by Pasha Malla
Finally, as a sort of afterthought, Barbara indicated an elderly woman at the end of the table so faded and gauzy she seemed crafted from dust. ‘Good for you, writing a book, something I’d always wanted to do,’ she rasped.
‘Well!’ said Barbara. ‘We’re so pleased you could come, Ash. Especially’—her face drooped into a mask of tragedy—‘considering the circumstances.’
Condolences rippled through the group.
‘Thanks,’ said Ash.
A waiter announcing the specials was interrupted. ‘He wrote this book,’ Barbara proclaimed, tapping her copy: the proof.
‘You?’ said the waiter, eyeing Ash, who shrugged and ordered French toast.
This merited Barbara’s approval: ‘They do a superb job of that here.’
Wine came. The librarian went for it with aplomb, filling his glass and tipping half its contents down his throat before anyone else had a turn with the bottle.
Barbara commanded a cheers. ‘To Ash Dhar,’ she said. ‘Our author.’
The writer knocked Ash’s glass especially hard. As Ash mopped the spill, he attempted to mollify her. ‘So, what sort of writing do you do?’
‘Mostly diptychs,’ he was told cryptically. And then she withdrew.
‘So,’ said Barbara, wagging Ash’s book in a faintly menacing way, ‘who will begin?’
‘I thought it was wonderful,’ said the elderly lady.
‘Thank you,’ said Ash.
She shook her head in awe. ‘I don’t know how you writers do it—type all those words, all the way to the end. Very impressive.’
Ash held his smile.
‘Who else? Jerry, you had some questions about sales?’
‘Yes,’ said a voice from beneath the stacked hair. ‘How many copies?’
Ash felt pressure, per Karina’s goodness and humility, to deflect this question. ‘I’d tell you,’ he joked, ‘but then I’d have to kill you.’
Too much. Six sets of eyes retreated to their plates. Save Karina, who hid her grin behind her drink. One ally, at least.
Barbara rallied: ‘Karina, you had some questions about what you thought to be some…misogyny.’ This she pronounced my, as if the sogyny were her own.
Ash turned his smile upon Karina, hoped it seemed hospitable and self-aware: misogyny, yes, of course. They were friends. Ash had read Cixous. They could talk!
‘Such a scary word, “misogyny,” ’ said Karina. ‘Not really where I’d hoped to start.’ Across the table the diptychian reached at the librarian. He handed over his reading glasses. They were married, Ash realized. A team.
Karina held Ash’s eyes steadily with her own. They glittered with intelligence. Ash thought of the alleged video from the night before. Perhaps it did exist. Perhaps it had been posted. Perhaps this young woman had seen it.
Ash itched to pull out his phone, to message Sherene: Help me, I’m being book clubbed! Instead he went for his wine. Swallowing took effort.
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I want to understand your intentions before accusing you of anything. I believe that’s only fair.’
Ash tilted his head: of course, proceed.
‘I guess what I’m wondering is what you wanted the book to be about.’
‘About,’ said Ash.
Karina smiled. And waited. They were all waiting.
‘Well, it’s about a guy who—a harmless guy—’
‘How so, “harmless”?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Ash laughed, drank more wine. He was sweating. ‘I just mean not an exceptional person. Just, you know. Harmless?’
‘I’ve read interviews where you say the character is based on you.’
‘Oh?’ Ash felt like a trapped rabbit, snared and struggling and only further entangling itself.
‘So then, what about the love interest?’ Karina opened her book. ‘Here is she is—page thirty-two: “She dressed in revealing clothing, which her various fleshes swolled”—a new word to me—“and escaped.” It goes on: “Her brazen sexuality was as much a liberation from social strictures as it was from her own homeliness. The gelatinous cleavage, the dimpled buttocks, the great crests of flesh that heaped themselves over her waistband, these were grotesqueries, more a travesty of male desire than a rejection of it. And still he loved her.” ’ Karina looked up. ‘ “Still.” Is that meant to be somehow…generous?’
From the end of the table, the old lady’s cackle sounded like a goose being throttled.
Karina continued: ‘This is based on someone you loved? Or someone you once loved, maybe, who left you, so you’re getting some sort of—sorry—revenge?’
