Carol Shields

The Republic of Love

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London. First published in Canada by Random House of Canada in 1992. First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1992. Published in the USA by Penguin Books 1993.

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Copyright © Carol Shields, 1992

Published with the permission of Carol Shields Literary Trust

Cover design Multitude

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isbn 978-94-6238-090-5

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Tom

AS A BABY, Tom avery had twenty-seven mothers. So he says. That was almost forty years ago.

Ask me more, his eyes beg, ask me for details.

Well, then. At three weeks of age, there he was, this little stringy wailing thing, six and a half pounds of malleable flesh. His mother was sick, desperately sick, a kind of flu that worsened to pneumonia and then depression. In all, she was hospitalized for six months. Where was his father in all this? What father? Ha! That’s another story.

A kindly social worker looked at scrawny, misshapen little Tom (rickets, one foot turning out sideways, not quite right) and said: ‘Leave him to me.’ The next day Tom was installed in the Department of Home Economics at the University of Manitoba. He was moved straight into McDougal Hall, the Home Ec’s neo-Georgian practice house on the banks of the river, the wide Red, and put to sleep in a white enamelled crib. Little Tom, the practice baby.

McDougal Hall was a kind of paradise, equipped with a streamlined (for its time) kitchen, built-in cupboards made of fruitwood, a scalloped colonial cornice around the ceiling, concealed lighting, everything—even a row of clay pots on the windowsill holding geraniums, begonias, pointed spears of chives, and thyme. There was a tiled laundry room down in the basement with a mangle and a Bendix washer, and upstairs, occupying the broad landing, a linen closet with stacked sheets and pillow cases tied prettily with pink ribbons, and wonderful ironed kitchen towels that bespoke a vision of order that would first admonish and then inspire the inhabitants of this house, the fourth-year girls, twenty-seven of them, who took up residence here. A Dr. Elizabeth French, D.Sc. (1900-76), occupied the ground-floor suite. From here the daily household duties were organized, the names of those girls assigned to dusting, to silver polishing, to the turning and mending of sheets, to menu planning, soup making, table setting, flower arranging, floor waxing, spot removing—the thousand and one skills needed by young homemakers who came into being in those passionate, scented postwar years. Dr. French herself took shifts of girls out onto the second-floor balcony and demonstrated the correct method for shaking a dust mop. ‘We’re not just here to play house, girls,’ she warned at the planning session that launched each new day. And there they would be, listening and nodding, the twenty-seven sweatered beauties (as Tom Avery will always imagine them) arranged like lovely statuettes in Dr. French’s soft-coloured sitting room, primly perched on the Duncan Phyfe sofa and side chairs or else sprawled, adorably, lusciously, on the gold-toned carpet with their full tartan skirts pulled down over rounded knees. Their gaze was tender—air and openness commingled—and their thoughtful chins rested on laced hands. And what hands! Some of those hands were already wearing diamond engagement rings. (These hands are now sixty years old; Tom has had occasion to meet a few of his old ‘mothers’ around town, and he’s seen, and even held, some of their hands affectionately in his own, and listened to remembrances of that charmed time.)

These were the pale pearly hands that dipped baby Tom into his daily bath water. (‘Always test the temperature with your elbow, girls.’) The same hands that buttoned tiny Tom into his miniature shirts and nightgowns and tied his booties in place. (‘But not too tight, girls, remember baby’s circulation.’) Fortunate, fortunate Tom Avery. Passed from hand to hand, rocked and tickled, fed, burped, coaxed, rewarded, exposed to the open air—if the weather was mild—and held up to the weak sunlight for five carefully regulated minutes. (‘Vitamin D, girls, the sunshine vitamin.’)

Sunlight and sterilized milk, strained cereal and vegetables and coddled eggs and mashed bananas and custard baked in little glass cups. Was baby wet? His diaper was checked hourly, the whitest, softest, most lovingly folded diaper imaginable. A line of these excellent flannelette diapers flapped in the clean air behind McDougal Hall, well away from the shaken dust mops, whipped by the wind and made incomparably fragrant. What went into baby was measured, and what came out as well. His miniature fingernails were trimmed, his weight recorded, his hand-eye skills observed, his small gassy noises noted. Whirled in the air, passed from lap to lap, kissed, oiled, powdered, wrapped tight, little Tom was never allowed to cry for more than a minute, never mind what Dr. French had to say about spoiling, about bad habits starting early.

The twenty-seven mothers pressed him close to their tender sweater fronts. They would have given him anything, their own breast milk had there been any to offer. With the softest of brushes they smoothed his half dozen silken hairs. Such love, such love—ah God, he’d never know love like that again. They praised his given name, Tommy, Tomikins, or else Wee Fellow or Mister Sweetmeat or Little Puff-Cheeks. They loved him just for being alive, for doing nothing to deserve their love. No wonder he thrived and babbled; his rounded boneless limbs flopped and contracted and grew strong—the cleanest, brightest, most polished, ventilated, and smiled upon infant west of the Red River, maybe in the whole world.

Breaking

IT’S GOOD FRIDAY, a cold spring morning, and Fay McLeod, a woman of thirty-five, is lying in bed beside a man she no longer loves.

His name is Peter Knightly. ‘Happy Good Friday,’ he murmurs against her mussed hair, moving toward her under the blanket. He says this in his modified Midlands accent—which always sounds to Fay like someone doing an imitation of an Englishman—and at the same time he’s working her thighs apart with his right hand. We can stay in bed, his right hand is saying, we can take our time, and then his thumb moves sideways, elaborately positioning itself.

Yesterday she loved him, but today she doesn’t.

