An Honest Woman Read online

  “You have a — ”

  “Shush. Yes, I do. I’m a closet Victorian, I guess. Anyhow, the part I remember most vividly is when the guy is out on the moors, trying to seduce his Muse, and at the moment she comes to him, and he’s seized with the passion of creation, the intense wonderful moment when inspiration flows through him, he is presented with a moral dilemma, a choice. And he chooses with hideous but shamefully recognizable egocentrism, to continue composing.

  “How’m I doin’ so far? Don’t answer! At least you’re neither weeping nor cringing, and you appear to have all the hair you started out with this evening, so . . . now for a truly embarrassing confession. I haven’t read the one that was just made into a major motion picture. Well, you know how it is, so many books, so little time. But I loved the one before that, Regret. Particularly the bit where the young couple are having a knee trembler, and the young guy is wanting to hold back, and is filling his mind with thoughts of wastebaskets and rubber boots. Priceless, and something I’d entirely forgotten about young men, poor things. So . . . I guess that’s it. I’m done.”

  Leland looks at his hands, then directly at her. Says nothing for quite a long time. Then, very quietly, “I think there’s a little more. Isn’t there?”

  Elation tumbles into terror. He knows she’s lying. Jesus, why didn’t she think this through before she opened her fat yap, Christ almighty —

  “Okay. Okay, I was less than honest. Okay. Shit, I can’t believe I’m doing this. I did buy . . . you know, that major motion picture one, of course. In hardcover. And started it and found it very rich. And stately and detailed. Reminded me of To the Lighthouse, that loving, devoted attention to time and place and class and family dynamic. You know, I think it was probably my own time and place that interfered, my own family dynamic; I was in a tight spot, a really frantic spot, at that point in my life, the details of which are unimportant. So I set the book aside. I knew I couldn’t give it the right kind of attention at that moment. You know that yourself, I’m sure. You have to be receptive to a book, and at that moment I couldn’t be. I hope to be, though. Some day.”

  He sits back now, appears satisfied with the addendum.

  She says, “So. That’s it. Was that okay?”

  He hems, smiles slightly, and reaches over, very lightly encircling her wrist with his fingers, then just as quickly withdraws them. “You’re tiny, your wrist is so small, yet your hands look like they belong on someone else. Someone much larger.”

  Jay regards her hands with interest and dismay. The knuckles reddish purple and flaked with dead skin, fingers thick, nails unpolished and raggedly manicured with a toenail clipper, thumb pads cracked and dry — not bleeding yet but they will be by winter. Raised purple veins on the backs of the hands, palms blotched red, nails sprouting little colonies of torn skin along the cuticle. She is mesmerized by these ugly hands of hers and can think of no way to reply, so the two of them sit in silence. He too seems disinclined to speak and finally she murmurs, “Well. It’s getting late.”

  It’s as if her voice has wakened him: “Yes, right. Of course. Here, let me — ” and he’s left the table in search of the waitress and their bill.

  She can’t decide whether to beat herself up now or later for doing such a stupid presumptuous thing. Giving Leland Mackenzie her dimwitted response to his work, and going on and on like that, Jesus, who does she think she is? He returns to the table, though, with an air of brisk cheerfulness, and they set out back to the hotel. She is talked out, emptied. Scared. And it is her, not him, who lapses into silence as they walk. Leland, very gently and with practised decorum, asks a few tactful questions about her schedule tomorrow, the weather, her future writing projects. Slowly she is able to slide back into her normal social self, responding as if on autopilot. A sense of loss consumes her. This night, this amazing night, all those foolish things she planned to say, never mind the foolish things she actually did say — oh yes, she has been writing this scene two or three pages ahead while living the present, an occupational hazard; she has already pictured herself in the elevator, saying, “This has been the most amazing first date, not that this is a date or anything, but I have had so many disastrous first . . . encounters that — ” and then off into her hilarious stories about the African grad student and the recently bereaved husband and oh yes the famous poet — unless she gets Leland into her room, but wouldn’t they have stopped talking by then?

