During the intermission Jimroy remained in his seat and studied, from the corner of his eye, a man who had come in late and was sitting to his left. He was a man in his late twenties, perhaps a little older, with curly brown hair brushed back from a pale forehead. There was an expression about the eyes that was close-hauled and secretive—probably he’d been drinking. The nose was beaky; no, the whole face was beaky. On his chin was a brown mole, which protruded slightly, though it wasn’t large enough to be disfiguring. But the surprising thing about this man was that he was wearing a full Scottish kilt. Jimroy took in the soft reds and greens of the tartan and reflected that the cloth looked both old and authentic, and there was one of those little leather purses hanging from his belt. (There was a name for them. What was it, now?)
Jimroy pondered the significance of this Scottish costume. Probably there was none. Half the people in Palo Alto seemed to drift about dressed as characters out of a play. Yesterday, crossing the campus, he’d seen a bare-chested youth in satin track pants coming toward him on a unicycle, balancing an armload of books and flashing the tense nervous smile of an actor. The Creative Sandwich Shop where he’d eaten lunch today had been filled with long-skirted gipsy-like girls, and one of them, barely out of puberty, had worn what looked like a width of carpeting belted around her hips. Another girl behind the counter, scooping out avocado flesh and smashing it onto slices of bread, was dressed in blue bib overalls covered with tiny embroidered flowers and the stitched message over one breast, “Taste Me.” (Jimroy had stared boldly at this message, wanting to show that he did not find it in the least shocking—which indeed he did not.)
“Pardon me.” It was the man in the kilt.
“Are you speaking to me?” Jimroy heard his own voice, priggish and full of Canadian vowel sounds.
“You’ve dropped your program.” Then, “At least I believe it’s yours.”
“Thank you, very kind.” His snorty laugh, never intended, but always ready to betray him.
“Interesting production, wouldn’t you say?” The man in the kilt said this in a bright, liturgical, surprised-sounding voice. A Scottish accent, Jimroy noted, though certainly muted, perhaps even counterfeit.
“Quite good,” Jimroy said, feeling friendly because of the ambiguity of the accent. “Especially the notary.”
“Ah, yes, the notary. Wonderful. Great sense of maturity. And the maid, what do you think of the maid, little Toinette? Now that’s a role to conjure with.”
“Very demanding, yes,” Jimroy said, and rested his gaze on the Scotsman’s knees, which were clutched tightly together. Nervous type. Perhaps the kilt eased his limbs and that was the reason he wore it.
He considered his own clothes, the light green cotton pants and the checked shirt, not at all what he might have worn for an evening out at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. They were emergency clothes, bought three weeks ago when the airline admitted, finally, that both of his suitcases seemed to be temporarily lost. (Temporarily—what a joke.) They had gone astray somewhere between Manitoba and California. No one was able to account for it. He phoned the airline office every day or two, but nothing had turned up yet, and meanwhile he alternated between two sets of clothes he’d purchased in a men’s store in the Stanford Shopping Mall. The clothes were cheap, but the colours pleased him, these minty green pants and a second pair in a sort of salmon. He had also bought himself a minimal supply of underwear, some white socks—when had he last worn white socks?—and a pair of pyjamas made in Taiwan.
With this limited wardrobe he had managed well enough and, in fact, rather liked the clean feeling of owning so spare a closet of clothes. But soon he would need a suit and a dress shirt or two. More alarming was the loss of some papers he needed for his work and, of course, the photograph of Mary Swann. He would give the airline another week and then begin to press them harder. Luggage didn’t disappear into thin air. It had to be somewhere. He realized now that he should have made more of a fuss in the first place.
At the end of the play, after applause faded, the man in the kilt turned abruptly to Jimroy and said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to join me for a drink.”
Jimroy hesitated a second, caught off guard, confused by the Scottish accent, which seemed not quite as Scottish as before, and the man quickly amended, “Or a cup of coffee perhaps. They make a very good espresso at a place not far from here.”
