The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  This morning too I did the balcony experiment—one dish of water put out there and one into the deep-freeze. As expected, Nature won. There was a skin of ice on the balcony dish in the time it took to walk across the room and back. Minutes later the Kelvinator dish hadn’t begun to freeze. So, you darlings in the South Pacific to whom I wrote that stepping out here is like stepping into a cool-store—revise it please. And remember that the air in this deeper-freeze moves. It’s what they call a ‘windchill factor’ and it’s why God designed you flap-eared—so you could have fair warning. When some oil-rich sheikdom invites me to its university as Distinguished Visitor and provides me with a handsome apartment I will of course fry one egg on the balcony rail and another in a pan on the stove, and again, no doubt, Nature will triumph.

  But it’s Sunday afternoon I’ve a need to record. I was taken to the home of the chairman of Quinton’s Department of Comp. Lit. (my host department) to meet the chairman and his family and some members of his staff. Chairman Hyde is big, sandy-haired and slow-spoken. His wife is small, quick and pretty, still youthful, shy at first, but soon the confidence appears, and with it the pride, and the impatience. She’s almost certainly smarter than her husband, and has recently completed her PhD. She tells how someone phoned recently and asked, ‘Could I speak to Dr Hyde?’ to which she replied, ‘Which of them do you want?’

  ACROSS THE STREET the neighbours are shovelling snow off the roof. Paths have been dug to the sidewalk. More members of the department arrive. There is one, Eugene Fish, who has a thin moustache and the look of a band leader of the 1920s—a sort of Scott Fitzgerald look. His wife is plump and must have once been pretty. She’s still pretty, but plump. Her dress has a design of tiny shoes that run around it in circles. She’s one of those faculty wives who cause embarrassment by offering perfectly ordinary and sensible domestic observations and reminiscences. She’s shy and never raises her voice or moves her lips much, but it’s obvious she’s a compulsive talker once set in motion through a gap in the conversation, and Eugene Fish covers for her with quick loud quips, like a back-up gun in a Western movie.

  There is also a big man, an American, Hank Judder, who arrives on skis, wearing mukluks and a large Indian fur-lined coat with a hood. He’s a poet and lives in the woods out of town with his wife, who weaves and does Indian craft work and arrives minutes later in an SUV. Judder hasn’t sat down before he’s wanting me to agree that the eighteenth century is the sanest. I feel he’s checking me out before deciding to stay. I say, ‘The sanest might be most insane.’ I’m not sure what this means, except that it’s a way of evading the question, which I don’t understand either. He looks doubtful, probably disappointed, but he accepts a drink from Chairman Hyde and sits down, chewing on my aphorism.

  Faculty talk goes on making considerable use of numerals. It’s like that story about monks who’ve lived together so long they’ve reduced all their jokes to numbers. In faculty talk the numbers are all courses—3.307 Literature and Silence; 2.903 Comparative Semiotics; 4.747 Frontier Feminism; 3.208 the Syntax of Self in early America. So it goes ‘We need to have another look at 1.425.’ ‘I’ve got to get through 2.901 before I can begin to think about that.’ ‘But that won’t be until the next session.’ ‘The Chairman’s setting up a committee anyway to look at all the 3s.’ ‘Did that student in 4.301 get hold of you?’ ‘Someone told me your lectures in 2.223 have been brilliant this semester.’

  Out there a squirrel is rippling along a bough, and I remember I’ve read somewhere that the word squirrel comes from the Greek and means ‘shadow tail’. The youngest Hyde describes to me the animal’s regular path—over the woodshed at the back, along the fence, across the roof, down the elm bough … He asks about animals in New Zealand. I tell him about the possum I feed. He tells me about the skunk that got under the porch. In a minute the numbers are dropped and everyone is exchanging animal stories. A moose has been seen this year down on the frozen river. The lady with the little coloured shoes walking in circles around her dress tells how she got up in the night and saw ‘a nice dog’ in the moonlight on the snow. ‘And then it put its head back and …’ They all laugh and junior Hyde explains to me that the ‘nice dog’ was a coyote. Hank Judder explains his problem with bats which maybe ought to be killed because they’re said to carry rabies but which up close have such nice faces. There’s a story about bears one summer on the shores of one of the lakes …

  Numberless, we seem more relaxed. The animals have humanised us. The drinks maybe have something to do with it as well. Outside there is the sound of shovels scraping on paths and sidewalks. I resolve inwardly, solemnly, never to write about these people. Cross my heart. Chairman Hyde asks if I’m finding Ashtree’s office comfortable.

