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Let Us Imagine Lost Love: Part One — Robert Day

Sep 082013

Editor’s Note: Herewith, the opening section of Robert Day’s novel Let Us Imagine Lost Love, which we published in its entirety as a serial novel from September, 2013, to April, 2014. The novel remained online until August, 2014, at which point, as per our original agreement with the author, we deleted all the segments except for the first. We have left this opening segment, just as it was published, for your entertainment and to celebrate the amazing experience we had putting this book together. This was a first for Numéro Cinq, our first full length novel, our first serial novel — exciting times, wonderful experience watching the novel unfold month by month.

In the tradition of Charles Dickens and any number of 19th century novelists who wrote those triple-decker novels first published in serial form in magazines, Numéro Cinq today launches Robert Day’s new novel Let Us Imagine Lost Love, which will appear here in seven monthly parts. This is the long awaited follow-up to Day’s wondrous and acclaimed first novel The Last Cattle Drive; it’s not a sequel, but in Let Us Imagine Lost Love, Day returns to his native Kansas, of which he is a wry, witty and affectionate observer. His narrator is a book designer, who loves the jargon and paraphernalia of his profession, a man without a wife but a string of Wednesday lovers, his “Plaza wives,” he calls them. At his back, as we learn in the opening sequence, is a strong-willed Kansas mother who made him memorize three words a day and wouldn’t think of letting him go east to college (he ends up at Emporia State Teachers College). But this is vintage Robert Day: the humor is dry yet generous, the dialogue is laconic but rich with implication. You shouldn’t miss skinny dipping with Melinda or Tina, the narrator’s college girlfriend who would only begin to take her clothes off over the telephone (those innocent days). And stay tuned for the next installment.

—

Part One: My Cosmic Smoke Signal

Since You Asked and I Promised: Here’s How It’s Turned Out

These days I design books. Gutters and “case backs,” “rivers” and “verso,” “quarto,” and “signature” are the nomenclature of my trade. Or were when I started. “Format” and “galley proof.” Pocket Pal and Rookledge’s Type Designers are my codices.

I understand I am un-hip in my patois, as if I were to use “Hi-Fi” instead of “stereo”—which I do. “Mono,” I am told by Lillian, my sister’s late-in-life daughter, is a disease. It used to be music as well: the kind that came from the lid of a forty-five record player: Memories Are Made of This. Scotch and Soda.

At first I worked at Hallmark here in Kansas City. Now I freelance. My Plaza apartment is my office. The Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge’s domain. Calvin Trillin slurping a frosty at Winstead’s. Edward Dahlberg pissing and moaning about the city.

At Hallmark I designed “favorites:” 20 Favorite Poems by Shakespeare. 100 Favorite Love Poems. 50 Favorite Words of Wisdom. 100 Famous Quotations By American Women. I also designed “paths”: 50 Paths to Wisdom. 25 Paths to Bliss. No one suggested 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. Or even one.

I was not cynical about such work then, nor am I now. When you grow up with webbed aluminum lawn chairs and a pedestal-mounted blue glass globe in your front yard, an Irish father who talked to himself but not much to anybody else (“I’m talking to a smart man when I’m talking to myself”), and a Polish mother who saved coins in Mogen David wine jars, you gain perspective. If my book buyers want their wisdom flush left in purse-sized octavos, who am I to judge? We all have our paths.

I design address books. I do not design novels. I design recording calendars, sometimes called “agendas.” I do not design memoirs (fictional or not). I do not design auto repair manuals. Or medical texts. I design exhibition catalogues: A Painter’s Room of My Own. Coffee table books: The Stalls of the Seine (into which I cut and pasted some of my own books that were—as far as I know—never there, unless you count them being vicariously there—which I do). More: Joyce’s Paris. Small Hotels of Italy. A Place in the World Called Seville. And once, a tiny duodecimo for autographs.

I win awards. I am well paid. I am praised for my “tailored elegance.” For “combining utility with beauty”: For “fusing” the well-known (a Degas auto point that looks like Allen Ginsberg as Allen Ginsberg got older) with an obscure Franz Beckman auto point.

Among my favorite projects have been two “Abecedarians.” One was about painting: M was for Matisse: with a young woman in an afternoon pose; a second was about writers whose pictures appeared like a water mark behind their letters with their text at the bottom: C was for Chekhov: “It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea front: a lady with a dog.”

But my favorites are “Blanks”— books with empty pages for memoirs to be written or diaries to be kept. Or not. I am Mr. Tabula Rasa of Kansas City. And other cities as well.

Over the years I have spread into various rooms: computers, scanners, light tables, and a recently purchased color copier configured to print and bind books. With that addition I am a one-man, limited edition, publishing firm: Blanche de Blank Books, the bit of French added for a bit of cache, if not for Stella Kowalski’s sister.

This week I am finishing a series of “Artist Blanks,” each with a picture or text as the cover: Van Gogh’s portrait on a sketch book. John Donne (I long to talk to some lover’s ghost who died before the God of love was born) for poets. Notes from Pachebel’s Canon (it’s in fashion again). I am trying to decide if Chekhov should be a short story writer or a playwright.

—Did you do this? my sister Elaine asked when she and her husband Gerhard had me for dinner.

It was a coffee table book that featured paintings of women in New York museums: Madame X from the Metropolitan, a Vermeer from the Frick. Picasso’s Two Nudes from MOMA. Others. I had been inspired by an old Playboy photo series: The Women of Rome (they were riding topless on Vespas); The Women of San Francisco (they were hanging out of both their blouses and the cable cars on which they rode).

—Not that you always “fess up,” she said.

—Yes, I said.

—Lovely, she said. I keep it out.

My sister’s diary, an early Blank of mine (a garden motif with both plants and flowers as a running head and end papers), also in the living room that night was (I took a peek) blank: Hours without alphabets. Days without words. Impatiens without patience. It was sitting next to another book I designed on the gardens in Tuscany, but since Elaine did not ask about either of them, I said nothing.

I like what I do. There is a pleasing philistine sensibility about a well- designed, large-format book that features the flora and fauna from the French impressionist period. The philistine sensibility is not in the book, but in the plush homes and apartments where Monet’s Water Lilies or Fantin LaTour’s Still Lives languish. I test my designs against the horizontal of coffee tables, not the vertical of bookshelves.

At first, I would use an alphabet soup of Bs and Es and Ts and Hs on the page to make sure the design was working, even if the book itself might never find work. For recent projects I have been using authors I am reading: Walker Percy, William Carlos Williams, Anton Chekhov. Today I used Joyce Cary: The Horse’s Mouth. Gully Jimson.

