A book at war with itself
Tough questions get short shrift in Lawrence Scanlon's A Year of Living Generously, an account of volunteering for 12 charities in as many months.
Lawrence Scanlan’s idea was deceptively simple. “I decided I would volunteer with 12 charitable organizations and dedicate a month of hands-on involvement to each one,” the veteran Canadian journalist and community activist explains in the preface to A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Philanthropy.
In January, Scanlan served meals at Vinnie’s, a St. Vincent de Paul Society soup kitchen in Kingston, Ontario. May? Listened to the life stories of people living with HIV/AIDS at Hogar de la Esperanza, a shelter in Costa Rica. October? Built new homes with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
Over the course of 2008, Scanlan covered the charitable/non-profit waterfront: he spent time in homeless shelters, prisons, hospices; he worked with environmental good-doers; he volunteered to teach English to troubled aboriginal kids and journalism to eager women at a radio station in Senegal.
Scanlan is an eloquent, perceptive chronicler and companion on his journey, which is as much psychic as physical. He can be amusingly self-deprecating about his own foibles and follies but also painfully self aware of the limitations of what he is doing. When he talks about the people he meets – the helpers and the helped – he writes, as someone once said of Martha Gellhorn, with “a cold eye and a warm heart.”
Still, I had problems with his “suffering sampler” approach.
Although Scanlan is a talented journalist and an experienced volunteer, a month is just too brief a time to spend and expect to come back with real insights. And, because of the writing skills Scanlan brought to his volunteer work, he often gets asked to serve his volunteer stint on communication and newsletter projects. While that gave him journalistic permission to ask personal questions of other volunteers and clients, it also distanced him from the grit-level experiences of most ordinary volunteers.
Scanlan says he came back from his year’s experience “changed.” He is more comfortable around people who are homeless, he says, more conscious of race, more appreciative of just how difficult it is to turn a life around.
I’m not sure I felt changed reading it. What I felt instead was that the year-of core of the book was often at war with Scanlan’s deeper concerns about the intersection of volunteerism, social activism, and social responsibility.
Scanlan clearly does want to tackle his subject’s darker, more difficult questions.
We live in a time when governments demonstrate an unseemly eagerness to rip the social safety net out from under the poorest and the weakest, Scanlan writes in the preface, returning to the idea in his epilogue. Policy-makers do so on the falsely self-serving assumption that armies of ordinary volunteers coupled with grand individual, idiosyncratic (and tax-deductible) philanthro-capitalistic gestures – can you say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “does” malaria? – will fill the void. They can’t.
In such circumstances, he wonders, do individuals doing good really do good, or do their generous gestures “only serve to prop up the status quo.” If volunteer-run soup kitchens and homeless shelters end up making it easier for governments to wriggle away from their responsibilities, “where does this leave collective action against poverty and suffering?”
But those questions mostly get short shrift through Living Generously’s month-by-month storylines. They do occasionally come up in passing. At one point during the February he spends with Toronto’s homeless, for example, Scanlan channels the “crusty” frustration of a street nurse who complains that “this whole pool of [volunteers who feed the homeless] end up feeling good about helping poor people but none are walking into the mayor’s office and complaining.”
In his epilogue, Scanlan returns to this vexing problem. We won’t solve the world’s problems simply by volunteering, he admits. The epilogue, in fact, reads like a reasoned cri de coeur for social activism. But Scanlan also understands that changing government social policy – changing the system – is daunting, perhaps an impossible challenge for most of us to take on.
So “what does one do in the face of human suffering and need?” Scanlan asks rhetorically, then answers: “All I know is this: what one should not do is nothing.”
It is an inadequate, unsatisfying answer. But it is true. Which makes it all the more frustrating.
From The Mark, posted July 26, 2010
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
What I did on my summer vacation… Life as a G-G judge
When the woman from the Canada Council finally reached me on my cell phone one afternoon in late July, I was in St. John’s. I’d just completed some interviews for a project I was working on and had begun strolling down Water Street, soaking in a sunny, breezy Newfoundland day and looking forward to the beer I knew awaited me at the Ship’s Inn.
Would I, the woman asked, be willing to serve as a judge in the nonfiction category of this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards?
I’ve judged plenty of awards competitions in my time: National Magazine Awards, National Newspaper Awards, even an international travel writing awards contest (which offered the delightful—and rare—perk of a trip to New York to present the award to the winner).
