He put on clean pants and the least creased shirt in his closet, added a light windbreaker, and walked to the A & W for a hamburger; he remembered afterward how theatrical the sky had looked with its packed, pulsing clouds, each one outlined by a band of garish light. On the balconies of apartment buildings outdoor furniture sat suspended in exceptional stillness, the webbing and chrome chilly, bright, and mortal. Soaked leaves lay smashed on the street; some of them, though it was still July, were nut-brown.
Tom read the newspaper as he ate his burger. There was a photo on the front page that showed a young woman in a swimsuit dipping a toe into the water at Gimli Beach, and beneath it was a caption: “Making the Most of Summertime.”
Summertime – what juice that word contained, what roll and pitch, what indolence and pleasure. These seasons tricked him sometimes into the belief that his life was cyclical and endlessly renewable, when all the time he was traveling, like everyone else, straight toward a famine of the senses and the dryness of his own death. Today, though, he was able to delude himself. The smell of food fattened the air. The cheeseburger he bit into was hot and moist, the fries crisp, thin, and winking with salt. He rejoiced in the twirl of pale cream in his coffee and the convivial crackle of the little sugar packet.
Afterward he shrugged off an urge to take in a movie. He said no to the idea of phoning Sheila’s office and inviting her out for a friendly drink. Instead he walked along River Avenue and across the Norwood Bridge, discovering, happily, that his vast public face had been scrubbed from the billboard and replaced with a pastel invitation to take a Caribbean holiday – palm trees, blue water, muscled bodies. The start of a song twitched in his throat. He stopped at a lunch counter for a cup of coffee and – thoughtfully, taking his time – counted out the exact change, lightening his pockets of their heavy pennies. He kept on walking – through pared suburban neatness, then around the fake rural greenness of Kingston Crescent, then over the footbridge and north toward River Heights. The sun had returned, blinding; but the next minute a light drizzle began, and he welcomed its cool fine spray on his face, on his lips.
Now it was late afternoon, nearly five o’clock. A whole day obliterated. He arrived, his hair slicked with rain, at the cream stucco house on Yale Avenue. Three stories. Clumsy but comfortable. A wide porch. A shiny green door standing open. He knocked lightly and was invited in by Sonya McLeod.
She was a flushed, breathless woman. Something purple, Kool-Aid, probably, was spilled down the front of her white skirt. The party, it seemed, had been driven indoors by the rain, and half a dozen small boys were running relays in the large cluttered living room. Crepe-paper streamers gave a look of madness. “This is calm compared to an hour ago,” Sonya told Tom cheerfully, and introduced him – shouting the names – to two or three other parents who had arrived to pick up their children.
Tom, bewildered, still breathing the ether of his recovery, stood in a corner of the narrow front hall, leaning against a wall. Someone handed him a glass of cold wine. His hand was shaken several times. “So you’re Tom Avery, I certainly know that name.”
Seven-year-old Gary Waring hurled himself at Tom’s legs, rebounded, then abruptly disappeared into the kitchen. “I’m Clyde McLeod,” a man said. “I’m p-p-pleased to meet you, sorry about all the chaos.”
Afterward Tom remembered that a small red-headed boy, whose birthday it apparently was, flew into the hallway, shouting, “It’s Aunt Fay. Here comes Aunt Fay.”
Someone opened the wide screen door, and Tom saw a woman running up the sidewalk toward the house. Oh my God, he thought, and seemed to see her pinned to the air like a hologram. He had an impression of thinness, of dark hair swinging from side to side as she ran, of a wide skirt in several shades of blue. One of her hands kept her skirt in check, and with the other she held on to the strings of a dozen rainbow-colored balloons.
Someone, one of the adults standing beside Tom, exclaimed, “Why it’s Fay McLeod.”
