Free The Republic of Love by Carol Shields Page A

Instead of asking: How are you?
    “H OW ARE YOU , F AY ?” 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.”
    “P EOPLE ,” F AY 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