by JoAnn McCaig
The Diviners, Margaret Laurence
Everything that’s grim about November gathers around me as I trundle to the car after the last class of the day. Louring skies, a menacing chill in the air, all colour leached from the world, everything dull grey and brown, not yet brightened by snow. The Canlit survey class on Atwood’s early stories went pretty well. Okay, so “Rape Fantasies” was probably a bit dated for them, in their world of instant porn. But I think they got a kick out of the title story, “Dancing Girls.”
But there was that strange moment in the discussion of “Rape Fantasies.” Determined to get a rise out of them, I said: “This narrator seems to think that she is simply being an honest woman. Is she self-deceived?”
Not one student made eye contact — which usually means they haven’t read the story. But not always.
Then I sensed movement and muttering from the back of the room. “Yes? Did you have a comment? Is it Renee?” I still haven’t got all the names straight. The girl is pale, shy. Red-faced.
“Umm,” she mutters — and I don’t want to push.
But then the chatty young man in the next desk says, “Well, it’s sort of a ‘lie back and enjoy it’ kind of thing, isn’t it, Professor Mair? Pretty old school?”
“No,” Renee says, with surprising force. “I just think that the only people who enjoy rape fantasies must be people who’ve never been raped.”
A beat.
I say, “You know, that’s a potent suggestion. Yes. To take the position that the narrator of ‘Rape Fantasies’ takes is to claim a kind of privileged ignorance, isn’t it?”
An icy wind wraps itself around my ungloved hands as I dump books and files into the back seat and start the car. I wonder, now that I’ve gotten to the end of Final Draft, to the end of Leland and Jay, whether things will settle down. Maybe the real world will begin to seem adequate again, maybe even interesting, maybe even promising. Maybe even real. But then the car radio blares to life, and there’s that CBC program about writers, there’s the smooth-voiced host, so smart and interested, asking soulful deep questions to some writer . . . and off I go. Again.
3
Radio Host: You may recall my interview last year, at the Toronto Literary Festival with author Janet Mair about her wonderful novel, Final Draft. Mair’s book, which critics and readers alike found funny, erotic and playful, describes a romance between a fiftyish Canadian woman writer and a famous male novelist from Britain. Welcome back to the studio, Janet Mair.
Hi.
Many readers have been struck by your fictional Leland Mackenzie’s resemblance to a certain real British writer, multiple award winner and author of some of the finest novels we have. The first question I want to ask is have you ever met this author?
Yes, we met informally when I was in London for a reading.
And?
And well, I sort of asked his permission to use his . . . likeness in my novel. And he agreed good humouredly. And that was that.
No sparks?
Heavens no!
None, Janet Mair?
Look, he’s happily married, and I’m happily partnered. So no. No sparks.
I ask because there was quite a buzz at this year’s festival. Both of you were slated to appear and there was tremendous interest in whether or not you would meet, even though you were scheduled to appear on different days. Were you in attendance at his readings or panels?
No. Yes. Well, some.
Were you ever in the same room at the same time at any of the social events or parties?
Not that I recall.
Well, there have been strange rumours. Even before the festival ended, a staffer let slip that the separation of your schedules had come at the British publisher’s request.
I doubt that.
That it was written into his contract.
Weird.
A more bizarre rumour was that both of you were guests at the Toronto home of Canada’s most famous literary couple. Stories surfaced of you two sneaking in through the alley behind their home in The Annex, holding hands and necking like a couple of randy teenagers.
Don’t you just love tabloid so-called journalism?
One other odd thing, though: I happened to be in London recently, and I noticed the teeniest item on the business page of the Times which mentioned some legal matter resolved in our famous author’s divorce, thus clearing the way for the sale of foreign rights to his next bestseller-to-be. Did you know he got divorced?
No. Yes. Um.
I did some digging and found out that he filed for divorce last summer. And unlike many of the splashier Brit Lit marital bust-ups, this one was quiet, uncontested. And apparently very expensive.