I could scan these texts, but when Chekhov goes up my fingertips to the radial nerve, then through the brachial plexus, he arrives at my temporal lobe with all his faculties in intact. Give me fifty words and I am the doctor in Ward Six. A hundred words later I am Doctor Chekhov. Five hundred (plus a pull of vodka), and I am Mother Russia. The transmigration of texts.

Before I send the final designs to the publisher I “delete” and “expunge” Gulley’s London, Percy’s New Orleans, or Chekhov’s Yalta. I don’t want my editors to know whose verbal masks I wear at work.

Nor do I want the finished book: my contracts specify that I shall not get complimentary copies, nor credited with the design. When I see my books I want it to be by chance, as in my sister asking: Did you do this? Or the other day in Barnes and Noble on the Plaza where I take coffee and browse:

—Lovely, isn’t it? said the elegant blond check-out woman when I bought a copy of my remaindered The Table of Chez Panisse. Then, looking at me, she said:

—You’re somebody, aren’t you?

—Yes, I said. She smiled, took a second look, but could not place me. It might come to her because Picnic is playing at the art theater nearby.

—I thought so, she said.

Serendipity is my favorite royalty. Even if I don’t make use of fortuitous coincidences. In this case the actor she has half in mind is fully dead.

—What are you working on now? Elaine asked.

Gerhard was in the kitchen with Rosetta (a cleaning woman we share) fixing martinis out of Sean Connery movies. I have agreed to come “a few minutes early to talk entre nous.”

About the time the martinis are to be wheeled in, my “date” will arrive—a woman my sister tells me makes her own sweaters. As the day has been surprisingly cool, she might be wearing one. The evening is one of Elaine’s attempts to “hook me up” (my niece’s language). Elaine wants me to “settle down” with someone “solid,” someone with whom we can all travel. I don’t travel.

—I’m designing an agenda for the Nelson-Atkins’s spring show. Also a book for a friend.

— It’s only August, she said.

—They need lead time, I said.

My sister studied me for a moment. She and Gerhard are on the board of the Nelson and she probably knows about the spring show and its featured painter. She is waiting for me to “fess up.” I don’t. I had expected she’d ask about the “friend,” but she seems to have been distracted.

—Anything else?

—Freelance proposals, I said. What would you think of a diary using Tom Lehrer Songs across the top: “It Just Takes a Smidgen to Poison a Pigeon.”

—Too mean, my sister said. Shame on you.

My sister has a “suppressed” smile; she holds her lips together and that makes the rest of her face—eyes, nose, ears—break into a bemused grin. She might have been smiling under her hairdo.

—How about an agenda of Keane women coupled with Rod McKuen’s poetry? I said.

—Very too mean, she said.

I don’t tell her that for my amusement I’ve designed both: The Vatican Rag with Paranisi prints; and The Shadow of Your Smile Meets the Windmill of Your Mind, using the big-eyed Keanes. They were practice for this very Blank which, when done, I will send it to Blanche de Blank Books. I knew I was on the right track when a cosmic high-sign smoke signal curled off my Latin language dialog dashes.

—Steve tells me the Keanes are in fashion again, said my sister just as their dog Precious limped into the room, came over to me, barked once and sat down.

—What’s the matter?

—She got a thorn in her paw this afternoon and we were waiting for you to take it out.

—Let me see, I said and made a rollover motion. It’s not a thorn but a piece of glass.

—Should I haven taken her to the vet? She’s afraid of the vet, she’s not afraid of you. It’s probably in her genes. And you know how to…

—Get me some Neosporin, tweezers, and a paper towel.

When Elaine returned, I took out the glass, cleaned the cut, and filled it with Neosporin—all the while Precious was calm, only barking once from her back at the syncopated chime of the doorbell.

—My hero, my brother, Elaine said as 007’s martinis were wheeled in.

•

The Go-Slow Guide to William Allen White’s Town

I had not been good enough in high school to go “East” for college. My father had hoped for a scholarship to Yale or Harvard: an Ivy League education is to a young man from Kansas what a rich marriage is to a young woman. It went unsaid that the young man in question was thought none-too-bright.

My father’s ambition had been fueled beyond reason because Steve had earned a scholarship to Princeton three years before, and a year later Elaine would win one to Vassar. As for my mother, she discovered that any college in Kansas had to take you if you had graduated from a state high school.

—I think he should stay in our domain, she’d say, using one of the ubiquitous words she was forever trying to teach us.

—He should go East, my father would say without—I would learn later—any sense of history or irony: “Go East,” you could hear him say summer evenings in our front yard as he drank his beer on one of the two folding aluminum lawn chairs he had arranged on either side of the glass globe.

—I think he should stay in our environs, my mother would say from her kitchen window as she did the dishes.

I was often talked about in the third person

The summer after my high school graduation, I lived at home, not being a bother to my parents—in fact being considerable help when not life guarding at the municipal pool.

When my mother had to stay late at the county office where she was a clerk, I worked through her Chore List: “Start potatoes at 350, scrub them smooth”; “wipe kitchen counter, make it sparkle”; “shake throw rugs, make dust flit”). I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I didn’t fret about it. I didn’t hang around my room looking into a tank of goldfish.

I mowed the lawn, painted the basement walls, cleaned out the attic, hung laundry on the clothesline, and ran errands. I picked Elaine up at the airport when she flew back for a visit. Some days I fixed flats, pumped gas and changed oil at my father’s garage and filling station. There were evenings when I would help him restore an old Studebaker Champion convertible in which he had courted my mother.

—I bought it back, he would say routinely as we’d come into the shop.

At the swimming pool, I saved a boy out of the deep end bottom but never said anything about it until my father saw it as a news item in the local paper.

—Was that you? he said, reading the paper in his lawn chair.

—What? said my mother through the open window.

I was the kind of kid who did not explain himself. Apparently I was saving myself.

The evenings I had off from the pool, I ran a movie projector for Al Roster who owned the local theater.

—You see Melinda in the back? he said

—Yes.

—Watch Bones McCall slip his hand into her blouse.

I watched.

—Watch how Melinda takes a breath.

I watched. Melinda tilted her head back and closed her eyes. Bones stared straight ahead. The movie was April Love.

Later that summer I got a few dates with Melinda as she didn’t seem to be going steady with Bones. We’d take in a movie, and afterwards drive to Winstead’s on the Plaza for a hamburger, fries, and a frosty. I had a key to the pool so we’d go for a swim after it had closed.

Melinda wouldn’t skinny dip, but she’d pull down top of her bathing-suit. I watched the way the underwater lights sparkled and bubbled around her breasts; I watched the way the bubbles cleared, and in so doing revealed her.

—When are we going to meet your girlfriend? my mother asked.

—She’s not my girlfriend.

—What is she? asked my mother.

Instead of an answer, I told her I had been accepted at Emporia State Teacher’s College for the fall semester.

