He sat panting in the back seat, looking out at the vast sunless city streets. An immense disappointment seemed to be waiting for him, and heartbreak.
The taxi driver had a fat, breadlike back of the neck and was full of chat. About a son just starting out in the construction business. A daughter at Berkeley (“one of your brainy types”). And a wife who taught yoga three days a week at the Y and had the figure of a twenty-year-old. He spoke of them proudly, with ease. He was, Tom saw clearly, a man who lived simply, who kept a clean smoke-free cab and brought home the bacon and was met at the door by the wife with the body of a twenty-year-old girl who pressed ravishing kisses on his thick white neck and who, in the jagged peaks of her ever-renewable ecstasy, cried out his given name, which was … what?
Tom leaned forward in the cab and peered at the driver’s identification card, at the small darkishly ruddy head-and-shoulders photo, and read the words: Leroy Gower. It entered his brain with a quick little sorrowful arrow, Leroy Gower, and stayed there. Leroy Gower, Leroy Gower. The name of a happy man.
HE AND FAY that first day lay down together on his bed, on the cool clean blue blanket, lying on their sides facing each other. He took her face in his hands. It was a hot day. A fly buzzed against the wall. It was around noon, he guessed. The window was open, and the greenness of trees cut by slivers of sun filled up the frame. He became aware of the scent of her skin, which was mild, faintly dusty. His fingers reached out and touched the contour of her hips, the lovely long trench of her spine, apprehended the oval concave dip at the small of her back. Her face was pale – her last week in Europe, she had explained in a rushing voice, had been filled with rainy days – and across this paleness was spread a sheet of straight dark hair, a strand of which he wrapped around his finger and tasted on his tongue. “You’re home,” he said to her at the airport, and now, feeling shy and happy, he said it again – “You’re home” – and again heard her muffled yes, and felt her mouth opening on his.
Once, years ago, in the first flush of his first marriage, Sheila had locked her legs around him, her short muscular volleyball-player’s legs encircling his naked body, and he had felt one of his ribs give way. The pain had been sudden and hideous. He had gone the next day to the Winnipeg clinic to be X-rayed and was told he had a hairline fracture. Nothing much could be done. He was given a packet of painkillers and told to take it easy for a few weeks. The rib cage was exceedingly fragile, the X-ray technician said – you could break a rib just coughing or laughing too hard.
Sheila had not reacted with commiseration or guilt, not Sheila. No, she had crowed in a kind of mirthful triumph, had bitten her lower lip, teased him, made sly jokes about Adam’s rib, about the general frailty of men. He had held himself carefully away from her, feeling himself grow stiff and vulnerable. It had lasted for days, months. It became a habit.
“Our bodies are made of Stardust,” said Tom’s good friend Jeff Waring, who is a physicist by profession. This was at a dinner party a year or so ago at the Warings’ long polished table, lit on this particular night by a circle of thick blue candles. The assembled guests had been charmed but skeptical. “It’s true,” Jeff persisted. “Our atoms are part of the Big Bang, our blood, our bones, all of us, just cosmic matter. Stardust.”
“Fay, Fay,” Tom said into the darkness of Fay McLeod’s hair, and felt his head fill up with images of shooting meteors and white light.
THAT FIRST DAY they slept and woke. Toward the end of the afternoon he got out of bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen, bringing back twin glasses of orange juice and handing one to her with both his hands.
“This is,” she said, lying back on the pillow and sipping, “all very strange.”
Strange, yes. He felt filled to the brim, yet starved.
He loved her long thin flexed arms, their rangy look of bareness against the blue blanket, but still he searched her body, wanting to guard some of his early apprehension, wanting to hoard it. Why? As a reference point or because he needed to store it up against some future disappointment? He sat down on the side of the bed as if to displace the strangeness with the volume of his body. “Maybe we should do something ordinary,” he said.
She smiled. The smile was tender, shy, full of trust. “What do you ordinarily do about this time of day?” she asked.
“Usually,” he told her, “I have a shower and then I walk over to the A & W on Osborne and have a burger.”
“Let’s go, then,” she said, but continued to lie in bed watching him.
