Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

“Miss Svetgartot — Lily. Please, just tell me what ending she’s going to use.”

“What happens is, a psychiatrist that you — that is, your character — has been talking to. This is in the script, after the wife Elizabeth is murdered. Your psychiatrist reveals confidential information. About your seeing Elizabeth on the beach at night.”

“A psychiatrist does this? Unlikely. Whom does he give this information to?”

Lily took a deep breath and said, “Well, we don’t actually see who. We just see the psychiatrist in a pub, and he’s talking to someone. We don’t see who he’s talking to. The psychiatrist is all nervous and fidgety. He looks like he knows he shouldn’t be talking about any of this, but he’s doing it anyway.”

“Right now! I’ll drive to Halifax and have a little chat with Miss Zento.”

Lily wrapped her arms around me, pressing her face close to mine. Then I felt her tighten her embrace as she said, “I’m afraid it’s too late. They have already shot the ending. And Miss Zento and Mr. Akutagawa have left for Japan. Separate flights.”

“Lily,” I said, “please sit down.”

She let go of me and sat at the kitchen table. Her face was flushed and she began to comb her hair rapidly with her fingers. “Lily, five deep breaths,” she said, then loudly inhaled and exhaled five times. “The final ending won’t please you in the least, either, Sam. It can’t. See, what happens is, we are now on the beach behind Philip and Cynthia’s house. There’s all sorts of people there. We haven’t seen any of them before. Except for Elizabeth — Emily Kalman, I mean. And the actor playing the dance instructor Arnie Moran. There’s a bandstand. On the beach. There’s a big wooden console radio. This radio is playing loud dance music from the 1930s. And the characters of Arnie Moran and Elizabeth are dancing to jitterbug music. It’s supposed to be taking place in the 1930s, you see. A sudden time travel, and it’s a kind of dance hall. And then along comes the Sam Lattimore character. He is all nicely dressed. He walks right up and cuts in on Arnie Moran. He takes his wife in his arms. The camera holds on her face a long time. She’s staring right into the camera. The music gets louder. Then the screen goes dark.”

I sat down at the table. “But if Istvakson already had this in a notebook—”

“Yes, exactly,” Lily said. “Then why would he need to go down to the beach?”

I asked Lily Svetgartot to leave.

“Sam, I’d like to give you my address in Norway. The city of Bergen. I leave tomorrow for there.”

“You’re a good person, Miss Svetgartot,” I said, purposely sounding as formal as humanly possible. By her expression, I could see the formality had struck a chord. “But no thank you.”

“Having my address on a piece of paper can’t hurt,” she said. “That’s a phrase I learned, ‘It can’t hurt.’ But then again, I suppose you’ll always associate me with this movie you’re going to hate. Associate me with everything else that’s happened. How can you not?”

I walked her outside and stood on my porch and watched as she made her way over to Cynthia and Philip’s door. More goodbyes. A short time later, I heard her car start up, and from my bedroom window I saw her taillights fade and finally disappear down the road.

THE TITLES OF the books missing from the Port Medway Library: A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Black Swan in Swansea, Lyddie by the Sea in Wales, The Silly Caterpillar in Caerphilly, A Treasury of Welsh Tales, The Girl Who Walked Across Wales, The Morning I Saw Mary Jones at the Market at Blaenau Ffestiniog, Cobbler Harry of Haverfordwest, The Big Storm in Tonyrefail, The Dream of Macsen Wledig, and Preiddeu Annwfn: A Story about a Magic Cauldron.

I spent a good two hours with the staff at John W. Doull Booksellers in Halifax, and through their kind patience ordered the missing titles. They said it might take months to obtain all eleven. As it happened, in nine weeks Doull’s sent me a postcard saying that the books had arrived. The next day I drove to the bookshop, where I found a neatly packed box waiting for me. I settled my bill and then drove to the Port Medway Library and delivered the books to Bethany Dawson.

“Do you want your name mentioned in the church bulletin,” she asked, “in this regard?”

“Not necessary. But you might help me with something.”

“If I can, I will.”

“Whom do I talk to about obtaining a grave site in Port Medway?”

“Feeling right at home, are we, Mr. Lattimore?”

CYNTHIA TELEPHONED TO ask if I’d like to drive out to Vogler’s Cove. Sitting in the café there, she told me that before I’d moved into the cottage, she and Philip had invested money in the movie. “It was fairly simple,” she said. “There had been a public call for investors, and we signed right up. We were told that roughly ten percent of the budget had to come from private sources. Just so you know, that’s why we got to meet the cast and crew. The whole movie thing, it spiced up our life a little, I’ll admit. But as we got to know and love you, it’s become awkward, obviously. On the one hand, we had the famous actress Emily Kalman to the house for dinner. On the other hand, the movie became the bane of your existence. Which was hard for Philip and me to see happening, Sam. Really it was.”

“You’ve seen things, that’s for sure. And you’ve been dear friends. That’s all that matters.”

“I have to say this, too. Philip and I have seen you on the beach I can’t count how often. And we have never seen Elizabeth.”

“Yet I’ve never once felt that you were just—”

“Hospitable to your delusions?”

“Oh, right. I told you that’s what Dr. Nissensen said you were being.”

“But that’s definitely not what we’re doing. Want to know something? What you’ve been experiencing in your life—” Tears came to her eyes and she looked away.

“Cynthia, what? It’s okay. It’s okay. Just say it.”

“Whatever it is you are experiencing here,” she said, our eyes meeting again, “it’s… enviable in a very profound and human way to us. To love someone so much that you’ll do everything in your power to keep her near, no matter what.”

“Elizabeth keeps herself near.”

“Okay, so it’s reciprocal as you experience it. Look, Sam, I’m not your shrink. Philip’s not your shrink. So however it works, we don’t care. I’m trying to say that going through this with you, I’ve realized that sometimes a person gets it right the first time. Philip and I the second time, having each been married once before, I mean. Sometimes with another person you get it right the first time. It then defines who you are, what you’re experiencing, and you never hid it from us. It’s allowed Philip and me to ask some very basic — basic to us, at least — questions about our own marriage. That must sound like some sort of marriage counselor bullshit. But I don’t mean it to. Philip is the love of my life; I’m the love of his life. But we both know, if you are with someone who is not the love of your life, you are always aware of it. Every day, that knowledge is with you. And deep down in your heart you know you’ve settled in some way. Which is just human, to settle. In a marriage, things can just go along, you may even be fucking your brains out all the time, or have ten children together, or have been to hell and back together, and even if it’s been wonderful traveling through time together, side by side, you know. Still, there’d be the secret knowledge that you aren’t with the love of your life. Maybe that’d be like being a secret sharer with yourself. I don’t know. What you’re experiencing, Sam, what you find so necessary to experience — no matter what else, in Elizabeth you found the love of your life. And please, for God’s sake, my little confession in this café here doesn’t warrant another moment’s thought. And don’t think that I’ve said all this to try and offset my guilt about investing in the movie — it’s just money — because you’d be wrong. Okay, sure, having a famous film actress to dinner. Who would have ever thunk all of this, huh? How things turned out. How things turn out. It’s beyond Philip and me. It’s really beyond us.”