And then confusion receded. She found herself paralyzed with terror, but also wonder. She was alive. Oxygen flowed through the gills of her body. The relief of it, to be standing on her own feet, alive.
This sensation was close to what she experienced immediately after telling Tom Avery that it was impossible for them to go on. That it was over. That it wasn’t going to work out. A sense of salvation was what she felt. Profound relief. A narrow escape.
THE PROBLEM with stories of romance is that lovers are always shown in isolation: two individuals made suddenly mythic by the size of their ardor, an ardor that is declared to be secretive or else incomprehensible to the rest of the wide buzzing world. And the moment love is seized upon and named, the lovers are magically released from a need for dentists, for tax advisers, for shoe salesmen, for anyone who stands outside their immediate sphere of passion.
Perhaps it is even a subtle form of ostracism. Fay has noticed how love in old-fashioned novels and modern films tends to be shown as a rarefied blessing, accompanied usually by perfect health, full employment, closets full of clothes, and, most particularly, a conspicuous absence of other people. She wonders why it is that lovers in books are cast adrift – at candlelit tables set for two, in the streets of alien cities, wandering hand-in-hand on abandoned beaches – where they are free to stew in their unnatural seclusion, removed from human interference or even human needs. Their families, their friends, even their work and their separate histories pale beside their rapture, which lies outside of life, not within it. The pains and contrivances of fictitious lovers belong only to themselves, an enclosed circle, a symmetry of limbs and matched yearning, a snug, rounded universe with its own laws.
But none of this is true. The world does not retreat. It presses even closer, offering relics of failure, pointing to omens, making dire predictions, whispering warnings. Which was why Fay said what she did to Tom Avery on the telephone: that things weren’t going to work out after all.
FAY HAS SEEN people at funeral receptions throw back their heads and laugh. At one time she found this kind of behavior shocking, but no longer. The wiring of a human brain is, after all, complex. There’s no telling how people will react to the unexpected.
When she told her brother, Clyde, that she and Tom Avery were not going to be married, that the wedding was canceled, he said: “Jesus Christ!” He was breathing hard. “You can’t d-d-d-o this, Fay. P-p-postponing is one thing, but c-c-c-canceling! You just can’t. Whose idea is this, anyway, yours or his?” He knocked a fist against his forehead. His face was red and ridged. “Oh, my g-g-good God, it’s what I’ve always said, you’re afraid to t-t-take a chance. We all t-t-take a chance. That’s what it means, getting m-m-married. I only knew Sonya s-s-six months. I don’t know how I’m going to t-t-tell her – Sonya, I mean. She’ll go c-c-crazy when she hears about this.”
“Listen, Fay,” Sonya said. “If you’ve really got serious doubts about this man, now’s the time to call a halt. Right now. Not that we don’t all have doubts. I remember the day before Clyde and I got married, I looked in my bedroom mirror and I said, ‘Holy matrimony, I’m about to give myself in holy matrimony.’ Just those two words, they scared me to death. It’s true you haven’t known Tom that long. I liked him, though, right from that first day at the birthday party. But it’s you, you’re the one, you’ve got to trust him completely, and I mean completely. This is your life, and don’t let Clyde get to you.”
“Oh, Fay,” Bibbi said. Her beautiful soft mouth was wide open. “Are you sure this is what you want? You’ve been right in the middle of all this – all this awful sadness. But it doesn’t have to be that way with you and Tom – what I mean is, everyone makes their own arrangements, and we can’t know how other people make theirs tick along, if you see what I mean. We can’t see into their lives, into their heads. I wish I could see into your head. I wish I could help you.”
“What a mess,” Iris said. “Christ. A lot of mess and fuss and embarrassment and grief, but don’t worry. You know how you feel and that’s what matters. Let me know what I can do. Where’s the guest list? I’ll start phoning. And I’d better get to the caterer’s fast.”
“Oh, boy,” Beverly Miles said, “this is bad, bad news. But you know what I honestly think? I think you’ve got a major case of the wedding jitters, so, listen, why don’t you just give Tom a call and tell him you need to talk this over, tell him you got scared, it happens, but now it’s okay.”
