Swann (15 page)

“They don’t need appreciation,” Sarah wrote back, absolving him—and, furthermore, she wrote, “nature worshippers are vastly overrated as human beings, particularly in their own estimation.”

It was what he needed to hear. Sweet impunity. Everything Sarah (Sarah! Sarah!) writes is what he needs to hear.

Of course he knows this can be explained as a trick of love, that every word spoken by a lover becomes radiantly relevant and overlaid with gold.

Sporran
.

Jimroy is awakened in the middle of the night by this word, which appears suddenly spelled out in his dream.

The rest of the dream fades quickly—he has never been able to retain his dreams—leaving only this single word:
sporran
. The letters dance with a garish blue light behind his closed eyelids. There is a background of dull grey and a sensation of shrill music being played off stage.

The image is surprisingly persistent, and in order to make it disappear Jimroy is forced to reach over and turn on the bedside lamp. The alarm clock on the table says 3:00 A.M.

Sporran
. Of course. It is the word he was trying to remember, the name of the little purse that Highlanders wear in front of their kilts. He saw one not long ago on that odd young duck of a Scotsman sitting next to him at the University Theater.

This is something that has happened to him fairly frequently. A word or phrase or piece of trivia will completely slip out of his mind, only to reappear later when the need of it has passed. Objects mislaid, an appointment overlooked. It happens to everyone, of course—he knows that—and gets worse with age. From time to time, especially in the middle of a lecture, it has caused Jimroy a flutter of embarrassment. The phenomenon had to do with the breakdown of the oxygen supply to the brain cells. Somewhere he has read an article about it. Was it
Scientific American
? No, must have been
Harpers
. Or else he’s seen a television program about it. He hopes he won’t become the kind of doddering old fool who forgets to zip up his pants or has to have his phone number pinned inside his shirt.

Probably it’s a good sign that the forgotten word or phrase always does come back to him eventually, usually when he’s relaxed or even, as tonight, in the middle of sleep. What a curious thing the brain is really, with its intricate circuits and cross channels, all embedded in inches of damp, unpretentious, democratic tissue. Sometimes Jimroy thinks of his brain as a rather thick child, wilful and mischievous and dully unaccountable, that he must carry atop an awkward body. But tonight he is grateful for the sudden flashpoint of memory.

Wide awake now, he tries to recall something that has happened during the day to produce this sudden revelation, this illuminated word
sporran
. There is nothing. And it’s been weeks since his encounter with the Scotsman, weeks since he’s asked himself what the term was for the little pouch the man wore around his waist. Of course, it’s not a particularly common word. One could go years and years without hearing it. But still he should not have forgotten.

It isn’t as though this word was something he was trying
to suppress, not like the time he was filling out the divorce papers and quite suddenly couldn’t remember Audrey’s middle name. In a case like that he was willing to admit there might be an element of unconscious blocking.

Audrey Joan Beamish Jimroy. The name
Joan
came to him the day after he mailed in the papers to the lawyers, when he was sitting in a tub of hot water. He immediately got out, dried himself off and phoned the lawyer, saying that he “might possibly have neglected to include my estranged wife’s middle name.”

Then he got back into the tub, telling himself, making light of it, that he was thankful his parents had chosen not to give him a middle name or he might very likely have forgotten that, too. After his bath he sat down in a chair by a window and made himself recite some of the Cantos; on one line only, but a line that had once been a favourite, he faltered. He would have to watch himself. In his métier a good memory was essential. Vitamin E was helpful, so some people believed. It was something to look into. If a man was going around forgetting his wife’s middle name …

Sporran, sporran
. He turns out the light and tries to go back to sleep, but the word beeps in his head. He wonders what its origin is. Irish, probably. It has that sound. Nothing to do with spores certainly, though it is hung on the body in a conspicuously spore-related place.

Audrey Joan Beamish. He clearly remembers the first time he saw her name, a signature at the bottom of an application letter. All spring he had been looking for a research assistant, and Audrey, who didn’t know research from beans, had applied. Typical of Aud to think she could master anything she put her mind to. At least she could type a little, that was something. And her Birmingham accent had an invigorating effect on him. Her boniness, her rawness—
she had the kind of reddened nose that was always pressed in a wad of damp tissue—invited his tenderness. He wanted to protect her from herself. Poor old Audrey.

