The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  She’s brought one of these stones along with her to Europe, loose in her change purse, rubbing up against Dutch guilders, French francs, and German marks. It’s not for luck that she’s brought it – she doesn’t believe in that kind of talisman any longer. She doesn’t know what it’s for, but every time she touches it with her fingers, its smoothness feeds her courage and reminds her of her fundamental and obstinate sanity.

  If she were really insane, she tells herself, she would have torn up her excursion ticket days ago and bought a one-way ticket home, home to Tom, straight into the embrace of love.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT. Another city, another civic clock chiming the night hours. In her dream she is swimming. Her long skirt is entangled in her legs and she is unable to kick herself free. Her arms, too, are caught in a kind of webbing, which she divines, finally, is her own hair, grown impossibly long. Air, air, she struggles for a mouthful of air. And wakes suddenly, gasping.

  TONIGHT, in a spartan hotel room near the Amsterdam airport, she has the same dream again, her hair, her trapped arms and legs, her stuck breath, and this time she decides to turn on her bedside lamp and read for a while.

  But the moment she pushes the switch, the light bulb burns out. There is a blue burst, a crisp little smacking sound like an electric kiss, then a scratched red line in space. Tiny explosive particles travel up her arm, or seem to, and carry a wave of weak guilty shock. If only she hadn’t turned it on so brutally, she thinks, but this thought is exceedingly brief, hardly a thought at all, more like a leaf falling or a flash of heat that buzzes on the outside edge of her consciousness.

  Oh, God.

  Now she is fully awake, lying on her side facing her dead lamp. Its base is glazed ceramic, cheap, anonymous, but nicely rounded, pleasing to her fingertips.

  Her alarm clocks says 5:00 a.m. The room is filling up with a wash of snagged light that creeps around the curtain, top and bottom, gray upon gray, and its polished fullness is as empty of shadows as the lamp base or her own blown-out breath. The room’s high dusky ceiling seems to be emptiness itself, hovering over her and offering certain rewards.

  But this is not happiness she’s feeling; it’s too dry, too shallowly drawn. This is what precedes happiness: lightheadedness, pangs of hunger, the ballooning sensation of being intensely alive.

  In an hour she must get up, wash her hair, and dress. In three hours her plane will take off. In ten hours she will be home, standing in an airport with her arms around Tom Avery and his around her. Beyond that moment her imagination will not travel.

  ∼ CHAPTER 22 ∼

  Everything They Say Is True

  “SO WHAT’S GOT INTO YOU?” TED WOLOSCHUK ASKED TOM AVERY. “I mean, you’re like a new man for crying out loud, not that I’m going to start squawking. You come into the studio sort of almost dancing-like. Up on the air. Whistling! I didn’t know you knew how to whistle. Even the music you’ve been choosing for the show. We’ve been getting calls. I guess maybe Bruce told you. People like it. Starting Monday night they’ve been phoning in. It’s good to see you looking up. I don’t give a damn about the ratings, you know me better than that, but it’s sure a lot more cheerful around here all of a sudden. So what’s up? Did’ya win a lottery or what? Why’ve you all of a sudden got that crazy big grin all over your puss?”

  “WELL, FOR PETE’S SAKE,” Tom’s mother yelled happily into the phone. “Will wonders never cease. I’ve been wondering, and Mike, too, when you were going to get yourself up here for a weekend. You know how long it’s been? Weeks. The weather’s gorgeous, and the sunsets! Of course, we’ve had a couple real hard frosts, I’ve brought my tomatoes in, didn’t want to take a chance, but it warms up real nice in the daytime. Oh boy, you should see the colors. The poplars. Real September weather. A girl? You’re thinking of bringing a girl along? Is this the same one that – her name is what? Fay? I’ll get Mike to barbecue some pickerel, fresh out of the lake, I’ll bet she’s never had fish fresh out of the lake. We’ve got this new gismo for barbecuing fish, a special rack thing. Two beds or one? Ha. Just thought I’d ask. All the more room to roll around, eh? Fay, you said her name was? F-a-y? Rhymes with bay. Well, you know something? You sound full of beans.”

