Duet

But that night Martin was at a meeting, and I was asleep when he came home. The next day I forgot. And the next. Whenever it pops into my mind, he isn’t around. And when he is, something makes me stumble and hesitate as though I were afraid of the reply. I still haven’t asked him, but this morning I looked in the drawer to see if it was still there. It was all in place, all eight bundles; nothing had been touched. I must ask Martin about it.

As Meredith grows up I look at her and think, who does she remind me of? A shaded gesture, a position struck, or something curious she might say will touch off a shock of recognition in me, but I can never think who it is she is like.

I flip through my relatives – like flashcards. My mother. No, no, no. My sister Charleen? No. Charleen, for all her sensitivity, has a core of detachment. Aunt Liddy? Sometimes I am quite sure it is my old aunt. But no. Auntie’s fragility is neurotic, not natural like Meredith’s. Who else?

She has changed in the last year, is romantic and realistic in violent turns. Now she is reading Furlong Eberhardt’s new book about the prairies. While she reads, her hands grip the cover so hard that the bones of her hands stand up, whey-white. Her eyes float in a concerned sweep over the pages, her forehead puzzled. It’s painful to watch her; she shouldn’t invest so much of herself in anything as ephemeral as a book; it is criminal to care that much.

Like my family she is dark, but unlike us she has a delicious water-colour softness, and if she were braver she would be beautiful. She is as tall as I am but she has been spared the wide country shoulders; there are some blessings.

It is an irony, the sort I relish, that I who am a biographer and delight in sorting out personalities, can’t even draw a circle around my own daughter’s. Last night at the table, just as she was cutting into a baked potato, she raised her eyes, exceptionally sober even for her, and answered some trivial question Martin had asked her. The space between the movement of her hand and the upward angle of her eyes opened up, and I almost had it.

Then it slipped away.

Last night Martin and I went to a play. It was one of Shaw’s early ones, written before he turned drama into social propaganda. The slimmest of drawingroom debacles, it was a zany sandwich of socialism and pie-in-the-eye, daft but with brisk touches of irreverence. And the heroes were real heroes, the way they should be, and the heroines were even better. The whole evening was a confection, a joy.

During the intermission we stood in the foyer chatting with Furlong Eberhardt and his mother, our delight in the play surfacing on our lips like crystals of sugar. Mrs Eberhardt, as broad-breasted as one of the Shavian heroines, encircled us with her peculiar clove-flavoured embrace. A big woman, she is mauve to the bone; even her skin is faintly lilac, her face a benign fretwork of lines framed with waves of palest violet.

‘Judith, you look a picture. How I wish I could wear those pant suits.’

‘You look lovely as you are, Mother,’ Furlong said, and she did; if ever a woman deserved a son with a mother fixation, it was Mrs Eberhardt.

Martin disappeared to get us drinks, and Furlong, by a bit of clever steering, turned our discussion to his new book. Graven Images.

‘I know I can count on you, Judith, for a candid opinion. The critics, mind you, have been very helpful, and thus far, very kind.’ He paused.

For a son of the Saskatchewan soil, Furlong is remarkably courtly, and like all the courtly people I know, he inspires in me alleys of unknown coarseness. I want to slap his back, pump his hand, tell him to screw off. But I never do, never, for basically I am too fond of him and even grateful, thankful for his most dazzling talent which is not writing at all, but the ability he has to make the people around him feel alive. There is an exhausted Byzantine quality about him which demands response, and even at that moment, standing in the theatre foyer in my too-tight pantsuit and my hair falling down around my rapidly ageing face, I was swept with vitality, almost drunk with the recognition that all things are possible. Beauty, fame, power; I have not been passed by after all.

But about Graven Images, I had to confess ignorance. ‘I’ve been locked up with Susanna for months,’ I explained. It sounded weak. It was weak. But I thought to add kindly, ‘Meredith is reading it right now. She was about halfway through when we left the house tonight.’

At this he beamed. ‘Then it is to your charming daughter I shall have to speak.’ Visibly wounded that I hadn’t got around to his book, he rallied quickly, drowning his private pain in a flood of diffusion. ‘Public reaction is really too general to be of any use, as you well know, Judith. It is one’s friends one must rely upon.’ He pronounced the word friends with such a silky sound that, for an instant, I wished he were a different make of man.

‘Meredith would love to discuss it with you, Furlong,’ I told him honestly. ‘Besides, she’s a more sensitive reader of fiction than I am. You, of all people, know fiction isn’t my thing.’

‘Ah yes, Judith,’ he said. ‘It’s your old Scarborough puritanism, as I’ve frequently told you. Judith Gill, my girl, basically you believe fiction is wicked and timewasting. The devil’s work. A web of lies.’

‘You just might be right, Furlong.’

When Martin came back with our drinks, Furlong issued a general invitation to attend his publication party in November. He beamed at Martin, ‘You two must plan to come.’

