The Republic of Love (43 page)

“Right now.”

“I just want you to understand – ”

“Good-bye.”

“L
OOK,
T
OM
,” Ted Woloschuk said on Sunday night, or rather four o’clock on Monday morning, after “Niteline” went off the air. “How ’bout giving me a minute or two before you head off home. I just want to say I appreciate you telling me what you did before airtime, for letting me know what’s happened and all. It’s plain as anything that you’re going through a real bad time. I don’t know how you did it tonight, carrying on with the show. You did great. It was a great show. This is just, just a terrible thing. All your plans, everything, down the drain. Ahhhh! I always try to be the optimist, sometimes it’s hard, but I try, and what I want to say is – I’ve been turning this over in my head all night long – I want to say to you that maybe it’s for the best. Who knows, maybe some things aren’t
meant to be, maybe they aren’t supposed to work out, if you know what I mean. Better to find out now than, say, two, three years down the road, eh? You know what folks say about rushing into things, it’s easy enough tying the knot but not so easy getting it untied. Well, you know that. But listen, Tom, you can’t let this get to you. Because it can. It can get a person depressed. People can stew about things and get themselves into real trouble. Maeve and me, we’re worried sick right now about our boy Patrick, he’s been going out with a particular girl, all last spring and summer, right up to the end of October, and all of a sudden it comes to nothing, we don’t know the whole scoop, he won’t say much, he’s always been a quiet kind of kid, but ever since it happened he comes home for supper and just lays around the house like he’s sick. It’s like he hasn’t got any energy in him anymore, and here’s a bright young kid with his whole future ahead of him. We don’t know what to do. Maeve wanted to phone up this girl, her name is Joan, she’s a real nice girl, and smart as a whip. Maeve thought she could maybe talk to her, try to tell her how serious and bad this is for Patrick, but we can’t do that, that would be like stepping in where we’ve got no business, it’s like our hands are tied. We even thought of maybe phoning one of those crisis lines. Maeve’s going crazy with worry. Patrick just lays there on the couch, not saying a word to anyone, just staring at the TV but not seeing a thing. It’s like he’s practicing to die, Maeve says.”

I
T’S SAID THAT
dreams come out of a darker, windier place than we like to acknowledge.

One night, soon after Fay’s phone call, Tom dreams he’s in a strange pink room with soft fleshlike walls. There are no windows or doors, just four pale trembling walls that heave in and out, mimicking his own breathing body. After a while the floor, too, begins to soften and heave, and he tries hard to keep his balance, but can’t. He scrambles like a soft-shoe artist to stay upright, to avoid having to touch the undulating surfaces. As if to explain his clumsiness, he points to his bare feet – for some reason he has
misplaced his shoes and socks – and insists, in a stagy, grossly amplified radio voice, that none of this is his fault, that he didn’t come here by choice.

In the morning he wakes late with a dry mouth. He stumbles into the bathroom and stands before the mirror, speaking to his dwindled self. So, he says in a rough voice, what did you expect?

His face looks like a chestnut’s split casing. Avid. Unhealthy.

The stickiness of pop lyrics has led him astray. Falling in love. Falling. Fallen. (Grow up.)

He thinks about going for a walk and glances out the bathroom window. The morning is beautiful, cold, still. Snow covers Grosvenor Avenue, a perfect fresh wafer of white extending as far as he can see, wonderfully masking the neighborhood trees and hedges and roofs. Overhead the sky is a hard flat blue. He remembers a local artist he interviewed on the show a couple of years back who complained that she had a tough time selling her prairie landscapes. It seemed people wanted a few fluffy clouds in their skies. They wanted gradations of color, subtlety. They thought she was faking it with her clear hard-blue paint.

He wonders whatever happened to his downstairs neighbor, Mr. Duff – Mr. Duff with his soft meaty gums and his chestful of phlegm.

He decides, finally, against going for a walk. He remembers that he’s left his good outdoor boots in Fay’s apartment; he has another, older pair, but he’s not sure where they are – probably in the back of his hall closet covered with dust balls. He’ll creep back into bed instead, pull up the covers.

But he’s frightened of falling back into his dream again, those pink pulsing corrosive walls.

