Real Life

by Sharon Butala

  The truth is, she’d been surprised to have been asked to sit on the jury, assuming that as no readers seemed to have heard of her, neither had anybody else, including the arts organization awarding the prize, and so she agreed out of the fear that if she didn’t, she’d instantly be erased from the history into which she’d so suddenly been written. She and the two other jurors spent hours locked together in a hotel room arguing politely—“Not all juries are so polite,” the arts organization’s officer said—and in Jenna’s opinion, through the course of the long session, each juror demonstrated admirable integrity combined with a deep streak of perversity. She doesn’t exclude herself from this analysis, and wonders if she’d been like the others, male and professors, whether their decision would have been the same. She knows she knuckled under, there’s no other way to put it, and she pictures herself sinking to her knees as her legs turn to a pale, flesh-coloured water that soaks into the smart hotel rug.

  Or maybe she didn’t knuckle under. Maybe there was nothing she could have done to change the outcome short of forcing a hung jury. That would have created a huge scandal. But, in the end, a scandal was created anyway. Once their decision was known, critics surfaced across the country, although ninety per cent of them were in Toronto. They chastised the jury from television sets, radios, and newspapers with varying degrees of outrage for not choosing, in Jenna’s opinion too, the wonderful fifteenth novel of Bella Griffin, which, if it hadn’t exactly been a bestseller before the decision, certainly has been since.

  “The other jurors must have had good reasons for choosing the book they did,” Hannah points out in a reasonable, therapist’s tone. Jenna considers. In fact, there’d been little discussion, she’d been unconvinced by anything they’d said, but their tones—full of certainty, expecting no disagreement—had quite simply scared her into silence.

  “Who was I to argue with them?” she asks Hannah. “They seemed so sure. I thought they knew better than I did.” Hannah studies her, as if she sees something in her old friend’s face that surprises and puzzles her. Jenna drops her eyes.

  Though Hannah’s sofa is wide and soft, Jenna spends most of the night tossing. All the city noises, that sense of it as a great beast curled up for the night, its breathing audible through the open window, keeps her awake. Toward morning she falls asleep and dreams she’s strolling with her mother arm in arm down a city sidewalk. She and her mother got along badly, but ever since her mother’s death at seventy-two, a few years earlier, she keeps appearing in Jenna’s dreams, gentle and helpful, offering advice, opening her arms to Jenna as she never did in life. Strangely, Jenna never wakes bitter from one of these dreams, but instead, a little shaky and softened, as though a crusted and aching wound had been cleansed.

  In the morning Hannah and Jenna drink coffee together before Hannah leaves for her office and Jenna sets out on the first day of her three-day visit to Toronto. Her new novel just out, this morning she’ll be stopping in at her publisher’s office to say hello and collect any advance reviews. Her publisher, a well-known, although small, company, occupies a set of tiny, crowded rooms in a dilapidated building just beyond the borders of the real downtown. Jenna decides that instead of pacing Hannah’s apartment until it’s time to take the subway, she’ll walk to her meeting. She’s not excited about it, she knows that a staffer half her own age will greet her, that probably she’ll be taken by this young woman to lunch somewhere, where they’ll have a hard time making conversation, and the next time Jenna meets her—if she does—she won’t even recognize the girl.

  Still, it’s a warm, early fall day and the walk is interesting. It feels good to be marching down a city sidewalk again, her hands in her pockets, as if she belongs here. At moments like this, when she’s alone in the city, some knotted place inside her loosens and relaxes. Nearly thirty years in the country and when she’s not angry with the city, or out of her depths, her youthful days in one return to her and she feels happy and at home.

  This afternoon she’s to do an interview at an ethnic radio station and two more at strange little magazines, places so obscure that she’s never heard of them, and knows she herself will never see or hear the interviews. Then, tomorrow night, she’ll give a reading at a downtown library. It’s the first time she’s been invited to read in Toronto, and she alternates between excitement about it and a darker mood that eventually overtakes her every time she comes here. She suspects if she could isolate its cause it wouldn’t do her credit. It’s a deep-rooted anger, she thinks, a helpless, smouldering rage that this is the wall she has to scale—big-city indifference, big-city arrogance.

