The Republic of Love (7 page)

T
HIS BUSINESS OF
being a guy, it never let up. In the morning, getting out of bed, he left his pajama tops buttoned, just yanked them over his head, balled them up, rammed them under his pillow. Was that being a guy? Or did guys buy those knitted pullover pajamas? Or sleep in their underwear like his stepfather, Mike? Or in nothing at all, damp skin, sweaty genitals, and chest hair, like Burt Reynolds?

He looked hard in the bathroom mirror and said to himself: All I have is this self. Not another thing. Just this irreducible droning self.

But a guy has to eat. Hey, protein, carbohydrates! He considered lunching on a handful of cereal, but decided instead to walk down to the A & W for a Papa Burger, maybe some fries and a milkshake. Guy food. Gut food.

The girl who plunked down his plate verged on pretty. A boil-in-a-bag kind of pretty, someone who looked like she’d just grown into her bones. He would have bet money that two years ago she
was having trouble with her skin, but now she’d got it under control. Nice hair, too, clean, yellowish, long. Guys liked long hair.

Oh Christ, he was boring himself stiff.

And it was only two in the afternoon. No invitations to waffle lunches today, no phone calls either. No plans. Well, he was going to have to do something about his life. Smarten up, big fella. These loops of time had a way of widening out if you weren’t careful.

“Look,” the waitress said, waving at the window. “It’s a parade.”

Hey, that was more like it. He bolted his coffee, paid his bill (leaving a guy’s kind of tip, twenty percent), and went out into the sunshine, directly into a holiday crowd strung thinly along the roadway, breathing in immaculate air.

But what was this? The parade that bumped along Osborne Street had too much sweetness and fancy to be a military parade. Its marchers were dancing and skipping on the wide cleared pavement, and singing some high light hymn with a floating descant that rose straight up on a current of air, and scattering love behind them like a kind of rarefied mulch. They carried one banner that read “Jesus Our Lord and Master” and another that said “Hope and Glory.” A squadron of slender girls, so freshly skirted and sandaled and garlanded with paper flowers that they seemed like flowers themselves, circled as they moved along, and swirled over their heads long colored ribbons for Jesus. Close behind them walked a small brass band, a dozen men with bugles, trumpets, trombones, and drums. Such manly, non-guy men – Tom’s breath wheezed in his chest – so closely barbered, so clean and beefy and calm and beating their drums for their Lord Jesus.

It was over almost before it had begun, and Tom, stricken by a sharp, sweet craving for godly forgetfulness and unwilling to let the paraders pass out of sight, strolled along beside them for a while as they made their way over the Osborne Bridge to the Legislative grounds. He felt his feet obeying their light drifting holy contagion of music and gaiety. Behind, around and in front of Tom, were women in summer dresses, some of them holding children by the hand. Other children ran past him shouting. The
sunlight falling down around him seemed made of little grains, and the air was milder than it had been in many months, so clear and blue he wanted to blubber with the beauty of it. O spring, he thought. O longing. O love.

M
ONDAY NIGHT
down at CHOL is survey night. Listeners call in between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. to answer the question of the week. Tonight’s question is: What do you think about when you’re in the shower?

One caller says, “Well” – his voice is old, webby, androgynous – “we don’t have a shower, but if you want to know what I think about in the bathtub, I’ll tell you. I think about the condition of the world. The Chinese, the Russians. Even these Romanians. How all of a sudden the Russians are good guys, after all these years of being bad guys, wanting to drop bombs on us. Well, I think we had the wool pulled over our eyes. People don’t change overnight, you know.”

“What worries me,” a woman says, “is how a shower wastes water. This really comes from when I was a kid and lived on a farm. Up near Amiota? We had a well, but not a very reliable one, and so we were darned careful about wasting water. I think of that when I’m standing in the shower, all that water just running down the drain. I’m forty-six now, and I’ve got my own family, with all the running water in the world, but I still think every single time I’m in the shower that I shouldn’t be so wasteful, and that takes all the fun out of it.”

“I feel like a jerk in the shower,” a man says. He has a youthful voice with tenor margins to it. “I feel dumb or drunk or something. It’s the steam. I’ve got this head of naturally curly hair, but in the shower it gets all slicked down so I look like a nerd. Looks are kind of like a priority, and with me, priorities come first.”

