The Republic of Love (38 page)

Two days later Tom ran into him in the Belgian Bakery on Corydon Avenue, buying a loaf of Hovis bread. “Hullo again,” Peter Knightly neighed, and a strained conversation followed, an absurd, hearty discussion about bran muffins, whether they should or should not contain raisins.

A day or two after that Tom was driving down Memorial Avenue and stopped suddenly at a crosswalk. At least twelve cars had jammed on their brakes for a single pedestrian, a long-legged guy in a flapping overcoat. Not Peter Knightly again! Christ! Don’t let him see me, Tom prayed to the windshield, and at that moment
Peter Knightly looked up, recognized him, smiled (wanly), and offered a limp salute.

And now – a Saturday morning – again!

There was Tom, in the middle of his weekly run, bumping along eastward across Assiniboine Park, a scarf wrapped loosely over his mouth, and keeping a sharp lookout for the treacherous black ice that forms on the path this time of year. One false step and he’d be down. A lot of joggers quit toward the middle of October because of this ice, taking up indoor pursuits instead, stationary bicycles or rowing machines. The ranks were definitely thinning, the wimps and the stalwarts parting company. Uh-huh! But who was this sprinting toward him this bright morning in the red-and-white Gore-Tex job? God, no. Picking up his feet like a pro. Rhythmic and easy. A natural. Coming closer and closer. Coming into focus.

“Morning, Tom,” Peter Knightly said as he brushed lightly by.

“Morning,” Tom breathed back. It came out a whisper. Two minutes later, turning onto Wellington Crescent, his brain awash with obscene images, he slipped and fell.

“A
BAD SPRAIN
,” Dave Neuhaus said. “You want to apply an ice pack periodically to fight the swelling, use an elastic bandage for the first week at least, and keep that ankle elevated every chance you get.”

Ah, but this is heaven, Tom thinks. A Sunday afternoon that stretches endlessly forward and backward.

Dull winter light plays on the window. Outside the snow is drifting down in soft flakes, the first snow of the year, and inside the warm apartment he and Fay are sitting side by side on her corduroy couch, his foot resting comfortably on a pair of pillows that Fay has positioned for him on the coffee table. He feels peaceful. He feels married. Intimacy – Patsy MacArthur’s I-word. So this is intimacy. Good old intimacy.

They’ve been drinking coffee and listening to the radio, a
regular Sunday-afternoon music show with a New Age theme, and Tom is attempting to explain to Fay what a vibraphone is. “You know what a marimba is?” he asks her.

“Yes.”

“Well, a vibraphone is a lot like a marimba, only it resonates differently. The valves are motorized, and that’s what gives it its particular buzzy sound.”

“But how big is it? What does it look like?” Her face is decorated by a blaze of late sun that cuts through the window.

He picks up a pencil and draws in the margin of a magazine. She watches closely.

“So that’s a vibraphone?” She pronounces the word slowly, and he can tell she’s committing it to memory. “Vi-bra-phone.”

They live inside different vocabularies, the two of them. This is something he thinks about quite a lot. It’s true their bodies and their temperaments rhyme; witness this Sunday-afternoon peace, this quiet room, music, snow falling outside, warmth within. But the words that come out of their mouths are wildly dissimilar.

Just last week, in casual conversation, he’d heard Fay pronounce the word “encomium.” She was saying something about Hannah Webb, the director of the folklore center, who was soon to receive an honorary degree. Encomium. It dropped off her tongue, fell off like any other word, like “mosquito” or “wallpaper” or “hangnail,” purposeful syllables socketed into an ordinary sentence. Encomium. It sounded vaguely familiar, but what exactly did it mean? He should have asked her. The other day he overheard her talking on the phone to Beverly Miles. “It’s really the elementary rubric that’s so often misunderstood,” she said. Rubric. Would Peter Knightly be able to define the word “rubric”? Without a doubt.

A week ago she gave a Friday-afternoon colloquium on mermaid lore to her colleagues at the center. Colloquium. Uh-huh.

Tom had suggested – keeping it casual, keeping it very, very laid back – that he might come and hear her speak. “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

She’d put her arms around him. “You’d be bored to death,”
she’d said, or something to that effect. She’d pressed a kiss against his neck.

