Next Life Might Be Kinder (2 page)

“Not past tense, please.
Love,
not
loved.
”

With Dr. Nissensen, October 10, 1972:

 

Sam, let me get this straight. You say that since Elizabeth's murder you've been unable to properly order your thoughts, that—how did you put it?”—he checked his notebook—“‘my memories come unbidden and defy chronology,' and therefore you're worried this means your mind's gone off the rails, that you're cracking up.”

“That's about it. Yes.”

He thought for a moment. Our session had been highly contentious, and it felt like Dr. Nissensen wanted to end it on a conciliatory note.

“Well,” he said, “we don't very often remember our lives in original chronologies, do we? More in associative patterns.” He wrote something down. “Ordered memories, disordered memories. Really, no matter either way as long as our work together eventually leads to your attaining a kind of—”

“Do not use the hated word,” I said. “Please don't use the hated word.”

“No, I was going to say
clarity.
”

Y
EAR AFTER YEAR
, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck, what does it matter as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such passionate equanimity as need met with fate.

I first met Elizabeth two years ago almost to the day, on August 30, 1971, at about eight-thirty in the evening, at the small Hartison Gallery on Duke Street in Halifax. The gallery was associated with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, most famous for his book
The Americans
and who spent summers on Cape Breton, was teaching a course at the college, and there was a lot of excitement in town about this. He also had agreed to exhibit twenty of his Nova Scotia photographs at the gallery. I was thirty-four and had started to write my second novel,
Think Gently on Libraries.
I had an apartment on Granville, right there in the neighborhood. My regular café was Cyrano's Last Night, also on Duke Street. Art students liked to hang out there. The café had one of those enormous espresso machines that looked like it had been designed by Jules Verne in a hallucinatory condition. Like an ancient sea creature trying to breathe on land, when coffee was being made the machine steamed and wheezed loudly, drowning out the nonstop opera, which was, much to my preference, usually Puccini or Verdi, never Wagner.

Anyway, the gallery was crowded, and after moving slowly along the walls from photograph to photograph, I found myself standing next to Elizabeth (of course I didn't know her name yet), in front of a diptych called
Mabou Window,
which consisted of two identical views of an expanse of snowy boulders and flat rock outcroppings that led down to the sea. A section of broken wooden fence was in each foreground. The snow's glare nearly made me wince, yet there was a strangely animate quality to the light, as if I were seeing wind that contained snow moving toward the water. To me,
Mabou Window
was epigrammatic, if a landscape study can be epigrammatic; it held a lot of muted, even spectral emotion, a kind of photographic pencil sketch of a stretch of the Cape Breton coast coming into focus out of the fog. As I stood there, a touch lost in thought, lightly jostled by other people but hardly minding, I heard Elizabeth read the words Robert Frank had scrawled across the bottom:
Next Life Might Be Kinder.
I didn't look at her right away.

Then Elizabeth turned to me and said, “You probably noticed that he's written the same thing on every one of these twenty photographs. They're unsettling, don't you think—those words? We're going to have to think about them for a while.”

I
'M NOT A
spiritual person, but you know what my one prayer is? Please let me get some sleep.

Some nights all memory becomes a ten-second strip of film run in slow motion, which shows Elizabeth spilling down the stairs in the Essex Hotel, shot by the bellman Alfonse Padgett. Though I did not see it happen, I keep seeing it happen. I could be typing away on my Olivetti manual. I could be organizing plates and coffee cups in the dishwasher. I could be riding my bicycle along the jigsaw coastline near Port Medway, the full moon bright enough you could read a book by it. I could be having a conversation with Philip or Cynthia Slayton. (How many middle-of-the-night telephone calls have they suffered?) I could be having a cup of coffee on the porch. I could be watching a movie at three
A.M.
in the kitchen, where the small portable TV sits on the counter. Anything, really. “In the moment,” as they say, and then the film strip ambushes me. When that happens, I've taught myself to counteract it by clamping apart my eyelids with my fingers, to the point of causing tears, which usually takes only a few seconds—Dr. Nissensen didn't suggest this technique—and it's then I willfully recall, in as great detail as possible, the first time Elizabeth and I made love.

