It’s only this one agonizing moment in the day – when she turns her key in the lock and pushes open the door.
It’s coming at her, it’s about to pounce. The emptiness flowing toward her like a cloud of gas.
“I’m home,” she announces to the silent walls.
SHE WENT TO BED with a new book, but she must have drifted off early.
She dreamed she was walking through shallow water in her bare feet. The water was warm, it was lake water, and she could feel her toes gripping the ribbed sand of a lake bottom. She took a step. The sun fell around her shoulders – it was such a surprise, this sunlight – and she moved out a little deeper. But then something called her back. A loud ringing, scolding voice. It went on and on.
She woke slowly, as though she were rising up through a bubble of air. What was this?
Her doorbell was ringing. She opened her eyes, confused by the blaze of light from the bedside lamp and the digits of the clock radio – Tom’s clock radio. It was 2:45 in the morning.
There must be some mistake, someone looking for another apartment, someone drunk. She pulled on her robe, shivering. She knew better than to open the door at this hour. “Who is it?” she called out loudly, a hoarse squawk.
“It’s Onion,” she heard.
“Onion?”
She slipped back the bolt and opened the door.
Onion was wearing her ancient mink coat. Fay couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t owned this old, bulky coat, though nowadays she wore it only in the most extreme weather. A plaid woolen muffler was wrapped around her head and knotted beneath her chin. Her face was creased, thin, terrifying, and cold. “He’s gone,” she said.
Fay blinked.
“Strom. He’s gone. Just after midnight. He slipped away.”
“Oh, Onion.” Fay put her arms around her and drew her inside; she could feel, under the matted fur, the stiff cracked animal skins that had hardened and dried, and beneath that Onion’s trembling body.
“I saw your light was on. I couldn’t bear to go home.”
“Of course not.”
“There’s nothing there. Not one thing.”
“I know, I know,” Fay said, rocking her.
“I was holding on to his arm when he died, rubbing it and rubbing it, trying to keep the pulse alive, but of course he didn’t know I was there, he didn’t know anything at the end.”
“Come in and get warm. Let me get you something hot to drink.”
“It was dark, I couldn’t bear – ”
“Onion, you can stay here. I’ll make up a bed – ”
“I couldn’t bear thinking I didn’t belong anywhere, not to anyone.”
“You loved each other.” Fay said this consolingly, letting it roll out of her mouth.
Onion abruptly drew away from her and gave her head a violent shake, in anger or grief, Fay wasn’t sure which. “You’ve made a mistake, Fay,” she said. “I don’t know what’s got into you, why you’ve gone and done what you’ve done, but you’ve made a terrible mistake, and you’ve got to stop it right now. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to admit it to yourself. You’ve got to listen to me for once in your life.”
∼ CHAPTER 36 ∼
Out of the Blue
THE LANDING WHEEL OF AN AIRPLANE CAME FALLING OUT OF A CLEAR blue December sky.
The plane was a DC-4, carrying a light load of drilling equipment up from Grand Forks, and coming in at three degrees for a landing at the municipal airport. It was flying at about seven hundred and fifty feet when the wheel detached itself. The crew – pilot, copilot, and flight engineer, all of whom were interviewed later – claimed they had been unaware that anything was amiss; their instrument panel had registered only that the wheel assembly had been successfully lowered.
A number of witnesses, mostly motorists and midday shoppers, watched the wheel as it fell through the air. This fact Tom Avery found surprising; he would have guessed city dwellers were too habituated to aircraft noise to stop and look up at a passing plane.
One of the witnesses was a nineteen-year-old bank employee named Kimberley Kozak who had just returned from a fast-food outlet (next door to the bank) with a tray of coffee and sandwiches ordered by her coworkers; it happened to be a few minutes before noon, lunch time. She set the cardboard tray on her desk and dialed the police emergency number, 911. “A wheel just fell off an airplane,” she reported in a calm voice. “Just east of Kenaston Avenue, and south of Portage. I don’t know what kind of plane it is, just a plane, and it looks like it’s about to land.” This, too, Tom found surprising: this cool-headed girl, her quickness, and her instinctive notions of responsibility.
