Flirt: The Interviews (6 page)

—I was married once – I made my own dress (a million pencil pleats) while working in the elementary school with a predominantly aboriginal student body and looking after a springer spaniel with epilepsy – when I was nineteen.

—What decade are we in?

—That was the late seventies.

—An interesting time to be a woman. Feminism had offered some answers but the questions were growing more complicated.

—And there seemed to be so much work to do on the whole culture to make it even close to worthy of the name “democracy”.

—Where to begin when you figure out you've been getting privileges others only dream about?

—What's that spice?

—Not a spice: orange rind.

—Of course. So I was in Alert Bay at nineteen, married to a schoolteacher who was also a lay preacher in the Anglican church on the reservation and who fished commercially on an Indian boat in the summer.

—There's lots of material in a character like that.

—I'm not sure we should pick a mate on that basis.

—Maybe not, but the better the nouns, the better the marriage. Describe his hair.

—Oh, whispy blonde and then white in summer, the tideline climbing further up his forehead. Bright blue eyes.

—Blue like sky or blue like ice?

—Blue like heartache.

—How did the Indians take to him?

—When we moved out of the manse on the Reserve to a cottage at the other end of the island, a bundle of them came around in a big ugly pickup while he was at work and stole his firewood from where he'd dumped it in the driveway.

—He'd chopped that himself, I suppose. You'd fall for a man like that. A woodcutter.

—Despite his allergy to yellow cedar.

—You should drink that juice. Rachel presses the carrots and beets in a very nifty stainless steel juicer and then adds last year's frozen pulp from her late spartans. Can you taste the ginger? Special ingredient: cantaloupes, also from her garden. Let me tuck this in your blouse or you'll have the whole spectrum down your front.

—Thank-you. Your skin is so smooth.

—Drink. Here's that little dog back to forgive you. I wonder what made his tail go so crooked. That's a lot of wagging for such a small dog.

—Long story short, the school year ends and the new husband goes fishing.

—So soon?

—I fall for someone, anyone and husband comes back from a coho opening and the someone's wife finds out. New husband says, oh yeah? He wasn't really fishing but down in Vancouver with Sandra or Susan or Sally, arranging for the birth and adoption of their child.

—You knew?

—Nope. I knew he was infertile according to the last sperm count. So he said.

—No.

—So he'd fooled around before we got together and now the baby was getting contracted out.

—You were nineteen.

—So young to figure these things out: guilt, betrayal, hostility. I was living on the water and the trees across the strait were old, huge and lush. The closeness of landscape did things to my common sense. Up there, it supernaturalizes emotion, lures the mopey and allows them to disconnect from what matters. Green on green on darker green. My dog was so neurotic she couldn't cross the road and scout the beach without a chaperone.

—Your dog's name?

—Thurber.

—Oh dear. Life should be lighter when a dog has that name.

—I was out of love and set on this other woman's husband who seemed set on me but also on his wife, who was a hotshot and deserved better; I was working in the library at the school; and my sister was teaching there.

—Oh, for heaven sake. What a thing to do.

—Yes.

—What a mess of complications you managed to scramble together. And with an epileptic spaniel, too. Violence, or the implied understatement of it?

—Well, he threw a knife at my head as I sat on the couch.

—Miss by much?

—Oh, he meant to miss. He hated that knife because I'd cut strawberries with it and never wipe the blade which, he said, would cause corrosion, pit the blade. He didn't like it when I let the emergency brake rub teeth when I pulled it up, either. That, too, would wear things down.

—There's a metaphor to put on the list. So. You're a teenager and a man is throwing a knife and there's a wife about to get even – how did you escape this tangle, as if I have to ask.

—You spend half the year in Comox.

—Yes.

—Then you know the hospital there, the one with the psychiatric ward?

—Yes.

—So they pumped my stomach and stitched my wrists –

—What was in the stomach?

—Turpentine. Champagne.

—I wonder if that kind of corrosion would permanently damage a stomach?

—I wonder, too. The doctor said, “We don't want a woman who carves and poisons herself living in our community. Come back when you're ready to be part of the community.” And the next morning they flew me down to Comox in a little Cessna 180.

—Seems like a hypocritical thing for a doctor to say. After all, I'm sure there were worse than you in the seventies in a place like that.

—Tough love?

—Nonsense.

—It was a good time to leave. I remember not much.

—Memory is a very interesting organ. I bet if you started to write a story

– not autobiographical, but personal – about that time, I bet you'd begin to recover details and feelings and events. They'd be suspect in their accuracy, of course, but you'd have them.

—Not yet. I'm not hungry for those details yet. And the story seems sort of bewildering and pathetic. I was wrong about everything.

—Oh, the story could work around that. Give that young woman a little more power, blonder hair and a head scarf, or maybe set it in the sixties, and really work out the landscape so the story's also about that, and I think you'd have an interesting moment to play with. But these things take time, you're right. A story can't always be squeezed out of history. With me, writing has something to do with the fight against death, the feeling that we lose everything every day, and writing is a way of convincing yourself
perhaps that you're doing something about this. You're not really, because the writing itself does not last much longer than you do; but I would say it's partly the feeling that I can't stand to have things go . . . Speaking of hungry. There's a Dutchman down the way who makes divine sausage and bakes his own sourdough buns. He usually has a bottle of Kenyan beer tucked in a cooler under his tailgate.

—It seems to me your stories are getting sexier.

—Well, you may be right. Hello Harry! He's handsome, don't you think? His wife's arms jiggle and she talks about her sons' PhDs too much. Still.

—Most of them begin with a paragraph loaded with female desire, female want, some naughty language. And later that desire is mocked, then refused and finally satisfied in some way.

