The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  He was entitled to a few comforts. There was something oxlike and docile about him, yes, but wasn’t he entitled to a vision of plenitude and order, clothes freshly washed, freshly ironed? Why not? Other people had these things. He worked hard five nights a week. He earned a good salary. He had money in the bank. He’d been crazy to live the way he’d been living. It had got him down, worn him out, made him feel lonely and abandoned. Never again, Buster Blue-Eyes, never again.

  AND NEVER AGAIN would he spend an ounce of his human energy on father-quest crap. What did it matter who his old man was? Whoever it was wasn’t a father anyway, just a misplaced sperm on a misplaced night.

  “Your dad’s dead,” his mother told him in the beginning, which was a nice simple slug of information for a kid until the time came when he wanted to know what the man had died of – was it a car accident or cancer or maybe killed in action? Well, his mother said after a while, he’s not so much dead as disappeared. But where? he asked her – hoping for Alaska, maybe Mexico or Hollywood – and got one of his mother’s burnt, bright smiles, the lips wrinkling up. “He’s just disappeared, just vamoosed.” But what was his name, then, what did he look like? These questions came later, when Tom was twelve, thirteen, and starting to pick up auxiliary information at school, pieces that were at odds with Betty Avery’s version.

  The question of who his father was began to obsess him, and there was no one else to ask. His mother had come from the tiny town of Ramston Portage, a crossroads really, raised there by a grandmother who had since died. Her history was full of unposed questions. Tom sneaked looks in her dresser drawers, hunting for letters, photographs. Somehow the time had passed when he could ask her freely for information. The space between them had grown shy and slippery. He had no sense of what he was entitled to know, or even needed to know. It may have been that the vital facts had been explained to him years before, only he had forgotten, and now the information gap would never be closed.

  Eighteen years old and filling out a scholarship application for the University of Toronto, it occurred to him that he might solicit his mother’s help with the personal-information sheet, that this crafty ploy would force her to declare a few of the facts he needed to know.

  It was a Sunday. The two of them, he remembered, sat close together at the kitchen table, brown plastic bordered by chrome stripping. She picked up the pen he gave her, slowly and carefully filled in all the blanks – except for “father’s name.” Aha!

  “You can’t leave that blank,” Tom told her triumphantly. “You’ve got to put something in that space. A name.”

  He was shaking with excitement.

  She stared at the paper for a few seconds, one of her hands reaching up and rubbing the back of her tiny, tightly curled head. Then she leaned over the table, her hand cramped like a kind of shellfish, and printed, neatly, “John Smith.”

  John Smith? What? Who?

  Her face collapsed. Her arms shot out. She’d been a crazy mixed-up kid in those days, she told her son, Tom, just sixteen, a wild one. “I had a lot of boyfriends,” she sighed, dropping her eyes and doing her little trick with her mouth. “Just which one was your father, well, I never was exactly sure.”

  Boyfriends. He hated the word. Its trivial twang. A sour lump formed in his throat. He wanted to punch this woman, her crumpled, pleading face. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut, rolled his head back, and the moment passed.

  He wasted a lot of time after that looking around Duck River for men who might have been on the scene at the time, men whose coloring and bone structure resembled his. In his daydreams he imagined a meeting with “John Smith” and what he would say to him. “Dad,” he’d cry, choking up and embracing him. Or shaking hands in a husky Lorne Greene way. Or giving him a punch in the gut. Even when he went away to Toronto he examined the faces of men he saw on the street. Several times he considered reopening the question with his mother, trapping her, insisting she be more specific, that it was his right to know.

  But lately he’s come back to his old child’s assurance, that his father is dead, dead to him, anyway, and that he’s prepared to live with the mysterious wear and damage of that fact. He’s going to have to accept it, and now that he’s made up his mind, it seems as though he’s taken a step forward. He’s hanging loose, he’s stopped dreaming up sly scenarios. He’s wasted too much time thinking about something that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s over, it’s done with. It’s pointless torturing himself with what’s dead and buried. Never again, he’s decided.

  NEVER AGAIN is he going to have the kind of sex he had with Charlotte Downey last night. He’d rather do without. He’d rather enter a life of celibate denial than go through the hard labor and humiliation of bringing Charlotte Downey to quality orgasm. Quality orgasms were the only kind worth having, she told him. She said this sitting on the edge of Tom’s new bed. Her clothes were off. She flicked back her short hair meaningfully. Her face was vaporous, her eyes gelid.

  They had been to a movie, a German soft-porn piece with the kind of subtitles that give him headaches. He had a headache now, looking into Charlotte’s wide open face.

  “We’d better talk about the matter of precautions first,” she said. She showed him her condoms and he showed her his. “I hope you don’t mind if we use mine,” she said. “I’d feel better.”

  “You don’t mind if I ask if you’re a complete hetero,” she said. She was beginning to sound not tough, but toughened, which was something different. “I mean, I assume you’re a hetero, but I need your assurance, if I’m going to relax.”

  “Do you by any chance,” she asked, “have a herpes history?”

