The Republic of Love (11 page)

“Oh, damn it, damn it,” she mouthed into the wind.

A truck drew up along the curb, a small clean yellow truck; the truck’s cab was like a little car. A woman with curly red hair rolled down the window and asked Fay if she’d like a lift downtown.

Between River Avenue and Market Street she told Fay her life story. As a young girl she’d worked at Eatons, the drug and cosmetic section. One day a tall American came along and asked her to dinner. He’d been watching her for days. “Here I was with my red hair and freckles, I guess he thought I was colorful if nothing else.” She married him and went to live on a farm in North Dakota. They raised pigs, seven hundred at one time. It was a terrible marriage. “You’re acting like your mother,” he accused her all the time, but how could she help it? Her mother was inside her, as mothers are. “Our sex life was awful. He just wanted me to lie there and stare at the ceiling, not touch him at all.” It was her father-in-law who urged her to think about another life. After seventeen years she left the marriage. Back in Canada, she discovered her childhood sweetheart in the middle of a divorce and custody battle. They married seven years ago. “There’re lots of sevens in my story.” She’s never looked back. Life is bliss, sex is good. “We’ve got his kids and my son, he plays jazz piano at the Nostalgia Club, and in a year Jim’ll retire. I give pottery lessons, I’m having a show next month. My name is Molly Beardsley.”

“I
KNOW
M
OLLY
B
EARDSLEY
,” Beverly Miles told Fay at lunch. “Jim Beardsley’s first wife was my sister’s best friend.”

This kind of thing is always happening to Fay, circles inside circles. Last week Hannah Webb told her she’d attended an evening seminar on menopause given by a marvelous woman, a Dr. McLeod. “That’s my mother,” Fay said. “Peggy McLeod? That’s my mother.”

The population of Winnipeg is six hundred thousand, a fairly large city, with people who tend to stay put. Families overlap with families, neighborhoods with neighborhoods. You can’t escape it. Generations interweave so that your mother’s friends (Onion Boyle, Muriel Brewmaster, and dozens more) formed a sort of squadron of secondary aunts. You were always running into someone you’d gone to school with or someone whose uncle worked with someone’s else’s father. The tentacles of connection were long, complex, and full of the bitter or amusing ironies that characterize blood families.

At the same time, Fay has only a vague idea who the noisy quarreling couple on the floor above her are, and no idea at all who lives in the crumbling triplex next door, though she knows, slightly, two of the tenants in the building across the street. Her widowed Uncle Arthur lives one street over on Annette Avenue, but she knows no one else on that street. Some days she can wait anonymously in the bus shelter at River and Osborne and speak to no one, and the next day she’ll run into any number of acquaintances. These surprises used to drive Peter crazy, the oppressive clannishness they implied and the embarrassments, but Fay again and again is reassured and comforted to be part of a knowable network.

When her former lover, Nelo Merino, was tranferred to Ottawa and wanted her to come with him, she had to ask herself, in the sternly analytical style she favored in those days: Do I love Nelo more than I love these hundreds, thousands of connections, faces, names, references and cross-references, biographies, scandals,
coincidences, these epics, these possibilities? The answer, and it didn’t take her long to make up her mind, was no.

Geography is destiny, says Fay’s good friend Iris Jaffe, and Fay tends to agree.

“I
FORGOT
to tell you,” Fay said to her mother on the telephone, “that Hannah Webb was at that seminar you gave at the Y last week.”

“Hannah?”

“You know Hannah Webb. Our director.”

“Really? Was she there? Well, there was such a huge turnout. I never did get a chance to look at the registration list.”

“She said she found it extremely helpful.”

“Oh good, I’m glad.”

“And that you were a marvelous woman. How do you like that? Sympathetic, she said. But with a practical grasp.”

“Heavens.”

“You must have seen her there. She’s got grayish-goldish hair. Sort of piled up with combs. Lovely hair. She’s about five-foot, six. Probably wearing a white raincoat?”

“Oh dear, there were so many there, you’d be surprised.”

“She asked you a question during the discussion, about hot flashes. What caused them.”

“Oh, of course! I remember now. Well, I can’t have been very helpful on that subject. I mean, we don’t know for sure about hot flashes, what brings them on.”

“She said you had some good ideas for handling them. She was really pleased she’d gone. She’s been having a rotten time.”

“Isn’t that amazing.”

