Small Ceremonies (9 page)

“Ah, Judith, you miss the point. A movie. This is no mere trickle of royalties. This is big rich.”

“Well, maybe,” I said, not really seeing the point.

“The old bugger,” Martin said. “He's going to be really unbearable now.”

“Tell me, Martin. Have you read it yet?
Graven Images?"

“No,” he said. “I keep putting it off.”

“His party is next week. Sunday.”

“I know. I know,” he said despairingly.

“It may not be too bad.”

“It'll be bad.”

“Do you really despise him, Martin?”

“Despise him. God, no. It's just that he's such a perfect asshole. Worse than that, he's a phony asshole.”

“For example?” I asked smiling.

“Well, remember that sign he had in his office a few years ago? On his desk?”

“No. I never saw a sign.”

“It was a framed motto:
You Shall Pass Through This Life but Once."

“Really? He had one of those? I can't imagine it. It seems so sort of Dale Carnegie for Furlong.”

“He had it. I swear.”

“And that's why he's an asshole?”

“No. Not that.”

“Well, why then?”

“Because, after he got the Canadian Fiction Prize, and that big write-up in
Maclean's
and
The New York Times,
both in the same month –"

“Yes?”

“Well, right after that happened, he took down his sign. Just took it away one day. And it's never been seen since.”

“He'd never own up to it now,” I said.

“When I think of that sign and the way he stealthily disposed of it, another notch of sophistication – I don't know. That just seems to be Furlong Eberhardt in a nutshell. That one act, as far as I'm concerned, encapsulates his whole personality.”

Meredith leapt from the sofa, startling us both. “I think you're both being horrible. Just horrible. So middle-class, so smug. Sitting here. It's character assassination, that's what. And you're enjoying it.” She flew from the room with her breath coming out in jagged gasps.

For a moment Martin and I froze. Then he very slowly picked up the newspaper from the floor, reached for the sports page, and gave me a brief but hurting glance. “I don't understand her sometimes,” was all he said.

It was then that I noticed Richard sitting quietly in a corner of the room, unobtrusive in his neat maroon sweater. He was watching us closely.

“What are you doing, Richard?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

 

Frantically, neurotically, harried and beleaguered, I am addressing Christmas cards. Richard, home with a cold, sits at the dining table with me; he is checking addresses, licking stamps, stacking envelopes in their individual white pillars; the overseas stack that will now have to be sent expensively by airmail, the unsealed ones with nothing but a rude “Judith and Martin Gill” scrawled inside them, the letters to old friends where I've crammed a year's outline into two or three inches - “A good year for us, Martin busy teaching, the children are getting ENORMOUS, am working on a new book, not much news, wish you were closer, happy holidays.” And Martin's stack, the envelopes which Richard and I will leave unsealed so that tonight, after he gets home from the university, he can sit down and quickly, offhandedly write the funny, intense little messages he is so good at.

The afternoon wears on, and outside the window snow is falling and falling. Since noon we have had the overhead light on. Richard in striped pajamas looks pale.

This is a long, tedious task, and it irritates me to separate and put in order the constellations of our friends and to send them each these feeble scratched messages. But for the sake of the return, for the crash of creamy envelopes blazing with seals that will soon spill down upon us, I push on. For I want to hear from the O'Malleys who lived across the hall from us in our first apartment. I want to know if the Gorkys are still together and where the best man at our wedding, Kurt Weisman, has moved. Dr. Lawrence who supervised Martin's graduate work and his wife Bettina always write us from Florida and so do the Grahams, the Lords, the Reillys, the Jensens. What matter that they were often dull and that we might have drifted apart eventually? What matter that they were sometimes stingy or overly frank or forgetful? They want to wish us a merry Christmas. They want to wish us all the best in the New Year. I can't help but take the printed card literally; these are our friends; they love us. We love them.

Richard is studying the airmail stamp which goes on the letters to Britain. It is a special issue with a portrait of the Queen, an enormous stamp, the largest we have ever seen. The image is handsome and the background is filled in with pale gold. On the corners of the tiny Rustcraft envelopes, all I could find at this late date, it gleams like a gem.

