There are people who make a life out of dislocation. Tenancy is all they demand in their refusal to merge with particular neighbourhoods or rooms. But Tom is different. He burrows into the idea of home. I knew this from the beginning, from the first time we met, though I wasn’t able, then, to articulate the thought.
It is not true that people in long marriages dissolve into each other, becoming one being. I touch Tom’s elbow, the sleeve of his tan jacket; he places his long arms around me and his hands cup my breasts in the friendliest possible way. We are two people in a snapshot, but with a little cropping we could each exist on our own. But that’s not what we want. Hold the frame still, contain us, the two of us together, that’s what we ask for. This is all it takes to keep the world from exploding. There’s that tan jacket of his, a windbreaker with its zipper and smooth microfibres, nothing to call attention to itself, the most generic of garments. On the other hand, there are men, the composed, noisy men from Bay Street, who choose bright colours, teal or tangerine, for weekend wear, or else the skins of animals, goats, sheep, and so forth. They are men spangled with epaulettes, toggles, tabs, and insignias, the breezy rapists from the Nautica ads, cool and criminal in their poplins, shellacked with light, but they know they’re in costume, that they’ve made an effort that other men, men like Tom, aren’t forced to make.
My husband has only one childhood complaint: that his mother was a lousy housekeeper. Once a year (maybe) she got around to scrubbing the soap dish in the bathroom. He remembers how the melting block of Palmolive sweated with its own bubbled dirt, an object of such disgust that he refused to touch it. No one, however, noticed his avoidance of soap. This went on for years. No one thought it mattered, that every day his eyes met with soupy slop. He told me this in our early days together, wanting me to understand his fastidiousness about our bathroom arrangements and worrying that I might think he was one of those comically neurotic men you read about in novels. Unless you had a mother like that, you wouldn’t understand. And unless you had been given an alternative glimpse of orderliness, you wouldn’t mind. You needed to know about that silken bar sitting freshly in its little porcelain dish, that such an item was a possibility. Anyone’s childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light, but Tom for some reason has fully recovered from his fear of dirty soap dishes, and nowadays his mother has grown obsessive about household cleanliness and even uses that blue antiseptic water in her toilet.
We were talking about his mother as we made our way between gravestones. Lois Winters, née Maxwell, a widow for twelve years now. She worships her son, Tom, her only child, and adores her three granddaughters. She likes me well enough, I think, but there are great windy gaps between us. She has my books, for instance, all of them inscribed, stacked on her glass-topped coffee table, but she has never read a single one of them. This is something a writer can sense immediately. A wall of numb radar rears up and reveals itself when she hears one of my books mentioned. I understand this refusal of hers perfectly, and the reason for it. It has nothing to do with rejection and everything to do with me being the mother of her grandchildren and her son’s spouse. This arrangement cannot be challenged by my hobbies, my pastimes, my professional life, my passion.
She has changed since Norah went on the street, as though her brain has lingered too long, like a lettuce leaf in oil and vinegar, a slow deterioration. Since she has dinner with us every night—she brings the dessert, something sweet and homemade—we’ve been able to observe her gradual day-by-day withdrawal. There was a time, nevertheless, when she took a lively part in the conversation, asking the girls how they were liking their teachers, how the swim team was doing. Always a nettlesome woman, she had political opinions, rather conservative, it’s true, but opinions nonetheless, and she listened to the radio, kept up with public affairs.
“Where is Norah?” she kept asking. “When is Norah coming home?” Finally Tom told her, making a careful incremental story of it; Norah had dropped out of university, she had parted from her boyfriend, she was pursuing a path to spiritual goodness, which the family couldn’t quite understand, she was detaching herself from the rest of us, sleeping in a hostel, and yes, begging money at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor in downtown Toronto—but everyone held out hopes that she would return to being the Norah we knew and loved, that she would recover from whatever delusion had seized her, that we were doing everything we could for her and that she, as Norah’s grandmother, was not to worry.
Well, of course she is worried about her oldest granddaughter, her best-loved granddaughter, if the truth were declared, her darling Norah. She grew steadily more passive at the dinner table, then silent. In recent weeks, her growing silence has become an uncanny reflection of Norah’s silence, her posture is as defeated as Norah’s. I wonder sometimes if we have all—Tom, Natalie, Chris, Lois—become actors in Norah’s shadow play, if in these last few months we’ve turned wary, guarded, angered, waiting to be given back what we once had, each of us frozen to the bone and consigned to a place where nothing ever changes. Even Pet has slowed down, his dog-smile retriever’s face draped in acquiescence.
But that’s not true for life outside our house. I look around and I see all kinds of changes, some of them astonishing. For one thing, our friends Colin and Marietta Glass are back together again; the last thing we expected. She’s said goodbye to her lover in Alberta. The Glasses have forgiven each other for God only knows what transgressions and smoothed out their differences. It is astonishing, such an emotional reversal. Colin is tender and loving in her presence—I must admit, it’s a joy to see him helping her into her chair at the table—and she, in return, awards him a gaze as soft and uninjured as a young girl’s.
