Unless (22 page)
“Really! I never put that together.”
“And there’s that man who makes those outrageous twig chairs that—”
“That you can’t actually sit down on.”
“They’re sculpture, in his view, not furniture. And there’s someone new, he’s got hair down to his waist, who takes chunks of wood and installs little secret drawers in them, and inside the drawers are other little drawers.”
“What do you think he’ll be like?” Sally asks. “Your Arthur Springer with his—”
“I don’t know,” I confess. “But I’m terribly afraid he’s going to be—I can’t pin it down exactly, but—”
“New Agey?”
“New Yorky.”
“Cool type? Ivy covered?”
I shake my head. “I’m afraid he’s going to be smarmy.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Don’t let him get away with it.”
“Just smarm him back.”
“Pompously mandarin, like those—”
“I’ll have to ask him to stay to dinner, and I have a feeling Tom’s going to be driven up the wall. The girls too. They’re formidable. They have this new word: kronk. It means shit or something like that. Kronk you, they say to each other. They call Tom the Kronkmeister, and he loves it. He does a little salute and clicks his heels. Natalie does these wicked imitations of—”
“Leave it to a teenager to see through genuine smarm—”
“Especially New York smarm. Or kronk, for that matter. When we were there—”
“I’ve talked to him on the phone twice now, and I couldn’t help noticing that he always interrupts me just when I’m getting to the point of—”
“We’re always interrupting each other. Have you noticed how we, the four of us—”
“That’s different. It’s all right to interrupt each other when there’s no power structure to—”
“Really? Do you really believe that—?”
“It’s how the conversation goes, how it gets made, brick by brick, but with these little chipped-in bits of—”
“But you and Arthur What’s-his-name are definitely in a power arrangement, Reta.”
“This man’s your publisher.”
“No, he’s her editor, not her publisher.”
“But he can decide what is going to be published, what is acceptable to the—”
“He can definitely influence Reta’s novel.”
“If you let him.”
“At least you’ll be on home turf. They always say with football that the home field has a definite—”
“You know, Reta, the very fact that he was ‘unable’ to come on the fifth as you suggested and changed to the nineteenth—”
“Definitely signals a power play.”
“Absolutely.”
“The final say.”
“I’ve done it myself.”
“How is it coming, Reta? The novel?”
“Slowly. I’ve slowed down a bit.”
“The pressure from New York can’t help. And so soon after Christmas when it’s all we can do to gear up again.”
“You’re right. Just the thought of him makes me terribly self-conscious. The more he praises, the more doubtful I become.”
This is true. I haven’t looked at the manuscript for a couple of days. Before hearing from Arthur Springer it had been my darling baby, my greatest distraction. The only efficient way I had to palliate my worry about Norah was to melt into an alternative reality, to hie myself downtown to Wychwood City with its financial district and concert hall and statues and street corners and its luminous puzzles of space. And now I’m frightened by it, afraid to click on the icon for
Thyme in Bloom
. Instead I’ve been brushing up on trombones, astonished to find a sizable webliography on the subject. Trombones look idiotically simple, but in fact they’re the subject of legend and romance, even greatness. Another distraction. I think about these brass instruments the way I look into the dregs of a coffee cup, idly, tipping it so that the circle at the bottom of the cup widens to an oval lake. There is so much to know.
Meanwhile, the novel is frozen by its own core of procrastination. Alicia is
still
trying to decide what she can do to save herself. She doesn’t want to hurt Roman, her dear Roman with his thick rumpled head of hair and musky scent, like a wedge of cheese crusted over. But she must tell him soon what he long ago should have understood. Her mother will wail, her father will grouch, and Roman’s family will think ill of her, everyone will be embarrassed. But she must secure her own survival. Yet that sounds selfish. She wants out of the engagement but she also wants to live with a good conscience. Surely there is some kind of ethical judgment she can draw on. Everywhere on this earth there exist lovers who dissolve their commitments; it’s scarcely a crime. Alicia knows she and Roman will survive, but she—
she
will be the destroyer, the breaker of promises, hard-hearted, unkind, bringing corrosion and damage to an existence that has been underpinned with natural goodness. Love, marriage, children, a nest in which to nestle. The comfort of it, the natural curvature to which we cling.
