Losing shepherd, p.8
Losing Shepherd, page 8
Every other writer I’d enjoyed and admired, even Fitzgerald, still my favourite then, was a child. That first story—what was going on? I barely understood, and yet I recognized. People were like this. They loathed each other. They failed. It had something to do with World War Two, probably. But not just that. How did she do it? What was the trick? How could a story be about its sentences and its characters at the same time? How could a writer hate people so much and yet … not? And be so funny?
When I looked up intermittently, I found Taylor in different postures, finally lying on his back on the couch, holding his book above his face. I thought I’d stop. Then I’d read just one more story. Another.
“Boys. It’s getting rather late,” said Taylor’s mother. Taylor put his book down and stood up. I stood up.
“Yeah, I should be getting home,” I said.
The next day I wasn’t moved to seek out more. I didn’t pick up another Gallant for weeks. Taylor raced through his father’s complete set that winter, but I took years to complete the oeuvre. I’d reread bits, read sentences out loud. Just take my time. Each new story collection took months to assimilate.
When I got home after that session at the Billy Bishop with Taylor, I hid in my room. For a while I sat on my bed. I had a stack of books on a table, novels I’d been looking forward to reading. I tried a few and couldn’t get past a couple of paragraphs.
I stood in front of my bookshelves, nothing close to a plan in mind. The spines came in and out of focus. I ran my hand over them. I pulled a few out an inch or so and nudged them back. I took Gallant’s In Transit off the shelf and sat on the bed again, the book in my lap.
I flipped through the pages and then stopped at “April Fish.” It’s short, and I read it, not remembering at first, but then yes, of course. Such ruthlessness. What did the New Yorker editor who took it on think? “Ah yes, this’ll do, three amusing pages to dramatize a crushing indictment of all of Western civilization. Lovely, really.”
I set the book down on my desk, open to the story, and I began to write.
Why should it be so difficult? I knew nothing about grammar, it turned out. Parts of speech? I’m an ignoramus. But the project insisted on itself. I was rewriting “April Fish”: my new version—syntactically identical to the original, word for word. My nouns replaced hers, my prepositions, verbs, substituted for the originals. My story would duplicate her rhythms, her patterns of summary and dialogue, but it would be new. Will this do the trick, Taylor? Fat chance. I should think, instead, about what it means, that I find this so difficult. An hour to produce a new sentence, and that sentence barely makes sense.
I would have given up again. But I had no other ideas. Failing here would just be too much.
I didn’t call Taylor, and I didn’t hear from him. He was giving me time to recover, to do as I’d promised and be happy for him. And then, after a while, I began to notice my anxiety shifting, even as I accomplished so little, one mediocre scene after another. I felt no better about the quality of the work I was producing, but I realized I was only pretending to care.
Mavis, this is for you. I should have done this long ago. A clumsy piano student struggles through some Bach, an unskilled painter copies a Rembrandt. A failed beginner imitates Mavis Gallant. Says “thank you.”
At the end of another afternoon Kits Point walk, rapping about Taylor’s new project, he at length with the thoughts and plans, me with the encouraging little interjections, we stopped on the beach and he turned his back to me. He picked up a few stones and threw them into the waves. Then he turned around. “If I could’ve left the room …” he said.
Two months later, when I’d finally reached the end, Taylor over for a visit, I told him about my rewrite project. He insisted on reading it, right then.
When he finished he danced a little jig, slapping his knees with the manuscript, laughing. A jig was not characteristic of lanky, injury-prone Taylor. No, Canada’s hottest new novelist was not a man for spontaneous dancing.
“It’s a hoot, isn’t it?” I said, laughing with him.
“It’s way better than a hoot.” He slapped his knees with the papers again.
I guessed he was happy that I’d successfully completed the exercise, that the effect had amused, and that my persistence impressed. All true, but he also thought the new “story” had something special and strange. He said that it deserved to be published.
