It was Fay’s responsibility to take him to dinner. Hannah Webb, full of apologies about a previous commitment, lent Fay her car. “Treat him nicely,” she whispered in Fay’s ear.
They went to a restaurant called Dubrovnik’s and, at a table overlooking the river, ate smoked-trout salad, rare roast lamb with baby green beans, and a strawberry torte, and drank a bottle of dry red wine. Just a short distance beneath their window the currents of the river shifted, and a drift of wind made it hard to know which way the river was flowing; this was a familiar optical illusion of the region, Fay pointed out to Dr. Conrad in her role as guide. Toward the end of the evening – the sky was full of flat blue light – they talked about Margaret Mead, a new biography in which her reputation had been further capsized. “Reputation,” Fletcher Conrad said, quoting Balzac, “is a prostitute.” “A crowned prostitute,” said Fay, who remembered the quotation. They both looked pleased with themselves about this exchange. They got up to go. It was then Fay noticed that he was approximately half an inch shorter than she. She had already noticed his tiny hands, the left one curved inside the right on the tablecloth, like a captured bird.
An hour later they were in her bed, and his small pointed movie-director’s beard was nudging its way, diagonally, roughly, across her belly. “Ah, dear Christ,” he gasped, and Fay found herself floating between waves of appetite and a stern minor-key voice, her own, that said: You must not let this happen again.
There are certain moments in her life of which she is deeply ashamed, and this, she knew, even as she took him in her mouth, her tongue circling, was going to be one of them. There was too much carelessness here, and down in the tangle of damp limbs and body hair and hooded flesh, struggling to catch her breath, Fay was unable to remember, for the space of a minute, what this man’s name was. Who was he? Who? Tiny hands, thumping knees, panicked flesh. Fletcher Conrad. Or was it Conrad Fletcher?
No, it must not happen again.
∼ CHAPTER 6 ∼
Love Is the Only Enchantment
LIFE IS NOT ALWAYS FILLED TO THE BRIM. CERTAINLY NOT TONIGHT. Tonight the capricious winds of May, a bad head cold, and a dab of bird shit on the windshield of his newly washed Riviera drove Tom Avery back to a meeting of the Newly Single Club at the Fort Rouge Community Center.
Two weeks ago he’d attended a Friday-night talk there entitled “The Ghettoization of the Single in Contemporary Urban Society” and was introduced to three key coping strategies – bonding, re-bonding, and disbonding; that was the point at which he’d dozed off. There was something too droningly familiar about the way in which human behavior divided itself into categories of three, something too cozy, too suspicious, too sleep-producing. Enough already. He was wasting his time. Finis. So long, newly singles. He had better things to do.
But here he was again, back for an evening of tactical analysis. Patsy MacArthur, the spirited club co-ordinator, announced the evening topic: Meeting New Mates. Small squares of paper were distributed on which everyone was to write down places where a possible Significant Other might be encountered. “Take your time,” Patsy called out in her high, harsh, pulsing voice. “Think outside the clichés. Think beyond singles bars and Laundromats.”
Tom fished in his pocket for a pencil. He never carried a pencil, but still he fished hopefully. “Here,” the woman next to him whispered, “I’ve got an extra.”
Had he imagined it? Had she winked at him through her long dark bangs? He offered back his monkey smile. “Thanks.”
All around him he heard the industrious application of pen to paper. The woman beside him – those bangs were either a fussy, self-protective ploy or an indication of monstrous neglect – scratched frantically, well down already into a list.
“Be creative,” Patsy sang out, striding between the rows of chairs. “Look beyond the obvious. Forget want ads. Look past the art gallery and the zoo. Nobody ever met anybody at the zoo, except maybe a baboon.”
The woman next to Tom – she looked about thirty – peered up through her stringy fringe, then sorrowfully stroked “zoo” and “art gallery” off her list. Her chin was pointed. She had the look of someone turning, about to be greeted. A dull silver brooch in the form of a musical note was pinned to her blouse.
