Finally! I couldn’t understand what could possibly be keeping you away; I’ve been waiting for your arrival for more than an hour now and I wondered if I should spoil a new story on someone less distinguished. I see my worry was in vain and the nightmare is over. Pull up a chair, pick a drink, and please don’t ask any questions; I’ve been cooped up all day with no one to pontificate with and I could’ve fallen off the roof with the want.
Death isn’t something I like to talk about with guests, but there was a funeral here today you see. I’m sorry, not a funeral, a wake. I was completely unaware of what this was like, the funeral experience. As hard as it may be to believe I’ve never attended one, being so frequently hung up by my work.
The bereaved arrived today, a day where the last thing anyone might have thought of was their mortality, in the middle of the afternoon. Wsunglight and hile everything outside the Bonne Nuit was sunlight and spices, everything inside took on a terminal aspect: the darkness of the wine, the ornamental stillness of the curtains, how the floorboards seemed to petrify under the guests feet. The men pulled at their white shirts and suit jackets of varying fits and sizes, some wore sweater vests and polite striped shirts with stiff cuffs that had been crumpled and rolled up the arm. The women wore humble skirts and dresses with opals and pearls. One woman displayed too much cleavage, another disproved loudly about the other’s cleavage, and the men were caught between staring at the one and agreeing with the other. The guests discussed the wine, the newest art exhibit, the construction around the city, the atrocious directions for finding this place, and of course, they spoke of the dearly departed.
Someone had placed picture on the bar, and a young man who sat beside it occasionally glanced at the frame as though the face would start berating him at any moment. The picture displayed a woman in her seventies, standing on a dock, and looking into the camera with the lake behind her. Her hair was a cold white, her eyes thin, and her mouth was the faintest slit beneath her nose; she hadn’t cared to smile in the picture. She didn’t seem unhappy, but seemed above having her picture taken, as some people are. One could wonder if she assualted the camera person with the camera afterwards. Story after story gave her character, but the most popular of topics surrounded her vocation.
Her name was Rosamund Ueller and she was a writer. She specialized in journalism and the editorial style, these being of the utmost challenge considering the only embellishment could be in how she garnished chalk-white paper with elegant prose. They requir the strictest truth if they are ever to be printed and the most honest interpretation to ever be considered enjoyable, and it was this challenge she enjoyed so very much. Her work had been published in short story collections, in magazines, two entire novels, and she regarded each piece with a hint of resentment and distance, like a nephew that never quite realized his potential. She would hold public readings and organize them to include other literary companions, most of whom made up the crowd present at the wake. The pieces she chose were never just projects she had tucked away; each story had to have been noted or published or referenced or plagiarized before she would ever read them to her public. Many said it was because she needed proof they were fit to share. She lived alone, spent many nights either writing or sharing stories with friends, and otherwise travelled to writing conferences or to find inspiration for her next piece.
She was found two weeks ago sitting on a bus bench near her house, dressed in a pale blue suit and matching sun hat, her chin on her chest, sunlight resting on her shoulders and warming her cold hands. The contents of her suitcase revealed a ticket to Brunei, a dress shirt, two pairs of flip flops, a small towel, and a bottle of what appeared to have been strong pain killers. Few of the guests had been considered worthy of knowing this last detail, those that wouldn’t hold it against her.
The night carried on, the guests besting one another in jousts of story. The wine flowed with the conversation until a man—short and bald, with tortoiseshell glasses that matched the colours in his moustache—stood and asked everyone to be seated. The guests formed loose columns in the middle of the room like schoolchildren and rested their glass of wine atop their thighs. Every glass was filled, every story was finished, and when the door was locked and all was made private the speaker raised his glass, leading those seated to do the same.
“To Rosamund Ueller, the most mysterious of spinx’s.” This received a reserved chuckle from those who got the joke, snorts from those who didn’t understand but wanted to seem like they did, and a respectful silence from those who honestly thought he had meant to say ‘sphinx.’ Each guest took the slightest swallow as though taking holy communion. The host grinned at the wine inside his glass and said, “I’m sure if she was here she would say this was a wine not to be trifled with.” He made several other jokes—some with greater success than others—he hinted at the poor directions on the back of the funeral service pamphlet; he made sport of a man who had been the sole reason there would be no open-mic at this event. It was a jovial atmosphere, and the air in the room softened in the lamp light. Several onlookers stared from the sidewalk into the Bonne Nuit throughout the night, dissapointed that they were not allowed to join, thinking this might be a celebration of some sort. At times it very much was.
