Finding Again the World

by John Metcalf

  The kipper and the cardboard cup of Bar-B-Q Sauce he would leave to All-Island Realties as quit claim and compensation.

  “Montreal Herald,” said the girl. “Entertainments.”

  “Charles Pevensey, please.”

  “I’m sorry. He’s not in this morning.”

  “Oh. That’s strange. I’d understood he’s been trying to contact me. Something about the length of my review.”

  “Oh,” said the girl. “I see. Well, he might be in later. If you could call back at about eleven?”

  Could one, he wondered, “beard” a toad?

  Hefting his Air Canada bag, he stood looking around the bare white room. He’d shift the cartons after nightfall. The picture. The sleeping bag would protect it.

  A potato-shape in black crayon. A single red eye near the top. Seven orange sprouts. He’d typed underneath:

  “Daddy” by Anna Haine (age 2½)

  The newsprint was yellowing, the expensive non-glare glass dusty; the top edge of the frame was furred. He wiped it clean with his forefinger.

  Orange arms and legs of course, silly Jim.

  He tried to recall the name of the girl who’d got it framed for him. A painter sort of girl. Black hair, he remembered.

  Frances?

  Sonia?

  But it was gone.

  * * *

  The Montreal Herald building reared concrete and glass. As he walked along towards the main entrance, past the emporia of used office-furniture, the pawn shops, the slum side streets, he wondered, as he often wondered, why he always had a compulsion to lie about his occupation to the people who gave him lifts; why he claimed to be a professor at McGill, a male nurse, a pest-control officer, a journalist.

  The escalator conveyed him to the potted palms of Third Floor Reception, the elevator to the Fourth. Below him on the first and second floors, the giant drums and rollers of the Herald presses. He smiled at the memory of a wrench-brandishing Charlie Chaplin swimming through the cogs. He turned down the corridor to Entertainments and pushing through the swing doors, walked up the aisle between the desks to Pevensey’s corner. The desk was piled with review copies, a hundred more stacked in the window embrasure behind.

  He stood irresolute for a few moments and then went into the pen and sat in Pevensey’s chair. The clattering typewriters paid no attention. Opposite, on the other side of the room, he noticed another set of swing doors. Glass portholes. He glanced at the top copy-sheet in the folder; a review of Heraldry and You. He took three cigarettes from the open package on the desk.

  A tall blonde girl was walking up the aisle, looked about twenty, shoulder bag, shades. Legs too thin. She went into the next pen and dropped her bag on the desk. A plaque on the desk said Youth Beat. Her typewriter cover was dotted with stick-on flowers and butterflies. He felt her staring at him.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Umm?”

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “What an attractive pendant!” he said, staring at her breasts.

  “Oh, thank you.”

  He turned back to the file of copy.

  “Excuse me . . .”

  He did his blank look.

  “If you’re waiting for Mr. Pevensey, I’m afraid . . .”

  “Mr. Pevensey!” called Jim.

  A tactical blunder.

  Pevensey, what looked like a teapot in his hand, glanced, pushed back through the swing doors, disappeared. Jim hurried after him.

  “Mr. Pevensey!” he shouted to the echo of the footsteps on the concrete stairs. He ran down and found himself in an empty corridor facing two doors.

  “PEV-EN-SEY.”

  One door led to the cafeteria, the other to the library. The cafeteria was nearly empty; the library girl claimed not to know who Pevensey was. He walked back up the corridor, past the foot of the stairs, found a washroom. Locking himself into a cubicle, he took the Magic Marker from his Air Canada bag and wrote on the wall:

  “Charles Pevensey has a PERSONAL subscription to Reader’s Digest.”

  He lowered his trousers and sat.

  He needed money.

  He needed breakfast.

  He needed a place to live.

  A downtown breakfast would be more expensive than the Budapest where he usually ate; he liked the Budapest because George, the owner, had gold teeth and always said, “For you, gentlemans?” Today, he decided, would have to be a toast day.

