Oh my god, it’s him, thinks Jay, at the precise moment that her handler, Laurel, squeals, “Oh my god, is that who I think it is? Let’s go introduce you!” and grabs her by the arm.
“No way.”
“C’mon, it’ll be fun!” Laurel is surprisingly strong for someone who wears size zero.
Jay struggles, protests, “I can’t, I’m too — no! Don’t you dare, I won’t know what the hell to — oh. Hello.”
Laurel beams, says, “Leland? Hi, welcome to the festival! I’m from Great North Publishing, we distribute your work here. May I present Jay McNair? Jay is one of our newest writers and we’re very proud of her. I’m sure you know her novel Richdale?”
He is tall, thin, sort of craggy. Dark hair worn a little too long, rimless glasses, thin face. She didn’t think he’d be so tall. He looks harassed yet wretchedly bored, slightly glazed and desperate, but he shakes her hand and says, “So pleased for you. I look forward to reading your work.”
“Oh. And I am so . . . I am a serious ad — I’m uh . . . a huge fan.”
“Thanks so much. You’re very kind.”
Jay is now struck dumb. Here she is with one of the most celebrated living authors in the English language and she cannot come up with a single sentence. Well, I love you comes most immediately to mind, but somewhere in what’s left of her brain a tiny voice whispers not now.
He’s used to this, obviously. He glances around the room, seeking deliverance from what James Joyce would have called her “confused adoration,” but can’t seem to find another familiar face. He takes a sip of his drink. He has beautiful hands. Too terrified to continue looking at his face, she decides to follow his hands. The moment stretches into eternity. She looks for Laurel, but she has flitted away. She wants to cry.
“So. Is this your first festival?”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes it is. It’s quite . . . ” She gestures, a limp wave of her arm.
He smiles, though. “Overwhelming? Yes, it is.” Nods at someone, takes a step back. “Well, I must — ” His voice! No doubt he has already forgotten her name. One more second and he’ll be gone.
“You know,” she says, “one of my favourite scenes in your work, and I know it’s not a major thematic or dramatic scene, of course, but you know how some moments from a novel just really stick? It’s the moment in The Dark when the central character, the man, is in a little café in a French village, and he’s watching a family, and the father begins to mistreat the child — do you know the scene I mean?”
“Yes, I believe I do.”
“And the man tries to intervene but his French isn’t very good and he goes over to the father and ends up saying something like ‘if you touch that child again, I will knock my block off!’”
Leland smiles very slightly. “Yes. How good of you to remember it.” Well, what the hell else can he say?
He’s turning away, he has seen someone famous and important and not stupid — no, not even that, just someone who isn’t her. But then he stops, asks, “Why do you think you remember it?”
“I’ve never really understood why that is, but I wonder about it sometimes, why we — ”
A flurry of bangles and forest green silk and: “Leland! You must meet — oh hello so nice to see you — I’m afraid I must steal him just for a moment.”
And he is gone. And she has made an ass of herself. And where the hell is Laurel?
Jay heads for the bar. All around her in the lineup, people are shouting into each other’s faces with a noisy social hunger that makes the word carnivorous swim into her brain. No one knows her, though. She’s a nobody, thank god. She waits in line, and just before her turn comes, a voice behind her, right in her ear, says, “Those moments of transcendence, the felicitous coupling of authorial vision with readerly largesse of spirit, it mystifies me still, how that happens, how that chasm is breached, whether — ”
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 — ”
“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.