This Location of Unknown Possibilities (3 page)

2
.

M
arta breathed thanks for a vacant seat. At this hour humid buses teemed with vigorous student bodies pouring from campus. The boisterous chatter—of parties or concerts to attend, planned trips to ski slopes or brilliant sand beaches, as though they weren't harried, overworked undergrads subsisting on instant ramen and shoestring budgets so much as carefree Gamma Phi Beta initiates and titanic football-hurling beer pong players filling scenes in an American frat house comedy—crowded the airwaves and made Marta feel depleted, lacking a vital genetic marker that would assure a place at the coveted centre, one of those smiling tall girls whose cascading, photographer-ready hair and beguiling doe eyes proved accomplishment enough, a surefire means to a ringed finger resting on the social pulse, not to mention a comfortable end.

She reached into her bag, faded black canvas and advertising a bookseller squeezed out of business and replaced by a clothing chain years ago. The CD player she withdrew looked so dated it could well have been a bulky
8
–track player or a gramophone complete with wooden trumpet speaker. Marta understood that if detected her half-hearted activism—Just Say No to Built-In Obsolescence—would register as unfashionable, even retrograde, like picketing against lady parliamentarians. Or technology.

No matter. Marta suspected that pulling a mandolin or a lute from the tote would cause no huge stir. Students fully expected an eccentric penchant for the quaint and outmoded to accompany their professors' willful scorn for ephemeral styles and electronic indispensables. Bow ties, clock brooches, fountain pens, wing tip brogues, briar pipes, Peter Pan collars over well-aged woolens, hangers burdened with sturdy tweed: a professor's prerogative, one that went hand in hand with the lifelong membership at the Museum of Irrelevance, relishing fading words bound between obscure covers.

Marta caught expressions—wary, uncomfortable, at times perplexed—on the faces of coltish students dropping by the office with concerns over grades or assignments. Eyes eventually settling on the imposing shelves of books, they would summon a genuine frown, the diplomatically unasked question completely sincere: “A reclusive career tending to forgotten grave markers in an infinite text necropolis: why would anyone choose that?” Marta was also prepared to admit to an element of projection in the mind-reading attempt: a truly accurate breakdown of student reaction might be “Huh?” with soupçons of “Why?” and “Whatever.”

If they pinpointed the crimson spine of
Imperial(ist) Empress
or the light-bleached powder blue of the slim Austen and colonialism volume—the second study branching organically from her first—they didn't succumb to any temptation to flattery.

Marta empathized to a degree. Any thought of Commerce, the nebulous career plan for the landslide majority of freshmen students, inspired only an involuntary moue.

“Miss Spëk?” Marta bristled. Miss Spëk had been summoned, a familiar dun spectre. Dr. Spëk had been designed as the estimable replacement.

Turning to look up, Marta smiled automatically. “Yes . . . ?”

The girl, pretty and soft-spoken, was a stranger wearing artful eyeliner. She crouched, now able to converse eye to eye.

“I'm in your Po-Co Lit class. Queenie, um, Queenie Liu.”

“Right. Was there something . . . ?” Marta studied the black ensemble of layers, ruffles, and lace, recognizing the Kuro Lolita look, a subset of an exotic micro-trend on a campus otherwise clothed in surfer, snowboarder, and yoga brands.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Is it okay to talk now? Here?” She cupped her ears.

Marta slipped the earphones into the tote. “Sure, Mahler can wait. If you'd prefer it, we can set up an appointment.”

“It's just that, well, the semester's been like really crazy. How do you feel about extensions?”

“How do I feel about them? In general?” When student imprecision did not grate on her sensibilities, it sparked pedantry.

“No. I mean, well, I mean, like, can I get, you know, an extension?”

“And you know the deal, Queenie:
‘Extensions can be granted for legitimate medical reasons.' Every student has a crazy semester, so professors tend to shy away from anything without medical legitimacy.” Marta fully intended to give the student what she desired, but waited to hear what ingenuity the student would air, or what species of tragic circumstance she'd cough up.

“Well, to be honest. My boyfriend's in this band, Dramaturd.”

“Dramaturge?”

“No. It's a deathcore band.”

Marta supposed the student expected a disturbed reaction or parental consternation. She said nothing.

