Vancouver: A novella (Wisdom Tree Book 3)

by Nick Earls

  The highway cuts at an odd angle across the town, some streets ducking under us, others hitting acutely and coming to a stop in culverts or weedy heaps of gravel. The squat cinder block building of Canadian border processing appears to the left, with limp flags of the two nations on poles outside it.

  This is a border crossing between two nations that will never go to war and, once the official work was done to put it in place, it soon became a regulation blight on the landscape.

  For another minute or two, we stay suspended above the United States or walled off from it by concrete, the mood of the border crossing process damping down conversation. Knut bends his knees and rubs his calves. He makes a teeth-sucking sound but his expression doesn’t change. Tree reflections rush across the lenses of his glasses.

  The road slips through raised verges, house roofs showing above them here and there. Blaine is lost beyond the trees now, or bypassed. We are in farming country and finally there are no barriers by the roadside.

  Janet pulls over and says, ‘Leg stretch,’ as she cranks the handbrake.

  We are on the edge of a broad area of mown grass leading to r trees and more grass growing unchecked. As I open the door, the air smells of cut grass and leaves and feels cool on my face. I should be used to Calgary October days never finding warmth, however bright they might appear. Janet is out before I am. She’s looking back down the road, feet apart, hands on hips, as if the border crossing might still be in view and meriting a show of defiance.

  Knut leaves the car one limb at a time. He lets out an audible sigh, stretches one arm and then the other, then reaches into the car again to fetch his cane. He grimaces as he straightens out one balled-up leg muscle after another.

  ‘There are constant rumours the Seattle Space Needle’s going to be attacked,’ Janet says, in the direction of the north horizon. ‘We’re jumping at ghosts now, at anything. That’s the power of this. If it’s real once...’ She scrapes the ground with the toe of her shoe. There’s a bent nail in the grass, and she kicks it towards a patch of gravel. ‘Normal’s a way off and there’s no telling yet what it’ll be.’

  ‘Hey, fresh salmon,’ Knut says, pointing with his cane at a truck parked further down the road.

  There’s a sandwich board with ‘fresh wild salmon’ written on it.

  ‘We should get some.’ He looks set to stride down there.

  ‘We have lamb, remember?’ Janet shields her eyes from the sun as she follows the line of the cane to the distant salmon truck. ‘You have that pinot noir.’

  In Calgary, the festival changed its programming to include a forum on how we, as writers, should deal with September’s terrorist attacks. We gathered in a meeting room and sat on grey plastic chairs arranged into an oval. It had the look and ambience of an AA meeting. The room’s whiteboard was backed into a corner at an angle and marked up for noughts and crosses, a single cross placed strategically in a corner before the game had been interrupted. No one should lose from there, from placing the first X in a corner.

  I had no answer to the change in the world we were coming to grips with. The way forward didn’t exist in my small interior stories. I want to build them like Swiss watches, from tinier and tinier parts, and the forum said writing was grand enough to aim in the opposite direction. This subject was the biggest canvas in the world, and we were invited to put some marks on it.

  I wondered if the best thing I could do was to continue undaunted.

  One writer said we needed an answer, a response that would count. He had lost a friend in the attacks, or a friend of a friend, and she was a beautiful lady. He kept saying it—beautiful lady—until tears ran down his face without him knowing. The children’s author next to him put her hand on his shoulder. She was sixtyish, with a grey bun and a floral skirt that went all the way to her boots. He reached up and put his hand on hers, and the forum hung there for a full minute.

  I felt I was letting him down, letting us all down, maybe, by not having some kind of writerly statement to offer. For just a moment, I wanted to know someone who had died that day. I wanted to have a better claim to be in the room. I shut my mouth—I concentrated on keeping it closed, forcing my lips together to keep this awful thought from getting out. The festivals had own me all that way, and I had turned out not to be smart after all.

  The attacks erased my US itinerary. No one wants book events, not now. It seems disrespectful to even wish that they might, but I am heading to New York anyway, after Vancouver, since I have the ticket and it seems the right thing to do, to be present, to express something in solidarity, to be less than completely cowed. A writer should have better cards to play than that.

