Unless (3 page)
Why would a woman leave such personal diaries behind? To punish, to hurt, of course. Colin, for the most part a decent, kind-hearted man, used to address her in a dry, admonitory way, as though she were a graduate student instead of his wife. “Don’t tell me this is processed cheese,” he asked her once when we were having dinner at their house. Another time: “This coffee is undrinkable.” He loved pleasure—he was that kind of man—and took it for granted and couldn’t help his little yelps of outrage when pleasure failed. You could call him an innocent in his expectations, almost naive on this particular August evening. It was as though he were alone in a vaulted chamber echoing with immensities, while Tom and I stood attendance just outside the door, catching the overflow, the odd glimpse of his skewed but calm brilliance. Even the little pockets under his eyes were phlegmatic. He was not a shallow person, but perhaps he suspected that we were. I had to stop myself interrupting with a joke. I often do this, I’m afraid: ask for an explanation and then drift off into my own thoughts.
How could he now be sitting at our table so calmly, toying with cherries and coffee cups and rolling the edge of his
straw placemat, and pressing this heft of information on us? It was close to midnight; he had an hour’s drive ahead of him. What did the theory of relativity really matter to his ongoing life? Colin, with his small specs and trim moustache, was at ease with big ideas like relativity. As a theory, relativity worked, it held all sorts of important “concepts” together with its precision and elegance. Think of glue lavishly applied, he said helpfully about relativity; think of the power of the shrewd guess. Such a sweeping perspective had been visionary at the beginning, but had been assessed and reinforced, and it was, moreover, Colin was now insisting, useful. In the face of life’s uncertainties, relativity’s weight could be assumed and then set aside, part of the package of consciousness.
He finished awkwardly, sat back in his chair with his two long arms extended. “So!” That’s it, he seemed to say, or that’s as much as I can do to simplify and explain so brilliant an idea. He glanced at his watch, then sat back again, exhausted, pleased with himself. He wore a well-pressed cotton shirt with blue and yellow stripes, neatly tucked into his black jeans. He has no interest in clothes. This shirt must go back to his married days, chosen for him, ironed for him by Marietta herself and put on a hanger, perhaps a summer ago.
The theory of relativity would not bring Colin’s wife hurrying back to the old stone house on Oriole Parkway. It
would not bring my daughter Norah home from the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, or the Promise Hostel where she beds at night. Tom and I followed her one day; we had to know how she managed, whether she was safe. The weather would be turning cold soon. How does she bear it? Cold concrete. Dirt. Uncombed hair.
“Would you say,” I asked Colin—I had not spoken for several minutes—“that the theory of relativity has reduced the weight of goodness and depravity in the world?”
He stared at me. “Relativity has no moral position. None whatever.” (“This coffee is undrinkable.”)
I looked to Tom for support, but he was gazing with his mild eyes at the ceiling, smiling. I knew that smile.
“But isn’t it possible,” I said to Colin, “to think that goodness, or virtue if you like, could be a wave or particle of energy?”
“No,” he said. “No, it is not possible.”
I made an abrupt move to clear the table. I was suddenly exhausted.
Still, I am thankful for the friendship and intellectual ardour of such an unpretentious man as Colin Glass, who despite his suffering and shame really wanted me to understand a key concept of the twentieth century. Or was he simply diverting himself for an hour? This is what I must learn: the art of diversion. He said not one word about Marietta all evening long. Tom and I understand
that he is reconstructing his life without her. But a daughter is something different. A daughter of nineteen cannot be erased.
I
T WAS UNDERSTOOD
that I would do the publicity, such as it was, for Danielle Westerman’s third volume of memoirs. At eighty-five she was too old, and too distinguished, to handle a day of interviews in Toronto, even though she lives there. I, as the translator, could easily field questions from the press. A very light schedule was organized by the publisher, since Dr. Westerman already possesses a long twilight of faithful readership.
In early September, I drove into Orangetown, down its calm, old-fashioned main street and into the countryside again. The city of Toronto, monumental and lonely, glowed in front of me. Its outskirts are ragged, though its numbered exits pretend at a kind of order. Traffic was light. I drove slowly by the corner of Bloor and Bathurst for a glimpse of Norah. There she was, as always, on the northeast corner, seated on the ground near the subway entrance with her bowl and cardboard sign, even though it was not yet nine o’clock. Had she had breakfast? Did she have nits in her hair? What is she thinking, or is her mind a great blank?