  Already Ashtree has taken my fancy. There’s that shelf of handbooks on writing in his office—On Writing Better and Best, Styles and Structures, The Writer’s Control of Tone, The Canadian Writers’ Handbook … Why should a distinguished Canadian poet keep all that stuff on his shelves? I suppose all it means is that he teaches one of those courses that aim to turn literary sows’ ears into publishable silk purses. I imagine a text called The Sow’s Ear’s Handbook.

  I tell Chairman Hyde that the office is comfortable, the view fine, and I thank him. It’s a room of course hermetically sealed. The windows can’t be opened and you must accept the weather sent you through pipes. I’m told that on one side of the building the combination of piped weather and natural sunshine turns the offices into something like a sauna. With snow drifts heaped up against the unopenable double panes, and great icicles hanging from the eaves, they sit sweating and trying to cool themselves with electric fans. I have no such problem. But does Ashtree mind my occupancy while he’s on leave? Was there a problem of some kind?

  My question produces what feels like a moment of awkwardness. Is Chairman Hyde embarrassed? Quick as a pretty ferret his lady, Dr Hyde II, says if the Distinguished Visitor is comfortable then there’s no problem. None. And she offers to refill his glass. I’m reeling already, not used to drinking in the afternoon. Maybe that’s why I persist. I mention the letter I’ve had from Ashtree himself. ‘Dear Dr Bulov,’ it began, ‘I have just been informed that you, as Distinguished Visitor to Quinton campus, have been assigned to my office for your personal use throughout the duration of your tenure.’ I think some of those handbooks could have been profitably brought to bear on that sentence, but Ashtree was writing under pressure. He went on to explain that there had been ‘no consultation’. He’d had ‘no prior warning’ that someone would be ‘poking about’ in his office, which, he continued, like everyone’s he supposed, contained papers which were ‘personal and private’. In particular he would be grateful if, ‘instantly upon arrival’, I would turn the key in the top of his filing cabinet and hand it (I assumed he meant the key, not the cabinet) to Mrs Merrill in the department office for safekeeping. The top key, I would find, locked all four drawers at once.

  I responded to this as to an electric prodder. Already when his letter reached me I had been in occupation three days. It was too late for action ‘instantly upon arrival’. But in those three days I hadn’t so much as looked at his filing cabinet. I don’t believe I’d noticed it was there. Now I sprang into action—out of the chair in which I was reading his letter, across the room, turning the key that was sticking out the top of the cabinet, guiltily locking its contents away from my own prying gaze and taking the key at once to the imperturbable Mrs Merrill who said it would go straight into the departmental safe.

  I convey something—a little—of this to the Sunday afternoon, but there’s no response. If there’s anything odd about Ashtree, they’re covering well for him. ‘I should have warned the poor guy,’ Chairman Hyde admits. ‘I thought I did warn him. There’s so damned much to remember these days.’

  After the others have gone I’m retained, along with Hank Judder and his weaving wife, for dinner with the family. There’s a dispute about whether it’s true
that the bathwater goes down differently in the northern and southern hemispheres—clockwise in one, anti-clockwise in the other. I try to use my wine glass as a globe to show that a clockwise spin is anti-clockwise when looked at from below. I spill some wine and the point is not understood. The children insist that the difference between hemispheres bathwater behaviour is real, and they have a name for the phenomenon. Hank Judder asks me about my tastes in music.

  His are classical, mine romantic, and I lumber into an admission of a passion for Wagner, which becomes in turn a defence of such a preference, and then of Wagner.

