Real Life (12 page)

The pastor’s voice suddenly rose out of the background murmur, his words not quite distinguishable, and both of them turned to glance at the far end of the hall where he was engaged in an intense conversation, perhaps even an argument, with some of his male parishioners. Embarrassed, the two women turned back to each other.

“We would all have died to eternal life,” Mrs. Akinson whispered to Astrid, much as the children in Astrid’s class would give a memorized answer that they didn’t understand, but knew was the right one, to a question she’d asked. Astrid didn’t reply, distracted as she was by some other emotion that was struggling to free itself. She wasn’t sure what it was, and would have gotten up now and gone away, except that suddenly she found herself too tired to move. She began to wish she had not been so hard on Mrs. Akinson who, despite her denial, she could see now, had suffered. I have been suffering too, she thought, but the worst is over now.

She found herself edging out her hand across the table until her fingers grazed Mrs. Akinson’s. Mrs. Akinson did not draw back her hand, but left it there, and they sat that way for a long time, in silence, never looking at each other, their fingers touching.

        She doubts it’s a good title, imagines it in the ironic, wavering type of
The New Yorker
and then in the sterner, more assertive type of
Saturday Night,
and would go further, but her memory for the handful of top-flight magazines and their typefaces fails her. And anyway, marvel of marvels, they have once again achieved flight; below them Saskatchewan is at once shrinking and expanding as they rise.

She wonders what picture the word
Saskatchewan
might evoke in readers of
The New Yorker,
thinks hopefully: a wild, rugged country of raging rivers, impenetrable black forests, jagged snow-covered mountains, and canoes full of Indians. As it appeared, in fact, in that old bomb of a movie,
Saskatchewan,
with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters, filmed, in fact, in Alberta. She knows a reader of
Saturday Night
would see a sort of impossibly extended, frozen dogpatch. But what does the word conjure for her, who has spent her life in Saskatchewan? It stretches below her, unfortunately flat all around its capital and, to complete the stereotype, newly snow-covered. She closes her eyes, mouths “Saskatchewan,” and swirling snow scuds across a field of wind-packed, glossy ice. Nothing moves,
even the few bare trees look as if they’re about to shatter with cold. She sighs and opens her eyes.

It’s her familiar defensiveness, she knows it, taking hold as she flies off to the dreaded East. Maybe she should call the story she’s working on “Toronto,” she thinks, since so much of what she does is defined by the place, though she’s been there for maybe a total of two weeks in her life and knows nobody. Or almost nobody. She has one friend, Hannah, with whom she’ll be staying.

The man sitting beside her is studying the interior of his briefcase, a shabby leather satchel of the kind male students used to carry when she was still a city girl, and in university thirty years earlier. Therefore not a businessman, probably a professor. He has a pleasant face, dark wavy hair, long and unfashionable.

The flight attendant offers drinks which Jenna refuses. Her seatmate orders whisky, and catching its scent, her mouth waters. But no, she can’t tackle the Toronto airport drunk, she’d never be heard from again. Before she can stop herself she’s made a disparaging snort out loud. She should wear a sign:
I am alone too much. I talk to myself

He turns out to be a composer. This is so surprising after years of sitting beside businessmen who ignore her or give her unasked-for paternal advice about flights and hotels that she’s silenced. When she tells him her name and that she’s a writer, and the name of her just-released, latest novel, she sees that neither means anything to him. Although she reminds herself that she’s never heard of him either, this still depresses her and she thinks woefully, as if she’s thinking about a good friend, of the ambition with which she feels herself saddled, a burden she has wearily to carry, barely manages to keep at a socially acceptable level.

And, once they start talking about the arts, she discovers
glumly she doesn’t know any of the well-known writers who are apparently acquaintances of his. It’s because she doesn’t live in a city, doesn’t even live near one, and knows, too, that this is viewed as a personal failing by the people she has to deal with in cities, an inexplicable character flaw for which she’d be forgiven if she lived on a chic acreage on a city’s outskirts and had an artist husband. She imagines a sculptor working in iron high up a ladder, his head vanished inside a welder’s helmet, his torch hissing, then a potter squatting in front of the barn at a raku fire.

