We So Seldom Look on Love (26 page)

She keeps clinging to him as he sits up. She thinks he’s trying to get away. But he kneels between her legs and parts her labia with his fingers. Then he licks her there. It’s the first time this has been done to her. She assumes it’s preliminary. He keeps it up, though, soft, steady, devoted, cat-like licking until her body begins to loosen. Her joints unhinge. Her vulva breaks free and levitates, and her skin spreads like dough, a lovely, funny sensation, and then a disturbing one. And then she doesn’t care—she’d die to prolong it.

Her orgasm is like a series of electric shocks. Her pelvis jolts and her vagina contracts almost painfully. “I love you,” Sam says urgently, as if he knows that she’s in new territory. “I love you, I love you,” over and over until she lies still.

“Oh, my God,” she says then. “I love you,” she says. She hasn’t told him in five months. After a moment she says, “It’s you I love.” Under the circumstances that sounds more precise, more to the point. Tomorrow he is going into the hospital. Flying down to Boston by himself. Since she wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t even think about it, there was never any
question of her going with him. Now, for the first time, she allows herself to wonder what will happen. She is still not ready for details, but she asks if the operation is dangerous.

“Apparently not,” he says. “I mean, not life-threatening.”

She turns to him and places her hand over his crotch. She knows he’s wearing underwear, which makes it easier.

“Don’t!” he says, wrenching sideways.

“No, let me,” she says, and puts her hand back. She presses her palm down and feels the springiness of his pubic hair. “It’s just like me,” she says, oddly relieved.

He doesn’t move.

“It’s you,” she says.

“It is,” he says. “And it isn’t.” He takes her hand and holds it to his chest. Then he covers them both with the sheet.

He is still holding her hand when she wakes up. His head is arched back and he’s snoring, a soft purring sound. It’s morning. There’s a band of grey light between the drapes, and another band flaring across the ceiling.

If somebody were looking down on them, Marion thinks—if, for instance, her mother’s spirit was that clean, geometrical flare—they would seem like any other man and wife. They would seem content, she thinks. Peaceful, and lucky. Two people unacquainted with grief. They would seem like two happily married, perfectly normal people.

About the author

Author Biography

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About the book

An Interview with Barbara Gowdy, by Steven Heighton

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An Excerpt from
Falling Angels

B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.

She lives in Toronto.

The following is excerpted from “Points of Faith: An Interview with Barbara Gowdy,” which appeared in Descant’s Spring 2006 issue dedicated to the author, entitled Entering the Other: The World of Barbara Gowdy. We talked for a couple of hours on Barbara Gowdy’s back porch in mid-September, 2004. It was warm and sunny. Apparently, the hardwoods of Wellesley Park were full of noisy cicadas; I say “apparently” because somehow I failed to notice them at the time. But as I transcribed the interview a few months later, there they were on the tape, so loud in a few places that I had to strain to make out our words.

—Steven Heighton

Steven Heighton:
The Latin dramatist Terence wrote that because he was human, nothing human was alien to him. I realize this credo has become something of a chestnut, but after reading your books in sequence, I kept wanting to quote it.

Barbara Gowdy:
Well … a whole lot of what is human is alien to me, but it’s hardly my job to decide whether or not it should exist or be explored. I can be as repelled as anyone else. I struggle against my reactions, though, when I feel that they’re getting in the way of my finding out something interesting or important. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as “too much information.”

SH:
Okay, here’s another quote for you. A reviewer in
Saturday Night
once remarked—about the stories in
We So Seldom Look on Love
—that “Gowdy stares down the things she finds repulsive.” I quote this one partly because I think the reviewer has it wrong. To me, the evidence of your writing doesn’t suggest any revulsion, any recoiling from the “abnormal,” but instead, the natural fascination of a child.

BG:
No, I’m not revolted by the abnormal, not as a matter of course. When I say I can be repelled, I mean by bodily functions, certain ones. What the necrophile does in “We So Seldom Look on Love” repels me, for instance. It’s nothing I could have concocted. I lifted it from an interview in which a real necrophile, a woman named Karen Greenlea, describes how she expresses her love for dead men. In fact, every one of the stories in that collection is based on something I heard or read about, however outlandish.

SH:
Well, any repulsion or revulsion you felt seems to have become invisible, or was transformed, in the process of writing the story “We So Seldom Look on Love.” I don’t read it and think, “The author is really struggling with the material here.” It feels totally natural. You’ve got right into the character’s mind, her body and voice, and she’s obviously not repulsed.

BG:
There’s no point in exploring anything if you’re not going to try to get right inside it and be empathetic. What fascinated me about the real necrophile’s story was that she was embracing death, quite literally. Whereas most of the rest of us don’t even touch death. We rarely have open-casket funerals these days. You know, the only kind of aberrant behaviour that disgusts me is the kind that knowingly or indifferently does harm. I get more upset about corporate environmental behaviour than about someone having sex with a dog. As long as the dog’s enjoying it. Not that I’ve written about that.