No, that’s not quite true. She’s known for a while. The knowledge has been working away at her, giving off its muted signals. For one thing, she finds that she looks in the mirror a lot lately, squinting, making rude faces, and some mornings she sits on the edge of her bed, hunched there for minutes at a time, shivering. She has a longing to scrub herself down, cut off her hair, floss her teeth until her gums bleed, buy herself a lacy peach half-slip. She’s caught herself calculating lately, with her breath drawn in sharply, the length of time she and Peter have been together: three years, one thousand days.

This morning she finds it hard to concentrate on Peter Knightly’s thumb, what it’s doing. Nevertheless, she registers his words—Good Friday. An official holiday. The folklore centre where she and Peter both work is closed today, and somehow the next twelve hours will have to be filled.

She ponders this while Peter Knightly’s thumb rotates back and forth—persistent, and very cunning, twiddling away. She’s going to have to tell him, today, that it’s over. Going on like this is making her sick. Her stomach, right this minute, is burning, and she knows it’s not hunger or even pain, but some species of angry embarrassment. The worst of it is that all this—this predicament, this loss and damage—it’s her own doing.

Now Peter’s mouth has fixed itself on her left nipple, whispering and sliding, a suave licking. Oh, this is very familiar. He’s learned after all this time how to please. Don’t ever stop, she thinks, but knows he is about to, travel over to her right nipple. Dutifully. Fairly.

Her hand comes to rest on his back, where she discovers an appalling patch of dry skin.

She tries to concentrate on the reverberations of Good Friday. The thoughts spill and roll. Does he know, she wonders, rocking him gently back and forth, that Good Friday has pagan roots? That it is the ultimate day of contradictions? Celebration mixed with gloom. Suffering with satiety. The dolorous and the delightful. Winter and spring. Cold and hot. Did he know, she silently pursues, that in certain quaint corners of England the entire population rolls a giant barrel of beer through the streets, and that this barrel has its origin in the bloodied heads of animal sacrifices?

She is a woman plagued with information, burdened with it, and always checking an impulse to pass it on to others. Is Peter Knightly, her lover of a thousand wasted days, aware that in certain Slavic villages young men on Good Friday fashion squirt guns from reeds and spray each other with water, and that this, of course, has strong sexual implications?

What is he thinking about at this moment? Is he thinking about anything?

Does he realize the importance of Easter eggs? Could anything be more symbolically charged than an egg, a lustrous, fragile egg snatched from a hen house and piously engraved?

No, it’s not just her stomach that hurts, it’s her heart. It hurts for both of them, and for the passage of time. Shouldn’t time add up to something?

‘Well,’ Peter says to Fay—and his voice comes out in aggrieved gasps—‘You seem a long way off this morning.’

He pulls away, slides his arms from around her body, smoothing the blanket binding over her shoulder in a way that is faintly conciliatory. But his face, drained and hurt, gives him away. Why do you always have to spoil everything? his face says as he retreats to the bathroom.

IF FAY McLEOD no longer loves Peter Knightly, there is still the question of whether she can live without him, live alone that is. She is thirty-five years old, after all, and should know something about compromise.

Toast, she says to herself, might be the test.

She is being whimsical, of course, which is one of the ways she protects herself, but she is partly serious too: can she bear to stand alone in her kitchen on a Saturday morning, or any morning, for that matter, and push down the lever of her ten-year-old General Electric black-and-chrome toaster and produce a single slice of breakfast toast? One only.

Other things she can do on her own. Traveling, for instance. Last summer, tracking down mermaid legends, she scoured half a dozen American libraries, California, Texas, Boston—three happy weeks, travelling light, one suitcase, three changes of clothes, two pairs of shoes, that was it. She relished the ease of arranging single-seat tickets and the sight every night of a neatly made-up hotel room, avoiding, if she could, those pompous doubles with their giant puffed duvets and bulging headboards. ‘A very small room, please,’ she said to a succession of hotel clerks, interchangeable behind their crisp summer haircuts and narrow shirt collars and eager looks, and they’d complied, beaming as though she’d bent forward over the desk and smoothed their faces with the flat of her hand. Occasionally, vacationing families with young children called out greetings, but mostly she sat alone by pool sides or in hotel dining rooms with a book open by her plate. People looked her way and smiled, pitying or else envious, she wasn’t sure which, and it didn’t matter. She finds the bewilderment of travel rousing. Next summer she’ll be off again, Europe this time, her mermaids again, a second research grant, more generous than the first. She departs at the end of July and will be gone for four intense weeks. Most of the arrangements have already been made—and the thought that she will be on her own adds to, rather than subtracts from, her anticipation.

The solitude of living alone does worry her, a grim little visitation of concern—mostly in the late afternoons, when the day feels vacuumed out, but she’s not at the point of paralysis, not yet. She’s capable, for instance, of going for a walk alone. The street she lives on, Grosvenor Avenue, is old, lined with trees and with Victorian houses, now mostly converted to rental apartments, or to condominiums, like the one she shares with Peter Knightly. The snow is almost gone, the sidewalks more or less clear of ice, and she likes on Saturday afternoons to put on a pair of jeans and her suede jacket and strike off, saying to herself: I, Fay McLeod, have every right to breathe this air, to take possession of this stretch of pavement. (Occasionally during these walks, the word ‘single’ presents itself. She makes herself sigh it out, trying hard to keep her mouth from puckering—single, singleness, singlehood, herself engaged in a single-ish stroll.) Blasts of wind smooth the sky to a glossy blue-rose, and the sun sits weak and yellow. She can set her own pace, that is her right after all, and fill up her lungs with the chilly air, stop if she likes at the Mozart Cafe for a cup of coffee, come home when she chooses. Along the way she smiles and nods at elderly couples or joggers or women dragging shopping bags, and each time this happens she feels her ties to the world yank and hold firm.

Sleeping alone is harder than going for a walk alone, oh yes, she admits it, but she’s learned a few tricks of accommodation. And sex these days is everywhere, abundantly, dismayingly available.

