What we both know, p.18
What We Both Know, page 18
If only he’d act a bit more gone.
I am reminded of when my mother once took me to the doctor in childhood. I’d had this horrible cough, for weeks, but when we got into the doctor’s office I didn’t cough once. My mother pulled me out of there, fuming, saying I’d made a fool out of her for having brought me in with “nothing wrong.” As if something was only wrong if somebody else said it was.
The doctor is pleased with Baby’s current state and assures me that there is some time left.
A FANTASTIC BETRAYAL OF MY CHARACTER
By Baby Davidson
Chapter I
The extravagant promotional event does not a writer make.
It is the eventual resignation to the process, the admission that all of the pleasure of the craft lies in anticipation. The unfinished manuscript, the sudden idea, the wait for the response from the agent or publisher. The writer works and waits. Whomever arrives at the event, tailored, groomed, cocktail in hand—that’s someone else. The occasional and brief venture into fraternization always sends a writer scurrying back under the rock from whence they came. A colleague once said, “The relationship between the agent and the writer thrives in darkness.” That is, communication is sparse.
Alas, the deals do get done. I was flown to New York and put up in a Manhattan hotel. I’d invited along two of my students, hoping to offer some sort of taste of The Business. There’d been a sudden sting of regret when we got buckled into the plane, realizing we’d not had a thing to talk about. I’d feigned sleep, then really did fall asleep, and when I awoke the girls were nudging me. We were there: New York City!
Many of the individuals in attendance I’d only before seen in photographs, in magazines and on the backs and inside covers of books. To have their eyes fixed on me, to shake their hands and not have had to tell them my name, it was surreal. Though it at first thrilled me, and I floated between groups of writers, editors, agents, feeling as if the night were representative of some sort of major shift in my trajectory, I quickly became overwhelmed.
It was during the fourth retelling of the process of writing the book—frenzied, without sleep, all through the nights to capitalize on the only quiet in my household, then, waking and showering, shaving, and dressing for work at the university—that I’d become suddenly uninterested in the whole ordeal.
“That’s what it takes, eh,” an older, unsuccessful writer, had said.
“No,” I’d told him. “It’s just how I do it.”
I’d snuck outside to a phone booth and closed myself in, desiring a brief intermission. It would seem natural now for me to have phoned home. I do believe I’d wanted to. I’d wanted to hear their voices, my daughters. My wife’s too, but I’d found myself wishing she could’ve said different things than I knew she’d have said, had I called.
When I re-entered, the girls had established themselves as popular figures in the room. A rush of envy, seeing them surrounded by men who were hungry and wolfish in posture, was replaced with a feeling of pride. They were wise beyond their years, I felt. I was lucky to have such students, lucky to shepherd them into the limelight. One day, perhaps they would become quite remarkable.
My agent, too, had his own business to do, his own hands to shake. This night belonged to everyone; my name on the sign outside was irrelevant.
I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of sadness, watching the girls. They had a certain ease of posture, a confident wide-mouthed laugh. I missed my family. I felt horror at the thought of my daughters in a room like that one, talking to men like those.
Had I approached the girls to warn them of my departure, to offer to bring them back with me, I worried I’d cut something short, something valuable and life-changing. I left them be, though not without worry that they might be rushed out by another man, pushed into a cab, and used up. I’d let the natural order of the world dictate the rest of the night, for them. For me, I could not withstand the remainder.
I made my way to the airport with increasing but happy impatience. Soon I would be in my house, under the bed linens beside my wife, my children long asleep. In the morning my having returned would be a surprise. The flight seemed to pass in an instant. I boarded, buckled my seatbelt, had a passing thought or two, and then I was retrieving my car from the airport parking lot, driving in the soft pink glow of the first hours of the day. I’d lost my handle on time. I’d figured somehow I would arrive home at the same hour as I’d left the literary event. Then, coming up the driveway with the weight of the weekend on my back, my head cutting through the fine mist of the morning, bringing a sting to my eyes, through which I saw the fogged-up kitchen window, four small handprints against the glass, and two small faces, alight with anticipation.
