An Honest Woman Read online

  ©JoAnn McCaig, 2019

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  410 2nd Avenue North

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: An honest woman / JoAnn McCaig.

  Names: McCaig, JoAnn, 1953- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190131373 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190131756 | ISBN 9781771871785 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771871792 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771871808 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8575.C34 H66 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Cover painting: Hush by Betsy Rosenwald

  Author photo by Michelle Lazo

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel was many years in the making.

  First readers Audrey Andrews and Elaine Park saw what I was trying to do and seemed to think I might be able to pull it off.

  Editors and mentors who helped along the way include Helen Humphreys, Kathy Page, Merilyn Simonds, and Diane Schoemperlen.

  Edna Alford totally got the mythical man of the morning.

  Greg Hollingshead suggested the onion structure.

  The stalwart souls of the East Village Writers Collective slogged through the marshy parts with me and helped me out of the swamp. (Thanks Sarah Butson, Karen Craig, Ron Ostrander, Tim Ryan, Elena Schacherl, and Kerry Woodcock.)

  Kelsey Attard offered sensible advice and a keen eye.

  Al Forrie was mesmerized by the turbulence.

  Michael Kenyon was the editor of my dreams.

  Jackie Forrie was a good shepherd.

  Igpy Pin designed a good map.

  Michelle Lazo made me look good.

  Betsy Rosenwald made the cover beautiful.

  Perry helped with the details.

  My three sons are as necessary as sunshine and fresh air.

  Both of my parents were still living when I started writing this book. I honour the memory of my father, Bud McCaig (1929 to 2005) and my mother Anne S. McCaig (1928 to 2015).

  DEDICATED

  to readers and writers everywhere,

  with love

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A LUCID DREAM

  In which JM meets a man in a bar, contemplates her romantic history, and finds herself engulfed in a conflagration of carnal desire and writerly ambition as her reproductive life draws to a close, inspiring her to write a novel called A Happy Prisoner.

  A HAPPY PRISONER

  In which Janet Mair, an English professor who is working on a novel called Final Draft, meets a man named Ray while she is spending a summer month near a lake with a houseful of kids, and she finds that the world of her daydreams intrudes rather alarmingly on her reality.

  FINAL DRAFT

  In which a Canadian woman writer named Jay McNair meets a very famous British writer named Leland Mackenzie at a literary festival, and they really, really hit it off, for a while at least.

  A HAPPY PRISONER REVISITED

  In which we return to Janet, who is now back in the city, and whose fantasies about Leland and Jay — and the novel she has written about them, and the real life rewards she hopes to attain from it — continue despite the fact that in real life her efforts to seduce an actual man, namely Ray, don’t go well at all, and things get very confusing until finally an in-class discussion helps to bring her back to earth.

  A LUCID DREAM REVISITED

  In which JM confesses to various fictional machinations and misdemeanors (about which she may or may not be telling the truth) and also has an intimate encounter with the man she met at the bar.

  POSTSCRIPTS: one for Jay, one for Janet, and one for JM.

  APPENDIX 1: A PLACE AT THE TABLE

  In which the author replies to her critics, with footnotes.

  APPENDIX 2: EPILOGUE

  In which the author finds a happy ending. Maybe. Or maybe not.

  A SORT OF MAP

  A LUCID DREAM

  You cannot call it love, for at your age The heyday in the blood is tame; it’s humble, And waits upon judgment.

  Hamlet 3.4.68-70

  A cat approached her, a black cat. Nuzzled her arm and purred. Nuzzled insistently. And then more insistently. Nuzzled his head underneath her shirt, to her breast. She had this halter T-shirt she wore a lot that summer, just a navy jersey T-shirt but instead of a neckhole and two sleeves, there was just a kind of loop that went over her head, leaving her back bare. No bra, of course.

  And this cat. Well. She doesn’t know what got into this cat, she was pretty fucked up that night, and maybe she just imagined a scratchy tongue on her nipple and then the thrill and horror of a mouth filled with such sharp teeth —

  For now, let’s just call her JM.

  Let’s call this Sam’s Bar and Grill, Kensington Crescent, Calgary.

  So, there’s this woman, JM, a writer, and one night, she met this man whose teeth didn’t match. The uppers sleek, white and even, the lowers crooked and stained. He sat down next to her at Sam’s Bar on a November evening and they watched, united in horror, the re-election of George W. Bush. This man, the one with mismatched teeth, enchanted JM. She’d become increasingly disaffected with her usual companions, the insouciant boozy crowd that never seemed to get her jokes. That crowd, once a viable alternative to a night at home in front of a rerun of Law and Order, now seemed mere wretches of the earth. Compared to him, this man she’d met. He gave her his email address while Ohio hung in the balance. Next day, not really knowing or even wondering where this sudden heat came from, just acting on it, putting herself out there in a way she hadn’t risked in years, she wrote to him, “You’re a lovely man, you know that?”1

  She figured it must be long past time for some kind of upheaval when, as she left the house at 9 o’clock that Tuesday night, telling her twelve-year-old son, “I’m going out,” the boy got up from the couch, set down his gaming controller, glanced at the kitchen clock and said, “At this hour?”

