An Honest Woman Page 6

  Jay says to the bartender, “That’s — white wine please,” and to Leland, “You?”

  “Whiskey.”

  “Neat?”

  “With ice.”

  “With ice,” she tells the server, and then they wait together, side by side. She says, “I think the scene stuck with me because I once saw some children abusing a dog on a street in a Swiss town. But by the time I’d put together a coherent sentence to get them to stop, they were gone. And it has stayed with me for years. The frustration of it, of not having the words.”

  The drinks arrive. Stupidly, she picks up both.

  “Thanks,” Leland says, taking the glass from her. “Such a moment would rankle any writer, I should think. All our eggs are in the verbal basket; how could there be no words?”

  “Leland!” A phlegmy male voice, a beefy arm. “Leland, old man, you must join us, someone just made the most outrageous claim about your last book — ”

  Leland glances at her, whiskey sloshing over his thin white hand. Shrugs.

  “No sweat.” She smiles. Then leans over and whispers, “Perhaps we can continue this conversation some other time — when you’re not quite so famous.”

  The beefy man tugs Leland away, and she wanders off into the crowd, clutching her glass of white wine, wondering whether he actually talks like that all the time.

  She wanders hopelessly in the literary din, smiling a tight, terrified social smile. Risks a glance at her watch — gawd. Only twenty minutes to eight and she has resolutely promised herself that she must stick it out until nine at the very least. The ladies room? A rescue? His voice, behind her again. “What kind of dog?”

  “A boxer,” she shouts at his retreating back.

  Chitchat with a clutch of similarly terrified, vaguely familiar Westerners, equal parts shameful clinging and infuriated marginalization their only common ground. She finally extricates herself, heads to the ladies room. He’s just coming out of the men’s. “What kind of boxer?” he asks, not slowing down, not breaking stride.

  “A brindle!” she yells as he passes.

  Front desk 9:05 PM, requesting extra pillows: “Was the dog injured?”

  She’s getting used to this: “No, I don’t think so. It was tied in a doorway. Just one, thanks.”

  “Messages for 1612? Thanks.”

  “Tell me, do you believe in sequential conversation? 934. Thanks.”

  “It has its place. Hard to do at a gathering like this, though.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  He laughs. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I take it you don’t have teenagers. Would you like to go for a drink with me?”

  “Actually, I do. Have teenagers, I mean. Yes, I would.” He glances toward the piano bar in the lobby. She has not yet had time to panic, says, “Hell, no! Shark tank. There’s a place nearby I went to a few years ago — just down the street.”

  Leland checks his watch. “Let’s see. I have to go and be famous for, oh, maybe another twenty minutes or so. Shall I meet you right around here?”

  “Sure. No. Outside. Just outside the front doors, d’you see, over there?”

  “Right, then.” And he’s gone, broad bony shoulders moving under a fine wool sports jacket. His hair could use a wash. Jay still hasn’t quite registered what she has just done. But she does know that her feet are killing her and guesses that there’s plenty of time to go upstairs and change, as well as to ask at the desk for directions to that little place that a friend took her to once, after the book launch last year, what was it called?

  The half hour she spends outside the hotel doors are agonizing. Never, in ten years, has she missed smoking so much. But then —

  “You’re a quick change artist as well, I see.”

  “My feet were hurting. And I hate pantyhose. Where’s your coat?”

  “Upstairs. I won’t need it.”

  “This is Canada. You’ll need it. I’ll wait.”

  “Yes, Mother,” he grins. The ten-minute wait, this time, is pure pleasure.

  The bar is packed, but they manage to find a narrow booth in the back and . . . they chat. Pleasant chat about names and ages of children, place of residence, observations about the festival, his panels, interviews, readings, her single reading and radio interview. The subject of spouses is evaded with dexterity; he ducks the question first. Jay has adored this man for years and has fantasized about meeting him, but she can feel the energy draining from the encounter. She senses he’s getting bored, and she’s perilously close to bored as well. It’s only when he returns to the dog that she realizes she has allowed the conversation to flag. “So. It was a brindle?” he says.

