Wilderness Tips (17 page)

One of the uncles, the one with the hardware store, took her aside one Sunday and told her she had a head on her shoulders and ought to use it. Another, the banker, said that a knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping never hurt you in any line of work, and showed her how to do it. The third said she should not throw herself away by getting married too soon, and that a woman who knew how to earn a living would never have to be dependent. Susanna knew they were talking about her mother. She paid attention.

In the last years of high school, Susanna studied hard and performed well – “performed well” was what the uncles said – and won a small scholarship to university. The uncles paid for the rest. Their own sons had not turned out as well as expected. One of them had become a ballet dancer.

Soon after Susanna graduated, in a black gown, with the uncles applauding and the aunts beside them smiling their tight little smiles because they knew how much it had cost, the uncles died, one after the other. They had remained big eaters, lovers of roast beef and fried chicken, of whipped cream and thick slabs of pie. They had never grown any thinner, only softer. They all died suddenly, of heart attacks, and for a time Susanna felt the world had gone deaf.

Each of the uncles had left some money to Susanna’s mother, and some to Susanna as well. Not a lot, but it was too much for the aunts, who felt that enough had been spent on Susanna already. When, soon afterwards, her mother married again, a man she’d met through the uncles – a widower, once in the roofing business, now retired – and went to live in California, they were even more outraged. Her mother’s worst crime was to sell the house and keep the money for herself. They felt it should have gone to them, because of everything the uncles had invested. That the widower was well off made it worse. They took his wealth as a personal affront.

This was a relief for Susanna: she no longer had to pretend to like them. She found a job in Toronto, a minor job with one of the big daily papers, compiling obituaries and birth notices and accounts of weddings and doing dogsbody research. She was marking time. The money from the uncles was stowed safely away in the bank. She could have used it to go on in school, in graduate school or one of the professions; her marks were high enough. But although she was
good at a lot of things, there was nothing in particular she especially wanted to do.

It was the same with men. She’d had boyfriends over the years, by this time even a couple of lovers, but they were her own age and she had trouble taking them seriously. She told them jokes when the conversation got too personal, when they wanted to know what she really felt about them; she teased, asked impudent questions, pushed herself into their privacy. She had the knack of appearing warmly interested, although she was not. Curious was more like it. She assumed that flirtation was harmless, and that men would always indulge her. There had been some bad scenes. Angry boys had cornered her in the kitchen at parties, or in the room where the coats were piled, and accused her of leading them on. She’d had a couple of narrow escapes from parked cars. She’d laughed during a marriage proposal; she hadn’t meant to be nasty, but the idea had struck her as funny. The man threw a plate at her, but he was drunk. It was at another party, and that was what men did at parties, then.

Susanna’s reaction on these occasions was never anger, only surprise. The surprise was that she had somehow failed to please.

At the newspaper there was one man she truly admired. His name was Percy Marrow. He did most of the cultural things: not that there were many of them in Toronto, in those days. But if a play came to town it was Percy who reviewed it; or a dance company from England, or a visiting string quartet. Percy was known to take trips to New York, although the paper didn’t pay for them. This gave him a cosmopolitan outlook: he was fond of decrying the provincial tastes and boorishness of the locals. He did jazz too, and film reviews, and sometimes a book. He did these things because nobody else at the paper wanted to do them.

“Percy does all the fairy stuff,” was how it was explained to Susanna in the newsroom, which she had to walk through in order
to get to her own cramped desk with its stacks of the newly married and the freshly dead. The newsroom prided itself on being rough on people. Percy Marrow was known there, behind his back, as Vedge, which was short for vegetable marrow. This was cruel, because it did describe his shape. From a distance, which was the only vantage point from which Susanna had yet seen him, he looked like Humpty Dumpty, or like Mr. Weatherbee, the bald egg-shaped high-school principal in the
Archie
comic books. The photo of his head that appeared above his weekly “Doings Around Town” column resembled a peeled potato, with small features glued on, old-fashioned rimless half-glasses, and a little tuft of fuzz on top.

“Don’t be so mean,” Susanna said when she first heard his nickname. “He’s not fat. He’s just
big.”

“Susie-Q’s sticking up for Vedge,” said Marty, the sports editor. “Vedge is a busy bee. He looks after himself.”

“Vedge is a pompous twit,” said Bill, who was an imported Cockney and did hard news such as murders. He was the paper’s pet left-winger, excused because he was foreign. “All those artsy-fartsies are.”

“Artsy
-fatsies,”
said Cam, who covered politicians and was the most cynical of them all.

Susanna, who usually joked back with them, found herself getting angry. She thought they were jealous because Percy Marrow knew a lot more than they did, about more interesting things. But she knew better than to say this. She walked past them to her desk, through the smoke-filled, raucous, clattering air, followed by the yum-yum noises and lip-smackings that were their habit.

Susanna did not see a big future for herself in obituaries. She began to stalk Percy Marrow. She noted his comings and goings, and finally managed to introduce herself to him at the water cooler. She was impressed by him, but she was not intimidated. She told him she very much appreciated his work, that she thought of him as
a sort of model. She suggested they have lunch: maybe he could give her some pointers? She was prepared for him to brush her off – after all, who was she? – but after a moment, during which his round face registered something like horror, he accepted. He was diffident, almost shy. Susanna got the impression he was not used to compliments.

