An Exile's Perfect Letter

By Larry Mathews

**NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR BOOK AWARDS FICTION LONGLIST**
Sixty-two-year-old English professor Hugh Norman is getting ready to retire and just going through the motions. He’s detached, irreverent, and quite pleased with himself. But then he learns of a long-lost friend’s sudden death, and shockingly discovers a body while walking through a city park. Suddenly, over just a few days, Hugh is compelled to deal with a large cast of eccentric characters and a police detective who has taken a sudden interest in his life. With a perfect sense of comedic timing, An Exile’s Perfect Letter is a portrait of a man forced to come of age all over again. It’s a send-up, a love story, an elegy for lost youth, and a celebration of friendships that stand the test of time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books
• Release date: Sep 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781550817089

Larry Mathews

Larry Mathews teaches in the English department at Memorial University. He is author of the short-story collection The Sandblasting Hall of Fame and the novel The Artificial Newfoundlander. Mathews lives in St. John’s.

Book preview

ONE

I think I may be in love with my dentist.

This thought crosses my mind as I stare into the eyes of Dr. Sherry Kirsch, on the occasion of my first visit to her practice. Dr. Kirsch—or Sherry, as I’ve already begun to think of her—seems to have violet eyes, or maybe it’s a trick of the light. Does anyone really have violet eyes? Can’t be contacts, since she’s wearing glasses. Or perhaps the glasses are props, placebos designed to give patients the sense that one is dealing with, being dealt with by, a serious professional and not merely some bimbo who’s managed to scrape through dentistry school on the basis of charm alone.

She’s what you might call petite—or would if you were still in the 1950s—and there’s a sweet earnestness about her nearly pretty face as she gives me the scoop on what’s happening inside my mouth. Why only nearly pretty, and what does that even mean? Strike that from the record. We’re not judging here. There’s something, not to put too fine a point on it, sexy about the brisk professionalism of her manner that trumps any pointless detailing of physical features (perfectly disciplined shortish dark hair, but no opportunity to observe the contours of her body, concealed as it is beneath her dentist’s scrubs). And as for what’s happening inside my mouth—not much, is apparently the bottom line, but the subtext is that it’s me she’s telling me about, there’s no reason to change anything in the immediate future, I’m okay, I will continue to be okay, I’ve received the blessing of the secular priestess, she who knows everything it is necessary to know.

There is of course that mysterious fracture in the upper left incisor, of which I have until now been unaware.

What could have caused it? I ask her, eager to show I’m no passive recipient of her wisdom but a keen, self-motivated student of all things dental. Why wouldn’t I have noticed when it happened?

Who knows, she says. It’s probably something that happened eons ago.

Like so much else in my life, I reply, with what I hope seems like rueful, self-deprecating wit.

I’m sixty-two. Sherry can’t be much over thirty.

She smiles. Her teeth are perfect.

I have sought out the services of Dr. Sherry Kirsch, DDS, because my last dentist, Dr. Sylvester O’Connor, committed suicide a few months back. An occupational hazard of dentists, conventional wisdom has it. Theories abound. At his funeral, attended by a strong representation of his clientele (not me, though), it was noted that neither his wife nor his daughter expressed much in the way of grief, both having been seen to sport tight, self-satisfied little smiles. The only public blubbering emanated from his long-time receptionist, unlikely to have been an erotic interest of his, but sounding sincere nonetheless. And where, people said sympathetically, would she get another job at her age?

Sylvester was seventy.

This being St. John’s, there was a literary angle. A character based on Sylvester figured prominently in a story by a local writer published, remarkably, in Harper’s around 1980. He was the cheating husband in a love triangle. The story was widely anthologized, but the writer never published another. She too is dead.

Sylvester’s daughter would have been born around the time the story was published, though who knows what significance, if any, that fact might have. But as a card-carrying English prof, I have to think there might be one, even if I don’t really want to uncover or unearth it.

So here I am in Sherry’s chair, sitting up with what I hope is a reasonably dignified posture as she browses through the material in the envelope I’ve retrieved from Sylvester’s office. The examination was over quickly. She began by feeling my neck, something Sylvester certainly never did, but which, she explained, was standard procedure for her (lest, presumably, I should conclude that there’s something special about my neck).

Oh, and Sherry, those ridiculous gloves, you don’t need them, not with me of all patients. You have nothing to fear, truly. Shed them. Shed them.

My exercise in mind control having failed, I listened, fascinated, as she told the story of each of my teeth in turn to her bored but attentive hygienist amanuensis. Buckle here, crown there, this that and the other thing somewhere else, fifty-percent overbite. Sherry! Isn’t that a bit harsh. Can’t we shade the truth a little here? Or perhaps, for all I know, a fifty-percent overbite is as good as it gets, some sort of golden mean, a phenomenon any dentist is glad to discover.

Now she’s looking at the information sheet I filled out earlier. I’ve answered No to all the questions aimed at finding something wrong with me. No medication? She looks skeptical. Of any kind?

No. Nothing.

Vitamin supplements?

No. Go ahead. Keep asking, Sherry. You know you want to.

But she doesn’t.

Perhaps she intuits the truth.

