Unless (18 page)

I caught myself at the edge of disapproval with Ben, wanting to pick apart his finer feelings, and then I thought: He’s young and he’s tasted disappointment; he has a girlfriend whom he may or may not love, and she has left him to live on the street. They’ve invested more than a year of feeling in each other—of absorption, of fantasy. This is stuff for crabbed old age, not for a young man with a young man’s yearning for satisfaction and a belief that he’ll get what he deserves. He’s approached love with a young man’s wonder and gratitude, only to find its abrupt withdrawal.

“She changed,” he said. “Over a few weeks. Late January, February, March. She was short-tempered. Then she’d go quiet. Her professor, Dr. Hamilton, she hated him for some
reason. I asked her what the guy had done, if he’d come on to her or something, and she was furious that I’d think of a thing like that, that that was what would occur to me, something sexual. She started giving me these, you know, these long, hard looks. Scrutinizing looks. Like she’d just suddenly realized what a dickhead I was or something. Then she left. One afternoon last week. I thought she was just going to Honest Ed’s, but she never came back. Most of her stuff is still here. She’d stopped going to lectures by March, she just hung around the apartment reading or staring off into space. I would have phoned you after she left, but I thought she’d gone home, that she was with you. She was thinking about goodness and evil, about harm to the earth, that kind of thing. And then, it was just a couple of days ago, this girl I know said she saw Norah panhandling at Bathurst and Bloor, and I couldn’t believe it. I went and looked, and there she was with that sign, sitting on the sidewalk. I walked up to her and said, ‘What are you doing, Norah, what is this all about?’”

I watched him lean back into the torn couch cushions, and he started to sob unrestrainedly. He howled so long and so eloquently that I will never forget it. Tears streamed down his face and he made no effort to brush them away. His hands were spread out uselessly on his denim thighs. I wanted to reach out and stroke his hand, but I couldn’t, I didn’t. I knew it wasn’t his fault, this poor young kid, but I felt myself
harden. I felt the force of blame gathering. I just sat there and watched him cry. I felt my hopes flatten out and crush me with their weight. Now I knew it was true. There wasn’t going to be anything I could do to save Norah from herself.

Following

H
OW OLD IS ALICIA
, the heroine of my novel? This matter is critical. She lives in the large city of Wychwood. She is an editor for a fashion magazine. She is engaged to be married to Roman, aged thirty-eight, and the wedding is just weeks away. This is her second marriage, and she has lived for short periods of time with two other men. I want her to remain grave and intelligent, yet still young enough to stir ardour. She is pert rather than perky, a wide-awake woman who already understands that the universe is supremely insufficient. She was thirty-four in the first novel two years ago, and so now I have assigned her the age of thirty-six. Forty lies ahead, and she is well aware of forty—but not frightened by it. She spends perhaps too much money on top-quality skin products, even though she knows what scams the cosmetic industry brews up. There is something hermetic about her disposition, but she doesn’t really know this, not yet

Does she speak her own story? In other words, is this to be a first-person narrative? Yes. For one thing,
My Thyme Is Up
employed the first person, and a sequel must be consistent in such matters. Her voice is ironic and quizzing, loose-jointed
but pulsingly intimate. She is not in the least ashamed that she is detached from large slices of popular culture. She might say “shit,” if she stumbled and scraped her knee, but she would never, under any circumstances, describe some person or some essence as being “shitty.” That’s where her delicacy shows itself, in her vocabulary. Certain people might call this prissiness. She is mildly musical, plays the piano a little and once was reasonably accomplished on the flute. Her degree is in journalism, from Columbia. An A-minus average. (She could have done better if she’d loved men less.) She wears shawl-like garments, loose loping jackets, long dipping skirts, heavy silk, slim silver jewellery, clever earrings.

