Well, he is a doctor. The idea of diagnosis and healing comes naturally to him, a rhythmic arc of cause and effect that has its own built-in satisfactions, and how enviable, to me, this state of mind is. So simple, so clean. I wish now that I had made Roman a doctor rather than a trombonist, but it’s too late. I can’t see him without that flash of brass in his arms and his mouth pumping away, and besides, he was a trombonist in the previous novel and I can’t arbitrarily send him off for four years of medical school, never mind pre-med and a disposition that begins at birth.
I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work, engaged with their work, the architect seen in a state of concentration at the drafting table, the dancer thinking each step as it’s performed, the computer programmer tracing a path between information and access. Emma Allen believes that the great joy of detective fiction is watching the working hero being busy every minute with work; work in crime novels is always in view, work is the whole point.
I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local café, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at her neck, wander up a grassy hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner—what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him work.
I love work. When I meet people I always want to ask them what they do, but Lynn Kelly tells me this is no longer an allowable conversational probe. There are too many people who are unemployed or else ashamed of what they do, assembly work in condom factories, for example, or exterminating cockroaches. Work can be ugly. Work is a sensitive issue. The last time I asked a woman what she “did”—this was at a Christmas party a couple of weeks ago—she gave me a look and said, “I don’t do anything.” Then she intensified her glare and said, “And I don’t do courses either.” (When the time comes for my lobotomy this is one of several social incidents I plan to remove.)
But why did I make Roman a trombonist in the first place if I knew nothing about trombones? Because I was sitting in my little box room, stuck on a paragraph in an early chapter, and idly springing a French paper clip back and forth in my fingers. When we were in France—admittedly this is an affectation—I brought back a large box of paper clips, which are pointed at one end instead of rounded. They look different from our North American paper clips, they look chic, they look French. And they’re known to the French, who love to press endearments on objects, as trombones. This was how Roman acquired his vocation in the world of brass, through an accident of association, because I, the stalled writer of a first novel, happened one afternoon to be twisting un petit trombone in my hands and thinking about giving my male character some real work to do.
Horst Raasch, Romans hero and teacher, claimed that the trombone should strive for a sound not unlike the cello, coming out in long slow heartbeats. Raasch taught him to attack the tone softly but clearly, keeping the tone stands steady. “Tonal beauty” was the ultimate goal. Roman began serious study at fourteen with a Kruspe Modell Weschke—which his family could scarcely afford; his grandfather saved coins in a pickle jar in order to purchase this instrument. The Sachse Concerto was chosen—Roman can’t remember why—for his mid-term exam, and he succeeded brilliantly. He loved the idea of being brilliant, and began to practise more and more so that he could be brilliant all the time. He learned, eventually, to perform with exactitude, the eighths, triplets, sixteenth, and thirty-second notes. He developed an excellent high register. On off-hours he stumbled into jazz: “Sleepy Lagoon,” “Stardust,” “I’m Getting Sentimental over You,” but he had to hide that side of himself from purists. He was good, more than good, as his appointment to the Wychwood Symphony confirms.
The trombone is a difficult instrument to master, since the tolerance between the inner and outer slides is so precise that lubrication is needed. At one time Pond’s cold cream was the chosen lube, but recently there have been tailored-to-the-need products such as silicone drops, applied weekly and augmented by a creamy soapy liquid. Most trombonists also need an occasional squirt of water from an atomizer, keeping the mechanism moist and slippery. The F-attachment has, needless to say, made an immense difference to symphony trombonists, not least because it adds a few notes to the bottom range—and Roman loves the bottom range. He knows how fortunate he is to be employed by an eminent orchestra, but his feet are itchy these days, and his “differences” with Sylvia Woodall, the bassoonist, are coming to a head; he loathes the woman. In addition, he feels a longing to visit Albania, the land of his forefathers.
As a novelist, I am somewhat surprised by the complexity of Romans vocation and have to ask myself, every day, how I got into such complexity.
Alicia I put to work at an unnamed fashion magazine, and this, too, I regret. My idea of magazine ambiance comes from TV or films. I have no idea what the fashion-magazine workplace looks like or how magazine people interact. I like to think that Alicia sees through the fraud of fashion or that she raises fashion to the level of style and style to the level of imprimatur, all of it stacked neatly under the elegant and sensible rubric of being. I pretend, when she writes about gloves or handbags or shoes, that she is looking at the history or the philosophic of these objects. She is amused by them, but respectful; otherwise she would, out of disgust, enrol at Wychwood University and do a doctorate in, say, Chinese women’s poetry in the second half of the eighteenth century. But a work shift of that order is cataclysmic, and I doubt my ability to make the change plausible to readers who are quite happy to linger in the sleek, perfumed boardroom and corridors of X Magazine. Something would have to trigger the impulse, something traumatic to make loyal, hardworking, serious, sincere Alicia abandon the fashion world for academe. And then she would have to write a thesis, and I would become a woman writing about a woman writing about women writing, and that would lead straight to an echo chamber of infinite regress in company with the little Dutch girl, the girl on the bathroom cleanser, the vision multiplied, but in receding perspective. No.