∼ CHAPTER 17 ∼
Anything Might Happen
FAY’S HAD REMARKABLY GOOD LUCK WITH PEOPLE SHE’S MET BY chance while traveling, particularly on long flights, overnight flights when the dimmed cabin lights, the blankets, the pillows, the compact trays of food and drink, have summoned a surge of intimacy. But tonight, traveling between Winnipeg and Amsterdam, a direct flight that arches boldly over the top of the globe, she resists the friendly overtures of her seatmate. She’s polite enough. She nods and smiles (faintly) and makes appropriate replies, and even contributes, when asked, a Tylenol tablet from a bottle at the bottom of her bag. But she refuses to be drawn in.
She is suspended inside an image. Hanging there by a thread.
She resents even the necessity of looking sideways and shifting her body. What she focuses on is a pressing incantation, a chant. It thrums inside her throat, adheres like silver plate to the rise and hollow of her breath. It seems to her that this is all she requires to keep her alive and steady in the long blue tunnel of Atlantic air. Just two words: Tom Avery.
AMSTERDAM IS COLD and damp, but the small hotel where Fay is staying has a thick comforter on the bed. Not a new lightweight duvet, but a heavy old-fashioned wool-filled cover with a warm lumpy substantiality that mimics the feel of a human presence. Travel and its disorderly aftermath, taxis, trains, the clink of unfamiliar coinage, have left her with a longing for sobriety. In a thin cotton nightgown she surrenders to the comforter’s intimate, uneven pressure. She badly needs sleep but finds herself lying at attention between the starched sheets, unwilling to give up the stream of lighted images that rolls beneath her eyelids.
Tom Avery. She pronounces the syllables in her head and readies herself for a re-enactment.
“How do you do,” she’d said when they were introduced at the birthday party, and her first thought was that she would like to reach up and press the back of her hand against his cheek.
The smooth-shaven face and the bulk of his body unsettled her. And the way he was looking at her, with a question shaping itself behind his eyes.
“You look very familiar,” she said. The two of them were squashed in a corner of Clyde and Sonya’s front hall, which was really just a narrow passage.
She rested one arm along a cool shelf of gumwood paneling, steadying herself. The big, normally airy house was suffocatingly humid. Outside, a summer rain was battering the grass and the flower borders.
“Do I?” he asked.
“Pardon?” She needed time to think.
“Look familiar. You said I looked familiar.”
“Yes. We must have met somewhere or other.”
He shook his head slowly.
He had untidy hair, uncombed, medium brown – hair that was thinning. She wondered how she knew this.
“No,” he said, leaning toward her. He had the teasing look of someone holding flowers behind his back.
“At school maybe?” she tried. “Or a party? Or maybe here. Clyde’s my brother.”
“I don’t know Clyde. Or at least I didn’t until a few minutes ago.”
“At the folklore center, maybe?” She was watching his mouth. “I work there.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said in the tone of a man who had never thought of going to such a place.
“A restaurant?” Why was she pursuing this? “Or maybe just on the street.”
“Well, I’ve lived here for seventeen years,” he contributed. “In Winnipeg.”
“Pardon?” She saw his lips move but couldn’t hear a word.
The little boys were running in the living room, shrieking and thumping on the floor. Some incomprehensible activity was taking place, chanting, singing. Their shirts made wild blocks of color against the white walls. Fay began to wonder which of these children belonged to Tom Avery, who was staring at her, staring hard.
“I said, I’ve lived here for seventeen years,” Tom said. Then, “Noisy, aren’t they?”
“I’ve lived here all my life.” Was she boasting? “Excep
t for intervals now and then.”
“A native daughter.”
“Pardon?” The noise was overwhelming.
He leaned down, and she felt the roundness of his warm breath on her face, as though he had reached out and touched her with his hand.
“Maybe it’s your name that’s familiar,” she said.
“Maybe. You don’t by any chance listen to late-night radio?”
“Radio? Not very often, I’m afraid. How late?”
“I do a radio show. ‘Niteline.’ CHOL. You might have heard my name in connection with – ”
“What time is this show?”
“Midnight to four.”
“The middle of the night!”
“Yes.” He was smiling.
A warm fold of moisture formed on her brain. It was his smile that caused it, a smile that held a normal proportion of teeth and gum, but an angle of good humor that was slightly mocking.
