But there are, at least, wedding rings. These had been selected, rather frantically, by Fay and Onion, who had met at a jeweler’s downtown at noon today. Plain gold bands were decided on; they’d guessed at Strom’s ring size and, to their surprise, have got it right.
“In sickness and in health,” Onion repeats dryly, affecting a wince, drawing wide the corners of her mouth and raising her eyebrows. Strom, who is supported by three large pillows, beeps back his assent, his fingers aflap and his one good eye madly dancing.
Presents are opened: a VCR from Fay’s parents; two soft leather wallets made by Bibbi, a hand-woven blanket in light Icelandic wool from Clyde and Sonya, a set of high-power binoculars from Fay (who is rather proud of this inspired choice), and a pair of matching dressing gowns from Dr. Cummerford, hospital greenies. No one is sure if this is meant to be a joke, whether it is a gesture of practicality or intended to salute the curious valor and contradictions of the event; everyone stares with discomfort as the gift is unwrapped and revealed.
Then Clyde uncorks two bottles of champagne, and even Strom drinks a little, through a plastic drinking straw. Onion reaches under the bed and produces a chocolate cake, and for an hour everyone eats, drinks, brushes crumbs from the bed sheet and discusses with varying degrees of heat the situation in South Africa – until a voice over the loudspeaker announces that visiting hours are over. Gloria hustles in with her tray of medications and apple juice, making noises. It’s time for everyone to go home, and they do, except for Strom – and Onion, who elects to sit with him for a few minutes longer, until he falls asleep.
“SO, HOW’RE YOUR MERMAIDS coming along?” Mac Jaffe asks Fay.
“Never mind her mermaids,” Iris interrupts. “She’s in the middle of telling me about Onion. And Strom Symonds. They got married. Last night. At St. Boniface Hospital. During visiting hours, yet.”
“Well, well,” Mac Jaffe says.
The three of them are sitting in the Jaffes’ striking black-and-white kitchen in a newly converted warehouse on Ballentyne Street – or, rather, Fay is sitting. She feels lanky and powerful perched here on a bar stool, as though her bones had been whittled clean; Iris is standing at a chopping block snipping fresh dill and throwing it into a bowl of green beans, and Mac is standing in the doorway, just home from a day at his office in the Grain Exchange, where he advises, consults, whatever – Fay’s never entirely understood what it is that Mac Jaffe does, except that he appears to do it well and to be amply rewarded. Condominiums in this building start at two hundred thousand dollars, and the Jaffes have bought one of the penthouses, six rooms roofed and sided with immense sheets of tinted glass. Fay’s here a lot. “Hey, get yourself over here,” Iris says to her at least once a week, “I need your elbows on my table.”
Iris Corning Jaffe, who is the same age as Fay, divides her life down the middle. Half the time she works as an actress, picking up small parts on radio or television, doing occasional commercials, and every summer taking a part in one of the musicals at Rainbow Stage. When she isn’t being an actress, she’s trying to get pregnant, so far without success. What she’s done to this end forms a production in itself, from sexual gymnastics to tarot cards to taking her ova to Toronto, where they were placed in a Petri dish with Mac Jaffe’s sperm and encouraged to reproduce. Recently, perhaps with tongue in cheek, perhaps not, Iris drank a glass of tea made with lilac blossoms and suffered an allergic reaction so severe that her understudy at Rainbow Stage had to be summoned. A short, slight, curly headed woman with a cool oval of a face, Iris is Fay’s oldest and closest friend. They’ve known each other since they were four, two girls growing up on the same tree-shaded block of Ash Avenue. Yaf and Siri they called each other when they were younger – their names spelled backward. Among their ancient rituals is the exchange of elaborate compliments. “Well-snipped dill,” Fay will say to Iris. “Exquisitely combed hair,” Iris will say to Fay, or “That lip gloss brings out your essential you-ness,” or “Your shoulder blades are looking particularly goodish today.” They love the word “goodish,” as in goodish sunsets, goodish travel bargains, goodish men. Iris is a woman of emphatic gestures and a nervous resonant voice, who worries about becoming what she calls “actressy,” one of those self-dramatizing dollies she despises, and occasionally resembles.
