Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Fine,” he said and wondered what she was talking about. He still could not remember what she had told him.

  He turned to Chalifour. “Allô, Emile. Comment vas-tu ce soir?” Chalifour shrugged. “Comme çi, comme ça.”

  “Comme tout le monde.”

  He turned to Uncle Conrad. “Well, Professor, it’s not often we have a man of your distinction on our little program. We’re honored.”

  Timothy recorded that Uncle Conrad made a small, formal bow and spoke with a slight but attractive foreign accent.

  “I have heard much about you, Mr. Timothy Wellfleet, and I have here –” he hesitated when he saw Timothy glancing at his watch and turning away. Then he took out of his pocket an envelope and touched Timothy’s elbow. “I have here a message from somebody you know very well, somebody who is very fond of you. Perhaps you might read it?”

  Suddenly Timothy wanted to urinate, but his watch had told him there was no time for it. He slipped the letter into a side pocket without even glancing at it.

  “I’m sorry, Professor, but perhaps you might save it till after the show. I was in Washington this morning and I was late getting back. We’ve got to go onto the set immediately.”

  “I hope I will be satisfactory,” Uncle Conrad said. “I have never before been on the television. I’m a little nervous.”

  “There’s nothing to it, Professor. This isn’t art or lecturing. This is just a few people talking together. Forget the audience. Just relax and say whatever comes off the top of your head. In this medium naturalness is everything.”

  I could imagine the scene – Uncle Conrad taking some notes out of his pocket, looking at them through his bifocals, and saying there were things he had wished to say for a long time and he had made careful preparations. He was still trying to talk to Timothy, who was not listening, when the floor manager stuck his head into the doorway and said it was time. Timothy and the poet walked out together.

  “You look great, Madeleine,” Timothy said, which was the exact opposite of how he thought she looked.

  Together they walked into the high-roofed, darkened studio where the cameramen and the floor crew were wired together with headphones clamped to their ears and the live audience was invisible behind the lights. Shining like an altar was the dais with its revolving plastic chairs and small tables holding the water glasses and ash trays. The dais was three feet higher than the floor, which made it easy to take those low-angled shots focussing on a speaker’s lower jaw, a technique Timothy always demanded whenever he wished to make a guest look bad. Among his papers I found a notation that the controller of a television show had nineteen chances out of twenty to put anyone at his mercy so long as the control was his. Most inexperienced people’s eyes narrowed in the glare of the kliegs and if a camera tilted up at a face from below, with the lights striking down from above, a man’s eyes often looked opaque and dishonest, especially if he had prominent cheekbones. Another of Timothy’s notes informed me that he had come close to ruining a cabinet minister by his use of the camera alone. The man had always been assumed to be handsome and wore a clipped military moustache. He was also an authentic war hero and an old friend of Timothy’s father. “By taking nothing but undershots,” noted Timothy, “we didn’t make him look like a boob. We made him look like a rabbit chewing carrots.”

  Behind the dais and suspended from the roof was an illuminated globe of the world, slowly revolving. If Timothy wished to create an impression of alarm, the revolutions were speeded up and sometimes the show ended with the globe whizzing around and around in a blur of flashing crystals.

  Timothy and Madeleine Ball took their seats on the dais and two cameras aimed at them with their ruby eyes shut. The floor manager’s hand dropped. Timothy glanced sideways and saw the monitor screen come alive with the image of a girl looking like a pre-Raphaelite hippie twanging a guitar. The pitch of the music was high, anguished, strident with discords. Head thrown back, long hair hanging backwards almost to her hips, eyes half shut, body writhing, the girl looked so sexy that the studio received dozens of letters and phone calls every day asking for her real name, address, and telephone number, and this made Timothy laugh because “It never occurred to the boobs that any girl could look and sound like her and in reality be a homebody in love with one of the dumbest-cluck husbands I ever saw, and that she was putting on this act to pay the rent and also, as she put it, to finance a baby.” She had proved herself a shrewd businesswoman, for when she signed the contract, instead of accepting a flat fee of two hundred dollars, she had asked for, and got, a royalty of seventy-five dollars for every time her little act was used as a signature. By this time she had hauled in several thousand.

