Someone sneezes. Someone else struggles to remove a jacket. The room is terribly hot.
“In other words,” Fay says, signaling to Art Frayne for the next set of slides (the gorgeous Danish and German and Italian mermaids), “in other words, folk credulity may well be a conditioned response. A society that is open to symbolic forms continues to welcome and embrace whatever mysteries are offered.”
She has convinced herself that this is true.
“Believers,” she says in a voice which has now steadied itself, “develop an aptitude for belief, a willed innocence which becomes part and parcel of the folk system. Whereas disbelievers” – and she raises an arm in a broad gesture that encircles the audience and includes herself – “disbelievers, those without a mythic tradition, are unable to abandon rationality. They demand evidence. They expect their proofs to accord with the contemporary notion of reality, and when this test fails, as it will inevitably fail, they are rendered utterly incapable of an act of belief.”
“WHO EXACTLY ATTENDS these Friday-afternoon lectures?” Tom had asked her. He was standing in Fay’s kitchen, pulling the tab on a can of frozen orange juice.
“Well, the staff goes, of course. They’re more or less expected to be there. And theoretically the talks are open to the public.”
“Theoretically?”
“There’s usually a little notice in the paper. But, in fact, only a handful of people ever show up. The subjects are usually pretty esoteric.”
“But anyone can come?”
“Well, yes.”
“Maybe I should come. To listen to your lecture, I mean. I’m not doing anything Friday afternoon.”
She could hear him straining for nonchalance. “Oh, you’d hate it, Tom.” She handed him a jug for the juice.
“Would I?”
“It’ll be awfully dry.”
“Really? I might learn something.”
“You’d be bored to death. Believe me.”
Gently, calmly, she had discouraged him from coming. For one thing – and she finds this difficult to formulate, even to herself – it worries her that he should feel an obligation to penetrate the narrowness of her world. It was distressing to her, the thought of him consigned to the edge of all that arcane folklore vocabulary and theoretical morass, most of it incomprehensible. It comforts her, on the other hand, to see him captured by his own pursuits. He has his solidly assimilated world, after all – music, radio, that wide-flung audience – and she loves to think of him standing at its center, sure of where he is.
But there’s something else, too, that worries her – which is the thought that she might be put in the position of having to introduce him to Peter Knightly. She admitted to herself that she wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
NEVERTHELESS it happened, as it was bound to happen.
It happened at seven o’clock on a cold windless Sunday evening when Fay and Tom were standing on Notre Dame Avenue, lining up for tickets for the new Woody Allen movie. Directly ahead of them in line were Peter Knightly and Fritzi Sweet.
“Why, Fay,” Peter said by way of greeting.
“Peter,” she said. “And Fritzi. How nice to see you again.” Then, “Peter, I don’t think you know Tom Avery.”
“How do you do,” Tom said. His upbeat radio voice. Chocolatey. The two men shook hands, and it maddened Fay that Peter should extend his arm in such a lean and rangy and proprietorial manner, as if he were the elected chairman of a hastily assembled committee, though she knew, in fact, that he was innocent of any such notion.
“And this is Fritzi Sweet,” Peter said.
“We’ve met,” said Tom. “Two or three times.”
“Hello,” said Fritzi, smiling widely at both Fay and Tom. “Nice to run into you.” Her large happy teeth gleamed in the blue light. Her hand was tucked into Peter’s overcoat pocket.
The movie was only mildly funny. Tom, who normally loved Woody Allen, sat silent through most of it, and Fay noticed that for the first three-quarters of the film he leaned stiffly away from her.
At last she could bear it no longer. She turned in the dark and put her hand up to his cheek. Uttering an abrupt breathy sound and shifting his body, he grasped her fingers and moved them quickly to his lips, touching them with the imprint of a kiss. Then he took her middle finger and placed it between his front teeth, biting down gently on it. Gently.
A FEW DAYS AGO Fay’s mother, Peggy McLeod, phoned and invited Fay and Tom for dinner on Monday might. “Just leftovers,” she said. “Potluck. Monday-night fare. But do come. We haven’t seen you since the party. It’ll be just the four of us. We’ll have a chance to catch up on your wedding plans.”
