“I’m just leaving,” I said.
“Leaving where to, Mr. Lattimore, may I ask.”
“To look at birds. I’m trying to learn the birds that live around here.”
“Want some companionship?”
“I think you meant to say company, do I want some company. And the answer is no. What did Istvakson send you for this time, Miss Svetgartot?”
“He didn’t send me. I went for a drive. It’s my one-day-and-one-night vacation.”
“Well, enjoy the rest of it, then.”
I took up my rain slicker, binoculars, and boots, went outside, and put them in my truck. Through the kitchen window I saw Lily Svetgartot preparing coffee. I got in the truck and drove past the grocery and post office in Port Medway, then on out to the beach at Vogler’s Cove. I noticed clouds building to the south. I sat in a small seafood café, reading the various local newspapers and drinking a hot chocolate. Through the window I could see a few eider ducks and scoters bobbing on the water. Gulls were out, of course, always gulls. Then, absent-mindedly paging through the Chronicle-Herald, I noticed yet another article about the movie, now officially referred to as Next Life. The piece mentioned where in Halifax scenes were being shot (the gossip journalist had adopted the noun “shoot”) and which actors or actresses were spotted in which restaurants. Four or five paragraphs down, there was a brief interview with Istvakson in which he said, “I’m completely taken over by the sheer pathos of this story I’m filming. Sam Lattimore and Elizabeth Church—it’s almost as if I’m becoming them. I dream them. I daydream them. We’re on a strange and wonderful and very profound journey together.” Reading this, I wanted to lie down on the cold sand so that a gull, any kind of gull, could scream these words out of my brain. Instead, I took a walk.
I had to come to terms with the fact that the novel I’d been working on when Elizabeth was alive, Think Gently on Libraries, not only was stalled, but the mere thirty-one pages I’d written were in bad shape. Here’s the basic story.
In middle age the narrator decides to find out everything he can about the day he was born, March 4, 1929, at 11:58 P.M. in Halifax. What did his mother, a librarian, and his father, a police detective, do that day? Why was he delivered into the world on the roof of the Halifax Free Library? Why was he delivered into the world by a Dr. Petronius? Why did his mother, when the narrator was just a year old, run off with Dr. Petronius to Vancouver? What was she doing on the roof of the library at all? How did Dr. Petronius even know she was there? The narrator teaches art history at Dalhousie University but is himself no artist; he likes teaching, though, and is good at it. His wife of twenty-six years is a police sketch artist and part-time art teacher in two different high schools; they have a daughter, just off to university in Montreal to study medicine, with a special interest in forensic pathology. Anyway, the questions about his birth, his parents’ lives, all sorts of things that up to his middle age had troubled him only now and then, now mercilessly haunt him. They are all he can think about. His obsession is beginning to fray his marriage. Yet as he begins his research, he discovers that none of his academic training is of any use. He applies for a year’s leave (fabricating a research project), receives it, and starts to investigate the day he was born. He begins to find out things he is not sure he wants to know. But he cannot stop finding them out.
I always cringe when a writer, in person or in print, whines about writer’s block. Basically, I don’t believe in it. I think it’s all bullshit. Oh, of course, of course life intervenes: there’s illness, there’s depression, there’s attending to children, there’s a truck to get repaired, there’s Japanese crabapple trees to plant. (I’d read that the Japanese crabapple thrives in the Nova Scotia climate. My second week in the cottage, I ordered twenty young trees and planted them out back, a small orchard. “Expect deer,” Philip said.) All sorts of quotidian anxieties and demands intrude. But what’s necessary is to find a time of the day or night to dedicate exclusively to writing, even if only a page or two, even if you end up writing garbage. Drink more coffee; drink less coffee. Set the alarm for four A.M. “Wait for the moon, admit the moon isn’t showing up,” as Yasunari Kawabata, one of my favorite Japanese novelists, wrote. “No matter—just write every day.” I realize I’m being unsympathetic to the insistences and fragilities of some people’s emotional makeup; I realize it’s idiosyncratic, life to life to life. Who doesn’t know that? Good Lord, listen to me. All platitudes (mine especially) about writing sound hollow, a dumb show.