  Now her voice joined the music. With her face straining as if in a love-climax, her body writhing, she chanted four times over This is now – Now is this – All there is – This is now …, the final now drawn out into a long quaver fading out into nothing.

  The monitor cut off, the two cameras began to burn, and Timothy and Madeleine Ball were alive on the channel.

  TEN

  About three months after I asked André Gervais to search for a playback machine for videotapes, without much hope that he would find one, he called me to say that his organization had discovered an apparatus of a kind he had never seen and that he believed it might be what I wanted. I went in to Metro and by God, it was a real playback machine. What seemed a miracle of coincidence was where it had turned up. For years it had been gathering dust in the basement of a large old building in the country which now was part of a compound similar to my own. One of the aged inoperatives living there had recognized what it was and even knew how to operate it, but as he had no tapes it remained useless. When I asked some more questions, I suddenly realized that when I was a small boy I myself had lived in the building where it was found. It had been my old boarding school and I was there when Timothy produced this interview with Conrad Dehmel. I never saw this particular performance because the headmaster would not let us look at Timothy’s show; he thought it disgraceful, subversive, and in bad taste. But though I did not see the show I certainly heard about its aftermath and even heard people asking why a man as intelligent as Conrad Dehmel had put himself at Timothy’s mercy.

  Uncle Conrad was a far shrewder man than I guessed during the little time I knew him. He must certainly have known what kind of a performer Timothy was, but if he had anything to say that he believed was important, he was never afraid to say it. Not only did Timothy have the largest audience in the country, he had exactly the audience Conrad wanted to wake up to their danger. The mood in our city at this time was making all our European immigrants nervous. They had seen in their own countries what kind of explosions can come out of paranoiac propaganda. They knew all about the techniques of the hidden operators who went down into le milieu and recruited violent and fanatical young men to do their dirty work for them. They could smell this kind of operation even when it was invisible.

  There was also my mother. Even as a boy I knew there was a dangerous innocence in her, particularly in her feelings to those she thought of as “my children.” If she had watched any of Timothy’s shows, and I’m sure she had, she must have been distressed by many of them, just as she must have been pleased when he exposed a genuine evil, as he did very often. I can hear her telling Conrad that at heart Timothy was really a sweet person who had suffered from an unfortunate childhood. But though Mother was innocent she was always very careful. She had therefore taken the precaution of giving her husband a note to deliver to Timothy before the show began. She knew that if Timothy read it, Conrad would be safe from him and in this she was certainly right, for she was the only person he truly loved.

  Another aspect of this affair that puzzles me somewhat is Timothy’s ignorance that his older cousin Stephanie had married Conrad Dehmel. Mother had married Conrad some six years before this show occurred and her father – my grandfather – had died only a year before that. It would have been unusual of
her not to have sent Timothy an announcement of the marriage. Possibly he received it and forgot all about it. Possibly he was abroad at the time and she did not know where he was. But even before she married Conrad, she had been living her own life and years might have passed without her seeing Timothy’s father. I give up trying to explain it. All I know is that Timothy did not realize that Conrad was Stephanie’s husband when he invited him to the program and in a later sequence I discovered that he did not find out until exactly a week too late. So the show took place.

  Now the first camera was dollying in and Timothy at last remembered what his present guest had proposed at the cocktail party a fortnight earlier. “I’m going to use that word,” she had said earlier. “You know – that word! It’s in one of my poems.”

  A few years later “that word” became so commonplace that it sometimes appeared in the most conservative magazines and newspapers, but at the zenith of Timothy’s career it was supposed to be a victory over the Establishment if anyone got away with it in the media.

