Carol Shields - Unless

And Chrétien is back in power with a huge majority, though the American election results continue to be stalled. Margaret Atwood did win the Booker Prize. We are going to have a white Christmas, it is guaranteed. Norah has replaced her bedraggled sign with a new one, freshly inked — even this is cheering.

And Cheryl Patterson, the librarian in Orangetown, has married her Bombay dentist, Sam Sondhi. His divorce came through more quickly than expected, and a civil service was held a week ago Saturday, after which we had a reception in our house, a sandwich and champagne lunch for thirty of Cheryl’s friends and our friends too, all in a celebratory mood. Who doesn’t love a wedding! Richer or poorer, better or worse. Tom had fires lit in the living room and the den, and of course there was the Christmas tree in the hall, put up a few days early this year to accommodate Cheryl and Sam’s wedding. The whole house boomed with overflowing spirits. In my long tawny velvet skirt, I passed slices of fruitcake on a silver tray, a tray I only get down from the top cupboard at Christmastime. There was a tiny silver Christmas ornament poked into my chignon, une épingle à cheveux, a gift from Tom some years ago. I was smiling, smiling, as I made my rounds, yes, isn’t it a miracle they found each other, two divorced people, in a place like Orangetown, Ontario, in the great glistening continent of North America. I was smiling and saying: Please, try this fruitcake, my mother-in-law made it, it’s marvellous, an old family recipe. And there was Tom, opening the wide front door to welcome yet another party of guests. He glanced in my direction and smiled broadly. Love of my life. On the buffet table is a salmon, pink and skinned. At certain moments, for no reason — the smell of apple wood burning in the fireplace — I become convinced that everything is going to be all right.

And then suddenly I will be thrown out of the circle of safety, aching all over with pain and feeling a fracture in my cone of consciousness, which is inhabited, every curve of it, by the knowledge (that pale sustenance) that Norah, in the cold and snow of downtown Toronto, has gone as far away as she could go. As was possible to go.

Stop it. Return to the lamplit murmur of now, this minute. Have some fruitcake. There’s coffee in the dining room. I hear the voice in my head saying: careful, be careful.

We only appear to be rooted in time. Everywhere, if you listen closely, the spitting fuse of the future is crackling. Despite my mood of anxiousness, my novel, Thyme in Bloom, is almost completed. Alicia and Roman have been deconstructing their relationship with articulate arguments and with bad behaviour on both sides. Now and then they eat, drink, and make love, but mostly they systematically destroy what they once had between them, grinding down the core of love with their philosophical arguments so that nothing is left but burnt rice — this from a scene in which they, touchingly, desperately, try to cook a Greek meal in Roman’s apartment. Alicia grows sleek, lubricious, and almost beautiful in her independence.

We see a steady accretion in her observations, while Roman reveals an irksome antic side, those striped yellow socks, for instance. His strong chin becomes even stronger, and his sexual appetite more voracious. When he practises on his very expensive trombone, he punches great jagged holes in the air. He thinks aloud, and often, about his relations in Albania with whom he has lost touch, grieving for them, everything they’ve been through; yet what can he do? He went to Tirana in 1986 and tried to make contact, but was discouraged.

He almost landed in jail, he was threatened, spat upon, but he loved the goddamn place.

There are two, maybe three chapters to go in Thyme in Bloom. Then the denouement, which will contain a twist that is certain to challenge any reader’s good will, but I’m determined to go through with it. I’m working toward that moment, bristling with invention.

How can this be? How can a woman who has lost her daughter and is suffering acute separation anxiety be capable of writing a comic fantasy?

Although it must be said that Mr. Springer, my new editor, does not agree with me about Thyme in Bloom being a comic fantasy. Au contraire.

Whatever

The sunshine at midmorning was flowing into the kitchen, and the telephone was ringing.

“Hello? May I speak with Ms. Reta Winters, please.”

“This is Reta Winters.”

“Oh, Reta, I am so sorry. I failed to recognize your voice.”

“I have a bit of a cold —”

“It’s Arthur calling. Arthur Springer.”

“Arthur.”

“From New York. From Scribano and —”

“Oh, of course, how are —?”

“I hope you had a happy Christmas. You and your family.”

“Well, yes, yes, we did. We are. And did you —?”

“I do apologize for phoning you at home.”

“At home? That’s quite all right. In fact, this is where I —”

“And I apologize even further for phoning during Christmas week. This is the one time in the year when we should put all business aside and make merriment our first concern.”

“Well, yes —”

“As a matter of fact, Scribano & Lawrence is officially closed until the new year, as per tradition, but I am so excited about your manuscript that I wanted to make immediate contact and I thought to myself that you might have the goodness to forgive me for breaking into the holiday so rudely, and no doubt I’ve phoned at an ungodly hour.”

“Oh, no, we’re actually in the same time zone as —”

“ Thyme in Bloom ! Where can I begin!”

“Well, I —”

“I finished reading the partial draft last night. I hardly slept. Alicia and Roman were so much in my mind, visceral beings, pressing against my consciousness, all they endured, their personal courage, their sense of their very selves as their insight grew and grew, their interior vision, piercing like a laser, you can imagine my — How I grieved when — and yet marvelled at — I woke up thinking, this is what life is, no one ever promised we wouldn’t suffer as we make our way, our expectations are doomed to disappointment —”

“But, Arthur —”

“And Alicia — her persevering goodness. I told you that last time we spoke, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. I was so pleased. I’m trying to work out what goodness is, in fact, its essence, and —”

“Such goodness of soul, of heart. It’s integral, you don’t even have to remark on it or put little quotes around it. You can see why I had to call you right away. Even if it was Christmas week, even if —”

“But, Arthur —”

“And Roman. That man. Roman, Roman.”

“Yes?”

“Indescribable. The one word a writer must never use, but for us editors, well, we can only think: what an indescribable character! His complexity, I mean.”

“Really?”

“Indescribable! I can’t imagine how we’re going to present him in the flap copy, but we’ll work on it.”

“You do know, Mr. Springer, Arthur, this isn’t the complete manuscript. I’ve still got at least three chapters to finish and even what you saw is just a draft —”

“I do, I do, Reta, I remember our conversation. I know that what I’ve just read is a draft and a partial draft at that. But, and this is what’s so wonderfully uncanny, I know where you’re going with this. Now, don’t, please, misinterpret my words. What I mean is, I know and I don’t know. You haven’t given anything away, you’ve been astonishingly stern and strict with the reader, letting him or her do no more than sniff and conjecture. But the form, and I am speaking of the form in its universal aesthetic sense, is so solidly there, and so is the sense that the form will complete itself in the only way it can.”