—William Allen White’s town, my father would say by way of explaining my fate to his customers. “Emporia,” he would say in the evenings polishing the blue globe with a clean red shop rag. “William Allen White’s town.”

—You’ll need a dictionary, my mother said. Pick three words a day, even if you think you know them. But not in alphabetical order. That way you won’t get bored. Open the dictionary, find a word, learn it, and then write it on a slip of paper. Like a bookmark. Do you know what domain means? Do you know what plethora means? You need to make up for the words you missed.

She was referring to a grade-school year when I was a sickly child with an acute case of tonsillitis (probably misdiagnosed, now that I know better) that resulted in earaches, high fevers and many days absent from class.

—Words make a life, my mother would say, as much a mantra for herself as “go East” was for my father. Words make a life, she’d say washing the evening’s dishes while drinking the last of her Mogen David. Do you know what divined means?

One night toward the end of summer, Al Roster came to the pool. The evening had been chilly and there weren’t many swimmers left. We were about to close. The manager had gone home. Al was waiting at the turnstile. We walked out and stood by my car—a used Ford that had been a family hand-me-down from my father’s garage.

—I’ll pay you a wage, said Al. No more hourly. Full time work.

He wanted to expand. He was going to buy a theater in Overland Park and, after that, one in Roeland Park. Someday I could have a “cut of the net.”

—There’s a future for you in movies, Al said. And plenty of Melindas to watch. What’s an education good for these days? Nothing but trouble.

He made a pair of binoculars with his fists and peered at the ground. —Plus all the popcorn you can eat.

That fall I drove to William Allen White’s town.

—Your grandmother was a teacher in western Kansas, my father said by way of goodbye.

—Teachers and government workers always have employment, my mother said. Don’t forget: three words a day from the dictionary I bought you. It’s just like mine, so we can keep in conjunction.

•

Bottle James

When I got Emporia I took a room with Hulga, an Estonian who lived in a house her contractor son had built with the idea she could rent rooms to college students. There were six of us. I lived in the refurbished garage with Bottle James, whose car was a floating couch of a blue, four-door Hudson Hornet. His real name is John Lee James, but he was called “Bottle” by the time I arrived.

—Hulga started it, he said. It’s because I booze. Want a pull? Vodka.

—No thanks.

Bottle James built sets for the college theater and he had remodeled the garage with bookcases and desks arranged throughout. But he didn’t use them.

—No books, he said.

—How so?

—Library. I have a place in the scene shop where I study. Most of the time I sleep there. I live on air. Air and booze. Want a pull?

—No thanks.

—I’m going to Hollywood, he said. One night I’ll be acting the star role for the set I’m building, and the director will come along with an actress he’s going to ball and hear me. That’s how I’ll get my break. Then I’ll ball the actress. In the meantime, use the place. I built it as a set for somebody who’s into books and desks and pads on desks—and those calendars you flip over for every fucking day in the week of your life. That’s not me. We split the phone bill. What’s that?

—A record player. Plays both thirty-threes and forty-fives. The speaker’s in the lid.

I unfolded it.

—You got forty fives? Don’t tell me you got Dean Martin?

I didn’t tell him I had Dean Martin.

—That your Hudson in the driveway? I asked.

—Yes. The last of its kind. Next year I’m going to take it to Hollywood to scout the place.

I put my mother’s dictionary (Webster’s New World, College Edition) in the middle of the desk by the window. I put out one of those calendars you flip over for every fucking day in the week of your life. I arranged my textbooks in the shelves. I became a student with ease: English, psychology, history, general science, I liked it. Especially History. And three words a day: enigmatic, penultimate, erudition.

•

I Have Never Married

From the balcony that runs the length of my Plaza apartment I can see south across Brush Creek to my sister’s house in the neighborhood of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward—as well as Ernest Hemingway finishing A Farewell to Arms. East is the Nelson-Atkins Museum. West is the Kansas line. I cannot see the ten miles to our old house in Merriam.

To the north is Westport where the Santa Fe Trail started. By leaning over my railing I can see the Westport Inn (now called Kelly’s Tavern), and next to it Jim Bridger’s “historic” outfitting store. I am told that in the late nineteen seventies a cattle drive came in from western Kansas and wound up at Kelly’s. I doubt it. But I like to doubt.

I have never married. I have had—and am having—a series of Wednesday afternoon affairs. My Plaza wives. Nothing solid. No one with whom to travel. All married.

Not long ago, I bought a second apartment in my building. Across and down the hall. It is smaller. No balcony. Still, it is pleasant in its way.

I do not rent it, nor do I intend to. I have made it a showcase (complete with a stylish coffee table and two excellent end tables) for the books I have designed. I also arrange the gifts I get from my Wednesday wives: French jams and Spanish olives and Belgian chocolate truffles they buy me at the Better Cheddar and bring to our assignations. Soaps and body lotions from Williams Sonoma. Bottles of wine if they need aging. Tins of foie gras. Silk flowers. Provençal napkins, Sardinian grappa. What these women give me is their lingua franca for who they are; I know this, they do not.

•

A Guide to Housing, Circa 1960’s

Emporia was my father’s webbed lawn chair. There was an honest earnestness to the town, and to the college. The students were not worldly and not knowing so. The boys talked about cars and girls; the girls talked about boys and lipstick. Our education did not lead to an education. That year I found erudite in my mother’s dictionary (page 494) and thought that is not me (nor “not I,” as I would later learn). Only Bottle James complained of Dean Martin: The rest of us were happy with Ray Coniff and Johnny Mathis. We were provincial and didn’t know it. Nor the word. The Kingston Trio had not yet left the Seine. Joan Baez didn’t yet have a ribbon in her hair.

Tina, Hulga’s daughter, lived in an upstairs room of the main house. There was a rumor that her father was a Professor Humbolt who had died in bed with Hulga the night of Tina’s conception. You could see Professor Humbolt’s portrait in the History Department where each year at graduation a prize was awarded in his name. By the dates on the portrait, Professor Humbolt had been dead long enough to be Tina’s father. I never asked.

—Forget about balling Tina, said Bottle. Everybody’s tried. Me included.

—She dating somebody?

—It’s because her father had a heart attack getting laid by Hulga and she’s afraid.

—She’s afraid she’ll die getting balled?

—You got to be afraid of something.

Tina was tall, had brown hair, a thin-lipped smile, and walked with a slight bump and grind. Her hips seemed to be moving even when she was standing still.

—I’m afraid, Tina said.

—Of what?

—I don’t know.

—I do.

—What?

—You’re afraid of being naked in front of me.

—It’s just not right.

—You’re afraid of being embarrassed of me being naked in front of you.

—What happens if I get a disease? Or pregnant.

—You’re afraid that you don’t know how to do it.

—Do you?

—I have a plan.

—What?

