The Republic of Love (20 page)

Why was it people in books threw themselves on beds to cry? Because it felt as though you were pushing up against something real, a shock of grief that became a shape. A mattress was the next best thing to a person; oh God, it was true, what a terrible thought. To weep into springs and padded cotton. She lay on her bed and sobbed for two or three minutes longer. Where did all this bodily water come from? Where was it stored up? In her sinuses? The ventricles of her heart? She got up and looked in the mirror. The wings of her nostrils were reddened and raw. “I can’t bear this,” she said out loud, forcing her voice up to an abrupt, dissonant pitch. She said it again, with an English accent. “I cahn’t beah this.” She squinted at the clock. It was 4:00 a.m.

F
AY LOOKED SHYLY
at her father and said, “I’m thinking of having a baby.”

“Oh,” he said. “A baby.”

“I’m at the critical age, as they say.”

“Are you sure” – he paused – “that you want a baby?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t want to leave it until it’s too late and then be sorry.”

“You’ve got a little time,” he said.

“It gets risky.”

“I know, I know.”

It was a Saturday morning, and Fay and her father were sitting across from each other at Mister Donut’s, drinking coffee out of heavy mugs and eating bran muffins.

“I’ve been mulling it over,” Fay said. She considered the rim of her cup. “I’m earning enough now to support a child. That wouldn’t be a problem.”

“I gather you’re thinking of taking on this project alone?”

“Well, yes.” She gave a minute shrug. Her mouth collapsed downward.

“I see, yes. Hmmm. And, of course, I don’t have to remind you how fraught with difficulties the life of a single parent is, quite aside from money.”

“I know, I know. That’s one of the things I’m taking into consideration.”

“You haven’t made up your mind definitely, then?”

“I’m just thinking about it. Considering. And I guess I wanted to test the notion on you.”

“Me?”

“You wouldn’t find it too awkward to handle? This husband-less daughter of yours, producing a kid.”

“Believe me, daughter mine, awkward is not a word that would occur to me. And since when, may I ask, have you felt obliged to ask for your parents’ blessing?”

“I’d just like your reaction. For instance, do you think it’s selfish?”

“What?”

“Plopping a child into a single-parent situation?”

“I think you want to ask yourself something, Fay. Whether you’d be doing this as a kind of insurance against loneliness.”

“But I’m not lonely.” She said this loudly, then lowered her voice. “At least not too often. Not really. No more than anyone else. It’s just that having kids seems to be one of the big pieces we’re given. You only get a few pieces and that happens to be one.”

“Lots of people don’t have children. They have perfectly valid lives, full lives. Look at Onion.”

“I am looking at Onion. It’s the part of her that seems a little – damaged.”

“I don’t think she’d agree. I don’t think I’d agree, either.”

“They’re not rooted in anything, childless people.”

“They’re connected to love. And to work. The two good Freudian anchors.”

“How did we get to Freud so fast!”

“I’m just pointing out – ”

“I’ve got a feeling you’re trying to discourage me. You’re being altogether too broad-minded and tolerant. Too
fatherly.
”

“I suppose I’m just trying to feel out how serious you are.”

“I’m serious.”

“And whether you’ve thought about… well, the logistics. Of getting pregnant, I mean.”

“I’m seeing someone right now.” She shrugged and felt her face go foolish. “I could keep it all reasonably simple and discreet.”

“This doctor person?”

She smiled. “Yes, this doctor person.”

“I take it he’s not someone you’d like to carry on with.”

“You mean on and on and on?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Hmmm.”

“I do realize this has a predatory side,” Fay said. “Helping myself to someone else’s gene pool and so on. Like shoplifting.”

“Well, yes, I suppose so.”

“I’m just worried about time running out on me.”

“Can I give you some advice?”

“I adore advice. And you never give me any anymore.”

“Wait six months before you decide definitely. Oh, I know all about the biological clock ticking away, I’ve heard your mother talking about it, but six months won’t affect things that much.”

“Why six months?”

“I don’t know. It’s only been a short time since you and Peter went your separate ways – ”

“It’s been four months now. Nearly.”

“That’s not long. Why not make sure you’re clear of all that first. Besides, anything could happen in six months.”

