Stairway to Heaven: March 1988
Yes, it's complicated.
Now we come to the crux of the matter, the fulcrum on which the whole Story rests and tilts.
First, yes, there were the glances. The significant glances. The very beginning, January 14, the day she applied for the job, when she turned her head around to look at me as she went out the door. Quick but loud, the snap-CLAP of a rifle shot, its echo taunting the edges of the silence that followed. The next week, as I saw her exiting the interview room, she threw me another one, halfway across the office. A slider, inside corner. No mistaking that one. And finally, her first day on the job, the first I knew of her having been hired, when they marched the three newbies around to be introduced and gazed upon. It hadn't escaped me that, in a manner of speaking, she was a replacement for the recently departed and lamented Lisa. So when the trio arrived in my area, it was me this time who threw a little something her way. I figured she was owed. This time she just swiped a glance at me out of the corner of her eye, her head dipping lower for a second.
I did get a better look at her, though, one that for the first time lasted longer than a second. Now I at least had a snapshot to go by. Shoulder-length light brown hair, slender face, and almost spooky narrowed eyes, green with a touch of brown, like mine. She was pretty, yes, and once my eyes strayed from her face I could see that she was, in classic Sam Spade–Philip Marlowe lingo, "well put together."
From what I had seen, she also had quite an expressive face, so a glance from her could mean any number of things. As, I supposed, could mine. Hello there. Yes, I see that you exist. How are you? Who are you? Why are you looking at me like that? Is it happening again? Oh, no, it's happening again.
And then everything dissolved into work routine until three days later, when Pat approached my desk to ask me if I had time to proofread with one of the newbies, show them the ropes. (In those days we still orally proofread, in pairs, the galleys of everything we published.)
"It'll be Monica, Peter. Over in Laura's office, after lunch."
Of course. In Laura's office. Not that Laura, another Laura, one of the senior legal editors. Still, there was the name. And the date. January 28. Three years to the day since we'd moved into this office, this building, Rocky Mountain Plaza—the first building I had entered upon my arrival in Calgary a decade earlier. Okay, I thought, if anything's going to happen, or is supposed to happen, I'll know pretty soon.
When I arrived after lunch, Monica was already sitting at Laura's desk, ready to go. She extended her hand across the desk in greeting.
"Peter. So. We're together now."
"Uh, yeah," I stumbled, bumped a bit off-balance by her choice of words. Perfectly innocent, of course. Could mean, "So, hey, look at us, here we are, let's get started." Or, "So WE'RE together now, my new reading partner." Except she had put the emphasis on TOGETHER, not we're.
Me being me, of course, all I could think of was the little-known, ill-fated 1968 Keith Relf single, "Together Now." Flip side, "All the Falling Angels." Perfectly understandable. If a beautiful, charismatic young woman shook your hand and said, "So. Fly Me to the Moon," you'd think of Frank Sinatra, wouldn't you?
I did regain my footing, and we spent what I recall as a fairly uneventful few hours trading our voices and thumbnail sketches of ourselves over vast, trackless wastes of mind-deadening legalese. She had a journalism degree from University of Victoria and had worked at a small newspaper in Ashcroft, BC, before moving back to her hometown, Calgary. Here she'd worked in one of those boutique bookstores catering to our curiously educated bourgeois intelligentsia, where she'd met her husband.
Married. Well, that was both a shame and a relief, I muttered to myself in my best Sam Spade voice. I told her about myself, minus the self-pitying pathos. In other words, it didn't take long.
Then, as we began wrapping up, she told me she'd had the feeling after her second interview with our [admittedly, often perplexing] manager, Pat, that she wouldn't be hired, although she'd had a strong intuition until then that she would. I told her Pat had put me off, too, back in 1981, but I'd also been sure the job was for me. Then, as if it were the most natural, inevitable of segues, she pronounced, "I feel it's fate that's put me here."
Oookaaay, muttered Sam Spade to himself. Let's just let that lie there for a few seconds and see if it gets clarified.
The silence lasted a few seconds too long.
"So. Peter." [I would soon grow to appreciate and anticipate this verbal tic of hers, the way she always introduced comments and questions.]
"So. Peter. Do you believe in Fate?"