Maybe so, but it’s nothing to do with —
And then last summer the Vancouver Sun reported our author, famous and dishevelled, at a hardware store in Cranbrook, BC —
Saturday night, Matt’s AWOL and Eric’s at the wave pool with the neighbours. Aah, the house to myself. But no, Matt and his friends return and the rumble of skateboard wheels on the wooden deck, their harsh laughter and randy noise unsettle me, make me feel hunted. As usual, I seek sanctuary in my room. Then it occurs to me: it’s Saturday night, Eric’s safe, Matt’s home, why do I need to stay here?
So I leave, with minimal explanation and little planning. It’s only after I order my green tea at the coffee shop that I realize I’m broke, that I’ve handed over all my bills to Eric for the pool. The nice man at the counter lets me have my tea anyway, though. For seventy-six cents. The banality of my existence juxtaposed with these lush dreams. But how delicious, what happiness to be so immersed, so taken up, so carried away. I watch an elderly woman walk through the coffee bar. Neat shiny grey hair, well cut. A trim figure. Smooth skin.
Over and over, I tell myself that I’m too old for all this yearning. It’s ridiculous. This morning, more signs: a white pearl of richly fertile mucous. If biology is destiny, it also has a weird sense of humour. Oh I know how this madness ends. I invented a new scene this morning. I tried it out before writing it, “imagined it out” as Eric would say. The boys were still asleep. I hope. And this new scene is spectacular. Just a slight revision in which . . . he has her prepared, secured, naked and has asserted himself through a few small teasing touches. He licks his finger and now he is ready but still he takes his time. He undresses very slowly — does he say that line now? it’s just a great line — he stands silent at the foot of the bed, sipping his drink until she turns her head to look at him. Once he has her attention, he begins, with a maddening lack of haste, to undress, then he says —
A burst of laughter from the beautiful old woman across the room, talking with her friends. Across the street, a man is climbing a ladder to fix a roof, his slim hips moving smoothly and surely in faded jeans.
The skateboarders are gone when I get home, Eric is in bed, happy and stinking of chlorine. There’s a magazine in the bathroom, tossed on the floor alongside Matt’s boxers, socks and T-shirt. I sit there, staring down at the back cover. At what appears to be an advertisement for socks. A very pretty blonde, naked, sits with her knees drawn up, hands draped just so, like the girl in that Ken Danby painting of the Sunbather. This position allows the pretty young naked blonde not only to conceal her breasts and crotch, but also to display the socks she is wearing. On one side of the ad are three smaller photographs of the same young woman, head shots only. It takes me a while to interpret these smaller pictures, as I sit on the can gazing at the back cover of the skateboarding magazine. The woman’s head is on a pillow. The woman’s face shows various stages of sexual pleasure. I realize that the photographer pretty well has to be stuck right up her at the moment the photos were taken. Or at least that’s the illusion intended.
It shakes me, then, this most private passion on display — feigned, of course, but isn’t that worse? — in order to sell socks. The image is somehow far more obscene than the juicy spreads that I know Matt keeps hidden under the mattress in his room,
and as I sit here, I feel a tawdry shadow falling over whatever joy I might steal from the strange fever that has overtaken me these days.
I offer to help our hostess, the female half of Canada’s most famous literary couple, with the dishes after the guys have headed off to an interview at CITYTV. It doesn’t take long for her to exhaust the pleasantries and get to her point: “The re-creation of sexual passion is so much easier in poetry than novels. You can’t really even fully remember physical pleasure, don’t you think?”
“I agree it’s one of the hardest things to write, certainly.”
“Clean dishtowels in the end drawer, Janet. Have you had much reaction to the raunchy section of Final Draft?”
“Well, any copies I sent to elderly relatives had certain pages cut out.” I expect a laugh here, but get only a grim smile.
“And your children?”
“I maintain my sanity in that regard by operating on the assumption that my kids have no interest at all in my books and that they never read them. It’s worked pretty well for all of us, so far. How do you deal with questions around sexual content in your own work? The story about the mother, for example? Or that randy perverted doctor? The one who has an affair with his landlady?”
