The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  He trusts her. This trust of his is based on – instinct? Her hands on his back, pressing; those hands were about to solve and satisfy something in him. (Had he imagined that her fingers opened, spread themselves?) Her warm, even bodily pressure moving against him. He hadn’t imagined that.

  So he trusts her, yes, and – an ancillary happiness – he trusts himself, too, knowing that when he sat down twelve days ago at his kitchen table, pen in hand, scattering words over the pale blue paper – foolish words, crazy words – that he was as deeply, rationally sane as he’d ever been in his life.

  “WELL, YES, I suppose I could say I know Fay McLeod,” Liz Chandler told Tom. “Here, have another waffle. Not that I know her well. We say hello if we run into each other, that kind of thing. She was a couple of years behind me in high school, and you know what it’s like when you’re in high school, a couple of years makes an enormous difference. Actually, Fay McLeod’s a good friend of Iris Jaffe’s, Iris used to be a Corning, her mother was Winnie Corning, she was a friend of my mother’s, they used to play tennis together, mixed doubles, back in the dark ages. She used to go with someone called Willy Gifford – Fay, I’m talking about, not Winnie Corning, for heaven’s sake. Did you know Willy Gifford? He was in advertising or films or something, he was gorgeous. Women fell at his feet. He and Fay McLeod went together for ages, and if I’m not mistaken they were even engaged for a while, but I guess it didn’t pan out, anyway, he’s out on the west coast somewhere, I think. Or the east coast. Gene, that waffle’s about done, I think, it’s going to burn. No, she’s never been married, I’d know something like that, not that she hasn’t had plenty of friends, good friends, shall we say. She was living with Peter what’s-his-name, that long humongous guy, you know, who used to be married to Fritzi Sweet? Yes, Fritzi. Didn’t you know she’d been married before? In fact, I think they’re back together again. Fritzi and this Peter person. Poor Sammy, a sweet guy, talk about untimely – yes, I do remember Sammy was married to your Sheila. That sure was a quickie. What was it – two years? Well, that’s the way it goes, a merry-go-round. Well, I’m not sure, but I could figure it out – I’m thirty-seven, so Fay McLeod must be thirty-five or thereabouts, but, then, she hasn’t had any kids, so no stretch marks, no agony lines, et cetera. Chrissie, will you shut up for one minute, I’m getting you another glass of milk, give Mommy half a sec. Now listen, Tom, you’ve hardly eaten a thing. Well, I’m not sure why they split up. I mean, she probably met someone else, it wasn’t as though they were married, and she is a fairly attractive woman. Well, okay, very attractive. Anyway, what’s up? Why so interested in Fay McLeod all of a sudden?”

  “YES, INDEED,” said Simon Birrell, who does the noon-hour farm report for CHOL. “I’ve known Fay for years. Stephanie and I are both fond of her, and so are the kids – she loves kids, it’s a shame she hasn’t had half a dozen of her own. I’m surprised, Tom, that you’ve never run into her at our place. We see quite a bit of her. She’s in the Handel Chorale, has been for ages, second alto, not a great voice, not a solo voice, that is, but a decent voice. Well, yes, that’s true, she was living with Peter Knightly. Do you know Peter? A decent guy, English background. I don’t know what happened. The usual thing, I guess, it just ran its course. She may have said something to Stephanie about it, but not to me, and I certainly wouldn’t have asked. I think, perhaps, she’s just one of these women who can’t settle down. It happens. It’s sad to see. My heart goes out to people who’re on their own, who make that choice. But maybe it happens because they want it to happen, who knows?”

  “WHY HELLO, TOM,” Sonya said on the telephone. “Of course, it’s no bother. Fay’s address? You mean in Paris? But I thought I gave you her address – sure, I’d be glad to check it again. I’ve got it right here somewhere on a little bitty piece of paper. Good Lord, I’ve got so many bits and scraps floating around. Here it is. Number fourteen, rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris six, that’s the Sixth Arron-dissement. Is that the same address I gave you before? Anyway, her time in Paris is just about up, I think she’s off to Germany next, and then she’s got this little chunk of Italy, kind of a circuit, then she’s on her way home, what a whirlwind tour! Well, we’ve had a couple of postcards, yes, and she says everything’s going just swimmingly.”

