The Republic of Love (24 page)

But tonight she regards the two of them almost with pity, a pair of oversized children swept away on their own forward current. They’ll drink their coffee, clean up, make a panful of scrambled eggs, put the boys to bed, watch the late-night news, and then go to bed themselves. Probably they’ll make love – up there on the third floor in their big cool water bed with the windows open to the familiar dampish night air. They must know already, the two of them, as they drink their coffee from heavy blue mugs, precisely what the rest of the day will offer.

Whereas she is about to be driven home by someone she’s never met before.

This simple premise magisterially suggests something grandly unsettling – that anything can happen.

F
AY HAS AN
appointment with Maja van Ginkel at ten o’clock on the other side of Amsterdam. She rises early and dresses herself in extraordinary clothes – extraordinary, that is, for a late-summer morning: a wool skirt, a sweater, stockings, a jacket of fine-woven wool.

The clay-colored sky is overcast. Downstairs in the hotel she sits in a low-ceilinged room with a dozen other hotel guests and is served thick milky coffee and slices of bread and cheese. The cheese comes in transparent sheets and tastes sour. Fay, imagining Maja van Ginkel, her rank and reputation among folklorists, supplies her with a wide shy eager face and fleshy chin. Dr. van Ginkel has published a paper in which the mermaid trope is identified
with the sexual subconscious, with a primitive fear of castration and an urge to return to the watery womb.

The double spine of this theory is a little flat-footed for Fay, who hopes to question Dr. van Ginkel closely. Are human beings really so locked into their own cherished anxieties that the only vibrations they feel are solitary and private? Aren’t people capable of more than this? Please, please – don’t they sometimes commit acts of abandonment, calling out to each other, demanding to be buried in each other’s mortal or immortal flesh?

T
HE COMBED YELLOW HAIR
of Maja van Ginkel was unyielding, the rectangularity of her eye sockets fixed. English words burst from her throat with a puncturing explosive rattle. She was beautiful, and her particular kind of waxy beauty made her opaque. After their meeting Fay was struck with the shocking thought that this woman was probably two or three years younger than she herself was.

That night she dreamed about her. The two of them were perched on the ridgepole of a small dwelling, making polite conversation, and behind them, lost in a mottled sky, were the eyes, mouth, and hairline of Tom Avery.

The next morning, her fifth in the hotel, Fay looked into the bathroom mirror, puzzling over the disguise of her body. She was still there, her long dark straight hair cut with bangs across her forehead, a decent-looking woman whose smooth skin concealed her body’s other secrets, its leakages and cracks. Who was it, she asked herself; who was the woman Tom Avery had offered to drive home?

A dozen harmless vanities keep her balanced. A man once said to her – and she remembers exactly who he was and all the details of their meeting – that she had lovely earlobes. A manicurist, years ago, had commented passingly on the length of her nailbeds. (She hadn’t even known the word “nailbed” but was grateful nevertheless for this minor tribute.) Her sister, Bibbi, confided once, “You have the kind of face that doesn’t have to smile all the
time. You can just go around with your face as it is, not having to try too hard.” All of these casually offered comments have been stored carefully at the back of her brain.

Earlier in the day Dr. van Ginkel, with her beautiful solid Dutch mouth, had delivered a nervous creed. “Our bodies are inescapable,” she said to Fay. “They are the only bodies we can ever know.”

And Fay, who cannot now recall what Tom Avery looks like, had nodded in agreement.

I
N THE LAST FEW DAYS, SINCE HIS MEETING WITH
F
AY
M
C
L
EOD
, Tom’s been living the mechanical glassy life of a sleepwalker. A segment of his conscious existence has been dislodged and assigned to automatic pilot.

So this is how a robot functions, he thinks, coming and going as through various humid dreams and wakenings, eating hamburgers and donuts, driving to the station shortly before midnight and home again after his four-hour shift, gunning the car down the dark narrow streets, breaking through the nightly quiet with spurts of gas, a foot on the pedal pushing the gray-colored air ahead of him. That’s all he does: eats and sleeps and attends to the continuous, unfolding surface of his day and night routines, always surprised that his arrangements can be managed this mindlessly.

But inside his head he’s cooking up a stew of audacious fantasies, midnight strategies of stealth, flash, and perversity which he recognizes, but only in his calmer moments, as being insane.

