HUNTER TREMAYNE is a New York City & Barcelona Actor.Director.Novelist.Playwright

An Unreliable Narrator

By Hunter Tremayne

I am Ian Sinclair, an English private eye based in New York in the year 1948. My left hand is on the top of a busted garden gate that when I push it swings open with an arc that ends its movement with a soft thud into a small snowdrift.

It is night, and snow is falling. The garden before me is pristine with fallen snow. I step forward and my gumshoe sinks an inch into the stuff. I wear gumshoes because I am a detective, and leather on the feet of a private detective wears out faster than the makeup on a three-dollar whore in the arms of a sailor with a three-day furlough.

I can hear a woman crying, somewhere close. She is saying a word that I don’t understand, over and over again. There is a bird in the branches of a tree above me. With a shiver of recognition I look around the garden and see the well.

And now I know the word the woman must be saying.

The world changes.

I am an English private eye called Ian Sinclair. I am in the living room of a well-appointed Upper East Side New York townhouse. There is a gun in my hand. Three people lie dead on the floor. On the couch, the sister of the woman I am pointing my gun at lies dying, but I don’t know that yet.

There is a woman in the doorway. She is sitting on a chair, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

Why is she in the doorway? Who puts a chair in a doorway?

The world changes.

The word the woman is saying is babulyah. It is Ukrainian. I know this because I was told it by the person who created the world I am standing in now, every snowflake beneath my feet, every snowflake on the tree branches above me, every snowflake I can see and every snowflake in this world was created by the power of her imagination.

So I am a private eye, and fictional. I have to be fictional, as it’s not 1948, it’s 2011. I am fictional, but this is not my world. It’s hers.

Babulya, she cries again.

The world changes.

It is New York, 2006. I am an English actor and I have just written a play, my first, a full-length one about an English private eye in 1948 New York. I wrote it because we couldn’t get the rights to do Les Liaisons Dangerous and we were running out of time. I come up with a name for the lead character: Ian Sinclair.

The world changes.

It is Barcelona, 2011. I am in the offices of the Well-Woman clinic in Urquinaona, rehearsing a scene from the private eye play I had written in New York. I am playing Ian Sinclair. In my hand is a gun. A real gun, but loaded with blanks.

I love you, I am saying to the actress who plays my lover. I will always love you.

But there is something wrong. My eyes are upon the actress, but my words are said to the woman who sits inside the doorway.

The world changes.

She created this frozen world, this nighttime chiaroscuro of falling snow and trees and well and cottage, and she created, too, the woman with the tortured soul who cries out the name of her child. She gave me this story to read and I gave her notes on it on the night that I…

The world changes.

After the rehearsal I cannot breathe properly. I am on my way to a bar with her but I have to keep stopping to catch my breath. What on earth is wrong with me?  When we get to the bar we order wine and I give her the notes on her story but all I see is her neck as she gathers her hair up and then lets it down again. She is utterly beautiful.

The world changes.

I had the heart attack during the rehearsal.  There would be no more rehearsals and for once the play would not go on. The fourth of the arteries to my heart had closed up. The attack should have killed me on the spot, but something kept me going long enough to make it to the hospital. Later my heart surgeon would suggest that it was adrenaline, or simply luck. I think it was love.

I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. One Thursday in November. She walked in the door of that bar and smiled at me and told me her name. It doesn’t matter why she was there that evening. It never did. She had come to Barcelona to write a novel. I had written a couple of my own. We laughed and talked and drank red wine until they threw us out.

That night a miracle happened.

I used to write poetry: love poetry, in particular. Then back in 1992 a drunken Scottish landlady set fire to everything I had ever written. “Only Rabbie Burns can write poetry,” she said the next day. She offered me a bottle of sherry by way of apology. I had never drunk a drop of sherry since and never written another poem.