Oh, Jeez, so this was going to happen after all. She was going to keep saying stuff like this, and I was going to be challenged to respond in some way that was genuine while not "giving the game away," so to speak. It would not do for her to know that I already thought of her as the answer to a question I wasn't even capable of asking myself yet.
So I was wishy-washy in my answer. I said I sometimes believed in fate, that things seemed to fall into place and happen of their own accord sometimes (careful not to mention my theory that such times had more to do with desire than anything else)—but that free will was ultimately paramount.
The way I put it to her was that for me the word fate was lowercase, not uppercase. Down, not up, in the lingo of oral proofreading. She got a kick out of that, or seemed to. That would have to do for now. Whatever this was, my "takeaway" (as we would say nowadays) from my 1985 experience was that it couldn't be forced or rushed.
Free will. Yeah, that's me, Mr. Free Will, Free Willy himself. You go with that, Pete. Good luck with that, as I might have said to myself a decade or two later. I knew my judgment, my initiative—and yes, dammit, my free will—wasn't to be trusted in these matters.
I had few illusions (those would come later). Through the weeks to come, I knew I was at that phase of the midway ride where the roller coaster is climbing, inching, clinking, slowly but relentlessly to the top. The spaces between the clinks . . . lengthening . . . ominously. You try to brace yourself, to secure your valuables, your belongings, your sense of safety and equilibrium.
But nothing, ultimately, can prepare you for what's coming. For what's coming is that . . . you're . . . going. You're going, you're going, you're going . . . and then you're GONEGONEGONE . . .
Down, not up.
This was 1988, and Calgary was about to host the Winter Olympics. There was an Olympic Book Fair at the Convention Centre the first week of February, featuring readers by famous authors and a huge retail book display, the latter managed by Monica's husband. So, when I attended a reading on February 3rd at Monica's suggestion, and met them walking in, arm in arm, I was shocked at how much older than her he seemed, and how pale and anemic he looked beside her catlike vitality. He could be her father, I said to myself at first glance, although I knew he was only a decade older than she was. I was soon to find out that the marriage was on shaky ground; in fact, they had recently separated, albeit temporarily. Does that matter to me? I asked myself. My self and I agreed to table the question for later.
It behooves us, then, to summarize with a brief timeline what has happened so far :
• MARCH 1976: I hear the Yardbirds' March 1964 live performance of "I'm a Man" for the first time. Keith Relf's spooky enunciation of the letter A when he spells out MAN blows my mind. Or so it seems, in retrospect. Conveniently, perhaps. How else to explain my worsening fecklessness and lacklustre approach to reality for years after that?
• MARCH 1985: Having become infatuated with Laura Clapperton, a charismatic young blonde scholar/athlete then proofreading at the publishing house where I work, I experience a brief but intense manic phase, which features a renewed Yardbirds frenzy and, eventually, resignation from my full-time job and return to university.
• MARCH 1986: At university I take a seminar course recommended by ex-Carswell colleague Monica B., wherein I meet Jana, a very pretty and intelligent young oboist whom I will eventually marry. So, yes, the new life I seemed to sense a year earlier now begins.
• SEPTEMBER 1986: At university I take a history class recommended by another ex-Carswell colleague, wherein I encounter the serene dark-haired girl whose beauty will vex me during the coming years.
• SEPTEMBER 1987: A year later, after several false starts, I finally work up the nerve to introduce myself to this girl, whose name, I discover, is Kari.
• JANUARY 1988: Another Monica, a striking but somewhat fey dancer-actress, arrives at Carswell to be interviewed and hired as editor, replacing my elegant, artistic almost-friend Lisa Bryce, who had left in December without saying goodbye. Monica and I exchange glances and snippets of conversation weighted with enigmatic meaning, spookily recalling the Clapperton situation three years earlier.
First, yes, there were the glances. The significant glances. The very beginning, January 14, the day she applied for the job, when she turned her head around to look at me as she went out the door. Quick but loud, the snap-CLAP of a rifle shot, its echo taunting the edges of the silence that followed. The next week, as I saw her exiting the interview room, she threw me another one, halfway across the office. A slider, inside corner. No mistaking that one. And finally, her first day on the job, the first I knew of her having been hired, when they marched the three newbies around to be introduced and gazed upon. It hadn't escaped me that, in a manner of speaking, she was a replacement for the recently departed and lamented Lisa. So when the trio arrived in my area, it was me this time who threw a little something her way. I figured she was owed. This time she just swiped a glance at me out of the corner of her eye, her head dipping lower for a second.
