Novelists Read online

  C. P. BOYKO

  NOVELISTS

  stories

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © C. P. Boyko, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit

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  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Boyko, Craig, author

  Novelists / written by C.P. Boyko.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927428-71-9 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927428-72-6

  (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.O9962N69 2014 C813’.6 C2013-907287-X

  C2013-907288-8

  Edited by Dan Wells

  Copy-edited by Zachariah Wells

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover designed by Gordon Robertson

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  Versions of these stories have appeared in PRISM International, Witness, Confrontation, CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries and The New England Review.

  For Bertie

  And for Andrew, who lowered our rent

  THE WORD “GENIUS”

  MR. MALCOLM GAWFLER could not sit still. He was alarmed, though he did not know why. Something terrible was about to happen, but he did not know what. War? Famine? An earthquake? Yes, that would be just his luck: an earthquake the same day his new book was launched! A gaping chasm would swallow up all fifteen hundred copies, he supposed. In any case, survivors of earthquakes did not run out the next morning to buy new novels, but instead useful trash like bandages, food, and rope. Yet he was expected to perform tonight, to read aloud passages of this scandalously irrelevant work, as if an apocalypse were not hanging over his head! He had another cup of coffee, to steady his nerves, then another; but for some reason, this did not help.

  Mrs. Deirdre Gawfler watched him sadly as he lunged about the room, muttering and making gestures of hypothesis, decision, and renunciation. She intervened long enough to straighten his cuffs and wipe the ever-present smut from his fingers. His large, knobby hands were trembling and his eyes were wide open, as if to Injustice.

  “You’ll do fine,” she said, though she knew better, and patted his lapels.

  “Who cares?” he cried, tearing his arms free and throwing the cuffs again out of alignment. He felt like a man going over a waterfall being reassured that his hair was well parted. “Who the deuce cares?” He clutched his chest and resumed pacing.

  Sometimes Mrs. Gawfler wished (for his sake) that her husband were not a novelist, but something less taxing, like a priest, or a soldier, or a prison warden.

  But she needn’t have worried about that evening. The reading was a success, at least compared with previous occasions. In the past, Malcolm’s nervousness had filled his speech with long, bewildered pauses; it was as if he had never seen his text before, did not recognize the language it was written in, or indeed the alphabet. That night, however, he read derisively and incredulously, like an angry atheist mocking the Bible in church. This new style was deemed by the audience an improvement. It was certainly quicker, and got the drinks served sooner. Mrs. Gawfler noted with relief that Lady Astmore had complied with her private suggestion and withheld coffee.

  An hour later, when Mr. Gawfler had more or less subsided to his normal level of excitability, Mrs. Gawfler made her excuses (“The children …”) and took her leave. On the way out she touched the arm of Mullens, the publisher, to remind him of the little matter of the book reviews.

  Mr. Gawfler, meanwhile, was feeling more optimistic. He no longer felt that an earthquake was imminent, or even inevitable. Probably the people in this room would live to ripe old ages. They certainly deserved to. They were good people, intelligent people, with obviously refined tastes. They deserved to be happy. He toasted them, individually and collectively, with the latest in a series of whiskies that had begun mysteriously to appear in his hand. He did not normally like whisky—he did not normally drink—but this stuff, really, was not half bad. He could give credit where credit was due. Tears came to his eyes at this realization of his own generosity. His epitaph, he thought, might someday say, “Kind Even To Whisky.” Cigarettes too. He did not normally smoke, but at one point in the evening someone offered him a cigarette—or anyway allowed the hand holding it to drift too near his gaze—and Mr. Gawfler plucked it from their fingers. He sucked on the thing as if trying to draw a pebble through it; when his lungs and cheeks were full, he threw back his head, puckered his lips, and exhaled a magisterial cloud of dense white smoke. A moment later he was seized by a fit of hacking, shuddering coughs. When the worst of these had passed, he looked around him, dazed. “Where did that come from?” he wondered.

  All but two of the people in attendance were known to him personally, and these two were promptly recommended to him as the rarities they were. The first was a man who claimed to have read all his books, and, in proof, quoted a few lines that he had particularly admired—and which Mr. Gawfler did not recognize at all. The feeling that came over him whenever one of his friends strayed from generic into specific praise came over him now. He felt stiff and uncomfortable and fraudulent. All that old stuff seemed so far behind him! Why did no one ever praise the paragraphs he’d written that morning, for instance, or the ones he was going to write tomorrow? The little man before him had a receding upper lip, caterpillar eyebrows, and squirrel-tail side whiskers. Mr. Gawfler thanked him, delivered some thoughts on the indispensability of the reader in the creative act, and autographed for him a fresh copy of the new novel (thus obligating the poor man to purchase a second one). Then he turned his attention, by turning his body, aside.