The night we met I wrote a poem for her. It was a love poem, and it was pretty good. I gave it to her the night she left for Ukraine under the Arc de Triomf, after a night of laughing and walking the wonderful streets of Barcelona for hours, singing songs and sharing secrets. I asked her not to read it until Christmas Day and she agreed. She asked me to quit smoking in return, and so I did.

I was to write many other poems for her. On her birthday I wrote her a very long poem based on Spencer’s The Faerie Queene called A Woman of Many Parts, one of the best things I ever wrote, full of love and friendship and joy. And she wrote poetry for me, too, and one of them would be the most wonderful poem I have ever read.

The emergency operation installed a stent into one of my arteries, which would keep me going until the main bypass operation. I would still be short of breath; walking the three flights of stairs to her apartment left me breathless for a good ten minutes, but it was Valentine’s Day and I had a rose and a poem to deliver.

A day later we walked along Barcelonetta beach. We talked about a spy novel she had worked on while she was inNew York, and another book we might write together. The walk drained me, and out of concern she stayed with me all the way home.

She meets me in a local tavern where I draw her a diagram of my heart, showing what had happened to it and what the operation would do to cure it. She looks at it and bursts into tears. At the metro we look at each other and know it may be the last time we will see each other again.

The world changes.

Nobody had told me that salt is an incredibly bad thing to have if you have had a heart attack, and after a day eating patatas bravas and drinking salty margaritas, I was rushed to hospital, where although all is ultimately well, they decide to keep me in, bringing forward the date of the bypass.

She came to see me in the hospital, bringing poetry, strawberries and laughter. I wrote a  poem about her visit.

She came to see me, newly saved from death
She opened her book, and with her every breath
With her Moscow Look and with her laughing eyes
Her voice like golden water, the sound like dancing fireflies
Whose wings keep darkness at bay.
And in her grace, every perfect word upon her satin lips
Shimmered in the air; and when she was done 
She rose, and turning to the window, every age she had ever been
Was upon her face: the girl of seventeen and every woman past that point
For time was out of time and out of joint. 
She shrugged, her hands fell akimbo to her hips
And unconsciously was she Venus reborn: the evening light had reverentially
Revealed her sensuality, and she was every woman
That had ever been or would ever be: incarnate: standing next to me.
And as I swept my gaze up from her body to her smile
The words of the poem she had read me turned virile 
For the fire and the rose were as one
As I looked at her face in the sun
And long after she departed I sat there in thought 
Understanding the happiness that she had brought 
I remembered all she had given me
Intentionally or undesigned 
And the wonders she took with her 
And everything she left behind

The world changes.

.

When you come around after an operation for a triple heart bypass you will have a tube stuck down your throat. The nurses will explain to you that it will be removed shortly. They will also tell you that there will be a brief period of pain while the anesthetics are switched over. This is exactly what happened to me after my operation, except that there had been an administrative error and the nurses did not know that I could not understand Spanish and as I had a tube down my throat I could not inform them otherwise. They put my kindle into my hand and smiled at me and chatted amongst themselves.

So when the pain hit me like a son of a bitch they ignored it. I was too weak to do anything except weep in fear and terror. Then I remembered something.

She had sent an email to my kindle with a poem attached and made me promise not to read it until I was out of surgery. I always keep my promises. With trembling fingers I read her poem.

Dearest friend, I write you now a poem,

You, who have written so many beautiful words,

And yet read none by me….

And all the pain is washed away as I read and reread her words of affection and friendship. By the time the morphine kicked in I must have had read that poem a hundred times.

And all goes well. The surgeon tells me that it will take three months for my breastbone to heal and that I should not lift anything heavy, like a TV or a couch or a washing machine. Okay.

The world changes.

She sent me the third and final part of her story while I was recovering from the operation, out of Intensive Care but with my body still covered in catheters. My Kindle could not open the PDF attachment she had sent with her email.  I could text her, as we text every day, but I know that today she will be at the ballet in Kiev with her daughter.

I am an impulsive man.

