Small Ceremonies (15 page)

It would help if it snowed. The ground is covered with old crusted snow and pitted with ice. The roads and sidewalks are rutted and hard to walk on, and driving is dangerous. A layer of grime covers everything. One soft and lovely fall of snow might at least keep me from this overwhelming compulsion to put my head down and cry and cry and cry.

 

I don't really feel like cooking, but I feel so sorry for Roger that one night we invite him for a family dinner. He hasn't heard from Ruthie. He doesn't know where she's living. He would feel better, he tells me, if he knew where she was staying.

“Are you really that worried about her?” I ask, putting a slice of meatloaf on his plate.

“No. I know she's all right because she's at work.”

“What then?”

“I just want to know where she's living.”

“You've tried her girl friends?”

“Yes. And they don't know.”

“What about her family?” I ask. I know she is from a small town in northern Ontario. “Couldn't you write to them?”

“God, no. They never liked the idea that we were living together. Not married. They're pretty rigid.”

“Why don't you follow her home from work?” Richard asks; taking the words out of my mouth.

“Don't be stupid,” Meredith says sternly. “This isn't a James Bond movie. That would be just plain sneaky, following her like that.”

I say nothing. Roger shakes his head sadly. “I couldn't. Believe me, I've thought about it, but it does seem to be an invasion – and, I don't know – I just couldn't.”

Martin interrupts us with, “Look, if she wants it this way, isn't it better to leave her alone. You've got to get your mind on something else, Roger.”

“God knows I'm busy enough at work,” Roger says. “It seems I've just got the Christmas exams marked, and now we're onto a new set. I don't even have time to do enough reading to keep up.”

“What did you think of
Graven Images?"
I ask him suddenly.

“Great.” He barks it out. “Absolutely his best.”

“Why?” I ask, trying not to sound too sly.

“I don't know, Judith. It's got more – more body to it.”

“A better plot?” I suggest.

“That's it. A real brainstorm. No wonder the films snatched it up.”

“I just loved it,” Meredith murmurs.

Martin says nothing; he still hasn't got around to reading it.

“Tell me, Roger,” I ask, “would you say that Furlong is an original writer?”

“Damn right I would.”

“How is he original?” I ask. “Tell me, in what way is he original?”

Roger leans back, shaking his thick curls out of his eyes, and for a moment Ruthie is forgotten, for a moment he seems happy. He is recalling phrases from his thesis. “All right, Judith, take his use of the Canadian experience. Now there's a man who actually comprehends the national theme.”

“Which is what?” Martin asks.

“Which is shelter. Shelter from the storm of life, to use a corny phrase.”

“Corny is right,” Richard says.

“Who asked you, Richard?” Meredith tells him.

In the kitchen I serve ice-cream drizzled with maple syrup; I haven't the energy to think of anything else. Meredith carries in the plates for me. Roger is expanding on the theme of shelter.          

“I don't, of course, mean just shelter from those natural storms which occur externally. Although he is tremendous on those. That hail sequence in
Graven Images –
now didn't that grab you? Even you'd like it, Martin. It's got a sort of Miltonic splendor. Like the hail is a symbol. He makes it stand for the general battering of everyday life.”

“So what about the shelter theme?” Martin is smiling broadly, happy tonight.

“Okay, I'm getting to that. Remember the guy out on the prairie, Judith, just standing there. And the hail starts. Golfballs. His dog is killed. Remember that?”

“Christ,” Martin says. “It sounds like
Lassie Come Home."

“It sounds bad, I'll admit. But that's the beautiful thing about Furlong. He can carry it off when no one else can. What someone else makes into a soap opera, he makes part of the national fabric.”

“But Roger,” I plead, “getting back to originality for a moment, do you really think he comes up with original plots?”

“Well, we don't use that word plot much anymore. Not in modern criticism. But, yes, sure I think he does. You read
Graven Images.
Wasn't that a real heart-stopper?”

“What about the others though?” I ask. “Where do you think he got the ideas for those early books? Did you go into that when you wrote your thesis?”

