand. It was like pressing in the side of a rubber ball. The lips did not turn to dust—which did not surprise Frances at all, but rather confirmed what she had known all along. Later, she would look at her finger and say to herself, “This finger has touched dead lips.” Then she would feel herself grow rich with disgust. The touch, she knew, had not been an act of love at all, but only a kind of test.
With the same middle finger she later touched the gelatinous top of a goldfish swimming in a little glass bowl at school. She touched the raised mole on the back of her father’s white neck. Shuddering, she touched horse turds in the back lane, and she touched her own urine springing onto the grass as she squatted behind the snowball bush by the fence. When she looked into her grandmother’s mirror, now mounted on her own bedroom wall, she could hardly believe that she, Frances, had contravened so many natural laws.
The glass itself was beveled all the way around, and she can remember that she took pleasure in lining up her round face so that the beveled edge split it precisely in two. When she was fourteen she wrote in her diary, “Life is like looking into a beveled mirror.” The next day she crossed it out and, peering into the mirror, stuck out her tongue and made a face. All her life she’d had this weakness for preciosity, but mainly she’d managed to keep it in check.
She is a lithe and toothy woman with strong, thick, dark brown hair, now starting to gray. She can be charming. “Frances can charm the bees out of the hive,” said a friend of hers, a man she briefly thought she loved. Next year she’ll be forty-five—terrible!—but at least she’s kept her figure. A western sway to her voice is what people chiefly remember about her, just as they remember other people for their chins or noses. This voice sometimes makes her appear inquisitive, but, in fact, she generally hangs back and leaves it to others to begin a conversation.
Once a woman got into an elevator with her and said, “Will you forgive me if I speak my mind? This morning I came within an inch of taking my life. There was no real reason, only everything had got suddenly so dull. But I’m all right now. In fact, I’m going straight to a restaurant to treat myself to a plate of french fries. Just fries, not even a sandwich to go with them. I was never allowed to have french fries when I was a little girl, but the time comes when a person should do what she wants to do.”
The subject of childhood interests Frances, especially its prohibitions, so illogical and various, and its random doors and windows that appear solidly shut, but can, in fact, be opened easily with a touch or a password or a minute of devout resolution. It helps to be sly, also to be quick. There was a time when she worried that fate had penciled her in as “debilitated by guilt,” but mostly she takes guilt for what it is, a kind of lover who can be shrugged off or greeted at the gate. She looks at her two daughters and wonders if they’ll look back resentfully, recalling only easy freedoms and an absence of terror—in other words, meagerness—and envy her for her own stern beginnings. It turned out to have been money in the bank, all the various shames and sweats of growing up. It was instructive; it kept things interesting; she still shivers, remembering how exquisitely sad she was as a child.
“It’s only natural for children to be sad,” says her husband, Theo, who, if he has a fault, is given to reductive statements. “Children are unhappy because they are inarticulate and hence lonely.”
Frances can’t remember being lonely, but telling this to Theo is like blowing into a hurricane. She was spoiled—a lovely word, she thinks—and adored by her parents, her plump, white-faced father and her skinny, sweet-tempered mother. Their love was immense and enveloping like a fall of snow. In the evenings, winter evenings, she sat between the two of them on a blue nubby sofa, listening to the varnished radio and taking sips from their cups of tea from time to time or sucking on a spoonful of sugar. The three of them sat enthralled through “Henry Aldrich” and “Fibber Magee and Molly,” and when Frances laughed they looked at her and laughed too. Frances has no doubt that those spoonfuls of sugar and the roar of Fibber Magee’s closet and her parents’ soft looks were taken in and preserved so that she, years later, boiling an egg or making love or digging in the garden, is sometimes struck by a blow of sweetness that seems to come out of nowhere.
The little brown house where she grew up sat in the middle of a block crowded with other such houses. In front of each lay a tiny lawn and a flower bed edged with stones. Rows of civic trees failed to flourish, but did not die either. True, there was terror in the back lane, where the big boys played with sticks and jackknives, but the street was occupied mainly by quiet, hard-working families, and in the summertime hopscotch could be played in the street, there was so little traffic.
Frances’s father spent his days “at the office.” Her mother stayed at home, wore bib aprons, made jam and pickles and baked custard, and every morning before school brushed and braided Frances’s hair. Frances can remember, or thinks she can remember, that one morning her mother walked as far as the corner with her and said, “I don’t know why, but I’m so full of happiness today I can hardly bear it.” The sun came fretting through the branches of a scrubby elm at that minute and splashed across her mother’s face, making her look like someone in a painting or like one of the mothers in her school reader.
Learning to read was like falling into a mystery deeper than the mystery of airwaves or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus. Deliberately she made herself stumble and falter over the words in her first books, trying to hold back the rush of revelation. She saw other children being matter-of-fact and methodical, puzzling over vowels and consonants and sounding out words as though they were dimes and nickels that had to be extracted from the slot of a bank. She felt suffused with light and often skipped or hopped or ran wildly to keep herself from flying apart.
Her delirium, her failure to ingest books calmly, made her suspect there was something wrong with her or else with the world, yet she deeply distrusted the school librarian, who insisted that a book could be a person’s best friend. (Those subject to preciosity instantly spot others with the same affliction.) This librarian, Miss Mayes, visited all the classes. She was tall and soldierly with a high, light voice. “Boys and girls,” she cried, bringing large red hands together, “a good book will never let you down.” She went on; books could take you on magic journeys; books could teach you where the rain came from or how things used to be in the olden days. A person who truly loved books need never feel alone.
But, she continued, holding up a finger, there are people who do shameful things to books. They pull them from the shelves by their spines. They turn down the corners of pages; they leave them on screened porches where the rain and other elements can warp their covers; and they use curious and inappropriate objects as bookmarks.
From a petit point bag she drew a list of objects that had been wrongly, criminally inserted between fresh clean pages: a blue-jay feather, an oak leaf, a matchbook cover, a piece of colored chalk and, on one occasion—“on one occasion, boys and girls”—a strip of bacon.
A strip of bacon. In Frances’s mind the strip of bacon was uncooked, cold and fatty with a pathetic streaking of lean. Its oil would press into the paper, a porky abomination, and its ends would flop out obscenely. The thought was thrilling: someone, someone who lived in the same school district, had had the audacity, the imagination, to mark the pages of a book with a strip of bacon. The existence of this person and his outrageous act penetrated the fever that had come over her since she’d learned to read, and she began to look around again and see what the world had to offer.
Next door lived Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, and upstairs, fast asleep, lived Louise Shaw, aged eighteen. She had been asleep for ten years. A boy across the street named Jackie McConnell told Frances that it was the sleeping sickness, that Louise Shaw had been bitten by the sleeping sickness bug, but Frances’s mother said no, it was the coma. One day Mrs. Shaw, smelling of chlorine bleach and wearing a flower-strewn housedress, stopped Frances on the sidewalk, held the back of her hand to the side of Frances’s face and said, “Louise was just your age when we lost her. She was forever running or skipping rope or throwing a ball up against the side of the garage. I used to say to her, don’t make such a ruckus, you’ll drive me crazy. I used to yell all the time at her, she was so full of beans and such a chatterbox.” After that Frances felt herself under an obligation to Mrs. Shaw, and whenever she saw her she made her body speed up and whirl on the grass or do cartwheels.
A little later she learned to negotiate the back lane. There, between board fences, garbage cans, garage doors and stands of tough weeds, she became newly nimble and strong. She learned to swear—damn, hell and dirty bastard—and played piggy-move-up and spud and got herself roughly kissed a number of times, and then something else happened: one of the neighbors put up a basketball hoop. For a year, maybe two—Frances doesn’t trust her memory when it comes to time—she was obsessed with doing free throws. She became known as the queen of free throws; she acquired status, even with the big boys, able to sink ten out of ten baskets, but never, to her sorrow, twenty out of twenty. She threw free throws in the morning before school, at lunchtime, and in the evening until it got dark. Nothing made her happier than when the ball dropped silently through the ring without touching it or banking on the board. At night she dreamed of these silky baskets, the rush of air and sinuous movement of the net, then the ball striking the pavement and returning to her hands. (“Sounds a bit Freudian to me,” her husband, Theo, said when she tried to describe for him her time of free-throw madness, proving once again how far apart the two of them were in some things.) One morning she was up especially early. There was no one about. The milkman hadn’t yet come, and there was dew shining on the tarry joints of the pavement. Holding the ball in her hands was like holding onto a face, it was so dearly familiar with its smell of leather and its seams and laces. That morning she threw twenty-seven perfect free throws before missing. Each time the ball went through the hoop she felt an additional oval of surprise grow round her body. She had springs inside her, in her arms and in the insteps of her feet. What stopped her finally was her mother calling her name, demanding to know what she was doing outside so early. “Nothing,” Frances said, and knew for the first time the incalculable reward of self-possession.
There was a girl in her sewing class named Pat Leonard. She was older than the other girls, had a rough pitted face and a brain pocked with grotesqueries. “Imagine,” she said to Frances, “sliding down a banister and suddenly it turns into a razor blade.” When she trimmed the seams of the skirt she was making and accidentally cut through the fabric, she laughed out loud. To amuse the other girls she sewed the skin of her fingers together. She told a joke, a long story about a pickle factory that was really about eating excrement. In her purse was a packet of cigarettes. She had a boyfriend who went to the technical school, and several times she’d reached inside his pants and squeezed his thing until it went off like a squirt gun. She’d flunked math twice. She could hardly read. One day she wasn’t there, and the sewing teacher said she’d been expelled. Frances felt as though she’d lost her best friend, even though she wouldn’t have been seen dead walking down the hall with Pat Leonard. Melodramatic tears swam into her eyes, and then real tears that wouldn’t stop until the teacher brought her a glass of water and offered to phone her mother.
Another time, she was walking home from a friend’s in the early evening. She passed by a little house not far from her own. The windows were open and, floating on the summer air, came the sound of people speaking in a foreign language. There seemed to be a great number of them, and the conversation was very rapid and excited. They might have been quarreling or telling old stories; Frances had no idea which. It could have been French or Russian or Portuguese they spoke. The words ran together and made queer little dashes and runs and choking sounds. Frances imagined immense, wide-branching grammars and steep, stone streets rising out of other centuries. She felt as though she’d been struck by a bolt of good fortune, and all because the world was bigger than she’d been led to believe.
At university, where she studied languages, she earned pocket money by working in the library. She and a girl named Ursula were entrusted with the key, and it was their job to open the library on Saturday mornings. During the minute or two before anyone else came, the two of them galloped at top speed through the reference room, the periodical room, the reading room, up and down the rows of stacks, filling that stilled air with what could only be called primal screams. Why this should have given Frances such exquisite pleasure she couldn’t have said, since she was in rebellion against nothing she knew of. By the time the first students arrived, she and Ursula would be standing behind the main desk, date stamp in hand, sweet as dimity.
One Saturday, the first person who came was a bushy-headed, serious-minded zoology student named Theodore, called Theo by his friends. He gave Frances a funny look, then in a cracked, raspy voice asked her to come with him later and have a cup of coffee. A year later he asked her to marry him. He had a mind unblown by self-regard and lived, it seemed to Frances, in a nursery world of goodness and badness with not much room to move in between.
It’s been mainly a happy marriage. Between the two of them, they’ve invented hundreds of complex ways of enslaving each other, some of them amazingly tender. Like other married people, they’ve learned to read each other’s minds. Once Theo said to Frances as they drove around and around, utterly lost in a vast treeless suburb, “In every one of these houses there’s been a declaration of love,” and this was exactly the thought Frances had been thinking.
To her surprise, to everyone’s surprise, she turned out to have an aptitude for monogamy. Nevertheless, many of the scenes that have come into her life have involved men. Once she was walking down a very ordinary French street on a hot day. A man, bare-chested, drinking Perrier at a café table, sang out, “Bonjour.” Not “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” just “Bonjour.” Cheeky. She was wearing white pants, a red blouse, a straw hat and sunglasses. “Bonjour,” she sang back and gave a sassy little kick, which became the start of a kind of dance. The man at the table clapped his hands over his head to keep time as she went dancing by.
Once she went to the British Museum to finish a piece of research. There was a bomb alert just as she entered, and everyone’s shopping bags and briefcases were confiscated and searched. It happened that Frances had just bought a teddy bear for the child of a friend she was going to visit later in the day. The guard took it, shook it till its eyes rolled, and then carried it away to be X-rayed. Later he brought it to Frances, who was sitting at a table examining a beautiful old manuscript. As he handed her the bear, he kissed the air above its fuzzy head, and Frances felt her mouth go into the shape of a kiss too, a kiss she intended to be an expression of her innocence, only that. He winked. She winked back. He leaned over and whispered into her ear a suggestion that was hideously, comically, obscene. She pretended not to hear, and a few minutes later she left, hurrying down the street full of cheerful shame, her work unfinished.
These are just some of the scenes in Frances’s life. She thinks of them as scenes because they’re much too fragmentary to be stories and far too immediate to be memories. They seem to bloom out of nothing, out of the thin, uncolored air of defeats and pleasures. A curtain opens, a light appears, there are voices or music or sometimes a wide transparent stream of silence. Only rarely do they point to anything but themselves. They’re difficult to talk about. They’re useless, attached to nothing, can’t be traded in or shaped into instruments to prise open the meaning of the universe.
There are people who think such scenes are ornaments suspended from lives that are otherwise busy and useful. Frances knows perfectly well that they are what a life is made of, one fitting against the next like English paving-stones.
Or sometimes she thinks of them as little keys on a chain, keys that open nothing, but simply exist for the beauty of their toothed edges and the way they chime in her pocket.
Other times she is reminded of the Easter eggs her mother used to bring out every year. These were real hens’ eggs with a hole poked in the top and bottom and the contents blown out. The day before Easter, Frances and her mother always sat down at the kitchen table with paint brushes, a glass of water and a box of watercolors. They would decorate half a dozen eggs, maybe more, but only the best were saved from year to year. These were taken from a cupboard just before Easter, removed from their shoebox and carefully arranged, always on the same little pewter cake stand. The eggs had to be handled gently, especially the older ones.
Frances, when she was young, liked to pick up each one in turn and examine it minutely. She had a way of concentrating her thoughts and shutting everything else out, thinking only of this one little thing, this little egg that was round like the world, beautiful in color and satin to the touch, and that fit into the hollow of her hand as though it were made for that very purpose.
Fragility (#ulink_a1318387-6055-5b79-85cf-7980b085a8fa)
WE ARE FLYING OVER THE ROCKIES on our way to Vancouver, and there sits Ivy with her paperback. I ask myself: Should I interrupt and draw her attention to the grandeur beneath us?
In a purely selfish sense, watching Ivy read is as interesting as peering down at those snowy mountains. She turns the pages of a book in the same way she handles every object, with a peculiar respectful gentleness, as though the air around it were more tender than ordinary air. I’ve watched her lift a cup of tea with this same abstracted grace, cradling a thick mug in a way that transforms it into something precious and fragile. It’s a gift some people have.
I decide not to disturb her; utterly absorbed in what she’s reading, she’s seen the Rockies before.
In the seat ahead of us is a young man wearing a bright blue jacket—I remember that once I had a similar jacket in a similar hue. Unlike us, he’s clearly flying over the Rockies for the first time. He’s in a half-standing position at the window, snapping away with his camera, pausing only to change the film. From where I’m sitting I can see his intense, eager trigger hand, his steadying elbow, his dropped lower lip. In a week he’ll be passing his slides around the office, holding them delicately at their edges up to the light. He might set up a projector and screen them one evening in his living room; he might invite a few friends over, and his wife—who will resemble the Ivy of fifteen years ago—will serve coffee and wedges of cheese cake; these are the Rockies, he’ll say—magnificent, stirring, one of the wonders of the continent.
I tell myself that I would give a great deal to be in that young man’s shoes, but this is only a half-truth, the kind of lie Ivy and I sometimes spin for our own amusement. We really don’t want to go back in time. What we envy in the young is that fine nervous edge of perception, the ability to take in reality afresh. I suppose, as we grow older, that’s what we forfeit, acquiring in its place a measure of healthy resignation.
Ivy puts down her book suddenly and reaches for my hand. A cool, light, lazy touch. She’s smiling.
“Good book?”
“Hmmm,” she says, and stretches.
Now, as a kind of duty, I point out the Rockies.
“Beautiful,” she exclaims, leaning toward the window.
And it is beautiful. But unfortunately the plane is flying at a height that extracts all sense of dimension from the view. Instead of snow-capped splendor, we see a kind of Jackson Pollock dribbling of white on green. It’s a vast abstract design, a linking of incised patterns, quite interesting in its way, but without any real suggestion of height or majesty.
“It looks a little like a Jackson Pollock,” Ivy says in that rhythmic voice of hers.
“Did you really say that?”
“I think so.” Her eyebrows go up, her mouth crimps at the edges. “At least, if I didn’t, someone did.”
I lift her hand—I can’t help myself—and kiss her fingertips.
“And what’s that for?” she asks, still smiling.
“An attack of poignancy.”
“A serious new dietary disease, I suppose,” Ivy says, and at that moment the steward arrives with our lunch trays.
Ivy and I have been to Vancouver fairly often on business trips or for holidays. This time it’s different; in three months we’ll be moving permanently to Vancouver, and now the two of us are engaged in that common-enough errand, a house-hunting expedition.
Common, I say, but not for us.
We know the statistics: that about half of all North Americans move every five years, that we’re a rootless, restless, portable society. But for some reason, some failing on our part or perhaps simple good fortune, Ivy and I seem to have evaded the statistical pattern. The small stone-fronted, bow-windowed house we bought when Christopher was born is the house in which we continue to live after twenty years.
If there had been another baby, we would have considered a move, but we stayed in the same house in the middle of Toronto. It was close to both our offices and close too to the clinic Christopher needed. Curiously enough, most of our neighbors also stayed there year after year. In our neighborhood we know everyone. When the news of my transfer came, the first thing Ivy said was, “What about the Mattisons and the Levensons? What about Robin and Sara?”
“We can’t very well take everyone on the street along with us.”
“Oh Lordy,” Ivy said, and bit her lip. “Of course not. It’s only-”
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe we can talk Robin and Sara into taking their holidays on the coast next year. Sara always said—”
“And we’ll be back fairly often. At least twice a year.”
“If only-”
“If only what?”
“Those stupid bulbs.” (I love the way Ivy pronounces the word stupid: stewpid, giving it a patrician lift.)
“Bulbs?”
“Remember last fall, all those bulbs I put in?”
“Oh,” I said, remembering.
She looked at me squarely: “You don’t mind as much as I do, do you?”
“Of course I do. You know I do.”
“Tell me the truth.”
What could I say? I’ve always been impressed by the accuracy of Ivy’s observations. “The truth is—”
“The truth is—?” she helped me along.
“I guess I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?” Her eyes filled with tears. This was a difficult time for us. Christopher had died in January. He was a tough kid and lived a good five years longer than any of us ever thought he would. His death was not unexpected, but still, Ivy and I were feeling exceptionally fragile.
“Ready for what?” she asked again.
“For something,” I admitted. “For anything, I guess.”
The first house we look at seems perfect. The settled neighborhood is dense with trees and shrubbery and reminds us both of our part of Toronto. There are small repairs that need doing but nothing major. Best of all, from the dining room there can be seen a startling lop of blue water meeting blue sky.
I point this out to Ivy; a view was one of the things we had put on our list. There is also a fireplace, another must, and a capacious kitchen with greenhouse windows overlooking a garden.
“And look at the bulbs,” I point out. “Tulips halfway up. Daffodils.”
“Lilies,” Ivy says.
“I think we’ve struck it lucky,” I tell the real-estate woman who’s showing us around, a Mrs. Marjorie Little. (“Call me Marge,” she’d said to us with west-coast breeziness.)
Afterward, in the car, Ivy is so quiet I have to prompt her. “Well?”
Marge Little, sitting at the wheel, peers at me, then at Ivy.
“It’s just,” Ivy begins, “it’s just so depressing.”
Depressing? I can’t believe she’s saying this. A view, central location, a fireplace. Plus bulbs.
“Well,” Ivy says slowly, “it’s a divorce house. You must have noticed?”
I hadn’t. “A divorce house? How do you know?”
“I looked in the closets. Her clothes were there but his weren’t.”
“Oh.”
“And half the pictures had been taken off the wall. Surely you noticed that.”
I shake my head.
“I know it sounds silly, but wouldn’t you rather move into a house with some good”—she pauses—“some good vibrations?”
“Vibrations?”
“Did you notice the broken light in the bathroom? I’ll bet someone threw something at it. In a rage.”
“We could always fix the light. And the other things. And with our own furniture—”
Ivy is an accountant. Once I heard a young man in her firm describe her as a crack accountant. For a number of years now she’s been a senior partner. When this same young man heard she was leaving because of my transfer, he couldn’t help ragging her a little, saying he thought women didn’t move around at the whim of their husbands anymore, and that, out of principle, she ought to refuse to go to Vancouver or else arrange some kind of compromise life—separate apartments, for instance, with weekend rendezvous in Winnipeg.
Ivy had howled at this. She’s a positive, good-natured woman and, as it turned out, she had no trouble finding an opening in a good Vancouver firm at senior level. As I say, she’s positive. Which is why her apprehension over good or bad vibrations is puzzling. Can it be she sees bad times ahead for the two of us? Or is it only that she wants solid footing after these long years with Christopher? Neither of us is quite glued back together again. Not that we ever will be.
“I can’t help it,” Ivy is saying. “It just doesn’t feel like a lucky house. There’s something about—”
Marge Little interrupts with a broad smile. “I’ve got all kinds of interesting houses to show you. Maybe you’ll like the next one better.”
“Does it have good vibes?” Ivy asks, laughing a little to show she’s only half-serious.
“I don’t know,” Marge Little says. “They don’t put that kind of info on the fact sheet.”
The next house is perched on the side of the canyon. No, that’s not quite true. It is, in fact, falling into the canyon. I notice, but don’t mention, the fact that the outside foundation walls are cracked and patched. Inside, the house is alarmingly empty; the cool settled air seems proof that it’s been vacant for some time.
Marge consults her fact sheet. Yes, the house has been on the market about six months. The price has been reduced twice. But—she glances at us—perhaps we noticed the foundation …
“Yes,” I say. “Hopeless.”
“Damn,” Ivy says.
We look at two more houses; both have spectacular views and architectural distinction. But one is a bankruptcy sale and the other is a divorce house. By now I’m starting to pick up the scent: it’s a compound of petty carelessness and strenuous neglect, as though the owners had decamped in a hurry, angry at the rooms themselves.
To cheer ourselves up, the three of us have lunch in a sunny Broadway restaurant. It seems extraordinary that we can sit here and see mountains that are miles away; the thought that we will soon be able to live within sight of these mountains fills us with optimism. We order a little wine and linger in the sunlight. Vancouver is going to be an adventure. We’re going to be happy here. Marge Little, feeling expansive, tells us about her three children and about the problem she has keeping her weight down. “Marge Large they’ll be calling me soon,” she says. It’s an old joke, we sense, and the telling of it makes us feel we’re old friends. She got into the business, she says, because she loves houses. And she has an instinct for matching houses with people. “So don’t be discouraged,” she tells us. “We’ll find the perfect place this afternoon.”
We drive through narrow city streets to a house where a famous movie idol grew up. His mother still lives in the house, a spry, slightly senile lady in her eighties. The tiny house—we quickly see it is far too small for us—is crowded with photographs of the famous son. He beams at us from the hallway, from the dining room, from the bedroom bureau.
“Oh, he’s a good boy. Comes home every two or three years,” his mother tells us, her large teeth shining in a diminished face. “And once I went down there, all the way down to Hollywood, on an airplane. He paid my way, sent me a ticket. I saw his swimming pool. They all have swimming pools. He has a cook, a man who does all the meals, so I didn’t have to lift a finger for a whole week. What an experience, like a queen. I have some pictures someplace I could show you—”
“That would be wonderful,” Marge Little says, “but”—she glances at her watch—“I’m afraid we have another appointment.”
“—I saw those pictures just the other day. Now where—? I think they’re in this drawer somewhere. Here, I knew it. Take a look at this. Isn’t that something? That’s his swimming pool. Kidney-shaped. He’s got another one now, even bigger.”
“Beautiful,” Ivy says.
“And here he is when he was little. See this? He’d be about nine there. We took a trip east. That’s him and his dad standing by Niagara Falls. Here’s another—”
“We really have to—”
“A good boy. I’ll say that for him. Didn’t give any trouble. Sometimes I see his movies on the TV and I can’t believe the things he does, with women and so on. I have to pinch myself and say it’s only pretend—”
“I think—”
“I’m going into this senior-citizen place. They’ve got a nice TV lounge, big screen, bigger than this little bitty one, color too. I always—”
“Sad,” Ivy says, when we escape at last and get into the car.
“The house or the mother?” I ask her.
“Both.”
“At least it’s not a D.H.” (This has become our shorthand expression for divorce house.)
“Wait’ll you see the next place,” Marge Little says, swinging into traffic. “The next place is fabulous.”
Fabulous, yes. But far too big. After that, in a fit of desperation, we look at a condo. “I’m not quite ready for this,” I have to admit.
“No garden,” Ivy says in a numb voice. She looks weary, and we decide to call it a day.
The ad in the newspaper reads: WELL-LOVED FAMILY HOME. And Ivy and Marge Little and I are there, knocking on the door, at nine-thirty in the morning.
“Come in, come in,” calls a young woman in faded jeans. She has a young child on one hip and another—they must be twins—by the hand. Sunlight pours in the front window and there is freshly baked bread cooling on the kitchen counter.
But the house is a disaster, a rabbit warren of narrow hallways and dark corners. The kitchen window is only feet away from a low brick building where bodywork is being done on imported sports cars. The stairs are uneven. The bedroom floors slope, and the paint is peeling off the bathroom ceiling.
“It just kills us to leave this place,” the young woman says. She’s following us through the rooms, pointing with unmistakable sorrow at the wall where they were planning to put up shelving, at the hardwood floors they were thinking of sanding. Out of the blue, they got news of a transfer.
Ironically, they’re going to Toronto, and in a week’s time they’ll be there doing what we’re doing, looking for a house they can love. “But we just know we’ll never find a place like this,” she tells us with a sad shake of her head. “Not in a million zillion years.”
After that we lose track of the number of houses. The day bends and blurs; square footage, zoning regulations, mortgage schedules, double-car garages, cedar siding only two years old—was that the place near that little park? No, that was the one on that little crescent off Arbutus. Remember? The one without the basement.
Darkness is falling as Marge Little drives us back to our hotel. We are passing hundreds—it seems like thousands—of houses, and we see lamps being turned on, curtains being closed. Friendly smoke rises from substantial chimneys. Here and there, where the curtains are left open, we can see people sitting down to dinner. Passing one house, I see a woman in a window, leaning over with a match in her hand, lighting a pair of candles. Ivy sees it too, and I’m sure she’s feeling as I am, a little resentful that everyone but us seems to have a roof overhead.
“Tomorrow for sure,” Marge calls cheerily. (Tomorrow is our last day. Both of us have to be home on Monday.)