She cannot be stunningly beautiful and possessed of a perfect figure, and this was made clear in the first novel. The genre of “light” fiction rules out bodily perfection. We are not allowed to garland our men and women with exceptional good looks. Romance novels, on the other hand, are able to fill their pages with dozens of strikingly beautiful women, and literary novels can permit a single heroine a rare beauty, one only. Light fiction, being closer to real life, knows better. Some imperfection must intervene, and usually this is in the nature of a slightly too long nose or a smaller than average chin. It is not necessary to award such disadvantages as giant hips or mannish shoulders and certainly not one eye larger than the other, although breasts may be on the small size or
else more generous than normal. A passing prettiness is what I claim for Alicia, conveyed without a lot of heavy detail.

Does she believe in God? No, despite her Presbyterian upbringing. God and his Son are metaphors, representing perhaps creation and renewal; this certainty arrived like a bullet-shaped slug of pewter when she was about twenty, sitting in a church pew with her parents, reciting the Nicene Creed. She almost never speaks of it, it is so unimportant in her life, the question of belief or disbelief—and she and Roman have not really touched on the subject. There is a great deal they have not touched on, and this is beginning to worry her slightly.

Does she want children of her own? Yes, desperately. But vaguely. Does she see herself unbuttoning her blouse and offering her breast to a baby’s gaping mouth? Well, no, she hasn’t got that far in her thinking. A little girl would be lovely. Or a little boy. It didn’t matter a great deal. She supposes she would go on working for the magazine after a short time spent at home, six months or so. She has just begun a new monthly series on accessories and is now researching the history of women’s handbags. It is fascinating, really. It all began with the chatelaine of the medieval castle, the roving household manager needing something in which to carry her keys and her domestic accounts. It’s true you often see the Virgin Mary in paintings with a little sack purse on the floor next to her chair, but this is most likely an anachronism, as Alicia informed Roman yesterday while
they were having dinner at Maurice’s, steak and frites and a good bottle of red wine.

“A what?” he said blankly. He hadn’t been listening to her. She gave him a long, severe look.

“Never mind,” she said crossly. Then she reached out and stroked his hand. Working as a symphony trombonist (note to myself: find out more about trombones; I was rather opaque about Roman’s vocation first time round), he sometimes complains that Alicia’s world of writing is narrow and inbred, forgetting that he and his fellow musicians form an exceedingly tight, self-referencing subgroup.

I too am aware of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing. I know perfectly well that I ought to be writing about dentists and bus drivers and manicurists and those folks who design the drainage beds for eight-lane highways. But no, I am focusing on the stirrings of the writerly impulse, or the “long littleness,” to use Frances Cornford’s phrase, of a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages. We may pretend otherwise, but to many writers this is the richest territory we can imagine. There are novelists who go to the trouble of cloaking their heroes in loose crossover garments, turning them into painters or architects, but no one’s fooled. This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can’t stop doing it.

Hardly

N
OT THAT I WRITE
with a pen. Nor do I know anyone else who does these days. But a little puff of romanticism still attaches to the idea of pen and ink, and testifies, falsely, to the writers essential independence and freedom. No one is quite ready to give up pen and papers metaphoric weight. I was thinking these thoughts when the kitchen telephone rang early on a November morning.

“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Reta Winters, please,” said a man’s resonant voice.

“This is Reta Winters speaking.” I was holding the phone in my left hand and unloading the dishwasher with my right.

“Have I caught you at an awkward moment?” the voice asked. “You’re not in the middle of breakfast?”

“No,” I said and stopped bashing the china about. “This is a good time.”

“I just phoned to introduce myself,” said the deep baritone voice with its range of lighter musical notes. “My name is Arthur Springer from Scribano & Lawrence, and I have the great honour, Mrs. Winters, of being your new editor.”

“Oh,” I said, genuinely pleased; such professional civility was impressive. “Well, how nice of you to phone and introduce yourself, Mr. Springer.”

“I hope you’ll call me Arthur once we get to know each other.”

“Well, then you must call me—”

“Reta. It would be a pleasure, Reta. I’m so pleased you feel that way. That will get us off to a good start. I want to say right off that I know I can’t begin to replace the inestimable Mr. Scribano.”

