Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  “I can’t believe I said anything as silly as that.”

  “Wounds, Edith-Esther. The wounds of Christ? Surely that rings a ding-dong.”

  “I must have been trying to describe the color of her lips, their redness, something like that. Perhaps they were chapped. Perhaps she was suffering from cold sores. I myself used to be troubled by—”

  “You’ve always undervalued your own work, Edith-Esther. Rejected any sense of subtext, even when it’s staring you in the face.”

  “I’ve never—”

  “Why is it you’re always refusing comfort? Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She really didn’t. Though perhaps she couldn’t help thinking, it was because she’d refused to offer her readers the least crumb of comfort.

  “Never mind, forgive me. It’s part of your charm, Edith-Esther. It’s all right. It’s you.”

  “My kernel of authenticity?”

  “What a memory you have. You’re teasing me, I know, feeding me back my own nonsense. Une taquine. Even over the telephone wire, I can hear you teasing. But yes, it’s true. You’re exactly who you are.”

  “Whoever that may be.”

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, Edith-Esther. It’s me.”

  “So early.”

  “I’ve been up all night rereading Sacred Alliance.”

  “Well”—she gave a laugh, rather a wobbly one—“I’m afraid you can’t describe that one as a critical success.”

  “Because it was misunderstood. I mean that with all my heart. I misunderstood it myself, initially. That word Sacred in the title, it completely escaped me until last night, but now I see exactly the flag you were waving.”

  “Flag? Waving? Oh, my. The title, I’m quite sure, was meant to be ironic. I’m certain that was my intention. It’s so long ago, though, and I just this minute woke up. I can’t seem to find my glasses. I know they’re here somewhere. Perhaps I should phone you back when I’m feeling more focused—”

  “You remember when Gloria first meets Robin, page fifty-one, and admits the fact of her virginity to him, it all comes out in a burst, not surprisingly, but what she’s really saying is that she’s made a choice, a sacred choice, a declaration about where she ultimately intends to place her devotion—”

  “I can’t imagine what I did with those glasses. I left them on the bedside table last night—”

  “—and so, when Gloria and Robin go off to Vienna together and after that most unsatisfactory consummation et cetera, and when he goes out to arrange for a rental car and she locks herself in the hotel room—remember—and writes him a note—”

  “They’re broken. One of the lenses. The left one. Smashed. I simply can’t understand it—”

  “—and the key word in that note is in the last line, the word intact. She writes that she wants to keep their one glorious night together intact, but what she’s really saying is—”

  “Oh, God!”

  “Edith-Esther?”

  She seemed to be stumbling across a width of unleveled ground, still wet with the morning’s dew. “I’ll have to phone you back, I can’t seem to—”

  “—that she will choose celibacy, that her calling lies in the realm of the spiritual, and that she—Are you there, Edith-Esther? Hello? Hello?”

  “Just a quick call. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “I was just lying here dozing. Feeling guilty. Thinking about getting up.”

  “I had to know. Have you seen the book?”

  “Which book?”

  “The book. Your biography. A Spiritual Odyssey?”

  “Oh.”

  “Surely it arrived. Surely you’ve had a chance to look at it.”

  “I’ve been a little under the weather. Just twinges. And my glasses are broken again.”

  “You’re not seriously ill, surely.”

  “Too many birthdays. As they say.”

  “Not you, Edith-Esther. Not someone with your spirit.”

  “My spirit? My what?”

  “The cover. What do you think of the cover?”

  “Very arresting. It turned out well. But the title—when did you decide to change the title?”

  “Last-minute kind of thing. The publisher and I agreed it captured the direction your life has taken.”

  “You took out that part in the second chapter about my first communion.”

  “No, it’s there. I just gave it a slightly different interpretation.”

  “I dropped the host on the church floor and stepped on it.”

  “You may remember it that way, but in fact—”

  “It’s just ordinary bread, I remember saying to myself. Store bread. White bread. I wanted to see if there’d be any lightning bolts.”

  “You were very young. And probably excited. You dropped it by accident, and were so embarrassed you tried to cover it—the host, that is—with your foot.”

  “There were no lightning bolts. I was sure there wouldn’t be. There was nothing, only a hard, accusing look from the priest.”

  “He understood your embarrassment.”

  “His name was Father Albert. You left out his name.”

  “He could still be living.”

  “He’d have to be a hundred and ten.”

  “There might be a lawsuit, though. From the Church.”

  “Because he liked little girls? Liked to tickle them under the arms and between the legs?”

  “The implications, that’s all.”

  “You should have asked me—”

  “It isn’t what people want to hear, Edith-Esther. They’ve heard too much of that particular story in recent years. You’d be charged with a psychological cliché, I’m afraid.”

  “Clichés are almost always true—have you noticed that?”

  “I don’t want to see you represented as one of those insipid victims—”

  “I saw early on that my particular kind was considered dangerous and needed to be locked up—in the house, in the convent. Did you know women were excluded from the Latin discourse?”

  “Other times, other rhymes.”

  “I haven’t been well.”

  “You sound extremely weak, Edith-Esther. Your voice. Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “I can’t possibly know. But I can tell you one thing. The book is getting a positive response.”