  “WHY, TOM AVERY, you look like the cat that ate the cream,” Jenny Waring told Tom, running into him in the Safeway. She peered into his shopping cart. “Kiwi fruit? Strawberries? Well. You look like you’ve lost weight. Or put some on, something anyway. You look kind of – blissed out. Have you been away, or what? You know, Gary’s still talking about those great couple of days he had with you when we were in Minneapolis, and I don’t have to tell you what a lift it gave me, getting away. We had lousy weather, rain, but every minute was pure joy. I needed it! I guess I was feeling kind of down, but I came back full of energy. I’ve enrolled in two night courses, bread making and Greek mythology. It’s amazing, a couple of days away from the kids and I felt restored. That’s how you look, Tom. Restored.”

  “YOU’RE IN EXCELLENT SHAPE,” David Neuhaus informed Tom. “All the tests came back negative. We could do a stress test, but what the hell, you’re looking great. Compared to last spring, Jesus! Still running? Keep it up. Fiber, too. Just as well you’ve given up the vasectomy idea, you’re still young, forty is young these days. You’re probably in better shape than you were at twenty-five. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

  TOM’S ex-wife Sheila phoned and said, “My God, what’s got into you, sending me flowers out of the blue, and what flowers! You’re a sweetie. And not even my birthday or anything. It’s not like you to do something that spontaneous, or maybe it is like you and I never knew it. And that note, I’ll treasure that note, you big softie. Well, listen, I wish you all kinds of happiness, too.”

  Dear Tom,

  Gregor and I were super-surprised when the florist rolled up with that great big basket of mums, and you even remembered yellow is my absolutely favorite color. We both want to say thank you. We’re enjoying them muchly. And thanks for the sweet note, too. It brought tears to my eyes.

  Yours,

  Suzanne

  Dear Tom Avery,

  Just want to send a big fat hug from the night staff here at Minnedosa Community Hospital. Don’t know how we’d while away the hours without “Niteline.” (We’ve got twenty beds but only eight patients at the moment, knock wood.) Sunday’s show was the greatest, and Monday even better. You’re in top form!

  All the best from four loyal and grateful fans, Janice, Charmion, Marg, and Wayne

  ∼ CHAPTER 23 ∼

  So This Is How It Feels

  THEY SAY LOVE MAKES ANGELS OF THE WICKED. THAT PEOPLE IN LOVE are kinder in their ways, stronger in their resolve and lit from within by an incandescence so generous, impulsive, and willing, so mild, too, and almost innocent, that other people, observing them, are reminded of young children – the good, stalwart, focused children of fairy tales.

  They say love affects the blood-sugar level and that, all other things being equal, lovers will win Olympic medals, score higher on examinations, donate more generously to charities, ward off the most potent flu germs, and kindle the kind of rare happiness that deflects the envy of others.

  They say love distorts judgment, so that the most morally robust can drift into evil, and the evil into goodness.

  Another thing people say is that love quickens the sensory organs. Fingertips grow more sensitive and more eager. Hearing becomes acute, sometimes painfully so. The olfactory organs crackle and swell and make themselves known. And vision grows more precise, more penetrating – although Fay, arriving at the Winnipeg airport at 10:15 in the morning, was so dazed by noise and the press of other passengers that she didn’t even see Tom Avery until the moment his arms were around her, the moment she discovered the side of her face resting against the hairy weave of his jacket. (The ribbed cloth, surprisingly, held an aura of chill. Why should that be? she remembers thinking. But, of course, it was the end of summer, the last day of August; it was fall.
) She held on tighter, cherishing the abrasiveness, and wondered what she might say.

  “You’re home,” he said, rocking her back and forth.

  “Yes.”

  SHE KNOWS HOW she must have looked. People getting off international flights are so desperately tired they often look ill. Their clothes are creased, and their hair sprouts wildly in clumps or else lies too flat against the head.

  “You look beautiful,” Tom Avery said into the crown of her hair.

  “My parents,” Fay said, “I think I should tell you that they might be here to meet me.”

  “I phoned them. I got their number from Sonya. I told them I’d meet you.”

