Small Ceremonies

by Carol Shields

  “You did? When was that?”

  “Remember last year. No, the year before last, the year after England. When I was taking Furlong’s course in creative writing.”

  “Oh yes.” He is scribbling in the margin.

  “Well, on my way to the seminar room one day, I was walking past a blank door on the third floor of the Arts Building.”

  “Yes?”

  “Through the door there was a sound coming. A familiar sound, all muffled through the wood. You know how thick those doors are. If it had been anyone else I wouldn’t even have heard it.

  “And it was me.”

  “It was you. And it’s a funny thing, I couldn’t hear a word you were saying. It was all too muffled. Just the rise and fall of your voice. And I suppose some sort of recognizable tonal quality. But it was mainly the rise and fall, the rise and fall. It was your voice, Martin. There wasn’t a notice on the door saying it was you in there teaching Milton, but I was sure.”

  “You should have come in.”

  “I was on my way to Furlong’s class. And besides I wouldn’t have. I don’t know why, but I never would have come in.”

  “I’d better just check these notes over once more.”

  “Actually, Martin, it was eerie. Your voice corning through the wood like that, rising and falling, rising and falling.”

  “My God, Judith, you make me sound like some kind of drone.”

  “It’s something like handwriting.” I propped myself up on one elbow. “Did you know that it’s almost impossible to fake your handwriting? You can slant it backhand or straight up and down and put in endless curlicues, but the giveaway is the proportion of the tall letters to the size of the small ones. It’s individual like fingerprints. Like your voice. The rhythm is personal, rising and falling. It was you.”

  “Christ, Judith, let me get this done so I can get some sleep.”

  “The funny thing is, Martin, that even when I was absolutely certain, I had the oddest sensation that I didn’t know you at all. As though you were a stranger, someone I’d never met before.”

  “Really?” He reaches for my breasts under the yellow nylon.

  “You were a stranger. Of course, I realized it was just the novelty of the viewpoint. Coming across you unexpectedly. In a different role, really. It was just seeing you from another perspective.”

  “Why don’t we just make love?”

  But I am still in a contemplative frame of mind. “Did you ever think of what that expression means? Making love?”

  “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  “Milton, eh?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, that’s quotable.”

  “Fairly.”

  “Martin. Before you turn out the light, there’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for weeks.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m prying or anything.”

  “Who would ever suspect you of a thing like that?” His tone is only slightly mocking.

  “But I notice things and sometimes I wonder.”

  His hand rests on the lamp switch. “Judith, just shoot.”

  “I was wondering, I was just wondering if you were really happy teaching Milton year after year?”

  The light goes out, and we fall into our familiar private geometry, the friendly grazing of skin, the circling, circling. The walls tilt in; the darkness presses, but far away I am remembering two things. First, that Martin hasn’t answered my question. And second – the question I have asked him – it wasn’t the question I had meant to ask at all.

  I spend one wet fall afternoon at the library researching Susanna Moodie, making notes, filling in the gaps.

  This place is a scholarly retreat, high up overlooking the river, and the reading room is large and handsome. Even on a dark day it is fairly bright. There are rows of evenly spaced oak tables, and here and there groupings of leather armchairs where no one ever sits. The people around me are bent over enormous books, books so heavy that a library assistant delivers them on wheeled trolleys. They turn the pages slowly, and sometimes I see their heads bobbing in silent confirmation to the print. Unlike me, they have the appearance of serious scholars; distanced from their crisp stacks of notes, they are purposeful, industrious, admirable.

  What I am doing is common, snoopy, vulgar; reading the junky old novelettes and serialized articles of Susanna Moodie; catlike I wait for her to lose her grip. And though she is careful, artfully careful, I am finding gold. The bridal bed she mentions in her story “The Miss Greens,” a hint of sexuality, hurray. Her democratic posture slipping in a book review in the Victoria Magazine, get it down, get it down. Her fear of ugliness. And today I find something altogether unsavory – the way in which she dwells on the mutilated body of a young pioneer mother who is killed by a panther. She skirts the dreadful sight, but she is really circling in, moving around and around it, horrified, but hoping for one more view. Yes, Susanna, it must be true, you are crazy, crazy.

