Vancouver: A novella (Wisdom Tree Book 3)

by Nick Earls

  PW—Publishers Weekly—is always one of the first, reviewing for the trade before a book comes out. It was a good review. A starred review without the star, my publicist said when she faxed it the first week in September, back before the line, Knut’s before-and-after line. Hopes were high, and not just mine. The broadsheet reviews are all on spikes now, never to run. When America wants to know about books again, it will not be September’s. I will never know who got the Gatsby agenda and who didn’t at the Times, the Post, the Sentinel, the Tribune.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ he says, putting down his fork, ‘I think you got the Gatsby stuff right.’ My publicist sent him an advance copy, and this is the first mention of him reading it. But it’s not a thing to shout out at an airport, and maybe not to put in an email. I’m still learning how it’s all done, writer to writer. ‘You got the balance between thematic and literal,’ he tells me. He’s never sounded more professorial. ‘The green light was a nice touch. I don’t think you should do Gatsby without a green light, just a small one, somewhere there in the middle distance.’

  He holds his hand out, implying that distance. The hand hovers over the table, over the cluster of candles, buffeting their flames in unison.

  That had been my thought exactly, though my small green light in Rattlesnakes was in a window in the weeks approaching Christmas, with a darkened shop behind it, shut up for the night. Fitzgerald’s had been on a pier, with the black waters of a sound behind it, then the infinite rolling hills of the republic. My light was just a light in comparison. Its only other meaning was Gatsby, but perhaps that was enough.

  ‘There’ll still be the paperback,’ he says. ‘Right?’

  It’s become a question already. The hardback is six weeks old and dead in its tracks.

  ‘Yeah. We hope there might be some more coverage then.’

  He nods. ‘Right.’

  The paperback will arrive with no momentum at all. It will stumble out and blink at the light before walking into traffic. The meeting in the Flatiron Building was the start of something, or was supposed to be. An American career. But it peaked that day. Or it peaked in Calgary on the night with Richard Ford, or downstairs with the Carver picture.

  ‘Well,’ Janet says, putting on a smile and holding her glass a little nearer to the candle for a more thorough appraisal, ‘this pinot is one of the better ones. Knut got it from a grateful student whose novel got picked up by a big-six publisher. An experience you know very well yourself, Paul.’

  She raises her glass to me, and Knut hurries his into the air and clinks. It’s an instinctive response. We toasted my book when the wine was first poured.

  He takes a sip and puts down his glass. When his elbow returns to the arm of his seat, it slips off, the woollen sleeve of his jumper getting no traction on the polished wood. He lifts it back into place, then raises his hands, touching his fingertips together in an almost church-and-steeple-sized version of the children’s game Here is the Church and Here is the Steeple.

  ‘Are you still dislocating?’ I can remember him placing his right elbow carefully, guarding his shoulder or working around muscle spasm.

  ‘Your father seemed to think it was a state of mind, as though dislocation could occur through a lack of will.’ He’s smiling, the candlelight adding emphasis to the creases in his face. ‘No. I don’t dislocate any more. Not that shoulder. I had it repaired, finally. It’s got some arthritis in it now, which is apparently a consequence of the surgery. It took thirty yards off my pass.’

  He reaches his arm behind his head, but not far, nowhere near the point it once reached to throw a seventy-yard bomb.

  ‘I have no idea what it took off my pass, but it cut down the range of movement and there’s only so far an elbow can throw. The last pass I ever threw was in Australia, in the parking lot of a trucking company near the Brisbane airport, just so the guy who owned it could stand there with his hands on his hips and say, ‘Is it just that the ball’s lighter?’’

  His accent is so close to perfect I can even pick the decade.

  ‘My eye problems are unrelated.’ He readjusts his glasses on his nose. ‘With these hands, the height, the glasses, every few years a bright new MD brings up Marfan’s syndrome, but it’s not that. I’m just tall. Long of bone. Uncommonly tall, even if not storybook tall. It’s been a while since I played the classroom circuit. I told Janet about that. I’ve still got the picture of my dad standing in the model village.’

