I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

We lay in bed for a while, not speaking.

  “He’s not giving much away,” I said.

  “Maybe he knows what writers do,” Emily said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I remember when he finished the novel and showed me the typescript. The characters were lifeless. I asked him why didn’t he write about people he knew. About his family, about Montreal, his private school, McGill. He said he didn’t want anything to do with Canada or anything connected with it. I don’t know anyone who hates Canada so much. And how can you be a writer if you reject your past? Seeing Victor, I can see the person I was.”

  “Yes,” Emily said. “He can tell little lies. He said we haven’t changed. I know we have. It’s the kind of small talk you used to make. Why say things you don’t mean?”

  “It’s a form of politeness,” I said. “I wonder what would have happened to Victor if that dark-haired girl was pregnant?”

  “But he’s happy with his life,” Emily said. “The nice thing about these trips,’“ he told me, ‘“is that at the end I can go back home to Morocco. To my house and my Arab friends.’” I think he’s very lucky to live in a place he likes.”

  I didn’t reply. I expected her to go on and say: we’re about the only ones who live in a place they don’t like. Instead she said, “I think Victor disapproves of me. Every time he looked at me, I felt it.”

  “I also think he disapproves of me now,” I said. “For not living better—for not getting on.”

  “Well you have written a few books since you last saw him.”

  “But he’s not curious about our life at all,” I said. “He hasn’t asked me one question as to what I’ve been doing these past twenty years. It’s as if he looks at the way we live—and doesn’t want to know. And he has forgotten a lot. I walked down the street with him, showing where we had the cottage that first summer—where Pop Short lived—Maskell’s—The Gay Viking. All he said was: I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

  “Perhaps that’s why he was able to come down here,” Emily said. “He doesn’t have much to lose.”

  Next day, Saturday, they didn’t arrive until noon.

  “I’ve been walking up and down the street,” Victor said. “I couldn’t find the house. All the houses look so much the same.”

  “I’ve found Morocco in Ella’s atlas book,” Emily said, and showed Abdullah the map. “Are you anywhere near the coast?”

  “We are about three hundred miles from the coast. Beside the mountains.”

  From the window I could see the sky was still overcast. “I hope you’ll get a bit of sun while you’re here,” I said to Abdullah. “Then you’ll be able to see the colours.”

  “I like the way it is,” Abdullah said. “I have never seen anything like this.”

  “Why don’t we go for a drive across the moors,” Victor said. “Stop at a few pubs. Then I’ll take you and Emily out to a meal.”

  I got in front with Victor. Emily was in the back with Abdullah. And in a matter of minutes we were on the moors. The small green fields with the grey broken-stone hedges. The hedges with gorse and hawthorn on both sides of the road. Last year’s bracken a light rust colour. Some deserted tin-mine chimneys.

  “In Morocco,” Victor said, “you have these wild flowers. One day they are all yellow. Next day they are pink.”

  “I suppose you find this drab.”

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind getting out here and doing some painting.”

  I could hear Abdullah telling Emily, “My father has two dozen head of cows, some chickens and sheep.”

  “If a Moroccan sheep saw this green grass,” Victor said, “it would go ga-ga.”

  We drove along the turning road. There was a drop to the green fields below us on the right while the moors went up on the left.

  I can hear Emily with Abdullah in the back. “Have you any brothers and sisters?”

  “I have thirteen brothers and sisters. My father has fifteen wives. But only four at a time. When my father comes in and tells the women to start cleaning and cooking—I know he is getting a new wife.”

  “He has written an autobiography,” Victor told me. “That’s all in it.”

  I hear Emily say, “Why have you written your autobiography?” and Abdullah saying, “Because I have had a very interesting life. I find life much more interesting than fiction.”

  “How old are you?” I asked Abdullah, turning my head.

  “Twenty-three.”

  “How long have you and Victor known each other?”

  “Five years.”

