The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  He had not met Charlotte Downey before. Her powerfully made-up face was square-jawed but sensual, and able to shift rapidly in its expression. Her languorous quizzing eyes and her dark hair, cut short so that it bent above her ears, gave her the look of a sex-wise teenager. The inclination of her head seemed to invite his approval. She wore a dark red sundress and white sandals, and when she turned sideways in the light he could see a thin gold chain burning on her tanned neck. Of course she had been invited for him, and he for her; Tom knew this as a certainty and knew that she knew as well. “I think,” she said, when her turn came, “that I’d like to be a coastal ridge. Like the Sierras, maybe, sharply defined, but at the same time not too intimidating.”

  Emma Klein wanted to be a river delta. An island, said Jenny Waring, who was the mother of three young children – a choice that made her husband look up, puzzled. But only in winter, she amended. In summer she preferred to be a long low valley – she gave a sexual laugh, or so it seemed to Tom – with a guaranteed abundance of rainfall.

  “I suppose it would be too arrogant to want to be an Ocean,” Jeff Waring began – but at that moment Tom looked at his watch. It was 11:35. He had twenty minutes to get to the station. He would have liked to whisper in Charlotte Downey’s ear, “I’ll give you a call” or “When can we get together?” But the opportunity did not offer itself. He left quickly, hurrying down the cooled sidewalk to his car, saddened but also relieved – he admitted it – to be alone again.

  AT PARTIES where there is a good deal of drinking and where a large number of people are crowded into a small space, or where the social mix is familiar and also random – at these kinds of gatherings there is often someone who, late in the evening, will make a teasing remark to Tom about his three disastrous marriages. Whatever is said will be put forward with a spirit of light good nature, something like: “Hey Tom, when’s round four coming up?”

  Or there will be some slipping, winking comment about alimony, about rice coming out of his ears, about going for the Guinness Book of World Records, about getting the wedding march on a compact disc.

  Men tend to make these kinds of jokes more than women, jokes that are meant to be chummy, to simulate envy.

  Tom imagines that the gibes, digs, pleasantries, whatever, possess the same weight and texture as those that involve the humiliation of large noses, big feet, balding heads, and double chins.

  It seems clear that a man of forty with three ex-wives is fair game. In the public domain. It seems clear, too, that Tom has become a comic figure.

  How does he respond to this kind of male joshing? He feels his mouth move sideways in what he supposes is a grin. A stone enters his throat, and the skin of his face freezes over. As soon as he can, he moves away to safer territory.

  ONCE A YEAR Big Bruce (Bossman Bruce) throws a barbecue for the CHOL gang out at his riverside property west of the city. He goes the whole hog: colored lights all around the grounds, an illuminated sign at the end of the driveway that says “This Way Folks,” an open bar set up in a trailer, a striped canopy big enough for a small circus, and everything catered. Then fireworks, then dancing to a live trio, and around dawn a huge breakfast.

  Big Bruce is big, two hundred and fifty pounds of resonating flesh. Sixty years old. A lawyer by training. The son of a Ukrainian farmer. He made his first big money in real estate and then bought a radio station and found his true love.

  Big Bruce’s wife, Erleen, makes her own sauerkraut. Otherwise she does nothing. If you ask her about her grandchildren, she’ll say: “Those little bums, they’re spoiled rotten.” If you ask her about CHOL: “It’s a hole to pour money in.” About her husband, Big Bruce: “He’s an old sweetie-pie.”

  Lenny Dexter’s at the party. He arrives in denim and leather handmade boots, and a string tie. On his head is the white cowboy hat he bought at an auction for a thousand bucks – it’s got the name Hank Williams sewn right into the lining. Lenny’s in radio for the kicks. He gets a high from the late-night intimacy of it, the thought of his voice spilling over the city perimeter and entering the cabs of truck drivers, beautiful guys hauling their tankers to Fargo or Minneapolis or up to Thompson.