  Susanna Strickland Moodie 1803–1885. Gentle English upbringing, gracious country house, large and literary family, privately tutored at home, an early scribbler of stories. Later to emerge in a small way in London reform circles, a meeting with a Lieutenant Moodie in a friend’s drawing-room, marriage, pregnancy, birth, emigration, all in rapid order. Then more children, poverty, struggle, writing, writing by lamplight, a rag dipped into lard for a wick, writing to pay off debts and buy flour. Then burying her husband and going senile, little wonder, at eighty, and death in Toronto.

  It is a real life, a matter of record, sewn together like a leather glove with all the years joining, no worse than some and better than many. A private life, completed, deserving decent burial, deserving the sweet black eclipse, but I am setting out to exhume her, searching, prying into the small seams, counting stitches, adding, subtracting, keeping score, invading an area of existence where I’ve no real rights. I ask the squares of light that fall on the oak table, doesn’t this woman deserve the seal of oblivion? It is, after all, what I would want.

  But I keep poking away.

  No wonder Richard seals his letter with Scotch tape. No wonder Meredith locks her diary, burns her mail, carries the telephone into her room when she talks. No wonder Martin is driven to subterfuge, not telling me that his latest paper has been turned down by the Renaissance Society. And concealing, for who knows what sinister purposes, his brilliant hanks of wool.

  And John Spalding in Birmingham.

  Poor John Spalding, how I added him up. Lecturer in English, possessor of a shrewish wife and precocious child, querulous and slightly affected, drinking too much at staff parties and forcing arguments about World Federalism, writing essays for obscure quarterlies; John Spalding, failed novelist, poor John Spalding.

  How was he to know when he rented his flat to strangers that he would get me, Judith Gill, incorrigibly curious, for a tenant. Curious is kind; I am an invader, I am an enemy.

  And he is a right chump, just handing it over like that, giving me several hundred square feet of new territory to explore. Drawers and cupboards to open. His books left candidly on the shelves where I could analyze the subtlety of his underlining or jeer at his marginal notations.

  All that year I filtered him through the wallpaper, the kitchen utensils, the old snapshots, the shaving equipment, distilling him from the ratty blankets and the unpardonable home carpentry, the Marks-and-Spencer lamp shades and the paper bag in the bathroom cupboard where for mysterious reasons he saved burnt-out lightbulbs. Why, why?

  The task of the biographer is to enlarge on available data.

  The total image would never exist were it not for the careful daily accumulation of details. I had long since memorized the working axioms, the fleshy certitudes. Thus I peered into cupboards thinking, “Tell me what a man eats and I will tell you who he is.” While examining the bookshelves, recalled that, “A man’s sensitivity is indexed in his library.” While looking into the household a
ccounts – “A man’s bank balance betrays his character.” Into his medicine cabinet – “A man’s weakness is outlined by the medicines which enslave him.”

  And his sex life, his and Isabel’s, strewn about the flat like a moldering marriage map; ancient douche bag under a pile of sheets in the airing cupboard; The Potent Male in paperback between the bedsprings; a disintegrating diaphragm, dusty with powder in a zippered case; rubber safes sealed in plastic and hastily stuffed behind a crusted Vaseline jar; half-squeezed tubes of vaginal jelly, sprays, circular discs emptied of birth control pills – didn’t that woman ever throw anything away – stains on the mattress, brown-edged, stiff to the touch, ancient, untended.

