Len shows all of us his loopy grin once more. It makes it hard not to like the guy. His passions worn so plainly, so shamelessly, I find myself almost envying him.
Sitting beside Len’s nervous bulk, Angela looks small as a child. Part of this illusion is the result of her happening to occupy the largest chair in the room, a wing-backed lounger set so high the toes of her shoes scratch the floor. Other than this, what’s notable about Angela’s appearance is its lack of distinction. Even as I try to sketch her into my memory I recognize she has the kind of face that would be difficult to describe even a few hours from now. The angles of her features seem to change with the slightest shift, so that she gives the impression of being a living composite, the representative of a general strain of person rather than any person in particular.
Even what she says seems to evaporate as it drifts out into the room. Relatively new in the city, having arrived via "a bunch of different places out west". The only constant in her life is her journal. "Except it’s not
really
a journal,” she says, and makes an odd sound with her nose that might be a stifled laugh. "Most of it is made up, but some of it isn’t. Which makes it more fiction than, like, a diary, I guess."
With this, she stops. Slides back into the chair and lets it swallow her. I keep watching her after she’s finished. And though she doesn’t meet eyes with anyone else in the circle, I have the notion that she’s recording what everyone says just as deliberately as I am.
Next is Evelyn. The deadpan pixie in a biker jacket. I’m a little surprised to learn that she is
a grad student at the University of Toronto. It isn’t her youth. It’s the outfit. She looks more like Courtney Love when she first fell for Kurt than the fellowship winner who can’t decide between Yale, Cornell or Cambridge to do her Ph.D. Then the answer comes: her planned dissertation will be a study of "Dismemberment and Female Vengeance in the 1970s Slasher Film". I remember enough of university to know that such topics are best handled by those in costume.
We’re now all the way around to the latecoming giant. When Evelyn’s finished speaking, there’s a subtle positioning of our bodies to take him in, more an adjustment of antennae to pick up a distant signal than the directness required in making eye contact. Still, all of the circle can steal a look at him except for me. Given his proximity, I would have to turn round and tuck my leg under to see him straight on. And this is something I don’t want to do. It may only be the room’s unfamiliarity, the awkwardness in meeting strangers who share little other than a craving for self-expression. But the man sitting to my left radiates a darkness of a different kind from the night outside. A strange vacancy of sympathy, of readable humanness. Despite his size, it’s as though the space he occupies is only a denser form of nothing.
"And you?” Conrad White prompts him. "What brings you to our circle?"
The giant breathes. A whistling that comes up through his chest and, when exhaled, I can feel against the back of my hand.
"I was called,” he says.
"’Called’ in the sense of pursuing your destiny, I take it? Or perhaps a more literal calling?"
"In my dreams."
"You were summoned here in your dreams?"
"Sometimes—” the man says, and it seems like the beginning of a different thought altogether. "Sometimes I have bad dreams."
"That’s fine. Perhaps you could just share your name with us?"
"William,” he says, his voice rising slightly. "My name is William."
My turn.
I say my name aloud. The sound of those elementary syllables allows me to string together the point form brief on Patrick Rush. Father of a smart little boy lucky enough to take his mother’s looks. A journalist who has always felt that something was missing from his writing. (I almost say "life” instead of "writing", a near-slip that is as telling as one might think). A man who isn’t sure if he has something to say but who now feels he has to find out once and for all.
"Very good,” Conrad White says, a note of relief in his voice. "I appreciate your being so frank.
All
of you. Under the circumstances, I think it only fair that I share with you who I am as well."
Conrad White tells us that he has recently "returned from exile". A novelist and poet who was publishing in Toronto, back just before the cultural explosion of the late sixties that gave rise to a viable national literature. Or, as Conrad White puts it evenly (though no less bitterly), "The days when writing in this country was practiced by unaffiliated individuals, before it took a turn toward the closed door, the favoured few, the tribalistic." He carried on with his work, increasingly feeling like an outsider while some of his contemporaries did what was unimaginable among Canadian writers up to that point: they became famous. The same hippie poets and novelists that were in his classes at UofT and reading in the same coffee houses were now being published internationally, appearing as "celebrity guests” on CBC quiz shows, receiving government grants.
