The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  The snow lasted right into May, a record. On Mother’s Day there was a storm, real drifts piled like meringues around the trees and shrubs. A week later they found themselves in the midst of a heat wave.

  The sudden softening of the air, the humid, spongy nights, the bursting greenness along the city thoroughfares convinced them that they loved each other after all, that they would love each other forever. Tom, one morning, took down the blanket. He made a ritual of it. Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to reveal… The small square bedroom became, instantly, a golden cube, and the bed a design of furrowed light. Sheila, twenty-three years old, spread naked on the sheets, naked and also watchful, seemed to him to be aglow with vitality, her shoulders, her full hips so cheerful and shameless. There was something birdlike and beseeching about the ginger tuft that sprang from her pubis. “Why don’t we get married,” he said in a roughened voice, moving toward her, and three days later they were standing in line at the Law Courts, perspiring, waiting their turn, hanging on quietly to each other’s hand.

  Clair had worn black. A black sweater, a black corduroy skirt reaching to her ankles, flat black shoes. A single earring of blackened silver, heavy. It was the middle of a rainy April. He’d known her for two weeks. Her face had a stillness about it that he loved. He could talk and talk and her eyes never changed. He felt he could pour himself into her with a kind of retro-exploitative hunger. This concentrated calm was what he required, what he’d been looking for, that’s what he told himself. When he put his arms around her he felt her shudder – a shudder that traveled the length of her body, and his too – and also the simultaneous force and blessing of her silence.

  He went to Toronto to audition for a job and talked her into going with him. They stayed a week in a room at the Royal York Hotel, and in the middle of that week they walked down the street and got married. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The rounded soot-colored Toronto clouds pressed down on them. This was his second city-hall special (that should have been a warning). Afterward he phoned the news to his mother, who shrieked out her good wishes, frightening Clair with her long-distance exuberance. (“All the best, honey.”) He persuaded Clair to telephone her parents in Winnipeg, whom he had not yet met. “Who?” Foxy Howe had shouted over the phone. “Tom who?” “You’ve known him how long? Two weeks?” “Well, you’re twenty-eight years old, what can we say?”

  Tom, hovering by the telephone, had been taken aback. Clair had told him she was twenty-five. He worried about the birth date on the marriage papers. He wondered, in fact, if they were legally married. Clair, hanging up abruptly, began to cry. She wept hysterically for over an hour, beating his chest, and then took a sleeping pill, several of them, in fact, and slept for twelve hours. When she woke up her eyes seemed to Tom to be fixed dully in her face like a pair of glazed pebbles. She looked older.

  He and Suzanne were married on a bitterly cold day in January. He had met her three months earlier at the Chandlers’ Halloween party (she dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, he as a cowboy), and a week later he moved in with her. They had lain lightly on her narrow bed; the lightness bore down on him, and also the obliquely delivered knowledge that this love of theirs held only a minor cargo.

  Suzanne’s parents – meek, puzzled country people with pink plumped skin – drove into Winnipeg for the wedding, which was held in a private room at the Northstar Hotel. (It was Tom who paid for the rental of the room and for the supper that followed.) Tom’s mother was there, too, having traveled down from Duck River on a Grey Goose bus. A Lutheran clergyman presided, and a dozen friends (the Chandlers, Jeff and Jenny Waring, and so on) gathered to witness and celebrate the event. Tom had been proud to produce these solidly married friends. He was, in those days, enchanted by their marriages, their temporary apartments and cheerful makeshift arrangements. Suzanne carried pink roses against her white wool dress. She whispered her wedding vows while looking up into Tom’s face. Shyly, it seemd to him. Flirtatiously. The chandeliers were blinding and so was the white cloth on the buffet table. He remembers that the smell of salmon salad was strong in the room. Salmon and pink roses. And Suzanne’s favorite perfume, Ma Griffe. For a minute he had felt ill. That was all he needed, to be sick on the swirled red carpet. What was the matter with him? The charged air? Or had it been nervousness? To have and to hold from this day forward. That waterfall of words drifting past his ears.

