YEAR AFTER YEAR, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck, what does it matter as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such passionate equanimity as need met with fate.
I first met Elizabeth two years ago almost to the day, on August 30, 1971, at about eight-thirty in the evening, at the small Hartison Gallery on Duke Street in Halifax. The gallery was associated with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, most famous for his book The Americans and who spent summers on Cape Breton, was teaching a course at the college, and there was a lot of excitement in town about this. He also had agreed to exhibit twenty of his Nova Scotia photographs at the gallery. I was thirty-four and had started to write my second novel, Think Gently on Libraries. I had an apartment on Granville, right there in the neighborhood. My regular café was Cyrano’s Last Night, also on Duke Street. Art students liked to hang out there. The café had one of those enormous espresso machines that looked like it had been designed by Jules Verne in a hallucinatory condition. Like an ancient sea creature trying to breathe on land, when coffee was being made the machine steamed and wheezed loudly, drowning out the nonstop opera, which was, much to my preference, usually Puccini or Verdi, never Wagner.
Anyway, the gallery was crowded, and after moving slowly along the walls from photograph to photograph, I found myself standing next to Elizabeth (of course I didn’t know her name yet), in front of a diptych called Mabou Window, which consisted of two identical views of an expanse of snowy boulders and flat rock outcroppings that led down to the sea. A section of broken wooden fence was in each foreground. The snow’s glare nearly made me wince, yet there was a strangely animate quality to the light, as if I were seeing wind that contained snow moving toward the water. To me, Mabou Window was epigrammatic, if a landscape study can be epigrammatic; it held a lot of muted, even spectral emotion, a kind of photographic pencil sketch of a stretch of the Cape Breton coast coming into focus out of the fog. As I stood there, a touch lost in thought, lightly jostled by other people but hardly minding, I heard Elizabeth read the words Robert Frank had scrawled across the bottom: Next Life Might Be Kinder. I didn’t look at her right away.
Then Elizabeth turned to me and said, “You probably noticed that he’s written the same thing on every one of these twenty photographs. They’re unsettling, don’t you think—those words? We’re going to have to think about them for a while.”