A fertile, lucid happiness has taken charge of him, made him exaggerated and crazy about what he should do next, what is required of him. This feeling, though unfocused, cannot be put down, cannot be cleared out of his mind.

His first thought was to get on a plane and go to Europe, where he would intercept Fay McLeod. He’s never been to Europe; nothing there has ever seemed compelling enough to compensate for what he imagines to be an assault of massive stone monuments and continuous drenching rain. He fears, more than damp feet, the narrow Continental streets full of toxic haze, and unreadable European maps whose rivers, roads, railway lines, and national boundaries wrinkle and shrink the eyesight of travelers and strip them clean of volition, of identity. Europe with its sneering face. Europe the mercenary uncle.

But now? He could surprise her, arriving suddenly and presenting himself, his bones, his wayward, undisguised self. Tonight she’ll be arriving in Paris after a week in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and he’s succeeded, with only minimum difficulty, in tracking down where she’s staying: the hôtel de l’Avenir, on the rue du Cherche-Midi.
(L’avenir?
He remembers from his high-school French what the word means: it means future; he embraces this pellet of knowledge, this omen.)

First he had phoned the switchboard at the National Center for Folklore Studies, where Fay worked, and asked, with cautious, underheated guile, for her forwarding address. (“I’m trying to reach …”) He put his question quickly, drawing in his breath and managing to suggest that a small but urgent crisis required that he get in touch with Ms. McLeod immediately.
Ms. McLeod;
he’d stretched out that murmury syllable
Ms.,
layering it with solicitude.

He was firmly refused. “I’m afraid we cannot give out that kind of information,” the shocked, reproving switchboard operator told him, in a voice that was, at the same time, oddly drenched with sweetness.

Fay existed, at least. That much was confirmed, and he longed suddenly for the outside world to keep on confirming it.

Next he phoned Sonya. “Would you happen to know,” he
began, suspecting he sounded solemn and bogus, “where Fay is staying in Paris?” “Hang on a sec,” she’d said, cheerful, offhand, phlegmatic, as though there were nothing untoward or desperate about this request of his. “Lemme ask Clyde, he’s got Fay’s itinerary around here somewhere. Oh, here it is, right on the bulletin board. Hôtel de l’Avenir, rue du Cherche-Midi, number fourteen.”

If he really intended to go to Europe he’d have to approach Big Bruce, and quick, about getting time off. He’d have to pitch his plea a grain huskier than usual. “Look, Bruce, I’ve got to get away. I’m close to exhaustion, that’s the truth of it. These late nights, it’s crazy, and I’ve been going at it hard for three years straight. The ratings are right up there at the moment. Plus, summer’s slow anyway, with everyone at the lake. Plus, Dexter’d kill for a chance to take over for a couple of weeks. Right now – this is just between you and me – right now I feel like I’ll maybe crack up if I don’t get away, and I mean really away. I was thinking of, well, maybe going to Europe….”

No, no, no, no. What kind of presumptuous nut case was he. Think it through, buddy.

He decided he would phone her instead. He’d sit down and figure out the time difference, catch her early in the morning before she left the hotel. Hello. (Reminding himself not to yell.) It’s Tom Avery. From Winnipeg? We met last week? At your brother’s. I walked you home, remember? Well, I just wanted to …

To touch base? To connect? To hear your voice? To remind you of mine? To see how you’re making out over there? So, how’s the weather? (Keeping his voice up, keeping his throat full of jolly sparkles.) When you get back, I was thinking we could maybe … Yeah, right!

She’d flip. She’d run. At the very least she’d be confused, alarmed. Is anything the matter? she’d probably ask. Or, after a smarting, doubting silence, deliver her own cold inquiry: Why exactly are you phoning? What is it you want?

No. A phone call was madness. And to think he’d got as far as looking up the international dialing code.

He’d read somewhere, a novel, maybe, about a man who’d
sent a woman a bunch of flowers every hour for twenty-four hours. The flamboyance of this gesture had impressed him at the time, also the foolishness of it. It was a folly, one he could suddenly understand but knew himself incapable of. And the expense of an act like that might, well, convince her of his utter fecklessness.

Or else remind her of a novel
she’d
once read in which a man had sent… Oh God!

