Duet. Carol Shields

how could I since, despite my urging them to call me Judith, they always referred to me as Mrs Gill. And when I read my short weekly contributions, always a quarter the length of theirs, they listened politely, even Ludwig, and never ventured any remarks except perhaps, very deferentially, that my sentences were a bit too structured or that my situations seemed a little, well, conventional and contrived.

      Somewhat to my surprise I found that Furlong ran his creative writing seminar in a highly organized manner, beginning with what he called warming-up exercises. These were specific weekly assignments in which we were to describe such things as the experience of ecstasy or the effect of ennui, a dialogue between lovers one week and enemies the next.

      I sweated through these assignments, typing out the minimum required words and, when my turn came, I read them aloud, feeling like a great overblown girl, red-faced and matronly, who should long since have abandoned such childish games.

      The rest of them were not the least reticent; indeed they were positively eager to celebrate their hallucinations aloud. Arleen dragged us paragraph by paragraph through her thoughts on peace and mankind, and a girl named Lucy Rimer was anxious to split her psyche wide open, inviting us to inspect the tortured labyrinth of her awakening sexuality. Joseph, an African student, disgusted and thrilled us with portraits of his Ghanian grandparents. Someone called George Riorden dramatized his feeling on racial equality by having two characters, Whitey (a Negro) and Mr Black (a white) dialogue over the back fence, reminding us, in case we missed it, of the express irony implied by their names. Ludwig poked with a blunt and dirty finger into the sores of his consciousness, not stopping at his subtle and individual response to orgasm and the nuances of his erect penis. On and on.

      They were relentless, compulsive, unsparing, as though they had waited all their lives for these moments of catharsis, these Wednesday afternoon epiphanies. But looking around, when I dared to look around, I watched them wearing down, week by week exhausting themselves, and I wondered how long it could go on.

      Eventually Furlong, who until then had merely listened and nodded, nodded and listened, called a halt and announced that it was time to begin the term project. Each of us was to write a short novel, about ten chapters he suggested, a chapter a week, which we were to bring to class to be read aloud and discussed. I breathed with relief. This was what I had hoped for, a general to command me into action and an audience who, by its response, might indicate whether I was going in the right direction.

      I began at once on my first chapter, carefully introducing my main characters, providing a generous feeling of setting, and observing all the conventions as I understood them. It was all quite easy, and when my turn came to read, the class listened attentively, and even Furlong beamed approval.

      And then I got stuck. Having described the personalities of my characters, detailed where they lived and what they did, I didn’t know what to do with them next. The following week when my turn came, I apologized and said I was unprepared.

      The others in the class seemed not to suffer from my peculiar malady which was the complete inability to manufacture situations, and I envied the ease with which they drifted off into fantasies, for although they strained my credulity, their inventiveness seemed endless.

      A second week went by, leaving me still at the end of Chapter One. A third week. Furlong questioned me kindly after class.

      ‘Are you losing interest, Judith?’

      ‘I think I’m losing my mind,’ I said. ‘I just can’t seem to get any ideas.’

      He was understanding, fatherly. ‘It’ll come,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see.’

      I waited but it didn’t come, and I began to lie awake at night, frightened by the emptiness in my head. In the small hours of the morning, with Martin asleep beside me, I several times crept out of bed, padded downstairs, made tea, sat at the kitchen table and felt myself overcome by vacancy, barrenness, by failure.

      A Wednesday afternoon came when I phoned Furlong before class pleading a violent toothache and a sudden dental appointment. The following Wednesday I went one step further: I absented myself without excuse. I was in descent now, set on a not-too-painful decline. There were days when I seldom thought about the novel at all.

      I went skiing. I had my hair restyled at a place called Rico’s of Rome and I shopped for new clothes. I painted the upstairs bathroom turquoise and joined a Keep Fit class. I went to the movies with Martin and Roger and Ruthie. I fringed and embroidered Richard’s jeans, wrote a long letter to my sister Charleen. Everyone was kind; no one said a word about my novel. No one inquired about the seminar I was attending. No one except Furlong.

      He kept phoning me. ‘You made a brilliant start, Judith. Your first chapter showed real strength. Head and shoulders above the rest of the little brats.’

      ‘But I can’t seem to expand on that, Furlong. And not for want of trying.’

      ‘You say you really have been trying?’

      ‘I have rings under my eyes,’ I lied.

      ‘How about just letting your mind go free. Conduct a sort of private brainstorming. I sometimes find that helps.’

      ‘You mean you’ve felt like this too? Bereft? Not an idea in your head?’

      ‘If you only knew. The truth is, Judith, I can be sympathetic because I haven’t had a good idea in almost two years. And that, my old friend, is strictly entre-nous.’

      ‘And you’ve no solutions? No advice?’

      ‘Try coming back to class. I know you think you can’t face it at this point, but steel yourself. Most of what they write is garbage, but it’s stimulation of a sort.’

      I promised, and I did actually go back for one or two sessions. And at home I forced myself to sit down and type out a paragraph every morning, but the effort was akin to suffering.

      And then one day, just as Furlong had said, it came. In the middle of a dazzling winter morning, ten o’clock with the sun bold and fringed as a zinnia, it came. I would be able to save myself after all.

      I would simply borrow the plot from John Spalding’s first abandoned and unpublished novel, the one I had so secretly consumed in Birmingham. Such a simple idea. What did it matter that his writing was banal, boyish, embarrassingly sincere; the plot had been not only clever – it had been astonishingly original. Otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered it, for like many rapid readers, I forget what I read the minute I close the covers. But John Spalding’s plot line, even after all these months, was surprisingly vivid.

      What I couldn’t understand was why I hadn’t thought of it before now. It was so available; what a waste to leave it stuck in a buff folder on a dusty shelf in an obscure flat in Birmingham, England. A good idea should never be orphaned. Luxuriously, I allowed the details to circulate through my veins, marvelling that the solution to my dilemma had been so obvious, so right, so free for the taking; it had an aura of inevitability about it which made me wonder if it hadn’t been incubating in my blood all these months – germination, growth, now the burst of blossom.

      I thought of the Renaissance painters, and happily, gleefully, drew parallels; the master painter often doing nothing but tracing in the lines, while his worthy but less gifted artisans filled in the colours. It had been a less arrogant age in which creativity had been shared; surely that was an ennobling precedent. For I didn’t intend anything as crude as stealing John Spalding’s plot outright. I already had my line-up of characters. My setting had been composed. All I needed to borrow was the underlying plot structure.

      I woke the next day feeling spare, nimble, energetic, sinewy with health and muscle, confident, even omnipotent. I felt as though the blood had been drained out of me and replaced with cool-flowing Freon gas. My fingers were lively little machines exciting the keys; my eyes rotated mechanically, left to right, left to right; the carriage rocked with purpose. My brain ticked along, cleanly, accurately, uncluttered. The first day I wrote fifty pages.

      I telephoned Furlong, shrilling, ‘I’ve finally got started.’

      ‘All