  These three weddings lie strewn around him. Quickies. But they are surprisingly vivid still and seem to gesture toward something essentially frivolous in his nature. He’s grateful Fay hasn’t pressed him for details.

  MCLEOD/AVERY

  Fay Elizabeth McLeod, daughter of Richard and Peggy McLeod, of Winnipeg, and Thomas Avery, son of Betty Avery Barbour of Duck River, are happy to announce their forthcoming marriage. A November wedding is planned.

  Tom is amazed at the number of things Fay owns. She has a set of china, matching china, enough for eight people. She has several extra blankets folded on a shelf, extra pillows, sheets, a stack of kitchen towels, all that stuff.

  She has a toaster, for God’s sake. (“Everyone has a toaster,” Fay tells him peacefully. “A toaster is a basic”)

  She owns a set of matching cookware, a microwave oven, a washer and dryer, and a red plastic laundry basket. Also a file cabinet (alphabetized, orderly) and paid-up subscriptions to four different magazines. She keeps a whole range of vases on hand, large, small, tall, squat, all of them lined up neatly on a high shelf in her kitchen. (“They’ve just somehow accumulated,” she explains, puzzled.) There is an address book by the telephone, a legible, up-to-date address book with postal codes and phone numbers inked in. She has spare light bulbs stacked in a cupboard, each in its own crisp corrugated paper casing. In the corner of her desk is a pretty pottery mug full of pens and pencils, also a hollowed-out cube of glass holding paper clips. She has skirt hangers, plastic garment bags, shoe polish, a clothes brush, a sewing basket. Everything.

  All these possessions, Tom sees, are emblems of her well-stocked, stable life, yet she wakes up each morning to the clanging of an old-fashioned, loudly ticking, inaccurately functioning, badly chipped and tarnished wind-up alarm clock. Unbelievable. Why does she put up with it?

  He carries his own clock radio across the street one day and presents it to her. Its sleek sides wrap around to a glistening digital display and now she wakes up to weather, music, and tossed dreamy scraps of local news – about church bazaars, school-board elections, flu epidemics, inner-city housing, recreational outings for the aged. It’s like a toy. She loves it, especially the “dream bar” on top, which when pressed will allow her ten extra minutes of sleep. The music comes on in midphrase, and when she hears it she stretches an arm across his chest, tucks her head under his chin; he can feel her body curling back into sleep.

  Lately, though, in the days following the anniversary party, she’s been waking early, and instead of fitting her body to his, she lies stiffly beside him. Light leaks in through the blinds; the clocks have been turned back an hour, bringing lighter mornings. He hates dark mornings – they seem an injustice when the year is at its thinnest – and he hates even more the breaking of the darkness, the green luminous digits of the clock radio at 6:45, the harsh bedside lamp switched on.

  This morning he wakes to the sober news of a radio commentator, the Middle East again, the release of political prisoners, uneasiness, and behind the cool analytical male voice he hears the sound of Fay sighing. A sharp sigh that narrows down to a kind of whimper.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks her, without turning, without opening his eyes. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  He wonders if she is thinking about the marriage license they applied for the day before. They had gone together to the Office of Vital Statistics in the Law Courts Building and there had filled out the necessary papers and paid the obligatory fee. “Have either of you been married before?” the pretty young clerk asked, and Tom had reached i
nto his breast pocket for his papers, his three divorce decrees. The clerk had riffled through them, her face expressionless. “It’s only the most recent we require,” she told Tom. During this exchange Fay had resolutely studied her hands.

  “You’re worried,” he says to her this morning.

  “Yes.”

  “About us, our wedding?”

  “No.”

  “About your father?”

  “Yes.”

  HE HAD FOUND it unsettling going back to his apartment, to get the clock radio. Putting the key in the lock made him feel like a burglar. Stealthy.

  The neatness of his living room surprised him, or rather its austerity. This wasn’t how he remembered it, the new furniture and its minimal comfort, everything swept bare. If he were to clap his hands he imagined he would hear an echo. The settled still quality of the air struck him as distinctly unwelcoming; who had been the occupant of this apartment, anyway? Someone large and gloomy, a pale unhealthy balloon of a man who crashed on that bedroom mattress and banged with thick hands on those kitchen cupboards. Over there was the table where he’d sat one day and composed a letter to Fay. Pouring out his heart. Love, love.

