The Republic of Love (30 page)

She looked up. His face seemed a long way away, like a diagram of a face, and she realized she had no access to his thoughts. “Did you really? You did all that?”

“I explained I was a friend of yours.”

She felt her mouth smiling. “What did they say?”

“Their exact words?”

“Yes.”

“They said to give you a hug and kiss from them.”

“That sounds exactly like what they’d say.”

He moved forward to touch his lips to hers, and she remembers thinking: What will this feel like? What will it mean?

H
E ARRANGED
her two suitcases in the trunk of his car, and then he turned to her and asked, “Is it all right if we go to my place? Or would you like to go straight home?”

“Your place is fine.” This wasn’t what she had imagined, but, then, she hadn’t imagined anything, only tentative shapes, colors, a shadow on the wall.

The sun was blinding along Wellington Crescent, and the tall trees seemed knitted together, tobacco colored, squashed gold, swinging their branches in long easy arcs. As he drove, Tom recited what seemed to Fay a kind of meteorological report, as though she were a stranger in this city, an exalted visitor, and he had been appointed to ease her entry with a battery of relevant facts. “The nights have been getting steadily cooler,” he announced, “but by ten or eleven in the morning, it’s blazing. Today, though, you can feel fall in the air. It’s been dry, so the mosquitoes have kept themselves manageable, but there’re forest fires in the Thompson area. Just look how green the lawns are.” (He said this with pride, as though he’d been waiting to show her this greenness.) “Around eight, nine in the evening the breezes come up. We haven’t had any frost yet, though, but up in Duck River they’ve already had a couple of freeze-ups.”

“Duck River?” She tested the sound of this.

“Have you ever been up there?”

“No.”

“That’s where I was born, where I grew up. My mother still lives there.”

“You grew up in Duck River?”

“Yes.”

“That’s wonderful, oh that’s wonderful.”

“Why?” He said it slowly, drawling it out like an old joke.

“I don’t know.” She meant it, she didn’t know. But the naming of this place sounded to her like the opening line of a very long story that she would soon be hearing, that she would be learning by heart, and that would become before long a part of her own story, a story that will contravene and replace the abstract narratives
she has been constructing for herself these last weeks. “Duck River,” she said to the passing trees, to the traffic light on the corner of Wellington and Grosvenor, and at that moment they drove up beside her front door.

S
HE LOOKED ACROSS
the street at his building. Red brick, three stories, cheaply built, probably in the early sixties, that unlovely period. She’d never really looked closely at it before.

“What about your suitcases?” Tom Avery asked. (She couldn’t yet think of him except by his complete name.) His car keys were in his hand, hooked there.

“Why don’t I” – she paused – “why don’t I leave them for now?”

The foyer of his apartment building was small and dusty, with a rubber mat on the floor. There were six mailboxes mounted on the left-hand wall, and Fay could see that the top one bore the name T. Avery, a smudged, hand-printed label, stuck on with a strip of Scotch tape. She had an impulse to touch it, and was just lifting her arm when an elderly man entered from the street.

The gray wings of his hair flew out sideways. His breath was coming hard, chuffing in an old-man way, and he held his head down, about to brush past them, when Tom stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Duff,” he said quickly. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is Fay McLeod. Fay, this is one of my neighbors, Mr. Duff.”

Mr. Duff blinked. Dull light snagged on the gold of a back tooth. He looked puzzled, and then alarmed, as though he would like to escape – but nevertheless he put out his hand for Fay to shake and mumbled something that sounded approximately like how-do-you-do.

It occurred to Fay that this was an occasion, a ceremony with something particularly spacious and kind about it. “I’m very happy to meet you,” she said, and smiled at Mr. Duff, who looked stunned, off balance, his mouthful of ivory teeth catching the light so that the moment became radiant.

