Losing shepherd, p.23
Losing Shepherd, page 23
“It is.”
“Gordon.”
“It is.”
“You have to … you have to, or else you’ll be so unhappy, or else you’ll betray yourself, or else you’ll just keep on like this, weakening so badly, punishing yourself more than you deserve to be punished. You have to because I love you so much and you know it.”
“That’s not what you meant.”
“That’s your story. It’s not the story I’m telling. Your story, Gordon, and if you’ve been carrying it all this time, retelling it to yourself, well, that does explain some things. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because you’ve always done it, haven’t you? You make up stories. Some of them you write down, and some of them you just fit us into, don’t you?”
“Like what?”
“Like the story of your beautiful, distant wife. I know that one, Gordon. You were telling that one from the beginning, and I let you because it was flattering to be thought of that way, and your story of our miraculous sons, Gavin so sensitive, Leo so mature and gifted. They never needed to be that to be miracles, you know. But I colluded there too. I was happy to be part of that story. You tell it so well that it becomes real and it’s exciting to enter into it.
“No! Don’t say anything. Yes, I know you’d say that is reality. I can hear you. I could create an entire Gordon Bridge speech if I had to—reality is narrative, narrative creates reality, blah blah blah. Blah blah fucking blah. I’m not impressed, okay? Take some responsibility. You’re the author. They’re your stories. Quit blaming other people when they don’t turn out the way you want. Quit using them as excuses when you don’t behave as you should. Be a better goddamned father.”
“I will.”
“Tell a better story.”
“I’ll try.”
50
Let us compare mythologies, mine and Jessica’s. I’m not sure I’m more of a storyteller than anybody else. I’m also not sure that being a novelist gives me more responsibility. We can’t ever really see the stories we’re telling, and that’s as true for novelists as it is for anybody else. If we think we can see that stuff, all we’ve done is create a new story.
I know, that’s exactly the kind of Gordon Bridge talk that Jessica said she could reproduce if she tried. I don’t doubt her. But Jessica is as beautiful as I’ve said, Gavin as sensitive, Leo as bright. I’m sticking to my story. The threat? Let me ponder.
I broke my promise to Leo and Gavin. Right away would have been … right away: that night, maybe the next morning at the latest. But I needed time, and I needed a way forward. What could I say to Taylor that would compel him, draw him along?
I spent a couple of afternoon hours revolving in the Cloud Nine lounge, with Gavin’s slip case, beyond words beautiful, there on the table for my adoration.
Rainy downtown; herbal tea; creamy, jewelled slipcase; rainy Point Grey; other side of the slip case; trace the colours with my index finger; more tea; no more boozy cloud-forest nostalgia; 360 sober degrees of grey, rain, Vancouver.
The precipitating incident, the answer to the question of how to begin: I learned of it after descending to my room, when I turned on the CBC for the news. I followed up with online reports, the first obituaries.
I’m holding books in my hands, I’m reading stories, I’m discovering worlds … of sentences, places. But she’s gone.
His email address was on his author website. I intended my hands steady, wrote:
Dear Taylor,
I just now learned that Mavis Gallant has died.
Please, see me. Name a time and place.
Gordon
What then? He might not check email for hours, might not respond for days, or at all. What to do with my time? Email Leo and Gavin to let them know I’ve made the move? No, terrible idea, pathetic, to announce an inch of progress as if I deserved admiration for it. Same for telling Trudy. So … what?
The right choice emerged, a relief. I’d like it if you could feel good for me here—I know that at this point in the narrative I’m not winning warm support. How to fill the time? What story do I tell now? Open it, Gordon.
Open the document.
I continued. You have the proof in your hands. I picked up right where I’d stopped many unproductive months ago. You remember—back when I left Vancouver, not long after Mum died. I launched the new section, following my theft from the end of Gatsby.
I wrote,
“Gordon.”
“Noreen.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“I’m so glad you think so.”
