An Honest Woman

by JoAnn McCaig

  “Janet,” the Englishman says, “tell me. Why do you want to publish this book?”

  “All the usual reasons. Ego, greed, certainly. But also the simple desire to be heard, to know that maybe what I think, what I’ve noticed, matters. To give pleasure. To show what I’ve learned. To please the reader, to please myself.”

  He says, “Gerard Manley Hopkins just wrote for himself. And for God.”

  “Yes, and so did Emily Dickinson — the two litmus tests of writerly virtue, I know, I know. But I’m not that pure. And neither are you.”

  It’s unseasonably warm for late November, and my Canlit seminar votes to move outside for the last half of the class. I sit yoga fashion on the ground near the flagpole, a few students share the only wooden bench, and the rest sprawl on the dry grass. We’re wrapping up our discussion of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.

  The dreadlocked guy furrows his brow, says, “So you mean that her husband, that professor guy, kinda represents colonialism?”

  “Well, sort of. I guess I’m suggesting that Laurence quite deliberately makes Morag’s romantic life a mirror of her writing life, her creative life. Morag marries her English professor, Brooke Skelton, whose own brokenness, by the way, is associated with imperialism. You’ll recall his account of being raised under the Raj in India. But that union is barren, unequal, doomed. Contrast that with Morag’s relationship with Jules Tonnerre, which is erratic and uncertain and ultimately tragic, but it does bear fruit, namely their daughter Piquette. And it’s fruitful because the relationship is grounded not in some externally imposed notion of cultural identity, but in the very native soil where Morag was born and raised.”

  Renee raises her hand, excited. “So it’s the same with her writing, you mean? That if she focuses on her own stuff instead of trying to imitate some kind of canonical notion of what literature is, then she succeeds?”

  “Yes, exactly. I think you’re right,” I tell her. And shy little Renee just beams.

  After class, I stop off in the mailroom on my way out and notice the balding head of one of my least favourite colleagues, too late to duck back down the hall. He’s the one I used as the prototype for the fawning co-worker of Jay’s who accosts her and Leland on campus that day of the surprise visit to the college where she teaches. “Class good today?” he asks, and for something to say, I mention how my whole Canlit group initially bitched and whined about having to read The Diviners: “‘It’s so LONG,’ they wailed, their eyes bugging out. Why the hell do they sign up for English classes if they don’t want to read? But I’m pleased to report that they seemed totally into it by the time we wrapped things up today.”

  “Ah yes, good old Morag,” the man says, leering. “A very lusty woman.” As I walk away, I’m thinking, No. No, he’s wrong, that’s not it at all, she’s not lusty. She’s normal. It’s what I’ve always loved about her. The frankness of her desire. The novel isn’t a dirty joke and anyone who reads it as one has totally missed the point. As I walk away, it occurs to me that Jay makes much the same journey, with Leland, as Morag does with Brooke.

  Leaving the building, I catch up with Renee. She’s a pale, kind of doughy girl, huddled around her binders and textbooks. I come up behind her and say, “I was sure pleased to see you getting into the discussion today.”

  “Oh yes,” she says, softly. “This class, this whole term, I sort of feel like the world is opening up in some way. That this is connected to that, and this thing is a reference to that thing and it’s so, I don’t know. Cool, I guess.”

  “Yes. To see the assumptions behind the structures of things is kind of empowering, isn’t it? If you can see how it’s built then you can see your way through it somehow.”

  “Yes, exactly!” she exclaims, with a sudden warmth that surprises me. I get the feeling she would throw her arms around me if she dared. But of course, she doesn’t dare.

  Still, it’s a tender moment. One that reminds me why I love teaching. And on my way home, in traffic, on Deerfoot Trail, it occurs to me to ask myself, Where have I been? What’s the point of all this sturm und drang when all the tenderness I crave is right here in front of me if I only have eyes to see it?

