Unless. Carol Shields

thought has drifted by, silken as a breeze against a lattice. There’s something missing in these memoirs, or so I think in my solipsistic view. Danielle Westerman suffers, she feels the pangs of existential loneliness, the absence of sexual love, the treason of her own woman’s body. She has no partner, no one for whom she is the first person in the world order, no one to depend on as I do on Tom. She does not have a child, or any surviving blood connection for that matter, and perhaps it’s this that makes the memoirs themselves childlike. They go down like good milk, foaming, swirling in the glass.

      II. I shouldn’t mention Book Number Eleven since it is not a fait accompli, but I will. I’m going to write a second novel, a sequel to My Thyme Is Up. Today is the day I intend to begin. The first sentence is already tapped into my computer: “Alicia was not as happy as she deserved to be.”

      I have no idea what will happen in this book. It is a mere abstraction at the moment, something that’s popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn. I’ve stumbled up against this idea in my clumsy manner, and now the urge to write it won’t go away. This will be a book about lost children, about goodness, and going home and being happy and trying to keep the poison of the printed page in perspective. I’m desperate to know how the story will turn out.

       Nearly

      WE ARE MORE THAN halfway through the year 2000. Toward the beginning of August, Tom’s old friend Colin Glass came to dinner one night, driving out from Toronto. Over coffee he attempted to explain the theory of relativity to me.

      I was the one who invited him to launch into the subject. Relativity is a piece of knowledge I’ve always longed to understand, a big piece, but the explainers tend to go too fast or else they skip over a step they assume their audience has already absorbed. Apparently, there was once a time when only one person in the world understood relativity (Einstein), then two people, then three or four, and now most of the high-school kids who take physics have at least an inkling, or so I’m told. How hard can it be? And it’s passed, according to Colin, from crazy speculation to confirmed fact, which makes it even more important to understand. I’ve tried, but my grasp feels tenuous. So, the speed of light is constant. Is that all?

      Ordinarily, I love these long August evenings, the splash of amber light that falls on the white dining-room walls just before the separate shades of twilight take over. The medallion leaves that flutter their round ghost shadows. All day I’d listened to the white-throated sparrows in the woods behind our house; their song resembles the Canadian national anthem, at least the opening bars. Summer was dying, but in pieces. We’d be eating outside if it weren’t for the wasps. Good food, the company of a good friend, what more could anyone desire? But I kept thinking of Norah sitting on her square of pavement and holding up the piece of cardboard with the word GOODNESS, and then I lost track of what Colin was saying.

      E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared. The tidiness of the equation raised my immediate suspicion. How can mass—this solid oak dining table, for instance—have any connection with how fast light travels? They’re two different things. Colin, who is a physicist, was patient with my objections. He took the linen napkin from his lap and stretched it taut across the top of his coffee cup. Then he took a cherry from the fruit bowl and placed it on the napkin, creating a small dimple. He tipped the cup slightly so that the cherry rotated around the surface of the napkin. He spoke of energy and mass, but already I had lost a critical filament of the argument. I worried slightly about his coffee sloshing up onto the napkin and staining it, and thought how seldom in the last few years I had bothered with cloth napkins. Nobody, except maybe Danielle Westerman, does real napkins anymore; it was understood that modern professional women had better things to do with their time than launder linen.

      By now I had forgotten completely what the cherry (more than four dollars a pound) represented and what the little dimple was supposed to be. Colin talked on and on, and Tom, who is a family physician and has a broad scientific background, seemed to be following; at least he was nodding his head appropriately. My mother-in-law, Lois, had politely excused herself and returned to her house next door; she would never miss the ten-o’clock news; her watching of the ten-o’clock news helps the country of Canada to go forward. Christine and Natalie had long since drifted from the table, and I could hear the buzz and burst of TV noises in the den.

      Pet, our golden retriever, parked his shaggy self under the table, his whole dog body humming away against my foot. Sometimes, in his dreams, he groans and sometimes he chortles with happiness. I found myself thinking about Marietta, Colin’s wife, who had packed her bags a few months ago and moved to Calgary to be with another man. She claimed Colin was too wrapped up in his research and teaching to be a true partner. A beautiful woman with a neck like a plant stem, she hinted that there had been a collapse of passion in their marriage. She had left suddenly, coldly; he had been shocked; he had had no idea, he told us in the early days, that she had been unhappy all these years, but he found her diaries in a desk drawer and read them, sick with realization that a gulf of misunderstanding separated them.

      Why would a woman leave such personal diaries behind? To punish, to hurt, of course. Colin, for the most part a decent, kind-hearted man, used to address her in a dry, admonitory way, as though she were a graduate student instead of his wife. “Don’t tell me this is processed cheese,” he asked her once when we were having dinner at their house. Another time: “This coffee is undrinkable.” He loved pleasure—he was that kind of man—and took it for granted and couldn’t help his little yelps of outrage when pleasure failed. You could call him an innocent in his expectations, almost naive on this particular August evening. It was as though he were alone in a vaulted chamber echoing with immensities, while Tom and I stood attendance just outside the door, catching the overflow, the odd glimpse of his skewed but calm brilliance. Even the little pockets under his eyes were phlegmatic. He was not a shallow person, but perhaps he suspected that we were. I had to stop myself interrupting with a joke. I often do this, I’m afraid: ask for an explanation and then drift off into my own thoughts.

      How could he now be sitting at our table so calmly, toying with cherries and coffee cups and rolling the edge of his straw placemat, and pressing this heft of information on us? It was close to midnight; he had an hour’s drive ahead of him. What did the theory of relativity really matter to his ongoing life? Colin, with his small specs and trim moustache, was at ease with big ideas like relativity. As a theory, relativity worked, it held all sorts of important “concepts” together with its precision and elegance. Think of glue lavishly applied, he said helpfully about relativity; think of the power of the shrewd guess. Such a sweeping perspective had been visionary at the beginning, but had been assessed and reinforced, and it was, moreover, Colin was now insisting, useful. In the face of life’s uncertainties, relativity’s weight could be assumed and then set aside, part of the package of consciousness.

      He finished awkwardly, sat back in his chair with his two long arms extended. “So!” That’s it, he seemed to say, or that’s as much as I can do to simplify and explain so brilliant an idea. He glanced at his watch, then sat back again, exhausted, pleased with himself. He wore a well-pressed cotton shirt with blue and yellow stripes, neatly tucked into his black jeans. He has no interest in clothes. This shirt must go back to his married days, chosen for him, ironed for him by Marietta herself and put on a hanger, perhaps a summer ago.

      The theory of relativity would not bring Colin’s wife hurrying back to the old stone house on Oriole Parkway. It would not bring my daughter Norah home from the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, or the Promise Hostel where she beds at night. Tom and I followed her one day; we had to know how she managed, whether she was safe. The weather would be turning cold soon. How does she bear it? Cold concrete. Dirt. Uncombed hair.

      “Would you say,” I asked Colin—I had not spoken for several minutes—“that the theory of relativity has reduced the weight of goodness and depravity in the world?”

      He stared at me.“Relativity has no moral position. None whatever.” (“This coffee is undrinkable.”)