“Hmmm,” Muriel Brewmaster said, “I guess I did have some doubts right from the first. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but I wondered if you weren’t rushing things a bit, and I kept thinking to myself, a disc jockey, Fay’s going to marry a disc jockey. I couldn’t get over it. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a disc jockey, but. And his track record, marriagewise, that’s another thing.”
“Oh, Fay,” Hannah Webb said. “I can’t bear this, I think I’m going to cry, everything seemed so perfect, you were glowing, just glowing. We were going to have the loveliest little champagne reception for the two of you, the whole staff, and the board, too, a surprise, it was all planned, and now – ”
“Oh, my dear,” Richard McLeod said over the telephone. “I think you need to give yourself some time. Go away for a couple of days and give yourself a break, the two of you. These last few weeks – you can’t possibly be thinking straight. Of course, I hold myself responsible, how can I not? My dear, dear child. No, I haven’t forgotten about his three unfortunate marriages, but I thought you had accepted that as a given, that you’d reached some kind of an accommodation. You were certain. ‘This is it,’ you said. Do you remember? We were sitting on the porch drinking iced tea. Oh, it seems a million years ago, but I remember how happy you looked, radiant.”
“This is a terribly serious decision,” Peggy McLeod said, rising and putting her arms around Fay, who was astonished to see her mother so composed, “but only you can know what’s right.” Her voice was unexpectedly firm.
Fay allowed her own rangy body to be enclosed by her mother’s neat little arms. “It’s bound to be hurtful for you both,” she went on, “but it’s not the first time it’s happened in the history of the world, and people do recover. They go on. There, there, love, cry your heart out if you want to, and then we’ll sit down and make a list of what needs doing.”
“I saw this coming,” Tom said to her over the telephone, coldly, dully, from a great distance. “I knew it was coming.”
“I’M SO SORRY,” she’d said into the silence. “I’m so sorry.”
The echo drummed in her head for days. A woman being sorry. A sorry woman. What does it mean to be sorry? Is being sorry a kind of pocket in which a hollow promise is placed, a promise to make amends, to imagine that some sort of brutal realignment might take place?
“I’ll look after everything,” she told him, and even to her ears this sounded like a dishonorable offering.
And there were things to be done. The undoing of arrangements, the phone calls to be made, the notes to be written, the explanations, the confessions of failure and doubt, the unknotting of recent time – all this busyness kept her breathing, and she was grateful, particularly after her first dazed sensation of relief left her.
She was astonished at what there was to do, so many details, so many chiming voices to be listened to and answered. The rhythms of the house rolled over like a kind of weather. Attention had to be paid to practical hour-by-hour demands, twenty-four hours a day, every day a matter of schedules and priorities, every night a sorry box where she lies down and grieves.
It’s at night that she thinks about Tom. He seems at times to be in the bedroom with her, upstairs in the guest bedroom of her mother’s house, pushing away the darkness with his body. An archaic phrase from the wedding service comes to her: with my body I thee worship. It is a phrase that has gone out of fashion; she hasn’t heard it for years, but now it presses close against her, brushing her lips, disturbing, but also comforting.
/> “WELL, THAT’S IT, I think,” Peggy McLeod said. “I think we’ve contacted everyone.”
“What about Onion?” Fay asked. “We still haven’t heard from Onion.”
“I left two or three messages at the hospital. I’m sure they’ve been passed on to her.”
“It seems funny she hasn’t phoned.”
“She’s distracted, poor lamb, you know that.” She said this in a mild shrugging manner that Fay found startling.
She looked up. “Lamb?” she said. “I never think of Onion as a lamb.”
“Oh, but that’s just what she is.”
It was true, Fay thought – Onion, who loved her so sternly, so singularly, asked nothing of her beyond the most simple attachment. Love without indulgence, that rare thing, and her mother had recognized it. A lamb, yes.
In the last few days her mother has regathered some of her old strength. She is sleeping better and eating normally, and is on the phone daily to Muriel Brewmaster and her other friends; yesterday she slipped out for an hour to go to the hairdresser’s, driving herself there in her Fiesta, and when she came home she wrote a reminder to herself to have the left-rear tire checked.
