Specimen & Other Stories (8 page)

I asked her if she wanted me to come back
and pick her up at seven to go to the Professor’s for dinner. She
said no, rather tersely, and jumped. What a trooper. I slowed as
much as I could but she hit the ground on her wrong foot, I think,
and staggered several yards before she ran into a parked Lincoln
Continental. I heard a curse, although I don’t know whether it was
from her or the guy whose ride she’d plowed into.

I went back to my place and, by making a
sharp U-turn on my snow-slick street, spun around in the road and
shifted gears from first to reverse as I slid backwards up my
inclined driveway. I cut the engine and went in to my bed-sit
apartment where I had a joint and a beer to calm my nerves after
that exciting encounter with the Queen of CanLit. I got my bass
guitar out from under the bed and checked my amp. Sixteen bars of
Inna Gadda Davidda
later, I figured everything was fine. I
plugged in my Sears microphone. Testing, testing, testing…

At seven o’clock I packed my gear into the
Bug, got a running start down the driveway and cruised over to the
Professor’s house. He lived on the side of the hill so, even though
I had to park a block away, I was set for the next leg of the
evening. I arrived at the Professor’s place to find him and the
missus in a testy mood. His wife was a handsome woman with thick
eyebrows and ample breasts and whenever I saw her I thought of
James Joyce’s character Nora in
Ulysses
, an earth mother
with a vibrant passion for life. She gave me a wet kiss when I
arrived and asked me what I wanted to drink. Knowing I was now in
genteel company, I accepted a glass of wine.

Ms. Atwood arrived ten minutes later. The
Professor and his wife gushed over her, taking her coat and asking
about her flight, and whether she found the Beaverbrook Hotel to
her liking. Ms. Atwood wasn’t very forthcoming in the travelogue
department, providing only monosyllabic responses, which I thought
was kind of pathetic for a woman with her alleged command of the
language. Maybe she was just saving her
bon mots
for her
reading later tonight. As she entered the living room with a slight
limp, she glanced my way and I thought I caught a glimpse of
something malign there, as if she suspected I might have been
regaling the Professor and his wife with tales of airport
follies.

Ms. Atwood and I sat in the living room
while the Professor and his wife alternated playing host/hostess
while the other scurried off to the kitchen where some culinary
crisis seemed to be brewing. The Professor had a senile golden
retriever named Shaggy that, however much she seemed to discourage
it, took quite a liking to Ms. Atwood. I had to admit, there was a
poetic ring to it – Shaggy and Maggie.

In any event, Shaggy was well-named because
every time you touched him, a huge mitt-full of his hair came away
in your hand. In moments Ms. Atwood’s other ankle-length dress, a
tartan thing of dark colors, was covered with mustard-colored hair.
In short order she was sniffling and sneezing and trying to push
Shaggy away. He misinterpreted this as rough-house play and came
bounding back each time to paw her all over. The Professor
eventually saw that Ms. Atwood, clearly more of a cat person, had
had enough of this fun and banished Shaggy to the basement where we
listened to him growl and howl for the rest of the evening.

Eventually whatever had been on fire in the
kitchen was put out and we convened to the dinner table where Nora
brought out a blackened dish of casserole with apologies that the
Professor had read the recipe wrong to her and she’d cooked it at
450 instead of 350. He scowled and denied it, but to make up for
whoever had allowed such a thing to happen, opened a bottle of the
“good wine” for dinner. Nora dished out generous helpings of
blackened casserole, what might have sounded appetizing on a Cajun
menu, with side orders of over-cooked broccoli and under-cooked
carrots. Finding no topic worthy of conversation, we all drank a
toast to the brave men and women of Canadian letters, and wielded
our utensils to attack dinner.

After a brief foray between the layers of
her lasagna, Ms. Atwood muttered that her lasagna contained meat.
The Professor laughed heartily at that, saying of course there’s
meat, that’s how we make lasagna, what were you expecting – tofu?
And there was this dead silence, relatively speaking, except for
the low moan of a desolate dog down in the dungeon, and Ms. Atwood
said,
but I’m a vegetarian
.