Warning him, he supposed, that he ran the risk of finding himself adrift in an arcane vocabulary. Hers. Which was different from his. Separate planets.

He isn’t sure how he should respond to these differences. Whether or not they pose a threat. Whether he should rejoice or worry.

D
UCK RIVER
, where Tom grew up, is a pulp-mill town, two hundred and fifty miles straight north, a five-hour drive. The air over Duck River smells bitterly of sulphur. A chain of lakes surrounds it, and in summer the excellent fishing brings tourists from as far away as Duluth and Minneapolis, but in winter it lies buried in snow, and the highway is frequently shut down. Tom has grown to hate that long monotonous drive.

As a result he makes the trip only three or four times a year, and this means that he has, to a great extent, separated himself from the town and from the life his mother leads. He talks to her almost every week on the telephone, her nickel or else his, but, in fact, he has only a minimal notion of her day-to-day life, and he imagines that she has just as little understanding of his.

Fay’s relationship with her family is entirely different. Her parents, her sister, Bibbi; her brother, Clyde, and his family, Sonya and their two small boys – she talks to one or the other of them almost every day on the telephone and sees them at least once a week. Tom is astonished and also humbled by all this family involvement. “It’s like living in a saga,” he told her one day. “More like a soap opera,” she said.

Recently Matthew and Gordon have been down with prolonged stomach flu, and this has meant extra visits, extra treats wrapped and delivered.

On Wednesday nights Fay meets Bibbi in a restaurant for dinner. This arrangement, Tom is given to understand, is inviolable. “It’s the only chance I really get to see her,” Fay explains.

Then there are her regular Saturday-morning breakfasts with
her father at Mister Donut’s. Last Saturday, though, and the one before, she hadn’t gone. Both times her father had called at the last minute to say he was unable to come. He hadn’t explained why – just that he would be unable to meet her as usual.

T
OM CAN’T UNDERSTAND
why Fay’s suddenly so worried about her parents.

Of course, he doesn’t yet know them very well. On the few occasions when they’ve all been together, he’s felt awkward, wondering if they were still looking him over, turning over in their minds what they know about him, what exactly he represented, and whether he would bring danger into their daughter’s life, interfere with her happiness. Fay’s mother turns her full attention to Tom and inquires brightly, winningly, about the business of broadcasting, what are its tensions, its rewards, what is his audience profile like, how does he handle obstreperous callers, does he plan to stay in broadcasting permanently? Richard McLeod, on the other hand, is quieter, more watchful, and Tom finds himself wondering whether Peter Knightly had been subjected to the same studious paternal appraisal.

Fay claims that she had never seen her father cry before the night of the party.

“A few tears in his eyes,” Tom reminds her. “That’s not really crying.”

“I saw him,” Fay maintains. “I was standing right there. He was crying. He was in some kind of pain.”

“You said yourself it was probably just the shock.”

“I said that then. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Or overwhelmed by the emotional – ”

“I don’t think so.”

“I thought it was supposed to be okay now for men to express their – ”

“You don’t know my father.”

“No.”

“Maybe I don’t, either.”

“And afterward, when he came downstairs, he was fine, wasn’t he?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He made that terrific speech. He toasted all his friends. He drank some champagne. He was smiling, laughing even. Dancing. He cut the cake, he ate a big chunk of it. Remember the pictures we took? He was fine.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Fay says, shaking her head, “but I just don’t.”

E
VERY TIME
Tom comes into the kitchen he sees the list that Fay has stuck on the refrigerator door: a prewedding list of details to arrange, events to attend, items to buy. There’s the phone number of the woman who is looking after the wedding cake. Under that is the word “flowers” (but that item has now been checked off). A lingerie shower next Thursday (women only) at Iris Jaffe’s. A buffet supper next week at Jeff and Jenny Waring’s (twice postponed, once because Gary Waring was down with stomach flu and once because Jeff was called out of town). Photographer (also checked off).

At the bottom of the list is the word “DRESS.”

Fay’s been spending all her lunch hours dashing from store to store in search of a dress. Twice she’s brought home dresses, beautiful dresses, it seemed to Tom, and both times she’s returned them. One had a yellowish cast, she said, when held up to natural light, and the other had “pompous” sleeves.