Furthermore, she has taken on herself the awkward and tedious job of returning Fay and Tom’s wedding gifts, a task that she performs with the unstudied competence that has made her famous among her friends – even though the rituals of dismantling a marriage ceremony are new to her.
All this surprises Fay. She hadn’t expected anything like this. And certainly not so soon.
∼ CHAPTER 34 ∼
Practicing to Die
HE PACKED HIS THINGS QUICKLY. TEN MINUTES WAS ALL IT TOOK – shirts, sweaters, socks, underwear, shoes.
All these things made a very small pile. His suitcase was in Fay’s hall closet, parked there. He opened it brutally on the bedroom floor and filled it. Belts, ties, jackets, his razor. He reminded himself to keep breathing, to draw out each separate exhalation as long as possible, so that the air in his chest burned and blew as though there were a separate creature trapped there. This rough breathy music drove a wedge through his bewilderment. His head felt torn with fever; he imagined a spray of cartoon lightning bolts breaking through his hair and entering the stratosphere.
What else? He glanced around the bedroom and saw the clock radio. Yes or no? He touched it with the flat of his hand and remembered Fay’s arm in the early morning, reaching out blindly for the dream bar, an extra ten minutes of sleep. The thought made the pulse in his throat jump like a gun. No. He’d leave the clock radio where it was. Its luminous digital mechanism sickened him, that terrible greenish grin turning over minute by minute.
He stripped the bed. He did this to hurt her, yanking back the blankets, ripping off the sheets and carrying them into the little laundry room, where he squashed them into the washer and banged down the lid.
He left a lamp burning in the bedroom. Its yellow glare fell across the wide bare mattress.
Then he picked up his suitcase and left, twisting the key from his ring and pushing it under the door.
He crossed the street, kicking through lightly falling snow. In the distance he could hear the whooping of an ambulance and the other city sounds of traffic and channeled wind. The door of his old apartment building opened easily into a cubicle of dusty warmth, and he remembered that the winter before there’d been a problem about winos sleeping in the foyer on cold nights. Well, why not? What was the harm? A refuge. He found his key in his pocket, and the thought came to him: so this is why I kept the lease up, for this.
His old rooms were silent, comfortless, chilly. Maybe they had always been chilly, he couldn’t remember. He turned up the thermostat and ducked his head into the kitchen, not sure what he expected to find there. It was odorless, spruce. For at least a minute he stood in the half-dark living room, observing the shadowy arrangement of furniture. His new furniture – he could smell the newness emanating from the twin sofas, the only fragrance in the room, glue and sizing. Its richness disgusted him as much as its cheapness. At last he went into the bedroom, where he put down his suitcase, and then, with his heavy winter coat still buttoned across his chest, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.
“TOM?” she had said on the telephone. “Don’t hang up. Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t saying anything.”
“What would you like me to say?” Politely.
“I don’t know. Something.”
“I saw this coming. I could have bet money on it.”
“We should …” There was a silence from her end, and then a choking sound.
“We should what?” he asked, bearing down.
“We should at least get together and talk about this. We need to talk this over.”
“Why?”
“Because … we …”
He waited patiently. “Because why?”
“Because … we owe it to each other.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just for a few minutes. We’d feel better, both of us.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Please, Tom. I could come over right now. We could sit down and – ”
“No.”
“I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“I’m going to hang up now, Fay.”
“Tom, wait – ”
“Right now.”
“I just want you to understand – ”
“Good-bye.”
