For that was the beginning, the middle and the end of Roger: Joseph Conrad, né Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 1857–1924. That was the one strand that twined through his whole existence, from age twelve to forty-nine, for longer than he had known his ex-wife or his kids. Only his parents could claim greater longevity. Roger was one of those lucky people who had found that he could make a living doing what he enjoyed. The author of his boyhood adventure stories in Indiana became the subject of his doctoral study at Oxford became his passport to a life in academia. Roger loved Conrad in ways that changed as he changed. So when he was young he sailed the sea in his armchair with
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’
with
Typhoon
, with
Tales of Unrest
, with
Victory
. Then he matured into
Lord Jim
, which in time he found strained and a little tiresome to teach, and into
The Secret Agent
. When I knew him, it was around the key insight of
Heart of Darkness
— too well known, too little understood — and around the monument that is
Nostromo
and around Conrad himself that his thoughts tended to collect. If there were politics and revolution in Roger’s life, they were only those he witnessed in
Nostromo
and
Under Western Eyes
. He derived his untested dislike of disorder from Conrad’s overtested dislike. Just as humour is absent in
Conrad, Roger rarely sought to see things in a humorous way, which is not to say that he was heavy, dour or cheerless, only that laughter was not an exit he favoured. He felt it was a weak catharsis. Roger was serious in a positive sense, as serious as life is serious. He was the first intellectual I met who had little use for irony.
As for the October Revolution that saved the downtown colleges, Roger simply said, “It happened. They wanted to close them down, some people disagreed, I happened to be master of S-M. I just followed along at the head of the parade.”
This is what intrigued me in Roger, that Conrad was The Word, The Book and The Way, though he would never say that. Roger taught other writers — the rest who delivered this century — and there was more to him than the books he had read. But being obdurately incapable of believing in God, I am interested in secular religions. Roger apprehended life through Conrad. Conrad was his idealized double. The choice of prophet was arbitrary — it could have been Kafka or Bach or Matisse or anarcho-syndicalism or Zionism or animal rights or baseball, all depending on what a twelve-year-old boy was doing one day — but it is this very arbitrariness that interests me, that we
choose
what thing, what god, to believe in and, thus limited, open ourselves up to the world.
When Roger and I walked the streets of Roetown, we turned a corner as if we were sailing around a bend in a tropical river. We might surprise a leopard lapping at the water’s edge, a jewel in a green setting. Or catch the sight and sound of savages dancing to the beat of tomtoms around an unrestrained Kurtz. Or come upon a calm citizen, of impassive expression, just as fearsome. Roger made me see that Roetown was not a quiet little Canadian backwater, but a Malay
River, where madness, breakdown and explosion were always possible.
I don’t think of Roger very often now, but he influenced me more than I realized. One of the few times that Tito hurt me was when he said that sometimes I had a tendency towards conservatism. I stood accused of the very thing I had accused Roger of, and was deeply upset. On the positive side, it was while I was with Roger that I wrote my first published story, the one about dentures, and that notions of art and meaning came together for me in a roughly coherent way. And we had great sex — I owe that to Roger too, moments of blazing carnality.
