The Republic of Love (34 page)

“What about two?” he said.

“Yes, two.”

“I want us to put one of those engagement announcements in the newspaper,” Tom said.

“Really? You do? Why?”

“I want everyone to know.”

“Did you ever – before? In the newspaper, I mean? The other times? With your other – ”

“Never. It never came up. I can’t remember why not.”

“I want to give you a wedding ring. How do you feel about wedding bands?”

“Yes, a wedding ring.”

“Something very plain,” Fay said.

“I want you to sit down and tell me everything there is to know about mermaids,” Tom said.

“You do? Everything?”

“Well, maybe not everything. But something.”

“I want you to stay the way you are.”

“The way I am?”

“Well, all the strange parts about you.”

“Strange?”

“Like the way you come and go in the night.”

“You mean,” he said, making a face, “that’s not normal behavior?”

“Not just that.”

“What else?”

“Hmmm. I’d have to think.”

“Think.”

“Well, the way you duck your head in the shower, that’s one thing, and scratch your scalp, hard. Why do you do that? Like you’re reminding your brain of something important. And I like that you come from Duck River. Duck River! I like to say to people, ‘He’s from Duck River, you know.’ And – now, I admit this is a bit hard to describe, but I like the way your skin stretches across your back.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I love the things you do. What you do to me.”

“I want you.”

“I want you, too.”

“That’s all I want. You.”

S
OMETIMES
F
AY
lies in bed in the dark and listens to “Niteline.”

“Hello out there,” she hears. “This is Tom Avery and this (pause) is ‘Niteline.’ A good, good end of the evening to listeners old and new. I’ll be here to keep you company for the next four hours – a little music and a little talk, and we’ve got a great interview coming up in an hour or so with hometown songwriter Benny Kaner, one of our own, who’s going to bring us up to the minute on what’s humming in the avant-garde pop scene. So stay tuned. And now, how about some Bruce Cockburn to get us into the mood.”

The show picks up a glow, a buzz. Fay, drifting toward sleep
on her bunched pillows, feels the music merge with Tom’s voice, a voice that surprises her by becoming a slidy tenor with pliant honeyed bands of laughter. His loose tensionless melody seems after a while to form a long seamless wall she’s feeling her way along. She melts in and out of consciousness, shifts on her pillows to find a cooler spot. She’s come to understand love’s crippling inability to look at itself but knows with certainty that Tom Avery is her star-spangled man.

“And this, listeners, (pause) is your own Tom Avery, signing off for another session of (pause, voice lowered) ‘Niteline.’”

A matter of minutes and he’ll be here. Twenty minutes at the most. Tiptoeing into the dark bedroom. His bare arm folding back the sheet. His body sliding into bed, next to her, moving his chest up to fit against her back. His breath on her shoulder, light and alert. Oh, she loves it, this having, this being, coming closer and closer now, turning her body to face him. Her rounded-out fullness. Her lover. Tom Avery. Her love.

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE
for us to live outside the culture we’re born into. Our communities claim us from the start, extending a thousand tentacles of possession, and Fay, a reasonable, intelligent woman, has long recognized that reverence for individualism is one of the prime perversions of contemporary society. It is illogical and foolish. Oh, yes. We are bound to each other biologically and socially, intellectually and spiritually, and to abrogate our supporting network is to destroy ourselves.

Yet it troubles her now and then that she is connected, albeit tenuously, with all three of Tom’s ex-wives. Something tribal and primitive about these human links threatens her, offends her sensibility. She wants to weep, thinking of it. She suspects herself of harboring an exaggerated fastidiousness and entertains brief, private fantasies in which she and Tom move to another city, perhaps even another country, where she will not be required, ever, to plan, to adjust, to avoid, to accommodate, to explain, and, worse, much worse, to be endlessly aware of Clair, Suzanne, Sheila.

Clair, Suzanne, Sheila. The wives.

