Real Life (13 page)

At ten o’clock, in the warm fall darkness, Jenna starts the walk back to Hannah’s apartment. She sees the Brunswick Avenue sign, recognizes the street as literary in some way she can’t remember, and decides to walk down it. Leaves from the big maples that line the avenue coat the sidewalk and in the light from the street lamps Jenna sees they’re the big, three-pointed ones in vivid reds that are on the Canadian flag.

She slows to a stroll and studies the old brick houses. Some have ornate, wrought-iron fences separating the small squares of grass from the sidewalk and most have stained-glass sections in their front door, or flanking them. The interior lights make the colours glow. How beautiful these houses must once have been, she thinks, for now they have a shabby air, they’re on their last legs. Once they must have been the homes of the bourgeoisie, surely working-class people couldn’t have afforded them. But she has little experience of the bourgeoisie, the only members of it she’s ever met were the failures, the black sheep, the kids who’d been sent to her high school where the poor kids went, after they’d been expelled from all the others. She remembers them as nice kids, but so frozen in their
misery and frightened by finding themselves there that they never made any friends at all, and not one of them lasted a full school year. And there is no bourgeoisie in the part of Saskatchewan where Jenna lives. Just farmers and ranchers with their own hidden and tense pecking order she only, after about twenty years, began to decipher, but the nuances of which still sometimes elude her, so that she has to ask her husband to explain a fleeting expression or an apparently offhand remark that everybody else seems to understand.

A woman’s voice floats out from the shadows across the street. She’s singing in a breathy contralto, wobbling on the sustained notes, a little off-pitch, an old song about September. Jenna holds her breath. The warmth, the intimacy of the voice, suffused as it is with longing, weaving through the leafy darkness, turns the street into a boudoir. A shiver runs down her back and she slows even more, trying to see the singer, or discover which embowered porch she’s singing from, but the night and the trees hide her.

Hannah is sipping a glass of wine and laying out a tarot deck on the coffee table when Jenna lets herself in.

“It’s one of the new decks I bought in New York,” she tells her as Jenna pours herself wine and stretches out on the sofa. “I’m trying to learn it.” Hannah owns dozens of decks, forever picking up new ones as they’re developed. It fascinates Jenna that Hannah finds the tarot at least as useful as Freud or Jung. Jenna herself relies for advice on the
I Ching.
“The Wanderer,” she keeps drawing.
Strange lands and separation are the wanderer’s lot.
She wonders if she should regard this as a directive or not, for although she has no plans to leave her husband and the ranch, neither has she been able to fully imagine living there until she dies. Whenever she tries, the future soon fades into a tangle of contradictory pictures and ideas, and Jenna draws back in perplexity.

Hannah says, “I read that interview with Bella Griffin in the paper. She’s caustic.”

“Vitriolic,” Jenna agrees. “Have you read any of her books?” Expressionless, Hannah reaches to the floor beside her and holds up a copy of the book in question.

“Bought it today,” she says, and breaks into a grin.

Jenna had flown home the day after the jury made its decision, and in the return to ranch life, though the decision dismayed her, she let it slip to the back of her mind. But as soon as the short list was released, the phone began to ring. Arts reporters from Toronto wanted to know what happened, why was Griffin ignored? She couldn’t turn on the radio or
TV
without having to listen to panelists discussing the jury’s decision in amazed and disapproving tones. The frustration of not being able to respond was such that finally, when she heard a censorious panel on the radio, she had to lie down with a fever. But she continued to believe Griffin’s book to be the best and didn’t know how to reply when she received a couple of letters commending the jury’s decision.

At first Griffin said nothing about being left off the list, which Jenna regarded as proper and dignified, but eventually reports of her remarks about the verdict, which seemed to Jenna to ring with an unbecoming immodesty, reached her, and at last she began to be angry both at Griffin’s refusal to accept the judgement and at finding herself in the impossible situation of having to remain silent about a decision with which she doesn’t agree. But it’s a sort of woeful, frustrated anger.

