The Dilettantes (13 page)

And Victoria—well, Alex considered her with fresh eyes. They were alone at the table together.
Could I?
he thought.
Is it possible?
(Tyson briefly appeared in his thoughts like a Jedi counsel, chanting, “Cock, cock, cock.”) Victoria was shrill, yes. But not without a certain kind of litheness that in someone with a better personality might be called
grace
. Her eyes were sharply green, her face round and inviting. She was wearing a lacy tank top with no bra underneath. Her breasts were small and well-shaped enough that he guessed she didn’t need to wear one very often. All in all, she passed the swimming pool test with flying colours.

And she
had
invited him over here in the first place. That had to count for something.

“So, Victoria,” he said to her, “I was wondering, are you, at all—do you have a boyfriend?”

Just as the words left his mouth, Paul and (T)Edd(y)ie arrived back at the table, teapot in hand.
Oh no
.

“Oh my god, are you
hitting on me
right now?” Victoria said. Her jaw actually fell open an inch or two. “That is so adorable!”

“What’s adorable?” asked Paul, sitting down between the two of them.

“Alex just asked me if I had a boyfriend!” she said.

“No way!” Paul said. “Alex, you dog!”

No, no, no
, he thought, face mashed hard into the palms of his hands.
What am I doing here? I have an entire screenplay to write, for fuck’s sake
.

Across the table, he heard (T)Edd(y)ie, who evidently hadn’t been paying attention, ask everyone what it was they were all laughing about. And Nintendo guy could be heard finally emerging from the bathroom—
he’d
need filling in, too.

Pull the ripcord. Get me out of here
.

The next day, Alex dropped by the
Peak
offices to print out his Shakespeare project on his way to Eli’s office. It was finished, it was ironic, and Alex hated it. His dream of artfully skewering Hollywood had withered and died on the vine, right next to all of his other fancy writerly ideas. What he was about to turn in had eventually been fired off in an hour and a half. It was no better than an overlong
Mad Magazine
parody.
Blechsure for Blechsure
.

Alex half-nodded to Steve, who was perched at one of the main computers, scanning his email for anything he could turn into content for the coming issue. It was, he claimed, the usual wasteland. Then Steve started chuckling to himself.

“What’s so funny?” Alex asked.

“This guy thinks the
SFU
motto is
French,”
Steve said, gesturing. “He wrote a letter about doing your homework or whatever, and he says at the end that
nous sommes prêts
is fucking French.” He laughed again, louder. “I’m keeping it! I’m using it!”

After a pause, Alex said, “It is French.”

“What?”

“It
is
French. It means
we are ready.”

“I know what it means,” Steve said. “But is … are you sure?”

“Yes. What language did you think it was in?”

“Man, I don’t know. Latin?”

Alex made a scoffing noise.

“What? Come on. You’ve got to admit it sounds a little Latin-y.”

Getting up from his own computer, Alex thought,
Everyone knows you make it all up, man. You don’t have to keep talking up your imaginary writers
.

He stood beside the printer as it spat out his pages. The editors all made liberal use of it for anything they needed a hard copy of, school-related or otherwise. They justified the extra cost to the newspaper by reminding themselves of how underpaid they were, given the hours and workload, and the fact that paper literally grew on trees.

A counter-argument could be made, however, that since their paycheques came from student fees, and given the quality of the product, as well as their readers’ middling satisfaction with it, that, really, they were making
too much
money.

Alex hoped the board would not come to the latter conclusion. But since all financial matters were in its hands, he just crossed his fingers that the math would continue to work out in his favour. His only job was to take care of the paper itself. And the readers. And also the writers. But how? Was it even possible to do all three at once? He mulled this over while pirating twenty-five pages plus the cost of ink.

“So I looked it up,” Steve said, looking over. “You’re right: French.”

“I know. That’s why I laughed at you.”

“It’s too bad, though. If the guy was wrong—”

“But he’s not. Right? You get that?”
And “the guy” is you. We all know it. Why Suze would want to sleep with a moron like you is a mystery
.

“Fuck. Yes. I’m saying if he
was
wrong, and if I ran the letter anyway, we could put one of those brackety note things after the mistake. You know, where it’s like we’re saying, ‘Look how this writer fucked up. We’re not going to fix it, even though we totally could.’ I forget what those’re called.”

“You mean a
sic?”

