Blue Moon (35 page)

My former landlady was Casper's most cherished guest. Emma despised all cats. Perfectly aware of this frailty, Casper showered her
with the most gentlemanly of attentions when he approached her, even condescending to roll on his back in mock-submission the moment he beheld her. Emma was convinced he was making fun of her, but the cat had the makeup of a courtier. I think he wanted to convince her she must love him and, if that happened, wouldn't that open the door to all others of his species?

At Duthie's, Bill gave me more and more responsibility for stocking the paperback section, which thrived. I relished talking about books with young people, especially the bookish misfits who asked my advice about what books to read, their eyes wide as saucers as I told them I envied the pleasure they would experience meeting Defoe, Tolstoy or Cervantes for the first time. There were the hard-to-please customers, who automatically rejected every suggestion offered them in response to their earnest requests to help them find something exciting or new.

My favourite customer in those early days was a conservatively dressed, ultra-slim housewife with high cheek bones, brightly burning eyes, and a mischievous smile. She had lived in Africa for a number of years—had recently returned from there with her engineer husband and two small children—and had begun to write seriously in Ghana. She told me she hated the “whole goddamn racket” of writing fiction. “I can't stop myself, but it feels like I'm being torn apart from the inside. I hate myself for doing it. I'm like a moth drawn to the flame that will kill it.” Mainly we talked writers, not writing. She was amazed that I liked John Galsworthy's
Forsyte Saga.
Much too upper-class for her, she assured me. “I consider myself a socialist.” Once I told her I had literary ambitions of my own: “Kid, you're crazy if you go down that path. Take it from someone who has just about gone bonkers.” I laughed; she smiled. Yet I knew very well she was telling me a desperate truth.

I never knew Margaret Laurence outside Duthie's, but I have never forgotten her description of the writing life as a bad habit, like cigarette smoking, that one could never get out of one's system. She always needed, she confessed, to have her daily fix. In those days, I had yet to succumb.

Once or twice she confided to me her thoughts about Vancouver as a literary backwater. “There's that booze hound, Malcolm Lowry, who croaked a few years ago. He used to live in a shack in Dollarton on the
edge of this
great
metropolis. And there's friendly old Earle Birney. He's a decent poet but a first-class skirt chaser. Be careful of him when he comes in here. The only
real
writer in Vancouver is Mrs. Wilson.

“I'll have to leave Canada if I want to turn myself into any kind of real writer. I can't go to the States—I would become one of
them.
Maybe England. There's a semblance of a literary community there.”

Nowadays, Laurence's comment seems awfully cynical, but she was correct. I had learned that the “San Francisco of the North” may have been much more lushly beautiful than Hamilton, but in the 1960s it had an identical village soul.

Within a year of settling in Vancouver, my life had assumed a comfortable rhythm. I liked my work and my flat. Emma was a congenial companion. My teas with Mrs. Wilson made me feel in touch with a living literary culture, although I doubted I could ever become part of that tradition myself. On the surface, everything was going well. But the dream visited me every night. Sometimes I frightened Casper, my bed companion, when I awoke from a particularly heinous variant. For that reason, I decided to consult Dr. Newman.

My first memory of Dr. Newman is of his small office in the Medical-Dental building on Georgia. The corridor leading to the consulting room was exceptionally narrow. In particular, I remember how difficult it was to avoid touching the eight prints of
Death
by Kathe Kollwitz—four on each side—that lined that meagre space. Afraid those eerie works of art—monumental yet deeply sombre etchings bitten deeply into the plate of men and women suffering from terminal malnutrition—might determine the mood for what went on in the room, I asked him on the first day why those depressing representations of the end of life were there. Of course, he did not
answer the question. “Why do you think I put them there? What are your fantasies about them?”

All of this was asked in flat, accentless English, If there was German underneath it, I could not catch it. No harsh sibilants, no wheezing guttural noises. My interrogator was about my age, I guessed. Completely bald and round, he had large brown eyes that concealed all emotion.

