The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  Sheila. Sheila Woodlock. Of course she knows Sheila Woodlock. Sheila is known to a lot of people. A smart woman. Attractive. A tough nut, some say. Possibly a lesbian. She lives with three other women in a house in Linden Woods, and one of these women, Patricia Henney, is Fay’s lawyer, the one who acted on Fay’s behalf when she and Peter Knightly bought their condo on Grosvenor Avenue and who did the paperwork when Fay bought out Peter’s share some months ago. All this is bad enough, but there’s more, much more. Sheila Woodlock, after she stopped being Sheila Avery, married Sammy Sweet, who later married Fritzi Knightly, who was formerly married to Peter Knightly, with whom Fay lived for three years and whose body she knows intimately, every inch, every crease.

  This Tom-Sheila-Sammy-Fritzi-Peter-Fay merry-go-round dismays her when she stops to think about it, these unspooled connections. And she can’t help thinking about it. She contrasts the tidy faithfulness of her parents’ lives with her own disordered history, which is coated with an impure sheen, which is obscene and, yes, incestuous. A malevolent circle with an oily scent of the profane.

  What had Tom’s three marriages meant? Did they represent a helpless reaching out for happiness, or an aptitude for error? (Sloppiness?) From the corner of her eye she glimpses danger, some connection between herself and Tom momentarily loosened.

  But this is nonsense, and she knows it. She’s lived in this city all her life and is part of the human weave. What does she expect? To remain untouched? What childishness. What arrogance!

  There’s even something faintly comic about the situation. It all depends on the angle of vision. She ought to laugh or recycle Tom’s marital history into a droll story. Shrugging her shoulders, holding up her hands – c’est la vie. Marveling at modern life’s lumpish, grumpish ironies, the way they reach out and touch every last one of us.

  FAY FINDS HERSELF waiting for her mother to say something about Tom. Such as: What an interesting man he is! Aren’t you glad you waited? His sense of humor is delicious. And he’s attractive, but it’s not the kind of attractiveness that goes soft and sick, the kind that invites trouble. He’s basically kindhearted. He has a sense of ease about him. Openness. Maturity. Warmth. I adore him. I can see exactly why you love him.

  She says none of these things, and Fay can’t bring herself to ask her what she does think.

  Of course, Peggy McLeod is very busy. All summer she’s been working on the final chapters of her book on menopause. Now she’s fretting about titles. She has come up with The Pause That Puzzles, which delights her, but which everyone else, her husband, her children, find impossible. “I just can’t think of anything else,” she tells Fay, patting her white hair flat.

  Until she was sixty she kept her hair dyed a warm chestnut. The shock of her pure-white head still catches Fay by surprise, though it is beautiful hair, thinly scattered but nevertheless healthy. Today, late on a Monday afternoon, Fay drops in on her way home from work and finds her mother sitting at her desk in the back bedroom that she uses for a study. The day is cool, and she wears a cardigan over her light wool dress, an expensive white cotton cardigan that has perhaps been washed once too often, so that it drags down a fatal quarter inch at the back. She has combed her hair hurriedly today, or perhaps not at all, and a similarly fatal patch of pink scalp shows through at the back. The weak light from the window cruelly outlines the formless knob of her chin. She looks old. She looks tired. Fay wonders if she is happy, but wouldn’t dream of asking.

  Just as her mother would never dream of asking her.

  HER FATHER was more open.

  “You seem,” he told her, “like another person.”

  “How?” she asked, knowing she was being childishly greedy for attention, but not caring, “Tell me what you think.”

  “Well, it’s clear you’re happy. You radiate with happiness. This room, any room you happen to be in, is full of it.”

  Touched but impatient, she said, “What about Tom? What do you think about Tom?”

  “I’ve only met him a few times….”

  “Come on.”

  “He’s … what can I say? He’s a man in love.”

  “What an expression – ‘in love.’ ”

  “People these days like to pretend that being in love is a virus.”

  “I’ve noticed, especially at our age.”

  “Your age? What do you mean, your age?”

