What We Both Know, page 3
I am hungover just a little bit, in a way I find almost pleasant. Baby is in the back seat of the Jeep with a paperback copy of his 1979 novella Nervous Habits. The book was released before he became more widely recognized as a short story writer, and it went out of print before I was born. We were able to track down a used copy on Amazon through a bookseller in Syracuse, New York, but the book accidentally went to my mother’s address in Kingston due to the shared account I years ago set up for them. She saw this as some sort of sadistic act upon receiving the book, and it took some amount of convincing for her to agree to package it back up and ship it to us at the house. “What a happy, happy accident,” she barked over the phone.
Baby has angled himself against one of the back doors, legs across the back seat, and has the book in one hand, half of it folded around its spine, and is speaking quietly at the page.
“No, said Richard, it’s a matter of scale, he had the thick unselfconscious lenses of an academic, gentle hands, something unattractive about their neatness to Marcia, made her too aware of her own, plus she wasn’t speaking, probably not paying attention, the sharp profile of her face angled toward the train window, catching a yellow gleam.”
“Okay,” I say, and turn off the car.
Baby dog-ears his page, folds the book in his lap, sorts out his posture. “No,” he says, “said Richard. It’s a matter of scale.”
I’ve had to park a few blocks away from the building, which faces right onto Bloor Street. The agency is located on the ninth floor of a skyscraper that also houses a number of psychotherapy offices, a law firm, and a restaurant and café on the ground floor. This building is a different one than where the agency had been in my childhood. At least, I think so. I recall being driven somewhere in the northern part of the city, to a home office of some sort, being served hot chocolate by a shiny-haired woman with big chunky rings on her fingers and a long flowered dress. Mark and Baby had gone off to some other part of the house while I got to sit at the big wraparound desk in the office and talk to the shiny-haired woman about how when I grew up I’d like to be a writer like my dad.
“Ready?” I say. I clap my hands down over the wheel in a way that reminds me of my mother.
“Home at last,” he says. At this I feel a pressure behind my eyes.
I go around to the back and open Baby’s door for him. “We’ve arrived at Mark Richman’s office,” I say. “You have a meeting about your new book.”
“Ah,” he says. “Yes.”
“Do you remember Mark Richman?”
He fusses with his jacket, shoves the novella into an inner pocket. “Mark Richman!” He comes alive, looks to the front seat as if to find Mark there. “He wants to end me. To ruin my career.”
“I don’t think he’d do a thing like that.”
“He wants to shelve me in romance! He wants me in book clubs!”
“Why don’t we go talk to him and see?”
“I won’t talk to that prick,” he says. “That prick,” he says again, takes his book back out of his pocket and returns to reading.
The hangover has turned on me; I have an unusual shortage of patience for him. So, I leave him, and go alone into the building and take the elevator up to the literary agency.
* * *
—
AS A YOUNG WRITER in the late sixties, Baby had been part of a collective of English grad students (although he himself was in the third year of his undergraduate degree at this time) who called themselves the Arthurs—initially Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table—and ran a small zine out of the university’s magazine office. The zine was released independently from the official university magazine but used the majority of its resources to print on fairly high-quality paper and access the mailing list database to reach out to other Canadian university publications, etc. The Arthurs handed out copies on Bloor Street and were notorious for hassling passersby, sometimes pressing copies of the zine into chests, shouting, “If poetry is a dying art…prove it!” and tearing up copies and handing them out in piles of shreds. There is a framed photograph of Baby in a white T-shirt with DON’T READ THIS!!! written in black permanent marker across the chest, holding a stack of zines and looking wild-eyed at the camera, wearing business slacks cut at the knee and a backwards cap in mid-February sleet.
But one of Mark Richman’s first moves when he signed Baby on was telling him he’d better “cut the damn stunt shit,” and he’d had to put some distance between himself and the other Arthurs. This understandably was met with some backlash, and the very next issue of the zine— titled, by the way, Sword & Stone—was the “Beheading Issue,” featuring a caricature of Baby on its cover, with the distorted likeness of his head bleeding and resting upside down at his feet.
