The Republic of Love (13 page)

The plane bobbed and plunged, and ropes of lightning jerked past the windows, but to her surprise she was not in the least frightened. It seemed to her that as long as she kept her nose in
People,
she would be safe. The slick paper and the faint electrical charge that clasped one page to the next formed part of a hieratic defense, and by running her eyes along the lines of print, she was helping to keep the plane aloft.

Next to Fay, by the window, sat a woman with smoothly combed white hair and polished spectacles, the temples of which dipped stylishly. She had about her body, her hands and neck, an intimate bulk, cultivated, learned. Her broad shoulders were held erect, neat as a syllogism, and like Fay she had a briefcase at her feet, an excellent one in real leather, but rather scuffed. A pediatrician? A librarian? No. Perhaps the editor of an in-house publication, insurance or finance. Immensely valuable to her associates. Revered rather than loved. Passed over but depended upon. An aunt. Someone’s older sister. A person who received boxes of bath powder at Christmas.

On another sort of morning Fay might have turned in her seat and opened a conversation. Their briefcases, their gender, their longing for something hot to drink would have been enough
to set things going. What difference, really, Fay asked herself, was there between herself and her white-haired seatmate, or her sister-in-law Sonya, or Aunt Velma, or Muriel Brewmaster, or even Winifred Noyes? Weren’t they all pleading for a share, a role of some kind, in the pageant of romance?

Not Onion, though; Onion was on the other side of romance, above it, perhaps, too sharp of eye or too solidly tied to her own whims.

And the flight attendants, too, seemed to Fay to stand outside the romantic iconography. They were exempt, these nerveless automatons. Fay couldn’t help wondering why she, strapped in her seat, should remain vulnerable, while they, in their pumps and skirts and skinny looped scarves, were permitted to move untouched down the aisle, collecting breakfast trays and dishing out their jaunty consoling oxygen-enriched advice. They came forth in pairs or coveys – bending, reaching, adjusting, offering their balletic strategies and quick thinking.

Fay’s former lover, Peter Knightly, postulated that these hostesses of the air are the mermaids of our present age. That the watery diaspora of legend has devolved to these half-women, so brilliantly smiling and unreachable, so emptied out and knowing. We get the myths we can handle, he told Fay on their last day together.

W
HENEVER
F
AY
ran into her Uncle Arthur at family gatherings or on the street, she used to shout into his ear: “How’re you feeling, Uncle Arthur?” and he would grunt and clear his throat and, from deep within the arthritic rectangle of his upper body, compose a reply which was always, “Well, I suppose I’m feeling my age.”

And this is what she has been feeling all spring: her age. It’s not so much that she dwells on the number thirty-five, but that she feels its authority glowing incandescently over her shoulder or tapping gently on her wrist. It has a voice, too, a lightly mocking scold, somewhat humorous, but ultimately stern. When she runs for the bus at the end of the day, dodging cars, stepping around puddles, it says, “This is the way a thirty-five-year-old woman
runs.” When she notices one morning that a measure of buoyancy has gone out of her long dark hair, that it may not come back however much she douses it with rinses and sprays, it says, “This is what thirty-five-year-old hair is like.” She examines her face and body minutely, watches for fluctuations in her periods, in her ability to concentrate, for accrued habits of manner or speech: Is this a thirty-five-year-old voice, she asks herself, so disingenuously courteous and droll on the telephone, and on occasion so sharp? In the act of love, her legs wrapped and locked around a man’s back, the thought has come: Is this seemly? For a woman of my age? Isn’t this maybe a touch absurd? Her arm with its gold bangles, her hand with its garnet ring – these are attached to a thirty-five-year-old person. The new dress she’s bought to take to the Regional Folklore Association in Minneapolis has a fullness of skirt and boldness of color that might be just a fraction girlish for a thirty-five-year-old woman. It suits her, even flatters her; yet next year she may decide to put it at the back of her closet and buy something more appropriate for a woman of her age.

S
HE LOVES CLOTHES
and is superstitious about them.

She once owned a pair of white crêpe de Chine pants for which she paid ten dollars in a store called Marguerite’s Nearly New Boutique. Tiny buttons, like tears, brought the material together at the ankles. In the waistband she found a concealed pocket, and in the pocket was an Irish sixpence.

