May 17, 7.28 a.m.
2nd day off from the store, very welcome. Tuesday is my Sunday. Hoping for quiet, if not for rest. Yesterday was a six hour symphony of pressure washing from the building next door. Too bad it’s not one of those “man fries egg on pavement” days because you could eat off their parking lot. Whoever the worker — and if ever there was a job for which one could not be paid too much, it would be pressure washing — was extremely thorough, a quality I’d admire under most under other circumstances. Every 90 minutes or so, he’d take a little break — blessed quiet — and watch the asphalt dry, study his handiwork, locate the flaws, then rev anew his Satanic mill. Stood on my balcony and watched him hard at it, blasting away at every little spot, Lady MacBeth but with a roaring compressor. “Oily smudge remaining in the northwest sector,” I trilled out, benefiting from my elevated vantage point; if he heard, he gave no sign.
Exciting development on the domestic front, a propos. Leaflets were delivered to each of our doors yesterday, advising that a balcony expert — construction and maintenance, not decorating — is going to be on site on Thursday and any of us who are having structural issues with our tiny outcrops should make them known. This was the first I’d heard of a creeping peste de balcon that might require third party advice and possibly costly intervention. I hastily drafted a note advising that I have lived here for almost four years and not once has anyone stood underneath mine and sung Deh, vieni alla finestra while plucking the mandolin, which strikes me as being more than a tad problématique. Perhaps I’ll stay my hand when it comes to hitting “send” with that missive. Why there’s so little tolerance of irony at time in the world when we need it the most is a mystery.
Restless night. Repetitive anxiety dream from which I’d wake, would will it to go away, but it would start up again directly I closed my eyes, loudly insistent, like Mr. Pressure Washer bending again to his task. It was the “double booking” nightmare, a classic. I’d agreed, apparently, to two public speaking requests, both on the same day, at the same time, but in different cities: one in Toronto, one in Ottawa. The invitations to off-gas before an audience — about what, exactly, I couldn’t tell you —had come from two friends whom I have — in real, waking life, I mean — reason to believe I’ve disappointed. (Note to self: address this deficiency.) How could I extricate myself from this self-painted corner without further aggravating the hurt? The problem just kept re-asserting itself, over and over over, but no solution was forthcoming. It was as dull as it was frustrating, and is dull in the telling, too. Which is the way with most dreams; my dreams, I mean to say.
Here, with dull dreams in mind, I divert to gaze briefly upon Mavis Gallant’s (MG) short story “Bernadette” which appeared in The New Yorker, January 12, 1957. Nora and Robbie are in a rocky road stretch of their marriage due, in part, to the pregnancy of their maid, Bernadette.
“She said, ‘Robbie, can I talk to you?’ Reluctant, he looked away from his book. She said, ‘I just wanted to tell you about a dream. Last night I dreamed you died. I dreamed that there was nothing I could do to bring you back, and that I had to adjust all my thoughts to the idea of going on without you. It was a terrible, shuddering feeling.’ She intended this to be devastating, a prelude to the end. Unfortunately, she had had this dream before, and Robbie was bored with it. They had already discussed what it might mean, and he had no desire to go into it now.”
Maybe having read, yesterday, during the pressure washing business, about Nora’s unsuccessful dream was in part responsible for my own oneiric treadmill. I thank the very fine writer Sara O’Leary for putting in my paws the willow wand that witched that well. Responding to Sunday’s diary entry, about Eudora Welty and MG and childhood reading, she kindly placed this in the comment section:
I very clearly remember the first word I read in the sense of the shape of the letters and the meaning suddenly converging. The thrill of it! And one of the things that I read when I was a child of about 8 was a Mavis Gallant story included in an anthology of fiction from The New Yorker that was on the bookshelf in my parents' living room. It was an article of faith for me to read every book I could physically get my hands on that time and I didn't let it bother me how very little I understood of what I read. The story was "Bernadette" and just about everything in it was foreign and unfathomable to me--the pregnancy, the religion, the Quebec setting. Yet what I took away was that here was a Canadian story in the pages of this New Yorker book (I don't think I knew about the magazine!), and that the story was written by a Canadian, and that somehow this meant that I too could write books some day. So I've been forever grateful to "our" Mavis.
And I am grateful to Sara. Thank you.
Where were we? Oh, yes. Bad sleep. There’s usually a reason for it, and not one that needs much excavating to haul to the surface. A visit to the bar such as the one I made last night is not a conduit to somnolence, as I ought to know by now. Had a beer, but I don’t think that was unrest’s bitter root. It had more to do, I think, with the long talk I had with a fellow who has done well for himself as an independent trader: stocks, bonds, commodities, whatever it is traders trade. Hockey players. I have no idea, I’ve not been well-served by my willful ignorance, irresponsible, of anything number reliant, and that includes money. Even a dyed-in-the-wool innumerate such as myself can’t help but be shocked, as is everyone I know, by the across-the-board price rises that are second only to the weather as a talking point. A few times a week at the store, new shelf tags will be issued for 50, maybe 60 products. The price points they mark are never traveling south, nor are the increments ever minor. Those pots of jam are going up by two bucks, not a quarter. One supplement stocked in the health area, something that promises to enhance vigour in men over 40, was worth 36 dollars at 8 a.m. and 63 dollars — a neat numeric reversal, yes — at 8.05. No one needs vigour that badly is my opinion, not that anyone is asking.