  ‘I can’t believe you got away with it,’ Janet says. ‘With that talk you did.’

  Knut puts his elbow on the table and leans her way. ‘Lecturette. Things get professorial early in Australia. The success was all Paul’s. I just had to stand there. He delivered it with utmost sincerity. That was the key.’ He squeezes his fingers into a fist and then releases them. ‘I’ve got arthritis in lots of places. Knees are the worst, but I’m holding off on the replacements. Don’t want to go too early. I got the best of it for a tall guy. The figures make interesting reading.’ Candlelight glints from his glasses as he looks at me. ‘Pituitary giants die on the way up, twenty-something sometimes and still growing. Here’s the thing. Humans have a low life expectancy past eight feet. John Rogan, eight nine and a half, thirty-seven. John Carroll, eight seven and a half, died at the same age. The Canadian, Edouard Beaupré, eight three and still growing when he died at twenty-three.’ New giant stories, all statistics this time. ‘Robert Wadlow died at a little over eight eleven when he was twenty-two. That was the only thing that boy ever got to be, a giant. On the other hand, seven-footers fall apart, and can take some time to do it, if they remember to duck under bridges. We have the luxury of living long enough to wear out. We can put a pinot on its side for a year or two.’

  ‘There’s a little left in the bottle,’ Janet says, rising from her chair to reach for it and pour it into my glass.

  Knut sets up for yoga after our second coffee in the morning. He rolls out four mats in the middle of the living room, under the apex of the vaulted ceiling. Janet puts on hiking boots and goes for a walk. I can hear the murmur of the voice of the yoga instructor on Knut’s video as I’m checking email downstairs.

  There’s a reply from Megan. Life at home goes on. The anthrax scare was almost certainly a false alarm.

  Knut packs a lunch while Janet’s still out walking, and the three of us take it down to the lake. It’s a weekday, overcast. There’s no one in the picnic area. Janet says it’s cold enough that it might snow. There is one boat on the water, just one. It’s a sailing dingy with a red sail, picking up the puffs of wind and gliding across the surface at no great speed.

  We take a different road back into Bellingham and drive a lap of the grounds of Montgomery College. At the centre of the campus, stone buildings with corner towers and porticoed entrances stand around a quad—it’s the Ivy League look—but the rest of the architecture is practical, unremarkable, more like school classroom blocks. The stone buildings are featured on the website, and I had imagined Knut there, in an office that was more of a study, walls all dark timber shelves filled with hardbacks, a chester eld sofa, the professor behind a leather-top desk, contemplating some student’s over-attachment to adverbs, his hands unconsciously set in here’s-the-church-and-here’s-the-steeple as he leads them back towards economy, Hemingway, Carver, the greats.

  Knut’s office is in a block from the sixties or seventies, its walls clad in grey and blue panels with peeling flyers promoting socials, or furniture being sold by students who graduated in the summer.

  ‘I’d take you inside,’ he says, looking up at the second storey, hands warm in his pockets, ‘but they’re fumigating our floor today. There’s a borer infestation in one of the other buildings. Most of us aren’t in on Mondays, so...’

  From a stairwell at the far end of the building, a student calls out and waves. Knut waves back. Janet winds the car window down and says,

  ‘We’d better get going.’

  We make it back into Va
ncouver by late afternoon, another leg-stretch stop along the way, another border crossing, no body searches this time. Canadian protocols, not American. The guard makes it clear he’s scrutinising our documents, matching our faces, putting our names into his database, but no one needs to leave the vehicle.

  When we arrive at the Granville Island Hotel, a parking valet takes Janet’s car keys. The hotel is a repurposed industrial building in an area that seems full of artsy new life—boutiques selling handcrafted leather purses, canneries that are now theatres, stalls selling waffles and gourmet ice cream. The cobbles are damp with recent rain.

  As the valet shuts the car door, a woman in her early twenties at the hotel entrance calls out, ‘Professor Knutsen.’

  She steps from the foyer into the walkway, an open structure with a peaked glass roof and neat shrubs in pots along its sides. She’s holding a clipboard against her chest and wearing a houndstooth jacket and glossy black boots.

