Juliet Was a Surprise (15 page)

“Ten. It's ten.” But an enjoyable ten. Please, Dorothy, shut up. She will not describe herself at her peak. She will tell no one that she is desperate to burst but can't, and that what it often takes in the end is Redmond saying her name, with his low voice, his accent, and it is proof of their love that he could know this.

TODAY, A SATURDAY MORNING,
Katherine is extra self-conscious. She's in the middle of telling Redmond three lies. First—a lie of omission—she's not told him what her doctor wants her to do the next time they make love. Second, she's told Redmond that her dripping faucet is driving her crazy, she thinks it's just a washer, will he please, please come over and fix it, she even has tools and an extra washer—when in fact she opened the faucet herself and purposely mangled the washer with a pair of pliers.

Redmond arrives, game to try, looking annoyed but proud, she can tell, to have been asked. He's cute in his plaid workshirt, which looks brand new, perhaps bought right after her phone
call, and it's also cute that he's deemed such a shirt necessary. She hands him several wrenches, hoping he will be able to figure out the right one—he does—and she drops just enough advice while watching him fix her faucet.

When Redmond finishes, one knuckle is bleeding. He taps the faucet and, so English, announces, “Right,” and tries the taps. He's slightly amazed and then proud of the water gushing into the basin.

She hands him a coffee to sip while she tries hot, then cold, cooing amazement too. Katherine's not a good actor, but she takes his collar in both hands and says, “My hero,” coy as Marilyn Monroe. She adds, “There's something about a man and his tools,” the line made lamer for being pre-planned, and declares that she can't let him leave without giving him his reward. This, the third lie, she knows won't stay a lie. His work clothes and clumsiness hadn't been arousing at all, but once in bed she knows she'll rise to the occasion. She takes Redmond by the hand, senses reluctance and, Marilyn again, tilts her head to undo the buttons over his chest. Redmond asks if it's this Bob the Builder shirt that's caught her eye, and she says, yes, it's
absolutely unbearable
, joining his joke. And Katherine sees how love can deepen even in lies and frivolity.

All part of the plan, she must have him gone by two because the clinic closes at three. Dr. Reynolds wants Katherine tested within an hour of having sex. That is, of having an orgasm. That is, of being stricken with dreams. In her office, face falling professionally soft, Dr. Dorothy had told Katherine that the brain releases an enzyme into the blood when part of it dies. The blood test will be for a stroke.

Today, after the faucet repair: She's on a plane, a propeller plane, and there's turbulence. The pilot sings to them in what sounds Mexican, then becomes Irish. The plane isn't falling yet, but everyone seems to know it's about to. She's the only one afraid, though she isn't really, and her screams are insincere, though she tries her best to make them real. As the plane's nose tilts down and things speed up, the woman in the seat to her left dares her, hands her a knife. And from Katherine's wrist black roses bloom.

SUCH IS THEIR LOVE
that they don't discuss much. She doesn't understand men, but she and Redmond seem to share a knowing. She is sure of it. They haven't, for instance, had to speak of work, where she's branch manager and he occupies an echelon or two below. Redmond jokes about his smaller office and salary—in the parking lot he once shouted across to her,
At least my car is bigger
. They both know that he entered the financial world late, and that he is capable and might keep climbing. None of this needs to be mentioned. And though Katherine yearns to proclaim their love, would proudly arrive at work hand in hand, they both know to keep it hidden due to the perception that their relationship might be advantageous for him. She knows there likely are odious murmurs that he is sleeping his way up the ladder. But he can joke about this too. It felt dangerous, it felt almost like sex, when he surprised her that time in bed, announcing deadpan, “If you promote me I'll marry you.” When he left it at that, unexplained, she lay there paralyzed for the longest time, until finally he coughed out
laughter, and then she joined him, desperately and with relief that they
were
laughing, she feeling like a dry well suddenly filling with water, the sweetest, warmest water. It brimmed in her eyes. She could see that Redmond knew just how dangerous he was to her. And he knew that she knew, and they didn't need to say a word.

