The Republic of Love (32 page)

“M
Y
G
OD
,” Iris Jaffe marvels, laughing her rich nutty laugh, “love at first sight, it’s hard to believe. Remember, Fay, how we used to have those long moony discussions, the two of us flipped out in your bedroom – is there really such a thing as love at first sight? Infatuation or crushes, maybe, but love, that was something else. We were a couple of very, very conservative kids, now that I think about it. But I’m more and more convinced it’s a matter of fit.
Things fit or they don’t fit, and I’m not talking about cocks and vaginas, either, although that’s a consideration, God knows. I’m talking about, you know, fitting together. I knew right away when I met Mac that we fit. And I was only nineteen, as you know, and so was he, for that matter. Well, everyone said I was too young, and he was Jewish, it was a whole different culture, all that bullshit about his family and my family raising a royal ruckus,
oy,
but I knew it would be okay because we just, well, fit. It’d be nice, of course if we could make babies, that would confirm what I knew right from the beginning, that we belonged together. It was predetermined. In the stars. That’s another thing we used to talk about, remember? Destiny. Oh, my God. Anyway, when’re you going to bring him over? I’m dying to meet him. Mac and I actually stayed up last night and listened to his show, part of it, anyway, till we fell asleep, it’s kind of late for old married folks like us, but look, what about bringing him for lunch on Sunday? Just tell him we want to check him out, we want to give him the old once-over, see how he does on page turning – remember how you told me once you wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t turn the page of a book
mannishly.
You’re going
where
for the weekend?
Duck River?”

T
HERE’S PLENTY
going on at the National Center for Folklore Studies: The new exhibition of Ukrainian toys. The display of early-twentieth-century postcards. Fay’s mermaid colloquium is coming up soon. And there’s lots of buzzing during the coffee breaks, too. Donna Watts, head of the volunteer program, has had her baby, a seven-pound son, Steven Andrew. Hannah Webb has been invited to accept an honorary degree from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Anne Morris is on dialysis and waiting for a kidney, and her husband, Frank, has started drinking again, has been on a month-long bender, in fact. Peter Knightly continues to rent a room in the house of his former wife, Fritzi Sweet, who was tragically widowed last spring, and Fay McLeod is having a torrid love affair with the host of a radio show, a man named Tom Avery.

“I am not having an affair,” Fay told Beverly Miles over coffee, after the others had gone back to their offices. Love affairs were
what movie stars have, or members of the royal family. Love affairs were trashy and temporary. “I’m having,” said Fay, “I’m having … I don’t know what I’m having. A romance, I suppose. What a word! Do you know what my sister-in-law, Sonya, calls romance? She calls it ‘the love that dares not speak its name.’ Romance fiction, those doctor-and-nurse things. It’s lost its meaning, romance – if it ever had any. The romance of history, the romance of travel, the medieval romance, Ottoline Morrell tarting herself up for Bertie Russell. It kills me what people have done to the word ‘romance.’ Because that’s what I’m having. A romance. A fine romance. Why are you laughing, Bev? Surely you believe in the wonder of romance.”

“I think,” Beverly says, “that you’re far too intelligent a woman to be having a romance. Only deeply fluffy people have romances. Besides, wasn’t it you who told me that it was impossible to speak of love in the twentieth century except ironically?”

“Me? Did I say that?”

“You said romantic love was invented in the Middle Ages, and that it was a mere literary device – ”

“I don’t think I actually – ”

“ – and that it would end with our millennium.”

“But I was speaking – ”

“In the abstract. Why not call what you’re having a love affair and be done with it?”

Is it possible to have an intelligent love affair? Fay asks herself the question, not sternly but seriously. She thinks of Peter, of Nelo, of beautiful, distant Willy Gifford. Had she loved them with intelligence?

No, not with intelligence at all, but with blind intuition. She has – she confesses to herself, and with a shameful twinge of sensual pride – only managed in her life to be intelligent about love affairs after they ended.

T
O
R
OBIN
C
UMMERFORD
, Fay says, “Oh, Robin, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry. I certainly didn’t mean to – I didn’t realize you felt so – I know what you said before I went away, yes, I remember,
but – I really am sorry. I’ve been terribly insensitive, I’m afraid – forgive me. I would never have – this is just something that happened, I didn’t plan it, it’s one of those things. But it
is
serious, it certainly is. I think that’s a little unfair of you, Robin. I think you’re being more than a little judgmental. I never once, it never occurred to me that – oh, for heaven’s sake, no. No, I don’t think it would be a good idea, we’d just be embarrassed and awkward and mean-hearted and, and I can’t honestly think of anything more I can say on the subject, I’m sorry.”

