Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  She was surprised, a bit hurt. Men. What a study! She didn’t know what he wanted, what sort of special words, whether to make him on the Goddess or Quiver. Maybe it would take both before he’d crack open.

  The auditorium was only quarter full. Almost everyone was down close to the front. There were four panellists: a red-haired bloated face who looked stuffed into his suit like a penis in a condom; a short, balding, pathetic ponytail in sandals and denim; a wiry black man in a dark jacket trying to be dangerous; and a grey-haired, thin-lipped, post-fucking stage-of-life woman who’d shovelled herself into drab, olive pants and a tired beigy cowl-neck sweater.

  “The thing we have to remember about this period in American letters,” the woman was saying, “was that there was no international copyright law, so American publishers were simply stealing British books and magazine articles, flooding the country with cheap reprints, and thus keeping the monetary value of American writing artificially low. As you know, Poe was very involved with the fight for an international copyright, and he would have been a wealthy man if he could’ve cashed in on the popularity of some of his works, like ‘The Raven,’ for example.”

  “And it would’ve been interesting to see what kind of shift might have happened in Poe’s writing,” the stuffed man cut in, “if he’d had sufficient income. It’s quite possible, of course, that if he’d had ready access to a well-stocked liquor cabinet he’d never have lasted as long as he did or been anywhere near as productive.” There was a titter in the audience, a light squawking of birds. “Some people are beyond a doubt the authors of their own misfortunes. But just to get back to the focus of this discussion …”

  Sienna scanned the heads below her. She couldn’t see him.

  “Writers today are every bit as hungry as Poe,” the ponytail said, “if you think about it. There are hundreds of literary journals in this country and they don’t pay even the equivalent of Graham’s five-dollar page in Poe’s day. I mean, today it’s still five dollars a page, maybe ten, although many literary journals pay nothing – you’re lucky if you get a couple of contributor’s copies. Poets, of course, consider themselves lucky to be paid in toilet paper. Hardly any mass-market periodicals publish short stories any more …”

  He wasn’t there. He hadn’t bothered to phone. He wasn’t waiting for her here. She opened her notebook and on a blank page wrote:

  She heard the auditorium door open and shut behind her and felt a jolt of adrenaline. She knew but she didn’t turn her head. She wanted to be absorbed in something when he found her. There were footsteps, muffled by the carpet, but from a heavy man. She knew it was him.

  this is y this is when this is you and that was then

  Steps. She focused on the page, wondered if he’d walk right past her, not see her because his eyes were adjusting to the darkness. So she looked up, just as he gazed at her.

  But it wasn’t him. It was a tall hawk-faced man with enormous hands and patches on the elbows of his sports jacket. He saw her just as he was stepping past and he stopped in mid-stride, pulled his foot back like it was something private hanging out.

  “Is anybody sitting here?” he asked, indicating the seat beside Sienna. There were hundreds of open seats all around them.

  “Well,” she said, and stiffened.

  “I want to be able to duck out,” he said, and even though she hadn’t given her assent he added, “Thanks.”

  He was enormous and bony and didn’t seem to be able to slide past her without rubbing against her legs and examining her chest. Then when he was seated, his elbow took most of the shared armrest.

  “So, any fireworks?” he asked and looked at her notebook, which she closed immediately.

  “I got here a little late myself,” she whispered.

  “Larry Barclay, from Berkeley,” he said, and held out his enormous, bony hand, which she took reluctantly. His fingers were cold.

  “Sienna Chu,” she said. “Ottawa.”

  “Ottawa! I was there, when was that? It must’ve been 1977. Your prime minister was a rock star or something. What was his name?”

  “Pierre Trudeau,” she said. “He wasn’t a rock star. His wife hung out with rock stars.”

  “That was it!” he said, too loud. Heads far down below turned to see who was causing the disruption. “You probably weren’t even born in 1977,” he said.

  “I read about it.” Sienna sighed, tucked her chin in, clutched her notebook to her lap.

  Larry Barclay from Berkeley listened to the panellists for a few seconds, then said, in a slightly lowered voice, “You know, a lot of this is crap.”

  “I’m trying to listen,” she said.

  “Yes, of course,” he said quickly and leaned back but looked sideways at her, not down at the speakers.

  “Do you have a pen?” he asked, after a time.

  Sienna bit her lip, then felt in her purse and pulled out her spare pen.

  “Thank you.”

  The ponytail was saying, “I think Longfellow is the exception that proves the rule. That’s why Poe was so jealous of him. He married marvellously, was independently wealthy, and made money through his poetry not only by being popular, but also because he invested in publishing himself. He didn’t need the money the way that Poe did. Voices of the Night sold forty-three thousand copies. Poe was sick with envy. But it didn’t stop him from currying favour with the great man.”

  “Excuse me,” Larry said, laying his hand on her arm.

  “What?” Everything was too clear, that was a problem. Every re-entry was different. She wished she’d taken something else. That stuff that Ricky put in chewing gum that tasted like cherry. You could blur by anything, just hit fast-forward. But not now. She was stuck in crystal mode.