But late on Monday afternoon she phoned Fay at work and said, “Listen, dear, I’m afraid it’s not going to work out tonight. For dinner, I mean. I’m so sorry, Fay. Something’s come up. I hope you’ll explain to Tom. Oh, no, nothing serious, just one of those things. Look, we’ll make it another time. That’s a promise. No, nothing’s the matter. It’s just – well, you know how things get. It’s nothing.”
“I CAN’T HELP IT,” Fay said to Tom the next morning. “I’m worried about them.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Tom said. “A headache. A cold. Or maybe she was just feeling too tired to knock a meal together.”
They were lying together in bed, side by side, facing each other. It was seven o’clock. Tom reached out and touched her hair, then moved his lips down between her breasts.
“You don’t realize,” she said carefully, talking into the crown of his head, “how unlike my mother it is to cancel anything.”
“No, I don’t realize.” His voice was muffled. His soft lips buzzed her sternum. She felt the warm tip of his tongue.
Had she hurt him, she wondered, reminding him how recently he had entered her life and how much he had yet to learn? She put her arms around him and said, “It’s heaven to wake up next to you this way. I want to go on waking up like this forever.”
“We’ll have white hair.” He raised himself on his elbows and looked at her. “Or maybe no hair. And our bones will creak.”
“I won’t mind if you don’t mind.”
“We’ll be on salt-free diets.”
“And vitamin-B injections,” Fay said. “Oh Lord.”
“But we’ll still – ” He was fitting himself between her legs.
She moved in closer. Her body felt bent into the shape of a smile.
“And, who knows,” he said, “maybe our children will decide to throw us a big surprise party.”
Why had he said that? Why? She rocked him in her arms, forcing herself against his body, trying to push away whatever it was that was nudging at her thoughts and interfering with her happiness.
“DADDY,” SHE HAD SAID, seeing her father across Sonya and Clyde’s blue-and-green quilt.
She hadn’t called him that for years. Probably not since she was twelve years old.
He had looked into her eyes, and a wavelet of thought struck her – that a man discovered weeping in the corner of a bedroom ought, out of shame or embarrassment, to turn his head aside, or at least cover his face. But he wasn’t doing either of those things.
The table lamp picked up the rounded shine of his tears. Tears – they stood out like tears in a wood engraving. And he looked smaller than he really was, shrunken against the upholstery of the armchair, against the pale striping of the curtains.
“What is it?” Her voice wobbled. She felt sick. She glanced at the flat field of the water bed and experienced a strong desire to lie down on top of all that softness, to close her eyes and drift into sleep.
Then he did something that tore her heart. He lifted his two hands, lifted them tentatively into the air, and gestured blindly in the direction of his eyes. He gave his head a single violent shake and drew in his breath sharply. In that sudden gasp she read the sum of his bewilderment.
So. Sonya had been right, after all. The shock of surprise had been too much. She remembered So
nya’s exact words. That surprise can be an act of aggression. They should have listened to her, wise Sonya.
She approached him cautiously, saying to herself: I must be careful. She sat on the edge of the bed, just inches away from him, and then he did finally turn away, covering his face with his hands. She heard him gasp again, but this time it was more of a sob. He squeezed his eyes shut and groped in his pocket for a handkerchief.
A fresh linen handkerchief. It was an eccentricity in this day and age for a man to carry a linen handkerchief, but he preferred them. Every day he took a fresh handkerchief from his bureau drawer, a handkerchief ironed and folded flat by his wife of forty years.
“We should have told you,” Fay said. She reached for his hand but felt suddenly afraid, as though his flesh might explode or disintegrate at her touch. “We shouldn’t have surprised you like this.”
He held the handkerchief over his eyes and forehead, pressing.
“Are you feeling sick?” Fay asked after a while, and he shook his head emphatically, a wide arc of denial, no, no. Not sick.
If only he’d look at her. “What, then?” she asked at last.
It took him another minute to compose himself, but even then the words came out brokenly. “I can’t,” he said, “I can’t go on.”
BUT HE had gone on.