Another caller says: “When I’m in the shower I get this compulsion to count. Like how many showers I’ve had in my life? And how many more I’m going to have, all those showers stretching out into the future, three hundred and sixty-five a year, and on and on. I try to keep my shower time down to ninety seconds.”

“I find,” a woman says, “that I have a very hard time getting out of the shower. I favor very hot water, probably too hot for most people, I must have some Japanese blood in me, and I keep thinking, Oh God, now I have to get out and be cold again. I’d like to stay in there, just prolong and prolong it and never get out.”

“I study my shower curtains,” an out-of-town caller reports. “I’ve got one of those map-of-the-world shower curtains and I would recommend it to any listener. It’s supposed to be accurate, and I’m telling you, the stuff I’ve learned. South America. Africa, too.”

“You want me to be honest?” a young male voice says. “Taking a shower makes me feel sexy. I think of all the great girls I’ve known lately. I like to take a shower with a girl. Hey, can I say this on the air? Well, it’s a great way to go. And at the same time you’re getting clean.”

“The thing about a shower,” the final caller says, “is not just getting clean. A shower takes you down memory lane. You go under the nozzle and it’s like a time machine. Taking a shower, it’s like being back in the ocean or back in your mother’s womb. Safe and full of these far-out thoughts. When I’m in the shower I feel powerful, but also like I’m a better person.”

T
OM HAS TO ADMIT
he was touched by all the birthday cards he got for his fortieth.

Most of them, to be sure, came from listeners, mailed in to the station on Pembina Highway, and quite a lot of them were anonymous, signed simply “from a grateful listener” or “from your late-night comrade in arms.” Why would anyone go to the bother, he wonders, but his wondering is colored with gratitude.
I want to thank you folks out there for all your …

And yet, here he is bundling these same cards into a green garbage bag. It’s house-cleaning time, a Tuesday morning. This is a pigsty he’s living in, and he’s determined to do something about it, to get some order into his life. Into the garbage bag with three half-rotted apples, two empty wine bottles, the crushed cornflakes
box, last week’s newspapers, a ripped T-shirt, some slivers of soap, and an unidentifiable toothbrush, and all one hundred sixty birthday cards, plus a box of homemade oatmeal cookies (uneaten – why risk it? says Big Bruce) from a listener who wrote in hot-pink ink, “To the man who lights up my life and who I love most in the world after my husband. Hang in there, Tom, forty is just the beginning.”

“A
H
, T
OM
,” said Tom’s first wife, Sheila. “How could I forget your birthday, and especially this birthday! Anyway, it all of a sudden hit me, wham, and I thought the least I could do was take you to lunch, better late than never, and I remembered you used to love coming to this place. I can remember sitting at this very table. A million years ago. You had a seafood crepe, I think. Crepes were just coming into their own, crepes, not pancakes. Why do I always remember things like that? It’s insane the stuff I store in this brain of mine. Anyway, I’m glad you were free today, I know how busy you are, but listen, you look great. I’m serious, you do not look forty. Now tell me, what’s new, what’s happening in your life. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen you. Where’ve you been hiding out?”

Almost immediately after Tom and Sheila were divorced in 1979 Sheila made two decisions, one bad, one good. The bad decision was to marry a man called Sammy Sweet, a real estate agent. The marriage lasted exactly eighteen months, and then Sammy left her, saying he had fallen desperately in love with a woman called Fritzi Knightly. Sheila went around telling people this. “He says he’s ‘desperately’ in love and ‘can’t live without her,’ and her name is Fritzi, if you can believe it. Fritzi!”

Her good decision was to leave her secretarial job and enter law school. She was in the middle of her second year when Sammy Sweet left her, and so busy studying and working on the Law Review and volunteering for the legal-aid program that the shock of his betrayal, she said, was like a bomb dropping in another country, though it cured her forever of the idea of marriage. “It’s clear I’m lousy marriage material,” she announced at the time, and since the divorce she’s lived with three other women, two lawyers,
one accountant, in a large modern house in a new subdivision. Tom is invited there now and then when they need an extra man for parties, and he’s reasonably fond of Patricia and Sandra and Dru, though somewhat guarded, never sure how thoroughly Sheila has described their old intimacies.

