The Republic of Love (6 page)

It’s always the same when Fay sees her younger brother: she has to adjust to that jolting stutter of his, remembering to shift the ordinary rhythms of conversation and reminding herself that though he speaks haltingly, he takes in information at the normal human speed. He is a sociable man who loves speculation of all kinds, courts it in fact, and he has always been exceptionally patient with Fay’s involutions.

Tonight, though, it took him a full minute to respond to her question about the contemporary romantic rubric, then another minute to gather the syllables on his tongue – “To believe anything can happen to us.” (B’s are especially hard for him, also
p’s.)
His
consonants flop and spit, and then teeter maddeningly – almost, but not quite, locked to the roof of his mouth.

Fay sometimes tries to imagine the interior of her brother’s head, and what she sees is pink crosshatching and vacuum tubes and erratically flashing lights. Stuttering, she knows, is considered a crippling affliction, yet Clyde is far from crippled. That stutter of his has saved him from critical severity, which is the wound she assigns herself. She’s wondered (flinching at her own indecent curiosity) how blocked are his cries of rapture or his expressions of love, or whether he and Sonya have worked out some sort of declarative gesture that serves in place of words. His happiness seems double-distilled: at thirty-three he has achieved a kind of plant life down there in his basement, but he comes up the tiled stairs to full-blown domesticity. An urban fastness: house, garden, garage, everything wired tight and warm. Fay knows he worries about her, his big sister, that she’s missing out on something essential which he lacks the arrogance to define.

To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us, he said, and later Fay considered how, in his metonymic way, he had summed it up exactly right, although she notices he has set himself carefully outside its gravitational force, and also ignores or rejects the retractable malice romance holds out. Romance, Fay knows, grabs on to people like a prize deformity; it keeps them on edge, taunts them, then slitheringly changes shape and withdraws. Romance – that holy thing. A cycle of rupture and reconciliation. Recently she has begun to understand it for the teasing malady it is.

F
AY AND
P
ETER
worked hard all evening. She folded and packed his shirts and sweaters, and then his bunched-up socks and underwear. One summer when she was a student, she worked at a suburban shopping center in a place called Jean Junction, and there she was taught the art of precision folding. It still, after all this time, gave her pleasure to transform a jumble of clothes into neat rectangular packets, as flat, trim, and uniform as fast-food hamburger patties.

While she busied herself folding and stacking, Peter wrapped coffee mugs and plates in newspaper and lowered them into cardboard cartons. The kitchen radio was tuned to a soft-rock station, old-fashioned rock, and when the Beatles came on with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the two of them sang along as if they were any happy couple preparing to move to a new location.

Later they went for a walk in the neighborhood. The night had turned cold, with a strong steady breeze that kept at them, and a moon that stared down hard and glassy. They walked southward first, down a street quaintly named Gertrude, and then up a parallel street called Jessie. Many of the streets in this part of the city were similarly named: Minnie, Agnes, Flora, Bella, and Lizzie, immortalizing, Fay has always supposed, the patient or demanding wives of early-twentieth-century developers, women who would feel proud to walk down streets that bore their names, or else ashamed and self-conscious, but in any case assured of their thread of connection to a place where they had, however accidentally, found themselves.

Fay is able to see more beauty in these small front yards than she used to, and this has made her feel hopeful about the future. Each yard is fenced with varied, incongruous materials, so that wire netting meets with wooden pickets, and woven metal strips with peeled poles. One house, on the corner of Adelaide and Edna, is surrounded with an odd, low mesh of plastic tubes in astringent shades of orange and yellow, an effect that is oddly cheering. The purpose of these fences must be territorial, Fay thinks, since they are far too flimsy to keep dogs in or out, and offer no protection at all to children, who can easily step over them. Two miles away on Ash Avenue, where she grew up, the front yards flow uninterruptedly in broad even waves down toward the rolled curbs, not even a sidewalk breaking the illusion of easeful neighborly trust, while here on Jessie, street sovereignty remains on guard, and sidewalks run down both sides, the cement broken by a combination of harsh winters and sprawling tree roots. Tonight, walking slowly along one of these old buckled sidewalks and turning
a corner, Peter and Fay came across the chalked markings of a hopscotch game.

