When I got home, Montreal being home now, I began my own book. The one Daniel was not able to write.
“Let me tell you about my grandfather …”
DANIEL
She has brought her manuscript to Peacock Island. It’s odd — I have been reading as though it was a validation of me. As though all the years of love and faith in her were worth it all. As though she was worth it all. How selfish of me. But for me it proves my instincts were correct and that her heart is true. Sometimes I had nothing to go on but that instinct, but like Ernest and Nora I sensed a capacity for depth and strength despite her skittishness, her need to come to terms in life with the concept of the edit. Ernest would be so proud. I felt an urge to wave the manuscript in Henny and Timmy’s face: “Now do you believe me?”
Her book isn’t a biography, it’s her memories. Within its pages stretches the landscape of her mind, one that is capable of empathy and compassion, intelligence and character. It stands as a work on its own merits, even if there had never been the wonder of a man called Ernest. Her writing has the lyrical quality of her poetry and the moments of whimsy and insight I have always known her for. There is a joy in her writing which I’m sure reflects the happiness she felt living with Ernest in those years again.
I try to imagine myself working on my manuscript in that room overlooking the sea, knowing that nearby my other self is working on hers. It’s strange, but journeying so long with her words it almost feels like my work too. I feel as though our ships are running parallel at last next to each other — as though the force of our engines side by side will create a wake greater than either of us could achieve far apart.
We have established separate routines, sharing our lives the way I’d always imagined as two writers we would. Guarding our private times, our silent coffees on the patio at dawn, watching the peacocks reconnoitre the place afresh each day. Our rest time after lunch. Our early bedtimes, as predictable as the elderly. I feel a great sadness that this serene balance must be so fleeting.
And then sometimes we talk to a point of exhaustion.
Her latest obsession is Ernest’s desk that some lover of Jacob has painted pink. A silly woman trying to express herself as best she can, hoping to keep up with her Joneses. Its imperfection she said was proof of the uncorrupted originality of Erehwemos, which was now compromised and betrayed. Ernest’s mind lives on in his thoughts and pages, in the minds and hearts of those whom like us he influenced, I told her. His world could not be betrayed by a pot of paint or a vapid woman. It was more solid than that. I wasn’t even completely sure he wouldn’t be capable of romantic negligence himself. Like his son, he was capable of having a flirtation with a woman who’d paint a desk pink — although Nora would not allow such foolishness. Not the painting of his mahogany desk. You cannot allow this piece of trivia to send you mad, Lethe; now that would be the ultimate betrayal.
But Lethe would become quite irrational about this, dragging the argument along as though driving home some twisted chasse.
In conversation, Lethe’s veil of grief gets snagged on various annoyances. She rehashes her memories disconsolately. At times, she allows me to be there, a quiet paperweight providing an anchor for her as she frowns, the edge of her thumb in her mouth worrying at the skin with her teeth.
This grief, sharp in her mind now will eventually settle into her heart’s limitless capacity for mourning. This will become her inspiration. And it will be distilled into the crystal prose of her memoir.
“Never lose control,” I warn her, reminding her of Shake-speare’s Othello. “Don’t be consumed by passion.”
Lethe is far from healed. I was selfish to believe this time with me would be good for her. I felt that having made all my arrangements she’d be spared all but the job of getting my book to a publisher. I had convinced myself that here — in a place where nothing is expected, nothing prescribed, where nothing is inappropriate — I could provide the certainties she needed. Now it occurs to me that when I’m gone, she will be dealing with another loss, another sorrow made worse by counting this visit as our last goodbye.
So far it’s been comfortable the way quite naturally we continue our lifelong conversation. We have spoken about Ernest and Nora, and her memoir. We have discussed areas where she needs to tighten or expand. I’ve written some notes and advised her that when she has polished and pruned the manuscript some more it will be time to show it to a publisher. I suggested when she finally puts the book to bed, she start the process of applying for fellowships, grants, residencies — a writer’s life, lonely, yet with its unique rewards. Bearing in mind she won’t have my influence, I’m afraid she’ll just fall back into the mindless social life she used to inhabit in Jamaica or Barbados, or worse still, return to the dreaded cold northern world of Alex in Montreal. But I must admit there with him she has been settled enough to allow her the necessary peace of mind to produce that book. How strange. He must be good for her.
The only loss of camaraderie is in our old habit of lighting up cigarettes together. She gave up the habit after her operation. She hadn’t felt the urge to smoke with the pain and never returned to it. I don’t know why I’m so taken aback. Perhaps as long as Lethe smoked, I felt no need to give up. It wouldn’t have been chivalrous to become healthier than her. I am amazed she found the self-control; she’s always been so obsessive. My astonishment with her discipline has become linked with my astonishment at the manuscript she is producing. Although I had always thought she had raw talent, I did wonder if she was capable of sustaining the work necessary to create a memoir of this quality. Knowing she’d spent long hours every day, thinking and dreaming and writing and rewriting, for two years until she had that impressive pile of paper sitting up there on the table by my bed amazed me; this woman has grown in ways I hadn’t considered or imagined.
Maybe I am jealous she’s done all this without me.