It was in my one-room apartment. She kissed my ears and whispered, “Tonight, your Elizabeth,” as if reading the title on some lurid cover of a 1940s paperback detective novel. Just the way she said it, enunciating each word in my ear. Each word given equal regard by her tongue and breath. From that night forward, before our marriage, during our marriage, these two things—kissing and then whispering into my ear, “Tonight, your Elizabeth”—always guaranteed we'd go (to quote Veronica Lake in a movie) from slowly opening buttons to smoking cigarettes without even turning back the bedclothes.

I
SHOULD MENTION THAT
in Halifax they're filming a movie based on my marriage to Elizabeth and her murder, basically our life together. I think that's an accurate way to describe the subject of the movie. Though if someone had said, in regard to how this movie got made in the first place, “You've whored out your life,” I'd have to accept the accusation. When Elizabeth Church was murdered, we had $58 in our savings account. I am just stating facts here. I had a financial situation. My last royalty statement from my first novel (
I Apologize for the Late Hour
) had amounted to $28. So I borrowed $1,000 from an uncle on my mother's side who lived in Regina (“We've never been close,” he'd said, “but all right”), and paid him right back when Pentagonal Films bought, for $125,000, as the contract read, “all rights to the story of the marriage, the murder, and its aftermath.” And I signed it with eyes wide open, remorse already in place. Pentagonal, which was based in Toronto, assigned the project to a director-screenwriter named Peter Istvakson. I met with him a few times and found him the most severe example of a wonder-of-me type I've ever seen. “The progress of this picture will be the progress of my soul”—he actually said this while we were having coffee in my old haunt, Cyrano's Last Night. I mean, who talks like that? A real dunce. Go sit in the corner with your dunce cap on, dunce.

The production's been up and running for about three weeks now. The cast and crew are set up at the Essex Hotel on Argyle Street. Definitely something perverse in that choice, since that's where Lizzy was murdered. “The hotel manager, Mr. Isherwood, was disgusted, but the hotel's owner gave us the best rates,” Istvakson's assistant, Lily Svetgartot, told me on the telephone. “He figured having a film crew and all those actors and actresses around would help soften what happened to Elizabeth in the public's conscience. Well, a hotel is a business, after all.”

Just yesterday, Lily Svetgartot telephoned again. “Mr. Istvakson prays you'll soon visit the shoot,” she said. I immediately arranged for an unlisted phone number for my cottage. The “shoot,” I'm told, is any location at which the movie is being filmed. Prays, does he?

Night has fallen; full moon; the tide is out. What makes me feel homicidal toward Istvakson is something else he told the
Halifax Chronicle-Herald:
“I no longer think in sentences.” Like he's transcended language and risen to a higher plane of regard—cinematic images. Gulls tonight are ghosting the shore, along with the occasional petrel. I've been studying the field guide, but I don't know the birds around Port Medway all that well yet. The ones I'm looking at outside my kitchen window might be Franklin's gulls, little gulls, laughing gulls, or black-headed gulls. Bonaparte's gulls, mew gulls, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, Iceland gulls, great black-backed gulls, glaucous gulls, Sabine's gulls, or ivory gulls. Because all of these frequent Nova Scotia.

Anyway, in just a short while, my sweater and buckled fisherman's boots on—purchased at a church yard sale, perfect fit—I'll walk down to the beach and wait for Elizabeth.

“I
WANTED YOU TO
know,” Peter Istvakson said one evening at Cyrano's Last Night before the movie started production, “publicity is planning to advertise our film as being ‘based on a true story.'” He set out a mock-up of the poster. The title of the movie was apparently
Next Life.
“You haven't even started making this movie and there's already a poster?” I said.

“No final decision's been made,” he said. “I have final approval.”

In conversations leading up to principal photography—the first day of actual film production—Istvakson used certain pet phrases, and besides making me cringe, these phrases struck me as being encoded: they sounded one way but meant something else, and they seemed to have a deep hostility toward language itself. I suppose they were the standard-issue currency of the movie business, since finally these phrases conveyed nothing. My favorite example of this, which I wrote down in a notebook, was “It's not a yes but it's not a no.” He said that one a lot. At various times it applied to (1) whether the recently famous Canadian actress Emily Kalman had accepted the role of Elizabeth (she had); (2) whether
Next Life Might Be Kinder
would be the title (no); (3) whether Matsuo Akutagawa, who had won international awards, would sign on to work with Istvakson again as cinematographer or remain in a rest hospital on the Sea of Japan (he did sign on); and (4) whether I would, as I had requested, be granted leave of my contractual obligation to “provide additional dialogue upon request” (an attorney got me out of that).