And on. I pushed ahead, determined, not inspired, a way not to compose responses to Jessica in my head, a way not to fret about Taylor while awaiting his answer. Also, a way not to brood on Mavis Gallant dying poor in Paris. (What? Poverty? Mavis Gallant? Why didn’t I know? I could have signed a cheque. I could have helped. I could have … really, I could have justified my life.)
The first chapter of the new section, this section, I got all of it done that afternoon-evening, uninterrupted, right up to Noreen again: “You’re going to have to track him down. I’m sorry, Gordon, but you just have to. You have to see him. Then you write about it. Then you’re finished.”
Confident—that is, nervous but confident, as though science fiction-wise this chunk of past telling will generate the energy to charge some present result—I check my email, first time since I’ve begun. And, voilà: Taylor.
All right. Tomorrow. The Art Gallery again. 11:00.
Delay could have been good for memoir tension building, but I was happy to let that go. An evening and early morning wait was long enough. What to do till then?
Write on, the recollection of my conversation with Leo and his stuffed animals, Dilly and Miss George, no idea what place it takes in the memoir, then the journey back to Brooklyn and the panicked, juvenile, nightmare fantasy—“Trudy had not returned from Trinidad”—and then, recognize the obvious connection between the two episodes, flip the order and edit. Another chapter done. I’m a distance away still, but I’m coming up to it, not falling comically behind, but seriously catching up one more time to the present. To Taylor.
51
Jittery, some kind of pressure on my eyeballs, I headed out, then I stopped at the elevator, returned, wrapped up Gavin’s slipcase and put it in my backpack, and then off once more.
I arrived at the café in plenty of time, but Taylor had already commanded a seat at the back, facing out, tall, surveying, still, not haughty but a gaze that managed to be direct and withdrawn at the same time … withholding.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Thanks for seeing me.”
Nod.
He had a salad on a plate in front of him, close to finished. I looked at it, back at him, he nodded again, and he emphasized the point, eating a forkful, spinach and mushroom.
“I’m sorry, Taylor.”
“Yes.”
“I read a bio of Mordecai Richler a few years back. On his deathbed he got a note from Brian Moore. He wept. They’d been tight friends, intimates, and then they weren’t. Something happened. Richler wept because they’d blown it. He’d blown it. Decades of friendship lost.”
“I read it. What do you want from me?”
“Did you know that Mavis Gallant was poor? I learned about it yesterday.”
“I didn’t know. I’m not here to grieve for Mavis Gallant with you.”
“Mind if I get a coffee?”
“Go ahead.”
I had no plan. I got my decaf and returned to the table. Taylor had finished his salad.
Sorrow, regret, confusion, pain, confusion, guilt, guilt, heaps of it, and guilt’s old partner—anger: take a sip of coffee.
“I just … let me show you.”
I unwrapped it. “Gavin gave the slipcase to me, yesterday, for my birthday.”
Taylor looked at it, dull eyes.
“He made the paper himself.”
He put his hands to his head, face downward, then looked up at me. “Gordon,” he said, frustrated. Okay. The object, sacred or not, would do nothing. Talk, then. Launch. I wrapped the parcel up and restored it to its place in the pack.
“I want to understand something. This could sound like an accusation, but it isn’t one. I did a terrible thing. I apologized, many times. Why wasn’t that enough, not to make things right, but to communicate, at least? Why wasn’t it enough so we could try? I did a terrible thing. Lots have done worse and then made efforts. Yvonne told me. She told me—”
“I couldn’t eat.”
“Taylor …”
He held up one hand and glanced at the ceiling. At me. Then, gaze resting on his empty plate, hands on either side holding it by the rim, as though to steady it: “Not being able to eat embarrassed me. It felt theatrical. Histrionic. And it really worried Yvonne.”
“No kidding.”
