by Alan Cumyn
“Bob,” she said softly, but with an edge so that he understood perfectly.
The taxi pulled up in the driveway and honked. Bob opened the case, retrieved the package from the floor, put it inside and snapped the lid shut again. “I’m sorry,” he said, straightening. “I’m sorry, Matthew.” He nuzzled the boy’s neck. Matthew kept his face buried in Julia’s front. “I wish I didn’t have to go,” Bob said, and kissed Julia on the cheek, nuzzled her earlobe. He felt a wave of tenderness for her as she stood in her frayed yellow sweatsuit, the sleep still in her warm brown eyes, her blonde hair, not natural any more, but the colouring suited her, wisps tucked behind one ear and straying over the other – a surge of love and appreciation for her beauty. Little as she tried, she was still striking.
She turned for a proper kiss but the taxi honked again and Bob had already stepped away to pick up the rest of his luggage.
“Hey,” she said at the door. Bob was halfway down the steps but stopped, took three strides back to her, and kissed her on the mouth.
“I wish you could go with me,” he said. His voice was gentle and deep, his eyes soft with what he knew was a look of self-mocking, a sense of the absurdities of the world and his own position. “Next time,” he said and kissed her again.
“You’ll get lipstick,” she said and wet her thumb, rubbed it off his lips.
It wasn’t a long ride to the airport. The route skirted the university and along the Rideau Canal. Ottawa was subdued, the colours muted and wet, the sky choked with gnarly clouds and the vague threat of winter, a dull chill, a starkness where the leaves had left the trees, the sudden thickness of people’s clothing. The roads were congested with workaday government and high-tech types on their way in for nine o’clock. Bob studied their faces: doomed-looking, numb-eyed men and women clutching their coffee cups, rolling forward a few feet then stopping, their shoulders hunched already, backs aching.
The taxi driver said the forecast was for rain then and Bob made an appropriate reply, his face composed, as if there were no special package in his briefcase. As if he hadn’t ordered it from an Internet company five weeks ago and conducted a detailed correspondence to tack down his measurements – hip point to hip point, belly button to base of the spine, the average size of his penis and testicles (measured in bath water, resting) – his skin colour (porcelain-beige, pale), his pubic-hair type (basic black, mince, but with traces of heather-brown). Bob asked, “Does your business pick up in the rain?” and the driver told him all about it. It wasn’t such a simple thing. It depended on what type of rain it was, what time of day, what season. A really hard rain in the morning in the summer might mean that people decide to call a cab to get to work, or they might just stay home. A light rain in January that made everything icy slick …
“Yes,” Bob said, following him and not following.
“All I know, the really heavy rain, the traffic is crap,” the driver said, and Bob nodded in solidarity.
“We should all stay home in a heavy rain,” Bob said. “Stay home and take taxis!”
She was waiting for him by the ticket counter. It had all been arranged, and yet when she stood up he felt giddy and a new sense of awe. She was tall and wiry and womanly and twenty-one, in black hip-hugging pants that twenty-one-year-olds used to wear when Bob was twenty-one. With flared legs and rounded, pocketless bottoms and even damn near the same ridiculous cloggy skyscraper shoes from the olden days. And her maroon leather jacket was open to reveal a clingy black top several sizes too small. Nobody could get away with clothes like that. Except if you were twenty-one and immortal.
“Professor Sterling,” she said, stepping towards him. She had sunglasses tipped high on her head, holding back her shoulder-length black satin hair. She looked like she belonged in a glossy magazine, a certain kind of immortal of the instant. But more than that, Bob knew this girl had an intensely intriguing spirit. She was Sienna Chu, half-Chinese, half-Irish, and her eyes were ever-so-slightly crossed so Bob couldn’t tell if she was looking directly at him or away.
“Please, call me Bob. Everyone in the department calls me Bob.” He touched her arm briefly, put his briefcase down – he was dragging his main luggage behind him on little wheels. “Well, isn’t this marvellous!” he exclaimed, gesturing vaguely so that he might mean the occasion, the day, the airport, or perhaps just life in general.