  “ ‘In love’ is high-school stuff.”

  “You want me to quarrel with that notion?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think it’s a matter of age at all. I’ve never thought that. Your Uncle Arthur. Your Aunt Velma.”

  “I can never believe – ”

  “You can’t believe it because you never knew them when their bodies weren’t withered and old.”

  “I can’t imagine them – ”

  “ – rapturously joined?”

  “Well, no.” She felt unaccountably embarrassed.

  “I’m not sure that was part of it. It was something else. A sort of ongoing courtship. Something edgy and polite about the way they treated each other, as though they were only pretending to be normal so the rest of us wouldn’t be too uncomfortable. Or too envious. As a young boy I used to find myself staring at them. You know, for all we talk and sing and carry on about being in love, I think it’s a rather rare condition.”

  “How rare?” she heard herself asking. What was it she wanted him to say?

  “Rare,” was what he answered, “extremely rare,” and she felt he had reached out and blessed her.

  AN ANONYMOUS DONOR has presented the National Center for Folklore Studies with a small bus which will be used to transport schoolchildren and senior citizens and other interested groups to and from exhibitions, and one bright cold Wednesday morning Fay attended a bus-blessing ceremony. A priest, a rabbi, and a United Church minister were present, along with the staff of the center, the members of its board, and a few representatives from the press. Hannah Webb, the sleeves of her Burberry flapping in a stiff wind, made a short, graceful speech in which she explained how vehicles such as ships and trains are traditionally launched with praise and invocation. Why not a bus? Why not indeed! Blessings were then distributed: to the generous donor, to the appointed driver (Art Frayne), to the prospective passengers and their bodily safety, to the tires, engine, and frame of the cheeky little blue bus itself – blessings, acknowledgment, approbation, sanction.

  Blessing, Fay thought later, is what she would like from Onion. From Onion, of all people. Her family will always embrace her choices, and her friends will credit her with good sense, even when she hasn’t earned it. But Onion – out of a different kind of love, a love made of sinew and resolve – will guard her against true harm; Fay’s always known that. Tell me it’s all right, she wants to say to Onion.

  It’s not approval she wants; the wish for approval strikes her as inappropriate. She wants only Onion’s blessing.

  She’s tried to broach the subject from a number of different directions. She’s been bold about it, stopping herself just short of a direct plea for – for what? For consent? For permission? For recognition, at the very least. A word or two.

  Never mind about Onion, her father told her. Onion has her own concerns these days.

  That much was true. Onion spends almost all her time at Strom’s bedside. She sits erect in the slippery vinyl visitor’s chair, a book open on her lap, reading or not reading, or helping with Strom’s medication, with his meals. She adjusts his earphones so that his favorite recorded music flows through to him hour after hour. She watches his face for a flicker of an eyelid, for any minute sign of recognition. Often she spends the night with him, too, settling herself stiffly on a portable bed next to his.

  “I won’t be able to make it,” she announced to Fay the day before the fortieth-anniversary party. Her voice was abrupt, short. “I can’t possibly leave Strom for that long.”

  Fay had been dumbfounded. And injured. “You have to come, Oni
on. You’re one of Mother’s oldest friends. Just think of all you’ve been through together, all those years. Strom can spare you for a few hours, you know he can. Please reconsider. At a time like this, we really do need you as much as he does. You’re family. You’re part of us.”

  Speaking in this way, Fay had felt a dismaying loss of control. Her pitched pleas seemed to come from a part of her body she only dimly recognized. Please, please, please come.

  Moved at last, Onion had agreed. She would attend the party, she said, but would leave early.

  THE EVENING WAS COOL. The sky, Fay noted, was clear. A clear starry night.

  And everything else went well, too. The food. The cake. The cases of wine delivered to the house. The tables. The lighting. Bibbi’s beautiful invitations. And the flowers – she and Clyde and Bibbi had ordered an immense engraved pottery vase, and into this vase each arriving guest placed a single flower – beautiful. At her suggestion, Tom had installed a sound system and agreed to look after the taped music. Just seeing him, his earnest attentions, enormously enlarged her love for him. She was unprepared for it. “Tom,” she said, pausing in the middle of the long noisy evening and placing a hand on his back, “you’re doing fine.”