“I have to confess,” she said, shaking her head, “that it never occurs to me to turn on the radio at that hour.”
“You’re probably asleep.”
“Well” – this, too, seemed a confession – “I guess I am usually.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky?”
“It’s a program for insomniacs mostly. The night folk. They’re a different breed. You wouldn’t want to be one, believe me.”
“But you’re one.”
“A charter member.”
Fay looked sideways. Her brother, Clyde, was handing Oh! Henry bars to three little boys who had finished first in the straw race. Sonya was bending from the waist, wiping a spill from the green carpet. “This is a fairly wild scene,” Fay said, raising her voice.
“How old are your kids?” he was asking.
“I don’t have any, I’m afraid. I’m just the aunt.” She said this with a ripple of emphasis, putting a set of feathery quotation marks around the word “aunt.”
One of the parents, a man standing next to her, was saying something about voter apathy, about an article he’d read in the Atlantic on the conscience of the electorate.
“I would have remembered if I’d met you,” Tom Avery was saying to Fay. His voice was touchingly persuasive and so close to her ear she could feel its vibrations.
“The public is drugged by information overload,” someone standing next to Fay said.
She put her feet together and made herself concentrate on what Tom Avery was saying. He had a mouth that moved carefully, the way a mouth does when someone is about to begin an elaborate joke. She wondered how it would feel to kiss that mouth. Tender. Slow-motion. She wondered if he could be thinking the same thing.
She felt perilously close to the toe edge of incomprehension. The heat, the noise, the thunder outside, his face. “I can’t hear you,” she said finally, lifting her arms in a broad shrug.
He leaned toward her, and again she felt the touch of his breath on her neck. “I just said,” he shouted, “I just said, I don’t have any kids, either.”
FAY HAS BEEN in Amsterdam for forty-eight hours and hasn’t seen a thing. She hasn’t read any of the papers or journals she’s brought along with her, nor has she visited the State Museum of Folklore, where there is a celebrated collection of mermaid lore. She’s wasting Amsterdam, wasting her time, wasting her grant money, wasting herself.
Sailors, in ancient times, stuffed their ears with beeswax to keep themselves from succumbing to the sirens’ song, fearing the power of distraction, how it could initiate acts of carelessness and cast mortal souls into a state of thralldom.
Fay knows she must somehow recapture her concentration. She is a woman who is writing a serious book. She’s waited three years to make this trip. She holds a travel grant funded by a public institution, and she went to a good deal of trouble to secure this money. She’s made promises and committed herself to deadlines. There is so much to uncover and analyze, so many strands of myth and legend and art and theory to bind together.
But so far she’s done nothing but walk down chilly stone streets, gaze into canal water and shop windows, and buy a few postcards. She chose these cards with sacerdotal reverence and paid for them with carefully counted guilders, but they’re still in their plastic envelope, not yet written upon or stamped. She’s spent considerable time lying on her sagging bed in the hotel, flat on her back with her eyes open, observing a splash of weak sunlight on the wall and on the slightly soiled ceiling. She’s taken in the voluptuous broken curve of the plaster cornice and sniffed the cooking smells from the ground floor, meat roasting or burned milk. She wills her mouth to go slack. Her hands curl against her thighs. Between her body and what she is thinking is a smiling, devouring complicity. Gleeful. Precious. Inside her head she pronounces Tom Avery’s name and waits for his face to come into focus.
“I’ll drive you home,” Tom Avery had offered.
The other parents had picked up their children and departed. Only Gordon, Matthew, and little Gary Waring were left, the three of them sprawled in a corner of the living room watching TV while Sonya and Clyde busied themselves making coffee for Fay and for Tom Avery.
“God,” Sonya sighed happily, looking around, “this place looks like a combat zone.”
Paper plates and cups littered the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Gift wrap lay curled in the corners. Shreds of balloon were scattered on the rug, and other balloons, still intact, bobbed weakly against the ceiling.
