Swann

by Carol Shields

  What good people they were: middle-aged, civilized, tolerant, travelled and tanned and united, all of them, in their contempt for Ronald Reagan. They offered Jimroy, without a thought of return, their delicious food, their good-to-excellent wine, their recorded music, and their conversation, and they sent him home well before midnight.

  Jimroy, thankful, could only think: thank God for their honest cuts of beef and the little pings of laughter that leapt from their mouths when he produced his “first impressions” of California. He was less lonely than he had been in Winnipeg, although he knew similar couples there, the Swensens, the Zieglers, the Mullocks. He marvelled at the steadiness of love that seemed to flow between these husbands and wives. Most of them had been married for well over twenty-five years, and still they maintained toward each other an attitude of courtesy and tenderness. He tried to imagine them coupling in their beds—lan’s plump penis stuck up there between Elizabeth’s legs—and couldn’t; but that scarcely seemed to matter. Love was what mattered, that enduring, mysterious refuge. Returning home alone to the flatness of the Flanners’ bed, he carried some of their circumambient warmth with him.

  He reflects on one such night that it has been some weeks since he’s surrendered to that hideous weakness of his, which is to make anonymous phone calls to Audrey in Florida. Perhaps he’s getting over the need to hear her croaking voice erupting from sleep “Hullo?” she yawks into the phone, like someone testing the depth of a cave. He shuts his eyes and tries to imagine the trailer she’s living in, what her bed is like, if she requires a blanket in that ridiculous climate, how she looks sitting on the edge of the bed with the receiver in her hand.

  “Hullo, I said. Who is this?”

  He never speaks back; just holds the receiver, listening.

  “Who is this anyway?” she demands roughly. That Midlands snarl.

  More silence. He is careful not to breathe. He would never stoop to being a breather. And he doesn’t really want to frighten her. Dear old Aud.

  “Who is this, for the love of God?”

  A long pause, and Jimroy waits for the voice that will surely come and fill it. Instead she often bangs the phone down hard.

  Once she shouted, “You can’t fool me. I know who it is, you bugger.”

  His hands had trembled, but he managed to hang on to the receiver. His lips brushed against the mouthpiece, fear and love entwined. He thought of her large mouth, not an attractive woman, not at all.

  It’s been several weeks since he’s phoned Audrey in the middle of the night. A good sign. He should celebrate, like an alcoholic after a dry month.

  If only he could expunge—ah, but he can’t. He promises himself, a solemn pledge, that he will make no more phone calls to Sarasota. His work on Mary Swann is coming along; every week he mails a sheaf of papers off to Mrs. Lynch for typing. Fragrant air drifts in through the open window. He’s sleeping well. He has just returned from a charming evening with cheerful, intelligent friends who regard him, he knows, as a minion from the North, a role he fancies. And, after all, he doesn’t love Audrey any more. That was over years ago.

  But he is, he admits to himself, deeply in love. He is sodden with love, foolish with love. And the woman he loves is Sarah Maloney of Chicago whom he has never met.

  October 24

  Dear Morton,

  I knew you’d relent! So! We’ll meet at last—I’m delighted. You should be getting your tentative program in a few days, hot off the press. What would our Mary have thought of all this? I’m afraid that when I try to imagine her sitting in the audience listening to someone discussing her use of the caesura, it all seems suddenly laughable. You may not agree. Do you? Or not?

  Toronto in January—it sounds like a piece of misery. I do agree with you, yes, that it would have been more appropriate to hold the thing in Nadeau, and the Steering Committee did look into it. (Isn’t Steering Committee, a curious expression? Fascist almost; invented no doubt to give us false notions of power.) The problem with Nadeau was hotel space—none. Unless you count the six rooms over the beer parlour. And, yes, Elgin was a possibility, though the hotel is one of those drafty old country places, as you must know. And the highway between there and Toronto is sometimes closed in January because of storms. It was agreed that Toronto would have to do if we wanted to attract people. And, astonishingly, it looks as though there will be sixty of us, and maybe more. Who would have believed it? Herb Block is coming from Harvard. When I heard that, little silver bells rang in my head. Herb Block! I suppose you know we invited Frances Moore. “Not quite my thing,” she replied. A cool one.

  And now, Morton, I want you to know that I was deeply touched by what you said in your last letter, how important it was to you to receive personal mail. Yes, I know about what you call the “loneliness of the half famous”—not, by the way, a category I would place you in. I think a lot about loneliness, surely the most widespread of modern diseases—don’t I know! As a matter of fact, it was the spectre of loneliness that first attracted me to Mary Swann’s work, that she and I shared the same bad cold. Of all her poems, the one that speaks to the very centre of my heart is “Alone in the House.”

  Especially those lines —

  Pity my blood hidden and locked

  Pity my mouth shut tight.

  Pity my passing unlocked

  Hours, pity my unwatched night.

  Not her best stanza, but when you think of the anguish behind it! How that poor woman needed someone to “watch” her. How we all do! I don’t, by the way, think she’s being self-pitying here as Professor Croft suggests in her PMLA article. (By the way, Croft is coming to the symposium, a sure sign that our Mary has arrived.)