“Hey, you’re all doing great,” Patsy encouraged. “I can actually feel the energy in this room building. Five more minutes, will that do you?”
More scratching, and then the pieces of paper were collected. And read aloud. And discussed item for item.
Supermarkets got poor marks. Men who attempted to strike up an acquaintance by humbly seeking the advice of women on the choosing of melons were too obvious, too sexist; jerks, in fact.
Parties given by friends? Friends invited unattractive people they felt sorry for or people getting over depressions who “needed a night out.” Friends preened their own marital harmony. Friends were so hysterical about being thought matchmakers that they ended up doing nothing.
A choral group? Very, very original, said Patsy approvingly. Yes, someone else said, but choirs are too churchy, too good. Not necessarily, you could always shop around for a singles-oriented group, it was something to keep in mind.
Aerobics classes. Too many women. The wrong kind of men. Letches. Trendy. Grunt and sweat. Temporary liaisons only. If that.
Political meetings. Wrong kind of heat. Committed people weren’t out there looking for new bonding units. Too sincere, too boring, too much work – delivering leaflets, stuffing envelopes, and so on.
The library. You could sit down at the same table with, say, someone who was reading a book you’d read or a magazine you liked, it could be an indicator.
Poetry readings. Poetry readings? What?
“Hey,” said Patsy, holding up a final scrap of paper and taking a jocular, accusing stance. “Here’s someone who didn’t write down a single thing.”
Tom at that moment was busily studying the woman next to him, wondering if under her hair she might be attractive. Wondering again if she really had winked at him. Or if he was going squirrelly.
HE GOT HER NAME and phone number from Patsy. This effort on his part was in response not to a summons of desire, but to a summons to fill his time. Time was the gnat in his ear: no more time must be wasted, especially the open, fertile width of a Saturday night.
Elizabeth Joll. She lived in a duplex on Lanark Avenue. Turn a sharp right after the lights, she told him.
He parked beside a small lilac tree that was just coming into bloom, and it seemed to him as he walked up the porch steps (peeling paint, loose boards) that if he could only fill his lungs full enough with hypnotic lilac fragrance, it would carry him through the first hour of anxious stiffness. Valor, valor, he said to himself.
“Care for something to drink before we go?” Elizabeth Joll offered.
He was able to see more of her face tonight, since she’d fluffed her bangs slightly and tied the rest of her hair back with a piece of yellow ribbon. Lilacs, a sloping front porch, yellow ribbon in the hair; something chimed in his head, some scrap of tired music. The living room was small and very clean. He sat down on a hard plastic bitter-smelling armchair, behind which he spotted a wicker basket, neatly filled with plastic toys.
She followed his gaze. “I couldn’t get a sitter,” she said, “but my little boy’s asleep, and the next-door neighbor said she’d check on him every half hour.”
“We don’t have to go to a movie,” Tom said. “We could always stay here and watch TV,” but even he knew this wasn’t much of an offer.
“He’s good as gold. He never wakes up at night.”
“If you’re sure.”
She tiptoed into the kitchen and came back carrying a small round tray on which were balanced two glasses of wine. “I don’t have any real booze, I’m afraid, just this wine.”
“Great.”
“Hmmm. It’s not bad.”
“Not too sweet.”
“Don’t you just hate sweet wine?” She seem
ed to wear about her head an aura of apprehension.
“A lot of people like it, though.”
“So I’ve noticed.” At which she laughed, rather loudly and long.
The movie was surprisingly entertaining, what the reviews had described as a comic thriller: a car-theft ring, hardened criminals all, who find themselves in possession of a hot Volvo containing a litter of purebred puppies, one of the world’s rarest breeds and worth millions.
Tom, who was fond of dogs, though he’d never actually owned one, was enchanted by the puppies’ antics and forgot to reach for Elizabeth Joll’s hand until half the film had elapsed. The hand, when he found it, was smooth, ringless, and rather small. He squeezed, self-critically – was his squeeze a skillful squeeze? She squeezed back, and laughed her disproportionately loud laugh once again.