Even today the rest of the Arthurs continue to publish locally and often collaboratively with one another. They don’t get much recognition outside of the province, but locally they are perhaps the biggest names in the independent scene. Sort of like grandfather figures to young aspiring experimental writers. Or, so, that’s how it’s been explained to me. I don’t know if now they’ve perhaps been cast out by the new literary generation. The whole lot of them, Baby included, are hard-headed and closed to change. They dress in the same vests and corduroys as in old photographs from their university days, keep thick moustaches and bowl-ish haircuts, and worship the classics. Ask any one of them and I bet they couldn’t tell you the name of a living Canadian writer with a major-press publication.
Baby has often bitterly used the phrase “keeping one’s seat at the round table” to suggest stagnation and a lack of commercial success. Baby encouraged me to make what he called “career moves.” “Keep an eye on the big picture.” I don’t think he realized the smallness of my life as it stands. I move from room to room; I drive to the grocery store, the post office; I see Catherine, sometimes; and I miss Pauline. My job is I take care of Baby and he pays me. If he didn’t pay me now it would be money I’d get through an inheritance. So in a way he’s charging me, he likes to say. Before I moved in I didn’t have much more going on. I kept to myself, worked in administration in the creative writing department. I got the position because of Baby, because he’d taught in the creative writing program. When it comes down to it I’ve never gotten an honest job, not anything other than picking up plates in a bar.
Mark Richman now, as compared to photographs of him and Baby pinned to the walls in Baby’s office, appears fragile. But then, so does Baby. Mark mutters to himself while he makes me a coffee, picks through the top drawer of one of his filing cabinets. I’ve had to lie about Baby’s absence and tell Mark that it is due to his current writing schedule that he is unable to make it into the city until a contract needs signing. I have no way of knowing whether this is usual behaviour in the dynamic between the men, whether this is allowed in publishing, even, but Mark does not push me for answers.
The office is lined on two walls with bookshelves, all full of leathery hardcovers. On the third wall, a small square window and a brass cart with an espresso maker and small tins and boxes of tea and coffee. A photograph of himself accepting some accolade. He looks handsome, and big, like a rugby player.
“So,” he says. He sets a mug down in front of me, another one in front of his chair and then sits down. “What’s the project?”
“It’s a memoir.”
“Okay,” he says, but it sounds like a question.
I try to recall Baby’s phrasing, when he’s talked about it. It’s always been “the memoir.” That always seems grand enough, to him.
I take a sip of coffee and the heat surprises me, scalds my tongue.
“Do you take anything?”
My focus is on pretending not to have felt the pain. “What?”
“Your coffee. Do you take anything?”
“Oh, no. It’s fine.”
“It’s fine now that you’ve had a sip? Because to ask for milk or sugar would imply that it’s no good? Had I asked before you had some, would you have asked for something?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“Alone in my office, you’ve just heard I’ve passed away, you go to the coffee cart for something to do, no, it’s not a heartless act, you’re in shock. You make a coffee. Milk? Sugar?”
“It’s good,” I say.
His arms are mid-air; he’s engaged in the energy of the scenario. He deflates.
“So the memoir,” he says, and his tone has changed. I fear he has realized I have nothing of value to tell him. “What’s the angle?” He seems disappointed that I won’t play with him. The truth is I don’t know how. Baby would know. I on the other hand wasn’t born with the gift of ease.
“It’s going to tell it all,” I say. “Things he’s never told.”
“What kinds of secrets is he keeping from me?”
“It’s going to break down all of the ways he has wronged everyone in his life.”
“Now there’s a Baby Davidson idea,” he says. “Called, ah, A Table Bedecked in Cards.” He laughs.
“Yes,” I say. “Something like that.” I realize too late I’d been meant to laugh.
There is a silence.
“When can I have it?” he says.
“Oh,” I say, “um.”
“Is he far in? Is there a draft? A skeleton?”
“A skeleton for sure.”
“I’ll draft a letter. I’ll need a synopsis, and then I’ll need some pages.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll tell him.”
