Category: Prose Fiction

Among the personal effects of Bert Spalding, Joan his estranged widow found in his papers the following brief account that took her somewhat by surprise after their ten years of marriage. While not a widely acknowledged fabulist, Bert, sadly no longer with us, undoubtedly had a rich inner life.  Upon brief enquiry we found his story unfortunately without merit.  

Reproduced with the permission of Joan Neesden (nee Piper):

Before I came along, my wife Gertie (or Greta as you may perhaps be more familiar) was working at what used to be the local Odeon behind the counter.  I spotted her a mile off, with that unmistakeable gaze and the way she flapped her eyelashes. I always knew this moment would arrive.

It was a Thursday afternoon and  I was looking forward with great relish to another sojourn to Gone with the Wind.  A small Tizer, I announced, summoning the courage and giving her a knowing wink.  Something in my expression caught her eye, and her lavishly mascara’ed lashes droopped ever so slightly.  I felt hot all of a sudden and wanted to remove my coat and scarf.

When the picture had run its course I emerged into the foyer but Gertie had clocked off.  Fighting my disappointment but girded by the possibilities of the silver screen, I left a cheeky but polite note for her with an usher.  Ten weeks to the day later Gertie and me were married in Elmsley Wood town hall.  Best four bob I ever spent.  

Dear S,

=====

It’s been a while. Thirty-two years actually. When I see that number, and the encrusted life I now own, it seems unnatural – perversely multiplied. It can’t be true that I still feel this way – a third of a century later – about someone I knew for barely two months. What a strange thing the memory is. What odd curators we are – shelving and cataloguing some moments but not others, of visceral longing too much unacknowledged at the time – irresistible, real and deeply strange, but now so divorced from the blood blind compulsions of our youthful senses.

I do know, of course, you are no longer here. I know that, of course. I heard the news from a friend of a friend – a text, some months ago. Almost offhandedly she told me: how odd I thought until I realised how much of what I’d stored inside was entirely unknown to anyone except myself. When she mentioned your death in passing, along with the odd lurching sensation of a silent fall from a tall building I saw you – in an instant – before me, in your black leather bomber jacket, your ever so slightly reddened by the cold March air ice blue eyes and your tight ponytailed dirty blond hair – perched for the first and last time on the edge of the bed in my flat on Redcliffe Gardens, applying lip balm habitually with your long fingers. It was your dry skin but so too an under-managed manifestation of your vulnerability, and so a flash of hope that you weren’t en-tirely lovely and perhaps not en-tirely beyond my reach, after all. You didn’t stay long, perhaps half an hour – but your visit meant something I suppose neither of us could bring ourselves to acknowledge, then or afterward. Time had run out before I realised the clock was running. I loved your silly travel letters from Tokyo and Adelaide, hashed out on flimsy blue paper in terminals and hostels.

Aren’t we just animal spirits? First, predominant, hormones bursting, bloody and startled, resplendent and chattering without the time, need or inclination to reflect? Then spirits more, reflecting on what we did, what we felt, our animal selves dutifully contained or compromised by an embarrassment of later riches and failures? I don’t have answers S-. I only know that I think I can recreate what made you you, that even now I want to recreate what made you you, without ever having had the chance to discover it then. I’m our last remaining record-keeper. Without me we cease to exist. I suppose, after all those months since I heard, this is what seeped into my consciousness, that I feel the need to speak to you, to make up for lost time and lost chances: chances not taken when I knew there was some spark between us that only required one of us to ignite, with some trivial act of courage. For whatever reason, neither of us embraced the courage we might have had. Perhaps we felt it was inevitable and thus unnecessary to hurry along. We’ll never know. It’s too late. But what do I do otherwise with all these evergreen thoughts? Do I pile them high, at last, on the bonfire at the bottom of the garden and stand, contemplative, alone, as the particles of a life unlived dissemble themselves in the intense heat and float way into the winter night as I stand shivering in my borrowed winter boots? Do I preserve them in jars, for occasional inspection? Or should I reanimate them, bring to them new life, that we might not cease to exist after all?

Forgive me now if I choose the last. I feel it is something I should do – that I want to do – as selfish as it sounds. I’ll treat you fairly, I promise. Only I want you to come alive again, in some way that only I could bring about. I know you wouldn’t mind, entirely too much.

The entire day and most of the evening before, he’d waited anxiously for her call. He’d clucked and paced and as Thursday evening shrank toward midnight he became embittered by the snub he felt sure he had been dealt. He became convinced that she’d had only a cursory interest in him from the outset. He experienced in response a sort of pique that hardly warranted the time and effort that justified nurturing further whatever their first meeting had promised. She was coming to the city for a job interview and she had forgotten, he was sure, that she had even suggested they meet. 

