Carol Shields - Unless

Our lives don’t really “befall” us; we tend to rouse ourselves to invention, to accommodation. It was spring. I was “in love.” But I continued with my studies — I was doing Old Frankish now — and in the midst of strange vowels and blurred consonants, I turned a large portion of my life over to this person, this Tom Winters. The sound of the sixties had been “doo-wop.” But the seventies said home, make a new home, create a home of your own, dress yourself in warm earth colours, get back to the earth, dig yourself into your life. People were starting to have babies again.

At various times I’ve talked to each of my daughters about birth control. Norah at seventeen placed her hand on my wrist and said with a smile: I already know. Chris laughed and said mysteriously: Okay, okay, I get it. Natalie — this was only a year ago when she was fourteen — said, tucking in her chin: Not to wo-r-ry, I’ll look after that when the time comes.

But I must start thinking seriously about Alicia and Roman’s sex life. I have to be braver about it this time round. An awful maidenly daintiness runs through the pages of My Thyme Is Up, a prudery that has nothing to do with sex in the twenty-first century. They slept together, Roman and Alicia. They melted in each other’s arms, buttery and sweet. An ethereal transaction was attempted as they bedded down, yes, on their very first date. There was no fumbling with condoms, his or hers, no guilt, no actuarial accountings, no position three, four, or five bolstered up by beams and rope, just two human bodies humming up and down the musical scale of skin, bone, creases, shadows, cleanly, singingly, besottedly droll. But the real running syrups and juice of sex were absent. You could tell that none of this cost anything.

You could hardly hear Alicia and Roman breathing. Their kisses tasted scrubbed, like fresh soap and water. Accessible. Decent! Dressed up for ecstasy, but not able to go there. The amperage was there, and Alicia and Roman were willing. Perhaps they lacked the self-forgetfulness that good sex requires, the wanting and then the retreat from want.

Other writers know how to do vivid sex scenes. They’ve got the chronology down, first the languorous removal of clothing, some slow dancing maybe to an old Sinatra record, then the nibbling, the rubbing, the sucking, the smelling, the tasting, the barking commands and screaming surrender, yes, yes, and then, finally, “he enters her.” Well, come right in, my fine fellow, and make yourself at home.

I have three daughters; naturally I shrink from the thought of embarrassing them with what I publish. People in Orangetown will stare at Tom if I screw up my nerve and get into whips and leather and suchlike; his patients, out of suspicion, may drift off to other practitioners. I certainly would. Moreover, I don’t know all that much about kinks and jinks. My imagination tends not to drift in that direction.

Oh, loosen up, Ms. Winters.

Sex talk is so eroded, that’s the problem. We’ve all learned it at the movies, and the movies made it up. Do anything to me. Take me. Overwhelm me. I’m coming. How was it for

— ?

I can’t, I can’t. I grow rich with disgust, not with sex but with the vocabulary of sex.

Besides, light comic fiction does not invite a step-by-step nipple-penis-vulva-clitoris-anus exposition. Alicia is a sensuous woman who understands her body but she does not dwell on the subject of her pubic hair. Pubic hair is out of place in this genre. Roman is allowed to be something of an athlete in bed; a man who plays the trombone, after all, knows about thrusting and triple tonguing and embouchure. Both Alicia and Roman want, both of them desire. Ridiculous word, desire. Tu désires quelque chose? Delete.

But they want tenderness as much as they want passion, they crave the feathered touch of softness, sweetness. They yearn — and this is what I can’t get my word processor to accept — to be fond of each other, to be charitable, to be mild and merciful. To be barefootedly beautiful in each other’s eyes.

And now, a November day, flattened by wind and worry, the trees throwing their bare branches about outside my window, I shut down my computer for the day, unwilling at this hour — five o’clock, already dark — to award them what they haven’t the wit to define.

Thereupon

At the beginning of every month, now, I sit down at Tom’s desk and write out a cheque to the Promise Hostel in Toronto. I allow myself to weep a few moderate tears while I fold the cheque and place it in an envelope, seal it, and write out the address on Bathurst Street. Still weeping as I affix a stamp, still weeping as I walk down the road to the mailbox. The tears are in appreciation of the extreme goodness of the Anglican congregation in Toronto, who some years ago turned a neighbourhood school into a refuge for homeless people. Where did such goodness come from? I know there must have been endless committee meetings, a call for volunteers, the striking of an official board, fundraising suppers, confrontations with the city council and with the local residents — all of that inevitable paperwork and bureaucracy that goes with public-spirited projects; but where did the goodness begin, the germ of goodness, the primal thought to offer food and shelter to strangers?

Following Christ’s example, the Anglican community might say, though I doubt it, not in these ecumenical times. Social responsibility is more likely, but even this is to delicately bracket what is, in reality, a powerful tide of virtue flowing from the veins of men and women who will not be much rewarded or even recognized for their efforts. Frances Quinn, the director, is paid, but the dormitories at the Promise Hostel are swept and swabbed by people who come and go from their offices, their professional business addresses, from million-dollar houses in Forest Hill or Rosedale or the Annex. The same people, these chanters of church litanies, also do laundry, wash windows, clean up messes of urine and vomit, and make hundreds of chicken pot pies in the immense basement kitchen.

As soon as we discovered where Norah spent her nights we went to see the place, Tom and I, along with Chris and Natalie. We phoned ahead. It was a Saturday afternoon early last May.

The rain had been pouring for a week, and when we arrived downtown, two men were squatting on the second-floor roof, patching a hole. Inside, Frances Quinn was busy on the telephone, but she waved at a volunteer, a man in his fifties we guessed, to tour us around. He showed us, without the least display of hushed piety, a small chapel on the ground floor and a dormitory for twenty women, a lineup of camp beds, neatly made up, a wall of lockers, and a communal bathroom. Norah lives here, I said to myself, she sleeps in this room. A clean towel was folded over the end of each bed. The room was spotless, but dust motes nevertheless swam in the beams of light from the windows, the kind of dust that is impossible to banish. The bare wooden floor creaked underfoot. Forty men sleep in a similar dormitory upstairs. In the basement was the dining hall and kitchen, where four women were gathered around an industrial wood-and-steel table collaborating on a list of some kind. They looked hearty, cheerful, plain, full of ease, and each wore a black barbecue apron upon which was printed the word PROMISE. Food donations are delivered at the rear entrance, one of them told us; today they had received a case of canned tomatoes, always welcome, and there were plenty of donations from downtown hotels and restaurants, though these tended to be last minute and required creativity on the part of the volunteer cooks who would be taking over the kitchen at four o’clock. The smell of potatoes and mould lingered in the corners of the room, but every surface was scrubbed clean. Dish detergent, or something stronger, spiked the air. The women talked about how they spent lots of time figuring out ways to freshen up day-old bread — they had a number of tricks — and for some reason this mention of freshening up bread sent them off into gales of private laughter. They pointed to the huge, recently acquired television screen in the dining hall, the gift of a major real estate dealer in the city.