by Karen Smythe
A provocative and piercing novel that explores the meaning we find within the random architecture of despair and joy.
“In this wry and visceral debut novel, Karen Smythe has found new and intriguing ways to tell a powerful story of longing, love, and what it means to be brave. Her characters show us how we are all repeatedly reconstituted by love and how, for better or worse, we must accept what we thought we couldn’t and find a way to live with the different versions of ourselves as we navigate our own lives.”
— Diane Schoemperlen, author of This Is Not My Life
“This Side of Sad is as intimate as a best friend’s confession, as well wrought as a fine clay vessel, and as consoling as only a fine blues tune can be.”
— Antanas Sileika, author of The Barefoot Bingo Caller
“Sensitive and authentic, This Side of Sad brims with introspection, wry humour, and Karen Smythe’s signature literary grace. The story will remain rooted in your heart and mind.”
— Danila Botha, author of For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known
“A courageous debut novel and one of the most searing explorations of love and grief you will ever read. This is writing that probes as deeply as fiction can the conflicting emotions that ensue upon devastating loss. This Side of Sad is a dramatically vivid work of fiction.”
— Ian Colford, author of Perfect World
Also by Karen Smythe
Stubborn Bones (stories)
Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (criticism)
Copyright © 2017 by Karen Smythe.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Excerpts from “The Verb to Be” by André Breton, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, in Earthlight (2017). Used with permission from Black Widow Press, Boston, Massachusetts. Excerpts from Waiting for God by Simone Weil, translated by Emma Craufurd, translation copyright © 1951, renewed © 1979 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, copyright © 1959, 1962, 1984, 1992 by Viktor E. Frankl. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover image from the series Femina Plantarum, copyright © 2013 by Elsa Mora. www.elsamora.net
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Smythe, Karen E. (Karen Elizabeth), 1962-, author
This side of sad / Karen Smythe.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-86492-985-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-0-86492-986-0 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-0-86492-987-7 (MOBI)
I. Title
PS8587.M994T45 2017 C813'.6 C2017-902823-5
C2017-902824-3
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
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Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
For J.H.
I know the general outline of despair. A very small shape, defined by jewels worn in the hair. That’s despair.… I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no heart, my hand always touches breathless despair, the despair whose mirrors never tell us if it’s dead.… I don’t remember anything and it’s always in despair that I discover the beautiful uprooted trees of night.… In its general outline despair has no importance. It’s a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it’s a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it’s a squad of one-less-days that will eventually make up my life.
— André Breton
There is both continuity and the separation of a definite point of entry, as with the temperature at which water boils, between affliction itself and all the sorrows that, even though they may be very violent, very deep and very lasting, are not affliction in the strict sense. There is a limit; on the far side of it we have affliction but not on the near side. This limit is not purely objective; all sorts of personal factors have to be taken into account. The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another.…
— Simone Weil
To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life?
— Viktor Frankl
Foreword
March 2005
Everyone wants to know if I’ve come to terms with what happened. Come to terms — what a strange phrase for “acceptance.” Terms are words. Terms are time. Terms are the agreed-upon parameters of a relationship.
I didn’t agree to this.
Right now I have only the fact of James’s death, and facts alone won’t help me. Before there are terms, any terms, to come to, I need to know what happened out in the woods, when he died. I don’t mean whether or not it was an accident, or not only that; either way, my husband decided on danger that day. What I need to understand is why. What pushed him there? I thought we’d both recovered from the toll of my surgery, that James was finally moving forward. Did I miss something in the months leading up to James’s retirement? I must have missed something, the first time through. Something big. Something telling.
But figuring out what happened to James, to us…this will not be easy. I don’t expect to stumble across the truth and recognize it in a flash, or hear a voice yell “This is it!” the way your gut does, when you fall in love. No, that’s not the way this story will end. If it ends. Clearly, I don’t know how to get there. Or how to begin. I am in shambles. Aghast. Afflicted, a mute. “I” stands for “Imposter” now. Because that woman, James’s wife? She’s vanished. Banished, gone underground; absconded with the goods. What happened to James happened to her, too, in a way. The person I was, with James, died when he did.
The weekend it happened, I’d not gone to the farm. I’ve often wondered if that had been part of James’s plan. Not that he was upset with me for not being there, come Saturday (though there might have been that, too), but that the opportunity should not be wasted. If it happened that way, that is — if it wasn’t an accident.
What if I could watch our life together unfold again, if I could unreel it, exhume it, observe it scene by random scene? Not only that one day or week, or even the months before, but the years before that: the whole of our life. Would that do it? Would that be enough to get me there, to the truth about what happened to James? To us?