He shook himself to attention, shoulders back, head up, then blew his nose loudly, that familiar, fatherly sound. He stood abruptly, ran his hands quickly down the sides of his suit jacket, smoothing the cloth. His hair he smoothed, too, rubbing his palms twice across the back of his scalp. He bent over to meet his body in the bedroom mirror and pulled his tie straight.
“Ready?” he said to Fay. The firmness of his tone, and the iciness, stunned her into silence.
She led the way, down both flights of stairs, then through the narrow hallway and into the living room, where they were instantly engulfed by the sound of recorded music – a full orchestra booming away, something from The King and I. A hundred people were talking all at once and swaying, circling, in the soft light. And Peggy McLeod was coming toward them, looking lovely, looking almost youthful, with a brilliant smile of greeting on her lips, slipping her arm through her husband’s, saying, “We’ve been looking for you everywhere, Richard. I’m not going to let go of you again.”
∼ CHAPTER 30 ∼
What Has Befallen Him
“CONGRATULATIONS,” EVERYONE SAYS TO TOM ABOUT HIS FORTHCOMING marriage to Fay McLeod.
These glad shouts fall like showers of soft rain. “Terrific news, Tom,” or “All the best to you both.” He’s been warmed through and through by the numbers of well-wishers, surprised that so many people in this city seem happy to acknowledge what has befallen him.
But there are a few – maybe half a dozen, all of them men, mostly men of the crony sort, old radio acquaintances, late-night comrades, drinking buddies, Judd Hollander, Russ Conte, Louis Breuer – who make such deeply disturbing comments as, “So, Tom, you’re off for another ride around the track, are you?” Gesturing at his unstable history. Implying that he, Tom Avery, is a trifler, a lightweight in the matter of love, a less-than-serious man. That he’s moving along aboard a sharply drawn arrow, straight into an area of fresh wreckage. Again. Another fuckup. Another failure.
This time, though, it’s going to be different. That’s what he longs to tell Russ and Judd and Louis and the rest of the tribe – but doesn’t. (For one thing, he’s wary of mouthing clichés; for another, he knows his credibility is on the minus side of zero.)
But this time it is different. All around him are providential signs, and like an accountant he’s been keeping track.
The engagement announcement in the newspaper, for example. God, but he loves that square inch of print (loves it more even than the beautifully printed wedding invitations). On the day the announcement came out he walked over to Mickey’s Smoke Shop and bought several copies and clipped the item carefully with Fay’s sewing shears. (He’s a man who’s about to marry a woman who owns a pair of sewing shears.) Two copies of the announcement he sent to his mother in Duck River. Another he mailed to an old school friend, Finn Hoag, who now works for the police force up in Whitehorse; still another went to Ken Baggot in Toronto, who has himself married disastrously, and more than once. He’s even, feeling only moderately foolish, pinned up a copy on the notice board next to the coffee machine down at CHOL. (Have his fellow staff members guessed it was he and not the sentimental Rosalie Summers who put it there? Probably not.) Three additional copies he’s put away for safekeeping in an envelope marked “Engagement Announcement,” and this envelope he’s placed in a leather folio, which also contains his life-insurance policy. One copy he’s had laminated in a print shop down on Vaughan Avenue, and he carries it in his wallet. (One morning not long ago, he opened his wallet and showed it to Fay, who smiled her surprise, and also her somewhat puzzled approval. “Why, Tom,” she said after a pause, the corners of her mouth rising, and then she seemed lost for words.)
Sentimental, yes, he admits it, but there’s more to it than that. The announcement of his and Fay’s forthcoming marriage in a public newspaper seems to him to certify his connection to his fellow citizens. He is no longer the careless blunderer he was. He’s grown up. He’s a thoughtful and prudent human being who takes the ceremonies of his society seriously and demonstrates his seriousness by adhering to certain primary conventions. Yes, absolutely! He is responsible, mature, and committed (Patsy MacArthur’s awful C-word, but never mind). Committed for life.
