A Celibate Season. Carol Shields
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just install a modem, but do we want the kids accessing our private disclosures? I think not. Besides, it costs money.
Château Laurier
Sept. 4
Dear Chas,
Well, reni, vidi, vici—except that I didn’t conquer. In fact I think I came a bit unstuck. I was half an hour early leaving the Château Laurier, and after a leisurely stroll to the East Block I was still twenty minutes early. I was tempted to just hang around, but the guards aren’t great on hangers-around so I walked over to the Centre Block and pretended intense interest in the portraits of ex-prime ministers. One of the guards told me to notice how Mr. Diefenbaker’s eyes followed me around wherever I moved, a thought that did more to unnerve than to uplift. But finally the clock in the Peace Tower bonged eleven, so back I went. A guard phoned ahead and gave me directions to Senator Pierce’s office. He hadn’t arrived yet, but five minutes later he came bustling in and I introduced myself. He looked quite uncomprehending.
“Jocelyn Selby,”I repeated. “The legal counsel from Vancouver. For the Commission?”
“You’re the legal counsel?” he asked, with just the right degree of astonishment. He managed—now this is subtle—to imply that such a dish couldn’t be such a heavy, but if indeed he should be so fortunate then he would personally get down on his knees and thank le bon Dieu. (In spite of the anglo name his mother tongue is French. I’d never noticed the slight and charming—what else?—accent on TV.) I felt like a combination emancipated new-look career woman and Playboy bunny.
“Well,” he said, and flashed me a Robert Redford smile, including dimple, “this Commission is going to be more interesting than I’d thought.” Injustice! The man must be fifty if he’s a day, yet I’ll bet he looks, if anything, better than he did at thirty. The blue eyes, the slightly silvering and perfectly styled (blow-dried) hair, the perfect suit, the trace of accent—and to top it off, he’s not just another beau visage.
He went into a kind of crouch, and, with a sort of fascinated horror, I saw he was about to kiss my hand, when suddenly my eardrums were shattered by a raucous female voice behind me. “Still charming them, you old goat? Christ, you must be some kind of Dorian Gray. Where’s the real you? Hidden in the bowels of the Peace Tower?”
I wheeled around to face the most unlikely looking woman—unlikely in that setting, I mean. She was—is—immensely broad in the beam and wearing brown cords that stretch tightly over her thighs and a faded blue plaid shirt, not tucked in. Long black greasy hair. Striped headband. Thick, eye-distorting glasses. Senator Pierce swept past me in my neat get-up and perfect hair, threw his arms around her, and said, “Jess, you old cuss, you still look like a leftover hippie.”
That is Jessica Slattery. She’s actually ON THE COMMISSION! Appointed at the last minute after the women’s groups got so mad that there wasn’t a woman commissioner on a commission to look into the feminization of poverty. (I suppose my sex got me my appointment too—a nice reversal on the usual theme.)
I’ve found out since that Jessica is the president of the Canadian Social Welfare Council (which I didn’t know existed), that she’s been riding the poverty horse for years, and that she believes in farting when she feels like it. Unfortunately she felt like it just as Senator Pierce was introducing us, and I didn’t handle it with aplomb. I had managed my most gracious how do you do? when she let go, and the Senator guffawed and I would gladly have disappeared into a fourth-dimensional time-warp. (What I did was turn red and mutter, “Excuse me.” And then I was mortified that the Senator might think I’d done it.)
Sept. 5
Sorry, got interrupted. I’ve been hunting for a place to stay, but so far no luck.
I haven’t told you about the third commissioner, Dr. Grey. (Grey by name and grey by nature, my first impression.) He’ll take some getting to know. He’s a skinny grey man in a grey flannel suit with a grey voice. I was—am—astonished! Mother babbled on and on about Austin Grey—McGill University, economist, statistician, Rhodes Scholar, poet—and I don’t know exactly what I expected, but I thought he’d be, well, not-grey. He’s even greyer lined up against unbelievable Jessica and beautiful Vance. (Vance has asked me to call him Vance, but it isn’t easy. Makes me think I’m talking to a movie star.) Jessica controlled her sphincter in Dr. Grey’s presence—does natural dignity impose restraint on others, as Mother is always preaching? I’ll watch, or rather listen, and let you know.
Love,
Jock
29 Sweet Cedar Drive
North Vancouver, B.C.
9 September
Dear Jock,
Your letter just arrived and it bucked me up no end, which makes two pluses this Monday morning.
I’m feeling more or less buoyant because I’ve had a lead on a possible job opening. You remember Sanderson and Sanderson Associates? Talbot Sanderson is the cretin who wore the black cape and eye patch at the Ticknows’ New Year’s Eve bash last year, and his wife is the one who trounced me in Trivial Pursuit the same night. If you’ll remember, she couldn’t get over the fact that I didn’t know what Lassie’s master’s name was. The two of them run a fair-sized design company that puts out decent work, though nothing earth-shattering. They were big on urban development for a time, but like Robertson’s they’ve had to lay off half their architects. Now they’ve landed that big harbour-development contract that was in the papers last summer—remember?—and will probably be taking on staff.
The unlikely person who put the bug in my ear was that old grump Gil Grogan, all sotto voce through the hedge Saturday morning when I was out hacking back the alder. There hasn’t been anything public, he said, but the word was out that they’d be taking on two or possibly three temporary staff. Naturally I tried to find out how he’d heard the rumour, but he just stood there swaying and looking smug and mumbling about keeping the old ear to the old ground. (Now there’s a man who seems to thrive on celibacy. Since Meg’s died he’s taken up jogging and other primordial sins such as grouchiness and neighbourhood vigilance.) Still I was grateful and told him so.
I heard the same happy rumour about Sanderson, etc., from—guess who?—your mother. (By the way, her cold is better. She specifically asked me to tell you, since she’s too busy to write, she says, until after the Fall Fair.) She stopped by on her way over to the church hall to bring us a coffee cake and an eggplant casserole. In some ways it was unfortunate we didn’t hear her pulling into the driveway. She let herself in the front door and caught us in the middle of carrying the drafting table up the basement stairs. Greg had the top end and I had the bottom and we were negotiating that narrow spot by the landing, Greg his usual grunting, unaccommodating self, Mia screaming at us from the top of the stairs to move to the right, move to the left, and me blustering away, I’m afraid, in my loudest sergeant-major voice and turning the air a smokey blue—in all, not exactly a Walton family picnic. Suddenly your mother appeared over Mia’s shoulder, looking pale and puzzled and asking what in sweet heaven we were doing and were we sure that Jocelyn would approve. (I hope you do, my beauty, because I’d sooner dynamite the thing before moving it another inch.)
To smooth things over I asked her if she’d care for a sherry, and true to form and to no one’s surprise’ she said, “Well, maybe just a teeny-weeny one.” I also offered Greg a cold beer. (After all, that drafting table weighs a ton, and he is seventeen years old, and I was having a beer myself.) I wish you’d been here to hear the curtness with which your firstborn refused this kindly meant offer. “No thanks,” he said (sneered), and walked over to the fridge and poured himself a large, wholesome glass of milk, which he drank eyeing me and my beer all the time with a look so pious it made me wonder if you and I maybe overdid the puritan principles. Your mother chimed in with, “I don’t think a teeny-weeny bit of beer’s all that harmful”—this while I topped up her glass.
The rain stopped for a whole ten minutes or so, and we were able to take our drinks out on the deck. (It’s so green