J
EFF
W
ARING
phones Tom and says in a voice that is stiff with kindness and tact: “Tom? Jeff here. Just wanted to touch base. We also wanted to let you know we were, uh, notified. About your plans. The
change
of plans, I should say. Fay’s sister phoned us, at least I think it was her sister. Jen and I got to thinking, well, we just hope things work out. One way or another. Not a bad idea,
rethinking the situation. More people should do it, that’s what Jen says, before they rush into things. Jen says to tell you she’ll give you a call in a couple of days, see if we can get together, maybe take in a hockey game on the weekend. How does that sound?”

Rethinking the situation.
A useful phrase. A saving phrase, and he’s someone who needs saving.

He adopts it as his own. “We’re rethinking the situation,” he tells the people who phone, the people at work, the people he runs into. He even says it to himself, eyeballing himself in the mirror.
Hi there, buddy, I understand you’re rethinking the situation.

Right.

B
IG
B
RUCE
says: “Take a vacation. You ever been across the pond? Now’s the time. The French franc’s weak right now, sterling too. I’d rather head off for the Caribbean myself, one goddamned cathedral’s just like the next one as far as I’m concerned, but it’d do you good to get away, and I mean
away.
Take a couple of weeks, three weeks, recharge the batteries. Lenny’ll come in and do the show for us, give yourself a break. You’re doing a great job, the ratings are terrific, but this is just a radio show, fella, you don’t have to nail yourself to the cross.”

“Are you okay, Tom?” Liz Chandler asks. “Listen, I don’t want to interfere or anything, there’s nothing worse than someone jumping into someone else’s private matters, but, well, I guess just about everybody knows that the McLeods have split up, Fay’s parents I’m talking about. Marriage! God, it’s scary. Gene and I’ve been married eight years now, and there’ve been plenty of scary times, especially right after Chrissie was born. It was rocky for a while there, maybe you noticed, I felt I was being pulled in three different directions. And listen, don’t worry about the wedding present – it’s a waffle iron, why don’t you just keep it, it might come in useful. I just hope you’re okay, we both do.”

“We were very sorry to hear the news,” said Simon Birrell, and then he said, “These things happen and they seem pretty catastrophic at the time, and then they blow over before you know it.”

Betty Avery phoned and said, “You could have knocked me for a loop. Mike, too, we’re just stumbling around here like a couple a zombies. But then, as I said to Mike, people get cold feet, I know that, and I don’t blame you for a minute, wanting to be careful. I mean, you’ve had some bad luck and you want to be sure what you’re diving into. Give it a few months, take your time. Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t, but just you remember there’re plenty of other gals out there who’re dying to settle down and start a family. How about coming home for a few days, the highway’s pretty good right now, the plows went right through after that snowfall we had. You’ve got some vacation time coming, you could stay right through Christmas, lots of your old friends’ll be back, a few of them, anyways. At least think about it. And listen, don’t waste your time being gloomy, that’s one thing I’ve learned, life’s too darned short to sit around being gloomy and glum.”

Sheila (formerly Sheila Avery, then Sheila Sweet, now back to being Sheila Woodlock) said: “Christ, Tom, you must be rock bottom. Oh, Christ, I know what you’re going through. When Sammy left me for Fritzi I thought I’d – forget it, I didn’t phone to dump a bunch of ancient history on your head, and besides, poor old Sammy’s gone to his reward, anyway. I phoned because I’ve been thinking about you all day, having to go through this … this anguish, not to mention plain old-fashioned embarrassment. You don’t deserve this. You were ripe for things to work out for a change. Maybe they still will, who knows. I gather the McLeods are in a family mess. Well, who isn’t. Would you like me to come by? We could sit and talk. To be honest, I don’t think you should be alone. I mean that. I remember when Sammy left, I needed someone to hang on to. We could sort of hang on to each other, Tom, we’re old hands at that. Anyway, if you change your mind, give me a call. You know me, I’ll do whatever I can.”

Fay said (at the end of a long letter): “I want you to remember, darling Tom, that none of this has anything to do with you – you’re a fine, wonderful, loving man who has given me more happiness than my heart can hold. The problem is with me. I love you dearly – I think you know that – but I can’t make this next step.
Other people seem able to do it, but I can’t. I can’t make promises, and for some reason which I don’t understand, I can’t bring myself to accept them, either. Please forgive me and please try to understand.”

