Write What You Know.
This is one of the primary Writers’ Rules, though an unnecessary one, as the initial inclination of most is toward autobiography anyway. The imagination comes later, if it comes at all, after all the pages of the family photo album have been turned, love affairs autopsied, coming-of-age revelations and domestic tragedies rehashed on the page. Usually, people find their own lives sufficiently fascinating to never have to confront the problem of making things up. The Kensington Circle is no exception. Evelyn’s campus sexcapade, Petra’s marital breakdown, Ivan’s sewer-rat metamorphosis. I’m jealous of them. It would make writing so much easier if I never tired of seeing the same face in the mirror.
But what if you don’t particularly find the life you know all that interesting?
Real,
yes. And marked by its share of loss, redeemed by the love of a son with eyes the colour of his mother’s. It’s
just that I don’t see my life as satisfactory material to present as fiction. I find it challenge enough just muddling along as who I am, never mind casting myself as hero.
This is the reasoning I call on when, as now, I try to squeeze out a paragraph to be read at the next circle meeting, and nothing comes. I’m taking lunch at my desk, gnawing on a cafeteria hamand-cheese, randomly pecking at the keys of my computer. Tim Earheart, who finds my literary aspirations perplexing (“Why do you think anybody would pay to read the shit you’re pulling out of your ass?” is how he put it to me, unanswerably, when I told him of my attendance at a fictionwriting circle), comes by to read over my shoulder.
“I’m no judge,” he says, “but I’m not sure you’re going anywhere with this.”
He’s right. Over the next hour and a half, only a few sentences remain on the screen.
Here’s what good Write What You Know has done for me today:
After my wife died I started hearing voices. Just hers at first. And then others I’ve never heard before. Strangers. I can’t know this for sure but I have the feeling that all of them are dead.
They come to me before I go to sleep. This is what frightens me. Not that they’re dead, or that I can hear them. But that I’m awake when I do.
Once this passage of luminous prose has been accomplished, I turn my mind to my Couch Potato column for the weekend edition. This week it’s a gloves-off attack on the Canadian franchise of
American MegaStar!,
a talent show that is the toprated program in this country, as well as the fourteen others it has colonized. An entire, worldwide generation being led to believe they are entitled to be famous. It’s toxic. A lie. It’s
wrong
. And it’s also how my frustration with Writing What I Know opens the gates to Writing How the World Has Gone to Crap, which has never been much of a problem for me.
Even though I know that
Canadian MegaStar!
is owned by the same multinational media behemoth that owns the paper I work for, and even though there have been ominous hints from the section editor to “go easy” on “content” which is produced by said behemoth, I let slip the dogs of war on
MegaStar!
as if it is single-handedly responsible for carrying out a cultural atrocity. In fact, this last phrase makes it into the lede. From this measured opening, the column goes on to be brutal, hyperbolic and libellous, all leading to the kind of hysterical finish where you’re actually a little concerned about the mental health of the column’s author. It’s
personal
.
I stay at work late (Thursdays keep me at the office at least until midnight copyediting the Best on the Box listings) and walk home wondering if today will prove to be my last in my current
position. Or, come to think of it, my last in
any
position. It’s almost amusing to wonder what else I might be qualified to do. I’ve always rather liked the idea of running my own business. Something very hands off. Automated, preferably. A laundromat. A spray-it-yourself car wash.
I round the corner on to my street speculating over what kind of pay cut, if any, would be involved in delivering newspapers instead of writing for them, when I notice the yellow police tape around the house across from mine. It is the neighbouring family at 147, and not my own family at 146 that the four police cruisers are parked in front of. But I still run the half-block up Euclid, ring the bell at my front door after twice dropping the keys, and confirm my son is safe with Emmie before going back out to ask the cop turning traffic back toward Queen what’s going on.
“Break and enter,” he says, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“What’d they take?”
“Didn’t touch a thing. The kid was the only one who saw him.”
“Joseph. My boy plays with him sometimes.”
