The Republic of Love

by Carol Shields

  LOUISE OF GRESHAN’S TRAVEL was nowhere near as understanding as Jenny Waring. “I’m sorry, Mr. Avery, but I did tell you when you first booked that your tickets were final. You remember me saying that, I’m sure you do. Excursion tickets are final. I always make that absolutely clear to my clients, because we have had trouble in the past, people don’t understand what cancellation insurance is for. I can understand how you feel. If your fiancée was actually sick, if she had a doctor’s certificate, we might be able to do something for you, but this is different, this is a contingency of a different color, someone who’s used up her vacation time. I hate to say this, Mr. Avery, but she should have checked first. I’m afraid I don’t know what to suggest. You’re absolutely sure she can’t arrange to get more vacation time? I mean, if she explained to her employer? Yes, I remember booking you to San Diego last winter, I’ve got your file right here in front of me, we do try to look after our regulars, but Mr. Avery, we can’t take a loss every time one of our – . Yes, I know this is a honeymoon we’re talking about, you told me that. I understand that. No, of course I wouldn’t want you to go on your honeymoon alone, that is not what I was suggesting, that would be perfectly ridiculous. Look, Mr. Avery. Please, allow me to make my point. I’m trying to explain. Well, I’m doing my best. I did speak to the manager about this. I’m sorry. There is nothing we can do. That happens to be our policy, that’s all I can say, my hands are tied.”

  TOM’S MOTHER was on the line, buoyant, breathless. Bright little sparks seemed to fly out of the telephone straight into Tom’s ear: “Tom? How’re you doing? Pretty busy time right now, I bet, you’re right down to the wire practically, just two weeks to go. Whew. The big day. We’ve got the calendar circled in red. Mike’s had the car checked over top to bottom, and guess what? He’s got himself two brand-new snow tires. Say we get a great big storm, and there’s Mike and me stuck on the highway somewhere, just when they start playing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ at the church. Every time I think of Fay all got up in her mother’s bride dress I get sort of, you know, teary-eyed. I guess I’m getting soft in the noggin, it’s my old age or something. Who’d of thunk it!”

  TOM CHERISHES his connections in radioland, otherwise he would have quit years ago. The spreading circles of listeners out there in the darkness intrude on his most private affections, and he feels especially warm toward those who phone in to the show, plucking out their own hearts and going at them with a wire brush. The faces may be blank and the voices often deceptively stripped of particularity, but he loves their eager innocence and the way in which they overlap in a kind of black festival heat, letting go for a few minutes of the tight knit of their own lives. He loves them all.

  But none of this shared radiance consoles the solitary body, his body, alone in a bed, alone at a table, alone in the rubbish heap of his unarticulated thoughts.

  Fay is half a mile away, in another bed, part of another household, a household ruptured and sorrowing. He is longing for her, day and night. He’s never felt love this close up and he fears its loss. The organs of his body are swollen and dangerous with apprehension, and his throat, too, seems plugged with unspoken words. You are first in my heart, he wants to tell her, but can’t.

  The phrase feels dated, scented, genteel, sentimental, false, and yet it embraces the whole of his desire. You are first in my heart; now tell me I’m first in yours.

  So this is where the years of maturity deliver us – to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else’s first and primal other.

  Once – a long time ago, so remote a time, in fact, that the truth of it can be glimpsed only through cracked snapshots or accidents of peripheral vision – he had been first in the heart of a woman, a girl, really, sixteen years old, called Betty Avery. Yes, most assuredly first. But now a man named Mike Barbour is her number one, and no wishing it were otherwise, either.

  But what, Tom wonders, becomes of the race of people who fail to achieve this modest human need to be first in someone’s heart? Clearly they are a marked breed, a lesser breed. Something serious and damaging happens to them, so that they are irrevocably set apart from the fortunate others, the one who is the first one turned to, thought of, considered, hovered over, cherished, protected, honored. Loved before all others.

