The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  “Yes? Out with it.”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “So! Not a babe in the woods.”

  “No.”

  “And he hasn’t been married before?”

  “He certainly hasn’t said anything about… no, I don’t think so.”

  “So where’s he taking you tonight?”

  “We’re driving out to Birds Hill. The Folk Festival.”

  “Good, good.”

  “You do approve, then?” Fay put on her mock-formal tone.

  “Partly. Measured approval, anyway. There’s one thing that rings funny bells, though. Why is it you only see this man on Thursdays?”

  Fay paused. “I’m not sure exactly. We’ve sort of, I don’t know, fallen into this Thursday thing.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Isn’t it faintly sinister and werewolfish? The Thursday-night man?”

  “I wouldn’t say sinister, exactly.”

  “A little overprogrammed?”

  “Maybe. Look, Iris, I’ve got to go. We have a staff meeting in two minutes.”

  “What about kissing?”

  “What?”

  “Have you at least brushed your tender lips against his rough manly lips?”

  “This is getting silly.”

  “Well, have you?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to get rid of this man.”

  “You might be right,” Fay said, then added with more despair than she felt, “but who else is there?”

  ∼ CHAPTER 16 ∼

  Fortuitous Events

  TOM AVERY HAS JUST BEEN STUNG BY A WASP. SOMETHING, ANYWAY, with wings and proboscis that landed on the back of his hand while he leaned on his bathroom-window sill, breathing in the shining powdery morning air and gazing at the condominium across the street, an immense old mansion renovated two or three years ago and jumped up with skylights, stained glass, and slashes of bright hardware on its heavy, rather forbidding oak door. Only occasionally has Tom ever seen anyone coming or going through that door, and he supposes there must be another entrance at the back, next to the parking lot. He can’t actually see the parking lot from his window, but he imagines it to be filled with glossy little Japanese models in bright assertive colors.

  He stares at his hand, which in less than one minute has puffed up to nearly twice its usual size, a reddened, meaty paw. The pain strengthens, and seems to sing at the edge of his dissolving surprise. He strokes the swelling flesh reproachfully. Forty years old and this is the first time he’s been stung.

  He’s read about people who’ve died of insect stings, and for all he knows he’s one of those afflicted with the deadly allergy. He should drop everything and race over to the drop-in clinic on Osborne Street. Fortuitous. (He imagines himself telling friends at some later date how fortuitous it was that this clinic should have been so close at hand.) The waiting room would be full, but he could explode into that circle of arthritic ladies and pregnant women, holding up his arm and shouting, “This is an emergency!”

  He feels a bubble of compacted air in his chest. His hand, this stiff red appurtenance which seems no longer a part of his body, demands that he keep his eyes on it, that he blink several times in an attempt to squeeze it into focus. Down below him on the street a young woman rides by on a bicycle. She wears red shorts and a white T-shirt. The harsh light that fills the street is softened by her bare arms, which are fetchingly free, and around her head is tied a printed scarf, knotted there, he supposes, to keep her hair from flying around her eyes. He could love a woman like that. She rides along so primly, with her back so straight and neat. Should he call down to her, ask her for help? Her legs are pale, girlish. Does he have the right to offend her with his ugly swollen flesh?

  He might pound on the floor and rouse the old man who lives downstairs, a Mr. Duff, retired, a widower who rarely goes out till evening, and then only as far as the Quick-Shake for an ice-cream cone. Once, on the landing, Tom had had a brief conversation with him about fishing in the Lake of the Woods, about Mr. Duff’s late wife, who suffered from hypertension, and about their son, who has moved to Los Angeles to work in the plastics industry. Mr. Duff might be immensely flattered to be asked to play a role in a medical emergency. How do we know who our rescuers will be, or when we ourselves will be called upon? Tom puts this question to himself, finding it more speculative and interesting than the issue of hypochondria, a shameful condition boiled out of ego and abetted by loneliness. But am I really lonely? he demands of the chipped paint work on the window frame.