“What?”

“I mean, that your director discusses her hot flashes with her staff.”

“Well, she’s very –”

“You’ll never guess who else was there. Marlene Fournier.”

“Marlene Fournier? Becky Scott’s aunt?”

“We had a good chat afterward about Becky.”

“I haven’t seen Becky in years.”

“She and Calvin are in Newfoundland now. Some job with the federal government, in fisheries. They love it there, the freedom. And she and Cal have just had their first baby. A boy, I think Marlene said.”

“I wonder if he looks like Cal.”

“Or Cal’s mother. Remember her? That gorgeous Icelandic coloring. A nordic Amazon, or is that possible?”

“It’s Cal’s father I remember. I had him for math two years running.”

“That’s right, you did. A miserable man. Exceedingly dour.”

“I saw him about a month ago. He remembered me, or so he said. He was part of a tour group at the center. From that Green Pillars place.”

“Green Pillars? You don’t mean the retirement home?”

“That place way out on west Portage.”

“I didn’t realize Calvin’s father was as old as that.”

“Time goes.”

“It certainly does.”

D
O MERMAIDS TALK
? Do they possess language? The question interests Fay, but she’s found scant evidence of actual speech in mermaid lore. Even their songs are wordless. Their underwater journeys and adventures, their consuming drive to tempt and console – all remain wrapped in silence. And, disappointingly, the legends in which they figure are almost never satisfying as stories. What Fay uncovers are mostly fragments, blurred visions, partial accounts, and even these tentative offerings are underpinned by the suggestion of hard drink and the deceptive algebra of the imagination trying to make a story out of an absence of linearity.

“My life is a story,” Molly Beardsley said to Fay the day she gave her a lift downtown.

But Fay knows better; however much Molly Beardsley yearns to bring narrative wholeness to her life, hers is not a complete
story, and not because it isn’t comic, brave, touching, and possessed of a happy ending. Her experience is too random and unreasonable, too large-scale; it has a bulging, uneven shape; there are too many pigs, too many years, and no recorded trace of reflection.

Most people’s lives don’t wrap up nearly as neatly as they’d like to think. Fay’s sure of that. Most people’s lives are a mess.

T
OM’S FACE WAS EIGHT FEET HIGH, HIS NOSE – FAIRLY STRAIGHT
, decently modeled, for which he has his mother to thank – was a yard long, terminating in nostrils deep and dark as caves. The self-mocking mouth widened out gigantically, ready to eat whole sheep and goats, or children, in a single bite. The Avery eyes, famous for mischief and blueness, full of brio and fake tenderness, blinked turquoise like a pair of comic-strip lakes. Anyone driving over the Norwood Bridge in the center of town came face to face with the continent of Tom Avery’s chin, the long left basin of his ear, his hugely combed strands of hair. An obscenity, this aggressive billboard merriment. Two-dimensional flesh and print. A paper-faced ogre whose morality was clearly an invention of chance and default.

RELAX THE NIGHT AWAY
WITH TOM AVERY’S NITELINE
CHOL – MIDNIGHT TO 4:00 A.M.
“HE’S OUR BOY”

By coincidence – well, more like the right word dropped in the right ear – it was Tom’s old friend Ken Baggot who had flown in from Toronto to take the photo. Back in 1970 the two of them had shared a student apartment in Toronto, where Tom was majoring in political science, having switched from history, traveling from the surreal to the superreal, as he liked to put it in those days. Ken Baggot was a skinny white-faced draft dodger from the States, enrolled in the journalism program. He talked about dying his hair and getting himself a fake ID and slipping back over the border so he could “photo-essay” the antiwar movement, his way of “paying his dues.” On weekends he relaxed with a few joints, but he was clean as a monk during the week, acquiring his “tools,” as he called them, so he could get back to the real struggle. The Canadians, as he saw them, were a tribe of nobodies, too bland, cool, and disengaged to claim a real existence.

At least not until the spring of 1973, when the advertising firm of Anderson & Soles offered Ken Baggot a job, and he dropped out of his course. He could make his contribution by bringing a little color to this safe, bleak, end-of-the-underground-railroad nation, and while he was at it he was going to find himself a better apartment, buy a hi-fi, and marry a girl he’d been seeing.