T
OM
A
VERY’S MOTHER
, dressed in a pink-and-white checked pant-suit with a cardigan thrown over the shoulder to ward off the morning chill, says to Fay, “Now you be sure to come again, you don’t have to let us know ahead of time or anything like that, just come. It’s been a real ball all weekend, I just wish you kids didn’t have to hit the road so soon, but I know how it is. It’s a treat seeing Tom looking so – well, it’s funny, but I always knew he’d find the right girl. Look at me, it took me till I was fifty-two years of age to settle down. To find the right person, Mike. There’s someone cut out for everyone, a Mr. Right. Or a Ms. Right, ha. Oh, he’s had his ups and downs, Tom, but I guess you know all about that – haven’t we all? I always knew he’d find the right – and I was saying to him just now, when he was drying the breakfast dishes, I said, ‘Listen, honey, this girl’s a real sweetheart, don’t let this one get away on you.’”

T
OM HAS MOVED IN WITH
F
AY
.

He sleeps now on the right side of her queen-sized bed (in the same space where Peter Knightly once slept, but he tries to block out this thought) on sheets of ivory-colored cotton. His dozen shirts and half-dozen jackets hang in the left side of Fay’s double closet, his socks are bunched in the bottom drawer of an old oak dresser that Fay bought, she tells him, at a garage sale ten years ago, when she was twenty-five, when she was strapped for cash, in need of furniture, and ready to tackle with sandpaper and varnish whatever she could salvage. (Fay at twenty-five; his breath hardens in his windpipe when he thinks of it.)

They are living together, yes, but she has her routines and he has his. She wakes at 6:45, shutting off her alarm clock, one arm reaching out blindly, quickly so as not to wake him, but he insists on getting up anyway, pouring orange juice, making coffee, and watching from the doorway as she dresses. As she brushes her
hair. As she drops slices of bread into the toaster. As she holds a cup up to her lips. He doesn’t want to waste any of this.

After she leaves for work he can sleep for another four or five hours, and by 5:30 she’ll be home again, coming through the door with a bag of groceries and something of the day’s accumulated industry and hum about her. He loves this buzz. He even loves the groceries she brings, fragrant bread, cartons of eggs, milk, vegetables in primary colors and shapes, rounded and firm under their skins. A red pepper. A head of cauliflower. Stooping, bending at the knee, she stows them quickly away in that lower drawer of the refrigerator, the crisper. She understands about crispers, she understands groceries; this knowledge seems wonderful to Tom.

The next few hours are the hours they live. They have until 11:30, which is when Tom leaves for CHOL. After that Fay goes to sleep, or tries to. Shortly after 4:00 a.m., he’s home again, lying beside her in the dark, his legs sliding against hers.

He thinks about what a strange shuttle of hours they inhabit and cancel, and how the whole construct of day and night feels newly made, its edges and corners sharpened and its wide white livable space reorganized and made porous. He prizes it, every minute, including the opaque intensities of their late-night conversations, which he spends his days retracing. He’s waited all his life for time like this.

Now and then he glances across the street at his old apartment building, whose textured brick cornice and blindly curtained windows tell him to get busy – to give notice, cancel his lease, or, at the very least, clear out his cupboards and closets. But the days go by, light as helium. It’s a beautiful golden dusty September.

T
OM DESCRIBES
for Fay’s amusement – and so she will comprehend something of his efforts to save himself – his long desperate immersion in the Newly Single Club. He does a merciless imitation of Patsy MacArthur, limns the club’s varied membership (not excluding the piteous, stricken Elizabeth Joll), and elucidates the
many “workshops” and “strategies” he has undergone. At last, at last, he tells Fay, he feels liberated from the panic and capsized faith of the single life and the ghastly penance of those Friday nights.

Fay, in turn, explains about
her
Friday nights, about the Handel Chorale rehearsals that occupy the hours between seven and nine. “We actually need baritones,” she tells him. “Why don’t you audition?”

“Me? I can’t sing a note.”