  ‘My mother grew up in the Blitz, in London,’ I tell Janet. ‘She once saw a dog fight above her street, two Hurricanes taking down a Junkers. She called me straight after the attacks last month, telling me the terrorists would win if I didn’t come.’

  ‘It’s a crazy world we’re in,’ Knut says, letting the cane tip pivot in the grass. ‘It’s like a line got ruled, and everything’s either before that day or after it. Who knows if it’ll keep feeling that way? I’m glad you’re here. And, in the spirit of your mother’s advice, we have lamb and a fine pinot and, unless there are battleships on Lake Whatcom, I say we consume them tonight.’ He raises the cane and thrusts it into the air, as if he’s just declared independence or called cavalry to charge. ‘Legs are good, Janet. Let’s get home.’

  From the I-5 at least, Bellingham takes a long time to resolve itself into a city. We pass by neat, clean-looking factory buildings with their car parks full, then the inevitable car dealerships and chain motels set among trees. There are American flags everywhere, on flagpoles, printed and taped to the insides of office windows, on placards hammered into lawns, small plastic versions clipped into the windows of cars and flapping so fast they’re almost buzzing. It’s as if we need to remove all doubt that America is in every thought, that that September day is in every thought, still.

  The Lakewood Drive exit takes us under the highway and onto a suburban road with strip malls, and traffic lights on long arms over the road. As Janet indicates a turn, there’s a glimpse of a lake ahead of us. Lake Whatcom, calm at water, no battleships. The new road takes us into woodland with houses set well back in the trees, some hidden completely, the only sign of their existence the mailboxes on posts at driveway entrances. The woodland becomes the dark green forest of a nature reserve. Knut winds the window down to smell the sharp, clean conifer smell.

  ‘To think,’ he says, his hair buffeted by the wind, ‘in taxis around the world, people try to get that smell from a piece of cardboard swinging from their rear-view mirror.’

  The road curves around the hillside and we turn into Lost Fork Lane. Their house is timber, two-storey, with the branches of the huge trees behind it settling on its roof. It’s cream in colour, with white rails around its front deck and a matching cream two-car garage with brass carriage lamps either side of the roll-a-door.

  As we drive in, Knut says, ‘You want to email home?’ He’s confirming it more than asking.

  This time he’s not as stiff when he gets out of the car. It might be the forest air or being home, or just good luck. The wheels of my suit-case make the only noise as I pull it across the concrete. Then a bird calls out from the direction of the lake.

  ‘My office is the best spot for emailing.’ He steers me under the deck with his hand on my shoulder, cunning quadruped again. ‘Janet was planning to make tea, I think.’ He says the word ‘tea’ as if it isn’t natural. ‘Coffee or tea. We can do both. I seem to remember your parents drank a lot of tea.’

  ‘It was the seventies,’ I tell him. ‘Coffee hadn’t arrived in Brisbane then. Either would be great. I’m very happy with coffee, if you’ve got it.’

  ‘Good.’ He squeezes my shoulder and then releases it.

  We’re standing at a double glass sliding door with faded green curtains behind it. The upper level of the house is high at the
front so, once he has stooped to go inside, Knut can stand fully upright with room to spare. He looks around his office, trying to appraise it with a visitor’s eyes, house keys in one hand.

  ‘I know where everything is,’ he tells me. ‘That’s the best I can say about it.’

  A long high desk cluttered with papers runs the length of the wall nearest to me, with shelves of books above it and, turned away from the desk, as if vacated seconds before, a throne-sized chair on castors, upholstered in brown leather with separate sheepskins on the seat and back. The opposite wall has a stone replace, with wood piled ready to be lit. At the far end of the room there’s a bare timber door and, next to it, a staircase with more crammed bookshelves in the triangle beneath it.

  ‘I’ll get the coffee going,’ Janet says on her way to the stairs. ‘You can have it right away while you’re emailing, or before or after. Up to you.’

  Above the replace there’s a mantelpiece with framed photos on it, catching the daylight from the door.