“Yeah? Well, when Joseph woke up tonight some son of a bitch was standing over his bed.”
“Was he able to give a description?”
“All he can say is the guy’s a shadow.”
“A shadow?”
“Went downstairs to the living room with the kid following behind him. Just stood at the front
window, staring out at the street. Then, after a while, he walked out the front door as if he owned the place. Turn it
around,
buddy! Yeah,
you
!”
The cop steps away to have a word with whoever’s behind the wheel of the SUV that refuses to head back to Queen. It gives me a chance to walk up on to the neighbour’s patch of lawn and stand with my back to their front window. The same view the shadow would have had, standing behind the glass.
Staring at my place.
Where Sam is now. Standing next to Emmie on the porch, squinting over at me.
I read the nanny’s lips—
Wave to Daddy!
—and Sam raises his chubby arm in salute. And as I wave back I wonder if he can see how bad Daddy’s shaking.
The next circle meeting is at Petra’s house. She had kindly offered to host all of us the week before, though as I step out of my cab at her Rosedale address, I see she was being modest to the point of insult when she described her digs as “Nothing too fancy”. The place is a mansion. Copper roof, terraced landscaping that looks expensive even under a couple inches of snow, matching Mercedes coupés (one red, one black) docked in the carport. It makes me wonder how much the husband had
before
the divorce if this is Petra’s cut.
Inside the door, my coat is taken by a silverhaired man wearing a better suit than any I have
ever owned. A man who serves not only a different class, but a different century. My first honestto-God butler.
“The group is assembling in the Rose Room,” he says, and leads me over marble floors to a sunken lounge of leather chairs, each with their own side table, and a snapping fire in the hearth. At the door, the butler discreetly inquires as to whether I would like a drink. He says it in a way that makes it clear real drinks are included in the offer.
“Scotch?” I say, and he nods, as though my choice had confirmed a suspicion he’d had on first sight.
Most of the other members are already here. Conrad White has chosen a chair near the fire, its orange flickers lending him a devilish air which is only enhanced by the smirk he barely manages to conceal as he notes the room’s incoherent collection of Inuit sculptures, garish abstracts and bookshelves lined with leather-bound “classics”. In this context of stage-set wealth, the rest of us look like hired help sneaking a break, holding our crystal goblets with both hands so nothing might spill on the rug.
Len in particular seems out of place. Or perhaps this is because he’s the only one talking.
“You should come. You
all
should. How about you, Patrick?”
“How about me what?”
“The open mic. There’s a launch party for a new litmag, and then afterwards they open the floor to anyone who wants to read.”
“I don’t know, Len.”
“C’mon. You can check out what’s
going on
out there.”
“They have a bar?”
“Half-price beer if you buy the zine.”
“Now you’re talking.”
All of us are here now except for William and Petra, the latter clipping back and forth to the kitchen on high heels, touchingly anxious about burning the shrimp skewers. When our hostess finally sits, Conrad White decides to go ahead without William. There’s a subtle easing in all of our postures at this. I would be surprised if any of us didn’t hope that William has moved on to other creative endeavours, if not a different area code altogether.
I’m first, which is something of a relief, as the sooner I can get through the miserable couple of paragraphs I’ve brought along, the sooner I can get to work on the quadruple single malt Jeeves has poured for me.
Besides, I’m only here for one reason anyway.
Angela.
She doesn’t disappoint. I say this even though I’m not really listening. After I click my dictaphone on, I pay less attention to her words than how she speaks them. I have assumed all along that Angela was using a voice distinct from her own in her readings. Now I realize that I have virtually no idea what her “real” voice is like, or whether it would be different from the one I listen to now.
She has said so little in the circle (her responses to the other readers little more than a murmured “I liked it a lot”) that it may be the at once innocent and debauched little girl tone she uses is the same as her everyday speech.
When she’s finished, no one says anything for what may be a minute. The fire hissing like a punctured tire. An ice cube cracks in Len’s tumbler of apple juice. And from the moment Angela closes the cover of her journal to the moment Conrad White invites the circle to comment on what we’ve just heard, she looks at me.