“Anyway, I've been writing songs with him.
You know
.” Widened eyes conveyed, “Boys will be boys.”

Oh, the sweet bond of sisterhood, spurred on by love to make altruistic sacrifices for our men
, Marta thought. But how unexpected that the student would try to bridge the generational gap and join arm in arm with that long procession of women who'd sacrificed so much to clasp a place of honour with the opposite sex.

“How about a week?”

“Agreed. One work week. Remind me about it on Monday, in class.”

“Thanks so much, Miss—”

“Doctor. But please call me Marta.”

“Okay, Marta.” Strategic friendliness accomplished, the student returned to a friend. Marta exhaled, relieved too. Despite the front and centre lecture hall career, she didn't count people skills as a natural or well-developed talent; wherever the milk of human kindness might originate, her supply flowed a touch erratically.

Though transit experiences had taught her what to expect, Marta flipped awkwardly through folders of ungraded assignments; having them alphabetized before her stop would be handy. The student chatted across the crowded aisle.

“No way, I have an all or nothing relationship with chocolate,” she said. Marta assumed that Queenie was replying to an offer.

“What if it's in baked goods? What about hot chocolate?” The friend's tone was incredulous.

“I'm hardcore against it.”

“No way, that's like extremely will power-y. It's totally ­brutal.”

Surrendering to cramped conditions, Marta slid the folders away and scanned articlettes in a throwaway newspaper—pausing only to savour “caustic and insolent,” an evocative phrase serving to sum up and pillory a far-off artist.

For the final ten blocks Marta stared out at the familiar retail corridor of the route.

3
.

T
he squat fact of Undre Arms was mood leavening every afternoon Marta approached the apartment building's proud coat of arms stenciled black, green, and gold on the glass of each entrance door. Years ago she'd substituted a set of hairy tradesman's arms lifting cinderblocks for the twin lions, oak leaves, and ersatz-medieval shields, and those imaginary armpits greeted her now.

Dating from
1969
, the three-story shoebox came from an engineer's office with no taste for Age of Aquarius embellishment. Marta's forecast called for its numbered days. Homely touching on forlorn, the greying stucco and mildewed patches could be foolproof lures only to developers, whose search-and-destroy vision ranked low-rise apartment blocks as bygone low-density no-nos that should be converted into high-density, small footprint profit.

Compared to any of the recently erected city condos selling for obscene dollars per square foot, Undre Arms stood out as a spacious bargain; even with the scurrying, paper-devouring silverfish insurgents that bred in drains or beneath floorboards and never failed to startle, Marta fondly called the place, and its ample closets stuffed with books, home. She expected to linger there until making the epochal, adult leap to home ownership, a leap practically inevitable and yet so momentous—the daredevil's inaugural skydive or the suicide's posture on a building's top story edge—that with thoughts of the awesome expenditure she continuously pushed the date forward.

Marta's parents firmly believed in squirreling away for the unavoidable rainy day. Every time the real estate topic arose she'd wonder if that fateful hour had dawned. Delaying the decision again, she foresaw being pushed out: arriving on a Thursday and finding an unwelcome letter crammed under the door that announced the building's sale and imminent date with a wrecking crew: “Vacate the premises immediately.” No doubt the owner's son, eyeing a future of conspicuous sports car consumption, would thrill at the stock phrase.

After settling—voicemail checked, mail read, take-home work filed, a dish of no-fat yogurt eaten—Marta dedicated a few minutes to the computer, checking campus email one final time before halfheartedly Googling name combinations, beginning with “Hester Stanhope biopic.” She found little, and nothing of value.

Evidently no Amelia Earhart, Elizabeth I, or Virginia Woolf, Lady Stanhope warranted no big budget, no public relations underling paid to stimulate advance interest, and not even a compulsive blogger unleashing pre-production trivia. As for “Jakob Nugent Lora Wilkes” and the production company, the information was likewise scant.

Marta imagined local production companies laboured under such penny-pinched operating costs that they claimed notice only with a film festival debut. Less charitably, she supposed the Stanhope project might be a made-for-a-specialty-television-network movie and so destined for justified invisibility from the moment it was okayed. Or worse, she feared, the screenwriter might have disinterred
The Nun of Lebanon
—the biography's revelation about Stanhope's doomed love affair barely scandalous when published in
1951
—and converted the woman's life into cloying syrup, all emotional anguish and tearful
au revoirs
with exotic backdrops.

