Still, it was only through a number of mishaps and misunderstandings that the offer ever came to be made to me. The first and decisive one being a coronary thrombosis which hospitalized the instructor hired to conduct the Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter, or COCWE, as those of us in adult continuing education like to think of it. Under such unforeseen and pressing circumstances, any warm body that was reasonably punctual and could plausibly imitate semi-literacy would do.
Initially, however, I was very suspicious of the offer. I naturally presumed that the whole thing was a tasteless joke cooked up by a cadre of Victoria’s vindictive little chums. Such offers are made to people like me only in jest. But the longer I played along with the woman on the other end of the line, the clearer things became, and the greater my horror grew with the realization that she was serious. Apparently I had met her at one of those benefits for Central American freedom fighters at which Victoria used to demand my attendance. Not only had she remembered my name, she had also remembered my spurious and likely drunken claim to be a man of letters.
It was a claim I was driven to make in those long-ago days when my wife supported me in indolent ease. Pasha Ed was how my jealous male acquaintances used to refer to me. Others were less kind. My embarrassment at being unemployed prompted the idea of passing myself off as a writer. Also, by then I knew the idea of going to Greece was beyond reviving. Posing as a writer wouldn’t encourage Victoria to make me prove I was one.
At the time the whole world seemed intensely interested in what I was up to. Election enumerators quizzed me on my occupation; sales clerks inquired after my place of business when I tried to write a cheque for a purchase. People I was introduced to at parties turned vocational counsellor when they learned I was unemployed. My doctor, while thumping my sternum, absent-mindedly asked me how I like my job. What do you do? I seemed to get that question every time I turned around. The truth was I didn’t do anything.
But, I asked myself, if you could do something what would you do? Unhesitatingly I answered, write.
There it was. The esteem in which I had always held authors and the pleasure their books had given me only confirmed my decision. To make such a claim, in France, say, would have been base, despicable. Masquerading there as an écrivain entails little risk or hardship for an impostor. France names streets and avenues after its authors. It is a country where the public raised a furor over Rodin’s statue of Balzac, incensed that the great man had not been done justice in bronze. In Canada, however, writing, like soldiering, is an occupation for those young men for whom all hope has been abandoned.
So I decided to impersonate a writer. An act of defiance like my stubbornly persisting in launching the shot in the teeth of the laws of gravity and my own nature during those sweltering afternoons in a deserted suburban park. For anyone who cared to listen I was a writer. When asked where I published my short stories (I was, I said, a short-story writer at work on a novel), I told them The Paris Review. The name didn’t mean anything to Victoria’s friends but it made me feel I’d arrived. My policy, if asked how to find one of my stories, was to cite a reference at least two years back. And seem vague. “I think,” I’d say, “it was Vol. 9, No. 7. Or was it Vol. 7, No. 9? Anyway, if you do a little digging it won’t be hard to find. It’s called ‘Les Arbres de Stockholm’.” There was no risk. Nobody could care less. Nobody ever bothers.
But obviously I had made some impression on that woman, at least to the extent that in a moment of crisis she found herself offering me two hundred and fifty dollars a month to take a group of tyro scribblers under my wing Every Second Bloody Fucking Tuesday. Two hundred and fifty dollars a month is what I pay in rent for this miserable hole I am squatting in.
A restless conscience almost led me to confess my charlatanry, and I almost refused the job. I almost said: “Look, lady, I am not now and never have been a writer. I am sorry for the inconvenience the delusions I was suffering under at that time of my life have caused you now. I am very sorry.”
But wait a minute, Ed, clamoured the voice of reason. How can you say you’re not a writer? When Victoria abandoned ship, didn’t you produce a 75,000-word western about Sam Waters, buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and quick-fisted marshal? Of course you did. And he who writes a novel, is he not a novelist? Just so. And should the sweat and labour and grief and tears of a novelist go unrewarded? Not if there’s any justice in this world they shouldn’t. For the moment this ingenious line of argument sufficed. I accepted the position as leader of the Community Outreach Creative Writing Encounter.
Of course, when examined, my attempts to justify accepting the job didn’t hold water. The 75,000 words I had scrawled didn’t amount to a book. There was more justice in describing my process of creation as a case of automatic handwriting than its product as a novel. What I wrote in that desperate time after Victoria had announced she had had enough of me was patterned on the childhood fantasies that had sustained me through the misery and indignity of being fat, awkward, and a mouth-breather. Translated by imagination into Chingachgook, or D’Artagnan, or Vercingetorix, or Huck, I had been able to forget the taunts and heavy-minded impertinences of the neighbourhood morons who followed me gleefully while I waddled along crimson-faced with self-loathing and murderous anger.
So leathery Sam Waters, with his laconic speech, his deliberating, cold eyes, his stunning, lightning-quick fists, was the sort of fantastically potent icon that cuckold Ed’s vulgar, wounded ego would create. A tough hombre who could gentle a mustang or a cantina spitfire; a grave, slouching, lean figure to be found propped against doorposts and fence-rails, Stetson tipped over his eyes as he coolly waited for the drover to walk out of the orange ball of sun burning at the end of an empty street. A man whose courage was so serene and incorruptible that the calculation of odds never entered into his decisions to uphold and protect the good, the true, the beautiful. The Sam Waters I had struck from the base metals of my mind would have bellied up to the bar with Socrates and asked for a shot of that there hemlock too, pardner.