  She looked up. His face seemed a long way away, like a diagram of a face, and she realized she had no access to his thoughts. “Did you really? You did all that?”

  “I explained I was a friend of yours.”

  She felt her mouth smiling. “What did they say?”

  “Their exact words?”

  “Yes.”

  “They said to give you a hug and kiss from them.”

  “That sounds exactly like what they’d say.”

  He moved forward to touch his lips to hers, and she remembers thinking: What will this feel like? What will it mean?

  HE ARRANGED her two suitcases in the trunk of his car, and then he turned to her and asked, “Is it all right if we go to my place? Or would you like to go straight home?”

  “Your place is fine.” This wasn’t what she had imagined, but, then, she hadn’t imagined anything, only tentative shapes, colors, a shadow on the wall.

  The sun was blinding along Wellington Crescent, and the tall trees seemed knitted together, tobacco colored, squashed gold, swinging their branches in long easy arcs. As he drove, Tom recited what seemed to Fay a kind of meteorological report, as though she were a stranger in this city, an exalted visitor, and he had been appointed to ease her entry with a battery of relevant facts. “The nights have been getting steadily cooler,” he announced, “but by ten or eleven in the morning, it’s blazing. Today, though, you can feel fall in the air. It’s been dry, so the mosquitoes have kept themselves manageable, but there’re forest fires in the Thompson area. Just look how green the lawns are.” (He said this with pride, as though he’d been waiting to show her this greenness.) “Around eight, nine in the evening the breezes come up. We haven’t had any frost yet, though, but up in Duck River they’ve already had a couple of freeze-ups.”

  “Duck River?” She tested the sound of this.

  “Have you ever been up there?”

  “No.”

  “That’s where I was born, where I grew up. My mother still lives there.”

  “You grew up in Duck River?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s wonderful, oh that’s wonderful.”

  “Why?” He said it slowly, drawling it out like an old joke.

  “I don’t know.” She meant it, she didn’t know. But the naming of this place sounded to her like the opening line of a very long story that she would soon be hearing, that she would be learning by heart, and that would become before long a part of her own story, a story that will contravene and replace the abstract narratives she has been constructing for herself these last weeks. “Duck River,” she said to the passing trees, to the traffic light on the corner of Wellington and Grosvenor, and at that moment they drove up beside her front door.

  SHE LOOKED ACROSS the street at his building. Red brick, three stories, cheaply built, probably in the early sixties, that unlovely period. She’d never really looked closely at it before.

  “What about your suitcases?” Tom Avery asked. (She couldn’t yet think of him except by his complete name.) His car keys were in his hand, hooked there.

  “Why don’t I” – she paused – “why don’t I leave them for now?”

  The foyer of his apartment building was small and dusty, with a rubber mat on the floor. There were six mailboxes mounted on the left-hand wall, and Fay could see that the top one bore the name T. Avery, a smudged, hand-printed label, stuck on with a strip of Scotch tape. She had an impulse to touch it, and was just lifting her arm when an elderly man entered from the street.

  The gray wings of his hair flew out sideways. His breath was coming hard, chuffing in an old-man way, and he held his head down, about to brush past them, when Tom stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Duff,” he said quickly. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is Fay McLeod. Fay, this is one of my neighbors, Mr. Duff.”

  Mr. Duff blinked. Dull light snagged on the gold of a back tooth. He looked puzzled, and then alarmed, as though he would like to escape – but nevertheless he put out his hand for Fay to shake and mumbled something that sounded approximately like how-do-you-do.

  It occurred to Fay that this was an occasion, a ceremony with something particularly spacious and kind about it. “I’m very happy to meet you,” she said, and smiled at Mr. Duff, who looked stunned, off balance, his mouthful of ivory teeth catching the light so that the moment became radiant.

  THERE WAS A KITCHEN, a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Everything was clean. The smell of Lemon Pledge pierced her to the heart. From the bedroom window she could look out and see the front door of her condominium, the tub of begonias to one side and high above it the small stained-glass window that was her kitchen. Her watch was still on Paris time, but she calculated that it must be about noon. Noon – the thought of this unlikely hour wrung from her an involuntary cry. Down below, on what looked suddenly like a foreign street, a young woman was pushing a stroller, and Fay could see the pale blue roundness of the child’s bonnet and hear the wheels, in need of oil, squeaking faintly at every revolution. She could hear birds singing, too, or rather crying out their longings, and, from somewhere not far away, a truck shifting gears.

