Swann (14 page)

“Under any circumstances.”

“I understand. I do understand.” He held his lips together.

“More tea?”

“I would, yes, please, I’m becoming quite addicted to green tea. I never —” He hears his voice foolish and passionate, his ninny laugh.

“The neighbours. Now, let me see. Mrs. Hanna I’ve already done. There was one other family. The Enrights. They had a bigger farm, not far from us. A modern barn.”

Jimroy, worshipper of images from a disjointed world, is writing as rapidly as he can: “The Enrights. Large farm, modern barn.”

He found the evenings difficult at first; what was he to do with these long soft evenings?

In the Flanners’ microwave oven he warmed himself meals. He switched on the news as he ate; Californians seemed mired in their own crises, their mudslides and earthquakes and city politics and major art robberies. After dark he went for long walks and felt his lungs expand in the moist evening air, pure oxygen topped with the scent of petroleum. Pollution’s cordial edge. The moon, rising, seemed rimmed with Vaseline. What a puzzle California was, even Palo Alto. There was no easy way to understand it. He felt reassured, though, by the lights going on in neighbouring houses. The domesticity of others sometimes made him envious but, as he zipped up his new light windbreaker, he told himself that he had come to feel at home inside his loneliness. In truth he half believed this, and the thought kept Audrey at bay.

After a few weeks he was invited next door to a buffet supper. There the Lees introduced him to the Krauses, who lived on the other side of him. “Meet Morton Jimroy, he’s in the Flanners’ house.” He met at least a dozen other people too. “So you’re in the Flanners’ house, we’ve been wondering. So you’re the biographer. Well, how’re you adapting to the coast?”

They were hospitable people, and soon he was being made welcome in their houses too. He was grateful for these low-key social evenings, even though he sensed he would
never have been asked had he not possessed at least a degree of celebrity with which to advertise himself. These people were accustomed to success. Dr. Lee next door (Ian) was forever being driven to the airport by his wife, Elizabeth (a strenuous, combative woman possessing a large elastic mouth, but very kind), so that he could fly half way around the world to lecture on arcane branches of mathematics. And Dr. Krause was a world-class philologist (the expression
world-class
was sprinkled like cayenne on the Stanford community). Krause’s heavy body seemed to Jimroy barely able to move beneath its weight of knowledge. His wife, Monique, a psychologist, was an expert on cheesecake and national parks hiking trails. These kind people accepted Jimroy, inviting him in for platefuls of roast beef and baked ham, teasing out of him opinions and anecdotes and asking for his comments on the methodology of biography. Ian Lee pressed him about how a biographer knew when he had at last reached the essence of personality—“Does a light go on or what?” he asked Jimroy, snapping his fingers. August Krause pursued him about the gap between the private and public person. “Ah, but what
is a
public person?” Monique Krause cried, clapping her little hands together. “Only a nude body wearing slightly better clothes.”

What good people they were: middle-aged, civilized, tolerant, travelled and tanned and united, all of them, in their contempt for Ronald Reagan. They offered Jimroy, without a thought of return, their delicious food, their good-to-excellent wine, their recorded music, and their conversation, and they sent him home well before midnight.

Jimroy, thankful, could only think: thank God for their honest cuts of beef and the little pings of laughter that leapt from their mouths when he produced his “first impressions” of California. He was less lonely than he had been in
Winnipeg, although he knew similar couples there, the Swensens, the Zieglers, the Mullocks. He marvelled at the steadiness of love that seemed to flow between these husbands and wives. Most of them had been married for well over twenty-five years, and still they maintained toward each other an attitude of courtesy and tenderness. He tried to imagine them coupling in their beds—lan’s plump penis stuck up there between Elizabeth’s legs—and couldn’t; but that scarcely seemed to matter. Love was what mattered, that enduring, mysterious refuge. Returning home alone to the flatness of the Flanners’ bed, he carried some of their circumambient warmth with him.

He reflects on one such night that it has been some weeks since he’s surrendered to that hideous weakness of his, which is to make anonymous phone calls to Audrey in Florida. Perhaps he’s getting over the need to hear her croaking voice erupting from sleep “Hullo?” she yawks into the phone, like someone testing the depth of a cave. He shuts his eyes and tries to imagine the trailer she’s living in, what her bed is like, if she requires a blanket in that ridiculous climate, how she looks sitting on the edge of the bed with the receiver in her hand.

“Hullo, I said. Who is this?”

He never speaks back; just holds the receiver, listening.

“Who is this anyway?” she demands roughly. That Midlands snarl.

More silence. He is careful not to breathe. He would never stoop to being a breather. And he doesn’t really want to frighten her. Dear old Aud.

“Who is this, for the love of God?”

A long pause, and Jimroy waits for the voice that will surely come and fill it. Instead she often bangs the phone down hard.

Once she shouted, “You can’t fool me. I know who it is, you bugger.”

His hands had trembled, but he managed to hang on to the receiver. His lips brushed against the mouthpiece, fear and love entwined. He thought of her large mouth, not an attractive woman, not at all.

