Next Life Might Be Kinder (22 page)

“That very same thought occurred to me. That truth is a byproduct of pain. You've said that physical pain helps you think clearly, because you have to think
against
the pain.”

I said, “No, you have that wrong. I told you that's what Elizabeth said, relating to a time she herself suffered a headache and was working on her dissertation.”

“My apologies.”

“Except—I know how you think. You think that my seeing Elizabeth all these months keeps me connected to the pain of losing her, and therefore distracts me from the truth—that she isn't really there.”

“May I suggest you not put words in my mouth?”

“Fair enough.”

“Sam, we don't talk about fairness in here, do we? We don't even want to be hospitable to the notion of fairness. I think, as a basic premise, fairness does not apply to what happened to Elizabeth, and to you. Fairness cannot be allowed into consideration. What happened was hardly fair.”

I took in your critique of the novel you have just read. Allow me to respond. At the hand of a conscientious writer, synchronicity of incident might contribute to an indispensable sense of verisimilitude in a work of fiction. In the hand of a less conscientious writer, it may seem too much contrivance, meaning less original. The only question is, does the work as a whole allow one to taste the bitterness and sweetness of life. If the answer is a resounding yes, then to point out examples of so-called contrivance strikes me as prosecutorial, carping and undignified.

—Chekhov, in a letter to a friend in the theater

 

I can see two people being swept up by an atmosphere.

—Myrna Loy to William Powell, in
Double Wedding

 

My friend Astrid said, “I envy people with repressed memories.” (Of course, she lived through the Blitz.) But I said, too bad we can't choose which to repress. We had a good laugh. But her expression belied her laughter.

—Marghanita Laski

 

Good Lord, I simply cannot recall Stephen's face, my great love. I can't remember it. It is driving me mad. But I refuse to rely on photographs. And now all these autumn leaves are falling. How can they? How can they abandon their trees like that? This is all too much for me. I'm taking to my bed.

—Oleander Martin, British artist and writer

 

After my shell-shock during the war, the way I defeated concussion and amnesia was at an excruciating slow pace to piece together, like a jig-saw puzzle the size of a gymnasium floor, everything I remembered about the life of my trench-mate those many weeks, Robert Meyers-Brittman. What a gift, then, that Bobby was such a talker. In the trenches we stood apart at a distance no more than three meters. One morning, on a charge through barbed wire, Bobby was blown to pieces by artillery in the mud. Yet still I feel him at that former proximity now. I hear the exact timbre of his voice. Quite clearly hear it, drumming of rain on his helmet and mine notwithstanding.

—Michael Hoyd, World War I soldier and memoirist

 

On ward rounds I saw a fellow banging his head against a wall. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” I think he was trying to banish a memory that wouldn't allow it.

—Stewart Plate, hospital orderly, Washington, D.C., during the American Civil War

 

To travel all one needs to do is close one's eyes.

—Emily Dickinson, American poet

 

In this remote and strange place, sometimes it is close to overwhelming, how deep my desire for my old life; though perhaps not for all of it.

—Marcus Densmore, Canadian diarist, 1866

 

Today I fell to the ground at the pull of memory. There quite seemed a permanence to my defeat. And here I thought, in their profound tug-of-war, present and future would, by sheer shouldering force of will and superior numbers, win out over the past. How wrong I was.

—Marghanita Laski

A
FTER RECORDING THE
final episode of
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons,
there was a masquerade party held at the CBC offices. It was the brainstorm of the series' director, Martha Bellevance, who'd worked in radio for decades, that everyone dress up as characters from the episodes. Four of the crew who worked for Martha—a writer, a producer, a technician, and an actor—obviously hadn't been consulted in advance, because they all arrived dressed as Mr. Keen. They took as a model the portrait of Mr. Keen in the original publicity materials (who in fact was modeled on a night janitor in the old NBC radio studios in New York; he was dapper in an expensive suit with wide lapels and had an expression of skeptical curiosity and very kind eyes). The rest of us were dressed as various characters who had been tracked down by Keen. We each wore a name tag identifying the title of the episode and the name of the character. I dressed as Bobo the clown, from “The Case of the Missing Clown.”

Though Elizabeth had followed the radio series faithfully (it scored high ratings!), she dressed as a bellman. She had her hair tucked up under a bellman's cap. “I can't really look like a man, I know,” she'd said. “But I like the outfit.” Looking back on this, I wonder if she was at all conscious of inhabiting her fear. Or was she courageously facing it down? She'd asked Derek Budnick for the uniform, and he'd provided her with a moth-bitten one from the hotel's basement storage. At the party her costume was a big hit, though Martha Bellevance came over and said, “I don't remember a bellhop in any of the episodes. Which one was it?”

“I'm afraid I've dressed wrongly,” Elizabeth said.

Martha wanly smiled and left us be.

I said, “Lizzy, you're a little tipsy.”

She said, “You'll appreciate it more when we get back home. Which I hope is soon.” She could not find the soul of the evening.

T
ODAY I WOKE
at four
A.M.
Riffling through my own unorganized files, I found the catalogue for the exhibit of Robert Frank's photographs where Elizabeth and I first met. I looked at the reproductions. Each one, of course, had
Next Life Might Be Kinder
written along the lower margin. About a month after attending the opening of the exhibit, we'd gone to Robert Frank's lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

The auditorium was filled to the rafters and there was much excitement in the room. The moderator (a notable museum curator, Elizabeth told me) made the introduction and Robert Frank stepped to the podium. He was balding slightly, with dark, curly hair, and seemed at first reticent. He wore charcoal-gray trousers, a white shirt, and black socks and shoes. He talked without notes and was all sweetness and light about his students, and humorous. He spoke admiringly of his father and fondly of his boyhood in Zurich. He mentioned his admiration for Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He had a distinct accent. During the Q and A, he tended to rephrase the more mundane questions to better get at a subject of interest to him. He tried to make the session less like a formal lecture and more like a conversation. He referred four times to Bob Dylan's
Blonde on Blonde
album, which he said he'd been listening to a lot. “I like the song ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,'” he said.

