The Republic of Love (29 page)

Oh, Tom, Tom.

The sun is shining. She is drinking tea from a large white porcelain cup, which sits on a circle of lacy paper, which sits in turn on a saucer, which sits on a second circle of lace. The air she breathes is layered with the smell of flowers and mild soap and green leaves washed with oxygen. The clock in the town square chimes.

In five days she’ll be home.

“I
LOVE YOU
,” Fay had said to Willy Gifford after she had known him for a year. They were driving down Portage Avenue in Willy’s old Dodge. It must have been late winter, probably March. She remembers that the snow was falling so heavily that it was piling up in clumps under the blades of the windshield wipers. Every few blocks Willy had to stop the car, get out, and knock the packed snow loose with the butt end of a whisk broom. The wonder was that he did it uncomplainingly. Every time it happened, he broke off his monologue about – but Fay can’t remember what it was about, something political, probably, his usual sunny, roaring rhetoric. He swept away the snow, climbed back into the car, and picked up at the point where he’d left off. His face shone. He was a handsome man, almost pretty. “Did I hear right?” he asked suddenly, turning to Fay. “Did you just say what I think you said? You love me? Christ, woman, I thought you’d never say it. I’d convinced myself you didn’t know the words.”

“I love you,” Fay had told Nelo Merino one week after she met him. She was on her back. Nelo was on top of her. His legs were covered with thick fur, as was his back, his chest, and his rather heavy, childish arms. A kind of Caliban was how she thought of him, rough but enchanted with the refined. She sighed the words out, I love you, rather than speaking them, and heard herself say them again and again in a doused voice like someone drugged.

“Yes, of course I love you,” she told Peter Knightly. She said it blithely. He had caught her by surprise. She was sitting across a table from him, a table covered with the debris of a meal he had himself cooked, chicken bones, scrapings of curried rice, a smeared jar of mango chutney, all of it brought brightly forward for her, for her alone, and his hand was seeking her hand, moving across the back of her wrist. “I do,” she said, “yes, I do love you.”

But this is different, saying “I love you” to Tom Avery; this is of a different order. (But people always say that, don’t they? This time it’s different.)

“I love you” is what her parents must say up there in their wallpapered bedroom in their house on Ash Avenue, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times.

And what her stammering brother, Clyde, must whisper to his dear rounded ebullient Sonya, struggling to concentrate, getting the words to come out straight.

And it could be that even Jake Greary barks it into Bibbi’s ear, a harsh, compromised, Marxist version – I love you. Yes.

And Onion and Strom? It is hard for Fay to imagine, but not impossible. Across the white sheet in that hospital room? Surely mysteries have been exchanged there between the two of them. Almost everyone gets a chance to say it – I love you. And to hear it said to them. Love is, after all, a republic, not a kingdom.

“I think I love you,” Robin Cummerford said to Fay a few days before she left for Amsterdam. “Believe it or not, this hasn’t happened to me before. I find that I’m always thinking about you, even when I’m doing my rounds on the ward. We seem to appreciate the same things. I wonder if you think it would be a good idea if we went away for a weekend. When you get back from Europe, I mean. The two of us. To see, you know, how it goes. How can anyone really know? But I do feel that I’m, as it were, in love with you.”

To which Fay, being kind, being tired, too, said: “Well, there’s no hurry, is there?”

Though love is not necessarily patient. She knows that. Nor kind.

H
ER TRAVEL
grant is down to its last few scurrying dollars, but there’s enough to take her by train to Turin, in the north of Italy, to photograph the medieval merfolk on the old church wall.

At last! These paint-daubed creatures are joyous acrobats – oddly, whitely fleshed and wonderfully endearing. One round face in particular, with its steamy secret smile, speaks of perfect composure, of mer-ness accommodated to the last eighth of an inch. For this sight Fay has sacrificed Norwich Cathedral, with its mermaid suckling a lion, and Ripon Cathedral, with its carved choir mermaid, and also the island of Iona, where Saint Patrick in the fifth century is said to have banished old pagan women and turned them into mermaids. According to legend, one of them wept so copiously that her tears formed the strangely shaped pebbles that litter the island.

