“Figures on a Wharf” by Wayne Tefs

In Figures on a Wharf, recently published by Turnstone Press, Wayne Tefs writes a classic story in clear, evocative language. He explores a disintegrating marriage and the emergence of a new love, a new marriage; he patterns and layers his story with a grace and sophistication rarely found in first novels.

The novel is structurally exciting: finely tuned, the various layers reverberate within the work, exposing the complexity of the human relationships it records. Tefs’ use of dated chapter divisions, anecdotes, and speculative descriptions of photographs juxtapose factual events with remembered ones, the subjective voice of the central character with the objective voice of the narrator. This method reveals the character’s personal mythological experience as it exists in conflict and in harmony with his larger, communal experience.

The story itself is familiar: Michael, the protagonist, is a middle-aged professor who falls in love with Mary, a married student, eventually destroying his old marriage and creating a new one with Mary. It is a typical and somewhat tiresome theme, both in novels and in life, but Tefs’ treatment is refreshingly thoughtful and bleakly honest. The interesting thing about this novel is that very little changes; Michael replaces one woman for another, but the form of his loving does not change. In fact, judging from the descriptions of the photographs which begin and end the novel, the two women are very alike. Mary is beginning to gain weight, a characteristic initially associated with Patricia. Ironically enough, Patricia herself loses weight as she loses Michael; one wonders if she will change again into an early version of her successor, as Mary herself transforms into Michael’s woman, recreated according to his needs and vision of her. Michael himself, in both photographs, boasts a similar stance—although he appears happier in the second photograph, he is, as in the first, looking off into the distance, slightly distracted.

This act of replacement reflects an assumption which Tefs appears to be questioning—that the problems within a marriage rest in the people involved, rather than in the act of loving. This idea is revealed most obviously through the short passages placed between the chapters—passages which voice uneasy male anecdotes concerned with ‘possessing’ women, and which serve to emphasize the cultural ideology that women are primarily physical objects held within a male vision. Tefs reveals the conflict between the uneasy bravado expressed in such prevailing cultural fantasies and the male experience in the concrete world with real women. He explores the way in which such communal experience can lead to self-deception, to unknown longing, to that look of distance in Michael’s eyes.

That Michael himself is softer, more tender than the characters of the anecdotes is important, since he exposes the clash between personal and communal mythology—for Michael lives with the same fear of women expressed so self-consciously in the anecdotes. He, too, expects that Mary, the ‘perfect’ woman, will manage to take away his own human loneliness, that her presence will serve to erase and fill his emptiness. The anecdotes function as a series of memories and impressions in his and the narrator’s mind, informing his emotional understanding of women and dictating his pattern of loving them. The final one is expressed in his own voice:

“The women will always be there, they’ll always be there. Whether you want commitment, love, or just plain sex, there are thousands of them out there waiting to mother us.” His arm sweeps the air, taking in the shore, the forest in behind, the lake, the sky. “They want to mother us. Take us to their breasts, forgive us, hold us.
Don’t be afraid. The women will always be there.” I’ve heard him say this before, but now, seeing the almost imperceptible twitch that punctuates his jaw before he quickly inhales on his cigarette, I wonder if even he believes it.

Michael’s distracted gaze in the second photograph suggests that he has missed something, that his replacement of one woman for another is simply another empty gesture that the novel documents and attempts to understand.

The climactic scene further reinforces the fear of women expressed throughout the novel. In a beautifully explicit scene of domestic violence (which was first seen as an excerpt in the December, 1982 issue of Arts Manitoba), Patricia exposes her rage at Michael’s affair and subsequent abandonment of her. She hurls domestic objects at the walls and at Michael, screaming and shattering glass in opposition to his lies, his evasions, and finally threatens him with a butcher knife. Michael literally fears for his life. Although his brothers arrive and close in on Patricia, wresting the knife from her hands, Michael recognizes that he was unable to control her—emotionally or physically. He remembers early married scenes where he would tussle playfully with Patricia, and easily handle her, presumably recognizing that she was letting him overpower her. After this scene, Michael is stunned into silence, expressing only innocent incomprehension and fear; Patricia, who has burst through Michael’s image of her with a display of raw and violent emotion, appears undignified, crazy. The brothers take her home, suggesting that one of them will ‘get her head together.’ Yet the passion that Patricia displays accurately reveals the frustration, the desolation of their marriage: her statement of rage is far more honest than Michael’s empty gestures.

The novel reads like a time-bomb: one expects it to explode, shatter, resolve itself. But it doesn’t. And as such, it reveals the tensions and evasions of relationships as they are lived, rather than as they are imagined: already in the second relationship, Michael and Mary are covering up, lying, faking.

The novel is exciting to read; Tefs is always thoughtful, and he portrays his characters with remarkable sensitivity. He is concerned with exploring the intricacies of human emotion and behaviour and with leaving things unsaid. Because of this, the novel is sometimes, momentarily, too vague. Although he is usually successful in creating natural, realistic dialogue, there are occasionally heavy, almost lifeless passages. Yet his use of language throughout the novel is precise and beautiful, caressing the reader. His greatest strength as a novelist rests in his uncanny ability to expose the images which surround the relationships he explores—as such, Figures on a Wharf is perfectly titled. ♦

Kathie Kolybaba is the literary editor of Arts Manitoba.