“You’re sounding awfully prophetic.”

“Well, you never know what’s going to happen. What’s just around the corner.”

Fay drank her coffee. After a minute she looked up and said, “Anyway, it’s only something I’m thinking about.”

She left her muffin uneaten; she was so sorry to hear herself talking the way she was. Her pronouncements, her plans, her foolishness – they filled her up with sadness so that she couldn’t eat a thing.

“C
HURCH BELLS
!” Onion pronounced with scorn.

“Yes,” Fay said. “Where is it, St. Luke’s or Holy Rosary?”

“Wherever it is, it’s an imposition.”

“Onion! It’s a lovely sound, church bells. I love it.”

“Tinny.”

“In a way.”

“Have another glass of wine before you go.”

“Just a slurp. I’ve still got some notes to look over for tomorrow.”

“Mermaiding?”

“Yes.”

“Church bells are no more tolerable than those blasts of rock music you get from car windows.”

“I think it’s Holy Rosary. It’s coming from that direction.”

“Calling the faithful to prayer.”

“Have you ever said a prayer, Onion? Tell me honestly.” (She was loving this, sitting in Onion’s living room, letting the words drift along.)

“Not since I entered the age of reason.”

“And when was that?”

“Eighteen. Or was it nineteen.”

“What happened when you were eighteen? Did a light go on?”

“I saw a body.”

“A body?”

“A dead person. An aunt of mine, stretched out in a coffin. She had on rouge and jewelry. She had a dressy black dress on and a string of pearls. One day she was alive and the next day she
was lying there dead. I had this sudden notion that it didn’t make a pinch of difference if you were one or the other.”

“But of course it made a difference. To the people who loved her.”

“It made a ripple. That’s not a difference.”

“Some people make bigger ripples than others.”

“A ripple eventually subsides. What does it matter if it subsides next week or next year? That’s what I thought, looking at her. It was a bitter little thought, let me tell you. And chilling.”

“And were you shattered? About the revelation, not your aunt.”

“Just the opposite.” Onion’s voice went firm. “I was relieved. I felt the mystery go out of things, whoosh, it was gone, and everything seemed a whole lot more solid as a result. I was a bundle of protoplasm and so was everyone else.”

“And it never came back? The mystery?”

“There they go again, those damn bells. They’re as bad as those prayers they pipe into Strom’s room at the hospital. Morning and night he’s got to put up with that mumbo jumbo.”

“How is Strom?”

“No change.” She sipped, then sighed harshly. “Well, he’s a little worse. His hand, he can’t move it at all anymore.”

“Do you think he even hears those prayers?”

“Probably not.”

“What if he does, though? What if he finds them a comfort? Not the words maybe, but the repeating of them. Something to measure off time.”

“Hmmm,” Onion said, closing her eyes. She looked inexpressibly tired. “Seeing my aunt lying there that time, an odd phrase jumped into my head, and I’ve never forgotten it. I thought, there she is, all dressed up and nowhere to go. All alone there and no one to swank for. She’d been a great one for swanking, as we used to call it. People used to laugh at her behind her back. But there she lay, this singular being. This singular, insensible being. My uncle, a terribly pious old goat, came up to me and said, ‘I hope you said a prayer for Auntie.’”

“And what did you say?”

“I said yes. But my fingers were crossed. That’s the way I was. A person with crossed fingers. My identity, if you like – not that I have any patience with all this search-for-identity nonsense.”

Fay listened to Onion and found herself nodding. She, too, is uneasy with people perpetually searching for their identities. She’s sick of her identity; in fact, she’s afraid of it. She has all the identity she wants, all she can absorb. Daughter, sister, girlfriend, all her Fay-ness, and all of its tints and colors, her clothes, her bed sheets, her cups and saucers, her writing paper. This looks just like you, people tell her. This is your sort of book, your sort of movie, the kind of thing only you would say. Fay McLeod. Yammer, yammer, yammer. She’s sick of the woman. Throttle her, put her on the back shelf. (Only when she’s with Onion does the image retreat.)