And here I am now, dying with my own blasted story I’ve yet to finish.
Her manuscript is proof that Lethe’s emotional solitude reflects the life of a writer and not of a waif. Maybe I can stop worrying over her now. Maybe not. Not the flesh and blood of her that will bury me, but over her soul, battered as it is by the losses of the last years. Unlike me, who has always known fiercely who I am, separate than my family, her sense of dislocation is reinforced with every death. Maybe the boundary between my father and me gave me the safety of an unequivocal distance against which I was able to define myself as separate. Frankly Lethe’s decision to commit herself to write a memoir, glorious as this is, may be a relinquish-ing of her own life in exchange for the past. It worries me how she clings to memory. In her youth she wore a lot of makeup. Now her face is quite bare. At first, it made her appear oddly defence-less. Now I’m not sure. I think it’s more an inwardness, possibly a disinterest in the future. Perhaps she no longer needs to wear a mask.
I can hear her at night, prowling quietly across the wooden floor. I see the flashlight dancing in the gap between my bedroom wall and the ceiling, hear the tap running in the bathroom or the flushing of the toilet. Nights must be difficult for her alone in her room with her sorrow. For me, it is now her room — as with everything else that she’s touched in my life.
What she hears at night I don’t know. Is it my smoker’s cough? I don’t think she pays attention to it. But the nights when the cough plagues me I try to be quiet and bury my face in the pillow. It’s hard to tell what causes her to get up and walk around; she’s been careful not to intrude on any part of my life she considers separate from us.
I console myself that it’s inevitable her visit will be intense to a point of imbalance. The truth is that over the years it was ever so. We wouldn’t be us if it weren’t.
Over the years. What a tiny phrase with such long feet.
There have been stormier visits. Lethe, with her prodigious memory, prefers to forget the second time when she visited me i
n Trinidad. She had another manuscript; it was her first solo, a collection of poems she wanted to show me. It was just for a weekend. I was living with a woman and Lethe said she didn’t feel welcome. There certainly was tension enough to go around. Both women wanted all my attention. Lethe was a wreck. They behaved badly that weekend. One sulked in silence. The other strutted about, throwing tantrums. I never got to look at the manuscript until Lethe was gone!
Funny how the memories return. I remember we went to see Helen, who had brought the children home to Trinidad. She had rented a house not too far from mine. Lethe would meet my daughters and I’d get a break. Helen had made Lethe Marion’s godmother. Then a strange thing happened.
After brunch we sat on the verandah, Lethe and I side by side in a hammock. The girls were dressing up and putting on lipstick. Marion was directing a play she’d made up and was seriously and calmly walking her sister through her lines and entrances, when suddenly the hammock broke and Lethe and I went tumbling to the floor.
I mentioned to Lethe the hopeless look on Helen’s face when she saw us fall.
“It was such a metaphor,” I said.
Metaphor for what?
For us. Falling for each other.
She completely disagreed with my interpretation. If this scene was a metaphor then she thought it described two people who broke the gentle swing of happiness without even trying. Just by virtue of who we were, perhaps Nora’s motherless theory, we simply defied any chance at harmony. Maybe that’s what Helen saw, Lethe said. Our doom! Or maybe she was distressed that the hammock was broken.
She didn’t return with me, remaining at Helen’s until her flight the next day.
When we parted, Lethe was convinced we were done. Standing at the airport gate, she suddenly railed at me for inviting her to Trinidad. (She had actually invited herself.) I had deceived her. My thoughtless invitation came with the cost of two lives. It was all a dream, a nightmare. We were over.
“Your heart’s an empty house waiting for someone to rent!”
All this was said with her small fists pummelling my chest, as amused airline staff awkwardly pretended not to look.
And yet as she walked away from me, toward the plane, I noticed how much lighter, how less fretful she looked. I realized she’d got it off her chest. Her back was almost straight as she crossed the tarmac, her hair in the wind blowing back from her face. It made we wonder if it truly lightened her burden when she convinced herself I was wrong.
Immediately after she left, I wrote her a letter that I sent to Barbados.
To disrespect my heart, is to disrespect something that you own. It is to disrespect the finest feelings that are vested in you. You have no right to do that to me; you have no right to do that to yourself.
I will always love you. Despite yourself I have found in you the elements of life worth treasuring, the capacity for wonder and worship for this gift we share of the world. I knew that from Mona. In the dark days when you lose your way or when you cannot sustain that wonder, I will keep it safe for you. I will keep you safe from the self that gets tired of being big, tired of the weight of courage; I will keep you safe till you are strong enough to carry the burden of bearing witness again.
I will always be a place of rest when you need one. I am not an orphan. You saw to that. My heart has its people and will never be empty again. Once loved, a heart has its home.
I’m sure she rolled her eyes in some gesture of jaded exasperation when she read my letter, but this was the truth. My truth.
I said that there would come a time when life would stop to pick us up again and she would walk with me, always near, the rest of the way.
She wrote back that she’d hoped she’d crash and had cried all the way back to Barbados. I doubt Lethe cried that hard, for she was very practical in her observances. She tended to feel an emotion and note it, often describing it metaphorically as if it happened to someone else and in terms she thought others would relate to. Whether or not she cried, I knew that the bonds between us were strong. Lethe was Lethe, and I have no doubt from the moment she left, even before she crossed the tarmac, she was planning for whatever lay ahead.