Somehow I’d let myself believe I’d get away with there being no book. I realize I’ve romanticized the industry to the point of seeing it as entirely abstract. All along I’ve thought Baby worked only in ideas. I never gave him the credit of logging long hours on the page. I do have some pages. But am I really going to send them to Mark? Those pages?
“Tell him to shoot off a few chapters to my email when they’re ready. And to call me. I haven’t heard a thing for months. He doesn’t have to send you in and waste your time. You’re busy”—he waves his hands—“I’m busy. Okay, good. Good?”
“Good.” I nod. A few chapters when they’re ready. My anxiety about the writing is somehow reversed. How long is this all going to take? By the time they’ve found a publisher Baby won’t recognize his own name on the cover. Then, how do I suppose they’ll believe he wrote the thing?
His readers are such hungry animals. University students write papers on the minutiae in novels he published decades ago. Sure, I can posture, but for how many pages can I pretend to be Baby before I slip and reveal my own voice?
“Actually,” I say. “How about I get him to send the whole thing?”
“It’s done?”
“Well. Soon it will be.”
“Soon.” He sits back, satisfied. As if this is how he wanted things to go.
* * *
—
IT’S A SHORT WALK to the pharmacy, so I circle back to the car so I can check to make sure Baby is still okay. Through the windshield I can see a silhouette in the back seat, upright, things seemingly in order.
Side by side on Bloor Street are two buildings: a family-owned pharmacy and a Canada Post office where Baby rents a PO box. At home the mail is collected in boxes grouped together at the end of the road, and ours will from time to time receive mail addressed to Pauline, my mother, or myself. Since Pauline, he has avoided the local box. Slowly he has begun to have all of his mail addressed to the PO, business or not.
Along the walls of the pharmacy are shelves and shelves of over-the-counter products. I leave a prescription for donepezil with the woman behind the counter, take a pamphlet on memory loss with my back turned to her in case she remembers me, tells someone. The owner is a family friend, which is what makes Baby believe it is the only place that won’t give him the wrong stuff, cut it with something lethal or, worse, give him something weaker than necessary. To be honest I don’t know anymore what’s in the cocktail of pills he takes; the names all blend together, and I just mark small Xs on a paper schedule in the kitchen. The less I know, the less I think about his death. The memory loss I’m comfortable with; the physical death makes my skin crawl. Anyway, I’m grateful for the stranger working today, meaning I don’t have to stay and chat. Instead I slip out and go next door to the post office.
In one of Baby’s old briefcases I’ve got folders of documents confirming his birth, his parents’ names, the schools he attended from the ages of four until dropping out at fifteen, only to miraculously be accepted into university at eighteen. I am to scan each one and staple all of them together, mail them to a government office along with a completed form requesting information on the adoption that took place in July of 1952, when Baby was brought into the Greene family. We have gone through this process twice now, each time being notified six weeks later that there was information or documentation missing. I worry that this too is something that may happen too slowly. By the time things are complete Baby may have forgotten this part of himself.
The adoption was closed, meaning nothing could be legally provided by the adoption agency or the city, but due to a call last winter notifying him of the death of his biological mother, he now was able to file a request for some of her records. In addition, he subscribed to an ancestry site to try to find cousins, siblings, anyone. The problem was there was no father. Well—on Baby’s birth certificate (and this is where “Baby” originated: in the adoption he was listed as Baby Davidson, just as others were listed as Baby Other-Surname; he was later renamed Marcus Greene, but he started using his pre-adoptive name pseudonymously as advised by Mark Richman to distinguish himself from his notorious Arthurs personality) the man listed as the father is also Baby’s mother’s father, meaning, well, there are a few possibilities. One of them being that the father was simply absent and so the form had to be filled in by someone.
In the po box there is a letter from a DNA testing company, one from an ancestry website, and some royalty cheques, all of which I stuff inside of the briefcase.
When I return to the pharmacy to pick up the pinched little paper bags of prescriptions, the owner is behind the counter. The woman from before is nowhere to be seen, and I wonder if she’s told the pharmacist I was in earlier looking at the pamphlets.
