Double Talk (23 page)

“They're at the Health Sciences, but Geoff says there's no need to go over. Fabian and Ian are with him.”

“What do you mean — no need to go over? Of course I'm going over.” He stands up and begins to pull up his pants, but they're on backwards. He sits down again.

“I'm so sorry, Brian.”

“Jesus,” he says, “Jesus, God, oh Jesus.”

It is the first time someone close to Violet has died. She feels dislocated, restless. Death is no longer an abstract concept, something that happens to other families. In the days between Wallace's death and his funeral, she can't stay still. That first morning, after Brian went dashing off to the hospital, she strapped Joe to her back, put Lucy in her stroller and went out for a long walk. Violet was surprised by how calmly Lucy took the news, repeating several times that “Uncle Wallace was very sick, very sick,” and nodding her head in a way that made Violet cry.

Violet walks through the downtown and up Water Street West, past the container yard and up Patrick Street, turning left onto Hamilton Avenue. She walks quickly past Geoff and Wallace's front door, suddenly panicked in case Geoff is home and sees her — she realizes she is not yet ready to see him. She keeps going until she reaches Wallace's office at the top of the hill, then stops and stares for a long time at his brass nameplate with its rosette screw covers. WALLACE. R. BROWN. She was there the day they struggled to attach the newly minted plate to the front of the building:
How many gay dentists does it take to screw a plaque to a brick wall?
was the running joke. She reaches out and runs her fingers over the raised letters in his name.

For some reason, she thinks of Jake, the red setter she and Brian bought Wallace and Geoff when they first moved into town. She used to have a picture of Wallace holding the dog in his arms, both of them windblown. Wallace loved that dog in spite of its propensity to be a glutton — it once ate an entire pound of butter that had been left on the counter to soften, tinfoil wrapper and all — its chronic shedding and its habit of tearing magazines and books into tiny shreds. “I lost a first edition Phillip Larkin to that slobbery fucker,” he told Violet the day they were forced to have the animal put down.

Violet loved everything about Wallace, from his eccentric habits of dress to his crude talk — the bluer the language the better. She loved him because at heart she knew he was a sentimentalist. All his tough talk was just a bluff. She remembers how he cried unashamedly the day he showed her the box containing Jake's ashes, or “cremains,” as they referred to them at the animal funeral home. It was a black plastic box about sixteen inches long by twelve inches deep, containing a vacuum-sealed clear plastic bag of grey material. “It's the economy casket,” he said.

Violet misses his wry humour. She misses his gentleness, the kindness he had shown her and, as far as she knew, everyone else. She could always talk to him about Brian. “You have to give that boy some time,” Wallace would say. “He's a dreamer, an innocent. The world is too harsh for him, but you watch — mark my words — when his big idea finally arrives he will be something to behold.”

Now his words blow back through the hole his sudden death has made in her. Am I a cruel, hard bitch? she wonders. No, he would say. No, you're not. Everyone is flawed. That's why we need one another.

Violet has a sudden and visceral need to hug him, talk to him. In the first hours after his death his presence hovers over her. Things about him that she had barely noticed when he was alive now stand out in high definition: his small feet, the way he tweaked his earlobe when he was nervous, the way his nose hair busheled out when he laughed. She remembers what it was like to hug him, the surprising strength in his arms, and the way his muscles curved on either side of his spine.