I write a brief note to the Spaldings, a spray of ritual phrases. “We often remember the wonderful year we spent in Birmingham. The children have such happy memories. Hope your family is well and that you are having a mild winter, best wishes from the Gills.”

Richard seals it and affixes the great golden stamp. “He's writing a book,” he says.

“Who?” I ask absently.

“Mr. Spalding. He's writing a novel.” Richard seldom mentions the Spaldings, but when he does, it is abruptly, as though the words lay perpetually spring-loaded on the tip of his tongue.

“I suppose Anita wrote you about it?” I say inanely.

“Yes.”

“And is it going well? The novel?”

“I don't know,” he says. “But she says that sometimes he stays up all night typing.”

“Well, I wish him luck,” I say, thinking of his row of rejected manuscripts.

Richard makes no reply, and after a minute I ask him, “What's it about? The novel, Anita's father is writing?”

“How should I know?” he says, suddenly querulous.

I snap back. “I only asked.”

But I really would like to know what John Spalding is writing about. Maybe he's incorporating some new material from the year in Cyprus. Or perhaps reworking one of his old plots. He might even have resurrected his one good one.

I think of him typing through the night in the chilly, gas-smelling flat while the frowsy Isabel snores in a distant bedroom. I imagine his small frame, tense, gnatlike, concentrating on the impossible mass of a novel, and for a moment I see him as almost touchingly valiant.

Then guilt attacks me; a pain familiar by now, a spurt of heat between my eyes, damn.

 

The Magic Rocking Horse
was the name of the novel I wrote the year we came back from England. I intended, and for a while even believed, that the title would convey a subtle, layered irony – a childlike innocence underlying a theme of enormous worldliness.

But the novel never materialized on either level. Instead it simply stretched and strained along, scene after scene pitiably stitched together and collapsing in the end for want of flesh. For, unlike biography, where a profusion of material makes it possible and even necessary to be selective, novel writing requires a complex mesh of details which has to be spun out of simple air. No running to the public library for facts, no sleuthing through bibliographies, no borrowing from the neat manila folders at the Archives. That year the most obvious fact about fiction struck me afresh: it all had to be made up.

And where to begin? For two or three months I did nothing at all but think about how to begin. Dialogue or description? Or a cold plunge into action? Once or twice I actually produced a page or two, but later, reading over what I had written, I found the essential silliness of make-believe disturbing, and I began to wonder whether I really wanted to write a novel at all.

I discussed it with everyone I knew and got very little support. Roger and Ruthie told me, flatteringly, that it was a waste of my biographical skills. Nancy Krantz, sipping coffee, pursed her lips and pronounced, in a way which was not exactly condemning but almost, that she seldom read novels. Martin said little, but it was obvious that he viewed the whole project as somewhat dilettantish; and the children thought it might be a good idea if I wrote something along the line of Agatha Christie but transferred to a Canadian setting.

Furlong Eberhardt was the only one who volunteered a halfway friendly ear, and when he suggested one day that I might want to sit in on his creative writing seminar, it seemed like a good idea; a chance to sit down with a circle of other struggling fiction writers, sympathetic listeners upon whom I might test my material and who, in turn, might provide wanted stimulation or, as Furlong put it, might “prime the old pump.”

Looking back, I believe the idea of again being a student appealed to me too. I bought a notebook and a clutch of yellow pencils, and each Wednesday afternoon I dressed carefully for the class which met in an airless little room at the top of the Arts Building; my fawn slacks or my bronze corduroy skirt, a turtleneck, something youthful but never going too far, for what was the point of being grotesque for the sake of ten undergraduates ranging from eighteen-year-old Arleen whose black paintbrush hair fell to her hips, all the way to Ludwig, aged about twenty-four, horribly pimpled, who stared at me with hatred because I was married (and to a professor at that), because I lived in a house, because I was a friend of Furlong's, and possibly because my fingernails were clean.