  We meet her halfway along and she says, ‘Hi,’ enthusiastically to Janet, waiting for a name to fall into place. It doesn’t. ‘And Paul Coates.’ She beams at me, her cheeks pink in the cold. ‘I recognise your photo. And you’re with the professor of course.’ She indicates Knut with her hand. ‘That makes it easy. I’m Jamie, one of the volunteers. We have your check-in paperwork and your author information at the desk inside. The reception’s about to start in the Quarterdeck and Bridge Room. I can have your suitcase taken to your room if you’d like to go there now, to the reception. Or maybe you’d like to freshen up. That’s fine, too.’

  She’s still beaming, giving us her best volunteer welcome. Her eyes are open wide and a gust of cold air runs down the walkway and makes her blink.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ she says, turning to lead the way.

  At the desk in the foyer, she searches the first of three boxes of envelopes, names written along the top in black marker pen. Each envelope is full of papers, the festival program, sponsors’ flyers, no doubt a map of the area. As she hands me mine, I can make out the telltale bulge of a lanyard.

  By the time I’ve filled in the hotel paperwork and given a credit card imprint, Knut and Janet are already in conversation with two people, both lanyarded, who I assume are Canadian writers. One is sixtyish with a cloud of white hair and a patch on one elbow of his khaki jumper, which looks like something he might wear for bird watching or fishing. The other is a woman around thirty, with a shawl and a knitted beret. She has a slim volume of poetry in one hand. The man is already taking Knut’s elbow, guiding him in the direction of the reception. He’s pointing down a hallway with his other hand, which is holding a beer.

  Janet handles the introductions when I catch up with them. It’s clear she and Knut are friends with the older writer at least, but a second later I realise I’ve forgotten the names already. As we move towards the Quarterdeck and Bridge Room I stare at the bald spot on the older writer’s head, brown as an egg in its silver-white nest, willing his name to come back to me. It doesn’t.

  The windows in the room look out to water, a river or inlet with apartment buildings on the other side. A screen has been pulled down against one end wall. There’s a pop as someone taps the microphone set up at the lectern.

  The official welcome and video presentation are friendly and brief, and as soon as they’re done the festival program manager introduces me to two writers I’ll be with on a panel on Wednesday. I have notes for the topic in my suitcase, but I can barely remember what I’ve written. Wednesday and festival work feel like a couple of gear changes away.

  The room has broken into conversations, dozens of them, crowding each other. Drinks and canapés are doing the rounds on trays.

  By the time I get back to Knut, he’s holding a glass of red wine and is deep in a discussion with Jamie the volunteer and two other women around the same age.

  Jamie mentions Hemingway, and he says, ‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.’ He nods. ‘Yeah. I’m not so sure about the Hemingway part of that, the attribution, but, yeah. It works, in a way. As a piece of writing.’

  He shifts the tip of his cane an inch or two across the carpet and tilts his pelvis to one side, changing the load on his back muscles. It’s too small a move for Jamie and her friends to notice.

  ‘It’s a moment full of implication,’ he says. ‘Is it a story? I think your lecturers would agree that’s a question that’d take more than six words to answer. I hope they would.’

  He catches the eye of a passing waiter, who refills his glass. The women must be students, studying micro-fiction and perhaps writing their own.

  ‘I don’t tend to use it.’ He’s still on the six- word story that was maybe by Hemingway. ‘Every so often you find someone who’s lived it, and they’ve got plenty that takes them back there already. I’m okay to give Hemingway a few more than six words. I know he’ll cut out any he doesn’t need.’ He smiles and gives me a sideways look, which draws all the students’ attention to me. ‘Have you read The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories?’ he says to Jamie. ‘Still worth a look, even now.’

  ‘Volunteers, volunteers,’ a voice says next to me, less measured, less professorial. It’s the program manager. ‘We have six writers arrived on a late plane from Toronto. They’re in the lobby.’ She puts her hand on Knut’s forearm. ‘Sorry, Knut. I can tell you’re in the middle of something.’