  “I don’t have anything against oral sex,” she told him, “but I prefer not to the first time with someone. I hope that’s okay with you. I don’t want you to think I’m against it on principle. It’s just this thing I have.”

  “This may sound kind of weird,” she said, “but could you start by rubbing the instep of my feet. Both feet. My feet have always been erogenous. Only about one percent of people have erogenous feet, at least that’s what my therapist says. Also the backs of my knees and the insides of my wrists. But especially my feet. I always get there if my partner starts with my feet.”

  After a while she said, “That’s good, that feels so good, but your elbow is putting just a bit too much pressure – there, that’s better. Yes, that’s a lot better. Would you mind reaching over and turning on the light. On. Thanks.”

  “I don’t mind if you talk,” she said later. “Just say anything that comes into your head. Any words you like.”

  “I’m starting to get there,” she said. “I’ll be another few minutes, though, if you can hold off. Maybe if you flick your tongue back and forth. Not like that, though, that tickles. Maybe if you tried doing it a little harder, sort of a circular movement. I think you’re getting the idea.”

  Then, “Here I come, here I come. Keep me flying, keep me up there. Oh, lovely, hmmm, yes, like that, heavenly, oh that was nice.”

  Finally: “Let’s just talk now. Let’s just hang on to each other and talk. Let’s be, you know, spontaneous. Oh, you don’t know how I’ve needed this. Next time we can try something else if you want. You plan the menu next time.”

  Never again, he said to himself. Never again.

  ∼ CHAPTER 15 ∼

  Something I’ve Been Thinking About

  FAY CRIED ALL NIGHT LONG.

  It was a Friday night. She had spent the evening at a baby shower for Donna Watts, who was the coordinator of the volunteer program at the folklore center. The shower was held at the house of Beverly Miles, on Smith Avenue, just off Wolsley, in an old treed part of town where individual family houses were jammed together on short busy blocks. Beverly’s teenaged daughter, Lara, had decorated the screened front porch with garden flowers and candles and long swoops of ribbon. Lengths of this same ribbon had been threaded through a wicker bassinet, positioned on a card table, which was to hold the bounty
of baby gifts. (For Donna’s first baby, due late in September, Fay had knitted a bunting bag in fine white wool with a band of fuchsia around the hood.)

  The women ate from plates which they balanced on their laps. It seemed to Fay, looking around, that the faces of these familiar women appeared softened, beautiful. Beverly said she was sorry they had to use their laps, and someone else said: “Why is it people are so nitzy about balancing plates on their laps? You’d think it took some special kind of acrobatic finesse. It’s the most natural thing in the world.” One of the women, Sarah Jane Brady, reminded everyone of the lap suppers that had been a part of frontier life in the west. The older Morris girl said to Fay, “I’ve never been to a shower before, they’re really neat,” and at that moment Fay cut into her cake with a fork and struck a silver dollar, which declared her the next to become pregnant. Fay looked around the darkening porch and thought how happy she was to be here. There is nowhere else I’d rather be, she said to herself, and meant it.

  But the minute she opened the door of her apartment she began to cry. She set down her key ring in the flat glass dish on the hall table and then she tore off her clothes, just left them in a heap on the floor, and stepped into the shower, turning the water on so that it was as hot as she could bear. It struck her breasts and the inside of her thighs, and she made herself turn her face to take the stream full force. She opened her mouth and let loose a wavy howl of anguish. Stop it, she said, and turned the water off. A sudden silence closed around her. She wrapped herself in the largest towel she owned and made a pot of tea, then forgot to drink it. She fiddled with the television and sniffled through fifteen minutes of an old movie starring David Niven, then switched it off with a snap. “I hate your guts,” she blubbered to the dead screen, to David Niven’s vanished image. “I hate mustached jerks like you.”

  She held on to the sides of her head, pressed as hard as she could, and thought: I will not be placated, I will not be placated.

  She got into bed, twisted her pillow as though it were a human neck, and cried. “Why, why,” she wept. She listened to herself weeping, her torn, startled gasps, the sliding octaves which she recognized as being melodramatic. “Boo hoo,” she said aloud, experimentally. She tasted her tears. Only a week ago someone at work – Colin? – had told her that the chemical makeup of sad tears was different from that of happy tears. One was saltier than the other. She blew her nose and thought about how ugly nose blowing was. If you lived alone for a long time you might get to the point of blowing your nose on your bed sheets, why not? She got out of bed and paced up and down in her dark living room. She looked out the window at the bulky buildings across the street. Not a light anywhere. This kind of loud, bleak sorrowing should be saved for sudden and tragic death – she knew that, but at the same time she didn’t know how to make herself stop.

  Why was it people in books threw themselves on beds to cry? Because it felt as though you were pushing up against something real, a shock of grief that became a shape. A mattress was the next best thing to a person; oh God, it was true, what a terrible thought. To weep into springs and padded cotton. She lay on her bed and sobbed for two or three minutes longer. Where did all this bodily water come from? Where was it stored up? In her sinuses? The ventricles of her heart? She got up and looked in the mirror. The wings of her nostrils were reddened and raw. “I can’t bear this,” she said out loud, forcing her voice up to an abrupt, dissonant pitch. She said it again, with an English accent. “I cahn’t beah this.” She squinted at the clock. It was 4:00 a.m.

