So Much Love Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Rosenblum

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rosenblum, Rebecca, 1978–, author

  So much love / Rebecca Rosenblum.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-7243-7 (paperback).–ISBN 978-0-7710-7244-4 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8635.O65S66 2017 C813’.6 C2016-901417-7

  C2016-901418-5

  ISBN 9780771072437

  Ebook ISBN 9780771072444

  Cover design: Rachel cooper

  Cover images: dreamstime.com

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  For Mark Sampson,

  with so much love

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Marriage

  The Girl for Me

  Before (Some Things)

  Castle

  To Burn in a Bright Moon

  The House That Modern Art Built

  The Happy Ending

  At the End of Breath

  Part Two

  Sad Stories

  Sometimes Nothing Happens

  Youth Must Have Its Day

  Long Live Home

  Sometimes the Door Sticks

  What the Dead Remember

  Catherine Reindeer

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Marriage

  Just before the winter semester wrapped up at the end of March, one of my Canadian Poetry students disappeared—not just from my class but also maybe from the earth. Catherine Reindeer left the restaurant where she worked at the end of a day shift, but she didn’t come home that night, or any night since. They found her purse in the parking lot the next morning. She was a good student, good enough that she didn’t need me to review her essay topics or suggest background readings. But she was chatty and didn’t seem to have friends in the class, so sometimes I was the recipient of her thoughts on Gwendolyn MacEwen, Michael Ondaatje, Julianna Ohlin. She spent a lot of time reading the biographical notes at the backs of books, always interested in discussing whose marriage had been happy, who worked a day job in addition to writing. She was—is?—a pretty girl, confident, a bit older than the rest. She had a husband, the newspapers said, unusual for an undergrad. I don’t remember a ring. I liked talking to her, but I didn’t know her well. Now that’s she’s gone, I think of her constantly.

  Throughout the rest of the semester, her classmates held vigils for her, and her husband and mother appeared on the news—and then I had to give her an Incomplete in the class. I’ve moved on to teaching summer session, which is always full of kids who look for an easy pass: stoners, guys who leave their skateboards in the aisle. I don’t have much else to do this summer. I finally finished my Ohlin monograph and sent it off for consideration, Gretta and I are in one of our silent spells, and everyone I tolerate socially seems to have gone to a cottage. All I have left to occupy my time is hosing bird shit off the patio chairs and attending Gretta’s family events. So maybe the damn CanLit survey I’m teaching is getting more focus than it deserves. Extra intensity can only benefit the students, but it’s odd being stressed out in July—unnatural. It’s the fifth week of term and already I have a tight spot in my left shoulder blade and pre-class dread. As I approach the Humanities building, where the class meets, I feel my jaw clench.

  The last lamppost I pass still has a tattered purple poster from one of the vigils they held for Catherine and the high-school boy who went missing around the same time. You could feel a raw terror all through town then—two gone and no one was safe. Kids clumped together after evening classes to walk to the bus, everyone glancing over their shoulders. They had the vigils because there’s strength in numbers, I guess. I had thought about going to one, but in the end I couldn’t see what standing on the east lawn surrounded by strangers and holding a candle in the dark would accomplish. There are still a lot of posters up on campus, but they’re old and coming apart and there hasn’t been a vigil since summer term started.

  My teaching assistant, Alan—who hates the students and his job and probably me but loves literature—is slouching beside the west doors, smoking.

  I stop in front of his dirty black dress shoes. “Morning.”

  He doesn’t shift his gaze. “Morning, sir.”

  I could watch the cigarette burn right down and he wouldn’t say anything more. “See you in class.” He nods, a tiny dip of the chin. It’s this lack of interaction that drives me to overthink my lectures—between Gretta and Alan, I’m getting a bit desperate for conversation, or at least some eye contact. I go past him inside. On my way downstairs, I pass a couple of my spring-term students. They smile but don’t really look at me either; I am seen but not engaged. They were in Catherine’s class. I wonder if they knew her. The girl on the left, big-eyed and big-hipped, is prettier than her skinny friend. Gretta has intuited over the years that when I see a girl, I don’t just see “pretty”—I see skin tone, the cut of a skirt. This is not Gretta’s favourite thing about me, even though I do it to her too. Or especially because I do—no compliment I’ve ever given on her pronounced yet elegant clavicles, her long, enveloping curtain of hair, the blue-veined skin at her wrists has ever been well received.

  The Humanities building is old stone, which appears glamorous from the outside, but in the basement classroom I’ve been assigned, all that the stonework façade gets us is damp and small windows.

  Alan slumps into the front row and pulls a paperback out of his pocket. It’s actually the book under discussion today, The Rainbow Poems by Julianna Ohlin. I don’t know why he bothered to bring it—I’m sure he has it memorized. It’s probably just a guard against any student trying to speak to him.