“I suppose we could always rent for a year.” Ivy says this with low enthusiasm.
“Or,” I say, “we could make another trip in a month or so. Maybe there’ll be more on the market.”
“Isn’t it funny? The first house we saw, remember? In a way, it was the most promising place we’ve seen.”
“The one with the view from the dining room? With the broken light in the bathroom?”
“It might not look bad with a new fixture. Or even a skylight.”
“Wasn’t that a divorce house?” I ask Ivy.
“Yes,” she shrugs, “but maybe that’s just what we’ll have to settle for.”
“It was listed at a good price.”
“I live in a divorce house,” Marge Little says, pulling in front of our hotel. “It’s been a divorce house for a whole year now.”
“Oh, Marge,” Ivy says. “I didn’t mean—” she stops. “Forgive me.”
“And it’s not so bad. Sometimes it’s darned cheerful.”
“I just—” Ivy takes a breath. “I just wanted a lucky house. Maybe there’s no such thing—”
“Are you interested in taking another look at the first house? I might be able to get you an appointment this evening. That is, if you think you can stand one more appointment today.”
“Absolutely,” we say together.
This time we inspect the house inch by inch. Ivy makes a list of the necessary repairs, and I measure the window for curtains. We hadn’t realized that there was a cedar closet off one of the bedrooms. The lights of the city are glowing through the dining-room window. A spotlight at the back of the house picks out the flowers just coming into bloom. There’ll be room for our hi-fi across from the fireplace. The basement is dry and very clean. The wallpaper in the downstairs den is fairly attractive and in good condition. The stairway is well proportioned and the banister is a beauty. (I’m a sucker for banisters.) There’s an alcove where the pine buffet will fit nicely. Trees on both sides of the house should give us greenery and privacy. The lawn, as far as we can tell, seems to be in good shape. There’s a lazy Susan in the kitchen, also a built-in dishwasher, a later model than ours. Plenty of room for a small table and a couple of chairs. The woodwork in the living room has been left natural, a wonder since so many people, a few years back, were painting over their oak trim.
Ivy says something that makes us laugh. “Over here,” she says, “over here is where we’ll put the Christmas tree.” She touches the edge of one of the casement windows, brushes it with the side of her hand and says, “It’s hard to believe that people could live in such a beautiful house and be unhappy.”
For a moment there’s silence, and then Marge says, “We could put in an offer tonight. I don’t think it’s too late. What do you think?”
————
And now, suddenly, it’s the next evening, and Ivy and I are flying back to Toronto. Here we are over the Rockies again, crossing them this time in darkness. Ivy sits with her head back, eyes closed, her shoulders so sharply her own; she’s not quite asleep, but not quite awake either.
Our plane seems a fragile vessel, a piece of jewelry up here between the stars and the mountains. Flying through dark air like this makes me think that life itself is fragile. The miniature accidents of chromosomes can spread unstoppable circles of grief. A dozen words carelessly uttered can dismantle a marriage. A few gulps of oxygen are all that stand between us and death.
I wonder if Ivy is thinking, as I am, of the three months ahead, of how tumultuous they’ll be. There are many things to think of when you move. For one, we’ll have to put our own house up for sale. The thought startles me, though I’ve no idea why.
I try to imagine prospective buyers arriving for appointments, stepping through our front door with polite murmurs and a sharp eye for imperfections.
They’ll work their way through the downstairs, the kitchen (renewed only four years ago), the living room (yes, a real fireplace, a good draft), the dining room (small, but you can seat ten in a pinch). Then they’ll make their way upstairs (carpet a little worn, but with lots of wear left). The main bedroom is fair size (with good reading lamps built in, also bookshelves).
And then there’s Christopher’s bedroom.
Will the vibrations announce that here lived a child with little muscular control, almost no sight or hearing and no real consciousness as that word is normally perceived? He had, though—and perhaps the vibrations will acknowledge the fact—his own kind of valor and perhaps his own way of seeing the world. At least Ivy and I always rewallpapered his room every three years or so out of a conviction that he took some pleasure in the sight of ducks swimming on a yellow sea. Later, it was sailboats; then tigers and monkeys dodging jungle growth; then a wild op-art checkerboard; and then, the final incarnation, a marvelous green cave of leafiness with amazing flowers and impossible birds sitting in branches.
I can’t help wondering if these prospective buyers, these people looking for God only knows what, if they’ll enter this room and feel something of his fragile presence alive in a fragile world.
Well, we shall see. We shall soon see.
The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On (#ulink_f570f5b9-46e7-52bc-8a7a-ffd48241e732)
“THE METAPHOR is DEAD,” bellowed the gargantuan professor, his walrus mustache dancing and his thundery eyebrows knitting together rapaciously. “Those accustomed to lunching at the high table of literature will now be able to nosh at the trough on a streamlined sub minus the pickle. Banished is that imperial albatross, that dragooned double agent, that muddy mirror lit by the false flashing signal like and by that even more presumptuous little sugar lump as. The gates are open, and the prisoner, freed of his shackles, has departed without so much as a goodbye wave to those who would take a simple pomegranate and insist it be the universe.
“Furthermore,” trumpeted the cagey professor, warming to his thesis and drumming on the lectern, “the dogged metaphor, that scurfy escort vehicle of crystalline simplicity, has been royally indicted as the true enemy of meaning, a virus introduced into a healthy bloodstream and maintained by the lordly shrewdness of convention. Oh, it was born innocently enough with Homer and his wine-dark sea (a timid offering, perhaps, but one that dropped a velvet curtain between what was and what almost was). Then came Beowulf, stirring the pot with his cunning kennings, and before you could count to sixteen, the insidious creature had wiggled through the window and taken over the house. Soon it became a private addiction, a pipe full of opium taken behind a screen—but the wavelet graduated to turbulent ocean, and the sinews of metaphor became, finally, the button and braces that held up the pants of poesy. The commonest object was yoked by adulterous communion with unlike object (bread and wine, as it were, touching the salty lips of unreason like a capricious child who insists on placing a token toe in every puddle).
“Initially a toy of the literati,” the fiery professor cried, “the metaphor grew like a polyp on the clean chamber of poetry whose friendly narrative lines had previously lain as simply as knives and forks in a kitchen drawer and whose slender, unjointed nouns, colloquial as onions, became puffed up like affected dowagers, swaying, pelvis forward, into a Victorian parlor of cluttered predicates, where they took to sitting about on the embroidered cushions of metonymy and resting their metered feet on quirky mean-spirited oxymorons.
“Once established they acquired an air of entitlement, the swag and flounce and glitter of the image boxed within another image, one bleating clause mounting another, sometimes marinated in irony, other times drenched in the teacup of whimsy. Grown fat with simile and the lace of self-indulgence, the embryo sentence sprouted useless tentacles and became an incomprehensible polyhedron, a glassine envelope enclosing multiple darting allusions that gave off the perfume of apples slowly rotting in a hermit’s cryptic cellar. There followed signs of severe hypochondria as these verbal clotheshorses stood contemplating one another and noting the inspired imbroglio lodged beneath each painted fingernail. The bell had clearly sounded. It was time to retreat.
“And now,” the professor essayed, stabbing the listening air, “like light glancing off a bowling ball, the peeled, scrubbed and eviscerated simplicity of language is reborn. Out onto the rubbish heap goes the fisherman’s net of foxy allusions. A lifeboat has been assigned to every passenger—and just in time too—and we are once again afloat on the simple raft of the declarative sentence (that lapsed Catholic of the accessible forms) and sent, shriven and humble, into orbit, unencumbered by the debris of dusty satellites, no longer pretending every object is like another; instead every object is (is, that frosty little pellet of assertion that sleeps in the folds of the newly minted, nip-wasted sentence, simple as a slug bolt and, like a single hand clapping, requiring neither nursemaid to lean upon nor the succor of moth-eaten mythology to prop it up). With watercolor purity, with soldierly persistence and workmanlike lack of pretence, the newly pruned utterance appears to roll onto the snowy page with not a single troubling cul-de-sac or detour into the inky besmudged midnight of imagery.
“But, alas,” the ashen professor hollowly concluded, “these newly resurrected texts, for all their lean muscularity (the cleanly gnawed bones of noun, the powerful hamstrings of verb) carry still the faulty chromosome, the trace element, of metaphor—since language itself is but a metaphoric expression of human experience. It is the punishing silence around the word that must now be claimed for literature, the pure uncobbled stillness of the caesura whose unknowingness throws arrows of meaning (palpable as summer fruit approaching ripeness) at the hem of that stitched under-skirt of affirmation/negation, and plants a stout flag once and forever in the unweeded, unchoreographed vacant lot of being.
“And now, gentle people, the chair will field questions.”
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Carol Shields
For the first time all of Carol Shields’ remarkable short stories – some previously unpublished – are gathered together in one volume.‘Carol Shields’ stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure’ Alice MunroIn the Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields’ original short-story volumes, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, as well as many stories not previously published in the UK, including ‘Segue’, her last work.In these stories the author combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that won so many readers to her prize-winning novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless.
The Collected Stories
CAROL SHIELDS
For Emma and Alden
Contents
Cover (#u83df48ca-95b2-51d3-8d61-f58da66d7802)
Title Page (#ufc233b8e-3b55-5db3-acfd-e864d470b831)
Introduction By Margaret Atwood (#uda13142d-6754-572d-bf35-58b5bc00cd0b)
Segue (#u7b319aa7-84ea-5325-b3ea-fe037f333c8d)
Various Miracles (#u3fe9af4e-5be3-5114-856d-6cb6fff11d36)
Various Miracles (#uf4f81001-2917-557c-8e64-098084128ebf)
Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass (#ue97716b7-2930-55e3-b736-96e96a2a4661)
Accidents (#u74883bfa-9106-5449-bc15-6145a84ecafa)
Sailors Lost at Sea (#ufda27c2e-b6c8-5f40-bd2c-80976d4bdcf2)
Purple Blooms (#u32bfa03d-bc70-5a03-87a2-b1f0c7a8557a)
Flitting Behavior (#uc54ed3bf-ff66-53fa-a007-4570ec4cec16)
Pardon (#ua5fb74f8-2953-53f5-9721-647bfd391095)
Words (#u62d54e0b-0b84-5e0f-a88b-82d9c835b21a)
Poaching (#ufdd5b4ad-36a1-572d-852f-93e3489ec912)
Scenes (#u3e4dd03f-04b6-53da-9cd7-6b3455d9c294)
Fragility (#uee45e55e-8cd5-5570-b26d-33d536f8e309)
The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On (#u15a2b5d1-7e66-51e1-a5e6-90bd3d295e5b)
A Wood (with Anne Giardini) (#u540b3f31-0f86-5c38-b54d-0f73e2193e1d)
Love so Fleeting, Love so Fine (#u5f26552b-9f13-555f-ac93-02f81fc66959)
Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls (#u0a37e745-5f56-5849-940c-61249d84d921)
Invitations (#ua151ff79-dbea-53f4-a83e-9044f221c6c5)
Taking the Train (#u7f7fc464-846b-5e74-8152-dfddef58790c)
Home (#u7ef97959-c25f-52ef-804c-a84c2a1626c4)
The Journal (#u41fc8ccc-4fd7-5fae-b0c5-e4d8f2d44055)
Salt (#uc75c2916-20b6-55eb-9d25-7325b951379e)
Others (#u5dd7d542-d0bd-59cd-bd8f-ff3cc03263c4)
The Orange Fish (#u6fde22f1-8333-5843-b0cb-1958f081cbd5)
The Orange Fish (#uffa66f1e-46cf-5912-907c-05bbd1912cdd)
Chemistry (#u2f04f2b4-ad15-596b-bc21-95dfe518c689)
Hazel (#ufae794a2-9723-5d7c-81ee-5b2c213db48d)
Today Is the Day (#uef865e63-5f91-5d82-8b97-52f6c1a11e86)
Hinterland (#u57e96fdf-aacf-505f-ac10-74a52dd79381)
Block Out (#ue39a23c3-bb5a-5e26-a031-9558946152e9)
Collision (#u3da586ea-944d-5c83-8085-a5842ff21853)
Good Manners (#u3cf3e8cb-06af-56b3-bcb9-8b45208a32fd)
Times of Sickness and Health (#uc7faaaf3-dc63-5443-ad35-b5e6e01324b3)
Family Secrets (#u0c72806e-96a1-5629-9f2c-78ea4d52170d)
Fuel for the Fire (#u589c0292-72d4-5f8c-8e01-4f20c9d52eac)
Milk Bread Beer Ice (#u4caddc7c-6998-589e-8e9e-59426b10aa68)
Dressing Up for the Carnival (#u8ca4f116-77ba-5644-a73f-9ddd67eb263e)
Dressing Up for the Carnival (#ue51ff9d9-3240-5c9d-9859-fb96daaf67c0)
A Scarf (#ua5ed81dc-6842-5296-ac86-8de8e9a08d83)
Weather (#u64681399-91db-5233-8ec7-64f0055caf80)
Flatties: Their Various Forms and Uses (#uae8c367e-0d62-504f-ba09-f726554af797)
Dying for Love (#u836a4d13-3152-53a7-b2eb-4b26f42e625b)
Ilk (#uaf8d8241-927a-5b43-b8eb-c28e0af16334)
Stop! (#u02c6315b-6b3e-5b16-9000-1871fe44cc50)
Mirrors (#u27b3526c-6cb5-5574-a381-fefca35be586)
The Harp (#u9612a118-aeb8-5f02-90a6-c50e71f52f5f)
Our Men and Women (#uaf85a35c-a5e2-5d7b-9a79-0dbdd94c1812)
Keys (#u98e40738-551a-5bda-a9f8-8b3e51076646)
Absence (#u29e5c107-4eb4-5912-8def-9895cad431b6)
Windows (#u05849be0-a633-5430-8718-91ab99b69cd1)
Reportage (#uf446aa43-d7a6-54b0-8e1a-1f80aaae7692)
Edith-Esther (#u7de93858-d75b-5f2c-824c-fd92e9a12323)
New Music (#ue66b9b14-ce37-52cc-906e-7a99ca26b2bd)
Soup du Jour (#u42858f89-25e0-5abb-8d0e-13c2e47bdc35)
Invention (#uc787f185-d691-5940-9955-f94e2c1dc49d)
Death of an Artist (#u5c08caa1-a001-5c22-9a0e-e25787faecf5)
The Next Best Kiss (#u7f10a547-0612-5fc3-85e2-85d3d24d867e)
Eros (#u3328b41a-4135-5ca6-b2d9-65303ba082bf)
Dressing Down (#u261e7cb0-0dc9-5be8-97e0-76fdc670d961)
About the Author (#u737ec195-c334-5392-87a4-eb78fec80a08)
From the reviews of Collected Stories: (#udf630d1e-bba7-5367-b5dd-ff536bd8b9cb)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#u7cf4f634-7b93-5ae9-b78b-576c65bff4fd)
Copyright (#u3374be86-8c9a-53b1-a4f7-cfa16fb4a530)
About the Publisher (#u84e24f33-3509-5696-94ef-cdde881c4585)
Introduction By Margaret Atwood (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
I began reading Carol Shields’s books many years ago, with The Box Garden. In that novel there’s a passage that made me laugh so hard I thought I would do myself an injury. It’s the chapter describing a mother with scant taste but a lot of energy, who spends her time like a down-market and rather crazed Martha Stewart, relentlessly decorating her modest house - papering and re-papering its walls, hand-painting its lampshades, dying its scatter rugs - much to the alarm of her adolescent daughter, who never knows what new, ferocious colour the house will be when she gets home from school.
This, I thought, was not only terrific satire, but fine comedy as well. Yet when I recently read the passage again, it no longer struck me as all that funny. Now - years later, and with several demented decorating episodes of my own behind me - I found it poignant, even faintly tragic. The mother is defeated by her house, in the end. She abandons her doomed attempts to make it into a work of art. She recognizes the futility of her efforts. Time claims her. She sinks down. She gives up.
This ability to strike two such different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’s writing - the iridescent, often hilarious surfaces of things, but also their ominous depths. The shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx.
Carol Shields died on 16 July 2003 at her home in Victoria, British Columbia, after a long battle with cancer. She was sixty-eight. The enormous media coverage given to her and the sadness expressed by her many readers paid tribute to the high esteem in which she was held in her own country, but her death made the news all around the world.
Conscious as she was of the vagaries of fame and the element of chance in any fortune, she would have viewed that with a certain irony, but she would also have found it deeply pleasing. She knew about the darkness, but - both as an author and as a person - she held on to the light. ‘She was just a luminous person, and that would be important and persist even if she hadn’t written anything,’ said her friend and fellow author Alice Munro.
Earlier in her writing career, some critics mistook this quality of light in her for lightness, light-mindedness, on the general principle that comedy - a form that turns on misunderstanding and confusion, but ends in reconciliation, of however tenuous a kind - is less serious than tragedy, and that the personal life is of lesser importance than the public one. Carol Shields knew better. Human life is a mass of statistics only for statisticians: the rest of us live in a world of individuals, and most of them are not prominent. Their joys, however, are fully joyful, and their griefs are real. It was the extraordinariness of ordinary people that was Shields’s forte. She gave her material the full benefit of her large intelligence, her powers of observation, her humane wit, and her wide reading. Her books are delightful, in the original sense of the word: they are full of delights.
She understood the life of the obscure and the overlooked partly because she had lived it: her work reveals a deep sympathy with the plight of the woman novelist toiling incognito, appreciated only by an immediate circle but longing for her due. Born in 1935 in the United States, Shields was at the tail end of the post-war generation of North American college-educated women who were convinced by the mores of their time that their destiny was to get married and have five children. This Carol did; she remained a devoted mother and a constant wife throughout her life. Her husband Don was a civil engineer; they moved to Canada, beginning with Toronto in the sixties, a time of poetic ferment in that city. Carol, who was already writing then, and attended some readings, said of that time, ‘I knew no writers.’ Undoubtedly she felt relegated to that nebulous category, ‘just a housewife’, like Daisy in The Stone Diaries and like Mary Swann, the eponymous poet who is murdered by her husband when her talent begins to show.
After obtaining an MA at the University of Ottawa, Shields taught for years at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, where she began publishing in the seventies. But this was the decade of rampant feminism, in the arts at least. Her early books, including Others, Intersect, Small Ceremonies, and The Box Garden, which examined the vagaries of domestic life without torpedoing it, did not make a large stir, although some of their early readers found them both highly accomplished and hilarious. She had her first literary breakthrough - not in terms of quality of writing, but in terms of audience size - in Britain rather than in North America, with her 1992 novel The Republic of Love.
Her glory book was The Stone Diaries, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Canadian Governor General’s Award, and then, in 1995, the Pulitzer Prize, a feat her dual citizenship made possible. Her next novel, Larry’s Party, won the Orange Prize in 1998. To say that she was not thrilled by success would be to do her an injustice. She knew what it was worth. She’d waited a long time for it. She wore her new-found prominence with graciousness and used it with largesse.
Unless, her last novel, was written in the small space of time she spent in England and France, after beating cancer the first time and before it came back. It’s a hymn to the provisional: the sense of happiness and security as temporary and fragile is stronger than ever. Those who had heard Carol Shields interviewed earlier were probably surprised by a frankly feminist strain in the novel - particularly the angry letters her protagonist, writer Reta Winters, addressed to male pundits dismissive of woman writers - because in conversation she was discreet and allusive. The little frown, the shake of the head said it all. Possibly feminism was something she worked into, as she published more widely and came up against more commentators who thought excellent pastry was a facile creation compared with raw meat on skewers, and who in any case could not recognize the thread of blood in her work, though it was always there. The problem of the luminous is that its very luminosity obscures the shadows it depends on for its brilliance.
Unless was published in 2002; although it was shortlisted for just about every major English-language prize, the Munro Doctrine, informally named after Alice Munro, had set in by then - after a certain number of prizes you are shot into the stratosphere, where you circulate in radiant mists, far beyond the ken of juries.
I last saw Carol Shields at the end of April. Her new house was spacious, filled with light; outside the windows the tulips in her much loved garden were in bloom. Typically for her, she claimed she couldn’t quite believe she deserved to live in such a big and beautiful house. She felt so lucky, she said.
Although she was very ill, she didn’t seem it. She was as alert, as interested in books of all kinds, and as curious as ever. She’d recently been reading non-fiction works on biology, she told me: something new for her, a new source of amazement and wonder. We did not speak of her illness. She preferred to be treated as a person who was living, not one who was dying.
And live she did, and live she does; for as John Keats remarked, every writer has two souls, an earthly one and one that lives on in the world of writing as a voice in the writing itself. It’s this voice - astute, compassionate, observant and deeply human - that will continue to speak to her readers everywhere. For who is better at delineating happiness - especially the sudden, unlooked-for, unearned kind of happiness - than Carol Shields? It’s easier to kill than to give birth, easier to destroy than to create, and easier for a writer to describe gloom than to evoke joy. Carol Shields can do both supremely well, but it’s her descriptions of joy that leave you open-mouthed. The world may be a soap bubble hovering over a void, but look - what astonishing colours it has, and isn’t it amazing that such a thing exists at all?
Such a world - various, ordinary, shimmering, evanescent but miraculous - is a gift; and it’s the vision of this gift that Carol Shields has presented us with in her extraordinary books. We give thanks for it - and for her.
Something has occurred to her—something transparently simple, something she’s always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we are still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.
—From The Stone Diaries
Segue (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
SOMETHING IS ALWAYS SAYING TO ME: Be plain. Be clear. But then something else interferes and unjoints my good intentions.
Max and I were out yesterday morning, Sunday, a simple enough errand in our neighborhood. We “sallied forth” to buy a loaf of good seed bread and a potted plant, chrysanthemums in our case, with the smashed little faces that our daughter so admires, that bitter bronze color, matching the tablecloth she was sure to be laying right that moment out there in Oak Park. Eleven o’clock; my husband Max and I would be expected at half past twelve. We always arrive carrying a modest gift of some sort.
There, at the market, stimulated, probably, by the hint of frost in the air, I felt a longing to register the contained, isolated instant we had manufactured and entered, the purchase of the delicious hard-crusted bread, the decision over the potted plant—this was what I wanted to preserve. But an intrusive overview camera (completely imaginary, needless to say) bumped against me, so that instead of feeling the purity of the coins leaving my hand, I found myself watching the two of us, a man and a woman of similar height, both in their middle sixties, both slightly stooped—you’d hardly notice unless you were looking—and dressed in bright colors, making a performance of paying for their rounded and finite loaf of bread and then the burst of rusty chrysanthemums.
Wait a minute. Shouldn’t there be a grandchild in this picture, a little boy or girl staying over with Nana and Poppa in downtown Chicago for the weekend? Well, no, our aging couple has not been so fortunate.
Our Sunday self-consciousness, the little mid-morning circle around Max and me, was bisected by light and dark. The day bloomed into mildness, October 7, one year and one month after the September 11 tragedy—event, spectacle, whatever you choose to call it. Max is a well-known Chicago novelist—he both loves and hates that regional designation—and he was, of course, spotted by other Sunday morning shoppers. That’s Max Sexton. Where? Over there. Really? A little buzz travels with my husband, around him and above him, which, I believe, dishes out the gold dust that keeps him alive. To be noticed, to be recognized. With his white beard, white swifts of soft hair swept backward, his old-fashioned, toolarge horn-rimmed spectacles, he is a familiar enough sight in our immediate neighborhood, and—allow me to say—in the national journals too, even to the point that he has been mentioned once or twice in the same breath with the Nobel Prize (as a dark horse, the darkest of horses). Not that we ever speak of this. It does not come up, we forbid it, the two of us. He has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer—we don’t speak of that either.
There we were, yesterday morning, a fine Sunday.
Accompanying the novelist Max Sexton was his wife of forty years—me—whose name is Jane; I had my right arm crooked loosely through the great author’s blue nylon jacket sleeve. Plain Jane. Well, not quite, God be thanked. My very good scarf gives me a certain look, not just its color, but the fact that it was knotted high up on the throat. Jane, the wife, the poet and editor, soon (tomorrow) to become past president of the American Sonnet Society—now known as Sonnet Revival—she with her hair in a smooth white pageboy and her reasonably trim body, c’est moi. Notice the earrings, handmade, Mexican. Wouldn’t you just know! Oh God, yes. Yesterday, at the Andersonville market in Chicago’s near-north side, Jane Sexton was sporting an excellent cashmere poncho-thingamajig, deep rose in color, and well-fitting black pants and expensive boots, which she always keeps nicely polished.
Let me say it: I am an aging woman of despairing good cheer—just look through the imaginary camera lens and watch me as I make the Sunday morning transaction over the bread, then the flowers, my straw tote from our recent holiday in Jamaica, my smile, my upturned sixty-seven-year-old voice, a voice so crying-out and clad with familiarity that, in fact, I can’t hear it anymore myself, thank God; my ears are blocked. Lately everything to do with my essence has become transparent, neutral: Good morning, Jane Sexton smiles to one and all (such a friendly, down-to-earth woman). “What a perfect fall day.” “What glorious blooms!” “Why, Mr. Henning, this bread is still warm! Can this be true?”
Max must surely hear the scattershot of my neighborhood greetings, so fond in their expression and so traditionally patterned, exactly what healthy, seasoned, amiable women learn to say in such chapters of their lives. He has, after so many years, a certain amount of faith in my voice, if nothing else, the voice that he’s married to, but then he doesn’t believe, I suspect, that the mystery of being is as deeply manifest in women as in men. The voice, as he perfectly well knows, is a social projection, an oral accomplishment, something I’ve created and maintained along with my feminine peers. I’m just being merry—that’s how I imagine Max processing my ebullience—I’m being cordial in a way that may be slightly dishonest but that keeps life from bearing down with its solemn weight, keeps it nosing forward, and overrides the worst possible story the day might otherwise offer, his story, that is, which could quickly turn dreary and strangulated without my floating social descant riding overhead on strings of nylon. Oh, do shut up, Jane.
Yes, there we stood: the morning’s excursion to the market, which we managed to stretch out an hour longer than it should have taken, then the taxi to our daughter’s house in Oak Park, her austere three-story brick cube on East Avenue (built 1896) where she lives with her film agent husband, Ivan, with its wide front steps and shrubbery and cement cupids—where we were to have lunch, as usual on Sundays, something hot and savory in the dining room, followed by fresh fruit (on French fruit plates, each one different in design, and accompanied by knives with ceramic handles) and afterward coffee, and then the journey home. Ivan, without a word of complaint, will drive us back to our downtown apartment, silently ferrying his mother-in-law, his father-in-law (he is a man who cannot drive and talk at the same time), eastward through the light Sunday traffic, taking Chicago Avenue as usual. He will actually back his old Packard out of the Oak Park garage, slowly, down the narrow overgrown driveway with its scraping branches, wincing as he hears his beautifully restored car suffering instances of minute damage.
I have attempted in my life—at least in the last thirty years—to write one sonnet every fourteen days, and it is my especial (see Fowler’s on the difference between especial and special) pleasure to spread the work out over the available working days. On Mondays, usually in the early morning after the house has been set right, I decide on the form—Italian (for which I have a special fondness), Shakespearean, contemporary or what I, and some of my colleagues, call essentialist. Surprisingly, this choice precedes the subject matter. “But how do you decide what exactly to write about?” asked the Chicago Tribune journalist, Meg Alford, in her early spring article.