By Thanksgiving, Tina would unbutton her blouse while we were talking on the phone, me in the garage, she in her bedroom a hundred feet away.

—Will you take it off?

—No.

My record player lid was singing “When I Fall in Love.”

—Mother says you have a girlfriend, my sister said when we were back for the summer. From Emporia.

—Not really. Sort of.

—Have you…

—We’re working on it.

—I was about to say: “Have you thought about bringing her home?”

—No.

We were sitting on our mother’s chartreuse couch; she was still at the Water Department; our father was at the garage putting chains on tires. Steve was spending Christmas in Cambridge working at a law firm. I had picked up Elaine from the airport two days before. My sister seemed different, but I didn’t say so.

When you are a young man trying to get used to your body and what it wants, it is difficult to understand how strangely you behave. Tina taking off her clothes at the end of the phone line would not be all that ”kinky” today (as in the bumper sticker I saw on an art student’s car the other day at the Art Institute: “It’s Only Kinky The First Time”). But sitting next to my sister it seemed something I should be ashamed of. Better to go swimming with Melinda. And since “kinky” was not in my mother’s dictionary, nor in the lexicon of the sixties, I could not name the nature of my unease. Nor, given my Wednesday wives, can I now.

—Are you in love? said my sister.

—No.

—I might be, she said.

—Have you…?

—I’m thinking about it, she said.

—Do you know about men? I said.

—I’m learning, she said. From you.

Before she flew back East, Elaine asked me to drive her to Winstead’s for a Frosty; then into the hills behind the Plaza on the south side where the expensive houses are. Our parents did not spend their Sundays “Wish Book” driving. But both Elaine and I had friends whose parents did, and one of Elaine’s high school boyfriends took her for such rides.

—Do you want to live in houses like this? Elaine asked me we curved among the lawn-clipped mansions of Mission Hills, then down toward the Plaza and past the house where one day Precious would need to have a gash cleaned.

—I don’t think about it.

—Really. Don’t you think about what you’ll be like when you are mother and father’s age?

—I don’t.

—How strange, she said. Is it because you boys are always thinking about girls? Not about getting married to them or anything like that. Not about houses where you’ll raise children. Just about girls…well, you know what I mean.

I had never heard my sister talk like this. I wondered if that was what was different about her. She had turned a corner at Vassar and ahead of her was life: a curved driveway sweeping through a manicured lawn. And for her, life was the future with the past going out of view in the rear view mirror of my old Ford as we drove toward home.

Then I said something beyond my years; even as I said it I knew I didn’t fully understand its implications.

—You don’t grow up all at once. It takes a lot of not growing up along the way to get there. I think the trick is…

Then I remember not knowing what to say next.

—Will you let me meet Tina? My sister asked as we turned back onto Johnson Drive toward Lowell.

—No.

—Then it’s not right, she said. For her or for you.

But this was after she had been silent most of the way home, and then said: “Turn here—” just as we reached Lowell, as if somehow I would not have known how to get to our house.

•

Swimming Pools and the Practice of Medicine

I completed my first year at Emporia and came home for the summer to lifeguard. Melinda did not. But there were other girls to take to the movies and then for a late-night swim. I tell my parents I am studying to be a high school history teacher.

—American history? asked my mother.

—Yes.

—Real American history? asked my father. With heroes.

—Yes.

—And your words? Three a day, said my mother. You don’t want to be a rube.

—I left the dictionary in Emporia, I said.

—We can share, my mother said.

—When will we meet your girlfriend? asked my father.

—I don’t have a girlfriend.

—Who do you talk to on the phone? asked my mother.

—A friend from college whose father was in the History Department.

Our words started with alacrity, propensity, and serendipity. A big week for the suffix.

•

Clarence Day and Berkeley: An Introduction to a Memoir

—Your uncle Conroy writes that he has a fellowship if you earned good grades in science, my mother said one day when I came home from the pool for lunch. It pays wages and you get college credit. My mother said this without much enthusiasm. She was holding the letter and reading it a second and third time.

Uncle Conroy was my mother’s older brother, a pediatric researcher of international fame. In the cultural gulf between our linoleum-floor life in Merriam, Kansas, and Doctor Conroy Watkins directing a celebrated pediatric research lab in Berkeley, California, there was a pleasing pride—as if in our small house on Lowell we had a first edition signed by Clarence Day.

—Let me see, my father said, who was home for lunch.

—At the University of California at Berkeley, said my mother.

I have an hour before I have to be back at the pool. After closing I am to take Muff LaRue to the Plaza. It is our first date. We will drive back to the pool for a swim. I am told by Bones she goes all the way.

—That’s what it says, said my father. A fellowship in Conroy’s research lab that could lead to medical school. He should get there as soon as possible for training.

—I don’t know that General Science counts, said my mother.

—Two semesters of A’s, my father said.

—He’ll need some lessons in manners if he goes, said my mother. Aunt Lillian will have more than one fork at dinner. They don’t “just eat” in a society like hers. They bring food to their mouth and not their mouth to the food.

I seem not to be present, even in the third person.

—I am going to be a doctor, I said to Muff LaRue as I unlocked the gates to the pool.

Muff dove in fully clothed and swam to the deep end. When she got there she pulled herself out and said if I’d turn off the lights she’d skinny dip. I flipped switches.

—I’ve never dated a doctor, she said. What kind of doctor?

She walked to the end of the low board. She took off her shorts and tossed them on the deck. Then she pulled her t-shirt over her head and threw it in the pool.

—A surgeon. I am going to Cal-Berkeley to be a surgeon.

I was treading water beneath her.

—I’m going to Sarah Lawrence to study classics. If you have a rubber I’ll do it with you, she said. A rubber and an air float.

She was trying to decide, long before Cybill Shepherd, whether to take off her bra next or her panties. Not that she is shy about it. Just before she dove in she laughed—a deep, throaty laugh.

It took me a few days to quit the pool and pack. I drove to Emporia to pick up the record player, records, clothes, and my dictionary. I told Hulga I would not be back in the fall. Tina had gone to western Kansas to visit her grandmother. Later that week, I parked the car at my father’s garage and took the bus to San Francisco. My uncle met me at the station.

—So you might want to be a doctor? he said.

—I don’t know, I said.

We were driving over the Bay Bridge toward the East Bay. You have to be a young man from a small Kansas town to understand how astonishing it is to see San Francisco Bay for the first time. There is nonchalance about its grandeur.

When I said I didn’t know if I wanted to be a doctor to one of the most famous and accomplished physicians in America, a man who had probably made special arrangements to get me a fellowship I did not deserve, it sounds, even at this distance, something Californian-sixties: Mellow. Really, man. Yeah. Wow. Far out. That’s not what I meant. Perhaps I thought—as we crossed the Bay Bridge to the East Bay—that if I couldn’t be a doctor like Uncle Conroy, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I’d like to think that now.

