The Republic of Love (4 page)

Unworthy this.

Well, Tom decides early Sunday morning, he’ll take them tulips. It’s spring, he says, looking around. In fact, it really is a few degrees warmer today. A sweet haze hangs over the streets, and the hedges in front of his building are starting to go pea green. The caragana, they’re always first. All this seems to have happened overnight.

The Safeway on the corner opens at noon on Sunday, and he’ll be able to nip over there and pick up a dozen or so tulips for under ten bucks. He always buys flowers at Safeway now. (The
florists downtown, they rob you blind, he’s stopped going there altogether.) Even the flowers he sent Suzanne and Gregor the day they were married came out of a plastic pail at Safeway’s checkout. El Cheapo, Suzanne would have said if she’d known where they’d come from, and probably she did know. He’d wrapped them loosely in paper and dropped them off early in the morning with a brief note saying: “All the best.”

You sent your ex-wife flowers! he said to himself in the mirror the morning after the wedding. I don’t believe it. He was shaving, paying particular attention to the tricky bit in the middle of the chin. The soap lather smelled soothing, like cantaloupe. “Is that appropriate behavior?” he said out loud. “Hey, you’d better get yourself together, you weirdo, you dumb ox, you creep.”

F
ROM MIDNIGHT
to 4:00 a.m. Uncle Tom Avery brightens the night. Middle-class insomniacs in this city hang in with Uncle Tom, tuning in every night, and a surprising number of them call in requests. He knows what they’re after. They want their edges knocked off, they want to get some sleep so they can get up in the morning and get on with their dangerous daylight hours. They’re into the kind of music you pour straight from the bone marrow. Nostalgia’s all the hell they care about, all they’re up to. And a dose of Uncle Tom’s chitchat in between, keeping it intimate, throwing in the odd chunk of fortune-cookie mysticism. Hey, you out there. Just you and me and the night, eh? Cutting the glaze of memory with an earful of Mel Tormé, folks. Mel Tormé, are you nuts, wha’d’ya take me for? Well, just a quick snort, guys and gals, a fast fix. The Velvet Fog, they used to call him. Cobweb throat. Very, very heavy back then. Still is. You mean to tell me this guy’s still walking around living and breathing? Jesus Christ. Hey, hey, we’re on the air. Have we got another caller there? Drunk, belligerent. Swiss-army mouth. Not him again. Insists the Velvet Fog is actually the one and only Vaughn Monroe, yeah, “Dance Ballerina Dance” and all that great stuff. You got any Vaughn Monroe? Hey, you’re too young, I betcha. You gotta go back to the real mellow years, late fifties, hell, early fifties, after
that everything went down the toilet, you know? Get this guy off the air, quick. The Beatles did it, did us in, they changed everything and not for the best, believe you me. They killed music, killed it dead –

Once Suzanne called in. This was when they were still married but toward the end. She didn’t say who she was, but of course he knew right away. Sinatra, she said. “The Lady Is a Tramp,” that one.

His scalp went tight. He felt crowded, breathless, but he managed to hold up his finger, giving Ted Woloschuk the signal to put the music on quick, and then he let Old Bag Eyes take over.

Listening to the wet ribbony phrases slipping out on top of that absolutely solid orchestration, he marveled at the distance between them, between him and Suzanne. She’d be sitting up late, two miles away across town, the other side of the river, their place on Assiniboine Avenue, probably in her shorty nightgown, sitting on the bed with a cup of tea balanced on the sheet, orange spice, filled to the brim, about to tip over or threatening to – she wouldn’t let it, though, she was too careful for messy stuff like that to happen. She had the fat plushy unmuscled love of a stuffed animal. In their four years they’d never once got close to an act of sympathy more worthy, more humanly binding, than the discussion they’d had about that bed, how she never seemed to get away from it, sitting upright on the sheets painting her toenails with Ice Glow or sprawled on her stomach reading magazines or sleeping late, then bringing plates of toast back to the warm creased bedding, burrowing down. The bed made her go lazy, she said, she didn’t know why. The two of them exhausted themselves on that bed, giving it too much of their energy, lying there in the morning until the sun was high and everything seemed suddenly too much trouble, even talking. Well, that was the problem right there.