“Or we could go somewhere more … more” – he tried to find the right word – “more celebratory.”
“The A & W sounds just right. I mean, it’s your place, after all.”
“I’m afraid it is.” Stop staring, he said to himself.
“Then that’s where we’ll go.”
“I’m happy,” he said. The words fell out of his mouth. “I’m completely happy from head to foot. Even my toenails are happy.”
“I don’t even know what your feet look like,” Fay said in a tone of wonderment. “Or if you smoke or not.”
He held up a foot for inspection. “And I had my last cigarette in 1979.”
“When do you go to work? At the radio station.”
“Midnight.”
“Do you have to go tonight?”
“I’m off Fridays and Saturdays. I don’t have to be there till midnight Sunday.”
“Amazing.”
“What’s amazing?”
“The way your life is arranged. Upside down.”
“In a way.”
“And now it’s …?”
“Four o’clock. In the afternoon. A beautiful Friday afternoon.”
“I’m still confused with time. The time change, and” – she gestured with her arm, taking in the bed, the room – “all this.”
“I know,” he said.
“What are we going to do?”
“You mean right now? This minute?”
“No, I mean, what are we going to do?”
“I want” – he hesitated and forced himself to put both feet squarely on the floor – “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
The balance of air in the room seemed monumentally disturbed, as though he had driven it out with the wedge of his voice. A fly buzzed, surely not the same fly he had heard earlier, though perhaps it was. He stared away from her, at the half-open window, the shady blue rectangle of light, and waited, suddenly fearful.
“That’s what I want, too,” Fay said.
“THREE!” FAY SAID, exclaimed, cried. Her eyes were wild.
“I knew it would be a shock.”
“Three.” She said it again, slowly, and lowered her hamburger to her plate. Her hand groped for her glass of root beer. “Three.”
“I thought it over carefully,” Tom said, “and I felt it was better if I told you before anyone else did. Because lots of people know. I mean, I haven’t made a secret of it, not that I could in a city this size, even if I’d wanted to – ”
“I’m just so …” She stared at him intently across the table.
“I know, I know.”
“It’s such a lot to take in. A lot. Three!”
“There’re times when I can hardly believe it myself,” Tom said. “I look in the mirror and think, How did it happen?”
“How did it happen?”
“I don’t know.” He wondered how much to say. That there was something in him not understood. Should he bring up the twenty-seven mothers? A marriage counselor had once suggested his troubles dated from that time, that some kind of psychic confusion concerning women had been engendered. “When I want to be especially kind to myself,” he told Fay, “I say I’ve had a string of bad luck.”
“How long” – she paused for an instant, her expression rapt – “did these marriages last?”
“Four years the first time.” He paused and drew a deep breath. “Then two years. Then four years again.”
“Oh.” She said this wi
th a little cry.
“I wish to hell I didn’t have to tell you all this. I’m not proud of it, God knows.”
“It’s all right, you have to tell me. I mean, I have to know.”
“What I mean is, I wish I didn’t have to tell you today, right away like this.”
“I have to know.”
“You look – stricken. Christ, I don’t blame you.”
“Two would be almost easy, but three – ”
“I know, I know. What can I do?”
“Just let me sit here and grieve for a minute.”
“I’m forty years old,” Tom said, and reached for her hand. “You must have known I’d have some history.”
“Of course, of course.” She was moaning faintly. “Of course I knew that.”
“I’ve told you the worst.”
She looked up, bending her straw in half. “Are there any children?”
“No.”
“I don’t know what to say.” She said this with a sob, her voice bending against itself.
“For what it’s worth,” Tom told her carefully, “I was always faithful. While I was married, I mean. One hundred percent faithful. And I didn’t…”
“What? You didn’t what? Tell me.”
He was overcome by the crimped angles of her face. “I didn’t… go in for wife beating or verbal abuse or anything like that.”
“What was it, then?” She grasped the edge of the table. “What happened?”
He picked his words carefully. “I’m not especially good at psyching these things out, but I think that for some reason, I was always meeting unhappy women. Maybe I was even drawn to them.”
