* * *
—
In 1990, George bought a used car from a neighbour named Steve, who told him he was forming a small men’s group with his pals Neil and Greg. He asked whether George would like to join? The group afforded a private realm of honest talk unfit for conventional social intercourse, and in he jumped.
One day Greg and Steve returned from a Mastery Workshop, a quasi-therapeutic weekend operating out of Los Angeles that toured North American cities. The men burned with evangelical fire over how the experience—a mix of confrontation, support and primal screaming—could detonate the mid-life psychic roadblocks, the dead-end jobs, the stagnant relationships. George was still George, pushing back hard against anything smacking of a naval command, yet a day later he thought, My life stands at a crossroad and I need a reboot. I will try anything once.
On a Friday evening in January 1991, George took a seat among thirty men and women in the Cambrian Hall in downtown Vancouver, nowhere close to realizing how the weekend would rewire his fuse box. When the charismatic American leader invited the group to engage in a screaming exercise to open up their bodies, George shrugged it off as silly. But when a woman started shrieking, he felt pressure welling up inside, and he let ’er rip. He almost loved it.
As the Friday session extended to 4 a.m., the leader assessed George’s baggage: too nice, too boring, too cautious, too safe. Too Canadian. George was given homework: come back tomorrow morning at nine wearing Bermuda shorts, snorkel and flippers, and so he did, clomping through the slush of the parking lot, feeling stupid and small. He was rescued when a tall, striking woman just short of his own height of six feet approached with the irresistible words: “I want to play with you.” Her name was Anne.
Into the pool of thirty bodies they plunged, bottom-of-the-lungs waves of howling, bellowing, screaming. Everybody was digging it—or most of them; at day’s end, some staggered into the streets, uncorked messes of goo stripped of the basic defences needed to negotiate the world. But for George, it was more than he hoped for: a transformative jolt of theatre.
He learned that Anne was thirty-two, eleven years younger than he was, and unhappily married. She had left her hometown of Calgary for Vancouver in 1975, the same year George quit Ontario, to escape the dead end of her oppressive working-class Catholic family. She was determined to make her own way, taking a criminology degree at Simon Fraser University en route to a career in social work. Because she was set on reshaping herself, George felt an instant identification, but bitter experience told him that this time he should bide his time.
Just as he was drawn to an imagined future with Anne, he felt the tugging fingers of the past—an urge to look back and understand what had happened to his first marriage to Sandy. He invited her out to Vancouver for a visit, and they enjoyed a day out on Mac’s boat where everything between them clicked. He visited her in Toronto, but the second encounter proved difficult, and he headed back west, leaving Sandy with the feeling that he was deciding between her and another woman. Six months later, George sat down with Anne’s husband, an accountant, and pointed to the writing on the wall: “You and Anne aren’t working, but we might.”
As he had with Sandy and Ronda, George told Anne about Sally: “I’ve been emotionally involved with a dead person for over twenty years.” Like his first two wives, Anne was undaunted, but this time George found himself promising that he would not flirt with the ghost.
With her husband, Anne had failed to conceive, even with the aid of in vitro fertilization. Freed of the need for birth control, in June 1992, she joined George on the ferry to Hornby Island to enjoy a weekend getaway in a cabin offered by friends. The obstacles had fallen away, and the uncanny slipped into the bedroom. George and Anne realized that at the precise instant of consummation they both knew she had conceived. The doctor merely confirmed it.
* * *
—
On December 3, 1992, Mac Orr passed his seventieth birthday knowing he was dying of lymphatic cancer. Although the scourge had stripped fifty pounds from his already lean frame, he managed a trip to Toronto for a farewell party with a loyal crew of friends. Back in Vancouver, he was quickly hospitalized. George came to sit at his bedside, father and eldest son grasping at threads of conversation. Anxiously George confessed that Anne was six months pregnant and he had not yet divorced Ronda. “Thank God,” came the unexpected reply, for Mac was fond of Anne. “I thought you were going to say my boat sank.” In stages, the son heard the father’s breathing sink into the shallows, and as the last puff turned to silence, days before Christmas, George felt nothing; or if he did, the emotions escaped his reach.