It got to the point where he was on edge all the time. He was like a coconut tree ready to be shaken. Ask me, he wanted to say to her when he got home that night. Ask me what I’m thinking, what I want, what I’m made of, why I’ve gone so sick and slack. Invade me, suck me dry. But don’t call up the station where I
work, where I earn my living, for the first time in four years and say you want to hear Frank Sinatra. Ask me something, for God’s sake. Ask me anything.

I
N
T
OM
A
VERY’S
refrigerator are a carton of orange juice, six bottles of beer resting on their sides, and one cracked egg stuck by a skin of burst yolk to the plastic egg tray. In a cupboard he’s got a box of raisin bran but no milk to pour over it. He’s got a pound of coffee in a sack but no coffee pot. He’s got some glasses on a shelf, but he’s become the kind of man who drinks juice straight from the container and cereal out of his hand. That’s breakfast. Breakfast can be in the middle of the night or the middle of the afternoon, it all depends. Lunch and dinner he eats out, burgers, steaks. All these habits are relatively new. He hasn’t even admitted to them yet. In fact, he’s planning to get himself organized soon and cultivate a better set of habits. All he needs is a theory to set things in motion. He’s going to start working on that.

T
OM WORKS AT
the radio station down on Pembina Highway every night except Fridays and Saturdays, just him and Ted Woloschuk, the technician, holding down the fort. On Friday night Lenny Dexter takes over the show. (His real name is Offenshaur, but Big Bruce, CHOL’s president, says a name like Offenshaur wouldn’t ripple right on the air waves.) Friday night is a western version of Tom’s “Niteline,” mostly blather about Hank Williams, what a great and innovative and creative and terrific genius Hank Williams really was and what a lousy deal the guy got in his short career. Friday nights get a pretty good audience, better than on week-nights, but Tom’s just as glad he doesn’t have to do it. Country music makes him feel ashamed of himself for some reason, the way it drags on the primal tear ducts. And then on Saturday night “Niteline” gives way to sports – hockey, football; scores and recaps all night long, with a little pop in between.

That leaves Tom Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; midnight to 4:00 a.m. Twenty hours a week, but he’s paid for forty, and pretty well paid, too. He gets fan mail as well
as call-ins. This week, for his fortieth birthday, he received over a hundred and sixty cards, mostly from strangers. A lot of people in this town know who Tom Avery is, and in a sense he’s a sort of local celebrity, having been profiled three times in the papers. “What do you personally get out of this, Mr. Avery?” he’s been asked.

It’s a living, he tosses off. Really? Yeah, really. He’s a night person. Hey, he feels good when he’s communicating. He feels in touch with, well, with a certain segment of the population, the night segment. Not just nutsy insomniacs, hell no. All kinds of people come awake at night. The highly intelligent, the cranks, the rednecks, the lovers. Eccentrics. The unemployed. People who feel life’s kicked them in the teeth. And the kickers – they’re out there, too. The lazy. The hip. The drinkers. People who worry. People who don’t. Old people who don’t need their sleep anymore, that’s a medical fact. The actively ill. The passively violent. The trapped, the unlucky, the unclaimed, the lonely. They’re all graduates of Mea Culpa College. Really, they’re just plain people out there, and there’re a helluva lot of them. And they’re real folks, Tom Avery says, every last one of us.

“L
ET ME THROW YOU THIS ANALOGY
,” P
ETER
K
NIGHTLY WAS ALWAYS
saying to Fay in a voice that went roomy and reasonable and deep in its reaches. Or “Let me try this on you,” or “Let me emphasize this point.”

This was his pedagogical tone, which he seemed unable to suppress. At the folklore center where he and Fay work, his official title is Co-ordinator of Education, and he’s a man who’s perceived generally as being good at his job, erudite but easy, a nonsmoker with a pipe lover’s insouciant, reasonable air of capability, a man who likes going at questions sideways – slyly, it seems to Fay, who can’t get over the way Peter’s boyhood is always pushing up to the surface of his lips and eyes and urging him toward detachment. He grew up in postwar England, on the outskirts of Sheffield, the son of schoolteachers, and Fay supposes that someone or other in that suburban English house was always sitting him down and saying with softly focused sincerity, “Why don’t we re-examine this issue, why don’t we approach this problem from a fresh angle?”

“We should at least,” he said to Fay on a Friday night in the middle of April – he hadn’t yet moved out – “try to put our finger on what went wrong.”