She thought about this for what seemed like several minutes, and he began to think the silence would never end. But then she sat back suddenly in the chair, as though accommodating her body to its molded form, took a deep breath, and asked, “What were their names?”
“Sheila. Clair. And Suzanne.” Like stones dropped from a great height.
“In that order?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, absorbing, taking it in. The space between them seemed distorted by wave on wave of shy courtesy. “I suppose,” she asked at last, “that you must have loved them?”
He had feared this question. “I did,” he said, “yes.”
“Do you still see them?”
“Not Clair, but the others occasionally.”
“I see.” Then, again, “I see.” That clamoring I see.
A phrase flew into his head, a phrase he had never heard spoken aloud. Abide with me, abide with me. Where had it come from, this biblical imprecation? No, it was a hymn.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked them, leaning over their table. “Coffee?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
He felt Fay’s fingers tap a message on his wrist, and then she spoke it aloud. “I’ll never leave you,” she said.
LATER SHE SAID: “I have my history, too.”
It shocked him, how unprepared he was for this. “Of course,” he managed to say.
“There have been,” she told him, “a few serious love affairs.”
He said nothing, nothing.
“About half a dozen in all.”
If only he could put a finger to her lips.
She went on, fully articulating, as though she were reciting a piece she had learned from memory. “I’ve lived with three different men. For quite long periods of time.”
He wondered what his face looked like.
“Twice,” she said, “it came fairly close to marriage.”
“But didn’t.”
“No.”
“What happened? Not that I’ve any right to – ”
“But you do,” she said. “You have every right. I’m not sure, though, what happened. My brother, Clyde, says I’m afraid of committing myself. That’s his theory, anyway.”
He leaned over and smoothed her hair, and then the side of her face.
“Or else,” she went on, “it’s the curse of our generation, our needy, greedy independence. But probably – this is my theory – it’s because of my parents.”
He felt his eyebrows go up. Why?
“Their – what do you call it? – their example. They’ve been married, happily married, for forty years. Next month is their fortieth wedding anniversary. When I think of it, forty years! We’re having a big surprise party for them. You’re invited. I invite you.”
“I accept.”
“You’d think, growing up in a family like that, I’d be filled with confidence, you’d think I’d be willing to gamble on the idea of marriage. But it hasn’t worked out that way. It’s made me, I don’t know, just terribly, terribly careful. It’s like – ”
“Like what?”
“Like a spell. It’s cast a kind of paralyzing spell over me.”
“And now?”
“And now,” she said solemnly – how he loved her for her solemnity, her mouth going into a straight thoughtful line – “now, suddenly, the spell is broken.”
TOM LOVES RADIO, its buoyancy, its immediacy and verve, but he wonders sometimes, and worries, what it’s done to his brain cells. All those years of radioland patter and chatter. Shooting from the lip instead of the cortex. Inanity. The fear of dead air. Microphones make people cocky, and even the mellowness that comes on late in the night is probably just one more form of brain death. Whatever comes out of those deep-night, annular, cooing mouths is mellifluous. Spin it out, pour it, spill it, give us that old sweet back-of-the-throat butterscotch, coming on cool, sweet, and clear. Fill us up, empty us out, lay it on us.
And years of pop music. Hey baby. I wanna hold your haaaand. You set me on fire, on fi-yah.
But that’s how he feels. Oh, Christ, will he really go down to death with a few measures of Mellencamp crooning in his ears? Maybe, maybe he will. And maybe this is the ultimate truth. Because he is on fire. On fi-yah! He’s over the rainbow. On top of the world. He’s rockin’ along. Burning, burning in a sea of love. Burning up with love.
“I LOVE YOU, FAY.”
He says this to her every day, several times a day. When he wakes up in the morning, before he goes off to the studio at night. He says it on the phone. He says it with his hand, his body. He says it with flowers (twice). He says it over tables, over coffee cups and dishes of ice cream, over glasses of wine, over the bed sheets, between their kisses, over her naked body, her breasts, her long curved hips, into her ear, into the warm, starry September night he says, “I love you, Fay.”