He lifted a hand and waved it a bit before grabbing the plate again—spare him the understanding interruptions. He lifted the same hand once more, rubbed his forehead, yet again gripped the plate.
“It took me a bit to understand. I didn’t have an upset stomach. When I tried to eat, the sensation simply …
“It’s easier if I take this from a different angle. I read the review. It startled me. It took some time to realize what startled me. I didn’t know you.”
He shifted the plate, spun it slowly, a quarter turn, a dab of spinach near the rim moving from noon to three.
“You were not who I’d thought. You were my closest friend, obviously, by far, and you were not who I’d thought, and our friendship, in that case ...
“Yvonne has a friend, a woman—you don’t know her. Her husband came out. He left her for a man.
“She fell apart. Her husband wasn’t the person she’d thought. Their marriage wasn’t what she thought. Still, why fall apart?
“There’s not much of a deduction left. Just another small step. You know how this goes, Gordon. Who are we? What happens when the relations in which we’re enmeshed … when the relations that shape us and make us get overturned? What happens, in other words, when we discover that we are not who we are?
“Gordon Bridge. It turns out that Gordon Bridge is the writer of a dishonest, subtly vicious review. That’s who he is. Not who I thought! No! Nothing like that! Our friendship … obviously, obviously it’s not what I thought. It’s not even … it’s not friendship, is it? Is it?
“No. And so, and so, I am not who I thought. Which leaves me a little problem. A problem. Who the hell am I?
“I thought I was Gordon Bridge’s friend. That’s who I believed I was. The fundamental me. You were so much the stronger of us, the leader, even when I’d been the first to publish, God, how I’d relied on you.
“I’d take a bite of food, and the sensation—to call it disturbing would be a sickening understatement. I tried to talk myself out of it. I was overreacting. I tried. But I wasn’t to be persuaded. I felt … occupied. Okay? I was one of the taken. Really. That’s the best way to describe it. Tasting, chewing, swallowing, all of it … God. I was so alienated from my self. The sensations of eating … You have no idea. It felt as though they belonged to someone else. So, I couldn’t eat. Rather fundamental, you know? Then it began to ease, and then, well, I’d get another of your letters. You timed them so exquisitely.
“I don’t know what you want, Gordon. What do you want? A Gordon-Taylor reunion tour? It’s not going to happen.”
He shifted the plate, spinach on to nine. “Go ahead,” he said.
I’d been ready, in a way. I’d expected him to be extreme. I had some things to say, not quite clear yet. Now I didn’t want to say them, to apologize pointlessly again, much less to explain, less still to argue. I also didn’t want to stop there. So, here we go:
“What did my father say to you?”
“What?”
I was thinking the same thing—What?
Taylor was turning the plate again, and I reached out and stopped it, pretty aggressive under the circumstances, and he looked at me.
“He’s dead and I’m trying to get some things sorted out. You know what I’m talking about. What did he say?”
52
Perhaps what’s best now is another digression. Maybe try to charm things up with a resumption of the tale of my tortured puberty, left off, you might recall, in my bedroom, where I sang the joyous coming of the Lord and coaxed my voice to crack. It would force you to wait and ramp the tension a bit before you hear again from Taylor. No. Not up for charm any more, not sure now if I ever achieved it, trading however heavily on my sons, certainly not up for ramping.
I released my grip on the empty salad plate. Taylor fidgeted the spinach time on to ten. He clasped his hands in front of him and exhaled.
What did I ask that question for? What did it have to do with anything? But I wanted to know. Singing in my bedroom, celebrating the arrival of my excruciatingly postponed change, I’d been longing for knowledge of that discussion down below, exactly, word for word. But I never asked. Nothing volunteered, ever. Privacy respected and preserved. No longer.
“All right,” said Taylor.
“Okay.”
“You want to know that.”
I waited.
“He told me it was very common. He reassured me. He said I should practice putting on a condom a few times by myself. I’d catch on, I’d be relaxed, and there’d be no more problems.”