  The second stranger was a woman who also claimed to have read all his books. She made other claims, too, some of which were not comprehensible to Mr. Gawfler in his exalted state, and many of which were interrupted by Mr. Gawfler’s own enthusiastic agreement. She claimed that his characters really lived; that he had a remarkable understanding of women; that she would rank him among the preeminent novelists of the day, alongside Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome; that she had read The Layman and Lord Newbotham three times, and that “that Newbotham” was a “real subtle character”; that his use of punctuation in the Laura chapter of Mrs. Dreazle was simply extraordinary; that one sensed such sadness beneath the bright pageantry of his plots; that that bit about birds and trees at the end of Jebediah Stokes was perhaps the finest piece of really lyrical prose since she didn’t know when; that she loved his inventiveness, his compassion, his sense of humor; that she loved his mind. She had a protruding lower lip, a drooping eyelid, and a chin like a spade. She spoke with a modulating inflection, as if her voice were an instrument she was trying to tune. She sounded always on the verge of breaking into embarrassed laughter. Mr. Gawfler was charmed. He spoke with her, to the exclusion of everyone else, for the rest of the evening. He did not even think to sign for her a copy of the new novel—an oversight which would have significant consequences, as the reader shall presently see.

  Mr. Gawfler was not what one might call a good sleeper. He did n
ot sleep easily, and especially did not fall asleep easily. He seemed never able to get all his many long limbs inside the bed at once, but had to fold and refold himself this way and that, tucking parts of himself away wherever they would fit, as if his body were one too many towels to be stuffed into a drawer. He was always too cold or too hot, a difficulty rendered quite unresolvable by the possible combinations of seven blankets and the window’s several hundred possible degrees of openness. And in addition to these physical discomforts, he had to contend with a restless mind … Consequently, he often leapt into bed at the first yawn or telltale sign of mental fogginess, hoping to smuggle himself across the border into the Land of Nod while his mind was off its guard, as it were. But inevitably, as soon as his head hit the pillow, acute mental clarity and crackling wakefulness lit the inside of his brain like a searchlight and he found himself, against his will, pondering such questions as how many bees it took to make a teaspoonful of honey, whether or not Reverend McAdams would like the books he had lent him, what funny things the children had said at supper time, whether or not he had brushed his teeth, whether or not he had that morning used a semicolon incorrectly, and how long it would take so many bees to make so much honey. When he realized that his mind had tricked him and that it had no intention of turning off, he became angry—which of course only woke him more fully. But his anger also made him more determined, so that he would often lie there for hours, his eyes clamped defiantly shut, his every muscle straining with the effort to sleep.

  That night, however, he sank into his vast mattress as if it were sun-warmed moss; his limbs unfolded effortlessly and imperceptibly, like petals unfurling in springtime; his joints exuded a pleasant healing fatigue, like cut branches exuding sap; his eyelids were warm stones; waves of happy accomplishment flowed down his spine; and his mind hummed in wordless contentment, like the final dying notes of a symphony. His last thoughts were: “Mrs. Brewler; her name is Mrs. Brewler,” and, “She loves my mind!” Then the lukewarm tide of slumber came in and gently extinguished these last embers of consciousness.

  But when the morning came, something was wrong. He awoke convinced that all his anxiety of the previous afternoon had been justified—that something terrible had happened after all. He lifted his head from the pillow (it was like shifting a sack of meal) and looked hard at the world. He found signs of the catastrophe everywhere, in every thing: the way his shoes lay empty and abandoned on the floor; the way all that remained of yesterday’s coffee were cold dregs; the way the very walls were blistered and peeling, as though bursting with rot. He sloshed himself queasily upright and stared out the window. The sun glazed the hills of mud with a harsh, tacky, amber light, like syrup that had congealed. There had been no earthquake, perhaps, but it would have been better if there had. He staggered out of bed, and armed with nothing but a terrific headache and a tongue like a slab of cold turkey wrapped in a handkerchief, he launched himself out into the world to find the cause of this cataclysm.

  Mr. Gawfler, you see, was an intellectual, and had, as I have endeavored to show, the intellectual’s tendency to become bewildered by his internal, emotional states, and the intellectual’s need to find rational, external explanations for them. In short: He felt bad, and he wanted to know why.

  He had not far to seek. The smell of frying rashers reached him on the stairs, and he realized that their cook was a sadist. The page boy passed him in the hall and tipped his hat, and Mr. Gawfler realized that they employed the most incompetent, lazy, and insolent help in the world. In the dining room his children lunged at him like feral dogs and wiped their sticky paws and muzzles on his pyjamas, and he realized that parenthood is a prison sentence. His wife said “Good morning,” and he realized that he hated her.

  Ah, God! It hadn’t always been thus. He’d loved her once. He’d even been in love with her once! An image opened in his mind like an old wound, a vision of the fields outside Hawksmoor where they had rambled that summer, so many years ago. Ah, God, the cruel ravages of time! thought Mr. Gawfler poignantly. He’d been in love then, certainly—though he may not have realized it at first. He thought he was just being gentlemanly, keeping the poor girl company. He explained his happiness, when he recognized it as happiness, as the logical result of so much exercise, sunshine, good conversation, and, yes, feminine beauty. For he had to admit that her hair in the sunlight looked as soft and thick as a muskrat’s pelt, and he did rather like the way her little pouchy cheeks framed her mouth like parentheses when she smiled, and he supposed he admired the way she moved so easily, like a single swath of fabric wafted by a breeze. But he also found that his nerves jangled, his extremities tingled, and his insides became muck in her presence. He concluded that she had an abrasive personality.