And when she thinks about what she knows of Griffin, that the woman would care at all surprises Jenna. It’s not only that she’s already won the prize twice, as well as other much-coveted prizes that Jenna never expects to see—at least, not for years and years—but that by all reports she’s lived the most
glamorous of lives, in the great cities of the world, knows the most famous writers, and has rich and powerful friends. She wonders if the two other men on the jury who wouldn’t hear of giving the prize to Bella were merely jealous of her. The thought has crossed her mind before, but always she’s dismissed it as mean-spirited.

She spends another restless night on Hannah’s sofa. When she finally falls asleep, she dreams about her husband. He’s riding in a wild, untamed country full of deep, crumbling coulees whose sides are studded with sage and cactus. He rides down their sides with fearless abandon, on a perfect forty-five-degree angle, away from her. He seems to be fused to his horse, as if they’re one animal. When she wakes, she recognizes the dream as about the Archer, whose precise angle of travel represents the perfection of his fit to nature, and for a second she longs to be home.

This morning another junior staffer is going to take her around to bookstores so that she can sign stock. Jenna dreads this. Usually the bookstore staff doesn’t recognize her name, which humiliates her, although she always pretends to find it amusing, and she’s dismayed whether her books are on the shelves or not. If they’re there, she thinks it’s because nobody wants them, but if they’re not, she thinks the same thing. She knows she’s being ridiculous. It’s her pride, it stems from her thwarted ambition that gnaws at her, and she can’t tell if it’s thwarted because she’s unlucky or because she’s a bad writer who merely thinks she’s a good one.

Besides, she thinks, brightening, it’s fun to walk or drive around the city with someone who knows her way, and at the end of the bookstore circuit, no matter how demoralizing, there will be another pleasant lunch in a nice restaurant. In the afternoon, she thinks, I’ll go to the museum. And tonight is her
reading, although she’ll be only one of three readers. She wonders if she’ll be allotted the prestigious last position, or if, ignominiously, she’ll be assigned to read first.

The day unfolds predictably, and when evening comes, Hannah accompanies her to the library, then seats herself in the small auditorium among the audience of fifty or so people. The young publicist, Carol, with whom Jenna spent the morning doing the bookstore circuit, arrives and sits beside Hannah, while Jenna is introduced by a librarian to the other readers, both younger than she is. The woman, having just published her first short-story collection to excellent reviews, is giddy with excitement, and when asked to read first, doesn’t appear to mind. Jenna suspects she doesn’t yet know what this means. The man, grungy in torn jeans and faded T-shirt, his hair uncombed and his attitude, at best, impassive, is a prize-winning Toronto poet. The minute she hears his name she knows
he’ll
be the one to read last.

Although she dreams of the day when she’ll be the only one on the program, tonight she finds she’s relieved to read with others, especially local writers who will draw an audience she knows that in this city she’d never get on her own. Although she hopes—no, she tells herself, she believes—she’s past the day when only one person, or no one at all, will show up at her reading.

Happily, the young woman, Gillian, doesn’t read too long, and both funny and charming—Jenna sees that one day she may also be a very good writer—she leaves the audience in a receptive mood for Jenna’s turn. Jenna has chosen the section she’ll read with care; she wants these listeners to see that she isn’t mediocre, that she’s much better than Gillian who now sits smiling up at Jenna with glittering eyes and flushed cheeks, obviously not hearing a word Jenna reads. Jenna wants to hold her listeners’ attention so that while she is reading they can’t
look away or move; she wants each of her words to fall on them like single stones tossed into water. She isn’t a bit nervous—at moments like this, something deep inside her, for which she has no name, no explanation, grips her and carries her through.

When she has finished, to brief but, she thinks hopefully, enthusiastic applause, there’s an intermission. Then it’s the poet’s turn. He goes on for more than half an hour, until people begin to get up and sidle out quietly. He doesn’t look up from his page, he mumbles something between poems now and then, but if his remarks are complete sentences, Jenna can’t figure them out. It amazes her that any writer could be so cavalier about an audience. Unless that’s his point, she thinks. But then, why come at all?

Finally, it’s over. Jenna is about to suggest to Hannah that they stop somewhere on the way home for a drink, when Hannah yawns and says, “Well, let’s go, I have to be up early tomorrow.” Disappointed, Jenna reaches to take her coat from Carol.