In the days following Wallace's death Violet so wants to keep his presence close that she walks around the city looking for him. It's dumb, she knows. She visits his favourite places, especially the path around Quidi Vidi Lake where he and Geoff used to walk every evening, sometimes going twice around. It is her vaguely formulated plan to overtake him, surprise him — and sometimes she even manages to. In those moments she sees not the bloated and dazed Wallace they had known towards the end, but the Wallace of lavender track-suits and spit-polished comb-overs, the fit and hearty Wallace who could live on breakfast cereal and skim milk. What she notices is this: when he appears to her he is always in the middle distance, halfway up the grassy slope on the lake's northwest end or standing at the far side of the rugby field, near the chicken factory. She wants to believe that he is aware of her presence, but the more she pictures him the more difficult it is to persuade herself of this. In fact, it's not long before she has to admit there is something untruthful in the way she conjures him. It's nothing he says — because he never makes any attempt to speak — but it's plain from his unchanging facial expression, and from his body language that something is wrong. He stands at an angle to her, as if he is about to turn away. He seems frozen, as in a photograph, stiff, as though he has been forced to attention by nothing more than an act of will. On the second night after his death, walking late around the lake, Violet imagines him sitting alone in a rowboat, his back to her, a desperately lonely figure, adrift in the textured bands of water that are lit up by the penitentiary's floodlights.

The post-mortem examination of Wallace's remains is delayed because of a boarding house fire that happened the night of his death. Six men died in the fire. There is nothing anyone can do but wait for the coroner's office to release Wallace's remains. He's in the queue.

To kill time, Violet walks with Lucy and Joe. Twice a day she steers their double stroller through icy streets to the park. Lucy loves the swings and always wants Violet to push her. She doesn't care that the motion of the swing makes her mother dizzy. This has often been something of a sore point between them, and they have argued about it. But now, in her grief, Violet finds the patience to push Lucy for as long as the child wants. She is content to be cold and dizzy and bored and whatever else it might take to make her daughter and her baby son happy. She is content to let Joe lie on the ground and stuff his mouth with gravel-studded snowballs.

Violet feels blown open, utterly passive before the world. She feels sick each time she hears news reporters describe the six dead men from that rooming house fire as indigents. These men had once been someone's pride and joy.

Grief comes in waves; Violet feels tenderised, as though she were a piece of steak. She is convinced she is seeing the bare heart of life exposed.

And yet, even by the morning of the third day she is beginning to feel less emotional, a fact that she finds more than a little disturbing. She assumes that her grief should exist in direct proportion to the love she had for Wallace. Nothing should take from the sanctity of that feeling. What then is Frank James doing in her head, fording the river of her sorrow just as she reaches for a chocolate chip muffin? Why, as she sits in the privacy of their kitchen nook, Joe in his high-chair beside her, Lucy playing in the next room, does the memory of her most recent — and hopefully last ever — encounter with that man keep surfacing?

“You're looking some beautiful, Violet,” Frank said.

She was sitting in the wicker loveseat in the sun room of Amy and Devlin's new house, taking time away from their dinner party to breastfeed Joe. She was enjoying the dreamy state that came over her whenever Joe's appetite for breast milk matched her overabundant supply. She was feeling both jealous and superior — jealous because Amy and Devlin's new house was so large, and superior because it was decorated in such poor style: pinks and floral patterns, deep pile carpets, Holly Hobbie wallpaper borders, chandeliers under low stucco ceilings, prints instead of paintings, brushed cotton doilies on the arms of their matching La-Z-Boys. The only things missing, Violet thought, were the crocheted kitchen mice. Violet could only imagine the flowing christening gown Amy would produce — and there would be a christening — for her soon to be delivered baby.

Violet was looking up at the stars through the sun room's octagon-shaped skylight, when someone flopped down next to her on the couch. She assumed it was Brian — his heavy landing an index to the number of glasses of Cawarra he'd consumed — but it wasn't Brian, it was Frank James. The weight of another body hitting the couch startled Joe who released Violet's breast and threw back his head to look.

“Oh, wow,” Frank said, staring at Violet's exposed nipple and refusing to look away even when Joe, with a somewhat derisive glance, latched on again. “That's the place to be, eh?” He spoke directly to the baby.

“That's disgusting, Frank.”

“Violet, sweetheart, chill out. It's all natural.”

“You're invading my privacy.”

“Whoa. Where did that come from? I'm just being neighbourly.”

