I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories

by Norman Levine

  And later we went into the next room and sat around the large dining room table, dressed in the new sweater, the new shirt. A fire was going in the fireplace. The kids’ paper chains were crisscrossing from the ceiling. And I had tacked some branches of ivy on the top of the walls as well.

  We began with the last of the smoked salmon. Then the goose was brought in . . . and the vegetables . . . I poured brandy on the pudding and lit it . . . And it burned with a blue flame.

  We had finished the pudding and sat around the table with paper hats on our heads, when Martha had to go upstairs. When she came back she said, “Dad, there’s a goat on the front steps by the door nibbling at the tree.”

  We went to the front room, to the window. And there was a dirty billy goat with part of an old torn rope hanging from its neck dragging on the ground. It was on the front granite steps nibbling at the pittosporum.

  And we all laughed. It was so dirty and bedraggled and it didn’t look domestic at all. It was black with some hairs that might have been white but were now dirty grey. The hairs were matted together and of different lengths. When it went down the slope, to the next house, I opened the front door and we went out. And watched it go, slowly, down the street. Stopping at the front gardens, the front steps, or staying on the sidewalk, then standing in the middle of the road. It looked so out of place in this suburban street of terraced houses.

  Then I saw that the whole street was now out . . . in small groups . . . in front of their doors . . . or on their steps. Some, like us, with paper hats still on their heads. And everyone was laughing or smiling and talking . . . and looking at the goat.

  Someone must have called the police. For later I heard they brought the goat back to the farmer, a few miles from here, who reported it missing.

  On December 28, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I wrote to the fishmonger whose address was on the label. Two and a half weeks later a letter arrived. In large, almost childish, writing it said:

  Dublin, 4 January

  Dear Sir, I am pleased you enjoyed the salmon. We received a money order for same with instructions to send to you. It was signed, “anonymous gift.”

  Yours truly

  P.J. Nolan

  A MARITIME STORY

  When i think of Max Bleenden I see him driving a long red car in Fredericton, dressed in grey flannels, a navy blue blazer, or (if it was warm) a light purple shirt, and smoking a Gauloise. He looks solid. Broad shoulders, a strong neck, a wide face. His dark wavy hair is brushed back and receding. There is a slightly crooked smile. He wears glasses. The eyes are brown. In public he has the air of a celebrity. People look pleased when they say, “Hello, Dr. Bleenden.” I can hear him come up the worn steps of the George Hotel, knock on the grey-painted door of my rented rooms. When I open the door he speaks in a rough, low voice that has something of Europe in it.

  “Can you lend me five dollars? I forgot to go to the bank. I have the gardener coming this morning. And I need to buy some tea and eggs. It’s a tradition. I always make breakfast for the gardener.”

  I would give him the money then make some coffee while he looked around at the way I was living in this hotel with the second-hand furniture, the worn linoleum.

  “I envy you,” he said. “You live such a simple life. Mine is complicated.”

  Later, leaving Fredericton, he was driving me to the airport. We were silent. Suddenly he said, “You’re going away . . . that’s awful . . . I won’t have anyone to talk to. There’s no one down here.”

  I came to the Maritimes in 1965 because of Max Bleenden. He had written to me in England. He said he liked my short stories. Would I like to come to Fredericton and be resident writer. And because we needed the money I said yes. I owed rent for two years. Had a lawyer’s letter threatening action from the landlady’s son. The landlady was a nice old lady who apologized for this. It only came out when she was sick. Her son happened to see what I owed.

  I left wife and children behind—I had no intention of settling in the Maritimes—and flew over at the end of August.

  Max Bleenden was to meet me in the lobby of the Beaverbrook Hotel. As he came in he looked around expectantly. But as soon as he saw me he looked disappointed.

  “I didn’t think you would be so short.”

  Max was several inches shorter. He drove me to his house—a solid greystone facing the river with a gravel drive, grass on either side, and a heavy wooden front door. Behind the house were tall trees and large gardens of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. Inside, the rooms were high, painted white, and lightly furnished with antique wooden furniture and blue carpets. On the walls were abstract oil paintings, and a photograph of a serious young girl. There were irises, roses, gladioli, in different colours, in glass vases and earthenware pots. There was a glass bowl full of fruit.

  His wife came in. She was a bit taller than Max. Thin and shy with red hair. When she smiled she looked like a pretty Tallulah Bankhead. She hardly spoke. If I spoke to her, she smiled back. We sat in the comfortable chairs, in one of the front rooms, looking out at the river, and had tea.

  A large elderly woman in grey walked in with sandwiches on a tray. As she went out Max said, “She is here to look after my mother. My mother’s name is Nettie. I want you to meet her.”

  He led me up the stairs, past three rooms, to a bare white room where a small elderly woman sat in a high-backed chair. Her hands were clutching the armrests. Her feet were not touching the ground. She was dressed in a purple blouse, a black skirt. Around her neck a light silk lemon scarf was tied loosely. Her grey hair was cut short and permed and I could see the pink scalp between curls. She sat by a window and beside a fish tank that had three small fish swimming in it. Max introduced me.

  “Who are you?” his mother said in a flat voice.