Three months later, on March 7, 1993, Anne delivered a son whom they named Jordan. When George had suggested filming the great event, Anne balked; some things were best left to memory. As a stepmother, Anne engaged the challenges of a blended family, gradually winning over the recalcitrant preteens Nick and Lily—“We don’t do dishes!”—with a mix of affection and discipline. George insisted on clearing the house of all elephants, inviting the honest talk absent from his own upbringing. He regarded Anne as a splendid person in every respect, possessed of more integrity than himself. Sally had believed there was order to life, right up to the moment it ended, and Anne brought the same qualities to their bond—vital, warm, comfortable in her own skin. This, he now knew, was what he wanted from life—a steadying influence, a loving home, a partner capable of spontaneous fun. Through the stability of family, George admitted his attraction to a state he’d long mistrusted: normal.
Perhaps the timing was no accident, but one day the rejuvenated father of three chanced upon a jewellery box he had not opened in years. Rooting around among the buttons and baby teeth inside, George pulled out the silver ring that Sally had given him before heading off on her Odyssey. He tried to slip it on, but the years had thickened his fingers. Next he picked up the two gifts that Dr. Wodehouse had found in Sally’s suitcase in August 1968 and passed on to him: a pair of German beer-stein cufflinks and the Bucherer Swiss watch he’d worn for fifteen years until it stopped ticking. Pulling out a yellowing newspaper clipping, he realized it was Sally’s death notice. As he scanned the type, something dimly remembered rose into full consciousness: Sally’s birthdate of May 25, 1950. Then the slap in the head: his daughter, Lily, was born on May 25, 1984. What was he to make of such a link?
TWENTY-TWO
Kill Your Parents
Holed up in a one-bedroom high-rise apartment, unburdened by wife, children or mortgage, I had stripped my life down to the basics. I delivered my dying Dodge Dart through the gates of the automobile graveyard and took up walking and public transit. I quit smoking but not drinking. To face down the heavy, best travel light.
More intimate with books than women, I found perfect lovers only in the cave of sleep. My social life was sustained by a circle of male friends—Mark, Peter, Craig, Ken, Terry, Frank, Doug—but romantic forays remained few and fraught. I dated the sister of my dead friend Jay, a lively, witty Branksome Hall grad and talented artist, dimly sensing, then denying, a back channel to Sally; what exactly was I trying to resurrect?
One evening at the International Festival of Authors, the novelist John Fowles jammed my flank with a cattle prod when he mouthed the electric words: “If you want to be a writer, you must kill your parents.”
I was struggling to carve out a sane distance from my mother, erasing the wheedling-yet-imperious messages left on my answering machine. As my father’s physical health deteriorated, unresolved guilts and hatreds were revving my mother and sister up to sixties levels of intensity. If my father was predisposed by family and fate to be driven out of his mind, my mother was the last spike. Unable to acknowledge her unconscious wish for his death even as he tried to take his own life, she’d shifted the burden to my sister, who felt she had no choice but to carry it.
My mother had long since perfected the dark art of gaslighting, delivering steady digs and jabs designed to make her targets d
oubt their own perceptions of reality. One day Shelagh made the mistake of admiring a piece of jewellery our mother kept in a glass case and expressed a desire to have the maternal heirloom when the time came, not realizing that she was drawing attention to our mother’s mortality. Only weeks later, Shelagh happened to see the very same piece displayed in the window of a pawnshop. Of countless provocations, this one was a capper. Then, one day, the levee broke and mother and daughter fell into an all-out, screaming fist fight. In a sense, they had hit a new form of honesty—ugly, but honest—a shift from the covert shivs in the back, death by a thousand cuts.