After the movie, heartened by the availability of her hand, he suggested going to a jazz club he knew.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She brushed back her hair. “My little boy – I’d better get home. Why don’t you come back and I’ll make us some coffee?”
The night was warm, the moon nimble and shy, and they drove along the spacious dark streets with the windows down. She was a bookkeeper for a Ford agency, she told him, shifting sideways on the upholstery. He was in communications, he said, and she bobbed her head vigorously as though this were something she already knew but was too embarrassed to discuss.
When they pulled up in front of her house, he breathed in another noseful of lilac, but the scent, instead of sharpening his longing, made him wish, suddenly, to be elsewhere, not inside the clean cramped airlessness of this house, but in some dark, starry place where he could be as still and unconscious and alone as Elizabeth Joll’s sleeping child. This was all wrong. Let me out of here, his heart cried.
And then the two of them, sitting in the parked car, entered what Tom afterward remembered as a dialogue of pure pathos, the script of twin losers, a couple of chumps anxious to spare each other’s feelings.
“Maybe I’d better not come in,” he said. His face felt broken, weak. “I’m kind of tired. And I’ve got this cold.”
“That’s okay,” she said with one final peal of her hungry laughter. “I’ve got my period anyway.”
“MOM.”
“That you, Tom? I thought it might be you phoning. I said to Mike, ‘I bet that’s Tom phoning.’ ”
“How you doing, Mom?”
“You all right? Everything okay?”
“Just phoning to say hello, Mom. See how you’re doing.”
“You sound kind of stuffed up.”
“I’ve got this cold.”
“It’s going around. Summer colds. Could be hay fever.”
“Sun shining up there?”
“Rain. Same thing every darn Sunday. It’s like the weatherman’s got it in for us, but good.”
“Here too, it’s crazy.”
“You sure sound plugged up.”
“I’m fine, fine. I just called because I thought you and Mike might’ve phoned last night. When I was out.”
“We were down at the Legion. Big retirement party, a real gang.”
“Great.”
“Out? You were out last night?”
“Yeah. A movie.”
“With a girl?”
“Well, more like a woman than a girl, I guess.”
“Nice?”
“Pretty nice.”
“How about you bringing her up one weekend? Mike’s been talking about doing some fishing, keeps asking when you’re coming up. You could bring her along, we’re not shy.”
“Oh, I’ll be up in a couple weeks. This is kind of a busy time of year.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Lots to do, this time of year.”
“What’s her name?”
“Whose name?”
“The new girl. The one you were out to the show with last night.”
“Oh, she’s just a girl.”
“Yeah, well, I bet you anything she’s got a name.”
“Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth, eh.”
“Well, I just thought I’d give you a call, Mom, in case you phoned last night and wondered where I was.”
“So, you doing anything special today?”
“Nothing much. I’ve got some work I’ve got to do. Say hello to Mike.”
“Gargle.”
“What?”
“For that cold. Look after yourself, gargle.”
“I will, I will. Take care, Mom.”
“You too, kiddo.”
ALL SHE WANTS for him is everything.
This is what Tom, talking about his mother, sometimes says. All she wants is his success, his health, his total happiness, but mostly she wants to see him settled.
“So you’ve hit some rough spots, so what. Next time you’ll hit the jackpot. I’ve seen it happen. I never was a hundred percent sure of that Sheila of yours. She had the career-girl look in her eyes right from the start, real ambitious, I could tell. And that Clair, what a girl she was, she just had you by the short and curlies, thought she’d have herself a free ride, butter both sides of her pocket. I think you just felt sorry for her. I sure was glad when you caught on to her. I was pretty worried, let me tell you, and then out of the fire into the frying pan with your Susie-Q. Well, she sure wasn’t ready to settle down. Frying an egg was too much bother. Making the bed was too much bother. But how’re you supposed to know how she’d turn out, how she was going to play the queen bee all the time. There’re plenty of nice girls out there ready to settle down. They’d give their heart to settle down. Nice house, couple of kids, a camper for trips. They’d give their eye-teeth. So don’t let yourself get bogged down on a plateau. Be a little choosy. You had your wild oats, that’s fine, but you got to be choosy when you think about really settling down. Oh boy, do you ever.”
