New Story: "Artsy Lady"

Artsy Lady

Maybe she was an artist, maybe she wasn’t, I hadn’t seen her work; but she dressed like an artist, all loose and free in striking coordination and always with a scarf or shawl that made her oversized body look as comely as clothes would allow, and she said all the right things and sounded devastatingly au current and in the know; but I could not get a fix on her. She was like the quicksilver colour of her striking long hair that she always wore in a bun that affected an artsy old-country woman look, like she wanted to be both contemporary and traditional all in one.

“I don’t know where she gets her characters from,” I shared with her the first time we spoke in the restaurant after our spiritual workshop on “Dreams, Past Lives, and Soul Travel” because of the impression of erudition that she had made upon me in the workshop. “I’ve never met people like that. Have you?”

I was referring to Alice Munro. I had just read The Love of a Good Woman, another one of her books of short stories and couldn’t get over the people that she wrote about because I had never met people like that in Northwestern Ontario.

She showed interest in my writing, so I gave her a copy of my first novel that so upset the people of St. Jude that Cathy and I had to relocate and which she insisted on paying for the next time she saw me because she told me her ex-husband was a poet and she was familiar with the struggling life of a writer; but I saw her dozens of times since and simply chalked up her lapse of memory to experience, the kind of little thing that Alice Munro would write about in one of her stories.

That was her gift that would garner her the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years down the road: she could create a whole tapestry out of little details that in themselves didn’t seem that important but when woven together created such a memorable picture that her stories became a part of you, unlike John Updike’s stories that I also loved to read but which never stayed with me for some reason and probably why he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Apparently the artsy lady sculptured in miniature soapstone, which she showed in various locations throughout the city and, she said, “I also dabble in water colour to stretch my imagination and fortify my personal identity.” So I took her at her word that she was an artist and presumed some measure of familiarity because we both shared in the spirit of individuation through the creative process.

“Are people really like that?” I asked, making my point about the people in Munro’s Southern Ontario Huron County world.

“They must be,” she said, with a big smile that I mistakenly read to be well-informed. “What are the people like where you come from?”

“They’re not as idiosyncratic. But maybe I just didn’t see them the way Alice Munro sees people. Maybe that’s what makes her a master of the short story,” I responded, which was exactly what the Nobel committee in Stockholm said about her in October, 2013— “master of the contemporary short story.”

“Artists see things that other people don’t see. My ex-husband is like that. He can talk to you for ten minutes and write a ten-line poem about you that will reveal things about you that you don’t even know existed. He’s quite talented.”

“He’d have to be” I said, with an ironic snicker. “I’d like to read him,” I added, and she brought one of his books to our workshops several months later, which I paid for then and there and read while the workshop was in session because the book was so short and which didn’t really do anything for me; but I got a real surprise when I saw his picture on the back cover: he was black.

“What does your ex do for a living?” I asked in the restaurant where a small group of us went for lunch after our workshops and for which she very quietly borrowed twenty dollars from her fellow High Initiate who conducted our workshop on “Spiritual Survival in Our Times” to pay for her Greek salad and herbal tea.  

“He has a used book store in Toronto; but his heart’s into poetry. He loves performance poetry. He’s quite the ham.”

“Do you have any children?”

“We have a boy and girl and one grandchild.”

“No kidding? You’re a grandmother?”

“I know. I can hardly believe it myself.”

“So, are they on this path too?

“Yes. And so is my ex. In fact, he introduced me to this teaching. We were living in Manhattan and he brought me to an introductory talk.”

She revealed this information casually, as though she had honeymooned in the city of love or holidayed in Tuscany one summer, and I couldn’t help but see an image of them walking together in Manhattan, her with her striking silver-white hair and alabaster Irish face and he as black as black could be, which probably nobody would have noticed in New York City anyway; but what an artsy couple they must have made. “So, what happened?” I had to ask. “Clash of artistic temperaments?”

“I wish. He left me for another woman.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. She was at our workshop today.”

“Who?”

“Doreen. The lady in the blue dress. But he left Doreen after three years. He’s with a woman of his own race today, and they have two children.”