Still, when we lived in the Essex Hotel, my writing for radio really was demanding. And I was all too willing to set aside the novel to do it. I could have rationalized this by saying that a novel (as Elizabeth had put it, about Marghanita Laski) is a jealous mistress, and there’s no room for distractions of any sort, so if I couldn’t concentrate fully on writing a novel, I’d be better off setting it aside and returning to it when our financial bad weather cleared. Truth be told, Elizabeth was the disciplined writer of the household. Often it was a matter of my own brand of willful incapacitation. While I was convinced of the plot of Think Gently on Libraries and thought about it all the time, I was not devoted enough to writing the thing. Then Elizabeth was murdered.
Dr. Nissensen once said, “From everything you’ve told me about her and your marriage, Elizabeth would have wanted—wants—you to finish this book. In time, perhaps you’ll take your inspiration from that.”
In any case, after escaping from Lily Svetgartot, I spent much of the day at Vogler’s Cove, trying to distinguish one gull from another, walking to near exhaustion, setting up “problems for thought,” as Chekhov wrote, and trying to solve them, finally admitting to myself that I’d have to bring up my seething anger toward Istvakson with Dr. Nissensen at our next session. I went to the seafood café twice more. It was about five o’clock when I got back to the cottage. There was a note thumbtacked to the front door: Dinner at seven! I’m making the Hungarian goulash you like so much!—Cynthia
I was happy to be invited. I decided to take a hot bath. In the tub I realized that I’d caught a chill during the day, maybe even had a slight fever. Toweling off, I took two aspirin, set the alarm clock, and lay down on the bed for an hour’s nap. Waking to the alarm, I went into the kitchen, threw water on my face, and dried off with a dishtowel. I got dressed and, carrying a bottle of wine, walked over to Philip and Cynthia’s, glancing out at the beach, hoping Elizabeth might show up later that night. I knocked on the door and stepped inside. “Hello?”
“Oh, Sam, come on in,” Cynthia called from the kitchen. “Philip and Lily are having drinks.”
I turned to leave. But Cynthia hurried over, took my bottle of wine, and pulled me by the front of my sweater into the kitchen. “Don’t be an idiot, Sam. We aren’t trying to set you two up, for God’s sake.”
“She’s invading my privacy and she’s the lackey of a fucking idiot.”
“It’s not her fault that you hate her boss so much.”
“Why didn’t you say in your note that she was invited?”
“When I left the note, she wasn’t yet. I ran into her at the library in town.”
When I got to the kitchen, I saw that Philip had moved The Sleepless Night of the Litigant from over his typewriter to the wall above the kitchen counter. Philip said, “Sam, I’ve been reading the Max Frisch you recommended. Montauk. It’s the best thing I’ve read in a long time. I’m going to read everything he’s written.” Having noticed my not greeting Lily Svetgartot, he said, “You know Lily, of course.”
I said, “You taking in stray dogs now, Philip?” It was uncalled-for sarcasm, crude, completely lacking in etiquette in the face of his and Cynthia’s hospitality, but it flew right out.
“Lily is a film student, did you know that? She’s been telling stories out of school about Mr. Istvakson, which should please you no end.”
“Have a drink, Sam,” Cynthia said.
“Vodka, please.”
“Orange juice as us
ual or straight up?”
“Straight up, thank you.”
Cynthia prepared my drink and handed it to me. Lily, dressed in that long sweater and jeans, thick scarf coiled around her neck, stepped out onto the back porch overlooking the horseshoe beach. Philip said, “I’m going to get in some wood. A fire’ll be nice in the woodstove. Temperature drop, the radio said.”
“Sam, why not go out on the porch and try and be civil to our guest,” Cynthia said. “I can’t think of a better way to make up to me and Philip for your absolute rudeness.” Cynthia was otherwise concentrating on a large pot of goulash whose aroma filled the room.
I was caught in the situational ethics: do I stay with my honest feelings about Istvakson, and by association Lily Svetgartot, or do I put my anger aside and apologize to Cynthia and Philip? When I went out on the porch, I brought up the one subject I least wanted to hear about. “How’s the movie going, Miss Svetgartot?”