  Her mother’s face when she entered the house at the beginning of the evening had registered shock. A hand had flown to the throat of her rather ordinary cream blouse, and her face had folded into a perplexed, obedient frown, then shifted to dazed realization, then became a mask of happiness – her friends, her family, this joyful, radiant celebration.

  The noise level grew – music, voices, shrieks of laughter, the wind rounding the corners of the glassed-in porch, wineglasses clinking. The Jaffes, the Sharpes, the Lavanders. Wonderful old Hazel Moore. Helena Ruislip, all the way from San Francisco.

  And Sonya. From across the dining room, Fay regarded her sister-in-law with admiration. This was the sort of occasion Sonya loved – loved to organize, loved to preside over. Except now Sonya’s face was wrinkled with concern. She was looking at her watch and gesturing to Clyde; a minute later, she was working her way across to where Fay stood.

  “Fay,” she said, “we’re looking for your father. We think we should start the toasts.”

  “I haven’t seen him,” Fay said. “At least not for the last half hour or so. Maybe he stepped out for a breath of – but I haven’t seen him.”

  “Neither has Clyde.”

  “Did you ask Bibbi?”

  “Yes. And Onion. They haven’t seen him, either.”

  “Maybe – ”

  “Clyde’s already checked the bathrooms.”

  “He might have gone out for some air.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Tom,” Fay said, “have you seen my father? Clyde wants to start the speeches in a few minutes.”

  “Maybe he went out for a breath of fresh air.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open. I’ll tell him you – ”

  Fay stepped outside the back door, listening hard, trying to see in the darkness. The dark vault of the sky seemed depthless. The wind had risen. She walked a few yards into the garden, then turned and peered back into the lighted house. The windows were golden with light. Every room was filled. The kitchen, with its clutter of silver and china. The living room, the dining room overflowing with people. Bouquets of flowers stood on every table.

  She let herself in and walked through the narrow hallway and up the carpeted stairs. Pale carpeting, a mushroom beige. A series of pen-and-ink drawings on the wall. Architectural drawings that Clyde has been collecting. The stairs creaked pleasingly underfoot.

  She checked Matthew’s bedroom, then Gordon’s. Their beds were piled high with coats. She climbed the slightly narrower, more claustrophobic stairs to the third floor, to Clyde and Sonya’s dimly lit bedroom.

  The room lay before her. The wide bed was covered with Sonya’s treasured quilt, a pattern of blue and green squares. In a corner by the curtained window was a small blue rather feminine-looking armchair, and seated in that chair was the shadowy neat upright figure of Richard McLeod.

  Fay stared at him a moment over the glowing quilt and saw him look up. Their eyes locked. His were bright with tears.

  ∼ CHAPTER 28 ∼

  Moving Right Along

  A STRANGE EUPHEMISM, TOM THINKS, TO SLEEP WITH SOMEONE, but no stranger than its substantive form, real sleep – not screwing, not fucking or fornicating, not engaging in sexual intercourse, sexual congress, or even making love, but sleeping.

  He prizes it. Actual sleep, that is.

  The intimacy of sleep, of falling into unconsciousness, locked body-to-body with another person, a stranger, someone not of one’s own blood, the skin-on-skin unlikelihood of it. What a bonus it is that the palpable world can be left behind and the dark cave of sleep trustingly entered. All those hours pressed together in twinned silence – how does it happen? What are those hours made of? Oxygen? Ether? How can the breathing of two people be this effortless? So synchronized that it seems a single lung is blowing up with air and deflating with its long slow rhythmic release.

  From time to time during the long nights he feels his limbs shift, as though they were made of some plantlike substance, moving sideways on the bed of their own accord, swimming away from him and touching another’s sleeping body. Fay’s body.

