by John Metcalf
Yet… was that true?
Out of it all, only three mountains stood from the plain—Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Jelly Roll Morton.
All the rest of it—brutal truth he was having to acknowledge—was antiquarianism, the epithet “moldy fig” justified. From that first awful record in Jimbo’s bedroom, Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, Jimbo and he had been like arid scholars poring over fragments of Miracle Plays and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, claiming their essential links to Shakespeare.
He even wondered if it had been about music at all, wondered if he had been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, wondered if it all had been as tediously commonplace and ordinary as adolescent rebellion, an escape from the confines and complacencies of middle-class existence, plump armchairs and sugar-tongs.
At the opposite pole, underlining all this, burning at the forefront, horrible to have it so constantly revisiting one, the crouching black man in the lay-by south of Vicksburg caught in the incandescent light, the night pulsing with the noise of frogs, pierced by the screams of night creatures.
He was also heavy with sexual tension.
The tension informed his anxiety.
He was thinking often about Jenny, picturing her, feeling guilty, desiring her.
His muddied thoughts, feelings, picturings, carried through to no conclusions.
The lacy ironwork in the French Quarter kept intruding, the feeling that it was somehow Spanish rather than French—though why the matter kept recurring he had no idea—its Spanishness having something to do with a head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman staring out of the canvas at him with huge, dark eyes—who was it? Degas? Velazquez? Goya? Manet?—a woman wearing over her hair a mantilla, black openwork lace.
The decision to leave, leaving Jenny behind, was easy, the leaving painful. He hated himself for causing pain. Jenny’s father was an admiral and was referred to by Jenny and her mother as The Admiral; that was connected in some small way with his decision to leave; the depth of Jenny’s talent was another cause for concern; he feared she was insufficiently devoted to it, feared she would abandon what he loved in her, feared that as she grew older she would revert, the traditions of the Quarterdeck reasserting themselves, and that he would end up all shipshape and Bristol fashion in a life that involved lawnmowers.
Involved in this stew of thoughts and feelings, the heretofore unacknowledged decision that he intended to escape from teaching; register-keeping, the number of seats permissible in a classroom, he realized that he had no intention of ever becoming Certified; what he would do next he did not know; time was pressing on him…
Jenny.
What he would do, whatever the shape of it, when it was accomplished years hence, might make him feel less culpable, might, even in his own mind, exonerate him.
While Tim clambered and scrambled up ahead, Rob shouted after him that he was going to rest where he was and would wait there for him.
Small stones and scree rattled down for a minute and then silence settled again. Rob rested under an overhang of rock that shielded him from view above. The land spread out below him. The sky was vast. The black shapes of turkey buzzards circled on the thermals.
Heavy with anxiety and the need for sexual release, he was already tumescent. He ejaculated in spasm after spasm, pumping his seed onto cool Precambrian rock where it lay, glistening.
Medals and Prizes
There was a young man of Devizes
Whose balls were of different sizes
One was so small
It was no good at all
With the other he won medals and prizes
Forde lined up at the Canada Post counter in the Quickie Convenience Store in the mini-mall near Alex’s place. Many postal outlets, he now found, were staffed by families from India. This one, however, he could hear was French Canadian. Forde was particular about stamps. He wanted sober stamps. He did not want Signs of the Zodiac stamps, the Stompin’ Tom Connors Memorial stamp, Batman or Mickey Mouse stamps, Canadian Mammals stamps, Emily bloody Carr stamps, the Mary Pratt Meticulous Dead Fish on Saran Wrap stamps, Colville stamps, bloody Bateman stamps, stamps featuring the marquetry of the feeble interior decorator Klimpt, nor did he want Extra Large Stamps of gap-toothed Hockey Players, nor those celebrating the Chinese Year of the Snake, Pig, or Goat.
He would have been embarrassed to send such stamps to anyone, but especially to correspondents in England or the USA.
He wanted decorous stamps bearing simply the Sovereign’s head.
“Have you any with the Queen on?”
The youth tapped his long fingernail on the flat display case on the counter that contained a single booklet of ten.
“She’s all gone, her.”
“Then what do you have?”
The youth indicated the booklet.
Three groundhogs sat up in a row on the earth mound excavated from their burrow, peering towards possible danger.
“You’re sure?”
The youth again tapped the showcase.
“All we ‘ave,” he said, “are rodents.”
*
Suzy Hughes opened the door and said, “Where’s your medal?”
“It was heavy,” said Forde, “ruined the way my lapel sits.”
“Nice suit, though,” said Suzy, “new?”
“Sheila took it home with her. It’s not new. It’s pressed. She’s getting her hair cut or whatever for tonight.”
“Lunch?” said Suzy.
The floor was marked out every two feet or so with strips of white tape.
“No, no thanks, Sheila and I stopped in at the Chateau Laurier on the way home and raised a couple of brandies and some peanuts.”
Walking ahead down the passage into the kitchen, Suzy said “I should damn well think so! Do you think my behind’s getting too big?”
“Too big for what?”
“Cheeky!”
“Well,” said Forde, “it’s a bit cheeky.”
