I couldn’t help but notice, though, that Avery Lynch from the Globe and Mail wasn’t there, and that struck me as odd. Usually he went to these things. He liked to turn up with his girlfriend with the little chain around her neck and talk to people with his arm around her. She was quite a bit younger than he was, his “lover.” Code for, “I’m fucking her,” of course.
Near three in the morning, as the guests cleared out— a drunken Englishman lolled about on the couch impersonating his rich mother—I started to gently dismantle the party, taking the empty wine bottles into the kitchen, covering the cheese plate and so on. Using a book from my bookshelf, an especially mediocre Canadian novel that had been reviewed with excessive generosity a while back, I began to cap the flames on a set of small pot lights which sat in a row directly above the couch. But I’d had a few drinks, I lost my balance and knocked one of them over; molten candle wax dribbled down onto the couch. I even got a splash on my pants. It was a disproportionately shocking accident. Fixable but somehow, it seemed, malevolent, as if the spilled wax symbolized the consequences of a careless life catching up with me. Of a life lived incorrectly. Why hadn’t I pushed the couch from beneath the candle’s reach before trying to extinguish it? Wasn’t the choice of an ungifted writer’s novel as a snuffing instrument a gesture of unattractive spite? Was I being punished for it? Had I not, in fact, knocked over a candle at almost exactly the same spot a few years earlier?
Still worse, the spilled wax seemed like a bad omen for my new novel, and Avery’s no-show at my party assumed an even more sinister tone. The remaining guests, noticing the spill, made sympathetic groans, but no one took it with any gravity. An actress with a haggard face (she really should quit smoking) suggested a hot iron and a brown paper bag; a playwright with big ears who had spent entirely too many years giggling (in an irritatingly high pitch) at parties and sleeping with women not his wife mentioned a brand name and giggled again.
The next day, I came down the stairs into the living room more hungover than I should have been; it was the kind of hangover you get from drinking to get a flat evening airborne, from “forcing” it. Thinking back on the party, though, there had been something rather sinister about it. But what? My book had come out at a difficult time of year, March break, people away on holidays, so several friends had been unable to attend. And that had given the evening a sort of uninhabited feel. Yes. True. But that wasn’t it.
Cleaning up the living room, rinsing the wineglasses, dumping the appalling cheese tray (I couldn’t stop noticing the candle-wax stain on the couch; it seemed to occupy the centre of the apartment), I was left with the feeling that I hadn’t had a single satisfactory conversation all evening long. I’d start talking and be interrupted; start again and be interrupted again. But what else could I do? I was too old to be a guest at my own party.
All day I wondered about the upcoming review in the Globe and Mail—it was scheduled to appear in the Saturday edition—and I kept returning, like picking at a blister, to Avery’s no-show. And to René Goblin with the black-rimmed glasses. I had a sick feeling, you know the kind, that I knew what was going to happen, that in spite of my visit Avery was going to get René to do the review. Just to show me what happens when a writer wanders into his office and starts telling people what to do.
On the other hand, somebody at the party had told me a young woman writer, a noodle-armed sexpot everyone had a crush on, was launching her new novel the same night as mine. How To Be A Girl, it was called. Bound for success, from the title onwards. So maybe Avery, “player” that he fancied himself to be, went there instead. To give her a sniff, so to speak. Mind you, you couldn’t fault him for that. I’d met this girl once; she was so erotic with her skinny arms and little-girl voice that I’d daydreamed about her for weeks . . .
Anyway, where was I? Yes, the review. I’d thrown the party before the review came out instead of after so that if things went poorly I wouldn’t have to contend with long-faced people showing up at my door or pretending they hadn’t read it or, worse, feeling sorry for me. The whole thing was a nightmare and at some point that afternoon, my hangover clicking in a notch, the stain from the candle wax accusing me every time I walked by the couch, I decided that I was never, ever going to write another novel. That it wasn’t worth the stress on my nervous system. No, I’d become a high school teacher instead. Drink too much at night and jack off in the staff washroom to images of Italian students in wet T-shirts. A much healthier existence, that!