  The loss she feels is more than disappointment. This isn’t the deletion of a good scene. It’s that she opened to him, in that little bar. She could think out loud in his presence — Charlotte Bronte’s phrase “audible thinking” occurs to her — and he, Leland . . . received her, she knows he did, she felt it. The gates opened, but now they are closed. She thinks he closed them, but she’s not entirely sure. There was the caress —

  All gone now, and they are walking side by side, chatting up a nervous storm, and she will never get to say it: This was amazing, you are amazing, and her heart feels broken. The lobby lights are far too bright and harsh laughter booms from the piano bar. “Are you — ?” He stops midsentence and gestures toward the crowd at the bar.

  “Gawd, no! Drunk writers at this time of night? Spare me.”

  “I think I’ll give it a miss as well.”

  The elevator door stands open and they step inside. Jay punches the nine, but he makes no move. “What floor?” she says.

  “Oh. Um . . . 12. No, sorry. 16.”

  She presses the button and they rise in silence until the chime sounds at the ninth and the doors open.

  “Well,” she says.

  “This was a — most pleasant evening,” he says.

  “Yes. It was. Well. Good night.”

  She shuts the door of 934 behind her and leans against it for several minutes, eyes closed. For some reason, she’s thinking about Anne Lamott’s memoir. How Lamott talks about different kinds of prayer, describes a friend of hers whose morning prayer consisted of the word “whatever” and whose night-time prayer was “oh well.”

  “Oh well,” Jay murmurs, and gets ready for bed.

  2.

  Leland stands in the elevator, watching the doors whush closed, hearing the chimes ring, feeling the floor rise under his feet. He remains perfectly still. At 16, the machine waits politely for him to make up his mind, and when he doesn’t, the doors whush closed, and the elevator carries him back down to the lobby. He stumbles toward the roar of noise from the bar but catches himself at the entrance and pauses, listening. I have known them all already, known them all — the high shrieks of laughter from the women, the boozy bravado roars of the men. He does a pirouette and shortly finds himself back in the quiet of his suite, pouring a glass of whiskey over the few remaining slivers of ice.

  He can’t believe this. No invoice, no bill. He cringed from the moment he took her funny rough hand in his, to the moment the door slid shut behind her: what will it be? what will this cost? A blurb at the very least. The name of a really good agent. Maybe a little help with chapter four, or maybe a quick read of the whole manuscript, no rush, just when he has a minute. A famous fuck, of course. That’s a given. And he liked her so much. And is actually grateful for the last truth of what she said. She’d been so there, so righteous, so unshakably real that he’d seen immediately that when it came to the novel she hadn’t read to the end, she had lied. He knew that, and it shook him, thrilled him, because he’d felt for some time now that he couldn’t tell anymore, couldn’t tell whether the work was good or not, couldn’t tell whether people meant what they said. Anyone — lovers, editors, total strangers. And it occurs to him that for years now he has coped with this gradual blindness by simply assuming that everyone lied. About everything. All the time.

  But with Jay, he could tell the lie and he called her on it, and she came through. As far as she dared, at least. And he liked her so much and was so grateful that he just couldn’t face the rest of it. Receiving her bill.

  But it never
came. How could she not want anything? He pours another glass and paces. He can’t figure this out. Flicks on the TV and quickly turns it off again. Sits at his laptop but does not raise his hands to the keyboard. Contemplates the phone. Pours a third drink, then has an idea, and heads down to the bar, with a stop at the front desk on the way, to arrange for the bellman to come to his door next morning at 6:45 precisely for the message he is going to write:

  Midnight: First Draft: Sorry for being such a constipated shit last night, but

  3:00 AM: Second Draft: I really enjoyed our talk last night and was wondering whether

  3:10 AM: Third Draft: I can’t believe you haven’t read what half the world thinks is my best book you daft twit

  6:40 AM: Fourth (and final) Draft: Hi Jay: Want to meet at that same bar again this evening, around 10:30 or so? LM

  3.