  Almost against the drift of my will I became an assimilator of details and, out of all the miscellaneous and unsorted debris in the Birmingham flat, John Spalding, wiry (or so I believe him to be), university lecturer, neurotic specialist in Thomas Hardy, a man who suffered insomnia and constipation, who fantasized on a love life beyond Isabel’s loathsome douche bag, who was behind on his telephone bill – out of all this, John Spalding achieved, in my mind at least, something like solid dimensions.

  Martin was busy that year. Daily he shut himself inside the walnut horizons of Trinity Library, having deluded himself into thinking he was happier in England than he had ever been before. The children were occupied in their daily battle with English schooling, and I was alone in the flat most of the time, restless between biographies, wandering from room to room, pondering on John and Isabel for want of something better to do.

  Gradually they grew inside my head, a shifting composite leafing out like cauliflower, growing more and more elaborate, branching off like the filaments of a child’s daydream. I could almost touch them through the walls. Almost.

  Then I discovered, on the top shelf of John’s bookcase, a row of loose-leaf notebooks.

  His manuscripts.

  I had noticed them before in their brown-and-buff covers, but the blank private spines had made me disinclined, until this particular day, to reach for them.

  But taking them down at last, I knew before I had opened the first one that I was onto the real thing; the total disclosure which is what a biographer prays for, the swift fall of facts which requires no more laborious jigsaws. That first notebook weighed heavy in my hands; I knew it must all be there.

  I had already known – someone must have told me – that John Spalding had written a number of novels, and that all of them had been rejected by publishers. And here they were, seven of them.

  Since I had no way of recognizing their chronology, I simply started off, in orderly fashion, with the notebook on the far left. In a week I had read the whole shelf, the work, I guessed, of several years. I swallowed them, digested them whole in the ivory-tinted afternoons to the tune of the ticking clock and the spit of the gas fire.

  Before long a pattern emerged from all that print, the rickety frame upon which he hung his rambling stream-of-consciousness plots. Like ugly cousins they resembled each other. Their insights bled geometrically, one to the other.

  The machinery consisted of a shy sensitive young man pitted against the incomprehensible world of irritable women, cruel children, sour beer, and leaking roofs. Suddenly this man is given the gift of perfect beauty, and the form of this gift varies slightly from novel to novel. In one case it appears in the shape of a poetry-reciting nymphet; in another case it occurs as a French orphan with large unforgettable eyes. And large unforgettable breasts. A friendship with a black man, struck up one day on a bus, which leads into a damp cave of brothels and spiritualism. Thus stimulated, the frail world of the sensitive young man swirls with sudden meaning, warming his heart, skin, brain, blood, bowels, each in turn. And then a blackout, a plunge as the music fades. The blood cools, and the hand of despair stretches forth. On the journey between wretchedness and joy and back to wretchedness, the young man is tormented by poverty and by the level of his uninformed taste. He is taunted by his mysterious resistance to the materialistic world or his adherence to fatal truths. Thousands and thousands of pages, yards and yards of ascent and descent, all totally and climactically boring.

  Although, in fairness, the first book – at least the one on the far left which I judged to be first – had a plot of fairly breathless originality. I pondered a while over the significance of that. Had he lived this plot himself or simply dreamed it up? The rest of the books were so helplessly conventional that it was difficult for me to credit him with creativity at any level. Still, it seemed reasonable, since the least of us are visited occasionally by genius, that this book might have been his one good idea.

  Later I was to ask myself what made me pry into another person’s private manuscripts, and I liked to think that having discovered the bright break of originality in the first book, I read to the end in the hope of finding more. But it was more likely my unhealthy lust for the lives of other people. I was fascinated watching him play the role of tormented hero, and his wife Isabel too, floating in and out, bloody with temper, recognizable even as she changed from Janet, Ida, Anna, Bella, Anabel, Ada, Irene.

  But more was to come. Besides the loose-leaf notebooks there was a slim scribbler which turned out to be a sort of writer’s diary. I should have stopped with the novels, for opening and reading such a personal document made me cringe at his candor, my face going hot and cold as his ego stumbled beyond mere boyish postures, falling into what seemed like near madness. The passages were random and undated.