  “GOOD AFTERNOON, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the National Center for Folklore Studies. My name is Beverly Miles and I’m your guide today. We’ll begin our tour in just a couple of minutes. Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but you look very, very familiar, are you by any chance Tom Avery? I thought so. Well, I’m one of your fans. Really! No, I mean it! I listen to ‘Niteline’ every night, the first hour, anyway, and then I’m afraid I drift off. I loved your Bob Dylan special last week. Maybe you’ll give the center a mention on the air sometime. We have conducted tours Tuesday through Saturday, every hour on the half hour. Well, it’s time we began, I think. If you’ll follow me, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll start with the Great Plains room, where we’ll stop and look at some interesting artifacts from our aboriginal peoples. Please just follow me and feel free to ask questions. That’s what we’re here for.”

  “HEY, TOM,” cried Rosalie Summers, the CHOL receptionist, “a fax came for you about an hour ago, and here it is. And listen, you’d better put on your asbestos gloves, Romeo, this one’s a sizzler.”

  Tom opened it, held it up to the light, and read:

  I love you too. Returning home Aug. 31, 10:15 A.M., Air Canada, flight 192. I love you too.

  Fay

  ∼ CHAPTER 21 ∼

  I Love You Too

  FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, WHEN FAY WAS A GIRL OF TWENTY, SHE WENT away to the University of Wisconsin in Madison in order to study that unstable art or science, whichever it is, that goes by the name of folklore.

  Folk Studies. She liked the sound of it. It felt roughly formed and accessible, tactile and breathing. It opened doors in the corporeal world that were logical, quirky, arcane, and sometimes whimsical. Sex and economics lay at the bottom of it, and also the collapsing edge of elaborate religious observance. Folklore seemed to her a kind of poetry, a way of guessing at the links between language and behavior, and, furthermore, no one else she knew was doing it.

  During her two years in Madison she had three love affairs, one of them serious, or so it seemed while it was happening. Also during that period she lived alone for the first time, a frightening but joyous experiment, in a cramped apartment on a short dark street near the main campus, and learned how it was possible to stretch a small sum of money – the Quiller Foundation Fellowship, as it was called – over the exigencies of rent, food, clothes, books, and movies (at this period of her life she found herself several afternoons a week seated in dark boxlike theaters where she drank in the dappled images and subtitles and nuanced exhortations of foreign-film makers, always, afterward, re-entering the clean sun-specked streets of Madison full of cheerful skepticism and surprise at where destiny had thus far delivered her.)

  She took up cycling and then fencing, gave up red meat, smoked small amounts of hash with a wide spectrum of friends, a few of whom she is still in touch with, and once or twice became dismayingly, bone-shakingly drunk on cheap wine. She was cheerful more often than she was sad, and was prideful about her discovery that happiness was a kind of by-product of existence and not an end in itself. Wearing jeans and a coarse-knit Brittany sweater, she sat in various Madison coffee bars talking and being talked at and laying to rest such issues as the evils of imperialism, the menace of nuclear arms, the weight of the patriarchy, the insularity of the Western tradition, and the old unchartable persistence of spiritual belief. She learned, sitting cross-legged on her bed, to play a few chords on a guitar and to sing mournfully to herself, relishing this self-image above all others. And at the end of her fellowship, a few weeks after her twenty-second birthday, she was awarded a master’s degree in Folklore Studies.

  Working under the direction of Hector Lownsbrough, that wattled, decent, fussy
septuagenarian, Fay examined the conjugal arrangements in five widely differing societies – Uganda, France, Mexico, Japan, and Albania. Ring around the rosy, ring around the world. She concluded that the marriage ceremony itself constituted a mere rubber-stamping of a more significant, though far less codified, premarriage agreement – which was the exchange of sentiments between a woman and a man that declared their hearts to be open to one another. (Not that she used the word “heart” in her thesis, and not that she risked, except within the boundaries of crisply set quotation marks, the word “love.”)

