The Progress of This Picture Is the Progress of My Soul
I SHOULD MENTION THAT in Halifax they’re filming a movie based on my marriage to Elizabeth and her murder, basically our life together. I think that’s an accurate way to describe the subject of the movie. Though if someone had said, in regard to how this movie got made in the first place, “You’ve whored out your life,” I’d have to accept the accusation. When Elizabeth Church was murdered, we had $58 in our savings account. I am just stating facts here. I had a financial situation. My last royalty statement from my first novel (I Apologize for the Late Hour) had amounted to $28. So I borrowed $1,000 from an uncle on my mother’s side who lived in Regina (“We’ve never been close,” he’d said, “but all right”), and paid him right back when Pentagonal Films bought, for $125,000, as the contract read, “all rights to the story of the marriage, the murder, and its aftermath.” And I signed it with eyes wide open, remorse already in place. Pentagonal, which was based in Toronto, assigned the project to a director-screenwriter named Peter Istvakson. I met with him a few times and found him the most severe example of a wonder-of-me type I’ve ever seen. “The progress of this picture will be the progress of my soul”—he actually said this while we were having coffee in my old haunt, Cyrano’s Last Night. I mean, who talks like that? A real dunce. Go sit in the corner with your dunce cap on, dunce.
The production’s been up and running for about three weeks now. The cast and crew are set up at the Essex Hotel on Argyle Street. Definitely something perverse in that choice, since that’s where Lizzy was murdered. “The hotel manager, Mr. Isherwood, was disgusted, but the hotel’s owner gave us the best rates,” Istvakson’s assistant, Lily Svetgartot, told me on the telephone. “He figured having a film crew and all those actors and actresses around would help soften what happened to Elizabeth in the public’s conscience. Well, a hotel is a business, after all.”
Just yesterday, Lily Svetgartot telephoned again. “Mr. Istvakson prays you’ll soon visit the shoot,” she said. I immediately arranged for an unlisted phone number for my cottage. The “shoot,” I’m told, is any location at which the movie is being filmed. Prays, does he?
Night has fallen; full moon; the tide is out. What makes me feel homicidal toward Istvakson is something else he told the Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “I no longer think in sentences.” Like he’s transcended language and risen to a higher plane of regard—cinematic images. Gulls tonight are ghosting the shore, along with the occasional petrel. I’ve been studying the field guide, but I don’t know the birds around Port Medway all that well yet. The ones I’m looking at outside my kitchen window might be Franklin’s gulls, little gulls, laughing gulls, or black-headed gulls. Bonaparte’s gulls, mew gulls, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, Iceland gulls, great black-backed gulls, glaucous gulls, Sabine’s gulls, or ivory gulls. Because all of these frequent Nova Scotia.
Anyway, in just a short while, my sweater and buckled fisherman’s boots on—purchased at a church yard sale, perfect fit—I’ll walk down to the beach and wait for Elizabeth.
Based on a True Story
“I WANTED YOU TO know,” Peter Istvakson said one evening at Cyrano’s Last Night before the movie started production, “publicity is planning to advertise our film as being ‘based on a true story.’” He set out a mock-up of the poster. The title of the movie was apparently Next Life. “You haven’t even started making this movie and there’s already a poster?” I said.
“No final decision’s been made,” he said. “I have final approval.”
In conversations leading up to principal photography—the first day of actual film production—Istvakson used certain pet phrases, and besides making me cringe, these phrases struck me as being encoded: they sounded one way but meant something else, and they seemed to have a deep hostility toward language itself. I suppose they were the standard-issue currency of the movie business, since finally these phrases conveyed nothing. My favorite example of this, which I wrote down in a notebook, was “It’s not a yes but it’s not a no.” He said that one a lot. At various times it applied to (1) whether the recently famous Canadian actress Emily Kalman had accepted the role of Elizabeth (she had); (2) whether Next Life Might Be Kinder would be the title (no); (3) whether Matsuo Akutagawa, who had won international awards, would sign on to work with Istvakson again as cinematographer or remain in a rest hospital on the Sea of Japan (he did sign on); and (4) whether I would, as I had requested, be granted leave of my contractual obligation to “provide additional dialogue upon request” (an attorney got me out of that).