When she was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin she bought herself a short suede jacket that buttoned at the hip in a slightly military manner. She loved to run her fingers up and down the sleeves, which felt almost soapy in their smoothness. A man she was in love with then, a Renaissance scholar writing his dissertation on
Coriolanus,
told her that the jacket made her smell like a colt, and also like long wet grass.

Once, when she was driving somewhere with her father, her stocking caught and ran. “It must be terrible,” her father said, “wearing those things on your legs.” No, she said, it wasn’t, it felt wonderful, one knee sliding over the other, a leg skimming under
a skirt or pointing into a boot – but he had remained unconvinced.

She has a tightly woven flannelette nightgown – she’s had it for years – with a ruffle around the hem. On extremely cold winter nights, or on nights when she feels the world is unfair or cruel, she wears this old nightgown to bed – drops it over her head, buttons it up to the chin – and sleeps soundly.

The day she met Peter Knightly she was wearing a two-piece outfit in moss-green wool. She wore that outfit for years, but last fall she put it on and it suddenly looked wrong – it looked silly; it make her look like a mother frog.

All spring she’s been wearing a raincoat in a dusty-pink color, and this collarless coat with its deep dropped sleeves has carried her through the last few difficult weeks of being on her own. Every morning she slides her arms into it and feels grateful. At night she adjusts it on the hanger with a feeling of relief; she’s gotten herself through another day.

You’re coping, she breathes into the mirror.

And now, having checked herself into the Hotel Normandy in Minneapolis and taken a long shower, she is thinking about clothes again, a dress in rough purple cotton with a wide woven belt in purple, white, and brilliant green. She bought the dress with the idea that she would wear it when she presented her mermaid paper to the association, a paper entitled “Mermaids: A Feminist Perspective.” She is uneasy about her approach and about how the paper will be received, and she hopes that the fullness of the purple dress, those yards of redundant material, will disarm her critics, or at least distract them.

She loves the way this dress dips away from her neck and the spread of its pleats beneath the belt. When she turns, even slightly, the skirt, with a small swirl of resistance, follows.

B
OTH MEN AND WOMEN
, but particularly men, like to look at a pretty girl. Beyond the tug of sex rides the simple wish to gaze upon what is fresh, appealing, and unselfconscious, and Fay knows that this elemental attraction must have encouraged lonely sailors to manufacture visions from sea waves and mist. This is one explanation
of the mermaid myth, but it is not the one she places before the Regional Folklore Association in Minneapolis.

The mermaid, Fay says at the conclusion of her paper, touching a pensive finger to the side of her jaw, is thus, an emblem of sexual ambiguity. Traditionally, women were regarded as lesser versions of men, with abbreviated sex organs, but the mermaid preceded even that image, being a female whose development was arrested at an early stage of evolution. She is erode but passionless, a culturally charged gender model whose seductive capacity is valued over her reproductive capacity. In her double-tailed version she may call to mind the old Celtic sheila-na-gig, or the Indian Kali, aggressively squatting and displaying her yoni. In her far more familiar single-tailed version, though, she is closer to an Eve figure overlaid with the cult of the Virgin, a sealed vessel enclosing either sexual temptation or sexual virtue, or some paradoxical and potent mixture of the two.

What’s that again?

As Fay speaks, hearing her voice, traveling, plaintive and persuasive, through the microphone, rising and falling, pausing and charging, she glances up from her notes, being careful not to lose her place, and thinks: Do I believe one word of this?

“I
DON’T GET IT
,” a man named Cliff Eggleston says to Fay over a drink. “You talk as if there really were such things as mermaids. Are you sure you haven’t corporealized the myth? Overinvested? It’s a temptation in our field, you know. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Anyway, why don’t we skip tonight’s banquet and go find a decent restaurant somewhere? Seafood should suit your mood. With a good bottle of briny wine. On second thought, why don’t we skip dinner and go up to my room and have a nice long leisurely fuck. Hey, come on now, don’t look so appalled, you’re too grown-up a lady for that. You know you want it as much as I do. That purple dress, I’m sure you know damn well what purple signifies. No? It’s the color of engorgement. I’m not kidding. Oh, for Christ’s sake, have I said something to upset you? Oh, look, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean it. Oh, what the hell.”