SH:
In the opening paragraph of the story, you write: “There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite…. There are always sparks at those extreme points.” I wonder if those lines could be reread as a kind of aesthetic credo, since your fiction is so often situated at the intersection point of morbidity and vitality—the place where mortality and life, especially in its basic sexual guise, interpenetrate and even become indistinguishable.

BG:
Most writers seem to write to temperament, and my temperament often has me describing things in an extreme way simply because I’m not happy with euphemisms or half-truths. I sometimes go overboard for the sake of cutting the bullshit, and then I try to pull back to a place of truth.

“There’s no point in exploring anything if you’re not going to try to get right inside it and be empathetic.”

SH:
Susan Swan … described you to me as a romantic—she said it’s something that people might not think initially. I can see how that could happen. Someone encountering
We So Seldom Look on Love
… might think, “She’s no romantic.” There’s a sort of surgical exactitude to the prose that’s at odds with what we think of as romantic prose.

BG:
Well, I feel that I am, and that the “exactitude” comes from wanting to honour the romantic in myself. I couldn’t bear to write careless prose and then put icing on it. As I keep saying, I want to get to the truth—all writers do—and I think that the finer, altered light is the true light, and that you can only get anywhere near it through discipline.

SH:
And Romanticism is so misunderstood. When people think of romantic prose, at least nowadays, they think of what you’ve described to me elsewhere as “quiveringly beautiful prose”—self-consciously beautiful writing—which you’ve conscientiously avoided, I think.

BG:
I can write that stuff, but it never makes it into the final drafts. Not that I despise beautiful prose when it works—I envy it when it works—it just doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s as if I were a country-and-western singer trying to sing opera. If writers can make it work, it’s probably because it suits their temperament. It’s at odds with mine, and with the things I’m describing.

SH:
But I suppose you could have done the necrophile story in a tone of … deliberate Gothic excess.

“I couldn’t bear to write careless prose and then put icing on it…. I want to get to the truth.”

BG:
But then it would have come across as Gothic! What I was trying to do with that story, with all the stories in the collection, was to be as calmly objective as I could about what people do to survive. If I was also trying to shock, I wasn’t aware of it. I know that sounds disingenuous. Maybe it is.

SH:
Not really.

BG:
That I don’t always react the way other people do can be pretty estranging.

SH:
Maybe it’s necessary for writers to feel somewhat estranged. I know a few writers who were popular when they were kids, part of the gang, but they’re the minority. Most of us felt like freaks. Most of us fulfilled Byron’s prerequisite for a writer—”an uneasy mind in an uneasy body.” Come to think of it, that also describes most of the characters in
We So Seldom Look on Love.

BG:
Well, I felt very odd as a child. I was a late developer, physically. I didn’t get my period until I was fifteen, and I was small and thin for my age. For a couple of years there in my teens I wore about three pairs of underwear and two pairs of jeans and padded bras. I was trying to look like Sandra Dee and came across looking like—I don’t know—Olive Oyl on steroids. So I really had a sense of how the body does not describe the soul.

SH:
One thing reviewers hardly ever talk about when they talk about fiction is the actual writing, word by word and sentence by sentence. This always amazes me. It’s true “What I was trying to do with all the stories in the collection, was to be as calmly objective as I could about what people do to survive.” that much of the poetry of your own work comes from the attentively rendered detail and characterization, but those details are built out of words, and yours are chosen with the ear of a poet and the economy of someone dispatching an urgent telegram…. There’s plenty of gorgeous assonance everywhere, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. Then there are the striking similes and metaphors, as when Sylvie, the Siamese twin in
We So Seldom Look on Love,
sees “ovations of fireflies” along the road. Which is not only a nice metaphor, it’s also synesthetic—a staple technique of poetry, especially in the surrealist mode. So, I have to ask you—do you read a lot of poetry, and, more to the point, have you written any, or do you think you might?

BG:
I read poetry just like I listen to jazz sometimes, to loosen up my ear. I tried to write poetry—once. I was asked to write a poem for an American magazine, about ten years ago, and I worked and worked on this poem. And I honed it down to two words…. It’s like Siddhartha, who yearns to hear music as a single note. Working on that poem, I started out with something like twenty stanzas and ended up with two words. I tend to trim a lot when I am writing anyway, and the permission to trim a poem was probably too strong. You expect poetry to be about tone, about the musicality of the line. Every word rings more glaringly than it does, or needs to do, in fiction…. In fiction, if you write, “Oh, go to hell,” there’s nothing to polish…. Regarding how I think of language in fiction, there’s a kind of effect I want, which is memorable but unselfconscious. Not too cool, though, not too emotionless, and it has to sound true. “Ovations of fireflies”—I’d forgotten that line. But now that you remind me, I remember holding the pen above the paper for a long time.