As though I would tell her—and the world—about the tiny spiral notebook in the upper-left-hand drawer of my desk with its crowded list recorded randomly in ink or else pencil, and even in one case lip-liner, of new and possible subjects: the smell of taxis, the texture of bread, sleep, chewing gum, Picasso, flints and arrowheads, the cello, the shape of coastal islands and the children who are born on islands, cabbage, shingle beaches, feet, Styrofoam, photographs of the newborn as they appear in the newspaper (with sleek seal-baby faces stroked in stone). Or a medieval wooden Christ image that Max happened upon at the Art Institute, brooms and brushes and dustpans and the concept of debris (how we half treasure what we can’t wait to throw away), a table set for eight (and its companion sestet “Table Set for Seven”), the beauty of coinage when neatly stacked on a counter, urban alleys after dark, and—a mere jump away—the commingling of hollyhocks and overhead wire, and then human faces and their afterimage—an afterimage not being anything like an aura, but possessing a different kind of density altogether. I’ve worked on this particular afterimage/aura construct for the last two weeks, finishing on Saturday afternoon (with a slight alteration round about midnight, two closing words pondered and then juxtaposed), and was more than usually pleased with my efforts, that feeling every poet knows of arrival home, the self returned to its self.
There is never a shortage of subjects, I explained to the Chicago Trib reporter, hoping my teeth were not projecting an idiotic over-gladness at the thought of such abundance waiting to be expressed, matter and ideas swelling forward, eager to be sonnetized.
For the next two weeks my writing will approach the subject of my aging body; I have attempted this subject before, but always with indirection, as though I were peering at it from behind a shrub, so that it could be anyone’s body. Now I must claim it, it seems, as mine. I see it close up: chin, breasts, stomach, hips and legs giving way to specific gravity, which will never relent, no matter what I do. The stars are speeding away from each other—we know that, so why are we surprised when the same thing happens to our various body parts, their willingness to spread and collapse and soften. My kneecaps, the skin that covers them, are as wrinkled as the fuzz of a poached peach, and sliding downward, always downward. But no one sees my knees anymore, so it doesn’t matter.
Sonnet writing—and this is what I wanted the Trib reporter to understand—no longer confines itself to the professing and withdrawing of courtly love, although I insisted that a nod to such love is always hovering, or rather nudging. Is this notion true or just part of my fussy exegetic self? Courtly love? Who knows what shadow of that instinct survives? To be honest (not that I was honest with the slender, leather-skirted junior reporter and her tape recorder), it’s only a suspicion borrowed from Max’s belief that every novel, whatever its genre or subject, is about death. I certainly have never bought that one, not for a minute. A novel is about everything it touches upon, and so is a sonnet.
I reminded the reporter that sonnet means “little sound.” “Oh,” she said, and I could tell by the way her pen jumped in her hand that she was charmed by the idea; people almost always are.
Sonnets are taken so strenuously, so literally, when taught at school, or at least they used to be, and the definition—fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter—hardens and ends up gesturing toward an artifact, an object one might construct from a kit. But if you picture the sonnet, instead, as a little sound, a ping in the great wide silent world, you make visible a sudden fluidity to the form, a splash of noise, but a carefully measured splash that’s saved from preciosity by the fact that it comes from within the body’s own borders; one voice, one small note extended, and then bent; the bending is everything, the volta, the turn, and also important is where it occurs within the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground,” to quote old Wordsworth. From there the “little sound” sparks and then forms itself out of the dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness.
Max’s novels, on the other hand, come as a communal roar, especially the most recent one, Flat Planet, which was published with exquisitely poor timing, last year, 2001, on September 10.
Of course, no one had time to read the ensuing reviews of Flat Planet, no one cared about social novels and novelistic dioramas during that pinched, poisoned, vulnerable and shocking time, and it must be admitted that the contents of Flat Planet, with its wrangling families and chords of memory, sounded rancorously in the face of Ground Zero. Flat Planet became a note in the margin: NOTED CHICAGO WRITER PRESENTS NEUROTIC FATHER (who tries his damndest to persuade his adult kids to come home for Thanksgiving, when they’d rather be out in the world making money or enjoying alternative forms of sex or fine dining.) One critic did go so far as to say that Max Sexton at least had the stones to resist the excesses of postmodernism. Stones; Max loved that, I could tell. Max also loves—has always loved—Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving of the old, weird America that lived in the woods or behind sets of green hills. He wanted so much for the book to sum up all that the word thanksgiving illuminates in America. But, really, what does the idea of thanks mean when a spectacularly fortunate country has been smacked in the chin? Has been flattened. Thanks to whom and for what?
Somewhere, someday, probably soon, a scholar will write a comparative thesis on pre- and post-World Trade Center literature. I can imagine her (or him), an intrepid young person in her early, awkward twenties (Columbia or else Yale), her hair flattened by neglect, her body unbalanced by bad posture and fad diets, perpetually in a state of flinching, just slightly overawed by her male supervisor (or the other way around), but determined (nevertheless) to identify the fulcrum that she knows, by instinct, separates the now-world, which has seen the end of Fortress America, and the notion of giving thanks from the “olden days”—separates real terrorism from the old excuse of vengeance, striking back when power is denied.
Max, with his shy, proud, leftish politics, would never reduce the ill-timing of September 11 to a career complaint, but I know he has felt the injustice of it. I understand exactly how he could have emended the book’s galleys, given a few weeks’ grace, even a few days’, and, having done so, he would have found himself credited by the literary media with a handsome sense of prophecy and the companionable embrace of now that shades, so subtly, toward the current state of inquietude in America at this moment.
Instead, he and his book Flat Planet have been swept into a cave of unfashionable hush, dismissed and somehow made to feel a triviality. Since Flat Planet (those quarreling family members and their generational rivalries and heroic accumulations of wealth), Max has stayed as far as he can from talking to me about his New Manuscript.
Ever since we were married (1957), since the publication of his early Lincoln Park Beatitudes, Max has always had on hand a New Manuscript. That’s part of what I married at the altar of Euclid Methodist Church in Oak Park. He had never made a secret of the fact that he intended to spend his life writing novels; it was certainly not a thing hidden from the new young wife—me—who had pledged herself to be Max Sexton’s muse, even though we never thought of employing the word muse. He believed in my support, and I believed in his ability to have, always, in the rim of his consciousness, a New Manuscript, the future offering, the work with which he was currently engaged and to which I would always take a second place. What did I pledge in return? Nothing, really, except my presence. My abiding presence, the value of which I have recently come to question.
The new, new, New Manuscript lives at this moment in Max’s orange vinyl briefcase (a souvenir bought in a public market in Paris, which he uses for luck), really a child’s 1960ish backpack, a cartable. The manuscript might comprise three pages or three hundred at this point. I haven’t asked. He takes it with him in the morning when he goes to his office, which is a small, comfortless room over a hardware outlet a mere two blocks away on Rush Street.
It is surprising to me that in a busy urban high-tech city we still need a place to buy screws and nuts, nails and hammers. We continue to require these old-fashioned items, as well as a place where they can be procured. You have to enter the revolving door of our very successful local hardware store, then walk by the rubber-smelling stock of garden tools and housewares, then up a set of stairs, to find Max’s office door, a plain gray-painted metal door that opens with difficulty, scraping hard against the cheap tiled floor. There’s a stubby window (glass bricks, gritted with dirt) high up on one wall. There’s a shared bathroom down the hall; Max formerly had to ask one of the cashiers downstairs for a key, but now he has acquired one of his own.
For my husband, Max, spartanness serves as a set of crossed fingers; he mustn’t give way to greed or a taste for luxury, or it will eat him up the way it ate Bellow and Steinbeck. Probably this explains why the two of us have never owned a car, certainly an eccentricity for our generation.
In the late afternoon, after a day at his word processor, he locks his office door with a sigh—or so I imagine—and totes his briefcase down the stairs, across the street and home, and then the two of us sit down in the living room for coffee.
I use freshly ground beans from the freezer, also beautiful Mexican handmade cups and saucers on a polished wooden tray; we deserve this after all our work, and after, in Max’s case, hours of self-denial in his blank cell. What do we talk about?
He seems—I can only guess at this from the way his face relaxes, his tongue caught in silence—to enjoy an account of my day of sonnet-making, as long as I remember to keep my merry voice, but he offers nothing in return about the contents of his briefcase and how the New Manuscript is progressing.
Our Andersonville apartment in the late afternoon catches the full orange of the western sun. This is the old Swedish immigrant neighborhood, now—who knows why?—a refuge for gays and lesbians. Look at us. We are two oldish, coupled heterosexuals drinking coffee after a day of writing, of transposing our thoughts onto the ephemera of paper. One of us speaks of it, and one of us doesn’t. I can’t be sure of holding his interest when I tell him of my daily progress, but he is always eager to hear about—and amused by—the latest news of our Monday meetings of Sonnet Revival. Today was the day when, after all these years, I handed over the society’s chair to another sonneteer, or sonnet-maker as we prefer to be called nowadays, a man named Victor Glantz. Max knows Victor and despises him, yet he inclined his head when Victor’s name came up, eager for details, and anxious, I could see, to avoid any reference to his own working day.
His side trips to the Newbury, his “research,” assure me the New Manuscript is going slowly—and that means badly. Research is a postponement, as I’ve heard Max say a dozen times. A novel is a whole world; there’s so much to get right, but you don’t get it right from reading encyclopedia articles. Sonnets, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter, those little sounds.
I work on my sonnets at a small keyhole desk in a corner of our blue-and-gray bedroom. I actually work with real paper, lined paper from a thick tablet, and a ballpoint pen, with a great many crossings-out and dozens of arrows and question marks and sometimes such marginal scribblings as “No!” or “saccharine” or “derivative,” or else I present myself with that bold command: “Make fresher?” Freshness is the most demanding task one faces when dealing with a traditional meter, no matter how forgiving that meter is.
The first several pages are a mess, but I like to allow the mess to flow and flower. I make it move, sitting back in my chair, rotating my shoulders every half hour or so; I try to unknot my muscles, go, go, go—as long as it is forward. Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy. Forget all that business about fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter; think of Leonardo and his sage wisdom: “Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom.” Or the problems that accrue from the “weight of too much liberty” (Wordsworth). Drown out the noise of rhyme and rhythm. Think only of the small dramatic argument that’s being brought into being—a handball court, or a courtroom itself, hard, demanding thick stone walls—between perseverance and its asymmetrical smash of opposition. Think of that rectangle, perfect in its proportions, that plastic cutlery tray in your kitchen drawer, with its sharp divisions for forks, knives, spoons. Or think of the shape of a human life, which, like it or not, is limited. I believe that humans are meant to live about a hundred years—after that the cells stop wanting to divide and replicate themselves. Chickens, if left alone, will live for thirty years. I wrote a sonnet once about a chicken in great old age, screeching into its decayed wing feathers. Every species has a probable life span, and this observation offers me a verification of sorts for my fourteen-line creations.
From week to week, the subject of my ongoing sonnet suggests itself. It’s as though there’s a small thread clinging to my sweater’s sleeve, always there, waiting to be picked off. I look up from my desk at the framed poster of Rilke’s “Sonnet to Orpheus no. 14” that’s fixed to the wall, and think: this is me. This is I—getting more grammatical, now—my surroundings being a fine-furred extension of myself. These moments of mental vacancy are mine too, and the smothering way, according to Max, I have of signing my letters with amities and my poems with the turn in point of view at about—more or less—the eighth line. Me, always me. My inescapable self with its slightly off-balanced packaging, benignly decentered by an altered view. When I announce my name, Jane Sexton, to new acquaintances, in circumstances formal or informal, my attempt at musical elusion is also part of me, riding up the “a” in Jane, as though a twinkly uncertainty waited, then plunging down into the plainness of Sexton, with its embedded salute to hard churchly labor—the sexton being only a sort of janitor, and wouldn’t I rather have a name like Bishop or Deacon? No, I would not want to lose my bell-ringing, steeple-climbing, altar-dusting self, unconditioned for awe, broken-tongued on the subject of reverence.
My aging is me too, as well as the subject of my current sonnet. Only two years ago the idea of aging belonged to the whole world. It was background. I hadn’t been touched by it then. Now I am. Because I’m tall and thin, I am conscious of my bones, especially my hips, which are so shallowly buried, and also conscious of their curvature and sharpness. Often I feel like a walking ossuary. Shouldn’t the exercise of staring at my body involve a little veneration? Well, yes. My knuckles have grown elaborate and curious, white and blue knobs in a setting of stringy flesh. I’ve learned to curl my hands in my lap, one inside the other, so that no one can see the wonder of their structure, no one but me.
I am more and more solitary, and so is my poor Max. Are we then starting to take responsibility for our own dying bodies? It seems that each of us will have to do this on our own.
For a long time I have been perfectly happy to chair the twice-monthly meetings of the Sonnet Society, known since 1988 as the Sonnet Revival. Every second Monday, noon to one-thirty. The time is manageable—an hour and a half every other week, and our location in Clark House behind the SUD Building is an easy walk for me. The other members of the society find their parking on the street, which they do happily, since parking rarely presents a problem on Mondays.
Until recently we had the wide, broad-beamed Clark House room on the ground floor to ourselves, our massive oak conference table and the files where we keep our archives, but a year ago the Oulipian Society became aware of our privileged location, and applied for the use of our official meeting room on alternate Mondays, which seemed only fair to me and not a great inconvenience. Several of our members, though, felt our space had been compromised. Those upstarts!
I tried to reason with my colleagues, explaining that there should be no conflict if we planned our calendar carefully. But, in fact, the sharing of the room has caused occasional confusion, since many of our ranks are getting forgetful with age. I made the mistake once myself not too long ago. I can’t imagine how I had mixed up the weeks except that Max and I had been away to Jamaica. In any case I arrived at the Oulipian Society meeting with my latest sonnet and bag lunch to find them in the midst of what they called their “combinatorial stratagems.” On that particular Monday they were doing poems in which every line was to contain two words with double consonants. Their chair, Douglas Pome, asked me to stay for their “workshop” (as an “honored guest,” he said) and I did, feeling a little awkward about being thought a forgetful type who mixes up the weeks, and not so much enjoying the session as thinking it would make a good story to tell Max over coffee, something new for a change—my ever-present itch of compunction.
The Oulipians were younger than our group and more raffish, especially Doug Pome, with his careful midlife beard and his joke of a name. (He does write a nice fleet line.) I noticed they had catered sandwiches instead of doing the brown-bag thing as we’ve done for years. Most of their poems had a kind of tumbling, jesting humor, which they richly enjoyed. Humor is something sonnet-makers do badly, if at all.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Oulipians. I understand that, at first glance, they might seem to resemble the sonnet revivalists in that they set up constrictive forms for their literary production. But—whether they pursue their experiments and practice under the ever-anxious gaze of consciousness or whether they use anagram or linguistic transplant or number series—they suffer the disadvantage that they can never repeat their forays.
A sonnet, on the other hand, comes with its coat of varnish. As Flaubert says, the words are like hair; they shine with combing. We can do what we want with a sonnet. It is a container ever reusable, ever willing to be refurbished, retouched, regilded and reobjectified.
“Congratulations,” I said to Victor Glantz today as I handed over the gavel and welcomed him to the head of the table, where I always sit. For the next three years he will take charge of the society meetings and newsletter, and after that he may earn himself another term. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)
“I promise,” he said formally, in his irritating way, “to carry on the mandate of our society and to bring the sonnet into greater and greater public usage.” (I do cherish my association with Sonnet Revival, but I sometimes wish we had fewer loonies among us, and not quite so much enthusiastic mediocrity.)
Because the meeting broke up earlier than usual, and because time is more and more a problem for me, I took a different route home, doubling the distance between Clark House and our apartment building. After all these years I know our Andersonville area well, but the darkening skies, or else the glare of city lights, confused me for a moment. I felt my hands trembling in my pockets. One of the familiar old buildings had been razed; that was what was confusing me, something as simple as that.
Nevertheless I recognized later that I had, in fact, panicked. Fear spread rapidly through my body and went with a rush to my head, so that I thought I might faint. What was the matter with me? I had simply turned right when I should have turned left. There was a coffee shop on the corner. I had seen it many times, but had never entered. Now I went in, sat down at a small table by the window and ordered a cup of hot tea. Here I am, I said to myself two or three times, here I am, here I am, sipping at the edge of the plastic cup. I am five blocks from home, an aging woman who has lost her bearings. But now it’s all right. In fifteen minutes I’ll be home.
I didn’t tell Max about getting lost, but I did tell him what Victor Glantz had said when taking over the meeting, his hopes that the sonnet would gain in public usage. Max laughed at that, laughed harder than I had expected. I gave him a small smile in return. He stopped laughing then and gulped his coffee, struggling to straighten his face. We have to be terribly careful after forty years together. We are both so easily injured.
On Mondays, even on Sonnet Revival days, I try to get one or two lines down. Today I did what I do every day, exactly the same. I start at the beginning, the first line, the first word, and then work my way through to the end, thinking: this is familiar, oh yes. This—if it is to mean anything—must be familiar; familiarity is the point, after all. Spring and counter-spring. April, May, June, July. Then August, then September, straight through the tunnel of the chilly calendar. I am not thinking, in this early stage, of octave-sestet divisions.
Everything I need is within reach—my notes, my dictionary and thesaurus, my Leonardo quote taped to my desk, and, in fact, except for the steady accompaniment of good light, what else am I likely to require as I move from space to space, other than this tough little pad of paper and the stub of my pen?
But there will come a moment, possibly today—I came close early this morning—when my faith in my miniature art collapses. I can count on that; everything will be going well, the words adding themselves up, gorging on themselves, and saluting the friendly gathering of half-rhymes (which is what I favor these days), then the slow sexual stroke of the iamb arrives, and then, for reasons undisclosed to me, I will be stopped in my working tracks, unable to complete more than six lines. For the first week, the sonnet lives underground, where delay and containment are my chief concerns. It is as though I am looking at it with one eye squeezed shut. And then—this can happen quickly—by the second Monday, I have, mostly, managed to set up my scaffolding for all of the fourteen lines, but it is a scaffolding with several bits unnailed, and nothing yet committed. There are pressures working on particular words, but mostly I try to silence what I think of as a foot pedal of a piano, which is ever ready to stomp and shout and take an easy ride home. I want space for strangeness to enter—not obscurities or avoidances, but idiosyncrasies of grammar or lexicon, so that the sound is harsh, even hurtful.
Half a dozen syllables in the third line are being withheld from me, so temptingly, a few feet out of sight, suspended on the other side of the desk lamp. Or else they are unwilling to freeze themselves in the particular posture I have prepared for them. I refuse, possessing as I do a kind of preternatural sprezzatura, and this presents another hurdle, to invert the structure of ordinary spoken English, attaching adjectives to the end of a line for the sake of rhyme. Here’s an example from the literature of sonnets: “With strange new hopes and fears and fancies wild.” “Wild” to rhyme with “smil’d” (Wilmon Brewer, a ferocious old sonnet-writer, whose book, awful, was published in 1937, Sonnets and Sestinas). If I were at the helm, Wilmot Brewer’s line would have to go “With strange new hopes and fears and wild fancies,” and where would you find a rhyme for fancies? In any case, I don’t believe fancies is a word I’ve ever used in a sonnet.
And I want, also, that short introductory beat, the primary iamb, followed by the heavier second beat, and I won’t have it any other way, though many sonnet-makers give in at this early point, as though they are inserting a trumpet into the verse and daring it to blow.
My brain stem is ready, the iambic grasp of knit/purl engaged, and is so close to matching the rhythm of my breath that I don’t even think of it. Its motor hums in the joints of my shoulders and wrists, knit/purl, knit/purl, ten items arranged on each clean glass shelf, though I don’t like to be overly prescriptive when it comes to meter.
Sometimes I look around whatever room I happen to be in as a way of steadying my thoughts. It is seven o’clock now. After our coffee ceremony I moved from the living room to the kitchen, with its fused aroma of afternoon coffee and tonight’s roasting chicken and fresh pepper. My little notepad occupies the clean edge of the corner table, and I have just heard a woman on the radio say to her interviewer, about a local celebrity murderer, “There was something about that man that made the hair on my spine stand up.”
After a minute I pick up a pencil and jot down the word spine. Then spinal. No, spinal is an anapest. I turn the radio off. Color in its array of tints moves forward in my mind, but not the words I need. Spinal fluid. Not quite.
It is my aging body I want to write about, this oiled goatskin I live inside of. The body that rises now, a little creakily, though I attempt to disguise this lack of limberness with an effort of will. I lean over from the waist as smartly as I can (as though a witness were standing next to me taking notes) and check the chicken in the oven and the pair of baking potatoes, darkening in their hides. Max is reading the newspaper. I hear him turning over the pages in the living room and think how he has deprived himself all day of this pleasure. He’s always been strict about the avoidance of the newspaper earlier in the day, he is like a puritan in that way: first he must perform his daily task, getting down onto hard disk or paper his own five hundred words, which tomorrow he may or may not delete. In ten minutes we will sit down at the dinner table, just the two of us. Are we to share the future or no? I’ve never made a fuss of things—why would I begin now?
Oh, these duo dinners! They’ve grown so hard for us. We’ll be talking about the Middle East tonight, the two of us. Or else the obscenity of CEO salaries in America. We already know each other’s views on these subjects; we speak in order to keep the silence away. It’s as though we reheat these issues in our very dear little copper saucepan—so battered and beloved—hoping by accident to stir in something new. But we are inoculated against surprise. We can no longer make each other laugh. We can’t even startle one another. We are both abashed at this imposed duty at the end of every day, even though we’ve done it for years: each of us is obliged to eat a meal in the presence of a stranger, and yet each is determined to be a self, a singular self. Music helps; this is something we’ve both noticed in the last year, and I can hear Max now, rising and shuffling among CDs on the shelf where we keep them. What’s it to be tonight? Ah, Mozart. Good!
After dinner, which includes a single glass of red wine, sipped slowly, grape-sized sips, I will phone our daughter in Oak Park to see how she got through her day, to try to gauge from her voice her level of vitality. I can hear myself being distractingly glib in order to blunt all that I resist. Is she bearing up? Will she manage another day of effort as she tries to see through her life’s obscuring clutter? I have to know before I can tuck myself into our queen-size water bed, where I will read for an hour or more, while Max in another room watches a documentary on television. I am reading a short, bleak Irish novel and he is watching something to do with elephant tusks, needless slaughter and corruption in the international market.
Sleep arrives early, and my arm lifts, as though under hypnosis, to switch off the bedside lamp. My last thought before drifting off collapses into a kind of formula of information directed to the center of my cortex, where a question awaits. What am I now? What is my position in the universe, in the fen and bog of my arrangements?
The reply comes promptly, mocking my tone of high seriousness: if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.
Various Miracles (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
Various Miracles (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
SEVERAL OF THE MIRACLES THAT OCCURRED this year have gone unrecorded.
Example: On the morning of January 3, seven women stood in line at a lingerie sale in Palo Alto, California, and by chance each of these women bore the Christian name Emily.
Example: On February 16 four strangers (three men, one woman) sat quietly reading on the back seat of the number 10 bus in Cincinnati, Ohio; each of them was reading a paperback copy of Smiley’s People.
On March 30 a lathe operator in a Moroccan mountain village dreamed that a lemon fell from a tree into his open mouth, causing him to choke and die. He opened his eyes, overjoyed at being still alive, and embraced his wife, who was snoring steadily by his side. She scarcely stirred, being reluctant to let go of a dream she was dreaming, which was that a lemon tree had taken root in her stomach, sending its pliant new shoots upward into her limbs. Leaves, blossoms and finally fruit fluttered in her every vein until she began to tremble in her sleep with happiness and intoxication. Her husband got up quietly and lit an oil lamp so that he could watch her face. It seemed to him he’d never really looked at her before, and he felt how utterly ignorant he was of the spring that nourished her life. Now she lay sleeping, dreaming, her face radiant. What he saw was a mask of happiness so intense it made him fear for his life.
On May 11, in the city of Exeter in the south of England, five girls (aged fifteen to seventeen) were running across a playing field at ten o’clock in the morning as part of their physical education program. They stopped short when they saw, lying on the broad gravel path, a dead parrot. He was grassy green in color with a yellow nape and head, and was later identified by the girl’s science mistress as Amazona ochrocephala. The police were notified of the find, and it was later discovered that the parrot had escaped from the open window of a house owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who claimed, while weeping openly, that they had owned the parrot (Miguel by name) for twenty-two years. The parrot, in fact, was twenty-five years old, one of a pair of birds sold in an open market in Marseilles in the spring of 1958. Miguel’s twin brother was sold to an Italian soprano who kept it for ten years, then gave it to her niece Francesca, a violinist who played first with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and later with the Chicago Symphony. On May 11 Francesca was wakened in her River Forest home by the sound of her parrot (Pete, or sometimes Pietro) coughing. She gave him a dish of condensed milk instead of his usual whole-oats-and-peanut mixture, and then phoned to say she would not be able to attend rehearsal that day. The coughing grew worse. She looked up the name of a vet in the Yellow Pages and was about to dial when the parrot fell over, dead in his cage. A moment earlier Francesca had heard him open his beak and pronounce what she believed were the words “Ça ne fait rien.”
On August 26 a man named Carl Hallsbury of Billings, Montana, was wakened by a loud noise. “My God, we’re being burgled,” his wife, Marjorie, said. They listened, but when there were no further noises, they drifted back to sleep. In the morning they found that their favorite little watercolor—a pale rural scene depicting trees and a winding road and the usual arched bridge—had fallen off the living-room wall. It appeared that it had bounced onto the cast-iron radiator and then ricocheted to a safe place in the middle of the living-room rug. When Carl investigated, he found that the hook had worked loose in the wall. He patched the plaster methodically, allowed it to dry, and then installed a new hook. While he worked he remembered how the picture had come into his possession. He had come across it hanging in an emptied-out house in the French city of St. Brieuc, where he and the others of his platoon had been quartered during the last months of the war. The picture appealed to him, its simple lines and the pale tentativeness of the colors. In particular, the stone bridge caught his attention since he had been trained as a civil engineer (Purdue, 1939). When the orders came to vacate the house late in 1944, he popped the little watercolor into his knapsack; it was a snug fit, and the snugness seemed to condone his theft. He was not a natural thief, but already he knew that life was mainly a matter of improvisation. Other returning soldiers brought home German helmets, strings of cartridge shells and flags of various sorts, but the little painting was Carl’s only souvenir. And his wife, Marjorie, is the only one in the world who knows it to be stolen goods; she and Carl belong to a generation that believes there should be no secrets between married couples. Both of them, Marjorie as much as Carl, have a deep sentimental attachment to the picture, though they no longer believe it to be the work of a skilled artist.
