The Republic of Love (35 page)

“I won’t be able to make it,” she announced to Fay the day before the fortieth-anniversary party. Her voice was abrupt, short. “I can’t possibly leave Strom for that long.”

Fay had been dumbfounded. And injured. “You have to come, Onion. You’re one of Mother’s oldest friends. Just think of all you’ve been through together, all those years. Strom can spare you for a few hours, you know he can. Please reconsider. At a time like this, we really do need you as much as he does. You’re family. You’re part of us.”

Speaking in this way, Fay had felt a dismaying loss of control. Her pitched pleas seemed to come from a part of her body she only dimly recognized.
Please, please, please come.

Moved at last, Onion had agreed. She would attend the party, she said, but would leave early.

T
HE EVENING WAS COOL
. The sky, Fay noted, was clear. A clear starry night.

And everything else went well, too. The food. The cake. The cases of wine delivered to the house. The tables. The lighting. Bibbi’s beautiful invitations. And the flowers – she and Clyde and Bibbi had ordered an immense engraved pottery vase, and into this vase each arriving guest placed a single flower – beautiful. At her suggestion, Tom had installed a sound system and agreed to look after the taped music. Just seeing him, his earnest attentions, enormously enlarged her love for him. She was unprepared for it. “Tom,” she said, pausing in the middle of the long noisy evening and placing a hand on his back, “you’re doing fine.”

Her mother’s face when she entered the house at the beginning of the evening had registered shock. A hand had flown to the throat of her rather ordinary cream blouse, and her face had folded into a perplexed, obedient frown, then shifted to dazed
realization, then became a mask of happiness – her friends, her family, this joyful, radiant celebration.

The noise level grew – music, voices, shrieks of laughter, the wind rounding the corners of the glassed-in porch, wineglasses clinking. The Jaffes, the Sharpes, the Lavanders. Wonderful old Hazel Moore. Helena Ruislip, all the way from San Francisco.

And Sonya. From across the dining room, Fay regarded her sister-in-law with admiration. This was the sort of occasion Sonya loved – loved to organize, loved to preside over. Except now Sonya’s face was wrinkled with concern. She was looking at her watch and gesturing to Clyde; a minute later, she was working her way across to where Fay stood.

“Fay,” she said, “we’re looking for your father. We think we should start the toasts.”

“I haven’t seen him,” Fay said. “At least not for the last half hour or so. Maybe he stepped out for a breath of – but I haven’t seen him.”

“Neither has Clyde.”

“Did you ask Bibbi?”

“Yes. And Onion. They haven’t seen him, either.”

“Maybe – ”

“Clyde’s already checked the bathrooms.”

“He might have gone out for some air.”

“Do you think so?”

“Tom,” Fay said, “have you seen my father? Clyde wants to start the speeches in a few minutes.”

“Maybe he went out for a breath of fresh air.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open. I’ll tell him you – ”

Fay stepped outside the back door, listening hard, trying to see in the darkness. The dark vault of the sky seemed depthless. The wind had risen. She walked a few yards into the garden, then turned and peered back into the lighted house. The windows were golden with light. Every room was filled. The kitchen, with its clutter of silver and china. The living room, the dining room overflowing with people. Bouquets of flowers stood on every table.

She let herself in and walked through the narrow hallway and up the carpeted stairs. Pale carpeting, a mushroom beige. A series of pen-and-ink drawings on the wall. Architectural drawings that Clyde has been collecting. The stairs creaked pleasingly underfoot.

She checked Matthew’s bedroom, then Gordon’s. Their beds were piled high with coats. She climbed the slightly narrower, more claustrophobic stairs to the third floor, to Clyde and Sonya’s dimly lit bedroom.

The room lay before her. The wide bed was covered with Sonya’s treasured quilt, a pattern of blue and green squares. In a corner by the curtained window was a small blue rather feminine-looking armchair, and seated in that chair was the shadowy neat upright figure of Richard McLeod.

Fay stared at him a moment over the glowing quilt and saw him look up. Their eyes locked. His were bright with tears.

A
STRANGE EUPHEMISM,
T
OM THINKS, TO
SLEEP
WITH SOMEONE,
but no stranger than its substantive form,
real
sleep – not screwing, not fucking or fornicating, not engaging in sexual intercourse, sexual congress, or even making love, but
sleeping.

He prizes it. Actual sleep, that is.