It had been observed at the control tower that something had fallen from the plane, but what? Luckily, Ms. Kozak’s call was relayed in the nick of time.
The pilot was radioed: “You’ve lost a wheel.” The runway was quickly foamed, and the plane came down, a little jittery with one side wheel missing, but a decent landing nonetheless. A structural problem in the landing-gear assembly was the reason put forward for the malfunction. Poor maintenance or a design fault? There would undoubtedly be an official investigation.
The falling wheel itself, a rubber tire just a little larger and fatter than an ordinary automobile tire, achieved enormous velocity during its brief descent; the plummeting wheel (in the words of the six-o’clock newscaster) fell like a speeding bullet through the roof of a west-side apartment building, punching its way through asphalt roofing, layers of vapor barrier, wooden supports, insulation, ceiling plaster – and into the kitchen of a fifth-floor apartment, where it wedged between a small apartment-sized refrigerator and a cupboard.
The tenant (Richard McLeod, sixty-six, retired) was standing four feet away in a small hallway, removing his overcoat, having just returned from the funeral of an old friend. He was shaken by the incident but uninjured. His photograph, which appeared in the evening paper, showed the dazed, childlike face of an earthquake survivor.
“What was your first thought, Mr. McLeod, when you saw the wheel coming through your ceiling?” This was the question put to him by the six-o’clock-news team.
There was a pause. He blinked twice. A microphone was pushed directly in front of his mouth, ready to catch whatever might spill out. “What did I think?” he said quietly. “Nothing, and everything. I suppose I thought that the world had come to an end. And I had no one to tell.”
SOMETIME LATER that same evening, about nine or ten o’clock, Richard McLeod phoned his wife, Peggy, out of the blue and asked if he might come home.
Tom, when he was told of this phone call, couldn’t imagine what words Richard McLeod had found or how they were strung together. Even harder to imagine was his tone of voice. Was it stricken? Remorseful? Resigned? Frightened?
“Yes,” said Peggy McLeod, who by this time had seen the television report and read the newspaper coverage, “come home.” Or words to that effect.
“I’m sure she didn’t hesitate for a minute,” Fay said to Tom.
He watched her closely. “How can you be so sure?”
“I just know her,” Fay said.
“It seems impossible that they can – that they can live together again, after all that’s happened.”
“I know,” Fay said, and looked directly into Tom’s face.
The airplane incident took place on a Monday. By that time he and Fay had been married for three days. Seventy-two hours. Wedded. Husband and wife.
HE’D COME HOME from the station the previous Friday at six o’clock on a cold, dark winter’s morning. He’d climbed the three flights of stairs wearily and found her curled on the floor in front of his apartment door, sleeping.
Driving home, his gas line had frozen. He sat for a few minutes in the stalled car, staring through the fogged windshield, listening to the wind hammering the side of the car, too tired even to curse. The temperature was thirty-five degrees below zero and dropping; Pembina Highway, deserted in the early-morning hours
, was streaked by bluish sodium lamps. He felt immobilized with dread and exhaustion but managed, finally, to shake off his inertia, phone a tow truck, and get a taxi to drive him home.
He almost fell over her, this shapeless thing blocking his way – the light on the landing was nothing more than a dim red exit sign. He’d reached down and encountered the surprise of hummocky fur – old, musty-smelling fur. Some instinct made him draw back. A creature who’d wandered in from the cold. A large rumpled warmly breathing creature, asleep in his doorway. He knelt to investigate.
Fay.
“Tom,” she said, opening her eyes. “It’s me. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“THE STATE OF matrimony is a state ennobled and enriched by a long and honorable tradition of love and devotion.”
Tom and Fay stood in a downtown courtroom not much larger than Fay’s living room. The ceiling, though, was exceptionally high, so that the room formed a kind of square box, whose walls were painted a sobering legal green. The Marriage Commissioner – hurriedly called in – was a woman of about sixty (Tom guessed) whose crisp permed hair and beige wool cardigan put him in mind of his mother.
