Flirt: The Interviews

by Lorna Jackson

  I looked to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Race Rocks and Cascadia, to the spawning of sockeye salmon in a desperate and detergent-fouled Goldstream River, not for the consolation of cheapshit metaphor, not for lack of imagination. I know the city’s stupid secrets, printed as they are now in a too-sharp digital format. I know the city; I want what came before. Why did we abandon that? Who will read the city’s history, trace its underground streams, and where? Treeplanters with poems shoved into their knapsacks? Mention a raven now and bingo: you’re a) too pastoral or b) a fucking racist.

  Does knowing the New Yorker will publish the best of your work change the writing of that work in some way?

  —It might, to be honest with you, but I’m not aware of it. There maybe some sort of pre-cognitive selection that goes on in the things I will and won’t write about which means that they’re adapted to what I think the New Yorker’s sensibilities are, but the New Yorker has a wide sensibility, often an erratically wide sensibility and I don’t think that I make any adaptations to fit in. I won’t get paid enough money if I publish elsewhere and I don’t have a teaching job.

  —Wait now. I wouldn’t call what I do “job,” at least not in the “accrue capital and security and retire well in Irish linen” sense of the word.

  —I’m always trying to kind of angle for the bucks here.

  —Oh, to have bucks for which to angle! Are you suggesting I am my own victim? That I should quit my so-called job and write cheatin’ hurtin’ stories for the huge rags? Okay, sign me up. Will I need to learn to live on less, just until the real money starts pouring in? If I buy a second house in the Gulf Islands, should I have someone – a former student or hardluck alco-poet maybe – rent it while I winter in, say, Thessalonika? Do I charge them the going rate, or discount for artists and small press losers? What purpose will landscape serve in my fiction? Why will my men all be sort of western guys? Why will I have trouble writing about women?

  —This period in my life in which I’ve been publishing stories in the New Yorker, it won’t last forever, it’ll go away, other writers will come along and take those slots. It’s just been this time for me, this period.

  —That drawl, that sonorousness and suggestion of ice clinking in a good glass, you have such a pleasing voice, I hear it always when reading your work, even though I try to dismiss it so I can get a clean reading of a character.

  —Before I lock ’em up and put ’em in a book, I read ’em aloud myself, so I know what their essential rhythms are.

  —Your writing has never relied on irony for its power.

  —Nope.

  —Sincerity seems more to the point with your work.

  —Yup. I’m an essentialist.

  —We are being told that we have reached the end of irony. Does this supposed cultural shift have importance for a writer like you?

  —No. No. It has no importance for me and it isn’t true. I mean, we haven’t reached the end of irony, are you kidding? That’s such a cultural myopia that says things like that. Another day will dawn whether we want it to or not. No, I don’t think irony is under any attack and all that may be happening to it is that it’s being replaced.

  —You are the king of the retrospective narrator. You often choose the retrospective voice when sons are recalling fathers, and you achieve a lovely split consciousness, at once young and also painfully wise and old. Why do you choose that perspective?

  —I can tell you exactly the cause: I read Sherwood Anderson when I was twenty-three years old, and I was so moved by “Death in the Woods,” and I wanted to know why so much that I thought, “oh gee, if I could just write stories like that for the rest of my life, I would.” That’s the exact reason.

  —With Earl in “Rock Springs” you’ve said it’s to prove that he made it out of the life he was living, the mistakes he kept making.

  —Yeah, that’s right, and the presumption about that kind of a narrative set-up is that somebody has survived it well enough to tell it. And so it is hopeful, perspectively.

  —The Sportswriter’s Frank Bascombe – also a retrospective guy who survives – calls hockey something like “a boring game played by Canadians.” I understand Frank, I think, and know the irony implied in a character like him, one who makes his living writing about something he cares little about. Sure, Frank likes baseball and a little basketball, but that’s it. He has to write about something he doesn’t care about because he’s so undone by grief – his little boy’s death – that any emotion – real passion or glee or sorrow – will unhinge everything and he’ll end up a suicide. So, for him, hockey has to be “a boring game played by Canadians.”