  Knut notices me looking that way and says, ‘Nieces and nephews mostly. We’ve got fourteen of them. And great nieces and great nephews, too. Three so far.’

  ‘Except the one at the end. I don’t think that’s a nephew.’

  It’s a younger Knut, hands in his pockets, towering over Raymond Carver, the bare tree branches out of focus behind them. It’s not the glowering Carver seen on dust jackets. They’re both laughing, but it’s no snapshot. It’s black-and-white, from a magazine shoot, I’d guess.

  ‘Yeah.’ Knut steps towards it and picks it up. ‘That was in Iowa. We were both back there presenting at a symposium. You know it’s Ray Carver, right?’ He turns to make sure I do. ‘I was at Iowa a few years after Ray and John Cheever almost killed themselves drinking there. The fall semester of ’73, I think that was. I was under your house that year.’ He runs a finger along the top of the frame and brushes the dust away. ‘We met through Gordon Lish. He put me in Esquire, shortly before he left. Good timing. It was my first published piece. He went through me, in case you’re wondering, but no more than he went through Ray.’

  The stories of Carver’s editing by Lish are famous, the leanness of Carver’s ground-breaking short fiction a thing of Lish’s making, partly, as he stripped the writer’s work back close to half its original size, sometimes further than that. I have read both versions of some pieces and can see both sides, if there are sides. Carver’s had more heart, though perhaps more sentimentality, too. Lish cut the passionate speeches, to the bone sometimes, the characters blunted, the ordering of a cake delivered in the same tone as a car accident. I could see truth in that, though. In one note to Lish, Carver wrote that he owed him his standing and credibility, in another he begged him not to go ahead with the changes.

  I have tried to write good short stories. Carver is my Hemingway, I suppose. I’ve read everything. And here he is, in a photo with Knut.

  I can breathe in this room, in its musty pine- scented air a long, long way from any harm. Writers are not circling chairs in this room to discuss the big issues.

  Knut sets the photo back on the mantelpiece, keeping his eyes on it, on that cold Iowa day, now long gone.

  There are more shelves built in next to the replace and, like most of the room’s other horizontal surfaces, they are filled with books, papers and, in this case, a stack of framed pictures or documents. The thought of Carver is still strong in my head and I take a step towards them before I can check myself, remind myself this is someone’s private space, not set up for me to rifle through.

  ‘Oh, those,’ Knut says.

  He lifts the top one and flips it over so that we can both see it. It’s a Whiting Writers’ Award. The one beneath it is another prize, a Lannan. I don’t know either of them, but I don’t know many American awards outside the Pulitzer. Knut takes on an awkward look with one in each hand, as if neither is quite what he expected.

  ‘Janet framed them. It keeps them in one piece.’ He pauses to read the words of a citation. ‘Don’t think I’m ungrateful. That makes me sound ungrateful, saying that.’ He sets them back on the shelf, top one face down again. ‘You know, when your friend Richard Ford was asked in an interview which of his books made him most proud, he said he wasn’t proud of any of them. Pride was the wrong concept. He was grateful for getting to do this.’ Something else catches his eye. ‘Hey, here’s one you should see.’

  He moves back to the shelf so quickly he has to reach out to the wall to keep his balance. The fourth frame from the top of the pile is bigger than most of the rest and he pulls it out and hands it to me.

  ‘Here’s the degree your father bought me,’ he says. ‘Well, at least the first part of it was down to him.’ It’s a BA from Humboldt State University, in California. ‘I spent nothing while I was in Australia. Did you know that? Everything went on college and mailing costs. And maybe three typewriter ribbons. I left in the same shoes I arrived in.’

  I never thought about his shoes, where they came from, who made them, how he might get more. They were leather boots, the shoes he came and went in, size twenty-two, I think.