Clair. Clair Howe is the only child of Foxy and Lily Howe, who are old friends of her parents. They are a fat, sweet, sorrowing couple. Lily drinks far too much, as everyone knows, and sinks on social evenings into a dull, kindly, embarrassing reverie. Foxy is clever and has done well in real estate and land development, and they live, along with their crazy daughter, in a large tree-shaded Tudor-style house in Tuxedo Park. Crazy Clair. An apartment has been made for her over the garage. Fay remembers Clair as a child, turning up at birthday parties, a heavy, silent little girl. It was said that something was amiss. She was sent to a school in Toronto for emotionally disturbed children and came home thin. Her parents rarely mention her name, but Fay has always been aware, distantly, vaguely, of intermittent hospitalization, and later a term or two at the University of Winnipeg, where she disrupted classes by shouting. For a time she did volunteer work at the Art Gallery, and people spoke of the wonder of the new stabilizing drugs. There was a brief, unsuccessful marriage. (Ah, yes, now she remembers, yes, of course.) A rumor of shock treatments and their terrible failure. Something about a suicide attempt, perhaps several attempts – Fay has forgotten the details if she ever knew them. She hasn’t seen Clair Howe in years. She hasn’t even thought about her, but now she must.

Suzanne. Sue? Fay never did know her last name. But she recalls the slow-moving girl/woman who stood, or rather lounged, behind the counter at Chimes Bookstore on Osborne Street – thin face, long blond hair hooked behind childish ears, wide waxy hands, a lascivious mouth, greedy, blurred. Yes, you could say she was pretty. This was the person who accepted Fay’s money, placed it in the drawer of the cash register, and, ditheringly, extracted change. The same person who dropped Fay’s purchases, making no comment on what they might be, into one of the slippery, bright Chimes bags – and who at that very moment was married to Tom Avery, well-known radio host, well known at least to a sector of the community, the night people, but certainly not to Fay. Now Suzanne has disappeared from the bookstore. She has remarried,
it seems. To someone rich. Someone called Gregor Heilbrun. The name rings a bell in Fay’s head. Of course! Gregor Heilbrun’s first wife was Lee Heilbrun. Who sings with the Handel Chorale. Or used to, before she moved to Vancouver last year. On and on it goes.

Sheila. Sheila Woodlock. Of course she knows Sheila Woodlock. Sheila is known to a lot of people. A smart woman. Attractive. A tough nut, some say. Possibly a lesbian. She lives with three other women in a house in Linden Woods, and one of these women, Patricia Henney, is Fay’s lawyer, the one who acted on Fay’s behalf when she and Peter Knightly bought their condo on Grosvenor Avenue and who did the paperwork when Fay bought out Peter’s share some months ago. All this is bad enough, but there’s more, much more. Sheila Woodlock, after she stopped being Sheila Avery, married Sammy Sweet, who later married Fritzi Knightly, who was formerly married to Peter Knightly, with whom Fay lived for three years and whose body she knows intimately, every inch, every crease.

This Tom-Sheila-Sammy-Fritzi-Peter-Fay merry-go-round dismays her when she stops to think about it, these unspooled connections. And she can’t help thinking about it. She contrasts the tidy faithfulness of her parents’ lives with her own disordered history, which is coated with an impure sheen, which is obscene and, yes, incestuous. A malevolent circle with an oily scent of the profane.

What had Tom’s three marriages meant? Did they represent a helpless reaching out for happiness, or an aptitude for error? (Sloppiness?) From the corner of her eye she glimpses danger, some connection between herself and Tom momentarily loosened.

But this is nonsense, and she knows it. She’s lived in this city all her life and is part of the human weave. What does she expect? To remain untouched? What childishness. What arrogance!

There’s even something faintly comic about the situation. It all depends on the angle of vision. She ought to laugh or recycle Tom’s marital history into a droll story. Shrugging her shoulders,
holding up her hands –
c’est la vie.
Marveling at modern life’s lumpish, grumpish ironies, the way they reach out and touch every last one of us.

F
AY FINDS HERSELF
waiting for her mother to say something about Tom. Such as: What an interesting man he is! Aren’t you glad you waited? His sense of humor is delicious. And he’s attractive, but it’s not the kind of attractiveness that goes soft and sick, the kind that invites trouble. He’s basically kindhearted. He has a sense of ease about him. Openness. Maturity. Warmth.
I adore him. I can see exactly why you love him.

She says none of these things, and Fay can’t bring herself to ask her what she does think.

Of course, Peggy McLeod is very busy. All summer she’s been working on the final chapters of her book on menopause. Now she’s fretting about titles. She has come up with
The Pause That Puzzles,
which delights her, but which everyone else, her husband, her children, find impossible. “I just can’t think of anything else,” she tells Fay, patting her white hair flat.

