Next Life Might Be Kinder (10 page)

“He accosted me this morning in the lift,” I said. “He spun me like the lindy.”

“We have got to get him sacked. There are grounds for it. Really, there are. We'll make a list of grievances.”

We had our coffees and sat and talked awhile. When we got back to our apartment, we saw that the chaise longue had been torn, two long shredded furrows, the white stuffing billowing out. We had house detective Derek Budnick up in our room in five minutes. This wasn't a movie.

A
T THE COTTAGE
, I thought about having my telephone service stopped. I really only wanted to speak with Philip and Cynthia, and they were practically within shouting distance. And with Elizabeth, of course. Instead, I simply kept the phone off the hook, sometimes for whole days.

“I think your phone is not working,” Lily Svetgartot said when I opened the door at ten o'clock on a cold, clear morning. I'd been reading Elizabeth's notebooks for
The Preoccupations of Marghanita Laski.
I wanted to review things in case her dissertation came up in conversation on the beach. “Do you have coffee?”

“I'm just leaving,” I said.

“Leaving where to, Mr. Lattimore, may I ask.”

“To look at birds. I'm trying to learn the birds that live around here.”

“Want some companionship?”

“I think you meant to say
company,
do I want some
company.
And the answer is no. What did Istvakson send you for this time, Miss Svetgartot?”

“He didn't send me. I went for a drive. It's my one-day-and-one-night vacation.”

“Well, enjoy the rest of it, then.”

I took up my rain slicker, binoculars, and boots, went outside, and put them in my truck. Through the kitchen window I saw Lily Svetgartot preparing coffee. I got in the truck and drove past the grocery and post office in Port Medway, then on out to the beach at Vogler's Cove. I noticed clouds building to the south. I sat in a small seafood café, reading the various local newspapers and drinking a hot chocolate. Through the window I could see a few eider ducks and scoters bobbing on the water. Gulls were out, of course, always gulls. Then, absent-mindedly paging through the
Chronicle-Herald,
I noticed yet another article about the movie, now officially referred to as
Next Life.
The piece mentioned where in Halifax scenes were being shot (the gossip journalist had adopted the noun “shoot”) and which actors or actresses were spotted in which restaurants. Four or five paragraphs down, there was a brief interview with Istvakson in which he said, “I'm completely taken over by the sheer pathos of this story I'm filming. Sam Lattimore and Elizabeth Church—it's almost as if I'm becoming them. I dream them. I daydream them. We're on a strange and wonderful and very profound journey together.” Reading this, I wanted to lie down on the cold sand so that a gull, any kind of gull, could scream these words out of my brain. Instead, I took a walk.

I had to come to terms with the fact that the novel I'd been working on when Elizabeth was alive,
Think Gently on Libraries,
not only was stalled, but the mere thirty-one pages I'd written were in bad shape. Here's the basic story.

In middle age the narrator decides to find out everything he can about the day he was born, March 4, 1929, at 11:58
P.M.
in Halifax. What did his mother, a librarian, and his father, a police detective, do that day? Why was he delivered into the world on the roof of the Halifax Free Library? Why was he delivered into the world by a Dr. Petronius? Why did his mother, when the narrator was just a year old, run off with Dr. Petronius to Vancouver? What was she doing on the roof of the library at all? How did Dr. Petronius even know she was there? The narrator teaches art history at Dalhousie University but is himself no artist; he likes teaching, though, and is good at it. His wife of twenty-six years is a police sketch artist and part-time art teacher in two different high schools; they have a daughter, just off to university in Montreal to study medicine, with a special interest in forensic pathology. Anyway, the questions about his birth, his parents' lives, all sorts of things that up to his middle age had troubled him only now and then, now mercilessly haunt him. They are all he can think about. His obsession is beginning to fray his marriage. Yet as he begins his research, he discovers that none of his academic training is of any use. He applies for a year's leave (fabricating a research project), receives it, and starts to investigate the day he was born. He begins to find out things he is not sure he wants to know. But he cannot stop finding them out.