“There is a desire for a lifelong companionship,” she pronounced, reading from a rather worn photocopied sheet and shifting her weight from one hip to the other, “and a generous sharing of the help and comfort that husband and wife ought to have for one another through whatever circumstances.”
Tom caught Fay’s eye and held it.
“Marriage is not to be entered into lightly, but with certainty, mutual respect, and a sense of reverence.”
It was Friday afternoon. They had come alone, just the two of them. This was the way they wanted it. Two women from the secretarial staff had volunteered to serve as witnesses for the brief ceremony.
“Marriage symbolizes the ultimate intimacy between man and woman, and is based on love, which is the most elusive of human bonds.”
A civil ceremony, this was called, yet it was emblazoned with hope-filled poetry – and mystery: the most elusive of human bonds.
“Do you undertake to afford to this woman the love of your person, the comfort of your companionship, and the patience of your understanding?”
“I do,” he said.
Then turning to Fay, “And do you undertake to afford to this man the love of your person, the comfort of your companionship, and the patience of your understanding?”
“I do,” Fay said, her eyes stern.
Fumblingly, they exchanged rings.
These rings they had picked up at the last minute from Greening’s Jewelers on Graham Avenue. (“I tried to phone you a couple of weeks ago,” the jeweler said rather crossly, “to tell you they were ready.”) The date engraved on the inside of the two rings could be changed later, but there would be a small charge, of course.
“And thereto I pledge you my troth,” Fay said. He could tell she loved that word “troth,” she said it so lingeringly, its long o sound.
“That’s it,” the Marriage Commissioner announced, folding her creased text in quarters and slipping it into her zippered bag.
Tom turned and looked at the two witnesses, who were now bent over, signing the marriage record; their expressions were placid but unreadable, and the thought came to him that they must have seen hundreds of such ceremonies and that for them there could be scarcely a flicker of meaning left behind the ritualized phrases.
Homilies. Questions and answers. Promises. And a groping after definition – mere words, elusive words. He had pronounced them before, but today they came toward him newly minted.
Fay was signing the record now, her large, careful script unrolling. He watched her wrist move across the paper and wondered if the moment had filled up for her as it had for him.
“We did it,” he said, taking her arm.
“Yes,” she answered.
“HONEYMOON” IS A WORD that’s been out of favor for a long time, too honeyed or too moony, Tom supposes, and too weighted with old-fashioned notions of innocence. And yet, it is a word he loves.
“And where did you and your wife go on your honeymoon?” he imagines some improbable stranger asking in the course of an improbable, fast-forwarded future.
Well now, that’s a long story. No, not a long story, hardly a story at all – at least, not a story worth telling. They stayed in Tom’s apartment. The wind raged around them for two long days and nights. The Saturday following their wedding was the coldest twenty-four-hour period ever recorded in the region, and the gas furnace in the Grosvenor Avenue building never shut off once, not for one second; it burned and burned, trying to keep pace with the unprecedented cold. (More fuel was consumed in the city on that day than ever before. They heard this later.)
They made a few necessary telephone calls announcing their new state and then unplugged the phone. In the cupboards Tom found cans of soup, also tomato sauce, salmon, sardines, some rice, macaroni, a box of crackers, a packet of dry-roasted peanuts, corn oil, salt and pepper, a box of cornflakes which he roasted back to freshness in a hot oven, instant coffee, tea bags, a jar of raspberry jam, a plastic tub of honey. These discoveries brought him little jolts of happiness. There was no need to venture out-of-doors. The windows were completely frosted over. He and Fay were survivors on an opaque island, their own earth and sky, shut off from the noise of the world, warm and fed, sufficient unto themselves.
And that, Tom would say, if asked – that was our honeymoon.