As for the future, there will be other men. Or at least there probably will be others. This is one of the hopeful thoughts Fay has about herself. Before Peter Knightly, she lived for three years with a man called Nelo Merino, an investment consultant who was later transferred to Ottawa; she still feels swamped at times by her lost love for Nelo, who is married now, she’s been told, and the father of three children. Before Nelo it was Willy Gifford (two years), who produced business training films and was a philosopher of sorts, a Cartesian he liked to call himself, whom she might have married if his political views had been less rigidly anchored and less tiresomely voiced. Between Willy and Nelo, and again between Nelo and Peter, there had been short periods of living on her own, and she honestly can’t remember these intervals as being lonely. She has her job at the National Centre for Folklore Studies, her friends, her family (mother, father, brother, sister, all of them living close by), her summer trips, and her book on mermaids that she hopes to finish sometime in the next year. She’s always busy, too busy, and is always reminding herself of this fact, so that the notion of an empty apartment, even an empty bed, holds no more than a faint flush of alarm. And only when she thinks about it—those late afternoons when her blood sugar dips and the overhead lights in her office go on. She’ll manage, though. She knows she will.

It comes down, then, to just one brief moment, which is inwoven in her morning routine and located in that most familiar of rooms, the kitchen. Peter Knightly, with whom she has lived for three years now, will be making coffee, stooping in the manner of tall men and registering on his long face the kind of seriousness she finds silly but endearing. A temporary hood of domesticity and sexual ease hovers over them, sending down its safe blue even heat. He grinds his special French-roast beans and measures out water, and she, standing with her back to him, is making toast, dropping the seven-grain bread into twin slots, pushing the lever down and eliciting a satisfying double click as it first strikes the bottom of its long silvery groove and then locks into place. The heat rises gradually to her face. Her image bends on the satiny chrome—a woman performing a simple but necessary task—and inside the mechanism, down there where she can’t see, separate molecules of bread are transcending their paleness and drifting toward gold. She imagines a pair of scented clouds, rectangular and contained, rising up and mingling with the coffee odours. The toastness of toast, its primary grainy essence. Peter is pulling cups from a cupboard, smooth white porcelain objects out of a cartoon, and heating a little jug of milk in the microwave.

Then the toast pops. It always takes her by surprise, those two identical slices bounding upward, perfectly browned and symbolically (it seems to her) aligned, and bringing every single morning a shock of happiness.

FAY IS GREGARIOUS by nature. She’s even wondered from time to time—and idly worried—about being perhaps overly sociable, too dependent on the response of others and incapable of sustaining any kind of interior life for more than a few seconds at a time. Who is she anyway but a jumble of other people’s impressions? A receptor of external stimulation. A blank lake.

It’s a vaguely frightening thought.

People ought to be able to appreciate a sunset, or a waterfall, or a flower, as a solitary experience; she’s heard people say so a thousand times and believes it, but doubts she could pass the test. She likes sunsets but doesn’t know what to do with them, doesn’t distinguish much between one sunset and the next, and isn’t chased by them into flights of private reverence or extrapolated awe. She’d never dream of sitting down and writing a sunset poem, for instance. What would she say? Crimson hues, orange bands. Blah, blah, blah.

When pushing up against the world, she needs companionship, someone by her side. Is it because she’s the daughter of sociable parents? she wonders. She has a lot of strong curiosity about people, and often she’s been praised for her ability to draw out individuals and set them at ease. People relax in her presence, grow expansive. Hannah Webb, who heads the folklore centre, frequently asks her to show visitors around. She appreciates, she really does, how time can be telescoped, an hour reduced to minutes when in the presence of agreeable company. The addition of another person can lighten the most routine work and make ordinary experiences luminous—just going to a restaurant or a movie or even on a walk. When she reads about political prisoners locked up for years in solitary confinement, she marvels that they manage to hang on to their sanity. She knows she’d never survive.

Yet here she is, about to make a great change in her life, a change that frightens her with the spectre of loneliness. It’s Sunday morning, and she and Peter are in their small blue Honda on their way to Fay’s parents for Easter lunch. It is 12:45 by the car clock, which has yet to be reset on daylight-saving time. They are driving down a bare sunny boulevard and quarrelling over the nature of time.

‘It’s gone,’ Fay is saying. ‘One hour just wiped out. It’s like when they do those bowel operations, cut out the tumourous parts and rejoin the sections and try to fool the intestine into not noticing.’

‘Not really,’ Peter says in his adult-education voice. ‘The daylight-saving hour is just an illusion. It never was an hour. Nothing gets thrown away. You have to think of time as a device. An arbitrary invention, that’s all. You always go and personalize things, Fay. Why are we talking about this anyway?’

‘It feels like robbery, losing the hour at night when we’re all asleep, that’s what offends me.’

‘Christ. You’re being whimsical again.’

‘You’re nervous,’ she charges, but keeps her voice small.

‘You’re right.’ He says this acerbically, which reassures Fay.

‘Just think,’ she says, ‘what you could do with that hour if you had it back.’ But she’s having trouble keeping this going.

‘What?’ The edge on his voice dissolving.

‘You could’—she stops to think—‘you could make a sandwich. A fried-egg sandwich. With plenty of mayo and salt.’

‘I’ve never seen you eat a fried-egg sandwich, Fay. Never.’

‘Or you could stay in bed, then, and have an extra dream or two. A good classic REM dream, getting on the bus in just your underwear. Or finding a new room in the apartment, a whole room where you thought the closet was.’

‘You know what that one means.’

‘What?’

‘That things are out of control.’

‘Oh.’

‘Look, Fay, about your parents. Do we tell them today or leave it?’

‘It’s Easter. Let’s leave it.’

‘Why not get it over with?’

‘The whole family’ll be there, everyone. Bibbi’s even coming.’

‘This week then. Promise me you’ll phone your mother tomorrow. And I think you owe me one thing, Fay.’

