Swann (11 page)

Josh the Nobel Prize winner, a smuggler of rose cuttings. Jimroy found the fact discreditable but humanizing.
(Later, after he moved in, he would wander about the little house thinking: a Nobel Prize winner sat in this armchair, lay on that pillow, occupied this toilet seat, adjusted this shower head.)

Mrs. Flanner, her face flushed—clearly she liked her drinks—poured him a second gin and tonic and asked what it was that had brought him to California for a year. “Are you working on a new biography?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. Eyes downcast, expression modest. Ever the man possessed, the body snatcher.

“And is it to be another poet?” She asked this in her merry voice.

“I’m afraid so,” he said again.

“I don’t suppose I really should ask who —”

“I doubt very much if you’ve heard of her,” he began.

“Ah!” she said, and clapped her hands together. Brown hands with rather short fingers and an old-fashioned wedding ring in reddish gold. “A her! A woman! How wonderful. I mean, my group will be thrilled that —”

“As I say, though, she is not well known. Hardly in the same class as Starman or Pound. Still she was quite a remarkable poet in her way —” He wished to appear forthright, honest, but out came the old sly evasions.

“I wonder if I might know her,” Marjorie Flanner said. “I used to read a lot of poetry when I was younger. Josh and I —”

“Mary Swann.”

“Pardon?”

“Her name. Mary Swann. The poet I’m working on at the moment.”

“Aahhh!” A look of mild incomprehension. She took a rather large gulp of gin and then asked politely, “And did she have a fascinating life?”

“I’m afraid not,” Jimroy said, feeling a quickening of his body. “I think you would have to say she had one of the dullest lives ever lived.”

She looked at him with new interest. “And yet she was a remarkable poet.”

“That
is
the paradox,” he said, giving a laugh that came out a bark. “That was, I suppose, the thing I could not resist.”

“I can imagine,” Marjorie Flanner said. She smiled. Her teeth flashed, and Jimroy could see the grindings of an old eagerness. “Well, that’s quite a challenge, Professor Jimroy.”

Quite a challenge. Jimroy wondered in an idle way if Marjorie Flanner had ever uttered those words
it’s quite a challenge
to Joshua Flanner as he sat contemplating the mysteries of mass and energy that glued the universe together. Probably she had. Probably Joshua Flanner, humanist and smuggler of rose cuttings, had not found the phrase objectionable. Why should he? Who but a throttled misanthrope would object to such a trifling remark?

Later, at the motel where he was staying temporarily, falling asleep in his buttoned, made-in-Taiwan pyjamas, Jimroy remembered the brief bright expansion of Mrs. Flanner’s face as she handed him the house keys. It had seemed artificially lit, a social expression only, as though she were concealing some minor disappointment she felt toward him. Perhaps she
had
expected him to invite her to dinner, or even to stay the night. It was a failing of Jimroy’s, not knowing what other people expected.

Like many an introvert, Jimroy distrusts the queasy interior world of the psyche, but has enormous faith in the mechanics of the exterior world of governments and machinery and architecture and science—all these he sees as being
presided over by anonymous but certified authorities who are reliable and enduring and who, most importantly, are possessed of good intentions. He is able to step back from the threat of acid rain, for instance—every softy in Canada is babbling about acid rain—certain that ecologists will arrive any day now at a comprehensive solution. He
trusts
them to find an answer; they will find it chiefly because the burden of their care demands it. AIDS will be conquered too, Jimroy has no doubt about it, what with the piles of research money and all those serious ready faces turned together in consultation.

And on a more self-interested level, he reasons that someone or other will always come forward, ready to defend
his
civil liberties, and someone else will keep him relatively safe on the highways and even flying through the air. A race of incomprehensible (to him) men and women have assumed responsibility for
his
safety, have been willing to make regulations, set standards, and bring into being an entire system of checks and counter checks. When he flicks the switch on the Flanners’ microwave oven to warm up his taco dinner he takes it for granted that the tiny crinkled rays will permeate the food and not him, and that the tacos themselves, though tasteless, will be free of botulism. Thus, when he thinks about his lost luggage, he is no more than marginally worried.

