The Letter Opener (25 page)

We had left the restaurant, and as we were walking through the park near my apartment, I was talking about my day. “There were two cremation urns this morning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, and all of a sudden there are two in one day. Do you think that’s a bad omen?…Paolo?” I tapped him on the shoulder and stopped walking. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

He stopped, rubbed his palm over his neck, looked momentarily confused. “Sorry? What did you say?”

“Hey. Look at me, okay?” I grabbed his hand, clutching it.

He nodded but tried to extricate his hand.

“No. Keep holding,” I said, and squeezed harder. His mouth opened from the pressure.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Are you satisfied?” I was remembering the question Andrei had asked us on his first day at work. Paolo arched an eyebrow. “Am I satisfied?”

“I’m asking if you’re happy.” I looked at his face, which showed he was now thinking, contemplating. “I want to know, are you fairly, spectacularly or not at all content?” I flapped his hand impatiently. “Well? Are you?”

As he considered the options, a wind lifted the snow off the ground and the air filled with blowing particles. I shivered. I don’t know how long we stood there, but at some point I let go of his hand.

I felt heartbreak at Paolo’s obvious uncertainty. For a moment, he looked like he wanted to walk on, but finally he turned to me, ready to speak.

“I could be,” he said.

“Okay then,” I said quickly. “Okay,” I repeated with resolve, and clasped my hands in front of me like a jolly friar. I felt a grin spreading across my face.

When we hugged, it felt different. It felt as though I came into my body, came into the present. I am really here, I thought, nuzzling my face into the side of his neck. It was such a sense of discovery. I started giggling.

Paolo stepped back, put his index finger to his temple and made a circular motion. He whistled like a cuckoo but I didn’t care if he thought I was off my rocker.

My body felt alive with heat and cold. I wrapped my arms around myself and jumped up and down, bleating, “Brrr. Brrr. Brrr.”

It would have been so easy for one or both of us to have given up.

I took hold of his fingers and we walked and then ran toward home.

I
t is my job to distinguish between objects, to arrange things into clean boxes, sorting the similar from the dissimilar. It is the modus operandi of my working existence. It’s what I do best. Every morning when Marvin arrives I must begin again.

In the anarchic bins he delivers I see the whole world, the chaos and the change. Someone in the pile may give birth tomorrow. Or die. Someone will fall in love. Or get divorced. Someone else will retire. Or move into a nursing home. Someone will leave for Mozambique. Or Florida. Eternity stretches here, in this pile of photos, keepsakes, books. What brings me to isolate this rather than that particular thing, story, person? (Why him, why you, why then, why now?)

I am not a collector or a saver by nature. But several months ago I set my own box aside. I have been chucking unclaimed pieces of silverware into it. I can see a bohemian picnic aesthetic emerging. There
are forks with bent tines and butter knives with chipped bone handles. And there are spoons. Lots of spoons. Dainty ones with little engraved flowers. Tiny ones with airline logos. Tablespoons with metal bark handles. Thick weighty soup spoons with an agreeable dip. Spoons, knives, forks, never meant to be brought together, some from the dingiest of cafeterias, others from elite dining rooms—the cutlery of class. I polish each piece until it gleams in the light. I am hoping to compose a complete set in time for Christmas. It will be my present to Paolo. When I am finished, I may paint a blue band around their handles, or have them engraved with a
P
—something to stamp them as a family. Or maybe I will just leave them as they are, odd and mismatched.

I am learning more about what true and unconditional love really is.

Today something unusual happened at work, something that has happened only twice before during my nine years in mail recovery. Halfway through the morning I realized that my hamper was empty.

I might have celebrated the accomplishment, but I felt strangely lost. Had I botched things, taken too many shortcuts? I have learned I am error-prone when not fully focused. I had to work to a plan, sorting and storing, or things were as good as lost.

Before I could think any further on the matter, the clatter of Marvin arriving interrupted my thoughts. He was pushing a bucket toward me. It was full. He had several vintage concert buttons and a smiley face pinned to his open jacket, his own private message board. His T-shirt said:
This is it
, referring, I suppose, to life. A small cellophane bag of chocolate dangled from between his teeth. Christmas is coming.

And so it begins again.