∼ CHAPTER 25 ∼
“It”
“I LOVE HIM,” FAY CONFIDES TO HER MOTHER AND FATHER A FEW days after getting home. “I really do love him.”
The three of them are sitting on the screened porch at the side of the Ash Avenue house, drinking iced tea and cooling off after a record hot day.
“I didn’t expect this to happen,” Fay tells them. “I’m really surprised, to tell the truth. But this is it. It. What people mean, I suppose, when they say it. Oh, I know what you’re thinking – here she goes again, another major fling. But it’s not that. Well, it is, and it isn’t. I can’t tell you how idiotic I feel, a great big overgrown schoolgirl talking about being in love. Limp with love. I have to laugh at myself. Oh, I’m perfectly sane and healthy, but it’s, well, affecting me. I’m jittery, just look at my hand shaking. I’ve lost three pounds. I seem to be hyper and at the same time peaceful, almost sleepy. I went to work today and just sat in my office and looked at the walls. Dreaming. I haven’t even opened my mail. Or my slides, the ones I brought back from Europe. Onion thinks I have a case of extended jet lag, she’s advised me not to do anything rash until I’ve got myself under control, whatever that means. Honestly, I’m a goof. And the funny part is, I have no idea why, what exactly it is about him. About Tom. But I knew right away. Well, almost right away. He’s … he’s – I trust him, that’s part of it. When you know him better, when you know what he’s like, you’ll understand. Oh, I don??
?t know what to say, I’m just happy, happy.”
“HOW ON EARTH did you and Tom Avery get together?” is the question people ask Fay.
She’s obliged to produce the low-art time capsule in which she arrived some weeks ago at her nephew’s birthday party, balloons, cake, and ice cream, the whole thing, and how Tom Avery happened to be there to pick up his godchild, Gary Waring, yes, Gary Waring, Jenny Waring’s little boy, and, well, after the party was over, he offered her a lift home, only he didn’t have a car, it was like a musical comedy in a way, and so they walked home, he actually lives right across the street, yes, an apartment on Grosvenor, he’s lived there about two years, only for some crazy reason they’ve never bumped into each other before, and now –
SHE LOVES to lie next to him with her hand reading the back of his head, his heavy, sleepy, substantial head, pushing her palm against the taper of his hair. Her own hands at these moments seem detached from her body, not Fay McLeod’s hands at all, but hands belonging to a woman in love, any woman. They might be any couple, too, any lucky couple who happened to come together and now hold a privileged but hackneyed citizenship in each other’s lives.
She loves to see him captured in the midst of his own pursuits, his habits, his pocket diary inked in with appointments – and his possessions, his toothbrush, his springy shoelaces and the zipper of his jacket. The spaces of his profoundly personal moments offer themselves up, and all these unguarded offerings are rounded and roughened by love.
But Fay’s noticed something she’s never noticed before. That love is not, anywhere, taken seriously. It’s not respected. It’s the one thing in the world everyone wants – she’s convinced of that – but for some reason people are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and foolish.
Work is important. Living arrangements are important. Wars and good sex and race relations and the environment are important, and so are health and illness. Even minor shifts of faith or political intention are given a weight that is not accorded love. We turn our heads and pretend it’s not there, the thunderous passions that enter a life and alter its course. Love belongs in an amateur operetta, on the inside of a jokey greeting card, or in the annals of an old-fashioned poetry society. Moon and June and spoon and soon. September and remember. Lord Byron, Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s womanish, it’s embarrassing, something to jeer at, something for jerks. Just a love story, people say about a book they happen to be reading, to be caught reading. They smirk or roll their eyes at the mention of love. They wink and nudge. Lovebirds. Lovesick. Lovey-dovey. They think of it as something childish and temporary, and its furniture – its language, its kisses, its fevers and transports – are evidence of a profound frivolity. It’s possible to speak ironically about romance, but no adult with any sense talks about love’s richness and transcendence, that it actually happens, that it’s happening right now, in the last years of our long, hard, lean, bitter, and promiscuous century. Even here it’s happening, in this flat, midcontinental city with its half million people and its traffic and weather and asphalt parking lots and languishing flower borders and yellow-leafed trees – right here, the miracle of it.