As I looked around the consulting room, I was amazed at the bright, geometrically coloured rugs that covered the floor and the walls. Navajo, I guessed. A small desk and accompanying chair, an even tinier chair for patients, a large leather-covered, reclining chair for Newman, and the couch. These four articles of furniture were uneasily crowded into the room which, although it was not windowless might just as well have been. The shade—a dingy brown—was always completely drawn.

From Newman emanated several distinct smells of body odour, cigars, and the cologne by means of which he attempted to drown the other two. If the doctor was repulsed by what I eventually told him—after almost two long months—of the murder of John Dick, my various appearances in court, and my sojourn in P4W, he concealed those feelings. On the day I finally confessed, he asked: “Why have you come here? What can I do for you?”

“I feel completely lost. I have managed to establish some sort of equilibrium in my daily life, but I do not know where I am going.”

“You feel lost in a dark wood?”

I was pleased he had read Dante. “Exactly. I have many questions about the past.”

“This room might be the entirely appropriate place in which to interrogate your childhood and young adulthood. Is that what you are trying to tell me?” The last question was voiced impatiently. I nodded agreement.

“If you wish to pursue this matter in the kind of detail it requires, I am at your service. You would need to come four times a week faithfully.” He stopped and, for the first time, looked directly into my eyes: “Are you prepared for that? It is very difficult work, extremely painful. I cannot promise the result will be to your liking.”

“Will I become a more aware person?”

“Yes. I can promise that. But knowledge—especially self-knowledge—is often a heavy burden.”

“I must understand my early life more clearly. At least, more accurately.”

“Fine. We can begin next Monday.”

My sessions with Dr. Newman were extremely predictable. I spoke for virtually the entire fifty minute duration of each meeting. Since I occupied the couch, Dr. Newman directly behind me, I only saw him for about twenty seconds each day when he answered the door to his office and then showed me out. I had a difficult time remembering what he looked like. At the outset, he would occasionally ask me to clarify a point. Or explain something I tried to skip over. “Did your father place his penis in your mouth? Did your mother touch your vagina when you two shared a bed? Did you experience sexual pleasure when you went to bed with one of your clients? Did Bill Bohozuk excite you sexually? Were you sexually attracted towards any of the women you knew at Kingston?”

Strange to say, I found these questions comforting, sensing that Dr. Newman was trying to come to some sort of scientific understanding. Most of the time he was resolutely silent. Whenever I asked a question, he always turned it back on me. Why did I want to know such a thing? He would then ask if I had fantasies about his real life as opposed to his existence in the room sitting behind me, pen and pad in hand, occasionally smoking a cigar or cigarette? His silence seemed cold when I told him I had little or no interest in such matters. What thoughts—if any—did I have of the “private” life I had no interest in? Surely I had some reflections on this aspect of his existence?

“Although I cannot tell where your slight accent comes from, I imagine you are from somewhere in middle Europe, that you are about five years older than me, that you may have been in a concentration camp, that your wife and children may have been murdered in the Holocaust, and that, like me, you are tormented by events you had little or no control over.”

Dr. Newman did not reply. Throughout the remainder of that day, I felt guilty about voicing my fantasies. The silence in which he existed during the sessions was for my benefit, not supposed to be contaminated by his life. And yet I felt I had been cruel because, I was certain, my potted biography had hit the mark.

I was never embarrassed about the sexual details that emerged in the sessions. Now I remembered my father forcing me to attempt
fellatio—but I was too young, my mouth too small. I could now recall Mother rubbing the hairs on my pudenda when I was 12 or 13. I knew all over again that the pleasures of the body had always been forbidden me. What began to bother me in a new way was the absolute distance between my body and my soul. I was so completely empty of the physical.

