“Which is—?”
“Which is the pursuit of identity. I-den-ti-ty.”
“Identity can be—”
“Identity is the dominant mystery of our lives, the numinous matter of self, and it can’t help but surrender to its own ironic destiny. Which is this: the self can never be known. This is the calamity of our lives, simply that, which is why Darling Buds is such a profound statement of being. As a book it is un succès d’estime, I admit. That’s a French expression. It means it—”
“Yes, I know.”
“Not a bestseller, true. A nation of TV gluttons doesn’t want to take art seriously, not while fast-food fare is available. But I am serious, Reta. I want you to know that I, your editor, care deeply about literature and its paramount statement. And I believe you do, too. In fact, I know you do.”
“Perhaps you will let me refill that glass.”
“A splendid wine. You see—let me explain—I’ll lay it out for you. Scribano & Lawrence—and I am happy to make this statement—we don’t need to publish mega-buck books.”
“But surely you have to keep an eye on a book’s marketability and the readers who—”
“We happen to be in a very nice position at the moment. You’ve heard of John Lord Morgan? And Wilfred Laranzo?”
“Vaguely, but I haven’t actually—”
“They’re both ours. Morgan writes courtroom drama. Laranzo does interplanetary fantasy. We’re glad to have them on our list. They make huge bucks, bucks enough to keep the rest of our writers viable. Our serious literary writers. Our gilt-edged writers.”
“You’re saying that—”
“I’m saying, Reta, that we’re in the market for quality fiction.”
“As opposed to—”
“As opposed to popular fiction.”
“Oh.”
“We want to publish your manuscript. We stand ready to do that. I don’t want to confuse you on that point—”
“But—”
“But you must realize that Thyme in Bloom could be one of those signal books of our time. The possibility is there. Your manuscript could become a monument. Everything is in place, and with a mere two or three shifts of perspective you could move from a popular novel to a work of art.”
“Gilt-edged.”
“Right. I knew you’d key right in. You’re an intelligent woman, after all, and this manuscript is so close to greatness that it would be a tragedy not to turn it around. We have that chance, Reta. That’s why I’ve come all the way up here to the north. To tell you that your new novel is not in the same company as your first book. My Thyme Is Up was a completely other enterprise.”
“It did win the Offenden Prize.”
“Exactly.”
“But the new book is a sequel to that book.”
“That’s the first thing we can turn around. Maybe I will have a little more wine. Hmm, beautiful. Did you know that a sequel, on average, only makes two-thirds the money that the original has earned?”
“But I thought you said money wasn’t an issue—”
“It’s not. And you did very well with your first novel. Not millions, to be sure, but what we call a very decent run. And the paperback did fairly well too. But your current work is of a different magnitude altogether. This manuscript, these pages before us, are about the central moral position of the contemporary world. I think it is exceptionally important that we not present this with the title you have suggested, Thyme in Bloom. Personally, I prefer Bloom on its own.”
“Just—Bloom?”
“What a word that is. Suggestive but not literal. And you can see how it gestures toward the Bloom of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, that great Everyman.”
“But my name is associated with—”
“Associated with light fiction. This is why, in my thinking over the last two weeks, I’ve come to favour a pseudonym. The problem is to find the right one. Now what was your name before you married, Reta? And do you have a middle name?”
“Reta Ruth Summers.”
“Wonderful, I love Summers. It fits perfectly with Bloom, doesn’t it? Bloomsday, et cetera. The month of June. There’s a kind of preternatural blood hyphen there, if we can just pin it down. We, Scribano & Lawrence, could present you as R. R. Summers. I like it. It sounds solid. Yet fresh. A new writer, a new discovery: R. R. Summers.”
“Using initials, though, might make it sound like, you know, that I’m a male writer.”
“Does it matter? You’re dealing with universal themes. You’ve gone beyond the gendered world.”
“But this book—well, Alicia is thinking quite hard about gender, at least in her own rather spacey way.”
“Spacey, hmm. That’s true, that’s absolutely true, but even at this stage we can put a kind of torque on the book and move it toward the universal. I have a number of ideas that I want to put before you, Reta. The first is—”
“You make it sound as though we’ll be rewriting the whole book.”
“Just tweaking, that’s all. Everything is here, Reta. Everything is beautifully here.”
“I had thought—I’ve been thinking that the book was—almost done. I was going to write the concluding scene after—”
“Don’t, please don’t. Don’t touch it. Not until we’ve discussed a few editorial ideas. I beg of you. We can make this one of the great books of the new century.”
“But I was trying to—”
“You were trying to write a light comic novel. But you’ve done something quite other. You’ve made a literary statement, something for future generations of readers, and it would be a catastrophe if you now—”
“What would we have to do?”
“I’ve made a list of things. Here we go. First, there’s the matter of Roman. His role needs enlarging. His interiority. His desire to make a pilgrimage to the land of his fathers. I see this as quite central to the novel.”
“But Alicia is really the focus—I thought you—well, you said you admired her for her goodness. You said that on the phone, remember?”
