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Max must surely hear the scattershot of my neighborhood greetings, so fond in their expression and so traditionally patterned, exactly what healthy, seasoned, amiable women learn to say in such chapters of their lives. He has, after so many years, a certain amount of faith in my voice, if nothing else, the voice that he’s married to, but then he doesn’t believe, I suspect, that the mystery of being is as deeply manifest in women as in men. The voice, as he perfectly well knows, is a social projection, an oral accomplishment, something I’ve created and maintained along with my feminine peers. I’m just being merry—that’s how I imagine Max processing my ebullience—I’m being cordial in a way that may be slightly dishonest but that keeps life from bearing down with its solemn weight, keeps it nosing forward, and overrides the worst possible story the day might otherwise offer, his story, that is, which could quickly turn dreary and strangulated without my floating social descant riding overhead on strings of nylon. Oh, do shut up, Jane.
Yes, there we stood: the morning’s excursion to the market, which we managed to stretch out an hour longer than it should have taken, then the taxi to our daughter’s house in Oak Park, her austere three-story brick cube on East Avenue (built 1896) where she lives with her film agent husband, Ivan, with its wide front steps and shrubbery and cement cupids—where we were to have lunch, as usual on Sundays, something hot and savory in the dining room, followed by fresh fruit (on French fruit plates, each one different in design, and accompanied by knives with ceramic handles) and afterward coffee, and then the journey home. Ivan, without a word of complaint, will drive us back to our downtown apartment, silently ferrying his mother-in-law, his father-in-law (he is a man who cannot drive and talk at the same time), eastward through the light Sunday traffic, taking Chicago Avenue as usual. He will actually back his old Packard out of the Oak Park garage, slowly, down the narrow overgrown driveway with its scraping branches, wincing as he hears his beautifully restored car suffering instances of minute damage.
I have attempted in my life—at least in the last thirty years—to write one sonnet every fourteen days, and it is my especial (see Fowler’s on the difference between especial and special) pleasure to spread the work out over the available working days. On Mondays, usually in the early morning after the house has been set right, I decide on the form—Italian (for which I have a special fondness), Shakespearean, contemporary or what I, and some of my colleagues, call essentialist. Surprisingly, this choice precedes the subject matter. “But how do you decide what exactly to write about?” asked the Chicago Tribune journalist, Meg Alford, in her early spring article.
As though I would tell her—and the world—about the tiny spiral notebook in the upper-left-hand drawer of my desk with its crowded list recorded randomly in ink or else pencil, and even in one case lip-liner, of new and possible subjects: the smell of taxis, the texture of bread, sleep, chewing gum, Picasso, flints and arrowheads, the cello, the shape of coastal islands and the children who are born on islands, cabbage, shingle beaches, feet, Styrofoam, photographs of the newborn as they appear in the newspaper (with sleek seal-baby faces stroked in stone). Or a medieval wooden Christ image that Max happened upon at the Art Institute, brooms and brushes and dustpans and the concept of debris (how we half treasure what we can’t wait to throw away), a table set for eight (and its companion sestet “Table Set for Seven”), the beauty of coinage when neatly stacked on a counter, urban alleys after dark, and—a mere jump away—the commingling of hollyhocks and overhead wire, and then human faces and their afterimage—an afterimage not being anything like an aura, but possessing a different kind of density altogether. I’ve worked on this particular afterimage/aura construct for the last two weeks, finishing on Saturday afternoon (with a slight alteration round about midnight, two closing words pondered and then juxtaposed), and was more than usually pleased with my efforts, that feeling every poet knows of arrival home, the self returned to its self.
There is never a shortage of subjects, I explained to the Chicago Trib reporter, hoping my teeth were not projecting an idiotic over-gladness at the thought of such abundance waiting to be expressed, matter and ideas swelling forward, eager to be sonnetized.
For the next two weeks my writing will approach the subject of my aging body; I have attempted this subject before, but always with indirection, as though I were peering at it from behind a shrub, so that it could be anyone’s body. Now I must claim it, it seems, as mine. I see it close up: chin, breasts, stomach, hips and legs giving way to specific gravity, which will never relent, no matter what I do. The stars are speeding away from each other—we know that, so why are we surprised when the same thing happens to our various body parts, their willingness to spread and collapse and soften. My kneecaps, the skin that covers them, are as wrinkled as the fuzz of a poached peach, and sliding downward, always downward. But no one sees my knees anymore, so it doesn’t matter.
Sonnet writing—and this is what I wanted the Trib reporter to understand—no longer confines itself to the professing and withdrawing of courtly love, although I insisted that a nod to such love is always hovering, or rather nudging. Is this notion true or just part of my fussy exegetic self? Courtly love? Who knows what shadow of that instinct survives? To be honest (not that I was honest with the slender, leather-skirted junior reporter and her tape recorder), it’s only a suspicion borrowed from Max’s belief that every novel, whatever its genre or subject, is about death. I certainly have never bought that one, not for a minute. A novel is about everything it touches upon, and so is a sonnet.
I reminded the reporter that sonnet means “little sound.” “Oh,” she said, and I could tell by the way her pen jumped in her hand that she was charmed by the idea; people almost always are.
Sonnets are taken so strenuously, so literally, when taught at school, or at least they used to be, and the definition—fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter—hardens and ends up gesturing toward an artifact, an object one might construct from a kit. But if you picture the sonnet, instead, as a little sound, a ping in the great wide silent world, you make visible a sudden fluidity to the form, a splash of noise, but a carefully measured splash that’s saved from preciosity by the fact that it comes from within the body’s own borders; one voice, one small note extended, and then bent; the bending is everything, the volta, the turn, and also important is where it occurs within the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground,” to quote old Wordsworth. From there the “little sound” sparks and then forms itself out of the dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness.
Max’s novels, on the other hand, come as a communal roar, especially the most recent one, Flat Planet, which was published with exquisitely poor timing, last year, 2001, on September 10.