Yes, there on a shelf above her computer is a photo of her, a man, and two young children, but who knows what that may mean? Nothing conclusive certainly, a PR gesture, reassuring image of domestic normality. For all I know the diploma on the wall of the outer office is bogus too. But what odds.

Lots of work down the road, Sherry is saying. But nothing immediate. And I think the university plan covers major.

It doesn’t, I know, but I don’t want to contradict her.

Wouldn’t want to hit you with a thousand dollars out of the blue.…

Sherry! What’s a thousand? Don’t even think about it. I’ll give it to you right now.

She’s slender under her light blue coverall, her dark hair appropriately under stringent control, only a single ringlet dangling free.

Sherry Kirsch. What were your parents thinking? It would be nice if people associated our daughter with the idea of a sweet alcoholic haze? If she turns out to have a drinking problem, people won’t be judgmental—they’ll say, With a name like that, what can you expect?

And where are you from? Not here, either by name or accent. Your husband (maybe ex- by now) is probably a Newfoundlander. You met him at dentistry school on the mainland. Refused to change your name. Good self-assertive gesture. But then he insisted you both move here, and you caved. Not so good. Or is it: willing to compromise, willing to try new things. That’d be okay, then.

She leads me back to the outer office, where the receptionist tells her the university won’t pay for major.

Am I afraid to visit the dentist was a question on the sheet I filled out. Actually I’d prefer, just now, not to leave the place where Sherry is. Not, of course, that I’m afraid, exactly.

She’s happy about the condition of my gums, she’s said. Happy.

---

Of course I’m not really in love with my dentist. That particular cloud-capped tower comes tumbling down the instant I step into the parking lot of the strip mall where Sherry’s, Dr. Kirsch’s, office is located.

There’s the hot sun, the banality of asphalt, the rows of motionless vehicles somehow radiating an aura of stolid insolence, as though having ignored the commands of their owners to take them somewhere. There’s also the dispiriting insight that with all the resources of the human imagination hypothetically at their disposal, the folks who control this parcel of land could think no higher thought than: Parking.

But it’s not only that.

There, heaving herself out of what appears to be an absurdly undersized Yaris, is my colleague, Dr. Bernadette O’Keefe. She seems to be shaking her generously proportioned clouds of gray hair at me, though I can’t quite believe this. Hugh, she says, mock-severely but with a layer of real severity tucked away in there somewhere. We need to talk.

Uh, do we?

"Don’t be coy, Hugh. You know what I mean. Does the phrase ludic narrative ring a bell?"

Tolls me right on back to my sole self, I say, never at a loss for creaky pedantic jollity.

Bernadette’s brief smile is suggestive of someone tasting an obscure wine and quickly deciding No thank you.

She has what I imagine would in other circumstances be the aura of the Mother Superior about her, something that strongly implies (without stating anything directly, mind) that one should pay attention. Or, possibly, else. My colleague Barney Power loves to tell the story of being approached by a student looking for Bernadette, but unable to remember her name. You know, sir, the student said, the one that looks like a grandmother hippie. Barney, not a fan of Bernadette, is so pleased with this anecdote that he repeats it two or three times a year, making sure Bernadette is out of earshot.

Here for my physio, she says, waggling her cane as if to evoke the unmentionable complexity of her constellation of ailments.

Beothuk Physio occupies the same building as the Colonial Dental Centre.

Teeth, I explain.

Hugh, about that proposal…

Bernadette and I are members of the departmental graduate studies committee, responsible for, among much else, approving thesis proposals. She has a bee in her bonnet about Destabilizing Indeterminacy: A Poststructural Analysis of Three Ludic Narratives, submitted by a student unknown to either of us, to be supervised by our newest young hotshot, Lister Craddock, noted mainly for his ironic T-shirts and general sense of entitlement.

Surely you must agree, Bernadette is saying. Not a single English-language-written work.

How many hyphens would you put in there?

What?

"I’d put in two. Between English and language, of course, but also, and here’s where it gets dicey, between language and written. What do you think?"

Don’t try to change the subject, Hugh. This is serious.

But so are hyphens. Why don’t people use them anymore?

Bernadette doesn’t respond to this question, but reminds me that the student plans to write about a novel translated from Spanish (whose title I’ve already forgotten), a Chinese film (ditto), and a video game titled something like Major Felony Gangsta. Bernadette doesn’t understand how a video game can be regarded as a narrative, ludic or otherwise. But the student asserts that all three texts, as she calls them, will be shown to be ideal vehicles for the exploration of the world of ludic narrativity, said world having been discovered by a couple of no-name theorists in whose ground-breaking footsteps she will be pleased to follow. This is what passes for significant novelty in these parts, though really the project promises to be a hunting-and-gathering exercise, which will nevertheless pass easily, if recent history is any guide.

But not if Bernadette can help it.

Need to take a stand on this one, she’s saying. "Are we now the Department of Everything but English Literature? Or, well, not just English Literature, but you know what I mean."