  That night, after supper and homework and dishes, I go down to my basement office and pull the manuscript out of the drawer. Grab a piece of lined paper and hand write a letter to my agent. “I know it’s been a while, but here’s the novel I’ve been working on. It’s called Final Draft. Let me know what you think.”

  3 Dear Reader: Remember that these downward arrows indicate Janet’s fantasies, while sideways ones indicate that she’s back in her real world, such as it is.

  A LUCID DREAM REVISITED

  “I’m being totally honest,” I say. I always am and they

  know it. There’s no point in being anything else, is the

  way I look at it, and sooner or later the truth will out

  so you might as well not waste the time, right?

  “Rape Fantasies” from Dancing Girls and Other Stories

  Margaret Atwood

  Reader, she invented them. Jay, Leland, Janet, Mister Sunshine. All of them.

  JM did, I mean. She released a novel called A Happy Prisoner and it sank like a stone.

  Or maybe people loved it, and it won a gazillion awards.

  Doesn’t matter.

  Reader, she invented him. Like Charlotte Bronte invented Rochester, made him difficult and often cruel. Made him atone, too, humbled him. Now our JM, she doesn’t play that way, or maybe she’s too wise. She just had to let Leland be.

  Charlotte invented a lover with whom conversation was ‘audible thinking.’ And then in real life she married the Reverend Arthur Nichols, after everyone she loved had died. She herself died within a year of her marriage. From “complications of pregnancy.”

  On the other hand, JM is past childbearing. That’s something to keep in mind.

  Suppose she did actually meet him, though. Him. The Englishman. The one on whom Leland is based.

  See, in October, when she’s gazing at a review, sipping coffee, watching light snow drifting off roofs under the bright blue Calgary sky, she gets this call from an agent in the U.K. Plummy accent, says he wants her to meet him in the lobby lounge at the Westin, next Thursday at three, to talk about a potential contract.

  She enters the near-empty bar and sits on a banquette, facing outwards. Orders a drink, and a dark-haired man rises from his barstool, approaches her. “Waiting for someone?”

  Oh god, it’s him. “You set me up, didn’t you?”

  A nod. He reaches into his jacket, laughing when she flinches. He murmurs, “Don’t be afraid of me. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

  “Hey,” she shoots back, without thinking, “write your own goddamn dialogue!”

  He grins. “Don’t quote yourself. It’s arrogant. It’s unseemly.” The object he’d been reaching for is the paperback edition of her book. “I was hoping you’d sign this for me.”

  “You came all the way here for this?”

  “I’ve been doing some research in Vancouver. This is just a stopover.”

  Blushing, she searches her bag for a pen. “So,” she says, “you’re all right with all of this, then?”

  “Of course. It isn’t me you laid bare, after all. And it wasn’t you who wrote the novel, right? That was Janet.”

  “So you thought you’d just stop by to point that out?”

  “And to see how you’re doing,” he says. “How are you doing?”

  “Well, on the one hand, I’m in constant peril of turning into an asshole. And on the other, I feel so exposed and embarrassed I could just fucking die.”

  “That sounds about right. One question more?”

  “All right.”

  “What, exactly, is the five-hole?”

  So perhaps they had a drink and talked about writing. And his flight was at six, so they just barely had time for a walk with the dog on her own little acre of urban prairie. (He knows what prairie
means, by the way.) But if he was struck by something he saw there, some vision or memory, he didn’t mention it.

  At the airport, she reached up and rested her hand on the side of his face, and planted a shy kiss on the other. But she didn’t say the line, “You’re way better than the man I imagined,” because she knew not to fall in love with her own good lines. She couldn’t think what else to say though, so she settled for, “Thanks for the ambush.” To which he replied, “One good turn deserves another.” Then he turned and walked through the gate.

  Yes, she’s caught in this dream, JM is; she can’t stop this dreaming.

  I can’t stop this dream —

  In her real life, JM met this man whose teeth didn’t match. After they’d known each other a few weeks, he invited her to dinner at his place out in the country, near Water Valley.