Of course, no one had time to read the ensuing reviews of Flat Planet, no one cared about social novels and novelistic dioramas during that pinched, poisoned, vulnerable and shocking time, and it must be admitted that the contents of Flat Planet, with its wrangling families and chords of memory, sounded rancorously in the face of Ground Zero. Flat Planet became a note in the margin: NOTED CHICAGO WRITER PRESENTS NEUROTIC FATHER (who tries his damndest to persuade his adult kids to come home for Thanksgiving, when they’d rather be out in the world making money or enjoying alternative forms of sex or fine dining.) One critic did go so far as to say that Max Sexton at least had the stones to resist the excesses of postmodernism. Stones; Max loved that, I could tell. Max also loves—has always loved—Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving of the old, weird America that lived in the woods or behind sets of green hills. He wanted so much for the book to sum up all that the word thanksgiving illuminates in America. But, really, what does the idea of thanks mean when a spectacularly fortunate country has been smacked in the chin? Has been flattened. Thanks to whom and for what?
Somewhere, someday, probably soon, a scholar will write a comparative thesis on pre- and post-World Trade Center literature. I can imagine her (or him), an intrepid young person in her early, awkward twenties (Columbia or else Yale), her hair flattened by neglect, her body unbalanced by bad posture and fad diets, perpetually in a state of flinching, just slightly overawed by her male supervisor (or the other way around), but determined (nevertheless) to identify the fulcrum that she knows, by instinct, separates the now-world, which has seen the end of Fortress America, and the notion of giving thanks from the “olden days”—separates real terrorism from the old excuse of vengeance, striking back when power is denied.
Max, with his shy, proud, leftish politics, would never reduce the ill-timing of September 11 to a career complaint, but I know he has felt the injustice of it. I understand exactly how he could have emended the book’s galleys, given a few weeks’ grace, even a few days’, and, having done so, he would have found himself credited by the literary media with a handsome sense of prophecy and the companionable embrace of now that shades, so subtly, toward the current state of inquietude in America at this moment.
Instead, he and his book Flat Planet have been swept into a cave of unfashionable hush, dismissed and somehow made to feel a triviality. Since Flat Planet (those quarreling family members and their generational rivalries and heroic accumulations of wealth), Max has stayed as far as he can from talking to me about his New Manuscript.
Ever since we were married (1957), since the publication of his early Lincoln Park Beatitudes, Max has always had on hand a New Manuscript. That’s part of what I married at the altar of Euclid Methodist Church in Oak Park. He had never made a secret of the fact that he intended to spend his life writing novels; it was certainly not a thing hidden from the new young wife—me—who had pledged herself to be Max Sexton’s muse, even though we never thought of employing the word muse. He believed in my support, and I believed in his ability to have, always, in the rim of his consciousness, a New Manuscript, the future offering, the work with which he was currently engaged and to which I would always take a second place. What did I pledge in return? Nothing, really, except my presence. My abiding presence, the value of which I have recently come to question.
The new, new, New Manuscript lives at this moment in Max’s orange vinyl briefcase (a souvenir bought in a public market in Paris, which he uses for luck), really a child’s 1960ish backpack, a cartable. The manuscript might comprise three pages or three hundred at this point. I haven’t asked. He takes it with him in the morning when he goes to his office, which is a small, comfortless room over a hardware outlet a mere two blocks away on Rush Street.
It is surprising to me that in a busy urban high-tech city we still need a place to buy screws and nuts, nails and hammers. We continue to require these old-fashioned items, as well as a place where they can be procured. You have to enter the revolving door of our very successful local hardware store, then walk by the rubber-smelling stock of garden tools and housewares, then up a set of stairs, to find Max’s office door, a plain gray-painted metal door that opens with difficulty, scraping hard against the cheap tiled floor. There’s a stubby window (glass bricks, gritted with dirt) high up on one wall. There’s a shared bathroom down the hall; Max formerly had to ask one of the cashiers downstairs for a key, but now he has acquired one of his own.
For my husband, Max, spartanness serves as a set of crossed fingers; he mustn’t give way to greed or a taste for luxury, or it will eat him up the way it ate Bellow and Steinbeck. Probably this explains why the two of us have never owned a car, certainly an eccentricity for our generation.
In the late afternoon, after a day at his word processor, he locks his office door with a sigh—or so I imagine—and totes his briefcase down the stairs, across the street and home, and then the two of us sit down in the living room for coffee.
I use freshly ground beans from the freezer, also beautiful Mexican handmade cups and saucers on a polished wooden tray; we deserve this after all our work, and after, in Max’s case, hours of self-denial in his blank cell. What do we talk about?
He seems—I can only guess at this from the way his face relaxes, his tongue caught in silence—to enjoy an account of my day of sonnet-making, as long as I remember to keep my merry voice, but he offers nothing in return about the contents of his briefcase and how the New Manuscript is progressing.
Our Andersonville apartment in the late afternoon catches the full orange of the western sun. This is the old Swedish immigrant neighborhood, now—who knows why?—a refuge for gays and lesbians. Look at us. We are two oldish, coupled heterosexuals drinking coffee after a day of writing, of transposing our thoughts onto the ephemera of paper. One of us speaks of it, and one of us doesn’t. I can’t be sure of holding his interest when I tell him of my daily progress, but he is always eager to hear about—and amused by—the latest news of our Monday meetings of Sonnet Revival. Today was the day when, after all these years, I handed over the society’s chair to another sonneteer, or sonnet-maker as we prefer to be called nowadays, a man named Victor Glantz. Max knows Victor and despises him, yet he inclined his head when Victor’s name came up, eager for details, and anxious, I could see, to avoid any reference to his own working day.
His side trips to the Newbury, his “research,” assure me the New Manuscript is going slowly—and that means badly. Research is a postponement, as I’ve heard Max say a dozen times. A novel is a whole world; there’s so much to get right, but you don’t get it right from reading encyclopedia articles. Sonnets, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter, those little sounds.
I work on my sonnets at a small keyhole desk in a corner of our blue-and-gray bedroom. I actually work with real paper, lined paper from a thick tablet, and a ballpoint pen, with a great many crossings-out and dozens of arrows and question marks and sometimes such marginal scribblings as “No!” or “saccharine” or “derivative,” or else I present myself with that bold command: “Make fresher?” Freshness is the most demanding task one faces when dealing with a traditional meter, no matter how forgiving that meter is.
