Authors: Carol Shields
“Jane and I are seriously considering a walking tour of the Hebrides next year,” Nigel had written.
Robert applied for a year off in order to do some research on the immune system, but almost from the start things went badly. The data he required accumulated slowly and yielded little that was specific. He learned too late that someone else, someone younger and with a larger grant, was on the same track at Stanford. He insisted on being given computer time in order to correlate his findings, and then discovered he was painfully, helplessly inept at using a computer. He began drifting to his club in the early afternoons to swim laps, or sometimes he drank in the bar and told Lila that he swam laps. His disappointment, his difficulty, his lies, his drunkenness, his life sliding away from him down a long blind chute, made him decide that the time had come to buy a house.
The house was expensive, ten rooms of glass and dark-stained wood cunningly perched on the side of a ravine, but it saved his life, or so he said at the time. He and Lila and the boys moved in at the end of November. As always, when they moved, Lila made careful, tactful, heroic efforts to have their mail forwarded. She looked forward to the barrage of Christmas greetings. Nigel and Jane’s card came from the Hebrides that year, just a short note saying, “We made it at last. The birds are magnificent.”
Lila had the use of her mother’s summer cottage in Muskoka, and she and Robert and the children liked to spend four or five weeks there every summer. There was a particular nightgown she wore at the lake. It was altogether different from her city nightgowns, which were long, sliplike things in shiny materials and in colors such as ivory or melon or plum. The cottage
nightgown was white cotton printed with quite large red poppies. There was a ruffle at the neck and another at the feet. On a bigger woman, it would have been comic; it was large, loose, a balloon of a garment.
Robert couldn’t imagine where it had come from. It was difficult to think of someone as elegant as Lila actually going out to buy such a thing. She kept it in an old drawer at the cottage, and one summer they arrived and found that a family of mice had built a nest in its flower-strewn folds. The children ran screaming.
“Throw it away,” Robert told her.
But she had washed it in the lake with strong detergent and dried it in the sun. “As good as new,” she said after she mended one small hole.
For a week the children called it her mouse gown and refused to touch it.
But Robert loved her in it. How he loved her! The wet, lakey smell was in her hair all summer long, and on her skin. She was his shining girl again, easy and ardent and restored to innocence.
Summer was one thing, but for most of the year Lila and Robert lived in a country too cold for park benches or
alfresco
dining or cuddling on yachts or unzipping the spirit. They suffered a climate more suitable for sobering insights, for guilt, for the entrenchment of broad streams of angst and darkness.
England, too, was a cold country, yet Nigel wrote: “We’ve had a cheerless autumn and no summer to speak of, but as long as Jane and I have our books and a good fire, we can’t complain.”
Just as heavy drinkers gather at parties to condemn others for
overindulgence, so Lila lovingly gathered stories of wrecked marriages and nervous breakdowns—as though an accumulation of statistics might guard her sanity and her marriage, as if the sheer weight of disaster would prevent the daily erosion of what she had once called her happiness. She wailed, loudly and frequently, about the numbers of her friends who popped Valium or let their marriages slide into boredom. “I’ll go crazy if I hear about one more divorce.” She said this mournfully, but with a sly edge of triumph. Her friends’ children were taking drugs or running away from home. She could weep, she told Robert, when she looked around and saw the wreckage of human lives.
But she didn’t weep. She was, if anything, reaffirmed by disaster. “I ran into Bess Carrier downtown,” she told Robert, “and she looked about sixty, completely washed out, devastated. You wouldn’t have known her. It was heartbreaking. I get so depressed sometimes. There must be something we can do for her.”
Robert knew it would come to nothing, Lila’s plans to take Bess Carrier out for lunch or send her flowers or invite her around for a drink. Lila’s charity seldom got past the point of corpse-counting these days; it seemed to take most of her time.
No one escaped her outraged pity—except perhaps Nigel and Jane. They were safe, across the ocean, locked into their seasonal rhythms, consumed by their various passions. They were taking Portuguese lessons, they had written. And growing orchids.