  Inhale. Exhale. The pain is beginning to withdraw, and he examines his hand with curiosity now, this bloated fishlike thing which seems suddenly at the center of his body, as vital and solid as an organ.

  It comes to him that his life has been minutely altered. Un-stung five minutes ago, he has now been inducted into the territory of those who understand the injury bees do, and he feels a compulsion to announce his changed state. But to whom?

  To nobody he can think of.

  Perhaps he really is lonely. Undoubtedly he is. Of course he is. Why else had he been so moved last week seeing a young father in the Portage Place Mall stoop suddenly and tie his child’s shoelace? The tenderness of the man’s bent head had reminded him of his own solitariness, how it was possible to get used to this condition and to die of it.

  He raises his hand to his lips and holds it there for a minute, pressing into the numb private flesh the imprint of a kiss.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING the swelling was down, leaving a patch of itchy reddened skin with a dull button of pain at its center. “What you do is put baking soda on it,” his mother instructed him over the telephone – showing how little she knows about his life, imagining his kitchen and bathroom shelves to be as fully provisioned as her own. “If that doesn’t do the trick, you might give it a dab of calamine lotion. Or a little E.”

  “E?”

  “You buy it in a tube.”

  “Did you get the flowers?” he prompted.

  “Flowers, oh boy, did I get the flowers! I said to Mike, this must of cost him an arm and a leg, long stems and all. And that’s a real cute birthday card, a hoot. I heard you interviewing that lady politician last week. Tuesday, I think it was. On the radio. What’s her name again?”

  “What were you doing awake at that hour?”

  “Hay fever. Do I have a dose! Especially at night.”

  “It’s all the dust in the air.”

  “Well, I’ve got my nasal spray, I’ve got my drops. But I’m still up sneezing my head off in the middle of the night. Mike says – ”

  “But you heard the show?” He tried not to sound pleased.

  “Did I ever! She’s one smart cookie, as I told Mike the next morning. A gift for the gab. And do you want to know something? You’ve got a teensy-weensy bit of it too, Mr. Blarney Stone, those snazzy words of yours. Is she good-looking?”

  “What?”

  “Pretty? Is she pretty?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Married?”

  “Married? I don’t know. I think so. Anyway, she’s old enough to be – ”

  “Can’t hear you. Mike’s got the sander going, he’s taking the finish off that old spice rack of mine, he’s going to do it in driftwood gray.”

  “I just said happy birthday.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  A DRY HOT WIND’S been pestering the city all week long. Dust from a hundred miles away has settled on the trees that line the boulevards, and even the petunias in the beds along Wellington Crescent are coated with gray powder. When Tom opened his mouth to say good evening to Mr. Duff, he felt it fill up with dust.

  The thought has come to him that he ought to be kinder to lost souls like Mr. Duff. He’ll be old himself one day, old and – the image arrived like a blast of hot air – perhaps living alone. Yes. Very probably living alone, and dealing with the creak and chagrin of an old body. The day
s would stretch. His income would shrink. The dread he’s already begun to hoard might find inappropriate outlets. An odd man, people would say, bent in his yearnings. A loner with a fatal lack of animation. His joints would stiffen. People, strangers and friends alike, would avert their glance from his watery eye-sacs, hurry past him on the stairs as though he were invisible. It wouldn’t be worth their while to divert Old Man Avery (“one of your old-time radio hands”) with everyday anecdotes, or even to comment on the weather.

  “Well,” Tom said to Mr. Duff, after running into him on the sidewalk in front of the apartment block, “we’re certainly having ourselves a good hot summer.” He made a special effort at eye contact.

  “Little too hot, I’d say.” Abuse or else ridicule marred Mr. Duff’s tone, and a red bubbling of flesh appeared at the corner of his mouth, a kind of sore that matched the irritation in his voice. Tom tried for a pitch of jokey optimism. “I suppose we should store up some of this heat for the winter. Won’t be long.”

  “Never minded the winters myself.”

  “You don’t feel the cold then?” A fake chuckle rattling beneath his voice.

  “I stay indoors.”