18
I’VE SENT OUT INVITATIONS to everyone I could think of, received a handful of sorry-nos. Though he is hounded by fans, industry professionals, and so on, I was hard-pressed to think of his friends. It surprised me when Baby asked me to reach out to my mother a second time, to insist, though didn’t surprise me when she dismissed the idea. Catherine has arranged for flowers to be presented to Baby upon his arrival, by one of the members of the Arthurs, in case she herself can’t make it. She is scheduled to have five dogs, can’t seem to find a replacement. I feel on edge waiting for her confirmation, and try to expect a no. Especially after inviting the family members from the DNA site and having both of them, in other words, reply, “Who?”
Baby has asked me to speak—“be funny”—when he receives the award. I have prepared notes but not rehearsed them. My anticipation of spending time with Catherine is making me shaky. It’s just I don’t know how to be around her anymore. Am I allowed to stand close, to treat our bodies as extensions of each other? Or is she an old friend of my father, as he has always said? See, I’d hate for a new distance to come out of my inaction.
Baby is going through his closet, asking me, “And whose is this?” about a number of his suit jackets. On one end of the rack is the yellow suit that he wore to see Pauline, lifeless on its hanger.
“Okay,” I say, “and what about when they call your name?”
He strokes the arm of a wine-coloured shirt. “Thank you very much for this great and unexpected honour,” he says.
I nearly scold him when I realize he is joking with me.
Something I have not considered: How would Pauline have been had I been the one to go? I say “the one” as if it had been a matter of chance—50/50 odds, in my favour.
“That one is yours,” I say about a grey checked jacket.
Would Pauline have moved in too, I wonder? Would they have eased back into the routines of her childhood? He couldn’t. Would he? Would she have done it anyway, in the end? She was so troubled by large things. She fixated on death. She once told me, “I feel like a magnet being pulled toward my end.” She slept whenever possible, drank to keep herself out of the house, came home and broke things, acted violently against anyone trying to placate her. The big things, I understood. In fact, I associated her acts of aggression with beauty. I see Pauline behind every beautiful blonde. But the small nuanced danger of the household was lost on me. I saw the family as heroic, something to aspire to. I wanted attention. I even wanted…I can’t say. Pauline knew I did, too. She saw me as small and neurotic, unable to understand a thing. She became frustrated by my inability to just be. These were the things I used to believe about myself and Pauline. These were our differences. However, the further I get from her the more certain I become that I did not understand at all. All along I knew that one of us had to be wrong, and I never expected that it could be me. For, it turns out, I was luckier than I could ever have known. Protected by the blood running under my skin.
I could have saved her if I had known. It would have saved me too. I know I shouldn’t compare. Here I am. Saved? I live in aftermath and I measure time in the negative. Lately, some days, Baby seems not to remember Pauline at all. Sometimes I don’t either. Other times he sees her where she isn’t. For a moment the other day, I thought of my mother, and I thought of her in a way that I think of Pauline, by which I mean I know that I was operating as if she were dead. I sat with the thought for a moment before I remembered, oh! Despite the return to having my ideas straight, it proved impossible for me to understand that my mother was in the world, doing something, thinking something, at that very moment. In hypothetical, yes. But just as when I try to imagine the vastness that is beyond Earth, the vastness that is beyond the walls of the house when I am inside with the curtains closed, it simply did not seem to be real. Then, the same exercise with Catherine. Closer, plus I’ve seen the inside of her home. It is easy for me to imagine her doing things I have seen her do; she may be at the table eating lunch, she may be on the couch reading, she may be in the basement with one of the dogs. But something else, something perfectly believable such as organizing her dresser, washing her face. There seems to be no way. And in this way I feel stunned by the sudden realization that I do not believe there is a world outside of my experience. That I do not believe, were I to go to where Pauline is, that things would continue on. And this makes me wonder if this was Pauline’s way of finally having control. Locking us into our patterns, ensuring that we live out the rest of our lives in a circuit, picking up pieces that were once together.