The first several pages are a mess, but I like to allow the mess to flow and flower. I make it move, sitting back in my chair, rotating my shoulders every half hour or so; I try to unknot my muscles, go, go, go—as long as it is forward. Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy. Forget all that business about fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter; think of Leonardo and his sage wisdom: “Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom.” Or the problems that accrue from the “weight of too much liberty” (Wordsworth). Drown out the noise of rhyme and rhythm. Think only of the small dramatic argument that’s being brought into being—a handball court, or a courtroom itself, hard, demanding thick stone walls—between perseverance and its asymmetrical smash of opposition. Think of that rectangle, perfect in its proportions, that plastic cutlery tray in your kitchen drawer, with its sharp divisions for forks, knives, spoons. Or think of the shape of a human life, which, like it or not, is limited. I believe that humans are meant to live about a hundred years—after that the cells stop wanting to divide and replicate themselves. Chickens, if left alone, will live for thirty years. I wrote a sonnet once about a chicken in great old age, screeching into its decayed wing feathers. Every species has a probable life span, and this observation offers me a verification of sorts for my fourteen-line creations.
From week to week, the subject of my ongoing sonnet suggests itself. It’s as though there’s a small thread clinging to my sweater’s sleeve, always there, waiting to be picked off. I look up from my desk at the framed poster of Rilke’s “Sonnet to Orpheus no. 14” that’s fixed to the wall, and think: this is me. This is I—getting more grammatical, now—my surroundings being a fine-furred extension of myself. These moments of mental vacancy are mine too, and the smothering way, according to Max, I have of signing my letters with amities and my poems with the turn in point of view at about—more or less—the eighth line. Me, always me. My inescapable self with its slightly off-balanced packaging, benignly decentered by an altered view. When I announce my name, Jane Sexton, to new acquaintances, in circumstances formal or informal, my attempt at musical elusion is also part of me, riding up the “a” in Jane, as though a twinkly uncertainty waited, then plunging down into the plainness of Sexton, with its embedded salute to hard churchly labor—the sexton being only a sort of janitor, and wouldn’t I rather have a name like Bishop or Deacon? No, I would not want to lose my bell-ringing, steeple-climbing, altar-dusting self, unconditioned for awe, broken-tongued on the subject of reverence.
My aging is me too, as well as the subject of my current sonnet. Only two years ago the idea of aging belonged to the whole world. It was background. I hadn’t been touched by it then. Now I am. Because I’m tall and thin, I am conscious of my bones, especially my hips, which are so shallowly buried, and also conscious of their curvature and sharpness. Often I feel like a walking ossuary. Shouldn’t the exercise of staring at my body involve a little veneration? Well, yes. My knuckles have grown elaborate and curious, white and blue knobs in a setting of stringy flesh. I’ve learned to curl my hands in my lap, one inside the other, so that no one can see the wonder of their structure, no one but me.
I am more and more solitary, and so is my poor Max. Are we then starting to take responsibility for our own dying bodies? It seems that each of us will have to do this on our own.
For a long time I have been perfectly happy to chair the twice-monthly meetings of the Sonnet Society, known since 1988 as the Sonnet Revival. Every second Monday, noon to one-thirty. The time is manageable—an hour and a half every other week, and our location in Clark House behind the SUD Building is an easy walk for me. The other members of the society find their parking on the street, which they do happily, since parking rarely presents a problem on Mondays.
Until recently we had the wide, broad-beamed Clark House room on the ground floor to ourselves, our massive oak conference table and the files where we keep our archives, but a year ago the Oulipian Society became aware of our privileged location, and applied for the use of our official meeting room on alternate Mondays, which seemed only fair to me and not a great inconvenience. Several of our members, though, felt our space had been compromised. Those upstarts!
I tried to reason with my colleagues, explaining that there should be no conflict if we planned our calendar carefully. But, in fact, the sharing of the room has caused occasional confusion, since many of our ranks are getting forgetful with age. I made the mistake once myself not too long ago. I can’t imagine how I had mixed up the weeks except that Max and I had been away to Jamaica. In any case I arrived at the Oulipian Society meeting with my latest sonnet and bag lunch to find them in the midst of what they called their “combinatorial stratagems.” On that particular Monday they were doing poems in which every line was to contain two words with double consonants. Their chair, Douglas Pome, asked me to stay for their “workshop” (as an “honored guest,” he said) and I did, feeling a little awkward about being thought a forgetful type who mixes up the weeks, and not so much enjoying the session as thinking it would make a good story to tell Max over coffee, something new for a change—my ever-present itch of compunction.
The Oulipians were younger than our group and more raffish, especially Doug Pome, with his careful midlife beard and his joke of a name. (He does write a nice fleet line.) I noticed they had catered sandwiches instead of doing the brown-bag thing as we’ve done for years. Most of their poems had a kind of tumbling, jesting humor, which they richly enjoyed. Humor is something sonnet-makers do badly, if at all.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Oulipians. I understand that, at first glance, they might seem to resemble the sonnet revivalists in that they set up constrictive forms for their literary production. But—whether they pursue their experiments and practice under the ever-anxious gaze of consciousness or whether they use anagram or linguistic transplant or number series—they suffer the disadvantage that they can never repeat their forays.
A sonnet, on the other hand, comes with its coat of varnish. As Flaubert says, the words are like hair; they shine with combing. We can do what we want with a sonnet. It is a container ever reusable, ever willing to be refurbished, retouched, regilded and reobjectified.
“Congratulations,” I said to Victor Glantz today as I handed over the gavel and welcomed him to the head of the table, where I always sit. For the next three years he will take charge of the society meetings and newsletter, and after that he may earn himself another term. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)
“I promise,” he said formally, in his irritating way, “to carry on the mandate of our society and to bring the sonnet into greater and greater public usage.” (I do cherish my association with Sonnet Revival, but I sometimes wish we had fewer loonies among us, and not quite so much enthusiastic mediocrity.)
Because the meeting broke up earlier than usual, and because time is more and more a problem for me, I took a different route home, doubling the distance between Clark House and our apartment building. After all these years I know our Andersonville area well, but the darkening skies, or else the glare of city lights, confused me for a moment. I felt my hands trembling in my pockets. One of the familiar old buildings had been razed; that was what was confusing me, something as simple as that.