“I have to drop over to the launch for Eric Anderson’s new book. Would you mind coming with me?” Carol asks. Eric Anderson is literary star, one of the biggest, another one Jenna’s never met or even, come to think of it, seen in the flesh.

Hannah says, “Go, Jen, I’ll take a cab home. You’ll have fun.” She turns away, waving at Jenna over her shoulder.

“It’s good for you to be seen around,” Carol tells her seriously. Jenna can’t figure out if Carol just doesn’t want to go alone, or if some senior person at the publishing house has told Carol to take Jenna out after her reading. She hesitates, then decides that it doesn’t matter what Carol’s reason is, and agrees to go.

She and Carol go out of the library and Carol flags down a cab. They get in and in moments they’ve arrived in the middle of a series of old stone buildings which Jenna recognizes, even
in the shadowy darkness, are on the university campus. Carol and the cab driver confer and soon he pulls up to a side door of a rust-coloured stone building.

As the cab drives away from the leaf-littered curb, Carol pushes open the heavy oak door, they enter a hallway, and then go through open double doors leading into a large, dark room, an auditorium, full of people, all standing and looking toward a low stage in the far corner where someone Jenna can’t see is making a speech. It must be witty because every once in a while the people around Jenna break into laughter. She tries to hear what the speaker is saying, but in the crush, and the near-darkness and her unfamiliarity with the situation, she can’t get the words to make any sense.

The man on the stage has been replaced by a woman who is introducing someone else. As the crowd claps for the new speaker, Jenna stops where she is and joins in, then, because she can’t see the stage at all from where she is now, keeps moving, making her way out of the crush of people toward a wall she can lean against. Finally, she reaches a stretch of wall, but here it is all occupied, and so, fearful of attracting attention to herself, she keeps walking slowly along the outer edge of the crowd. At last, on the side of the hall away from the stage, she sees a place to stand, and squeezing past people, moves toward it.

She’s nearly there when a tall, slender woman abruptly turns directly into Jenna’s path and they nearly collide. It takes her an instant, during which she’s apologizing, to realize she’s face to face with Bella Griffin. Griffin appears as startled by Jenna as Jenna is by her.

“Ahh,” Bella says. “I think I know you—you’re Jenna Messer.” Jenna is too flustered now to say anything. It’s hard to see in the dim light, but Jenna thinks Bella’s expression is disapproving, and she has to subdue the urge to say, “Excuse me,” and to dive
back into the thickest part of the crowd. There is a long silence which Jenna is too nervous to break and which Bella seems disinclined to do. She observes that this woman is old, seventy if she’s a day, and she realizes she’s always thought of Bella Griffin as having stopped aging at about sixty.

“I seem to have lost track of the people I came with,” Jenna says irrelevantly. “I mean, uh—I’m very glad to meet you.” Bella is holding a wineglass and Jenna realizes now that everybody has one and that somewhere in this huge room there must be a bar and a table of snacks. Bella hasn’t made any move to give Jenna her hand, and confused, Jenna is about to speak again when Bella says firmly, “Let’s talk,” as if she’s just made a decision about something. “There’s a lounge over there.” She turns peremptorily and strides away, not even glancing back to see if Jenna is behind her. Meekly, Jenna follows. Her mouth has gone dry, and she wishes she had a glass of wine, is immediately glad she doesn’t, because then she’d only say stupid things.

On her right, through a break in the crowd, she sees Carol in earnest conversation with a group of young women, all rail-thin and dressed alike in flat shoes, tights, very short skirts, and sweaters that hug their tiny breasts and concave midriffs. She thinks how they all look to her like they bathe too much, and is appalled that in such a moment she can still have these ridiculous but, nonetheless, interesting thoughts.

They enter the lounge, it’s empty, they must have all gone to hear the speeches, and Jenna sees the bar across the room. Bella goes straight to a corner and sits down on a narrow, L-shaped sofa, and waits for Jenna. Obediently, Jenna sits kitty-corner to her. The lights in this room haven’t been dimmed, and when she glances at Bella, Jenna sees that although she was once a beauty, her skin has that powdery look of the aged, and is criss-crossed with a pattern of tiny wrinkles. But her eyes are
as sharp and bright as a child’s, although without the child’s quality of eager innocence.