The intimacy of sleep, of falling into unconsciousness, locked body-to-body with another person, a stranger, someone not of one’s own blood, the skin-on-skin unlikelihood of it. What a bonus it is that the palpable world can be left behind and the dark cave of sleep trustingly entered. All those hours pressed together in twinned silence – how does it happen? What are those hours made of? Oxygen? Ether? How can the breathing of two people be this effortless? So synchronized that it seems a single lung is blowing up with air and deflating with its long slow rhythmic release.

From time to time during the long nights he feels his limbs
shift, as though they were made of some plantlike substance, moving sideways on the bed of their own accord, swimming away from him and touching another’s sleeping body. Fay’s body.

She’s almost as tall as he is, but thin – especially her upper body, her rib cage, her long arms. Her slenderness is her one vanity. He teases her about the bag lunches she takes to work, her clear plastic containers of cottage cheese, her carrot sticks, her yogurt, her apple, her Swedish whole-grain wafers. “I don’t mind getting old,” she tells him, “but not old and fat.” (This is not quite true. She
does
mind getting old; in February she’ll turn thirty-six; she can’t believe this, she tells Tom.)

By next February – and this is astonishing to Tom – the two of them will have been married for three months. A couple. Husband and wife. They’ve set a date, the third Saturday in November. A simple ceremony in the chapel of All Saints Church, the same church where Fay’s parents were married forty years ago. The wedding will be at four o’clock. Just family and close friends, about eighty guests in all. Ian Innes, an old family friend of the McLeods, will officiate. Stephanie Birrell and her cello will provide the music. A traditional ceremony, yes, but with a few differences. Fay doesn’t want to walk down the aisle, she says; she’d feel silly. And she doesn’t want a long white bridey dress. She doesn’t yet know what she wants; she’s planning to start looking around for something simple, something halfway between formal and informal, something marvelous.

Whenever Tom tries to focus his mind on these plans, he’s overcome with confusion. A train of images moves into view: himself swaying on the red church carpet, the weave of his dark suit fragmenting into its separate threads, the swelling whiteness of his shirt collar, his knotted tie dissolving, and Ted Woloschuk standing somewhere nearby, just slightly out of focus. And then there’s the blur of faces out there watching, those attentive numbered faces, eighty of them, tipped forward and lit by the midafternoon light that falls through the colored west windows – winter light, opalescent, full of trickery and wrinkles of perception. And the unthinkable
moment when he will pull a ring from his pocket and place it on Fay’s finger. A wedding ring, a solid but slippery thing; he has an image of her fingers drifting toward him in a miasma of grayed dots like those on the edge of a photograph.

But no, this is real. Sleeping beside her tonight, and waking drowsily at dawn, he feels an exhausted, drunken greed for each moment that holds them. Sleep presses inward, soft edged, delicately colored, burgeoning with new possibility. Now. Today. The two of them, he and Fay, lying side by side beneath the warmth of Fay’s electric blanket, which is set this freezing autumn night at medium. This is really happening. It has already, in fact, happened. Love and its transforming power have laid out a far more generous future than the one he had been willing to settle for. He is soon to be married to the woman who sleeps beside him. Fay McLeod. There will be not only a marriage ceremony but annual celebrations of that marriage, the date circled each year on the calendar. The day will bring gifts and reminiscences, how they met, the special circumstances, what happened next, what was said, the retelling of that particular narrative which married people uniquely cherish. Our story. Our marriage. November, that unlikely month.

He turns on his side so he can watch her face.

Glimpsed like this, still sleeping, shadowed, her features composed, she seems not only his lover but his gallant and wistful friend. One of her arms is flung toward him on the pillow, the smooth thin girlish hand curved inward. He could if he liked, and without waking her, make a circle of his thumb and middle finger and wrap it like a bracelet around her wrist.

H
E AND
S
HEILA
had been married in June of 1975.

A hot day. Sheila had worn a backless sundress made of pink cotton and a pair of soiled, cottony Roman sandals that laced halfway up her legs and left diamond-shaped welts on her hard young calves. They’d been living together for close to a year in a third-floor apartment on Lilac Avenue, locked into what Tom always
thought of as a rude, talky conviviality, not a love affair at all. Theirs was an old cheap apartment block with ill-fitting windows, and all winter they’d quarreled about an army blanket Tom had nailed across the bedroom window. It kept out the worst of the drafts, yes, but living in the perpetual brownish dark had gotten Sheila down. It got so she hated going into that bedroom. Tom told her it was not uncommon in places like Duck River for people to cover their windows in winter with blankets or with sheets of aluminum foil or plastic film. This isn’t Duck River, Sheila said, this isn’t the back of beyond, and she didn’t want to live that way, like a mole in an underground burrow.

