Next Life Might Be Kinder (4 page)

Silence a moment.

“You and I can discuss whatever you think we should discuss,” I said. “Prayer, if you want. I'm fine with that. But you want to know how I feel about the passage Elizabeth recited? To me, it's simple. She was telling me she was on page two hundred five, which made me so happy, because she wanted me to know she was continuing to work on her dissertation.”

“Our time is almost up. Where do you think Elizabeth might be storing the pages of the dissertation she is writing, as they accrue?”

“I have no idea. But here's a promise. I'll give you a copy when it's finally finished. I'll hand it to you in person. I'll give you permission to read it.”

“Not like the film director, Istvakson. You didn't allow him to read the manuscript, as far as Elizabeth had progressed in it, right? I'm relieved to know I have a different status in your life than Istvakson does.”

“I hate that fucking egotistical Norwegian shit. I can't bear to think about him.”

A few weeks earlier, I had purchased a used Ford pickup truck for $450, including the trade-in for my claptrap Buick four-door. The truck has automatic transmission, is painted black, and the cab is big enough for two adults. It has 52,009 kilometers on the odometer. Runs like a dream, at least the kind I wish I had, where things run smoothly. The previous owner hauled sheep and goats in it. The bed has dents from their hooves. After the session with Dr. Nissensen, I had a coffee at Cyrano's Last Night, then got in my truck and drove out to the highway. Entering Port Medway, I stopped to look at dozens of sparrows on three parallel telephone wires near the library, a cobblestone building ten meters or so from a sea wall. As I watched, a sparrow would shuffle along a line to the left, two sparrows would shuffle to the right, another following, or eight sparrows would slide along in unison, or two or three at a time, a kind of abacus of sparrows, sparrow addition and subtraction, that must be going on all the time across Canada, a country of millions of sparrows and telephone lines—and then they all flew off.

According to the field guide, the sparrows I saw here could have been chipping sparrows, tree sparrows, clay-colored sparrows, field sparrows, vesper sparrows, lark sparrows, Savannah sparrows, Ipswich sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, sharp-tailed sparrows, seaside sparrows, fox sparrows, Lincoln's sparrows, swamp sparrows, white-throated sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, or house sparrows.

H
AD I TAKEN
the first intermediate lindy lessons with Elizabeth, would things have turned out differently? How can I know?

We had been living in the Essex Hotel for about two months. We had something of a routine, with spontaneities, naturally, and variations. Elizabeth usually got up first, then she woke me. “Sleepyhead.” Coffee. We tried to be at our desks—in my case, the kitchen table—by nine o'clock. Depending on anything that might happen between newlyweds before nine o'clock. On Elizabeth's desk, everything was in its place, her notebooks squared, her pencils lined up. Whereas my work table was a sight; within minutes it looked like the Rolling Stones had spent the night in the kitchen. I don't know how this happened. Coffee cups, crusts of toast. I was a bit of a slob. “Coffee grounds on the floor, typewriter ribbon fingerprint smudges on the cupboard—who broke in?” Lizzy once said, in good humor tinged with annoyance. “Shall I draw you a map to the broom and dustpan?” On another occasion she said, “I'm not going to clean up after you. In particular, and I realize it's a pet peeve, I will not wake up to a messy kitchen. It's the one thing I ask. First thing, after coffee and the newspaper, I like to sit right down at my desk, and I'm constitutionally incapable of doing that if there are dishes in the sink.” From then on, I saw to that. I mean, we were just starting out. Still, I practically needed to search for my typewriter under the newspapers. It's odd, because now I keep my cottage in such neat order.

First thing in the morning, before we started on our respective projects—Elizabeth on her dissertation, me on a deeply resistant novel (or was I resisting
it?
)—I'd go down to the lobby and buy the
Chronicle-Herald.
I sometimes saw Alfonse Padgett, if he was on the six
A.M.
to two
P.M.
shift. Or, on occasion, I saw him when he worked the night shift and stayed on to talk to other bellmen or the concierge, August DeBelle. And when I returned to our apartment, Elizabeth would immediately start reading the paper, and read it straight through, every section, with great concentration. More than once I saw her set the newspaper on the chaise longue, go back to her desk, and say, “Okay, Marghanita, I hear you calling.” Summoned back to work. She broke a lot of pencil points pressing down so hard on the page. From the kitchen, I'd sometimes hear one snap.