KATHERINE UNDRESSES FOR BED
. Redmond is in the living room, comfortable in her recliner, enjoying a magazine article on the Vancouver Island mountain lion. She half-listens as he explains to her loudly from the other room that the big cat was bounty-hunted and almost wiped out, and that only the fiercest survived to breed, which is why there are more attacks on Vancouver Island than the rest of North America combined. She slides into bed with her book. He will join her eventually, and even if he has to wake her, they will make love. When he sleeps over, they have never not made love.

She is scheduled at the hospital next week for a strange procedure involving electrodes, shaved head and more. It also involves a vibrator and an orgasm. She knows she won't go through with it. She simply won't show up. She would be alone in a room, but her pleasure, as well as her blackout and her dreams, would appear onscreen as angry red or glaring green, indicating bleeding or oxygen or a shrieking lack of it, all to be interpreted by men in long smocks. Ever since the blood tests proclaimed the worst—a series of small strokes—and a neurologist confirmed the losses in brain function, Katherine has paid more attention to the dreams. They have grown precious to
her. How could they not? She imagines each brain cell as a vault that holds a single image and blooms proudly with it as it dies. They have her on blood thinners. She has been told to avoid stress and exercise, especially sex, sex most of all, since this is what, mysteriously, is killing her.

Redmond enters her bedroom yawning grandly, head kinked against shoulder, arms flung out, hands in fists. Katherine pretends to read. Her body is minutely shaking. He loves her. How has she managed to do this? He will interrupt her reading with a loving hand on her shoulder.

Soon enough, he does. His lips are on her neck, he is humming a jazzy non-melody and warmth thrills up her spine, forcing her eyes closed. All her life, all her life, she has waited.

TONIGHT A PERFECT PIE
cools on a cottage windowsill, as in a fairy tale. The dream itself knows it's corny. The crust she pushes open with a finger, and it smells like fruit and meat combined, a deep genius of food. She eats it as she walks a forest path. Then falls off the cliff that surprises her, though she knows she's fallen off it before. She watches herself falling. She looks at her hands. She makes herself fall slower so she can study her hands. She can flex them. Amazing: she can grow those fingernails, can watch her fingernails growing. The dream goes on and on, as dreams are willing to do.

At Work in the Fields of the Bulwer-Lytton

H
is sister's phone call interrupted him composing his next bad sentence:

His loincloth coming away with the sound of low-grade adhesive

Raymond let Elizabeth talk. When she was done, he dropped his phone from a height and with a noise that made him check for cracked plastic. He couldn't take it anymore. Leaning back in his chair he balanced on the two rear legs to the verge of toppling. He had learned not to hear the muffled booming of pucks in the six rinks outside his office's glass door, but he heard them now. He moaned low and long, building it nearly to a shout. As always, he was damned if he said something and damned if he didn't. After a week's research, his sister, fiftythree, was convinced not only of having Alzheimer's, but a particularly swift kind that attacked the young. His sincerely intentioned comment—that if she had Alzheimer's she couldn't have done such excellent research on Alzheimer's—had caused her to announce, “You just abandoned me,” and hang up.

He didn't know what to do. It hurt to think about. Because he loved her, he supposed.

Raymond let his chair fall forward. He picked up his pencil. She'd be crying now. The one upside to these more explosive conversations was that she wouldn't call him for a week. Unless … she forgot. No, he mustn't make light of this. Maybe she did display more memory loss of late, more than just the name-forgetting kind, and both their parents had gone daffy before they died. But her panic was unbearable. Today asking him, all a-fever, if she should check her iron levels again, because they can point to arterial blockage and oxygen depletion in— Her voice was shaking and what's he supposed to say?

Raymond never panicked. It dismayed him that his older sister could be so different in this way. They were only two years apart. They had the same curly ginger hair, the same swelling cheekbones with unfortunate small eyes. They were both high-strung and made impractical life decisions. Their tastes were so similar that it didn't surprise him, for instance, to learn that Elizabeth disliked Chilean wine, and that her reasons were exactly his.

