The Republic of Love (16 page)

Bibbi doesn’t miss a beat. She reaches across for a portion and stuffs it into her beautiful mouth. “Happy enough,” she says, as though the pure pleasure of eating excuses her from taking this question seriously. And then immediately she changes the subject.

Later they share a taxi, dropping Bibbi first at the shadowy doorway on Selkirk Avenue. There is a light on in the window above the repair shop: Jake must be home from his meeting, waiting for Bibbi’s return, perhaps even now rising from a chair to slide back the bolt and let her in. Will he welcome her home?

The words of that welcome are unimaginable to Fay.

The lives of others baffle her, especially the lives of couples, the chancy elusive cement of their private moments. What exactly do Iris and Mac Jaffe
think
when they lie down together at night in their glittering midnight-blue bedroom? How have Onion and Strom, now husband and wife, filled up their thousands of sequestered hours – with stern conversation? With silence? And Clyde and Sonya – do they balance between them, like an extra child, an image of that amorphous thing they’ve brought into being, their love, their marriage? Do her own parents, after forty years of being married, still glance shyly at each other, coax from each other’s bodies new expressions of tenderness or definition, and are they stricken from time to time with incomprehension:
Who is this person? Whose face is this next to mine, this flesh-not-of-my-flesh, this stranger?

P
EOPLE WHO MAKE
movies know less about love than people who pay good money to see them.

This is what Fay thought coming out of a movie theater with Robin Cummerford at ten-thirty on a Thursday night. There was a time when she would have voiced her skepticism aloud, but recently she’s grown more cautious about opening her mouth, perhaps more kind, too. For one thing, it was Robin Cummerford who had paid for tonight’s movie, and for another thing, he appeared from his post-movie demeanor to have been deeply moved by the film, a black claustrophobic import called
Juice of the Larger Orange.

He had phoned Fay unexpectedly on the Tuesday morning after Onion’s wedding, having tracked down her phone number. He apologized twice for calling her at work. He wondered if she was by any chance free one night this week. For dinner, or maybe a movie?

And there they were, on their way to have a drink at the Fort Garry Lounge, having endured an hour and a half of curiously translated subtitles in which men and women uttered breathy jealous threats or spoke in varying shades of cruelty of their mutual enthrallment and disgust. “Extremely powerful,” Robin Cummerford announced, “the emotional force of love.”

It surprised Fay that a man trained in science, a physician, could so readily mistake the angers of erotic transport for love. At the same time, she wondered whether there was something amiss with her own appetites. Was she shriveling up inside her jangling singleness? Or had she maybe dozed off in the middle of the film and missed something obvious?

A little later, dropping her off at her front door, lightly touching the sleeve of her pink coat, he said, “I’ve really enjoyed tonight. Is there any chance you’re free for dinner next week? Thursday night?”

“That would be very nice,” she said.
Nice!
Had she really said
nice?

She realized, suddenly, that she was about to be pursued by this quiet, awkward, rather opaque man, that the clutter and flutter of courtship was going to sweep her up once again, and that before long there would be difficulties.
This isn’t going to work out, Robin,
she imagined herself saying over a restaurant table, over the phone, over a twisted pillow.
This just isn’t going anywhere.

S
OMEONE SENT
T
OM A PRETTILY WRAPPED PACKAGE OF SHIT
. So! Some goon out there in big wide radioland had it in for him, and for a man like Tom, whose chief disability – he admits it – is his wish to be liked, the gift was deeply disturbing. He ran a few possibilities through his head.

That marathon prick, what’s-his-name? Steve Fitzsimmons?

Or some crank who’d called in to “Niteline” and got cut off too quickly. It happened all the time. Ted Woloschuk did his best to screen the calls, but it was really Tom who had to juggle the drunks and crazies and get them off the air fast.

And then there was Mike Healey, who emceed the all-night show on CRSM. But Mike was far too sweet a guy to think up this kind of vindictive monkey stuff. And who else? There was that hoser of a songwriter around town, Benny Kaner, a sleepy old ponytailed creep who’d been badgering Tom for a couple of years to air some of his tapes on the show.

For a day or two Tom made a point of not mentioning the
shit incident to anyone, and then suddenly he found himself telling everyone.