What some might call an overactive imagination, albeit sharpened to a point and focused so exquisitely that one might call it schizoid was his attempt to allay the hurt he felt, in his imagination, by having being already snubbed and overlooked, and in multiplying the hurt by constructing not one plausible reason to believe in the fact of his being shunned, but several. Somewhere, a rationalization which, although imaginary, should have rewarded him with the satisfaction that the insult was not intentional, instead only gave him additional reason to feel wretched. There was bitter comfort in intuiting why she was tormenting him in this way. There was a distinct and pleasurable satisfaction in confirming his paranoia; his self doubt, and that of others in meeting his expectations, were again safely shored up.

The initial contact, after she had arrived in the city, was on Friday evening at five thirty. It was no surprise to him, now, after so much perplexed hurt, that one of his imagined scenarios involved her long, stressful job interview followed by a tension-relieving sleep back at the hotel: when she felt the important task and its physical demands to be done with, she would call. And so it was. After all, his message had said he wouldn’t be home ’til five at the earliest. She was far too formal to consider calling him at work.

They spoke for fifteen minutes or so. He’d fretted about how he should broach the subject of meeting and spending time together lest he sound so eager it became obvious to her that her dating resolution (never to go out with anyone who’d dated her sister) was to him mere words, and that he was simply chasing to catch up with his imaginary affair by clumsily and blindly filling in the background material preceding their eventual, mutual seduction with inchoate ‘facts.’

Where shall we first meet? When? Whose decision will prevail? Who will lead and who will follow? God, how we decided outcomes before they could possibly be foreseen. We decide what will be, then we proceed to manoever our way to this predetermined outcome. And we are shocked, hurt and confused when the other party thwarts our ambitions. That he had already decided he was to connect the dots with lines to his goal illustrated the manipulation inherent in this kind of human relation. We want before we can expect. But presupposing the result of all action henceforth becomes instrumental and more frighteningly objective. Solely objective. Therefore, if our co-author is conducive to our goal we find blind mapping was accurate. If not, it was not the goal nor the map that was faulty but the other person after all. They spoiled our plans. They were not suitable. They did not play the game. How can we justify this method? Can we adore a blank canvas, and reel in joy when our canvas has been suitably scored? It is so. We picture in our minds what we want, and we plot its realisation. Where, in this process, do we fall in love with our subject as it is, as it is in the state of becoming? Do we find ourselves becoming enamoured, infatuated and submissive as the object of our desire takes shape? No, we take satisfaction that all is going to plan. We orient toward the end, toward termination, toward completion. We picture first, complete in mind alone, then we draw together the fragments – the constituent parts in the world – as best we can. 

Now, understanding that this was how he envisioned things to be, how could she be anything but material for his canvas, colours to be mixed, fibres to be blended and woven? She must be discarded then, if it becomes clear she is not what she already is in the completed picture in his mind. Why can’t he adore his materials, and be pleased with how well they receive him – changing, developing, understanding an order is forming from the chaos, an image which cannot and will not be predeterrmined? Surely there is greater excitement in discovering how cooperation between actor and acted upon shall fuse than to fix the wished-for result, than force it, will it, to become its progenesis?

He conceded to meet her at her hotel, although he knew that his desire to meet here and begin had overcome his wish to be the one drawing her to him, not the other way around. They spoke by phone for a minute or two on the subject of when and where they would first meet – she protesting the need to do some work, he protecting her need to work. Despite her protest, he wanted to see her that night. He did not want to wait until the following day. It was Friday night – the night, and the excitement of Friday, the weekend that is but is not quite; a delicious limbo not be wasted. The night might work in his favour and enchant her with rising expectations. Still, he must hold out, give leniency for refusal, and appear to sensibly support the reasons for a refusal; in short, to be impressively considerate, but sufficiently nonchalant to stir her equally ambiguous state of mind. To do all this, and then to win the chance to see her that same night. That would be ideal. After that minute or two, each had their own way, and he dressed, donned his coat and left to walk to her hotel, arriving at about seven. He called her from the foyer. She sounded to his ear a little flat in tone, as if she were slightly mifffed that he was early, and yet tending more toward the nonchalant. As he left the elevator on the eleventh floor and took two or three steps along the corridor her door opened and she leaned out to greet him.

He saw her for the first time in light strong enough to illuminate her features. He recorded dark, shadowed eyes – the eyes of one who sleeps too little and reads too much. At the centre of the dark hollows were green, bright compassionate eyes. They took pride of place on her face, with courtiers for eyebrows – arched affairs that gracefully accented each their mistresses. The mouth was just as he had known it: one that easily licked a curl of gentle condescension; a knowing smile but with no evident cruelty. That smile seemed to be her mouth’s most comfortable and self-realising pose. It was the same one it wore on the night he met her. The eyes and that mouth were all he needed to confirm his impression of her as distinctly alive – an alert creature whose outward self would always conceal surprises, whose precarious sensitivity denoted not an impulsive nature but one in which an inchoate decision had always to rise and fall repeatedly before it became finally settled in her mind.

He was immediatly pleased, and strode bullishly in the room, envigorated and electrified with the shared presence of his mystery figure, embodied in an unexpected but almost silently delightful form. They took station first at the large picture window overlooking the bay, across toward the lonesome island with the the tower to the right, a little down the hill. He pointed to where he lived and worked, although each was obscured by the buildings between. She returned to her seat at the table, where she was working on a paper. Each was unable to sit still for very long – excited as they were by this new meeting, and the slight but pleasant discomfort of those who find an instant common bond and seek, with nervous excitement, to test its extent.