DURING THOSE PERIODS when his life was going badly, he’d sometimes felt himself elected to undergo a series of disappointments. It seemed he was helpless to contravene the approach of difficulty, and he’d found it painful to reconcile himself to this idea – that a quirky fate had penciled him in for failure. It was unfair, it was undeserved – he knew this – and it was frightening.
He imagines that Richard McLeod’s near-collision with the wheel of an aircraft carried the same overwhelming incomprehension. There were, after all, hundreds of other rooftops where the wheel might have fallen, thousands of back yards, parking lots, and roadways. But it was one particular roof that was pierced – his; his refuge that was invaded.
Even those who have been wedded all their lives to a rational stance and who are daily witnesses to the randomness of events, even they are required to respond to damage as accurately aimed as this. Why me? is the traditional cry. A weak, lonely sound.
And in the silence that follows there is an instinct that sends the victims scurrying blindly toward safety, toward home, toward an innocence of vision they thought they’d left behind.
Home. That’s where Tom feels himself to be. He’s been away for a long time, and now at last he’s home.
IT’S CALL-IN TIME down at CHOL, the last call-in show Tom will ever do.
Out of the blue, Big Bruce has offered him the driving-home show (4:00 to 6:00 p.m., five days a week). Siggy Thorvaldson, who’s hosted the show all these years, is up for retirement, and anyway, the slot needs some brightening up (that certain Avery touch, is how Big Bruce put it). Tom’s thought it over and he’s decided to go with it; he’ll start next week. There’s no doubt about it, he’ll miss “Niteline,” but it’s time for a change, he’s decided – time to see what the world looks like in the mellow late afternoon.
Tonight’s question: What can you do to help keep the earth green?
The first caller speaks in a sweetly cracked, no-nonsense contralto: “Baking soda. Get your listeners going on baking soda, Tom. Bicarbonate of soda. Sprinkle a little on your kitchen sink, on your bathroom fixtures, whatever, and just wipe clean. It’s natural, it’s pure, it runs straight down the drain and back into the earth.”
“Hey,” the second caller says, “Wally Badarou’s the man to keep us green. How about playing a little Badarou tonight instead of all that folky goop you’ve been dishing up lately. My favorite’s a piece called ‘Rain.’”
A man calls in and says: “Ban snow blowers. They’re noisy and they use up precious fuel, and th
ey blow snow all over your neighbor’s driveway. I got a fella next door that I sure hope is listening in tonight.”
A woman says: “I plan to cut the shoulder pads out of all my blouses and dresses and load them on a barge and dump them in Lake Winnipeg, creating a tidal wave which I’m told can be harnessed to provide electric power to the entire region.”
“I like to chant a couple of lines of poetry into the ozone layer every day or so,” another caller says. “That’s my contribution.”
“You know what?” the final caller says. “We’ve got to get back to neighborliness. We’ve lost it. Saying good morning to each other? Saying how do you do, how are you feeling, how’s the world treating you? Recycling plastic bags is peanuts, ditto with phosphate-free detergent. We’re always hollering these days about the infrastructure of our cities, but love’s got an infrastructure, too. Love your neighbor, let him love you back a little. Love’s the greenest stuff going. Let’s hear it for love.”
Fay
RATIONALISTS WHO SEEK TO DISABUSE THE WORLD OF ITS MYTHOLOGY have suggested that mermaids sighted by seamen in the days of yore were, in reality, small aquatic mammals known as manatees, or their cousins, the dugongs. These curious, rather ugly creatures have no hind limbs but possess forelimbs which are small fingerless flippers. The female occasionally uses these flippers to clasp her young to her breast. Manatees and dugongs (both of which belong to the order Sirenia) are able to remain submerged for about a quarter of an hour at a time. They are covered with short bristly hair and frequently live in small family groups. Fay has examined photographs of these animals and finds that, in fact, there is little resemblance between them and the mermaids of legend and art. She is much more willing to put mermaid sightings down to a three-cornered mixture of ocean mist, sailor’s rum, and profound spiritual hunger – a combination capable of producing a vivid optical illusion. Allurements. Immensities.