Coincidence
Surrounding my time at that telemarketing company from ten years ago, I was living in Laval and going to school/work at various places around Montreal. That meant a lot of years with 2.5 – 3 hours a day of public transit, and I was reading a lot. My favourite used book store was on the east side of Stanley, between Ste. Catherine and de Maisonneuve. The owner looked like a shorter Bruce Cockburn and, no matter how much time I spent at his shop, never said a word to me that didn’t include the price of purchase. Last time I visited, it was still there.
I would go in weekly, head to the fiction & literature section, and look at covers until something looked good. My rule was less than $7 for something that looked interesting, $7 – $9 for something really interesting, and $9+ if it was something I’d heard about and actively wanted to buy. One day I came across Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine, a gorgeous-looking book about letters between two people that featured actual envelopes from which you would pull out the story page by page. Definitely in the really interesting category, but priced a little too high, so I didn’t buy it.
Later that night I was reading some E/N sites (blogs before they were called blogs, meant Everything to the writer but Nothing to the reader). I came across Nicki, an interesting and artsy girl whose archives contained a quote from someone named Sabine about letter-writing. Was it a coincidence? I wrote her asking if was from Griffin & Sabine, and whether or not she thought it would be worthwhile to break my price rules. She wrote back saying it was from that book, and that it was one of her favourites. I bought it the next day.
It’s an amazing book; the first of a trilogy. Reading a correspondence that makes you physically remove letters from envelopes is completely unmatched in terms of fictional voyeurism. There’s a second trilogy which is pretty bad—the novelty has completely worn off and the new characters are very forced—but the initial three are just wonderful. They’re fully illustrated by Bantock—who before G&S was known for his pop-up books—and just as enjoyable to look at as they are to read.
The inside of my copy was inscribed with what you see at the top of the above picture. For years I’ve wondered who Marina and Jeff are, and how (what seems like) such a personal gesture could have ended up in a used book store. Margin notes and inscriptions are some of my favourite things about buying used books, and this is by far the most elaborate I’ve found in a “modern” book. The added voyeurism was almost criminal.
When I first moved to Vancouver, in 2002, I started dating this girl named Jen. It was one of those insanely rocky relationships that had amazing highs and devastating lows; nothing was calm, but nothing was boring. We became a couple in the middle of a (very loud and rude) argument at the Fringe Café when one of us, as an excuse for our behaviour, screamed “I only said that because I like you!” and got “oh yeah? Well I really like you, too!” Followed by an awkward silence, a “now what?” moment, and then a year and a half what is still my most interesting relationship.
In 2004 we’d broken up for the umpteenth time, but decided to try getting together again—Jen suggested we go see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at 5th Ave. Cinema. Neither of us knew what it was about, but we’d both heard good things so it was a date. Cue about two hours of awkwardness, followed by a walk down 4th to Jitters Café. We drank coffee and played chess in an unspoken agreement that we’d just seen the absolute worst movie to watch in our situation and did not want to talk about/discuss it or its implications.
A few days later, Jen came over to my apartment. She didn’t know, but I wanted her to over to finally end it for good; fun as it was, staying together was unhealthy for the both of us. She bought me a copy of Nick Bantock’s The Venetian’s Wife, which I awkwardly accepted before the “talk.” A combination of just finishing the second G&S trilogy and the end of the relationship meant that it ended up unread on my shelf for a lot of years. Somehow it survived last year’s enormous pre-move book purge, and I finally picked it up a couple days ago to read while waiting for a couple of books to come in the mail.
And there it was, an inscription! I’d never even opened it and had no idea. I don’t know what she means by “I saw this book and automatically thought ‘Ooh!!” I assume I’d lent her G&S and she knew I liked them, but was “Ooh!!” an inside joke I’ve since forgotten? Is it just something to write on an awkward gift? On top of that, I have absolutely no idea what that symbol means. Possibly the start of a regretted sign-off, scribbled over and replaced? Something cultural? Just as mysterious as Marina and Jeff to me.
The Venetian’s Wife is alright, but nothing I’d recommend. The whole thing feels incomplete, with an annoying meta-awareness of incompleteness built into the plot. Bantock uses a similar device to the letter-writing of G&S, but it too feels incomplete. While one character’s parts are written in a sans-serif font, italics when in thought, the protagonist gets no such distinction. Her first-person narrating, emails, and diary entries are all the same indistinguishable serif. The binding and paper are beautifully high quality, but the pages haven’t been cut well and constantly threaten with paper cuts. The written letters and art in the pages, while meant to look like scans of real art, look computer-generated and very fake. It reads like a rush job to capitalize on the success of G&S.
But then I hit page 105 and realized that I was either caught in a coincidence, or took six years to notice a really thoughtful gesture:
We passed a store with a display of old record albums. There was that early cover with the picture of a woman striding side by side with Bob Dylan; she’s leaning into him and her arm is wrapped round his. I wanted to do that with Marco, but I didn’t. I did allow myself to walk a little closer to him. He’s taller than I’d realized. My eyes are exactly on a level with the tip of his nose.
One of my favourite memories with Jen was walking her to the bus stop late one night. We were headed down w 13th to MacDonald after a rare Vancouver snow storm that left the sidewalks un-walkable. It was late enough to walk down the middle of the street and she was holding onto my arm while I kept pulling her to the point where she’d lose her balance and have to lean into me. Finally she asked:
“What are you doing?!”
“I’m trying to recreate that Bob Dylan cover.”
Then she called me a dork and I pushed her into a snow bank.
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