Often, even here in California, homeland of long-legged American beauties, he sees extraordinarily unattractive women—sallow or bent or overweight or in some way deformed—riding on buses or dragging through department stores. Their shopping bags and the children they tug along confirm without doubt that these women are married. Who would marry such women? Jimroy has asked himself. Then he remembers:
he
married Audrey. He was even drawn to her because of her long horse’s face, her knobbed wrist bones gleaming like pickled onions above her hands.

Even her ignorance gave him pleasure in the early days, telling him he was not alone in his failings. He had amused himself by mumbling inanities to her: Isn’t this the most celestial sky, isn’t this the most urban city, isn’t so-and-so forever putting his foot in his Achilles’ heel, wasn’t somebody-or-other always looking back in retrospect. Then he would watch her face in canny delight as these remarks bounced off her like rubber bullets. She would frowningly turn her eyes upward in thought or else give her sideways nod; one shoulder would go up. Yes, yes, she would say, riding roughshod over hi
s jeu d’esprit
, his prickliness, blind to it, oblivious as only Audrey could be oblivious.

What he loved her for, if love in its defective mode can still be called love, was her stubborn though unspoken belief that there existed an order to the universe and that she was part of the human army who propped it up.
Soldiering on
was the phrase Audrey lived by, soldiering on blindly, bravely, doing those thousands of things she deemed worth doing. With a wild flailing of arms, with an inexhaustible noisy flow of energy, she had wallpapered the hall of the
ugly old house Jimroy owned in Winnipeg, scraped paint from the woodwork, planted her “veg patch” in the scrubby backyard. He admitted that she was simple-minded—but there was such
kindness
in the way she misread him. To her he was not a crippled cynic with a talent for misanthropy; to Aud he was no more than a poor sap who needed cheering up. A coarse, awkward woman, but something in her nature appealed, even her sense of righteousness. He once in conversation used the word
poleaxed
, and she took him to task for being derogatory about the Polish people.

When he married Audrey Beamish he had been prepared for pity from his acquaintances. He braced himself for their questioning faces. Why in his fortieth year had he saddled himself with a wife, particularly a wife like Audrey?

Instead of pity there was rejoicing. She was just what he needed, people said, this noisy good sport of a woman with a heart the size of a watermelon. (Someone or other had used those exact words.)

Moments of lamentations. Everyone has them, Jimroy supposes. His are conducted late at night.
My wound is that I have no wound
. This is just one of those things Jimroy chants to himself, not sure how fitting it is—introspection distorts even the sharpest mind and extremely doubtful about its originality. (The phrase, the rhythm of it, sounds suspiciously like something someone else said, someone starkly confessional and melodramatic—Rupert Brooke, someone of that ilk.) Nevertheless Jimroy proceeds:
My wound is that …

His wound, or woundlessness as it were, is a small organism curled inside him, patient, docile, like a sleeping spaniel, a dwarf spaniel. It refuses to identify itself, and the only reason Jimroy knows of its existence is that he sometimes, though rarely, encounters it elsewhere, curled inside
another human body where it is, to his surprise, instantly recognizable. That student he once had at the university, Ely Salterton, fresh off a wheat farm; from Ely Salterton he had kept his distance. And “more recently” that queer fellow in the kilt—well,
he
was not a clear case. But Audrey; in Audrey he had seen it at once, only instead of being repelled by it, he had reached out, a man who at forty was in danger of drowning.

“Never mind, love,” Audrey said after his first (and last) sexual attempt. “It doesn’t matter in the least, love.”

Amazingly, it hadn’t.

A miracle. He had been free to withdraw his hand from the damp coarseness of Audrey’s pubic curls, from the folded old-man confusion of her wet labia—at least he supposed those spongy tissues were labia.