She’s learned, too, how unstable identity can be, how it can quickly drain away when brought face to face with someone else’s identity. Talking to Hannah Webb, the placidly genteel Hannah, Fay feels herself coarsen; she wants to slap her knee, wave her arms boisterously, shift into an alien diction, say words like “fuck” and “lousy” and “bitched-up.” With Clyde or Bibbi she becomes the calm older sister, slightly ponderous, immensely charitable. With Iris Jaffe she grows a coat of acute girlishness; with Beverly Miles she’s a skeptic. With Peter Knightly she was intermittently outrageous and determined, as though she were locked into a desire to keep him off balance; she never knew why; probably she was feeding some strain of
his
identity, reflecting, deflecting, fading back, re-emerging. And with herself? A woman not even on speaking terms with her own loneliness.

Enough of this, enough.

It was exhausting, the battle to give yourself a shape. It was depressing, too, like an ugly oversized dress you had to go on wearing year after year after year.

“I
SUPPOSE
I
SHOULD SAY
bon voyage,” Peter said to Fay, running into her one morning in the staff cafeteria.

“Oh, but I don’t go for another ten days,” Fay told him. “A whole week, and a half.”

“Lucky you to get away from this heat. It’s been a pretty cool summer in Europe from all reports.”

“Except in Greece. It’s been terrible there, people collapsing on the streets.”

“Right, I read something about it. But in England, and in Paris – ”

“I’ll have to take a raincoat.”

“And an umbrella.”

“Yes,” Fay said, “there’ve been record rainfalls in the U.K.”

To herself she said: Here we are, this man, this former lover and I, standing on a strip of beige public carpeting in front of a soft-drink machine, talking about rain and cold. The most neutral of all subjects, the most harmless.

“Quite a lot of flooding on the Saône,” Peter went on. “And in the north of Italy, Tuscany. Devastating. We saw some clips on the news.”

We? Of course. Peter and Fritzi.

This is the man whose mouth has read the length and width of her body.

She knows his tongue and teeth. She’s acquainted with the fine tremors of his long thighs. His surprisingly silken pubic hairs. The reddened veins of his penis. And what else, what else? All those nights. She’s absorbed those strange moans of his that seemed to originate not in the throat but in some primary node of memory, nothing to do with his real voice, nothing to do with
him.

Oh, the things he’s done to me, Fay thought, staring into the shaded knot of his tie. Maroon with blue flecks. Nubby. The things I’ve done to him,
for
him.

“Of course,” Peter was saying, “the wind off the North Sea.”

“Brutal.”

“Never really lets up.”

The death of intimacy, so this is what it means: Bodies dissolved in water. Bodies made of water. A trickle of memory left, thin as the mention of rain in a weather bulletin. The waste of it.

“How’s Fritzi getting along?” she asked Peter. Her confected social voice.

“Oh, God, this has been a tough time for Fritzi.”

“And the girls.”

“Terrible, terrible. Heather’s been having nightmares. And acting out, tantrums and so on. Fritzi’s worried about her. We both are.”

Both. The word hung in the air, small and subtly textured, like a tennis ball.

“I’m staying on for the moment,” Peter said, as though he felt an explanation were called for. “It’s not just the rent money, which does help out, God knows. It’s more the emotional support. Although I suppose it’s got the communal tongue wagging.” At this he peered questioningly at Fay, who could think of nothing to say.

“Well,” he said, moving away, “I won’t say good-bye just yet. I’m sure to see you before you head off.”

Familiar tucks appeared at the corners of his mouth, a retractable smile in a face composed of cartilage and muscle, of aqueous matter, social tissue, a long malleable humid face. A face that Fay has sometimes thought of as ecclesiastical.

How impervious and ongoing his life seemed at the moment: Fritzi, the girls, a household hanging together.

Protoplasm, she said to herself, and shivered with hurt.

F
AY AND
I
RIS
Jaffe had planned to go to an early movie on Tuesday night and then stop off somewhere for a pizza, but Iris phoned at the last minute to say her temperature was up and she and Mac were going to spend the evening in bed trying to make a baby.

Well, Fay thought, I’ll have a “singles” evening at home – and I’m going to enjoy it, too.

I
will
enjoy it!

She would make herself a salad, she decided, but when she opened the refrigerator and looked at the drawer full of lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, and parsley, all those wet things, things that needed cutting up, she thought: Why bother.