“Someone take that man’s keys before it’s too late.” The crowd laughed and the the host took another drink and placed his glass on the floor, freeing his hands to clasp themselves together, pressing his thumbs against each other and pulling them apart. “What a day this has been. What a week! To go from hearing the news to joinging together like this, I thought the whole affair might seem longer, but such as life, all things pass much more quickly than we expect.” This got a humble grunt of agreement from the crowd. “Rosamund asked us to gather at the Bonne Nuit was not only to drink their highly palatable wine but to enjoy each other’s company as lovers of all things literary. From many of the stories told I can tell she held a better rapport with some than with others, but to see so many faces gathered is something I think she would have been proud of. While many of us likely held our own difference with her at one point or another, she was someone who valued this community. But I did enough speaking today at the ceremony so I don’t feel the need to go on about who Rosamund was in this community. Actually, she requested someone in particular for this tonight.
“He became a good friend of Rosamund’s in her last months. He is a fellow writer, and recently won the Brigadier General Literary Arts Scholarship.” He waited for some kind of congratulatory reaction, of which there was none. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Arnold Whispe.”
Chairs creaked as guests turned to each other wondering where this Whispe might appear from among them, and one by one each noticed the thin figure of the young man—the one that had been sitting at the bar all evening beside Rosamund’s picture—rise from his stool at the bar, finish his drink, and walk to the front of the room with a collection of pages he repeatedly furled and unfurled, eventually folding them down the middle, his fingers slight and delicate, the fold pristine. At the front of the crowd he gave a slight nod to the group and waited for a nod or smile in return. The group stared discontentedly.
“Hello. My name is Arnold Whispe, and apparently Rosamund wanted me to talk to you all tonight.” He paused, trying to choose where might be best to start, looking at the lights, staring at the back wall. “I really don’t have a lot of experience with public speaking.” Here he paused, making his last point quite clear. He watched the faces of the guests, flipping from face to face, looking maybe for acceptance, possibly for forgiveness. The silence of the moment became something crawling up everyone’s leg.
“I guess I met Rosamund through Professor Robert Illian—” he pointed to a man in the crowd who gave a slight nod. “I wrote a piece for his class, something based on the current trends in internet meme culture in young adolescent males that was, well, borderline autobiographical, and Professor Illian said that I should enter it into the annual BGLA scholarship. Like was said, I was lucky enough to be accepted which I didn’t expect at all. Normally I write poetry so it was quite a happy surprise. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the scholarship, but aside from the money you’re also paired with a local writer who works with you on the piece, afterwhich you do a public reading of your work. It’s funny because the administrator for the contest asked who I’d like to be paired with and I said I normally wrote poetry so if I could get someone in that field I’d prefer that. She said that would be fine and that she had a few poets she could pair me up with, but in the end was somehow paired up with Rosamund, who obviously doesn’t write poetry. Sorry, didn’t. Anyway, I was disappointed but there wasn’t anything I could do, so I decided to make the best of it. And then after I was able to find some of her work online I thought all hell was going to break loose when we met and she wouldn’t rest until it read like one of her pieces, which of course were fine but it wasn’t what I wanted to write. So I didn’t really know what to expect.
“We started talking over email and I sent her the story and she said she’d look over it but she wanted to meet in person. She chose Border’s downtown, but we eventually ended up meeting all over the city at other small coffee shops like the Pinecone and Mary Bittersweet’s, all the writerly joints around the city. The first thing she did was tell me almost everything that was going on in her life at the moment, like the local Rainforest pledge ceremony that she was organizing, how she was preparing to go to Montreal to talk about the feminist movement after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Hungary, writing the piece that was actually just published in the Everbrook reading series. After we’d talked a little bit about who I was she took out my piece and it was covered in more pen ink than printer ink and she said holding her chin, ‘Do you know the difference between it’s and its?’ As far as my ego it was all downhill from there.
“She broke down to nothing by the end of the that first talk. She said the chronology wasn’t working, she didn’t understand half my terminology, but the ending worked well and it had it’s own voice, so there was probably something worth working out. She even somehow knew I was a poet from the way I wrote, and then when she went back to read my piece she actually undid a few of her revisions. When I told her this was the first thing I’d ever submitted I got to see that sort of half-raised-eyebrow with a little grin she hid behind her fingertips when she knows something’s good but doesn’t want to let you know she knows. I can see from some of the grins here that you know exactly what look I’m talking about.
