The Republic of Love (25 page)

He had had to assure her that he was overjoyed at the idea of taking care of a small boy, that the two of them, child and man, would abandon themselves to a disordered male reign of junk food and bacchic license.

In fact, Tom was nervous about how exactly the two of them would get along. Ages seven and forty thrust together. The substance of a sentimental film, maybe, but the reality made him itch; it was not what he would have chosen. He liked Gary, who was a sturdy child, dark haired, watchful, his mouth perpetually hanging open a thoughtful quarter inch, but how do you keep a kid amused
for two days? What would they talk about? He imagined long silences, uneasiness, false enthusiasm.

Children baffle Tom. He hardly knows any. Children are unpredictable, the way they behave and the way they turn out. It strikes him that a good many of his friends are frightened of their own children, that the little ruins and ironies of married life were furiously multiplied by their presence. Noise, mess, complication, dangers to watch out for. Children go crazy at times, seized by bizarre, primitive notions. Tom knows all this; he even remembers at times something of what it was like being a child, the precise sensations. The hands of children are sticky. They wet their pants, stick out their tongues. That people love them seems amazing to him, heartening, too, even miraculous.

And they do. Once people have produced a baby, their world softens up and becomes a baby world of pink toweling, tiny teeth, diapers, highchairs, scrubbable plastic toys that nevertheless acquire the fetid sweetness of the babies themselves. The funny or outrageous misdeeds of their progeny were recounted again and again, with wily dejection, as though to confirm membership in the rueful, sober, laconic confederacy of parenthood.

Nevertheless, it was where Tom’s friends wanted to be, the only place – this is what he’s concluded. Even Nathan and Judy Kappel’s little Melody, who hits her head against the wall and who once bit Tom’s wrist, even Kelly Waterford, who throws himself down in supermarket aisles screaming, even Trevor Masterson, with crossed eyes and curious webs of flesh between his thumb and forefinger, even these damaged, difficult offspring consume their parents’ love.

Tom, invited to houses where children are present, does his best; he does what he thinks is expected of him, pats bellies and diapered bottoms, brings gifts, comments on the agreeable shapes of baby heads – always a safe topic – or the presence of baby hair, baby resemblances, baby cleverness, the promise of widely spaced
eyes or a muscular grip. He knows what to do, more or less, and he likes to think he does it with sincerity, but he knows better. Children are not much fun. They’re not – for some reason this is a well-guarded secret – they’re not particularly interesting. And so Tom knows there’s something here he doesn’t understand. Some joyful, consuming secret.

And he’d been touched when the Warings some years ago asked him to be Gary’s godfather. At that time he had been between marriages; it may have been that they felt sorry for him – oddly, this occurs to him today for the first time. Gary was a lump of baby tissue packed into a blanket. He smelled of urea and baby powder (that dense blocked odor) and soap and milky vomit. His bundled arms and lolling head appeared boneless and only tentatively connected to his swollen trunk. His features were small, snaillike, closed, and when he was placed, compacted and warm and surprisingly robust, in Tom’s arms during the christening ceremony in the Warings’ living room, he opened his eyes briefly, rolled his eyeballs upward as if catching the tail end of a milky dream, then fell once again into baby unconsciousness.

That’s when you really love your kids, people tell Tom, when you come across them sleeping with their limbs outflung on the bed sheet, or else curled up tight like a squirrel or some other burrowing creature. The sleeping faces of children are their real faces. They’re weighted with heat, painted pink by the glow of a night-light. Their skin is perfect, translucent, newly made, the visible sign of incalculable trust – the face it would gladden us to go back to and claim.

“I
DON’T SEE
any car.”

The words came toward Tom slowly, as though from a great distance. The cloudy pillar billowing up over the trees, the concrete curb where he and Fay McLeod balanced, the pale side-parting of her dark hair – all this had pitched him into dizzy confusion.

Why exactly was Gary yelling his head off? The car, where
was it? It must be around the corner. Stolen? Had he left the key in the ignition? He knew there was something he wasn’t remembering, but what?

He reached into his jacket pocket, touched the leather tag of his key ring, and remembered.

