Duet. Carol Shields

you ask for something else,’ I suggested, aware that our conversation was slipping over into a new frontier.

      ‘Just to let me alone, to let me goddamned alone. Every night she has to ask me what I did all day. At the plant. She wants to know, she says. I tell her, look, I lived through it once, do I have to live through it twice?’

      ‘I see what you mean,’ I said, hardly able to remember what we were talking about.

      ‘You do?’ Far away in his nest of sheets he registered surprise.

      ‘Yes. I know exactly what you mean. As my mother used to say, “I don’t want to chew my cabbage twice.”’

      ‘You mean you don’t ask your husband what he did all day?’

      ‘Well,’ I said growing weary, ‘no. I don’t think I ever do. Poor Martin.’

      ‘Christ,’ he said as two nurses began rolling him to the doorway.

      ‘Christ. I wish I was married to you.’

      ‘Thank you,’ I called faintly. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

      Absurdly flattered, I too was wheeled away. Joy closed my eyes, and all I remember seeing after that was a blur of brilliant blue.

      

      ‘You haven’t read it yet, have you?’ Meredith accuses me.

      ‘Read what yet?’ I am ironing in the kitchen, late on a Thursday afternoon. Pillowcases, Martin’s shirts. I am travelling across the yokes, thinking these shirts I bought on sale are no good. Just a touch-up they’re supposed to need, but the point of my iron is required on every seam.

      ‘You haven’t read Furlong’s book?’ Meredith says sharply.

      ‘The new one you mean?’

       ‘Graven Images.’

      ‘Well,’ I say apologetically, letting that little word ‘well’ unwind slowly, making a wavy line out of it the way our mother used to do, ‘well, you know how busy I’ve been.’

      ‘You read Pearson’s book.’

      ‘That was different.’

      Abruptly she lapses into confidence. ‘It’s the best one he’s written. You’ve just got to read it. That one scene where Verna dies. You’ll love it. She’s the sister. Unmarried. But beautiful, spiritual, even though she never had a chance to go to school. She’s blind, but she has these fantastic visions. Honestly, when you stop to think that here you have a man, a man who is actually writing from inside, you know, from inside a woman’s head. It’s unbelievable. That kind of intuition.’

      ‘I’m planning to read it,’ I assure her earnestly, for I want to make her happy. ‘But there’s the Susanna thing, and when I’m not working on that, there’s the ironing. One thing after another.’

      ‘You know that’s not the reason you haven’t read it,’ she says, her eyes going icy.

      I put down the iron, setting it securely on its heel. ‘All right, Meredith. You tell me why.’

      ‘You think he’s a dumb corny romantic. Flabby. Feminine.’

      ‘Paunchy,’ I help her out.

      ‘You see,’ her voice rises.

      ‘Predictable. That’s it, if you really want to know, Meredith.’

      ‘I don’t know how you can say that.’

      ‘Easy.’ I tell her. ‘This is his tenth novel, you know, and I’ve read them all. Every one. So I’ve a pretty good idea what’s in this one. The formula, you might say, is familiar.’

      ‘What’s it about then?’ her voice pleads, and I don’t dare look at her.

      I shake a blouse vigorously out of the basket. ‘First there’s the waving wheat. He opens, Chapter One, to waving wheat. Admit it, Meredith, Saskatchewan in powder form. Mix with honest rain water for native genre.’

      ‘He grew up there.’

      ‘I know, Meredith, I know. But he doesn’t live there now, does he? He lives here in the east. For twenty years he’s lived in the east. And he isn’t a farmer. He’s a writer. And when he’s not being a writer, he’s being a professor. Don’t forget about that.’

      ‘Roots matter to some people,’ she says in a tone which accuses me of forgetting my own. Nurtured on the jointed avenues of Scarborough, did that count?

      ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Then you move into his storm chapter. Rain, snow, hail, locusts maybe. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s devastating. Echoes of Moses. A punishing storm. To remind them they’re reaching too high or sinning too low. A holocaust and, I grant you this, very well done. Furlong is exceptional on storms.’

      ‘This book really is different. There’s another plot altogether.’

      I rip into a shirt of Richard’s. ‘Then the characters. Three I can be sure of. The Presbyterian Grandmother. And sometimes Grandfather too, staring out from his little chimney corner, all-knowing, all-seeing, but, alas, unheeded. Right, Meredith?’

      Stop, I tell myself. You’re enjoying this. You’re a cruel, cynical woman piercing the pink valentine heart of your own daughter, shut up, shut up.

      She mumbles something I don’t catch.

      ‘Then,’ I say, ‘we’re into the wife. She endures. There’s nothing more to say about her except that she endures. But her husband, rampant with lust, keep your eye on him.’

      ‘You haven’t even read it.’

      ‘Watch the husband, Meredith. Lust will undo him. Furlong will get him for sure with a horde of locusts. Or a limb frozen in the storm and requiring a tense kitchen-table amputation.’

      ‘Influenza,’ Meredith murmurs. ‘But the rest really is different.’

      ‘And we close with more waving wheat. Vibrations from the hearthside saying, if only you’d listened.’

      ‘It’s not supposed to be real life. It’s not biography,’ she says, giving that last word a nasty snap. ‘It’s sort of a symbol of the country. You have to look at it as a kind of extended image. Like in Shakespeare.’

      ‘I’m going to read it,’ I tell her as I fold the ironing board, contrite now. ‘I might even settle down with it tonight.’

      We’ve had the book since August. Furlong brought me one, right off the press one steaming afternoon. Inscribed ‘To Martin and Judith Who Care.’ Beautiful thought, but I cringed reading it, hoping Martin wouldn’t notice. Furlong seems unable to resist going the quarter-inch too far.

      Furlong’s picture on the back of the book is distressingly authorly. One can see evidence of a tally taken, a check list fulfilled. Beard and moustache, of course. White turtleneck exposed at the collar of an overcoat. Tweed and cablestitch juxtaposed, a generation-straddling costume testifying to eclectic respectability.

      A pipe angles from the corner of his mouth! It’s bowl is missing, the outlines lost in the dark shadow of the overcoat, so that for a moment I thought it was a cigarillo or maybe just a fountain pen he was sucking on. But no, on close examination I could see the shine of the bowl. Everything in place.

      The picture is two-colour, white and a sort of olive tone, bleeding off the edges, Time-Life style. Behind him a microcosm of Canada – a fretwork of bare branches and a blur of olive snow, man against nature.

      His eyes are mere slits. Snow glare? The whole expression is nicely in place, a costly membrane, bemused but kindly, academic but gutsy. The photographer has clearly demanded detachment.

      The jacket blurb admits he teaches creative writing in a university, but couched within this apology is the information