  Carly Blackwood, from the wake-up show, is at the party. Through thick lenses she gives Tom a scampish wink. “If I were in TV, they’d make me get contacts. They’d want me to fix my hair into one of those gravity-defying jobs stuck back with hair spray, no thanks. I see morning radio as something that energizes people. People wake up feeling ugly and lonely and weak and they’d just as soon hide out at home, right? But all they have to do is reconnect. Get their hearts restarted. It’s hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”

  Simon Birrell is also at the party. He’s in charge of the noon-hour farm show, and after fifteen years in that slot he still reels with the irony of it – that he, a musician’s son from New York City, should be chatting knowledgeably for fifty minutes every weekday about the fertile measurement of bulls or effective weed management or cucumber blight or crises in egg marketing. He lives with his wife, Stephanie, and four teenaged children in a large old-fashioned Roblyn Road apartment. “People are always surprised to find I don’t live in a manure field,” he once told Tom. It was Simon who first told Tom about the reissued Caruso records that have been such a surprise hit on “Niteline.”

  The old timekeeper moon shines down, nested tonight in whirling vapors of clouds. Tom keeps a careful eye on the time. Before he leaves he exchanges a few words with Maeve Woloschuk, Ted’s wife. Maeve tells him about her oldest son, Patrick, who has fallen in love. “This may be just a summer romance,” she says, “or it may be forever, who can tell. All we know is he’s got a bad, bad case. I look at him all moony and in a trance and I want to hoot, but I don’t dare. Ted says it’s like a case of flu. Well, she’s a nice girl. Her name’s Joan, she’s studying education. All of a sudden Patrick loves the whole world. He keeps giving me these big hugs and asking if there’s anything he can do to help me out around the house. Oh, if he can just hold on to this! But I don’t know, it might kill him, a case of love like this. I don’t think anyone can survive for long at this pitch, they’d die of it after a while.”

  A WEEK AGO Tom got an invitation in the mail. “Drinks” the card announced in big block letters; “5:00 to 7:00 P.M.” The invitation had a black-and-white line drawing of a martini glass, and in the glass was an olive with a happy face. It was from Tom’s ex-wife Suzanne, wife number three, and her new husband, Gregor Heilbrun.

  Tom was surprised. His sleepy Suzanne had worked up the energy to give a cocktail party. “Hope to see you” she’d written next to the martini glass in her lazy script; he’d know that sloped hand anywhere.

  During their brief marriage she worked a mere eighteen hours a week in a bookstore, and when the shop offered her more hours, she refused. Why bother when she could wander all day around the apartment in her kimono with a cup of coffee and a magazine? It was a joke, at first, that it took her half an hour to floss her teeth, an hour to take a bath. It tore at him, his inability to rouse Suzanne from her torpor. He began to think her condition was hopeless and degenerative – and, even more worrying, contagious.

  And now, suddenly, a few months into her second marriage, she had awakened. This was his Suzanne, this perky creature in the deep pink dress who opened the door for him when he arrived at the Heilbrun house on South Drive. Her kiss was fluttery and full of sweetness, but nonetheless a hostess kiss, one that drew him swiftly into the coolness of the house and directed him toward Gregor, who waited, solid and serene in an open-necked sports shirt, ready to put him at his ease. “Tom, Tom,” he boomed. “What can I offer to quench your thirst?”

  “Let me get it,” Suzanne said in a voice that sounded to Tom like a chiming bell. “I know exactly what Tom likes.”

  “You’re looking wonderful,” he said to her later in the evening. Even to his own ears this sounded social and insincere, the comment of a man too wised up for lo
ve. She had a new gesture, a trim way of lifting her shoulders and signaling the start of a delicate shrug. “I mean it,” Tom said into her ear, “you look wonderful.”

  “I feel,” she said, “as though my life has just begun.”

  IT’S POSSIBLE for a man with three ex-wives to have six ex – in-laws, and Tom is on remarkably good terms with four of his.

  Sheila’s mother and father, Walter and Margaret Woodlock, live for most of the year in Sarasota, Florida, but they always send him a Christmas card with a cheery note and remember him on his birthday, usually with a postcard inscribed with a comic adage – on life in general, and on getting older. They seem for some reason to have decided that Tom is a man with a jokey, comedic core who contributed, briefly, a measure of welcome bounce to their family – Tom, the good-hearted clown, the failed son-in-law.