More active than staring. A
taking in
. Every blink marking some new observation. And I do the same. Or try to. To see inside, sort her truth from the make believe. Figure out whether she can spot anything worthwhile in me. Anything she might like.
“Wonderful, Angela. Truly
wonderful,
” Conrad White says.
Everyone raises their heads. No one had noticed our silent exchange except for Conrad himself. And Ivan. Both men shifting in their chairs to find relief from an affliction I immediately recognize. A thought that, for the lonely like us, passes more than any other.
Why not me?
After the meeting, we step out into the cold night, none of us knowing which way will lead us out of the enclave’s curving streets and cul-de-sacs that discourage entry or exit. I look around for
Angela, but she must have grabbed her coat before us. In any case, there’s no sign of her now.
“So, Patrick, we’re on for Tuesday?” Len asks. I look at him like I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. Which I don’t. “The open mic?”
“Right. Yes. Absolutely.”
“’Night then,” he says, and scuffs off in the opposite direction I would guess to be the way out of here. Leaving just me and Ivan standing there.
“I know the way,” Ivan says.
“You’re familiar with this neighbourhood?”
“No,” he says, exhaling a long, yogic breath. “I can hear the trains.”
Ivan tilts his head back, eyes squeezed shut, as though savouring the melody of a violin concerto, when all there is to hear is the clacking of the subway train emerging out of the tunnel somewhere in the ravine below.
“Follow me,” Ivan says, and starts out toward the nearest doors to the underworld.
On our walk out of Rosedale’s labyrinth of oldmoney chateaux and new-money castles, enveloped in a cold-hardened March darkness, Ivan tells me he’s never hit a jumper. For a subway driver with his years of seniority, this is a rare claim. Not once has one of the bodies standing behind the yellow warning line on the platform made that incongruous leap forward. Yet every time his train bursts out of the tunnel and into the next station lit
bright as a surgery theatre, he wonders who it will be to break his good record.
“Every day I see someone who thinks about it,” Ivan says as we cross the bridge over the tracks. “The little moves they make. A half step closer to the edge, or putting their briefcase down at their side, or swinging their arms like they’re at the end of a diving board. Getting ready. Sometimes you can only read it in their faces. They look at the front of the train—at me behind the glass—and there’s this calm that comes over them. How
simple
it would be. But in the next second, they’re thinking, ‘Why
this
train? If there’s another just as good coming along, why not wait? Make sure everything’s right.’ I can hear them like they’re whispering in my ear.”
“And then they change their minds.”
“Sometimes,” Ivan says, spitting over the side of the bridge on to the rails below. “And sometimes the next train
is
the right train.”
We walk on toward Yonge Street where it breaks free of the downtown stretch of head shops and souvenir fly-by-nights, and heads endlessly north. Ivan talks without provocation, laying out his thoughts in organized capsules. Even when we come to stand outside the doors to the station he continues on, never looking at me directly, as though he has memorized this speech by heart and cannot allow himself to be distracted. It leaves me to study his head. Hatless and bald. A vulnerable cap of skin turned the blue-veined white of Roquefort.
And what does Ivan tell me? Things I would have already guessed, more or less. Son of Ukrainian immigrants. His father a steel cutter with a temper, his mother an under-the-table seamstress, mending the clothes of the neighbourhood labourers in their flat over what was then a butcher’s, now an organic tea shop on Roncesvalles. Never married. Lives alone in a basement apartment, where he writes in the off-hours. Meandering stories that follow the imagined lives of those he shuttles here and there under the city.
“This is the first time I’ve been with people in a long time,” he says. It takes a moment to realize he’s talking about the circle. About me.
“It’s hard to meet strangers in this town,” I say.
“It’s not that. It’s that I haven’t allowed myself to be around others.”
“Why not?”
“I was accused of something once,” he says. Looks at me straight. “Have you ever been accused of something?”