  Because, you see, Frank will never be a player, never a good body, a salvage king, a hero in Hanna, Alberta. He’ll never make it through three playoff rounds and into the NHL finals skating and hip checking and scoring off wrist shots on only one leg, he won’t spend the next year coming back from a litany of arthroscopic invasions, throwing the ball around the yard with his little dark-haired girl, Isabella, maybe croquet, his happy winner’s face made handsome by three hundred stitches in fifteen years. Or, here. Frank will not almost lose his life mid-season to a rogue cancer and, chemo be damned, come back a threat in the playoffs and pass and score while renegades cross-check and board him and test how well he’s stitched together, his blonde Finnish hair just poking through and he looks like a brushcut kid just trying out. Or, here. Frank will never get cut loose from long-term drug rehab to compete – compete in the sexiest and most primal way – in the Olympics because his nation wants him – We forgive you! – on the ice. No. Frank is too busy. Too busy hunting stupid sex, his grief pushed back and up, back and up, back and up. Frank is too afraid of commitment – way fucked up, in other words – to appreciate the game of Canadian hockey.

  —Hold on.

  —No, that’s just the rooster.

  —Hold on. There’s someone at the door. Hello? No, I don’t need them, just leave them outside the door. What? No, darlin’, I’m on the bed right now, so I don’t want you to make it. No. I’m liein’ on the bed and talkin’ on the phone. Thank-you.

  —You wouldn’t be naked would ya, Richard?

  —I would be, but I happen not to be. That’s what Scott says, he said, “Now when you talk to her you can sort of lie back on the bed,” and I said, “Oh, is she coming to the room?”

  —That’s funny. Speaking of infidelity, it’s obviously a pattern in your work. That was a good segué don’t you think?

  —Pretty good. We’ll see.

  —I’m wondering if your writing treats faithfulness now with cynicism.

  —No, it doesn’t. No, look.

  —You’re mad again.

  —Look. I’ll tell you something. I don’t feel that way. And I think one of the things I learned as I looked through this collection, as I was putting it together in essence, kind of going through it last spring, and seeing what fit together where and what was like something else and if anything needed to be nicked out of the slick because it repeated something, one of the things I noted was how much the stories, albeit in an unanticipated way, credit the virtues of family. In a story where the greatest source of solace for the woman is her mother, and even in a story where this sort of creepy guy kind of blunders into the family, the family still, even though the wife has been expunged, the family – which is to say the father and his daughter – is still a kind of image of integrity and hope. So, no. I think you could find other images, too, which say that what these people in these stories are playing along the edge of is not the dissolution of family, the dissolution of marriage and fidelity, at all.

  —I read your stories with eighteen-year-olds, one story per term, and I’m gladdened by their response. These are slim boys who have yet to work the green chain. They made the swim team and went to the finals in Kelowna. Their dads and moms are teacher/homemakers. The dog is a retriever and older sister, Sarah, is in South Africa on a Rotary exchange. Maybe they know a girl with an eati
ng disorder, a friend split apart by a drunk driver. They keep away from the kid in the dorm who went professional and made the Vancouver Ravens lacrosse team.

  —Thank-you for doing that.

  —For many, it is their first exposure to random sex and petty larceny and Mercedes ragtops the colour of fruit and guys like Earl or Frank in fiction, and they seem to think, Hey, I never knew it was okay to write about that stuff!

  —Young readers can definitely get some news in short stories.

  —What needs to happen before readers take to the short story as easily as they do to novels?

  —I don’t really understand that. I really don’t know.

  —Is it too precious a form? Do all the rules and regulations scare readers into thinking they must find a cut jewel and stick it on their finger? Or did Alice make writers go too pastoral or domestic and write only about lonely women and their unfortunate choices? Do you favour the urban edge vis à vis short fiction?