He had feared something like this. The moment his neighbour had uttered the word “little Toinette,” he had been alerted. Certain kinds of people were inevitably attracted to him; he possessed a lean body, neat shoulders, hips that were unusually small; it was probably not a good idea under the circumstances to go in for green pants. “I’m awfully sorry —”
“I just thought. Since you seemed to be alone.”
“Very kind of you.” Jimroy rose hurriedly, at the same time mumbling a brief apology, which was courteous, deferential and, in its way, he supposed, convincing: the lateness of the hour; an early morning appointment; and a delicate suggestion that he was expected elsewhere, that someone awaited his arrival.
No one awaited his arrival. He was living alone in a house he had rented from a famous physicist, a Nobel Prize winner, who had left, months earlier, for a year in Stuttgart. The house was small, just two bedrooms, a single-story California-style house with white siding and redwood trim. The rent was entirely reasonable considering how close it was to the university, so close he was able to manage without a car. The famous physicist’s wife, Marjorie Flanner, had been anxious to join her husband in Germany and was happy to find a tenant like Jimroy who was mature and responsible.
She showed him the large tiled bathroom and the stacks of folded sheets in the linen cupboard. In the bedroom she pressed down on the mattress with the heel of her hand to demonstrate its firmness and told him who he might phone if there were problems with the air conditioning. The only thing she really cared about, she said, was the garden. Things needed pruning. Occasionally, depending on the weather, it was necessary to water certain of the plants or spray for spiders. The gate at the back of the garden had to be kept latched so the children in the neighbourhood would stay out of the roses. “I hope you like roses.” She smiled at Jimroy. Her middle-aged face was soft and puffed, rather like a rose itself.
He knew nothing about roses. He knew none of the names for any of the flowers in the garden or even the name of the bent little tree that stood protected by its own low wall of pink brick. The yard in Winnipeg, his and Audrey’s, had contained nothing but a patch of grass, a pair of lilac bushes and what Audrey liked to call her veg patch, her rows of onions and radishes and runner beans. “I hope you like roses.” Mrs. Flanner turned her pink face in his direction.
Reluctant to crush her open look of hopefulness, he exclaimed in his awful voice, “I adore roses,” and heard himself continue, “Roses, as a matter of fact, happen to be my favourite type of bloom.”
Already he was imagining himself carrying his morning coffee into the Flanners’ garden, along with his books and papers. There were several garden chairs grouped on the flagged patio. And the little brick wall would serve nicely as a kind of desk. He felt certain that the sun—a whole year of sun—would do him good. As for the Flanners’ roses, he would put up a notice somewhere, perhaps run an advert in the local paper. There must be thousands of gardeners in this part of the world.
Marjorie Flanner did not treat him as though he were a person of no consequence. She made him a gin and tonic, stirred it carefully, and decorated it with a frilled lemon slice, and they sat for an hour on the wrought-iron garden chairs discussing details about the house. The neighbours were “tremendous,” she said, all of them Stanford people; he would be besieged with dinner invitations. Hmmmmm, said Jimroy, who intended to ignore the neighbours. About the rent, she said, would he mind very much giving her postdated cheques. Not at all, Jimroy said, and immediately pulled out his chequebook, asking in a polite, faintly stagy voice, if she would like a bank r
eference.
At this she almost, but not quite, giggled. “Heavens, no. I mean, in a way I do know you. That is,” she adjusted her pretty legs, “that is, my discussion group’s just done your book on Starman. Someone in the group suggested, way back last year I think it was, that we try one of Morton Jimroy’s books.”
He fixed his eyes on the brick wall and tried not to look pleased.
“So you’re hardly a stranger, Professor Jimroy. But I’m afraid I haven’t read your other book, the one on Pound.”
“Don’t apologize please —” Jimroy began, conscious of a small pink wound opening in the vicinity of his heart, a phenomenon that occurred always when such blithe confessions were brought forth. Irrational. Paranoid.
“But then —” Marjorie Flanner gave a small laugh—“I haven’t really read Ezra Pound either. I mean, not really.”
“Pound can be difficult,” he said kindly. Even more kindly he added, “And he can be an awful old bore too.”