  Toast reminded him that it was Monday. He added a note to his list:

  Cantor’s Bakery 11:30 PM (if poss.).

  The woman there sold him Friday’s Kaiser rolls for two cents each. He also needed more tins of Brunswick sardines. Holding steady at twenty-nine cents a tin.

  Moving upset him. And he was fond of the Victoria Manor Apartments. He would miss the conversations with Mrs. McGregor who gave him milk and who, on the day he’d moved in six months or so ago, had slipped a note under his door which read:

  They are all FLQ in this building. Signed:

  the Lady Next Door. (Scottish)

  And Bernie who ran the FCI Detective Agency on the first floor. He’d miss the stairways which were always jammed with struggling furniture; the conversations with the basement owner of the Harold Quinn School of Music; the showcase outside the Starkman Orthopedic Shoe Company which was full of plaster casts of deformed feet.

  The rest of the list read:

  Call Réal.

  Call McCready.

  Night of the Jewish Ladies.

  Staying with Myrna would be impossible; she’d want to screw all the time which was wasteful and irritating when he was nearing a possible form. Alan was still shacked up with the Bell Telephone girl.

  Carol?

  He remembered the last time he’d been forced to use her place. No. Not even for a few days could he live in the maelstrom of her emotional life. He remembered how, at her last gasp, she’d sobbed a stanza of Sylvia Plath. Nor, come to think of it, could he stomach her brown rice with bits in, wheat germ salad, and other organic filth. And he definitely wasn’t inclined to endure lectures on the power of Sisterhood and the glories of multiple clitoral orgasm.

  Remembering a glimpse of her naked in the bathroom, one foot on the rim of the tub, thigh, hip, the creases of her waist suffused in morning sunlight. Pure Bonnard stuff. Painter’s work. He wondered if she still brushed her teeth with twigs, still washed her hair with honey.

  He strained and grunted.

  veteres patronos

  He was being too literal. Again. He needed to get further from the text. To preserve. Intact. The main line of. Intent. But let. The.

  The outer door banged shut; the bolt of the next cubicle slotted home. Checkered trousers rumpled over a pair of brown shoes.

  Inter tam veteres ludat lasciva patronos

  Et nomen blaeso garriat ore meum.

  “Care!” said Jim.

  The brown shoes cleared his throat.

  Yes.

  Expand it.

  She would have been but six cold winters old if she had lived

  Even those few days more; so let her walk

  And run a child still in your elder care

  “You beautiful, inevitable bastard!” said Jim.

  “Are you okay?” said the brown shoes.

  “What?”

  * * *

  Breakfasted on toast and coffee (twenty-five cents) now 12:35 and his guts hollow. Used the counter phone. Professor McCready was teaching; would he care to leave a message? The white globes above the length of the counter reminded him of a night scene. A cafe. A woman singing. Degas? Renoir?

  Just beyond, in that place between night and twilight, not to be pried at, not to be forced, the words were moving in his head.

  He walked up towards Dorchester and the Q
ueen Elizabeth Hotel weighing his chances in the lottery of grant renewal. His other two references were certain to be good. He’d sent McCready a Xerox of the central poems of Marriage Suite now nine days ago along with the Letter of Reference form. Sixteen days to the deadline.

  He strolled into the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth and wandered around looking for the notice board. Conventions, Annual Meetings, Associations of. Sometimes, wearing shirt and tie, under buffet conditions, it was possible to lunch or dine with Travel Agents, Furniture Retailers, Pharmaceutical Sales.

  In the hardcover Classic Book Store on St. Catherine Street, he checked the number of copies of The Distance Travelled, arranged them more advantageously. He was classified under “Canadiana” and surrounded by Esquimaux and whales.

  He strolled back on the other side of the street to the paperback store and browsed through the literary magazines, off-set and mimeo, looking for work by his contemporaries. Edifice, Now, Ssip, another new thing from Vancouver called Up Yours.