‘Hmmm,’ Martin murmured noncommitally. He doesn’t really like Furlong; the relationship between them, although they teach in the same department, is one of tolerant scorn.

The lights dipped, and we found our way back to our seats. Back to the lovely arched setting, lit in some magical way to suggest sunrise. Heroines moved across the broad stage like clipper ships, their throats swollen with purpose. The play wound down and so did they in their final speeches. Holy holy, the crash of applause that always brings tears stinging to my eyes.

All night long memories of the play boiled through my dreams, a plummy jam stewed from those intelligent, cruising, early-century bosoms. Hour after hour I rode on a sea of breasts: the exhausted mounds of Susanna Moodie, touched with lamplight. The orchid hills and valleys of Mrs Eberhardt, bubbles of yeast. The tender curve of my daughter Meredith. The bratty twelve-year-old tits of Anita Spalding, rising, falling, melting, twisting in and out of the heavy folds of sleep.

I woke to find Martin’s arm flung across my chest; the angle of his skin was perceived and recognized, a familiar coastline. The weight was a lever that cut off the electricity of dreams, pushing me down, down through the mattress, down through the floor, down, into the spongy cave of the blackest sleep. Oblivion.

October (#ulink_e63cd20c-2262-5910-a37b-3441f7afba6c)

The first frost this morning, a landmark. At breakfast Martin talks about snow tires and mentions a sale at Canadian Tire. After school these days Richard plays football with his friends in the shadowy yard, and when they thud to the grass, the ground rings with sound. Watching them, I am reassured.

It is almost dark now when we sit down to dinner. Meredith has found some candles in the cupboard, bent out of shape with the summer heat but still useable, so that now our dinners are washed with candlelight. I make pot roast which they love and mashed potatoes which make me think of Susanna Moodie. In the evening the children have their homework. Martin goes over papers at his desk or reads a book, sitting in the yellow chair, his feet resting on the coffeetable, and he hums. Richard and Meredith bicker lazily. Husband, children, they are not so much witnessed as perceived, flat leaves which grow absently from a stalk in my head, each fitting into the next, all their curving edges perfect. So far, so far. It seems they require someone, me, to watch them; otherwise they would float apart and disintegrate.

I watch them. They are as happy as can be expected. What is the matter with me, I wonder. Why am I always the one who watches?

One day this week I checked into the Civic Hospital for a minor operation, a delicate, feminine, unspeakable, minimal nothing, the sort of irksome repair work which I suppose I must expect now that I am forty.

A minor piece of surgery, but nevertheless requiring a general anaesthetic. Preparation, sleep, recovery, a whole day required, a day fully erased from my life. Martin drove me to the hospital at nine and came to take me home again in the evening. The snipping and sewing were entirely satisfactory, and except for an hour’s discomfort, there were no after effects. None. I am in service again. A lost day, but there was one cheering interlude.

Shortly before the administering of the general anaesthetic, I was given a little white pill to make me drowsy. In a languorous trance I was then wheeled on a stretcher to a darkened room and lined up with about twelve other people, male and female, all in the same condition. White-faced nurses tiptoed between our parked rows, whispering. Far below us in another world, cars honked and squeaked.

Lying there semidrugged, I sensed a new identity: I was exactly like a biscuit set out to bake, just waiting my turn in the oven. I moved my head lazily to one side and found myself face to face, not six inches away from a man, another biscuit. His eyes met mine, and I watched him fascinated, a slow-motion film, as he laboured to open his mouth and pronounce with a slur, ‘Funny feeling, eh?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As though we were a tray of biscuits.’

‘That’s right,’ he said crookedly.

Surprised, I asked, ‘What are you here for?’

‘The old water works,’ he said yawning. ‘But nothing major.’

Kidneys, bladder, urine; a diagram flashed in my brain. ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. Always polite. I cannot, even here, escape courtesy.

‘What about you?’ he mouthed, almost inaudible now.

‘One of those female things,’ I whispered. ‘Also not major.’

‘You married?’

‘Yes. Are you?’ I asked, realizing too late that he had asked because of the nature of my complaint, not because we were comparing our status as we might had we met at a party.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m married. But not happily.’

‘Pardon?’ Courtesy again, the scented phrase. Our mother had always insisted we say pardon and, as Charleen says, we are children all our lives, obedient to echoes.

‘Not happily,’ he said again. ‘Married yes,’ he made an effort to enunciate, ‘but not happily married.’

A surreal testimony. It must be the anesthetic, I thought, pulling an admission like that from a sheeted stranger. The effect of the pill or perhaps the rarity of the circumstances, the two of us lying here nose to nose, almost naked under our thin sheets, horizontal in midmorning, chemical-smelling limbo, our conversation somehow crisped into truth.

‘Too bad,’ I said with just a shade of sympathy.

‘You happily married?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I murmured, a little ashamed at the affirmative ring in my voice. ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. Not that I deserve it.’

‘What do you mean, not that you deserve it?’

‘I don’t know.’