Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Let me guess. Mr. Keen.”

“I typed up and sent your résumé last week. Including a copy of your first novel.”

“You already went and did that?”

“Yes I did.”

“And did I get a response yet?”

“In fact, they called this morning when you were out. You have an interview. Darling, my fellowship money is dwindling fast. I can waitress — I don’t mind. I’d apply for the radio work myself, but my brain doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t make up dialogue and all that. Besides, Marghanita Laski would be too jealous a mistress. I have to stick with her.”

“The interview—”

“Four P.M. tomorrow, the CBC office on Cogswell Street.”

The interview went well, and the CBC gave me four cassettes of episodes of Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, parts 1 through 4 of “The Case of the Author Who Lost His Soul,” which originally ran on the NBC Blue network. For my audition, I was asked to write a fifth episode, “to extend the story line,” even though in the original broadcasts the story had been fully concluded. I went right back to the hotel and listened to the cassettes. Part 1 (December 27, 1938, 7:15–7:30 P.M.) synopsis: “Jane Merrill asks Keen to locate her ex, Stephen Giddings, a struggling author. An unpublished novel he wrote years ago is now in demand. Giddings left Jane to wed affluent Rita Sandford.” Part 2 (December 28, 1938, 7:15–7:30 P.M.) synopsis: “Rita could support Giddings’s writing lifestyle. Jane still loves him and wants to see the book succeed. Keen finds the Giddingses living in Bermuda, and flies down to urge Stephen to return to writing.” Part 3 (December 29, 1938, 7:15–7:30 P.M.) synopsis: “Giddings has changed. He and Rita live wasted, lazy existences. He hasn’t written in years. Disillusioned, he’s fed up with his marriage. Keen reports this to Jane.” Part 4 (January 3, 1939, 7:15–7:30 P.M.) synopsis: “Mr. Keen takes Giddings, a beaten failure, back to his first wife, Jane. Giddings realizes that all his achievements sprang from the devotion and encouragement of this woman.”

I played the episodes for Elizabeth that night. “Oh, this’ll be a piece of cake for you,” she said.

“I’m not sure I like that response, seeing that the title is ‘The Author Who Lost His Soul.’”

“It’s fiction. Just pretend to be someone else.”

I wrote the episode and got the job. To celebrate my becoming employed, Elizabeth made salade Niçoise, with crème brûlée for dessert. At the kitchen table I was typing away at my first paid assignment, to extend the episodes of “The Case of Lucy Daire’s Real Family,” originally broadcast in 1939. Elizabeth was wearing only a denim work shirt, a few sizes too big for her, held together by a single button at the navel. “Making your favorite aphrodisiac salad for you, Sam. I bought an expensive bottle of Chablis, too. Way too expensive. I couldn’t be happier.”

She took a small fillet of tuna from the refrigerator and seared it for a few minutes in a pan slicked with olive oil. She put two eggs on to boil. She took out a head of lettuce and washed it leaf by leaf under the spigot, pressing each on a paper towel to soak up the moisture before setting it in a big wooden bowl. She put two large red potatoes, cut in quarters, in a pot of water and lit a flame under it. She put a handful of green beans on to boil. She took out a bread board and cut three scallions into quarter-inch pieces and pushed them with the knife into a saucepan, where she sautéed them for a minute or two in olive oil. On a separate board she cut the tuna into quarter-inch pieces. She took out the potatoes, peeled the skins, and cut the pieces into neat rectangles. She took up the eggs with a spoon and ran each under cold water. Then she cracked and peeled their shells and sliced the eggs into the salad. She put in the potatoes and fish and scallions. She sprinkled in peppercorns, laid the green beans on top, and dropped in half a dozen or so sweet grape tomatoes. She emptied a can of white kidney beans in the bowl. She added an oil-and-vinegar dressing, tossed it all lightly — just twice — with long wooden spoons, and set the bowl on the table. She brought out two plates and forks and cloth napkins. She took a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator and poured us each a glass. I was famished and the salad looked so good. “Thank you for all this,” I said, and reached for the bowl and wooden spoons that lay crosswise on top.

But before she sat down, Elizabeth put an album by Marianne Macdonough, Winter Trees, on the phonograph and set the needle on the song called “Upward.” Fiddle, guitar, and flute accompaniment, with a voice straight from the Cape Breton highlands. The first stanza was:

It only takes one glass of wine

To do as I please.

The breeze gently unbuttons my blouse,

I comb your hair with my fingers,

You kiss me upward from my knees.

As the song continued, Elizabeth opened the button of her denim shirt.

Last night I was reading an Acadian romance,

All pounding hearts and rain,

And owls at prayer in the trees,

When, my sweet love, you set my book

Beside the pillow

And kissed me upward from my knees.

“Get the hint?” she said. She lay down on the Victorian chaise longue.

Elizabeth used to say, “I have certain defining impulses.”

ALFONSE PADGETT WAS a psychopathic thug in a bellman’s uniform, but I could not see this at first. I saw only the bellman’s etiquette, the practiced sense of deference. Like any bellman in any hotel lobby, he was part of a hierarchy: hotel manager, concierge, bellman. I did notice that he often acted put out, to the point of dramatically sighing in exasperation at normal requests. And I witnessed one incident that far exceeded feigned insult or petulance, when the hotel manager, Mr. Isherwood, asked him to unload six large suitcases from a limousine — a rare sight in Halifax, especially at the Essex Hotel, because wealthy people usually stayed at the Lord Nelson — and to “fetch them up to the Provincial Suite,” on the top floor, “as quickly as possible.” I happened to be in the lobby to buy a newspaper when I overheard the exchange. Padgett more or less snapped at Mr. Isherwood, “I’m going to take my coffee break first.” “No, after, ” Mr. Isherwood said. “I don’t fetch luggage,” Padgett said. “I’m not a dog.” Then he walked out of the hotel and went next door to the Saint-Laurent Restaurant, which had a counter that all of the bellmen frequented. The chauffeur lined up the suitcases, and a trunk festooned with travel stickers, in the middle of the lobby, as if to reprimand the bellman for his negligence. Other guests had to walk around the luggage. I sat on a couch in order to see what might occur, I admit. It was a good twenty-five minutes before Padgett returned. Mr. Isherwood met him at the suitcases and said, “You are docked half a day’s pay.”

The morning of Elizabeth’s second lindy lesson, Padgett was on shift. Elizabeth had worked all morning at her desk, despite a headache. She had made a breakthrough in her understanding of The Victorian Chaise-Longue, the symbolic elements of a kind of time travel: the main character, Melanie, is tucked in by the nurse for restorative sleep, and when she wakes up, she finds herself imprisoned in the body of a woman in Victorian times. Elizabeth read me a couple of pages of her dissertation and then said, “I still don’t want you to read the thing until it’s done.”

“What you just read sounds good,” I said. “The thinking is solid, Lizzy. But do you want to take a break? I can massage your temples, work on that headache, or don’t you have it anymore?”