Out on the street, he walked slowly, deliberately, with his toes out like a penguin. They went to a restaurant where no one from the newsroom was likely to go. Susanna thought he might order an exotic wine – she counted on him to know something about that, too – but he didn’t. He explained that he never drank while he was working, and called for two glasses of water. Susanna was pleased: this was a reversal of newsroom values. The boys there came in from lunch reeking like a brewery; or they kept pocket flasks in their desks.

Susanna launched right in. What she wanted was a chance, a foot in the door. No one else at the paper was likely to give her one. She knew she was worth more than births and deaths. If she was no good, he could just dump her back, and no hard feelings.

Percy Marrow regarded her over the tops of his half-moon glasses. He was thinking. He took off the glasses and polished them on his tie. His hands were small; like many large men, he had delicate hands and feet. Up close, he was a lot younger than he looked in the paper. Not fifty at all. Probably no more than ten years older than she was; or maybe five. It was hard to tell, because of his shape.

Maybe she could try some art reviews, he said at last. That was something he didn’t care for much himself. She would be doing him a favour. She could do them at night, and keep on with her regular job as well. That way she wouldn’t be risking a lot.

“But I don’t know anything about art,” said Susanna, a little dismayed. She’d been picturing something more like a column, with her photo above it.

“You don’t need to,” Percy said. “I’ll give you some samples.” He
paused to examine his green beans. “Overcooked,” he pronounced. He was a picky eater. “Just remember, this place is still a small town. All the artists know and loathe one another. You’ll find out how easy it is to get yourself hated.”

“By writing bad reviews?” said Susanna.

“No. By writing good ones.” For the first time, Percy smiled at her. It was an odd smile. It didn’t quite go with his shyness. There was a hint of malice in it, as if he knew she was heading for trouble, and enjoyed the idea.

But that was only a flash, and she quickly decided she’d been wrong. The next instant his face was back to its usual repose; like a Buddha, she thought, or a benign walrus, without the tusks and moustache.

Over the next few months Percy took her on as a sort of protégée. They were both from small towns, maybe that was it. Maybe that was why she felt so comfortable with him. He helped her with her first reviews, commenting on the shape, the style; he suggested approaches, and praised her when in his estimation she’d done well. Susanna herself thought her reviews were fraudulent, but that nobody would be able to tell, considering what the other art reviews were like. She learned to use a lot of adjectives. They came in pairs, good and bad. The same painting could be energetic or chaotic, static or imbued with classical values, depending on whim. She got her first hate letter, and read it out to Percy at lunch.

Their lunches did not go unnoticed in the newsroom. “You got warm drawers for old Vedge, then?” said Bill.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Susanna, more defensively than she should have. “He’s married.” This was true. She’d met Percy’s wife, bumped into the two of them in the elevator. Percy had stumbled over the introduction. The wife was a short, sharp-eyed woman, who had made it clear to Susanna that she did not care for her one bit.

“Married! Oh dew tell! Getting some on the side then is he? Shocking!”

“I would too if I had a wife like that. The Human Wen, we call her.”

“Vedge is wen-pecked.”

“If I gained two hundred pounds, would you screw me too, darling?”

“Susie-Q is sleeping her way up the ladder. We’ve seen those artsy-fartsy reviews of yours. By-line and all, very nice.”

“Listen to this: ‘Lyrical, uncluttered line, and good placing of spatial mass.’ ”

“What’s that from, a girdle ad? Sounds like a nice bum to me.”

“She’s got old Vedge by the balls.”

“If he has any.”

“If he has any
left
.”

“Bugger off,” said Susanna, resorting to their own language. The newsroom hooted.

They were wrong, of course. There was nothing like that going on. True, Susanna felt protective about Percy, but he was like family. Right now she was seeing somebody new, an ad-agency man who wore ascots and whose hobby was sports cars. She regarded him with what she considered sexual passion, but underneath she thought he was lightweight. Percy was still the most intelligent man she’d ever met. This was how she accounted for him to her friends, of whom she now had many. Also he was kind.

He had begun giving her advice on how to dress. He had views on that subject, as on most others; now that he was used to her, she was hearing more of them. She looked forward to their meetings: she never knew what piece of advice or gossip, what hint or treasure he might have in store for her. He doled them out sparingly, one at a time, like candies.

An opening came up for a column. It was in the women’s pages,
but it was a column nevertheless. Anyway, there were some stirrings just then about women. It was an area that was heating up. “Women” were no longer only recipes and clothes and advice about dry underarms. Women were beginning to make a fuss.

The column was offered to Susanna, who took it. “Did you do that?” she asked Percy. But he smiled and was inscrutable, and polished his glasses.

Susanna invested some of the uncles’ money in clothes, good ones, and some in an unlisted telephone number. Now that her picture was in the paper, above her column, she’d begun to attract heavy breathers. She made the mistake of mentioning this to Bill, and for a week the entire newsroom took turns calling her up on the office phone and breathing at her. She was getting sick of them.

Her column was fresh and breezy. These were the adjectives Percy applied to it. Informal and witty, but with punch. He thought she dealt with the issues, but in a questioning, balanced way. Not fanatical. He congratulated her, and after several months he mentioned that there was an opening at one of the bigger radio stations. The show was called “In Depth.” They wanted someone who could do interviews on current topics; they were looking for a woman. It could be just the thing for her.

“I’ve never done anything like that before,” said Susanna, waiting for encouragement.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Percy. “What they need is someone who can improvise, and sound warm and friendly. You can do that, can’t you? Because it’s genuine.” He had his glasses off and was polishing them. He raised his head; his eyes looked unprotected. There was something watery and pleading about them that alarmed her.

She laughed. “I can fake anything,” she said. “I’ll give it a try.”