It was, in fact, painted by a twelve-year-old boy named Pierre Renaud, who until 1943 had lived in the St. Brieuc house. It was said that as a child he had a gift for painting and drawing; in fact, he had a gift merely for imitation. His little painting of the bridge was copied from a postcard his father had sent him from Burgundy, where he’d gone to conduct some business. Pierre had been puzzled and ecstatic at receiving a card from his parent, a cold, resolute man with little time for his son. The recopying of the postcard in watercolors—later Pierre saw all this clearly—was an act of pathetic homage, almost a way of petitioning his father’s love.
He grew up to become not an artist but a partner in the family leather-goods business. In the late summer he liked to go south in pursuit of sunshine and good wine, and one evening, August 26 it was, he and Jean-Louis, his companion of many years, found themselves on a small stone bridge not far from Tournus. “This is it,” he announced excitedly, spreading his arms like a boy, and not feeling at all sure what he meant when he said the words, “This is it.” Jean-Louis gave him a fond smile; everyone knew Pierre had a large capacity for nostalgia. “But I thought you said you’d never been here before,” he said. “That’s true,” Pierre said. “You are right. But I feel, here”—he pointed to his heart—“that I’ve stood here before.” Jean-Louis teased him by saying, “Perhaps it was in another life.” Pierre shook his head, “No, no, no,” and then, “Well, perhaps.” After that the two of them stood on the bridge for some minutes regarding the water and thinking their separate thoughts.
On October 31 Camilla LaPorta, a Cuban-born writer, now a Canadian citizen, was taking the manuscript of her new novel to her Toronto publisher on Front Street. She was nervous; the publisher had been critical of her first draft, telling her it relied too heavily on the artifice of coincidence. Camilla had spent many months on revision, plucking apart the faulty tissue that joined one episode to another, and then, delicately, with the pains of a neurosurgeon, making new connections. The novel now rested on its own complex microcircuitry. Wherever fate, chance or happenstance had ruled, there was now logic, causality and science.
As she stood waiting for her bus on the corner of College and Spadina that fall day, a gust of wind tore the manuscript from her hands. In seconds the yellow typed sheets were tossed into a whirling dance across the busy intersection. Traffic became confused. A bus skittered on an angle. Passersby were surprisingly helpful, stopping and chasing the blowing papers. Several sheets were picked up from the gutter, where they lay on a heap of soaked yellow leaves. One sheet was found plastered against the windshield of a parked Pontiac half a block away; another adhered to the top of a lamppost; another was run over by a taxi and bore the black herringbone of tire prints. From all directions, ducking the wind, people came running up to Camilla, bringing her the scattered pages. “Oh this is crazy, this is crazy,” she cried into the screaming wind.
When she got to the publisher’s office, he took one look at her manuscript and said, “Good God Almighty, don’t tell me, Camilla, that you of all people have become a post-modernist and no longer believe in the logic of page numbers.”
Camilla explained about the blast of wind, and then the two of them began to put the pages in their proper order. Astonishingly, only one page was missing, but it was a page Camilla insisted was pivotal, a keystone page, the page that explained everything else. She would have to try to reconstruct it as best she could. “Hmmmmm,” the publisher said—this was late in the afternoon of the same day and they sat in the office sipping tea—“I truly believe, Camilla, that your novel stands up without the missing page. Sometimes it’s better to let things be strange and to represent nothing but themselves.”
The missing page—it happened to be page 46—had blown around the corner of College Street and through the open doorway of a fresh fruit and vegetable stand, where a young woman in a red coat was buying a kilo of zucchini. She was very beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and she was also talented, an actress, who for some months had been out of work. To give herself courage and cheer herself up she had decided to make a batch of zucchini-oatmeal muffins, and she was just counting out the change on the counter when the sheet of yellow paper blew through the doorway and landed at her feet.
She was the kind of young woman who reads everything, South American novels, Russian folk tales, Persian poetry, the advertisements on the subway, the personal column in the Globe and Mail, even the instructions and precautions on public fire extinguishers. Print is her way of entering and escaping the world. It was only natural for her to bend over and pick up the yellow sheet and begin to read.
She read: A woman in a red coat is standing in a grocery store buying a kilo of zucchini. She is beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and it happens that she is an actress who—
Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
OH, MRS. TURNER IS A SIGHT cutting the grass on a hot afternoon in June! She climbs into an ancient pair of shorts and ties on her halter top and wedges her feet into crepe-soled sandals and covers her red-gray frizz with Gord’s old golf cap—Gord is dead now, ten years ago, a seizure on a Saturday night while winding the mantel clock.
The grass flies up around Mrs. Turner’s knees. Why doesn’t she use a catcher, the Saschers next door wonder. Everyone knows that leaving the clippings like that is bad for the lawn. Each fallen blade of grass throws a minute shadow that impedes growth and repair. The Saschers themselves use their clippings to make compost, which they hope one day will be as ripe as the good manure that Sally Sascher’s father used to spread on his fields down near Emerson Township.
Mrs. Turner’s carelessness over the clippings plucks away at Sally, but her husband, Roy, is far more concerned about the Killex that Mrs. Turner dumps on her dandelions. It’s true that in Winnipeg the dandelion roots go right to the middle of the earth, but Roy is patient and persistent in pulling them out, knowing exactly how to grasp the coarse leaves in his hand and how much pressure to apply. Mostly they come up like corks with their roots intact. And he and Sally are experimenting with new ways to cook dandelion greens, believing as they do that the components of nature are arranged for a specific purpose—if only that purpose can be divined.
In the early summer Mrs. Turner is out every morning by ten with her sprinkling can of chemical killer, and Roy, watching from his front porch, imagines how this poison will enter the ecosystem and move by quick capillary surges into his fenced vegetable plot, newly seeded now with green beans and lettuce. His children, his two little girls aged two and four—that they should be touched by such poison makes him morose and angry. But he and Sally so far have said nothing to Mrs. Turner about her abuse of the planet because they’re hoping she’ll go into an old-folks home soon or maybe die, and then all will proceed as it should.
High school girls on their way home in the afternoon see Mrs. Turner cutting her grass and are mildly, momentarily repelled by the lapped, striated flesh on her upper thighs. At her age. Doesn’t she realize? Every last one of them is intimate with the vocabulary of skin care and knows that what has claimed Mrs. Turner’s thighs is the enemy called cellulite, but they can’t understand why she doesn’t take the trouble to hide it. It makes them queasy; it makes them fear for the future.
The things Mrs. Turner doesn’t know would fill the Saschers’ new compost pit, would sink a ship, would set off a tidal wave, would make her want to kill herself. Back and forth, back and forth she goes with the electric lawn mower, the grass flying out sideways like whiskers. Oh, the things she doesn’t know! She has never heard, for example, of the folk-rock recording star Neil Young, though the high school just around the corner from her house happens to be the very school Neil Young attended as a lad. His initials can actually be seen carved on one of the desks, and a few of the teachers say they remember him, a quiet fellow of neat appearance and always very polite in class. The desk with the initials N.Y. is kept in a corner of Mr. Pring’s homeroom, and it’s considered lucky—despite the fact that the renowned singer wasn’t a great scholar—to touch the incised letters just before an exam. Since it’s exam time now, the second week of June, the girls walking past Mrs. Turner’s front yard (and shuddering over her display of cellulite) are carrying on their fingertips the spiritual scent, the essence, the fragrance, the aura of Neil Young, but Mrs. Turner is as ignorant of that fact as the girls are that she, Mrs. Turner, possesses a first name—which is Geraldine.
Not that she’s ever been called Geraldine. Where she grew up in Boissevain, Manitoba, she was known always—the Lord knows why—as Girlie Fergus, the youngest of the three Fergus girls and the one who got herself in hot water. Her sister Em went to normal school and her sister Muriel went to Brandon to work at Eaton’s, but Girlie got caught one night—she was nineteen—in a Boissevain hotel room with a local farmer, married, named Gus MacGregor. It was her father who got wind of where she might be and came banging on the door, shouting and weeping. “Girlie, Girlie, what have you done to me?”
Girlie had been working in the Boissevain Dairy since she’d left school at sixteen and had a bit of money saved up, and so, a week after the humiliation in the local hotel, she wrote a farewell note to the family, crept out of the house at midnight and caught the bus to Winnipeg. From there she got another bus down to Minneapolis, then to Chicago and finally New York City. The journey was endless and wretched, and on the way across Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania she saw hundreds and hundreds of towns whose unpaved streets and narrow blinded houses made her fear some conspiratorial, punishing power had carried her back to Boissevain. Her father’s soppy-stern voice sang and sang in her ears as the wooden bus rattled its way eastward. It was summer, 1930.
New York was immense and wonderful, dirty, perilous and puzzling. She found herself longing for a sight of real earth, which she assumed must lie somewhere beneath the tough pavement. On the other hand, the brown flat-roofed factories with their little windows tilted skyward pumped her full of happiness, as did the dusty trees, when she finally discovered them, lining the long avenues. Every last person in the world seemed to be outside, walking around, filling the streets, and every corner breezed with noise and sunlight. She had to pinch herself to believe this was the same sunlight that filtered its way into the rooms of the house back in Boissevain, fading the curtains but nourishing her mother’s ferns. She sent postcards to Em and Muriel that said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got a job in the theater business.”
It was true. For eight and a half months she was an usherette in the Lamar Movie Palace in Brooklyn. She loved her perky maroon uniform, the way it fit on her shoulders, the way the strips of crinkly gold braid outlined her figure. With a little flashlight in hand she was able to send streams of light across the furry darkness of the theater and onto the plum-colored aisle carpet. The voices from the screen talked on and on. She felt after a time that their resonant declarations and tender replies belonged to her.
She met a man named Kiki her first month in New York and moved in with him. His skin was as black as ebony. As black as ebony—that was the phrase that hung like a ribbon on the end of his name, and it’s also the phrase she uses, infrequently, when she wants to call up his memory, though she’s more than a little doubtful about what ebony is. It may be a kind of stone, she thinks, something round and polished that comes out of a deep mine.
Kiki was a good-hearted man, though she didn’t like the beer he drank, and he stayed with her, willingly, for several months after she had to stop working because of the baby. It was the baby itself that frightened him off, the way it cried, probably. Leaving fifty dollars on the table, he slipped out one July afternoon when Girlie was shopping, and went back to Troy, New York, where he’d been raised.
Her first thought was to take the baby and get on a bus and go find him, but there wasn’t enough money, and the thought of the baby crying all the way on the hot bus made her feel tired. She was worried about the rent and about the little red sores in the baby’s ears—it was a boy, rather sweetly formed, with wonderful smooth feet and hands. On a murderously hot night, a night when the humidity was especially bad, she wrapped him in a clean piece of sheeting and carried him all the way to Brooklyn Heights, where the houses were large and solid and surrounded by grass. There was a house on a corner she particularly liked because it had a wide front porch (like those in Boissevain) with a curved railing—and parked on the porch, its brake on, was a beautiful wicker baby carriage. It was here that she placed her baby, giving one last look to his sleeping face, as round and calm as the moon. She walked home, taking her time, swinging her legs. If she had known the word foundling—which she didn’t—she would have bounded along on its rhythmic back, so airy and wide did the world seem that night.
Most of these secrets she keeps locked away inside her mottled thighs or in the curled pinkness of her genital flesh. She has no idea what happened to Kiki, whether he ever went off to Alaska as he wanted to or whether he fell down a flight of stone steps in the silverware factory in Troy, New York, and died of head injuries before his thirtieth birthday. Or what happened to her son—whether he was bitten that night in the baby carriage by a rabid neighborhood cat or whether he was discovered the next morning and adopted by the large, loving family who lived in the house. As a rule, Girlie tries not to think about the things she can’t even guess at. All she thinks is that she did the best she could under the circumstances.
In a year she saved enough money to take the train home to Boissevain. She took with her all her belongings, and also gifts for Em and Muriel, boxes of hose, bottles of apple-blossom cologne, phonograph records. For her mother she took an embroidered apron and for her father a pipe made of curious gnarled wood. “Girlie, my Girlie,” her father said, embracing her at the Boissevain station. Then he said, “Don’t ever leave us again,” in a way that frightened her and made her resolve to leave as quickly as possible.
But she didn’t go so far the second time around. She and Gordon Turner—he was, for all his life, a tongue-tied man, though he did manage a proper proposal—settled down in Winnipeg, first in St. Boniface, where the rents were cheap, and then Fort Rouge and finally the little house in River Heights just around the corner from the high school. It was her husband, Gord, who planted the grass that Mrs. Turner now shaves in the summertime. It was Gord who trimmed and shaped the caragana hedge and Gord who painted the little shutters with the cut-out hearts. He was a man who loved every inch of his house, the wide wooden steps, the oak door with its glass inset, the radiators and the baseboards and the snug sash windows. And he loved every inch of his wife, Girlie, too, saying to her once and only once that he knew about her past (meaning Gus MacGregor and the incident in the Boissevain Hotel), and that as far as he was concerned the slate had been wiped clean. Once he came home with a little package in his pocket; inside was a diamond ring, delicate and glittering. Once he took Girlie on a picnic all the way up to Steep Rock, and in the woods he took off her dress and underthings and kissed every part of her body.
After he died, Girlie began to travel. She was far from rich, as she liked to say, but with care she could manage one trip every spring.
She has never known such ease. She and Em and Muriel have been to Disneyland as well as Disneyworld. They’ve been to Europe, taking a sixteen-day trip through seven countries. The three of them have visited the south and seen the famous antebellum houses of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, after which they spent a week in the city of New Orleans. They went to Mexico one year and took pictures of Mayan ruins and queer shadowy gods cut squarely from stone. And three years ago they did what they swore they’d never have the nerve to do: they got on an airplane and went to Japan.
The package tour started in Tokyo, where Mrs. Turner ate, on her first night there, a chrysanthemum fried in hot oil. She saw a village where everyone earned a living by making dolls and another village where everyone made pottery. Members of the tour group, each holding up a green flag so their tour leader could keep track of them, climbed on a little train, zoomed off to Osaka, where they visited an electronics factory, and then went to a restaurant to eat uncooked fish. They visited more temples and shrines than Mrs. Turner could keep track of. Once they stayed the night in a Japanese hotel, where she and Em and Muriel bedded down on floor mats and little pillows stuffed with cracked wheat, and woke up, laughing, with backaches and shooting pains in their legs.
That was the same day they visited the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. The three-storied temple was made of wood and had a roof like a set of wings and was painted a soft old flaky gold. Everybody in the group took pictures—Em took a whole roll—and bought postcards; everybody, that is, except a single tour member, the one they all referred to as the Professor.
The Professor traveled without a camera, but jotted notes almost continuously into a little pocket scribbler. He was bald, had a trim body and wore Bermuda shorts, sandals and black nylon socks. Those who asked him learned that he really was a professor, a teacher of English poetry in a small college in Massachusetts. He was also a poet who, at the time of the Japanese trip, had published two small chapbooks based mainly on the breakdown of his marriage. The poems, sadly, had not caused much stir.
It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation. His domestic life had been too cluttered; there had been too many professional demands; the political situation in America had drained him of energy—these were the thoughts that buzzed in his skull as he scribbled and scribbled, like a man with a fever, in the back seat of a tour bus traveling through Japan.
Here in this crowded, confused country he discovered simplicity and order and something spiritual too, which he recognized as being authentic. He felt as though a flower, something like a lily, only smaller and tougher, had unfurled in his hand and was nudging along his fountain pen. He wrote and wrote, shaken by catharsis, but lulled into a new sense of his powers.
Not surprisingly, a solid little book of poems came out of his experience. It was published soon afterward by a well-thought-of Boston publisher who, as soon as possible, sent him around the United States to give poetry readings.
The Professor read his poems mostly in universities and colleges where his book was already listed on the Contemporary Poetry course. He read in faculty clubs, student centers, classrooms, gymnasiums and auditoriums, and usually, partway through a reading, someone or other would call from the back of the room, “Give us your Golden Pavilion poem.”
He would have preferred to read his Fuji meditation or the tone poem on the Inner Sea, but he was happy to oblige his audiences, though he felt “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” was a somewhat light piece, even what is sometimes known on the circuit as a “crowd pleaser.” People (admittedly they were mostly undergraduates) laughed out loud when they heard it; he read it well too, in a moist, avuncular amateur actor’s voice, reminding himself to pause frequently, to look upward and raise an ironic eyebrow.
The poem was not really about the Golden Pavilion at all, but about three midwestern lady tourists who, while viewing the temple and madly snapping photos, had talked incessantly and in loud, flat-bottomed voices about knitting patterns, indigestion, sore feet, breast lumps, the cost of plastic raincoats and a previous trip they’d made together to Mexico. They had wondered, these three—noisily, repeatedly—who back home in Manitoba should receive a postcard, what they’d give for an honest cup of tea, if there was an easy way to remove stains from an electric coffee maker, and where they would go the following year—Hawaii? They were the three furies, the three witches, who for vulgarity and tastelessness formed a shattering counterpoint to the Professor’s own state of transcendence. He had been affronted, angered, half-crazed.
One of the sisters, a little pug of a woman, particularly stirred his contempt, she of the pink pantsuit, the red toenails, the grapefruity buttocks, the overly bright souvenirs, the garish Mexican straw bag containing Dentyne chewing gum, aspirin, breath mints, sun goggles, envelopes of saccharine, and photos of her dead husband standing in front of a squat, ugly house in Winnipeg. This defilement she had spread before the ancient and exquisitely proportioned Golden Pavilion of Kyoto, proving—and here the Professor’s tone became grave—proving that sublime beauty can be brought to the very doorway of human eyes, ears and lips and remain unperceived.
When he comes to the end of “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” there is generally a thoughtful half second of silence, then laughter and applause. Students turn in their seats and exchange looks with their fellows. They have seen such unspeakable tourists themselves. There was old Auntie Marigold or Auntie Flossie. There was that tacky Mrs. Shannon with her rouge and her jewelry. They know—despite their youth they know—the irreconcilable distance between taste and banality. Or perhaps that’s too harsh; perhaps it’s only the difference between those who know about the world and those who don’t.
It’s true that Mrs. Turner remembers little about her travels. She’s never had much of a head for history or dates; she never did learn, for instance, the difference between a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine. She gets on a tour bus and goes and goes, and that’s all there is to it. She doesn’t know if she’s going north or south or east or west. What does it matter? She’s having a grand time. And she’s reassured, always, by the sameness of the world. She’s never heard the word commonality, but is nevertheless fused with its sense. In Japan she was made as happy to see carrots and lettuce growing in the fields as she was to see sunlight, years earlier, pouring into the streets of New York City. Everywhere she’s been she’s seen people eating and sleeping and working and making things with their hands and urging things to grow. There have been cats and dogs, fences and bicycles and telephone poles, and objects to buy and take care of; it is amazing, she thinks, that she can understand so much of the world and that it comes to her as easily as bars of music floating out of a radio.
Her sisters have long forgotten about her wild days. Now the three of them love to sit on tour buses and chatter away about old friends and family members, their stern father and their mother who never once took their part against him. Muriel carries on about her children (a son in California and a daughter in Toronto), and she brings along snaps of her grandchildren to pass round. Em has retired from school teaching and is a volunteer in the Boissevain Local History Museum, to which she has donated several family mementos: her father’s old carved pipe and her mother’s wedding veil and, in a separate case, for all the world to see, a white cotton garment labeled “Girlie Fergus’s Underdrawers, handmade, trimmed with lace, circa 1918.” If Mrs. Turner knew the word irony she would relish this. Even without knowing the word irony, she relishes it.
The professor from Massachusetts has won an important international award for his book of poems; translation rights have been sold to a number of foreign publishers; and recently his picture appeared in the New York Times, along with a lengthy quotation from “A Day at the Golden Pavilion.” How providential, some will think, that Mrs. Turner doesn’t read the New York Times or attend poetry readings, for it might injure her deeply to know how she appears in certain people’s eyes, but then there are so many things she doesn’t know.
In the summer, as she cuts the grass, to and fro, to and fro, she waves to everyone she sees. She waves to the high school girls, who timidly wave back. She hollers hello to Sally and Roy Sascher and asks them how their garden is coming on. She cannot imagine that anyone would wish her harm. All she’s done is live her life. The green grass flies up in the air, a buoyant cloud swirling about her head. Oh, what a sight is Mrs. Turner cutting her grass, and how, like an ornament, she shines.
Accidents (#ulink_9f0423ff-4d87-507c-93a8-15f1981470cd)
AT HOME MY WIFE IS MODEST. She dresses herself in the morning with amazing speed. There is a flashing of bath towel across the fast frame of her flesh, and then, voilà, she is standing there in her pressed suit, muttering to herself and rummaging in her bag for subway tokens. She never eats breakfast at home.
But the minute we hit the French coast—we stay in a vacation flat owned by my wife’s brother-in-law—there she is, on the balcony with her bare breasts rising up to the sun. And she has breakfasted, and so have I, on three cups of coffee and a buttered croissant.
Her breasts have remained younger than the rest of her body. When I see her rub them with oil and point them toward the fierce sunlight, I think of the Zubaran painting in the museum at Montpellier which shows a young and rather daft-looking St. Agatha cheerfully holding out a platter on which her two severed breasts are arranged, ordinary and bloodless as jam pastries.
One morning something odd happened to my wife. She was sitting on the balcony working on her new translation of Valéry’s early poems and she had a cup of coffee before her. I should explain that the dishes and cutlery and cooking things in the flat are supplied, and that this particular coffee cup was made of a sort of tinted glass in a pattern that can be found in any cheap chain store in France. Suddenly, or so she told me later, there was a cracking sound, and her cup lay in a thousand pieces in the saucer.
It had simply exploded. She wondered at first if she had been shot at with an air rifle. There was another apartment building opposite under construction, and at any time of the day workmen could be seen standing on the roof. But clearly it would have required an extraordinary marksman to pick off a cup of coffee like that from such a distance. And when she sifted through the slivers of glass, which she did with extreme care, she found no sign of a pellet.
The incident unnerved her. She put on her blouse when she went out on the balcony later in the day, but I noticed she kept a cup of coffee in the middle of the table as though daring a second explosion to occur.
I knew, though I’m not a scientist, that occasionally tempered glass fractures spontaneously. It’s thought to come about by a combination of heat, light and pressure. It happens sometimes to the windshields of automobiles, though it is extremely rare and not entirely understood.
I told all this to my wife. “I still don’t understand how it could have happened,” she said. I explained again, knowing my explanation was vague and lacking in precision. I was anxious to reassure her. I reached down and put my arms around her, and that was how my accident occurred. She turned to look at me, and as she did so, the back of her earring tore the skin of my face.
It was surprising how long the tear was, about four inches in all, and it was deeper than just a scratch, although the blood oozed out slowly, as though with reluctance. We both realized I would require stitches.
The doctor in the Montpellier clinic spoke almost perfect English, but with a peculiar tonelessness, rather like one of those old-fashioned adding machines clicking away. “You will require a general anesthetic,” he told me. “You will be required to remain in the hospital overnight.”
My wife was weeping. She kept saying, “If only I hadn’t turned my head just at that moment.”
The doctor explained that since the hospital was full, I would have to share a room. Always, he said, gesturing neatly with both hands, always at vacation time there were accidents. A special government committee, in fact, had been established to look into this phenomenon of accidents de la vacances, and someone had suggested that perhaps it might be the simplest solution if vacations were eliminated entirely.
I speak French fluently, having grown up in Montreal, but I have difficulty judging the tone of certain speakers. I don’t know when someone—the doctor, for example—is speaking ironically or sincerely; this has always seemed to me to be a serious handicap.
While still under the anesthetic I was put into a room occupied by a young man who had been in a motorcycle accident. He had two broken legs and a shattered vertebra and was almost completely covered in white plaster. Only his face was uncovered, a young face with closed eyes and smooth skin. I put my hand on my own face, which was numb beneath the dressing, and wondered for the first time if I would be left with a scar.
My wife came to sit by my bed for a while. She was no longer crying. She had, in fact, been shopping and had bought a new pale yellow cardigan with white flowers around the neck, very fresh and springlike. I was touched to see that she had removed her earrings. On her ear lobes there was nothing but a faint dimple, the tiny holes made, she once told me, by her own mother when she was fourteen years old.
There seemed little to talk about, but she had bought a Herald Tribune, something she normally refuses to do. She scorns the Herald Tribune, its thinness and its effete news coverage. And it’s her belief that when you are in another country you should make an attempt to speak and read the language of that country. The last time she allowed herself to buy a Herald Tribune was in 1968, the week of Trudeau’s first election.
The young man with the broken legs was moaning in his sleep. “I hope he doesn’t go on like this all night,” she said. “You won’t get any sleep at this rate.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Do you think we should still plan to go over to Aigues Mortes?” she asked, naming the place we try to visit every summer. Aigues Mortes is, as many people have discovered, an extraordinary medieval port with a twelfth-century wall in near-perfect condition. It has become a habit with my wife and me to go there each year and walk around this wall briskly, a distance of a mile. After that we take a tour through the Tower of Constance with an ancient and eccentric guide, and then we finish off the afternoon with a glass of white wine in the town square.
“It wouldn’t feel like a holiday if we didn’t do our usual run to Aigues Mortes,” my wife said in a rather loud cheerful voice, the sort of voice visitors often acquire when they come to cheer the sick.
The man with the broken legs began to moan loudly and, after a minute, to sob. My wife went over to him and asked if she could do anything for him. His eyes were still closed, and she leaned over and spoke into his ear.
“Am I dead?” he asked her in English. “Did you say I was dead?”
“Of course you aren’t dead,” she said, and smiled over her shoulder at me. “You’re just coming out of the anesthetic and you’re not dead at all.”
“You said I was dead,” he said to her in clear carrying British tones. “In French.”
Then she understood. “No, we were talking about Aigues Mortes. It’s the name of a little town near here.”
He seemed to need a moment to think about this.
“It means dead waters,” my wife told him. “Though it’s far from dead.”
This seemed to satisfy him, and he drifted off to sleep again.
“Well,” my wife said, “I’d better be off. You’ll be wanting to get to sleep yourself.”
“Yes,” I said. “That damned anesthetic, it’s really knocked me for a loop.”
“Shall I leave you the Herald Tribune?” she asked. “Or are you too tired to read tonight?”
“You take it,” I told her. “Unless there’s any Canadian news in it.”
That’s another thing we don’t like about the Herald Tribune. There’s hardly ever any news from home, or if there is, it’s condensed and buried on a back page.
She sat down again on the visitor’s chair and drew her cardigan close around her. In the last year she’s aged, and I’m grieved that I’m unable to help her fight against the puckering of her mouth and the withering away of the skin on her upper arms. She went through the paper page by page, scanning the headlines with a brisk professional eye. “Hmmm,” she said to herself in her scornful voice.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Well, here’s something.” She folded back the page and began to read. “Gilles Villeneuve is dead.”
“Who?”
“Gilles Villeneuve. You know, the racing driver.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s see. It says ‘Canadian racing driver, killed in practice run.’ Et cetera. Always claimed racing was dangerous and so on, said a year ago that he’d die on the track.” She stopped. “Do you want to hear all this?”
“No, that’s enough.” I felt the news about Gilles Villeneuve calmly, but I hope not callously. I’ve never really approved of violent sports, and it seems to me that people foolish enough to enter boxing rings or car races are asking for their own deaths.
