“If it’s a secret, how would I even know to ask about it?”
“I was thinking of the phrase ‘a painful secret.’”
“There is one thing. It’s something lately I sense she wants to tell me.”
“And now you in fact want to hear it?”
“I’m sort of afraid to hear it, actually.”
He closed his notebook and stared at the cover, then looked up at me.
“Is that one thing how she was murdered, Sam? What really happened. Not in the courtroom, what the bellman Alfonse Padgett described as having occurred, but the incident from Elizabeth’s point of view. Her own account of it. Which would naturally be the truth to you — and should be. Are you afraid, as you say, because you might then experience what she felt at that moment? And yet you want to feel everything she felt. Because you loved her so deeply.”
“Not past tense, please. Love, not loved.”
The Hated Word “Closure”
With Dr. Nissensen, October 10, 1972:
Sam, let me get this straight. You say that since Elizabeth’s murder you’ve been unable to properly order your thoughts, that — how did you put it?”—he checked his notebook—“‘my memories come unbidden and defy chronology,’ and therefore you’re worried this means your mind’s gone off the rails, that you’re cracking up.”
“That’s about it. Yes.”
He thought for a moment. Our session had been highly contentious, and it felt like Dr. Nissensen wanted to end it on a conciliatory note.
“Well,” he said, “we don’t very often remember our lives in original chronologies, do we? More in associative patterns.” He wrote something down. “Ordered memories, disordered memories. Really, no matter either way as long as our work together eventually leads to your attaining a kind of—”
“Do not use the hated word,” I said. “Please don’t use the hated word.”
“No, I was going to say clarity.”
Love of Your Life
YEAR AFTER YEAR, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck, what does it matter as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such passionate equanimity as need met with fate.
I first met Elizabeth two years ago almost to the day, on August 30, 1971, at about eight-thirty in the evening, at the small Hartison Gallery on Duke Street in Halifax. The gallery was associated with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, most famous for his book The Americans and who spent summers on Cape Breton, was teaching a course at the college, and there was a lot of excitement in town about this. He also had agreed to exhibit twenty of his Nova Scotia photographs at the gallery. I was thirty-four and had started to write my second novel, Think Gently on Libraries. I had an apartment on Granville, right there in the neighborhood. My regular café was Cyrano’s Last Night, also on Duke Street. Art students liked to hang out there. The café had one of those enormous espresso machines that looked like it had been designed by Jules Verne in a hallucinatory condition. Like an ancient sea creature trying to breathe on land, when coffee was being made the machine steamed and wheezed loudly, drowning out the nonstop opera, which was, much to my preference, usually Puccini or Verdi, never Wagner.
Anyway, the gallery was crowded, and after moving slowly along the walls from photograph to photograph, I found myself standing next to Elizabeth (of course I didn’t know her name yet), in front of a diptych called Mabou Window, which consisted of two identical views of an expanse of snowy boulders and flat rock outcroppings that led down to the sea. A section of broken wooden fence was in each foreground. The snow’s glare nearly made me wince, yet there was a strangely animate quality to the light, as if I were seeing wind that contained snow moving toward the water. To me, Mabou Window was epigrammatic, if a landscape study can be epigrammatic; it held a lot of muted, even spectral emotion, a kind of photographic pencil sketch of a stretch of the Cape Breton coast coming into focus out of the fog. As I stood there, a touch lost in thought, lightly jostled by other people but hardly minding, I heard Elizabeth read the words Robert Frank had scrawled across the bottom: Next Life Might Be Kinder. I didn’t look at her right away.
Then Elizabeth turned to me and said, “You probably noticed that he’s written the same thing on every one of these twenty photographs. They’re unsettling, don’t you think — those words? We’re going to have to think about them for a while.”
Tonight, Your Elizabeth
I’M NOT A spiritual person, but you know what my one prayer is? Please let me get some sleep.
Some nights all memory becomes a ten-second strip of film run in slow motion, which shows Elizabeth spilling down the stairs in the Essex Hotel, shot by the bellman Alfonse Padgett. Though I did not see it happen, I keep seeing it happen. I could be typing away on my Olivetti manual. I could be organizing plates and coffee cups in the dishwasher. I could be riding my bicycle along the jigsaw coastline near Port Medway, the full moon bright enough you could read a book by it. I could be having a conversation with Philip or Cynthia Slayton. (How many middle-of-the-night telephone calls have they suffered?) I could be having a cup of coffee on the porch. I could be watching a movie at three A.M. in the kitchen, where the small portable TV sits on the counter. Anything, really. “In the moment,” as they say, and then the film strip ambushes me. When that happens, I’ve taught myself to counteract it by clamping apart my eyelids with my fingers, to the point of causing tears, which usually takes only a few seconds — Dr. Nissensen didn’t suggest this technique — and it’s then I willfully recall, in as great detail as possible, the first time Elizabeth and I made love.
It was in my one-room apartment. She kissed my ears and whispered, “Tonight, your Elizabeth,” as if reading the title on some lurid cover of a 1940s paperback detective novel. Just the way she said it, enunciating each word in my ear. Each word given equal regard by her tongue and breath. From that night forward, before our marriage, during our marriage, these two things — kissing and then whispering into my ear, “Tonight, your Elizabeth”—always guaranteed we’d go (to quote Veronica Lake in a movie) from slowly opening buttons to smoking cigarettes without even turning back the bedclothes.
The Progress of This Picture Is the Progress of My Soul
I SHOULD MENTION THAT in Halifax they’re filming a movie based on my marriage to Elizabeth and her murder, basically our life together. I think that’s an accurate way to describe the subject of the movie. Though if someone had said, in regard to how this movie got made in the first place, “You’ve whored out your life,” I’d have to accept the accusation. When Elizabeth Church was murdered, we had $58 in our savings account. I am just stating facts here. I had a financial situation. My last royalty statement from my first novel (I Apologize for the Late Hour) had amounted to $28. So I borrowed $1,000 from an uncle on my mother’s side who lived in Regina (“We’ve never been close,” he’d said, “but all right”), and paid him right back when Pentagonal Films bought, for $125,000, as the contract read, “all rights to the story of the marriage, the murder, and its aftermath.” And I signed it with eyes wide open, remorse already in place. Pentagonal, which was based in Toronto, assigned the project to a director-screenwriter named Peter Istvakson. I met with him a few times and found him the most severe example of a wonder-of-me type I’ve ever seen. “The progress of this picture will be the progress of my soul”—he actually said this while we were having coffee in my old haunt, Cyrano’s Last Night. I mean, who talks like that? A real dunce. Go sit in the corner with your dunce cap on, dunce.