  THE DAYS ARE GOING BY. I clamber into the toque (the Helmut Schmidt look has admitted defeat) scarf coat gloves and go out to buy the few things I need. I sit staring at the long green hair of the carpet in my apartment and at the snow falling in the streets, thinking of nothing. Quinton seems unreal, so does New Zealand. I’m tired, sleep too long and wake tired. I force myself out of doors into the bracing air, crunching over the ice, to wake myself. Sun shines on the snow, the huge icicles hanging at the corners of the Faculty Club glisten, the skiers glide by among the trees, the brief day is dazzling and beautiful but the cold drives me indoors again. I write letters home but there’s little to report. In the afternoons I sit in Ashtree’s office watching the shadow cast by this slope climb the other beyond the river towards the base of my apartment tower. Downriver there are factory chimneys casting white smoke into the icy blue, which seems edged with green at sundown. In the far distance there is a single gas-flare. It’s hard to imagine the river, a quarter of a mile or more wide, is still flowing down there under its ice.

  Somewhere under the faces people in the department present to me I sense warring factions. I try not to identify them, not to guess where I belong in them or for whom my invitation may have been a triumph and for whom a defeat. The long-tailed magpies dart about in the empty trees and I wonder what they find to eat. Melancholy loves me dearly and wants to hug me to her heart.

  Ms Libby Valtraute, on the other hand, is probably not interested. She presents a paper on the poetry of Alban Ashtree to the Graduate Seminar on Canadian Literature. Being a feminist she takes a strong line with certain aspects of Ashtree’s work. His ‘Muse obsession’, for example. His Snow White Goddess, she calls it. She admires him for his independence as a Canadian (lucrative offers from US campuses have been declined). She loves his sense of ‘the divine in the derelict’. She approves of the way he has refocused the central image of Canadian literature on ‘the cold wastes that were always there as a challenge to the imagination’. But in human relationships he is, she says, ‘manly’ (which she gives a negative emphasis) and ‘cock eyed’.

  I’ve always been drawn to strong, intelligent, verbal, not to say literary women, as some are drawn to rock climbing, or hang gliding, or canoeing down rapids; and Ms Valtraute is tall with a beautiful freckled nose, a perfect mouth, keen clear observing eyes and thick red-gold hair. She plans to write her thesis on sexual politics in selected Commonwealth poets and I’m wondering where in her life sexual politics, as she calls it, ceases to be political and is permitted to re-inhabit its long social and biological history.

  This afternoon is Friday and the sun has failed to shine. Cloud presses down on the tall buildings across the river; snow is falling, and cars crossing the bridge have their lights on. An awful silence has descended over the department, signalling the onset of a weekend in which I have nothing to do, no one to talk to. My eye goes around and around the room, which I designate in my thoughts (because of how it sounds on the inner ear) as ‘the office of Ashtree’. A student from Bangladesh knocks and asks to borrow a stapler. I find one in the desk. The student uses it, thanks me and vanishes into the silence. My last human contact until Monday? My eye going around again falls on drawer three (counting from the top) of Ashtree’s cabinet. It seems to be protruding a few millimetres. I go over to it, look at it closely, pull at it gently. It opens. I slam it but it won’t shut. The bolts, closing downward from the top, have left drawer three unlocked while locking the others. I rush out for Mrs Merrill so I can borrow the key and relock the whole cabinet. She’s gone like everyone else. It seems I’m to spend a weekend with that naked lady, the filing cabinet in ‘the office of Ashtree’, baring her bosom or belly at me.

  My thoughts return—I return them there—to Ms Valtraute. Libby. A few nights ago she sat three rows in front of me at Quinton’s National Film Theatre. She was wearing a coat with a fur-lined collar and in the half-light it reminded me of something out of my past—or was it out of the forbidden filing cabinet? (Already I’m uncertain.) I was in Denmark in the late autumn, a little snow was falling and I was standing outside a discotheque called Locomotion with a woman whose name was Bodil. We had been dancing in the discotheque—God knows why. Bodil was a respectable Danish lady with a husband in banking and two delightful children. But I, or Alban, had been a visitor (Distinguished?—yes I think so) and she had been entertaining me. First dinner (teaching me how that Danish table with its apparently random offerings is to be approached in the proper order) and Danish beer, then wine because I had wanted it, and finally, by no very clear progression, Locomotion where Bodil feared she might be seen by some shop assistant or bank clerk.