The problem is, I’m not sure I believe in the thunderclap of trauma. A stubborn screen of common sense keeps getting in my way and cancelling the filigree of fine-spun theory. Isn’t our species smarter than that? Somewhere, wired into our brains, there must exist a little bean-shaped nerve cluster that registers the relative proportion of events and separates the exceptional experience that we can shrug off simply because it is exceptional from the slow, steady accumulation of incremental knowledge, which is what really delivers us to the brink, one small injury bleeding into another until the whole system tips over.
I don’t actually say this aloud to Tom as he delves into the subject of trauma, hoping to rescue or at least understand Norah by tracking down that “thing” that leapt out at her last spring and knocked her out of her life. I don’t want to discourage his pursuit, which, even if it leads nowhere, at least affords him a distraction. As long as he finds parallel examples, he can believe. He is certain his own mother, for instance, has been traumatized by Norah’s stance. He suspects Da
nielle Westerman suffers from some long ago childhood trauma, that she, at eighty-five, still reverberates with an unrecognized shame or loss or sorrow of a highly specific sort.
Because Tom is a man, because I love him dearly, I haven’t told him what I believe: that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang. That’s the problem.
This cry is overstated; I’m an editor, after all, and recognize purple ink when I see it. The sentiment is excessive, blowsy, loose, womanish. But I am willing to blurt it all out, if only to myself. Blurting is a form of bravery. I’m just catching on to that fact. Arriving late, as always.
Whence
January 10, 2001
Dear Peter (“Pepe”) Harding:
So! You’ve died. I read your obituary this morning in the Globe and Mail, while sitting in a sunny corner of my living room; you don’t even want to know what it’s like outside today; it’s so bad the weather report on the radio broke into poetry and called what we’re experiencing “bitter cold,” which sounds like a phrase from an ancient Anglo-Saxon epic. There’s a bitter wind, too, meaner than a junkyard dog, as the old song has it.
Years ago I belonged to a small writing group, and the leader of our group, a woman called Gwen Reidman, advised us to read obituaries because they carry, like genes packed tight in their separate chromosomes, tiny kernels of narrative. These little yelps of activity—Gwen always referred to them as putty—are so personal and authentic and odd that they are able to reinforce the thin tissue of predictable fiction and bend it into unlikely shapes. I recently read an obit, for instance, of an elderly deceased woman who had been the 1937 lacrosse champion of Manitoba. Think of it: this was a woman who carried her triumph through the years of World War II, through the riotous sixties, through the long leadership era of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, all the way into the late nineties, when her grandchildren acquired—I am guessing—a computer with access to the Internet, where they found, after some minutes of searching, a number of Web pages devoted to the nearly extinct game of lacrosse—and a mention of a name, their grandmother’s name, it was astonishing!—that name was still blinking out there in the detritus of time, a champions name, a victor.
I was sorry to read that you have struggled so long with your cancer, but “bravely,” as the report says, all the way to the end. What an interesting life you’ve led. I’m sure you didn’t dream growing up on a hardscrabble Saskatchewan farm that you would be awarded the Douglas McGregor Scholarship and end up in Toronto, a beloved teacher at the very private and elite Upper Canada College, and that you would always give your “utmost” to your students, so that when you retired in 1975 they got together and held a roast at Hart House, an event of such warmth and tribute that it is still talked about today. Kaye, your wife, will miss you, as will your children, Gayle and Ian, and your three grandchildren, and your old colleagues who visited you in hospital, sitting upright in those stiff, steel hospital chairs.
You were comforted in your last days, the obituary notice concludes, by that pile of books on your bedside table. You would not be parted from them. Mark Twain, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Leonard Cohen—their texts constituted for you an “entire universe.” Another “entire universe” reached you through the earphones provided by the hospice and for which your family gives thanks: Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart; they sang you off to your death.
I am going through some bleak days, Mr. Harding, Pepe. (Difficult teenagers and so on, which you will know something about from your teaching years and from your own family.) I, too, am hungry for the comfort of the “entire universe,” but I don’t know how to assemble it and neither does the oldest of my children, a daughter. I sense something incomplete about the whole arrangement, like a bronze casting that’s split open in the foundry, an artifact destined by some invisible flaw to break apart. Also, I’m frightened that I’m missing something, that Norah is missing something.