But not Conrad White. He was working on a different animal altogether. Something he knew would not dovetail neatly with the preferred subject matters and stylistic modes of his successful cohorts. A novel of "ugly revelations” that, once published, proved even more controversial than he’d anticipated. The writing community (as it had begun to regard itself) turned its back on him. Though he responded with critical counter-attacks in any journal or pamphlet that would have him, the rejection left him more brokenhearted than livid. It prompted his decision to live abroad. England, at first, before moving on to India,
southeast Asia, Morocco. He had only returned to Toronto in the last year. Now he conducted writing workshops such as these to pay his rent.
"I say ’workshops’, but it would be more accurate to speak of them in the singular,” Conrad White says. "For this is my first."
Outside, the snow has stopped falling. Beneath our feet the bass thud from The Fukhouse’s speakers has begun to rattle the windows in their frames. From somewhere in the streets of the market, a madman screams.
Conrad White passes a bowl around to collect our weekly fee. Then he gives us our assignment for next week. A page of a work-in-progress. It needn’t be polished, it needn’t be the beginning. Just a page of
something
.
Class dismissed.
I fish around for my boots by the door. None of us speak on the way out. It’s like whatever has passed between us in the preceding hour never happened at all.
When I get to the street I start homeward without a glance back at the others, and in my head, there’s the conviction that I won’t return. And yet, even as I have this thought, I know that I will. Whether the Kensington Circle can help me find my story, or whether the story is the Kensington Circle itself, I have to know how it turns out.
Emmie has Wednesday mornings off, so it’s my day to work from home and look after Sam on my own. Just four years old and he sits up at the breakfast table, perusing the Business and Real Estate and International News sections right along with me. Though he can hardly understand a word of it, he puts on a stern face—just like his old man—as he licks his thumb to turn the grim pages.
As for me, I comb the classifieds to see if Conrad White’s ad is still running, but can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps he’s decided that the one group who assembled in his apartment the night before will be all that he can handle.
Sam pushes the Mutual Funds Special Report away from him with a rueful sigh.
"Dad? Can I watch TV?"
"Ten minutes."
Sam retreats from the table and turns on a Japanimation robot laser war. I’m about to ask if he
wouldn’t mind turning it down when a short piece in the City section catches my attention.
A missing person story. The victim (is one a "victim” when only missing?) being one Carol Ulrich, who is presumed to have been forcibly taken from a neighbourhood playground. There were no witnesses to the abduction—including the woman’s son, who was on the swings at the time. Residents have been advised to be alert to any strangers "acting in a stalking or otherwise suspicious manner". While authorities continue their search for the woman, they admit to having no leads in the case. The story ends ominously with the police spokesperson stating that "activity of this kind has been shown to indicate intent of repeated actions of a similar nature in the future".
It’s the sort of creepy but sadly common item I would normally pass over. But what makes me read on to the end is that the neighbourhood in question is the one we live in. The playground where the woman was taken the same one where I take Sam.
"What are you
doing,
Daddy?"
Sam is standing at my side. That I’m also standing is something of a surprise. I look down to see my hands on the handle of the living room’s sliding door.
"I’m locking the door."
"But we
never
lock
that
door."
"We don’t?"
I peer through the glass at our snow-covered garden. Checking for footprints.
"Show’s over,” Sam says, pulling on my pant leg and pointing at the TV.
"Ten more minutes."
As Sam runs off, I pull the dictaphone out of my pocket.
"Note to self,” I whisper. "Buy padlock for back gate."
