But that wasn’t it. What I was afraid of, really afraid of, was the violence of doing it, the blood, the mashed-in head. In response to an unseen audience, I said, “I don’t have the stomach for it. I am not of that world, the violent world.” And while I was saying this I remembered René Goblin and the plan to punch him in the face. “I am not of that world,” I said. And in the calm that followed, I felt that I had been spared, that a dreadful presence had come and stood very close to me, and then gone away.
I washed my hands and cleaned my fingernails. When I got to the park, I saw the pigeon lying very close to the wall of the sandbox, the very wall he’d been in such a strange hurry to get to only seconds after the wheel had crushed him. But he didn’t look in such bad shape now; a bent wing, yes, but no blood. I thought, He’s made it this far. Maybe he’s going to survive. I shouldn’t kill him now, not with him making it this far. But why, I wondered, was the bird staying so close to the wall? He was pressed right up against it. What was there? As I turned to go home, I saw a cat stealing across the grass towards me; but it wasn’t until later in the day that it occurred to me why he was moving like that, so low to the ground, and why the pigeon had wanted to get so close to the wall.
And again I thought about phoning Catherine. I stared at the phone, I put my hand on it and I rehearsed my story. Then I dialed her number. It rang and rang and then her voice-mail message came on, the voice of a woman whose first impulse is to like strangers and trust in their innate decency. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my head seemed too small for my shoulders, and put down the phone.
I started a book tour, going from city to city across the country. But everywhere I went, it seemed as though I could smell Goblin’s hateful review. I could feel it in the poorly attended public readings; I detected it in a journalist’s tone of voice, even in his greeting when he shook my hand. Even the book itself, the actual physical entity, began to acquire an almost electrical charge. Like an ungrounded refrigerator.
I gave a reading in Vancouver. Two hundred empty seats. A scattering of people, even a woman wearing a garbage bag with armholes. Three elderly ladies waited patiently near the front, all with copies of my novel in their hands. I tried to flee. I was seconds from a clean getaway when a local television crew turned up. Taking me by the arm, a young producer steered me toward the octogenarian table.
“I’d like you to read to them,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll shoot it close.” When I saw it later, it looked as though I was reading a bedtime story to senior citizens.
I woke up the next morning in a rage. Staring out at the beautiful harbour below my hotel window, a jogger making his way bouncily along the footpath, I wondered if I was going bonkers. Was I going to allow this guy, this Goblin, to spoil every moment attached to this book? Every moment attached to the act of writing itself? Could I not impose some kind of control over these feelings, this obsession with a thoughtless review? Why, I wondered, does it seem that flattery is always a lie but a condemnation— a condemnation has the ring of truth? My brain teemed with snakes. Unless you act, unless you do something about René Goblin, you’re going to feel like this forever—
Eighteen months passed. One afternoon I was walking home after a visit to the dentist. It was a grey, overcast day in the garment district, the sidewalk busy with people coming from and going to lunch. I stopped to do up my shoelace, and just as I looked up, there was René Goblin passing on my right. He glanced over and kept going, an easy stride, looking at this and looking at that in the store windows. There was a touch of the theatrical about it, as if he were performing for me, as if he were saying, Yes, I recognize you, and your unpleasant feelings about me are of so little importance that, see here, I can even take time to look in shop windows.
As if I had come across someone who had abused one of my children years before and gone unpunished, I found myself calmly, murderously alert. And the notion that he had said such terrible things about my book, had been recreationally cruel about something that mattered so deeply to me, that he assumed—by that gait alone—that not only had he gotten away with it but that my feelings on the matter, then as now, were not only unimportant but possibly even amusing, threw fresh gasoline on what had been, until a few moments earlier, a small if insistent back-burner flame. But I am not one to forget a slight.