For me, I have known time and time again our story wasn’t over. There would always be another chapter in our book.
I wouldn’t see Lethe again for many years — Nora’s funeral — years during which I wrote my heart out, mostly in my weekly column. We kept in touch, talking of our writing and our children and current politics, neither mentioning intervening relationships with others or indeed our own.
I still ask myself how can there be a great love story without physical intimacy. We’ve had our tender moments, but we never consummated our love. That archaic phrase is so apt. Doesn’t it describe the all-consuming madness of an act so primal, so free from logic, so untainted by the manners and control of centuries of civilization that it needs the fire and form of ritual? And apt in the sense of the ultimate, the purity of its instinct, the surety of itself as to what it is, and what it isn’t, its sheer binding undeniability.
I am still aroused seeing Lethe at fifty in her black swimsuit. It was a surprise to see how soft her body has become. Not fat. Just not bony, as she had been at thirty. Her stomach is like a tender whale belly to touch. Her thighs heavier and motherly. Her body now approachable in a way it had not appeared before.
Lethe once said — probably to placate me — that some loves endure and are paradoxically made whole by chastity. I know that I never intended this to be so. I lusted after Lethe from the moment I set my eyes on her. In my imagination I have known her body over and over in every way that it is possible to know a woman. But I do think that if we were to last there was something about our lives, if not in our beings, that demanded a sacrifice of us. Otherwise we would have been too human. It might have dissipated us, made us less than we had to be to sustain each other. Who said the world is too much with us? Too many mundane things, the plumber to call, the nappy to change, jobs lost, the hunger pains of disappointments. And yes, that is a glory for some, but with us there was always this calling of something else so demanding and specific: our writing. And what we needed to save for one another might have been spoiled by the ripening years of living life together.
Did she sell me this bill of goods? Probably this is how I now console myself.
Several times at night I’ve gone to check on Lethe and found she needed me. Her bed is just a single, so she follows me back into my room, trailing the soft cotton coverlet she’s taken a shine to in a childish manner. In my larger bed, she wraps herself around me with such intensity I’ve become familiar with her softening thighs and her softened belly. I am a man. I want her. But I know Lethe’s grief would make sexual intimacy a blasphemy; in some convoluted way, it would feel like fucking Jacob.
But there’s more — some deeper fear that’s stopped me. I always wondered if Lethe, who would write the most suggestive letters, who would wrap herself around my body as easily as she did around my heart and yet manage to make it all so tentative, so reversible and withdrawable, if she would finally laugh at me, reject me? Would she evaporate like a spectre, leaving me to discover she’d never been there at all?
I remain tentative, knowing our time together carries the fault line that runs beneath our common ground. In this new incarnation, the shape of the trouble is Mamta. If I knew what it was I feared, whether Lethe could see or not see, hear or not hear what I think I am seeing and hearing, it would solve the mystery. Aesop asks if it’s my conscience.
Lethe knows what she knows, but says nothing.
LETHE
I was sitting at Daniel’s desk, trying to compose a letter. I’d made the decision to leave. Daniel wouldn’t be surprised. “I knew you’d go,” he’d say matter-of-factly, as though we’d been fishing and it was time for me to gather up the tackle and go home. I always leave. That’s what I do best. We both knew th
e time had come.
Daniel had gone to Battle Beach — it was a good place to swim — and I had asked to use his typewriter. He thoughtfully left paper and corrector ink out for me. I had recently moved from a Selectric to my first computer. The manual keys now felt so heavy as I pushed down on them in a dead slow hunt-and-peck. Any sentimentality about the old manual typewriter as a time machine faded.
Light filtered in through the brightly coloured stained-glass window, the endless dust and ddt forming constellations in its shafts. But I didn’t feel like writing. Distracted, I looked around the room, measuring in my mind how much time it would take to finish dusting the shelves, wishing I’d had time to finish it. Maybe it was a task I shouldn’t have taken on, knowing how unfinished unfinished things left me feeling. It was the simple completion of a mindless routine I wished I could take home with me.
I picked up the duster and started along a new shelf filled with bound encyclopedias, brown with gold writing. Harvard Classics: The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. I looked at the shelf. They filled it and used up a quarter of the one underneath. Was it really five feet of pages? As I dusted, I counted them out. Fifty-one books, from number one, Franklyn Woolman Penn, through number twenty-eight, English Essays, on to number forty, Chaucer to Gray, forty-six and forty-seven, Elizabethan Drama. I returned to the start of the lower shelf, dropped the duster, and pulled out forty-two, English Poetry, Tenny-son to Whitman. The inside of its front cover was dutifully stamped with House Library Loyola College, Montreal. Had Esopus been to my new hometown? Was Loyola missing its precious collection before it became incorporated into Concordia? I looked to see what year it was published and found the name of the publishers: P.F. Collier & Son, New York. The earliest copyright was 1910. I wondered what had ever happened to the Son. Did he echo his father, Mr. P.F. Collier, down the years?
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