by JoAnn McCaig
“I’m proud of you.”
“He’ll go after me again, I just know it. I can’t go back out there, I just can’t.”
“You have to. I’ll be right there.”
“Yeah, right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The words come out before she has even noticed they’re in her head. “Leland, sometimes I wish you could find me a little less amusing, you know. In public, I mean.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake — ”
“I’m not an experience you’re having. Okay?”
“Oh my dear — ”
“Swear to God, Leland, if you call me ‘little one’ right now, I will plunge a knife through your heart.”
“The place you’re from is not you, all right?”
“Well, it isn’t. But it is. The same goes for you, you know.”
“Perhaps. I think Henry James had it right — in Washington Square — you know, when what’s his name, Maurice, says, You would not want me without my attributes. I know I wouldn’t want you without your attributes. And you probably wouldn’t want me without mine. Isn’t that right? Come back to the table. Soon.”
She successfully avoids the curmudgeon for the remainder of the evening; in fact, she’s surprised and gratified at how generously the other guests, to a man and woman, join forces to shield her (or possibly her hosts, or Leland, or more likely the simple idea of social decorum) by engaging the two antagonists in separate animated conversations until the meal ends, and the guests begin to disperse. Only on one brief occasion does she pass close to him on her way to the kitchen with a load of dessert plates, and overhears, “Amazing really. No little hat with fishing lures ranged along the band. I’m so disappointed.”
Part Five
What Happens Next
19.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: May 27 9:10 AM
Subject: thanks for
The memories. My first London dinner party. Remind me to never accept a similar invitation again. Kidding aside, though, it just occurred to me — Jesus, you must think me shockingly naïve — but it just now occurs to me that the reason I got invited to read in London this time last year was . . . because of you. I mean, you did something, spoke to someone. Didn’t you?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: May 28 11:05 PM
Subject: the facts, jack
It would be a fine thing if literary publishing were a meritocracy, but it is not. Why, just last night, for political reasons, I was forced to sit through an interminable reading by a young poet in whom the ratio of ambition to actual talent is greater than three to one. Why was she standing there when others, so much better, cleaner, pleasure-giving, toil away unknown but to those who love them?
Jay, if I can do some small thing, I do it gladly. I’d prefer not to discuss what, if anything, I may or may not do to be helpful to you. Can we set that aside, please? If I offer to dry the dishes, or carry in the groceries, or lift something too heavy for you, there’s no need for gratitude. And there’s no need on this other, too. I help if I can, if I may.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: May 29 9:45 AM
Subject: Yes, but
Oh dear. I can’t make up my mind. Is it about just helping out, just lifting and fetching and carrying? I keep thinking about what Berger says in Ways of Seeing. You know, how the image of a man speaks of what he can do to you or for you, whereas the image of a woman speaks of what can be done to her and for her. I can’t . . . sort this through, Leland. If you didn’t offer to carry in the groceries, I’d think you a total asshole. If you do speak my name or whisper Richdale in the ear of someone who might do the book some good . . . oh I don’t know. This confuses the hell out of me.
How’s the new flat? How’s the squash game? Are you looking forward to Hay on Wye?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 15 3:10 PM
Subject: Wye note
Berger also very rightly points out that art is a commodity, in addition to . . . what ever else it might aspire to be, and that those who become sentimental about that, who take the moral high ground, merely refuse to see what is really there.
The Hay Festival a delight as always. Lovely setting, convivial company, wonderful food and drink. Always a pleasure to watch your dinner party nemesis drink too much and make a fool of himself over some young thing. My stints on stage were mercifully brief and no-one threw things at me. Remember that line in The Smoking Diaries where Simon is at Toronto and he pulls out the measuring stick for who has the longest line for book-signings? Doesn’t he say that “a quarter of a dozen” people lined up at his table, while the line for David Lodge seemed, to poor old Simon at least, to go out into the lobby, down the motorway and all the way to the airport?
Well, my dear, you will be pleased to hear that mine was longer than the curmudgeon’s. Much, much longer. But I expect you knew that already. Instinctively, I mean. Not actually. Not practically, I hope. Oh my.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 16 9:20AM
Subject: size matters
Size doesn’t matter.
Yes it does and I am . . . um, fully satisfied with facilities on offer . . . oh dear.
But Leland, despite the long separations, can we please resist cyber sex and phone sex? I mean, I don’t mind the occasional phrase like “your nipple stiffening against my hand” for example — I remember that line, it has a lovely resonance, and I do recall it, and the sensation it describes, often and with pleasure. But let’s be cautious about this, okay? To be doing the fuck-me-baby thing from a distance is just . . . crass.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: June 18 12:10 AM
Subject: decorum
I couldn’t agree more.
Love,
L
PS Fuck me baby
Part Six
Summer, then Winter
20.