  —I don’t understand why readers don’t read short stories with a great deal more alacrity than they do. I don’t get it. It’s just something culturally that I don’t get. Every time I even try to hazard a guess about that my sense of conviction runs out from under me. I don’t know.

  —This time last year, every male writer I know had an anecdote about partying with Candace Bushnell. Do you have such a story? Last year, men on either side of the country, on the same weekend, were e-mailing me about having partied with Candace Bushnell.

  —Shame on them. What an indiscrete thing to do.

  —Talk about it?

  —Put it on the e-mail.

  —That’s what we’ve come to.

  —Well, so to speak, I guess it is. I have no recollection of Ms. Bushnell, though I’m sure she’s a very nice person. I’d like to meet her.

  —Do you have anxieties about writing in the first person from the narrative perspective of a guy who has sex with eighteen women after his little boy dies, or a guy who thinks Canadians and their sport are boring? Are you afraid friends and family might confuse author and character?

  —Absolutely not.

  —Is that maturity, or did you never have those anxieties?

  —I don’t give a shit.

  —And did you never give a shit?

  —If I did I made myself quit.

  —One more question, Richard, then my time’s up. Who’s writing better short stories than you are?

  —Well let’s see. Uh, Alice. Alice certainly. Yes, Alice.

  —Does Faulkner still have no equal?

  —Faulkner wasn’t a real good story writer, he wasn’t a real master of that form. Carver wrote better stories than I do. I generally don’t feel competitive with other writers. I know lots of writers who write really well and when I see them writing really well, I don’t often think to myself, “they’re better than I am.”

  —So, you’re not competitive?

  —And I never think to myself, “I’m better than they are.” Updike is probably a better sentence maker than I am, but I don’t think he writes about as interesting a set of things as other people, including myself.

  —But you’re not competitive.

  —He’s such a lapidary master of making sentences, I think sometimes that can be a delimiter of what he is able to take in. Mavis Gallant, probably, writes better stories than I do. With Alice, there’s just no use. She just is a better story writer than I am and is better at it, and I’m sorry she is, actually, I wish I were as good as she is but I’m just not.

  —Thank-you for taking the time for this.

  —Well, thank-you. It’s been a pleasure. Now, will I be seeing you in Vancouver next week?

  —Oh. I’m not sure. I live on Vancouver Island. I left Vancouver, you’ll remember, and I rarely get back. Occasional upscale hair cuts. I might be there, yes. I could be.

  —Then you’ll come up and say hello if you are, won’t you?

  —I will say hello.

  —Do that.

  —I will.

  —Good.

  —I’m grateful, Richard.

  —Me, too.

  I Flirt with JANET JONES-GRETZKY

  —Your hands are bigger than Wayne’s.

  —Oh my gosh, you noticed that? Don’t say I’m taller, just don’t. He hates that. Wayne has a great deal of pride and he’s extremely competitive. He doesn’t like to lose, even to me. I’m going to pour more water on the rocks. I like it very hot. Cute bracelet you’re wearing; my daughter makes those for her friends.

  —What’s that smell?

  —I’ve added several drops of eucalyptus special for saunas. We find it really soothes muscles after a workout and it clears Wayne’s sinuses. Sometimes, we add sandalwood, and the kids like a lemon milk we get from Australia. They say it smells like Easter, but we don’t see the connection.

  —You’ve done remarkable designing in here. The cedar actually seems more Louis XV than Finnish.

  —Oh my gosh, that’s what Jarri Kurri says when he visits! “Yawnet” – that’s what he calls me! – “Yawnet, what have you done to my country here? What’s about the arches and the swirls? What’s about the cherubs?” he always says, and I’m, “Jarri, please, relax, it’s my style!” He’s a lovely, lovely person.

  —You like athletes.

  —I love athletes. And dancers. People who take their bodies to the limit. But athletes especially. Oops. Sorry. No no. Your leg’s fine there, I’ll just scootch over a bit. You have very plump calves, very nice. You must work out. How old are you, if you don’t mind the question?