I did get a better look at her, though, one that for the first time lasted longer than a second. Now I at least had a snapshot to go by. Shoulder-length light brown hair, slender face, and almost spooky narrowed eyes, green with a touch of brown, like mine. She was pretty, yes, and once my eyes strayed from her face I could see that she was, in classic Sam Spade–Philip Marlowe lingo, "well put together."
From what I had seen, she also had quite an expressive face, so a glance from her could mean any number of things. As, I supposed, could mine. Hello there. Yes, I see that you exist. How are you? Who are you? Why are you looking at me like that? Is it happening again? Oh, no, it's happening again.
And then everything dissolved into work routine until three days later, when Pat approached my desk to ask me if I had time to proofread with one of the newbies, show them the ropes. (In those days we still orally proofread, in pairs, the galleys of everything we published.)
"It'll be Monica, Peter. Over in Laura's office, after lunch."
Of course. In Laura's office. Not that Laura, another Laura, one of the senior legal editors. Still, there was the name. And the date. January 28. Three years to the day since we'd moved into this office, this building, Rocky Mountain Plaza—the first building I had entered upon my arrival in Calgary a decade earlier. Okay, I thought, if anything's going to happen, or is supposed to happen, I'll know pretty soon.
When I arrived after lunch, Monica was already sitting at Laura's desk, ready to go. She extended her hand across the desk in greeting.
"Peter. So. We're together now."
"Uh, yeah," I stumbled, bumped a bit off-balance by her choice of words. Perfectly innocent, of course. Could mean, "So, hey, look at us, here we are, let's get started." Or, "So WE'RE together now, my new reading partner." Except she had put the emphasis on TOGETHER, not we're.
Me being me, of course, all I could think of was the little-known, ill-fated 1968 Keith Relf single, "Together Now." Flip side, "All the Falling Angels." Perfectly understandable. If a beautiful, charismatic young woman shook your hand and said, "So. Fly Me to the Moon," you'd think of Frank Sinatra, wouldn't you?
I did regain my footing, and we spent what I recall as a fairly uneventful few hours trading our voices and thumbnail sketches of ourselves over vast, trackless wastes of mind-deadening legalese. She had a journalism degree from University of Victoria and had worked at a small newspaper in Ashcroft, BC, before moving back to her hometown, Calgary. Here she'd worked in one of those boutique bookstores catering to our curiously educated bourgeois intelligentsia, where she'd met her husband.
Married. Well, that was both a shame and a relief, I muttered to myself in my best Sam Spade voice. I told her about myself, minus the self-pitying pathos. In other words, it didn't take long.
Then, as we began wrapping up, she told me she'd had the feeling after her second interview with our [admittedly, often perplexing] manager, Pat, that she wouldn't be hired, although she'd had a strong intuition until then that she would. I told her Pat had put me off, too, back in 1981, but I'd also been sure the job was for me. Then, as if it were the most natural, inevitable of segues, she pronounced, "I feel it's fate that's put me here."
Oookaaay, muttered Sam Spade to himself. Let's just let that lie there for a few seconds and see if it gets clarified.
The silence lasted a few seconds too long.
"So. Peter." [I would soon grow to appreciate and anticipate this verbal tic of hers, the way she always introduced comments and questions.]
"So. Peter. Do you believe in Fate?"
Oh, Jeez, so this was going to happen after all. She was going to keep saying stuff like this, and I was going to be challenged to respond in some way that was genuine while not "giving the game away," so to speak. It would not do for her to know that I already thought of her as the answer to a question I wasn't even capable of asking myself yet.
So I was wishy-washy in my answer. I said I sometimes believed in fate, that things seemed to fall into place and happen of their own accord sometimes (careful not to mention my theory that such times had more to do with desire than anything else)—but that free will was ultimately paramount.