‘No! That’s not the intention at all.’
‘Hey, come on,’ Karina’s voice was soft, assured. She reached across the table toward him. ‘I’m not accusing you. I’m just trying to understand.’
‘Sounds like my-sogyny to me,’ said Barbara. The diptychian snorted.
Ash looked to the exit, imagined Matt crashing through the plate-glass window with his pickup, hauling Ash to freedom, saving the day.
Karina flipped to a new page: ‘ “He’d never understood her, never gotten a sense of how to negotiate her various moods and cycles and faintly amphibious smells.” ’
‘Can I see your book?’ Ash croaked at Barbara.
‘No,’ she said, clutching it to her chest. ‘I’m using it.’
All goodwill around the table had vanished. Karina read another excerpt; everyone listened with fealty and reverence. And hearing his own words—careless words, despicable words—Ash began to share SLAW’S disgust. The book had long embarrassed him as a document of youth, like a school photo that captured some especially flagrant hairstyle. It was something, too, that he and Sherene never discussed; he’d always got the sense she didn’t think much of it. But now he felt confronted with something essential and harder to disavow: he was a vindictive creep, a sogynist of everyone’s, and his book was the proof. And there might be recent video evidence, too.
Worst of all was Katrina’s benevolence. She parroted his insipid words with a compassionate smile. She seemed to believe she was doing Ash a favour, revealing this truth about himself to which he’d been oblivious. And as her oration concluded and the old lady actually nudged Ash’s book away, he felt looked upon not with revulsion, or even disappointment, but mercy.
‘So, again,’ said Karina, ‘I don’t want to point any fingers. I just thought this might be a chance for you to clear the air.’
Everyone stared at him. An explanation or apology was due.
The French toast arrived, saving him momentarily. ‘Wow, looks great,’ Ash squawked, and filled his mouth.
‘I think,’ said the librarian, ‘that we might need to separate the character in the novel from the author.’
Ash glanced up, chewing. Not an escape route he’d considered.
‘Of course you take his side,’ said the diptychian. ‘You men always stick together.’
Shit. The guy’s breadcrumb trail to salvation only indicted Ash further!
‘And it’s based on himself,’ said Jerry. ‘He told us so.’
‘Exactly,’ said Barbara. She had forced this loathsome sexist upon the group and, honour on the line, was trying to distance herself from him entirely.
Ash lifted a hand to wipe his forehead—the hand that held a fork of sopping toast; syrup dripped down his shirtfront. He searched for his napkin. Discovered it at his feet like a dead and trampled dove.
All eyes were upon him. Ash fondled his phone in his pocket.
‘Maybe that’s enough now,’ whispered Barbara. ‘The boy’s father did just die.’
Everyone eased back from the table as if his grief might be contagious. Croissants were buttered, coffee was sipped. And ‘the boy,’ mercied upon his dad’s grave, poked his French toast, which had congealed to a doughy lump on his plate.
When he looked up, Barbara was smiling at him with strained charity. ‘I so enjoy our club’s ability to have these frank discussions
,’ she said.
Ash pictured her dress hiked to her waist, Matt with his pants around his ankles. At his father’s funeral. And now she had the gall to take the moral high ground. His humiliation developed edges, needling outward—but Barbara was moving in again.
‘There’s just one more thing I have to ask.’ She placed a cold, thin hand atop his. ‘Tell me, Ash: what are you working on now?’
—
IT HAD BEEN YEARS since Ash had visited the Montreal studios. So much orange, so much brown, so much tinted, bevelled glass. The design seemed based on a 1970s notion of what a spaceship might one day appreciate looking like, provided the future were locked in some perennial, analogue autumn of carpeted walls and LSD.
‘Kind of a porno set vibe in here,’ said Matt, and played some slinky slap-bass on his leg while he and Ash waited to be buzzed through security.
Ash was cleared and stickered, but, they were informed, since no guest had been pre-authorized, his friend would not be admitted inside. Matt eyed Ash from other side of the turnstiles with the look of a refugee.
Sherene was summoned. She came gliding across the lobby, dressed to the nines as always and moving with an ease and confidence that suggested an enviable serenity in the world. She hugged Ash and stood back, smiling, seemingly glad to see him. And for a moment he felt redeemed.
