Practical Jean (28 page)

A moment later, as Cheryl was mopping her eyes with toilet paper, the washroom filled with the sound of frantic banging, and the voice of Fran, crying, “Jean! Jean! Are you in there?
Jean!
”

Jean went to unlock the door. And when she pulled it open, there was Fran. Or sort of Fran. Her face had been remade, as if by another artist, into an expression of exaggerated horror. In her hand, she held Jean's phone and, seeing Jean, she seemed not to be able to move.

“Have . . .” A whisper was apparently all the voice Fran could now muster. “Have you done something bad?” The noise of footsteps sounded behind Jean and Fran turned, her eyes fixed wide, to see Cheryl coming forward, wadding toilet paper into a tight, damp ball. She blinked and gaped again at Jean. “Milt called,” she whispered. “I saw his picture so I answered it. I didn't think you'd mind. He told me I should run for my life.”

“Milt said that?” said Jean.

“Why would Milt say that?” said Cheryl.

“He said . . .” Fran swallowed. “Well, he said that Jean was very dangerous at the moment. Or words to that effect.”

Jean sighed and shook her head, and took the phone out of Fran's hand.

“Nothing at all is going to happen to you, Fran,” she said. “I'm sorry, but you and I are just not that close.”

Jean paid their bill and the three women left, although no one had eaten a thing. They climbed into Fran's SUV without a word. Fran in particular strapped herself in very gingerly.

As they made their way out of the parking lot and headed toward the highway, Jean thought about the people she was close to in Kotemee. Milt was first on her mind, of course, and not because she was annoyed that he'd upset Fran. Mostly she wondered whether this whole business would change the way he felt about her, because there were times when Milt was not very understanding and this was probably going to be one of those times. She thought about Welland, too, and worried about how this might affect his career, whether it would give him a bad feeling about police work, just when he was starting to get the hang of it. Andrew Jr. flashed through her mind as well, but she thought he would manage just fine.

As Fran merged onto the highway, Jean looked over her shoulder at Cheryl in the back seat. She still had the wad of toilet paper in her hand, and seemed confused but not distraught, as if she thought she might have misheard what Fran had said, or that she'd had some sort of alcoholic hallucination. At least she didn't appear to be jumping to any conclusions, which Jean thought was very fair of her.

In the driver's seat, Fran had the wheel in a firm grip. Her lips were pressed tight together, she directed a fixed glare at the road in front of her, and for once, Jean was pleased to see, she was driving in the fast lane at an appropriate speed. Jean thought the word that might best describe Fran just then would be
determined
. But she knew Fran well enough now to know there was probably a good deal going on under the surface. Fran had a lot more substance to her than she'd realized, and her mind was always working, and right now Jean figured it was probably swirling with all sorts of conflicting thoughts.

“Fran,” she said, “if you need to listen to Celine Dion all the way home, feel free.”

Fran turned her head slightly. “Really?” she said. “You won't mind?”

“No,” said Jean. “It's absolutely fine.” And she opened the glove box to let Fran choose.

Epilogue

PEOPLE LIKE TO KNOW
how a story ends, so it seemed a good idea to say a few words about what happened to Jean, after she got back to Kotemee.

She was arrested, of course. That didn't take very long. Fran dropped her off at Jean and Milt's house, where the driveway and the curbsides were lined with police cars and dozens of silent onlookers, many of them people Jean knew. And when she walked into the house, Detective Rinneard, who had sharp blue eyes and a shaved head and didn't look anything like Serpico, arrested her for the murder of her three best friends. Jean didn't make any sort of fuss and “went along quietly,” as they say, not even objecting to the use of the word “murder.”

Jean's arrest, and the trial that followed, filled the Kotemee
Star-Lookout
for months. It was front-page news in the city for a day or two, and a bunch of TV reporters came and nosed around a bit, and did their reports standing on the sidewalk in front of Jean's Expressions. Milt kept the store locked, but they took some video of her display pieces in the window, and on the Internet there was lots of discussion of Jean's ceramics: “The art of the serial killer.” Some people, including one prominent art writer from the city, said she was a genius, and if Milt had wanted to sell any of her pieces he could have made a small fortune. But he didn't seem to want to. Eventually, one night, someone put a brick through the front window of Jean's shop and tried to steal all of her ceramics. No one knows how many they made off with, but judging from the amount of dust and crumbled bits on the floor of the shop and the sidewalk outside, most of the pieces likely disintegrated as soon as the thieves picked them up.