“Why oh why?” she asks Fay, wagging the kitchen shears. “Why would Onion, after all these years, go through with it?”
“Is that garlic I smell?” Mac asks. “It smells beautiful in this room.”
“Have a drink, Mac,” Iris commands. “Fay and I’ve already had two.”
“No one really knows,” Fay says. “It’s odd, but not one of us actually asked her. You know how private Onion can be. You never want to step over that invisible line. But my mother thinks it’s guilt, that Onion’s always been the one to postpone marriage, not Strom, and that now she wants to make amends before it’s too late. My father just thinks she’s gone soggy in the head, he thinks retirement’s tipped her judgment, given her too much time to regret and grieve.”
“Regret and grieve,” Iris picks up. “That sounds like the title of one of those murky German movies. The other night we saw – ”
“Clyde thinks Onion has deluded herself into thinking that Strom will make a complete recovery, and that they’ll have this lovely bit of wedded bliss together. Sonya thinks Onion has a subconscious desire to be a bourgeois housewife and that she’s suppressed it all these years. I don’t know. I think it’s one of those necessary gestures. That she can’t let go of him somehow until she’s sealed their life, with a ceremony. Okay, I’m talking like a folklorist, God forbid, but I don’t think she’s crazy at all. I think she’s listening to her instincts for once. And Bibbi more or less agrees.”
“Don’t tell me Bibbi was there, too?”
“Yes.”
“How is Bibbi? Does she seem happy? Do you think she is? Happy, that is.”
Fay shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t asked her for ages. But I’m going to see her tomorrow night. We’re going out to that new Greek restaurant on Arlington. Maybe I’ll ask her.”
“I always loved Bibbi,” Mac says. “I hate to see her wasting her life.”
Fay says, “I don’t know about that, Mac. I’m not sure she’s wasting her life. Anyway, she’s not even thirty yet.”
“Almost.”
“Dinner’s ready.” Iris says this with a mock curtsy. “You two guys ready?”
“Ready,” Mac says.
“Ready,” says Fay. “Where’ll I sit? My usual place?”
FAY’S SISTER, BIBBI – her baby sister, she sometimes calls her – is one of only three women cobblers in Canada, one of only twenty-four in North America, of sixty-two in the English-speaking world – at least as far as anyone’s counted. She learned the trade in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she found herself at the age of nineteen, having hitchhiked from Manitoba and arriving with four dollars in her pocket. She lived that winter with a young alcoholic shoe-repair man and within eight months had learned the trade. “I can make anything,” she says. She repairs all manner of shoes, belts, bags, and luggage. Her shoe-repair shop is on Selkirk Avenue, in Winnipeg’s North End, and for the last five years she’s lived above the shop with her lover, Jake Greary, a professional communist.
Jake scorns the entrepreneurial system, and so the shop is run as a co-op, and most of Bibbi’s labor is bartered for goods and services, with the result that she’s almost always short of cash. Jake Greary, who has remained unmoved by the crumbling of the Eastern bloc, also disapproves of Bibbi’s middle-class parents and refuses to enter their house. An austere and joylessly resolute man, he thinks Bibbi’s godmother, Muriel Brewmaster, is a joke, a healthy woman who has never worked at anything in her life. He despises Bibbi’s brother, Clyde, calling him a tool of the system. His hatred of Fay – they have met only twice – seems to derive from the fact that as a folklorist she accepts public money for nonproductive ends, lives in a c
lean apartment with attractive furniture, and insists on paying the bill when she and Bibbi go out for a meal. He works in a glove factory by day and attends meetings most nights. Wednesday night is his union meeting, and it’s on Wednesday nights that Fay usually meets Bibbi.
These evenings are a little tricky, since Bibbi insists on simple food and spartan surroundings. The new Greek place, Spiro’s, with its cloth napkins and subtle lighting, clearly makes her uncomfortable, but she compensates by ordering a plate of plain rice and vegetables and accepting only a single glass of chilled retsina.
She is as tall as Fay but with fuller breasts, shapely and rounded breasts, lovely even beneath the dark, stretched, slightly soiled sweatshirt she wears tonight. Her hair, unlike Fay’s, is very light brown, almost blond, and she wears it in a thick loose braid that comes halfway down her back. She has a beautiful and collected face. People have always exclaimed about the glory of Bibbi’s facial bones, sometimes with a hint of disbelief or regret in their voices – this extraordinary creature, those eyes, that coloring, that natural grace, all that intelligence, too, and for what?