“It’s sad to die so young,” my wife said, as if required to fill the silence I’d left.
The young man in the next bed began to sputter and cough, and once again my wife went over to see if she could do anything.
“You mustn’t cry,” she said to him. She reached in her bag for a clean tissue. “Here, let me wipe those tears away.”
“I don’t want to die.” He was blubbering quite noisily, and I think we both felt this might weaken the shell of plaster that enclosed him.
My wife—I forgot to mention that she is still a very beautiful woman—placed her hand on his forehead to comfort him.
“There, there, it’s just your legs. You’ve been sleeping, and you’re only a little bit confused. Where do you come from?”
He murmured something.
“What did you say?”
“Sheffield. In England.”
“Maybe I can telephone someone for you. Has the hospital sent a message to your people?”
It was an odd expression for her to use—your people. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use that particular phrase before.
“It’s all right,” he said. He had stopped crying, but my wife kept her hand on his forehead for another moment or two until he had dropped off to sleep.
I must have dropped off to sleep as well because when I opened my eyes she had gone. And after that it was morning and a nurse was opening the shutters and twittering something at me in French. The bed next to mine was empty, and she began to strip off the sheets.
“Where is he?” I asked her in my old, formal schoolboy French. “Where’s my comrade with the broken legs?”
“Il est mort,” she said in the same twittering singsong.
“But he can’t be dead. His legs were broken, that’s all.”
“The spinal cord was damaged. And there were other injuries. Inside.”
A minute later the doctor came in and had a look under my dressing. “You perhaps will have a little scar,” he said. “For a woman this is terrible, of course. But for a man …” He smiled and revealed pink gums. “For a man it is not so bad.”
“I understand that he’s died,” I said, nodding at the stripped bed.
“Ah yes. Multiple injuries, there was no hope, from the moment he was brought in here yesterday.”
“Just a young man,” I said.
He was pressing the bandage back into place. “Les accidents de vacances. Every year the same. What can one do? One should stay home, sit in the garden, be tranquil.”
When my wife comes for me in half an hour or so, I will have prepared what I’ll say to her. I know, of course, that the first thing she’ll ask me is: How is the young man from Sheffield? She will ask this before she inquires about whether I’ve had a good night or whether I’m suffering pain. I plan my words with precision.
This, luckily, is my métier, the precise handling of words. Mine is a profession that is close to being unique; at least I know of no one else who does the same sort of work on a full-time basis.
I am an abridger. When I tell people, at a party for instance, that I am an abridger, their faces cloud with confusion and I always have to explain. What I do is take the written work of other people and compress it. For example, I am often hired by book clubs to condense or abridge the books they publish. I also abridge material that is broadcast over the radio.
It’s a peculiar profession, I’m the first to admit, but it’s one I fell into by accident and that I seem suited for. Abridging requires a kind of inverse creativity. One must have a sharp eye for turning points and a seismic sensitivity for the fragile, indeed invisible, tissue that links one event with another. I’m well-paid for my work, but I sometimes think that the degree of delicacy is not appreciated. There are even times when it’s necessary to interfere with the truth of a particular piece and, for the sake of clarity and balance, exercise a small and inconspicuous act of creativity that is entirely my own. I’ve never thought of this as dishonesty and never felt that I had tampered with the integrity of a work.
My wife will be here soon. I’ll watch her approach from the window of my hospital room. She still walks with a kind of boyish clip-clop, as though determined to possess the pavement with each step. This morning she’ll be wearing her navy blazer; it’s chilly, but it will probably warm up later in the day. She’ll probably have her new yellow cardigan on underneath, but I won’t be able to tell from here if she’s wearing earrings. My guess is that she won’t be. In her hand she’ll have a small cloth bag, and I can imagine that this contains the picnic we’ll be taking with us to Aigues Mortes.
“And how is be?” she’s going to ask me in a few minutes from now. “How is our poor young friend with the broken legs?”
“He’s been moved to a different place.” I’ll say this with a small shrug, and then I’ll say, quickly, before she has a chance to respond, “Here, let me carry that bag. That’s too heavy for you.”
Of course, it’s not heavy at all. We both know that. How could a bag containing a little bread and cheese and perhaps two apples be heavy?
It doesn’t matter. She’ll hand me the bag without a word, and off we’ll be.
Sailors Lost at Sea (#ulink_eeb0ef67-0935-5abf-9cad-3360e8f8b1d1)
ONE AFTERNOON, OUT OF CURIOSITY or else boredom, Hélène wandered into an abandoned church. A moment later she found herself locked inside.
This was in France, in Brittany, and Hélène was a girl of fourteen who had been walking home from the village school to the house where she and her mother were temporarily living. Why she had stopped and touched the handle of the church door, she didn’t know. She had been told, several times, that the little church was kept tightly locked, but today the door had opened easily at her touch. This was puzzling, though not daunting, and she had entered bravely, holding her head high. She had recently, since arriving in France, come to understand the profit that could be had from paying attention to good posture, how she could, by a minor adjustment of her shoulders or a lifting of her chin, turn herself into someone who had certain entitlements.
She and her mother were from Canada and, despite her Manitoba accent—which she knew seemed quaint, even comic to French ears, funnier even than Québécois—she was regarded with envy and awe by the girls in the village school in St. Quay. That she was from a place called Winnipeg, the girls found exotic. “Weenie-pegg,” they said, with a giggling way of hanging on to the final g. Her mother said this was because St. Quay was an out-of-the-way sort of place.
This was true. It was a fact that only two girls in her level had ever been to Paris, which was just five hours away by train, and a surprising number of them had never been even as far as Rennes. Also impressive to these girls was the fact that Hélène’s mother was a poet, a real poet, who had published three books. Trois livres? Vraiment? Their eyes had opened wide at this, and they weren’t giggling any longer. (“That’s one thing about the French,” Hélène’s mother told her. “They respect writers.”) The girls at l’école Jeanne d’Arc were forever asking Hélène how her mother was getting on with her poetry. “Ta mère, elle travaille bien?” Their own mothers were the wives of fishermen or shopkeepers. Hélène had been presented to some of these mothers in the village streets: thick-ankled, round-faced women wearing old woolen coats and carrying groceries in bags made of plastic net.
Hélène and her mother had never intended to spend the whole of the year in St. Quay. They had planned to travel, to drift like migrants along the edges of the country. (La France has the shape of a hexagon, Hélène has been taught in the village school; this fact is repeated often, as though it carries mystical significance.) Instead of traveling, they had attached themselves like barnacles—this was how Hélène’s mother put it—to this quiet spot on the channel coast, and Hélène had enrolled in the local school. There was a very good reason for this, her mother surprised her by saying. “The only way to get the feel of the country is to become a part of it.” Of course, as Hélène now knew, and as her mother would soon discover, it was not possible at all for them to become part of the community. Everywhere they went, to the boulangerie, to the post office, everywhere, there was a rustle and a whisper that went before them, announcing, just behind the weak smiles of welcome, “Ah, les Canadiennes!” It made Hélène feel weak; she always was having to compose herself, to imagine how she must look from the outside.
In St. Quay there were a number of old churches, though the largest, a church dating from the thirteenth century, had been torn down ten years earlier. It had been replaced with a brown brick building that was square and ugly like a factory, and distressingly empty, distressing, that is, to the local priest, a Father Dominic. He was an old man with creased yellow skin and a stiff manner, but he was the only friend Hélène’s mother had so far found in St. Quay.
“Alas,” said Father Dominic, rubbing his long chin, “Brittany was once the most religious corner of France, and now it has become, overnight”—he made a zigzag in the air to signify lightning—“secularized.” He said this in his loud, lonely voice, speaking as though there could be no reversal.
“The church,” he said, “has lost out to television and motorbikes and modernism in general, and it has all happened in a flash.”
Well, this was not quite the truth, Hélène’s mother explained later. The truth was that during the French Revolution Brittany had been filled with ranting anticlerical mobs who tore the statues out of church niches and removed stone chunks (heads chiefly or the fingers of upraised hands) from the roadside cavalries that dotted the Côte du Nord. Quel dommage, Hélène’s mother said, in sly imitation of Father Dominic, her only friend.
The particular church where Hélène found herself imprisoned on a Thursday afternoon was one of these small, desecrated churches, statueless and plain, its heavy doors shorn clean of carving and its windows replaced by dull opalescent glass. The church was officially closed. She knew that; it had been closed for many years.
Father Dominic had explained to them that it was no longer served by a priest. Nowadays there was but a single Mass celebrated here each year—it was he who had the privilege of serving—and that was on a certain spring day set aside by tradition to honor sailors who had been lost at sea. On that particular Sunday in early April, the doors would be thrown open and people would enter carrying armloads of spring flowers; after that, a procession would wind over the rocks and down the beach itself.
When Hélène’s mother heard Father Dominic talking about this festival, her eyes had softened with feeling, and she had nodded as though she too had had occasion to pay tribute to lost seamen—which, of course, coming from Winnipeg, she had not.
“That will be something to see,” she said to Hélène, and wrote the name of the festival in her notebook. At that moment, seeing her mother writing down the details of the fete and imagining the blond sunniness of this festive day, Hélène truly understood that they would be staying here the entire year, that their drifting, which she had loved, all ten days of it, was not to be resumed.
The old church stood just outside the village on the rue des Chiens, the same street where they had found a house to rent. “We’ve installed ourselves in a cheap stone house on Dog Street.” Hélène’s mother had written this in a cheerful letter to a friend back home, as though having an inelegant address gave them an unconquerable ascendancy over the difficulties the little stone house presented. There it stood, surrounded by drenched shrubbery, a dragging lace of rain falling from the corners of the steep roof. The landlord, a scowling, silent widower with three teeth in his head, lived in the basement, and his presence cast a spell of restraint over them so that they tiptoed about the house, his house, in bedroom slippers and spoke to each other in hushed formal voices, more like a pair of elderly sisters than a mother and daughter. The bathroom stank despite the minty blue deodorizer Hélène had bought and attached to the wall, and the kitchen was damp and without cupboards. The two armchairs in the living room were covered with ancient, oily tapestry cloth, badly frayed. In the morning her mother made coffee, carried it to one of these repellent chairs and sat down with her notebooks. There she spent her time, scarcely getting up and looking out at the sea all day. Hélène knew without asking that the poems were not coming easily.
By good fortune the Canadian government had seen fit to award her mother a sum of money so that she could come to France for a year in order to write poetry. She had long desired—and this was explained at great length in the application—to touch the soil where her ancestral roots lay. (But these roots, she now admitted to Hélène in one of their long whispered talks, were more deeply buried than she had thought. Her forebears had gone to Canada a long time ago, first to Quebec, then making their way to Manitoba.) And she was not entirely certain which region of France they had come from, though it was generally believed to have been either Brittany or Normandy. Now she was here, breathing French air, eating French bread, drinking bitter black coffee and taking weekend walks on the wild wetted path that went along the coast, but what really was the use of this? What had she expected? For the so-called roots to rise up and embrace her?
It seemed to Hélène that her mother had childish notions about the magic of places. A field of oats was a field of oats. The blackberries they’d found along the coast path had the same beaded precision as those at home. Her mother had a way of making too much of things, always seeing secondary meanings, things that weren’t really there, and her eyes watered embarrassingly when she spoke of these deeper meanings. It was infantile, the way she went on and on about the fond of human experience. What was the fond but carrying home the groceries, trying to keep warm in the drafty stone house, walking down the dark road in the morning to school, where the other girls waited for her, admiring her warm wool sweaters and asking her how her mother, the poet, was doing.
Recently Hélène’s mother, as if to make up for the lack of poems, had latched with fevered intensity on to particles of local lore, prising them out of Michelin guides and storing them up in notebooks—not the same notebooks the poems went into, but pale green spiral-bound books with squared-off pages, notebooks (meant for young school children) that she bought in the village at the Maison de la Presse. In one of these notebooks, she had recorded:
There are two legends surrounding the founding of St. Quay, stories that contain similar elements but that occupy different sides of a coin. In the “good” story, a fourth-century Irish saint called St. Quay arrives in a stone boat to bring Christianity to the wild Breton coast. A bird flies ahead to tell the villagers of his imminent arrival, and the women (why just women?) joyfully run to the shore to greet him, bringing with them armloads of flowers and calling “St. Quay, St. Quay,” guiding the boat to safety with their cries.
In the second version, the “bad” version, the same bird arrives to say that a stranger is approaching in a stone boat. The women (women again!) of the village are suspicious and hostile, and they run to the shore with rough stalks of gorse in their hands which they brandish ferociously, all the time crying, “Quay, quay,” which means in old Gaelic, “Away, away.”
Her mother asked Hélène one day which version she preferred, but before Hélène could decide, she herself said, “I think the second version must be true.” Then she qualified. “Not true, of course, not in a real sense, but containing the elements, the fond of truth.”
“Why?” Hélène asked. She saw the shine on her mother’s face and felt an obligation to keep it there. “Why not the first version?”
“It’s a matter of perspective,” her mother said. “It’s just where I am now. In my life, I mean. I can believe certain things but not others.”
Because of the way she said this, and the way she squeezed her eyes shut, Hélène knew her mother was thinking about Roger, the man in Winnipeg she was in love with. She had been in love before, several times. Love, or something like it, was always happening to her.
But now something had happened to Hélène: she was locked inside a church, chosen somehow, the way characters in stories are chosen. The thought gave her a wavelet of happiness. And a flash of guilty heat. She should not have entered the door; it should not have been unlocked, and she should not be standing here—but she was. And what could she do about it—nothing. The feeling of powerlessness made her calm and almost sleepy. She looked about in the darkness for a place to sit down. There was nothing—no pews, no chairs, only the stone floor.
She tried the door again. The handle was heavy and made of some dull metal that filled her hand. She set her school bag on the floor and tried turning the handle and pushing on the door at the same time, leaning her shoulder into the wood. Then she pulled the door toward her, rattled it sharply and pushed it out again.
“Open,” she said out loud, and heard a partial echo float to the roof. It contained, surprisingly, the half-bright tone of triumph.
“I’m fourteen years old and locked in a French church.” These words slid out like a text she had been asked to read aloud. Calm sounds surrounded by their own well of calm; this was a fact. It was no more and no less than what had happened.
Perhaps there was another door. She began to look around. The windows, high up along the length of the church, let in soft arches of webbed light, but the light was fading fast. It was almost five o’clock and would be dark, she knew, in half an hour. Her mother would be waiting at home, the kitchen light on already, something started for supper.
High overhead was a dense, gray collision of dark beams and stone arches, and the arches were joined in such a way that curving shadows were formed, each of them like the quarter slice out of a circle. Hélène had made such curves with her pencil and compass under the direction of Sister Ste. Adolphe at the village school, and had been rewarded with a dainty-toothed smile and a low murmur, “Très, très bon.” Sister Ste. Adolphe gave her extra pencils, showed her every favor, favors that, instead of exciting envy among the girls, stirred their approval. Hélène was a foreigner and deserved privileges. It was just.
It occurred to Hélène that there must have been a reason for the church to be open. Perhaps there was a workman about, or perhaps Father Dominic himself had come to see that the church was safe and undisturbed during its long sleep between festivals.
“Hello,” she called out. “Bonjour. Is there anyone here?” She stood still, pulling her coat more closely around her and waiting for an answer.
While she waited, she imagined two versions of her death. She would be discovered in the spring when the doors were flung open for the festival. The crowds, rushing in with armloads of flowers, would discover what was left of her, a small skeleton, odorless, as neat on the floor as a heap of stacked kindling, and the school bag nearby with its books and pencils and notebooks would provide the necessary identification.
Or some miracle of transcendence might occur. This was a church, after all, and close by was the sea. She might be lifted aloft and found with long strands of seaweed in her hair; her skin would be bleached and preserved so that it gleamed with the lustre of certain kinds of shells, and her lips, caked with salt, would be parted to suggest a simple attitude of prayerfulness. (She and her mother, in their ten days of wandering, had visited the grave of an imbecile, a poor witless man who had lived as a hermit in the fourteenth century. It was said, a short time after his death and burial, that a villager had noticed a golden lily growing from the hermit’s grave, and when the body was exhumed it was discovered that the bulb of the plant was located in his throat, a testimonial to his true worth and a rebuke to those who had ignored him in his life.)
It occurred to Hélène that her mother would blame herself and not France. Lately, she was always saying, “One thing about France, the coffee has real flavor.” Or, “At least the French aren’t sentimental about animals,” or, “You can say one thing for France: things are expensive, but quality is high.” It seemed her mother was compelled to justify this place where she had deliberately settled down to being lonely and uncomfortable and unhappy.
It had all been a mistake, and now her mother, though she didn’t say it, longed for home and for Roger. “A man friend” is what she called Roger, saying this phrase with special emphasis as though it was an old joke with a low wattage of energy left in it. Roger loved her and wanted to marry her. They had known each other for two years. His first wife had left him. “He’s very bitter,” Hélène’s mother said, “and for someone like Roger, this can be a terrible blow, a great humiliation.”
He was a chef at the Convention Center in downtown Winnipeg. When he was a young man, he had been taken into the kitchens of the Ritz Carleton in Montreal, where he had learned sauces and pastries and salads. He had learned to make sculptures out of butter or lard or ice or sugar, and even—for it was an arduous apprenticeship, he tells Hélène—how to fold linen table napkins in twenty classic folds. Would she like a demonstration? She had said yes, despising herself, and Roger had instantly obliged, but he could remember only thirteen of the twenty ways. Now, at the Convention Center, he seldom does any cooking himself, but supervises the kitchen from a little office where he spends his time answering the phone and keeping track of grocery orders.
On Saturday nights he used to come to the apartment in St. Vital where Hélène and her mother lived, and there in the tiny kitchen he made them veal in cream or croquettes or a dish of steamed fish, pickerel with white mushrooms and pieces of green onion.
“Tell me what you like best,” he’d say to Hélène, “and next week I’ll try it out on you.”
Of course, he often stayed the night. He was astonishingly neat, never leaving so much as a toothbrush in the bathroom. On Sunday mornings he made them poached eggs on toast—ducks in their nests he called them. He had a trick with the eggs, lifting them from the simmering water with a spatula, then flipping them onto a clean, cotton tea towel, patting them dry, and then sliding them onto buttered triangles of toast—all this without breaking the yolks. He had learned to do this at the Ritz Carleton when he was a young man. “It would not have been acceptable,” he said, “to serve an egg that was wet.” He does it all very quickly and lightly, moving like a character in a speeded-up movie. The first time he did it for Hélène—she was only twelve at the time—she had clapped her hands, and now he’s made it into a ceremony, one of several that have unsettled the household.
“Come here, little duckie,” he says, flashing his spatula. “Turn yourself over like a good little duck for Hélène.” Hélène, when he said this, found it hard to look at her mother, who laughed loudly at this showmanship, her mouth wide and crooked.
Later, after Roger had left, there were a few minutes of tender questioning between them. Hélène’s mother, settling down on the plumped cushions, talked slowly, evenly, taking, it would seem, full measure of the delicate temperamental balance of girls in their early adolescence. About the disruption to the household, she was apologetic, saying, “This is only temporary.” And, saying with her eyes, “This is not how I planned things.” (“Shhh,” she said to Roger when he became too merry, when he was about to tell another joke or another story about his apprenticeship.) “How do you like Roger?” her mother asked her. Then, instead of waiting for an answer, her mother began to talk about Roger’s ex-wife, how vicious she had been, how she left him for another man.
“I hope I’m not barging in,” Roger said, if he dropped by in the middle of the week. He was always bringing presents, not just food, but jewelry, once an alarm clock, once a coat for her mother and a silk blouse for herself. (“I don’t know what girls like,” he’d said abjectly on this occasion. “I can take it back.”)
This is what made Hélène numb. She couldn’t say a word in reply, and her silence ignited a savage shame. What was the matter? The matter was that they were waiting for her. They were waiting for her to make up her mind, just as the girls in the schoolyard with their cartables and their regulation blouses wait for her to arrive in the dark mornings and bring some improbable substance into the cement schoolyard. “Tell us about Weenie-pegg. Tell us about the snow.”
It was growing very cold inside the church, but then even the churches they had visited in September had been cold. Hélène and her mother had carried cardigans. “You can never tell about the weather here,” her mother had said, puzzled. This was a point scored against France, a plus for Manitoba, where you at least knew what to expect.
And soon it would be dark. Frail moons of light pressed like mouths on the floor, though the walls themselves were darkly invisible. Hélène reached out and rubbed her hand along the rough surface. This was—she began to figure—this was a fourteenth-century church; twenty centuries take away fourteen—that left six; that meant this church was six hundred years old, walls that were planted by the side of a road called rue des Chiens in a village called St. Quay, which was hidden away in the hexagon that was France. And her body would not be found until spring.
O Mother of God, she said to herself, and rubbed at her hair. O Mother of Jesus.
She tried the door again, putting her ear to the wood to see if she could sound out the inner hardware. There was only a thickish sound of metal butting against wood and the severed resistance of moving parts. She was going to perish. Perish. At fourteen. The thought struck her that her mother would never get over this. She would go back home and tell Roger she couldn’t marry him. She would stop writing poems about landscapes that were “jawbone simple and picked clean by wind” and about the “glacé moon pinned like a brooch in the west.” She would sink into the fond, and her mouth would sag open—this was not how she had planned things. And whose fault was it?
By now the church was entirely dark, but at the far end the altar gleamed dully. It seemed a wonder to Hélène that she could summon interest in this faint light. What was it? There was no gold or ornamentation, only a wooden railing that had been polished or worn by use, and the last pale light lay trapped there on the smooth surface like a pool of summer water.
O Mother of God, she breathed, thinking of Sister Ste. Adolphe, her tiny teeth.
She ran her hand along its edge. There was something at one end. Altar candles. The light didn’t reach this far, but her hand felt them in the darkness, a branched candle holder, rising toward the center. She counted the tall candles with her fingers. Up they went like little stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six and then down again on the other side.
There might be matches, she thought, and fumbled at the base of the candle holder. Then she remembered she had some in her school bag. Her mother had asked her to stop at the tobagie for cigarettes and matches. (At home in St. Vital they had refused to sell cigarettes to minors, but here in France no one blinked an eye; a point for France.)
She felt her way back to where she had left the bag, rummaged for the matches, and then moved back along the wall to the candles. She managed to light them all, using only three matches, counting under her breath. The stillness of the flames seemed of her own creation, and a feeling of virtue struck her, a ridiculous steamroller. She thought how she would never again in her life be able to take virtue seriously.
Astonishing how much light twelve candles gave off. The stone church shrank in the light so that it seemed not a church at all, but a cheerful meeting room where any minute people might burst through the door and call out her name.
And, of course, that was what would happen, she realized. The lit-up church would attract someone’s notice. It was a black night, and rain was falling hard on the roof, but nevertheless someone—and soon—would pass by and see the light from the church. An immediate investigation would be in order. Father Dominic would be summoned at once.
This might take several minutes; he would have to find his overshoes, his umbrella, not to mention the key to the church. Then there would be the mixed confusion of embracing and scolding. How could you? Why on earth? Thank God in all his mercy.
Until then, there was a width of time she would enter and inhabit. There was nothing else she could do; it was laughable. All she had to do was stand here warming her hands in the heat of the twelve candles—how beautiful they were really!—and wait for rescue to come.
Purple Blooms (#ulink_b3067f88-1624-58a2-a72a-ba217dcaedf1)
THERE IS A BOOK I LIKE by the Mexican poet Mario Valeso, who, by coincidence, lives here in this city and who, in the evening, sometimes strolls down this very street. The book is entitled Purple Blooms and it is said to resolve certain perplexing memories of the poet’s childhood. It is a work that is full of tact, yet it is tentative, off-balance, dark and truncated—and it is just this lack of finish that so moved me the first time I read it.
I gave a copy of the book to my friend Shana, who’s been “going through a bad time,” as she puts it. People who meet her are generally struck by her beauty. She’s young, well-off and in excellent health, yet she claims that the disconnectedness of life torments her. Everything makes her sad. Lilacs make her sad. Chopin makes her sad. The thought of rain falling in a turbulent and empty ocean makes her sad. But nothing makes her sadder than the collection of toby jugs that her mother, the film actress, left her in her will.
More than a hundred of these sturdy little creatures fill the shelves of her sunny apartment. I myself find it unnerving the way they glisten and grin and puff out their pottery cheeks as though oblivious to the silly pouring lip that deforms the tops of their heads. Knick-knacks, Shana calls them, willfully denying their value, but she refuses nevertheless to part with them, though I’ve given her the name of an auctioneer who would guarantee a fair price.
It could be said that she encourages her sadness. It could be demonstrated. On her glass-topped coffee table she keeps a large vase of lilacs and an alabaster bust of Chopin and, since last Saturday, my gift of Mario Valeso’s book Purple Blooms. The denseness, the compaction of the closed text and the assertive angle with which it rests on the table suggest to me that she has not yet opened its pages.
I have also given a copy to Edward. He is attractive, my Edward. I’ve spent a considerable number of hours staring at him, hoping his handsome features would grow less perfect, more of a match for my own. What does he see in me? (This is the question I ask myself—though I like to think I put it rhetorically.)
“Purple Blooms,” Edward murmured as he slipped the gift wrap off the book, and then he said it again—“Purple Blooms”—in that warm, sliding, beet-veined voice of his. His father, as everyone knows, sang tenor with the Mellotones in the late forties, and some say that Edward has inherited something of the color of his voice. Edward, of course, vehemently denies any such inheritance. When he hears old records of “Down by the Riverside” or “I’m Blue Turning Gray Over You,” he cannot imagine how he came to be the son of such a parent. The line of descent lacks distinction and reason, and Edward is a distinguished and reasoning man. He is also a man attentive to the least sexual breeze, and the minute he pronounced the words, “Purple Blooms,” I began worrying that he would find the poems not sensual enough for his liking.
“These poems are about the poet’s past,” I explained to Edward, rather disliking myself for the academic tone I was taking. “Valeso is attempting to make sense of certain curious family scenes that have lingered in his memory.”
Edward, wary of dark sublimities, examined the dust jacket. “It won’t bite you,” I said, joking. He placed the book in his briefcase and promised he would “look at it” on the weekend or perhaps on his summer holidays.
“If you’re not going to read it,” I said, testing him, “I’ll give it to someone else.”
For a minute we were pitched straight into one of those little arched silences that lean inward on their own symmetry as though no exterior force existed. Edward took my hand sweetly, then rubbed his thumb across the inside of my wrist, but I noticed he did not promise me anything, and that made me uneasy.
As always, when I’m uneasy, I go out and buy my mother a present. Sometimes I bring her roasted cashews or fresh fruit, but today I take her a copy of Purple Blooms. “A book?” she shouts. She has not read a book since she was a young girl.
Fat and full of fury, she stands most days by an upstairs window and spies on the world. What possible need does she have for books, she asks me. Life is all around her.
To be more truthful, life is all behind her. At eighteen she was crowned North America’s Turkey Queen at Ramona, California, and wore a dress that was made up entirely of turkey feathers. She has the dress still, though I’ve never laid eyes on it since she stores it in a fur vault in San Diego, once a year mailing off a twelve-dollar check for storage fees and saying, as she drops the envelope in the mailbox, “Well, so much for misspent youth.”
