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Authors: Carol Shields
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this very table. A million years ago. You had a seafood crepe, I think. Crepes were just coming into their own, crepes, not pancakes. Why do I always remember things like that? It’s insane the stuff I store in this brain of mine. Anyway, I’m glad you were free today, I know how busy you are, but listen, you look great. I’m serious, you do not look forty. Now tell me, what’s new, what’s happening in your life. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen you. Where’ve you been hiding out?”
Almost immediately after Tom and Sheila were divorced in 1979 Sheila made two decisions, one bad, one good. The bad decision was to marry a man called Sammy Sweet, a real estate agent. The marriage lasted exactly eighteen months, and then Sammy left her, saying he had fallen desperately in love with a woman called Fritzi Knightly. Sheila went around telling people this. “He says he’s ‘desperately’ in love and ‘can’t live without her,’ and her name is Fritzi, if you can believe it. Fritzi!”
Her good decision was to leave her secretarial job and enter law school. She was in the middle of her second year when Sammy Sweet left her, and so busy studying and working on the Law Review and volunteering for the legal-aid program that the shock of his betrayal, she said, was like a bomb dropping in another country, though it cured her forever of the idea of marriage. “It’s clear I’m lousy marriage material,” she announced at the time, and since the divorce she’s lived with three other women, two lawyers,one accountant, in a large modern house in a new subdivision. Tom is invited there now and then when they need an extra man for parties, and he’s reasonably fond of Patricia and Sandra and Dru, though somewhat guarded, never sure how thoroughly Sheila has described their old intimacies.
It was Sheila who handled Tom’s divorce from Suzanne. “A good clean divorce,” she said when it was over. “No embarrassing strings hanging off it. I hope to hell you’re grateful.”
His other friends told him his situation was ludicrous, a first wife negotiating a divorce from a third. It was the material of soap opera, but for Tom the shame of a third-marriage breakup – and he was pierced through with shame, it lingers still – seemed softened by the fact that it was dealt with from within the family, so to speak, that its ripple of failure was laid smooth by the clean hand of a former wife for whom he still feels a shy fondness.
He loves her pressed lawyer clothes, her nifty dark suits and silk scarves, even her restive, edgy way of holding her knife and fork. “I think I loved you best of all the wives,” he said today, loathing himself for yammering so cheaply – and not saying what he means, either. Light from the window fell on her mouth, her rounded cheeks, her young girl’s nose. This was in the middle of a spinach-and-bacon crepe, during a lull in the conversation. He rubbed his teeth with the tip of his tongue.
She was ready for him, and fluttered a hand across the table to take his. “We liked each other a lot,” she said, “but we were not, as people say, in love. Whatever the hell that means. I’ve never been in love. I think I do have an inkling of what people mean when they say ‘in love,’ and maybe you do too, but we didn’t have it, you and me. I’ll never have it. But Tom, you might someday. I honestly think you have the capacity. But I sure don’t.” She sipped a little coffee and resettled her cup on its saucer. “Love,” she sniffed rudely. “Who needs it.”
T OM WAS TWENTY years old, a history student at the University of Toronto, when he first heard the phrase “Who needs it.” This was in 1970, a year of turmoil. He possessed at that time a thick unevenbeard. His hair curled around his shoulders, chestnut hair, beautiful, but his head was befuddled. With six other students, one of them a part-time drug dealer, he lived in a small illegal basement apartment in the Riverdale
Almost immediately after Tom and Sheila were divorced in 1979 Sheila made two decisions, one bad, one good. The bad decision was to marry a man called Sammy Sweet, a real estate agent. The marriage lasted exactly eighteen months, and then Sammy left her, saying he had fallen desperately in love with a woman called Fritzi Knightly. Sheila went around telling people this. “He says he’s ‘desperately’ in love and ‘can’t live without her,’ and her name is Fritzi, if you can believe it. Fritzi!”
Her good decision was to leave her secretarial job and enter law school. She was in the middle of her second year when Sammy Sweet left her, and so busy studying and working on the Law Review and volunteering for the legal-aid program that the shock of his betrayal, she said, was like a bomb dropping in another country, though it cured her forever of the idea of marriage. “It’s clear I’m lousy marriage material,” she announced at the time, and since the divorce she’s lived with three other women, two lawyers,one accountant, in a large modern house in a new subdivision. Tom is invited there now and then when they need an extra man for parties, and he’s reasonably fond of Patricia and Sandra and Dru, though somewhat guarded, never sure how thoroughly Sheila has described their old intimacies.
It was Sheila who handled Tom’s divorce from Suzanne. “A good clean divorce,” she said when it was over. “No embarrassing strings hanging off it. I hope to hell you’re grateful.”
His other friends told him his situation was ludicrous, a first wife negotiating a divorce from a third. It was the material of soap opera, but for Tom the shame of a third-marriage breakup – and he was pierced through with shame, it lingers still – seemed softened by the fact that it was dealt with from within the family, so to speak, that its ripple of failure was laid smooth by the clean hand of a former wife for whom he still feels a shy fondness.
He loves her pressed lawyer clothes, her nifty dark suits and silk scarves, even her restive, edgy way of holding her knife and fork. “I think I loved you best of all the wives,” he said today, loathing himself for yammering so cheaply – and not saying what he means, either. Light from the window fell on her mouth, her rounded cheeks, her young girl’s nose. This was in the middle of a spinach-and-bacon crepe, during a lull in the conversation. He rubbed his teeth with the tip of his tongue.
She was ready for him, and fluttered a hand across the table to take his. “We liked each other a lot,” she said, “but we were not, as people say, in love. Whatever the hell that means. I’ve never been in love. I think I do have an inkling of what people mean when they say ‘in love,’ and maybe you do too, but we didn’t have it, you and me. I’ll never have it. But Tom, you might someday. I honestly think you have the capacity. But I sure don’t.” She sipped a little coffee and resettled her cup on its saucer. “Love,” she sniffed rudely. “Who needs it.”
T OM WAS TWENTY years old, a history student at the University of Toronto, when he first heard the phrase “Who needs it.” This was in 1970, a year of turmoil. He possessed at that time a thick unevenbeard. His hair curled around his shoulders, chestnut hair, beautiful, but his head was befuddled. With six other students, one of them a part-time drug dealer, he lived in a small illegal basement apartment in the Riverdale
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