The Republic of Love (3 page)

Fay met Morris Kroger at a wine-and-cheese party that preceded a ballet opening. He bumped up against her, then introduced himself. A clumsy man, yet here he was at the ballet.

It was summer. They spent a week together in a tent near Clear Lake. (This was after Nelo and before Peter.) They both suffered from mosquitoes, which were especially bad that year, and Fay, with mosquito repellent in her hair and ears and all the joints of her body, felt sure at first that it was this that rendered Morris impotent. Night after night he struggled with himself on the ridged slippery air mattress. His hoarse breathing frightened her, and on their last night together he gave way to a spasm of choked sobs. Something about his parents, something psychological and hopeless had spoiled his manhood. The next day they
drove back to Winnipeg in silence, four hours on the burning highway, and two weeks later he mailed her the stone mermaid. Fay remembers opening the box slowly, as though it might contain a bomb or something equally dangerous, but it was only this carved female likeness with her taunting abbreviated tail.

Impenetrable. The word rose up and socked her in the throat with its unsheathed subtlety. An accusation.

But no, she was being paranoid, it was just a present.

She found out later, much later, that the carving had been made in Cape Dorset not long after the Hollywood film
Splash!
had been shown there at the Community Hall, and this irony greatly expanded her love for it.

Its smile makes it rare. She has discovered only one other smiling mermaid, a tiny figure bobbing about in a fourteenth-century German fresco. She hopes to see it this summer when she goes to Augsburg, and photograph it for her book.

Morris Kroger is gone, having sold the family business and moved to Florida. Someone told Fay he had retired. At his age! Fay thinks of him maybe once a year. Usually when the mosquitoes come out. For about five minutes.

P
ETER KNIGHTLY’S FACE
as it leans over his sock drawer is too elongated and bewildered for love, and also sulky, lip-drooping, not a face to live with forever. She pities him, a man of thirty-seven years, hesitating like this between black and brown. He gazes at the neat little sock balls, then stirs them with a long teacherly finger. That same finger has stirred me, thinks Fay, who is still in bed, her head turned on the pillow and her eyes wide open, mournfully watching.

In the last few days a mild dislike for him has fallen over her. The whole of his body seems a pale, elongated gland, colorless and cold and stiff with hairs. It distresses her to open her closet and see his jackets and sweaters, most of them gone nubby at the elbows, rubbing up against the smoothness of her blouses. Watching him, she feels her thoughts darken. And every time she opens her
mouth, it seems, she injures his puffball innocence; she’s tried, often, to locate the exact point where this weakness of his is centered – that nick, maybe, at the edge of his tucked Englishy mouth. Or the ruffled tips of his thick beige hair, like feathers, blunt and soft at the same time. Oh, why does he keep tempting her, offering up his sponge of a heart and inviting her to take a punch? She’s figured it out; at last she knows. So he can blame her, so she can be sorry, so he can sulk, so she can feel guilty. This has been going on for three years now. He will say something ordinary and neutral, and the next minute she’s unsnapped one of his nursery certitudes. Would she do this if she loved him? She doesn’t think so.

She knows the old cliché: To fall in love is to fall out of love. Maybe that’s all that’s happened, something as simple and blameless as that.

L
OVE IS SELFISH
. Love is dangerous, impractical, wasteful. Loving, we put a pistol to our heads. It burns, it makes us into fools, always it keeps us waiting. It sickens, it makes us sick, it’s the start of a serious illness, it’s illness itself.

But Fay’s parents are something else. They live in that big old house over on Ash Avenue and at night they read to each other in bed. Richard McLeod reads Peggy McLeod long magazine pieces about the asbestos industry, and Peggy McLeod reads Richard McLeod chunks of novels, descriptive passages out of P. D. James about Oxford or London or the Devon coast. They share a yearning for jokes and subtle proofs and oddities of language, and every single Wednesday night they sit down with their good friends John and Muriel Brewmaster, who have been married even longer than they have – for forty-three years – and the four of them play bridge. After the Brewmasters go home they discuss their hands, their good or bad luck, it doesn’t matter which. They give each other gifts, admittedly only at Christmas and for birthdays, and they have a pact that these gifts must not attach in any way to the house. For example, no microwave ovens, no table saws, nothing
like that. They may give articles of clothing made of knitted wool or silk. Or perfume, luggage, wrist watches, little luxuries, tickets to New York, maybe. They love to go to New York and see the latest plays and musicals. For anniversaries – they’ve been married thirty-nine years, forty next fall – they do not exchange gifts. They are each other’s gift. Fay’s mother actually said this once. Out loud. Each other’s gift.