  The morning of the dinner, in anticipation, she grabbed a pack of Trojans at the Esso, from Dee, who sells her coffee and smokes every day.4 Unable to ignore the question in Dee’s eyes, she muttered, “Teenagers.”

  “Ah,” said Dee. “There was a young guy in here last week who wanted a pack of these but didn’t have quite enough money. So I made up the difference for him. And then this woman in line behind him just tore a strip off me afterwards, but I said, ‘Look, if it were my kid, I’d want somebody to help him out.’ I mean, with my daughter — ”

  (Yes, the one with cleavage lavishly displayed front and back for a morning of junior high math? No kidding, JM thinks, still bristling at the realization that she can’t even buy a condom in this town without having to explain.)

  But oh, the luxurious preparations for that evening, that dinner in the country . . . choosing a shirt that will come off attractively and easily. Jeans that fit but are not so tight that they leave marks on the skin. And also loose enough to allow a hand. The lovely rituals of preparing the skin, the exfoliant scrub, the scented lotion; how long has it been since she has thought of such things? Too long.

  But their first night together stunned her, a sweet derangement. His hands on her, so present yet so utterly strange. The unexpected nipple ring. The novelty of being gently warned about it.

  When she slipped away before sunrise, leaned over to kiss him, his hair was lank with sweat against his neck. Strange how her writer self knows that fiction lies when it tells us that consummation concludes the narrative. Because, oh, this is so much more complicated than she thought it would be: no happy ending, merely a door opening onto a labyrinth, a pathless forest. The sea is not calm tonight.

  She phoned him the day after, and the call went about as badly as it possibly could. The distance in his voice, the faint murmur, “Sure, yeah, let’s get together again sometime soon.” She doesn’t know what to do, how to play this. She wants to speak her heart but doesn’t dare.

  oh his hands on me, his mouth

  She thought things would be so straightforward, that she had imagined this event so fully that nothing could surprise her. But what caught her up was how real it was, how it felt, how it smelled, how it sounded . . . and oh god the love. She’d forgotten about that, the love. She thought of him constantly for days, flesh remembering the sweep of eager hands. There’s so much to learn about this man. He cries out in his sleep. And the love: you can’t even begin to imagine it.

  4 Once when JM came to the till with coffee, jujubes, and potato chips, then asked for a pack of smokes, Dee commented, “Ah, good. You’ve got all the food groups.”

  POSTSCRIPTS

  Jay: a dream come true

  That first night we spent together, I told Leland a lot of things, but never this dream, one that I had over and over again before I met him. The dream unfolds on a cobblestone street in an ancient town, not a city, somewhere in Europe. I am older, in my seventies, wearing a long filmy gown, a flowing India print perhaps, cool and comfortable and appropriate for the season and the place. I am walking along with a man I’ve known a long time, taking him to my home for a visit. We are, for the first time in years, at peace with each other. My partner has died. But I am at peace.

  When I first glimpsed this cobblestone street in my dreams, I thought that the man beside me was my ex-husband, the father of my children. But in truth, he did not live to be an old man, he was too careless for that. When the street first appeared in my dreams, I didn’t even know Leland, and though I’d met Gray, I didn’t like him very much at all. And after that first night with Leland, I never dreamed that dream again, not once. Funny how things turn out.

  When the dream comes true, it’s Leland and me, walking slowly, stately, through these ancient streets together, toward the modest little house where Gray lived out his final years with me. Leland and I sit together outside on the little beflowered deck that overlooks the sea, in the cool sunshine and salt breeze. I am wearing a long filmy dress of local manufacture, in soft fabric and soft colours. I have always wanted to dress like a gypsy and at last I can. Leland and I have a glass together and a quiet meal at the cafe down the road. And at bedtime (which comes at dusk, because we both are old) we embrace without passion and retire to our separate bedrooms. He is self-conscious about the bag concealed beneath the waistband of his trousers, and I of the diagonal scar where my breast used to be. But in the night I leave the bed I shared with Gray and pad barefoot down the hall to him, to Leland. And nestle against him like I used to, so many years ago.

