The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  “My life is a story,” Molly Beardsley said to Fay the day she gave her a lift downtown.

  But Fay knows better; however much Molly Beardsley yearns to bring narrative wholeness to her life, hers is not a complete story, and not because it isn’t comic, brave, touching, and possessed of a happy ending. Her experience is too random and unreasonable, too large-scale; it has a bulging, uneven shape; there are too many pigs, too many years, and no recorded trace of reflection.

  Most people’s lives don’t wrap up nearly as neatly as they’d like to think. Fay’s sure of that. Most people’s lives are a mess.

  ∼ CHAPTER 8 ∼

  Running Lightly

  TOM’S FACE WAS EIGHT FEET HIGH, HIS NOSE – FAIRLY STRAIGHT, decently modeled, for which he has his mother to thank – was a yard long, terminating in nostrils deep and dark as caves. The self-mocking mouth widened out gigantically, ready to eat whole sheep and goats, or children, in a single bite. The Avery eyes, famous for mischief and blueness, full of brio and fake tenderness, blinked turquoise like a pair of comic-strip lakes. Anyone driving over the Norwood Bridge in the center of town came face to face with the continent of Tom Avery’s chin, the long left basin of his ear, his hugely combed strands of hair. An obscenity, this aggressive billboard merriment. Two-dimensional flesh and print. A paper-faced ogre whose morality was clearly an invention of chance and default.

  RELAX THE NIGHT AWAY

  WITH TOM AVERY’S NITELINE

  CHOL – MIDNIGHT TO 4:00 A.M.

  “HE’S OUR BOY”

  By coincidence – well, more like the right word dropped in the right ear – it was Tom’s old friend Ken Baggot who had flown in from Toronto to take the photo. Back in 1970 the two of them had shared a student apartment in Toronto, where Tom was majoring in political science, having switched from history, traveling from the surreal to the superreal, as he liked to put it in those days. Ken Baggot was a skinny white-faced draft dodger from the States, enrolled in the journalism program. He talked about dying his hair and getting himself a fake ID and slipping back over the border so he could “photo-essay” the antiwar movement, his way of “paying his dues.” On weekends he relaxed with a few joints, but he was clean as a monk during the week, acquiring his “tools,” as he called them, so he could get back to the real struggle. The Canadians, as he saw them, were a tribe of nobodies, too bland, cool, and disengaged to claim a real existence.

  At least not until the spring of 1973, when the advertising firm of Anderson & Soles offered Ken Baggot a job, and he dropped out of his course. He could make his contribution by bringing a little color to this safe, bleak, end-of-the-underground-railroad nation, and while he was at it he was going to find himself a better apartment, buy a hi-fi, and marry a girl he’d been seeing.

  Last week, when Ken Baggot was in Winnipeg to take Tom’s picture, the two of them went out for a fat expense-account dinner at the Winnipeg Inn. Urban males, Ken Baggot confided to Tom, have been paralyzed by Woody Allen-ism. “It’s pernicious how we’ve let this scrawny postadolescent nerdbox screw us with guilt. We’re supposed to be ashamed for driving a decent car. And having a closet full of suits. I like my closet full of suits. Back in ’73 I had two pairs of jeans, you remember. I never wash them. How could I? Woody wants me to go back to wearing smelly jeans. Hey, remember how we got together in the first place? The guy you were going to share with ducked out on you and needed someone quick to make up the rent. Seventy bucks a month. Weird. And here you are. And here I am. To take your picture to blow you up sky high.”

  HE HATED IT. The size of it. The indecency. It was altogether too public. It lunged at motorists, at perfectly nice guys driving by in their cars, guys who had a right to look up and see someone maybe drinking orange juice or reaching for a tea bag. God. It was a shocking face, irresponsible, far too much protoplasm hanging on to the edges, a fake Olympian, a greaser, a hoser. (Would you buy a used crutch from this man? Are you kidding?) Tom Avery, he’s our man. Yeah, yeah. Smarm. That’s a leer you got, fella. It made him sick just to look at it. And there were eleven others just like it dotted across town. He wasn’t even going to think about that.