Awards judging, I’ve come to accept, is one of those sort-of-solemn duties that come with the territory when you teach writing.
Sure, I said. Why not?
She seemed surprised, and not a little relieved.
Little did I know.
A few days later, seven bulging cardboard boxes filled with books thunked down on my doorstep. A few days later, there was another. And then another. And…
Before the deluge ended, there were 12 boxes containing a total of 222 freshly minted masterpieces that their hopeful publishers had submitted on behalf of their equally expectant authors, each one imagining that hers or his would be chosen the “best book” of nonfiction published in Canada in the preceding year.
Whatever "best book" really means...
I won’t dazzle you with the impossibly illogical logistics of trying to read, and then rank-order, 222 mostly fine and sometimes wonderful books in a little over two months.
But let me take you quickly through the judging process.
After my fellow judges (British Columbia writer Ross A. Laird and Toronto-based filmmaker Nelofer Pazira) and I had read—in our own form and fashion—all the submitted books, each of us had to submit our own top-10-books list to Canada Council officials by mid-September.
Officials compiled the long shortlist of titles, which they then circulated back to us so we could each take a second look at books that had not made our own lists but had obviously caught the eye of one or more of the other judges.
Ten days after that, in late September, the three of is gathered in a boardroom in the Council’s Ottawa headquarters where we spent a full day discussing the relative merits of each of the books on our combined long list, after which we delicately winnowed that list down to five finalists and then chose our winner.
The envelope please.
The winner—M.G. Vassanji’s A Place Within: Rediscovering India—was officially unveiled in Montreal today. He, along with his fellow winners in other literary categories in French and English, will be feted, at Rideau Hall next week. (As with most national awards, organizers kindly invite the judges to the party too but, sadly, their budgets never include the plane tickets that would allow those of us at the farther ends of the country to attend the celebration. Ah, well...)
Of course, I can’t—I’m sworn to until-death-do-you-part secrecy—tell you what we actually said about each of the books behind the closed doors of that Ottawa boardroom that day.
I can tell you the decisions weren’t easy, despite the fact that my fellow judges were a congenial, agreeable and wise lot. There simply were a lot of fine nonfiction books from which to choose, including many that did not even end up as finalists.
I can also tell you that judging the GG’s was an exhausting, exhilarating and, ultimately, rewarding way to spend my summer vacation.
I am happy to have done it but I will know better than to be so quick to say yes another time!
***
For those of you looking for books to read, may I suggest a worthy title from our eclectic short list of finalists for this year’s Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction.
Randall Hansen, Toronto,
Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-45.
(Doubleday Canada; distributed by Random House of Canada)
(ISBN 978-0-385-66403-5) A brave re-examination of a controversial episode in World War II history. Randall Hansen combines meticulous research with an eye for telling human detail to make his case that the Allied bombing campaign didn’t help to win the war, and actually prolonged it. A book that offers lessons for today.
Trevor Herriot, Regina,
Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds.
(Phyllis Bruce Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers; distributed by HarperCollins Canada) (ISBN 978-1-55468-038-2) Like the resilient but vulnerable birds that are its subject, this is a book of great and simple beauty. Trevor Herriot is a wise guide into a vanishing realm, almost invisible at the threshold of human culture. His poetic prose – finely-crafted, urgent and lyrical – reminds us of the entwined spirits of the human and natural worlds.
Eric S. Margolis, Toronto, American Raj: Liberation or Domination? (Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World). (Key Porter Books; distributed by H.B. Fenn and Company Ltd) (ISBN 978-1-55470-087-5) American Raj offers the missing context to the media coverage of current political events. Written from the perspective of the Muslim world, Eric S. Margolis’s fluid narrative is an unapologetic account of the growing mistrust of Muslims toward the West. Powerful and unequivocal writing that shuns easy answers.
Eric Siblin, Westmount (Quebec), The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. (House of Anansi Press; distributed by HarperCollins Canada) (ISBN 978-0-88784-222-1) A delightfully quirky quest to uncover the three-century-old mystery and magic behind Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous cello suites. Eric Siblin seamlessly weaves together the tale of how Bach’s lost and mostly forgotten manuscript came to be discovered a century later by Pablo Casals, and finally became Siblin’s personal passion.
