Swann (10 page)

It was not unusual for him to take his pleasures in this way, as though they were doses of medicine. Bookishness had kept him narrow, or so his ex-wife had complained. “You look like a bloody monk,” she accused him once, putting her long, purplish neck around the door of his study—she never did learn to knock. “You ought to get out now and then,” she scolded. “Mix a little. Have more fun. It’d cure what ails you.”

Dear old Aud. Well meaning, sensible, but a woman whose intuitive thrusts had invariably reminded Jimroy of metal shelving screwed to a wall. It was like her always to think she knew what ailed him. He smiled at the thought. Audrey with her frizz of red hair, her narrow shoulders and flat front. And her elbows, the way they went scaly in winter so that she had to rub them with Jergens before she went to bed, his dear, greasy Aud. He thought of her often,
especially in the early evenings, especially in the fall of the year, and yet it was an indulgence thinking about her, one that brought him sharp little arrows of pain. But yes, he admitted it. He missed the cups of strong tea she used to bring him after dinner, and even the way she set them down—hard—on his desk.

Well, time dulled petty irritations. Time had even brought a perverse rosy appreciation for those acts of Audrey’s that he’d found most annoying, so that now it was with autumnal nostalgia—certainly not love—that he recalled her voice, clamorous and hoarse from too much smoking, and the white tea mug grasped in her chapped hand.

There was no autumn in California, which Jimroy found disorienting. Here it was, the third week in September, and all around him trees and shrubs were keeping their shrill green. Numbers of dripping eucalyptus gave a blue roundness to the air, a roundness cut by the ubiquitous highways with their terrifying loops and ramps. Stanford bloomed. Everywhere along the campus walls and walkways flowers swayed; and what flowers!—like open mouths with little tongues dragging out. Oppressive, Jimroy thought, but was careful not to say so aloud.

He reminded himself that there would be no winter to cope with; he wouldn’t miss that, not for a minute. Back home in Manitoba it made his head ache to hear his acquaintances exclaim year after year about the beauty of trees in their winter dress or the music of snow crunching underfoot. This year he had escaped all that, as well as the kitsch outpourings it seemed to inspire. A snowless year. H
is annus mirabilis
. He would be able to sleep all year round with the windows wide open. For this coup he congratulated himself, thinking happily of his heavy, hairy coat and gloves and
overshoes left back in Winnipeg in a bedroom closet, locked away from the young tenant who had rented his house. Let him freeze.

This year, his fifty-first, he would be spared the drift of snow around his windows and that confusing ritual with the antifreeze that he had never felt easy with. Californians were spoiled and fortunate, and this green place was clearly paradise, and yet, and yet.… When he looked around him at the people he had met in the last few weeks, he could not imagine how they regulated their lives or what it was that kept them buoyant.

The Molière play at the Stanford Student Center began at nine o’clock. This would not have been the case in Winnipeg, where things got under way at eight-thirty. And there were other differences. Here people drifted in, a surprising number of them alone, wearing soft clothes and looking sleepy-eyed and dreamy as though they had just risen from their beds. The girl who showed him to his seat wore old faded jeans and a navy cardigan with the buttons mismatched. This seemed to Jimroy a fey affectation, and so did the high sweet western voice. “There,” she crooned to Jimroy, as though he were a person of no consequence. “There at the end.”

He was handed a program printed on what looked like a section of newsprint, an immense limp sheet too big to be held on the lap. The ink rubbed off on his fingers, and after the house lights dimmed he let it slide to the floor.

Molière had no heart. Even the French, he was told, admitted that Shakespeare outdid Molière in largeness of heart. There was no worthwhile philosophy, either, and no real intelligence. Surfaces and madcap mischief, coincidence and silliness, hiding in armoires or scrambling under beds; that was the sum of it. Still, once or twice toward the end of
the first act he caught himself smiling, and he welcomed his own smile with a sense of reprieve, thinking in Audrey’s insipid phrase that this might, after all, be good for what ailed him.