One day around this time, Elizabeth found a flyer that had been slipped under our door. After studying it for a moment, she folded it into a paper plane and sailed it expertly toward me, where it landed on the kitchen table. I unfolded it, and it read:
LEARN THE SMOOTH LINDY—INTERMEDIATE LESSONS
. There was a pen-and-ink drawing of a dancing couple: the woman, wearing a short dress and twirling a pearl necklace, held her hands at either side of her face as if utterly astonished, her left foot kicking outward; the man, seen in profile, wore a tuxedo and had his arms demurely crossed, and held in his right hand a cigarette in a holder, more like he was engaged in conversation than dancing the lindy. From the cigarette rose a curl of smoke, as solid-looking as a watch spring.

“Old-fashioned dance lessons,” Elizabeth said from her desk in the bedroom. “Right here in our hotel. Sounds like fun. What do you think.”

“I have two left feet,” I said.

“Fuddy-duddy.”

“What, me?”

“Stick-in-the-mud.”

“Embarrassed on the dance floor is more like it.”

“Well, okay. Would you mind if I took the lessons?”

“Maybe later you could teach me. You know, in the privacy of our grand suite here.”

“I promise to charge only what my dance instructor charges,” Elizabeth said. “Not a penny more.”

“I didn't know they had a ballroom in this hotel, did you?”

“Nope. When was the lindy popular, anyway?”

“It was a craze having something to do with ‘Lucky Lindy,' I think. You know, Charles Lindbergh, the first to fly the Atlantic solo.”

“He did that in 1927, I'm pretty sure,” she said. “So the lindy would be, what? Late twenties, early thirties?”

“Makes sense,” I said. “We could look it up at the library.”

“Or just ask the instructor.”

“Good idea.”

“Let's see.” I looked at the flyer. “The first intermediate lesson's tomorrow night. Eight o'clock. Pretty late notice.”

“We don't have other plans, do we?” she said. “Opera tickets in Paris?”

“Not for tomorrow night, no. We were going to maybe sit in Cyrano's. There's always opera playing there, right? It's all cheap seats.”

“Okay, let's go over to Cyrano's after and I can tell you about the lesson. Later yet, we can begin our personal lessons. I'll be an expert by then. But you're sure you won't try the intermediate smooth lindy?”

“I'll stay here, Lizzy. It's fine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I'll read. Or take a walk. Something. I'm sure you'll have a great time.”

“I don't have a skirt that'll twirl as short as the one on that flyer. Should I buy a new one?”

“Lucky dance partner if you do.”

Looking back on this moment, I realize I should have gone to the intermediate lindy lesson. There is no closure to certain regrets.

Elizabeth ran a bath. That was a rare thing, it being the early afternoon. “Oh, good,” she called out. “You didn't forget the lavender bath beads when you went shopping.”

V
IVID MEMORY BEING
the blessed counterpart to closure, here is another still life from the Essex Hotel.

On her desk, Elizabeth's black Underwood manual typewriter. A few pages of hotel stationery, whose logo was a globe fitted on a wooden stand. Her favorite lace shawl on the bedpost. “No, not given to me by a handsome matador in Barcelona. I found it in a thrift shop on Water Street, right here in Halifax.” The radiator behind her desk, like an iron accordion painted white, flaking from its own heat in winter. A framed poster of
La Bohème,
from the Paris Opera Company, a performance in Edinburgh that Elizabeth attended with her parents when she was twelve. A scallop of peach-colored soap in a black glass soap dish—I never knew why she kept it on her desk, maybe for the fragrance. An antique silent butler, scuffed and marred, next to her desk; on it hung her two satchels full of research, a scarf (the heat sometimes just shut off; this was usually signaled by a series of dungeon clanks from the radiator), and her black-and-white polka-dot raincoat—“Come on, what if the bathtub directly above us overflows? I don't want to have to leave my work just because it starts raining inside the apartment.” Her little joke. A small oil painting of a man and woman on a city street, the man's lips pressed to the woman's ear, their arms interlocked; the title, painted in small, ornate letters at the bottom left:
Sweet Nothings.
A photograph of Elizabeth at her high school graduation in Hay-on-Wye, standing with her mother and father and her aunt Olivia. An enormous
Oxford English Dictionary.
A teacup full of hard rubber erasers. Scotch-taped to the desk, a strip of four photographs of Elizabeth and me, taken in a photo booth in the mall at Historic Properties, on Halifax Harbor, five or six days after we first met. Our faces touching. We already look like we know our life together is for keeps. I read it that way. (This strip of photographs is the only thing on the wall of my bedroom in the Port Medway cottage.) Also on the desk, a big Russian blue cat named Maximus Minimum. (“The name of a gladiator who fights mice,” Dr. Nissensen said, attempting humor.) I have Maximus with me in my cottage now. He's an indoor cat.

