The Romantic (39 page)

“I envy writers who have all these other talents,” she says, a trifle querulously. “I said to Chris that I have put all my eggs in one basket and he said ‘No, you have your egg in one basket,’ and we both laughed.”

Part of Gowdy’s postpartum despair comes from the compulsive way she writes and rewrites. She is easily distracted by sounds, so she wears earplugs, and has a white-noise machine in her office. During the six months she spent revising
The Romantic
, she rented a hotel room on Toronto’s Jarvis Street off and on for a couple of weeks at a time so that she could evade friends and domesticity. She ordered in, a chambermaid cleaned up, she found somebody to feed the cat, and she spent 15 hours a day pushing herself further and further into her characters and her storytelling.

“I love to see how deep I can go,” she says. “If it doesn’t do well, I can regret not being smarter, or the extent of my so-called gift, but I can’t regret how hard I worked or how much I put myself into it. I gave it my all, and there is a great satisfaction in that.”

With satisfaction, though, comes depletion. Waiting for the well to fill again puts Gowdy “in an awful place,” she confesses. Experience has taught her that she can’t move on to a new project until she has gauged the reaction to her current book. “I always finish a book thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s over. I’m finished. I’m washed up. I have no ideas.’ I remember years ago [after her story collection appeared] saying that to one of my nephews. He must have been six or seven. And he said, ‘Here is
a story: There is a lizard, and he lives on the lizard planet, and he comes to Earth,’” she intones. “And I was almost grasping him by the lapels and saying, ‘What happens next, kid?’”

Despite her anxiety, Gowdy will be fine. She has done it before, she will do it again.
The Romantic
will be a success.

The novel is compelling, the story is finely paced in its seamless shifts back and forth in time, and the writing is sharply polished. Besides, the subject matter—the different ways men and women love—is irresistible. Still, offering Gowdy gratuitous reassurance is like telling a woman who has already had five healthy babies not to worry during her sixth pregnancy. That’s why she is worrying—her luck must be about to run out.

All Gowdy can do in this resting phase is to wait it out, have faith that the muse will visit again, that her book will sell, and she won’t end up as a bag lady just yet. She knows the drill.

—Reprinted with permission from
The Globe and Mail

For more on Barbara Gowdy, visit her website:
www.barbaragowdy.ca

For information on Abelard and Heloise, referred to in
The Romantic,
check out:
historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aao2050oa.htm?once=true&classiclit.about. com/cs/articles/a/aa_abelard.htm

www.gutenberg.org/etext/14268
(Historia Calamitatum
by Peter Abelard, the correspondence between Heloise and Abelard, from Project Gutenberg)

Read
The Observer’s
in-depth interview with Barbara Gowdy on
The Romantic
at the following link:
books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/o”982294,00.html

Descant
cultural magazine devoted its entire Spring 2006 issue to Barbara Gowdy. For information on this issue, visit:
www.descant.on.ca/issues/d132.html

Chapter One

On a sweltering afternoon in early June, Celia Fox stands at the railing of her deck and smokes the second-to-last cigarette she’ll allow herself before going to work.

The apartment is small and stuffy (one of the drawbacks to living on the third floor of a Victorian house) but at least she and Rachel have this deck with its overhanging horse-chestnut tree whose glovelike leaves are already big enough to shade the entire front yard. From the railing of the deck you can see both the street out front and the lane that runs along the back of the stores on Parliament Street. Usually there’s something going on in the lane, although right now, because it’s so hot, not many people are out: only a legless man, dozing in his wheelchair behind the Shoppers Drug Mart dumpster, and the muscle-bound dog walker who holds all his leashes in one fist like a charioteer. An appliance-repair van drives by, and Celia wonders if repair places sell used air conditioners. Except she can’t afford even a used one. And anyway, she has to finish filling in the modelling-school application if she wants to make the deadline.

Does she want to make it? She hasn’t decided. Nine strikes her as a little young to start trading in on your looks, although, if she chooses to believe the guy from the modelling ►
agency, nine verges on decrepitude. When she told him Rachel’s age he said he’d have put her at seven and a half, eight at the outside. “But that’s okay,” he said, eyeing Rachel as if she were a used car,“she can pass.”