Andrei once said that there are things best kept to oneself, that to share is not necessarily to give; thoughts and objects can become a burden to others or become lost in forgotten drawers. But, I say, not all things, and not for all time.

I still dream about him. I wake up feeling soft and bleary, not immediately remembering what I’ve dreamt, but then I know. It’s the birds that tip me off. I hear the
whoosh
of their wings in my head and I know he’s still with me.

For all its dangers, I still put faith in constancy; such is the core of human nature, I think. Every day when I open the door to my apartment (yes, my apartment, I still live alone) and venture into the world, there are habits of seeking, reaching, testing, retracting that endure. As a geographer’s daughter, I am aware that the ground on which I stand will shift but I trust that it will endure, and that on it things will grow and walk and stomp and live. I know that there will be days when nothing lines up and other days filled with amazing moments of consonance. I suppose that this makes me an optimist. I did not inherit my father’s pessimism after all.

This morning as I rode the bus to work I thought of Kana. One day she may come home. One day she may even say, “I kind of left you holding the bag.”

I watched the early December snow drift past the windows.

Somewhere in the world there is my father. Somewhere in the world there is Andrei. I think of us—them, myself—moving around the planet, each one scuffed and creased, each one overlaid with labels, scrawled with histories. I imagine that the future is where we send ourselves, not knowing when or how we’ll arrive. “Look,” says a voice behind me. Then a creaking sound.

When I turn around, Warren is leaning back in his chair, a letter in his outstretched hand.

“Look at this,” he says.

K
YO
M
ACLEAR
was born in London, England, in 1970. At age three, she enjoyed a brief theatrical career in
The King and I
at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand. “I had the loudest voice at the audition,” she says. “My only line was ‘I believe in snow.’ It was a visionary sentiment.” A year later, in the midst of “a very snowy winter,” she and her parents moved to Toronto, Canada.

Maclear graduated from the University of Toronto with an undergraduate degree in fine art and art history, and a graduate degree in cultural studies. She spent many years writing creative non-fiction, short prose and poetry before taking the plunge into novel writing with
The Letter Opener
(2007). She has compared the process of crafting a novel to “a high-wire act,” adding that “sometimes it’s best to keep going and not look down.”

Her earliest writing began with her active involvement in the anti-apartheid movement. “I used to write and illustrate our group’s literature. It was very declarative, zealous writing. The challenge was to use language to
literally
move people.” She says that her subsequent magazine writing took place in fits and starts between university sessions and job contracts. She was on an academic path through her mid-twenties (much to the chagrin of her parents—who formed a “less school is the best school” lobby once they discovered she was not on her way to becoming a lawyer or an orthodontist). In fact, she was all set to start a PhD when she decided she needed to leave the academic world because she cared about writing and language too much. “I wanted to explore literary subjects
and knew I couldn’t do that and remain under the blanket of academia…At some point, I heard a writer give a talk in which he advised writers to forgo narrative shortcuts and enjoy ‘the scenic route,’ and that’s what I’ve tried to do ever since—be less rushed, be more perceptually and emotionally open.”

In 1997, she received a Banff Arts Journalism Fellowship under chair Michael Ignatieff, and in 2003, she took part in the Humber School for Writers’ creative writing correspondence program, under mentor Elisabeth Harvor.

One of Maclear’s great pleasures over the years has been writing about the visual arts for such publications as
Canadian Art
,
Saturday Night
and
Toronto Life.
“Writing about art, like writing about music or food, is an exercise in perseverance and humility. One can circle the subject forever and still never capture its essence. What often matters most in art are the aspects that cannot be explained. I have found perseverance and humility to be equally important traits in the development of fiction. When I write, I sometimes feel like a Victorian collector chasing my own version of a butterfly, trying to net the inexpressible.”

Maclear garnered a nomination for a National Magazine Award in 2001 for her essay “Pictures at an Execution,” which appeared in
Saturday Night.
Three years later, she was shortlisted for
This Magazine
’s Great Literary Hunt. Her graduate thesis,
Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima–Nagasaki and the Art of Witness
, was subsequently published by State University of New York Press (1999). Maclear is also the co-author of
Private Investigators: Undercover in Public Space
(Banff Centre Press, 1999), co-editor of
Life Style,
by Bruce Mau (Phaidon, 2000), and former editor of
Mix
magazine.