“Hillary!” he calls. A bell jingles behind me as the door closes. He has a plastic basket in front of him with two white paper bags inside of it. He asks me how my father is. I consider telling the same story as I told to Mark, about the hard work. Instead I tell the pharmacist that the city stresses him out, that he’s settling back into the quiet of small town life. That he’s moved back into the house I grew up in not because my mother finally gave it up but because it had been the plan all along. Well, I don’t tell him that part.
“You know what he used to say to me,” says the pharmacist.
“What’s that,” I say.
“He’d come in here and he’d say, ‘Doc Laughlin, what’s the difference between you and me?’ And, you know, he’d’ve told me last time, and I’d go, ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘what is it, Mr. Greene?’ And he’d go, he’d say, ‘You have more patients!’ ”
With this he offers me the prescriptions, laughing.
“Only one who ever called me doc,” he says.
* * *
—
I FEEL THE MEMORY loss pamphlet against my hip, or I imagine I do, when I get back into the car. I play out scenarios in which Baby finds it and something irreparable happens between us. Or worse, he’s interested.
In the fourth grade it was suggested to my parents that I should be put in therapy. Both me and Pauline, actually, though if I remember correctly the conversations happened at different times, for different reasons—mine being due to a general sort of lackadaisical attitude and inability to properly assimilate with other students. That is to say I roamed the school field alone, participated in class only when addressed directly, stood still and white-faced in the gymnasium during any team-based game. At this suggestion, Baby, and in turn my mother, as she often in my upbringing sided with my father fervently, took immense offence to this attack on the family unit and our propensity for “us-against-them” behaviour, which, they insisted, signalled high intelligence and independent, creative thought. Plus my grades were the highest in my year, though I should note that my mother wrote all of my assignments for me, acting as if I was a pest for offering input.
“Mail from the ancestry site,” I say. He is consumed by his book and doesn’t respond. I keep the DNA testing results a secret for now, wanting to wait until I screen them for anything that might cause a fuss.
When I get onto Highway 401 he perks up and angles himself again toward the backseat window, forgetting the book. He becomes consumed by the traffic. If he watches close enough, there can’t be an accident. Sometimes a car on the other side of the highway divide will drive in our direction in a particular way that catches Baby’s eye and he’ll press his hands and his forehead to the window and shout, “Slow down, slow down, slow down.” When I exit the highway I feel him relax. Evening comes quickly, as if we’ve pulled the day shut with the Jeep, rumbling down Concession Road 7. On the more heavily-bushed side roads there are no lamps, putting us in complete darkness outside of the circle of our headlights when there are no other drivers on the road. When there is an oncoming vehicle, which is rare, especially on weekday evenings after the work rush, there’s a sense of being watched.
When we return to darkness, my eyes are fuzzy and I can no longer feel the edge of the road. Baby taught me to watch the reflection of lights on the telephone wires for oncoming traffic. A trick he learned while driving delivery trucks in between his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He delivered stacks of plastic bins, full of one hundred books each, to wholesalers and dollar stores in the towns surrounding Orillia, where he lived in a bachelor apartment in a building owned by his father. He felt a unique sort of peacefulness while driving the books to the stores and the empty bins back to the warehouse unmatched by any other activity, including reading and writing, which both made up his forty-plus-year career. He considered withdrawing from his master’s program on multiple occasions to keep up the driving, maybe never do anything else, but his back started to get to him, and he got scouted by an agent (Mark Richman, that is) who’d been keeping an eye on the writing program at the university. When Baby was a student there wasn’t such a thing as a bachelor of creative writing, so the novelists entered the professional writing and English literature programs, where they would get jobs editing the school lit mag, often printing their own work and leaving submissions unopened on the office shelves. Mark found out Baby had been submitting manuscripts to small local publishers and made him send them letters informing them that the work was no longer available, that they shouldn’t read it, and then he, the agent, went to the big conglomerate publisher and told them he had something they needed to take a look at right away. This was what would later be titled V Formation.