Unsurprisingly Baby has decided to wear the yellow suit. I brought it upon myself. When he asked, “Whose is this?” and pulled the yellow sleeve out from the body, I said nothing as I was lost in thought. This caused him to take special notice. Perhaps he preferred it, imagining it belonged to somebody else. Being somebody else was a special passion of Baby’s. He is wearing the jacket over top of a slack grey T-shirt, sweatpants.
There is a possibility that he is wearing the suit out of spite. Yes, that must be it, even if he doesn’t know it. Some friction against Pauline. All along, he has hated her. Surely that is why I was spared. Never have I been more relieved by his disdain. For, there must not have been as much perversion as there was punishment. Oh, how I can disturb myself right out of my skin.
I am running out of time to get ready for this evening. My hair is wild and unwashed, but to wash and style it would use up all of what I have. I will have to settle for makeup and something taken from one of the other women in my family. I leave Baby to fend for himself in the closet, go to look through my boxes from Pauline. On my way to the ceremony I will wear my mother’s mink coat over top of whatever I borrow from Pauline.
Pauline’s formal wear is in the other box I picked up from the roommate, the one that I have left sealed. The other I have brought in from the garage, picked through, worn or at least tried on some things. With a ballpoint pen I scrape through the brown packaging tape, worry I may be drawing a straight blue line across some folded garment. When I pry open the box flaps the top layer is small bunches of pink, beige, and white lace. Thongs, crotchless panties, wireless bras. I arrange them on my bedspread and as I’m laying out a white G-string I see that many of the pieces are unwashed.
There is a feeling in my body that for a moment I sit with, still and silently. I wait to hear evidence of Baby being consumed by some task, though he would never come through a closed door, anymore. He seems to not want to see anything he is unprepared for. The regular information of the day already overwhelms him.
I imagine the roommate, or maybe even the roommate’s family, or a police officer or hired cleaner taking Pauline’s lingerie, maybe her laundry, and putting it in a box. Touching each piece, folding them. I lie down on the bed next to the rows of panties, lying in such a way so that my face rests on the white soiled G-string, not touching it with my hands, relieving myself of intention, acting with two minds, one of them playing out a lie. And I smell Pauline and I am with Pauline, and later when I arrive at the ceremony with the lace under my clothes I will be Pauline, too.
What if these bugs really are the same bugs that fed on Pauline? What if for Pauline it all came down to the infestation? Suddenly I fear, if that is so, that it might happen to me too. I mean I’ve already lost Pauline. What more can be expected of me in a calendar year? To wash, to inspect, to exterminate, to exterminate again. It really could do me in. But I am belittling Pauline. It’s just I’d prefer it be the bugs than anything else, considering the other things. There is a simple romance to this having been her breaking point. A beautiful woman in a two-bedroom apartment, draped in silk, covered in insect bites, overwrought. Another example of my not having a penchant for the written word. Then, a thought. Pauline’s bugs surviving in the box of lingerie means Pauline’s blood is inside of the bugs in the box. My blood and Pauline’s blood in the bugs in the lingerie that I am wearing at the literary ceremony in the church on Bloor Street. Well, I know it is not the same blood. Generations of bugs must have lived in the apartment. Feeding on her roommate in the night. Their heritage in part being Pauline. Their meals, their rituals. Perhaps even religious ceremonies around feeding on Pauline. Their parents’ parents’ bodies replenished and rebuilt out of Pauline.
I squeeze one of the bites hard and clear fluid forms a small perfect sphere on top of my skin. Then the pain stops me from continuing. I can’t bring myself to throw out the G-string; besides, the other garments are on my bedspread. I must instead accept the infestation. In bed with the lingerie, I feel I am the same sexual girl from the photograph in the kitchen. Someone I perhaps would have been, always, otherwise.