  Janet: a daydream

  Mister Sunshine finally called a few days before Christmas as she was preparing a bath. Was contrite, said, “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t expect to like you so much. I had this kind of porno fantasy about some rich bored housewife and I just — it was as if I couldn’t reconcile what I’d imagined with what I actually encountered.”

  Janet listened, holding the phone to her ear, remembering the night she’d had dinner at the cabin with him, how she’d gestured to the piles of manuscript pushed to one side of the table, saying, “Yes, it’s a novel I’m working on. And it’s like a relationship in that I’m at the stage where the initial infatuation is over, and now I actually have to say, ‘okay this is gonna work or it isn’t’ and go on to the next stage. The next draft.”

  She thanked Ray for the call, wished him a Merry Christmas and hung up the phone. She continued with her bath. It was late; Eric in bed, Matthew out with his girlfriend. She lay in the tub — the citrus verbena aroma of bath salts, the minor key of a Bach Adagio on the boombox, the glow of tea lights, her own body, its curves and furrows and blemishes and smoothness, its beauty and imperfection. What was missing that night, for probably the first time she could remember, was the male watcher in her mind, the one who admires and comments, who praises and disapproves. He didn’t show up that night, and she didn’t miss him at all. She was just there in the bath, her ownself, her own body. Just Janet and no one else.

  JM: a lucid dream

  I wrote to him, reader. I’m sure you know by now who I mean. The Englishman, the real writer. And he was lovely. A few emails back and forth, then he suggested a phone conference over “a few details” before he would be willing to grant me permission. Permission? To use — not him, exactly — but suggestions of his identity, in the published book. Time zones were troublesome; my weekday mornings too busy for his afternoons, and by the time I got a break in the action in Calgary, it would be after midnight where he lived. So we settled on a Saturday morning: I was to await his call between nine and nine-thirty.

  So I’ve got the coffee on, kids still asleep. I should not have been surprised when the bell that rang was the front door.

  I’d been anticipating the voice; now add the grey eyes and the sly smile and well . . . a miracle I got any words out at all. What I managed was, “You bastard! You set me up!”

  “Ah,” he said, “the famous flannelette nightie, the tent. I just had to see it with my own eyes.”

  I opened the door, set him to work making tea for himself while I dressed and combed my hair, then we sat side by side at the dining room tabl
e.

  He brought his own copy of the galleys, flagged with post-its, plenty of notes in the margins. He made maybe eight or ten really potent technical points, and I was scribbling like mad, trying to get it all down. Then he said, “Now to the rather more thorny question of content.”

  “Please,” I said, “tell me that all of your children are alive and well. That if you do have a mistress, she doesn’t have piercings and dreads. That you’re not going to punch me out — or Jay out, rather — for not liking your best book.”

  “Thank you, my children are thriving. My love life will not be adversely affected in any way. And as to the other, well. Everyone is entitled to her opinion, no matter how stupid.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “No, it’s this. Here. About the sled. This troubles me. I have wracked my brain about it. I cannot understand how you got this.”

  “How I got it?”

  “This is not public, never has been. I can say with absolute certainty that I have never told this story to a single journalist, ever. A few people close to me, perhaps, but — it matters to me how you found this out. All of us want, I think, to hold back just a few things, in order to keep some of measure of dignity, privacy, sanity even.”

  “Jesus — ”

  “Oh my.” He registered it then, the look of shock on my face.

  “I . . . gave it to you, to Leland I mean, but it’s mine. It is. That’s where I got it. Jay was just yakking away and I needed something for Leland so I gave him the sled story, but it’s mine. It happened to me. When I was little. Though I made up the stitches.”