  “I’m Max’s friend.”

  “Do you live here?’’

  “Yes.”

  She looked out of the window at the road, the river, the far shore, the sky.

  “I write to Max every week,” she said. “Did you know I’m going to Canada?”

  She left us again. Went back to the window.

  She had an interesting but worn-out face. She must have been pretty, for the structure was still there with the prominent cheekbones, the small mouth with the noticeable front teeth as if a smile was never far away.

  “I hate this house,” she said. “It goes quiet. I don’t know where everyone is.”

  She looked at the tank.

  “They are trying to fob me off with fish. I don’t want fish. I want people.”

  She looked at me.

  “Suddenly it’s quiet,” she said. “They don’t explain things. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know when they are coming back. They don’t ask me if I want to go. They just go away . . .

  “Did you know I’m going to Canada? To the Maritimes. I have a son in the Maritimes.”

  Max began to walk impatiently up and down. She followed his movements. When he stopped near her she said, “How long am I going to stay here?”

  “How long would you like to stay, mother?” Max said. “Forever?”

  “That’s not very long,” she said.

  As I was leaving, Max said he and his wife were driving to Boston tomorrow for a short holiday before the academic year started. Would I like to come?

  When we got to Boston all Max wanted to see were films. We saw six films in three days. He also wanted to go to a striptease. We went into a dark place where a young girl with long legs performed on a small stage, in the centre of the room, while the customers stood around and watched. A cigarette girl, not young, came by. Max picked up a small cigar from her tray, and took out a coin from his pocket.

  “Can I put a quarter in your box?” he asked with a grin.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” the cigarette girl said. “You can’t get into my
box for a quarter.”

  She couldn’t have known that she was talking to the dean of a university.

  On the drive back from Boston, with his wife asleep, Max told me about himself. He was born in Hamburg. “Both my parents spoke Yiddish. I also spoke Yiddish. But I have long forgotten it.” His father was a publisher. They had a comfortable life. When he was thirteen—it was 1933—his mother brought him to London. They didn’t see his father again. He went to an English grammar school, then London University. They had little money. His mother did a variety of jobs, whatever she could get. It was while he was at university that his poems began to appear in the little magazines. His reviews in the weeklies. And talks on the BBC. That’s when I first heard of him. But we never met. Although I used to go to the same Soho clubs, the same pubs: the French, Joe Lyons, the Mandrake. Max said he played the piano, for a while, at the Colony. And we talked about Muriel Belcher and Francis Bacon. After the war (“My father was a conscientious objector . . . his father was a conscientious objector . . . so I was a conscientious objector. I was sent to work on the land. I was digging ditches. And all I wanted to do was fly a Spitfire.”) he came to Canada to lecture at a small college in Nova Scotia where he met his wife, the daughter of a general. She inherited money. They moved to Fredericton. “After I married, the writing stopped. The instinct for it had gone. And I haven’t written anything since. But I can tell the real thing when I see it. And, boychick,” he slapped my knee, “you have it.”

  But despite this friendliness I was uncomfortable with Max.

  In the first week of term he asked me to meet his creative writing class. There were about twenty students, mostly girls. “Here is our resident writer,” Max began. “He writes short stories. They are mostly stories about being hard-up. But look the way he is dressed. He is wearing an expensive English suit, expensive English shoes, an expensive shirt and tie.”

  I didn’t know where to look.

  (The thin light grey suit I bought in a discount house in Truro, Cornwall, for nine pounds. It was made in Bulgaria. My shoes, also cheap, I bought in Exeter. They were made in Romania.)

  I also disliked the way he took it for granted that I would just fall in with his plans. He never asked. He just said, “Let’s go—” or “I’ll pick you up for a football game at—”

  My reaction to this was immediate.

  When I was supposed to be at the president’s reception to introduce new members I was in the Riverside Room of the Beaverbrook Hotel drinking a beer and reading a thriller.

  Next morning he came to my office, three doors away from his. A hurt expression on his face.

  “Why weren’t you at the president’s reception?”

  “When was it?”

  “Yesterday. I made a speech telling all about you. People clapped. We waited for you to step forward. Nothing happened.”

  I turned down all invitations.

  Max would walk briskly into my office and say, “I just had a phone call from the Rotarians. They have a monthly meeting. The food is very good. They would like you to be their next speaker—”

  “I’m busy,” I said. “Working.”

  I wasn’t working. I was moving. From the Beaverbrook, that he put me in, to the George, which was less than half the price. I was also getting to know Fredericton. The long residential streets with the front lawns and the large wooden houses with verandas and trees. The short business streets, by the river, with the small stores and Chinese restaurants. But it didn’t take long to walk through it. And I had a feeling of isolation, of being cut off.

  One morning I walked to the supermarket by the river to get some groceries. When I came out a mild man in glasses, dressed like a farmer, came up to me.

  “Have you got education?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Have you got education?”

  I thought this was a new way of asking for money.

  “Yes,” I said hesitantly.

  “What is eight at fifty dollars each?”

  “Four hundred dollars.”

  “Four hundred,” he said loudly. And repeated it as if he didn’t believe it. He walked away delighted.