M.G. Vassanji, Toronto, A Place Within: Rediscovering India. (Doubleday Canada; distributed by Random House of Canada) (ISBN 978-0-385-66178-2) Lyrical, evocative and informative, A Place Within reaches deep into a long, contested past history, and brings it to the surface, to the present, so the reader can see it, and touch it in its fullness. M.G. Vassanji’s prose has a transcendent quality, like the journey itself.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
IWK book to launch October 8
Th
e IWK Health Centre and Nimbus Publishing
are celebrating the launch of
IWK: A Century of Caring for Families
a new book by Stephen Kimber
Where:
The Gallery of the
Richard B. Goldbloom Pavilion,
IWK Health Centre
5850/5980 University Ave.
When: Thursday, October 8, 11:00am
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books to be published soon
One morning in the late spring of 2008, Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Clare were enjoying their usual weekly “half-business/half-pleasure” coffee at the Trident Café and Bookstore in downtown Halifax, and enjoying even more their own noisy argument about best books. Today they were debating the relative merits of two iconic Nova Scotian-Canadian authors, Thomas Raddall and Alistair MacLeod.
Adams is the Editor of Halifax, an urban lifestyles magazine, while Clare, the former Books Editor of the defunct Halifax Daily News, is one of Halifax’s busiest freelancers.
While business had been the original rationale for their weekly coffee conversations, Clare and Adams had become friends as well. They’d shared their fears: Stephen about becoming a father again at 40, Trevor about whether he was ready for marriage. And they’d shared their passions, including the Montreal Canadiens, their favourite hockey team, and of course, their favourite books.
Partly because Adams’ soon-to-be wife was from Liverpool and partly because he himself could claim one of Raddall’s sons as his dentist, Adams confessed a “natural affinity” for the late Nova Scotia writer of popular historical fiction who had been a three-time winner of the Governor-General’s literary awards. Clare, on the other hand, a Montreal-born musician and freelance writer who’d moved to Halifax nine years before, was more partial to the cerebral, Cape Breton-born, Ontario-based MacLeod, whose No Great Mischief had won him the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Today’s argument had gone on long past the end of their coffees.
Which got Clare to thinking about an interview he’d done recently with music journalist Bob Mersereau concerning his 2007 book, The Top 100 Canadian Albums.
What if?...
That was the beginning.
Next month, Nimbus will publish Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, their rank-ordered compendium of the region’s best books “ever published.” The book, which will include reviews by either Clare or Adams of every one of the chosen books, will be illustrated with book covers and author photos, and feature essays as well as additional top-10 listings for everything from best French-language books, to aboriginal books, to books bearing the silliest titles (can you say Lobster in my Pocket?).
“I’m not naïve enough to think this will be the definitive word” on which is the absolute best, number-one-for-all-time Atlantic Canadian book ever written, Adams concedes. Even if their list simply provokes “a couple of good, knock-out donnybrooks” over which should have been judged best, adds Clare, he’ll consider theirs a job well done.
They concede the process of choosing the books wasn’t scientific.
In the beginning, Adams explains, they had some “pretty rigid” criteria—the author had to be from this region, or have spent a substantial amount of time here—but then they’d encounter a book that didn’t fit their criteria yet clearly belonged on the list and… well, the criteria became less rigid.
In the same way, while the list mostly represents a tallying of votes received, there are occasional books that made the list because the editors decided they belonged. “It’s called editorial discretion,” says Adams.
The two arbitrarily decided some books—cookbooks, for example—didn’t belong, while others—poetry collections, plays—did but would probably “drop off the bottom” of any broader list. So they established separate listings for them and asked experts to submit their choices.
Once they’d sorted out their parameters, they prepared an open-ended email and sent it to everyone they could think of—authors, critics, librarians, professors of Canadian literature and history, bookstore owners and, of course, readers—inviting them to compile their own personal top 10 lists. And then invited those people to forward the email on to others they thought might be interested in doing the same.
By the time it was over, they’d received 716 replies. One woman submitted her list and then wrote back the next day to revise it, and then twice more after that to revise her revisions. “How could I have possibly forgotten…?”
There were, of course, occasional efforts to rig the outcome. Clare recalls receiving 30 almost identically worded submissions, all from the same computer IP address and all listing only the same one book. “That just wasn’t on,” he says.