Well, you could have heard a participle
drop. But secretly I was thrilled. After the logistical nightmare
of transporting Ms. Atwood from airport to hotel in my clutch-less
car, my ears had been burning all evening just thinking of the
polysyllabic cuss words she must have invoked as she mended her
torn dress, applied liniment to a strained muscle, or examined the
bruise on her hip where she’d collided with a Lincoln. I was
relieved to see that a little of the shit going through the fan
would be spread liberally around. Nobody could accuse me of having
dumped a burned meat offering on her plate.

We all looked at each other. The Professor
was aghast. No one had told him. He’d read every word of Northrop
Frye, he assured us, and not once had that esteemed critic of
Canadian literature mentioned that Margaret Atwood was a
vegetarian. She fixed him with a squinty eye and said in a frosty
tone whose spirit flatly contradicted the words she chose,
it’s
all right, I’ll just eat around it
.

For a moment there, I struggled to recall a
joke that might lighten the atmosphere. But a glance at Ms. Atwood,
seeing a bright spot on her cheekbone, cautioned me that this was a
situation where belly laughs would not be readily forthcoming. So I
bit my tongue, diplomat that I am, and chewed silently on my
blackened lasagna leather.

Again I had to tip my hat to Ms. Atwood. She
could have stood up, knocked over the table and stormed off into
the wintry night to flag a taxi whose driver might have guided her
to a Chinese restaurant with a nice bean curd soup and vegetarian
spring roll to tide her over. But no, she hung tough. Using her
utensils as deftly as a surgeon, she quickly dissected the lasagna,
pushing the meat off to one side, the pasta off to another, and
grimly ate her meal, her face reflecting the same gusto with which
Russian soldiers during the siege of Stalingrad had controlled
their gag reflex to swallow a rat drumstick and a side order of
rotten potato.

The rest of us pretended not to notice how
picky she was, when I know we were really all thinking, what the
hell’s the matter with a bit of Grade A ground beef? The Professor
opened another bottle of the “good wine” and deftly steered the
conversation boat toward the shores of Canadian Literature,
prattling on about how
The Fiddlehead
was publishing reams
of good stuff this year, some of it contributed by very promising
young writers, like Alan sitting right here at the table. Ms.
Atwood turned her head a couple of degrees in my direction, and one
of her eyes regarded me warily, reminding me of the way horses
watch you nervously when you sneak up on them with the gelding
shears.

Showing the first glimmer of sympathy I’d
seen all evening, Ms. Atwood sought to relieve the Professor of his
lasagna
faux pas
by asking him kindly, how fared dear old
Fred Cogswell. This was another English Faculty professor of great
geniality who had for many years offered a heavy load of “bird”
courses in which every student, no matter how densely illiterate,
stood assured of getting at least a B-grade, while he
simultaneously shepherded to print the quarterly edition of UNB’s
literary magazine,
The Fiddlehead
, whose literary output was
second only to what was coming out of Kingston via
The Queen’s
Quarterly
.

Well, given a nudge in the right direction,
the Professor was off and running like a horse with the bit between
his teeth. We got treated to a complete rundown on every other
academic in the English Department. An ex-patriate American, the
Professor had once mentioned in class that, instead of going to
Korea, he’d served stateside in Military Intelligence, implying
that he was pretty hot stuff, and that he’d been in a serious
quandary at one point as to whether he should take a job with the
CIA and become an assassin of Commie agents or continue his
graduate studies to become a professor. Lucky for those Commies
he’d made the wrong choice.

You could tell, however doubtful his story
was, that there was indeed something of the spy in him, the way
he’d built a dossier on the whole English Faculty, just in case
Canada, as left-wing as it was, turned Commie too and he’d have to
squeal on his associates in order to protect his own tenure.

Dessert was offered but Ms. Atwood, as
anxious as any sane visitor to escape from a nut-house back into
normal society, said maybe it was best to forego that pleasure and
head off to the university for her reading. The Professor would
drive her, she made that clear, so I headed off on my own. The Bug
was parked on a steep street so it was a breeze to get started and
drive over to UNB, whose campus itself was built on the summit of a
considerable hill. I parked at the highest point I could find in
the lot of the Memorial Hall Building, and made two trips to carry
into the lecture hall my Fender Bassman amp with its huge speaker
cabinet and the 100-watt amplifier head along with my Sears
microphone and assorted cables.