Goodbye, rest in peace. Go well, as they say in Swaziland, where my friend Sally Bachelli spent a year teaching village women to make dresses for themselves. Four-hour dresses, they were called; that’s how long it took to make a dress without a sewing machine, Sally’s own design.
I grieve for you too.
Rita Hayworth
Orange Blossom City
Forthwith
RETA!”
“Arthur.”
“I hope I’m not too terribly late. Traffic was a nightmare, and then the taxi got lost, thinking it was Orangeville I wanted, not Orangetown. It seems there’s a great difference.”
“About fifteen miles, it’s awfully confusing, but do come in out of the cold. Here, let me take your coat. I thought you’d be older somehow.”
“Thirty-nine. And you’re forty-four—I looked it up in the clipping file.”
“Almost contemporaries. But not quite.”
“What a heavenly house. Wood smoke, I can smell wood smoke. Ah, and there is the fire, the source of that heavenly aroma.”
“I thought we could sit—”
“There’s nothing like a wood fire. Crackling away. In New York only the fortunate few have access to—And the price of firewood! Ten dollars for four little sticks, of course that’s for very, very good firewood, hickory—What a splendid room this is, Reta—these lovely windows—Good God, it’s already getting dark—not even four-thirty—of course, you’re much further north—that would make the difference.”
“Would you like some coffee? I’ve just—”
“Coffee, hmm.”
“Or, since you’ve just got out of a cold taxi—maybe—it’s early, but maybe you’d like a glass of red wine.”
“I wouldn’t want you to open a bottle just for me.”
“I’m sure we have one open. I’ll just—”
“So this is where you work.”
“Well, not in this actual room. This is the living room. I have a little spot on the third floor that I—”
“Oh my!”
“I hope you’re not allergic to dogs.”
“No, I was just—just taken by surprise.”
“He’s entirely harmless, aren’t you, Pet—with an extremely obedient nature, though it took forever to get him housetrained. That’s what we call him. Pet.”
“And your family? They’re here at the moment.”
“The girls will be home in an hour or so. They’ve got swimming after school today. And my husband, Tom, he’ll be coming soon. We’re hoping you can stay to dinner, just a simple—”
“I’d be delighted. Honoured to be welcomed so warmly. I don’t want to be a nuisance but—this view with the fading light, that hint of rose in the air behind the trees, it must be a source of calm and, well—I do hate the word inspiration, it’s grown to be such a cliché, but in this case I feel I can believe in such a thing, that living here, in such peace, these oaks and maples, the pace of each day quietly asserting itself—ah, thank you so much—the seasons rolling along—Hmm—a lovely light red, it’s never too early in the afternoon for a red like this. Let me propose a toast to the new manuscript—to Alicia and Roman!—and now, tell me, how is it coming?”
“I printed it out this morning. This is it, or rather, most of it.”
“Let me see. Hmm. The heft itself is most impressive—three hundred pages—oh my, Reta, you’ve added quite a bit since I read it in December. Quite a bit,”
“I still have a hundred things to do. Some patching and poking. And the final chapter.”
??
?Ah yes, the final chapter. The all-important final chapter.”
“The most difficult chapter in a way.”
“I absolutely agree. It’s critical. What is a novelist to do? Provide closure for the reader? Or open the narrative to the ether?”
“You mean—”
“I think of the final chapter as the kiln. You’ve made the pot, Reta, the clay is still malleable, but the ending will harden your words into something enduring and beautiful. Or else beautiful and ethereal.”
“What an interesting thought. I was just thinking the other day about the way a bronze casting sometimes breaks unexpectedly in the forge. And now you mention pots in the Kiln—”
“I meant it as a metaphor.”
“So did I.”
“I knew we were kindred spirits, Reta. Though I should tell you I am in favour, in your particular case, of not offering closure. There is a danger, you see, that you might trivialize Romans search for identity, which is ongoing, a forever kind of thing.”
“Can I give you a little more wine?”
“With pleasure. Lovely and dry, this red, just the thing for our first face-to-face meeting. The sort of meeting that could be difficult.”
“I do want you to know, Mr. Springer, that I am completely open to editing suggestions.”
“Arthur, please. That’s wonderful to know, that you don’t object to the editorial hand. I understand Mr. Scribano did not really edit My Thyme Is Up. He was the editor, of course, nominally, but he did very little, my sources tell me, in the way of reshaping the work.”
“He did ask me to break one very long paragraph into two, and I thought that was an excellent suggestion. I was happy to—”
“I believe I told you on the phone that I like to have a much more hands-on approach with my authors. For their sake. And for Scribano & Lawrence. What we both want, editor as well as writer, is the very best book possible, wouldn’t you agree, Reta? Have you read Darling Buds? For me that book, which I am proud to have worked on, is an example of a comic novel that never for a moment loses its investment of concern with its central image.”