Unless

by Carol Shields

  At noon I go to Danielle Westerman’s Rosedale apartment and eat small sandwiches at a table set up in her sunroom, wonderful catered sandwiches, crabmeat, artichoke, curried chicken. These days I am almost her only visitor. A beautiful cloth covers the little table, and small ladylike napkins, professionally laundered, standing up in crisp points. We drink very strong tea from Russian glasses; this is one of Danielle’s affectations. Her hair has been dyed so often it has grown into a soft rust and purple turban. One of her hands touches her hair, which is coming unpinned and threatening to fall over her eyes. Once, years ago, she wore her hair brushed straight back from her forehead and ears and caught in a shining chignon—which is how I wear my hair now; a tribute—and not unconscious at all—to young Danielle, early Danielle, that vibrant girl-woman who reinvented feminism. Nowadays she wears tiny gold and white shoes that look like bedroom slippers, and her bare legs are much marked with bruises and spots. Her pleated grey skirt and cardigan are part of her daily uniform, as they have been for years. Where does she find such terrible cardigans? I marvel at the number of years locked up in her body, all she has seen and thought, all the words she has lined up on the page, the weather she’s endured, the lovers she’s encountered, the suffering during the war. We talk about volume four of the translation, which I am not, to her consternation, doing, and then, after a little while, we discuss the problems of Alicia and Roman in my new novel, which is finally on the trajectory it was meant to have. We raise our tea glasses to the memory of Mr. Scribano, and Danielle wonders for the thousandth time whether Scribano can possibly have been his real name or one adopted when he found his vocation. I rise, finally, bend down to hug her fragile body, and insist that I will let myself out the door. I can see that she is nodding off to sleep.

  After that I take one more slow drive past Bloor and Bathurst before heading for the highway and home, looking for that familiar gallant self in its navy peacoat, that bent head, wrapped now in a scarf, awarding myself the easy pleasure that people invite when nothing has improved but at least nothing has changed. Still there. Still there. A dithering reassurance that pulls against the gravity of mourning. Never mind the car behind me impatiently honking. I take my time.

  Notwithstanding

  TOM AND I still have sex—have I mentioned this?—even though our oldest daughter is living on the street, a derelict. This happens once or twice a week. We actually lie on our queen-size bed together; it will be midnight, the house quiet, our faces close together, the warm, felt cave beneath Tom’s jaw at my cheek, his breath. The specificity of his body keeps me still, as though I’m listening for a signal. He reaches for me; I respond, sometimes slowly, lately quite slowly. Spirals of transcendence drift through me like strands of DNA, always rising upward. Concentrate, concentrate; yes, concentration helps. Soon we are rocking together like a pair of hard-breathing lunatics, and afterwards one or the other of us will cry. Sometimes we both cry. Our ongoing need for sex lies between us like something we don’t dare pick up. It’s as though we have struggled to enter an interior sleep-room where the capacity for suffering has withered. The hum in our ears is our own history, and that hum never goes away.

  Do we still love each other? We must if we’re still having sex after twenty-plus years. Of course we have our quarrels, but never anything we can’t find our way back from. The question of love is not relevant in our case, not for the moment. The question can be postponed. We live in each other’s shelter; we fit. We’re together after all this time; that’s what matters. When we go for a walk together, his arm is locked into my arm, his hand is locked into my hand. Since I’m several inches shorter, this requires a lifting of my shoulder and a slight stoop on his part. We fit together that way. The sex part of our life is also a matter of minute adjustment and accommodation. Our habits are so familiar; they’re like the interiors of uncurtained houses at night, a reassuring wedge of known lamplight, a corner of a familiar ceiling cornice, a wall of books, the top of a wing chair, always there, the same arrangements. “How odd,” I said to him after some particularly aggressive lovemaking (the middle of November, the night of the season’s first real snow storm).

  “Odd?”

  “That we go on doing this.”

  “I know.”

  “The same way we keep up the garden.”

  “And pay the bills.”