It’s been several weeks since he’s phoned Audrey in the middle of the night. A good sign. He should celebrate, like an alcoholic after a dry month.

If only he could expunge—ah, but he can’t. He promises himself, a solemn pledge, that he will make no more phone calls to Sarasota. His work on Mary Swann is coming along; every week he mails a sheaf of papers off to Mrs. Lynch for typing. Fragrant air drifts in through the open window. He’s sleeping well. He has just returned from a charming evening with cheerful, intelligent friends who regard him, he knows, as a minion from the North, a role he fancies. And, after all, he doesn’t love Audrey any more. That was over years ago.

But he is, he admits to himself, deeply in love. He is sodden with love, foolish with love. And the woman he loves is Sarah Maloney of Chicago whom he has never met.

Most of the letters that arrive for Jimroy are business letters from his publishers in New York or from his colleagues in Manitoba. These typed communications, though welcome, hurt his eyes. Too casual, this plinking of print, too easily accomplished. The battering of mechanical keys seems to convince most people that they are witty, when, in fact, they are only verbose. The result, Jimroy finds, is exasperating prolixity and an excess of little dots between sentences, or else that gassy kind of nervousness that came blithering off Ezra Pound’s typed notes to his friends—Jimroy always imagines that these letters of Pound’s, even the gayest of them, were written with his teeth tightly clenched. Sarah Maloney’s envelopes bear jaunty angled stamps and are, Jimroy dares to hope, lovingly licked. The letters themselves are handwritten. Her crisp—but not too crisp—off-white paper suggests harmony and resilience.
The ink is deep blue and flows from a medium-tipped pen, what to Jimroy looks like a nylon nib. He loves the calm way Sarah Maloney writes
honor
and
center
—these words, with their plain American spellings, seem to grow rounded and luminous. Her wide-open a’s and o’s enchant him. Her capital w’s are innocent well-fed young birds, ready to try their wings. She is twenty-eight years old; he knows because the date of her birth was included in the biographical data that accompanied her first published article, but in any case he would have guessed from her handwriting that she was still in her twenties, the lucky age, the emanicipated age. One has only to look at Mary Swann’s cramped hand or at his own squashed loops. Her tone is murmurous, womanly.

He distrusts the photo on her book jacket, long hair falling over a long face. A talky mouth and libidinous eyes. A neat little chin, though, redeems her. She might, he thinks, be the kind of woman who hangs prisms or pieces of coloured glass wistfully in her windows. He imagines that she shuns crimson nail polish. A certain bodily stockiness? He fervently hopes not. (At least Audrey had not been stocky.) He knows that Virginia Woolf is Sarah’s favourite novelist—as a rule he distrusts a Woolfian bias in women—and that V.S. Pritchett is her favourite essayist. The books of these two authors, he imagines, are placed side by side on a little painted shelf close to the desk where she works, the place where she sits (in a pool of sun?) writing her lovely handwritten letters, licking with her soft tongue, honey at its core, the gummed envelopes and stamps—ah, Sarah.
The soft tongue, pink, travels across his body. For heaven’s sake, take off your pyjamas, Sarah whispers, foolish buttons, hurry. Oh, how sweet, let me lick, lick, lick. There now, isn’t that what you needed? What you wanted? Yes, of course it is
.

He is sure she has mellowed, changed utterly in fact, since the publication of her big, beefy, angry book,
The Female Prism
. Her letters are all soft edges and crisp corners. Her refusal, for instance, to part with Mary Swann’s notebook was tenderly phrased, so that the sting of denial was scarcely felt. Well, only a flick. And only for an instant.

Her most recent letter is the tenth one she has written him. Jimroy places it at the bottom of the pile under the others and replaces the rubber band with a glad snap. Tonight, since the Lees’ party ended even earlier than usual, he will get into bed, pull up the light cotton blanket, and treat himself to the whole oeuvre.

He admits that her style leaves something to be desired; only occasionally does it tilt toward the kind of persiflage he admires. He wishes she wouldn’t use that phrase
deeply touched;
he imagines reddened nostrils, dampness, appalling
sincerity
. The word
lousy
offends him slightly. She seems unable to produce the long, many-branched sentences he most admires, but he hasn’t the heart to cavil at something she can’t help. And her phrases
do
have a certain sonority, a stubbornness, her own kind of reckless heat. More than that, the words seem to be shaped for him and for him only. He imagines that the letters she writes to others—Herb Block, that lightweight fake—are thinner and deficient in vitality.

When he writes to Sarah Maloney he is careful not to smoke. He doesn’t want her to open his envelopes and inhale staleness. Another thing: he makes a point of inserting one, and only one, personal message that he knows will elicit a personal response. He tries for something self-deprecating, the admission of some minor failing or misadventure, for he knows he is most likeable when he is being second rate. He rations himself, anxious that this
relationship not turn soppy. He wants hardness, sharpness,
net
, with just the occasional soft spot, rapidly opened and just as rapidly closed. In a recent letter he told her about the guilt (a mild exaggeration, but no matter) he suffers over the Flanners’ roses, how he sits among them but ignores their beauty, how they bloom without his appreciation.