“I am so excited! I’ve never been to a Poe conference before.” She blushed, it was endearing, and she had no further need to be endearing, he was already teetering on the edge of total endearment.
“Where’s your ticket, Sienna?”
Helen in the English-department office had booked her into economy, which was ludicrous. Bob marched her straight to the booth to upgrade her to business class. “Some things in life are not worth stinting on,” he said. “If we’re going to die a ragged, awful, cruel death, then it should be in great comfort, with plenty of leg room, a champagne glass at our lips, and smart, good-looking attendants to look after our every whim.”
Bob waited for her reaction, but she apparently chose not to react, looked away instead like a princess who doesn’t have to listen if she doesn’t want to. But she did let Bob pay the difference, then take her to the restaurant to buy her a proper breakfast: two eggs and sausage, toast, hash browns, coffee. “You can’t trust the food on the plane,” he said. “Even in business class. Alcohol, certainly, but I have a friend in catering and the stories he tells me!” She gobbled down her food like a starving child. He tried not to stare at the soft taper of her fingers, the smooth heaven of her throat.
“They say the same about residence food,” she said.
“Don’t get me started on residence food!” he exclaimed, too loud. People looked at them from other tables. But he couldn’t help it, he was utterly alive, he felt like shouting. “Don’t get me started,” he repeated in a more normal voice. “I have seen them taking the bodies out at night. Poor, anonymous freshmen who paid the ultimate price for coveting the custard pie. It’s scandalous, there’s been a cover-up for years. The parents are bought off by the multinational that owns every college catering company in the Western world!” He was babbling but couldn’t help himself.
“No wonder you like Poe so much,” she said, and pulled out the conference brochure. “I really want to hear Solinger on Poe’s concept of women,” she said.
“Oh, Poe and his women. Don’t get me started!” Bob said. But it was too late, he was already started. There was Eliza Poe, Poe’s actress mother, who outshone her shiftless husband so badly and died so young, penniless, a charity case after having played more than three hundred parts. And Poe’s wife and cousin, Virginia – Sissy – fourteen when they married, who lingered for years on her deathbed, the relentless cough of the white plague, tuberculosis, her skin pale, deathly beautiful, tinted with night sweats, too pink in pallor. The poor dear, saddled with Poe, a dead-poor, luckless, mercurial poet, scathing critic, inventor of the detective story, author of all those cryptic tales, wildly ambitious, jealous, driven, haunted, alcoholic, unstable, brilliant, morose, half-starved, bitter, possibly mad.
“Curiously,” Bob said, glancing at his watch – he didn’t want to miss the flight, and giddy as he was he could see himself doing it – “Curiously enough, one time Poe almost got a government job. It was as if the gods were playing with him. Prominent writers used to get cushy jobs back then –”
“Yes, you said,” Sienna cut in. “I remember you mentioned this in class.”
“Did I?” Bob asked. “Yes, probably. My God, the old professor has started repeating himself.”
She might have interjected something about him not really being old, but instead she said, “His name was actually published for the post, wasn’t it?”
“Yes! Well, it was Pogue, under the list of new appointments, and Poe inquired and was apparently told the name was his, garbled by the press. He was all set for the swearing-in. At last, a government job! He waited and waited …”
/> “Should we get going, Professor Sterling?” Sienna asked. “Bob, I mean.”
“Yes, we should,” Bob said, but stayed a moment more just to look at her. Then while they were walking to the departures gate they passed a mirrored wall at which Bob couldn’t help glancing. He was struck, as he had been several times lately, by a feeling of being an impostor, but quite a good one: solid-looking, squarish, fleshy, yes, but tanned, too, and prosperous and well turned out. She was gorgeous, a real head-turner. But he too had a presence, didn’t look hopelessly drowned beside her.
There was an annoying delay in the customs line-up which Bob hadn’t figured on. Being Canadian, he found it hard to consider the United States an entirely foreign country, and he’d forgotten about this small matter. Time really was pressing now, so he sent Sienna into another line down the row. Then he waited patiently while a young woman with an English accent and seven rings in her cheek showed her passport, answered one question, then was let through. She was followed by a raggedy, intense man with a sickly pale face and dust on his jacket who squinted at the customs officer like a known criminal, also said only a few words, and was similarly waved through.