Nevertheless I recognized later that I had, in fact, panicked. Fear spread rapidly through my body and went with a rush to my head, so that I thought I might faint. What was the matter with me? I had simply turned right when I should have turned left. There was a coffee shop on the corner. I had seen it many times, but had never entered. Now I went in, sat down at a small table by the window and ordered a cup of hot tea. Here I am, I said to myself two or three times, here I am, here I am, sipping at the edge of the plastic cup. I am five blocks from home, an aging woman who has lost her bearings. But now it’s all right. In fifteen minutes I’ll be home.
I didn’t tell Max about getting lost, but I did tell him what Victor Glantz had said when taking over the meeting, his hopes that the sonnet would gain in public usage. Max laughed at that, laughed harder than I had expected. I gave him a small smile in return. He stopped laughing then and gulped his coffee, struggling to straighten his face. We have to be terribly careful after forty years together. We are both so easily injured.
On Mondays, even on Sonnet Revival days, I try to get one or two lines down. Today I did what I do every day, exactly the same. I start at the beginning, the first line, the first word, and then work my way through to the end, thinking: this is familiar, oh yes. This—if it is to mean anything—must be familiar; familiarity is the point, after all. Spring and counter-spring. April, May, June, July. Then August, then September, straight through the tunnel of the chilly calendar. I am not thinking, in this early stage, of octave-sestet divisions.
Everything I need is within reach—my notes, my dictionary and thesaurus, my Leonardo quote taped to my desk, and, in fact, except for the steady accompaniment of good light, what else am I likely to require as I move from space to space, other than this tough little pad of paper and the stub of my pen?
But there will come a moment, possibly today—I came close early this morning—when my faith in my miniature art collapses. I can count on that; everything will be going well, the words adding themselves up, gorging on themselves, and saluting the friendly gathering of half-rhymes (which is what I favor these days), then the slow sexual stroke of the iamb arrives, and then, for reasons undisclosed to me, I will be stopped in my working tracks, unable to complete more than six lines. For the first week, the sonnet lives underground, where delay and containment are my chief concerns. It is as though I am looking at it with one eye squeezed shut. And then—this can happen quickly—by the second Monday, I have, mostly, managed to set up my scaffolding for all of the fourteen lines, but it is a scaffolding with several bits unnailed, and nothing yet committed. There are pressures working on particular words, but mostly I try to silence what I think of as a foot pedal of a piano, which is ever ready to stomp and shout and take an easy ride home. I want space for strangeness to enter—not obscurities or avoidances, but idiosyncrasies of grammar or lexicon, so that the sound is harsh, even hurtful.
Half a dozen syllables in the third line are being withheld from me, so temptingly, a few feet out of sight, suspended on the other side of the desk lamp. Or else they are unwilling to freeze themselves in the particular posture I have prepared for them. I refuse, possessing as I do a kind of preternatural sprezzatura, and this presents another hurdle, to invert the structure of ordinary spoken English, attaching adjectives to the end of a line for the sake of rhyme. Here’s an example from the literature of sonnets: “With strange new hopes and fears and fancies wild.” “Wild” to rhyme with “smil’d” (Wilmon Brewer, a ferocious old sonnet-writer, whose book, awful, was published in 1937, Sonnets and Sestinas). If I were at the helm, Wilmot Brewer’s line would have to go “With strange new hopes and fears and wild fancies,” and where would you find a rhyme for fancies? In any case, I don’t believe fancies is a word I’ve ever used in a sonnet.
And I want, also, that short introductory beat, the primary iamb, followed by the heavier second beat, and I won’t have it any other way, though many sonnet-makers give in at this early point, as though they are inserting a trumpet into the verse and daring it to blow.
My brain stem is ready, the iambic grasp of knit/purl engaged, and is so close to matching the rhythm of my breath that I don’t even think of it. Its motor hums in the joints of my shoulders and wrists, knit/purl, knit/purl, ten items arranged on each clean glass shelf, though I don’t like to be overly prescriptive when it comes to meter.
Sometimes I look around whatever room I happen to be in as a way of steadying my thoughts. It is seven o’clock now. After our coffee ceremony I moved from the living room to the kitchen, with its fused aroma of afternoon coffee and tonight’s roasting chicken and fresh pepper. My little notepad occupies the clean edge of the corner table, and I have just heard a woman on the radio say to her interviewer, about a local celebrity murderer, “There was something about that man that made the hair on my spine stand up.”
After a minute I pick up a pencil and jot down the word spine. Then spinal. No, spinal is an anapest. I turn the radio off. Color in its array of tints moves forward in my mind, but not the words I need. Spinal fluid. Not quite.
It is my aging body I want to write about, this oiled goatskin I live inside of. The body that rises now, a little creakily, though I attempt to disguise this lack of limberness with an effort of will. I lean over from the waist as smartly as I can (as though a witness were standing next to me taking notes) and check the chicken in the oven and the pair of baking potatoes, darkening in their hides. Max is reading the newspaper. I hear him turning over the pages in the living room and think how he has deprived himself all day of this pleasure. He’s always been strict about the avoidance of the newspaper earlier in the day, he is like a puritan in that way: first he must perform his daily task, getting down onto hard disk or paper his own five hundred words, which tomorrow he may or may not delete. In ten minutes we will sit down at the dinner table, just the two of us. Are we to share the future or no? I’ve never made a fuss of things—why would I begin now?
Oh, these duo dinners! They’ve grown so hard for us. We’ll be talking about the Middle East tonight, the two of us. Or else the obscenity of CEO salaries in America. We already know each other’s views on these subjects; we speak in order to keep the silence away. It’s as though we reheat these issues in our very dear little copper saucepan—so battered and beloved—hoping by accident to stir in something new. But we are inoculated against surprise. We can no longer make each other laugh. We can’t even startle one another. We are both abashed at this imposed duty at the end of every day, even though we’ve done it for years: each of us is obliged to eat a meal in the presence of a stranger, and yet each is determined to be a self, a singular self. Music helps; this is something we’ve both noticed in the last year, and I can hear Max now, rising and shuffling among CDs on the shelf where we keep them. What’s it to be tonight? Ah, Mozart. Good!