It took some convincing, but I sent it off. The Capilano Review, always open to this kind of thing, agreed with Taylor and took the story along with a brief account of my experiment. Not a novel, not a story collection, but still, a publication. Baby step.
Even when optimistic, I hadn’t expected to learn anything concrete from my Gallant project. I just hoped. I began a new novel, drunk with longing.
I wrote a sentence. What was that? It was only a sentence. The next one, also, just prose, as usual. So, what was this change? I could hear it. As surely as I knew I’d discovered something important when I first read Gallant, I understood that a change had come. Every phrase emerged as a unit of sound, without my reading aloud, but as the words came and as they appeared on the screen. I didn’t do a lot of revising to achieve an effect, I just … wrote differently; my identity had become the words and sentences themselves. Could it be a placebo? Who cares. Give me a placebo, please, doctor. Watch me gulp it down and write.
Taylor saw it when he read the finished draft of Monica Documented, and you know the story of the publication and the Ethel Wilson prize. It made things easier for the two of us, no longer a strain to find some way to share power. Everybody in every relationship needs to share power.
That night, back to that night, the big nastiness with Jessica, unprecedented worst. Jessica tossing and turning, frustration and angry disappointment. I, unmoving, locked into my cycle of questions and regrets, hate and anger. That different thing—it would have to be more than another clever writing exercise, more than an honest thank you to one of my gods. What? Then my old enemy, my neck, began to seize me once more, first an ache, deepening, a warmth, hot paralysis, my damned neck, a lot to do with what had happened and what would follow. Let me explain.
16
Post-Winnipeg and the Earl Birney affair, my neck hurt. Sometimes it hurt so much that if I sat, I had to steel myself to stand. The inflamed muscles would engage as my body shifted forward, igniting a flash fire across my shoulders and down my spine. Sneezing or coughing—just death; inadvertent sudden movement—Hell. During these attacks I simply had to wait, walking oh so slowly, turning my whole body in order to face someone not in my line of sight.
It was precisely the behaviour that had added up to asshole, according to the Winnipeg Arts Review. Take a look at the photos you can find on-line from my bit as judge for the Ethel Wilson contest. I’m at the gala, standing, facing the camera, while others just turn their heads. Or I look at someone while that someone faces the camera. In every shot, I look like a prick or a moron.
I took therapeutic massage. I thought it did me some good, but I hadn’t received the last scheduled treatment before my neck seized again. The therapist suggested I see a chiropractor.
And so, down the months—chiropractor, acupuncturist, chiropractor, physio, a better physio, new and better acupuncturist, on, on, and on: failures all. I tried yoga, Feldenkrais, and tai chi. We installed a massage attachment on the showerhead, changed mattress and pillows. On an anti-inflammatory diet I curried up with scary quantities of turmeric and achieved nothing.
Finally, intramuscular stimulation, IMS for short. It’s like acupuncture, a bit, but one feels the needles. It was all the thing for intractable necks and backs.
People’s pain is boring. More detail risks entirely derailing any narrative momentum. But one scene, please: me and the boys.
I signed up for the prescribed ten sessions of IMS. I would experience some discomfort, said the eager young woman poised to stab needles into knotted neck muscles. She smiled.
When I staggered out the first time, a guy standing by the door gave me a curious look. I wasn’t in the mood. “Did you want something?”
He peered around me. “I wanted to see what she looked like, you know, the beeitch who made you scream that way.”
She assured me the treatments would work. So confident. My body rebelled, and I hurt everywhere.
“It’s normal. It’s a muscular adjustment. With a few more sessions, you’ll notice a big improvement.”
Four times, I submitted. Now, my passivity shames me. But perhaps it’s helpful for us to encounter our horrible weakness before the figure that embodies so much, the publicly insured practitioner—science and the state, vicious partners in evil.
I arrived home after the fourth appointment. Through the door, down the hallway, into the living room: to my knees I fell, then over on my side, fetal. I wish the memory were less clear, the trauma not so enduring. I could observe myself observing that sweat soaked my shirt. Pointless to try not to weep.