  And yet, on Sunday morning, waking early and pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweater, he walked over to Mr. Donut’s for coffee and then found himself continuing down Stradbrook, a street overleafed by elm and ash trees, past Posters Plus and the AIDS Information Center and the Kitchen Refit place, down toward the Norwood Bridge. Ah, God! Still there – the imbecile grin, the acreage of forehead, fleshy pinks, flashy oranges, a guy drooling sunshine all over the public. Weary, bleary, arghhh, get rid of this creep. He’s a menace to the environment, an insult to the calm daily river of traffic.

  But today was different.

  Main Street was full of commotion today. A Sunday morning, a flawless sky. People were lined up along the curbs, an air of carnival. Another parade? Unlikely.

  Then he remembered. Today was Marathon Day, the fourth Sunday in May. He’d been announcing it on the air every night for a week, but he’d forgotten today was the day. A terrific day, too. A flushed, salmon-colored sky filled in the narrow spaces between stone buildings, keeping them buoyant and friendly.

  “Hey, Tom. How ya doin’, fella?”

  It was Sammy Sweet running by, light and fresh in blue-and-white shorts and beautiful Nike Air-Max running shoes. Pale, plump Sammy, who had briefly been married to Tom’s first wife, Sheila, and then married a woman called Fritzi. Tom had met Sammy four or five times around town, a nice enough guy, but not someone he’d figured for a runner.

  He was caught off guard, and as a reflex, or a gesture of apology for having misjudged Sammy, he wasn’t sure which, Tom fell in with him – despite the fact that he was dressed in jeans and street shoes. The two of them ran alongside each other for a matey half mile or so.

  “So,” Tom breathed out, his shoes slapping the pavement, “you going the whole twenty-six?”

  Sammy was in a cheery mood. “Hope so. It’s my sixth year.”

  “Not bad, not bad,” Tom said. He meant it.

  “This first five miles is the easy part, though. After that I start to feel it in the old lung sacs.”

  Tom said to Sammy, “I guess you learn to pace yourself.” This struck him as an appropriate remark between two guys running along together. Two guys who’d both been married to the same woman.

  “Oh, well” – Sammy exhaled noisily, as if to demonstrate an underlying humility – “I’m one of the slow ones. Never made it under four hours yet. Probably never will. I’m not in it for the competition. I get plenty of that in my working life.”

  “How’s the market doing, anyway?” Tom remembered now that Sammy was in real estate and that the market was slow.

  “Starting to pick up.”

  “Great, great.” He felt his pants ripple against his calves. He and Sammy were trotting past the handsome old train station now, and the crowds along the sides of the street were getting heavier.

  “A perfect day,” Sammy said socially. “Last year was a bummer, we had the heat and the humidity both.”

  A perfect day? Was it? Yes, it was. Tom looked up. The sky over the Trizec Building was hard and brilliant, like a stretch of painted scenery.

  “You ever think of going for it?” Sammy asked, glancing down at Tom’s shoes. “You look like you’ve got a great stride on you.”

  This tossed scrap of praise warmed Tom extravagantly. “I just might one year.”

  “Here’s where I have to start paying attention,” Sammy said. “Fritzi said she’d be in front of the Richardson Building with the kids. Waving me on.”

  Fritzi. Fritzi Knightly? Tom tried to remember what she looked like. Reddish hair. More blond than red. A heavy face for a woman. Big toothy smile. But sensual. He’d met her once, at a football game or something, and shaking her hand he’d thought: So this is the woman Sammy Sweet “couldn’t live without.” He remembered the phrase – how the force of Sammy’s rumored pa
ssion (relayed to him by Sheila) had gripped and puzzled him.

  “I don’t see her,” Sammy breathed. “Do you see her?”

  “No,” Tom said, looking to the right, “but there’s a lot of people.”

  “Oh, Fritzi’ll be right out in front. She’s bringing a change of socks. It’s worth losing a minute for fresh socks, you can make it up. That’s one of the little-known truths of the marathon game. Fresh socks.”

  “I don’t see her.”

  “She must’ve got the time wrong,” Sammy said. He was panting faintly.

  “Maybe she said across from the Richardson Building.”

  “No.” The suggestion seemed to irritate Sammy. “She’s always in front of the Richardson Building. With the kids.”

  “We must’ve missed her, then.”

  “Or else she got the time screwed up.”

  “That’s probably it.”

