all the social virtues, charm is, in the end, the most unrewarding. And compared to goodness, real goodness, or the unmovable self-abnegation my daughter Norah practises, charm is nothing but crumpled tissue paper, soiled from previous use.
Sincerity? No. Sincerity’s over. Sincerity’s lost whatever edge it had. It’s fine, fine matter but wasted on the press, who all grew up post-Holocaust, devoted readers of Mad Magazine, and wouldn’t recognize a bar of willed innocence if it came wrapped in foil.
Nor will I ever again be pointlessly, endlessly polite. I got over that two years ago when I did my author tour. It seems I’ve lost, like a stream of pebbles leaving my hand, the kind of endurance that professional courtesy demands: suck in your breath, let your face go numb, listen to the interviewer’s questions, register optimally, let your breath out, evaluate the feelings of those who depend on you (agent, publisher, editor, that nice Sheila person who does publicity, and of course Danielle Westerman), and perform again and again like the tuned-up athlete you are, the fit physical specimen that each new book demands, then move on to the next task.
Mrs. Winters, who has just translated The Middle Years, the unfolding memoir of Holocaust survivor Danielle Westerman, is a woman of grace and charm, whose thick brown hair is arranged into a bun. Putting down her coffee cup, she shrugs off her beige raincoat and…
I’ve entered early middle age now and I have a nineteen-year-old daughter who lives on the street. I no longer require a reputation for charm, those saving lilac shadows and contours. Maybe I never did. I won’t—not now—tuck the ends of my sentences into little licks of favour, and the next time a journalist pins me down with a personal question, trolling for information—Tell me, Mrs. Winters, how are you able to balance your family and professional life?—I will stare back hard with my newly practised stare. How do I balance my life? Tinted eyebrows up. Just what kind of inquiry is this? Wouldn’t you prefer, Mrs. Winters, to pursue you own writing rather than translate Dr. Westerman’s work? Please, not that again. How did you and your husband meet? What does he think of your writing?
I will in the future address my interviewer directly, and say with firmness: “This interview is over.” There is nothing to lose. Rude and difficult people are more likely to be taken seriously. Curmudgeons are positively adored. I’ve noticed this. Even the fascinatingly unknowable earn respect.
And when I read in the paper tomorrow that “Mrs. Winters looked all of her forty-three years” and that “Mrs. Winters with her familiar overbite was reluctant to talk about her work schedule,” I will want to phone the editor and complain bitterly. This from the pen of a small, unattractive man, almost entirely lipless beneath a bony, domineering nose, sweating with minor ambition, head tilted like something carved out of yellow wax.
He interviewed me in a cappuccino bar in mid-Toronto. A chilly, stooped, round-headed man in his thirties or forties—it was hard to tell—slow to smile, pathetically in need of human attention, thinking his superior thoughts. Fluff on his shoulders begged to be picked off. I, on the other hand, was wearing a soft jade jacket of cashmere lined with silk, which represented a rare splurge on my part, but I could be sure this man would overlook this garment with its crystal buttons and mandarin collar and concentrate instead on my drab raincoat, beige, and not quite pristine at the cuffs. In print he will be certain to refer to my chignon as a bun. It’s taken me years to learn to do a glossy little chignon—I can get my hair brushed back and securely pinned up each morning in a mere two and a half minutes and I consider my coiffure one of my major life accomplishments. I really mean this.
Sheila from publicity had filled me in before the interview, and I felt the information packet hovering; what to do with it? This young/youngish man was the newly appointed books columnist at Booktimes. He was well known for holding pious opinions about the literature of the Great North, about his own role as advocate of a diverse new outpouring of Canadian voices, the post-colonial cry of blaming anguish. The stream of current fiction about middle-class people living in cities was diluting the authentic national voice that rose from the landscape itself and—
Oh, shut up, shut up.
Cappuccino foam dotted the corners of his undistinguished mouth. And just one more question, Mrs. Winters—
Of course he didn’t call me Reta, even though there might be only a year or two between us. The “Mrs.” gave him power over me: that vexing r rucking things up in the middle and making one think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins. He was the barking terrier, going at Mrs. Winters’s ankles, shaking out his fur and asking me to justify myself, wanting me to explain the spluttering, dying, whimpering bonfire of my life, which I would not dream of sharing. He seemed to forget he was interviewing me about Danielle Westerman’s new book.
I understand you’re working on a second novel, said he.
Well, yes.
Takes nerve.
Uh-huh.
Actually—actually, well, he had a novel on the go himself.
Really! What a surprise!
At the end of the hour he did not ask for the bill. I asked for the bill. “I’ll just put it on my Visa,” I said, breaking a tenuous breadth of silence. I announced this with all the majesty I could muster over a vinyl table, like a grande dame, adding twenty years to my age, and feeling the vowels shifting in my beautifully moulded throat. Such dignity; I surprised myself with my own resonance, and I may have managed a pained smile, displaying, no doubt, that famous overbite. He turned off the tape recorder at the word “Visa.”
He had two young children at home, he said. Christ, what a responsibility, although he loved the little bastards. One of them was quite, quite gifted; well, they both were in their separate ways. But the work of raising kids! Never enough time to read the books he had to review, books all over the house with little markers in them, books he would never finish. So much was expected, and of course, like all journalists, he was underpaid.
Oh, shut up.
They also expected him to do a feature on the weekend.
Uh-huh?
And last week he’d actually broken the MacBunna story.
Really? Macumba? Marimba?
Congratulations, said Mrs. Reta Winters from Orangetown.
Thanks.
I should be getting on my way, I said. My parking meter. A lunch date. A long drive home.
I understand you and your family live in a lovely old house near Orangetown…
And then, slyly: I understand one of your daughters now lives in Toronto and…
I’ve been here before. There is something about having an established family, a long-lasting spousal arrangement, three daughters in their teens, a house in the country, a suggestion of impermeability, that draws the curiosity of others so that they can, as Tom says, probe with probity.
But no, this man across the table will not be feeding on my flesh, nor will his colleagues—though one can tell that he has no colleagues; there is no possibility of colleagues. He has no context for friends or co-workers, though there are the kids and there’s the wife; he’s referred to her three times now. Nicola. She has her professional life, too, he tells me, as though the matter were in dispute.
I can’t resist. “Does Nicola—is she a journalist too?”
“Journalist?”