  She arrives at 10:20, hoping to have time to reapply her lipstick and maybe brush her teeth. His reading tonight was very good, and the crowd adored him. Her radio interview in the morning seemed to go okay, and when she called Calgary, the kids were fine. Well, at least the house was still standing, or so they said. But all that day, that note that note that note, oh how it buoyed her up —

  But there he is already, how in hell did he escape the mob? The line at the book table ran right out of the hall and into the lobby —

  “Well, then,” he says and gestures at the seat across from him.

  His imperious tone frees her to insist, “Back in a flash, just have to make a pit stop.”

  Her face in the mirror — dread, anticipation, delight. And oh if she could just stop these ridiculous fantasies, these romantic scenarios, You know what I really wish? I wish that I could be given a chance to learn to love you. And he smiles and pats the place beside him —

  Back at the booth, and he smirks, “Pit stop? No shit Sherlock? You’re providing me with quite an education, Jay.”

  “Well. There you go.”

  He grins. “The usual?”

  “Yes, please. But are you sure you’re up for this? I heard that you had to cancel your gig on the international panel because you have the flu.”

  “A lie. Never felt better. Spent the day in bed, reading.”

  “You’re not ill?”

  “Not at all. Listen, I read the most wonderful book today; it’s called Richdale and I want to give its author the gift of a reading. From an ordinary reader. A fan.”

  “Oh god.”

  “Rules: you are to remain completely silent. No protests, no blushing, no — ”

  “You’ve forgotten the first rule. The author has to agree to hear the reading.”

  “And do you?”

  “No!”

  He takes her hand as the waitress brings her white wine, and his, what, second whiskey?

  “It would be such an honour for me to do this, Jay.”

  She has to look down, his eyes are, dear god, she’s going to, god only knows, cryfaintscreampassout?

  “Jay?”

  “Just give me a minute.” He won’t let go of her hand. His touch is gentle but strong. His thumb moves over her knuckles, exactly the way her father used to, holding her hand when she was a little girl. Safe. A breath, a deep one. Then another. “Okay,” she says.

  “Good. Richdale. What struck me the most. The promise of that little town is inextricable from despair. It made me think that possibly the two are inseparable. The graveyard with the single stone, the solitary Mary, the ghost of every lost or discarded child. Very good. And the bit at the end where Sally re-visits the houses, photographing them as a way of attesting to their reality. And then finding the new graves. It would have been far too neat to have exactly the right number; excellent that you didn’t fall into that trap, that temptation.

  “But that scene — the scene, okay? — in the little coffee shop in the town near the homestead, the man with bright blue eyes, Jamie’s bastard son, now a grandfather, spooning pudding into his granddaughter’s mouth, looking up, recognizing something in Sally. Lovely. They can’t meet each other’s eyes; it’s a sad moment but somehow deeply funny as well.”

  Jay can’t look at him. He gets it, he got it. Her ideal reader, the person she wrote this book for, the consciousness she wanted to address, awaken, touch.

  He adds, “I plan to reread, of course. Pick up whatever I missed, on the plane home tomorrow. I need to think more about how the dispossessed, the exiled, have this absence in their histories. My own ancestors were far from rich, but they had their place in the world and they chose to keep it. But Sal’s forebears, like yours I guess, had to begin again. Or chose to. And what a gift that choice was, yet what a burden too. I know where every one of my ancestors is buried. Every house inhabited by a family member still stands, the churches and the schools and the pubs. But with your lot, the past is erased over and over again, with each push west. And yet Sal and the others need to go back anyway, digging in the bloody soil with their bare hands. Sal’s moment in that valley, as if the landscape itself is recognized as her first mother. It goes far deeper than any such I’ve ever read, man or woman.”

  Jay’s mouth is parched. Her gums crackle when she opens her mouth to drink.

  He watches her, a shy smile. “You may speak now, if you wish.”

  Don’t go. don’t go home.

  “Or not.” He looks slightly anxious, grabs his glass and drinks.

