The Republic of Love (8 page)

Forget what’s in the past, go back to the newspaper.

One of the headlines says, “Buddhists Go on Rampage.” That makes her smile, and she’s pleased that she’s able to sit alone in a room and smile over a trifle. Then she reads another headline, which says, “Iowa Woman Fears Losing Looks; Drowns in Well.”

She says aloud, cherishingly: “The world is full of pathos,” and she is startled by the foreign quality of her voice, erupting, it seems, from some newly discovered vent in her throat, so rich with dignity, so cool and artificial it might have come out of a radio.

F
AY’S BROTHER
, C
LYDE
, and his wife, Sonya, went to Minneapolis for the weekend, and Fay offered to baby-sit.

High up in an upstairs bedroom she reads her nephews, Gordon and Matthew, a bedtime story. The three of them lie sprawled on a bed, a woolen blanket pulled up to their chins. A circle of yellow light from the small shaded Mickey Mouse lamp falls on the book’s pages and across the fluffed heads of the two boys. She feels a wrenching ache of love for them both, their two small heads on her shoulders, the rounded polish of bone and flesh, and a wondrous conjunction of bath soap and soft fur. The story she reads is one of her favorites, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

But it is not a good choice, not at all. Gordon, who is only six, cries when she finishes and pounds her arm and says she’s mean. His face twists into an ideogram of a face, and Fay, putting her head back on the soft pillows, quickly improvises a new ending. She makes the father in the story say he’s sorry about the whole
thing, that little boys have no business being out all night anyway. They need their sleep, and from now on the sheep are going to be put in the barn at night.

Gordon laughs loudly. His laughter is ranged along a single note like an electric mixer. He has a trick of looking grave even when he smiles.

During the night, Matthew wakes up crying. He has been dreaming about wolves. “Shhh,” Fay whispers, placing her hand against his cheek. “There aren’t any wolves here, I absolutely promise you. Not a single one.”

She switches on a lamp, and together they inspect the closet and check under the bed, even peer into the dresser drawers and behind the curtain.

After that he falls asleep at once, but Fay lies awake on the bed beside his compact, humming little body for an hour or more, trembling at what she has almost forgotten: the rivery end of memory, wolves, bears, nakedness, falling down holes, aimless and solitary wandering – all the rain and weather, in fact, of her own scrambled dreams.

F
AY’S MERMAID WORK
goes back to the time when Morris Kroger presented her with the little Inuit sculpture and, unknowingly, set her on her way. She has yet to understand what mermaids mean, their place in the human imagination, but she knows how they look and behave. Hair, vegetablelike, weedy and massed. A face that is beautiful or cunning, and sometimes both. Lungs and larynx, a singing voice but without a song. Arms, usually rudimentary, but able to hold a mirror, and sometimes a comb. The torso may vary from slender to voluptuous; an earthy mermaid – is that possible? Very occasionally mermaids, as seen in art or described in legend, wear garments of some sort, or at least a piece of fine veiling or aquatic plant that flows over and partially conceals their high, hard, rounded breasts. There might also be a necklace or hair ornament.

In the matter of mermaid tails there is enormous variation.
Tails may start well above the waist, flow out of the hips, or extend in a double set from the legs themselves. They’re silvery with scales or dimpled with what looks like a watery form of cellulite. A mermaid’s tail can be perfunctory or hugely long and coiled, suggesting a dragon’s tail, or a serpent’s, or a ferocious writhing penis. These tails are packed, muscular, impenetrable, and give powerful thrust to the whole of the body. Mermaid bodies are hard, rubbery, and indestructible, whereas human bodies are as easily shattered as meringues.

The asexual morphology of mermaids is obvious, there being no feminine passage designed for ingress and egress.

The mermaid image in art is highly stylized, and Fay, responding to that stylization, and perhaps defending it, has taped over her desk a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci: “Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.”

Mermaids are the color of water and of watery vegetation – brown, blue, green, silver. Mermen are found in art and in folk tales, and even merdogs and mercats, but among mythical fishy creatures, mermaids predominate.

Some folklorists have suggested that mermaids are matter and spirit fused.

Mermaids exist in all the world’s cultures and go back to the dawn of time, always gesturing, it seems, at the origin of life itself, which began in the sea.