Whenever Alicia thinks of idealized goodness, the image of granite comes to mind, polished surfaces, impermeable stone. But stone can be crushed, rather easily, in fact. Alicia has visited the quarry down near Straw Hill. She’s seen the giant machines at work. Goodness is not guaranteed. A life of principle requires practice, and although a lot of contractual morality has been worked out, people continue to make mistakes. Then goodness becomes simply a matter of what we wanted to do all along. Whatever is convenient. Face it, goodness has no force; none. Decadence and transgression and overturned promises do occur, all the time, in fact. She’s tried to describe her feelings to Roman, but he is occupied with other issues.
He wants to honeymoon in Albania, for one thing; he is being most insistent. He’s bought a map. He’s e-mailed his relations in Tirana and discovered that even in this poorest corner of Europe the e-mail network is potent. Alicia finds this honeymoon idea hard to entertain, never mind the marriage itself. Albania sounds like punishment to her. Nevertheless, Roman is wearing her down. They never seem to get around to having a real discussion about their future together. Roman doesn’t yet understand that the marriage is not going to take place. His nerves are too tender to register the fact. Or else they’re too coarse.
Furthermore, he has fallen out with the bassoonist in the Wychwood Symphony. The bassoonist’s chair is just in
front of Roman’s, and she—Sylvia Woodall—complains that the bell of Romans trombone is smack in her ear. She also complains that she gets wet when he moistens his slide with his little spray bottle of water, and her hair, which is naturally curly, goes into a witch’s frizz and makes her lose her composure and her sense of where she is in the music. She wants him to move his chair back an inch or two, and Roman refuses. There’s no room, he maintains. What can he do? Well, Sylvia Woodall says, then you can at least redirect the angle of the spray. I can’t, says Roman, who might easily be accused of possessing an over-groomed sense of entitlement: it’s impossible.
The two lovers, Alicia and Roman, are getting nowhere, and the wedding date is approaching. And I, the director of this comic romance, have reached an end to my thinking. A narrative apogee is called for at this time, and it slyly evades me. I keep stopping and trying to tease out from the lovers’ quarrels those small illuminations that fit like a plug into a socket, but all I get is anger. I’m beset by a serious post-Christmas
énervement
. Is there any task as joyless as undecorating a tree? Yes and no. I always wait till the girls go back to school and Tom back to the clinic; they can’t be trusted with the tedium of unhooking fragile ornaments, wrapping them in tissue paper, and putting them back in their designated cartons, and then easing the tree onto its side and dragging it out the big front door, then sweeping up mountains of needles
and picking them one by one out of the baseboards. A whole morning of methodical and discouraging labour.
But there; it’s done; I’m glad to have it gone. I welcome this reclaimed space. Now I can think.
I’m trying to reconstruct my phone conversation with Arthur Springer, but only a few particles survive. He said something about a pilgrimage, which makes no sense at all. I imagine now that a twinkling menace overhung the words he uttered. But then the kitchen was particularly noisy the morning he phoned. Natalie and Chris, on Christmas break, had risen late and were making pancakes at the stove, trying to form their initials in pancake batter. They had the radio turned up, a particularly loud rock station. The dishwasher was running. Tom was clumping down the stairs. My heart was beating. It’s a wonder I heard anything at all.
N
ATALIE AND CHRIS
have resumed their Saturday visits to Bathurst and Bloor, and just before Christmas they took Norah an immense Christmas bundle, lovely things, all of them beautifully wrapped, a soft blue tracksuit with thermal lining, perfumed soap, a brush and comb, a stocking full of fruit and chocolate. Our collective guess is that she gave all these things away, immediately, to strangers, but we can accept that, we
have
to accept it since we can’t stop thinking about it.