In the dim street light, the pattern was barely discernable. Fay supposed that the children who had made these scratchings must now be asleep in their beds.

The image of her own childhood dissolved and reformed in the remembrance of such learned street inscriptions, especially the game of hopscotch, with its magic numbered squares and its wide empty arc of heaven. Every winter the rules were forgotten, and in the spring they were relearned. As the summer wore on, the squares grew larger, the lines straighter, and the rules more stringent or fanciful. The smoothest piece of pavement would be sought out and its location memorized, and it would be remembered one day that real chalk was not needed, since a common piece of stone dug out of a garden might do almost as well. Most of Fay’s notions of fairness and improvisation, she believes, were learned in the quiet streets of this city on evenings such as this, learned and relearned, rehearsed and perfected, but then, oddly, forgotten.

She can’t remember at this moment exactly how the game of hopscotch progresses, what is required of a player in order to win or lose or get to heaven. The intricacies of play and penalty have eroded, forming part of a larger ebbing of memory, and that worries her. The weave of her life is growing thinner, plainer, and she sees she may be in danger of losing what she has unconsciously assembled.

At the same time, new possibilities present themselves. A month ago she might have stopped under the cone of street light and pronounced the word “hopscotch” aloud, asking Peter if he had ever played this game on the streets of Sheffield, and pressing on him – never mind his sigh of exasperation – her set of rules, her sense of the game, going on and on and demanding a corresponding account from him.

But not tonight. Tonight she says nothing, and inside her head she offers up congratulations. A certain amount of silence might be useful at this point. She hopes it will be the kind of silence that
mends its own tissues, and that maybe she’s learning something out of all this difficulty.

I
T WAS LATE
on a dark night, Thursday. Peter’s mouth came down on hers awkwardly, almost missing, like a kiss in a silent movie, and she heard an eruption in his throat that might have been laughter or else surprise at his own clumsiness.

We’ve lost our ear for love, Fay thought sadly, our touch. But the next minute Peter was moving lightly above her, striking shocks off her slicked body. Her skin was only half dry. A damp bath towel lay under them.

After three years the absolute length of his thigh bones still came as a shock, and also those long covering stretches of surprisingly tender skin.

She shivered, reading the lower edge of his rib cage with her fingers, willing herself to be engulfed, feeling a passionate, frantic sense of loss, and wondering, a minute later, how it was possible to be so simultaneously bored and excited. Was this a trance she was entering or a period of illness? What are we doing? she imagined her own voice saying.

L
AST WEEK WHEN
T
OM WENT FOR
S
UNDAY LUNCH AT
L
IZ AND
G
ENE
Chandler’s, Liz turned to him and said: “I believe in one thing, and that one thing is routine. I didn’t always. I used to look at my mother with her Monday wash and her Tuesday ironing and think, Oh my God, spare me. My parents sat down to lunch every day at 12:15. They even had the same things on certain days, like lamb on Wednesday, beef-and-vegetable stew on Thursday, and so on. Imagine! I used to look at their narrow throttled lives and say, hey, is this ever pathetic. A twentieth-century form of slavery, and they don’t even realize it. But do you know what? My mother and dad are in their eighties and they’re in perfect health. Perfect. They live in their own house, and my father does all the gardening and repairs and my mother still does all her own housework. They’re never sick. They hardly ever complain. They’re happy. They’re happy because of their routines. They watch the news at ten. They turn out the light at eleven and go straight to sleep, presto. It’s taken me years to get a perspective on this thing, why
we need certain fixed patterns in our lives. And I’ve figured it out. Routine is liberating, It makes you feel in control. A paradox, isn’t it? You think your routines are controlling you, but in fact you’re using the routine to give you power. Like, for example, we have waffles every Sunday, Gene and I, and that might sound boring to certain people, but it soothes me. I need it, dumb as it sounds. And Tom, listen, I know the last thing you need is advice, but has it occurred to you that you need, maybe, an element of routine in your life?”