The snow lasted right into May, a record. On Mother’s Day there was a storm, real drifts piled like meringues around the trees and shrubs. A week later they found themselves in the midst of a heat wave.

The sudden softening of the air, the humid, spongy nights, the bursting greenness along the city thoroughfares convinced them that they loved each other after all, that they would love each other forever. Tom, one morning, took down the blanket. He made a ritual of it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to reveal…
The small square bedroom became, instantly, a golden cube, and the bed a design of furrowed light. Sheila, twenty-three years old, spread naked on the sheets, naked and also watchful, seemed to him to be aglow with vitality, her shoulders, her full hips so cheerful and shameless. There was something birdlike and beseeching about the ginger tuft that sprang from her pubis. “Why don’t we get married,” he said in a roughened voice, moving toward her, and three days later they were standing in line at the Law Courts, perspiring, waiting their turn, hanging on quietly to each other’s hand.

Clair had worn black. A black sweater, a black corduroy skirt reaching to her ankles, flat black shoes. A single earring of blackened silver, heavy. It was the middle of a rainy April. He’d known her for two weeks. Her face had a stillness about it that he loved. He could talk and talk and her eyes never changed. He felt he
could pour himself into her with a kind of retro-exploitative hunger. This concentrated calm was what he required, what he’d been looking for, that’s what he told himself. When he put his arms around her he felt her shudder – a shudder that traveled the length of her body, and his too – and also the simultaneous force and blessing of her silence.

He went to Toronto to audition for a job and talked her into going with him. They stayed a week in a room at the Royal York Hotel, and in the middle of that week they walked down the street and got married. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The rounded soot-colored Toronto clouds pressed down on them. This was his second city-hall special (that should have been a warning). Afterward he phoned the news to his mother, who shrieked out her good wishes, frightening Clair with her long-distance exuberance. (“All the best, honey.”) He persuaded Clair to telephone her parents in Winnipeg, whom he had not yet met. “Who?” Foxy Howe had shouted over the phone. “Tom who?” “You’ve known him how long? Two weeks?” “Well, you’re twenty-eight years old, what can we say?”

Tom, hovering by the telephone, had been taken aback. Clair had told him she was twenty-five. He worried about the birth date on the marriage papers. He wondered, in fact, if they were legally married. Clair, hanging up abruptly, began to cry. She wept hysterically for over an hour, beating his chest, and then took a sleeping pill, several of them, in fact, and slept for twelve hours. When she woke up her eyes seemed to Tom to be fixed dully in her face like a pair of glazed pebbles. She looked older.

He and Suzanne were married on a bitterly cold day in January. He had met her three months earlier at the Chandlers’ Halloween party (she dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, he as a cowboy), and a week later he moved in with her. They had lain lightly on her narrow bed; the lightness bore down on him, and also the obliquely delivered knowledge that this love of theirs held only a minor cargo.

Suzanne’s parents – meek, puzzled country people with pink
plumped skin – drove into Winnipeg for the wedding, which was held in a private room at the Northstar Hotel. (It was Tom who paid for the rental of the room and for the supper that followed.) Tom’s mother was there, too, having traveled down from Duck River on a Grey Goose bus. A Lutheran clergyman presided, and a dozen friends (the Chandlers, Jeff and Jenny Waring, and so on) gathered to witness and celebrate the event. Tom had been proud to produce these solidly married friends. He was, in those days, enchanted by their marriages, their temporary apartments and cheerful makeshift arrangements. Suzanne carried pink roses against her white wool dress. She whispered her wedding vows while looking up into Tom’s face. Shyly, it seemd to him. Flirtatiously. The chandeliers were blinding and so was the white cloth on the buffet table. He remembers that the smell of salmon salad was strong in the room. Salmon and pink roses. And Suzanne’s favorite perfume, Ma Griffe. For a minute he had felt ill. That was all he needed, to be sick on the swirled red carpet. What was the matter with him? The charged air? Or had it been nervousness?
To have and to hold from this day forward.
That waterfall of words drifting past his ears.