It was a coincidental yen for pecan pie that brought us together. That summer I had set myself to a rigorous work schedule: up at eight every day, and three pages of fiction before I could leave the house. Which was nonsense. I did get up at eight, but the three pages were always put off to the next day; for now I would prepare, work on the mural, fine-tune things. I suffered the creative paralysis that is the horror and torment of creators, but is of no interest to other people, who simply work and then enjoy life. I suppose I could have just started the bloody thing, just sat down and launched forth:
Hello! How are you? It is my great pleasure to meet you and to be your Christian guide to this novel. I am a sixth-generation mongrel, this is my village, Corto is my master and Christ is my Lord. We are in Portugal, a human unit of geography which I gather you will find illuminating. One thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine years have passed since He took upon Himself the burden of our sins. It is morning. As you can see, this is the main street of the village. The church is behind
you, to your left. We will visit it, be assured. There is something oh so special in it, the inspiration of my life. But wait! Don’t go! There is plenty of time yet, I assure you. Let your anticipation grow, let it torment you. The pleasure of satisfying it will be all the greater, your spirit will soar all the higher. Speaking of anticipation, I have been so excited at the prospect of meeting you, quite beside myself, really, that I haven’t had the peace of mind yet for my first shit of the day. So let me celebrate the time and place of our meeting with this small monument. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooh. Ahhhhhhh. Ohjustonemorepiece! Ah hhhhhhhh such rapture. Amen! Here, I’ll show you the village. Mark out our territory, so to speak. And you must meet the villagers. They are good, hard-working Catholics. When you have met them, after the awkward small talk, after the smiles and handshakes that you are so fond of, we will go to the church and I will leave you there in silence for twenty minutes or so. Then I will yelp you out of your praying and we will begin on the drama. The where, the how, the why. For it all starts with the priest. With the priest, and with the holy town of Fatima, which is beyond those high, savage mountains that you see to the west. You know about Fatima, of course? You don’t! Well, we must start with Fatima then. In the year of Our Lord 1917 — ah, here comes the barber. Barber. Barber, I say! Come meet our reader.
But I couldn’t. As soon as I got close to starting anything, I was beset by questions and hesitations. What I was about to
do was so important, so significant, that it always required further consideration. My spontaneity would fizzle. I would put off my oeuvre another day. Tomorrow at eight-thirty I would start, for sure. Meanwhile, in joyful anticipation of this, I would go for a walk and then read.
On just such a day, in mid-June, I think it was, in the early afternoon, I suddenly had the urge for the sweet crunch of pecan pie. There was a dessert cafe a short walk away, a quiet, pleasant place that served dozens of kinds of tea.
Roger was there. There was no one else — just him with a book, and the lazily busy waitress. Up till then I’d say he was an acquaintance. We greeted each other when we crossed paths, and we had had conversations here and there, a few one on one, but mostly in groups. He knew a few facts about me — my parents and Cuba, my former involvement in student politics, my philosophy major with interest in English lit — and I knew a few facts about him. I liked him, the way students can like their teachers, though I had never taken a course with him.
To the tintinnabulation of doorbells, I entered the cafe. He looked up and we said hello.
“What are you still doing here?” he asked.
“I’m spending the summer in Roetown.”
“I was tricked by the department into teaching a summer course on D.H. Lawrence.
Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, Kangaroo
— I can barely stand it.”
I smiled. I didn’t want to tell him why I was staying the summer.
“Please join me,” he added.
I ordered a slice of pecan pie and a pear-vanilla herbal tea.
“Have you read this?” he asked, holding up
Almayer’s Folly
.
“Yes.”
“Well, in my old age, this first novel is growing in my estimation. There’s this part here.…”
He showed me a short paragraph. There was a matter of punctuation he admired, a particularly apt use of semicolons. We talked about punctuation.
A close relationship starts when barriers begin to fall. The first that fell for me was age, the intimidating notion that Roger was over double my age. I had turned twenty-one only a few days before; he was forty-nine. Ruth was also much older than I, but with her it had been different. Right from the start, it hadn’t seemed to matter. Was it the foreign environment? That we were both women? Simply the way our personalities mixed? I don’t know — probably a mix of the three. With Roger, at first, I felt at every moment, in every exchange, the difference in years. It was a clear measure of our respective experience of life, of our maturity and wisdom. I had talked to him before with perfect confidence, but suddenly I was feeling tongue-tied and incoherent. I kept saying things and thinking right after, “Why did I say that?”
Age was erased with words. The more we talked that day, and in the ensuing days when we seemed to keep bumping into each other, the more I felt we were reaching a sort of equality, an easy osmosis of personalities. This had much to do with something I mentioned before: his lack of a penchant for irony. Roger took me seriously — and so I took myself seriously.
Quite early on, when we were still just friends, with no idea — at least on my part — that we were becoming anything else, I confessed to him that I was working on a novel. I hate the fact that I used that tone of voice, but that’s the way it came out, a confession. If
I
had been listening to myself, I
would have rolled my eyes. But Roger said, “Really?”, there was a pause and then he asked, “What’s it about?” I explained the broad outlines, the angle of narration, the splintering of Voice into voices, the theme of the strong sustaining belief, the relationship between ideals and their material symbols, but I cautioned him, protected myself, by saying that I was quite stuck, that I wasn’t so much working on a novel as wanting to work on one.