Adams and Clare compiled the more than 7,000 ballots cast for 2,000 different books (with votes coming from locals, expats and interested outsiders from 17 countries) and tallied up the votes to determine the rankings.
And the winner is…
Not so fast. The book doesn’t hit the bookstores until mid-October so their publishers at Nimbus—not surprisingly—are loath to let Clare and Adams give away too many secrets too soon. Nimbus is actually inviting readers to predict which will be the top five books when the list is finally unveiled. Those who guess correctly will be entered in a draw for a $100 gift certificate for—what else?—books. For details, go to www.nimbus.ca and select “Contests.”
That said, there are a few things Adams and Clare will confide.
First, of course, is the fact that both Raddall and MacLeod will make the top 100 list. Second, while you might quibble about the order, Adams says, you won’t be surprised by which books ended up in the top 10. Their order, he adds, is “exactly as the numbers came out. It was really only when we got to the bottom 50 where we asked ourselves, ‘Why does this book matter?’”
You probably also won’t be surprised to discover that there are common themes in the selected books, and that those themes include the importance of geography and natural setting.
Or that Atlantic Canadian authors are not only talented, they’re generous. “People like Lesley Choyce and Ami MacKay and David Adams Richards would get back to us,” Adams notes, “and ask, Have you thought about so-and-so, or so-and-so?”
More by luck than by design, he adds, the book “balanced out nicely. All four provinces are well represented. There is a balance of men and women; there are writers of colour.”
But taking the project from coffee-argument idea to finished book in just over a year, they admit, did become an all consuming project. Trevor even took the manuscript with him to Jamaica on his honeymoon despite promising not to. “Busted!” he jokes. Later, his wife woke him up one morning at three o’clock; he’d been talking in his sleep about Thomas Raddall. Clare says he ended up buying his postal delivery person a thank-you package of Tylenol to compensate for all the heavy books he’d had to deliver to him.
While Adams and Clare are still putting the final-final finishing touches on Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, they admit they’re already considering another collaboration. “Something sports related,” Adams suggests. “That could be fun.”
***
Stephen Kimber, the author of one novel and seven books of nonfiction, is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. Full disclosure: he contributed his own top 10 list on the best “Historical Books of Atlantic Canada, Fictional and Not So...” to Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
A Short Story
As if it mattered
By Stephen Kimber
From Mixed Messages, "an anthology of literature to benefit hospice and cancer causes," published by English Garden Publishers and featuring such writers as Jane Urquhart, Paul Quarrington, Joseph Boyden, Wayson Choy, Katherine Govier, Will Ferguson, Andrew Pyper, Stuart McLean and Erika Ritter. Edited by Paul Knowles.
The 1-0-4? You. Quizzical. Professorially skeptical. You mean the 4-0-1. As if you were lecturing a particularly dense student. Or you wife. As if this kind-eyed cop standing in your front porch telling you your wife has just been killed in a car accident must have gotten her highway route numbers mixed up.
As if the numbers mattered.
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1. I heard you say it. In my head. In that strapped, trapped-in-place, tumbling, twisting, turmoiled, ice-skidding, gravel-spitting, chassis-flipping, coffees-flying, metal-crunching, airbags-exploding, windshield-shattering, roof-meets-mind, final, strangely never-ending ever second between what had been and nothingness… I heard you say it.
Even though you hadn’t.
Not yet.
But you would.
You did, didn’t you?
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.
I loved you for it. Perhaps that is why I fell in love with you. For your uncanny ability to fixate on such an insignificant detail and miss what really matters — to be, so often, so beside the point. I used to think of it — my gender forgive me — as an expression of your endearingly ditzy, feminine side. Or, to give you your male professional due, as a manifestation of your absent-minded professor self.
As you will now have to discover for yourself, I twisted whatever you prefer to call that guileless obtuseness of yours to my own advantage. Not that I intended to.
How could you not have known? You must at least have suspected? How did we end up with our roles so scrambled? I should have been the one listening to the kind-eyed cop. And you should have… Instead of…
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.
Of course, I hated you for it too, for your annoying need to be correct. About everything. And anything. Do you remember that time you decided I should take Quinpool Road to get to my office?
“It would be faster,” you said.
“No, it wouldn’t,” I answered. “There’s less traffic and fewer lights on Chebucto.”