It’s the weekend already, and Tuesday’s deadline requiring a page from my nonexistent workin-progress is fast approaching. I’ve made a couple stabs at something during the week, but the surroundings of either the Crypt at home or the cubicle at work have spooked any inspiration that might be waiting to show itself. I need to find the right
space
. A laptop of one’s own.
Once Tamara’s out-of-town sister, Stacey, has come by to take Sam and his cousins to see the dinosaurs at the museum, I hit the Starbucks around the corner. It’s a sunny Saturday, which means that, after noon, Queen Street will be clogged with shoppers and gawkers. But it’s only just turned ten, and the line-up isn’t yet out the door. I secure a table, pop the lid on my computer, and stare at a freshly created word-processing file. Except for the blinking cursor, a virgin screen of grey. Its purity stops me from touching the keys. The idea of typing a word on to it seems as crude as stepping outside and pissing into a snowbank. And the dentist office grind of the cappuccino machine is starting to get on my nerves. Not to
mention the orders shouted back and forth between the barista kids behind the counter. Who wouldn’t raise their head to see what sort of person orders a venti decaf cap with half skim, half soy and
extra whipped cream
?
I pack up and walk crosstown to the Reference Library on Yonge. The main floor entrance is crowded, as it always is, with the homeless, the new-in-town, the dwindling souls without a cellphone who need to make a call. Through the turnstiles, the building opens into an atrium that cuts through the five floors above. I choose the least occupied level and find a long work table all to myself. Lean back, and think of a single word that might stride forth to lead others into battle.
Nothing.
All around me are tens of thousands of volumes, each containing tens of thousands of printed words, and not
one
of them is prepared to come forward when I need it most.
Why?
The thing is, I
know
why.
I don’t have a story to tell.
But Conrad White did, once upon a time. Seeing as I’m in the Reference Library, I decide to take a break and do a bit of research. On Mr White, ringleader of the Kensington Circle.
It takes a little digging, but some of the memoirs and cultural histories from the time of sixties Toronto make footnoted mention of him. From old money, privately schooled, and author of a
debatably promising novel before going into hiding overseas. As one commentator tartly put it, "Mr White, for those who know his name at all, is more likely remembered for his leaving his homeland than any work he published while living here."
What’s intriguing about the incomplete biography of Conrad White are the hints at darker corners. The conventional take has it that he left because of the critical reception given his book,
Jarvis and Wellesley
, the fractured, interior monologue of a man walking the streets of the city on a quest to find a prostitute who most closely resembles his daughter, recently killed in a car accident. An idealized figure he calls the "perfect girl". To anyone’s knowledge, Conrad White hasn’t written anything since.
But it’s the echoes of the author’s actual life to be found in the storyline of
Jarvis and Wellesley
that gives bite to his bio. He
had
lost a daughter, his only child, in the year prior to his embarking on the novel. And there is mention of White’s exile being precipitated by his relationship with a very real teenage girl, and the resulting threats of legal action, both civil and criminal. A literary recluse on the one hand, girl-chasing perv on the other. Thomas Pynchon meets Humbert Humbert.
I go back to my table to find my laptop screen has fallen asleep. It knows as well as I do that there will be no writing today. But that needn’t mean there can’t be reading.
The edition of
Jarvis and Wellesley
I pull off the shelf hasn’t been signed out in over four years. Its spine creaks when I open it. The pages crisp as potato chips.
Two hours later, I return it to where I found it.
The prose ahead of its time, no doubt. Some explicit sex scenes involving the older protagonist and young streetwalkers lend a certain smutty energy to the proceedings, if only passingly. And throughout, the unspoken grief is palpable, an account of loss made all the more powerful by narrating its effects, not its cause.
But it’s the description of the protagonist’s "perfect girl” that leaves the biggest impression. The way she is conjured so vividly, but using little or no specific details. You know exactly what she looks like, how she behaves, how she feels, though she is nowhere to be found on the page.
What’s stranger still is the certainty that I will one day meet her myself.