  Suzanne’s parents live in Trent, Manitoba, a semi-retired farm couple, deeply, narrowly religious, and strong believers in family values. Suzanne’s mother, Christa Friesen, likes to come into Winnipeg to shop now and then, and when she does she always telephones Tom for a chat. Even when she doesn’t catch him on the first call, she perseveres. “Just wanted to say hello. Harvey’s been pretty well all winter, back’s better and so on, and I can’t complain. He specially wanted me to give you a call. You know how he is, likes to keep in touch, and I feel the same.”

  But his second wife’s parents, Foxy and Lily Howe, are another matter. They live in a large, dark, Tudor-style house in Tuxedo Park, and, since the divorce, Clair has lived there with them. Tom can imagine the poisons that have been breathed against him in that house, the accusations, the act of cruelty he’s been charged with, the insensitivities rehearsed and endlessly dramatized.

  He doesn’t have to worry about running into Clair, since from all reports she never leaves the house. But occasionally he does run into Foxy or Lily – this is, after all, a small city – and receives, every time it happens, the full force of their hatred. It knocks him flat, as sudden and oppressive as waking up in a room that’s caught fire.

  Tonight, a Thursday, it happens.

  He has phoned Charlotte Downey and invited her to dinner, a Vietnamese place on Sergeant Avenue. Charlotte is talkative and lively, and she seems, though he may be flattering himself, extravagantly happy to be sitting here across from him, eating stingray salad and sipping at a glass of cold beer. And then a waiter leads Foxy and Lily past their table.

  Tom looks up and meets Foxy’s cold eye. And wonders how he could have forgotten so quickly the box of shit that arrived for him in the mail just a few short days ago, its stench and bulk, and its power to hurt him.

  ∼ CHAPTER 13 ∼

  Seduction and Consolation

  BOTH FAY MCLEOD AND HER MOTHER, PEGGY MCLEOD, ARE IN THE middle of writing books, and whenever they see each other, which is at least once a week, sometimes oftener, they compare their progress.

  Fay will say: “The thing keeps getting beyond me. Either I stick to my original notion of collating mermaid legends and visual images and trying to isolate the common element, seduction or consolation or whatever, or I work the more primary grid, sorting out the primitive significance, goddess figures, the intersection with the Virgin cult, and all that stuff. It’s a blessing, but a curse, too, the fact that these mermaid narratives are so tentative and that they never got pinned down and codified the way the Olympian hierarchy did. I’m just grabbing at odd straws and trying to make a basket of them. It’s true I don’t get myself trapped in other people’s rigid interpretations, because there aren’t any. I can stir and construe to my heart’s content, but it’s all so formless and loose. It’s a little like documenting air currents.”

  Peggy McLeod will say, her forehead frowning into a kind of lace: “The last thing I want to produce is another self-help manual. We’ve got all kinds of books that reassure menopausal women but offer nothing in the way of information, what’s really happening to their bodies. My head just isn’t made that way. I don’t want to give a pep talk to aging women, and I don’t think women will swallow that kind of pious wishful thinking anymore, that rubbish about the beauty of life after sixty and liberating the mature body and so on.”

  Fay, who cherishes the divagations of research at the same time she curses them, and who gets lost in the dark rooty middles of her own paragraphs, will say: “If only I could stay detached. I’m always looking for some crazy twentieth-century signifier. Freudian junk, Jungian. Archetypal. Somehow I’ve got to try to stand back and observe. I’ve got to let the observations speak for themselves. The overall pattern, if I ever find it, is going to come out of the accumulated stories or visual recordings.”

  Peggy McLeod says: “I look at the statistics, the calculations, and think, now I’ve got it in focus. And then I remember my own menopause, how it coincided with that terrible time Bibbi ran away and we didn’t know where she was for four months, and what that did to me, the way it tore my insides apart. I don’t know. We seem to be doomed by our body’s capriciousness – at least your mermaids don’t bleed and then stop. And we’re double-doomed by our history, where we happen to be in our lives when we hit age forty-seven or fifty.”