Marta admired the long dead aristocrat's instinct for adventure, not to mention the willingness to thumb a nose at convention. Though “Film Consultant—Marta Spëk” might ultimately appear in the smallest of fonts as the credits rolled, Marta felt averse to collude with a production company that would sully Lady Stanhope, the forgotten accomplishments, or the old time derring-do. Stanhope had been an odd bird who grew increasingly eccentric each year, and her pipe-dream reign in the ruins of an abandoned monastery would be easy to misconstrue.

Granting the film's exploitative designs, Marta supposed her professionalism might fortify scenes, smooth rough edges, and cull vulgarity as well as anachronisms. Contributing praiseworthy lines—or an entire scene—stood out as another possibility.
Pop cultural immortality
, she thought, unclear about her actual perspective about that temporary apotheosis.

ON THIS SHORT DAY OF FROST AND SUN

1.

A
t moments of ordinary respite during the weeks preceding the interview lunch—in line for sushi at the Student Union Building, gathering wool along transit lines, and once in the midst of a notably arid departmental meeting—Marta placed herself on the bustling set of
The Prophet of Djoun
. That title wouldn't last, she gathered: overt religious politics limited market penetration. At first she'd pictured
Hester!
, but decided the tone would never suffice: it summoned an old Mel Brooks production, or one of those Technicolor biblical epics with the ballooning cast of extras. And, besides, irony-free exclamation marks had long passed out of fashion.

The scenes she formed wavered and collapsed like mirages, a habitual desire for accuracy warring with farfetched guesswork. She'd never visited a set before, but knew that since her notions about film production originated with features about movie-making they were both outdated and malformed, likely veering far from fact. The image of a barking bald German director wearing a monocle and jodhpurs, imperious and intent in an elevated embroidered canvas chair, a cliché of course, recurred frequently, an antique tableau situated nearly a century in the past. Perhaps physical sets—wood, paint, spray foam, props—had also been rendered quaint, supplanted by cavernous warehouses of green screens and unfathomable computer processes outsourced to crowded facilities in equatorial hubs.

What role might they request? Marta had no clue. Did the production company even anticipate a bodily presence? Assumedly, an on-set lackey could call or send email queries that long distance expertise would clarify:
“Professor Spëk, the director wants ‘Get a life, assclown.' What's the
1820
s' version of that expression?” Then again, fate might orchestrate call centre tribulations: answering prompts while holed up at a desk in a rented office cubicle (or a tent—considering that Lady Stanhope had settled and eventually died in a remote dusty corner of Lebanon, the production required some semblance of sand). The absence of data troubled her.

Though city dwellers were aware their home had been crowned Hollywood North, with vast facilities constructed somewhere in outlying areas (Marta's Internet perusal added specifics: “Vancouver's the home to literally hundreds of film & video companies, talent agencies
—people & animals—F/X & post-production facilities, shooting stages & water tank facilities”), the bulk of Marta's images sprang ready-made from American screwball comedies, hyperbolic and yet based on a thin tissue of truth. Colossally oversized egos, tragic deluded has-beens, difficult capital A artists, diva actors bursting into tantrum and shutting themselves up in luxury trailers stocked with idiosyncratic and required-by-contract necessities—an oxygen tank, Algerian bottled water, a Thai masseuse—clashing visions, sniveling, hangdog, or back-stabbing assistants, devastating insults and public humiliations, rabid oily agents with transparent get-ahead schemes and ready stashes of cocaine, ridiculous intrusions and edicts from distant and invisible but all-seeing—spies everywhere!—studio execs (young thoroughbred prostitutes across their middle-aged laps, lines of white powder running along the low-fat flesh covering exquisite arched spines): how close to actual did these shopworn figures stand?

And her, typecasting too, a fraction of another movie commonplace: heavy-framed utilitarian spectacles and tightly reined hair understood by audience and script alike as an unprepossessing bud disguising an inevitable flowery beauty; the dour, pencil-in-hand scholarly demeanor undermining a buoyant though compliant femininity. The situation could be undone by a fresh perspective and the right man, not to mention the off-camera discovery of a push-up bra and cinching belt, contact lenses, bright lipstick, and expert strokes of a curling iron.