Lila loved parties, and she and Robert went to a great many. But when they drove home past lighted houses and streets full of parked cars, she was tormented by the parties she had missed, assuming, as a matter of course, that these briefly
glimpsed gatherings glittered with a brighter and kinder light. She imagined rooms fragrant with woodsmoke and fine food—and talk that was both grave and charming. Who could guess what her imagination had cost her over the years?
The same plunging sense of loss struck her each year when she opened the Christmas greeting from Nigel and Jane. Elsewhere, these cards said to her, people were able to live lives of deep trust. How had it happened—that others were able to inhabit their lives with such grace and composure?
“He probably sends out thousands of these things,” Robert once said to Lila, who was deeply offended. “He must be a bit off his rocker. He must be a real nut.”
It was the month of July. Robert bundled the boys into the station wagon and they drove across the country, camping, climbing in the mountains, cooking eggs and coffee over an open fire, breathing fresh air. Lila went to Rome on a tour with a group from the art gallery. While she was gone, her mother died of heart failure on the platform of the College Street subway station. The moment she collapsed, her straw hat flying into the air, was the same moment when Lila stood in the nave of St. Peter’s, looked up into its magisterial vaulting and felt that she had asked too much of life. Like Nigel and Jane, she must try to find a simpler way of being: playing word games at the kitchen table, being attentive to changes in the weather, taking an interest in local history, or perhaps collecting seashells on a beach, taking each one into her hand and minutely examining its color and pattern.
A snowy day. Lila was at home. There was a fire, a pot of Earl Grey and Beethoven being monumentally unpleasant on the record player. She turned the music off and was rewarded by
a blow of silence. In the whole of the long afternoon there was not one interruption, not even a phone call. At seven, Robert arrived home and the peace was broken by this peaceful man.
A snowy day. Robert was up at seven. Granola in a bowl given to him by his wife. She was lost in a dream. He would like to have surprised her by saying something startling, but he was convinced, prematurely as it turned out, that certain rhythms of speech had left him forever. He knew this just as he knew that he was unlikely ever again to kiss the inner elbow of a woman and behave foolishly.
A snowy day. Nigel wrote: “We are wrapped in a glorious blizzard, an extraordinary North Pole of a day. Jane and I send good wishes. May you have peace, joy and blessings of every kind.”
Loss of faith came at inappropriate times, settling on the brain like a coat of deadly lacquer. Lila thought of her dead baby. Robert thought of his abandoned research. But, luckily, seasonal tasks kept the demons down—the porch to open and clean, the storm windows to see to, the leaves. Robert and Lila always gave a party for the staff in the fall. After the fall party, there were the Christmas things to be done. The children were doing well in school. Soon it would be summer.
Occasionally, in a crowd, in an airport or a restaurant or in the street, Robert would see a woman’s face so prepared in its openness for the appeal of passion, tenderness or love, so composed and ready, that he was moved to drop everything and take her in his arms. A thousand times he had been able to resist. Once he had not.
She was a woman not much younger than Lila and not as pretty. His feeling for her was intense and complicated. He
was corrupted by the wish to make her happy, and the fact that it took little to make her happy touched him in the same way his children’s simple wants had once aroused his extravagant generosity. He had no idea why he loved her. She rode a bicycle and pulled her hair back with a ribbon. Her hair ribbons, her candor, her books and records, and especially her strong rounded arms, put him in mind of Jane. When she closed a book she was reading, she marked her place with a little silk cord and folded her hands, one inside the other, in exactly the same way he imagined Jane would do.
Lila was stepping into a taxi on her way to see her lawyer. Nothing she could do, not even the bold, off-hand way she swung her handbag on her shoulder, could hide the touching awkwardness and clumsy surprise of a woman who had been betrayed by someone she loves.
The taxi driver drove through the late-afternoon traffic. “Would you object if I smoke?” he asked Lila, who was embarrassed by his courtesy. She wondered if he had a wife. His shoulder-length hair was clean and more than commonly fine, and on the fingers of his left hand there were three rings, so large and intricate and so brilliantly colored that she was moved to comment on them.
“I go with a girl who did a jewelry course in New Brunswick,” he said. “She keeps making me rings. I don’t know what I’m going to do if she keeps making me rings.”