L
ILY SVETGARTOT STOPPED
by again without invitation. She was quite tall, perhaps five foot ten, and what might be called willowy. She was dressed in blue jeans, knee-high lace-up boots, and a thick sweater. She had short-cropped hair that at first seemed almost comically abrupt, especially in contrast to the dark blue waterfall of the sweater. She knocked at my door at nine
A.M.
, which meant she had to have set out by car from Halifax by seven. When I opened the door, she said, “Lily Svetgartot, remember?” (Her Norwegian accent was pronounced; she enunciated her last name as if there was a
d
before the final
t
). “Mr. Istvakson's right-hand lady, remember? He sent me again, Mr. Lattimore, to invite you to have dinner with him. I'm the personal touch, no?”

I said, “That's the last thing in the world I want.” She was still standing on the porch. “To have a meal with Peter Istvakson.”

“Do you have coffee?”

“All right, you want me to be polite. Come in. I have about five minutes for you.”

She stepped inside. “Is that five minutes after coffee is made, or five minutes altogether?”

“In fact,” I said, “I'm not going to make coffee. Let's just sit at the kitchen table and you tell me why you're here.”

“I understand. I understand your attitude. I really do.”

We sat at the table. “And what attitude is that?”

“I could really use a coffee.”

I reheated the coffee I'd made at five
A.M.
I used a frying pan on the stove, because a frying pan was closest at hand.

“Fried coffee, how lovely. This is a first-time experience for me,” she said.

“I'm not pleased you're here, Miss Svetgartot. Really, I'd like you to have this cup of coffee and then leave.” I poured the heated coffee into a cup. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Just fried coffee. Black, please.”

I set the cup down in front of her. “You already know I don't want anything to do with the movie.”

She took a few sips, grimacing, but then took another sip. “For weeks now, Mr. Istvakson—sometimes this happens two or three times a day—he hands me a question written out on a piece of paper.” She unbuttoned the bottom three buttons of her sweater, reached under her untucked blouse, took out a folder, set it on the table, then buttoned the sweater. “Take a quick look, please. Just so I can say you read it.”

“My guess is that these are questions about Elizabeth Church and me that Istvakson wants me to—”

“
Needs
you to answer. Begs you to. Has come to rely on the answers, to—”

“To continue the progress of his soul?”

“All right, I agree, he can be pompous. I think that is the right English word, ‘pompousness.' But Mr. Istvakson has a vision, of course.”

“That's what I was afraid of.”

“All right. Dead end for now. Dead end for now with you, Mr. Lattimore. You see me as a lackey. I'm sure you have a lot of work to do. But I look forward to seeing you this evening.”

“Oh, I doubt very much that will happen.”

“You are going to dinner at Philip and Cynthia's, aren't you? They said you were. I met them for the first time today. They were standing in front of their house and we talked awhile. I told them I worked for Mr. Istvakson. They were kind enough to invite me to dinner. People here in Port Medway are so welcoming. It reminds me of home.”

I went into my bedroom. Shutting the door loudly, I lay down on my bed. I heard Lily Svetgartot leave the cottage. Suddenly exhausted, I got under the blanket and slept for an hour. Of course, I'd been awake since three
A.M.