“Oh, Forde!” she said. “Oh, Rob!”
He gathered her to him and they stood in the kitchen holding each other.
Through her hair, he said, “What are those stripes for?”
“What?”
“On the floor.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you’ve heard of this Parkinson’s shuffle, that feeling they have that their feet won’t move, so this is what his doctor told us to do. It gives him something to aim for, something that shows him where his feet should go.”
“This is sudden, isn’t it, Suzy? Worse, I mean. Suddenly.”
She nodded.
“Yes, this last month.”
They pulled out stools and sat at the counter.
“Coffee?”
Forde nodded, watched her getting a package of beans and the grinder out of a cupboard.
“Christ!” he said.
Something to aim for!
“But I had a good idea a couple of weeks ago!” said Suzy. “He’s been hiding in the house more and more lately, but I know he likes to go out with me grocery shopping—God! How pathetic that sounds! But even that’s begun exhausting him and so I hurry and that just makes him more tired and more stressed and anxious, ohh…”
She sighed.
“I have to have a bag in the car with a complete change of clothes in case he has an accident.”
Forde shook his head.
“Which we’ve had.”
She sighed.
“Anyway, he likes to watch people—of course he does—and lots of immigrants go there to buy produce they’re used to—I don’t know—papayas, Ugli fruit, Lebanese cabbage, curry leaves… he likes to look at the colours, peppers, and celery, apples, mushrooms, fresh mint, and watercress… and you have to drag him away from the fish counter look at the mackerel, he’ll say, the markings, the dark bars, that black- green
with a glint of gold. He always did have that kind of eye, didn’t he? He used to write like that.
One week, after the groceries, it was a bad day, the drugs fading out, he couldn’t speak more than a whisper and I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say, so he wrote over and over on a scrap of paper, but the handwriting’s so tiny now you can’t really read it—hand muscles…”
Suzy’s eyes shone with unshed tears.
“This was the man who wrote novels and short stories. He wrote this one word over and over until I could make it out—he wanted me to know how much he liked seeing the fruit and vegetables.
Variegated, he wrote.”
She turned her back squarely.
Fussed over the cone of filter paper.
Reached down mugs from the cupboard.
Busied herself.
“So this idea?” said Forde. “This good idea you had?”
“Ah!” she said. “Yes. Well, the shopping tired him and the stress of walking and the fear of ‘freezing’—do you…?”
Forde nodded.
“Go on.”
“So I thought of getting him a shopping cart and putting a couple of heavy cases, you know, soft drinks, on the platform underneath as ballast and he could lean on that like a big walker. Then give the cases back to the cashier—changed my mind—and it’s working.
She sat and raised her mug.
“Cheers,” she said, “and congratulations.”
He smiled and hummphed her congratulations away.
“I was thinking the other day,” she said, “about when you and Sheila and yours and our kids—driving up to our cottage. And when you got up into the Rideau Lakes area there were estate agent For Sale signs everywhere, that company called Bowes & Cocks. Remember? And Alex used to call out to the kids,
‘Bows & Cocks! Keep your eyes skinned, hombres! We’re entering Mohawk territory.’”
“I remember,” said Forde, “coming back from one of these jaunts, when he started in Brockville putting forward the proposition that concrete was among mankind’s most useful inventions. Useful and beautiful. It went on from Brockville until he pulled up in the drive here.”
“In all the years of my marriage,” she said, “I’ve never lacked for conversation.”
“What do you mean, ‘the drugs fading out’?”
“Well, he has to take them every four hours, and by about the end of hour three, the symptoms get stronger, the tremors come back, the rigidity… Everything slows down again and he gets more anxious and he’s slower to answer a question or understand what I’m saying to him.”
“Does the doctor know? Give him something stronger?”
“There’s nothing more they can do. It’s dopamine replacement—two drugs every day. Sinemet it’s called. Sinemet and Stalevo. Diminishing returns, that’s the story. It’s the best they can do.”
A silence fell between them.
“So,” said Forde, “do you know what it is he wants to tell me?”
“Yes,” said Suzy. “But I wanted to warn you. What his life’s about now is dignity. He insists on showers every day even though the struggle of it is awful. This bloody thing makes you sweat heavily and it makes your skin oily. So that involved drilling through tile and grab bars and a sort of walker structure in the shower that stands on rubber mats.
Oh, Forde! I sit on the floor outside that bathroom every day waiting for the sound of his fall.
Most days I help him get dressed—which he doesn’t like—he can’t do buttons because they’re too fiddly now. And shoe laces he can’t do because they’re fiddly too, and if he tries to bend over, he falls. I tried to get him to wear shoes with a Velcro strap but he said they were for children and he won’t wear pull-on shirts like, oh, I don’t know, polo shirts or rugby shirts, anything without buttons. And his razor—I bought an electric one, but he said it didn’t shave properly, it was dirty. And when he has a not-getting-dressed day—dressing can take more than an hour—he wears pyjamas and a dressing gown but he wears polished dress shoes on his bare feet. Get the picture?”
Forde nodded.
“So don’t be ‘understanding’ or pity him.”
Forde nodded.