“Yes.”
“He could tell I was worried. I didn’t have to say about what. He told me there was no chance she would say anything. I was fifteen years old, and I feared that when I went back to school that Monday, everyone would know, my humiliation a lurid farce for lunchtime cafeteria entertainment. He guaranteed that she wouldn’t tell anyone, not even her best friend. That’s what he promised.”
“You talked down there for more than an hour.”
Taylor took a big breath and looked around the room, filled now with the early lunch crowd.
“I don’t remember every word.”
I reached across and shifted his plate counter-clockwise. “We haven’t spoken in years. Maybe we won’t speak again.”
“He said that sex makes people vulnerable. We should take care of that. She was too young to take care of me, or I of her.
“It’s all mixed up now, what he said. What I made of it. He said that things go wrong, and when they do, you have to be able to laugh about it. He didn’t just mean sex. He said I should be prepared for big things between people to go off track, and that I shouldn’t blame people, or myself.”
“Off track.”
“Later, not then, but a while later, I thought he was talking about his marriage.”
“That would have been a big thing.”
“You asked me … I told you I don’t remember, but this is what I made of it.”
“Taylor. Everything I did before I wrote the review, everything after, it was just as much me. Wasn’t it? Is that who I am, one moment, one error, a failure, that big thing?”
“A carefully written review is rather a willed undertaking, wouldn’t you say? More so than a lost erection, or a compromised marriage, for that matter.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“Sure, it’s more willed. Of course. Or probably. Or maybe not. I thought at first that I’d been trying to show off our friendship. Maybe that’s true. I thought I was trying to hurt you, I don’t know why. I thought for a while that I was doing it to please my mum. What if it’s just something that starts one way and then goes off track, doesn’t even have anything to do with what it seems like it should?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Do you know why?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let it go.”
Taylor took his napkin from his lap, crunched it up in his hands and dropped it on his plate. Our grand meeting, over so soon. He looked at me, waiting for me to leave. I didn’t move.
I didn’t move, and Taylor waited. I had nothing to say or ask, the conversation so deflating, but I needed to stay. He’d signalled the talk done; he could be the one to go, if he wanted.
He didn’t get up. He shrugged impatience. He reached for his water glass but didn’t take it.
Then, in a series of painful stages he rose. He placed his palms on the table to take some of his weight in his shoulders, leaned forward to shift his centre of gravity, grimaced fiercely, unfolded, pushing down agony, and rose. From behind him on the bench seat he fumbled out a wooden cane. He shuffled. One hand on the cane, the other on the table, he eased out, he hobbled; pain in his knees, hips, feet, he lurched to the exit.
53
I stayed in the café after Taylor’s crippled leaving.
First, the boys:
I saw him. Let’s get together.
Then, what? I took some time, deep breaths. Just say it, Gordon.
Yvonne and Taylor:
I just watched Taylor leave the café. Taylor, I’m sure, I know, I can make you well. I can. Call me at The Landmark. I’ll explain.
Trudy:
I need you here. Phone when you’re done work.
What next? Back to the hotel—walk out of the restaurant, jog, run along Robson Street. Why the hurry? My room, my laptop, Cloud 9, and into it yet again: I was writing to deadline, racing to overtake the present, as though doing so would change it, that sci-fi business again.
Trudy called: “I’ll post a notice saying I have a family emergency.”
Yvonne called: “What the hell is this, Gordon?”
Several emails, then the phone again with Taylor, with Yvonne. My diagnosis grudgingly confirmed: the sedentary writing life wrought worse than Taylor’s clumsy active youth, far worse: muscles pulled, not to heal, joints swelling and rebelling, back a catastrophe, and nothing worked. No treatment. By contrast, my neck ordeal a trifle.
What could they do but doubt? I re-emerge after years, clearly agenda-armed, and, nothing to go on beyond the sight of Taylor battling his affliction, I claim a special power, Trudy, she will do it. Not quite plausible.