“Yeah! But inside those, um, square brackets. What are those ones called?”

“Brackets.”

“No, the square ones.”

“Those are brackets. You’re thinking of parentheses.”

“Oh.”

“There are also braces, which look like old-timey parentheses. Nobody uses them anymore.”

“Yeah, um. Anyway.
Sic
s are hilarious.”

Privately, Alex agreed with him. The
sic
was indeed the truest, most merciless arrow in an editor’s quiver. If an exclamation mark was like laughing at your own joke, a
sic
was laughing at a joke someone else didn’t even know they were making. Like a whisper at an art gallery, it quietly announces,
Psst—this is all bullshit
.

He and Tracy had joked about it a bunch of times. Before she disappeared, that is.

Instead, Alex said, “You ever hear of a
stet?
I like those, too.”

“Yeah, Tracy writes that on my stuff sometimes. Usually next to a big scribble. Isn’t that the same thing as
sic?”

“Kind of,” Alex said. “Sic means the writer fucked up.
Stet
means the editor fucked up. Both are from the Latin—unlike the
SFU
motto. Out of curiosity, who wrote that letter of yours?”

Steve clicked around—a little overdramatically, Alex thought. “Trent Sip,” he said finally. “Trent ‘Whalebone’ Sip.”

Liar. Liar. Liar
. “He included a nickname?” Alex said. “That’s weird.”

“I guess. I’ve seen weirder.”

This kind of shit doesn’t help the paper. It doesn’t help readers. And it definitely doesn’t help writers. Why have we put up with it for so long?
“And what’s your full name again? You have a middle name, right?”

“Yeah. Earl. What does that have to do with anything?”

“Steve Earl Botwin,” Alex repeated. “So formally, I guess it’d be Stephen, right? Stephen Earl Botwin.” He repeated it aloud a few more times. “Quite a name, that is. It’s—elastic.”

Steve kept clicking around. “You’re one to talk, Castlevania.”

They both stood for a second in the haze of the computer screen. Steve squirmed a little in his seat. Alex let his thoughts drift to the pile of
Top Gun
–inspired gibberish he was about to hand in for a grade, and then to Tracy. Someone should really check in on her.

“Did you hear about this board meeting?” Steve asked.

Alex snapped back with a twinge. “Yeah,” he said. The email had been sent at 2:00 a.m. that morning—meaning that Rick had been up at least that long, dealing with the
The Peak’
s various money hemorrhages.

The meeting was scheduled for that evening. At 6:00 p.m. sharp, after the other students had retreated to their cozy homes and left the
SFU
campus grey and desolate, its right angles soaked in streaks of rainwater, the
Peak
board would decide the fate of its ungrateful children—who would, in turn, paw their stubbly chins and kick rocks no matter what.

SFU
: Sent to Bed Without Dinner Since 1965.

It was even worse than they thought.

According to Rick,
The Peak
was running out of gas. If the newspaper were one of those old coal-powered trains, now would be the time to start throwing luggage and furniture into the furnace, all in the name of maintaining a little forward momentum.

And yet it wasn’t that the
Metro
had put a huge dent in
The Peak’
s pick-up rate after all. Apparently students weren’t omnivores so much as scavengers, willing to ingest whatever print media was closest at hand. Usually that did mean the daily, with its ever-present green pillboxes. But not always.

No, the real problem had deeper roots. And it wasn’t complicated: advertisers, most of them on-campus businesses, hated
The Peak
. They’d hated it for years, it turned out—its delusions of grandeur, not to mention its patronizing anti-capitalist pose—but until now they’d never had an alternative. As soon as the slightest wedge of competition forced itself in, virtually all of them jumped ship.

Monopolies, said the member representing alumni, tend to work like that.

As Rick explained to the others, his voice scary-calm, a metal ruler serving as his makeshift pointer, what had to happen next was the equivalent of emergency surgery. There were tough decisions to
be made at every level of the entire operation. Should they drop their page counts? Cut wages, or entire sections? Switch to online-only? Nothing was off the table at this point. And while Rick appreciated that each member had the right to disagree with his assessment, the fact was—now swatting the ruler against his palm with a cleaver’s
thwack
—that unless something drastic was done right away, pretty soon there wouldn’t
be
a rest-of-the-board to have these disagreements with.