It was Sheila who handled Tom’s divorce from Suzanne. “A good clean divorce,” she said when it was over. “No embarrassing strings hanging off it. I hope to hell you’re grateful.”

His other friends told him his situation was ludicrous, a first wife negotiating a divorce from a third. It was the material of soap opera, but for Tom the shame of a third-marriage breakup – and he was pierced through with shame, it lingers still – seemed softened by the fact that it was dealt with from within the family, so to speak, that its ripple of failure was laid smooth by the clean hand of a former wife for whom he still feels a shy fondness.

He loves her pressed lawyer clothes, her nifty dark suits and silk scarves, even her restive, edgy way of holding her knife and fork. “I think I loved you best of all the wives,” he said today, loathing himself for yammering so cheaply – and not saying what he means, either. Light from the window fell on her mouth, her rounded cheeks, her young girl’s nose. This was in the middle of a spinach-and-bacon crepe, during a lull in the conversation. He rubbed his teeth with the tip of his tongue.

She was ready for him, and fluttered a hand across the table to take his. “We liked each other a lot,” she said, “but we were not, as people say, in love. Whatever the hell that means. I’ve never been in love. I think I do have an inkling of what people mean when they say ‘in love,’ and maybe you do too, but we didn’t have it, you and me. I’ll never have it. But Tom, you might someday. I honestly think you have the capacity. But I sure don’t.” She sipped a little coffee and resettled her cup on its saucer. “Love,” she sniffed rudely. “Who needs it.”

T
OM WAS TWENTY
years old, a history student at the University of Toronto, when he first heard the phrase “Who needs it.” This was in 1970, a year of turmoil. He possessed at that time a thick uneven
beard. His hair curled around his shoulders, chestnut hair, beautiful, but his head was befuddled. With six other students, one of them a part-time drug dealer, he lived in a small illegal basement apartment in the Riverdale area of Toronto, and throughout the long winter months he slept on a shredded mattress between unwashed sheets. Every morning he looked into a square of broken mirror and winced at the grayness of his skin. There were mice in the apartment, possibly rats. Something, anyway, that gnawed on the electric wires. He could never find his own clothes, and his one pair of shoes seemed to be continually wet. Most of the time he was wretched and cold and worried about what would happen to him next, but that odd phrase – “Who needs it” – so brilliant, defiant, and novel, so explicitly emblematic of its time – carried him through. Like a flag, he unfurled it before sleep, and again on waking, and he applied its compacted and plenteous powers particularly to the new territory of love and accomplishment. He wasn’t sure what it meant – he still isn’t. “Who needs it.” Who needs
what?
But back in that foolish, puny time he needed a weapon he could hold next to his body, something that would make him brave, or make him appear to be brave.

F
AY PUTS DOWN THE NEWSPAPER, STARES OUT THE WINDOW AT THE
budding trees, and thinks: I’m getting along fine. Peter’s been gone for one week now. I’ve eaten seven breakfasts alone (seven single-toast breakfasts), and four dinners, and one lunch. I’ve slept alone for seven nights now, seven nights in that big bed.

There were only two nights when she’d slept badly, and only one when she’d curled to the edge of the bed and given way to a fit of whimpering – but that lasted for only about five minutes. Seven chaste nights punctuated by a single long engorged sexual dream that woke her suddenly with its intensity, leaving her limp, sweating – and mildly curious about who it was who entered her sleep and aroused her to such a pitch.

She’s bought a new tube of toothpaste, an expensive off-brand she’s never heard of. She’s bought herself a new summer robe, widely yoked and prodigal with poppies. She’s bought a large economy-size pack of Q-Tips – she doesn’t know quite why but suspects she’s preparing for a fanatical scouring and scourging of her flesh.

She thinks: It’s May now, a new month.

The idea is bracing, and so is the fact that June, July, and August will follow, a series of green arches she can walk under, reassuring herself as she goes, pinching herself awake and knowing she will always, somewhere, be driven into little deceptions of happiness. She has a knack, it seems, for deception.

Peter took Fay’s flowering cactus with him. She had insisted on it, an obscure gesture of good will, but now a bitter thought comes: I wish I’d kept that cactus, I was a fool to part with it.