The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  When pushing up against the world, she needs companionship, someone by her side. Is it because she’s the daughter of sociable parents? she wonders. She has a lot of strong curiosity about people, and often she’s been praised for her ability to draw out individuals and set them at ease. People relax in her presence, grow expansive. Hannah Webb, who heads the folklore center, frequently asks her to show visitors around. She appreciates, she really does, how time can be telescoped, an hour reduced to minutes when in the presence of agreeable company. The addition of another person can lighten the most routine work and make ordinary experiences luminous – just going to a restaurant or a movie or even on a walk. When she reads about political prisoners locked up for years in solitary confinement, she marvels that they manage to hang on to their sanity. She knows she’d never survive.

  Yet here she is, about to make a great change in her life, a change that frightens her with the spectre of loneliness. It’s Sunday morning, and she and Peter are in their small blue Honda on their way to Fay’s parents for Easter lunch. It is 12:45 by the car clock, which has yet to be reset on daylight-saving time. They are driving down a bare sunny boulevard and quarreling over the nature of time.

  “It’s gone,” Fay is saying. “One hour just wiped out. It’s like when they do those bowel operations, cut out the tumorous parts and rejoin the sections and try to fool the intestine into not noticing.”

  “Not really,” Peter says in his adult-education voice. “The daylight-saving hour is just an illusion. It never was an hour. Nothing gets thrown away. You have to think of time as a device. An arbitrary invention, that’s all. You always go and personalize things, Fay. Why are we talking about this anyway?”

  “It feels like robbery, losing the hour at night when we’re all asleep, that’s what offends me.”

  “Christ. You’re being whimsical again.”

  “You’re nervous,” she charges, but keeps her voice small.

  “You’re right.” He says this acerbically, which reassures Fay.

  “Just think,” she says, “what you could do with that hour if you had it back.” But she’s having trouble keeping this going.

  “What?” The edge on his voice dissolving.

  “You could” – she stops to think – “you could make a sandwich. A fried-egg sandwich. With plenty of mayo and salt.”

  “I’ve never seen you eat a fried-egg sandwich, Fay. Never.”

  “Or you could stay in bed, then, and have an extra dream or two. A good classic REM dream, getting on the bus in just your underwear. Or finding a new room in the apartment, a whole room where you thought the closet was.”

  “You know what that one means.”

  “What?”

  “That things are out of control.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, Fay, about your parents. Do we tell them today or leave it?”

  “It’s Easter. Let’s leave it.”

  “Why not get it over with?”

  “The whole family’ll be there, everyone. Bibbi’s even coming.”

  “This week then. Promise me you’ll phone your mother tomorrow. And I think you owe me one thing, Fay.”

  “What?”

  “That you tell them this is your decision, not mine. You’re the one that wants out.”

  “It’s not a decision exactly.”

  “Then what in God’s name do you call it?” His eyes are directed straight ahead, fixed on the light Sunday traffic.

  “You make it sound as though all of a sudden I just clenched up my brain and decided.”

  “Well?”

  “You said yourself you felt things were coming to an end.”

  “I didn’t say that exactly.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Anyway, let’s not drag it out. I’ll see about getting a place tomorrow, a room or something. And then we’ll have to think about what to do with the car.”

  “And the apartment.”

  “Right.”

  Fay looks sideways at Peter, who is glancing up at the telephone wires, his forehead going into lines, too. She wonders what he’s thinking. What have their three years together meant, anyway? One thousand days and nights, about to be swallowed up – like last night’s hypothetical hour, that lovely light-spirited hour that never was and never will be.

  “OH, GOOD HEAVENS,” Fay’s mother said on the telephone. Chipper, breathless. But disappointed.