  Tom said, after a pause, “I got stung by a bee the other day. Just standing and looking out the bathroom window.” If nothing else, his years in radio have taught him how to keep the ball up in the air. “It can be pretty dangerous, a bee sting.”

  A curtain dropped across Mr. Duff’s face. Incomprehension or boredom, Tom wasn’t sure which.

  “First time in my life,” Tom went on, as though this were an intimate offering between two seasoned friends.

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Duff said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Excuse me, I said. I just farted.”

  “Don’t mention it, Mr. Duff. It happens.”

  Tom said this joyfully. “It happens all the time.” Laughter rolled out of him. He was ready now to embrace the man, declaring him his brother. Why, this person standing before him was a spirit colliding with his own, a random particle, a face, a name, a set of testicles, a crumbling body frame, a breather of oxygen, a farter – living his life in a set of rooms suspended beneath his own, connected to him by water pipes and plasterboard and a few cubic yards of fraternal air. The differences between them were infinitesimal; they were the same flesh, neighbors, brothers. Agghh!

  “LET’S HEAR THOSE telephones ringing,” Tom pleaded to his “Niteline” listeners on Monday night. “Tonight’s our annual roundup of civic affirmation. It’s booster night. Are you ready out there? Okay then. ‘I love Winnipeg because – ’”

  At first the calls dribbled in.

  “Well, it so happens I love Winnipeg,” the first caller said, “because my roots are here.” He interrupted himself with an eager piercing laugh. “This is not a city of transients. You just plain old-fashioned live here. And so does everyone you know.”

  “I don’t love Winnipeg, I adore Winnipeg.” The voice was boozy, female, full of squawks. “And I’ll tell you why. I like seasons. Have you been out to the west coast? They’ve got one season out there, the rainy season. Gets boring. Bo-ring.”

  “I don’t love Winnipeg at all,” the third caller said. “Everyone here is trying their damndest to love it, that’s the whole problem. Methinks they doth protest too much. We’ve got a lousy climate here; we’ve got to grit our teeth and put up with it. So let’s can all this you-know-what about loving it here. Let’s be honest for a change.”

  “Hey, Tom, you there? You mind if I reply to Miss Sourpuss, your previous caller? She’s forgetting what this city offers. I’m talking sports, entertainment. I’m talking great movies, and the biggest shopping mall this side of Edmonton.”

  “Go ahead, caller,” Tom said. “Are you there?”

  “My permanent home is in Winnipeg at the moment, but I’ve got a transfer coming up and I’m going to be putting my house on the market. If anyone out there’s interested in a fantastic bargain, split-level, three bedrooms – ”

  “Your listeners might be interested to know that there’re more restaurants here per capita than any city in the world. How ’bout that?”

  “I love Winnipeg because the people here are the salt of the earth. You walk down Portage and you get smiles from everyone, even the cops. I do wish they’d stop their scrapping on City Council, though. We’ve got some real nerds on City Council, one or two in particular, real dinosaurs. Okay if I mention their names on the air?”

  “Maybe we should just leave it at that,” Tom suggested, giving Ted Woloschuk the wind-up signal.

  “I love Winnipeg,” the final caller said, “but I’d love it more if we had a few more heated bus-shelters. It’s summer, but I’m starting to dread winter already, standing out there every morning on Henderson Highway and freezing my buns off. Otherwise this is paradise. I mean it. It’s heaven.”

  “ARE YOU SURE you don’t mind, Tom?” Jenny Waring was saying on the telephone. “I mean, we could get a sitter, but the Chandlers are taking the girls to the lake with them, and that just leaves Gary. The whole thing came up so suddenly. Jeff only found out about this conference at the last minute and he thought, what a chance to get away, just the two of us, even if it is just Minneapolis.”

  “Hey, Minneapolis is a great – ”

  “If it were the weekend my mother could take him, but Thursday night’s her bridge tournament, and besides, ever since her hip went she finds the kids a handful. But listen, Tom, I just hope you mean it when you say – ”

  “It’s only two nights, Jen. And it’ll be a great change for me to have a sidekick – ”

  “He thinks the world of you, you know, he’s always asking when you’re coming around – ”

  “You tell him I’m looking forward to it. Tell him we’re going to have two whole days without vegetables. Just morning-to-night milkshakes and maybe the odd burger thrown in.”