  “Really?”

  “More than positive. The fact is, people are finding it uplifting.”

  “Up-what?”

  “I know you detest the word. And the concept. But some of us haven’t your strength. We need encouragement along the way.”

  “I never meat to be uplifting. The last thing I wanted was to—”

  “Of course not. But your example, Edith-Esther. All you’ve been through. The way you’ve translated your spiritual struggle into enlightenment.”

  “My glasses are broken.”

  “I’m praying that it hits the best-seller lists by next week.”

  “You’re praying? Is that what you said?”

  “Edith-Esther, are you there?”

  No, she is no longer there. She’s walking down the long green hummocky field, which may not be a field at all but a garden in a state of ruin. Whatever it is, it slopes toward a mere trickle of a river, and this is disappointing, the reluctant flow of water over small white stones, and also the surprising unevenness of the terrain. Ugly, ugly, seen up close. She feels, or else hears, one of her ankles snap. Chitinous. Oh, God. Barbed weeds and rough sedges, they scratch her bare legs and thighs. Luckily she has the sense to squeeze her eyes shut and to make tight fists of her hands. Every muscle in her body tenses against a possible invasion of bees or whatever else might come.

  Some years ago Edith-Esther’s pencil jar was stolen from her kitchen by an avid literary groupie. An image of this plain glass jar returns to her at the very moment she stumbles and falls. Probably, before its pencil-jar incarnation, it had held her favorite red currant je
lly. Its glassy neck was comfortably wide, the more freely to receive her sharpened pencils and a fat pink eraser with old rubbed edges. There was a serious pair of scissors too, black-handled, and what else? She was forgetting something. Oh, yes. A decorative letter opener given to her by a friend—Magdalena? —with the Latin words RARA AVIS stamped on the handle. A rare bird.

  She feels herself grasping the handle now and testing the blade against her arm. It is surprisingly sharp, so sharp she decides to hack at the savage purple grass rising up around her, clearing a path for herself, making her way forward.

  NEW MUSIC

  She was twenty-one when he first saw her, seated rather primly next to him on the Piccadilly Line, heading toward South Ken sington. It was midafternoon. Like every other young woman in London, she was dressed from head to toe in a shadowless black, and on her lap sat a leather satchel.

  It was the sort of satchel a girl might inherit from her adoring barrister father, and this was the truth of the matter (he found out later), except that the father was a piano teacher, not a barrister, and that his adoration was often shaded by exasperation—which one can understand.

  After a moment of staring straight ahead, she snapped open her satchel, withdrawing several sheets of paper covered with musical notations. (He was on his way to Imperial College for a lecture on reinforced concrete; she was about to attend an advanced class in Baroque music.) He had never before seen anyone “read” music in quite this way, silently, as though it were a newspaper, her eyes running back and forth, left to right, top of the page to the bottom, then flipping to the next. The notes looked cramped and fussy and insistent, but she took in every one, blinking only when she shifted to a new page. He imagined that her head was filled with a swirl of musical lint, that she was actually “hearing” a tiny concert inside that casually combed head of hers. And his head?—it was crammed with different stuff: equations, observations, a set of graphs, the various gradients of sands and gravels, his upcoming examinations, and the fact that his trousers pocket had a hole in it, leaking a shower of coins on to the floor as he stood up.

  “I think this is yours,” she said, handing him a dropped penny.

  “Whose music is that?” he managed. “The music you’re looking at?”

  “Tallis. Thomas Tallis.”

  “Oh.”

  She took pity on him as they stepped together onto the platform. “Sixteenth-century. English.”

  “Is he?”—inane question—“is he good?”

  “Good?”

  “His music?—is it, you know, wonderful? Is he a genius, would you say?”

  She stopped and considered. They were in the street now. The sunshine was sharply aslant. “He was the most gifted composer of his time,” she recited, “until the advent of William Byrd.”

  “You mean this Byrd person came along and he was better than Thomas What’s-his-name?”

  “Oh”—she looked affronted—“I don’t think better is quite the word. William Byrd was more inventive than Thomas Tallis, that’s all. More original, in my opinion anyway.”

  “Then why”—this seemed something he had to know, even though his reasoning was sure to strike her as simplistic and stupid—“why are you carrying around Thomas Tallis’s music instead of the other chap’s—the one who was better?”

  She stared at him. Then she smiled and shrugged. “Do you always insist on the very best?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, not being someone who’d experienced much in the way of choices. He was conscious of his hideous ignorance and inability to express himself. “It just seems like a waste of time. You know, taking second best when you could have the best.”

  “Like reading, hmmm, Marlowe when you could have Shake speare?”

  He nodded, or at least attempted to nod.

  “It’s because I believe Tallis is second best that I prefer him,” she told him then. Her chin went up. Her voice was firm. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “I do, I do,” he exclaimed in his awful voice. And it was true, he did.

  He loved her. Right from that instant, the way she opened up her mouth and said because Tallis is second best.

  Imagine a woman getting out of bed one hour earlier than the rest of the household. What will she do with that hour?