Violet looked closely at him. His eyes were bottle green. Sometimes they were light blue, sometimes chestnut brown. “I see you're wearing your green contact lenses tonight.”

His eyes narrowed and he reached back to self-consciously flip his ponytail. Violet could see that he didn't like being teased about his vanity. She noted that the nail on his pinkie finger was longer than the rest and was painted in deep purple nail polish.

“That's so gay,” she said.

He laughed, dryly. Frank knew Violet didn't like him. In fact, Violet found him creepy, as did all her girlfriends. He was the kind of man, Violet said, who always made you feel under-dressed. They played at liking one another, but more and more she had to struggle for something more than a sarcastic tone when talking to him. He usually played along, but that evening she saw that her comment had stung him. Was it possible she had hit a nerve? Could he really be gay? Or maybe he was hurt, she thought, because, pleasantly high, he had come to bask in the glow of this Madonna and child scene, and she had called into question his motives. No one liked a mirror held up to their actions unexpectedly.

“That's funny, Violet, you calling me gay. Things have changed since your women's studies days, eh?”

“Women can't be gay, Frank.”

His eyes turned mean then, and he cocked his head to one side like a dog.

“Please stop staring at my breast.”

“That wouldn't have bothered you at one time, I dare say.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Violet felt a mild tingle of shock. She guessed he was referring to the one time in her life she took off her clothes for money. And she knew he could only have known about that if Brian told him. Add one more, she thought, to my long list of regrets about my husband. She told Brian about her one-night burlesque career the time they camped by the river in Avondale. She told him because she wanted to be open. She told him because he had just been humiliated and she wanted to make him feel better. Her shame, she thought, would cancel out his shame. Two negatives would make a positive. And she was right. That was the night she had broken through to Brian.

Frank James began to laugh. He looked again at Violet's breast and slowly reaching out his hand began to stroke Joe's head. The sight of his small puffy hand on Joe's clean white hair filled Violet with disgust. She was suddenly furious.

“Please leave us alone. I'm trying to feed my baby.”

“You watch your tone with me, my honey,” Frank said. “I'm no pussy that you can just push around, like that husband of yours. Everyone knows he's been whipped.”

“And I thought you were his friend.”

Frank ignored her. “I know things about that husband of yours that you don't even know.”

Violet wanted to defend Brian, but found she was unable to. In fact, it took every bit of strength she had not to ask Frank James to explain what he meant. Violet couldn't believe the atmosphere in the room had turned so ugly.

“Please leave us alone. I'm trying to feed my baby.” She was half shouting.

The conversation in the dining room lowered in volume. People were listening while trying to make it seem like they were not doing so.

“I'm sorry, Violet,” Frank said, in a loud and super friendly voice, “I just wanted to visit the little fella. I meant no offence.”

And then, just as he stood up, he looked at Violet malevolently and whispered: “Remember that presentation, that big one your husband did for the government? Well, it never happened. He faked the whole thing.”

Violet's grief washes over the memory of that night, over her silent cab ride home with Brian. All she could think at the time was that there was no way back for them. And none had seemed possible until Wallace's death prompted a sea change in her thinking. Day after day of raw emotion awakens in her a religiosity she hadn't known she possessed. Washed in the blood of Christ, Brian might be redeemed, she thinks, even as another more sceptical voice tells her she is channelling the voice of some hoary, black-veiled ancestor.

In the days leading up to Wallace's funeral Violet struggles with the urge to reach out to Brian. He has been a ghost ever since she confronted him, confirming what Frank James had told her. “But it's not what you think,” Brian pleaded. “It was cancelled at the last minute; there was some kind of civil service shuffle and all new projects were frozen. I didn't know how to tell you.” Violet wanted to believe him but couldn't. A hundredweight fatigue settled into her bones. She felt suddenly worn out from making excuses for him. She had married a dud. The clincher came when he turned and looked at her and in all sincerity said, “There's still a good chance I'll get to do the presentation, once the new department head reviews the file.”