I parked the car and walked over to where she was. “Hello, darling Norah,” I said, setting down a plastic bag of food: bread and cheese, fruit and raw vegetables. And, in an envelope, a recent photo of Pet with his straight, proud muzzle and furry ruff. Norah, of all the girls, doted on Pet, and now I was bribing her shamelessly. It was a chilly day, and it iced my heart to see her unreadable immobility, but I was glad to notice that she was wearing warm mittens. Glad? Me glad? The least little signal will gladden my heart these days. Today she looked not quite at me, and nodded. Another wave of gladness struck. I allow myself only one such glimpse a week, since she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to see us.
It is like watching her through plate glass. All week I will draw expensively on this brief moment of voyeurism, at the same time trying to blot it out with images of Norah on her bicycle; Norah sitting at the kitchen table studying for exams; Norah reaching for her green raincoat; Norah trying on new school shoes; Norah sleeping, safe.
After a while I went to have my eyebrows arched and tinted at Sylvia’s, which calls itself a “spirit spa,” meaning, it seemed, that while Madame Sylvia swiped at my brow with a little paintbrush, she murmured and sang into my ear. It was now nine-thirty in the morning and I lay on a narrow table in a tiny white room. “You are at the age when you must protect the fine skin around the eyes,” she
warned. “A woman’s face falls, it is inevitable, but the eyes go on and on, giving light. You will be eighty, ninety, and your eyes will still charm.”
She knows nothing about my life. I’ve never been here before and have never thought of having an eyebrow tint. I have perfectly decent eyebrows, nicely shaped and regular, but I did look into a mirror a week or so ago and noticed that the small hairs at the outside corners were coming in grey. There was a little grey at the temples too, but nothing to be surprised about, not for a woman whose forty-fourth birthday is approaching, not for a woman who has never even thought of herself as possessing “temples,” such august body parts.
“Are you by any chance a Gemini?” Madame Sylvia asked intimately. Swish went the paintbrush. She stopped, peered at me closely, then swished again, a deft little stroke.
“No,” I said, ashamed to acknowledge the astrological universe. “My birthdays in September. Next week, in fact.”
“I can tell, yes.” She had a touch of the harridan in her voice. “I can always tell.”
What could she tell?
“Twenty-four dollars,” she said. “Let me give you my card. For next time.”
Presumptuous, but yes, there will be a next time. I calculated quickly. My face would make it through the next
few weeks, but by November I will probably be back in Madame Sylvia’s hushed white cell. I may well become a regular. Eyebrows, lashes, full facials, neck massage. I have led a reflective life, a life of thought, a writer, a translator, but all this is about to change. The delicate skin around my eyes was demanding attention. Has Tom noticed? I don’t think so. Christine and Natalie don’t really look at me in that way; they just see this watercolour blob that means mother, which is rather how I see myself.
“A woman’s charm is with her for life,” Madame Sylvia said, “but you must pay attention.”
No, I thought an hour later, no. I’m sorry, but I have no plans to be charming on a regular basis. Anyone can be charming. It’s really a cheap trick, mere charm, so astonishingly easy to perform, screwing up your face into sunbeams, and spewing them forth. The calculated lift of the wrist, chin up, thumb and forefinger brought together to form a little feminine loop, that trick of pretending to sit on a little glass chair, that concentration of radiance,
l’esprit;
little sprinkles of it everywhere, misting the air like bargain scent. Ingenue spritz, Emma Allen calls it.
I know that cheapness so intimately—the grainy, sugary, persevering way charm enters a fresh mouth and rubs against the molars, sticking there in soft wads, promoting mouth ulcers or whatever it is that’s the metaphoric projection of self-hatred. Of all the social virtues, charm is, in the end, the
most unrewarding. And compared to goodness, real goodness, or the unmovable self-abnegation my daughter Norah practises, charm is nothing but crumpled tissue paper, soiled from previous use.
