Fair Play (2 page)

It's also a novel very much about “unexplored territory,” something Jansson will have been very aware of in the writing of these stories about friendship between women, and something which so fascinates Jonna in her love of B-movie Westerns and their repeating of clichés about endless honorable “friendship between men.” But the keys to this particular new territory are the opposite of cliché. Openness, playfulness, and space are concepts which come up repeatedly through the novel. “Give these ladies some space!” yells a barmaid in Phoenix on one of the explorative adventures Mari and Jonna have. “They're from Finland.” It's as if
Fair Play
knows it's a kind of foreign territory in itself. So many of these stories are about the giving of space to another person, the kind of space that only someone who loves properly and openly can give. “There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.” There's also crucial space between Mari and the narrator, which is what gives this book its essential meditative nature.

But it is, too, a piece of writing about time running out, about the end of living space, about inevitable ends. The chapter called “Cemeteries,” for instance, examines how we helplessly think we can order things and control our fates;
Fair Play
never ignores real bleakness. Part of its analysis of art knows that art makes a killing in the same way as a pin will through a butterfly. Part of its radicalism comes from the repeated admittance that its main characters are simply getting older. Yet the form of the book suggests there'll be no stopping. There's only the journey, the open traveling companionship, the long-running aesthetic argument and agreement between Jonna and Mari, “doing all right,” from the start of the book to its finish.

Consider the gentleness of this work, the twinned humility and understatement in what it actually means to be “doing all right.” Jansson deals with its relationship with care, humor and, above all, affectionate discretion.
Fair Play
is, in the end, a huge, yet astoundingly discreet, declaration of a good-working love, a homage to the kind of coupledom that rarely receives such homage, and at the same time a homage to the everyday weather, the light, the skies, the countless bad movies and good movies of living and working well with someone for the length of an adult life.

Labora et amare
. “They sat opposite each other at the table without talking.” Kindness passes between them unspoken. It's a relationship that works. Its final chapter, in which one, without so much as saying it, grants the other the necessary space to work—in other words, to be herself—reveals not just the size and truth of the love but the revolutionary freedom that comes with such love.

Fair Play
is a very fine art.

—A
LI
S
MITH

J
ONNA
had the happy ability to wake up every morning as if to a new life, opening before her clean and unspent right through to evening, rarely shadowed by yesterday's worries and mistakes.

Another ability—or rather a gift, always equally surprising—was her flood of unexpected and completely spontaneous ideas. Each lived and blossomed powerfully for a time until suddenly swept aside by a new impulse demanding its down undeniable space. Like now this business about the frames. Several months earlier, Jonna had decided she wanted to frame some of the pictures by fellow artists that Mari had on her walls. She made some very pretty frames, but when they were ready to hang, Jonna was seized by new ideas and the pictures were left standing around on the floor.

“For the time being,” Jonna said. “And for that matter, your whole collection needs rehanging, top to bottom. It's hopelessly conventional.” Mari waited and said nothing. In fact, it felt good having things unfinished, a little as if she had just moved in and didn't have to take the thing so seriously.

And over the years, she'd learned not to interfere with Jonna's plans and their mysterious blend of perfectionism and nonchalance, a mix not everyone can properly appreciate. Some people just shouldn't be disturbed in their inclinations, whether large or small. A reminder can instantly turn enthusiasm into aversion and spoil everything.

Pursuing her work in blessed seclusion, free from interference; molding and playing with all sorts of materials, a game that all at once, capriciously, could become irresistible and crowd out all other activity. Enjoying a sudden burst of practical energy and repairing everything broken in the house and in the apartments of her completely impractical friends—mending things or making them beautiful, or simply, to everyone's relief, discarding them. Periods of nothing but intense reading, night and day. Periods of listening to music to the exclusion of all else. To name just a few.

And each and every one of these periods was sharply defined by a day or two of extreme unease and boredom, irresolute days in search of a new course. It was always the same; there was no other way. To encroach on those empty days with suggestions or advice was utterly unthinkable.

Once Mari happened to observe, “You do only what you like.”

“Naturally,” Jonna said, “of course I do.” And she smiled at Mari in mild astonishment.

And now came the day in November when everything in Mari's studio was to be rehung, rearranged, renewed, and given a completely new significance—graphics, paintings, photographs, children's drawings, and all sorts of precious small objects reverently pinned up on the walls, which as time passed had lost all memory and meaning. Mari had assembled hammer, nails, picture hooks, steel wire, a level, and several other tools. Jonna had brought only a tape measure.

She said, “We'll start with the wall of honor. Naturally, that will stay strictly symmetrical. But your grandfather and grandmother are too far apart, and for that matter it can rain in on your grandfather through the stovepipe. And your mother's little wash drawing gets lost; it needs to be higher. That pretty mirror is idiotic, it doesn't belong, we have to keep it austere. The sword's okay, if a little pathetic. Here, measure—it'll be seven, or six and a half. Give me the awl.”

Mari gave her the awl and saw how the wall regained a balance that was no longer traditional but instead almost provocative.

“Now,” said Jonna. “Now we'll remove these little curiosities you don't really care about. Free up the walls. This will be an exhibition without a lot of knickknacks all over the place. Put them in one of your seashell boxes or send them to some children's museum.”

Mari thought quickly about whether she should be offended or relieved, couldn't decide, and said nothing. Jonna moved on, took pictures down and put them back up, her hammer blows inaugurating a new era.