Then they both laughed. He imagined their laughter and the blended tinkling of their ice cubes floating through the lathe fence and reaching the ears of the friendly neighbours, the ones who soon would be pressing dinner invitations on him. He dared another look at Marjorie Flanner’s warm brown legs and wondered if he should suggest dinner some place. No.
She was back on the subject of roses. Five years ago she and Josh had brought in a load of special soil. Roses like a sandy loam with just the right balance of minerals. Whenever Josh came home from one of his trips he always brought back a new rose cutting. It was illegal, of course, bringing rose cuttings into the country, and so he had become adept at smuggling. There was this little loose piece of lining in his suitcase, and it was under this flap that he hid his contraband.
Josh the Nobel Prize winner, a smuggler of rose cuttings. Jimroy found the fact discreditable but humanizing. (Later, after he moved in, he would wander about the little house thinking: a Nobel Prize winner sat in this armchair, lay on that pillow, occupied this toilet seat, adjusted this shower head.)
Mrs. Flanner, her face flushed—clearly she liked her drinks—poured him a second gin and tonic and asked what it was that had brought him to California for a year. “Are you working on a new biography?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. Eyes downcast, expression modest. Ever the man possessed, the body snatcher.
“And is it to be another poet?” She asked this in her merry voice.
“I’m afraid so,” he said again.
“I don’t suppose I really should ask who —”
“I doubt very much if you’ve heard of her,” he began.
“Ah!” she said, and clapped her hands together. Brown hands with rather short fingers and an old-fashioned wedding ring in reddish gold. “A her! A woman! How wonderful. I mean, my group will be thrilled that —”
“As I say, though, she is not well known. Hardly in the same class as Starman or Pound. Still she was quite a remarkable poet in her way —” He wished to appear forthright, honest, but out came the old sly evasions.
“I wonder if I might know her,” Marjorie Flanner said. “I used to read a lot of poetry when I was younger. Josh and I —”
“Mary Swann.”
“Pardon?”
“Her name. Mary Swann. The poet I’m working on at the moment.”
“Aahhh!” A look of mild incomprehension. She took a rather large gulp of gin and then asked politely, “And did she have a fascinating life?”
“I’m afraid not,” Jimroy said, feeling a quickening of his body. “I think you would have to say she had one of the dullest lives ever lived.”
She looked at him with new interest. “And yet she was a remarkable poet.”
“That is the paradox,” he said, giving a laugh that came out a bark. “That was, I suppose, the thing I could not resist.”
“I can imagine,” Marjorie Flanner said. She smiled. Her teeth flashed, and Jimroy could see the grindings of an old eagerness. “Well, that’s quite a challenge, Professor Jimroy.”
Quite a challenge. Jimroy wondered in an idle way if Marjorie Flanner had ever uttered those words it’s quite a challenge to Joshua Flanner as he sat contemplating the mysteries of mass and energy that glued the universe together. Probably she had. Probably Joshua Flanner, humanist and smuggler of rose cuttings, had not found the phrase objectionable. Why should he? Who but a throttled misanthrope would object to such a trifling remark?
Later, at the motel where he was staying temporarily, falling asleep in his buttoned, made-in-Taiwan pyjamas, Jimroy remembered the brief bright expansion of Mrs. Flanner’s face as she handed him the house keys. It had seemed artificially lit, a social expression only, as though she were concealing some minor disappointment she felt toward him. Perhaps she had expected him to invite her to dinner, or even to stay the night. It was a failing of Jimroy’s, not knowing what other people expected.
Like many an introvert, Jimroy distrusts the queasy interior world of the psyche, but has enormous faith in the mechanics of the exterior world of governments and machinery and architecture and science—all these he sees as being presided over by anonymous but certified authorities who are reliable and enduring and who, most importantly, are possessed of good intentions. He is able to step back from the threat of acid rain, for instance—every softy in Canada is babbling about acid rain—certain that ecologists will arrive any day now at a comprehensive solution. He trusts them to find an answer; they will find it chiefly because the burden of their care demands it. AIDS will be conquered too, Jimroy has no doubt about it, what with the piles of research money and all those serious ready faces turned together in consultation.