My high finance drinking buddy, who’s paid close attention to the markets since he graduated with an English degree in 1979 and immediately began working as a gold trader, who has been in the trenches and has a good grasp of what happens there, was candid in saying how unusually worrying he finds our present inflationary trend, how concerned he is about shortages, famine, and not just on distant shores. A trip to the bar shouldn’t be sobering, but this one was. Part of this conversation was another of the regulars, a young, very lovely, very bright woman who came to Canada from Romania as a high school student. I’d told her before that she bore a striking resemblance to MG who, on her mother’s side, had Eastern European ancestry. I happened to have with me my copy of MG’s Paris Notebooks, from 1986 and, to prove the point, held up for all to see the author photograph. Everyone agreed: a dead ringer, adjusted for age.
Here’s a phone-made facsimile of that photo, which is by John Mastromonaco. (I hope he’ll be tolerant of this lumpen duplication, if ever he sees it.) My Romanian acquaintance works in the film industry, and as I made my way home, a two block journey,I turned all these things over in what little remains of my brain and kept hearing an echo of something I’d recently read, something about MG and the film industry and the month of May. Somewhere on my table, see above, I’d find the answer, I was sure. In due course, I did. Bear in mind that this was yesterday, May 16. The source was Antaeus Magazine, Autumn, 1988 - I mentioned it in a post made last week. MG is among the writers who contributed journal writings. This is from what MG wrote on May 16, 1987.
John Mastromonaco, the photographer cited above, is a filmmaker, as it turns out, working mostly a producer of high-end commercials. Might he be the godson to whom she refers, her lunch companion? I must find out. Paris in May in 1987 was cold, and so is the Vancouver May of 2022. It was aberrantly chilly on the Left Bank in May of 1968, too, when MG kept her detailed, day-by-day account of the student uprising. Then, as she would again in 1987, she wrote about how the heat had been reignited in her apartment building, about how the concierge told her it would stay on for as long as the oil lasts. Fuel shortages were much in the news then, as now. On May 20, 1968, MG wrote about the hoarding epidemic that had seized the city.
She adds, “During the Suez crisis, everyone bought candles and salt. Candles for power failures, and salt because of an extraordinary rumour that it protects one from radioactivity. You were supposed to fill the tub with salt and water and pop the whole family in the tub and be saved.”
I probably shouldn’t have read this before I went to bed and mounted the tedious treadmill of my dreams. I was already unsettled by my conversation with the trader, whose informed forecast is bleak. It reminded me, too, of something I saw in the store a few days back that off-kiltered me. I passed through the baking section just as a colleague was helping a shopper retrieve salt from a lower shelf: expensive, coarse to the point of nuggety sea-salt. She numbered the bags, Baa Baa Black Sheep style. Eight, nine, ten, I heard her count as she plopped them, one after the other, into the customer’s wheely-cart. Why on earth, I wondered, would anyone buy so much salt? I knew this shopper, a little, had helped her on a few occasions. She’s Eastern European, Russian I think, elderly, and very bent over. To go out, to navigate the aisles, can’t be easy. I admire her tenacity, her persistence. But why so much salt? What does she know that I don’t?
Edmund White, in his Paris memoir Inside a Pearl, writes about MG. “The last time I saw her she was completely bent over like a hairpin, but she straightened herself out and had lunch with several of us at the Select.” I admire her tenacity and persistence, too. Osteoporosis, diabetes, financial difficulties, housing worries, bureaucratic pestering over resident permits: these were the plagues of her late life. But she kept on. I think, often, and never without astonishment, about her industry, the sheer volume of what she produced. The 120 short stories, the journalism, the criticism, the massive, unpublished book on Dreyfus, her diaries, likewise unpublished, and a vast, vast correspondence. To her friends, to her social life, to conversation, she gave as much energy and attention as she did to her formal output. She kept up with people she cared about. Floating around the world are thousands and thousands of letters in her fluent hand. A friend who visited MG towards the end of her life, when she was very unwell and her accustomed acuity no longer a given, told me how she would sit at her table and make the motion of writing, it was that much a part of her quotidian, her purpose, her practice, that much the output of not only her mind, but her body: an animating current of the proprioceptors.
Well. Enough. Unbelievably, Mr. Pressure Washer has returned. He’s hard at it. What can he possibly have left undone? Why should I suffer for his perfectionism? I’m outta here. To the library, I think. I just don’t have enough, you know, books. Scarcity is upon us. I don't want to be caught out. Thanks for reading, xo, B
I've missed your voice. So happy to have stumbled across it again. Thank you for sharing this..it made be smile on a horrible, no good, very bad day.
I’m new to your Oh MG diaries. Love them. Examining your book pile, I note two copies of Home Truths. Is one signed, or is this an example of hoarding before the impending apocalypse? Will her books be useful as currency? You may consider hoarding Camus as well, if you can find any, as there seems to be a run on his books. Paper Hound was cleaned out, and likewise when I visited The Other Nearby Bookstore, the one you don’t want to be in when the ‘Big One’ strikes, the proprietor was heard to mention ‘there had been a sustained assault on the Camus section’ and indeed the shelf labelled ‘Camus’ was empty. However, some fine copies of MG’s books were acquired at both shops, but I left some for you, if you need to add to your pile.