“What ‘based on a true story' means,” Istvakson said, “is my film will tell what really happened, only better.”

A
WRITER HAS TO
have an address, a place to put a desk, a typewriter, stamps, and envelopes, a place to cook a meal in the middle of the night. It is as simple as that. Thirteen months ago, I committed to purchasing this cottage pretty much sight unseen, except that I'd studied the photographs of the interior and the surrounding five acres which Philip and Cynthia sent after I had seen their advertisement in the
Chronicle-Herald
and telephoned them to express definite interest. Four days after that conversation, I telephoned them a second time, from the Essex Hotel, and spoke with Philip for a few minutes, at which point he said, “Why not drive out today and have a look?”

“I already know I want it,” I said. “I can meet your price.”

“All this just from the photographs?”

“Yes. I hope I don't sound like a nut case.”

“Let's just say you're decisive. Still, why not drive out?”

“I'm on my way. Just give me the directions.”

I shifted the phone to my other ear, to make it easier to write.

“Ready? Take 103 East,” he said. “You'll be on 103 for more than an hour. Get off 103 at exit 5. The exit sign will say Route 213, Peggy's Cove and St. Margaret's Bay. I think one of the signs preceding it mentions the airport. When you get off at exit 5, you come to a stop sign. Take a left back over 103. It may be marked with an airplane symbol. Take 213 for nine or ten miles. Turn left onto 102 North. Just before you arrive at the turn, there's a sign saying 102 South, Halifax.
You don't want that.
You continue under the viaduct and take a left on 102 North. Be careful when you make this turn—there are often cars coming toward you. Take 102 North for about fifteen miles. Get off at exit 6. In case you get lost, our telephone number is 646-354-1110.”

 

Tonight I saw Elizabeth again. At about ten o'clock I had walked across the road and down to the horseshoe-shaped beach. There was enough moonlight to illuminate the shoreline. Though the far end of the beach, at the start of the tree-filled peninsula, was in shadow, a stretch of about thirty meters was clearly visible. Looking behind me, I could see Cynthia and Philip sitting close to each other on their sofa. I could see the bookshelves behind them. I could see they were drinking wine. I could see the flickering of the television screen reflected in the wide bay window. Turning back to the water, I saw that Elizabeth was on the beach.

E
LIZABETH AND I
were married on January 14, 1972. We got a marriage license from a deputy issuer, found a justice of the peace, Irwin Abershall, and arranged for a room in the city hall, 1841 Argyle Street. It was a bitterly cold day, snowing lightly, and the wind, up from the harbor, found even the side streets. Still, on our walk to city hall Lizzy and I held bare hands inside her coat pocket. “I love this old building,” she said when we walked up the stairs. “But there are pigeons on the roof, which means the insulation up there isn't as good as it should be. On the other hand, that's nice for the pigeons.”

We needed a legal witness, so we asked Marie Ligget, Lizzy's dear friend, a waitress at Cyrano's Last Night, and she was there right on time, four-thirty
P.M.
, and was more dressed up than Elizabeth and I. After the exchange of mismatched antique rings (bought at Harborfront Pawn) and vows, Marie Ligget went directly back to work, and Elizabeth and I checked into room 50 at the Essex Hotel. We had already secured room 58—a four-room suite—where we would begin our life together. But we felt that it would be more romantic to spend our wedding night in a different room, even though it was at the other end of the same floor. We had a light dinner, soup and a baguette, and polished off a bottle of wine, in the small restaurant off the lobby. The only customers. Late that evening, after we had made love, I was reclining in the bathtub. Elizabeth appeared naked in the bathroom doorway, holding a lit candle in an old-fashioned candle holder, with a curved handle and wax catcher at the base, and after what she said, I thought I'd lose my breath from laughing. Nodding her head toward the bedroom, then languorously moving her free hand across her breasts, then down along her hips, she said, in her best Mae West imitation, “That was very nice. But next time, let's try it without all the mistakes.”