Three weeks later, when I’d forgotten all about the conversation, you brought it up again. “I was right,” you said. (You were always right, of course, or perhaps you just never mentioned it again when you were wrong.) As an experiment, you told me, you’d driven each route for a full week during both morning and evening rush hours, then averaged out the times. Taking the Quinpool Road route saved, on average, forty eight seconds’ driving time in the mornings, thirty six in the evenings. You. Triumphant.
Did I ever tell you how much I disliked that about you?
Not that that explains anything. I mean this didn’t happen because I hated you for your need to always be right. I did it because… well, that’s the question, isn’t it?
You mean the 4-0-1.
You were wrong this time. Not that that’s your fault. And not that it explains anything either.
I didn’t take the flight to Toronto. Another damn sales meeting, I’d told you. Carolyn’s panicking about the fall numbers already. So she’s called a special meeting. You know how much I hate those meetings. But what can I do? It’s just one night. Me. Resigned.
There was no meeting. No Toronto. And so, no 4-0-1.
I did go to the airport, but only to pick up Hubert. You remember Hubert Durand? The French author? The one whose universities’ tour I organized last spring? You don’t, do you? Like I said, you always missed what matters. Anyway, let me tell you some other things you don’t know that now don’t matter anymore either.
Hubert, a professor of literature at some university in Paris, wrote a novel, a truly trashy erotic romance, the translation of which somehow ended up in a discard bin at the New York Review of Books. Some reviewer picked it out of the pile, read it, loved it and wrote a review that tarted up Hubert’s simple lust story with multiple metaphysical meanings he had never intended nor — believe me when I say this — understood.
His freshly re-interpreted book — repackaged with a gauzy, sepia cover photo that featured mysteriously entwined naked limbs — their naughty bits decorously obscured by breathless blurb copy from the now-infamous review —became a cult phenomenon on North American university campuses (where smut is always welcome, especially when served with a dollop of sanctifying meaning). The publisher, understanding how quickly today’s cult success can become tomorrow’s pulped returns, immediately decided to cash in with a lecture tour to celebrate the novel’s miraculous resurrection from the remainder bin.
Which, of course, is where I came in. You must remember this part. After I’d organized Hubert’s east coast stops, the publisher asked if I would accompany him. They were worried his English might not be adequate, that he’d get lost, or disappear, or something. I didn’t want to do it. I was trying to nail down the local details of the next Atwood book flog, but the publicity people were insistent. I told you all this at the time; I know I did. Am I telling you again now to try and explain why what happened happened? I didn’t want to go. I didn’t intend…
It’s not quite true. While it is fair to say I didn’t intend for precisely what happened to happen, I didn’t not intend it either — if that make any sense. The only part I really didn’t intend was how it has now all ended. I definitely didn’t intend that.
At any rate, Hubert’s English was fine. Better than fine, actually. I met his plane at the airport. By the time we’d rescued his luggage from the carousel, he’d already propositioned me. I won’t flatter myself; he was practising his new role as middle-aged campus literary Lothario. He was good at it. And good looking too, in a rumpled, stubbled, smoky, boozy, weathered, French author sort of way that usually doesn’t appeal to me.
So why did I say yes? I didn’t. In fact, that first time, I laughed at him. Out loud. Perhaps that was because it had been so long since anyone had come on to me like that. You certainly never did. That first night at the bar, I was the one who picked you up. Remember? Five years ago, when my biological clock was still a ticking time bomb. You fit within what I thought at the time were all the requisite father-of my-child parameters: you were male, heterosexual and had a pulse. Better, you were gainfully employed, a tenured professor even, smarter than me, probably kinder. What can I say? I was thirty five; I wasn’t thinking straight. Otherwise, I might have asked for a fertility test, or at least a sperm count.
Was that the issue? Too few of your little guys swimming victory laps around my crown jewels? Does that explain everything? Anything? I doubt it. The truth — I never told you this, perhaps because I didn’t want to acknowledge it myself — was that your diagnosis was also this condemned woman’s minute-before-midnight governor’s stay of execution. I was not ready, not fit to be a mother.