  HE TOOK OFF all her clothes, slowly, taking his time, not saying a word. First her hopelessly crushed linen jacket, with an ivory cameo pinned to its collar, next her blouse, then her skirt, with its side opening, then her underthings, one at a time, and folded all these clothes carefully and placed them on a small straight-backed chair that stood against the wall. It surprised Fay, thinking about it later, how passive she’d been, like a large solemn child, and how her whole body seemed to be smiling at this absurdity.

  He took his own clothes off next, and then they lay down together on the bedspread, which was not really a bedspread but a kind of light summer blanket in a dark shade of blue.

  SO THIS is what it feels like. To be coming awake. To be burning, her skin, her mouth, his hand against her burning back, trembling slightly, but a fine tremor that seemed almost electric. And grazing her knees and thighs. Come, come, she wanted to cry, meaning – come closer, closer.

  She placed her hands at the back of his head, then drew them down along his shoulders, reading him as though she were sightless, memorizing his skin, with its alternate regions of texture and tenderness, his sides, sloping smoothly around the cushioned ribs – she fixed everything in her mind. Her breath rose and fell. So this was what it was like. To open her body completely and to feel another’s opening in response. She felt all his loneliness coming toward her. This was how it happened.

  For once, to lay ourselves bare.

  She heard him moaning her name over and over, and heard herself, too, trying out his, gathering in the resonance of that single syllable. Tom. It formed a portion of her exhaled breath and like a word in a classical language grew instantly solid and unbreakable and seemed to cantilever at the top of her consciousness. Her arms, her legs, felt transparent, fluid.

  She did not say at that moment, “I love you.”

  It was true she had spelled it out on a French fax machine a few days earlier and rehearsed it inside her head a hundred times, but this was different. It seemed to her that to pronounce the word “love” aloud would mean the beginning of the need to earn it.

  ∼ CHAPTER 24 ∼

  Stardust

  “WE’RE A
LL SEXUAL CREATURES, EVERY LAST ONE OF US,” SAID PATSY MacArthur some months ago, leading a workshop called Sex for Singles at the Fort Rouge Center, “and our sexual appetites need to be listened to if good mental health is to be maintained. Keep your condoms handy, by all means, but be ready when opportunity knocks. And remember, failing opportunity, there’s always masturbation. Which I’ll be talking about in depth next week. Plus other alternatives.” Tom had listened, but he knew there was nothing sadder or more saddening on earth than the spectre of loveless sex.

  This was not a fashionable belief – he could imagine Patsy snorting out her scorn – and not even a popular belief, yet he knows it’s true. He’s known for – how long? – eight, nine months, ever since his Club Excelsior holiday in San Diego last December, a time of excess and failure, of unrestrained sweats and grunts with (one night) an Oregon secretary (no names exchanged on either side) who barked harsh words of self-hatred into his ears and then asked him to perform a bizarre act with a toothbrush, saying it was the only thing that turned her on. And another woman, what was her name? She had possessed a flat nasal sporty little laugh. She said she thought Winnipeg sounded like the name of a board game, thought being a disc jockey must be a gas, and told Tom there were more cards in the deck than he seemed willing to shuffle – this last she did not explain but attempted to demonstrate while sitting astride his chest.

  After that there had been at least two (three?) other moments of brief hectic release followed by hours of recovery, of blisters on the inside of his mouth (frightening), dry-tongued confusion, and the intermittent terror of having forgotten his own name. Love on the loose, on the lam, the horny, porny love of the dead.

  At the end of ten days he had jammed his things into his sports bag – balled-up cotton shirts, a swimsuit still damp from a post-coital dip, and a jumble of brightly colored Jockey shorts, purchased back home in frozen Winnipeg with seduction in mind and now soiled with his own body juices – and grabbed a taxi out to the airport.