  And now we were standing in the flurries of light snow, outside the discotheque and down the road from my hotel, and Bodil was drawing the pale fur collar around her throat and declining to kiss me.

  ‘I am very hot-blooded,’ she explained, as if it was a deficiency. ‘If I kiss you I get excited.’ She was about to get into her car. I took hold of her—it was just a big friendly hug in the snow, my mouth somewhere between the collar and the throat, touching both. I felt her resist and then relax. She sighed. ‘Goodnight, Mr Dancer,’ she said. And she got into her big German Ford, waved a small gloved hand and drove away.

  I ENJOY SHOPPING AND BUY more than I need. It’s the standard form of stimulation isn’t it, for people who live inside a protective cocoon. But I’ve neglected to buy soap powder. I decide to manufacture some out of the airline toilet soaps I’ve collected along the way. I choose UTA and it takes almost half an hour sitting at the table with the bread knife turning the little bar of soap into Lux-style flakes. I’ve done that and the machine’s already into its second rinse when I remember that this apartment block has a shop which is open on Sunday.

  Some kind of tussle goes on in me about whether I should go to ‘the office of Ashtree’ this afternoon. There’s nothing else to do, it’s true. And yesterday I proved for the first time it’s possible to go there on foot. I bought one of those knitted hats concealing a mask you can pull down to your chin, with gaps for eyes and mouth. Crossing the long bridge over the river I had to pull down the mask against the wind. Inside my trousers I was wearing pyjamas and inside my shoes two pairs of socks. My heavy German tweed coat with its woollen lining was doing its heavy German work. I was cold at the extremities but I made it in three-quarters of an hour, and no frostbite. So it can be done—that’s not the problem. It’s only that I wonder should one go in every day, weekends included. I’m suspicious of that voluptuous filing cabinet with its see-through drawer, its keyhole opening up the Snow White Goddess. Have I ever been to Denmark? Did I ever know a bourgeois Danish lady called Bodil who danced like a demon and refused to kiss me in the snow? Was it part of something dreamed last night (when I woke and couldn’t remember the geography of my apartment)—or am I right in remembering someone telling me that Ashtree’s itinerary will take him to Scandinavia?

  Strange things happen in strange lands. One of the movies I shared inadvertently with Ms Valtraute was by Pasolini. It was called Theorem. A beautiful young man comes into a middle-class household—mother father son daughter and maid. Beautiful young man is Christ—or at least I think that’s the intention. Each member of the household becomes obsessed with him and they all respond to him sexually because (I’m guessing at what maestro Pasolini intended) that’s the only way we, the mode
rn decadent bourgeoisie, have of responding to anything. And isn’t it true? Ms Valtraute’s fur collar in the half-light of the movie house has set me thinking about Danish Bodil whom I hugged (or Ashtree hugged her) in the snow, and who might have said to Jesus Christ disguised as a beautiful young man, ‘I am very hot-blooded. If I kiss you I get excited.’ A boy with an angel face runs in flapping his arms and bearing a telegram calling the beautiful young man away. The BYM goes. The whole family is bereft and each goes mad in a different way. The most successful is the maid because she still has the vehicle of primitive Catholicism. She returns to the village, sits out of doors, refuses all food but boiled nettles, cures a sick boy, levitates about the rooftops (a good job here by the special effects team), and finally has herself buried alive on a muddy building site at dawn.

  At the interval I watch Ms Valtraute’s fur collar but it sits facing forward and doesn’t move. It’s possible (anything seems possible) she has vacated it. Round two is a French movie by Resnais, Mon oncle d’Amérique. It portrays three lives that intersect, and the narrative, documentary style is cut into by a ‘scientific’ account of human behaviour in terms which mix Skinnerian behaviourism and Freudian psychology. It seems to me affectionate, tolerant, with a nice ‘tone’, but on some point of sexual politics Resnais may well have erred. When the lights go up Ms Valtraute and her fur collar are nowhere to be seen.