  Now Timothy was surveying Madeleine Ball with a critical eye and cursing himself for having invited her. The woman was big, she was lush, and she looked bold in a way that would make about ninety-nine percent of other women detest her. Had she been a professional whore – quite a number of whores appeared on the media in those years – she would have been a much safer prospect. “The male viewers would be titillated by her and the women viewers would secretly admire her because she was conning the men. But this God-damn female was not a whore, she was a poet, and that would mean that nobody would like her.”

  He opened blandly, “Well, Madeleine Ball, you’ve become one of the exciting new personalities in our city. Your poetry” – he held up a slim volume and looked at it in pretended admiration – “your poetry has been well received at least locally. But first will you tell me a little about yourself. Apart from poetry, what is your chief interest?”

  She looked at him with her big eyes and said solemnly, “Making love.”

  “Just that?”

  “Making love is a lot more than just that.”

  “Do you consider yourself a connoisseur of love, Madeleine?”

  “I hate that word, connoisseur.”

  “Gourmet, perhaps?”

  “Another of those false words. Applied to love it’s disgusting.”

  Timothy smiled with suave hostility. “Just the same, Madeleine, your previous remarks indicate that you are, shall we say, at least interested in men. So what kind of man pleases you? Or should I say, turns you on?”

  “That’s a typical male question. Now you answer me this, Timothy Wellfleet. In love, what is the great difference between a man and a woman? I dare you to admit it.”

  “I think,” Timothy drawled, “it might come better from you.”

  “You see? You don’t dare admit it. Well, let me tell you the difference. A woman is capable of multiple orgasms and a man isn’t. Now, what I claim is that every woman has the right to multiple orgasms. If she has to go through the hell of bearing children, to say nothing of sacrificing the best years of her life to rearing them, I claim it was established in the Great Chain of Being that at least she has this compensation. Nature agrees with me. Nature gave women a far bigger capacity for sexual greatness than she gave to men, and that’s why men are jealous of women and won’t admit it. If a woman doesn’t get her multiple orgasms, it’s always the man’s fault. And since you ask me what kind of men interest me, you’d better believe it that the young ones don’t.”

  “But you’re young yourself,” Timothy purred. “What have you got against your own peer group?”

  “The average man under thirty goes after a woman like a lumberjack after a steak. I’ve seen a lumberjack eat a one-pound steak in three minutes. I timed him.”

  “You talk of these multiple orgasms – I presume you’re capable of them yourself?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Timothy was growing uneasy, even embarrassed, but before he could think of another question, Madeleine Ball was off again.

  “Love-making should be a symphony. Even a fugue will do. There should be a minimum of four distinct movements in symphonic love. You begin with a largo. You move into an allegretto. Then into a scherzo – a period of playfulness and surprises. Then in the same key you let go into a prestissimo. That’s symphonic love. Of course, it’s not going to happen very often. But the fugue – yes, a fugal approach could be basic and it would be wrong to criticize it.”

  “And you’re suggesting that you don’t trust any man under forty even to be up to a fugue?”

  “I don’t trust many over forty, either.”

  “But you do know of a few?”

  “Now here is something else a woman has to watch out for – the male connoisseur type who uses women as instruments to inflate his own ego. The kind that pretend they’re doing something terrific for a woman when what they’re really doing is making love to themselves.”

  “And that’s bad even if she gets –”

  “It’s another form of exploitation of women. It’s the very worst kind.”

  “So your idea is a pair of artists – a man and a woman making a kind of Kreutzer Sonata out of it?”

  “That was far from being Beethoven’s best work. It’s nervous and neurotic. But the Fifth Symphony – have you ever really listened to that?”

  Timothy cleared his throat with elaborate timing and looked carefully at Madeleine Ball.

  “However, Madeleine, I suppose you’d agree that the most important thing in your life is your poetry?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t agree with that. Living and loving are the most important things in my life. But yes, my poetry is important to me. You asked me to bring along two of my poems and I have them here. May I read them?”

  Somewhat acidly, Timothy said, “That’s what we’ve all been waiting for, Madeleine.”

