The Republic of Love (44 page)

She became aware that the bedroom was overheated and airless, but it was too cold a night to open a window.

She remembered a nature program she’d seen recently on TV in which the life cycle of a lungfish had been described. The lung-fish was a miracle of adaptation, an ugly earth-colored creature capable of surviving long periods of drought. During times when there was no water to be had, it buried itself in mud and slept, sometimes for as long as two years. By lowering its heart rate and blood pressure, it managed to stay alive but to feel nothing.

She lay back stiffly on the bare mattress and wondered if it was too early to go to bed and whether she would be able to sleep.

She wished she could run through the dark streets crying, doing nothing to hold back her spilling tears. But the streets were choked with deep rutted snow tonight, and the wind was excruciatingly cold.

She wondered if Tom was at home – across the street, the third floor, right this minute. Sitting in a room, the kitchen, perhaps, or the bedroom – reading a newspaper, watching television, making himself some kind of meal.

“I can’t bear this,” she said, bringing her hands up to her mouth like a kind of cup.

A
LMOST EVERY DAY
she’s spoken to her father. They talk on the telephone, or else Fay takes a bus or a taxi to his furnished apartment. It seems to her that if she can only keep talking to him she will be able to bring about some kind of reversal.

Surprisingly, she’s grown accustomed to the sight of the dim
little living room and the brown lumpish furniture, and accustomed to the sight of her father, too, relaxed in an armchair, one leg crossed over the other, his spectacles balanced in his hand.

They both try hard to discuss normal things. Today, a Sunday afternoon, they talk about the weather forecast – a week of bitter cold – and the fact that “bitter” seems a curious word for a meteorologist to use, a word that is oddly poetic and imprecise and also endearing. They talk about a recent by-election, a swerve to the right, and about the problem of noise from overhead aircraft.

Today he tells her: “I’m glad you’ve moved back to your apartment, Fay. Even though you may find it difficult at first, being on your own.”

And what about you? she wants to ask. How are you finding it, being alone?

He’s explained to her over and over, and to Clyde and Bibbi, too, just why he had to leave home, that his long peaceful marriage had somehow overnourished him. He couldn’t breathe. He felt watched, insulated, incapacitated.

Fay finds all this baffling. Love is love. Her mother’s only transgression, as far as she can see, is to have loved him deeply.

“
Too
deeply,” Bibbi said to her a week ago. “Too richly. Too much.” Her words had the force of an announcement. “You remember, Fay, when I was nineteen and ran away from home. It wasn’t freedom I wanted – that’s what everyone thought. Or drugs or sex or craziness or any of those things. I had to get away from all that love. That storm of love, it never let up. You and Clyde had left home by then, and I was in the middle of it. It was like a terrifying magnetic field, it kept pulling me in closer and closer. I knew I was hurting everyone by running away, but I had to. I would have died otherwise.”

I
T TOOK MORE
than an hour for Fay to open her accumulated mail. There were the usual bills: telephone, electricity, Visa, and also a handful of invoices for such items as wedding invitations and for the gold wedding band she had picked out for Tom, a ring which had been sent away for engraving and was now ready to be picked
up from the jeweler’s. There was an invitation from the Salvation Army to contribute to their Christmas drive. And a reminder from the Handel Chorale about the final rehearsal schedule and the Christmas concert itself. There was a painful clutch of little notes from friends, notes meant to console, to offer hope for the future, to pledge assurance of friendship and understanding, and especially,
especially,
to bridge the awkwardness that accrues around arrangements that have been mysteriously capsized.

Finally, there was a brisk announcement on a red printed card.

Fritzi Sweet and Peter Knightly
are Pleased to Announce
their Marriage
which Took Place
at a Family Ceremony
on November Twenty-Third
NO GIFTS PLEASE

O
N
T
UESDAY
, when Fay finally goes back to the folklore center after an absence of one month, Peter Knightly is the first person she runs into. “Congratulations,” she says. The brightness of her voice seems to strike shock waves off the corridor walls.