‘What?’

‘That you tell them this is your decision, not mine. You’re the one that wants out.’

‘It’s not a decision exactly.’

‘Then what in God’s name do you call it?’ His eyes are directed straight ahead, fixed on the light Sunday traffic.

‘You make it sound as though all of a sudden I just clenched up my brain and decided.’

‘Well?’

‘You said yourself you felt things were coming to an end.’

‘I didn’t say that exactly.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Anyway, let’s not drag it out. I’ll see about getting a place tomorrow, a room or something. And then we’ll have to think about what to do with the car.’

‘And the apartment.’

‘Right.’

Fay looks sideways at Peter, who is glancing up at the telephone wires, his forehead going into lines, too. She wonders what he’s thinking. What have their three years together meant, anyway? One thousand days and nights, about to be swallowed up—like last night’s hypothetical hour, that lovely light-spirited hour that never was and never will be.

‘OH, GOOD HEAVENS,’ Fay’s mother said on the telephone. Chipper, breathless. But disappointed.

She was a doctor, a gynecologist with an office in a shopping mall in south Winnipeg, but Mondays she always spent domestically at home, doing the washing, tidying up after the weekend. ‘Well, of course I’m surprised. Daddy and I just naturally thought, well, we knew you weren’t frantic for a traditional wedding and all that, but we did think when you and Peter decided to buy a condo, and that was only a year ago, a year and a half, then, that that represented something, a commitment more or less, which was how you put it at the time, remember?—something like that, anyway. I know people think of these things differently now, Fay, but do you realize that condo of yours cost more than this house, this big house? Well, that’s neither here nor there. All I’m saying is that we didn’t think you and Peter were just making an investment, we thought you were, well—settling down. People do settle down. They do. They don’t keep moving and changing partners forever, they make commitments, not that we’d ever want you to commit yourself to somebody you weren’t sure of, but you and Peter seem so, well, larky together. Sometimes things cool down between a couple, goodness, I know that, but it comes back, almost always it comes back, as long as there aren’t any real irreconcilable differences. You have to anticipate certain times when things seem, well, flat. I mean, if that’s all it is. But you and Peter, I always thought you two just—yesterday, when he was putting whipped cream on your pie, the way he was, you know, teasing you? And, well. We just thought that eventually you’d get the urge to start a family, you’re both so crazy about kids, and you’ve no idea how different it is with kids of your own, you love them ten times more than you love other people’s. It takes people by surprise how much love they have stored up. Young mothers are always telling me that, how they actually fall in love with their babies. Fall in love, that’s how they phrase it, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. I know I did, and oh, I guess I just hate you to miss out on all that, even though I know, I really do, that you have a full life. In many ways. Doing what you want, just picking up and going when the spirit moves you, but there’s something to be said for having a centre, for belonging to someone, your own family, not just one person living for himself or herself. Darn it all, sweetheart, I find it hard to express, but I just hope, Daddy and I hope you know what you’re doing, that’s all.’

A FEW YEARS AGO a man called Morris Kroger gave Fay a small Inuit carving, a mermaid figure, fattish and cheerful, lying on her side propped up by her own thick muscled elbow. It is made of highly polished gray soapstone, and its rather stunted tail curls upward in an insolent flick. It weighs about half a pound and, when picked up, nicely fills a human hand. Fay keeps it on her long oak coffee table next to a stack of magazines and a flowering cactus.

Fay met Morris Kroger at a wine-and-cheese party that preceded a ballet opening. He bumped up against her, then introduced himself. A clumsy man, yet here he was at the ballet.

It was summer. They spent a week together in a tent near Clear Lake. (This was after Nelo and before Peter.) They both suffered from mosquitoes, which were especially bad that year, and Fay, with mosquito repellent in her hair and ears and all the joints of her body, felt sure at first that it was this that rendered Morris impotent. Night after night he struggled with himself on the ridged slippery air mattress. His hoarse breathing frightened her, and on their last night together he gave way to a spasm of choked sobs. Something about his parents, something psychological and hopeless had spoiled his manhood. The next day they drove back to Winnipeg in silence, four hours on the burning highway, and two weeks later he mailed her the stone mermaid. Fay remembers opening the box slowly, as though it might contain a bomb or something equally dangerous, but it was only this carved female likeness with her taunting abbreviated tail.

Impenetrable. The word rose up and socked her in the throat with its unsheathed subtlety. An accusation.

But no, she was being paranoid, it was just a present.

She found out later, much later, that the carving had been made in Cape Dorset not long after the Hollywood film Splash! had been shown there at the Community Hall, and this irony greatly expanded her love for it.

Its smile makes it rare. She has discovered only one other smiling mermaid, a tiny figure bobbing about in a fourteenth-century German fresco. She hopes to see it this summer when she goes to Augsburg, and photograph it for her book.

Morris Kroger is gone, having sold the family business and moved to Florida. Someone told Fay he had retired. At his age! Fay thinks of him maybe once a year. Usually when the mosquitoes come out. For about five minutes.

PETER KNIGHTLY’S FACE as it leans over his sock drawer is too elongated and bewildered for love, and also sulky, lip-drooping, not a face to live with forever. She pities him, a man of thirty-seven years, hesitating like this between black and brown. He gazes at the neat little sock balls, then stirs them with a long teacherly finger. That same finger has stirred me, thinks Fay, who is still in bed, her head turned on the pillow and her eyes wide open, mournfully watching.