A few sobbing minutes, then Gavin and Leo arrived home from school.
“Dad?”
“Dad?”
I forced myself together. Still lying on my side, invalid, I gave a few instructions, and the boys prepared dinner. By the time Jessica came home I had made it to the breakfast nook, and the boys said nothing when they served the meal. Of course, Jessica could tell something was terribly wrong, our sons looking at me, at her, scared as hell. But they waited, Gavin and Leo, for me, until I explained.
Maybe I don’t wish for forgetfulness. I remember the agony and I can feel the greasy pain-sweat. Sobs burst out of my gut. But I see Gavin and Leo. And I need to say this, in my defence, for you to keep in mind as you read what comes next; I need to say that I do not underestimate. Them. What they mean to me.
The obvious analysis occurred to me, as it has to you—I’m confident of that. The neck onset, you’ll recall, coincided with a reward for my return to writing—mediocre, jokey sonnets, but still, writing, and a reward, the Earl Birney Prize. This new flare-up, that same structure: an article written, praise and recognition following, and ouch, ouch, ouch. Want to cure your neck problems, Gordon? See Taylor. Deal with the years of loss. Show some courage, man.
Or the courageous thing to do was to live with it, accept that pain, because if Taylor wanted to hear from me, I’d have heard from him, or I’d have heard from Yvonne, an update on that note gouged in ballpoint.
I lived with it through the night of my big metaphor argument with Jessica. I got out of bed and shuffled through the house, trying to move without moving, failing to sleep while sitting in my office chair. In my slippers I stepped outside and journeyed down the dark street, cautiously, not lifting my feet, not thinking or dreaming, just suffering into the night.
The swooshing of a few cars on The Drive, the night-sighs of the city, and then, out of the quiet, an ambulance siren. It wailed faintly in the distance, and I was still on Kitchener Street but I was back in Madrid: sirens, shouts, the waiter hurling Spanish curses at me, the televised horror. Guernica, the boys so wounded. Jessica withdrawing.
It all mixed up there in the night—the terror, my dying marriage. Were my feelings about Madrid just projections of despair over what Jessica and I had come to? The reverse? Were we each mistaking a shell-shock loss of joy and will for the other’s failure?
As best as I could, I hurried home. I’d wake her. Insist that we be kind and honest as we talked to each other. But in our room, my neck screaming now, I looked down at her sleeping so deep, relaxed long breaths, and my resentment took me again. It was her. Her fault.
Before anyone else got up in the morning I left, an excruciating bus ride over to Douglas Park.
“I’m going to be on a panel, ‘Reading Terrorism.’” At the Y.”
Pause. The pause extends. Then laughter, Mum’s and mine, because “the Y” can only mean the YMHA on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I’m not much disappointed by the contrast here: no celebratory laughter marked earlier successes—book contracts, prizes, the novels themselves.
Nobody else I knew would’ve understood without some elaboration. Maybe, right then, we were closer than we’d ever been, closer than when she stayed up with me (all night, I say), closer than when she said “sure, you can buy a pennant,” even closer than when I sat across from her, and she sat on her couch, and she finished it, my first published novel, put it down, got up, walked out of the room.
“You’re a snot-nosed kid,” she said.
My mother’s laughter was much more important than the muscle spasms that still gripped my neck, at takeoff, New York bound.
“I’ve got a stiff neck, so I apologize for not being able to turn to face people.”
“You should get a massage,” said our moderator.
Afterward, all my nuances having been shared and appreciated, came the obligatory milling, down there in front of the stage. I tried to say with my frightened eyes, please, be careful, don’t shake my hand vigorously, don’t touch me at all.
People were pretty considerate. I told myself, it’ll pass, Gordon. You’ll survive. I told myself this and then I could sense someone standing behind me, too close.
But there was no danger. Or … there was. There was!