  “Do you have a piece of paper?” he asked.

  Sienna pulled her arm free, tore out a sheet from her notebook, and handed it over. He took it, thanked her, but had nothing solid to use as a backing. Finally he used the thin armrest, which meant having to rub his shoulder against hers. She leaned away as far as she could.

  The woman said, “I think we need to recognize that the excesses of the Longfellow War are symptomatic of a deeper imbalance within Poe’s psyche. He attacked Longfellow in print both as himself and posing as other people. He even pseudonymously praised Longfellow so that as Poe he could respond in the negative. These are all signs of extreme disjunction, the juxtaposition of his desperate literary ambitions with his agonizing struggle with poverty and the dreadful realities of the writing life.”

  Larry Barclay from Berkeley bumped Sienna’s elbow. She looked at him with impatience, wondered, What now? He handed her back the piece of paper.

  “What are you doing after this?” he’d written.

  “I think if I can interject,” the black man said. “Lorraine, you have to admit that Longfellow was a very popular but tepid poet, perhaps the equivalent in his day of a Robert Frost or a Rod McKuen …”

  There were noises of protest in the audience and the stuffed man said, “That’s just opening a can of worms, isn’t it?”

  Sienna looked at the piece of paper, felt her anger rising.

  “It was certainly a strong part of the debate during Poe’s day,” the black man countered. “Even if we condemn Poe’s methods …”

  “I was hoping I could sleep with you,” Sienna wrote back. When she handed the note over she caressed his forearm briefly. She could feel his gaze but kept her eyes trained on the speakers below. His hand immediately felt her thigh, but she stabbed him quickly with her pen.

  “Ow!” he said, but it was lost in the hubbub of the debate.

  Sienna ripped out a new sheet and wrote, “You don’t touch me. Not here.”

  Again she handed it over without looking, but didn’t brush his arm this time.

  “I don’t see why we need to bring the name of Robert Frost into this discussion,” the woman was saying. “Or Rod McKuen for that matter. The point is that Poe engineered most of the Longfellow War
as a desperate bid to build himself up by …”

  “Where?” Larry Barclay from Berkeley wrote back.

  “Tell me what you like first,” she replied.

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see him pausing for a moment, looking at the immobile side of her face. Then he set to writing as if completing a momentous essay in the dying moments of an exam. A minute later he handed over the sheet. She turned ever so slightly away, read his scrawl coolly.

  “Is that all?” she wrote on a new piece of paper.

  “Poe was out of control at the time,” the ponytail said. “People commented on it. He wrote a review of Elizabeth Barrett’s Drama of Exile that was almost schizophrenic, he was so cutting and so gushing at the same time.”

  He wrote something else, quite crude.

  “You can certainly see the same sort of loving hatchet job showing up in today’s criticism,” the stuffed man said. “Writers can be consumed by ambition and jealousy as much as any professionals, and it’s usually frustrated novelists or poets who do the reviews. Somebody did a review of my book last year …”

  “I didn’t think you would be so conventional,” she replied.

  All four panellists started squawking at once about rotten reviews their books had received.

  “What do you like?” he shot back, and she smiled softly, took her time composing her reply.

  Sienna ripped out another sheet.

  “I want you nearly cracking,” she wrote. “I want to know what REALLY turns you on.”

  “She as much as confessed in the article that she didn’t like books by men!” the stuffed man said, his voice finally drowning out the others. “And then she proceeded to trash my book! I know it has nothing to do with Poe and nineteenth-century conditions, but all I’m saying is this sort of thing goes on today. This woman – I’m not going to bring up her name, she’d probably sue me for slander – she’s a fine essayist, a brilliant mind, but there it was plain as day in her review.”

  Larry was writing in a blur now. He filled a page and handed it over, started on another, then handed it over as well. She could feel his heat and strength, the stupid, thrilling danger of the moment.

  “I don’t think this is quite the forum for discussion of sexist reviews of current literature,” the woman said. “But I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I have had books absolutely dismissed by male reviewers, when they get reviewed at all, which by the way is a far more serious, if less blatant, sort of sexual discrimination.”

  “You wait here for me,” she wrote. Then she got up without looking at him, stuffed the sheets of exchanged notes in her purse and walked off, knowing that if she bolted he would chase her, but if she simply walked at a certain speed, without looking back, he would wait and wait for her long after the lecture hall was deserted.

  15

  “Just leave your seatbelt alone, please. We’ll be home in a few minutes,” Julia said. They were in the van. Julia reached over with her right hand and snapped the clasp back in place. Her mother immediately started to fiddle with it again.

  “I would just like to know where you’re taking me!”

  “Home! We’re going home. Please, Mom.”

  “But this isn’t the way! I don’t recognize any of this!” She was trying to open the door now, pawing the unfamiliar latch, which Julia had automatically locked from the driver’s side.

  “We’re going to my home. You’re not used to the route, that’s all. Please leave the door alone.”

  “I think we should ask for directions. There’s somebody!” And she started knocking on the window as they drove past the man. “You didn’t stop!” she said. “Now we’ll never get there!”