Her younger sister’s beauty has never given Fay anything but the most intense pleasure, not that she expects anyone to believe this; it’s almost more than she can believe herself.
“Tell me what’s new on the mermaid front,” Bibbi asks Fay, then sits back and listens with the whole of her face and body.
The two of them can talk about anything – anything, that is, but Jake Greary and whether or not Bibbi is happy.
“Are you happy, Bibbi?” Fay asks tonight, looking down at her plate, cutting her almond pastry carefully in half with the side of her fork.
Bibbi doesn’t miss a beat. She reaches across for a portion and stuffs it into her beautiful mouth. “Happy enough,” she says, as though the pure pleasure of eating excuses her from taking this question seriously. And then immediately she changes the subject.
Later they share a taxi, dropping Bibbi first at the shadowy doorway on Selkirk Avenue. There is a light on in the window above the repair shop: Jake must be home from his meeting, waiting for Bibbi’s return, perhaps even now rising from a chair to slide back the bolt and let her in. Will he welcome her home?
The words of that welcome are unimaginable to Fay.
The lives of others baffle her, especially the lives of couples, the chancy elusive cement of their private moments. What exactly do Iris and Mac Jaffe think when they lie down together at night in their glittering midnight-blue bedroom? How have Onion and Strom, now husband and wife, filled up their thousands of sequestered hours – with stern conversation? With silence? And Clyde and Sonya – do they balance between them, like an extra child, an image of that amorphous thing they’ve brought into being, their love, their marriage? Do her own parents, after forty years of being married, still glance shyly at each other, coax from each other’s bodies new expressions of tenderness or definition, and are they stricken from time to time with incomprehension: Who is this person? Whose face is this next to mine, this flesh-not-of-my-flesh, this stranger?
PEOPLE WHO MAKE movies know less about love than people who pay good money to see them.
This is what Fay thought coming out of a movie theater with Robin Cummerford at ten-thirty on a Thursday night. There was a time when she would have voiced her skepticism aloud, but recently she’s grown more cautious about opening her mouth, perhaps more kind, too. For one thing, it was Robin Cummerford who had paid for tonight’s movie, and for another thing, he appeared from his post-movie demeanor to have been deeply moved by the film, a black claustrophobic import called Juice of the Larger Orange.
He had phoned Fay unexpectedly on the Tuesday morning after Onion’s wedding, having tracked down her phone number. He apologized twice for calling her at work. He wondered if she was by any chance free one night this week. For dinner, or maybe a movie?
And there they were, on their way to have a drink at the Fort Garry Lounge, having endured an hour and a half of curiously translated subtitles in which men and women uttered breathy jealous threats or spoke in varying shades of cruelty of their mutual enthrallment and disgust. “Extremely powerful,” Robin Cummerford announced, “the emotional force of love.”
It surprised Fay that a man trained in science, a physician, could so readily mistake the angers of erotic transport for love. At the same time, she wondered whether there was something amiss with her own appetites. Was she shriveling up inside her jangling singleness? Or had she maybe dozed off in the middle of the film and missed something obvious?
A little later, dropping her off at her front door, lightly touching the sleeve of her pink coat, he said, “I’ve really enjoyed tonight. Is there any chance you’re free for dinner next week? Thursday night?”
“That would be very nice,” she said. Nice! Had she really said nice?
She realized, suddenly, that she was about to be pursued by this quiet, awkward, rather opaque man, that the clutter and flutter of courtship was going to sweep her up once again, and that before long there would be difficulties. This isn’t going to work out, Robin, she imagined herself saying over a restaurant table, over the phone, over a twisted pillow. This just isn’t going anywhere.
∼ CHAPTER 12 ∼
Riding High
SOMEONE SENT TOM A PRETTILY WRAPPED PACKAGE OF SHIT. So! Some goon out there in big wide radioland had it in for him, and for a man like Tom, whose chief disability – he admits it – is his wish to be liked, the gift was deeply disturbing. He ran a few possibilities through his head.