  He required nearly two weeks to achieve insight. The day before he was due to return to Fulfordton, he called at his aunt’s a few minutes early—and discovered that Deirdre sat on the floor like a child to tie her shoelaces. Then, while they were walking, she mispronounced a word: she said that Blake was too “eth-real” for her. These idiosyncrasies warmed his heart almost painfully; he did not know why. He believed he was embarrassed for her. In fact, she was endearing herself to him.

  An hour later, he finally understood. They had found and venturesomely reclaimed an overgrown trail through a hedge of blackthorn that led down to a secluded bower where a stream gurgled complacently, like bathwater draining from a tub. The natural sanctity of the setting, or perhaps the thought of his imminent departure, rendered the two of them mute. Eventually he noticed that, every minute or so, and quite unnecessarily, she smoothed back the hair from her cheek with the last two fingers of her hand. Fear coursed through him; his blood tolled like a bell with the realization that she was nervous in his company—that she loved him.

  And so, at last, he was able to see, in the mirror of her feelings, his own.

  “Would you,” he said, “will you,” he said, “would you by any chance like for me to—permit me to—read you a chapter or two of my novel?”

  He remembered how her eyes had shone with emotion.

  Yet it was all doomed to end here, at this awful table, with these horrible, still-quivering strips of fried pigflesh on the plate before him!

  Still, there was no use denying it: he had been happy once—ah, God!—happier than he had been at any time since.

  Until, that was, last night.

  He brooded over his breakfast, clutching his fork and knife like bludgeons, and occasionally making strictly defensive attacks on his rashers. He managed to keep them at bay; but his thoughts were another matter.

  Why should he have been happy last night? What about last night could have made him feel so good, so much better than he had felt since he was in love?

  His rashers enjoyed a momentary respite as his utensils fell still. Everything became clear.

  Mrs. Brewler’s face, certain characteristics of her voice, and even a few of her words came back to him. He realized—that he was in love.

  Mrs. Gawfler watched her husband throw down his utensils, stagger back from the table as if warding off a blow, and galumph out of the dining room without a word. She listened to him trudge upstairs to the attic, grapple with the door for a moment before slamming it vindictively shut, and begin resolutely to pace—setting out each time, from alternate corners, with renewed purpose, as if determined this time not to be checked. She smiled, sighed, and raised her eyebrows all at once. It was always something of a relief when Malcolm returned to work after a long hiatus—even though in many ways he was more difficult to live with when he was writing. He began to sleep at odd hours or not at all; he forgot to eat and to shave and to wash; he became irritable and preternaturally sensitive to all “noise” and “clutter”—two fluid categories which seemed to encompass, at one time or another, the set of all things audible and visible. Thus it became necessary for the cook to prepare only “quiet” meals, bland foods which could b
e ingested with minimal distraction to the eye, ear, nose, or tongue; for the children to eat at other times or in other rooms; for the gardener to do all his work on the south side of the house either before dawn or after dusk; and for Mrs. Gawfler to do without house guests or callers for the four or five months Malcolm required to complete a book.

  On the other hand, the hours when he locked himself in The Brown Study were her most productive. It was considerably easier to answer his correspondence, pay his bills, organize his library, and make a clean copy of the latest pages of his manuscript when he was not constantly buzzing around. Nevertheless, she knew that, relieved though she now was, in a month or two she would begin to miss him, begin almost to long for the day he would be finished—that first jubilant, attentive, loving day of idleness, when he would bundle her and the children outside for a romp in the fields or a long botanical walk through the woods. By all appearances he seemed to hate the writing life; but he needed to write, she supposed, so that he could occasionally feel by contrast the joys of not writing, of not having to write. Still, sometimes she wished he wrote short stories.

  She sent the children outside with the nurse and both maids and luxuriated, for nearly five minutes, in the silence and freedom of solitude. Then she returned to the library and resumed her hunt through that morning’s newspapers for any mention of her husband’s new novel. Distantly and soothingly, like the ticking of an old grandfather clock or the dripping of a faucet, came the sound of the novelist’s regular, agitated pacing.

  But Mr. Gawfler, as the reader knows, was not hatching a new novel; he was reluctantly but with scrupulous honesty convincing himself that his deduction was correct—that he was indeed in love with Mrs. Brewler. Whenever his arguments lost coherence, flying apart into so many fragments of excitement and dismay, he dragged himself back to facts. It was true, at least, that she was in love with him. She had said as much—had she not? “I love your mind,” she had said. But what was he if not his mind? To say “I love your mind” was to say “I love your soul,” or “I love your you.” So she loved him. She loved him! Panic swept through his body—and he assumed that this was reciprocation. He felt ill, and supposed that this was love.