But she lives on a real working ranch, has a real cowboy for a husband who comes in with manure on his boots and hay stuck in his clothes and who, preoccupied with his own world, is rarely more than mildly curious about hers. People don’t ask about him, she doesn’t know why not, unless the apparent sheer improbability of their mating boggles them too much.

Jenna and the composer settle into a camaraderie based on the fact that they’re both artists. He lives in Victoria but he’s crossing the country to sit on an arts jury about which he’s discreetly silent. Jenna knows it’s bad form to talk about it, as she’s still suffering from the repercussions of sitting on a jury that gave the country’s top literary prize to the wrong person. She’s glad not to talk about it, tries not even to think about it.

They share a small bottle of wine, exchange addresses and phone numbers, though Jenna doubts they’ll ever meet again, and finally, after seeing the mass of people vying for taxis, share one downtown from the mouth of hell, otherwise known as the Toronto airport.

It’s raining gently when she says goodbye to the composer, gets out of the cab in front of a big brick house near Bloor Street, and takes her bag. As the taxi swishes away on the wet pavement, she pauses, lifts her face to the rain-dampened branches of the old trees that line Hannah’s street, and feels its
soft patting on her face. How easily it rains here, she thinks, as if rain were nothing at all. The glimpses of sky she sees between the branches are luminescent but starless, the city itself glows, a star fallen to earth. She climbs the wooden steps, crosses the decaying porch, and before she can knock, Hannah appears in the square of light, holding the door open for her.

Although their friendship dates back to university days, they never talk about when they were students together in faraway Saskatoon, part of a group of women grad students whose allegiance to each other cut across colleges and departments, and survived through divorces, affairs, depressions, and heartbreak. Curled up on the sofa while Hannah’s cats walk across her lap, Jenna thinks how everything seemed to be falling apart in those days, hanging on was the best you could hope for, and she didn’t even manage that, got married instead and went off, while Hannah stayed until she had a doctorate, an achievement of which Jenna is in awe.

“I saw your name in the paper,” Hannah says. “Quite a few times, actually. It wasn’t all flattering.” Jenna can’t think of any reason for her name to have been in the paper. “About the Bella Griffin thing,” Hannah tells her, looking a little surprised. Bella Griffin is one of the country’s best-known, bestselling authors. Jenna moans and puts her face in her hands.

“This upsets you,” Hannah comments, an insight worthy of a doctor of psychology. For a second Jenna can’t believe Hannah doesn’t know anything about this. But then Hannah lives in a world of psychotherapy that Jenna finds mysterious and amazing: Adlerians, Jungians, Reichians—nobody in Hannah’s world seems to be a Freudian—psychotherapists who drum, who use hypnosis, Hannah herself is an expert on the tarot. Jenna begins to explain, and the story floods out of her, unstoppable.

The truth is, she’d been surprised to have been asked to sit
on the jury, assuming that as no readers seemed to have heard of her, neither had anybody else, including the arts organization awarding the prize, and so she agreed out of the fear that if she didn’t, she’d instantly be erased from the history into which she’d so suddenly been written. She and the two other jurors spent hours locked together in a hotel room arguing politely—“Not all juries are so polite,” the arts organization’s officer said—and in Jenna’s opinion, through the course of the long session, each juror demonstrated admirable integrity combined with a deep streak of perversity. She doesn’t exclude herself from this analysis, and wonders if she’d been like the others, male and professors, whether their decision would have been the same. She knows she knuckled under, there’s no other way to put it, and she pictures herself sinking to her knees as her legs turn to a pale, flesh-coloured water that soaks into the smart hotel rug.

Or maybe she didn’t knuckle under. Maybe there was nothing she could have done to change the outcome short of forcing a hung jury. That would have created a huge scandal. But, in the end, a scandal was created anyway. Once their decision was known, critics surfaced across the country, although ninety per cent of them were in Toronto. They chastised the jury from television sets, radios, and newspapers with varying degrees of outrage for not choosing, in Jenna’s opinion too, the wonderful fifteenth novel of Bella Griffin, which, if it hadn’t exactly been a bestseller before the decision, certainly has been since.