  FAY LOOKED SHYLY at her father and said, “I’m thinking of having a baby.”

  “Oh,” he said. “A baby.”

  “I’m at the critical age, as they say.”

  “Are you sure” – he paused – “that you want a baby?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I don’t want to leave it until it’s too late and then be sorry.”

  “You’ve got a little time,” he said.

  “It gets risky.”

  “I know, I know.”

  It was a Saturday morning, and Fay and her father were sitting across from each other at Mister Donut’s, drinking coffee out of heavy mugs and eating bran muffins.

  “I’ve been mulling it over,” Fay said. She considered the rim of her cup. “I’m earning enough now to support a child. That wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I gather you’re thinking of taking on this project alone?”

  “Well, yes.” She gave a minute shrug. Her mouth collapsed downward.

  “I see, yes. Hmmm. And, of course, I don’t have to remind you how fraught with difficulties the life of a single parent is, quite aside from money.”

  “I know, I know. That’s one of the things I’m taking into consideration.”

  “You haven’t made up your mind definitely, then?”

  “I’m just thinking about it. Considering. And I guess I wanted to test the notion on you.”

  “Me?”

  “You wouldn’t find it too awkward to handle? This husband-less daughter of yours, producing a kid.”

  “Believe me, daughter mine, awkward is not a word that would occur to me. And since when, may I ask, have you felt obliged to ask for your parents’ blessing?”

  “I’d just like your reaction. For instance, do you think it’s selfish?”

  “What?”

  “Plopping a child into a single-parent situation?”

  “I think you want to ask yourself something, Fay. Whether you’d be doing this as a kind of insurance against loneliness.”

  “But I’m not lonely.” She said this loudly, then lowered her voice. “At least not too often. Not really. No more than anyone else. It’s just that having kids seems to be one of the big pieces we’re given. You only get a few pieces and that happens to be one.”

  “Lots of people don’t have children. They have perfectly valid lives, full lives. Look at Onion.”

  “I am looking at Onion. It’s the part of her that seems a little – damaged.”

  “I don’t think she’d agree. I don’t think I’d agree, either.”

  “They’re not rooted in anything, childless people.”

  “They’re connected to love. And to work. The two good Freudian anchors.”

  “How did we get to Freud so fast!”

  “I’m just pointing out – ”

  “I’ve got a feeling you’re trying to discourage me. You’re being altogether too broad-minded and tolerant. Too fatherly.”

  “I suppose I’m just trying to feel out how serious you are.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “And whether you’ve thought about… well, the logistics. Of getting pregnant, I mean.”

  “I’m seeing someone right now.” She shrugged and felt her face go foolish. “I could keep it all reasonably simple and discreet.”

  “This doctor person?”

  She smiled. “Yes, this doctor person.”

  “I take it he’s not someone you’d like to carry on with.”

  “You mean on and on and on?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I do realize this has a predatory side,” Fay said. “Helping myself to someone else’s gene pool and so on. Like shoplifting.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “I’m just worried about time running out on me.”

  “Can I give you some advice?”

  “I adore advice. And you never give me any anymore.”

  “Wait six months before you decide definitely. Oh, I know all about the biological clock ticking away, I’ve heard your mother talking about it, but six months won’t affect things that much.”

  “Why six months?”

  “I don’t know. It’s only been a short time since you and Peter went your separate ways – ”

  “It’s been four months now. Nearly.”

  “That’s not long. Why not make sure you’re clear of all that first. B
esides, anything could happen in six months.”

  “You’re sounding awfully prophetic.”

  “Well, you never know what’s going to happen. What’s just around the corner.”

  Fay drank her coffee. After a minute she looked up and said, “Anyway, it’s only something I’m thinking about.”

  She left her muffin uneaten; she was so sorry to hear herself talking the way she was. Her pronouncements, her plans, her foolishness – they filled her up with sadness so that she couldn’t eat a thing.

  “CHURCH BELLS!” Onion pronounced with scorn.

  “Yes,” Fay said. “Where is it, St. Luke’s or Holy Rosary?”

  “Wherever it is, it’s an imposition.”

  “Onion! It’s a lovely sound, church bells. I love it.”

  “Tinny.”

  “In a way.”

  “Have another glass of wine before you go.”

  “Just a slurp. I’ve still got some notes to look over for tomorrow.”

  “Mermaiding?”

  “Yes.”

  “Church bells are no more tolerable than those blasts of rock music you get from car windows.”

  “I think it’s Holy Rosary. It’s coming from that direction.”

  “Calling the faithful to prayer.”

  “Have you ever said a prayer, Onion? Tell me honestly.” (She was loving this, sitting in Onion’s living room, letting the words drift along.)

  “Not since I entered the age of reason.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Eighteen. Or was it nineteen.”