Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

LILY SVETGARTOT STOPPED by again without invitation. She was quite tall, perhaps five foot ten, and what might be called willowy. She was dressed in blue jeans, knee-high lace-up boots, and a thick sweater. She had short-cropped hair that at first seemed almost comically abrupt, especially in contrast to the dark blue waterfall of the sweater. She knocked at my door at nine A.M., which meant she had to have set out by car from Halifax by seven. When I opened the door, she said, “Lily Svetgartot, remember?” (Her Norwegian accent was pronounced; she enunciated her last name as if there was a d before the final t ). “Mr. Istvakson’s right-hand lady, remember? He sent me again, Mr. Lattimore, to invite you to have dinner with him. I’m the personal touch, no?”

I said, “That’s the last thing in the world I want.” She was still standing on the porch. “To have a meal with Peter Istvakson.”

“Do you have coffee?”

“All right, you want me to be polite. Come in. I have about five minutes for you.”

She stepped inside. “Is that five minutes after coffee is made, or five minutes altogether?”

“In fact,” I said, “I’m not going to make coffee. Let’s just sit at the kitchen table and you tell me why you’re here.”

“I understand. I understand your attitude. I really do.”

We sat at the table. “And what attitude is that?”

“I could really use a coffee.”

I reheated the coffee I’d made at five A.M. I used a frying pan on the stove, because a frying pan was closest at hand.

“Fried coffee, how lovely. This is a first-time experience for me,” she said.

“I’m not pleased you’re here, Miss Svetgartot. Really, I’d like you to have this cup of coffee and then leave.” I poured the heated coffee into a cup. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Just fried coffee. Black, please.”

I set the cup down in front of her. “You already know I don’t want anything to do with the movie.”

She took a few sips, grimacing, but then took another sip. “For weeks now, Mr. Istvakson — sometimes this happens two or three times a day — he hands me a question written out on a piece of paper.” She unbuttoned the bottom three buttons of her sweater, reached under her untucked blouse, took out a folder, set it on the table, then buttoned the sweater. “Take a quick look, please. Just so I can say you read it.”

“My guess is that these are questions about Elizabeth Church and me that Istvakson wants me to—”

“ Needs you to answer. Begs you to. Has come to rely on the answers, to—”

“To continue the progress of his soul?”

“All right, I agree, he can be pompous. I think that is the right English word, ‘pompousness.’ But Mr. Istvakson has a vision, of course.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“All right. Dead end for now. Dead end for now with you, Mr. Lattimore. You see me as a lackey. I’m sure you have a lot of work to do. But I look forward to seeing you this evening.”

“Oh, I doubt very much that will happen.”

“You are going to dinner at Philip and Cynthia’s, aren’t you? They said you were. I met them for the first time today. They were standing in front of their house and we talked awhile. I told them I worked for Mr. Istvakson. They were kind enough to invite me to dinner. People here in Port Medway are so welcoming. It reminds me of home.”

I went into my bedroom. Shutting the door loudly, I lay down on my bed. I heard Lily Svetgartot leave the cottage. Suddenly exhausted, I got under the blanket and slept for an hour. Of course, I’d been awake since three A.M.

When I woke up from my nap, I went in and began to read Istvakson’s questions, which Lily Svetgartot had left on the kitchen table: “1. According to someone who took the dance lessons with you and Elizabeth, your wife always wore…”

But I couldn’t read any more. I crumpled up the piece of paper, stuffed it into the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink, and ground it to nothing. Then I telephoned Philip and Cynthia and begged off dinner: “I’m in a good place with this new novel and can’t interrupt” (a lie), “and this so seldom happens” (the truth).

With Dr. Nissensen, December 5, 1972:

So far, I’ve discussed only one dream with Dr. Nissensen. “I had this dream,” I said, first thing, in today’s session, “and I remember it in such detail it’s like I’m still in it.”

Dr. Nissensen is sixty-one. I know this because I asked him his age. I also told him that I noticed, on the wall of his office, several photographs of himself, taken at least twenty years earlier, in which his thick, one might even say luxurious, hair was already completely white. “I got a virus at age thirty, and my hair turned white almost overnight,” he said. “Now that we’ve got my hair out of the way, how are things, Mr. Lattimore?”

Today he was dressed in dark green corduroy trousers, a gray tweed sports jacket, a pale yellow shirt, a black tie with a vertical lime-green stripe running top to bottom, black socks, and dark brown, comfortable-looking shoes. He was understated but subtly inventive in his choice of clothes. I admired this, maybe because I always felt disheveled, with limited taste and color sense in my own dress.

“Continue, please.”

“The guy who’s eventually directing the movie.”

“Mr. Istvakson.”

“Istvakson has this assistant named Lily Svetgartot.”

“This is in the dream?”

“That’s his assistant’s real name — she shows up in the dream.”

“I see.”

“Last week she — real life now — knocked on my door and left me questions that Istvakson wants me to answer. Questions about me and Elizabeth. I was rude, but possibly not rude enough. I didn’t completely deny access. Anyway, she left a page of questions. I mashed them up in the garbage disposal.”

“That’s certainly a response to Mr. Istvakson’s impudence. Carried out in the privacy of your home, but still a response.”

“Back to the dream. I’m in a diner at night, something like that famous Edward Hopper painting.”

“ Nighthawks. I know it.”

“Ten years ago, I’d look at that painting — this is an aside. I’d look at it and think, The world’s full of horrible loneliness. Now I look at it and feel envy toward that guy at the counter, the one sitting alone with his back to the viewer. You know, a little free time to just sit and have a coffee.”

“Was there a waitress? Who else was—”

“Istvakson is behind the counter. He’s folding and unfolding cloth napkins like a crazy person. He can’t get them right. Over and over. Folding. Unfolding. Lily Svetgartot is the waitress. I order a cup of coffee. Then the lights go out — not just go out, but blow out. The neon tubes shatter. It’s nearly totally dark in there now. There’s some light from the street. But I can still see the napkins, because they’re translucent. I see them being folded and unfolded. Suddenly the assistant Lily Svetgartot pulls out a pistol and puts the barrel to the side of my head. ‘Did you answer the questions?’ Istvakson says. I try to stay cool, calm, and collected and just sip the coffee, but then I say, ‘No, I didn’t. I crammed them into the garbage disposal.’ Then Lily Svetgartot shoots me in the head.”

“Just like you asked me to do, remember? In a previous session you said that if you ever said you’d found closure with Elizabeth, I was to shoot you in the head.”

He wrote something down.

“Those napkins suggest Istvakson’s obsessive need to control — he’s a film director, after all,” Nissensen said. “In your dream, when the lights blow apart, he’s lost his temper. Normally as a director he’d control the lighting. He keeps folding and folding because he can’t get it right without your answers. He can’t square things. Or get the right angle. These are just initial responses. Let me give it more thought. It’s a powerful dream, Sam. It must have been disturbing. Here, the assistant shoots you. But if you are dead, Istvakson cannot obtain the answers he so desperately needs. Your actual knowledge is what he needs. Your knowledge of Elizabeth. Your knowledge of your life with her. Nonetheless, the assistant shoots you.”