  He walked up to the Sheraton and consulted the notice board; looked in at Mansfield Book Mart; checked the Sonesta Hotel.

  The same girl answered the phone again. Professor McCready had just left for the day; would he care to leave a message?

  Ten cents.

  He copied down McCready’s home number from the directory.

  Academe—Intercede for us

  Standing closed in the phone booth, he stared out at the flow of cars along Sherbrooke.

  Jury of Experts—Compassionately Adjudicate us

  Significance of Past Contribution—Justify us

  Selling the drugs for Jackie would probably bring him $40.00 or $50.00 but he resented the waste of time, the endless phone calls.

  The Desert Express Is in.

  Poor glazed bastard.

  He wondered what peyote looked like; what one did with it? Smoked it? Made an infusion? Ate it? He went back towards Classics to find out. For all he cared, they could stuff it up their collective fundament. As he walked along, he constructed arguments:

  Look, man. You’ve dropped acid. You’ve done chemicals. Okay. But this is pure, it’s like ORGANIC.

  Or, for the carriage trade,

  It’s like acid, but SMOOTH. It’s the difference between a bottle of Brights and a bottle of wine.

  In Classics he gleaned the necessary sales information.

  You ate it.

  Devotees of the cactus cult are said to be “following the Peyote Road”—he copied the expression into his notebook. The practice had spread from Mexico to the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indians. Ingestion put one in touch with mana—the LIFE FORCE. Introspection resulted. Visions of God, Jesus, and those on the Other Side were vouchsafed.

  The prospect of being forced to stay with Jackie was depressing. In the gloom of obligatory candles he would have to listen to the latest fragment of Jackie’s novel—the action of which all took place in Jackie’s head during a seven hour freak-out on top of Mount Royal and involved him in varieties of Cosmic Union with stars, planets, and a bi-sexual Cree Guide called Big Bear.

  And he, in turn, would have to pay tribute by giving Jackie a copy of his latest verse. He’d already chopped Howl into tiny sections. He considered Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  O the mind

  MIND

  has mountains

  cliffs

  of

  fall

  SHEER

  nomanfathomed.

  It’s like a lyric, man. They write themselves.

  He resolved to call Carol.

  For an hour or more, he stood watching the work on a construction site on Dorchester. He watched the tamping of the dynamite in the rock, watched the crane swing the coir nets and matting into place, waited for the dull crump and the heave of the matting and then the buckets grubbing out the boulders and the scree. He could feel the words edging closer. He watched until he no longer saw the yellow helmets, the clanking bulldozers, the trucks churning up the muddy slope, until his eyes grew unfocused.

  The end of the afternoon was growing cold. The words hurried him across the approach of the Place du Canada where the wind was clacking the wire halyards against the aluminum flagpoles.

  He found an empty table at the back of the Steerarama and sat warming his hands on the coffee cup. Shapes of figures passing beyond the net-curtained windows. Light on the chrome of the cash register. A sheen of light across the polished lino below the cash register, a green square, a red square, part of a green square before the carpet edge.

  Et nomen blaeso garriat ore meum.

  The horns were long, buffed and lacquered, the colours running from grey through beige to jet at the points. From the astrakhan middle where the horns were joined hung a card which read:

  Our “Famous” Steerburger (6 oz. of Prime Beef)

  As he tilted his head, the light ran the horns’ curved length.

  blaeso garriat demanded “lisping,” “stammering.”

  The gloss had given him: “And lisp my name with stammering tongue.”

  Which made the child sound like a cross between a half-wit and Shirley Temple.

  “lisping”

  “prattle”

  “babble”

  He stared at the cinnamon Danish in the glass case on the counter. But the Night of the Jewish Ladies had promised refreshments.

  Although a bending of the text, a real distortion of meaning even, and swaying on a tightrope over sentimentality, “baby talk” might.

  Might.

  If it was somehow balanced off.

  He smoothed the paper place mat with the edge of his hand and sat staring at the drawing of the smiling waitress.