  And yet, in her country home she’s still seen as the city woman—never will be anything else—while here she’s classified as purely country. Worst of all, she can’t tell herself any more which is closest to the truth.

  Once, when she’d stumbled on a psychic fair by accident, she’d paid twenty dollars to have an earnest young clairvoyant mistake this thing that drives her for alcoholism. The comparison is too apt to be funny. Yes, she’s addicted, she’s out of control. And she refuses, except in moments of despair, to attribute her lack of success to her shortcomings as a writer. She knows this is blindness, something with which she still has to come to terms. But she’s far from ready to accept she may not be as good as she thinks she is—she’s published, isn’t she? Never has any trouble finding a publisher, her reviews are good. She jerks her mind away, tries to pay attention to the people she’s meeting as she walks along the busy sidewalk toward her publisher’s.

  The day having gone pleasantly, if dully, and it being the day Hannah teaches a night class at the university, Jenna decides to spend the evening at a movie. Since her departure to the ranch she’s had to give up movies—the nearest movie theatre is fifty miles away, and tends, anyway, to show only Hollywood spectaculars. Now, whenever she’s in a city, she tries to see at least one. She often thinks she shouldn’t, because one movie is never enough to satisfy, yet more would move her into some other, almost-forgotten realm from which she’d only have to return the moment she got on the plane that would take her home. But lately, oddly, her desire for even one movie has been failing her, as if her last hold on her former city-self is disintegrating. About this, she alternates between being discomfited and relieved.

  At ten o’clock, in the warm fall darkness, Jenna starts the walk back to Hannah’s apartment. She sees the Brunswick Avenue sign, recognizes the street as literary in some way she can’t remember, and decides to walk down it. Leaves from the big maples that line the avenue coat the sidewalk and in the light from the street lamps Jenna sees they’re the big, three-pointed ones in vivid reds that are on the Canadian flag.

  She slows to a stroll and studies the old brick houses. Some have ornate, wrought-iron fences separating the small squares of grass from the sidewalk and most have stained-glass sections in their front door, or flanking them. The interior lights make the colours glow. How beautiful these houses must once have been, she thinks, for now they have a shabby air, they’re on their last legs. Once they must have been the homes of the bourgeoisie, surely working-class people couldn’t have afforded them. But she has little experience of the bourgeoisie, the only members of it she’s ever met were the failures, the black sheep, the kids who’d been sent to her high school where the poor kids went, after they’d been expelled from all the others. She remembers them as nice kids, but so frozen in their misery and frightened by finding themselves there that they never made any friends at all, and not one of them lasted a full school year. And there is no bourgeoisie in the part of Saskatchewan where Jenna lives. Just farmers and ranchers with their own hidden and tense pecking order she only, after about twenty years, began to decipher, but the nuances of which still sometimes elude her, so that she has to ask her husband to explain a fleeting expression or an apparently offhand remark that everybody else seems to understand.

  A woman’s voice floats out from the shadows across the street. She’s singing in a
breathy contralto, wobbling on the sustained notes, a little off-pitch, an old song about September. Jenna holds her breath. The warmth, the intimacy of the voice, suffused as it is with longing, weaving through the leafy darkness, turns the street into a boudoir. A shiver runs down her back and she slows even more, trying to see the singer, or discover which embowered porch she’s singing from, but the night and the trees hide her.

  Hannah is sipping a glass of wine and laying out a tarot deck on the coffee table when Jenna lets herself in.

  “It’s one of the new decks I bought in New York,” she tells her as Jenna pours herself wine and stretches out on the sofa. “I’m trying to learn it.” Hannah owns dozens of decks, forever picking up new ones as they’re developed. It fascinates Jenna that Hannah finds the tarot at least as useful as Freud or Jung. Jenna herself relies for advice on the I Ching. “The Wanderer,” she keeps drawing. Strange lands and separation are the wanderer’s lot. She wonders if she should regard this as a directive or not, for although she has no plans to leave her husband and the ranch, neither has she been able to fully imagine living there until she dies. Whenever she tries, the future soon fades into a tangle of contradictory pictures and ideas, and Jenna draws back in perplexity.