“Next!” the customs officer said, staring at Bob. He pulled his luggage up to the yellow line, stood with his briefcase under his arm.
“Name?”
“Uh, Bob Sterling. Professor Bob Sterling.”
“From?”
“From here. From, uh, Ottawa.”
“Destination?”
“New York City.”
“Purpose of trip?”
“Oh, uh -” Bob couldn’t seem to get the rattle out of his voice. He felt suddenly and completely guilty. “I’m going to New York for the Poe conference at Columbia University.” Then he added, “Edgar Allan Poe. The writer.”
“You’ll be there for how long?”
“What’s today, Friday? Till Sunday.” That was better. His voice sounded more normal. The customs officer was a plain-looking woman, her uniform puffed-out and sexless, her face quite blank: pale blue eyes behind wispy brown lashes. In her identity-tag photo she looked as if she was being busted for drug possession. Rebecca Williams.
“Do you have anything to declare?” It was a standard question, and it may have been the way she ran all the words together that made Bob pause to consider that, given his age and stage and position, perhaps he had, or at least ought to have, things to declare. She didn’t mean it in a philosophical way, of course, and he realized it nearly right away, but for an instant he tried to think what he could possibly say to excuse himself, as if she had seen into his soul and was demanding some sort of justification or analysis.
“Uh, no,” he said, finally.
She asked something else, too quickly to catch, and again Bob had to ask her to repeat herself.
“Could you open your briefcase please?”
“Oh, I, uh, I just have the one piece of luggage,” Bob said, turning to gesture to his suitcase behind him. She was staring at him so hard he finally looked – clown-like, he thought – down at the briefcase tucked under his arm. He’d been clutching it so hard he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh gosh, yes!” he said, smiling and blustering. He almost started to explain about absent-minded professors, how he could be walking down the street completely absorbed in some thought or other …
“Your briefcase, sir,” she said, rather harshly. “Could you open it?”
“Oh, this!” Bob said, still clutching it.
Sienna was waiting for him now beyond the customs line. People of all stripes were turning to look at her as they filed past.
“Here it is,” Bob said softly, and placed the briefcase on the inspection table, fiddled self-consciously with the lock. Finally, after too much effort, it fell open.
Rebecca Williams flicked through several things. “What’s this?” she asked. She held up the special package.
“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I just threw it in there. It came in the mail today.”
“What is it?” she asked slowly, enunciating every syllable, as if talking to a second-language learner.
“It’s a tape of a famous lecture on Poe’s view of poetics and transcendence, in light of his struggles with the Transcendentalists,” Bob said. Then, meeting her blank expression, he added, “It’s an academic cassette.”
“Value?” she asked finally.
“I’m sorry?”
“What’s the value?”
“Oh, uh, it’s completely useless to almost anyone. But to me -” And then he stopped himself. She was looking at him with near-malice. “Twenty-five dollars,” Bob said.
There was a terrible moment in which it looked as if she was going to open the package anyway. She’d hooked her sharp thumbnail under an edge, and at the same time was eyeing his suitcase. Bob willed himself to appear absolutely calm and innocent, despite his rising panic.
“Could you open your other bag?” she asked, and closed the lid of the briefcase, leaving the special package unopened inside.
Bob hoisted the suitcase onto the table. Sienna gave him a bright smile when he looked up, terror-stricken.
The customs officer unzipped Bob’s bag and rummaged through his things: spare shirts, trousers, and socks, the Silverman biography of Poe, and an old copy of the complete tales and poems too bulky for his briefcase. Then she got to the padded black lace bra and panties, the nylons and purple silk slip and red satin corset at the bottom of the bag. She didn’t hold them up but simply fingered through them, pausing with each new discovery.
“Those are, uh, some of my wife’s things,” he said, feebly. His face was flushed crimson and he was aware that his breath rattled in shallow, rapid little wheezes. He tried to calm himself but couldn’t.
“Your wife?” Williams asked, deadpan.
“She’s uh, she’s waiting for me. Over there,” Bob said. He pointed slightly in Sienna’s direction.