  Only a few weeks had passed since then. Unbelievable.

  He opened the refrigerator. Three bottles of beer lay angled on the silvery shelf, a bag of apples, and a piece of orange cheese that had gone hard and cracked. He really should sort through this stuff, salvage what hadn’t spoiled and throw out the rest. Tom Avery’s leftovers. Tom who?

  He let the door swing shut.

  And heard at the same moment the sound of banging down below. And loud quarreling voices, male voices. Mr. Duff? Impossible; Mr. Duff came and went without a sound.

  He disconnected the clock radio quickly and tucked it under his arm, locked the apartment, and went down a flight of stairs to knock on Mr. Duff’s door. He noticed the stair carpet smelled musty. He noticed, too, that the overhead light was burned out.

  A thick-torsoed man came to the door. He was about forty, Tom guessed. His hairline sloped sharply back from a peeled impassive face, and he wore a down vest over his wrinkled denim shirt.

  “Yeah?” he said to Tom. In one of his hands he balanced a videocassette.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Duff,” Tom said.

  “He’s moved out.”

  “Moved?” He took a breath. “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “You don’t happen to know where he’s gone, do you?”

  “Not a clue, sorry. Didn’t know the guy.”

  “He wasn’t sick or anything?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Someone must have a forwarding address.”

  “Not me.”

  “Maybe he went to California. He’s got a son there who – ”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Hey no problem, no problem.”

  “No problem.” Tom mouthed back the words. He felt momentarily weakened, as though he had suddenly been reminded of all kinds of important matters he had forgotten: that there was a hole now in the earth’s oxygen layer, that the atoms of his own body were sloughing off, that important papers had been misfiled or lost.

  THURSDAY NIGHTS on CHOL Tom likes to play a little reggae. Already it’s gotten to be kind of a tradition. If he misses a reggae night he starts getting calls. “What gives?” his callers ask.

  There’re a whole lot of reggae fans out there.

  Reggae suits his mood tonight. The compelling beat and the lightly dragging rhythm buzz his brain. It’s husky, it’s sweet. Marley and his pals. Yellowman. He’ll do a straight hour tonight, 3:00 to 4:00 a.m., never mind Ted grimacing away in the control room. Dope music, Ted calls it. He says reggae gives him a case of the bends.

  “Hey,” Ted had said to him earlier, “we saw your announcement in the paper. Your wedding announcement. Maeve’s cut it out. She’s got it stuck on the fridge.”

  “Really?” Tom said, absurdly pleased and wondering if his pleasure showed on his face.

  “She’s going out shopping this weekend. For a new dress for the wedding, she says. She’s going to blow the bank.”

  “Well!”

  “Well, why not? That’s what I said.”

  “Great.”

  “Seeing it in the paper,” Ted went on, “sort of makes it official. I guess you’re busy making plans.”

  “It’s moving right along,” Tom said, and in the back of his head a mechanical arm picked up the phrase and set it to music, wrapped it tight in a cool black hopeful beat – it’s moving right along, yeah, it’s moving right along – movin’ riiight alooong.

  ∼ CHAPTER 29 ∼

  Keeping the Faith

  “CERTAIN PARTS OF THE EARTH’S GEOGRAPHY,” FAY BEGINS, “seem particularly hospitable to the incursions of legend and to certain emblems that become rooted in the culture.”

  It is four o’clock on a cloudy Friday afternoon, and she is standing at a lectern in the auditorium of the National Center for Folklore Studies addressing her colleagues, as well as various interested members of the public, on the subject “Mermaids and the Mythic Imagination.”

  “At first glance,” she continues, “the Loire delta in France might seem an unlikely repository for folk beliefs. This is not the far more familiar Château section of the Loire, but the region lying to the west of Nantes. The countryside is generally flat and open and rather dull, and the villages, which are very close together, have almost nothing about them that can be described as picturesque.”