Last week, when Ken Baggot was in Winnipeg to take Tom’s picture, the two of them went out for a fat expense-account dinner at the Winnipeg Inn. Urban males, Ken Baggot confided to Tom, have been paralyzed by Woody Allen-ism. “It’s pernicious how we’ve let this scrawny postadolescent nerdbox screw us with guilt. We’re supposed to be ashamed for driving a decent car. And having a closet full of suits. I like my closet full of suits. Back in ’73 I had two pairs of jeans, you remember. I never wash them. How could I? Woody wants me to go back to wearing smelly jeans. Hey, remember how we got together in the first place? The guy you were going to share with ducked out on you and needed someone quick to make up the rent. Seventy bucks a month. Weird. And here you are. And here I am. To take your picture to blow you up sky high.”

H
E HATED IT
. The size of it. The indecency. It was altogether too public. It lunged at motorists, at perfectly nice guys driving by in their cars, guys who had a right to look up and see someone maybe drinking orange juice or reaching for a tea bag. God. It was a shocking face, irresponsible, far too much protoplasm hanging on to the edges, a fake Olympian, a greaser, a hoser. (Would you buy a used crutch from this man? Are you kidding?) Tom Avery, he’s our man. Yeah, yeah. Smarm. That’s a leer you got, fella. It made him sick just to look at it. And there were eleven others just like it dotted across town. He wasn’t even going to think about that.

And yet, on Sunday morning, waking early and pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweater, he walked over to Mr. Donut’s for coffee and then found himself continuing down Stradbrook, a street overleafed by elm and ash trees, past Posters Plus and the AIDS Information Center and the Kitchen Refit place, down toward the Norwood Bridge. Ah, God! Still there – the imbecile grin, the acreage of forehead, fleshy pinks, flashy oranges, a guy drooling sunshine all over the public. Weary, bleary, arghhh, get rid of this creep. He’s a menace to the environment, an insult to the calm daily river of traffic.

But today was different.

Main Street was full of commotion today. A Sunday morning, a flawless sky. People were lined up along the curbs, an air of carnival. Another parade? Unlikely.

Then he remembered. Today was Marathon Day, the fourth Sunday in May. He’d been announcing it on the air every night for a week, but he’d forgotten today was the day. A terrific day, too. A flushed, salmon-colored sky filled in the narrow spaces between stone buildings, keeping them buoyant and friendly.

“Hey, Tom. How ya doin’, fella?”

It was Sammy Sweet running by, light and fresh in blue-and-white shorts and beautiful Nike Air-Max running shoes. Pale, plump Sammy, who had briefly been married to Tom’s first wife, Sheila, and then married a woman called Fritzi. Tom had met
Sammy four or five times around town, a nice enough guy, but not someone he’d figured for a runner.

He was caught off guard, and as a reflex, or a gesture of apology for having misjudged Sammy, he wasn’t sure which, Tom fell in with him – despite the fact that he was dressed in jeans and street shoes. The two of them ran alongside each other for a matey half mile or so.

“So,” Tom breathed out, his shoes slapping the pavement, “you going the whole twenty-six?”

Sammy was in a cheery mood. “Hope so. It’s my sixth year.”

“Not bad, not bad,” Tom said. He meant it.

“This first five miles is the easy part, though. After that I start to feel it in the old lung sacs.”

Tom said to Sammy, “I guess you learn to pace yourself.” This struck him as an appropriate remark between two guys running along together. Two guys who’d both been married to the same woman.

“Oh, well” – Sammy exhaled noisily, as if to demonstrate an underlying humility – “I’m one of the slow ones. Never made it under four hours yet. Probably never will. I’m not in it for the competition. I get plenty of that in my working life.”

“How’s the market doing, anyway?” Tom remembered now that Sammy was in real estate and that the market was slow.

“Starting to pick up.”

“Great, great.” He felt his pants ripple against his calves. He and Sammy were trotting past the handsome old train station now, and the crowds along the sides of the street were getting heavier.

“A perfect day,” Sammy said socially. “Last year was a bummer, we had the heat and the humidity both.”

A perfect day? Was it? Yes, it was. Tom looked up. The sky over the Trizec Building was hard and brilliant, like a stretch of painted scenery.

“You ever think of going for it?” Sammy asked, glancing down at Tom’s shoes. “You look like you’ve got a great stride on you.”

This tossed scrap of praise warmed Tom extravagantly. “I just might one year.”