Around eleven that same night, I fled my apartment as if it were on fire and hurried to my favourite newsstand (I’m a superstitious man); the early Saturday edition wasn’t in yet, but hang on, what’s this? A broken-down fellow in a long coat drifted along the sidewalk with an armful of newspapers. He was working the bars. “Paper. Saturday Globe,” he said in the tone of a man who knows no one is listening but makes his announcement anyway.
I shouldn’t buy it from him, I thought; he looks like bad luck. But then impatience won over—it always does—and I bought the paper, giving the man a large tip as a way, I hoped, of neutralizing his effect. From there, with an escalating heartbeat, I took an expensive taxi to the house of Catherine, my second ex-wife, across the bridge in the Greek part of town. It was a cold spring night; the creek beneath the bridge glinted malignantly. I found myself thinking about my poor cousin who, when he discovered his wife was having an affair, threw himself off this very bridge twenty years earlier. What was his name? But why think about that now? Still, it was a hell of a way to kill yourself. He’d done it in the middle of the day, just pulled his car over to the side of the bridge and hopped over the railing. Down, down, down he went. What must he have thought about, plunging into the creek like that? And his wife! I saw her at the funeral with their three children. She took my hand softly and whispered in my ear, “It’s all right. He’s better off now.”
Better off now? How do you figure that? Then I remembered the playwright with big ears giggling at my party; what an unpleasant racket! Why was a man at his age still giggling?
I knocked on the door and waited; Catherine appeared behind the glass, peeking out with a kindly smile. That long face, those lovely brown eyes. Like a nurse or a mother; a woman for whom wounded men call out on the battlefield. I handed her the Globe and Mail as though it were a police warrant.
“Do you want me to read it here?” she asked. “Or go upstairs?”
“Upstairs. Please.”
It was a small house with her eccentricities everywhere. A piano she never played; odd ornaments here and there. Edwardian dollies; tasselled lamps. A pair of bright yellow rubber boots she had bought for two dollars at a yard sale. (Our son, Nick, had implored her at an early age to please never wear them when picking him up after school.) But it was a comforting home, as if a benevolent ghost drifted nightly through the rooms dusting their contents with cozy powders.
I heard Catherine’s footsteps cross the floor over my head and come to a stop in her bedroom at the end of the hall. Then silence. My heart crashed, then crashed again. I got to my feet. I paced the living room, picking up this and that, a yellowing aerial photo of the Saskatchewan farm where she grew up, a beaded wallet, a Joni Mitchell CD; I turned them over in my hands, unseeing. What was taking so long? But on it went; not a sound, not a movement.
And then steps, rather slow, moving across the ceiling, followed by her voice at the top of the stairs.
“It’s a disappointment,” she said.
“Who wrote it?” I shouted, as if the answer might make me feel better, might stop the spinning, downward plunge.
“René Goblin,” she said in a voice trying for irony. But she wasn’t an ironical woman and it didn’t quite hit the right note.
“René Goblin? That’s impossible.”
But of course it wasn’t, and everything fell into place with a ghastly clank: Avery not coming to my party, my premonitions, the cripple selling the newspapers, the nasty creek winding beneath the bridge,
the giggling playwright.
Sometime after midnight, I took an expensive taxi home from Catherine’s house (twenty dollars), flung open the front door to my apartment, went straight downstairs to my basement locker (where I hid them from myself) and took a sleeping pill.
Don’t believe that old adage that a bad review is supposed to ruin breakfast but not lunch. A bad review can spoil a good deal more than that. This one, this ugly-minded pigeon shit (I’ll kill that motherfucker!), made me feel as if my novel, only days out of the gate, had already a stain on it and that every time I looked at it, like at the couch, I would see only the stain. It made me feel as if everyone in the world had read the review—people on the street, people going by in cars, people looking out the window of a hairdressing salon—which produced in my body a sensation of physical distress, like being in a horror movie. No matter where I turned I couldn’t shake it. I had spent three years writing the book, weighing this sentence, that sentence, and now, or so it seemed, it was all over in the space of time it took my ex-wife to go upstairs and say, “It’s a disappointment.”