  The students are trickling in, but no one even glances at me. Hard to tell whether they feel intimidated or are trying to intimidate. They are likely just not paying attention. In the front row there’s a guy in an oversized striped shirt squinting at a bright iPhone, drumming his fingers on the desktop. Even the nerds overwhelm me these days—they can be so dismissive of anything outside the gleam of a screen. We’re far enough into the semester that I should know most of their names, but I don’t. Somewhere around my fifth year of teaching, they just stopped sticking. Even the gorgeous girls in the third row are anonymous. I will remember their shiny hair, the few windblown strands across their foreheads, the faded denim shorts cut off above the hollows of their silky thighs, but not their names. I will watch them all semester and never discover if their carelessness is genuine: their clothes will never get nicer, the hair never tidier, but they’ll pass lipgloss back and forth during lectures and toss their hair like models in a shampoo ad. I can never stop watching them. I wish I could because I’m sure they notice.

  The students are settling down now, shuffling into seats. Soon, I will have no choice but to begin—already those without friends to talk to are watching me impatiently. What are they expecting? Truth and beauty? Library reserves and deadlines?

  The only way to swim is to dive in. “Julianna Ohlin was a brilliant poet
who happened to be from right here in Iria, an unusual confluence of virtues. She even attended this university for a semester.” Some voices fade away as soon as I raise mine; some determinedly finish their sentences, but after about twenty words I hear my own voice, dropped a half-octave from normal conversation, echoing alone in the high-ceilinged room. “I’ll use this lecture to introduce her work and give some context about her life and heartbreaking early death.” I have them now, though by no means for keeps.

  I read aloud a poem, the one about the pointless magic of sunlight on crumpled aluminum: Dull in fresh air / like smog after rain. Not a great poem, just a famous one, one they can all recognize and feel good about. And if I’m being honest, I do like it: I can relate to the everydayness of the poem as if I could live inside it. “We’ll be dealing with the only two books Ohlin published, and yes, you should own them. They are Sometimes the Door Sticks and The Rainbow Poems, which was assembled from her notebooks after her death.”

  I relish this too much—imparting, declaiming, making them know what I want them to know. But they are unquestionably with me: I can see the whites of their eyes.

  Phrases flash by like fish in a river: “almost Byronic bravado,” “sibilant longing.” For a while I half tune out on my own speechifying. Then students start to shift and fidget—they aren’t whispering yet, but the rustle of their skirts and cutoffs sounds like whispering.

  “Other than a few short poems in some journals no one had heard of, Ohlin published nothing in her lifetime—her first book was a couple months away from being published when she died at the age of twenty-seven. All her fame and success—a lot, for a poet—came after her body was found in a flax field outside Calgary. She probably believed she was a failed poet. She died thinking that.”

  This would be a good time to taper off into the video clips, but I don’t want to waste the day, waste Julianna. I can only devote one class to her. Much of the excitement people felt about her—and maybe part of what they still feel—was for the work she was going to do. To talk about her gifts is to talk about what was still to come, after she matured, explored her craft, had more experiences—poems she will never write.

  The tragedy of her death hits me for the thousandth time when I see it reflected in the students’ faces. Julianna really was a person once, a fleshy girl like these ones, with their long limbs, fruity perfumes. And Catherine, that girl grinning on the rain-sodden vigil posters who once got an A- on my midterm exam, she was a person once too. She had a husband, and now that man does not have a wife. Somewhere in the city, Catherine’s husband is grieving and waiting for news. How does he pass the time? Even during the worst days of our marriage, and there have been plenty of those, I’ve always stayed awake until Gretta came home for the night, even if we didn’t speak once she returned. Catherine has not been home in four months, but she could still escape from the terrifying narrative the news is positing, from that ripped poster, and return to her life.

  I pause to catch my breath and give the students a moment to think. “Any questions so far?” One of the pretties in the third row leans forward. Her hand rises, a bony wrist with a leather bracelet, cinnamon-painted nails. “But how did she die?”

  “Oh. Well, she was murdered…most bodies found in flax fields are.”

  “But just…like, by a stranger? Did they catch the guy?”

  “How do you know it was a guy?”

  An accusation of unconscious sexism is one of my go-to stall tactics, but she only shrugs. “It’s usually a guy.”

  I shrug back. “You’re right. It was her boyfriend, actually. There was never any mystery, really—or if there was, it was cleared up when he ran his car off a bridge a couple weeks later. Unless you’re a drug dealer or in the mob, most people who get murdered get murdered by a loved one.”

  She glances at her friends before speaking again. “But not always. Like, last spring. Catherine Reindeer went missing and so did the boy from the high school just east of campus. They didn’t know each other, so probably it was a stranger… ”

  The words fumble in my mouth but eventually drop out: “They’re still missing.”