And on a more self-interested level, he reasons that someone or other will always come forward, ready to defend his civil liberties, and someone else will keep him relatively safe on the highways and even flying through the air. A race of incomprehensible (to him) men and women have assumed responsibility for his safety, have been willing to make regulations, set standards, and bring into being an entire system of checks and counter checks. When he flicks the switch on the Flanners’ microwave oven to warm up his taco dinner he takes it for granted that the tiny crinkled rays will permeate the food and not him, and that the tacos themselves, though tasteless, will be free of botulism. Thus, when he thinks about his lost luggage, he is no more than marginally worried.
His two large vinyl suitcases, one black, one tan, are not, after all, metaphysical constructs, but physical objects occupying definable space. The number of places where these suitcases might reasonably be is finite. It is only a matter of time before they are discovered and identified and shipped to him in Palo Alto, accompanied by official apologies and an entirely plausible explanation, which he will, of course, believe and accept with grace; this is not a perfect world—how well he knows that—but a world, at least, turned in the general direction of improvement.
Besides, he sees now that his Manitoba clothes would be out of place here. Those suits of his, those heavy laced shoes; it would be an act of brutality to bring such dark colours and such thick materials into the delicate latticed light of California. He wears open-weave shirts now, pure cotton preferably, and finds he can get along perfectly well without a tie, even when invited out to dinner. The sandals he bought for $4.95 are about to fall apart after one month—it seems they are stapled rather than sewn—but he is prepared to buy another pair, and another—they are surprisingly comfortable, too, especially when worn over a pair of heavy cotton socks.
It’s true he’s been inconvenienced by the loss of some of his papers, but it was an easy matter to telephone Mrs. Lynch in Winnipeg and have her send photocopies. His first-draft documents are safely locked away in a desk drawer in his study at home, which is a relief. He does, though, suffer intermittent worry over the photograph of Mary Swann. It had not been a good idea to bring it. It cannot be replaced and is one of only two known photographs of her in existence. (The other, much the inferior, is still in th
e Nadeau Museum, a blurred snapshot of Mrs. Swann standing in front of her house with her eyes sealed shut by sunlight.) The loss of the photograph would be serious, tragic in a sense, if indeed it is lost, but Jimroy persists, even after days and weeks have gone by, in thinking that his luggage will reappear at any moment.
This occasional nagging worry about the photograph is, in any case, tempered by the relief he feels that at least he has the letters from Sarah Maloney safely in his possession. What amazing luck! He can’t help wondering what bolt of good fortune made him decide at the last minute, packing his things in Winnipeg, to put Sarah’s letters in his briefcase rather than with his other papers in his luggage. When he thinks of it, he shakes his head and feels blessed.
He needs the letters more than ever now that he has been uprooted; they stabilize him, keeping away that drifting sadness that comes upon him late in the evening, eleven, eleven-thirty, when the density of the earth seems to empty out. It’s then that he likes to reread her letters, letters that pulse and promise, that make his throat swell with the thought of sex. He props himself on the headboard of the Flanners’ outsize bed, cleansed from his shower, toenails pared, a cup of hot milk at his elbow. (Half his stomach was removed the winter Audrey left, and he admits to anyone kind enough to inquire that the hot milk and the early nights are needed now, besides he likes to think of his homely habits as a precaution against hubris.)
“Dear Morton Jimroy,” runs her first letter, sent to him more than a year ago in Winnipeg. “Will you allow me to introduce myself? My name is Sarah Maloney, and a mutual friend, Willard Lang, has told me that you too are interested in the work of Mary Swann. I am writing to ask you …”
“Dear Mr. Jimroy,” the second letter reads—Jimroy keeps the letters in chronological order, each one in its original envelope with its U.S. stamp and the Chicago postmark. “I am amazed and delighted to have a letter back from you so quickly, amazed in fact that you replied at all after my cheeky intrusion —”