Until she was sixty she kept her hair dyed a warm chestnut. The shock of her pure-white head still catches Fay by surprise, though it is beautiful hair, thinly scattered but nevertheless healthy. Today, late on a Monday afternoon, Fay drops in on her way home from work and finds her mother sitting at her desk in the back bedroom that she uses for a study. The day is cool, and she wears a cardigan over her light wool dress, an expensive white cotton cardigan that has perhaps been washed once too often, so that it drags down a fatal quarter inch at the back. She has combed her hair hurriedly today, or perhaps not at all, and a similarly fatal patch of pink scalp shows through at the back. The weak light from the window cruelly outlines the formless knob of her chin. She looks old. She looks tired. Fay wonders if she is happy, but wouldn’t dream of asking.

Just as her mother would never dream of asking her.

H
ER FATHER
was more open.

“You seem,” he told her, “like another person.”

“How?” she asked, knowing she was being childishly greedy for attention, but not caring, “Tell me what you think.”

“Well, it’s clear you’re happy. You radiate with happiness. This room, any room you happen to be in, is full of it.”

Touched but impatient, she said, “What about Tom? What do you think about Tom?”

“I’ve only met him a few times….”

“Come on.”

“He’s … what can I say? He’s a man in love.”

“What an expression – ‘in love.’ ”

“People these days like to pretend that being in love is a virus.”

“I’ve noticed, especially at our age.”

“Your age? What do you mean, your age?”

“ ‘In love’ is high-school stuff.”

“You want me to quarrel with that notion?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think it’s a matter of age at all. I’ve never thought that. Your Uncle Arthur. Your Aunt Velma.”

“I can never believe – ”

“You can’t believe it because you never knew them when their bodies weren’t withered and old.”

“I can’t imagine them – ”

“ – rapturously joined?”

“Well, no.” She felt unaccountably embarrassed.

“I’m not sure that was part of it. It was something else. A sort of ongoing courtship. Something edgy and polite about the way they treated each other, as though they were only pretending to be normal so the rest of us wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Or too envious. As a young boy I used to find myself staring at them. You know, for all we talk and sing and carry on about being in love, I think it’s a rather rare condition.”

“How rare?” she heard herself asking. What was it she wanted him to say?

“Rare,” was what he answered, “extremely rare,” and she felt he had reached out and blessed her.

A
N ANONYMOUS DONOR
has presented the National Center for Folklore Studies with a small bus which will be used to transport schoolchildren and senior citizens and other interested groups to and from exhibitions, and one bright cold Wednesday morning Fay attended a bus-blessing ceremony. A priest, a rabbi, and a United Church minister were present, along with the staff of the center, the members of its board, and a few representatives from the press. Hannah Webb, the sleeves of her Burberry flapping in a stiff wind, made a short, graceful speech in which she explained how vehicles such as ships and trains are traditionally launched with praise and invocation. Why not a bus? Why not indeed! Blessings were then distributed: to the generous donor, to the appointed driver (Art Frayne), to the prospective passengers and their bodily safety, to the tires, engine, and frame of the cheeky little blue bus itself – blessings, acknowledgment, approbation, sanction.

Blessing, Fay thought later, is what she would like from Onion. From Onion, of all people. Her family will always embrace her choices, and her friends will credit her with good sense, even when she hasn’t earned it. But Onion – out of a different kind of love, a love made of sinew and resolve – will guard her against true harm; Fay’s always known that.
Tell me it’s all right,
she wants to say to Onion.

It’s not approval she wants; the wish for approval strikes her as inappropriate. She wants only Onion’s blessing.

She’s tried to broach the subject from a number of different directions. She’s been bold about it, stopping herself just short of a direct plea for – for what? For consent? For permission? For recognition, at the very least. A word or two.

Never mind about Onion, her father told her. Onion has her own concerns these days.

That much was true. Onion spends almost all her time at Strom’s bedside. She sits erect in the slippery vinyl visitor’s chair, a book open on her lap, reading or not reading, or helping with
Strom’s medication, with his meals. She adjusts his earphones so that his favorite recorded music flows through to him hour after hour. She watches his face for a flicker of an eyelid, for any minute sign of recognition. Often she spends the night with him, too, settling herself stiffly on a portable bed next to his.