  She wrote instead of the ritualized exchange of gifts – rings, money, cattle, carved spoons, flowers, vials of tears, pierced sea-shells, bracelets of human hair, or offerings of costly fruit, all of which were portents of larger, final gifts to come.

  She catalogued the traditional methods by which the couple’s private pledge was broadcast to the wider community. The publication of banns. The wearing of scarlet cloth or a lace headdress. The visitation of one family upon the other, during which certain sweet cakes were eaten or a ceremonial brew drunk.

  Her final chapter, and the most original – “This is the thesis,” insisted Dr. Lownsbrough – analyzed the formal phrase, or speech tag, that attaches to a declaration of affection.

  These linguistic units, in all societies – or, at least, in all those Fay examined – tend to be both ancient and economical, and their word pattern fairly rigidly ordered – a subject and object balanced like a teeter-totter over a verb, or else, as in the French je t’aime, the object cradled in the arms of the vital sentiment. The distribution of syllables in such phrases is close to perfect. Vowel sounds predominate, and such consonants as exist lie soft on the tongue. In even the most conservative communities the utterance is oddly ungendered, though it is generally spoken first by the male and echoed by the female. It wraps itself around a resolution that cannot readily be expressed in words of similar weight. Its currency is hard, unqualified, and almost shocking in its directness. Its subsequent disavowal is difficult to establish without guilt or loss of face. It is so deeply embedded in the culture that it is not easily dislodged by fashion, and generally it holds on to its potency despite the corruption of popular songs, cheap slogans, greeting-card verses, and the like. In most languages its music is sonorous and rhythmic – I love you, I love you. A miniature poem that fills the mouth, yet it is uttered often with curious difficulty, almost reluctance.

  “I love you,” Fay had faxed to Tom Avery in Winnipeg. She had pronounced the words. Her brain felt washed, cool. At rest.

  LIVING OUT OF a suitcase all these weeks has made her dizzy. Too many hotels, too many strange beds, bad beds, generally, damp and unmercifully flat and topped by a long hard sluglike roll instead of a pillow. What was inside those unyielding sausages, anyway? Compacted corn husks? Wet cotton? No wonder the French were an irascible people – they must all suffer from sore neck disease.

  Now, however, in Germany, in the old city of Trier, her bed is soft, white, and generous. But still she’s unable to sleep. It’s three o’clock in the morning – the church bell chimes every quarter hour – and she turns and grasps a handful of smooth sheeting, wrings it unsparingly and thinks of the faxed message she’s sent to Tom Avery. What, oh, what has she done!

  The mermaids have affected her equilibrium. She’s seen too many of them (the museum in Trier is particularly rich) and she’s filled up so many note cards that she’s been forced to buy a new satchel to hold them all. She’s sick of mermaids. Their writhing bodies. Their empty unblinking faces shrieking for love. (She’s taken over a hundred photographs herself and arranged for a further forty to be professionally done.) Not one of the mermaids she’s seen has had a whit of intelligence about her. The tiny annular mouths are greedy. Love, love, love is all they can dream up down there in their underwater homes. They’re starved and vapid and stupid as fish. They’re impoverished by love, maddened by love, they’re crazy as … as crazy as Fay is herself.

  SHE’S NOTICED something odd: that the mermaid likenesses found close to the sea are coarse in their configuration and animalistic, while those found farther inland are finer, more ethereal, more womanly. In the German city of Augsburg, for instance, the mermaids possess an enchanting rococo pink-and-whiteness, like cherubs who have sprouted fins and tails instead of wings. Insipid, perhaps, but she likes them. And in Augsburg she had the good fortune to see, as part of a traveling exhibition from the Vatican, Konrad von Megenberg’s charming, gamboling Meerwundern, dating from 1475.

  Oh, Tom, Tom.

  The sun is shining. She is drinking tea from a large white porcelain cup, which sits on a circle of lacy paper, which sits in turn on a saucer, which sits on a second circle of lace. The air she breathes is layered with the smell of flowers and mild soap and green leaves washed with oxygen. The clock in the town square chimes.