British Airways Flt 034, to London, August
Leland is remembering the play of light on Jay’s shoulders, her sleek head breaking green water. And in the speedboat, how the kids laughed at his panic — “Stop! she’s falling, Christ!” “No, man she’s just dropping the ski, she’s going slalom” — and there she was, skimming the lake, grinning, raising rainbowed arcs of water at the outer curve of each graceful turn.
He did not know that water could be so cold. After immersion in such water, nothing looks so pitiful as a man’s private parts and nothing tastes so good as a hot cup of tea. She does not know who Alan Bennett is. She’s never heard of Beyond the Fringe. He is keeping a list for her: an imperial education, she calls it, and claims she does not need to know such things, she will know them if her curiosity is adequately piqued. She seems oddly content with her . . . context, her limited view. This puzzles him, frankly. How could she not want to know what any literate person, but most particularly any writer, must know? She has such a good mind, a lively soul, how could she be content —
Labour Day, Skookumchuck
A hot and still and clear day, belying summer’s end. Jay sits on the deck with her oldest friend. The boys have gone off to the cliffs in the runabout, so the two women risk an after-dinner joint, just prior to Leland’s taped broadcast on CBC, his eulogy for the Salinger biographer, Ian Hamilton. Which the two of them listen to on the radio balanced on the planks.
Jay wishes she hadn’t smoked that joint. She wishes Leland hadn’t referred to Salinger as “Jerry” quite so often. She wishes his voice didn’t override the softer voice of the other commentator, a man who obviously knew Hamilton better and cared about him more. She wishes that Leland’s comments, in his tribute, this eulogy, would begin less often with the words
when I was and I felt then that — When the interview ends, she finds nothing to say. Her friend takes a breath, looks across at the lake. “Well. He’s very well read, isn’t he? That man of yours.”
It’s the joint, it must be. She really really wishes she hadn’t smoked that joint.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: September 15 9:20 AM
Subject: re: Mr. Mackenzie regrets
Hey guy: Good to talk to you last night. Seriously, Leland, no sweat about having to cancel your Thanksgiving visit. Yes, I’m sure you were just dying to sample my legendarily disastrous attempt at a turkey dinner. But I remember what it’s like to be on the home stretch with a manuscript. Keep your head down. Go for it, dude.
Love,
J
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 10 11:55 PM
Subject: what I meant was
Well, no of course I don’t have a fucking clue what kind of Scotch Mordecai Richler drank, and as to the identity of the lampooned party in the Atwood story you mentioned I am entirely innocent. Your reaction surprised me, frankly. I was merely recommending a book, Jay. Written by a friend of mine. One that I like very much. The book and the friend, I mean.
Lucille got all fluttery at tea Monday over “setting the date,” by the way. I know you want to keep an eye on your mum, though . . . oh hell. I’ll give you a call this weekend, okay?
With fondest love from your colonial oppressor
L
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 24 8:10 AM
Subject: the empire whines back
Next time she corners you like that, just tell Lucille you’ve decided not to marry me because you realized that I’d make a shitty wife. Tell her that you know this because I said to you, recently, “I’d make a really shitty wife.” And actually, I did make a fairly shitty wife, you know. Well, I was good at some parts of the job. Fidelity I had no trouble with. Loyalty either. But “adoring” came hard, and “long-suffering” I didn’t do well AT ALL.
I really do think that all this romance stuff gets it backwards: that it’s men who want to be adored. Women just want to be taken seriously.
Let’s just have an affair that lasts forever. What do you say?
Love,
J
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: October 30 11:50 PM
Subject: adorable
It really is absolutely adorable, the way you can use the word “shitty” so many times in a single paragraph. Did you see my piece on Hamilton in the Guardian mag? I’ve gotten good feedback on it here. Sorry to hear of Mara’s turn for the worse, Jay. What do the doctors say? Do you want me to come?
Love,
L
21.
Agape Manor Hospice Calgary, November
The impossibly shiny corridors. The worn plaid chairs in the family lounge. She’s sitting with a rolled-up copy of a magazine in her hand, willing her breathing to slow, willing her heart to quiet, willing that thick nausea back down down down —
Gray touches her shoulder, “You’ll be all right, Jay, you’re doing great.”
Not caring, ready to plead grief’s derangement, she merely smiles through tears. Then she rises, twists the Guardian magazine containing that supposed tribute that’s really just a long advertisement for Leland’s own brilliance, and tosses it in the garbage can (not rubbish bin!) before returning to Mara’s bedside.
London, November
Being so caught up with the pre-Christmas publishing rush, the frenzied round of readings, events, launches, Leland nearly misses Jay’s email, her sad but not unexpected news. She states very clearly that she does not want him to attend the funeral. She reminds him that he has already said his goodbyes when he visited Mara in the rest home last summer, and even then her mom didn’t know him, didn’t remember, kept calling him by the wrong name. “My biggest regret, of course,” Jay writes, “is that I dismissed her even more readily than she dismissed herself. And my greatest fear is that I was so intent on becoming exactly NOT-HER that, in so many ways, I became her.”