“Goodness but not greatness. Who said that?”
“Danielle Westerman.”
“Really? I haven’t read the old girl, but I know Mr. Scribano gave her a helping hand at one time.”
“She’s eighty-five. She’s a very well recognized writer. She really is extremely—”
“And I wondered if you would mind terribly making Roman a violinist rather than a trombonist. A violin sounds more serious, as an instrument, I mean, and I don’t think a small thing like that would involve a compromise of your original—”
“Oh, I don’t think I could do that—”
“You’re thinking that he was a trombonist in the first book and so he must remain a trombonist. But if we get ourselves out of the sequel state of thinking, Reta, he can be anything. He could even be the conductor of the orchestra. Or a composer/performer.”
“And Wychwood City—”
“Could easily be re-sited in New York. Or Boston. Chicago? Well, maybe Chicago. Even Toronto, though that would limit its readership—”
“Oh, I don’t think so, not anymore.”
“He suddenly, in mid-life, wants more. He yearns for more.”
“Who?”
“Roman.”
“Oh.”
“I do think we might try to underplay some of the farcical scenes, though they are quite well done. As the no-longer-quotable Woody Allen once put it, the writers of comedy are always asked to sit at the children’s table.”
“But I can’t see Roman as a serious—”
“His parents were immigrants. They sacrificed their language, their cultural roots. Think of that. He somehow got educated, became a musician. He is wonderfully attractive to women, that hair of his, that very physical body, and his ever active brain. His first marriage was a washout, and then he met Alicia, who works in, of all things, the world of fashion. Everything he despises. The marriage must not happen.”
“I absolutely agree with that,
the marriage must not happen, but—”
“I am so glad you are in accord with me there.”
“But, really, it is Alicia who sees that—”
“She cannot understand his need to reconnect with his family, his heritage. His real love, of course, is Sylvia Woodall, Sylvia the bassoon player. I recognized what you were up to there, the minute she walked onto the page. Sylvia and her outrageous spirit. She responds to Romans need. That need drills straight through the man’s soul. I am talking about Roman being the moral centre of this book, and Alicia, for all her charms, is not capable of that role, surely you can see that. She writes fashion articles. She talks to her cat. She does yoga. She makes rice casseroles.”
“It’s because she’s a woman.”
“That’s not an issue at all. Surely you—”
“But it is the issue.”
“She is unable to make a claim to—She is undisciplined in her—She can’t focus the way Roman—She changes her mind about—She lacks—A reader, the serious reader that I have in mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a serious work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speaking.”
“Because she’s a woman.”
“Not at all, not at all.”
“Because she’s a woman.”
As
BECAUSE SHE’S A WOMAN,” I said, and at that moment three things happened more or less simultaneously. Arthur Springer lifted his arm in polite protest, and in so doing, knocked over the bottle on the coffee table, drenching the morning newspaper with red wine—an almost holy spreading stain, though luckily there wasn’t much left—and scaring Pet out of his skin, so that he skittered backwards and sideways on the hardwood floor, landing in a corner behind the little glass table, where he lay, panting and shuddering with his face buried in his paws.
At that moment Natalie and Chris came in through the front door. They were loud and noisy, more big-footed than usual it seemed to me, scrambling out of their boots and throwing their books onto the hall floor. “Kronk City,” I heard Chris shouting, and then the two of them were laughing themselves sick over something to do with our neighbour, Willow Halliday, who had kindly driven them home when they’d missed the school bus and when Tom failed to show up.
I was about to introduce them to Arthur Springer when I was distracted by the ringing of the telephone. I left Arthur to mop up the spilled wine with his handkerchief—a white linen handkerchief, I noticed out of the corner of my consciousness, you don’t see people with real handkerchiefs very often. Pet followed, right at my heels, into the kitchen, and pressed his quaking side against my leg.
It was Tom on the phone. “Where are you?” I said.
“There’s nothing to worry about, everything’s fine.” He said this so quickly that I knew something was terribly wrong.
“But—?” I sank into a chair.
“But it’s Norah, she has pneumonia, she’s going to be fine, she’s sleeping right now, but—”
“Where is she?” I couldn’t get my breath out.
“In Toronto General. They’re taking excellent care of her and she’s responding beautifully.”
“I’ll come right away.” I was thinking fast. “It’ll take me an hour.”
“I’ll be waiting in her room. It’s 434, the West Wing. Unfortunately, there were no single rooms available—”
That doesn’t matter, that doesn’t matter.
“Drive carefully,” he said sharply.
“Put your coats back on,” I said to the girls, speaking with the same sharpness. “Norah’s in the hospital with pneumonia. Your father’s with her right now.”
To Arthur Springer I said—I’m not quite sure what I said. Something about an emergency. I would have to leave at once. (Already I had my coat on and was scrambling for my boots.) I uttered something hurried and hostessy into his ear, something like: stay as long as you like, make yourself at home, there’s food in the fridge, pasta, that white bowl with the plastic wrap on it, it just needs heating up, there’s more wine in the cupboard, plenty of firewood, I have no idea when we’ll be back.