  We come to Zennor and Victor stops the car by the Tinners Arms and we get out and see the old squat church. No clock but a sundial. Inside the Tinners we stand and drink Guinness and take in the atmosphere. On the wall there is a painting of a stallion.

  “It’s an Arab,” Abdullah said.

  “How can you be so sure?” Emily said.

  “See the smooth lines. Your English horses are more heavy in the stomach.”

  A group of young people sit at the far end where a fire is going. I recognize one as the son of a painter Emily and Victor and I knew twenty years ago.

  “Are you one of the Sparks?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, standing up and saying my name. We shake hands. He is the same age as Abdullah and twice as tall.

  “Your mother and father,” I said, “brought you over to see us when we lived in Mousehole.”

  “When I was in diapers,” Sparks said laughing.

  I introduce him to Abdullah. “He’s from Morocco.”

  “I was there last summer,” Sparks said. “I was thrown in jail. My friend, the chief of police, got me out and then I was in even worse trouble.”

  There is an immediate rapport between the small Arab and the tall country-faced young man.

  While Abdullah is talking to Emily, Sparks tells me:” Abdullah—it’s like Fred over there. You see all these mothers come running out of their houses calling: ‘“Come here, Abdullah, you naughty boy.’”

  “He’s just like his father,” I said when we were getting back in the car, “outgoing—giving of himself.”

  “He tried to say goodbye to me in Arabic,” Abdullah said.

  We drove over to Mousehole. (We were covering old ground that Victor knew.) We came there just after Emily and I married. Lived for a year in a large granite house on the side of a hill. It had a nice garden with bamboos, copper beech, and palm trees. In the morning, when we were still in bed, we could hear the melancholy sound of curlews flying over to the fields above. And again at dusk when they flew back to the rocks at the sea’s edge. Victor was living in St. Ives and he would come on Friday night for meals that Emily made. Our novels were finished and were making the rounds of the publishers . . .

  Now, we were looking through the bare hedge at the granite house in silence. Emily wanted to get away. “Some things are best left undisturbed,” she told me. Victor showed no interest at all.

  “Let’s go,” he said, “and have a meal.”

  The little village was very clean, the colours as fresh as paint, the streets deserted. But we were too late for lunch.

  We drove into Penzance. The restaurants were shut. Finally we find one open in Market Jew Street. It was packed. Every seat taken. People were standing up. I saw stairs. I suggested we go up the stairs. Here it was all empty. The tables nicely set with white tablecloths and facing a wall window overlooking Market Jew Street.

  “I see the advantage of a university education,” Emily said.

  “Now,” Victor said, “we’ll have a feast.”

  The menu was brought to us by a stocky middle-aged waitress. She had white shoes on, and gave the impression that there was still lots of life in her yet. We all agreed to have soup and scampi.

  The waitress came carrying the bowls of sou
p close to her breasts. And she was singing, “Isn’t it romantic—”

  The soup was terrible. The scampi wasn’t very good either. But we were hungry.

  The waitress came back with a bottle of standard fish sauce, her hips swaying.

  “Let’s try some of this exotic sauce,” Victor said, putting his knife into the bottle.

  “I’ll have some too,” I said.

  “Isn’t it romantic—” she sang.

  Abdullah didn’t like the scampi. The waitress went back and sat down by another table. I guess she had her eye on Abdullah. But Abdullah was looking out into Market Jew Street.

  “In Morocco,” he said to Emily, “the people would be on the road and the cars on the pavement.”

  An old man came up and sat down at a table.

  “Hullo, my handsome,” the waitress said loudly. And went over carrying a cup of tea.