“The other jurors must have had good reasons for choosing the book they did,” Hannah points out in a reasonable, therapist’s tone. Jenna considers. In fact, there’d been little discussion, she’d been unconvinced by anything they’d said, but their tones—full of certainty, expecting no disagreement—had quite simply scared her into silence.

“Who was I to argue with them?” she asks Hannah. “They
seemed so sure. I thought they knew better than I did.” Hannah studies her, as if she sees something in her old friend’s face that surprises and puzzles her. Jenna drops her eyes.

Though Hannah’s sofa is wide and soft, Jenna spends most of the night tossing. All the city noises, that sense of it as a great beast curled up for the night, its breathing audible through the open window, keeps her awake. Toward morning she falls asleep and dreams she’s strolling with her mother arm in arm down a city sidewalk. She and her mother got along badly, but ever since her mother’s death at seventy-two, a few years earlier, she keeps appearing in Jenna’s dreams, gentle and helpful, offering advice, opening her arms to Jenna as she never did in life. Strangely, Jenna never wakes bitter from one of these dreams, but instead, a little shaky and softened, as though a crusted and aching wound had been cleansed.

In the morning Hannah and Jenna drink coffee together before Hannah leaves for her office and Jenna sets out on the first day of her three-day visit to Toronto. Her new novel just out, this morning she’ll be stopping in at her publisher’s office to say hello and collect any advance reviews. Her publisher, a well-known, although small, company, occupies a set of tiny, crowded rooms in a dilapidated building just beyond the borders of the real downtown. Jenna decides that instead of pacing Hannah’s apartment until it’s time to take the subway, she’ll walk to her meeting. She’s not excited about it, she knows that a staffer half her own age will greet her, that probably she’ll be taken by this young woman to lunch somewhere, where they’ll have a hard time making conversation, and the next time Jenna meets her—if she does—she won’t even recognize the girl.

Still, it’s a warm, early fall day and the walk is interesting. It feels good to be marching down a city sidewalk again, her hands in her pockets, as if she belongs here. At moments like this,
when she’s alone in the city, some knotted place inside her loosens and relaxes. Nearly thirty years in the country and when she’s not angry with the city, or out of her depths, her youthful days in one return to her and she feels happy and at home.

This afternoon she’s to do an interview at an ethnic radio station and two more at strange little magazines, places so obscure that she’s never heard of them, and knows she herself will never see or hear the interviews. Then, tomorrow night, she’ll give a reading at a downtown library. It’s the first time she’s been invited to read in Toronto, and she alternates between excitement about it and a darker mood that eventually overtakes her every time she comes here. She suspects if she could isolate its cause it wouldn’t do her credit. It’s a deep-rooted anger, she thinks, a helpless, smouldering rage that this is the wall she has to scale—big-city indifference, big-city arrogance.

And yet, in her country home she’s still seen as the city woman—never will be anything else—while here she’s classified as purely country. Worst of all, she can’t tell herself any more which is closest to the truth.

Once, when she’d stumbled on a psychic fair by accident, she’d paid twenty dollars to have an earnest young clairvoyant mistake this thing that drives her for alcoholism. The comparison is too apt to be funny. Yes, she’s addicted, she’s out of control. And she refuses, except in moments of despair, to attribute her lack of success to her shortcomings as a writer. She knows this is blindness, something with which she still has to come to terms. But she’s far from ready to accept she may not be as good as she thinks she is—she’s published, isn’t she? Never has any trouble finding a publisher, her reviews are good. She jerks her mind away, tries to pay attention to the people she’s meeting as she walks along the busy sidewalk toward her publisher’s.

The day having gone pleasantly, if dully, and it being the day Hannah teaches a night class at the university, Jenna decides to spend the evening at a movie. Since her departure to the ranch she’s had to give up movies—the nearest movie theatre is fifty miles away, and tends, anyway, to show only Hollywood spectaculars. Now, whenever she’s in a city, she tries to see at least one. She often thinks she shouldn’t, because one movie is never enough to satisfy, yet more would move her into some other, almost-forgotten realm from which she’d only have to return the moment she got on the plane that would take her home. But lately, oddly, her desire for even one movie has been failing her, as if her last hold on her former city-self is disintegrating. About this, she alternates between being discomfited and relieved.