“What ‘based on a true story’ means,” Istvakson said, “is my film will tell what really happened, only better.”
A Writer Has to Have an Address
A WRITER HAS TO have an address, a place to put a desk, a typewriter, stamps, and envelopes, a place to cook a meal in the middle of the night. It is as simple as that. Thirteen months ago, I committed to purchasing this cottage pretty much sight unseen, except that I’d studied the photographs of the interior and the surrounding five acres which Philip and Cynthia sent after I had seen their advertisement in the Chronicle-Herald and telephoned them to express definite interest. Four days after that conversation, I telephoned them a second time, from the Essex Hotel, and spoke with Philip for a few minutes, at which point he said, “Why not drive out today and have a look?”
“I already know I want it,” I said. “I can meet your price.”
“All this just from the photographs?”
“Yes. I hope I don’t sound like a nut case.”
“Let’s just say you’re decisive. Still, why not drive out?”
“I’m on my way. Just give me the directions.”
I shifted the phone to my other ear, to make it easier to write.
“Ready? Take 103 East,” he said. “You’ll be on 103 for more than an hour. Get off 103 at exit 5. The exit sign will say Route 213, Peggy’s Cove and St. Margaret’s Bay. I think one of the signs preceding it mentions the airport. When you get off at exit 5, you come to a stop sign. Take a left back over 103. It may be marked with an airplane symbol. Take 213 for nine or ten miles. Turn left onto 102 North. Just before you arrive at the turn, there’s a sign saying 102 South, Halifax. You don’t want that. You continue under the viaduct and take a left on 102 North. Be careful when you make this turn—there are often cars coming toward you. Take 102 North for about fifteen miles. Get off at exit 6. In case you get lost, our telephone number is 646-354-1110.”
Tonight I saw Elizabeth again. At about ten o’clock I had walked across the road and down to the horseshoe-shaped beach. There was enough moonlight to illuminate the shoreline. Though the far end of the beach, at the start of the tree-filled peninsula, was in shadow, a stretch of about thirty meters was clearly visible. Looking behind me, I could see Cynthia and Philip sitting close to each other on their sofa. I could see the bookshelves behind them. I could see they were drinking wine. I could see the flickering of the television screen reflected in the wide bay window. Turning back to the water, I saw that Elizabeth was on the beach.
We Are Married
ELIZABETH AND I were married on January 14, 1972. We got a marriage license from a deputy issuer, found a justice of the peace, Irwin Abershall, and arranged for a room in the city hall, 1841 Argyle Street. It was a bitterly cold day, snowing lightly, and the wind, up from the harbor, found even the side streets. Still, on our walk to city hall Lizzy and I held bare hands inside her coat pocket. “I love this old building,” she said when we walked up the stairs. “But there are pigeons on the roof, which means the insulation up there isn’t as good as it should be. On the other hand, that’s nice for the pigeons.”
We needed a legal witness, so we asked Marie Ligget, Lizzy’s dear friend, a waitress at Cyrano’s Last Night, and she was there right on time, four-thirty P.M., and was more dressed up than Elizabeth and I. After the exchange of mismatched antique rings (bought at Harborfront Pawn) and vows, Marie Ligget went direct
ly back to work, and Elizabeth and I checked into room 50 at the Essex Hotel. We had already secured room 58—a four-room suite—where we would begin our life together. But we felt that it would be more romantic to spend our wedding night in a different room, even though it was at the other end of the same floor. We had a light dinner, soup and a baguette, and polished off a bottle of wine, in the small restaurant off the lobby. The only customers. Late that evening, after we had made love, I was reclining in the bathtub. Elizabeth appeared naked in the bathroom doorway, holding a lit candle in an old-fashioned candle holder, with a curved handle and wax catcher at the base, and after what she said, I thought I’d lose my breath from laughing. Nodding her head toward the bedroom, then languorously moving her free hand across her breasts, then down along her hips, she said, in her best Mae West imitation, “That was very nice. But next time, let’s try it without all the mistakes.”