What I’d like is a lobotomy, a clean job, the top of my head neatly sawn off and designated contents removed. I’d get rid of that week last spring when we didn’t know where Norah was. I’d extract the blood pouring out of Natalie’s forehead that time years ago when her high chair ripped over in the garden and hit the fence. All body wounds, in fact, would go, including the scabs I saw on Norah’s wrists last week, that half inch between her mittens and her coat sleeve, a ring of red sores. I’d take out the whole soundtrack of
My Fair Lady
and the memory of my mother painting china after
she had to be put in the care facility because she couldn’t cope, couldn’t even remember her own name after my father died. Also that time I started menstruating on the train to Ottawa; naturally I was wearing my new white pantsuit. And that bout of cystitis Chris had when we were in France, when for five whole minutes I couldn’t remember the word for bladder (
vessie
, noun, feminine). And that fight Tom and I got into on the third anniversary of our meeting in Nathan Phillips Square, over what I can’t remember, when each of us said too much and too cruelly. Neither of us would dare go back to that moment when we came close to tearing each other apart, so that for days afterwards we trembled and whispered and hung on to each other all night long.
Tom was puzzled when I described the red scabbiness of Norah’s wrists. Chilblains, he guessed, that odd, almost Dickensian ailment brought on by exposure to fierce weather.
“You don’t think she could have taken a razor and—”
“No.” Shaking his head. “You said it was more like a rash.”
He had a look himself on Friday when he was in Toronto and now he isn’t sure—but he had hesitated about getting too close to her as she paced back and forth on her corner. He didn’t want her to think he was
peering
. Severe eczema occurred to him, and he left a jar of cortisone cream next to the square of cardboard she occupies, and, from Honest Ed’s, a huge pair of sheepskin gloves that will come up to her elbows if she has the sense to put them on.
What a guessing game we play with this child of ours. She has not had such intense parenting since she was an infant, but this time round all our efforts are based on conjecture.
There are dance anthropologists—Annette Harris told me about this phenomenon—who attempt to reconstruct the lost ballets of Nijinsky, relying on scraps of music, reviews, the temper of the times at the beginning of the twentieth century, and half a dozen rough choreographic notes scribbled in the margin of a diary. This has to be heart’ breaking work, doomed to failure, yet the exercise is very like what Tom and I do when we confer about Norah: her health, her sanity, the rash on her wrists, her nutrition, the glaze coating her dull eyes, what her sisters report, and what it is that passes through her brain as she walks to her corner every morning and then back to the shelter at night. And why?
Tom has come to believe she is suffering post-traumatic shock. The problem, he says, is identifying the trauma and making it visible. A brutal visibility, but authentication can transform the event from an ever-repeating reality to mere memory, which the brain can accommodate. He has all but deserted his trilobites for his current research on stress and trauma. He sits hunched over his computer in the evenings, deep into the Internet, webbing off darkly into trauma therapy, trauma stress, trauma case histories. In our bedroom we have a stack of books and journals on the subject.
Well, he is a doctor. The idea of diagnosis and healing comes naturally to him, a rhythmic arc of cause and effect that has its own built-in satisfactions, and how enviable, to me, this state of mind is. So simple, so clean. I wish now that I had made Roman a doctor rather than a trombonist, but it’s too late. I can’t see him without that flash of brass in his arms and his mouth pumping away, and besides, he was a trombonist in the previous novel and I can’t arbitrarily send him off for four years of medical school, never mind pre-med and a disposition that begins at birth.
I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work,
engaged
with their work, the architect seen in a state of concentration at the drafting table, the dancer thinking each step as it’s performed, the computer programmer tracing a path between information and access. Emma Allen believes that the great joy of detective fiction is watching the working hero being busy every minute with work; work in crime novels is always in view, work is the whole point.
I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local café, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at
her neck, wander up a grassy hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner—what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him
work
.