  Hands. That’s it. Something to do with hands. Jay covers his hands with her own, mutters, “Not that this is a date or anything.”

  “Pardon?”

  She lifts her hands. “I realize that this isn’t what I’m supposed to be talking about at this moment, but for some weird reason, I want to tell you about the worst date I ever had. It was with a poet. Older guy, quite well known. We’d met at a conference in France. And though we’d said goodbye at the last session, we ended up on the same train the next morning, both headed for Paris, he for a long stay in a borrowed apartment, and me just overnight before my flight home. He asked me out for dinner.

  “I was so excited about this. A famous poet, a romantic evening in Paris. And it was such a fucking disaster. For a variety of reasons, but one was that he saw me as this, I don’t know, cushion or something. Munro has a line about ‘undifferentiating welcome’ when she describes a mildly retarded girl at school who is sexually used by the boys. That’s precisely what this man seemed to expect from me, to want me for: undifferentiating welcome. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know his work, but did not say anything or ask anything about mine. He basically performed the whole date. Really. It was as if he was the performance and I was supposed to be the adoring audience, beaming, gasping, applauding. Every move, from the inside story on the Cambodian waiter who served us aperitif at the sidewalk cafe in St. Germain, to the carefully selected cosy little bistro and, ‘May I take the liberty of ordering for both of us?’ to the after-dinner stroll down to the Seine, the big finale on the Pont Neuf with Notre Dame illuminated in the background, where the music swells and she falls into his arms and and and . . . But I swear, Leland, by the time we got to the violin part, I was so goddamn furious, so insulted by his condescension and his complete lack of interest in me or my work or my opinions — hell, an inflatable doll would have served his purposes just as well, better — that I very deliberately said, ‘Nice view. Hey, I have to get going. Can you show me where to find a taxi?’ And yes, there were a variety of things I was pissed off about, but a big one was that in that whole evening — can you imagine spending an entire evening with anyone, say from 6:30 ’til nearly midnight, and not asking one question about that person’s life or interests?”

  Jay sips her wine, and goes on: “What happened afterwards, though, was what cut it for me. Because I went home, and after I’d cooled off a bit, I went to the library, not the bookstore, mind you, the library, and took out several volumes of his poetry. Because if you meet a person who is a writer and you want to . . . respect or know that person, then you read thei
r work. And then I sent him a polite note of thanks, on email, for the dinner, and made some comment on his work. And then I waited for some word from him. He knew I was a writer, my publications were listed on my bio for the conference, and he could have given the slightest indication that he knew I was a writer too. But no. His reply was, if possible, even more arrogant than his behavior in Paris. It was one of those email replies where the person just returns the sender’s email with his own responses inserted between the paragraphs, or even sometimes the sentences. Lazy as hell for one thing, and insultingly like receiving a graded undergrad paper back for another. I sent no reply and haven’t heard from him since.”

  Leland begins to speak, but she raises her hand to stop him. She needs to take a moment to assemble the last fragments of thought.

  “So. I can’t seem to find the right words for how I feel about what you’ve said. Not flattered, that’s servile. So is honoured, as if some higher being has deigned to give my work his attention. I mean, I know that my work is not me, but it’s a bloody important part of me. I can’t find any word that explains how your reading — which by the way is absolutely dead wrong on every friggin’ count — how this reading…”

  He waits, alert now.

  Again she places her farmwife hands over his, simply covers his fine white hands with her own. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “And how did you manage to get the book so late last night?”

  “I was heroic. I braved the madding crowd at the bar downstairs, found that silly heavyset woman with the big square glasses and browbeat and pleaded and bloody well had to offer to marry the silly bitch before she’d take me into the storeroom where they lock up the book tables for the night. Read ’til three or so, then slept a few hours ’til it was time to send you the message — ”

  “Valued, maybe that’s the word.”

  “Possibly. Read again straight through with a couple of calls to cancel things. I knew I couldn’t get out of my mainstage reading, of course, but all the rest of it — ”