Big Bruce, who owned the station, said the same thing had happened to him once, only it was plastic poop, not the real thing. It’s part of the game. You stick your head up out of the crowd and you get shot at.

Rosalie Summers, the receptionist at the station, told Tom about someone who’d put an underarm deodorant in her locker back when she was in high school, and attached to it had been a scribbled, unsigned note that said “A Word to the Wise.” It still made her blood boil, just talking about it.

Everyone Tom talked to told him not to worry. These things happen. It was par for the course. There were a lot of nuts out there, all kinds of berries on the bush. Forget it, everyone said.

H
E DID FORGET IT
, or almost. He was too busy to worry, he was riding high, out almost every night.

“We’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” his mother said when she phoned from Duck River on Saturday morning, minutes after he’d come back from his weekly run. “Night after night we’ve been trying and the phone just rings and rings. I guess you’re pretty busy, eh, leading the gay bachelor life. Ha. But you can’t say that word gay anymore. I keep forgetting. Leading the wild life, is that better? You still seeing that girl, Elizabeth? Mike and I were thinking, it might be nice if you brought her up here, had yourself a nice relaxing weekend. We’ve got the pullout, you know, it sleeps two, or she could sleep on the rollaway, depending. It doesn’t matter one teensy bit to Mike and me, whatever you feel comfortable with. We’ve been freezing fish. Someone gave us a great big catch of pickerel, that Archie Frobish, you remember him, his wife passed on about a year or so back. Well, we fillet them first, or rather Mike does, and then we freeze them in milk cartons that I rinse out real well, and then we top them up with water and stick them in the deep-freeze. It works like a charm. Archie can’t eat what he catches nowadays, not since he’s been on his own, the poor old guy. It’s no fun being on your own when you get to be that
age. Any age, let’s face it. Mike says he’s got a dilly of a Newfie joke for you. I can’t tell it on the phone, it’d turn the wires blue, but he says he’ll save it up for you, you’ll get a good laugh. It would do you good to have a nice couple of days, get out of the city, relax. And tell Elizabeth we’ve got lots of room. Tell her we don’t bite.”

A
SKED TO NAME
his ideal land form, what pan of the earth’s geography he would choose to be, Tom said a peninsula.

This was at a dinner party, a Sunday night, and he was praised by the others around the table for his originality. Why a peninsula? Because it was separate yet joined. Because, well, it surrendered part but not all of its independence. Because it was permitted a measure of eccentricity. Because a peninsula can be easily defended.

“You mean you want everything and nothing,” Mark Klein charged, and Tom replied, well, yes, maybe that was true.

At a round painted table on the screened front porch of Jeff and Jenny Waring’s house on Waterloo Avenue, along with Mark and Emma Klein, and a woman called Charlotte Downey, he ate an odd and beautiful pasta salad and took part in the discussion of geographical entities and private choices.

He was happy to be here, grateful to be remembered by old friends like the Warings, to be telephoned in advance and included in a low-key summer evening. Outside, beyond the dark screening, a low wind could be heard stirring the full trees. Inside, the only light source was a low shaded table lamp, against which a number of moths batted intermittently. He wondered if the others guessed how he relished such evenings. The faces of the Warings, of the Kleins, of Charlotte Downey, seemed to possess a golden plasticity, and the white wine, the bowls of raspberries, the coffee poured from a tall ivory-colored coffeepot brought Tom a convulsive upsurge of feeling and a doubling of consciousness, so that he was able to see the evening as it was as well as the way he might afterward remember it.

He had not met Charlotte Downey before. Her powerfully
made-up face was square-jawed but sensual, and able to shift rapidly in its expression. Her languorous quizzing eyes and her dark hair, cut short so that it bent above her ears, gave her the look of a sex-wise teenager. The inclination of her head seemed to invite his approval. She wore a dark red sundress and white sandals, and when she turned sideways in the light he could see a thin gold chain burning on her tanned neck. Of course she had been invited for him, and he for her; Tom knew this as a certainty and knew that she knew as well. “I think,” she said, when her turn came, “that I’d like to be a coastal ridge. Like the Sierras, maybe, sharply defined, but at the same time not too intimidating.”