And such cruel phrasing (why did I keep rereading it?), the implication being, in every sentence of the review, that I had taken on a complex subject (sexual obsession) and had simply lacked the talent to pull it off. “He’s just not that good,” Goblin had written as the review’s final, condemning axe stroke. And indeed, because all writers, including René, suspect that they’re “just not that good,” those words activated an already existent agony. My beautiful book, my beautiful book. Ruined by someone who spent an hour and a half reading it. I simply couldn’t shake the appalling, almost electrical waves of shame and hurt and rage and injustice. Because it had been, after all, a lovely book. A lovely book! (Look at that! Already in the past tense.) I’d had such hopes for it. Only somebody who didn’t like me could dislike it. Or so I reasoned.
Yes, yes, I understand—and understood then—that a creative life is neither made nor broken by a single review. Who remembers the critics (and there were many) who panned The Great Gatsby? It had happened before, over and over and over again. I was also old enough to suspect that after a certain age you can’t distinguish between good luck and bad luck (not until you see how things play out), but this was still a hard slap in the face. This terrible poison coursing throughout my body.
To distract myself, to cool the fireball in my stomach, I flipped to another section of the newspaper. But I wasn’t safe there either. It was a day designed to torture me. For there, in front of me, was the prize-winning short story from this year’s national competition. It started thusly:
Blame force of habit, if you like, or early-onset misanthropy or just the simple rules of coincidence: But none of this ever would have happened if he hadn’t got up before dawn to beat the holiday traffic.
I stopped reading and said to no one in particular— for there was no one else in the room—“This is precisely the kind of bullshit writing that wins prizes in this country.” I looked at the paragraph again. “Early-onset misanthropy”? What’s that? And what’s the guy beating early morning traffic for? Let me guess. He has a cottage. Who has a cottage these days? It was middle-class twaddle, the kind that only matrons in Canadian book clubs enjoy. Jesus, this was my audience.
“Who has a cottage?” I bellowed. It was like those terrible television shows that have people gathering around the water cooler. It never happens.
I bent forward and underlined the paragraph in clumsy red ink, but then, not liking the look of that either, I hurled the paper onto the floor.
There were many things that irked me that morning: a neighbour’s radio, the ghastly clawing of pigeon feet outside my bedroom window, a car alarm going off. “Fix that fucking alarm!” I screamed out the window.
Then I took another sleeping pill. Pills are never a good idea, especially for me, but I thought, to hell with it, I’m not interested in feeling like this all day. So I fished around in the basement again until I found the frosted vial in my winter boot, gave it a shake (a reassuring swish-swish) and popped a green tablet into my mouth, swallowing it dry.
Lesson number one: Sleeping pills don’t always make you sleepy. Sometimes they can make you very busy indeed; and about an hour later, red-lipped from having downed a delicate Burgundy I’d been saving for my daughter’s university graduation, I sat at my computer and wrote an imprudent note to the pink-faced Avery Lynch, a letter which concluded with the bewildering demand that the next time he, Avery, threw a party, he might clean up his house beforehand, this last bit referring to a gathering I’d gone to at his house three years earlier where, by ten o’clock, there were no clean glasses left and a grubby, fraternity-house feel hung over the proceedings. Alarm bells sounded in my head, but when the moment to hit the Send button arrived, they were too muffled to make their case, and off went the note.
I must have passed out, because when I woke up it was dark outside. I set off to find René Goblin. A self-consciously with-it asshole like René would probably gravitate to College Street on a Saturday night, one of those appalling boîtes with young men dressed in black who let their cellphones ring in restaurants. Self-important little pricks to a man. Yes, that’s where René Goblin would be, explaining in tones of quiet condescension (I was certain) why, try as he did, he simply couldn’t restrain himself from giving my novel a public smack. “The bottom line,” I could hear René say, “is talent, I’m afraid. He’s just not that good.”
A furious revenge movie ran and reran in my thoughts as I hurried up through Chinatown, turned left at the fire station and headed along College Street. “I’m not going to eat this one,” I said, and moved closer to the bright ring of lights. The plan: to walk into the bar, situate René, proceed directly to his table, get his attention and deliver a mighty slap across his face. Which would knock his glasses clean off. Those stupid, affected glasses. Deliberately ugly. Glasses that said, Aren’t I interestingly unattractive?