“I know,” she said, “rejection's not easy. But you reject words, whole pages, long impossible stories, and it feels good once it's done. It's no different rejecting pictures, a picture's right to hang on a wall. And most of these have hung here too long; you don't even see them anymore. The best stuff you have, you don't see anymore. And they kill each other because they're badly hung. Look, here's a thing of mine and here's your drawing, and they clash. We need distance, it's essential. And different periods need distance to set them apart—unless you're just cramming them together for the shock effect! You simply have to feel it ... There should be an element of surprise when people's eyes move across a wall covered with pictures. We don't want to make it too easy for them. Let them catch their breath and look again because they can't help it. Make them think, make them mad, even ... Now we'll give our colleagues here better light. Why did you leave so much space right here?”

“I don't know,” Mari said. But she did know. Suddenly she knew very well that deep down she didn't like the painter colleagues who had done these undeniably very fine works. Mari began paying attention. As she watched Jonna rehang the pictures, it seemed to her that lots of things, including their life together, fell into perspective and into place, a summary expressed in distance or selfevident clustering. The room had changed completely.

When Jonna had taken her tape home with her, Mari marveled all evening at how easy it is in the end to understand the simplest things.

T
HEY LIVED
at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between their studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man's-land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains. She could pause on the way to listen to the rain on the metal roof, look out across the city as it lit its lights, or just linger for the pleasure of it.

They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they'd gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

When Mari came in, Jonna was on a ladder building shelves in her front hall. Mari knew that when Jonna started putting up shelves she was approaching a period of work. Of course the hall would be far too narrow and cramped, but that was immaterial. The last time, it was shelves in the bedroom and the result had been a series of excellent woodcuts. She glanced into the bathroom as she passed, but Jonna had not yet put printing paper in to soak, not yet. Before Jonna could do her graphic work in peace, she always spent some time printing up sets of earlier, neglected works—a job that had been set aside so she could focus on new ideas. After all, a period of creative grace can be short. Suddenly, and without warning, the pictures disappear, or they're chased away by some interference—someone or something that irretrievably cuts off the fragile desire to capture an observation, an insight.

Mari went back to the hall and said she had bought milk and paper towels, two steaks, and a nailbrush, and it was raining.

“Good,” Jonna said. She hadn't heard. “Could you grab that other end for a second? Thanks. This is going to be a new shelf for videos. Nothing but videos. Did I mention Fassbinder's on tonight? What do you think? Should I build it right out to the door?”

“Yes, do. What time?”

“Nine-twenty.”

About eight they remembered Alma's dinner. Jonna phoned her. “I'm sorry to call so late,” she said, “but you know, Fassbinder's on this evening, and it's the last time ... What? No, that won't work; we have to be here to cut out the commercials ... Yes, it's really too bad. But you know how I loathe those commercials; they can ruin the whole film. Say hello to everyone. We'll see you ... Yes, I will. Have fun. So long.”

“Was she mad?” Mari asked.

“Oh, you know. Apparently the woman hasn't a clue about Fassbinder.”

“Should we unplug the phone?”

“If you want. Nobody's going to call. They know better. Anyway, we don't have to answer.”

The spring evenings had grown long, and it was hard to darken the room. They sat in their separate chairs and waited for Fassbinder, their silence a respectful preparation. They had waited this way for their meetings with Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder, and all the other honored guests that Jonna had chosen and enthroned—the finest present she could give her friend.

Over time, these video evenings had become very important in Jonna and Mari's lives. When the films were over, they talked about them, earnestly and in detail. Jonna put the cassette into a slipcover decorated in advance with text and pictures, copies from the film library she'd been collecting all her life, and the cassette was given its dedicated place on the shelves reserved for videos—an attractive, continuous surface of gold and soft colors with little flags on the backs showing the country where each film was made. Only very rarely did Jonna and Mari have time to see their films a second time. There was an uninterrupted flood of new ones to accommodate. They had long since filled every shelf in the house. The shelves in the hall were in fact badly needed.

Especially close to Jonna's heart were the silent films in black-and-white; Chaplin, in particular, of course. Patiently, she taught Mari to understand the classics. She talked about her student years abroad, the cinema clubs, her rapture at seeing these films, sometimes several a day.

“You understand, I was possessed. I was happy. And now when I see them again, these classics, so awkwardly expressive, with the clumsy technology that was all they had, it's like being young again.”

“But you never grew up,” said Mari innocently.

“Don't be smart. They're the real thing, those old films. The people who made them went all out, defied their limits. They're hopeful films—young, courageous films.”

Jonna also collected what she called “pure movies”—Westerns, Robin Hood films, wild pirate romances, and a lot of other simple stories of justice, courage, and chivalry. They stood alongside the films of contemporary multifaceted geniuses and defended their territory. Their slipcovers were blue.

Jonna and Mari sat in their separate chairs in the darkened room and waited for Fassbinder.

“Before I go to sleep,” Mari said, “you know, I think more about a film you've shown me than I do about all my worries, I mean all the things I've got to do and all the dumb things I've ever done ... It's sort of like your movies freed me from myself. I mean, of course it's still me, but I'm not my own responsibility.”

“You do get to sleep pretty quickly,” Jonna said. “It can't hurt you to not have a bad conscience once in a while for twenty minutes. Or ten. Now you can go and turn it on.”

The little red light came on. Fassbinder confronted them in all his exquisite, controlled violence. It was very late when he was done. Jonna switched on the lamp, slipped the cassette into its cover, and put it on the shelf labeled “Fassbinder.”