  “But I can’t figure out why – ”

  “Well, I’ll leave you here,” Tom said. “Best of British luck.” And he turned off – he was beginning to feel his heart chopping away – into the quiet Sunday stillness of McDermot Avenue, leaving Sammy Sweet running northward along the roadway with his light, rhythmic, arching steps.

  IDLY, LAZILY, Tom looked at the Monday paper. Sammy Sweet was not listed as a finalist. He checked again. No Sammy.

  Sammy was a harmless likable guy, so why should it give Tom a flush of warm pleasure to see he hadn’t made the whole twenty-six?

  He read on. The first-place winner this year was a thirty-four-year-old runner named Steve Fitzsimmons, from West Kildonan; time, two hours, ten minutes. Tom looked him up in the phone book and gave him a call.

  “My name’s Tom Avery,” he said in his chummy radioland voice, “and I’m host of a late-night show here in Winnipeg, music, talk, guest shots, and so on, and we wondered if you’d be willing to come on the program and chat a bit about how it feels to win a marathon.”

  “It feels great. It feels like about time. You know how old I am? Thirty-four. On the brink of middle age. Not exactly there, but for a runner I’m brinking, let’s face it. The fact is, I could be competing with the old guys with leaky hearts and varicose veins, doing fun runs, but no, I went into the marathon, with kids who’re maybe nineteen, twenty, kids in their prime, and I came out on top. I’ve trained five, six years. Every morning before work. It’s still dark, but I’m out there training. I’m an airlines reservation clerk. Mainly I just sit on my butt listening to beefs, not exactly what you’d call the world of the athlete, eh? At the end of the day I’m out there again, it’s dark, cold, but I put in another few miles of the hard stuff. You know how I see this victory? I see a twofold kind of thing going on. Age is immaterial, that’s the first point. Mind if I ask how old you are, sir?”

  “Forty on the nose.”

  “Secondly, perseverance pays off.”

  “How about coming on the show tonight and talking about it.”

  “Glad to. I’ve done some TV around town, and the way I see it, there’s a real message I can give. A, age is immaterial, and B, perseverance pays off.”

  “This is radio,” Tom said.

  “Radio?”

  “Yeah. Late-night audience.”

  “How late’re we talking about?”

  “After midnight.”

  “I don’t know. I need my sleep. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but I’m going into the Boston biggie. I’m going to show those guys. Training never stops, know what I mean? You can’t let up.”

  “Right,” Tom said. “Right.” And he hung up.

  Prick!

  SAMMY Sweet was dead. It was in the Winnipeg Free Press, the front page, but somehow Tom had missed it.

  CITY REALTOR, 44, COLLAPSES DURING MARATHON

  He had died on the north end of the Redwood Bridge, which would make it fifteen minutes, twenty at most, after Tom had turned off at the corner of McDermot and Main.

  There they’d been, chugging along, shooting the breeze, the sun shining down, a nice easy May wind keeping things cool, and half an hour later, while Tom stood at the counter of the Scotsman Café raising a cappuccino to his lips, Sammy was stretched out in an ambulance, already dead. Dead on arrival, the report said.

  The obituary read:

  Survived by his wife, Fritzi, and daughters, Heather and Elsbeth. A member of the Manitoba Club and Rotary International. Past Co-chairman of the United Way. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Heart Fund.

  Tom, hideously shaken, put a hand to his own chest, feeling sudden pain, constriction. He took several deep breaths – there, that was better – then replayed his last few seconds with Sammy. “Best of British luck,” he’d said stupidly, meaninglessly – a phrase from his boyhood in Duck River – and what had Sammy said in reply? Nothing. Just flashed him a loopy undirected smile and pressed on his way.

  Should he phone the police? The family? The hospital? Didn’t he, as the last person to talk to the deceased Sammy, have some moral, or even legal, responsibility? As usual when faced with a dilemma, he asked Ted Woloschuk down at CHOL for advice.

  Talking to Ted was like talking to the drywall. Ted never interrupted. He never said, “Are you sure of that?” or, “Let’s go over that again.” He listened, nodded, poured more cold coffee into his cup, and finally, after thirty seconds of pure silence had elapsed, said, “Forget it, Tom, it’s over.”

  WHO KILLED SAMMY SWEET? This was a necessary question.