  Notice me, people cry out, touch me, care for me, think of me, keep a place set for me at the edge of your consciousness, let me be first – is that too much to ask?

  O love is warm

  When it is new

  And love is sweet

  When it is true

  But when it’s old

  It groweth cold

  And fades away

  Like the dum dum de dum.

  How does that last line go? Tom can’t remember. It’s driving him crazy. When he gets to the studio tonight he’ll check it out. Dum dum de dum?

  It’s not a song people sing anymore. A sixties song, maybe early seventies – he can’t remember – based probably on some ancient ballad, it has that feel to it. It was always rather dolefully sung, he recalls, by male folkies of the Murray McLauchlan stripe, or else in the ripply water tones of people like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell.

  Come to think of it, he’s not sure of the first two lines, either; maybe it goes: Love is sweet, instead of warm. And the second two lines – it might be: Love is strong when it is true. It’s been a good ten years since he’s heard it sung. No, Christ, more like fifteen. Maybe even twenty. Twenty years! Twenty years ago he was a kid.

  But he’s sure of the middle part:

  But when it’s old

  It groweth cold

  How could anyone forget that pair of benighted lines.

  The first time he heard them sung they fell like freezing rain on his ears. A north wind came straight at him. He thought at first he must have misunderstood – for how could a pleasant, slightly schmaltzy folk ballad like this get spiked with blasphemy? It groweth cold. The words seemed out of joint not just with the song but with the granola optimism of the times, the way the sense of them butted against the kitschy gold of eternal love, love that swelled, endured, grew richer with the years. When love is old.

  And yet there was something about those words that drilled straight through to him. They were chilly and strange and darkly, smoochily romantic, but they carried with them – he acknowledged it – the melodic and woeful and ultimately persuasive heft of truth.

  WILD NOTIONS come to Tom these days. One of these notions is that he will make an appointment to call on Fay’s father, that the two of them will sit down together, two sensible men, and discuss the wreckage that has occurred. He imagines he will be able to pierce to the heart of the calamity, which is something that Fay has not been able to manage. Why are you doing this? he hears himself asking the silver-haired Richard McLeod. What went wrong? What do you want? And then, sternly but kindly: Do you have any idea of the extent of the damage you’ve done?

  He imagines, too, a scene in which he will say to Fay: “Come home. I need you more than your parents do right now.” Or, “You have your life and they have theirs, let them work this out.” Or, “It’s not fair the way you’re letting this get in the way of everything else.”

  He doesn’t do any of these things. Instead, while unopened wedding gifts mount up in a corner of the bedroom, he’s been living from day to day, every morning and evening phoning Fay and asking how “things” are going.

  Things are not going well. She sounds tired and sad, and he pictures her standing by the telephone table in her parents’ kitchen, leaning up against the yellow checked wallpaper, bracing herself. One hand will be curled into a fist, and that fist will be pressed to her forehead. She moans and shivers as she talks. Her slenderness of body, which he loves so dearly, translates itself into a thinness of voice, an agitated whisper, in fact, and a deeply distracted manner. Melancholy has eaten away her mouth, and she speaks quickly, as though in a great rush, and covertly, as though she fears being overheard. She reports to Tom her continuing
discussions with her father – fruitless. With her mother – confused. With Bibbi and Clyde – conspiratorial. With the lawyer, Patricia Henney – frustrating. With the family doctor – disquieting.

  And every day now for the last week and a half – he’s been keeping track – she’s been fretfully but systematically dismantling that thing, that megachip he’s come to think of as his happiness, their happiness. This steady erosion has taken the form of living under separate roofs and sleeping in separate beds, of hurried, hushed telephone conversations, of canceled parties, a revamped marriage service, a drastic scaling down of the wedding reception, a postponement of the honeymoon. And today, Fay’s decision to abandon the wearing of her mother’s bridal dress. “It’s suddenly occurred to me that I can’t possibly wear it,” she tells Tom, and it seems to him he can feel the heat of her breath over the wires. “It’s not a question of superstition, it’s just a question of… I don’t know. Prancing into a church in that dress, that beautiful unlucky doomed dress, I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t risk it, I’ll think of something else, just give me time, let me think.”