A handful of these lovely pebbles was given to Fay by Hannah Webb after she visited Iona two years ago. Fay keeps them in an old glass jar on her coffee table, where they are exclaimed over by friends, or lined up in rows and counted and recounted by her young nephews. There are forty-four in all.

She’s brought one of these stones along with her to Europe, loose in her change purse, rubbing up against Dutch guilders, French francs, and German marks. It’s not for luck that she’s brought it – she doesn’t believe in that kind of talisman any longer. She doesn’t know what it’s for, but every time she touches it with her fingers, its smoothness feeds her courage and reminds her of her fundamental and obstinate sanity.

If she were really insane, she tells herself, she would have torn up her excursion ticket days ago and bought a one-way ticket home, home to Tom, straight into the embrace of love.

W
EDNESDAY NIGHT
. Another city, another civic clock chiming the night hours. In her dream she is swimming. Her long skirt is entangled in her legs and she is unable to kick herself free. Her arms, too, are caught in a kind of webbing, which she divines, finally, is her own hair, grown impossibly long. Air, air, she struggles for a mouthful of air. And wakes suddenly, gasping.

T
ONIGHT
, in a spartan hotel room near the Amsterdam airport, she has the same dream again, her hair, her trapped arms and legs, her stuck breath, and this time she decides to turn on her bedside lamp and read for a while.

But the moment she pushes the switch, the light bulb burns out. There is a blue burst, a crisp little smacking sound like an electric kiss, then a scratched red line in space. Tiny explosive particles travel up her arm, or seem to, and carry a wave of weak guilty shock. If only she hadn’t turned it on so brutally, she thinks, but this thought is exceedingly brief, hardly a thought at all, more like a leaf falling or a flash of heat that buzzes on the outside edge of her consciousness.

Oh, God.

Now she is fully awake, lying on her side facing her dead lamp. Its base is glazed ceramic, cheap, anonymous, but nicely rounded, pleasing to her fingertips.

Her alarm clocks says 5:00 a.m. The room is filling up with a wash of snagged light that creeps around the curtain, top and bottom, gray upon gray, and its polished fullness is as empty of shadows as the lamp base or her own blown-out breath. The room’s high dusky ceiling seems to be emptiness itself, hovering over her and offering certain rewards.

But this is not happiness she’s feeling; it’s too dry, too shallowly drawn. This is what precedes happiness: lightheadedness, pangs of hunger, the ballooning sensation of being intensely alive.

In an hour she must get up, wash her hair, and dress. In three hours her plane will take off. In ten hours she will be home, standing in an airport with her arms around Tom Avery and his around her. Beyond that moment her imagination will not travel.

“S
O WHAT’S GOT INTO YOU?”
T
ED
W
OLOSCHUK ASKED
T
OM
A
VERY
. “I mean, you’re like a new man for crying out loud, not that I’m going to start squawking. You come into the studio sort of almost dancing-like. Up on the air. Whistling! I didn’t know you knew how to whistle. Even the music you’ve been choosing for the show. We’ve been getting calls. I guess maybe Bruce told you. People like it. Starting Monday night they’ve been phoning in. It’s good to see you looking up. I don’t give a damn about the ratings, you know me better than that, but it’s sure a lot more cheerful around here all of a sudden. So what’s up? Did’ya win a lottery or what? Why’ve you all of a sudden got that crazy big grin all over your puss?”