The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees on the spot. Everyone felt mildewy and uncomfortable in their seats. Rachel and Suze, the two staff representatives, felt so unprepared for this news that they couldn’t muster a single argument in their defence between them. Even the usual row of pizzas sat untouched for most of the meeting, until one judicious board member pointed out that if they were thrown away, the list of unnecessary expenses would only grow a little longer. The slices were folded up in jagged pieces of paper towel and stuffed into pockets and handbags to be eaten, maybe a little guiltily, later on.

One day not long before the Christmas break, Alex worked up the nerve to call Tracy. He’d heard reports around the office that Dave had whimperingly fled the scene for good—retreating to his parents’ house with a hastily packed suitcase and an armful of lab beakers and desert-island records.

After a rambling explanation of how he found her number in the staff directory, Alex asked Tracy how she was doing. All he heard back through the line was a raspy chuckle. She was taunting him, he thought, daring him to give up on this half-hearted charity project. He should just quit. Yet despite his brain’s red alert, he plowed ahead and insisted they go book shopping for the upcoming semester together. Alex made a point of suggesting Bibliophile, which was Tracy’s favourite used bookstore, as well as only a short walk from her house.

He got there early, battling with an unruly scarf. Taking in the Commercial Drive foot traffic, Alex had no idea if he should mention the cause of Tracy’s withdrawal from collegiate society. Maybe that was the tactfulness she needed right now. Or maybe she’d have no time for any pretences at all, and so he should rip the bandage clean off—refer to Dave directly, and by name—right away. Both options made a lot of sense and at the same time none at all. He stood in front
of the store for a few minutes, scratching his neck through the wool of the scarf, wondering if even waiting outside for her was an overly polite gesture. She might think it weird, or even sexist in its latent need to protect. Too many possibilities. He went in, the overhead bell chiming as he kicked his shoes clean on a worn-down doormat. Only then did he become truly aware of how nervous he was, how much he really did want to help, and how labyrinth-lost he was trying to navigate all the attendant subtleties of heartbreak. He thought back to their last real conversation, and the poor deluded look on Tracy’s face when she still thought Dave was just taking her out for a romantic dinner.
God
, Alex thought,
what am I doing here?

Bibliophile was one of Alex’s favourite bookstores, too. The tall shelves, jutting in and out like edges on a huge puzzle piece, made for plenty of quiet corners in which to browse without having to worry about anyone eavesdropping on your taste. It was a humbly made-up store, clean and welcoming. A sign in the window said they only bought “gently used” books, and you could tell they meant it. Classical music from
CBC
Radio 2 provided a soundtrack that was both key to the experience and easy to tune out. The store charged a little more, but that extra dollar functioned like insurance: here you were guaranteed not to find dried blood, or a pubic hair, inside anything you bought.

They also had a full shelf called Anchors and Cannons, devoted to seafaring fiction, which brought Alex endless delight, even if he’d never so much as cracked open any of the books that got shelved there.

He was only just taking stock of the new-arrival wall, marveling at the fleet of current event/political tomes that, only months old, were already rubbing up against their expiry dates, when the bell went off again and in walked Tracy. She looked as though she’d been fighting off cabin fever, or maybe just been kept awake for several consecutive weeks.

“What the fuck, Belmont?” she said, shoving him roughly and sending him back on his heels. “You don’t even wait outside for a lady anymore?”

Shit
. He should have waited. He knew it. “Sorry, yeah. Sorry. I was going to, but—”

She waved him off and unbuttoned her jacket. “I’m just kidding.”

“Oh. Well, good.” Apparently Tracy had emerged from her breakup with an even dryer sense of humour than she’d gone in with. This invitation was way too premature—they were just colleagues, and here he was, trying to push a friendship on her that she obviously didn’t have time for. She was as unequipped for human interaction as he was. They stood there for a second in conversational stalemate. Radio 2 droned on in the background like a posh fruit fly. “So should we …” Alex began, with no clue how he was going to end the sentence.

“Start crossing some of these books off our lists? Thought you’d never ask.” Tracy smiled demurely, sealing off the Question of Dave for the time being. “You did make a list, didn’t you?”

Alex drew a jet-black Moleskine notebook from his inner jacket pocket. “I did, actually.”

“Excellent.” She moved swiftly past him and waded into the stacks beyond.