Somehow I don’t think so. Somehow, I think there is something deeper I need to get at, to dig out from my life before I met James. I’m the only one left who might be able to tell me the truth about myself. If I could see my entire life from one step back, watch it but at the same time remove my
self from it, then maybe the true story about James and me would reveal itself. It might emerge like an apparition, oozing out of the spaces between the scrambled episodes.
There wasn’t a lot of time between the end of my relationship with Ted and the start of life with James. There could be something there, back then — something about me, or in me, in the person I’d become with Ted that festered, and festers still. What happened to her, to the woman I’d been during the years I shared with him, once he cut ties — where did she go? James didn’t meet her; I didn’t take her with me when I moved into my life with James, my life after Ted. And the girl before her, before Ted and I fell in love — what about her, that girl who carried a burnished, buried love for Josh, from her teens into her twenties? I left her behind when Ted came along; is she, too, part of this fray, this knotted tangle that came to strangle and estrange us, James and me?
Time itself seems broken, it sits in frozen pieces that need to melt and merge to form a solution. Time needs to flow again, so I can bring back the messy necessities of mind and heart for the reckoning: the false and the true, the subconscious glue that has kept my sclerotic life together. Because every bit of me has to be dissected, laid bare, exposed to the elements. There is no other way to move forward, no restart button or blueprint to follow, no script to tell me what to say or how to be.
My doctor suggested that I start keeping a journal. Writing my thoughts out every day, he thinks, might help me sort through the indecipherable mess of my mind. I said I’d prefer another prescription for Ativan, thank you very much. The discord between all those blank pages and the disarray in my head is too much to overcome. Besides, you don’t just keep a diary, you are supposed to keep it alive, like a pet. I can barely keep myself alive right now. And memories do not add up to a life, anyway, not even when strung together day by day or week by week. There is so much more that falls between the cracks, unremembered or deliberately forgotten. And if I can’t remember everything, how do I go on then? Because I’m afraid I might not be able to. Remember everything, I mean.
“Go on now, Maslen. Remember. Make yourself remember.” Jesus, I said that out loud. And referring to myself in the second person, to boot. Isn’t that a sign of madness? To be beside oneself, outside of oneself? Well. Maybe that’s good; maybe that’s exactly the step back I need, to make this work. To make something of nothing.
Okay, you — get on with it, then. “Make yourself remember. Go on.”
Make. Your. Self.
Remember.
Go on.
one
Sometimes, when James and I still shared a bed, I’d lie on my back, eyes closed, and listen to my husband breathing. James had never snored; his respiration had always been regular, slow and subdued — so much so that I’d turn, periodically throughout the night, to watch for the rising and falling of his chest, for the movement of the sheet that covered us, to make sure he was still with me. Later, when he began to have nightmares, he’d wake up panting, out of breath, as if he’d been trying to run away or run after something, or someone.
In the beginning I would not have believed we’d come to be so physically separate, James and I, that one day we’d lie side by side not touching, not entwined like a caduceus as we fell asleep.
Our story was simple. James and I met in February, a few months after Ted ended our engagement and moved out of the city. I was taking a ceramics class at the Y where James and his best friend Tony worked out with weights. I’d become sick of myself after spending a stir-crazy holiday alone, my first without Ted in five years. My sister, Gina, had given me a Continuing Ed. course coupon for Christmas, to get me out of my apartment. “You spend too much time in your head,” she liked to say about me.
I wanted to take the Art History course, so I could sit in the dark looking at slides of masterpieces without having to talk to anyone, but it was full. I already knew How to Use Computers and How to Write for Business, so that left Pottery for Beginners. It was held in an airless studio with a clear-glass viewing pane in the interior wall, facing the hallway.
As I kneaded some clay during the first class, I sensed a gaze on my face, so I glanced up and saw a man smiling at me. I smiled back, shrugged, and looked down again. The next week he hung about in the hallway like a teenager. I finished washing up and approached him as I walked toward the exit. “Hello,” I said in a tone that could have let either of us walk away without losing face, but he wasn’t going anywhere. “The name’s ‘James,’ actually,” he said, his Sean Connery dead on. “As in ‘Bond, James Bond.’” That broke me up and I laughed more than James had expected me to. “She was a pushover,” he joked whenever he told the story. “I wooed her with a silly impression.”
Every time one of us recounted how we met, our relationship seemed to gain ground. By telling it over and over in our first few weeks together, we gave our union a gravitas that had seemed absent, I thought, at first.
It’s quiet, too quiet, in here. The snowfall has hushed the houses on our street this morning. My street, not ours. It’s just my street now.
