Rethinking the situation. A useful phrase. A saving phrase, and he’s someone who needs saving.
He adopts it as his own. “We’re rethinking the situation,” he tells the people who phone, the people at work, the people he runs into. He even says it to himself, eyeballing himself in the mirror. Hi there, buddy, I understand you’re rethinking the situation.
Right.
BIG BRUCE says: “Take a vacation. You ever been across the pond? Now’s the time. The French franc’s weak right now, sterling too. I’d rather head off for the Caribbean myself, one goddamned cathedral’s just like the next one as far as I’m concerned, but it’d do you good to get away, and I mean away. Take a couple of weeks, three weeks, recharge the batteries. Lenny’ll come in and do the show for us, give yourself a break. You’re doing a great job, the ratings are terrific, but this is just a radio show, fella, you don’t have to nail yourself to the cross.”
“Are you okay, Tom?” Liz Chandler asks. “Listen, I don’t want to interfere or anything, there’s nothing worse than someone jumping into someone else’s private matters, but, well, I guess just about everybody knows that the McLeods have split up, Fay’s parents I’m talking about. Marriage! God, it’s scary. Gene and I’ve been married eight years now, and there’ve been plenty of scary times, especially right after Chrissie was born. It was rocky for a while there, maybe you noticed, I felt I was being pulled in three different directions. And listen, don’t worry about the wedding present – it’s a waffle iron, why don’t you just keep it, it might come in useful. I just hope you’re okay, we both do.”
“We were very sorry to hear the news,” said Simon Birrell, and then he said, “These things happen and they seem pretty catastrophic at the time, and then they blow over before you know it.”
Betty Avery phoned and said, “You could have knocked me for a loop. Mike, too, we’re just stumbling around here like a couple a zombies. But then, as I said to Mike, people get cold feet, I know that, and I don’t blame you for a minute, wanting to be careful. I mean, you’ve had some bad luck and you want to be sure what you’re diving into. Give it a few months, take your time. Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t, but just you remember there’re plenty of other gals out there who’re dying to settle down and start a family. How about coming home for a few days, the highway’s pretty good right now, the plows went right through after that snowfall we had. You’ve got some vacation time coming, you could stay right through Christmas, lots of your old friends’ll be back, a few of them, anyways. At least think about it. And listen, don’t waste your time being gloomy, that’s one thing I’ve learned, life’s too darned short to sit around being gloomy and glum.”
Sheila (formerly Sheila Avery, then Sheila Sweet, now back to being Sheila Woodlock) said: “Christ, Tom, you must be rock bottom. Oh, Christ, I know what you’re going through. When Sammy left me for Fritzi I thought I’d – forget it, I didn’t phone to dump a bunch of ancient history on your head, and besides, poor old Sammy’s gone to his reward, anyway. I phoned because I’ve been thinking about you all day, having to go through this … this anguish, not to mention plain old-fashioned embarrassment. You don’t deserve this. You were ripe for things to work out for a change. Maybe they still will, who knows. I gather the McLeods are in a family mess. Well, who isn’t. Would you like me to come by? We could sit and talk. To be honest, I don’t think you should be alone. I mean that. I remember when Sammy left, I needed someone to hang on to. We could sort of hang on to each other, Tom, we’re old hands at that. Anyway, if you change your mind, give me a call. You know me, I’ll do whatever I can.”
Fay said (at the end of a long letter): “I want you to remember, darling Tom, that none of this has anything to do with you – you’re a fine, wonderful, loving man who has given me more happiness than my heart can hold. The problem is with me. I love you dearly – I think you know that – but I can’t make this next step. Other people seem able to do it, but I can’t. I can’t make promises, and for some reason which I don’t understand, I can’t bring myself to accept them, either. Please forgive me and please try to understand.”
DOES HE WANT to understand her? What does it mean to be understood, anyway? To be eaten alive? He remembers a marriage counselor he and Suzanne once visited in their last desperate days, a sharp-jawed, unsmiling woman who laid the blame for his chaotic marital life squarely on his twenty-seven mothers. (His prized infancy, shot down by “understanding.”)
He doesn’t want to walk around for the rest of his life with a damaged air, with parts of him missing or mutilated. On the whole, he thinks, understanding has been highly overrated. He’d rather hang in there with his terrible, fumbled incomprehension.
This is what he thinks as he goes about his Christmas shopping. The downtown stores are filled with bustling, frowning, preoccupied shoppers. They push against him with their shoulders and wrapped parcels, knowing nothing about him, who he is, what he’s feeling. Carols boom through overhead speakers. Joy to the World. A temporary anesthetic. He has a gift list in his hand. He spends lavishly this year, his mother, Mike, his friends, the gang down at the station. He has no idea why. He doesn’t understand himself, he doesn’t understand anything. Understanding is the last thing on his mind.
∼ CHAPTER 35 ∼
Important Announcement
“I’M THINKING,” PEGGY MCLEOD SAID TO HER DAUGHTER FAY OVER breakfast, “of maybe going back to work after the weekend.”
“To work? To your office?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re ready for that?” Fay asked carefully.