In the last few days a mild dislike for him has fallen over her. The whole of his body seems a pale, elongated gland, colourless and cold and stiff with hairs. It distresses her to open her closet and see his jackets and sweaters, most of them gone nubby at the elbows, rubbing up against the smoothness of her blouses. Watching him, she feels her thoughts darken. And every time she opens her mouth, it seems, she injures his puffball innocence; she’s tried, often, to locate the exact point where this weakness of his is centred—that nick, maybe, at the edge of his tucked Englishy mouth. Or the ruffled tips of his thick beige hair, like feathers, blunt and soft at the same time. Oh, why does he keep tempting her, offering up his sponge of a heart and inviting her to take a punch? She’s figured it out; at last she knows. So he can blame her, so she can be sorry, so he can sulk, so she can feel guilty. This has been going on for three years now. He will say something ordinary and neutral, and the next minute she’s unsnapped one of his nursery certitudes. Would she do this if she loved him? She doesn’t think so.

She knows the old cliché: To fall in love is to fall out of love. Maybe that’s all that’s happened, something as simple and blameless as that.

LOVE IS SELFISH. Love is dangerous, impractical, wasteful. Loving, we put a pistol to our heads. It burns, it makes us into fools, always it keeps us waiting. It sickens, it makes us sick, it’s the start of a serious illness, it’s illness itself.

But Fay’s parents are something else. They live in that big old house over on Ash Avenue and at night they read to each other in bed. Richard McLeod reads Peggy McLeod long magazine pieces about the asbestos industry, and Peggy McLeod reads Richard McLeod chunks of novels, descriptive passages out of P. D. James about Oxford or London or the Devon coast. They share a yearning for jokes and subtle proofs and oddities of language, and every single Wednesday night they sit down with their good friends John and Muriel Brewmaster, who have been married even longer than they have—for forty-three years—and the four of them play bridge. After the Brewmasters go home they discuss their hands, their good or bad luck, it doesn’t matter which. They give each other gifts, admittedly only at Christmas and for birthdays, and they have a pact that these gifts must not attach in any way to the house. For example, no microwave ovens, no table saws, nothing like that. They may give articles of clothing made of knitted wool or silk. Or perfume, luggage, wrist watches, little luxuries, tickets to New York, maybe. They love to go to New York and see the latest plays and musicals. For anniversaries—they’ve been married thirty-nine years, forty next fall—they do not exchange gifts. They are each other’s gift. Fay’s mother actually said this once. Out loud. Each other’s gift.

Beginning

FOR A MAN nurtured by twenty-seven mothers, Tom Avery suffers from surprising insecurities. At thirty-nine, almost forty, he is mildly, obscurely fearful of: young children, stinging insects, German shepherds, acupuncture, income-tax forms, street evangelists, public telephones, cottage cheese, and old age.

He is acutely, palpably afraid of Friday nights, what to do with them, those gaping, sneering, and stubbornly recurring widths of time—how to accommodate them, fill them, use them, annihilate them. He’d do anything to sidestep a Friday night. Friday nights demand conviviality and expenditure. It’s the time to let loose (yeah, sure).

Well, not tonight. Tonight he sits alone in his apartment on Grosvenor Avenue and drinks beer and reads the newspaper and thinks dark, unkind thoughts about his life. By eleven he is in bed, sound asleep, another Friday night erased.

WHY DO WE SEEK so strenuously, so publicly, to purify ourselves?

This is what Tom thinks as he goes for his weekly eight-kilometre run down Wellington Crescent. That crosswise slab of belly fat he’s got—a disgrace. A faint hangover, too, poisonous fumes bubbling up from his intestines and pressing his lungs flat. Heated gas ripping upward and downward, shaming him, making him glad he’s thumping along on his own steam. His kidneys he pictures as hard little lozenges, jelly beans in thin casings of sugar. Now that’s a pretty picture.

It’s Saturday morning, the last Saturday before he turns forty. On and on he tramps, past what used to be the Richardson mansion, triplexed now with a series of winking solariums shelving off at the back. Past a darkly stuccoed building with a military insignia over its door, past a stand of leafless shrubs, past the synagogue in which gatherings of men are even now praying.

It’s a cold day. Damp through and through. Spring dampness. Now he’s coming up toward the bridge. Dancing up and down at the curb, keeping time while he waits for a break in the traffic at Academy Road; traffic, it never lets up. It’s a chance, though, to catch his breath.

He’s been jogging for two years now, ever since his divorce papers came through. Ask him about it—he’ll be glad to tell you. It’s one of the stories he likes to pull out. Well, the papers came through, you see. It was on a Saturday morning. They were sent over by courier, Pink Lady, delivered and signed, heavy legal sheets in a strong taped envelope. Here you are, sir. A ceremonial present to start your day.

Light rejoicing seemed called for, but what? Food, drink, sex; nothing appealed, and to tell the truth, nothing was readily available. He had just moved into this rinky-dink—his mother’s word—apartment on Grosvenor, no furniture, not a stick, just a shower, taps and nozzle, not even a plastic shower curtain to pull around him in the morning. The arrival of his divorce papers made him want to give himself up to the air, to get scraped down, pressed flat like an aerodynamic object. Running was all he could think of. In a cardboard carton in the corner of the living room he had the equipment, the hundred-buck shoes and the blue-and-white sweats, bought for him by Suzanne—that’s the ironic bit, the kicker—their last Christmas together, and never worn. Well, he hadn’t been ready then. Now he was.

That’s how the Saturday-morning runs got launched.

He hates every minute of it. He stamps along saying words like ‘fuck,’ ‘shit,’ ‘fart,’ ‘cunt,’ all the sputtered grotesques of the language, and it does help, it gives him strength. It’s April now, one week after Easter, and still pretty nippy. What a climate; why does he stay here? God and Jesus only know. Grit blows straight into his face, in his eyes and mouth and up his nose. A walloping old guy passes him, bald, huffing away, but with a not-bad speed on him—Christ!

Now, finally, he’s got a decent pace going. Breathe in, then out, count your breaths, it makes the time turn over. And think of your feet rounding on the pavement, the heel first, bending, rolling up to the toes, keep that image in your mind.