The lecture hall, which the Drama Club used
for its monthly productions, had a good-sized stage and mezzanine
section, behind which a spectator gallery with built-in wooden
seats rose at a steep incline. I imagined this was something like
the design of old-style English theatres, where the gentry looked
down over the heads of the riff-raff. Little did I know that a
Shakespearean drama of minute proportions was about to unfold this
evening, and that I would play such a villainous, albeit petty,
role.

As the spectator gallery filled up, I went
about my business as poet roadie. I plugged in my amp and cabled it
up to the speaker cabinet. I ran the microphone cable up onto the
stage where a wooden lectern faced the gallery. In those days,
living on the shoestring of a graduate student’s assistantship, I’d
never known the luxury of a microphone stand. During jam sessions
in my apartment with my brother or some other amateur, I’d made do
with a broomstick handle taped to a chair, and the microphone taped
to the broomstick. Tonight in my haste I had forgotten to bring my
broomstick.

But as Frank Zappa used to say, necessity is
the motherfucker of invention, and I wasn’t going to let a little
thing like this spoil Ms. Atwood’s big night in Fredericton. I
hustled out to the cloak room where I found a wire coat hanger. I
bent it into an appropriate shape and anchored one end of it around
the lectern’s reading light and, with a generous quantity of
electrical tape, secured the Sears microphone to the other end of
the coat hanger. I switched on the amp and gave it a few minutes to
warm up.

Although the Bassman was a classic piece of
rock ’n’ roll equipment, practically a collector’s item, it was a
tube amplifier. There were about half a dozen of those tubes, each
one looking like a little miniature city under a dome of glass, the
lights slowly coming on in the little cathode skyscrapers. Compared
to today’s modern electronics, this was almost Soviet-era
technology, but if it was good enough for Jimi Hendrix, I figured,
it was good enough for Margaret Atwood.

In a few minutes, the Bassman was humming
happily, a steady low-decibel drone like a distant airplane that
could be heard throughout the lecture hall. I thought this might be
a little distracting so I tried reversing the polarity on the power
plug, but that only sent it into overdrive, like the sound of a
kamikaze plane beginning its dive into some hapless troop ship. I
quickly returned the plug to its earlier position.

By now the lecture hall was filled to
capacity. Ms. Atwood was chatting with a few of the English Faculty
and at one point I actually heard her laugh, and I could see that
everyone was squirming with excitement and that the evening was
shaping up to be one of those great cultural events everyone would
fondly remember years after. A few minutes later the Professor
started shushing people and urging them to take their seats. He and
Ms. Atwood mounted the stage where he fumbled his way through her
introduction, getting the name of one of her novels wrong, calling
it
The Inedible Woman
, probably still thinking of the food
she’d left on her plate. Finally, he finished and left the stage to
her.

There was a hushed silence in which the
audience was clearly perplexed to hear the drone of a distant
airplane. I crept from my seat in the front row and thumped the
Bassman with the heel of my hand. A low rumble echoed from the back
of the hall. Now it sounded like an airplane flying through a
thunderstorm. I passed my hand over the amplifier and discovered
that if I kept it within a few inches of the biggest tube, the
sound of the distant airplane diminished from that of a four-engine
cargo plane to that of a single-engine Cessna. I crouched there, my
hand in place like a Reiki master administering healing vibes to a
sick client, and nodded to Ms. Atwood that it was safe to
proceed.

She began to read her poetry. She had a
small breathless voice like an asthmatic child and it was clearly
evident why amplification was mandatory for her. Things went well
for another poem or two and then it all went to hell in a handcart.
She was in the middle of a poem when the Bassman suddenly cut loose
with a terrible yowl, like a cat “getting fixed” without benefit of
anesthesia. She stopped in mid-sentence and glanced in my
direction, and the look in her eyes was like a hail of bullets in a
drive-by shooting.
I be wastin’ yo ass, muthahfuckah, if’n I
hear dat again
.