“I suppose you want me to admit that his stories are a bit on the formula plan. So, okay, I admit it. But
Graven Images
confirms what I said then – that he's a pretty original guy.”

“He really is,” Meredith says smiling.

“Hmmmm,” Martin says.

I say nothing. I am sitting quiet. Girding my loins. I know that my present weakness is trivial and temporary. Next week, I promise myself, next week I'm going to have it out with Furlong. He's going to have to do some explaining. Or else.

Or else what? Endlessly, silently, I debate the point.

What power do I have over Furlong? Who am I, the far from perfect Judith Gill, to judge him, and how do I hope to chastise him for his dishonesty?

I only want him to know that I know what he did.

Why? What's the point? Why not let it pass?

Because what he's done may be too small a crime to punish, but at the same time it's too large to let go unacknowledged. Talk about scot-free.

Is Furlong a bad man then? A criminal?

No, not bad. Just weak. Complex, intelligent, but weak. I've just discovered how weak. But he has a glaze of arrogance, a coloratura confidence that demands that I respond.

In what way is he weak?

Let me explain. When I was about fifteen years old I read a very long and boring novel called
Middlemarch.
By George Eliot yet. I got it from the public library. (All girls like me who were good at school but suffered from miserable girlhoods were sustained for years on end by the resources of the public libraries of this continent.) Not that
Middlemarch
offered me much in the way of escape. It offered little but a rambling plot and quartets of moist, dreary, introspective characters, one of whom was accused by the heroine of having “spots of commonness.” I liked that expression, “spots of commonness,” and even at fifteen I recognized the symptoms, interpreting them as a familiar social variety of measles.

Furlong suffers more than anyone I know from this exact and debilitating malady. Witness the framed motto he once had in his office, and witness also the abrupt banishment of it. Observe the clichés on his book jacket, remember his cranberry-vodka punch, his petty jealousies of other writers, his dependence on nationality which permits him his big-frog-in-little-pond eminence.

His sophistication is problematically wrought; it's uneven and sometimes, when instinct fails, altogether lacking. He can, for instance, be too kind, too lushly, tropically kind, a kindness too rich and ripe for ordinary friendship. And, in addition, he is uncertain about salad forks, brandy snifters, and how to use the subjunctive; he finds those Steuben glass snails charming and he favors Renoir; he sometimes slips and says supper instead of dinner, and, conversely, in another pose, he slips and says dinner instead of supper; he is spotted, oh, he is uncommonly spotted.

But is he less of a thief for all that?

A thief is a thief is a thief.

Very profound. But don't forget, you stole the plot in the first place.

That was different. I didn't actually go through with it. And I didn't profit from it the way Furlong has profited.

So that's what's bothering you. You're jealous.

No, no, no, no. Not for myself. For Martin maybe. Here is Furlong, enjoying an unearned success. And Martin gets nothing but crazy in the head.

Are there no mitigating circumstances in this theft?

Many. Obviously he was desperate. He admitted that much, letting slip the fact that the well had gone dry. He was on the skids, hadn't had a good idea for two years. Poor man, snagged in literary menopause and sticky with hot flushes. And he is nice to his mother. And patient with his students. And always touchingly, tenderly gallant with me, actually thinking of me as a fellow writer, and accepting me, great big-boned Judith Gill, as charming, a really quite attractive woman. And what else? Oh, yes. He has a passionate and pitiable desire to be loved, to be celebrated with expletives and nicknames, to be in the club. And then, an alternating compulsion to draw back, to be insular and exclusive and private. Psychologically he's a mess. I suppose he was driven to theft.

But who does it really harm?

I refuse to answer such an academic question.

Don't you like him at all?

Like him? I do. No, I don't, not now. I suppose I'm fond of him. But no matter how charming he will be in the future, no matter how he disclaims his act of plunder and he will, no matter what amends he may make for it, I will not be moved. I don't know why, but he will never, he will never, he will never be someone I love. Only someone I could have loved.