“Such a tragedy—”

“I can tell you, Reta, that our Mr. Scribano was delighted that you were working on a second novel, a sequel to
My Thyme Is Up
. He told me as much just a few days before his fall”

“Did he really? He was always very kind and encouraging—”

“I had nothing but respect for him as a person and as an editor. I’ve been with the firm since the beginning of last year and have had the good fortune to learn a good deal from him. Though, of course, we represent different generations and have our separate approaches. My own approach is very much dialogic. My training was at Yale, originally. Then Berkeley.”

“Well, yes—”

“Now, can you give me an idea, Reta, of when you will next be in New York.”

“Well actually—”

“I think it’s essential that we sit down and go over the manuscript together. I’m a bit of a point-by-point man when
it comes to editing, and, unlike many of my contemporaries, I lack faith in e-mail communications or even the telephone.”

“But there is no manuscript, in a sense.” I resumed my task of unloading the dishwasher, but very quietly now, lifting the plates out one by one, stacking them softly on the shelf. “That is, the manuscript is coming along, but very slowly.”

“In percentage terms?”

“Sorry, I don’t quite—”

“Are you at the halfway point, Reta, or three-quarters? Or?”

“Oh. Well, I’m not quite sure. But in any case, I’m afraid I have no plans to be in New York, not in the near future.”

“Fine, fine. Just send me what you’ve got so far.”

“But I don’t think I can do that. You see, what’s down on paper, or on disk really, is still very much in the, you know, the tenuous mode—”

“Oh, I assure you, Reta, that I appreciate the fact that a draft is a draft is a draft. That is one of the first things a fiction editor must understand.”

“I don’t see how I can—”

“Look, Reta, I’m going to give you our UPS number. Have you got a pencil handy? All you have to do is print out the pages and bundle them up. I’ll phone and make the arrangements for a pick-up. What about later this afternoon? We’re hoping for a fall publication, which means moving along very rapidly. You’ll find I’m an appreciative editor. I like to bring out the best in a writer. Have you read
Darling Buds?
That was one of my writers.”

“Darling Buds?”

“I’ll courier you a copy right away.”

“Oh, that would be—”

“There is just one thing I want to say, Reta, before we say goodbye. I love Alicia. Your Alicia. I want you to know that my devotion to her is enormous. I am greatly attracted to her reflective nature. I’ve read
My Thyme Is Up
several times now, and each time I love her more. There’s a golden quality about her. As though she were a gold autumn leaf among others less gold. I’ve thought and thought about what it is that draws me to your Alicia. Its not her sensuality, not that she is lacking in that department, not in the least. The way she has of sitting still in a chair. Just sitting. Her generosity, that’s part of it. Her tolerance too. But what really makes me want to take her in my arms is her goodness.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t quite hear what you said, Mr. Springer, Arthur. Did you say—?”

“Her goodness. Her profound human goodness.”

“Oh. Goodness.”

“Yes, goodness.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Since

A
RRANGE TO HAVE HER
kidnapped,” people said when Norah turned up at Bathurst and Bloor, “and then have her professionally deprogrammed.”

Sally said: “Have the police pick her up for questioning. They’ve seen lots of these cases and know how to handle them.”

Other friends—Lynn, Annette—said: “Use a little force. If you and Tom force her into the car and drive her straight home, the shock will bring her to her senses. That’s what she needs to break the spell, a shock.” I did actually try this one day; I parked, illegally, on Bathurst, as close to her as I could get, got out of the car, and grabbed her by the hand. She screamed horribly and pulled back from me. I felt her glove coming off. It was as though she were an incendiary object, a hot coal. People started to gather, and I got back into the car quickly—forgive me, Norah, forgive me—and drove away.

Frances Quinn from the Promise Hostel said to us: “She is in good health at the moment. She seems sane, but rather determined. I’ve offered her counselling, of course, but she appears to be sure she knows what she’s doing. She’s not yet
twenty. Time’s on her side. I’ve seen stubborn cases before, and in the end they usually yield.”