  He killed Sammy, who else? With the guilt of the survivor, Tom accepted full responsibility. First, there was that sneering billboard, which Sammy must have seen but was too decent to mention; and then he’d poisoned Sammy in his final moments by asking him how the market was doing – an incendiary topic – and topped that off with his bland agreement about the perfection of the weather. He’d failed to look into Sammy’s eyes, where he might have deteced signs of fatigue and stress. He’d raised Sammy’s anxiety level simply by being there, flapping along beside him in clumsy street clothes. That light urea smell of Sammy’s sweat: a warning he’d missed. The color and size of his pupils. There were questions he might have put to Sammy: Why exactly are you pushing yourself like this? What are you trying to prove? Why don’t you come have a cappuccino with me, we can have a real talk for the first time in our goddamned lives. About the really important questions that face us. The fact that we’ve both been married to the same woman, a woman called Sheila, we loved her and left her, how about that? We could talk about love. Passion. You could tell me about some of those things.

  No, it was Fritzi Sweet who killed Sammy. Why had she defaulted on the clean socks, why hadn’t she been in front of the Richardson Building at the appointed time? It was for Fritzi that Sammy was out there running. Fritzi – his sun and his moon, without whom he had not been able to live, Fritzi the culpable, the betrayer.

  No, Christ, no, it was Steve Fitzsimmons, winner of this year’s marathon, who had sprung forward at the starting line, ten years younger than Sammy Sweet, leaner, better muscled, more disciplined, unfettered by love (probably), by children, by the plunging real estate market. Prideful Steve Fitzsimmons, who never once looked over his shoulder at those he overtook, who slept easy in his ignorance of the delicate springs of cause and effect, happy with his terrible guilt.

  STEVE FITZSIMMONS gave Tom a call at the station.

  “Steve Fitzsimmons here,” he said. “I’m taking off a few days from my training program and I’ve got a little more time than I thought, and, well, someone pointed you out to me yesterday, that humongous billboard, wow! And I hear you’ve got a pretty big following. So I just phoned to say that, sure, I’d be glad to come on your show, do a one-on-one interview kind of thing.”

  “Well, that’s great,” Tom said, affable, smarmy, “but the fact is, I’ve got this week covered, and next week, too. But I’ll tell you what – give me a call after the Boston biggie, and we can rap.”

  “Yeah, well,
I might do that. Or then again, I might not.”

  “Suit yourself,” Tom said, and then added, trembling, “and the best of British luck.”

  ∼ CHAPTER 9 ∼

  The Pageant of Romance

  FAY WAS GLAD TO GET AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS, EVEN IF IT WAS ONLY to Minneapolis. She’d had enough for one week with three funerals – first her Uncle Arthur, then John Brewmaster, and then Sammy Sweet.

  Uncle Arthur was really her father’s uncle, a man with a heavy forward tilting belly, saturnine, monosyllabic. “We never expected he’d hang on for as long as he did after your Aunt Velma went into Eastgate Manor,” Fay’s father told her five minutes before the service at Westminister Church, a service attended by fewer than thirty people. “He depended on her, adored her. You wouldn’t remember this, but he used to have a pet name for her. He called her Cricket. He liked to buy her jewelry, gold chains and long ropes of pearls. Once he said to me – this was just after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – ‘Your Aunt Velma has the most beautiful throat in the world.’ “

  Fay grew up thinking of her Aunt Velma as a lump in a corner of a sofa, tutting and wincing over inconsequential items of news, and now she’s a silent lump in a ghostly hospital bed. The possibility that she might once have stirred ardor in a man, even a man like Uncle Arthur, came as a surprise to Fay, the kind of surprise that made her smile inside her head. At the same time, suspicious of condescension, she is wary of extravagant, arcane tributes, especially those that attach to something as soft-tissued and nonthreatening as a woman’s throat.

  Those at the funeral attributed the small turnout to the fact that Arthur McLeod had outlived most of his friends, of whom it was said he once had many. This was one more thing Fay found hard to believe. Her uncle had been taciturn and top-heavy, bending stiffly from the waist when he spoke to people, though perhaps that was because of his deafness. She thought to herself during the singing of the final hymn how kind she had been to invite him to lunch recently, how thoughtful, but in the next breath castigated herself for her smug self-approval, then lightly forgave herself before the music had altogether faded.