My own sporadic interactions with my mother seemed to invite a truce, but her words had a way of stopping me cold.
One moment she’d blurt, almost as an accusation: “Why were you so withdrawn as a child?”
Then, in a tone of desperation: “I’d do anything for you!”
Then, accusingly (and truthfully): “We have no relationship!”
When she announced that on her death she wanted her ashes thrown off the ferry to the Toronto Islands, I thought: Why wait?
One Christmas, in a tone of accusation mixed with what seemed genuine puzzlement, my mother asked why none of her three children had presented her with grandchildren. When I ever so gently broached the subject of her historical interferences with my romantic choices, she bristled: “You’re a nasty piece of work.”
When I fished for sympathy in my next session with Peter, he simply responded, “What profiteth it a man if he confronts his mother and ends up feeling crazy?”
Of course.
* * *
—
I’d moved over to run the promotion-publicity department of the Toronto branch of Addison-Wesley, another American-owned publishing house, where I nursed hidden passions for a string of unavailable women. If I marshalled the gumption to ask out one of the available kind, I felt I had only one shot, so I had to make it perfect. Invariably my tremulous intensity leaked through the mask of enforced calm and I recreated the original maternal drama, transforming the smile on the receptive face into an expression of barely disguised alarm. Even so, what would I do if I won? Drop her? Keep her? Then what? One day over lunch, my bright female assistant offered the astute perception that like Plato, I regarded women first as an idea. I responded: “I’ll have to think about that.”
At a company Christmas party, a tall, thirty-year-old editor with charisma to burn, like Sally a daughter of a doctor, unhappily married to a corporate drone, pulled me by my tie onto the dance floor as “Let’s Get Physical” beckoned. Whatever she saw in me, I didn’t. Let’s Get Metaphysical? Back in my concrete box of an apartment, I thought of the wisdom of Zorba the Greek: “There is one sin God will not forgive: if a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.”
In the summer of 1988, I hosted the twentieth reunion of the Odyssey. This time, I stood with nine others for the photo shoot—Ross, Dave, Sean, Stu, Rich, Marywinn, Nick and Jane—one fewer than the 1978 reunion. The party proved an inert affair; I was holding on, but why and to what end?
* * *
—
After a decade in book publishing, I was fired in the spring of 1989 because I’d confronted a Nurse Ratched–like administrator who routinely bullied the high and the low with impunity. It proved a blessing in disguise. I went to work as an editor on a new trade magazine founded by my friend Mark. Once I was back in journalism, the buttery piano keys of the Mac computer rekindled the writing I had neglected like a bad child, and my life path was reset.
On my thirty-ninth birthday, I hesitantly accepted a honey-toned invitation to travel the six subway stops north to my mother’s semi-detached house near Yonge and Eglinton for a dinner with her, my brother and sister. She served Orange Crush, hot dogs and chips in a jokey reference to childhood birthdays, and I was made to feel nine, not thirty-nine. At precise ten-minute intervals, my oldest and closest friends walked through the door, one by one, unfolding a slow, seamlessly orchestrated surprise party. I was a lobster in a pot, boiling by degrees.
Has she de-crypted my address book? I wondered, for she had never met most of my non-UCC friends, as they were hatched outside the Toronto WASP nest. I come close to admiring the disarming, clandestine deception of the stealth attack—in certain parts of the Upper Canadian universe, you don’t know you’ve been fucked until you’re nine months pregnant. But mostly I was creeped out by her gambit, playing the gracious chatelaine in an attempt to telegraph to my friends that no matter what I might have told them, she was not the reincarnation of Lady Macbeth.
One night I dreamed of my mother slipping seductively between the sheets of my bed and whispering, “Do you want me to leave?” When I was young, she had never ventured to my bedside and now this? What would have been life to the boy was now death to the man, and within the dream state I was tongue-tied.