“Cynthia and Philip said they have a daughter about my age. That’s probably why they’re being so lovely to me.” She set her wine glass on the small wooden table, then wrapped herself tightly in her own arms. “I laugh when people in Nova Scotia complain of the wind. They should feel the wind in my part of Norway. It goes right through you.” She took a sip of wine and set the glass down again. Looking out to the horizon, she said, “I don’t sleep with Mr. Istvakson. Being a lackey doesn’t require that. Nor am I interested.”
“None of my business.”
“Cynthia directly asked me if I slept with Istvakson. She is direct. I like even the way she uses the word ‘directly.’ She says, ‘I’ll get to dinner directly.’ I like that in her. It’s, you know, direct.”
“How is the movie coming along?”
“Okay, since you asked, let the lackey make a report for you, Mr. Lattimore. First of all, Emily Kalman—she, of course, has the part of Elizabeth—is not sober on most nights. Not every night is she drunk, but almost every night. I make a lot of strong black coffee for Miss Kalman. She has two of her own assistants, but I make the coffee for her. She is a fine actress, though. Second of all, Mr. Akutagawa is intense about his cinematography—‘intensity incarnate,’ as Mr. Istvakson said. He said it with admiration. The actors adore Mr. Akutagawa. Especially the actor playing the role of you, Mr. Clancy Leonard. He is Canadian also. He wants to meet you, talk with you. It might interest you, the lackey has persuaded him into not driving to your cottage. From your attitude toward—everything. Now that you know he wishes to talk with you, if you want to, you can contact him easily. Rumors to the contrary, I don’t sleep with Mr. Clancy or Miss Kalman, contrary to rumors. A movie set, Mr. Lattimore, is made of rumors. One reason I drive to Port Medway is to get away from that. The air is better here, you understand.”
“Will I want to kill myself when I see the finished product, Miss Svetgartot? Knowing me as well as you do.”
“That is funny, Mr. Lattimore.”
“I think dinner’s being served. Let’s go in.”
“Fine. But it’s a small table. I’ll either be sitting next to you or across from you. It can’t be helped. Philip and Cynthia won’t allow the lackey to eat on the porch alone.”
A Book Falls to the Floor
I WAS ORGANIZING AND filing some of Elizabeth’s papers earlier today, and I discovered, tucked inside a notebook, some newspaper reviews of The Victorian Chaise-Longue. Most were photocopied from library sources, others Elizabeth had written out by hand. From an Edinburgh newspaper:
Time travel and fear and confusion and a haunting piece of Victorian furniture, what more could you want of a story on a cold rainy night in front of the fire? Here we have a young wife named Melanie suffering from tuberculosis, a tragic and romantic illness, and who is confined to her room, which affords readers a sense of claustrophobia unlike anything, to this reader’s mind, since Edgar Allan Poe. Melanie, all pent-up hallucinatory desire and intelligence, hopes that she will survive with the help of her trusted physician, perhaps most unselfishly because of her newborn baby, whom she has yet to hold in her arms. At one point her family decides she must move from one room to another in the house, and in the new room there is the Victorian chaise-longue, almost a chair-as-revenant, if you will, or at least it seems to have a life of its own, a separate emotional history, a haunting pedigree. While lying back to rest on this ungainly piece of furniture, Melanie wakes up in a world almost 100 years ago. She is still infected with tuberculosis (time travel did not cure her), and in this incarnation Melanie does not, as in her contemporary life, have a loving husband to look after her, but instead there is a sister who holds a dark secret with her—and what’s more, her formerly neat and clean room has been replaced by filthy and unkempt quarters, her room all sordid décor, in which Melanie inhales gothic dust deep into the lungs. What was once familiar and comforting to Melanie is now all almost entirely unfamiliar, and the effect on Melanie’s mind is one of the intensifying elements of the plot in this strange and mesmerizing tale, which, while it may have antecedents in literature, is quite original and utterly memorable.
Before and while Elizabeth and I lived in the Essex Hotel, I’d never read The Victorian Chaise-Longue. Naturally, I came to know the novel, since Elizabeth detailed its plot and often referred to it, but I’d not read it. Elizabeth was quite aware of this, and it didn’t noticeably bother her, though she said, “Before you read my dissertation you really should read the novel itself.” I promised, and the subject never came up again.