—I don’t mean. . . I said as we drove up Grove Avenue past the lab where I would be working.

—I understand, he said. Don’t worry about your future. It is always there.

—Thank you, I said.

—That is the hospital with which the lab is associated, my Uncle said as we passed by. And that’s where you can get a cup of coffee.

On the other side of the street was an all-night diner, its neon sign proclaiming: MEL’S.

From Grove we drove into the Berkeley Hills behind the Claremont Hotel to my aunt and uncle’s house overlooking the Bay. It was where I lived until just before the fall semester began when I rented a room on Derby.

•

The Thor: An Owner’s Manual

The other day Elaine and I drove to our home in Merriam. I don’t have a car, so we used hers. The house is twenty minutes west across the state line, 505 Lowell.

On previous trips we noticed the place was vacant; drapes pulled, its lawn not mowed. I am thinking about buying it but I have not told my sister. It might take me awhile to find the owner. There was no “For Sale” sign.

505 Lowell is a small ranch affair with a one-car garage. There is a basement my father refinished so my brother and I could have rooms of our own. They were on either side of the furnace out of which heating ducts ran upstairs. When my mother wanted to talk to us she would speak into one of the floor registers; the one in the kitchen went to my room; the one in the living room worked for Steve. When my mother made a mistake it was our joke to say “wrong number” and beat on the heating ducts. My sister lived upstairs and down the hall from our parents.

Steve and I had small windows onto the lawn. After a few years our father refinished the front part of the basement with brown vinyl paneling, making it into a “rec room.” There was a ping-pong table, a sofa on which Elaine necked with her boyfriends, and the portable forty-five record player that each of us would claim and that I took to Emporia: “Summer Place.” “Misty.”

We sold the house after my mother died; Steve wanted the money; my sister had married and moved to Mission Hills. I wanted to keep it but didn’t say so.

The glass globe is gone, but the Christmas tree my father planted when Elaine was born is still there—now more than forty feet tall. The wooden awnings he made to celebrate Steve’s birth are gone and the gravel driveway has been blacktopped, but as far as I know they are the only changes in all these years. Precious’ great grandmother is buried in the backyard.

Like the apartment, I would not rent the house. I’d furnish it with a chartreuse davenport and matching end tables on either side. Webbed aluminum lawn chairs. Early Ozzie and Harriet. The Thor All Purpose Domestic Appliance. We could probably get most of what we need from yard sales. Or E-Bay, if I did the Internet. Elaine has the record player in her attic.

—What happened to his globe? my sister said as we turned down Lowell from Johnson Drive.

—I don’t know, I said.

—And the Thor?

—It went to the garage when he died, I said. It wasn’t there when mother died. I expect the new owner had it hauled away.

—I got a tree and Steve got awnings, my sister said. She leaves it unsaid that I got nothing.

Elaine and I have gone over all this before. The furniture of memories: familiar roads, familiar talk. The yard sale of our lives. The repetition is pleasing: even the pauses between us have been there before. I should do a Blank: Silences. Use stills from Woody Allen’s Interiors. Or Pakula’s Klute.

The Thor was a combination dishwasher, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and clothes dryer. A round, menacing contraption, it was mounted on four hard rubber wheels that had to be locked before starting it. The lid looked like a submarine hatch; the body a tank turret. It took my father and two neighbors to carry it into the kitchen. It was our mother’s anniversary present. The following Christmas, he bought her a Western Flyer lawn mower.

Elaine and I have come to the end of Lowell and are making a turn down the hill at 52^nd street. Some trips she asks about the Thor, other trips she talks about the glass globe. Because she has brought up both, I wonder if she senses I am thinking of buying the house.

—Do you remember when the Thor attacked us? my sister asked as we took a right turn up Newton to take a left on Johnson Drive past the corner where my father’s filling station had been, but where is now a visitor’s parking lot for our high school across the street. She has said this before.

—Yes, I said.

—Where did he get it?

—A friend of his in the military made them after the war, I said.

I have said this before.

We are a blank of silence the fifteen-minute length of Johnson Drive to Fairway Manor.

—I knew about you and Muff LaRue, my sister said as we crossed State Line road, then down Ward Parkway, along Brush Creek and into the Plaza.

Just as my sister and I repeat ourselves, it is also our routine to add something on our drives. Muff LaRue is what she has added. I am wondering what I should add. Not about buying the house, I decide.

—I’ll walk from here, I said.

Elaine has stopped at the corner of 48^th street and Jefferson near the sitting bronze of Ben Franklin and across from a series of amusing busts atop an apartment building just out of reach of the “building covenant” of the Plaza. In recent days a local rapper of national fame has been chanting up and down the streets, and my sister and I see him heading our way, his spray-dyed red hair bobbing and jerking.

—Did you know I knew about you and Muff? she said.

—I did, I said.

But I did not. It is not that I lie to my sister, it is that. . ..well, what is it? She is literal and I am not. Some of my life needs to be fiction, and my sister is my best reader. I take that back: I am my best reader, but I need someone to doubt me. Present company excluded.

—I don’t believe you, Elaine said.

—Did you know about Melinda? I said.

—I do now, she said.

—Ben Franklin wrote an essay on the virtues of older women, I said as the rapper got closer.

It was what I have decided to add.

—Did he?

—Yes.

—Life comes around, Elaine said as I got out of the car. Muff LaRue has moved back to the Plaza and wants to meet you.

•

Design Proposal for Blanche de Blank Books: One of X

1. Title: My Cosmic Smoke Signal

A. Quarto: Neither paginated nor cut. Acid free paper.

B. Where a Section ends, there is a line drawing of your paintings (or segments of those paintings) mentioned in the text but scrambled so they are not where they are cited.

C. Typeface for text: Bookman (old style). 14 point.

D. Watermark: interlined subliminal text from California when facing text is Kansas, and vice versa.

E. Typeface for watermark: Book (Antiqua, Italics). 10 point.

F. Sample Text: “Clouds all streaming away like ghost fish under ice. Evening sun turning reddish. Trees along the hard like old copper. Old willows leaves shaking up and down in the breeze, making shadows on the ones below, reflections on the ones above. Need a tricky brush to give the effect and what would be the good. Pissarro’s job, not mine.” —Gully Jimson

G. Edition Binding. Title embossed in gold.

—Robert Day

Robert Day’s most recent book is Where I Am Now, a collection of short fiction published by the University of Missouri-Kansas City BookMark Press. Booklist wrote: “Day’s smart and lovely writing effortlessly animates his characters, hinting at their secrets and coyly dangling a glimpse of rich and story-filled lives in front of his readers.” And Publisher’s Weekly observed: “Day’s prose feels fresh and compelling making for warmly appealing stories.”