After a moment of reflection, he said, “I’ve never written a creative word in my life. Anything I’ve done has hung on the creativity of others. I’ve been a spectator of books, of my wife’s pregnancies, of my children growing up. Mind you, I have no regrets. I’m good at being a spectator. I demand a lot. But still, I’m a glorified traffic cop: I wave my hands at people in their big, powerful engines — this way! that way! — and they roar by while I stay still.” And he smiled at me, with a what-can-you-do shrug.
I showed him my office the next day. He looked closely, stretched to his tiptoes, bent down, sailed from source to lake. I hoped he didn’t notice the index cards about shit.
“Looks amazing. But you’re stuck, you say.”
“Completely. It’s in my head and on these walls and nowhere else. Certainly not on a page.”
“Well, it makes for a terrific sculpture.”
“Yeah.” A neutral yeah.
He looked at me. “There’s no point in being stuck. It gets you nowhere. If you’re really stuck, maybe you should destroy all this and start all over.”
A simple, bold idea that had never occurred to me.
It was not then, not even in the next week, but it was not very long after. It was surprisingly easy. Outside the house
there was a metal barrel that striking workers at the oatmeal factory had used as a fireplace during the winter. One moment my cards seemed as eternal as the Ganges, the next they were on fire in the barrel, along with much of the paint from the walls. The sun was so strong that day that I couldn’t see any flames, only index cards that convulsed as they turned black and vanished, giving off wisps of smoke. I was happy. I was free to start again.
When Roger came to my place the first time, Sarah was there and I said, “Sarah, you know Professor Memling, don’t you?”
“Hi, Sarah,” said Professor Memling.
“Hi, Roger,” said Sarah.
I felt a pang of jealousy, a silly pang of jealousy.
The click, the erotic click that flooded my system with adrenalin, took place in his office late one hot evening. After one of his rare laughs we were standing close to each other, a deliberate, unacknowledged closeness, a sort of open secret. I was smiling for no reason. Our eyes met and fled, met and fled. A hand of his was floating in the air, hovering near my shoulder. It landed. He kissed me. I brought my arms up around him.
Now that things were in the open, they could flow — and flow they did, did they ever. Within minutes of starting our kissing I had backed him down onto his small sofa, knelt between his legs, unzipped his pants and flopped out his tumescent penis. Roger had a handsome dick, straight, large but not too large, with a rich, warm complexion — and perpetually at attention in my presence. I sucked till it gushed. It was hot and slimy and tasted strange. Not the sort of thing I would buy at the supermarket in its ice-cream version, but in the
state of sexual animation I was in, a thrill to have erupt in my mouth — his dick
pulsated
.
We often did it in his office. It was a turn-on, not a necessity; his house wasn’t far. There was something deliciously salacious about doing it in a place that was so functional and public. Roger had his seminars in his office. It was big enough to accommodate nine students — seven on chairs, two on the sofa — and a professor in his comfortable swivel chair. That year I took his fourth-year Conrad course and I made a point of always sitting on the sofa, that very sofa on which later in the day I would lie naked, with Roger looming over me or kneeling with his head between my legs. During class he would display perfect equanimity, considering my questions and interventions with the same deliberation as he did those of other students. He would be egalitarian even in his eye contact, his asides, his peaks of enthusiasm. But at night he would complain to me about the discomfort of unwanted erections.
Roger lived on a street above and behind S-M, a bumpy strip of asphalt with no sidewalks that the city had laid atop a drumlin decades ago and forgotten since. In the quiet of this municipal amnesia the trees became enormous, the houses settled and nothing new happened except for the progressive fracturing of the road. One oak tree, dead set on reclaiming lost territory, had burst through the asphalt with so many rooty kneecaps that the road looked like the folds of an accordion. When I manoeuvred my way down the street on my bike I always thought of that line in Albee’s
Zoo Story:
“Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”