 

Nancy Krantz and I went out to lunch one day to celebrate my recovery from the flu. We went to the Prince Lodge where Paul Krantz is a member (and has a charge account) and sat at one of the dark oak tables which are moored like ships on the sea of olive carpet. Around us quiet, dark-suited businessmen in twos and threes talked softly; glasses and silver clinked faintly as though at a great distance.

“Two dry sherries,” Nancy told the waiter briskly. I longed to tell her about Furlong's plagiarism, but that was out of the question since it would have necessitated the disclosure of my own theft, not to mention my prying into John Spalding's private manuscripts.

We ordered beef curry, and while we waited we discussed the alternating vibrations which regulate female psychology.

“Up and down,” Nancy complained. “A perpetual see-saw ride. Pre-menstrual, post-menstrual. Optimism, pessimism.”

I agreed; it did seem that the electricity of life consisted mainly of meaningless fluctuations in mood, so that to enter an era of happiness was to anticipate the next interlude of depression.

“Of course,” Nancy said, “there are those occasional little surprises which make it all worthwhile.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“The peach,” she said. “Did I ever tell you the peach story?”

“No,” I said, “never.”

So she told me how, last summer, she and Paul and their children, all six of them, had been stalled in heavy traffic. It was a Friday evening and they were working their way out of the city to get to the cottage sixty miles away. The children were quarrelsome and the weather was murderously humid. In another car stalled next to them, a fat man sat alone at the steering wheel, and on the back seat, plainly visible, was a bushel of peaches. He smiled at the children, and they must have smiled back, for he turned suddenly and reached a fat hand into his basket, carefully selected a peach, and handed it out the window to Nancy.

She took it, she said, instinctively, uttering a confused mew of thanks. Ahead of them a traffic light turned green, and the fat man's car moved away, leaving Nancy with the large and beautiful peach in her hand. It was, she said the largest peach she had ever, seen, almost the size of a grapefruit, and its skin was perfect seamless velvet without a single blemish. Paul shouted at her over the noise of the traffic to look out for razor blades, so she turned it over carefully, inspecting it. But the skin was unbroken. And the exact shade of ripeness for eating.

“What did you do with it?” I asked.

“We ate it,” Nancy said. “We passed it around. Gently. Like a holy object almost, and we each took big bites of it. Until it was gone. One of the children said something about how strange it was for someone to do that, give us a peach through a car window like that, but the rest of us just sat there thinking about it. All the way to the cottage. A strange sort of peace stuck to us. It was so – so completely unasked for. And so undeserved. And the whole thing had been so quick, just a few seconds really. I was – I don't know why – I was thrilled.”

I nodded. I was remembering something that had happened to us, an incident I had almost forgotten. It was perhaps a shade less joyous a story than Nancy's, but the element of mystery had, at the time, renewed something in me.

It had happened, I told Nancy, on our first day in England. We had taken a train from London to Birmingham. Everything was very new and crowded and confused; the train puffing into Birmingham seemed charmingly miniature; the station was glass-roofed and dirty with Victorian arches and tea trolleys and curious newspapers arrayed in kiosks; odd looking luggage, belted and roped, even suitcases made of wicker, were stacked on carts. Martin, the children and I struggled with our own bags, hurrying down the platform, disoriented by the feel of solid ground underfoot, bumped and jostled at every step by people hurrying to board the train we had just left. Passengers pulled down the train windows, leaned out talking to their friends while paper cups of tea changed hands and kisses flew through the air. Children with startling red cheeks, wearing blue gabardine coats, hung onto their mothers' hands. A cheerful scruffiness hung over the station like whisky breath.

And at that moment a short, dark little man stopped directly in front of me and pushed a small brown paper parcel at me. I must have shaken my head to indicate that it wasn't mine, but he pushed it even harder at me, speaking all the time, very rapidly, in a language I didn't recognize. Certainly no species of English; nor was it French or German; it might have been Arabic we speculated later.