  That night in bed Emily said, “Yesterday, early Friday, it was raining. And you know how it is here sometimes. You think it’s all coming down on you. I just wanted to talk to someone. And there was Mr. Care outside his nice pink house with a broom. And I said, You’re not going to change the colour? No, he said, I’ve been away for a few days. I’m just tidying up. Where did you go? To Brighton. My son is a vicar there. He is the vicar for the crematorium. And I remembered our neighbour with her obsession about the dead. It was all getting me down. Then Victor phones to say he’s here. And the next day I am out driving in a car across the moors and there were the green fields and this very English landscape. And sitting beside me is a dark little Arab. Suddenly life seems to have all sorts of possibilities. If this can happen—there’s hope. I was so excited I was almost jumping up in the back seat. Thank God for Abdullah. Victor is too glum for me. And his talk is so superficial. I don’t suppose you would have anything to do with him now if you met him.”

  “I don’t suppose either of us would,” I said. “He didn’t expect to find us here when he came. I don’t think we’ll even exchange postcards when he gets back.”

  “That happens all the time,” Emily said. “People who know each other when they are young drift apart. Are they coming tomorrow for lunch?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ll do a roast chicken and make a nice dessert.”

  “Fine,” I said. “And I’ll get some wine.”

  Soon after they arrived at noon, I brought them upstairs to this room. It seemed necessary, for me, that Victor should see what I had done with all those years. I showed him the books. For twenty years they seemed so few. But I tried to make it look better by showing him the various editions. Knowing his predilection for the exotic I showed him an article on some of the books in the Bangkok Post of 2 August 1970.

  “This is nice,” Victor said as he read it.

  “Do many people come to see you?” Abdullah asked.

  “A few.”

  “What do they want?”

  “I think they want something to happen to them. Then they go home.”

  “Do you write about them?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “People are very generous. They let you into their lives. So you don’t want to hurt them by what you write. In any case I write about people I like or have liked. And only about people I know. Their visit is only the tip of an iceberg.”

  The meal went all right. Victor kept touching his chin when he talked. Abdullah was much more at ease. He told us that he was circumcised when he was six, that the Jews and Arabs were cousins, and what was all this stupid fighting for.

  After lunch I took them both for a walk. “That’s Emily’s garden,” I said. “There used to be a greenhouse but the storm blew it down. Underneath the pear tree there is a little cemetery of children’s animals—part of Martha’s and Ella’s childhood—two cats, one kitten, two hamsters, a goldfish.”

  I walked them through the twisting back streets and around the harbour. “You have seen the small stone cottages,” I said to Abdullah, “and the kind of terrace houses we live in. Now I’ll show you how other people live here.”

  We got in the car and I told Victor to drive out of the place. Then down a road with trees. And through a wide gate. And there were the fine lawns with the large house at the end. The sides with trees. And a sheer slope down to the sand and the water of the bay. Abdullah could not contain his excitement. “Shall I take some pictures?” he asked Victor.

  “I don’t think the light is good enough,” Victor said woodenly.

  And I wondered why Victor hadn’t taken any pictures of where we lived or of Emily, Ella, or myself.

  “You might remember Henry Nicolle,” I said to Victor as we walked towards the house. “He was a painter. We went to his first show in London in 1949. His widow still lives here.”

  But Victor didn’t remember.

  The front door was shut. I looked inside the front room with the paintings on the wall, the antique furniture. “I guess no one’s in,” I said.

  But Victor had already gone back to the car. He looked impatient to get away. Did it remind him of the house in Westmount, of summers in Murray Bay, St. Andrew’s Ball, Sherbrooke Street, McGill? I didn’t know. When we got in the car he said, “I’ll drive back to say goodbye to Emily.”

  For a while Victor and Emily looked at each other in the hallway. Neither knew what to say. Then they embraced and kissed. “If you are ever in Morocco,” Victor said. And Emily laughed. “Yes, Victor—”

  I went out to walk them back to the car park. It was dusk. Most of the houses were in darkness.

  “You’ll be able to get back to work,” Victor said.

  “The importance of work is highly exaggerated,” I said. “Sometimes I think it is just another con trick.” I didn’t know if I believed this or not. Or was I trying to tell him that I understood his life. “It’s probably just another way of passing the time.”