She turns toward me, her celebrated intense regard far more powerful and scary in person: “I would never, ever, use the abuse of sexual power as a narrative device.”
I’m ready for this, though; holding her gaze, I say, “Neither would I. But desire’s a pretty complicated thing, in my view. I read a New Yorker interview with Pauline Reage in which she dismissed The Story of O as an ‘entertainment’ she’d devised for a lover. She’s an old woman now, can’t understand what all the fuss was about.”
“But she eroticizes male sadism and female masochism!”
“Yes, I suppose she does. O is ‘a happy prisoner on whom everything is imposed and from whom nothing is asked.’ On one level it’s the female condition under patriarchy in a nutshell. In another sense it’s a fantasy of abdication that I suspect has its attractions for every adult human on the planet. I mean, millions of copies of the story are in print, after all these years. I don’t deny it’s a dangerous fantasy but it’s persistent, it’s powerful, it has its seductions. And besides, millions of women also fantasize about extreme sexual power and domination. Different sides of the same coin, don’t you think?”
“Possibly,” my famous hostess says. “Cutlery drawer on the left.”
Ray won’t remember. I’d told him, of course, during our evening together, six weeks ago, before the fire, “I won’t be back ’til Remembrance Day.” I’d said it with some emphasis.
And I’ve forgotten about him, or nearly. Well, except for the thing that happened in the massage room, but that was just a blip. So today, going through the pass (leaving Calgary sunshine behind in the foothills, and driving into an inversion layer filling the mountain valleys with damp and cold) on the 11th of November, a Thursday, I idly think of Mister S in a generalized horny sort of way because I’ve got other men on my mind these days. There’s that crazy guy I met online. And there’s the man from election night, he’s cute. Now poor old Leland, he’s almost done, back on the shelf, for now. Worn out, used up, bless his heart.
So I hardly let Mister Sunshine cross my mind all the way down the highway. Except I decide that I’ll call him when I arrive, or maybe just before I leave to come back home. Just to finish it off, put paid to it. Just a friendly, neutral, “Hi, how ya doin’? Back in the mountains for a few days, drop by for tea if you feel like it.” Really, why not? A turn at bat consists of three strikes, right? So, before I left this morning, I fished his note — call me anytime — out of the phone file and tucked it into my wallet. More, I told myself, out of a desire to just put this one away than any hope of —
There’s his van. I pull onto the ranch road, make the turn to the cabin, remember to say hello to the lake, and there’s a flash of yellow at the next cottage over. His van. Mister Sunshine’s. On November 11th. A holiday.
Now who could blame me? Who could blame me for letting my spirits soar, for letting it all come back in a rush? For thinking he has come for me? Who could blame me for entering the cabin and playing my latest pop infatuation, The Killers, really loud, and dancing in the living room? For thanking my lucky stars I’d thought to throw my best lingerie into the sports bag at the last moment? The signs are there, there is no other way to read them. Mister Sunshine has come for me, for Janet. For me.
I’m ready for his knock on the door by three. When he hasn’t popped over — my car visible, the smoke from the chimney, the pounding beat of “Somebody Told Me” (sound carries so well out here on the lake) — I decide that it’s time to take the dog for a walk. I look good; I’ve even risked a faint smudge of eye pencil and a swipe of lipstick, rubbed off with a Kleenex. Anathema to wear make-up at the lake, but this is a special day. Remembrance Day. He remembered.