That marathon prick, what’s-his-name? Steve Fitzsimmons?
Or some crank who’d called in to “Niteline” and got cut off too quickly. It happened all the time. Ted Woloschuk did his best to screen the calls, but it was really Tom who had to juggle the drunks and crazies and get them off the air fast.
And then there was Mike Healey, who emceed the all-night show on CRSM. But Mike was far too sweet a guy to think up this kind of vindictive monkey stuff. And who else? There was that hoser of a songwriter around town, Benny Kaner, a sleepy old ponytailed creep who’d been badgering Tom for a couple of years to air some of his tapes on the show.
For a day or two Tom made a point of not mentioning the shit incident to anyone, and then suddenly he found himself telling everyone.
Big Bruce, who owned the station, said the same thing had happened to him once, only it was plastic poop, not the real thing. It’s part of the game. You stick your head up out of the crowd and you get shot at.
Rosalie Summers, the receptionist at the station, told Tom about someone who’d put an underarm deodorant in her locker back when she was in high school, and attached to it had been a scribbled, unsigned note that said “A Word to the Wise.” It still made her blood boil, just talking about it.
Everyone Tom talked to told him not to worry. These things happen. It was par for the course. There were a lot of nuts out there, all kinds of berries on the bush. Forget it, everyone said.
HE DID FORGET IT, or almost. He was too busy to worry, he was riding high, out almost every night.
“We’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” his mother said when she phoned from Duck River on Saturday morning, minutes after he’d come back from his weekly run. “Night after night we’ve been trying and the phone just rings and rings. I guess you’re pretty busy, eh, leading the gay bachelor life. Ha. But you can’t say that word gay anymore. I keep forgetting. Leading the wild life, is that better? You still seeing that girl, Elizabeth? Mike and I were thinking, it might be nice if you brought her up here, had yourself a nice relaxing weekend. We’ve got the pullout, you know, it sleeps two, or she could sleep on the rollaway, depending. It doesn’t matter one teensy bit to Mike and me, whatever you feel comfortable with. We’ve been freezing fish. Someone gave us a great big catch of pickerel, that Archie Frobish, you remember him, his wife passed on about a year or so back. Well, we fillet them first, or rather Mike does, and then we freeze them in milk cartons th
at I rinse out real well, and then we top them up with water and stick them in the deep-freeze. It works like a charm. Archie can’t eat what he catches nowadays, not since he’s been on his own, the poor old guy. It’s no fun being on your own when you get to be that age. Any age, let’s face it. Mike says he’s got a dilly of a Newfie joke for you. I can’t tell it on the phone, it’d turn the wires blue, but he says he’ll save it up for you, you’ll get a good laugh. It would do you good to have a nice couple of days, get out of the city, relax. And tell Elizabeth we’ve got lots of room. Tell her we don’t bite.”
ASKED TO NAME his ideal land form, what pan of the earth’s geography he would choose to be, Tom said a peninsula.
This was at a dinner party, a Sunday night, and he was praised by the others around the table for his originality. Why a peninsula? Because it was separate yet joined. Because, well, it surrendered part but not all of its independence. Because it was permitted a measure of eccentricity. Because a peninsula can be easily defended.
“You mean you want everything and nothing,” Mark Klein charged, and Tom replied, well, yes, maybe that was true.
At a round painted table on the screened front porch of Jeff and Jenny Waring’s house on Waterloo Avenue, along with Mark and Emma Klein, and a woman called Charlotte Downey, he ate an odd and beautiful pasta salad and took part in the discussion of geographical entities and private choices.
He was happy to be here, grateful to be remembered by old friends like the Warings, to be telephoned in advance and included in a low-key summer evening. Outside, beyond the dark screening, a low wind could be heard stirring the full trees. Inside, the only light source was a low shaded table lamp, against which a number of moths batted intermittently. He wondered if the others guessed how he relished such evenings. The faces of the Warings, of the Kleins, of Charlotte Downey, seemed to possess a golden plasticity, and the white wine, the bowls of raspberries, the coffee poured from a tall ivory-colored coffeepot brought Tom a convulsive upsurge of feeling and a doubling of consciousness, so that he was able to see the evening as it was as well as the way he might afterward remember it.