  I haven’t asked about his legs yet, or his health generally. My parents will want to know. ‘I wrote a novel once,’ he says. There’s a copy of Northwest of Everything shelved near his pile of framed documents. I know the title from my time on Alta Vista. ‘With your second one already out back home, I think you’ve officially lapped me there. I nearly wrote another, straight after the first. The folks at Scribner said they’d like that, but it just wasn’t me, in the end. Maybe it was the experience of the first one that did it. I had a small grant to research it and I took it very seriously. I spent a winter in Alaska, in a cabin. No fuel other than the branches I collected. Just to get close to my characters.’ He laughs. ‘It’s too much, isn’t it? At some point—this is what I tell my novelist students when they get too intense—at some point you can give yourself permission not to know everything.’ His eyes linger on the spine for a moment and then he says, ‘Email. We’re here so that you can email home, otherwise we’d be having coffee already.’ He puts one hand on a shelf and turns himself around. The other side of the room is three steps away. His modem is plugged in and when he clicks on the icon there’s a rush of pinging noises and static. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘Here.’ He takes the back of his enormous chair in both hands and swivels it my way. The seat part bumps into my side.

  ‘We might have to lower it a little.’ He frowns. ‘Except then there’d be the issue of reaching the desk.’

  He makes a quick move towards the desk, but stops himself, whatever solution he had amounting to nothing.

  Somewhere else in the house, in a room that’s almost certainly more my size, Janet checks email regularly.

  ‘I’ll be fine with this,’ I tell him. ‘Just hold the chair still.’

  ‘Like mounting a horse,’ he says as I climb on.

  Like being ten again. Small, helped. My feet reach down to the chair legs where they jut out with castors beneath them, but not to the floor. He steers me to the desk and lines me up with the keyboard. Even the keyboard is oversized, with chunky keys broader than my thumb and the entire screen falling between ‘W’ and ‘O’. All my typing instincts are wrong on it.

  Knut watches over my shoulder as I pick out the letters to make Hotmail and my log-in details and then says, ‘Good. Looks like you’re in. I’ll go help Janet. Let you get your thoughts together. Say hi if you’re emailing anyone I know.’

  The stairs creak as he climbs them in big slow strides, one hand on the rail for leverage.

  I have an email to Megan started in the time it takes him to reach the top, but I wait until he’s out of sight before I type, ‘I’m sitting not three metres from a picture of Knut and Ray. That’s RAYMOND CARVER to you.’ Another web page chugs open on screen as I write—I’ve set up a separate window for a news site from home. The email is proof of life, but more when there is more. ‘They were friends, I think. They definitely knew
each other.’

  At home most of my books are shelved wherever there’s a space, but the Carvers, Vintage reissues mostly, are together in chronological order.

  In my mind, I have already strung together a lineage that extends from Hemingway to Knut to Carver, or Carver to Knut, and then to me, as if I’m entitled to claim the next spot in that line. I don’t believe it, and probably never will, but in this room it seems less wrong. I could write more and keep writing. I could win awards, frame them, pile them.

  Line by line, a picture takes shape on the news page, a man in Brisbane being hosed down outside a city building by hazmat crews, an anthrax scare, white powder in the mail.

  Even before the sun is lost in the trees behind the house, Knut turns the heating up.

  The pinot noir is a 1996 Blue Mountain from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, on the other side of the coastal mountains. Knut and Janet have a small cellar in a windowless room downstairs, behind Knut’s office, but this bottle is already upstairs with its foil cut and cork inspected.

  Knut looks wrong in the kitchen, and it’s not just a question of scale. The cupboards have pastel lime doors, the floor is lino and a row of miniature cacti—all different varieties—stands along the windowsill in thumb-sized terracotta pots. I still have his ancient New York dreams in my head.

  It’s not until we’re eating the lamb that he says, ‘I saw your review in PW. Not bad at all. I thought the Gatsby comparison was fair, though I don’t think the reviewer worked out your agenda, or what you got out of it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I can feel my pulse in my throat, my heart beating in my chest like a kettle drum. What would Knut Knutsen make of it? That thought was in my head even as I was writing the novel. I saw him scowl at stories in the New Yorker in the seventies, and make editorial notes in the margins. For his own sake, always, to refine his own sense of what to do and what not to.