Shaking his head minutely, in the kind of spasm that did mean to abandon his sister for a week, Raymond leaned over his foolscap to read his latest. This was the best time of year, these spring weeks leading up to the deadline. He finished reading it, hesitated, then pencil-tapped it with approval. Fixing a few circled bits as he went, he committed this to his computer screen:

His loincloth coming away with the sound of a low-grade adhesive, Jungle Jones eyed his next conquest, tried and failed to grunt like one of his idols, a silverback, rose to his feet and leapt to the liana vine, from which he fell because he was tired from all the conquesting.

It wasn't his best but it was a keeper he'd enter in the Romance category, under one of his pseudonyms. Marvin Gets. Westley Winns. Thomas Smother. It was Thomas Smother who won a dishonourable mention two years ago in the Crime category. Raymond had that one committed to memory:

As they lay waiting in the alley, involuntarily spooning, for the thugs to run past, his overcoat could not cushion him from the press of her Luger, which made his own gun feel like nothing but a Mauser in his belt—because that's all he had, a lousy Mauser—so he was glad his back was to her.

He could recall the spreading glow in his stomach when he was notified. He remembered how surprised he'd been that this one had won; it was nowhere near the best of the thirty or so he'd submitted that year—and the contest itself dissuaded the use of the dash.

He copied his sentence into the body of a new email and popped Send, nostalgic for the days when it was done by letter. One entry per envelope. Stamps did get expensive, but everything about good old mail—the labour of addressing, the folding of paper and the taste of glue, the frisky walk in all
kinds of weather to the mailbox, not to mention the primal act of sliding a letter through a spring-loaded slot—all of it suited the contest's archaic soul. Apparently there was a torrent of complaints when the rules changed.

This year Raymond's goal was one hundred entries. He was at fifty-seven. He no longer cared much if he won. The goal was the path.

AS ON-SITE MANAGER
of ArenaSix, Raymond was content enough with his job, it being understood here that work was work and one would rather be elsewhere. He kept the ice sheets near to booked and resurfaced between sessions, the two Zambonis in repair, the monthly schedules publicized, the bar/ restaurant staffed with nubiles (as Nabokov had called them), and the hockey parents away from the throats of the parents of figure skaters (though the skaters' parents, especially the mothers, tended as a species to be the fiercest and most blind to compromise). And though his job also oversaw the losing battle to keep beer out of the changing rooms during men's late-night hockey, it was, as jobs went, not unbearable.

Though on occasion he had to fire someone. This morning it was Mr. Fernandez, one of his two maintenance men. Through his damnable glass door Raymond had been eyeing Mr. Fernandez perched out there on the bench, waiting in the cold. No one should have to wait in the cold on a bench like that one, wooden and skate-mauled, let alone someone about to be fired. Raymond was further disappointed that the man hadn't had the good graces to come alone. As always,
he'd brought Paytro (likely the name was Pedro, but it always sounded like “Paytro”), as if he didn't know his son was the heart of the problem. Paytro had Down syndrome, was perhaps in his adolescence and never stopped fidgeting, especially a grand rolling of one hand around the axis of his wrist. The boy held his twirling hand out from his body in a way that suggested ritual, and because each roll made the faintest click, Raymond guessed that the patrons of this place were as nauseated by this as he was. Despite two warnings, Mr. Fernandez insisted, intermittently at first and then always, on bringing Paytro with him to work.

Raymond re-read his sentence. He turned off the screen.

He stood, stretched, then opened the door to Mr. Fernandez, who ushered wrist-rolling Paytro in first.

The whole affair was predictably uncomfortable. Mr. Fernandez nodded when asked if he knew why he was being called in, and then he demanded that Raymond explain things to his son.

“I would like to hear you say to Paytro why we are not wanted anymore” is how the glowering maintenance man put it.

Why explain what Fernandez already knew, that the problem was the “we”? Fernandez had proved an excellent painter, cleaner and, most of all, fixer. In the shop he'd used a grinding machine to shape a piece of scrap metal that somehow fixed the number two Zamboni. The problem was solely the “we.” Paytro was never not with him. More and more, Fernandez gave him jobs to do. Sometimes, the father simply stood watching the son sweep or rake or polish.