  “Can you forget, Tom? Tell me. Are you ever able to forget about her?”

  A pause, then, “I don’t think so. Not completely. Never. Do you?” (I do love him. When I ask him a question, he asks back.)

  “No.”

  We must have drifted off to sleep after that conversation. (So there it is: we have regular sex and we are able, mostly, to sleep. It’s almost negligent of us, two heartbroken parents; yet to all appearances, we are able to carry on with our lives.)

  A hundred elements of today’s culture outrage me, particularly the easy unthinkingness of people’s claim to “spirituality,” but I remain forever grateful for the good scrambled liberated days Tom and I came out of, the seventies. “To be young was very heaven,” sang old Wordsworth, and we had that heaven, a taste of it anyway, the veryness of it. We had sex the first night we met, Tom and I, two students sitting side by side at a human rights rally in Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto. We fell to talking, then walking around the downtown streets, then back to Tom’s apartment on Davenport, the brown couch he had with the awful-smelling corduroy cushions, each one centred with a big hard brown button. I didn’t phone home. I didn’t phone the dorm. This was during a time when I seemed to have very little in the way of a real life, and now here I was, lying beside a man I’d just met. Two strangers held together in a save-the-earth era. Tom’s hand had been under my sweater all the way from downtown Toronto. I was on the pill, there was nothing to discuss, nothing could have stopped us, it was like flying. I remember, afterwards, studying his face, trying to see what passion had accomplished, and grieving for just a moment that there wouldn’t, couldn’t, be another event quite equal to this, not if I lived to be a hundred.

  Our lives don’t really “befall” us; we tend to rouse ourselves to invention, to accommodation. It was spring. I was “in love.” But I continued with my studies—I was doing Old Frankish now—and in the midst of strange vowels and blurred consonants, I turned a large portion of my life over to this person, this Tom Winters. The sound of the sixties had been “doo-wop.” But the seventies said home, make a new home, create a home of your own, dress yourself in warm earth colours, get back to the earth, dig yourself into your life. People were starting to have babies again.

  At various times I’ve talked to each of my daughters about birth control. Norah at seventeen placed her hand on my wrist and said with a smile: I already know. Chris laughed and said mysteriously: Okay, okay, I get it. Natalie—this was only a year ago when she was fourteen—said, tucking in her chin: Not to wo-r-ry, I’ll look after that when the time comes.

  But I must start thinking seriously about Alicia and Romans sex life. I have to be braver about it this time round. An awful maidenly daintiness runs through the pages of My Thyme Is Up, a prudery that has nothing to do with sex in the twenty-first century. They slept together, Roman and Alicia. They melted in each other’s arms, buttery and sweet. An ethereal transaction was attempted as they bedded down, yes, on their very first date. There was no fumbling with condoms, his or hers, no guilt, no actuarial accountings, no position three, four, or five bolstered up by beams and rope, just two human bodies humming up and down the musical scale of skin, bone, creases, shadows, cleanly, singingly, besottedly droll. But the real running syrups and juice of sex were absent. You could tell that none of this cost anything. You could hardly hear Alicia and Roman breathing. Their kisses tasted scrubbed, like fresh soap and water. Accessible. Decent! Dressed up for ecstasy, but not able to go there. The amperage was there, and Alicia and Roman were willing. Perhaps they lacked the self-forgetfulness that good sex requires, the wanting and t
hen the retreat from want.

  Other writers know how to do vivid sex scenes. They’ve got the chronology down, first the languorous removal of clothing, some slow dancing maybe to an old Sinatra record, then the nibbling, the rubbing, the sucking, the smelling, the tasting, the barking commands and screaming surrender, yes, yes, and then, finally, “he enters her.” Well come right in, my fine fellow, and make yourself at home.

  I have three daughters; naturally I shrink from the thought of embarrassing them with what I publish. People in Orangetown will stare at Tom if I screw up my nerve and get into whips and leather and suchlike; his patients, out of suspicion, may drift off to other practitioners. I certainly would. Moreover, I don’t know all that much about kinks and jinks. My imagination tends not to drift in that direction.