Half wanting to give her some space, and half falling into his own bookstore trance, Alex let her go. Instead he moved along his familiar trajectory, alphabetically through the fiction section. Running his hand along the distinctive ridges and textures of the spines, he felt his head automatically cock to one side. He imagined his own paltry collection at home swelling and multiplying. Piles and piles of paperbacks. Swallowing his desk, lining his walls, surrounding his bed like castle walls. Never mind his poverty. This was an irresistible daydream, and one in which he wanted to bask for a little while longer.

Eventually he made his way to his touchstones: Bellow, Murakami, Roth, Saramago. Alex liked to check in with these guys (and they
were
all guys) as if they were old friends. It came from a basic curiosity about the economics of used bookstores—whether having these books in stock suggested a spike in his pals’ popularity, or a drop. Was giving them a spot on the shelf the stores’ way of responding to demand? Or were they desperate to unload some dead weight?

Picking up a bright orange copy of
Portnoy’s Complaint
, Alex fanned the pages with one thumb. To him, there was no better proof of a life fulfilled than seeing your name on a cover. No matter how slim or underappreciated the rest of the book was, this was a concrete marker of one’s legacy—even the bare fact of one’s existence. Books outlived everybody. Plus they were a renewable resource, able to be re-opened and re-experienced at the drop of a hat. Whatever meagre amounts of love or hate Alex gave to this world would fade, and soon. Maybe they were gone already. But a book could be his way of making a permanent mark on the world. It could be his cannon, he thought, thinking back once again to the niche sections behind him. His anchor, too.

He wandered down to the P/Q junction to check in on another of his standbys. Alex hadn’t read most of this guy’s books (in fact, this was true of every author on his mental checklist); he admired their dense, world-building, tail-swallowing qualities, but even then mostly in theory. No, the kinship he felt for Pynchon owed more to the man’s reputation as a recluse, which let thousands of kids just like Alex fill in the gaps, each according to his own particular moral palette, the same way sons did absentee fathers. Combing the shelves at Bibliophile this time, he was met with a dead end. Nothing. His gaze shot right into the threadbare Qs before he even quite realized it.

But as he reversed course a name caught his eye, one he’d only ever noticed glancingly, subconsciously. It was the one that almost
always closed out the P section if there weren’t any of Pynchon’s paranoia-soaked doorstops kicking around: Barbara Pym.

He pulled out the paperback, which was primly designed but with pages yellowed from age, and scoured the back cover for clues. Who was this woman? Alex had no idea. Yet he’d probably cursed under his breath a dozen times upon seeing one of her books sitting there in lieu of his beloved Thomas P. Probably the only reason his brain had registered her name at all was because of the slight Marvel Comics connection.
Hank Pym, founding member of the Avengers and the world’s first wife-beating superhero
.

Maybe this female Pym was an amazing talent, Alex thought. Maybe she was lucid and hilarious, with big ideas and juicy dialogue, ahead of her time and now criminally forgotten. She could’ve been essential reading fifty years ago, for all he knew. Maybe she’d even had a book banned—for speaking
too much
truth, too clearly. She could well turn out to be Alex’s all-time favourite writer. And this whole time all he’d associated her with was a feeling of mild disappointment at not finding that copy of
V
. that he wouldn’t have bought anyway.

But there was an unpleasant subtext to the Pym/Pynchon arrangement. Even if Alex were to somehow distil all of his ideas onto the page, inflating his anecdotes to the right levels and avoiding all of the embarrassing snares that first-time novelists so often get tangled up in, nobody in their right mind would ever buy his book. He was wrecked right out of the gate.

It was his last name: Belmont. His (as yet unwritten) book would inevitably be shelved immediately next to those of Saul Bellow. What self-respecting reader would look at the two of them, and then go with the untested, overwrought young punk? It was enough to make him close his laptop on the spot. Plus, anything he wrote would inevitably be compared to the Nobel laureate anyway, since Alex, like his
idol, had a habit of trying to capture the entire universe in every sentence. He didn’t need to give critics such a readymade way to phrase the insult.

Besides, what could he do to give his book even the hint of a fighting chance? Think of a hilarious title? Kidnap Chip Kidd and make him design a cover that could outshine the majesty of the all-black Penguin Classics? Should he switch to non-fiction, or sci-fi, just to get a fair shake in a different part of the store?

Alex remembered reading an essay that pointed out how sad it was that an innocent woman’s one-line obituary will read, “She was Timothy McVeigh’s mother.”