By this time Celia was regretting having let him buy her and Rachel iced teas in lava Ville, but he’d chased them up Parliament Street and he’d seemed, in those first few minutes, so boyish and pleasant.

“Little girls are a big deal right now,” he told her. “For certain high-end ads they’re pulling in close to a thousand, plus residuals.”

Rachel’s head snapped up from her book. “A thousand dollars?”

“That’s right.”

“I could be paid a
thousand dollars?”

“Once we get that face of yours out there.” He assured Celia that for girls with Rachel’s potential the modelling school waived its fee.

“What does ‘potential’ mean?” Rachel asked.

“Beauty,” he said. “You know you’re beautiful, right?”

Rachel shrugged.

“Take it from me.” He looked back and forth from her to Celia, clearly wondering the same thing everybody who met them for the first time wondered.

At which point Celia picked up the pamphlets and application form. “We’ll have to read all this over,” she said. She had no intention of satisfying his curiosity but she wasn’t offended, either. Didn’t she herself live in perpetual amazement that she could be her
daughter’s biological mother? She pushed back her chair, then saw by the inclination of Rachel’s head that he was going to be set straight after all.

And here it came: “Some people ask if I’m adopted. Well, I’m not.”

“Okay,” the guy said.

“My father’s black. Which is probably obvious.”

“It would have been my guess.”

With a new inflection of pride or challenge, as if she’d only recently figured out that this information wasn’t so predictable, Rachel said,“He’s an architect in New York City. His name’s Robert Smith.”

“Cool,” the guy said. “An architect in New York City.”

Or a veterinarian in Hoboken … Celia has no idea. She isn’t even sure that his last name is Smith.

She goes inside and reads a depressing fiction piece in
Harper’s
about a husband indulging his wife’s bizarre mental breakdown. Then she shoves the cat off the piano and practises “Besame Mucho” for about half an hour, after which she forces herself to take another stab at the modelling-school application. She’s still on the first page (“Would you describe your child as overly sensitive to criticism?” “Is your child afraid of dogs?”) when Rachel arrives home, calling that Leonard wants to be a model, too. In exchange for free piano lessons, Leonard Wong accompanies Rachel to and from school. He’s twelve years old but acts forty, a terrifyingly high-minded boy who sends his allowance to an orphanage in Shanghai. ►

“He’s not really model material,” Celia says tactfully.

“I know,” Rachel says. “He needs braces. I didn’t tell him, though.” She comes over and presses a palm along Celia’s bare, sweat-sticky shoulders. “Hey!” She has seen the application. “What’s this still doing here?” She snatches it up.

“I’ve been having second thoughts,” Celia admits. “Would you like some lemonade?”

“Not right now,” Rachel says stonily.

Celia reaches for her cigarettes. “Let’s go outside.”

“It’s like you don’t even care if we’re poor,” Rachel says, following Celia onto the deck. She drops on the sofa and starts tugging foam from a hole in the cushion.

Celia has gone over to the railing. “Stop that—” nodding at the cushion. “We’re not poor.”

“Whatever.”

“We’re thrifty.” Celia lights her cigarette. “Do you want to be a model? Forget the money. Do you want to spend all your time after school and on weekends rushing around to auditions and sitting for hours under hot lights and hardly ever having any fun?”

“The guy said a thousand dollars.”

“It’s not your job to worry about money.”

“When you die from smoking, it’ll be my job.”

“I’m cutting down.”

“Liar.” She jumps up and comes over to Celia and hugs her arm. “Liar, liar!” she cries theatrically. “You smoke more than Mika, even.”

Mika, their landlord and closest friend. “He’s a social smoker,” Celia says. “He doesn’t count.”

Rachel releases Celia and starts spinning around the deck.

“So,” Celia says,“can I rip up the application?”

“You’re the one who brought it home.” She throws herself against the railing and slumps there.

“Good. That’s settled then.”

“Rachel straightens. Something in the lane has caught her attention.”

“What?” Celia says, turning to see. The guy in the wheelchair is gone. Across the street two pigeons peck at a dropped ice cream cone. “What are you looking at?”

“You don’t have enough clothes on.”

“Nobody could tell from there.”

Rachel scoops up Felix, who has just strolled out onto the deck. “I think I’ll go with you tonight,” she says.