He loves, too, the wording of the newspaper text, so brief and official in its syntax, yet so resonant with tribal connection. It has the feel of a poem. He knows it by heart, and occasionally these days, when caught off balance or plunged into some small and momentary condition of uncertainty or injury, he feels it thumping at the back of his head like a secondary pulse. “Fay Elizabeth McLeod, daughter of…, and Tom Avery …” He sees these shapely words as evidence of a new rationality.
Before his fellows he’s declared his sober intent. Made a sacred pledge.
TOM HAS BEEN introduced to Peter Knightly. It’s happened; the two men have met each other formally and shaken hands.
He hadn’t even known how much he’d dreaded this meeting, yet when it actually occurred he had surprised himself by remaining cool. A part of his brain had stirred itself to attention and sized up the situation: Peter Knightly: a couple of inches taller than he was himself, thinner in the headbone, bloodless, something knobbly, too, about his upper face, and an inclination to swing his head sideways when he spoke – deferential, or else condescending. “How d’you do,” he’d said to Tom in a genial enough tone. One of those Englishy voices. Soft bushings in the throat.
Two days later Tom ran into him in the Belgian Bakery on Corydon Avenue, buying a loaf of Hovis bread. “Hullo again,” Peter Knightly neighed, and a strained conversation followed, an absurd, hearty discussion about bran muffins, whether they should or should not contain raisins.
A day or two after that Tom was driving down Memorial Avenue and stopped suddenly at a crosswalk. At least twelve cars had jammed on their brakes for a single pedestrian, a long-legged guy in a flapping overcoat. Not Peter Knightly again! Christ! Don’t let him see me, Tom prayed to the windshield, and at that moment Peter Knightly looked up, recognized him, smiled (wanly), and offered a limp salute.
And now – a Saturday morning – again!
There was Tom, in the middle of his weekly run, bumping along eastward across Assiniboine Park, a scarf wrapped loosely over his mouth, and keeping a sharp lookout for the treacherous black ice that forms on the path this time of year. One false step and he’d be down. A lot of joggers quit toward the middle of October because of this ice, taking up indoor pursuits instead, stationary bicycles or rowing machines. The ranks were definitely thinning, the wimps and the stalwarts parting company. Uh-huh! But who was this sprinting toward him this bright morning in the red-and-white Gore-Tex job? God, no.
Picking up his feet like a pro. Rhythmic and easy. A natural. Coming closer and closer. Coming into focus.
“Morning, Tom,” Peter Knightly said as he brushed lightly by.
“Morning,” Tom breathed back. It came out a whisper. Two minutes later, turning onto Wellington Crescent, his brain awash with obscene images, he slipped and fell.
“A BAD SPRAIN,” Dave Neuhaus said. “You want to apply an ice pack periodically to fight the swelling, use an elastic bandage for the first week at least, and keep that ankle elevated every chance you get.”
Ah, but this is heaven, Tom thinks. A Sunday afternoon that stretches endlessly forward and backward.
Dull winter light plays on the window. Outside the snow is drifting down in soft flakes, the first snow of the year, and inside the warm apartment he and Fay are sitting side by side on her corduroy couch, his foot resting comfortably on a pair of pillows that Fay has positioned for him on the coffee table. He feels peaceful. He feels married. Intimacy – Patsy MacArthur’s I-word. So this is intimacy. Good old intimacy.
They’ve been drinking coffee and listening to the radio, a regular Sunday-afternoon music show with a New Age theme, and Tom is attempting to explain to Fay what a vibraphone is. “You know what a marimba is?” he asks her.
“Yes.”
“Well, a vibraphone is a lot like a marimba, only it resonates differently. The valves are motorized, and that’s what gives it its particular buzzy sound.”
“But how big is it? What does it look like?” Her face is decorated by a blaze of late sun that cuts through the window.
He picks up a pencil and draws in the margin of a magazine. She watches closely.
“So that’s a vibraphone?” She pronounces the word slowly, and he can tell she’s committing it to memory. “Vi-bra-phone.”
They live inside different vocabularies, the two of them. This is something he thinks about quite a lot. It’s true their bodies and their temperaments rhyme; witness this Sunday-afternoon peace, this quiet room, music, snow falling outside, warmth within. But the words that come out of their mouths are wildly dissimilar.