  In a lugubrious voice she intoned her first poem, and when she had finished, Timothy asked her if she could explain what it meant. She looked at him in reproof and declared that nobody could explain a true poem because it existed in its own right and on its own terms. A poem was an act. It was an existential act. Then she went into her second and last poem.

  Now do I feel again the stirring of the power

  the power implacable

  and will it be the god who comes?

  The god is there.

  I have not found him yet nor yet has he found me

  but he is there.

  And this I ask –

  When, upon this lovely dying star

  I lay again my body down –

  will it be the god who comes?

  The god Apollo – sure and strong?

  I would love to greet him.

  His would be all my secret parts and meanings

  if it is the god who comes.

  Here she paused, looked around, then resumed in a broken tempo, her voice sad and absolutely genuine:

  Or will it be the usual jerk

  who’ll spread himself out upon the sky of me

  and do what he calls the job on me

  and merely fuck?

  While she was intoning this, Timothy was off-camera grinding his teeth. When she had finished and they were on-camera together again, she spoke before he had time to open his mouth.

  “Of course, this poem really needs a guitar accompaniment.”

  Timothy’s hostility to women, which he seems never to have known that he had, flashed out like a knife.

  “Why not an organ accompaniment?”

  Her large, earnest face almost collapsed. Then, with the dignity of the totally humorless, and with complete sincerity, she drove one more nail into Timothy’s ego.

  “I should have known better. I should never have let you talk me into coming here. You – the famous freedom-fighter! Now I see that you’re just another of the ones that use people. If people like you ever get power over us, you’ll be three times worse than what we
have now. I never claimed to be a great poet. I’m just a sincere woman. And I do think somebody out there may have been listening to me – really listening.”

  “Thank you, Madeleine Ball. I understand from the ratings there are several millions out there listening to you. And now we will pause for this message.”

  She left the set and Timothy sat cursing silently while the first commercial came on. “My antennae,” he later recorded, “or whatever it is that does that kind of work for us, were picking up alarm signals all over the place.” Then the cameras burned again and Uncle Conrad and Chalifour were on the dais with Timothy.

  I studied this scene very carefully and played the tape over many times. André watched it with me the first time and became enormously excited. To him the whole thing seemed like a miracle. The commercials particularly excited him, and though the topics of discussion bewildered him because he knew nothing of their context, he was shocked by Timothy’s performance. s6 was I. Parts of this section of the program were so raw and naked that I had no need of Timothy’s subsequent notes to read his feelings. Anyway, Timothy himself later wrote an introduction to it:

  “This had been one of those days that start beautifully and then turn sour. Esther, the police raid, the black girl, Madeleine Ball, and now Emile Chalifour. I looked at him and felt that at any moment the trapdoor was going to spring open. This man for an ally? My enemies must be laughing. Then I looked at the German professor and wondered how a man with an expression like his could even vaguely resemble the character described to me by Jason Ross. I remembered what Esther had told me about Ross and where did that leave me? With no choice but continuing my game plan or letting the whole program collapse.”

  Studying the tape, I saw Timothy’s baffled expression as he gave a glance of furtive assessment at Uncle Conrad. Now, all these years later and living in a totally different age, the reappearance of Uncle Conrad was more than strange. It was a kind of revelation of my own lack of development when he was alive. A strong body, yet quick in its movements. A European face from west of the Elbe with high, wide cheekbones, a domed forehead, receding but vigorous gray hair swept back, eyes that looked straight at you, yet with a suggestion of irony I had not understood when I was a boy. Though the facial muscles were disciplined by experience and marked by a fading scar, I had the feeling that underneath the discipline a small boy had lingered, a youth of high endeavor was still there. I remembered Mother’s pride in him and his own flashes of despair when people could not understand things that were so clear to him. “Conrad,” I remember Mother saying once, “why do you have to keep on learning more than anyone’s brain can hold?” This was a question he often had asked himself, for he is on record as believing that modern man knew so much that his knowledge was larger than the central nervous system of his brain could handle, with the result that many human brains had became like an overloaded telephone exchange where messages essential to survival failed to get through in time.