  In five days she’ll be home.

  “I LOVE YOU,” Fay had said to Willy Gifford after she had known him for a year. They were driving down Portage Avenue in Willy’s old Dodge. It must have been late winter, probably March. She remembers that the snow was falling so heavily that it was piling up in clumps under the blades of the windshield wipers. Every few blocks Willy had to stop the car, get out, and knock the packed snow loose with the butt end of a whisk broom. The wonder was that he did it uncomplainingly. Every time it happened, he broke off his monologue about – but Fay can’t remember what it was about, something political, probably, his usual sunny, roaring rhetoric. He swept away the snow, climbed back into the car, and picked up at the point where he’d left off. His face shone. He was a handsome man, almost pretty. “Did I hear right?” he asked suddenly, turning to Fay. “Did you just say what I think you said? You love me? Christ, woman, I thought you’d never say it. I’d convinced myself you didn’t know the words.”

  “I love you,” Fay had told Nelo Merino one week after she met him. She was on her back. Nelo was on top of her. His legs were covered with thick fur, as was his back, his chest, and his rather heavy, childish arms. A kind of Caliban was how she thought of him, rough but enchanted with the refined. She sighed the words out, I love you, rather than speaking them, and heard herself say them again and again in a doused voice like someone drugged.

  “Yes, of course I love you,” she told Peter Knightly. She said it blithely. He had caught her by surprise. She was sitting across a table from him, a table covered with the debris of a meal he had himself cooked, chicken bones, scrapings of curried rice, a smeared jar of mango chutney, all of it brought brightly forward for her, for her alone, and his hand was seeking her hand, moving across the back of her wrist. “I do,” she said, “yes, I do love you.”

  But this is different, saying “I love you” to Tom Avery; this is of a different order. (But people always say that, don’t they? This time it’s different.)

  “I love you” is what her parents must say up there in their wallpapered bedroom in their house on Ash Avenue, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times.

  And what her stammering brother, Clyde, must whisper to his dear rounded ebullient Sonya, struggling to concentrate, getting the words to come out straight.

  And it could be that even Jake Greary barks it into Bibbi’s ear, a harsh, compromised, Marxist version – I love you. Yes.

  And Onion and Strom? It is hard for Fay to imagine, but not impossible. Across the white sheet in that hospital room? Surely mysteries have been exchanged there between the two of them. Almost everyone gets a chance to say it – I love you. And to hear it said to them. Love is, after all, a republic, not a kingdom.

  “I think I love you,” Robin Cummerford said to Fay a few days before she left for Amsterdam. “Believe it or not, this hasn’t happened to me before. I find that I’m always thinking about you, even when I’m doing my rounds on the ward. We seem to appreciate the same things. I wonder if you think it would be a good idea if we went away for a weekend. When you get back from Europe, I mean. The two of us. To see, you
know, how it goes. How can anyone really know? But I do feel that I’m, as it were, in love with you.”

  To which Fay, being kind, being tired, too, said: “Well, there’s no hurry, is there?”

  Though love is not necessarily patient. She knows that. Nor kind.

  HER TRAVEL grant is down to its last few scurrying dollars, but there’s enough to take her by train to Turin, in the north of Italy, to photograph the medieval merfolk on the old church wall.

  At last! These paint-daubed creatures are joyous acrobats – oddly, whitely fleshed and wonderfully endearing. One round face in particular, with its steamy secret smile, speaks of perfect composure, of mer-ness accommodated to the last eighth of an inch. For this sight Fay has sacrificed Norwich Cathedral, with its mermaid suckling a lion, and Ripon Cathedral, with its carved choir mermaid, and also the island of Iona, where Saint Patrick in the fifth century is said to have banished old pagan women and turned them into mermaids. According to legend, one of them wept so copiously that her tears formed the strangely shaped pebbles that litter the island.

  A handful of these lovely pebbles was given to Fay by Hannah Webb after she visited Iona two years ago. Fay keeps them in an old glass jar on her coffee table, where they are exclaimed over by friends, or lined up in rows and counted and recounted by her young nephews. There are forty-four in all.