D
OES HE WANT
to understand her? What does it mean to be understood, anyway? To be eaten alive? He remembers a marriage counselor he and Suzanne once visited in their last desperate days, a sharp-jawed, unsmiling woman who laid the blame for his chaotic marital life squarely on his twenty-seven mothers. (His prized infancy, shot down by “understanding.”)

He doesn’t want to walk around for the rest of his life with a damaged air, with parts of him missing or mutilated. On the whole, he thinks, understanding has been highly overrated. He’d rather hang in there with his terrible, fumbled incomprehension.

This is what he thinks as he goes about his Christmas shopping. The downtown stores are filled with bustling, frowning, preoccupied shoppers. They push against him with their shoulders and wrapped parcels, knowing nothing about him, who he is, what he’s feeling. Carols boom through overhead speakers.
Joy to the World.
A temporary anesthetic. He has a gift list in his hand. He spends lavishly this year, his mother, Mike, his friends, the gang down at the station. He has no idea why. He doesn’t understand himself, he doesn’t understand anything. Understanding is the last thing on his mind.

“I
’M THINKING,”
P
EGGY
M
C
L
EOD SAID TO HER DAUGHTER
F
AY OVER
breakfast, “of maybe going back to work after the weekend.”

“To work? To your office?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you’re ready for that?” Fay asked carefully.

Her mother was sipping orange juice and staring into her glass as if mesmerized by its floating particles of pulp. “I phoned in yesterday. The backlog’s already enormous.”

“But Dr. Suzlov was going to look after your patients for the time being.”

“I know, I know, and she’s been wonderful, but there are some cases you can’t hand over to someone else.”

“Do you really think – ”

“I think I might be a lot better off if I got out of this house every day and filled up my hours with something useful. With something.”

“Well…” Fay felt her voice falling down a steep slope.

“And I think you should go back, Fay. You’ve been home from the center for almost a month, since the first of November. You can’t know how I’ve appreciated having you here. What a pair we’ve made, a couple of ghosts propping each other up. But your poor mermaids will think you’ve forgotten them.”

Was that a note of merriment she heard in her mother’s voice?

“Your mother’s a regular dynamo,” Muriel Brewmaster had told Fay a few days earlier. “She’ll bounce back.”

A dynamo? Fay had scowled, doubtful. But she’s seen in the last few days how a subtle reordering of strength has taken place, an unconscious, saving shift in the household balance. The chemistry, the mechanics of the conversion elude her, and she senses that these proofs of perception will remain mysterious, despite the fact that they are always on view, part of the domestic scenery; they’re too simple and too obvious to be acknowledged, like certain free-floating truths that are given substance only in emblematic acts or images. Lately her mother’s been going through cupboards, through a new book by P. D. James, through a parcel of legal documents. (A week ago Fay sat in this kitchen and watched her write the words “Have left-rear tire checked” on a scrap of paper, a reminder to herself.)

Small acts, promptings, scratchings at the future – Fay had been startled, but recognized it for what it was: a sign of recovery, the kind of blind step forward that she herself is going to have to make.

“H
OW ARE YOU
doing, Fay?” her friends ask her.

“Okay,” she says, or “Fine,” or “Not bad.”

To herself she announces, I can’t bear this.

On Saturday evening she got into a taxi with a suitcase of clothes and moved back into her Grosvenor Avenue apartment. (It’s time, she said to herself, making a face and feeling a stitch in her throat.) A pile of mail awaited her. A light was burning in the bedroom – she almost jumped at the sight of it. The bed was stripped clean, the curtains pulled shut. She opened the drawers where Tom’s things had been stored and found them bare. His
clothes were gone from his half of the closet, leaving a numbing expanse of whiteness filled with wire hangers. She struck these hangers between her hands like cymbals, setting off a weak jangling crash of music. (“I’ll get used to this,” she announced under her breath.) She thought suddenly of one of his shirts, a finely checked shirt in soft cotton, and the undertow of memory was so strong she had to sit down for a minute on the edge of the bed. If she had that shirt in her hand right now she would press her face into its folds and kiss it.