Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields Read Free Book Online

concealing, for who knows what sinister purposes, his brilliant hanks of wool.
    And John Spalding in Birmingham.
    Poor John Spalding, how I added him up. Lecturer in English, possessor of a shrewish wife and precocious child, querulous and slightly affected, drinking too much at staff parties and forcing arguments about World Federalism, writing essays for obscure quarterlies; John Spalding, failed novelist, poor John Spalding.       
    How was he to know when he rented his flat to strangers that he would get me, Judith Gill, incorrigibly curious, for a tenant. Curious is kind; I am an invader, I am an enemy.
    And he is a right chump, just handing it over like that, giving me several hundred square feet of new territory to explore. Drawers and cupboards to open. His books left candidly on the shelves where I could analyze the subtlety of his underlining or jeer at his marginal notations.
    All that year I filtered him through the wallpaper, the kitchen utensils, the old snapshots, the shaving equipment, distilling him from the ratty blankets and the unpardonable home carpentry, the Marks-and-Spencer lamp shades and the paper bag in the bathroom cupboard where for mysterious reasons he saved burnt-out lightbulbs. Why, why?
    The task of the biographer is to enlarge on available data.
    The total image would never exist were it not for the careful daily accumulation of details. I had long since memorized the working axioms, the fleshy certitudes. Thus I peered into cupboards thinking, “Tell me what a man eats and I will tell you who he is.” While examining the bookshelves, recalled that, “A man’s sensitivity is indexed in his library.” While looking into the household accounts – “A man’s bank balance betrays his character.” Into his medicine cabinet – “A man’s weakness is outlined by the medicines which enslave him.”
    And his sex life, his and Isabel’s, strewn about the flat like a moldering marriage map; ancient douche bag under a pile of sheets in the airing cupboard; The Potent Male in paperback between the bedsprings; a disintegrating diaphragm, dusty with powder in a zippered case; rubber safes sealed in plastic and hastily stuffed behind a crusted Vaseline jar; half-squeezed tubes of vaginal jelly, sprays, circular discs emptied of birth control pills – didn’t that woman ever throw anything away – stains on the mattress, brown-edged, stiff to the touch, ancient, untended.
    Almost against the drift of my will I became an assimilator of details and, out of all the miscellaneous and unsorted debris in the Birmingham flat, John Spalding, wiry (or so I believe him to be), university lecturer, neurotic specialist in Thomas Hardy, a man who suffered insomnia and constipation, who fantasized on a love life beyond Isabel’s loathsome douche bag, who was behind on his telephone bill – out of all this, John Spalding achieved, in my mind at least, something like solid dimensions.
    Martin was busy that year. Daily he shut himself inside the walnut horizons of Trinity Library, having deluded himself into thinking he was happier in England than he had ever been before. The children were occupied in their daily battle with English schooling, and I was alone in the flat most of the time, restless between biographies, wandering from room to room, pondering on John and Isabel for want of something better to do.
    Gradually they grew inside my head, a shifting composite leafing out like cauliflower, growing more and more elaborate, branching off like the filaments of a child’s daydream. I could almost touch them through the walls. Almost.
    Then I discovered, on the top shelf of John’s bookcase, a row of loose-leaf notebooks.
    His manuscripts.
    I had noticed them before in their brown-and-buff covers, but the blank private spines had made me disinclined, until this particular day, to reach for them.
    But taking them down at