The last question was posed by an art student sitting in the front row (“Her name's Rebecca Culpepper,” Elizabeth whispered to me, “a painter”): “Mr. Frank, you've written
Next Life Might Be Kinder
on nearly every one of the photographs. Could you tell us if this is a religious belief, like in reincarnation or something? Or is it meant to be like a one-line poem, or what? It seems both pessimistic and optimistic. It's like you're saying this life hasn't been so great, so the next one almost has to be better. Kinder, I meant to say. And you do use the word ‘might,' so maybe your optimism is, well, qualified.”

“If there is a next life, yes, I have that hope, for it to be kinder,” Robert Frank replied. “But probably whatever notion you come up with will be better than anything I could come up with. I'm in a constant state of uncertainty.”

The moderator quickly stepped in to conclude the evening.

On the street afterward there was a dusting of snow. We were both excited by having seen Robert Frank, but far more so by the electric current of anticipation—sparks practically jumped between our hands when they touched—of making love later. Which we did as soon as we got back to Elizabeth's small apartment. But despite the immediacy of “lovely intertwinings” (you see, I'm quoting Marghanita Laski!), I could tell that Elizabeth was preoccupied about something. As we sat in the bathtub at around one o'clock in the morning, she said, “You know, I felt a great sadness in Robert Frank. But also the questions were, most of them, pretty stupid, didn't you think? Like, for instance, why he'd written
Next Life Might Be Kinder
across the bottom of those photographs in the exhibition. Of
course,
who else would do that but a sad sack? But it's that old European sort of weariness, you know, where personal tragic events—I mean, his daughter died in a plane crash, for God's sake. It's what Marghanita Laski—remember? that's who I'm writing my dissertation on—what she calls “the imprimatur of permanent melancholy.” Yeah, that's what I felt from Mr. Frank, just exactly how Marghanita said it.”

T
HE WORLD TURNS
upside down and doesn't right itself completely. The movie has been temporarily shut down. Here's the front-page headline from today's
Chronicle-Herald:
MOVIE DIRECTOR DROWNS AT PORT MEDWAY
.

Just after dawn this morning, Philip telephoned me. “There are police cars, and I mean right out back in the cove. Peter Istvakson drowned. What was he doing here in the first place?”

“I'm coming over.”

I telephoned Lily Svetgartot, and she said, “Michiko Zento will go on with the filming.
Next Life
will be completed.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Later, you might consider that pretty cold, Mr. Lattimore. Well, there's to be an investigation. An inquiry. And when that is over, they'll send Mr. Istvakson home. By the way, there's a private memorial service two days from now. Will you want to know the location? Probably a church.”

“I'll grieve in private, thank you.”

“I can drive out and speak to you about all this. There are things I can tell you now that I couldn't tell you before. I can drive out to see you in a few days.”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “See you then.”

Half an hour or so later, I walked over to Philip and Cynthia's. There were two black sedans parked in front. Without knocking I stepped into the kitchen. Cynthia was setting out coffee and cake on a tray for the three detectives sent out from Halifax. One seemed to be in his late thirties, one in his late forties, the third at least sixty. They all wore suits and ties, and each held a small, flip-open notebook and pen. I was introduced and then went to the window, where I saw bright orange crime-scene tape stretched between stakes on the sand. The wind was fluttering the tape. About ten square meters of beach were cordoned off, apparently where Philip had discovered Istvakson's body. Cynthia walked over and handed me a cup of coffee. “Come sit down,” she said. I sat on the sofa.

The men had been introduced as Detective Seshaw, Detective Paldimer, and Detective Van der Kloet. They were speaking in low tones among themselves and then to Philip and Cynthia, and I heard only one thing clearly: “No, we never met Mr. Istvakson,” Cynthia said. “Not in person, anyway. Like everyone, we saw his photograph in the newspaper. And his assistant, Lily Svetgartot, has become a friend. She's stayed in our guest room. But no, we never met Peter Istvakson.”

Seshaw, the eldest detective, said, “Sir—Mr. Lattimore. For the record, I was one of the detectives assigned to the homicide at the Essex Hotel. Just for the record. My brother does some security on the movie set. Small world, eh? So you live out here now?”

“Just across the road,” I said.

“Our information has it that you and the deceased Mr. Istvakson were not on the best of terms.”

“Best of terms? No, probably not.”

“Newspaper articles about the deceased indicate this. Certain statements he made.”

“He wasn't on good terms with me in private, by himself. I wasn't on good terms with him in private, by myself. Before the movie started up, we met at Cyrano's Last Night.”

“The bohemian café?”

“We spoke by telephone early on, a couple of times, too.”

“Was there communication after that?”

“Yes, through his assistant, Lily Svetgartot.”

“And you say you live across the road?” Seshaw was writing in his notebook.

“Yes, you can see my cottage from here.”

“In our experience—maybe ninety years between the three of us here—most likely this was a suicide. But in our experience, every so often a suicide turns out not to be one.”

“I heard about the drowning when Philip telephoned me. I'd say about six o'clock this morning.”

“I didn't ask,” the detective said. He looked at Cynthia. “Can I trouble you for another cup of coffee, please?”