After dinner, which includes a single glass of red wine, sipped slowly, grape-sized sips, I will phone our daughter in Oak Park to see how she got through her day, to try to gauge from her voice her level of vitality. I can hear myself being distractingly glib in order to blunt all that I resist. Is she bearing up? Will she manage another day of effort as she tries to see through her life’s obscuring clutter? I have to know before I can tuck myself into our queen-size water bed, where I will read for an hour or more, while Max in another room watches a documentary on television. I am reading a short, bleak Irish novel and he is watching something to do with elephant tusks, needless slaughter and corruption in the international market.
Sleep arrives early, and my arm lifts, as though under hypnosis, to switch off the bedside lamp. My last thought before drifting off collapses into a kind of formula of information directed to the center of my cortex, where a question awaits. What am I now? What is my position in the universe, in the fen and bog of my arrangements?
The reply comes promptly, mocking my tone of high seriousness: if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.
Various Miracles (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
Various Miracles (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
SEVERAL OF THE MIRACLES THAT OCCURRED this year have gone unrecorded.
Example: On the morning of January 3, seven women stood in line at a lingerie sale in Palo Alto, California, and by chance each of these women bore the Christian name Emily.
Example: On February 16 four strangers (three men, one woman) sat quietly reading on the back seat of the number 10 bus in Cincinnati, Ohio; each of them was reading a paperback copy of Smiley’s People.
On March 30 a lathe operator in a Moroccan mountain village dreamed that a lemon fell from a tree into his open mouth, causing him to choke and die. He opened his eyes, overjoyed at being still alive, and embraced his wife, who was snoring steadily by his side. She scarcely stirred, being reluctant to let go of a dream she was dreaming, which was that a lemon tree had taken root in her stomach, sending its pliant new shoots upward into her limbs. Leaves, blossoms and finally fruit fluttered in her every vein until she began to tremble in her sleep with happiness and intoxication. Her husband got up quietly and lit an oil lamp so that he could watch her face. It seemed to him he’d never really looked at her before, and he felt how utterly ignorant he was of the spring that nourished her life. Now she lay sleeping, dreaming, her face radiant. What he saw was a mask of happiness so intense it made him fear for his life.
On May 11, in the city of Exeter in the south of England, five girls (aged fifteen to seventeen) were running across a playing field at ten o’clock in the morning as part of their physical education program. They stopped short when they saw, lying on the broad gravel path, a dead parrot. He was grassy green in color with a yellow nape and head, and was later identified by the girl’s science mistress as Amazona ochrocephala. The police were notified of the find, and it was later discovered that the parrot had escaped from the open window of a house owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who claimed, while weeping openly, that they had owned the parrot (Miguel by name) for twenty-two years. The parrot, in fact, was twenty-five years old, one of a pair of birds sold in an open market in Marseilles in the spring of 1958. Miguel’s twin brother was sold to an Italian soprano who kept it for ten years, then gave it to her niece Francesca, a violinist who played first with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and later with the Chicago Symphony. On May 11 Francesca was wakened in her River Forest home by the sound of her parrot (Pete, or sometimes Pietro) coughing. She gave him a dish of condensed milk instead of his usual whole-oats-and-peanut mixture, and then phoned to say she would not be able to attend rehearsal that day. The coughing grew worse. She looked up the name of a vet in the Yellow Pages and was about to dial when the parrot fell over, dead in his cage. A moment earlier Francesca had heard him open his beak and pronounce what she believed were the words “Ça ne fait rien.”
On August 26 a man named Carl Hallsbury of Billings, Montana, was wakened by a loud noise. “My God, we’re being burgled,” his wife, Marjorie, said. They listened, but when there were no further noises, they drifted back to sleep. In the morning they found that their favorite little watercolor—a pale rural scene depicting trees and a winding road and the usual arched bridge—had fallen off the living-room wall. It appeared that it had bounced onto the cast-iron radiator and then ricocheted to a safe place in the middle of the living-room rug. When Carl investigated, he found that the hook had worked loose in the wall. He patched the plaster methodically, allowed it to dry, and then installed a new hook. While he worked he remembered how the picture had come into his possession. He had come across it hanging in an emptied-out house in the French city of St. Brieuc, where he and the others of his platoon had been quartered during the last months of the war. The picture appealed to him, its simple lines and the pale tentativeness of the colors. In particular, the stone bridge caught his attention since he had been trained as a civil engineer (Purdue, 1939). When the orders came to vacate the house late in 1944, he popped the little watercolor into his knapsack; it was a snug fit, and the snugness seemed to condone his theft. He was not a natural thief, but already he knew that life was mainly a matter of improvisation. Other returning soldiers brought home German helmets, strings of cartridge shells and flags of various sorts, but the little painting was Carl’s only souvenir. And his wife, Marjorie, is the only one in the world who knows it to be stolen goods; she and Carl belong to a generation that believes there should be no secrets between married couples. Both of them, Marjorie as much as Carl, have a deep sentimental attachment to the picture, though they no longer believe it to be the work of a skilled artist.
It was, in fact, painted by a twelve-year-old boy named Pierre Renaud, who until 1943 had lived in the St. Brieuc house. It was said that as a child he had a gift for painting and drawing; in fact, he had a gift merely for imitation. His little painting of the bridge was copied from a postcard his father had sent him from Burgundy, where he’d gone to conduct some business. Pierre had been puzzled and ecstatic at receiving a card from his parent, a cold, resolute man with little time for his son. The recopying of the postcard in watercolors—later Pierre saw all this clearly—was an act of pathetic homage, almost a way of petitioning his father’s love.
He grew up to become not an artist but a partner in the family leather-goods business. In the late summer he liked to go south in pursuit of sunshine and good wine, and one evening, August 26 it was, he and Jean-Louis, his companion of many years, found themselves on a small stone bridge not far from Tournus. “This is it,” he announced excitedly, spreading his arms like a boy, and not feeling at all sure what he meant when he said the words, “This is it.” Jean-Louis gave him a fond smile; everyone knew Pierre had a large capacity for nostalgia. “But I thought you said you’d never been here before,” he said. “That’s true,” Pierre said. “You are right. But I feel, here”—he pointed to his heart—“that I’ve stood here before.” Jean-Louis teased him by saying, “Perhaps it was in another life.” Pierre shook his head, “No, no, no,” and then, “Well, perhaps.” After that the two of them stood on the bridge for some minutes regarding the water and thinking their separate thoughts.