The Victorian Chaise Longue
TWO MORNINGS AFTER our wedding, at about eight-thirty, there was a knock at the door. We were now set up in our apartment, room 58. We only had a bed, a desk, a rocking chair in the living room, and four ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table. Elizabeth opened the door. I was sitting at the table having coffee. This was the first time we’d laid eyes on Alfonse Padgett. He looked about fifty; later I learned he was forty-three. He wore his bellman’s uniform with epaulets, a bellman’s cap, and trousers with a dark stripe that ran the length of the legs. He was roughly six feet tall, handsome though a bit gaunt, his black hair was slicked back, and he had a noticeable scar, about three inches long, horizontal as a natural furrow, on his forehead. Above his left breast pocket Mr. Padgett was stitched in gold cursive. “A Mrs. Lattimore?” he said, then checked a piece of paper. “I have the right room, don’t I?”
“Yes, you do,” Elizabeth said. Then she did an odd thing. Lizzy had on a Dalhousie University sweatshirt, jeans, and black tennis shoes and socks, but immediately went and put a sweater on. The radiators were working nicely, and the apartment was well heated. Looking back, I don’t comprehend this in some mystical way, like she was feeling a premonitory chill at the sight of Alfonse Padgett. It’s just that the sweater didn’t seem necessary. When she came back to the living room she said, “I take it you’re delivering my chaise longue?”
“Brought it up on the service lift,” he said. He stepped aside and we could see the chaise longue in the hallway. My thought was that he must be physically strong to move furniture like this. He then picked it up and carried it into the living room and set it down. Then he said something definitely off-tilt: “Some men get to carry a bride over the threshold. Me, a musty old piece of furniture, eh?” He left without another word, shutting the door behind him. We more or less shrugged this incident off. Elizabeth looked so happy to see the chaise longue.
“Did you see the name?” Elizabeth said. “Mr. Padgett.”
“Now I get to sit on the chaise longue you’ve been telling me so much about.”
“Well, we have to break it in,” Elizabeth said. She slid the sweater off over her head and then, her hair now disheveled, began to lift the sweatshirt off.
“Elizabeth, you said it was from Victorian times. There’s a good chance it’s already been broken in.”
“Not by us, darling. Not by us newlyweds. T-shirt now fallen to the floor, she was naked from the waist up. She bunched up her hair and held it above her head, and whenever she held her hair up that way, it was my fall from grace. “I’m going to take the rest of my clothes off and we’ll lie down on this Victorian chaise lounge. And later . . . But let’s give it some time. I’m going to tell you all about how I discovered Marghanita Laski, okay? And especially her novel The Victorian Chaise-Longue. Because you’ll want to know all the details. And I’m ready to tell you. I know what you’re thinking, that there’s not room enough for both of us, but you know what? There’s room enough if we fit ourselves together.”
Elizabeth removed her shoes and socks, her jeans and panties. I got out of my clothes, too, adding to the pile on the kitchen floor. I lay down on the chaise longue. With her legs around my hips, Elizabeth slid me into her. She leaned forward, her breasts against my chest, her arms tight around my neck and shoulders, moving to her rhythm, which became mine. “I’m all jostled and alert, but maybe not. I’m just not sure,” she said. Fragments, like things said in sleep. I don’t know where they came from. I believe she was speaking to me, though maybe as much to herself. Attempting to turn over in tandem, we almost fell off the chaise longue but managed not to. Then her legs were around my shoulders, and she pulled me deep inside and said, “I was so thirsty and now I’m not”—somehow these non sequiturs intensified everything—“but I will be,” and then, trembling convulsively, “I’m there,” and then I was.