P
EOPLE ARE ALWAYS
looking for consolation and accepting it too readily. They find clever ways to invert their humiliations, little tricks of self-deception, a form of artistry.

Fay, lying awake in the Hotel Normandy in Minneapolis, is thinking about how she will re-create her encounter with Cliff Eggleston for the entertainment of her friends at home. She’ll set the story up, give an astringent little sketch of a ruddy, alert, shrink-wrapped, denim-clad assistant professor from a third-rate Lutheran college: chin like a teacup, the ubiquitous academic haircut – you would think one barber serviced the entire male teaching population of North America – then the clumsy, weak, rolled-up shirt sleeves. (All this undercut by an unfocused leer; some men could not master a leer. Then the punch line:
You know damn well what purple signifies.)

Sonya and Clyde will roar. Bibbi will be angry at first, but will end up laughing. Iris Jaffe can be counted on; Mac, too.

The coffee-break crowd at work, will she tell them? Maybe, depending on whether or not Peter is present.

Not her parents, though; she won’t tell them – not because they’re prudish about such things, but because she doesn’t want them worrying about her, their thirty-five-year-old daughter adrift and unprotected in the world, opening herself up to injury on this scale.

T
OM WONDERS WHY HE STAYS HERE
. T
HE CLIMATE GETS HIM DOWN
, and so does the grid of streets, bridges, shopping centers, traffic lights, and pedestrian crossings – at times the punishing municipal familiarity of these fixtures causes him to lean forward on the steering wheel of his car and whimper. How many hundreds of times has he spun his wheels off the ramp at the St. Vital Mall and entered that hard-surfaced glaring corridor between joyless shoe stores, trust companies, fast-food counters, discount drugs, and the hollow blue interiors of video franchises, all of it pushing up against his other cravings – which are forceful and persistent, but something of a mystery to him.

Worse, the history of his failed marriages colors the various decent neighborhoods of the city. There’s Sheila, his first, out there in the Linden Woods subdivision, then Clair – but he never runs into Clair – in Tuxedo Park, then Suzanne, on South Drive in Fort Garry. A three-starred constellation flung across the city; there
isn’t a day when he doesn’t feel its configuration bearing down on him.

He’s invested a lot here – left quite a few marks, sat in a fair number of bars and back yards, stamped snow off his feet on numerous front and back porches, eaten at a thousand tables. Once he started to add up the number of different apartments he’s rented since he first settled here (after graduating from Toronto with a degree in sociology, having switched from the grease pit of polysci), and stopped counting at twelve. During that time he’s owned six different cars – his favorite was a beige Citroen sedan – and held jobs at four different Winnipeg radio stations. Friends have entered and left his life. But he has no children, no relatives, no property, none of the blown aftermath other people attach to their arrangements.

Downtown Winnipeg has its city-share of graffiti-spattered back alleys but is mostly made up of wide formal boulevards lined with handsome stone buildings, piteously exposed despite repeated attempts at landscaping. This is a place with a short tough history and a pug-faced name. Elsewhere people blink when you say where you’re from, and half the time they don’t know where it is. An American woman Tom met in San Diego on his last vacation there dug her fingernails into his bare shoulder and said, “God, I don’t believe it. You mean to tell me you live
north
of North Dakota!”

R
IGHT NOW
, early June, is the worst time of the year, worst because he forgets from summer to summer that it’s really going to happen. Just when the trees have finally filled out their crowns with great glossy leaves, the cankerworms go on the march. The beetles make their way up the tree trunks, the larvae are hatched, and then the munching begins. It takes no more than two days to transform an avenue of foliage into ragged lace, and ten days to strip the trees bare. At night there’s a steady drizzling rain which is not rain at all but the continuously falling excrement of billions of cankerworms, chewing and digesting. The streets and sidewalks are covered with slippery syrup. The air turns putrid; the worms,
grown fat, spin themselves long stick threads, and on these they descend, like acrobats, to the ground.