  “Huh? Oh. Yes. A brindle. Smaller one, a female. Tied up in a doorway. In Neuchatel.”

  “I know the place. Were you there on holiday?”

  “No.” She sighs. “And that’s at the heart of it, I guess. Because I was there to help my sister. No, first, let me describe the dog. It was tied in a doorway on a residential street, cobblestone, those three or four-storey narrow rowhouses. A group of schoolboys — I didn’t have kids of my own then, so I wasn’t very good at judging their ages — but nine or ten, maybe. Anyhow they were pelting this dog with snowballs, close range, laughing and egging each other on. School uniforms — blazers and short pants, little peaked caps, those rectangular satchel briefcases they strap to their backs?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen those.”

  “It was January and there was a bit of snow in drifts in the gutters. It was a narrow street too. The dog didn’t yelp or scream, though. Just stood there shivering with its eyes bulging out, looking so stupid and ugly and helpless. I couldn’t even formulate a sentence. Arret or arreter? I wasn’t sure. Ca ce n’est pas juste! No, juste is wrong. Or is it? Vous ne aimez pas si quelque chose no quelqu’un or is it vous ne l’aimerai future? Laying a guilt trip is too complicated in French. As I say, they were long gone before I could even collect a few words, and even all these years later, I still can’t. Hell, these boys are grown up now, probably have kids of their own, and I still can’t, I don’t know, forgive myself. Imagine. This happened nearly twenty-five years ago. And besides, I hate boxers.”

  “Did you write it?”

  “Well, I did write a story about that time in my life, but the central image wasn’t a dog but a herd of caribou I’d read about, they’d stranded themselves on an island and starved to death for reasons nobody could understand.”

  “Why were you there? In Neuchatel.”

  “My younger sister had been at an international school there but she had to withdraw because she was anorexic. I mean, she already was when she arrived, but it got worse over there. It was obvious that she needed to come home and get some treatment so I was the designated family member elected to go over to help, to bring her back home.”

  “And did you? Help her, I mean.”

  “Oh. Unlike the dog? Well, I got her home.”

  He waits.

  Jay takes a breath. “She died. In 1985. Heart attack. She was only twenty-three.”

  Leland is watching her intently, but says nothing.

  “So yes, I suppose it’s as if — do you think? — the two silences, no not silence, but speechlessness. Are they related in some weird way? You know, the mistreated child in your novel, my abused dog? Hey, why am I answering questions I never even heard you ask?”

  He smiles then, a shy smile. “Shall I tell you the story of the moment I became a writer?”

  “Yes!”

  “I was a wee tad, outside with the bigger kids on a winter’s day. I grew up in a little provincial town, east of London. And certainly, a Canadian such as yourself would scoff at my notion of ‘winter’ but there was, indeed, snow on the ground, and I’d been shoved out of the door by my mother. I was three or perhaps four, swaddled in a canvas snowsuit that made a veritable symphony of scraping and rustling with my every step. And layers of damp scratchy wool, my mittens and muffler stiff with a mix of ice and snot. The local
kids were all out sledding on a little hill. I watched this activity with a mixture of dread and fascination. It looked such fun, but it terrified me too. My keeper, a large noisy girl, a neighbour, plunked me down on her sled and stuck her big red face into mine: ‘Right then, Leely, want to go down? Shall I ride with you or would you rather go by yourself?’ Well, I answered quickly that of course while I should very much like to try it, I was a little bit wary, but perhaps I’d give it a go if she were to sit on the sled behind me like some of the other kids did with their younger brothers and sisters. I pictured myself sort of enclosed in this big puffy cocoon of her arms and legs, and of course she’d do the steering.

  “So I told the silly bitch all this very clearly, we had a long conversation about it all, her breathing noise and motherly concern at me, and then? Damned if she didn’t plunk me down on the sled, throw the reins at my frozen little mittens and give me a bloody great shove. Down the hill. Alone.