My deep-down humanity—if I can call it that—was concentrated on my children, all three of them. I would see a sixteenor seventeen-year-old girl on the street and become convinced she was Heather: same colouring, same nose, same shape to the mouth. Two or three times I followed these teenagers in order to get a better look. After each close inspection I realized my error. Although I made the rational assumption that Heather was alive somewhere, probably in Ontario, I knew the two babies were dead, absolutely unrecoverable. When I got up some mornings, I felt like I lived in the kingdom of death. The world I would confront on such days was only a simulacrum—the real world was one of shadows, of murder, of prostitution, of dead and lost children.

Dr. Newman was very sparing in offering me interpretations. One afternoon, after I had been seeing him almost eighteen months, I had been talking about what I called my horrible crimes—the ensnarement of John Dick, the neglect of my baby son murdered by my father. Dr. Newman could not contain himself: “You have a profound misunderstanding of your past. You allowed others to coerce you into doing what you consider evil. In essence, you were a witness to evil and could do very little about it. Or so you thought. Your frailty is one you share with many others in this century: you witnessed evil and did little or nothing to stop it.”

“You are saying I was a victim?”

“If you choose to employ that word, I won't object.”

“What word would you use?”

“You are always looking for labels that mean little or nothing.” His voice became darker, much more resonant. “When Hitler first came to power in Germany, his agenda was clear-cut. Most Jews did little or nothing to stop him. Later—when the worst atrocities were being committed—most Christians in the know were deeply passive, believing—perhaps rightly—that the monster could not be destroyed. So they became fellow-travellers.
They weren't arm in arm with Satan, hut they tolerated his existence because he was so powerful.”

“So I'm a fellow-traveller?”

“Again, you want a simple label. I am suggesting you had little control over what happened to you. You carry a heavy weight of unjustified guilt and must learn to jettison that burden. My job is to help you do exactly that.” Having delivered himself of this observation, Dr. Newman was largely silent for almost a year.

Emma was extremely cynical of my visits to Dr. Newman. “You go there four times a week in order to talk to the walls! And, what's more, you pay good money for the privilege! I call that a waste of time.”

I insisted that I found the process mysterious but helpful. Tm getting a better handle on things.”

“And getting your head shrunken in the process. What about books and movies as a way of self-understanding? That's how I use films. In them, I'm always seeing various parts of myself. That way I can think through certain parts of my life.”

“Psychoanalysis is about putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. Integrating them.”

“But no one does that in real life—complete the crossword puzzle that is their existence. What is more, I don't think they should do so.”

That evening, Emma was reclining on my sofa, Casper as was his wont nestled in her bosom. Having learnt that any expression of disdain would simply make the cat more insistent in his wooing, she was studiously trying to pretend he wasn't there. Although she and I had become good friends over the years, we had widely differing views on most subjects. For her, the masterpiece of sixties' cinema was Bunuel's excessively cynical
Belle de Jour
about a bored Parisian housewife who becomes a prostitute. According to Emma, Bunuel was aware of the tremendous pleasures of the flesh at the very same time he satirized hedonistic indulgence. I told her I found the film tasteless and offensive.

“That's because you've always closed yourself off from the body. No wonder you don't care for
Belle.”

“I don't think that bored housewives become call girls. That's Bunuel's twisted, puerile view of the French bourgeoisie.”

“What you are forgetting is that sex—even sex for money—can be fun.” Very much in the manner of one of Ingres's odalisques, she stretched herself languidly, in the process dislodging an irate Casper. That evening Emma told me about her early life in greater detail than she had ever done before.

“I was a farm girl from Kelowna. Perfectly happy upbringing. Devoted but old-fashioned parents. I lost my cherry at the age of 13 to an older man, a migrant worker from the prairies who was helping out at the farm. Dad didn't know just how handy that guy really was.

“After high school, I was bored. Although I had a steady boyfriend, I couldn't see myself settling down. So, like many others of my generation, I arrived in Vancouver at the age of 18 in 1939, just as the war was on the verge of starting. Hitler was still a comic figure to most people; everyone listened to 'Fibber McGee and Molly' and 'Amos V Andy' on the radio.