“W
ELL, FOR
P
ETE’S SAKE
,” Tom’s mother yelled happily into the phone. “Will wonders never cease. I’ve been wondering, and Mike, too, when you were going to get yourself up here for a weekend. You know how long it’s been? Weeks. The weather’s gorgeous,
and the sunsets! Of course, we’ve had a couple real hard frosts, I’ve brought my tomatoes in, didn’t want to take a chance, but it warms up real nice in the daytime. Oh boy, you should see the colors. The poplars. Real September weather. A girl? You’re thinking of bringing a girl along? Is this the same one that – her name is what? Fay? I’ll get Mike to barbecue some pickerel, fresh out of the lake, I’ll bet she’s never had fish fresh out of the lake. We’ve got this new gismo for barbecuing fish, a special rack thing. Two beds or one? Ha. Just thought I’d ask. All the more room to roll around, eh? Fay, you said her name was? F-a-y? Rhymes with bay. Well, you know something? You sound full of beans.”

“W
HY,
T
OM
A
VERY
, you look like the cat that ate the cream,” Jenny Waring told Tom, running into him in the Safeway. She peered into his shopping cart. “Kiwi fruit? Strawberries? Well. You look like you’ve lost weight. Or put some on, something anyway. You look kind of – blissed out. Have you been away, or what? You know, Gary’s still talking about those great couple of days he had with you when we were in Minneapolis, and I don’t have to tell you what a lift it gave me, getting away. We had lousy weather, rain, but every minute was pure joy. I needed it! I guess I was feeling kind of down, but I came back full of energy. I’ve enrolled in two night courses, bread making and Greek mythology. It’s amazing, a couple of days away from the kids and I felt restored. That’s how
you
look, Tom. Restored.”

“Y
OU’RE IN EXCELLENT SHAPE
,” David Neuhaus informed Tom. “All the tests came back negative. We could do a stress test, but what the hell, you’re looking great. Compared to last spring, Jesus! Still running? Keep it up. Fiber, too. Just as well you’ve given up the vasectomy idea, you’re still young, forty is young these days. You’re probably in better shape than you were at twenty-five. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

T
OM’S
ex-wife Sheila phoned and said, “My God, what’s got into you, sending me flowers out of the blue, and what flowers! You’re
a sweetie. And not even my birthday or anything. It’s not like you to do something that spontaneous, or maybe it is like you and I never knew it. And that note, I’ll treasure that note, you big softie. Well, listen, I wish you all kinds of happiness, too.”

T
HEY SAY LOVE MAKES ANGELS OF THE WICKED
. T
HAT PEOPLE IN LOVE
are kinder in their ways, stronger in their resolve and lit from within by an incandescence so generous, impulsive, and willing, so mild, too, and almost innocent, that other people, observing them, are reminded of young children – the good, stalwart, focused children of fairy tales.

They say love affects the blood-sugar level and that, all other things being equal, lovers will win Olympic medals, score higher on examinations, donate more generously to charities, ward off the most potent flu germs, and kindle the kind of rare happiness that deflects the envy of others.

They say love distorts judgment, so that the most morally robust can drift into evil, and the evil into goodness.

Another thing people say is that love quickens the sensory organs. Fingertips grow more sensitive and more eager. Hearing becomes acute, sometimes painfully so. The olfactory organs crackle
and swell and make themselves known. And vision grows more precise, more penetrating – although Fay, arriving at the Winnipeg airport at 10:15 in the morning, was so dazed by noise and the press of other passengers that she didn’t even see Tom Avery until the moment his arms were around her, the moment she discovered the side of her face resting against the hairy weave of his jacket. (The ribbed cloth, surprisingly, held an aura of chill. Why should that be? she remembers thinking. But, of course, it was the end of summer, the last day of August; it was fall.) She held on tighter, cherishing the abrasiveness, and wondered what she might say.

“You’re home,” he said, rocking her back and forth.

“Yes.”

S
HE KNOWS HOW
she must have looked. People getting off international flights are so desperately tired they often look ill. Their clothes are creased, and their hair sprouts wildly in clumps or else lies too flat against the head.

“You look beautiful,” Tom Avery said into the crown of her hair.

“My parents,” Fay said, “I think I should tell you that they might be here to meet me.”

“I phoned them. I got their number from Sonya. I told them I’d meet you.”