Once someone asked Fay a surprising question: Did she ever imagine how it would feel to be a mermaid? No, she said, never.

In fact, if she ever thinks of herself as having a different shape, especially these days, it is more likely to be a sailor lost at sea.

Frequently, people greet Fay McLeod with the question: How are your mermaids coming along? Instead of asking: How are you?

“H
OW ARE YOU
, F
AY
?” Beverly Miles asks on Monday morning, poking her head around the doorway of Fay’s office. Fay and Beverly have been good friends for about five years, ever since Beverly came to work at the center.

Today her eyes are bright with health, and her partially graying hair is skimmed back from a girlish face dabbed with bits of color, blue on the eyelids, pink on the rather heavy lips, and pools of deeper pink on the cheeks. She has the look of a merry, earnest, convivial woman, which she is. At twenty she had married a man three times her age, an Egyptologist, and had borne him three children. By thirty she was widowed. Now, though she is just four years older than Fay, her waist and hips are thickening, and she still loves to wear full-skirted dresses in diminutive prints and trim ballet slippers. She seems to possess none of the dissatisfaction other women feel toward their bodies. “How are you, Fay?” she asks, and in a conspiratorial tone, the skin around her eyes creasing, “How is the real you?”

This is a joke between them – the real self that hides beneath the public skin. “Fine, fine,” Fay says abruptly, then tries to amend with a softened, “Well, not bad.”

“Can I come in for a sec? You got a minute?” Already Beverly has shut the door and is easing herself into a chair and grasping her knees in a gesture of benignity. “Is there anything,” she begins, her voice urgent and unsteady, “I can say or do?”

“I suppose everyone here knows by now.”

“Well, this is a very small club.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me what they’re saying.”

“Just that it’s a rotten shame. A great pity, a waste. All the usual clucking. And then the frivolous stuff, what a striking couple you are, et cetera. You know, both tall and slender – ”

“Like a pair of pepper mills.”

“ – and how they’re fond of you both. All of which is true.”

“Oh,” Fay says. Her throat feels full of sand.

“And when I saw Peter skulking around looking so chilly and silent, and you turning into a hermit here, I started to wonder, well, how final all this is.”

“He’s moved out.”

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean it has to be final.”

“There’s no one else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“I was wondering.”

“My mother thinks I expect too much. I expect the world. Her very words. And she’s right.”

“I expected a lot myself at one time. Oh, you can’t imagine how greedy I was. You didn’t know me then. I thought I could have everything because I’d been a good girl, a nice girl, and I deserved to be happy. People do make compromises along the way. They do.”

“We were just half happy. No one should settle for being half happy.”

“Really?” Beverly’s pink lips close over her teeth, then slowly open again in a smile. “What do you think they settle for, then?”

“You’ve got your kids, Bev. You’ve got a whole life.”

“Well, part of a life, anyway.”

“P
EOPLE
,” F
AY SAID
to Peter, catching sight of him in the corridor, “are talking.”

“I know, I know.” His face was busy arranging itself in what Fay supposed was a rueful grin.

“I guess we should have expected a certain amount of talk, but I hate it.”

“It’ll die down. It’s the topic of the week, that’s all.”

“I’m also getting advice. Counseling.”

“Beverly?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. She means well.”

“I know.” Fay nodded. “And Colin had a lunge at me too this afternoon.”

“Really? That’s interesting. What did he have to say? Or was it that same old line about what a striking couple we made?”

“How did you know?”

“He’s got that kind of brain, I’m afraid. Retinal clichés.”

“I found that leather case of yours. For your travel alarm clock, I think. It was under some blankets.” To herself she said: A little ghost.

“I’ve never used it. Why not just pitch it out?”

“How’s Fritzi? And Sammy?”

“Good, good, just fine.”

“How’s … the cactus?”

“Blooming.”

“Really?”

“Not really, but about to. Would you like it back?”

“No thanks.”

“You were right – about coexistence. It is possible.” He gave his watery laugh. “We’re being decent and polite and civilized, aren’t we?”

“Hmmm.”

“Fletcher Conrad’s coming on Friday, did you know? He’s supposed to be fairly sharp.”

“I hope so,” Fay said. “It seems I’ve been given the job of looking after him.”