Her mother was sipping orange juice and staring into her glass as if mesmerized by its floating particles of pulp. “I phoned in yesterday. The backlog’s already enormous.”
“But Dr. Suzlov was going to look after your patients for the time being.”
“I know, I know, and she’s been wonderful, but there are some cases you can’t hand over to someone else.”
“Do you really think – ”
“I think I might be a lot better off if I got out of this house every day and filled up my hours with something useful. With something.”
“Well…” Fay felt her voice falling down a steep slope.
“And I think you should go back, Fay. You’ve been home from the center for almost a month, since the first of November. You can’t know how I’ve appreciated having you here. What a pair we’ve made, a couple of ghosts propping each other up. But your poor mermaids will think you’ve forgotten them.”
Was that a note of merriment she heard in her mother’s voice?
“Your mother’s a regular dynamo,” Muriel Brewmaster had told Fay a few days earlier. “She’ll bounce back.”
A dynamo? Fay had scowled, doubtful. But she’s seen in the last few days how a subtle reordering of strength has taken place, an unconscious, saving shift in the household balance. The chemistry, the mechanics of the conversion elude her, and she senses that these proofs of perception will remain mysterious, despite the fact that they are always on view, part of the domestic scenery; they’re too simple and too obvious to be acknowledged, like certain free-floating truths that are given substance only in emblematic acts or images. Lately her mother’s been going through cupboards, through a new book by P. D. James, through a parcel of legal documents. (A week ago Fay sat in this kitchen and watched her write the words “Have left-rear tire checked” on a scrap of paper, a reminder to herself.)
Small acts, promptings, scratchings at the future – Fay had been startled, but recognized it for what it was: a sign of recovery, the kind of blind step forward that she herself is going to have to make.
“HOW ARE YOU doing, Fay?” her friends ask her.
“Okay,” she says, or “Fine,” or “Not bad.”
To herself she announces, I can’t bear this.
On Saturday evening she got into a taxi with a suitcase of clothes and moved back into her Grosvenor Avenue apartment. (It’s time
, she said to herself, making a face and feeling a stitch in her throat.) A pile of mail awaited her. A light was burning in the bedroom – she almost jumped at the sight of it. The bed was stripped clean, the curtains pulled shut. She opened the drawers where Tom’s things had been stored and found them bare. His clothes were gone from his half of the closet, leaving a numbing expanse of whiteness filled with wire hangers. She struck these hangers between her hands like cymbals, setting off a weak jangling crash of music. (“I’ll get used to this,” she announced under her breath.) She thought suddenly of one of his shirts, a finely checked shirt in soft cotton, and the undertow of memory was so strong she had to sit down for a minute on the edge of the bed. If she had that shirt in her hand right now she would press her face into its folds and kiss it.
She became aware that the bedroom was overheated and airless, but it was too cold a night to open a window.
She remembered a nature program she’d seen recently on TV in which the life cycle of a lungfish had been described. The lung-fish was a miracle of adaptation, an ugly earth-colored creature capable of surviving long periods of drought. During times when there was no water to be had, it buried itself in mud and slept, sometimes for as long as two years. By lowering its heart rate and blood pressure, it managed to stay alive but to feel nothing.
She lay back stiffly on the bare mattress and wondered if it was too early to go to bed and whether she would be able to sleep.
She wished she could run through the dark streets crying, doing nothing to hold back her spilling tears. But the streets were choked with deep rutted snow tonight, and the wind was excruciatingly cold.
She wondered if Tom was at home – across the street, the third floor, right this minute. Sitting in a room, the kitchen, perhaps, or the bedroom – reading a newspaper, watching television, making himself some kind of meal.
“I can’t bear this,” she said, bringing her hands up to her mouth like a kind of cup.
ALMOST EVERY DAY she’s spoken to her father. They talk on the telephone, or else Fay takes a bus or a taxi to his furnished apartment. It seems to her that if she can only keep talking to him she will be able to bring about some kind of reversal.
Surprisingly, she’s grown accustomed to the sight of the dim little living room and the brown lumpish furniture, and accustomed to the sight of her father, too, relaxed in an armchair, one leg crossed over the other, his spectacles balanced in his hand.
They both try hard to discuss normal things. Today, a Sunday afternoon, they talk about the weather forecast – a week of bitter cold – and the fact that “bitter” seems a curious word for a meteorologist to use, a word that is oddly poetic and imprecise and also endearing. They talk about a recent by-election, a swerve to the right, and about the problem of noise from overhead aircraft.
Today he tells her: “I’m glad you’ve moved back to your apartment, Fay. Even though you may find it difficult at first, being on your own.”
And what about you? she wants to ask. How are you finding it, being alone?
He’s explained to her over and over, and to Clyde and Bibbi, too, just why he had to leave home, that his long peaceful marriage had somehow overnourished him. He couldn’t breathe. He felt watched, insulated, incapacitated.
Fay finds all this baffling. Love is love. Her mother’s only transgression, as far as she can see, is to have loved him deeply.