It wasn’t more than three minutes, our breaths ratcheting down to near normal, before she said, “Stay inside me, okay? You know, for as long as you can.” We lay side by side, her leg stretched over mine, and she was speaking over my shoulder, more or less into the maroon velvet back of the chaise longue, with its ornate wooden framework and equally ornate wooden legs. “I’d put things off. I had to find a topic for my dissertation at Dalhousie quickly. I mean in a week. My professors were on my case. I don’t blame them. They wanted good things for me. I spoke with my adviser, Professor Auchard. Auchard asked if there was anyone whose novels I secretly loved. Putting it a bit provocatively, I thought, but I knew he meant novels that I thought were excellent but nobody much talked about, let alone taught them. He wanted me to discover someone new on his behalf, I think. I understood that right away. I thought that was great. So I said, Yes, Marghanita Laski’s novels. And I was so, so happy that he had never heard of Marghanita Laski, and here I’d thought he’d read everything.”
“Is Marghanita Laski still alive?” I said.
“Yes, she lives somewhere in England, I think. I actually met her. I went to Europe and met her. It all started with a letter I wrote to her.”
“Why write her in the first place?”
“See, The Victorian Chaise-Longue was published in 1953. I first read it when I was eighteen, my first week at Dalhousie. I’d found a Penguin paperback—you know, with the orange cover—in a bin at a library sale. Fifteen cents, I think. I picked it up, read the back cover, which I still can recite by heart: ‘In this short, eerie novel a young mother who is recovering from tuberculosis falls asleep on a Victorian chaise-longue and is ushered into a waking nightmare of death among strangers.’ I’m telling you, darling, with just that I was hooked.
“But my letter, maybe four or five handwritten pages, was all about the fact that I’d found a real Victorian chaise longue. Found it in a shop on Water Street. I told her I used my holiday money from my parents to purchase it. Told her it was my one piece of furniture, besides my bed and student desk, in my room across from Dalhousie. I told her I sometimes slept on it.”
“Were you surprised she wrote back?”
“Yeah, I didn’t expect to hear from her. And when I told Professor Auchard about the exchange of letters, he said, ‘You’ve found your topic.’ And so I had.”
“Yes, and now you’re on page eighty-six.”
Since Elizabeth’s death, I have read the manuscript a dozen times. That is, up to page 193, the page she was on when she died. In fact, Lily Svetgartot mentioned to Peter Istvakson that she’d noticed the unfinished dissertation on my work desk the first time she visited me at my cottage (as an uninvited guest), and the director immediately wanted to see it. Lily Svetgartot wrote me a note stating that Istvakson “needs to know everything possible there is to know. He’d very much appreciate reading the dissertation.” But I refused.
Marghanita Laski
With Dr. Nissensen, November 7, 1972:
In my session today I told Dr. Nissensen that two nights back, Elizabeth, after setting out books on the beach, had said, “Sam, I’m up to page two hundred five,” which meant that she was continuing to work on her disserta
tion.
“I see,” Dr. Nissensen said. “Where do you imagine she does her writing? Perhaps she’s taken a room near Port Medway.”
“Perhaps she has. And your tone just now—go fuck yourself. I feel like leaving.”
“I meant it as an inquisitive tone, Mr. Lattimore. We’re still learning what not to take too personally in here, aren’t we.”
“I take everything personally. Why else would I want to talk with you?”
“My apologies. I promise to be more aware of my tone.”
“I take the weather personally. I take that Van Gogh drawing on your wall personally.”
“I understand,” Nissensen said. I tried to decipher what he wrote in his notebook; it might’ve been just the word “personally.”
The title Elizabeth chose for her dissertation was The Preoccupations of Marghanita Laski. She had tried out a lot of subtitles, but finally decided each one rationalized rather than clarified. For example, one evening she set down her pencil (she wrote her first draft in longhand in blue exam notebooks) and said, “How about ‘Metaphor as Passion in The Victorian Chaise-Longue’? No, see what I mean? That’s shit. If a title’s good, it doesn’t need a subtitle, right?” Elizabeth wanted eventually to teach in university. “Cardiff University or Swansea, those are my first choices, but I’d also love for us to try living in Edinburgh—someday, I mean. But that’s all in the future.”
Next Life Might Be Kinder Page 2