However, Elizabeth, during our life in the Essex Hotel together, read the novel at least a dozen times all the way through, not to mention rereading hundreds of individual passages, for the sake of writing her dissertation. Mumbling out loud at her desk, “What are you doing here, Marghanita, what are you trying to do with this paragraph?” The séance aspect of her thinking. I’d find notes like this all over the apartment: WHY DID M.L. USE THE WORD “DREAD”?
Elizabeth loved reading the letters of Anton Chekhov, and the one she quoted from most was a letter Chekhov had written to his wife in which he reports: “Last night, I dined with intelligent, lively, accomplished people. And yet I could not locate the soul of the evening.” Lizzy and I didn’t have a lot of friends—didn’t need them—though greatly enjoyed going to the movies with Marie Ligget. On occasion we’d meet our photographer friends Jack and Esme Swir (Esme was later hired to take still photographs on the movie set) at Cyrano’s Last Night, or at a pub on Water Street or Gottingen Street. And I could tell when Elizabeth had found the soul of an evening, because she’d relax and have a rollicking good time. But if the soul of the evening proved elusive, she would insist on leaving. She never made excuses, she’d just say, “Sam, I’m tired. Take me home, darling.” People who knew her didn’t mind. That was just the way Elizabeth was. We mainly were in each other’s company.
But I regret not reading the novel while Elizabeth was alive. So, this evening, I brought her copy with me to the beach. I wanted to tell her that I was reading it now. It was about nine-thirty when Elizabeth appeared, walking out of the stand of birch trees just west of the cove. It was quite cold out; Elizabeth wore an overcoat, dark woolen slacks, galoshes. Her hair was tucked under a knit cap, though the cap couldn’t contain it all. She looked out at the water for a moment, then began to set out her eleven books. Once the books were lined up, she walked over to the rocks, where she sat down on a flat rock and looked at the beach again. That is when she noticed me. I was perhaps twenty meters away, and Philip and Cynthia’s house was in the background. The light was on in their kitchen, but otherwise the house was dark.
On these occasions, when Elizabeth spoke she sounded like herself. Voice-wise, nothing different. Just the same voice that said, “Sam, when you go out today, can you pick up coffee and bread?” Or whispered, “Tonight, your Elizabeth.” Or said with exhaustion, “Work went like shit today, I’m afraid.”
On the beach, I held up her copy of The Victorian Chaise-Longue. Almost immediately, Eliz
abeth said, “You should have worn a scarf, Sam. Is that my copy of the novel?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Would you do me a favor and set it down here with the other books?”
Walking toward her, I desperately wanted Elizabeth to stay where she was; it would mean I’d get my closest look yet. But as I approached, she stepped back to the rocky surround. I set the novel at the end of the line of books. I didn’t try to read the other titles. Then she said, “Thank you. I won’t keep it, but I wanted to look at something I wrote in the margin of page 66 again.”
“You remember the exact page?”
“I was working on that page the morning I died, silly.”
I couldn’t speak. I can honestly say I was stunned into speechlessness. Elizabeth didn’t speak, either. The horseshoe beach came alive as it had not done before, at least to me. Birds at night: nightjars and another kind I could not identify. The wind was light, the tide out, but the white froth where waves met the shore could be seen. I heard the noise of a television, I think from a house just beyond the trees where a retired lobster fisherman, Alan Leary, now a beekeeper, had lived for fifty years, forty-six of those with his wife, Kristin, who had died in 1967. A slight rustle in the dry cattails, maybe a neighborhood cat or a raccoon. Otherwise, a night so quiet it reminded me of a Japanese poem Lizzy once read to me: “A whispered mention of loneliness / from the moon / has finally arrived.”
Elizabeth picked up the copy of The Victorian Chaise-Longue, opened it to page 66, read for a moment, said, “Oh, of course, now I remember,” then set the book on the sand again. She looked at all the books for a minute or two. “Do you want to know what happened, my love?” she said. “That day. Will it help you in any way to know?”
Next Life Might Be Kinder Page 8