Weeks later, when the disturbing incestuous dream recurred, I was able to muster the feeble words, “I’d rather you didn’t.” When I saw the film Dead Poets Society, I was moved by the scene of the English master goading the petrified prep boy to let fly with a Whitmanesque yawp. In the boy I saw a replica of myself. The unconscious mind is relentless, but so was my drive to decipher it in my sessions with Peter. When I dreamed of my mother’s bedroom invasion a third time, I was able to scream in her face, blasting her out of the bed and the room. I was decoding the Ultrasecret, my mother the spy, cell by cell.
In a do-or-die moment with her on the telephone, I took a deep breath and stood my ground. Most men are lucky if they reach a semblance of maturity by the age of forty, and I was feeling lucky. I spelled out my terms of disengagement: unless she backed off to a prescribed distance, she risked losing a son permanently, with no chance of reconciliation.
“Are you prepared to live with that?” I asked. “It’s your decision.”
In her wavering silence I sensed she knew that if she forced my hand, I would, in fact, play it.
The harassing, backbiting phone calls stopped, but my mother never forgave me for shredding the unconscious script and cutting loose from the family emotional plague. In the moment I stopped standing in for her husband, I started becoming myself.
* * *
—
Although eighteen months younger, my brother had always felt like a fraternal twin. For all our family griefs, he had carved out a rewarding career in business, and I appreciated his steady decency and dependability, his dry ironic wit and a subtle psychic radar no doubt born of our early childhood isolation.
As we talked one night over dinner in a downtown restaurant, I sensed the cross-currents of my life coming to a head in the form of a book I thought I wanted to write. I had recently devoured Studs Terkel’s oral history Working, a collection of tape-recorded and transcribed subjective voices ranging from hookers to hockey players, bus drivers to bank presidents, on the theme of work. Everyone was potentially a walking storybook and all they needed was a competent listener. Terkel’s voices delivered a sense of alienation worthy of Karl Marx: most people hated what they did for a living.
What if I applied Terkel’s technique to the alumni of the country’s most prestigious and exclusive private school and left it up to the reader of the book to interpret the stew of voices? I could slip through the gates of the male, monied, macho, monarchical, military, corporate hierarchy. But I wouldn’t treat them like objects, as I had been; I’d treat them like subjects, with unique voices. In fact, together we might even change the subject.
In his apartment bunker, my lithium-dampened, zombie-eyed, TV-addicted father, haunted by the mad end of his own father, was swirling down a slow drain to meet him. On my sporadic visits, I was a paragon of gentle diplomacy, sifting for clues to the paternal generational mysteries, but he gave nothing away except his own pathos; in our silent movie, there were no speaking parts.
During his first mid-life breakdown, I had seen my father fall into a state of abject vulnerability, reaching out for help like a wounded
child. There was something hopeful about it, something very sixties: he was fed up with the false life thrust upon him and wanted to change. At this critical, revolutionary moment, he was reachable, and as a teenager I sensed it. Breakdown can be breakthrough.
But he became a victim of shocking psychiatric malpractice and learned a final lesson: to never again permit himself an iota of vulnerability. Naively I kept returning to the well, hoping to revive the gentle, sensitive, witty man I’d glimpsed under the armour, but we had no historical ground on which to stand. My tactful attempts to stir memories of his own father, the eminent man who had killed himself, shaming the family, only raised the drawbridge; in fact, my very presence posed a threat, as it had from my birth, because it triggered the loathed emotional vulnerability. In the reflection of his wily, wary eyes I saw myself, the subversive son failing to spark the conversation that might set us free.
During his declining months, I reached a point when I realized, as with my mother, that I had nothing to lose. When I confronted him for his maltreatment of my too-eager-to-please sister, I broke a long-standing taboo by going to bat for a sibling. Mortified, he rocketed out his chair and dragged me up and down the corridor of his apartment building to work off his agitation; like my mother, he neither tolerated nor forgave direct talk.
Dreaming Sally Page 23