In addition to writing, Maclear works as an editor and has illustrated one children’s book, and numerous book and CD covers. She lives in Toronto with singer and composer David Wall and their two children. Maclear is currently writing her second novel, for which the Ontario Arts Council awarded her a Chalmers Arts Fellowship.

Much of
The Letter Opener
takes place in the Undeliverable Mail Office, a warehouse that resembles a giant pawnshop. What research did you undertake to render the details and feel of this unusual place?

I have never worked in a post office, though I sometimes think that being a letter carrier would suit my temperament—I like walking; I like solitude. I was originally drawn to the symbolism of the setting, the psychological and historical richness of an Undeliverable Mail Office.

Once I determined that the story would be set there, I made arrangements to visit an actual mail recovery centre in Mississauga and spent an afternoon observing the detectivemanner of the employees, the serried rows of objects, the buckets of errant mail. Something about the place spoke to me on a gut level. Its attempt at order. Its massiveness. Yet also its humanness.

Beyond conducting that research visit, I also read what I could find on dead-letter offices, which, surprisingly, wasn’t very much. I reread Herman Melville’s classic story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (the despondent Bartleby was said to have once been employed as a dead-letter office clerk). But mostly, I embellished by drawing on other mausoleum-like places I have known. Antique emporiums. Library archives. The Musée de Cluny in Paris. It’s a kind of obvious necrophilia, I suppose, but I do find something numinous in the experience of being among aged and ancient objects.

One is reminded when reading your novel that everyday objects and personal effects have significance as touchstones for memories, and even as talismans. What objects, lost or found, personal or public, hold meaning for you?

Strangely, I grew up in a family of few heirlooms. I think that part of this can be attributed to the fact that both of my parents came from families of modest means and grew up in the tumult of the Second World War. I also have a theory that when my parents decided to leave their cultures of origin, they made a resolution to travel lightly—hoping to experience the tabula rasa effect of resettlement.

Once they arrived in Canada, it was quite a different story. By the mid-1970s, my parents entered a period of rapid accumulation. My mother, who started an art gallery, collected Japanese prints, and later, antiques; and my father, who was travelling constantly as a journalist, collected, along with stories, handcrafted objects from around the world. The benefit of having grown up in such an eclectic home is that I was often surrounded by the most incredible and eccentric objects—yet, oddly, few of those items stand out in my memory today. I think what I carry from my childhood is the gestalt of a house crammed with beautiful things, which is probably why I’m drawn to flea markets and why I’ll never be a minimalist. My idea of heaven is a souk on a warm afternoon.

My children both have “loveys”—or what psychologists sometimes refer to as “security”
or “transitional” objects. My transitional objects are books. I’m a sucker for beautiful monographs and chapbooks with interesting images and typography. But I have to say that the books that mean the most to me are the ones that were given to me by close friends and family. They don’t substitute for the people I love, but they have, on occasion, kept me company and given me tangible comfort.

Your novel features Andrei, a Romanian refugee. What moved you to write about the immigrant experience?

I grew up in Toronto, but I was born in England to a British father and a Japanese mother. When we came to Canada, we were all new immigrants with no real ties to our new home. Fortunately, my father had a job placement with the CBC, which provided a comfortable cushion for our landing. In that sense, we did not have the typical immigrant experience. We did not face many of the uncertainties and hardscrabble realities of life in a foreign land.

That said, the thing about being of mixed-race ancestry, I’ve realized, is that one never fully “arrives” or becomes “settled” in the traditional sense. A hybrid house is a compression of influence, a constant negotiation of language and custom. When you’re a person of mixed descent, words such as
roots
and
homeland
are immediately denaturalized.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in Canada, and spending summers in Japan, I often felt as though I was on the outside looking in. Depending on the context, that feeling can be fairly painful and isolating.

But, as it turns out, inhabiting a cultural boundary is actually good for writers. It means being constantly on your toes, in a state of perpetual observation. I think this vantage point has been formative in drawing me to the stories and experiences of people who feel they don’t quite belong or feel they belong in many places at once—those who stand outside national narratives by virtue of who they are.