How I plead with her! Go to a movie, I say. Invite the neighbors in. Take a course in French conversation or gourmet cooking or music appreciation. A year ago she stopped the newspapers. When the picture tube went on the TV, she decided it wasn’t worth fixing. It seems nothing that’s happening in the world has any connection with the eighteen-year-old girl carried so splendidly through the streets of Ramona with a crown of dusky turkey feathers in her hair.
“What do I want with a book about flowers,” my mother growls. Her tone is rough, though she loves me dearly. I explain that the book is not about flowers (and at the same time imagine myself slyly trading on her innocent error at some future gathering of friends). “This poet,” I tell her, “is attempting to recall certain early scenes that bloomed mysteriously and darkly like flowers, and that he now wants to come to terms with.”
This is rather an earful for my mother. She pulls at her apron, looks frowningly at the ceiling, then out the window; this last I recognize as a signal that she wants me to leave, and I do.
Later that afternoon I find myself in the park. Almost everyone knows about the very fine little park at 16th and Ossington—a gem of a park with a wide gravel path and a sprightly round-headed magnolia and smooth painted benches by the side of a bowling green. A cool, quiet place to sit and read, but today it is filled with people.
I stop and ask some schoolchildren what the excitement is about, and a little boy in a striped sweater tells me that Mario Valeso is autographing copies of Purple Blooms over in the shady spot under the magnolia tree. There is a great deal of pushing and shoving and general rowdyism. Everyone, it seems, has brought along a copy of Purple Blooms for Mr. Valeso to sign. Shana is there with Edward, her arm slipped through his, and they both tell me they have “been greatly helped and strengthened” by reading the poems. “It’s all a matter of making connections,” Shana says in her breathless way, and Edward says, “It’s discovering that we all share the same ancestors.”
Then, to my surprise, I catch sight of my mother ahead of me in the crowd, and it pleases me to see that she has put on her best cardigan and her white shoes and that she is holding forth loudly to someone or other, saying, “Letting go of the past means embracing the present.” Someone else is saying, “The seeds of childhood grow on mysterious parental soil,” and an old man in a baseball cap is muttering, “We are the sum of our collective memories.”
The crowd grows even larger, and again and again I find myself pushed to the end of the line. I realize it will be hours before my turn comes, and so I pull a book out of my knapsack to help while away the time. It is a new book of poetry, untitled and anonymous, which appears to be a celebration of the randomness and disorder of the world. We are solitary specks of foam, the poet says, who are tossed on a meaningless sea. Every wave is separate, and one minute in time bears no relationship to the moment that precedes or follows it.
I read on and on, and soon forget about the people crowding around me and reading over my shoulder. The bowling green fades into dimness, as do the benches and the magnolia tree and the gravel path, until all that’s left is a page of print, a line of type, a word, a dot of ink, a shadow on the retina that is no bigger, I believe, than the smallest violet in the woods.
Flitting Behavior (#ulink_ff978fd3-7da2-552d-b08b-de8d1a6c4107)
SOME OF MEERSHANK’S WITTIEST WRITING was done during his wife’s final illness.
“Mortality,” he whispered each morning to give himself comfort, “puts acid in the wine.” Other times he said, as he peered into the bathroom mirror, “Mortality puts strychnine in the candy floss. It puts bite in the byte.” Then he groaned aloud—but only once—and got straight back to work.
His novel of this period, Malaprop in Disneyfield, was said to have been cranked out of the word processor between invalid trays and bedpans. In truth, he wept as he set down his outrageous puns and contretemps. The pages mounted, two hundred, three hundred. The bulk taunted him, and meanwhile his wife, Louise, lingered, her skin growing as transparent as human skin can be without disintegrating. A curious odor, bitter and yellow, stole over the sickroom. Meershank had heard of the odor that preceded death; now he breathed it daily.
It was for this odor, more than anything else, that he pitied her, she who’d busied herself all her life warding off evil smells with scented candles and aerosol room fresheners. Since a young woman she’d had the habit of sweetening her bureau drawers, and his too, with sprigs of dried lavender, and carrying always in her handbag and traveling case tiny stitched sachets of herbs. He had sometimes wondered where she found these anachronistic sachets; who in the modern industrial world produced such frivolities?—the Bulgarians maybe, or the Peruvians, frantic for hard currency.
Toward the end of Louise’s illness he had a surprise visit from his editor, a vigorous, leggy woman of forty who drove up from Toronto to see how the new manuscript was coming along. She came stepping from her car one Monday afternoon in a white linen jumpsuit. Bending slightly, she kissed Meershank on both cheeks and cried out, “But this is extraordinary! That you can even think of work at a time like this.”
Meershank pronounced for her his bite-in-the-byte aperçu, very nearly choking with shame.
He was fond of his editor—her name was Maybelle Spritz—but declined to invite her into his wife’s bedroom, though the two women knew and liked each other. “She’s not strong enough for visitors,” he said, knowing it was the smell of the room he guarded her from, his poor Louise’s last corner of pride. “Maybe later.”
He and Maybelle sat drinking coffee on the veranda most of the afternoon. The weather all week had been splendid. Birds sang in the branches of Meershank’s trees, and sunlight flooded the long triangle of Meershank’s side lawn. Maybelle, reading slowly as always, turned over the manuscript pages. Her nails were long and vivid. She held a pencil straight up in her hand, and at least once every three minutes or so she let loose a bright snort of laughter, which Meershank welcomed like a man famished. He watched her braided loop of auburn hair and observed how the light burned on the tips of her heavy silver earrings. There was a bony hollow at the base of her neck that deepened, suddenly, each time another snort was gathering. Later, at five o’clock, checking his watch, he offered gin and tonic. For Louise upstairs he carried cream of celery soup, weak tea and an injection for her hip, which the visiting nurse had taught him to administer.
“Are you feeling lonely?” his wife asked him, turning on one side and readying herself for the needle. She imagined, rightly, that he missed her chatter, that her long days spent in drugged sleep were a deprivation. Every day she asked the same question, plunging him directly into blocky silence. Yes, he was lonely. No, he was not lonely. Which would please her more? He kept his hand on her discolored hip and mumbled the news—testing it—that Maybelle Spritz was thinking of coming for a visit.
She opened her eyes and managed a smile as he rearranged the pillows. He had a system: one pillow under each knee, one at the small of her back and two to support her shoulders. The air in the room was suffocating. He asked again, as he did every day, if he might open a window. No, she said, as she always did; it was too cold. She seemed convinced that spring had not arrived in its usual way, she who’d always been so reasonable.
Downstairs Maybelle stood in the kitchen drinking a second gin and tonic and heating up a noodle pudding she had brought along. She had occasionally been a dinner guest in Meershank’s house, but had never before penetrated the kitchen. She set a little table on the veranda. There was a breeze, enough to keep the mosquitoes away for a bit. Knives and forks she discovered easily in the first drawer she opened. The thick white dinner plates she found stacked on a shelf over the sink. There were paper napkins of a most ordinary sort in a cupboard. As she moved about she marveled at the domesticity of the famous, how simple things appeared when regarded close up, like picking up an immense orange and finding it all thick hide on a tiny fruit. She wondered if Meershank would ask her to spend the night.
————
They had only once before shared a bed, and that had been during the awful week after Louise’s illness has been diagnosed.
The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns.
The word terminal had floated out of the young doctor’s wide pink face; it was twice repeated, until Meershank collected himself and responded with a polite nod. Then he put back his head, counted the ceiling tiles—twelve times fourteen—and decided on the spot that his wife must not be told.
The specialist laced clean hands across flannel knees and pressed for honest disclosure; there were new ways of telling people that they were about to die; he himself had attended a recent symposium in Boston and would take personal responsibility …
No. Meershank held up his hand. This was nonsense. Why did people insist that honesty was the only way of coping with truth? He knew his wife. After thirty-five years of marriage he knew his wife. She must be brought home from the hospital and encouraged to believe that she would recover. Rest, medication, country air—they would work their healing magic. Louise could always, almost always, be persuaded to follow a reasonable course.
The following day, having signed the release papers and made the arrangements to have his wife moved, Meershank, until then a faithful husband, took his editor, Maybelle Spritz, to a downtown hotel and made plodding love to her, afterward begging pardon for his age, his grief and his fury at the fresh-faced specialist who, concluding their interview, had produced one of Meershank’s books, Walloping Westward, and begged the favor of an inscription. Meershank coldly took out a pen and signed his name. He reminded himself that the Persians had routinely put to death the bearer of bad news.
Home again, with Louise installed in the big front bedroom, he resumed work. His word processor hummed like a hornet from nine to five, and the pages flew incriminatingly out of the printer. During the day his brain burned like a lightbulb screwed crookedly into a socket. At night he slept deeply. He wondered if he were acquiring a reputation for stoicism, that contemptible trait! Friends stopped by with gifts of food or flowers. The flowers he carried up to Louise’s bedroom, where they soon drooped and died, and the food he threw in the garbage. Coffee cakes, almond braids, banana loaves—his appetite had vanished.
“Eat,” Maybelle commanded, loading his plate.
He loved noodle pudding, and wondered how Maybelle knew. “It’s in your second novel,” she reminded him. “Snow Soup and Won Ton Drift. Remember? Wentzel goes into the café at Cannes and demands that—”
“I remember, I remember.” Meershank held up a hand. (He was always holding up a hand nowadays, resisting information.) He had a second helping, ingesting starch and sweetness. This was hardly fitting behavior for a grieving husband. He felt Maybelle’s eyes on him. “I shoulda brought more,” she said, sounding for a minute like a girl from Cookston Corners, which she was. “I said to myself, he’ll be starving himself.”
For dessert she rummaged in the refrigerator and found two peaches. Louise would have peeled them and arranged the slices in a cut glass bowl. Meershank and Maybelle sat eating them out of their hands. He thought to himself: this is like the last day of the world.
“Ripe,” Maybelle pronounced. There was a droplet of juice on her chin, which she brushed away with the back of her hand. Meershank observed that her eyes looked tired, but perhaps it was only the eye shadow she wore. What was the purpose of eye shadow, he wondered. He had never known and couldn’t begin to imagine.
A character in his first book, Swallowing Hole, had asked this question aloud to another character, who happened to be his wife. What was her name? Phyllis? Yes, Phyllis of the phyllo pastry and philandering nights. “Why do you smudge your gorgeous green eyes with gook?” he, the cockolded husband, had asked. And what had the fair Phyllis replied? Something arch, something unpardonable. Something enclosing a phallic pun. He had forgotten, and for that he blessed the twisted god of age. His early books with their low-altitude gag lines embarrassed him, and he tried hard to forget he had once been the idiot who wrote them.
Maybelle, on the other hand, knew his oeuvre with depressing thoroughness and could quote chapter and verse. Well, that was the function of an editor, he supposed. A reasonable man would be grateful for such attention. She was a good girl. He wished she’d find a husband so he would feel less often that she’d taken the veil on his account. But at least she didn’t expect him to converse with wit. Like all the others, she’d bought wholesale the myth of the sad jester.
It was a myth that he himself regarded with profound skepticism. He’d read the requisite scholarly articles, of course, and had even, hypocrite that he was, written one or two himself. Humor is a pocket pulled inside out; humor is an anguished face dumped upside down; humor is the refuge of the grunting cynic, the eros of the deprived lover, the breakfast of the starving clown. Some of these cheap theories he’d actually peddled aloud to the graduating class at Trent a year ago, and his remarks had been applauded lustily. (How much better to lust applaudingly, he’d cackled, sniggered, snorted inside his wicked head.)
He suspected that these theories were leapt upon for their simplicity, their symmetry, their neat-as-a-pin ironic shimmer. They were touted by those so facile they were unable to see how rich with ragged comedy the world really was. But Meershank knew, he knew! Was it not divinely comic that only yesterday he’d received a telephone solicitation from the Jackson Point Cancer Fund? Wasn’t it also comic that the specter of his wife’s death should fill him with a wobbly lust for his broad-busted, perfume-wafting, forty-year-old editor? For that matter, wasn’t it superbly comic that a man widely known as a professional misogynist had remained happily married to one woman for thirty-five years? (Life throws these kinky curves a little too often, Meershank had observed, and the only thing to do was open your fool mouth and guffaw.)
At nine he checked once again on his wife, who was sleeping quietly. If she woke later, a second injection was permitted. He carried a bottle of brandy out on to the veranda. One for the road?, he asked Maybelle with his eyebrows. Why not, she said with a lift of her shoulders. Her upper lip went stiff as a ledge in the moonlight, and he shuddered to think he was about to kiss her. The moon tonight was bloated and white, as fretful as a face. Everywhere there was the smell of mock orange blossoms, which had bloomed early this year and in absurd profusion. Crickets ticked in the grass, like fools, like drunkards. Meershank lifted his glass. The brandy burned his throat and made him retreat for an instant, but Maybelle became attenuated, lively, sharp of phrase, amusing. He laughed aloud for the first time in a week, wondering if the world would crack down the middle.
It did. Or seemed to. A loud overhead popping noise like the cracking of whips made him jump. Maybelle slammed down her glass and stared. All around them the sky flashed white, then pink, then filled with rat-a-tat-tat fountains and sparks and towering plumes.
“Jesus,” Maybelle said. “Victoria Day. I almost forgot.”
“I did forget,” Meershank said. “I never once thought.”
A rocket whined and popped, made ropy arcs across the sky, burst into petals, leaving first one, then a dozen blazing trails. It was suddenly daylight, fierce, then faded, then instantly replaced by a volley of cracking gunpowder and new showers of brilliance.
The explosions, star-shaped, convulsive, leaping out of the other, made Meershank think of the chains of malignant cells igniting in his wife’s body.
He set down his brandy, excused himself and hurried upstairs.
Meershank, marrying Louise Lovell in 1949, had felt himself rubbing bellies for the first time with the exotic. He, a Chicago Jew, the son of a bond salesman, had fallen in love with a gentile, a Canadian, a fair-haired girl of twenty who had been gently reared in the Ottawa Valley by parents who lived quietly in a limestone house that was a hundred years old. It faced on the river. There was a rose garden criss-crossed by gravel paths and surrounded by a pale pink brick wall. Oh, how silently those two parents had moved about in their large square rooms, in winter wrapping themselves in shawls, sitting before pots of raspberry-leaf tea and making their good-natured remarks about the weather, the books they were forever in the middle of, the tiny thunder of politics that flickered from their newspaper, always one day old.
The mother of Louise possessed a calm brow of marble. The father had small blue eyes and hard cheeks. He was the author of a history of the Canadian Navy. It was, he told Meershank, the official history. Meershank was given a signed copy. And he was given, too, with very little noise or trouble, the hand of Louise in marriage. He had been stunned. Effortlessly, it seemed, he’d won from them their beloved only daughter, a girl of soft hips and bland hair done roundly in a pageboy.
“What exactly do you do?” they only once asked. He worked as a correspondent for a newspaper, he explained. (He did not use the word journalist.) And he hoped one day to write a book. (“Ah! A book! Splendid!”)
The wedding was in the month of June and was held in the garden. Meershank’s relatives did not trouble to travel all the way up from Chicago. The wedding breakfast was served out-of-doors, and the health of the young couple—Meershank at twenty-seven was already starting to bald—was toasted with a non-alcoholic fruit punch. The family was abstemious; the tradition went back several generations; alcohol, tobacco, caffeine—there wasn’t a trace of these poisons in the bloodstream of Meershank’s virgin bride. He looked at her smooth, pale arms—and eventually, when legally married, at her smooth, pale breasts—and felt he’d been singularly, and comically, blessed.
There is a character, Virgie Allgood, in Meershank’s book Sailing to Saskatchewan, who might be said to resemble Louise. In the book, Virgie is an eater of whole grains and leafy vegetables. Martyrlike, she eschews french fries, doughnuts and liver dumplings, yet her body is host to disease after disease. Fortified milk fails. Pure air fails. And just when the life is about to go out of her, the final chapter, a new doctor rides into town on a motorbike and saves her by prescribing a diet of martinis and cheesecakes.
There is something of Louise, too, in the mother in Meershank’s tour de force, Continuous Purring. She is a woman who cannot understand the simplest joke. Riddles on cereal boxes have to be laboriously explained. Puns strike her as being untidy scraps to be swept up in a dustpan. She thinks a double entendre is a potent new drink. She is congenitally immune to metaphor (the root of all comedy, Meershank believes), and on the day her husband is appointed to the Peevish Chair of Midbrow Humor, she sends for the upholsterer.
When Encounter did its full-length profile on Meershank in 1981, it erred by stating that Louise Lovell Meershank had never read her husband’s books. The truth is she not only had read them, but before the birth of the word processor she had typed them, collated the pages, corrected their virulent misspelling, redistributed semicolons and commas with the aplomb of a goddess, and tactfully weeded out at least half of Meershank’s compulsive exclamation points. She corresponded with publishers, arranged for foreign rights, dealt with book clubs and with autograph seekers, and she always—less and less frequently, of course—trimmed her husband’s fluffy wreath of hair with a pair of silver-handled scissors.
She read Meershank’s manuscripts with a delicious (to Meershank) frown on her wide pale brow—more and more she’d grown to resemble her mother. She turned over the pages with a delicate hand as though they possessed the same scholarly sheen as her father’s Official History of the Canadian Navy. She read them not once, but several times, catching a kind of overflow of observance that leaked like oil and vinegar from the edges of Meershank’s copious, verbal, many-leafed salads.
Her responses never marched in time with his. She was slower, and could wave aside sentimentality, saying, “Why not?—it’s part of the human personality.” Occasionally, she said the unexpected thing, as when she described her husband’s novella, Fiend at the Water Fountain, as being, “cool and straight up and down as a tulip.”
What she actually told the journalist from Encounter was that she never laughed when reading her husband’s books. For this Meershank has always respected her, valued her, adored her. She was his Canadian rose, his furry imbiber of scented tea, his smiling plum, his bread and jam, his little squirrel, his girlie-girl, his Dear Heart who promised in the garden by the river beside the limestone house in 1949 to stay at his side forever and ever. What a joke she has played on him in the end.
She has, Meershank said to Maybelle, taken a turn for the worse. He phoned the doctor, who said he would come at once. Then he handed Maybelle a piece of paper on which two telephone numbers were written. “Please,” he said. “Phone the children.”
Maybelle was unprepared for this. And she had never met the children. “What should I tell them?” she asked.
“Tell them,” Meershank said, and paused. “Tell them it could be sooner than we thought.”
One of the daughters, Sonya, lived in London, Ontario, where she was the new director of the program for women’s studies. (For those who trouble to look, her mirror image can be found in Ira Chauvin, post-doc researcher in male studies, in Meershank’s academic farce, Ten Minutes to Tenure.) Sonya did not say to Maybelle, “Who is this calling?” or “How long does she have?” She said, “I’ll be there in three hours flat.”
The other daughter, Angelica, ran a health-food restaurant and delicatessen with her husband, Rusty, in Montreal. They were just closing up for the night when Maybelle phoned. “I can get a plane at midnight,” Angelica said in a high, sweet, shaky voice. “Tell her to wait for me.”
After that Maybelle sat on a kitchen chair in the dark. She could have switched on the light, but she preferred to sit as she was and puzzle over what level of probability had landed her on the twenty-fourth of May as a visitor—she was not such a fool as to mistake a single embrace for anything other than a mutation of grief.
The tiles of the kitchen wall, after a moment, took on a greenish glow, and she began to float out of her body, a trick she had perfected during her long years of commuting between Cookston Corners and downtown Toronto. First she became Sonya, flying down an eastbound highway, her hands suddenly younger and supple-jointed on the slippery wheel. She took the long cloverleafs effortlessly, the tires of her tough little car zinging over ramps and bridges, and the sleepy nighttime radio voices holding her steady in the middle lane.
Then, blinking once and shutting out the piny air, she was transformed into Angelica, candid, fearful, sitting tense in an aisle seat at the rear of a plane—she had her mother’s smooth cheeks, her father’s square chin and her own slow sliding tears. On her lap she clutched a straw bag, and every five minutes she pushed back the sleeve of her blouse and checked her wristwatch, trying to freeze its hands with her will.
Next she was the doctor—springing onto the veranda, tapping at the screen door and taking the stairs two at a time. She drifted then into the amorphous body of Louise, where it was hot and damp and difficult to breathe, but where shadows reached out and curved around her head. Her hands lay surprisingly calm on the sheet—until one of them was lifted and held to Meershank’s beating heart.
She felt his bewilderment and heard with his ears a long popping chain of firecrackers going off. A window in the bedroom had been opened—at last—and the scent of the mock orange blossoms reached him with a rushing blow. Everything was converging. All the warm fluids of life came sliding behind Maybelle’s eyes, and she had to hold on to the sides of the kitchen chair to keep herself from disappearing.
In each of Meershank’s fictions there is what the literary tribe calls a “set piece,” a jewel, as it were, set in a spun-out text, or a chunk of narrative that is somehow more intense, more cohesive, more self-contained than the rest. Generally theatrical and vivid, it can be read and comprehended, even when severed from the wider story, or it can be “performed” by those writers—Meershank is not one—who like to gad about the country giving “readings.”
In Meershank’s recently published book, Malaprop in Disneyfield, the set piece has four characters sitting at dusk on a veranda discussing the final words of the recently deceased family matriarch. The sky they gaze into is a rainy mauve, and the mood is one of tenderness—but there is also a tone of urgency. Three of the four had been present when the last words were uttered, and some irrational prompting makes them want to share with the fourth what they heard—or what they thought they heard. Because each heard something different, and there is a descending order of coherence.
“The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.
“The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.
The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirt sleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”
All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.
The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.
Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”
“Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.
Pardon (#ulink_5ecf1573-441d-5f4f-ba8b-472d60535e26)
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON MILLY STOPPED at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law, whom she had apparently insulted.
“Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”
Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or a mind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.
“You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hotcakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”
“How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”
Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.
Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.
At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.
Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m really sorry to hear this.”
“And then,” Ernie’s wife went on, “a gentleman came in here saying he’d had an out-and-out row with his next-door neighbor who’d been a true-blue friend for twenty years.”
“These things happen,” Milly said. “Just this week my own father-in-law—”
“Seems the man and his neighbor got on to the subject of politics—in my opinion not a subject for friends to be discussing. The neighbor called my customer a stuffed-shirt fascist right to his face.”
“That seems a little extreme,” Milly said. “But why should he be the one to send a sorry card when his friend was the one who—?”
“Exactly!” Ernie’s wife held up a finger, and her eyes filled with fire. “My thoughts exactly. But later that same day who should come in but a sweet old white-haired gent who said his next-door neighbor had called him a pinko bleeding heart and he—”
“Do you mean to tell me he was the very—”
“You’re interrupting,” Ernie’s wife cried.
Milly said she was terribly sorry. She explained that she was feeling unstrung because now she would have to go all the way downtown to buy a card for her father-in-law.
“Well, if you’re going downtown,” Ernie’s wife said, “would you mind returning a pair of pajamas for me? I bought them in the sales last week and, lo and behold, I got them home and found a flaw in the left sleeve.”
Milly disliked going all the way downtown. She disliked waiting for the bus, and when she got on the bus she disliked the way a man sitting next to her let his umbrella drip on her ankle.
“I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t even notice. In a hundred years I would never have let—”
Milly managed a smile and made a gesture with her hand that said: It’s all right, I accept your apology. She was glad the umbrella hadn’t dripped on the pajamas Ernie’s wife had given her to return. Returning merchandise can be tricky, especially when it’s wet and when the receipt’s been mislaid. More often than not you meet with suspicion, scorn, arrogance, rebuff.
But today the gentleman in the complaint department was wearing a yellow rose in his lapel, and his eyes twinkled.
“We take full responsibility for flaws,” he said. “Head office will be sending your friend a letter begging her pardon, and I personally apologize in the name of our branch and in the name of the manufacturer.”
Milly, triumphant, took the bus home. The driver apologized, as well he should, for splashing her as she stood at the bus stop.
“It’s not your fault, it’s all this blessed rain,” Milly said.
The bus driver shook his head. “A regular deluge. But I should have been more careful.”
The instant the words left his mouth, the rain began to fall more heavily. The sky turned an ugly black, and soon rain was pelting down, loud and musical, slamming on the roof of the bus and streaming in thick sheets down its sides. The windshield wipers did their best to beat back the water, but clearly they hadn’t been designed for a storm of this magnitude and, after a few minutes, the driver pulled over to the curb.
“I’m awfully sorry, folks,” he announced, “but we’re going to have to wait this one out.”
Nobody really minded. It was rather pleasant, almost like a party, to be sitting snug inside a parked bus whose windows had turned to silver, swapping stories about storms of other years. Several passengers remembered the flood of 1958 and the famous spring downpour of 1972, but most of them agreed that today’s storm was the most violent they had ever seen. They would be going home to flooded basements and worried spouses, yet they remained cheerful. Some of the younger people at the back of the bus struck up an impromptu singsong, and the older folks traded their newspapers back and forth. The headline on one paper said TRUDEAU APOLOGIZES TO REAGAN, and another said REAGAN APOLOGIZES TO SUMMIT. By the time the sun burst through, many of the passengers had exchanged names and phone numbers and announced to each other how cleansing a good storm can be, how it sweeps away unspoken hostilities and long-held grudges.
Milly, walking home from her bus stop, breathed in the shining air. Her feet were drenched, and she was forced to step over several fallen tree branches, but she noted with pleasure the blue clarity of the sky. It was going to be a splendid evening. A single cloud, a fluffy width of cumulus, floated high in the air over her house. It was shaped like a pair of wings, thought Milly, who was in a fanciful mood. No, not like wings, but like two outstretched hands, wonderfully white and beseeching, which seemed to beckon to her and say: Sorry about all this fuss and bother.
Seeing the great cloudy hands made Milly yearn to absolve all those who had troubled her in her life. She forgave her father for naming her Milly instead of Jo Ann, and her mother for passing on to her genes that made her oversensitive to small hurts and slights. She forgave her brother for reading her diary, and her sister for her pretty legs, and her cat for running in front of a truck and winding up pressed flat as a transfer on the road. She forgave everyone who had ever forgotten her birthday and everyone who looked over her shoulder at parties for someone more attractive to talk to. She forgave her boss for being waspish and her lover for lack of empathy and her husband for making uncalled-for remarks about stale breakfast cereal and burned toast.
All this dispensing of absolution emptied Milly out and made her light as air. She had a sensation of floating, of weightlessness, and it seemed to her that bells were chiming inside her head.
But it was only the telephone ringing—without a doubt her father-in-law phoning to ask forgiveness. She hurried inside so she could sing into his ear, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Words (#ulink_17fef4b1-4e2d-5905-8021-14622e4cd7a6)
WHEN THE WORLD FIRST STARTED HEATING UP, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation.
Ian’s small northern country—small in terms of population, that is, not in size—sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate. She wore a terrible green dress the first time he saw her, and rather clumsy shoes, but he could see that her neck was slender, her waist narrow and her legs long and brown. For so young a woman, she was astonishingly articulate; in fact, it was her voice more than anything else that he fell in love with—its hills and valleys and its pliant, easy-sided wit. It was a voice that could be distinguished in any gathering, being both sweet and husky and having an edging of contralto merriment that seemed to Ian as rare and fine as a border of gold leaf.
