Reynolds marches out to the kitchen, leaving Gavin alone on the sofa gazing at the view, such as it is. There’s a blue sky, there’s a picture window. The window gives onto a fenced enclosure in which there’s a palm tree. Also a jacaranda, or is it a frangipani? He wouldn’t know, they only rent this house.
There’s a swimming pool that he never uses, although it’s heated. Reynolds plunges into it occasionally before he wakes up in the morning, or so she says: she likes to flaunt such examples of her physical agility. Leaves fall into the pool from the jacaranda or whatever it is, and also spiky prongs from the palm. They float around on the surface, swirling in the slow eddy caused by the circulation pump. A girl comes by three times a week and skims them out with a net on a long handle. Her name is Maria; she’s a high school student; she’s included in the rent. She lets herself in through the garden gate with a key and moves over the tiled and slippery patio noiselessly on rubber soles. She has long dark hair and a lovely waist, and may possibly be Mexican; Gavin doesn’t know because he’s never spoken to her. She always wears shorts, light blue denim or darker blue denim, and she bends over in her denim shorts while skimming out the leaves. Her face, when he’s able to see it, is impassive, though verging on the solemn.
Oh Maria, he sighs to himself. Are there troubles in your life? If not, there soon will be. What a trim ass you have. All the better to wig and wag.
Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can no longer taste it?
He’s writing a poem that begins, “Maria skims the dying leaves.” Though technically speaking the leaves are already dead.
The doorbell rings, and Reynolds clatters into the hall. There are female greeting sounds from the entranceway, that cooing and come-inning and pigeon oodle-ooing that women do nowadays. They’re going over each other with the woo-woo ooo sounds as if they’re best friends, though they’ve never met. The contact was through email, which Gavin despises. He should not have despised it, however: handing over control of his correspondence to Reynolds has been a mistake, because it’s given her the keys to the kingdom: she’s now the gatekeeper to the Kingdom of Gavin. Nobody gets in unless she says so.
“He’s just been having a nap,” says Reynolds, using that mock-reverential tone she slides into when about to display him to third parties. “Would you like a peek at his study first? Where he does his writing?”
“Oh, ooodle-oo,” says the voice of Naveena, which must indicate delight. “If it’s all right.” Clickety-click down the corridor go their two pairs of shod feet.
“He can’t write on a computer,” Reynolds is saying. “He has to use a pencil. He says it’s a hand-eye thing.”
“Awesome,” says Naveena.
Gavin hates his study with a rancorous hatred. He hates this study — which is only a temporary one — but especially he hates his real study, back in British Columbia. It was designed for him by Reynolds, and has quotations from his most-anthologized poems stencilled on its kidney-coloured walls in white paint; so he has to sit in there surrounded by monuments of his own decaying magnificence while all around him the air is thick with shreds and tatters of the stellar poetic masterpieces he’d once revered: the shards of well-wrought urns, the broken echoes of other men’s wit and scope.
Reynolds tends both of his studies as if they’re shrines and he their graven image. She makes a production of sharpening his pencils and blocking all phone calls and shutting him in there. Then she tiptoes around outside as if he’s on life support, and then he can’t write a word. He can’t spin straw into gold, not in that mausoleum of a study: Rumpelstiltskin, the malicious dwarf who’s the most likely shape of his Muse these days — tardy Rumpelstiltskin never shows up. Then it will be lunchtime, and Reynolds will gaze at him hopefully across the table and say, “Anything new?” She’s so proud of how she protects his privacy, and fosters his communion with his own poetic juices, and enables what she calls his “creative time.” He doesn’t have the heart to tell her he’s dry as a bone.
He needs to get out, out of here; at least outside the study, the two studies, with their arid scent of embalmed pages. In the ’60s, when he was living with Constance in that cramped, sultry steam bath of a room where they stewed like prunes, back when they had no money and he certainly had no la-de-dah study, he could write anywhere — in bars, in fast-food joints, in coffee shops — and the words would flow out of him and through the pencil or the ballpoint onto anything flat and handy. Envelopes, paper napkins; a cliché, granted, but it was true all the same.
How to get back there? How to get that back?
Clickety-click, heading in his direction. “Right through here,” says Reynolds.
Naveena is ushered into the living room. She’s a beautiful little creature, practically a child. Big, shy dark eyes. She has earrings in the shape of octopuses, or octopi. You’ve got seafood on your ears, he might begin if he was intending to pick her up in a bar, but he doesn’t try that now. “Oh, please don’t get up,” she says, but Gavin makes a show of hauling himself to his feet so he can shake her hand. He holds it — deliberately — a little too long.
Then the pillows must be rearranged by Reynolds, doing her competent-nurse act. What would happen if Gavin were to grab the black-pullovered tit that’s being thrust into his eye and use it as a lever to flip Reynolds over onto her back like a turtle? A jolly thriving wooer. Screaming, recriminations, the Saran Wrap ripped off their bowl of marital leftovers, in front of a galvanized audience of one. Would that kind of uproar get him out of this bush-league interview?
But he doesn’t want to get out of it, not yet. Sometimes he enjoys these ordeals. He enjoys saying he can’t remember writing that piece of word salad, whatever it may be; he enjoys blowing off the poems these sentimental kids produce as their favourites. Crap, drivel, trash! He enjoys telling tales on his erstwhile poet buddies, his erstwhile rivals. Most of them are dead, so no harm done. Not that harm done would stop him.
Rey inserts Naveena into the easy chair where she can get a full frontal view of him. “It’s such an honour to meet you,” she says, deferentially enough. “This is nerdy, but I feel as if I, like. . as if I kind of actually know you. I guess it’s because of studying your work, and everything.” She may be of Indian extraction, but the voice is pure Midwest.
“Then you have the advantage of me,” says Gavin. He leers like a trolclass="underline" it can throw them off their stride, that leer of his.
“Pardon?” says Naveena.
“He means that although you know a lot about him, he doesn’t know anything about you,” says Reynolds, interposing herself as usual. She casts herself as his interpreter; as if he’s an oracle, spouting gnomic sayings that only the high priestess can decipher. “So why don’t you tell him what you’re working on? What part of his work? I’ll go and make us some tea.”
“I’m all ears,” says Gavin, holding his leer.