“No kidding? What does he do, recruit people for this teaching? Alice Munroe could get a great story out of this,” I said, and chuckled; but by this time I had begun to experience the people of Southern Ontario, and Munro's people began to make a lot more sense as the artsy lady’s life unfolded before me.

As coincidence would have it, her ex was the guest speaker at our workshop in Southlake the following month, but which neither of his ex-wives attended; he spoke on “The Golden-tongued Wisdom,” a term that our spiritual path used for what the Medieval Catholic monks used to call “reading the book of the world.”

He was an imposing man whom I met in the washroom unselfconsciously checking himself out in the mirror. I glanced his way to catch his eye so I could introduce myself, but he was much too absorbed in his own reflection to acknowledge my presence; and when he introduced himself in the workshop I knew it had to be him and why his ex-wives refused to attend his workshops.

I was right. “I never attend his workshops. I can’t stand to be in the same room with him,” she confessed at our Carlton worship service the following Sunday when I told her about her ex’s histrionic talk on signs and symbols which I paid particular attention to because from what I gathered he was definitely Munro material.

“And Doreen? She wasn’t at the workshop either. Does she feel the same way about him?” I asked, not deliberately to collect material; I was genuinely curious.

With a hint of triumph in her smile, she said, “She can’t stand to be in the same room with him either. We never go to his workshops.”

“What does that tell you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He still has power over you,” I said, but regretted saying it the moment it left my mouth. I had to soften the blow: “Don’t give it to him. Go to his next workshop. Don’t let him steal your identity. You’re only feeding his vanity.”

A look of horror came over her face, and she turned to look at Doreen who was talking to the man who had loaned her twenty dollars for lunch that day; but Doreen didn’t notice, and she turned back to me, her beautiful alabaster Irish face flushed crimson, “I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

“Bullshit! Don’t give him that power. Take it back. You don’t want to go through life enslaved to him. What the hell’s this path all about if not to become our own master? Don’t give him the satisfaction, Eve—"

Impeccably dressed in a dark suit and flashy  orange tie, he stood large waiting for total silence before reciting one of his poems like Richard Burton doing Lear; and then he picked up his little box of tricks that looked like a cigar box, which he told us it was because he used to smoke cigars before meeting the Spiritual Master of our path by chance at a Worldwide Seminar in St. Louis where he looked into the Master’s eyes and experienced the Darshan that sent him into a swoon that he swore changed the molecules of his soul, and then he told us how the Golden-tongued Wisdom, which he called the Inner Master’s Voice, guided his life from that day on and had everyone’s rapt attention but me because I had long made the connection that the Inner Master was our higher self that Jung called “superior insight,” but I was mesmerized by the poet’s inflated sense of self-importance and listened to his histrionic anecdotes with an ironic smile upon my face.

Every prop that he took out of his little box of tricks had a story that revealed (some much more tenuously than others) how the symbolic language of life had guided him through yet another critical juncture, like the first time he met Doreen in his book store and was told by the Golden-tongue that she would be his future wife despite the fact that Eve was pregnant with their second child; and the time he fell into despair when he received yet another rejection slip for his first book of poetry and then read a fortune cookie that told him to make his own way and went on to self-publish five books of poetry, and he waved the tiny little white fortune cookie in his big black hand for everyone to see; and so on, all innocent messages that could easily be read to satisfy one’s eager vanity but which everyone took to be the Spiritual Master’s guidance; and everyone clapped and clapped and clapped, and he bowed respectfully with the modesty of a great but unacknowledged poet.

After the workshop in Carlton I treated Eve for lunch, just the two of us, and she ordered Greek salad and herbal tea and I Pastrami on Rye and coffee.

“I feel I owe you an apology, Eve. I had no right to speak to you as I did at our workshop. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“No offense taken. I admire your integrity. I saw that the moment I set eyes on you at our first workshop; and your novel confirmed it.”

“Really? Maybe you should be the one writing poetry,” I said, and by the time we finished lunch she cemented my feeling that she could easily have been one of the women in Munro's book The Love of a Good Woman.

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