  Oh, loosen up, Ms. Winters.

  Sex talk is so eroded, that’s the problem. We’ve all learned it at the movies, and the movies made it up. Do anything to me. Take me. Overwhelm me. I’m coming. How was it for—?

  I can’t, I can’t, I grow rich with disgust, not with sex but with the vocabulary of sex. Besides, light comic fiction does not invite a step-by-step nipple-penis-vulva-clitoris-anus exposition. Alicia is a sensuous woman who understands her body but she does not dwell on the subject of her pubic hair. Pubic hair is out of place in this genre. Roman is allowed to be something of an athlete in bed; a man who plays the trombone, after all, knows about thrusting and triple tonguing and embouchure. Both Alicia and Roman want, both of them desire. Ridiculous word, desire. Tu désires quelque chose? Delete.

  But they want tenderness as much as they want passion, they crave the feathered touch of softness, sweetness. They yearn—and this is what I can’t get my word processor to accept—to be fond of each other, to be charitable, to be mild and merciful. To be barefootedly beautiful in each other’s eyes.

  And now, a November day, flattened by wind and worry, the trees throwing their bare branches about outside my window, I shut down my computer for the day, unwilling at this hour—five o’clock, already dark—to award them what they haven’t the wit to define.

  Thereupon

  AT THE BEGINNING of every month, now, I sit down at Tom’s desk and write out a cheque to the Promise Hostel in Toronto. I allow myself to weep a few moderate tears while I fold the cheque and place it in an envelope, seal it, and write out the address on Bathurst Street. Still weeping as I affix a stamp, still weeping as I walk down the road to the mailbox. The tears are in appreciation of the extreme goodness of the Anglican congregation in Toronto, who some years ago turned a neighbourhood school into a refuge for homeless people. Where did such goodness come from? I know there must have been endless committee meetings, a call for volunteers, the striking of an official board, fundraising suppers, confrontations with the city council and with the local residents—all of that inevitable paperwork and bureaucracy that goes with public-spirited projects; but where did the goodness begin, the germ of goodness, the primal thought to offer food and shelter to strangers?

  Following Christ’s example, the Anglican community might say, though I doubt it, not in these ecumenical times. Social responsibility is more likely, but even this is to delicately bracket what is, in reality, a powerful tide of virtue flowing from the veins of men and women who will not be much rewarded or even recognized for their efforts. Frances Quinn, the director, is paid, but the dormitories at the Promise Hostel are swept and swabbed by people who come and go from their offices, their professional business addresses, from million-dollar houses in Forest Hill or Rosedale or the Annex. The same people, these chanters of church litanies, also do laundry, wash windows, clean up messes of urine and vomit, and make hundreds of chicken pot pies in the immense basement kitchen.

  As soon as we discovered where Norah spent her nights we went to see the place, Tom and I, along with Chris and Natalie. We phoned ahead. It was a Saturday afternoon early last May. The rain had been pouring for a week, and when we arrived downtown, two men were squatting on the second-floor roof, patching a hole. Inside, Frances Quinn was busy on the telephone, but she waved at a volunteer, a man in his fifties we guessed, to tour us around. He showed us, without the least display of hushed piety, a small chapel on the ground floor and a dormitory for twenty women, a lineup of camp beds, neatly made up, a wall of lockers, and a communal bathroom. Norah lives here, I said to myself, she sleeps in this room. A clean towel was folded over the end of each bed. The room was spotless, but dust motes nevertheless swam in the beams of light from the windows, the kind of dust that is impossible to banish. The bare wooden floor creaked underfoot. Forty men sleep in a similar dormitory upstairs. In the basement was the dining hall and kitchen, where four women were gathered around an industrial wood-and-steel table collaborating on a list of some kind. They looked hearty, cheerful, plain, full of ease, and each wore a black barbecue apron upon which was printed the word PROMISE. Food donations are delivered at the rear entrance, one of them told us; today they had received a case of canned tomatoes, always welcome, and there were plenty of donations from downtown hotels and restaurants, though these tended to be last minute and required creativity on the part of the volunteer cooks who would be taking over the kitchen at four o’clock. The smell of potatoes and mould lingered in the corners of the room, but every surface was scrubbed clean. Dish detergent, or something stronger, spiked the air. The women talked about how they spent lots of time figuring out ways to freshen up day-old bread—they had a number of tricks—and for some reason this mention of freshening up bread sent them off into gales of private laughter. They pointed to the huge, recently acquired television screen in the dining hall, the gift of a major real estate dealer in the city. At six o’clock the hostel doors are opened for the evening; five o’clock in the winter months. Lights out at eleven, and everyone was expected to be out on the street by eight-thirty after a hot breakfast. No alcohol or drugs were allowed, but of course there were those who broke the rules. Upstairs a woman was playing the piano and singing brightly: “Art thou weary, art thou languid?” She repeated these first two lines several times, practising, stopping herself, starting again. At this point Christine slipped her hand into mine, as though she were a small girl.