—What story are you thinking of?

—“Floating Bridge.”

—Of course. You would like that story, given the lives you've led.

—I love that story.

—I do, too. But tell me why.

—For all the right crafty reasons: the invisibly-stitched physical description of characters; the ambiguous relationship between the cancerous woman, Jinny, and her asshole husband, Neal; the plottiness that has become a bit of a pattern in your later work whereby a caregiver or nurse – a third party – is introduced into an existing relationship; the class-conscious settings of paradise and its opposites; your weaving of present and past. I love it for your skill, is what I'm saying, and how you manage to dance so much so fast, without your tights getting saggy.

—I'm not sure that metaphor quite works. But add it to the list.

—And because I'm getting older and because men . . . I, but they, we – well, the ending.

—Ricky's kiss on the bridge pleases you, doesn't it.

—It really really does. When the boy drives poor Jinny home – they've only just met – and he stops and they look at the stars on the bridge. She's forgotten her hat in the corn field and she has only a nob of a head. He
touches her waist and kisses her. He says “oh.” I asked my friend Johnny why Ricky kisses her.

—Oh, I'd like to hear a man's opinion on that.

—Johnny's not just any man. But he said, “What's in him at that moment? I don't know, some bizarre cocktail of bravado and compassion and oedipal urgings. Why does he do it? Because she wants him to and he's a good boy. Because he's so alive he's bigger than death. Because he's on an Experience-gathering expedition, and this is a Big One. Because this is where he brings girls to kiss them, and she's a girl. Because they've slipped out of the stream of time and become ageless. Because he's so beautiful it would be a scandal if nobody were kissing him. Because he reads her well enough to know he can get away with it, and getting away with things is the teenager's
raison d'être
. Because he's in awe of the moment he's concocted, and knows he has to do something remarkable to mark it . . .”

—John's words comfort you, don't they.

—They do.

—Why do you think he kisses her? Before you answer, try to open your mind, your heart, try to think about where you are – in the country on a hot day and eating a handful of blackberries that will stain your lips, holding my hand like we're girlfriends off from school for the turning-point summer we've been waiting for. Look at me. Now, why do you think he kisses her?

—Feel this under the dog's front leg. Here, Alice. Put your fingers under mine. Feel that? There's a little tumor under there, floating around, fixing for trouble. But look at him, smiling in his sleep, oblivious. Good dog.

He kisses her because she gives him the word “tannin”. No woman has given him a word. Take off your hat, Alice. He kisses her because she's beautiful regardless of time. Because he can't help it.

—Waiting for you to phone feels like high school. Will he? Won't he? How do I look?

—But I called, whereas in high school they likely didn't.

—I went to high school in Vancouver and stood far too many cold afternoons under the colonial street light on the corner of Wiltshire and 43rd with boyfriend X, after our respective rugby and volleyball games. I tried to convince him I wasn't too crazy to love long term, that just because my sister was near death I wasn't sad all the time, I could tell a good joke, cared about the civil rights movement and necked well, though ancient at fifteen. We stood so long my toes froze, in sight of my square blue Georgian house, its rhododendrons, my mother's cream-coloured Austin inept in the driveway, but we didn't go in there. X helped keep me whole but by graduation, he had taken up with a rough covey of rugger chicks who liked their boys straddling rebuilt Harleys with long scars where pins held their ruptured bodies – elbows, knees. Girls who drank hard liquor fast and smoked weed in their parents' condos at Whistler and took pills and called that carefree. My sister dead, I quit the team, and found a nice United church redheaded boy who refused to fuck but could fingerpick a punchy acoustic guitar – his brother's D-28 Martin – and who lived for the scratch and squeeze of tight harmony. Of course, moral differences ripped us apart, and the phone calls stopped coming when I begged the world for one more talk. Richard, this is already better than high school.

—We'll see.

—Thank-you for calling.

—My pleasure so far.

—You may occasionally hear the sound of chickens. My office looks out on a rough little coop built seventy years ago from field stones and cedar shingles by a local shoemaker and is now home to a dozen Barred Rocks
and a couple of freakish and testy Black Minorcas. Their egg yolks this time of year are a yellow not otherwise found in nature and taste rich as French pastries, thick from a diet of hatching slugs. Early this morning, turkey vultures circled low and shadowed the windows Hitchcock-wise. I found the hens stockstill, like a watercolour, huddled under the tayberries. The rooster – a huge and handsome Barred Rock, his tail a conquistador's helmet – posed on the nearby pathway, ready to give it up for his girls, to be their he-man. I urged and flicked them back to the coop and fixed a board across the hole they'd excavated under the run's wire. The vultures circled and watched and dipped close in their primitive formation and then sauntered off. Today, all day, the rooster will crow. Your voice sounds sweetly Southern and bourbon-soaked. Am I right?

—It's only noon where I am. What a peculiar question.

—Are journalists asking you different questions this time?

—I just kind of started, last week, so the questions seem quite fresh. They don't seem to be questions about “does the landscape influence your work,” “Do you have a problem writing about women,” “Why are your men kind of western guys?”

—Has your celebrity changed the tack we're taking?

—I don't think celebrity lasts very long, frankly, so I'm unaware of that. For the most part, when people ask me questions they're quite nice, and I can usually get my head into them. They aren't frivolous and they aren't dumb. Particularly in Canada, I'm always pleased with the kind of preparation journalists do. Much better than in the US of A.

—Well that's nice to hear. I am not only a journalist, though, and my questions will arise from several positions: writer, teacher, critic. Your writing showed me many things when I started working with the sweet calisthenics of the short story. I like men who are kind of western guys, maybe that's it. If my questions seem odd or random, they are, and they need to be.