I also knew that if I waited, at some point René was going to find a pretext to stop his leisurely advance up the sidewalk and look around. I was sure of it. He crossed a small street, still no backward glance, and then came to a halt in front of a large window. It was a bedding store, mattresses and sheets and pillow slips. I could tell by the angle at which he was standing that he was, in fact, staring at my reflection in the glass. Those ugly black frames on his glasses. As if I were being pulled by a cord, with the conviction that I was absolutely in the right and would never ever be able to draw a breath again unless I did this, I walked straight over to René Goblin and smacked him across the face with an open hand. The black-framed glasses fell to the sidewalk. So did René.
Then a strange thing happened that even at the time I knew I would never forget. Without looking at me, René pulled himself into a doorway; and in that gesture there was something appallingly vulnerable, sickeningly so, and I found myself thinking about the pigeon hurrying to the fence, even with a broken wing.
I meant to say something; even as I swung I had imagined a crisp, perfect utterance, but now it escaped me. I stood looking down at René, frightened, ugly René. I picked up the glasses and offered them.
“Don’t,” he said, pulling further into the doorway. Realizing that I had now entered into something that was not easily or perhaps ever fixable, I placed the glasses gently on the sidewalk.
I didn’t see him again for a long time; and, life being life, other things, other concerns moved into the rooms that René had so thoroughly occupied. Sitting under the big skylight in the CBC broadcast centre, I realized, seeing him across the room with that young crowd of producers, that what I was feeling was not guilt or shame or regret, but delight. René Goblin was not a place, not a film festival hospitality suite, not an old dormitory, but for a while he was certainly an arena of vulnerability. I remember wincing when I saw his name in the newspaper or heard somebody mention his name in conversation. Until I smacked him, that is. After that, I felt okay about the whole thing. I still do.
9
The Alligator under the Bridge
It was a brief moment of prosperity. I was forty-three, I was the host of a harmless little television show on the arts; guests came and went, actors and writers and musicians flogging their novels, movies, CDs and what have you. It was like the provincial branch of an advertising agency that disguised boosterism as “arts journalism.” But it paid well and satisfied the cravings of my almost insatiable vanity.
On the recommendation of a colleague, I rented a vacation house that summer on the island of Sanibel off the coast of Florida. A snobby little enclave where, in those days, the only non-whites you saw had garden rakes in their hands. To the delight of my children—my son, Nick, then aged eight, and his naughty sister, Franny, fourteen— I hired a stretch limo to drive us to the airport; it had a sun port in the roof from which, as we drove up the street, they poked their beautiful heads.
In the Miami airport, we rented a white Mustang convertible and then, with the top down, the air conditioning on Los Angeles–style, children in the back seat, sound system thumping reggae, we beetled across the breast of Florida; we drove through swampland, ate an American lunch (food for ten) and swooped, hair flying, along a sea-scented coastal highway. We stopped for a moment in St. Petersburg to take a photograph of my son standing in front of the same strawberry hotel where I had posed for my mother’s camera, seagulls wheedling overhead, almost thirty-five years earlier. (How odd, how unimaginable the way one’s life unfolds. How strange these two photographs look, side by side: me, chicken-chested with big ears, my son, a cockier stance, his deep-set S
lavic eyes gazing warily at the camera.)
We took a wrong turn in Fort Myers and drove through a tough neighbourhood, bars on the windows, crumbling sidewalks, boarded-up stores. My daughter, her blond prosperous hair fluttering in the breeze, waved at three black teenagers picking their way across a parkette. A middle finger rose from the discarded candy bar wrappers and sunburnt grass.
“Stop,” Franny hollered from the back seat. “I want to speak to those guys!” We continued on.
Three blocks later, American-style, we found ourselves in a different kind of city. Snappy little cafés with ferns in the window; gay men in shorts with tans and crisp biceps and white, white teeth. One of them walked a small, pug-faced dog. We drove past a grocery store a block long and then turned onto a magnificent bridge; there was the smell of the ocean again, salty and mysterious, a smell that made me nostalgic for a time in my life that had never actually occurred. A white deep-sea fishing boat pulled into harbour. In the rear-view mirror I caught a glimpse of my children in the back seat, the late afternoon sun on their faces, and I remember thinking, I will never be this happy again. (Happily, I’ve thought this before.)