Tom protests. He
does
have routines. Besides his Saturday-morning jogs he has his Friday-night meetings at the Fort Rouge Community Center, the Newly Single Club.

“Yeah, well,” says Liz, who more and more assumes the right to scold and who now, sitting across the table from Tom, dramatically rolls her eyes. “But where is that getting you exactly? I mean, you’re not newly single anymore, Tom, are you?” She shifts her weight. “You’ve been going to those meetings for two years now. Could it be you’re just a bit of a newly single junkie, if you don’t mind my saying so? Just where is it getting you?”

He wonders himself. The program at the Community Center rotates every six months or so, and by now he’s heard all the speakers. Some of them he’s heard several times. The one he’s heard the most often is a woman called Jennifer Keeley Harvath from the psych department at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Harvath has a set piece she does on Divorce Guilt. Her long Mexican earrings shake with fervor when she outlines on the blackboard the four separate stages of guilt, which are: realization, responsibility, reconciliation, and realignment. Her whole body shakes, trembling inside the strong folds of her trim professorial clothes – short skirts, long jackets, blouses that seem to spill and froth and confuse. “If you deny your guilt now,” she tells the pale faces before her – faces that make Tom think of cauliflowers, so outspread and porous are they – “then you’ll pay later.”

Tom once invited her out to dinner. He made reservations at a new place across the river, expensive, advertised as French, thinking that if the two of them were going to get acquainted they would
have to travel as far as possible from the beige and blue floor tiles and folding chairs of the Fort Rouge Community Center.

She had ordered roughly in American-accented French, though the waiter protested that he spoke no French at all, only English, Portuguese, and a few words of Filipino.

“About your divorce,” she asked Tom directly over the first course, which was scallops in
beurre blanc.

“Which one?” he said, already convinced the evening was lost.

“You’ve had more than one divorce?” Her head jerked forward, releasing fragrance.

“Three.” He made separate syllables of it – thuh-ree-ee – made it a gift, just handed it over.

She chewed the tender fish, chewed and chewed, using her molars in long circular thoughtful grindings. Watching her, he felt his guilt turn into a spray of brilliant colors and fan out over the dull white tablecloth.

“So,” she said, and at last laid down her knife and fork. “Three.”

He watched her crumple. He was amazed that he had been able to bring this crumpling about so easily, by uttering a single word. The collar of her suit jacket had by now collapsed, and her blouse, too, and the tender upper parts of her mouth. It was painful to see, but it also brought him a thrill of excitement. The room felt anchored with the force of declaration. Cutlery plinked, a kind of foolish incidental music. Jennifer Harvath’s long silver earrings brushed close to her plate. The part in her dark blond hair caught the light harshly.

He decided to fake a laugh. “I tell myself,” he said loudly to her, to the earrings, to the wallpaper, “that I’ve been unlucky.”

T
HERE IS SOMETHING
, Tom knows, called learned dependency, and there’s a lot of it around, more than there used to be. He hears it mentioned all the time. Its victims send out subliminal pleas for help, wringing from their family and friends advice about how to conduct their lives.

Tom’s mother, Betty Avery Barbour, in Duck River telephoned
recently and said: “Tom? Is that you? Well, what do you know! I didn’t know if I’d find you home, on a Saturday night. Sitting at home. You watching the game? Mike’s watching the game, we’re just taking a breather here, I’m about to fix us a sandwich and put some coffee on and I thought I’d give you a call, see what you were up to. But I said to Mike, knowing you, you’d be out probably, out to a show, or someplace dancing. The way you used to dance. “Rock Around the Clock,” that was your middle name, remember those days? You alone? Right now, I mean. I don’t know for the life of me why you don’t come up here for the weekend. It beats me why you want to stay in the city. On a Saturday night. That Suzanne isn’t the only fish in the lake, you know, at least I hope you know. There’s plenty more, all kinds. Nice gals just looking for a real man to settle down with, raise a family. Look at all those years I was on my own, footloose and fancy free. I was looking, let me tell you, I had my eyes peeled. But you’re not going to find someone just sitting home moping. On your own. Oh sweetie, on a Saturday night.”