T
HERE WAS A KITCHEN
, a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Everything was clean. The smell of Lemon Pledge pierced her to the heart. From the bedroom window she could look out and see the front door of her condominium, the tub of begonias to one side and high above it the small stained-glass window that was her kitchen. Her watch was still on Paris time, but she calculated that it must be about noon. Noon – the thought of this unlikely hour wrung from her an involuntary cry. Down below, on what looked suddenly like a foreign street, a young woman was pushing a stroller, and Fay could see the pale blue roundness of the child’s bonnet and hear the wheels, in need of oil, squeaking faintly at every revolution. She could hear birds singing, too, or rather crying out their longings, and, from somewhere not far away, a truck shifting gears.

H
E TOOK OFF
all her clothes, slowly, taking his time, not saying a word. First her hopelessly crushed linen jacket, with an ivory cameo pinned to its collar, next her blouse, then her skirt, with its side opening, then her underthings, one at a time, and folded all these clothes carefully and placed them on a small straight-backed chair that stood against the wall. It surprised Fay, thinking about it later, how passive she’d been, like a large solemn child, and how her whole body seemed to be smiling at this absurdity.

He took his own clothes off next, and then they lay down together on the bedspread, which was not really a bedspread but a kind of light summer blanket in a dark shade of blue.

S
O THIS
is what it feels like. To be coming awake. To be burning, her skin, her mouth, his hand against her burning back, trembling slightly, but a fine tremor that seemed almost electric. And grazing her knees and thighs. Come, come, she wanted to cry, meaning – come closer, closer.

She placed her hands at the back of his head, then drew them down along his shoulders, reading him as though she were sightless, memorizing his skin, with its alternate regions of texture and
tenderness, his sides, sloping smoothly around the cushioned ribs – she fixed everything in her mind. Her breath rose and fell. So this was what it was like. To open her body completely and to feel another’s opening in response. She felt all his loneliness coming toward her. This was how it happened.

For once, to lay ourselves bare.

She heard him moaning her name over and over, and heard herself, too, trying out his, gathering in the resonance of that single syllable. Tom. It formed a portion of her exhaled breath and like a word in a classical language grew instantly solid and unbreakable and seemed to cantilever at the top of her consciousness. Her arms, her legs, felt transparent, fluid.

She did not say at that moment, “I love you.”

It was true she had spelled it out on a French fax machine a few days earlier and rehearsed it inside her head a hundred times, but this was different. It seemed to her that to pronounce the word “love” aloud would mean the beginning of the need to earn it.

“W
E’RE ALL SEXUAL CREATURES, EVERY LAST ONE OF US,” SAID
P
ATSY
MacArthur some months ago, leading a workshop called Sex for Singles at the Fort Rouge Center, “and our sexual appetites need to be listened to if good mental health is to be maintained. Keep your condoms handy, by all means, but be ready when opportunity knocks. And remember, failing opportunity, there’s always masturbation. Which I’ll be talking about in depth next week. Plus other alternatives.” Tom had listened, but he knew there was nothing sadder or more saddening on earth than the spectre of loveless sex.

This was not a fashionable belief – he could imagine Patsy snorting out her scorn – and not even a popular belief, yet he knows it’s true. He’s known for – how long? – eight, nine months, ever since his Club Excelsior holiday in San Diego last December, a time of excess and failure, of unrestrained sweats and grunts with (one night) an Oregon secretary (no names exchanged on either side) who barked harsh words of self-hatred into his ears
and then asked him to perform a bizarre act with a toothbrush, saying it was the only thing that turned her on. And another woman, what was her name? She had possessed a flat nasal sporty little laugh. She said she thought Winnipeg sounded like the name of a board game, thought being a disc jockey must be a gas, and told Tom there were more cards in the deck than he seemed willing to shuffle – this last she did not explain but attempted to demonstrate while sitting astride his chest.

After that there had been at least two (three?) other moments of brief hectic release followed by hours of recovery, of blisters on the inside of his mouth (frightening), dry-tongued confusion, and the intermittent terror of having forgotten his own name. Love on the loose, on the lam, the horny, porny love of the dead.

At the end of ten days he had jammed his things into his sports bag – balled-up cotton shirts, a swimsuit still damp from a post-coital dip, and a jumble of brightly colored Jockey shorts, purchased back home in frozen Winnipeg with seduction in mind and now soiled with his own body juices – and grabbed a taxi out to the airport.