“Gordon.”
“It is.”
“You have to … you have to, or else you’ll be so unhappy, or else you’ll betray yourself, or else you’ll just keep on like this, weakening so badly, punishing yourself more than you deserve to be punished. You have to because I love you so much and you know it.”
“That’s not what you meant.”
“That’s your story. It’s not the story I’m telling. Your story, Gordon, and if you’ve been carrying it all this time, retelling it to yourself, well, that does explain some things. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because you’ve always done it, haven’t you? You make up stories. Some of them you write down, and some of them you just fit us into, don’t you?”
“Like what?”
“Like the story of your beautiful, distant wife. I know that one, Gordon. You were telling that one from the beginning, and I let you because it was flattering to be thought of that way, and your story of our miraculous sons, Gavin so sensitive, Leo so mature and gifted. They never needed to be that to be miracles, you know. But I colluded there too. I was happy to be part of that story. You tell it so well that it becomes real and it’s exciting to enter into it.
“No! Don’t say anything. Yes, I know you’d say that is reality. I can hear you. I could create an entire Gordon Bridge speech if I had to—reality is narrative, narrative creates reality, blah blah blah. Blah blah fucking blah. I’m not impressed, okay? Take some responsibility. You’re the author. They’re your stories. Quit blaming other people when they don’t turn out the way you want. Quit using them as excuses when you don’t behave as you should. Be a better goddamned father.”
“I will.”
“Tell a better story.”
“I’ll try.”
50
Let us compare mythologies, mine and Jessica’s. I’m not sure I’m more of a storyteller than anybody else. I’m also not sure that being a novelist gives me more responsibility. We can’t ever really see the stories we’re telling, and that’s as true for novelists as it is for anybody else. If we think we can see that stuff, all we’ve done is create a new story.
I know, that’s exactly the kind of Gordon Bridge talk that Jessica said she could reproduce if she tried. I don’t doubt her. But Jessica is as beautiful as I’ve said, Gavin as sensitive, Leo as bright. I’m sticking to my story. The threat? Let me ponder.
I broke my promise to Leo and Gavin. Right away would have been … right away: that night, maybe the next morning at the latest. But I needed time, and I needed a way forward. What could I say to Taylor that would compel him, draw him along?
I spent a couple of afternoon hours revolving in the Cloud Nine lounge, with Gavin’s slip case, beyond words beautiful, there on the table for my adoration.
Rainy downtown; herbal tea; creamy, jewelled slipcase; rainy Point Grey; other side of the slip case; trace the colours with my index finger; more tea; no more boozy cloud-forest nostalgia; 360 sober degrees of grey, rain, Vancouver.
The precipitating incident, the answer to the question of how to begin: I learned of it after descending to my room, when I turned on the CBC for the news. I followed up with online reports, the first obituaries.
I’m holding books in my hands, I’m reading stories, I’m discovering worlds … of sentences, places. But she’s gone.
His email address was on his author website. I intended my hands steady, wrote:
Dear Taylor,
I just now learned that Mavis Gallant has died.
Please, see me. Name a time and place.
Gordon
What then? He might not check email for hours, might not respond for days, or at all. What to do with my time? Email Leo and Gavin to let them know I’ve made the move? No, terrible idea, pathetic, to announce an inch of progress as if I deserved admiration for it. Same for telling Trudy. So … what?
The right choice emerged, a relief. I’d like it if you could feel good for me here—I know that at this point in the narrative I’m not winning warm support. How to fill the time? What story do I tell now? Open it, Gordon.
Open the document.
I continued. You have the proof in your hands. I picked up right where I’d stopped many unproductive months ago. You remember—back when I left Vancouver, not long after Mum died. I launched the new section, following my theft from the end of Gatsby.
I wrote,
“Gordon.”
“Noreen.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“I’m so glad you think so.”