There was little of the real discomfort that might indicate two individuals fighting to overcome the irresistable barriers of incompatibility. Despite their nervousness they were at ease in each others’ company. She came to rest in the chair opposite him. This was the closest they had come to one another, and for the first time, relaxed. He could look intently in her eyes as she spoke to him. He noticed the inflection of her right eyebrow, surprised by how it arched so high and yet caused no furrow to break upon her forehead. She had the skin of one showing the first signs of age although this could only be seen if one sat close and observed intently, as he was doing at that moment. If aging, it was even and only a gentle relaxing of what may once have been tautness, without sign of visible wrinkling. 

Almost immediately it became obvious that she (unconsciously, he thought) moved from her natural, although by no means strong, American accent to the clipped, slightly nasal tones of standard English pronunciation. Things were bustling along at such a pace, he didn’t sense some strategem bywhich this subtle transformation took place, but it irked him slightly to think she should condescend to them both by this subtle but noticeable shift. She’d spent some time in England in a town in the North and as even he could and did meander somewhat between dialects as situations presented themselves (although never attempting duplicity) he was somewhat sympathetic to this shift. It was partly flattering, he felt, that she should wish to communicate with him this way, and he was content not to allow it to disrupt the flow of conversation.

He anticipated the exquisite pleasure of being able, in her company, to be playful and yet serious. All too often he felt trapped in seriousness, or in the opposite – whichever way the current flowed – and he could never find the company to travel in both directions. She was not sarcastic. She was sardonic, for sure, but not sarcastic. That wry smile he had stored away from their first encounter months ago would not exist had she cultivated any tendency to sarcasm. The gradual arc, rather than the brutal hook of her critique, gave her away as considerate, not scathing.

She decided it was time to eat. The two prepared to leave, but did so only after a protracted search for her room key. Distractedness never fails to charm, suggesting as it does, that awareness of the importance of small but vital details has been displaced by the more overwhelming mental and physical burden of being in the presence of someone new in one’s life, who one is mystifying enough to disrupt one’s equilibrium temporarily. He was equally distracted and helped in the search with the same enthusiasm he would were it his own key. The key was found and they left to go to dinner, passing along corridors whose walls were adorned with photographs of the hotel’s history. They stopped briefly to examine the pictures, she describing a garden which had once stood where The Tower was now.

He watched her intently. When he left to make a phone call, it suddently occured to him how one monumental fact in this relationship had already been established: whatever the attraction they might feel toward one another, there was no collapse of the need for separation. He felt, at that very moment, that were either one to take it upon themselves to go about their own business, that the other would desire no hindrance, either spoken or unspoken. They were at liberty to follow their own nature, without prejudice or penalty. He looked back as he walked away and saw her waiting without watching where he went, satisfied, he thought, that he would be back as soon as he had done whatever he might need be done. This liberty, he knew, would make a bond all the stronger for the confidence it represented. The next day, as they would tramp across the clifftop overlooking the rocky coast and the looming, crashing waves, each pursuing their own interest, and yet sure in their inseparable purpose, he would feel again the awful pressure of knowing how right this was – to be free and yet free together. As he spied her ahead – a greyish silhouette against the sky and the cliffs – he had known she would be there, as if it were of no consequence that they’d travelled the same path alone and yet felt together.

Having made the phone call, he walked back across the foyer to where she waited. She was wearing a black, felt round-rimmed hat with a red cloth flower pinned in the front. The hat was of the kind that made her seem cheeky and impetuous and not serious. It was the kind of hat that when worn low over the eyes, pushed fringes of hair out the sides and gave the wearer either a carefree or churlish demeanour, depending upon their wish to seem one or the other. Her coat was unattractive – an observation he’d made the moment she had put it on in the hotel room, although this unexpected distaste he felt he wanted to put away. She had a slight hunch of the shoulders, suggesting to him that she was not altogether prepossesed by her own self image. The hunch – if one should call it that – was enough to make her posture unappealing. It was an attitude that agreed with his subdued respect for rebellion. As he knew would be the case, walking up to her, she acknowledged his return without comment and the two departed through the swing doors onto the street. 

They found themselves waiting in line for a table at the restaurant. Having stood watching several groups of two and three led to their tables, with as many again waiting, they sat dejected momentarily, on a small bench, big enough for two. Apropos of nothing, she said how horrified she was at seeing the pictures of newly-wed couples in the social section of the local newspaper, how awful it was that brides were subjugating themselves, conceding their careers to marriage and losing their identity with the adoption of their husbands’ names. Why this subject now, he wondered? Did this recurrent convocation of hers: men, women, sex and marriage belie her own fears? Was it merely conversation – another subject open for critical review? Or was she advancing our nascent relationship to it’s terminal breaking point before we’d even sat down for dinner?