I froze, embodied vengeance inches away from my back. Some trick of synchronicity had dipped into my sorrow, my failure, my deep culpability, and conjured up an assassin.
My neck burned. Paralyzed, I waited for the knife blade. The fearsome memories rushed into that moment, images from a time when so many had wanted to hurt me, and worse.
17
“Fill out your organ donation card, asshole. Your time is coming.”
“You’ll be donating your own organs soon.”
“Kill yourself and donate your organs. Your books are shit.”
“Of course you should be afraid,” said Jessica. “Jesus.”
This was back in my glory days, Gordon Bridge the shiny new thing on the Can Lit scene. Leo was only a few months old, and fatherhood and fame puffed me up, so I’d ignored the first threats. When they kept coming, I showed them to Jessica. She took my face in her hands, cool hands on my cheeks, and she looked in my eyes. “I’m your protection. You need to tell me these things, right away.”
She dialled and then handed me the phone. “The police. Tell them.” She stood beside me, hand on my arm, while I did just that.
I could understand the anger. These are heavy, emotional cases. If you read Vancouver Flood you’ll remember the bit where it’s early June, and Royce, his illness advanced, is teetering, and Andora is stricken, and together they’re reading the papers and watching the news.
The material leading to that moment is the strongest in the novel. The reader doesn’t know. Understanding emerges, and then, despite sympathy, horror: Royce and Andora, near the crisis, hoping to hear of fatal car accidents. Early June, high-school grad season, let’s face it—it’s the best time of year for such nightmares: healthy teens, celebrate their pending release, overestimate their road skills, and then, brains dead, bodies pumping along for a few machine-supported minutes, they offer up fresh, pink organs to the dialysis-dependent, the lung-frozen, the heart-clotted desperate ones. It’s a sad truth, but the truth part is not enough justification for some. It doesn’t excuse saying such things, in print, in a novel everyone could read, exposing them.
A police detective visited—rather smart guy. He asked to read the passage upsetting so many, which I thought a very sensible place to start. He sat on the couch for about ten minutes. You could read those couple of pages in much less time, but he took care. I saw his lips move slightly, but you’d be surprised how many people do that; it’s no sign of illiteracy. Near the end, his eyebrows went up, and then he showed himself a sophisticated critic indeed.
“This bit here, at the end—that’s what’s causing the problem, isn’t it?”
He put a finger on the spot. He’d read on from the passage I’d shown him.
Andora and Royce aren’t happy about what they’re doing; they feel just sick about it. But they feel justified too. They say to themselves that they’re not hoping for people to be killed. They’re only wishing that if people die, they’ve thought to donate their organs, so Royce can get a liver and live on. They don’t go out and try to cause accidents, flashing mirrors into drivers’ eyes, nothing like that. But still, they need to apologize to themselves for what they’re doing.
“The thing is, you’re sort of doing the same thing, what you say right here.”
“I don’t understand, Detective.”
He read: “‘Thus our longing, to be to others what we are to ourselves. To be ends. Thus our society, our world that forces us to use others as means.’ These characters here, Royce and Andora. They’re a means to you, aren’t they? You use them to get the point across.”
Correct, okay, but they’re fictional. He was probably also right about the other, what really ate at people. I’d like to think so, that at least something subtle provoked the murderous thoughts. Full disclosure here: the worst thing? The passage. What embarrassing crap. Such pretentious, awkward, intrusive didacticism, and it could get me killed. It was a rather extreme way to get the lesson that the metaphor must always speak for itself.
The messages stopped, and the police never found any suspects. I grew pretty scared there for a time. So, Salman, I know it’s not on the same scale, but I understand a little. You too, Philip.
In fact, Philip Roth was the more germane case, to me, at the precise moment of my more-than-panic, fear-frozen at the YMHA. Years back he was a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew, according to a few jerks who felt accused by those great stories in Goodbye, Columbus, and for such a sin he did not deserve to live. Imagine the person who takes this imagined insult to his dignity so deeply. This person is crazy and dangerous.
