Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Touché.”

“It comes back to verification, doesn’t it,” I said.

“Your old nemesis.”

“So, in your way of thinking, if I rush up and throw myself onto the books and read the titles, and I discover they’re the same titles as the books stolen from the library, it would verify the actual existence of the books in the physical world. That’s A. B would be that therefore Elizabeth herself actually exists in the physical world.”

Dr. Nissensen said, “Perhaps we should switch chairs.”

“No. Then I’d have to think like you. I don’t want to think like you.”

“That’d be too much like talking to yourself, Sam. Why would you come in here every week and pay good money to talk with yourself?”

“At least your office, here, is a change of locale. From talking to myself in my cottage.”

“When you go down to the beach at night to encounter Elizabeth, do you see it as breaking your solitude?”

“It’s kind of you to worry about my solitude. But it’s a melodramatic word.”

“Okay, then, your aloneness. Your aloneness compels you down to the beach. It’s a way of participating in the condition of things. The condition of things being that it is absolutely intolerable to be without Elizabeth.”

“It’s like you’re hearing for the first time what I’ve been saying for months and months.”

He wrote something in his notebook. “Did you ever think of inviting her back to the cottage?”

“Elizabeth?”

“Well, who are the women in your life? There’s Elizabeth. There’s Cynthia Slayton. There’s Lily Svetgartot. Now perhaps we could add the librarian.”

“In my life?”

“My point is, given your devotion, the fidelity to your marriage. You said yourself it gets cold on the beach at night. I simply can’t believe your lack of basic etiquette, Sam. It seems so obvious a thing to do. To invite your wife back to the cottage. If you don’t consider her a ghost, then there’d be no worry about importing a haunting presence into the cottage, right? Of course, it would take you away from the physical surroundings of the beach, to which you have become… habituated.”

Silence.

“When you were first courting, did you invite her back to your rooms?” Dr. Nissensen asked.

“My room. My one-room apartment. No, I didn’t. And she didn’t invite me back to her apartment. What happened was, she asked me to invite her back to my room.”

“Maybe it’s your turn, in this new phase of your marriage, for you to do the inviting.”

“Know what? Fuck you. You’re suddenly giving credence to—”

“Your worst nightmare, huh? That we might agree on something. Look, everything happens in a context, Sam. If the context is that the wretchedness of being alone is counterbalanced by accommodating an apparition, I eventually have to give that condition more leeway. At least in conversation.”

“You seem exhausted,” I said. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m exhausted.”

“Perhaps we have, together, exhausted a certain way of speaking with each other. The thought has occurred to me — it’s a concern — that I’m failing you, in an exhaustive way.”

“Good Lord, bring on the violins. The thing is, lately — last few sessions? — I don’t even have the stamina to drive back to my cottage. I stay at the Haliburton.”

There was a long silence. Looking around, I saw a copy of The Summer Before Dark, by Doris Lessing, on his desk. By the placement of the leather bookmark, it appeared that Dr. Nissensen had read it about halfway through.

“I have something for you, Sam,” he finally said. He leaned forward and handed me a small leather notebook.

I took it and examined it. “I doubt you’d allow yourself to give me a gift if it didn’t have a useful purpose for our work together. That’d be inappropriate, right? Professionally speaking.”

“It’s a notebook specifically — just a suggestion — so that when you come to Halifax, you can jot down where you’ve parked your pickup truck. Write down which street, perhaps a house or building number, too.”

At the Haliburton House Inn that evening, I sat in the small library off the lobby, reading the newspaper and having a hot cocoa. I took out the notebook from my back pocket. It was an elegant notebook, fairly expensive, I thought. On the inside front cover I wrote the date and signed my name, to verify.

What got to me at that moment was that I kept picturing Elizabeth at age nine (a physical image I had from her childhood photographs). There she was, filching a library book, running home, giddy and ashamed and all sorts of other things. Running like she was flying. I thought, Now Elizabeth’s life even before she met me is coming back.

“MR. ISTVAKSON ASKED me to deliver this gift,” Lily Svetgartot said. She held up a book. I looked at the title: The Art of War by Sun-tzu. “All movie directors and executives love this book. It’s their bible. Mr. Istvakson foists it on everybody. Proselytizes like he’s on the Crusades, not like he’s just directing a fucking movie. He gave me a copy for my birthday last week, for God’s sake! I threw it into the harbor. It’s so stupid, this book. I mean, for his personal little opera he’s got going in his head every minute. It’s so typical — about men and competition and combat. He thinks he’s fighting some heroic battle. He thinks he’s fighting Chinese armies two thousand years ago. Brrrr. ” She shivered with disgust.

I gestured for her to come into the cottage. “I’ve never heard of this book,” I said.

She seemed quite agitated. She went right into my kitchen and put the book on the table. She opened the refrigerator, took out a package of coffee beans, shut the refrigerator door, ground the coffee in the grinder, emptied the coffee into the screen funnel of the coffeepot, poured three full glasses of water into the pot, then pressed the on button.

“Make yourself right at home,” I said.

Suddenly she took up the book, opened to a page seemingly at random, and said, “Listen to this: ‘The way of war is the way of deception. When able, feign inability. When deploying troops, appear not to be. When near, appear far. When far, appear near. Strike with chaos.’ Page after page of this stupid bullshit. Let’s face it, Peter Istvakson never appears far. He is always too near. I’m having a cup of coffee. Can I pour you one?”

“No thanks.”

She poured herself a cup, no milk, two teaspoons of sugar, and sat at the kitchen table. I stood in the kitchen doorway.

“Why I really came to visit this evening,” she said, “is because Emily Kalman wants to meet you and talk with you.”

“If you say ‘for the sake of authenticity’ again, I can’t promise I’ll be civil.”

She stood, took off her coat, and set it over the back of the chair. She sat back down. “No, let me say what I have to say. At the shoot, you haven’t watched a scene with Emily Kalman in it yet, am I right?”

“I haven’t, no.”

“I suggest you don’t. Because the way she looks, Mr. Lattimore, the way she looks might make you—”

“You drove all the way here to try and protect me from an actress?”

“Who now looks so much like your wife that you won’t believe it.”

“No one can look like Elizabeth. There may be superficial resemblances.”

“You don’t understand. She’s become — how do you say it? — a spitting image.”

“Did you bring any photographs of Miss Kalman in her role?”

“She herself is sitting in my car.”

I went out the door and walked to the end of the gravel drive where Lily Svetgartot’s car was parked. I heard the car radio and then heard it go silent. I walked up to the driver’s side and looked in through the window. Emily Kalman (I’d seen her in only one film; she was pretty good in it, but the film itself was useless), who sat in front on the passenger side, looked at me. I studied her face a moment, then returned to the cottage. In the kitchen, I said, “Are you both staying at Philip and Cynthia’s tonight?”