He’s grinning now, like a guy in a beer commercial. Grin, grin, grin. Transparency, bottom of the barrel. Then he’s a gorilla, chump, chump, chump, arms loose and swinging. Screw that. Now he’s part of a Camus fable, a lost soul, loveless. That look in his eyes, that existential light, bores right through you. Think of hot coffee, think of having it over for another week.

Now he’s in the park. Just five more minutes and he can turn around and head back. What is this for, why does he care about his belly fat anyway? He’s going to be forty years old in three days. Whoa there, what about that? The universe is about to shrink around him. God help him. It shames him how little he’s discovered during his time in the world. This isn’t where he meant to be at forty, not at all, running down a gritty sidewalk on a cold windy day with his chest burning and his rear end bouncing.

Running out the park gates now, back down Wellington Crescent, those big dopey houses, it costs a fortune to heat those houses, past the synagogue again, past the spiky hedges, past the new condos, Christ, a wall of condos, you can hardly see the river anymore, they just keep heaving them up, one after the other.

Hang a right at Grosvenor, home again, the brick building, dirty shrubbery, no leaves, no buds even, no elevator either, tiled steps streaked with wet, three small rooms on the third floor, and no one waiting for him.

TOM’S EX-WIFE, SUZANNE, recently got married again, and this marriage has released their friends from the agony of divided loyalty. Since the wedding, February 19, invitations have favoured Tom, who isn’t sure just why, whether old Suze has slipped sideways or upward or down on the social scale, or whether his own solitude is more clearly underlined now that she’s so visibly coupled. Recoupled, that is.

Her new husband is a divorced man in his unalarming midfifties, and rich. His name is Gregor Heilbrun; this name strikes Tom as being phony, either too abbreviated or too ornate, too something, anyhow. Gregor’s got wide, wide shoulders and soft hips and dark blue suit jackets that settle shyly around those hips of his, and he walks with a waggle. A waggle is not the same as a swagger, far from it. Tom, who was invited to attend the small wedding ceremony at Knox Church over on Broadway, a Saturday afternoon quickie between two other full-scale weddings, had observed the waggling Heilbrun hips with triumph. And noted, too, the way Gregor’s thin uncoloured hair fell crudely around his ears. Some men couldn’t take a haircut. Some men couldn’t carry off a blue suit, no matter what it cost. Gregor teaches economics at the University of Winnipeg and has written a book on Marxist theory and the contemporary marketplace, proving that the two things are one and the same, but his driving-around money comes from the family fur business and from gambling. People say he’s lucky, just two trips a year to Vegas and he comes back with his pockets full.

It used to be that Tom’s old friends invited him to Saturday night dinner parties, but lately the invitations tend to come along for Sundays, when he’s fitted into family brunches, lunches, picnics, or whatever. He doesn’t complain about this, but he notices. Oh boy, he notices. The other thing he’s observed is that he’s started buying bigger boxes of candy for his hosts and more expensive bottles of wine. He’s moved up a notch in the gift department, he’s not sure just when it happened. He can afford it, and again, he’s not complaining, but it’s as though he’s now obliged to pay his way, to buy his way, even, and he tries not to think about the implications of propitiating chocolate or exotic wine. Furthermore, accepting his friends’ invitations, he knows more or less what he’s letting himself in for: the forlorn clutter and noise of other people’s marriages, afternoons of making himself agreeable, scratching their dogs behind the ears, or a project in the yard, maybe, and almost certainly one or two dribbling babies dropped on his lap. He would like to give his heart to his friends’ children, to be the sort of uncle-type guy they want their kids to have, but he can’t. In fact, he can’t imagine how his friends put up with the whining and the diaper smells and the out-and-out mess of it all.

Today he’s on his way to the Chandlers for one of their traditional waffle lunches. One o’clock, Harvard Avenue, an easy walk, ten minutes at the most from his place on Grosvenor. Already he imagines the maple syrup running on the tablecloth, a narrow river of it, and then spreading into a lake, and then young Chrissie’s fat bratty fingers poking in it, and Liz doing nothing, absolutely nothing, not jumping up for a wet cloth, but just sitting there and smiling, or maybe pressing a paper napkin down on top of it all. Gene, at the head of the table, presiding at the waffle iron, will glow with happiness. A splat of batter will decorate his shirt front. It draws attention.

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 behaviour?’ he said out loud. ‘Hey, you’d better get yourself together, you weirdo, you dumb ox, you creep.’

FROM 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 marvelled 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.

IN TOM AVERY’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.

TOM 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 weeknights, 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.

Put That on my Tombstone

‘LET ME THROW you this analogy,’ Peter Knightly 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 centre 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 non-smoker 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 post-war 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 centre 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 theatre 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.’

FAY’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 favour 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 travelled quietly.

‘I don’t know. We seem to have such a lot of stuff to sort out. I mean, just three years together, it’s amazing, and we own all these things.’

‘I see,’ he said, and then a minute later, ‘Like what, for instance?’

‘Well, we have all these spatulas.’

His eyes widened; she loved that, his simplicity about domestic details. ‘How many?’ he asked her.

‘Three.’

‘Three.’ As though he weren’t sure that were too many or too few.

‘We also have the Joe Fafard print you and Mother gave us last Christmas.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’m keeping that.’

‘Good.’

‘The way you say that!’

‘How?’

‘Well, that was pretty emphatic. The way you just said ‘good’ like that.’

‘Was it? I didn’t think I was being emphatic. Not at all. I’m trying, in case you didn’t realize it, to be unemphatic. Neutral.’

‘I know.’

‘Ah. Well, then.’

‘Just tell me one thing.’ She made an effort to control her breathing. ‘Do you think I’m doing the right thing?’

‘What kind of question is that?’ He set an eave of muffin afloat in his coffee, then captured it on a plastic spoon. ‘I just told you I was intending to stay on the sidelines.’

‘Like an umpire, you mean?’