Leland tries several drafts of his response: “Whatever her failings, she gave me the most wonderful gift, she gave me you — ” No, too sappy. “Whatever her indecisions, her refusal to act or choose, she gave rise to you, she opened the door for you.” None of it works, though, and he books a flight.
22.
It’s late, after eleven, on a blustery November night. Jay is wrapping up the leftover sandwiches, when Ben yawns through the kitchen. “How come Leland was at the funeral but not at the reception? It’s weird that he didn’t come.”
“What?”
“Leland. Reception. Didn’t come.”
“Leland wasn’t at the funeral.”
“Yes he was, way in the back. I talked to him when I went out to use the can.”
“But I wrote him about Gramma and told him not to come! Jesus, Ben, why didn’t you tell me?”
Her boy smiles wearily. “Jesus, Mom! Because I thought you knew! I’ll finish this up if you like.” And he drapes his arm over her shoulder, kisses the top of her head.
Leland is not hard to find. Same hotel as last winter, the International. The desk clerk gets a little snotty with her, justifiably so, as it’s very late and she looks and acts like a crazy woman. But the guest picks up on the first ring and gives the okay.
He’s still up, still dressed, his laptop on. He’s had a bit to drink, but not too much. “I watched you. With your boys, with your man. And it surprised me really, the sense of relief. She’s okay, I thought, she’s fine.”
“Look, Leland, it’s the death, that’s what it is, I needed — ”
Leland raises a hand, backs her off. “Jay, it occurs to me that really, all that can be obtained — no, not obtained, but received — from this, this gift, because that’s what it is, what it was — well, we have it all already. We’ve used it up.”
“Leland. No.”
“To continue would be foolish. We can’t continue. That’s clear.”
“Look, I called Gray a week before Mom died. A lot of old people die this time of year, around the first frost, first snowfall. As if they just can’t be bothered to go through another winter. I hadn’t talked to him for six months, but the rest home called and I went to see her and, obviously it wouldn’t be long now and, I don’t know, I just felt . . . ” And at that moment, the will to fight just leaves her. She meets Leland’s steady gaze. “He’s someone I know, someone who knows me.” A deep breath. “Who likes me the way I am.”
Leland drains his glass, sets it down on the table. Then turns to her, says “Well, Jay. There you go.”
She lifts her coat from the chair as if to leave, but then turns back.
“But don’t kid yourself that this is about Gray, because you know as well as I do that it isn’t. I thought you had something I needed, but it turns out that the space you take up in my life is just too big. I can’t spare it.” She takes a step toward him. “And, admit it, ever since Katie, you’ve been telling yourself some story of redemption, but really . . . Leland?”
They look at each other, a long deep look in which is distilled at last a moment of the most perfect and unblemished communion: the truth of what she wanted from him, and he from her, laid bare. Her foolish hope of putting on his knowledge with his power, his impossible desire to atone —
“But really,” he agrees at last, “I would have lost Katie anyway, whether I’d met you or not.”
“Yes.”
Oddly, what’s in his eyes at that moment is the glimmer of a self-deprecating smile.
And in the air between them as they say goodbye there’s a weird ineffable grace, something oddly like forgiveness.
23.
From: [email protected]
To: jmcn
[email protected]
Date: January 11 3:00 PM
Subject: Final email, final draft:
I think now that you and I came together not for joy but for blood and tearing. (Yes I know that’s Elizabeth Smart, and yes I know she’s Canadian. And Barker was an asshole Brit, I know that too.)
Thank you, for blood and tearing.
(Though unlike Barker, I did in fact leave my wife.)
Please don’t reply, Jay. Shoot me a blank so I know you’ve received this, but please don’t reply.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: January 11 11:55 PM
Subject: no subject
Times Literary Supplement: July, two years later
The newest Mackenzie is a departure; this voice is unlike any we’ve heard from this acclaimed author of serious literary yet widely read fictions about contemporary life. In The Woman at the Top of the Stairs, Mackenzie crosses cultures and epochs to craft a story of love, romantic and paternal, that is at once dreamlike and vividly sensual. He abandons his customary decorum and reserve at every artistic level, weaving a story that might move even the most jaded reader to startled laughter and quiet tears.
Globe and Mail Book Review: one year after that
Jay McNair has built her reputation by sheer cheek; she deals in a kind of self-disparaging irony that has attracted a narrow if devoted following among the perimenopausal set. But with Definition, McNair has matured. She has, dare I say it, learned to take herself and her art seriously, and the result is smashing.
A HAPPY PRISONER REVISITED
At least Royland knew he had been a true diviner. There were the wells, proof positive. Water. Real wet water. There to be felt and tasted. Morag’s magic tricks were of a different order. She would never know whether they actually worked or not, or to what extent. That wasn’t given to her to know. In a sense, it did not matter. The necessary doing of the thing — that mattered.
