A tale of magic realism
THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS
By Stephen Evans
180 pp. Unbridled Books $14.95
Reviewed by Cornelia Veenendaal
A magician never tells how his magic works, and we don’t want to know. But Stephen Evans’ first novel gives us all the pieces to put together. Propelled by a dramatist’s humorous and ironic dialogue, it’s not just romance or political satire, but a tale of magic realism. We read it on a summer afternoon and laugh. Then we go back and read it again and marvel.
The plot springs from lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Nick proposes to Lena: “I imagine that I will love you for as long as we both shall live.” She doesn’t resist; her mind is already made up. He believes that together they’ll do great things. The story has to prove that the greatest thing they do is weather the alterations, time, and tempests of their marriage.
In her last year at law school, Lena took Environmental Law because she heard that the instructor was funny. Fascinated by Nick’s passion and humor, she color-coded her notes of his unpredictable lectures. She researched some of his fabulous references to see if they had a basis in reality. Like the one about mosquito pie. When Thoreau visited Minnesota, he found mosquitoes as large as wrens in the marshes. Early Minneapolitans hunted them and made mosquito pies. Anyway, the first part was fact.
Skipping Lena’s graduation reception, they rush away to be married in a court room by a judge. What better place for two lawyers to be married? Nick argues. Before long, Lena’s executive talent and Nick’s vision build a law firm specializing in environmental protection. They win cases, make money, and lecture all over the world. Lena works at an uncluttered crystal desk. Rainbows flash off its edges. Nick putters around the office, picking up papers and throwing them down; still caring about the law itself, but dissatisfied with the way it’s practiced. “I don’t make plans,” he says, “I have visions.”
Finally his “imagination” drives Lena crazy. When Nick charters a jet plane to send her a dozen roses in Geneva, she asks for a divorce. Nick takes his Sheepdog puppet, Sancho, and leaves their home—but not her life. Once over her heartbreak, she thinks she won’t have to try to understand him any longer—until a news item in the Star Tribune reports the arrest of Barrister Nick Ward. His offense is filling the mayor’s swimming pool with 144 lobsters, in salted water and blocks of ice. She finds him at the psychiatric institute in a strait jacket.
Lena represents her ex-husband at the hearing, and pleads for a sentence of community service and counseling. The prosecutor, who meanwhile has become her boyfriend, is doing all he can to have Nick jailed or committed to an asylum. Nick agrees to six months’ volunteering at the city animal shelter, and counseling. Because he has no one else, Lena agrees to supervise him, and Nick and Sancho take up residence in her guest room.
At the animal shelter he makes friends with the keepers, a married couple named Ralph and Alice. In a conversation with Ralph, Nick asks: “You two are so different... How do you make it work?”
“Duct tape and Krazy Glue,” says Ralph. “Marriage is a partnership sustained by a common vision.” He continues, “It’s not always like this. But it’s like this enough.”
Nick also spends time with his other new friend, Oscar, guard at the psychiactric institute and part-time balloon man at childrens’ parties. Well-worn comic books hang out of his pocket. “Cervantes wrote the first comic book, you know.”
“I’m familiar with it,” says Nick, beside the ever watchful puppet, Sancho.
Oscar whispers: “My theory is that comic books are about vision. All superheroes have x-ray vision.... That’s why comics have all those bright colors.”
Nick’s community service brings him into direct contact with endangered species close to home. Dogs and cats that reach the end of their allotted time in cages and haven’t been adopted are, by law, euthanized. His job is to walk the dogs around and around a cement enclosure. He is especially appalled by the plight of an aging Irish wolfhound, Wolfram. He stays with the wolfhound all night when he is sick, and, to his surprise, Lena joins him there. The day Wolfram is to be euthanized, Ralph takes the great dog to the canister of Carbon Monoxide. Above the canister a balloon turns in the breeze. “Killing is Easy” is written on one side of the balloon; “Comedy is Hard” on the other. The label on the canister reads: Helium.
Why is Sancho in every scene, I wondered. Either on Nick’s hand, like a knight’s gauntlet, or watching Lena when Nick has left him with her. Perhaps it’s Sancho’s story after all. His witness to the marriage of true minds.
Connie Veenendaal, a retired English teacher, is a poet and a founder of the poetry cooperative, Alice James Books. She is working on a memoir and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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