  I’m so glad you weren’t miffed by my reluctance to let go of the Swann notebook at this time. If I thought there was material in it that you could use for your book, of course I’d send you a copy. But mostly it’s just notes, ideas for poems, lots of scribbles—of which I’ll be talking about in my presentation. I feet rotten about this, damn it. But then you know about the selfishness of scholars. What a lousy bunch we are.

  All good wishes,

  Sarah

  Most of the letters that arrive for Jimroy are business letters from his publishers in New York or from his colleagues in Manitoba. These typed communications, though welcome, hurt his eyes. Too casual, this plinking of print, too easily accomplished. The battering of mechanical keys seems to convince most people that they are witty, when, in fact, they are only verbose. The result, Jimroy finds, is exasperating prolixity and an excess of little dots between sentences, or else that gassy kind of nervousness that came blithering off Ezra Pound’s typed notes to his friends—Jimroy always imagines that these letters of Pound’s, even the gayest of them, were written with his teeth tightly clenched. Sarah Maloney’s envelopes bear jaunty angled stamps and are, Jimroy dares to hope, lovingly licked. The letters themselves are handwritten. Her crisp—but not too crisp—off-white paper suggests harmony and resilience. The ink is deep blue and flows from a medium-tipped pen, what to Jimroy looks like a nylon nib. He loves the calm way Sarah Maloney writes honor and center—these words, with their plain American spellings, seem to grow rounded and luminous. Her wide-open a’s and o’s enchant him. Her capital w’s are innocent well-fed young birds, ready to try their wings. She is twenty-eight years old; he knows because the date of her birth was included in the biographical data that accompanied her first published article, but in any case he would have guessed from her handwriting that she was still in her twenties, the lucky age, the emanicipated age. One has only to look at Mary Swann’s cramped hand or at his own squashed loops. Her tone is murmurous, womanly.

  He distrusts the photo on her book jacket, long hair falling over a long face. A talky mouth and libidinous eyes. A neat little chin, though, redeems her. She might, he thinks, be the kind of woman who hangs prisms or pieces of coloured glass wistfully in her windows. He imagines that she shuns crimson nail polish. A certain bodily stockiness?
He fervently hopes not. (At least Audrey had not been stocky.) He knows that Virginia Woolf is Sarah’s favourite novelist—as a rule he distrusts a Woolfian bias in women—and that V.S. Pritchett is her favourite essayist. The books of these two authors, he imagines, are placed side by side on a little painted shelf close to the desk where she works, the place where she sits (in a pool of sun?) writing her lovely handwritten letters, licking with her soft tongue, honey at its core, the gummed envelopes and stamps—ah, Sarah. The soft tongue, pink, travels across his body. For heaven’s sake, take off your pyjamas, Sarah whispers, foolish buttons, hurry. Oh, how sweet, let me lick, lick, lick. There now, isn’t that what you needed? What you wanted? Yes, of course it is.

  He is sure she has mellowed, changed utterly in fact, since the publication of her big, beefy, angry book, The Female Prism. Her letters are all soft edges and crisp corners. Her refusal, for instance, to part with Mary Swann’s notebook was tenderly phrased, so that the sting of denial was scarcely felt. Well, only a flick. And only for an instant.

  Her most recent letter is the tenth one she has written him. Jimroy places it at the bottom of the pile under the others and replaces the rubber band with a glad snap. Tonight, since the Lees’ party ended even earlier than usual, he will get into bed, pull up the light cotton blanket, and treat himself to the whole oeuvre.

  He admits that her style leaves something to be desired; only occasionally does it tilt toward the kind of persiflage he admires. He wishes she wouldn’t use that phrase deeply touched; he imagines reddened nostrils, dampness, appalling sincerity. The word lousy offends him slightly. She seems unable to produce the long, many-branched sentences he most admires, but he hasn’t the heart to cavil at something she can’t help. And her phrases do have a certain sonority, a stubbornness, her own kind of reckless heat. More than that, the words seem to be shaped for him and for him only. He imagines that the letters she writes to others—Herb Block, that lightweight fake—are thinner and deficient in vitality.

  When he writes to Sarah Maloney he is careful not to smoke. He doesn’t want her to open his envelopes and inhale staleness. Another thing: he makes a point of inserting one, and only one, personal message that he knows will elicit a personal response. He tries for something self-deprecating, the admission of some minor failing or misadventure, for he knows he is most likeable when he is being second rate. He rations himself, anxious that this relationship not turn soppy. He wants hardness, sharpness, net, with just the occasional soft spot, rapidly opened and just as rapidly closed. In a recent letter he told her about the guilt (a mild exaggeration, but no matter) he suffers over the Flanners’ roses, how he sits among them but ignores their beauty, how they bloom without his appreciation.

  “They don’t need appreciation,” Sarah wrote back, absolving him—and, furthermore, she wrote, “nature worshippers are vastly overrated as human beings, particularly in their own estimation.”

  It was what he needed to hear. Sweet impunity. Everything Sarah (Sarah! Sarah!) writes is what he needs to hear.