During the intermission Jimroy remained in his seat and studied, from the corner of his eye, a man who had come in late and was sitting to his left. He was a man in his late twenties, perhaps a little older, with curly brown hair brushed back from a pale forehead. There was an expression about the eyes that was close-hauled and secretive—probably he’d been drinking. The nose was beaky; no, the whole face was beaky. On his chin was a brown mole, which protruded slightly, though it wasn’t large enough to be disfiguring. But the surprising thing about this man was that he was wearing a full Scottish kilt. Jimroy took in the soft reds and greens of the tartan and reflected that the cloth looked both old and authentic, and there was one of those little leather purses hanging from his belt. (There was a name for them. What was it, now?)

Jimroy pondered the significance of this Scottish costume. Probably there was none. Half the people in Palo Alto seemed to drift about dressed as characters out of a play. Yesterday, crossing the campus, he’d seen a bare-chested youth in satin track pants coming toward him on a unicycle, balancing an armload of books and flashing the tense nervous smile of an actor. The Creative Sandwich Shop where he’d eaten lunch today had been filled with long-skirted gipsy-like girls, and one of them, barely out of puberty, had worn what looked like a width of carpeting belted around her hips. Another girl behind the counter, scooping out avocado flesh and smashing it onto slices of bread, was dressed in blue bib overalls covered with tiny embroidered flowers and the stitched message over one
breast, “Taste Me.” (Jimroy had stared boldly at this message, wanting to show that he did not find it in the least shocking—which indeed he did not.)

“Pardon me.” It was the man in the kilt.

“Are you speaking to me?” Jimroy heard his own voice, priggish and full of Canadian vowel sounds.

“You’ve dropped your program.” Then, “At least I believe it’s yours.”

“Thank you, very kind.” His snorty laugh, never intended, but always ready to betray him.

“Interesting production, wouldn’t you say?” The man in the kilt said this in a bright, liturgical, surprised-sounding voice. A Scottish accent, Jimroy noted, though certainly muted, perhaps even counterfeit.

“Quite good,” Jimroy said, feeling friendly because of the ambiguity of the accent. “Especially the notary.”

“Ah, yes, the notary. Wonderful. Great sense of maturity. And the maid, what do you think of the maid, little Toinette? Now that’s a role to conjure with.”

“Very demanding, yes,” Jimroy said, and rested his gaze on the Scotsman’s knees, which were clutched tightly together. Nervous type. Perhaps the kilt eased his limbs and that was the reason he wore it.

He considered his own clothes, the light green cotton pants and the checked shirt, not at all what he might have worn for an evening out at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. They were emergency clothes, bought three weeks ago when the airline admitted, finally, that both of his suitcases seemed to be temporarily lost. (Temporarily—what a joke.) They had gone astray somewhere between Manitoba and California. No one was able to account for it. He phoned the airline office every day or two, but nothing had turned up yet, and meanwhile he alternated between two
sets of clothes he’d purchased in a men’s store in the Stanford Shopping Mall. The clothes were cheap, but the colours pleased him, these minty green pants and a second pair in a sort of salmon. He had also bought himself a minimal supply of underwear, some white socks—when had he last worn white socks?—and a pair of pyjamas made in Taiwan.

With this limited wardrobe he had managed well enough and, in fact, rather liked the clean feeling of owning so spare a closet of clothes. But soon he would need a suit and a dress shirt or two. More alarming was the loss of some papers he needed for his work and, of course, the photograph of Mary Swann. He would give the airline another week and then begin to press them harder. Luggage didn’t disappear into thin air. It had to be somewhere. He realized now that he should have made more of a fuss in the first place.

At the end of the play, after applause faded, the man in the kilt turned abruptly to Jimroy and said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to join me for a drink.”

Jimroy hesitated a second, caught off guard, confused by the Scottish accent, which seemed not quite as Scottish as before, and the man quickly amended, “Or a cup of coffee perhaps. They make a very good espresso at a place not far from here.”

He had feared something like this. The moment his neighbour had uttered the word “little Toinette,” he had been alerted. Certain kinds of people were inevitably attracted to him; he possessed a lean body, neat shoulders, hips that were unusually small; it was probably not a good idea under the circumstances to go in for green pants. “I’m awfully sorry —”

“I just thought. Since you seemed to be alone.”

“Very kind of you.” Jimroy rose hurriedly, at the same
time mumbling a brief apology, which was courteous, deferential and, in its way, he supposed, convincing: the lateness of the hour; an early morning appointment; and a delicate suggestion that he was expected elsewhere, that someone awaited his arrival.