His two large vinyl suitcases, one black, one tan, are not, after all, metaphysical constructs, but physical objects occupying definable space. The number of places where these suitcases might reasonably be is finite. It is only a matter of time before they are discovered and identified and shipped to him in Palo Alto, accompanied by official apologies and an entirely plausible explanation, which he will, of course, believe and accept with grace; this is not a
perfect world—how well he knows that—but a world, at least, turned in the general direction of improvement.

Besides, he sees now that his Manitoba clothes would be out of place here. Those suits of his, those heavy laced shoes; it would be an act of brutality to bring such dark colours and such thick materials into the delicate latticed light of California. He wears open-weave shirts now, pure cotton preferably, and finds he can get along perfectly well without a tie, even when invited out to dinner. The sandals he bought for $4.95 are about to fall apart after one month—it seems they are stapled rather than sewn—but he is prepared to buy another pair, and another—they are surprisingly comfortable, too, especially when worn over a pair of heavy cotton socks.

It’s true he’s been inconvenienced by the loss of some of his papers, but it was an easy matter to telephone Mrs. Lynch in Winnipeg and have her send photocopies. His first-draft documents are safely locked away in a desk drawer in his study at home, which is a relief. He does, though, suffer intermittent worry over the photograph of Mary Swann. It had not been a good idea to bring it. It cannot be replaced and is one of only two known photographs of her in existence. (The other, much the inferior, is still in the Nadeau Museum, a blurred snapshot of Mrs. Swann standing in front of her house with her eyes sealed shut by sunlight.) The loss of the photograph would be serious, tragic in a sense, if indeed it is lost, but Jimroy persists, even after days and weeks have gone by, in thinking that his luggage will reappear at any moment.

This occasional nagging worry about the photograph is, in any case, tempered by the relief he feels that at least he has the letters from Sarah Maloney safely in his possession. What amazing luck! He can’t help wondering what bolt of
good fortune made him decide at the last minute, packing his things in Winnipeg, to put Sarah’s letters in his briefcase rather than with his other papers in his luggage. When he thinks of it, he shakes his head and feels blessed.

He needs the letters more than ever now that he has been uprooted; they stabilize him, keeping away that drifting sadness that comes upon him late in the evening, eleven, eleven-thirty, when the density of the earth seems to empty out. It’s then that he likes to reread her letters, letters that pulse and promise, that make his throat swell with the thought of sex. He props himself on the headboard of the Flanners’ outsize bed, cleansed from his shower, toenails pared, a cup of hot milk at his elbow. (Half his stomach was removed the winter Audrey left, and he admits to anyone kind enough to inquire that the hot milk and the early nights are needed now, besides he likes to think of his homely habits as a precaution against hubris.)

“Dear Morton Jimroy,” runs her first letter, sent to him more than a year ago in Winnipeg. “Will you allow me to introduce myself? My name is Sarah Maloney, and a mutual friend, Willard Lang, has told me that you too are interested in the work of Mary Swann. I am writing to ask you …”

“Dear Mr. Jimroy,” the second letter reads—Jimroy keeps the letters in chronological order, each one in its original envelope with its U.S. stamp and the Chicago postmark. “I am amazed and delighted to have a letter back from you so quickly, amazed in fact that you replied at all after my cheeky intrusion —”

“Dear Morton,” reads letter three. “Your cheerful letter arrived on a day when I particularly required a cheerful letter —”

He is glad she waits a decent interval before answering his letters. The silence torments him, but endows her with substance.

Ah, Sarah, Sarah. He sings her name aloud, so round a sound, so annulated—to the walls, the ceiling, the open window. The smell of flowers floats in from the garden, and he wonders if it could possibly be jasmine at this time of year. (The neighbours have mentioned jasmine; he himself wouldn’t recognize a jasmine bloom if it were right before his eyes, another admission. The neighbours have also cautioned him about leaving the windows wide open. Hasn’t he ever heard of burglars?)