And on. I pushed ahead, determined, not inspired, a way not to compose responses to Jessica in my head, a way not to fret about Taylor while awaiting his answer. Also, a way not to brood on Mavis Gallant dying poor in Paris. (What? Poverty? Mavis Gallant? Why didn’t I know? I could have signed a cheque. I could have helped. I could have … really, I could have justified my life.)
The first chapter of the new section, this section, I got all of it done that afternoon-evening, uninterrupted, right up to Noreen again: “You’re going to have to track him down. I’m sorry, Gordon, but you just have to. You have to see him. Then you write about it. Then you’re finished.”
Confident—that is, nervous but confident, as though science fiction-wise this chunk of past telling will generate the energy to charge some present result—I check my email, first time since I’ve begun. And, voilà: Taylor.
All right. Tomorrow. The Art Gallery again. 11:00.
Delay could have been good for memoir tension building, but I was happy to let that go. An evening and early morning wait was long enough. What to do till then?
Write on, the recollection of my conversation with Leo and his stuffed animals, Dilly and Miss George, no idea what place it takes in the memoir, then the journey back to Brooklyn and the panicked, juvenile, nightmare fantasy—“Trudy had not returned from Trinidad”—and then, recognize the obvious connection between the two episodes, flip the order and edit. Another chapter done. I’m a distance away still, but I’m coming up to it, not falling comically behind, but seriously catching up one more time to the present. To Taylor.
51
Jittery, some kind of pressure on my eyeballs, I headed out, then I stopped at the elevator, returned, wrapped up Gavin’s slipcase and put it in my backpack, and then off once more.
I arrived at the café in plenty of time, but Taylor had already commanded a seat at the back, facing out, tall, surveying, still, not haughty but a gaze that managed to be direct and withdrawn at the same time … withholding.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Thanks for seeing me.”
Nod.
He had a salad on a plate in front of him, close to finished. I looked at it, back at him, he nodded again, and he emphasized the point, eating a forkful, spinach and mushroom.
“I’m sorry, Taylor.”
“Yes.”
“I read a bio of Mordecai Richler a few years back. On his deathbed he got a note from Brian Moore. He wept. They’d been tight friends, intimates, and then they weren’t. Something happened. Richler wept because they’d blown it. He’d blown it. Decades of friendship lost.”
“I read it. What do you want from me?”
“Did you know that Mavis Gallant was poor? I learned about it yesterday.”
“I didn’t know. I’m not here to grieve for Mavis Gallant with you.”
“Mind if I get a coffee?”
“Go ahead.”
I had no plan. I got my decaf and returned to the table. Taylor had finished his salad.
Sorrow, regret, confusion, pain, confusion, guilt, guilt, heaps of it, and guilt’s old partner—anger: take a sip of coffee.
“I just … let me show you.”
I unwrapped it. “Gavin gave the slipcase to me, yesterday, for my birthday.”
Taylor looked at it, dull eyes.
“He made the paper himself.”
He put his hands to his head, face downward, then looked up at me. “Gordon,” he said, frustrated. Okay. The object, sacred or not, would do nothing. Talk, then. Launch. I wrapped the parcel up and restored it to its place in the pack.
“I want to understand something. This could sound like an accusation, but it isn’t one. I did a terrible thing. I apologized, many times. Why wasn’t that enough, not to make things right, but to communicate, at least? Why wasn’t it enough so we could try? I did a terrible thing. Lots have done worse and then made efforts. Yvonne told me. She told me—”
“I couldn’t eat.”
“Taylor …”
He held up one hand and glanced at the ceiling. At me. Then, gaze resting on his empty plate, hands on either side holding it by the rim, as though to steady it: “Not being able to eat embarrassed me. It felt theatrical. Histrionic. And it really worried Yvonne.”
“No kidding.”
He lifted a hand and waved it a bit before grabbing the plate again—spare him the understanding interruptions. He lifted the same hand once more, rubbed his forehead, yet again gripped the plate.