  She was a doctor, a gynecologist with an office in a shopping mall in south Winnipeg, but Mondays she always spent domestically at home, doing the washing, tidying up after the weekend. “Well, of course I’m surprised. Daddy and I just naturally thought, well, we knew you weren’t frantic for a traditional wedding and all that, but we did think when you and Peter decided to buy a condo, and that was only a year ago, a year and a half, then, that that represented something, a commitment more or less, which was how you put it at the time, remember? – something like that, anyway. I know people think of these things differently now, Fay, but do you realize that condo of yours cost more than this house, this big house? Well, that’s neither here nor there. All I’m saying is that we didn’t think you and Peter were just making an investment, we thought you were, well – settling down. People do settle down. They do. They don’t keep moving and changing partners forever, they make commitments, not that we’d ever want you to commit yourself to somebody you weren’t sure of, but you and Peter seem so, well, larky together. Sometimes things cool down between a couple, goodness, I know that, but it comes back, almost always it comes back, as long as there aren’t any real irreconcilable differences. You have to anticipate certain times when things seem, well, flat. I mean, if that’s all it is. But you and Peter, I always thought you two just – yesterday, when he was putting whipped cream on your pie, the way he was, you know, teasing you? And, well. We just thought that eventually you’d get the urge to start a family, you’re both so crazy about kids, and you’ve no idea how different it is with kids of your own, you love them ten times more than you love other people’s. It takes people by surprise how much love they have stored up. Young mothers are always telling me that, how they actually fall in love with their babies. Fall in love, that’s how they phrase it, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. I know I did, and oh, I guess I just hate you to miss out on all that, even though I know, I really do, that you have a full life. In many ways. Doing what you want, just picking up and going when the spirit moves you, but there’s something to be said for having a center, for belonging to someone, your own family, not just one person living for himself or herself. Darn it all, sweetheart, I find it hard to express, but I just hope, Daddy and I hope you know what you’re doing, that’s all.”

  A FEW YEARS AGO a man called Morris Kroger gave Fay a small Inuit carving, a mermaid figure, fattish and cheerful, lying on her side propped up by her own thick muscled elbow. It is made of highly polished gray soapstone, and its rather stunted tail curls upward in an insolent flick. It weighs about half a pound and, when picked up, nicely fills a human hand. Fay keeps it on her long oak coffee table next to a stack of magazines and a flowering cactus.

  Fay met Morris Kroger at a wine-and-cheese party that preceded a ballet opening. He bumped up against her, then introduced himself. A clumsy man, yet here he was at the ballet.

  It was summer. They spent a week together in a tent near Clear Lake. (This was after Nelo and before Peter.) They both suffered from mosquitoes, which were especially bad that year, and Fay, with mosquito repellent in her hair and ears and all the joints of her body, felt sure at first that it was this that rendered Morris impotent. Night after night he struggled with himself on the ridged slippery air mattress. His hoarse breathing frightened her, and on their last night together he gave way to a spasm of choked sobs. Something about his parents, something psychological and hopeless had spoiled his manhood. The next day they drove back to Winnipeg in silence, four hours on the burning highway, and two weeks later he mailed her the stone mermaid. Fay
remembers opening the box slowly, as though it might contain a bomb or something equally dangerous, but it was only this carved female likeness with her taunting abbreviated tail.

  Impenetrable. The word rose up and socked her in the throat with its unsheathed subtlety. An accusation.

  But no, she was being paranoid, it was just a present.

  She found out later, much later, that the carving had been made in Cape Dorset not long after the Hollywood film Splash! had been shown there at the Community Hall, and this irony greatly expanded her love for it.

  Its smile makes it rare. She has discovered only one other smiling mermaid, a tiny figure bobbing about in a fourteenth-century German fresco. She hopes to see it this summer when she goes to Augsburg, and photograph it for her book.

  Morris Kroger is gone, having sold the family business and moved to Florida. Someone told Fay he had retired. At his age! Fay thinks of him maybe once a year. Usually when the mosquitoes come out. For about five minutes.

  PETER KNIGHTLY’S FACE as it leans over his sock drawer is too elongated and bewildered for love, and also sulky, lip-drooping, not a face to live with forever. She pities him, a man of thirty-seven years, hesitating like this between black and brown. He gazes at the neat little sock balls, then stirs them with a long teacherly finger. That same finger has stirred me, thinks Fay, who is still in bed, her head turned on the pillow and her eyes wide open, mournfully watching.