F
OR A MAN NURTURED BY TWENTY-SEVEN MOTHERS
, T
OM
A
VERY SUFFERS
from surprising insecurities. At thirty-nine, almost forty, he is mildly, obscurely fearful of: young children, stinging insects, German shepherds, acupuncture, income-tax forms, street evangelists, public telephones, cottage cheese, and old age.

He is acutely, palpably afraid of Friday nights, what to do with them, those gaping, sneering, and stubbornly recurring widths of time – how to accommodate them, fill them, use them, annihilate them. He’d do anything to sidestep a Friday night. Friday nights demand conviviality and expenditure. It’s the time to let loose (yeah, sure).

Well, not tonight. Tonight he sits alone in his apartment on Grosvenor Avenue and drinks beer and reads the newspaper and thinks dark, unkind thoughts about his life. By eleven he is in bed, sound asleep, another Friday night erased.

W
HY DO WE SEEK
so strenuously, so publicly, to purify ourselves?

This is what Tom thinks as he goes for his weekly eight-kilometer run down Wellington Crescent. That crosswise slab of belly fat he’s got – a disgrace. A faint hangover, too, poisonous fumes bubbling up from his intestines and pressing his lungs flat. Heated gas ripping upward and downward, shaming him, making him glad he’s thumping along on his own steam. His kidneys he pictures as hard little lozenges, jelly beans in thin casings of sugar. Now that’s a pretty picture.

It’s Saturday morning, the last Saturday before he turns forty. On and on he tramps, past what used to be the Richardson mansion, triplexed now with a series of winking solariums shelving off at the back. Past a darkly stuccoed building with a military insignia over its door, past a stand of leafless shrubs, past the synagogue in which gatherings of men are even now praying.

It’s a cold day. Damp through and through. Spring dampness. Now he’s coming up toward the bridge. Dancing up and down at the curb, keeping time while he waits for a break in the traffic at Academy Road; traffic, it never lets up. It’s a chance, though, to catch his breath.

He’s been jogging for two years now, ever since his divorce papers came through. Ask him about it – he’ll be glad to tell you. It’s one of the stories he likes to pull out. Well, the papers came through, you see. It was on a Saturday morning. They were sent over by courier, Pink Lady, delivered and signed, heavy legal sheets in a strong taped envelope. Here you are, sir. A ceremonial present to start your day.

Light rejoicing seemed called for, but what? Food, drink, sex; nothing appealed, and to tell the truth, nothing was readily available. He had just moved into this rinky-dink – his mother’s word – apartment on Grosvenor, no furniture, not a stick, just a shower, taps and nozzle, not even a plastic shower curtain to pull around him in the morning. The arrival of his divorce papers made him want to give himself up to the air, to get scraped down, pressed flat like an aerodynamic object. Running was all he could think of. In a cardboard carton in the corner of the living room he had the
equipment, the hundred-buck, shoes and the blue-and-white sweats, bought for him by Suzanne – that’s the ironic bit, the kicker – their last Christmas together, and never worn. Well, he hadn’t been ready then. Now he was.

That’s how the Saturday-morning runs got launched.

He hates every minute of it. He stamps along saying words like “fuck,” “shit,” “fart,” “cunt,” all the sputtered grotesques of the language, and it does help, it gives him strength. It’s April now, one week after Easter, and still pretty nippy. What a climate; why does he stay here? God and Jesus only know. Grit blows straight into his face, in his eyes and mouth and up his nose. A walloping old guy passes him, bald, huffing away, but with a not-bad speed on him – Christ!

Now, finally, he’s got a decent pace going. Breathe in, then out, count your breaths, it makes the time turn over. And think of your feet rounding on the pavement, the heel first, bending, rolling up to the toes, keep that image in your mind.