  Hannah says, “I read that interview with Bella Griffin in the paper. She’s caustic.”

  “Vitriolic,” Jenna agrees. “Have you read any of her books?” Expressionless, Hannah reaches to the floor beside her and holds up a copy of the book in question.

  “Bought it today,” she says, and breaks into a grin.

  Jenna had flown home the day after the jury made its decision, and in the return to ranch life, though the decision dismayed her, she let it slip to the back of her mind. But as soon as the short list was released, the phone began to ring. Arts reporters from Toronto wanted to know what happened, why was Griffin ignored? She couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without having to listen to panelists discussing the jury’s decision in amazed and disapproving tones. The frustration of not being able to respond was such that finally, when she heard a censorious panel on the radio, she had to lie down with a fever. But she continued to believe Griffin’s book to be the best and didn’t know how to reply when she received a couple of letters commending the jury’s decision.

  At first Griffin said nothing about being left off the list, which Jenna regarded as proper and dignified, but eventually reports of her remarks about the verdict, which seemed to Jenna to ring with an unbecoming immodesty, reached her, and at last she began to be angry both at Griffin’s refusal to accept the judgement and at finding herself in the impossible situation of having to remain silent about a decision with which she doesn’t agree. But it’s a sort of woeful, frustrated anger.

  And when she thinks about what she knows of Griffin, that the woman would care at all surprises Jenna. It’s not only that she’s already won the prize twice, as well as other much-coveted prizes that Jenna never expects to see—at least, not for years and years—but that by all reports she’s lived the most glamorous of lives, in the great cities of the world, knows the most famous writers, and has rich and powerful friends. She wonders if the two other men on the jury who wouldn’t hear of giving the prize to Bella were merely jealous of her. The thought has crossed her mind before, but always she’s dismissed it as mean-spirited.

  She spends another restless night on Hannah’s sofa. When she finally falls asleep, she dreams about her husband. He’s riding in a wild, untamed country full of deep, crumbling coulees whose sides are studded with sage and cactus. He rides down their sides with fearless abandon, on a perfect forty-five-degree angle, away from her. He seems to be fused to his horse, as if they’re one animal. When she wakes, she recognizes the dream as about the Archer, whose precise angle of travel represents the perfection of his fit to nature, and for a second she longs to be home.

  This morning another junior staffer is going to take her around to bookstores so that she can sign stock. Jenna dreads this. Usually the bookstore staff doesn’t recognize her name, which humiliates her, although she always pretends to find it amusing, and she’s dismayed whether her books are on the shelves or not. If they’re there, she thinks it’s because nobody wants them, but if they’re not, she thinks the same thing. She knows she’s being ridiculous. It’s her pride, it stems from her thwarted ambition that gnaws at her, and she can’t tell if it’s thwarted because she’s unlucky or because she’s a bad writer who merely thinks she’s a good one.

  Besides, she thinks, brightening, it’s fun to walk or drive around the city with someone who knows her way, and at the end of the bookstore circuit, no matter how demoralizing, there will be another pleasant lunch in a nice restaurant. In the afternoon, she thinks, I’ll go to the museum. And tonight is her reading, although she’ll be only one of three readers. She wonders if she’ll be allotted the prestigious last position, or if, ignominiously, she’ll be assigned to read first.

  The day unfolds predictably, and when evening comes, Hannah accompanies her to the library, then seats herself in the small auditorium among the audience of fifty or so people. The young publicist, Carol, with whom Jenna spent the morning doing the bookstore circuit, arrives and sits beside Hannah, while Jenna is introduced by a librarian to the other readers, both younger than she is. The woman, having just published her first short-story collection to excellent reviews, is giddy with excitement, and when asked to read first, doesn’t appear to mind. Jenna suspects she doesn’t yet know what this means. The man, grungy in torn jeans and faded T-shirt, his hair uncombed and his attitude, at best, impassive, is a prize-winning Toronto poet. The minute she hears his name she knows he’ll be the one to read last.