No, I didn't fool myself that I was going to be one of them. And how could I since, despite my urging them to call me Judith, they always referred to me as Mrs. Gill. And when I read my short weekly contributions, always a quarter the length of theirs, they listened politely, even Ludwig, and never ventured any remarks except perhaps, very deferentially, that my sentences were a bit too structured or that my situations seemed a little, well, conventional and contrived.

Somewhat to my surprise I found that Furlong ran his creative writing seminar in a highly organized manner, beginning with what he called warming-up exercises. These were specific weekly assignments in which we were to describe such things as the experience of ecstasy or the effect of ennui, a dialogue between lovers one week and enemies the next.

I sweated through these assignments, typing out the minimum required words and, when my turn came, I read them aloud, feeling like a great overblown girl, red-faced and matronly, who should long since have abandoned such childish games.

The rest of them were not the least reticent; indeed they were positively eager to celebrate their hallucinations aloud. Arleen dragged us paragraph by paragraph through her thoughts on peace and mankind, and a girl named Lucy Rimer was anxious to split her psyche wide open, inviting us to inspect the tortured labyrinth of her awakening sexuality. Joseph, an African student, disgusted and thrilled us with portraits of his Ghanian grandparents. Someone called George Riorden dramatized his feeling on racial equality by having two characters, Whitey (a Negro) and Mr. Black (a white) dialogue over the back fence, reminding us, in case we missed it, of the express irony implied by their names. Ludwig poked with a blunt and dirty finger into the sores of his consciousness, not stopping at his subtle and individual response to orgasm and the nuances of his erect penis. On and on.

They were relentless, compulsive, unsparing, as though they had waited all their lives for these moments of catharsis, these Wednesday afternoon epiphanies. But looking around, when I dared to look around, I watched them wearing down, week by week exhausting themselves, and I wondered how long it could go on.

Eventually Furlong, who until then had merely listened and nodded, nodded and listened, called a halt and announced that it was time to begin the term project. Each of us was to write a short novel, about ten chapters he suggested, a chapter a week, which we were to bring to class to be read aloud and discussed. I breathed with relief. This was what I had hoped for, a general to command me into action and an audience who, by its response, might indicate whether I was going in the right direction.

I began at once on my first chapter, carefully introducing my main characters, providing a generous feeling of setting, and observing all the conventions as I understood them. It was all quite easy, and when my turn came to read, the class listened attentively, and even Furlong beamed approval.

And then I got stuck. Having described the personalities of my characters, detailed where they lived and what they did, I didn't know what to do with them next. The following week when my turn came, I apologized and said I was unprepared.

The others in the class seemed not to suffer from my peculiar malady which was the complete inability to manufacture situations, and I envied the ease with which they drifted off into fantasies, for although they strained my credulity, their inventiveness seemed endless.

A second week went by, leaving me still at the end of Chapter One. A third week. Furlong questioned me kindly after class.

“Are you losing interest, Judith?”

“I think I'm losing my mind,” I said. “I just can't seem to get any ideas.”

He was understanding, fatherly. “It'll come,” he promised. “You'll see.”

I waited but it didn't come, and I began to lie awake at night, frightened by the emptiness in my head. In the small hours of the morning, with Martin asleep beside me, I several times crept out of bed, padded downstairs, made tea, sat at the kitchen table and felt myself overcome by vacancy, barrenness, by failure.

A Wednesday afternoon came when I phoned Furlong before class pleading a violent toothache and a sudden dental appointment. The following Wednesday I went one step further: I absented myself without excuse. I was in descent now, set on a not-too-painful decline. There were days when I seldom thought about the novel at all.

I went skiing. I had my hair restyled at a place called Rico's of Rome and I shopped for new clothes. I painted the upstairs bathroom turquoise and joined a Keep Fit class. I went to the movies with Martin and Roger and Ruthie. I fringed and embroidered Richard's jeans, wrote a long letter to my sister Charleen. Everyone was kind; no one said a word about my novel. No one inquired about the seminar I was attending. No one except Furlong.