  ∼ CHAPTER 33 ∼

  Putting Asunder

  EVERY MORNING TOM STOPS BY TO DROP OFF MAIL OR WEDDING presents for Fay. He stays a scant five minutes, the two of them whispering at the doorway as though this house had been transformed into a convalescent home of some kind.

  On Thursday he handed over to Fay a number of lavishly wrapped gifts, including a small square package which she opened after he had gone. It was strongly done up in brown paper and bore a local postmark. Her name and address were neatly printed in blue ink, but there was no return address. Inside was a cardboard box, with no note attached, and inside the box, cushioned in tissue paper, was an entrancing little bottle.

  She thought at first it was some kind of exotic liqueur, which seemed to her an odd choice for a wedding gift, but a change from the piles of linens, china, and French cookware that had been arriving in recent days. The container was of frosted glass, elegantly shaped, but without a label. The pretty glass stopper had been taped in place. With her thumbnail Fay removed it and sniffed.

  The odor sprang out at her, a shouting reek of ammonia that made her wince and draw back. What? What was this! She examined the bottle carefully for a minute, and again put it to her nose. Be calm, be calm, she said to herself. There was something familiar about its awful stink, but what? She held it up to the light and observed the muted transparency of yellowish-green liquid. It was, she thought, rather beautiful; she was reminded of the top layer of lake water seen in a late-afternoon light.

  Then comprehension swamped her: the little glass bottle was filled with urine.

  Cat urine, dog urine, human urine – which? Not that it mattered. Someone, some person in this city, a city where she had lived all her life, and where her parents and grandparents had also lived, had sent her a bottle of urine. A little gift bottle. Carefully wrapped and consigned. Addressed and stamped. Who? It was midmorning; she was alone in her mother’s living room, sitting on the center cushion of her mother’s pretty yellow-and-white flowered sofa with a bottle of piss on her lap. She seemed to hear pulsing waves of blood pouring through her heart’s valves.

  Sun rebounded on the snow outside and streamed into the quiet room through the big southerly window, coating the flat waxed tabletops and lighting upon neat piles of books and magazines. A mantel clock ticked. Heat puffed generously through the brass-grilled registers. One of her father’s windmill models sat half finished on a corner table, and upstairs her mother, a little calmer today, was moving about, going through some papers, straightening a drawer.

  Her hands gripped the bottle. She was acutely aware of her unsteady body, and she perceived, rather disinterestedly, the cold lumpish entities that were her hands and feet. A bottle of urine had been mailed to her address.

  She sat absolutely still, thinking. Who? Why?

  Some penalty was being exacted, some bold repayment of pain for pain, and her first thought, flashing across her mind like a blade of light through a narrow window, was that she must deserve this offering and that some righteous balance was being addressed. People are called upon to accept such judgments, she knew that perfectly well, just as they accept the slippery, dangerous notion that they are owed love.

  The sun spread a layer of warmth on her shoulders; the first half of November had been gray, overcast, and now at last there was a flood of wintry yellow. This weak sun seemed to shine in her behalf, but it was not enough, not nearly enough.

  After a few minutes other thoughts began to intrude, and dully she welcomed them. She felt, first, a kind of shameful relief that she was alone.

  And then came the sly knowledge that she could dispose of this object swiftly and secretly. She would wrap it in several layers of newspaper and carry it straight outside and deposit it in the large plastic garbage container by the back door, making sure it was buried beneath other debris. In a day or two one of the city trucks would arrive and carry it away, and then she would be able to put all her efforts into forgetting its existence, and also what it might mean.

  BELIEF, FAY KNOWS, is sometimes perverse. Black represents evil in most of the world’s societies, but in a few, a rare half-dozen, black is thought to be the essence of joy.