When we met, James had his own condo uptown, though he all but moved into my tiny apartment soon after. We bought this place a couple of years later, just before we married, and it suited us. A two-bedroom bungalow seemed to be all the space we’d ever need. We didn’t fill it with a lot of furniture, but the house did start to feel confining to James, once he retired and spent seven days a week here. I guess it felt constraining to me, too, when James stopped engaging with the world, and the atmosphere at home became laden with tension I didn’t know how to break. Sleep came as relief to both of us at night.
***
I’d attracted James with aloofness, I suppose. Some men are drawn to that quality in women, consider it a test, even. James admitted later that getting me to go out with him had been an irresistible challenge. I looked so intent on triumphing over that lump of clay, he said, and yet when I looked up and smiled at him, my face radiated a potential for joy he wouldn’t have guessed was there, behind the screen of seriousness. “I knew you would be interesting when I saw you in a lab coat instead of an apron, like the other women wore. I had to find out what was going through that mind of yours.”
James mentioned that scene again when he proposed to me. “When I saw you smile the first time, I wanted to make you feel that happy all the time. I wanted to be the one who could do that.” When I said yes, he looked as if he’d won a contest. I knew James had been telling Tony everything about our relationship from the get-go, and I wondered if he’d made a bet with his friend about how long it might take to win me over.
I won, too, finding James. But in the early days I was highly swayable, and seeing James was a pleasant distraction while I waited for Ted to come to his senses and back to me, to what I thought of as my real life, our life together. The two men crossed paths just once, disturbing my sense of time and place and what I was doing, with whom. James had let himself into my apartment after work, as he often did — he was a teacher, so his day ended earlier than mine — and when I got home he was browning onions for a tomato sauce in my ill-equipped kitchen. He said the phone had been ringing every few minutes, but no one had left a message. This irritated me. The next time it rang, I was brusque and abrupt with my “Hello?” Blood-bubbling anxiety rippled through me at the sound of Ted’s voice asking, “Maslen, is that you?”
Ted was in town for the weekend and had tickets to the Jays; that’s why he called, to invite me to go to the playoff game with him. “Come on, it’ll be like old times,” he said with a slight pout in his voice, as if I would hurt his feelings if I didn’t accept. My instinct was to do just that, to run out the door and leave James — living, breathing, fucking James — in my apartment to eat spaghetti alone and lock up behind him when he left; but I took a deep breath and said, “No, I can’t,” which Ted hadn’t expected. “Oh.” Long pause. “Well, then…” he said, and we both stayed on the line for a few more moments, as if one of us was about to f
igure out what to do or say to the other. With James five feet away from me, I couldn’t ask Ted where he was living, or how I could get in touch with him later — not unless I was willing to tell James everything, to put that morass of my recent past on the table between us. So all I said to James after I hung up was, “A ghost.” James nodded. His trust in me and confidence in himself precluded the need for any further explanation, it seemed. We never spoke of the call or that ghost again.
***
Confidence, at least in terms of sex appeal — that was all I’d say James and Ted had in common. Ted’s body language exuded availability and interest, and he drew women to him with a smile that promised a pleasant surprise, as though he had a secret to share or a gift to give; when he used it on me, my usual defences against such put-on charm waned despite myself. James’s allure worked differently; he didn’t think twice about whether or not I would be attracted to him, so he didn’t need to play that game. He knew himself, he was comfortable and content with who he was and what he had to offer. That quality, that solid self-assurance without the self-centred show, was partly why I found him physically irresistible. After our first night together, the pull to be with him was intense and instinctive; it was as if, whenever I saw him, my inner organs and intuition started issuing orders that I mate, that I copulate and populate, that I give myself over to this desire no matter where it might lead. So I did, and I was surprised when it quickly led me to happiness, and, two years later, to a comfortable marriage that worked. Until it didn’t.
***
James surprised me one Monday morning a couple of years ago by running into the bedroom wearing only a scuba diving mask and flippers, shouting, “Beach day! Maslen, wake up, it’s beach day!” I should have been dressed at least half an hour before but I’d been silencing my alarm clock with the snooze button every few minutes, unable to rouse myself. I had been down about work for a few weeks at that point — the language school where I was an administrator had been sold, and the new owners were making aesthetic and policy changes, “to give the operation a more corporate look and feel,” we were told. I felt less and less like I belonged there, and getting up and going each morning was becoming harder, so James was trying his best to cheer me up. “We’re going to play hooky today, Maslen. I’ve called in sick.” When I protested, he cut me off. “Honey, it’s not really a lie. We both need a mental health day.” He handed me the phone. “Your turn.”