He sat panting in the back seat, looking out at the vast sunless city streets. An immense disappointment seemed to be waiting for him, and heartbreak.

The taxi driver had a fat, breadlike back of the neck and was full of chat. About a son just starting out in the construction business. A daughter at Berkeley (“one of your brainy types”). And a wife who taught yoga three days a week at the Y and had the figure of a twenty-year-old. He spoke of them proudly, with ease. He was, Tom saw clearly, a man who lived simply, who kept a clean smoke-free cab and brought home the bacon and was met at the door by the wife with the body of a twenty-year-old girl who pressed ravishing kisses on his thick white neck and who, in the jagged peaks of her ever-renewable ecstasy, cried out his given name, which was … what?

Tom leaned forward in the cab and peered at the driver’s identification card, at the small darkishly ruddy head-and-shoulders photo, and read the words: Leroy Gower. It entered his brain
with a quick little sorrowful arrow, Leroy Gower, and stayed there. Leroy Gower, Leroy Gower. The name of a happy man.

H
E AND
F
AY
that first day lay down together on his bed, on the cool clean blue blanket, lying on their sides facing each other. He took her face in his hands. It was a hot day. A fly buzzed against the wall. It was around noon, he guessed. The window was open, and the greenness of trees cut by slivers of sun filled up the frame. He became aware of the scent of her skin, which was mild, faintly dusty. His fingers reached out and touched the contour of her hips, the lovely long trench of her spine, apprehended the oval concave dip at the small of her back. Her face was pale – her last week in Europe, she had explained in a rushing voice, had been filled with rainy days – and across this paleness was spread a sheet of straight dark hair, a strand of which he wrapped around his finger and tasted on his tongue. “You’re home,” he said to her at the airport, and now, feeling shy and happy, he said it again – “You’re home” – and again heard her muffled yes, and felt her mouth opening on his.

Once, years ago, in the first flush of his first marriage, Sheila had locked her legs around him, her short muscular volleyball-player’s legs encircling his naked body, and he had felt one of his ribs give way. The pain had been sudden and hideous. He had gone the next day to the Winnipeg clinic to be X-rayed and was told he had a hairline fracture. Nothing much could be done. He was given a packet of painkillers and told to take it easy for a few weeks. The rib cage was exceedingly fragile, the X-ray technician said – you could break a rib just coughing or laughing too hard.

Sheila had not reacted with commiseration or guilt, not Sheila. No, she had crowed in a kind of mirthful triumph, had bitten her lower lip, teased him, made sly jokes about Adam’s rib, about the general frailty of men. He had held himself carefully away from her, feeling himself grow stiff and vulnerable. It had lasted for days, months. It became a habit.

“Our bodies are made of Stardust,” said Tom’s good friend Jeff Waring, who is a physicist by profession. This was at a dinner
party a year or so ago at the Warings’ long polished table, lit on this particular night by a circle of thick blue candles. The assembled guests had been charmed but skeptical. “It’s true,” Jeff persisted. “Our atoms are part of the Big Bang, our blood, our bones, all of us, just cosmic matter. Stardust.”

“Fay, Fay,” Tom said into the darkness of Fay McLeod’s hair, and felt his head fill up with images of shooting meteors and white light.

T
HAT FIRST DAY
they slept and woke. Toward the end of the afternoon he got out of bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen, bringing back twin glasses of orange juice and handing one to her with both his hands.

“This is,” she said, lying back on the pillow and sipping, “all very strange.”

Strange, yes. He felt filled to the brim, yet starved.

He loved her long thin flexed arms, their rangy look of bareness against the blue blanket, but still he searched her body, wanting to guard some of his early apprehension, wanting to hoard it. Why? As a reference point or because he needed to store it up against some future disappointment? He sat down on the side of the bed as if to displace the strangeness with the volume of his body. “Maybe we should do something ordinary,” he said.

She smiled. The smile was tender, shy, full of trust. “What do you ordinarily do about this time of day?” she asked.

“Usually,” he told her, “I have a shower and then I walk over to the A & W on Osborne and have a burger.”