The novel banners at top and bottom are by Bruce Hiscock.

The Instructor: Novel Excerpt — Ann Ireland

Aug 182013

Part way through the opening chapter of Ann Ireland‘s novel The Instructor, the narrator remarks that her putative lover (and art teacher) is like “a scout for some enemy camp, logging facts for a future ambush.” To me, this is about as exact a description of love as I have ever come across. La-de-dah romantics tend to ignore the fact that two people are distant countries, speaking foreign tongues, and that the progress of love is a sort of invasion that is always followed by hasty translation, colonization attempts, power struggles, and, often, retreat. Alice Munro, who wrote the jacket blurb for the novel, gets the picture. The Instructor, Ireland’s second novel, has just been reprinted by Dundurn Press, and we have the honour of publishing the first chapter here for the occasion. The novel tells the story of how 19-year-old Simone Paris falls for her much older art teacher, Otto Guest, on the first day of classes — and what ensues. Ann Ireland is a sophisticated observer of human affairs (of all sorts), and she is deceptive: she tells a good story, sure enough, but she also eschews relationship stereotypes by drilling into the complex undercurrents and finds uneasy answers.

—

Chapter One

MY DEAR OTTO:

See my hand shaking like crazy? It’s not because I’m scared, not in the least. Though two hours ago I was so damn nervous and fidgety I scurried to the outhouse every ten minutes, then worried you’d choose that instant to roll up the hill. There I’d be, popping open the door of the little pagoda, while you leaned against the door of your car, grinning.

I jammed crackers in my mouth, thinking I needed the salt.

Why was I in such a state?

After all, you were history.

The phone call had come out of the blue. “Let’s have tea, just the two of us,” you said, your voice so low and intimate I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure you weren’t standing there.

My own voice, when it found itself, was guarded.

“Late afternoon is best. I’ve got meetings.”

That sounded important.

It is important. We’re running through the slate for next year’s program and I’ve been fighting for that New Music trio to be given the residence position.

“Why do you want —” I said, too late, into the dead phone. As was your habit, you’d hung up without warning. I was shaking then too … for this was my chance to show you what I’d become, how I’d devised a life of my own.

To begin with, the vehicle was all wrong. Come on, Otto, a brick-coloured Honda? It had to be a rental.

When you slipped out of the car, legs first like some starlet, I let out a sigh. For it was you, in the flesh and life-size. You strolled up the dirt path jiggedy-jog, legs bent at the knees, hands thrust deep into your pockets, so loose-limbed I swore you were about to keel over. Your face, grinning widely, so sure of its welcome, grew bigger and bigger — and still I didn’t move a muscle. I was nailed to the position I’d decided on since yesterday’s phone call: arms crossed, back sloped against the doorjamb of the cabin, wearing a black tank top that bled into the darkened interior. Like some Walker Evans photo, I decided, most of my hair drawn back with an elastic, the rest sweeping over my face in the lake breeze.

“Very nice, Simone,” you nodded, missing nothing. A cigarette dangled from your lips. I let you come right up until our toes touched.

“Hello, Otto.”

Of course we embraced, though perhaps a little stiffly. My face got buried in the base of your neck and it seemed to me I’d spent a lot of time gazing into the hollow of your throat where the pulse tapped silently. My fingers curled around the cloth of your collar — threadbare, soft denim — and I was whisked without warning to the hill outside San Patricio: hard earth and scrubby cactus, burros grazing. The heat and dryness made our skin crack and fissure, mimicking the landscape. We’d hiked all afternoon toward the peak where the cross stood, passing only gruff men in straw hats tending goats, then, as we neared the top, no one at all. It was your idea that we couldn’t look down till we reached the summit.

“No cheating, Simone.”

You wanted the vista to hit us in one overwhelming stroke — no dribs and drabs, no gradual seeping in. I scrambled up ahead the last few feet and touched the wooden cross, then turned to look. I felt myself teeter toward the land, which rolled out in all directions, a vast tanned skin of parched mountain and plain declining toward the horizon in minute gradations of brown. The town, with its clay roof tiles, sprawled up the walls of the valley. The sounds were more precise in distance, less cluttered by our own noises: dogs yelped and howled in the endless loop of call and response, while ancient buses groaned up the hills. A woman was calling to her children, her voice spinning effortlessly through the miles of open space. For once I forgot you were there until suddenly your arms swooped around my waist and tugged me in: this same shirt, I swear, my eyes batting against this hollow of a throat.

“I would hardly have recognized you.” You reached up and pulled off your cap, regulation New York Yankees model. Your hair, always bushy, had been flattened, and when you ran your hand through it I saw extra streaks of grey.

“Come on, Otto, it hasn’t been that long.”

“Four or five years.”

“Six, actually.”

“Really?” You seem genuinely astonished. “You look fantastic.”

I had to smile.

Of course you’ve got twenty-five years on me — and look it. What’s happened to your eyes that used to be so clear and sharply focused? And I have to say this, Otto, your jawline is starting to ripple toward the neck. You seem thinner, more brittle, though I felt the little pot belly when our bodies pressed together. An unexpected squish.

“I look like hell, I know it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“But you were thinking it, dear.”

Dear. That rankled.

We continued to stare at each other, you jiggling change, me stock-still. And I thought, nothing’s happening. The butterflies that had been charging through my stomach all morning seemed to have been drugged. Do you understand what I’m saying, Otto? You stood a foot away and I felt a big fat zero.

“Going to let me in?”

“Of course. Sorry.”

You pushed past and I let you poke around the cabin, lifting objects off the mantel: the cracked coil pot, an Indian basket, the black-and-white photo of Father digging the outhouse hole. The woodstove received special attention, and you lifted the burner and peeked inside. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d reached in and touched the ashes, but you just looked, as if deciding whether I’d chucked something in there to burn. After, you strolled past the coffee table, picked up the book of feminist film criticism, flipped through, and I got the distinct impression you knew it had been selected for display. My cheeks heated up. Your hand swept over the tops of chairs and bookshelves, leaving streaks of shiny wood. Why did I feel you were a scout for some enemy camp, logging facts for a future ambush? I stiffened; the nervous feeling kicked in again. It was almost a relief; this was how I expected to be with you.

I decided to make tea and handed you the kettle so you could fetch water from the outside pump.

“This place is great!” you enthused on your return. “Your dad made it?”

“With my mother.”

“It’s like …” You tilted your head. “The house where the seven dwarfs lived. A cartoon cabin.” You hunched under the door frame. “Bet your old man is exactly five foot six. Everything’s scaled to that height.”

Right as always.

I found of box of lemon biscuits and tossed them on the table. You began to make short work of them, knocking two at a time into your hand, while crumbs scattered down the front of your shirt.

“Where’s your mother now?” you said, dropping onto a chair.