SHE HERSELF MARRIED for the first time at the age of fifty-two. The man she married was a retired barber named, appropriately, Mike Barbour. She’d known him for years, and she’d been a good friend of Cissy Barbour, too, before she died of cancer of the uterus. Once they’d even gone on a vacation together, the three of them, driving down to Las Vegas to play the slot machines.
When Mike Barbour married again so soon after Cissy died, no one in Duck River raised so much as a squawk. Certain men can’t keep house or cook a proper meal, but more than that, they need some softness in their lives to answer to their own. And Betty Avery, despite her rattletrap voice, was a softie. A hellion in her young days, though lots had been worse. She’d gone ahead and got her practical nurse’s license, and when her son, Tom, was away at university she took extra shifts at the hospital, on her feet half the night, and home to that suite over the barber shop, three dinky rooms and the pullout couch she slept on until Tom went away for good, all by her lonesome up there, just her and the TV set, black-and-white, too. No one should be alone forever, people said after she and Mike Barbour tied the knot, no one.
“DON’T STIR YOURSELF,” Tom’s mother used to say to him when he was growing up. It was one of her expressions. Don’t stir yourself, I’ll get your socks, your glass of milk, your book, your pencil, your pillow, your aspirin. Sit tight, don’t exert yourself, let me, let me sew on your button, polish your shoes, bake your favorite dessert. Sit back, be comfy, let me do it.
What could he do but obey? She possessed a combination of good will and vulnerability that made it hard to refuse her. Why should he stir himself when this deft, energetic, wily mother of his was so insistent, and when doing things for him gave her so much pleasure – for years, her only pleasure.
“I was what you call a spoiled brat,” Tom told Ted Woloschuk down at the studio five minutes before air time. In front of him on his felt-padded table was a box of Kleenex, a package of cough drops, and a tall glass filled with hot water, lemon juice, and honey. “I was spoiled on a daily basis, but when I was sick I was spoiled rotten. And this, right here in front of me, was my mother’s pr
ize cure, hot lemon and honey.” He raised it to his lips. “May it work its healing magic.”
It was Wednesday night, guest night, and tonight’s guest, on a telephone hookup from Thunder Bay, was Helen Ryder, who had recently invited a blue-ribbon bull into a friend’s china shop. It was really a charity stunt, she explained, a money raiser for multiple sclerosis, but it turned out to be a crazy kind of community extravaganza. The sidewalk outside the store was full of people peering through the window, trying to see how many teapots and plates the bull knocked off the shelves. Some of them were placing private bets as well as buying raffle tickets on a Royal Doulton cake server. Well, nothing much happened. A lot of money got raised and a lot of excitement was generated, but the bull just stood placidly in the aisle for half an hour, only once or twice sniffing a cup and saucer with his big soft nose.
“People kept asking me if we’d tranquilized him,” Helen Ryder said, “but we didn’t. He’s just a very nice bull. He belongs to my brother who farms about thirty miles from here. His name’s Bobby. The bull, that is, not my brother.”
It always surpises Tom that guests are willing to come on his show in the middle of the night – the Wednesday-night guest slot is between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. – and without getting paid a cent. Hardly anyone ever says no. He can’t understand it, whether it’s vanity or a yearning for a crack at show biz or maybe some naive reverence for the air waves that makes an invitation seem like a summons. He’s also surprised at how chatty even the shy and nervous are at this hour. Of course, late-night radio invites intimacy; he himself finds he can ask outrageous questions. People seem to feel they can say almost anything, open up confidences they wouldn’t dream of touching in the daytime.
“Let me ask you this,” he said in tonight’s wrapup with Helen Ryder. “You made a lot of money for M.S. and you provided some fun for Thunder Bay, but what did you, Helen Ryder, get out of it?”