“Is something wrong?” Fay asked in a low voice.

“Where is it?” Gary was pounding on Tom’s leg. “Where is it?”

“It’s not here.” He was groaning. “It’s all right, but it’s not here. I forgot. I don’t know how I could forget. I walked over here. I don’t have it, my car – it’s at home. In the parking lot. Parked there.”

The confession came running out of his mouth in the usual way of confessions, unsorted, discontinuous, but at the same time the flip side of his brain was coolly reading the screen of Fay’s expression. It was lovely to see. He thought it a perfect moment. What she registered were images of bewilderment, attention, comprehension, relief, surprise, laughter, and then – and this he found loveliest of all – a brisk realignment. “Well, then,” she said, looking first at Gary and then at him, “why don’t we start walking?”

T
HEY WALKED SLOWLY
. Here and there were puddles of greenish rainwater, and in the puddles floated small twigs and leaves. Overhead the branches of the separate trees gathered together, oak, elm, ash, poplar – city trees with black tarry rings painted around their trunks, put there to discourage the cankerworm larvae. The uniformity of these dark markings turned them into a tree army, marching straight up to a point of perspective.

River Heights was an old part of town. It occurred to Tom for the first time that someone had sat down and planned these streets, inked them on a master plan and given them names – Harvard, Yale, Kingsway, Oxford – suggestive of older, more settled, more easterly territory. Sixty or seventy years earlier, someone, thinking of families and the needs of small children
had picked up a ruler and marked off lot sizes, making them generous, allowing for garages and back lanes and for space where raspberries might be grown and front yards that were broad enough to give the houses a touch of dignity, of unassuming definition.

It seemed to Tom, recalling this walk later, that he and Fay had strolled past these houses at a kind of princely pace. Their strides were those of the long-limbed, the unhurried. He must have shortened his steps to match hers, or else she had stretched hers to meet his. It would have been a minuscule adjustment. She was perhaps two inches shorter than he was, which would make her about five feet, nine inches. A tall girl. No, not a girl, certainly not a girl. How old? Thirty, he guessed. And married? If he got a chance he’d check her left hand for a ring, not that that meant anything these days. He would pay attention, listen for the plural pronoun, the attached woman’s “we” or “us” or “ours.”

Gary Waring did not walk at a princely pace. He had immediately slipped his hand loose from Fay’s, running ahead of them or falling behind, zigzagging back and forth across the sidewalk, doubling the distance they covered, stopping to pick up a worm from a sidewalk crack, running the palms of his hands flat along the caragana hedges and transferring the glistening rainwater to his mouth. As though driven by a rubber-band motor he circled trees and poles, scooted pebbles along with the side of his foot, kicking at cracked cement, at fences, knocking experimentally against the side of a mailbox, even putting his ear up to its slot, listening. Turning the corner onto Stafford Avenue, he drummed on the glass window of Murray’s Bookstore, humming to himself all the while, chanting some uninhibited breathy tune, bobbing his head up and down extravagantly, and reminding Tom of what he had not thought of in years: the curious and brave efforts of children to charge their immediate world with brilliance, making it glow with color as they move among common objects, bringing those objects alive with incantatory music, alive with texture and outline, alive with life.

H
E COULDNT REMEMBER
afterward what he and she had talked about, and this seemed strange to him, as though the act of walking, of rhythmically placing one foot before the other, had absorbed and determined the nature of what they said. He knows that they traded lists of current information, that she was thinking of buying a car but hadn’t had time to shop around, that he was thinking of investing in a Macintosh computer but couldn’t imagine what he would do with it. That she sang in the Handel Chorale, that he jogged in the park on Saturday mornings. That besides her brother, Clyde, she had one sister, named Bibbi, which was short for Beatrix. That “Niteline” was in its sixth year. That she was writing a book on mermaids – “Yes, mermaids!” – as seen from a feminist perspective but was beginning to think she would never get her various theories glued together. That he was continually surprised, and sometimes shocked, by the candor of the people who phoned in to his show, that he believed people were rendered defenseless in the middle of the night, pouring out more than they really wanted to, their loneliness, chiefly. Maybe it does them good, Fay told him; it may be that they don’t regret it the next morning at all, but feel better for it, relieved in some way, better able to cope with – loneliness. If that’s what it is.