For the trial, Jean said she didn't need a lawyer; she was content to plead guilty because she wasn't ashamed of what she'd done. But the court assigned her one anyway, a nice enough man who, because he was graying and had a bit of a belly, looked something like Milt, except with a nicer suit. He rounded up some psychiatrists from the city who testified as to Jean being temporarily insane at the time of the killings. But when Jean got on the stand she said that was all nonsense. She stood up and told the courtroom that after what she'd learned about growing old, if anybody thought she was crazy for giving her friends a fast, happy way out, then they didn't know much about friendship.

Cheryl Nunley stayed in Kotemee, and it was kind of funny how that worked out. She got herself into a twelve-step program, which seemed to do her some good. And when she sold the winery, she wound up with a parcel of money. It wasn't much, but it was enough to buy a cozy little house, and the house she ended up buying was Natalie's. She got it as cheap as could be, too, because nobody else wanted to buy a house where somebody had been gruesomely slain. Cheryl, however, bought it without any qualms whatsoever. She told people that whatever Jean had done, she'd done out of love, and so there weren't any strange feelings or vibrations in the house. The only problem was that it was a bit cramped. She thought she might put on an addition.

As for the men, well, let's see: Milt finally got a full-time teaching position, because without Jean's income from her art, he needed the money. And he didn't see Louise again; that decision stayed firm. Andrew Jr. carried on being chief of police at Kotemee, which was no big surprise. Nobody thought it strange to have a police chief with a sister serving time for multiple murders, because in a small town lots of people have relatives who do strange things that everybody knows about, and life just goes on. As for Welland, he quit the Kotemee force, applied for a patrol job in the city, and got it. The day he started, he enrolled in special training to become a detective constable. It meant coming in early and staying late every shift. But he was pretty determined.

Jean was sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after fifteen years. They trucked her off to the federal penitentiary for women in Mainsview, about a day's drive from Kotemee, and she took to prison life rather well, although she found it a little hard to make friends. She got lots of time for her ceramics, though, and after asking for nearly a year, she even managed to get the prison to install an extra-large kiln. There wasn't much greenery around the prison yard, of course, and her access to books was restricted mostly to what the prison library kept on its shelves, so the inspiration for her pieces had to come from her imagination, and from whatever her visitors might bring. And that's where Fran Knubel came in.

One day, a few months after the trial, Fran kissed her husband, Jim, on the cheek, climbed into her SUV, and drove up to see Jean. The two of them had a good long visit, or as long as the guards would allow, which was about twenty minutes the first day. Eventually they snuck that up to half an hour. And now Fran drives up about once a month. Usually she takes with her a little package of leaves, plants she's picked from the garden or weeds from the roadside, or even greenery she's cut from supermarket produce, like kale and celery leaves and basil, because these days Jean is happy for whatever she can get. Fran wraps them in a damp cloth laid inside a Tupperware container to keep them supple, as per Jean's request, and presents them proudly after the guards have given them the once-over to make sure they're not drugs.

Of course, people want to know why she goes up there. “Why are you going out of your way to see that killer?” people ask her. Fran just holds herself very tall and says it's hard to make friends these days, and anyone in her shoes would do the same thing. “Aren't you afraid?” people ask her. And Fran assures them she's not. Jean killed only the women who were closest to her, she explains, and she would not presume that level of friendship, certainly not on the basis of monthly visits. But then, Fran will become lost in her deepest thoughts, and she'll get a peculiar look in her eyes. It's what you might describe as a sad and hopeful expression.

Tina Dooley

Acting President

Kotemee Business Association

Acknowledgments

At times, the novelist is a scavenger, rooting among the weathered memories and dog-eared details of other people's lives in search of the piece that will fit his imagined construction, or the bean that will sprout something wholly new. My heartfelt thanks to those friends and acquaintances who, by sharing the stuff of their lives in conversation, seeded important elements of this story long before there was a story.

I'm grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their crucial support. Thanks also to Tara for her ceramics knowledge, to Miranda and Krista for their reading and insights, to Lara Hinchberger and Ellen Seligman for their encouragement and guidance, and to Bruce Westwood and Carolyn Forde for joining me in the leap of faith.

Insights, Interviews & More. . .

About the author

Meet Trevor Cole

An Interview with Trevor Cole

About the book

Practical Jean
's Parallels

Read on

Trevor Cole's Favorite Novels

About the Author

Meet Trevor Cole

ALL MY LIFE,
or as much of it as I can remember, I wanted to write novels. And yet I didn't allow myself a real opportunity to pursue that wish until I reached my late thirties. Instead, I rerouted the desire to create stories into other kinds of word-work, doing ad copywriting at radio stations or working as an editor at magazines. It seemed very important to me to maintain a full-time job, to be a responsible wage-earner, no matter how much the artist inside of me wanted to get out.