  In the last few days a mild dislike for him has fallen over her. The whole of his body seems a pale, elongated gland, colorless and cold and stiff with hairs. It distresses her to open her closet and see his jackets and sweaters, most of them gone nubby at the elbows, rubbing up against the smoothness of her blouses. Watching him, she feels her thoughts darken. And every time she opens her mouth, it seems, she injures his puffball innocence; she’s tried, often, to locate the exact point where this weakness of his is centered – that nick, maybe, at the edge of his tucked Englishy mouth. Or the ruffled tips of his thick beige hair, like feathers, blunt and soft at the same time. Oh, why does he keep tempting her, offering up his sponge of a heart and inviting her to take a punch? She’s figured it out; at last she knows. So he can blame her, so she can be sorry, so he can sulk, so she can feel guilty. This has been going on for three years now. He will say something ordinary and neutral, and the next minute she’s unsnapped one of his nursery certitudes. Would she do this if she loved him? She doesn’t think so.

  She knows the old cliché: To fall in love is to fall out of love. Maybe that’s all that’s happened, something as simple and blameless as that.

  LOVE IS SELFISH. Love is dangerous, impractical, wasteful. Loving, we put a pistol to our heads. It burns, it makes us into fools, always it keeps us waiting. It sickens, it makes us sick, it’s the start of a serious illness, it’s illness itself.

  But Fay’s parents are something else. They live in that big old house over on Ash Avenue and at night they read to each other in bed. Richard McLeod reads Peggy McLeod long magazine pieces about the asbestos industry, and Peggy McLeod reads Richard McLeod chunks of novels, descriptive passages out of P. D. James about Oxford or London or the Devon coast. They share a yearning for jokes and subtle proofs and oddities of language, and every single Wednesday night they sit down with their good friends John and Muriel Brewmaster, who have been married even longer than they have – for forty-three years – and the four of them play bridge. After the Brewmasters go home they discuss their hands, their good or bad luck, it doesn’t matter which. They give each other gifts, admittedly only at Christmas and for birthdays, and they have a pact that these gifts must not attach in any way to the house. For example, no microwave ovens, no table saws, nothing like that. They may give articles of clothing made of knitted wool or silk. Or perfume, luggage, wrist watches, little luxuries, tickets to New York, maybe. They love to go to New York and see the latest plays and musicals. For anniversaries – they’ve been married thirty-nine years, forty next fall – they do not exchange gifts. They are each other’s gift. Fay’s mother actually said this once. Out loud. Each other’s gift.

  ∼ CHAPTER 2 ∼

  Beginning

  FOR A MAN NURTURED BY TWENTY-SEVEN MOTHERS, TOM AVERY SUFFERS from surprising insecurities. At thirty-nine, almost forty, he is mildly, obscurely fearful of: young children, stinging insects, German shepherds, acupuncture, income-tax forms, street evangelists, public telephones, cottage cheese, and old age.

  He is acutely, palpably afraid of Friday nights, what to do with them, those gaping, sneering, and stubbornly recurring widths of time – how to accommodate them, fill them, use them, annihilate them. He’d do anything to sidestep a Friday night. Friday nights demand conviviality and expenditure. It’s the time to let loose (yeah, sure).

  Well, not tonight. Tonight he sits alone in his apartment on Grosvenor Avenue and drinks beer and reads the newspaper and thinks dark, unkind thoughts about his life. By eleven he is in bed, sound asleep, another Friday night erased.

  WHY DO WE SEEK so strenuously, so publicly, to purify ourselves?

  This is what Tom thinks as he goes for his weekly eight-kilometer run down Wellington Crescent. That crosswise slab of belly fat he’s got – a disgrace. A faint hangover, too, poisonous fumes bubbling up from his intestines and pressing his lungs flat. Heated gas ripping upward and downward, shaming him, making him glad he’s thumping along on his own steam. His kidneys he pictures as hard little lozenges, jelly beans in thin casings of sugar. Now that’s a pretty picture.

