Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“In some strange way it might be helping me to concentrate, concentrate away from the headache, I mean. But can you go next door and get me two espressos?”

“Be right back.”

I took the electric lift. When it had descended to the lobby, the door opened and I slid the old-style metal grille sideways and there was Alfonse Padgett. He was holding a suitcase, but its owner was not in tow. First thing, Padgett glanced around the lobby as if to see whether he was under surveillance from Mr. Isherwood or anyone else. The coast was clear, so he blocked my path. He set down the suitcase, roughly grasped me around my waist and clutched my right hand in his left hand, then spun me around inside the lift and shouted, “Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!” When he had me pressed against the back of the lift, he kissed my forehead with a loud smack and said, “I can’t wait for tonight’s lesson, baby.” He stepped back. “I put the fix in with Arnie Moran,” he said. “Alfonse Padgett and Mrs. Lattimore are partnered up tonight. Oh, goody.” He turned around, picked up the suitcase, and decided to take the stairs.

ELIZABETH’S DESK WAS a Canadian school desk that she had purchased at Webster’s, a used-furniture warehouse at the foot of Agricola Street; we had borrowed the hotel’s flatbed truck to haul it to our apartment. To the left of her desk was a bookcase with two shelves containing scholarly monographs about Marghanita Laski, a few in French, which Elizabeth read fluently. On the wall to the left was a framed photograph of Lizzy and me standing in front of Cyrano’s Last Night on our wedding day. Marie Ligget had taken the picture with Elizabeth’s camera. On the wall directly in front of her desk was a framed author’s photograph from the back of one of Marghanita Laski’s books. In this black-and-white portrait she appears to be perhaps fifty. She is wearing a round pendant at the neck of a dark blouse and is looking straight at the camera — serious expression, kind eyes, sensual mouth, dark hair pulled back and combed close to her head, very precise about her person, composed. Anyway, when Elizabeth looked up from her work, there Marghanita Laski was. On the wall to the right of the desk was a third framed photograph, this one of her mother and father in front of their small house in Hay-on-Wye. On the day Elizabeth died, on the left-hand side of her desk was her well-thumbed copy of The Victorian Chaise-Longue, held open by a glass paperweight to pages 66–67. I have that very copy right here, with a paragraph on page 66 underlined, with an exclamation point in the left margin:

“O Father of mercies and God of all comfort,” prayed Mr. Endworthy, “our only help—” and Melanie closed her eyes and laid her hands together, fingers to fingers, devoting her whole being to submission and repentance, hearing not the Vicar’s words but the sound of his words, trying to drown utterly in submission to divine omnipotence, knowing the waiting and wondering, the waiting and wondering for it to happen, hearing Mr. Endworthy conclude, “—through the merits and meditation of Jesus Christ, thine only Son, our Lord and Saviour. Amen,” hearing him shuffle up from his knees, and knowing that to keep her eyes shut or to open them again was equally useless.

When Elizabeth died, she had left a piece of paper in the typewriter with only one phrase composed on it, “for a time quite possibly a mild opium smoker,” but I have no idea to whom that referred. Was it Marghanita Laski herself, one of her fictional characters, or someone in Laski’s circle of friends or acquaintances?

Some evening I’ll have to ask Elizabeth about “for a time quite possibly a mild opium smoker.”

With Dr. Nissensen, December 12, 1972:

Today’s session moved in fits and starts. Well into it, Dr. Nissensen said, “Sam, I’ve been reading — that is, I’ve returned to reading— A Grief Observed, written, as you well know, by C. S. Lewis.”

“I’m guessing that today there’s one passage in particular—”

Dr. Nissensen read: “‘All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still; after she is dead.’”

I asked him to read the passage again, which he did. “If I remember right,” I said, “Lewis goes on to compare his beloved — his dead wife — compares her to God. Well, he would, wouldn’t he, being so self-dramatizing and sanctimonious. But he goes on to say that loving his wife is like loving God, in the sense that you can’t see Him.”

“That’s a harsh judgment, Sam.”

“Too bad Lewis’s wife didn’t line books up on a beach at night; he would’ve written a different book. Elizabeth is not invisible to me. And I don’t need metaphor to try and elevate her to a deity. She is just Elizabeth. She made good soups and stews. She was writing a book. She used pencils.”

“The paragraph was meant to begin a conversation, not end one,” Nissensen said.

“You chose the wrong paragraph, then. I’ll grant C. S. Lewis one thing, however. Near the end of his book, he says, ‘The best is perhaps what we understand least.’”

“Do you find our trying to understand your seeing Elizabeth unproductive, then?”

“I’m strongly suggesting you stop using goddamn literature to try and find a way to talk about things. It’s failing us.”

He wrote something in his notebook.

“Last night I saw Elizabeth at about nine o’clock. It was freezing out. There was a nasty wind. She had a heavy sweater on. And a new thing happened. Well, new for me at least. I heard her reading a book. She was mouthing the words, mumbling them, more or less, and running her finger along the page in a way I never knew her to read. I couldn’t make out any words.”

“Had you been able to,” Nissensen said, “it might’ve led to your recognizing which book she was reading.”

“Later, I thought of that.”

“How much later?”

“Are you asking if I slept last night?”

“Did you sleep last night?”

“No.”

“I’m sure there’s not a typical night of insomnia, Sam, but would you mind describing last night?”

“How I kill time?”

“How you use the hours. Do you work, for instance? Do you listen to the radio?”

“Have you ever heard of The Sleepless Night of the Litigant ?”

“Interesting phrase, or title. But no, I haven’t.”

“The movie director—”

“Mr. Istvakson. The, if I remember correctly, ‘hideous Norwegian shit.’”

“Actually, I’d like to go to Norway. I’d like to see the fjords. Birds flying around the fjords. Anyway, he sent me a gift. It’s a print of an old Dutch engraving called The Sleepless Night of the Litigant. It shows a man tormented by spirits and demons. They won’t let him sleep. Istvakson, through his assistant—”

“Miss Svetgartot, I believe.”

“—through Miss Svetgartot, tried to convince me he couldn’t sleep because I was keeping some indispensable knowledge of Elizabeth’s and my life together from him. Which he claims he needs to make his movie. Anyway, I don’t know what lawsuit the insomniac in the Dutch engraving is a party to. He may be the litigant who is bringing the lawsuit or the one being litigated against. I don’t know which. All I know is he can’t sleep.”

“Demons won’t let him.”

“Right,” I said.