‘Like a guy in the last row of the bleachers. Just watching and hoping for the best. You’re old enough to know what you want.’

‘You ought to put that on my tombstone. “She’s old enough to know what she wants.”’

‘All right.’

‘Oh, Lord, how did I ever get to be thirty-five?’

‘How did I ever get to be sixty-six?’

‘You must hate having such an old kid. It’s obscene.’

‘Well, I don’t really think so. Not obscene.’

‘I wish I were sixty-six. Then I wouldn’t be going through this fake divorce.’

It shamed her to be saying this; she didn’t mean it. Being sixty-six was the worst thing she could think of, and she’d only said it to cheer her father up. She knew it did people good to be envied, even for a minute, and even when they knew it was less than authentic.

‘It’s never easy, Fay, these breakups. Believe me, I know. A lot turns on them. A whole life can turn on them, though I honestly don’t believe it often happens that way. Most of our heavy decisions amount to nothing. Momentary thunder and then it’s all over, everything back to normal.’

‘So, do you think I’m doing the right thing? I mean, after three years, and here I am, still not sure of this person yet. I just don’t feel too much. Not enough. Not much spark. What a word, spark. Fizz is what I mean.’

‘Passion?’

She blinked. The word startled her, coming from her father’s lips. ‘He’s not a bad person,’ she said. ‘He’s really quite a decent person, as you know. He certainly would never do anything outrageous. He’s even got this wretched saintly side to him. He wouldn’t ruin my life or anything. That really drives me crazy, knowing that it could just possibly be okay to go on with him. But do you think I’m doing the right thing, ending it? Just because the fizz is low. Yes or no? Be honest.’

‘Yes.’

And then he put down his cup and said, ‘If it’s what you really want.’

FAY DIDN’T TELL her father that Peter was moving back in with his ex-wife, Fritzi. She didn’t know herself until Sunday morning, when Peter broke the news. He offered it not in his usual juicy Sheffield tones, but with a truculent chop, as if he wanted to get it over with fast. ‘I think you should know, Fay, that I’ve arranged to rent a room at Fritzi’s for the next couple of months.’ He hurried on. ‘They’ve got this room on the third floor. Don’t look so stunned, Fay. They can use the cash. Sammy was telling me about the market, it’s been a bit slow this year, and they’ve got their mortgage to meet, and for the time being this room will serve the purpose as well as help them out. I can look for an apartment in September, when a few vacancies will come up. But it’s a perfectly decent room, and there’s a bath … for Christ’s sake, you look stricken, Fay. Be sensible. There’s nothing untoward about it. Fritzi and I’ve been divorced for years, you know that, and she’s happy as a hen with Sammy. Oh, I know you think he’s a bit of a dolt, so do I, but she’s happy. We’re certainly not about to go kinky or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking, and even if we were, what would it matter? That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That’s rubbish. It’s even got a separate entrance, the room. Why in hell am I bothering to explain this, will someone please tell me? Anyway, it’s a fait accompli, I’m afraid. I’ve already given them postdated checks for the next four months. And it’s furnished, so I won’t be needing the pine table, that should simplify things for you. I don’t even need a bed. They’ve got one of those fold-out affairs. They were thinking of renting it to a student, but then I ran into Fritzi and Sammy at the Belgian Bakery when I picked up the croissants. You know, sometimes I think you’re dead right about this city, that it really is a bit too small. Okay, I admit it’s a somewhat eccentric arrangement. The whole world doesn’t have to know, and it’s just temporary, it’s practical, we have to be moderately practical until we decide what we want to do with the condo. We can’t afford to be unreasonable. What I mean is, we can’t be foolishly extravagant and overly delicate. This opportunity has, well, presented itself, running into Fritzi and hearing about their spare room. You’re not crying, Fay. Oh, for God’s sake, why on earth would you cry about a thing like this? It doesn’t make sense, it’s ludicrous. Half the time I don’t know what’s going on with you, what’s inside your head.’

FAY LOVES HER WORK at the folklore centre.

To begin with, she admires the new building of pale sandstone, the large, accommodating display area, the administrative floor with its soft green carpet and painted doors, each a different colour—hers is yellow—and each opening onto a fresh cubicle of polished plaster and a trio of high slit windows like open mouths. Fay’s three windows overlook a sliver of the old warehouse district, and a section of disused railroad track and, beyond that, clear to the sky, the curved crust of the Red River, which is really brown, sliding its way northward.

The staff numbers forty, and there is not one among them who refers to her as Miss McLeod or even Ms. McLeod. She is Fay to Hannah Webb, the director, and Fay to Art Frayne, who does electrical work around the place and simple carpentry.

Her office is modest. One wall holds shelves of her books, and the opposite wall is covered with family snapshots—her parents, her two nephews, a blown-up photo of her sister, Bibbi, holding a hammer in her hands, one of Peter at Victoria Beach, and so on—and three large posters, all of them framed, all of them announcing special exhibitions the centre has put on in recent years. At angles sit two moulded chairs covered with textured blue cotton, and, behind her desk, her own shiny desk chair. The desk itself is wide and handsome, composed of some hard white unscratchable substance; no one liked these desks at first, but now everyone does. Her official title is Associate Folklorist. Sometimes she swivels sideways in her chair and looks over at her books, then her posters, then her tumbling green plants, and finally the glistening desk top, and says to herself, administering a dose of bracing tribute, I am an Associate Folklorist. The word fills her mouth with meaninglessness. She takes a shy secret pleasure in knowing she doesn’t quite fulfil this role, and sometimes, thinking of it, she looks straight up at the ceiling and laughs.