  After the tour we walked back to where we had parked the car and got in. It was still raining. The girls, in the back seat, were silent. I couldn’t bear to turn my head and look at them. Tom sat behind the steering wheel with his seat belt on, but he didn’t start the car right away. We sat and watched the rain streaming down the windshield. We looked at the long, narrow street of houses with their tiny front yards and their blue recycling boxes. The city trees were just leafing out, that pale hazy green I love so much. I put my fingertips lightly on Tom’s knee. He moved suddenly, covering his face with his hands. Natalie in the back seat began to blub, and then we all did.

  Despite

  I CONTINUE, DESPITE everything, to work away at the novel. There are always decisions to make. Does Alicia have a dog or cat or nothing? I decide on a cat called Chestnut. An old cat with one blind eye. Alicia is not a serious ailurophile, however; she neglects Chestnut, and Chestnut knows it.

  Mr. Scribano’s secretary phoned and told me in a tone of high seriousness how much they all were looking forward to seeing my manuscript and how much Mr. Scribano had been counting on it to sparkle up next year’s list. They would like to be able to mention it in the spring catalogue, just the title and a brief description. A teaser, she called it. There was no reason to fear that Mr. Scribano’s death would jeopardize such an old and well-established firm. A new editor was about to be appointed. She promised to keep me up to date.

  We also continue to listen to the news. Tom and I have views about the news, which we express, even though we know how inconsequential the unfolding of political events is. People enter and exit the world; that’s the real news. The rest is a residue, a crust left behind in the creases of the eye or mouth. The American election results have confounded everyone. In that great
noisome nation the presidential decision has actually come down to two hundred people in the state of Florida. Two hundred people; they could all be crammed into the Orangetown Public Library, rubbing shoulders. How can that be? What about the proud old American constitution with its much-heralded system of checks and balances? Janet Reno appears on television and says something about how every vote really does count and this proves that democracy works. But wait a minute. It isn’t working, Ms. Reno. It’s something to talk about, all the chatter of chads and dimples. Natalie looks up chad in the dictionary, and yes, it really is there, it’s been there all along. Good Scrabble word, Chris announces.

  They are both studying for exams. Just because their older sister is living the life of a derelict doesn’t mean there will be no exams. French, history, math, language arts. This is monstrous: that exams are being scheduled, that George W. Bush exists, that Mr. Scribano fell downstairs, that people are booking flights for their Christmas holidays, that Danielle Westerman accuses me of insufficient sorrow, that I am calmly wiping down the kitchen counters after a dinner of shepherds pie and spinach salad, while at the same time plotting what Alicia will say to Roman about the need to cancel the wedding, and observing that outside it is snowing and the drifts are building thickly sculpted walls against the north side of our house, and Tom is settling down in his favourite chair with a new book on trilobites that arrived in today’s mail. The wind is blowing and blowing. I am still I, though it’s harder and harder to pronounce that simple pronoun and maintain composure.