* * *
—
BECAUSE OF THE WAY the road loops around the lake, the longer way goes past the exit we’d take for the train station, if we were picking up my mother. She has given a final answer: no. Though she has had second thoughts about Christmas; I am once again invited. Just me, that is. Baby is consumed by himself anyway, and so won’t challenge the right turn out of the driveway in lieu of the faster left. He smells of aftershave, the nurse having done a clean job. I even invited him to come, the nurse, forgetting he was simply at work.
Catherine outside playing tug-of-war with a handful of dogs. She’s cleared off most of the front yard now, a task I appreciate due to my inability to carry it out in any proper way. She is wearing a long coat that looks like a quilt, pyjama pants, and rain boots, and she’s leaping, dancing each time she yanks at the piece of rope. I am ashamed to be taking great solace in the image of her in her yard. As if my enjoyment, unknown to her, is a perversion.
Baby rolls down his window and smacks the hood of the car with his mitten in this old familiar way. I am reminded of their closeness, and the newness of my closeness with Catherine. There is something between them that is greater than I am. She looks up, waves, hurries inside. So she has sorted out care for the dogs.
It is for the best that my mother is not here with us. Then Catherine might change her mind.
“What shall I say the book is called?” says Baby. “The title is no good, I can’t use the one we have.”
“You changed your mind?”
“It’s no good.”
“Well.” I can see through a window Catherine is hurrying from room to room. The dogs must be going wild at her feet. “What else, then?”
“Something from the Bible,” says Baby.
“Okay,” I say.
“To Know Not What We Do.”
“Too wordy, I think.”
“The New Is Here.”
“No good,” I say.
“To Be Like Wool,” he says. “Delight to Show Mercy.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll think of it when we get there,” he says. “Be funny when you introduce me. I’ll think of it while they’re laughing.”
“Why don’t I just think of it?” I say. “Since, you know.”
“It’s my life’s work,” he says. “Hillary, it’s very important.”
“Yes, I know, Dad.” I can feel sweat on my face, and worry my makeup will be ruined. “I wrote it.”
In the doorway of the house, a man perhaps a few years younger than me. Slim, tall, wheat-coloured hair. I’ve entirely forgotten she has a son, erased him. He smiles at our vehicle, looks straight through the windshield into my eyes, or so it feels. Then, Catherine is ready, just like that, and joins us.
“My goodness,” she says to me. “Hillary, you look,” and she stops, and I turn and smile out the window.
* * *
—
WE ENTER AS A FORCE. I feel something strange standing between Catherine and Baby, something familial. But, I feel too the guilt of my mother.
My head is swimming. Everyone is here; the Arthurs, Mark Richman, some people from the publishing company, Pauline, Baby, Catherine, various people in the industry whom I’ve seen or seen photos of. I said Pauline. Of course she isn’t. Otherwise, the turnout is nothing too big, not too many non-industry attendees. People pass us, some smile in a way they’re smiling at everyone else. A man or two stop Baby, say something along the lines of, “You’re still here?” Obviously I exaggerate.
When I see Catherine from various areas of the room I am struck by her posture, by the way she holds her face. Her hair, her frame, are so beautiful. You wouldn’t believe it. I can hardly believe she is one of us. Well, in a way. The way any of us are.
Baby looks smaller than he ever has to me. His mouth is a thin line with the weight of his whole face holding it closed. He hunches, scuttles from table to table, I figure looking for copies of his work. Despite the size of his name on the event poster projected onto the stage, there are few people for him to speak with. It is all shaping up to be a bit of a punch in the gut.
I think of the family members found through the DNA site, and the event feels small. The contacts from the DNA site dismissing my invitation recontextualizes Baby and his world, for me. I’ve always assumed a largeness about literature. As if all lives are shaped around it just like my own. But other people have other things; they watch movies, they follow touring bands on the road.