There's no mystery as to why. My father had been an artist, a musical stage actor who achieved a small, brief level of stardom in Canada. But he had demons, terrible insecurities and narcissistic tendencies that led him to drink and behave irresponsibly, and that prevented him from reaching his full potential. He was the perfect role model for everything I didn't want to be, and so for many years I did everything in the world of words except the thing that would have made me happiest—writing fiction full-time.

Marrying a woman who understood the life of an artist finally gave me the courage, or the sense of permission, to quit my job as a senior writer at a national business magazine and dedicate myself to writing novels. I suppose it shouldn't be any surprise that the first novel of mine to be published told the story of an alcoholic, narcissistic actor whose insecurities prevented him from achieving his artistic dreams.

An Interview with Trevor Cole

A version of this interview was published in the online literary magazine
The Puritan.

Q:
What was the genesis for the story of
Practical Jean
?

A:
I'd been toiling for three years on a book that wasn't working. It was big and serious—my attempt at weighty historical fiction—and I was itching to return to the kind of writing I loved, something sharp, dark, and funny. I decided I wanted to write an entire book from the perspective of a female character, which I'd never done before, and so I thought for a while about who that woman would be, and what she'd want to do that would drive the novel forward. I knew it would be some kind of dark quest, and briefly I thought that Jean might be driving across the country to do harm to her husband's lover. But I rejected that pretty quickly. To me there was no point in writing the book if Jean's actions were driven by vengeance or evil; we've read that or seen it on the screen too many times. So, what was the opposite of vengeance? What emotion was the least likely to drive someone who was passably sane to kill? The answer was love. Everything fell into place for me when I figured out—it hit me like a splash of water—that Jean had witnessed the slow death of her mother, and that she had a group of friends whom she loved and wanted more than anything to protect from a similar fate. For me, nothing holds more potential for both comedy and tragedy than the character who heads with absolute conviction in the worst possible direction.

Q:
Your fiction is very character-driven. How has the work of describing and expressing your characters contributed to the process of finding your voice as a writer?

A:
I can't begin writing or even planning a story until I've figured out who my main character is and what that person is all about—what are his or her deepest fears and desires? How does he or she think and sound? I didn't know that at first, earlier in my career, and so I stumbled in my fiction writing for a while, half-completing a couple of books that didn't work. Then I hit on the idea of writing a novel about a character based on my father—a narcissistic, alcoholic, washed-up actor. And I knew that character so intimately, it allowed me to find his voice immediately, and that helped me to write with far more confidence than I'd ever felt to that point. It was figuring out that my stories don't spring from the landscape or the history of a place, or from an issue or a constant recurring theme, but from the psychology of the story's central character, that has made everything possible for me.

So, the process of writing each new novel now begins by meeting and, if you like, romancing my main character, getting to know him or her the way you'd get to know a new love interest, finding out everything, good and bad, and becoming enthralled with every detail. The narrative voice of the novel comes from the understanding I develop about that person, and I try to carry an element of that person's essential personality in the words I choose.

How does that work in practice? In the case of
Practical Jean
, one example is that the prose picks up on Jean Horemarsh's tendency to use casual “y” words—wonky, goose-bumpy, jutty, pebbly—whenever it's following Jean's perspective. Those aren't words I would use in my own descriptions (and you'll notice they don't appear in any of the chapters written from Cheryl's perspective) but they are apt for Jean. It's not something that's meant to jump out at the reader; the effect should be almost subliminal.

Q:
Most of your books are told by a fairly uniform third-person narrator. But your main characters are all very different—a murderous ceramics maker, a control-freak executive, a narcissistic actor. Why do you use this kind of narration and how does it help you to accommodate such resoundingly different personalities?

A:
I tend to write most happily in the subjective third person. In a sense, my narrator sits on the shoulder of the protagonist, facing where she faces, seeing what she sees, while maintaining a kind of Vulcan mind meld that allows the narrator to know the character's thoughts and pick up on her personality. Why, then, don't I just write in the first person? Because that slight separation allows the narrator to observe not just what the character observes, but also the character herself, and to notice the reactions of others. The narrator is more aware than the main character, and from the reader's perspective, that makes the narrator more reliable. So, in the tone of the prose, the narrator is able to offer a comment on the character. In
Practical Jean
, for instance, you can tell when Jean has misinterpreted something or made a terrible decision, even if she isn't aware of it herself.

Q:
You've mentioned elsewhere your admiration of the work of author Jonathan Franzen, and Franzen has said that, in an age with so many sources of distraction and entertainment, modern fiction should reward readers for the time they invest in a book. Do you agree, and how much thought do you give to how your readers will respond to your work?