“She moved into a condo in Etobicoke. Nice view of the lake. She loves it.”

“And your dad?”

“He died three and a half years ago.”

“I’m so sorry.” You winced and briefly shut your eyes. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course not: how could you?” I pulled away from your reaching hand and watched you swing your legs so you could follow my movements around the room. You didn’t speak, and I knew you were hoping I’d say more about him. Your face waited, creased in sympathy. I measured tea into the Brown Betty pot and rinsed out two mugs. I collected the plastic honey jar from the shelf, then poured milk into a tiny pitcher. I would not give you this chance to pry me open. The spoons received a quick wipe on the towel.

You watched each gesture avidly.

“Then will you at least tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself?”

I let out a breath, staring at the back of my own hand as it closed over the teapot handle. You could still do it, make me achingly visible to myself.

“What do you want to know, Otto?”

“Everything. The works — every second since you left me.”

“You think I’ve been writing it all down, waiting for the day you’d turn up again?”

You smiled quickly. “Haven’t you?”

I flushed, because in a way I had. Lived my life and at the same time wondered what you’d make of it, anticipating your comments, your chuckles, and of course, the withering asides that had the effect of turning whatever I was doing — or whoever I was with — into something faintly comical.

“Well?” You leaned forward, following the motion of my fingers as they wrapped around the copper tray. “There must have been plenty of men sniffing around.”

You wanted all the details, fixing me with your eyes until I’d find myself describing the colour of the sheets, the texture of skin and hair. I set down the tea tray, the smell of Earl Grey a consoling presence, and pulled up a chair.

“Anyone serious?” you persisted.

“What’s this all about, Otto?”

“Curiosity.”

“Is that all?”

You hesitated only a second. “Of course.”

I stared into your face looking for signs: irony, amusement … but could read only the wide-eyed innocence you’d chosen for display.

I could tell you about Raymond, the dancer — but stopped just as I saw the edges of your mouth tighten. Already I was turning Raymond into a story, a series of tiny tropes to make you howl with delight and commiseration.

I shook my head, half laughing at my narrow escape, trying to shake that eager stare, at the same time bathing in its intensity.

“No, Otto, it’s my turn.”

“Your turn?”

“That’s right. My turn to ask questions.”

“Ahhh,” you exhaled noisily and pushed your chair away from the table. You lifted your chin toward the window and a glazed look came over your face that I instantly recognized: the Shift. The moment of withdrawal. Suddenly, with the practiced move of an old-time actor, you launched, full-tilt, into a monologue.

Something about light refraction that you’d read in a scientific journal. “Great diagrams, and a nice sequence of time-lapse photos …” Your legs splayed and you crooked an arm over the back of the chair.

The room shrank.

“… This guy’s theory knocks away all our notions of how we see, how our eyes gather and process light.”

I was supposed to lean into every word.

Instead, I gazed at you in amazement; you’d known, hadn’t you, exactly what I’d been about to say? The more you blabbed, underlining every third word with your finger on the tabletop, the sadder I felt.

And I was bored, Otto.

That was a first.

“… So you just change the angle of dispersal.” You hiked a cigarette from the package and positioned it just so on the table. “What appears to be pigment is really nothing more than mirrors!” You giggled with delight.

“Otto —”

“Think what could be done —”

“Ot-to —” singing it now like “Yoo-hoo.” Nervy. You weren’t accustomed to being interrupted in full flight.

Finally you tugged your gaze away from the open window and looked at me.

“I want to know why you’re here.” I was proud of that, the simple declarative statement.

Our stares hooked for an instant, then, incredibly, you drop-ped right back into the soliloquy as if I’d never uttered a word.

“… bombard them with photosensitive materials …”

I saw exactly what was going to happen, how you’d leave with nothing said and that it would drive me crazy and I’d spend the next six months berating myself, reconstructing the scene. So I pushed my chair back and brazenly set my face close to yours.

“Why are you here, Otto? Don’t natter on about goddamn light refraction — mail me the article!”

Your cheek muscles worked up and down. Your stare was flat, as if you were overhearing some foreign language. Then you chuckled, flicked an ash off your cigarette, and said, “You haven’t yet told me what you’ve been up to.”

You weren’t going to be snared by an amateur.

“It’s been six years, Otto.”

“So work backwards.”

Of course. Time is a fluid concept, its direction determined by a tilt of the glass.

“I’m director of the Summer Arts Festival.”

A quick smile. “Good for you.”

“As of two years ago.”

“Still making art?”

“No time.” I made a dismissive gesture but felt the familiar pang.

“Of course not. You have a real job. Someone has to run the country.”

“It’s a big operation,” I heard myself insist. “We cram two months full of chamber music, author readings, dance performances, workshops, and classes. Our budget’s doubled in two years and most of that is local money.” I sounded like the Chamber of Commerce.

You nodded. Smoke drifted from your nostrils and made its languid way toward the ceiling rafters. You were enjoying this. And why not? I was right where I had always been: desperate to please and impress you.

“I’m on a roll,” I declared. “They do everything I want. When Krizanc, chairman of my board, starts to rant about ‘market-driven programming,’ I tell him we have to create our audience. Not let the audience create us. Make them drowsy with something familiar — then kick open the gates. Blow them away!”

Who was this talking?

All these years of careful filtering, reclaiming my voice — and now this: the mimic reborn.

Late-afternoon sun pressed through the window and I leapt to tug the curtain. “It’s all in the presentation. Make them think they’re on the cutting edge right here in Rupert and it becomes a point of pride. They expect art to be tough; they want it to be.”

Your word, as in “tough-minded,” “tough-thinking.”

“Bravo.” You hooked a chair with the toe of your boot. “Sit down, Simone, you’re very flushed.”

I obeyed, hating the way I felt, overheated and sticky, pulse racing.

“My half-dozen years haven’t been nearly so fruitful.”

I forced myself to look straight into your face. “What have you been doing?”

One of your famous pauses.

“I stayed on,” you said at last.

“In San Patricio?”

You nodded.

“What on earth did you do there for six years?” I was shocked; it never occurred to me that you might have stayed on. All this time I’d been walking down Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto every chance I got, glancing up at your studio window, wondering if you were in there with your ripped-up magazines and glue stick.

“Got drunk most days. Made a truckload of bad drawings. Then one morning I got sick of the sun and the smell of rancid cooking oil and started to drive north.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“What about your ex —”

“Wife? Carmen’s out of the picture, except where Kip is concerned.”

Your son. He’d be twenty-one by now. Older than I was when I stepped on the plane to come home. “What’s he up to?” You always loved to talk about your son.

Your fingers wrapped around your teacup, the nails chewed to bits. “I saw him this morning. Not so good, Simone. Not so good.”

I stared.

“They’re adjusting his medication. Makes him screwy, his equilibrium is shot. The kid can hardly walk.”