  “I thought I would die. I shrieked like a heretic in flames all the way, my screams probably misheard as shouts of joy. I tumbled off near the bottom, having of course not the slightest idea how to make this diabolical contraption do my bidding. Hurtled off the sled and whacked headfirst into a, fortunately, rather small and flexible sapling. A young ash, I believe it was.

  “My first thought, on awakening in hospital with eleven sutures in my forehead and a nose mashed to pulp, was ‘language is power.’ Or something to that effect.”

  Jay says, “You mean, you tried to tell her you didn’t want to go alone, but — ”

  “But the linguistic capabilities at my disposal then, perfectly adequate for having every need and demand met by my mother, were apparently grossly inadequate in the wide world. I understood that the blame for the accident rested solely with me and I was struck with a dreadful feeling that I could not begin to save myself from wretchedness and pain with the limited tools at my disposal. I became a writer at that moment, as a simple matter of survival.” He drains his glass, grins. “Thereby discovering broad new vistas of wretchedness and pain. Another?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “Do you think, then, that what strikes us as so memorable in the fiction we read is something that echoes or resonates in memories of our own? Or is it a combination of that with some moment of strength or felicity of phrase in the text itself?”

  “Not sure — oh, same again please. Thanks. Bit of both, I think. I don’t know. I’m always amazed with what people read into my work, the things they remember, the things that strike the average reader. And of course the way that the stuff I’ve made up out of the whole cloth tends to be the stuff people regard as the most ‘true,’ the most autobiographical.”

  “Me too,” she says. “Isn’t that weird?”

  “Though I must say, these days, people — I mean ordinary readers, not critics, not people in the trade, not fans or sycophants — but ordinary people who just read for pleasure — well, those types don’t seem to say much to me anymore. Or if they do, I don’t hear them say it. I forgot what I was going to say — ”

  “There you go,” says the waitress.

  “Oh that’ll be lovely, thanks.” He waits a moment, then leans forward. “Why do Canadians say, ‘There you go’?”

  “Do we?”

  “All the time. It’s the oddest thing . . . ” He turns to her with mischief in his eyes. “You examine me, Ms. McNair.”

  She startles, flushes, then gets the tease, and grins back: “If you’re going to quote Charlotte Bronte to me, pal, you have to give the rest of the line.”

  Now it’s Leland’s turn to flush slightly. He clears his throat: “You examine me, Ms. McNair. Do you find me handsome?”

  “No.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Right. No, sir.” Liarliarliar! “But listen. I just had an idea. There’s something I’d like to give you.”

  He cocks his head, says silkily, “Really? What might that be?”

  “Oh god, don’t come on like that. It doesn’t suit you at all.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No. It’s . . . unseemly.” She likes him so much already that she doesn’t even mind the flash of dismay on his face at this. “Let me give you a gift. A reading of your work. Let me be your ordinary reader. And I really am. Yes, I teach first year English, and yes I’m a writer, but in terms of your work, I’m just an ordinary reader. Because Canlit is my teaching area — not to mention my national literature, and also, in the crassest professional terms, the competition — I read it differently than stuff I read for pleasure. So I don’t know your work except as a pleasure. I read very little American fiction; all that manly bluster and wrestling with the Big Questions of Life. Which all too often seem related to securing the adoration of a nubile younger woman. I read a lot of contemporary Canlit of course. But I read English writers for pleasure. Not to be well read or literate, but simply for enjoyment. I read women, mostly: Drabble, Byatt, Barker. But in terms of male Brit Lit your books are the ones I . . . remember, I guess. The ones that stick. So. Will you let me do this? Just tell you what I liked and what I thought and felt, and what I found striking?”

  Leland regards her for a long moment, considering. Clears his throat. “If you like,” he says.