Emma Klein wanted to be a river delta. An island, said Jenny Waring, who was the mother of three young children – a choice that made her husband look up, puzzled. But only in winter, she amended. In summer she preferred to be a long low valley – she gave a sexual laugh, or so it seemed to Tom – with a guaranteed abundance of rainfall.

“I suppose it would be too arrogant to want to be an Ocean,” Jeff Waring began – but at that moment Tom looked at his watch. It was 11:35. He had twenty minutes to get to the station. He would have liked to whisper in Charlotte Downey’s ear, “I’ll give you a call” or “When can we get together?” But the opportunity did not offer itself. He left quickly, hurrying down the cooled sidewalk to his car, saddened but also relieved – he admitted it – to be alone again.

A
T PARTIES
where there is a good deal of drinking and where a large number of people are crowded into a small space, or where the social mix is familiar and also random – at these kinds of gatherings there is often someone who, late in the evening, will make a teasing remark to Tom about his three disastrous marriages. Whatever is said will be put forward with a spirit of light good nature, something like: “Hey Tom, when’s round four coming up?”

Or there will be some slipping, winking comment about alimony, about rice coming out of his ears, about going for the
Guinness
Book of World Records,
about getting the wedding march on a compact disc.

Men tend to make these kinds of jokes more than women, jokes that are meant to be chummy, to simulate envy.

Tom imagines that the gibes, digs, pleasantries, whatever, possess the same weight and texture as those that involve the humiliation of large noses, big feet, balding heads, and double chins.

It seems clear that a man of forty with three ex-wives is fair game. In the public domain. It seems clear, too, that Tom has become a comic figure.

How does he respond to this kind of male joshing? He feels his mouth move sideways in what he supposes is a grin. A stone enters his throat, and the skin of his face freezes over. As soon as he can, he moves away to safer territory.

O
NCE A YEAR
Big Bruce (Bossman Bruce) throws a barbecue for the CHOL gang out at his riverside property west of the city. He goes the whole hog: colored lights all around the grounds, an illuminated sign at the end of the driveway that says “This Way Folks,” an open bar set up in a trailer, a striped canopy big enough for a small circus, and everything catered. Then fireworks, then dancing to a live trio, and around dawn a huge breakfast.

Big Bruce is
big,
two hundred and fifty pounds of resonating flesh. Sixty years old. A lawyer by training. The son of a Ukrainian farmer. He made his first big money in real estate and then bought a radio station and found his true love.

Big Bruce’s wife, Erleen, makes her own sauerkraut. Otherwise she does nothing. If you ask her about her grandchildren, she’ll say: “Those little bums, they’re spoiled rotten.” If you ask her about CHOL: “It’s a hole to pour money in.” About her husband, Big Bruce: “He’s an old sweetie-pie.”

Lenny Dexter’s at the party. He arrives in denim and leather handmade boots, and a string tie. On his head is the white cowboy hat he bought at an auction for a thousand bucks – it’s got the name Hank Williams sewn right into the lining. Lenny’s in radio for the kicks. He gets a high from the late-night intimacy of it, the
thought of his voice spilling over the city perimeter and entering the cabs of truck drivers, beautiful guys hauling their tankers to Fargo or Minneapolis or up to Thompson.

Carly Blackwood, from the wake-up show, is at the party. Through thick lenses she gives Tom a scampish wink. “If I were in TV, they’d make me get contacts. They’d want me to fix my hair into one of those gravity-defying jobs stuck back with hair spray, no thanks. I see morning radio as something that energizes people. People wake up feeling ugly and lonely and weak and they’d just as soon hide out at home, right? But all they have to do is reconnect. Get their hearts restarted. It’s hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”

Simon Birrell is also at the party. He’s in charge of the noon-hour farm show, and after fifteen years in that slot he still reels with the irony of it – that he, a musician’s son from New York City, should be chatting knowledgeably for fifty minutes every weekday about the fertile measurement of bulls or effective weed management or cucumber blight or crises in egg marketing. He lives with his wife, Stephanie, and four teenaged children in a large old-fashioned Roblyn Road apartment. “People are always surprised to find I don’t live in a manure field,” he once told Tom. It was Simon who first told Tom about the reissued Caruso records that have been such a surprise hit on “Niteline.”