I wasn’t worried about him, not one bit. We were on the road in no time, Christine in the back seat, Natalie sitting beside me, up front. We drove as fast as I dared on the dark icy road, first into Orangetown and out the other end, then onto the highway with its uneven glare, heading south. The pink haze that was the city of Toronto lay before us in the distance. The traffic was going to be heavy at this hour. We were mostly silent, the three of us. We never thought about Mr. Springer, we never considered his comfort or convenience for one minute. We forgot Mr. Springer completely; we forgot my mother-in-law too, and only found out later what became of them.
He did make himself at home. He did open another bottle of wine. I keep the corkscrew in an unlikely spot in the dining room, behind a beautiful piece of local pottery, but he found it nevertheless. Then he must have looked around for the television. It was six o’clock, time for the Lehrer NewsHour. There! He found the TV, in the den. And there was the remote, where it almost always is—on the little side table. He probably seeded down in the big corduroy wing chair with his glass of wine and thought: My God. Why am I here? How on earth did I get to this place?
Very gradually he became aware of someone knocking persistently at the back door. He wasn’t familiar with the house, and so it took him a little while to figure out where the knocking was coming from. Pet, no doubt, was still huddled in the kitchen, recovering from the clunk of the wine bottle and the sense of there being a stranger in the house.
It was Lois, with a dish of bread pudding in her hands, one of her rectangular Pyrex casseroles from fifty years ago.
She pushed her way into the warm house, explaining who she was, that she had awaited the usual signal that dinner was ready, the closing of the red curtains, and then she grew worried and thought she’d come over to investigate. She could see the flicker of the TV, so she knew someone was at home. She’d phoned, but there was no answer. She knew, of course, that a guest was expected to dinner, that’s why she’d made a larger than usual dessert. She hoped he liked bread pudding.
Mr. Springer explained that he had had the volume turned up rather loudly. He also explained who he was and why he was in the house and where the rest of us had gone. He was all apologies. He hadn’t heard the phone ringing. He was so sorry. But, he exclaimed, it was an unexpected pleasure to meet Reta’s mother.
Mother-in-law, she corrected him. Reta was married to her son, Tom. Well, sort of married.
Oh.
Norah and pneumonia, she mused aloud. Well! Pneumonia was once a serious illness, but now it was more a matter of antibiotics and people up and about in no time. Still, it was gravely worrying.
Mr. Springer was sure Norah would be fine.
Lois mumbled something about Norah not being fine, that she hadn’t been fine for some time, this first and dearest granddaughter. Then she caught sight of Pet. The poor creature. Had he been fed?
Mr. Springer was so sorry, he hadn’t thought about the dog, he didn’t exactly know what to do. He wasn’t very good with animals, they seem frightened of him, and he had, quite frankly, forgotten the dog was in the house.
Like all goldens, Pet is greedy. He consumes supper with great joy and afterwards presents a mighty belch. I’ll just get him looked after, Lois said, hanging up her coat and taking charge. Pet was used to being fed at around six-thirty, then he liked to be let out for a bit, he never strayed off the property, he had a keen sense of where he belonged.
Which is more than most of us have, Mr. Springer responded. He said this philosophically.
Yes, Lois agreed. Yes, indeed. Then she suggested that they go ahead and have a bite to eat. There was no telling how long Reta and the girls would be gone.
Mr. Springer remembered something about pasta in the fridge. He hadn’t taken in the details. Everything had happened
in such a rush.
Lois busied herself with warming up the pasta in the microwave and she urged Mr. Springer to go back to the TV. She would have the meal ready in two shakes.
He hoped he could help her. He had been watching the news and there was nothing interesting at all. Now and then, not often, there comes a day when nothing seems to happen.
Yes. Lois certainly agreed with him on that topic.
It’s like God’s decided to give us a day off, Mr. Springer said, or something to that effect.
Lois, taking in his smooth, strong face, explained how she could always tell from the first news item. If it was about new safety standards for hockey helmets, that was an indication that nothing terrible had happened. No bombs or murders or riots or fires.
I love those blank days, said Mr. Springer.
So do I.
They’re so rare.
Lois suggested they set the table in the kitchen, since there were only two of them.
An excellent idea. Mr. Springer insisted on helping. If Lois would just show him where the knives and forks were kept—
She dimmed the lights slightly. She explained, as she served out the pasta onto two heated plates—she was a genius at heating plates—that Reta had prepared her usual artichoke dish with black olives and chunks of tomato and asiago cheese. Reta always made the artichoke dish when she wasn’t sure if people were going to be vegetarians or not. It was safe. Unless they happened to be those people who don’t eat cheese, vegans they were called, but there weren’t too many of them, thank heaven.
Mr. Springer poured himself another glass of wine, but first he poured one for Lois, asking her with a lift of an eyebrow if she would care for a bit. She nodded, and then the two of them sat down, at the same instant, as though a gong had sounded.
And now, said Mr. Springer, leaning over his steaming plate of pasta: Tell me all about yourself, Lois.