He’d write her a letter instead.

If he mails it to the hôtel de l’Avenir today she’ll have it in ten days, or so he was told at the post office when he went to buy an air letter. (An air letter seemed jauntier than plain paper and an envelope, and more innocently motivated.) Ten days. The thought of the time gap is crushing, but he sees its usefulness. Ten days to cool and objectify the words on the page.

But what
will
he say?

He has the thudding sensation of new spaces entered and instantly lost, but he latches on to one nuggety word: now. He cradles that word close to his body.

Now. This minute. Before it disappears. Now or never.

He spreads the blue tissuey aerogram on his kitchen table, which he has first washed and carefully dried. The paper lies flat like a lake, empty and blue, its glued edges slightly curled, offering up to him a spacious, clean, formal permission. For this sheet of paper he feels an excruciating tenderness.

“Friday morning,” he writes in the upper-right-hand corner, then shuts his eyes and allows an image of Fay’s intricate mouth and eyes to form and dissolve, her oval face, her chin, her neck, her long supple arms swinging, a dozen balloons floating above her.

The white plastic pen he holds in his hand has the words “Imperial Bank of Commerce” on it. Its ink is vivid blue. This ink will be the vector of his pleading, he will trust it absolutely.

“Dear Fay,” he writes carefully.

“C
AN I DRIVE
you home?” he’d said to her that night. Or maybe – he can’t remember the exact words – “Would you like a lift?”

She had turned toward him, pausing. “It’s only a twenty-minute walk,” she’d said, or something to that effect, smiling all the while with that large mobile mouth of hers, the lipstick eaten away. “I don’t want to take you out of your way.”

“No trouble at all.” Where had that wheeze come from? Shameful, like an old man. He cleared his throat ostentatiously, observing her lower lip and imagining how it would feel to draw his tongue along its length, a pencil feeling out a line. “I’m not in any special hurry.”

“Well…” Biting down on her lower lip, considering. A light at the back of her eyes sizing him up.

“I’d be glad to give you a lift.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Clyde could easily run you home, Fay,” Sonya offered.

“Sure,” from Clyde, who was yawning, who had slipped off his shoes.

“No, really,” Tom said too loudly, setting down his coffee cup, giddy. “I’ll be happy to. I’ve got Gary with me, but there’s plenty of room in the car.”

“Well…” She was still doubtful, or was this a brand of politeness he hadn’t encountered before? Or did it hold a measure of suspicion? Or judgment? “I live just over on Grosvenor Avenue.”

“Grosvenor? So do I.”

“Where on Grosvenor?” Her eyes opened wide, her mouth moved up. Brown eyes. Eyebrows faint. That mouth. He searched her features for some fault that might reassure him.

“Between Stafford and Wellington. Closer to Stafford.”

“You do? So do I. What number?”

“Near the corner, eight-forty-eight.”

“That’s amazing. I’m at eight-forty-seven. The condo conversion. I’ve been there two years.”

“With the wood door? The flowers? I’m right across the street.”

“The red brick?”

“Third floor.”

“We’re neighbors.”

Had he said that, or had she?

“Neighbors,” Sonya repeated. She was standing by the sink, briskly wrapping up a wedge of birthday cake for Gary. She said it again, preoccupied, neutral. “Neighbors.”

T
OM STOOD BY THE CURB
. Next to him was Fay McLeod, and holding on to Fay’s hand was seven-year-old Gary Waring, solidly gripping in his other hand a plastic bag of birthday cake and candy. Overhead a double row of elms met, their full crowns nodding with rainwater. The air was cool, damp, the pressed wet unfocused air of early evening. Eight o’clock. In the western sky a column of peach-colored cloud spiraled upward. Yale Avenue at this hour was tranquil. And empty.

“Hey.” Gary was yelling in high, childish pips of relish. “Hey, Tom, I don’t see any car.”

W
HEN
J
ENNY
W
ARING
had phoned to ask if he would look after Gary for a couple of days, Tom had been taken by surprise. Jenny had never before asked him to do anything of the kind, and it had never occurred to him to offer, though he could see, when he considered, how it might do her good to get away for a change. On the telephone she had been breathless, excited, but he heard apology in her voice, too, and when he at once agreed to look after Gary she had seemed almost cravenly grateful.