  “Okay then. Ground rules. You must keep completely silent. No reactions, no questions, interjections, corrections. No writhing in agony when I get it wrong, even dead wrong; no slapping yourself upside the head for your failure to communicate adequately, and especially, especially, no slapping me upside the head screaming, ‘No, no, no, you twit, good god woman, are all you colonials bloody illiterate?’”

  His sudden laugh is throaty and unreserved.

  A surprise. It takes him a moment to catch his breath, then he says, “All right. Agreed.”

  Now that it’s too late, it occurs to Jay that this is a dreadful risk. She knows nothing about this man: she knows him intimately . . . but what the hell. She’s sitting in a bar with a Booker prize-winner that she’s had a crush on for years. Her, Jay McNair, a nobody, a Western Canadian, a single mother, a part time college lecturer; what the hell does she have to lose?

  “So. The big names in male Brit Lit are . . . yourself, of course. Then there’s, well let’s just call him the curmudgeon with father issues. I honestly think I’ve read more about him that I have of his actual work and the few shorter pieces I’ve gotten through are just so self-consciously tragic and dark. Anyway, so I start this big bloody novel of his that a good friend has raved about — isn’t it awful, I can’t even remember the title, not The Corrections, that was the American guy who snubbed Oprah, bless his heart — ”

  Leland raises his hand.

  “No! Not a word, remember? But the book was just . . . nasty. Well written, witty, virtuoso even. But the characters were nasty, the narrator was nasty. And worst of all was this sort of self-conscious brilliance in the writing. Writing that kept jumping off the page and going, Did you see that? wasn’t that amazing? Frankly, it irritated the hell out of me, and I closed the book after about twenty pages and muttered, ‘Oh shut the fuck up, you smug prick.’ Did I say chortling was allowed? I guess I’ll just have to let it go.

  “And then there’s the other big name — let’s call him the erudite postmodernist. I really liked him. Now, admittedly it was in grad school that I read him, and of course I thought his deconstructions of literary norms were absolutely brilliant — clever, inventive, hilarious. But you know what? If you ask me now, ten years later, to remember one single detail of these books, I could not do it. I can’t recall a single detail of plot, or anything about a central character, not even a line of dialogue or an image. Nothing. And to me, a truly good novel cannot be forgettable in that way. It has to stick. It has to bear some kind of truth that you can carry away from it. So really, yes the erudite postmodern is an entertainment, a lark. A really good one night stand, so to speak. But not a relationship. Not a romance.

  “So we come to you. That was just the preamble.
Are you ready? Don’t answer, just nod. Okay. The first book of yours that I read, a long time ago, was Theft of Love. What you really got at, for me, was how that kind of pain and unknowing is so utterly unbearable that it just rips you apart. I think there was some kind of supernatural or metaphysical aspect to the couple’s final coming back together after their loss — maybe something like Jane hearing Rochester’s voice through the window at the moment she’s about to succumb to Rivers. I don’t remember precise details but I do remember the moment. I don’t know whether the novel actually suggested that they’d come back together to make another baby. Perhaps I was just left with the hope that they would.

  “Next, The Dark. Scene of the older man present at the dismantling of the Berlin wall, this potent combination of the personal and the political. And the woman, I remember, had inherited a farmhouse in France. Her family had obtained it for next to nothing from people who’d been forced out by the Nazis. So the impression I kept from what I read then is a sense of the burden of history, I guess. Of how we all live our little lives ignorant of, no not ignorant, but forgetting or trying to forget how social and historical forces have shaped us. How powerful and important the past is. And of course there’s the scene in the café, the man’s frustration in wanting to do the right thing, to help this little kid, and not being able to find words.

  “Perchance to Sleep came next, I think. One bit I remember very clearly, a paragraph I read and reread: just an offhand remark by one of the central characters at a social event — a wedding or funeral — and he asks himself, ‘How did we all get so rich, so comfortable, so prosperous without ever really noticing or thinking about it?’ I liked that line so much I actually copied it into my commonplace book — ”