She refuses to believe this. “That’s impossible. I mean, you’re in the music business. I’m sure you can sing a little.”

Touched, he says, “Completely tone deaf.”

“Sing me something. Sing ‘God Save the Queen.’”

“You don’t want to hear it.”

“I do, go ahead.”

He tries a few bars, then stops. “See what I mean?”

“Mmm, yes.”

He tells her about his Saturday-morning runs and offers to buy her a pair of Nike Air-Strides and give her a few pointers.

“I hate to run,” she says. “I can’t think when I run, with my head bobbing up and down.”

“Do you have to think all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Every single minute? Don’t you ever give your brain a vacation?”

“Never.” Then she stops and thinks, smiling, “Well, almost never.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to try just once?”

“I’m sure. And besides, I usually meet my father on Saturday morning. At Mr. Donut’s. Why don’t you come, too? After your run, I mean.”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“Oh, Tom, it’s not like that. He’s my father. You’ve got to get to know him.”

“So I can ask him for his daughter’s hand?” He says this with elaborate nonchalance, but watches her face.

“Yes.” Laughing a little.

“What if he says no way? What if he thinks a three-times-divorced disc jockey is a pretty bad bargain? Or does he already know? About the divorces, I mean.”

“I thought I’d better tell them right away. So I did.”

“A good idea.” He watches the way her hair picks up spots of light.

“Anyway,” Fay says, “he’s exceedingly tolerant. And he’s a true believer.”

“In what?”

“In love. He believes in love. More than my mother, in a way. At least, I’ve always thought so.”

“Let’s make it soon, then. Let’s get married and start being real people.”

“Real people?”

“I’ve waited all these years, and I don’t want to spend any more time waiting for you.”

“But we are together.”

“I want to stand up in a church and say the words: I, Tom, take thee, Fay.”

“How soon?”

“How about next week?”

“Next week is my parents’ fortieth anniversary, the big party.”

“We could always make it a double ceremony.”

“Be serious.”

“What about November? Not that I’ve ever heard of anyone getting married in November.”

“When were” – she pauses – “your others?” The lightly stressed
others
is something he will have to get used to.

“Do you really want to know stuff like that?”

“I don’t want to, not at all. But I think I ought to.”

“June, the first time around. Then April. Then, let’s see … January.”

“And you think November might be lucky?”

“I do.”

“Then I do, too.”

“I can’t live without you, Fay. I want to marry you. I’m asking. Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

W
HAT A BROAD
and bountiful thing it is to be happy, thinks Tom.

Jogging in the park on Saturday morning, he seems to hold his happiness in his mouth like a lozenge. He knows himself to be favored. The banked chevron-shaped clouds in the east and the blown brown leaves are auspicious signs. His feet land lightly on the path, are nearly noiseless, in fact, and each breath he draws is exactly the right size, filling his chest perfectly, then escaping in blurred, bobbing, vaporous ovals that print themselves on the crackling air. For once nothing seems wasted; his blood sings with the optimum level of oxygen, and the linkages of his body stretch and flex. He thinks of how it felt to run across a field of grass when he was a young boy and, remembering, breaks into a fresh gait.

He imagines, or hears, the words “Tom and Fay” emblazoned on the air, on envelopes, in the mouths of friends, a single word, “Tom-and-Fay,” “Fay-and-Tom.”

He is driven these days to commit extravagant gestures. To each of his three ex-wives he has sent a lavish arrangement of flowers, though he had the sense, in Clair’s case, to make the gift anonymous. He wrote a hearty note of congratulations to Mike Healey, of “The Healey Beat” on CRSM, who is moving to Toronto to host a major network show, and presented his godson, Gary Waring, with an elegant dragon-shaped kite, then took him to Peanut Park for an afternoon of kite flying. He has surrendered at last to the pleadings of a slightly insane local songwriter, Benny Kaner, and agreed to play one of his puzzling, scatological tapes on “Niteline.” For Rosalie Summers, the receptionist at CHOL, he bought a new chemical spray (wrapped and tied with a ribbon) that’s guaranteed to keep the spider mites off her fig tree. He gave Big Bruce a rough, unprecedented half-hug when he bumped into him at the coffee machine. And he’s bought Fay McLeod an antique
opal ring, an engagement ring, a beauty, with a strangely worked filigree setting in pale yellow gold.