The relief was awesome. Even more awesome was his conviction that Audrey felt the same exalted sense of relief. The failing between them was recognized at once and surrendered to. Afterwards they lay quietly in the dark, their arms around each other, the happiest hour Jimroy has ever known. Plenitude. A rich verdure, richer than he had ever imagined from his reading of love poetry. And where did it come from? From Audrey. Dumb Audrey with her grating voice. Audrey who thought Shakespeare was “snooty,” Audrey who had never even heard of the poet John Starman, Audrey who pronounced Camus so that it sounded like Cam-muss; at that moment, at that level, hidden away in a dark Fort Garry bedroom, they met. Their silence settled on the hairs of his released hand and on Audrey’s sadly smiling mouth. Dear Christ, what happiness.

After the divorce a surprising number of their friends sided with Audrey. (There were those who cruelly joked that she was the first of their acquaintance to divorce a man
for sarcasm.) Of course she felt rejected, people said this with small lip pursings and an upward glance. They could understand exactly how it must be from her point of view. Even now Jimroy knows that these old friends receive postcards from Sarasota from time to time. Good old Audrey reporting in.

And what does he get? Nothing.

Eastern Airlines was unable to trace Jimroy’s lost luggage. They were sorry. They gave him a number of new forms to fill out and told him not to abandon hope entirely. There were hundreds of wild stories about baggage turning up in out-of-the-way places. Of course he would receive a cheque for the replacement value of the contents and for the two pieces of luggage themselves. Was Jimroy absolutely sure that the luggage had been weighed in at the Winnipeg airport? (He had to say no to this, remembering that Mrs. Lynch had looked after the luggage.) Had he, when arriving in the San Francisco airport, gone directly to the luggage pickup or had he stopped somewhere, at the men’s room perhaps, or at a coffee machine? (Jimroy could not be sure of this, not after all this time.) Luggage, he was told, was rarely stolen, but on occasion … well it was certainly not unknown. Mrs. Myrtle, the adjuster, was sorry about the lost papers, which she realized were extremely valuable as well as being irreplaceable, but with luck, these might still surface. There was a woman just last year who lost her vanity case on a flight between Santa Barbara and L.A., and six months later, after an unexplainable detour to Hong Kong, the case was returned to her. Anything could happen. It could turn up at any moment.

And on November 10—there was a fall of rain, which prevented Jimroy from working out of doors—it did turn up, though no one was able to say exactly how it had
happened. Mrs. Myrtle from the airline phoned Jimroy and informed him in a rocking jubilant contralto that his baggage appeared to have been found. Would he come out to the airport to identify it?

An hour later he was there, inspecting his suitcases. Inside were his clothes, his folded suits and shirts, his shoes still wrapped loosely in the newspaper he had put around them two months earlier. He looked inside his toilet case and saw that his toothbrush had gone green with mould, but that everything else was in order. His neckties were still rolled neatly around his black nylon socks. There was his battery shaver—a gift from Audrey; one of her good ideas—and the striped swimming trunks he had put in at the last minute. A set of towels and face cloths, a knitted vest for chilly days. He reached a hand under the vest, searching for his papers and for the photograph of Mary Swann. His fingers struck glass, then the hard metal frame. “Everything’s here,” he told Mrs. Myrtle, a heavy black woman with large swinging earrings. “The photograph too.”

“Photograph?”

“Of a woman.” How silky he sounded saying this:
Of a woman
. “Who unfortunately is no longer alive.” Her blue-black forehead became a sheet of crinkles. “Yeah?”

“A wonderful woman.” His happiness had made him silly.

“Can I see?”

He held up the picture for her inspection. “The love of my life”, he said recklessly.

He observed that her eyes rolled back slightly and that she blew softly through her teeth. “Far out,” she said, a phrase that injured Jimroy with its aroma of doubt.

“This is an extremely rare photograph.” He heard himself turn weak with pleading. “The only copy in existence.”

“Hey.” She sounded soft, smoky. He could swear she was laughing at him. “Didn’t I tell you we’d find your stuff, Mr. Jimroy?”

When he reached home he unpacked his suitcase and hung his clothes carefully in the closet. He set the photograph on the bureau and then sat down on the bed, his hands icy despite the heat. A moan bubbled its way through his closed lips. She had changed. Her face was hard, unreasonable, closed, and invoked in him a fever of shame. I am a relatively famous man, he said to himself, seeking comfort. My name is well known, and I have no reason to be ashamed.