“I’d appreciate a ride, yes,” Fay said to Tom when he offered to drive her home. “But I really could walk. It’s only twenty minutes or so from here.”
“Have some coffee first,” Clyde said. He had cleared off the kitchen table and set out four pottery mugs. “We d-d-deserve a little caffeine shootup after that circus.”
“Well, it went pretty well,” Sonya said. Her arms were folded flat across her front.
Fay said, “I should really be on my way. I’ve still got some packing to do.”
“Fay leaves at midnight,” Sonya explained to Tom. “Four weeks tramping around Europe. Our hearts bleed for her, don’t they, Clyde?”
“P-p-p-profusely,” Clyde said. He and Sonya had not met Tom Avery before, though Sonya announced that she’d sometimes listened to his show when she was driving late at night, coming home from out-of-town meetings.
“It’s more work than vacation,” Fay told Tom. “I wouldn’t want anyone here to think I was actually going just to enjoy myself.”
“God forbid,” Sonya said, and handed around the filled cups.
She was flushed with postparty satisfaction, smiling across the kitchen at Clyde and saying, “It’s a good thing, love, that we only have to go through this punishment twice a year.”
Occasionally, seeing her brother and his wife together like this, in a scene fragrant with earned exhaustion and with the mild, disordered pains of domesticity, Fay has felt herself suddenly starved of oxygen. Jealousy, or else panic, grips her at such moments. Will she ever own even a portion of what they so effortlessly possess? The question strikes like a blow and never fails to leave a trace of shame.
But tonight she regards the two of them almost with pity, a pair of oversized children swept away on their own forward current. They’ll drink their coffee, clean up, make a panful of scrambled eggs, put the boys to bed, watch the late-night news, and then go to bed themselves. Probably they’ll make love – up there on the third floor in their big cool water bed with the windows open to the familiar dampish night air. They must know already, the two of them, as they drink their coffee from heavy blue mugs, precisely what the rest of the day will offer.
Whereas she is about to be driven home by someone she’s never met before.
This simple premise magisterially suggests something grandly unsettling – that anything can happen.
FAY HAS AN appointment with Maja van Ginkel at ten o’clock on the other side of Amsterdam. She rises early and dresses herself in extraordinary clothes – extraordinary, that is, for a late-summer
morning: a wool skirt, a sweater, stockings, a jacket of fine-woven wool.
The clay-colored sky is overcast. Downstairs in the hotel she sits in a low-ceilinged room with a dozen other hotel guests and is served thick milky coffee and slices of bread and cheese. The cheese comes in transparent sheets and tastes sour. Fay, imagining Maja van Ginkel, her rank and reputation among folklorists, supplies her with a wide shy eager face and fleshy chin. Dr. van Ginkel has published a paper in which the mermaid trope is identified with the sexual subconscious, with a primitive fear of castration and an urge to return to the watery womb.
The double spine of this theory is a little flat-footed for Fay, who hopes to question Dr. van Ginkel closely. Are human beings really so locked into their own cherished anxieties that the only vibrations they feel are solitary and private? Aren’t people capable of more than this? Please, please – don’t they sometimes commit acts of abandonment, calling out to each other, demanding to be buried in each other’s mortal or immortal flesh?
THE COMBED YELLOW HAIR of Maja van Ginkel was unyielding, the rectangularity of her eye sockets fixed. English words burst from her throat with a puncturing explosive rattle. She was beautiful, and her particular kind of waxy beauty made her opaque. After their meeting Fay was struck with the shocking thought that this woman was probably two or three years younger than she herself was.
That night she dreamed about her. The two of them were perched on the ridgepole of a small dwelling, making polite conversation, and behind them, lost in a mottled sky, were the eyes, mouth, and hairline of Tom Avery.
The next morning, her fifth in the hotel, Fay looked into the bathroom mirror, puzzling over the disguise of her body. She was still there, her long dark straight hair cut with bangs across her forehead, a decent-looking woman whose smooth skin concealed her body’s other secrets, its leakages and cracks. Who was it, she asked herself; who was the woman Tom Avery had offered to drive home?