“LOOK, TOM,” Ted Woloschuk said on Sunday night, or rather four o’clock on Monday morning, after “Niteline” went off the air. “How ’bout giving me a minute or two before you head off home. I just want to say I appreciate you telling me what you did before airtime, for letting me know what’s happened and all. It’s plain as anything that you’re going through a real bad time. I don’t know how you did it tonight, carrying on with the show. You did great. It was a great show. This is just, just a terrible thing. All your plans, everything, down the drain. Ahhhh! I always try to be the optimist, sometimes it’s hard, but I try, and what I want to say is – I’ve been turning this over in my head all night long – I want to say to you that maybe it’s for the best. Who knows, maybe some things aren’t meant to be, maybe they aren’t supposed to work out, if you know what I mean. Better to find out now than, say, two, three years down the road, eh? You know what folks say about rushing into things, it’s easy enough tying the knot but not so easy getting it untied. Well, you know that. But listen, Tom, you can’t let this get to you. Because it can. It can get a person depressed. People can stew about things and get themselves into real trouble. Maeve and me, we’re worried sick right now about our boy Patrick, he’s been going out with a particular girl, all last spring and summer, right up to the end of October, and all of a sudden it comes to nothing, we don’t know the whole scoop, he won’t say much, he’s always been a quiet kind of kid, but ever since it happened he comes home for supper and just lays around the house like he’s sick. It’s like he hasn’t got any energy in him anymore, and here’s a bright young kid with his whole future ahead of him. We don’t know what to do. Maeve wanted to phone up this girl, her name is Joan, she’s a real nice girl, and smart as a whip. Maeve thought she could maybe talk to her, try to tell her how serious and bad this is for Patrick, but we can’t do that, that would be like stepping in where we’ve got no business, it’s like our hands are tied. We even thought of maybe phoning one of those crisis lines. Maeve’s going crazy with worry. Patrick just lays there on the couch, not saying a word to anyone, just staring at the TV but not seeing a thing. It’s like he’s practicing to die, Maeve says.”
IT’S SAID THAT dreams come out of a darker, windier place than we like to acknowledge.
One night, soon after Fay’s phone call, Tom dreams he’s in a strange pink room with soft fleshlike walls. There are no windows or doors, just four pale trembling walls that heave in and out, mimicking his own breathing body. After a while the
floor, too, begins to soften and heave, and he tries hard to keep his balance, but can’t. He scrambles like a soft-shoe artist to stay upright, to avoid having to touch the undulating surfaces. As if to explain his clumsiness, he points to his bare feet – for some reason he has misplaced his shoes and socks – and insists, in a stagy, grossly amplified radio voice, that none of this is his fault, that he didn’t come here by choice.
In the morning he wakes late with a dry mouth. He stumbles into the bathroom and stands before the mirror, speaking to his dwindled self. So, he says in a rough voice, what did you expect?
His face looks like a chestnut’s split casing. Avid. Unhealthy.
The stickiness of pop lyrics has led him astray. Falling in love. Falling. Fallen. (Grow up.)
He thinks about going for a walk and glances out the bathroom window. The morning is beautiful, cold, still. Snow covers Grosvenor Avenue, a perfect fresh wafer of white extending as far as he can see, wonderfully masking the neighborhood trees and hedges and roofs. Overhead the sky is a hard flat blue. He remembers a local artist he interviewed on the show a couple of years back who complained that she had a tough time selling her prairie landscapes. It seemed people wanted a few fluffy clouds in their skies. They wanted gradations of color, subtlety. They thought she was faking it with her clear hard-blue paint.
He wonders whatever happened to his downstairs neighbor, Mr. Duff – Mr. Duff with his soft meaty gums and his chestful of phlegm.
He decides, finally, against going for a walk. He remembers that he’s left his good outdoor boots in Fay’s apartment; he has another, older pair, but he’s not sure where they are – probably in the back of his hall closet covered with dust balls. He’ll creep back into bed instead, pull up the covers.
But he’s frightened of falling back into his dream again, those pink pulsing corrosive walls.
JEFF WARING phones Tom and says in a voice that is stiff with kindness and tact: “Tom? Jeff here. Just wanted to touch base. We also wanted to let you know we were, uh, notified. About your plans. The change of plans, I should say. Fay’s sister phoned us, at least I think it was her sister. Jen and I got to thinking, well, we just hope things work out. One way or another. Not a bad idea, rethinking the situation. More people should do it, that’s what Jen says, before they rush into things. Jen says to tell you she’ll give you a call in a couple of days, see if we can get together, maybe take in a hockey game on the weekend. How does that sound?”