On October 31 Camilla LaPorta, a Cuban-born writer, now a Canadian citizen, was taking the manuscript of her new novel to her Toronto publisher on Front Street. She was nervous; the publisher had been critical of her first draft, telling her it relied too heavily on the artifice of coincidence. Camilla had spent many months on revision, plucking apart the faulty tissue that joined one episode to another, and then, delicately, with the pains of a neurosurgeon, making new connections. The novel now rested on its own complex microcircuitry. Wherever fate, chance or happenstance had ruled, there was now logic, causality and science.
As she stood waiting for her bus on the corner of College and Spadina that fall day, a gust of wind tore the manuscript from her hands. In seconds the yellow typed sheets were tossed into a whirling dance across the busy intersection. Traffic became confused. A bus skittered on an angle. Passersby were surprisingly helpful, stopping and chasing the blowing papers. Several sheets were picked up from the gutter, where they lay on a heap of soaked yellow leaves. One sheet was found plastered against the windshield of a parked Pontiac half a block away; another adhered to the top of a lamppost; another was run over by a taxi and bore the black herringbone of tire prints. From all directions, ducking the wind, people came running up to Camilla, bringing her the scattered pages. “Oh this is crazy, this is crazy,” she cried into the screaming wind.
When she got to the publisher’s office, he took one look at her manuscript and said, “Good God Almighty, don’t tell me, Camilla, that you of all people have become a post-modernist and no longer believe in the logic of page numbers.”
Camilla explained about the blast of wind, and then the two of them began to put the pages in their proper order. Astonishingly, only one page was missing, but it was a page Camilla insisted was pivotal, a keystone page, the page that explained everything else. She would have to try to reconstruct it as best she could. “Hmmmmm,” the publisher said—this was late in the afternoon of the same day and they sat in the office sipping tea—“I truly believe, Camilla, that your novel stands up without the missing page. Sometimes it’s better to let things be strange and to represent nothing but themselves.”
The missing page—it happened to be page 46—had blown around the corner of College Street and through the open doorway of a fresh fruit and vegetable stand, where a young woman in a red coat was buying a kilo of zucchini. She was very beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and she was also talented, an actress, who for some months had been out of work. To give herself courage and cheer herself up she had decided to make a batch of zucchini-oatmeal muffins, and she was just counting out the change on the counter when the sheet of yellow paper blew through the doorway and landed at her feet.
She was the kind of young woman who reads everything, South American novels, Russian folk tales, Persian poetry, the advertisements on the subway, the personal column in the Globe and Mail, even the instructions and precautions on public fire extinguishers. Print is her way of entering and escaping the world. It was only natural for her to bend over and pick up the yellow sheet and begin to read.
She read: A woman in a red coat is standing in a grocery store buying a kilo of zucchini. She is beautiful, though not in a conventional way, and it happens that she is an actress who—
Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass (#u4b553220-72cd-5fec-8139-bae5f8ef621d)
OH, MRS. TURNER IS A SIGHT cutting the grass on a hot afternoon in June! She climbs into an ancient pair of shorts and ties on her halter top and wedges her feet into crepe-soled sandals and covers her red-gray frizz with Gord’s old golf cap—Gord is dead now, ten years ago, a seizure on a Saturday night while winding the mantel clock.
The grass flies up around Mrs. Turner’s knees. Why doesn’t she use a catcher, the Saschers next door wonder. Everyone knows that leaving the clippings like that is bad for the lawn. Each fallen blade of grass throws a minute shadow that impedes growth and repair. The Saschers themselves use their clippings to make compost, which they hope one day will be as ripe as the good manure that Sally Sascher’s father used to spread on his fields down near Emerson Township.
Mrs. Turner’s carelessness over the clippings plucks away at Sally, but her husband, Roy, is far more concerned about the Killex that Mrs. Turner dumps on her dandelions. It’s true that in Winnipeg the dandelion roots go right to the middle of the earth, but Roy is patient and persistent in pulling them out, knowing exactly how to grasp the coarse leaves in his hand and how much pressure to apply. Mostly they come up like corks with their roots intact. And he and Sally are experimenting with new ways to cook dandelion greens, believing as they do that the components of nature are arranged for a specific purpose—if only that purpose can be divined.
In the early summer Mrs. Turner is out every morning by ten with her sprinkling can of chemical killer, and Roy, watching from his front porch, imagines how this poison will enter the ecosystem and move by quick capillary surges into his fenced vegetable plot, newly seeded now with green beans and lettuce. His children, his two little girls aged two and four—that they should be touched by such poison makes him morose and angry. But he and Sally so far have said nothing to Mrs. Turner about her abuse of the planet because they’re hoping she’ll go into an old-folks home soon or maybe die, and then all will proceed as it should.
High school girls on their way home in the afternoon see Mrs. Turner cutting her grass and are mildly, momentarily repelled by the lapped, striated flesh on her upper thighs. At her age. Doesn’t she realize? Every last one of them is intimate with the vocabulary of skin care and knows that what has claimed Mrs. Turner’s thighs is the enemy called cellulite, but they can’t understand why she doesn’t take the trouble to hide it. It makes them queasy; it makes them fear for the future.
The things Mrs. Turner doesn’t know would fill the Saschers’ new compost pit, would sink a ship, would set off a tidal wave, would make her want to kill herself. Back and forth, back and forth she goes with the electric lawn mower, the grass flying out sideways like whiskers. Oh, the things she doesn’t know! She has never heard, for example, of the folk-rock recording star Neil Young, though the high school just around the corner from her house happens to be the very school Neil Young attended as a lad. His initials can actually be seen carved on one of the desks, and a few of the teachers say they remember him, a quiet fellow of neat appearance and always very polite in class. The desk with the initials N.Y. is kept in a corner of Mr. Pring’s homeroom, and it’s considered lucky—despite the fact that the renowned singer wasn’t a great scholar—to touch the incised letters just before an exam. Since it’s exam time now, the second week of June, the girls walking past Mrs. Turner’s front yard (and shuddering over her display of cellulite) are carrying on their fingertips the spiritual scent, the essence, the fragrance, the aura of Neil Young, but Mrs. Turner is as ignorant of that fact as the girls are that she, Mrs. Turner, possesses a first name—which is Geraldine.