“Thanks for your bank draft.”

“Thanks for yours.”

W
ITH SURPRISINGLY
little effort or discord, Fay and Peter have settled their affairs. A single trip to Fay’s lawyer, Patricia Henney, and a visit to the bank were all that was required. Afterward, they shook hands like characters in a comedy act and went out for a drink. Fay, negotiating a loan from her parents, has bought Peter’s half of the condominium, and Peter has bought Fay’s half of the Honda.

Life without a car is somewhat awkward, but for the time being, with spring coming on steadily, the shrubs leafing out and the temperature rising, Fay’s been taking the bus to and from work. This is a novelty. She welcomes it. Light breezes flutter the hem of her pale pink raincoat as she waits by the bus stop. From the bus window the streets have the gray-and-amber freshness of a foreign city, stretching purposefully toward the doors of serious institutions and office blocks where the intricacies of commerce and learning unfold. The traffic lights blink cleanly against the
fleece of clouds, and Fay thinks how fortunate she is to live in a place where the air is relatively pure and where she can almost always, even during rush hour, get a seat on the bus.

She finds herself inspecting the other passengers intently, and notes with surprise – but why should she be surprised? – that those who ride the early-morning buses are mainly women, a separate caste, who seem to carry with them a suggestion of their flushed domestic chaos, the imprint of families hurriedly fed and admonished, cupboard doors left ajar, and greasy cups and plates stacked in the sink until evening. The expression on these women’s faces is rushed and resigned. Boarding, they hold their breath hard in their chests, as though it were a kind of precious guarded pain, lean tensely forward in their seats, and only gradually, after two or three stops, relax, gazing around them, and quite often launching into conversation with their neighbors.

Fay closes her eyes and listens, catching dismaying scraps of talk. She supposes it is only a trick of the senses, a reflection of her own unsettled state, that she hears mainly stories of connubial disarray and impending crisis.

“A promise is a promise” comes floating toward her one morning in aggrieved tones.

“All he does is watch television,” she hears. “Anything that’s on.”

“ – and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times.”

“ – hides her birth-control pills on this little ledge – ”

“ – windows broken, dishes broken, pictures smashed – ”

“ – no sooner gets off the lung machine and he collapses a second time – ”

“ – a broken jaw, every tooth knocked loose – ”

“ – but the insurance didn’t cover – ”

“ – doesn’t grow on trees.”

“ – and ending up like this.”

O
N
F
RIDAY AFTERNOON
, the Australian folklorist Dr. Fletcher Conrad, age fifty-five, spoke in the center’s auditorium for an hour, without notes, on the survival of superstition among the aborigines.
He spoke with fluidity, lining up his points firmly, but softening them with little dashes of self-deprecation and gentle tips of the hat toward otherwise examples or extenuating circumstances. His lips were wet. He had a fine cantering laugh with elegant high notes. His anecdotes – about birds, about his wife and children, about the Australian landscape – were charmingly spaced and delivered, and he closed his lecture by praising the audience for their attention, exclaiming over the honor they had done him by inviting him to the center and placing him – and here he paused and smiled – in Ms. Fay McLeod’s capable hands.

It was Fay’s responsibility to take him to dinner. Hannah Webb, full of apologies about a previous commitment, lent Fay her car. “Treat him nicely,” she whispered in Fay’s ear.

They went to a restaurant called Dubrovnik’s and, at a table overlooking the river, ate smoked-trout salad, rare roast lamb with baby green beans, and a strawberry torte, and drank a bottle of dry red wine. Just a short distance beneath their window the currents of the river shifted, and a drift of wind made it hard to know which way the river was flowing; this was a familiar optical illusion of the region, Fay pointed out to Dr. Conrad in her role as guide. Toward the end of the evening – the sky was full of flat blue light – they talked about Margaret Mead, a new biography in which her reputation had been further capsized. “Reputation,” Fletcher Conrad said, quoting Balzac, “is a prostitute.” “A crowned prostitute,” said Fay, who remembered the quotation. They both looked pleased with themselves about this exchange. They got up to go. It was then Fay noticed that he was approximately half an inch shorter than she. She had already noticed his tiny hands, the left one curved inside the right on the tablecloth, like a captured bird.