“Why don’t you try on my wedding dress?” Peggy McLeod suggested.

“It wouldn’t begin to fit,” said Fay, who is five inches taller than her mother.

But it
had
fit, almost perfectly, though the hem, instead of falling to the floor, struck Fay at midcalf. It was more ivory colored than white, and simply made for a dress of its period, a smooth silk bodice with a skirt that draped rather than billowed. The material, after so many years, was fragile, and the alterations to
the sleeves (a row of gathers removed to yield an extra half-inch) had been done with great care.

Now there’s an exuberant checkmark after the word “DRESS.”

In the last few days Tom’s been feeling uneasy for some reason, but whenever he pauses and looks at Fay’s list, he’s reassured. Each check mark moves him closer to his wedding day and reminds him that his life has turned lucky.

H
ALLOWEEN NIGHT
. And down at CHOL, Tom’s been celebrating.

Between midnight and 1:00 a.m. he played his favorite spook tunes. Creep and plunge. Squeak and groan. Witchy stuff full of wind and wolf cries.

Between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. he interviewed seventy-year-old Cecily Holmfield, who is a self-proclaimed local witch, and between 2:00 and 3:00 he took a dozen calls on the subject of Halloween vandalism. Kids have to act out
once
a year, the first caller said; so what if a few porch lights get smashed, big deal. Yeah, someone else said, but what about those razor blades stuck in apples or popcorn balls? Listen, a final caller said, it so happens that putting on a funny costume and being greedy is one of the few authentic folk traditions we bequeath our children, so let’s not get all holy about Halloween, let’s enjoy it for the crazy mixed blessing it is.

Hey, that’s enough Halloween. It’s 3:00 a.m., it’s reggae time. Let’s go with it. How ’bout it, Yellowman. Boot it, Black Uhuru. Give us some shaky snakey ups and doodles, keep it dark and curvy – a little wailing and thrashing and hitting the high notes.

He loves it.

Then wrapping up, closing time, turning the studio over to the graveyard gang, saying good night to Ted Woloschuk. Hey, Ted, have a great weekend. Have a good one yourself.

Home to Fay. Driving down Pembina Highway, then the welter of dark empty side streets. Snow flurries spinning in the headlights. Should he run that red light at Lilac and Corydon? It’s four in the morning, the town’s dead, of course he’s going to run that red light.

Then parking the car in the lot, unlocking the shadowy back
door and climbing the stairs slowly, remembering to go easy on his bad ankle, then groping for his key and letting himself in.

Usually Fay leaves the hall light burning, but not tonight. He stops in the bathroom, brushes his teeth, drops his clothes, splashes water on his face, then tiptoes into the bedroom, feeling his way in the darkness, rounding the end of the bed, pulling back the blanket edge. Pale street light leaks around the edges of the window, so that all the tones and tints in the room become grayed velvet. He swears he can smell her sweetness mingled with the smooth sheets. He thinks of a rose, its centered calyx, cup-shaped. Fay. He reaches out to her.

His arm travels through a furrow of sheeting and straight into a void. The bed is flat, empty. Fay?

“Fay?” he says out loud, and reaches over to switch on the lamp.

F
AY HAD LEFT
T
OM A NOTE.
S
HE’D WRITTEN IT QUICKLY ON THE BACK
of an envelope and attached it with a little mermaid magnet to the refrigerator door.

But the tiny rubberized magnet must have been too weak to hold the envelope in place (she should have known better), and sometime during the night the note had fallen to the floor. Tom, coming home, had picked it up – a return envelope, rather creased, from the Cancer Society – but he’d neglected to turn it over and read the message.

When Fay phoned him at eight o’clock on Friday morning to
tell him the news, he reacted wildly. Where had she been? he shouted into the telephone. Why hadn’t she left a message? He was in a rage.

She found herself staring at the receiver, those tiny weak perforations. She’d never heard him in a fit of fury. She had not even imagined it. Tom Avery was a gentle, patient, and quiet-voiced man. Whenever her thoughts strayed to his three bad marriages she pictured them disintegrating softly, pulling apart like fibers of wool. She had not entertained the possibility of arguments or accusations. Or fury.