  It’s Saturday morning, the last Saturday before he turns forty. On and on he tramps, past what used to be the Richardson mansion, triplexed now with a series of winking solariums shelving off at the back. Past a darkly stuccoed building with a military insignia over its door, past a stand of leafless shrubs, past the synagogue in which gatherings of men are even now praying.

  It’s a cold day. Damp through and through. Spring dampness. Now he’s coming up toward the bridge. Dancing up and down at the curb, keeping time while he waits for a break in the traffic at Academy Road; traffic, it never lets up. It’s a chance, though, to catch his breath.

  He’s been jogging for two years now, ever since his divorce papers came through. Ask him about it – he’ll be glad to tell you. It’s one of the stories he likes to pull out. Well, the papers came through, you see. It was on a Saturday morning. They were sent over by courier, Pink Lady, delivered and signed, heavy legal sheets in a strong taped envelope. Here you are, sir. A ceremonial present to start your day.

  Light rejoicing seemed called for, but what? Food, drink, sex; nothing appealed, and to tell the truth, nothing was readily available. He had just moved into this rinky-dink – his mother’s word – apartment on Grosvenor, no furniture, not a stick, just a shower, taps and nozzle, not even a plastic shower curtain to pull around him in the morning. The arrival of his divorce papers made him want to give himself up to the air, to get scraped down, pressed flat like an aerodynamic object. Running was all he could think of. In a cardboard carton in the corner of the living room he had the equipment, the hundred-buck, shoes and the blue-and-white sweats, bought for him by Suzanne – that’s the ironic bit, the kicker – their last Christmas together, and never worn. Well, he hadn’t been ready then. Now he was.

  That’s how the Saturday-morning runs got launched.

  He hates every minute of it. He stamps along saying words like “fuck,” “shit,” “fart,” “cunt,” all the sputtered grotesques of the language, and it does help, it gives him strength. It’s April now, one week after Easter, and still pretty nippy. What a climate; why does he stay here? God and Jesus only know. Grit blows straight into his face, in his eyes and mouth and up his nose. A walloping old guy passes him, bald, huffing away, but with a not-bad speed on him – Christ!

  Now, finally, he’s got a decent pace going. Breathe in, then out, count your breaths, it makes the time turn over. And think of your feet rounding on the pavement, the heel first, bending, rolling
up to the toes, keep that image in your mind.

  He’s grinning now, like a guy in a beer commercial. Grin, grin, grin. Transparency, bottom of the barrel. Then he’s a gorilla, chump, chump, chump, arms loose and swinging. Screw that. Now he’s part of a Camus fable, a lost soul, loveless. That look in his eyes, that existential light, bores right through you. Think of hot coffee, think of having it over for another week.

  Now he’s in the park. Just five more minutes and he can turn around and head back. What is this for, why does he care about his belly fat anyway? He’s going to be forty years old in three days. Whoa there, what about that? The universe is about to shrink around him. God help him. It shames him how little he’s discovered during his time in the world. This isn’t where he meant to be at forty, not at all, running down a gritty sidewalk on a cold windy day with his chest burning and his rear end bouncing.

  Running out the park gates now, back down Wellington Crescent, those big dopey houses, it costs a fortune to heat those houses, past the synagogue again, past the spiky hedges, past the new condos, Christ, a wall of condos, you can hardly see the river anymore, they just keep heaving them up, one after the other.

  Hang a right at Grosvenor, home again, the brick building, dirty shrubbery, no leaves, no buds even, no elevator either, tiled steps streaked with wet, three small rooms on the third floor, and no one waiting for him.

  TOM’S EX-WIFE, SUZANNE, recently got married again, and this marriage has released their friends from the agony of divided loyalty. Since the wedding, February 19, invitations have favored Tom, who isn’t sure just why, whether old Suze has slipped sideways or upward or down on the social scale, or whether his own solitude is more clearly underlined now that she’s so visibly coupled. Re-coupled, that is.