During that monotonous departmental meeting Marta had snickered, thinking of Cyd Charisse's grey-suited Stalinist functionary (“
Nyet
, Comrade”) in
Silk Stockings
, whose officious military façade melted into a cascade of pastel chiffon after the briefest exposure to French couture and gung-ho American joie de vivre. Little had Lenin suspected the fragility of ideology. Marta, reluctantly drawn to the sheen of the idea, wished for longer hair.

She resigned herself to waiting. If nothing else, a studio meeting would strike a bold line between fact and fancy.

2
.

I
f the countless mysteries of the impending term of employment were mildly worrisome, a certifiable known served to buttress Marta's reluctance.

She hadn't dwelled on it in years, but Marta easily recalled a singular encounter with one man, later (and later still: the anecdote had circulated a few times) renamed SRLFI, the Stellar Representative of the Local Film Industry. The guy's preference, the Stevester, came nowhere close to eligible for use.

Regret entwined the memory, which also served readily as an ambiguous cautionary tale.

The situation seemed innocuous on paper, Marta had decided, potentially no better or worse than any other blind date—a contradictory phenomenon that demanded low expectations and a fine thread of optimism from all parties concerned. As she languished in the final semester of a second graduate degree, jittery and melancholic in turn, she'd been set up on a date by Judy, whose insistent refrains about growing really tired of Marta's lack of initiative had abruptly turned into a strategic initiative.

Judy zealously believed that the meager—“shut-in,” “Norman Bates-ish,” and “mole-like” her rotating choice of terms—routines of graduate students atrophied their social skills and thereby stunted their written work's heft: who could trust output by an intellectual with merely theoretical knowledge of life? Grad students befriending Judy were soon informed that “balance” encapsulated her worldview; innate evangelism also meant everyone in Judy's sphere of influence must convert. “Get out there,” she'd said to Marta, “you're a virtual sciophobe.” Marta, exacting with word use, gathered that Judy meant “afraid of your own shadow,” but conceded a relative proximity.

A professed free spirit, Judy borrowed key lines from the American philosophical tradition of Auntie Mame; and she preached the Gospel of Carpe Diem too. Seizing opportunity—men, grants, choice seating in seminar rooms and the graduate student lounge—pulsed through her veins, natural, obligatory, the secret to the fully realized life. As for caveat emptor, Judy dismissed the phrase as Cowardly Lion's rationalization for quaking in the shadows, a living doormat.

Marta, despite years of feminism and post-this and post-that literary theory meant to gnaw away at the truisms of suspect, oppressive patriarchal convention, nonetheless viewed her friend as “having a touch of the tramp”—that term her mother's, once regularly deployed to help young and impressionable Marta to distinguish rotten apples from good eggs—because Judy occasionally, or frequently, depending on the semester's stressors, bedded men whose names she'd scarcely heard.

Judy's match up for Marta: an Assistant Director “producing,” Judy spat, “detritus.” Her honest used car dealer pitch admitted minor flaws while underscoring the sterling plusses. He currently slaved on
Transfiguro III
, the second sequel of a comic book franchise that degraded (as eye candy, food for thought, and sheer entertainment spectacle) and belched empty awfulness with each outing. But the features—showcasing the boundless ingenuity and wisecrack-accompanied feats of a superhero able to change shape as he pleases—made vaults of cash and kept local crews and their American bosses gainfully employed. A hot prospect, SRFLI's paper characteristics proclaimed
going places
.

When Judy said, “You could cut steak with the man's chiseled good looks,” Marta, avoiding any questions about the logic or aptness of Judy's image and bowled over by her friend's force of nature personality, had shrugged in turn: “Sure.”

“What's our commonality?” Marta had wanted to ask, and in retrospect lamented the question's failure to launch.

The last date in a skimpy, unremarkable series had been a thudding fiasco—with a preppy button-down Oxford cloth tenure stream History prof so dull and career-obsessed that the responses of ire and unveiled boredom, and, later, grey despair that came with imagining an entire life shared with such a blinkered specimen who evidently preferred crumbling folios to living flesh, had seemed predestined. With the new proposition Marta had thought
Why not?
with the irrational yet pigheaded assurance of a gambler already long into a meteoric losing streak. And, anyway, she reasoned, the single-occupancy shell that at the moment she felt so eager to discard could always and easily be revisited, like home.