I always cringe when a writer, in person or in print, whines about writer's block. Basically, I don't believe in it. I think it's all bullshit. Oh, of course,
of course
life intervenes: there's illness, there's depression, there's attending to children, there's a truck to get repaired, there's Japanese crabapple trees to plant. (I'd read that the Japanese crabapple thrives in the Nova Scotia climate. My second week in the cottage, I ordered twenty young trees and planted them out back, a small orchard. “Expect deer,” Philip said.) All sorts of quotidian anxieties and demands intrude. But what's necessary is to find a time of the day or night to dedicate exclusively to writing, even if only a page or two, even if you end up writing garbage. Drink more coffee; drink less coffee. Set the alarm for four
A.M.
“Wait for the moon, admit the moon isn't showing up,” as Yasunari Kawabata, one of my favorite Japanese novelists, wrote. “No matter—just write every day.” I realize I'm being unsympathetic to the insistences and fragilities of some people's emotional makeup; I realize it's idiosyncratic, life to life to life. Who doesn't know that? Good Lord, listen to me. All platitudes (mine especially) about writing sound hollow, a dumb show.

Still, when we lived in the Essex Hotel, my writing for radio really was demanding. And I was all too willing to set aside the novel to do it. I could have rationalized this by saying that a novel (as Elizabeth had put it, about Marghanita Laski) is a jealous mistress, and there's no room for distractions of any sort, so if I couldn't concentrate fully on writing a novel, I'd be better off setting it aside and returning to it when our financial bad weather cleared. Truth be told, Elizabeth was the disciplined writer of the household. Often it was a matter of my own brand of willful incapacitation. While I was convinced of the plot of
Think Gently on Libraries
and thought about it all the time, I was not devoted enough to writing the thing. Then Elizabeth was murdered.

Dr. Nissensen once said, “From everything you've told me about her and your marriage, Elizabeth would have wanted—
wants
—you to finish this book. In time, perhaps you'll take your inspiration from that.”

In any case, after escaping from Lily Svetgartot, I spent much of the day at Vogler's Cove, trying to distinguish one gull from another, walking to near exhaustion, setting up “problems for thought,” as Chekhov wrote, and trying to solve them, finally admitting to myself that I'd have to bring up my seething anger toward Istvakson with Dr. Nissensen at our next session. I went to the seafood café twice more. It was about five o'clock when I got back to the cottage. There was a note thumbtacked to the front door:
Dinner at seven! I'm making the Hungarian
goulash you like so much!—Cynthia

I was happy to be invited. I decided to take a hot bath. In the tub I realized that I'd caught a chill during the day, maybe even had a slight fever. Toweling off, I took two aspirin, set the alarm clock, and lay down on the bed for an hour's nap. Waking to the alarm, I went into the kitchen, threw water on my face, and dried off with a dishtowel. I got dressed and, carrying a bottle of wine, walked over to Philip and Cynthia's, glancing out at the beach, hoping Elizabeth might show up later that night. I knocked on the door and stepped inside. “Hello?”

“Oh, Sam, come on in,” Cynthia called from the kitchen. “Philip and Lily are having drinks.”

I turned to leave. But Cynthia hurried over, took my bottle of wine, and pulled me by the front of my sweater into the kitchen. “Don't be an idiot, Sam. We aren't trying to set you two up, for God's sake.”

“She's invading my privacy and she's the lackey of a fucking idiot.”

“It's not her fault that you hate her boss so much.”

“Why didn't you say in your note that she was invited?”

“When I left the note, she wasn't yet. I ran into her at the library in town.”

When I got to the kitchen, I saw that Philip had moved
The Sleepless Night of the Litigant
from over his typewriter to the wall above the kitchen counter. Philip said, “Sam, I've been reading the Max Frisch you recommended.
Montauk.
It's the best thing I've read in a long time. I'm going to read everything he's written.” Having noticed my not greeting Lily Svetgartot, he said, “You know Lily, of course.”

I said, “You taking in stray dogs now, Philip?” It was uncalled-for sarcasm, crude, completely lacking in etiquette in the face of his and Cynthia's hospitality, but it flew right out.

“Lily is a film student, did you know that? She's been telling stories out of school about Mr. Istvakson, which should please you no end.”

“Have a drink, Sam,” Cynthia said.

“Vodka, please.”

“Orange juice as usual or straight up?”

“Straight up, thank you.”

Cynthia prepared my drink and handed it to me. Lily, dressed in that long sweater and jeans, thick scarf coiled around her neck, stepped out onto the back porch overlooking the horseshoe beach. Philip said, “I'm going to get in some wood. A fire'll be nice in the woodstove. Temperature drop, the radio said.”