She has me pegged for an ally. We both teach Creative Writing (me, fiction; she, poetry). We both publish in unpopular areas (me, on obscure Canadian fiction writers; she, poetry). That is, she publishes poetry itself, not articles about poetry. Her most recent book, Rampsing along the Landwash, was widely praised on the mainland for its attempt to preserve authentic Newfoundland speech (though widely, as applied to a volume of poetry, is of course intrinsically hyperbolic). And precisely what the mainland reviewers knew about authentic Newfoundland speech was somewhat unclear. Perhaps they were relying on the author’s preface, which stated that "where possible, every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb is taken from The Dictionary of Newfoundland English. Only one commentator slyly noted a certain gimmicky quality. The book was nominated for a major award, which fact Bernadette took as supreme validation of her literary career, despite her contempt, in other contexts, for the mainland literary establishment."

In any case, she’s long since forgiven me for my own mainlanderness. We have too much in common: our propensity for professional self-marginalization, our teaching interest in actual literary creation be it ever so humble, and—unspoken, but overriding everything—our allegiance to the old-time religion of humanist values.

So why am I reluctant to ride along with her on this one?

Lister’s research, she snorts.

Well that’s not really relevant to the proposal, is it? The student—

It’s all part of the same thing, Hugh.

Lister is interested in postscripts. He believes postscripts are best studied separate and apart from the letters to which they are appended. He is reputed to have developed complex theories about the aesthetics of postscripts and their cultural importance. The humble postscript, hitherto disregarded by conventional scholarship, can say much about a civilization at its most inadvertently self-revelatory, he thinks.

Bernadette is staring at me, daring me to contradict her.

"Uh, times change, right? It is 2006. And yes, I am ashamed to say that’s all I’ve got. Sorry."

She’s starting to get angry now, though she’s struggling to project an expression of goodwill. Haven’t we been on the same side for nearly two decades, she seems to be asking. And haven’t I long since forgiven her for the satirical poem about a Creative Writing instructor from the mainland named Hubert, who sought to convince his students that publishing outside Newfoundland might be a good thing, and as punishment was tortured and then dismembered by several female spirits of place with unpronounceable names from Irish mythology? Well, haven’t I?

What she says is: I would have expected more of you.

Look, Bernadette, I don’t mean to be flippant here, but the thing is, if we try to draw a line in the sand on this one, we’re going to end up looking like twin Canutes with the tidal wave of 1929 bearing down on us. What’s the point?

I’m quite proud of myself for this, the twin Canutes idea stressing our putative common cause, and the tidal wave reminding her of my hard-won immigrant’s knowledge of all things Newfoundland. But she’s not mollified.

Fifteen years ago, or even ten, she says, you wouldn’t be talking like this. You wouldn’t have given up. There’s a note of sad reproach here. I’m being reclassified under the rubric of lost cause. She’s ready to make a more serious move toward Beothuk Physio.

I’ve seen the future, I tell her. It has an endless supply of cool T-shirts and an insatiable desire to inflate the importance of the trivial.

But she’s already limping away as I finish.

I agree about the hyphens, she says, over her shoulder.

---

Driving home along Elizabeth Avenue, I feel a certain low-key guilt-related pang of sorrow at having let Bernadette down. She’s right, after all—our profession, it sometimes seems, has been sliding downhill for about forty years now, with increasing velocity lately. But I’m right, too. With three years to go in my career, why bother circling the wagons? No cavalry will come riding over the hill. Chief Lister Craddock and his tribe will prevail. The chronicle of the Battle of Destabilizing Indeterminacy will be written in a language unintelligible to me. But I won’t be around to read it anyway.

This thought cheers me up somewhat, as I cruise past a building that used to be a high school but is now, if I’m not mistaken, an old folks’ home, nice visual metaphor for the transition I’m about to undergo. A new life awaits, and although it’ll be much shorter than the old one, it won’t involve making a fool of oneself in front of groups of forty or fifty inattentive twenty-year-olds. What it does involve remains, of course, an open question. But it will be new.

And from this perspective, how unnatural does my professional life now seem. Forcing people to read poems, stories, novels, herding them into classrooms and insisting they pretend to listen to me talking about them. How cruel. And what a disservice to the authors, to their works. As if literature existed to fuel an obsolescent machine in an obscure corner of a factory whose products no one can see. Something out of Orwell. The Ministry of Whimsicality. The Department of Pointless Wordmongering.

Three years to go.

Up the hill on Mayor Avenue, past the cemetery on the left, the new tiny overpriced row houses on the right, past the aging nondescript residential blur higher up (yes, yes, each dwelling no doubt containing its precious cargo of unique misery and—long shot—joy, unknowable to the dilettante passerby), then around the corner onto Freshwater, and home.

Maureen, the love of my life, and partner of four years (impossible not to say the word as though there were quotation marks around it) comes out of her study to greet me, face serious.

I’m not sure I’m ready to hear whatever it is she’s about to tell me. There’s a natural severity to it, her face, the features a tad sharper than what would be considered ideal by whoever it is who determines these things. At first glance there’s something formidable in the blue gaze, something in the expression that speaks of prudishness, as in I have more important things to do than descend to that level. But then you notice the lips, full, lush, sensual despite—one thinks, but for only a moment—the probable desire of their owner. The shoulder-length dark-blondish hair seems designed to have one’s