“Are you going to marry her?” Lila asked. Now that she was taking the first step to dissolve her marriage, she felt she had the right to ask all manner of outrageous questions.
“Marriage?” He paid grave attention to her question. “I don’t know about marriage. Marriage is a pretty long haul.”
“Yes, it is,” Lila said. She rolled down the window and
looked at the heavy, late-afternoon sky which seemed now to form a part of her consciousness. Why wouldn’t someone help her? She slumped, turned her face sideways and bit on the bitter vinyl of the upholstery. “Nigel, Nigel,” her heart pleaded.
Robert missed his house, he missed his sons and often he missed Lila. Guilt might explain the trembling unease he felt when he stamped the snow off his shoes and rang the bell of what had been his front door. Inside he would find the smell of fresh coffee, that most forgiving of smells, and the spicy chalk smell of adolescent boys. And what else?—the teasing drift of Lila’s perfume, a scent that reminded him of grass.
He arrived at 9:00 A.M. every Saturday, insisting, he said rather quaintly, on doing the household chores. More often than not these chores consisted of tapping on the furnace gauge or putting a listening ear under the hood of Lila’s car or filling out some forms for the fire insurance. He did all these things with a good—some would say guilty—heart. He even offered to do the Christmas cards and advise their many, many friends that he and Lila were now separated.
Most of the friends replied with short notes of condolence. Several of them said, “We know what you’re going through.” Some said, “Perhaps you’ll find a way to work things out.” One of them, Bess Carrier, wrote, “We’ve suspected for some time that things weren’t right.”
Nigel wrote: “We hope this Christmas finds you both joyous and eager for the new year. Time goes so quickly, but Jane and I often think of the two of you, so happy and young in Normandy, and how you found the goodness to come to our aid.”
Lila missed Robert, but she didn’t miss him all the time. At
first, she spent endless hours shopping; all around her, in the department stores, in the boutiques, people were grabbing for the things they wanted. What did she want, she asked herself, sitting before a small fire in the evening and fingering the corduroy of the slipcover. She didn’t know.
She rearranged the house, put a chair at an angle, had the piano moved so that the sun struck its polished top. She carried her Grandfather Westfield’s temperance novels out of the basement and arranged them on a pretty little table, using a piece of quartz for a book end. The stone scratched the finish, but she rubbed it with a bit of butter as her mother used to do, and forgot about it. Some days she woke up feeling as light as a girl, and as blameless. The lightness stayed with her all day, and she served her sons plates of soup and sandwiches for dinner. When summer came, she bought herself a pair of white cotton pants and a number of boyish T-shirts. One of them had a message across the front that said “Birds are people too.”
She had a great many friends, most of them women, and sometimes it seemed to her that she spent all day talking to these women friends. She wondered now and then how Jane filled her days, if she knitted or visited the sick or what. She wished they could meet. She would tell Jane everything. She would trust her absolutely.
Certain kinds of magazines are filled with articles on how to catch a man and how, having caught him, to keep him happy, keep him faithful, keep him amorous. But Lila and her friends talked mainly about how few men were worth catching and how fewer still were worth keeping. Yet, when Robert asked if he might come back, she agreed.
She would have expected a woman in her situation to feel victorious, but she felt only a crush of exhaustion that had the
weight and sound of continuous rain. Robert suggested they get away for a vacation, somewhere hot: Spain or Portugal. (Nigel and Jane had gone to Portugal where they had spent many hours walking on the beaches.)
Lila said: “Maybe next year.” She was too tired to think about packing a suitcase, but next year she was bound to have more energy.
Robert gave Lila an opal ring. Lila gave Robert a set of scuba equipment. Robert gave Lila a book of French poems that he’d found at a garage sale. Lila gave Robert a soft scarf of English wool and put it around his neck and patted it in place, saying, “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Robert said back, and to himself he said: There’s no place in the world I would rather be at this minute.
The card from England was late, but the buff envelope was reassuringly familiar and so was the picture—a scenic view of Salisbury Plain under a wafery layer of snow. Inside, Nigel had written: “Jane has been in a coma for some months now, but it is a comfort to me that she is not in pain and that she perhaps hears a little of what goes on about her.”