“Finger?” said Fay. The word brought a breath of disgust, and so did Peter’s manner, the way it worryingly seemed to concede to her certain reserves of glacial ice and feigned boredom. Her voice rose. “Our finger!”

“Christ, what now?”

“When I think, of fingers,” she said after a minute, modulating carefully, “I think of the finger of blame.” She set down her pencil, flat on the coffee table, put her hand on it so it wouldn’t roll off, and imagined how she would replay this conversation in her head during the months ahead, shaming herself with her deliberate insensitivity. “I see a large green finger coming down from heaven. Poking out of the clouds. Bits of lightning coming off it.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. I merely suggested that we try to sort out our feelings.”

“Feelings?”

“You don’t like that word, either. Fingers. Feelings.”

“I just think people should spend more time feeling their feelings and less time talking about them.”

“You sound like your father, saying that. Exactly. His intonation, and his substance, too.”

That made her smile. Somewhat to her surprise he smiled back, and she was glad to see him turn genial. “My father, yes,” she said to prolong the moment.

“It’s uncanny,” he observed, and reached across to pick up the pencil. “This familial distrust of feeling. The idea that feeling is junk. The soul’s junk.”

She could think of nothing to say. In an hour they were expected downtown at a restaurant called Act Two, dinner with old friends, Mac and Iris Jaffe, who, she supposed, would have to be told, and soon, that she and Peter were about to separate. Separate. The icy release of that word. About to go their separate ways. She felt suddenly lazy and unaccountably happy, as though she were hovering at the center of contentment, halfway between weight
and weightlessness. Peter went on. “We’re going to see each other every day. We should at least work out a strategy as to how we’re going to handle it.”

“Oh, Peter.” She was careful to keep her gaze mild. “You know perfectly well what we’ll do. We’ll smile and nod and be polite and decent. We don’t have to discuss how we’re going to behave at work. Why don’t we just concentrate on getting through this list?”

There was a pause, then, “Where were we?” from Peter.

She consulted the pad of paper on her lap. “CDs, Pachelbel.”

“Christ.”

“What now?” She said this as nicely as she could.

“This is demeaning. It’s bruising – like a bloody divorce. Fritzi and I went through the same quaint theater piece. Only it wasn’t compact discs. It was 45s.”

“Oh.” An arrow of sadness passed quickly through her. Her head ached. Even her eyelashes ached. “The air in here,” she said, shaking her head. “Let’s open a window.”

He ignored her. “Exactly like a divorce,” he said.

Then she felt herself revive. “And did you and Fritzi put your ‘finger’ on what went wrong?”

“You won’t let it go, will you?”

She stared at him over the clutter and detected in his face a betraying trace of satisfaction. “I guess I’m tired. And hungry. And you’re right, this is demeaning, splitting up objects, as if we really cared. Do we care? Why don’t we call it quits for now? Before we start getting mean and shrewd.”

“I’m pretty tired too, but in half an hour we could have all this sorted out….”

“Okay, okay, okay.” She liked his rudeness. It told her that she hadn’t knocked his courage out. He could still come at her.

“Jesus, you’re touchy,” he accused her.

“I know.”

F
AY’S FATHER
, who owns a chain of dry-cleaning stores (“McLeod – Soft Garments in 24 hours”), does not go at things sideways. He’s famous, at least within his immediate family, for his frontal attacks.
“I’d be interested to hear,” he said to Fay, “why exactly he’s still there. I mean, here you are, you’ve declared an end to things, a separation, and he’s still living with you. You’re still in the same apartment. You’re still – ” He stopped himself.

“Still in the same bed,” Fay supplied. “Well, it’s true. What can I say?”

She and her father frequently meet for breakfast on Saturday mornings. At one time Fay saw these breakfasts as a chance to pull herself together, and she believed that her father, with his measured questioning and patient, listening face, would help her put her thoughts, and her routines, in order. She longs to tell him everything, but neither of them could bear it. They favor a place on Osborne Street, Mr. Donut’s, where they generally pass up the donuts and order a pair of apple-bran muffins and large coffees.

“Well,” she said to her father, “I have to admit it’s taking longer than we thought it was going to.”

“Why is that?” her father asked. Frontal, yes, but his voice traveled quietly.