From nowhere comes an overpowering wish to share the fragrant air with Sarah Maloney of Chicago. He inhales deeply—the stillness of uncommunicated rapture!—releases his breath in a long sighing moan, like a man gasping out of the richness of his cravings, and then picks up Sarah’s letters again. They bring him—what?—solace. And connection with the world, a world redolent with intimate pleasures, sight, sound, touch, especially touch. His tongue tests the sharpness of his teeth. He imagines Sarah Maloney’s soft lips, and how they must enclose small, white, perfect teeth, opening and speaking, her teasing voice.
Take off that ridiculous shirt, she says, and helps him with the buttons. Hurry, she commands, now those silly green pants, let me do the zipper for you. There. That’s better. Ah, how soft. How adorable. Like a little bird, all fluttery. Let me put my mouth there for a minute. Please. See, I told you I’d be gentle
.

It is not quite sane, Jimroy knows, these images, this caressing of a strange woman’s words, but the warmth they carry has become a necessary illusion, what he appears to need if he is going to continue his life.

In October Jimroy was asked to address a group of graduate students and staff.

As a Distinguished Visitor, his official title for the year,
he knew he would be required from time to time to “share” his experience as a writer of literary biography. The word
share
is an irritant, nevertheless, for what would these hundred or so naked faces in the audience share with
him?
Their gaping incredulity? Their eagerness for “advice”? What?

Back in Winnipeg he had demanded a year’s leave of absence, hoping his life might hold one more surprise. Leave had been granted without a murmur, one of the rewards of fame, and Stanford, also without a murmur, had given him the Distinguished Visitor title, plus office space—if that little cinderblock cube with cracked floor tile could be called an office—and provided him with the services of a typist, as though he would for a minute let anyone, anyone but Mrs. Lynch, handle his personal correspondence. He had, moreover, been “welcomed to the Stanford community of scholars,” as Dean Evans put it in his introduction to Jimroy’s afternoon talk.

Welcomed? A nebulous word. An ingratiating word. An oily, blackened coin. Community of scholars? Equally cut-rate, and ludicrous, too, since they all looked like tennis players arrayed before him. A ripple of faces, eye slits and dark combed hair, a collage of open-necked T-shirts, muscular forearms, healthy hands gripping biceps, and the conditioned eagerness of beagles, the fools, the idiots.

Stop, Jimroy hissed to himself, in God’s name, desist.

He longed for Sarah in Chicago, serene and responsive and saying the right thing, the only thing; he longed for autumn, for the indulgent sadness that autumn brings. He longed for Manitoba and his bumbling starch-fed students who conceived of literature as a comical family product to be gnawed upon between real meals, Shakespeare’s Richard, a nutty Oh Henry bar for a vacant Saturday afternoon. And why not?

Didn’t these monied Stanford sharpies realize that literature was only a way for the helpless to cope. Get back to your tennis courts, he wanted to shout. Out into the sunshine. Live! Universities are nothing but humming myth factories. Dear God. How we love to systemize and classify what is rich and random in life. How our fingers itch to separate the tangled threads of theme and anti-theme, moral vision and moral blindness, God and godlessness, joy and despair, as though all creativity sat like a head of cabbage on a wooden chopping block, ready to be hacked apart, first the leaves, then the hot, white heart. Scholarship was bunk—if they only, only knew. It was just a matter of time before the theoreticians got to Mary Swann and tore her limb from limb in a grotesque parody of her bodily death. But he could not think about that now; now was not the time.

His talk, entitled “The Curve of Life: Poetry and Principle,” went well. The applause was prolonged and vigorous, even from the back of the lecture hall, where a number of people had been forced to stand throughout the hour. When Dean Evans called for questions from the floor, Jimroy was flattered to see so many hands in the air. Such strong brown arms, flailing the air, beseeching. Rather touching in a way.

“Can you tell us if you think a biographer has a moral obligation to his or her subject?” This from the slenderest of young women, lovely, lovely, those frail shoulders. Crushable. And such hair. A voice clear as bouillon. Pour forth, my beauty.

“What kind of moral obligation are you thinking of?” Jimroy asked her in his most tender, questioning manner.

She hesitated, raised her lovely shoulders an eighth of an inch. “I just mean, well, if you’re looking at someone’s life, say, and you feel that there’s something, like, well, private, would you —”

“Respect it.” Jimroy supplied. Gentlemanly. A thin smile playing on his lips, but nothing committal. He liked to think he had eyes that expressed irony.