  Fay, stricken, feeling real panic, says: “Oh, God, I could be there, in just twelve years, menopause. I’ll be forty-seven in twelve years. Can you believe it? I can’t. What’ll I do? Oh, God.”

  Her mother says: “In twelve years I could be dead. I’ll have had my three score and ten.”

  “You won’t,” Fay says.

  “I sometimes think that the best thing about your mermaids is the fact that they never age. And then I think, no, I couldn’t bear that either.”

  THE HOUSE on Ash Avenue where Fay grew up, and where her mother and father continue to live, is filled with light and air. The pale-colored rugs in the McLeod house are sent out twice a year for cleaning, January and July. There are polished tables and soft chairs, shaded reading lamps, kitchen equipment in good repair, and a pretty garden with shrubs and pansy borders. The freezer in the basement is full. The cupboards are also full. In every room are shelves filled with books, and with magazines that are stacked neatly and chronologically arranged.

  On the second floor, beyond the wide square balustraded stairway, are four bedrooms. Fay’s parents, Peggy and Richard, aged sixty-two and sixty-six, respectively, occupy the large rectangular room at the front of the house. Sometime ago their old double bed was traded in for two singles. The wallpaper in this room is renewed every five or six years, and these wallpapers are always subdued, always some variation on stripes, always in a shade of blue or mauve, so as to fit in with the blue Thai silk curtains which were in place when Fay was a child and which have just now begun to rot along their seams.

  Next to the front bedroom is Clyde’s old boyhood room, now a study, sometimes called an office, for Fay’s father. It is a small, relatively sunless room furnished with an oak table, a swivel chair, file cabinets, and more bookshelves, but, according to family legend, it has never been used; Richard McLeod says this is not true, that in fact he once sat for an hour (well, almost an hour) at the expensive oak table and riffled through a folder of tax receipts. He retired officially from his firm one week ago, but even so, he has never been a man to bring work home from his office; his time at home is spent downstairs in the sunny living room reading books about windmills or building windmill models. It has been suggested to him by friends that he write his own book on windmills now that he’ll have time, but he says he has nothing new to say, and that it is quite enough anyway to have a wife and a daughter who are writing books.

  Bibbi’s old room is now referred to as the guest room. This room has been redone in white, the walls, the curtains, the bedspread, everything white except for the rug, which is a soft-edged Swedish design in shades of peach and apricot. A tiny, strictly functional bathroom has been carved out of the closet. This is the room where the McLeods’ two young grandsons, Gordon and Matthew, often stay on weekends, or where Fay
from time to time, too lazy to go home, or in need of family walls, spends the night.

  Fay’s old bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, has become a workroom for Peggy McLeod, a large organized space where for the last five years she has been assembling her menopause project.

  Work on the book has cut sharply into her private time, which is why the blue silk curtains have not yet been replaced, why her two best friends, Onion Boyle and Muriel Brewmaster, have seen so little of her recently, why she dropped out of the Handel Chorale, why she is spending this summer at home instead of renting, as she and Richard usually do, a cottage on Clear Lake. “I try to visualize this book as finished,” she says to Onion or Muriel or Fay or Bibbi or whoever is about, “but I can’t get hold of it, I can’t seem to hold it in my hand with its cover and pages all in place, like a real thing.”

  All her life Fay has watched how her mother takes pleasure in the small acts that order and thread the day, straightening a drawer, wiping a surface clean, folding sheets and towels. Her father’s bright face expresses a similar shock of contentment, as if a light were passing over his features, every time he takes his place at the dining table. Seeing the two of them growing old in this house, Fay imagines that even the rude surprises of illness and infirmity will be lessened by the presence of familiar walls and by the fact that they have each other.

  She knows they must worry about the temporary and unresolved lives of their two daughters, that she and Bibbi are not “settling down” in the usual way, marrying, producing children, and investing in property. As parents, the two of them have been both loving and broad-minded. Each of them, at different times, has expressed a belief that every life should contain a measure of anarchy. That possessions in themselves don’t bring happiness. That attachments are not always their own recompense. That love is imperfect and can even be the cause of suffering, but at least it is better than ending up alone.