“Sam, why not go out on the porch and try and be civil to our guest,” Cynthia said. “I can't think of a better way to make up to me and Philip for your absolute rudeness.” Cynthia was otherwise concentrating on a large pot of goulash whose aroma filled the room.

I was caught in the situational ethics: do I stay with my honest feelings about Istvakson, and by association Lily Svetgartot, or do I put my anger aside and apologize to Cynthia and Philip? When I went out on the porch, I brought up the one subject I least wanted to hear about. “How's the movie going, Miss Svetgartot?”

“Cynthia and Philip said they have a daughter about my age. That's probably why they're being so lovely to me.” She set her wine glass on the small wooden table, then wrapped herself tightly in her own arms. “I laugh when people in Nova Scotia complain of the wind. They should feel the wind in my part of Norway. It goes right through you.” She took a sip of wine and set the glass down again. Looking out to the horizon, she said, “I don't sleep with Mr. Istvakson. Being a lackey doesn't require that. Nor am I interested.”

“None of my business.”

“Cynthia directly asked me if I slept with Istvakson. She is direct. I like even the way she uses the word ‘directly.' She says, ‘I'll get to dinner directly.' I like that in her. It's, you know,
direct.
”

“How is the movie coming along?”

“Okay, since you asked, let the lackey make a report for you, Mr. Lattimore. First of all, Emily Kalman—she, of course, has the part of Elizabeth—is not sober on most nights. Not every night is she drunk, but almost every night. I make a lot of strong black coffee for Miss Kalman. She has two of her own assistants, but I make the coffee for her. She is a fine actress, though. Second of all, Mr. Akutagawa is intense about his cinematography—‘intensity incarnate,' as Mr. Istvakson said. He said it with admiration. The actors adore Mr. Akutagawa. Especially the actor playing the role of you, Mr. Clancy Leonard. He is Canadian also. He wants to meet you, talk with you. It might interest you, the lackey has persuaded him into not driving to your cottage. From your attitude toward—
everything.
Now that you know he wishes to talk with you, if you want to, you can contact him easily. Rumors to the contrary, I don't sleep with Mr. Clancy or Miss Kalman, contrary to rumors. A movie set, Mr. Lattimore, is made of rumors. One reason I drive to Port Medway is to get away from that. The air is better here, you understand.”

“Will I want to kill myself when I see the finished product, Miss Svetgartot? Knowing me as well as you do.”

“That is funny, Mr. Lattimore.”

“I think dinner's being served. Let's go in.”

“Fine. But it's a small table. I'll either be sitting next to you or across from you. It can't be helped. Philip and Cynthia won't allow the lackey to eat on the porch alone.”

I
WAS ORGANIZING AND
filing some of Elizabeth's papers earlier today, and I discovered, tucked inside a notebook, some newspaper reviews of
The Victorian Chaise-Longue.
Most were photocopied from library sources, others Elizabeth had written out by hand. From an Edinburgh newspaper:

 

Time travel and fear and confusion and a haunting piece of Victorian furniture, what more could you want of a story on a cold rainy night in front of the fire? Here we have a young wife named Melanie suffering from tuberculosis, a tragic and romantic illness, and who is confined to her room, which affords readers a sense of claustrophobia unlike anything, to this reader's mind, since Edgar Allan Poe. Melanie, all pent-up hallucinatory desire and intelligence, hopes that she will survive with the help of her trusted physician, perhaps most unselfishly because of her newborn baby, whom she has yet to hold in her arms. At one point her family decides she must move from one room to another in the house, and in the new room there is the Victorian chaise-longue, almost a chair-as-revenant, if you will, or at least it seems to have a life of its own, a separate emotional history, a haunting pedigree. While lying back to rest on this ungainly piece of furniture, Melanie wakes up in a world almost 100 years ago. She is still infected with tuberculosis (time travel did not cure her), and in this incarnation Melanie does not, as in her contemporary life, have a loving husband to look after her, but instead there is a sister who holds a dark secret with her—and what's more, her formerly neat and clean room has been replaced by filthy and unkempt quarters, her room all sordid décor, in which Melanie inhales gothic dust deep into the lungs. What was once familiar and comforting to Melanie is now all almost entirely unfamiliar, and the effect on Melanie's mind is one of the intensifying elements of the plot in this strange and mesmerizing tale, which, while it may have antecedents in literature, is quite original and utterly memorable.