Duet. Carol Shields

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 candour, 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.

      His closest friend at the university is Roger Ramsay who teaches Canadian Literature. Roger has a fat man’s face, round and red, with a hedge of fat yellow curls. But his body is long and lean and muscular. He is younger than we are, young enough so he is able to live with someone without marrying her, and he and Ruthie have an apartment at the top of an old Gothic house which is cheap and charming and only a little uncomfortable. Posters instead of wallpaper, ragouts in brown pots instead of roasts, candles instead of trilights, Lightfoot records instead of children. A growing collection of Eskimo carvings and rare Canadian books.

      Ruthie St Pierre is small, dark and brilliant; assistant to the head of the translation department in the Central Library. They both smoke the odd bit of pot or, as Roger puts it, they’re into it. We love them, but what we can’t understand is why they love us, but they do, especially Martin. In this friendship I am the extra; the clumsy big sister who is only accidentally included.

      My closest friend is a woman named Nancy Krantz. She is about my age, mother to six children and wife to a lawyer named Paul Krantz, but that is strictly by the way. Nancy is not really attached to anyone, not even to me, I admit sadly. I am an incidental here as well.

      She generally drops in unexpectedly between errands, usually in the morning. She almost, but not quite, keeps the Volkswagen engine running in the driveway while we talk. She is in a rush and she dances back and forth in my kitchen with the car keys still jingling in her fingers. I cannot, in fact, imagine her voice without the accompaniment of ringing car keys. Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.

      We talk fast, both of us, as though we accelerated each other, and there is a thrilling madness in our morning dialogues. Nancy has always just been somewhere or is on her way to somewhere – to an anti-abortionist meeting, to a consumers’ committee, to a curriculum symposium. And into these concerns, which in the abstract interest me very little, she manages to sweep me away. I stand, coffee cup in one hand, wildly gesticulating with the other, suddenly stunningly vocal. The quality of our exchanges is such that she enables me to string together miles of impressive phrases; my extemporaneous self reawakened. I pour