Not that she’s ever been called Geraldine. Where she grew up in Boissevain, Manitoba, she was known always—the Lord knows why—as Girlie Fergus, the youngest of the three Fergus girls and the one who got herself in hot water. Her sister Em went to normal school and her sister Muriel went to Brandon to work at Eaton’s, but Girlie got caught one night—she was nineteen—in a Boissevain hotel room with a local farmer, married, named Gus MacGregor. It was her father who got wind of where she might be and came banging on the door, shouting and weeping. “Girlie, Girlie, what have you done to me?”
Girlie had been working in the Boissevain Dairy since she’d left school at sixteen and had a bit of money saved up, and so, a week after the humiliation in the local hotel, she wrote a farewell note to the family, crept out of the house at midnight and caught the bus to Winnipeg. From there she got another bus down to Minneapolis, then to Chicago and finally New York City. The journey was endless and wretched, and on the way across Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania she saw hundreds and hundreds of towns whose unpaved streets and narrow blinded houses made her fear some conspiratorial, punishing power had carried her back to Boissevain. Her father’s soppy-stern voice sang and sang in her ears as the wooden bus rattled its way eastward. It was summer, 1930.
New York was immense and wonderful, dirty, perilous and puzzling. She found herself longing for a sight of real earth, which she assumed must lie somewhere beneath the tough pavement. On the other hand, the brown flat-roofed factories with their little windows tilted skyward pumped her full of happiness, as did the dusty trees, when she finally discovered them, lining the long avenues. Every last person in the world seemed to be outside, walking around, filling the streets, and every corner breezed with noise and sunlight. She had to pinch herself to believe this was the same sunlight that filtered its way into the rooms of the house back in Boissevain, fading the curtains but nourishing her mother’s ferns. She sent postcards to Em and Muriel that said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got a job in the theater business.”
It was true. For eight and a half months she was an usherette in the Lamar Movie Palace in Brooklyn. She loved her perky maroon uniform, the way it fit on her shoulders, the way the strips of crinkly gold braid outlined her figure. With a little flashlight in hand she was able to send streams of light across the furry darkness of the theater and onto the plum-colored aisle carpet. The voices from the screen talked on and on. She felt after a time that their resonant declarations and tender replies belonged to her.
She met a man named Kiki her first month in New York and moved in with him. His skin was as black as ebony. As black as ebony—that was the phrase that hung like a ribbon on the end of his name, and it’s also the phrase she uses, infrequently, when she wants to call up his memory, though she’s more than a little doubtful about what ebony is. It may be a kind of stone, she thinks, something round and polished that comes out of a deep mine.
Kiki was a good-hearted man, though she didn’t like the beer he drank, and he stayed with her, willingly, for several months after she had to stop working because of the baby. It was the baby itself that frightened him off, the way it cried, probably. Leaving fifty dollars on the table, he slipped out one July afternoon when Girlie was shopping, and went back to Troy, New York, where he’d been raised.
Her first thought was to take the baby and get on a bus and go find him, but there wasn’t enough money, and the thought of the baby crying all the way on the hot bus made her feel tired. She was worried about the rent and about the little red sores in the baby’s ears—it was a boy, rather sweetly formed, with wonderful smooth feet and hands. On a murderously hot night, a night when the humidity was especially bad, she wrapped him in a clean piece of sheeting and carried him all the way to Brooklyn Heights, where the houses were large and solid and surrounded by grass. There was a house on a corner she particularly liked because it had a wide front porch (like those in Boissevain) with a curved railing—and parked on the porch, its brake on, was a beautiful wicker baby carriage. It was here that she placed her baby, giving one last look to his sleeping face, as round and calm as the moon. She walked home, taking her time, swinging her legs. If she had known the word foundling—which she didn’t—she would have bounded along on its rhythmic back, so airy and wide did the world seem that night.
Most of these secrets she keeps locked away inside her mottled thighs or in the curled pinkness of her genital flesh. She has no idea what happened to Kiki, whether he ever went off to Alaska as he wanted to or whether he fell down a flight of stone steps in the silverware factory in Troy, New York, and died of head injuries before his thirtieth birthday. Or what happened to her son—whether he was bitten that night in the baby carriage by a rabid neighborhood cat or whether he was discovered the next morning and adopted by the large, loving family who lived in the house. As a rule, Girlie tries not to think about the things she can’t even guess at. All she thinks is that she did the best she could under the circumstances.
In a year she saved enough money to take the train home to Boissevain. She took with her all her belongings, and also gifts for Em and Muriel, boxes of hose, bottles of apple-blossom cologne, phonograph records. For her mother she took an embroidered apron and for her father a pipe made of curious gnarled wood. “Girlie, my Girlie,” her father said, embracing her at the Boissevain station. Then he said, “Don’t ever leave us again,” in a way that frightened her and made her resolve to leave as quickly as possible.
But she didn’t go so far the second time around. She and Gordon Turner—he was, for all his life, a tongue-tied man, though he did manage a proper proposal—settled down in Winnipeg, first in St. Boniface, where the rents were cheap, and then Fort Rouge and finally the little house in River Heights just around the corner from the high school. It was her husband, Gord, who planted the grass that Mrs. Turner now shaves in the summertime. It was Gord who trimmed and shaped the caragana hedge and Gord who painted the little shutters with the cut-out hearts. He was a man who loved every inch of his house, the wide wooden steps, the oak door with its glass inset, the radiators and the baseboards and the snug sash windows. And he loved every inch of his wife, Girlie, too, saying to her once and only once that he knew about her past (meaning Gus MacGregor and the incident in the Boissevain Hotel), and that as far as he was concerned the slate had been wiped clean. Once he came home with a little package in his pocket; inside was a diamond ring, delicate and glittering. Once he took Girlie on a picnic all the way up to Steep Rock, and in the woods he took off her dress and underthings and kissed every part of her body.