“Too deeply,” Bibbi said to her a week ago. “Too richly. Too much.” Her words had the force of an announcement. “You remember, Fay, when I was nineteen and ran away from home. It wasn’t freedom I wanted – that’s what everyone thought. Or drugs or sex or craziness or any of those things. I had to get away from all that love. That storm of love, it never let up. You and Clyde had left home by then, and I was in the middle of it. It was like a terrifying magnetic field, it kept pulling me in closer and closer. I knew I was hurting everyone by running away, but I had to. I would have died otherwise.”
IT TOOK MORE than an hour for Fay to open her accumulated mail. There were the usual bills: telephone, electricity, Visa, and also a handful of invoices for such items as wedding invitations and for the gold wedding band she had picked out for Tom, a ring which had been sent away for engraving and was now ready to be picked up from the jeweler’s. There was an invitation from the Salvation Army to contribute to their Christmas drive. And a reminder from the Handel Chorale about the final rehearsal schedule and the Christmas concert itself. There was a painful clutch of little notes from friends, notes meant to console, to offer hope for the future, to pledge assurance of friendship and understanding, and especially, especially, to bridge the awkwardness that accrues around arrangements that have been mysteriously capsized.
Finally, there was a brisk announcement on a red printed card.
Fritzi Sweet and Peter Knightly
are Pleased to Announce
their Marriage
which Took Place
at a Family Ceremony
on November Twenty-Third
NO GIFTS PLEASE
ON TUESDAY, when Fay finally goes back to the folklore center after an absence of one month, Peter Knightly is the first person she runs into. “Congratulations,” she says. The brightness of her voice seems to strike shock waves off the corridor walls.
He looks embarrassed. “I’m so sorry, Fay. About you and Avery calling it off.”
Avery!
Shut up, shut up, why don’t you.
She is dismayed by how much she hates Peter Knightly at this moment.
No gifts please.
The arrogance.
She has a sheaf of papers in one hand, and in the other her key ring. She wonders what would happen if she raked the keys across his face, how much damage she could do.
She manages a faint smile and gestures vaguely, desperately, in the direction of her office, where a thousand pressing details await her attention: reports, offprints, another enormous pile of mail to open. “I think I’d better …”
“Of course,” he nods.
A grotesque nod. Almost – she can hardly believe this – almost a bow. An absurd, pitying, gentleman’s bow. Oh, God, God.
She sits at her desk for a minute, panting. What next, what will she do next?
She picks up a thin envelope and slices it open with a paper knife.
Dear Ms. McLeod:
We are happy to inform you that your interesting and highly original paper, “Mermaids and Meaning,” is one of six selected for discussion in the opening session at the June meeting of the NAFA in Chicago. The committee sends you warm congratulations and looks forward to your presentation.
Program details will follow.
So! She will be going to Chicago, taking her slides along and attempting to persuade a roomful of people that the mermaid myth is at once private and collective, born of sexual longing and a need for solace, or possibly hatched from the residue of racial memory. Think of it! In the mythic system the mermaid has specific gravity, even though its legends wobble with beguiling ambiguity.
She will actually do this. (Six months is not far off.) She can already picture herself (new dress? dark green? summer jewelry?) ascending the three or four steps to the platform, arranging her notes on the lectern, clearing her throat, glancing at her watch. A serious professional woman, a little thin, perhaps, but with such a disarming smile, delightful presentation, really, though she’s maybe a little defensive during the question period, almost sharp, you might say. A woman who’s made her choices, quite possibly one of those women who avoid love out of a fear of its reversals … or perhaps … perhaps …
This is what she’ll become. A tourist in her own life. Well, she’s going to have to learn a few things – such as how to blow with calm ordinary breath on the happiness of others or else risk being thought ungenerous. Possibly she’ll decide to cultivate a leaner and lighter set of responses, nursing at the same time (but slyly) a delectation in the brokenness of friends, collecting stories of divorce and breakdown and
deformity and illness. Probably she’ll begin to think of her body as a betrayer and resolutely refuse to imagine the shape of the future.
Day by day, that’s the way to go. Keeping herself alive on the air of conjecture, scornful of the happy/sad balance sheet of the young, eating off the edge of a table and lying down in her bed at night, rehearsing her anger, counting up her enemies, waiting for the blessing of recovery, knowing it will come.
THE WORST MOMENT of the day is this moment, six o’clock, when she puts her key in her own front door and thinks about what lies on the other side.
What lies on the other side is about to jump out at her. Her feet hurt, she’s exhausted. All the way home on the bus she’s comforted herself with the thought of a peaceful evening, how pleasant, how agreeable – her pretty living room, her refrigerator full of food. But now, turning the key, comes the moment of terror.
She has strategies, of course. Enter humming. Then switch on the radio fast and fill up the air with electronic hubbub. Tell yourself you’ll get used to this, you’ll get so you prefer it this way. Pour a glass of cold white wine. Drink it slowly, thinking: I deserve this after a hard day, this little cushion against stillness.
After ten, twenty minutes she really will feel better. She’ll find something to eat, something quick, and then she’ll go out again – there are all kinds of things to do in the evenings. For one thing, she can’t afford to miss any more rehearsals for the Christmas concert. She might sign up for an aerobics class in the new year. Or possibly a course in conversational Russian. The world is full of possibilities, satisfactions.