But then it all collapsed: ‘You look terrible.’
‘I told you last night to come rescue me!’
She held his eyes. ‘You sure you want to do this? If it’s too much right now—’
‘It’s fine,’ said Ash. ‘Though there is one problem. Can you get my buddy in?’
‘You brought someone?’ said Sherene. Matt, leaning on the security desk, lifted a peace sign in salutation. She turned Ash away by the elbow, spoke in a hushed voice. ‘Sweetie, this isn’t my building. They’ve already given me a hard enough time about booking studio time.’
So it fell to Ash to tell his friend he wasn’t welcome. ‘I’ll be an hour,’ he said. ‘And then we can go do whatever you want.’
But something had been triggered; Matt’s eyes were skittering back and forth. ‘This is BS. I’m your best friend.’
Before Ash knew what was happening, Matt had launched himself halfway over the desk to grab a handful of the security guard’s uniform. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he roared, rattling the guy by the lapels. ‘My taxes pay your salary! But when I try to come in here to audition or hang out with my friend, I’m suddenly human garbage?’
‘Stop it before you get Tasered or something,’ Ash begged, shooting an apologetic look at Sherene. But she was on the phone for, he assumed, backup.
Grudgingly Matt relented, lowering the guy and shaking his head. He turned on Ash, a fat sausage of a finger wagging at him from the far side of the turnstiles. ‘I drove across the country for you, Dhar, and what do you do? Act like I’m your chauffeur.’
‘Hey, come on—’
But Matt waved him off, turned his back, and stormed out of the building, leaving Ash in a swirl of guilt, disgrace and relief. Also bewilderment: what had just happened?
He turned to Sherene, who looked as stunned as he felt.
‘So,’ she said, ‘that’s a friend of yours?’
‘From childhood. Not someone I see much anymore.’
‘Whoever he is, he’s certainly got a thing for you.’ Sherene checked her watch. ‘Anyway, sweetie, let’s get a move on. We’ve got a Behemoth to interview.’
Ash was led down a memorabilia-lined hallway to their borrowed studio. By the console was Sherene’s copy of Into the Night, the spine bowed and cracked, a rainbow of Post-its sprouting from the pages.
‘I’ll need to borrow this,’ he said. ‘Left my copy in the car.’
‘Did you at least get the script I emailed you?’
‘Shoot,’ said Ash. ‘Sorry, I forgot that too.’
She pulled one free from a clipboard. Ash glanced over her questions. Looked up. ‘Thanks for doing this. Just, with this whole week—’
She waved it away. ‘Good thing, is all, that you had so long with the book.’
‘Yeah, about that…’
‘Ash!’
‘I read some of it!’
‘How much?’
‘The first…part.’
‘Did you get to the flood at least?’
‘Flood?’
Frowning, Sherene filled him in quickly. ‘Which,’ she concluded, ‘happens at the end of the first part.’
‘Sorry, just, the thing is? I found something Brij was writing.’ It was a cheap shot but Ash felt cornered. ‘And I read it instead. It felt…like he was back with me, for a bit.’
‘Your dad wrote a book? What about?’
Ash gave her the gist.
‘Wow, my old man gets up the wherewithal to write me a birthday card and I fly over the moon.’ Sherene shook this thought away and looked at him with a new kind of focus. She sighed, took his hands in hers. ‘Oh, Ash. I’m sorry for not being much support lately. With your dad and everything. Work’s no excuse. I’ve been a bad friend.’
‘It’s okay.’ Ash allowed himself to be petted. ‘Anyway—The Behemoth, right?’
‘Okay, but let’s talk about this later. Lunch when we’re back in Toronto, maybe?’ She released his hands and glanced again at her watch. ‘We have to get a move on, but please don’t worry too much about the book. I’ve listened to a dozen interviews with this guy and holy does he like to talk. Just stick to the script and sweetie? You’ll be fine.’