As a teenager I remember talking my way out of babysitting jobs — Test tomorrow… Have to study… So sorry… Why don’t you ask my little sister? — because just the thought of taking care of some crying, clinging, wriggling, shitting, puking helpless little thing scared the hell out of me. In my late twenties, when all my friends suddenly seemed to transform themselves into baby-making factories, I had to force myself to coo and cuddle, and pronounce every Winston-Churchill or rhesus-monkey-looking one of them the most adorable baby I’d ever seen. And, worse, to put up with their mother monsters, my former friends who’d joined the coven, swallowed the Kool-Aid and now professed that having your nipples nibbled raw by an insatiable teething beast was fulfilling, that sleeplessness was its own reward… and, oh, Chloe, why don’t you join us?
At the time, I thought I must just be jealous. I realize now I was not.
The more we tried — and failed — to conceive, the more I worried we might actually succeed. I can’t tell you how relieved I was the day that officious young resident at the clinic finally delivered his male-factor-infertility-for-dummies lecture, complete with personally tailored, colour-coded PowerPoint charts that might have been funny if he — and you — weren’t so serious.
See this blue line here, Mrs. Lydon, he explained, a long, elegant finger tracing its trajectory across the computer screen. This line represents what medical science considers a normal sperm count — twenty million or more sperm per milliliter of semen. He clicked the mouse and a second, much shorter yellow line magically drew itself beneath the first. This line shows your count from last week’s fertility test, Mr. Lydon. As you can see, it’s only eleven million per millilter, or just over half of the normal level. We call this condition oligospermia, or, in layman’s language, low sperm count. He paused, turned and smiled at both of us. The good news is that modern artificial reproductive technologies now offer the opportunity for us to assist Mother Nature…
That was his good news, not mine. When I recoiled, the doctors, who quickly became puppy-eager to offer up their cocktails of anti-depressants to deal with my “problem,” and assumed my increasingly shrill refusal to consider artificial insemination (“too clinical”), sperm donation (“some pimply-faced guy in a backward baseball cap jerking off into a bottle is not going to be the father my child!”), male fertility drugs, (“what if we ended up with some hideous mutant?”), or adoption (“I don’t want someone else’s damaged goods”) was just my understandable, if crazed hormonal response to the news you were not the man you were supposed to be, but that I would get over it, come around, be realistic, adapt.
I didn’t. And, when I think about it, you didn’t try too hard to change my mind. I wonder now if that was because you were as frightened about having a child as I was. It’s too bad we didn’t talk more. Perhaps if we had, this would all be easier.
What else can I tell you that will help you make sense of it all now?
The first time? St. John’s. Last stop on the tour. After the post-lecture reception at the university. We’d taken a cab back to the hotel.
“A night cap?” he said. “To celebrate such a wonderful evening.”
“I should call my husband,” I said. And meant it. I was feeling randy from the two glasses of wine and the exhausted exhilaration of having done what I knew was a good job, but all I wanted was to curl up in bed and listen the sound of your voice over the phone.
“Just one?”
“Well… OK… but just one....”
I knew where it was heading, long before the first glass of wine became the second Scotch-on-the-rocks and the third Scotch turned into a coquettish, I-really-shouldn’t, sweet-dreams, bottoms-up Bailey’s; certainly well before Hubert got off the elevator at my floor instead of continuing on to his own because “a gentleman always sees a lady to her room;” and way before a simple thanks-for-all-your-good-work, goodnight peck on the cheek turned into a gasping, groping dry hump against my hotel room door while Hubert took the plastic room card-lock key from my outstretched hand and slid it into the slot in the door and we tumbled backwards through the opened door onto the carpeted floor, at first giggling and then urgent, rolling, pulling, shrugging, unbuttoning, unzipping…
I’d known where it was heading, and I didn’t do anything to stop it. After, I asked myself, What was I thinking?, tried to summon up some shame, or, at least, the least regret. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about how good it all felt. Not the sex. The sex itself, as always, was a letdown (if that makes you feel any better). It was the letting go, the giving up, the absolute and total abandonment of all my usual, careful, consider-the-consequences calibrating, measuring, weighing, balancing. The pleasure, the release was in just experiencing the moment. The sex was better than I said (why should I lie now?), but the power of the orgasm had less to do with what was happening between my legs and much more with the absence of what usually happens inside my head.
Even the next morning, I felt remarkably free of guilt, or even angst. Perhaps because I knew the tour was over and I would never have to see Hubert again. Perhaps because I knew you would never find out.
What did I know?