  Make breakfast scones for her husband and three school-age children? Not this woman, not scones, banish the thought. Will she press her suit skirt? clean out her handbag? ready her attaché case for a day at work? No, this woman works at home—at a computer set up in what was once, in another era, in another incarnation, a sewing room. It’s a room with discolored wallpaper, irises climbing on a sort of trellis, which doesn’t make sense for a non-climbing, earthbound flower. Against one wall is her writing table, which is really a cheap plywood door laid flat on trestles. She has been offered, several times, a proper desk, but she actually prefers this makeshift affair—which wobbles slightly each time she puts her elbow on the table and stares into the screen.

  That’s where she is now. At this hour! Her old and not-very-clean mauve dressing gown is pulled tight against the chill. It is not a particularly flattering color, but she doesn’t know this, and besides, she’s as faithful to old clothes as she is to inferior wallpaper. It’s as though she can’t bear to hurt their feelings. She’s tapping away, without so much as a cup of coffee to cheer her on. It’s still dark outside, not black exactly but a brew of streaked gray. You’d think she’d put up a curtain or at least a blind to soften that staring gray rectangle, but no. Nor has she thought to turn on the radio for a little musical companionship, she of all people. She’s tapping, tapping at her keyboard, her two index fingers taking turns, and for the moment that’s all she appears to need.

  Is she writing a letter to her mother in Yorkshire? A Letter to the Editor complaining about access ramps for the handicapped? A suicide note full of blame and forgiveness and deliberate little shafts of self-pity? No. Today she’s writing the concluding page (page 612) of a book, a book she’s been working on for four years now, the comprehensive biography of Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, ca. 1505-1585. The penultimate paragraph is already on the screen, then the concluding paragraph itself, and now, as a scarf of soft light flows in through the window and lands on her shoulders, she taps in the last sentence, and then the final word—which is the burnished, heightened, blurted-out word: “triumph.” The full sentence reads: “Nevertheless Tallis’s contribution to English music can be described as a triumph.”

  Nevertheless? What’s all this nevertheless about, you’re probably asking?

  Squinting into the screen, she taps in “The End,” but immediately deletes it. My guess is that she’s decided writing “The End” is too self-conscious a gesture. Did her husband write “The End” when he finished his monograph Distribution of Gravel Resources in Southwest England? Yes, certainly, but then he’s not as fearful of self-indulgence as she.

  She’s spent four years on this book. I’ve already said that, haven’t I?—but to be fair, the first eight months were passed listening to Tallis’s music itself. The Mass for Four Voices, Spem in alium, Lamentations of Jeremiah, nine motets, and so on. She lay on our canted, worn sofa—the kids at school, the husband at the office—and listened with notepad and pencil on her sweatered chest, waiting for the magnetic atoms of musical matter to come together, one and one and one, and give shape to the man who created them. There’s so little known about him, and what is known is made blurry with might have, could have, possibly was—all the maddening italics of a rigorously undocumented life. The only real resource is the music, which, curiously, has come down to our century intact, or so I’m told, and that is why this woman spent eight months absorbing each separate, self-contained, cellular note.

  Occasionally she fell asleep during those long sofa days. I’m no expert, but I’ve been told that Tallis is not particularly interested in counterpoint as such, and that the straightforward way he develops his musical ideas produces a sense
of serenity which can be an invitation to doze. She admits this, but insists he can be experimental when he wants to be and even mildly extravagant. (In nomine she gives as an example.)

  Tallis’s ghost lives in our house, his flat, hummy, holy tones and the rise and fall of Latin phrasing; it’s permeated the carpets and plaster; it clings to the family hair and clothing and gets into the food. And for several months now an inky photocopy of his portrait has been stuck on the fridge, a little wraith of a man with a small pointed beard and abundant shoulder-length hair brushed back from his forehead. He is vain about his hair, one can tell.

  It’s not easy to calculate overall height from a head-and-shoulder image, but clearly he’s got the alarmed, doubting eyes of a short man. (I am not a particularly tall chap myself, and so I instantly recognize and connect with a short man’s uneasy gaze.) The children are forever asking their mother how Tom Tallis is getting along, meaning is she going to finish her book soon. They miss her rhubarb crumble, they miss the feel of ironed clothes and clean sheets and socks sorted into pairs. Her husband—he’s in the sand and gravel business—he misses waking up beside her in the morning. By the time the alarm goes at half-past seven, the bed is cold, and she’s already been working for an hour or more at her secondhand word processor. “There’s cornflakes,” she calls out when she hears footsteps in the kitchen, not for a moment lifting her eyes from the screen. “There’s plenty of bread for toast.” Well, sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t.

  But because this is the final morning in the writing of her book, with the book’s closing word “triumph” winking at her from the screen, she rises and stretches and makes her way to the kitchen, a sleepy, mauve-toned phantom. There she finds them— two sons, daughter, and spouse, gathered about the toaster. She stares as though we are strangers who have entered her house sometime during the last four years and are now engaged in a mystical rite around this small smudged appliance. We’re not exactly unwelcome, her look tells us, but the nature of our presence has yet to be explained.