In
The Letter Opener
, I derived a certain pleasure from playing with racial expectations through the characters of Andrei and Naiko, in terms of who typically gets cast in the role of “the immigrant” and who tends to fit the profile of “the Canadian.” It was clear from the beginning that I wanted to avoid a simplifying saviour motif—the notion that an immigrant arrives to an open and rescuing embrace. My intention was to explore an empathetic relationship between the two characters, not a flawless one.

Your protagonist, Naiko, struggles to deal with her mother’s declining cognitive abilities as a result of Alzheimer’s. What are your thoughts on memory and how it defines us?

Let me say here that I have no direct experience with Alzheimer’s in my family, but having watched families undergo the ordeal, I feel I have gained a few limited insights.

I don’t think it is overstating matters to say that memory is what gives us our identity. We rely on memories for a sense of continuity. When a memory is revised or missing, our
self-perception can be affected in ways that may leave us feeling lost, upset or angry. Think about how unhinging it is to forget the name of a person in your personal photo album or school yearbook, especially someone with whom you were once on intimate terms. Then imagine that you are the one being forgotten, that your mother is quizzing you, asking, “How are we related again?” What happens when a relationship is irretrievably altered by memory loss—say, through dementia or emotional amnesia?

There is a kind of doubling that occurs in the novel between Naiko’s mother and Andrei; both feel they are losing a foothold in worlds they once knew deeply. The way Naiko’s mother reacts to this sense of flux and uncertainty is to grab hold of the material world. She becomes a hoarder. Rather than see her response through the medical lens of “obsession,” I try to humanize it by setting her behaviour in a wider context and by showing that there can be moments of grace, humour and intense connection even in the midst of a devastating memory illness. I also wanted to explore this idea of “letting go” and whether there are times when forgetting is a necessary and even a healthy condition of life.

What place, if any, does the old-fashioned letter have in this electronic age?

I grew up writing letters because it was expected of me. All of our relatives were in other countries, and it fell upon me to keep in touch. I have since learned that many immigrant families delegate this job of keeping in touch to the children of the house.
Now that many of my relatives have e-mail accounts, my list of traditional pen pals has dwindled to two—a step-grandmother living in Brighton, England, and a friend in Toronto with whom I continue an erratic but satisfying correspondence.

My six-year-old son recently cottoned on to the whole letter-writing idea. To him, dropping an envelope in a red-and-blue box and having it appear two days later in your home mailbox is a kind of magic—on par with pulling rabbits from hats. When I see his excitement, a part of me thinks,
How quaint.
You see, my son still doesn’t know that letters are “old-fashioned.” He has no idea that letters have become the ascot or bowler hat of communication media, that to partake of a dying trend is to be ascribed with an aura of outmodedness and—worse!—affectation. Because I have a sentimental streak, I sometimes wonder if either of my children will ever have the opportunity to send a handwritten love letter without feeling pompous or ironic. I feel fortunate that I was born early enough to have had the experience of conducting deep friendships and romances by surface mail. I’ll never forget the experience of receiving a letter from my husband-to-be when I was staying for a time with an uncle in Mallorca. Nothing can replace the tactile significance of holding and reading a letter sent by someone you desire.

Having said all this, letter writing is still the primary means of written communication for many of the world’s people. Such is the unevenness of technological “progress” that
a BlackBerry still holds the connotation of exotic fruit in most global communities. Even at my son’s downtown Toronto school, at least a third of the families are without e-mail access.

In my novel, I wanted to give form to the idea that people live in different “nows.” By dint of geography, history, trauma or good fortune, they may be worlds and decades removed from one another. A teenager in Fallujah and a teenager in Tulsa may wear identical Nike t-shirts but in every other respect be completely out of sync.

So for me, the questions become: What stories are being left behind or are not finding a listener simply because they don’t fit a familiar form or idiom? What qualities of social interaction are lost when a medium—such as letter writing—fades in significance? If Canada is a kind of meta-version of the Undeliverable Mail Office, what letters and people aren’t finding a proper home?

In some respects,
The Letter Opener
is an allegory of disconnection and connection: it is about friends who never write back and strangers who choose to listen.

—
To listen to a HarperCollins Canada Prosecast interview with the author and hear her read from
The Letter Opener
, visit
www.foursevens.com/prosecast
and scroll down to “Kyo Maclear.”