Judy's goading expertise played a part too: “God, branch out a bit. Who the hell wants to date another graduate student? Too much braininess kills physicality. Ker-splat. You'd try to impress each other with your peerless insights about Lacan until
11PM
and then shake hands like abstinent Christian teenagers on some pimply, tight-assed high school debating team.” Marta refused to share the fact that she'd willingly, happily participated in debate competitions—with other teens in matching green polo shirts who, yes, kept the tetracycline industry bullish—throughout grades
11
and
12
.

The date did in fact dislodge Marta from terra firma, which was, she'd admit, small to begin with. SRLFI chose an
It Space
, his idiot term, capitalized and italicized judging from the intonation, used to describe a fussy overdressed start up restaurant that begged for interior design magazine photographers and coolness credibility, not messy humans prone to spilling fashionable alcohol concoctions and filling bellies that bulged ever so subtly over expensive waistbands. Between courses, Marta watched, curious to see where he stowed the gum he chewed so tirelessly. He seemed the type to stick a wad under the table.

After eight oblong plates of Minutia—“Appetizers as a concept are just so
1970
s-Galloping-Gourmet-scallops-wrapped-in-bacon-and-served-in-a-brown escargot-dish, right?” he'd sputtered, inciting a facial reaction less impassive and pleased than she wanted—they'd driven, Marta listening, SRLFI motormouthed, to
Transfiguro III
's wrap party. “We'll check out the vibe,” he explained before speeding into a tangled, angrily-toned story about the search to finalize the sequel's official name. Watching passive captives in other cars, Marta nonetheless caught “so-called marketing geniuses,” “brain-dead focus groups,”
“La La Land,” “child's play,” “give me a break,” and “total clusterfuck” before intuiting that “their heads shoved all the way up their asses” amounted to his summary statement and a request for her nodded or vocalized sympathies. “Unbelievable,” she'd enthused.

Scrutinizing the narrow gastro-lounge restlessly—all shiny plastic beige surfaces, as though clamped together from
Space:
1999
set remnants—Marta counted people using their mobile devices. The average was
3
.
5
per dartboard-sized table.

SRLFI spoke at a canter, blithe self-love a fortress completely impervious to her purposeful arrows of silence. Marta fixed on him with a baleful, dismissive stare; she meant it to shout “O joy! A shallow movie guy who yearns to be a shallow fashion guy,” and was shocked that—she supposed—the man misunderstood so completely, believing her to be conveying instead, “Please go on. I'm fascinated by each and every verb.”

His conversational stride exhibited no sign of fatigue as he steered and prodded and nudged her through intimate groupings of crew, all the while oblivious to the affront of his trespasses into Marta's personal space.

Hardly a complete disaster—exoticism saved him from becoming a deadly bore, and the partygoers did not ever whine competitively about the job market, funding applications, tenure, students, busyness, conference papers, or research plans—neither could the date ever warrant being judged a moderate success.

Introduced to SRLFI's “peeps,” Marta noticed how one after the next looked beyond her shoulder or else right through her with the keenly focused eyes of a dog bred to retrieve. The single guy who broke the pattern—tall, rail lean, black shirt unbuttoned two places below decorum—had turned the conversation to Alice Munro. Since he'd managed, moments earlier, to drop the names of a famous Manhattan fashion visionary and a Hollywood producer (likewise “truly visionary”) with whom he claimed to be very close friends, Marta registered surprise at the sudden literary tangent. She perked up.

On the next beat he asked: “I heard she's a real bitch. Is that true?”

Marta eyes widened, aghast. Was he for real? She had wanted to slap him, douse the man's fatuous face with the table's bottle of Swiss water and exclaim “How crass can you be?” but had chosen a prim “Well, we don't really study authors in quite that way.” Back on campus the vulgarity had made for an entertaining tale of heresy.

The gaze of anyone else seemed to lose predatory gleam—undisguised assessment complete, the eye tracked movement at distant tables—when Marta revealed a lowly, would-be lecturer status rather than “I'm a writer with a hot screenplay recently green lit and gearing up for cast.” She thought,
I am not worthy of being prey
. Such relegation struck her as an insult of a strange kind.