  This constant rejection is finally taking its toll. I honestly believe I am the next Shakespeare, but without some sign of recognition, how can I carry on?

  Constipation. It seems I am meant to suffer. An hour today in the bathroom – the most painful so far. It is easy to blame I. Fried bread every morning. I am sick with grease. I am losing my grip.

  Have not heard from publishers yet and it is now three months. No news is good news, I tell I. She smirks. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

  My hopes are up at last. Surely they must be considering it – they’ve taken long enough over it. We are ready to go to London or even New York the minute we hear. Must speak to Prof B. about leave of absence. Should be no trouble as university can only profit by having novelist on staff.

  Have been thinking about movie rights. Must speak to lawyer. Too expensive though. Could corner someone in the law faculty.

  I am frightened at what comes out of my head. This long stream of negation. Life with I. and A. has become unreal. I exist somewhere else but where?

  Manuscript returned today. Polite. But not very long note. Still, they must think I have some talent as they say they would like to see other manuscripts. I expected more after six months. My first book was my best. A prophet in his own country….

  Stale, stale, stale. The year in Nicosia will do me good. Freshen the perceptions. Thank God for Anita, who doesn’t know how I suffer. Had another nosebleed last night.

  I read the notebook to the end although the terrible open quality of its confessions brought me close to weeping. Silly, silly, silly little man. Paranoiac, inept, ridiculous. But he reached me through those disjointed bleeding notes as he hadn’t in all his seven novels.

  That shabby flat. I looked around at the border of brown lino and the imitation Indian rug. Fluffy green chunks of it pulled away daily in the vacuum cleaner. Why did he save light bulbs? Did he believe, somewhere in his halo of fantasy, that they might miraculously pull themselves together, suffer a spontaneous healing so that the filaments, reunited, their strength recovered, were once again able to throw out light?

  I put the notebook back on the shelf with the sad, unwanted novels. I never told anyone about them, not even Martin, and I never again so much as touched their tense covers. John Spalding and his terrible sorrowing stayed with me all winter, a painful bruising, crippling as the weather, pulling me down. I never really shook it off until I was back aboard the BOAC, strapped in with a dazzling lunch tray on my lap and the wide winking ocean beneath me. />
  NOVEMBER

  Richard’s friends are random and seasonal. There are the friends he swims with in the summer and the casual sweatered football friends. There is a nice boy named Gavin Lord whom we often take skiing with us but forget about between seasons. There is a gaggle of deep-voiced brothers who live next door. For Richard they are interchangeable; they come and go; he functions within their offhand comradeship. In their absence he is indifferent. And, of course, he has Anita.

  Meredith’s best friend is a girl named Gwendolyn Ackerman, an intelligent girl with a curiously dark face and a disposition sour as rhubarb. She is sensitive: hurts cling to her like tiny burrs, and she and Meredith rock back and forth between the rhythm of their misunderstandings; apology and forgiveness are their coinage. It is possible, I think, that they won’t always be friends. They are only, it seems, temporarily linked together in their terrible and mutual inadequacy. After school, huddled in Meredith’s bedroom, they minutely examine and torment each other with the nuances of their daily happenings, not only what they said and did, but what they nearly said and almost did. They interpret each other until their separate experiences hang in exhausted shreds. They wear each other out; it can’t last.

  For a quiet man, Martin has many friends. They exist, it seems to me, in separate chambers, and when he sees them he turns his whole self toward them as though each were a privileged satellite. A great many people seem to be extraordinarily attached to him. There are two babies in the world named after him. Old friends from Montreal telephone him and write him chatty letters at Christmas as though he really might care about their new jobs or the cottages they are building. His university friends often drop in on Saturday afternoons and, in addition, he hears regularly from his colleagues in England. He is not an effervescent man, but when he is with his friends he listens to them with a slow and almost innocent smile on his face.