He looks embarrassed. “I’m so sorry, Fay. About you and Avery calling it off.”

Avery!

Shut up, shut up, why don’t you.

She is dismayed by how much she hates Peter Knightly at this moment.

No gifts please.

The arrogance.

She has a sheaf of papers in one hand, and in the other her key ring. She wonders what would happen if she raked the keys across his face, how much damage she could do.

She manages a faint smile and gestures vaguely, desperately, in the direction of her office, where a thousand pressing details
await her attention: reports, offprints, another enormous pile of mail to open. “I think I’d better …”

“Of course,” he nods.

A grotesque nod. Almost – she can hardly believe this – almost a
bow.
An absurd, pitying, gentleman’s bow.
Oh, God, God.

She sits at her desk for a minute, panting. What next, what will she do next?

She picks up a thin envelope and slices it open with a paper knife.

So! She will be going to Chicago, taking her slides along and attempting to persuade a roomful of people that the mermaid myth is at once private and collective, born of sexual longing and a need for solace, or possibly hatched from the residue of racial memory.
Think of it!
In the mythic system the mermaid has specific gravity, even though its legends wobble with beguiling ambiguity.

She will actually do this. (Six months is not far off.) She can already picture herself (new dress? dark green? summer jewelry?) ascending the three or four steps to the platform, arranging her notes on the lectern, clearing her throat, glancing at her watch. A serious professional woman, a little thin, perhaps, but with such a disarming smile, delightful presentation, really, though she’s maybe a little defensive during the question period, almost sharp, you might say. A woman who’s made her choices, quite possibly one of those women who avoid love out of a fear of its reversals … or perhaps … perhaps …

This is what she’ll become. A tourist in her own life. Well, she’s going to have to learn a few things – such as how to blow
with calm ordinary breath on the happiness of others or else risk being thought ungenerous. Possibly she’ll decide to cultivate a leaner and lighter set of responses, nursing at the same time (but slyly) a delectation in the brokenness of friends, collecting stories of divorce and breakdown and deformity and illness. Probably she’ll begin to think of her body as a betrayer and resolutely refuse to imagine the shape of the future.

Day by day, that’s the way to go. Keeping herself alive on the air of conjecture, scornful of the happy/sad balance sheet of the young, eating off the edge of a table and lying down in her bed at night, rehearsing her anger, counting up her enemies, waiting for the blessing of recovery, knowing it will come.

T
HE WORST MOMENT
of the day is this moment, six o’clock, when she puts her key in her own front door and thinks about what lies on the other side.

What lies on the other side is about to jump out at her. Her feet hurt, she’s exhausted. All the way home on the bus she’s comforted herself with the thought of a peaceful evening, how pleasant, how agreeable – her pretty living room, her refrigerator full of food. But now, turning the key, comes the moment of terror.

She has strategies, of course. Enter humming. Then switch on the radio fast and fill up the air with electronic hubbub. Tell yourself you’ll get used to this, you’ll get so you prefer it this way. Pour a glass of cold white wine. Drink it slowly, thinking: I deserve this after a hard day, this little cushion against stillness.

After ten, twenty minutes she really will feel better. She’ll find something to eat, something quick, and then she’ll go out again – there are all kinds of things to do in the evenings. For one thing, she can’t afford to miss any more rehearsals for the Christmas concert. She might sign up for an aerobics class in the new year. Or possibly a course in conversational Russian. The world is full of possibilities, satisfactions.

It’s only this one agonizing moment in the day – when she turns her key in the lock and pushes open the door.

It’s coming at her, it’s about to pounce. The emptiness flowing toward her like a cloud of gas.

“I’m home,” she announces to the silent walls.

S
HE WENT TO BED
with a new book, but she must have drifted off early.

She dreamed she was walking through shallow water in her bare feet. The water was warm, it was lake water, and she could feel her toes gripping the ribbed sand of a lake bottom. She took a step. The sun fell around her shoulders – it was such a surprise, this sunlight – and she moved out a little deeper. But then something called her back. A loud ringing, scolding voice. It went on and on.