  This man whose teeth don’t match is English born, son of a famous man and a long-suffering woman.2 He played rugby in boyhood, hence the teeth. He is a philosopher, currently unemployed. It shocks him, deeply, that JM has never thought to apply Hegelian dialectic to the novels of Jane Austen. This man with mismatched teeth drinks too much, smokes too much, and is almost as smart as he thinks he is. He likes to stay on at the bar after she goes home to her kids.

  She wishes he’d ask her questions, though. He never seems to. In fact, now that she thinks about it, nobody asks her direct questions anymore. Sometimes, days or even weeks go by and the only thing anybody ever asks her is: Was that to stay or to go? The only direct question the man with mismatched teeth ever asked her is: “Where are all the strip joints in this town anyway?” And sometimes, when she’s out with him, he gets so drunk he embarrasses her. And, he hectors her mercilessly about the musical genius of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. She remains unconvinced, however.

  And in the end, it seems, he remains unconvinced. About her, that is. In fact, his lack of interest in her is
truly stunning. He apologizes, says he’s got a lot on his mind. That’s what he says but when she touches him he trembles. Not on the surface of his skin, which tenses against hers, recoils almost — but deeper, inside his body. A rumbling. A motor quietly idling.

  It has been many years alone, for her. More years than she wants to count. And one night a while back, in the midst of this cruel romantic drought, she prepared a lifetime list of her lovers, chronologically, by name. The tally was respectably long, and satisfying. As she reviewed the list, it occurred to her, equally satisfyingly, that there was not one name whose pastness she regretted. There is not one man that she now misses or dreams of or longs for. She is fond of closure. It’s possible she has a gift for it.

  But as she thinks about it a bit more, after an evening at Sam’s, she remembers two men she does regret, two men she wants more of, two she wishes she could have again. They don’t have names, though. That’s why they aren’t on the list.

  The first she met when she was nineteen, at university in Ottawa. She’d gone out with her roommates to the Chaudiere Ballroom in Hull, where they flirted with some guys and invited them home after the bar closed. The girl she shared a room with got together with one of the guys so JM had to find somewhere else to sleep. The last of the men, the one nobody had claimed, sat slumped in the living room chair, snoring. She hadn’t been particularly interested in any of these guys. She liked to think, then, that the power of refusal was the best card in her hand. A sign of her value, her independence. So with everybody else paired off and passed out in various bedrooms, she hauled the foamy out of the hall closet and curled up on the living room floor in a sleeping bag. Sometime during the night, though, the guy in the chair woke up and just sort of took her. All of a sudden he was just on her with such . . . authority. She had never been handled like that before, with that intensity, that strength of purpose. Reader, don’t mistake this for violence or coercion. Not at all. His ardour was thrilling. The sweet intense words he breathed in her ear. His honest desire was both flattering and infectious.

  He was gone when she woke up the next morning. And she surprised herself, her cynical, worldly nineteen-year-old self, by pining for that man for weeks, pining like a teenybopper. Scanning the streets for his little green sports car. An MG, she thought. Never saw him again. Doesn’t recall his name, if she ever knew it in the first place.

  Six months later came the other nameless man. She had dropped out of university by then and was living out on the west coast, drinking, getting high and screwing pretty much anything that moved. Because by then she had come to believe that her most potent currency was consent. A sign of her independence, her freedom. And so she gave her consent to just about any reasonably attractive guy who offered a place to sleep or a ride up the Island Highway or a square meal.

  The details are foggy. She could make them up, but that would just be fiction.

  There was a party at an A-frame on Quadra Island, smoke and hallucinogens and booze and, well everything seemed a little distorted, but in her memory, the cabin’s main floor just had a stove and some chairs and shelves, and then the sleeping area was a loft that you climbed a rickety ladder to get to. She had climbed up to this loft under the eaves, maybe to get away from whatever was happening at the centre of the little house, the loud raw energy of the voices and guitars.

  Maybe she passed out for a while, and then that weird thing happened with the cat, and after that, she must have tumbled down from the loft onto the floor of the main room, where the party was going on. And a short time later, a guy approached and pulled her away from the guitars and booze and the chest-thumping and rough laughter of the mostly men in the room. This kind man offered her a place to stay and she said okay, fully expecting him to exact the usual fee. He drove her to a little cottage near the ferry landing. The man had pale skin, and reddish blond hair. He gently put her to bed. He didn’t touch her. Maybe he honestly realized that she was kind of used up, so he tucked her into a clean warm bed and let her sleep. She doesn’t remember much about the next morning. Sunlight through little square-paned windows, water sparkling in the harbour. Fried eggs. A white lambskin draped over a wooden rocking chair. If she ever learned this man’s name, she’s forgotten it now. Never saw him again either.

  It strikes JM as quite funny that it’s only these two she longs for, it’s only these two she wishes she could have again.