“It took me a bit to understand. I didn’t have an upset stomach. When I tried to eat, the sensation simply …
“It’s easier if I take this from a different angle. I read the review. It startled me. It took some time to realize what startled me. I didn’t know you.”
He shifted the plate, spun it slowly, a quarter turn, a dab of spinach near the rim moving from noon to three.
“You were not who I’d thought. You were my closest friend, obviously, by far, and you were not who I’d thought, and our friendship, in that case ...
“Yvonne has a friend, a woman—you don’t know her. Her husband came out. He left her for a man.
“She fell apart. Her husband wasn’t the person she’d thought. Their marriage wasn’t what she thought. Still, why fall apart?
“There’s not much of a deduction left. Just another small step. You know how this goes, Gordon. Who are we? What happens when the relations in which we’re enmeshed … when the relations that shape us and make us get overturned? What happens, in other words, when we discover that we are not who we are?
“Gordon Bridge. It turns out that Gordon Bridge is the writer of a dishonest, subtly vicious review. That’s who he is. Not who I thought! No! Nothing like that! Our friendship … obviously, obviously it’s not what I thought. It’s not even … it’s not friendship, is it? Is it?
“No. And so, and so, I am not who I thought. Which leaves me a little problem. A problem. Who the hell am I?
“I thought I was Gordon Bridge’s friend. That’s who I believed I was. The fundamental me. You were so much the stronger of us, the leader, even when I’d been the first to publish, God, how I’d relied on you.
“I’d take a bite of food, and the sensation—to call it disturbing would be a sickening understatement. I tried to talk myself out of it. I was overreacting. I tried. But I wasn’t to be persuaded. I felt … occupied. Okay? I was one of the taken. Really. That’s the best way to describe it. Tasting, chewing, swallowing, all of it … God. I was so alienated from my self. The sensations of eating … You have no idea. It felt as though they belonged to someone else. So, I couldn’t eat. Rather fundamental, you know? Then it began to ease, and then, well, I’d get another of your letters. You timed them so exquisitely.
“I don’t know what you want, Gordon. What do you want? A Gordon-Taylor reunion tour? It’s not going to happen.”
He shifted the plate, spinach on to nine. “Go ahead,” he said.
I’d been ready, in a way. I’d expected him to be extreme. I had some things to say, not quite clear yet. Now I didn’t want to say them, to apologize pointlessly again, much less to explain, less still to argue. I also didn’t want to stop there. So, here we go:
“What did my father say to you?”
“What?”
I was thinking the same thing—What?
Taylor was turning the plate again, and I reached out and stopped it, pretty aggressive under the circumstances, and he looked at me.
“He’s dead and I’m trying to get some things sorted out. You know what I’m talking about. What did he say?”
52
Perhaps what’s best now is another digression. Maybe try to charm things up with a resumption of the tale of my tortured puberty, left off, you might recall, in my bedroom, where I sang the joyous coming of the Lord and coaxed my voice to crack. It would force you to wait and ramp the tension a bit before you hear again from Taylor. No. Not up for charm any more, not sure now if I ever achieved it, trading however heavily on my sons, certainly not up for ramping.
I released my grip on the empty salad plate. Taylor fidgeted the spinach time on to ten. He clasped his hands in front of him and exhaled.
What did I ask that question for? What did it have to do with anything? But I wanted to know. Singing in my bedroom, celebrating the arrival of my excruciatingly postponed change, I’d been longing for knowledge of that discussion down below, exactly, word for word. But I never asked. Nothing volunteered, ever. Privacy respected and preserved. No longer.
“All right,” said Taylor.
“Okay.”
“You want to know that.”
I waited.
“He told me it was very common. He reassured me. He said I should practice putting on a condom a few times by myself. I’d catch on, I’d be relaxed, and there’d be no more problems.”
“Yes.”