She woke slowly, as though she were rising up through a bubble of air. What was this?

Her doorbell was ringing. She opened her eyes, confused by the blaze of light from the bedside lamp and the digits of the clock radio – Tom’s clock radio. It was 2:45 in the morning.

There must be some mistake, someone looking for another apartment, someone drunk. She pulled on her robe, shivering. She knew better than to open the door at this hour. “Who is it?” she called out loudly, a hoarse squawk.

“It’s Onion,” she heard.

“Onion?”

She slipped back the bolt and opened the door.

Onion was wearing her ancient mink coat. Fay couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t owned this old, bulky coat, though nowadays she wore it only in the most extreme weather. A plaid woolen muffler was wrapped around her head and knotted beneath her chin. Her face was creased, thin, terrifying, and cold. “He’s gone,” she said.

Fay blinked.

“Strom. He’s gone. Just after midnight. He slipped away.”

“Oh, Onion.” Fay put her arms around her and drew her inside; she could feel, under the matted fur, the stiff cracked
animal skins that had hardened and dried, and beneath that Onion’s trembling body.

“I saw your light was on. I couldn’t bear to go home.”

“Of course not.”

“There’s nothing there. Not one thing.”

“I know, I know,” Fay said, rocking her.

“I was holding on to his arm when he died, rubbing it and rubbing it, trying to keep the pulse alive, but of course he didn’t know I was there, he didn’t know anything at the end.”

“Come in and get warm. Let me get you something hot to drink.”

“It was dark, I couldn’t bear – ”

“Onion, you can stay here. I’ll make up a bed – ”

“I couldn’t bear thinking I didn’t belong anywhere, not to anyone.”

“You loved each other.” Fay said this consolingly, letting it roll out of her mouth.

Onion abruptly drew away from her and gave her head a violent shake, in anger or grief, Fay wasn’t sure which. “You’ve made a mistake, Fay,” she said. “I don’t know what’s got into you, why you’ve gone and done what you’ve done, but you’ve made a terrible mistake, and you’ve got to stop it right now. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to admit it to yourself. You’ve got to listen to me for once in your life.”

T
HE LANDING WHEEL OF AN AIRPLANE CAME FALLING OUT OF A CLEAR
blue December sky.

The plane was a DC-4, carrying a light load of drilling equipment up from Grand Forks, and coming in at three degrees for a landing at the municipal airport. It was flying at about seven hundred and fifty feet when the wheel detached itself. The crew – pilot, copilot, and flight engineer, all of whom were interviewed later – claimed they had been unaware that anything was amiss; their instrument panel had registered only that the wheel assembly had been successfully lowered.

A number of witnesses, mostly motorists and midday shoppers, watched the wheel as it fell through the air. This fact Tom Avery found surprising; he would have guessed city dwellers were too habituated to aircraft noise to stop and look up at a passing plane.

One of the witnesses was a nineteen-year-old bank employee named Kimberley Kozak who had just returned from a fast-food
outlet (next door to the bank) with a tray of coffee and sandwiches ordered by her coworkers; it happened to be a few minutes before noon, lunch time. She set the cardboard tray on her desk and dialed the police emergency number, 911. “A wheel just fell off an airplane,” she reported in a calm voice. “Just east of Kenaston Avenue, and south of Portage. I don’t know what kind of plane it is, just a plane, and it looks like it’s about to land.” This, too, Tom found surprising: this cool-headed girl, her quickness, and her instinctive notions of responsibility.

It had been observed at the control tower that
something
had fallen from the plane, but what? Luckily, Ms. Kozak’s call was relayed in the nick of time.

The pilot was radioed: “You’ve lost a wheel.” The runway was quickly foamed, and the plane came down, a little jittery with one side wheel missing, but a decent landing nonetheless. A structural problem in the landing-gear assembly was the reason put forward for the malfunction. Poor maintenance or a design fault? There would undoubtedly be an official investigation.