It was Sheila who handled Tom’s divorce from Suzanne. “A good clean divorce,” she said when it was over. “No embarrassing strings hanging off it. I hope to hell you’re grateful.”
His other friends told him his situation was ludicrous, a first wife negotiating a divorce from a third. It was the material of soap opera, but for Tom the shame of a third-marriage breakup – and he was pierced through with shame, it lingers still – seemed softened by the fact that it was dealt with from within the family, so to speak, that its ripple of failure was laid smooth by the clean hand of a former wife for whom he still feels a shy fondness.
He loves her pressed lawyer clothes, her nifty dark suits and silk scarves, even her restive, edgy way of holding her knife and fork. “I think I loved you best of all the wives,” he said today, loathing himself for yammering so cheaply – and not saying what he means, either. Light from the window fell on her mouth, her rounded cheeks, her young girl’s nose. This was in the middle of a spinach-and-bacon crepe, during a lull in the conversation. He rubbed his teeth with the tip of his tongue.
She was ready for him, and fluttered a hand across the table to take his. “We liked each other a lot,” she said, “but we were not, as people say, in love. Whatever the hell that means. I’ve never been in love. I think I do have an inkling of what people mean when they say ‘in love,’ and maybe you do too, but we didn’t have it, you and me. I’ll never have it. But Tom, you might someday. I honestly think you have the capacity. But I sure don’t.” She sipped a little coffee and resettled her cup on its saucer. “Love,” she sniffed rudely. “Who needs it.”
TOM WAS TWENTY years old, a history student at the University of Toronto, when he first heard the phrase “Who needs it.” This was in 1970, a year of turmoil. He possessed at that time a thick uneven beard. His hair curled around his shoulders, chestnut hair, beautiful, but his head was befuddled. With six other students, one of them a part-time drug dealer, he lived in a small illegal basement apartment in the Riverdale area of Toronto, and throughout the long winter months he slept on a shredded mattress between unwashed sheets. Every morning he looked into a square of broken mirror and winced at the grayness of his skin. There were mice in the apartment, possibly rats. Something, anyway, that gnawed on the electric wires. He could never find his own clothes, and his one pair of shoes seemed to be continually wet. Most of the time he was wretched and cold and worried about what would happen to him next, but that odd phrase – “Who needs it” – so brilliant, defiant, and novel, so explicitly emblematic of its time – carried him through. Like a flag, he unfurled it before sleep, and again on waking, and he applied its compacted and plenteous powers particularly to the new territory of love and accomplishment. He wasn’t sure what it meant – he still isn’t. “Who needs it.” Who needs what? But back in that foolish, puny time he needed a weapon he could hold next to his body, something that would make him brave, or make him appear to be brave.
∼ CHAPTER 5 ∼
How Are You, How Are You?
FAY PUTS DOWN THE NEWSPAPER, STARES OUT THE WINDOW AT THE budding trees, and thinks: I’m getting along fine. Peter’s been gone for one week now. I’ve eaten seven breakfasts alone (seven single-toast breakfasts), and four dinners, and one lunch. I’ve slept alone for seven nights now, seven nights in that big bed.
There were only two nights when she’d slept badly, and only one when she’d curled to the edge of the bed and given way to a fit of whimpering – but that lasted for only about five minutes. Seven chaste nights punctuated by a single long engorged sexual dream that woke her suddenly with its intensity, leaving her limp, sweating – and mildly curious about who it was who entered her sleep and aroused her to such a pitch.
She’s bought a new tube of toothpaste, an expensive off-brand she’s never heard of. She’s bought herself a new summer robe, widely yoked and prodigal with poppies. She’s bought a large economy-size pack of Q-Tips – she doesn’t know quite why but suspects she’s preparing for a fanatical scouring and scourging of her flesh.
She thinks: It’s May now, a new month.