“He feels humiliated he can’t use a knife and fork and cutting up food for him is worse—rubs in the child thing—so everything I make has to be things he can eat with just a fork in his good hand.”
“Talk about ‘blessed among women,’” said Forde.
“And then there’s the constipation. Chronic. But let’s not get into that.”
“Is that drugs or part of the beast?”
“The beast. And odd things happen, things they didn’t warn us about. There was a while there he couldn’t seem to grasp if a glass was upright or upside down, and he’d pour orange juice onto it not into it, so I had to teach him to feel the glass first to see if he could put a finger inside it.”
She shook her head slowly.
“Can you see that? One of the finest literary minds in the country standing in his pyjamas, frowning at a tumbler.”
“Oh, God!” said Forde.
“The kids have been good, though. One or the other usually comes round and polishes a couple of pairs of shoes. Danny bought a shoehorn and spliced it onto a broom handle so he wouldn’t have to bend. Part of trying to get him to accept loafers so he won’t have to fiddle with laces. Which him being him, he’s always trying to do.”
She fell silent again.
“Which him,” she said, “still being him.”
Smiled at him suddenly.
“You with that pack of kids trailing you, going around old manure heaps with a pitchfork catching milk snakes for them.”
“Long time ago.”
She squeezed his hand.
“Not forgotten.”
“So…” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “I’ve got to tell you this. This is exactly up your alley. We were at the hospital for an X-ray and the girl technician said he’d have to take off his button-up. His what? he said. Your button-up, she said. This? he said, plucking up a fold of his shirt.
And I had to unbutton it because he couldn’t and he was terribly embarrassed even though she was scarcely more than a child. Poor little creature, one side of her face ravaged by acne. Marked for life. Anyway, on good days when his voice was strong he kept returning to this, saying she had to be quasi-literate to be a technician, high school, a college course, but she didn’t seem to know the word ‘shirt.’ To her, it was ‘a thing with buttons on,’ a button-up.
Do you see what this means? he’d say. Where we’re headed? It’s a glimpse into the abyss. Terrifying.
Actually, of course, he was very pleased.”
She fell silent and then said, “What was I talking about?”
“Dignity.”
“Those mealy-mouthed bastards at the university,” she burst out, “he’s worked there for thirty years—thirty years—and they voted to deny him emeritus status because they said novels and short stories and essays weren’t academic achievements. Sick petty, but it hurt him.”
“Ah, baubles, Suzy. Like this morning. Baubles.”
“What was it like this morning? What was she like, the Governor General?”
“I’d have to admit, charming. Gave a surprising, unsugary speech. I was surprised, pleased. I’d been fully prepared to dislike her. I hadn’t expected such seriousness from an ex-media thingy. But there were forty-some people getting the damn things, knee-deep in philanthropists, entrepreneurs, donors to this and that, NGO people fertilizing the desert wastes, ancient nuns—I was awash in do-goodery. Not my usual scene. And tonight it’s the formal dinner. God! Absolutely not my scene.
And the funny thing is, Suzy, I have no idea who proposed me for the bloody thing. I just can’t imagine the Chief Justice of the Supreme Co
urt of Canada giving me the old Nihil Obstat. Worries me, actually, being acceptable. Tokenism. Makes me think I’ve lost my edge. Their literary exhibit. Won’t bite. Toothless.”
“Not you, you boozy old sod!”
“Now, now. ‘Suzy, play nicely!’,” chided Forde.
She put one hand over the other under her chin and did contrite little girl.
“But the best part for me, midst all this what passes in Canada for pomp and circumstance, was Sheila, we were looking round the more public rooms in Rideau Hall afterwards and I’d drifted on and I was looking at a nice little landscapey abstraction by Ulysses Comtois and I heard Sheila’s voice calling me.
I turned round and she was standing about ten feet away.
She looked me up and down, suit, damn great snowflake, and she said,
‘Not bad Forde.’
Made my heart turn over.”
“Well, of course it did,” said Suzy. “She adores you.”
Forde nodded slowly.
“So…” said Suzy. “What Alex wants.”
“Go on.”
“Well, contracts, paperback reprints, all that rights stuff, he wants you to handle it. He feels he’s been too long on the sidelines. He wants to get his best work into print again. Really what he wants—he wants you to save what his life’s been about.”
Forde nodded.
“Of course,” he said, “Of course, I’ll try my hardest but I have to be blunt, Suzy. Of course I’ll do everything that can be done, but Alex’s reputation is in decline. Mine, too. We’re what are called ‘midlist’ writers—if we’re even that. ‘Midlist’ means that in the eyes of conglomerates we’re failures. The judgement’s financial, of course. Good equals large number sold. We know the exact opposite’s true.
We’re at the mercy of ‘the media.’ People talk about it as if it exists as an abstract force, but what is ‘the media’? Simply the sum of hacks and flacks who are individually unfit to polish Alex’s shoes.
The populist tide rises!
The world’s persuaded itself that easy’s the new great.
Once it was glory, Suzy. Now it’s mayflies dead in a day.
The cachet Alex and I once had… comic books, Suzy.”