“The more we met the less it became about the story and just about writing in general and school and everything else. She loved to tell stories, but she also loved to hear them. One time we somehow ended up talking about my love life, and I told her about how this girl I had wanted to date had said that she didn’t want to date but was happy that we could now be friends. She was just so involved with everyone else’s story, she let herself get absorbed into it, even something as mundane and cliché as bad college romance. It made some of the more boring parts of my life seem worth mentioning.”
He paused, and in the moment the sound of traffic and the hum of the lights became another presence in the room, seating themselves between the chairs.
“So we met several times and worked on the piece that went through more revisions than I’d care to mention—I think I had said it was finished about four times when it wasn’t—and when it finally came to the reading I wasn’t nervous. Well, I was nervous. But it had nothing to do with the piece, and not because I thought the piece itself was good. That was something that Rosamund also pushed home, she always told me that writing had nothing to do with thinking something was good and everything to do with whether or not it was absolutely true. I should mention now that I heard several of you talking about how she needed her pieces to be recognized before she ever read them in public. Rosamund told me that she did that for other people. She never liked anything she wrote, and I understand that now. By the time we were done editing, and after a month of walking away from my piece I never wondered whether or not it was ‘good.’ It’s real, and because of that I can read it at anytime and know who I was when I wrote it. And it’s amazing that I have something like that.”
The paper seemed to straighten itself in his hands, and Johnathan stared at the front of the page, looking almost unsure of what he was holding.
“So Rosamund wanted me to read. This isn’t the piece that won the Brigadier General, this is something we were working on in the last couple of months that I finally had the nerve to finish. Mostly because of tonight. It’s a little longer than she instructed I ever read out loud to a crowd, so I hope you’ll bear with it.” Johnathan waited for the noise of traffic and the humming of the lights to politely quiet down, and when everything was silent it seemed as though the pages themselves began to speak, such was how Arnold was able to speak. So many of the guests had long forgotten their early readings. They had forgotten how it felt placing a part of themselves in the hands of strangers—infinitely worse, friends. Johnathan’s words spilled to the ground and wet the ankles of his guests. The story filled the room, a story about a bus driver he had met, how they had seen one another on several rides, how they had seen eachother once in the grocery store but were too shy to say hello to one another. There was a beautiful imagery, words and pictures linked by the most tenuous of feelings, always suggesting but never admitting, never allowing the audience to fully understand him but never leaving them behind. Minds drifted along with the story, some guests wondering about their fathers, others thinking of how they loved their children, and others wondering if they had ever become who they had always wanted to be, all brought forward by the tenor and dry tongue of a twenty-three year old who had never traveled, never loved, and never felt he had accomplished anything beautiful.
The silence that followed the ending was almost as much a part of the story as its title. It was consumed by the polite applause of the audience, and Johnathan stood nodding, silently thanking his guests. When the applause passed his eyes returned to the papers, which he folded over and over until it disappeared in his hands as though the whole thing had been a magic trick. He looked back up at the crowd, exhausted.
“I wish I could thank Rosamund for tonight. I know that she wanted me to read because of the connections I could make from it. She never said that was why but I know because it was the sort of thing she would do. And that says so much about what she thought of my writing. I never had the nerve to tell her that I made the decision to not be a writer. It wasn’t a decision I made because of money or the lifestyle, which is something we talked about often. I just know it’s not the path I want to take.” He looked out over the crowd, over the faces that had suddenly grown grey. “Thank you for coming tonight, and thank you for listening to me talk about this part of my life.” Johnathan turned to the host, standing without a thought of what to do or say, turned to the guests, smiled at them once more, walked to the door and unlocked it and walked outside without so much as a sound to acknowledge that he had ever been there.
I can tell you there wasn’t much atmosphere after that. The host tried to resume the night, but chairs were shortly put away and good-bye’s were given and guests walked out to try and breath the air back into their lungs. Death can be a very sobering thing, and how sobering is a day with two deaths.
And I wonder what Rosamund thinks of this. The woman in the picture on the dock would be horrified I feel. The woman described by the guests would likely be dissappointed but would move on, not wasting her time on such a listless rube of a boy. But Arnold’s Rosamund would likely enjoy the sad hilarity of the moment. And of course the honesty, the unalterable truth of a path not taken simply because it wasn’t wanted. And while he turned at the fork in the road, I’m sure he will be able to look through the bracken to the other path he could have crossed and see Rosamund’s footsteps and where they might have led him. And he will thank her for the time spent.
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