The idea is bracing, and so is the fact that June, July, and August will follow, a series of green arches she can walk under, reassuring herself as she goes, pinching herself awake and knowing she will always, somewhere, be driven into little deceptions of happiness. She has a knack, it seems, for deception.
Peter took Fay’s flowering cactus with him. She had insisted on it, an obscure gesture of good will, but now a bitter thought comes: I wish I’d kept that cactus, I was a fool to part with it.
Forget what’s in the past, go back to the newspaper.
One of the headlines says, “Buddhists Go on Rampage.” That makes her smile, and she’s pleased that she’s able to sit alone in a room and smile over a trifle. Then she reads another headline, which says, “Iowa Woman Fears Losing Looks; Drowns in Well.”
She says aloud, cherishingly: “The world is full of pathos,” and she is startled by the foreign quality of her voice, erupting, it seems, from some newly discovered vent in her throat, so rich with dignity, so cool and artificial it might have come out of a radio.
FAY’S BROTHER, CLYDE, and his wife, Sonya, went to Minneapolis for the weekend, and Fay offered to baby-sit.
High up in an upstairs bedroom she reads her nephews, Gordon and Matthew, a bedtime story. The three of them lie sprawled on a bed, a woolen blanket pulled up to their chins. A circle of yellow light from the small shaded Mickey Mouse lamp falls on the book’s pages and across the fluffed heads of the two boys. She feels a wrenching ache of love for them both, their two small heads on her shoulders, the rounded polish of bone and flesh, and a wondrous conjunction of bath soap and soft fur. The story she reads is one of her favorites, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
But it is not a good choice, not at all. Gordon, who is only six, cries when she finishes and pounds her arm and says she’s mean. His face twists into an ideogram of a face, and Fay, putting her head back on the soft pillows, quickly improvises a new ending. She makes the father in the story say he’s sorry about the whole thing, that little boys have no business being out all night anyway. They need their sleep, and from now on the sheep are going to be put in the barn at night.
Gordon laughs loudly. His laughter is ranged along a single note like an electric mixer. He has a trick of looking grave even when he smiles.
During the night, Matthew wakes up crying. He has been dreaming about wolves. “Shhh,” Fay whispers, placing her hand against his cheek. “There aren’t any wolves here, I absolutely promise you. Not a single one.”
She switches on a lamp, and together they inspect the closet and check under the bed, even peer into the dresser drawers and behind the curtain.
After that he falls asleep at once, but Fay lies awake on the bed beside his compact, humming little body for an hour or more, trembling at what she has almost forgotten: the rivery end of memory, wolves, bears, nakedness, falling down holes, aimless and solitary wandering – all the rain and weather, in fact, of her own scrambled dreams.
FAY’S MERMAID WORK goes back to the time when Morris Kroger presented her with the little Inuit sculpture and, unknowingly, set her on her way. She has yet to understand what mermaids mean, their place in the human imagination, but she knows how they look and behave. Hair, vegetablelike, weedy and massed. A face that is beautiful or cunning, and sometimes both. Lungs and larynx, a singing voice but without a song. Arms, usually rudimentary, but able to hold a mirror, and sometimes a comb. The torso may vary from slender to voluptuous; an earthy mermaid – is that possible? Very occasionally mermaids, as seen in art or described in legend, wear garments of some sort, or at least a piece of fine veiling or aquatic plant that flows over and partially conceals their high, hard, rounded breasts. There might also be a necklace or hair ornament.
In the matter of mermaid tails there is enormous variation. Tails may start well above the waist, flow out of the hips, or extend in a double set from the l
egs themselves. They’re silvery with scales or dimpled with what looks like a watery form of cellulite. A mermaid’s tail can be perfunctory or hugely long and coiled, suggesting a dragon’s tail, or a serpent’s, or a ferocious writhing penis. These tails are packed, muscular, impenetrable, and give powerful thrust to the whole of the body. Mermaid bodies are hard, rubbery, and indestructible, whereas human bodies are as easily shattered as meringues.
The asexual morphology of mermaids is obvious, there being no feminine passage designed for ingress and egress.