I shared my room with a man with a very large family. An hour later, while they were visiting, I began to laboriously and carefully disengage myself from the catheters. It took me a while to get to my feet as it had been some time since I had stood on them, but after that everything was plain sailing. I put on my slippers, drew on my dressing gown and, as nonchalantly as I could, left the ward and strolled down the corridor towards the elevators. While I waited for them, I saw through the windows that the afternoon skies were filled with torrential rain.

I stepped into the elevator and before the doors closed, a nurse I knew called Isabella stepped smartly between them. As we descended she produced an umbrella from her bag. We both stepped out on the ground floor and I started towards the corridor that leads towards the main entrance.

Isabella tapped me on the shoulder.

“And where exactly,” she said in her perfect English, “Do you think you are going?”

“I live one block away, Isabella.” I told her, keeping my voice as calm as I could. “My friend has sent me the last part of a book she has written and I want to print it off and read it as quickly as I can.”

“Does this friend of yours know that you have just had a major heart operation?”

“Yes, she does.” I looked her in the eye. “Look, this isn’t her idea. But spending time with her story is a lot like spending time with her, and that always makes me feel better. So if you let me do this, you will be speeding along the healing process.”

She looked at her wristwatch, then her shoes and everywhere except at me.

“She must be very special to you,” she said.

“She is,” I said, and then added with a wink. “But not as special as you.”

She smiled at me and took my arm. “One block, yes?”

“One block.”

It took ten minutes to walk to my apartment, three times as long as usual because I couldn’t walk very fast. Twelve minutes to print off the last part of the story. Twenty minutes to get back as I lost a slipper crossing the street in the rainstorm and it was swept away.  Isabella insisted on trying to find it, to no avail. Five minutes after that I was back in bed and Isabella was drying my foot while I started reading.

Her story is set in Ukraine, a saga of three females: grandmother, mother and child. The mother is the central character, although this is not immediately apparent, and the closest in personality to the author. Her husband has left, leaving his wife to raise their daughter alone. One night, in despair, she tries to kill herself.

I had not seen that coming.

While she lay in the snow, dying, I lay in my hospital bed, reading the manuscript while Isabella reapplied all of the catheters.

What can we do to help when we want to help with all of our heart and soul?

We do what we can. We do what we must. I close my eyes and start to write. I have no pen and no paper, but that is not a problem, for I am an actor as well as a writer, and I will remember everything.

For one last time, the world changes.

I, who am Ian Sinclair, and who is not, stand in a snowy garden that does not really exist, listening to the cries of a woman who is not a real woman.

It doesn’t matter. Not for one moment, not for one instant, does it matter.

I run through the snow until I see her lying there. I tear off my jacket and cover her with it. I pick her up and carry her inside and ignore the pain in my chest because she weighs a lot less than a washing machine. I lay her on the table and sing songs to her that I have written for her. I stroke her hair and recite poetry to her that she inspired. I tell her she is the most beautiful woman in the world, because she is.

On the table, her eyes flicker as she slips back into consciousness. I leave the room, closing the door softly. I retrace my steps to the crippled garden gate, smoothing over my footprints as I go. You’d never even know I was there.

This is not my story, it is hers; I know that. But how can the story of my life from this moment on be wholly mine if our friendship had saved it? What could I write that would not have her presence in it? The woman I saved from suicide was as fictional as my detective, but real flesh and blood is invested in every character we create. There is often as much truth in fiction as there is in real life. We cannot always trust what we read, but the writer must always believe in who they write about.

And so I write this now: I know that by all that is right and true and holy in this world I would be dead right now if I had never met this woman. I love her with all of my heart, and be it a detective called Ian Sinclair or the man who invented him, be it truth or fiction or everything in between, whichever reliable or unreliable narrator tells the tale, all that matters in any story, all that matters in any life,  always, forever and a day, is love.

(c) 2011 by Hunter Tremayne