  A rainbow almost everywhere is welcomed as a good omen, but there are groups of people, more sophisticated, perhaps, or more intuitive or cunning, for whom the rainbow represents false redemption, a sneering, overdressed whore.

  It once was that mothers and fathers who lost their sons at sea took comfort in the ancient mermaid myth, believing, or pretending to believe, that a form of womanly consolation would reach out from the watery depths and envelop their lost children. But weren’t these same mermaids, with their wild greedy wooing, the cause of death, tempting the helpless with their hypnotic song? What was to be made of this doubleness, of temptation and its reverse side, which was supreme consolation? Was it possible that the two aspects could be conflated?

  Asked to name a magic number, many people will give the number seven. Seven deadly sins. Seven virtues. Seven curses or blessings. Seven stars in a beaming or hostile universe. The seventh son of a seventh son, possessed of psychic powers. The seven sorrows of the Virgin Mother. Seven, that oddly numbered assembly, lucky seven, unlucky seven.

  It is late on a Saturday afternoon, the second Saturday in November, and just seven days before Fay and Tom’s wedding day. The year is unfolding, coming to an end, in fact, and so, Fay suddenly divines, is her good luck.

  The clues lie all around her, masked by an early twilight, but sharp with logic – desertion, disruption, and a storm of foreboding that has been augmented in recent days by the trapped fetid threat of bodily harm, that bottle of urine she will never be able to forget or speak of, but which she divines is wrapped up in the darkness of Tom Avery’s history, one of those wives.

  The thought of this secret knowledge, how she will have to carry it all her life, frightens her. She will not be able to speak of it to anybody, she realizes, not even to Tom – something will prevent her, some inviolable notion she has constructed of herself, nice Fay McLeod, her niceness grown over her like a deadly coat of lacquer.

  She remembers suddenly what she has forgotten, or perhaps brushed aside, how in Mexico women who have survived three husbands are called man-eaters. They are avoided, shunned, regarded by everyone as unlucky, and yet they exert a kind of hypnotic power.

  Her own body frightens her, too, the way it feels stretched thinly from point to point so that it has no substance of its own. Her brain is tired, it wants to rest, to lie down. Everywhere she looks she is pierced with the fragility of human arrangements, and she finds that she is continuously on the point of weeping.

  No, no, she suddenly sees; she cannot open her body to such harm.

  Out of love people make absurd, misguided choices. Love has a way of attaching to unlucky objects and pinning its faith on a curtain of air. Out of love, or its
punishing absence, her drugged mother is slumped today before a television set, watching a game show. Her father, who has survived on love’s diminishing curve all these years, or so he tells her, has exiled himself to a dark brown solitary cave. And Tom Avery, that altogether shadowy presence, that dangerous stranger, is waiting, right now, right this minute, for her telephone call – she’s promised to phone him at seven o’clock and deliver a bulletin on the state of affairs.

  “Tom,” she finds herself stammering into the receiver. “Listen, Tom, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say, I’m so sorry, but this just isn’t going to work out.”

  ONE DAY, a year ago, Fay was crossing Osborne Street where it meets River Avenue, and a heavy truck rounded the corner and missed her by half an inch. She was struck on her thinly covered legs by the full, breathy, immediate terror of displaced air; the truck, in fact, had passed so close to her that its swaying bulk had buzzed the hem of her coat.

  She remembers that she stood swaying for a moment on the curb, too shocked and bewildered to react. The huge truck thundered on its way, dissolving into traffic and leaving her overwhelmed by a drenching sensation of weakness. The air around her felt watery and wasteful, though she took great gulps of it into her mouth. “That was a close call,” someone nearby said, and someone else said, “I sure hope you got that fellow’s license number.”

  Dazed, she shook her head, recognizing, finally, that the thudding presence in her chest was her own heart, whose violent rocking rose up and flooded the cavities behind her ears. For a moment she was convinced she was about to drown.