  These honest men.

  Death visited her, last night. Her own death. She awoke in the small hours, as she often does these days, got up, and padded down the hall to the bathroom. Produced gouts of unexpected blood, dark clots then a bright sudden swirl. Accustomed by now to random bleeds, she cleaned up quickly, and when she crawled back between the covers, the bed was still warm. She lay there listening to herself breathe. And then it stopped. Everything stopped. Breathing, heartbeat, consciousness. Life left her body. An absence, a space.

  Then she breathed again.

  It was just a small absence. Grey, like smoke. About half an inch long.

  Tonight she dreams the familiar dream. The one about pulling up to a house in the country. A sweeping double staircase, a dog barking, someone awaiting her up on the landing, the high porch. Like always, the dream ends before she finds out what is behind the door at the top of the stairs.

  This is her story, JM’s story. This is the beginning of what happens when a final not flicker but conflagration of desire engulfs her, as the last hormones flare and flee. Fiery desire to love and make love and write and rise and triumph and and and —

  1 If JM were an honest woman, she’d admit that this encounter was arranged through an online dating site.

  2 Here’s a story he told about his family: His mother was working as a volunteer at a silent auction. She and a co-worker watched an attractive young woman pass. The co-worker said, “Do you know the artist David Pyke? That’s his girlfriend,” unaware that the woman she was speaking to was David Pyke’s wife.

  A HAPPY PRISONER

  If that I speke after my fantasye As taketh not agrief of that I seye For myn entente nys but for to pleye.

  “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” Geoffrey Chaucer

  A NOTE TO THE READER:

  In this section the narrator, Janet Mair, often tunes out of her real life and drops down into fantasy.

  In the text, these forays into her dreams and fantasies are indicated by downward-pointing arrows, like these:

  When Janet returns to her real, actual (though admittedly fictional) life, you’ll see sideways-pointing arrows, like these:

  I sleep late — bless this lake and its lush silence — but startle out of bed after nine, embarrassed to think that Mister Sunshine might ring the bell and I’d have to answer the door with ratty hair and pillow-seamed cheek. All quiet, though, and, right, Mister S isn’t coming ’til later and the kids are still fast asleep. It’s grocery day, so I make my preparations, gather the list, collect the videos. Damn kids have left a couple in the bunkhouse, apparently.

  The moment I enter the room, I smell it. A sour sharp chemical smell. Sure, there are the usual crushed pop cans — the boys flex their biceps, shout at each other hey, you got a licence for those guns? — along with splintered potato chips, crumpled candy wrappers, but more mess, more carelessness this summer than last, when I was shocked to realize that the best week of the season was the one I’d spent with three fourteen-year-old skateboarders. Not this year. There’s an edge to Matt and his friends, something nasty. And then there’s the . . . something that Trev slid under a blanket when I walked in on them yesterday.

  And yes, there it is.

  In my day kids at least had the wit to be devious. Not this crew. A zip-lock, tucked carelessly beneath a sleeping bag. Inside, two stripped cigarette filters and a twisted sheet of paper containing dark tobacco that smells like old puke. I track the chemical smell. To the sauna. Christ almighty! A hundred acres of forest and fresh air and they have to smoke up in a small enclosed space in a pristi
ne and rigorously smoke-free bunkhouse? In the bloody sauna? The smell will cling to those cedar walls for months, years.

  I’m pissed. Decide that’s it, those friends of his are going back to the city today, and Matthew stays here. No, he may not drive back to town with the guys, Craig with his newly minted driver’s licence. No Snoop Dogg and Buck 65 in the car, no stop at the skateboard park in Banff, no. Matthew stays here. Where he is safe.

  Damn kids. Really cramp a person’s style. Like the way two weeks ago I forgot all about Leland’s kids when I was writing that really hot scene between him and my central character Jay in the Kensington Suites. There they were, Leland and Jay fucking like animals over every square inch of that suite and afterwards he’s going to spirit her away to some lovely little cottage in Suffolk or Sussex or somewhere to get away from the press, and Jay will heal him and love him and help him be strong. But then I remembered, what about his kids? He can’t just take off and leave them to deal with the death of their mother on their own. I mean, the Leland I’m creating is a bit of a bastard, but not that bad.

  Damn kids. Ruin everything.

  All told, the chores take all morning. Hope I haven’t missed Mister Sunshine; he’s the guy my ex-father-in-law, Dad Moe, hired to install a solar heating system for the water tanks in the cabin. Mister S, a twenty-first century diviner, is a startlingly handsome man in his thirties — trim and tanned and glowing with sincere environmental goodness and grand health. He wears khaki hiking shorts and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the company logo, which of course incorporates a smiling sun. Me, I never manage to get much further than quietly fretting about the environment, but I admire (also fear) those who roll up their sleeves and get to work on the problem. And, as with any good-looking man I meet, I begin by assuming indifference if not outright rejection and just carry on from there. It’s a stance that usually serves me well.