  Of course he knows this can be explained as a trick of love, that every word spoken by a lover becomes radiantly relevant and overlaid with gold.

  Sporran.

  Jimroy is awakened in the middle of the night by this word, which appears suddenly spelled out in his dream.

  The rest of the dream fades quickly—he has never been able to retain his dreams—leaving only this single word: sporran. The letters dance with a garish blue light behind his closed eyelids. There is a background of dull grey and a sensation of shrill music being played off stage.

  The image is surprisingly persistent, and in order to make it disappear Jimroy is forced to reach over and turn on the bedside lamp. The alarm clock on the table says 3:00 A.M.

  Sporran. Of course. It is the word he was trying to remember, the name of the little purse that Highlanders wear in front of their kilts. He saw one not long ago on that odd young duck of a Scotsman sitting next to him at the University Theater.

  This is something that has happened to him fairly frequently. A word or phrase or piece of trivia will completely slip out of his mind, only to reappear later when the need of it has passed. Objects mislaid, an appointment overlooked. It happens to everyone, of course—he knows that—and gets worse with age. From time to time, especially in the middle of a lecture, it has caused Jimroy a flutter of embarrassment. The phenomenon had to do with the breakdown of the oxygen supply to the brain cells. Somewhere he has read an article about it. Was it Scientific American? No, must have been Harpers. Or else he’s seen a television program about it. He hopes he won’t become the kind of doddering old fool who forgets to zip up his pants or has to have his phone number pinned inside his shirt.

  Probably it’s a good sign that the forgotten word or phrase always does come back to him eventually, usually when he’s relaxed or even, as tonight, in the middle of sleep. What a curious thing the brain is really, with its intricate circuits and cross channels, all embedded in inches of damp, unpretentious, democratic tissue. Sometimes Jimroy thinks of his brain as a rather thick child, wilful and mischievous and dully unaccountable, that he must carry atop an awkward body. But tonight he is grateful for the sudden flashpoint of memory.

  Wide awake now, he tries to recall something that has happened during the day to produce this sudden revelation, this illuminated word sporran. There is nothing. And it’s been weeks since his encounter with the Scotsman, weeks since he’s asked himself what the term was for the little pouch the man wore around his waist. Of course, it’s not a particularly common word. One could go years and years without hearing it. But still he should not have forgotten.

  It isn’t as though this word was something he was trying to suppress, not like the time he was filling out the divorce papers and quite suddenly couldn’t remember Audrey’s middle name. In a case like that he was willing to admit there might be an element of unconscious blocking.

  Audrey Joan Beamish Jimroy. The name Joan came to him the day after he mailed in the papers to the lawyers, when he was sitting in a tub of hot water. He immediately got out, dried himself off and phoned the lawyer, saying that he “might possibly have neglected to include my estranged wife’s middle name.”

  Then he got back into the tub, telling himself, making light of it, that he was thankful his parents had chosen not to give him a middle name or he might very likely have forgotten that, too. After his bath he sat down in a chair by a window and made himself recite some of the Cantos; on one line only, but a line that had once been a favourite, he faltered. He would have to watch himself. In his métier a good memory was essential. Vitamin E was helpful, so some people believed. It was something to look into. If a man was going around forgetting his wife’s middle name …

  Sporran, sporran. He turns out the light and tries to go back to sleep, but the word beeps in his head. He wonders what its origin is. Irish, probably. It has that sound. Nothing to do with spores certainly, though it is hung on the body in a conspicuously spore-related place.

  Audrey Joan Beamish. He clearly remembers the first time he saw her name, a signature at the bottom of an application letter. All spring he had been looking for a research assistant, and Audrey, who didn’t know research from beans, had applied. Typical of Aud to think she could master anything she put her mind to. At least she could type a little, that was something. And her Birmingham accent had an invigorating effect on him. Her boniness, her rawness—she had the kind of reddened nose that was always pressed in a wad of damp tissue—invited his tenderness. He wanted to protect her from herself. Poor old Audrey.

  Often, even here in California, homeland of long-legged American beauties, he sees extraordinarily unattractive women—sallow or bent or overweight or in some way deformed—riding on buses or dragging through department stores. Their shopping bags and the children they tug along confirm without doubt that these women are married. Who would marry such women? Jimroy has asked himself. Then he remembers: he married Audrey.
He was even drawn to her because of her long horse’s face, her knobbed wrist bones gleaming like pickled onions above her hands.

  Even her ignorance gave him pleasure in the early days, telling him he was not alone in his failings. He had amused himself by mumbling inanities to her: Isn’t this the most celestial sky, isn’t this the most urban city, isn’t so-and-so forever putting his foot in his Achilles’ heel, wasn’t somebody-or-other always looking back in retrospect. Then he would watch her face in canny delight as these remarks bounced off her like rubber bullets. She would frowningly turn her eyes upward in thought or else give her sideways nod; one shoulder would go up. Yes, yes, she would say, riding roughshod over his jeu d’esprit, his prickliness, blind to it, oblivious as only Audrey could be oblivious.