Despite my fervid admiration for this cowpoke there was something about Sam that troubled me, like a face one knows but cannot place. He came to the page too easily, fully formed. Sitting there in my dingy apartment, the bass of a neighbour’s stereo thudding distantly like a voodoo drum, the first paragraph of Cool, Clear Waters had come to me all in a rush.
Sam Waters had been a plainsman, a buffalo hunter, a wind-drinker, a free man, before he became the sheriff of Constitution. And because of the long vistas he had looked steadily into and the clean rain he had tasted, he didn’t care much for towns. Sam Waters was too big a man to feel easy in towns. They made him feel pinched and cramped and restless. And the worst thing about them was that their smells made it difficult for him to breathe, and no town smelled worse than Constitution, because Constitution stank with the worst smell of all – hypocrisy.
I will not comment on the deficiencies of this passage. I will only say I wrote these words with a sense of exhilarating release, as if an aching tooth had been torn from a tender, swollen gum. But even then I felt a prickly uneasiness linger. I could not shake the feeling that I knew this man. I believed we shared a history.
My attachment to Sam, however, could not compensate for the ludicrousness of my calling myself a writer. Of course, I skated over all such thin spots with extreme care during my chat with he extension officer. When I said my book hadn’t had a wide readership I wasn’t being modest. I was leading her to infer that a small but nevertheless select audience had savoured my prose with much appreciative smacking of lips.
The truth was, the book had never been published, hadn’t even been submitted to a publishing house. As far as I knew, its readership consisted of myself, and possibly, just possibly, Victoria. For on completing my sagebrush magnum opus, I had mailed my absent wife a photostat copy of the manuscript, a palpable refutation of her charge that I was incapable of completing anything I began. But I doubt Victoria read it. Sh
e was full of hard feelings at the time.
Which puts me in mind of the eight unread student manuscripts stowed under my bed. There will be no more flinching from duty, Ed. I patter off on bare feet to my bedroom, drop on all fours, and peer under the bed. My breathing becomes stertorous and sets long, serpentine boas of slut’s wool to eddying along the floor. I ought to vacuum.
There they are: the inevitable television scripts for Three’s Company, Dallas, Dynasty, or Taxi; a short story or two; and the latest instalment of Dr. Mandelstam’s bewildering novel about a dog who acquires, through surgery, the disgusting habits of homo sapiens. Dr. Vlady volunteered to me the provenance of this work. “You knowit Mikhail Bulgakov boog?” he demanded. “Wall, this boog is ironic rewerse!” To which I nodded sagely, even though I had not the slightest understanding of what he was talking about.
Only Stanley Rubacek never hands in material, secure in the knowledge of his own genius. And mine possibly, too. He tells me there is nothing doing until we reach an agreement. So I have no idea of what he is writing. Not that I care.
Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday finds Stanley barricaded behind his stack of smudged and bleary foolscap. It is my custom, when desperation overtakes me and I am at a loss what to do next, to call upon a member of COCWE to read from his manuscript. Discussion then follows. Stanley has always politely but firmly refused to read. He fears plagiarism.
Stanley spends his time in class brooding over his pile of manuscript, bulging shoulders hunched protectively, forearm shielding its southern approaches from prying eyes. Occasionally he plies a vigorous pencil when visited by the divine afflatus. Rubacek writing sounds like someone wire-brushing old paint off house siding. It has entered my mind that he may be dangerous.
A kind of general dread coalesces into a heavy lump in the pit of my stomach whenever I think of Every Bloody Second Fucking Tuesday. In my mind’s eye I can see the long corridor which leads me to room 31, and the reflected light lying in waxy puddles down its length of polished tile. If I walk this corridor with energy and business-like purpose my heels ring out like a doomed man’s. Also my students hear me coming. So Every Second Tuesday I walk soft-footed the first five yards, creep-slide the next ten, and steal on tiptoe the final five. Then I hover indecisively outside the door of the classroom, trying to compose myself and rehearsing my opening remarks, while one distracted ear fills with the hum of voices filtering through the door of room 31.
Opening remarks are crucial. I always mean to begin critically, yet end encouragingly. That, I believe, is the formula. Still, it never fails that the moment I enter that room, whatever I meant to say flies clear out of my head. All I can think of is confession. Public confession. I feel an overwhelming need to make a clean breast of it and lift from my stooping shoulders their trust, their admiration, their dreams. I want to tell them I never sold scripts to Magnum P.I. or “took a meeting with Tom Selleck in a cabana at a Hollywood poolside.” And, I want to say, neither will any of you.
But that would be terrible all the way round. So I have stood for long minutes before their uplifted faces trying to recover those lost words, turning over manuscripts, fumbling aimlessly in my briefcase, buying time as I ransack a vacant mind.
Confess, I think.