They played truant, missing half the study sessions, the two of them lingering instead over tall, cool drinks in the café they found on the Via Traflori. There, under a cheerful striped canopy, Isobel leaned across a little table and placed long, ribbony Spanish phrases into Ian’s mouth, encouraging and praising him when he got them right. And he, in his somewhat stiff northern voice, gave back the English equivalents: table, chair, glass, cold, hot, money, street, people, mouth. In the evenings, walking in the gardens in front of the institute where the conference was being held, they turned to each other and promised with their eyes, and in two languages as well, to love each other for ever.
The second International Conference was held ten years later. The situation had become grave. One could use the word crisis and not be embarrassed. Ian—by then married to Isobel, who was at home with the children—attended every session, and he listened attentively to the position papers of various physicists, engineers, geographers and linguists from all parts of the world. It was a solemn but distinguished assembly; many eminent men and women took their places at the lectern, including the spidery old Scottish demographer who years earlier had made the first correlation between substrata temperatures and highly verbalized societies. In every case, these speakers presented their concerns with admirable brevity, each word weighted and frugally chosen, and not one of them exceeded the two-minute time limitation. For by now no one really doubted that it was the extravagance and proliferation of language that had caused the temperature of the earth’s crust to rise, and in places-California, Japan, London—to crack open and form long ragged lakes of fire. The evidence was everywhere and it was incontrovertible; thermal maps and measurements, sonar readings, caloric separations, a network of subterranean monitoring systems—all these had reinforced the integrity of the original Scottish theories.
But the delegates, sitting in the plenary session of the second International Conference, were still reluctant to take regulatory action. It was partly a case of heads-in-the-sand; it was—human nature being what it is—partly a matter of political advantage or commercial gain. There lingered, too, a somewhat surprising nostalgia for traditional liberties and for the old verbal order of the world. Discussion at the conference had gone around and around all week, pointless and wasteful, and it looked very much as though the final meeting would end in yet another welter of indecision and deferral. It was at that point that Ian, seated in the front row, rose and requested permission to speak.
He was granted a one-minute slot on the agenda. In fact, he spoke for several minutes, but his eloquence, his sincerity (and no doubt his strong, boyish appearance, his shaggy hair and his blue eyes) seemed to merit an exception. Certainly not one person sitting in that gathering had any wish to stop him.
It was unfortunate, tragic some thought, that a freak failure in the electronic system—only a plug accidentally pulled from its socket—prevented his exact words from being recorded, but those who were present remembered afterward how passionately he pleaded his love for the planet. (In truth—though who could know this?—he was thinking chiefly of his love for Isobel and his two children.)
We are living in a fool’s dream, he told his fellow delegates, and the time has come for us to wake. Voluntary restraints were no longer adequate to preserve the little earth, which was the only home we know. Halfway measures like the old three-hour temps tranquilles were next to useless since they were never, or almost never, enforced. The evening curfew-lingua was ridiculously lenient. Abuses of every sort abounded, particularly the use of highly percussive words or words that were redolent with emotional potency, even though it had been established that these two classes of words were particularly damaging to bedrock and shales. Multilingualism continued to flourish. Wasteful antiphonic structures were actually on the increase in the more heavily populated regions, as was the use of elaborate ceremonial metaphor. It was as though, by refusing to make linguistic sacrifices, the human race had willed its own destruction.
When he finished speaking, the applause was prolonged and powerful. It perhaps held an element of shame, too; this young man had found the courage to say at last what should have been said long before. One after another the delegates rose to their feet, and soon their clapping fell into a steady rhythmic beat that had the effect of holding Ian hostage on the platform. The chairman whispered into his ear, begging him for a few additional words.
He assented. He could not say no. And, in a fever that was remarkably similar to the fever he had suffered as a child during a severe case of measles, or like the fever of love he had succumbed to ten years earlier in Rome, he announced to the audience, holding up a hand for attention, that he would be the first to take a vow of complete silence for the sake of the planet that had fathered him.
Almost at once he regretted his words, but hubris kept him from recanting for the first twenty-four hours and, after that, a kind of stubbornness took over. Isobel met him at the airport with the words, “You went too far.” Later, after a miserable, silent attempt at lovemaking, she said, “I’ll never forgive you.” His children, clamoring to hear about his moment of heroism, poked at him, at his face and chest and arms, as though he were inert. He tried to tell them with his eyes that he was still their father, that he still loved them.
“Leave him alone,” Isobel said sharply. “He might as well be a stranger now. He’s no different than anyone else.”
She became loud and shrewish. When his silent followers arrived at their door—and in time there were thousands of them, each with the same blank face and gold armband—she admitted them with bad grace. She grew garrulous. She rambled on and on, bitter and blaming, sometimes incoherent, sometimes obscene, sometimes reverting to a coarse, primitive schoolyard Spanish, sometimes shouting to herself or cursing into the mirror or chanting oaths—anything to furnish the emptiness of the house with words. She became disoriented. The solid plaster of the walls fell away from her, melting into a drift of vapor. There seemed to be no shadows, no sense of dimension, no delicate separation between one object and another. Privately, she pleaded with her husband for an act of apostasy. Later she taunted him. “Show me you’re still human,” she would say. “Give me just one word.” The word betrayal came frequently out of her wide mobile mouth, and so did the scornful epithet martyr.
But time passes and people forget. She forgot, finally, what it was that had betrayed her. Next she forgot her husband’s name. Sometimes she forgot that she had a husband at all, for how could anything be said to exist, she asked herself loudly, hoarsely—even a husband, even one’s self—if it didn’t also exist in the shape of a word.
He worried that she might be arrested, but for some reason—his position probably—she was always let off with a warning. In their own house she ignored him, passing him on the stairs without a look, or crossing in front of him as though he were a stuffed chair. Often she disappeared for hours, venturing out alone into the heat of the night, and he began to suspect she had taken a lover.
The thought preyed on him, though in fact he had long since forgotten the word for wife and also the word for fidelity. One night, when she left the house, he attempted to follow her, but clearly she was suspicious because she walked very quickly, looking back over her shoulder, making a series of unnecessary turns and choosing narrow old streets whose curbs were blackened by fire. Within minutes he lost sight of her; soon after that he was driven back by the heat.
The next night he tried again, and this time he saw her disappear into an ancient, dilapidated building, the sort of enclosure, he remembered, where children had once gone to learn to read and write. Unexpectedly, he felt a flash of pity; what a sad place for a tryst. He waited briefly, then entered the building and went up a flight of smoldering stairs that seemed on the point of collapse. There he found a dim corridor, thick with smoke, and a single room at one end.
Through the door he heard a waterfall of voices. There must have been a dozen people inside, all of them talking. The talk seemed to be about poetry. Someone—a woman—was giving a lecture. There were interruptions, a discussion, some laughter. He heard his wife’s voice, her old gilt-edged contralto, asking a question, and the sound of it made him draw in his breath so sharply that something hard, like a cinder or a particle of gravel, formed in his throat.
It stayed stubbornly lodged there all night. He found it painful to breath, and even Isobel noticed how he thrashed about in bed, gasping wildly for air. In the morning she called a doctor, who could find nothing wrong, but she remained uneasy, and that evening she stayed home and made him cups of iced honey-and-lemon tea to ease his throat. He took her hand at one point and held it to his lips as though it might be possible to find the air he needed inside the crevices of her skin. By now the scraping in his throat had become terrible, a raw agonizing rasp like a dull knife sawing through limestone. She looked at his face, from which the healthy, blood-filled elasticity had gone and felt herself brushed by a current of air, or what might have been the memory of a name.
He began to choke violently, and she heard something grotesque come out of his mouth, a sound that was only half-human, but that rode on a curious rhythmic wave that for some reason stirred her deeply. She imagined it to be the word Isobel. “Isobel?” she asked, trying to remember its meaning. He said it a second time, and this time the syllables were more clearly formed.
The light of terror came into his eyes, or perhaps the beginning of a new fever; she managed to calm him by stroking his arm. Then she called the children inside the house, locked the doors and windows against the unbearable heat, and they began, slowly, patiently, hands linked, at the beginning where they had begun before—with table, chair, bed, cool, else, other, sleep, face, mouth, breath, tongue.
Poaching (#ulink_24584c2c-5860-5852-9303-cc02f5be3e34)
ON OUR WAY TO CATCH the Portsmouth ferry, Dobey and I stayed overnight at a country hotel in the village of Kingsclere. The floors sloped, the walls tipped, the tap leaked rusty water and the bedclothes gave out an old, bitter odor.
At breakfast we were told by the innkeeper that King John had once stayed in this hotel and, moreover, had slept in the very room where we had spent the night.
“Wasn’t he the Magna Carta king?” Dobey said, showing off. “That would make it early thirteenth century.”
“Incredible,” I said, worrying whether I should conceal my fried bread beneath the underdone bacon or the bacon beneath the bread. “Extraordinary.”
The innkeeper had more to tell us. “And when His Royal Highness stopped here, he was bit by a bedbug. Of course, there’s none of that nowadays.” Here he chuckled a hearty chuckle and sucked in his red cheeks.
I crushed my napkin—Dobey would call it a serviette—on top of my bacon and fried bread and egg yolk and said to myself: next he’ll be rattling on about a ghost.
“And I didn’t like to tell you people last night when you arrived,” the innkeeper continued, “but the room where the two of you was—it’s haunted.”
“King John?” I asked.
“One of the guards, it’s thought. My wife’s seen ‘im many the time. And our Barbara. And I’ve heard ‘im clomping about in his great boots in the dark of the night and making a right awful noise.”
Dobey and I went back to our room to brush our teeth and close our haversacks, and then we lay flat on our backs for a minute on the musty bed and stared at the crooked beams.
“Are you thinking kingly thoughts?” I said after a while.
“I’m thinking about those poor bloody Aussies,” said Dobey.
“Oh, them,” I said. “They’ll make out all right.”
Only the day before we’d picked up the two Australians on the road. Not that they were by any stretch your average hitchhikers—two women, a mother, middle-aged, and a grown daughter, both smartly dressed. Their rented Morris Minor had started to smoke between Farrington and Kingsclere, and we gave them a lift into the village.
They’d looked us over carefully, especially the mother, before climbing into the back seat. We try to keep the back seat clean and free of luggage for our hitchhikers. The trick is to put them at their ease so they’ll talk. Some we wring dry just by keeping quiet. For others we have to prime the pump. It’s like stealing, Dobey says, only no one’s thought to make a law against it.
Within minutes we knew all about the Australians. They were from Melbourne. The mother had recently been widowed, and her deceased husband, before the onset of Addison’s disease, had worked as an investment analyst. Something coppery about the way she said “my late husband” suggested marital dullness, but Dobey and I never venture into interpretation. The daughter taught in a junior school. She was engaged to be married, a chap in the military. The wedding was six months away, and the two of them, mother and daughter, were shoring themselves up by spending eight weeks touring Britain, a last fling before buckling down to wedding arrangements. It was to be a church ceremony, followed by a lobster lunch in the ballroom of a large hotel.
The two of them made the wedding plans sound grudging and complex and tiresome, like putting on a war. The daughter emitted a sigh; nothing ever went right. And now they’d only been in England a week, had hardly made a dent, and already the hired car had let them down. It looked serious too, maybe the clutch.
Everything the mother said seemed electrically amplified by her bright, forthcoming Australia-lacquered voice. She had an optimistic nature, quickly putting the car out of mind and chirping away from the back seat about the relations in Exeter they planned to visit, elderly aunts, crippled uncles, a nephew who’d joined a rock band and traveled to America, was signed up by a movie studio but never was paid a penny—all this we learned in the ten minutes it took us to drive them into Kingsclere and drop them at the phone box. The daughter, a pretty girl with straight blond hair tied back in a ribbon, hardly said a word.
Nor did we. Dobey and I had made a pact at the start of the trip that we would conceal ourselves, our professions, our antecedents, where we lived, what we were to each other. We would dwindle, grow deliberately thin, almost invisible, and live like aerial plants off the packed fragments and fictions of the hitchhikers we picked up.
One day we traveled for two hours—this was between Conway and Manchester—with a lisping, blue-jeaned giant from Canada who’d come to England to write a doctoral thesis on the early language theories of Wittgenstein.
“We owe tho muth to Withgenstein,” he sputtered, sweeping a friendly red paw through the air and including Dobey and me in the circle of Wittgenstein appreciators. He had run out of money. First he sold his camera; then his Yamaha recorder; then, illegally, the British Rail Pass his parents had given him when he finished his master’s degree. That was why he was hitchhiking. He said, “I am going to Oxthford” as though he was saying, “I am a man in love.”
He talked rapidly, not at all embarrassed by his lisp—Dobey and I liked him for that, though normally we refrain from forming personal judgments about our passengers. He spoke as though compelled to explain to us his exact reason for being where he was at that moment.
They all do. It is a depressing hypothesis, but probably, as Dobey says, true: people care only about themselves. They are frenzied and driven, but only by the machinery of their own adventuring. It has been several days now since anyone’s asked us who we are and what we’re doing driving around like this.
Usually Dobey drives, eyes on the road, listening with a supple, restless attention. I sit in the front passenger seat, my brain screwed up in a squint from looking sideways. At times I feel that giving lifts to strangers makes us into patronizing benefactors. But Dobey says this is foolish; these strangers buy their rides with their stories.
Dobey prefers to pick up strangers who are slightly distraught, saying they “unwind” more easily. Penury or a burned-out clutch—these work in our favor and save us from having to frame our careful questions. I am partial, though, to the calm, to those who stand by the roadside with their luggage in the dust, too composed or dignified to trouble the air with their thumbs. There was the remarkable Venezuelan woman who rode with us from Cardiff to Conway and spoke only intermittently and in sentences that seemed wrapped in their own cool vapors. Yes, she adored to travel alone. She liked the song of her own thoughts. She was made fat by the sight of mountains. The Welsh sky was blue like a cushion. She was eager to embrace rides from strangers. She liked to open wide windows so she could commune with the wind. She was a doctor, a specialist in bones, but alas, alas, she was not in love with her profession. She was in love with the English language because every word could be picked up and spun like a coin on the table top.
The shyest traveler can be kindled, Dobey maintains—often after just one or two strikes of the flint. That sullen Lancashire girl with the pink-striped hair and the colloid eyes—her dad was a coward, her mum shouted all the time, her boyfriend had broken her nose and got her pregnant. She was on her way, she told us, to a hostel in Bolton. Someone there would help her out. She had the address written on the inside of a cigarette packet. I looked aslant and could tell that Dobey wanted to offer her money, but part of our bargain was that we offer only rides.
Another thing we agreed on was that we would believe everything we were told. No matter how fantastic or eccentric or crazy the stories we heard, we’d pledged ourselves to respect their surfaces. Anyone who stepped into our back seat was trusted, even the bearded, evil-smelling curmudgeon we picked up in Sheffield who told us that the spirit of Ben Jonson had directed him to go to Westminster and stand at the abbey door preaching obedience to Mrs. Thatcher. We not only humored the old boy—who gave us shaggy, hand-rolled cigarettes to smoke—but we delivered him at midnight that same day.
Nevertheless, I’m becoming disillusioned. (It was my idea to head for Portsmouth and cross the channel.) I long, for instance, to let slip to one of our passengers that Dobey and I have slept in the bedchamber where King John was nipped by a bedbug. It’s not attention I want and certainly not admiration. It’s only that I’d like to float my own story on the air. I want to test its buoyancy, to see if it holds any substance, to see if it’s true or the opposite of true.
And I ask myself about the stories we’ve been hearing lately: Have they grown thinner? The Australian mother and daughter, for example—what had they offered? Relations in Exeter. A wedding in Melbourne. Is that enough? Dobey says to be patient, that everything is fragmentary, that it’s up to us to supply the missing links. Behind each of the people we pick up, Dobey believes, there’s a deep cave, and in the cave is a trap door and a set of stone steps that we may descend if we wish. I say to Dobey that there may be nothing at the bottom of the stairs, but Dobey says, how will we know if we don’t look.
Scenes (#ulink_409d4041-fc89-5896-9a81-6e8c6df344f1)
IN 1974 FRANCES WAS ASKED to give a lecture in Edmonton, and on the way there her plane was forced to make an emergency landing in a barley field. The man sitting next to her—they had not spoken—turned and asked if he might put his arms around her. She assented. They clung together, her size 12 dress and his wool suit. Later, he gave her his business card.
She kept the card for several weeks, poked in the edge of her bedroom mirror. It is a beautiful mirror, a graceful rectangle in a pine frame, and very, very old. Once it was attached to the back of a bureau belonging to Frances’s grandmother. Leaves, vines, flowers and fruit are shallowly carved in the soft wood of the frame. The carving might be described as primitive—and this is exactly why Frances loves it, being drawn to those things that are incomplete or in some way flawed. Furthermore, the mirror is the first thing she remembers seeing, really seeing, as a child. Visiting her grandmother, she noticed the stiff waves of light and shadow on the frame, the way square pansies interlocked with rigid grapes, and she remembers creeping out of her grandmother’s bed, where she had been put for an afternoon nap, and climbing on a chair so she could touch the worked surface with the flat of her hand.
Her grandmother died. It was discovered by the aunts and uncles that on the back of the mirror was stuck a piece of adhesive tape and on the tape was written: “For my vain little granddaughter Frances.” Frances’ mother was affronted, but put it down to hardening of the arteries. Frances, who was only seven, felt uniquely, mysteriously honored.
She did not attend the funeral; it was thought she was too young, and so instead she was taken one evening to the funeral home to bid goodbye to her grandmother’s body. The room where the old lady lay was large, quiet and hung all around with swags of velvet. Frances’s father lifted her up so she could see her grandmother, who was wearing a black dress with a white crepe jabot, her powdered face pulled tight, as though with a drawstring, into a sort of grimace. A lovely blanket with satin edging covered her trunky legs and torso. Laid out, calm and silent as a boat, she looked almost generous.
For some reason Frances was left alone with the casket for a few minutes, and she took this chance—she had to pull herself up on tiptoe—to reach out and touch her grandmother’s lips with the middle finger of her right hand. It was like pressing in the side of a rubber ball. The lips did not turn to dust—which did not surprise Frances at all, but rather confirmed what she had known all along. Later, she would look at her finger and say to herself, “This finger has touched dead lips.” Then she would feel herself grow rich with disgust. The touch, she knew, had not been an act of love at all, but only a kind of test.
With the same middle finger she later touched the gelatinous top of a goldfish swimming in a little glass bowl at school. She touched the raised mole on the back of her father’s white neck. Shuddering, she touched horse turds in the back lane, and she touched her own urine springing onto the grass as she squatted behind the snowball bush by the fence. When she looked into her grandmother’s mirror, now mounted on her own bedroom wall, she could hardly believe that she, Frances, had contravened so many natural laws.
The glass itself was beveled all the way around, and she can remember that she took pleasure in lining up her round face so that the beveled edge split it precisely in two. When she was fourteen she wrote in her diary, “Life is like looking into a beveled mirror.” The next day she crossed it out and, peering into the mirror, stuck out her tongue and made a face. All her life she’d had this weakness for preciosity, but mainly she’d managed to keep it in check.
She is a lithe and toothy woman with strong, thick, dark brown hair, now starting to gray. She can be charming. “Frances can charm the bees out of the hive,” said a friend of hers, a man she briefly thought she loved. Next year she’ll be forty-five—terrible!—but at least she’s kept her figure. A western sway to her voice is what people chiefly remember about her, just as they remember other people for their chins or noses. This voice sometimes makes her appear inquisitive, but, in fact, she generally hangs back and leaves it to others to begin a conversation.
Once a woman got into an elevator with her and said, “Will you forgive me if I speak my mind? This morning I came within an inch of taking my life. There was no real reason, only everything had got suddenly so dull. But I’m all right now. In fact, I’m going straight to a restaurant to treat myself to a plate of french fries. Just fries, not even a sandwich to go with them. I was never allowed to have french fries when I was a little girl, but the time comes when a person should do what she wants to do.”
The subject of childhood interests Frances, especially its prohibitions, so illogical and various, and its random doors and windows that appear solidly shut, but can, in fact, be opened easily with a touch or a password or a minute of devout resolution. It helps to be sly, also to be quick. There was a time when she worried that fate had penciled her in as “debilitated by guilt,” but mostly she takes guilt for what it is, a kind of lover who can be shrugged off or greeted at the gate. She looks at her two daughters and wonders if they’ll look back resentfully, recalling only easy freedoms and an absence of terror—in other words, meagerness—and envy her for her own stern beginnings. It turned out to have been money in the bank, all the various shames and sweats of growing up. It was instructive; it kept things interesting; she still shivers, remembering how exquisitely sad she was as a child.
“It’s only natural for children to be sad,” says her husband, Theo, who, if he has a fault, is given to reductive statements. “Children are unhappy because they are inarticulate and hence lonely.”
Frances can’t remember being lonely, but telling this to Theo is like blowing into a hurricane. She was spoiled—a lovely word, she thinks—and adored by her parents, her plump, white-faced father and her skinny, sweet-tempered mother. Their love was immense and enveloping like a fall of snow. In the evenings, winter evenings, she sat between the two of them on a blue nubby sofa, listening to the varnished radio and taking sips from their cups of tea from time to time or sucking on a spoonful of sugar. The three of them sat enthralled through “Henry Aldrich” and “Fibber Magee and Molly,” and when Frances laughed they looked at her and laughed too. Frances has no doubt that those spoonfuls of sugar and the roar of Fibber Magee’s closet and her parents’ soft looks were taken in and preserved so that she, years later, boiling an egg or making love or digging in the garden, is sometimes struck by a blow of sweetness that seems to come out of nowhere.
The little brown house where she grew up sat in the middle of a block crowded with other such houses. In front of each lay a tiny lawn and a flower bed edged with stones. Rows of civic trees failed to flourish, but did not die either. True, there was terror in the back lane, where the big boys played with sticks and jackknives, but the street was occupied mainly by quiet, hard-working families, and in the summertime hopscotch could be played in the street, there was so little traffic.
Frances’s father spent his days “at the office.” Her mother stayed at home, wore bib aprons, made jam and pickles and baked custard, and every morning before school brushed and braided Frances’s hair. Frances can remember, or thinks she can remember, that one morning her mother walked as far as the corner with her and said, “I don’t know why, but I’m so full of happiness today I can hardly bear it.” The sun came fretting through the branches of a scrubby elm at that minute and splashed across her mother’s face, making her look like someone in a painting or like one of the mothers in her school reader.
Learning to read was like falling into a mystery deeper than the mystery of airwaves or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus. Deliberately she made herself stumble and falter over the words in her first books, trying to hold back the rush of revelation. She saw other children being matter-of-fact and methodical, puzzling over vowels and consonants and sounding out words as though they were dimes and nickels that had to be extracted from the slot of a bank. She felt suffused with light and often skipped or hopped or ran wildly to keep herself from flying apart.
Her delirium, her failure to ingest books calmly, made her suspect there was something wrong with her or else with the world, yet she deeply distrusted the school librarian, who insisted that a book could be a person’s best friend. (Those subject to preciosity instantly spot others with the same affliction.) This librarian, Miss Mayes, visited all the classes. She was tall and soldierly with a high, light voice. “Boys and girls,” she cried, bringing large red hands together, “a good book will never let you down.” She went on; books could take you on magic journeys; books could teach you where the rain came from or how things used to be in the olden days. A person who truly loved books need never feel alone.
But, she continued, holding up a finger, there are people who do shameful things to books. They pull them from the shelves by their spines. They turn down the corners of pages; they leave them on screened porches where the rain and other elements can warp their covers; and they use curious and inappropriate objects as bookmarks.
From a petit point bag she drew a list of objects that had been wrongly, criminally inserted between fresh clean pages: a blue-jay feather, an oak leaf, a matchbook cover, a piece of colored chalk and, on one occasion—“on one occasion, boys and girls”—a strip of bacon.
A strip of bacon. In Frances’s mind the strip of bacon was uncooked, cold and fatty with a pathetic streaking of lean. Its oil would press into the paper, a porky abomination, and its ends would flop out obscenely. The thought was thrilling: someone, someone who lived in the same school district, had had the audacity, the imagination, to mark the pages of a book with a strip of bacon. The existence of this person and his outrageous act penetrated the fever that had come over her since she’d learned to read, and she began to look around again and see what the world had to offer.
Next door lived Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, and upstairs, fast asleep, lived Louise Shaw, aged eighteen. She had been asleep for ten years. A boy across the street named Jackie McConnell told Frances that it was the sleeping sickness, that Louise Shaw had been bitten by the sleeping sickness bug, but Frances’s mother said no, it was the coma. One day Mrs. Shaw, smelling of chlorine bleach and wearing a flower-strewn housedress, stopped Frances on the sidewalk, held the back of her hand to the side of Frances’s face and said, “Louise was just your age when we lost her. She was forever running or skipping rope or throwing a ball up against the side of the garage. I used to say to her, don’t make such a ruckus, you’ll drive me crazy. I used to yell all the time at her, she was so full of beans and such a chatterbox.” After that Frances felt herself under an obligation to Mrs. Shaw, and whenever she saw her she made her body speed up and whirl on the grass or do cartwheels.
A little later she learned to negotiate the back lane. There, between board fences, garbage cans, garage doors and stands of tough weeds, she became newly nimble and strong. She learned to swear—damn, hell and dirty bastard—and played piggy-move-up and spud and got herself roughly kissed a number of times, and then something else happened: one of the neighbors put up a basketball hoop. For a year, maybe two—Frances doesn’t trust her memory when it comes to time—she was obsessed with doing free throws. She became known as the queen of free throws; she acquired status, even with the big boys, able to sink ten out of ten baskets, but never, to her sorrow, twenty out of twenty. She threw free throws in the morning before school, at lunchtime, and in the evening until it got dark. Nothing made her happier than when the ball dropped silently through the ring without touching it or banking on the board. At night she dreamed of these silky baskets, the rush of air and sinuous movement of the net, then the ball striking the pavement and returning to her hands. (“Sounds a bit Freudian to me,” her husband, Theo, said when she tried to describe for him her time of free-throw madness, proving once again how far apart the two of them were in some things.) One morning she was up especially early. There was no one about. The milkman hadn’t yet come, and there was dew shining on the tarry joints of the pavement. Holding the ball in her hands was like holding onto a face, it was so dearly familiar with its smell of leather and its seams and laces. That morning she threw twenty-seven perfect free throws before missing. Each time the ball went through the hoop she felt an additional oval of surprise grow round her body. She had springs inside her, in her arms and in the insteps of her feet. What stopped her finally was her mother calling her name, demanding to know what she was doing outside so early. “Nothing,” Frances said, and knew for the first time the incalculable reward of self-possession.