The mermaid image in art is highly stylized, and Fay, responding to that stylization, and perhaps defending it, has taped over her desk a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci: “Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.”
Mermaids are the color of water and of watery vegetation – brown, blue, green, silver. Mermen are found in art and in folk tales, and even merdogs and mercats, but among mythical fishy creatures, mermaids predominate.
Some folklorists have suggested that mermaids are matter and spirit fused.
Mermaids exist in all the world’s cultures and go back to the dawn of time, always gesturing, it seems, at the origin of life itself, which began in the sea.
Once someone asked Fay a surprising question: Did she ever imagine how it would feel to be a mermaid? No, she said, never.
In fact, if she ever thinks of herself as having a different shape, especially these days, it is more likely to be a sailor lost at sea.
Frequently, people greet Fay McLeod with the question: How are your mermaids coming along? Instead of asking: How are you?
“HOW ARE YOU, FAY?” Beverly Miles asks on Monday morning, poking her head around the doorway of Fay’s office. Fay and Beverly have been good friends for about five years, ever since Beverly came to work at the center.
Today her eyes are bright with health, and her partially graying hair is skimmed back from a girlish face dabbed with bits of color, blue on the eyelids, pink on the rather heavy lips, and pools of deeper pink on the cheeks. She has the look of a merry, earnest, convivial woman, which she is. At twenty she had married a man three times her age, an Egyptologist, and had borne him three children. By thirty she was widowed. Now, though she is just four years older than Fay, her waist and hips are thickening, and she still loves to wear full-skirted dresses in diminutive prints and trim ballet slippers. She seems to possess none of the dissatisfaction other women feel toward their bodies. “How are you, Fay?” she asks, and in a conspiratorial tone, the skin around her eyes creasing, “How is the real you?”
This is a joke between them – the real self that hides beneath the public skin. “Fine, fine,” Fay says abruptly, then tries to amend with a softened, “Well, not bad.”
“Can I come in for a sec? You got a minute?” Already Beverly has shut the door and is easing herself into a chair and grasping her knees in a gesture of benignity. “Is there anything,” she begins, her voice urgent and unsteady, “I can say or do?”
“I suppose everyone here knows by now.”
“Well, this is a very small club.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me what they’re saying.”
“Just that it’s a rotten shame. A great pity, a waste. All the usual clucking. And then the frivolous stuff, what a striking couple you are, et cetera. You know, both tall and slender – ”
“Like a pair of pepper mills.”
“ – and how they’re fond of you both. All of which is true.”
“Oh,” Fay says. Her throat feels full of sand.
“And when I saw Peter skulking around looking so chilly and silent, and you turning into a hermit here, I started to wonder, well, how final all this is.”
“He’s moved out.”
“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean it has to be final.”
“There’s no one else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I was wondering.”
“My mother thinks I expect too much. I expect the world. Her very words. And she’s right.”
“I expected a lot myself at one time. Oh, you can’t imagine how greedy I was. You didn’t know me then. I thought I could have everything because I’d been a good girl, a nice girl, and I deserved to be happy. People do make compromises along the way. They do.”
“We were just half happy. No one should settle for being half happy.”
“Really?” Beverly’s pink lips close over her teeth, then slowly open again in a smile. “What do you think they settle for, then?”
“You’ve got your kids, Bev. You’ve got a whole life.”
“Well, part of a life, anyway.”
“PEOPLE,” FAY SAID to Peter, catching sight of him in the corridor, “are talking.”
“I know, I know.” His face was busy arranging itself in what Fay supposed was a rueful grin.
“I guess we should have expected a certain amount of talk, but I hate it.”
“It’ll die down. It’s the topic of the week, that’s all.”
“I’m also getting advice. Counseling.”
“Beverly?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. She means well.”
“I know.” Fay nodded. “And Colin had a lunge at me too this afternoon.”