We drove along the coast of Sanibel, our little island, turning here and there, through a small town with a video store and then into a driveway shaded by heavy, overhanging trees. It was a white house with big windows which, to my surprise, looked as good as its photograph. You went out the back door, crossed ten yards of hot sand, skirted a jacaranda bush and then crossed over a gently arching wooden bridge. A small alligator lived under there; you could see him in the morning, half submerged, slit-eyed. After that, the beach. Women with shirts knotted at the waist drifted along the water’s edge. Short bald men who looked like Picasso walked in pairs. On the blue horizon, a freighter hung motionless, like a child’s painting.
I unpacked my bags; I unpacked War and Peace.
In the afternoons, while my children splashed like seals in the pool or made noisy, messy lunches for themselves in the kitchen, I underlined and made notes and tried to write like Tolstoy. (That book never saw the daylight.) But I was happy; we were all happy.
Three days later, Molly Wentworth, my girlfriend, arrived and she was not happy. You could see it the second she got out of the taxi, a strained smile on her face. (She was already aware of something but, because she was so young, she didn’t quite recognize what it was.) Molly was a blond, stick-figure girl, pointy-featured, a television producer whom I had fallen narcotically in love with. In her white jeans and T-shirt, she had seemed, I remember, so full of beans, so engaged and excited by life. An up-for-anything girl. You want to get in the car and drive to Buffalo tonight? Sure! I looked over at her once in a movie theatre, her short hair, her sharp chin, her lovely eyelashes, and felt almost alarmed at the pleasure just the simple fact of her being there gave me. How lucky I felt. (I was old enough to no longer take love for granted.)
And for a long time, indeed, it was lovely between us. Then gradually, like a photograph in a developing tray— only in reverse—her face began to darken. It seemed as if the rooms she moved through darkened too. At the time I didn’t know what it was. (I didn’t understand the nature of accumulated scar tissue.) You could feel the tension coming from her young body, a troubled smile, a mechanical cheerfulness, almost like a child who is trying to stay out of trouble. And when she laughed—near the end there— it was, I now realize, an expression of relief that a storm had passed her by. In a word, I scared her. Not with blows or harsh words, but with a suffocating anticipation of disapproval. And eventually she stopped loving me for it.
“Are you sure you put it there?”
“Yes, absolutely certain.”
“Then where is it?”
It occurs to me now that that’s how you lose a woman. She doesn’t need to find you in bed with a boy; it’s merely an accumulation of jagged little pricks and careless bruisings until she catches herself at a turn in the stairwell or stopped at a red light and realizes she doesn’t want to be there anymore. This person who once so adored you that she lied to her friends, or went on three hours’ sleep to spend the night with you, prefers a life without you.
I saw her once emerging from the side door of our apartment building in Toronto. I hid behind a tree. I couldn’t face the nervous exchange that was only yards away.
“Right, then, see you tonight?”
“Sounds good.”
“Okay.”
“Everything okay?”
“Peachy.”
“Peachy. . . ?”
Sometimes, in our house on Sanibel Island, I caught her staring out the window at the ocean and I wondered, What is she thinking? My children, Franny and Nick, raced around the house doing laundry, making snacks, quibbling, videotaping each other. But there was Molly, in the centre of all this liveliness, and absolutely alone.
We were coming home one night from dinner at a fish restaurant on the other side of the island. It was already dark; the island a jewel of windows and dock lights; somewhere there was a lighthouse. The car roof was down; I turned on the radio; a country and western song came on. The children rested their heads against the back of the seat and let the wind and the moonlight play over their faces.
We drove slowly past our white house.
“Can you drop me off here?” Molly said.