There was a girl in her sewing class named Pat Leonard. She was older than the other girls, had a rough pitted face and a brain pocked with grotesqueries. “Imagine,” she said to Frances, “sliding down a banister and suddenly it turns into a razor blade.” When she trimmed the seams of the skirt she was making and accidentally cut through the fabric, she laughed out loud. To amuse the other girls she sewed the skin of her fingers together. She told a joke, a long story about a pickle factory that was really about eating excrement. In her purse was a packet of cigarettes. She had a boyfriend who went to the technical school, and several times she’d reached inside his pants and squeezed his thing until it went off like a squirt gun. She’d flunked math twice. She could hardly read. One day she wasn’t there, and the sewing teacher said she’d been expelled. Frances felt as though she’d lost her best friend, even though she wouldn’t have been seen dead walking down the hall with Pat Leonard. Melodramatic tears swam into her eyes, and then real tears that wouldn’t stop until the teacher brought her a glass of water and offered to phone her mother.
Another time, she was walking home from a friend’s in the early evening. She passed by a little house not far from her own. The windows were open and, floating on the summer air, came the sound of people speaking in a foreign language. There seemed to be a great number of them, and the conversation was very rapid and excited. They might have been quarreling or telling old stories; Frances had no idea which. It could have been French or Russian or Portuguese they spoke. The words ran together and made queer little dashes and runs and choking sounds. Frances imagined immense, wide-branching grammars and steep, stone streets rising out of other centuries. She felt as though she’d been struck by a bolt of good fortune, and all because the world was bigger than she’d been led to believe.
At university, where she studied languages, she earned pocket money by working in the library. She and a girl named Ursula were entrusted with the key, and it was their job to open the library on Saturday mornings. During the minute or two before anyone else came, the two of them galloped at top speed through the reference room, the periodical room, the reading room, up and down the rows of stacks, filling that stilled air with what could only be called primal screams. Why this should have given Frances such exquisite pleasure she couldn’t have said, since she was in rebellion against nothing she knew of. By the time the first students arrived, she and Ursula would be standing behind the main desk, date stamp in hand, sweet as dimity.
One Saturday, the first person who came was a bushy-headed, serious-minded zoology student named Theodore, called Theo by his friends. He gave Frances a funny look, then in a cracked, raspy voice asked her to come with him later and have a cup of coffee. A year later he asked her to marry him. He had a mind unblown by self-regard and lived, it seemed to Frances, in a nursery world of goodness and badness with not much room to move in between.
It’s been mainly a happy marriage. Between the two of them, they’ve invented hundreds of complex ways of enslaving each other, some of them amazingly tender. Like other married people, they’ve learned to read each other’s minds. Once Theo said to Frances as they drove around and around, utterly lost in a vast treeless suburb, “In every one of these houses there’s been a declaration of love,” and this was exactly the thought Frances had been thinking.
To her surprise, to everyone’s surprise, she turned out to have an aptitude for monogamy. Nevertheless, many of the scenes that have come into her life have involved men. Once she was walking down a very ordinary French street on a hot day. A man, bare-chested, drinking Perrier at a café table, sang out, “Bonjour.” Not “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” just “Bonjour.” Cheeky. She was wearing white pants, a red blouse, a straw hat and sunglasses. “Bonjour,” she sang back and gave a sassy little kick, which became the start of a kind of dance. The man at the table clapped his hands over his head to keep time as she went dancing by.
Once she went to the British Museum to finish a piece of research. There was a bomb alert just as she entered, and everyone’s shopping bags and briefcases were confiscated and searched. It happened that Frances had just bought a teddy bear for the child of a friend she was going to visit later in the day. The guard took it, shook it till its eyes rolled, and then carried it away to be X-rayed. Later he brought it to Frances, who was sitting at a table examining a beautiful old manuscript. As he handed her the bear, he kissed the air above its fuzzy head, and Frances felt her mouth go into the shape of a kiss too, a kiss she intended to be an expression of her innocence, only that. He winked. She winked back. He leaned over and whispered into her ear a suggestion that was hideously, comically, obscene. She pretended not to hear, and a few minutes later she left, hurrying down the street full of cheerful shame, her work unfinished.
These are just some of the scenes in Frances’s life. She thinks of them as scenes because they’re much too fragmentary to be stories and far too immediate to be memories. They seem to bloom out of nothing, out of the thin, uncolored air of defeats and pleasures. A curtain opens, a light appears, there are voices or music or sometimes a wide transparent stream of silence. Only rarely do they point to anything but themselves. They’re difficult to talk about. They’re useless, attached to nothing, can’t be traded in or shaped into instruments to prise open the meaning of the universe.
There are people who think such scenes are ornaments suspended from lives that are otherwise busy and useful. Frances knows perfectly well that they are what a life is made of, one fitting against the next like English paving-stones.
Or sometimes she thinks of them as little keys on a chain, keys that open nothing, but simply exist for the beauty of their toothed edges and the way they chime in her pocket.
Other times she is reminded of the Easter eggs her mother used to bring out every year. These were real hens’ eggs with a hole poked in the top and bottom and the contents blown out. The day before Easter, Frances and her mother always sat down at the kitchen table with paint brushes, a glass of water and a box of watercolors. They would decorate half a dozen eggs, maybe more, but only the best were saved from year to year. These were taken from a cupboard just before Easter, removed from their shoebox and carefully arranged, always on the same little pewter cake stand. The eggs had to be handled gently, especially the older ones.
Frances, when she was young, liked to pick up each one in turn and examine it minutely. She had a way of concentrating her thoughts and shutting everything else out, thinking only of this one little thing, this little egg that was round like the world, beautiful in color and satin to the touch, and that fit into the hollow of her hand as though it were made for that very purpose.
Fragility (#ulink_a1318387-6055-5b79-85cf-7980b085a8fa)
WE ARE FLYING OVER THE ROCKIES on our way to Vancouver, and there sits Ivy with her paperback. I ask myself: Should I interrupt and draw her attention to the grandeur beneath us?
In a purely selfish sense, watching Ivy read is as interesting as peering down at those snowy mountains. She turns the pages of a book in the same way she handles every object, with a peculiar respectful gentleness, as though the air around it were more tender than ordinary air. I’ve watched her lift a cup of tea with this same abstracted grace, cradling a thick mug in a way that transforms it into something precious and fragile. It’s a gift some people have.
I decide not to disturb her; utterly absorbed in what she’s reading, she’s seen the Rockies before.
In the seat ahead of us is a young man wearing a bright blue jacket—I remember that once I had a similar jacket in a similar hue. Unlike us, he’s clearly flying over the Rockies for the first time. He’s in a half-standing position at the window, snapping away with his camera, pausing only to change the film. From where I’m sitting I can see his intense, eager trigger hand, his steadying elbow, his dropped lower lip. In a week he’ll be passing his slides around the office, holding them delicately at their edges up to the light. He might set up a projector and screen them one evening in his living room; he might invite a few friends over, and his wife—who will resemble the Ivy of fifteen years ago—will serve coffee and wedges of cheese cake; these are the Rockies, he’ll say—magnificent, stirring, one of the wonders of the continent.
I tell myself that I would give a great deal to be in that young man’s shoes, but this is only a half-truth, the kind of lie Ivy and I sometimes spin for our own amusement. We really don’t want to go back in time. What we envy in the young is that fine nervous edge of perception, the ability to take in reality afresh. I suppose, as we grow older, that’s what we forfeit, acquiring in its place a measure of healthy resignation.
Ivy puts down her book suddenly and reaches for my hand. A cool, light, lazy touch. She’s smiling.
“Good book?”
“Hmmm,” she says, and stretches.
Now, as a kind of duty, I point out the Rockies.
“Beautiful,” she exclaims, leaning toward the window.
And it is beautiful. But unfortunately the plane is flying at a height that extracts all sense of dimension from the view. Instead of snow-capped splendor, we see a kind of Jackson Pollock dribbling of white on green. It’s a vast abstract design, a linking of incised patterns, quite interesting in its way, but without any real suggestion of height or majesty.
“It looks a little like a Jackson Pollock,” Ivy says in that rhythmic voice of hers.
“Did you really say that?”
“I think so.” Her eyebrows go up, her mouth crimps at the edges. “At least, if I didn’t, someone did.”
I lift her hand—I can’t help myself—and kiss her fingertips.
“And what’s that for?” she asks, still smiling.
“An attack of poignancy.”
“A serious new dietary disease, I suppose,” Ivy says, and at that moment the steward arrives with our lunch trays.
Ivy and I have been to Vancouver fairly often on business trips or for holidays. This time it’s different; in three months we’ll be moving permanently to Vancouver, and now the two of us are engaged in that common-enough errand, a house-hunting expedition.
Common, I say, but not for us.
We know the statistics: that about half of all North Americans move every five years, that we’re a rootless, restless, portable society. But for some reason, some failing on our part or perhaps simple good fortune, Ivy and I seem to have evaded the statistical pattern. The small stone-fronted, bow-windowed house we bought when Christopher was born is the house in which we continue to live after twenty years.
If there had been another baby, we would have considered a move, but we stayed in the same house in the middle of Toronto. It was close to both our offices and close too to the clinic Christopher needed. Curiously enough, most of our neighbors also stayed there year after year. In our neighborhood we know everyone. When the news of my transfer came, the first thing Ivy said was, “What about the Mattisons and the Levensons? What about Robin and Sara?”
“We can’t very well take everyone on the street along with us.”
“Oh Lordy,” Ivy said, and bit her lip. “Of course not. It’s only-”
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe we can talk Robin and Sara into taking their holidays on the coast next year. Sara always said—”
“And we’ll be back fairly often. At least twice a year.”
“If only-”
“If only what?”
“Those stupid bulbs.” (I love the way Ivy pronounces the word stupid: stewpid, giving it a patrician lift.)
“Bulbs?”
“Remember last fall, all those bulbs I put in?”
“Oh,” I said, remembering.
She looked at me squarely: “You don’t mind as much as I do, do you?”
“Of course I do. You know I do.”
“Tell me the truth.”
What could I say? I’ve always been impressed by the accuracy of Ivy’s observations. “The truth is—”
“The truth is—?” she helped me along.
“I guess I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?” Her eyes filled with tears. This was a difficult time for us. Christopher had died in January. He was a tough kid and lived a good five years longer than any of us ever thought he would. His death was not unexpected, but still, Ivy and I were feeling exceptionally fragile.
“Ready for what?” she asked again.
“For something,” I admitted. “For anything, I guess.”
The first house we look at seems perfect. The settled neighborhood is dense with trees and shrubbery and reminds us both of our part of Toronto. There are small repairs that need doing but nothing major. Best of all, from the dining room there can be seen a startling lop of blue water meeting blue sky.
I point this out to Ivy; a view was one of the things we had put on our list. There is also a fireplace, another must, and a capacious kitchen with greenhouse windows overlooking a garden.
“And look at the bulbs,” I point out. “Tulips halfway up. Daffodils.”
“Lilies,” Ivy says.
“I think we’ve struck it lucky,” I tell the real-estate woman who’s showing us around, a Mrs. Marjorie Little. (“Call me Marge,” she’d said to us with west-coast breeziness.)
Afterward, in the car, Ivy is so quiet I have to prompt her. “Well?”
Marge Little, sitting at the wheel, peers at me, then at Ivy.
“It’s just,” Ivy begins, “it’s just so depressing.”
Depressing? I can’t believe she’s saying this. A view, central location, a fireplace. Plus bulbs.
“Well,” Ivy says slowly, “it’s a divorce house. You must have noticed?”
I hadn’t. “A divorce house? How do you know?”
“I looked in the closets. Her clothes were there but his weren’t.”
“Oh.”
“And half the pictures had been taken off the wall. Surely you noticed that.”
I shake my head.
“I know it sounds silly, but wouldn’t you rather move into a house with some good”—she pauses—“some good vibrations?”
“Vibrations?”
“Did you notice the broken light in the bathroom? I’ll bet someone threw something at it. In a rage.”
“We could always fix the light. And the other things. And with our own furniture—”
Ivy is an accountant. Once I heard a young man in her firm describe her as a crack accountant. For a number of years now she’s been a senior partner. When this same young man heard she was leaving because of my transfer, he couldn’t help ragging her a little, saying he thought women didn’t move around at the whim of their husbands anymore, and that, out of principle, she ought to refuse to go to Vancouver or else arrange some kind of compromise life—separate apartments, for instance, with weekend rendezvous in Winnipeg.
Ivy had howled at this. She’s a positive, good-natured woman and, as it turned out, she had no trouble finding an opening in a good Vancouver firm at senior level. As I say, she’s positive. Which is why her apprehension over good or bad vibrations is puzzling. Can it be she sees bad times ahead for the two of us? Or is it only that she wants solid footing after these long years with Christopher? Neither of us is quite glued back together again. Not that we ever will be.
“I can’t help it,” Ivy is saying. “It just doesn’t feel like a lucky house. There’s something about—”
Marge Little interrupts with a broad smile. “I’ve got all kinds of interesting houses to show you. Maybe you’ll like the next one better.”
“Does it have good vibes?” Ivy asks, laughing a little to show she’s only half-serious.
“I don’t know,” Marge Little says. “They don’t put that kind of info on the fact sheet.”
The next house is perched on the side of the canyon. No, that’s not quite true. It is, in fact, falling into the canyon. I notice, but don’t mention, the fact that the outside foundation walls are cracked and patched. Inside, the house is alarmingly empty; the cool settled air seems proof that it’s been vacant for some time.
Marge consults her fact sheet. Yes, the house has been on the market about six months. The price has been reduced twice. But—she glances at us—perhaps we noticed the foundation …
“Yes,” I say. “Hopeless.”
“Damn,” Ivy says.
We look at two more houses; both have spectacular views and architectural distinction. But one is a bankruptcy sale and the other is a divorce house. By now I’m starting to pick up the scent: it’s a compound of petty carelessness and strenuous neglect, as though the owners had decamped in a hurry, angry at the rooms themselves.
To cheer ourselves up, the three of us have lunch in a sunny Broadway restaurant. It seems extraordinary that we can sit here and see mountains that are miles away; the thought that we will soon be able to live within sight of these mountains fills us with optimism. We order a little wine and linger in the sunlight. Vancouver is going to be an adventure. We’re going to be happy here. Marge Little, feeling expansive, tells us about her three children and about the problem she has keeping her weight down. “Marge Large they’ll be calling me soon,” she says. It’s an old joke, we sense, and the telling of it makes us feel we’re old friends. She got into the business, she says, because she loves houses. And she has an instinct for matching houses with people. “So don’t be discouraged,” she tells us. “We’ll find the perfect place this afternoon.”
We drive through narrow city streets to a house where a famous movie idol grew up. His mother still lives in the house, a spry, slightly senile lady in her eighties. The tiny house—we quickly see it is far too small for us—is crowded with photographs of the famous son. He beams at us from the hallway, from the dining room, from the bedroom bureau.
“Oh, he’s a good boy. Comes home every two or three years,” his mother tells us, her large teeth shining in a diminished face. “And once I went down there, all the way down to Hollywood, on an airplane. He paid my way, sent me a ticket. I saw his swimming pool. They all have swimming pools. He has a cook, a man who does all the meals, so I didn’t have to lift a finger for a whole week. What an experience, like a queen. I have some pictures someplace I could show you—”
“That would be wonderful,” Marge Little says, “but”—she glances at her watch—“I’m afraid we have another appointment.”
“—I saw those pictures just the other day. Now where—? I think they’re in this drawer somewhere. Here, I knew it. Take a look at this. Isn’t that something? That’s his swimming pool. Kidney-shaped. He’s got another one now, even bigger.”
“Beautiful,” Ivy says.
“And here he is when he was little. See this? He’d be about nine there. We took a trip east. That’s him and his dad standing by Niagara Falls. Here’s another—”
“We really have to—”
“A good boy. I’ll say that for him. Didn’t give any trouble. Sometimes I see his movies on the TV and I can’t believe the things he does, with women and so on. I have to pinch myself and say it’s only pretend—”
“I think—”
“I’m going into this senior-citizen place. They’ve got a nice TV lounge, big screen, bigger than this little bitty one, color too. I always—”
“Sad,” Ivy says, when we escape at last and get into the car.
“The house or the mother?” I ask her.
“Both.”
“At least it’s not a D.H.” (This has become our shorthand expression for divorce house.)
“Wait’ll you see the next place,” Marge Little says, swinging into traffic. “The next place is fabulous.”
Fabulous, yes. But far too big. After that, in a fit of desperation, we look at a condo. “I’m not quite ready for this,” I have to admit.
“No garden,” Ivy says in a numb voice. She looks weary, and we decide to call it a day.
The ad in the newspaper reads: WELL-LOVED FAMILY HOME. And Ivy and Marge Little and I are there, knocking on the door, at nine-thirty in the morning.
“Come in, come in,” calls a young woman in faded jeans. She has a young child on one hip and another—they must be twins—by the hand. Sunlight pours in the front window and there is freshly baked bread cooling on the kitchen counter.
But the house is a disaster, a rabbit warren of narrow hallways and dark corners. The kitchen window is only feet away from a low brick building where bodywork is being done on imported sports cars. The stairs are uneven. The bedroom floors slope, and the paint is peeling off the bathroom ceiling.
“It just kills us to leave this place,” the young woman says. She’s following us through the rooms, pointing with unmistakable sorrow at the wall where they were planning to put up shelving, at the hardwood floors they were thinking of sanding. Out of the blue, they got news of a transfer.
Ironically, they’re going to Toronto, and in a week’s time they’ll be there doing what we’re doing, looking for a house they can love. “But we just know we’ll never find a place like this,” she tells us with a sad shake of her head. “Not in a million zillion years.”
After that we lose track of the number of houses. The day bends and blurs; square footage, zoning regulations, mortgage schedules, double-car garages, cedar siding only two years old—was that the place near that little park? No, that was the one on that little crescent off Arbutus. Remember? The one without the basement.
Darkness is falling as Marge Little drives us back to our hotel. We are passing hundreds—it seems like thousands—of houses, and we see lamps being turned on, curtains being closed. Friendly smoke rises from substantial chimneys. Here and there, where the curtains are left open, we can see people sitting down to dinner. Passing one house, I see a woman in a window, leaning over with a match in her hand, lighting a pair of candles. Ivy sees it too, and I’m sure she’s feeling as I am, a little resentful that everyone but us seems to have a roof overhead.
“Tomorrow for sure,” Marge calls cheerily. (Tomorrow is our last day. Both of us have to be home on Monday.)
“I suppose we could always rent for a year.” Ivy says this with low enthusiasm.
“Or,” I say, “we could make another trip in a month or so. Maybe there’ll be more on the market.”
“Isn’t it funny? The first house we saw, remember? In a way, it was the most promising place we’ve seen.”
“The one with the view from the dining room? With the broken light in the bathroom?”
“It might not look bad with a new fixture. Or even a skylight.”
“Wasn’t that a divorce house?” I ask Ivy.
“Yes,” she shrugs, “but maybe that’s just what we’ll have to settle for.”
“It was listed at a good price.”
“I live in a divorce house,” Marge Little says, pulling in front of our hotel. “It’s been a divorce house for a whole year now.”
“Oh, Marge,” Ivy says. “I didn’t mean—” she stops. “Forgive me.”
“And it’s not so bad. Sometimes it’s darned cheerful.”
“I just—” Ivy takes a breath. “I just wanted a lucky house. Maybe there’s no such thing—”
“Are you interested in taking another look at the first house? I might be able to get you an appointment this evening. That is, if you think you can stand one more appointment today.”
“Absolutely,” we say together.
This time we inspect the house inch by inch. Ivy makes a list of the necessary repairs, and I measure the window for curtains. We hadn’t realized that there was a cedar closet off one of the bedrooms. The lights of the city are glowing through the dining-room window. A spotlight at the back of the house picks out the flowers just coming into bloom. There’ll be room for our hi-fi across from the fireplace. The basement is dry and very clean. The wallpaper in the downstairs den is fairly attractive and in good condition. The stairway is well proportioned and the banister is a beauty. (I’m a sucker for banisters.) There’s an alcove where the pine buffet will fit nicely. Trees on both sides of the house should give us greenery and privacy. The lawn, as far as we can tell, seems to be in good shape. There’s a lazy Susan in the kitchen, also a built-in dishwasher, a later model than ours. Plenty of room for a small table and a couple of chairs. The woodwork in the living room has been left natural, a wonder since so many people, a few years back, were painting over their oak trim.
Ivy says something that makes us laugh. “Over here,” she says, “over here is where we’ll put the Christmas tree.” She touches the edge of one of the casement windows, brushes it with the side of her hand and says, “It’s hard to believe that people could live in such a beautiful house and be unhappy.”
For a moment there’s silence, and then Marge says, “We could put in an offer tonight. I don’t think it’s too late. What do you think?”
————
And now, suddenly, it’s the next evening, and Ivy and I are flying back to Toronto. Here we are over the Rockies again, crossing them this time in darkness. Ivy sits with her head back, eyes closed, her shoulders so sharply her own; she’s not quite asleep, but not quite awake either.
Our plane seems a fragile vessel, a piece of jewelry up here between the stars and the mountains. Flying through dark air like this makes me think that life itself is fragile. The miniature accidents of chromosomes can spread unstoppable circles of grief. A dozen words carelessly uttered can dismantle a marriage. A few gulps of oxygen are all that stand between us and death.
I wonder if Ivy is thinking, as I am, of the three months ahead, of how tumultuous they’ll be. There are many things to think of when you move. For one, we’ll have to put our own house up for sale. The thought startles me, though I’ve no idea why.
I try to imagine prospective buyers arriving for appointments, stepping through our front door with polite murmurs and a sharp eye for imperfections.
They’ll work their way through the downstairs, the kitchen (renewed only four years ago), the living room (yes, a real fireplace, a good draft), the dining room (small, but you can seat ten in a pinch). Then they’ll make their way upstairs (carpet a little worn, but with lots of wear left). The main bedroom is fair size (with good reading lamps built in, also bookshelves).
And then there’s Christopher’s bedroom.
Will the vibrations announce that here lived a child with little muscular control, almost no sight or hearing and no real consciousness as that word is normally perceived? He had, though—and perhaps the vibrations will acknowledge the fact—his own kind of valor and perhaps his own way of seeing the world. At least Ivy and I always rewallpapered his room every three years or so out of a conviction that he took some pleasure in the sight of ducks swimming on a yellow sea. Later, it was sailboats; then tigers and monkeys dodging jungle growth; then a wild op-art checkerboard; and then, the final incarnation, a marvelous green cave of leafiness with amazing flowers and impossible birds sitting in branches.
I can’t help wondering if these prospective buyers, these people looking for God only knows what, if they’ll enter this room and feel something of his fragile presence alive in a fragile world.
Well, we shall see. We shall soon see.
The Metaphor Is Dead—Pass It On (#ulink_f570f5b9-46e7-52bc-8a7a-ffd48241e732)
“THE METAPHOR is DEAD,” bellowed the gargantuan professor, his walrus mustache dancing and his thundery eyebrows knitting together rapaciously. “Those accustomed to lunching at the high table of literature will now be able to nosh at the trough on a streamlined sub minus the pickle. Banished is that imperial albatross, that dragooned double agent, that muddy mirror lit by the false flashing signal like and by that even more presumptuous little sugar lump as. The gates are open, and the prisoner, freed of his shackles, has departed without so much as a goodbye wave to those who would take a simple pomegranate and insist it be the universe.
“Furthermore,” trumpeted the cagey professor, warming to his thesis and drumming on the lectern, “the dogged metaphor, that scurfy escort vehicle of crystalline simplicity, has been royally indicted as the true enemy of meaning, a virus introduced into a healthy bloodstream and maintained by the lordly shrewdness of convention. Oh, it was born innocently enough with Homer and his wine-dark sea (a timid offering, perhaps, but one that dropped a velvet curtain between what was and what almost was). Then came Beowulf, stirring the pot with his cunning kennings, and before you could count to sixteen, the insidious creature had wiggled through the window and taken over the house. Soon it became a private addiction, a pipe full of opium taken behind a screen—but the wavelet graduated to turbulent ocean, and the sinews of metaphor became, finally, the button and braces that held up the pants of poesy. The commonest object was yoked by adulterous communion with unlike object (bread and wine, as it were, touching the salty lips of unreason like a capricious child who insists on placing a token toe in every puddle).
“Initially a toy of the literati,” the fiery professor cried, “the metaphor grew like a polyp on the clean chamber of poetry whose friendly narrative lines had previously lain as simply as knives and forks in a kitchen drawer and whose slender, unjointed nouns, colloquial as onions, became puffed up like affected dowagers, swaying, pelvis forward, into a Victorian parlor of cluttered predicates, where they took to sitting about on the embroidered cushions of metonymy and resting their metered feet on quirky mean-spirited oxymorons.
“Once established they acquired an air of entitlement, the swag and flounce and glitter of the image boxed within another image, one bleating clause mounting another, sometimes marinated in irony, other times drenched in the teacup of whimsy. Grown fat with simile and the lace of self-indulgence, the embryo sentence sprouted useless tentacles and became an incomprehensible polyhedron, a glassine envelope enclosing multiple darting allusions that gave off the perfume of apples slowly rotting in a hermit’s cryptic cellar. There followed signs of severe hypochondria as these verbal clotheshorses stood contemplating one another and noting the inspired imbroglio lodged beneath each painted fingernail. The bell had clearly sounded. It was time to retreat.
“And now,” the professor essayed, stabbing the listening air, “like light glancing off a bowling ball, the peeled, scrubbed and eviscerated simplicity of language is reborn. Out onto the rubbish heap goes the fisherman’s net of foxy allusions. A lifeboat has been assigned to every passenger—and just in time too—and we are once again afloat on the simple raft of the declarative sentence (that lapsed Catholic of the accessible forms) and sent, shriven and humble, into orbit, unencumbered by the debris of dusty satellites, no longer pretending every object is like another; instead every object is (is, that frosty little pellet of assertion that sleeps in the folds of the newly minted, nip-wasted sentence, simple as a slug bolt and, like a single hand clapping, requiring neither nursemaid to lean upon nor the succor of moth-eaten mythology to prop it up). With watercolor purity, with soldierly persistence and workmanlike lack of pretence, the newly pruned utterance appears to roll onto the snowy page with not a single troubling cul-de-sac or detour into the inky besmudged midnight of imagery.
“But, alas,” the ashen professor hollowly concluded, “these newly resurrected texts, for all their lean muscularity (the cleanly gnawed bones of noun, the powerful hamstrings of verb) carry still the faulty chromosome, the trace element, of metaphor—since language itself is but a metaphoric expression of human experience. It is the punishing silence around the word that must now be claimed for literature, the pure uncobbled stillness of the caesura whose unknowingness throws arrows of meaning (palpable as summer fruit approaching ripeness) at the hem of that stitched under-skirt of affirmation/negation, and plants a stout flag once and forever in the unweeded, unchoreographed vacant lot of being.
“And now, gentle people, the chair will field questions.”
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Carol Shields
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: For the first time all of Carol Shields’ remarkable short stories – some previously unpublished – are gathered together in one volume.‘Carol Shields’ stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure’ Alice MunroIn the Collected Stories we bring together Carol Shields’ original short-story volumes, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for the Carnival, as well as many stories not previously published in the UK, including ‘Segue’, her last work.In these stories the author combines the dazzling virtuosity and wise maturity that won so many readers to her prize-winning novels such as The Stone Diaries and Unless.