  “He’s going to love this. And I’ll be sure to send his sleeping bag – ”

  “Don’t worry. You haven’t seen my place lately. I’ve got real furniture now. I’ll bed him down on the couch. And I’ve even got sheets. I went wild. All the modern conveniences.”

  “But what about Thursday night? You’ve got the show to do on Thursday night. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “I’ll roll him in a blanket and take him down to the studio. Just tuck him up in the lounge, no problem. Someone’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “He’s not the best sleeper – ”

  “If he wakes up he can watch us do the show. I’ll let him do a commercial.”

  “I just feel, you know, this is such an imposition – ”

  “I’m the godfather, remember? It’s time I acted a little godly.”

  “I still worry – ”

  “It’s two nights, Jenny. Relax. You’ll have a great time, and it’ll do me good to have company.”

  “I’ll get Jeff to drop off his stuff, his pajamas and toothbrush and all. And if you can pick him up at this birthday party – ”

  “I’ve already written it down. Thursday afternoon, five o’clock. Yale Avenue. The McLeods, 307 Yale.”

  “You probably know them. Clyde and Sonya McLeod? She’s the abortion lawyer. He’s got this stutter – ”

  “I don’t think so. But don’t worry. It’ll work out fine.”

  “Right. And Tom – ”

  “What?”

  “You’re a sweetheart. Really, I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  MISERY DOES NOT love company. The lonely can do very little for each other. Emptiness does not serve emptiness. The wormy black dreads (as Tom pictures them) come bubbling out of a swampish fatigue, out of the most innocent or shallow breath, the least word, the way your necktie unknots or the hair on your head sits. A gesture, a sigh, can spread contagion. Darkness rubs off. It only gets darker. It’s blank, viewless.

  Knowing all this – too well, too well – Tom spends all day Wednesday in bed. Around noon he calls the stat
ion and reports in sick. Lenny Dexter can take the show for him. Lenny will jump at the chance, leaving Tom free to sweat out his hyperbolic self-pity, if that’s what it is.

  Here he lies, a man alone in an apartment, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the North American continent. A man who produces nothing but noise. A man attached to no one. A man sliding downhill.

  These attacks have occurred two or three times before in his life, and he knows how to deal with them. He’s got a method. He sleeps and reads, gives himself punishing chores, treats himself unkindly, then sleeps again. He resists the urge to whimper. He clenches his fists, trying to be hearty, rubbing his hot face. He resists the notion of a mid-afternoon Scotch. He resists phoning his mother and telling her he’s feeling terrific.

  The rain falls continuously in the windless air. It gathers in beads on the window screen, filling in one small square after another with a film of silver. Tom watches this progression for an hour or more. Life’s offerings ought to be more vivid than this, he knows that, more ablaze with meaning and more splendid. He could put on some music, he could turn on a lamp, he could make some coffee – but he doesn’t. He mutters to himself instead. He accuses himself of cultivating a sadness in order to cast it off.

  And he will cast if off. He is reasonably certain that tomorrow he will undergo a mending of his fibrous tissues, climb out of this marshy place. It’s possible, he knows, to win himself back. He’s done it before. More than once.

  TOM REMEMBERS that he woke up hungry on Thursday morning. Wake up, the sunlight said, wake up and eat.

  He asked himself when he had last felt so hungry. What blew through his body was a starved clean longing for food, and this longing was accompanied by an impeccable asceticism. He ate a basic breakfast, cereal and milk, and immediately, ritualistically, washed and dried the dishes and put them away.

  He took a long shower and dried himself with a clean towel. A brand-new towel, never before used. The price tag was still stapled to the hem. “You wimp,” he said to his dusky penis, but in a friendly tone. He dried carefully between his toes. It had been some time since he had regarded his toes closely. Years. He found some foot powder on the bathroom shelf and sprinkled himself lavishly. This seemed for some reason a large and noble gesture.