  This is a wrong turn, and the hour is wearing on. I am not talking about style or complexity or elegance. I am not even talking about the tragic loss of Julianna, or thinking about it, because I am thinking about Catherine’s careful bibliographies, her typo-less essays. How, hanging around the lectern one time, waiting for me to shuffle through the stack of graded papers and find her essay on Layton’s poetic diction, she mumbled, “I think maybe once I’ve studied enough poetry, I could maybe write some of my own.” I asked her why she needed to wait, why not just give it a try now and see. She said, “Better to know what I’m getting into. Due diligence and all.” Possibly the least poetic line ever spoken, but she did seem wise to me, at that moment.

  I jolt to realize that I have not spoken for what must be over a minute, judging by the students’ bemused stares. I stumble to the laptop and make my customary scene hooking it up to the projector. Finally, Julianna flickers across the screen. In the first video clip she’s very young, maybe seventeen, dancing as part of a fellow student’s performance art piece, all draped scarves and lugubrious arm movements. Thirty seconds later she’s a little older and reading aloud an early draft of the same poem I just read them, solemnly enunciating her words into a microphone, her neck tangled with yet more scarves. The next clip is a news report accessorized with her high-school grad photo; the anchor wears a jaunty green tie but casts his eyes down appropriately. He’s back in the final clip, this time with a darker tie, as the accompanying footage shows a sheet-covered gurney trundling onto an ambulance under a cloudless sky.

  By the time I get the lights back on, everyone’s blank-eyed and pale. I meant the class to be intriguing, intense, poetic. I meant to connect with these kids, cut through the thick air in the middle of the classroom and say something that mattered to them. Gretta would say I went in too heavy, too close to the bone. As I scan the room, everyone looks as if they’ve just seen a girl die.

  —

  And then I have to go home and get ready for the wedding of a couple I barely know. My summer suit is right at the back of my closet, where I left it in 2006, after the last formal wedding of one of Gretta’s distant cousins. Somehow, since then, the jacket has gotten tight in the armpits. The only comfortable way to position my arms is as if I’m offering a tray of drinks.

  The bride, Lisha, is a third cousin of Gretta’s whom I’ve only met a handful of times, and the groom is a man whose name, as far as I can recall, I was never told. I doubt the bridal couple cares much how I dress, and with my mind still back in my silent classroom with my struggling students, I can think of no alternative outfit so I set off uncomfortably for the church.

  Since my walk home from campus, the sky has eaten the sun and the buildings no longer cast a shadow. The interior of the car is pressingly hot, like being inside a lung. About three blocks out, I realize that I only hazily know the way to the wedding venue, and the Google Maps printout is crumpled on my office floor. I haven’t seen my awful BlackBerry in weeks. But Gretta will know where we have to go. She grew up in that beige suburb, where people on the radio are always commenting that schools are underfunded.

  Traffic is as sticky and dense as the air. Even with the air conditioning on and the windows sealed, I still feel the humidity creeping in. I pass the restaurant where Catherine Reindeer was last seen, the one she worked at. It gives no sign of its dramatic role. It’s supposed to be one of the nicer places in town—I always meant to take Gretta there but never have. Now I feel like I shouldn’t. The parking lot, where Catherine’s purse and cellphone were found, is crowded—so is the patio. The chalkboard out front advertises specials of mussels and 2-for-1 martinis. As I pass in the crawling traffic, a young waitress in very high heels stands at a patio table, pouring from a pitcher.

  Even though it’s only 3:01, Gretta is already waiting at the curb in front o
f her shop, looking south, leaning forward intently. She’s changed her clothes since I saw her leave this morning, from jeans and a button-up shirt to a long purple silk dress fading in and out of wallpaper shades, from pale to brilliant, violet to lilac. It is shapeless and sleeveless and hangs away from her body as she tilts on the sidewalk. Her much younger assistant gave her the high-heeled sandals, tied with ribbons crisscrossing her shins, up and under her hemline. The whole outfit—the dull dangling earrings, her hair loose down her back—makes her appear younger than she really is, and different too, freer and more relaxed. I know she’ll be uncomfortable in an hour—sooner, as soon as anyone looks at her. I also know that by the end of the evening she’ll be sorry she wore any of it.

  All this before the car even comes to a complete stop.

  She enters with a heavy whiff of grape gum, slams the door, puts on her seatbelt. Her bag slides to the floor with a fabric-muffled thunk that could be either books or blocks of wood.

  I put the car into gear and start moving. “Hi, Gretta.”

  “Len.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Didn’t we say two-thirty?”

  I bite the inside of my cheek. “Three.”

  “Yes, and then we remembered cottage traffic and so… ”

  “Two-thirty?”

  “Yes.”

  “At least this wasn’t one of the times I decided on your behalf that you wouldn’t mind waiting. I just forgot.”

  She flicks on the radio, twists the dial, flicks it off. “The 414 on-ramp is up ahead. It’s a left merge.” A beat. “You should get over.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She hunches toward the window.