Swann by Carol Shields Page A

about the little house thinking: a Nobel Prize winner sat in this armchair, lay on that pillow, occupied this toilet seat, adjusted this shower head.)
    Mrs. Flanner, her face flushed—clearly she liked her drinks—poured him a second gin and tonic and asked what it was that had brought him to California for a year. “Are you working on a new biography?”
    “I’m afraid so,” he said. Eyes downcast, expression modest. Ever the man possessed, the body snatcher.
    “And is it to be another poet?” She asked this in her merry voice.
    “I’m afraid so,” he said again.
    “I don’t suppose I really should ask who —”
    “I doubt very much if you’ve heard of her,” he began.
    “Ah!” she said, and clapped her hands together. Brown hands with rather short fingers and an old-fashioned wedding ring in reddish gold. “A her! A woman! How wonderful. I mean, my group will be thrilled that —”
    “As I say, though, she is not well known. Hardly in the same class as Starman or Pound. Still she was quite a remarkable poet in her way —” He wished to appear forthright, honest, but out came the old sly evasions.
    “I wonder if I might know her,” Marjorie Flanner said. “I used to read a lot of poetry when I was younger. Josh and I —”
    “Mary Swann.”
    “Pardon?”
    “Her name. Mary Swann. The poet I’m working on at the moment.”
    “Aahhh!” A look of mild incomprehension. She took a rather large gulp of gin and then asked politely, “And did she have a fascinating life?”
    “I’m afraid not,” Jimroy said, feeling a quickening of his body. “I think you would have to say she had one of the dullest lives ever lived.”
    She looked at him with new interest. “And yet she was a remarkable poet.”
    “That
is
the paradox,” he said, giving a laugh that came out a bark. “That was, I suppose, the thing I could not resist.”
    “I can imagine,” Marjorie Flanner said. She smiled. Her teeth flashed, and Jimroy could see the grindings of an old eagerness. “Well, that’s quite a challenge, Professor Jimroy.”
    Quite a challenge. Jimroy wondered in an idle way if Marjorie Flanner had ever uttered those words
it’s quite a challenge
to Joshua Flanner as he sat contemplating the mysteries of mass and energy that glued the universe together. Probably she had. Probably Joshua Flanner, humanist and smuggler of rose cuttings, had not found the phrase objectionable. Why should he? Who but a throttled misanthrope would object to such a trifling remark?
    Later, at the motel where he was staying temporarily, falling asleep in his buttoned, made-in-Taiwan pyjamas, Jimroy remembered the brief bright expansion of Mrs. Flanner’s face as she handed him the house keys. It had seemed artificially lit, a social expression only, as though she were concealing some minor disappointment she felt toward him. Perhaps she
had
expected him to invite her to dinner, or even to stay the night. It was a failing of Jimroy’s, not knowing what other people expected.
    Like many an introvert, Jimroy distrusts the queasy interior world of the psyche, but has enormous faith in the mechanics of the exterior world of governments and machinery and architecture and science—all these he sees as beingpresided over by anonymous but certified authorities who are reliable and enduring and who, most importantly, are possessed of good intentions. He is able to step back from the threat of acid rain, for instance—every softy in Canada is babbling about acid rain—certain that ecologists will arrive any day now at a comprehensive solution. He
trusts
them to find an answer; they will find it chiefly because the burden of their care demands it. AIDS will be conquered too, Jimroy has no doubt about it, what with the piles of research money and all those serious ready faces turned together in consultation.
    And on a more self-interested level, he reasons that someone or other will always come forward, ready to defend
his
civil liberties,