A:
Franzen's right. For a work of fiction to live it has to be read, and to be read it must be enjoyed. Reading should be
fun
. That's the main reward I think Franzen is talking about. And yet how many times as readers have we given up on a book after only a few chapters, or “toughed it out” to the end because of a sense of obligation? I think sometimes writers get so focused on conjuring up their vision that they forget to think about the reading experience. When I'm working on a book, I read over every page again and again to make sure that it's not lagging. I want to create characters that readers actually care about and I want to make sentences and paragraphs that are fun to read. One of the biggest compliments I can get from a reader is, “I read the whole book in one weekend.”

Q:
As works of social realism, your novels contain a fabulously convincing level of detail. How much research do you do for your novels?

A:
Each one is different. My second novel
The Fearsome Particles
included sections about an armed forces base in Afghanistan and also examined the affluent world of a stager of luxury homes. Those sections were built on the research I'd done for two large magazine stories, and the grounding I got in those two unique settings gave me the confidence to be able to fictionalize them, and also made me aware of what additional research I needed to do. In the case of
Practical Jean
, I had a basic understanding of the process of ceramics, which I fleshed out by talking to ceramics artists—one in particular who did some leaves in her work. And Jean's experiences as a child, seeing her mother performing operations on animals in her kitchen, is based on something learned from another magazine story I'd done. My understanding of Jean's sense of loss and her need to do something constructive after her mother died comes largely from my own experience after the death of my father a few years ago.

Q:
You've referred several times to your work in magazine journalism. In what way does your ability to distill and communicate a large amount of information stem from your years writing nonfiction?

A:
The work of fiction and nonfiction is very different, but it's true that the years I've spent doing magazine pieces have helped me tremendously. When you're preparing a magazine story, the process of research is like gathering up a whole bunch of tiny puzzle pieces, some of which will fit together and some of which won't. And you have no picture to go by other than the partially formed one in your head. Eventually, once you've got ten times the number of pieces that you need, you get down to the task of putting the puzzle together, bit by bit, discarding the pieces that don't fit. So from that I've learned how to recognize which details will help the story of my novel and which won't. And I know how to parcel out information, whether it's a plot point or a character trait that needs to be established.

Q:
Your novels have all been commended for their use of comedy, but most critics have noted that this humor is married to themes and concerns that are both deeply serious and timely. To what do you owe your particular sense of humor? Are there works of fiction (literary or filmic) that serve as personal models for this blending of comedy and serious dramatic storytelling?

A:
I was definitely planted in comedy. How I got there I'm not entirely sure. Maybe it was listening to Bill Cosby and Don Adams records when I was a boy, the way other kids listened to the Rolling Stones. Maybe it was lying in bed at night, listening to my father laugh at Johnny Carson. When Dad was laughing at the television, everything was all right in the house. When he wasn't, things could get unpredictable. I always preferred character-based humor over one-liners. To my ears, character-based humor was more human and more realistic, and therefore richer and funnier. So that meant I was a
Barney Miller
guy rather than a
Welcome Back, Kotter
guy. In movies, I loved the multiple-character comedies of Peter Sellers.

So my early comic influences were all based in performance, rather than in literature. Even as a boy I seemed to understand the process of actors, and had some insight into the decisions they made, probably because I watched my father as he rehearsed the plays he was in, and even helped him practice his lines. My childhood sources of print humor were few—
Mad
magazine was about it. But I loved its sly, cruel irony. As I grew up I graduated to Philip Roth novels, which always had a kind of fury underneath the funny and showed me how complex humor could be. Today, there are deep resonances for me in the black humor of the Coen brothers' movies. Jonathan Franzen, who we've mentioned before, exemplifies in his treatment of his characters, particularly in
The Corrections
, the ideal balance between irony and empathy. And somehow Annie Proulx's
The Shipping News
manages to be, at the same time, the funniest and saddest book I've ever read.

Q:
Practical Jean
is concerned largely with conflicts and connections between women. What were some of the anxieties and challenges that arose while trying to portray your female characters?

A:
The positive reaction of women to
Practical Jean
has been hugely satisfying, and I think the response comes partly from the fact that I didn't approach my female characters as women so much as individuals. In our society there's no one way for a woman to be. So I never found myself thinking “how would a woman deal with this?” Instead, I wondered how Jean or Cheryl or Fran or Natalie would deal with it. And I tried to steer clear of having my characters doing or thinking things that a man might consider obviously “feminine.” I don't, for instance, have a lot of purses or lipsticks cropping up in the book. When Jean worries about what she's wearing it has to do with her own personal insecurities not the fact that she's a woman.

The one important aspect of the novel where I thought quite consciously about the difference between women and men was in the area of friendship. It's my sense that women think about their friendships more than men do, and they work harder at nurturing them. To me, that quality of female friendship is the crux of the novel; I just don't think you could have a
Practical John
, about a man killing his buddies out of love. So my challenge was to be observant and respectful of the way women are with their friends, and then to find a way to satirize it.

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