The yellow van is parked beside the cottage a few hundred yards from ours. Stan’s white pickup is there too. The two of them are inside, working together. I figure that I’ll find them if I circle the house; they must be in a garage or basement that opens to the outside, like at my place. And this time, when I come upon them, I will not say something stupid. I will say the right thing. “Hi” seems like a good start. I will receive a warm smile of greeting; he is so glad to see me, he has hoped against hope that I’d come —
No luck. All the way around the house — no basement entrance, no garage — to peer in the sliding glass door on the lake side, but the drapes are closed tight. I knock at the front door, calling “Hello?” shyly, once then again, but there’s not a sound from within, despite the fact of two vehicles parked in the drive. It occurs to me, right at that moment, that one of the things I love about Mister Sunshine is that, unlike 99 percent of the workmen I’ve encountered, he doesn’t listen to classic rock FM radio while he works. I still remember having my basement painted by a ferret-faced man who was excruciatingly partial to Foreigner and Styx and Bryan Adams, and who tortured me with repeated renditions of “Hot Blooded.”
The dog is bouncing, impatient, poking the backs of my legs, herding me down the road. I decide to just continue my walk. I’ll stop by again on the way back. The road is a mile long oval, running along the lakeshore, then circling back up through the trees above the hayfield. I’m so happy, rehearsing the ecstatic news to Paula — yes, the drought has ended, praise the lord — when I hear something behind me, just as I reach the far end of the loop. It’s Stan, in his white pickup. Out of politeness, he stops. Out of politeness, I ask him about his arthritis, and his answer is anxious, pained, befuddled and excessively detailed. Once he runs down, I ask, “So, you were just over . . . next door, were you?”
“Oh. Yeah. I bin workin’ with that, what’s his name, installing the water system. Ray.”
Exultation. No doubt. Not an underling or subcontractor or crew. Just him. He came for me. Mister Sunshine. I extricate myself from Stan’s dismay at the state of his knees and fairly dance down the road. I do not rush, though, or try not to, try to keep the pace measured and steady. Take my time, savour it. It’s going to happen, and not just in my head this time. He has come for me.
I make the final turn and head back toward the cabin. The neighbour’s roof is in sight now. It’s too perfect that Stan’s gone, it’ll just be the two of us. Mister Sunshine and me. “Hi” still seems like a good enough start. There are the walls of the neighbour’s cabin. The van’s roof should be visible by the time I can see those; did he move it?
The van is gone. This does not distress me. He’s probably waiting out in front of my place. The yellow roof of his van will come into view any second —
But the only car in front of the cabin is my own. My spirits don’t flag, though, not in the slightest. Isn’t this funny, how could we have missed each other like this? He’s just finished up and followed Stan down the road to do up the invoice or put some tools away or maybe to ta
ke some debris to the dump. He has knocked at my door, of course, puzzled that I didn’t answer; or perhaps he’s called, no answering machine at the cabin, no way. So he’ll be over any minute now. I poke the fire. Then, just in case, dig the slip of paper out of my wallet and, without taking even a second to talk myself into it, call his cell number. He answers on the second ring.
“Hi Ray. This is Janet. Janet Mair?” I’m so sure, still.
“Oh. Janet, hi. How are you?”
“Great thanks, but it looks like I just missed you. Saw your van parked next door and then after I got back from walking the dog, it was gone. How weird is that? I even came by the house to say hi, but I couldn’t find you. You haven’t finished work over there for the day, have you?”
“Well, yeah, just now. You mean you’re there? God, I must be blind. And I even asked Stan if anyone was up for the long weekend and he said, ‘No, nobody’s here.’ Oh man. So you’re there. I can’t believe I missed you.”
“Oh well. No sweat. So where are you right now?” He can’t be more than ten minutes down the road. He could turn around right now, this minute.
“On my way to the next job. A really ugly job that I just want to get rid of — ”
“But it’s a holiday. I mean, I was just hoping you might be able to drop by. For tea or something. It would be good to see you.”
“Yeah, typical me, didn’t even twig that it’s a holiday. So how long are you here?”
“Not sure. I did try to get my kids to come, but they bitched and whined and I finally said, okay fine, if you can find yourselves a place to stay. So I’m here on my own again, just working away on this manuscript . . . ’til Saturday morning for sure. Maybe Sunday, depending on how things go.”
I’ve already decided that, once the wild scenes I imagine get rolling in real life, no flippin’ way I’m going to want to set foot out the door until Sunday, nor will he let me.
