Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

According to the field guide, the sparrows I saw here could have been chipping sparrows, tree sparrows, clay-colored sparrows, field sparrows, vesper sparrows, lark sparrows, Savannah sparrows, Ipswich sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, sharp-tailed sparrows, seaside sparrows, fox sparrows, Lincoln’s sparrows, swamp sparrows, white-throated sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, or house sparrows.

HAD I TAKEN the first intermediate lindy lessons with Elizabeth, would things have turned out differently? How can I know?

We had been living in the Essex Hotel for about two months. We had something of a routine, with spontaneities, naturally, and variations. Elizabeth usually got up first, then she woke me. “Sleepyhead.” Coffee. We tried to be at our desks — in my case, the kitchen table — by nine o’clock. Depending on anything that might happen between newlyweds before nine o’clock. On Elizabeth’s desk, everything was in its place, her notebooks squared, her pencils lined up. Whereas my work table was a sight; within minutes it looked like the Rolling Stones had spent the night in the kitchen. I don’t know how this happened. Coffee cups, crusts of toast. I was a bit of a slob. “Coffee grounds on the floor, typewriter ribbon fingerprint smudges on the cupboard — who broke in?” Lizzy once said, in good humor tinged with annoyance. “Shall I draw you a map to the broom and dustpan?” On another occasion she said, “I’m not going to clean up after you. In particular, and I realize it’s a pet peeve, I will not wake up to a messy kitchen. It’s the one thing I ask. First thing, after coffee and the newspaper, I like to sit right down at my desk, and I’m constitutionally incapable of doing that if there are dishes in the sink.” From then on, I saw to that. I mean, we were just starting out. Still, I practically needed to search for my typewriter under the newspapers. It’s odd, because now I keep my cottage in such neat order.

First thing in the morning, before we started on our respective projects — Elizabeth on her dissertation, me on a deeply resistant novel (or was I resisting it? ) — I’d go down to the lobby and buy the Chronicle-Herald. I sometimes saw Alfonse Padgett, if he was on the six A.M. to two P.M. shift. Or, on occasion, I saw him when he worked the night shift and stayed on to talk to other bellmen or the concierge, August DeBelle. And when I returned to our apartment, Elizabeth would immediately start reading the paper, and read it straight through, every section, with great concentration. More than once I saw her set the newspaper on the chaise longue, go back to her desk, and say, “Okay, Marghanita, I hear you calling.” Summoned back to work. She broke a lot of pencil points pressing down so hard on the page. From the kitchen, I’d sometimes hear one snap.

One day around this time, Elizabeth found a flyer that had been slipped under our door. After studying it for a moment, she folded it into a paper plane and sailed it expertly toward me, where it landed on the kitchen table. I unfolded it, and it read: LEARN THE SMOOTH LINDY — INTERMEDIATE LESSONS. There was a pen-and-ink drawing of a dancing couple: the woman, wearing a short dress and twirling a pearl necklace, held her hands at either side of her face as if utterly astonished, her left foot kicking outward; the man, seen in profile, wore a tuxedo and had his arms demurely crossed, and held in his right hand a cigarette in a holder, more like he was engaged in conversation than dancing the lindy. From the cigarette rose a curl of smoke, as solid-looking as a watch spring.

“Old-fashioned dance lessons,” Elizabeth said from her desk in the bedroom. “Right here in our hotel. Sounds like fun. What do you think.”

“I have two left feet,” I said.

“Fuddy-duddy.”

“What, me?”

“Stick-in-the-mud.”

“Embarrassed on the dance floor is more like it.”

“Well, okay. Would you mind if I took the lessons?”

“Maybe later you could teach me. You know, in the privacy of our grand suite here.”

“I promise to charge only what my dance instructor charges,” Elizabeth said. “Not a penny more.”

“I didn’t know they had a ballroom in this hotel, did you?”

“Nope. When was the lindy popular, anyway?”

“It was a craze having something to do with ‘Lucky Lindy,’ I think. You know, Charles Lindbergh, the first to fly the Atlantic solo.”

“He did that in 1927, I’m pretty sure,” she said. “So the lindy would be, what? Late twenties, early thirties?”

“Makes sense,” I said. “We could look it up at the library.”

“Or just ask the instructor.”

“Good idea.”

“Let’s see.” I looked at the flyer. “The first intermediate lesson’s tomorrow night. Eight o’clock. Pretty late notice.”

“We don’t have other plans, do we?” she said. “Opera tickets in Paris?”

“Not for tomorrow night, no. We were going to maybe sit in Cyrano’s. There’s always opera playing there, right? It’s all cheap seats.”

“Okay, let’s go over to Cyrano’s after and I can tell you about the lesson. Later yet, we can begin our personal lessons. I’ll be an expert by then. But you’re sure you won’t try the intermediate smooth lindy?”

“I’ll stay here, Lizzy. It’s fine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll read. Or take a walk. Something. I’m sure you’ll have a great time.”

“I don’t have a skirt that’ll twirl as short as the one on that flyer. Should I buy a new one?”

“Lucky dance partner if you do.”

Looking back on this moment, I realize I should have gone to the intermediate lindy lesson. There is no closure to certain regrets.

Elizabeth ran a bath. That was a rare thing, it being the early afternoon. “Oh, good,” she called out. “You didn’t forget the lavender bath beads when you went shopping.”

VIVID MEMORY BEING the blessed counterpart to closure, here is another still life from the Essex Hotel.

On her desk, Elizabeth’s black Underwood manual typewriter. A few pages of hotel stationery, whose logo was a globe fitted on a wooden stand. Her favorite lace shawl on the bedpost. “No, not given to me by a handsome matador in Barcelona. I found it in a thrift shop on Water Street, right here in Halifax.” The radiator behind her desk, like an iron accordion painted white, flaking from its own heat in winter. A framed poster of La Bohème, from the Paris Opera Company, a performance in Edinburgh that Elizabeth attended with her parents when she was twelve. A scallop of peach-colored soap in a black glass soap dish — I never knew why she kept it on her desk, maybe for the fragrance. An antique silent butler, scuffed and marred, next to her desk; on it hung her two satchels full of research, a scarf (the heat sometimes just shut off; this was usually signaled by a series of dungeon clanks from the radiator), and her black-and-white polka-dot raincoat—“Come on, what if the bathtub directly above us overflows? I don’t want to have to leave my work just because it starts raining inside the apartment.” Her little joke. A small oil painting of a man and woman on a city street, the man’s lips pressed to the woman’s ear, their arms interlocked; the title, painted in small, ornate letters at the bottom left: Sweet Nothings. A photograph of Elizabeth at her high school graduation in Hay-on-Wye, standing with her mother and father and her aunt Olivia. An enormous Oxford English Dictionary. A teacup full of hard rubber erasers. Scotch-taped to the desk, a strip of four photographs of Elizabeth and me, taken in a photo booth in the mall at Historic Properties, on Halifax Harbor, five or six days after we first met. Our faces touching. We already look like we know our life together is for keeps. I read it that way. (This strip of photographs is the only thing on the wall of my bedroom in the Port Medway cottage.) Also on the desk, a big Russian blue cat named Maximus Minimum. (“The name of a gladiator who fights mice,” Dr. Nissensen said, attempting humor.) I have Maximus with me in my cottage now. He’s an indoor cat.