Well
, he thought,
for every titan of literature, there are two lesser writers who will forever be remembered as their bookends
.

He took the Pym novel with him and started consulting the real list in his notebook. A few minutes later he emerged with two of the six titles he’d written down—not a bad showing. Alex then went to find Tracy, who was wandering, in her own trance, along the opposite wall.

“Ready, then?” he asked, glancing at the stack of identically designed paperbacks—seven or eight at least—in her arms.

“Ondaatje,” she said, as if the man’s name were a curse word.

“Ah. Say no more.”

“Next semester is my CanLit pre-req. I put up a good fight, too, but I couldn’t escape it—or him. So I’m just going to buy up his whole damn catalogue and call it a day.”

Alex offered his condolences. “It happens to the best of us,” he said. For a moment he felt like they were a pair of grizzled World War
II
veterans comparing shrapnel wounds. “What about Atwood? Did you ever have to do her?”

“Handmaid’s Tale,”
she said. “Twice. You?”

“We read
Alias Grace
in 1st-year. Then later I signed up for a course on Homer—only to find out that the first five weeks would
be spent on Atwood’s feminist rewrite thing. I ran away at the first break and never looked back.”

While Tracy thumped her Ondaatje motherlode onto the front counter, Alex made one last detour to the poetry section. Behind him he heard the cashier whistle in admiration.

Alex didn’t read all that many poems, but this section spoke to him even more strongly than the fiction did. Here, every second volume had a massively satisfying title—something like
Works: 1913–49
, or, better still,
Collected Poems
. Yes, he felt, with that telltale Nabokovian spine tingle, these were the writers who truly
got it
. They understood the lightness that came with indexing absolutely everything in one’s desk drawers. These books of poems weren’t texts so much as actual lives, shrunken and collated. They dispelled loneliness; they transcended human failure.

Outside, Tracy asked, “So what’d you come up with?”

“Off the list? Virginia Woolf, and this copy of
Master and Margarita,”
Alex said, running his fingers along the cover. “Look at that. It’s a beauty.”

“Don’t you already have that?”

“Not this translation.”

“Is that for a class, too?” she said, pointing at the Pym paperback.

Alex shrugged. “No—just for fun, I guess. I heard she’s pretty good.” He switched his pile between hands, left to right and back again. “But it’s worked out pretty well, actually. For once I’ve got a bunch of novels to read this semester. It’ll be a nice note to go out on.”

“Right!” Tracy’s face brightened for a second. “This’ll be your last semester. I’d completely forgotten. How exciting.”

“I guess so.” Truthfully, Alex felt like his training wheels were coming off, and soon he’d have to back up all that talk about how they were only holding him back to begin with. Soon he’d be held accountable for every wobble.

“So are you done all your pre-reqs?”

“Yep,” he said. “I’m even taking an intro film course to celebrate. Figured I’d round out those breadth credits a little.”

“I did one of those in 1st-year,” Tracy said, nodding. “Is yours a ridiculous, the-history-of-all-movies-in-thirteen-weeks kind of thing?”

Alex said, sheepishly, “It’s a bit … dumber than that. Apparently we’re going to be the pilot program.”

“Dumber than
that?
Good luck.”

Now they came to that curiously unnamed part of a conversation where the current topic is on the wane, and a decision must be made either to wrap things up and say goodbye, or else broach something brand new—in which case, a change of scenery was also in order. Alex and Tracy had never hung out together outside of school before, and he still wasn’t sure if he should assume that this trip had broken down the barrier permanently.

He started to put his scarf back on, beginning his retreat. “Well, this was fun,” he said defensively. “If you ever want to—”

Tracy stuck her hip out and her arms went akimbo. “So that’s it, huh? You’re not even going to ask me about Dave? I was under the impression that this was all about shaking me out of some imagined stupor.”

“No, no, it is,” Alex said, moving a step closer. “I mean, I really was trying to help. I did need the books, but—I mean, that’s obviously not the point.” He took a breath and regrouped. “I just don’t think this stupor of yours is strictly imaginary. You know? We haven’t seen you around the office. You’re editing from home so much these days. I didn’t see you once during the spoof—and it actually turned out pretty funny, for once.
SFUrks Illustrated’
s swimsuit issue? I still can’t believe you let Keith Photoshop the president into that bikini.”