But I didn’t find René that night. I poked my head into a handful of shadowy, candlelit bars that I’d quit going to a dozen years before. At The Butter Bar (stupid name), I asked the bartender if she knew René Goblin. Yes, she did. Had he been in tonight? No, he usually comes in Sunday for the jazz.
For the jazz. How perfect. How René!
“Tell him this guy is looking for him.” I wrote down my name on a coaster and handed it to her.
Then I went home; I don’t remember taking my clothes off. But the next morning I awoke with the sense that something horrible had happened. It was very early, the sky still red behind the tree branches outside my window. Blood-red. What have I done? I wondered, and then I recalled the taxi ride to my ex-wife’s house, her kind eyes, the apology in her voice at the top of the stairs. How glad I was, though (it washed over me in a wave of gratitude), that I hadn’t found René.
The morning wore on, and as it did, the nausea—and fury—returned. Knowing better but striking a posture of embittered nonchalance, I slipped downstairs for more sedation. And this time it worked. I curled up under my covers comforted by the surety that I would fall asleep. It was as though by taking the pill I had been guaranteed passage through a safe and welcoming valley: sweet vegetation, pastel birds, a clear stream glinting in the sunlight. Just before I slipped under, I remembered writing the email to Avery Lynch. Fuck him, I whispered to the curtained room, and fell asleep. It was a little after eleven in the morning.
Looking back on what happened next, I can’t quite pinpoint the timing of events. Those several days remain in my memory like the pieces of a broken jug. I woke up; it must have been early afternoon the same day, the sky bright blue. I spotted the newspaper on the floor with its violent red underlining and it scared me, as if I were drifting toward a black iceberg, that I needed to do something concrete to order my life, to inflict a kind of structure over things which might prevent me from being further wounded. I took a letter that had been lying on the dining room table for weeks, an unimportant cheque to an u
nimportant creditor, and thought, That’s it. I’ll mail the cheque. And again I caught sight of the melted candle wax on my couch. And again it frightened me. It seemed to say, You have let things go too far.
I’ll take care of that too, I thought.
But first the letter. I put it into my shirt pocket and went onto the porch and unchained my bicycle. I noticed my fingernails were dirty and I stared at them, puzzled, for a moment. I never have dirty fingernails. I rode up my street, turning onto a cinder pathway that traversed the park. I could see the red, sturdy mailbox between the trees. It was a concrete goal, the beginning of mending myself, and in that and in the comforting sound of the cinder under my tires I could feel a kind of relief, quite involuntary, come over me—the worst was over—when out of nowhere a pigeon ran in front of me; it came from the left, small-headed, pink-eyed, scurrying like a fat man trying to catch a bus. I felt a rise and fall in my back wheel as if I’d gone over a small speed bump. I looked over my shoulder, afraid of what I was going to see. The pigeon, its feathers scattered, was flopping back and forth on a broken wing, pulling itself across the walk toward a child’s sandbox. But why is he doing that? I wondered. Why is he trying to get over to that sandbox? In his wake lay a trail of under-feathers, delicate, like a kitten’s fur. And the sight of these feathers struck me as more horrible than blood.
Taking the envelope in my hand, my fingernails filthy, I dropped it into the red box and took another route home.
Back in my living room a few minutes later, I avoided the window that faced the park. “What should I do?” I said out loud. I thought of calling Catherine. Asking her. (God, if it’s not ex-girlfriends, it’s mutilated birds. How much must an ex-wife put up with?) But it was my mess, my problem. I knew I should go back to the park, find the pigeon and put him out of his misery. Bash his head in with a rock. “But I can’t do that,” I said, again out loud, aware that my mouth tasted very bad indeed. You can’t smash a pigeon to death in a public park. People will see me. They’ll think I’m murdering a pigeon because I don’t like pigeons. Somebody might even want to fight with me.
The Perfect Order of Things Page 13