Sincerity? No. Sincerity’s over. Sincerity’s lost whatever edge it had. It’s fine, fine matter but wasted on the press, who all grew up post-Holocaust, devoted readers of
Mad Magazine
, and wouldn’t recognize a bar of willed innocence if it came wrapped in foil.
Nor will I ever again be pointlessly, endlessly polite. I got over that two years ago when I did my author tour. It seems I’ve lost, like a stream of pebbles leaving my hand, the kind of endurance that professional courtesy demands: suck in your breath, let your face go numb, listen to the interviewer’s questions, register optimally, let your breath out, evaluate the feelings of those who depend on you (agent, publisher, editor, that nice Sheila person who does publicity, and of course Danielle Westerman), and perform again and again like the tuned-up athlete you are, the fit physical specimen that each new book demands, then move on to the next task.
Mrs. Winters, who has just translated
The Middle Years,
the unfolding memoir of Holocaust survivor
Danielle
Westerman, is a woman of grace and charm, whose thick brown hair is arranged into a bun. Putting down her coffee cup, she shrugs off her beige raincoat and…
I’ve entered early middle age now and I have a nineteen-year-old daughter who lives on the street. I no longer require a reputation for charm, those saving lilac shadows and contours. Maybe I never did. I won’t—not now—tuck the ends of my sentences into little licks of favour, and the next time a journalist pins me down with a personal question, trolling for information—Tell me, Mrs. Winters, how are you able to balance your family and professional life?—I will stare back hard with my newly practised stare. How do I balance my life? Tinted eyebrows up. Just what kind of inquiry is this? Wouldn’t you prefer, Mrs. Winters, to pursue you own writing rather than translate Dr. Westerman’s work? Please, not that again. How did you and your husband meet? What does he think of your writing?
I will in the future address my interviewer directly, and say with firmness: “This interview is over.” There is nothing to lose. Rude and difficult people are more likely to be taken seriously. Curmudgeons are positively adored. I’ve noticed this. Even the fascinatingly unknowable earn respect.
And when I read in the paper tomorrow that “Mrs. Winters looked all of her forty-three years” and that “Mrs. Winters with her familiar overbite was reluctant to talk about her work schedule,” I will want to phone the editor and complain bitterly. This from the pen of a small, unattractive man, almost entirely lipless beneath a bony, domineering
nose, sweating with minor ambition, head tilted like something carved out of yellow wax.
He interviewed me in a cappuccino bar in mid-Toronto. A chilly, stooped, round-headed man in his thirties or forties—it was hard to tell—slow to smile, pathetically in need of human attention, thinking his superior thoughts. Fluff on his shoulders begged to be picked off. I, on the other hand, was wearing a soft jade jacket of cashmere lined with silk, which represented a rare splurge on my part, but I could be sure this man would overlook this garment with its crystal buttons and mandarin collar and concentrate instead on my drab raincoat, beige, and not quite pristine at the cuffs. In print he will be certain to refer to my chignon as a bun. It’s taken me years to learn to do a glossy little chignon—I can get my hair brushed back and securely pinned up each morning in a mere two and a half minutes and I consider my coiffure one of my major life accomplishments. I really mean this.
Sheila from publicity had filled me in before the interview, and I felt the information packet hovering; what to do with it? This young/youngish man was the newly appointed books columnist at
Booktimes
. He was well known for holding pious opinions about the literature of the Great North, about his own role as advocate of a diverse new outpouring of Canadian voices, the post-colonial cry of blaming anguish. The stream of current fiction about middle-class people
living in cities was diluting the authentic national voice that rose from the landscape itself and—
Oh, shut up, shut up.
Cappuccino foam dotted the corners of his undistinguished mouth. And just one more question, Mrs. Winters—
Of course he didn’t call me Reta, even though there might be only a year or two between us. The “Mrs.” gave him power over me: that vexing
r
rucking things up in the middle and making one think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins. He was the barking terrier, going at Mrs. Winters’s ankles, shaking out his fur and asking me to justify myself, wanting me to explain the spluttering, dying, whimpering bonfire of my life, which I would not dream of sharing. He seemed to forget he was interviewing me about Danielle Westerman’s new book.