This time — the second time, the time that never actually happened — it was different. Hubert emailed me last week. He’d been invited to speak at some literary conference in Boston and had a few free days afterward. He wrote that he was thinking of flying to Nova Scotia, and wondered if I might be free to show him around and “perhaps renew acquaintances.” I wrote back to say — equally blandly — that it was a very busy time for me but that, if he came, “perhaps we could have lunch.”
If you’re curious, you’ll find this exchange of unrevealing correspondence on my computer in a sub-folder of the “Freelance” folder of my email program entitled, “Other…”, along with three previous messages from Hubert, including a “Thanks for everything!” message containing a smiley-face emoticon, which he wrote just after he arrived back in Paris the first time, and two even more impersonal messages, including the text of a news story — in French — from a Paris newspaper about his North American tour and a much-forwarded email containing a link to a joke about George Bush eating French fries that I didn’t get. Or perhaps wasn’t funny. You won’t find any other replies from me. There weren’t any.
You’ll be curious, of course. You’ll check my cell phone records — why is it that modern technology makes everything so easy to know and so difficult to understand? — and discover a series of calls to and from Hubert’s hotel room in the Boston Marriott, only one of which lasted longer than two minutes. That call, made on a Sunday afternoon three days before he flew to Halifax, was from me to him, went on for twelve minutes and thirty four seconds, and was followed, less than half an hour later, by a one-minute-and twelve-second call from his room to me. And then, three minutes after that, the records will show I placed a call to a number in Sackville, New Brunswick. If you check, you’ll find the number is for the Marshlands Inn. You remember that lovely old inn where we stayed on our honeymoon? I’m not very imaginative. If you call, you’ll discover I made a reservation for the same room in which we stayed, the one with the sleigh bed and cast iron clawfoot tub. I’m not very inventive either. The reservation is for Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Lydon.
There will be more hints and allegations you’ll discover as you go. When the Visa bill comes, for example, you’ll notice a purchase from Leeza’s Lingerie dated the day after that exchange of phone calls. You’ll find the purchase itself — a too lacey, too revealing, much-too-girlish-for-me pink peignoir set — in my suitcase with the price tag still on. You won’t know this — except that I’m telling you — but I left the tag attached in case I chickened out and decided to return it instead. (Leeza’s has a strict thirty-day returns policy, so you shouldn’t wait too long—… My God, such strange advice I’m offering you! Think of it as the practical side of my personality, showing itself even in death. I mean, there’s no point for you to keep it… unless… do you have secrets too?
How little we really know about anyone.
And even what we think we know… do we really know it at all?
I would like to tell you I planned to call it off — whatever this “it” really was. I did. In fact, in the days of doubt between that flurry of Sunday phone calls and the arrival of Flight AC8894 at 10:38 on Wednesday morning, I considered calling Hubert to cancel many times. The cell phone logs don’t count calls considered but not made.
I would like to tell you I was hesitant because I loved you. But then I would have to tell you that I went ahead anyway because I didn’t love you. And neither is quite true.
If you must know, you had very little to do with either decision. Neither did Hubert. It was, as so many things are, mostly just about me. About the positive job evaluation I got. And the raise I didn’t. About the fact I actually cared about either. About the jeans that no longer fit the way I’d imagined they once did. About my father’s cancer. And my mother’s loneliness. About the new computer program I can’t seem to make do what the ads claimed it would. About the hot flashes that began before I was ready for them. About all the people I never became. And the one I did. About me.
It was as twisted and as uncomplicated as that. Escape from reality. Pretend for a day and a night. And then back to my life, my job, my husband.
No one would ever know.
So much for that.
It was different than the first time. We — I — couldn’t pretend I didn’t know the road we were traveling down. Literally. Figuratively. We stopped for coffee in Truro. Hubert had acquired a taste for Tims double-doubles during his last visit. We talked about the success of his book and his inability to write the next one, the conference in Boston and the pretentiousness of academics, the war in Iraq, the first signs of spring in Boston and the far-from-last vestiges of winter in Nova Scotia, the unlikely prospect that a Nova Scotia vintner could ever produce a wine Hubert would consider acceptable … everything, that is, except the fact this was all a huge mistake, and that it shouldn’t have happened the first time, and that it couldn’t happen again.