The way I put it to her was that for me the word fate was lowercase, not uppercase. Down, not up, in the lingo of oral proofreading. She got a kick out of that, or seemed to. That would have to do for now. Whatever this was, my "takeaway" (as we would say nowadays) from my 1985 experience was that it couldn't be forced or rushed.
Free will. Yeah, that's me, Mr. Free Will, Free Willy himself. You go with that, Pete. Good luck with that, as I might have said to myself a decade or two later. I knew my judgment, my initiative—and yes, dammit, my free will—wasn't to be trusted in these matters.
I had few illusions (those would come later). Through the weeks to come, I knew I was at that phase of the midway ride where the roller coaster is climbing, inching, clinking, slowly but relentlessly to the top. The spaces between the clinks . . . lengthening . . . ominously. You try to brace yourself, to secure your valuables, your belongings, your sense of safety and equilibrium.
But nothing, ultimately, can prepare you for what's coming. For what's coming is that . . . you're . . . going. You're going, you're going, you're going . . . and then you're GONEGONEGONE . . .
Down, not up.
*****
So I met the husband, David, and bought a book, On Divination and Synchronicity by Marie-Louise von Franz, apparently a disciple and confidante of Carl Jung. Monica assured me von Franz was the real deal and the book a legitimate entry in the Jungian canon. Unfortunately that was little help to me in penetrating its dense, obscure prose, so after a single probing assault I retreated for the time being. As the days went by, though, the concept continued to preoccupy, perhaps even magnetize me. A piece in the latest Harper's magazine on the previous year's stock market crash was prefaced by this pithy quote from Jung himself:
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
*****
We had a party at Carswell on February 18, during the Winter Olympics. We were able to watch the medal ceremonies from our office windows across the street from Olympic Plaza. My music was playing in the coffee room, as usual. I wandered in just as the rave-up in the Yardbirds' "Respectable" was climaxing, and fell into conversation with Monica.
Appearances could be deceptive. She was, after all, separated from her husband. So, yet another element curiously symmetrical with 1985, when I was infatuated with a young woman heading into a marriage.
As others joined us, we indulged in a wide-ranging discussion on God, the gods, belief and authority, at the end of which we reached a consensus that "it's not so much what we believe in anymore, as what we pay attention to." I suppose I meant that media and information had so much overloaded us that the mere decision about where to direct one's attention was now analogous to yesteryear's choice of belief. Of course none of us suspected that, within a decade or two, our attention spans would become keystone commodities within the new digital economy, bought and sold and sliced and diced within an inch, or maybe a kilobyte, of their lives.
My attention by that time was divided almost equally between Monica—or, more precisely, my infatuation with Monica— and Jana—or, more precisely, the stress of being absorbed in and, lately, buried by, Jana's ongoing difficulties with her studies and her family. And it was precisely her difficulties, her atmosphere of perpetual stress and crisis, that made it unlikely that I would ever walk away from the situation. There were lots of pluses, too, of course, and I could still foresee making a long-term commitment to us, but couldn't imagine it co-existing with much enjoyment of life on my part if it stayed like this. Endurance, yes. And maybe, having been unable thus far to summon the initiative to extricate myself or even improve the situation, endurance what I was stuck with and deserved. A sort of Vietnam of the heart, in geopolitical terms (bitterness and flippancy being convivial bedfellows).
And Monica? After my 1985 Clapperton experience, any infatuation I felt was going to be tempered with skepticism. If "skeptical infatuation" sounded oxymoronic—or just moronic—that was the hand I'd been dealt, or had decided to deal myself. In geopolitical terms (anticipating Bush the Elder by several years), no more Vietnams.
*****
The afternoon after the party was a marvelous chinook, perhaps 16 degrees, so I took the bike for its first spin of the year. The warmth, the fresh air, the image of her face in my mind, pregnant with some elusive memory, it was all sending me back to 1985 again, and again I wondered if, despite my skepticism, something magical and unprecedented was on the horizon.
In any case, I was on a natural high. There was a glint, not in my eye but in my mind. I felt ten years younger. No, I felt as I should have felt ten years earlier.
And just as in 1985, whatever might be on the horizon also seemed inevitable. Little did I know that five days later it would be Monica's birthday, and that the words inevitable and déjà vu would never feel quite the same thereafter.
Next Stop: I KNEW A WOMAN
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