They agreed, walking along, that it was surprising how quiet it was at this hour, only a single car passing, its tires hissing on the damp asphalt. The air was cooler than it had been in weeks, but this hint of fall was false; there would be plenty of hot weather yet.

He looked down at the top of her head rather than into her face. He would have liked to reach out and touch her hair. Her bare arms swung at her sides. He could see the weave of her blouse, the way it sat on her shoulders, and the shoulders themselves, the curving arc of bone and smoothed skin. He felt that if he wanted to, he could see straight into her head. He wondered if she was cold. They crossed Stafford at the light and turned into Grosvenor Avenue. Gary danced beside them as they crossed, and Fay reached
out and put a hand on the middle of his back, lightly. Tom, observing the particularity of her touch, felt something like enchantment.

Someone had once told him that Grosvenor, directly translated, meant gross way, or broadway, and he wondered if she knew this; it seemed like something she might like to know.

He asked her how long she planned to be in Europe.

Four weeks, she said. That was long enough when you were traveling alone.

He almost stumbled with happiness. The word struck him full force – “alone.” He posed a casual question. “You’re not married?”

“No.” Lightly. And then, “Are you?” So lightly he could tell she had not been deceived by his nonchalance.

“Divorced,” he said to the top of her head. He’d long ago learned to keep things simple.

“Ah.”

They’d come to a stop now, standing in front of her building, and she turned directly toward him. “Nice to discover who lives in your own neighborhood.” She said this socially.

Struck with inspiration, he asked her how she was getting to the airport, and she said her parents were going to take her, that they lived close by on Ash Avenue, that they’d be coming for her – she checked her watch – in just one hour.

“I suppose I should say bon voyage,” Tom said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gary pick up a stick and test it rhythmically against the tub of flowers by the door.

What had she said next? Thank you?

They stood, half smiling, divided, it seemed to him, by her fine dark hair and the soft air of congeniality. Motionless. Something holding them there.

“I’ll probably,” he said, looking at her with amazement, “be running into you when you get back.”

She smiled. “Probably.” She seemed to be waiting, as though there were one more thing to be said.

“What I’d really like …” he began, then stopped himself.

Her smile dimmed, but it was still there. Still there. “
What
would you like?” she asked. The sky behind her head was colored a rainy iridescence.

“I have to put Gary to bed,” he said. “And you have to finish packing.”

“Yes?”

“What I’d really like is to put my arms around you for a minute.”

E
VERYWHERE
F
AY LOOKS SHE SEES MEN AND WOMEN EMBRACING: IN
Amsterdam, in Copenhagen, and now in Paris. Does this go on all year round? she asks herself. This open abandonment? This ardent, pressing, fleshly extravagance of arms and lips?

In Dutch railway stations, in the lobby of a movie theater, in the narrow streets of the old Jewish quarter – in all these places she’s seen how a simple handshake can unfold into something more lingering and sensual, transformed into an intimacy of limbs that yearns for and suggests a deeper convergence. In Denmark, where Fay spent two days attending the European Folkloric Congress, she observed an exchange of greetings between colleagues, what started simply as the wave of a hand across a meeting room, then expanded slowly until it was two circling arms uplifted like bees’ wings, indicating surprise, affection, invitation, friendship, and even – yes! – erotic rapture. People hand each other books, papers, glasses of water, and these small formalities imply a longing to become part of one vast undulation. Bodies of the old and young
curl toward each other, speaking of commonplace things but signaling desire – she’s sure of it. It comes sighing through the simultaneous-translation system. She herself was kissed a dozen times, the two-cheek European buzz that can mean nothing or everything. Dr. Kottenheim from Hamburg, younger than she’d expected from his monograph on angels, hairy as a wrestler, ripely physical with a melancholy nose and smelling of starch and figs, had gathered her two hands in his, cradled them there like nesting swallows, rubbed her wrist with his thumbs, beamed viscerally – “Ah, my dear, my dear, at last we meet.”
Take me, ravish me.