Ash spent a few minutes pairing Sherene’s prompts with page numbers, dog-earing as he went. But his thoughts kept caroming back to Matt’s breakdown, to the book club disaster, to the possible ignominies of the night before: all connected. Ash rolled over to the studio’s computer and searched for the alleged video—Hotdog steam, Un con soul et son pen, etc. Nothing. Ash Dhar, of course, returned no recent hits at all. He hoped it stayed that way. Not being famous was infinitely better than sudden, disgraceful infamy.
A voice materialized in his headphones: ‘Okay, Ash. He’s on the phone. As soon as you’re done checking your email I’ll put him through.’
So harsh, so business. Where was the love? Matt, Sherene—on their lives went; Ash’s sorrows were his alone. And now like a penned bull The Behemoth lurked on the end of the line, a man’s man who trampled the frail and left a trail of ruined bodies in his dust. Best to play the matador, sword bared for the death blow.
Ash rolled up to the microphone. ‘Let’s do this.’
‘Here he is.’
Ash opened with an ad lib: ‘I’m quite enjoying your book.’ (The gerund indicating that he hadn’t bothered to finish it; ‘quite’ to suggest not really.)
These nuances were ignored: ‘Appreciated.’
In the booth Sherene held up the script. Ash gave her the thumbs-up and returned to it: ‘Can you tell me about the main character?’
‘Hardwick? He just came to me: “You need to tell my story.” ’
‘So he isn’t based on you?’
‘Well, we have certain commonalities, sure. He’s a guy, I’m a guy. About my age. Military background. Talks like me. Maybe even kind of looks like me. But writers should never treat their characters as proxies for some personal agenda. A writer’s job is to honour the reader, and to do that one must write in service of the reader.’
On it went. Ash asked a question, The Behemoth monologued, and on they moved to the next talking point. Although Ash wasn’t really listening, he sensed impatience in The Behemoth’s replies: same old, same old. So he thought to shake things up bit.
‘Your character kills his wife and child. In a fire.’
‘He does.’
‘What’s that about?’
‘Well, he loses it. This is a guy, keep in mind, who’s experienced trauma. Real trauma. Not just I-didn’t-get-the-promotion-I-want trauma. And there are no mechanisms for him to deal with that trauma. So he implodes. And his implosion is so sev
ere that he takes down with him the only people who might have kept him afloat.’
‘A woman. And a child.’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that a bit manipulative? Cruel, even?’
‘What fiction isn’t manipulative? The whole enterprise of the novel is simply one scheme of manipulation upon another. But I don’t think it’s cruel. I don’t approach my characters or readers with cruelty.’
‘It’s not cruel to burn people alive?’
‘Of course it’s cruel to burn people alive.’ The words were sharp, fairly spat down the line. ‘In what scenario would that not be an act of cruelty? To fictionalize that sort of trauma, though, is something else. To use it—’
‘To use the death of a woman and child?’ Sherene was glaring at Ash through the glass. But they were jousting now. Ash puffed himself up and went for the kill: ‘Some might suggest that sounds…misogynistic.’
‘Sorry, what does?’
‘Exploiting women for the sake of a story.’
Sherene was sawing a hand across her throat.
‘Exploiting,’ echoed The Behemoth, in a voice like low thunder.
Ash went on to critique the dead wife’s characterization: a type, a victim, a sacrifice for the sake of the male hero’s personal journey. He was on a roll. The Behemoth remained silent. Humbled, probably. ‘You talk about how the writer should disavow control, but the truth is you’re totally in control. And you have a responsibility—’
‘Oh, boy,’ sighed The Behemoth.
‘A responsibility,’ continued Ash, ‘to whomever you’re representing. Don’t you think.’
‘No.’
The air went dead around that no. Sherene buried her face in her hands.
‘Yet here you are,’ continued Ash, ‘doing the man’s man writer thing. The Hemingway pose. Fisticuffs and whiskey and killing off women and whatever else. I mean, wasn’t this whole thing a little played out fifty years ago?’
Silence.
Ash flailed forward with his attack: ‘And this whole ridiculous performance of masculinity, of men who fail in relation to this dumb imagined ideal of manhood. It’s absurd. A man kills his woman so he’s got to drink hard and fight hard and fuck hard and chop wood and build a cabin and kill a bear and gut a bear and wear the bearskin as a cloak so he can walk among the bears and kill them all, one by one—’