I was saving that conversation for after dinner. No, later. For after sex. Or, perhaps, later still, for those few minutes tomorrow in the airport lounge after he’d checked in for his flight back to Boston and before he proceeded through Security. It’s been fun, Hubert, I was going to tell him, and good for me in a strange kind of way — it’s important to be honest — but it can’t go on. I have a husband. And a job. And a life. Goodbye…
Do you believe that? Do I believe that?
Not that it matters now, of course. We never made it to the inn, let alone to dinner, sex, breakfast, back to the airport. We never had the conversation.
It was early afternoon. Around two, I’m guessing. The sky — grey, gloomy, heavy with menace and malice — pressed down hard against the frozen landscape while wind-whipped snow squalls chased each other angrily across the road in the beams of the car’s headlights. We were driving along the 1-0-4 somewhere between Wentworth and Oxford. I used to know all the landmarks but, ever since they replaced the old, winding, “too dangerous” road with a new toll highway a few years ago, it all looks the same to me.
I needed a cigarette. I know, I know. I don’t smoke, and haven’t since long before I met you. But I had one that first night in St. John’s. After. Hubert was still on his back, waiting for his breathing to slow down. I was tucked into the crook of his arm, feeling the room spin. He reached over to his sports jacket and pulled a pack of Gitanes from its inside pocket, lit one, and held it out to me. I arched my neck up toward his proffered hand, took a long, slow drag and remembered how much I used to like the sensation of smoking. Do you remember me joking that if the doctor ever told me I had a terminal illness, the first thing I’d do was go out and buy a package of cigarettes — or was that from before I met you? Not that it matters. Smoking kills. Trust me on that.
Hubert had left his package of cigarettes in the well between the car’s front seats, along with my sunglasses and cellphone, and his new iPod. You would have been proud of me. I know how much you hate when I get distracted putting on my makeup while driving. I didn’t look down, just kept my eyes fixed on the snowy nothingness in front of me and felt around with my right hand like a blind man until I felt the familiar shape of the cardboard packaging.
“Want one?” I asked Hubert.
“Sure,” he said. “But, please, let me…”
“No, no, that’s OK. I can do it.” I had a sudden image — black and white, from a fifties’ movie, a romantic comedy, perhaps? — of me with two unlit cigarettes dangling from my mouth, lighting one, passing it across to Hubert and then lighting my own.
Smooth.
Not so much in real life.
I did manage to get both cigarettes out of the package, insert them, filters facing correctly, into my mouth and, then, more awkwardly than in the picture in my mind’s eye, lit each of them with the car’s lighter. But, as I reached back up to take the first from my mouth and hand it to Hubert, I somehow knocked the second from between my lips. It fell into my lap. Instinctively, I looked down and frantically began to use my right hand to brush it off my slacks. Wrong hand. Now, one burning cigarette had fallen onto the seat between my legs, the other had become — thanks to me — a shower of sparks burning pinkprick holes in my slacks. Had I packed another pair? I—
“Merde! Non—“
I looked up, saw the red tail lights of a monster eighteen-wheeler looming up out of the snow swirls dead ahead of us. We were going too fast; it wasn’t going fast enough. We were about to rear-end a transport truck!
“No! Fuck—“
I slammed on the brakes and, at the same time, twisted the steering wheel to my left, thinking, ‘If I can just get past him, everything will be OK.’ But then it wasn’t. An air horn blast just above and behind me! Oh, no. There was a second truck. In the outside lane. Trying to pass me and the first truck. Sandwich time. I dragged the steering wheel back to my right, felt the hurricane whoosh of the second truck as it barreled past to my left. Breathed again. Braking had put some distance between me and the truck in front. It was going to be OK. I almost had time to feel the pain from the cigarette still burning between my legs. Almost. The car’s rear end fishtailed as it hit a patch of black ice. Was this a metaphor for my life? Just when you think… Brake? Don’t brake? Brake. Jolt. Gravel. Pavement. Ice. Gravel again. Then flying. And then silence.
And then everything happened at once, and didn’t happen at all.
Which was when I heard you say it.
The 1-0-4? You mean the 4-0-1.
I wanted to explain, make you understand that this wasn’t about Hubert, or you, or us; that it was about me; that none of the explanations explained anything because there was no explaining anything; that I was sorry for what you could never know; that I’d loved you in my way, been true to you in my fashion.
As if any of it mattered.
But I couldn’t.
I’m dead.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.