“Medication? What are you talking about?” My self-consciousness vanished.

“He gets seizures.” Your eyes scanned the room without focusing. “It began five or six years ago. Of course, you’d have no way of knowing.”

“What kind of seizures?”

“He goes months without any problem, then suddenly, keels over wherever he is: the gym, a crowded subway.”

“Jesus, Otto, I had no idea.”

“Of course not.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with” — I struggled to sound casual — “that time he fell off the boat?”

“What?”

You sound genuinely mystified.

“In San Patricio, on the lake.” I prodded, already wishing I hadn’t brought it up.

You stared at me, fully engaged for a few seconds. “I don’t see how. He wasn’t under more than a minute.”

Right.

“The worst of it isn’t the seizures,” you went on. “Which happen maybe three, four times a year. It’s his attitude that stinks. Yesterday, at the hospital, he made his neck go all floppy, then titters, ‘What a shame your kid’s a crip.’ Crip my ass!”

The table shuddered as you smacked it with your hand. “Ninety-five percent of the time he’s perfectly okay. There’s guys a lot worse off than him — blind! Imagine being blind, or deaf! But you don’t see them hanging out on Queen Street, playing skinhead, cadging cigarettes and spare change. He snorts PAM out of a goddamn baggie …” You took a deep breath and snapped open the top of your shirt. “He’s quit three schools, got caught boosting a pair of Doc Martens from the Eaton Centre …”

Had you driven two hours to spout off against your son, ask my forgiveness for being such a lousy father?

“I’m sorry, Otto.”

“So am I.” Your tone was aggressive, as if you were determined I’d know the worst of it. “I thought if I stayed far away in some hill town everyone would be better off, that I was so fucked up it would overwhelm them. Pure ego.” You laughed. “Which I’ve never been short of.”

I didn’t deny this. “He lives with you, or Carmen?”

“He’s in a halfway house for kids who screw up. They huddle out on the sidewalk most of the day, smoking, or they’re taking courses in something called ‘Life Skills.’” You snorted. “He asked after you, just as I was leaving today.”

“Me?” My mind was racing.

“He wondered if you were ‘still on the scene.’”

“What did you say?”

“That I hadn’t seen you for years. That it wasn’t meant to be.” Your knee pressed against mine. “He’s convinced you saved his life, that time he pitched overboard.”

I reddened. “That’s absurd.”

“Even so, he likes the idea that you pulled him from the brink.”

“But it’s not true!”

“He thinks it is.”

First your knee, now your thigh. Uneasy, I shifted, but didn’t move away.

You reached for the cookie box and shook it. Empty.

This wasn’t the scene I’d be picturing, far from it.

Hell, I was feeling sorry for you. I’d been prepared for anger — even desire, but not this.

“Sometimes I used to feel you two were conspiring against me.” You spoke with studied casualness. “When you came in from riding those underfed nags, Kip was so flushed and healthy-looking — I used to wish I had that power.”

Power? I had to laugh. So you were jealous, Otto. This notion would have pleased me once. Now I just felt drained. The numbness crept back. Here we were again, using Kip as our topic, and I was supposed to pretend I cared. I reached for the tea things and scraped cookie crumbs onto a saucer.

A long time ago I was reaching for you to tear the world open. Now, in your presence, I felt hemmed in, claustrophobic.

“I need to live in Toronto again, to be near Kip.”

“That makes sense.” I didn’t hide a yawn.

“Last Saturday I picked up the newspaper and who did I see but you — with this most professional smile planted on your face. Very impressive, Simone.”

“You saw that?” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. The Globe had done a feature in the Arts section, underlining how the Summer Festival had “revitalized” the area and pinning much of the success of its “fresh, young director.”

“I thought, She looks so damn competent — pretty too.”

I crumpled the cookie box and tossed it toward the trash.

“I’m flat broke, Simone. Benny says the art market’s shriveled, nothing’s moving, nothing he can do for me.”

Benny — your dealer.

“There’s a recession, Otto. Even in San Patricio you must have heard about it.”

“I need a job.”

“Right.” I still didn’t get it.

“So —” You followed me to the sink with your saucer and cup. “You’re running this nice little festival. You could fit me in, as a teacher, artist-in-residence. I’m flexible as an old shoe, and more to the point, I’m desperate.” A smoke ring escaped from your mouth and hung in the air.

“As a teacher,” you continued, “I’m the best there is. You, if anyone, should know that.”

I dumped the leaves into the compost bowl. Now I understood why you’d come.

“We always got along well.”

I stared, mouth open.

You were jiggling a set of keys: Budget Rent A Car. At least I was right about that. “Think about it. Drop me a line, or call, as soon as you get a moment. I’ve got my old studio back.”

* * *

The little Honda bucked down the hill until its muffler scraped highway asphalt.

Then you cranked your window down and shouted into the hot still air: “You must feel very safe here!”

I opened my mouth to protest — “Who the hell wants safety?” — then remembered: they were your exact words, uttered years earlier.

•

It was a scruffy copy of Lassie Come Home, borrowed from the Rupert Public Library, and as I turned each page my fingers buffed scabs of peanut butter and petrified snot.

I didn’t even notice the sun was falling and I was losing my light. I simply tilted the book a little more every few minutes — until a word stopped my eye mid-sentence.

What was this word?

She.

Lassie, I’d just discovered, was a “she.”

The book dropped between my knees. Lassie, the hero of the tale, was actually a heroine. That was like those other despised words: poetess, actress, cowgirl — images of women in fringed skirts, riding sidesaddle, squealing with terror. How could I identify with the girl version of the real thing? How can fantasy be populated by underachievers?

—Excerpted from The Instructor

———————-

Ann Ireland is the author of four novels, most recently THE BLUE GUITAR, which has been getting excellent reviews all across Canada. She coordinates the Writing Workshops department at the Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, in Toronto. She teaches on line writing courses and edits novels for other writers from time to time. She also writes profiles of artists for Canadian Art Magazine and Numéro Cinq Magazine (where she is Contributing Editor). Dundurn Press will be re-publishing Ann’s second novel: THE INSTRUCTOR over the summer of 2013.

Through the Night: Novel Excerpt — Stig Sæterbakken

Aug 152013

Herewith is “Us.” I’ve chosen this excerpt of Through the Night (Dalkey Archive Press), translated by Seán Kinsella, to illustrate the power of Sæterbakken’s prose, particularly his narrative voice and control of the moment. “Us” comes early in the novel, and is perhaps the origins of Karl and Eva’s eventual separation. But as this section makes clear, Karl poses many existential questions on love and fidelity, which are paralyzing, and for him unanswerable. This rather prismatic questioning of life is repeated throughout the novel, adding to the novel’s overall tension and psychological terror.

—Jason DeYoung