  Although she dreams of the day when she’ll be the only one on the program, tonight she finds she’s relieved to read with others, especially local writers who will draw an audience she knows that in this city she’d never get on her own. Although she hopes—no, she tells herself, she believes—she’s past the day when only one person, or no one at all, will show up at her reading.

  Happily, the young woman, Gillian, doesn’t read too long, and both funny and charming—Jenna sees that one day she may also be a very good writer—she leaves the audience in a receptive mood for Jenna’s turn. Jenna has chosen the section she’ll read with care; she wants these listeners to see that she isn’t mediocre, that she’s much better than Gillian who now sits smiling up at Jenna with glittering eyes and flushed cheeks, obviously not hearing a word Jenna reads. Jenna wants to hold her listeners’ attention so that while she is reading they can’t look away or move; she wants each of her words to fall on them like single stones tossed into water. She isn’t a bit nervous—at moments like this, something deep inside her, for which she has no name, no explanation, grips her and carries her through.

  When she has finished, to brief but, she thinks hopefully, enthusiastic applause, there’s an intermission. Then it’s the poet’s turn. He goes on for more than half an hour, until people begin to get up and sidle out quietly. He doesn’t look up from his page, he mumbles something between poems now and then, but if his remarks are complete sentences, Jenna can’t figure them out. It amazes her that any writer could be so cavalier about an audience. Unless that’s his point, she thinks. But then, why come at all?

  Finally, it’s over. Jenna is about to suggest to Hannah that they stop somewhere on the way home for a drink, when Hannah yawns and says, “Well, let’s go, I have to be up early tomorrow.” Disappointed, Jenna reaches to take her coat from Carol.

  “I have to drop over to the launch for Eric Anderson’s new book. Would you mind coming with me?” Carol asks. Eric Anderson is literary star, one of the biggest, another one Jenna’s never met or even, come to think of it, seen in the flesh.

  Hannah says, “Go, Jen, I’ll take a cab home. You’ll have fun.” She turns away, waving at Jenna over her shoulder.

  “It’s good for you to be seen around,” Carol tells her seriously. Jenna can’t figure out if Carol jus
t doesn’t want to go alone, or if some senior person at the publishing house has told Carol to take Jenna out after her reading. She hesitates, then decides that it doesn’t matter what Carol’s reason is, and agrees to go.

  She and Carol go out of the library and Carol flags down a cab. They get in and in moments they’ve arrived in the middle of a series of old stone buildings which Jenna recognizes, even in the shadowy darkness, are on the university campus. Carol and the cab driver confer and soon he pulls up to a side door of a rust-coloured stone building.

  As the cab drives away from the leaf-littered curb, Carol pushes open the heavy oak door, they enter a hallway, and then go through open double doors leading into a large, dark room, an auditorium, full of people, all standing and looking toward a low stage in the far corner where someone Jenna can’t see is making a speech. It must be witty because every once in a while the people around Jenna break into laughter. She tries to hear what the speaker is saying, but in the crush, and the near-darkness and her unfamiliarity with the situation, she can’t get the words to make any sense.

  The man on the stage has been replaced by a woman who is introducing someone else. As the crowd claps for the new speaker, Jenna stops where she is and joins in, then, because she can’t see the stage at all from where she is now, keeps moving, making her way out of the crush of people toward a wall she can lean against. Finally, she reaches a stretch of wall, but here it is all occupied, and so, fearful of attracting attention to herself, she keeps walking slowly along the outer edge of the crowd. At last, on the side of the hall away from the stage, she sees a place to stand, and squeezing past people, moves toward it.

  She’s nearly there when a tall, slender woman abruptly turns directly into Jenna’s path and they nearly collide. It takes her an instant, during which she’s apologizing, to realize she’s face to face with Bella Griffin. Griffin appears as startled by Jenna as Jenna is by her.