  The students speak over each other, coy expressions of gratitude all coming out in a hurry as they step away from Knut towards the foyer and the envelope boxes. Jamie reaches out to shake Knut’s hand, then sees he’s holding a wine glass and gives his cane hand a quick squeeze instead.

  Janet is at my elbow with the white-haired writer from the foyer beside her. He has a glass of wine now, and a bite-sized hamburger.

  ‘Their writing’s probably terrible, professor,’ she says, her eyes on the students and their confident progress through the crowded room, hair bouncing on their shoulders, catching the light.

  Knut laughs. ‘Most writing’s terrible.’ He drinks a mouthful of wine. ‘Your hands are empty. Is it that time?’ He hooks a finger around the cuff of his jacket and pulls it up to check his watch. ‘It is. Already. All too soon.’ He sets his glass, still with wine in it, on a passing tray. ‘I’m better back in my own bed,’ he says to me. ‘Hotel beds never work for me, and hotel floors don’t work much better. Your mom, she built a good bed.’

  Knut hugs the Canadian writer with his right arm and slaps him on the back. The Canadian’s head presses brie y into Knut’s chest like a ball of white wool.

  Knut shakes all the hands offered to him on the way out. He introduces me to writers and editors. He uses me, only me, as a leaning post when he needs to. It’s another twenty minutes before we’re at the door.

  ‘This is why I start him early,’ Janet says, as he takes the festival director through the travails of the American Football League of Australasia in 1973. ‘But it’s worse than usual today. See what you’ve done?’

  She hands the parking valet a folded bank note and takes her keys. Knut mimes a final football pass for the director, then steps outside to join us on the walkway, his cane clicking on the pavers, his first breath a rush of vapour.

  ‘You know there’s three different endings to the story of Alfred Bulltop Stormalong?’ he says as Janet walks around the car to the driver’s door. It’s the first time I’ve heard the giant’s name in thirty-eight years. ‘All deaths, as I recall. But maybe it was nothing so dramatic. Maybe he’d had enough of the sea. What if he found himself in some small place, living a life of the mind? That could happen. Even if some people were still inclined to notice that mind was five fathoms off the floor.’

  He stops and lifts both arms out to his sides, signalling a hug. His coat flaps open around me and his arms almost close it across my back.

  ‘I’m too old for planes now,’ he says as we step apart. ‘Too old to spend a day with my head between my knees and a week in therapy to get my spine moving again. That Pac
ific flight...’ He shakes his head.

  Janet pushes his door open from inside the car, another sign that he has to go.

  He pulls his coat closed at the front and lowers himself in.

  When his feet are in place and the cane beside him, he clicks the glove box open and says, ‘I want you to have this.’

  He lifts out a dark hardback novel. It’s a curio in his hands, micro-sized as if scaled down for a purpose or with its status as an object foremost in mind. ‘I still have a few of this edition in a box,’ he says. ‘So...’

  It’s Northwest of Everything, a first-edition copy. In my hands it’s a standard size, one of the more compact options for a hardback but nonetheless off the rack. They would have made him read from it, his Scribner team, putting him behind lecterns and microphones that were all out of whack, handing him this book that he could hide in his palm.

  ‘That first book,’ he says, reaching a finger up and tapping it on the spine. ‘It feels like it’s everything. Feels like everything’s riding on it. It’s the dream you’ve dreamt all that time, and then you get it. It pushes your hopes and fears to the max—it has to—and then it lands somewhere between the two. Closer to the fears, more often than not. But that matters less than anyone thinks it might. Do you get to live the life? That’s the thing.’ He is riffing on the Richard Ford theme, intentionally or otherwise. ‘Do you get to put your mind to what you want to? Pigskin was never me, even when I got to throw it a long way.’

  Janet puts her hand on Knut’s thigh and leans across. ‘You’ll come back, won’t you? Don’t feel you have to wait to put another book out before you come back.’

  ‘Yes,’ Knut says, as Janet starts the engine. ‘Come back.’

  He shuts the door, and winds his window down. The lights of the hotel walkway are golden on his face.

  ‘I’m still adjusting to how tall you are,’ he says, and smiles.