No one awaited his arrival. He was living alone in a house he had rented from a famous physicist, a Nobel Prize winner, who had left, months earlier, for a year in Stuttgart. The house was small, just two bedrooms, a single-story California-style house with white siding and redwood trim. The rent was entirely reasonable considering how close it was to the university, so close he was able to manage without a car. The famous physicist’s wife, Marjorie Flanner, had been anxious to join her husband in Germany and was happy to find a tenant like Jimroy who was mature and responsible.

She showed him the large tiled bathroom and the stacks of folded sheets in the linen cupboard. In the bedroom she pressed down on the mattress with the heel of her hand to demonstrate its firmness and told him who he might phone if there were problems with the air conditioning. The only thing she really cared about, she said, was the garden. Things needed pruning. Occasionally, depending on the weather, it was necessary to water certain of the plants or spray for spiders. The gate at the back of the garden had to be kept latched so the children in the neighbourhood would stay out of the roses. “I hope you like roses.” She smiled at Jimroy. Her middle-aged face was soft and puffed, rather like a rose itself.

He knew nothing about roses. He knew none of the names for any of the flowers in the garden or even the name of the bent little tree that stood protected by its own low wall
of pink brick. The yard in Winnipeg, his and Audrey’s, had contained nothing but a patch of grass, a pair of lilac bushes and what Audrey liked to call her veg patch, her rows of onions and radishes and runner beans. “I hope you like roses.” Mrs. Flanner turned her pink face in his direction.

Reluctant to crush her open look of hopefulness, he exclaimed in his awful voice, “I adore roses,” and heard himself continue, “Roses, as a matter of fact, happen to be my favourite type of bloom.”

Already he was imagining himself carrying his morning coffee into the Flanners’ garden, along with his books and papers. There were several garden chairs grouped on the flagged patio. And the little brick wall would serve nicely as a kind of desk. He felt certain that the sun—a whole year of sun—would do him good. As for the Flanners’ roses, he would put up a notice somewhere, perhaps run an advert in the local paper. There must be thousands of gardeners in this part of the world.

Marjorie Flanner did
not
treat him as though he were a person of no consequence. She made him a gin and tonic, stirred it carefully, and decorated it with a frilled lemon slice, and they sat for an hour on the wrought-iron garden chairs discussing details about the house. The neighbours were “tremendous,” she said, all of them Stanford people; he would be besieged with dinner invitations. Hmmmmm, said Jimroy, who intended to ignore the neighbours. About the rent, she said, would he mind very much giving her postdated cheques. Not at all, Jimroy said, and immediately pulled out his chequebook, asking in a polite, faintly stagy voice, if she would like a bank reference.

At this she almost, but not quite, giggled. “Heavens, no. I mean, in a way I
do
know you. That is,” she adjusted her pretty legs, “that is, my discussion group’s just done your
book on Starman. Someone in the group suggested, way back last year I think it was, that we try one of Morton Jimroy’s books.”

He fixed his eyes on the brick wall and tried not to look pleased.

“So you’re hardly a stranger, Professor Jimroy. But I’m afraid I haven’t read your other book, the one on Pound.”

“Don’t apologize please —” Jimroy began, conscious of a small pink wound opening in the vicinity of his heart, a phenomenon that occurred always when such blithe confessions were brought forth. Irrational. Paranoid.

“But then —” Marjorie Flanner gave a small laugh—“I haven’t really read Ezra Pound either. I mean, not really.”

“Pound can be difficult,” he said kindly. Even more kindly he added, “And he can be an awful old bore too.”

Then they both laughed. He imagined their laughter and the blended tinkling of their ice cubes floating through the lathe fence and reaching the ears of the friendly neighbours, the ones who soon would be pressing dinner invitations on him. He dared another look at Marjorie Flanner’s warm brown legs and wondered if he should suggest dinner some place. No.

She was back on the subject of roses. Five years ago she and Josh had brought in a load of special soil. Roses like a sandy loam with just the right balance of minerals. Whenever Josh came home from one of his trips he always brought back a new rose cutting. It was illegal, of course, bringing rose cuttings into the country, and so he had become adept at smuggling. There was this little loose piece of lining in his suitcase, and it was under this flap that he hid his contraband.