  “I know how to get to my own home. Just relax, will you?”

  “There’s somebody!” her mother said excitedly. “We could ask him. Oh, why won’t you stop?” Her fists were doubled and then she started to cry.

  “Mother. Please.” “You never listen. You never stop to ask directions. I don’t recognize anything. Why don’t we just ask? There’s somebody!”

  They were stopped at a light now. Julia flicked on the radio to light classical music. “Why don’t you just listen for a minute?” she asked soothingly.

  “Hello! Hello!” her mother said, knocking on the window. The man, sleepy-eyed, wearing a blue tuque and a black nylon hockey jacket that said “Hawks,” was standing at a bus stop just a few feet away with a white plastic grocery bag in his hand.

  “We’re okay. I know where we’re going. I don’t need to ask directions.”

  “Hello!” Her mother’s left hand was making futile rolling motions, over and over, where the window roller would have been on an older-model car. The man looked up, started to walk over. “Oh, here he is!” her mother said. “I can’t get this window. Blast it! Here he is!”

  Julia leaned across, waved to the man dismissingly. “It’s okay. It’s all right!” He turned his ear in question, motioned to her mother to put down the window.

  “I can’t get it. Oh, this is so annoying!”

  “Fine,” Julia said angrily and she lowered the window from the driver’s side.

  “Hi, there,” the man said. He had a day’s black stubble on his cheeks.

  “Yes, hello,” her mother said, very politely. “And how are you?”

  “Fine,” he said, and smiled. “Do you need help?”

  “No thanks,” Julia said.

  “Well, it’s very kind of you to offer,” her mother said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We don’t really know.”

  “It’s all right,” Julia said.

  “We’ve been driving for hours and hours, and we thought you might know.”

  There was a horn blast from behind them. The light had turned green.

  “Thank you. Thanks!” Julia said and drove off, pushing the button to raise her mother’s window. “We’re almost there,” she said hotly. “Just relax.”

  “How can I relax? Honestly! I don’t know where we’re going, you won’t ask directions, you won’t tell me anything!”

  She’s not in her right mind, Julia thought. She always thrived on crisis anyway, there’s no need to take the bait. Julia focused on the road ahead.

  “Why can’t we ask somebody?” her mother pleaded. Then, “There’s someone! Stop! Stop!” And she started to pull on Julia’s arm.

  “You’re going to cause an accident! Just stay in your seat, please!” Julia didn’t think it would work but her mother took her hand away suddenly, sat back, and made a little miffing noise with her nose. Now they were stopped at another light.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” her mother said bitterly.

  “I know. I know. But if you could just trust …”

  “We’re driving around aimlessly for hours and hours –”

  “We have been driving precisely fifteen minutes.” Don’t respond! Julia thought even as she was blurting it out. How could she not, she wondered? Confused as this woman was, altered almost beyond recognition, those blue eyes still reached deep into Julia’s childhood, those thin shoulders had carried her long before memory, that frightened, uncertain gaze still belonged to her mother.

  “And we don’t know where we’re going. Everything is strange and unrecognizable. I have never been able to get you to ask for directions. Never! This is so typical!” Her hand was making the circling motion again, turning in the air fruitlessly. “And you are such an ass sometimes. Drinking in front of the children!”

  “What?”

  “I asked you not to, but you wouldn’t listen!”

  Julia stopped herself from responding. The light turned green. It was slow traffic, late Saturday afternoon in the Glebe, an old residential neighbourhood near downtown. The sidewalks were crammed with shoppers, young mothers pushing strollers, elderly couples looking in the shop windows, traffic stopped at every block. Julia edged the van forward into the intersection, but she wasn’t certain she could clear in time for
the next light because of a bottleneck up ahead.

  “You never took me seriously,” her mother said. “As long as I had your martini ready, that was all that mattered!”

  Inching forward. The light turned red and they weren’t quite through the intersection. But there was nowhere else to go. Nothing was moving up ahead. A pick-up truck turned left and crowded in behind them.

  “I think I can ask this man!” her mother said suddenly, and then the door was open.

  “Hello! Hello!” her mother said. She waved, then wrestled with the seatbelt, which would not let go, then waved again. “Excuse me, sir, could you help us?”

  “Close the door!” Julia snapped. She leaned over her mother’s lap but the door was too far to reach.

  “We’ve been driving for hours and hours!” her mother announced.

  Julia threw open her own door and ran around the front of the van to her mother’s side.

  “What’s the problem?” the man asked. He was an older, fairly short gentleman in a black felt coat.

  “Hours! Just hours! And we can’t find our way!”

  “It’s all right. It’s fine!” Julia said and pushed her mother’s arm and leg back in the van, locked and shut the door.

  “Where do you want to go?” the man asked.

  “She has Alzheimer’s. I know where I want to go,” Julia said and sprinted around to her side again. Cars were honking behind them; the traffic had cleared ahead and the light had turned green. She drove another block with her mother fighting for release from her seatbelt. Finally Julia parked the van on the side of the road and turned off the engine.

  “We are almost home,” she said through tense lips.