My long silences always produce terrifying doubts in their minds. They take them as a sign of displeasure at their efforts. The room fills with the nervous musk of schoolrooms and courtrooms, of places where people are called upon to defend themselves before the powerful and capricious. The pale girl at the back of the room, incapable of blanching whiter, seems to yellow. The overhead lights glitter in Dr. Mandelstam’s wire-framed spectacles and his gold tooth glimmers wanly in a fixed and artificial smile. The fat ladies stare at their broken, scuffed shoes or examine, against columnar thighs, fingers that look like Vienna sausages.
You have to say something, I remind myself, growing more and more anxious.
Only Stanley Rubacek sits massively self-confident behind his life’s work, scratching his scalp through thinning hair, showing as he does a floral tattoo on the back of his left hand. He can’t be more than five years older than I, but there are deep lines cut in his cheeks and he has lost his teeth; I sometimes catch his upper plate slipping. His gaze is always direct. Come on, let’s strike a deal, his expression seems to say to me.
I cannot find a path between confession, the truth, and lies. And so I hear myself saying, “These are wonderful. A source of inspiration I will carry with me to my own typewriter. Well done, one and all.”
Suddenly, Dr. Mandelstam’s gold tooth blazes forth like the sun, nearly blinding me.
5
Hideous Marsha’s father has installed her in one of those trendy condominiums which in the past few years have risen near the river. They replaced the old three-storey houses which decayed in lock-step with the elderly widows who lacked the means to maintain them. At first these houses were chopped into tiny suites, warrens for university students and welfare recipients, but the widows finally died and their heirs loosed the developers’ bulldozers for the coup de grâce. With the houses went the elms and mountain ashes which mingled their leaves in high Gothic vaults that turned the narrow streets of July into long naves of shadow streaked by sunlight rich and yellow-white as cream. Victoria and I inhabited one of those dying houses when we were first married. On summer evenings we strolled those streets while unseen sparrows chorused above in the breeze-swung branches. I miss those quiet, green stretches.
It was during our walks down our lovely street that I attempted to stonewall the trip to Greece. The argument ran on for weeks.
“Ed, what do you mean we don’t have enough money? We have the cash we got as wedding presents, and we have the money we’ve saved. It’s enough.”
“I don’t want to get halfway into my book and have to come back. I want to see it right through to the end, without interruptions.”
“You will, Ed. Just relax.”
“Next year. We’ll go next fall.”
“We’ll go this fall.”
“Half of that money is mine, Victoria. I have some say.”
“Nowhere near half of the money is yours. I’m the one who punched the keys at the checkout all last winter, remember?”
“Why can’t you be reasonable about this? What’s the rush?”
“I want to live, Ed!” She said that so vehemently and with such a rush of colour to her face that I almost surrendered before her desire for experience, for life. But I succeeded in steadying myself. I was not going to risk everything. I had no intention of jeopardizing what I had: Victoria, the trees lining the street, the elegant old houses that wrenched my heart. In the end I wore her down. We would work another year; the extra money would allow us to live like kings in Greece. I think she believed we were still going even three years later. It was only when she suggested we have a baby that I knew she had given up on the idea of Greece.
It is a different street now. The condos which supplanted the trees and houses come in two styles. They are what I like to call Babylonian ziggurat, an industrial hymn to concrete, and the more homely Zuni-pueblo preferred by the under-forties. The pueblo is, of course, where Marsha is to be found. Sitting in my car looking at those huge, jumbled cubes and their glowing windows I feel more keenly the cold and my exhaustion. The Encounter went badly tonight. Or to put it another way, it went so splendidly that I am wrung by remorse.
At six o’clock tonight, an hour before the curtain went up on COCWE, I suddenly recalled with panic that two weeks ago I had promised the class, at their insistence, to read to them this Tuesday from my work in progress. Since no such work exists, this was a foolish promise. Earlier I had got around their questions as to why they couldn’t find my first novel in libraries or bookstores by bemoaning my publisher’s small press run and explaining that the company had quickly let the book lapse out of print. But I had also spoken casually about a work in progress. This was my undoing. As the weeks passed, the cla
ss importuned me to treat them to a selection. Of course, I could have dodged the issue somehow. Upon reflecting, however, I have surmised I may have unconsciously made that promise to entrap myself, to furnish myself with the opportunity for an oblique confession. My commitment to read would force me to write something, and reading what I wrote would reveal me for the fraud I am. I would be eased.
That was only the first step. The second followed inevitably from my nature. I forced this onrushing unpleasantness out of my mind, delayed, dawdled, forgot. So tonight I had nothing to read, nothing except Cool, Clear Waters. But when the crisis was upon me I knew I couldn’t read that. Sam Waters was too private, too cherished, a figure to run the risk of having him exposed to sniggers.
There was nothing else to do but cheat. I hammered out at my typewriter a passage from a book I thought it unlikely anyone in the class had read, an historical novel by Alfred Duggan. Tonight, when I was done reading and I glanced up at those exalted faces, I knew, with a rending sensation, that they had loved it. All but Stanley, that is. The fat ladies expressed awe at my erudition (destrier, hauberk, etc.), while Dr. Vlady judged my battle scene surpassed only by Stendhal’s account of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma. I was a hit with nary a tip of the old topper to Mr. Duggan.
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