  He didn’t reply.

  When we got to the car, Victor turned and said, “It’s been fun.”

  He said this with something of the gaiety that I remembered. I shook hands with both of them, and walked quickly away.

  For the next three days I came up here and tried to get on with some work but couldn’t. Victor’s visit had made me dissatisfied with the sort of life I was living. Why am I chained to this desk? I asked myself. What’s so important about writing? Victor was living a much freer life. He had travelled and continues to travel all over the world. But when I make a trip it is back to Canada—to keep in touch with the past. Another chain. I deliberately remain uninvolved with things here because I don’t want to lose the past—to put too many layers between. While Victor—? I suddenly envied his life. I don’t mean living in Morocco or his house or Abdullah—I envied him his freedom. Chains and freedom, I thought. Chains and freedom.

  But on the fourth day the visit began to fade. Things here were getting back to the way they were before. Emily came up at ten thirty in the morning with a cup of coffee and a biscuit. And I began to go on with the writing where I left off.

  A week later I had a letter from Montreal, from the Graduates Society of McGill, letting me know that this year was our silver anniversary. “Dear Classmate,” it began. “Yes indeed it is hard to believe that a group as young as we are graduated from the old alma mater twenty-five years ago! But that’s the way it is!”

  BY A FROZEN RIVER

  In the winter of 1965 I decided to go for a few months to a small town in Northern Ontario. It didn’t have a railway station—just one of those brown railway sidings, on the outskirts, with a small wooden building to send telegrams, buy tickets, and to get on and get off. A taxi was there meeting the train. I asked the driver to take me to a hotel. There was only one he would recommend, the Adanac. I must have looked puzzled, for he said, “It’s Canada spelled backwards.”

  He drove slowly through snow-covered streets. The snowbanks by the sidewa
lk were so high that you couldn’t see anyone walking. Just the trees. He drove alongside a frozen river with a green bridge across it. Then we were out for a while in the country. The snow here had drifted so that the tops of the telegraph poles were protruding like fence posts. Then we came to the town—a wide main street with other streets going off it.

  The Adanac was a three-storey wooden hotel on the corner of King and Queen. It had seen better times. Its grey-painted wooden veranda, with icicles on the edges, looked old and fragile. But the woodwork had hand-carved designs, and the white windows had rounded tops. Beside it was a new beer parlour.

  Fifty years ago it was the height of fashion to stay at the hotel. It was then called the George. The resident manager told me this, in his office, after I paid a month’s rent in advance. His name was Savage. A short, overweight man in his sixties, with a slow speaking voice, as if he was thinking what he was going to say. He sat, neatly dressed, behind a desk, his grey hair crew-cut, and looked out of the large window at the snow-covered street. The sun was shining.

  “Well,” he said slowly. “It’s an elegant day.”

  His wife was a thin, tall woman with delicate features. She also hardly spoke, but would come into the office and sit, very upright, in a rocking chair near Mr. Savage and look out of the window. The office connected with their three-room flat. It was filled with their possessions. A small, bronze crucifix was on the wall. Over the piano a large picture of the Pope. There were a few coloured photographs: a boy in uniform, children, and a sunset over a lake.

  I rented the flat above. I had a room to sleep in, a room to write and read, and a kitchen with an electric stove and fridge. To get to them I would go up worn steps, along a wide, badly lit corridor—large tin pipes carried heat along the ceiling. But inside the rooms it was warm. They had radiators and double windows.

  I unpacked. Then went to the supermarket, by the frozen river, and came back with various tins, fruit, and cheap cigars that said they were dipped in wine. I made myself some coffee, lit one of the thin cigars, and relaxed.

  I saw a wooden radio on the side table in the sitting room. A battered thing. I had to put twenty-five cents in the back. That, according to a metal sign, gave me two hours’ playing time. But that was only a formality. For the back was all exposed, and the twenty-five cents kept falling out for me to put through again.