  —You were engaged for three years to Vitas Gerulaitas, the Lithuanian Lion. Long wavy blonde hair before stars were allowed to, an enormous twinkle. Only six feet tall, but he appeared much longer. In the late seventies, I watched tennis in Vancouver. Because I lived only blocks away and adored his company, I lunched with my father at the Vancouver Lawn Tennis club once a week. My dad was a great player, adored Arthur Ashe and Rod Laver but didn’t go for the new style of athlete, those who earned millions but couldn’t behave on the court or off it. I was living with my first serious love, a guitar player from Wawa, Ontario. He, too, was Lithuanian and I teased him with Vitas. My boyfriend’s hair was bad brown, short and already thinning. His skin was not tanned and smooth, but pale and deeply pocked from neck to forehead. Though his eyes were blue, the glasses he wore were so thick you couldn’t tell. He had a habit of squeezing his crotch in conversation, didn’t matter who he was talking to. He wore country music shirts. My favourite was a gingham pearl button number he had worn the afternoon his father shot himself in the basement in Wawa.

  —Vitas was a lovely, lovely man.

  —And also a man with addictions, treated for cocaine indulgence, notorious for his back-to-back women. Dead too young from inhaling carbon monoxide a pool heater leached into the room where he slept. My boyfriend only went stupid on a glass of cheap scotch. He liked cigarettes but they thrashed his voice and he longed to have the clear high notes of Glen Campbell or the Everly Brothers or the Beach Boys. As for women, who knows? When a guy plays the bars and stays out late and has a sense of humour bordering on infantile, when he’s a great bass player and moves on stage in a contorted, amoebic, quasi-Joe Cocker way, women go nuts, go figure. I had an imagination. My self-esteem had a poor plus-minus. Lonely. In bed at night waiting, I made up stories – he was the star – and there was always another woman: prettier, more confident and more talented than me. In my twenties, I wanted a man to worship me in a subtle, sophisticated way. I imagined a relationship where I was the implied queen, and my boyfriend would thrill to see me, would miss me like crazy, would realize how incredibly lucky he was to have a chick like me: talented, smart, funny and lovely, with the right ratio of sexuality to domesticity. Don’t all women covet this worship?

  —Vitas didn’t mean to hurt me and I’m sure your boyfriend didn’t know you were so sad. He sounds very sweet. Were you getting much exercise at the time?

  —This w
as two years after knee surgery and a time of inept rehab. So, no. I couldn’t walk in even a kitten heel. I swam lengths at the club, but drank beer to reward my get up and go. And wine. I thought booze would make me more fun to be with, but I had begun a nine-year phase of misery notorious for dawn-to-dawn sipping and much weepiness. I’d pick music – Emmylou and Roseanne Cash – that would press me further down. “Quit using that music to get depressed,” he’d shout. “They’re not talking about you.” I was not the queen. I was ignored and resented, and my dog lived with my parents, for chrissakes. How could I be happy? Now at one time, you folks had four dachshunds.

  —Oh my gosh, you know everything! Yes. We had three when Wayne was traded to New York and we left those here in California. The kids were so sad, so I really understand your point about not having a dog. Paulina was only eight and she’d cry for the dogs in bed at night. She blamed Wayne. It was hard on him. Those were difficult times, all of us in a penthouse apartment. New York! The light there is so different. But people were very kind to us and we could walk the kids to piano lessons. When we came back here to California, after Wayne’s retirement, we built a new house in the hills and had dogs again. That scar on your knee would improve if you rubbed coco butter on it every night. I’ll give you a jar before you go. All the players use it. You have pretty knees.

  —They sit up too high. That’s why the sub-luxing.

  —Let’s be positive: they’re pretty. Perrier? Not too hot for you? This guy you loved didn’t work out, huh?

  —He eventually had enough of the sadness, the suspicions, how I doubted my own talent.

  —Men really really hate doubts.

  —He dumped me and found a plain girl from a smaller town, a girl who did more drugs, had a better job, and didn’t aspire to be a musician, to be anything. I hooked up with a series of guitar players, same pattern.