“He could tell I was worried. I didn’t have to say about what. He told me there was no chance she would say anything. I was fifteen years old, and I feared that when I went back to school that Monday, everyone would know, my humiliation a lurid farce for lunchtime cafeteria entertainment. He guaranteed that she wouldn’t tell anyone, not even her best friend. That’s what he promised.”
“You talked down there for more than an hour.”
Taylor took a big breath and looked around the room, filled now with the early lunch crowd.
“I don’t remember every word.”
I reached across and shifted his plate counter-clockwise. “We haven’t spoken in years. Maybe we won’t speak again.”
“He said that sex makes people vulnerable. We should take care of that. She was too young to take care of me, or I of her.
“It’s all mixed up now, what he said. What I made of it. He said that things go wrong, and when they do, you have to be able to laugh about it. He didn’t just mean sex. He said I should be prepared for big things between people to go off track, and that I shouldn’t blame people, or myself.”
“Off track.”
“Later, not then, but a while later, I thought he was talking about his marriage.”
“That would have been a big thing.”
“You asked me … I told you I don’t remember, but this is what I made of it.”
“Taylor. Everything I did before I wrote the review, everything after, it was just as much me. Wasn’t it? Is that who I am, one moment, one error, a failure, that big thing?”
“A carefully written review is rather a willed undertaking, wouldn’t you say? More so than a lost erection, or a compromised marriage, for that matter.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“Sure, it’s more willed. Of course. Or probably. Or maybe not. I thought at first that I’d been trying to show off our friendship. Maybe that’s true. I thought I was trying to hurt you, I don’t know why. I thought for a while that I was doing it to please my mum. What if it’s just something that starts one way and then goes off track, doesn’t even have anything to do with what it seems like it should?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Do you know why?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let it go.”
Taylor took his napkin from his lap, crunched it up in his hands and dropped it on his plate. Our grand meeting, over so soon. He looked at me, waiting for me to leave. I didn’t move.
I didn’t move, and Taylor waited. I had nothing to say or ask, the conversation so deflating, but I needed to stay. He’d signalled the talk done; he could be the one to go, if he wanted.
He didn’t get up. He shrugged impatience. He reached for his water glass but didn’t take it.
Then, in a series of painful stages he rose. He placed his palms on the table to take some of his weight in his shoulders, leaned forward to shift his centre of gravity, grimaced fiercely, unfolded, pushing down agony, and rose. From behind him on the bench seat he fumbled out a wooden cane. He shuffled. One hand on the cane, the other on the table, he eased out, he hobbled; pain in his knees, hips, feet, he lurched to the exit.
53
I stayed in the café after Taylor’s crippled leaving.
First, the boys:
I saw him. Let’s get together.
Then, what? I took some time, deep breaths. Just say it, Gordon.
Yvonne and Taylor:
I just watched Taylor leave the café. Taylor, I’m sure, I know, I can make you well. I can. Call me at The Landmark. I’ll explain.
Trudy:
I need you here. Phone when you’re done work.
What next? Back to the hotel—walk out of the restaurant, jog, run along Robson Street. Why the hurry? My room, my laptop, Cloud 9, and into it yet again: I was writing to deadline, racing to overtake the present, as though doing so would change it, that sci-fi business again.
Trudy called: “I’ll post a notice saying I have a family emergency.”
Yvonne called: “What the hell is this, Gordon?”
Several emails, then the phone again with Taylor, with Yvonne. My diagnosis grudgingly confirmed: the sedentary writing life wrought worse than Taylor’s clumsy active youth, far worse: muscles pulled, not to heal, joints swelling and rebelling, back a catastrophe, and nothing worked. No treatment. By contrast, my neck ordeal a trifle.
What could they do but doubt? I re-emerge after years, clearly agenda-armed, and, nothing to go on beyond the sight of Taylor battling his affliction, I claim a special power, Trudy, she will do it. Not quite plausible.