  She’s almost as tall as he is, but thin – especially her upper body, her rib cage, her long arms. Her slenderness is her one vanity. He teases her about the bag lunches she takes to work, her clear plastic containers of cottage cheese, her carrot sticks, her yogurt, her apple, her Swedish whole-grain wafers. “I don’t mind getting old,” she tells him, “but not old and fat.” (This is not quite true. She does mind getting old; in February she’ll turn thirty-six; she can’t believe this, she tells Tom.)

  By next February – and this is astonishing to Tom – the two of them will have been married for three months. A couple. Husband and wife. They’ve set a date, the third Saturday in November. A simple ceremony in the chapel of All Saints Church, the same church where Fay’s parents were married forty years ago. The wedding will be at four o’clock. Just family and close friends, about eighty guests in all. Ian Innes, an old family friend of the McLeods, will officiate. Stephanie Birrell and her cello will provide the music. A traditional ceremony, yes, but with a few differences. Fay doesn’t want to walk down the aisle, she says; she’d feel silly. And she doesn’t want a long white bridey dress. She doesn’t yet know what she wants; she’s planning to start looking around for something simple, something halfway between formal and informal, something marvelous.

  Whenever Tom tries to focus his mind on these plans, he’s overcome with confusion. A train of images moves into view: himself swaying on the red church carpet, the weave of his dark suit fragmenting into its separate threads, the swelling whiteness of his shirt collar, his knotted tie dissolving, and Ted Woloschuk standing somewhere nearby, just slightly out of focus. And then there’s the blur of faces out there watching, those attentive numbered faces, eighty of them, tipped forward and lit by the midafternoon light that falls through the colored west windows – winter light, opalescent, full of trickery and wrinkles of perception. And the unthinkable moment when he will pull a ring from his pocket and place it on Fay’s finger. A wedding ring, a solid but slippery thing; he has an image of her fingers drifting toward him in a miasma of grayed dots like those on the edge of a photograph.

  But no, this is real. Sleeping beside her tonight, and waking drowsily at dawn, he feels an exhausted, drunken greed for each moment that holds them. Sleep presses inward, soft edged, delicately colored, burgeoning with new possibility. Now. Today. The two of them, he and Fay, lying side by side beneath the warmth of Fay’s electric blanket, which is set this freezing autumn night at medium. This is really happening. It has already, in fact, happened. Love and its transforming power have laid out a far more generous future than the one he had been willing to
settle for. He is soon to be married to the woman who sleeps beside him. Fay McLeod. There will be not only a marriage ceremony but annual celebrations of that marriage, the date circled each year on the calendar. The day will bring gifts and reminiscences, how they met, the special circumstances, what happened next, what was said, the retelling of that particular narrative which married people uniquely cherish. Our story. Our marriage. November, that unlikely month.

  He turns on his side so he can watch her face.

  Glimpsed like this, still sleeping, shadowed, her features composed, she seems not only his lover but his gallant and wistful friend. One of her arms is flung toward him on the pillow, the smooth thin girlish hand curved inward. He could if he liked, and without waking her, make a circle of his thumb and middle finger and wrap it like a bracelet around her wrist.

  HE AND SHEILA had been married in June of 1975.

  A hot day. Sheila had worn a backless sundress made of pink cotton and a pair of soiled, cottony Roman sandals that laced halfway up her legs and left diamond-shaped welts on her hard young calves. They’d been living together for close to a year in a third-floor apartment on Lilac Avenue, locked into what Tom always thought of as a rude, talky conviviality, not a love affair at all. Theirs was an old cheap apartment block with ill-fitting windows, and all winter they’d quarreled about an army blanket Tom had nailed across the bedroom window. It kept out the worst of the drafts, yes, but living in the perpetual brownish dark had gotten Sheila down. It got so she hated going into that bedroom. Tom told her it was not uncommon in places like Duck River for people to cover their windows in winter with blankets or with sheets of aluminum foil or plastic film. This isn’t Duck River, Sheila said, this isn’t the back of beyond, and she didn’t want to live that way, like a mole in an underground burrow.