And Chrétien is back in power with a huge majority, though the American election results continue to be stalled. Margaret Atwood did win the Booker Prize. We are going to have a white Christmas, it is guaranteed. Norah has replaced her bedraggled sign with a new one, freshly inked—even this is cheering.
And Cheryl Patterson, the librarian in Orangetown, has married her Bombay dentist, Sam Sondhi. His divorce came through more quickly than expected, and a civil service was held a week ago Saturday, after which we had a reception in our house, a sandwich and champagne lunch for thirty of Cheryl’s friends and our friends too, all in a celebratory mood. Who doesn’t love a wedding! Richer or poorer, better or worse. Tom had fires lit in the living room and the den, and of course there was the Christmas tree in the hall, put up a few days early this year to accommodate Cheryl and Sam’s wedding. The whole house boomed with overflowing spirits. In my long tawny velvet skirt, I passed slices of fruitcake on a silver tray, a tray I only get down from the top cupboard at Christmastime. There was a tiny silver Christmas ornament poked into my chignon, une épingle à cheveux, a gift from Tom some years ago. I was smiling, smiling, as I made my rounds, yes, isn’t it a miracle they found each other, two divorced people, in a place like Orangetown, Ontario, in the great glistening continent of North America. I was smiling and saying: Please, try this fruitcake, my mother-in-law made it, it’s marvellous, an old family recipe. And there was Tom, opening the wide front door to welcome yet another party of guests. He glanced in my direction and smiled broadly. Love of my life. On the buffet table is a salmon, pink and skinned. At certain moments, for no reason—the smell of apple wood burning in the fireplace—I become convinced that everything is going to be all right.
And then suddenly I will be thrown out of the circle of safety, aching all over with pain and feeling a fracture in my cone of consciousness, which is inhabited, every curve of it, by the knowledge (that pale sustenance) that Norah, in the cold and snow of downtown Toronto, has gone as far away as she could go. As was possible to go.
Stop it. Return to the lamplit murmur of now, this minute. Have some fruitcake. There’s coffee in the dining room. I hear the voice in my head saying: careful, be careful.
We only appear to be rooted in
time. Everywhere, if you listen closely, the spitting fuse of the future is crackling. Despite my mood of anxiousness, my novel, Thyme in Bloom, is almost completed. Alicia and Roman have been deconstructing their relationship with articulate arguments and with bad behaviour on both sides. Now and then they eat, drink, and make love, but mostly they systematically destroy what they once had between them, grinding down the core of love with their philosophical arguments so that nothing is left but burnt rice—this from a scene in which they, touchingly, desperately, try to cook a Greek meal in Roman’s apartment. Alicia grows sleek, lubricious, and almost beautiful in her independence. We see a steady accretion in her observations, while Roman reveals an irksome antic side, those striped yellow socks, for instance. His strong chin becomes even stronger, and his sexual appetite more voracious. When he practises on his very expensive trombone, he punches great jagged holes in the air. He thinks aloud, and often, about his relations in Albania with whom he has lost touch, grieving for them, everything they’ve been through; yet what can he do? He went to Tirana in 1986 and tried to make contact, but was discouraged. He almost landed in jail, he was threatened, spat upon, but he loved the goddamn place.
There are two, maybe three chapters to go in Thyme in Bloom. Then the denouement, which will contain a twist that is certain to challenge any reader’s good will, but I’m determined to go through with it. I’m working toward that moment, bristling with invention. How can this be? How can a woman who has lost her daughter and is suffering acute separation anxiety be capable of writing a comic fantasy?
Although it must be said that Mr. Springer, my new editor, does not agree with me about Thyme in Bloom being a comic fantasy. Au contraire.
Whatever
THE SUNSHINE at midmorning was flowing into the kitchen, and the telephone was ringing.
“Hello? May I speak with Ms. Reta Winters, please.”
“This is Reta Winters.”
“Oh, Reta, I am so sorry. I failed to recognize your voice.”
“I have a bit of a cold—”
“It’s Arthur calling. Arthur Springer.”
“Arthur.”
“From New York. From Scribano and—”
“Oh, of course, how are—?”
“I hope you had a happy Christmas. You and your family.”
“Well, yes, yes, we did. We are. And did you—?”
“I do apologize for phoning you at home.”
“At home? That’s quite all right. In fact, this is where I—”
“And I apologize even further for phoning during Christmas week. This is the one time in the year when we should put all business aside and make merriment our first concern.”
“Well, yes—”
“As a matter of fact, Scribano & Lawrence is officially closed until the new year, as per tradition, but I am so excited about your manuscript that I wanted to make immediate contact and I thought to myself that you might have the goodness to forgive me for breaking into the holiday so rudely, and no doubt I’ve phoned at an ungodly hour.”
“Oh, no, we’re actually in the same time zone as—”
“Thyme in Bloom! Where can I begin!”