  Bienvenue

  He gave her spectacles, a moustache, gaps in her teeth. Suddenly he started to write.

  She would have been but six cold winters old if she had lived

  Even those few days more; so let her walk

  And run a child still in your elder care

  And safely play, and tease you with my name in baby talk.

  Nodding at what he’d written, he stretched and leaned back. Everything depended now on the resolution of the final stanza. Blondin poised over Niagara had little on this. Lips working, he read the lines through again and again.

  Precarious.

  The ands repetition wasn’t bad, wasn’t too obtrusive in its suggestion of the child. But it was the tension in “tease”; it was only “tease” and its implications that were keeping him aloft.

  He found that he was gazing at the cinnamon Danish; he wanted the cinnamon Danish very much. He could feel the pressure of the final stanza, the bulge and push of it in his head. The hunger had turned to hollow pain. Half an hour to his meeting Mrs. Wise on the mezzanine in her russet linen pant suit and carrying a copy of the Montreal Herald. A group of young wives, she’d said, meeting in each other’ houses, quite informally, to discuss, to listen to speakers, to be stimulated, to broaden horizons.

  Now you mustn’t be modest, Mr. Haine. Quite a few of the girls saw your photograph and the piece about you in the Gazette.

  He hoped they’d pay him the $25.00 after the reading and not at some polite interval; he hoped it was sandwiches and not cakes. Sandwiches with meat in.

  Or egg.

  Or cheese.

  He felt an urge to delete the inverted commas on the Our “Famous” Steerburger sign with his Magic Marker.

  He hoped that payment would be made in cash.

  The last time had been cakes.

  Seventeen members of the Canadian Authors’ Association had gathered in a salon of the Laurentian Hotel. The president had asked everyone to stand one after another to announce their names. Most were hyphenated ladies.

  Against their rising conversation, he had read from The Distance Travelled. During the last
two poems a waiter had wheeled in a trolley of iced cakes and an urn of coffee.

  The president, a large lady, had called the meeting to order.

  When he’d finished reading, sudden silence ensued.

  Answering the president’s call for questions, a lady with aggressive orange hair had said:

  “Am I right in assuming you’ve had your work published?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “And you didn’t pay for it?”

  “Pay for it?”

  “To have it published.”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Well, my question is—who do you know?”

  “Know?”

  “In Toronto.”

  * * *

  Alone in the cream and gold sitting room, he examined the mantelpiece with its tiny fluted columns, shelves, alcoves, its three inset oval mirrors. He examined the silver-framed bride and groom. He examined the Royal Daulton lady in her windblown crinolines, the knickknacks, the small copper frying-pan-looking thing that said A Gift from Jerusalem, the Royal reclining Doulton lady. Glancing round at the open door, he turned back and peered into the centre mirror to see if hairs were sticking out of his nose.

  He sank for a few minutes into the gold plush settee.

  The doorbell kept ringing; the litany continued.

  Bernice! It’s beautiful!

  We only finished moving in three weeks ago.

  The pair of brass lamps which flanked the settee were in the form of huge pineapples. He touched the prickly brass leaves. The lampshades were covered in plastic. On the long table at the far end of the room, a white tablecloth covered food; he stared at the stacked plates and cups and saucers, at the tablecloth’s mysterious humps and hollows. He took a cigarette from the silver box. Which of the little things on the occasional tables, he wondered, were ashtrays? Each time the front door opened, the chandelier above him tinkled.

  Oh, Bernice! And quarry-tile in the kitchen, too!

  Would you like the tour?

  And as the tramplings went upstairs, faintly:

  master-bedroom . . .

  cedar-lined . . .

  A plump woman wandered in. He nodded and smiled at her. She hesitated in the doorway staring at him. The green Chinese lady gazed from her gilt frame. The plump woman went around the other end of the settee and stood fingering the drapes. He tried to remember the painter’s name; Tetchi, Tretchisomething—a name that sounded vaguely like a disease.