“Really? That’s interesting. What did he have to say? Or was it that same old line about what a striking couple we made?”
“How did you know?”
“He’s got that kind of brain, I’m afraid. Retinal clichés.”
“I found that leather case of yours. For your travel alarm clock, I think. It was under some blankets.” To herself she said: A little ghost.
“I’ve never used it. Why not just pitch it out?”
“How’s Fritzi? And Sammy?”
“Good, good, just fine.”
“How’s … the cactus?”
“Blooming.”
“Really?”
“Not really, but about to. Would you like it back?”
“No thanks.”
“You were right – about coexistence. It is possible.” He gave his watery laugh. “We’re being decent and polite and civilized, aren’t we?”
“Hmmm.”
“Fletcher Conrad’s coming on Friday, did you know? He’s supposed to be fairly sharp.”
“I hope so,” Fay said. “It seems I’ve been given the job of looking after him.”
“Thanks for your bank draft.”
“Thanks for yours.”
WITH SURPRISINGLY little effort or discord, Fay and Peter have settled their affairs. A single trip to Fay’s lawyer, Patricia Henney, and a visit to the bank were all that was required. Afterward, they shook hands like characters in a comedy act and went out for a drink. Fay, negotiating a loan from her parents, has bought Peter’s half of the condominium, and Peter has bought Fay’s half of the Honda.
Life without a car is somewhat awkward, but for the time being, with spring coming on steadily, the shrubs leafing out and the temperature rising, Fay’s been taking the bus to and from work. This is a novelty. She welcomes it. Light breezes flutter the hem of her pale pink raincoat as she waits by the bus stop. From the bus window the streets have the gray-and-amber freshness of a foreign city, stretching purposefully toward the doors of serious institutions and office blocks where the intricacies of commerce and learning unfold. The traffic lights blink cleanly against the fleece of clouds, and Fay thinks how fortunate she is to live in a place where the air is relatively pure and where she can almost always, even during rush hour, get a seat on the bus.
She finds herself inspecting the other passengers intently, and notes with surprise – but why should she be surprised? – that those who ride the early-morning buses are mainly women, a separate caste, who seem to carry with them a suggestion of their flushed domestic chaos, the imprint of families hurriedly fed and admonished, cupboard doors left ajar, and greasy cups and plates stacked in the sink until evening. The expression on these women’s faces is rushed and resigned. Boarding, they hold their breath ha
rd in their chests, as though it were a kind of precious guarded pain, lean tensely forward in their seats, and only gradually, after two or three stops, relax, gazing around them, and quite often launching into conversation with their neighbors.
Fay closes her eyes and listens, catching dismaying scraps of talk. She supposes it is only a trick of the senses, a reflection of her own unsettled state, that she hears mainly stories of connubial disarray and impending crisis.
“A promise is a promise” comes floating toward her one morning in aggrieved tones.
“All he does is watch television,” she hears. “Anything that’s on.”
“ – and if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times.”
“ – hides her birth-control pills on this little ledge – ”
“ – windows broken, dishes broken, pictures smashed – ”
“ – no sooner gets off the lung machine and he collapses a second time – ”
“ – a broken jaw, every tooth knocked loose – ”
“ – but the insurance didn’t cover – ”
“ – doesn’t grow on trees.”
“ – and ending up like this.”
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, the Australian folklorist Dr. Fletcher Conrad, age fifty-five, spoke in the center’s auditorium for an hour, without notes, on the survival of superstition among the aborigines. He spoke with fluidity, lining up his points firmly, but softening them with little dashes of self-deprecation and gentle tips of the hat toward otherwise examples or extenuating circumstances. His lips were wet. He had a fine cantering laugh with elegant high notes. His anecdotes – about birds, about his wife and children, about the Australian landscape – were charmingly spaced and delivered, and he closed his lecture by praising the audience for their attention, exclaiming over the honor they had done him by inviting him to the center and placing him – and here he paused and smiled – in Ms. Fay McLeod’s capable hands.