At the centre, each day is swallowed by the next, Monday to Friday, over and over; the pattern can be read in its tides of energy. Fay can see, but not feel, the monotony of it. In the morning she attends to the necessary administrative details, the not unpleasant meetings in the board room, then the correspondence, the memos, the conducted tours, which the staff shares, then lunch at the nearby Amigo Café—a bowl of soup and a carrot muffin, or else she brings a bag lunch and eats it at her desk. In the afternoons, at least for the last three years, she does her mermaids. (‘I do my mermaids,’ she says, in the same way her father, sitting down on weekends to his balsa wood and glue, says, ‘I’m doing my windmills.’) The mermaid hours pass quickly. Mermaid work means poring over journals and offprints, making notes, following up clues, sending out dozens of letters. Each jotted note, each new file adds to the sum of reality. One idea opens magically to ten or twelve others, and she knows by now that this is going to be a problem, that there’s altogether too much twirl and spread to her inquiry and not enough in the way of tight, helpful boundaries.

Around three o’clock she wanders down to the canteen for coffee. Beverly, Anne, Hannah, Ken, Donna, Colin—her friends, her colleagues—they’ll all be there. The youngishly old Beverly Miles, doyenne of popular-cultural forms and a lover of social gatherings however humble, will be there early and already digging vigorously into her cracked black purse for a paper sachet of rosehip or chamomile, an expectant convivial glow on her broad face that emends the brightness of her gray ponytail swinging and twitching and keeping time with her conversation. Anne Morris, Ken Merchant, Donna Watts, who heads the volunteer program, and Katherine Hill, secretary to the director, will wander in, talking, talking, talking—snatches of their talk float over the heads of the others—Nicaragua, strip mining, Earth Watch—and Colin King will shortly join them. If Peter is not in the field—off to Regina or Calgary or Ottawa—he may join them, too.

On Mondays everyone tends to be full of pleasant fatigue and minor grievances. By Friday the tenor of canteen talk will be up a dozen degrees. Anne Morris, who is Fay’s age, will be heading up to her cottage in the Lake of the Woods with her husband, Frank, opening it up for the season and urging invitations on the others. There might be talk of a new position coming up, an assistant for Donna Watts, who any day now will be announcing her pregnancy, not that she needs to announce it. The possibility of this new appointment has been discussed on and off for the eight years Fay has worked at the centre, and always it seems on the brink of fulfilment. Fay will reveal to the others the latest news from the mermaid world, real news from the Loire delta in France, where two teenage girls claim to have sighted a fishtailed woman, a sirène, rising from a shallow lake at dusk. Colin will snort and discredit, Anne will be analytical, and all the rest will offer up the cool glee and helpful tactics of professional scholars. ‘I don’t know,’ says Hannah Webb, sliding into an empty chair and opening her carton of milk with a scarlet thumbnail. ‘I wouldn’t discount it entirely.’

Fay knows that before too many days have passed, someone will notice that she and Peter no longer sit at the same table. Anticipating the tactful, consoling questions that inevitably will be put to her, she can already feel the comedy of her tragic role. Single again, our junior folklorist. My, my. Our education outreach man, too. Nothing lasts, it seems.

But these laments lie in the future. As yet, nothing has changed, nothing that anyone would notice. At 5:30 Fay knocks on Peter’s door, or else he knocks at hers, and the two of them go down the back stairway to the parking lot, where their Honda is parked, and then they drive home, turning right on Portage, bucking the worst traffic of the day, turning left onto Osborne, right again onto Stradbrook, as far as the second light.

This, Fay tells herself, glancing in the rearview mirror—nose shiny, hair collapsed (not that it matters if straight hair collapses)—is the only part of the day that will change, and this week is the last lap for them both. Peter intends to move out on Friday evening—he’s announced this firmly—and, in a mood of recklessness, good citizenship, and guilt, she’s offered to help him pack his things.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a romantic in the last decade of the twentieth century? This was the question Fay put to her brother, Clyde.

‘To believe anything can happen to us,’ he said, and gave her a look.

This conversation took place in the sunroom of the large three-story stucco house in an old residential section of Winnipeg where he lives, quite happily it seems to Fay, with his wife, Sonya, and their two small sons, Gordon and Matthew, who at this moment are asleep upstairs. The air is stuffy and dry because Clyde, an ardent conserver of energy, is reluctant to open a window so early in spring. It is nine o’clock or thereabouts on a dark, blowing April night. Sonya, as usual, is at a meeting. She is a short, spreading, humorous woman, a lawyer for a women’s-rights group. People all over the country know her name, and because she’s often interviewed about abortion on TV, they’ll stop her on the street or in theatre lobbies or at dentists’ offices and say, ‘Don’t I know you?’ It scares her, she once told Fay, the sharp way these people examine her features, boldly, frowningly, without the least suggestion of apology, making their calculations and private judgments. Once when she was getting into a car after a public meeting a man threw a rag doll at her. It had been ripped open down the belly so that the stuffing was coming out, and something red and wet, paint, or else ketchup, had been poured over it. Several times she’s received late-night phone calls, a high, driven whine saying, ‘God will punish you, God will drive a spike up your cunt.’ She laughs when she talks about these things; you expect a certain amount of craziness when you work in the abortion area, she says, it’s part of the territory. But the hard, random, assigning eyes of strangers are more than she can deal with. Is she there or not? Real or unreal? It makes her wonder, she says.

Fay’s brother, Clyde, has his own business, McLeod Mindscape, designing computer software. His is an exceedingly specialized line, mathematical and painstaking, to do with knitting machines for women’s hosiery patterns, and he sometimes jokes to friends about being in the erotic end of the electronics business—the world of ankles, knees, thighs, and lace. From infancy he’s suffered from severe stuttering, but in his particular work he has scarcely any need to meet clients face to face, or even to speak to them on the telephone. He’s arranged his business, his whole existence, this way. He works alone out of a cork-walled office in his basement, which means he’s available when Gordon and Matthew come home for lunch and after school.

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.

FAY AND PETER 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 centre 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 neighbourhood. 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 neighbourly 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.

IT 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.