  Another day I went to the legislative building. I was listening to a debate on fishing from the public gallery when an usher came up to me and whispered, “Sir, you can’t sit like that.”

  I had my legs crossed.

  “Why not?”

  “The members below—they can see.”

  “I’m wearing trousers.”

  “It’s a rule sir . . . because of the ladies. They’d come here . . . sit like you . . . and from below, with some, you could see the time of day.”

  On Armistice Day I went to the cenotaph. A service of remembrance was going on. Names of local people killed in the Second World War were being read over a loudspeaker. The voice said:

  Graham Budd, Royal Canadian Air Force.

  Robert Pichette, Royal Canadian Corps of Signals.

  Jim Smith, Royal Canadian Air Force.

  Brought to you by Frank’s Fast Foods . . .

  Tommy Symons, Royal Canadian Navy.

  Fred Towers, Royal Canadian Engineers.

  Brought to you by Dominion Supermarket . . .

  I wasn’t sleeping well. At first light I’d walk to the river to see the trees in their autumn colours, the solitary white house on the far shore, reflected in the water. After breakfast, I’d go out again, buy a paper. Then to the post office to see if there were any letters from my wife. I wrote three times, sometimes more, a week (as she did) telling her I missed her. That I disliked being here. And couldn’t wait to get back. Meanwhile I was going to earn as much money as I could.

  With this in mind I walked to the newspaper building in the square. And was shown into the owner’s empty office. The owner walked in. Small stubby brown shoes with thick heels and thick soles and rounded tops. A black eye patch over his right eye. He was about five foot ten. He had a small moustache, thin dark hair, and spoke in a clipped English voice. He was referred to as the Brigadier. And told me he was a friend of Beaverbrook, knew the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and, for my benefit, he talked about Arnold Bennett. He said that when Arnold Bennett reviewed a book in the Evening Standard the book would sell out. He would give me a page in his monthly magazine for the Maritimes, and he expected me to do the same as Arnold Bennett.

  But the books I wanted were published in London. And often they didn’t want to send review copies to a Maritime monthly they hadn’t heard of. The Brigadier was furious. I saw him pick up the phone, in a rage, and shout to the London publisher demanding a copy. Sometimes it worked.

  I did articles on an anthology of short stories, a novel by Graham Greene, books on Hemingway, Babel, Chekhov, and an anthology of the Second World War. I also had some of my stories reprinted. From this I earned an extra five hundred dollars a month.

  It was by doing this work that I met the journalists who worked for the Brigadier. They were young Englishmen, from English public schools, that the Brigadier brought over. Their calling cards said “Gentlemen of the Farm.” They lived in a run-down rented farm across the river. In the city they wore suits, ties, clean shirts. I expected a rolled umbrella, a bowler hat. And when they played cricket or soccer, against the university or the army camp, their sports clothes were immaculate. But on the farm—they only had chickens—they wore worn-out shabby clothes. They went around unshaven, uncombed. The rooms had disorder and chicken shit. The kitchen looked as if no one had washed up for months or put the garbage out . . .

  When I went for my early evening drink to the Beaverbrook, I would join these neatly dressed journalists and listen as they joked, discussed life and the world situation.

  With them, sometimes, was Marcel, a French Canadian from Moncton. He was in computers. He drove a green MG. He was convinced that I was getting the wrong
impression of the Maritimes by mixing too much with intellectuals and people with money. So he took me to various beer parlours. Then, to the outskirts, off the highway, and onto a dirt road, to a string of unpainted wooden shacks spaced far apart. Smoke came from a tin chimney. No one was outside.

  Marcel then drove to an Indian reservation. The same signs of poverty and hopelessness. As if everyone inside was lying fully dressed on a bed, not sleeping, in the middle of the afternoon.

  “I don’t read books,” Marcel said on the drive back, “but I’ll read one of yours. If I like it—I’ll buy it.”

  Max came to the George.

  “Have you been avoiding me? It’s over two weeks since I’ve seen you.”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “Come for a ride.”

  Then he said, “Let’s go back to my place for a drink. I’m depressed.”

  When we got out of the car, instead of going into the house he went around it. We cast long shadows on the grass. He led me to the trees. And, among them, to a wooden hut. He unlocked the door.

  Inside it was Spartan. A plain wooden table. An ordinary wooden chair. Used books on planks of wood held up by bricks. An open fireplace with sawn wood stacked beside it. There were picture postcards stuck on the walls of paintings by Rembrandt, Monet, Pissarro, Chagall, Bonnard. A small sink, a single tap, an electric kettle. Empty jars of instant coffee, packs of Gauloises and matches. A bottle of Remy Martin was by a small radio. A used upright piano by a wall. Beside another, a couch was made up as a bed.

  “I feel at home here,” Max said. “The house . . . that’s my wife’s place. This is mine.” He indicated the books, the faded poster of The Threepenny Opera on a wall, the faded magazines.

  I looked at the books. I knew them. They were English books of the late 1940s and 1950s. He showed me magazines with his poems, his reviews.

  “That was my time,” Max said. “Who knows what I would have done had I stayed in Europe. But I’m here. And, boychick, most of the time I like it.”