After he died, Girlie began to travel. She was far from rich, as she liked to say, but with care she could manage one trip every spring.
She has never known such ease. She and Em and Muriel have been to Disneyland as well as Disneyworld. They’ve been to Europe, taking a sixteen-day trip through seven countries. The three of them have visited the south and seen the famous antebellum houses of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, after which they spent a week in the city of New Orleans. They went to Mexico one year and took pictures of Mayan ruins and queer shadowy gods cut squarely from stone. And three years ago they did what they swore they’d never have the nerve to do: they got on an airplane and went to Japan.
The package tour started in Tokyo, where Mrs. Turner ate, on her first night there, a chrysanthemum fried in hot oil. She saw a village where everyone earned a living by making dolls and another village where everyone made pottery. Members of the tour group, each holding up a green flag so their tour leader could keep track of them, climbed on a little train, zoomed off to Osaka, where they visited an electronics factory, and then went to a restaurant to eat uncooked fish. They visited more temples and shrines than Mrs. Turner could keep track of. Once they stayed the night in a Japanese hotel, where she and Em and Muriel bedded down on floor mats and little pillows stuffed with cracked wheat, and woke up, laughing, with backaches and shooting pains in their legs.
That was the same day they visited the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. The three-storied temple was made of wood and had a roof like a set of wings and was painted a soft old flaky gold. Everybody in the group took pictures—Em took a whole roll—and bought postcards; everybody, that is, except a single tour member, the one they all referred to as the Professor.
The Professor traveled without a camera, but jotted notes almost continuously into a little pocket scribbler. He was bald, had a trim body and wore Bermuda shorts, sandals and black nylon socks. Those who asked him learned that he really was a professor, a teacher of English poetry in a small college in Massachusetts. He was also a poet who, at the time of the Japanese trip, had published two small chapbooks based mainly on the breakdown of his marriage. The poems, sadly, had not caused much stir.
It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation. His domestic life had been too cluttered; there had been too many professional demands; the political situation in America had drained him of energy—these were the thoughts that buzzed in his skull as he scribbled and scribbled, like a man with a fever, in the back seat of a tour bus traveling through Japan.
Here in this crowded, confused country he discovered simplicity and order and something spiritual too, which he recognized as being authentic. He felt as though a flower, something like a lily, only smaller and tougher, had unfurled in his hand and was nudging along his fountain pen. He wrote and wrote, shaken by catharsis, but lulled into a new sense of his powers.
Not surprisingly, a solid little book of poems came out of his experience. It was published soon afterward by a well-thought-of Boston publisher who, as soon as possible, sent him around the United States to give poetry readings.
The Professor read his poems mostly in universities and colleges where his book was already listed on the Contemporary Poetry course. He read in faculty clubs, student centers, classrooms, gymnasiums and auditoriums, and usually, partway through a reading, someone or other would call from the back of the room, “Give us your Golden Pavilion poem.”
He would have preferred to read his Fuji meditation or the tone poem on the Inner Sea, but he was happy to oblige his audiences, though he felt “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” was a somewhat light piece, even what is sometimes known on the circuit as a “crowd pleaser.” People (admittedly they were mostly undergraduates) laughed out loud when they heard it; he read it well too, in a moist, avuncular amateur actor’s voice, reminding himself to pause frequently, to look upward and raise an ironic eyebrow.
The poem was not really about the Golden Pavilion at all, but about three midwestern lady tourists who, while viewing the temple and madly snapping photos, had talked incessantly and in loud, flat-bottomed voices about knitting patterns, indigestion, sore feet, breast lumps, the cost of plastic raincoats and a previous trip they’d made together to Mexico. They had wondered, these three—noisily, repeatedly—who back home in Manitoba should receive a postcard, what they’d give for an honest cup of tea, if there was an easy way to remove stains from an electric coffee maker, and where they would go the following year—Hawaii? They were the three furies, the three witches, who for vulgarity and tastelessness formed a shattering counterpoint to the Professor’s own state of transcendence. He had been affronted, angered, half-crazed.
One of the sisters, a little pug of a woman, particularly stirred his contempt, she of the pink pantsuit, the red toenails, the grapefruity buttocks, the overly bright souvenirs, the garish Mexican straw bag containing Dentyne chewing gum, aspirin, breath mints, sun goggles, envelopes of saccharine, and photos of her dead husband standing in front of a squat, ugly house in Winnipeg. This defilement she had spread before the ancient and exquisitely proportioned Golden Pavilion of Kyoto, proving—and here the Professor’s tone became grave—proving that sublime beauty can be brought to the very doorway of human eyes, ears and lips and remain unperceived.
When he comes to the end of “A Day at the Golden Pavilion” there is generally a thoughtful half second of silence, then laughter and applause. Students turn in their seats and exchange looks with their fellows. They have seen such unspeakable tourists themselves. There was old Auntie Marigold or Auntie Flossie. There was that tacky Mrs. Shannon with her rouge and her jewelry. They know—despite their youth they know—the irreconcilable distance between taste and banality. Or perhaps that’s too harsh; perhaps it’s only the difference between those who know about the world and those who don’t.
It’s true that Mrs. Turner remembers little about her travels. She’s never had much of a head for history or dates; she never did learn, for instance, the difference between a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine. She gets on a tour bus and goes and goes, and that’s all there is to it. She doesn’t know if she’s going north or south or east or west. What does it matter? She’s having a grand time. And she’s reassured, always, by the sameness of the world. She’s never heard the word commonality, but is nevertheless fused with its sense. In Japan she was made as happy to see carrots and lettuce growing in the fields as she was to see sunlight, years earlier, pouring into the streets of New York City. Everywhere she’s been she’s seen people eating and sleeping and working and making things with their hands and urging things to grow. There have been cats and dogs, fences and bicycles and telephone poles, and objects to buy and take care of; it is amazing, she thinks, that she can understand so much of the world and that it comes to her as easily as bars of music floating out of a radio.