Rebecca Williams – small, pasty-faced Rebecca Williams with the limp brown hair and washed-out eyes – looked at the stunning Sienna for what seemed to Bob like thirty or forty years. Finally she turned back to him.
“All right. You can go,” she said. Not a flicker of light behind those eyes. “Have a good stay.”
Bob zipped up his bag, collected his briefcase, and wandered, dazed, to where Sienna was waiting.
“Boy, she really put you through it,” Sienna said.
“I need a drink,” he said.
Bob had a moment of nausea right before liftoff. He let Sienna have the window seat and tried to study his hands and breathe deeply. A video screen two seats in front of them showed calm, responsible people in life jackets sliding down an inflated rescue chute into … what? An angry ocean below? A sea of flames and death? Into the abyss off the screen.
“I just … I am so moved by this,” Sienna said. “It’s a miracle, the earth so still below. Whenever I’m taking off I have a sense of how large the planet is. It seems smaller when we’re on the ground.”
She was trying to be sophisticated and Bob felt more sophisticated just knowing that. She had also, some weeks before, given him a sheaf of poems to read. They were in his briefcase and he planned to discuss them with her on this trip. They were extraordinary. Everything about her, in fact, was extraordinary, but for the moment Bob had to concentrate on mentally pulling the plane away from the ground, to grease the connections and hoist up the wheels and ensure the electronic system didn’t catch fire, to clear the pilot’s neural pathways to allow for correct decisions.
It was an odd thing, this flight anxiety, a minor case he’d developed only after the break-up with Stephanie, although his near-disaster at customs was now contributing as well. It was as if he were being reminded that the end – death – was not just a theoretical, logical outcome, but inescapable and, quite possibly, imminent. Little mistakes erased entire lives. Valves gave out. Veins blew up to the size of balloons then burst. An argument in the morning with an ex-lover and a drink too many, a fing
er on the wrong switch, someone asleep at the air-control tower because the union failed to negotiate rest time and management squeezed an extra dollar …
In large part the feeling went away after they levelled off. His breathing eased, heart rate subsided. It wasn’t so bad, after all, as far as anxiety could go.
He ordered a Scotch for himself and Sienna took a brandy and sipped it competently, her lips leaving a small red mark on the edge of the glass. Bob took her hand and squeezed it gently, then let it go. “You are an astonishing poet,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I am just … well, I was amazed by many of the poems. Really striking work. We’ll go over it in detail, if you want. But I just meant to tell you …”
Oh, how she blushed! There is nothing a poet would rather hear more and Bob knew it, but he meant what he said, and his words made him feel even more deeply.
“You have a talent, Sienna, and it’s something that can’t be taught. I mean, one can get people to think more deeply and carefully about how they use words. But there’s a sensibility that simply is there or it isn’t. A lot of students show their work to me, I can’t tell you. I’m happy to look at it. But most student writing is, well, dross. But your writing …”
How she hung on his words. He could feel her heat rising. It was heady and he had a sense that he had to be careful, for himself as well as for her.
“Well, I don’t want to go on about it,” he said. “But you have a resonance, a sense of complexity of life and spirit.” He fumbled under the seat to pull up his briefcase, fought again with the combination before freeing the lid. There was the special package, still, thank God, wrapped in its thick brown envelope, and there were his conference papers, and there on the bottom was Sienna’s poetry. The first poem was “Night-time in Cellophane,” which Bob read quietly out loud:
“It’s very … evocative,” he said, fighting for a proper word. “I’m having a hard time describing it. You know, when a brain gets older it calcifies. That’s why it usually takes young people with nimble, unconventional minds to string together words like this. ‘Thunderslips and aphids.’ Wonderful! It’s nonsense, on one plane, and yet it has a resonance of received wisdom. Do you know what I mean?” She nodded but looked at the poem, not him. “ ‘There are no confectioneries here.’ It’s Joycean. I don’t mean to puff you up, but it took him years to string together words like this, the layers of different meanings. ‘Cumulonimbus nipplewort.’ Beautifully playful. And then: ‘kites / cut by the wind.’ Extraordinary!”