“Well, I—”
“I finished reading the partial draft last night. I hardly slept. Alicia and Roman were so much in my mind, visceral beings, pressing against my consciousness, all they endured, their personal courage, their sense of their very selves as their insight grew and grew, their interior vision, piercing like a laser, you can imagine my—How I grieved when—and yet marvelled at—I woke up thinking, this is what life is, no one ever promised we wouldn’t suffer as we make our way, our expectations are doomed to disappointment—”
“But, Arthur—”
“And Alicia—her persevering goodness. I told you that last time we spoke, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. I was so pleased. I’m trying to work out what goodness is, in fact, its essence, and—”
“Such goodness of soul, of heart. It’s integral, you don’t even have to remark on it or put little quotes around it. You can see why I had to call you right away. Even if it was Christmas week, even if—”
“But, Arthur—”
“And Roman. That man. Roman, Roman.”
“Yes?”
“Indescribable. The one word a writer must never use, but for us editors, well, we can only think: what an indescribable character! His complexity, I mean.”
“Really?”
“Indescribable! I can’t imagine how we’re going to present him in the flap copy, but we’ll work on it.”
“You do know, Mr. Springer, Arthur, this isn’t the complete manuscript. I’ve still got at least three chapters to finish and even what you saw is just a draft—”
“I do, I do, Reta, I remember our conversation. I know that what I’ve just read is a draft and a partial draft at that. But, and this is what’s so wonderfully uncanny, I know where you’re going with this. Now, don’t, please, misinterpret my words. What I mean is, I know and I don’t know. You haven’t given anything away, you’ve been astonishingly stern and strict with the reader, letting him or her do no more than sniff and conjecture. But the form, and I am speaking of the form in its universal aesthetic sense, is so solidly there, and so is the sense that the form will complete itself in the only way it can.”
“I’m so glad you feel that way—”
“I’m actually phoning you from the office. Mr. Scribano would do somersaults in his grave if he knew the Christmas holiday had been abused, but I had to come in and look up the reviews for My Thyme Is Up. I suppose I could have looked them up on the Internet, but I wanted to feel the weight of them in my hand. And to listen, actually listen, to what the reviewers said at the time. I am quite sure, Reta, that you have read some of them yourself.”
“All of them, I think.”
“Excellent, excellent. I have never found myself in accord with those writers who refuse to read their own reviews. And heed their reviews. It seems to me a more than arrogant position to take. Even though facing the critics is sometimes painful, it is only good sense to know whether or not you have actually connected with the reader. And at what level. And this is what I am anxious to talk to you about, Reta. The level, the tone, the intention of the book.”
“Well, my—”
“And so I’ve read all the reviews now for your first novel. New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera. You had excellent coverage for a first novel, I feel. Truly, I mean it, excellent coverage.”
“Yes, I was surprised at all—”
“I have them here spread out on my desk, and I’ve been sitting here for an hour underlining and circling, and here is the question I have for you, Reta. How did you feel about the books reception?”
“I was pleased. Astonished, really.”
“Good. You feel, then, that the books intention was understood by the critical reader?”
“I…I think so. Yes.”
“What, then, is your intention with this second novel, Thyme in Bloom?”
“You mean, what am I aiming for?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, it’s a sequel. So I suppose my intention, as you call it, is much the same. The same people, the same setting in Wychwood, the continuing problem of—”
“The problem is, Reta, you are writing, now, a pilgrimage. I have always been deeply drawn to the idea of pilgrimage. Always. You have written—and I have not forgotten it is a draft—you have produced a novel about human yearning. Do you know how rare that is? Your previous novel was—and I hope you will forgive me for putting it this way—it was a light romantic comedy about quite ordinary people.”
“I remember one of the reviewers called me a bard of the banal. And this was in an otherwise quite nice review. We really laughed about that.”
“Yes, yes, true. You do see, don’t you, Reta, that there is a problem about presenting your new novel as a sequel.”
“But it is a sequel. There’s Alicia and Roman and their marri
age plans and—”
“Anyway, I’m phoning to see when you can get to New York. Next week if possible.”
“Oh! I can’t possibly do that, go to New York.”
“It’s terribly important that we talk now, the two of us. Before you finish your draft, before you go any further.”
“I’m afraid I can’t leave home at the moment, Arthur. There are family considerations that—”
“I do remember Mr. Scribano saying there were problems, a worrying daughter, but surely you could get away for a day or two.”
“No. It’s not possible.”
“Then I’ll come to you! To Orangetown. Is this place near Montreal? I know Montreal very, very well.”
“It’s near Toronto.”
“Ah. Toronto, yes. I can easily manage Toronto. I’ll get a cab from there to your place of residence.”
“You might want to rent a car.”
“It will take us at least two days, Reta, to go through the manuscript. Is there a hotel in the village of Orangetown?”
“There’s the Orangetown Inn. It’s quite—”
“I’m looking at my calendar, I’ve got it right in front of me. Will January second be all right?”
“Let’s see, is that a Monday? I’ve got the days all mixed up, you know what Christmas week is like. If it’s a Tuesday or Wednesday I can’t possibly—”
“January second. I’ll get the earliest plane available. The Orangetown Inn. Don’t worry, I’ll phone right away and book for two nights, the second and the third. Keep them clear. There’s so much to talk about.”