He’s grinning now, like a guy in a beer commercial. Grin, grin, grin. Transparency, bottom of the barrel. Then he’s a gorilla, chump, chump, chump, arms loose and swinging. Screw that. Now he’s part of a Camus fable, a lost soul, loveless. That look in his eyes, that existential light, bores right through you. Think of hot coffee, think of having it over for another week.

Now he’s in the park. Just five more minutes and he can turn around and head back. What is this for, why does he care about his belly fat anyway? He’s going to be forty years old in three days. Whoa there, what about that? The universe is about to shrink around him. God help him. It shames him how little he’s discovered during his time in the world. This isn’t where he meant to be at forty, not at all, running down a gritty sidewalk on a cold windy day with his chest burning and his rear end bouncing.

Running out the park gates now, back down Wellington Crescent, those big dopey houses, it costs a fortune to heat those houses, past the synagogue again, past the spiky hedges, past the new condos, Christ, a wall of condos, you can hardly see the river anymore, they just keep heaving them up, one after the other.

Hang a right at Grosvenor, home again, the brick building, dirty shrubbery, no leaves, no buds even, no elevator either, tiled steps streaked with wet, three small rooms on the third floor, and no one waiting for him.

T
OM’S EX-WIFE
, S
UZANNE
, recently got married again, and this marriage has released their friends from the agony of divided loyalty. Since the wedding, February 19, invitations have favored Tom, who isn’t sure just why, whether old Suze has slipped sideways or upward or down on the social scale, or whether his own solitude is more clearly underlined now that she’s so visibly coupled. Re-coupled, that is.

Her new husband is a divorced man in his unalarming mid-fifties, and rich. His name is Gregor Heilbrun; this name strikes Tom as being phony, either too abbreviated or too ornate, too something, anyhow. Gregor’s got wide, wide shoulders and soft hips and dark blue suit jackets that settle shyly around those hips of his, and he walks with a waggle. A waggle is not the same as a swagger, far from it. Tom, who was invited to attend the small wedding ceremony at Knox Church over on Broadway, a Saturday-afternoon quickie between two other full-scale weddings, had observed the waggling Heilbrun hips with triumph. And noted, too, the way Gregor’s thin uncolored hair fell crudely around his ears. Some men couldn’t take a haircut. Some men couldn’t carry off a blue suit, no matter what it cost. Gregor teaches economics at the University of Winnipeg and has written a book on Marxist theory and the contemporary marketplace, proving that the two things are one and the same, but his driving-around money comes from the family fur business and from gambling. People say he’s lucky, just two trips a year to Vegas and he comes back with his pockets full.

It used to be that Tom’s old friends invited him to Saturday-night dinner parties, but lately the invitations tend to come along for Sundays, when he’s fitted into family brunches, lunches, picnics, or whatever. He doesn’t complain about this, but he notices. Oh boy, he notices. The other thing he’s observed is that he’s
started buying bigger boxes of candy for his hosts and more expensive bottles of wine. He’s moved up a notch in the gift department, he’s not sure just when it happened. He can afford it, and again, he’s not complaining, but it’s as though he’s now obliged to pay his way, to buy his way, even, and he tries not to think about the implications of propitiating chocolate or exotic wine. Furthermore, accepting his friends’ invitations, he knows more or less what he’s letting himself in for: the forlorn clutter and noise of other people’s marriages, afternoons of making himself agreeable, scratching their dogs behind the ears, or a project in the yard, maybe, and almost certainly one or two dribbling babies dropped on his lap. He would like to give his heart to his friends’ children, to be the sort of uncle-type guy they want their kids to have, but he can’t. In fact, he can’t imagine how his friends put up with the whining and the diaper smells and the out-and-out mess of it all.

Today he’s on his way to the Chandlers for one of their traditional waffle lunches. One o’clock, Harvard Avenue, an easy walk, ten minutes at the most from his place on Grosvenor. Already he imagines the maple syrup running on the tablecloth, a narrow river of it, and then spreading into a lake, and then young Chrissie’s fat bratty fingers poking in it, and Liz doing nothing, absolutely nothing, not jumping up for a wet cloth, but just sitting there and smiling, or maybe pressing a paper napkin down on top of it all. Gene, at the head of the table, presiding at the waffle iron, will glow with happiness. A splat of batter will decorate his shirt front. It draws attention.