  From her position on the podium Fay can see that Hannah Webb, in the second row, is beginning to nod off, and who can blame her, although it was Hannah who invited Fay to present a colloquium in the first place. Fay had suggested something more informal, a slide presentation in the staff room, for instance, but Hannah felt strongly that the center should open its programs to the “wider community,” as she liked to call it.

  Anne Morris, in the third row, is leaning forward, taking notes, and so is Ken Merchant, who will be giving next month’s colloquium (a summary of his work, thus far, on penitentiary rituals). Colin is sitting next to Ken and looking particularly attentive and thoughtful. And who else? Peter Knightly has taken a seat in the back row and arranged his lanky body in a deep slouch, corduroy pants, corduroy jacket, a corduroy composition, all angles and corded shadows; Fay predicts that he’ll slip out the minute she begins showing her slides. It is Friday after all, the tail end of a cold rainy week.

  “In fact” – her voice rises and swings into what she fears is a tiresome preacherly rhythm – “the Loire area is extremely rich in folk legend. We might look, for instance, at the interesting village of St. Philbert, which is the site of a beautiful ninth-century church. In the church crypt lies a roughly hewn stone coffin that is believed by pilgrims to be so holy that just to touch its surface is to bring good fortune and fertility.”

  Why is she so jittery today? There are perhaps sixty people in the audience, thirty of whom she knows well and many whom she loves, or at least admires. To give herself courage she jams her hands in the pockets of her new gray pleated skirt. She remembers to hold her head straight and not to let it go into a weak sideways tilt – it was Iris Jaffe who told her this trick.

  “Not far from St. Philbert,” she continues, “is the market town of Machecoul, an exceedingly unprepossessing and dusty place, yet known to be the ancient center of the Bluebeard legend.”

  She pauses, shuffles her notes, adjusts the height of the microphone, and takes a deep breath.

  “And nearby, at the bottom of the Lac du Grand-Lieu itself, there is believed to be an ancient drowned village from which church bells are said to toll on Christmas Eve. While I was in the region I spoke to a number of people who claim to have heard these bells.”

  She gives the signal to Art Frayne at the back of the room; the lights dim and the first slide comes on – a view of the lake, which is wide and grassy and surrounded by low-lying fields
. (Is it possible she was standing on the shore of that swampy lake just a few weeks earlier?)

  “It was here,” Fay says, taking up her pointer, “just to the right of this small wooden dock, where last year two local teenaged girls claim to have seen a mermaid, the first reported sighting in over a hundred years.”

  Hannah is asleep. Definitely asleep, her head sunk on her chest. And Peter’s chair at the back of the auditorium is empty.

  She swallows, turns to the next page, and continues. “The sighting at the Lac du Grand-Lieu was widely reported in the press, and these reports, in a sense, have validated the vision. The families of the two girls and the inhabitants of St. Pierre may be skeptical, but few of them are openly dismissive. Those I talked to were not unwilling to entertain the notion that a mermaid might actually have made an appearance. As with the inhabitants of the Loch Ness area, there seems to be a strong wish to be persuaded.”

  But who is that coming in late and settling herself into an aisle seat? Why, it’s Iris! How wonderful of Iris to come.

  She looks hard at her notes. She must concentrate. She’s just getting to the important part of her thesis, so why is her voice threatening to close down? And why are her thoughts drifting to her father at this moment, to the image of him sitting in a chair in Sonya and Clyde’s bedroom, on the other side of the wide quilt-covered water bed, his eyes bright with tears? “It seems clear,” she goes on, “that immersion in a rich folk tradition facilitates the continuation of that tradition. Legend, then, can be thought of as cumulative, feeding on other legends and attaching itself to those societies that already have a well-established history of mythical and mystical associations.”

  Ve-ry pro-found.

  “We know how visions of the Holy Virgin are multiplied and reinforced by the blessed communities. In a hundred years the people of the Loire delta may still be speaking of the mermaid who surfaced in the Lac du Grand-Lieu, and the story, originating with a casual sighting by two girls of impressionable age, will be not only entrenched but expanded.”