“I thought I’d drive around the island,” I said. “It’s such a beautiful night.” A night as beautiful as Natasha’s night in War and Peace when she calls her cousin to the window to see the stars.
“Here’s fine,” Molly said. And she got out of the car. I waited a moment until she walked down the driveway; the porch light clicked on; she went up the stairs, this little stick figure in white shorts put her key in the lock and then, without a backward glance, went in.
The three of us drove on. The children tactfully silent. Children miss nothing.
Molly returned to Toronto for unspecified “family obligations” a few days later. I stayed on. But some nights, after a day of trooping around Sanibel with my children, here for hamburgers, there to the video store, I experienced an inexplicable sense of agitation, an unwilling sortie in that zone of frightening private thought (frightening because of its incommunicable privacy). The arena where nineteenth-century Russian novelists are so incomparably true.
I woke up night after night at four in the morning. With only the ghostly whisper of air conditioning in my ears, as though I were in an airplane flying through the night, the rest of the passengers asleep, I felt that I had committed a terrible act for which I was about to be punished. But I couldn’t put my finger on what I’d done. I had that teetering, out-of-time feeling you have in those first waking seconds the morning after a cherished lover leaves you. You know something is wrong, but it takes a few seconds to remember what it is.
But what had I done? My children were asleep, safe and healthy in their beds. I had a job, a few friends, my ex-wives loved me, I didn’t have leukemia. I hadn’t written bad cheques or, like the young Rostov in War and Peace, lost a sickening amount of money at cards.
What is this horror? I asked myself.
Was it death? Was it Molly?
I wandered naked through the dark house. I looked in on my children: Franny, her bony arm thrown over her forehead as if protesting; her brother, chin pointed slightly upwards; he had kicked off his sheets and lay sprawled in his blue boxers. I covered him up. Kissed them both on the forehead, first one, then the other; and the sense that I was there to watch over them, that they slept such untroubled, exposed sleep because they knew they were safe, made the horror momentarily recede.
I slipped open the glass doors at the back of the house; you could hear the ocean from here; boom, a pause; then boom. I was going to go for a walk in the cold sand, but just out beyond the jacaranda bush I felt the presence of something that unsettled me.
What is this horror?
A horror of losing a life that I cherish? That someone will take it away? That circumstances wi
ll take it away? That I will do something to destroy it? (It takes years to build a good life, a long weekend to wreck it.) Or is this an inherited horror? A scared-of-the-dark horror: a million years of things trying to eat you, a sensation that is not easily dispelled by turning on the light?
The Russians (naturally!) have a name for this bout of middle-of-the-night terror. They call it Sparrow Nights. But what could it have been? In the years that have ensued, whenever these Sparrow Nights might occur, I have wondered again and again if I am (forgive the California tone of this) receiving a coded warning from the future, that a black train is coming up behind me; that it will catch me looking down the tracks in the other direction, wondering, Hmmm, what is that racket?
Or was it something less operatic, less Russian? Is it simply how your body feels when you’re over thirty and can no longer sleep like the child in the next room; when, as Leonard Cohen puts it, you “ache in the places you used to play”?
I stood for I don’t know how long in the open doors of our rented house; it was getting light over the ocean, a dazzling orange sky melting into pink melting into blue. How verblessly beautiful the world can be sometimes, I thought. Almost enough to make you believe in God.
To no one’s surprise, except mine, Molly left me several months later.
It happened on a Sunday. Dreadful things always happen on Sunday. Molly and I were in the living room of our small apartment and I was talking when her beautiful eyes filled with tears. “I can’t live here anymore,” she said. I put a consoling arm around her. “Then you mustn’t.” I was bluffing, for sure. I had rehearsed this very speech, it was part of my straighten-up-and-fly-right approach, a no-nonsense “buck up” to a young woman from an older man. One bad decision followed on the heels of another. Which is to say that I then went to a movie, leaving her alone in the apartment.
The Perfect Order of Things Page 14